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 CALIFORNIA 
 
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 /v4-c^^.
 
 LECTURES 
 
 ox 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, LLD., 
 
 LATB EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK FREEMAN'S JOURNAL, AND PROFESSOR OF 
 ENGLISH LITERATURB IN THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 WILLIAM H. SADLIER, 
 
 ii BARCLAY STREET.
 
 COPYRIGHTED, 1889, 
 BY WILLIAM H. SADLIER.
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 TO THE PUPILS, PAST AND PRESENT, 
 
 OF CATHOLIC COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS 
 
 IN THE UNITED STATES, 
 THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONA TEL Y DEDICA TED.
 
 COPYRIGHTED, 1889, 
 BY WILLIAM H. SADLIER.
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 TO THE PUPILS, PAST AND PRESENT, 
 
 OF CATHOLIC COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS 
 
 IN THE UNITED STATES, 
 77/75 BOOK IS AFFECTIONA TEL Y DEDICA TED.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Literature as a Factor in Life, i 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 Chaucer : Some Glimpses of his Time, his Life and his 
 
 Friends, ......... 22 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 The Real Meaning of /Esthetics, 41 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 Southwell, Crashaw, and Habington, . . . . 61 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 An Introduction to the Study of Tennyson, ... 88 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 Two Dramas by Tennyson and Aubrey De Vere, . no 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 Some Women Writers 132 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 Literature and Manners, 164
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 THERE are two extremes from which Literature is re- 
 garded in these days. From one point of view it is looked 
 on as the only thing in life worth living for; from the 
 other, as a mere ornament, a distraction, an amusement 
 for an idle hour. 
 
 The disciples of what is called Culture, a term which 
 like the adjective asthetic has suffered grievously by mis- 
 use, place Literature above Dogma. That is, they hold 
 that a human being may be able to get enough vital con- 
 solation out of books to do entirely without the teachings 
 of the Christian religion. Blasphemously they group the 
 sacred Scriptures, the Koran, the Buddhistic writings to- 
 gether as great works of literature. Thomas a Kempis 
 and the author of "Paul and Virginia," St. Paul and 
 George Eliot we find jumbled together by the cultured, 
 with a capital C who recommend books to the " masses." 
 
 Matthew Arnold's name is known to all of you. He 
 died recently. He did more to inculcate in the minds of 
 English-speaking people a love for Literature for the sake 
 of itself than any other man living or dead. He was a poet, 
 but not a great one. He cultivated the art of using words
 
 2 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 to the utmost extent possible in a man of his temperament. 
 He wrote at times exquisitely. He was an intellectual 
 aristocrat, and we cannot but admire the position he took 
 above all low, vulgar and common things. But, neverthe- 
 less, his life-long cultivation of the art of literature led to 
 nothing, because it did not lead to God. Literature is a 
 factor in life, and an important one in all well-regulated 
 lives, but it is not the end of life. God is the beginning 
 and the end. 
 
 The effect of Matthew Arnold's teachings may be traced 
 in a recent popular novel, " Robert Elsmere." The author 
 of it is Mrs. Humphrey Ward. It has succeeded Rider 
 Haggard's " She " and Robert Stevenson's " Dr. Jekyll 
 and Mr. Hyde " in the estimation of the thoughtless reader. 
 Why ? Because Mr. Gladstone reviewed it in The Nine- 
 teenth Century. There is no getting over the fact that 
 English opinion still sways our judgment in literary mat- 
 ters, although the West is more independent and Ameri- 
 can in this respect than the East. 
 
 This winter " Robert Elsmere " has become the talk of 
 all the drawing-rooms. Ladies who read it because it is 
 the fashion speak learnedly about the impregnable posi- 
 tion that Theistic teaching holds in the world of science. 
 I heard one the other day, and I asked, as politely as possi- 
 ble, what she meant. She did not answer; but I knew 
 she had been reading " Robert Elsmere." Next summer 
 when you are in the country, at the watering places, or at 
 home, you will find the ladies, old and young, discussing 
 " Robert Elsmere," and probably some of you will read it
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR J.V LIFE. 3 
 
 yourselves. Therefore, as this book is to-day, and will 
 perhaps be to-morrow, a topic of general discussion, I am 
 glad to have the opportunity of warning you against its 
 tendency. It is not immoral, as one late notorious story 
 by a woman is immoral. But it is immoral in an intel- 
 lectual sense. It is false, because the author pretends to 
 a first-hand knowledge of things which she has evidently 
 taken at second-hand. And all pretence in large or small 
 things is more or less immoral. 
 
 " Robert Elsmere," as I said, is the result of that 
 theory of life which makes Literature the end, the sup- 
 port, the consolation of life. This was Matthew Arnold's 
 theory; this is the theory of those of his cult who substi- 
 tute culture for faith and lucidity, sweetness and light, 
 which words are the slang of culture, for the Gifts of the 
 Holy Ghost. This novel teaches that through the in- 
 creased keenness which the study of Literature has given 
 us, we may pierce the past, and, by the light of our study 
 of literature, discover that the teachings of Christianity 
 have been mistaken from the beginning, and that our 
 Lord was only man, not God; and that God Himself is 
 only a mere vague name ! 
 
 This is the result of that devotion to culture which 
 Matthew Arnold considered the best thing in life, and the 
 result of his belief that religion and science might fail, 
 but that poetry, as the consoler and the elevator of man, 
 could never fail. This is the teaching of a novel which is 
 read to-day by every half-educated man and woman in 
 this country of half -education.
 
 4 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 You see that, since Literature has such an influence in 
 moulding the ideas of men and women, even concerning 
 the beginning and the end of all things, it is a very im- 
 portant factor in life. There are intellectual people, like 
 Matthew Arnold, among men, and among women, like 
 Mrs. Humphrey Ward and Vernon Lee, who overrate the 
 value of Literature and who put it in place of religion. 
 
 " No young man," says our old friend, the estimable 
 Duke of Omnium, in Anthony Trollope's novel, "should 
 dare to neglect literature. At some period of his life he 
 will surely need consolation ; and he may be certain that, 
 should he live to be an old man, there will be none other, 
 except religion." The Duke of Omnium, however, is not 
 of our time ; it is not strange that he is puzzled and be- 
 wildered by the breadth of view which permits agnosticism 
 as a decoration to the real business of life enjoyment 
 and denies none of the pleasant vices to exalted gentle- 
 men, or none of the picturesque frailties to no less exalted 
 ladies. Were the worthy duke abreast of the age, he 
 would not except religion, for it has become an axiom 
 with the most exact thinkers that culture is the highest 
 and best thing in life; and what is culture, judged by 
 their standard, but the art of reading in perfection ? 
 Matthew Arnold comes as near blasphemy as any man 
 can in this period, in which the saying of smart things 
 about the Creator has come to be regarded as a mark of 
 much wit, when he places poetry even above science as 
 the consoler of men. 
 
 " Without poetry," he asserts in a preface to Thomas Humphrey 
 Ward's admirable work, The English Poets which is the text of
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE, 5 
 
 this article, "without poetry our science would appear incomplete; 
 and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will 
 be replaced by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete with- 
 out it. For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry ' the im- 
 passioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'; and 
 what is a countenance without its expression ? Again, Wordsworth 
 finely and truly calls poetry ' the breath and finer spirit of all knowl- 
 edge. ' Our religion parading evidences such as those on which the 
 popular mind relies now ; our philosophy pluming itself on its reason- 
 ings about causation and finite and infinite being what are they but 
 the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge ? The day 
 will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted 
 them, for having taken them seriously ; and the more we perceive 
 their hollowness, the more we shall prize ' the breath- and finer spirit 
 of knowledge offered its by poetry.' " 
 
 The day has come when men, reared among the shams 
 of Protest, have turned away from the weak support of an 
 emasculated religion to seek rest in a philosophy which 
 offers no certitude, and in a science which is only half 
 understood. They stretch out their hands for bread, and 
 the priests of culture give them a stone. 
 
 Poetry, exalted, God-inspired as it is, interpreter as it 
 is of the voiceless messages that man and nature hold for 
 each other, fails when we go to it for that consolation 
 which all men crave some time or other, and without which 
 the highest attainment is valueless that consolation which 
 the soul craves, and craves more strongly, when it has 
 conquered the intellectual world and reached its ultima 
 thule of culture. At a certain time in his life the French 
 poet, Maurice de Guerin, found what he deemed consola- 
 tion in resting against the trunk of a lilac in his garden, 
 " le seul etre au monde centre qui il put appuyer sa chan- 
 celante nature, comme le seul capable de supporter son
 
 6 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 embrassement," in the struggle between pantheism and 
 faith that was going on in his soul. Poetry must fail those 
 who go to it as a last resource, as the lilac failed De 
 Guerin. It is the experience of men in all ages that 
 hearts only can comfort hearts; that the purest abstrac- 
 tions are cold and unsatisfactory. Humanity that can 
 console humanity must be, itself, yet higher than itself. 
 The Church offers, not poetry, but the Sacred Heart. 
 
 Goethe did not find consolation in poetry or the highest 
 flights of his intellect, and Matthew Arnold, the most pol- 
 ished and complaisant of the priests of culture, is not, it 
 would seem, free from that divine despair in which we 
 may imagine Sappho looking from her rock. Poetry is 
 a seraph on whom the light of God falls, but poetry is not 
 God. Poetry may bear the soul to supernal flights, but it 
 cannot give rest, serenity, hope, which make consolation. 
 It ever asks that " Why ? " to which religion gives an 
 eternal answer. 
 
 The Scriptures contain great poems the greatest 
 poems; but he who, reading them, tries to eliminate the 
 Godhead of Christ loses himself in what Ruskin calls the 
 verde smalto the helpless green of the Elysian Fields. 
 Homer, cold and joyless, offers no consolation; Horace 
 and Theocritus are without joy in their verde smalto. 
 Roses and wine soon lose their savor, and the cicada is 
 only harsh when the heart is sad. Christianity gave to 
 poetry all its joyousness, all that sympathy with men and 
 nature which makes us glad. Poetry no longer echoes 
 the sea-like moan of restless souls, as in Homer; it inter-
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 7 
 
 piets and elevates, as in Dante. It is impossible to divorce 
 Christianity from the poetry that is nearest to us. Chris- 
 tianity has made it what it is. It was not till after the 
 Resurrection that the spring clothed itself in gladness. 
 The rain came and departed, and the voice of the turtle 
 was heard in the land ; but the full glory and gladness of 
 the spring did not make itself known to the human heart 
 until after the first Easter. Who, going to Shakspeare for 
 consolation, is not referred to Him who is beyond ? And 
 where is the sublimity of Dante without the Divine Per- 
 sons from whom that sublimity radiates ? Such poets as 
 Swinburne and Gautier cannot escape from the light of 
 the cross. Their paganism is not the paganism of the 
 Greeks ; they cannot bridge over the stream that flowed 
 from Calvary. The light deepens their shadows. Their 
 effects are in chiaro-oscuro, and this has given them that 
 vogue for which they sacrificed so much. 
 
 On the other hand, there are many, the vast majority 
 in fact, who look on Literature as only an ornament of 
 life, a polite accomplishment, or the amusement of an 
 idle hour. Among these I am forced to class a great 
 number of young women. And, referring to them, I 
 should say idle hours rather than an idle hour. For of 
 those who regard Literature only as a diversion, the 
 greatest number read novels. I must elaborate this as- 
 sertion still further and say devour, instead of read. 
 
 If you have ever had the opportunity of seeing certain 
 people, who have only five minutes for refreshments, try- 
 ing to lunch at a railroad station while the train is waiting,
 
 8 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 you have an impression of how the young woman who is 
 devoted to novels takes her mental food. Once, far down 
 in Texas, I had the fortune to witness a process of this 
 kind. The traveller, a hungry one, made a dash at the 
 pickles because they were nearest. Then he crunched 
 until a bilious-looking mince-meat pie caught his glare. 
 He bolted the pie and then swallowed a plate of pork and 
 beans. He was stuffing a ham sandwich into his mouth 
 when the bell rang and, I feel sure, he was saved from 
 sudden death. 
 
 The reader who looks on Literature as mere amusement 
 generally acquires the habit of bolting novels as this 
 traveller devoured his food. I have met young ladies who 
 claimed to have read ten novels in a week! They, when 
 cross-examined as politely as possible, acknowledged that 
 they did not remember the characters in any of them. 
 They had a dim impression that Lady De Vere had mar- 
 ried the Duke of Something-or-Other : but whether Ange- 
 lina, the heroine of " Wedded on a Fatal Night," was a 
 creation of " The Duchess's " or " Ouida's " or " Bertha M. 
 Clay's," they really did not know. One young girl had, 
 she confessed without apparent shame,- read six of " The 
 Duchess's" novels in one week and was looking for more! 
 This was during the vacation time. And the week after 
 this, I saw her sitting on a piazza at Long Branch, with one 
 of Rhoda Broughton's near her, just finished, Haggard's 
 " She " and an utterly wretched work called " Miss Middle- 
 ton's Lover." Her mother did not seem to mind it. But 
 I think that both mother and daughter were to be pitied.
 
 LITERATURE ASA FACTOR IN LIFE. 9 
 
 The reading of novels, and worse than worthless 
 novels, was this young woman's way of making use of 
 Literature. If she were told that she was as absurd a 
 figure as the man who munches pie and pickles, pork and 
 beans and oysters at the same time, she would be indig- 
 nant, and yet she does a similar thing without a similar 
 excuse. The novels of " The Duchess " are like a very 
 light kind of confection with a drop of poison here and 
 there in it and a great deal of opium well disguised by the 
 experienced cook. 
 
 If there were no harm in them, these novels would be 
 as unhealthy as a constant diet of pies and caramels and 
 pickles would be. 
 
 Physical food is a great factor in life, so is mental food. 
 The mental system is as capable of derangement through 
 bad mental food as the physical system. Let anybody 
 who doubts this, analyze his or her state of mind after the 
 reading of a carelessly written sensational novel. It leaves 
 him in a dream. It has paralyzed his powers of thinking 
 and acting. It leaves in him a distaste for more solid 
 mental food. The inveterate novel-reader cannot be in- 
 duced to read history, a volume of fine essays, and a book 
 of devotions is impossible to him. He has created a 
 false appetite. He will henceforth have only condiments. 
 He will take the horse-radish, but not the roast beef; the 
 mustard, but not the cold ham ; and the cranberry sauce, 
 but not the turkey. 
 
 Short novels are only condiments, or bits of orna- 
 mental confectionery which are as fatal to the machinery
 
 10 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 of the mind, when habitually used, as caramels and nougat 
 would be to the machinery of the body, if they were in- 
 dulged in as a steady diet. Thackeray, one of the greatest 
 of English novelists, was once asked if he had read a cer- 
 tain new book, " I bake cakes," he said, " but I eat 
 bread." 
 
 You can easily prove to yourselves the truth of what I 
 say. Can any of you read " Ben Hur," or " Dion and the 
 Sibyls," or " Fabiola," without experiencing an exhilara- 
 tion of good purpose ? One must be very impassable 
 very void of fine feelings, if one does not have all good 
 resolves helped by such books. After reading such books 
 it seems easy to suffer and to die for the right. And if 
 the young man must dream, let him dream that h is 
 Pancratius or Ben Hur, let the young girl dream that she 
 is Fabiola or Esther. And yet dreams are dangerous. 
 They may become our masters before we know it. If we 
 dream great things, we may realize them, but they must 
 be things that strengthen and elevate our minds. It is 
 only by strengthening the good in us that we can grow 
 into our best selves. Literature is such a strong factor in 
 life because its influence works in us unconsciously to 
 ourselves. If we only knew how much our actions in 
 supreme moments of life, in times of crisis depend on 
 the little thoughts and acts that preceded them, we should 
 keep vigilant watch on the little foxes that make way 
 through the gaps in our hedges. It is the carelessness of 
 venial sins that make mortal sins easy. We, in this world, 
 are like the violins in a great orchestra. If we are not
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR 7A r LIFE. n 
 
 kept in tune, we lose in fineness of quality and, when the 
 Great Leader of this wonderous earthly orchestra waves 
 His baton, we are found wanting ; we make discord. To 
 be at our best always, we must keep ourselves in tune with 
 the best of the instruments near us. And the best of these 
 instruments are good books. 
 
 They are true friends. We can always have them with 
 us. As a clear-sighted writer says, they never take offence, 
 they never betray our confidence, they are ready to coun- 
 sel, to interest us at any moment. They have no moods. 
 A word from them often falls into our minds like a stone 
 into a clear pool. It makes ripples that reflect in prisma- 
 tic hues the face and the sun of heaven. No ; we must 
 not underrate the influence of books. And in these days 
 when it is truer than it was in Solomon's time, that of 
 the making of books there is no end, we must be careful 
 how we choose our books. Bad books have ruined as 
 many men as bad whiskey, and sentimental love stories 
 have made as many women useless and unworthy of their 
 high destiny as evil companions. The mission of women 
 is the highest mission on earth. When God sent His Son 
 on earth He intrusted Him to the care of her the Virgin 
 blessed among women. Women, as mothers, as teachers, 
 by precept, by example, rule the world. Therefore, they 
 owe to themselves, to society, to God, to make themselves 
 worthy of their vocation. 
 
 There have been women, like George Eliot and George 
 Sand, who held Literature to be the best thing in life. 
 There is a woman writing to-day who holds the same
 
 12 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 opinion. Her name is Vernon Lee, and all her knowledge 
 and all her literary skill are wielded against God. The 
 life of George Eliot shows that genius and the finest lit- 
 erary skill cannot compensate for the loss of God as re- 
 vealed by Himself. Her life was sad, as you can see by 
 the letters which her husband, Mr. Cross, has left us. 
 Practically rejecting Christianity, she committed a breach 
 of morality for which her greatest admirers dare not apol- 
 ogize. You see that Literature without God does not 
 make men and women virtuous. For without God it is 
 only part of itself. Cardinal Newman well says that a 
 university without a Chair of Theology is incomplete. It 
 is so with Literature. Literature without Christ is futile. 
 So futile is it, that all poets since the time of Augustus 
 are, in spite of themselves, Christian in their best moments. 
 
 Even George Eliot could not escape the charm of St. 
 Teresa. Her imagination clung to the proud figure of 
 Savonarola, though I could not advise you to take her 
 view of that great monk's character, or of Charles Kings- 
 ley's Cyril, in his novel of " Hypatia." She made a noble 
 picture of Florence. And, in " Daniel Deronda," a fine 
 defence of the Jews. That, I think, was the most Christian 
 thing she ever did. For we owe our morality, our Chris- 
 tianity itself to Hebrews, as well as the highest literature 
 we have, the sacred Scriptures. It was a Christian act to 
 recall this, and Christians are unworthy of the name who 
 are not willing to acknowledge their obligation to that 
 grand old race. 
 
 Some of you may say that you cannot read Dante ; that
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IX LIFE. 13 
 
 Shakspeare is too heavy; that Milton seems like a task; 
 that even the Vicar of Wakefield and Rasselas tire you. 
 Then I say that you are a bad case of mental dyspepsia. 
 You must take a course of reading which will be a tonic ; 
 but for very shame you must learn to like good books. 
 
 When I see, in the street cars of a large city, working 
 girls going home at night, each carrying her luncheon- 
 box and a paper-covered novel, when this novel is usually 
 " Molly Bawn," or the " Fatal Wedding," by Mrs. E. D. 
 E. N. Southworth, or " Miss Middleton's Lover," by that 
 trashiest of all story-writers, Miss Mary Jane Libby, I can 
 find much excuse for them. They have worked hard all 
 their lives. They have had no chance to know better. 
 Their taste for good books has never been cultivated. At 
 best, they have gabbled through the perfunctory lessons 
 of a public school, and completed their education by the 
 reading of the newspapers, and taken a post-graduate 
 course with the assistance of " The Duchess," " Ouida," 
 and Bertha M. Clay. 
 
 Are we to tolerate this kind of reading among young 
 gentlewomen, who have every advantage of education and 
 culture ? If they leave school without a taste for good 
 books, " classic books," your education has been a partial 
 failure. It is your mission to lead, not to follow, to set 
 an example of the cultivation and grace which should be- 
 long to a gentlewoman in these days. And every year the 
 world is becoming more exacting. We, in America, are 
 passing beyond the brick and mortar epoch; we are be- 
 coming more highly civilized and more exacting. Men
 
 I 4 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 are no longer satisfied with ignorance and a brownstone 
 house, nor with bad pictures in rich gold frames, nor with 
 carved book-cases and nothing in them. Similarly, they 
 judge education by a higher standard. And, as you grow 
 older, young ladies, you will find that a mere smattering of 
 literature will satisfy neither yourself nor your friends. 
 "To ask a man or woman," says Frederick Harrison, 
 "who spends half a life-time in sucking magazines and 
 new poems, to read a book of Homer would be like ask- 
 ing a butcher's boy to whistle the 'Adelaide.' '' This is 
 true ; transient, periodical literature is a bane of our civili- 
 zation. Now, I suppose you may consider me snobbish 
 for introducing Mr. Harrison's butcher boy. You may 
 say why should not a butcher boy whistle the Adelaide? 
 Well, there is no law against it. And if the butcher boy 
 is virtuous and cultivated, he is as good a gentleman as 
 anybody in the land. There is no aristocracy, except the 
 aristocracy of virtue and cultivation. As Tennyson says, 
 
 4 'Tis only noble to be good." 
 
 But, remember, that one must in this country be edu- 
 cated as well as good. You may be descended from all 
 the kings on earth, you may be rich and " prominent," and 
 be everything that answers for rank in this country; but 
 without cultivation, which presupposes a taste for and a 
 knowledge of Literature, you can never be gentlewomen. 
 We may say what we please ; we may hunt up our coats 
 of arms and our crests, and our cousins may even marry 
 foreign titles ; but, in our hearts, we know it is all a sham. 
 In this country, the only aristocracy is that of the heart and
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 15 
 
 the head, of character and acquirements. We cannot 
 make it otherwise, unless we make the country over again, 
 and blot out the Declaration of Independence. 
 
 People who read only the lower books acquire false- 
 ideas of life. And as most of these lower books are re- 
 prints of worthless English novels, we find that our young 
 people found their ideas of life on the English plan. They 
 know all about vicars and squires and young curates who 
 play lawn tennis; they tremble with delight when the 
 heroine refuses a baronet and accepts a duke. They 
 learn to love a title, and they dream of a time, when, en- 
 tering society in a new gown made by Madame Elise or 
 Worth, the music stops, for the musicians are so charmed 
 by their beauty that they cannot play. And then the 
 young duke or the young lord asks them to dance and 
 they float away, etc., etc. 
 
 " They live in Greece, 
 And die in peace, 
 And are buried in a pot of ashes." 
 
 You know the usual ending. The music does not stop 
 in real life. Nor do we find young dukes or young lords 
 prowling about in this country, unless it is for their own 
 country's good. And, even the young duke, if he were 
 the sort of man painted in the novels, would expect some- 
 thing more of his wife than that she should let down her 
 hair and play the harp, while the ambient clouds, tinged 
 with the rosy light of sunset, approached the golden sun 
 as if weeping for the glamour of some lost planet. 
 
 Forgive me this digression. I have written novels my-
 
 1 6 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 self. That is why I know so much about them. And 
 nobody can say of me that which is sometimes said of 
 your reverend instructors, " What does he know about 
 novels ? " I know a great deal. I have written novels 
 myself, but I have reformed. 
 
 Let me tell you how I made novels. First, I must ask 
 you not to misunderstand me. A great novel, like 
 " Fabiola," "Ben Hur," " Lorna Doone," "Esmond," 
 " Dion and the Sybils," is a gift of God. But the aver- 
 age novel is generally a gift of the devil. My novels were 
 something between the two, purgatorial. I mention 
 them here, to show you that the novelist very often smiles 
 at the ignorance of his audience, and regrets the necessity 
 of writing trash for them. My novels were written when 
 I was a young man. To be frank and I say mea cnlpa, 
 mea culpa in parenthesis, they were written for money. 
 This was the modus operandi. My publisher said : " This 
 is the first of December, we want a novel by the middle of 
 January." " Very well," I said. " The fashion in novels 
 now is that the hero should be a tall light man with side 
 whiskers and a frank open smile that shows rows of glit- 
 tering white teeth, and that the heroine should be short, 
 with scornful, curling lips, black hair, and eyes that reflect 
 the light like shimmering waves when the silver rays of 
 the moon fall first upon it." "Very well," I said, "how 
 much ? " Of course, the publisher did not like this inter- 
 ruption ; but I always settled that first before we thought 
 of the love story at all. " It must be a novel of society." 
 " Very well," I said. " There must be dukes and counts
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR /A" LIFE. 17 
 
 and lords in it." " Of course," I answered. "And above 
 all, Mr. Egan," he would end solemnly, " the dresses must 
 be described." This filled me with fear, but I never 
 showed it. "And, if you expect to make money out of it, 
 there must be plenty of action." 
 
 I was just twenty years old at this time. You may im- 
 agine how competent I was to write of life. But I went 
 on with the story. Love, murder, suicide, bankruptcy, 
 grief, despair, were easy to me. But when it came to 
 the question of women's gowns, I was unhappy, very 
 unhappy. I went to a fashion plate for consolation and 
 instruction. It was worse than a meteorological map. 
 But I saw a number on the margin, and this number was 
 duplicated in the body of the fashion plate. The num- 
 ber was 27, it ought to have been thirteen, for thirteen 
 is said to be an unlucky number. After 27 was written 
 these words: "A pink polonaise," and then some ob- 
 scure directions. After careful reflection, I came to 
 the conclusion that it was some graceful article for the 
 neck, a sort of a fichu. How could an unfortunate 
 bachelor know better ? And so I wrote: " Mabel turned 
 pale at her mother's words ; and, in her agitation forget- 
 ting the presence of the gay throng around, threw her 
 polonaise upon the ground and fainted away." 
 
 The critics very soon taught me what polonaise meant. 
 I know it now. 
 
 As I said, I went to work at my novel. My plan was 
 to send the publisher two chapters every day. He re- 
 sponded to the first instalment by a slip of paper on which
 
 1 8 I.ITERATUKE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 was written " more action." I understood what he meant. 
 He wanted a few more murders and a suicide or two. 
 I put in more action. The next day there came another 
 note, " more action." The heroine then refused five offers 
 of marriage and I made the villain, a gentleman with 
 green eyes " which shone with the glint of emeralds in 
 Cimmerian darkness," poison his grandfather and kidnap 
 his two nephews. And I said to myself: "the publisher 
 will be satisfied now." But he was not. Though you 
 may think it strange, he was not. Again, after reading 
 this chapter of horrors, he sent me another demand for 
 action. I plunged into work again. And when the 
 chapter was finished, the stage was as well covered with 
 corpses as it is in the last act of Hamlet. But this did 
 not satisfy him. You can imagine my feelings! Action! 
 I plunged into horrors. I left rny hero hanging to the 
 brink of a precipice by his finger-tips, while he strangled 
 a boa-constrictor with his toes. And, after all this, there 
 came in response, a slip of paper from the publisher on 
 which was written "more action! " 
 
 I went to the publishing-house in a state of disgust. I 
 saw the office-boy. " Where is Mr. So and-So ? " "At 
 Newport." "And Mr. Thomas So-and-So? " "At New- 
 port, too." "And the junior member of the firm ? " "At 
 Newport, too." " How long have they been away ? " 
 " Oh, about ten days ! " " How can Mr. So-and-So have 
 written these notes, then ? " " Oh," said the office-boy, 
 " he wrote them before he left ; he left orders to have 
 them sent to you every day."
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. ig 
 
 This is an example of how novels are written by 
 machinery ! It shows, too, how much reliance is to be 
 put on the average novelist's pictures of life. I was just 
 twenty years old when I wrote a financially successful 
 novel. I shall not tell its name, because I am not proud 
 of it. But all the young ladies read it in 1872. They 
 thought, no doubt, that I knew life very well. You would 
 have fancied that I floated on the crest of the most ex- 
 alted society ; that I knew nobody less than a duke ; that 
 I spent my life in one round of polite dissipation ; that I 
 was a very sentimental person. But in reality, I spent 
 my time in studying very hard, and I seldom went out at 
 all. 
 
 Do you see how the books which form our young 
 people's views of life are made ? At the risk of seeming 
 egotistical, I have given you my experience. Mr. Nugent 
 Robinson, who writes such charming things in the Ave 
 Maria, once told me that he had longed to meet a certain 
 famous novelist. He had at last an invitation to an as- 
 sembly at which she was to be present. He yearned for 
 the moment to come ; it came, and the famous author, 
 whose sentimental and poetic descriptions of love and life 
 had entranced, was in the act of drinking what the English 
 call a pint of half-and-half. The foam which clung to her 
 lips was not that of sibylline inspiration, but of prosaic 
 porter! 
 
 And yet this lady's novels are devoured with avidity by 
 people who take all their ideas of the refinements of life 
 from her! Do not put your trust in the average novelist.
 
 20 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IN LIFE. 
 
 For the sake of the tone of your mind, for the sake of 
 your style in writing, do not look on Literature as a mere 
 distraction. They say, I do not know how true it is, 
 that if one writes with lemon juice on a blank sheet of 
 paper and, at some time after, hold the sheet before the 
 fire, the writing will appear distinctly. And so it is with 
 what you read in youth. It may seem to have no effect ; 
 but when the fires of the world try you, this apparently 
 colorless writing blazes out and helps to direct your actions 
 in moments of temptation. 
 
 Choose a few books. Keep them with you. Read 
 them often. Acquire a taste for them. Be satisfied with 
 nothing but the best. Begin by reading some parts of 
 the Sacred- Scriptures. For, apart from its being the 
 Word, there is no higher poetry on earth than Isaias, no 
 higher prose than the parables of our Lord. Then we 
 have " The Following of Christ," a book recognized even 
 by infidels as a masterpiece. Think for a moment of the 
 measureless influence which these books have had on the 
 lives of millions. Take lower books, take great novels 
 like that of Sir Walter Scott, take Robinson Crusoe, 
 which, by the way, is not a book merely for children. A 
 great philosophy underlies it. It shows what a man, by 
 exercising the energies God has given him, may do. It 
 is a prose epic on the triumph of mind over matter. 
 " The great masterpieces of the world are thus, quite 
 apart from the solace they give us, the master instruments 
 of a solid education." 
 
 If you leave school without a taste for good books, your
 
 LITERATURE AS A FACTOR IX LIFE. 2 I 
 
 education has partially failed. And so exacting has society 
 become, so important is Literature in life, that if you look . 
 on it as a mere amusement, a light and trifling amuse- 
 ment, you will have deep regrets your whole life long.
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 CHAUCER; 
 
 SOME GLIMPSES OF HIS TIME, HIS LIFE AND HIS FRIENDS. 
 
 I have chosen Chaucer as the subject of this lecture, 
 because he is really the father of English poetry, and be- 
 cause the consideration of his works gives us an oppor- 
 tunity of corroborating a theory which ought to permeate 
 all our studies in English literature. 
 
 This theory, which is amply supported by facts, is 
 that all English poets, from Chaucer to Tennyson, from 
 Milton to Longfellow, from Shakspeare to Aubrey de 
 Vere, owe all that is best in them to the inspiration of 
 Christianity; and when I say Christianity, I mean the 
 highest form of Christianity the Catholic Church. 
 
 We all know only too well that the English language is 
 the language of anti-Catholicism, and that its literature 
 has been for almost three centuries a conspiracy agains-t 
 the Church. But, still, I insist that I can prove that the 
 most glowing, the most exaltedly impassioned, the most 
 noble passages in the greatest of English-speaking poets 
 derive their light from the halo that surrounds the doc- 
 trines, the practices, the legends of the Christian Church. 
 
 There is no doubt that Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of 
 English poetry, was a devout Catholic. Hundreds of
 
 CHA UCER. 23 
 
 passages in Shakspeare could be quoted as evidence of 
 the Catholic feeling, if not the Catholic Faith, of that 
 great master. Milton glorified Satan ; but yet Milton owes 
 the whole frame-work of his " Paradise Lost " to the theol- 
 ogy of the Church. As to Tennyson, who would dream 
 of comparing the sentimental whining and complaining of 
 " Maud " and " Locksley Hall " with the serenity of the 
 " Idyls of the King," when the effects of Catholic tradi- 
 tion fall like the rosy glow of dawn on the pure marble of 
 a Corinthian temple. Who can think of the penitence of 
 Guinevere in the convent, or the speech of King Arthur to 
 Sir Bedivere, that most exquisite passage in Tennyson, 
 
 " If thou shouldst never see my face again, 
 Pray for my soul," 
 
 without admitting that the spirit of the Church has tri- 
 umphed in English poetry despite the conspiracy of the 
 English language against it ; for, in Longfellow's master- 
 pieces, is not the greatest " Evangeline ? " and in Aubrey 
 de Vere a writer whom I most earnestly recommend 
 to you, we find a perfect synthesis between the highest 
 religious idea and the highest poetical embodiment of it. 
 It may startle some of you to hear the name of Aubrey 
 de Vere mentioned in the same breath with that of Ten- 
 nyson. But, remember, I am not here as the follower of 
 any other critic. And I do not ask you to follow me 
 blindly; but I insist that we Catholics we Christians 
 shall in literature, as in all other sciences and arts, lead, 
 not follow. We have inherited the glory and the wealth 
 of all the ages. Let us, then, not accept the standards
 
 2 4 CHA UCER. 
 
 which an alien world has made for us. " In hoc signo 
 vinces" By the sign of Faith we conquer, and by the 
 sign of Faith we lead. We have no need to be afraid of 
 the truth, and no need to be afraid of falsehood. 
 
 For a long time, the writers of literary text-books have 
 told us that Chaucer was a Wycliffite a follower of an 
 unfortunate man who wanted to put the fallible authority 
 of human judgment in the place of the infallible authority 
 of the Church. In truth, so settled had become this opin- 
 ion among even men of letters, that, to my amazement, 
 one of the cleverest authors of my acquaintance said, in 
 answer to an assertion of Chaucer's Catholicity: "You, 
 Romanists, are claiming everybody." 
 
 Now it is our business to displace so far as possible the 
 fallacy that Chaucer was a Wycliffite, a Lollard, or a 
 member of any sect. We owe this to the interests of 
 truth and to the memory of a poet who, however short he 
 fell of what ought to be expected of so well instructed a 
 man and so great a poet, was true in his best moments to 
 the Church. 
 
 I do not ask you to read all of Chaucer. Indeed, I 
 think it is wise that you should read only parts of his 
 works. But the parts that your instructors select for you 
 are the best parts, and you lose nothing by missing the 
 others. Chaucer, repentant for the license of some of his 
 poems, wrote: 
 
 " For he shall find enough, both great and small, 
 Of storial thing that toucheth gentleness, 
 Likewise morality and holiness ; 
 Blame ye not me, if you should choose amiss."
 
 CHAUCER. 25 
 
 But the poet could not thus thrust the responsibility for 
 his bad work on the reader. We will act on his advice, 
 and avoid all that repels us. The good in his poems is 
 more than enough. 
 
 Chaucer, like most poets, borrowed the plots and some- 
 times even the words of his poetical stories from older 
 poets. He gave us the foundation of our language. 
 Dante, in Italy, made by his works one language out of 
 the many diverse dialects of Italy. Before the author of 
 the " Inferno " who owed as much to Catholic theology 
 as to himself consolidated the melodies and harmonies 
 of the Italian tongues into one language, the Lombards, 
 the Neapolitans, the Piedmontese, the Florentines, the 
 Pisans, the Genoese, had their dialects, and a poem writ- 
 ten in one dialect was not understood by the people using 
 another. Dante changed all this: he made one grand 
 language for the whole of Italy ; so Chaucer unconsciously 
 imitated him. Before Chaucer began to write, the English 
 was despised. The learned wrote in Latin or Norman- 
 French ; but Chaucer touched what appeared to be com- 
 mon earth, and behold! a clear stream gushed out "a 
 well," as Ben Jonson has it, " of English undefiled." 
 
 He borrowed much from the Italians, and we have to 
 regret that, in taking some of his stories from Boccaccio, 
 he took some of the licentiousness of that unhappy story- 
 teller. 
 
 Chaucer's life covered the last half of the fourteenth 
 century. He died in the last year of that century. His 
 latest biographer Mr. A. W. Ward says that the life of
 
 26 CHA UCEK. 
 
 the poet covers rather more than the interval between the 
 most glorious epoch of Edward III.'s reign for Crecy 
 was fought in 1346 and the downfall, in 1399, of his 
 unfortunate successor, Richard II. Under this king oc- 
 curred that horrible war of the peasants, who were urged 
 to the general destruction of all existing institutions by 
 the teachings of Wycliff, the chief anarchist of his time. 
 
 It would be silly to deny that abuses in religious disci- 
 pline did not exist in Chaucer's time. But the Church 
 was, and is always, the same. Some of the religious, and 
 many of the people, had begun to love wealth and ease 
 more than the cross of Christ or the honor of His Blessed 
 Mother. The poison in the nation's blood, which made 
 it delirious in the reign of Henry VIII., had already be- 
 gun to work in that of Edward III., and the poet's quick 
 insight into the abuses which were sapping the spiritual 
 strength of the people have caused many critics to set 
 down Chaucer as a follower of Wycliff. But these critics 
 are filled with the idea that Henry VIII. discovered re- 
 ligion. 
 
 I am sorry to see that even the amiable Miss Mitford 
 applauds Chaucer for his heretical tendencies. Miss Mit- 
 ford ought to have known better. I hope I may digress 
 enough to ask you to her delightful sketches of country 
 life. " Our Village " and " Belford Regis " are as fresh 
 and sweet as the English daisies, whose praises Chaucer 
 sings in "The Flower and the Leaf." There are not 
 many people who read " Belford Regis " or " Our Vil- 
 lage;" but I hope you will revive a taste for them, and,
 
 CHAL'CER. 27 
 
 living in the country as you do a great part of the year, 
 you will find them very charming. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is very hard to forgive Miss Mitford for 
 thinking that Geoffrey Chaucer reviled the Church in 
 which he was baptized, and which he loved. An impartial 
 examination of his writings will show that Chaucer, like 
 all true Catholics of his time, saw that pride and luxury, 
 sloth and simony, hiding under the desecrated cloak of 
 religion, were, like moths, separating the threads of the 
 sacred garment. 
 
 As England grew prosperous, the king, the nobles, and 
 even a few priests, defied Rome more and more. And it 
 is an axiom that the farther any Christian nation gets from 
 the salutary influence of the Pope, the nearer it gets to 
 Anti-Christ. In England, there were religious who loved 
 Caesar more than God, who loved their wealth and the 
 whims of their king more than the Vicar of Christ. An 
 example of this we see later, in the fate of Cardinal 
 Wolsey. 
 
 In reading such portions of "The Canterbury Tales 1 ' 
 as your judicious teachers may choose for you, you will 
 perhaps wonder why the pilgrimage resembled more a 
 picnic than a sacred procession to a venerated spot. But 
 these pilgrimages had degenerated; and their character 
 may be shown from the act of an archbishop, in refusing his 
 blessing to a company of pilgrims, telling them that for 
 sinners without contrition there were no indulgences at 
 the shrine of St. Thomas. Of true priests and true religi- 
 ous there were many; and they, seeing that the laxity of
 
 2 8 CffA UCER. 
 
 some of their brethren would lead to disaster, redoubled 
 their good works. But the abuses and the defiance of 
 Rome brought down the curse of heresy on the English 
 people. 
 
 Like most poets, Chaucer demanded more of the ideal 
 from the world than he was willing to put into his own 
 practices. His ridicule often played about abuses more 
 from wantonness than from any desire to amend them. 
 Vice was picturesque ; therefore he painted it. He seems 
 half disgusted, half amused by the evils of his day. He 
 never rises to righteous indignation. He is always rever- 
 ent to the Church and her dogmas. His faith in our eyes 
 may seem childlike ; in his time it was only manly. 
 
 No poet, except Shakspeare, reflected more than a 
 phase of his century, and Chaucer could not reflect fully 
 the various tendencies of his time. If our poet had always 
 been as moral in his stories as he was firm in his faith, 
 we might have even greater reason to be proud of him. 
 That his better training led him to feel ashamed of the 
 immorality that stains some of his pages is evident from 
 the apology he makes, and from the contrite prayer he 
 appends to " The Canterbury Tales." Had the age been 
 utterly vicious, Chaucer, not having the present moral 
 world in view, would scarcely have thought it necessary 
 to apologize. The description of the poor parson does 
 not strike us as containing anything unusual, and Chaucer 
 to-day might find many like him among our priests : 
 
 "A good man was ther of religioun, 
 And was a poure persoun of a toun ;
 
 CHA UCER. 29 
 
 But riche he was of holy thought and werk 
 
 He was also a lerned man, a clerk, 
 
 That Cristes Gospel trewely wolde preche ; 
 
 His parischens devoutly wolde teche. 
 
 Benigne he was, and wonder diligent, 
 
 And in adversite ful pacient ; 
 
 And such he was i-proved ofte sithes,* 
 
 Ful loth were him to curse for his tythes. 
 
 Bui rather wolde he yeven, out of dowte, 
 
 Unto his poure parischens aboute 
 
 Of his offrynge, and eek of his substaunce 
 
 He cowde in litel thing han suffisaunce. 
 
 \Vyd was his parische, and houses fer asonder, 
 
 But he ne lafte not for reyne ne thonder, 
 
 In sikenesse nor in meschief to visite 
 
 The ferreste in his parische, moche and lite, 
 
 Upon his feet, and in his hond a staf. 
 
 This noble ensample to his scheep he yaf. 
 
 That ferst he wroughte, and afterward he taughte, 
 
 Out of the Gospel he who wordes caughte, 
 
 And this figure he addede eek therto, 
 
 That if gold ruste, what shall yren doo ? 
 
 For if a prest be foul, on whom we truste, 
 
 No wonder is a lewe'd man to ruste ; 
 
 And schame it is, if that a prest tak keep, 
 
 A [filthy] schepherde and a clene scheep ; 
 
 \Vel oughte a prest ensample for to yive, 
 
 By his clennesse, how that his scheep schulde lyve. 
 
 He sette not his benefice to byre, 
 
 And leet his scheep encombred in the myre. 
 
 And ran to Londone, unto seynte Poules, 
 
 To seeken him a chaunterie for soules.f 
 
 Or with a bretherhede to ben withholde ; 
 
 But dwelte at boom, and kepte wel his folde, 
 
 So that the wolfe ne made it not myscarye ; 
 
 He was a schepherd and no mercenarie. 
 
 And though he holy were, and vertuous, 
 
 He was to sinful man nought despitous, 
 
 * Ofttiraes. i An endowment for saying Masses.
 
 30 CHA UCER. 
 
 " Ne of his speche daungerous * ne digne, 
 But in his teching discret and benigne. 
 To drawe folk to heven by fairnesse 
 By good ensample, this was his busynesse : 
 But it were eny persone obstinat, 
 What so he were, of high or lowe estat, 
 Him wolde he snybbe scharply for the nones. 
 A petter preest, I trowe, ther nowher non is. 
 He vvaytede after no pompe and reverence, 
 Ne makede him a spiced f conscience, 
 But Cristes lore, and His apostles twelve, 
 He taughte, but ferst He folwede it Himselve." 
 
 His fervent " Orison to the Holy Virgin," beginning 
 
 " Mother of God and Virgin undefiled," 
 
 is earnestly Catholic ; and in his "A B C " a translation 
 from the French there is an address to the Blessed Vir- 
 gin in twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one 
 of the letters of the alphabet arranged in proper succes- 
 sion. St. Charles Borromeo did not go outside the Church 
 in his attempt to bring her unfaithful servants nearer to 
 her, and Wycliffe, had he helped to revive that faith which 
 negligence, avarice, and luxury were gradually weakening 
 in the hearts of Englishmen, the best men in England 
 and our poet among them would have been with him. 
 But with heresy Chaucer had no sympathy. In the " Par- 
 sones Tale " he exclaims against the doctrines of 
 Wycliffe and the spoliation of church property; and if 
 there were the slightest doubt in the minds of careful 
 readers, the " Prayer of Chaucer " at the end of " The 
 Canterbury Tales " shows he died a devout Catholic. 
 
 Chaucer's English is to Dante's Italian what a bagpipe 
 
 * Haughty. t Nice, fastidious.
 
 CHA UCER. 3 1 
 
 is to an organ; but there is a direct simplicity about 
 Chaucer to which Dante never attained. Compare, for 
 instance, Dante's version of the " Story of Ugolino " with 
 Chaucer. Chaucer revered this wise bard of Florence; 
 but in borrowing the "Story of Ugolino," he treated it 
 with more simplicity than that divine poet. It is a good 
 example of Chaucer's peculiar qualities. In tenderness 
 and humanity it far exceeds Dante's version. 
 
 Chaucer owed even more to the French trouv&res than 
 to the Italians. It is said that he met Petrarch in Italy. 
 His life was not unworthy of a poet, being at the end 
 serene and peaceful. Chaucer married, about 1369, a 
 lady named Philippa. It is possible that the favorite 
 flower of this lady may have been the daisy, for Chaucer 
 sings of this simple flower in the prologue to the " Legend 
 of Good Women," and in " The Flower and the Leaf." 
 
 His refrain is: 
 
 " Si douce est la Marguerite." 
 
 His " marguerite " was not our field daisy, but the pink 
 and white many-petalled flower we find in old-fashioned 
 gardens. His most famous work, "The Canterbury 
 Tales," stories told by pilgrims on their way to the 
 shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, were written in the com- 
 parative ease of his later days. Most of his life was spent 
 at court. He was page in Prince Lionel's household; 
 he served in the army, and was taken prisoner in France ; 
 he was squire to Edward III.; he went as king's commis- 
 sioner to Italy in 1372; he was controller of the customs 
 of the port of London from 1381 to 1386; he was a mem-
 
 3 2 CHAUCER. 
 
 ber of the House of Commons for Kent in 1386, and in 
 1389 clerk of the king's works at Windsor. 
 
 His contemporaries appreciated his genius. Gowe-r 
 says that all England knew his fame; Lydgate calls him 
 "noble;" Occleve names him "the first finder of our 
 faire langage." The Scotch poets, beginning with James 
 I., were enthusiastic about Chaucer. 
 
 Chaucer adapted the " Roman de la Rose." Dry den 
 later, attempted a similar task, the adapting of Chaucer; 
 but the bloomlike expression is wanting. Most of us will 
 always know. Chaucer but through Dryden and Pope ; for 
 our century has small patience with diction that requires 
 a glossary. But Pope's " Temple of Fame " is merely a 
 parody. Chaucer in sword and periwig was about as 
 poetic a sight as a young faun in the dress of our decade. 
 
 When the mellow light of sunset fell on the poet, his 
 lines were cast in pleasant places. He was poor, and yet 
 serene of mind. It is easy to imagine him: grave, yet 
 with a twinkle in his eye, talking, rosary in hand, as he 
 is represented in a picture, with the blind poet Gower, 
 the philosophical Dominican Strode, the youthful Lydgate, 
 or Occleve, who furtively sketched a portrait of his master 
 on the margin of a precious book. He died in peace with 
 all the world. Would that he had written no line we 
 would wish to blot! 
 
 Langley, or Langland, who was contemporary with 
 Chaucer, does not seem to have felt his influence. " Piers 
 Plowman " is the work of a visionary brooding over the 
 wants of the people, who turns at last from the picture of
 
 CHA UCER. 33 
 
 an ideal reformer to come to the Saviour who had already 
 come. Langland, in his earnestness, high purpose, and 
 seriousness, is in striking contrast to Chaucer. " Piers 
 Plowman " is in the unrhymed alliterative metre of the 
 older English period almost the only metre that can be 
 called English, as Mr. Skeat remarks in his sketch of 
 Langley,* since all others have been borrowed from 
 French or Italian. 
 
 Of him whom Chaucer and Lydgate call the moral 
 Gower though his best-known work, " Confessio Aman- 
 tis," would to-day be considered anything but moral 
 very little is known. He seems to have been born in 
 1330, and to have died in 1408, having been blind for 
 eight or nine years before his death. He was a gentleman 
 of an old family owning estates in Kent and Suffolk. 
 The place of his birth is unknown. He probably died in 
 the priory of St. Mary Overies, Southwark, in the church 
 of which now called St. Saviour's his tomb may be still 
 seen. It is not known when his first work, " Speculum 
 Meditantis," written in French verse, was composed. The 
 second, "Vox Clamantis," in Latin elegiac verse, was 
 written between 1382 and 1384. The third, "Confessio 
 Amantis," was written, owing to the success with which 
 Chaucer had wielded his "langage faire," in English. 
 The grave and moral author mixes up Christianity and 
 paganism in the most astonishing manner in " Confessio 
 Amantis," and, strange to say, he seems altogether uncon- 
 scious of the incompatibility of these elements. Religion 
 
 * " The English Poets," vol. i.
 
 34 CHA UCER. 
 
 and passion change places with much complaisance, and 
 the impartial reader is reluctantly forced to conclude that 
 the " moral Gower " had an amazing faculty for mixing 
 things up. He possessed no spark of that genius which 
 illuminated everything that Chaucer touched. " Florent," 
 a story in the " Confessio Amantis," is not without merit. 
 Its moral is that 
 
 "Alle women most desire " 
 
 to have their own way. After a long dialogue, Florent 
 yields his will entirely to that of his wife. 
 
 Chaucer and Gower were intimate friends, but they had 
 a quarrel which was, however, made up. There is evi- 
 dence that Chaucer called one of Govver's tales " corsed," 
 which, if it means " sensational," shows that Gower had 
 an abnormally forgiving and unpoetical spirit. 
 
 John Lydgate, another of Chaucer's friends, seems to 
 have been stimulated to write by the example of his mas- 
 ter and by his love for the French poets of his time. To 
 Chaucer we owe the fact that he wrote in English. At 
 his best he reflects his model, for whom he cherished the 
 profoundest admiration, and whom he was proud of im- 
 itating. His first long poem, "The Storie of Thebes," 
 written when he was nearly fifty, he represents as a new 
 Canterbury Tale told by himself after he had joined the 
 company of pilgrims at Canterbury. In it he uses the 
 ten-syllable rhyming couplet after the manner of Chaucer 
 in "The Knightes Tale." Lydgate had a remarkable 
 faculty of versification, but he lacked the force of Chaucer. 
 There are passages full of spirit, followed by long stretches
 
 CHA UCER. 
 
 35 
 
 of dreary verse-making. Another important poem was 
 the "Storie of Troy," begun about the year 1412, at the 
 request of Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V. The 
 prince asked that Lydgate should do the noble story of 
 Troy into English, as other poets had done in other lan- 
 guages, and Lydgate complied. He finished the fifth and 
 last book in 1420. It is written in the ten-syllable coup- 
 lets, and founded on Guido di Colonna's prose history of 
 Troy. In the third book, where the story of Troilus and 
 Cressida is introduced, Lydgate seizes the chance to pay 
 an ardent tribute to Chaucer. His versification, although 
 he had evidently mastered his art as far as it went, is 
 often rough. " If the structure of the lines is attentively 
 considered," says Mr. Thomas Arnold, who writes a notice 
 of Lydgate in " The English Poets," " it will be seen that 
 he did not regard them as consisting of ten syllables and 
 five feet, or at least that he did not generally so regard 
 them, but rather as made up of two halves or counter- 
 balancing members, each containing two accents. Re- 
 membering this, the reader can get through a long passage 
 by Lydgate or Barclay with some degree of comfort; 
 though if he were to read the same passage with the ex- 
 pectation of meeting always the due number of syllables, 
 his ear would be continually disappointed and annoyed. 
 This vicious method of versification was probably a legacy 
 from the alliterative poets, whose popularity, especially in 
 the north of England, was so great that their peculiar 
 rhythm long survived after rhyme and measure had carried 
 the day."
 
 3 6 CHA UCF.R, 
 
 Lydgate, although a monk ostensibly, belonging to the 
 monastery of St. Edmund at Bury, does not seem, from his 
 own account, to have done much credit to his cal'ling: 
 
 ' ' Of religioun I weryd a black habite, 
 Oonly outward by apparence." 
 
 Toward the end of his life, however, his mind took a 
 more edifying turn, and he composed a metrical " Life of 
 St. Edmund " and the " Legend of St. Alban," which 
 raised him much higher in the estimation of his good 
 brothers the monks than all his idle tales of Thebes and 
 Troy. Lydgate's most notable work was "The Fall of 
 the Princes," founded on a French version of the Latin 
 treatise by Boccaccio, " De Casibus Virorum Illustrium." 
 The title-page of this poem, in nine books, printed in folio 
 in 1558, sufficiently explains the subject. It runs: "The 
 Tragedies gathered by John Bochas of all such Princes 
 as fell from theyr Estates throughe the Mutability of For- 
 tune since the creation of Adam until his time; wherin 
 may be seen what vices bring menne to destruccion, wyth 
 notable warninges howe the like may be avoyded. Trans- 
 lated into English by John Lydgate, Monk of Burye." 
 Lydgate is at his best in this poem ; he uses the seven- 
 line stanza, and gets nearer to the ease and liquidity of 
 versification which distinguish Chaucer. Of his minor 
 poems, " London Lickpenny," which describes the trials of 
 a penniless wanderer in the great metropolis, gives a very 
 vivid idea of the sights and sounds of the London streets : 
 
 " Then unto London I dyd me hye 
 Of all the land it beareth the pryse :
 
 CHAUCER. 37 
 
 ' Hot pescodes,' one began to crye, 
 " Strabery rype, and cherryes in the ryse' ; 
 One bad me come nere and by some spyce, 
 Peper and safforne they gan me bede, 
 But for lack of mony I myght not spede." 
 
 Of the poems of Thomas Occleve, who wrote " De 
 Regimine Principum " in 1411, the address to Chaucer is 
 the most beautiful. He reflected rather than originated ; 
 his work shows at times a charming simplicity and lofty 
 religious feelings ; but it is dwarfed by comparison with 
 that of the poet, whom he calls 
 
 " O maister dere and fader reverent, 
 My maister Chaucer! floure of eloquence." 
 
 Occleve was born between 1365 and 1370; it is be- 
 lieved that he lived to a great age, but the precise date of 
 his death is unknown. 
 
 Robert Henryson is the brightest light among the stars 
 that circled in the train of Chaucer. Of him little is 
 known. It is certain that, in 1462, he was incorporated of 
 the University of Glasgow, and that he was afterwards 
 school-master in Dunfermline, and that he worked there 
 as a notary public. Henryson was a true poet, and he 
 possessed what we call to-day a feeling for his art in a 
 high degree. His narrative is gay, easy, rapid ; his touch 
 light and vivid, and his dramatic power, both in dialogue 
 and construction, is not surpassed by Chaucer. His verse 
 is musical and well weighed ; he liked to try his hand at 
 new refrains, strange metres, and unexpected rhymes. 
 His dialect, to the modern eye and ear, is almost incom- 
 prehensible, but long study and great love will show him
 
 3 8 CHA UCER. 
 
 who cares to search that Henryson used it as the old com- 
 posers used the harpsichord. It is an instrument of nar- 
 row compass, yet capable of exquisite harmonies under 
 the hand of a master. 
 
 " To know the use he made of it in dialogue, he must be studied 
 in ' Robyne and Makyne,' the earliest English pastoral ; or at such 
 moments as that of the conversation between the widows of the Cock 
 who has just been snatched away by the Fox ; or in the incompara- 
 ble ' Taile of the Wolf that got the Nek-Herring throw the Wrinkis 
 of the Fox that Begylit the Cadgear,' which, outside La Fontaine, I 
 conceive to be one of the high-water marks of the modern apologue. 
 In such poems as ' The Three Deid Powis,'* where he has antici- 
 pated a something of Hamlet at Yorick's grave, as ' The Abbey 
 Walk,' the ' Garmond of Fair Ladies,' the ' Reasoning Between Age 
 and Youth,' it is employed as a vehicle for the expression of austere 
 thought, of quaint conceitcdness, of solemn and earnest devotion, of 
 satirical comment, with equal ease and equal success. " \ 
 
 There are delightful touches of fancy in all Henryson's 
 poems, which the dialect in which they are written pre- 
 vents us from quoting. To most of us Burns requires a 
 glossary; and, therefore, Henryson's mixture of old 
 English and Scotch would be hopeless in an age when he 
 who reads runs. 
 
 After Skelton who, by the way, resembles Rabelais 
 more than the centre of our circle a great change took 
 place. Poetry to'ok a tinge from the new creed, and lost 
 much of its gayety, and that quality which is called naivett, 
 in consequence. Stephen Hawes, a disciple of Lydgate, 
 wrote in 1506 " The Pastime of Pleasure, or the Historic 
 of Graunde Amoure and La Belle Pucel." It is an alle- 
 
 * Skulls. t The English Poets.
 
 CHA UCER. 
 
 39 
 
 gory, describing how Grande Amoure makes himself 
 worthy of perfect love La Belle Pucel. Hawes had no 
 small share of the divine fire, though his narrative and 
 descriptions are often dull. Hawes imitated Chaucer less 
 than those who preceded him. There is no new ring in 
 his verse which forebodes the new epoch at hand. He 
 wrote at least one couplet that deserves to live: 
 
 " For though the daye be never so long 
 At last the belle ringeth to evensong." 
 
 James I., the author of " The King's Quari,'' who, with 
 Dunbar and Gawain Douglas, reflected the light of 
 Chaucer, was the first Scottish poet to lighten the fifteenth 
 century. Dunbar, a strong and virile poet, born some- 
 where in East Lothian between 1450 and 1460, hearing 
 the mutterings of the coming storm, put his thoughts into 
 verse which stamps him as an earnest Catholic, and which 
 have been called by a competent critic " the finest devo- 
 tional fragments of their age." Gawain Douglas, Bishop 
 of Dunkeld, and son of the famous Eail of Angus " Beil- 
 the-Cat " who boasted that none of his sons except Ga- 
 wain could write, made a translation of the "^neid " 
 which cannot die ; but he was a dilettante rather than a 
 genuine poet, and he gladly dropped the pen for politics, 
 which desertion ultimately caused him to be exiled to 
 London, where he died in 1522. 
 
 When Hawes died, Chaucer's daisies were left to wither 
 until Burns tried to revive them ; but they were never the 
 same. Only he who sang " si douce est la marguerite" 
 can worthily, of all poets, wear that symbol of freshness
 
 40 CHA UCER. 
 
 and simplicity which the early poets, loving him well, 
 lauded in those " merrie " days before men had learned to 
 doubt and to resolve the Almighty God who made them 
 into " the unknowable."
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE REAL MEANING OF ESTHETICS. 
 
 THE word " aesthetics " is from the Greek. It describes 
 that science which discovers the beauty in art, in litera- 
 ture, in nature, and in life. 
 
 No word has been more misused and degraded. When 
 Oscar Wilde came hither he took advantage of the Ameri- 
 can tendency to imitate the English by carrying false 
 aestheticism to its utmost length. He donned knee- 
 breeches and long hair. He told the ladies what they 
 should wear with the solemnity of a prophet. He made 
 the sunflower and peacock feathers fashionable, until the 
 rage for household decoration has become so great that 
 the very dust-pans blossom in sunflowers, and only lately 
 one walked over, sat in, and looked at peacock's feathers 
 until they produced the effect of sea- sickness. They be- 
 came as common as the imposing horsehair-covered 
 furniture of older times, from which one slid off with more 
 ease than grace. Just before and just after Oscar Wilde's 
 advent, everybody talked of "aestheticism v without really 
 knowing what it meant. And to-day the word is used by 
 the newspapers and by people in ordinary conversation as 
 if it meant something eccentric, strained, affected. 
 
 Now it means nothing of the kind. It has a sane and
 
 42 THE REAL MEANING OF ESTHETICS. 
 
 good meaning, and one which we ought to understand 
 thoroughly before we begin to study literature, art, music. 
 To be an "aesthete " is generally understood to be a long, 
 lank creature, if it be a woman, with a straightly flow- 
 ing gown, of the color of faded oak leaves, with a weird, 
 " intense," look and a habit of falling into " stained glass 
 attitudes." Bunthorne, in the opera of " Patience," is 
 the type of the male " aesthete," the man with hanging 
 locks, who wears a sunflower in his button-hole, who wor- 
 ships the lily, and who tries to live up to a Japanese teapot. 
 
 This kind of aesthetics is very easily acquired. It is the 
 vulgar kind. It is well exemplified in one of De Manner's 
 pictures in the London Punch. " Who are those queer- 
 looking girls ? r> asks Mrs. Jones of her children. " They 
 are the de Cimabue Browns," responded Ethel Jones, 
 "they are very aesthetic." "So I thought," answers the 
 mother; ''are you acquainted with them ? " " Oh, no! " 
 cry the little Jones in chorus, " they are intensely aesthe- 
 tic, and they stick out their tongues if we only look at 
 them! " One of the first laws of modern sham culture is 
 that the tongue shall be stuck out in an aesthetic manner! 
 After that the rest is easy. 
 
 To be cultured, I am speaking of the sham culture 
 which is fashionable among superficial and hollow-hearted 
 people, you must have a cult, an intense worship of 
 something or somebody. The neophyte of culture may 
 select Donizetti, or Dante Cavalcante, or the piper that 
 played before Moses. He may take his choice, and must 
 find in his cult intense spiritual meanings, poetic insights.
 
 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 43 
 
 grand possibilities of passion and color, infinite perspec- 
 tive and chiaro-oscuro. It is the mission of culture to see 
 the unseeable and to know the unknowable. The more 
 of the unseeable you see, and the more of the unknowable 
 you know, the more cultured you will be. 
 
 "Culture" ignores morality. To talk of morals in 
 connection with art is to place one's self at once among the 
 rabble according to the cultured. To the cultured the 
 Scriptures are a beautiful poem, but nothing more; and 
 the religion of Christ a mosaic of color. The pretense 
 that drives the moral principles from art in its widest 
 sense is destructive of art. Prometheus suffering is de- 
 void of all his grandeur if we forget the higher suffering 
 that surpasses even the pangs of his vulture-torn heart ; 
 and what becomes of the inspiration of Raffaele if we see 
 in his masterpieces only the portraits of certain Italian 
 women? It is very well for the cultured to talk of the 
 sublime "nuances of expressiveness that intensify the 
 works of Fra Angelico." But the pictures of Fra Angelico 
 are nothing if not religious. No artist would call him an 
 anatomist, or say that he painted human faces ; and it is 
 certainly not very consistent with that eternal fitness of 
 things, of which the cultured continually prate, to put Fra 
 Angelico and Phidias on the same plane. Bric-a-brac is 
 the basis of this new movement which is dying out already. 
 If the end of life is to be decoration, life is a very poor 
 thing ; and this is the philosophy of culture. 
 
 Men of the highest modern culture look back to pagan- 
 ism with longing. The highest compliment that could
 
 44 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 
 
 be paid to men of this kind is to tell them they are 
 pagans. 
 
 The pretender to the highest aesthetics finds hidden 
 meanings and new beauties in bits of prose and verse, 
 which to the uninitiated seem without either meaning or 
 beauty. Sometimes the thing chosen by the " aesthete " 
 for admiration is only the mud of literature. To discover 
 animalculse in mud may be a laudable and interesting 
 work to a man with a microscope ; but to go into spasms 
 of admiration over the hidden beauties of mud and to 
 bespatter the roses of other people is the task of a scav- 
 enger smitten with the monomania of his trade. 
 
 The world must worship something, and when it has 
 lost the true God, it makes gods of its own, and changes 
 its gods every year. Since morality is nothing and beauty 
 is everything, according to the decree of culture, and to 
 be beautiful is to be true to one's self, it is fortunate that 
 the principles of culture have not yet reached the " masses." 
 The washerwoman, who knows all the points of Carlo 
 Dolce, and thinks Murillo a charlatan in color, will hardly 
 endear herself to the "cultured," if she forget the differ- 
 ence between mine and thine ; and the clerk who has his 
 " cult " may deem that the necessities of the beautiful 
 that is, the developement of all the capacities of his nature 
 requires the appropriation of a certain portion of his 
 employer's money. In cases like these, the advice of 
 Polonius should be taken with a grain of salt, for the cul- 
 tured may be " true " to themselves without being true to 
 any other man.
 
 THE REAL MEANIXG OF .-ESTHETICS. 45 
 
 Culture did not save the world. At the height of the 
 culture of the olden time, Christ came down to save man- 
 kind. Civilization, like an over-ripe pear, had become 
 rotten. We are asked to accept the body for the spirit; 
 we may grow ecstatic over the carving of a crucifix, but 
 we may not think of the anguish of Him typified; we 
 may cry aloud at the " effects " in a picture by Guido, but 
 we must forget the diviner beauty of the Immaculate 
 Mother; we may admire the "pose" and the "lights and 
 shades" in the hair of St. Mary Magdalen, but we may 
 not remember the Infinite Mercy that forgave her! " Can 
 anything be more false, more degrading than this gospel ? 
 Can anything be more hollow, more worthless than the 
 " sincerity " of which the cultured talk ? 
 
 And yet how many seemingly thoughtful people have 
 adopted the superficialities of this modern teaching. 
 There are to-day men who hold that education and culture 
 will reform the world. That a thorough knowledge of 
 grammar and the study of Shakspeare would thin out the 
 dangerous classes that if to these requisitions could be 
 added a satisfactory knowledge of the maxims of Emerson 
 and Confucius, the world would become a Paradise, in 
 which everybody would " intelligently " revel in combina- 
 tions of peacock blue and green, and understand the 
 shades of workmanship that divide cloissonnt from champ 
 five. This is the end of culture. After that the " un- 
 knowable ! " 
 
 A friend writes a description of an " aesthete " of a 
 lately fashionable type. He says :
 
 4 6 THE REAL MEANING OF .-ESTHETICS. 
 
 I once knew a young person full of " aesthetic " feeling 
 of the fashionable kind who worshipped simplicity. He 
 declared that the melodies of Mother Goose were replete 
 with higher meaning. " Oh," he had a habit of saying, 
 the " aesthetic " movement was then young, " Oh, if you 
 could only learn to draw into yourself the precious soul- 
 fulness of simplicity!" And then he read in his most 
 soulful and intense manner: 
 
 " Old Mother Hubbard, she went to the cupboard, 
 To get her poor dog a bone." . 
 
 He often asked me if I saw the symbolical and magnifi- 
 cent appropriateness of this. I was obliged to confess 
 that I did not. "Ah," he said, " do you not see that old 
 Mother Hubbard, oh, sweetly simple cognomen! typi- 
 fies the hope of the heart seeking for refreshment in an 
 arid world ? She went to the cupboard in the expecta- 
 tion of finding nothing for her own selfish pleasure. No, 
 she wanted only the inexpressible delight of giving 
 nourishment to a soul, typified by her dog, that hungered. 
 Oh, exquisite story ! in it I read much that the world can- 
 not see. Surely the genius of him that composed such a 
 poem was stronger and simpler than Shakspeare's." He 
 found joyous and ineffable meaning in " Little Boy Blue," 
 and he said that " Old King Cole " was a blast from the 
 silver trumpet of the centuries. I never quite understood 
 him. He thought he was inspired; but most of his friends 
 said that he was crazy. He felt this very much, and I 
 think that it was to show them they were wrong that he
 
 THE REAL MEANING OF .ESTHETICS. 47 
 
 stopped being an " aesthete " and went to help his uncle 
 in a soap factory. 
 
 But before that, he had some strange ways. We lived 
 in the same house. He had a picture of Dante, befor j 
 which he kept a candle burning day and night. And one 
 night when his lamp was lit beyond midnight, the landlady 
 knocked and found him with a lily in his hand by his open 
 window. He told her that the supremest moment of life 
 was when one could see the argent glances of the orb of 
 night through the ambient perfume of stately lily-flower. 
 The landlady frequently said after this that he ought to 
 have a keeper. But, as I said, he went into the soap 
 business. He does not write to me, because he always 
 considered me a Philistine he called everybody who did 
 not rave about the true, the beautiful, and the simple, 
 Philistines. He once quoted a line from a sonnet, be- 
 ginning: 
 
 " There were no roses till the first child died," 
 
 and he said: "Oh, essence of poetry! there you have 
 expressed a preciousness of exquisite meaning as if a silver 
 streak of dawn had darted into murk from the empyrean." 
 When I said I meant just what I said, he gave me up. 
 
 In cultivating a taste for good books, you are cultivat- 
 ing true aesthetics. In cultivating a taste for good pictures, 
 you are likewise doing so. In preferring Mendelssohn's 
 " Songs Without Words " to the " Carlotta Waltzes," you 
 are doing it too. Esthetics really means the calm and 
 reasonable seeking after the greatest things in art, litera-
 
 48 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 
 
 ture, and music. It does not mean straining after effect; 
 it does not mean attitudinizing and posing and wearing 
 strange clothes just to appear unusual. All that is vulgar 
 for affectation and pretension are always vulgar. 
 
 There are Philistines in the world, people who find no 
 good in anything that is not absolutely useful, who in 
 the sunset-tinged clouds see only banks of vapor, who 
 value heavy and rich furniture and surroundings only by 
 the show they make. The female Philistine values dia- 
 monds and sealskin sacks more than a good book, a great 
 picture, or the power to interpret the meaning of a Mozart 
 or a Schubert. The male Philistine laughs at music and 
 poetry and art and refinement. He sneers at everything 
 he does not understand. If he buys a picture, be sure it 
 is because he wants to boast of its price to his friends. 
 And even then he thinks more of the triple-gilding on the 
 frame than of the genius of the artist. He buys a dia- 
 mond because it is big and dear. He despises everything 
 that does not represent money. There are some poor 
 Philistines, but they would be three times as vulgar if they 
 were rich. Philistines, rich and poor, male and female, 
 are thoroughly despicable. You see them in large Ameri- 
 can cities in the winter and at watering-places in the sum- 
 mer, the men with immense diamonds, the women in the 
 latest fashionable attire. They are like nothing so much 
 as savages to whom a traveller has given a string of glass 
 beads. They are less to be respected than the savage, 
 because they live among shapes of beauty, yet they will 
 see them not. Education with them means accomplish-
 
 THE REAL MEANING OF A-.STHF.TICS. ' 49 
 
 ments that will " show off." A simple song well sung is 
 nothing to them. But a bit from an opera, full of cadenzas 
 and trills and fiorituri is everything, because it seems to 
 mean the expenditure of so much money. 
 
 A poem or a "chapter from a great book, read with true 
 feeling and expression, is nothing, though it be the per- 
 fection of the art that conceals art. No; they must have 
 passion torn to tatters. Elocution, in its worst sense, is 
 the only kind of delivery they can admire. And then 
 there must be sobs, claspings of the hands, and dramatic 
 attitudes, suitable enough perhaps on the stage of a third- 
 rate theatre, but impossible to people of nice taste in a 
 drawing-room. To the Philistine, 
 
 "A primrose by the river's brim 
 Only a primrose is to him 
 And it is nothing more." 
 
 To be what they call an " aesthete " is bad ; to be what 
 they call a Philistine is even worse. The "aesthete," after 
 all, can be made to feel so dissatisfied with himself that 
 he will drop his affectations ; but the incorrigible vice of 
 the Philistine is self-conceit. 
 
 Let us hope that we stand between the two. And if 
 we do not, let us hope that we shall cultivate such a noble 
 dissatisfaction with ourselves that we shall be neither 
 aesthetes nor Philistines. If the sham aesthetic move- 
 ment, which has now spent its force, did no other good, it 
 at least taught Americans, apt to be very thorough Philis- 
 tines, that there is a beauty in common things. It made 
 the field daisy and the sunflower fashionable, too fash- 
 4
 
 50 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 
 
 ionable for our comfort. But, nevertheless, it taught us 
 that the things that were so plenty that they could be had 
 for nothing, had a beauty of their own. If the morning- 
 glory were a hothouse flower, it would seem as precious 
 as the orchids about which the fashionable world is raving. 
 
 True aesthetics is the seeking of beauty in the life 
 around us. A Turkish writer has said : " If I had two 
 loaves of bread, I would give one for a hyacinth, for the 
 hyacinth would feed my soul." There is a great deal in 
 that. Who that has watched the bulb of the hyacinth in 
 its glass, at first a mere brown, clod-like thing, change, 
 like a buried body at the Resurrection, to a being replete 
 with life and beauty and perfume, does not feel that it is 
 worth some self-denial ? The creature who would not do 
 without some luxury to buy a great book, to read a great 
 poem, to see a fine picture, to hear the organ throb or the 
 voice of the violin pulsate under the force of genius is 
 nothing but a Philistine, half a barbarian, for his best 
 faculties are paralyzed. 
 
 Esthetics ought to be a part of our lives. It is a part 
 of the every-day life of the Christian Church. The Church 
 has drawn to tier service the great masters of aesthetics in 
 all ages. She made Raphael and Murillo possible. Bot- 
 ticelli and Fra Angelico could not have existed without 
 her. She created the music of Palestrina, inspired Mozart 
 and forced Haydn to join her choirs. Her ancient 
 stained glass is the despair of modern artists. The carv- 
 ing in wood in her old cathedrals, the unapproachable 
 models for carvers of the present day. Jewels, lace,
 
 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 51 
 
 flowers, were drawn to her shrines. These sham aesthetes 
 may praise paganism and make paeans in its honor, but 
 true aestheticism is essentially Christian. 
 
 Education without aesthetics is like a sonnet without 
 metre, a peach without bloom, a thrush without a 
 voice, a woman without gentle manners. Esthetics 
 does not consist of the painting of a bunch of golden rod 
 or a sumach leaf on every available spot. The young 
 woman who in search of new worlds to conquer painted 
 a pansy on her father's bald head while he was asleep 
 made a mistake. She probably found it out when he 
 awoke. It consists in using and seeking to use the gifts 
 God has bestowed on us in order to make our lives and 
 the lives of our neighbors more pleasant and beautiful ; it 
 teaches us to value the little pleasures of life; it helps to 
 put sweetness and light into dark and gloomy days. I 
 use sweetness and light not because Matthew Arnold used 
 them, but because, when used by a great theologian, cent- 
 uries before Arnold was born, they expressed what I mean. 
 
 To be an aesthete in the common meaning of the word 
 is to be a fool. It is to love art because it is fashionable ; 
 or rather to pretend to love it. Not long ago, every second 
 house showed a spinning-wheel in its parlor decorated 
 with orange, pink, or blue bows of ribbon. Why was the 
 old-fashioned spinning-wheel given such prominence ? 
 Not because it is beautiful ; not because it is old and the 
 property of a mother or grandmother; for these spinning- 
 wheels are made by the hundred in the furniture factories, 
 but because it suddenly became fashionable to have
 
 52 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 
 
 American ancestors. And the spinning-wheels and 
 grandfather's clocks, bought by the dozen in old farm 
 houses or made to order, were put for show in conspicuous 
 and inappropriate places. Now this was false aesthetics. 
 It was all sham. If I have an old cup, an old table, an 
 old sideboard which belonged to my grandmother, it is 
 right that I should value it, no matter how ugly it is. But 
 if I buy an old thing, not because it is beautiful, but be- 
 cause it is fashionable to have it, I become part of a 
 sham. To buy an old and beautiful thing is commend- 
 able ; but if I buy it because it is fashionable, not caring 
 whether it be beautiful or not, I fall below the level of 
 good taste. 
 
 The rich man who comes from Europe bringing with 
 him a miscellaneous collection of things which he has 
 purchased for the reason that he has been told that they 
 are fine, and for another reason that they are dear, 
 is a pitiable object. In his pretense and ignorance he 
 reminds one of the old Irish adage: "A well-dressed 
 man without education is like a boneen with a jewel in his 
 ear." A boneen, my friends, is a little pig ; perhaps you 
 know it in French as cochon. Riches cannot buy culture 
 when the fine instinct does not exist ; nor can they obtain 
 true aesthetics through old clocks made last year in New 
 Jersey, or somebody else's old spinning-wheels. 
 
 To be " aesthetic," in the true sense, one must be honest 
 and sincere ; not afraid to confess that one likes a simple 
 and common thing, and not afraid to give one's reasons 
 for such a liking. For myself, I have been in houses
 
 THE REAL MEAXIXG OF ESTHETICS. 53 
 
 which were palaces in which I was unhappy. And I have 
 been in little houses which were anything but palaces and 
 I have been very happy. The house which is like a 
 museum, where a flamboyant copy of one of Rubens' 
 Mary Magdalens jostles the Mercury of Praxiteles, where 
 solferino-colored cushions bought at a "fancy" shop and 
 Japanese screens, imitation armor and modern stained 
 glass make confusion, where a goblet carved by Cellini, 
 a lion of Barye's and a tambourine painted with sunflowers 
 repose side by side near the inevitable spinning-wheel, 
 and where everything says: "All this cost money," that 
 is a vulgar house. 
 
 There are probably more rich savages in America than 
 anywhere else, for the reason that many of our rich people 
 have not yet learned that one of the greatest privileges 
 wealth gives them is that of exercising good taste to the 
 utmost. A rich woman can afford to be elegant and 
 simple. But too often she does not understand this. She 
 glitters with diamonds in the morning and walks in the 
 streets in gowns that, in Europe, no decent woman would 
 wear unless she rode in a carriage. But this will be 
 changed when we become more civilized ; when we learn 
 that the possession of riches does not make people worthy 
 of respect and admiration, but that they must deserve it 
 in other ways. 
 
 With your advantages of home training and the incom- 
 parable training you receive here, you will be in a posi- 
 tion, when you enter the world, to distinguish between the 
 true and the false aesthetics.
 
 54 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 
 
 In order to make a good confession, one must have 
 committed sin. In order to acquire good taste, one must 
 know what bad taste is. It is bad taste to prefer costli- 
 ness to elegance, to imagine that costly things are always 
 elegant. It is bad taste to admire things because they 
 are fashionable without knowing why. As perhaps you 
 discovered from my first lecture, I am not an authority on 
 the subject of ladies' dress, but I do know that no young 
 lady with a tip-tilted retrousse, or, let us put it more 
 gently, a snub nose should wear a Grecian knot. Why ? 
 Because this fashion of wearing the hair was invented by 
 the Greeks, a people who were more particular about the 
 form and the fitness of things than even the French, who 
 are the real modern Greeks in spirit. You will find in 
 the famous head of the Clytie an example of this style of 
 hair-dressing now so fashionable. You will observe, how- 
 ever, that she has not a nose "tip-tilted like a flower." 
 The Grecian knot was invented to accompany the Grecian 
 nose. And the young lady with a Roman or a retrousst 
 nose who adopts the Grecian knot because it is the fashion 
 errs against perfect taste. For the aesthetics of dress are 
 worth considering if you consider dress at all. And even 
 in small things it is best to be correct. 
 
 It is bad taste, when you are permitted to hear good 
 singing, to admire and to think of the costumes of the 
 prima donna, or at a fine play to consider the question 
 whether the actress's dresses are by Worth, or not, as of 
 as much importance as her delivery of the words. It 
 seems to me to be bad taste not to choose religious
 
 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 55 
 
 pictures and statues with some regard to the rules of art. 
 It is a large part of the pretentious aesthetics of our time 
 to dwell more on the effect than on the cause, to think 
 more of the attitude of the Mater Dolorosa of Carlo Dolce 
 than of the ineffable woe her face expresses, to rave 
 about the opaline color of Fra Angelico's angels and to 
 think nothing of the fervent religious spirit which created 
 them. But some of us Catholics are prone to go to the 
 other extreme. The gaudiest religious print is good 
 enough for us. And while we revere unspeakably the 
 Passion of Our Lord, we keep in our oratories crucifixes 
 whose workmanship the most untutored Tyrolean peasant 
 would not tolerate. I have seen pictures of Our Blessed 
 Lady which were positively sacrilegious. While we would 
 not endure for a moment in our parlors a picture of Wash- 
 ington with a magenta coat and a green hat, and a figure 
 out of drawing, we contentedly put a figure of St. Joseph 
 painted in the crudest and most vulgar manner in our 
 oratories. And this in spite of the fact that we possess a 
 thousand exquisite and poetical conceptions, that all the 
 power of the genius of the most artistic age of the world 
 has burst forth in praise of Christ, His Mother and the 
 Saints. While the " aesthetes " buy our old altar pieces 
 for seemingly fabulous amounts of money, while their 
 drawing-rooms and studies are filled with copies of Bot- 
 ticelli, Raphael, Guido and Overbeck, we are content with 
 wretched prints and statues which make the judicious 
 grieve. There is one woman in all this land who has, in 
 spite of the vulgarity and ignorance around her, preached 
 ardently the aesthetics of religion.
 
 5 6 THE REAL MEANING OF ESTHETICS. 
 
 This is Miss Eliza Allen Starr. Her name deserves 
 reverence. 
 
 There are many houses throughout this country where 
 true agstheticism is understood ; where serenity and peace 
 dwell ; where the spirit of beauty is cultivated ; where the 
 inmates have learned that costliness is not the measure 
 of enjoyment. These are not generally the homes of the 
 rich, nor the homes of the very poor. It is in the happy 
 medium that one generally finds the truest refinement and 
 culture. I call to mind one now. Its centre is the sitting- 
 room of an old-fashioned house in the country. There 
 are always good books on the centre-table. The mother 
 and daughters know "The Following of Christ" by heart. 
 The few pictures are copies of old painters, good prints, 
 and photographs. On the open piano, one sees, not the 
 " Lullaby " from Erminie or a Valse Brilliante by nobody 
 knows who, but music showing that the brain and heart 
 have been brought into practice as well as the fingers. 
 And the people there are content. The lily and the tulip 
 from their garden, the daisy and the violet from their 
 meadows yield them renewed pleasure every year. They 
 try to have only beautiful things around them, and they 
 succeed, though they do not search the old curiosity shops 
 for Louis Sixteenth cabinets or Henry Second vases, and I 
 doubt whether they know the difference between the ware 
 of Satsuma and the ware of Limoge. 
 
 It is true that the history of each kind of pottery is in 
 part the history of the people who made it. From that 
 point of view it is interesting. The Wedgewood ware
 
 THE REAL MEAXIXG OF AESTHETICS. 
 
 57 
 
 represents a crystallization of enduring and well-directed 
 human effort, as you can see by reference to Samuel 
 Smiles' " Self-Help " and how much wonderful and mag- 
 nificent history is suggested by a carved cup of Benvenuto 
 Cellini's. But when people begin to make the real pur- 
 poses of life subservient to decoration, to consider the 
 fold of Oriental drapery, the marking of a teapot as of 
 more importance than virtuous and cheerful living, it were 
 better for them if all the pottery in the world had suffered 
 the fate of the great Alexandrian Library and been burned 
 in its own kilns. 
 
 This false aesthetics is a craze. I remember a dinner 
 at which one of the apostles of this very changeable relig- 
 ion was present. He was an Englishman and an Oxford 
 man. And the humble Americans waited anxiously for 
 him, and the poor hostess went about with red flushes on 
 her cheeks, fearing that everything would not be up to 
 his lordship's expectations; for it was rumored that he 
 once left a dinner-table because the lights were not 
 changed with every course ; and that he had no appetite 
 unless the proper music was played while he dined. It 
 was said that, by some mistake, the band had once in- 
 dulged in a galop during the serving of the soup. This 
 had given him a fit of dyspepsia from which he never re- 
 covered. The house was decorated with the choicest bits 
 of ceramic. The talk was of the most "aesthetic" kind: 
 " Oh," one lady said, " how intense, how preciously and 
 utterly intense is the unwritten poetry of the unknown 
 poet who never even murmurs the spontaneous, burning
 
 5 8 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 
 
 thoughts that foam within him ! " I was easily embar- 
 rassed then, so I said: " Yes, ma'am " which was not the 
 proper thing at all. When the great aesthete came, the 
 ladies all gathered around him. " How intense ! " they 
 said, "how quite too utterly intense! " And one of them 
 put a wreath of lilies on his head which hung down over 
 his left eye. When the dinner had begun, he disappointed 
 everybody by asking for roast beef and devouring three 
 large slices. He shocked the hostess by saying, " when a 
 man's hungry, he wants something more than ambrosia 
 and nightingale's tongues, doesn't he?" But the atti- 
 tudinizing, the straining after effect, the insincere nonsense 
 talked by these people while they waited for the " aesthe- 
 tic " splendor to dawn, showed how hollow and worthless 
 their sham aesthetics was. 
 
 There can be no true beauty in life unless there is good- 
 ness as a foundation for it. True aesthetics must mean 
 serenity and cheerfulness. It is really aesthetic to make 
 the best of everything, to look on the bright side, to 
 adorn the seamy side of life with such ornaments as are 
 near you. The old Turkish writer's saying comes back 
 again : " If I had only two loaves of bread, I would ex- 
 change one for a hyacinth." 
 
 The highest authority says that we cannot live by 
 bread alone. And again : " Look at the lilies of the field." 
 We cannot neglect the beauty of common things without 
 losing much that is good in life. If we want to find the 
 loveliest example of a household frugal, simple, contented, 
 serene, let us glance back at that of Nazareth. There we
 
 THE REAL MEANING OF ESTHETICS. 59 
 
 see the Virgin Mother " blessed among women " calmly, 
 yet with joy singing in her heart, doing her household 
 duties. The lily of the valley and the roses of Sharon 
 bloom around her. She did not live amid Persian stuffs 
 or the jewels of Solomon or ancient and curious vases, 
 and yet she lived the highest and most beautiful of lives. 
 
 The aesthetics of literature does not mean what this new 
 school would have us believe. We shall not find beauty 
 and consolation in authors whose only merit is the refin- 
 ing of trifles or the deification of pagan vice. Swinburne 
 and Rossetti, Villers and Rabelais, Gautier and Baudelaire 
 can only be adored by men of perverted taste. As the 
 drinker of whiskey cannot enjoy the flavor of food or 
 liquid less fiery, so our aesthetes, partially from perverted 
 taste, partially from a desire to be perverted and singular, 
 affect a liking for what no healthy-minded person can like. 
 
 The aesthetic sneer at " The Rainy Day " of Longfellow, 
 at "The Lost Chord" of Adelaide Procter, at much of 
 the poetry of Wordsworth, and at some of the poetry of 
 Tennyson. They find that Sir Walter Scott is not " utter " 
 enough ; they can endure no music with a melody in it, 
 no picture with a story in it. They pretend that a mut- 
 ton chop eaten from an ordinary plate is hateful to them. 
 And I have never believed that. But let us be content to 
 know what the science and art of true aesthetics mean. 
 Let us not be disturbed by these new English " fads." 
 Let us like what we have good reason for liking. The 
 fonder we are of our homes and our country, the more 
 truly "aesthetic" we shall be. I can forgive the adora-
 
 60 THE REAL MEANING OF AESTHETICS. 
 
 tion of the sunflower and the field daisy because they are 
 American flowers. Let us practise the art of aesthetics by 
 trying to find and to point out the beauty that springs from 
 American soil and permeates American literature. Do 
 not let us become vulgar by waiting with open mouths and 
 beating hearts for the latest British utterances. Until we 
 know the beauties of our own land, let us not go abroad. 
 If we do, we deserve to be counted among that vulgar 
 herd who "go to Europe to complete an education never 
 begun at home."
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASHAW, AND HABINGTON. 
 
 ALL poets have longed for clearer, more exact, and fer- 
 vent expression of their inspiration than any earthly lan- 
 guage can give, and all poets have felt that the highest 
 poetry here falls short of that sublime poetry which their 
 boldest thoughts only see as through a glass darkly. No 
 poet seems to have known this longing and this limitation 
 better than Robert Southwell. To him poetry brought no 
 consolation, as we may judge from his poems. To him it 
 brought no false quietism, which both Wordsworth and 
 Cowper seem to take for consolation. He burned to 
 manifest the divine love that lived within him ; and, in the 
 usual expression of poetry, he cried out. Southwell was 
 a priest whom religion forced to be a poet ; it is doubtful 
 whether either Habington or Southwell would have been 
 poets had they not been spurred on to ardent expression 
 by the motive which religion gives to devout souls. This 
 is true, perhaps, in a lesser degree of Habington and Cra- 
 shaw than of Southwell. The former, however, would 
 have been only dilettanti, had not religion given them 
 clearness and strength. All three were, as another writer 
 has expressed it of one of them, not merely poets who 
 happened to be Catholics, they were poets and Catholics ;
 
 62 SOUTHWELL, CRASH A W, AND HABINGTON. 
 
 and their religion and inspiration were so near each other 
 that it is difficult to tell which bade them sing. 
 
 No man can read the story of Robert Southwell's life 
 without a feeling of reverential admiration. His life and 
 his poetry are alike above our ordinary sympathy, for he 
 was a martyr, and a poet whose theme was always of 
 sacred things. Martyr and poet are epithets so grand 
 that when a man deserves them he becomes superhuman. 
 For this reason the poetry of Southwell will never become 
 popular. His poems had some vogue in England, not be- 
 cause the public really preferred strength and real passion 
 to the fashionable word-building and quaint conceits which 
 passed for poetry, or felt his power as a poet, but because 
 the heroism and pathos of his death attracted popular 
 sympathy to his work. Even his enemies admitted that 
 his death was worthy of an ancient Roman ; and zeal, in- 
 flexible faith, and heroic endurance were not without honor 
 even in days when the politicians had found it wise to lead 
 the English nation to regard a Catholic priest as worse 
 than a leper. 
 
 Southwell did not think much of poetry as an art; 
 but this fault was not uncommon among the Elizabethan 
 poets. His richness of expression is unbounded, unhus- 
 banded. Nature, as nature, had no message for him. 
 Nature was God's footstool ; of the myriad voices, of the 
 myriad phases in earth and heaven, he took no note for 
 themselves. The rose and the lily were for him in their 
 best place before the tabernacle, and the breath of the 
 new-mown fields was less sweet to him than the incense
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASHA W, AXD HABINGTOX. 63 
 
 that wreathed the pillars of a church. Rhythm and rhyme 
 were fetters to his thought rather than helps to it. Verse 
 in his hands was the nearest earthly approach to that 
 divine expression which the seraphs have ; it was powerless 
 to hold the fervor of a heart that burned with desire for 
 union with our Lord. " St. Peter's Complaint " the most 
 worthy expression of his genius is an evidence of this. 
 
 Southwell doubtless considered Shakspeare's contem- 
 porary poem of " Lucrece " if, indeed, he read it as 
 Ulysses looked upon the sirens. Professor Hales, who 
 contributes a brief but appreciative notice of Southwell to 
 Tlie English Poets, points out the striking resemblance, in 
 a literary way, between "St. Peter's Complaint" and 
 "Lucrece." In each poem there is an overpowering 
 wealth of imagery, a crowding of illustration, a luxuriance 
 of thought, and a minuteness of narration. " St. Peter's 
 Complaint " is the stronger poern, not only in its motive 
 but in treatment. " It is undoubtedly," says Prof. Hales, 
 " the work of a mind of no ordinary copiousness, often 
 embarrassed by its own riches, and so expending them 
 with a prodigal carelessness." But it is something more 
 than this. It is the outburst of a heart burning with divine 
 love and poetic fire ; it is unique in literature. It is not 
 artistic ; it contains little sweetness, no sympathy with the 
 humanity of the saint, which a modern poet would have 
 made the most prominent part of the " Complaint." The 
 silence of a Stylites only could better express the penitence 
 of such a soul as Southwell portrays. The poem is long, 
 consisting of one hundred and forty six-line stanzas. 
 These are striking and beautiful:
 
 64 SOUTHWELL, CRASIIA W, AND HABINGTON. 
 
 ' ' Like solest swan that swims in silent deep, 
 And never sings but obsequies of death, 
 
 Sing out thy plaints, and sole in secret weep, 
 In suing pardon spend thy perjured breath ; 
 
 Attire thy soul in sorrow's mourning weed, 
 And at thine eyes let guilty conscience bleed. 
 
 " Still in the 'lembic of thy doleful breast 
 
 Those bitter fruits that from thy sins do grow ; 
 
 For fuel, self-accusing thoughts be best ; 
 Use fear as fire, the coals let penance blow ; 
 
 And seek none other quintessence but tears, 
 That eyes may shed what entered at thine ears. 
 
 " When, traitor to the Son, in Mother's eyes, 
 I shall present my humble suit for grace, 
 
 What blush can paint the shame that shall arise 
 Or write my inward feelings on my face ? 
 
 Might she the sorrow with the sinner see, 
 Though I'm despised, my grief might pitied be. 
 
 ' ' But ah ! how can her ears my speech endure, 
 
 Or scent my breath still reeking hellish steam ? 
 
 Can Mother like what did the Son abjure, 
 Or heart deflowered a virgin's love redeem ? 
 
 The Mother nothing loves the Son doth loathe ; 
 Ah! loathsome wretch, detested of them both. 
 
 " Weep balm and myrrh, you sweet Arabian trees, 
 With purest gems perfume and pearl your rine ; 
 
 Shed on your honey-drops, your busy bees, 
 I, barren plant, must weep unpleasant brine : 
 
 Hornets, I hear, salt drops their labor plies, 
 Sucked out of sin, and shed by showering eyes. 
 
 " If love, if loss, if fault, if spotted fame, 
 
 If danger, death, if wrath or wreck of weal, 
 
 Entitle eyes true heirs to earned blame, 
 That due remorse in such events conceal : 
 
 That want of tears might well enroll my name 
 As chiefest saint in calendar of shame."
 
 SO U TH WELL, CRA SNA W, AMD HA BING TON. 6 5 
 
 These quotations give only a slight idea of the beauty 
 and richness of the poem. It is over-wrought, and the 
 constant alliteration detracts somewhat from the simplicity 
 of statement which would otherwise have strengthened 
 many of the lines. One cannot help speculating upon the 
 heights which Southwell might have reached in the art of 
 poetry, had he not suffered death at the age of thirty-three 
 at the age when he desired most to die, if God willed 
 it, as bringing him nearer that sublime Model of his life 
 whom he loved so well to intimate. It is hardly possible 
 that he would have written much, even had he lived to 
 remain in England. The life of a priest in the days of 
 " good queen Bess " had little leisure in it for dalliance 
 with a muse that does not love turmoil. And, moreover, 
 theology is not the most tender nurse of the poetic art. 
 Theology is apt to restrict its steps and hold it in leading- 
 strings, that it may not forget men's souls in plucking 
 flowers for the sake of their perfume. Dante, it is true, 
 was a theologian, and Milton probably thought that he 
 was one ; but Southwell was a priest, and the holy office 
 cannot accept a divided heart. It is quite probable that 
 in " St. Peter's Complaint " he reached his highest water- 
 mark in poetry. It may have been in him, as it was in 
 the author of " Lucrece," to write a poem that would move 
 the hearts of all the ages to come ; but to him, as a priest 
 and poet, fame was nothing. The soul nearest him was 
 more important to him than the admiration of centuries. 
 Southwell is one of a very few poets who never felt the 
 touch of earthly passion or of that sentiment, half -human, 
 5
 
 66 SOUTHWELL, CRASH AW. AND HABINGTON. 
 
 half-divine, that we call love. Even Crashaw's address to 
 his mythical mistress, impersonal as it is, expresses a feel- 
 ing which Southwell never experienced. He lent no ear 
 to the Circe who transformed so many of his brother poets 
 into a semblance of bestiality. As a priest, he felt the 
 sacredness of his place above angels ; and there is no sign 
 of that conflict between the sensuous and the spiritual to 
 which poetic temperaments seem especially prone. In 
 this Southwell offers a striking contrast to a rare and deK- 
 cate modern genius, Maurice de Guerin, who, likewise a 
 Catholic and with a strong instinct toward the entire 
 consecration of himself to God, shattered himself in a 
 struggle between the sensuousness of nature and the 
 asceticism which he felt in Christianity. But Southwell 
 was the highest type of a Catholic. This fact, from the 
 ordinary literary point of view, doubtless restricted his 
 scope as a poet; but from the ordinary literary point of 
 view, the manner is above the thing, the art of Gautier 
 above the fervor of Southwell, and human love is only 
 worthy of the poet's song. Southwell is none the less a 
 poet that he sang to God alone. The texture of his work 
 is stained in the Blood of the Sacred Heart, not iridescent 
 with the changing hues that arise from corruption. " Love's 
 Plot," which is not inappropriate here, is full of a charac- 
 teristic sententiousness that shows his firm poetical grasp 
 by never becoming prosy or commonplace : 
 
 " Love mistress is of many minds, 
 
 Yet few know whom they serve : 
 They reckon least how little love 
 Their service doth deserve.
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASH AW, AND IIABINGTOX. 67 
 
 " The will she robbeth from the wit, 
 
 The sense from reason's lore ; 
 She is delightful in the rind, 
 Corrupted in the core. 
 
 " She shroudeth vice in virtue's veil 
 
 Pretending good in ill ; 
 She offereth joy, affordeth grief, 
 A kiss when she doth kill. 
 
 "A honey flower reigns from her lips, 
 
 Sweet lights shine in her face ; 
 She hath the blush of virgin's mind, 
 The mind of viper's race. 
 
 " She makes thee seek, yet fear to find ; 
 
 To find, but not enjoy ; 
 In many frowns some gliding smiles 
 She yields, to more annoy. 
 
 " Like winter rose and summer ice, 
 
 Her joys are still untimely ; 
 
 Before her hope, behind remorse, 
 
 Fair first, in fine unseemly. 
 
 " Moods, passions, fancies, jealous fits, 
 
 Attend upon her train ; 
 She yieldeth rest without repose, 
 A heaven in hellish pain. 
 
 " Her house is sloth, her door deceit, 
 
 And slippery hopes her stairs ; 
 Unbashfal boldness bids her guests, 
 And every vice appears. 
 
 " Her sleep in sin doth end in wrath, 
 
 Remorse rings her awake ; 
 Death calls her up, shame drives her out, 
 Despairs her upshot make. 
 
 *' Plough not the seas, sow not the sands, 
 
 Leave off your idle pain ; 
 Seek other mistress for your minds 
 Love's service is in vain."
 
 68 SOUTHWELL, CRASH A /F, AND HABINGTON. 
 
 "Times go by Turns" and "The Burning Babe" are 
 already too well known to Catholics to need reproduction. 
 It is strange that his " Child of my Choice " a tender and 
 fervent address to the Child Jesus has not found its way 
 into our hymn books. 
 
 Southwell was not the only poet who suffered on the 
 scaffold. The gallant Surrey had preceded him, and in 
 after-years Andre Chenier died by the hand of the execu- 
 tioner ; but no poet in modern times died the glorious 
 death of Southwell. The deaths of Surrey and Chenier 
 were as mournful sunsets ; his a glorious sunrise. Like his 
 own " solest swan," his last songs in prison were sweetest, 
 for he had already pierced, with a martyr's vision, the 
 splendors of heaven. 
 
 From his childhood he was fervently religious. He was 
 the third son of Richard Southwell, a Catholic gentleman 
 of Norfolk. Robert was born at his father's seat, Hors- 
 ham, St. Faith's, about the year 1562. There is a tradi- 
 tion to the effect that a gypsy woman made an attempt to 
 steal him, in the hope of gain ; and he never ceased, it is 
 said, to show his gratitude to God for having saved him 
 from a semi-savage and vagrant life. Although the South- 
 well family was Catholic, Richard Southwell never per- 
 mitted his religion to stand in the way of his preferment ; 
 and in those days Catholics could obtain worldly advantage 
 only by the sacrifice of principle. Robert's tendency 
 towards the religious life was so strong that he was sent 
 to Douay to be educated for the priesthood, and from 
 there to Paris. This fact speaks well for his father, who
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASHA IV, AND HABINGTON. 69 
 
 risked much by having him educated abroad. Robert 
 went from Paris to Rome, where he was received into the 
 Society of Jesus. Early in the year 1585 he applied for 
 permission to return to England. The thought of souls 
 perishing for the sacred nourishment that he could give 
 them filled him with a solicitude that was agony, and he 
 longed for the crown of martyrdom. The peril that faced 
 him was not vague. "Any papist," according to the statute 
 27 Elizabeth c. 2, "born in the dominions of the crown of 
 England, who should come over thither from beyond the 
 sea (unless driven by stress of weather, and tarrying only 
 a reasonable time), or should be in England three days 
 without conforming and taking the oath, should be guilty 
 of high treason." Southwell knew that a Jesuit was 
 doubly obnoxious to the herd of Englishmen who blindly 
 followed time-serving leaders; he knew, too, that if dis- 
 covered he would be hanged, drawn, and quartered. He 
 did not shrink. Perhaps he reverently repeated the words 
 of his " Burning Babe : " 
 
 " Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorn, 
 The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals ; 
 The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls ; 
 For which, as now on fire I am, to work them to their good, 
 So will I melt into a bath, to wash them in my blood." 
 
 Southwell's letter to his father, which he wrote soon 
 after his return to England, shows that the poet who wrote 
 " St. Peter's Complaint " might as easily have spoken an 
 apologia before the despots who in England imitated the 
 persecutions of Diocletian in the name of "reformation."
 
 70 SOUTHWELL, CRASH A W, AND HABINGTON. 
 
 The letter is full of that earnestness and faith which were 
 ingrained in this remarkable man : 
 
 " Who hath more interest in the grape than he who planted the 
 vine ? Who more right to the crop than he who sowed the corn ? or 
 where can the child owe so great service as to him to whom he is in- 
 debted for his very life and being ? With young Tobias, I have 
 travelled far, and brought home a freight of spiritual substance to 
 enrich you, and medicinal receipts against your ghostly maladies. I 
 have, with Esau, after a long toil in pursuing a long and painful 
 chase, returned with the full prey you were wont to love, desiring 
 thereby to insure your blessing. I have, in this general famine of all 
 true and Christian food, with Joseph, prepared abundance of the 
 bread of angels for the repast of your soul. And now my desire is 
 that my drugs may cure you, my prey delight you, and my provision 
 feed you, by whom I have been cured, enlightened, and fed myself ; 
 that your courtesies may, in part, be countervailed, and my duty, in 
 some sort, performed. Despise not, good sire, the youth of your son, 
 neither deem your God measureth his endowments by number of 
 years. Hoary senses are often couched under youthful locks, and 
 some are riper in the spring than others in the autumn of their age. 
 God chose not Esau himself, nor his eldest son, but young David to 
 conquer Goliath and to rule his people : not the most aged person, 
 but Daniel the most innocent youth, delivered Susannah from the in- 
 iquity of the judges. Christ at twelve years of age was found in the 
 temple, questioning with the greatest doctors. A true Elias can con- 
 ceive that a little cloud may cast a large and abundant shower ; and 
 the Scripture teaches us that God unveileth to little ones that which 
 He concealeth from the wisest sages. His truth is not abashed by 
 the minority of the speaker, for out of the mouths of infants and 
 sucklings He can perfect His praises. Timothy was young, and yet 
 a principal pastor ; St. John a youth, and yet an apostle ; yea, the 
 angels by appearing in youthful semblance, gave us a proof that 
 many glorious gifts may be shrouded under tender shapes. All this 
 I say, not to claim any privileges surmounting the rate of usual abili- 
 ties, but to avoid all touch of presumption in advising my elders ; 
 seeing that it hath the warrant of Scripture, the testimony of exam- 
 ple, and sufficient ground both in grace and nature. 
 
 " If you," says this earnest poet, " if you were stretched on your 
 departing bed, burdened with the heavy load of your former tres-
 
 SO UTH WELL, CRA SfIA IV, A ND HA BING TON. 7 1 
 
 passes, and gored with the sting of a festered conscience ; if you felt 
 the hand of death grasping your heart-strings, and ready to make the 
 rueful divorce between -body and soul ; if you lay panting for breath 
 and bathed in a cold and fatal sweat, wearied with struggling against 
 the pangs of death, oh! how much you would give for one hour for 
 repentance! at what rate you would value one day's contrition ! Worlds 
 would then be worthless in respect of a little respite ; a short time 
 would seem more precious than the treasures of empires. Nothing 
 would be so much esteemed as a moment of time, which is now by 
 months and years so lavishly misspent. Oh! how deeply would it 
 wound your heart when, looking back into yourself, you consider 
 many faults committed and not confessed : many good works omitted 
 or not recovered ; your service to God promised but never performed. 
 How intolerable will be your case! Your friends are fled, your serv- 
 ants frightened, your thoughts amazed, your memory distracted, your 
 whole mind aghast, and, unable to perform what it would, only your 
 guilty conscience will continually upbraid you with most bitter accusa- 
 tions. What will be your thoughts when, stripped of your mortal 
 body, and turned both out of the service and house-room of this 
 world, you are forced to enter into uncouth and strange paths, and 
 with unknown and ugly company to be carried before a most severe 
 Judge, carrying in your own conscience your judgment written, and a 
 perfect register of all your misdeeds ; when you shall see Him pre- 
 pared to pass sentence upon you against whom you have transgressed ; 
 He is to be the umpire whom by so many offences you have made 
 your enemy ; when not only the devils but even the angels will plead 
 against you, and yourself, in spite of your will, be your own sharpest 
 impeacher ? What would you do in these dreadful exigencies, when 
 you saw the ghastly dungeon and huge gulf of hell breaking out with 
 most fearful flames ; when you heard the weeping and gnashing of 
 teeth, the rage of these hellish monsters, the horror of the place, the 
 rigor of the pain, the terror of the company, and the eternity of the 
 punishment? Would you then think them wise that would delay in 
 such weighty matters, and idly play away a time allotted to prevent such 
 intolerable calamities ? Would you then account it secure to nurse in 
 your bosom a brood of serpents, or suffer your soul to entertain so 
 many accusers ? Would not you then think a whole life too little to 
 do penance for so many iniquities ? \Vhy, then, do you not at least 
 devote the small remnant and surplus of these your latter days in 
 seeking to make an atonement with God, and in freeing your conscience
 
 72 SOUTHWELL, CRASH A IV, AND HABINGTON. 
 
 from the corruption that, by your treason and fall, has crept into it ; 
 whose very eyes that read this discourse, and very understanding that 
 conceiveth it, shall be cited as certain witnesses of what I describe ? 
 Your soul will then experience the most terrible fears, if you do not 
 recover yourself into the fold and family of God's Church." 
 
 For six years Southwell labored in his native land. 
 Many Catholic souls, even priests, in hiding, were strength- 
 ened by his example and consoled by his fervent piety. 
 His zeal made many return to the Church and saved 
 others from apostasy. Protected by Lady Arundel, whose 
 confessor he was, he performed his sacred duties and 
 wrote at intervals; but the crown of martyrdom, like a 
 pillar of fire, was always before him. It led to the 
 Promised Land, and he was soon to gain the end for which 
 he worked. The manner of his betrayal and imprison- 
 ment is related graphically by Mr. Turnbull in his bio- 
 graphy affixed to Mr. Russell Smith's edition of the martyr's 
 poems : 
 
 " There was resident at Uxendon, near Harrow-on-the-Hill, in 
 Middlesex, a Catholic family of the name of Bellamy, whom South- 
 well was in the habit of visiting and providing with religious instruc- 
 tion, when he exchanged his ordinary close confinement for a purer 
 atmosphere. One of the daughters, Ann, had in her early youth ex- 
 hibited marks of the most vivid, unmistakable piety ; but, having been 
 committed to the Gatehouse of Westminster, her faith gradually de- 
 parted, and along with it her virtue. For, having formed an intrigue 
 with the keeper of the prison, she subsequently married him, and by 
 that step forfeited all claim which she had by law or favor upon her 
 father. In order, therefore, to obtain some fortune she resolved to 
 take advantage of the act of 27 Elizabeth, which made the harboring 
 of a priest a treason, with confiscation of the offender's goods. Ac- 
 cordingly she sent a messenger to Southwell, urging him to meet her 
 on a certain day and hour at her father's house, whither he, either in 
 ignorance of what had happened, or under the impression that she
 
 SO U TH W ELL. CRA SHA IV, A ND HA BING TO.Y. 7 3 
 
 sought his spiritual assistance through motives of penitence, went at 
 the appointed time. In the mean while, having apprised her husband 
 of this, as also of the place of concealment in her father's house and 
 the mode of access, he conveyed the information to Topcliff, an im- 
 placable persecutor and denouncer of the Catholics, who with a band 
 of his satellites, surrounded the premises, broke open the house, ar- 
 rested his reverence, and carried him off in open day, exposed to the 
 gaze of the populace. He was taken in the first instance to Topcliffs 
 house, where during a few weeks he was put to the torture ten times, 
 with such dreadful severity that Southwell, complaining of it to his 
 judges, declared in the name of God that death would have been more 
 preferable. 
 
 ' ' The manner in which he was agonized may be seen in Tanner's 
 Societas Jesu Martyr. But all was to no purpose ; the sufferer main- 
 tained an inflexible silence ; nothing could shake his constancy ; and 
 the tormentors affirmed that he resembled a post rather than a man. 
 He was then transferred to the same Gatehouse which was kept by 
 the husband of the wretch who had betrayed him, and, after being 
 confined there for two months, was removed to the Tower and thrown 
 into a dungeon so filthy and noisome that, when brought forth at the 
 end of a month to be examined, his clothes were covered with vermin. 
 Whereupon his father presented a petition to Elizabeth, humbly en- 
 treating that if his son had committed anything for which by the laws 
 he had deserved it, he might suffer death ; if not, as he was a gentle- 
 man, he hoped her majesty would be pleased to order that he should 
 be treated as such, and not to be confined in that filthy hole. The 
 queen, in consequence, ordered that he should be better lodged and 
 gave his father permission to supply him with clothing, necessaries, 
 and books ; of which latter the only ones which he asked for were the 
 Bible and the works of St. Bernard. During all his protracted con- 
 finement, although his sister Mary, who was married to a gentleman 
 of the name of Bannister, had occasional access to him, he never dis- 
 coursed of anything but religion." 
 
 He was kept in prison for three years. At last, upon 
 his own petition, he was brought to trial. According to 
 Challoner, Cecil's reply to this petition was " that if he 
 was in so much haste to be hanged he should quickly have 
 his desire.'* He was removed from the Tower to New-
 
 74 SO U TH WELL, CRA SIT A W, A ND HA BING TON. 
 
 gate, and on the 2ist of February, 1595, he was taken to 
 Westminster and tried. His conduct before the court was 
 worthy of his life. He was serene, manly, and not pre- 
 sumptuous. He denied that he was guilty of treason, but 
 confessed that he was a Catholic priest, and that his pur- 
 pose in England was to administer the rites of the Church 
 to her faithful children. He was condemned, and on the 
 morning of the 22d of February was executed at Tyburn. 
 Through the blundering of the hangman his agony was 
 prolonged, and he "several times made the sign of the 
 cross while hanging." He was drawn and quartered; but 
 " through the kindness and interference of the bystanders 
 the martyr was allowed to die before the indignities and 
 mutilations were allowed." And this happened in the 
 reign of a woman whom historians have named " good," 
 and whom Englishmen have been taught to reverence as 
 
 "great!" 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 William Habington, who was born in 1605, has been 
 strangely neglected by Catholics and the public in general. 
 The pathos of Southwell's death did much toward keep- 
 ing his fame alive; but it is difficult to understand why, 
 when Crashaw is remembered, Habington is almost for- 
 gotten. In those wonderful melanges of literature com- 
 pounded " for the use of schools and colleges " it is diffi- 
 cult to find mention of him, and well did he write in " The 
 Holy Man:" 
 
 " Grown older I admired 
 Our poets $s from heaven inspired
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRA SHAW, AND HABINGTON. 75 
 
 What obelisks decreed I fit 
 For Spenser's art and Sydney's wit ! 
 But waxing sober soon I found 
 Fame but an idle sound." 
 
 It is not surprising that we, who have left the name of 
 a real Catholic poet, George Miles, fade away, and to 
 whom the Catholic Canadian, Louis Frechette, is only an 
 unknown name, should not delve into volumes of forgotten 
 law for Habington's poems ; it is surprising that at this 
 time, when the resurrection of musty poets has become a 
 mania, so little has been done for one who, if not born a 
 singer, was yet so near the divine voice as to catch some 
 exquisite echoes. He was pre-eminently the poet of 
 conjugal love, as Southwell was the poet of the higher * 
 love. His song is always of two pure hearts feeling hope 
 and fear, to whom the fever of passion is unknown. Hab- 
 ington came of a good Catholic family, which is a distinc- 
 tion in a country where the good families had been so willing 
 to barter faith for fortune. The stanchness of his blood was 
 proved by the way his ancestors had kept the faith. His 
 uncle, Edward Habington, having been implicated in Bab- 
 ington's famous conspiracy to rescue the Queen of Scots, 
 was hanged, drawn and quartered at St. Giles in the Fields. 
 As usual, there was a Protestant minister at the scaffold, 
 who urged him to be of a lively faith. He answered that 
 he believed steadfastly in the Catholic faith. The minister 
 feared that he deceived himself, and asked what he meant. 
 " I mean," he answered, " that faith and religion which is 
 holden in almost all Christendom, except here in Eng- 
 land." After this, much to the disgust of the reverend
 
 76. SOUTH WELL, CRA SHA IV, A ND HA BING TON. 
 
 gentleman, he would answer no questions, but prayed to 
 himself in Latin. In his dying speech he " cast out threats 
 and terrors of the blood that was ere long to be shed in 
 England." The poet's father, Thomas Habington, was 
 also implicated in the same conspiracy. He escaped prob- 
 ably because the people were becoming tired of the shed- 
 ding of the blood of some of the noblest men in England. 
 It was not hard for the public to sympathize with generous 
 youths who, as if to return to the days of chivalry, had 
 risked their lives in behalf of a beautiful and unfortunate 
 queen. The people at heart were not entirely devoted to 
 the daughter of Anne Boleyn, and the wily politicians 
 around her throne knew when it was prudent to stop the 
 shedding of blood. Hence, Thomas Habington escaped 
 the fate of his brother. He went to prison, however, and 
 when he was released, Mary Stuart had bidden farewell to 
 earth and gone, let us hope, to find a happier than even 
 " le plaisant pays de France." He retired to his ancestral 
 manor, Hendlip, where he led a life of lettered leisure, 
 producing several works of local topography and a trans- 
 lation of the epistle of Geldus a Britain. He suffered a 
 second imprisonment for suspected implication in the 
 Gunpowder Plot. That he sheltered the Jesuits, Father 
 Garnet and Father Oldcorne, afterwards most unjustly 
 hanged, at Hendlip, was the only evidence against him. 
 James I. is said always to have been partial to the partisans 
 of his mother, and it is possible that Thomas Habington's 
 connection with the Babington plot may have worked in 
 favor of his release. His brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle,
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASH A IV, AND HABIXGTON, 77 
 
 interceded in his behalf, and after his escape a second 
 time he betook himself to the company of his children 
 and books. 
 
 Of his son, the poet, little is known, except his love- 
 story. He was educated at St. Omer and at Paris. Re- 
 turning to England with the down just sprouting on his 
 lip, he fell in love. The lady of his thoughts was Lucy 
 Herbert, the daughter of Lord Powis. Habington was a 
 gentleman of small estate and a bearer of a name that of 
 late had not been on the winning side. Lord Powis felt 
 that the niece of Northumberland and the granddaughter 
 of an earl might look for a more splendid suitor. But 
 Lucy the incomparable Castara of Habington's poem 
 looked with favor on the poet. The course of true love 
 did not run smooth, but its variations were rather the rip- 
 ples of an April shower than the waves of an autumn 
 storm. Following the fashion, young Habington wooed 
 his lady-love in verse. It does not take much to excite 
 turmoil in a poet's soul, and Habington's troubles must 
 have been mild indeed, since they did not excite anything 
 but the most proper and gentlemanlike protest: 
 
 " Parents' laws must bear no weight 
 
 When they happiness prevent, 
 And our sea is not so strait 
 But it room has for content." 
 
 This is about the most violent sentiment he utters. Lord 
 Powis belonged to the Catholic branch of the Herberts, 
 and the stanchness of the Habington faith must have had 
 some effect in softening his opposition. He was not a
 
 7 8 SO U TH WELL, CRA SIT A W, A ND HA BING TON. 
 
 very cruel parent, and the fact that Habington had a" small 
 estate neutralized his demerit, in a father's eyes, of oc- 
 casionally dropping into poetry. In all his raptures of 
 Castara's sighs, glances, eyebrows, and bosom Habington 
 never loses a certain consciousness of " deportment." He 
 is never tired of protesting that the bent of his love is 
 honorable and his purpose marriage an iteration that 
 the occasion does seem to require. But if his verse was 
 somewhat mannered and even the spiritual Southwell 
 did not escape the conceits of his time his sentiment is 
 always honest, manly, and pure. His thoughts did not 
 wander from his wife, the wonderful Castara. Next to 
 religion she was the lodestar of his thoughts. He was 
 married at the age of twenty-eight, and the years of his 
 life afterward kept the peaceful and happy promise of his 
 wedding-day. 
 
 His description of Castara is the most exquisite passage 
 in his greatest poem : 
 
 " Like the violet which alone 
 
 Prospers in some happy shade, 
 My Castara lives unknown, 
 To no looser eye betrayed. 
 For she's to herself untrue 
 Who delights i ' th' public view. 
 
 " Such is her beauty, as no arts 
 
 Have enricht with borrowed grace , 
 Her high birth no pride imparts, 
 For she blushes in her place. 
 Folly boasts a glorious blood ; 
 She is noblest being good.
 
 SOL'TJIlf'ELL, CRASHA W, AND HABINGTON. 79 
 
 " Cautious, she knew never yet 
 
 What a wanton courtship meant ; 
 Nor speaks loud to boast her wit, 
 In her silence eloquent. 
 
 Of herself survey she takes. 
 
 But 'tween men no difference makes. 
 
 ' ' She obeys with speedy will 
 
 Her grave parent's wise commands ; 
 And so innocent that ill 
 
 She nor acts nor understands. 
 Women's feet run still astray, 
 If once to ill they know the way. 
 
 " She sails by that rock, the court, 
 
 Where oft honour splits her mast ; 
 And retiredness thinks the port 
 Where her fame may anchor cast. 
 Virtue safely cannot sit, 
 Where vice is enthron'd for wit. 
 
 " She holds that day's pleasure best 
 When sin waits not on delight. 
 Without mask, or ball, or feast. 
 Sweetly spends a %vinter's night. 
 
 O'er that darkness, whence is tlmut 
 Prayer and sleep, oft governs lust. 
 
 " She her throne makes reason climb, 
 
 
 
 \Yhile wild passions captive lie, 
 And each, each article of time 
 Her pure thoughts to heaven fly. 
 
 All her vows religiotts be, 
 
 And her love she vows to me" 
 
 He was friendly with all the great literary men of the 
 time. There is a tradition that he was not absent from 
 those feasts of reason and flows of sack in which Jonson, 
 Massinger, and the jolly crew of the famous old inns in- 
 dulged; with him all things were enjoyed in moderation.
 
 8o SO U TH WELL, CRA SHA W, A ND HA BING TON. 
 
 Tranquil, serene, surrounded by his children and sup- 
 ported by a firm faith, of which " The Holy Man," the 
 fourth part of " Castara," is an evidence, he ended a happy 
 and peaceful life in 1654. 
 
 He had not been unaccustomed to the pomp of that 
 court in which Charles I. and Henrietta Maria reigned, in 
 which Waller sang and Vandyke painted, and in his vol- 
 ume of poems (republished by Arber in 1870) the most 
 celebrated names of the epoch appear in dedications. His 
 tragi-comedy of " The Queene of Arragon " was acted in 
 1640 at Whitehall. The favor of the court did not disturb 
 him, nor did the Civil War draw him from his seclusion. 
 He was not a man to act except under strong impulse, 
 and it is probable that neither the Cavaliers nor the 
 Roundheads wholly had his sympathy. 
 
 " Castara " is divided into four parts. " The Mistress," 
 "The Wife," "The Friend," and "The Holy Man." It 
 speaks well for the unpoetical constancy of Habington 
 that Castara as the wife is even more beloved than Castara 
 the mistress. The muse did not say imperatively to him, 
 as she did to a later and very different bard,* " Poete, 
 prends ton luth." Indeed, one cannot help suspecting 
 that he often took up his lute because he had nothing else 
 to do. From lack of perception Habington is often un- 
 even. That perfect art that welds all parts into simplicity 
 was unknown to him as to most of the Elizabethan poets. 
 He startles the reader with vivid lines which are like the 
 bright scarlet of the -salt -marsh's bushes among the tawny 
 
 * De Mussel, " Nuit de Mai."
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASHA IV, AND HABINGTON. 81 
 
 hues of autumn. He cares little for the technical part of 
 his art. His sonnet to " Castara in a Trance," although 
 very fine, lacks the dignity of the sonnets of Milton, which 
 he must have known. To those scornful critics who assert 
 that the sonnet at its best is only fourteen jingling lines, 
 it will be an interesting comparison with any one of Dante's 
 or with Wordsworth's " The World is Too Much with Us." 
 
 " Forsake me not too soon ; Castara, stay, 
 
 And as I break the prison of my clay 
 
 I'll fill the canvas with my expiring breath, 
 
 And sail with thee o'er the vast main of Death. 
 
 Some cherubim thus, as we pass, shall play : 
 " Go, happy twins of love ! ' The courteous sea 
 
 Shall smooth her wrinkled brow ; the winds shall sleep, 
 
 Or only whisper music to the deep ; 
 
 Every ungentle rock shall melt away, 
 
 The sirens sing to please, not to betray ; 
 
 The indulgent sky shall smile ; each starry choir 
 
 Contend which shall afford the brighter fire ; 
 
 While love, the pilot, steers his course so even, 
 
 Ne'er to cast anchor till we reach to heaven." 
 
 This is a jingling sonnet ; but it is not the sonnet's 
 highest form. These striking lines, like most striking lines 
 in his poetry, are too epigrammatic; nevertheless they are 
 beautiful. He addressed roses in Castara's bosom : 
 
 " Then that which living gave you room 
 
 Your glorious sepulchre shall be ; 
 There wants no marble for a tomb 
 Whose breast has marble been to me." 
 
 In this stanza there is much melody and truth: 
 
 " They hear but when the mermaid sings, 
 And only see the falling star, 
 
 Who ever dare 
 
 Affirm no woman chaste or fair." 
 6
 
 82 SOU TH WELL, CRA SHA W, A ND HA BING TON. 
 
 His reverence for the Blessed Virgin, and, after her, for 
 Castara, made him believe in the virtue of all women. 
 Sensuousness, which is not lacking in his poems, never 
 degenerated into sensuality. The boldest flight of his 
 fancy is stayed by the influence of religion on a clean 
 heart. He believed that 
 
 " Virtuous love is one sweet, endless fire." 
 To poets who thought otherwise, he said: 
 
 " You who are earth and cannot rise 
 
 Above your sense, 
 
 Boasting the envied wealth which lies 
 Bright in your mistress' lips or eyes, 
 
 Betray a pitied eloquence." 
 
 The exquisite lines, 
 
 " When I survey the bright celestial sphere, 
 So rich with jewels hung that night 
 Doth like an Ethiop bride appear," 
 
 remind one of Shakspeare's 
 
 ' ' Her beauty hung upon the cheek of night, 
 Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear." 
 
 There is no greater similarity between these passages 
 than between Wordsworth's 
 
 " Violet by a mossy stone," 
 and Habington's 
 
 ' ' Like a violet which alone 
 Prospers in some happy shade." 
 
 But why blame poets for limning coincidences which 
 nature makes ? The poet who is truest to nature must 
 often seem to plagiarize from those who have been true
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASH A W, AND HABINGTON. 83 
 
 before him. Habington's worst faults are those of taste. 
 They go no deeper. " Castara," as a whole, is a noble 
 poem that deserves to live. Probably in no other poet's 
 works if we except Tennyson has a higher, yet not 
 superhuman, idea of womanhood been given. The most 
 exceptional and beautiful characteristic of the three truly 
 Catholics poets Southwell, Habington, and Crashaw 
 is their spotless purity of word and thought. Faith and 
 purity go hand-in-hand. If " Castara " were studied in 
 this age it might almost make chastity fashionable among 
 men. This virtue of Sir Galahad was not common in 
 Habington's time, and it has always required much courage 
 in a man of the world to proclaim that he possesses a 
 quality which is generally regarded as the crowning attri- 
 bute of womanhood. To this poet, who dared to dedicate, 
 in a licentious age, his work to the woman who was to 
 him as the Church of Christ, we owe honor; it was his 
 Catholic faith and practice that made him so noble among 
 the men of his time. Habington ought to be studied by 
 all young Catholics. Americans have inherited his poems 
 along with that language which was forced on the ances- 
 tors of some of us, but which is none the less our own. 
 His faults of technique, so glaringly apparent in this day 
 of almost perfect technique in poetry, offer lessons in 
 themselves. No man can read " Castara " without feeling 
 better and purer, and of how many poets can this be said ? 
 Since Pope taught the critics to place execution above 
 conception, Habington has found no place. It remains for 
 the rising generation of young Catholics who read and
 
 84 SOUTHWELL, CRASH A W, AND HABINGTON. 
 
 think to give him a niche that will not be unworthy of the 
 
 poet of that chaste love which was born of Christianity. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 If Richard Crashaw, a poet who, by reason of his entire 
 devotion to his faith and his absolute purity, belongs to 
 this group, had written nothing except the finale of " The 
 Flaming Heart," he would deserve more fame than at 
 present distinguishes his name. "The Flaming Heart," 
 marred as it is by those exasperating conceits which Cra- 
 shaw never seemed tired of indulging in, is full of the 
 intense fervor which the subject "the picture of the 
 seraphical St. Teresa, as she is usually expressed with 
 seraphim beside her " would naturally suggest to a religi- 
 ous and poetic mind. After what Mr. Simcox very justly 
 calls " an atrocious and prolonged conceit," * this poem 
 beautifully closes: 
 
 ' ' O thou undaunted daughter of desires ! 
 By all thy dower of lights and fires : 
 By all the eagle in thee, all the dove ; 
 By all thy lives and deaths of love ; 
 By thy large draughts of intellectual day, 
 And by thy thirsts of love more large than they ; 
 By all thy brim-fill'd bowls of fierce desire, 
 By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire, 
 By the full kingdom of that final kiss 
 That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee His ; 
 By all the heav'n thou hast in him, 
 (Fair sister of the seraphim !) 
 By all of him we have in thee, 
 Leave nothing of myself in me. 
 Let me so read thy life that I 
 Unto all life of mine may die." 
 
 * The English Poets.
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASHA W, AND HABINGTON. 85 
 
 The mystical fire which lights this poem is a character- 
 istic of all Crashaw's religious verses. " Intellectual day " 
 is a favorite expression of his ; " the brim-fill'd bowls of 
 fierce desire " is one of those lowering conceits that occur 
 so jarringly in Habington's poetry, and that are intolerably 
 frequent in Crashaw. Born about 1615, he began to write 
 at a time when a poem lacking in quaint conceits was 
 scarcely a poem, and his verse, delicate, tender, original, 
 and singularly fluent in diction, lost much strength from 
 this circumstance and from his habit of diluting a thought 
 or a line until all its force was lost. No poet since his 
 time has been given so greatly to dilution and repetition, 
 except Swinburne. In the famous " Wishes," written to 
 a mythical mistress, 
 
 " Whoe'er she be, 
 
 That not impossible she 
 That shall command my heart and me," 
 
 he plays with one idea, fantastically twisting it and repeat- 
 ing it until the reader grows weary. 
 
 In 1646, four years before his death, Richard Crashaw 
 published " Steps to the Temple." Reading it, one may 
 well exclaim, with Cowley: 
 
 "Poet and saint, to thee alone are given 
 The two most sacred names in earth and heaven ! " 
 
 It glows with an impetuous devotion which is like the 
 rush of a fiery chariot. It carries the soul upward, al- 
 though an occasional earthly conceit clogs its ascending 
 rush. And yet it is evident that the devotion of the poet
 
 86 SO U TH WELL, CRA SHA IV, A ND HA BING TON. 
 
 was so genuine that he did not think of his mode of ex- 
 pression. He tore out the words that came nearest to him, 
 in order to build a visible thought. Pope did not hesitate 
 to borrow the finest passages in " Eloisa and Abelard " 
 from Crashaw, and there are many lines in Crashaw's 
 poems which unite the perfect finish of Pope to a spon- 
 taneity and poetic warmth which the " great classic " never 
 attained. 
 
 Crashaw was born in an "intellectual day" tempered 
 by a dim religious light. His father, like Habington's, 
 was an author, a preacher in the Temple Church, London, 
 near which the poet was born. He took his degree at 
 Cambridge. He entered the Anglican Church as a min- 
 ister. But his views were not orthodox ; he was expelled 
 from his living, and soon after he became a Catholic. 
 From his poems it is plain that Crashaw was always a 
 Catholic at heart. He entered the Church as one who, 
 having lived in a half-forgotten place in dreams, enters 
 it without surprise. Crashaw went to court, but gained 
 no preferment. The " not impossible she " whose courtly 
 opposites suggested the portrait never "materialized" 
 herself. He became a priest, and died in 1650, canon of 
 Loretto an office which he obtained, it is said, through 
 the influence of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria. 
 Crashaw's poems are better known than Habington's, 
 though, with the exception of " Wishes," which, like Her- 
 rick's "To Daffodils," is quoted in almost every reader, 
 and the lovely poem beginning,
 
 SOUTHWELL, CRASIIAW, AND HABINGTON. 87 
 
 " Lo! here a little volume but large book 
 (Fear it not, sweet, 
 It is no hypocrite), 
 Much larger in itself than in its look," 
 
 they are read only in odd lines or striking couplets. Cra- 
 shaw had the softened fire of Southwell with the placid 
 sweetness of Habington. He possessed a wider range 
 than either of them ; the fact that he was at his best in 
 paraphrases shows that he did not own the force and 
 power which Habington had in less degree than Southwell, 
 or that his fluency of diction and copiousness of imagery 
 easily led him to ornament the work of others rather than 
 to carve out his own. As he stands, any country even 
 that which boasts of a Shakspeare may be proud to claim 
 him. For the fame of our three Catholic poets it is un- 
 fortunate that they wrote in the great shade of Shakspeare ; 
 but in the presence of great intellectual giants they are 
 by no means dwarfs. Flawless as men, unique and genu- 
 ine as poets, they cannot die as long as the world honors 
 goodness and that divine spark which men call poetry. 
 They were Catholic ; true alike to their faith and their in- 
 spiration ; faithful, and, being faithful, pure as poets or 
 men are seldom pure.
 
 LECTURE V- 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF 
 TENNYSON. 
 
 I AM about to speak of the greatest artist in words who 
 has ever worked in the plastic English language an artist 
 who, having the divine gift of uttering poetry both in 
 essentials and attributes, yet, with constant and noble 
 dissatisfaction, refines these attributes to their highest 
 point. I mean Lord Tennyson, a great English poet, but 
 not the greatest of English poets. 
 
 His influence on the life and literature of our time 
 has been immense. He at once expressed and reflected 
 the spirit of our time, although of late there has been a 
 perceptible move against his teachings or rather his ideals. 
 A literary generation that pretends to like brutal realism 
 cannot logically be expected to admire the purity and 
 delicacy of a poet who never fails to throw all the light of 
 a glorious art around truth, purity, and duty. 
 
 King Arthur is too ideal, too pure, for tastes formed by 
 Swinburne and Rossetti, and the readers of novels which 
 depend for their success on constant sensation find Tenny- 
 son's exquisite pictures of inanimate objects without in- 
 terest. And yet if Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth,
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 89 
 
 Tennyson also succeeded Byron. While Wordsworth was 
 serene, a painter of nature, Byron was the opposite of 
 him. He was fiery, volcanic, furious, lurid, great in , 
 genius, but, it must be said, impure. But he was popu- 
 lar, while Wordsworth, whom the world is now only be- 
 ginning to acknowledge, was neglected ; so that, strange 
 as it may seem at first, Tennyson's immediate predecessor 
 was Lord Byron. Byron's popularity was great while he 
 lived ; young men quoted him, wore open and turn-down 
 collars, assumed a corsair-like look and an appearance of 
 wickedness which were supposed to be Byronic. This 
 generation passed away, or rather grew older, and the 
 younger people became Tennysonian. They were senti- 
 mental and a little maudlin ; but they did not affect By- 
 ronic desperation or mysterious wickedness. The hero 
 of " Locksley Hall," I mean the first part of it, for I 
 think the second part printed about ten years ago is de- 
 cidedly the better, is a poor kind of a stick. And the 
 hero of " Maud " is of a similar type. 
 
 In " Locksley Hall " the hero sighs and moans, and calls 
 Heaven's vengeance down on his ancestral roof because 
 a young girl has refused to marry him, because his cousin 
 Amy marries another man, he goes into a paroxysm of 
 poetry and denunciation and prophecy. But as Shak- 
 speare says, " Many men have died, but not for love." 
 And the hero of " Locksley Hall " lives to write in a calmer 
 style a good many years later. " Maud," another famous 
 poem, like " Locksley Hall," showed something of the in- 
 fluence of Bryon. It is a love story, too, broken, inco-
 
 90 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 herent, but very poetical, with lines, here and there, that 
 seem to flash into the mind ; for instance : 
 
 " A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime 
 In the little grove where I sit, ah, wherefore cannot I be 
 Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland, 
 When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime, 
 Half lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea, 
 The silent, sapphire-spangled marriage-ring of the land." 
 
 After " Locksley Hall " and " Maud," the influence of 
 Byron on Tennyson seems to grow less. 
 
 In studying the poetry of poets, it is a wise thing to 
 study the influence of poets upon it. The young Tenny- 
 son's favorite poet was Thomson. he of the serene and 
 gentle "Seasons." Alfred Tennyson was born at Som- 
 ersby in Lincolnshire, England, on August 6th, 1809. He 
 began to write stories when he was very young. He wrote 
 chapters of unending novels which he put, day after day, 
 under the potato bowl on the table. Miss Thackeray says 
 that one of these, which lasted for months, was called 
 "The Old Horse." She gives this account of his first 
 poem: 
 
 "Alfred's first verses, so I have heard him say, were 
 written upon a slate which his brother Charles put into his 
 hand one Sunday at Louth, when all the elders of the party 
 were going into church, and the child was left alone. 
 Charles gave him a subject the flowers in the garden 
 and when he came back from church little Alfred brought 
 the slate to his brother, all covered with written lines of 
 blank verse. They were made on the models of Thom- 
 son's ' Seasons,' the only poetry he had ever read. One
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 91 
 
 can picture it all to one's self, the flowers in the garden, the 
 verses, the little poet with waiting eyes, and the young 
 brother scanning the lines. ' Yes, you can write,' said 
 Charles, and he gave Alfred back the slate/ 1 
 
 There is another story that his grandfather asked him 
 to write an elegy on his grandmother. When it was writ- 
 ten, the old gentleman gave the boy ten shillings, saying: 
 " There, that is the first you have ever earned by your 
 poetry, and, take my word for it, it will be your last." 
 
 This Charles, who admitted that Alfred could write, 
 became a very sweet poet himself as years went on. The 
 poet of Alfred's first love was the calm and pleasant 
 Thomson. Later, as he grew toward manhood, he read 
 Byron, then the fashion. He scribbled in the Byronic 
 strain. How strong a hold Byron's fiery verse had taken 
 on the boy's mind is shown by his own confession. When 
 Alfred was about fifteen, the news came that Byron was 
 dead. " I thought the whole world was at an end," he 
 said. " I thought everything was over and finished for 
 every one that nothing else mattered. I remember I 
 walked out alone, and carved ' Byron is dead ' into the 
 sandstone." Although " Locksley Hall " and " Maud" 
 show Byronic reflections, yet they were not the earliest 
 published of Tennyson's poems. 
 
 His life was placid, serene, pleasant. At home in one 
 of the sweetest spots of England, at college he lived among 
 congenial friends, and his after-life was and is the ideal 
 life of a poet. The premature death of his friend, Arthur 
 Hallam to which we owe the magnificent poem, "In
 
 92 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 Memoriam " was perhaps the saddest event that came to 
 him. Longfellow, his great contemporary, was also happy. 
 And just before the tragic death of his wife she was 
 burned to death a friend passing his cottage said : " I fear 
 change for Longfellow, for any change must be for the 
 worse." 
 
 And this is the drop of bitterness that must tinge all our 
 happiness in this world the thought that most changes 
 must be for the worse. But changes that have come to 
 Tennyson have brought him more praise, more honor, 
 until of late people have begun to say that the laureate 
 could only mar the monument he has made for himself 
 by trying to add too many ornaments to it. 
 
 In his first volume, published fifty-nine years ago, he 
 showed to the world a series of delicately-tinted portraits 
 of ladies. "Claribel," "Lilian," "Isabel," "Mariana," 
 " Madeline," "Adeline," his gorgeous set of pictures in 
 arabesque, " Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "Love 
 and Death," " The Dying Swan." 
 
 The appearance of this volume was not hailed as a 
 revelation by the reading public. And indeed there was 
 little in it to indicate the poet of " The Idyls of the King," 
 of " The Princess " and of " In Memoriam," except a fine- 
 ness of art which no English poet has yet surpassed or 
 even equalled. If "Airy, fairy Lilian " is like a cherry- 
 stone minutely carved, yet Tennyson was the first poet to 
 show how delicately such work could be done. If " Mar- 
 iana in the Moated Grange " is only an exercise in jewelled 
 notes, what bard ever drew such exquisitely modulated
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 93 
 
 tones from his lyre before ? If it is " a little picture 
 painted well," where was the poet since Shakspeare who 
 could have painted the picture so well ? " The Owl," 
 though many laughed at it, had something of the quality 
 of Shakspeare's snatches of song. 
 
 There was not a trace of Byron in this utterance. The 
 poet who had won the prize offered by Cambridge for 
 English poetry, in 1829, and who somewhat earlier had 
 seemed in despair over the death of Byron, did not utter 
 fierce heroics. He painted pictures with a feeling for art 
 that was new in literature. How this wonderful technical 
 nicety struck the sensitive young readers of the time, Ed- 
 mund Clarence Stedman tells us in " The Victorian Poets :" 
 
 "It is difficult now to realize how chaotic was the notion of art 
 among English verse-makers at the beginning of Tennyson's career. 
 Not even the example of Keats had taught the needful lesson, and I 
 look on his successor's early efforts as of no small importance. These 
 were dreamy experiments in metre and word-painting, and spontane- 
 ous after their kind. Readers sought not to analyze their meaning 
 and grace. The significance of art has since become so well under- 
 stood, and such results have been attained, that 'Claribel,' ' Lilian,' 
 ' The Merman,' ' The Dying Swan' seem slight enough to us now ; 
 and even then the affectation pervading them, which was merely the 
 error of a poetic soul groping for its true form of expression, repelled 
 men of severe and established tastes ; but to the neophyte they had 
 the charm of sighing winds and bubbling waters, a wonder of luxury 
 and weirdness, inexpressible, not to be effaced." 
 
 It was evident that Tennyson regarded poetry as an art. 
 It was evident that this art was one that needed constant 
 and persistent cultivation. It was evident that, deprived 
 as he was cf the material color of the painter, he was de- 
 termined to make words flash, jewel-like, to make them
 
 94 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 burn in crimson, or to convey with all the vividness of a 
 Murillo, tints not only the color, but the tints of the 
 sky, the earth, even of the atmosphere itself. 
 
 Let us take " Mariana." Look at the picture. The 
 subject is that of a woman waiting in a country house 
 surrounded by a moat. It is a simple subject, not a com- 
 plex or many-sided one. See how Tennyson gets as near 
 color as words can. We may be sure that he cast and 
 recast that poem many times before he printed it. 
 
 " With blackest moss the flower plots 
 
 Were thickly crusted, one and all ; 
 The rusted nails fell from the knots 
 That held the peach to the garden wall. 
 
 The broken sheds looked sad and strange, 
 Unlifted was the clinking latch ; 
 Weeded and worn the ancient thatch 
 Upon the lonely moated grange." 
 
 " All day within the dreamy house, 
 
 The doors upon their hinges creak'd ; 
 The blue ily sung in the pane ; the mouse 
 
 Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd, 
 Or from the crevice peered about." 
 
 Millet, in "The Angelus," depicted sound by the magic 
 of his brush which had the potent spell of color. Similarly, 
 Tennyson, in " Mariana," over-leaped the limitations of 
 his art, and painted in words both color and sound and 
 something more subtle than either. 
 
 Notice, too, how careful is his choice of epithets in this 
 early book. He asks: 
 
 " Wherefore those faint smiles of thine, 
 Spiritual Adeline ? "
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 95 
 
 You will never find a fault of taste in Tennyson ; and 
 if you should find a trochee where you expected an iam- 
 bus, be sure it is there because the musician willed a re- 
 freshing or effective discord. At the age of twenty-two, 
 he published the volume containing " The Lady of Shal- 
 ott," "Oenone," "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," "The 
 May Queen," " The Miller's Daughter," " The Palace of 
 Art," " Of Old Sat Freedom on the Heights," and half 
 a dozen others equally famous, equally exquisite, and all 
 showing an advance in power over his first volume and 
 also a decrease in affectation. "The Lady of Shalott " 
 is an allegory for Tennyson, like all English poets from 
 Chaucer to himself, is fond of allegories. In " The Lady 
 of Shalott " we have the first hint of the poem we now 
 know as " Elaine." 
 
 The Lady of Shalott is poetry, one of the helps to the 
 intellectual progress of man. But, to remain strong and 
 spiritual, poetry must be pure. It must not become 
 worldly or earthy. It must weave its web high above the 
 sordid aims of sin. And so the Lady of Shalott worked. 
 
 " There she weaves by night and day, 
 A magic web with colors gay, 
 She has heard a whisper say, 
 A curse is on her if she stay 
 To look down to Camelot, 
 
 She knows not what the curse may be 
 And so she weaveth steadily, 
 And little other care hath she, 
 The Lady of Shalott." 
 
 But, after a time, this wonderful lady who weaves into 
 her web for the solace and delight of man all the sights
 
 96 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 that pass her as shadows is tempted to go down from her 
 spiritual height. She yields to the temptation and dies. 
 In this allegory, we find the germ of Elaine, " the lily maid 
 of Astolat." 
 
 Henri Taine, the clever French critic of English litera- 
 ture, who fails in his appreciation of Tennyson, as his 
 compatriot, Voltaire, failed to rise to the heights of Shak- 
 speare, tells us that, dissatisfied with the critics after the 
 appearance of his second volume, Tennyson printed noth- 
 ing for ten years. In 1842, his third volume appeared. 
 It was called " English Idyls and Other Poems." This 
 was the glorious fruition of a spring-time which had caught 
 and garnered all the fresh beauty of the opening year. 
 The April and May of the poet's first poems had ripened 
 into June, and the June, azure-skied, rich, blooming, gave 
 promise of even greater loveliness. 
 
 In " The Lady of Shalott,*' we found the hint of Elaine. 
 In this new volume, we find studies for the great symphony 
 to come that English epic which is the poet's master- 
 piece. In this volume is that Homeric fragment the 
 Morte d Arthur which is one of the finest passages ever 
 written in any language. Dante never wrote anything 
 more sustained in strength, more heroic in style, more 
 reticent in expression and deeper in feeling than 
 
 " So all day long the noise of battle rolled." 
 
 But, to be logical, I must not consider the Morte 
 d Arthur here. In its place in this third volume, it is really 
 out of place. It belongs at the end of the complete Idyls,
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TEXXYSOX. 97 
 
 all of which we have now. But in 1842, the world had 
 only hints of them ; in the third volume the most portent- 
 ous hint was the Morte d Arthur. There were others. 
 " St. Agnes," " Sir Galahad," " Sir Launcelot and Guine- 
 vere." 
 
 Looking through this third volume, you will find all the 
 characteristics of the poet. Not only in the use of words 
 carried to the highest point, the development of a fashion 
 of blank verse which is as much Tennysonian as Spenser's 
 verse is Spenserian, a love for classic forms and allusions ; 
 but in a great love for English landscapes, English country 
 life, English modes of speeches, and English institutions. 
 Above all, whether the poet tells us a Saxon legend like 
 that of "Godiva;" a rustic idyl like "The Gardener's 
 Daughter; " a modern story like " Dora," or a Middle-age 
 legend like " The Beggar Maid," there permeates all his 
 verse reverence for womanhood and purity and nobility 
 of principle which is characteristic of all his work and all 
 his moods. This is one reason why all women love Ten- 
 nyson's poetry; for women are quicker than men to ap- 
 preciate the pure and the true in literature. It is to 
 Tennyson more than to any other man that we owe the 
 elevation and purity of most of the public utterances of 
 the nineteenth century. He, more than any other living 
 writer, has both influenced and been influenced by his time. 
 He is intensely modern. He is of the Victorian age as 
 Shakspeare was of the Elizabethan age. In truth, as Ben 
 Jonson and Shakspeare were representative of the spirit 
 of their time, so Tennyson is the exponent of ours. When
 
 98 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 he is highest, he is a leader ; when lowest, a follower. He 
 is reverential to Christianity ; in the case of his most im- 
 portant work, " The Idyls of the King," he is almost 
 Catholic in his spirit, because he has borrowed his legends 
 from Catholic sources; but still "all his mind is clouded 
 with a doubt." 
 
 Tennyson's doubt is evident even in that solemn and 
 tender dirge, " In Memoriam," which formed his fifth 
 volume, published a year after "The Princess," in 1850. 
 The Greek poet, Moschus, wrote an elegy on his friend, 
 Bion, and the refrain of this elegy, " Begin, Sicilian Muses, 
 begin the lament" is famous. Tennyson, this modern 
 poet, possessed of the Greek passion for symmetry and 
 influenced as much by Theocritus, Mochus, and Bion as 
 by the spirit of his own time, has made an elegy on his 
 friend as solemn, as stately, as perfect in its form as that 
 of Moschus; but not so spontaneous and tender. There 
 is more pathos in King David's few words over the body 
 of Absalom than in all the noble falls and swells of " In 
 Memoriam." I doubt whether any heart in affliction has 
 received genuine consolation from this decorous and 
 superbly measured flow of grief. It is not a poem of 
 Faith, nor is it a poem of doubt ; but Faith and doubt 
 tread upon each other's footsteps. Instead of the divine 
 certitude of Dante, we have a doubting half belief. Ten- 
 nyson loves the village church, the holly-wreathed bap- 
 tismal font, the peaceful vicarage garden, the comfortable 
 vicar, because they represent serenity and order. He de- 
 tests revolution. If he lived before the coming of Christ,
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 99 
 
 in the vales of Sicily, he would probably have hated to see 
 the rural spots of the pagans disturbed by the disciples of 
 a less picturesque and natural religion. His belief is 
 summed up in these words : 
 
 " Behold we know not anything" ; ' 
 
 I can but trust that good shall fall. 
 At last, far off, at last, to all, 
 And every winter change to spring. 
 
 "' So runs my dream ; but what am I ? 
 An infant crying in the night : 
 An infant crying for the light, 
 And with no 'language but a cry.' 
 
 He believes in the immortality of the soul, and yet, to 
 use again the words he puts into the mouth of his own 
 King Arthur, " all his mind is clouded with a doubt." 
 He says: 
 
 " My own dim life should teach me this, 
 That life should live for evermore 
 Else earth is darkness at the core, 
 And dust and ashes all that is 
 
 " This round of green, this orb of flame, 
 Fantastic beauty, such as lurks 
 In some wild poet, when he works 
 Without a conscience or an aim. 
 
 " What then were God to such as I ? 
 
 'Twere hardly worth my while to choose 
 Of things, all mortal, or to use 
 A little patience ere I die ; 
 
 " 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, 
 
 Like birds the charming serpent draws, 
 To drop head foremost in the jaws 
 Of vacant darkness and to cease." 
 
 But he is possessed by the restlessness of our time.
 
 100 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 He does not proclaim aloud that Christ lives ; he looks on 
 the faith of his sister with reverence, but he does not par- 
 ticipate in it; his highest hope is that a new time will 
 bring the faith that comes of self-control and that the 
 " Christ that is to be " will come with the new year. To 
 be frank, the Christianity of Tennyson seems to be little 
 more tangible than the religion of George Eliot. He 
 seems to hold that Christianity is good so far because no 
 philosopher can offer the world anything better. Between 
 the burning faith of Dante and the languid, half-sympa- 
 thetic toleration of Tennyson, the gulf is as great as be- 
 tween the fervor of St. John the Evangelist and the mild 
 beliefs of the modern broad-church Anglican divine. So 
 much for the most noble elegy of our century, which 
 needs only a touch of the faith and fire of Dante, to make 
 it the grandest elegy of all time. Arthur Hallam, the 
 subject of the " In Memoriam," had been Tennyson's 
 dearest friend ; he was engaged to marry the poet's sister. 
 " He was," Tennyson himself said, in later years, " as per- 
 fect as mortal man could be." " In Memoriam " was a 
 sincere tribute of love and genius to goodness and talent. 
 Regret as we may the absence of that Christian certitude 
 which can alone point upward unerringly from the mists 
 of doubt, yet we must rejoice that the nineteenth century 
 brought forth from the chaos of Byronic utterances and the 
 pretty rhetorical paper-flower gardens of Rogers and 
 Campbell a poem so pure in spirit and so pure in form. 
 
 Before considering " The Idyls of the King," that grand 
 and exquisite epic, which combines the ideal of Christian
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. IOI 
 
 chivalry with the perfection of modern expression, I must 
 call your attention to Tennyson's lyrics, especially to the 
 little songs scattered through " The Princess." There is 
 one lyric not in " The Princess " which must live forever. 
 And when you ask why ? I can only say because it is 
 poetry. No man has ever yet exactly denned what poetry 
 is. But if any man should ask me for illustrations of the 
 most evanescent quality in poetry, that quality which is 
 utterly incapable of being defined, I should point to the 
 " Break, Break, Break," of Tennyson and Longfellow's 
 " Rainy Day." Tennyson's expression of the inexpres- 
 sible, -Tennyson's crystallization of a mood is perfect, 
 
 ' Break, break, break, 
 On thy cold, gray stones, O Sea, 
 
 And I would that my tongue could utter 
 The thoughts that arise in me. 
 
 " O, well for the fisherman's boy, 
 
 That he shouts with his sister at play, 
 O, well for the sailor lad, 
 
 That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 
 
 " And the stately ships go on 
 
 To their haven under the hill ; 
 But O, for the touch of a vanished hand, 
 And the sound of a voice that is still ! 
 
 "Break, break, break, 
 At the foot of thy crags, O Sea, 
 
 But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
 Will never come back to me." 
 
 I must apologize for using the word " exquisite " so 
 often. It is the only word by which we can express the 
 art of these lovely unsurpassingly lovely little songs.
 
 102 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 We owe " The Idyls of the King " to the fact that Alfred 
 Tennyson read and pondered over Sir Thomas Malory's 
 old black-letter legends of King Arthur's Round Table. 
 Here he found the story of his epic ready made. In the 
 form he adopted, we find the influence of Theocritus, who 
 seems, of all poets who wrote in Greek, to have most in- 
 fluenced him. The title of his epic poem Tennyson took 
 from Theocritus. The Idyls of Theocritus are short pas- 
 toral poems, full of sweetness, tenderness and love of rural 
 life. In these qualities, Theocritus and Tennyson are 
 much in sympathy. Theocritus was born about two hun- 
 dred and eighty-four years before the birth of Our Lord. 
 His songs are of Sicilian woods and nightingales, of the 
 musical contests of shepherds. In Tennyson's " Oenone," 
 we find many traces of Theocritus, even paraphrases on 
 him. " Godiva " is formed on an idyl of Theocritus, and 
 his famous lullaby is suggested by Theocritus' song of 
 Alcmena over the infant Hercules. 
 
 Carlyle did not approve of Tennyson's reflections of the 
 Greek. And he expressed it in his pleasant way. " See 
 him on a dust-hill surrounded by innumerable dead dogs." 
 
 The term " Idyl," though applicable enough to the light 
 and pastoral poems of Theocritus, was hardly so appro- 
 priate to the various parts of the Arthurian epic. But 
 Tennyson has made the title his own ; we love " The Idyls 
 of the King " by the name he has re-created for them. 
 
 The " Idyls " are not complete. Though scattered 
 through several volumes now, they will doubtless soon be 
 given to us by the Laureate in logical sequence. They
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 103 
 
 follow each other in this order: " The Coming of Arthur," 
 "Gareth and Lynette," "Enid," " Balin and Balan," 
 "Vivien," "Elaine," "The Holy Grail," " Pelleas and 
 Ettarre," " The Last Tournament," " Guinevere," and 
 " The Passing of Arthur." 
 
 The " Idyls of the King '' is an allegory, as well as an 
 epic. It carries a great moral lesson. It is an epic of a 
 failure, a failure which falls on King Arthur and his 
 knights because of the sin that crept among them, like a 
 serpent, and left its trail over all. Arthur, the ideal king, 
 the chivalrous servant of Christ, seems to represent the 
 spiritual life. His Queen Guinevere is " sense at war with 
 soul." She loves the things of earth better than those of 
 heaven. And from her betrayal of the King, her fall, 
 like that of " The Lady of Shalott," her sinful love for 
 Sir Launcelot, who represents the pride of the flesh, flow 
 all the many evils that fall on the court of King Arthur. 
 
 It is true that the allegorical meaning in some of the 
 Idyls is dimmer- than in others. Sometimes it seems to 
 disappear altogether. I recommend to your attention a 
 very ingenious interpretation made by Mr. Conde Fallen, 
 of St. Louis, you will find in a recent volume of The 
 Catholic World. I can hardly see my way clear to adopt- 
 ing the interpretation of Mr. Fallen, which attracted the 
 favorable attention of Lord Tennyson ; but to which the 
 Laureate did not commit himself. 
 
 It is not fair to see in a poet's work more than he sees 
 himself, and therefore I shall speak only of those allegor- 
 ical meanings that are self-evident. It seems to me that
 
 104 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 the allegorical character of the Idyls was something of an 
 afterthought with Tennyson. 
 
 " The Coming of Arthur " is the first Idyl. King Arthur 
 seems to typify the soul. There is a dispute about Arthur. 
 The King Leodogran will not give Arthur, the knight 
 who has saved him, his daughter Guinevere, until he is 
 satisfied about Arthur's birth. Some say he came from 
 heaven, others that he was even as the earth. So men 
 have disputed over the origin of the soul. There is no 
 soul, some say, no spiritual life. But Queen Bellicent 
 cries out, describing the scene of Arthur's coronation, 
 
 " But when he spake and cheer'd his Table Round 
 With large, divine, and comfortable words 
 Beyond my tongue to tell thee I beheld 
 From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash 
 A momentary likeness of the King ; 
 And ere it left their faces, thro' the cross 
 And those around it and the Crucified, 
 
 ' ' Down from the casement over Arthur smote 
 Flame-color, vert and azure, in three rays. 
 One falling upon each of three fair queens, 
 Who stood in silence near his throne, the friends 
 Of Arthur, gazing on him, tall, with bright 
 Sweet faces, who will help him at his need." 
 
 The Lady of the Lake is there too, "clothed in white 
 samite, mystic, wonderful" "a mist of incense curled 
 about her." 
 
 The three Queens are Faith, Hope, and Charity, on 
 whom the colors symbolical of them, flame-color, blue, 
 and green, fall from the crucifix in the stained glass of 
 the casement, the crucifix being the source of all grace.
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 105 
 
 There is no doubt that Arthur represents the spiritual 
 soldier sent by Our Lord to conquer the unbelievers 
 and make clean the land. The Lady of the Lake, the 
 Church, gives him the sword Excalibur, which comes 
 from the serene depth of an untroubled lake. 
 
 Merlin, the sage and magician, is human reason without 
 grace, strong, quick to see, failing of being omnipotent be- 
 cause it lacks Faith. In a later Idyl, " Vivien " we see the 
 grave sage who relies on the proud power of his intellect 
 ruined by his weakness when approached by the tempta- 
 tions of sensuousness. The lesson of " Vivien " is that 
 reason and the highest culture, of themselves, are not 
 proof against corruption. 
 
 When the question is put to Merlin whether King Arthur 
 was sent from heaven or not, he answers, as human culture 
 too often does as to the origin of the soul, by a riddle. 
 He says: 
 
 " Rain, rain, and sun ! a rainbow in the sky ! 
 A young man will be wiser by and by. 
 An old man's wit may wander ere he die. 
 
 " Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow on the lea ! 
 And truth is this to me and that to thee ; 
 And truth, or clothed, or naked, let it be. 
 
 " Rain, sun, and rain ! And the free blossom blows ! 
 Sun, rain, and sun, and where is he who knows ! 
 From the great deep to the great deep he goes ! " 
 
 This is the answer of modern skepticism to the ques- 
 tions of the soul. " Rain, sun, and rain! " he says. They 
 exist because we see them. But, after all, it makes no 
 difference whether you beh'eve ths,t there is beauty jn
 
 lo6 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 Heaven or no Heaven at all, only the earth. Truth is 
 only a mirage, a delusion of the senses and the elements, 
 whether it seems of earthly or of heavenly origin. A 
 young man will find this out, by and by, though the old 
 man's wits may wander and he may take visions for reali- 
 ties. 
 
 " From the great deep to the great deep he goes." 
 
 This is Herbert Spencer's answer to "The Unknow- 
 able." And Pilate's doubt, "What is truth?" finds its 
 echo in Merlin's cynical phrase, 
 
 " And truth is this to me and that to thee." 
 The first Idyl has this line : 
 
 " The first night, the night of the new year, 
 Was Arthur born." 
 
 Let us observe, too, that King Arthur and Guinevere 
 were married in May; for, through all the Idyls, the unity 
 of time is carefully observed. The time in "Gareth and 
 Lynette," the second Idyl, is the late spring or early sum- 
 mer. 
 
 " For it was past the time of Easter Day." 
 
 And Lynette says: 
 
 "Good Lord, how sweetly smells the honeysuckle in the hushed 
 night." 
 
 "Gareth and Lynette" is full of symbolism. Again, 
 the Church appears more strongly symbolized. Gareth 
 represents the strength of manhood, the Lady Lyonors, 
 the spirit, and Lynette, imagination. I would advise you 
 to analyze this poem more closely.
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 107 
 
 Next comes " Enid " most lovely study of wifely gra- 
 ciousness and patience. Guinevere's sin has begun to 
 work horrible evil unconscious to herself. It plants sus- 
 picion in Geraint's mind and causes Enid to suffer intol- 
 erably. The time is still in the summer. 
 
 I have alluded to the lesson of " Vivien." " Balin and 
 Balan " precedes it with the same lesson. We shall pass 
 " Vivien," the time is still summer, and a summer thun- 
 der storm breaks as Reason (Merlin) falls a prey to the 
 seduction of Sensuality (Vivien). 
 
 " Elaine " follows. It is now midsummer. Guinevere and 
 Launcelot begin to suffer for having betrayed the blameless 
 King. Elaine, is " the lily maid of Astolat." Elaine has 
 the charm of a wood-fawn, the purity of dew on a lily. 
 But she, too, must die, because of the sin of Guinevere 
 and Launcelot, and because of her own wilfulness in loving 
 Launcelot in spite of all. Is there anywhere in poetry a 
 more pathetic, more beautiful picture than that of the 
 "dead steered by the dumb" floating past the Castle of 
 Camelot when the Queen had learned that the fairest and 
 richest jewels are worse than dust when bought by sin. 
 And Elaine 
 
 'In her right hand the lily, in her left 
 The letter all her bright hair streaming down, 
 And all the coverlid was cloth of gold 
 Down to her waist, and she herself in white, 
 All but her face, and that clear-featured face 
 Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead, 
 But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled." 
 
 " The Holy Grail," which, allegorically and practically,
 
 lo8 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 
 
 has puzzled most commentators, can have only its full 
 signification to Catholics. It is doubtful whether Ten- 
 nyson, taking the legend from the old romancers, has put 
 any meaning into it other than he found in it. The time 
 of "The Holy Grail " is still summer. In "Pelleas and 
 Ettarre," we see again the growing evil worked by sin in 
 King Arthur's plans for making the kingdom of Christ on 
 earth. Sin grows and Faith fails; the strong become 
 weak. Sir Galahad's strength is as the strength of ten be- 
 cause his heart is pure. The late summer is indicated 
 by the " silent, seeded meadow grass." In the next Idyl, 
 " The Last Tournament," when ruin begins to fall, the 
 gloom of autumn lowers, we read of the " faded fields " 
 and " yellowing woods." In " Guinevere," when the doom 
 of sin falls on all the court, it is dreary winter. 
 
 " The white mist, like a face cloth to the face, 
 Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still." 
 
 In the last of the Idyls, in " The Passing of Arthur," 
 we are in December. at its close, 
 
 " And the new sun rose, bringing the new year." 
 
 The splendid and blameless King lies by " the winter 
 sea," defeated, helpless, his Queen gone, his knights 
 routed, his hopes fallen. Only Sir Bedivere, who seems 
 to represent neither high Faith nor materialism, but some- 
 thing between the two, is with him. At last, Sir Bedi- 
 vere obeys and casts away the mystic blade, Excalibur. 
 King Arthur, close by the " broken chancel with the broken 
 cross," speaks the most solemn, most marvellous speech
 
 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF TENNYSON. 109 
 
 in this greatest of the Idyls, in which Tennyson the ex- 
 quisite becomes for once Tennyson the sublime, 
 
 " And slowly answered Arthur from the barge ; 
 ' The old order changeth, yielding place to new. 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 Comfort thyself : what comfort is in me ? 
 .1 have lived my life, and that which I have done 
 May He within Himself make pure ! but thou, 
 If thou shouldst never see my face again, 
 Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 
 Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice 
 Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 
 For what are men better than sheep or goats 
 That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
 If knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
 Both for themselves and those that call them friend ? 
 For so the whole, round earth is every way 
 Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 
 But now farewell.' " 
 
 The three Queens, clothed in black, gold-crowned, sail 
 away with the blameless King in the barge, " dark as a 
 funeral scarf," and he is seen no more
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 TWO DRAMAS BY TENNYSON AND AUBREY 
 DE VERE. 
 
 I AM very anxious to introduce to you a poet of whom 
 I spoke in the lecture on Chaucer, a poet who in many 
 respects may be said to have inherited the mantle of 
 Wordsworth. He was the intimate friend of that great 
 poet; he is the friend of Tennyson and Browning; his 
 name is a rallying word for all who believe that art may 
 be Christian and poetic at the same time. Besides, he is 
 acknowledged by the most careful and best equipped 
 critics to be, in certain departments of poetry, unequalled- 
 If he were not so Christian, I should, nevertheless, pro- 
 claim him as a poet who deserves to rank beside Tenny- 
 son. But as he is, above all, Christian, I am very happy 
 in pointing out to you, among a race of literary neo-pagans, 
 the one poet who is great as a poet, true as a man, mag- 
 nificent in his adherence to Divine Truth, I mean Aubrey 
 de Vere. 
 
 His father, Sir Aubrey de Vere, was also a poet, of 
 more warmth than the son, but of less elevation. In the 
 sonnet one of the most perfect forms of poetry of which 
 our language admits Aubrey de Vere works with love 
 and success. He has written several that are almost flaw-
 
 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VERE. lit 
 
 less, but he scarcely deserves the praises he has received 
 for his sonnets. As Mrs. Meynell, a competent and sym- 
 pathetic critic, says in a recent notice of him : " He 
 frequently passes over the pauses which mark the relation 
 of the parts ; and his sonnets seem to have less vigor and 
 movement than his unfettered lyrics. Nevertheless, many 
 of them have a beauty and loftiness of thought which 
 make them memorable poems, whatever they may be as 
 sonnets." 
 
 But of the lyrical greatness of the " Search for Pros- 
 erpine," the " Ode to the Daffodil," and " The Infant 
 Bridal," there can be no question. Sir Henry Taylor, the 
 author of the famous tragedy, " Philip Van Artevelde," 
 wrote : 
 
 " No lesser light 
 
 Than was lit in Sydney's spirit clear, 
 Or given to saintly Herbert's to diffuse, 
 Now lives in thine, De Vere. " 
 
 Even Swinburne, a poet so unlike him as to seem almost 
 antagonistic, praises him. 
 
 The otner day I said to you that you might be surprised 
 to hear me mention the names of Aubrey de Vere and 
 Tennyson in the same breath : to-day I shall give you my 
 reasons. It would be absurd to say that De Vere is so 
 exquisite a poet as Tennyson. But De Vere is a grander 
 poet. De Vere is too cold, too classical to sing a song 
 like the perfect bits of music in the " Princess." De Vere 
 has written too much ; we do not care to possess all his 
 poems; whereas we need all of Tennyson's, except the
 
 112 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VERE. 
 
 dramas. If De Vere had Tennyson's lightness and grace, 
 his subtle excellence of diction; if Tennyson had the re- 
 ligious spirit of De Vere and his elevation of thought, the 
 nineteenth century would need no other poet to make it 
 complete. 
 
 My lecture to-day will help to prove that the best poetry 
 in the English language owes its inspiration to the Catholic 
 Church which is Christianity in its highest form. I shall 
 speak of the qualities of Tennyson and Aubrey de Vere 
 in that great department of high poetry in which Shak- 
 speare made his fame. 
 
 In picturesqueness and " tender grace of a day tnat is 
 dead," the " Becket " of the laureate is vastly superior to 
 the one which, after "Alexander the Great," has made 
 Aubrey de Vere's name glorious in the literary annals of 
 the nineteenth century. But a great tragedy on a subject 
 which is what the Germans call " epoch-making " demand 
 higher qualities than picturesqueness and that nameless 
 grace and delicacy so essentially Tennysonian. It needs 
 even higher qualities than the contrast of marked char- 
 acters, pointed epigrams, or the fine play of poetic fancy. 
 Lord Tennyson's "Becket" has all the lower qualities, 
 Aubrey de Vere's "St. Thomas of Canterbury" all the 
 higher. An oak is not more of an oak because the sward 
 around is starred by violets and all the blooms of spring ; 
 and Aubrey de Vere's " St. Thomas " would not be a 
 greater tragedy if it had the exquisite touches which the 
 most delicate master of poetic technique the world has 
 ever seen gives to his.
 
 TENNYSOX AND AUBREY DE VERE. 113 
 
 Tennyson's tragedy is meant to be an acting play, and 
 it barely fails of being one ; De Vere's is, frankly, a drama 
 for the closet. Perhaps the lack of nobleness in Tenny- 
 son's is due to the necessity he felt of making it fit the arbi- 
 trary refinements of the stage. The episode of Fair Rosa- 
 mond, which is an offence against historical truth, good 
 art, and taste, would probably never have been introduced 
 had the laureate not been required to give a leading 
 dramatic lady something to do. Still, writers impregnated 
 with the traditions of the Reformation are always crying: 
 " CJierchez la femme" If a man is holy and there is no 
 disputing the fact, they construct a romance with a woman 
 in it to account for his renunciations, and vice versa. Ten 
 to one, if Tennyson is ever seized with the idea of putting 
 the Blessed Thomas More into a tragedy, he will show to 
 us the great chancellor dying, not as a martyr to religion, 
 but as a martyr to human love. He has ruined a magni- 
 ficent persona by making him, on the eve of his sublime 
 death for the Church and freedom, drivel of what he might 
 have gained had he married. In the monastery at Canter- 
 bury, just before the bell rings that calls him to his doom, 
 he sighs lackadaisically: 
 
 " There was a little fair-haired Norman maid 
 Lived in my mother's house : if Rosamond is 
 The world's rose, as her name imports her she 
 Was the world's lily. 
 
 JOHN OF SALISBURY : 
 " Ay, and what of her ? 
 
 BECKET : 
 
 ' ' She died of leprosy. 
 8
 
 114 rXWrSO.V A\'D AUBREY DE VERE. 
 
 JOHN OF SALISBURY : 
 
 " I know not why 
 You call these old things back, my lord. 
 
 BECKKT : 
 
 " The drowning man, they say, remembers all 
 The chances of his life, just ere he dies." 
 
 Possibly this discord may not strike the audience which, 
 in " Queen Mary," " Harold," and " Becket," Tennyson 
 addresses himself to. But to a Catholic it is fatal to 
 whatever harmony he might have found in the tragedy. 
 Surely the poet who gave us a type of purity in Sir Gala- 
 had, and of chaste elevation in King Arthur, might have 
 better understood the character of the martyred successor 
 of St. Anselm. It is impossible to approach the climax, 
 or rather anti-climax, of Tennyson's play without impa- 
 tience and irritation. If 
 
 " To be wroth with one we love 
 Doth work like madness in the brain," 
 
 the discovery that a true poet has misunderstood a grand 
 character and frittered away a sublime opportunity is 
 an incentive, too, to a helpless and hopeless sort of 
 anger. 
 
 In Aubrey de Vere's " St. Thomas " there is no anti- 
 climax, no disappointment. We miss sometimes the flowers 
 that might grow around the foot of the oak, but the oak 
 towers majestic. " St. Thomas " possesses what many of 
 us thought lacking in the less ambitious poems of an author 
 who has given out much light without heat sustained in- 
 tensity of passion. Added to this, Aubrey de Vere
 
 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VEKE. 115 
 
 thoroughly understands the historical meaning of St. 
 Thomas' time and the relations of the great chancellor and 
 primate to that time. Of these the laureate seems to be 
 in the densest ignorance. If in " Queen Mary " he drew 
 his facts from Froude, and in " Harold " from Bulwer- 
 Lytton, he appears in " Becket " to have depended on his 
 own inner consciousness for his " history." He has, in the 
 most important particulars, ignored the authentic chronicles 
 of his time. 
 
 It was, indeed, an "epoch-making" time, and one 
 worthy of a grand commemoration in an immortal poem. 
 England owes her liberty to the Church ; and, more than 
 all. to St. Anselm and St. Thomas, because they first with- 
 stood the advancing waves of royal despotism. And the 
 freedom of the Church was the freedom of the people. 
 St. Anselm put into the " Mariale " the echoes of the wails 
 of the Saxon people, beaten down by Norman conquerors 
 who would have been utter brutes for the Berserker spirit 
 was strong in them were it not for the influence of the 
 Church. The Saxons saw their priests made powerless, 
 their Church enslaved, and themselves in hopeless serfdom 
 more crushing even than the slavery which Ireland en- 
 dured from the same hands when suddenly that Church 
 which knows no nationality, which fuses all nations into 
 one, asserted her might in the persons of two primates ; 
 one of the conquering race, the other of the foreigner's 
 court. The position of St. Thomas k Becket has been 
 misinterpreted so utterly that he is often set down as an 
 ambitious revolutionist who tried, in the interests of ecclesi-
 
 Il6 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VERE. 
 
 astical tyranny, to dominate both king and people. In 
 truth, the Archbishop of Canterbury struggled for old 
 English laws against new ones devised by the Normans to 
 rivet more closely the fetters of serfdom on the Saxon 
 people. 
 
 It has been made a reproach against St. Thomas that 
 he resisted the "Royal Customs," that he figured as a 
 haughty prince of the Church scorning the pretensions of 
 the Plantagenet, and that he died a martyr to his obsti- 
 nate desire to crush even royal freedom, that he and his 
 monks might triumph. This view is founded on a mis- 
 conception of the nature of the Royal Customs. They 
 were not old Customs, but innovations invented by the 
 conquerors for their autocratic purposes. Aubrey de Vere 
 puts into Becket's mouth this description of these famous 
 Customs. The Earl of Cornwall says : 
 
 " You serve the king 
 Who stirred these wars ? who spurned the Royal Customs ? 
 
 BECKET : 
 
 ' ' The Customs ay, the Customs ? We have reached 
 At last 'twas time the inmost of this plot, 
 Till now so deftly veiled and ambushed. ' Customs ! ' 
 
 specious word, how plausibly abused ! 
 In Catholic ears that word is venerable ; 
 To Catholic souls custom is law itself, 
 
 Law that its own foot hears not, dumbly treading 
 A holy path smoothed by traditions old. 
 
 1 war not, sirs, on way traditionary ; 
 
 The Church of Christ herself is a tradition ; 
 Ay, 'tis God's tradition, not of men ! 
 Sir, these your Customs are God's laws reversed, 
 Traditions making void the Word of God,
 
 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VERE. 117 
 
 Old innovations from the first withstood, 
 
 The rights of holy Church, the poor man's portion, 
 
 Sold, and for naught, to aliens. Customs! Customs! 
 
 Custom was that which to the lord of the soil 
 
 Yielded the virgin one day wedded! Customs! 
 
 A century they have lived ; but he ne'er lived, 
 
 The man that knew their number or their scope, 
 
 Where found, by whom begotten, or how named : 
 
 Like malefactors long they hid in holes; 
 
 They walked in mystery like the noontide pest ; 
 
 In the air they danced ; they hung on breath of princes, 
 
 Largest when princes' lives were most unclean, 
 
 And visible most when rankest was the mist. 
 
 Sirs, I defy your Customs : they are naught : 
 
 I turn from them to our old English laws, 
 
 The Confessor's and those who went before him, 
 
 The charters old, and sacred oaths of kings : 
 
 I clasp the tables twain of Sinai : 
 
 On them I lay my palms, my heart, my forehead, 
 
 And on the altars dyed by martyrs' blood, 
 
 Making to God appeal." 
 
 These were the Customs that St. Thomas resisted to the 
 death. In this speech, so full of dignity and fire, Aubrey 
 de Vere has distorted no facts for the sake of effect. In- 
 deed, throughout the whole of his work he departs in 
 nothing, except in the episode of Idonea de Lisle, the 
 ward of Becket's sister, from the chronicled truth. Idonea, 
 a rich heiress, pursued by the ruffianly knight De Broc, 
 who "roamed a-preying on the race of men," took refuge 
 with Becket's sister and was protected by the power of the 
 primate. De Broc gained the king's ear, and, " on some 
 pretence of law," drove Idonea from the house of Becket's 
 sister. De Broc and his friends sued for her as a royal 
 ward:
 
 Il8 TEXXYSON AND AUBREY DE J'ERE. 
 
 " Judgment against her went. The day Lad come, 
 And round the minster knights and nobles watched : 
 The chimes rang out at noon : then from the gate 
 Becket walked forth, the maiden by his side : 
 Ay, but her garb conventual showed the nun ! 
 They frowned, but dared no more." 
 
 The feminine interest, to give which to his tragedy Ten- 
 nyson invented a new version of the legend of Fair Rosa- 
 mond, is supplied by Aubrey de Vere in this very fitting epi- 
 sode of Idonea. It is artistic and congruous. Idonea is 
 exiled from England when the king's wrath bursts on all the 
 relatives, friends, and dependents of A Becket; she finds 
 refuge with the Empress Matilda, mother of the king. 
 Then occurs a scene between the empress and the novice 
 which for spiritual as well as intellectual elevation has 
 seldom been equalled. 
 
 One would think that it would have been easy to give 
 the necessary feminine element to " Becket " by the use 
 of an underplot ; but Tennyson has preferred to bring the 
 king's mistress, a " light o' love," Fair Rosamond, into in- 
 timate association with the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 whose chastity, even before he took orders, amid all the 
 temptations of a court presided over by a loose-minded 
 Provencal queen, was proverbial. Fair Rosamond is re- 
 habilitated for the purpose of the laureate. She is made 
 to be, in her own eyes, the lawful wife of King Henry, and 
 the chancellor not yet made primate promises the king 
 to protect her against the vengeance of Queen Eleanor. 
 Becket, having become primate and gained the hatred of 
 the king, does so; and, in a dagger-scene quite worthy of
 
 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE rERE. 119 
 
 a sensational play, saves her from Eleanor's fury. After 
 that he induces her to leave her son and begin a novitiate 
 in Godstow convent, from which she emerges, with the 
 countenance of the abbess, disguised as a monk. She is 
 thus present at the murder of the archbishop, and her 
 presence excites that tender retrospection so in keeping 
 with theatrical traditions, but so shockingly contrary to 
 the martyr's character and the truth of history. It is here 
 that Becket says, according to Tennyson : 
 
 " Dan John, how much we lose, we celibates, 
 Lacking the love of woman and of child ! " 
 
 John of Salisbury seeks to give the archbishop consola- 
 tion for his supposed loss, in a most ungallant and pessi- 
 mistic tone smacking somewhat of " sour grapes : " 
 
 " More gain than loss ; for of your wives you shall 
 Find one a slut, whose fairest linen seems 
 Foul as her dust-cloth, if she used it ; one 
 So charged with tongue, that every thread of thought 
 Is broken ere it joins a shrew to boot, 
 Whose evil song far on into the night 
 Thrills to the topmost tile no hope but death ; 
 One slow, fat, white, a burthen of the hearth ; 
 And one that, being thwarted, ever swoons 
 And weeps herself into the place of power." 
 
 This is hardly the way in which a sturdy and ascetic 
 priest and counsellor would talk to an archbishop who, 
 almost at the moment of martyrdom, would begin to look 
 back at " lost chances " of love and matrimony. These 
 touches of false sentiment show how impossible it is for 
 Tennyson to comprehend a priest of the Church. How 
 different, but how true is the note struck by Aubrey de
 
 120 ENNYSOJV AND AUBREY DE VERE. 
 
 Vere! Becket has been just made primate, and he bursts 
 into the splendid speech to Herbert of Bosham: 
 
 " Herbert ! my Herbert ! 
 
 High visions, mine in youth, upbraid me now ; 
 I dreamed of sanctities redeemed from shame ; 
 Abuses crushed ; all sacred offices 
 Reserved for spotless hands. Again I see them ; 
 I see God's realm so bright, each English home 
 Sharing that glory basks amid its peace : 
 I see the clear flame on the poor man's hearth 
 From God's own altar lit ; the angelic childhood ; 
 The chaste, strong youth ; the reverence of white hairs : 
 "Tis this Religion means. O Herbert ! Herbert ! 
 We must secure her this. Her rights, the lowest 
 Shall in my hand be safe. I will not suffer 
 The pettiest stone in castle, grange, or mill, 
 The humblest clod of English earth, one time 
 A fief of my great mother, Canterbury, 
 To rest caitiff's booty. Herbert, Herbert, 
 Had I foreseen, with what a vigilant care 
 Had I built up my soul ! " 
 
 His pupil, young Prince Henry, is heard singing with- 
 out, and he says, in contrast to the whines put into his 
 mouth by Tennyson : 
 
 " Hark to that truant's song ! We celibates 
 Are strangely captured by this love of children 
 Nature's revenge say, rather compensation." 
 
 Catholics whose childhood has been passed among re- 
 ligious will recognize the truth of this, as well as the false- 
 ness of Tennyson's point of view. Exiled in the Abbey 
 of Pontigny, after the king has poured his wrath on him 
 and his kindred for defending the liberties of the Church 
 and the people, he does not break out into wild regret or
 
 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VEKE. 121 
 
 sentimental sighs. There is manly tenderness in his tone 
 to the abbot: 
 
 " My mother, when I went to Paris first, 
 A slender scholar bound on quest of learning. 
 Girdling my gown collegiate, wept full sore. 
 Then laid on me this hest : both early and late 
 To love Christ's Mother and the poor of Christ. 
 That so her prayer in heaven and theirs on earth, 
 Beside me moving as I walked its streets, 
 Might shield me from its sins." 
 
 ABBOT : 
 
 " Men say your mother 
 Loved the poor well, and still on festivals, 
 Laying her growing babe in counter-scale. 
 Heaped up an equal weight of clothes and food, 
 Which unto them she gave." 
 
 It would be necessary to apologize for giving many 
 quotations, tempting as their beauty is, were it not for the 
 fact that mere allusion to them would not suffice. It is 
 regrettable that among Catholics and the present writer 
 speaks from observation Tennyson's " Becket," printed 
 in 1884, is better known than De Vere's "St. Thomas," 
 an American edition of which appeared in 1876. 
 
 Aubrey de Vere's conception of the motives of the 
 martyred primate is worthy of a Catholic poet. Tenny- 
 son grasps only faintly the Christianity of A Becket. It 
 does not come home to him, it does not touch him, be- 
 cause in his experience he has never come in contact with 
 the inner life of a devout priest, and therefore his imagi- 
 nation is not equal to the task of evolving one. Of the 
 real meaning of asceticism he is entirely ignorant. The
 
 122 7YTA~A r KSa-V A. YD AL'BREY DE VERE. 
 
 pride and the impatience of his Becket are only equalled 
 by the self-conceit of his St. Simon Stylites. 
 
 In the dialogue between the abbot of Pontigny and the 
 exiled archbishop, just quoted, there is an example of 
 Catholic belief which, like sustaining gold threads in a 
 tissue of silk, runs through the wonderful tragedy of Ue 
 Vere's. The chancellor is made the primate ; he becomes 
 less gay, less worldly, more given to the building-up of his 
 soul and his mind, and more spiritual. He, almost alone, 
 stands up for the Church and the people. Time-serving 
 court bishops cower; the very court of Rome but not 
 the Church seems to desert him. The pope himself 
 sends him the habit of the monks of Pontigny, with the 
 cowl filled with snow "the pope knows well some heads 
 are hot." The archbishop endures it all with the meek- 
 ness of a saint, yet with the dignity of a man. Through 
 all trials, up to the time of martyrdom, he seems marked 
 for special grace. He is not singularly learned, for the 
 practical duties of the kingdom have left him little time 
 for study. And yet he is well equipped with fortitude and 
 his hope never falters. Why ? We are answered: be- 
 cause his mother has loved God and the poor, and because 
 he so loves Christ's poor, following her behest. This 
 essentially Catholic point is accentuated most sharply and 
 artistically by the author. 
 
 Tennyson draws very sharply the envious and the 
 fawning prelates around the king, and his characterization 
 is as keen and delicate as we have had every reason to 
 expect it to be. But the virtuous priests in " Becket " arc
 
 AXD AUBREY DE VERE. 123 
 
 certainly a strange group. We know that the Church in 
 England, half-enslaved by the state and burdened with 
 growing wealth, had need of reforms in discipline. Aubrey 
 de Vere, with a regard for truth which has probably caused 
 guileless Protestants to expect to see him crushed by the 
 thunder of Rome, makes the pious Empress Matilda say: 
 
 " I would your primate 
 Had let the Royal Customs be, and warred 
 Against the ill customs of the Church. 'Tis shame 
 To ordain a clerk in name that lacks a cure, 
 Whom idleness must needs ensnare in crime, 
 Scandal and worse to screen an erring clerk, 
 More fearing clamor than the cancer slow 
 Of wily wasting sin. Scandal it is 
 When seven rich benefices load one priest, 
 Likeliest his soul's damnation." 
 
 JOHN OF SALISBURY: 
 
 "Scandals indeed! 
 
 And no true friend to Thomas is the man 
 Who palliates such abuses. For this cause 
 Reluctantly he grasped Augustine's staff. 
 Therewith to smite them down. Madam, the men 
 Who brand them most are those who breed the scandals. 
 The primate warred on such. The king, to shield them, 
 Invoked the Royal Customs." 
 
 We understand all this, and no Catholic of to-day at- 
 tempts to palliate abuses which crept into the discipline 
 of the Church. It is evident that Aubrey de Vere does 
 not whiten the courtiers and sycophants, although clothed 
 with episcopal authority, who shrank from St. Thomas at 
 the king's scowl. He is even more pitiless to them than 
 Tennyson. Tennyson, however, does not seem to see the 
 anomaly of making an archbishop a saint canonized by
 
 124 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VEKE. 
 
 Rome show an insubordinate and mutinous spirit which 
 almost justifies the hot words that King Henry is made to 
 address to him : 
 
 No ! God forbid and turn me Mussulman ! 
 No god but one, and Mahomet is his prophet. 
 But for your Christian, look you, you shall have 
 None other god but me me, Thomas, son 
 Of Gilbert Becket, London merchant." 
 
 Tennyson's Becket has a most persistent habit of rep- 
 artee. The repartee is sometimes very apt, but very un- 
 saintly. Indeed, if the laureate had made Wycliff the hero 
 of his tragedy, some of the speeches would be in keeping 
 with the sentiments of that over-glorified Lollard. 
 
 It may be said that Tennyson's idea of St. Thomas is 
 very human, and that the poet has well depicted in rush- 
 ing words a proud nature towering and neither bending 
 nor breaking. Tennyson's Becket is well enough painted 
 from that point of view. There are some exquisitely fine 
 natural touches. But the poet-laureate had no right to 
 attempt to depict the character of St. Thomas merely 
 from that point of view. Pride and enthusiasm would 
 never have made a Christian martyr of Thomas a Becket, 
 and it is the full understanding of this that, leaving out 
 other qualities, makes Aubrey de Vere the greater poet 
 and the truer delineator of a hero whom it is almost sacri- 
 lege to misrepresent for the sake of a theatrical succes 
 destime. The character of St. Thomas a Becket belongs 
 to Christendom and to history, and the poet-laureate, 
 rushing in where angels fear to tread, not caring for or 
 understanding the sacredness of his subject, has done both
 
 TEXXYSON AND AUBREY DE VERE. 125 
 
 Christendom and art a wrong by dragging an effigy of the 
 martyred primate in the dust. It used to be the fashion 
 to overlook the liberties that poets and romance-writers 
 took with history; but since historians have become 
 romancers, and even adopted the adjectives of the poets, 
 we are more exacting. No excuse can be offered for 
 Tennyson's falsification of the character of A Becket 
 not even an excuse that he needed dramatic color. He 
 had a noble figure and a sublime time, and he belittled 
 them both, because he would not understand them, or 
 because the success of a play he had adapted from Boc- 
 caccio made him anxious for the applause of the frequenters 
 of theatres. 
 
 Tennyson, echoing, perhaps, some sectarian preacher, 
 causes the pope's almoner to suggest treachery to the 
 archbishop when the king is urging him to sign the articles 
 against the freedom of the Church. Philip de Eleemosyna 
 tempts the archbishop to grievous sin by whispering that 
 the pope wants him to commit it : 
 
 " Cannot the pope absolve tliee if thou sign ?" 
 
 This might be forgiven in a tract against popery, on the 
 score of ignorance ; but what plea can be offered for it in 
 the careful, overwrought work of a poet whose fame is 
 world wide and whose knowledge should not be much 
 narrower ? 
 
 Becket bursts out in this speech: 
 
 " Map scoffs at Rome. I all but hold with Map. 
 Save for myself no Rome were left in England : 
 All had been his. Why should this Rome, this Rome,
 
 126 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VERE. 
 
 Still choose Barabbas rather than the Christ, 
 Absolve the left-hand thief and damn the right ? 
 Take fees of tyranny, wink at sacrilege, 
 Which even Peter had not dared ? condemn 
 The blameless exile ? " 
 
 Is this the language of a Christian hero ? Are these 
 revilings of the Power he is willing to die for consistent 
 naturally or true artistically ? Herbert of Bosham, the 
 archbishop's faithful friend, a devout cleric and a sensible 
 man according to good authorities, is made to drivel : 
 
 " Thee, thou holy Thomas, 
 I would that thou hadst been the Holy Father." 
 
 To which Tennyson's archbishop complacently replies : 
 
 " I would have done my most to keep Rome holy : 
 I would have made Rome know she still is Rome, 
 Who stands aghast at her eternal self 
 And shakes at mortal kings her vacillation, 
 Avarice, craft. O God! how many an innocent 
 Has left his bones upon the way to Rome, 
 Unwept, uncared for ! Yea, on mine self 
 The king had had no power, except for Rome. 
 'Tis not the king who is guilty of mine exile, 
 But Rome, Rome, Rome ! " 
 
 Was there ever an honest and faithful priest and friend 
 so misrepresented by a poet dazzled by the glare of the 
 footlights ? Was ever a saint and martyr more besmeared 
 with mock heroic pride and selfishness ? 
 
 Chroniclers tell us that St. Thomas was serene and dig- 
 nified in all trials, but " Becket's " serenity is frequently 
 swept away in gusts of evil temper, and he is quite as 
 foul-mouthed as the enemies that bait him. The prelates 
 around him wrangle like school-boys, and the scene at
 
 TENA'YSOA" AND AUDREY DE VERE. I2^ 
 
 Northampton is simply a free quarrel. Aubrey de Vere, 
 comprehending that the key to St. Thomas' conduct must 
 be found in a supernatural manner, avoids the almost 
 brutal mistakes of the laureate. The scene of the signing 
 of the Royal Customs by A Becket was really at Claren- 
 don; Tennyson transfers it to Roehampton. De Vere 
 treats this scene with keen perception and admirable ret- 
 icence. The archbishop does not forget himself or burst 
 into violent assertions. He is made to explain the episode 
 of the almoner, which Tennyson treats in a truly evangeli - 
 cal way. He tells how he was deluded into signing the 
 articles. It is very different from the version in which the 
 pope's envoy whispers that one may sin freely and be sure 
 of absolution ! 
 
 ' ' Came next the papal envoy from Aumone, 
 With word the pope, moved by the troublous time, 
 Willed my submission to the royal will. 
 This was the second fraud ; remains the third. 
 My lords, the Customs named till then were few. 
 In evil hour I yielded pledged the Church, 
 Alas ! to what I know not. On the instant 
 The king commanded, ' Write ye down these laws.' 
 And soon, too soon, a parchment pre-ordained 
 Upon our table lay, a scroll inscribed 
 With usages sixteen, whereof most part 
 Were shamefuller than the worst discussed till then. 
 My lords, too late I read that scroll : I spurned it ; 
 I swore by Him who made the heavens and earth 
 That never seal of mine should touch that bond, 
 Not mine, but juggle-changed. My lords, that eve 
 A truthful servant and a fearless one, 
 Who bears my cross and taught me, too, to bear one 
 Llewellen is his name, remembered be it ! 
 Probed me, and probed with sharp and searching words;
 
 128 TF.A T An'SON AND AUBREY DE VERE. 
 
 And as the sun my sin before me stood. 
 My lords, for forty days I kept my fast, 
 And held me from the offering of the Mass, 
 And sat in sackcloth ; till the pope sent word, 
 Arise ; be strong and walk ! ' And I arose, 
 And hither came ; and here confession make 
 That till the cleansed leper once again 
 Take, voluntary, back his leprosy, 
 I with those Royal Customs stain no more 
 My soul, which Christ hath washed." 
 
 This is not the talk of Tennyson's ill-tempered and 
 sharp-tongued Becket, but the sense, if not the exact 
 words, of the real Becket. De Vere's consummate skill 
 in building up bit by bit the character of the archbishop, 
 in accordance with the character given him by authentic 
 writers, is worthy of careful analysis. The primate asked 
 of his servants their honest opinions of this conduct, and 
 accepted opinions thus frankly tendered as his guide. The 
 flattery of Tennyson's Herbert of Bosham, so compla- 
 cently swallowed by the laureate's political primate, would 
 have brought down the censure of the real St. Thomas. 
 De Vere characterizes Llewellen, the Welsh cross-bearer, 
 by a nice touch: 
 
 " The tables groaned with gold ; I scorned the pageant, 
 The Norman pirates and the Saxon boors 
 Sat round and fed ; I hated them alike, 
 The rival races, one in sin. Alone 
 We Britons tread our native soil." 
 
 In the death-scene Tennyson sins unpardonably. He 
 shows us the archbishop rushing to his death from obstinacy 
 and want of self-control. De Brito, Fitzurse, and De 
 Tracy have come to put into act the hasty words of the
 
 TEXXYSOtf AND AUBXEY DE VERE. 129 
 
 king and to murder the archbishop. Becket rails at them 
 bitterly, throws Fitzurse from him and pitches De Tracy 
 " headlong," after the manner of the muscular Christian 
 heroes beloved of the late Rev. Charles Kingsley. He 
 even sneers at the monks whom Tennyson makes to flee. 
 " Our dovecote flown," he says " I cannot tell why 
 monks should all be cowards." He still repeats the sneer, 
 until Grim, whose arm is broken by a blow aimed at 
 Becket, reminds him that he is a monk. Rosamond rushes 
 in and begs the murderers to spare the archbishop, and then 
 he is slain, just as a thunderstorm breaks; this climax, 
 which in Aubrey de Vere's tragedy follows strictly the 
 authentic account of the sacrilege, is made trivial by a silly 
 coup de theatre. 
 
 There is nothing in Tennyson's " Becket " to compare 
 with the lyrics in "The Princess," or even the lute song 
 in "Queen Mary;" but they are airy and expressive of 
 the mood of the persons in whose mouths they are placed. 
 Queen Eleanor sings : 
 
 " Over ! the sweet summer closes, 
 
 The reign of the roses is done ; 
 Over and gone with the roses, 
 And over and gone with the sun. 
 
 " Over : the sweet summer closes, 
 
 And never a flower at the close ; 
 Over and gone with the roses, 
 
 And winter again and the snows " 
 
 It is quite in accordance with the mood of the light- 
 minded queen, who is quite past the August of life, who 
 9
 
 130 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VERB. 
 
 has been wedded more for her rich possessions than her- 
 self, and who is far from her gay debonair Aquitaine. 
 
 Queen Eleanor does not sing in the similar scene in 
 Aubrey de Vere's tragedy. She turns to a trouvere and 
 asks him to sing. And he begins : 
 
 " I make not songs, but only find ; 
 
 Love following still the circling sun, 
 His carol casts on every wind, 
 And other singer is there none. 
 
 " I follow Love, though far he flies ; 
 
 I sing his song, at random found, 
 Like plume some bird-of-paradise 
 Drops, passing, on our dusky bound. 
 
 " In some, methinks, at times there glows 
 
 The passion of some heavenlier sphere 
 These too I sing ; but sweetest those 
 I dare not sing and sweetly hear. " 
 
 This is a smooth setting of a thought which both Keats 
 and Maurice de Guerin, and no doubt all poets, have tried 
 to express ; but Queen Eleanor, and perhaps the sensitive 
 reader, finds it lacking as a lyric. The trouvere then sings 
 another about Phoebus and Daphne. Queen Eleanor very 
 aptly cries: 
 
 "A love-song that ! An icicle it is 
 Added to winter." 
 
 But if Aubrey de Vere's lyrical touch is hard and cold 
 in comparison with Tennyson's, even when Tennyson's 
 lyrics are not his best, he has the advantage, in all the 
 higher attributes of a dramatic poet, in limning Queen 
 Eleanor, who was a creature of the senses, yet still a 
 princess and of no mean capabilities. Tennyson gives
 
 TENNYSON AND AUBREY DE VERE. 131 
 
 the impression that she was half-crazed a kind of Pro- 
 vencal Bacchante, and her first entrance destroys all 
 respect for her sanity. 
 
 Aubrey de Vere's " Saint Thomas of Canterbury " has a 
 foil in " Becket " which, by contrast, makes it glow and 
 seem more full of lustre and color, as a diamond of flaw- 
 less purity when put in a circle of brilliants. It is hard to 
 account for the blindness of the poet of the " Idyls of the 
 King " in venturing to attempt a work that had already 
 been perfectly done. Aubrey de Vere's place as a great 
 dramatic poet was settled when "Alexander the Great " 
 appeared. " Saint Thomas of Canterbury " was not needed 
 to teach the world what he could do. But he has given 
 it out of the abundance of his heart ; and we Catholics, 
 who have the key of faith with which to unlock its mys- 
 teries, which are unknown to a poet of even Tennyson's 
 insight, may thank God that he has raised up a seer at 
 once strong, pure, true to his ideals both in religion and 
 art, more than worthy to wear the mantle that fell from 
 the shoulders of Wordsworth, and with much of the divine 
 fire that made Shakspeare an arbiter of English thought 
 and speech.
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 I HOPE you will forgive me for not using the word 
 " poetess " in this lecture. In my opinion a woman who 
 writes poetry should not be ashamed to be called by the 
 name which distinguishes Dante, Calderon, Shakspeare, 
 Longfellow and many other immortals. 
 
 This century is the century of women writers. The 
 results of the great social change consequent from the 
 discovery of America and the French Revolution are more 
 apparent now than ever in the education of young girls 
 and the status of women. Our grandparents looked with 
 horror on the probability of a woman's working for a liv- 
 ing or working at all, except in the household. She could 
 embroider hideous samples, draw buttercups and daisies, 
 paint landscapes in which the cows might have been 
 horses and the lambs dogs; she was expected to be 
 "sweetly pretty," and ivy-like and clinging; her proper 
 dress was supposed to be white muslin ; she wore thin 
 slippers and, on festive occasions, a wreath of roses ; she 
 sang " Lightly the Troubadour Touched his Guitar " and 
 played " The Battle of Prague." Her fathers and brothers 
 worked for her ; but no matter how clever she was, or how 
 desirous of not burdening them she might be, it was not
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 133 
 
 permitted that she should work outside the family circle. 
 To be other than this, social convention decreed, was to 
 be " strong-minded." And to be " strong-minded " was to 
 be wicked, or worse than wicked. But all that is changed 
 now. Young women are no longer content to be ama- 
 teurs. They have learned that society has become more 
 exacting. The young woman of the present time cannot 
 be satisfied with such accomplishments as the making of 
 wax fruit and flowers, or the playing of a fantasia with a 
 note dropped out of every fourth bar. She endeavors to 
 acquire a specialty; for, if she be rich so uncertain is 
 the duration of fortunes in our country she may need it 
 to help her live, and perhaps who knows ? to enable 
 her to support a husband in the luxuries to which he has 
 been accustomed. For sometimes the American girl elopes, 
 and in that case she soon thanks Heaven that she has 
 been taught to earn her own bread. 
 
 There still remains in that small stratum of society in 
 which idleness is cultivated as the principal grace, a pre- 
 judice against young women who work for their living. 
 But a prejudice founded on no principle is disreputable. 
 And even this prejudice, which is really not worth con- 
 sidering, melts before talent and industry. The musician, 
 the composer, the singer, the artist, the writer are the 
 hardest of workers, and yet society meaning the would-be 
 exclusive class is only too eager to welcome and, unfor- 
 tunately, sometimes to spoil them ; so that there is no bar 
 now to a woman's cultivation of the best that is in her. 
 Twenty-five years ago, the woman who could play a great
 
 134 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 composition of Chopin or of Berlioz was a rarity, a phe- 
 nomenon. Now there are hundreds in every city who can 
 do it. Every year the publishers of the magazines receive 
 cleverer and cleverer illustrations from young women. 
 Young women no longer paint a castle on the Rhine with 
 a bridge in the foreground spanning the river, done in 
 bright blue with yellow high lights and weeping willows of 
 arsenic green dipping into the turgid stream. That be- 
 longs to the past of the sampler and the dog3 and cats 
 worked in Berlin wool. 
 
 MRS. BROWNING. 
 
 Similarly, the young lady is no longer satisfied with 
 composition; subject: "Sunshine." She wants to get 
 beyond ihat, and she does. If she have literary talent, 
 if she cultivate her taste, if she pay attention to form, 
 for literature is an art governed by rules as strict as those 
 which govern painting or music, she may earn, not only 
 position in the world which recognizes all good work, es- 
 pecially in literature, but an honorable income. Since 
 Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth's time, the number of 
 women writers has steadily increased. We have too many 
 of them, unfortunately, too many who have sacrificed all 
 that best becomes a woman for the sake of sensationalism 
 and money-getting. But, if we have Ouida, " The Duch- 
 ess," Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and the vulgarest of them all, 
 Ame"lie Rives on one side, we have Adelaide Procter, 
 Christian Reid, Eleanor Donnelly, Lady Georgiana Ful- 
 lerton, Mrs. Craven, who, however, has an unhappy
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 135 
 
 habit of making cousins marry at the end of her stories, 
 on the other. George Sand, a woman who tried to be 
 a man, had genius, but no morals. George Eliot, an- 
 other great woman writer, had genius, but no religion. 
 Their lives were sad and their deaths sad. They are 
 warnings to women that even genius and success cannot 
 compensate for their unsexing themselves. A woman 
 is admirable in proportion to her womanliness. And 
 a poet who wrote in prose has said that a woman with- 
 out religion is like a rose without perfume. Among the 
 women of our century there is one English woman 
 poet who towers above the rest a woman who expressed 
 great thoughts; who, aside from her philosophy and her 
 Italian politics, deserves a high place in that private liter- 
 ary oratory which each of us should erect. I speak of 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning. If ever any poet stood in the 
 white light of the beauty which we call poetry, it was Mrs. 
 Browning. Her thoughts were as fire and her words were 
 as fire. You remember the majestic opening of her " Vir- 
 gin Mary to the Child Jesus." It was suggested by Mil- 
 ton's 
 
 But see the Virgin blest 
 Has laid her Babe to rest." 
 
 Mrs. Browning's prelude runs thus: 
 
 " Sleep, sleep, mine Holy One! 
 My flesh, my Lord! what name? I do not know, 
 A name that seemeth not too high or low, 
 
 Too far from me or Heaven. 
 My Jesus, that is best ! that word being given 
 By the majestic angel whose command 
 Was softly as a man's beseeching said
 
 136 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 When I and all the earth appeared to stand 
 
 In the great overflow 
 Of light celestial from his wings and head. 
 
 Sleep, sleep, my Saving One." 
 
 And the cry of the children : 
 
 ' ' Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers, 
 
 Ere the sorrow comes with years ? 
 They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, 
 
 And that cannot stop their tears. 
 The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, 
 
 The young birds are chirping in their nest, 
 The young fauns are playing with the shadows, 
 
 The young flowers are blowing toward the west 
 But the young, young children, O my brothers, 
 
 They are weeping bitterly ' 
 They are weeping in the playtime of the others, 
 In the country of the free ! " 
 
 Spontaneous as Mrs. Browning's poetry seems, it would 
 have been made greater by a finer art, although the poet 
 made herself a scholar and her poetry was greatly in- 
 fluenced by the Greeks. 
 
 I must warn you that, in a lesser poet, Mrs. Browning's 
 faults of art would not be tolerated. She made herself a 
 scholar, it is true ; she was influenced by Theocritus, as 
 Tennyson was ; but not so much by the perfect symmetry 
 of the Greeks as by their thoughts. I regret that most 
 women poets are careless just where one would expect to 
 find them careful in matters of detail. Mrs. Browning's 
 rhythm and rhyme are sometimes so bad as to put the 
 critical reader or the musical reader out of patience. It 
 must be said, too, that Mrs. Browning's characters in her 
 long poems, "Aurora Leigh " and " Lady Geraldine's Court-
 
 SOME H'OME.Y WRITERS. 137 
 
 ship " are unreal. They are " imagination at a white heat." 
 Lady Geraldine is an unwomanly woman ; and Romney 
 Leigh is a very weak-minded fool. Nevertheless, looked 
 at as a poet, not as a story-teller or an artist, in the sense 
 that Tennyson is an artist, Mrs. Browning is the greatest 
 of the women poets. Mrs. Browning, when criticised for 
 her bad rhymes, replied that poetry with her was not 
 "reverie, but art." If this be true, we can only conclude 
 that she had a very poor ear for sound. Somebody made 
 a list of the defective rhymes in " Lady Geraldine's Court- 
 ship." For instance: 
 
 "Door-ways poor-ways; nature satire; woman gloaming; in- 
 vited freighted ; terrace heiress ; symbol humble ; islands si- 
 lence ; making speaking ; chamber remember ; coming woman ; 
 weakness blackness; mercies curses; earthly worthy," and 
 many more. 
 
 Mrs. Browning's love and sympathy for children are 
 pronounced in her poems. If Mrs. Browning gained 
 Heaven and who can tell ? it was through her love for 
 the poor and of helpless little children. Mrs. Browning's 
 art was not perfect ; but her voice, with a discord now 
 and then, came straight from her heart. If you read 
 nothing else of Mrs. Browning, read at least "At Cowper's 
 Grave," or " The Sleep," written on that Scriptural pas- 
 sage so beloved of poets, " He Giveth His Beloved 
 Sleep." In Mrs. Browning's " Vision of Poets " there is 
 a strong suggestion of Tennyson, as there is in Mrs. Mey- 
 nell's " Sonnet to a Daisy," which I shall speak of later. 
 
 Mrs. Browning owes almost as much to Theocritus as 
 Tennyson. And her paraphrase on the idyls of the
 
 138 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 Syracusan poet are very charming. Faulty in technique, 
 she is nevertheless an artist. One of the lessons of her 
 life which I may read to you, young ladies, is : never to 
 be satisfied with mediocrity; to cultivate your talents to 
 their utmost, and to leave no chance for mental improve- 
 ment pass by. I am not recommending the pursuit of 
 poetry as a profession ; no amount of application will make 
 a poet ; but no poet, no matter how high his genius is, 
 can afford to neglect the rules of art. I may here quote 
 for you the opinion of one of the oldest and the most 
 gifted of our living American poets, Mr. C. H. Stoddard, 
 on the relations of poetry to the art of expression. He 
 says: 
 
 "We won't quote Flaccus, although he is always worth quoting ; 
 but the best thing an amateur poet can do is to rewrite and rewrite 
 his verses, over and over and over again, seeking out the smallest er- 
 rors, and occasionally resorting to bore a friend with reading them, 
 and making all the changes that friends suggest perhaps perma- 
 nently, perhaps only temporarily. By that time the would-be poet 
 will be disgusted with his own work. That is the moment when it 
 becomes fit for anybody else to read, if there was a germ of poetry in 
 it to begin with. After that the aspirant for the bay may lay away 
 his mutilated treasure as long as he can stand it, then bring it out 
 and rewrite it and polish it, and send it to a newspaper or magazine 
 with a safe bet of ten to one that it will be rejected. Out of the throes 
 of many such workers a good poem might occasionally come forth 
 say once in a hundred times. The proportion now is about one in a 
 million." 
 
 This is rather too severe ; but it has truth in it. To 
 console, I may say that no true poem ever lacked a hear- 
 ing. If the Milton is inglorious, it is because he is mute ; 
 and if a great thought which you have does not reach the 
 people, it is because you are too slothful to cut your rough
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 139 
 
 diamond into shape. A perfect poem is a perfect gem, 
 with each facet cut God knows with what pain until it 
 reflects the light on all sides. 
 
 Miss PROCTER. 
 
 I am anxious to call your attention to two writers whom 
 you know and love already, Adelaide Procter and Lady 
 Georgiana Fullerton. There are two poets whom the 
 high literary sect profess to underrate, Longfellow and 
 Adelaide Procter. Longfellow has no superior among our 
 modern poets; and if Adelaide Procter is a lesser light 
 than Elizabeth Browning, it is only in the degree that the 
 flame of a prairie fire is more startling than the glow of the 
 wood in the grate at home. The splendid spectacle en- 
 trances for a time ; but we are never weary of the steady 
 glow of the fire on the hearth. If, speaking to you, who 
 may yet make names in literature, I were asked to give 
 you two models, I should name Adelaide Procter and 
 Lady Georgiana Fullerton. 
 
 I presume you all know some of Adelaide Procter's 
 poems by heart. " The Lost Chord " has been sung even, 
 to quote Tom Moore, "along the streets of Ispahan." 
 You know the last stanza of " Maximus: " 
 
 " Blessed are those who die for God, 
 
 And earn the Martyr crown of light ; 
 Yet he who lives for God may be 
 A greater Conqueror in His sight." 
 
 " The Storm " is famous. "A Parting " has found its 
 echo in many an agonized but resigned heart.
 
 14 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 " I thank you for the terrible awaking, 
 
 And if reproach seemed hidden in my pain, 
 And sorrow seemed to cry on your disdain, 
 Know that my blessing lay in your forsaking. 
 
 " Farewell forever now : in peace we part : 
 And should an idle vision of my tears 
 Arise before your soul in after years, 
 
 " Remember that I thank you from my heart." 
 
 And the divine thought : 
 
 ' ' Pray ; though the gift you ask for 
 
 May never comfort your fears, 
 May never repay your pleadings; 
 
 Yet pray, and with hopeful tears ; 
 An answer, not that you long for, 
 
 But diviner, will come one day; 
 Your eyes are too dim to see it, 
 
 Yet strive, and wait, and pray." 
 
 But why need I quote from this most womanly of poets, 
 most Christian of singers ? You probably know or will 
 know the sweetest of her poems and the true meaning of 
 them better than I, or any man, can. 
 
 Adelaide Procter was the daughter of a poet. Her 
 father wrote under the pen-name of Barry Cornwall. He 
 was a keen discerner of talent as well as a true poet. But 
 he never guessed that his daughter had written anything 
 until his friend, Charles Dickens, called his attention to 
 one of her poems. It was a strange case of poetic justice. 
 Mr. Procter had encouraged Dickens when the author of 
 "Nicholas Nickleby" was young and struggling, and 
 Dickens returned the favor by discovering that Barry 
 Cornwall's daughter was a poet!
 
 SOME WOMEX WRITERS. 141 
 
 Much wrong has been done to the poetic guild. Its 
 members are represented as continually complaining of 
 the neglect of the world. The poet is supposed to wear 
 long hair, to roll his eyes or her eyes in frenzy, to be 
 queer and eccentric, and to pounce on unhappy people 
 and read long poems to them. All the poets I have known 
 are very reasonable people; I have never seen one of 
 them moan in the moonlight or beat his breast and groan 
 except when he had dyspepsia. 
 
 Adelaide Procter was very sweet-tempered and reason- 
 able. She never alluded to herself as a " broken-hearted 
 bard : " she never felt that the world neglected her. On 
 the contrary, she was very grateful for the praise she re- 
 ceived. She was modest and unaffected. She was born 
 in 1825; she died in 1864. Had she lived in our time 
 she would not have affected "aestheticism." Charles 
 Dickens, as editor of Household Words, had to read 
 many poems. One day among a mass of trash he found 
 one signed by Mary Berwick. He was pleased with it. 
 
 " How we came gradually to establish at the office of 
 Household Words" wrote Dickens, in his introduction 
 to Miss Procter's poems, "that we knew all about Miss 
 Berwick, I never discovered. But we settled somehow, 
 to our own satisfaction, that she was a governess in a 
 family; that she went to Italy in that capacity and re- 
 turned; and that she had long been in the same family. 
 We really knew nothing whatever of her, except that she 
 was remarkably businesslike, punctual, self-reliant, and re- 
 liable ; so I suppose we insensibly invented the rest. For
 
 142 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 myself, my mother was not a more real personage than Miss 
 Berwick, the governess, became." 
 
 Miss Berwick turned out to be Adelaide Procter. One 
 day, about Christmas, 1854, Dickens went to dine with 
 his old friend Barry Cornwall. He had the proofs of the 
 Christmas number of Household Words with him. He 
 pointed out a very pretty poem. Next day he learned 
 that he had spoken to the writer of the poems in her 
 mother's presence. It was in this unobtrusive way, as 
 a lily of the valley lifts itself slowly and fills the air with 
 perfume before we see it, that Adelaide Procter began that 
 career of praying, working, and waiting which has en- 
 deared her to the hearts of the English-speaking world. 
 She, like Lady Georgiana Fullerton, was a convert to 
 the Catholic Church. 
 
 The name of Lady Georgiana Fullerton recalls " Lady 
 Bird " and " Grantly Manor," novels in their day as 
 widely read as any of the popular stories one sees adver- 
 tised now in the public prints. Her reputation rests on 
 her later works. Lady Georgiana, though she wrote poems, 
 was not a poet. We know her by her prose works. But 
 I ought first to speak of another poet. 
 
 MRS. MEYNELL. 
 
 There are two sisters in England, one of them little 
 known in this country, the other very famous, who have 
 done work which ought to be at once an incentive and a 
 consolation to other women. One, Lady Elizabeth Butler, 
 is the painter of the famous " Roll Call." of which the late
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 143 
 
 lamented Mother Angela once showed me a copy, and 
 which she liked exceedingly, as all the world did. The 
 other is Mrs. Meynell, Alice Meynell, the author of one 
 volume of poems. Mrs. Meynell, whose husband is the 
 editor of a weekly paper in London, has since her mar- 
 riage, in 1877, written no poetry I have seen. But what 
 she wrote before that time is real poetry, both in thought 
 and in expression. Mrs. Meynell then Miss Alice 
 Thompson owed her introduction to the public to Mr. 
 Ruskin's kindness, whose choice of poets is somewhat 
 erratic. It is strange that an autocrat who generally 
 chooses to praise weak verse should have selected the 
 sweetest and most artistic, if not the greatest of all the 
 woman poets. The famous art critic wrote of Mrs. Mey- 
 nell's poetry: 
 
 " The last verse of that perfectly heavenly ' Letter from the Girl to 
 Her Old Age,' the whole of ' San Lorenzo's Mother,' and the end of 
 the sonnet ' To a Daisy ' are the finest things I have yet seen (or felt) 
 in modern verse." 
 
 And yet sometimes even Mrs. Meynell fails a little in 
 art. In this very sonnet, " To a Daisy," the word, " liter- 
 ally " spoils a line : 
 
 "Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide, 
 Like all created, secrets from me, 
 And stand a barrier to eternity. 
 And I, how can I praise thee well and wide 
 
 " From where I dwell upon the hither side 
 Thou little veil for so great mystery, 
 When shall I penetrate all things and thec, 
 And then look back ? For this I must abide,
 
 144 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 " Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled 
 Literally between me and the world, 
 
 Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring 
 
 " And from a poet's side shall read his book 
 Oh, daisy mine, what will it be to look 
 
 From God's side even of such a simple thing." 
 
 This sonnet will recall Tennyson's treatment of the same 
 thought in " O Flower in Crannied Wall." 
 
 It is singular that the other poem, " San Lorenzo Guis- 
 tiniani's Mother," has not become better known than it is. 
 It deserves a place in every collection of good poetry. It 
 is the story, told in a few words, of a mother whose son 
 has become a Franciscan friar. One day a brother of his 
 order visits her for alms. Years have passed since she 
 saw her son, she thinks this visitor is he ; but she is not 
 sure. She says : 
 
 " Mine eyes were veiled by mists of tears 
 When on a day in many years 
 
 One of his order came. I thrilled. 
 Facing, I thought that face fulfilled, 
 I doubted for my mists of tears. 
 
 " 1 1 is blessing be with me forever ! 
 
 My hope and doubt were hard to sever,- 
 That altered face, those holy weeds, 
 I filled his wallet and kissed his beads, 
 And lost his echoing feet forever. 
 
 " If to my son my alms were given 
 I know not and I wait for Heaven. 
 
 He did not plead for child of mine, 
 
 But for another Child Divine, 
 And unto Him it was surely given. 
 
 " There is One alone who cannot change ; 
 Dreams arc we, shadows, visions strange ;
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 145 
 
 And all 1 give is given to One, 
 I might mistake my dearest son, 
 But never the Son who cannot change." 
 
 It is something to have written the thought which is the 
 germ of this beautiful poem. The mother whose heart 
 yearns for the son she has given to God, whose heart 
 leaps at a look in the friar's face so like the look she loved 
 from the time he was a baby in her arms, consoles her- 
 self with the consolation of Faith she might mistake her 
 son, but never our Lord to whom both he and she had 
 surrendered their wills. 
 
 Adelaide Procter is more direct than Mrs. Meynell. 
 There is the difference between Miss Procter's verse and 
 Mrs. Meynell which exists between Longfellow and the 
 more misty verses of younger poets. From the purely 
 literary standpoint, Miss Procter would be called less of 
 a poet than Mrs. Meynell, as Longfellow would be in 
 comparison with Shelley. But, to find the true poet, one 
 must not consider his verse entirely from the literary point 
 of view. 
 
 LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON. 
 
 " Femmes-Auteurs," as Louis Veuillot called "author- 
 esses," have done a great deal of harm in the world. The 
 sentimentalism of George Sand, the affected cynicism of 
 " Ouida," the sensuousness of Rhoda Broughton, and the 
 utter shamelessness of some others savor more of Mistress 
 Aphra Behn than of the reticence and self-respect of that 
 great English novelist, Miss Austen. Happily, our cen- 
 10
 
 I4 6 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 tury and the vocation of women of letters have been re- 
 deemed by names which are not inferior to the ones that 
 slowly arose above the flash and clangor of Sir Walter 
 Scott's wonderful mediaeval world. 
 
 Among the brightest of these names we do not hesitate 
 to put that of Lady Georgiana Fullerton. A certain deli- 
 cate quality of humor has caused Miss Austen to be named 
 second to Shakspeare by English critics. This praise 
 might be considered overstrained if we did not remark that 
 Shakspeare's humor is much less than his wit. In all the 
 qualities that made Jane Austen mistress of her craft 
 her consummate art, her careful reticence, her subtle 
 knowledge of the varying temperature of the social atmo- 
 sphere which her characters breathed Lady Georgiana 
 Fullerton was Miss Austen's equal, and more than her 
 equal in strength and intensity of feeling. 
 
 Miss Austen is likely to remind the average reader more 
 of Cowper than of Shakspeare. Her books seem redolent 
 of the aroma of tea mixed in just the right proportion. 
 They are comfortable steeped in comfort. If there is 
 no word in them that can bring a blush to the cheek of 
 a young girl, there is likewise no word in them to " catch 
 us by the throat " and to force us to acknowledge there 
 are better things in the world than a comfortable income, 
 a bright grate, and pleasant acquaintances. Nevertheless 
 she was an artist of the highest type. Mr. T. E. Kebbel, 
 in the Fortnightly Review, expresses that sense of the 
 limitations of her art which is one of the necessary re- 
 quirements of true art : " To have steered exactly between
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 147 
 
 the two extremes of undue severity and undue license ; to 
 have caused us an uninterrupted amusement without ever 
 descending to the grotesque ; to have been comic without 
 being vulgar, and to have avoided extremes of every kind 
 without ever being dull or commonplace, is the praise of 
 which Jane Austen is almost entitled to a monopoly, . . . 
 and only add another to the many proofs which we possess 
 that nothing is too mean for genius to convert into gold." 
 
 In writing of Lady Georgiana Fullerton I can add the 
 higher praise that she, without violating the principles of 
 art, led us through this world to the gate of one to which 
 this is a phantom of unreality. Miss Austen would have 
 regarded Emma, or any other of her heroines who might 
 have sold their goods and given the proceeds to the poor, 
 as monstrous changelings with whom she could not possi- 
 bly have any acquaintance or sympathy. She is always 
 decorous; the appearance of a Constance Sherwood or 
 her friend, Mistress Ward, with aspirations beyond the 
 visible world, in the little circle of her characters would 
 have filled her with uneasy amazement. 
 
 Lady Georgiana Fullerton knew Miss Austen's world of 
 English gentlemen and gentlewomen. She, too, could 
 bring around the atmosphere of toast and tea, of drawn 
 curtains and glowing grates, of the comfortable interiors 
 so dear to Miss Austen's greatest living successor, Mrs. 
 Oliphant; but she had powers, and exerted them, which 
 take her nearer to Thackeray the Thackeray of "Es- 
 mond " than any critic has so far been willing to admit. 
 And " The Handkerchief at the Window " is one of
 
 148 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 the most perfectly concentrated short stories ever 
 written. 
 
 The purely literary works of Lady Georgiana Fullerton 
 can be safely quoted against that class of dilettanti who 
 assert that the Christian religion, when it permeates and 
 directs literary work, enfeebles its artistic qualities. One 
 of the latest of English " femmes-auteurs," Miss Vernon 
 Lee, a positivist by profession, has written a novel to show 
 to what depths devotion to art for art's sake and to material 
 beauty for the sake of material beauty, leads. She shows, 
 with the air of a prophet, that the false sestheticism of 
 Dante, Rossetti, Pater, and the rest, leads to a degradation 
 so great as to be beyond the reach of human speech. Her 
 heroine, Miss Brown, seeks refuge in the barren abstrac- 
 tions in which George Eliot found only despondency. 
 These Miss Vernon Lee calls religion; she offers a de- 
 graded world Comte for our Lord, an impossible altruism 
 for charity. She speaks for positivism. It is evident that 
 the axiom that art is defective when it is not united to 
 something higher has ceased to be received by the " cul- 
 tured " as infallible. But with the school of sesthetes, now 
 growing small and unpopular, it is still held that the Chris- 
 tian must hamper the artist in his higher efforts, as it is 
 held by certain classes in France that a devotion to free- 
 dom is always united to a denial of God. 
 
 Villon, the poet of these aesthetes, asked, " Ou sont les 
 neiges d'autan ? " The snows of last year are forgotten, 
 as the pretentious "art," the mock paganism, and the 
 equally mock "blessed damozels" and Christian virgins
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 149 
 
 of this school without faith, will soon be forgotten. 
 The artistic quality of the novels of Lady Georgiana 
 Fullerton deepened with her faith, and her faith ran deeper 
 as she neared her end. Many of us can long for the in- 
 tense devotion which impelled her to say : " How few 
 Holy Weeks are left me! Even if I live to be very old 
 I cannot have more than twenty;" but how few really 
 have that utter union with the visible life of the Church it 
 expresses ! 
 
 Lady Georgiana Fullerton was essentially religious; 
 in 1844, prior to her conversion to the Church, she wrote 
 " Ellen Middleton," of which a new edition has recently 
 appeared in London. " Ellen Middleton " shows the 
 struggles of a devout soul. It has somewhat too much of 
 the sentiment and sentimentalism of the outpourings of a 
 heart that had kept its treasures of imagination and thought 
 close until the pen unlocked them. The story is serious 
 but interesting. Its style is vigorous, but without that 
 perfect equality of handling and clearness of tone which 
 make " Constance Sherwood " and "A Will and a Way " 
 models of good English. At this time Lady Georgiana 
 did not disdain what later she might have considered 
 "sensationalism;" but both the sentimentalism and the 
 sensationalism disappear as she gets nearer and nearer to 
 the heart of the Church. Her art grows stronger and 
 purer as her faith and charity increase. When she wrote 
 " Ellen Middleton " she believed in that chimera, Tracta- 
 rianism. A future Anglican Church seemed possible to 
 her. There are in the book lines which tell of her cling-
 
 150 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 ing to the fallacy of the validity of Anglican Orders. In 
 the last edition, printed early in the present year, these 
 lines have been permitted to remain, very wisely, as with- 
 out them the novel would not be so perfect an index of 
 the mind that created it. 
 
 After her conversion she was received into the Church 
 in 1846, four years after the conversion of her husband 
 she gave " Grantley Manor " to the world. It is a novel 
 of character, an advance on " Ellen Middleton." " The 
 Old Highlander" came next. In 1852 her success had 
 been so great that she published " Lady Bird." Of the 
 trio of earlier novels this is by far the most powerful. It 
 is intensely human and intensely real. Reading it, one 
 cannot help being impressed by the strength of purpose, 
 the great desire for truth, which the soul of the author 
 must have possessed ; for it is very plain that " Lady Bird," 
 "Grantley Manor," and "Ellen Middleton" are partly 
 autobiographical, not as to the incidents, but as to the 
 feelings of which the incidents are expressions. It is not 
 strange that these novels, better known on this side of the 
 Atlantic than her other works, are beloved of young people. 
 The author was not young when she published them, but 
 they are books that only one young and ardent in heart 
 and mind could have written. Unchastened by Christianity, 
 such a heart and mind might have run into extravagances 
 of which we find indications in " Ellen Middleton," and still 
 fainter in " Lady Bird." 
 
 "Too Strange Not to be True" and "Mrs. Gerald's 
 Niece" are also very well known here. The latter is a book
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 151 
 
 of religious controversy, edifying and in good taste, with 
 the thread of a story to keep it together. The former is a 
 novel of romantic and absorbing interest in which the au- 
 thor made one of those few errors which reviewers love to 
 discover in order to give liveliness to their criticisms. It 
 was in this book she described, if we do not mistake, the 
 gambols of monkeys on the banks of the Mississippi. Later, 
 in her translation of Mrs. Craven's " Elaine," the sapient 
 reviewers found canapt (sofa), translated " canopy," and 
 they exploited the mistake with double eagerness because 
 Lady Georgiana Fullerton was so careful and so rarely 
 fell into those slight errors which pepper the pages of 
 writers of fiction. In one of her short stories, "Ad Majorem 
 Dei Gloriam," she tries to teach the awfulness of a writer's 
 responsibility. She felt it deeply. As she grew older the 
 dreadful weight of her vocation would have made her over- 
 scrupulous had it not been made so evident to her that 
 one of her duties to God was to write. She turned her 
 attention to more serious work, as she doubtless thought 
 it, than the writing of novels. She trembled for the value 
 of the little seeds she scattered abroad on their tiny wings 
 from her full hands. Alas! if there should be one weed 
 planted even unconsciously by her hand ! She trembled 
 at the thought ; and throughout the whole twenty volumes 
 of her works one may see between the lines an undercur- 
 rent of watchfulness that cleansed every word as pebbles 
 are whitened in a clear stream. We have always regretted 
 that " Too Strange Not to be True " is disfigured by wood- 
 cuts incongruous to the text singular monstrosities which,
 
 152 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 when a new and uniform edition of her novels is issued by 
 some other publisher in America, we hope to see removed. 
 Lady Georgiana Fullerton was of the famous Leveson 
 Gower family. Her father was in 1833 created Lord 
 Granville. The present Lord Granville is her brother. 
 She was born on September 23d, 1812. The fact that she 
 wrote French as fluently and elegantly as she wrote Eng- 
 lish, and that she knew France as thoroughly as she knew 
 England, and that one country was almost as dear to her 
 as the other, is accounted for by her long residence in 
 France in the household of her father, who was ambassador 
 in Paris. Her life was very happy there. Her brother, 
 the present Lord Granville, oppressed with cares of state, 
 differing from her in religion, and often separated from 
 her by his duties, has never lost that love and reverence 
 for her which sprang up in the kindly, domestic warmth 
 of the exiled yet happy family. It was one of the fortu- 
 nate attributes of this lady, as eminent for her womanly 
 virtues as for her womanly genius, that she was tenacious 
 in her love. No relative ever had reason to complain of 
 her coldness, no friend of a change in her. To be loved 
 by her once was to be loved by her, in spite of all short- 
 comings, forever. Her charity in the truest sense of the 
 word was what St. Paul describes charity to be: 
 " Charity is patient, is kind ; charity envieth not ; dealeth 
 not perversely ; is not puffed up ; is not ambitious ; seeketh 
 not her own; is not provoked to anger; thinketh no evil; 
 rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth: 
 beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
 
 SOME WOMEX WRITERS. 153 
 
 endureth all things." This expresses her charity. The 
 love and friendship, the trust and belief she once gave she 
 never took back. 
 
 In 1833 she married Alexander George Fullerton, whose 
 family seats were in Ireland and England. Although her 
 love for Ireland is manifest in many of her books, and her 
 kindness to the Irish poor of London was unvarying and 
 thoughtful, she never entered Ireland. But she knew 
 Ireland and the Irish through the happy intuition of sym- 
 pathy. She looked on them as a race of martyrs, as a 
 race ennobled by the sword of persecution, whom she, 
 the daughter of a peer and the niece of a duke, was 
 honored in serving. Had they not suffered for Christ's 
 sake ? In her " Verses " she cries : 
 
 " Yes, you can die as martyrs die, 
 
 Sons of the saints of yore 
 Who fell when Erin's fields were stained 
 With her own children's gore." 
 
 She loved the poor. She begged for them, she worked 
 for them, she economized for them. She deprived herself 
 of luxuries constantly for their sake. A friend tells how 
 she walked long distances rather than hire a cab, that she 
 might add to her insatiable purse for the poor. She was 
 not unmindful of the duties of her state in life. She 
 played her part as hostess in her husband's house with 
 grace and elegance. She wrote for the poor, not for the 
 public. The money paid her by the publishers found its 
 way to the poor. Literally, she was a slave for Christ's 
 sake ; and, in the eyes of the world, a fool for Christ's 
 sake.
 
 154 SOME H'OME.Y ir/UTERS. 
 
 She founded the " Poor Servants of God Incarnate." 
 that the wretched might be helped. She gave all her 
 energy and peculiar earnestness to the getting of the Sisters 
 of St. Vincent de Paul into England, and she succeeded. 
 
 In 1842 Mr. Fullerton became a Catholic. The conflict 
 that tore the heart of his wife is described in the often- 
 quoted lines of hers, " Mother Church : " 
 
 " Oh ! that thy creed was sound, I cried, 
 
 Until I felt its power, 
 And almost prayed to find it false 
 
 In the decisive hour. 
 Great was the struggle, fierce the strife, 
 
 But wonderful the gain, 
 For not one trial or one pang 
 
 Was sent or felt in vain. 
 And every link of that long chain 
 
 That led my soul to thee 
 Remains a monument of all 
 
 Thy mercy sent to me." 
 
 The heaviest sorrow of Lady Georgiana Fullerton's life 
 was the death of her son by a sudden accident. She was 
 not with him when he died. If she could have seen him 
 before his young life took flight the blow would perhaps 
 have not left that constantly re opening wound which 
 gave her anguish until the day of her death. Her dearest 
 friends dropped from her one by one, each loss seeming 
 to tear away a portion of her heart. Her sister, Lady 
 Rivers, the Marchioness of Lothian, and Lady London- 
 derry were taken by death. Each vacancy in her heart 
 seemed to be at once filled with new love for her Lord. 
 
 She knew to its utmost the sweetness of Christian friend- 
 ship. In " Constance Sherwood," the greatest of her works
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 155 
 
 of fiction, she gives us a charming picture of that between 
 her heroine and Mistress Ann Dacre, afterwards Lady 
 Surrey. The account of the first meeting of these young 
 girls is a delightful bit of description. We see the rustic 
 but gentle Constance, a little shy from having seen few 
 people, forgetting to put down the posies of old-fashioned 
 flowers she had gathered for the rooms. The dahlias, the 
 marigolds, the late daisies, and the honeysuckle of her 
 garden filled her arms as the courtly party her parents 
 expected rode up to their house. Constance was the child 
 of " recusants," who clung to the faith of their fathers in 
 spite of the ostracism of their neighbors. Her heart had 
 ached when she saw the village children joyously dancing 
 around the May-pole ; but her father, finding her in tears, 
 led her into the woods where carpets of wild flowers had 
 been laid, and turned her tears to smiles by his pleasant 
 tales. At Easter, when the village children rolled pasch 
 eggs down the smooth sjdes of the green hills, her mother 
 would paint her some herself and adorn them with such 
 bright colors and rare sentences that she " feared to break 
 them with rude handling," and kept them by her throughout 
 the year, rather as pictures to be gazed on than toys to 
 be played with in a wanton fashion. Children would cry 
 out sometimes, but half in play, " Down with the papists! " 
 although the papists were not looked on unkindly by the 
 commoner sort of _folk, to whom their charity endeared 
 them. On the eve of Martinmas day Lady Monteagle 
 came to the Sherwood house with her son and her three 
 granddaughters. " Her son, 11 writes Constance, to whose
 
 156 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 
 
 personality Lady Georgiana Fullerton has given the diffi- 
 cult quality of reality, " had somewhat of the same nobility 
 of mien, and was tall and graceful in his movements ; but 
 behind her, on her pillion, sat a small counterpart of her^ 
 self, inasmuch as childhood can resemble old age, and 
 youthful loveliness matronly dignity. This was the eldest 
 of her ladyship's granddaughters, my sweet Mistress Ann 
 Dacre. This was my first sight of her who was hereafter 
 to hold so great a place in my heart and in my life. As 
 she was lifted from the saddle, and stood in her riding- 
 habit and plumed hat at our door, making a graceful and 
 modest obeisance to my parents, one step retired behind 
 her grandma, with a lovely color tinging her cheeks and 
 her long lashes veiling her sweet eyes, I thought I had 
 never seen so fair a creature as this high-born maiden of 
 my own age: and even now that time, as it has gone by, 
 has shown me all that a court can display to charm the 
 eyes and enrapture the fancy, I do not gainsay that same 
 childish thought of mine. And then Lady Monteagle 
 commanded Mistress Ann to salute ; and I felt my cheeks 
 flush and my heart beat with joy as the sweet little lady- 
 put her arms round my neck and pressed her lips on inv 
 cheek." 
 
 The progress of this friendship is the story of the book. 
 Mistress Ann Dacre becomes Lady Surrey. She is at 
 heart a Catholic and would willingly practise her religion, 
 although all around her have " conformed." Her husband 
 is lured from her by that expert coquette, Queen Eliza- 
 beth. Through all her trials and her weakness the friend-
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 157 
 
 ship between Constance and her remains unchanged. 
 Constance never upbraids her " sweet friend." Her friend- 
 ship is savored with divine charity and patience. The 
 strength of this exquisite novel lies in the purity and truth 
 of its author's own idea of friendship. Through all her 
 life Lady Georgiana Fullerton knew what it meant ; he 
 who would read how deeply one woman may love another 
 in Christ should ponder the story of Constance Sherwood. 
 One chapter of it, like a cool, clear day, fresh and re- 
 freshing, is worth all the raptures and the false, self-con- 
 scious, overstrained analysis of affected sentiments in 
 ' which \he.femmes-antei/rs delight to indulge. 
 
 Love-making is a very important matter in modem 
 novels, and in some modern novels much read it is a long 
 drawn-out and nauseating matter. There are few novelists 
 who know how to have their heroes and heroines make 
 love with sufficient delicacy. Of fewer novelists can it be 
 said that one would ask them for more love-making. In 
 reading Thackerary we laugh at or pity the lovers ; Trol- 
 lope's love-scenes are exceedingly matter-of-fact; Mrs. 
 Oliphant's love-making is what may be called " nice," and 
 William Black is too much engaged with the changes of 
 his scenes, his moonlight and sunrise effects, to give the 
 necessary attention to the billing and cooing of his char- 
 acters. Miss Austen's people make love like human be- 
 ings to whom " money settlements " are more important 
 than hearts. In most novelists' work we miss the quality 
 of reticence in love-making. Their lovers have either no 
 reserve or no feeling. It is a fine thing to think of a man's
 
 158 SOME WOMRX WRITERS. 
 
 heart as of a good violin. It is full of rich music; its 
 strings are drawn to their utmost tension. The master- 
 hand touches it with his bow; it does not give forth all 
 its rich harmonies at once. There is a prelude which 
 suggests the wealth of noble music stored in the tense 
 chords. Finally it comes forth in a grand, increasing 
 harmony of melodious sounds. But the strings do not 
 loosen; they are held tight; there is no abandonment; 
 when they relax and forget that music comes only by 
 sacrifice, there are no more noble sounds. A man's heart, 
 like a violin, must not relax its strings in that abandon- 
 ment which the femmes-auteurs like to depict. Passion 
 is discord : love is a different thing. 
 
 Lady Georgiana Fullerton's love-scenes are very tender 
 and delicate, full of reserve, yet showing bursts of the 
 tenderest feeling. She makes us feel the qualities of her 
 heroes without throwing a glare of light upon them ; all 
 the high lights in her pictures are in her heroines. Basil 
 Rockwood is sketched by Lady Georgiana Fullerton 
 rather than fully painted ; but the reader gets a lofty idea 
 of his consummate manliness. The author is true to the 
 character of the sweet, strong, maidenly Constance in 
 having her artlessly, yet with reserve, describe her love 
 for Basil. She met him in a great crowd of people at 
 " Mistress Wells 1 .'' They talk of the sincere and clever 
 widower. Mr. Roper, the husband of Sir Thomas More's 
 Margaret. 
 
 " I felt in my soul an unusual liking for his conversa- 
 tion, and the more so when, leaving off jesting, he said:
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS, 159 
 
 ' The last fault Mr. Roper did charge you with was lack 
 of prudence wherein prudence is most needed in these 
 days.' 
 
 " 'Alas! ' I exclaimed, 'for that also do I cry mercy; 
 but indeed, Master Rockwood, there is in these days so 
 much cowardice and timeserving which doth style itself 
 prudence that methinks it might sometimes happen that a 
 right boldness should be called rashness.' . . . Then some 
 persons moving nearer to where we were sitting, some 
 general conversation ensued, in which several took part ; 
 and none so much to my liking as Basil, albeit others 
 might possess more ready tongues and a more sparkling 
 wit. In all the years since I had left my home I had not 
 found so much contentment in any one's society. His 
 mind and mine were like two instruments with various 
 chords but one keynote, which maintained them in ad- 
 mirable harmony. The measure of our agreement stood 
 rather in the drift of our desires and the scope of our ap- 
 proval than in any parity of tastes, of resemblance of dis- 
 position. Acquaintanceship soon gave way to intimacy, 
 which bred a mutual friendship that in its turn was not 
 slow to change into a warmer feeling. We met very 
 often. It seemed so natural to him to affection me, and 
 me to reciprocate his affection, that if our love began not 
 which methinks it did on that first day of meeting, I 
 know not when it had birth." 
 
 Shakspeare, in "As You Like It," says : 
 
 " But, mistress, know yourself : down on your knees, 
 And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love/'
 
 *6o SOME ]VOMF..\' WRITERS. 
 
 " For I pray you," writes Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in 
 the person of Constance Sherwood, after Basil Rockwood 
 has proposed, " after the gift of faith and of grace for to 
 know and love God, is there aught on earth to be jewelled 
 by a woman like to the affection of a good man ; or a 
 more secure haven for her to anchor in amid the billows 
 of present life, except that of religion, to which all be not 
 called, than an honorable contract of marriage, wherein 
 reason, passion, and duty do bind the soul in a triple cord 
 of love ? " 
 
 Later Constance says to Basil: 
 
 " ' But truly, sir, if your thinking is just that easy virtue 
 is little or no virtue, I shall be the least virtuous wife in 
 the world. Why, Basil, what, I pray you, should be the 
 duty of a virtuous wife but to love her husband ? ' 
 
 Lady Surrey, who loves her husband in spite of his imi- 
 tation of the Earl of Leicester in dangling after Anne 
 Boleyn's daughter, makes Constance indignant when she 
 asks whether Constance would change if Basil changed. 
 
 " ' If he did much alter,' I answered, ' as no longer to 
 care for me, methinks I should at once cast him out of 
 my heart; for then it would not have been Basil, but a 
 fancied being coined by mine own imaginings, should I 
 have doted on.' " 
 
 " ' Tut ! ' she cried, ' thou art too proud. If thou dost 
 speak truly, I misdoubt that to be love which could so 
 easily discard its object.' 
 
 " ' For my part,' I replied, somewhat nettled, ' I think 
 the highest sort of passion should be above suspecting
 
 SOME ll'OME.V WRITERS. 161 
 
 change in him which doth inspire it, or resenting a change 
 which should procure it freedom from an unworthy thrall.' 
 
 " ' I ween,' she answered, 'we do somewhat misconceive 
 each one the other's meaning; and, moreover, no par 
 allel can exist between a wife's affection and a maidens 
 liking: " 
 
 In all Lady Georgiana Fullerton's novels we find love 
 depicted as it should be, with tenderness, with keen insight 
 into human hearts, with Christian reserve. Her char- 
 acters are not mere creatures of impulse tossed powerless, 
 seemingly without will or self-respect, on a rude sea bear- 
 ing them to chaos. Even in love they preserve their faith 
 and reason. The marriages in her novels and there are 
 many marriages are marriages of reason as well as affec- 
 tion. In the novel with a purpose the reader is usually 
 in the mental condition of the child forced to take medi- 
 cine disguised in syrup. He will drink the syrup, if he 
 can, and leave the bitter stuff; or, if they have been well 
 mixed, he will make a wry face and be thankful that the 
 docoction is no worse. Lady Georgiana Fullerton's books 
 all have a purpose ; but her careful art and her intense 
 earnestness save us from the fear that the "purpose" will 
 pop out suddenly and deprive us of interest in our story. 
 It is of few moral writers that this can be said. We read 
 Miss Austen for amusement, for the enjoyment of spend- 
 ing an hour in a past social atmosphere which she recon- 
 structs for us, but not for instruction or elevation. 
 
 In "A Will and a Way " Lady Georgiana Fullerton 
 similarly reconstructs for us social France as it was im- 
 1 1
 
 162 SOME WOME.V WRITERS. 
 
 mediately before and during the Revolution. Nothing 
 could be better done than the graphic pictures of the old 
 Voltairean chatelaine in her castle, untouched as yet by 
 the storm. It is a unique tableau, teaching us even more 
 than De Tocqueville of the means by which the ancient 
 regime undermined their own foundations. "A Will and 
 a Way," like " Constance Sherwood," has never yet re- 
 ceived the critical consideration it deserves. " Constance 
 Sherwood " is the more perfect work of art. In the quality 
 of vraisemb lance, in that of reproducing the manner of 
 speech of a past time, in the masterly reserve of power 
 which is the highest attribute of good art, " Constance 
 Sherwood " approaches nearer to Thackeray's incompar- 
 able " Esmond " than to any other novel of our time. 
 
 " A Will and a Way " has the moving elements of a 
 great historical tragedy. It gives us truer glimpses of that 
 time of tragedies than we get anywhere outside the more 
 honest parts of Carlyle. Lady Georgiana Fullerton fills 
 each inch of her great canvas so carefully, giving no hasty 
 blotches of crimson merely for effect, that she interprets 
 even the philosophy of the Revolution by means of her 
 social sketches better than many pretentious writers. The 
 reader who has not the time to collate the memoirs of the 
 period may yield himself to the guidance of Lady Geor- 
 giana Fullerton for a knowledge of France in the throes 
 of the Terror. She does not exaggerate even the smallest 
 incident for her purpose. Each touch, as we said before, 
 has the true color of truth. There is enough matter in 
 this book to fill a dozen novels and make them absorb-
 
 SOME WOMEN WRITERS. 163 
 
 ingly interesting, and enough suggestion for many months 
 of high thinking. 
 
 The test of the value of a novel is the impression it 
 leaves. Having read " Fabiola " or " Ben-Hur," we arise 
 with the triumphant exclamation, " I, too, am a Christian." 
 This is the cry which Lady Georgiana Fullerton would 
 move us to utter. This is her purpose. She lived for the 
 greater glory of God. Her works interpreted her life. 
 Each was the reflex of the other. The good she has done 
 lives after her. While there are young hearts ready to 
 glow with the records of Christian heroism of healthy 
 romance, and old ones capable of loving aspirations 
 toward great deeds and daily sacrifices, Lady Georgiana 
 Fullerton's novels will never lack admirers. 
 
 Let us hope that the everlasting flood of literary trash 
 will soon become so tiresome to the indefatigable readers 
 of fiction that a purer taste may arise, and the novels of 
 this Christian artist in letters be given their rightful place. 
 As it is, the young woman who from her course of reading 
 has omitted " Constance Sherwood " and "A Will and a 
 Way " should at once repair a serious defect in her literary 
 education.
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 LITERATURE AND MANNERS. 
 
 IF I seem to insist too much on the study of good litera- 
 ture as a preparation for life, it is because good literature 
 pictures man as he is, and often as he ought to be. And 
 the more our literature pictures man and woman as he or 
 she ought to be, without failing to be true to nature, the 
 better it will be for us. If I have seemed to be too severe 
 on a certain class of novels, I do not wish it to be under- 
 stood that I am a Puritan, disdaining and contemning all 
 novels because they are novels. I would have you dis- 
 criminate carefully. A good novel is a gift of God ; a bad 
 one was perhaps one of the most insidious gifts that 
 Mephistopheles, who, you know, was the devil, offered 
 Dr. Faust when he wanted his soul. Women are the 
 most influential people on the earth, while they remain 
 womanly. And on you, young ladies, will depend the 
 success in life of many in the circle around you. By suc- 
 cess I mean the good that comes from virtuous living. 
 In our time, perhaps more than in any other, true success 
 in life depends on honor and honesty, purity of intention 
 and energy of action. These may all be sapped by a 
 course of bad reading. It remains for you to acquire and 
 to set up a true standard of taste.
 
 LITERATURE AND MAXXERS. 165 
 
 Thackeray, whom some of you ladies call a cynic, had a 
 great opinion of your prowess ; he insists that you can do 
 anything you make up your mind to do. " Let us be 
 thankful," he cries, " that the fair sex does not know its 
 own power ; if it did, there would not be a bachelor in the 
 world!" These are not his exact words? but they con- 
 tain the substance of what he said, which is a tribute to 
 the power of the ladies, and an indication of the vanity 
 of the men, both equally colossal. 
 
 The novel is the literary expression of our time, just as 
 the drama was of the time of Queen Elizabeth, or the 
 satire that of the time of Queen Anne. It is remarkable 
 that the three greatest periods of literary activity in Eng- 
 lish literature should be in the reigns of three women, 
 Queen Elizabeth, Queen Anne, and Queen Victoria. 
 Perhaps American literature may not obtain its full growth 
 until we shall have a Presidentess. 
 
 Miss Austen, in "Northanger Abbey," expresses my 
 opinion of a good novel. She says that, in her time, the 
 young lady was ashamed to be seen reading a novel, even 
 when it was a good one. "Although," she writes, speak- 
 ing as a novelist, "our productions have afforded more 
 extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other 
 literary composition in the world, no species of composi- 
 tion has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or 
 fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers ; and 
 while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the 
 History of England, or of the man who collects and pub- 
 lishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, or
 
 166 LITERATURE AND MAXNERS. 
 
 Prior, with a paper from" the Spectator and a chapter 
 from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, there 
 seems almost a general wish to decry the capacity and 
 undervalue the labor of the novelist, and to slight the 
 performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to 
 recommend them. "A good novel " is " only some work 
 in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in 
 which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the 
 happiest delineations of its varieties, the liveliest effusions 
 of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best 
 chosen language." 
 
 I wish, from my heart, that our young ladies were 
 ashamed to be seen always reading novels. They have 
 changed since Miss Austen's time. But there are many 
 who devote the greater part of their time of leisure to the 
 pursuance of study even after they leave school. And 
 the love of study is growing in our country, in spite of 
 many obstacles; it is not fashionable to be ignorant, and, 
 though the novel is a literary power, morality and taste 
 have not suffered so much from it as they have in France, 
 Italy, and even in Spain. It is your duty in life, as mem- 
 bers of the ruling sex, to see that they do not suffer. With 
 that duty in view, let us consider the novel as a mirror of 
 manners ; for manners are the best indication of morality 
 and taste. 
 
 Let us take one of the fashionable novelists of a cer- 
 tain class, and observe how she, the Duchess, Bertha 
 M. Clay, Ouida, and their few American imitators 
 constructs her novel, and let us see whether she takes
 
 LITERATURE A.YD MAA 7 .\'ERS. 16.7 
 
 the manners of her characters from real life. Now. 
 when one reads a novel at all, one ought to read a 
 good one. A good novel should be elevating, it should 
 be natural, clear in style, true to the time in which its 
 scene is laid, and it should be, if possible, a reflection of 
 good manners. I do not mean to say that every person 
 in a novel should always be in a state of awful and con- 
 gealed perfection of manners, but I mean that the people 
 should act as ladies and gentlemen when they are repre- 
 sented to be ladies and gentlemen. And, if bad manners 
 are introduced, they should be contrasted with good. Sir 
 Walter Scott and Dickens and Thackeray draw the man- 
 ners of their characters from real life, Thackeray more 
 than the other two. Good and bad are always good and 
 bad, both in morals and in manners, in the books of these 
 authors. You cannot, through their fault, mistake one 
 for the other. 
 
 But I open a book by one of those " lady novelists/' 
 " who never would be missed." I find that the name of 
 her heroine is Diane. not Diana, but Diane, a " pansy- 
 eyed creature in whose flossy -golden curls, caught rebel - 
 liously after the manner of the love-lorn Psyche at the 
 hack of her head, the light of a summer's sunset seemed 
 ever willing to rest." I skip all this. I want to see what 
 kind of manners this lovely young thing has. I am intro- 
 duced to her at five o'clock tea in the drawing-room of a 
 Duchess, for, of course. Diane is English, and what 
 does she do first ? " She cranes her swan-like neck and 
 with a haughty movement hands Algernon Chichester a
 
 168 LITERATURE AXD MANNERS. 
 
 cup of amber-hued tea." I may be ignorant of the usages 
 of good society, but I confess, mea culpa! that I have 
 never seen anybody " crane a swan-like neck." It would 
 be a kindness if any young lady would show me how it is 
 done. If there is any young lady here who can crane her 
 " swan-like neck/and offer a cup of tea with a haughty 
 movement," will she please stand up ? There, I thought 
 so, if you cannot do it, nobody can. 
 
 A friend has sent me Miss Rives' last novel, "A Witness 
 of the Sun." If you like stupidity and nonsense, you can 
 read it; it is too silly to do anybody harm. This is the 
 first description I find. It is of a girl of ten, "her hair 
 of a pale silverish gold, suggestive of moonlight through 
 amber, grew in five well-defined points above her noble 
 low brow. Her skin had the clear whiteness of almonds 
 which had been soaked in water. Her eyes, large and 
 lustrous, were the tint of a spring rain-cloud, that inde- 
 scribable, bluish gray-violet which seems to make blue 
 cold by contrast, gray harsh, and violet sentimental." At 
 the age of seventeen, this paragon meets a young man 
 with the " thin, curled lips which, when not cruel, are so 
 beautiful. 11 She talks ; and one of the next things we learn 
 about her is that " she had one of those full, lissome 
 mouths which adapt themselves exquisitely to a smile." 
 When I read that, I hope you will pardon me for the 
 shocking vulgarity of the thought I recalled a contempt-- 
 nous phrase much used by the small boy at school, 
 " What a mouth for pie! " To go on. " Her whole face 
 changed with a smile as water under a float of sunlight.
 
 LITERATURE AND MA.\\\'ES. 169 
 
 The contour became more childish, and yet somehow her 
 expression was more that of a woman." Later, we find 
 somebody else extending her hand, " one of those beauti- 
 ful hands whose palms look like crumpled pink tissue- 
 paper, and yet which have the strength of machinery." 
 Now is not all this in bad taste ? Is it not absurdly ex- 
 aggerated ? Is it good manners to be continually making 
 remarks about anybody's appearance in this serious and 
 admiring manner? Fancy Dickens or Thackeray sitting 
 through three volumes in open-mouthed, idiotic admira- 
 tion for his heroines! This constant iteration of descrip- 
 tion of the heroine's attitudes and her clothes is one of 
 the most vulgar breaches of good manners in novels. 
 
 The novel devoted particularly to manners is an insti- 
 tution; here is one by another lady. Mark its taste. The 
 hero is of " Herculean build," his waist is " small," his 
 shoulders so broad that they could have borne the weight 
 of Atlas, his hands, " lion-like in strength," are white and 
 small, his mustache is " tinted with amber-like reflections," 
 his dark eyes have a fathomless look. The heroine, who 
 is a vicar's daughter, everything is intensely English in 
 the novel, though it is the work of an American, goes 
 out on a stormy night to warn the police that a murder is 
 about to be committed. It is raining and hailing; but, 
 says the author, "she trailed her sumptuous satin dress 
 through the streets, as Cleopatra might have done in some 
 old Egyptian night of Cimmerian darkness, and the wild 
 wind swept her golden tresses down on her bare neck and 
 shoulders, white as the fairest Italian marble."
 
 170 LITERATURE AND MANNERS. 
 
 Now is it natural that a well-brought-up young woman 
 should rush out into the streets at night in search of a 
 policeman ? The novelist has evidently done that only 
 to make a picture ; she does not care for naturalness. But 
 of course it is all very absurd. And yet some people read 
 it quite seriously, and in future times an innocent his- 
 torian may take that lurid glimpse of a Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury young woman as an example of the manner in which 
 you conduct yourselves in this year of grace. 
 
 To find a real gem of the novelist's attention to modern 
 manners, I dipped into a book by Joaquin Miller. It is 
 all about a lady who always dressed in pink: she was a 
 beautiful creature, and she had such charming manners. 
 For instance, she went into the great church of St. Peter's 
 at Rome. The organ played, and it occurred to her that, 
 as there were no pews, a little dance was the proper thing. 
 And so to the dreamy sound of exquisite music, she floated 
 beneath the stately dome. Everybody admired her; sev- 
 eral priests came to remonstrate with her, but they were 
 so entranced by her grace that they remained to watch 
 her. This is a true picture of what an American girl 
 would be likely to do in Rome, of course ! And yet the 
 manners of this person in pink are supposed to be painted 
 from real life. 
 
 There is one phase of life sometimes touched on in 
 novels of which you ought to be particularly competent 
 to judge. You may not know much about "society" as 
 yet, and -I hope you may never know much about that 
 world of dissipation, hypocrisy, and feverish amusement
 
 LITERATURE AND MANNERS. 171 
 
 to-day called " society," but you know something of 
 the manners of the convent school. Now there is a novel 
 by Admiral Porter, of the American Navy, in which the 
 manners and custom of a convent are described. The 
 heroine of this volume is called Louise Morton, the beau- 
 tiful Austrian. She sails the seas in company with a pirate, 
 of whom she says, after he has committed several atrocious 
 murders, " This is a being worthy of my love." Later, 
 when an unfortunate sea captain is made to walk the 
 plank, this lovely creature "saw it all, and looked on, 
 dismayed at the horrid spectacle. Give me champagne," 
 she cried, " I would forget this scene, if I could, I am not 
 yet steeped enough in crime." Still later, the amiable 
 pirate tells " the beautiful Austrian " that he has forged 
 notes, broken his mother's heart, and committed " unheard 
 of atrocities." To which the sweet creature replies, 
 "Oh, mere juvenile delinquencies!" 
 
 These passages are quoted, not to show the manners 
 of pirates and piratesses ; but merely to show what Ad - 
 miral Porter's idea of preparation for life in a con- 
 vent is. 
 
 This Louise Mortonjries to kill the pirate chief. Then, 
 growing weary of " life on the ocean wave," she enters 
 the convent of the Sisters of the Sacred Cross, "on the 
 Bloomingdale Road," in New York, although there was 
 no convent in New York at the time (1820). This shrink- 
 ing creature, who had acquired a taste for drinking cham- 
 pagne and assisting at murders, stayed in the convent two 
 weeks. At the end of that time, she was received into
 
 172 LITERATURE AND MANNERS. 
 
 the community, and became one of the most devout sisters 
 in the convent! 
 
 The author of this novel " taken from authentic sources " 
 did not know that a stranger without proper credentials, 
 without her certificate of baptism and confirmation, testi- 
 mony as to her good character, and a shown record of her 
 whole previous life, could not be admitted into any con- 
 vent under the jurisdiction of Catholic authority. The 
 time for the postulantship and the novitiate is regulated in 
 all religious congregations so strictly that the absence of 
 a day from the required term of years, would invalidate 
 the worth of the requisite time of preparation. 
 
 Nevertheless, Admiral Porter goes on. " In less than 
 a year," he says, "the Lady Superior dies. Sister Imo- 
 gene, whose touch on the piano was perfect," was " ap- 
 pointed by the Church authorities to the vacant place." 
 She immediately sold her diamond ring worth ten thou- 
 sand dollars and gave the proceeds to the conyent. The 
 Admiral's convent has stone floors. But there is no con- 
 vent in this country with such an expensive luxury as stone 
 floors. Another revelation of convent manners and cus- 
 toms is the description of the white veil the new Mother 
 Superior always wore at table, and in the presence of the 
 other Sisters. The Mother Superior who, by the way, 
 was not yet twenty-eight years of age always wore a 
 little silver bottle, supposed to contain smelling salts, 
 attached to her rosary. One day some former acquaint- 
 ances enter the convent. One of them calls her a " mur- 
 .deress." And, after some similar phrases, supposed to be
 
 LITERATURE AXD MAX. \~ERS. 173 
 
 generally used in convents, the smelling bottle, which con- 
 tained poison, was raised to her lips. " She fell to the 
 floor, writhing in agony, and in a few moments was a life- 
 less corpse." 
 
 Permit me to ask, can this be taken as a true picture of 
 novels? Do the good Sisters among whom you have the 
 happiness to live, walk mournfully with " baleful eyes on 
 damp stone floors," and carry smelling bottles full of 
 poison ? If they do, we shall be compelled to admit that 
 the ordinary novel gives us true pictures of the morals, 
 manners, and customs of real life. 
 
 Pardon me if I make one or two more extracts from a 
 heap of what is called "reading matter," but which can- 
 not be called literature. It is a story written by a writer 
 unknown to fame, whose books are occasionally sold in 
 the railway trains. This " Story of an Actress " was thrown 
 at me one day by a news-boy, who had acquired the art 
 of dropping such books on passengers without hurting 
 them very much. The scene is laid behind the scenes in 
 a theatre. The heroine's name is Marion. She is a far- 
 mer's daughter. She recites, and one day as she is engaged 
 on a pile of " aromatic hay, whose exquisite tint made a 
 delightful harmony with the curling locks upon her brow" 
 in reciting the balcony scene from " Romeo and Juliet," 
 she hears a footstep. She pauses ; no sound. She then 
 goes on to speak "Spartacus to the Gladiators." The 
 novelist tells us that her voice "thrilled in impassioned 
 cadences which filled the ancient barn with wondrous 
 echoes, as if Mrs. Siddons or some great lost star of the
 
 174 LITERATURE AND MANNERS. 
 
 theatrical firmament had come to earth again." Another 
 footstep interrupts her. She is startled; she shrieks: she 
 falls almost unconscious from the hay, to be picked up 
 by a gray-haired stranger; he is a theatrical manager; he 
 says, " Girl, 'tis long since I heard the expression of 
 genius like thine. Come to the great city. Soon you 
 shall receive a princely salary: the world will shower plau- 
 dits upon you." 
 
 Marion's father and mother are delighted when their 
 daughter tells them of the stranger's words. She starts 
 off with him at once. " Go, my child," the old man says, 
 "and return with the laurel wreath of genius on your 
 brow." Marion goes, carrying her modest valise in her 
 hand. Reaching the great city, she finds herself suddenly 
 in a crowd of anarchists who are about to hang an inoffen- 
 sive man to a lamp-post. The gaslight shines on her face 
 and the Anarchists are " struck by its rare beauty." She 
 stands up in her carriage. "Are ye men?" she asks, 
 and then in .impassioned tones she begins the speech of 
 Mark Antony over the body of Ccesar. The anarchists 
 are charmed. They demand " Shamus O'Brien.'' She 
 repeats it with " pathos that strikes the stagnant air like 
 the quick heart-throbs of some heroic warrior." The mob 
 release their prisoner and carry her in triumph to her 
 hotel. A few nights afterward, she makes her entrance 
 on the stage as Juliet. The town is at her feet. She 
 receives a fabulous sum of money and is hailed at once 
 as a great actress. The man rescued from the anarchists 
 turns out to be her long-lost brother and the novel ends.
 
 LITERATURE AND MAX. \~ERS. 175 
 
 just as of course it would end in real life, by the marriage 
 of the farmer's daughter to an English Duke! 
 
 This is all false, as we know. Such things could not 
 occur in life. A young girl who starts out to be an actress 
 takes the thorniest path, leading to the most dangerous 
 road in all creation. Theatrical managers would flee 
 from young ladies who are heard reciting " Spartacus," as 
 most sensible people would. Anarchists, if we can judge 
 by the newspapers, are not so easily impressed. There is 
 no drudgery so intense, so unremitting, as the drudgery 
 of the theatre : no drudgery so poorly paid, no life so 
 dangerous to all the womanly virtues. In the first place. 
 if Marion had managed to get the chance of acting a 
 small part, she would probably have been so shocked by 
 the freedom of manners of the people on the stage at re- 
 hearsal, that she would have gone back to her farm, glad 
 to give up all thoughts of the laurels of genius, remember- 
 ing how the manager swore at her awkwardness and how 
 he called her outrageous names, with a shudder. It is a pity 
 that such views of life so false and misleading should 
 be set before the inexperienced. The best safeguard 
 against them is the cultivation of good taste in literature. 
 It will supply the place of experience. The mind accus- 
 tomed to the great classics of literature cannot endure 
 the cheap trash of the railway train or the news-stand. 
 
 In speaking of the morals and manners of the novel, 
 I have almost omitted to speak of the pivotal subject of 
 most of them of all of them, in fact love. And on 
 no subject does the majority of novels give more delusive
 
 lj6 LITERATURE AXD MAXXERS. 
 
 views. Thackeray and Dickens are robust and honest 
 and practical in their treatment of this theme. Thack- 
 eray, who drew his pictures from real life and taught a 
 lesson by each picture, does not pretend that love is the 
 main motive, and marriage the great end to living. 
 Madame Swetchine says of novels, " They generally end 
 with a marriage, like a comedy; whereas, marriage is only 
 the beginning of life." In Thackeray's " Pendennis," in 
 " The Newcomes," in " The Virginians " a novel which 
 has special interest for us, now that we are celebrating the 
 anniversary of Washington's inauguration, sentimental 
 love is not the principal theme, nor is it in Sir Walter 
 Scott's, nor in the best of Dickens'. But it is in a vast 
 swarm of novels which, like the Egyptian locusts, devour 
 every green thing. They turn the young in heart old be- 
 fore their time. They raise delusive hopes which sink in 
 disappointment. If the sentimental novel could be sup- 
 pressed, there would be much less misery in the world. 
 Our young people ought to read, of course, but with dis- 
 crimination. Novels, like dancing, ought to be indulged 
 seldom. St. Francis de Sales, you remember, compares 
 dancing to mushrooms, of which, it seems, the saint was 
 not particularly fond. "The rest of dances are worth- 
 less," he says, " but, if, like mushrooms, you will have 
 them, have them but seldom." 
 
 And who, having seen the " society girl " odious phrase 1 
 exhausted, worn, useless, discontented after a winter of 
 cotillions and late hours, can fail to agree with the saint? 
 If some novelist would tell us the truth, and write out
 
 LITERATURE AND MAXNEKS. l^^ 
 
 what the partners of this dissatisfied and unhappy young 
 lady have said of her as she whirled around with them 
 night after night, I think that she would heartily agree 
 that promiscuous and constant dancing is an evil to be 
 detested. 
 
 Similarly, constant novel-reading, even when the novels 
 are good, is bad for every faculty. No one who ex- 
 pects to do good mental work can subsist chiefly on 
 novels. Ices and bon-bons have their place, but even 
 the most delicate of young ladies need bread and butter 
 and roast beef. Too much reading of Sir Walter Scott or 
 Dickens or Thackeray, good and stimulating as they are, 
 will not do. History and biography, poetry and art should 
 have their place in each month's leisure, set apart for 
 reading. If it be a question between sitting over a novel, 
 or having a game of tennis or base-ball, let us choose the 
 latter. There is more good to be had even in the dan- 
 gerous part of umpire than by breathlessly trying to find 
 out whether Amaryllis So-and-So will marry Tom, Dick, 
 or Harry at the end of the book. 
 
 But to return to the subject of love. The novelists who 
 write without reason, generally represent two* people as 
 meeting suddenly. They are both handsome; that is 
 enough; they were made for each other. The plot 
 thickens. Sensible parents oppose, experienced people 
 warn them that they are fools. The reader hates the 
 parents, and the experienced people. The heroine and 
 hero are both poor. He has a rich but honest uncle, who 
 may leave him some money; consequently, he has never 
 
 12
 
 178 LITERATURE AXD MANNERS. 
 
 learned to work. Why should he ? His business in the 
 novel is to love. She has never learned to darn stockings, 
 or wash dishes, or tell chicken from turkey. Why should 
 she ? Her business is to look beautiful. There is talk of 
 love in a cottage, and roses, and woodbines. But there 
 is no mention of who is to pay the rent and the bills for 
 quinine love in a cottage usually means malaria or 
 whether he has a knack of splitting wood or whether she 
 has a good temper. Now, without these two requisites 
 love in a cottage is impossible. Let the admirer of the 
 sentimental novel lay this axiom to heart. 
 
 The novice who would take his opinions of the way in 
 which people act in good society from the popular novel, 
 and try to act on them, would speedily be an object of 
 very unflattering attention. For instance, in one of the 
 late ones, it is written, " Novirine helped himself to a 
 slice of ham with a grand air." There is no mention of a 
 fork. He used a grand air. Or, " Una sailed into the 
 dining-room in her stately way just as the roast was served, 
 deigning no apology for her long absence in the conserva- 
 tory." If Una tried that in real life, I fancy her hostess 
 would nevet invite her to dinner again. 
 
 We do not find these absurdities in the work of the four 
 truly great English novelists, which works ought to be 
 the only novels read. If one wants to find a charming 
 picture, and a true one, of a Sister in a convent, there is 
 Kathleen O'Meara's "Narka." If one wants to find how 
 an actress lives, there is Miss Fotheringay in Thackeray's 
 " Pendennis." There is no nonsense about that young
 
 LIl^ERATURE AND MANNERS. 179 
 
 woman who, on tne stage, is " Miss Fotheringay," and at 
 home Miss Costigan. She makes pie and mends her 
 clothes, and works hard enough before she goes on the 
 stage as Ophelia, or Juliet. There is another picture of 
 the stage in Dickens' " Nicholas Nickleby." The Crum- 
 mies are inimitable. The struggles of Mr. and Mrs. 
 Crummies and the Infant Phenomenon for theatrical suc- 
 cess are truer to life than the story of Marion and the 
 anarchist. The life of the Crummies was a miserable, 
 sordid, feverish life, and even Dickens' humor cannot con- 
 ceal the gloom of it. The theatre is still the theatre of 
 the Crummies, in spite of the exaggerations that less true 
 artists than Dickens gave to the pictures of life behind the 
 scenes. We find it described in " Nicholas Nickleby." 
 
 " It was not very light, but Nicholas found himself close 
 to the first entrance on the prompt side, among bare walls^ 
 dusty scenes, mildewed clouds, heavily daubed draperies, 
 and dirty floors. He looked about him : ceiling, pit, boxes, 
 gallery, orchestra, fittings, and decorations of every kind, 
 all looked coarse, cold, gloomy, and wretched. 
 
 " ' Is this a theatre ? ' whispered Smike, in amazement. 
 ' I thought it was a blaze of light and finery.' 
 
 " ' Why, so it is.' replied Nicholas, hardly less surprised ; 
 ' but not by day, Smike ; not by day.' " 
 
 Nicholas, you remember, translates a play for Mr. 
 Crummies' troupe, who, as actors do in real life, look on 
 the thrilling situations as matters of pure business. Speak- 
 ing to Mr. Lenville, one of the leading actors, Nicholas 
 says,
 
 i So LITERATURE AND MANNERS. 
 
 " ' You turn your wife and child out of doors ; and in a 
 fit of rage and jealousy, stab your eldest son in the library.' 
 
 " ' Do I, though? ' exclaimed Mr. Lenville ; ' that's very 
 good business. ' 
 
 " 'After which,' said Nicholas ' you are troubled with 
 remorse until the last act, and then you make up your 
 mind to destroy yourself. But just as you are raising a 
 pistol to your head, a clock strikes ten.' 
 
 " ' I see,' cried Mr. Lenville, ' very good.' 
 
 " ' You pause,' said Nicholas, ' you recollect to have 
 heard a clock strike ten in your infancy. The pistol falls 
 from your hand you are overcome you burst into tears, 
 and become a virtuous and exemplary character forever 
 afterwards/ 
 
 "'Capital!' said Mr. Lenville, 'that's a sure card, a 
 sure card.' " 
 
 The hard-working actresses in " Nicholas Nickleby " and 
 Miss Fotheringay, doing house work by day and acting 
 at night, are nearer to the truth than the imaginative pic- 
 tures Of life on the stage given by the third-rate story- 
 writers. There is little romance about the life of an actor, 
 and God help the girl who becomes an actress. There 
 is only one Mary Anderson and she, with all her talent, 
 has worked herself to death. Before she gained recog- 
 nition at all, she had studied day and night for many years 
 and spent twenty thousand dollars. It was not by recit- 
 ing " Spartacus " that she stepped into a most arduous 
 and dangerous profession. 
 
 Even in the reading of the works of the three greatest
 
 LITER A TURK A. YD MAXXEJtS. 181 
 
 English novel-writers, there must be discrimination. Al- 
 though Thackeray points a moral in every character, it is 
 well in beginning his books to take direction as to which 
 is most suitable for us. But one gets no false views of 
 life from him. He has one grave fault, and this is that 
 he writes as if a man could be good of himself; he makes 
 his characters act from natural goodness, never from 
 supernatural. In his Becky Sharp, that famous personage 
 in " Vanity Fair " who resolves to gain her ends by selfish- 
 ness and intrigue, we have a terrible example of how vain 
 human effort is, even in this world where the heart is hollow 
 and the mind corrupt. In Blanche Amory, in the same 
 book, we are made to detest the heartless creature who 
 tortures the helpless, who is impertinent and cruel in her 
 family, but who in public weeps sentimental tears and 
 pretends to be an angel of compassion : in Major Pen- 
 dennis and in Baroness Bernstein the decay of selfish 
 lives. Thackeray never leads his readers to confound 
 right with wrong. If he seems unrelenting, it is only to 
 the utterly bad; he is always tender to the good, and 
 he never fails to point out that the only thing in life, 
 worth life itself, is a good conscience. His ladies and 
 gentlemen have natural manners. Ethel Newcome never 
 "cranes her neck," or "throws herself, with a spasmodic 
 sob, at the feet of anybody," and Philip Warrington never 
 takes his tea " with a grand air of utter disdain." And 
 where can we find a more upright, true and natural gentle 
 man than Thackeray paints George Washington to be? 
 A reader of light novels may find it difficult to acquire
 
 1 82 LITERATURE AND WAXNERS. 
 
 a taste for Thackeray. It requires good taste to appre- 
 ciate the marvellous art shown in every line of " Henry 
 Esmond." It is worth taking pains to reach to that 
 taste. Once gained, it is gained forever. Once gained, 
 the meretricious in literature is easily discovered by the 
 sense so refined. 
 
 Dickens has not Thackeray's almost perfect style. His 
 personages are often grotesque and sometimes, I must 
 admit, a little vulgar, sometimes, too, strained and 
 artificial. But, like Manzoni's great novel, " The Betroth- 
 ed," " Nicholas Nickleby " and " Bleak House" and "A 
 Tale of Two Cities " and " Barnaby Rudge " will remain 
 joys forever to the healthy and cultivated mind. 
 
 We may not agree as to the death of little Nell ; it may 
 be overstrained and long drawn out ; it may not have the 
 manly pathos of the chapter in Thackeray's " Newcomes " 
 where the Colonel cries "Adsum ;" but the dying child 
 and her canary have drawn tears from thousands of eyes 
 which, since it was written, have themselves closed in 
 death. 
 
 Say that Thackeray is cynical and Dickens grotesque, 
 if you will ; but you can say no worse. They touch the 
 heart; they do not allure the senses; if they make us 
 laugh, it is an honest laugh ; if they draw tears to our 
 eyes, it is because of the sufferings of beings of high pur- 
 pose ; they do not deceive the young by pointing to the 
 prismatic scum on the surface of a stagnant pool and tell- 
 ing us that it reflects the rainbow. This "Ouida"and 
 her followers do, to the destruction of many.
 
 LITERATURE AND MANNERS. 183 
 
 It rests with you, young ladies, to create a purer taste in 
 the world around you, to help to kill the vicious and 
 vulgar, the trifling and unnatural novels of the day. It 
 seems to me that if one has little time to read, one need 
 never go beyond the New Testament and the Imitation. 
 To-day this suggestion seems too rigid. But, as you will 
 go further, beware lest your taste be vitiated before you 
 know. The gaining of a correct taste in literature will 
 enable you to enjoy high thoughts in others and think 
 high thoughts in yourself it will be a perennial pleasure 
 which poverty nor care nor sickness itself can ever take 
 away.
 
 

 
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