THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES A RENEGADE POET AND OTHER ESSAYS BY FRANCIS THOMPSON WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EDWARD J. O'BRIEN BOSTON THE BALL PUBLISHING CO. 1910 INTRODUCTION Copyright 1910, by THE BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE I. A Renegade Poet on the Poet . . 25 11. Paganism: Old and New . . . . 17 111. THE Way OF Imi'Uii ection ... 71 I \ . \ \i i id. 's Im mortality 91 \'. Stray Thoughts om Shi mis . . . 109 VI. Crashaw 129 VII. Ariinn Di: Verb 161 VIII. William Erni st lln ley . . . .175 l\. Pope ">' X. The Error of the Extreme Realists 201 XI. Bunyan in Tin: Light of Modern Cunu ism -II XII. The Prose of Poets 1. Sin Philip Sidney --'' .'. Sn \Kl speare 240 3. Hi n .lossus 253 1. Goldsmith 266 Mil. Sartob Re-Read 279 XIV. Don Quixote ' : '' XV. Moestitiae Encomium '99 XVI. Finis Cobonat Oris 309 ±104616 INTRODUCTION In a London hospital, in November, 1907, there died a man of the rarest gen- ius, whom sorrow had marked for her own from His earliest years. His work was accomplished, and naught remained for him in life. For the past few years he had intellectually ceased to be, and the main enduring product of his labors had appeared during the four years preceding 1897. This man was Francis Thompson, who, like Lamb, was " called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God." He was a singer of songs, and as one whom Meredith and Patmore have acknowledged as a peer, his work is worthy of more than passing 7 A RENEGADE POET note — above all, since his life was roman- tic, and his poetry, nay, even his name, was, till lately, unknown in America. There are others of the little band to which he belongs whose works should be more familiar to us, but none of them, — not even Lionel Johnson, — has the fine poetic madness to such a notable degree as Francis Thompson. His life will interest us in many respects, especially as it has many points of resemblance to the un- happy years which De Quincey has pic- tured in his poignant autobiography. We may say that both men had sown in tears that they might reap in triumph. They expected bread and they were given a stone. Francis Thompson was born in 1860, and was the son of a physician practising in Manchester, England. His parents, who were converted to the Roman Catholic faith at the time of the Oxford move- ment, gave their son a good education, sending him to St. Cuthbert's College, at 8 [NTRODU< IION Ushaw, near Durham, where lie spent seven years. From Ushaw he was sent to Owens College in his native city, to study medi- cine, but much against his will. Instead of attending medical lectures, he spent his whole time in the public libraries, follow- ing the bent of his own desires. I lis father, discovering these pursuits, dis- owned him, and the sorrow of neglected filial duty only served to aggravate the bodily ailments of the poet. lie fell dan- gerouslj ill in Manchester, like De Quin- ce v. When he was sufficiently recovered, he made his way with difficulty up to Lon- don, and found, as the other writer before him, that Oxford Street is lacking in sym- pathy to impecunious would-be litterateurs. His little stock of money gradually dwin- dled, and as he was too delicate for manual labor, when he could not obtain literary employment, he sank lower and lower into the mire. lake De Quincey also in this respect, at one time his sole richer consisted in two books,- a copy of 9 A RENEGADE POET ^Eschylus in one pocket and a copy of Blake in the other. Reduced to beggary, so that he sold pencils in the street, and performed such other trifling services to gain a little bread as the law allows in its toleration of mendicants, one touching incident which occurred at this time re- minds us of De Quincey's meeting with Ann. In its pictorial suggestivenecs, some of us may think the story as Thomp- son tells it even more pathetic. Let us hear it in the author's own words: " Forlorn, and faint, and stark, I had endured through watches of the dark, The abashless inquisition of each star, Yea, was the outcast mark Of all those heavenly passers' scrutiny; Stood bound and helplessly For Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me; Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour In night's slow-wheeled car; Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength, 10 INTRODl '< TION I waited the inevitable last Then there came past A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring, And through the city-streets blown withering. She passed, — O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing! — And of her own sad pittance did she give, That I might eat and live: Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive." We may consider this as a gift of one child to another, for, as a friend has beau- tifully phrased it, " Thompson's was a child-spirit retained to the end: wander- ing perplexed through this tangled and bewildering world: looking out upon it all with the grave and solemn wonder of a child." Indeed the poet once expressed a desire that after death he might be sought in the nurseries of Heaven. After five years of terrible privation, in which he must have sounded the very bass-string of humility, Thompson fell into the kind 11 A RENEGADE POET hands of Mr. and Mrs. Meynell, and, after he had received medical treatment, was placed with the Premonasterian Fathers at Storrington. Here, and later at Craw- ley and elsewhere, Thompson wrote the whole of his poetical work. He fought long and bravely for many years against tuberculosis, until the flame of his life be- gan to flicker. At last, however, on No- vember 2, 1907, he entered the hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth, in St. John's Wood, London, and there he passed away quietly at dawn on November the thir- teenth, " Fading from a garden to a grave, Passing without a tear into the stars." A friend has written, " It was a part of him to die in the month of the dead. His death was the last dissolving harmony in a life of clashing discords ! " There were ele- ments in his character which were the air and fire and dew of songs, yet no genius had so sad a life, — not Keats, not Chat- 12 [NTRODl CTION terton, not Poe, — and we are tempted to echo his own words, written in retrospect, wt felt none the less keenly: " Ah ! must — Designer infinite ! — Ah ! must thou char the wood ere thou canst limn with it? " A wanderer alike in vision and in life, he had climbed his Calvary, and his peace was made, after such privations as would have rendered any other man incapable of literary work, if indeed they had not de- prived him of his reason. His published work is comprised in three slender volumes of verse, entitled re- spectively "Poems," "New Poems," ami "Sister Songs"; a large body of uncol- lected prose contributed to " Merry Eng- land," "The Academy," "The Athen- aeum," and two or three other periodicals; an essay on Shelley; a volume of ascetic practice entitled tk Health and Holiness"; and a life of St. Ignatius Loyola. 13 A RENEGADE POET Though it is on his poetry that Thomp- son's fame has hitherto rested, he has also bequeathed to us a precious legacy of prose which the world will not willingly let die. That admirable treatise on ascet- icism, " Health and Holiness," is only too little known, but is scarcely inferior in its way to the essay on " Shelley," whose re- cent posthumous publication in the Dublin Review sent that worthy, if slightly som- niferous, periodical into a second edition. Its republication both in England and America has been the signal for a simul- taneous burst of applause from all quar- ters. Yet Thompson has written even more worthy prose than that. Take, for example, the marvellous prose poem, " Moestitiae Encomium," reprinted for the first time in this volume. I have no hesi- tation in claiming it as the greatest of the three poems in that magnificent suite, whose other two members are De Quincey's " Levana " and James Thomson's " A Lady of Sorrow." " Come, therefore, O 14 INTRODUCTION Sadness, fair and f'roward and tender ; wasp who followest the fliers: dolorous coquette of the Abyss, who claspest them that shun thee, with fierce kisses that hiss against their tears; wraith of the mists of sighs; mermaid of the flood Cocytus, of the waves which are salt with the weeping of the generations ; most menacing seductress, whose harp is stringed with lamentations, whose voice is fatal with disastrous presci- ence ; draw me down, merge me, under thy waters of wail ! " Such a cry as this can only come out of the depths, but the depths of this experi- ence are the depths of vision and life. "Sadness the king-maker! morituri te sal uf n nt! ": — these words unconsciously sum up the life and vision of a great poet, of Francis Thompson. The child in him saved the poet from bitterness, though not from sorrow, and, after all, life seemed a wondrous God- given toy bestowed on him for his sport. Working after God's pattern he made an- 15 A RENEGADE POET other toy which mirrored the first, and the deft elfishness of his prose reveals one as- pect of it. For Francis Thompson's style is mar- vellously ductile. He tames and bends words to his purpose like a young Mercury in his cradle fashioning a lyre. And he is so sublimely unconscious, — a god, and he knows it not. St. Ignatius would have loved him as he loved Pedro de Ribadeneira. The com- parison is not playful, for these two chil- dren who never grew up are really contem- porary in more than a fanciful sense. Great artists and great saints never out- grow their childhood, for their simplicity is too disarming. They have the child's intuition which pierces through things, and this suffices them. Then, too, their mental gestures and movements have all the grace and charm of the physical move- ments of an unconscious child. It is given to them to love much, and to have sym- pathy for one another, and this is why a 16 INTRODUCTION saint can wish for no more sympathetic biographer than a poet who is pure of heart, and why Francis Thompson has in- terpreted so sympathetically the life of St. Ignatius. Nowadays the biographer is supposed to be detached from his subject. This is what science has done for us. We learn much from the literary product, but we lose sight of two personalities, that of the subject and that of the biographer. You cannot be detached and also warm the im- agination of your readers. But such, as I say, is the modern materialistic ideal in this era of laboratory courses in English in all our colleges. For this reason, it is refreshing to stum- ble across one of these flcsh-and-blood mediffival people who still believe in the fairies, ,uul who suppose everyone else does too. Such a man is Francis Thompson, and the chief impression which we gather from his humorous essays in prose expres- sion (I use the word humorous in a Bor 17 A RENEGADE POET rovian sense) is of a close impact of im- aginative truth on reality. In this, Francis Thompson is exceptional. He is in the modern world, but not of it, and his fancy leads him to earlier days when the world was still young, and men sought the great quests — to the age of Columbus and Bacon, of Ignatius and Teresa. He does not care to live ; he only cares to love, and the ideal translated into action bears a noble fruit. There is a gentle childlike wistfulness about the man which creeps into our hearts as we read his prose, and which brings him very near. Watch his elfish eyes as he pretends to scold " that sad dog of a Robert Louis ! " " Is there no utility in pleasure, pray you, when it makes a man's heart the better for it; as do, I am very certain, sun, and flowers, and Stevensons? They are medicinal, or language is a shelled pea's-cod ! ' ! What could be more disarming than this gleeful utterance of a gleeful child ! Truly it seems as if Francis Thompson 18 [NTRODUCTION musf have hidden behind Heaven's big front door win n Crashaw and Ilrrrick and he were appointed to go dancing out through life, and have played hide-and-go- seek so successfully with the angels that it took them three centuries to catch him. Then in revenge (as if angels could be re- vengeful!), they set him down on an earth which had just outgrown its childhood, and which was fraught with budding knowledge and power. Poor poet! hi' paid for his trick in am- ple measure. The world of his fellows had grown up into lads, — cruel, thought- less, superior lad-, who had no sympathy for this baby cradled in the centuries. And so they pinched and teased him, and when he sang, at first they did not listen. But the singer had the courage of his song, and he never let discouragement choke the glorious voice within him. When he sang the burden of his heart, the poetry was poignant in its beauty, and when he laughed, as all of us must laugh now and 19 A RENEGADE POET then just to show that we are still babes, the laugh was transmuted by his wand of fancy into a permanent and perfect beauty, the beauty of young, irresponsible, intuitive prose. This elfish child of fancy who never grew to manhood ever grew in beauty. We all must grow, and if our intellect will not, then must our soul. To grow in soul is to grow in sympathy, and when Francis Thompson creeps toward mortals to cud- dle a little bit, he comes very, very close. For, being a poet and a child, he gets at the heart of a man, and if he tugs a little, why 'tis a gentle thing! After all, babies have privileges, and their eyes see much that is lost to grown-up vision. Thompson prattles along in his prose like a happy child, exuberant and fanciful. Now and then he has long chats with him- self, and finds that, on the whole, he is good company. If he chats much, he sings to himself more. The burden of his song is light, for, being only a child, he has 20 INTRODUCTION no responsibilities, no doctrines, no heavy sense of an apostolic mission. lie is the unconscious airy singer, the skylark who soars to heaven in a lyric rapture of ex- uberant irresponsibility. In the volume of "Poems," for example, we find the series entitled " Love in Dian's Lap," of which Coventry Patmore, no mean critic, has written that it is such a series of poems as St. John of the Cross might have ad- dressed to St. Teresa, and as might well have filled the heart of Laura witli pride. They resemble Crashaw when at his best, not only in their religious ecstasy, but above everything in all the daringly fan- tastic imagery, alternately spontaneous and studied, which we find in the earlier poet. However, the artifice, when it ex- ists, is so cleverly concealed that at firsl reading we should hardly suspect Thomp- son's indebtedness. These poems well exemplify the distinc- tive qualities, good and bad. of the poet's work. On the one hind they are rather 21 A RENEGADE POET obscure, abounding in conceits and ex- travagant metaphors, but on the other hand, they are eminently characterised by a wealth of imagination, a subtlety of thought, and a magic of language to which no other modern poet but Shelley has been able to attain. Indeed, Thompson's " Ode to the Setting Sun " may be ranked with the few sublime odes of the language. Nay, we may almost say the same of " The Hound of Heaven," which carries the same appeal to its audience as some old " Ecce Homo." It is such high poetry as this which makes us claim Thompson as a member of the great Victorian Pleiad: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Ga- briel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, William Morris and Francis Thompson — the roll is now com- plete. To rank these poets one above an- other would savor only of pretense. But this, surely, may be said of the last-named poet and his work : that to have known 22 INTRODUCTION and to have loved him is one of those spiritual gains in our lives which, come what may, can never be lost entirely. Thompson was rather a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the heart of a child, so that we feel for him less of admiration than of tenderness and gratitude. And though his life was comparatively a dream, nevertheless, it was, as I la/lit t has written of another, a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the resurrection, and a judgment to come. Francis Thompson has done the world an inestimable good, if the world will but recognise it, for he has succeeded in reveal- ing vividly in all things the Divine Pres- ence which is Beauty. Truly a wonder was wrought through the humble priest- hood of this poet inspired of God, " And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us." Edward J. O'Brien. March J h 1910. 23 A RENEGADE POET ON THE POET y T I US an ill bird that fouls its own X nest ; and I trust an ill poet may have leave to do the same by his. As an ex-singer, I still have a benevolent desire to promote the multiplication of the class from which I have retired ; and I can con- ceive no more assured method than this of abuse : " for as the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows — ". A poet is one who endeavours to make the worst of both worlds. For he is thought seldom to make provision for himself in the next life, and 'tis odds if he gets any in this. The world will have nothing with his writings because they are not of the world : nor the religious, because they are not of religion. He is suspect of the worldly, because of his un- A RENEGADE POET worldliness, and of the religious for the same reason. For there is a way of the world in religion, no less than in irreligion. Nay, though he should frankly cast in his lot with the profane, he is in no better case with them ; for he alone of men, though he travel to the Pit, picks up no company by the way ; but has a contriv- ance to evade Scripture, and find out a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument I know of his salvation ; for 'tis inconceiv- able he should ever do as other men. We may consider the nature of the poet as the world esteems him, as his admirers esteem him, and as he esteems himself. For the first, 'tis easily stated: the world esteems him a fool. In support of this opinion may be noted the general asser- tion that the poet is born, not made, which equally holds of the fool. And whereas some do none the less 'spend no small dil- igence in making themselves poets, others 26 A RENEGADE POET ON THE POET .spend mi less diligence and capacity in making themselves fools, and with about equal success. Hut it is to be considered that port> are to be divided into major and minor; and that while no pains can make a man a major poet who is not such by the visitation of God, Mr. Traill would have it that men may, by extraordinary care, make themselves minor poets, whose number he has computed to be, at this pres- ent, fifty-two. It is much to be wished that he would investigate whether one might, with like zeal, modulate into the minor key of folly as of poetry. But whereas the discovery of fifty-two minor poets did much shock the general mind, it is to be feared that it would be quite otherwise surprised could he limit to fifty- two our minor fools. But the world can find other good cause for doing what it has made up its mind to do without cause. Poets are said to be women; and that is the reason, perhaps, why the same writers who cry down poets 27 A RENEGADE POET as women, do mostly cry down women as poets. But that poets are women I can- not believe, for we have yet heard nothing of poets' rights: from which it is mani- fest that poets are lamentably behind women in tenacity of their dues ; who, in- deed, hold everything that is their own, except their tongues. Nor is the saga- cious world without yet another admirable reason for contemning the poet: viz., that he is useless. And it has lately received the most grateful support from Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson; from which I cannot but think Ave must accuse the cark- insr influences of Samoan barons and la haute politique in the gilded saloons of South Sea diplomacy. He does not stick to affirm that the litterateur in general is but a poor devil of a fellow, who lives to please, and earns his bread by doing what he likes. Let this mere son of joy, says Mr. Stevenson, sleek down his fine airs before men who are of some use in the world. If the blood of the Haggards 28 A RENEGADE POET ON THE POET is unapt to stir in this quarrel, 'tis no con- cern of mine; but on behalf of the poet, here lies mv gage, and I will maintain with this poor gentlemanlike body that Mr. Stevenson aberrates from nice accu- racy three frit down in his throat. If religion be useful, so is poetry. For poetry is the teacher of beauty; and with- out beauty men would soon lose the con- ception of a God, and exchange God for the devil: as indeed happens at this day among many savages, where the, worships of ugliness and the devil flourish together. Whence it was, doubtless, that poetry and religion were of old so united, as is seen in the prophetic books of the Bible. Where men are not kept in mind of beauty, they become lower than the beasts; for a dog, I will maintain, is a very tolerable judge of beauty, as appears from the fact that any liberally educated dog does, in a general way, prefer a woman to a man. Tin' Instinct of men is against this rene gado of a Robert Louis. Though 29 A RENEGADE POET Butler justly observes that all men love and admire clothes, but scorn and despise him that made them, 'tis of tailors that he speaks. A modiste is held in as fair a reverence as any tradesman ; and 'tis evident that the ground of the difference is because a modiste has some connexion with art and beauty, but a tailor only with ugliness and utility. There is no utili- tarian but will class a soapmaker as a worthy and useful member of the com- munity ; .yet is there no necessity why a man should use soap. Nay, if necessity be any criterion of usefulness, (and surely that is useful which is necessary), the uni- versal practice of mankind will prove poetry to be more useful than soap ; since there is no recorded age in which men did not use poetry, but for some odd thousand years the world got on very tolerably well without soap. Look closely into the mat- ter, and there are no people really useful to a man, in the strict utilitarian sense, but butchers and bakers, for they feed a 30 A RENEGADE POET OX THE POl 1 man; builders, for they house a man; women, for they help him into the world; and doctors and soldiers, for they help him out of it. All the rest is luxury and super- fluity. I will uphold that it is not neces- sary for any man to wear clothes, hut it is necessary tor many men to read poetry. 1 Lastly, I will be sworn that the utilitarian has no reason to hold a pound of poetry less useful than a pound of candles, for I am persuaded that he does not know the difference hit ween them. Then, too, this rogue of an R. L. S., I doubt me, (plague on him! I cannot get him out of my head), has found writ- ing pretty utilitarian- to himself; and lit may be said by t lie shallow, that clothes are necessarj to one who lives in England. I reply thai no man has any righl to live in England, or any other region with a secondhand sun and a sky \ery much the worse lor wear. Were it not for the unnatural and degrading habit of wearing clothes, we should ill live in climates that had bread and sun gratis, where utility was useless, where everyone would understand poetry, and no one the British matron. 31 A RENEGADE POET utility begins at home, I take it. Does he not eat and drink romances, and has he not dug up Heaven knows what riches (the adventurer!) in "Treasure Island"? 'Tis sure as that, if the fairy Good Luck have been invited to his christening, guineas drop from a lawyer's mouth whenever he opens it. And as for usefulness to other men, since we must have that or be ignoble, it seems — is there no utility in pleasure, pray you, when it makes a man's heart the better for it ; as do, I am very certain, sun, and flowers, and Stevensons? They are medicinal, or language is a shelled pea's-cod ! So far the world, which cannot find that your Poet has any capital beyond the large one with which he delights to spell his name, or that poetry is quoted on the Stock Exchange. Yet there are who would have us trust the public for over- seers of poetry, as Mr. Archer would for overseers of morality. And I will con- fess the public to be a natural overseer 32 A RENEGADE POET ON THE l'Ol I of both poetry and morality, for 'tis most accustomed to overlook them both. But at the hands of his admirers the poet undergoes "a quick immortal change:' 1 he is the sacred, the divine. Nature clearly provides for this, as appears by her somewhat nice attention to singers' names. No rligginson, for instance, could ever break his name's invidious bar: he is forewarned from poetry. The common tongue of fame would falter over — " In the deathless words of the divine 1 Higgin son." Yet something the child of song has fallen from his antique estate, even among his admirers. 'Tis a trite observa- tion that of old prophet and poet were one, but 'tis a dear experience that nowa- days they are divided; for there are no profits among poets. Whether poet and profit God ever joined together I know not, but 'ti- very certain that man has put them asunder. Pindar, the sneer vates of the horse race, would in these time- find but one half of his functions valuable; 33 A RENEGADE POET but if the separation of them have not im- proved the breed of the sporting poet, we may indulge a just patriotism in the excellence to which it has brought the sporting prophet, whom I take to be Pindar's half-descendant. He is indubit- ably a votes, and in the sense of Horace's auri sacra fames, he may surely be entitled saeer; for after this meaning of the ad- jective, unlucky backers do constantly sacrate him in the Saxon vernacular. It may be much feared that the severance between poets and profits is grown a thing irreversible : I cannot perceive even among their admirers any disposition to make of them friends with the mammon of ini- quity. There is a pernicious impression that the lightness of the singer's flight is dependent on the lightness of his purse ; and that the muse, like a balloon, in order to ascend must throw out ballast. But indeed, 'tis the convinced belief of man- kind that to make a poet sing you must pinch his belly, as if the Almighty had 34 A HIAKOADE POET ON Till', lot. I construqted him like certain rudimentarily vocal dolls. Thus gunners use to light their <^un at the breech, to bring fire out at the mouth; and schoolmasters use in cultivate a boy's head, by diligent ap- plication to the other extremity. Tor the poet's opinion of the poet, 'tis hard to be come at : since regard for his modesty prevents him from expressing it in his own case, and in the case of his brother poets, his regard for theirs. Of the latter, indeed, he is far more tender than of his own (as our neighbor's reputa- tion should be dearer to us than ours), and is mosi delicately chary of wounding it by excessive praise. But you may ar- rive at some surmise by observing that in the former case no estimate appears to him excessive, and in the latter no esti- mate not excessive. This, however, is only while his brother poets live; for in their regard he is like other men, who hold that poets are as Roman emperors, and only become gods when they die. " Woe 35 A RENEGADE POET unto you when all men speak well of you," is indeed grown most applicable to poets at this present ; for when that comes about, their admirers must either look to beweep their death, or that they are not dead. For my part, I retired from the profes- sion because I found it no longer possible to read my poems even to the four walls of my room, on account of the singular effect. My landlord complained that I endangered the safety of the house, for the walls gave signs of yawning. But the less poets are honored by the world, the more they honor themselves. The}' have ceased, 'tis very notable, to invoke the muses at the head of their poems ; for 'tis hard if a good modern poet may not inspire himself without calling in a muse. He thinks it enough indignity that he cannot lie in of a volume, but he must press some publisher to act as midwife: nor will the world be contrived to his lik- ing till he can inspire, publish, and criti- cise himself. 36 A RENEGADE POET OX THE POET For the rest, though he most usually conceits himself a greal artist, he by no means accounts himself "divine" or •• sacred," or reckons himself by any of the overweening epithets which his indis- creet belauders are accustomed to bestow on him. Indeed, you shall no more per- suade a poet that his kind are prophets, than a woman that hers are angels. She will indeed very readily believe that she is an angel ; and if it shall please any one to tell me that / am a prophet, I will not have so ill manners as to return him the lie. Though indeed I know not but in some sort the poet may have the forehand of the prophet; for the prophet foretells only what he knows, hut the poet what he does not know. And as 'tis the more blessed way to believe and not see, than to believe and see; I perceive no good reason but it may be the more blessed way to prophesy and not foresee, than to prophesy and foresee. Did we give in t<> that sad dog of a S7 A RENEGADE POET Robert Louis, we must needs set down the poor useless poet as a son of joy. But the title were an irony more mordant than the title of the hapless ones to whom it likens him. Filles dc joie? O rather files d'amertume! And if the pleasure they so mournfully purvey were lofty and purging as it is abysmal and corrupting, then would Mr. Stevenson's parallel be just; but then, too, from ignoble victims they would become noble ministrants. 'Tis a difference which vitiates the whole comparison, O careless player with the toys of the gods ! whom we have taken, I warrant me, more gravely than you take your whimsical self in this odd pleas- antry ! Like his sad sisters, but with that transfiguring distinction, this poet, this son of bitterness, sows in sorrow that men may reap in joy. He serves his pleasure, say you, R. L. S.? 'Tis a strange pleasure, if so it be. He loves his art? No, his art loves him; cleaves to him when she has become unwelcome, a 38 A RENEGADE POET UN THE POET \.i\ weariness of the flesh. He is the sorry sport of a mischievous convention. The traditions of his craft, fortified by the unreasonable and misguiding lessons of those sages who have ever instructed the poet in the things that make for his better misery, persuade him that he can be no true singer without he slight the world. Wordsworth has taught him a most unnecessary apprehension lest the world should be too much with him; which, to be sure, was very singular in Words- worth, who never had the world with him till he was come near to going out of it. The poor fool, therefore, devotes assiduous . practice to acquiring an art which comes least natural to him of all men; and after employing a world of pains to scorn the world, is strangely huffed that it should return the compliment in kind. There is left him no better remedy but, having spent his youth in alienating its opinion, to spend his manhood in learning to des- pite its opinion. And though it be a hard 39 A RENEGADE POET matter to contemn the world, 'tis a yet harder matter to contemn its contempt. I regard the villainous misleaders of poets who have preached up these doctrines as all one for selfish cruelty with those who maintained the tradition for operatic eunuchs ; and would have them equally suppressed by Christian sentiment. For they have procured the severance of the one from his kind to gratify their under- standing, as of the other to gratify their ear. But this is to be serious, and I should apologise for being so much out of the fashion as to take poetry seriously ; which no one now does — not even poets. 'Tis, indeed, a consummation devoutly to be wished, that your modern poet would take himself less seriously and poetry more so. If he would not be so inflexibly grave over that new-fangled style of " artist," which to his great English predecessors would have suggested only hogs' bristles and paint-pots ! I know not why he should 40 A RENEGADE POET ON THE l'OET hanker after the paint-pots of the Eg} p tianSj and arrogate a title- which gives color to calling him useless. The only utility ever alleged for the artist was the fostering of religion. To what that function has come may lie seen in our churches; where the keenest denouncer <>f Papistry could not snuff idolatry in the kneeler before such images. Since though one should adore them, he would not trans- gress the First Commandment; for they are like nothing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters Under the earth. Odd's my life ! I perceive I have clean forgot the most important aspect of my theme, which is the poet as the critic him. 'Tis briefly remedied. There are two kinds of critics: the first see nothing in him, and the second themselves. The lat- ter is by far the more fashionable mode nowadays: the judicious critic (to speak by figure) uses polished poetry to reflect to readers his own countenance. I am 41 A RENEGADE POET myself indifferently skilled in this way, though I have strangely neglected it in the present article ; and, therefore, I am minded to let the reader know that I in- tend shortly to publish my autobiography, under the title " Reminiscences of Savage Landor." As I never saw Landor once, there is no danger that he will unduly interfere with the public's natural interest in me. This I think fit to acquaint the reader with, lest he should fall into an ill opinion of my genius, and unhappily conceive me destitute of modern literary gifts, when he discerns that I have written with a design to exhibit not my own great- ness, but the poet's. I am sensible that by such a method I shall justly undergo the censure of the present age as a critic of very little understanding. For 'tis a principle universally conceded, that, since the work of a great author is said to be a monument, your true critic, like your true Briton, does best evince his taste and sense by cutting his own name on it. 42 A RENEGADE POET ON THE POET 'Tis ;t procedure so accredited that across even the titulv/m of Golgotha a German scrawls " Johann Strauss,'" halt' hiding the Name of names; Chrisl finds an English Archdeacon more merciless than I h rod, for after being exhibited to the Jews clothed in a fool's garment, he is exhibited to the English clothed with a fool; and adds to the carrying of the Cross the carrying of Renan. 'Tis a re- versal worthy to be ranked as a later Pas- sion that He should hear among the Forty the same animal which once bore Him among the Twelve. But indeed, this man- ner of criticism and biography is the only one in scientific accord with the philosophy of the age. For modern philosophy, like Mi - . Oscar Wilde, has discovered that the easiest and most surprising way to make a new coat, is to turn an old coat inside out ; and const ructs its dogma as Mr. Wilde ('tis the observation of an acute critic) constructs his epigrams, by reversing the platitudes and truisms of former teaching. 43 A RENEGADE POET Thus, 'tis its first dogma that there is no dogma ; its first precept, that every man has an obligation to believe that he has no obligation to belief; with many more such Wildish paradoxes. Not the least pretty of these is that which touches the first source of all worship, and 'tis ob- tained by a simple reversal of the saying in Genesis : — Man made God to his own linage and likeness. Now 'twould argue a lamentable lack of modernity if your true critic should not remember the an- thropomorphic origin of worship in his devotion to illustrious authors, and plainly instruct the reader by his language that he adores in Keats or Shelley what Narcissus did in the stream. Angelica Kaufmann, studying the practice of so many famous painters, to search out the one countenance which seemed to them the supreme type of beauty and paint all their faces from it, excellently discovered both her sex and her thoughts by paint- ing all her faces after her own: and the 44 A RENEGADE POET ON THE POET greal critica arc much beholden to her example. 2 They have contrived a method to hand themselves down to posterity through the gods of literature, as did the Roman emperors through the gods of Olympus — by taking the head off their statues, and clapping on their own in its stead. Yet, though I admit the soundness of the principle, and do devoutly hold to its practice, I have at times a strange hack- sliding from modernity, an odd diseased kind of taste; which finds more comely and more reviving a life of Christ in which " Luke " or " John " appears only at top of the page, than one in which Ernest plays the part of a Gallic Judas, who should lend the Master a supper-room, and charge a franc a head for tout Paris • I have seen this asserted, but take it for a libel on poor Angelica. The face which pervades her pictures i> the conventional pseudo-Greek face which pervades all the would-be " ideal " painting of her day. 45 A RENEGADE POET to peep at Him through the keyhole. 'Tis partly, I take it, a passing access of this humor which has perverted me throughout such a masterpiece of litera- ture as the present, to retire myself in the background with so obtrusive a modesty. Yet when I think on it, I lie ; for though I have kept indifferent well to my subject, 'tis chiefly written to display my own wit. Now I have heard that every reader finds in a book exactly what he brings with him to the reading. And since I am satisfied that the reader brings to the considera- tion of this article an infinite deal of wit, I can be under no apprehension of what he will discover in it. 46 PAGANISM: OLD AND NEW " So died the old; here comes the new: Regard him; — a familiar face!" — Tennyson. HOW define new paganism? Most modern beliefs are easily defined. Agnosticism is the everlasting perhaps. An Atheist is a man who believes himself an accident. Morality (modern) is the art of defining your principles to oppose your practice. Immorality (again mod- ern)— well, it was excellently defined by Pope as A monster of such frightful mien As, to be hated, needs hut to be seen." That is to say, nobody minds it, if it be only kepi out of sight. Hut a definition of V w Paganism is vet to seek. 17 A RENEGADE POET That men who find Christianity too hard of belief should come to believe in Pagan- ism, sounds, I know, like an absurdity. But nothing is so incalculable as the cred- ulity of incredulity. Nevertheless it is not Paganism pure and simple which these men would restore. Rather it is the habit of mind, the sentiment, the ethos of Pagan- ism. If my view be correct, they would use the old " properties " of Paganism to deck out their own material nature-wor- ship. Venus would thus become what Ten- nyson has so eloquently described Lucre- tius as holding her to be. Ceres and Bacchus would become representative of the bounty and lustihood of Nature. The staid and severe would have their Pallas, and render homage to natural wisdom and self-control. Meanwhile all this would be in nowise novel, but indeed a revival of Paganism, — of a phase, and a late phase, of Paganism. There are cycles in thought as in the heavens ; and old views in time become new views. 48 PAGANISM: OLD AND M.U Here is a natural religion obviously cap- able of accommodating itself to widely different natures by reason of its entire flexibility. But though in this way mis- chievously catholic as atheism, it can, un- like atheism, surround itself with the pres- tige of a gnat past — though a dead pasl ; of a poetry — though a dead poetry : of a sculpture — though a dead sculpture; of an art — which is not dead. And it ciii proclaim that, with the revival of dead Paganism, these other dead things too shall live. It is with this aesthetic aspect of New Paganism that I wish to deal. 1 One of its chief recommendations to in- tellectual minds is the often-eulogised heauty of Paganism. The old gods, say its advocates, were warm with human life, and akin to human sympathy: beautiful i I oughl here, properly, to discuss the chances of pagan principles ever becoming more than the craze of a cliaue in England. But space forbids. Suffice it to say thai then- is a " niiliis," and the disease-genus are abroad. I!' A RENEGADE POET gods whose names were poetry. Then the daily gracefulness of pagan life and re- ligion ! The ceremonial pageants, with the fluent grace of their processional maid- ens, as they ". . . . shook a most divine dance from their feet/' 2 or the solemn chastity of their vestal vir- gins; the symmetry of their temples with their effigies of benignant powers ; the street, adorned with noble statuary, in- vested with a crystal air, and bright with its moving throng in garments of unla- bored elegance; and the theatre unroofed to the smokeless sky, where an audience, -in which the merest cobbler had some vis- ion beyond his last, heard in the language of /Eschylus or Sophocles the ancestral legends of its native land. With all this, the advocates I speak of contrast the condition of to-day. The cold formalities of an outworn worship; 2 Chapman, " Odyssey." 50 PAGANISM: OLD AND NEW our tie phis ultra of pageantry, a Lord Mayor's Show ; the dryadless woods re- garded chiefly as potential timber; the grimy street, the grimy air, the disfigur- ing statues, the Stygian crowd; the tem- ple to the reigning goddess Gelasma, which mocks the name of theatre; last and worst, the fatal degradation of popular perception, which has gazed so long on ugliness that it takes her to its bosom. In our capitals the very heavens have lost their innocence. Aurora may rise over our cities, but she has forgotten how 7 to blush. And those who, like the present writer, head as on thorns amidst the sordidncss and ugliness — the ugly sordidncss and the Sordid ugliness — the dull materiality and weariness of this unhonored old age of the world, — cannot but sympathise with these feelings, — nay, even look back with a cer- tain passionate regrel to the beauty which invested at least the outward life of those days. Hut in truth with this outward life 51 A RENEGADE POET the vesture of beauty ceases : the rest is a day-dream, lovely it is true, but none the less a dream. Heathenism is lovely be- cause it is dead. To read Keats is to grow in love with Paganism ; but it is the pagan- ism of Keats. Pagan Paganism was not poetical. Literally, this assertion is untenable. Almost every religion becomes a centre of poetry. But if not absolutely true, it is at least true with relation to Chris- tianity. The poetry of Paganism is chiefly a modern creation ; in the hands of the pagans themselves it was not even de- veloped to its full capabilities. The gods of Homer are braggarts and gluttons ; and the gods of Virgil are cold and unreal. The kiss of Dian was a frigid kiss till it glowed in the fancy of the barbarian Fletcher: there was little halo around Latmos' top, till it was thrown around it by the modern Keats. No pagan eye ever visioned the nymphs of Shelley. 3 In truth 3 I have here implicitly assumed a distinction 52 PAGANISM: OLD AND NEW there was around the Olympian heaven no such halo and native air of poetry as, for Christian singers, clothed the Christian heaven. To the heathen mind its divini- ties were graceful, handsome, noble gods; powerful, and therefore to be propitiated with worship; cold in their sublime selfish ness, and therefore unlovable. No pagan ever loved his god. Love he might, per- haps, some humble rustic or domestic deity, — but no Olympian. Whereas, in the Christian religion, the Madonna, and a greater than the Madonna, were at once high enough for worship and low enough for love. Now, without love no poetry can be beautiful; for all beautiful poetry (•nines from the heart. With love it was that Wordsworth and Shelley purchased the right to sing sweetly of nature. Bleats wrote lovingly of his pagan hierarchy, be- which I should rather explicitly have formulated, between the poetry lurking in the pagan myths and tlic poetical ideas associated with them by the pagans themselves. 53 A RENEGADE POET cause what he wrote about he loved. Hence for no antique poet was it possible to make, or even conceive, a pagan Para- dise. We, who love the gods, do not wor- ship them. The ancients, who worshipped the gods, did not love them. Whence is this? Coleridge, in those beautiful but hack- neyed lines from " Wallenstein," has given us his explanation. It is time, yet only half the truth. For in very deed that beautiful mythology has a beauty beyond anything it ever possessed in its worshipped days ; and that beauty came to it in dower when it gave its hand to Christianity. Christianity it was that stripped the weeds from that garden of Paganism, broke its statue of Priapus, and delivered it smiling and fair to the nations for their pleasure- ground. She found Mars the type of brute violence, and made of him the god of valor. She took Venus, and made of her the type of Beauty, — Beauty, which 54 PAGANISM: OLD AND NEW the average heat hen hardly knew. There is no more striking instance of the poetis- ing influence exerted on the ancient myth- ology by Christianity than the contrast between the ancient and modern views of I his goddess. Any school-boy will tell you that she was the goddess of love and beauty. "Goddess of Love" is true only in the lowest sense, but " Goddess of Beauty " ? It exhibits an essentially modern attitude towards Venus, and would be hard to support from the ancient poets. No doubt there are passages in which she is styled the beautiful goddess; but the phrases are scarcely to my point. If, reader, in the early days of the second Empire, you came across a writer who de- scribed the Empress Eugenie as "the beau- tiful Empress," you would hardly be fair in deducing from iluit his devotion to her as the Empress of Beauty. No; when Heine, addressing the Venus of Melos, called her "Our Lady of Beauty," the 55 A RENEGADE POET idea, no less than the expression, was cen- trally modern. I will go further. It was centrally Christian. To the average pagan, Venus was sim- ply the personification of the generative principle in nature ; and her offspring was Cupid — Desire, Eros — sexual passion. Far other is she to the modern. To him she is the Principle of Earthly Beauty, who being of necessity entirely pure, walks naked and is not ashamed, garmented in the light of her unchanging whiteness. This worship of Beauty in the abstract, this conception of the Lady Beauty as an all- amiable power, to register the least glance of whose eye, to catch the least trail of whose locks were worth the devotion of a life, — all this is characteristic of the Chris- tian and Gothic poet, unknown to the pa- gan poet. No antique singer ever saw Sibylla Palmifera; no antique artist's hand ever shook in her pursuit. 4 The 4 Philosophers and "dreaming Platonists," per- haps, had sealed her craggy heights after their own 56 PAGANISM: OLD AND NEW sculptors, I suspect, had known something of Sibylla, in the elder days, before Praxi- teles made of tlir Queen of Beauty merely the Queen of Fair Women. The Venus of Melos remains to hint so much. But, besides that Greek sculpture is virtually dead and unrrvivahle in civilized lands, I do not purpose in this narrow space to deal with subjects so wide as Sculpture or Art. Suffice it if I can suggest a few of the irreparable losses to Poetry which would result from the supersession of the Chris- tian by the Pagan spirit. If there are two things on which the larger portion of our finest modern verse may be said to hinge, they are surely Na- ture and Love. Yet it would be the meresl platitude to say that neither the one nor the other, as glorified by our great modern poets, was known to the singers of old. manner, !>nt none will pretend thai Platonic dreams Of the "First and Only Fair" were the offspring of Paganism, Rather were they a contravention of it. 57 A RENEGADE POET Their insensibility to landscape was ac- companied and perhaps conditioned by an insensibility to all the subtler and more spiritual qualities of beauty ; so that it would hardly be more than a pardonable exaggeration to call Christianity (in so far as it has influenced the arts) the re- ligion of beauty, and Paganism the reli- gion of form and sense. Perhaps it is incorrect to say that the ancients were in- different to landscape: rather they were indifferent to Nature. Cicero luxuriates in his " country," Horace in his Soracte and fitful glimpses of scenery ; but both merely as factors in the composition of enjo} r ment; the bees, the doves of Virgil are mere ministers to luxury and sleep. " The fool," says Blake in a most preg- nant aphorism, " The fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees." And as- suredly no heathen ever saw the same tree as Wordsworth. For it is a noteworthy fact that the intellect of man seems unable to seize the divine beauty of Nature, until 58 PAGANISM: OLD AND NEW moving bejond that outward beauty it gazes on the spirit of Nature; even as the mind seems unable to appreciate the beau- tiful face of* woman until it lias learned to appreciate the more beautiful beauty of her soul. That Paganism had no real sense of the exquisite in female features is evident from its statues and few extanf paintings: mere regularity of form is all it sees. Or again, compare the ancient erotic poets, delighting in the figure and bodily charms of their mistresses, with the modern love-poets, whose first care is to dwell on the heavenly breathings of their ladies' faces. Significant is it, from this point of view, that the very word in favor- ite use among the Latin poets to express beauty should be " form