AMONG MY BOOKS First Series by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL * * * * * To F. D. L. Love comes and goes with music in his feet, And tunes young pulses to his roundelays; Love brings thee this: will it persuade thee, Sweet, That he turns proser when he comes and stays? * * * * * CONTENTS. DRYDEN WITCHCRAFT SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO LESSING ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS * * * * * DRYDEN. [1] Benvenuto Cellini tells us that when, in his boyhood, he saw a salamandercome out of the fire, his grandfather forthwith gave him a sound beating, that he might the better remember so unique a prodigy. Though perhaps inthis case the rod had another application than the autobiographer choosesto disclose, and was intended to fix in the pupil's mind a lesson ofveracity rather than of science, the testimony to its mnemonic virtueremains. Nay, so universally was it once believed that the senses, andthrough them the faculties of observation and retention, were quickenedby an irritation of the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whipthe children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest the trueplace of them might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive amordant for the memory. From this practice the older school of criticswould seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of goodtaste, and what was somewhat vaguely called _classical_ English. To markthese limits in poetry, they set up as Hermae the images they had made tothem of Dryden, of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnlycastigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn performed the samefunction for the next generation, thus helping to keep always sacred andimmovable the _ne plus ultra_ alike of inspiration and of the vocabulary. Though no two natures were ever much more unlike than those of Dryden andPope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in suchexternals as could be easily caught and copied, yet it was the fashion, down even to the last generation, to advise young writers to formthemselves, as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworthhimself began in this school; and though there were glimpses, here andthere, of a direct study of nature, yet most of the epithets in hisearlier pieces were of the traditional kind so fatal to poetry duringgreat part of the last century; and he indulged in that alphabeticpersonification which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude, Freedom, by the easy magic of an initial capital. "Where the green apple shrivels on the spray, And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray, Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign With Independence, child of high Disdain. Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies, Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies, And often grasps her sword, and often eyes. " Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, even to thetriplet, which Swift hated so heartily as "a vicious way of rhymingwherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, imitated by all the bad versifiers ofCharles the Second's reign. " Wordsworth became, indeed, very early theleader of reform; but, like Wesley, he endeavored a reform within theEstablishment. Purifying the substance, he retained the outward formswith a feeling rather than conviction that, in poetry, substance and formare but manifestations of the same inward life, the one fused into theother in the vivid heat of their common expression. Wordsworth couldnever wholly shake off the influence of the century into which he wasborn. He began by proposing a reform of the ritual, but it went nofurther than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin original wherethe meaning was as well or better given in derivatives of the Saxon. Hewould have stricken out the "assemble" and left the "meet together. " LikeWesley, he might be compelled by necessity to a breach of the canon; but, like him, he was never a willing schismatic, and his singing robes werethe full and flowing canonicals of the church by law established. Inspiration makes short work with the usage of the best authors andready-made elegances of diction; but where Wordsworth is not possessed byhis demon, as Molière said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyondDryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions on instinct, andinsensibly modified them as he studied the masters of what may be calledthe Middle Period of English verse. [2] As a young man, he disparagedVirgil ("We talked a great deal of nonsense in those days, " he said whentaken to task for it later in life); at fifty-nine he translated threebooks of the Aeneid, in emulation of Dryden, though falling far short ofhim in everything but closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to havebeen convinced. Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the truefounder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan authoritysave Milton, whose own English was formed upon those earlier models. Keats denounced the authors of that style which came in toward the closeof the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through the whole of theeighteenth, as "A schism, Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, . .. Who went about Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large The name of one Boileau!" But Keats had never then[3] studied the writers of whom he speaks socontemptuously, though he might have profited by so doing. Boileau wouldat least have taught him that _flimsy_ would have been an apter epithetfor the _standard_ than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author ofthat schism against which Keats so vehemently asserts the claim of theorthodox teaching it had displaced. He was far more just to Boileau, ofwhom Keats had probably never read a word. "If I would only cross theseas, " he says, "I might find in France a living Horace and a Juvenal inthe person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whoseexpressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows fromthe ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almostas universally valuable. "[4] Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years; inthe second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the whole, sohigh as he; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy, detraction, unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminencewas conceded; he was the earliest complete type of the purely literaryman, in the modern sense; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him acertain claim to _greatness_ which would be denied to men as famous andmore read, --to Pope or Swift, for example; he is supposed, in some way orother, to have reformed English poetry. It is now about half a centurysince the only uniform edition of his works was edited by Scott. Nolibrary is complete without him, no name is more familiar than his, andyet it may be suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried inthat great cemetery of the "British Poets. " If contemporary reputation beoften deceitful, posthumous fame may be generally trusted, for it is averdict made up of the suffrages of the select men in succeedinggenerations. This verdict has been as good as unanimous in favor ofDryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observation of him, to consider him neither as warning nor example, but to endeavor to makeout what it is that has given so lofty and firm a position to one of themost unequal, inconsistent, and faulty writers that ever lived. He is acurious example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely of thedead, --that they get credit for what they might be quite as much as forwhat they are, --and posterity has applied to him one of his own rules ofcriticism, judging him by the best rather than the average of hisachievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing sidein politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's, --whom inmany respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of areasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness andexpansion, by its own motion, --that they have won his battle for him inthe judgment of after times. To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly interestingand even picturesque figure. He is, in more senses than one, in language, in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the direction of his activity, the first of the moderns. He is the first literary man who was also a manof the world, as we understand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as theacknowledged dictator of wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearlythe same interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, ages oftransition; but there are times when the transition is more marked, morerapid; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arriveat maturity during such a period, still more to represent in himself thechange that is going on, and to be an efficient cause in bringing itabout. Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontemporaneousnature, capable of being _tutta in se romita_, and of running parallelwith his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will bethwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so muchto do with its steady and successful application. Dryden suffered, nodoubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted backward inan eddy of the general current; yet of the intellectual movement of thetime, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, withAeneas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it. That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith toscepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to theunderstanding. It was in a direction altogether away from those springsof imagination and faith at which they of the last age had slaked thethirst or renewed the vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognizedthat indefinable and gregarious influence which we call nowadays theSpirit of the Age, when he said that "every Age has a kind of universalGenius. "[5] He had also a just notion of that in which he lived; for heremarks, incidentally, that "all knowing ages are naturally sceptic andnot at all bigoted, which, if I am not much deceived, is the propercharacter of our own. "[6] It may be conceived that he was even painfullyhalf-aware of having fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a greatpoet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing is so sensitive to thechill of a sceptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if it be notgenius, is at least the beautiful illusion that saves it from thebaffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, horn tosee things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them aspeople say they are, --to read God in a prose translation. Such wasDryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his ownchoice. He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashesfrom lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the heads ofinferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews. As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and repeatedlyreaffirmed the maxim that "He who lives to please, must please to live. " Without earnest convictions, no great or sound literature is conceivable. But if Dryden mostly wanted that inspiration which comes of belief in anddevotion to something nobler and more abiding than the present moment andits petulant need, he had, at least, the next best thing to that, --athorough faith in himself. He was, moreover, a man of singularly opensoul, and of a temper self-confident enough to be candid even withhimself. His mind was growing to the last, his judgment widening anddeepening, his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He confessedhis errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps in search of thatbetter knowledge which the omniscience of superficial study haddisparaged. Surely an intellect that is still pliable at seventy is aphenomenon as interesting as it is rare. But at whatever period of hislife we look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, may have been hispoetic creed, there was something in the nature of the man that would notbe wholly subdued to what it worked in. There are continual glimpses ofsomething in him greater than he, hints of possibilities finer thananything he has done. You feel that the whole of him was better than anyrandom specimens, though of his best, seem to prove. _Incessu patet_, hehas by times the large stride of the elder race, though it sinks toooften into the slouch of a man who has seen better days. His grand airmay, in part, spring from a habit of easy superiority to his competitors;but must also, in part, be ascribed to an innate dignity of character. That this pre-eminence should have been so generally admitted, during hislife, can only be explained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, andsound judgment, whose solid worth could afford that many a flurry ofvanity, petulance, and even error should flit across the surface and beforgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been, the last and abidingimpression of him is, that he was thoroughly manly; and while it may bedisputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of him, asWordsworth said of Burke, that "he was by far the greatest man of hisage, not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in variousdirections, his most able contemporaries. "[7] Dryden was born in 1631. He was accordingly six years old when Jonsondied, was nearly a quarter of a century younger than Milton, and may havepersonally known Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who was livingtill 1656. On the other side, he was older than Swift by thirty-six, thanAddison by forty-one, and than Pope by fifty-seven years. Dennis saysthat "Dryden, for the last ten years of his life, was much acquaintedwith Addison, and drank with him more than he ever used to do, probablyso far as to hasten his end, " being commonly "an extreme sober man. " Popetell us that, in his twelfth year, he "saw Dryden, " perhaps at Will's, perhaps in the street, as Scott did Burns. Dryden himself visited Miltonnow and then, and was intimate with Davenant, who could tell him ofFletcher and Jonson from personal recollection. Thus he stands betweenthe age before and that which followed him, giving a hand to each. Hisfather was a country clergyman, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of anancient county family. The Puritanism is thought to have come in with thepoet's great-grandfather, who made in his will the somewhat singularstatement that he was "assured by the Holy Ghost that he was elect ofGod. " It would appear from this that Dryden's self-confidence was aninheritance. The solid quality of his mind showed itself early. Hehimself tells us that he had read Polybius "in English, with the pleasureof a boy, before he was ten years of age, and yet even then _had somedark notions of the prudence with which he conducted his design_. "[8] Theconcluding words are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as men commonlydo, interpreted his boyish turn of mind by later self-knowledge. We thusget a glimpse of him browsing--for, like Johnson, Burke, and the full asdistinguished from the learned men, he was always a random reader[9]--inhis father's library, and painfully culling here and there a spray of hisown proper nutriment from among the stubs and thorns of Puritan divinity. After such schooling as could be had in the country, he was sent up toWestminster School, then under the headship of the celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made his first essays in verse, translating, among other schoolexercises of the same kind, the third satire of Persius. In 1650 he wasentered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for sevenyears. The only record of his college life is a discipline imposed, in1652, for "disobedience to the Vice-Master, and contumacy in taking hispunishment, inflicted by him. " Whether this punishment was corporeal, asJohnson insinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are ignorant. Hecertainly retained no very fond recollection of his Alma Mater, for inhis "Prologue to the University of Oxford, " he says:-- "Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own mother university; Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age. " By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into possession of a smallestate of sixty pounds a year, from which, however, a third must bededucted, for his mother's dower, till 1676. After leaving Cambridge, hebecame secretary to his near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at thattime Cromwell's chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House. In 1670 hesucceeded Davenant as Poet Laureate, [10] and Howell as Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. This place he lost at theRevolution, and had the mortification to see his old enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, as the best poet the Whig party could muster. If William was obliged to read the verses of his official minstrel, Dryden was more than avenged. From 1688 to his death, twelve years later, he earned his bread manfully by his pen, without any mean complaining, and with no allusion to his fallen fortunes that is not dignified andtouching. These latter years, during which he was his own man again, wereprobably the happiest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married LadyElizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. About a hundredpounds a year were thus added to his income. The marriage is said not tohave been a happy one, and perhaps it was not, for his wife wasapparently a weak-minded woman; but the inference from the internalevidence of Dryden's plays, as of Shakespeare's, is very untrustworthy, ridicule of marriage having always been a common stock in trade of thecomic writers. The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were written uponthe death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be, --a kind ofparody on the worst of Donne. They have every fault of his manner, without a hint of the subtile and often profound thought that more thanredeems it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne outdone. The young nobleman died of the small-pox, and Dryden exclaimspathetically, -- "Was there no milder way than the small-pox, The very filthiness of Pandora's box?" He compares the pustules to "rosebuds stuck i' the lily skin about, " andsays that "Each little pimple had a tear in it To wail the fault its rising did commit. " But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal. What follows is evenfiner:-- "No comet need foretell his change drew on, Whose corpse might seem a constellation. O, had he died of old, how great a strife Had been who from his death should draw their life! Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er Seneca, Cato, Numa, Caesar, were, Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this An universal metempsychosis! Must all these aged sires in one funeral Expire? all die in one so young, so small?" It is said that one of Allston's early pictures was brought to him, afterhe had long forgotten it, and his opinion asked as to the wisdom of theyoung artist's persevering in the career he had chosen. Allston advisedhis quitting it forthwith as hopeless. Could the same experiment havebeen tried with these verses upon Dryden, can any one doubt that hiscounsel would have been the same? It should be remembered, however, thathe was barely turned eighteen when they were written, and the tendency ofhis style is noticeable in so early an abandonment of the participial_ed_ in _learned_ and _aged_. In the next year he appears again in somecommendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epigrams of his friend, JohnHoddesdon. In these he speaks of the author as a "Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook, So lofty and divine a course hast took As all admire, before the down begin To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin. " Here is almost every fault which Dryden's later nicety would havecondemned. But perhaps there is no schooling so good for an author as hisown youthful indiscretions. After this effort Dryden seems to have lainfallow for ten years, and then he at length reappears in thirty-seven"heroic stanzas" on the death of Cromwell. The versification is smoother, but the conceits are there again, though in a milder form. The verse ismodelled after "Gondibert. " A single image from nature (he was almostalways happy in these) gives some hint of the maturer Dryden:-- "And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, Made him but greater seem, not greater grow. " Two other verses, "And the isle, when her protecting genius went, Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred, " are interesting, because they show that he had been studying the earlypoems of Milton. He has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbiage oneof the most purely imaginative passages ever written by the great Puritanpoet. "From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent. " This is the more curious because, twenty-four years afterwards, he says, in defending rhyme: "Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for theabolishment of rhyme, his own particular reason is plainly this, thatrhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it nor thegraces of it: which is manifest in his _Juvenilia_, . .. Where his rhymeis always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an agewhen the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost everyman a rhymer, though not a poet. "[11] It was this, no doubt, thatheartened Dr. Johnson to say of "Lycidas" that "the diction was harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. " It is Dryden's excusethat his characteristic excellence is to argue persuasively andpowerfully, whether in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed withthe most needful quality of an advocate, --to be always strongly andwholly of his present way of thinking, whatever it might be. Next wehave, in 1660, "Astraea Redux" on the "happy restoration" of Charles II. In this also we can forebode little of the full-grown Dryden but hisdefects. We see his tendency to exaggeration, and to confound physicalwith metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that brought home theroyal brothers, that "The joyful London meets The princely York, himself alone a freight, The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight" and speaks of the "Repeated prayer Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence. " There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vulgarity, of phrase, which Dryden never wholly refined away, and which continually tempts usto sum up at once against him as the greatest poet that ever was or couldbe made wholly out of prose. "Heaven would no bargain for its blessings drive" is an example. On the other hand, there are a few verses almost worthy ofhis best days, as these:-- "Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles; Such whose _supine felicity_ but makes In story chasms, in epochas mistakes, O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till with his silent sickle they are mown, " These are all the more noteworthy, that Dryden, unless in argument, isseldom equal for six lines together. In the poem to Lord Clarendon (1662)there are four verses that have something of the "energy divine" forwhich Pope praised his master. "Let envy, then, those crimes within you see From which the happy never must be free; Envy that does with misery reside, The joy and the revenge of ruined pride. " In his "Aurengzebe" (1675) there is a passage, of which, as it is a goodexample of Dryden, I shall quote the whole, though my purpose aims mainlyat the latter verses:-- "When I consider life, 't is all a cheat; Yet, fooled with Hope, men favor the deceit, Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay; To-morrow's falser than the former day, Lies worse, and, while it says we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. Strange cozenage! none would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain, And from the dregs of life think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold Which fools us young and beggars us when old. " The "first sprightly running" of Dryden's vintage was, it must beconfessed, a little muddy, if not beery; but if his own soil did notproduce grapes of the choicest flavor, he knew where they were to be had;and his product, like sound wine, grew better the longer it stood uponthe lees. He tells us, evidently thinking of himself, that in a poet, "from fifty to threescore, the balance generally holds even in our colderclimates, for he loses not much in fancy, and judgment, which is theeffect of observation, still increases. His succeeding years afford himlittle more than the stubble of his own harvest, yet, if his constitutionbe healthful, his mind may still retain a decent vigor, and the gleaningsof that of Ephraim, in comparison with others, will surpass the vintageof Abiezer. "[12] Since Chaucer, none of our poets has had a constitutionmore healthful, and it was his old age that yielded the best of him. Inhim the understanding was, perhaps, in overplus for his entire goodfortune as a poet, and that is a faculty among the earliest to mature. Wehave seen him, at only ten years, divining the power of reason inPolybius. [13] The same turn of mind led him later to imitate the Frenchschool of tragedy, and to admire in Ben Jonson the most correct ofEnglish poets. It was his imagination that needed quickening, and it isvery curious to trace through his different prefaces the gradual openingof his eyes to the causes of the solitary pre-eminence of Shakespeare. Atfirst he is sensible of an attraction towards him which he cannotexplain, and for which he apologizes, as if it were wrong. But he feelshimself drawn more and more strongly, till at last he ceases to resistaltogether, and is forced to acknowledge that there is something in thisone man that is not and never was anywhere else, something not to bereasoned about, ineffable, divine; if contrary to the rules, so much theworse for _them_. It may be conjectured that Dryden's Puritanassociations may have stood in the way of his more properly poeticculture, and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare was slight. He tellsus that Davenant, whom he could not have known before he himself wastwenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. But even afterhis imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, and hisexpression had been ennobled by frequenting this higher society, we findhim continually dropping back into that _sermo pedestris_ which seems, onthe whole, to have been his more natural element. We always feel hisepoch in him, that he was the lock which let our language down from itspoint of highest poetry to its level of easiest and most gently flowingprose. His enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it;but his strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, which isdistinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, power ofgeneralization, as Pope's by keenness of edge and point, were his, whether he would or no. Accordingly, his poetry is often best and hisverse more flowing where (as in parts of his version of the twenty-ninthode of the third book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions ofanother mind. [14] Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton's remark ofhim, that "he was a good rhymist, but no poet. " To look at all sides, andto distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the duty of acritic. But how if a certain side be so often presented as to thrustforward in the memory and disturb it in the effort to recall that totalimpression (for the office of a critic is not, though often somisunderstood, to say _guilty_ or _not guilty_ of some particular fact)which is the only safe ground of judgment? It is the weight of the wholeman, not of one or the other limb of him, that we want. _ExpendeHannibalem_. Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of a singlequality at a time, for it is their union, and not their addition, thatassures the value of each separately. It was not this or that which gavehim his weight in council, his swiftness of decision in battle thatoutran the forethought of other men, --it was Hannibal. But this prosaicelement in Dryden will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot helpthinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable, what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer orshorter space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot help eachother to something that is both flight and run at once. What with hishaste and a certain dash, which, according to our mood, we may callflorid or splendid, he seems to stand among poets where Rubens does amongpainters, --greater, perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, yet great herealso, if we compare him with any but the first. We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second year, and thus far have foundlittle in him to warrant an augury that he was ever to be one of the_great_ names in English literature, the most perfect type, that is, ofhis class, and that class a high one, though not the highest. If Josephde Maistre's axiom, _Qui n'a pas vaincu à trente ans, ne vaincra jamais_, were true, there would be little hope of him, for he has won no battleyet. But there is something solid and doughty in the man, that can risefrom defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when weare able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back. Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the _obbligato_ sort, atwhich few men of original force are good, least of all Dryden, who hadalways something of stiffness in his strength. Waller had praised theliving Cromwell in perhaps the manliest verses he ever wrote, --not _very_manly, to be sure, but really elegant, and, on the whole, better thanthose in which Dryden squeezed out melodious tears. Waller, who had alsomade himself conspicuous as a volunteer Antony to the country squireturned Caesar, ("With ermine clad and purple, let him hold A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold, ") was more servile than Dryden in hailing the return of _ex officio_Majesty. He bewails to Charles, in snuffling heroics, "Our sorrow and our crime To have accepted life so long a time, Without you here. " A weak man, put to the test by rough and angry times, as Waller was, maybe pitied, but meanness is nothing but contemptible under anycircumstances. If it be true that "every conqueror creates a Muse, "Cromwell was unfortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though dignified, isreserved if not distrustful. Marvell's "Horatian Ode, " the most trulyclassic in our language, is worthy of its theme. The same poet's Elegy, in parts noble, and everywhere humanly tender, is worth more than allCarlyle's biography as a witness to the gentler qualities of the hero, and of the deep affection that stalwart nature could inspire in hearts oftruly masculine temper. As it is little known, a few verses of it may bequoted to show the difference between grief that thinks of its object andgrief that thinks of its rhymes:-- "Valor, religion, friendship, prudence died At once with him, and all that's good beside, And we, death's refuse, nature's dregs, confined To loathsome life, alas! are left behind. Where we (so once we used) shall now no more, To fetch day, press about his chamber-door, No more shall hear that powerful language charm, Whose force oft spared the labor of his arm, No more shall follow where he spent the days In war or counsel, or in prayer and praise. * * * * * I saw him dead; a leaden slumber lies, And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes; Those gentle rays under the lids were fled, Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed; That port, which so majestic was and strong, Loose and deprived of vigor stretched along, All withered, all discolored, pale, and wan, How much another thing! no more That Man! O human glory! vain! O death! O wings! O worthless world! O transitory things! Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid, And, in his altered face, you something feign That threatens Death he yet will live again. " Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Murray, but they are of that highermood which satisfies the heart. These couplets, too, have an energyworthy of Milton's friend:-- "When up the armëd mountains of Dunbar He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war. " "Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse. " On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's panegyric on the Protector was sopoor. It was purely official verse-making. Had there been any feeling init, there had been baseness in his address to Charles. As it is, we mayfairly assume that he was so far sincere in both cases as to be thankfulfor a chance to exercise himself in rhyme, without much caring whetherupon a funeral or a restoration. He might naturally enough expect thatpoetry would have a better chance under Charles than under Cromwell, orany successor with Commonwealth principles. Cromwell had more seriousmatters to think about than verses, while Charles might at least care asmuch about them as it was in his base good-nature to care about anythingbut loose women and spaniels. Dryden's sound sense, afterwards soconspicuous, shows itself even in these pieces, when we can get at itthrough the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. But the authentic andunmistakable Dryden first manifests himself in some verses addressed tohis friend Dr. Charlton in 1663. We have first his common sense which hasalmost the point of wit, yet with a tang of prose:-- "The longest tyranny that ever swayed Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite, And made his torch their universal light. _So truth, while only one supplied the state, Grew scarce and dear and yet sophisticate. Still it was bought, like emp'ric wares or charms, Hard words sealed up with Aristotle's arms_. " Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he speaks of theinhabitants of the New World:-- "Guiltless men who danced away their time, Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime. " And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where "mighty visions of theDanish race" watch round Charles sheltered in Stonehenge after the battleof Worcester. These passages might have been written by the Dryden whomwe learn to know fifteen years later. They have the advantage that hewrote them to please himself. His contemporary, Dr. Heylin, said ofFrench cooks, that "their trade was not to feed the belly, but thepalate. " Dryden was a great while in learning this secret, as availablein good writing as in cookery. He strove after it, but his thoroughlyEnglish nature, to the last, would too easily content itself with servingup the honest beef of his thought, without regard to daintiness of flavorin the dressing of it. [15] Of the best English poetry, it might be saidthat it is understanding aërated by imagination. In Dryden the solid parttoo often refused to mix kindly with the leaven, either remaining lumpishor rising to a hasty puffiness. Grace and lightness were with him muchmore a laborious achievement than a natural gift, and it is all the moreremarkable that he should so often have attained to what seems such aneasy perfection in both. Always a hasty writer, [16] he was long informing his style, and to the last was apt to snatch the readiest wordrather than wait for the fittest. He was not wholly and unconsciouslypoet, but a thinker who sometimes lost himself on enchanted ground andwas transfigured by its touch. This preponderance in him of the reasoningover the intuitive faculties, the one always there, the other flashing inwhen you least expect it, accounts for that inequality and evenincongruousness in his writing which makes one revise his judgment atevery tenth page. In his prose you come upon passages that persuade youhe is a poet, in spite of his verses so often turning state's evidenceagainst him as to convince you he is none. He is a prose-writer, with akind of Aeolian attachment. For example, take this bit of prose from thededication of his version of Virgil's Pastorals, 1694: "He found thestrength of his genius betimes, and was even in his youth preluding tohis Georgicks and his Aeneis. He could not forbear to try his wings, though his pinions were not hardened to maintain a long, laboriousflight; yet sometimes they bore him to a pitch as lofty as ever he wasable to reach afterwards. But when he was admonished by his subject todescend, he came down gently circling in the air and singing to theground, like a lark melodious in her mounting and continuing her songtill she alights, still preparing for a higher flight at her next sally, and tuning her voice to better music. " This is charming, and yet eventhis wants the ethereal tincture that pervades the style of JeremyTaylor, making it, as Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, "neither prosenor poetry, but something better than either. " Let us compare Taylor'streatment of the same image: "For so have I seen a lark rising from hisbed of grass and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to getto heaven and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten backby the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregularand inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than itcould recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings, tillthe little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till thestorm was over, and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise andsing as if it had learned music and motion of an angel as he passedsometimes through the air about his ministries here below. " Taylor'sfault is that his sentences too often smell of the library, but what anopen air is here! How unpremeditated it all seems! How carelessly heknots each new thought, as it comes, to the one before it with an _and_, like a girl making lace! And what a slidingly musical use he makes of thesibilants with which our language is unjustly taxed by those who can onlymake them hiss, not sing! There are twelve of them in the first twentywords, fifteen of which are monsyllables. We notice the structure ofDryden's periods, but this grows up as we read. It gushes, like the songof the bird itself, -- "In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. " Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad prose from one of his poems. Iopen the "Annus Mirabilis" at random, and hit upon this:-- 'Our little fleet was now engaged so far, That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought. The combat only seemed a civil war, Till through their bowels we our passage wrought. ' Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those Toms who made him saythat "dulness was fatal to the name of Tom"? The natural history ofGoldsmith in the verse of Pye! His thoughts did not "voluntary moveharmonious numbers. " He had his choice between prose and verse, and seemsto be poetical on second thought. I do not speak without book. He wasmore than half conscious of it himself. In the same letter to Mrs. Steward, just cited, he says, "I am still drudging on, always a poet andnever a good one"; and this from no mock-modesty, for he is alwayshandsomely frank in telling us whatever of his own doing pleased him. This was written in the last year of his life, and at about the same timehe says elsewhere: "What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes, and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me that myonly difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse or togive them the other harmony of prose; I have so long studied andpractised both, that they are grown into a habit and become familiar tome. "[17] I think that a man who was primarily a poet would hardly havefelt this equanimity of choice. I find a confirmation of this feeling about Dryden in his early literaryloves. His taste was not an instinct, but the slow result of reflectionand of the manfulness with which he always acknowledged to himself hisown mistakes. In this latter respect few men deal so magnanimously withthemselves as he, and accordingly few have been so happily inconsistent. _Ancora imparo_ might have served him for a motto as well as MichaelAngelo. His prefaces are a complete log of his life, and the habit ofwriting them was a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with apen in his hand, which, according to Goethe, "if it do no other good, keeps the mind from staggering about. " In these prefaces we see his tastegradually rising from Du Bartas to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, fromCorneille to Shakespeare. "I remember when I was a boy, " he says in hisdedication of the "Spanish Friar, " 1681, "I thought inimitable Spenser amean poet in comparison of Sylvester's _Du Bartas_, and was rapt into anecstasy when I read these lines:-- 'Now when the winter's keener breath began To crystallize the Baltic ocean, To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, And periwig with snow[18] the baldpate woods. ' I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian. " Swift, in his"Tale of a Tub, " has a ludicrous passage in this style: "Look on thisglobe of earth, you will find it to be a very complete and fashionabledress. What is that which some call _land_, but a fine coat faced withgreen? or the _sea_, but a waistcoat of water-tabby? Proceed to theparticular works of creation, you will find how curious journeyman Naturehas been to trim up the vegetable _beaux_; observe how _sparkish aperiwig adorns the head of a beech_, and what a fine doublet of whitesatin is worn by the birch. " The fault is not in any inaptness of theimages, nor in the mere vulgarity of the things themselves, but in thatof the associations they awaken. The "prithee, undo this button" of Lear, coming where it does and expressing what it does, is one of those touchesof the pathetically sublime, of which only Shakespeare ever knew thesecret. Herrick, too, has a charming poem on "Julia's petticoat, " thecharm being that he lifts the familiar and the low to the region ofsentiment. In the passage from Sylvester, it is precisely the reverse, and the wig takes as much from the sentiment as it adds to a LordChancellor. So Pope's proverbial verse, "True wit is Nature to advantage drest, " unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands of a lady's-maid. [19] Wehave no word in English that will exactly define this want of proprietyin diction. _Vulgar_ is too strong, and _commonplace_ too weak. Perhaps_bourgeois_ comes as near as any. It is to be noticed that Dryden doesnot unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, but qualifies it with an"if I am not much mistaken. " Indeed, though his judgment in substantials, like that of Johnson, is always worth having, his taste, the negativehalf of genius, never altogether refined itself from a colloquialfamiliarity, which is one of the charms of his prose, and gives that airof easy strength in which his satire is unmatched. In his "Royal Martyr"(1669), the tyrant Maximin says to the gods:-- "Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies, And I'll keep back my flame and sacrifice; _Your trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand, And all your goods lie dead upon your hand, _"-- a passage which has as many faults as only Dryden was capable ofcommitting, even to a false idiom forced by the last rhyme. The sametyrant in dying exclaims:-- "And after thee I'll go, Revenging still, and following e'en to th' other world my blow, And, _shoving back this earth on which I sit, I'll mount and scatter all the gods I hit. _" In the "Conquest of Grenada" (1670), we have:-- "This little loss in our vast body shews So small, that half _have never heard the news; Fame's out of breath e'er she can fly so far To tell 'em all that you have e'er made war_. "[20] And in the same play, "That busy thing, _The soul, is packing up_, and just on wing Like parting swallows when they seek the spring, " where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates that inequality (poetryon a prose background) which so often puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitelyworse is the speech of Almanzor to his mother's ghost:-- "I'll rush into the covert of the night And pull thee backward by the shroud to light, Or else I'll squeeze thee like a bladder there, And make thee groan thyself away to air. " What wonder that Dryden should have been substituted for Davenant as thebutt of the "Rehearsal, " and that the parody should have had such a run?And yet it was Dryden who, in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happyphrase of "boisterous metaphors";[21] it was Dryden who said of Cowley, whom he elsewhere calls "the darling of my youth, "[22] that he was "sunkin reputation because he could never forgive any conceit which came inhis way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small. "[23] But thepassages I have thus far cited as specimens of our poet's coarseness (forpoet he surely was _intus_, though not always _in cute_) were writtenbefore he was forty, and he had an odd notion, suitable to his healthycomplexion, that poets on the whole improve after that date. Man atforty, he says, "seems to be fully in his summer tropic, . .. And Ibelieve that it will hold in all great poets that, though they wrotebefore with a certain heat of genius which inspired them, yet that heatwas not perfectly digested. "[24] But artificial heat is never to bedigested at all, as is plain in Dryden's case. He was a man who warmedslowly, and, in his hurry to supply the market, forced his mind. Theresult was the same after forty as before. In "Oedipus" (1679) we find, "Not one bolt Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more, _New-moulded thunder of a larger size!_" This play was written in conjunction with Lee, of whom Dryden relates[25]that, when some one said to him, "It is easy enough to write like amadman, " he replied, "No, it is hard to write like a madman, but easyenough to write like a fool, "--perhaps the most compendious lecture onpoetry ever delivered. The splendid bit of eloquence, which has so muchthe sheet-iron clang of impeachment thunder (I hope that Dryden is not inthe Library of Congress!) is perhaps Lee's. The following passage almostcertainly is his:-- "Sure 'tis the end of all things! Fate has torn The lock of Time off, and his head is now The ghastly ball of round Eternity!" But the next, in which the soul is likened to the pocket of an indignanthousemaid charged with theft, is wholly in Dryden's manner:-- "No; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward, And shake my soul quite empty in your sight. " In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) say that he is asmuch astonished as "drowsy mortals" at the last trump, "When, called in haste, _they fumble for their limbs_, " and propose to take upon himself the whole of a crime shared with anotherby asking Heaven _to charge the bill_ on him. And in "King Arthur, "written ten years after the Preface from which I have quoted hisconfession about Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind hecondemned:-- "Ah for the many souls as but this morn Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood, But naked now, or _shirted_ but with air. " Dryden too often violated his own admirable rule, that "an author is notto write all he can, but only all he ought. "[26] In his worst images, however, there is often a vividness that half excuses them. But it is agrotesque vividness, as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flashinto sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where the imaginations of poetand reader leap toward each other and meet half-way. English prose is indebted to Dryden for having freed it from the cloisterof pedantry. He, more than any other single writer, contributed, as wellby precept as example, to give it suppleness of movement and the easierair of the modern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial phrases, has that familiar dignity, so hard to attain, perhaps unattainable exceptby one who, like Dryden, feels that his position is assured. CharlesCotton is as easy, but not so elegant; Walton as familiar, but not soflowing; Swift as idiomatic, but not so elevated; Burke more splendid, but not so equally luminous. That his style was no easy acquisition(though, of course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells us. In hisdedication of "Troilus and Cressida" (1679), where he seems to hint atthe erection of an Academy, he says that "the perfect knowledge of atongue was never attained by any single person. The Court, the College, and the Town must all be joined in it. And as our English is acomposition of the dead and living tongues, there is required a perfectknowledge, not only of the Greek and Latin, but of the Old German, French, and Italian, and to help all these, a conversation with thoseauthors of our own who have written with the fewest faults in prose andverse. But how barbarously we yet write and speak your Lordship knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English. [27] For I am often putto a stand in considering whether what I write be the idiom of thetongue, or false grammar and nonsense couched beneath that specious nameof _Anglicism_, and have no other way to clear my doubts but bytranslating my English into Latin, and thereby trying what sense thewords will bear in a more stable language. " _Tantae molis erat_. Fiveyears later: "The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known tofew; it is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise themwithout the help of a liberal education, long reading and digesting ofthose few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men andmanners, _the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best companyof both sexes_, and, in short, without wearing off the rust which hecontracted while he was laying in a stock of learning. " In the passage Ihave italicized, it will be seen that Dryden lays some stress upon theinfluence of women in refining language. Swift, also, in his plan for anAcademy, says: "Now, though I would by no means give the ladies thetrouble of advising us in the reformation of our language, yet I cannothelp thinking that, since they have been left out of all meetings exceptparties at play, or where worse designs are carried on, our conversationhas very much degenerated. "[28] Swift affirms that the language had growncorrupt since the Restoration, and that "the Court, which used to be thestandard of propriety and correctness of speech, was then, and, I think, has ever since continued, the worst school in England. "[29] He lays theblame partly on the general licentiousness, partly upon the Frencheducation of many of Charles's courtiers, and partly on the poets. Drydenundoubtedly formed his diction by the usage of the Court. The age was avery free-and-easy, not to say a very coarse one. Its coarseness was notexternal, like that of Elizabeth's day, but the outward mark of an inwarddepravity. What Swift's notion of the refinement of women was may bejudged by his anecdotes of Stella. I will not say that Dryden's prose didnot gain by the conversational elasticity which his frequenting men andwomen of the world enabled him to give it. It is the best specimen ofevery-day style that we have. But the habitual dwelling of his mind in acommonplace atmosphere, and among those easy levels of sentiment whichbefitted Will's Coffee-house and the Bird-cage Walk, was a damage to hispoetry. Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesomefor the character. He cannot always distinguish between enthusiasm andextravagance when he sees them. But apart from these influences which Ihave adduced in exculpation, there was certainly a vein of coarseness inhim, a want of that exquisite sensitiveness which is the conscience ofthe artist. An old gentleman, writing to the Gentleman's Magazine in1745, professes to remember "plain John Dryden (before he paid his courtwith success to the great) in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. Ihave eat tarts at the Mulberry Garden with him and Madam Reeve, when ourauthor advanced to a sword and Chadreux wig. "[30] I always fancy Drydenin the drugget, with wig, lace ruffles, and sword superimposed. It is thetype of this curiously incongruous man. The first poem by which Dryden won a general acknowledgment of his powerwas the "Annus Mirabilis, " written in his thirty-seventh year. Pepys, himself not altogether a bad judge, doubtless expresses the commonopinion when he says: "I am very well pleased this night with reading apoem I brought home with me last night from Westminster Hall, ofDryden's, upon the present war; a very good poem. "[31] And a very goodpoem, in some sort, it continues to be, in spite of its amazingblemishes. We must always bear in mind that Dryden lived in an age thatsupplied him with no ready-made inspiration, and that big phrases andimages are apt to be pressed into the service when great ones do notvolunteer. With this poem begins the long series of Dryden's prefaces, ofwhich Swift made such excellent, though malicious, fun that I cannotforbear to quote it. "I do utterly disapprove and declare against thatpernicious custom of making the _preface_ a bill of fare to the book. ForI have always looked upon it as a high point of indiscretion inmonster-mongers and other retailers of strange sights to hang out a fairpicture over the door, drawn after the life, with a most eloquentdescription underneath; this has saved me many a threepence. .. . Such isexactly the fate at this time of _prefaces_. .. . This expedient wasadmirable at first; our great Dryden has long carried it as far as itwould go, and with incredible success. He has often said to me inconfidence, 'that the world would never have suspected him to be so greata poet, if he had not assured them so frequently, in his prefaces, thatit was impossible they could either doubt or forget it. ' Perhaps it maybe so; however, I much fear his instructions have edified out of theirplace, and taught men to grow wiser in certain points where he neverintended they should. "[32] The _monster-mongers_ is a terrible thrust, when we remember some of the comedies and heroic plays which Drydenushered in this fashion. In the dedication of the "Annus" to the city ofLondon is one of those pithy sentences of which Dryden is ever afterwardsso full, and which he lets fall with a carelessness that seems always todeepen the meaning: "I have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons whohave ended unfortunately, but never of any virtuous nation; Providence isengaged too deeply when the cause becomes so general. " In his "account"of the poem in a letter to Sir Robert Howard he says: "I have chosen towrite my poem in quatrains or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, becauseI have ever judged them more noble and of greater dignity, both for thesound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us. .. . The learnedlanguages have certainly a great advantage of us in not being tied to theslavery of any rhyme. .. . But in this necessity of our rhymes, I havealways found the couplet verse most easy, though not so proper for thisoccasion; for there the work is sooner at an end, every two linesconcluding the labor of the poet. " A little further on: "They [theFrench] write in alexandrines, or verses of six feet, such as amongst usis the old translation of Homer by Chapman: all which, by lengtheningtheir chain, [33] makes the sphere of their activity the greater. " I havequoted these passages because, in a small compass, they include severalthings characteristic of Dryden. "I have ever judged, " and "I have alwaysfound, " are particularly so. If he took up an opinion in the morning, hewould have found so many arguments for it before night that it would seemalready old and familiar. So with his reproach of rhyme; a year or twobefore he was eagerly defending it;[34] again a few years, and he willutterly condemn and drop it in his plays, while retaining it in histranslations; afterwards his study of Milton leads him to think thatblank verse would suit the epic style better, and he proposes to try itwith Homer, but at last translates one book as a specimen, and behold, itis in rhyme! But the charm of this great advocate is, that, whatever sidehe was on, he could always find excellent reasons for it, and state themwith great force, and abundance of happy illustration. He is an exceptionto the proverb, and is none the worse pleader than he is always pleadinghis own cause. The blunder about Chapman is of a kind into which hishasty temperament often betrayed him. He remembered that Chapman's"Iliad" was in a long measure, concluded without looking that it wasalexandrine, and then attributes it generally to his "Homer. " Chapman's"Iliad" is done in fourteen-syllable verse, and his "Odyssee" in the verymetre that Dryden himself used in his own version, [35] I remark also whathe says of the couplet, that it was easy because the second verseconcludes the labor of the poet. And yet it was Dryden who found it hardfor that very reason. His vehement abundance refused those narrow banks, first running over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, risingto an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I have little doubt thatit was the roominess, rather than the dignity, of the quatrain which ledhim to choose it. As apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere saysof octosyllabic verse: "The thought can turn itself with greater ease ina larger compass. When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightensthe expression: we are thinking of the close, when we should be employedin adorning the thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in a spacetoo narrow for his imagination. "[36] Dryden himself, as was not always the case with him, was well satisfiedwith his work. He calls it his best hitherto, and attributes his successto the excellence of his subject, "incomparably the best he had ever had, _excepting only the Royal Family_. " The first part is devoted to theDutch war; the last to the fire of London. The martial half is infinitelythe better of the two. He altogether surpasses his model, Davenant. Ifhis poem lack the gravity of thought attained by a few stanzas of"Gondibert, " it is vastly superior in life, in picturesqueness, in theenergy of single lines, and, above all, in imagination. Few men have read"Gondibert, " and almost every one speaks of it, as commonly of the dead, with a certain subdued respect. And it deserves respect as an honesteffort to bring poetry back to its highest office in the ideal treatmentof life. Davenant emulated Spenser, and if his poem had been as good ashis preface, it could still be read in another spirit than that ofinvestigation. As it is, it always reminds me of Goldsmith's famousverse. It is remote, unfriendly, solitary, and, above all, slow. Itsshining passages, for there are such, remind one of distress-rockets sentup at intervals from a ship just about to founder, and sadden rather thancheer. [37] The first part of the "Annus Mirabilis" is by no means clear of the falsetaste of the time, [38] though it has some of Dryden's manliest verses andhappiest comparisons, always his two distinguishing merits. Here, asalmost everywhere else in Dryden, measuring him merely as poet, we recallwhat he, with pathetic pride, says of himself in the prologue to"Aurengzebe":-- "Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast, The first of this, the hindmost of the last. " What can be worse than what he says of comets?-- "Whether they unctuous exhalations are Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone, Or each some more remote and slippery star Which loses footing when to mortals shown. " Or than this, of the destruction of the Dutch India ships?-- "Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, And now their odors armed against them fly; Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die. " Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shakespeare, but here at least waspoetry! This is one of the quatrains which he pronounces "worthy of ourauthor. "[39] But Dryden himself has said that "a man who is resolved to praise anauthor with any appearance of justice must be sure to take him on thestrongest side, and where he is least liable to exceptions. " This is truealso of one who wishes to measure an author fairly, for the higher wisdomof criticism lies in the capacity to admire. Leser, wie gefall ich dir? Leser, wie gefällst du mir? are both fair questions, the answer to the first being more ofteninvolved in that to the second than is sometimes thought. The poet inDryden was never more fully revealed than in such verses as these:-- "And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove, [40] Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand"; "Silent in smoke of cannon they come on"; "And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men"; "The vigorous seaman every port-hole plies, And adds his heart to every gun he fires"; "And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well, Whom Rupert led, and who were British born. " This is masculine writing, and yet it must be said that there is scarcelya quatrain in which the rhyme does not trip him into a platitude, andthere are too many swaggering with that _expression forte d'un sentimentfaible_ which Voltaire condemns in Corneille, --a temptation to whichDryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are passages higher inkind than any I have cited, because they show imagination. Such are theverses in which he describes the dreams of the disheartened enemy:-- "In dreams they fearful precipices tread, Or, shipwrecked, labor to some distant shore, Or in dark churches walk among the dead"; and those in which he recalls glorious memories, and sees where "The mighty ghosts of our great Harries rose, And armëd Edwards looked with anxious eyes. " A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative one in which he makes thespider, "from the silent ambush of his den, " "feel far off the tremblingof his thread, " show that he was beginning to study the niceties ofverse, instead of trusting wholly to what he would have called hisnatural _fougue_. On the whole, this part of the poem is very good warpoetry, as war poetry goes (for there is but one first-rate poem of thekind in English, --short, national, eager as if the writer were personallyengaged, with the rapid metre of a drum beating the charge, --and that isDrayton's "Battle of Agincourt"), [41] but it shows more study of Lucanthan of Virgil, and for a long time yet we shall find Dryden bewilderedby bad models. He is always imitating--no, that is not the word, alwaysemulating--somebody in his more strictly poetical attempts, for in thatdirection he always needed some external impulse to set his mind inmotion. This is more or less true of all authors; nor does it detractfrom their originality, which depends wholly on their being able so farto forget themselves as to let something of themselves slip into whatthey write. [42] Of absolute originality we will not speak till authorsare raised by some Deucalion-and-Pyrrha process; and even then our faithwould be small, for writers who have no past are pretty sure of having nofuture. Dryden, at any rate, always had to have his copy set him at thetop of the page, and wrote ill or well accordingly. His mind (somewhatsolid for a poet) warmed slowly, but, once fairly heated through, he hadmore of that good-luck of self-oblivion than most men. He certainly gaveeven a liberal interpretation to Molière's rule of taking his ownproperty wherever he found it, though he sometimes blundered awkwardlyabout what was properly _his_; but in literature, it should beremembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thusmakes it his own. [43] Mr. Savage Landor once told me that he said to Wordsworth: "Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix poetry with prose as much as he pleases, and itwill only elevate and enliven; but the moment he mixes a particle ofprose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole. " Wordsworth, he added, never forgave him. The always hasty Dryden, as I think I have alreadysaid, was liable, like a careless apothecary's 'prentice, to make thesame confusion of ingredients, especially in the more mischievous way. Icannot leave the "Annus Mirabilis" without giving an example of this. Describing the Dutch prizes, rather like an auctioneer than a poet, hesays that "Some English wool, vexed in a Belgian loom, And into cloth of spongy softness made, Did into France or colder Denmark doom, To ruin with worse ware our staple trade. " One might fancy this written by the secretary of a board of trade in anunguarded moment; but we should remember that the poem is dedicated tothe city of London. The depreciation of the rival fabrics is exquisite;and Dryden, the most English of our poets, would not be so thoroughlyEnglish if he had not in him some fibre of _la nation boutiquière_. Letus now see how he succeeds in attempting to infuse science (the mostobstinately prosy material) with poetry. Speaking of "a more exactknowledge of the longitudes, " as he explains in a note, he tells us that, "Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go, And view the ocean leaning on the sky; From thence our rolling neighbors we shall know, And on the lunar world securely pry. " Dr. Johnson confesses that he does not understand this. Why should he, when it is plain that Dryden was wholly in the dark himself! Tounderstand it is none of my business, but I confess that it interests meas an Americanism. We have hitherto been credited as the inventors of the"jumping-off place" at the extreme western verge of the world. But Drydenwas beforehand with us. Though he doubtless knew that the earth was asphere (and perhaps that it was flattened at the poles), it was always aflat surface in his fancy. In his "Amphitryon, " he makes Alcmena say:-- "No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth, And leap the precipice to 'scape thy sight. " And in his "Spanish Friar, " Lorenzo says to Elvira that they "will traveltogether to the ridge of the world, and then drop together into thenext. " It is idle for us poor Yankees to hope that we can inventanything. To say sooth, if Dryden had left nothing behind him but the"Annus Mirabilis, " he might have served as a type of the kind of poetAmerica would have produced by the biggest-river-and-tallest-mountainrecipe, --longitude and latitude in plenty, with marks of culturescattered here and there like the _carets_ on a proof-sheet. It is now time to say something of Dryden as a dramatist. In thethirty-two years between 1662 and 1694 he produced twenty-five plays, andassisted Lee in two. I have hinted that it took Dryden longer than mostmen to find the true bent of his genius. On a superficial view, he mightalmost seem to confirm that theory, maintained by Johnson, among others, that genius was nothing more than great intellectual power exercisedpersistently in some particular direction which chance decided, so thatit lay in circumstance merely whether a man should turn out a Shakespeareor a Newton. But when we come to compare what he wrote, regardless ofMinerva's averted face, with the spontaneous production of his happiermuse, we shall be inclined to think his example one of the strongestcases against the theory in question. He began his dramatic career, asusual, by rowing against the strong current of his nature, and pulledonly the more doggedly the more he felt himself swept down the stream. His first attempt was at comedy, and, though his earliest piece of thatkind (the "Wild Gallant, " 1663) utterly failed, he wrote eight othersafterwards. On the 23d February, 1663, Pepys writes in his diary: "ToCourt, and there saw the 'Wild Gallant' performed by the king's house;but it was ill acted, and the play so poor a thing as I never saw in mylife almost, and so little answering the name, that, from the beginningto the end, I could not, nor can at this time, tell certainly which wasthe Wild Gallant. The king did not seem pleased at all the whole play, nor anybody else. " After some alteration, it was revived with moresuccess. On its publication in 1669 Dryden honestly admitted its formerfailure, though with a kind of salvo for his self-love. "I made the townmy judges, and the greater part condemned it. After which I do not thinkit my concernment to defend it with the ordinary zeal of a poet for hisdecried poem, though Corneille is more resolute in his preface before'Pertharite, '[44] which was condemned more universally than this. .. . Yetit was received at Court, and was more than once the divertisement of hisMajesty, by his own command. " Pepys lets us amusingly behind the scenesin the matter of his Majesty's divertisement. Dryden does not seem to seethat in the condemnation of something meant to amuse the public there canbe no question of degree. To fail at all is to fail utterly. "_Tous les genres sont permis, hors le genre ennuyeux. _" In the reading, at least, all Dryden's comic writing for the stage mustbe ranked with the latter class. He himself would fain make an exceptionof the "Spanish Friar, " but I confess that I rather wonder at than envythose who can be amused by it. His comedies lack everything that a comedyshould have, --lightness, quickness of transition, unexpectedness ofincident, easy cleverness of dialogue, and humorous contrast of characterbrought out by identity of situation. The comic parts of the "MaidenQueen" seem to me Dryden's best, but the merit even of these isShakespeare's, and there is little choice where even the best is onlytolerable. The common quality, however, of all Dryden's comedies is theirnastiness, the more remarkable because we have ample evidence that he wasa man of modest conversation. Pepys, who was by no means squeamish (forhe found "Sir Martin Marall" "the most entire piece of mirth . .. Thatcertainly ever was writ . .. Very good wit therein, not fooling"), writesin his diary of the 19th June, 1668: "My wife and Deb to the king'splay-house to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw the new play'Evening Love, ' of Dryden's, which, though the world commends, she likesnot. " The next day he saw it himself, "and do not like it, it being verysmutty, and nothing so good as the 'Maiden Queen' or the 'Indian Emperor'of Dryden's making. _I was troubled at it_. " On the 22d he adds: "Callingthis day at Herringman's, [45] he tells me Dryden do himself call it but afifth-rate play. " This was no doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in hispreface to the play says, "I confess I have given [yielded] too much tothe people in it, and am ashamed for them as well as for myself, that Ihave pleased them at so cheap a rate, " he takes care to add, "not thatthere is anything here that I would not defend to an ill-natured judge. "The plot was from Calderon, and the author, rebutting the charge ofplagiarism, tells us that the king ("without whose command they should nolonger be troubled with anything of mine") had already answered for himby saying, "that he only desired that they who accused me of theft wouldalways steal him plays like mine. " Of the morals of the play he has not aword, nor do I believe that he was conscious of any harm in them till hewas attacked by Collier, and then, (with some protest against what heconsiders the undue severity of his censor) he had the manliness toconfess that he had done wrong. "It becomes me not to draw my pen in thedefence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a goodone. "[46] And in a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. Thomas, written onlya few weeks before his death, warning her against the example of Mrs. Behn, he says, with remorseful sincerity: "I confess I am the last man inthe world who ought in justice to arraign her, who have been myself toomuch a libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well contented Ihad time either to purge or to see them fairly burned. " Congreve was lesspatient, and even Dryden, in the last epilogue he ever wrote, attempts anexcuse:-- "Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far, When with our Theatres he waged a war; He tells you that this very moral age Received the first infection from the Stage, But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught, The seeds of open vice returning brought. * * * * * Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed, Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine, The strumpet was adored with rites divine. * * * * * The poets, who must live by courts or starve, Were proud so good a Government to serve, And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane, Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain. " Dryden least of all men should have stooped to this palliation, for hehad, not without justice, said of himself "The same parts and applicationwhich have made me a poet might have raised me to any honors of thegown. " Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, nor starved. Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the Comedy of the Restoration as"the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry, " where there was nopretence of representing a real world. [47] But this was certainly not so. Dryden again and again boasts of the superior advantage which his age hadover that of the elder dramatists, in painting polite life, andattributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse between the poets andthe frequenters of the Court. [48] We shall be less surprised at the_kind_ of refinement upon which Dryden congratulated himself, when welearn (from the dedication of "Marriage à la Mode") that the Earl ofRochester was its exemplar: "The best comic writers of our age will joinwith me to acknowledge that they have copied the gallantries of courts, the delicacy of expression, and the decencies of behavior from yourLordship. " In judging Dryden, it should be borne in mind that for someyears he was under contract to deliver three plays a year, a kind of bondto which no man should subject his brain who has a decent respect for thequality of its products. We should remember, too, that in his day_manners_ meant what we call _morals_, that custom always makes a largerpart of virtue among average men than they are quite aware, and that thereaction from an outward conformity which had no root in inward faith mayfor a time have given to the frank expression of laxity an air of honestythat made it seem almost refreshing. There is no such hotbed for excessof license as excess of restraint, and the arrogant fanaticism of asingle virtue is apt to make men suspicious of tyranny in all the rest. But the riot of emancipation could not last long, for the more tolerantsociety is of private vice, the more exacting will it be of publicdecorum, that excellent thing, so often the plausible substitute forthings more excellent. By 1678 the public mind had so far recovered itstone that Dryden's comedy of "Limberham" was barely tolerated for threenights. I will let the man who looked at human nature from more sides, and therefore judged it more gently than any other, give the only excusepossible for Dryden:-- "Men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them To suffer all alike. " Dryden's own apology only makes matters worse for him by showing that hecommitted his offences with his eyes wide open, and that he wrotecomedies so wholly in despite of nature as never to deviate into thecomic. Failing as clown, he did not scruple to take on himself the officeof Chiffinch to the palled appetite of the public. "For I confess mychief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humourof this be for low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force mygenius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in verse. Iknow I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy; I want that gayety ofhumour which is requisite to it. My conversation is slow and dull, myhumour saturnine and reserved: In short, I am none of those who endeavourto break jests in company or make repartees. So that those who decrymy comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit: Reputationin them is the last thing to which I shall pretend. "[49] For my own part, though I have been forced to hold my nose in picking my way through theseordures of Dryden, I am free to say that I think them far less morallymischievous than that _corps-de-ballet_ literature in which the mostanimal of the passions is made more temptingly naked by a veil of Frenchgauze. Nor does Dryden's lewdness leave such a reek in the mind as thefilthy cynicism of Swift, who delighted to uncover the nakedness of ourcommon mother. It is pleasant to follow Dryden into the more congenial region of heroicplays, though here also we find him making a false start. Anxious toplease the king, [50] and so able a reasoner as to convince even himselfof the justice of whatever cause he argued, he not only wrote tragediesin the French style, but defended his practice in an essay which is byfar the most delightful reproduction of the classic dialogue ever writtenin English. Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sidley), Crites (Sir E. Howard), and Neander (Dryden) are the four partakers inthe debate. The comparative merits of ancients and moderns, of theShakespearian and contemporary drama, of rhyme and blank verse, the valueof the three (supposed) Aristotelian unities, are the main topicsdiscussed. The tone of the discussion is admirable, midway betweenbookishness and talk, and the fairness with which each side of theargument is treated shows the breadth of Dryden's mind perhaps betterthan any other one piece of his writing. There are no men of straw set upto be knocked down again, as there commonly are in debates conducted uponthis plan. The "Defence" of the Essay is to be taken as a supplement toNeander's share in it, as well as many scattered passages in subsequentprefaces and dedications. All the interlocutors agree that "the sweetnessof English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers, " andthat "our poesy is much improved by the happiness of some writers yetliving, who first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy andsignificant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and tomake our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should nevermislead the sense, but itself be led and governed by it. " In anotherplace he shows that by "living writers" he meant Waller and Denham. "Rhyme has all the advantages of prose besides its own. But theexcellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr. Wallertaught it: he first made writing easily an art; first showed us toconclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which in the verse beforehim runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breathto overtake it. "[51] Dryden afterwards changed his mind, and one of theexcellences of his own rhymed verse is, that his sense is too ample to beconcluded by the distich. Rhyme had been censured as unnatural indialogue; but Dryden replies that it is no more so than blank verse, since no man talks any kind of verse in real life. But the argument forrhyme is of another kind. "I am satisfied if it cause delight, fordelight is the chief if not the only end of poesy [he should have said_means_]; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesyonly instructs as it delights. .. . The converse, therefore, which a poetis to imitate must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments ofpoesy, and must be such as, strictly considered, could never be supposedspoken by any without premeditation. .. . Thus prose, though the rightfulprince, yet is by common consent deposed as too weak for the governmentof serious plays, and, he failing, there now start up two competitors;one the nearer in blood, which is blank verse; the other more fit for theends of government, which is rhyme. Blank verse is, indeed, the nearerprose, but he is blemished with the weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme(for I will deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in him; but he isbrave and generous, and his dominion pleasing. "[52] To the objection thatthe difficulties of rhyme will lead to circumlocution, he answers insubstance, that a good poet will know how to avoid them. It is curious how long the superstition that Waller was the refiner ofEnglish verse has prevailed since Dryden first gave it vogue. He was avery poor poet and a purely mechanical versifier. He has lived mainly onthe credit of a single couplet, "The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed. Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made, " in which the melody alone belongs to him, and the conceit, such as it is, to Samuel Daniel, who said, long before, that the body's "Walls, grown thin, permit the mind To look out thorough and his frailty find. " Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the transfusion. It might seemthat Ben Jonson had a prophetic foreboding of him when he wrote: "Othersthere are that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning andrhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides and only makes asound. Women's poets they are called, as you have women's tailors. They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream. You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with yourmiddle-finger. "[53] It seems to have been taken for granted by Waller, asafterwards by Dryden, that our elder poets bestowed no thought upon theirverse. "Waller was smooth, " but unhappily he was also flat, and hisimportation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of thought-coopdid nothing but mischief. [54] He never compassed even a smoothnessapproaching this description of a nightingale's song by a third-rate poetof the earlier school, -- "Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note Through the sleek passage of her open throat, A clear, unwrinkled song, "-- one of whose beauties is its running over into the third verse. Thosepoets indeed "Felt music's pulse in all her arteries "; and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, that blank versewas not so easy a thing as he at first conceived it, nay, that it is themost difficult of all verse, and that it must make up in harmony, byvariety of pause and modulation, for what it loses in the melody ofrhyme. In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he butrediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymedpentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistakingmetre for rhythm. Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently lamented theawkwardness of movement imposed upon the French dramatists by the gyvesof rhyme. But he considers the necessity of overcoming this obstacle, onthe whole, an advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and superior muse. Howdid Dryden, who says nearly the same thing, succeed in his attempt at theFrench manner? He fell into every one of its vices, without attainingmuch of what constitutes its excellence. From the nature of the language, all French poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all thatkeeps out decay. The length of their dramatic verse forces the Frenchinto much tautology, into bombast in its original meaning, the stuffingout a thought with words till it fills the line. The rigid system oftheir rhyme, which makes it much harder to manage than in English, hasaccustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would shock them inprose. For example, in the "Cinna" of Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says to Augustus, -- "Ces flammes dans nos coeurs dès longtemps étoient nées, Et ce sont des secrets de plus de quatre années. " I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely prosaic surplusageexacted by the rhyme, nor of the jingling together of _ces, dès, étoient, nées, des, _ and _secrets_, but I confess that _nées_ does not seem to bethe epithet that Corneille would have chosen for _flammes_, if he couldhave had his own way, and that flames would seem of all things thehardest to keep secret. But in revising, Corneille changed the firstverse thus, -- "Ces flammes dans nos coeurs _sans votre ordre_ étoient nées. " Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order? Yet Voltaire, onhis guard against these rhyming pitfalls for the sense, does not noticethis in his minute comments on this play. Of extravagant metaphor, theresult of this same making sound the file-leader of sense, a singleexample from "Heraclius" shall suffice:-- "La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre Que Dieu tient déja prête à le reduire en poudre. " One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Apollo except in a full-bottomedperiwig, and the tragic style of their poets is always showing thedisastrous influence of that portentous comet. It is the _style perruque_in another than the French meaning of the phrase, and the skill lay indressing it majestically, so that, as Cibber says, "upon the head of aman of sense, _if it became him_, it could never fail of drawing to him amore partial regard and benevolence than could possibly be hoped for inan ill-made one. " It did not become Dryden, and he left it off. [55] Like his own Zimri, Dryden was "all for" this or that fancy, till he tookup with another. But even while he was writing on French models, hisjudgment could not be blinded to their defects. "Look upon the 'Cinna'and the 'Pompey, ' they are not so properly to be called plays as longdiscourses of reason of State, and 'Polieucte' in matters of religion isas solemn as the long stops upon our organs; . .. Their actors speak bythe hour-glass like our parsons. .. . I deny not but this may suit wellenough with the French, for as we, who are a more sullen people, come tobe diverted at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come thither to make themselves more serious. "[56] With what an air ofinnocent unconsciousness the sarcasm is driven home! Again, while he wasstill slaving at these bricks without straw, he says: "The present Frenchpoets are generally accused that, wheresoever they lay the scene, or inwhatever age, the manners of their heroes are wholly French. Racine'sBajazet is bred at Constantinople, but his civilities are conveyed to himby some secret passage from Versailles into the Seraglio. " It is curiousthat Voltaire, speaking of the _Bérénice_ of Racine, praises a passage init for precisely what Dryden condemns: "Il semble qu'on entende_Henriette_ d'Angleterre elle-même parlant au marquis de _Vardes_. Lapolitesse de la cour de _Louis XIV_. , l'agrément de la langue Française, la douceur de la versification la plus naturelle, le sentiment le plustendre, tout se trouve dans ce peu de vers. " After Dryden had brokenaway from the heroic style, he speaks out more plainly. In the Prefaceto his "All for Love, " in reply to some cavils upon "little, and notessential decencies, " the decision about which he refers to a master ofceremonies, he goes on to say: "The French poets, I confess, are strictobservers of these punctilios; . .. In this nicety of manners does theexcellency of French poetry consist. Their heroes are the most civilpeople breathing, but their good breeding seldom extends to a word ofsense. All their wit is in their ceremony; they want the genius whichanimates our stage, and therefore 't is but necessary, when they cannotplease, that they should take care not to offend. .. . They are so carefulnot to exasperate a critic that they never leave him any work, . .. For nopart of a poem is worth our discommending where the whole is insipid, aswhen we have once tasted palled wine we stay not to examine it glass byglass. But while they affect to shine in trifles, they are often carelessin essentials. .. . For my part, I desire to be tried by the laws of my owncountry. " This is said in heat, but it is plain enough that his mind waswholly changed. In his discourse on epic poetry he is as decided, butmore temperate. He says that the French heroic verse "runs with moreactivity than strength. [57] Their language is not strung with sinews likeour English; it has the nimbleness of a greyhound, but not the bulk andbody of a mastiff. Our men and our verses overbear them by their weight, and _pondere, non numero_, is the British motto. The French have set uppurity for the standard of their language, and a masculine vigor is thatof ours. Like their tongue is the genius of their poets, --light andtrifling in comparison of the English. "[58] Dryden might have profited by an admirable saying of his own, that "theywho would combat general authority with particular opinion must firstestablish themselves a reputation of understanding better than othermen. " He understood the defects much better than the beauties of theFrench theatre. Lessing was even more one-sided in his judgment uponit. [59] Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied it carefully withoutlosing his temper, and tried to profit by its structural merits. Dryden, with his eyes wide open, copied its worst faults, especially itsdeclamatory sentiment. He should have known that certain things can neverbe transplanted, and that among these is a style of poetry whose greatexcellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the genius of thepeople among whom it came into being. But the truth is, that Dryden hadno aptitude whatever for the stage, and in writing for it he wasattempting to make a trade of his genius, --an arrangement from which thegenius always withdraws in disgust. It was easier to make loose thinkingand the bad writing which betrays it pass unobserved while the ear wasoccupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which they marched. Except in "All for Love, " "the only play, " he tells us, "which he wroteto please himself, "[60] there is no trace of real passion in any of histragedies. This, indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, butonly personages, in any except that. That is, in many respects, a nobleplay, and there are few finer scenes, whether in the conception or thecarrying out, than that between Antony and Ventidius in the firstact. [61] As usual, Dryden's good sense was not blind to the extravagances of hisdramatic style. In "Mac Flecknoe" he makes his own Maximin the type ofchildish rant, "And little Maximins the gods defy"; but, as usual also, he could give a plausible reason for his own mistakesby means of that most fallacious of all fallacies which is true so far asit goes. In his Prologue to the "Royal Martyr" he says:-- "And he who servilely creeps after sense Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence. * * * * * But, when a tyrant for his theme he had, He loosed the reins and let his muse run mad, And, though he stumbles in a full career, Yet rashness is a better fault than fear; * * * * * They then, who of each trip advantage take, Find out those faults which they want wit to make. " And in the Preface to the same play he tells us: "I have not everywhereobserved the equality of numbers in my verse, partly by reason of myhaste, but more especially because I _would not have my sense a slave tosyllables_. " Dryden, when he had not a bad case to argue, would have hadsmall respect for the wit whose skill lay in the making of faults, andhas himself, where his self-love was not engaged, admirably defined theboundary which divides boldness from rashness. What Quintilian says ofSeneca applies very aptly to Dryden: "Velles eum suo ingenio dixisse, alieno judicio. "[62] He was thinking of himself, I fancy, when he makesVentidius say of Antony, -- "He starts out wide And bounds into a vice that bears him far From his first course, and plunges him in ills; But, when his danger makes him find his fault, Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse, He censures eagerly his own misdeeds, Judging himself with malice to himself, And not forgiving what as man he did Because his other parts are more than man. " But bad though they nearly all are as wholes, his plays contain passageswhich only the great masters have surpassed, and to the level of which nosubsequent writer for the stage has ever risen. The necessity of rhymeoften forced him to a platitude, as where he says, -- "My love was blind to your deluding art, But blind men feel when stabbed so near the heart. "[63] But even in rhyme he not seldom justifies his claim to the title of"glorious John. " In the very play from which I have just quoted are theseverses in his best manner:-- "No, like his better Fortune I'll appear, With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair, Just flying forward from her rolling sphere. " His comparisons, as I have said, are almost always happy. This, from the"Indian Emperor, " is tenderly pathetic:-- "As callow birds, Whose mother's killed in seeking of the prey, Cry in their nest and think her long away, And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind, Gape for the food which they must never find. " And this, of the anger with which the Maiden Queen, striving to hide herjealousy, betrays her love, is vigorous:-- "Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame, Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came. " The following simile from the "Conquest of Grenada" is as well expressedas it is apt in conception:-- "I scarcely understand my own intent; But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought, That I am lost in my own web of thought. " In the "Rival Ladies, " Angelina, walking in the dark, describes hersensations naturally and strikingly:-- "No noise but what my footsteps make, and they Sound dreadfully and louder than by day: They double too, and every step I take Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make. " In all the rhymed plays[64] there are many passages which one is ratherinclined to like than sure he would be right in liking them. Thefollowing verses from "Aurengzebe" are of this sort:-- "My love was such it needed no return, Rich in itself, like elemental fire, Whose pureness does no aliment require. " This is Cowleyish, and _pureness_ is surely the wrong word; and yet it isbetter than mere commonplace. Perhaps what oftenest turns the balance inDryden's favor, when we are weighing his claims as a poet, is hispersistent capability of enthusiasm. To the last he kindles, andsometimes _almost_ flashes out that supernatural light which is thesupreme test of poetic genius. As he himself so finely andcharacteristically says in "Aurengzebe, " there was no period in his lifewhen it was not true of him that "He felt the inspiring heat, the absent god return. " The verses which follow are full of him, and, with the exception of thesingle word _underwent_, are in his luckiest manner:-- "One loose, one sally of a hero's soul, Does all the military art control. While timorous wit goes round, or fords the shore, He shoots the gulf, and is already o'er, And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent, Looks back amazed at what he underwent. "[65] Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from Dryden's pen as if unawares, whether in prose or verse. I string together a few at random:-- "The greatest argument for love is love. " "Few know the use of life before 't is past. " "Time gives himself and is not valued. " "Death in itself is nothing; but we fear To be we know not what, we know not where. " "Love either finds equality or makes it; Like death, he knows no difference in degrees. " "That's empire, that which I can give away. " "Yours is a soul irregularly great, Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat. " "Forgiveness to the injured does belong, But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong. " "Poor women's thoughts are all extempore. " "The cause of love can never be assigned, 'T is in no face, but in the lover's mind. "[66] "Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence, For Heaven can judge if penitence be true; But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples. " "Kings' titles commonly begin by force, Which time wears off and mellows into right. " "Fear's a large promiser; who subject live To that base passion, know not what they give. " "The secret pleasure of the generous act Is the great mind's great bribe. " "That bad thing, gold, buys all good things. " "Why, love does all that's noble here below. " "To prove religion true, If either wit or sufferings could suffice, All faiths afford the constant and the wise. " But Dryden, as he tells us himself, "Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme; Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound, And Nature flies him like enchanted ground. " The finest things in his plays were written in blank verse, as vernacularto him as the alexandrine to the French. In this he vindicates his claimas a poet. His diction gets wings, and both his verse and his thoughtbecome capable of a reach which was denied them when set in the stocks ofthe couplet. The solid man becomes even airy in this new-found freedom:Anthony says, "How I loved, Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours That _danced away with down upon your feet_. " And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, what movement morefadingly accordant with the sense, than in the last two verses of thefollowing passage? "I feel death rising higher still and higher, Within my bosom; every breath I fetch Shuts up my life within a shorter compass, _And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less And less each pulse, till it be lost in air_. "[67] Nor was he altogether without pathos, though it is rare with him. Thefollowing passage seems to me tenderly full of it:-- "Something like That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard; But floods of woe have hurried it far off Beyond my ken of soul. "[68] And this single verse from "Aurengzebe":-- "Live still! oh live! live even to be unkind!" with its passionate eagerness and sobbing repetition, is worth aship-load of the long-drawn treacle of modern self-compassion. Now and then, to be sure, we come upon something that makes us hesitateagain whether, after all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, asin the two passages that next follow:-- "He looks secure of death, superior greatness, Like Jove when he made Fate and said, Thou art The slave of my creation. "[69] "I'm pleased with my own work; Jove was not more With infant nature, when his spacious hand Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas, To give it the first push and see it roll Along the vast abyss. "[70] I should say that Dryden is more apt to dilate our fancy than ourthought, as great poets have the gift of doing. But if he have not thepotent alchemy that transmutes the lead of our commonplace associationsinto gold, as Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense isalways up to the sterling standard; and though he has not added so muchas some have done to the stock of bullion which others afterwards coinand put in circulation, there are few who have minted so many phrasesthat are still a part of our daily currency. The first line of thefollowing passage has been worn pretty smooth, but the succeeding onesare less familiar:-- "Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too and full as vain; And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room, Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing; But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind, Works all her folly up and casts it outward In the world's open view. "[71] The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the thought obtains gracefor it. I feel as if Shakespeare would have written _seeing_ for_viewing_, thus gaining the strength of repetition in one verse andavoiding the sameness of it in the other. Dryden, I suspect, was not muchgiven to correction, and indeed one of the great charms of his bestwriting is that everything seems struck off at a heat, as by a superiorman in the best mood of his talk. Where he rises, he generally becomesfervent rather than imaginative; his thought does not incorporate itselfin metaphor, as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and reinforces itselfin simile. Where he _is_ imaginative, it is in that lower sense which thepoverty of our language, for want of a better word, compels us to call_picturesque_, and even then he shows little of that finer instinct whichsuggests so much more than it tells, and works the more powerfully as ittaxes more the imagination of the reader. In Donne's "Relic" there is anexample of what I mean. He fancies some one breaking up his grave andspying "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, "-- a verse that still shines there in the darkness of the tomb, after twocenturies, like one of those inextinguishable lamps whose secret islost. [72] Yet Dryden sometimes showed a sense of this magic of amysterious hint, as in the "Spanish Friar":-- "No, I confess, you bade me not in words; The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs, And pointed full upon the stroke of murder. " This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he always so possessed by theimage in his mind as unconsciously to choose even the picturesquelyimaginative word. He has done so, however, in this passage from "Marriageà la Mode":-- "You ne'er mast hope again to see your princess, Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets, And careless passengers going by their grates. " But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, it is true, and avery high level, but still somewhere between the loftier peaks ofinspiration and the plain of every-day life. In those passages where hemoralizes he is always good, setting some obvious truth in a new light byvigorous phrase and happy illustration. Take this (from "Oedipus") as aproof of it:-- "The gods are just, But how can finite measure infinite? Reason! alas, it does not know itself! Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. Whatever is, is in its causes just, Since all things are by fate. But purblind man Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links, His eyes not carrying to that equal beam That poises all above. " From the same play I pick an illustration of that ripened sweetness ofthought and language which marks the natural vein of Dryden. One cannothelp applying the passage to the late Mr. Quincy:-- "Of no distemper, of no blast he died, But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long, E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner; Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years; Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more, Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time, The wheels of weary life at last stood still. "[73] Here is another of the same kind from "All for Love":-- "Gone so soon! Is Death no more? He used him carelessly, With a familiar kindness; ere he knocked, Ran to the door and took him in his arms, As who should say, You're welcome at all hours, A friend need give no warning. " With one more extract from the same play, which is in every way his best, for he had, when he wrote it, been feeding on the bee-bread ofShakespeare, I shall conclude. Antony says, "For I am now so sunk from what I was, Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark. The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes Are all dried up, or take another course: What I have left is from my native spring; I've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate, And lifts me to my banks. " This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what used to be called the_grand_ style, at once noble and natural. I have not undertaken toanalyze any one of the plays, for (except in "All for Love") it wouldhave been only to expose their weakness. Dryden had _no_ constructivefaculty; and in every one of his longer poems that required a plot, theplot is bad, always more or less inconsistent with itself, and ratherhitched-on to the subject than combining with it. It is fair to say, however, before leaving this part of Dryden's literary work, that HorneTooke thought "Don Sebastian" "the best play extant. "[74] Gray admired the plays of Dryden, "not as dramatic compositions, but aspoetry. "[75] "There are as many things finely said in his plays as almostby anybody, " said Pope to Spence. Of their rant, their fustian, theirbombast, their bad English, of their innumerable sins against Dryden'sown better conscience both as poet and critic, I shall excuse myself fromgiving any instances. [76] I like what is good in Dryden so much, and it_is_ so good, that I think Gray was justified in always losing his temperwhen he heard "his faults criticised. "[77] It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that Dryden is best known, andas both he is in some respects unrivalled. His satire is not so sly asChaucer's, but it is distinguished by the same good-nature. There is nomalice in it. I shall not enter into his literary quarrels further thanto say that he seems to me, on the whole, to have been forbearing, whichis the more striking as he tells us repeatedly that he was naturallyvindictive. It was he who called revenge "the darling attribute ofheaven. " "I complain not of their lampoons and libels, though I have beenthe public mark for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repelledforce by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever reached me. "It was this feeling of easy superiority, I suspect, that made him themark for so much jealous vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing hisonslaught upon Settle to jealousy because one of the latter's plays hadbeen performed at Court, --an honor never paid to any of Dryden's. [78] Ihave found nothing like a trace of jealousy in that large and benignantnature. In his vindication of the "Duke of Guise, " he says, with honestconfidence in himself: "Nay, I durst almost refer myself to some of theangry poets on the other side, whether I have not rather countenanced andassisted their beginnings than hindered them from rising. " He seems tohave been really as indifferent to the attacks on himself as Popepretended to be. In the same vindication he says of the "Rehearsal, " theonly one of them that had any wit in it, and it has a great deal: "Muchless am I concerned at the noble name of Bayes; that's a brat so like hisown father that he cannot be mistaken for any other body. They might asreasonably have called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the resemblance wouldhave held as well. " In his Essay on Satire he says: "And yet we know thatin Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven as we expect thelike pardon for those we daily commit against Almighty God. And thisconsideration has often made me tremble when I was saying our Lord'sPrayer; for the plain condition of the forgiveness which we beg is thepardoning of others the offences which they have done to us; for whichreason I have many times avoided the commission of that fault, even whenI have been notoriously provoked. "[79] And in another passage he says, with his usual wisdom: "Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which Imean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason, which ofnecessity will give allowance to the failings of others, by consideringthat there is nothing perfect in mankind. " In the same Essay he gives hisown receipt for satire: "How easy it is to call rogue and villain, andthat wittily! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or aknave, without using any of those opprobrious terms!. .. This is themystery of that noble trade. .. . Neither is it true that this fineness ofraillery is offensive: a witty man is tickled while he is hurt in thismanner, and a fool feels it not. .. . There is a vast difference betweenthe slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke thatseparates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place. Aman may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plainpiece of work, of a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetlywas only belonging to her husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, ifthe reader would be kind enough to think it belongs to me. The characterof Zimri in my 'Absalom' is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem. It isnot bloody, but it is ridiculous enough, and he for whom it was intendedwas too witty to resent it as an injury. .. . I avoided the mention ofgreat crimes, and applied myself to the representing of blind sides andlittle extravagances, to which, the wittier a man is, he is genrally themore obnoxious. " Dryden thought his genius led him that way. In his elegy on the satiristOldham, whom Hallam, without reading him, I suspect, ranks next toDryden, [80] he says:-- "For sure our souls were near allied, and thine Cast in the same poetic mould with mine; One common note in either lyre did strike, And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike. " His practice is not always so delicate as his theory; but if he wassometimes rough, he never took a base advantage. He knocks his antagonistdown, and there an end. Pope seems to have nursed his grudge, and then, watching his chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind a corner, rather glad than otherwise if it fell on the women of those he hated orenvied. And if Dryden is never dastardly, as Pope often was, so also henever wrote anything so maliciously depreciatory as Pope's unprovokedattack on Addison. Dryden's satire is often coarse, but where it iscoarsest, it is commonly in defence of himself against attacks that werethemselves brutal. Then, to be sure, he snatches the first ready cudgel, as in Shadwell's case, though even then there is something of thegood-humor of conscious strength. Pope's provocation was too often themere opportunity to say a biting thing, where he could do it safely. Ifhis victim showed fight, he tried to smooth things over, as with Dennis. Dryden could forget that he had ever had a quarrel, but he never slunkaway from any, least of all from one provoked by himself. [81] Pope'ssatire is too much occupied with the externals of manners, habits, personal defects, and peculiarities. Dryden goes right to the rootedcharacter of the man, to the weaknesses of his nature, as where he saysof Burnet:-- "Prompt to assail, and careless of defence, Invulnerable in his impudence, He dares the world, and, eager of a name, He thrusts about and _justles into fame_. So fond of loud report that, not to miss Of being known (his last and utmost bliss), _He rather would be known for what he is_. " It would be hard to find in Pope such compression of meaning as in thefirst, or such penetrative sarcasm as in the second of the passages Ihave underscored. Dryden's satire is still quoted for itscomprehensiveness of application, Pope's rather for the elegance of itsfinish and the point of its phrase than for any deeper qualities. [82] Ido not remember that Dryden ever makes poverty a reproach. [83] He wasabove it, alike by generosity of birth and mind. Pope is always the_parvenu_, always giving himself the airs of a fine gentleman, and, likeHorace Walpole and Byron, affecting superiority to professionalliterature. Dryden, like Lessing, was a hack-writer, and was proud, as anhonest man has a right to be, of being able to get his bread by hisbrains. He lived in Grub Street all his life, and never dreamed thatwhere a man of genius lived was not the best quarter of the town. "Tellhis Majesty, " said sturdy old Jonson, "that his soul lives in an alley. " Dryden's prefaces are a mine of good writing and judicious criticism. His_obiter dicta_ have often the penetration, and always more than theequity, of Voltaire's, for Dryden never loses temper, and neveraltogether qualifies his judgment by his self-love. "He was a moreuniversal writer than Voltaire, " said Horne Tooke, and perhaps it is truethat he had a broader view, though his learning was neither so extensivenor so accurate. My space will not afford many extracts, but I cannotforbear one or two. He says of Chaucer, that "he is a perpetual fountainof good sense, "[84] and likes him better than Ovid, --a bold confession inthat day. He prefers the pastorals of Theocritus to those of Virgil. "Virgil's shepherds are too well read in the philosophy of Epicurus andof Plato"; "there is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous verses, somewhat of a holiday shepherd strutting in his country buskins";[85]"Theocritus is softer than Ovid, he touches the passions more delicately, and performs all this out of his own fund, without diving into the artsand sciences for a supply. Even his Doric dialect has an incomparablesweetness in his clownishness, like a fair shepherdess, in her countryrusset, talking in a Yorkshire tone. "[86] Comparing Virgil's verse withthat of some other poets, he says, that his "numbers are perpetuallyvaried to increase the delight of the reader, so that the same sounds arenever repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, thoughthey write in styles different from each other, yet have each of them butone sort of music in their verses. All the versification and littlevariety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines, and then he begins again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his senseat the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, ortwo substantives and two adjectives with a verb betwixt them to keep thepeace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers andsound as he; he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and hisverse runs upon carpet-ground. "[87] What a dreary half-century would havebeen saved to English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences toheart! Upon translation, no one has written so much and so well as Drydenin his various prefaces. Whatever has been said since is either expansionor variation of what he had said before. His general theory may be statedas an aim at something between the literalness of metaphrase and thelooseness of paraphase. "Where I have enlarged, " he says, "I desire thefalse critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but either _they are secretly in the poet_, or may be fairly deduced fromhim. " Coleridge, with his usual cleverness of _assimilation_, hascondensed him in a letter to Wordsworth: "There is no medium between aprose version and one on the avowed principle of _compensation_ in thewidest sense, i. E. Manner, genius, total effect. "[88] I have selected these passages, not because they are the best, butbecause they have a near application to Dryden himself. His owncharacterization of Chaucer (though too narrow for the greatest but oneof English poets) is the best that could be given of himself: "He is aperpetual fountain of good sense. " And the other passages show him aclose and open-minded student of the art he professed. Has his influenceon our literature, but especially on our poetry, been on the whole forgood or evil? If he could have been read with the liberal understandingwhich he brought to the works of others, I should answer at once that ithad been beneficial. But his translations and paraphrases, in some waysthe best things he did, were done, like his plays, under contract todeliver a certain number of verses for a specified sum. Theversification, of which he had learned the art by long practice, isexcellent, but his haste has led him to fill out the measure of lineswith phrases that add only to dilute, and thus the clearest, the mostdirect, the most manly versifier of his time became, without meaning it, the source (_fons et origo malorum_) of that poetic diction from whichour poetry has not even yet recovered. I do not like to say it, but hehas sometimes smothered the childlike simplicity of Chaucer underfeather-beds of verbiage. What this kind of thing came to in the nextcentury, when everybody ceremoniously took a bushel-basket to bring awren's egg to market in, is only too sadly familiar. It is clear that hisnatural taste led Dryden to prefer directness and simplicity of style. Ifhe was too often tempted astray by Artifice, his love of Nature betraysitself in many an almost passionate outbreak of angry remorse. Addisontells us that he took particular delight in the reading of our oldEnglish ballads. What he valued above all things was Force, though in hishaste he is willing to make a shift with its counterfeit, Effect. Asusual, he had a good reason to urge for what he did: "I will not excuse, but justify myself for one pretended crime for which I am liable to becharged by false critics, not only in this translation, but in many of myoriginal poems, --that I Latinize too much. It is true that when I find anEnglish word significant and sounding, I neither borrow from the Latin orany other language; but when I want at home I must seek abroad. Ifsounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder meto import them from a foreign country? I carry not out the treasure ofthe nation which is never to return; but what I bring from Italy I spendin England: here it remains, and here it circulates; for if the coin begood, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade both with the livingand the dead for the enrichment of our native language. We have enough inEngland to supply our necessity; but if we will have things ofmagnificence and splendor, we must get them by commerce. .. . Therefore, ifI find a word in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalized byusing it myself, and if the public approve of it the bill passes. Butevery man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry; every man, therefore, is not fit to innovate. "[89] This is admirably said, and withDryden's accustomed penetration to the root of the matter. The Latin hasgiven us most of our canorous words, only they must not be confoundedwith merely sonorous ones, still less with phrases that, instead ofsupplementing the sense, encumber it. It was of Latinizing in this sensethat Dryden was guilty. Instead of stabbing, he "with steel invades thelife. " The consequence was that by and by we have Dr. Johnson's poet, Savage, telling us, -- "In front, a parlor meets my entering view, Opposed a room to sweet refection due"; Dr. Blacklock making a forlorn maiden say of her "dear, " who is outlate, -- "Or by some apoplectic fit deprest Perhaps, alas! he seeks eternal rest"; and Mr. Bruce, in a Danish war-song, calling on the vikings to "assumetheir oars. " But it must be admitted of Dryden that he seldom makes thesecond verse of a couplet the mere trainbearer to the first, as Pope wascontinually doing. In Dryden the rhyme waits upon the thought; in Popeand his school the thought courtesies to the tune for which it iswritten. Dryden has also been blamed for his gallicisms. [90] He tried some, it istrue, but they have not been accepted. I do not think he added a single word to the language; unless, as Isuspect, he first used _magnetism_ in its present sense of moralattraction. What he did in his best writing was to use the English as ifit were a spoken, and not merely an inkhorn language; as if it were hisown to do what he pleased with it, as if it need not be ashamed ofitself. [91] In this respect, his service to our prose was greater than any other manhas ever rendered. He says he formed his style upon Tillotson's (Bossuet, on the other hand, formed _his_ upon Corneille's); but I rather think hegot it at Will's, for its great charm is that it has the various freedomof talk. [92] In verse, he had a pomp which, excellent in itself, becamepompousness in his imitators. But he had nothing of Milton's ear forvarious rhythm and interwoven harmony. He knew how to give newmodulation, sweetness, and force to the pentameter; but in what used tobe called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think he generally failed. His so much praised "Alexander's Feast" (in parts of it, at least) has noexcuse for its slovenly metre and awkward expression, but that it waswritten for music. He himself tells us, in the epistle dedicatory to"King Arthur, " "that the numbers of poetry and vocal music are sometimesso contrary, that in many places I have been obliged to cramp my versesand make them ragged to the reader that they may be harmonious to thehearer. " His renowned ode suffered from this constraint, but this is noapology for the vulgarity of conception in too many passages. [93] Dryden's conversion to Romanism has been commonly taken for granted asinsincere, and has therefore left an abiding stain on his character, though the other mud thrown at him by angry opponents or rivals brushedoff so soon as it was dry. But I think his change of faith susceptible ofseveral explanations, none of them in any way discreditable to him. WhereChurch and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds evenof a high order should unconsciously come to regard religion as only asubtler mode of police. [94] Dryden, conservative by nature, haddiscovered before Joseph de Maistre, that Protestantism, so long as itjustified its name by continuing to be an active principle, was theabettor of Republicanism. I think this is hinted in more than one passagein his preface to "The Hind and Panther. " He may very well have preferredRomanism because of its elder claim to authority in all matters ofdoctrine, but I think he had a deeper reason in the constitution of hisown mind. That he was "naturally inclined to scepticism in philosophy, "he tells us of himself in the preface to the "Religio Laici"; but he wasa sceptic with an imaginative side, and in such characters scepticism andsuperstition play into each other's hands. This finds a curiousillustration in a letter to his sons, written four years before hisdeath: "Towards the latter end of this month, September, Charles willbegin to recover his perfect health, according to his Nativity, which, casting it myself, I am sure is true, and all things hitherto havehappened accordingly to the very time that I predicted them. " Have weforgotten Montaigne's votive offerings at the shrine of Loreto? Dryden was short of body, inclined to stoutness, and florid ofcomplexion. He is said to have had "a sleepy eye, " but was handsome andof a manly carriage. He "was not a very genteel man, he was intimate withnone but poetical men. [95] He was said to be a very good man by all thatknew him: he was as plump as Mr. Pitt, of a fresh color and a down look, and not very conversible. " So Pope described him to Spence. He stillreigns in literary tradition, as when at Will's his elbow-chair had thebest place by the fire in winter, or on the balcony in summer, and when apinch from his snuff-box made a young author blush with pleasure as wouldnow-a-days a favorable notice in the "Saturday Review. " What gave andsecures for him this singular eminence? To put it in a single word, Ithink that his qualities and faculties were in that rare combinationwhich makes character. This gave _flavor_ to whatever he wrote, --a veryrare quality. Was he, then, a great poet? Hardly, in the narrowest definition. But hewas a strong thinker who sometimes carried common sense to a height whereit catches the light of a diviner air, and warmed reason till it hadwellnigh the illuminating property of intuition. Certainly he is not, like Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have also their rights. Eventhe Philistine is a man and a brother, and is entirely right so far as hesees. To demand more of him is to be unreasonable. And he sees, amongother things, that a man who undertakes to write should first have ameaning perfectly defined to himself, and then should be able to set itforth clearly in the best words. This is precisely Dryden's praise, [96]and amid the rickety sentiment looming big through misty phrase whichmarks so much of modern literature, to read him is as bracing as anorthwest wind. He blows the mind clear. In ripeness of mind and bluffheartiness of expression, he takes rank with the best. His phrase isalways a short-cut to his sense, for his estate was too spacious for himto need that trick of winding the path of his thought about, and plantingit out with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gardeners ofliterature give to a paltry half-acre the air of a park. In poetry, to benext-best is, in one sense, to be nothing; and yet to be among the firstin any kind of writing, as Dryden certainly was, is to be one of a verysmall company. He had, beyond most, the gift of the right word. And if hedoes not, like one or two of the greater masters of song, stir oursympathies by that indefinable aroma so magical in arousing the subtileassociations of the soul, he has this in common with the few greatwriters, that the winged seeds of his thought embed themselves in thememory and germinate there. If I could be guilty of the absurdity ofrecommending to a young man any author on whom to form his style, Ishould tell him that, next to having something that will not stay unsaid, he could find no safer guide than Dryden. Cowper, in a letter to Mr. Unwin (5th January, 1782), expresses what Ithink is the common feeling about Dryden, that, with all his defects, hehad that indefinable something we call Genius. "But I admire Dryden most[he had been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded by mere dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness and a carelessness almost peculiar to himself. His faults are numberless, and so are his beauties. His faults are thoseof a great man, and his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as Popewith all his touching and retouching could never equal. " But, after all, perhaps no man has summed him up so well as John Dennis, one of Pope'stypical dunces, a dull man outside of his own sphere, as men are apt tobe, but who had some sound notions as a critic, and thus became theobject of Pope's fear and therefore of his resentment. Dennis speaks ofhim as his "departed friend, whom I infinitely esteemed when living forthe solidity of his thought, for the spring and the warmth and thebeautiful turn of it; for the power and variety and fulness of hisharmony; for the purity, the perspicuity, the energy of his expression;and, whenever these great qualities are required, for the pomp andsolemnity and majesty of his style. "[97] Footnotes: [1] The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq. In six volumes. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. MDCCXXXV. 18mo. The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose-Works of John Dryden, now first collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, grounded on Original and Authentick Documents; and a Collection of his Letters, the greatest Part of which has never before been published. By Edmund Malone, Esq. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand. 4 vols. 8vo. The Poetical Works of John Dryden. (Edited by Mitford. ) London: W. Pickering. 1832. 6 vols. 18mo. [2] His "Character of a Happy Warrior" (1806), one of his noblest poems, has a dash of Dryden in it, --still more his "Epistle to Sir George Beaumont (1811). " [3] He studied Dryden's versification before writing his "Lamia. " [4] On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson's counter-opinion in his life of Dryden. [5] Essay on Dramatick Posey. [6] Life of Lucian. [7] "The great man must have that intellect which puts in motion the intellect of others. "--Landor, _Im. Con. _, Diogenes and Plato. [8] Character of Polybius (1692). [9] "For my own part, who must confess it to my shame that I never read anything but for pleasure. " Life of Plutarch (1683). [10] Gray says petulantly enough that "Dryden was as disgraceful to the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses. "--Gray to Mason, 19th December, 1757. [11] Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. [12] Dedication of the Georgics. [13] Dryden's penetration is always remarkable. His general judgment of Polybius coincides remarkably with that of Mommsen. (Röm. Gesch. II. 448, _seq_. ) [14] "I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English. " Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it "was better than the original. " J. C. Scaliger said of Erasmus: "Ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex suo versificator. " [15] In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin Mrs. Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says: "A chine of honest bacon would please my appetite more than all the marrow-puddings; for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar stomach. " So of Cowley he says: "There was plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men. " The physical is a truer antitype of the spiritual man than we are willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge the inconvenient country-cousinship of the stomach. [16] In his preface to "All for Love, " he says, evidently alluding to himself: "If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his greatest fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the matter, and to have called it readiness of thought and a flowing fancy. " And in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer: "This vehemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper. " He makes other allusions to it. [17] Preface to the Fables. [18] _Wool_ is Sylvester's word. Dryden reminds us of Burke in this also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom exactly. His memory was better for things than for words. This helps to explain the length of time it took him to master that vocabulary at last so various, full, and seemingly extemporaneous. He is a large quoter, though, with his usual inconsistency, he says, "I am no admirer of quotations. " (Essay on Heroic Plays. ) [19] In the _Epimetheus_ of a poet usually as elegant as Gray himself, one's finer sense is a little jarred by the "Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_. " [20] This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image in his "Last Day" (B. Ii. ):-- "Those overwhelming armies. .. . Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn Roused the broad front and called the battle on. " This, to be sure, is no plagiarism; but it should be carried to Dryden's credit that we catch the poets of the next half-century oftener with their hands in his pockets than in those of any one else. [21] Essay on Satire. [22] Ibid. [23] Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge themselves on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer faith. Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet his popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away from the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with gas, did certainly mount a little, _into_ the clouds, if not above them, though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very agreeable, --Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavor of the Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which he compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses striking the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's Will-o'-the-Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice but they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. [24] Dedication of Georgics. [25] In a letter to Dennis, 1693. [26] Preface to Fables. [27] More than half a century later, Orrery, in his "Remarks" on Swift, says: "We speak and we write at random; and if a man's common conversation were committed to paper, he would be startled _for_ _to_ find himself guilty in _so few_ sentences of so many solecisms and such false English. " I do not remember _for to_ anywhere in Dryden's prose. _So few_ has long been denizened; no wonder, since it is nothing more than _si peu_ Anglicized. [28] Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. [29] Ibid. He complains of "manglings and abbreviations. " "What does your Lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb'd, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others?" In a contribution to the "Tatler" (No. 230) he ridicules the use of _'um_ for _them_, and a number of slang Footnote: phrases, among which is _mob_. "The war, " he says, "has introduced abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many more campaigns. " _Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, pallisadoes, communication, circumvallation, battalions_, are the instances he gives, and all are now familiar. No man, or body of men, can dam the stream of language. Dryden is rather fond of _'em_ for _them_, but uses it rarely in his prose. Swift himself prefers _'tis_ to _it is_, as does Emerson still. In what Swift says of the poets, he may be fairly suspected of glancing at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and whose prefaces and translation of Virgil he ridicules in the "Tale of a Tub. " Dryden is reported to have said of him, "Cousin Swift is no poet. " The Dean began his literary career by Pindaric odes to Athenian Societies and the like, --perhaps the greatest mistake as to his own powers of which an author was ever guilty. It was very likely that he would send these to his relative, already distinguished, for his opinion upon them. If this was so, the justice of Dryden's judgment must have added to the smart. Swift never forgot or forgave: Dryden was careless enough to do the one, and large enough to do the other. [30] Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman's evidence without question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that runs back more than eighty-one years, and recollects a man before he had any claim to remembrance. Dryden was never poor, and there is at Oxford a portrait of him painted in 1664, which represents him in a superb periwig and laced band. This was "before he had paid his court with success to the great. " But the story is at least _ben trovato_, and morally true enough to serve as an illustration. Who the "old gentleman" was has never been discovered. Of Crowne (who has some interest for us as a sometime student at Harvard) he says: "Many a cup of metheglm have I drank with little starch'd Johnny Crown; we called him so, from the stiff, unalterable primness of his long cravat. " Crowne reflects no more credit on his Alma Mater than Downing. Both were sneaks, and of such a kind as, I think, can only be produced by a debauched Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden, is contemptuously alluded to by Cibber in his "Apology. " [31] Diary, III. 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that make him alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this Polonius-Montaigne, the only man who ever had the courage to keep a sincere journal, even under the shelter of cipher. [32] Tale of a Tub, Sect. V. Pepys also speaks of buying the "Maiden Queen" of Mr. Dryden's, which he himself, in his preface, seems to brag of, and indeed is a good play. --18th January, 1668. [33] He is fond of this image. In the "Maiden Queen" Celadon tells Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his heart is still her prisoner, "it only draws a longer chain after it. " Goldsmith's fancy was taken by it; and everybody admires in the "Traveller" the extraordinary conceit of a heart dragging a lengthening chain. The smoothness of too many rhymed pentameters is that of thin ice over shallow water; so long as we glide along rapidly, all is well; but if we dwell a moment on any one spot, we may find ourselves knee-deep in mud. A later poet, in trying to improve on Goldsmith, shows the ludicrousness of the image:-- "And round my heart's leg ties its galling chain. " To write imaginatively a man should have--imagination! [34] See his epistle dedicatory to the "Rival Ladies" (1664). For the other side, see particularly a passage in his "Discourse on Epic Poetry" (1697). [35] In the same way he had two years before assumed that Shakespeare "was the first who, to shun the pains of continued rhyming, invented that kind of writing which we call blank verse!" Dryden was never, I suspect, a very careful student of English literature. He seems never to have known that Surrey translated a part of the "Aeneid" (and with great spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was not a scholar, in the proper sense of the word, but he had that faculty of rapid assimilation without study, so remarkable in Coleridge and other rich minds, whose office is rather to impregnate than to invent. These brokers of thought perform a great office in literature, second only to that of originators. [36] Essay on Satire. What he has said just before this about Butler is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the "Rehearsal, " but Dryden had no grudges where the question was of giving its just praise to merit. [37] The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the best continuously fine passage. Dryden's poem has nowhere so much meaning in so small space as Davenant, when he says of the sense of honor that, "Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less. " Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir John Davies. Wyatt first used it, so far as I know, in English. [38] Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of style and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be called) than in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia. " For Mather, like a true provincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual in such cases, betrays all its weakness by the unconscious parody of exaggeration. [39] The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of the goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the thumb and forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colors, the beauty of the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. The critical parts of his Life of Dryden seem to me the best of his writing in this kind. There is little to be gleaned after him. He had studied his author, which he seldom did, and his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still rarer with him. As illustrative of his own habits, his remarks on Dryden's reading are curious. [40] Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Corneille, _monarque en peinture_. Dryden seldom borrows, unless from Shakespeare, without improving, and he borrowed a great deal. Thus in "Don Sebastian" of suicide:-- "Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, And give them furloughs for the other world; But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand In starless nights and wait the appointed hour. " The thought is Cicero's, but how it is intensified by the "starless nights"! Dryden, I suspect, got it from his favorite, Montaigne, who says, "Que nous ne pouvons abandonner cette garnison du monde, sans le commandement exprez de celuy qui nous y a mis. " (L. Ii. Chap. 3. ) In the same play, by a very Drydenish verse, he gives new force to an old comparison:-- "And I should break through laws divine and human. And think 'em cobwebs spread for little man, _Which all the bulky herd of Nature breaks_. " [41] Not his solemn historical droning under that title, but addressed "To the Cambrio-Britons on their harp. " [42] "Les poëtes euxmêmes s'animent et s'échauffent par la lecture des autres poëtes. Messieurs de Malherbe, Corneille, &c. , se disposoient au travail par la lecture des poëtes qui étoient de leur gout. "--Vigneul, Marvilliana, I. 64, 65. [43] For example, Waller had said, "Others may use the ocean as their road, Only the English _make it their abode_; * * * * * We _tread on billows with a steady foot_"-- long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both thoughts, enlivens them into "Her march is o'er the mountain wave, Her home is on the deep, " and they are his forevermore. His "leviathans afloat" he _lifted_ from the "Annus Mirabilis"; but in what court could Dryden sue? Again, Waller in another poem calls the Duke of York's flag "His dreadful streamer, like a comet's hair"; and this, I believe, is the first application of the celestial portent to this particular comparison. Yet Milton's "imperial ensign" waves defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even Campbell flaunts his "meteor flag" in Waller's face. Gray's bard might be sent to the lock-up, but even he would find bail. "C'est imiter quelqu'un que de planter des choux. " [44] Corneille's tragedy of "Pertharite" was acted unsuccessfully in 1659. Racine made free use of it in his more fortunate "Andromaque. " [45] Dryden's publisher. [46] Preface to the Fables. [47] I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this charming and acute essay by its title: "On the _artificial_ comedy of the last century. " [48] See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second Part of the "Conquest of Granada" (1672). [49] Defence of an Essay on Dramatick Poesy. [50] "The favor which heroick plays have lately found upon our theatres has been wholly derived to them from the countenance and approbation they have received at Court. " (Dedication of "Indian Emperor" to Duchess of Monmouth. ) [51] Dedication of "Rival Ladies. " [52] Defence of the Essay. Dryden, in the happiness of his illustrative comparisons, is almost unmatched. Like himself, they occupy a middle ground between poetry and prose, --they are a cross between metaphor and simile. [53] Discoveries. [54] What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his _alteration_ of the "Maid's Tragedy" of Beaumont and Fletcher:-- "Not long since walking in the field, My nurse and I, we there beheld A goodly fruit; which, tempting me, I would have plucked: but, trembling, she, Whoever eat those berries, cried, In less than half an hour died!" What intolerable seesaw! Not much of Byron's "fatal facility" in _these_ octosyllabics! [55] In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows him in his own gray hair. [56] Essay on Dramatick Poesy. [57] A French hendecasyllable verse runs exactly like our ballad measure:-- A cobbler there was and he lived in a stall, . .. _La raison, pour marcher, n'a souvent qu'une voye. _ (Dryden's note. ) The verse is not a hendecasyllable. "Attended watchfully to her recitative (Mile. Duchesnois), and find that, in nine lines out of ten, 'A cobbler there was, ' &c, is the tune of the French heroics. "--_Moore's Diary_, 24th April, 1821. [58] "The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose. "--Gray to West. [59] Diderot and Rousseau, however, thought their language unfit for poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agreed with them. No one has expressed this feeling more neatly than Fauriel: "Nul doute que l'on ne puisse dire en prose des choses éminemment poétiques, tout comme il n'est que trop certain que l'on peut en dire de fort prosaiques en vers, et même en excellents vers, en vers élégamment tournés, et en beau langage. C'est un fait dont je n'ai pas besoin d'indiquer d'exemples: aucune littérature n'en fournirait autant que le nôtre. "--Hist. De la Poésie Provençale, II. 237. [60] Parallel of Poetry and Painting. [61] "Il y a seulement la scène de _Ventidius_ et d'_Antoine_ qui est digne de Corneille. C'est là le sentiment de milord Bolingbroke et de tous les bons auteurs; c'est ainsi que pensait Addisson. "--Voltaire to M. De Fromont, 15th November, 1735. [62] Inst. X. , i. 129. [63] Conquest of Grenada, Second Part. [64] In most he mingles blank verse. [65] Conquest of Grenada. [66] This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset:-- "La muse est toujours belle. Même pour l'insensé, même pour l'impuissant, _Car sa beaute pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle. _" [67] Rival Ladies. [68] Don Sebastian. [69] Don Sebastian. [70] Cleomenes. [71] All for Love. [72] Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jonson in calling Donne "the greatest wit, though not the best poet, of our nation. " (Dedication of Eleonora. ) Even as a poet Donne "Had in him those brave translunary things That our first poets had. " To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of the senses as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function of poetry. [73] My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these extracts from Oedipus to Dryden rather than Lee. [74] Recollections of Rogers, p. 165. [75] Nicholls's Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering's edition of Gray's Works, Vol. V. P. 35. [76] Let one suffice for all. In the "Royal Martyr, " Porphyrius. Awaiting his execution, says to Maximin, who had wished him for a son-in-law:-- "Where'er thou stand'st, I'll level at that place My gushing blood, and spout it at thy face; Thus not by marriage we our blood will join; Nay, more, my arms shall throw my head at thine. " "It is no shame, " says Dryden himself, "to be a poet, though it is to be a bad one. " [77] Gray, _ubi supra_, p. 38. [78] Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, or he would have left it unwritten: "Fell to discourse of the last night's work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of Monmouth acted the 'Indian Emperor, ' wherein they told me these things most remarkable that not any woman but the Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis did anything but like fools and stocks, but that these two did do most extraordinary well: that not any man did anything well but Captain O'Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did dance most incomparably. "--14th January, 1668. [79] See also that noble passage in the "Hind and Panther" (1572-1591), where this is put into verse. Dryden always thought in prose. [80] Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs were to be believed even under oath! A great many authors live because we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow one of Dryden's phrases, "a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent poet. " [81] "He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere reconciliation with them that had offended him. "--Congress. [82] Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good gauge or criterion of genius, --whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. The first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. " (Table-Talk, 192. ) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall by seeming accident in his prose, as where he says of his Protestant assailants, "Most of them love all whores but her of Babylon. " They had first attacked him on the score of his private morals. [83] That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as any careful reader will see. [84] Preface to Fables. [85] Dedication of the Georgics. [86] Preface to Second Miscellany. [87] Ibid. [88] Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. P. 74 (American edition). [89] A Discourse of Epick Poetry "If the _public_ approve. " "On ne peut pas admettre dans le developpement des langues aucune révolution artificielle et sciemment executée; il n'y a pour elles ni conciles, ni assemblées délibérantes; on ne les réforme pas comme une constitution vicieuse. "--Renan, De l'Origine du Langage, p 95. [90] This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A language grows, and is not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonson taxes Marston in his "Poetaster" are now current. [91] Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he knew very little about the language historically or critically. His prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have made Lindley Murray's hair stand on end. _How_ little he knew is plain from his criticising in Ben Jonson the use of _ones_ in the plural, of "Though Heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath, " and be "as false English for _are_, though the rhyme hides it. " Yet all are good English, and I have found them all in Dryden's own writing! Of his sins against idiom I have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of our highest authorities for _real_ English. [92] To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one hand, and vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom Brown--if you can. [93] "Cette ode mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me trompe), passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d'oeuvre de la poésie la plus sublime et la plus variée; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais mieux l'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout Pindare. "--Voltaire to M. De Chabanon, 9 mars, 1772. Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. When Chief-Justice Marlay, then a young Templar, "congratulated him on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language, You are right, young gentleman' (replied Dryden), 'a nobler Ode never _was_ produced, nor ever _will_. '"--Malone. [94] This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more of Southey who in some respects was not unlike Dryden. [95] Pope's notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter from Lord Cobham to him: "I congratulate you upon the fine weather. 'T is a strange thing that people of condition and men of parts must enjoy it in common with the rest of the world. " (Ruffhead's Pope, p 276, _note_. ) His Lordship's naive distinction between people of condition and men of parts is as good as Pope's between genteel and poetical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it. [96] "Nothing is truly sublime, " he himself said, "that is not just and proper. " [97] Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715. WITCHCRAFT. [98] Credulity, as a mental and moral phenomenon, manifests itself in widelydifferent ways, according as it chances to be the daughter of fancy orterror. The one lies warm about the heart as Folk-lore, fills moonlitdells with dancing fairies, sets out a meal for the Brownie, hears thetinkle of airy bridle-bells as Tamlane rides away with the Queen ofDreams, changes Pluto and Proserpine into Oberon and Titania, and makesfriends with unseen powers as Good Folk; the other is a bird of night, whose shadow sends a chill among the roots of the hair: it sucks with thevampire, gorges with the ghoule, is choked by the night-hag, pines awayunder the witch's charm, and commits uncleanness with the embodiedPrinciple of Evil, giving up the fair realm of innocent belief to a murkythrong from the slums and stews of the debauched brain. Both havevanished from among educated men, and such superstition as comes to thesurface now-a-days is the harmless Jacobitism of sentiment, pleasingitself with the fiction all the more because there is no exacting realitybehind it to impose a duty or demand a sacrifice. And as Jacobitismsurvived the Stuarts, so this has outlived the dynasty to which itprofesses an after-dinner allegiance. It nails a horseshoe over the door, but keeps a rattle by its bedside to summon a more substantial watchman;it hangs a crape on the beehives to get a taste of ideal sweetness, butobeys the teaching of the latest bee-book for material and marketablehoney. This is the aesthetic variety of the malady, or rather, perhaps, it is only the old complaint robbed of all its pain, and lapped in wakingdreams by the narcotism of an age of science. To the world at large it isnot undelightful to see the poetical instincts of friends and neighborsfinding some other vent than that of verse. But there has been asuperstition of very different fibre, of more intense and practicalvalidity, the deformed child of faith, peopling the midnight of the mindwith fearful shapes and phrenetic suggestions, a monstrous brood of itsown begetting, and making even good men ferocious in imaginedself-defence. Imagination, has always been, and still is, in a narrower sense, thegreat mythologizer; but both its mode of manifestation and the force withwhich it reacts on the mind are one thing in its crude form of childlikewonder, and another thing after it has been more or less consciouslymanipulated by the poetic faculty. A mythology that broods over us in ourcradles, that mingles with the lullaby of the nurse and thewinter-evening legends of the chimney-corner, that brightens day with thepossibility of divine encounters, and darkens night with intimations ofdemonic ambushes, is of other substance than one which we take down fromour bookcase, sapless as the shelf it stood on, and remote from allpresent sympathy with man or nature as a town history. It is somethinglike the difference between live metaphor and dead personification. Primarily, the action of the imagination is the same in the mythologizerand the poet, that is, it forces its own consciousness on the objects ofthe senses, and compels them to sympathize with its own momentaryimpressions. When Shakespeare in his "Lucrece" makes "The threshold grate the door to have him heard, " his mind is acting under the same impulse that first endowed with humanfeeling and then with human shape all the invisible forces of nature, andcalled into being those "Fair humanities of old religion, " whose loss the poets mourn. So also Shakespeare no doubt projectedhimself in his own creations; but those creations never became soperfectly disengaged from him, so objective, or, as they used to say, extrinsical, to him, as to react upon him like real and even alienexistences. I mean permanently, for momentarily they may and must havedone so. But before man's consciousness had wholly disentangled itselffrom outward objects, all nature was but a many-sided mirror which gaveback to him a thousand images more or less beautified or distorted, magnified or diminished, of himself, till his imagination grew to lookupon its own incorporations as having an independent being. Thus, bydegrees, it became at last passive to its own creations. You may seeimaginative children every day anthropomorphizing in this way, and thedupes of that super-abundant vitality in themselves, which bestowsqualities proper to itself on everything about them. There is a period ofdevelopment in which grown men are childlike. In such a period the fableswhich endow beasts with human attributes first grew up; and we luckilyread them so early as never to become suspicious of any absurdity inthem. The Finnic epos of "Kalewala" is a curious illustration of the samefact. In that every thing has the affections, passions, and consciousnessof men. When the mother of Lemminkäinen is seeking her lost son, -- "Sought she many days the lost one, Sought him ever without finding; Then the roadways come to meet her, And she asks them with beseeching: 'Roadways, ye whom God hath shapen, Have ye not my son beholden, Nowhere seen the golden apple, Him, my darling staff of silver?' Prudently they gave her answer, Thus to her replied the roadways: 'For thy son we cannot plague us, We have sorrows too, a many, Since our own lot is a hard one And our fortune is but evil, By dog's feet to be run over, By the wheel-tire to be wounded, And by heavy heels down-trampled. '" It is in this tendency of the mind under certain conditions to confoundthe objective with subjective, or rather to mistake the one for theother, that Mr. Tylor, in his "Early History of Mankind, " is fain to seekthe origin of the supernatural, as we somewhat vaguely call whatevertranscends our ordinary experience. And this, no doubt, will in manycases account for the particular shapes assumed by certain phantasmalappearances, though I am inclined to doubt whether it be a sufficientexplanation of the abstract phenomenon. It is easy for the arithmeticianto make a key to the problems that he has devised to suit himself. Animmediate and habitual confusion of the kind spoken of is insanity; andthe hypochondriac is tracked by the black dog of his own mind. Diseaseitself is, of course, in one sense natural, as being the result ofnatural causes; but if we assume health as the mean representing thenormal poise of all the mental facilities, we must be content to callhypochondria subternatural, because the tone of the instrument islowered, and to designate as supernatural only those ecstasies in whichthe mind, under intense but not unhealthy excitement, is snatchedsometimes above itself, as in poets and other persons of imaginativetemperament. In poets this liability to be possessed by the creations oftheir own brains is limited and proportioned by the artistic sense, andthe imagination thus truly becomes the shaping faculty, while in lessregulated or coarser organizations it dwells forever in the _Nifelheim_of phantasmagoria and dream, a thaumaturge half cheat, half dupe. WhatMr. Tylor has to say on this matter is ingenious and full of valuablesuggestion, and to a certain extent solves our difficulties. Nightmare, for example, will explain the testimony of witnesses in trials forwitchcraft, that they had been hag-ridden by the accused. But to provethe possibility, nay, the probability, of this confusion of objectivewith subjective is not enough. It accounts very well for such apparitionsas those which appeared to Dion, to Brutus, and to Curtius Rufus. In suchcases the imagination is undoubtedly its own _doppel-gänger_, and seesnothing more than the projection of its own deceit. But I am puzzled, Iconfess, to explain the appearance of the _first_ ghost, especially amongmen who thought death to be the end-all here below. The thing onceconceived of, it is easy, on Mr. Tylor's theory, to account for all afterthe first. If it was originally believed that only the spirits of thosewho had died violent deaths were permitted to wander, [99] the conscienceof a remorseful murderer may have been haunted by the memory of hisvictim, till the imagination, infected in its turn, gave outward realityto the image on the inward eye. After putting to death Boëtius andSymmachus, it is said that Theodoric saw in the head of a fish served athis dinner the face of Symmachus, grinning horribly and with flamingeyes, whereupon he took to his bed and died soon after in great agony ofmind. It is not safe, perhaps, to believe all that is reported of anArian; but supposing the story to be true, there is only a short stepfrom such a delusion of the senses to the complete ghost of popularlegend. But, in some of the most trustworthy stories of apparitions, theyhave shown themselves not only to persons who had done them no wrong inthe flesh, but also to such as had never even known them. The _eidolon_of James Haddock appeared to a man named Taverner, that he might interesthimself in recovering a piece of land unjustly kept from the dead man'sinfant son. If we may trust Defoe, Bishop Jeremy Taylor twice examinedTaverner, and was convinced of the truth of his story. In this case, Taverner had formerly known Haddock. But the apparition of an oldgentleman which entered the learned Dr. Scott's study, and directed himwhere to find a missing deed needful in settling what had lately been itsestate in the West of England, chose for its attorney in the business anentire stranger, who had never even seen its original in the flesh. Whatever its origin, a belief in spirits seems to have been common to allthe nations of the ancient world who have left us any record ofthemselves. Ghosts began to walk early, and are walking still, in spiteof the shrill cock-crow of _wir haben ja aufgeklärt. _ Even the ghost inchains, which one would naturally take to be a fashion peculiar toconvicts escaped from purgatory, is older than the belief in thatreforming penitentiary. The younger Pliny tells a very good story to thiseffect: "There was at Athens a large and spacious house which lay underthe disrepute of being haunted. In the dead of the night a noiseresembling the clashing of iron was frequently heared, which, if youlistened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of chains; at firstit seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees; immediatelyafterward a spectre appeared, in the form of an old man, extremely meagreand ghastly, with a long beard and dishevelled hair, rattling the chainson his feet and hands. .. . By this means the house was at last deserted, being judged by everybody to be absolutely uninhabitable; so that it wasnow entirely abandoned to the ghost. However, in hopes that some tenantmight be found who was ignorant of this great calamity which attended it, a bill was put up giving notice that it was either to be let or sold. Ithappened that the philosopher Athenodorus came to Athens at this time, and, reading the bill, inquired the price. The extraordinary cheapnessraised his suspicion; nevertheless, when he heared the whole story, hewas so far from being discouraged that he was more strongly inclined tohire it, and, in short, actually did so. When it grew towards evening, heordered a couch to be prepared for him in the fore part of the house, and, after calling for a light, together with his pen and tablets, hedirected all his people to retire. But that his mind might not, for wantof employment, be open to the vain terrors of imaginary noises andspirits, he applied himself to writing with the utmost attention. Thefirst part of the night passed with usual silence, when at length thechains began to rattle; however, he neither lifted up his eyes nor laiddown his pen, but diverted his observation by pursuing his studies withgreater earnestness. The noise increased, and advanced nearer, till itseemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked up and saw theghost exactly in the manner it had been described to him; it stood beforehim, beckoning with the finger. Athenodorus made a sign with his handthat it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers;but the ghost still rattling his chains in his ears, he looked up and sawhim beckoning as before. Upon this he immediately arose, and with thelight in his hand followed it. The ghost slowly stalked along, as ifencumbered with his chains, and, turning into the area of the house, suddenly vanished. Athenodorus, being thus deserted, made a mark withsome grass and leaves where the spirit left him. The next day he gaveinformation of this to the magistrates, and advised them to order thatspot to be dug up. This was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a manin chains was there found; for the body, having lain a considerable timein the ground, was putrefied and mouldered away from the fetters. Thebones, being collected together, were publicly buried, and thus, afterthe ghost was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was haunted nomore. "[100] This story has such a modern air as to be absolutelydisheartening. Are ghosts, then, as incapable of invention as dramaticauthors? But the demeanor of Athenodorus has the grand air of theclassical period, of one _qui connaît son monde_, and feels thesuperiority of a living philosopher to a dead Philistine. How far aboveall modern armament is his prophylactic against his insubstantialfellow-lodger! Now-a-days men take pistols into haunted houses. Sterne, and after him Novalis, discovered that gunpowder made all men equallytall, but Athenodorus had found out that pen and ink establish asuperiority in spiritual stature. As men of this world, we feel ourdignity exalted by his keeping an ambassador from the other waiting tillhe had finished his paragraph. Never surely did authorship appear togreater advantage. Athenodorus seems to have been of Hamlet's mind: "I do not set my life at a pin's fee, And, for my soul, what can it do to that, Being a thing immortal, as itself?"[101] A superstition, as its name imports, is something that has been left tostand over, like unfinished business, from one session of the world's_witenagemot_ to the next. The vulgar receive it implicitly on theprinciple of _omne ignotum pro possibili_, a theory acted on by a muchlarger number than is commonly supposed, and even the enlightened are tooapt to consider it, if not proved, at least rendered probable by thehearsay evidence of popular experience. Particular superstitions aresometimes the embodiment by popular imagination of ideas that were atfirst mere poetic figments, but more commonly the degraded and distortedrelics of religious beliefs. Dethroned gods, outlawed by the new dynasty, haunted the borders of their old dominions, lurking in forests andmountains, and venturing to show themselves only after nightfall. Grimmand others have detected old divinities skulking about in strangedisguises, and living from hand to mouth on the charity of Gammer Gretheland Mère l'Oie. Cast out from Olympus and Asgard, they were thankful forthe hospitality of the chimney-corner, and kept soul and body together byan illicit traffic between this world and the other. While Schiller waslamenting the Gods of Greece, some of them were nearer neighbors to himthan he dreamed; and Heine had the wit to turn them to delightfulaccount, showing himself, perhaps, the wiser of the two in saving what hecould from the shipwreck of the past for present use on this prosaic JuanFernandez of a scientific age, instead of sitting down to bewail it. Tomake the pagan divinities hateful, they were stigmatized as cacodaemons;and as the human mind finds a pleasure in analogy and system, an infernalhierarchy gradually shaped itself as the convenient antipodes andcounterpoise of the celestial one. Perhaps at the bottom of it all therewas a kind of unconscious manicheism, and Satan, as Prince of Darkness, or of the Powers of the Air, became at last a sovereign, with his greatfeudatories and countless vassals, capable of maintaining a not unequalcontest with the King of Heaven. He was supposed to have a certain powerof bestowing earthly prosperity, but he was really, after all, nothingbetter than a James II. At St. Germains, who could make Dukes of Perthand confer titular fiefs and garters as much as he liked, without theunpleasant necessity of providing any substance behind the shadow. Thatthere should have been so much loyalty to him, under these dishearteningcircumstances, seems to me, on the whole, creditable to poor humannature. In this case it is due, at least in part, to that instinct of thepoor among the races of the North, where there was a long winter, and toooften a scanty harvest, --and the poor have been always and everywhere amajority, --which made a deity of Wish. The _Acheronta-movebo_ impulsemust have been pardonably strong in old women starving with cold andhunger, and fathers with large families and a small winter stock ofprovision. Especially in the transition period from the old religion tothe new, the temptation must have been great to try one's luck with thediscrowned dynasty, when the intruder was deaf and blind to claims thatseemed just enough, so long as it was still believed that God personallyinterfered in the affairs of men. On his death-bed, says Piers Plowman, "The poore dare plede and prove by reson To have allowance of his lord; by the law he it claimeth; * * * * * Thanne may beggaris as beestes after boote waiten That al hir lif han lyved in langour and in defaute But God sente hem som tyme som manere joye, Outher here or ellis where, kynde wolde it nevere. " He utters the common feeling when he says that it were against nature. But when a man has his choice between here and elsewhere, it may befeared that the other world will seem too desperately far away to bewaited for when hungry ruin has him in the wind, and the chance on earthis so temptingly near. Hence the notion of a transfer of allegiance fromGod to Satan, sometimes by a written compact, sometimes with the ceremonyby which homage is done to a feudal superior. Most of the practices of witchcraft--such as the power to raise storms, to destroy cattle, to assume the shape of beasts by the use of certainointments, to induce deadly maladies in men by waxen images, or love bymeans of charms and philtres--were inheritances from ancient paganism. But the theory of a compact was the product of later times, the result, no doubt, of the efforts of the clergy to inspire a horror of any lapseinto heathenish rites by making devils of all the old gods. Christianitymay be said to have invented the soul as an individual entity to be savedor lost; and thus grosser wits were led to conceive of it as a piece ofproperty that could be transferred by deed of gift or sale, duly signed, sealed, and witnessed. The earliest legend of the kind is that ofTheophilus, chancellor of the church of Adana in Cilicia some time duringthe sixth century. It is said to have been first written by Eutychianus, who had been a pupil of Theophilus, and who tells the story partly as aneyewitness, partly from the narration of his master. The nun Hroswithafirst treated it dramatically in the latter half of the tenth century. Some four hundred years later Rutebeuf made it the theme of a Frenchmiracle-play. His treatment of it is not without a certain poetic merit. Theophilus has been deprived by his bishop of a lucrative office. In hisdespair he meets with Saladin, _qui parloit au deable quant il voloit_. Saladin tempts him to deny God and devote himself to the Devil, who, inreturn, will give him back all his old prosperity and more. He at lastconsents, signs and seals the contract required, and is restored to hisold place by the bishop. But now remorse and terror come upon him; hecalls on the Virgin, who, after some demur, compels Satan to bring backhis deed from the infernal muniment-chest (which must have beenfire-proof beyond any skill of our modern safe-makers), and the bishophaving read it aloud to the awe-stricken congregation, Theophilus becomeshis own man again. In this play, the theory of devilish compact isalready complete in all its particulars. The paper must be signed withthe blood of the grantor, who does feudal homage (_or joing tes mains, etsi devien mes hom_), and engages to eschew good and do evil all the daysof his life. The Devil, however, does not imprint any stigma upon his newvassal, as in the later stories of witch-compacts. The following passagefrom the opening speech of Theophilus will illustrate the conception towhich I have alluded of God as a liege lord against whom one might seekrevenge on sufficient provocation, --and the only revenge possible was torob him of a subject by going over to the great Suzerain, his deadlyfoe:-- "N'est riens que por avoir ne face; Ne pris riens Dieu et sa manace. Irai me je noier ou pendre? Ie ne m'en puis pas à Dieu prendre, C'on ne puet à lui avenir. * * * * * Mès il s'est en si haut lieu mis, Por eschiver ses anemis C'on n'i puet trere ni lancier. Se or pooie à lui tancier, Et combattre et escrimir, La char li feroie fremir. Or est là sus en son solaz, Laz! chetis! et je sui ès laz De Povreté et de Soufrete. "[102] During the Middle Ages the story became a favorite topic with preachers, while carvings and painted windows tended still further to popularize it, and to render men's minds familiar with the idea which makes the nexus ofits plot. The plastic hands of Calderon shaped it into a dramatic poemnot surpassed, perhaps hardly equalled, in subtile imaginative quality byany other of modern times. In proportion as a belief in the possibility of this damnablemerchandising with hell became general, accusations of it grew morenumerous. Among others, the memory of Pope Sylvester II, was blackenedwith the charge of having thus bargained away his soul. All learning fellunder suspicion, till at length the very grammar itself (the last volumein the world, one would say, to conjure with) gave to English the word_gramary_ (enchantment), and in French became a book of magic, under thealias of _Grimoire_. It is not at all unlikely that, in an age when theboundary between actual and possible was not very well defined, therewere scholars who made experiments in this direction, and signedcontracts, though they never had a chance to complete their bargain by anactual delivery. I do not recall any case of witchcraft in which such adocument was produced in court as evidence against the accused. Such aone, it is true, was ascribed to Grandier, but was not brought forward athis trial. It should seem that Grandier had been shrewd enough to take abond to secure the fulfilment of the contract on the other side; for wehave the document in fac-simile, signed and sealed by Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, Elimi, Leviathan, and Astaroth, duly witnessed by Baalberith, Secretary of the Grand Council of Demons. Fancy the competition such astate paper as this would arouse at a sale of autographs! Commonly nosecurity appears to have been given by the other party to thesearrangements but the bare word of the Devil, which was considered, nodoubt, every whit as good as his bond. In most cases, indeed, he was theloser, and showed a want of capacity for affairs equal to that of anaverage giant of romance. Never was comedy acted over and over with suchsameness of repetition as "The Devil is an Ass. " How often must he haveexclaimed (laughing in his sleeve):-- "_I_ to such blockheads set my wit, _I_ damn such fools!--go, go, you're bit!" In popular legend he is made the victim of some equivocation so grossthat any court of equity would have ruled in his favor. On the otherhand, if the story had been dressed up by some mediaeval Tract Society, the Virgin appears in person at the right moment _ex machina_, andcompels him to give up the property he had honestly paid for. One istempted to ask, Were there no attorneys, then, in the place he came from, of whom he might have taken advice beforehand? On the whole, he hadrather hard measure, and it is a wonder he did not throw up the businessin disgust. Sometimes, however, he was more lucky, as with the unhappyDr. Faust; and even so lately as 1695, he came in the shape of a "tallfellow with black beard and periwig, respectable looking and welldressed, " about two o'clock in the afternoon, to fly away with theMaréchal de Luxembourg, which, on the stroke of five, he punctually didas per contract, taking with him the window and its stone framing intothe bargain. The clothes and wig of the involuntary aeronaut were, in thehandsomest manner, left upon the bed, as not included in the bill ofsale. In this case also we have a copy of the articles of agreement, twenty-eight in number, by the last of which the Maréchal renounces Godand devotes himself to the enemy. This clause, sometimes the only one, always the most important in such compacts, seems to show that they firsttook shape in the imagination, while the struggle between Paganism andChristianity was still going on. As the converted heathen was made torenounce his false gods, none the less real for being false, so therenegade Christian must forswear the true Deity. It is very likely, however, that the whole thing may be more modern than the assumed date ofTheophilus would imply, and if so, the idea of feudal allegiance gave thefirst hint, as it certainly modified the particulars, of the ceremonial. This notion of a personal and private treaty with the Evil One hassomething of dignity about it that has made it perennially attractive tothe most imaginative minds. It rather flatters than mocks our feeling ofthe dignity of man. As we come down to the vulgar parody of it in theconfessions of wretched old women on the rack, our pity and indignationare mingled with disgust. One of the most particular of these confessionsis that of Abel de la Rue, convicted in 1584. The accused was a novice inthe Franciscan Convent at Meaux. Having been punished by the master ofthe novices for stealing some apples and nuts in the convent garden, theDevil appeared to him in the shape of a black dog, promising him hisprotection, and advising him to leave the convent. Not long after goinginto the sacristy, he saw a large volume fastened by a chain, and furthersecured by bars of iron. The name of this book was _Grimoire_. Thrustinghis hands through the bars, he contrived to open it, and having read asentence (which Bodin carefully suppresses), there suddenly appeared tohim a man of middle stature, with a pale and very frightful countenance, clad in a long black robe of the Italian fashion, and with faces of menlike his own on his breast and knees. As for his feet they were likethose of cows. He could not have been the most agreeable of companions, _ayant le corps et haleine puante_. This man told him not to be afraid, to take off his habit, to put faith in him, and he would give himwhatever he asked. Then laying hold of him below the arms, the unknowntransported him under the gallows of Meaux, and then said to him with atrembling and broken voice, and having a visage as pale as that of a manwho has been hanged, and a very stinking breath, that he should fearnothing, but have entire confidence in him, that he should never want foranything, that his own name was Maître Rigoux, and that he would like tobe his master; to which De la Rue made answer that he would do whateverhe commanded, and that he wished to be gone from the Franciscans. Thereupon Rigoux disappeared, but returning between seven and eight inthe evening, took him round the waist and carried him back to thesacristy, promising to come again for him the next day. This heaccordingly did, and told De la Rue to take off his habit, get him gonefrom the convent, and meet him near a great tree on the high-road fromMeaux to Vaulx-Courtois. Rigoux met him there and took him to a certainMaître Pierre, who, after a few words exchanged in an undertone withRigoux, sent De la Rue to the stable, after his return whence he saw nomore of Rigoux. Thereupon Pierre and his wife made him good cheer, telling him that for the love of Maître Rigoux they would treat him well, and that he must obey the said Rigoux, which he promised to do. About twomonths after, Maître Pierre, who commonly took him to the fields to watchcattle, said to him there that they must go to the Assembly, because he(Pierre) was out of powders, to which he made answer that he was willing. Three days later, about Christmas eve, 1575, Pierre having sent his wifeto sleep out of the house, set a long branch of broom in thechimney-corner, and bade De la Rue go to bed, but not to sleep. Abouteleven they heard a great noise as of an impetuous wind and thunder inthe chimney: which hearing, Maître Pierre told him to dress himself, forit was time to be gone. Then Pierre took some grease from a little boxand anointed himself under the arm-pits, and De la Rue on the palms ofhis hands, which incontinently felt as if on fire, and the said greasestank like a cat three weeks or a month dead. Then, Pierre and hebestriding the branch, Maître Rigoux took it by the butt and drew it upchimney as if the wind had lifted them. And, the night being dark, he sawsuddenly a torch before them lighting them, and Maître Rigoux was goneunless he had changed himself into the said torch. Arrived at a grassyplace some five leagues from Vaulx-Courtois, they found a company of somesixty people of all ages, none of whom he knew, except a certain Pierreof Dampmartin and an old woman who was executed, as he had heard, aboutfive years ago for sorcery at Lagny. Then suddenly he noticed that all(except Rigoux, who was clad as before) were dressed in linen, thoughthey had not changed their clothes. Then, at command of the eldest amongthem, who seemed about eighty years old, with a white beard and almostwholly bald, each swept the place in front of himself with his broom. Thereupon Rigoux changed into a great he-goat, black and stinking, aroundwhom they all danced backward with their faces outward and their backstowards the goat. They danced about half an hour, and then his mastertold him they must adore the goat who was the Devil _et ce fait et dict, veit que ledict Bouc courba ses deux pieds de deuant et leua son cul enhaut, et lors que certaines menues graines grosses comme testesd'espingles, qui se conuertissoient en poudres fort puantes, sentant lesoulphre et poudre à canon et chair puant mesleés ensemble seroienttombeés sur plusieurs drappeaux en sept doubles. _ Then the oldest, and sothe rest in order, went forward on their knees and gathered up theircloths with the powders, but first each _se seroit incliné vers le Diableet iceluy baisé en la partie honteuse de son corps. _ They went home ontheir broom, lighted as before. De la Rue confessed also that he was atanother assembly on the eve of St. John Baptist. With the powders theycould cause the death of men against whom they had a spite, or theircattle. Rigoux before long began to tempt him to drown himself, and, though he lay down, yet rolled him some distance towards the river. It isplain that the poor fellow was mad or half-witted or both. And yet Bodin, the author of the _De Republica, _ reckoned one of the ablest books ofthat age, believed all this filthy nonsense, and prefixes it to his_Démonomanie, _ as proof conclusive of the existence of sorcerers. This was in 1587. Just a century later, Glanvil, one of the most eminentmen of his day, and Henry More, the Platonist, whose memory is still dearto the lovers of an imaginative mysticism, were perfectly satisfied withevidence like that which follows. Elizabeth Styles confessed, in 1664, "that the Devil about ten years since appeared to her in the shape of ahandsome Man, and after of a black Dog. That he promised her Money, andthat she should live gallantly, and have the pleasure of the World fortwelve years, if she would with her Blood sign his Paper, which was togive her soul to him and observe his Laws and that he might suck herBlood. This after Four Solicitations, the Examinant promised him to do. Upon which he pricked the fourth Finger of her right hand, between themiddle and upper Joynt (where the Sign at the Examination remained) andwith a Drop or two of her Blood, she signed the Paper with an O. Uponthis the Devil gave her sixpence and vanished with the Paper. That sincehe hath appeared to her in the Shape of a _Man_, and did so on_Wednesday_ seven-night past, but more usually he appears in the Likenessof a _Dog_, and _Cat_, and a _Fly_ like a Millar, in which last heusually sucks in the Poll about four of the Clock in the Morning, and didso _Jan_. 27, and that it is pain to her to be so suckt. That when shehath a desire to do harm she calls the Spirit by the name of _Robin_, towhom, when he appeareth, she useth these words, _O Sathan, give me mypurpose_. She then tells him what she would have done. And that he shouldso appear to her was part of her Contract with him. " The Devil in thiscase appeared as a black (dark-complexioned) man "in black clothes, witha little band, "--a very clerical-looking personage. "Before they arecarried to their meetings they anoint their Foreheads and Hand-Wristswith an Oyl the Spirit brings them (which smells raw) and then they arecarried in a very short time, using these words as they pass, _Thout, tout a tout, throughout and about_. And when they go off from theirMeetings they say, _Rentum, Tormentum_. That at every meeting before theSpirit vanisheth away, he appoints the next meeting place and time, andat his departure there is a foul smell. At their meeting they haveusually Wine or good Beer, Cakes, Meat or the like. They eat and drinkreally when they meet, in their Bodies, dance also and have some Musick. The Man in black sits at the higher end, and _Anne Bishop_ usually nexthim. He useth some words before meat, and none after; his Voice isaudible but very low. The Man in black sometimes plays on a Pipe orCittern, and the Company dance. At last the Devil vanisheth, and all arecarried to their several homes in a short space. At their parting theysay, _A Boy! merry meet, merry part!_" Alice Duke confessed "that AnneBishop persuaded her to go with her into the Churchyard in theNight-time, and being come thither, to go backward round the Church, which they did three times. In their first round they met a Man in blackCloths who went round the second time with them; and then they met athing in the Shape of a great black Toad which leapt up against theExaminant's Apron. In their third round they met somewhat in the shape ofa Rat, which vanished away. " She also received sixpence from the Devil, and "her Familiar did commonly suck her right Breast about seven at nightin the shape of a little Cat of a dunnish Colour, which is as smooth as aWant [mole], and when she is suckt, she is in a kind of Trance. " PoorChristian Green got only fourpence half-penny for her soul, but herbargain was made some years later than that of the others, andquotations, as the stock-brokers would say, ranged lower. Her familiartook the shape of a hedgehog. Julian Cox confessed that "she had beenoften tempted by the Devil to be a Witch, but never consented. That oneEvening she walkt about a Mile from her own House and there came ridingtowards her three Persons upon three Broomstaves, born up about a yardand a half from the ground. Two of them she formerly knew, which was aWitch and a Wizzard that were hanged for Witchcraft several years before. The third person she knew not. He came in the shape of a black Man, andtempted her to give him her Soul, or to that effect, and to express it bypricking her Finger and giving her name in her Blood in token of it. " Onher trial Judge Archer told the jury, "he had heard that a Witch couldnot repeat that Petition in the Lord's Prayer, viz. _And lead us not intotemptation_, and having this occasion, he would try the Experiment. " Thejury "were not in the least measure to guide their Verdict according toit, because it was not legal Evidence. " Accordingly it was found that thepoor old trot could say only, _Lead us into temptation, or Lead us notinto no temptation_. Probably she used the latter form first, and, finding she had blundered, corrected herself by leaving out both thenegatives. The old English double negation seems never to have been heardof by the court. Janet Douglass, a pretended dumb girl, by whosecontrivance five persons had been burned at Paisley, in 1677, for havingcaused the sickness of Sir George Maxwell by means of waxen and otherimages, having recovered her speech shortly after, declared that she "hadsome smattering knowledge of the Lord's prayer, which she had heard thewitches repeat, it seems, by her vision, in the presence of the Devil;and at his desire, which they observed, they added to the word _art_ theletter _w_, which made it run, 'Our Father which wart in heaven, ' bywhich means the Devil made the application of the prayer to himself. " Shealso showed on the arm of a woman named Campbell "an _invisible_ markwhich she had gotten from the Devil. " The wife of one Barton confessedthat she had engaged "in the Devil's service. She renounced her baptism, and did prostrate her body to the foul spirit, and received his mark, andgot a new name from him, and was called _Margaratus_. She was asked ifshe ever had any pleasure in his company? 'Never much, ' says she, 'butone night going to a dancing upon Pentland Hills, in the likeness of arough tanny [tawny] dog, playing on a pair of pipes; the spring heplayed, ' says she, 'was _The silly bit chicken, gar cast it a pickle, andit will grow meikle. _'"[103] In 1670, near seventy of both sexes, amongthem fifteen children, were executed for witchcraft at the village ofMohra in Sweden. Thirty-six children, between the ages of nine andsixteen, were sentenced to be scourged with rods on the palms of theirhands, once a week for a year. The evidence in this case against theaccused seems to have been mostly that of children. "Being asked whetherthey were sure that they were at any time carried away by the Devil, theyall declared they were, begging of the Commissioners that they might befreed from that intolerable slavery. " They "used to go to a Gravel pitwhich lay hardby a Cross-way and there they put on a vest over theirheads, and then danced round, and after ran to the Cross-way and calledthe Devil thrice, first with a still Voice, the second time somewhatlouder, and the third time very loud, with these words, _Antecessour, come and carry us to Blockula_. Whereupon immediately he used to appear, but in different Habits; but for the most part they saw him in a grayCoat and red and blue Stockings. He had a red Beard, a highcrowned Hat, with linnen of divers Colours wrapt about it, and long Garters upon hisStockings. " "They must procure some Scrapings of Altars and Filings ofChurch-Clocks [bells], and he gives them a Horn with some Salve in itwherewith they do anoint themselves. " "Being asked whether they were sureof a real personal Transportation, and whether they were awake when itwas done, they all answered in the Affirmative, and that the Devilsometimes laid something down in the Place that was very like them. Butone of them confessed that he did only take away her Strength, and herBody lay still upon the Ground. Yet sometimes he took even her Body withhim. " "Till of late they never had that power to carry away Children, butonly this year and the last, and the Devil did at this time force them toit. That heretofore it was sufficient to carry but one of their Childrenor a Stranger's Child, which yet happened seldom, but now he did plaguethem and whip them if they did not procure him Children, insomuch thatthey had no peace or quiet for him; and whereas formerly one Journey aWeek would serve their turn from their own town to the place aforesaid, now they were forced to run to other Towns and Places for Children, andthat they brought with them some fifteen, some sixteen Children everynight. For their journey they made use of all sorts of Instruments, ofBeasts, of Men, of Spits, and Posts, according as they had opportunity. If they do ride upon Goats and have many Children with them, " they have away of lengthening the goat with a spit, "and then are anointed with theaforesaid Ointment. A little Girl of Elfdale confessed, That, naming thename of JESUS, as she was carried away, she fell suddenly upon the Groundand got a great hole in her Side, which the Devil presently healed upagain. The first thing they must do at Blockula was that they must denyall and devote themselves Body and Soul to the Devil, and promise toserve him faithfully, and confirm all this with an Oath. Hereupon theycut their Fingers, and with their Bloud writ their Name in his Book. Hecaused them to be baptized by such Priests as he had there and made themconfirm their Baptism with dreadful Oaths and Imprecations. Here-upon theDevil gave them a Purse, wherein their filings of Clocks [bells], with aStone tied to it, which they threw into the Water, and then they wereforced to speak these words: _As these filings of the Clock do neverreturn to the Clock from which they are taken, so may my soul neverreturn to Heaven_. The diet they did use to have there was Broth withColworts and Bacon in it, Oatmeal-Bread spread with Butter, Milk, andCheese. Sometimes it tasted very well, sometimes very ill. After Meals, they went to Dancing, and in the mean while Swore and Cursed mostdreadfully, and afterward went to fighting one with another. The Devilhad Sons and Daughters by them, which he did marry together, and they didcouple and brought forth Toads and Serpents. If he hath a mind to bemerry with them, he lets them all ride upon Spits before him, takesafterwards the Spits and beats them black and blue, and then laughs atthem. They had seen sometimes a very great Devil like a Dragon, with fireabout him and bound with an Iron Chain, and the Devil that converses withthem tells them that, if they confess anything, he will let that greatDevil loose upon them, whereby all _Sweedland_ shall come into greatdanger. The Devil taught them to milk, which was in this wise: they usedto stick a knife in the Wall and hang a kind of Label on it, which theydrew and stroaked, and as long as this lasted the Persons that they hadPower over were miserably plagued, and the Beasts were milked that waytill sometimes they died of it. The minister of Elfdale declared that oneNight these Witches were to his thinking upon the crown of his Head andthat from thence he had had a long-continued Pain of the Head. One of theWitches confessed, too, that the Devil had sent her to torment theMinister, and that she was ordered to use a Nail and strike it into hisHead, but it would not enter very deep. They confessed also that theDevil gives them a Beast about the bigness and shape of a young Cat, which they call a _Carrier_, and that he gives them a Bird too as big asa Raven, but white. And these two Creatures they can send anywhere, andwherever they come they take away all sorts of Victuals they can get. What the Bird brings they may keep for themselves; but what the Carrierbrings they must reserve for the Devil. The Lords Commissioners wereindeed very earnest and took great Pains to persuade them to show some oftheir Tricks, but to no Purpose; for they did all unanimously confess, that, since they had confessed all, they found that all their Witchcraftwas gone, and that the Devil at this time appeared to them very terriblewith Claws on his Hands and Feet, and with Horns on his Head and a longTail behind. " At Blockula "the Devil had a Church, such another as in thetown of Mohra. When the Commissioners were coming, he told the Witchesthey should not fear them, for he would certainly kill them all. And theyconfessed that some of them had attempted to murther the Commissioners, but had not been able to effect it. " In these confessions we find included nearly all the particulars of thepopular belief concerning witchcraft, and see the gradual degradation ofthe once superb Lucifer to the vulgar scarecrow with horns and tail. "ThePrince of Darkness _was_ a gentleman. " From him who had not lost all hisoriginal brightness, to this dirty fellow who leaves a stench, sometimesof brimstone, behind him, the descent is a long one. For the dispersionof this foul odor Dr. Henry More gives an odd reason. "The Devil also, asin other stories, leaving an ill smell behind him, seems to imply thereality of the business, those adscititious particles he held together inhis visible vehicle being loosened at his vanishing and so offending thenostrils by their floating and diffusing themselves in the open Air. " Inall the stories vestiges of Paganism are not indistinct. The threeprincipal witch gatherings of the year were held on the days of greatpagan festivals, which were afterwards adopted by the Church. Maurysupposes the witches' Sabbath to be derived from the rites of BacchusSabazius, and accounts in this way for the Devil's taking the shape of ahe-goat. But the name was more likely to be given from hatred of theJews, and the goat may have a much less remote origin. Bodin assumes theidentity of the Devil with Pan, and in the popular mythology both ofKelts and Teutons there were certain hairy wood-demons called by theformer _Dus_ and by the latter _Scrat_. Our common names of _Deuse_ and_Old Scratch_ are plainly derived from these, and possibly _Old Harry_ isa corruption of _Old Hairy_. By Latinization they became Satyrs. Here, atany rate, is the source of the cloven hoof. The belief in the Devil'sappearing to his worshippers as a goat is very old. Possibly the factthat this animal was sacred to Thor, the god of thunder, may explain it. Certain it is that the traditions of Vulcan, Thor, and Wayland[104]converged at last in Satan. Like Vulcan, he was hurled from heaven, andlike him he still limps across the stage in Mephistopheles, thoughwithout knowing why. In Germany, he has a horse's and not a clovenfoot, [105] because the horse was a frequent pagan sacrifice, andtherefore associated with devil-worship under the new dispensation. Hencethe horror of hippophagism which some French gastronomes are striving toovercome. Everybody who has read "Tom Brown, " or Wordsworth's Sonnet on aGerman stove, remembers the Saxon horse sacred to Woden. The raven wasalso his peculiar bird, and Grimm is inclined to think this the reasonwhy the witch's familiar appears so often in that shape. It is true thatour _Old Nick_ is derived from _Nikkar_, one of the titles of thatdivinity, but the association of the Evil One with the raven is older, and most probably owing to the ill-omened character of the bird itself. Already in the apocryphal gospel of the "Infancy, " the demoniac Son ofthe Chief Priest puts on his head one of the swaddling-clothes of Christwhich Mary has hung out to dry, and forthwith "the devils began to comeout of his mouth and to fly away as _crows_ and serpents. " It will be noticed that the witches underwent a form of baptism. As thesystem gradually perfected itself among the least imaginative of men, asthe superstitious are apt to be, they could do nothing better thandescribe Satan's world as in all respects the reverse of that which hadbeen conceived by the orthodox intellect as Divine. Have you anillustrated Bible of the last century? Very good. Turn it upside down, and you find the prints on the whole about as near nature as ever, andyet pretending to be something new by a simple device that saves thefancy a good deal of trouble. For, while it is true that the poetic fancyplays, yet the faculty which goes by that pseudonyme in prosaic minds(and it was by such that the details of this Satanic commerce were piecedtogether) is hard put to it for invention, and only too thankful for anylabor-saving contrivance whatsoever. Accordingly, all it need take thetrouble to do was to reverse the ideas of sacred things already engravedon its surface, and behold, a kingdom of hell with all the merit and noneof the difficulty of originality! "Uti olim Deus populo suo HierosolymisSynagogas erexit ut in iis ignarus legis divinae populus erudiretur, voluntatemque Dei placitam ex verbo in iis praedicato hauriret; ita etDiabolus in omnibus omnino suis actionibus simiam Dei agens, gregi suoacherontico conventus et synagogas, quas satanica sabbata vocant, indicit. .. . Atque de hisce Conventibus et Synagogis Lamiarum nullusAntorum quos quidem evolvi, imo nec ipse Lamiarum Patronus [here heglances at Wierus] scilicet ne dubiolum quidem movit. Adeo ut tutoaffirmari liceat conventus a diabolo certo institui. Quos vel ipse, tanquam praeses collegii, vel per daemonem, qui ad cujuslibet sagaecustodiam constitutus est, . .. Vel per alios Magos aut sagas per unum autduos dies antequam fiat congregatio denunciat. .. . Loci in quibus solent adaemone coetus et conventicula malefica institui plerumque suntsylvestres, occulti, subterranei, et ab hominum conversatione remoti. .. . Evocatae hoc modo et tempore Lamiae, . .. Daemon illis persuadet eas nonposse conventiculis interesse nisi nudum corpus unguento ex corpusculisinfantum ante baptismum necatorum praeparato illinant, idque proptereasolum illis persuadet ut ad quam plurimas infantum insontium caedes easalliciat. .. . Unctionis ritu peracto, abiturientes, ne forte a maritis inlectis desiderantur, vel per incantationem somnum, aurem nimirumvellicando dextra manu prius praedicto unguine illita, conciliant maritisex quo non facile possunt excitari; vel daemones personas quasdamdormientibus adumbrant, quas, si contigeret expergisci, suas uxores esseputarent; vel interea alius daemon in forma succubi ad latus maritorumadjungitur qui loco uxoris est. .. . Et ita sine omni remora insidentesbaculo, furcae, scopis, aut arundini vel tauro, equo, sui, hirco, autcani, _quorum omnium exempla prodidit Remig_. L. I. C. 14, devehuntur adaemone ad loca destinata. .. . Ibi daemon praeses conventus in solio sedetmagnifico, forma terrifica, ut plurimum hirci vel canis. Ad quemadvenientes viri juxta ac mulieres accedunt reverentiae exhibendae etadorandi gratia, non tamen uno eodemque modo. Interdum complicatisgenubus supplices; interdum obverso incedentes tergo et modo retrogrado, in oppositum directo illi reverentiae quam nos praestare solemus. Insignum homagii (sit honor castis auribus) Principem suum hircum in[obscaenissimo quodam corporis loco] summa cum reverentia sacrilego oreosculantur. Quo facto, sacrificia daemoni faciunt multis modis. Saepeliberos suos ipsi offerunt. Saepe communione sumpta benedictam hostiam inore asservatam et extractam (horreo dicere) daemoni oblatam coram eo pedeconculcant. His et similibus flagitiis et abominationibus execrandiscommissis, incipiunt mensis assidere et convivari de cibis insipidis, insulsis, [106] furtivis, quos daemon suppeditat, vel quos singulaeattulere, inderdum tripudiant ante convivium, interdum post illud. .. . Necmensae sua deest benedictio coetu hoc digna, verbis constans planeblasphemis quibus ipsum Beelzebub et creatorem et datorem etconservatorem omnium profitentur. Eadem sententia est gratiarum actionis. Post convivium, dorsis invicem obversis . .. Choreas ducere et cantarefescenninos in honorem daemonis obscaenissimos, vel ad tympanumfistulamve sedentis alicujus in bifida arbore saltare . .. Tum suisamasiis daemonibus foedissime commisceri. Ultimo pulveribus (quos aliquiscribunt esse cineres hirci illis quem daemon assumpserat et quem adorantsubito coram illius flamma absumpti) vel venenis aliis acceptis, saepeetiam cuique indicto nocendi penso, et pronunciato Pseudothei daemonisdecreto, ULCISCAMINI VOS, ALIOQUI MORIEMINI. Duabus aut tribus horis inhisce ludis exactis circa Gallicinium daemon convivas suasdimittit. "[107] Sometimes they were baptized anew. Sometimes theyrenounced the Virgin, whom they called in their rites _extensammulierem_. If the Ave Mary bell should ring while the demon is conveyinghome his witch, he lets her drop. In the confession of Agnes Simpson themeeting place was North Berwick Kirk. "The Devil started up himself inthe pulpit, like a meikle black man, and calling the row [roll] every oneanswered, _Here_. At his command they opened up three graves and cuttedoff from the dead corpses the joints of their fingers, toes, and nose, and parted them amongst them, and the said Agnes Simpson got for her parta winding-sheet and two joints. The Devil commanded them to keep thejoints upon them while [till] they were dry, and then to make a powder ofthem to do evil withal. " This confession is sadly memorable, for it wasmade before James I. , then king of Scots, and is said to have convincedhim of the reality of witchcraft. Hence the act passed in the first yearof his reign in England, and not repealed till 1736, under which, perhapsin consequence of which, so many suffered. The notion of these witch-gatherings was first suggested, there can belittle doubt, by secret conventicles of persisting or relapsed pagans, orof heretics. Both, perhaps, contributed their share. Sometimes amountain, as in Germany the Blocksberg, [108] sometimes a conspicuous oakor linden, and there were many such among both Gauls and Germans sacredof old to pagan rites, and later a lonely heath, a place where two roadscrossed each other, a cavern, gravel-pit, or quarry, the gallows, or thechurchyard, was the place appointed for their diabolic orgies. That thewitch could be conveyed bodily to these meetings was at first admittedwithout any question. But as the husbands of accused persons sometimestestified that their wives had not left their beds on the alleged nightof meeting, the witchmongers were put to strange shifts by way ofaccounting for it. Sometimes the Devil imposed on the husband by a_deceptio visus_; sometimes a demon took the place of the wife; sometimesthe body was left and the spirit only transported. But the more orthodoxopinion was in favor of corporeal deportation. Bodin appeals triumphantlyto the cases of Habbakuk (now in the Apocrypha, but once making a part ofthe Book of Daniel), and of Philip in the Acts of the Apostles. "I find, "he says, "this ecstatic ravishment they talk of much more wonderful thanbodily transport. And if the Devil has this power, as they confess, ofravishing the spirit out of the body, is it not more easy to carry bodyand soul without separation or division of the reasonable part, than towithdraw and divide the one from the other without death?" The author of_De Lamiis_ argues for the corporeal theory. "The evil Angels have thesame superiority of natural power as the good, since by the Fall theylost none of the gifts of nature, but only those of grace. " Now, as weknow that good angels can thus transport men in the twinkling of an eye, it follows that evil ones may do the same. He fortifies his position by arecent example from secular history. "No one doubts about John Faust, whodwelt at Wittenberg, in the time of the sainted Luther, and who, seatinghimself on his cloak with his companions, was conveyed away and borne bythe Devil through the air to distant kingdoms. "[109] Glanvin inclinesrather to the spiritual than the material hypothesis, and suggests "thatthe Witch's anointing herself before she takes her flight may perhapsserve to keep the body tenantable and in fit disposition to receive thespirit at its return. " Aubrey, whose "Miscellanies" were published in1696, had no doubts whatever as to the physical asportation of the witch. He says that a gentleman of his acquaintance "was in Portugal _anno_1655, when one was burnt by the inquisition for being brought thitherfrom Goa, in East India, in the air, in an incredible short time. " As tothe conveyance of witches through crevices, keyholes, chimneys, and thelike, Herr Walburger discusses the question with such comical gravitythat we must give his argument in the undiminished splendor of itsjurisconsult latinity. The first sentence is worthy of MagisterBartholomaeus Kuckuk. "Haec realis delatio trahit me quoque ad illamvulgo agitatam quaestionem: _An diabolus Lamias corpore per angustaforamina parietum, fenestrarum, portarum aut per cavernas ignifluas ferrequeant?_" (Surely if _tace_ be good Latin for a candle, _cavernaigniflua_ should be flattering to a chimney. ) "Resp. Lamiae praedictomodo saepius fatentur sese a diabolo per caminum aut alia loca angustiorascopis insidentes per aerem ad montem Bructerorum deferri. Verumdeluduntur a Satana istaec mulieres hoc casu egregie nec revera rimulasistas penetrant, sed solummodo daemon praecedens latenter aperit etclaudit januas vel fenestras corporis earum capaces, per quas easintromittit quae putant se formam animalculi parvi, mustelae, catti, locustae, et aliorum induisse. At si forte contingat ut per parietem sedelatam confiteatur Saga, tunc, si non totum hoc praestigiosum est, daemonem tamen maxima celeritate tot quot sufficiunt lapides eximere etsustinere aliosne ruant, et postea eadem celeritate iterum eos in suumlocum reponere, existimo: cum hominum adspectus hanc tartarei latomifraudem nequeat deprendere. Idem quoque judicium esse potest detranslatione per caminum. Siquidem si caverna igniflua justaeamplitudinis est ut nullo impedimento et haesitatione corpus humanum eamperrepere possit, diabolo impossibile non esse per eam eas educere. Sivero per inproportionatum (ut ita loquar) corporibus spatium eas educittunc meras illusiones praestigiosas esse censeo, nec a diabolo hoc unquameffici posse. Ratio est, quoniam diabolus essentiam creaturae seu lamiaeimmutare non potest, multo minus efficere ut majus corpus penetret perspatium inproportionatum, alioquin corporum penetratio esset admittendaquod contra naturam et omne Physicorum principium est. " This is finereasoning, and the _ut ita loquar_ thrown in so carelessly, as if with adeprecatory wave of the hand for using a less classical locution thanusual, strikes me as a very delicate touch indeed. Grimm tells us that he does not know when broomsticks, spits, and similarutensils were first assumed to be the canonical instruments of thisnocturnal equitation. He thinks it comparatively modern, but I suspect itis as old as the first child that ever bestrode his father's staff, andfancied it into a courser shod with wind, like those of Pindar. Alas forthe poverty of human invention! It cannot afford a hippogriff for aneveryday occasion. The poor old crones, badgered by inquisitors intoconfessing they had been where they never were, were involved in thefurther necessity of explaining how the devil they got there. The onlysteed their parents had ever been rich enough to keep had been of thisdomestic sort, and they no doubt had ridden in this inexpensive fashion, imagining themselves the grand dames they saw sometimes flash by, in thehappy days of childhood, now so far away. Forced to give a _how_, andunable to conceive of mounting in the air without something to sustainthem, their bewildered wits naturally took refuge in some such simplesubterfuge, and the broomstave, which might make part of the pooresthouse's furniture, was the nearest at hand. If youth and good spiritscould put such life into a dead stick once, why not age and evil spiritsnow? Moreover, what so likely as an _emeritus_ implement of this sort tobecome the staff of a withered beldame, and thus to be naturallyassociated with her image? I remember very well a poor half-crazedcreature, who always wore a scarlet cloak and leaned on such a stay, cursing and banning after a fashion that would infallibly have burned hertwo hundred years ago. But apart from any adventitious associations oflater growth, it is certain that a very ancient belief gave to magic thepower of imparting life, or the semblance of it, to inanimate things, andthus sometimes making servants of them. The wands of the Egyptianmagicians were turned to serpents. Still nearer to the purpose is thecapital story of Lucian, out of which Goethe made his _Zauberlehrling_, of the stick turned water-carrier. The classical theory of the witch'sflight was driven to no such vulgar expedients, the ointment turning herinto a bird for the nonce, as in Lucian and Apuleius. In those days, too, there was nothing known of any camp-meeting of witches and wizards, buteach sorceress transformed herself that she might fly to her paramour. According to some of the Scotch stories, the witch, after bestriding herbroomsticks must repeat the magic formula, _Horse and Hattork!_ Theflitting of these ill-omened night-birds, like nearly all the generalsuperstitions relating to witchcraft, mingles itself and is lost in athrong of figures more august. [110] Diana, Bertha, Holda, Abundia, Befana, once beautiful and divine, the bringers of blessing while menslept, became demons haunting the drear of darkness with terror andominous suggestion. The process of disenchantment must have been a longone, and none can say how soon it became complete. Perhaps we may takeHeine's word for it, that "Genau bei Weibern Weiss man niemals wo der Engel Aufhört und der Teufel anfängt. " Once goblinized, Herodias joins them, doomed still to bear about theBaptist's head; and Woden, who, first losing his identity in the WildHuntsman, sinks by degrees into the mere _spook_ of a Suabian baron, sinfully fond of field-sports, and therefore punished with an eternalphantasm of them, "the hunter and the deer a shade. " More and morevulgarized, the infernal train snatches up and sweeps along with it everylawless shape and wild conjecture of distempered fancy, streaming away atlast into a comet's tail of wild-haired hags, eager with unnatural hateand more unnatural lust, the nightmare breed of some exorcist's orinquisitor's surfeit, whose own lie has turned upon him in sleep. As it is painfully interesting to trace the gradual degeneration of apoetic faith into the ritual of unimaginative Tupperism, so it is amusingto see pedantry clinging faithfully to the traditions of its prosaicnature, and holding sacred the dead shells that once housed a moralsymbol. What a divine thing the _out_side always has been and continuesto be! And how the cast clothes of the mind continue always to be infashion! We turn our coats without changing the cut of them. But was itpossible for a man to change not only his skin but his nature? Were theresuch things as _versipelles, lycanthropi, werwolfs, _ and _loupgarous?_ Inthe earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has becomescience. The phenomena of nature, imaginatively represented, were notlong in becoming myths. These the primal poets reproduced again assymbols, no longer of physical, but of moral truths. By and by theprofessional poets, in search of a subject, are struck by the fund ofpicturesque material lying unused in them, and work them up once more asnarratives, with appropriate personages and decorations. Thence they takethe further downward step into legend, and from that to superstition. Howmany metamorphoses between the elder Edda and the Nibelungen, betweenArcturus and the "Idyls of the King"! Let a good, thorough-paced proserget hold of one of these stories, and he carefully desiccates them ofwhatever fancy may be left, till he has reduced them to the properdryness of fact. King Lycaon, grandson by the spindleside of Oceanus, after passing through all the stages I have mentioned, becomes theancestor of the werwolf. Ovid is put upon the stand as a witness, andtestifies to the undoubted fact of the poor monarch's ownmetamorphosis:-- "Territus ipse fugit, nactusque silentia ruris Exululat, frustraque loqui conatur. " Does any one still doubt that men may be changed into beasts? CallLucian, call Apuleius, call Homer, whose story of the companions ofUlysses made swine of by Circe, says Bodin, _n'est pas fable_. If thatarch-patron of sorcerers, Wierus, is still unconvinced, and pronouncesthe whole thing a delusion of diseased imagination, what does he say toNebuchadnezzar? Nay, let St. Austin be subpoenaed, who declares that "inhis time among the Alps sorceresses were common, who, by makingtravellers eat of a certain cheese, changed them into beasts of burdenand then back again into men. " Too confiding tourist, beware of_Gruyère_, especially at supper! Then, there was the PhilosopherAmmonius, whose lectures were constantly attended by an ass, --aphenomenon not without parallel in more recent times, and all the morecredible to Bodin, who had been professor of civil law. In one case we have fortunately the evidence of the ass himself. InGermany, two witches who kept an inn made an ass of a young actor, --notalways a very prodigious transformation it will be thought by thosefamiliar with the stage. In his new shape he drew customers by hisamusing tricks, --_voluptates mille viatoribus exhibebat_. But one daymaking his escape (having overheard the secret from his mistresses), heplunged into the water and was disasinized to the extent of recoveringhis original shape. "Id Petrus Damianus, vir sua aetate inter primosnumerandus, cum rem sciscitatus est diligentissime ex hero, _ex asino_, ex mulieribus sagis confessis factum, Leoni VII. Papae narravit, etpostquam diu in utramque partem coram Papa fuit disputatum, hoc tandemposse fieri fuit constitum. " Bodin must have been delighted with thisstory, though perhaps as a Protestant he might have vilipended theinfallible decision of the Pope in its favor. As for lycanthropy, thatwas too common in his own time to need any confirmation. It was notoriousto all men. "In Livonia, during the latter part of December, a villaingoes about summoning the sorcerers to meet at a certain place, and ifthey fail, the Devil scourges them thither with an iron rod, and that sosharply that the marks of it remain upon them. Their captain goes before;and they, to the number of several thousands, follow him across a river, which passed, they change into wolves, and, casting themselves upon menand flocks, do all manner of damage. " This we have on the authority ofMelancthon's son-in-law, Gaspar Peucerus. Moreover, many books publishedin Germany affirm "that one of the greatest kings in Christendom, notlong since dead, was often changed into a wolf. " But what need of words?The conclusive proof remains, that many in our own day, being put to thetorture, have confessed the fact, and been burned alive accordingly. Themaintainers of the reality of witchcraft in the next century seem to havedropped the _werwolf_ by common consent, though supported by the samekind of evidence they relied on in other matters, namely, that of ocularwitnesses, the confession of the accused, and general notoriety. Solately as 1765 the French peasants believed the "wild beast of theGevaudan" to be a _loupgarou_, and that, I think, is his last appearance. The particulars of the concubinage of witches with their familiars werediscussed with a relish and a filthy minuteness worthy of Sanchez. Couldchildren be born of these devilish amours? Of course they could, said oneparty; are there not plenty of cases in authentic history? Who was thefather of Romulus and Remus? nay, not so very long ago, of Merlin?Another party denied the possibility of the thing altogether. Among thesewas Luther, who declared the children either to be supposititious, orelse mere imps, disguised as innocent sucklings, and known as_Wechselkinder_, or changelings, who were common enough, as everybodymust be aware. Of the intercourse itself Luther had no doubts. [111] Athird party took a middle ground, and believed that vermin and toadsmight be the offspring of such amours. And how did the Demon, a merespiritual essence, contrive himself a body? Some would have it that heentered into dead bodies, by preference, of course, those of sorcerers. It is plain, from the confession of De la Rue, that this was the theoryof his examiners. This also had historical evidence in its favor. Therewas the well-known leading case of the Bride of Corinth, for example. Andbut yesterday, as it were, at Crossen in Silesia, did not ChristopherMonig, an apothecary's servant, come back after being buried, and doduty, as if nothing particular had happened, putting up prescriptions asusual, and "pounding drugs in the mortar with a mighty noise"?Apothecaries seem to have been special victims of these Satanic pranks, for another appeared at Reichenbach not long before, affirming that, "hehad poisoned several men with his drugs, " which certainly gives an air oftruth to the story. Accordingly the Devil is represented as beingunpleasantly cold to the touch. "Caietan escrit qu'une sorciere demandaun iour au diable pourquoy il ne se rechauffoit, qui fist response qu'ilfaisoit ce qu'il pouuoit. " Poor Devil! But there are cases in which thedemon is represented as so hot that his grasp left a seared spot as blackas charcoal. Perhaps some of them came from the torrid zone of theirbroad empire, and others from the thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice. Those who were not satisfied with the dead-body theory contentedthemselves, like Dr. More, with that of "adscititious particles, " whichhas, to be sure, a more metaphysical and scholastic flavor about it. Thatthe demons really came, either corporeally or through some diabolicillusion that amounted to the same thing, and that the witch devotedherself to him body and soul, scarce anybody was bold enough to doubt. Tothese familiars their venerable paramours gave endearing nicknames, suchas My little Master, or My dear Martin, --the latter, probably, after theheresy of Luther, and when the rack was popish. The famous witch-finderHopkins enables us to lengthen the list considerably. One witch whom heconvicted, after being "kept from sleep two or three nights, " called infive of her devilish servitors. The first was "_Holt_, who came in like awhite kitling"; the second "_Jarmara_, like a fat spaniel without anylegs at all"; the third, "_Vinegar Tom_, who was like a long-tailedgreyhound with an head like an oxe, with a long tail and broad eyes, who, when this discoverer spoke to and bade him to the place provided for himand his angells, immediately transformed himself into the shape of achild of foure yeares old, without a head, and gave half a dozen turnesabout the house and vanished at the doore"; the fourth, "_Sack andSugar_, like a black rabbet"; the fifth, "_News_, like a polcat. " Othernames of his finding were Elemauzer, Pywacket, Peck-in-the-Crown, Grizzel, and Greedygut, "which, " he adds, "no mortal could invent. " Thename of _Robin_, which we met with in the confession of Alice Duke, has, perhaps, wider associations than the woman herself dreamed of; for, through Robin des Bois and Robin Hood, it may be another of thosescattered traces that lead us back to Woden. Probably, however, it isonly our old friend Robin Goodfellow, whose namesake Knecht Ruprechtmakes such a figure in the German fairy mythology. Possessed personscalled in higher agencies, --Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Powers; andamong the witnesses against Urbain Grandier we find the names ofLeviathan, Behemoth, Isaacarum, Belaam, Asmodeus, and Beherit, who spokeFrench very well, but were remarkably poor Latinists, knowing, indeed, almost as little of the language as if their youth had been spent inwriting Latin verses. [112] A shrewd Scotch physician tried them withGaelic, but they could make nothing of it. It was only when scepticism had begun to make itself uncomfortablyinquisitive, that the Devil had any difficulty in making himself visibleand even palpable. In simpler times, demons would almost seem to havemade no inconsiderable part of the population. Trithemius tells of onewho served as cook to the Bishop of Hildesheim (one shudders to think ofthe school where he had graduated as _Cordon bleu_), and who delectebaturesse cum hominibus, loquens, interrogans, respondens familiariteromnibus, aliquando visibiliter, aliquando invisibiliter apparens. Thislast feat of "appearing invisibly" would have been worth seeing. In 1554, the Devil came of a Christmas eve to Lawrence Doner, a parish priest inSaxony, and asked to be confessed. "Admissus, horrendas adversus Christumfilium Dei blasphemias evomuit. Verum cum virtute verbi Dei a parochovictus esset, intolerabili post se relicto foetore abiit. " Splendidlydressed, with two companions, he frequented an honest man's house atRothenberg. He brought with him a piper or fiddler, and contrived feastsand dances under pretext of wooing the goodman's daughter. He boastedthat he was a foreign nobleman of immense wealth, and, for a time, was assuccessful as an Italian courier has been known to be at one of ourfashionable watering-places. But the importunity of the guest and hisfriends at length displicuit patrifamilias, who accordingly one eveninginvited a minister of the Word to meet them at supper, and entered uponpious discourse with him from the word of God. Wherefore, seeking othermatter of conversation, they said that there were many facetious thingsmore suitable to exhilarate the supper-table than the interpretation ofHoly Writ, and begged that they might be no longer bored with Scripture. Thoroughly satisfied by their singular way of thinking that his guestswere diabolical, paterfamilias cries out in Latin worthy of Father Tom, "Apagite, vos scelerati nebulones!" This said, the tartarean impostor andhis companions at once vanished with a great tumult, leaving behind thema most unpleasant foetor and the bodies of three men who had been hanged. Perhaps if the clergyman-cure were faithfully tried upon the nextfortune-hunting count with a large real estate in whiskers and animaginary one in Barataria, he also might vanish, leaving a strong smellof barber's-shop, and taking with him a body that will come to thegallows in due time. It were worth trying. Luther tells of a demon whoserved as _famulus_ in a monastery, fetching beer for the monks, andalways insisting on honest measure for his money. There is one case onrecord where the Devil appealed to the courts for protection in hisrights. A monk, going to visit his mistress, fell dead as he was passinga bridge. The good and bad angel came to litigation about his soul. Thecase was referred by agreement to Eichard, Duke of Normandy, who decidedthat the monk's body should be carried back to the bridge, and his soulrestored to it by the claimants. If he persevered in keeping hisassignation, the Devil was to have him, if not, then the Angel. The monk, thus put upon his guard, turns back and saves his soul, such as itwas. [113] Perhaps the most impudent thing the Devil ever did was to opena school of magic in Toledo. The ceremony of graduation in thisinstitution was peculiar. The senior class had all to run through anarrow cavern, and the venerable president was entitled to the hindmost, if he could catch him. Sometimes it happened that he caught only hisshadow, and in that case the man who had been nimble enough to do whatGoethe pronounces impossible, became the most profound magician of hisyear. Hence our proverb of _the Devil take the hindmost_, and Chamisso'sstory of Peter Schlemihl. There is no end of such stories. They were repeated and believed by thegravest and wisest men down to the end of the sixteenth century; theywere received undoubtingly by the great majority down to the end of theseventeenth. The Devil was an easy way of accounting for what was beyondmen's comprehension. He was the simple and satisfactory answer to all theconundrums of Nature. And what the Devil had not time to bestow hispersonal attention upon, the witch was always ready to do for him. Was adoctor at a loss about a case? How could he save his credit more cheaplythan by pronouncing it witchcraft, and turning it over to the parson tobe exorcised? Did a man's cow die suddenly, or his horse fall lame?Witchcraft! Did one of those writers of controversial quartos, heavy asthe stone of Diomed, feel a pain in the small of his back? Witchcraft!Unhappily there were always ugly old women; and if you crossed them inany way, or did them a wrong, they were given to scolding and banning. If, within a year or two after, anything should happen to you or yours, why, of course, old Mother Bombie or Goody Blake must be at the bottom ofit. For it was perfectly well known that there were witches, (does notGod's law say expressly, "Suffer not a _witch_ to live?") and that theycould cast a spell by the mere glance of their eyes, could cause you topine away by melting a waxen image, could give you a pain wherever theyliked by sticking pins into the same, could bring sickness into yourhouse or into your barn by hiding a Devil's powder under the threshold;and who knows what else? Worst of all, they could send a demon into yourbody, who would cause you to vomit pins, hair, pebbles, knives, -indeed, almost anything short of a cathedral, -without any fault of yours, utterthrough you the most impertinent things _verbi ministro_, and, in short, make you the most important personage in the parish for the time being. Meanwhile, you were an object of condolence and contribution to the wholeneighborhood. What wonder if a lazy apprentice or servant-maid (Bekkergives several instances of the kind detected by him) should prefer beingpossessed, with its attendant perquisites, to drudging from morning tillnight? And to any one who has observed how common a thing in certainstates of mind self-connivance is, and how near it is to self-deception, it will not be surprising that some were, to all intents and purposes, really possessed. Who has never felt an almost irresistible temptation, and seemingly not self-originated, to let himself go? to let his mindgallop and kick and curvet and roll like a horse turned loose? in short, as we Yankees say, "to speak out in meeting"? Who never had it suggestedto him by the fiend to break in at a funeral with a real character of thedeceased, instead of that Mrs. Grundyfied view of him which the clergymanis so painfully elaborating in his prayer? Remove the pendulum ofconventional routine, and the mental machinery runs on with a whir thatgives a delightful excitement to sluggish temperaments, and is, perhaps, the natural relief of highly nervous organizations. The tyrant Will isdethroned, and the sceptre snatched by his frolic sister Whim. This stateof things, if continued, must become either insanity or imposture. Butwho can say precisely where consciousness ceases and a kind of automaticmovement begins, the result of over-excitement? The subjects of thesestrange disturbances have been almost always young women or girls at acritical period of their development. Many of the most remarkable caseshave occurred in convents, and both there and elsewhere, as in otherkinds of temporary nervous derangement, have proved contagious. Sometimes, as in the affair of the nuns of Loudon, there seems everyreason to suspect a conspiracy; but I am not quite ready to say thatGrandier was the only victim, and that some of the energumens were notunconscious tools in the hands of priestcraft and revenge. One thing iscertain: that in the dioceses of humanely sceptical prelates the cases ofpossession were sporadic only, and either cured, or at least hinderedfrom becoming epidemic, by episcopal mandate. Cardinal Mazarin, whenPapal vice-legate at Avignon, made an end of the trade of exorcism withinhis government. But scepticism, down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, was theexception. Undoubting and often fanatical belief was the rule. It is easyenough to be astonished at it, still easier to misapprehend it. How couldsane men have been deceived by such nursery-tales? Still more, how couldthey have suffered themselves, on what seems to us such puerile evidence, to consent to such atrocious cruelties, nay, to urge them on? As to thebelief, we should remember that the human mind, when it sails by _deadreckoning_, without the possibility of a fresh observation, perhapswithout the instruments necessary to take one, will sometimes bring up invery strange latitudes. Do we of the nineteenth century, then, alwaysstrike out boldly into the unlandmarked deep of speculation and shape ourcourses by the stars, or do we not sometimes con our voyage by what seemto us the firm and familiar headlands of truth, planted by God himself, but which may, after all, be no more than an insubstantial mockery ofcloud or airy juggle of mirage? The refraction of our own atmosphere hasby no means made an end of its tricks with the appearances of things inour little world of thought. The men of that day believed what they saw, or, as our generation would put it, what they _thought_ they saw. Verygood. The vast majority of men believe, and always will believe, on thesame terms. When one comes along who can partly distinguish the thingseen from that travesty or distortion of it which the thousand disturbinginfluences within him and without him would _make_ him see, we call him agreat philosopher. All our intellectual charts are engraved according tohis observations, and we steer contentedly by them till some man whosebrain rests on a still more unmovable basis corrects them still furtherby eliminating what his predecessor thought _he_ saw. We must account formany former aberrations in the moral world by the presence of more orless nebulous bodies of a certain gravity which modified the actualposition of truth in its relation to the mind, and which, if they havenow vanished, have made way, perhaps, for others whose influence will inlike manner be allowed for by posterity in their estimate of us. Inmatters of faith, astrology has by no means yet given place to astronomy, nor alchemy become chemistry, which knows what to seek for and how tofind it. In the days of witchcraft all science was still in the conditionof _May-be;_ it is only just bringing itself to find a highersatisfaction in the imperturbable _Must-be_ of law. We should rememberthat what we call _natural_ may have a very different meaning for onegeneration from that which it has for another. The boundary between the"other" world and this ran till very lately, and at some points runsstill, through a vast tract of unexplored border-land of very uncertaintenure. Even now the territory which Reason holds firmly as Lord Wardenof the marches during daylight, is subject to sudden raids of Imaginationby night. But physical darkness is not the only one that lendsopportunity to such incursions; and in midsummer 1692, when EbenezerBapson, looking out of the fort at Gloucester in broad day, saw shapes ofmen, sometimes in blue coats like Indians, sometimes in white waistcoatslike Frenchmen, it seemed _more_ natural to most men that they should bespectres than men of flesh and blood. Granting the assumed premises, asnearly every one did, the syllogism was perfect. So much for the apparent reasonableness of the belief, since every man'slogic is satisfied with a legitimate deduction from his own postulates. Causes for the cruelty to which the belief led are not further to seek. Toward no crime have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as inpunishing difference of belief, and the first systematic persecutions forwitchcraft began with the inquisitors in the South of France in thethirteenth century. It was then and there that the charge of sexualuncleanness with demons was first devised. Persecuted heretics wouldnaturally meet in darkness and secret, and it was easy to blacken suchmeetings with the accusation of deeds so foul as to shun the light of dayand the eyes of men. They met to renounce God and worship the Devil. Butthis was not enough. To excite popular hatred and keep it fiercely alive, fear must be mingled with it; and this end was reached by making theheretic also a sorcerer, who, by the Devil's help, could and would workall manner of fiendish mischief. When by this means the belief in aleague between witch and demon had become firmly established, witchcraftgrew into a well-defined crime, hateful enough in itself to furnishpastime for the torturer and food for the fagot. In the fifteenthcentury, witches were burned by thousands, and it may well be doubted ifall paganism together was ever guilty of so many human sacrifices in thesame space of time. In the sixteenth, these holocausts were appealed toas conclusive evidence of the reality of the crime, terror was againaroused, the more vindictive that its sources were so vague andintangible, and cruelty was the natural consequence. Nothing but anabject panic, in which the whole use of reason, except as a mill to grindout syllogisms, was altogether lost, will account for some chapters inBodin's _Démonomanie_. Men were surrounded by a forever-renewedconspiracy whose ramifications they could not trace, though they mightnow and then lay hold on one of its associates. Protestant and Catholicmight agree in nothing else, but they were unanimous in their dread ofthis invisible enemy. If fright could turn civilized Englishmen intosavage Iroquois during the imagined negro plots of New York in 1741 andof Jamaica in 1865, if the same invisible omnipresence of Fenianism shallbe able to work the same miracle, as it perhaps will, next year inEngland itself, why need we be astonished that the blows should havefallen upon many an innocent head when men were striking wildly inself-defence, as they supposed, against the unindictable Powers ofDarkness, against a plot which could be carried on by human agents, butwith invisible accessories and by supernatural means? In the seventeenthcentury an element was added which pretty well supplied the place ofheresy as a sharpener of hatred and an awakener of indefinable suspicion. Scepticism had been born into the world, almost more hateful than heresy, because it had the manners of good society and contented itself with asmile, a shrug, an almost imperceptible lift of the eyebrow, --a kind ofreasoning especially exasperating to disputants of the old school, whostill cared about victory, even when they did not about the principlesinvolved in the debate. The Puritan emigration to New England took place at a time when thebelief in diabolic agency had been hardly called in question, much lessshaken. The early adventurers brought it with them to a country in everyway fitted, not only to keep it alive, but to feed it into greater vigor. The solitude of the wilderness (and solitude alone, by dis-furnishing thebrain of its commonplace associations, makes it an apt theatre for thedelusions of imagination), the nightly forest noises, the glimpse, perhaps, through the leaves, of a painted savage face, uncertain whetherof redman or Devil, but more likely of the latter, above all, thatmeasureless mystery of the unknown and conjectural stretching awayillimitable on all sides and vexing the mind, somewhat as physicaldarkness does, with intimation and misgiving, --under all theseinfluences, whatever seeds of superstition had in any way got over fromthe Old World would find an only too congenial soil in the New. Theleaders of that emigration believed and taught that demons loved to dwellin waste and wooded places, that the Indians did homage to the bodilypresence of the Devil, and that he was especially enraged against thosewho had planted an outpost of the true faith upon this continent hithertoall his own. In the third generation of the settlement, in proportion asliving faith decayed, the clergy insisted all the more strongly on thetraditions of the elders, and as they all placed the sources of goodnessand religion in some inaccessible Other World rather than in the soul ofman himself, they clung to every shred of the supernatural as proof ofthe existence of that Other World, and of its interest in the affairs ofthis. They had the countenance of all the great theologians, Catholic aswell as Protestant, of the leaders of the Reformation, and in their ownday of such men as More and Glanvil and Baxter. [114] If to all thesecauses, more or less operative in 1692, we add the harassing excitementof an Indian war (urged on by Satan in his hatred of the churches), withits daily and nightly apprehensions and alarms, we shall be lessastonished that the delusion in Salem Village rose so high than that itsubsided so soon. I have already said that it was religious antipathy or clerical interestthat first made heresy and witchcraft identical and cast them into thesame expiatory fire. The invention was a Catholic one, but it is plainthat Protestants soon learned its value and were not slow in making it aplague to the inventor. It was not till after the Reformation that therewas any systematic hunting out of witches in England. Then, no doubt, theinnocent charms and rhyming prayers of the old religion were regarded asincantations, and twisted into evidence against miserable beldames whomumbled over in their dotage what they had learned at their mother'sknee. It is plain, at least, that this was one of Agnes Simpson's crimes. But as respects the frivolity of the proof adduced, there was nothing tochoose between Catholic and Protestant. Out of civil and canon law a netwas woven through whose meshes there was no escape, and into it thevictims were driven by popular clamor. Suspicion of witchcraft wasjustified by general report, by the ill-looks of the suspected, by beingsilent when accused, by her mother's having been a witch, by flight, byexclaiming when arrested, _I am lost!_ by a habit of using imprecations, by the evidence of two witnesses, by the accusation of a man on hisdeath-bed, by a habit of being away from home at night, by fifty otherthings equally grave. Anybody might be an accuser, --a personal enemy, aninfamous person, a child, parent, brother, or sister. Once accused, theculprit was not to be allowed to touch the ground on the way to prison, was not to be left alone there lest she have interviews with the Deviland get from him the means of being insensible under torture, was to bestripped and shaved in order to prevent her concealing some charm, or tofacilitate the finding of witch-marks. Her right thumb tied to her leftgreat-toe, and _vice versa_, she was thrown into the water. If shefloated, she was a witch; if she sank and was drowned, she was lucky. This trial, as old as the days of Pliny the Elder, was gone out offashion, the author of _De Lamiis_ assures us, in his day, everywhere butin Westphalia. "On halfproof or strong presumption, " says Bodin, thejudge may proceed to torture. If the witch did not shed tears under therack, it was almost conclusive of guilt. On this topic of torture hegrows eloquent. The rack does very well, but to thrust splinters betweenthe nails and flesh of hands and feet "is the most excellent gehenna ofall, and practised in Turkey. " That of Florence, where they seat thecriminal in a hanging chair so contrived that if he drop asleep itoverturns and leaves him hanging by a rope which wrenches his armsbackwards, is perhaps even better, "for the limbs are not broken, andwithout trouble or labor one gets out the truth. " It is well in carryingthe accused to the chamber of torture to cause some in the next room toshriek fearfully as if on the rack, that they may be terrified intoconfession. It is proper to tell them that their accomplices haveconfessed and accused them ("though they have done no such thing") thatthey may do the same out of revenge. The judge may also with a goodconscience lie to the prisoner and tell her that if she admit her guilt, she may be pardoned. This is Bodin's opinion, but Walburger, writing acentury later, concludes that the judge may go to any extent _citramendacium_, this side of lying. He may tell the witch that he will befavorable, meaning to the Commonwealth; that he will see that she has anew house built for her, that is, a wooden one to burn her in; that herconfession will be most useful in saving her life, to wit, her lifeeternal. There seems little difference between the German's white liesand the Frenchman's black ones. As to punishment, Bodin is fierce forburning. Though a Protestant, he quotes with evident satisfaction adecision of the magistrates that one "who had eaten flesh on a Fridayshould be burned alive unless he repented, and if he repented, yet he washanged out of compassion. " A child under twelve who will not confessmeeting with the Devil should be put to death if convicted of the fact, though Bodin allows that Satan made no express compact with those who hadnot arrived at puberty. This he learned from the examination of JeanneHarvillier, who deposed, "that, though her mother dedicated her to Satanso soon as she was born, yet she was not married to him, nor did hedemand that, or her renunciation of God, till she had attained the age oftwelve. " There is no more painful reading than this, except the trials of thewitches themselves. These awaken, by turns, pity, indignation, disgust, and dread, --dread at the thought of what the human mind may be brought tobelieve not only probable, but proven. But it is well to be put upon ourguard by lessons of this kind, for the wisest man is in some respectslittle better than a madman in a strait-waistcoat of habit, publicopinion, prudence, or the like. Scepticism began at length to make itselffelt, but it spread slowly and was shy of proclaiming itself. Theorthodox party was not backward to charge with sorcery whoever doubtedtheir facts or pitied their victims. Bodin says that it is good cause ofsuspicion against a judge if he turn the matter into ridicule, or inclinetoward mercy. The mob, as it always is, was orthodox. It was dangerous todoubt, it might be fatal to deny. In 1453 Guillaume de Lure was burned atPoitiers on his own confession of a compact with Satan, by which heagreed "to preach and did preach that everything told of sorcerers wasmere fable, and that it was cruelly done to condemn them to death. " Thiscontract was found among his papers signed "with the Devil's own claw, "as Howell says speaking of a similar case. It is not to be wondered atthat the earlier doubters were cautious. There was literally a reign ofterror, and during such _régimes_ men are commonly found more eager to beinformers and accusers than of counsel for the defence. Peter of Abano isreckoned among the earliest unbelievers who declared himself openly. [115]Chaucer was certainly a sceptic, as appears by the opening of the Wife ofBath's Tale. Wierus, a German physician, was the first to undertake(1563) a refutation of the facts and assumptions on which theprosecutions for witchcraft were based. His explanation of the phenomenais mainly physiological. Mr. Leckie hardly states his position correctly, in saying, "that he never dreamed of restricting the sphere of thesupernatural. " Wierus went as far as he dared. No one can read his bookwithout feeling that he insinuates much more than he positively affirmsor denies. He would have weakened his cause if he had seemed todisbelieve in demoniacal possession, since that had the supposed warrantof Scripture; but it may be questioned whether he uses the words _Satan_and _Demon_ in any other way than that in which many people still use theword _Nature_. He was forced to accept certain premises of his opponentsby the line of his argument. When he recites incredible stories withoutcomment, it is not that he believes them, but that he thinks theirabsurdity obvious. That he wrote under a certain restraint is plain fromthe Colophon of his book, where he says: "Nihil autem hic ita assertumvolo, quod aequiori judicio Catholicae Christi Ecclesiae non omninosubmittam, palinodia mox spontanea emendaturus, si erroris alicubiconvincar. " A great deal of latent and timid scepticism seems to havebeen brought to the surface by his work. Many eminent persons wrote tohim in gratitude and commendation. In the Preface to his shorter treatise_De Lamiis_ (which is a mere abridgment), he thanks God that his laborshad "in many places caused the cruelty against innocent blood toslacken, " and that "some more distinguished judges treat more mildly andeven absolve from capital punishment the wretched old women branded withthe odious name of witches by the populace. " In the _PseudomonarchiaDaemonum_, he gives a kind of census of the diabolic kingdom, [116] butevidently with secret intention of making the whole thing ridiculous, orit would not have so stirred the bile of Bodin. Wierus was saluted bymany contemporaries as a Hercules who destroyed monsters, and himself notimmodestly claimed the civic wreath for having saved the lives offellow-citizens. Posterity should not forget a man who really did anhonest life's work for humanity and the liberation of thought. From oneof the letters appended to his book we learn that Jacobus Savagius, aphysician of Antwerp, had twenty years before written a treatise with thesame design, but confining himself to the medical argument exclusively. He was, however, prevented from publishing it by death. It is pleasant tolearn from Bodin that Alciato, the famous lawyer and emblematist, was oneof those who "laughed and made others laugh at the evidence relied on atthe trials, insisting that witchcraft was a thing impossible andfabulous, and so softened the hearts of judges (in spite of the fact thatan inquisitor had caused to burn more than a hundred sorcerers inPiedmont), that all the accused escaped. " In England, Reginald Scot wasthe first to enter the lists in behalf of those who had no champion. Hisbook, published in 1584, is full of manly sense and spirit, above all, ofa tender humanity that gives it a warmth which we miss in every otherwritten on the same side. In the dedication to Sir Roger Manwood he says:"I renounce all protection and despise all friendship that might servetowards the suppressing or supplanting of truth. " To his kinsman, SirThomas Scot, he writes: "My greatest adversaries are _young ignorance_and _old custom_; for what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, itis so superstitiously pursued of some, as though no error could beacquainted with custom. " And in his Preface he thus states his motives:"God that knoweth my heart is witness, and you that read my book shallsee, that my drift and purpose in this enterprise tendeth only to theserespects. First, that the glory and power of God be not so abridged andabased as to be thrust into the hand or lip of a lewd old woman, wherebythe work of the Creator should be attributed to the power of a creature. Secondly, that the religion of the Gospel may be seen to stand withoutsuch peevish trumpery. Thirdly, that lawful favor and Christiancompassion be rather used towards these poor souls than rigor andextremity. Because they which are commonly accused of witchcraft are theleast sufficient of all other persons to speak for themselves, as havingthe most base and simple education of all others, the extremity of theirage giving them leave to dote, their poverty to beg, their wrongs tochide and threaten (as being void of any other way of revenge), theirhumor melancholical to be full of imaginations, from whence chieflyproceedeth the vanity of their confessions. .. . And for so much as themighty help themselves together, and the poor widow's cry, though itreach to Heaven, is scarce heard here upon earth, I thought good(according to my poor ability) to make intercession that some part ofcommon rigor and some points of hasty judgment may be advised upon. ". .. . The case is nowhere put with more point, or urged with more sense andeloquence, than by Scot, whose book contains also more curious matter, inthe way of charms, incantations, exorcisms, and feats of legerdemain, than any other of the kind. Other books followed on the same side, of which Bekker's, published abouta century later, was the most important. It is well reasoned, learned, and tedious to a masterly degree. But though the belief in witchcraftmight be shaken, it still had the advantage of being on the wholeorthodox and respectable. Wise men, as usual, insisted on regardingsuperstition as of one substance with faith, and objected to any scouringof the shield of religion, lest, like that of Cornelius Scriblerus, itshould suddenly turn out to be nothing more than "a paltry old sconcewith the nozzle broke off. " The Devil continued to be the only recognizedMinister Resident of God upon earth. When we remember that one man'saccusation on his death-bed was enough to constitute grave presumption ofwitchcraft, it might seem singular that dying testimonies were so long ofno avail against the common credulity. But it should be remembered thatmen are mentally no less than corporeally gregarious, and that publicopinion, the fetish even of the nineteenth century, makes men, whetherfor good or ill, into a mob, which either hurries the individual judgmentalong with it, or runs over and tramples it into insensibility. Those whoare so fortunate as to occupy the philosophical position of spectators_ab extra_ are very few in any generation. There were exceptions, it is true, but the old cruelties went on. In 1610a case came before the tribunal of the _Tourelle_, and when the counselfor the accused argued at some length that sorcery was ineffectual, andthat the Devil could not destroy life, President Seguier told him that hemight spare his breath, since the court had long been convinced on thosepoints. And yet two years later the grand-vicars of the Bishop ofBeauvais solemnly summoned Beelzebuth, Satan, Motelu, and Briffaut, withthe four legions under their charge, to appear and sign an agreementnever again to enter the bodies of reasonable or other creatures, underpain of excommunication! If they refused, they were to be given over to"the power of hell to be tormented and tortured more than was customary, three thousand years after the judgment. " Under this proclamation theyall came in, like reconstructed rebels, and signed whatever document wasput before them. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, the safething was still to believe, or at any rate to profess belief. Sir ThomasBrowne, though he had written an exposure of "Vulgar Errors, " testifiedin court to his faith in the possibility of witchcraft. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his "Observations on the Religio Medici, " takes, perhaps, as advancedground as any, when he says: "Neither do I deny there are witches; I onlyreserve my assent till I meet with stronger motives to carry it. " Theposition of even enlightened men of the world in that age might be calledsemi-sceptical. La Bruyère, no doubt, expresses the average of opinion:"Que penser de la magie et du sortilége? La théorie en est obscurcie, lesprincipes vagues, incertains, et qui approchent du visionnaire; mais il ya des faits embarrassants, affirmés par des hommes graves qui les ontvus; les admettre tous, ou les nier tous, paraît un égal inconvénient, etj'ose dire qu'en cela comme en toutes les choses extraordinaires et quisorteut des communes règles, il y a un parti à trouver entre les âmescrédules et les esprits forts. "[117] Montaigne, to be sure, had longbefore declared his entire disbelief, and yet the Parliament ofBourdeaux, his own city, condemned a man to be burned as a _noüeurd'aiguillettes_ so lately as 1718. Indeed, it was not, says Maury, tillthe first quarter of the eighteenth century that one might safely publishhis incredulity in France. In Scotland, witches were burned for the lasttime in 1722. Garinet cites the case of a girl near Amiens possessed bythree demons, --Mimi, Zozo, and Crapoulet, --in 1816. The two beautiful volumes of Mr. Upham are, so far as I know, unique intheir kind. It is, in some respects, a clinical lecture on human nature, as well as on the special epidemical disease under which the patient islaboring. He has written not merely a history of the so-called SalemWitchcraft, but has made it intelligible by a minute account of the placewhere the delusion took its rise, the persons concerned in it, whether asactors or sufferers, and the circumstances which led to it. By deeds, wills, and the records of courts and churches, by plans, maps, anddrawings, he has recreated Salem Village as it was two hundred years ago, so that we seem wellnigh to talk with its people and walk over itsfields, or through its cart-tracks and bridle-roads. We are made partnersin parish and village feuds, we share in the chimney-corner gossip, andlearn for the first time how many mean and merely human motives, whetherconsciously or unconsciously, gave impulse and intensity to the passionsof the actors in that memorable tragedy which dealt the death-blow inthis country to the belief in Satanic compacts. Mr. Upham's minutedetails, which give us something like a photographic picture of thein-door and out-door scenery that surrounded the events he narrates, helpus materially to understand their origin and the course they inevitablytook. In this respect his book is original and full of new interest. Toknow the kind of life these people led, the kind of place they dwelt in, and the tenor of their thought, makes much real to us that wasconjectural before. The influences of outward nature, of remoteness fromthe main highways of the world's thought, of seclusion, as thefoster-mother of traditionary beliefs, of a hard life and unwholesomediet in exciting or obscuring the brain through the nerves and stomach, have been hitherto commonly overlooked in accounting for the phenomena ofwitchcraft. The great persecutions for this imaginary crime have alwaystaken place in lonely places, among the poor, the ignorant, and, aboveall, the ill-fed. One of the best things in Mr. Upham's book is the portrait of Parris, theminister of Salem Village, in whose household the children who, under theassumed possession of evil spirits, became accusers and witnesses, begantheir tricks. He is shown to us pedantic and something of a martinet inchurch discipline and ceremony, somewhat inclined to magnify his office, fond of controversy as he was skilful and rather unscrupulous in theconduct of it, and glad of any occasion to make himself prominent. Was hethe unconscious agent of his own superstition, or did he take advantageof the superstition of others for purposes of his own? The question isnot an easy one to answer. Men will sacrifice everything, sometimes eventhemselves, to their pride of logic and their love of victory. Bodinloses sight of humanity altogether in his eagerness to make out his case, and display his learning in the canon and civil law. He does not scrupleto exaggerate, to misquote, to charge his antagonists with atheism, sorcery, and insidious designs against religion and society, that he maypersuade the jury of Europe to bring in a verdict of guilty. [118] Yetthere is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his belief. Was Parrisequally sincere? On the whole, I think it likely that he was. But if weacquit Parris, what shall we say of the demoniacal girls? The probabilityseems to be that those who began in harmless deceit found themselves atlength involved so deeply, that dread of shame and punishment drove themto an extremity where their only choice was between sacrificingthemselves, or others to save themselves. It is not unlikely that some ofthe younger girls were so far carried along by imitation or imaginativesympathy as in some degree to "credit their own lie. " Any one who haswatched or made experiments in animal magnetism knows how easy it is topersuade young women of nervous temperaments that they are doing that bythe will of another which they really do by an obscure volition of theirown, under the influence of an imagination adroitly guided by themagnetizer. The marvellous is so fascinating, that nine persons in ten, if once persuaded that a thing is possible, are eager to believe itprobable, and at last cunning in convincing themselves that it is proven. But it is impossible to believe that the possessed girls in this case didnot know how the pins they vomited got into their mouths. Mr. Upham hasshown, in the case of Anne Putnam, Jr. , an hereditary tendency tohallucination, if not insanity. One of her uncles had seen the Devil bybroad daylight in the novel disguise of a blue boar, in which shape, as atavern sign, he had doubtless proved more seductive than in his moreordinary transfigurations. A great deal of light is let in upon thequestion of whether there was deliberate imposture or no, by thenarrative of Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford, written in 1728, which gives usall the particulars of a case of pretended possession in Littleton, eightyears before. The eldest of three sisters began the game, and foundherself before long obliged to take the next in age into her confidence. By and by the youngest, finding her sisters pitied and caressed onaccount of their supposed sufferings while she was neglected, began toplay off the same tricks. The usual phenomena followed. They wereconvulsed, they fell into swoons, they were pinched and bruised, theywere found in the water, on the top of a tree or of the barn. To theseplaces they said they were conveyed through the air, and there were thosewho had seen them flying, which shows how strong is the impulse whichprompts men to conspire with their own delusion, where the marvellous isconcerned. The girls did whatever they had heard or read that was commonin such cases. They even accused a respectable neighbor as the cause oftheir torments. There were some doubters, but "so far as I can learn, "says Turell, "the greater number believed and said they were under theevil hand, or possessed by Satan. " But the most interesting fact of allis supplied by the confession of the elder sister, made eight years laterunder stress of remorse. Having once begun, they found returning moretedious than going o'er. To keep up their cheat made life a burden tothem, but they could not stop. Thirty years earlier, their juggling mighthave proved as disastrous as that at Salem Village. There, parish andboundary feuds had set enmity between neighbors, and the girls, called onto say who troubled them, cried out upon those whom they had been wont tohear called by hard names at home. They probably had no notion what afrightful ending their comedy was to have; but at any rate they werepowerless, for the reins had passed out of their hands into the sternergrasp of minister and magistrate. They were dragged deeper and deeper, asmen always are by their own lie. The proceedings at the Salem trials are sometimes spoken of as if theywere exceptionally cruel. But, in fact, if compared with others of thesame kind, they were exceptionally humane. At a time when Baxter couldtell with satisfaction of a "_reading_ parson" eighty years old, who, after being kept awake five days and nights, confessed his dealings withthe Devil, it is rather wonderful that no mode of torture other thanmental was tried at Salem. Nor were the magistrates more besotted orunfair than usual in dealing with the evidence. Now and then, it is true, a man more sceptical or intelligent than common had exposed somepretended demoniac. The Bishop of Orléans, in 1598, read aloud to MarthaBrossier the story of the Ephesian Widow, and the girl, hearing Latin, and taking it for Scripture, went forthwith into convulsions. He foundalso that the Devil who possessed her could not distinguish holy fromprofane water. But that there were deceptions did not shake the generalbelief in the reality of possession. The proof in such cases could notand ought not to be subjected to the ordinary tests. "If many naturalthings, " says Bodin, "are incredible and some of them incomprehensible, _a fortiori_ the power of supernatural intelligences and the doings ofspirits are incomprehensible. But error has risen to its height in this, that those who have denied the power of spirits and the doings ofsorcerers have wished to dispute physically concerning supernatural ormetaphysical things, which is a notable incongruity. " That the girls werereally possessed, seemed to Stoughton and his colleagues the mostrational theory, --a theory in harmony with the rest of their creed, andsustained by the unanimous consent of pious men as well as the evidenceof that most cunning and least suspected of all sorcerers, the Past, --andhow confront or cross-examine invisible witnesses, especially witnesseswhom it was a kind of impiety to doubt? Evidence that would have beenconvincing in ordinary cases was of no weight against the generalprepossession. In 1659 the house of a man in Brightling, Sussex, wastroubled by a demon, who set it on fire at various times, and wascontinually throwing things about. The clergy of the neighborhood held aday of fasting and prayer in consequence. A maid-servant was afterwardsdetected as the cause of the missiles. But this did not in the leaststagger Mr. Bennet, minister of the parish, who merely says: "There was a_seeming blur_ cast, though not on the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their servant-girl was at last found throwing some things, " and goesoff into a eulogium on the "efficacy of prayer. " In one respect, to which Mr. Upham first gives the importance itdeserves, the Salem trials were distinguished from all others. Thoughsome of the accused had been terrified into confession, yet not onepersevered in it, but all died protesting their innocence, and withunshaken constancy, though an acknowledgment of guilt would have savedthe lives of all. This martyr proof of the efficacy of Puritanism in thecharacter and conscience may be allowed to outweigh a great many sneersat Puritan fanaticism. It is at least a testimony to the courage andconstancy which a profound religious sentiment had made common among thepeople of whom these sufferers were average representatives. The accusedalso were not, as was commonly the case, abandoned by their friends. Inall the trials of this kind there is nothing so pathetic as the pictureof Jonathan Cary holding up the weary arms of his wife during her trial, and wiping away the sweat from her brow and the tears from her face. Another remarkable fact is this, that while in other countries thedelusion was extinguished by the incredulity of the upper classes and theinterference of authority, here the reaction took place among the peoplethemselves, and here only was an attempt made at some legislativerestitution, however inadequate. Mr. Upham's sincere and honestnarrative, while it never condescends to a formal plea, is the bestvindication possible of a community which was itself the greatestsufferer by the persecution which its credulity engendered. If any lesson may be drawn from the tragical and too often disgustfulhistory of witchcraft, it is not one of exultation at our superiorenlightenment or shame at the shortcomings of the human intellect. It israther one of charity and self-distrust. When we see what inhumanabsurdities men in other respects wise and good have clung to as thecorner-stone of their faith in immortality and a divine ordering of theworld, may we not suspect that those who now maintain political or otherdoctrines which seem to us barbarous and unenlightened, may be, for allthat, in the main as virtuous and clear-sighted as ourselves? While wemaintain our own side with an honest ardor of conviction, let us notforget to allow for mortal incompetence in the other. And if there aremen who regret the Good Old Times, without too clear a notion of whatthey were, they should at least be thankful that we are rid of thatmisguided energy of faith which justified conscience in making menunrelentingly cruel. Even Mr. Leckie softens a little at the thought ofthe many innocent and beautiful beliefs of which a growing scepticism hasrobbed us in the decay of supernaturalism. But we need not despair; for, after all, scepticism is first cousin of credulity, and we are notsurprised to see the tough doubter Montaigne hanging up his offerings inthe shrine of our Lady of Loreto. Scepticism commonly takes up the roomleft by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind mostlikely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came fromthe dead, it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, andwill put up with a very dubious one. So long as night is left and thehelplessness of dream, the wonderful will not cease from among men. Whilewe are the solitary prisoners of darkness, the witch seats herself at theloom of thought, and weaves strange figures into the web that looks sofamiliar and ordinary in the dry light of every-day. Just as we areflattering ourselves that the old spirit of sorcery is laid, behold thetables are tipping and the floors drumming all over Christendom. Thefaculty of wonder is not defunct, but is only getting more and moreemancipated from the unnatural service of terror, and restored to itsproper function as a minister of delight. A higher mode of belief is thebest exorciser, because it makes the spiritual at one with the actualworld instead of hostile, or at best alien. It has been the grosslymaterial interpretations of spiritual doctrine that have given occasionto the two extremes of superstition and unbelief. While the resurrectionof the body has been insisted on, that resurrection from the body whichis the privilege of all has been forgotten. Superstition in its banefulform was largely due to the enforcement by the Church of arguments thatinvolved a _petitio principii_, for it is the miserable necessity of allfalse logic to accept of very ignoble allies. Fear became at length itschief expedient for the maintenance of its power; and as there is abeneficent necessity laid upon a majority of mankind to sustain andperpetuate the order of things they are born into, and to make all newideas manfully prove their right, first, to be at all, and then to beheard, many even superior minds dreaded the tearing away of viciousaccretions as dangerous to the whole edifice of religion and society. Butif this old ghost be fading away in what we regard as the dawn of abetter day, we may console ourselves by thinking that perhaps, after all, we are not so _much_ wiser than our ancestors. The rappings, the trancemediums, the visions of hands without bodies, the sounding of musicalinstruments without visible fingers, the miraculous inscriptions on thenaked flesh, the enlivenment of furniture, --we have invented none ofthem, they are all heirlooms. There is surely room for yet anotherschoolmaster, when a score of seers advertise themselves in Bostonnewspapers. And if the metaphysicians can never rest till they have takentheir watch to pieces and have arrived at a happy positivism as to itsstructure, though at the risk of bringing it to a no-go, we may be surethat the majority will always take more satisfaction in seeing its handsmysteriously move on, even if they should err a little as to the precisetime of day established by the astronomical observatories. Footnotes: [98] Salem Witchcraft, with an Account of Salem Village, and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects. By Charles W. Upham. Boston: Wiggin and Lunt. 1867. 2 vols. Ioannis Wieri de praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac veneficiis libri sex, postrema editione sexta aucti et recogniti. Accessit liber apologeticus et pseudomonarchia daemonum. Cum rerum et verborum copioso indice. Cum Caes. Maiest. Regisq: Galliarum gratia et privelegio. Basiliae ex officina Oporiniani, 1583. Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft: proving the common opinions of Witches contracting with Divels, Spirits, or Familiars; and their power to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men, women, and children, or other creatures by diseases or otherwise; their flying in the Air, &c. ; To be but imaginary Erronious conceptions and novelties; Wherein also the lewde, unchristian practises of Witchmongers, upon aged, melancholy, ignorant and superstitious people in extorting confessions by inhumane terrors and Tortures, is notably detected. Also The knavery and confederacy of Conjurors. The impious blasphemy of Inchanters. The imposture of Soothsayers, and infidelity of Atheists. The delusion of Pythonists, Figure-casters, Astrologers, and vanity of Dreamers. The fruitlesse beggarly art of Alchimistry. The horrible art of Poisoning and all the tricks and conveyances of juggling and lieger-demain are fully deciphered. With many other things opened that have long lain hidden: though very necessary to be known for the undeceiving of Judges, Justices, and Juries, and for the preservation of poor, aged, deformed, ignorant people; frequently taken, arraigned, condemned and executed for Witches, when according to a right understanding, and a good conscience, Physick, Food, and necessaries should be administered to him. Whereunto is added a treatise upon the nature and substance of Spirits and Divels &c. , all written and published in Anno 1584. By Reginald Scot, Esquire. Printed by R. C. And are to be sold by Giles Calvert dwelling at the Black Spread-Eagle, at the West-End of Pauls, 1651. De la Demonomanie des Sorciers. A Monseigneur M. Chrestofe De Thou, Chevalier, Seigneur de Coeli, premier President en la Cour de Parlement et Conseiller du Roy en son privé Conseil. Reveu, Corrigé, et augmenté d'une grande partie. Par I. Bodin Angevin. A Paris: Chez Iacques Du Puys, Libraire Iuré, á la Samaritaine. M. D. LXXXVII. Avec privilege du Roy. Magica, seu mirabilium historiarum de Spectris et Apparitionibus spirituum: Item, de magicis et diabolicis incantationibus. De Miraculis, Oraculis, Vaticiniis, Divinationibus, Praedictionibus, Revelationibus et aliis eiusmodi multis ac varijs praestigijs, ludibrijs et imposturis malorum Daemonum. Libri II. Ex probatis et fide dignis historiarum scriptoribus diligenter collecti. Islebiae, cura, Typis et sumptibus Henningi Grossij Bibl. Lipo. 1597. Cum privilegio. The displaying of supposed Witchcraft wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of Melancholy and Fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the Devil and the Witch, or that he sucks on the Witch's body, has carnal copulation, or that Witches are turned into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests or the like is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein is also handled, The existence of Angels and Spirits, the truth of Apparitions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal Spirits, the force of Charms and Philters; with other abstruse matters. By John Webster, Practitioner in Physick. Falsa etenim opiniones Hominum non solum surdos sed et coecos faciunt, ita ut videre nequeant quae aliis perspicua apparent. Galen. Lib. 8, de Comp. Med. London: Printed by I. M. And are to be sold by the booksellers in London. 1677. Sadducismus Triumphatus: or Full and Plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions. In two Parts. The First treating of their Possibility; the Second of their Real Existence. By Joseph Glanvil, late Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty, and Fellow of the Royal Society. The third edition. The advantages whereof above the former, the Reader may understand out of Dr H. More's Account prefixed therunto. With two Authentick, but wonderful Stories of certain Swedish Witches. Done into English by A. Horneck DD. London, Printed for S. L. And are to be sold by Anth. Baskerville at the Bible, the corner of Essex-street, without Temple-Bar. M. DCLXXXIX. Demonologie ou Traitte des Demons et Sorciers: De leur puissance et impuissance: Par Fr. Perraud. Ensemble L'Antidemon de Mascon, ou Histoire Veritable de ce qu'un Demon a fait et dit, il y a quelques années en la maison dudit Sr. Perreaud a Mascon. I. Jacques iv. 7, 8. "Resistez au Diable, et il s'enfuira de vous. Approchez vous de Dieu, et il s'approchera de vous. " A Geneve, chez Pierre Aubert. M, DC, LIII. The Wonders of the Invisible World. Being an account of the tryals of several witches lately executed in New-England. By Cotton Mather, D. D. To which is added a farther account of the tryals of the New England Witches. By Increase Mather, D. D. , President of Harvard College. London: John Russell Smith, Soho Square. 1862. (First printed in Boston, 1692. ) I. N. D. N. J. C. Dissertatio Juridica de Lamiis earumque processu criminali, _Von Hexen und dem Peinl. Proceß wider dieselben_, Quam, auxiliante Divina Gratia, Consensu et Authoritate Magnifici JCtorum Ordinis in illustribus Athenis Salanis sub praesidio Magnifici, Nobilissimi, Amplissimi, Consultissimi, atque Excellentissimi Dn. Ernesti Frider. _Schroeter_ hereditarii in _Wickerstädt_, JCti et Antecessoris hujus Salanae Famigeratissimi, Consiliarii Saxonici, Curiae Provincialis, Facultatis Juridicae, et Scabinatus Assessoris longe Gravissimi, Domini Patroni Praeceptoris et Promotoris sui nullo non honoris et observantiae cultu sanctè devenerandi, colendi, publicae Eruditorum censurae subjicit Michael Paris _Walburger_, Groebzigâ Anhaltinus, in Acroaterio JCtorum ad diem 1. Maj. A. 1670. Editio Tertia. Jenae, Typis Pauli Ehrichii, 1707. Histoire de Diables de Loudun, ou de la Possession des Religieuses Ursulines, et de la condemnation et du suplice d'Urbain Grandier, Curé de la même ville. Cruels effets de la Vengeance du Cardinal de Richelieu. A Amsterdam Aux depens de la Compagnie. M. DCC. LII. A view of the Invisible World, or General History of Apparitions. Collected from the best Authorities, both Antient and Modern, and attested by Authors of the highest Reputation and Credit. Illustrated with a Variety of Notes and parallel Cases; in which some Account of the Nature and Cause of Departed Spirits visiting their former Stations by returning again into the present World, is treated in a Manner different to the prevailing Opinions of Mankind. And an Attempt is made from Rational Principles to account for the Species of such supernatural Appearances, when they may be suppos'd consistent with the Divine Appointment in the Government of the World. With the sentiments of Monsieur Le Clerc, Mr. Locke, Mr. Addison, and Others on this important Subject. In which some humorous and diverting instances are remark'd, in order to divert that Gloom of Melancholy that naturally arises in the Human Mind, from reading or meditating on such Subjects Illustrated with suitable Cuts. London: Printed in the year M, DCC, LII. [Mainly from DeFoe's "History of Apparitions. "] Satan's Invisible World discovered; or, a choice Collection of Modern Relations, proving evidently, against the Atheists of this present Age, that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches and Apparitions, from Authentic Records, Attestations of Witnesses, and undoubted Verity. To which is added that marvellous History of Major Weir and his Sister, the Witches of Balgarran, Pittenweem and Calder, &c. By George Sinclair, late Professor of Philosophy in Glasgow. No man should be vain that he can injure the merit of a Book; for the meanest rogue may burn a City or kill a Hero; whereas he could never build the one, or equal the other. Sir George M'Kenzie, Edinburgh: Sold by P. Anderson, Parliament Square. M. DCC. LXXX. La Magie et l'Astrologie dans I'Antiquité et au Moyen Age, ou Étude sur les superstitions païennes qui se sont perpétuées jusqu'a nos jours. Par L. F. Alfred Maury. Troisième Edition revue et corrigée. Paris: Didier. 1864. [99] Lucian, in his "Liars, " puts this opinion into the mouth of Arignotus. The theory by which Lucretius seeks to explain apparitions, though materialistic, seems to allow some influence also to the working of imagination. It is hard otherwise to explain how his _simulacra_, (which are not unlike the _astral spirits_ of later times) should appear in dreams. Quae simulacra. .. . . .. . Nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes terrificant atque in somnis, cum saepe figuras contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum quae nos horrifice languentis saepe sopore excierunt. _De Rer. Nat. _ IV. 33-37, ed. Munro. [100] Pliny's Letters, VII. 27. Melmoth's translation. [101] Something like this is the speech of Don Juan, after the statue of Don Gonzales has gone out: "Pero todas son ideas Que da a la imaginacion El temor; y temer muertos Es muy villano temor. Que si un cuerpo noble, vivo, Con potencias y razon Y con alma no se tema, ¿Quien cuerpos muertos temió?" _El Burlador de Sevilla_, A. Iii. S. 15. [102] Théatre Français au Moyen Age (Monmerqué et Michel), pp. 139, 140. [103] "There sat Auld Nick in shape o' beast, A towzy tyke, black, grim, an' large, To gie them music was his charge. " [104] Hence, perhaps, the name Valant applied to the Devil, about the origin of which Grimm is in doubt. [105] One foot of the Greek Empusa was an ass's hoof. [106] Salt was forbidden at these witch-feasts. [107] De Lamiis, p. 59 _et seq_. [108] If the _Blokula_ of the Swedish witches be a reminiscence of this, it would seem to point back to remote times and heathen ceremonies. But it is so impossible to distinguish what was put into the mind of those who confessed by their examining torturers from what may have been there before, the result of a common superstition, that perhaps, after all, the meeting on mountains may have been suggested by what Pliny says of the dances of Satyrs on Mount Atlas. [109] Wierus, whose book was published not long after Faust's death, apparently doubted the whole story, for he alludes to it with an _ut fertur, _ and plainly looked on him as a mountebank. [110] See Grimm's D. M. , under _Hexenfart, Wutendes Heer_, &c. [111] Some Catholics, indeed, affirmed that he himself was the son of a demon who lodged in his father's house under the semblance of a merchant. Wierus says that a bishop preached to that effect in 1565, and gravely refutes the story. [112] Footnote: Melancthon, however, used to tell of a possessed girl in Italy who knew no Latin, but the Devil in her, being asked by Bonaroico, a Bolognese professor, what was the best verse in Virgil, answered at once:-- "Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos, "-- a somewhat remarkable concession on the part of a fallen angel. [113] This story seems mediaeval and Gothic enough, but is hardly more so than bringing the case of the Furies _v. _ Orestes before the Areopagus, and putting Apollo in the witness-box, as Aeschylus has done. The classics, to be sure, are always so classic! In the _Eumenides_, Apollo takes the place of the good angel. And why not? For though a demon, and a lying one, he has crept in to the calendar under his other nnme of Helios as St. Hellas. Could any of his oracles have foretold this? [114] Mr. Leckie, in his admirable chapter on Witchcraft, gives a little more credit to the enlightenment of the Church of England in this matter than it would seem fairly to deserve. More and Glanvil were faithful sons of the Church; and if the persecution of witches was especially rife during the ascendency of the Puritans, it was because they happened to be in power while there was a reaction against Sadducism. All the convictions were under the statute of James I. , who was no Puritan. After the restoration, the reaction was the other way, and Hobbism became the fashion. It is more philosophical to say that the age believes this and that, than that the particular men who live in it do so. [115] I have no means of ascertaining whether he did or not. He was more probably charged with it by the inquisitors. Mr. Leckie seems to write of him only upon hearsay, for he calls him Peter "of Apono, " apparently translating a French translation of the Latin "Aponus. " The only book attributed to him that I have ever seen is itself a kind of manual of magic. [116] "With the names and surnames, " says Bodin, indignantly, "of seventy-two princes, and of seven million four hundred and five thousand nine hundred and twenty-six devils, _errors excepted_. " [117] Cited by Maury, p. 221, note 4. [118] There is a kind of compensation in the fact that he himself lived to be accused of sorcery and Judaism. SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. It may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to maintain morethan one truly great poet, --and whether there be more than one period, and that very short, in the life of a language, when such a phenomenon asa great poet is possible. It may be reckoned one of the rarest pieces ofgood-luck that ever fell to the share of a race, that (as was true ofShakespeare) its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect, itsprofoundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding should havebeen combined in one man, and that he should have arrived at the fulldevelopment of his powers at the moment when the material in which he wasto work--that wonderful composite called English, the best result of theconfusion of tongues--was in its freshest perfection. TheEnglish-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguidedenthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar; for, as the mixture of many bloodsseems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has themingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps thenoblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed. Had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been crampedby a book-language not yet flexible enough for the demands of rhythmicemotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and familiarexpression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical phrase asto render possible that ideal representation of the great passions whichis the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and generalconsent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease and congruityof metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years later, his ripenedmanhood would have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with thesolution of political and religious problems, from which his whole naturewas averse, instead of in that Elizabethan social system, ordered andplanetary in functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of theAreopagite, where his contemplative eye could crowd itself with variousand brilliant picture, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of whichseems to have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonlysagacious--could draw its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, itslessons of prudence and magnanimity. In estimating Shakespeare, it shouldnever be forgotten, that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer andartist, and incapable of partisanship. The passions, actions, sentiments, whose character and results he delighted to watch and to reproduce, arethose of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him toquestion the right of that society to exist than to criticise the divineordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they were, notwith man as he ought to be, --with the human soul as it is shaped ortwisted into character by the complex experience of life, not in itsabstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the first halfof the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual interest wasrather in the other world than in this, rather in the region of thoughtand principle and conscience than in actual life. It was a generation inwhich the poet was, and felt himself, out of place. Sir Thomas Browne, out most imaginative mind since Shakespeare, found breathing-room, for atime, among the "_O altitudines!_" of religious speculation, but soondescended to occupy himself with the exactitudes of science. JeremyTaylor, who half a century earlier would have been Fletcher's rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventual discipline of prose, (MaidMarian turned nun, ) and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making total shipwreck of his large-utterancedgenius on the desolate Noman's Land of a religious epic only by the luckyhelp of Satan and his colleagues, with whom, as foiled rebels andrepublicans, he cannot conceal his sympathy. As purely poet, Shakespearewould have come too late, had his lot fallen in that generation. In mindand temperament too exoteric for a mystic, his imagination could not haveat once illustrated the influence of his epoch and escaped from it, likethat of Browne; the equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as anartist, but equally removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast orlogician, would have unfitted him for the pulpit; and his intellectualbeing was too sensitive to the wonder and beauty of outward life andNature to have found satisfaction, as Milton's could, (and perhaps onlyby reason of his blindness, ) in a world peopled by purely imaginaryfigures. We might fancy him becoming a great statesman, but he lacked thesocial position which could have opened that career to him. What we meanwhen we say _Shakespeare_, is something inconceivable either during thereign of Henry the Eighth, or the Commonwealth, and which would have beenimpossible after the Restoration. All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity. The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and itsclarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse andexhilaration; there were small signs yet of the acetous and putrefactivestages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism. Oldforms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching toFancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted; the light ofsceptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapesstill cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material ofImagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing letters, had made the thought and history of the entire past contemporaneous;while a crowd of translators put every man who could read in inspiringcontact with the select souls of all the centuries. A new world was thusopened to intellectual adventure at the very time when the keel ofColumbus had turned the first daring furrow of discovery in thatunmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth with a beckoninghorizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed by rivers that floweddown out of primeval silences, and which still washed the shores ofDreamland. Under a wise, cultivated, and firm-handed monarch also, thenational feeling of England grew rapidly more homogeneous and intense, the rather as the womanhood of the sovereign stimulated a more chivalricloyalty, --while the new religion, of which she was the defender, helpedto make England morally, as it was geographically, insular to thecontinent of Europe. If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here were all theelements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky moment ofprojection was clearly come. If a great national poet could ever availhimself of circumstances, this was the occasion, --and, fortunately, Shakespeare was equal to it. Above all, we may esteem it lucky that hefound words ready to his use, original and untarnished, --types of thoughtwhose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In readingHakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that evencommon sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings withoutrising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction thatwe should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost. Those who lookupon language only as anatomists of its structure, or who regard it asonly a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to mind, as if it wereso many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the fact that its beingalive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not mean what istechnically called a living language, --the contrivance, hollow as aspeaking-trumpet, by which breathing and moving bipeds, even now, sailingo'er life's solemn main, are enabled to hail each other and make knowntheir mutual shortness of mental stores, --but one that is still hot fromthe hearts and brains of a people, not hardened yet, but moltenly ductileto new shapes of sharp and clear relief in the moulds of new thought. Sosoon as a language has become literary, so soon as there is a gap betweenthe speech of books and that of life, the language becomes, so far aspoetry is concerned, almost as dead as Latin, and (as in writing Latinverses) a mind in itself essentially original becomes in the use of sucha medium of utterance unconsciously reminiscential and reflective, lunarand not solar, in expression and even in thought. For words and thoughtshave a much more intimate and genetic relation, one with the other, thanmost men have any notion of; and it is one thing to use our mother-tongueas if it belonged to us, and another to be the puppets of anovermastering vocabulary. "Ye know not, " says Ascham, "what hurt ye do toLearning, that care not for Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorcebetwixt the Tongue and the Heart. " _Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_ isthe Italian proverb; and that of poets should be, _The tongue of thepeople in the mouth of the scholar_. I imply here no assent to the earlytheory, _or, _ at any rate, practice, of Wordsworth, who confoundedplebeian modes of thought with rustic forms of phrase, and then atonedfor his blunder by absconding into a diction more Latinized than that ofany poet of his century. Shakespeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the father and Norman by themother, he was a representative Englishman. A country boy, he learnedfirst the rough and ready English of his rustic mates, who knew how tomake nice verbs and adjectives courtesy to their needs. Going up toLondon, he acquired the _lingua aulica_ precisely at the happiest moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word, _modern, _--just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments fromthe Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the newideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation werefast making cosmopolitan, --words which, in proportion to their novelty, and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet whollymingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of theirmeaning. [119] It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage, that athorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly elements ofEnglish was brought about. Already, Puttenham, in his "Arte of EnglishPoesy, " declares that the practice of the capital and the country withinsixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction, the _jus et normaloquendi. _ Already Spenser had almost re-created English poetry, --and itis interesting to observe, that, scholar as he was, the archaic wordswhich he was at first overfond of introducing are often provincialisms ofpurely English original. Already Marlowe had brought the English unrhymedpentameter (which had hitherto justified but half its name, by beingalways blank and never verse) to a perfection of melody, harmony, andvariety which has never been surpassed. Shakespeare, then, found alanguage already to a certain extent _established_, but not yet fetlockedby dictionary and grammar mongers, --a versification harmonized, but whichhad not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in the stocks bycritics who deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orpheanmeasures of which their judges are insensible. That the language wasestablished is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by thedramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson'ssatire upon Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admittedforeign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is ingood measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary linehad been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply whatwas common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by theestablishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move inthe stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while theyforever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was debatingthe comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he snatchedwhat word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a kingspeak as his country nurse might have taught him. [120] It was Waller whofirst learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone comported with thestate of royalty. In the time of Shakespeare, the living tongue resembledthat tree which Father Huc saw in Tartary, whose leaves werelanguaged, --and every hidden root of thought, every subtilest fibre offeeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of expression, fed fromthose unseen sources in the common earth of human nature. The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the mystic word foranything attained to absolute mastery over that thing. The reverse ofthis is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughlypossessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image, becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it. Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot inthe manuscripts they received from Shakespeare; and this is the naturalcorollary from the fact that such an imagination as his is asunparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of the phrase in which itembodied itself. [121] We believe that Shakespeare, like all other greatpoets, instinctively used the dialect which he found current, and thathis words are not more wrested from their ordinary meaning than followednecessarily from the unwonted weight of thought or stress of passion theywere called on to support. He needed not to mask familiar thoughts in theweeds of unfamiliar phraseology; for the life that was in his mind couldtransfuse the language of every day with an intelligent vivacity, thatmakes it seem lambent with fiery purpose, and at each new reading a newcreation. He could say with Dante, that "no word had ever forced him tosay what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say what _it_would not, "--but only in the sense that the mighty magic of hisimagination had conjured out of it its uttermost secret of power orpathos. When I say that Shakespeare used the current language of his day, I mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universallycomprehensible, --that he was not run away with by the hobby of any theoryas to the fitness of this or that component of English for expressingcertain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a choice andnoble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in ours isevident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on Drayton, andby the epithet "well-languaged" applied to Daniel, whose poetic style isas modern as that of Tennyson; but the endless absurdities about thecomparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French, vented by personsincapable of distinguishing one tongue from the other, were as yetunheard of. Hasty generalizers are apt to overlook the fact, that theSaxon was never, to any great extent, a literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in the names of common things, but failed toanswer the demands of complex ideas, derived from them. The author of"Piers Ploughman" wrote for the people, --Chaucer for the court. We openat random and count the Latin[122] words in ten verses of the "Vision"and ten of the "Romaunt of the Rose, " (a translation from the French, )and find the proportion to be seven in the former and five in the latter. The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff in learninglanguages. He acquired only about as many British words as we have Indianones, and I believe that more French and Latin was introduced through thepen and the eye than through the tongue and the ear. For obvious reasons, the question is one that must be decided by reference to prose-writers, and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty well settled that more wordsof Latin original were brought into the language in the century between1550 and 1650 than in the whole period before or since, --and for thesimple reason, that they were absolutely needful to express new modes andcombinations of thought. [123] The language has gained immensely, by theinfusion, in richness of synonyme and in the power of expressing niceshades of thought and feeling, but more than all in light-footedpolysyllables that trip singing to the music of verse. There are certaincases, it is true, where the vulgar Saxon word is refined, and therefined Latin vulgar, in poetry, --as in _sweat_ and _perspiration_; butthere are vastly more in which the Latin bears the bell. Perhaps theremight be a question between the old English _again-rising_ and_resurrection;_ but there can be no doubt that _conscience_ is betterthan _inwit_, and _remorse_ than _again-bite_. Should we translate thetitle of Wordsworth's famous ode, "Intimations of Immortality, " into"Hints of Deathlessness, " it would hiss like an angry gander. If, insteadof Shakespeare's "Age cannot wither her, Nor custom stale her infinite variety, " we should say, "her boundless manifoldness, " the sentiment would sufferin exact proportion with the music. What homebred English could ape thehigh Roman fashion of such togated words as "The multitudinous sea incarnadine, "-- where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of thespeaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean morevividly than the famous phrase of Aeschylus does its rippling sunshine?Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell felt, whenhe wrote, "Ye mariners of England, " and Coleridge, when he chose "It was an ancient mariner, " rather than "It was an elderly seaman"; for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certainremoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not onlythat we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but alsotheir melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympatheticvariety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated. We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid was _buxom_, butwe could not use the term, as Milton did, in its original sense of_bowsome_, --that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_. [124] But the secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree ofnouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believein to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. It iswhen expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconsciousnecessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It isnot safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does tothe Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry. BecauseLear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts, " and "the all-dreaded thunder-stone"in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up Milton's Virgilian"fulmined over Greece, " where the verb in English conveys at once theidea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of riving andshattering. In the experiments made for casting the great bell for theWestminster Tower, it was found that the superstition which attributedthe remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain old bells to thelarger mixture of silver in their composition had no foundation in factIt was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary metals were balancedagainst each other, the perfection of form, and the nice gradations ofthickness, that wrought the miracle. And it is precisely so with thelanguage of poetry. The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use(else what use in his being poet at all?); and even then, unless theproportion and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that Art requiresand the most sensitive taste finds satisfaction in, he will have failedto make what shall vibrate through all its parts with a silveryunison, --in other words, a poem. I think the component parts of English were in the latter years ofElizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the other. Yet Bacon hadno faith in his mother-tongue, translating the works on which his famewas to rest into what he called "the universal language, " and affirmingthat "English would bankrupt all our books. " He was deemed a master ofit, nevertheless; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him inprose the same commendation which he gave Shakespeare in verse, saying, that he "performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferredeither to _insolent Greece or haughty Rome_"; and he adds this pregnantsentence: "In short, within his view and about his time were all the witsborn that could honor a language or help study. Now things daily fall:wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards. " Ben had good reason forwhat he said of the wits. Not to speak of science, of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of literary genius. An attack ofimmortality in a family might have been looked for then as scarlet-feverwould be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and Cervantes were born within fourteenyears of each other; and in England, while Spenser was still delving overthe _propria quae maribus_, and Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakespeare was stretching his baby hands for the moon, and the littleBacon, chewing on his coral, had discovered that impenetrability was onequality of matter. It almost takes one's breath away to think that"Hamlet" and the "Novum Organon" were at the risk of teething and measlesat the same time. But Ben was right also in thinking that eloquence hadgrown backwards. He lived long enough to see the language of verse becomein a measure traditionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partlyfrom the necessary order of events, partly because the most natural andintense expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied andexhausted, --but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as toShakespeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, amongmodern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says: "Optimisconceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones nonpossunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est; . .. Et sic non omnibusversificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientiâ etingenio versificantur. "[125] Shakespeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism ofEnglish as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal inits appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that themen whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect toget at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his home-bredspeech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims:-- "Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme. " He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the greattrust which he imposed upon his native tongue as the embodier andperpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he woulddo so _a fortiori_ in his plays, both for the purpose of immediate effecton the stage and of future appreciation. Clear thinking makes clearwriting, and he who has shown himself so eminently capable of it in onecase is not to be supposed to abdicate intentionally in others. Thedifficult passages in the plays, then, are to be regarded either ascorruptions, or else as phenomena in the natural history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at a clearer theory and betterunderstanding of it. While I believe that our language had two periods of culmination inpoetic beauty, --one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the ballads, which deal only with narrative and feeling, --another of Art, (or Natureas it is ideally reproduced through the imagination, ) of statelyamplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in Spenser and thegreater dramatists, --and that Shakespeare made use of the latter as hefound it, I by no means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or thatany inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great poet'sinkstand. But he enriched it only by the natural expansion andexhilaration of which it was conscious, in yielding to the mastery of agenius that could turn and wind it like a fiery Pegasus, making it feelits life in every limb. He enriched it through that exquisite sense ofmusic, (never approached but by Marlowe, ) to which it seemed eagerlyobedient, as if every word said to him, "_Bid me_ discourse, I will enchant thine ear, "-- as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the gold to Brahma, when he walked over the earth where it was hidden, crying, "Here am I, Lord! do with me what thou wilt!" That he used language with thatintimate possession of its meaning possible only to the most vividthought is doubtless true; but that he wantonly strained it from itsordinary sense, that he found it too poor for his necessities, andaccordingly coined new phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, heviolated any of its received proprieties, I do not believe. I have saidthat it was fortunate for him that he came upon an age when our languagewas at its best; but it was fortunate also for us, because our costliestpoetic phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the gleaming precipitate inwhich it united itself with his thought. That the propositions I have endeavored to establish have a directbearing in various ways upon the qualifications of whoever undertakes toedit the works of Shakespeare will, I think, be apparent to those whoconsider the matter. The hold which Shakespeare has acquired andmaintained upon minds so many and so various, in so many vital respectsutterly unsympathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is oneof the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature. That hehas had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own Falstaff was thecause of the wit, so he has been the cause of the foolishness that was inother men, (as where Malone ventured to discourse upon his metres, andDr. Johnson on his imagination, ) must be apparent to every one, --and alsothat his genius and its manifestations are so various, that there is nocommentator but has been able to illustrate him from his own peculiarpoint of view or from the results of his own favorite studies. But toshow that he was a good common lawyer, that he understood the theory ofcolors, that he was an accurate botanist, a master of the science ofmedicine, especially in its relation to mental disease, a profoundmetaphysician, and of great experience and insight in politics, --allthese, while they may very well form the staple of separate treatises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his learning, the range andaccuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later parallel, arereally outside the province of an editor. We doubt if posterity owe a greater debt to any two men living in 1623than to the two obscure actors who in that year published the first folioedition of Shakespeare's plays. But for them, it is more than likely thatsuch of his works as had remained to that time unprinted would have beenirrecoverably lost, and among them were "Julius Caesar, " "The Tempest, "and "Macbeth. " But are we to believe them when they assert that theypresent to us the plays which they reprinted from stolen andsurreptitious copies "cured and perfect of their limbs, " and those whichare original in their edition "absolute in their numbers as he[Shakespeare] conceived them"? Alas, we have read too many theatricalannouncements, have been taught too often that the value of the promisewas in an inverse ratio to the generosity of the exclamation-marks, tooeasily to believe that! Nay, we have seen numberless processions ofhealthy kine enter our native village unheralded save by the lusty shoutsof drovers, while a wretched calf, cursed by stepdame Nature with twoheads, was brought to us in a triumphal car, avant-couriered by a band ofmusic as abnormal as itself, and announced as the greatest wonder of theage. If a double allowance of vituline brains deserve such honor, thereare few commentators on Shakespeare that would have gone afoot, and thetrumpets of Messieurs Heminge and Condell call up in our minds too manymonstrous and deformed associations. What, then, is the value of the first folio as an authority? For eighteenof the plays it is the only authority we have, and the only one also forfour others in their complete form. It is admitted that in severalinstances Heminge and Condell reprinted the earlier quarto impressionswith a few changes, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse;and it is most probable that copies of those editions (whethersurreptitious or not) had taken the place of the original prompter'sbooks, as being more convenient and legible. Even in these cases it isnot safe to conclude that all or even any of the variations were made bythe hand of Shakespeare himself. And where the players printed frommanuscript, is it likely to have been that of the author? The probabilityis small that a writer so busy as Shakespeare must have been during hisproductive period should have copied out their parts for the actorshimself, or that one so indifferent as he seems to have been to theimmediate literary fortunes of his works should have given much care tothe correction of copies, if made by others. The copies exclusively inthe hands of Heminge and Condell were, it is manifest, in some cases, very imperfect, whether we account for the fact by the burning of theGlobe Theatre or by the necessary wear and tear of years, and (what isworthy of notice) they are plainly more defective in some parts than inothers. "Measure for Measure" is an example of this, and we are notsatisfied with being told that its ruggedness of verse is intentional, orthat its obscurity is due to the fact that Shakespeare grew moreelliptical in his style as he grew older. Profounder in thought hedoubtless became; though in a mind like his, we believe that this wouldimply only a more absolute supremacy in expression. But, from whateveroriginal we suppose either the quartos or the first folio to have beenprinted, it is more than questionable whether the proof-sheets had theadvantage of any revision other than that of the printing-office. Steevens was of opinion that authors in the time of Shakespeare neverread their own proof-sheets; and Mr. Spedding, in his recent edition ofBacon, comes independently to the same conclusion. [126] We may be verysure that Heminge and Condell did not, as vicars, take upon themselves adisagreeable task which the author would have been too careless toassume. Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out against the Folio of1623, whatever sins of omission we may lay to the charge of Heminge andCondell, or of commission to that of the printers, it remains the onlytext we have with any claims whatever to authenticity. It should bedeferred to as authority in all cases where it does not make Shakespearewrite bad sense, uncouth metre, or false grammar, of all which we believehim to have been more supremely incapable than any other man who everwrote English. Yet we would not speak unkindly even of the blunders ofthe Folio. They have put bread into the mouth of many an honest editor, publisher, and printer for the last century and a half; and he who lovesthe comic side of human nature will find the serious notes of a_variorum_ edition of Shakespeare as funny reading as the funny ones areserious. Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, if he had onlybeen at Shakespeare's elbow, he could have given valuable advice; scarceone who did not know off-hand that there was never a seaport inBohemia, --as if Shakespeare's world were one which Mercator could haveprojected; scarce one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were asufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, ofplanetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce onebut thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edgingshallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amidthe sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarceone but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigiousintelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language mustcoin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to sayShakesperian of any other. And yet, in the midst of our impatience, wecannot help thinking also of how much healthy mental activity this oneman has been the occasion, how much good he has indirectly done tosociety by withdrawing men to investigations and habits of thought thatsecluded them from baser attractions, for how many he has enlarged thecircle of study and reflection; since there is nothing in history orpolitics, nothing in art or science, nothing in physics or metaphysics, that is not sooner or later taxed for his illustration. This is partiallytrue of all great minds, open and sensitive to truth and beauty throughany large arc of their circumference; but it is true in an unexampledsense of Shakespeare, the vast round of whose balanced nature seems tohave been equatorial, and to have had a southward exposure and a summersympathy at every point, so that life, society, statecraft, serve us atlast but as commentaries on him, and whatever we have gathered ofthought, of knowledge, and of experience, confronted with his marvellouspage, shrinks to a mere foot-note, the stepping-stone to some hithertoinaccessible verse. We admire in Homer the blind placid mirror of theworld's young manhood, the bard who escapes from his misfortune in poemsall memory, all life and bustle, adventure and picture; we revere inDante that compressed force of lifelong passion which could make aprivate experience cosmopolitan in its reach and everlasting in itssignificance; we respect in Goethe the Aristotelian poet, wise byweariless observation, witty with intention, the stately _Geheimerrath_of a provincial court in the empire of Nature. As we study these, we seemin our limited way to penetrate into their consciousness and to measureand master their methods; but with Shakespeare it is just the other way;the more we have familiarized ourselves with the operations of our ownconsciousness, the more do we find, in reading him, that he has beenbeforehand with us, and that, while we have been vainly endeavoring tofind the door of his being, he has searched every nook and cranny of ourown. While other poets and dramatists embody isolated phases of characterand work inward from the phenomenon to the special law which itillustrates, he seems in some strange way unitary with human natureitself, and his own soul to have been the law and life-giving power ofwhich his creations are only the phenomena. We justify or criticise thecharacters of other writers by our memory and experience, and pronouncethem natural or unnatural; but he seems to have worked in the very stuffof which memory and experience are made, and we recognize his truth toNature by an innate and unacquired sympathy, as if he alone possessed thesecret of the "ideal form and universal mould, " and embodied generictypes rather than individuals. In this Cervantes alone has approachedhim; and Don Quixote and Sancho, like the men and women of Shakespeare, are the contemporaries of every generation, because they are not productsof an artificial and transitory society, but because they are animated bythe primeval and unchanging forces of that humanity which underlies andsurvives the forever-fickle creeds and ceremonials of the parochialcorners which we who dwell in them sublimely call The World. That Shakespeare did not edit his own works must be attributed, wesuspect, to his premature death. That he should not have intended it isinconceivable. Is there not something of self-consciousness in thebreaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book, --a sort of sadprophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, aftersuch thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years, only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money onmortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips withneighbors? His mind had entered into every phase of human life andthought, had embodied all of them in living creations;--had he found allempty, and come at last to the belief that genius and its works were asphantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the rumor of thepit? However this may be, his works have come down to us in a conditionof manifest and admitted corruption in some portions, while in othersthere is an obscurity which may be attributed either to an idiosyncraticuse of words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of intuition for aproper coalescence with which ordinary language is inadequate, to aconcentration of passion in a focus that consumes the lighter links whichbind together the clauses of a sentence or of a process of reasoning incommon parlance, or to a sense of music which mingles music and meaningwithout essentially confounding them. We should demand for a perfecteditor, then, first, a thorough glossological knowledge of the Englishcontemporary with Shakespeare; second, enough logical acuteness of mindand metaphysical training to enable him to follow recondite processes ofthought; third, such a conviction of the supremacy of his author asalways to prefer his thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feelingfor music, and so much knowledge of the practice of other poets as tounderstand that Shakespeare's versification differs from theirs as oftenin kind as in degree; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well aswith books; and last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, sogreat a familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty ingeneral, and of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shakespeare, aswill prevent his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, and enablehim to understand fully that the Gothic Shakespeare often superimposedupon the slender column of a single word, that seems to twist under it, but does not, --like the quaint shafts in cloisters, --a weight of meaningwhich the modern architects of sentences would consider whollyunjustifiable by correct principle. Many years ago, while yet Fancy claimed that right in me which Fact hassince, to my no small loss, so successfully disputed, I pleased myselfwith imagining the play of Hamlet published under some _alias_, and asthe work of a new candidate in literature. Then I _played_, as thechildren say, that it came in regular course before some well-meaningdoer of criticisms, who had never read the original, (no very wildassumption, as things go, ) and endeavored to conceive the kind of way inwhich he would be likely to take it. I put myself in his place, and triedto write such a perfunctory notice as I thought would be likely, infilling his column, to satisfy his conscience. But it was a _tour deforce_ quite beyond my power to execute without grimace. I could notarrive at that artistic absorption in my own conception which wouldenable me to be natural, and found myself, like a bad actor, continuallybetraying my self-consciousness by my very endeavor to hide it undercaricature. The path of Nature is indeed a narrow one, and it is only theimmortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselvescramped therein. My result was a dead failure, --satire instead of comedy. I could not shake off that strange accumulation which we call self, andreport honestly what I saw and felt even to myself, much less to others. Yet I have often thought, that, unless we can so far free ourselves fromour own prepossessions as to be capable of bringing to a work of art somefreshness of sensation, and receiving from it in turn some new surpriseof sympathy and admiration, --some shock even, it may be, of instinctivedistaste and repulsion, --though we may praise or blame, weighing our_pros_ and _cons_ in the nicest balances, sealed by proper authority, yetwe shall not criticise in the highest sense. On the other hand, unless weadmit certain principles as fixed beyond question, we shall be able torender no adequate judgment, but only to record our impressions, whichmay be valuable or not, according to the greater or less ductility of thesenses on which they are made. Charles Lamb, for example, came to the oldEnglish dramatists with the feeling of a discoverer. He brought with himan alert curiosity, and everything was delightful simply because it wasstrange. Like other early adventurers, he sometimes mistook shining sandfor gold; but he had the great advantage of not feeling himselfresponsible for the manners of the inhabitants he found there, and notthinking it needful to make them square with any Westminster Catechism ofaesthetics. Best of all, he did not feel compelled to compare them withthe Greeks, about whom he knew little, and cared less. He took them as hefound them, described them in a few pregnant sentences, and displayed hisspecimens of their growth, and manufacture. When he arrived at thedramatists of the Restoration, so far from being shocked, he was charmedwith their pretty and unmoral ways; and what he says of them reminds usof blunt Captain Dampier, who, in his account of the island of Timor, remarks, as a matter of no consequence, that the natives "take as manywives as they can maintain, and as for religion, they have none. " Lamb had the great advantage of seeing the elder dramatists as they were;it did not lie within his province to point out what they were not. Himself a fragmentary writer, he had more sympathy with imagination whereit gathers into the intense focus of passionate phrase than with thathigher form of it, where it is the faculty that shapes, gives unity ofdesign and balanced gravitation of parts. And yet it is only this higherform of it which can unimpeachably assure to any work the dignity andpermanence of a classic; for it results in that exquisite somethingcalled Style, which, like the grace of perfect breeding, everywherepervasive and nowhere emphatic, makes itself felt by the skill with whichit effaces itself, and masters us at last with a sense of indefinablecompleteness. On a lower plane we may detect it in the structure of asentence, in the limpid expression that implies sincerity of thought; butit is only where it combines and organizes, where it eludes observationin particulars to give the rarer delight of perfection as a whole, thatit belongs to art. Then it is truly ideal, the _forma mentis aeterna, _not as a passive mould into which the thought is poured, but as theconceptive energy which finds all material plastic to its preconceiveddesign. Mere vividness of expression, such as makes quotable passages, comes of the complete surrender of self to the impression, whetherspiritual or sensual, of the moment. It is a quality, perhaps, in whichthe young poet is richer than the mature, his very inexperience makinghim more venturesome in those leaps of language that startle us withtheir rashness only to bewitch us the more with the happy ease of theiraccomplishment. For this there are no existing laws of rhetoric, for itis from such felicities that the rhetoricians deduce and codify theirstatutes. It is something which cannot be improved upon or cultivated, for it is immediate and intuitive. But this power of expression issubsidiary, and goes only a little way toward the making of a great poet. Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and not a quality;it looks before and after, it gives the form that makes all the partswork together harmoniously toward a given end, its seat is in the higherreason, and it is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the image-makingpower, common to all who have the gift of dreams, or who can afford tobuy it in a vulgar drug as De Quincey bought it. The true poetic imagination is of one quality, whether it be ancient ormodern, and equally subject to those laws of grace, of proportion, ofdesign, in whose free service, and in that alone, it can become art. Those laws are something which do not "Alter when they alteration find, And bend with the remover to remove. " And they are more clearly to be deduced from the eminent examples ofGreek literature than from any other source. It is the advantage of thisselect company of ancients that their works are defecated of all turbidmixture of contemporaneousness, and have become to us pure _literature_, our judgment and enjoyment of which cannot be vulgarized by anyprejudices of time or place. This is why the study of them is fitlycalled a liberal education, because it emancipates the mind from everynarrow provincialism whether of egoism or tradition, and is theapprenticeship that every one must serve before becoming a free brotherof the guild which passes the torch of life from age to age. There wouldbe no dispute about the advantages of that Greek culture which Schilleradvocated with such generous eloquence, if the great authors of antiquityhad not been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar, and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection, instead ofcompanions for whose society the mind must put on her highest mood. Thediscouraged youth too naturally transfers the epithet of _dead_ from thelanguages to the authors that wrote in them. What concern have we withthe shades of dialect in Homer or Theocritus, provided they speak thespiritual _lingua franca_ that abolishes all alienage of race, and makeswhatever shore of time we land on hospitable and homelike? There is muchthat is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank asliterature in the highest sense is perennial. Their vitality is thevitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature;their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation;and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, butof whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, andunlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experiencegive him the key, but on no other condition. Their meaning is absolute, not conditional; it is a property of _theirs_, quite irrespective ofmanners or creed; for the highest culture, the development of theindividual by observation, reflection, and study, leads to one result, whether in Athens or in London. The more we know of ancient literature, the more we are struck with its modernness, just as the more we study thematurer dramas of Shakespeare, the more we feel his nearness in certainprimary qualities to the antique and classical. Yet even in saying this, I tacitly make the admission that it is the Greeks who must furnish uswith our standard of comparison. Their stamp is upon all the allowedmeasures and weights of aesthetic criticism. Nor does a consciousness ofthis, nor a constant reference to it, in any sense reduce us to the merecopying of a bygone excellence; for it is the test of excellence in anydepartment of art, that it can never be bygone, and it is not meredifference from antique models, but the _way_ in which that difference isshown, the direction it takes, that we are to consider in our judgment ofa modern work. The model is not there to be copied merely, but that thestudy of it may lead us insensibly to the same processes of thought bywhich its purity of outline and harmony of parts were attained, andenable us to feel that strength is consistent with repose, thatmultiplicity is not abundance, that grace is but a more refined form ofpower, and that a thought is none the less profound that the limpidity ofits expression allows us to measure it at a glance. To be possessed withthis conviction gives us at least a determinate point of view, andenables us to appeal a case of taste to a court of final judicature, whose decisions are guided by immutable principles. When we hear ofcertain productions, that they are feeble in design, but masterly inparts, that they are incoherent, to be sure, but have great merits ofstyle, we know that it cannot be true; for in the highest examples wehave, the master is revealed by his plan, by his power of making allaccessories, each in its due relation, subordinate to it, and that tolimit style to the rounding of a period or a distich is wholly tomisapprehend its truest and highest function. Donne is full of salientverses that would take the rudest March winds of criticism with theirbeauty, of thoughts that first tease us like charades and then delight uswith the felicity of their solution; but these have not saved him. He isexiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary. To take a morerecent instance, --Wordsworth had, in some respects, a deeper insight, anda more adequate utterance of it, than any man of his generation. But itwas a piece-meal insight and utterance; his imagination was feminine, notmasculine, receptive, and not creative. His longer poems are Egyptiansand-wastes, with here and there an oasis of exquisite greenery, a grandimage, Sphinx-like, half buried in drifting commonplaces, or the solitaryPompey's Pillar of some towering thought. But what is the fate of a poetwho owns the quarry, but cannot build the poem? Ere the century is out hewill be nine parts dead, and immortal only in that tenth part of himwhich is included in a thin volume of "beauties. " Already Moxon has feltthe need of extracting this essential oil of him; and his memory will bekept alive, if at all, by the precious material rather than theworkmanship of the vase that contains his heart. And what shall weforebode of so many modern poems, full of splendid passages, beginningeverywhere and leading nowhere, reminding us of nothing so much as theamateur architect who planned his own house, and forgot the staircasethat should connect one floor with another, putting it as an afterthoughton the outside? Lichtenberg says somewhere, that it was the advantage of the ancients towrite before the great art of writing ill had been invented; andShakespeare may be said to have had the good luck of coming after Spenser(to whom the debt of English poetry is incalculable) had reinvented theart of writing well. But Shakespeare arrived at a mastery in this respectwhich sets him above all other poets. He is not only superior in degree, but he is also different in kind. In that less purely artistic sphere ofstyle which concerns the matter rather than the form his charm is oftenunspeakable. How perfect his style is may be judged from the fact that itnever curdles into mannerism, and thus absolutely eludes imitation. Though here, if anywhere, the style is the man, yet it is noticeableonly, like the images of Brutus, by its absence, so thoroughly is heabsorbed in his work, while he fuses thought and word indissolublytogether, till all the particles cohere by the best virtue of each. Withperfect truth he has said of himself that he writes "All one, ever the same, Putting invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell his name. " And yet who has so succeeded in imitating him as to remind us of him byeven so much as the gait of a single verse?[127] Those magnificentcrystallizations of feeling and phrase, basaltic masses, molten andinterfused by the primal fires of passion, are not to be reproduced bythe slow experiments of the laboratory striving to parody creation withartifice. Mr. Matthew Arnold seems to think that Shakespeare has damagedEnglish poetry. I wish he had! It is true he lifted Dryden above himselfin "All for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctiveconviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none daredtread but he. Is he to blame for the extravagances of modern diction, which are but the reaction of the brazen age against the degeneracy ofart into artifice, that has characterized the silver period in everyliterature? We see in them only the futile effort of misguided persons totorture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be inthemselves. We do not find the extravagances in Shakespeare himself. Wenever saw a line in any modern poet that reminded us of him, and willventure to assert that it is only poets of the second class that findsuccessful imitators. And the reason seems to us a very plain one. Thegenius of the great poet seeks repose in the expression of itself, andfinds it at last in style, which is the establishment of a perfect mutualunderstanding between the worker and his material. [128] The secondaryintellect, on the other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, andstimulates itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of self, as style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first class hasever left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable; while, just as surely as the thermometer tells of the neighborhood of aniceberg, you may detect the presence of a genius of the second class inany generation by the influence of his mannerism, for that, being anartificial thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their expression; whileMilton, Sterne, and Wordsworth left behind them whole regiments uniformedwith all their external characteristics. We do not mean that great poeticgeniuses may not have influenced thought, (though we think it would bedifficult to show how Shakespeare had done so, directly and wilfully, )but that they have not infected contemporaries or followers withmannerism. The quality in him which makes him at once so thoroughlyEnglish and so thoroughly cosmopolitan is that aëration of theunderstanding by the imagination which he has in common with all thegreater poets, and which is the privilege of genius. The modern school, which mistakes violence for intensity, seems to catch its breath when itfinds itself on the verge of natural expression, and to say to itself, "Good heavens! I had almost forgotten I was inspired!" But of Shakespearewe do not even suspect that he ever remembered it. He does not alwaysspeak in that intense way that flames up in Lear and Macbeth through therifts of a soil volcanic with passion. He allows us here and there therepose of a commonplace character, the consoling distraction of ahumorous one. He knows how to be equable and grand without effort, sothat we forget the altitude of thought to which he has led us, becausethe slowly receding slope of a mountain stretching downward by amplegradations gives a less startling impression of height than to look overthe edge of a ravine that makes but a wrinkle in its flank. Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the barbarism of profusenessand exaggeration. But this is to measure him by a Sophoclean scale. Thesimplicity of the antique tragedy is by no means that of expression, butis of form merely. In the utterance of great passions, something must beindulged to the extravagance of Nature; the subdued tones to which pathosand sentiment are limited cannot express a tempest of the soul The rangebetween the piteous "no more but so, " in which Ophelia compresses theheart-break whose compression was to make her mad, and that sublimeappeal of Lear to the elements of Nature, only to be matched, if matchedat all, in the "Prometheus, " is a wide one, and Shakespeare is as trulysimple in the one as in the other. The simplicity of poetry is not thatof prose, nor its clearness that of ready apprehension merely. To asubtile sense, a sense heightened by sympathy, those sudden fervors ofphrase, gone ere one can say it lightens, that show us Macbeth gropingamong the complexities of thought in his conscience-clouded mind, andreveal the intricacy rather than enlighten it, while they leave the eyedarkened to the literal meaning of the words, yet make their logicalsequence, the grandeur of the conception, and its truth to Nature clearerthan sober daylight could. There is an obscurity of mist rising from theundrained shallows of the mind, and there is the darkness ofthunder-cloud gathering its electric masses with passionate intensityfrom the clear element of the imagination, not at random or wilfully, butby the natural processes of the creative faculty, to brood those flashesof expression that transcend rhetoric, and are only to be apprehended bythe poetic instinct. In that secondary office of imagination, where it serves the artist, notas the reason that shapes, but as the interpreter of his conceptions intowords, there is a distinction to be noticed between the higher and lowermode in which it performs its function. It may be either creative orpictorial, may body forth the thought or merely image it forth. WithShakespeare, for example, imagination seems immanent in his veryconsciousness; with Milton, in his memory. In the one it sends, as ifwithout knowing it, a fiery life into the verse, "Sei die Braut das Wort, Bräutigam der Geist"; in the other it elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. Accordingly, thebias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the latter towardover-diffuseness. Shakespeare's temptation is to push a willing metaphorbeyond its strength, to make a passion over-inform its tenement of words;Milton cannot resist running a simile on into a fugue. One always fanciesShakespeare _in_ his best verses, and Milton at the key-board of hisorgan. Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere vehicle of thought, it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The pleasure it givesus is unmixed, direct, like that from the smell of a flower or the flavorof a fruit. Milton sets everywhere his little pitfalls of bookishassociation for the memory. I know that Milton's manner is very grand. Itis slow, it is stately, moving as in triumphal procession, with music, with historic banners, with spoils from every time and every region, andcaptive epithets, like huge Sicambrians, thrust their broad shouldersbetween us and the thought whose pomp they decorate. But it is manner, nevertheless, as is proved by the ease with which it is parodied, by thedanger it is in of degenerating into mannerism whenever it forgetsitself. Fancy a parody of Shakespeare, --I do not mean of his words, butof his _tone_, for that is what distinguishes the master. You might aswell try it with the Venus of Melos. In Shakespeare it is always thehigher thing, the thought, the fancy, that is pre-eminent; it is Caesarthat draws all eyes, and not the chariot in which he rides, or the throngwhich is but the reverberation of his supremacy. If not, how explain thecharm with which he dominates in all tongues, even under thedisenchantment of translation? Among the most alien races he is assolidly at home as a mountain seen from different sides by many lands, itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts anddomesticated in all imaginations. In description Shakespeare is especially great, and in that instinctwhich gives the peculiar quality of any object of contemplation in asingle happy word that colors the impression on the sense with the moodof the mind. Most descriptive poets seem to think that a hogshead ofwater caught at the spout will give us a livelier notion of athunder-shower than the sullen muttering of the first big drops upon theroof. They forget that it is by suggestion, not cumulation, that profoundimpressions are made upon the imagination. Milton's parsimony (so rare inhim) makes the success of his "Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops Wept at completion of the mortal sin. " Shakespeare understood perfectly the charm of indirectness, of making hisreaders seem to discover for themselves what he means to show them. If hewishes to tell that the leaves of the willow are gray on the under side, he does not make it a mere fact of observation by bluntly saying so, butmakes it picturesquely reveal itself to us as it might in Nature:-- "There is a willow grows athwart the flood, That shows his _hoar_ leaves in the glassy stream. " Where he goes to the landscape for a comparison, he does not ransack woodand field for specialties, as if he were gathering simples, but takes oneimage, obvious, familiar, and makes it new to us either by sympathy orcontrast with his own immediate feeling. He always looked upon Naturewith the eyes of the mind. Thus he can make the melancholy of autumn orthe gladness of spring alike pathetic:-- "That time of year thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang Upon those boughs that shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. " Or again:-- "From thee have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn leaped and laughed with him. " But as dramatic poet, Shakespeare goes even beyond this, entering soperfectly into the consciousness of the characters he himself hascreated, that he sees everything through their peculiar mood, and makesevery epithet, as if unconsciously, echo and re-echo it. Theseus asksHermia, -- "Can you endure the livery of a nun, For aye to be in shady cloister mewed, To live a _barren_ sister all your life, Chanting faint hymns to the _cold fruitless_ moon?" When Romeo must leave Juliet, the private pang of the lovers becomes aproperty of Nature herself, and "_Envious_ streaks Do lace the _severing_ clouds in yonder east. " But even more striking is the following instance from Macbeth:-- "The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal enterance of Duncan Under your battlements. " Here Shakespeare, with his wonted tact, makes use of a vulgarsuperstition, of a type in which mortal presentiment is already embodied, to make a common ground on which the hearer and Lady Macbeth may meet. After this prelude we are prepared to be possessed by her emotion morefully, to feel in her ears the dull tramp of the blood that seems to makethe raven's croak yet hoarser than it is, and to betray the stealthyadvance of the mind to its fell purpose. For Lady Macbeth hears not somuch the voice of the bodeful bird as of her own premeditated murder, andwe are thus made her shuddering accomplices before the fact. Every imagereceives the color of the mind, every word throbs with the pulse of onecontrolling passion. The epithet _fatal_ makes us feel the implacableresolve of the speaker, and shows us that she is tampering with herconscience by putting off the crime upon the prophecy of the WeirdSisters to which she alludes. In the word _battlements_, too, not only isthe fancy led up to the perch of the raven, but a hostile image takes theplace of a hospitable; for men commonly speak of receiving a guest undertheir roof or within their doors. That this is not over-ingenuity, seeingwhat is not to be seen, nor meant to be seen, is clear to me from whatfollows. When Duncan and Banquo arrive at the castle, their fancies, freefrom all suggestion of evil, call up only gracious and amiable images. The raven was but the fantastical creation of Lady Macbeth's over-wroughtbrain. "This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air Nimbly and sweetly doth commend itself Unto our gentle senses. This _guest_ of summer, The _temple-haunting_ martlet, doth approve By his _loved mansionry_ that the heaven's breath Smells _wooingly_ here; no jutty, frieze, Buttress, or coigne of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle. " The contrast here cannot but be as intentional as it is marked. Everyimage is one of welcome, security, and confidence. The summer, one maywell fancy, would be a very different hostess from her whom we have justseen expecting _them_. And why _temple-haunting_, unless because itsuggests sanctuary? _O immaginativa, che si ne rubi delle cose di fuor_, how infinitely more precious are the inward ones thou givest in return!If all this be accident, it is at least one of those accidents of whichonly this man was ever capable. I divine something like it now and thenin Aeschylus, through the mists of a language which will not let me besure of what I see, but nowhere else. Shakespeare, it is true, had, as Ihave said, as respects English, the privilege which only first-comersenjoy. The language was still fresh from those sources at too great adistance from which it becomes fit only for the service of prose. Wherever he dipped, it came up clear and sparkling, undefiled as yet bythe drainage of literary factories, or of those dye-houses where themachine-woven fabrics of sham culture are colored up to the lastdesperate style of sham sentiment. Those who criticise his diction assometimes extravagant should remember that in poetry language issomething more than merely the vehicle of thought, that it is meant toconvey the sentiment as much as the sense, and that, if there is a beautyof use, there is often a higher use of beauty. What kind of culture Shakespeare had is uncertain; how much he had isdisputed; that he had as much as he wanted, and of whatever kind hewanted, must be clear to whoever considers the question. Dr. Farmer hasproved, in his entertaining essay, that he got everything at second-handfrom translations, and that, where his translator blundered, he loyallyblundered too. But Goethe, the man of widest acquirement in modern times, did precisely the same thing. In his character of poet he set as littlestore by useless learning as Shakespeare did. He learned to writehexameters, not from Homer, but from Voss, and Voss found them faulty;yet somehow _Hermann und Dorothea_ is more readable than _Luise_. So faras all the classicism then attainable was concerned, Shakespeare got itas cheap as Goethe did, who always bought it ready-made. For suchpurposes of mere aesthetic nourishment Goethe always milked otherminds, --if minds those ruminators and digesters of antiquity into asses'milk may be called. There were plenty of professors who were foreverassiduously browsing in vales of Enna and on Pentelican slopes among thevestiges of antiquity, slowly secreting lacteous facts, and not one ofthem would have raised his head from that exquisite pasturage, though Panhad made music through his pipe of reeds. Did Goethe wish to work up aGreek theme? He drove out Herr Böttiger, for example, among that fodderdelicious to him for its very dryness, that sapless Arcadia ofscholiasts, let him graze, ruminate, and go through all other needfulprocesses of the antiquarian organism, then got him quietly into a cornerand milked him. The product, after standing long enough, mantled overwith the rich Goethean cream, from which a butter could be churned, ifnot precisely classic, quite as good as the ancients could have made outof the same material. But who has ever read the _Achilleis_, correct inall _un_essential particulars as it probably is? It is impossible to conceive that a man, who, in other respects, madesuch booty of the world around him, whose observation of manners was sominute, and whose insight into character and motives, as if he had beenone of God's spies, was so unerring that we accept it without question, as we do Nature herself, and find it more consoling to explain hisconfessedly immense superiority by attributing it to a happy instinctrather than to the conscientious perfecting of exceptional powers tillpractice made them seem to work independently of the will which stilldirected them, --it is impossible that such a man should not also haveprofited by the converse of the cultivated and quick-witted men in whosefamiliar society he lived, that he should not have over and over againdiscussed points of criticism and art with them, that he should not havehad his curiosity, so alive to everything else, excited about thoseancients whom university men then, no doubt, as now, extolled without toomuch knowledge of what they really were, that he should not have heardtoo much rather than too little of Aristotle's _Poetics_, Quinctilian's_Rhetoric_, Horace's _Art of Poetry_, and the _Unities_, especially fromBen Jonson, --in short, that he who speaks of himself as "Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what he most enjoyed contented least, " and who meditated so profoundly on every other topic of human concern, should never have turned his thought to the principles of that art whichwas both the delight and business of his life, the bread-winner alike forsoul and body. Was there no harvest of the ear for him whose eye hadstocked its garners so full as wellnigh to forestall all after-comers?Did he who could so counsel the practisers of an art in which he neverarrived at eminence, as in Hamlet's advice to the players, never takecounsel with himself about that other art in which the instinct of thecrowd, no less than the judgment of his rivals, awarded him an easypre-eminence? If he had little Latin and less Greek, might he not havehad enough of both for every practical purpose on this side pedantry? Themost extraordinary, one might almost say contradictory, attainments havebeen ascribed to him, and yet he has been supposed incapable of what waswithin easy reach of every boy at Westminster School. There is aknowledge that comes of sympathy as living and genetic as that whichcomes of mere learning is sapless and unprocreant, and for this noprofound study of the languages is needed. If Shakespeare did not know the ancients, I think they were at least asunlucky in not knowing him. But is it incredible that he may have laidhold of an edition of the Greek tragedians, _Graecè et Latinè_, and then, with such poor wits as he was master of, contrived to worry someconsiderable meaning out of them? There are at least one or twocoincidences which, whether accidental or not, are curious, and which Ido not remember to have seen noticed. In the _Electra_ of Sophocles, which is almost identical in its leading motive with _Hamlet_, the Chorusconsoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes in the samecommonplace way which Hamlet's uncle tries with him. [Greek: Thnaetou pephukas patros, Aelektra phronei; Thnaetos d' Orestaes; oste mae lian stene, Pasin gar aemin tout' opheiletai pathein. ] "Your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his. .. . But to perséver In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness. .. . 'T is common; all that live must die. " Shakespeare expatiates somewhat more largely, but the sentiment in bothcases is almost verbally identical. The resemblance is probably a chanceone, for commonplace and consolation were always twin sisters, whomalways to escape is given to no man; but it is nevertheless curious. Hereis another, from the _Oedipus Coloneus_:-- [Greek: Tois toi dikaiois cho brachus nika megan. ] "Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just. " Hamlet's "prophetic soul" may be matched with the [Greek: promantisthumos] of Peleus, (Eurip. Androm. 1075, ) and his "sea of troubles, " withthe [Greek: kakon pelagos] of Theseus in the _Hippolytus_, or of theChorus in the _Hercules Furens_. And, for manner and tone, compare thespeeches of Pheres in the _Alcestis_, and Jocasta in the _Phoenissae_, with those of Claudio in _Measure for Measure_, and Ulysses in _Troilusand Cressida_. The Greek dramatists were somewhat fond of a trick of words in whichthere is a reduplication of sense as well as of assonance, as in the_Electra_:-- [Greek: Alektra gaeraskousan anumenaia te]. So Shakespeare:-- "Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled"; and Milton after him, or, more likely, after the Greek:-- "Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved. "[129] I mention these trifles, in passing, because they have interested me, andtherefore may interest others. I lay no stress upon them, for, if oncethe conductors of Shakespeare's intelligence had been put in connectionwith those Attic brains, he would have reproduced their message in a formof his own. They would have inspired, and not enslaved him. Hisresemblance to them is that of consanguinity, more striking in expressionthan in mere resemblance of feature. The likeness between theClytemnestra--[Greek: gunaikos androboulon elpizon kear]--of Aeschylusand the Lady Macbeth of Shakespeare was too remarkable to have escapednotice. That between the two poets in their choice of epithets is asgreat, though more difficult of proof. Yet I think an attentive studentof Shakespeare cannot fail to be reminded of something familiar to him insuch phrases as "flame-eyed fire, " "flax-winged ships, " "star-neighboringpeaks, " the rock Salmydessus, "Rude jaw of the sea, Harsh hostess of the seaman, step-mother Of ships, " and the beacon with its "_speaking eye_ of fire. " Surely there is morethan a verbal, there is a genuine, similarity between the [Greek:anaerithmon gelasma] and "the unnumbered beach" and "multitudinous sea. "Aeschylus, it seems to me, is willing, just as Shakespeare is, to riskthe prosperity of a verse upon a lucky throw of words, which may come upthe sices of hardy metaphor or the ambsace of conceit. There is such adifference between far-reaching and far-fetching! Poetry, to be sure, isalways that daring one step beyond, which brings the right man tofortune, but leaves the wrong one in the ditch, and its law is, Be boldonce and again, yet be not over-bold. It is true, also, that masters oflanguage are a little apt to play with it. But whatever fault may befound with Shakespeare in this respect will touch a tender spot inAeschylus also. Does he sometimes overload a word, so that the languagenot merely, as Dryden says, bends under him, but fairly gives way, andlets the reader's mind down with the shock as of a false step in taste?He has nothing worse than [Greek: pelagos anthoun nekrois]. A criticism, shallow in human nature, however deep in Campbell's Rhetoric, has blamedhim for making persons, under great excitement of sorrow, or whateverother emotion, parenthesize some trifling play upon words in the veryheight of their passion. Those who make such criticisms have either neverfelt a passion or seen one in action, or else they forget the exaltationof sensibility during such crises, so that the attention, whether of thesenses or the mind, is arrested for the moment by what would beoverlooked in ordinary moods. The more forceful the current, the moresharp the ripple from any alien substance interposed. A passion thatlooks forward, like revenge or lust or greed, goes right to its end, andis straightforward in its expression; but a tragic passion, which is inits nature unavailing, like disappointment, regret of the inevitable, orremorse, is reflective, and liable to be continually diverted by thesuggestions of fancy. The one is a concentration of the will, whichintensifies the character and the phrase that expresses it; in the other, the will is helpless, and, as in insanity, while the flow of the mindsets imperatively in one direction, it is liable to almost ludicrousinterruptions and diversions upon the most trivial hint of involuntaryassociation. I am ready to grant that Shakespeare sometimes allows hischaracters to spend time, that might be better employed, in carving somecherry-stone of a quibble;[130] that he is sometimes tempted away fromthe natural by the quaint; that he sometimes forces a partial, even averbal, analogy between the abstract thought and the sensual image intoan absolute identity, giving us a kind of serious pun. In a pun ourpleasure arises from a gap in the logical nexus too wide for the reason, but which the ear can bridge in an instant. "Is that your own hare, or awig?" The fancy is yet more tickled where logic is treated with a mockceremonial of respect. "His head was turned, _and so_ he chewed His pigtail till he died. " Now when this kind of thing is done in earnest, the result is one ofthose ill-distributed syllogisms which in rhetoric are called conceits. "Hard was the hand that struck the blow, Soft was the heart that bled. " I have seen this passage from Warner cited for its beauty, though Ishould have thought nothing could be worse, had I not seen GeneralMorris's "Her heart and morning broke together In tears. " Of course, I would not rank with these Gloucester's "What! will the aspiring blood of Lancaster Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted"; though as mere rhetoric it belongs to the same class. [131] It might be defended as a bit of ghastly humor characteristic of thespeaker. But at any rate it is not without precedent in the two greaterGreek tragedians. In a chorus of the _Seven against Thebes_ we have:-- [Greek: en de gaia. Zoa phonoruto Memiktai, _karta d' eis' omaimoi_. ] And does not Sophocles make Ajax in his despair quibble upon his own namequite in the Shakespearian fashion, under similar circumstances? Nor doesthe coarseness with which our great poet is reproached lack an Aeschyleanparallel. Even the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ would have found a truegossip in her of the _Agamemnon_, who is so indiscreet in her confidencesconcerning the nursery life of Orestes. Whether Raleigh is right or notin warning historians against following truth too close upon the heels, the caution is a good one for poets as respects truth to Nature. But itis a mischievous fallacy in historian or critic to treat as a blemish ofthe man what is but the common tincture of his age. It is to confound aspatter of mud with a moral stain. But I have been led away from my immediate purpose. I did not intend tocompare Shakespeare with the ancients, much less to justify his defectsby theirs. Shakespeare himself has left us a pregnant satire ondogmatical and categorical aesthetics (which commonly in discussion soonlose their ceremonious tails and are reduced to the internecine dog andcat of their bald first syllables) in the cloud-scene between Hamlet andPolonius, suggesting exquisitely how futile is any attempt at a cast-irondefinition of those perpetually metamorphic impressions of the beautifulwhose source is as much in the man who looks as in the thing he sees. Inthe fine arts a thing is either good in itself or it is nothing. Itneither gains nor loses by having it shown that another good thing wasalso good in itself, any more than a bad thing profits by comparison withanother that is worse. The final judgment of the world is intuitive, andis based, not on proof that a work possesses some of the qualities ofanother whose greatness is acknowledged, but on the immediate feelingthat it carries to a high point of perfection certain qualities proper toitself. One does not flatter a fine pear by comparing it to a fine peach, nor learn what a fine peach is by tasting ever so many poor ones. The boywho makes his first bite into one does not need to ask his father if orhow or why it is good. Because continuity is a merit in some kinds ofwriting, shall we refuse ourselves to the authentic charm of Montaigne'swant of it? I have heard people complain of French tragedies because theywere so very French. This, though it may not be to some particulartastes, and may from one point of view be a defect, is from another andfar higher a distinguished merit. It is their flavor, as direct atelltale of the soil whence they drew it as that of French wines is. Suppose we should tax the Elgin marbles with being too Greek? When willpeople, nay, when will even critics, get over this self-defrauding trickof cheapening the excellence of one thing by that of another, thisconclusive style of judgment which consists simply in belonging to theother parish? As one grows older, one loses many idols, perhaps comes atlast to have none at all, though he may honestly enough uncover indeference to the worshippers before any shrine. But for the seeming lossthe compensation is ample. These saints of literature descend from theircanopied remoteness to be even more precious as men like ourselves, ourcompanions in field and street, speaking the same tongue, though in manydialects, and owning one creed under the most diverse masks of form. Much of that merit of structure which is claimed for the ancient tragedyis due, if I am not mistaken, to circumstances external to the dramaitself, --to custom, to convention, to the exigencies of the theatre. Itis formal rather than organic. The _Prometheus_ seems to me one of thefew Greek tragedies in which the whole creation has developed itself inperfect proportion from one central germ of living conception. The motiveof the ancient drama is generally outside of it, while in the modern (atleast in the English) it is necessarily within. Goethe, in a thoughtfulessay, [132] written many years later than his famous criticism of Hamletin _Wilhelm Meister_, says that the distinction between the two is thedifference between _sollen_ and _wollen_, that is, between _must_ and_would_. He means that in the Greek drama the catastrophe is foreordainedby an inexorable Destiny, while the element of Freewill, and consequentlyof choice, is the very axis of the modern. The definition is convenientlyportable, but it has its limitations. Goethe's attention was tooexclusively fixed on the Fate tragedies of the Greeks, and uponShakespeare among the moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, custom, loyalty, honor, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as doom. In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, the crisis lies in the character ofthe protagonist. In this sense it is modern, and is the first example oftrue character-painting in tragedy. But, from whatever cause, thatexquisite analysis of complex motives, and the display of them in actionand speech, which constitute for us the abiding charm of fiction, werequite unknown to the ancients. They reached their height in Cervantes andShakespeare, and, though on a lower plane, still belong to the upperregion of art in Le Sage, Molière, and Fielding. The personages of theGreek tragedy seem to be commonly rather types than individuals. In themodern tragedy, certainly in the four greatest of Shakespeare'stragedies, there is still something very like Destiny, only the place ofit is changed. It is no longer above man, but in him; yet the catastropheis as sternly foredoomed in the characters of Lear, Othello, Macbeth, andHamlet as it could be by an infallible oracle. In Macbeth, indeed, theWeird Sisters introduce an element very like Fate; but generally it maybe said that with the Greeks the character is involved in the action, while with Shakespeare the action is evolved from the character. In theone case, the motive of the play controls the personages; in the other, the chief personages are in themselves the motive to which all else issubsidiary. In any comparison, therefore, of Shakespeare with theancients, we are not to contrast him with them as unapproachable models, but to consider whether he, like them, did not consciously endeavor, under the circumstances and limitations in which he found himself, toproduce the most excellent thing possible, a model also in its ownkind, --whether higher or lower in degree is another question. The onlyfair comparison would be between him and that one of his contemporarieswho endeavored to anachronize himself, so to speak, and to subject hisart, so far as might be, to the laws of classical composition. Ben Jonsonwas a great man, and has sufficiently proved that he had an eye for theexternal marks of character; but when he would make a whole of them, hegives us instead either a bundle of humors or an incorporated idea. WithShakespeare the plot is an interior organism, in Jonson an externalcontrivance. It is the difference between man and tortoise. In the onethe osseous structure is out of sight, indeed, but sustains the flesh andblood that envelop it, while the other is boxed up and imprisoned in hisbones. I have been careful to confine myself to what may be called Shakespeare'sideal tragedies. In the purely historical or chronicle plays, theconditions are different, and his imagination submits itself to thenecessary restrictions on its freedom of movement. Outside the tragediesalso, the _Tempest_ makes an exception worthy of notice. If I read itrightly, it is an example of how a great poet should write allegory, --notembodying metaphysical abstractions, but giving us ideals abstracted fromlife itself, suggesting an under-meaning everywhere, forcing it upon usnowhere, tantalizing the mind with hints that imply so much and tell solittle, and yet keep the attention all eye and ear with eager, iffruitless, expectation. Here the leading characters are not merelytypical, but symbolical, --that is, they do not illustrate a class ofpersons, they belong to universal Nature. Consider the scene of the play. Shakespeare is wont to take some familiar story, to lay his scene in someplace the name of which, at least, is familiar, --well knowing the reserveof power that lies in the familiar as a background, when things are setin front of it under a new and unexpected light. But in the _Tempest_ thescene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map. Nowhere, then? At once nowhere and anywhere, --for it is in the soul ofman, that still vexed island hung between the upper and the nether world, and liable to incursions from both. There is scarce a play ofShakespeare's in which there is such variety of character, none in whichcharacter has so little to do in the carrying on and development of thestory. But consider for a moment if ever the Imagination has been soembodied as in Prospero, the Fancy as in Ariel, the brute Understandingas in Caliban, who, the moment his poor wits are warmed with the gloriousliquor of Stephano, plots rebellion against his natural lord, the higherReason. Miranda is mere abstract Womanhood, as truly so before she seesFerdinand as Eve before she was wakened to consciousness by the echo ofher own nature coming back to her, the same, and yet not the same, fromthat of Adam. Ferdinand, again, is nothing more than Youth, compelled todrudge at something he despises, till the sacrifice of will andabnegation of self win him his ideal in Miranda. The subordinatepersonages are simply types; Sebastian and Antonio, of weak character andevil ambition; Gonzalo, of average sense and honesty; Adrian andFrancisco, of the walking gentlemen who serve to fill up a world. Theyare not characters in the same sense with Iago, Falstaff, Shallow, orLeontius; and it is curious how every one of them loses his way in thisenchanted island of life, all the victims of one illusion after another, except Prospero, whose ministers are purely ideal. The whole play, indeed, is a succession of illusions, winding up with those solemn wordsof the great enchanter who had summoned to his service every shape ofmerriment or passion, every figure in the great tragi-comedy of life, andwho was now bidding farewell to the scene of his triumphs. For inProspero shall we not recognize the Artist himself, -- "That did not better for his life provide Than public means which public manners breeds, Whence comes it that his name receives a brand, "-- who has forfeited a shining place in the world's eye by devotion to hisart, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the leaky carcass ofa boat, has shipwrecked on that Fortunate Island (as men always do whofind their true vocation) where he is absolute lord, making all thepowers of Nature serve him, but with Ariel and Caliban as specialministers? Of whom else could he have been thinking, when he says, -- "Graves, at my command, Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, By my so potent art"? Was this man, so extraordinary from whatever side we look at him, who ranso easily through the whole scale of human sentiment, from the homelycommonsense of, "When two men ride of one horse, one _must_ ride behind, "to the transcendental subtilty of, "No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change; Thy pyramids, built up with newer might, To me are nothing novel, nothing strange; They are but dressings of a former sight, "-- was he alone so unconscious of powers, some part of whose magic isrecognized by all mankind, from the school-boy to the philosopher, thathe merely sat by and saw them go without the least notion what they wereabout? Was he an inspired idiot, _vôtre bizarre Shakespeare_? a vast, irregular genius? a simple rustic, warbling his _native_ wood-notes wild, in other words, insensible to the benefits of culture? When attempts havebeen made at various times to prove that this singular and seeminglycontradictory creature, not one, but all mankind's epitome, was amusician, a lawyer, a doctor, a Catholic, a Protestant, an atheist, anIrishman, a discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and finally, thathe was not himself, but somebody else, is it not a little odd that thelast thing anybody should have thought of proving him was an artist?Nobody believes any longer that immediate inspiration is possible inmodern times (as if God had grown old), --at least, nobody believes it ofthe prophets of those days, of John of Leyden, or Reeves, orMuggleton, --and yet everybody seems to take it for granted of this oneman Shakespeare. He, somehow or other, without knowing it, was able to dowhat none of the rest of them, though knowing it all too perfectly well, could begin to do. Everybody seems to get afraid of him in turn. Voltaireplays gentleman usher for him to his countrymen, and then, perceivingthat his countrymen find a flavor in him beyond that of _Zaïre_ or_Mahomet_, discovers him to be a _Sauvage ivre, sans le moindre étincellede bon goût, et sans le moindre connoissance des règles_. Goethe, whotells us that _Götz von Berlichingen_ was written in the Shakespearianmanner, --and we certainly should not have guessed it, if he had notblabbed, --comes to the final conclusion, that Shakespeare was a poet, butnot a dramatist. Châteaubriand thinks that he has corrupted art. "If, toattain, " he says, "the height of tragic art, it be enough to heaptogether disparate scenes without order and without connection, todovetail the burlesque with the pathetic, to set the water-carrier besidethe monarch and the huckster-wench beside the queen, who may notreasonably flatter himself with being the rival of the greatest masters?Whoever should give himself the trouble to retrace a single one of hisdays, . .. To keep a journal from hour to hour, would have made a drama inthe fashion of the English poet. " But there are journals and journals, asthe French say, and what goes into them depends on the eye that gathersfor them. It is a long step from St. Simon to Dangeau, from Pepys toThoresby, from Shakespeare even to the Marquis de Châteaubriand. M. Hugoalone, convinced that, as founder of the French Romantic School, there isa kind of family likeness between himself and Shakespeare, stands boldlyforth to prove the father as extravagant as the son. Calm yourself, M. Hugo, you are no more a child of his than Will Davenant was! But, afterall, is it such a great crime to produce something absolutely new in aworld so tedious as ours, and so apt to tell its old stories over again?I do not mean new in substance, but in the manner of presentation. Surelythe highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and familiar. He inventsnothing, but seems rather to _re_-discover the world about him, and hispenetrating vision gives to things of daily encounter something of thestrangeness of new creation. Meanwhile the changed conditions of modernlife demand a change in the method of treatment. The ideal is not astrait-waistcoat. Because _Alexis and Dora_ is so charming, shall we haveno _Paul and Virginia?_ It was the idle endeavor to reproduce the oldenchantment in the old way that gave us the pastoral, sent to the garretnow with our grandmothers' achievements of the same sort in worsted. Every age says to its poets, like a mistress to her lover, "Tell me whatI am like"; and he who succeeds in catching the evanescent expressionthat reveals character--which is as much as to say, what is intrinsicallyhuman--will be found to have caught something as imperishable as humannature itself. Aristophanes, by the vital and essential qualities of hishumorous satire, is already more nearly our contemporary than Molière;and even the _Trouvères_, careless and trivial as they mostly are, couldfecundate a great poet like Chaucer, and are still delightful reading. The Attic tragedy still keeps its hold upon the loyalty of scholarsthrough their imagination, or their pedantry, or their feeling of anexclusive property, as may happen, and, however alloyed with basermatter, this loyalty is legitimate and well bestowed. But the dominion ofthe Shakespearian is even wider. It pushes forward its boundaries fromyear to year, and moves no landmark backward. Here Alfieri and Leasingown a common allegiance; and the loyalty to him is one not of guild ortradition, but of conviction and enthusiasm. Can this be said of anyother modern? of robust Corneille? of tender Racine? of Calderon even, with his tropical warmth and vigor of production? The Greeks and he arealike and alone in this, and for the same reason, that both areunapproachably the highest in their kind. Call him Gothic, if you like, but the inspiring mind that presided over the growth of these clusteredmasses of arch and spire and pinnacle and buttress is neither Greek norGothic, --it is simply genius lending itself to embody the new desire ofman's mind, as it had embodied the old. After all, to be delightful is tobe classic, and the chaotic never pleases long. But manifoldness is notconfusion, any more than formalism is simplicity. If Shakespeare rejectedthe unities, as I think he who complains of "Art made tongue-tied byAuthority" might very well deliberately do, it was for the sake of animaginative unity more intimate than any of time and place. The antiquein itself is not the ideal, though its remoteness from the vulgarity ofeveryday associations helps to make it seem so. The true ideal is notopposed to the real, nor is it any artificial heightening thereof, butlies _in_ it, and blessed are the eyes that find it! It is the _mensdivinior_ which hides within the actual, transfiguring matter-of-factinto matter-of-meaning for him who has the gift of second-sight. In thissense Hogarth is often more truly ideal than Raphael, Shakespeare oftenmore truly so than the Greeks. I think it is a more or less consciousperception of this ideality, as it is a more or less well-groundedpersuasion of it as respects the Greeks, that assures to him, as to them, and with equal justice, a permanent supremacy over the minds of men. Thisgives to his characters their universality, to his thought itsirradiating property, while the artistic purpose running through andcombining the endless variety of scene and character will alone accountfor his power of dramatic effect. Goethe affirmed, that, withoutSchröder's prunings and adaptations, Shakespeare was too undramatic forthe German theatre, --that, if the theory that his plays should berepresented textually should prevail, he would be driven from the boards. The theory has prevailed, and he not only holds his own, but is actedoftener than ever. It is not irregular genius that can do this, forsurely Germany need not go abroad for what her own Werners could morethan amply supply her with. But I would much rather quote a fine saying than a bad prophecy of a manto whom I owe so much. Goethe, in one of the most perfect of his shorterpoems, tells us that a poem is like a painted window. Seen from without, (and he accordingly justifies the Philistine, who never looks at themotherwise, ) they seem dingy and confused enough; but enter, and then "Da ist's auf einmal farbig helle, Geschicht' und Zierath glänzt in Schnelle. " With the same feeling he says elsewhere in prose, that "there is adestructive criticism and a productive. The former is very easy; for onehas only to set up in his mind any standard, any model, however narrow"(let us say the Greeks), "and then boldly assert that the work underreview does not match with it, and therefore is good for nothing, --thematter is settled, and one must at once deny its claim. Productivecriticism is a great deal more difficult; it asks, What did the authorpropose to himself? Is what he proposes reasonable and comprehensible?and how far has he succeeded in carrying it out?" It is in applying thislatter kind of criticism to Shakespeare that the Germans have set us anexample worthy of all commendation. If they have been sometimesover-subtile, they at least had the merit of first looking at his worksas wholes, as something that very likely contained an idea, perhapsconveyed a moral, if we could get at it. The illumination lent us by mostof the English commentators reminds us of the candles which guides holdup to show us a picture in a dark place, the smoke of which graduallymakes the work of the artist invisible under its repeated layers. Lessing, as might have been expected, opened the first glimpse in the newdirection; Goethe followed with his famous exposition of Hamlet; A. W. Schlegel took a more comprehensive view in his Lectures, which Coleridgeworked over into English, adding many fine criticisms of his own onsingle passages; and finally, Gervinus has devoted four volumes to acomment on the plays, full of excellent matter, though pushing the moralexegesis beyond all reasonable bounds. [133] With the help of all these, and especially of the last, I shall apply this theory of criticism toHamlet, not in the hope of saying anything new, but of bringing somethingto the support of the thesis, that, if Shakespeare was skilful as aplaywright, he was even greater as a dramatist, --that, if his immediatebusiness was to fill the theatre, his higher object was to createsomething which, by fulfilling the conditions and answering therequirements of modern life, should as truly deserve to be called awork of art as others had deserved it by doing the same thing informer times and under other circumstances. Supposing him to haveaccepted--consciously or not is of little importance--the new terms ofthe problem which makes character the pivot of dramatic action, andconsequently the key of dramatic unity, how far did he succeed? Before attempting my analysis, I must clear away a little rubbish. Aresuch anachronisms as those of which Voltaire accuses Shakespeare inHamlet, such as the introduction of cannon before the invention ofgunpowder, and making Christians of the Danes three centuries too soon, of the least bearing aesthetically? I think not; but as they are of apiece with a great many other criticisms upon the great poet, it is worthwhile to dwell upon them a moment. The first demand we make upon whatever claims to be a work of art (and wehave a right to make it) is that it shall be _in keeping_. Now thispropriety is of two kinds, either extrinsic or intrinsic. In the first Ishould class whatever relates rather to the body than the soul of thework, such as fidelity to the facts of history, (wherever that isimportant, ) congruity of costume, and the like, --in short, whatever mightcome under the head of _picturesque_ truth, a departure from which wouldshock too rudely our preconceived associations. I have seen an Indianchief in French boots, and he seemed to me almost tragic; but, put uponthe stage in tragedy, he would have been ludicrous. Lichtenberg, writingfrom London in 1775, tells us that Garrick played Hamlet in a suit of theFrench fashion, then commonly worn, and that he was blamed for it by someof the critics; but, he says, one hears no such criticism during theplay, nor on the way home, nor at supper afterwards, nor indeed till theemotion roused by the great actor has had time to subside. He justifiesGarrick, though we should not be able to endure it now. Yet nothing wouldbe gained by trying to make Hamlet's costume true to the assumed periodof the play, for the scene of it is laid in a Denmark that has no dates. In the second and more important category, I should put, first, co-ordination of character, that is, a certain variety in harmony of thepersonages of a drama, as in the attitudes and coloring of the figures ina pictorial composition, so that, while mutually relieving and settingoff each other, they shall combine in the total impression; second, thatsubordinate truth to Nature which makes each character coherent initself; and, third, such propriety of costume and the like as shallsatisfy the superhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the higherdrama appeals. All these come within the scope of _imaginative_ truth. Toillustrate my third head by an example. Tieck criticises John Kemble'sdressing for Macbeth in a modern Highland costume, as being ungracefulwithout any countervailing merit of historical exactness. I think adeeper reason for his dissatisfaction might be found in the fact, thatthis garb, with its purely modern and British army associations, is outof place on Fores Heath, and drags the Weird Sisters down with it fromtheir proper imaginative remoteness in the gloom of the past to thedisenchanting glare of the foot-lights. It is not the antiquarian, butthe poetic conscience, that is wounded. To this, exactness, so far asconcerns ideal representation, may not only not be truth, but may even beopposed to it. Anachronisms and the like are in themselves of no account, and become important only when they make a gap too wide for our illusionto cross unconsciously, that is, when they are anacoluthons to theimagination. The aim of the artist is psychologic, not historic truth. Itis comparatively easy for an author to _get up_ any period with tolerableminuteness in externals, but readers and audiences find more difficultyin getting them down, though oblivion swallows scores of them at a gulp. The saving truth in such matters is a truth to essential and permanentcharacteristics. The Ulysses of Shakespeare, like the Ulysses of Danteand Tennyson, more or less harmonizes with our ideal conception of thewary, long-considering, though adventurous son of Laertes, yet Simon LordLovat is doubtless nearer the original type. In Hamlet, though there isno Denmark of the ninth century, Shakespeare has suggested the prevailingrudeness of manners quite enough for his purpose. We see it in the singlecombat of Hamlet's father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vulgarwassail of the king, in the English monarch being expected to hangRosencrantz and Guildenstern out of hand merely to oblige his cousin ofDenmark, in Laertes, sent to Paris to be made a gentleman of, becominginstantly capable of any the most barbarous treachery to glut hisvengeance. We cannot fancy Ragnar Lodbrog or Eric the Red matriculatingat Wittenberg, but it was essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, andShakespeare sends him thither without more ado. All through the play weget the notion of a state of society in which a savage nature hasdisguised itself in the externals of civilization, like a Maori deacon, who has only to strip and he becomes once more a tattooed pagan with hismouth watering for a spare-rib of his pastor. Historically, at the dateof Hamlet, the Danes were in the habit of burning their enemies alive intheir houses, with as much of their family about them as might be to makeit comfortable. Shakespeare seems purposely to have dissociated his playfrom history by changing nearly every name in the original legend. Themotive of the play--revenge as a religious duty--belongs only to a socialstate in which the traditions of barbarism are still operative, but, withinfallible artistic judgment, Shakespeare has chosen, not untamed Nature, as he found it in history, but the period of transition, a period inwhich the times are always out of joint, and thus the irresolution whichhas its root in Hamlet's own character is stimulated by the veryincompatibility of that legacy of vengeance he has inherited from thepast with the new culture and refinement of which he is therepresentative. One of the few books which Shakespeare is known to havepossessed was Florio's Montaigne, and he might well have transferred theFrenchman's motto, _Que sçais je_? to the front of his tragedy; nor can Ihelp fancying something more than accident in the fact that Hamlet hasbeen a student at Wittenberg, whence those new ideas went forth, of whoseresults in unsettling men's faith, and consequently disqualifying themfor promptness in action, Shakespeare had been not only an eye-witness, but which he must actually have experienced in himself. One other objection let me touch upon here, especially as it has beenurged against Hamlet, and that is the introduction of low characters andcomic scenes in tragedy. Even Garrick, who had just assisted at theStratford Jubilee, where Shakespeare had been pronounced divine, wasinduced by this absurd outcry for the proprieties of the tragic stage toomit the grave-diggers' scene from Hamlet. Leaving apart the fact thatShakespeare would not have been the representative poet he is, if he hadnot given expression to this striking tendency of the Northern races, which shows itself constantly, not only in their literature, but even intheir mythology and their architecture, the grave-diggers' scene alwaysimpresses me as one of the most pathetic in the whole tragedy. ThatShakespeare introduced such scenes and characters with deliberateintention, and with a view to artistic relief and contrast, there canhardly be a doubt. We must take it for granted that a man whose worksshow everywhere the results of judgment sometimes acted with forethought. I find the springs of the profoundest sorrow and pity in this hardenedindifference of the grave-diggers, in their careless discussion as towhether Ophelia's death was by suicide or no, in their singing andjesting at their dreary work. "A pickaxe and a spade, a spade, For--and a shrouding-sheet: O, a pit of clay for to be made For such a guest is meet!" _We_ know who is to be the guest of this earthen hospitality, --how muchbeauty, love, and heartbreak are to be covered in that pit of clay. Allwe remember of Ophelia reacts upon us with tenfold force, and we recoilfrom our amusement at the ghastly drollery of the two delvers with ashock of horror. That the unconscious Hamlet should stumble on _this_grave of all others, that it should be _here_ that he should pause tomuse humorously on death and decay, --all this prepares us for therevulsion of passion in the next scene, and for the frantic confession, -- "I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not with all _their_ quantity of love Make up my sum!" And it is only here that such an asseveration would be true even to thefeeling of the moment; for it is plain from all we know of Hamlet that hecould not so have loved Ophelia, that he was incapable of theself-abandonment of a true passion, that he would have analyzed thisemotion as he does all others, would have peeped and botanized upon ittill it became to him a mere matter of scientific interest. All thisforce of contrast, and this horror of surprise, were necessary so tointensify his remorseful regret that he should believe himself for oncein earnest. The speech of the King, "O, he is mad, Laertes, " recalls himto himself, and he at once begins to rave:-- "Zounds! show me what thou'lt do! Woul't weep? woul't fight? woul't fast? woul't tear thyself? Woul't drink up eysil? eat a crocodile?" It is easy to see that the whole plot hinges upon the character ofHamlet, that Shakespeare's conception of this was the ovum out of whichthe whole organism was hatched. And here let me remark, that there is akind of genealogical necessity in the character, --a thing not altogetherstrange to the attentive reader of Shakespeare. Hamlet seems the naturalresult of the mixture of father and mother in his temperament, theresolution and persistence of the one, like sound timber wormholed andmade shaky, as it were, by the other's infirmity of will anddiscontinuity of purpose. In natures so imperfectly mixed it is notuncommon to find vehemence of intention the prelude and counterpoise ofweak performance, the conscious nature striving to keep up itsself-respect by a triumph in words all the more resolute that it feelsassured beforehand of inevitable defeat in action. As in such slipshodhousekeeping men are their own largest creditors, they find it easy tostave off utter bankruptcy of conscience by taking up one unpaid promisewith another larger, and at heavier interest, till such self-swindlingbecomes habitual and by degrees almost painless. How did Coleridgediscount his own notes of this kind with less and less specie as thefigures lengthened on the paper! As with Hamlet, so it is with Opheliaand Laertes. The father's feebleness comes up again in the wastingheartbreak and gentle lunacy of the daughter, while the son shows it in arashness of impulse and act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essentialfeebleness we are all the more sensible as contrasted with a nature sosteady on its keel, and drawing so much water, as that of Horatio, --thefoil at once, in different ways, to both him and Hamlet. It was natural, also, that the daughter of self-conceited old Polonius should have hersoftness stiffened with a fibre of obstinacy; for there are two kinds ofweakness, that which breaks, and that which bends. Ophelia's is of theformer kind; Hero is her counterpart, giving way before calamity, andrising again so soon as the pressure is removed. I find two passages in Dante that contain the exactest possibledefinition of that habit or quality of Hamlet's mind which justifies thetragic turn of the play, and renders it natural and unavoidable from thebeginning. The first is from the second canto of the _Inferno_:-- "E quale è quei che disvuol ciò che volle, E per nuovi pensier sangia proposta, Si che del cominciar tutto si tolle; Tal mi fec' io in quella oscura costa; Perchè pensando consumai la impresa Che fu nel cominciar cotanto tosta. " "And like the man who unwills what he willed, And for new thoughts doth change his first intent, So that he cannot anywhere begin, Such became I upon that slope obscure, Because with thinking I consumed resolve, That was so ready at the setting out. " Again, in the fifth of the _Purgatorio_:-- "Che sempre l' uomo in cui pensier rampoglia Sovra pensier, da sè dilunga il segno, Perchè la foga l' un dell' altro insolla. " "For always he in whom one thought buds forth Out of another farther puts the goal. For each has only force to mar the other. " Dante was a profound metaphysician, and as in the first passage hedescribes and defines a certain quality of mind, so in the other he tellsus its result in the character and life, namely, indecision andfailure, --the goal _farther_ off at the end than at the beginning. It isremarkable how close a resemblance of thought, and even of expression, there is between the former of these quotations and a part of Hamlet'sfamous soliloquy:-- "Thus conscience [i. E. Consciousness] doth make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action!" It is an inherent peculiarity of a mind like Hamlet's that it should beconscious of its own defect. Men of his type are forever analyzing theirown emotions and motives. They cannot do anything, because they alwayssee two ways of doing it. They cannot determine on any course of action, because they are always, as it were, standing at the cross-roads, and seetoo well the disadvantages of every one of them. It is not that they areincapable of resolve, but somehow the band between the motive power andthe operative faculties is relaxed and loose. The engine works, but themachinery it should drive stands still. The imagination is so much inoverplus, that thinking a thing becomes better than doing it, and thoughtwith its easy perfection, capable of everything because it can accomplisheverything with ideal means, is vastly more attractive and satisfactorythan deed, which must be wrought at best with imperfect instruments, andalways falls short of the conception that went before it. "If to do, "says Portia in the _Merchant of Venice_, --"if to do were as easy as toknow what 't were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men'scottages princes' palaces. " Hamlet knows only too well what 't were goodto do, but he palters with everything in a double sense: he sees thegrain of good there is in evil, and the grain of evil there is in good, as they exist in the world, and, finding that he can make thosefeather-weighted accidents balance each other, infers that there islittle to choose between the essences themselves. He is of Montaigne'smind, and says expressly that "there is nothing good or ill, but thinkingmakes it so. " He dwells so exclusively in the world of ideas that theworld of facts seems trifling, nothing is worth the while; and he hasbeen so long objectless and purposeless, so far as actual life isconcerned, that, when at last an object and an aim are forced upon him, he cannot deal with them, and gropes about vainly for a motive outside ofhimself that shall marshal his thoughts for him and guide his facultiesinto the path of action. He is the victim not so much of feebleness ofwill as of an intellectual indifference that hinders the will fromworking long in any one direction. He wishes to will, but never wills. His continual iteration of resolve shows that he has no resolution. He iscapable of passionate energy where the occasion presents itself suddenlyfrom without, because nothing is so irritable as conscious irresolutionwith a duty to perform. But of deliberate energy he is not capable; forthere the impulse must come from within, and the blade of his analysis isso subtile that it can divide the finest hair of motive 'twixt north andnorthwest side, leaving him desperate to choose between them. The veryconsciousness of his defect is an insuperable bar to his repairing it;for the unity of purpose, which infuses every fibre of the character withwill available whenever wanted, is impossible where the mind can neverrest till it has resolved that unity into its component elements, andsatisfied itself which on the whole is of greater value. A criticalinstinct so insatiable that it must turn upon itself, for lack ofsomething else to hew and hack, becomes incapable at last of originatinganything except indecision. It becomes infallible in what _not_ to do. How easily he might have accomplished his task is shown by the conduct ofLaertes. When _he_ has a death to avenge, he raises a mob, breaks intothe palace, bullies the king, and proves how weak the usurper really was. The world is the victim of splendid parts, and is slow to accept arounded whole, because that is something which is long in completing, still longer in demonstrating its completion. We like to be surprisedinto admiration, and not logically convinced that we ought to admire. Weare willing to be delighted with success, though we are somewhatindifferent to the homely qualities which insure it. Our thought is sofilled with the rocket's burst of momentary splendor so far above us, that we forget the poor stick, useful and unseen, that made its climbingpossible. One of these homely qualities is continuity of character, andit escapes present applause because it tells chiefly, in the long run, inresults. With his usual tact, Shakespeare has brought in such a characteras a contrast and foil to Hamlet. Horatio is the only complete _man_ inthe play, --solid, well-knit, and true; a noble, quiet nature, with thathighest of all qualities, judgment, always sane and prompt; who neverdrags his anchors for any wind of opinion or fortune, but grips all thecloser to the reality of things. He seems one of those calm, undemonstrative men whom we love and admire without asking to know why, crediting them with the capacity of great things, without any test ofactual achievement, because we feel that their manhood is a constantquality, and no mere accident of circumstance and opportunity. Such menare always sure of the presence of their highest self on demand. Hamletis continually drawing bills on the future, secured by his promise ofhimself to himself, which he can never redeem. His own somewhat femininenature recognizes its complement in Horatio, and clings to itinstinctively, as naturally as Horatio is attracted by that fatal gift ofimagination, the absence of which makes the strength of his owncharacter, as its overplus does the weakness of Hamlet's. It is a happymarriage of two minds drawn together by the charm of unlikeness. Hamletfeels in Horatio the solid steadiness which he misses in himself; Horatioin Hamlet that need of service and sustainment to render which gives hima consciousness of his own value. Hamlet fills the place of a woman toHoratio, revealing him to himself not only in what he says, but by aconstant claim upon his strength of nature; and there is greatpsychological truth in making suicide the first impulse of this quiet, undemonstrative man, after Hamlet's death, as if the very reason for hisbeing were taken away with his friend's need of him. In his grief, he forthe first and only time speaks of himself, is first made conscious ofhimself by his loss. If this manly reserve of Horatio be true to Nature, not less so are the communicativeness of Hamlet, and his tendency tosoliloquize. If self-consciousness be alien to the one, it is just astruly the happiness of the other. Like a musician distrustful of himself, he is forever tuning his instrument, first overstraining this cord alittle, and then that, but unable to bring them into unison, or to profitby it if he could. We do not believe that Horatio ever thought he "was not a pipe forFortune's finger to play what stop she please, " till Hamlet told him so. That was Fortune's affair, not his; let her try it, if she liked. He isunconscious of his own peculiar qualities, as men of decision commonlyare, or they would not be men of decision. When there is a thing to bedone, they go straight at it, and for the time there is nothing for themin the whole universe but themselves and their object. Hamlet, on theother hand, is always studying himself. This world and the other, too, are always present to his mind, and there in the corner is the littleblack kobold of a doubt making mouths at him. He breaks down the bridgesbefore him, not behind him, as a man of action would do; but there issomething more than this. He is an ingrained sceptic; though his is thescepticism, not of reason, but of feeling, whose root is want of faith inhimself. In him it is passive, a malady rather than a function of themind. We might call him insincere: not that he was in any sense ahypocrite, but only that he never was and never could be in earnest. Never could be, because no man without intense faith in something evercan. Even if he only believed in himself, that were better than nothing;for it will carry a man a great way in the outward successes of life, nay, will even sometimes give him the Archimedean fulcrum for moving theworld. But Hamlet doubts everything. He doubts the immortality of thesoul, just after seeing his father's spirit, and hearing from its mouththe secrets of the other world. He doubts Horatio even, and swears him tosecrecy on the cross of his sword, though probably he himself has noassured belief in the sacredness of the symbol. He doubts Ophelia, andasks her, "Are you honest?" He doubts the ghost, after he has had alittle time to think about it, and so gets up the play to test the guiltof the king. And how coherent the whole character is! With what perfecttact and judgment Shakespeare, in the advice to the players, makes him anexquisite critic! For just here that part of his character which would beweak in dealing with affairs is strong. A wise scepticism is the firstattribute of a good critic. He must not believe that the fire-insuranceoffices will raise their rates of premium on Charles River, because thenew volume of poems is printing at Riverside or the University Press. Hemust not believe so profoundly in the ancients as to think it wholly outof the question that the world has still vigor enough in its loins tobeget some one who will one of these days be as good an ancient as any ofthem. Another striking quality in Hamlet's nature is his perpetual inclinationto irony. I think this has been generally passed over too lightly, as ifit were something external and accidental, rather assumed as a mask thanpart of the real nature of the man. It seems to me to go deeper, to besomething innate, and not merely factitious. It is nothing like the graveirony of Socrates, which was the weapon of a man thoroughly inearnest, --the _boomerang_ of argument, which one throws in the oppositedirection of what he means to hit, and which seems to be flying away fromthe adversary, who will presently find himself knocked down by it. It isnot like the irony of Timon, which is but the wilful refraction of aclear mind twisting awry whatever enters it, --or of Iago, which is theslime that a nature essentially evil loves to trail over all beauty andgoodness to taint them with distrust: it is the half-jest, half-earnestof an inactive temperament that has not quite made up its mind whetherlife is a reality or no, whether men were not made in jest, and whichamuses itself equally with finding a deep meaning in trivial things and atrifling one in the profoundest mysteries of being, because the want ofearnestness in its own essence infects everything else with its ownindifference. If there be now and then an unmannerly rudeness andbitterness in it, as in the scenes with Polonius and Osrick, we mustremember that Hamlet was just in the condition which spurs men to salliesof this kind: dissatisfied, at one neither with the world nor withhimself, and accordingly casting about for something out of himself tovent his spleen upon. But even in these passages there is no hint ofearnestness, of any purpose beyond the moment; they are mere cat's-pawsof vexation, and not the deep-raking ground-swell of passion, as we seeit in the sarcasm of Lear. The question of Hamlet's madness has been much discussed and variouslydecided. High medical authority has pronounced, as usual, on both sidesof the question. But the induction has been drawn from too narrowpremises, being based on a mere diagnosis of the _case_, and not on anappreciation of the character in its completeness. We have a case ofpretended madness in the Edgar of _King Lear_; and it is certainly truethat that is a charcoal sketch, coarsely outlined, compared with thedelicate drawing, the lights, shades, and half-tints of the portraiturein Hamlet. But does this tend to prove that the madness of the latter, because truer to the recorded observation of experts, is real, and meantto be real, as the other to be fictitious? Not in the least, as itappears to me. Hamlet, among all the characters of Shakespeare, is themost eminently a metaphysician and psychologist. He is a close observer, continually analyzing his own nature and that of others, letting fall hislittle drops of acid irony on all who come near him, to make them showwhat they are made of. Even Ophelia is not too sacred, Osrick not toocontemptible for experiment. If such a man assumed madness, he would playhis part perfectly. If Shakespeare himself, without going mad, could soobserve and remember all the abnormal symptoms as to be able to reproducethem in Hamlet, why should it be beyond the power of Hamlet to reproducethem in himself? If you deprive Hamlet of reason, there is no trulytragic motive left. He would be a fit subject for Bedlam, but not for thestage. We might have pathology enough, but no pathos. Ajax first becomestragic when he recovers his wits. If Hamlet is irresponsible, the wholeplay is a chaos. That he is not so might be proved by evidence enough, were it not labor thrown away. This feigned madness of Hamlet's is one of the few points in whichShakespeare has kept close to the old story on which he founded his play;and as he never decided without deliberation, so he never acted withoutunerring judgment, Hamlet _drifts_ through the whole tragedy. He neverkeeps on one tack long enough to get steerage-way, even if, in a naturelike his, with those electric streamers of whim and fancy foreverwavering across the vault of his brain, the needle of judgment wouldpoint in one direction long enough to strike a course by. The scheme ofsimulated insanity is precisely the one he would have been likely to hitupon, because it enabled him to follow his own bent, and to drift with anapparent purpose, postponing decisive action by the very means he adoptsto arrive at its accomplishment, and satisfying himself with the show ofdoing something that he may escape so much the longer the dreadednecessity of really doing anything at all. It enables him to _play_ withlife and duty, instead of taking them by the rougher side, where aloneany firm grip is possible, --to feel that he is on the way towardaccomplishing somewhat, when he is really paltering with his ownirresolution. Nothing, I think, could be more finely imagined than this. Voltaire complains that he goes mad without any sufficient object orresult. Perfectly true, and precisely what was most natural for him todo, and, accordingly, precisely what Shakespeare meant that he should do. It was delightful to him to indulge his imagination and humor, to provehis capacity for something by playing a part: the one thing he could notdo was to bring himself to _act_, unless when surprised by a suddenimpulse of suspicion, --as where he kills Polonius, and there he could notsee his victim. He discourses admirably of suicide, but does not killhimself; he talks daggers, but uses none. He puts by the chance to killthe king with the excuse that he will not do it while he is praying, lesthis soul be saved thereby, though it is more than doubtful whether hebelieved it himself. He allows himself to be packed off to England, without any motive except that it would for the time take him fartherfrom a present duty: the more disagreeable to a nature like his becauseit _was_ present, and not a mere matter for speculative consideration. When Goethe made his famous comparison of the acorn planted in a vasewhich it bursts with its growth, and says that in like manner Hamlet is anature which breaks down under the weight of a duty too great for it tobear, he seems to have considered the character too much from one side. Had Hamlet actually killed himself to escape his too onerous commission, Goethe's conception of him would have been satisfactory enough. ButHamlet was hardly a sentimentalist, like Werther; on the contrary, he sawthings only too clearly in the dry north-light of the intellect. It ischance that at last brings him to his end. It would appear rather thatShakespeare intended to show us an imaginative temperament brought faceto face with actualities, into any clear relation of sympathy with whichit cannot bring itself. The very means that Shakespeare makes use of tolay upon him the obligation of acting--the ghost--really seems to make itall the harder for him to act; for the spectre but gives an additionalexcitement to his imagination and a fresh topic for his scepticism. I shall not attempt to evolve any high moral significance from the play, even if I thought it possible; for that would be aside from the presentpurpose. The scope of the higher drama is to represent life, not everydaylife, it is true, but life lifted above the plane of bread-and-butterassociations, by nobler reaches of language, by the influence at onceinspiring and modulating of verse, by an intenser play of passioncondensing that misty mixture of feeling and reflection which makes theordinary atmosphere of existence into flashes of thought and phrase whosebrief, but terrible, illumination prints the outworn landscape ofevery-day upon our brains, with its little motives and mean results, inlines of tell-tale fire. The moral office of tragedy is to show us ourown weaknesses idealized in grander figures and more awful results, --toteach us that what we pardon in our selves as venial faults, if they seemto have but slight influence on our immediate fortunes, have arms as longas those of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe of our lives, that they are dry-rotting the very fibre of will and conscience, so that, if we should be brought to the test of a great temptation or a stringentemergency, we must be involved in a ruin as sudden and complete as thatwe shudder at in the unreal scene of the theatre. But the primary_object_ of a tragedy is not to inculcate a formal moral. Representinglife, it teaches, like life, by indirection, by those nods and winks thatare thrown away on us blind horses in such profusion. We may learn, to besure, plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to havekingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a father's deathto avenge, or to kill our wives from jealousy; but Lear may teach us todraw the line more clearly between a wise generosity and a loose-handedweakness of giving; Macbeth, how one sin involves another, and foreveranother, by a fatal parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocksforbidden doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, thatmay not be so dark as blood, but that will not out; Hamlet, that all thenoblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like sand through thegrasp of an infirm purpose; Othello, that the perpetual silt of some oneweakness, the eddies of a suspicious temper depositing their oneimpalpable layer after another, may build up a shoal on which an heroiclife and an otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces. Allthis we may learn, and much more, and Shakespeare was no doubt well awareof all this and more; but I do not believe that he wrote his plays withany such didactic purpose. He knew human nature too well not to know thatone thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning, --that, where one man shapes his life by precept and example, there are athousand who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances. Hedid not mean his great tragedies for scarecrows, as if the nailing of onehawk to the barn-door would prevent the next from coming down souse intothe hen-yard. No, it is not the poor bleaching victim hung up to moultits draggled feathers in the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves thehawk-nature as well as the hen-nature; and if he is unequalled inanything, it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability ofreason, that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune andmisfortune, with the equal eye of the pure artist. Whether I have fancied anything into Hamlet which the author neverdreamed of putting there I do not greatly concern myself to inquire. Poets are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we find in theirworks; for these fine creations as truly build themselves up in the brainas they are built up with deliberate forethought. Praise art as we will, that which the artist did not mean to put into his work, but which founditself there by some generous process of Nature of which he was asunaware as the blue river is of its rhyme with the blue sky, has somewhatin it that snatches us into sympathy with higher things than those whichcome by plot and observation. Goethe wrote his _Faust_ in its earliestform without a thought of the deeper meaning which the exposition of anage of criticism was to find in it: without foremeaning it, he hadimpersonated in Mephistopheles the genius of his century. Shall thissubtract from the debt we owe him? Not at all. If originality wereconscious of itself, it would have lost its right to be original. Ibelieve that Shakespeare intended to impersonate in Hamlet not a meremetaphysical entity, but a man of flesh and blood: yet it is certainlycurious how prophetically typical the character is of that introversionof mind which is so constant a phenomenon of these latter days, of thatover-consciousness which wastes itself in analyzing the motives of actioninstead of acting. The old painters had a rule, that all compositions should be pyramidal inform, --a central figure, from which the others slope gradually away onthe two sides. Shakespeare probably had never heard of this rule, and, ifhe had, would not have been likely to respect it more than he has theso-called classical unities of time and place. But he understoodperfectly the artistic advantages of gradation, contrast, and relief. Taking Hamlet as the key-note, we find in him weakness of character, which, on the one hand, is contrasted with the feebleness that springsfrom overweening conceit in Polonius and with frailty of temperament inOphelia, while, on the other hand, it is brought into fuller relief bythe steady force of Horatio and the impulsive violence of Laertes, who isresolute from thoughtlessness, just as Hamlet is irresolute from overplusof thought. If we must draw a moral from Hamlet, it would seem to be, that Will isFate, and that, Will once abdicating, the inevitable successor in theregency is Chance. Had Hamlet acted, instead of musing how good it wouldbe to act, the king might have been the only victim. As it is, all themain actors in the story are the fortuitous sacrifice of hisirresolution. We see how a single great vice of character at last drawsto itself as allies and confederates all other weaknesses of the man, asin civil wars the timid and the selfish wait to throw themselves upon thestronger side. "In Life's small things be resolute and great To keep thy muscles trained: know'st thou when Fate Thy measure takes? or when she'll say to thee, 'I find thee worthy, do this thing for me'?" I have said that it was doubtful if Shakespeare had any conscious moralintention in his writings. I meant only that he was purely and primarilypoet. And while he was an English poet in a sense that is true of noother, his method was thoroughly Greek, yet with this remarkabledifference, --that, while the Greek dramatists took purely national themesand gave them a universal interest by their mode of treatment, he tookwhat may be called cosmopolitan traditions, legends of human nature, andnationalized them by the infusion of his perfectly Anglican breadth ofcharacter and solidity of understanding. Wonderful as his imagination andfancy are, his perspicacity and artistic discretion are more so. Thiscountry tradesman's son, coming up to London, could set high-bred wits, like Beaumont, uncopiable lessons in drawing gentlemen such as are seennowhere else but on the canvas of Titian; he could take Ulysses away fromHomer and expand the shrewd and crafty islander into a statesman whosewords are the pith of history. But what makes him yet more exceptionalwas his utterly unimpeachable judgment, and that poise of character whichenabled him to be at once the greatest of poets and so unnoticeable agood citizen as to leave no incidents for biography. His material wasnever far-sought; (it is still disputed whether the fullest head of whichwe have record were cultivated beyond the range of grammar-schoolprecedent!) but he used it with a poetic instinct which we cannotparallel, identified himself with it, yet remained always its born andquestionless master. He finds the Clown and Fool upon the stage, --hemakes them the tools of his pleasantry, his satire, and even his pathos;he finds a fading rustic superstition, and shapes out of it ideal Pucks, Titanias, and Ariels, in whose existence statesmen and scholars believeforever. Always poet, he subjects all to the ends of his art, and givesin Hamlet the churchyard ghost, but with the cothurnus on, --the messengerof God's revenge against murder; always philosopher, he traces in Macbeththe metaphysics of apparitions, painting the shadowy Banquo only on theo'erwrought brain of the murderer, and staining the hand of hiswife-accomplice (because she was the more refined and higher nature) withthe disgustful blood-spot that is not there. We say he had no moralintention, for the reason, that, as artist, it was not his to deal withthe realities, but only with the shows of things; yet, with a temperamentso just, an insight so inevitable as his, it was impossible that themoral reality, which underlies the _mirage_ of the poet's vision, shouldnot always be suggested. His humor and satire are never of thedestructive kind; what he does in that way is suggestive only, --notbreaking bubbles with Thor's hammer, but puffing them away with thebreath of a Clown, or shivering them with the light laugh of a genialcynic. Men go about to prove the existence of a God! Was it a bit ofphosphorus, that brain whose creations are so real, that, mixing withthem, we feel as if we ourselves were but fleeting magic-lantern shadows? But higher even than the genius we rate the character of this unique man, and the grand impersonality of what he wrote. What has he told us ofhimself? In our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melancholyliver-complaint, how serene and high he seems! If he had sorrows, he hasmade them the woof of everlasting consolation to his kind; and if, aspoets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its bitingair did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the manywindows of that self-centred and cheerful soul. Footnotes: [119] As where Ben Jonson is able to say, -- "Man may securely sin, but safely never. " [120] "Vulgarem locutionem anpellamus cam qua infantes adsuefiunt ab adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt: vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus _quam sine omni regula, nutricem imitantes accepimus_. " Dantes, _de Vulg. Eloquio_, Lib I. Cap. I. [121] Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that "nothing was done so well as at the first concoction, "--adding, as a reason, "We think in words. " Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakespeare had not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense, --and cited in proof of it the verse, "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause. " The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, and Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in consequence of Jonson's criticism. This is very probable; but we suspect that the pen that blotted them was in the hand of Master Heminge or his colleague. The moral confusion in the idea was surely admirably characteristic of the general who had just accomplished a successful _coup d'etat_, the condemnation of which he would fancy that he read in the face of every honest man he met, and which he would therefore be forever indirectly palliating. [122] We use the word _Latin_ here to express words derived either mediately or immediately from that language. [123] The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory (translating from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of Bacon, Browne, Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's _Shepherd's Calendar_ (1679) explains words of Teutonic and Romanic root in about equal proportions. The parallel but independent development of Scotch is not to be forgotten. [124] I believe that for the last two centuries the Latin radicals of English have been more familiar and homelike to those who use them than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor Crail, in his _English of Shakespeare_, derives _head_, through the German _haupt_, from the Latin _caput_! I trust that its genealogy is nobler, and that it is of kin with _coelum, tueri_, rather than with the Greek [kephalae], if Suidas be right in tracing the origin of that to a word meaning _vacuity_. Mr. Craik suggests, also, that _quick_ and _wicked_ may be etymologically identical, _because_ he fancies a relationship between _busy_ and the German _böse_, though _wicked_ is evidently the participial form of A. S. _wacan_, (German _weichen_, ) _to bend, to yield_, meaning _one who has given way to temptation_, while _quick_ seems as clearly related to _wegan_, meaning _to move_, a different word, even if radically the same. In the "London Literary Gazette" for November 13, 1858, I find an extract from Miss Millington's "Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance, " in which, speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales, --_De par Houmaut ich diene_, --she says; "The precise meaning of the former word [_Houmout_] has not, I think, been ascertained. " The word is plainly the German _Hochmuth_, and the whole would read, _De par (Aus) Hochmuth ich diene_, --"Out of magnanimity I serve. " So entirely lost is the Saxon meaning of the word _knave_, (A. S. _cnava_, German _knabe_, ) that the name _navvie_, assumed by railway-laborers, has been transmogrified into _navigator_. I believe that more people could tell why the month of July was so called than could explain the origin of the names for our days of the week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern reader. [125] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, Lib. II. Cap. I. _ad finem_. I quote this treatise as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manifestly his; though I believe that in its present form it is an abridgment by some transcriber, who sometimes copies textually, and sometimes substitutes his own language for that of the original. [126] Vol. III. P. 348, _note_. He grounds his belief, not on the misprinting of words, but on the misplacing of whole paragraphs. We were struck with the same thing in the original edition of Chapman's "Biron's Conspiracy and Tragedy. " And yet, in comparing two copies of this edition, I have found corrections which only the author could have made. One of the misprints which Mr. Spedding notices affords both a hint and a warning to the conjectural emendator. In the edition of "The Advancement of Learning" printed in 1605 occurs the word _dusinesse_. In a later edition this was conjecturally changed to _business_; but the occurrence of _vertigine_ in the Latin translation enables Mr. Spedding to print rightly, _dizziness_. [127] "At first sight, Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike; nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakespearian idiom. I suppose it is because Shakespeare is universal, and, in fact, has no _manner_. "--_Coleridge's Tabletalk_, 214. [128] Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb, because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless sweep a grace of curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others. [129] The best instance I remember is in the _Frogs_, where Bacchus pleads his inexperience at the oar, and says he is [Greek: apeiros, athalattotos, asalaminios, ] which might be rendered, Unskilled, unsea-soned, and un-Salamised. [130] So Euripides (copied by Theocritus, Id. Xxvii. ):-- [Greek: Pentheus d' opos mae penthos eisoisei domois] (_Bacchae_, 363. ) [Greek: _Esophronaesen ouk echousa sophronein_]. (_Hippol_. , 1037. ) So Calderon: "Y apenas llega, cuando llega á penas. " [131] I have taken the first passage in point that occurred to my memory. It may not be Shakespeare's, though probably his. The question of authorship is, I think, settled, so far as criticism can do it, in Mr. Grant White's admirable essay appended to the Second Part of Henry VI. [132] Shakspeare und kein Ende. [133] I do not mention Ulrici's book, for it seems to me unwieldy and dull, --zeal without knowledge. NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. [134] The history of New England is written imperishably on the face of acontinent, and in characters as beneficent as they are enduring. In theOld World national pride feeds itself with the record of battles andconquests;--battles which proved nothing and settled nothing; conquestswhich shifted a boundary on the map, and put one ugly head instead ofanother on the coin which the people paid to the tax-gatherer. Butwherever the New-Englander travels among the sturdy commonwealths whichhave sprung from the seed of the Mayflower, churches, schools, colleges, tell him where the men of his race have been, or their influencepenetrated; and an intelligent freedom is the monument of conquests whoseresults are not to be measured in square miles. Next to the fugitiveswhom Moses led out of Egypt, the little ship-load of outcasts who landedat Plymouth two centuries and a half ago are destined to influence thefuture of the world. The spiritual thirst of mankind has for ages beenquenched at Hebrew fountains; but the embodiment in human institutions oftruths uttered by the Son of man eighteen centuries ago was to be mainlythe work of Puritan thought and Puritan self-devotion. Leave New Englandout in the cold! While you are plotting it, she sits by every fireside inthe land where there is piety, culture, and free thought. Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work, --this is the short formula inwhich we may sum up the teaching of the founders of New England, a creedample enough for this life and the next. If their municipal regulationssmack somewhat of Judaism, yet there can be no nobler aim or morepractical wisdom than theirs; for it was to make the law of man a livingcounterpart of the law of God, in their highest conception of it. Werethey too earnest in the strife to save their souls alive? That is stillthe problem which every wise and brave man is lifelong in solving. If theDevil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busywith us as with them; and if we cannot find it in our hearts to breakwith a gentleman of so much worldly wisdom, who gives such admirabledinners, and whose manners are so perfect, so much the worse for us. Looked at on the outside, New England history is dry and unpicturesque. There is no rustle of silks, no waving of plumes, no clink of goldenspurs. Our sympathies are not awakened by the changeful destinies, therise and fall, of great families, whose doom was in their blood. Insteadof all this, we have the homespun fates of Cephas and Prudence repeatedin an infinite series of peaceable sameness, and finding space enough forrecord in the family Bible; we have the noise of axe and hammer and saw, an apotheosis of dogged work, where, reversing the fairy-tale, nothing isleft to luck, and, if there be any poetry, it is something that cannot behelped, --the waste of the water over the dam. Extrinsically, it isprosaic and plebeian; intrinsically, it is poetic and noble; for it is, perhaps, the most perfect incarnation of an idea the world has ever seen. That idea was not to found a democracy, nor to charter the city of NewJerusalem by an act of the General Court, as gentlemen seem to thinkwhose notions of history and human nature rise like an exhalation fromthe good things at a Pilgrim Society dinner. Not in the least. They hadno faith in the Divine institution of a system which gives Teague, because he can dig, as much influence as Ralph, because he can think, norin personal at the expense of general freedom. Their view of human rightswas not so limited that it could not take in human relations and dutiesalso. They would have been likely to answer the claim, "I am as good asanybody, " by a quiet "Yes, for some things, but not for others; as good, doubtless, in your place, where all things are good. " What the earlysettlers of Massachusetts _did_ intend, and what they accomplished, wasthe founding here of a _new_ England, and a better one, where thepolitical superstitions and abuses of the old should never have leave totake root. So much, we may say, they deliberately intended. No nobles, either lay or cleric, no great landed estates, and no universal ignoranceas the seed-plot of vice and unreason; but an elective magistracy andclergy, land for all who would till it, and reading and writing, will yenill ye, instead. Here at last, it would seem, simple manhood is to havea chance to play his stake against Fortune with honest dice, uncogged bythose three hoary sharpers, Prerogative, Patricianism, and Priestcraft. Whoever has looked into the pamphlets published in England during theGreat Rebellion cannot but have been struck by the fact, that theprinciples and practice of the Puritan Colony had begun to react withconsiderable force on the mother country; and the policy of theretrograde party there, after the Restoration, in its dealings with NewEngland, finds a curious parallel as to its motives (time will showwhether as to its results) in the conduct of the same party towardsAmerica during the last four years. [135] This influence and this fearalike bear witness to the energy of the principles at work here. We have said that the details of New England history were essentially dryand unpoetic. Everything is near, authentic, and petty. There is no mistof distance to soften outlines, no mirage of tradition to give charactersand events an imaginative loom. So much downright work was perhaps neverwrought on the earth's surface in the same space of time as during thefirst forty years after the settlement. But mere work is unpicturesque, and void of sentiment. Irving instinctively divined and admirablyillustrated in his "Knickerbocker" the humorous element which lies inthis nearness of view, this clear, prosaic daylight of modernness, andthis poverty of stage properties, which makes the actors and the deedsthey were concerned in seem ludicrously small when contrasted with thesemi-mythic grandeur in which we have clothed them, as we look backwardfrom the crowned result, and fancy a cause as majestic as our conceptionof the effect. There was, indeed, one poetic side to the existenceotherwise so narrow and practical; and to have conceived this, howeverpartially, is the one original and American thing in Cooper. This divinerglimpse illumines the lives of our Daniel Boones, the man of civilizationand old-world ideas confronted with our forest solitudes, --confronted, too, for the first time, with his real self, and so led gradually todisentangle the original substance of his manhood from the artificialresults of culture. Here was our new Adam of the wilderness, forced toname anew, not the visible creation of God, but the invisible creation ofman, in those forms that lie at the base of social institutions, soinsensibly moulding personal character and controlling individual action. Here is the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as thatof Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, asromantic in its relation to our homespun and plebeian mythus as Arthur inhis to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry. We do not mean, ofcourse, that Cooper's "Leatherstocking" is all this or anything like it, but that the character typified in him is ideally and potentially allthis and more. But whatever was poetical in the lives of the early New-Englanders hadsomething shy, if not sombre, about it. If their natures flowered, it wasout of sight, like the fern. It was in the practical that they showedtheir true quality, as Englishmen are wont. It has been the fashionlately with a few feeble-minded persons to undervalue the New EnglandPuritans, as if they were nothing more than gloomy and narrow-mindedfanatics. But all the charges brought against these large-minded andfar-seeing men are precisely those which a really able fanatic, Joseph deMaistre, lays at the door of Protestantism. Neither a knowledge of humannature nor of history justifies us in confounding, as is commonly done, the Puritans of Old and New England, or the English Puritans of the thirdwith those of the fifth decade of the seventeenth century. Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful andactive so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and itbecomes conservatism, whether it will or no. A sceptre once put in thehand, the grip is instinctive; and he who is firmly seated in authoritysoon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson ofstatecraft. From the summit of power men no longer turn their eyesupward, but begin to look about them. Aspiration sees only one side ofevery question; possession, many. And the English Puritans, after theirrevolution was accomplished, stood in even a more precarious positionthan most successful assailants of the prerogative of whatever _is_ tocontinue in being. They had carried a political end by means of areligious revival. The fulcrum on which they rested their lever tooverturn the existing order of things (as history always placidly callsthe particular forms of _dis_order for the time being) was in the soul ofman. They could not renew the fiery gush of enthusiasm, when once themolten metal had begun to stiffen in the mould of policy and precedent. The religious element of Puritanism became insensibly merged in thepolitical; and, its one great man taken away, it died, as passions havedone before, of possession. It was one thing to shout with Cromwellbefore the battle of Dunbar, "Now, Lord, arise, and let thine enemies bescattered!" and to snuffle, "Rise, Lord, and keep us safe in ourbenefices, our sequestered estates, and our five per cent!" Puritanismmeant something when Captain Hodgson, riding out to battle through themorning mist, turns over the command of his troop to a lieutenant, andstays to hear the prayer of a cornet, there was "so much of God in it. "Become traditional, repeating the phrase without the spirit, reading thepresent backward as if it were written in Hebrew, translating Jehovah by"I was" instead of "I am, "--it was no more like its former self than thehollow drum made of Zisca's skin was like the grim captain whose soul ithad once contained. Yet the change was inevitable, for it is not safe toconfound the things of Caesar with the things of God. Some honestrepublicans, like Ludlow, were never able to comprehend the chillingcontrast between the ideal aim and the material fulfilment, and lookedaskance on the strenuous reign of Oliver, --that rugged boulder ofprimitive manhood lying lonely there on the dead level of thecentury, --as if some crooked changeling had been laid in the cradleinstead of that fair babe of the Commonwealth they had dreamed. Trulythere is a tide in the affairs of men, but there is no gulf-streamsetting forever in one direction; and those waves of enthusiasm on whosecrumbling crests we sometimes see nations lifted for a gleaming momentare wont to have a gloomy trough before and behind. But the founders of New England, though they must have sympathizedvividly with the struggles and triumphs of their brethren in the mothercountry, were never subjected to the same trials and temptations, neverhampered with the same lumber of usages and tradition. They were notdriven to win power by doubtful and desperate ways, nor to maintain it byany compromises of the ends which make it worth having. From the outsetthey were builders, without need of first pulling down, whether to makeroom or to provide material. For thirty years after the colonization ofthe Bay, they had absolute power to mould as they would the character oftheir adolescent commonwealth. During this time a whole generation wouldhave grown to manhood who knew the Old World only by report, in whosehabitual thought kings, nobles, and bishops would be as far away from allpresent and practical concern as the figures in a fairy-tale, and allwhose memories and associations, all their unconscious training by eyeand ear, were New English wholly. Nor were the men whose influence wasgreatest in shaping the framework and the policy of the Colony, in anytrue sense of the word, fanatics. Enthusiasts, perhaps, they were, butwith then the fermentation had never gone further than the ripeness ofthe vinous stage. Disappointment had never made it acetous, nor had itever putrefied into the turbid zeal of Fifth Monarchism and sectarianwhimsey. There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on itskeel, and saving it from all risk of _crankiness_, than business. Andthey were business men, men of facts and figures no less than ofreligious earnestness. The sum of two hundred thousand pounds had beeninvested in their undertaking, --a sum, for that time, truly enormous asthe result of private combination for a doubtful experiment. That theirenterprise might succeed, they must show a balance on the right side ofthe countinghouse ledger, as well as in their private accounts with theirown souls. The liberty of praying when and how they would, must bebalanced with an ability of paying when and as they ought. Nor is theresulting fact in this case at variance with the _a priori_ theory. Theysucceeded in making their thought the life and soul of a body politic, still powerful, still benignly operative, after two centuries; a thingwhich no mere fanatic ever did or ever will accomplish. Sober, earnest, and thoughtful men, it was no Utopia, no New Atlantis, no realization ofa splendid dream, which they had at heart, but the establishment of thedivine principle of Authority on the common interest and the commonconsent; the making, by a contribution from the free-will of all, a powerwhich should curb and guide the free-will of each for the general good. If they were stern in their dealings with sectaries, it should beremembered that the Colony was in fact the private property of theMassachusetts Company, that unity was essential to its success, and thatJohn of Leyden had taught them how unendurable by the nostrils of honestmen is the corruption of the right of private judgment in the evil andselfish hearts of men when no thorough mental training has developed theunderstanding and given the judgment its needful means of comparison andcorrection. They knew that liberty in the hands of feeble-minded andunreasoning persons (and all the worse if they are honest) means nothingmore than the supremacy of their particular form of imbecility; meansnothing less, therefore, than downright chaos, a Bedlam-chaos ofmonomaniacs and bores. What was to be done with men and women, who boreconclusive witness to the fall of man by insisting on walking up thebroad-aisle of the meeting-house in a costume which that event had putforever out of fashion! About their treatment of witches, too, there hasbeen a great deal of ignorant babble. Puritanism had nothing whatever todo with it. They acted under a delusion, which, with an exception hereand there (and those mainly medical men, like Wierus and Webster), darkened the understanding of all Christendom. Dr. Henry More was noPuritan; and his letter to Glanvil, prefixed to the third edition of the"Sadducismus Triumphatus, " was written in 1678, only fourteen yearsbefore the trials at Salem. Bekker's "Bezauberte Welt" was published in1693; and in the Preface he speaks of the difficulty of overcoming "theprejudices in which not only ordinary men, but the learned also, areobstinate. " In Hathaway's case, 1702, Chief-Justice Holt, in charging thejury, expresses no disbelief in the possibility of witchcraft, and theindictment implies its existence. Indeed, the natural reaction from theSalem mania of 1692 put an end to belief in devilish compacts anddemoniac possessions sooner in New England than elsewhere. The last wehear of it there is in 1720, when Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford detected andexposed an attempted cheat by two girls. Even in 1692, it was the foolishbreath of Cotton Mather and others of the clergy that blew the dyingembers of this ghastly superstition into a flame; and they were actuatedpartly by a desire to bring about a religious revival, which might stayfor a while the hastening lapse of their own authority, and still more bythat credulous scepticism of feeble-minded piety which, dreads thecutting away of an orthodox tumor of misbelief, as if the life-blood offaith would follow, and would keep even a stumbling-block in the way ofsalvation, if only enough generations had tripped over it to make itvenerable. The witches were condemned on precisely the same grounds thatin our day led to the condemnation of "Essays and Reviews. " But Puritanism was already in the decline when such things were possible. What had been a wondrous and intimate experience of the soul, a flashinto the very crypt and basis of man's nature from the fire of trial, hadbecome ritual and tradition. In prosperous times the faith of onegeneration becomes the formality of the next. "The necessity of areformation, " set forth by order of the Synod which met at Cambridge in1679, though no doubt overstating the case, shows how much even at thattime the ancient strictness had been loosened. The country had grownrich, its commerce was large, and wealth did its natural work in makinglife softer and more worldly, commerce in deprovincializing the minds ofthose engaged in it. But Puritanism had already done its duty. As thereare certain creatures whose whole being seems occupied with an egg-layingerrand they are sent upon, incarnate ovipositors, their bodies but bagsto hold this precious deposit, their legs of use only to carry them wherethey may safeliest be rid of it, so sometimes a generation seems to haveno other end than the conception and ripening of certain germs. Its blindstirrings, its apparently aimless seeking hither and thither, are but thedriving of an instinct to be done with its parturient function towardthese principles of future life and power. Puritanism, believing itselfquick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, theegg of democracy. The English Puritans pulled down church and state torebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, butAmerica, they were building. But if their millennium went by, like therest, and left men still human; if they, like so many saints and martyrsbefore them, listened in vain for the sound of that trumpet which was tosummon all souls to a resurrection from the body of this death which mencall life, --it is not for us, at least, to forget the heavy debt we owethem. It was the drums of Naseby and Dunbar that gathered the minute-menon Lexington Common; it was the red dint of the axe on Charles's blockthat marked One in our era. The Puritans had their faults. They werenarrow, ungenial; they could not understand the text, "I have piped toyou and ye have not danced, " nor conceive that saving one's soul shouldbe the cheerfullest, and not the dreariest, of businesses. Theirpreachers had a way, like the painful Mr. Perkins, of pronouncing theword _damn_ with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in theirauditors' ears a good while after. And it was natural that men whocaptained or accompanied the exodus from existing forms and associationsinto the doubtful wilderness that led to the promised land, should findmore to their purpose in the Old Testament than in the New. As respectsthe New England settlers, however visionary some of their religioustenets may have been, their political ideas savored of the realty, and itwas no Nephelococcygia of which they drew the plan, but of a commonwealthwhose foundation was to rest on solid and familiar earth. If what theydid was done in a corner, the results of it were to be felt to the endsof the earth; and the figure of Winthrop should be as venerable inhistory as that of Romulus is barbarously grand in legend. I am inclined to think that many of our national characteristics, whichare sometimes attributed to climate and sometimes to institutions, aretraceable to the influences of Puritan descent. We are apt to forget howvery large a proportion of our population is descended from emigrants whocame over before 1660. Those emigrants were in great part representativesof that element of English character which was most susceptible ofreligious impressions; in other words, the most earnest and imaginative. Our people still differ from their English cousins (as they are fond ofcalling themselves when they are afraid we may do them a mischief) in acertain capacity for enthusiasm, a devotion to abstract principle, anopenness to ideas, a greater aptness for intuitions than for the slowprocesses of the syllogism, and, as derivative from this, in minds oflooser texture, a light-armed, skirmishing habit of thought, and apositive preference of the birds in the bush, --an excellent quality ofcharacter _before_ you have your bird in the hand. There have been two great distributing centres of the English race onthis continent, Massachusetts and Virginia. Each has impressed thecharacter of its early legislators on the swarms it has sent forth. Theirideas are in some fundamental respects the opposites of each other, andwe can only account for it by an antagonism of thought beginning with theearly framers of their respective institutions. New England abolishedcaste; in Virginia they still talk of "quality folks. " But it was inmaking education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory onall, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practicallysettled. Every man was to be trained, not only to the use of arms, but ofhis wits also; and it is these which alone make the others effectiveweapons for the maintenance of freedom. You may disarm the hands, but notthe brains, of a people, and to know what should be defended is the firstcondition of successful defence. Simple as it seems, it was a greatdiscovery that the key of knowledge could turn both ways, that it couldopen, as well as lock, the door of power to the many. The only things aNew-Englander was ever locked out of were the jails. It is quite truethat our Republic is the heir of the English Commonwealth; but as wetrace events backward to their causes, we shall find it true also, thatwhat made our Revolution a foregone conclusion was that act of theGeneral Court, passed in May, 1647, which established the system ofcommon schools. "To the end that learning may not be buried in the gravesof our forefathers in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting ourendeavors, it is therefore ordered by this Court and authority thereof, that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increasedthem to fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within theirtowns to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write andread. " Passing through some Massachusetts village, perhaps at a distance fromany house, it may be in the midst of a piece of woods where four roadsmeet, one may sometimes even yet see a small square one-story building, whose use would not be long doubtful. It is summer, and the flickeringshadows of forest-leaves dapple the roof of the little porch, whose doorstands wide, and shows, hanging on either hand, rows of straw hats andbonnets, that look as if they had done good service. As you pass the openwindows, you hear whole platoons of high-pitched voices discharging wordsof two or three syllables with wonderful precision and unanimity. Thenthere is a pause, and the voice of the officer in command is heardreproving some raw recruit whose vocal musket hung fire. Then the drillof the small infantry begins anew, but pauses again because someurchin--who agrees with Voltaire that the superfluous is a very necessarything--insists on spelling "subtraction" with an _s_ too much. If you had the good fortune to be born and bred in the Bay State, yourmind is thronged with half-sad, half-humorous recollections. The a-b absof little voices long since hushed in the mould, or ringing now in thepulpit, at the bar, or in the Senate-chamber, come back to the ear ofmemory. You remember the high stool on which culprits used to be elevatedwith the tall paper fool's-cap on their heads, blushing to the ears; andyou think with wonder how you have seen them since as men climbing theworld's penance-stools of ambition without a blush, and gladly givingeverything for life's caps and bells. And you have pleasanter memories ofgoing after pond-lilies, of angling for horn-pouts, --that queer bat amongthe fishes, --of nutting, of walking over the creaking snow-crust inwinter, when the warm breath of every household was curling up silentlyin the keen blue air. You wonder if life has any rewards more solid andpermanent than the Spanish dollar that was hung around your neck to berestored again next day, and conclude sadly that it was but too true aprophecy and emblem of all worldly success. But your moralizing is brokenshort off by a rattle of feet and the pouring forth of the wholeswarm, --the boys dancing and shouting, --the mere effervescence of thefixed air of youth and animal spirits uncorked, --the sedater girls inconfidential twos and threes decanting secrets out of the mouth of onecape-bonnet into that of another. Times have changed since the jacketsand trousers used to draw up on one side of the road, and the petticoatson the other, to salute with bow and courtesy the white neckcloth of theparson or the squire, if it chanced to pass during intermission. Now this little building, and others like it, were an original kind offortification invented by the founders of New England. They are themartello-towers that protect our coast. This was the great discovery ofour Puritan forefathers. They were the first lawgivers who saw clearlyand enforced practically the simple moral and political truth, thatknowledge was not an alms to be dependent on the chance charity ofprivate men or the precarious pittance of a trust-fund, but a sacred debtwhich the Commonwealth owed to every one of her children. The opening ofthe first grammar-school was the opening of the first trench againstmonopoly in church and state; the first row of trammels and pothookswhich the little Shearjashubs and Elkanahs blotted and blubbered acrosstheir copy-books, was the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. The men who gave every man the chance to become a landholder, who madethe transfer of land easy, and put knowledge within the reach of all, have been called narrow-minded, because they were intolerant. Butintolerant of what? Of what they believed to be dangerous nonsense, which, if left free, would destroy the last hope of civil and religiousfreedom. They had not come here that every man might do that which seemedgood in his own eyes, but in the sight of God. Toleration, moreover, issomething which is won, not granted. It is the equilibrium of neutralizedforces. The Puritans had no notion of tolerating mischief. They lookedupon their little commonwealth as upon their own private estate andhomestead, as they had a right to do, and would no more allow the Devil'sreligion of unreason to be preached therein, than we should permit aprize-fight in our gardens. They were narrow; in other words they had anedge to them, as men that serve in great emergencies must; for a Gordianknot is settled sooner with a sword than a beetle. The founders of New England are commonly represented in the after-dinneroratory of their descendants as men "before their time, " as it is called;in other words, deliberately prescient of events resulting from newrelations of circumstances, or even from circumstances new in themselves, and therefore altogether alien from their own experience. Of course, sucha class of men is to be reckoned among those non-existent human varietiesso gravely catalogued by the ancient naturalists. If a man could shapehis action with reference to what should happen a century after hisdeath, surely it might be asked of him to call in the help of that easierforeknowledge which reaches from one day to the next, --a power ofprophecy whereof we have no example. I do not object to a wholesome prideof ancestry, though a little mythical, if it be accompanied with thefeeling that _noblesse oblige_, and do not result merely in a placidself-satisfaction with our own mediocrity, as if greatness, likerighteousness, could be imputed. We can pardon it even in conqueredraces, like the Welsh and Irish, who make up to themselves for presentdegradation by imaginary empires in the past whose boundaries they canextend at will, carrying the bloodless conquests of fancy over regionslaid down upon no map, and concerning which authentic history isenviously dumb. Those long beadrolls of Keltic kings cannot tyrannizeover us, and we can be patient so long as our own crowns are uncracked bythe shillalah sceptres of their actual representatives. In our own case, it would not be amiss, perhaps, if we took warning by the example ofTeague and Taffy. At least, I think it would be wise in our orators notto put forward so prominently the claim of the Yankee to universaldominion, and his intention to enter upon it forthwith. If we do ourduties as honestly and as much in the fear of God as our forefathers did, we need not trouble ourselves much about other titles to empire. Thebroad foreheads and long heads will win the day at last in spite of allheraldry, and it will be enough if we feel as keenly as our Puritanfounders did that those organs of empire may be broadened and lengthenedby culture. [136] That our self-complacency should not increase thecomplacency of outsiders is not to be wondered at. As _we_ sometimes takecredit to ourselves (since all commendation of our ancestry is indirectself-flattery) for what the Puritans fathers never were, so there areothers who, to gratify a spite against their descendants, blame them fornot having been what they could not be; namely, before their time in suchmatters as slavery, witchcraft, and the like. The view, whether of friendor foe, is equally unhistorical, nay, without the faintest notion of allthat makes history worth having as a teacher. That our grandfathersshared in the prejudices of their day is all that makes them human to us;and that nevertheless they could act bravely and wisely on occasion makesthem only the more venerable. If certain barbarisms and superstitionsdisappeared earlier in New England than elsewhere, not by the decision ofexceptionally enlightened or humane judges, but by force of publicopinion, that is the fact that is interesting and instructive for us. Inever thought it an abatement of Hawthorne's genius that he came lineallyfrom one who sat in judgment on the witches in 1692; it was interestingrather to trace something hereditary in the sombre character of hisimagination, continually vexing itself to account for the origin of evil, and baffled for want of that simple solution in a personal Devil. But I have no desire to discuss the merits or demerits of the Puritans, having long ago learned the wisdom of saving my sympathy for more modernobjects than Hecuba. My object is to direct the attention of my readersto a collection of documents where they may see those worthies as theywere in their daily living and thinking. The collections of our varioushistorical and antiquarian societies can hardly be said to be _published_in the strict sense of the word, and few consequently are aware how muchthey contain of interest for the general reader no less than the specialstudent. The several volumes of "Winthrop Papers, " in especial, are amine of entertainment. Here we have the Puritans painted by themselves, and, while we arrive at a truer notion of the characters of some amongthem, and may accordingly sacrifice to that dreadful superstition ofbeing usefully employed which makes so many bores and bored, we can alsofurtively enjoy the oddities of thought and speech, the humors of thetime, which our local historians are too apt to despise as inconsideredtrifles. For myself I confess myself heretic to the established theory ofthe gravity of history, and am not displeased with an opportunity tosmile behind my hand at any ludicrous interruption of that sometimeswearisome ceremonial. I am not sure that I would not sooner give upRaleigh spreading his cloak to keep the royal Dian's feet from the mud, than that awful judgment upon the courtier whose Atlantean thighs leakedaway in bran through the rent in his trunk-hose. The painful fact thatFisher had his head cut off is somewhat mitigated to me by thecircumstance that the Pope should have sent him, of all things in theworld, a cardinal's hat after that incapacitation. Theology herselfbecomes less unamiable to me when I find the Supreme Pontiff writing tothe Council of Trent that "they should begin with original sin, _maintaining yet a due respect for the Emperor_. " That infallibilityshould thus courtesy to decorum, shall make me think better of it while Ilive. I shall accordingly endeavor to give my readers what amusement Ican, leaving it to themselves to extract solid improvement from thevolumes before us, which include a part of the correspondence of threegenerations of Winthrops. Let me premise that there are two men above all others for whom ourrespect is heightened by these letters, --the elder John Winthrop andRoger Williams. Winthrop appears throughout as a truly magnanimous andnoble man in an unobtrusive way, --a kind of greatness that makes lessnoise in the world, but is on the whole more solidly satisfying than mostothers, --a man who has been dipped in the river of God (a surer baptismthan Styx or dragon's blood) till his character is of perfect proof, andwho appears plainly as the very soul and life of the young Colony. Veryreverend and godly he truly was, and a respect not merely ceremonious, but personal, a respect that savors of love, shows itself in the lettersaddressed to him. Charity and tolerance flow so naturally from the pen ofWilliams that it is plain they were in his heart. He does not showhimself a very strong or very wise man, but a thoroughly gentle and goodone. His affection for the two Winthrops is evidently of the warmest. Wesuspect that he lived to see that there was more reason in the drum-headreligious discipline which made him, against his will, the founder of acommonwealth, than he may have thought at first. But for the fanaticism(as it is the fashion to call the sagacious straitness) of the abler menwho knew how to root the English stock firmly in this new soil on eitherside of him, his little plantation could never have existed, and hehimself would have been remembered only, if at all, as one of the jarringatoms in a chaos of otherwise-mindedness. Two other men, Emanuel Downing and Hugh Peter, leave a positivelyunpleasant savor in the nostrils. Each is selfish in his ownway, --Downing with the shrewdness of an attorney, Peter with thatclerical unction which in a vulgar nature so easily degenerates intogreasiness. Neither of them was the man for a forlorn hope, and bothreturned to England when the civil war opened prospect of prefermentthere. Both, we suspect, were inclined to value their Puritanism for itsrewards in this world rather than the next. Downing's son, Sir George, was basely prosperous, making the good cause pay him so long as it wassolvent, and then selling out in season to betray his old commander, Colonel Okey, to the shambles at Charing Cross. Peter became a colonel inthe Parliament's army, and under the Protectorate one of Cromwell'schaplains. On his trial, after the Restoration, he made a poor figure, instriking contrast to some of the brave men who suffered with him. At hisexecution a shocking brutality was shown. "When Mr Cook was cut down andbrought to be quartered, one they called Colonel Turner calling to theSheriff's men to bring Mr Peters near, that he might see it; and by andby the Hangman came to him all besmeared in blood, and rubbing his bloodyhands together, he tauntingly asked, _Come, how do you like this, Mr. Peters? How do you like this work?_"[137] This Colonel Turner can hardlyhave been other than the one who four years later came to the hangman'shands for robbery; and whose behavior, both in the dock and at thegallows, makes his trial one of the most entertaining as a display ofcharacter. Peter would seem to have been one of those men gifted withwhat is sometimes called eloquence; that is, the faculty of statingthings powerfully from momentary feeling, and not from that conviction ofthe higher reason which alone can give force and permanence to words. Hisletters show him subject, like others of like temperament, to fits of"hypocondriacal melancholy, " and the only witness he called on his trialwas to prove that he was confined to his lodgings by such an attack onthe day of the king's beheading. He seems to have been subject to thismalady at convenience, as some women to hysterics. Honest John Endicottplainly had small confidence in him, and did not think him the right manto represent the Colony in England. There is a droll resolve in theMassachusetts records by which he is "desired to write to Holland for500_l. _ worth of _peter_, & 40_l. _ worth of match. " It is with a matchthat we find him burning his fingers in the present correspondence. Peter seems to have entangled himself somehow with a Mrs. DeliveranceSheffield, whether maid or widow nowhere appears, but presumably thelatter. The following statement of his position is amusing enough: "Ihave sent Mrs D. Sh. Letter, which puts mee to new troubles, for thoughshee takes liberty upon my Cossen Downing's speeches, yet (Good Sir) letmee not be a foole in Israel. I had many good answers to yesterday'sworke [a Fast] and amongst the rest her letter; which (if her owne) dothargue more wisedome than I thought shee had. You have often sayd I couldnot leave her; what to doe is very considerable. Could I with comfort &credit desist, this seemes best: could I goe on & content myselfe, thatwere good. .. . For though I now seeme free agayne, yet the depth I knownot. Had shee come over with me, I thinke I had bin quieter. This sheemay know, that I have sought God earnestly, that the nexte weeke I shallbee riper:--I doubt shee gaynes most by such writings: & shee deservesmost where shee is further of. If you shall amongst you advise mee towrite to hir, I shall forthwith; our towne lookes upon mee contracted &so I have sayd myselfe; what wonder the charge [change?] would make, Iknow not. " Again: "Still pardon my offensive boldnes: I know not wellwhither Mrs Sh. Have set mee at liberty or not: my conclusion is, that ifyou find I cannot make an honorable retreat, then I shall desire toadvance [Greek: sun Theo]. Of you I now expect your last advise, viz:whither I must goe on or of, _saluo evangelij honore_: if shee bee ingood earnest to leave all agitations this way, then I stand still & waytGod's mind concerning mee. .. . If I had much mony I would part with it toher free, till wee heare what England doth, supposing I may bee called tosome imployment that will not suit a marryed estate": (here another modeof escape presents itself, and he goes on:) "for indeed (Sir) some mustlooke out & I have very strong thoughts to speake with the DuitchGovernor & lay some way there for a supply &c. " At the end of the letter, an objection to the lady herself occurs to him: "Once more for Mrs Sh: Ihad from Mr Hibbins & others, her fellowpassengers, sad discouragementswhere they saw her in her trim. I would not come of with dishonor, norcome on with griefe, or ominous hesitations. " On all this shilly-shallywe have a shrewd comment in a letter of Endicott: "I cannot but acquaintyou with my thoughts concerning Mr Peter since hee receaued a letter fromMrs Sheffield, which was yesterday in the eveninge after the Fast, sheeseeming in her letter to abate of her affeccions towards him & dislikingeto come to Salem vppon such termes as he had written. I finde now thathee begins to play her parte, & if I mistake not, you will see him asgreatly in loue with her (if shee will but hold of a little) as euer sheewas with him; but he conceales it what he can as yett. The begininge ofthe next weeke you will heare further from him. " The widow was evidentlymore than a match for poor Peter. It should appear that a part of his trouble arose from his havingcoquetted also with a certain Mrs. Ruth, about whom he was "dealt with byMrs Amee, Mr Phillips & 2 more of the Church, our Elder being one. WhenMr Phillips with much violence & sharpnes charged mee home . .. That Ishould hinder the mayd of a match at London, which was not so, could notthinke of any kindnes I euer did her, though shee haue had above 300_li. _through my fingers, so as if God uphold me not after an especiall manner, it will sinke me surely . .. Hee told me he would not stop my intendedmarriage, but assured mee it would not bee good . .. All which makes meereflect upon my rash proceedings with Mrs Sh. " Panurge's doubts anddifficulties about matrimony were not more entertainingly contradictory. Of course, Peter ends by marrying the widow, and presently we have acomment on "her trim. " In January, 1639, he writes to Winthrop: "My wifeis very thankfull for her apples, & _desires much the new fashionedshooes_. " Eight years later we find him writing from England, where hehad been two years: "I am coming over if I must; my wife comes ofnecessity to New England, having run her selfe out of breath here"; andthen in the postscript, "bee sure you never let my wife come away fromthence without my leave, & then you love mee. " But life is never purecomedy, and the end in this case is tragical. Roger Williams, after hisreturn from England in 1654, writes to John Winthrop, Jr. : "Your brotherflourisheth in good esteeme & is eminent for maintaining the Freedome ofthe Conscience as to matters of Beliefe, Religion, & Worship. Your FatherPeters preacheth the same Doctrine though not so zealously as some yearssince, yet cries out against New English Rigidities & Persecutions, theircivil injuries & wrongs to himselfe, & their unchristian dealing with himin excommunicating his distracted wife. All this he tould me in hislodgings at Whitehall, those lodgings which I was tould were Canterburies[the Archbishop], but he himselfe tould me that that Library wherein wewere together was Canterburies & given him by the Parliament. His wifelives from him, not wholy but much distracted. He tells me he had but 200a yeare & he allowed her 4 score per annum of it. Surely, Sir, the mostholy Lord is most wise in all the trialls he exerciseth his people with. He tould me that his affliction from his wife stird him up to Actionabroad, & when successe tempted him to Pride, the Bitternes in hisbozome-comforts was a Cooler & a Bridle to him. " Truly the whirligig oftime brings about strange revenges. Peter had been driven from England bythe persecutions of Laud; a few years later he "stood armed on thescaffold" when that prelate was beheaded, and now we find him installedin the archiepiscopal lodgings. Dr. Palfrey, it appears to me, givesaltogether too favorable an opinion both of Peter's character andabilities. I conceive him to have been a vain and selfish man. He mayhave had the bravery of passionate impulse, but he wanted that steadycourage of character which has such a beautiful constancy in Winthrop. Healways professed a longing to come back to New England, but it was only away he had of talking. That he never meant to come is plain from theseletters. Nay, when things looked prosperous in England, he writes to theyounger Winthrop: "My counsell is you should come hither with your familyfor certaynly you will bee capable of a comfortable living in this freeCommonwealth. I doo seriously advise it. .. . G. Downing is worth 500_l_. Per annum but 4_l_. Per diem--your brother Stephen worth 2000_l_. & amaior. I pray come. " But when he is snugly ensconced in Whitehall, andmay be presumed to have some influence with the prevailing powers, hiszeal cools. "I wish you & all friends to stay there & rather looke to theWest Indyes if they remoue, for many are here to seeke when they comeouer. " To me Peter's highest promotion seems to have been that he walkedwith John Milton at the Protector's funeral. He was, I suspect, one ofthose men, to borrow a charitable phrase of Roger Williams, who "fearedGod in the main, " that is, whenever it was not personally inconvenient. William Coddington saw him in his glory in 1651: "Soe wee toucke the tymeto goe to viset Mr Petters at his chamber. I was mery with him & calledhim the Arch Bp: of Canterberye, in regard to his adtendance by ministers& gentlemen, & it passed very well. " Considering certain charges broughtagainst Peter, (though he is said, when under sentence of death, to havedenied the truth of them, ) Coddington's statement that he liked to have"gentlewomen waite of him" in his lodgings has not a pleasant look. Onelast report of him we get (September, 1659) in a letter of JohnDavenport, --"that Mr Hugh Peters is distracted & under sore horrors ofconscience, crying out of himselfe as damned & confessing haynousactings. " Occasionally these letters give us interesting glimpses of persons andthings in England. In the letter of Williams just cited, there is alesson for all parties raised to power by exceptional causes. "Surely, Sir, youre Father & all the people of God in England . .. Are now in thesadle & at the helme, so high that _non datus descensus nisi cadendo_:Some cheere up their spirits with the impossibilitie of another fall orturne, so doth Major G. Harrison . .. A very gallant most deservingheavenly man, but most highflowne for the Kingdom of the Saints & the 5thMonarchie now risen & their sun never to set againe &c. Others, as, to myknowledge, the Protector . .. Are not so full of that faith of miracles, but still imagine changes & persecutions & the very slaughter of thewitnesses before that glorious morning so much desired of a worldlyKingdome, if ever such a Kingdome (as literally it is by so manyexpounded) be to arise in this present world & dispensation. " PoorGeneral Harrison lived to be one of the witnesses so slaughtered. Thepractical good sense of Cromwell is worth noting, the Englishunderstanding struggling against Judaic trammels. Williams gives usanother peep through the keyhole of the past: "It pleased the Lord tocall me for some time & with some persons to practice the Hebrew, theGreeke, Latine, French & Dutch. The secretarie of the Councell (MrMilton) for my Dutch I read him, read me many more languages. Grammarrules begin to be esteemed a Tyrannie. I taught 2 young Gentlemen, aParliament man's sons, as we teach our children English, by words, phrazes, & constant talke, &c. " It is plain that Milton had talked overwith Williams the theory put forth in his tract on Education, and made aconvert of him. We could wish that the good Baptist had gone a littlemore into particulars. But which of us knows among the men he meets whomtime will dignify by curtailing him of the "Mr. , " and reducing him to abare patronymic, as being a kind by himself? We have a glance or two atOliver, who is always interesting. "The late renowned Oliver confest tome in close discourse about the Protestants aifaires &c that he yet feardgreat persecutions to the protestants from the Romanists before thedownfall of the Papacie, " writes Williams in 1660. This "close discourse"must have been six years before, when Williams was in England. Within ayear after, Oliver interfered to some purpose in behalf of theProtestants of Piedmont, and Mr. Milton wrote his famous sonnet. Of thewar with Spain, Williams reports from his letters out of England in 1656:"This diversion against the Spaniard hath turnd the face & thoughts ofmany English, so that the saying now is, Crowne the Protector withgould, [138] though the sullen yet cry, Crowne him with thornes. " Again in 1654: "I know the Protector had strong thoughts of Hispaniola &Cuba. Mr Cotton's interpreting of Euphrates to be the West Indies, thesupply of gold (to take off taxes), & the provision of a warmer_diverticulum & receptaculum_ then N. England is, will make a footinginto those parts very precious, & if it shall please God to vouchsafesuccesse to this fleete, I looke to hear of an invitation at least tothese parts for removall from his Highnes who lookes on N. E. Only withan eye of pitie, as poore, cold & useless. " The mixture of Euphrates andtaxes, of the transcendental and practical, prophecy taking precedence ofthrift, is characteristic, and recalls Cromwell's famous rule, of fearingGod _and_ keeping your powder dry. In one of the Protector'sspeeches, [139] he insists much on his wish to retire to a private life. There is a curious confirmation of his sincerity in a letter of WilliamHooke, then belonging to his household, dated the 13th of April, 1657. The question of the kingly title was then under debate, and Hooke'saccount of the matter helps to a clearer understanding of the reasons forCromwell's refusing the title: "The protector is urged _utrinque_ & (I amready to think) willing enough to betake himself to a private life, if itmight be. He is a godly man, much in prayer & good discourses, delightingin good men & good ministers, self-denying & ready to promote any goodwork for Christ. "[140] On the 5th of February, 1654, Captain John Mason, of Pequot memory, writes "a word or twoe of newes as it comes from MrEaton, viz: that the Parliament sate in September last; they chose theirold Speaker & Clarke. The Protectour told them they were a freeParliament, & soe left them that day. They, considering where thelegislative power resided, concluded to vote it on the morrow, & to takecharge of the militia. The Protectour hereing of it, sent for somenumbers of horse, went to the Parliament House, nayld up the doores, sentfor them to the Painted Chamber, told them they should attend the lawesestablished, & that he would wallow in his blood before he would partwith what was conferd upon him, tendering them an oath: 140 engaged. " Nowit is curious that Mr. Eaton himself, from whom Mason got his news, wrote, only two days before, an account, differing, in some particulars, and especially in tone, from Mason's. Of the speech he says, that it"gave such satisfaction that about 200 have since ingaged to owne thepresent Government. " Yet Carlyle gives the same number of signers (140)as Mason, and there is a sentence in Cromwell's speech, as reported byCarlyle, of precisely the same purport as that quoted by Mason. To me, that "wallow in my blood" has rather more of the Cromwellian ring in it, more of the quality of spontaneous speech, than the "rolled into my graveand buried with infamy" of the official reporter. John Haynes (24th July, 1653) reports "newes from England of astonishing nature, " concerning thedissolution of the Rump. We quote his story both as a contemporaneousversion of the event, and as containing some particulars that explain thecauses that led to it. It differs, in some respects, from Carlyle, and ishardly less vivid as a picture: "The Parliament of England & Councell ofState are both dissolved, by whom & the manner this: The Lord Cromwell, Generall, went to the house & asked the Speaker & Bradshaw by what powerthey sate ther. They answered by the same power that he woare his sword. Hee replied they should know they did not, & said they should sitt noelonger, demanding an account of the vast sommes of money they hadreceived of the Commons. They said the matter was of great consequence &they would give him accompt in tenn dayes. He said, Noe, they had satetoo long already (& might now take their ease, ) for ther inrichingthemselves & impoverishing the Commons, & then seazed uppon all theRecords. Immediatly Lambert, Livetenant Generall, & Hareson MaiorGenerall (for they two were with him), tooke the Speaker Lenthall by thehands, lift him out of the Chaire, & ledd him out of the house, &commanded the rest to depart, which fortwith was obeied, & the Generalltooke the keyes & locked the doore. " He then goes on to give the reasonsassigned by different persons for the act. Some said that the General"scented their purpose" to declare themselves perpetual, and to get ridof him by ordering him to Scotland. "Others say this, that the cries ofthe oppressed proveiled much with him. .. . & hastned the declaracion ofthat ould principle, _Salus populi suprema lex_ &c. " The General, in theheat of his wrath, himself snatching the keys and locking the door, has alook of being drawn from the life. Cromwell, in a letter to GeneralFortescue (November, 1655), speaks sharply of the disorders anddebauchedness, profaneness and wickedness, commonly practised amongst thearmy sent out to the West Indies. Major Mason gives us a specimen: "It ishere reported that some of the soldiers belonging to the ffleet at Bostonffell upon the watch: after some bickering they comanded them to goebefore the Governour; they retorned that they were Cromwell's boyes. "Have we not, in these days, heard of "Sherman's boys"? Belonging properly to the "Winthrop Papers, " but printed in an earliervolume (Third Series, Vol. I. Pp. 185-198), is a letter of JohnMaidstone, which contains the best summary of the Civil War that I everread. Indeed, it gives a clearer insight into its causes, and a betterview of the vicissitudes of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, than anyone of the more elaborate histories. There is a singular equity andabsence of party passion in it which gives us faith in the author'sjudgment. He was Oliver's Steward of the Household, and his portrait ofhim, as that of an eminently fair-minded man who knew him well, is ofgreat value. Carlyle has not copied it, and, as many of my readers maynever have seen it, I reproduce it here: "Before I pass further, pardonme in troubling you with the character of his person, which, by reason ofmy nearness to him, I had opportunity well to observe. His body was wellcompact and strong; his stature under six feet, (I believe about twoinches;) his head so shaped as you might see it a store-house and shopboth, of a vast treasury of natural parts. His temper exceeding fiery, asI have known, but the flame of it kept down for the most part or soonallayed with those moral endowments he had. He was naturallycompassionate towards objects in distress, even to an effeminate measure;though God had made him a heart wherein was left little room for any fearbut what was due to himself, of which there was a large proportion, yetdid he exceed in tenderness toward sufferers. A larger soul, I think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was. I do believe, if hisstory were impartially transmitted, and the unprejudiced world wellpossessed with it, she would add him to her nine worthies and make thatnumber a _decemviri_. He lived and died in comfortable communion withGod, as judicious persons near him well observed. He was that Mordecaithat sought the welfare of his people and spake peace to his seed. Yetwere his temptations such, as it appeared frequently that he that hathgrace enough for many men may have too little for himself, the treasurehe had being but in an earthen vessel and that equally defiled withoriginal sin as any other man's nature is. " There are phrases here thatmay be matched with the choicest in the life of Agricola; and, indeed, the whole letter, superior to Tacitus in judicial fairness of tone, goesabreast of his best writing in condensation, nay, surpasses it in this, that, while in Tacitus the intensity is of temper, here it is the clearresiduum left by the ferment and settling of thought. Just before, speaking of the dissolution of Oliver's last Parliament, Maidstone says:"That was the last which sat during his life, he being compelled towrestle with the difficulties of his place so well as he could withoutparliamentary assistance, and in it met with so great a burthen as (Idoubt not to say) it drank up his spirits, of which his naturalconstitution yielded a vast stock, and brought him to his grave, hisinterment being the seed-time of his glory and England's calamity. "Hooke, in a letter of April 16, 1658, has a passage worth quoting: "Thedissolucion of the last Parliament puts the supreme powers upondifficulties, though the trueth is the Nacion is so ill spirited thatlittle good is to be expected from these Generall Assemblies. They [thesupreme powers, to wit, Cromwell] have been much in Counsell since thisdisappointment, & God hath been sought by them in the effectuall sense ofthe need of help from heaven & of the extreme danger impendent on amiscarriage of their advises. But our expences are so vast that I knownot how they can avoyde a recurrence to another Session & to make afurther tryall. .. . The land is full of discontents, & the Cavaleerishparty doth still expect a day & nourish hopes of a Revolucion. TheQuakers do still proceed & are not yet come to their period. ThePresbyterians do abound, I thinke, more than ever, & are very bold &confident because some of their masterpieces lye unanswered, particularlytheire _Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici_ which I have sent to Mr. Davenporte. It hath been extant without answer these many years [onlyfour, brother Hooke, if we may trust the title-page]. The Anabaptistsabound likewise, & Mr Tombes hath pretended to have answered all thebookes extant against his opinion. I saw him presenting it to theProtectour of late. The Episcopall men ply the Common-Prayer booke withmuch more boldness then ever since these turnes of things, even in theopen face of the City in severall places. I have spoken of it to theProtectour but as yet nothing is done in order to their beingsuppressed. " It should teach us to distrust the apparent size of objects, which is a mere cheat of their nearness to us, that we are so oftenreminded of how small account things seem to one generation for whichanother was ready to die. A copy of the _Jus Divinum_ held too close tothe eyes could shut out the universe with its infinite chances andchanges, its splendid indifference to our ephemeral fates. Cromwell, weshould gather, had found out the secret of this historical perspective, to distinguish between the blaze of a burning tar-barrel and the finalconflagration of all things. He had learned tolerance by the possessionof power, --a proof of his capacity for rule. In 1652 Haynes writes: "Therwas a Catechise lately in print ther, that denied the divinity of Christ, yett ther was motions in the house by some, to have it lycenced byauthority. Cromwell mainly oposed, & at last it was voted to bee burntwhich causes much discontent of somme. " Six years had made Cromwellwiser. One more extract from a letter of Hooke's (30th March, 1659) is worthgiving. After speaking of Oliver's death, he goes on to say: "Manyprayers were put up solemnly for his life, & some, of great & good note, were too confident that he would not die. .. . I suppose himselfe hadthoughts that he should have outlived this sickness till near hisdissolution, perhaps a day or two before; which I collect partly by somewords which he was said to speak . .. & partly from his delaying, almostto the last, to nominate his successor, to the wonderment of many whobegan sooner to despair of his life. .. . His eldest son succeedeth him, being chosen by the Council, the day following his father's death, whereof he had no expectation. I have heard him say he had thought tohave lived as a country gentleman, & that his father had not employed himin such a way as to prepare him for such employment; which, he thought, he did designedly. I suppose his meaning was lest it should have beenapprehended ha had prepared & appointed him for such a place, the burthenwhereof I have several times heard him complaining under since his comingto the Government, the weighty occasions whereof with continualloppressing cares had drunk up his father's spirits, in whose body verylittle blood was found when he was opened: the greatest defect visiblewas in his heart, which was flaccid & shrunk together. Yet he was onethat could bear much without complaining, as one of a strong constitutionof brain (as appeared when he was dissected) & likewise of body. His sonseemeth to be of another frame, soft & tender, & penetrable with easiercares by much, yet he is of a sweete countenance, vivacious & candid, asis the whole frame of his spirit, only naturally inclined to choler. Hisreception of multitudes of addresses from towns, cities, & counties dothdeclare, among several other indiciums, more of ability in him thancould, ordinarily, have been expected from him. He spake also withgeneral acceptation & applause when he made his speech before theParliament, even far beyond the Lord Fynes. .. . [141] If this Assemblymiss it, we are like to be in an ill condition. The old ways & customs ofEngland, as to worshipe, are in the hearts of the most, who long to seethe days again which once they saw. .. . The hearts of very many are forthe house of the Stewarts, & there is a speech as if they would attemptto call the late King's judges into question. .. . The city, I hear is fullof Cavaliers. " Poor Richard appears to have inherited little of hisfather but the inclination to choler. That he could speak far beyond theLord Fynes seems to have been not much to the purpose. Rhetoric was notprecisely the medicine for such a case as he had to deal with. Such werethe glimpses which the New England had of the Old. Ishmael must ere-longlearn to shift for himself. The temperance question agitated the fathers very much as it still doesthe children. We have never seen the anti-prohibition argument statedmore cogently than in a letter of Thomas Shepard, minister of Cambridge, to Winthrop, in 1639: "This also I doe humbly intreat, that there may beno sin made of _drinking in any case one to another_, for I am confidenthe that stands here will fall & be beat from his grounds by his ownarguments; as also that the consequences will be very sad, and the thingprovoking to God & man to make more sins than (as yet is seene) Godhimself hath made. " A principle as wise now as it was then. Our ancestorswere also harassed as much as we by the difficulties of domestic service. In a country where land might be had for the asking, it was not easy tokeep hold of servants brought over from England. Emanuel Downing, alwaysthe hard, practical man, would find a remedy in negro slavery. "A warrwith the Narraganset, " he writes to Winthrop in 1645, "is verieconsiderable to this plantation, ffor I doubt whither it be not synne inus, having power in our hands, to suffer them to maynteyne the worship ofthe devill which their pawwawes often doe; 2lie, If upon a just warre theLord should deliver them into our hands, wee might easily have men, woemen, & children enough to exchange for Moores, which wilbe moregaynefull pilladge for us than wee conceive, for I doe not see how weecan thrive untill wee gett into a stock of slaves sufficient to doe allour buisenes, for our childrens children will hardly see this greatContinent filled with people, soe that our servants will still desirefreedome to plant for them selves, & not stay but for verie great wages. And I suppose you know verie well how wee shall maynteyne 20 Moorescheaper than one Englishe servant. " The doubt whether it be not sin in uslonger to tolerate their devil-worship, considering how much need we haveof them as merchandise, is delicious. The way in which Hugh Peter gradesthe sharp descent from the apostolic to the practical with an _etcetera_, in the following extract, has the same charm: "Sir, Mr Endecot &myself salute you in the Lord Jesus &c. Wee have heard of a dividence ofwomen & children in the bay & would bee glad of a share viz: a youngwoman or girle & a boy if you thinke good. " Peter seems to have got whathe asked for, and to have been worse off than before; for we find himwriting two years later: "My wife desires my daughter to send to Hannathat was her mayd, now at Charltowne, to know if shee would dwell withus, for truly wee are so destitute (having now but an Indian) that weeknow not what to doe. " Let any housewife of our day, who does not findthe Keltic element in domestic life so refreshing as to Mr. Arnold inliterature, imagine a household with one wild Pequot woman, communicatedwith by signs, for its maid of all work, and take courage. Those wereserious times indeed, when your cook might give warning by taking yourscalp, or _chignon_, as the case might be, and making off with it intothe woods. The fewness and dearness of servants made it necessary to callin temporary assistance for extraordinary occasions, and hence arose thecommon use of the word _help_. As the great majority kept no servants atall, and yet were liable to need them for work to which the family didnot suffice, as, for instance, in harvest, the use of the word wasnaturally extended to all kinds of service. That it did not have itsorigin in any false shame at the condition itself, induced by democratichabits, is plain from the fact that it came into use while the word_servant_ had a much wider application than now, and certainly implied nosocial stigma. Downing and Hooke, each at different times, one of them solate as 1667, wished to place a son as "servant" with one of theWinthrops. Roger Williams writes of his daughter, that "she desires tospend some time in service & liked much Mrs Brenton, who wanted. " Thiswas, no doubt, in order to be well drilled in housekeeping, an examplewhich might be followed still to advantage. John Tinker, himself the"servant" or steward of the second Winthrop, makes use of _help_ in boththe senses we have mentioned, and shows the transition of the word fromits restricted to its more general application. "We have fallen a prettydeal of timber & drawn some by Goodman Rogers's team, but unless yourworship have a good team of your own & a man to go with them, I shall bemuch distracted for _help_ . .. & when our business is most in haste weshall be most to seek. " Again, writing at harvest, as appears both by thedate and by an elaborate pun, --"I received the _sithes_ you sent but inthat there came not also yourself, it maketh me to _sigth_, "--he says:"_Help_ is scarce and hard to get, difficult to please, uncertain, &c. Means runneth out & wages on & I cannot make choice of my _help_. " It may be some consolation to know that the complaint of a decline in thequality of servants is no modern thing. Shakespeare makes Orlando say toAdam: "O, good old man, how well in thee appears The constant service of the antique world, When service sweat for duty, not for meed! Thou art not of the fashion of these times, When none will sweat but for promotion. " When the faithful old servant is brought upon the stage, we may be surehe was getting rare. A century later, we have explicit testimony thatthings were as bad in this respect as they are now. Don Manuel Gonzales, who travelled in England in 1730, says of London servants: "As to commonmenial servants, they have great wages, are well kept and cloathed, butare notwithstanding the plague of almost every house in town. They formthemselves into societies or rather confederacies, contributing to themaintenance of each other when out of place, and if any of them cannotmanage the family where they are entertained, as they please, immediatelythey give notice they will be gone. There is no speaking to them, theyare above correction, and if a master should attempt it, he may expect tobe handsomely drubbed by the creature he feeds and harbors, or perhaps anaction brought against him for it. It is become a common saying, _If myservant ben't a thief, if he be but honest, I can bear with otherthings. _ And indeed it is very rare in London to meet with an honestservant. "[142] Southey writes to his daughter Edith, in 1824, "All themaids eloped because I had turned a man out of the kitchen at eleveno'clock on the preceding night. " Nay, Hugh Rhodes, in his _Boke ofNurture_(1577), speaks of servants "ofte fleeting, " i. E. Leaving onemaster for another. One of the most curious things revealed to us in these volumes is thefact that John Winthrop, Jr. , was seeking the philosopher's stone, thatuniversal elixir which could transmute all things to its own substance. This is plain from the correspondence of Edward Howes. Howes goes to acertain doctor, professedly to consult him about the method of making acement for earthen vessels, no doubt crucibles. His account of him isamusing, and reminds one of Ben Jonson's Subtle. This was one of the manyquacks who gulled men during that twilight through which alchemy waspassing into chemistry. "This Dr, for a Dr he is, brags that if he havebut the hint or notice of any useful thing not yet invented, he willundertake to find it out, except some few which he hath vowed not tomeddle with as _vitrum maliabile, perpet. Motus, via proxima ad Indos &lapis philosi_: all, or anything else he will undertake, but for hisprivate gain, to make a monopoly thereof & to sell the use or knowledgethereof at too high rates. " This breed of pedlers in science is not yetextinct. The exceptions made by the Doctor show a becoming modesty. Again: "I have been 2 or 3 times with the Dr & can get but smallsatisfaction about your queries. .. . Yet I must confess he seemed veryfree to me, only in the main he was mystical. This he said, that when thewill of God is you shall know what you desire, it will come with such alight that it will make a harmony among all your authors, causing themsweetly to agree, & put you forever out of doubt & question. " In anotherletter: "I cannot discover into _terram incognitam_, but I have had a kenof it showed unto me. The way to it is, for the most part, horrible &fearful, the dangers none worse, to them that are _destinati filii_:sometimes I am travelling that way. .. . I think I have spoken with somethat have been there. " Howes writes very cautiously: "Dear friend, I desire with all my heartthat I might write plainer to you, but in discovering the mystery, I maydiminish its majesty & give occasion to the profane to abuse it, if itshould fall into unworthy hands. " By and by he begins to think his firstdoctor a humbug, but he finds a better. Howes was evidently a man ofimaginative temper, fit to be captivated by the alchemistic theory of theunity of composition in nature, which was so attractive to Goethe. Perhaps the great poet was himself led to it by his Rosicrucian studieswhen writing the first part of Faust. Howes tells his friend that "thereis all good to be found in unity, & all evil in duality & multiplicity. _Phoenix illa admiranda sola semper existit_, therefore while a man & sheis two, he shall never see her, "--a truth of very wide application, andtoo often lost sight of or never seen at all. "The Arabian Philos. I writto you of, he was styled among us Dr Lyon, the best of all theRosicrucians[143] that ever I met withal, far beyond Dr Ewer: they thatare of his strain are knowing men; they pretend [i. E. Claim] to live infree light, they honor God & do good to the people among whom they live, & I conceive you are in the right that they had their learning fromArabia. " Howes is a very interesting person, a mystic of the purest kind, and thatwhile learning to be an attorney with Emanuel Downing. How little thatperfunctory person dreamed of what was going on under his nose, --aslittle as of the spiritual wonders that lay beyond the tip of it! Howeswas a Swedenborgian before Swedenborg. Take this, for example: "But toour sympathetical business whereby we may communicate our minds one toanother though the diameter of the earth interpose. _Diana non estcentrum omnium_. I would have you so good a geometrician as to know yourown centre. Did you ever yet measure your everlasting self, the length ofyour life, the breadth of your love, the depth of your wisdom & theheight of your light? Let Truth be your centre, & you may do it, otherways not. I could wish you would now begin to leave off beingaltogether an outward man; this is but _casa Regentis_; the Ruler candraw you straight lines from your centre to the confines of an infinitecircumference, by which you may pass from any part of the circumferenceto another without obstacle of earth or secation of lines, if you observe& keep but one & the true & only centre, to pass by it, from it, & to it. Methinks I now see you _intus et extra_ & talk to you, but you mind menot because you are from home, you are not within, you look as if youwere careless of yourself; your hand & your voice differ; 'tis myfriend's hand, I know it well; but the voice is your enemy's. O, myfriend, if you love me, get you home, get you in! You have a friend aswell as an enemy. Know them by their voices. The one is still driving orenticing you out; the other would have you stay within. Be within andkeep within, & all that are within & keep within shall you see know &communicate with to the full, & shall not need to strain your outwardsenses to see & hear that which is like themselves uncertain & too-toooften false, but, abiding forever within, in the centre of Truth, fromthence you may behold & understand the innumerable divers emanationswithin the circumference, & still within; for without are falsities, lies, untruths, dogs &c. " Howes was tolerant also, not from want offaith, but from depth of it. "The relation of your fight with the IndiansI have read in print, but of the fight among yourselves, _bellumlinguarum_ the strife of tongues, I have heard much, but little to thepurpose. I wonder your people, that pretend to know so much, doe not knowthat love is the fulfilling of the law, & that against love there is nolaw. " Howes forgot that what might cause only a ripple in London mightoverwhelm the tiny Colony in Boston. Two years later, he writes morephilosophically, and perhaps with a gentle irony, concerning "twomonstrous births & a general earthquake. " He hints that the people of theBay might perhaps as well take these signs to themselves as lay them atthe door of Mrs. Hutchinson and what not. "Where is there such anotherpeople then [as] in New England, that labors might & main to have Christformed in them, yet would give or appoint him his shape & clothe him too?It cannot be denied that we have conceived many monstrous imaginations ofChrist Jesus: the one imagination says, _Lo, here he is_; the other says, _Lo, there he is_; multiplicity of conceptions, but is there any one trueshape of Him? And if one of many produce a shape, it is not the shape ofthe Son of God, but an ugly horrid metamorphosis. Neither is it a livingshape, but a dead one, yet a crow thinks her own bird the fairest, & mostprefer their own wisdom before God's, Antichrist before Christ. " Howeshad certainly arrived at that "centre" of which he speaks and was beforehis time, as a man of speculation, never a man of action, may sometimesbe. He was fitter for Plotinus's colony than Winthrop's. He never came toNew England, yet there was always a leaven of his style of thinkers here. Howes was the true adept, seeking what spiritual ore there might be amongthe dross of the hermetic philosophy. What he says sincerely and inwardlywas the cant of those outward professors of the doctrine who were contentto dwell in the material part of it forever. In Jonathan Brewster, wehave a specimen of these Wagners. Is it not curious, that there shouldhave been a _balneum Mariae_ at New London two hundred years ago? that_la recherche de l'Absolu_ should have been going on there in a log-hut, under constant fear that the Indians would put out, not merely the flameof one little life, but, far worse, the fire of our furnace, and so robthe world of this divine secret, just on the point of revealing itself?Alas! poor Brewster's secret was one that many have striven after beforeand since, who did not call themselves alchemists, --the secret of gettinggold without earning it, --a chase that brings some men to a four-in-handon Shoddy Avenue, and some to the penitentiary, in both cases advertisingits utter vanity. Brewster is a capital specimen of his class, who arebetter than the average, because they _do_ mix a little imagination withtheir sordidness, and who have also their representatives among us, inthose who expect the Jennings and other ideal estates in England. IfHawthorne had but known of him! And yet how perfectly did his geniusdivine that ideal element in our early New England life, conceiving whatmust have been without asking proof of what actually was! An extract or two will sufficiently exhibit Brewster in his lunes. Sending back some alchemistic book to Winthrop, he tells him that if hisname be kept secret, "I will write as clear a light, as far as I dare to, in finding the first ingredience. .. . The first figure in Flamonell dothplainly resemble the first ingredience, what it is, & from whence itcomes, & how gotten, as there you may plainly see set forth by 2resemblances held in a man's hand; for the confections there named is adelusion, for they are but the operations of the work after some timeset, as the scum of the Red Sea, which is the Virgin's Milk upon the topof the vessel, white. Red Sea is the sun & moon calcinated & brought &reduced into water mineral which in some time, & most of the whole time, is red. 2ndly, the fat of mercurial wind, that is the fat or quintessenceof sun & moon, earth & water, drawn out from them both, & flies aloft &bore up by the operation of our mercury, that is our fire which is ourair or wind. " This is as satisfactory as Lepidus's account of thegeneration of the crocodile: "Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of yourmud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile. " After describingthe three kinds of fire, that of the lamp, that of ashes, and thatagainst nature, which last "is the fire of fire, that is the secret firedrawn up, being the quintessence of the sun & moon, with the othermercurial water joined with & together, which is fire elemental, " hetells us that "these fires are & doth contain the whole mystery of thework. " The reader, perhaps, thinks that he has nothing to do butforthwith to turn all the lead he can lay his hands on into gold. But no:"If you had the first ingredience & the proportion of each, yet all werenothing if you had not the certain times & seasons of the planets &signs, when to give more or less of this fire, namely a hot & dry, a cold& moist fire which you must use in the mercurial water before it comes toblack & after into white & then red, which is only done by these fires, which when you practise you will easily see & perceive, that you shallstand amazed, & admire at the great & admirable wisdom of God, that canproduce such a wonderful, efficacious, powerful thing as this is toconvert all metallic bodies to its own nature, which may be well called afirst essence. I say by such weak simple means of so little value & solittle & easy labor & skill, that I may say with Artephus, 200 page, itis of a worke so easy & short, fitter for women & young children thansage & grave men. .. . I thank the Lord, I understand the matter perfectlyin the said book, yet I could desire to have it again 12 months hence, for about that time I shall have occasion to peruse, whenas I come to thesecond working which is most difficult, which will be some three or [4]months before the perfect white, & afterwards, as Artephus saith, I mayburn my books, for he saith it is one regiment as well for the red as forthe white. The Lord in mercy give me life to see the end of it!"--anexclamation I more than once made in the course of some of Brewster'speriods. Again, under pledge of profound secrecy, he sends Winthrop a manuscript, which he may communicate to the owner of the volume formerly lent, because "it gave me such light in the second work as I should not readilyhave found out by study, also & especially how to work the elixir fit formedicine & healing all maladies which is clean another way of workingthan we held formerly. Also a light given how to dissolve any hardsubstance into the elixir, which is also another work. And many otherthings which in Ribley [Ripley?] I could not find out. More works of thesame I would gladly see . .. For, Sir, so it is that any book of thissubject, I can understand it, though never so darkly written, having bothknowledge & experience of the world, [144] that now easily I mayunderstand their envious carriages to hide it. .. . You may marvel why Ishould give any light to others in this thing before I have perfected myown. This know, that my work being true thus far by all their writings, it cannot fail . .. For if &c &c you cannot miss if you would, except youbreak your glass. " He confesses he is mistaken as to the time required, which he now, as well as I can make out, reckons at about ten years. "Ifear I shall not live to see it finished, in regard partly of theIndians, who, I fear, will raise wars, as also I have a conceit that Godsees me not worthy of such a blessing, by reason of my manifoldmiscarriages. " Therefore he "will shortly write all the whole work in fewwords plainly which may be done in 20 lines from the first to the last &seal it up in a little box & subscribe it to yourself . .. & will so writeit that neither wife nor children shall know thereof. " If Winthrop shouldsucceed in bringing the work to perfection, Brewster begs him to rememberhis wife and children. "I mean if this my work should miscarry by wars ofthe Indians, for I may not remove it till it be perfected, otherwise Ishould so unsettle the body by removing sun & moon out of their settledplaces, that there would then be no other afterworking. " Once more heinculcates secrecy, and for a most comical reason: "For it is such asecret as is not fit for every one either for secrecy or for parts to useit, as God's secret for his glory, to do good there with, or else theymay do a great deal of hurt, spending & employing it to satisfy sinfullusts. Therefore, I intreat you, sir, spare to use my name, & let myletters I send either be safely kept or burned that I write about it, forindeed, sir, I am more than before sensible of the evil effects that willarise by the publishing of it. I should never be at quiet, neither athome nor abroad, for one or other that would be enquiring & seeking afterknowledge thereof, that I should be tired out & forced to leave theplace: nay, it would be blazed abroad into Europe. " How much more comicis nature than any comedy! _Mutato nomine de te_. Take heart, ambitiousyouth, the sun and moon will be no more disconcerted by any effort ofyours than by the pots and pans of Jonathan Brewster. It is a curiousproof of the duality so common (yet so often overlooked) in humancharacter, that Brewster was all this while manager of the Plymouthtrading-post, near what is now New London. The only professors of thetransmutation of metals who still impose on mankind are to be found inwhat is styled the critical department of literature. Their _materiaprima_, or universal solvent, serves equally for the lead of Tupper orthe brass of Swinburne. In a letter of Sir Kenelm Digby to J. Winthrop, Jr. , we find some oddprescriptions. "For all sorts of agues, I have of late tried thefollowing magnetical experiment with infallible success. Pare thepatient's nails when the fit is coming on, & put the parings into alittle bag of fine linen or sarsenet, & tie that about a live eel's neckin a tub of water. The eel will die & the patient will recover. And if adog or hog eat that eel, they will also die. " "The man recovered of the bite, The dog it was that died!" "I have known one that cured all deliriums & frenzies whatsoever, & atonce taking, with an elixir made of dew, nothing but dew purified &nipped up in a glass & digested 15 months till all of it was become agray powder, not one drop of humidity remaining. This I know to be true, & that first it was as black as ink, then green then gray, & at 22months' end it was as white & lustrous as any oriental pearl. But itcured manias at 15 months' end. " Poor Brewster would have been the betterfor a dose of it, as well as some in our day, who expect to cure men ofbeing men by act of Congress. In the same letter Digby boasts of havingmade known the properties of _quinquina_, and also of the sympatheticpowder, with which latter he wrought a "famous cure" of pleasant JamesHowell, author of the "Letters. " I do not recollect that Howell anywherealludes to it. In the same letter, Digby speaks of the books he had sentto Harvard College, and promises to send more. In all Paris he cannotfind a copy of Blaise Viginere _Des Chiffres_. "I had it in my library inEngland, but at the plundering of my house I lost it with many other goodbooks. I have _laid out_ in all places for it. " The words we haveunderscored would be called a Yankeeism now. The house was Gatehurst, afine Elizabethan dwelling, still, or lately, standing. Digby made hispeace with Cromwell, and professes his readiness to spend his blood forhim. He kept well with both sides, and we are not surprised to find Hookesaying that he hears no good of him from any. The early colonists found it needful to bring over a few trainedsoldiers, both as drillmasters and engineers. Underhill, Patrick, andGardner had served in the Low Countries, probably also Mason. As Parishas been said to be not precisely the place for a deacon, so the camp ofthe Prince of Orange could hardly have been the best training-school forPuritans in practice, however it may have been for masters of casuistictheology. The position of these rough warriors among a people like thoseof the first emigration must have been a droll one. That of CaptainUnderhill certainly was. In all our early history, there is no figure socomic. Full of the pedantry of his profession and fond of noble phrases, he is a kind of cross between Dugald Dalgetty and Ancient Pistol, with aslight relish of the _miles gloriosus_. Underhill had taken side with Mr. Wheelwright in his heretical opinions, and there is every reason why heshould have maintained, with all the ardor of personal interest, theefficiency of a covenant of grace without reference to the works of thesubject of it. Coming back from a visit to England in 1638, he "wasquestioned for some speeches uttered by him in the ship, viz: that theyat Boston were zealous as the scribes and pharisees were and as Paul wasbefore his conversion, which he denying, they were proved to his face bya sober woman whom he had seduced in the ship and drawn to his opinion;but she was afterwards better informed in the truth. Among otherpassages, he told her how he came by his assurance, saying that, havinglong lain under a spirit of bondage, and continued in a legal way nearfive years, he could get no assurance, till at length, as he was taking apipe of the good creature tobacco, the spirit fell home upon his heart, an absolute promise of free grace, with such assurance and joy, as henever doubted since of his good estate, neither should he, whatsoever sinhe should fall into, --a good preparative for such motions as hefamiliarly used to make to some of that sex. .. . The next day he wascalled again and banished. The Lord's day after, he made a speech in theassembly, showing that as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he waspersecuting &c, so he might manifest himself to him as he was makingmoderate use of the good creature called tobacco. " A week later "he wasprivately dealt with upon suspicion of incontinency . .. But his excusewas that the woman was in great trouble of mind, and some temptations, and that he resorted to her to comfort her. " He went to the Eastward, and, having run himself out there, thought it best to come back to Bostonand reinstate himself by eating his leek. "He came in his worst clothes(being accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness)without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close to his eyes, and, standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance oftears, lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his hypocrisy &c. Hespake well, save that his blubbering &c. Interrupted him. " We hope he wasa sincere penitent, but men of his complexion are apt to be pleased withsuch a tragi-comedy of self-abasement, if only they can be chief actorsand conspicuous enough therein. In the correspondence before us Underhillappears in full turkey-cock proportions. Not having been advancedaccording to his own opinion of his merits, he writes to GovernorWinthrop, with an oblique threat that must have amused him somewhat: "Iprofess, sir, till I know the cause, I shall not be satisfied, but I hopeGod will subdue me to his will; yet this I say that such handling ofofficers in foreign parts hath so far subverted some of them as to causethem turn public rebels against their state & kingdom, which God forbidshould ever be found once so much as to appear in my breast. " Why, thenthe world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open! Next we hear himon a point of military discipline at Salem. "It is this: how they have oftheir own appointment made them a captain, lieutenant & ensign, & aftersuch a manner as was never heard of in any school of war, nor in nokingdom under heaven. .. . For my part, if there should not be areformation in this disordered practise, I would not acknowledge suchofficers. If officers should be of no better esteem than for constablesto place them, & martial discipline to proceed disorderly, I would ratherlay down my command than to shame so noble a prince from whom we came. "Again: "Whereas it is somewhat questionable whether the three months Iwas absent, as well in the service of the country as of other particularpersons, my request therefore is that this honored Court would be pleasedto decide this controversy, myself alleging it to be the custom ofNations that, if a Commander be lent to another State, by that State towhom he is a servant, both his place & means is not detained from him, solong as he doth not refuse the call of his own State to which he is aservant, in case they shall call him home. " Then bringing up again his"ancient suit" for a grant of land, he throws in a neat touch of piety:"& if the honored Court shall vouchsafe to make some addition, that whichhath not been deserved, by the same power of God, may be in due season. "In a postscript, he gives a fine philosophical reason for this desiredaddition which will go to the hearts of many in these days of high pricesand wasteful taxation. "The time was when a little went far; then muchwas not known nor desired; the reason of the difference lieth only in theerror of judgment, for nature requires no more to uphold it now than whenit was satisfied with less. " The valiant Captain interprets the law ofnations, as sovereign powers are wont to do, to suit his advantage in thespecial case. We find a parallel case in a letter of Bryan Rosseter toJohn Winthrop, Jr. , pleading for a remission of taxes. "The lawes ofnations exempt allowed phisitians from personall services, & theirestates from rates & assessments. " In the Declaration of the town ofSouthampton on Long Island (1673), the dignity of constable is valued ata juster rate than Underhill was inclined to put upon it. The Dutch, itseems, demanded of them "to deliver up to them the badge of Civil &Military power; namely, the Constable's staffe & the Colonel's. " MayorMunroe of New Orleans did not more effectually magnify his office when hesurrendered the city to General Butler. Underhill's style is always of the finest. His spelling was under thepurest covenant of grace. I must give a single specimen of it from aletter whose high moral tone is all the more diverting that it waswritten while he was under excommunication for the sin which heafterwards confessed. It is addressed to Winthrop and Dudley. "Honnoredin the Lord. Youer silenc one more admirse me. I youse chrischanplaynnes. I know you love it. Silenc can not reduce the hart of youerlove'g brother: I would the rightchous would smite me, espeschali youerslfe & the honnored Depoti to whom I also dereckt this letter togetherwith youer honnored slfe. Jesos Christ did wayt; & God his Father did digand telfe bout the barren figtre before he would cast it of: I would toGod you would tender my soule so as to youse playnnes with me. " (As ifanything could be plainer than excommunication and banishment!) "I wrotto you both, but now [no] answer; & here I am dayli abused by malischoustongse: John Baker I here hath rot to the honnored depoti how as I wasdronck & like to be cild, & both falc, upon okachon I delt with Wanuertonfor intrushon, & findding them resolutli bent to rout out all gud a mongus & advanc there superstischous waye, & by boystrous words indeferd tofritten men to acomplish his end, & he abusing me to my face, dru uponhim with intent to corb his insolent and dasterdli sperrite, but now [no]danger of my life, although it might hafe bin just with God to hafegiffen me in the hanse of youer enemise & mine, for they hat the wayse ofthe Lord & them that profes them, & therfore layes trapes to cachte thepore into there deboyst corses, as ister daye on Pickeren their ChorchWarden caim up to us with intent to mak some of ourse dronc, as issospeckted, but the Lord soferd him so to misdemen himslfe as he is liklito li by the hielse this too month. .. . My hombel request is that you willbe charitabel of me. .. . Let justies and merci be goyned. .. . You may pleseto soggest youer will to this barrer, you will find him tracktabel. " Theconcluding phrase seems admirably chosen, when we consider the means ofmaking people "tractable" which the magistrates of the Bay had in theirhands, and were not slow to exercise, as Underhill himself hadexperienced. I cannot deny myself the pleasure of giving one more specimen of theCaptain's "grand-delinquent" style, as I once heard such fine writingcalled by a person who little dreamed what a hit he had made. So far as Ihave observed, our public defaulters, and others who have nothing to sayfor themselves, always rise in style as they sink in self-respect. He isspeaking of one Scott, who had laid claim to certain lands, and had beencalled on to show his title. "If he break the comand of the Asembli &bring not in the counterfit portreture of the King imprest in yello waxe, anext to his false perpetuiti of 20 mile square, where by he did chet theTown of Brouckhaven, he is to induer the sentance of the Court ofAsisies. " Pistol would have been charmed with that splendid amplificationof the Great Seal. We have seen nothing like it in our day, except in aspeech made to Mr. George Peabody at Danvers, if I recollect, while thatgentleman was so elaborately concealing from his left hand what his righthad been doing. As examples of Captain Underhill's adroitness in phoneticspelling, I offer _fafarabel_ and _poseschonse_, and reluctantly leavehim. Another very entertaining fellow for those who are willing to workthrough a pretty thick husk of tiresomeness for a genuine kernel of humorunderneath is Coddington. The elder Winthrop endured many trials, but Idoubt if any were sharper than those which his son had to undergo in thecorrespondence of this excellently tiresome man. _Tantae molis Romanamcondere gentem!_ The dulness of Coddington, always that of no ordinaryman, became irritable and aggressive after being stung by the gadfly ofQuakerism. Running counter to its proper nature, it made him morbidlyuneasy. Already an Anabaptist, his brain does not seem to have been largeenough to lodge two maggots at once with any comfort to himself. FancyJohn Winthrop, Jr. , with all the affairs of the Connecticut Colony on hisback, expected to prescribe alike for the spiritual and bodily ailmentsof all the hypochondriacs in his government, and with Philip's warimpending, --fancy him exposed also to perpetual trials like this: "G. F. [George Fox] hath sent thee a book of his by Jere: Bull, & two more nowwhich thou mayest communicate to thy Council & officers. Also I rememberbefore thy last being in England, I sent thee a book written by FrancisHowgall against persecution, by Joseph Nicallson which book thou lovinglyaccepted and communicated to the Commissioners of the United Colonies (asI desired) also J. N. Thou entertained with a loving respect whichencouraged me" (fatal hospitality!)--"As a token of that ancient lovethat for this 42 years I have had for thee, I have sent thee threeManuscripts, one of 5 queries, other is of 15, about the love of Jesus&c. The 3d is why we cannot come to the worship which was not set up byChrist Jesus, which I desire thee to communicate to the priests to answerin thy jurisdiction, the Massachusetts, New Plymouth, or elsewhere, &send their answer in writing to me. Also two printed papers to set up inthy house. It's reported in Barbadoes that thy brother Sammuell shall besent Governour to Antego. " What a mere dust of sugar in the last sentencefor such a portentous pill! In his next letter he has other writings ofG. F. , "not yet copied, which if thou desireth, when I hear from thee, Imay convey them unto thee. Also sence G. Ffox departure William Edmondsonis arrived at this Island, who having given out a paper to all inauthority, which, my wife having copied, I have here inclosed presentedthee therewith. " Books and manuscripts were not all. Coddington was alsoglad to bestow on Winthrop any wandering tediousness in the flesh thatcame to hand. "I now understand of John Stubbs freedom to visit thee(with the said Jo: B. ) he is a larned man, as witness the battledoor[145] on 35 languages, "--a terrible man this, capable of inflictinghimself on three dozen different kindreds of men. It will be observedthat Coddington, with his "thou desireths, " is not quite so well up inthe grammar of his thee-and-thouing as my Lord Coke. Indeed, it is ratherpleasant to see that in his alarm about "the enemy, " in 1673, hebackslides into the second person plural. If Winthrop ever looked overhis father's correspondence, he would have read in a letter of HenryJacie the following dreadful example of retribution: "The last news weheard was that the Bores in Bavaria slew about 300 of the Swedish forces& took about 200 prisoners, of which they put out the eyes of some & cutout the tonges of others & so sent them to the King of Sweden, whichcaused him to lament bytterly for an hour. Then he sent an army &destroyed those Bores, about 200 or 300 of their towns. Thus we hear. "Think of that, Master Coddington! Could the sinful heart of man alwayssuppress the wish that a Gustavus might arise to do judgment on the Boresof Rhode Island? The unkindest part of it was that, on Coddington's ownstatement, Winthrop had never persecuted the Quakers, and had evenendeavored to save Robinson and Stevenson in 1659. Speaking of the execution of these two martyrs to the bee in theirbonnets, John Davenport gives us a capital example of the way in whichDivine "judgments" may be made to work both ways at the pleasure of theinterpreter. As the crowd was going home from the hanging, a drawbridgegave way, and some lives were lost. The Quakers, of course, made the mostof this lesson to the _pontifices_ in the bearing power of timber, claiming it as a proof of God's wrath against the persecutors. This wasrather hard, since none of the magistrates perished, and the popularfeeling was strongly in favor of the victims of their severity. ButDavenport gallantly captures these Quaker guns, and turns them againstthe enemy himself. "Sir, the hurt that befell so many, by their ownrashness, at the Draw Bridge in Boston, being on the day that the Quakerswere executed, was not without God's special providence in judgment &wrath, I fear, against the Quakers & their abettors, who will be muchhardened thereby. " This is admirable, especially as his parenthesis about"their own rashness" assumes that the whole thing was owing to naturalcauses. The pity for the Quakers, too, implied in the "I fear, " is a nicetouch. It is always noticeable how much more liberal those who deal inGod's command without his power are of his wrath than of his mercy. Butwe should never understand the Puritans if we did not bear in mind thatthey were still prisoners in that religion of Fear which casts out Love. The nearness of God was oftener a terror than a comfort to them. Yetperhaps in them was the last apparition of Faith as a wonder-worker inhuman affairs. Take away from them what you will, you cannot deny them_that_, and its constant presence made them great in a way and measure ofwhich this generation, it is to be feared, can have but a very inadequateconception. If men now-a-days find their tone antipathetic, it would bemodest at least to consider whether the fault be wholly theirs, --whetherit was they who lacked, or we who have lost. Whether they were right orwrong in their dealing with the Quakers is not a question to be decidedglibly after two centuries' struggle toward a conception of tolerationvery imperfect even yet, perhaps impossible to human nature. If they didnot choose what seems to us the wisest way of keeping the Devil out oftheir household, they certainly had a very honest will to keep him out, which we might emulate with advantage. However it be in other cases, historic toleration must include intolerance among things to betolerated. The false notion which the first settlers had of the savages by whom thecontinent was beflead rather than inhabited, arose in part from what theyhad heard of Mexico and Peru, in part from the splendid exaggerations ofthe early travellers, who could give their readers an El Dorado at thecheap cost of a good lie. Hence the kings, dukes, and earls who were soplenty among the red men. Pride of descent takes many odd shapes, noneodder than when it hugs itself in an ancestry of filthy barbarians, whodaubed themselves for ornament with a mixture of bear's-grease and soot, or colored clay, and were called emperors by Captain John Smith and hiscompeers. The droll contrast between this imaginary royalty and thesqualid reality is nowhere exposed with more ludicrous unconsciousnessthan in the following passage of a letter from Fitz-John Winthrop to hisfather, November, 1674: "The bearer hereof, Mr. Danyell, one of the RoyalIndian blood . .. Does desire me to give an account to yourself of thelate unhappy accident which has happened to him. A little time since, acareless girl playing with fire at the door, it immediately took hold ofthe mats, & in an instant consumed it to ashes, with all the common aswell as his lady's chamber furniture, & his own wardrobe & armory, Indianplate, & money to the value (as is credibly reported in his estimation)of more than an hundred pounds Indian. .. . The Indians have handsomelyalready built him a good house & brought him in several necessaries forhis present supply, but that which takes deepest melancholy impressionupon him is the loss of an excellent Masathuset cloth cloak & hat, whichwas only seen upon holy days & their general sessions. His journey atthis time is only to intreat your favor & the gentlemen there for a kindrelief in his necessity, having no kind of garment but a short jerkinwhich was charitably given him by one of his Common-Councilmen. Heprincipally aims at a cloak & hat. " "King Stephen was a worthy peer, His breeches cost him but a crown. " But it will be observed that there is no allusion to any such article ofdress in the costume of this prince of Pequot. Some light is perhapsthrown on this deficiency by a line or two in one of Williams's letters, where he says: "I have long had scruples of selling the Natives ought butwhat may tend or bring to civilizing: I therefore neither brought norshall sell them loose coats nor breeches. " Precisely the opposite coursewas deemed effectual with the Highland Scotch, between whom and ourIndians there was a very close analogy. They were compelled by law toadopt the usages of _Gallia Braccata_, and sansculottism made a penaloffence. What impediment to civilization Williams had discovered in theoffending garment it is hard to say. It is a question for HerrTeufelsdröck. Royalty, at any rate, in our day, is dependent for much ofits success on the tailor. Williams's opportunities of studying theIndian character were perhaps greater than those of any other man of histime. He was always an advocate for justice toward them. But he seems tohave had no better opinion of them than Mr. Parkman, [146] calling themshortly and sharply, "wolves endowed with men's brains. " The same changeof feeling has followed the same causes in their case as in that of theHighlanders, --they have become romantic in proportion as they ceased tobe dangerous. As exhibitions of the writer's character, no letters in the collectionhave interested us more than those of John Tinker, who for many years wasa kind of steward for John Winthrop and his son. They show him to havebeen a thoroughly faithful, grateful, and unselfish servant. He does notseem to have prospered except in winning respect, for when he died hisfuneral charges were paid by the public. We learn from one of his lettersthat John Winthrop, Jr. , had a negro (presumably a slave) at Paquanet, for he says that a mad cow there "had almost spoiled the neger & made himferfull to tend the rest of the cattell. " That such slaves must have beenrare, however, is plain from his constant complaints about the difficultyof procuring "help, " some of which we have already quoted. His spellingof the word "ferfull" shows that the New England pronunciation of thatword had been brought from the old country. He also uses the word"creatures" for kine, and the like, precisely as our farmers do now. There is one very comical passage in a letter of the 2nd of August, 1660, where he says: "There hath been a motion by some, the chief of the town, (New London) for my keeping an ordinary, or rather under the notion of atavern which, _though it suits not with my genius_, yet am almostpersuaded to accept for some good grounds. " Tinker's modesty is mostcreditable to him, and we wish it were more common now. No people on theface of the earth suffer so much as we from impostors who keepinconveniences, "under the notion of a tavern, " without any call ofnatural genius thereto; none endure with such unexemplary patience thesuperb indifference of inn-keepers, and the condescending inattention oftheir gentlemanly deputies. We are the thralls of our railroads andhotels, and we deserve it. Richard Saltonstall writes to John Winthrop, Jr. , in 1636: "The bestthing that I have to beg your thoughts for at this present is a motto ortwo that Mr. Prynne hath writ upon his chamber walls in the Tower. " Wecopy a few phrases, chiefly for the contrast they make with Lovelace'sfamous verses to Althea. Nothing could mark more sharply the differenthabits of mind in Puritan and Cavalier. Lovelace is very charming, but hesings "The sweetness, mercy, majesty, And glories of _his_ King, " to wit, Charles I. To him "stone walls do not a prison make, " so long ashe has "freedom in his love, and in his soul is free. " Prynne's King wasof another and higher kind: "_Carcer excludit mundum, includit Deum. Deusest turris etiam in turre: turris libertatis in turre angustiae: Turrisquietis in turre molestice. .. . Arctari non potest qui in ipsa Deiinfinitate incarceratus spatiatur. .. . Nil crus sentit in nervo si animussit in coelo: nil corpus patitur in ergastulo, si anima sit in Christo_. "If Lovelace has the advantage in fancy, Prynne has it as clearly in depthof sentiment. There could be little doubt which of the partiesrepresented by these men would have the better if it came to adeath-grapple. There is curiously little sentiment in these volumes. Most of theletters, except where some point of doctrine is concerned, are those ofshrewd, practical men, busy about the affairs of this world, and earnestto build their New Jerusalem on something more solid than cloud. Thetruth is, that men anxious about their souls have not been by any meansthe least skilful in providing for the wants of the body. It was far lessthe enthusiasm than the common sense of the Puritans which made them whatthey were in politics and religion. That a great change should be wroughtin the settlers by the circumstances of their position was inevitable;that this change should have had some disillusion in it, that it shouldhave weaned them from the ideal and wonted them to the actual, wasequally so. In 1664, not much more than a generation after thesettlement, Williams prophesies: "When we that have been the eldest arerotting (to-morrow or next day) a generation will act, I fear, far unlikethe first Winthrops and their models of love. I fear that the commontrinity of the world (profit, preferment, pleasure) will here be the_tria omnia_ as in all the world beside, that Prelacy and Papacy too willin this wilderness predominate, that god Land will be (as now it is) asgreat a god with us English as god Gold was with the Spaniards. While weare here, noble sir, let us _viriliter hoc agere, rem agere humanam, divinam, Christianam_, which, I believe, is all of a most public genius, "or, as we should now say, true patriotism. If Williams means no play onthe word _humanam_ and _divinam_, the order of precedence in which hemarshals them is noticeable. A generation later, what Williams hadpredicted was in a great measure verified. But what made New EnglandPuritanism narrow was what made Scotch Cameronianism narrow, --its beingsecluded from the great movement of the nation. Till 1660 the colony wasruled and mostly inhabited by Englishmen closely connected with the partydominant in the mother country, and with their minds broadened by havingto deal with questions of state and European policy. After that time theysank rapidly into provincials, narrow in thought, in culture, in creed. Such a pedantic portent as Cotton Mather would have been impossible inthe first generation; he was the natural growth of the third, --themanifest judgment of God on a generation who thought Words a savingsubstitute for Things. Perhaps some injustice has been done to men likethe second Governor Dudley, and it should be counted to them rather as amerit than a fault, that they wished to bring New England back withinreach of the invigorating influence of national sympathies, and to rescueit from a tradition which had become empty formalism. Puritanism wasdead, and its profession had become a wearisome cant before theRevolution of 1688 gave it that vital force in politics which it had lostin religion. I have gleaned all I could of what is morally picturesque orcharacteristic from these volumes, but New England history has rather agregarious than a personal interest. Here, by inherent necessity ratherthan design, was made the first experiment in practical democracy, andaccordingly hence began that reaction of the New World upon the Old whoseresult can hardly yet be estimated. There is here no temptation to make ahero, who shall sum up in his own individuality and carry forward by hisown will that purpose of which we seem to catch such bewitching glancesin history, which reveals itself more clearly and constantly, perhaps, inthe annals of New England than elsewhere, and which yet, at best, is buttentative, doubtful of itself, turned this way and that by chance, madeup of instinct, and modified by circumstance quite as much as it isdirected by deliberate forethought. Such a purpose, or natural craving, or result of temporary influences, may be misguided by a powerfulcharacter to his own ends, or, if he be strongly in sympathy with it, maybe hastened toward its own fulfilment; but there is no such heroicelement in our drama, and what is remarkable is, that, under whatevergovernment, democracy grew with the growth of the New England Colonies, and was at last potent enough to wrench them, and the better part of thecontinent with them, from the mother country. It is true that Jeffersonembodied in the Declaration of Independence the speculative theories hehad learned in France, but the impulse to separation came from NewEngland; and those theories had been long since embodied there in thepractice of the people, if they had never been formulated in distinctpropositions. I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, wholook upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight. An entire ship's company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It isnot wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurryis apt to cram his travelling-bag, with a total disregard of shape ortexture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fitcomfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did havea conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as anecessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on thosetwo eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had, indeed, norevolutionary ideas of universal liberty, but yet, what answered thepurpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and thefatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make allthings new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law andEnglish character, by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of theone was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of naturalright. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called, for no onewho is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive to thehighest and most earnest thinking of their time. Footnotes: [135] Written in December, 1864. [136] It is curious, that, when Cromwell proposed to transfer a colony from New England to Ireland, one of the conditions insisted on in Massachusetts was that a college should be established. [137] State Trials, II. 409. One would not reckon too closely with a man on trial for his life, but there is something pitiful in Peter's representing himself as coming back to England "out of the West Indias, " in order to evade any complicity with suspected New England. [138] Waller put this into verse:-- "Let the rich ore forthwith be melted down And the state fixed by making him a crown. " [139] The _third_ in Carlyle, 1654. [140] Collections, Third Series, Vol I. P. 183. [141] This speech may be found in the Annual Register of 1762. [142] Collection of Voyages, &c. , from the Library of the Earl of Oxford, Vol. I. P. 151. [143] Howes writes the word symbolically. [144] "World" here should clearly be "work. " [145] The title-page of which our learned Marsh has cited for the etymology of the word. [146] In his Jesuits in North America. LESSING[147] When Burns's humor gave its last pathetic flicker in his "John, don't letthe awkward squad fire over me, " was he thinking of actualbrother-volunteers, or of possible biographers? Did his words betray onlythe rhythmic sensitiveness of poetic nerves, or were they a foreboding ofthat helpless future, when the poet lies at the mercy of the plodder, --ofthat bi-voluminous shape in which dulness overtakes and revenges itselfon genius at last? Certainly Burns has suffered as much as mostlarge-natured creatures from well-meaning efforts to account for him, toexplain him away, to bring him into harmony with those well-regulatedminds which, during a good part of the last century, found out a way, through rhyme, to snatch a prosiness beyond the reach of prose. Nay, hehas been wronged also by that other want of true appreciation, whichdeals in panegyric, and would put asunder those two things which God hasjoined, --the poet and the man, --as if it were not the same rashimprovidence that was the happiness of the verse and the misfortune ofthe gauger. But his death-bed was at least not haunted by theunappeasable apprehension of a German for his biographer; and that thefame of Lessing should have four times survived this cunningest assaultof oblivion is proof enough that its base is broad and deep-set. There seems to be, in the average German mind, an inability or adisinclination to see a thing as it really is, unless it be a matter ofscience. It finds its keenest pleasure in divining a profoundsignificance in the most trifling things, and the number of mare's-neststhat have been stared into by the German _Gelehrter_ through hisspectacles passes calculation. They are the one object of contemplationthat makes that singular being perfectly happy, and they seem to be ascommon as those of the stork. In the dark forest of aesthetics, particularly, he finds them at every turn, --"fanno tutto il loco varo. "If the greater part of our English criticism is apt only to skim thesurface, the German, by way of being profound, too often burrows indelighted darkness quite beneath its subject, till the reader feels theground hollow beneath him, and is fearful of caving into unknown depthsof stagnant metaphysic air at every step. The Commentary on Shakespeareof Gervinus, a really superior man, reminds one of the Roman Campagna, penetrated underground in all directions by strange winding caverns, thework of human borers in search of we know not what. Above are the divinepoet's larks and daisies, his incommunicable skies, his broad prospectsof life and nature; and meanwhile our Teutonic _teredo_ worms his waybelow, and offers to be our guide into an obscurity of his owncontriving. The reaction of language upon style, and even upon thought, by its limitations on the one hand, and its suggestions on the other, isso apparent to any one who has made even a slight study of comparativeliterature, that we have sometimes thought the German tongue at least anaccessory before the fact, if nothing more, in the offences of Germanliterature. The language has such a fatal genius for goingstern-foremost, for yawing, and for not minding the helm without some tenminutes' notice in advance, that he must be a great sailor indeed who cansafely make it the vehicle for anything but imperishable commodities. Vischer's _Aesthetik_, the best treatise on the subject, ancient ormodern, is such a book as none but a German could write, and it iswritten as none but a German could have written it. The abstracts of itssections are sometimes nearly as long as the sections themselves, and itis as hard to make out which head belongs to which tail, as in a knot ofsnakes thawing themselves into sluggish individuality under a spring sun. The average German professor spends his life in making lanterns fit toguide us through the obscurest passages of all the _ologies_ and _ysics_, and there are none in the world of such honest workmanship. They aredurable, they have intensifying glasses, reflectors of the mostscientific make, capital sockets in which to set a light, and a handsomelump of potentially illuminating tallow is thrown in. But, in order to_see_ by them, the explorer must make his own candle, supply his owncohesive wick of common-sense, and light it himself. And yet theadmirable thoroughness of the German intellect! We should be ungratefulindeed if we did not acknowledge that it has supplied the raw material inalmost every branch of science for the defter wits of other nations towork on; yet we have a suspicion that there are certain lighterdepartments of literature in which it may be misapplied, and turn intosomething very like clumsiness. Delightful as Jean Paul's humor is, howmuch more so would it be if he only knew when to stop! Ethereally deep asis his sentiment, should we not feel it more if he sometimes gave us alittle less of it, --if he would only not always deal out his wine bybeer-measure? So thorough is the German mind, that might it not seem nowand then to work quite through its subject, and expatiate in cheerfulunconsciousness on the other side thereof? With all its merits of a higher and deeper kind, it yet seems to us thatGerman literature has not quite satisfactorily answered that solong-standing question of the French Abbé about _esprit_. Hard as it isfor a German to be clear, still harder to be light, he is more than everawkward in his attempts to produce that quality of style, so peculiarlyFrench, which is neither wit nor liveliness taken singly, but a mixtureof the two that must be drunk while the effervescence lasts, and will notbear exportation into any other language. German criticism, excellent inother respects, and immeasurably superior to that of any other nation inits constructive faculty, in its instinct for getting at whateverprinciple of life lies at the heart of a work of genius, is seldom lucid, almost never entertaining. It may turn its light, if we have patience, into every obscurest cranny of its subject, one after another, but itnever flashes light _out_ of the subject itself, as Sainte-Beuve, forexample, so often does, and with such unexpected charm. We should beinclined to put Julian Schmidt at the head of living critics in all themore essential elements of his outfit; but with him is not one consciousat too frequent intervals of the professorial grind, --of that Germantendency to bear on too heavily, where a French critic would touch and gowith such exquisite measure? The Great Nation, as it cheerfully callsitself, is in nothing greater than its talent for saying little thingsagreeably, which is perhaps the very top of mere culture, and inliterature is the next best thing to the power of saying great things aseasily as if they were little German learning, like the elephants ofPyrrhus, is always in danger of turning upon what it was intended toadorn and reinforce, and trampling it ponderously to death. And yet whatdo we not owe it? Mastering all languages, all records of intellectualman, it has been able, or has enabled others, to strip away the husks ofnationality and conventionalism from the literatures of many races, andto disengage that kernel of human truth which is the germinatingprinciple of them all. Nay, it has taught us to recognize also a certainvalue in those very husks, whether as shelter for the unripe or food forthe fallen seed. That the general want of style in German authors is not wholly the faultof the language is shown by Heine (a man of mixed blood), who can bedaintily light in German; that it is not altogether a matter of race, isclear from the graceful airiness of Erasmus and Reuchlin in Latin, and ofGrimm in French. The sense of heaviness which creeps over the reader fromso many German books is mainly due, we suspect to the language, whichseems wellnigh incapable of that aerial perspective so delightful infirst-rate French, and even English, writing. But there must also be inthe national character an insensibility to proportion, a want of thatinstinctive discretion which we call tact. Nothing short of this willaccount for the perpetual groping of German imaginative literature aftersome foreign mould in which to cast its thought or feeling, now trying aLouis Quatorze pattern, then something supposed to be Shakespearian, andat last going back to ancient Greece, or even Persia. Goethe himself, limpidly perfect as are many of his shorter poems, often fails in givingartistic coherence to his longer works. Leaving deeper qualities whollyout of the question, Wilhelm Meister seems a mere aggregation of episodesif compared with such a masterpiece as Paul and Virginia, or even with ahappy improvisation like the Vicar of Wakefield. The second part ofFaust, too, is rather a reflection of Goethe's own changed view of lifeand man's relation to it, than an harmonious completion of the originalconception. Full of placid wisdom and exquisite poetry it certainly is;but if we look at it as a poem, it seems more as if the author hadstriven to get in all he could, than to leave out all he might. We cannothelp asking what business have paper money and political economy andgeognosy here? We confess that Thales and the Homunculus weary us not alittle, unless, indeed, a poem be nothing, after all, but a prolongedconundrum. Many of Schiller's lyrical poems--though the best of them findno match in modern verse for rapid energy, the very axles of languagekindling with swiftness--seem disproportionately long in parts, and thethought too often has the life wellnigh squeezed out of it in thesevenfold coils of diction, dappled though it be with splendid imagery. In German sentiment, which runs over so easily into sentimentalism, aforeigner cannot help being struck with a certain incongruousness. Whatcan be odder, for example, than the mixture of sensibility and sausagesin some of Goethe's earlier notes to Frau von Stein, unless, to be sure, the publishing them? It would appear that Germans were less sensible tothe ludicrous--and we are far from saying that this may not have itscompensatory advantages--than either the English or the French. And whatis the source of this sensibility, if it be not an instinctive perceptionof the incongruous and disproportionate? Among all races, the English hasever shown itself most keenly alive to the fear of making itselfridiculous; and among all, none has produced so many humorists, only oneof them, indeed, so profound as Cervantes, yet all masters in theirseveral ways. What English-speaking man, except Boswell, could havearrived at Weimar, as Goethe did, in that absurd _Werthermontirung_? Andwhere, out of Germany, could he have found a reigning Grand Duke to puthis whole court into the same sentimental livery of blue and yellow, leather breeches, boots, and all, excepting only Herder, and that not onaccount of his clerical profession, but of his age? To be sure, it mightbe asked also where else in Europe was a prince to be met with capable ofmanly friendship with a man whose only decoration was his genius? But thecomicality of the other fact no less remains. Certainly the Germancharacter is in no way so little remarkable as for its humor. If we wereto trust the evidence of Herr Hub's dreary _Deutsche komische undhumoristische Dichtung_, we should believe that no German had even somuch as a suspicion of what humor meant, unless the book itself, as weare half inclined to suspect, be a joke in three volumes, the _want_ offun being the real point thereof. If German patriotism can be induced tofind a grave delight in it, we congratulate Herr Hub's publishers, andfor ourselves advise any sober-minded man who may hereafter "be merry, "not to "sing psalms, " but to read Hub as the more serious amusement ofthe two. There are epigrams there that make life more solemn, and, iftaken in sufficient doses, would make it more precarious. Even Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorous authors, and never surpassed in comicconception or in the pathetic quality of humor, is not to be named withhis master, Sterne, as a creative humorist. What are Siebenkäs, Fixlein, Schmelzle, and Fibel, (a single lay-figure to be draped at will withwhimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes, )compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby, characters which we do not see merely as puppets in the author's mind, but poetically projected from it in an independent being of their own?Heine himself, the most graceful, sometimes the most touching, of modernpoets, and clearly the most easy of German humorists, seems to me wantingin a refined perception of that inward propriety which is only anothername for poetic proportion, and shocks us sometimes with an_Unfläthigkeit_, as at the end of his _Deutschland_, which, if it makeGermans laugh, as we should be sorry to believe, makes other people holdtheir noses. Such things have not been possible in English since Swift, and the _persifleur_ Heine cannot offer the same excuse of savagecynicism that might be pleaded for the Irishman. I have hinted that Herr Stahr's Life of Lessing is not precisely the kindof biography that would have been most pleasing to the man who could notconceive that an author should be satisfied with anything more than truthin praise, or anything less in criticism. My respect for what Lessingwas, and for what he did, is profound. In the history of literature itwould be hard to find a man so stalwart, so kindly, so sincere, [148] socapable of great ideas, whether in their influence on the intellect orthe life, so unswervingly true to the truth, so free from the commonweaknesses of his class. Since Luther, Germany has given birth to no suchintellectual athlete, --to no son so German to the core. Greater poets shehas had, but no greater writer; no nature more finely tempered. Nay, maywe not say that great character is as rare a thing as great genius, if itbe not even a nobler form of it? For surely it is easier to embody finethinking, or delicate sentiment, or lofty aspiration, in a book than in alife. The written leaf, if it be, as some few are, a safe-keeper andconductor of celestial fire, is secure. Poverty cannot pinch, passionswerve, or trial shake it. But the man Lessing, harassed and strivinglife-long, always poor and always hopeful, with no patron but his ownright-hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, who saw ruin's ploughsharedrive through the hearth on which his first home-fire was hardly kindled, and who, through all, was faithful to himself, to his friend, to hisduty, and to his ideal, is something more inspiring for us than the mostglorious utterance of merely intellectual power. The figure of Goethe isgrand, it is rightfully pre-eminent, it has something of the calm, andsomething of the coldness, of the immortals; but the Valhalla of Germanletters can show one form, in its simple manhood, statelier even thanhis. Manliness and simplicity, if they are not necessary coefficients inproducing character of the purest tone, were certainly leading elementsin the Lessing who is still so noteworthy and lovable to us wheneighty-six years have passed since his bodily presence vanished fromamong men. He loved clearness, he hated exaggeration in all its forms. Hewas the first German who had any conception of style, and who could befull without spilling over on all sides. Herr Stahr, we think, is notjust the biographer he would have chosen for himself. His book is rathera panegyric than a biography. There is sometimes an almost comicdisproportion between the matter and the manner, especially in the epicdetails of Lessing's onslaughts on the nameless herd of German authors. It is as if Sophocles should have given a strophe to every bullock slainby Ajax in his mad foray upon the Grecian commissary stores. He is toofond of striking an attitude, and his tone rises unpleasantly near ascream, as he calls the personal attention of heaven and earth tosomething which Lessing himself would have thought a verymatter-of-course affair. He who lays it down as an axiom, that "geniusloves simplicity, " would hardly have been pleased to hear the "Letters onLiterature" called the "burning thunderbolts of his annihilatingcriticism, " or the Anti-Götze pamphlets, "the hurtling arrows that spedfrom the bow of the immortal hero. " Nor would he with whom accuracy was amatter of conscience have heard patiently that the Letters "appeared in aperiod distinguished for its lofty tone of mind, and in their owntowering boldness they are a true picture of the intrepid character ofthe age. "[149] If the age was what Herr Stahr represents it to have been, where is the great merit of Lessing? He would have smiled, we suspect, alittle contemptuously, at Herr Stahr's repeatedly quoting a certificatefrom the "historian of the proud Britons, " that he was "the first criticin Europe. " Whether we admit or not Lord Macaulay's competence in thematter, we are sure that Lessing would not have thanked his biographerfor this soup-ticket to a ladleful of fame. If ever a man stood firmly onhis own feet, and asked help of none, that man was Gotthold EphraimLessing. Herr Stahr's desire to _make_ a hero of his subject, and his love forsonorous sentences like those we have quoted above, are apt to standsomewhat in the way of our chance at taking a fair measure of the man, and seeing in what his heroism really lay. He furnishes little materialfor a comparative estimate of Lessing, or for judging of the foreigninfluences which helped from time to time in making him what he was. Nothing is harder than to worry out a date from Herr Stahr's haystacks ofpraise and quotation. Yet dates are of special value in tracing theprogress of an intellect like Lessing's, which, little actuated by aninward creative energy, was commonly stirred to motion by the impulse ofother minds, and struck out its brightest flashes by collision with them. He himself tells us that a critic should "first seek out some one withwhom he can contend, " and quotes in justification from one of Aristotle'scommentators, _Solet Aristoteles quaerere pugnam in suis libris_. ThisLessing was always wont to do. He could only feel his own strength, andmake others feel it, --could only call it into full play in anintellectual wrestling-bout. He was always anointed and ready for thering, but with this distinction, that he was no mere prize-fighter, orbully for the side that would pay him best, nor even a contender for meresentiment, but a self-forgetful champion for the truth as he saw it. Noris this true of him only as a critic. His more purely imaginativeworks--his Minna, his Emilia, his Nathan--were all written, not tosatisfy the craving of a poetic instinct, nor to rid head and heart oftroublous guests by building them a lodging outside himself, as Goetheused to do, but to prove some thesis of criticism or morals by whichTruth could be served. His zeal for her was perfectly unselfish. "Doesone write, then, for the sake of being always in the right? I think Ihave been as serviceable to Truth, " he says, "when I miss her, and myfailure is the occasion of another's discovering her, as if I haddiscovered her myself. "[150] One would almost be inclined to think, fromHerr Stahr's account of the matter, that Lessing had been anautochthonous birth of the German soil, without intellectual ancestry orhelpful kindred. That this is the sufficient natural history of nooriginal mind we need hardly say, since originality consists quite asmuch in the power of using to purpose what it finds ready to its hand, asin that of producing what is absolutely new. Perhaps we might say that itwas nothing more than the faculty of combining the separate, andtherefore ineffectual, conceptions of others, and making them into livingthought by the breath of its own organizing spirit. A great man without apast, if he be not an impossibility, will certainly have no future. Hewould be like those conjectural Miltons and Cromwells of Gray's imaginaryHamlet. The only privilege of the original man is, that, like othersovereign princes, he has the right to call in the current coin andreissue it stamped with his own image, as was the practice of Lessing. Herr Stahr's over-intensity of phrase is less offensive than amusing whenapplied to Lessing's early efforts in criticism. Speaking of poor oldGottsched, he says: "Lessing assailed him sometimes with cuttingcriticism, and again with exquisite humor. In the notice of Gottsched'spoems, he says, among other things, 'The exterior of the volume is sohandsome that it will do great credit to the bookstores, and it is to behoped that it will continue to do so for a long time. But to give asatisfactory idea of the interior surpasses our powers. ' And inconclusion he adds, 'These poems cost two thalers and four groschen. Thetwo thalers pay for the ridiculous, and the four groschen pretty much forthe useful. '" Again, he tells us that Lessing concludes his notice ofKlopstock's Ode to God "with these inimitably roguish words: 'Whatpresumption to beg thus earnestly for a woman!' Does not a whole book ofcriticism lie in these nine words?" For a young man of twenty-two, Lessing's criticisms show a great deal of independence and maturity ofthought; but humor he never had, and his wit was always of thebluntest, --crushing rather than cutting. The mace, and not the scymitar, was his weapon. Let Herr Stahr put all Lessing's "inimitably roguishwords" together, and compare them with these few intranslatable linesfrom Voltaire's letter to Rousseau, thanking him for his _Discours surl'Inégalite_: "On n'a jamais employé tant d'esprit à vouloir nous rendrebêtes; il prend enviede marcher à quatre pattes quand on lit votreouvrage. " Lessing from the first was something far better than a wit. Force was always much more characteristic of him than cleverness. Sometimes Herr Stahr's hero-worship leads him into positive misstatement. For example, speaking of Lessing's Preface to the "Contributions to theHistory and Reform of the Theatre, " he tells us that "his eye wasdirected chiefly to the English theatre and Shakespeare. " Lessing at thattime (1749) was only twenty, and knew little more than the names of anyforeign dramatists except the French. In this very Preface his Englishlist skips from Shakespeare to Dryden, and in the Spanish he omitsCalderon, Tirso de Molina, and Alarcon. Accordingly, we suspect that thedate is wrongly assigned to Lessing's translation of _Toda la Vida esSueño_. His mind was hardly yet ready to feel the strange charm of thismost imaginative of Calderon's dramas. Even where Herr Stahr undertakes to give us light on the _sources_ ofLessing, it is something of the dimmest. He attributes "Miss SaraSampson" to the influence of the "Merchant of London, " as Mr. Evanstranslates it literally from the German, meaning our old friend, "GeorgeBarnwell. " But we are strongly inclined to suspect from internal evidencethat Moore's more recent "Gamester" gave the prevailing impulse. And ifHerr Stahr must needs tell us anything of the Tragedy of Middle-ClassLife, he ought to have known that on the English stage it preceded Lilloby more than a century, --witness the "Yorkshire Tragedy, "--and thatsomething very like it was even much older in France. We are inclined tocomplain, also, that he does not bring out more clearly how much Lessingowed to Diderot both as dramatist and critic, nor give us so much as ahint of what already existing English criticism did for him in the way ofsuggestion and guidance. But though we feel it to be our duty to say somuch of Herr Stahr's positive faults and negative short-comings, yet weleave him in very good humor. While he is altogether too full uponcertain points of merely transitory importance, --such as the quarrel withKlotz, --yet we are bound to thank him both for the abundance of hisextracts from Lessing, and for the judgment he has shown in the choice ofthem. Any one not familiar with his writings will be able to get a verygood notion of the quality of his mind, and the amount of his literaryperformance, from these volumes; and that, after all, is the chiefmatter. As to the absolute merit of his works other than critical, HerrStahr's judgment is too much at the mercy of his partiality to be ofgreat value. Of Mr. Evans's translation we can speak for the most part with highcommendation. There are great difficulties in translating German prose;and whatever other good things Herr Stahr may have learned from Lessing, terseness and clearness are not among them. We have seldom seen atranslation which read more easily, or was generally more faithful. ThatMr. Evans should nod now and then we do not wonder, nor that he shouldsometimes choose the wrong word. We have only compared him with theoriginal where we saw reason for suspecting a slip; but, though we havenot found much to complain of, we have found enough to satisfy us thathis book will gain by a careful revision. We select a few oversights, mainly from the first volume, as examples. On page 34, comparing Lessingwith Goethe on arriving at the University, Mr. Evans, we think, obscures, if he does not wholly lose the meaning, when he translates _Leben_ by"social relations, " and is altogether wrong in rendering _Patrizier_ by"aristocrat. " At the top of the next page, too, "suspicious" is not theword for _bedenklich_. Had he been writing English, he would surely havesaid "questionable. " On page 47, "overtrodden shoes" is hardly so good asthe idiomatic "down at the heel. " On page 104, "A very humorousrepresentation" is oddly made to "confirm the documentary evidence. " Thereverse is meant. On page 115, the sentence beginning "the tendency inboth" needs revising. On page 138, Mr. Evans speaks of the "PoeticalVillage-younker of Destouches. " This, we think, is hardly the English of_Le Poète Campagnard_, and almost recalls Lieberkühn's theory oftranslation, toward which Lessing was so unrelenting, --"When I do notunderstand a passage, why, I translate it word for word. " On page 149, "Miss Sara Sampson" is called "the first social tragedy of the GermanDrama. " All tragedies surely are _social_, except the "Prometheus. "_Bürgerliche Tragödie_ means a tragedy in which the protagonist is takenfrom common life, and perhaps cannot be translated clearly into Englishexcept by "tragedy of middle-class life. " So on page 170 we find EmiliaGalotti called a "Virginia _bourgeoise_, " and on page 172 a hospitalbecomes a _lazaretto_. On page 190 we have a sentence ending in thisstrange fashion: "in an episode of the English original, which Wielandomitted entirely, one of its characters nevertheless appeared in theGerman tragedy. " On page 205 we have the Seven Years' War called "abloody _process_. " This is mere carelessness, for Mr. Evans, in thesecond volume, translates it rightly "_lawsuit_. " What English readerwould know what "You are intriguing me" means, on page 228? On page 264, Vol. II. , we find a passage inaccurately rendered, which we consider ofmore consequence, because it is a quotation from Lessing. "O, out uponthe man who claims, Almighty God, to be a preacher of Thy word, and yetso impudently asserts that, in order to attain Thy purposes, there wasonly one way in which it pleased _Thee_ to make _Thyself_ known to him!"This is very far from _nur den einzigen Weg gehabt den Du Dir gefallenlassen ihm kund zu machen!_ The _ihm_ is scornfully emphatic. We hopeProfessor Evans will go over his version for a second edition much morecarefully than we have had any occasion to do. He has done an excellentservice to our literature, for which we heartily thank him, in choosing abook of this kind to translate, and translating it so well. We would notlook such a gift horse too narrowly in the mouth. Let us now endeavor to sum up the result of Lessing's life and labor withwhat success we may. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born (January 22, 1729) at Camenz, in UpperLusatia, the second child and eldest son of John Gottfried Lessing, aLutheran clergyman. Those who believe in the persistent qualities ofrace, or the cumulative property of culture, will find something to theirpurpose in his Saxon blood and his clerical and juristic ancestry. It isworth mentioning, that his grandfather, in the thesis for his doctor'sdegree, defended the right to entire freedom of religious belief. Thename first comes to the surface in Parson Clement Lessigk, nearly threecenturies ago, and survives to the present day in a painter of somedistinction. It has almost passed into a proverb, that the mothers ofremarkable children have been something beyond the common. If there beany truth in the theory, the case of Lessing was an exception, as mighthave been inferred, perhaps, from the peculiarly masculine type of hischaracter and intellect. His mother was in no wise superior, but hisfather seems to have been a man somewhat above the pedantic average ofthe provincial clergymen of his day, and to have been a scholar in theampler meaning of the word. Besides the classics, he had possessedhimself of French and English, and was somewhat versed in the Orientallanguages. The temper of his theology may be guessed from his havingbeen, as his son tells us with some pride, one of "the earliesttranslators of Tillotson. " We can only conjecture him from the letterswhich Lessing wrote to him, from which we should fancy him as on thewhole a decided and even choleric old gentleman, in whom the wig, thoughnot a predominant, was yet a notable feature, and who was, like manyother fathers, permanently astonished at the fruit of his loins. He wouldhave preferred one of the so-called learned professions for hisson, --theology above all, --and would seem to have never quite reconciledhimself to his son's distinction, as being in none of the three careerswhich alone were legitimate. Lessing's bearing towards him, alwaysindependent, is really beautiful in its union of respectful tendernesswith unswerving self-assertion. When he wished to evade the maternal eye, Gotthold used in his letters to set up a screen of Latin between himselfand her; and we conjecture the worthy Pastor Primarius playing over againin his study at Camenz, with some scruples of conscience, the old trickof Chaucer's fox:-- "Mulier est hominis confusio; Madam, the sentence of this Latin is. Woman is mannës joy and mannës bliss. " He appears to have snatched a fearful and but ill-concealed joy from thesight of the first collected edition of his son's works, unlike Tillotsonas they certainly were. Ah, had they only been _Opera_! Yet were they notvolumes, after all, and able to stand on their own edges beside theimmortals, if nothing more? After grinding with private-tutor Mylius the requisite time, Lessingentered the school of Camenz, and in his thirteenth year was sent to thehigher institution at Meissen. We learn little of his career there, except that Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence were already his favoriteauthors, that he once characteristically distinguished himself by acourageous truthfulness, and that he wrote a Latin poem on the valor ofthe Saxon soldiers, which his father very sensibly advised him toshorten. In 1750, four years after leaving the school, he writes to hisfather: "I believed even when I was at Meissen that one must learn muchthere which he cannot make the least use of in real life (_der Welt_), and I now [after trying Leipzig and Wittenberg] see it all the moreclearly, "--a melancholy observation which many other young men have madeunder similar circumstances. Sent to Leipzig in his seventeenth year, hefinds himself an awkward, ungainly lad, and sets diligently to perfectinghimself in the somewhat unscholastic accomplishments of riding, dancing, and fencing. He also sedulously frequents the theatre, and wrote a play, "The Young Scholar, " which attained the honor of representation. Meanwhile his most intimate companion was a younger brother of hisold tutor Mylius, a young man of more than questionable morals, and who had even written a satire on the elders of Camenz, forwhich--over-confidently trusting himself in the outraged city--he hadbeen fined and imprisoned; so little could the German Muse, celebrated byKlopstock for her swiftness of foot, protect her son. With thisscandalous person and with play-actors, more than probably of both sexes, did the young Lessing share a Christmas cake sent him by his mother. Suchnews was not long in reaching Camenz, and we can easily fancy how tragicit seemed in the little parsonage there, to what cabinet councils it gaverise in the paternal study, to what ominous shaking of the clerical wigin that domestic Olympus. A pious fraud is practised on the boy, whohurries home thinly clad through the winter weather, his ill-eatenChristmas cake wringing him with remorseful indigestion, to receive thelast blessing, if such a prodigal might hope for it, of a broken-heartedmother. He finds the good dame in excellent health, and softened towardhim by a cold he has taken on his pious journey. He remains at homeseveral months, now writing Anacreontics of such warmth that his sister(as volunteer representative of the common hangman) burns them in thefamily stove; now composing sermons to convince his mother that "he couldbe a preacher any day, "--a theory of that sacred office unhappily not yetextinct. At Easter, 1747, he gets back to Leipzig again, with some scantsupply of money in his pocket, but is obliged to make his escape thencebetween two days somewhere toward the middle of the next year, leavingbehind him some histrionic debts (chiefly, we fear, of a certainMademoiselle Lorenz) for which he had confidingly made himself security. Stranded, by want of floating or other capital, at Wittenberg, he entershimself, with help from home, as a student there, but soon migrates againto Berlin, which had been his goal when making his hegira from Leipzig. In Berlin he remained three years, applying himself to his chosen callingof author at all work, by doing whatever honest job offereditself, --verse, criticism, or translation, --and profitably studious in avery wide range of languages and their literature. Above all, he learnedthe great secret, which his stalwart English contemporary, Johnson, alsoacquired, of being able to "dine heartily" for threepence. Meanwhile he continues in a kind of colonial dependence on the parsonageat Camenz, the bonds gradually slackening, sometimes shaken a littlerudely, and always giving alarming hints of approaching and inevitableautonomy. From the few home letters of Lessing which remain, (coveringthe period before 1753, there are only eight in all, ) we are able tosurmise that a pretty constant maternal cluck and shrill paternal warningwere kept up from the home coop. We find Lessing defending the moralityof the stage and his own private morals against charges and suspicions ofhis parents, and even making the awful confession that he does notconsider the Christian religion itself as a thing "to be taken on trust, "nor a Christian by mere tradition so valuable a member of society as "onewho has _prudently_ doubted, and by the way of examination has arrived atconviction, or at least striven to arrive. " Boyish scepticism of thesuperficial sort is a common phenomenon enough, but the Lessing varietyof it seems to us sufficiently rare in a youth of twenty. What strikes usmainly in the letters of these years is not merely the maturity theyshow, though that is remarkable, but the tone. We see already in them thecheerful and never overweening self-confidence which always so pleasantlydistinguished Lessing, and that strength of tackle, so seldom found inliterary men, which brings the mind well home to its anchor, enabling itto find holding ground and secure riding in any sea. "What care I to livein plenty, " he asks gayly, "if I only live?" Indeed, Lessing learnedearly, and never forgot, that whoever would be life's master, and not itsdrudge, must make it a means, and never allow it to become an end. Hecould say more truly than Goethe, _Mein Acker ist die Zeit_, since he notonly sowed in it the seed of thought for other men and other times, butcropped it for his daily bread. Above all, we find Lessing even thusearly endowed with the power of keeping his eyes wide open to what he wasafter, to what would help or hinder him, --a much more singular gift thanis commonly supposed. Among other jobs of this first Berlin period, hehad undertaken to arrange the library of a certain Herr Rüdiger, gettingtherefor his meals and "other receipts, " whatever they may have been. Hisfather seems to have heard with anxiety that this arrangement had ceased, and Lessing writes to him: "I never wished to have anything to do withthis old man longer than _until I had made myself thoroughly acquaintedwith his great library_. This is now accomplished, and we haveaccordingly parted. " This was in his twenty-first year, and we have nodoubt, from the _range_ of scholarship which Lessing had at command soyoung, that it was perfectly true. All through his life he was thoroughlyGerman in this respect also, that he never _quite_ smelted his knowledgeclear from some slag of learning. In the early part of the first Berlin residence, Pastor PrimariusLessing, hearing that his son meditated a movement on Vienna, was muchexercised with fears of the temptation to Popery he would be exposed toin that capital. We suspect that the attraction thitherward had itssource in a perhaps equally catholic, but less theological magnet, --theMademoiselle Lorenz above mentioned. Let us remember the perfectlyinnocent passion of Mozart for an actress, and be comforted. There is notthe slightest evidence that Lessing's life at this time, or any other, though careless, was in any way debauched. No scandal was ever coupledwith his name, nor is any biographic chemistry needed to bleach spots outof his reputation. What cannot be said of Wieland, of Goethe, ofSchiller, of Jean Paul, may be safely affirmed of this busy andsingle-minded man. The parental fear of Popery brought him a seasonablesupply of money from home, which enabled him to clothe himself decentlyenough to push his literary fortunes, and put on a bold front withpublishers. Poor enough he often was, but never in so shabby a pass thathe was forced to write behind a screen, like Johnson. It was during this first stay in Berlin that Lessing was brought intopersonal relations with Voltaire. Through an acquaintance with the greatman's secretary, Richier, he was employed as translator in the scandalousHirschel lawsuit, so dramatically set forth by Carlyle in his Life ofFrederick, though Lessing's share in it seems to have been unknown tohim. The service could hardly have been other than distasteful to him;but it must have been with some thrill of the _anche io!_ kind that thepoor youth, just fleshing his maiden pen in criticism, stood face to facewith the famous author, with whose name all Europe rang from side toside. This was in February, 1751. Young as he was, we fancy those cooleyes of his making some strange discoveries as to the real nature of thatlean nightmare of Jesuits and dunces. Afterwards the same secretary lenthim the manuscript of the _Siècle de Louis XIV. _, and Lessingthoughtlessly taking it into the country with him, it was not forthcomingwhen called for by the author. Voltaire naturally enough danced withrage, screamed all manner of unpleasant things about robbery and thelike, cashiered the secretary, and was, we see no reason to doubt, reallyafraid of a pirated edition. _This_ time his cry of wolf must have had aquaver of sincerity in it. Herr Stahr, who can never keep separate theLessing as he then was and the Lessing as he afterwards became, takesfire at what he chooses to consider an unworthy suspicion of theFrenchman, and treats himself to some rather cheap indignation on thesubject. For ourselves, we think Voltaire altogether in the right, and werespect Lessing's honesty too much to suppose, with his biographer, thatit was this which led him, years afterwards, to do such severe justice to_Merope_, and other tragedies of the same author. The affair happened inDecember, 1751, and a year later Lessing calls Voltaire a "great man, "and says of his _Amalie_, that "it has not only beautiful passages, it isbeautiful throughout, and the tears of a reader of feeling will justifyour judgment. " Surely there is no resentment here. Our only wonder wouldbe at its being written after the Hirschel business. At any rate, wecannot allow Herr Stahr to shake our faith in the sincerity of Lessing'smotives in criticism, --he could not in the soundness of the criticismitself, --by tracing it up to a spring at once so petty and so personal. During a part of 1752, [151] Lessing was at Wittenberg again as student ofmedicine, the parental notion of a strictly professional career of somekind not having yet been abandoned. We must give his father the credit ofhaving done his best, in a well-meaning paternal fashion, to make his sonover again in his own image, and to thwart the design of nature bycoaxing or driving him into the pinfold of a prosperous obscurity. ButGotthold, with all his gifts, had no talent whatever for contentedroutine. His was a mind always in solution, which the divine order ofthings, as it is called, could not precipitate into any of thetraditional forms of crystallization, and in which the time to come wasalready fermenting. The principle of growth was in the young literaryhack, and he must obey it or die. His was to the last a _naturanaturans_, never a _naturata_. Lessing seems to have done what he couldto be a dutiful failure. But there was something in him stronger and moresacred than even filial piety; and the good old pastor is remembered nowonly as the father of a son who would have shared the benign oblivion ofhis own theological works, if he could only have had his wise way withhim. Even after never so many biographies and review articles, geniuscontinues to be a marvellous and inspiring thing. At the same time, considering the then condition of what was pleasantly called literaturein Germany, there was not a little to be said on the paternal side of thequestion, though it may not seem now a very heavy mulct to give up oneson out of ten to immortality, --at least the Fates seldom decimate in_this_ way. Lessing had now, if we accept the common standard in suchmatters, "completed his education, " and the result may be summed up inhis own words to Michaelis, 16th October, 1754: "I have studied at theFürstenschule at Meissen, and after that at Leipzig and Wittenberg. But Ishould be greatly embarrassed if I were asked to tell _what_. " As earlyas his twentieth year he had arrived at some singular notions as to theuses of learning. On the 20th of January, 1749, he writes to his mother:"I found out that books, indeed, would make me learned, _but never makeme a man_. " Like most men of great knowledge, as distinguished from merescholars, he seems to have been always a rather indiscriminate reader, and to have been fond, as Johnson was, of "browsing" in libraries. Johnson neither in amplitude of literature nor exactness of scholarshipcould be deemed a match for Lessing; but they were alike in the power ofreadily applying whatever they had learned, whether for purposes ofillustration or argument. They resemble each other, also, in a kind ofabsolute common-sense, and in the force with which they could plant adirect blow with the whole weight both of their training and theirtemperament behind it. As a critic, Johnson ends where Lessing begins. The one is happy in the lower region of the understanding: the other canbreathe freely in the ampler air of reason alone. Johnson acquiredlearning, and stopped short from indolence at a certain point. Lessingassimilated it, and accordingly his education ceased only with his life. Both had something of the intellectual sluggishness that is apt to gowith great strength; and both had to be baited by the antagonism ofcircumstances or opinions, not only into the exhibition, but into thepossession of their entire force. Both may be more properly calledoriginal men than, in the highest sense, original writers. From 1752 to 1760, with an interval of something over two years spent inLeipzig to be near a good theatre, Lessing was settled in Berlin, andgave himself wholly and earnestly to the life of a man of letters. Athoroughly healthy, cheerful nature he most surely had, with something atfirst of the careless light-heartedness of youth. Healthy he was notalways to be, not always cheerful, often very far from light-hearted, butmanly from first to last he eminently was. Downcast he could never be, for his strongest instinct, invaluable to him also as a critic, was tosee things as they really are. And this not in the sense of a cynic, butof one who measures himself as well as his circumstances, --who lovestruth as the most beautiful of all things and the only permanentpossession, as being of one substance with the soul. In a man likeLessing, whose character is even more interesting than his works, thetone and turn of thought are what we like to get glimpses of. And forthis his letters are more helpful than those of most authors, as might beexpected of one who said of himself, that, in his more serious work, "hemust profit by his first heat to accomplish anything. " He began, we say, light-heartedly. He did not believe that "one should thank God only forgood things. " "He who is only in good health, and is willing to work, hasnothing to fear in the world. " "What another man would call want, I callcomfort. " "Must not one often act thoughtlessly, if one would provokeFortune to do something for him?" In his first inexperience, the life of"the sparrow on the house-top" (which we find oddly translated "roof")was the one he would choose for himself. Later in life, when he wished tomarry, he was of another mind, and perhaps discovered that there wassomething in the old father's notion of a fixed position. "The life ofthe sparrow on the house-top is only right good if one need not expectany end to it. If it cannot always last, every day it lasts toolong, "--he writes to Ebert in 1770. Yet even then he takes the manlyview. "Everything in the world has its time, everything may be overlivedand overlooked, if one only have health. " Nor let any one suppose thatLessing, full of courage as he was, found professional authorship agarden of Alcinoüs. From creative literature he continually soughtrefuge, and even repose, in the driest drudgery of mere scholarship. Onthe 26th of April, 1768, he writes to his brother with something of hisold gayety: "Thank God, the time will soon come when I cannot call apenny in the world my own but I must first earn it. I am unhappy if itmust be by writing. " And again in May, 1771: "Among all the wretched, Ithink him the most wretched who must work with his head, even if he isnot conscious of having one. But what is the good of complaining?"Lessing's life, if it is a noble example, so far as it concerned himselfalone, is also a warning when another is to be asked to share it. He toowould have profited had he earlier learned and more constantly borne inmind the profound wisdom of that old saying, _Si sit prudentia_. Let theyoung poet, however he may believe of his art that "all other pleasuresare not worth its pains, " consider well what it is to call down fire fromheaven to keep the pot boiling, before he commit himself to a life ofauthorship as something fine and easy. That fire will not condescend tosuch office, though it come without asking on ceremonial days to the freeservice of the altar. Lessing, however, never would, even if he could, have so desecrated hisbetter powers. For a bare livelihood, he always went sturdily to themarket of hack-work, where his learning would fetch him a price. But itwas only in extremest need that he would claim that benefit of clergy. "Iam worried, " he writes to his brother Karl, 8th April, 1773, "and workbecause working is the only means to cease being so. But you and Vess arevery much mistaken if you think that it could ever be indifferent to me, under such circumstances, on what I work. Nothing less true, whether asrespects the work itself or the principal object wherefor I work. I havebeen in my life before now in very wretched circumstances, yet never insuch that I would have written for bread in the true meaning of the word. I have begun my 'Contributions' because this work helps me . .. To livefrom one day to another. " It is plain that he does not call this kind ofthing in any high sense writing. Of that he had far other notions; forthough he honestly disclaimed the title, yet his dream was always to be apoet. But he _was_ willing to work, as he claimed to be, because he hadone ideal higher than that of being a poet, namely, to be thoroughly aman. To Nicolai he writes in 1758: "All ways of earning his bread arealike becoming to an honest man, whether to split wood or to sit at thehelm of state. It does not concern his conscience how useful he is, buthow useful he would be. " Goethe's poetic sense was the Minotaur to whichhe sacrificed everything. To make a study, he would soil the maidenpetals of a woman's soul; to get the delicious sensation of a reflexsorrow, he would wring a heart. All that saves his egoism from beinghateful is, that, with its immense reaches, it cheats the sense into afeeling of something like sublimity. A patch of sand is unpleasing; adesert has all the awe of ocean. Lessing also felt the duty ofself-culture; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this orthat faculty as of strengthening character, --the only soil in which realmental power can root itself and find sustenance. His advice to hisbrother Karl, who was beginning to write for the stage, is two partsmoral to one literary. "Study ethics diligently, learn to expressyourself well and correctly, and cultivate your own character. Withoutthat I cannot conceive a good dramatic author. " Marvellous counsel thiswill seem to those who think that wisdom is only to be found in thefool's paradise of Bohemia! We said that Lessing's dream was to be a poet. In comparison with successas a dramatist, he looked on all other achievement as inferior in kind. In. 1767 he writes to Gleim (speaking of his call to Hamburg): "Suchcircumstances were needed to rekindle in me an almost extinguished lovefor the theatre. I was just beginning to lose myself in other studieswhich would have made me unfit for any work of genius. My _Laocoon_ isnow a secondary labor. " And yet he never fell into the mistake ofovervaluing what he valued so highly. His unflinching common-sense wouldhave saved him from that, as it afterwards enabled him to see thatsomething was wanting in him which must enter into the making of truepoetry, whose distinction from prose is an inward one of nature, and notan outward one of form. While yet under thirty, he assures Mendelssohnthat he was quite right in neglecting poetry for philosophy, because"only a part of our youth should be given up to the arts of thebeautiful. We must practise ourselves in weightier things before we die. An old man, who lifelong has done nothing but rhyme, and an old man wholifelong has done nothing but pass his breath through a stick with holesin it, --I doubt much whether such an old man has arrived at what he wasmeant for. " This period of Lessing's life was a productive one, though none of itsprinted results can be counted of permanent value, except his share inthe "Letters on German Literature. " And even these must be reckoned asbelonging to the years of his apprenticeship and training for themaster-workman he afterwards became. The small fry of authors andtranslators were hardly fitted to call out his full strength, but hisvivisection of them taught him the value of certain structuralprinciples. "To one dissection of the fore quarter of an ass, " saysHaydon in his diary, "I owe my information. " Yet even in his earliestcriticisms we are struck with the same penetration and steadiness ofjudgment, the same firm grasp of the essential and permanent, that wereafterwards to make his opinions law in the courts of taste. For example, he says of Thomson, that, "as a dramatic poet, he had the fault of neverknowing when to leave off; he lets every character talk so long asanything can be said; accordingly, during these prolonged conversations, the action stands still, and the story becomes tedious. " Of "RoderickRandom, " he says that "its author is neither a Richardson nor a Fielding;he is one of those writers of whom there are plenty among the Germans andFrench. " We cite these merely because their firmness of tone seems to usuncommon in a youth of twenty-four. In the "Letters, " the range is muchwider, and the application of principles more consequent. He had alreadysecured for himself a position among the literary men of that day, andwas beginning to be feared for the inexorable justice of his criticisms. His "Fables" and his "Miss Sara Sampson" had been translated into French, and had attracted the attention of Grimm, who says of them (December, 1754): "These Fables commonly contain in a few lines a new and profoundmoral meaning. M. Lessing has much wit, genius, and invention; thedissertations which follow the Fables prove moreover that he is anexcellent critic. " In Berlin, Lessing made friendships, especially withMendelssohn, Von Kleist, Nicolai, Gleim, and Ramler. For Mendelssohn andVon Kleist he seems to have felt a real love; for the others at most aliking, as the best material that could be had. It certainly was not ofthe juiciest. He seems to have worked hard and played hard, equally athome in his study and Baumann's wine-cellar. He was busy, poor, andhappy. But he was restless. We suspect that the necessity of forever picking upcrumbs, and their occasional scarcity, made the life of the sparrow onthe house-top less agreeable than he had expected. The imagined freedomwas not quite so free after all, for necessity is as short a tether asdependence, or official duty, or what not, and the regular occupation ofgrub-hunting is as tame and wearisome as another. Moreover, Lessing hadprobably by this time sucked his friends dry of any intellectual stimulusthey could yield him; and when friendship reaches that pass, it is apt tobe anything but inspiring. Except Mendelssohn and Von Kleist, they werenot men capable of rating him at his true value; and Lessing was one ofthose who always burn up the fuel of life at a fearful rate. Admirablydry as the supplies of Ramler and the rest no doubt were, they had notsubstance enough to keep his mind at the high temperature it needed, andhe would soon be driven to the cutting of green stuff from his ownwood-lot, more rich in smoke than fire. Besides this, he could hardlyhave been at ease among intimates most of whom could not even conceive ofthat intellectual honesty, that total disregard of all personal interestswhere truth was concerned, which was an innate quality of Lessing's mind. Their theory of criticism was, Truth, or even worse if possible, for allwho do not belong to our set; for us, that delicious falsehood which isno doubt a slow poison, but then so _very_ slow. Their nerves wereunbraced by that fierce democracy of thought, trampling on allprescription, all tradition, in which Lessing loved to shoulder his wayand advance his insupportable foot. "What is called a heretic, " he saysin his Preface to _Berengarius_, "has a very good side. It is a man whoat least _wishes_ to see with his own eyes. " And again, "I know not if itbe a duty to offer up fortune and life to the truth; . .. But I know it_is_ a duty, if one undertake to teach the truth, to teach the whole ofit, or none at all. " Such men as Gleim and Ramler were mere _dilettanti_, and could have no notion how sacred his convictions are to a militantthinker like Lessing. His creed as to the rights of friendship incriticism might be put in the words of Selden, the firm tread of whosemind was like his own: "Opinion and affection extremely differ. Opinionis something wherein I go about to give reason why all the world shouldthink as I think. Affection is a thing wherein I look after the pleasingof myself. " How little his friends were capable of appreciating this viewof the matter is plain from a letter of Ramler to Gleim, cited by HerrStahr. Lessing had shown up the weaknesses of a certain work by the AbbéBatteux (long ago gathered to his literary fathers as conclusively aspoor old Ramler himself), without regard to the important fact that theAbbé's book had been translated by a friend. Horrible to think of atbest, thrice horrible when the friend's name was Ramler! The impressionthereby made on the friendly heart may be conceived. A ray of lightpenetrated the rather opaque substance of Herr Ramler's mind, andrevealed to him the dangerous character of Lessing. "I know well, " hesays, "that Herr Lessing means to speak his own opinion, and"--what isthe dreadful inference?--"and, by suppressing others, to gain air, andmake room for himself. This disposition is not to be overcome. "[152]Fortunately not, for Lessing's opinion always meant something, and wasworth having. Gleim no doubt sympathized deeply with the sufferer by thistreason, for he too had been shocked at some disrespect for La Fontaine, as a disciple of whom he had announced himself. Berlin was hardly the place for Lessing, if he could not take a step inany direction without risk of treading on somebody's gouty foot. This wasnot the last time that he was to have experience of the fact that thecritic's pen, the more it has of truth's celestial temper, the more it isapt to reverse the miracle of the archangel's spear, and to bring outwhatever is toadlike in the nature of him it touches. We can wellunderstand the sadness with which he said, "Der Blick des Forscher's fand Nicht selten mehr als er zu finden wünschte. " Here, better than anywhere, we may cite something which he wrote ofhimself to a friend of Klotz. Lessing, it will be remembered, hadliterally "suppressed" Klotz. "What do you apprehend, then, from me? Themore faults and errors you point out to me, so much the more I shalllearn of you; the more I learn of you, the more thankful shall I be. .. . Iwish you knew me more thoroughly. If the opinion you have of my learningand genius (_Geist_) should perhaps suffer thereby, yet I am sure theidea I would like you to form of my character would gain. I am not theinsufferable, unmannerly, proud, slanderous man Herr Klotz proclaims me. It cost me a great deal of trouble and compulsion to be a little bitteragainst him. "[153] Ramler and the rest had contrived a nice littlesociety for mutual admiration, much like that described by Goldsmith, if, indeed, he did not convey it from the French, as was not uncommon withhim. "'What, have you never heard of the admirable Brandellius or theingenious Mogusius, one the eye and the other the heart of ourUniversity, known all over the world?' 'Never, ' cried the traveller; 'butpray inform me what Brandellius is particularly remarkable for. ' 'Youmust be little acquainted with the republic of letters, ' said the other, 'to ask such a question. Brandellius has written a most sublime panegyricon Mogusius. ' 'And, prithee, what has Mogusius done to deserve so great afavor?' 'He has written an excellent poem in praise of Brandellius. '"Lessing was not the man who could narrow himself to the proportions of aclique; lifelong he was the terror of the Brandellii and Mogusii, and, atthe signal given by him, "They, but now who seemed In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs in narrow room Throng numberless. " Besides whatever other reasons Leasing may have had for leaving Berlin, we fancy that his having exhausted whatever means it had of helping hisspiritual growth was the chief. Nine years later, he gave as a reason fornot wishing to stay long in Brunswick, "Not that I do not like Brunswick, but because nothing comes of being long in a place which one likes. "[154]Whatever the reason, Leasing, in 1760, left Berlin for Breslau, where thepost of secretary had been offered him under Frederick's tough oldGeneral Tauentzien. "I will spin myself in for a while like an ugly worm, that I may be able to come to light again as a brilliant wingedcreature, " says his diary. Shortly after his leaving Berlin, he waschosen a member of the Academy of Sciences there. Herr Stahr, who has nolittle fondness for the foot-light style of phrase, says, "It may easilybe imagined that he himself regarded his appointment as an insult ratherthan as an honor. " Lessing himself merely says that it was a matter ofindifference to him, which is much more in keeping with his character andwith the value of the intended honor. The Seven Years' War began four years before Lessing took up his abode inBreslau, and it may be asked how he, as a Saxon, was affected by it. Wemight answer, hardly at all. His position was that of armed neutrality. Long ago at Leipzig he had been accused of Prussian leanings; now inBerlin he was thought too Saxon. Though he disclaimed any such sentimentas patriotism, and called himself a cosmopolite, it is plain enough thathis position was simply that of a German. Love of country, except in avery narrow parochial way, was as impossible in Germany then as inAmerica during the Colonial period. Lessing himself, in the latter yearsof his life, was librarian of one of those petty princelets who soldtheir subjects to be shot at in America, --creatures strong enough tooppress, too weak to protect their people. Whoever would have found aGermany to love must have pieced it together as painfully as Isis did thescattered bits of Osiris. Yet he says that "the true patriot is by nomeans extinguished" in him. It was the noisy ones that he could notabide; and, writing to Gleim about his "Grenadier" verses, he advises himto soften the tone of them a little, he himself being a "declared enemyof imprecations, " which he would leave altogether to the clergy. We thinkHerr Stahr makes too much of these anti-patriot flings of Lessing, which, with a single exception, occur in his letters to Gleim, and withreference to a kind of verse that could not but be distasteful to him, asneeding no more brains than a drum, nor other inspiration than serves atrumpet. Lessing undoubtedly had better uses for his breath than to spendit in shouting for either side in this "bloody lawsuit, " as he called it, in which he was not concerned. He showed himself German enough, and inthe right way, in his persistent warfare against the tyranny of Frenchtaste. He remained in Breslau the better part of five years, studying life innew phases, gathering a library, which, as commonly happens, heafterwards sold at great loss, and writing his _Minna_ and his _Laocoön_. He accompanied Tauentzien to the siege of Schweidnitz, where Frederickwas present in person. He seems to have lived a rather free-and-easy lifeduring his term of office, kept shockingly late hours, and learned, amongother things, to gamble, --a fact for which Herr Stahr thinks it needfulto account in a high philosophical fashion. We prefer to think that thereare _some_ motives to which remarkable men are liable in common with therest of mankind, and that they may occasionally do a thing merely becauseit is pleasant, without forethought of medicinal benefit to the mind. Lessing's friends (whose names were _not_, as the reader might be temptedto suppose, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) expected him to make somethinghandsome out of his office; but the pitiful result of those five years ofopportunity was nothing more than an immortal book. Unthrifty Lessing, tohave been so nice about your fingers, (and so near the mint, too, ) whenyour general was wise enough to make his fortune! As if ink-stains werethe only ones that would wash out, and no others had ever been coveredwith white kid from the sight of all reasonable men! In July, 1764, hehad a violent fever, which he turned to account in his usual cheerfulway: "The serious epoch of my life is drawing nigh. I am beginning tobecome a man, and flatter myself that in this burning fever I have ravedaway the last remains of my youthful follies. Fortunate illness!" He hadnever intended to bind himself to an official career. To his father hewrites: "I have more than once declared that my present engagement couldnot continue long, that I have not given up my old plan of living, andthat I am more than ever resolved to withdraw from any service that isnot wholly to my mind. I have passed the middle of my life, and can thinkof nothing that could compel me to make myself a slave for the poorremainder of it. I write you this, dearest father, and must write youthis, in order that you may not be astonished if, before long, you shouldsee me once more very far removed from all hopes of, or claims to, asettled prosperity, as it is called. " Before the middle of the next yearhe was back in Berlin again. There he remained for nearly two years, trying the house-top way of lifeagain, but with indifferent success, as we have reason to think. Indeed, when the metaphor resolves itself into the plain fact of living just onthe other side of the roof, --in the garret, namely, --and that from handto mouth, as was Lessing's case, we need not be surprised to find himgradually beginning to see something more agreeable in a _fixirtes Glück_than he had once been willing to allow. At any rate, he was willing, andeven heartily desirous, that his friends should succeed in getting forhim the place of royal librarian. But Frederick, for some unexplainedreason, would not appoint him. Herr Stahr thinks it had something to dowith the old _Siècle_ manuscript business. But this seems improbable, forVoltaire's wrath was not directed against Lessing; and even if it hadbeen, the great king could hardly have carried the name of an obscureGerman author in his memory through all those anxious and war-like years. Whatever the cause, Lessing early in 1767 accepts the position ofTheatrical Manager at Hamburg, as usual not too much vexed withdisappointment, but quoting gayly "Quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio. " Like Burns, he was always "contented wi' little and canty wi' mair. " Inconnection with his place as Manager he was to write a series of dramaticessays and criticisms. It is to this we owe the _Dramaturgie_, --next tothe _Laocoön_ the most valuable of his works. But Lessing--though it isplain that he made his hand as light as he could, and wrapped his lash invelvet--soon found that actors had no more taste for truth than authors. He was obliged to drop his remarks on the special merits or demerits ofplayers, and to confine himself to those of the pieces represented. Bythis his work gained in value; and the latter part of it, written withoutreference to a particular stage, and devoted to the discussion of thosegeneral principles of dramatic art on which he had meditated long anddeeply, is far weightier than the rest. There are few men who can putforth all their muscle in a losing race, and it is characteristic ofLessing that what he wrote under the dispiritment of failure should bethe most lively and vigorous. Circumstances might be against him, but hewas incapable of believing that a cause could be lost which had onceenlisted his conviction. The theatrical enterprise did not prosper long; but Lessing had meanwhileinvolved himself as partner in a publishing business which harassed himwhile it lasted, and when it failed, as was inevitable, left him hamperedwith debt. Help came in his appointment (1770) to take charge of the Dukeof Brunswick's library at Wolfenbüttel, with a salary of six hundredthalers a year. This was the more welcome, as he soon after was betrothedwith Eva König, widow of a rich manufacturer. [155] Her husband's affairs, however, had been left in confusion, and this, with Lessing's ownembarrassments, prevented their being married till October, 1776. EvaKönig was every way worthy of him. Clever, womanly, discreet, with justenough coyness of the will to be charming when it is joined withsweetness and good sense, she was the true helpmate of such a man, --theserious companion of his mind and the playfellow of his affections. Thereis something infinitely refreshing to me in the love-letters of these twopersons. Without wanting sentiment, there is such a bracing air aboutthem as breathes from the higher levels and strong-holds of the soul. They show that self-possession which can alone reserve to love the powerof new self-surrender, --of never cloying, because never wholly possessed. Here is no invasion and conquest of the weaker nature by the stronger, but an equal league of souls, each in its own realm still sovereign. Turnfrom such letters as these to those of St. Preux and Julie, and you arestifled with the heavy perfume of a demirep's boudoir, --to those ofHerder to his Caroline, and you sniff no doubtful odor of professionalunction from the sermon-case. Manly old Dr. Johnson, who could be tenderand true to a plain woman, knew very well what he meant when he wrotethat single poetic sentence of his, --"The shepherd in Virgil grew at lastacquainted with Love, and found him to be a native of the rocks. " In January, 1778, Lessing's wife died from the effects of a difficultchildbirth. The child, a boy, hardly survived its birth. The few wordswrung out of Lessing by this double sorrow are to me as deeply moving asanything in tragedy. "I wished for once to be as happy (_es so guthaben_) as other men. But it has gone ill with me!" "And I was so loathto lose him, this son!" "My wife is dead; and I have had this experiencealso. I rejoice that I have not many more such experiences left to make, and am quite cheerful. " "If you had known her! But they say that topraise one's wife is self-praise. Well, then, I say no more of her! Butif you had known her!" _Quite cheerful!_ On the 10th of August he writesto Elise Reimarus, --he is writing to a woman now, an old friend of hisand his wife, and will be less restrained: "I am left here all alone. Ihave not a single friend to whom I can wholly confide myself. .. . Howoften must I curse my ever wishing to be for once as happy as other men!How often have I wished myself back again in my old, isolatedcondition, --to be nothing, to wish nothing, to do nothing, but what thepresent moment brings with it!. .. Yet I am too proud to think myselfunhappy. I just grind my teeth, and let the boat go as pleases wind andwaves. Enough that I will not overset it myself. " It is plain from thisletter that suicide had been in his mind, and, with his antique way ofthinking on many subjects, he would hardly have looked on it as a crime. But he was too brave a man to throw up the sponge to fate, and had workto do yet. Within a few days of his wife's death he wrote to Eschenburg:"I am right heartily ashamed if my letter betrayed the least despair. Despair is not nearly so much my failing as levity, which often expressesitself with a little bitterness and misanthropy. " A stoic, not frominsensibility or cowardice, as so many are, but from stoutness of heart, he blushes at a moment's abdication of self-command. And he will not roilthe clear memory of his love with any tinge of the sentimentality so muchthe fashion, and to be had so cheap, in that generation. There is amoderation of sincerity peculiar to Lessing in the epithet of thefollowing sentence: "How dearly must I pay for the single year I havelived with a _sensible_ wife!" Werther had then been published fouryears. Lessing's grief has that pathos which he praised in sculpture, --hemay writhe, but he must not scream. Nor is this a new thing with him. Onthe death of a younger brother, he wrote to his father, fourteen yearsbefore: "Why should those who grieve communicate their grief to eachother purposely to increase it?. .. Many mourn in death what they lovednot living. I will love in life what nature bids me love, and after deathstrive to bewail it as little as I can. " We think Herr Stahr is on his stilts again when he speaks of Lessing'sposition at Wolfenbüttel. He calls it an "assuming the chains of feudalservice, being buried in a corner, a martyrdom that consumed the bestpowers of his mind and crushed him in body and spirit forever. " To crush_forever_ is rather a strong phrase, Herr Stahr, to apply to the spirit, if one must ever give heed to the sense as well as the sound of what oneis writing. But eloquence has no bowels for its victims. We have no doubtthe Duke of Brunswick meant well by Lessing, and the salary he paid himwas as large as he would have got from the frugal Frederick. But onewhose trade it was to be a Duke could hardly have had much sympathy withhis librarian after he had once found out what he really was. For even ifhe was not, as Herr Stahr affirms, a republican, and we doubt very muchif he was, yet he was not a man who could play with ideas in the lightFrench fashion. At the ardent touch of his sincerity, they took fire, andgrew dangerous to what is called the social fabric. The logic of wit, with its momentary flash, is a very different thing from that consequentlogic of thought, pushing forward its deliberate sap day and night with afixed object, which belonged to Lessing. The men who attack abuses arenot so much to be dreaded by the reigning house of Superstition as thosewho, as Dante says, syllogize hateful truths. As for "the chains offeudal service, " they might serve a Fenian Head-Centre on a pinch, butare wholly out of place here. The slavery that Lessing had really takenon him was that of a great library, an Alcina that could always tooeasily witch him away from the more serious duty of his genius. That amind like his could be buried in a corner is mere twaddle, and of a kindthat has done great wrong to the dignity of letters. Where-ever Lessingsat, was the head of the table. That he suffered at Wolfenbüttel is true;but was it nothing to be in love and in debt at the same time, and tofeel that his fruition of the one must be postponed for uncertain yearsby his own folly in incurring the other? If the sparrow-life must end, surely a wee bush is better than nae beild. One cause of Lessing'soccasional restlessness and discontent Herr Stahr has failed to notice. It is evident from many passages in his letters that he had his share ofthe hypochondria which goes with an imaginative temperament. But in himit only serves to bring out in stronger relief his deep-rooted manliness. He spent no breath in that melodious whining which, beginning withRousseau, has hardly yet gone out of fashion. Work of some kind was hismedicine for the blues, --if not always of the kind he would have chosen, then the best that was to be had; for the useful, too, had for him asweetness of its own. Sometimes he found a congenial labor in rescuing, as he called it, the memory of some dead scholar or thinker from thewrongs of ignorance or prejudice or falsehood; sometimes in fishing amanuscript out of the ooze of oblivion, and giving it, after a criticalcleansing, to the world. Now and then he warmed himself and kept hismuscle in trim with buffeting soundly the champions of that shallowartificiality and unctuous wordiness, one of which passed for orthodox inliterature, and the other in theology. True religion and creative geniuswere both so beautiful to him that he could never abide the mediocrecounterfeit of either, and he who put so much of his own life into all hewrote could not but hold all scripture sacred in which a divine soul hadrecorded itself. It would be doing Lessing great wrong to confound hiscontroversial writing with the paltry quarrels of authors. His ownpersonal relations enter into them surprisingly little, for his quarrelwas never with men, but with falsehood, cant, and misleading tradition, in whomsoever incarnated. Save for this, they were no longer readable, and might be relegated to that herbarium of Billingsgate gathered by theelder Disraeli. So far from being "crushed in spirit" at Wolfenbüttel, the years he spentthere were among the most productive of his life. "Emilia Galotti, " begunin 1758, was finished there and published in 1771. The controversy withGötze, by far the most important he was engaged in, and the one in whichhe put forth his maturest powers, was carried on thence. His "Nathan theWise" (1779), by which almost alone he is known as a poet outside ofGermany, was conceived and composed there. The last few years of his lifewere darkened by ill-health and the depression which it brings. HisNathan had not the success he hoped. It is sad to see the strong, self-sufficing man casting about for a little sympathy, even for a littlepraise. "It is really needful to me that you should have some small goodopinion of it [Nathan], in order to make me once more contented withmyself, " he writes to Elise Reimarus in May, 1779. That he was weary ofpolemics, and dissatisfied with himself for letting them distract himfrom better things, appears from his last pathetic letter to the oldfriend he loved and valued most, --Mendelssohn. "And in truth, dearfriend, I sorely need a letter like yours from time to time, if I am notto become wholly out of humor. I think you do not know me as a man thathas a very hot hunger for praise. But the coldness with which the worldis wont to convince certain people that they do not suit it, if notdeadly, yet stiffens one with chill. I am not astonished that _all_ Ihave written lately does not please _you_. .. . At best, a passage here andthere may have cheated you by recalling our better days. I, too, was thena sound, slim sapling, and am now such a rotten, gnarled trunk!" This waswritten on the 19th of December, 1780; and on the 15th of February, 1781, Lessing died, not quite fifty-two years old. Goethe was then in histhirty-second year, and Schiller ten years younger. * * * * * Of Lessing's relation to metaphysics the reader will find amplediscussion in Herr Stahr's volumes. We are not particularly concernedwith them, because his interest in such questions was purely speculative, and because he was more concerned to exercise the powers of his mind thanto analyze them. His chief business, his master impulse always, was to bea man of letters in the narrower sense of the term. Even into theology heonly made occasional raids across the border, as it were, and that not somuch with a purpose of reform as in defence of principles which appliedequally to the whole domain of thought. He had even less sympathy withheterodoxy than with orthodoxy, and, so far from joining a party orwishing to form one, would have left belief a matter of choice to theindividual conscience. "From the bottom of my heart I hate all thosepeople who wish to found sects. For it is not error, but sectarian error, yes, even sectarian truth, that makes men unhappy, or would do so iftruth would found a sect. "[156] Again he says, that in his theologicalcontroversies he is "much less concerned about theology than about soundcommon-sense, and only therefore prefer the old orthodox (at bottom_tolerant_) theology to the new (at bottom _intolerant_), because theformer openly conflicts with sound common-sense, while the latter wouldfain corrupt it. I reconcile myself with my open enemies in order thebetter to be on my guard against my secret ones. "[157] At another time hetells his brother that he has a wholly false notion of his (Lessing's)relation to orthodoxy. "Do you suppose I grudge the world that anybodyshould seek to enlighten it?--that I do not heartily wish that every oneshould think rationally about religion? I should loathe myself if even inmy scribblings I had any other end than to help forward those greatviews. But let me choose my own way, which I think best for this purpose. And what is simpler than this way? I would not have the impure water, which has long been unfit to use, preserved; but I would not have itthrown away before we know whence to get purer. .. . Orthodoxy, thank God, we were pretty well done with; a partition-wall had been built between itand Philosophy, behind which each could go her own way without troublingthe other. But what are they doing now? They are tearing down this wall, and, under the pretext of making us rational Christians, are making usvery irrational philosophers. .. . We are agreed that our old religioussystem is false; but I cannot say with you that it is a patchwork ofbunglers and half-philosophers. I know nothing in the world in whichhuman acuteness has been more displayed or exercised than in that. "[158]Lessing was always for freedom, never for looseness, of thought, stillless for laxity of principle. But it must be a real freedom, and not thatvain struggle to become a majority, which, if it succeed, escapes fromheresy only to make heretics of the other side. _Abire ad plures_ wouldwith him have meant, not bodily but spiritual death. He did not love thefanaticism of innovation a whit better than that of conservatism. To hissane understanding, both were equally hateful, as different masks of thesame selfish bully. Coleridge said that toleration was impossible tillindifference made it worthless. Lessing did not wish for toleration, because that implies authority, nor could his earnest temper haveconceived of indifference. But he thought it as absurd to regulateopinion as the color of the hair. Here, too, he would have agreed withSelden, that "it is a vain thing to talk of an heretic, for a man for hisheart cannot think any otherwise than he does think. " Herr Stahr'schapters on this point, bating a little exaltation of tone, are verysatisfactory; though, in his desire to make a leader of Lessing, healmost represents him as being what he shunned, --the founder of a sect. The fact is, that Lessing only formulated in his own way a generalmovement of thought, and what mainly interests us is that in him we see alayman, alike indifferent to clerisy and heresy, giving energetic andpointed utterance to those opinions of his class which the clergy arecontent to ignore so long as they remain esoteric. At present the worldhas advanced to where Lessing stood, while the Church has done its bestto stand stock-still; and it would be a curious were it not a melancholyspectacle, to see the indifference with which the laity look on whiletheologians thrash their wheatless straw, utterly unconscious that thereis no longer any common term possible that could bring their creeds againto any point of bearing on the practical life of men. Fielding never madea profounder stroke of satire than in Squire Western's indignant "Art notin the pulpit now! When art got up there, I never mind what dost say. " As an author, Lessing began his career at a period when we cannot saythat German literature was at its lowest ebb, only because there had notyet been any flood-tide. That may be said to have begun with him. When wesay German literature, we mean so much of it as has any interest outsideof Germany. That part of the literary histories which treats of the deadwaste and middle of the eighteenth century reads like a collection ofobituaries, and were better reduced to the conciseness of epitaph, thoughthe authors of them seem to find a melancholy pleasure, much like that ofundertakers, in the task by which they live. Gottsched reigned supreme onthe legitimate throne of dulness. In Switzerland, Bodmer essayed a morerepublican form of the same authority. At that time a traveller reportseight hundred authors in Zürich alone! Young aspirant for lettered fame, in imagination clear away the lichens from their forgotten headstones, and read humbly the "As I am, so thou must be, " on all! Everybodyremembers how Goethe, in the seventh book of his autobiography, tells thestory of his visit to Gottsched. He enters by mistake an inner room atthe moment when a frightened servant brings the discrowned potentate aperiwig large enough to reach to the elbows. That awful emblem ofpretentious sham seems to be the best type of the literature thenpredominant. We always fancy it set upon a pole, like Gessler's hat, withnothing in it that was not wooden, for all men to bow down before. Theperiwig style had its natural place in the age of Louis XIV. , and therewere certainly brains under it. But it had run out in France, as thetie-wig style of Pope had in England. In Germany it was the mereimitation of an imitation. Will it be believed that Gottsched recommendshis Art of Poetry to beginners, in preference to Breitinger's, because it"_will enable them to produce every species of poem in a correct style_, while out of that no one can learn to make an ode or a cantata"?"Whoever, " he says, "buys Breitinger's book _in order to learn how tomake poems_, will too late regret his money. "[159] Gottsched, perhaps, did some service even by his advocacy of French models, by callingattention to the fact that there _was_ such a thing as style, and that itwas of some consequence. But not one of the authors of that time can besaid to survive, nor to be known even by name except to Germans, unlessit be Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, and Gellert. And the latter'simmortality, such as it is, reminds us somewhat of that Lady Gosling's, whose obituary stated that she was "mentioned by Mrs. Barbauld in herLife of Richardson 'under the name of Miss M. , afterwards Lady G. '"Klopstock himself is rather remembered for what he was than what heis, --an immortality of unreadableness; and we much doubt if many Germansput the "Oberon" in their trunks when they start on a journey. Herderalone survives, if not as a contributor to literature, strictly socalled, yet as a thinker and as part of the intellectual impulse of theday. But at the time, though there were two parties, yet within the linesof each there was a loyal reciprocity of what is called on such occasionsappreciation. Wig ducked to wig, each blockhead had a brother, and therewas a universal apotheosis of the mediocrity of our set. If the greatesthappiness of the greatest number be the true theory, this was all thatcould be desired. Even Lessing at one time looked up to Hagedorn as theGerman Horace. If Hagedorn were pleased, what mattered it to Horace?Worse almost than this was the universal pedantry. The solemn bray of onepedagogue was taken up and prolonged in a thousand echoes. There was notonly no originality, but no desire for it, --perhaps even a dread of it, as something that would break the _entente cordiale_ of placid mutualassurance. No great writer had given that tone of good-breeding to thelanguage which would gain it entrance to the society of Europeanliterature. No man of genius had made it a necessity of polite culture. It was still as rudely provincial as the Scotch of Allan Ramsay. Frederick the Great was to be forgiven if, with his practical turn, hegave himself wholly to French, which had replaced Latin as a cosmopolitantongue. It had lightness, ease, fluency, elegance, --in short, all thegood qualities that German lacked. The study of French models was perhapsthe best thing for German literature before it got out of long-clothes. It was bad only when it became a tradition and a tyranny. Lessing didmore than any other man to overthrow this foreign usurpation when it haddone its work. The same battle had to be fought on English soil also, and indeed ishardly over yet. For the renewed outbreak of the old quarrel betweenClassical and Romantic grew out of nothing more than an attempt of themodern spirit to free itself from laws of taste laid down by the _GrandSiècle_. But we must not forget the debt which all modern proseliterature owes to France. It is true that Machiavelli was the first towrite with classic pith and point in a living language; but he is, forall that, properly an ancient. Montaigne is really the first modernwriter, --the first who assimilated his Greek and Latin, and showed thatan author might be original and charming, even classical, if he did nottry too hard. He is also the first modern critic, and his judgments ofthe writers of antiquity are those of an equal. He made the ancients hisservants, to help him think in Gascon French; and, in spite of hisendless quotations, began the crusade against pedantry. It was not, however, till a century later, that the reform became complete in France, and then crossed the Channel. Milton is still a pedant in his prose, andnot seldom even in his great poem. Dryden was the first Englishman whowrote perfectly easy prose, and he owed his style and turn of thought tohis French reading. His learning sits easily on him, and has a moderncut. So far, the French influence was one of unmixed good, for it rescuedus from pedantry. It must have done something for Germany in the samedirection. For its effect on poetry we cannot say as much; and itstraditions had themselves become pedantry in another shape when Lessingmade an end of it. He himself certainly learned to write prose ofDiderot; and whatever Herr Stahr may think of it, his share in the"Letters on German Literature" got its chief inspiration from France. It is in the _Dramaturgie_ that Lessing first properly enters as aninfluence into European literature. He may be said to have begun therevolt from pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have been thusunconsciously the founder of romanticism. Wieland's translation ofShakespeare had, it is true, appeared in 1762; but Lessing was the firstcritic whose profound knowledge of the Greek drama and apprehension ofits principles gave weight to his judgment, who recognized in what thetrue greatness of the poet consisted, and found him to be really nearerthe Greeks than any other modern. This was because Lessing looked alwaysmore to the life than the form, --because he knew the classics, and didnot merely cant about them. But if the authority of Lessing, by makingpeople feel easy in their admiration for Shakespeare, perhaps increasedthe influence of his works, and if his discussions of Aristotle havegiven a new starting-point to modern criticism, it may be doubted whetherthe immediate effect on literature of his own critical essays was sogreat as Herr Stahr supposes. Surely "Götz" and "The Robbers" are nothinglike what he would have called Shakespearian, and the whole _Sturm undDrang_ tendency would have roused in him nothing but antipathy. Fixedprinciples in criticism are useful in helping us to form a judgment ofworks already produced, but it is questionable whether they are notrather a hindrance than a help to living production. Ben Jonson was afine critic, intimate with the classics as few men have either theleisure or the strength of mind to be in this age of many books, andbuilt regular plays long before they were heard of in France. But hecontinually trips and falls flat over his metewand of classicalpropriety, his personages are abstractions, and fortunately neither hisprecepts nor his practice influenced any one of his greater coevals. [160]In breadth of understanding, and the gravity of purpose that comes of it, he was far above Fletcher or Webster, but how far below either in thesubtler, the incalculable, qualities of a dramatic poet! Yet Ben, withhis principles off, could soar and sing with the best of them; and thereare strains in his lyrics which Herrick, the most Catullian of poetssince Catullus, could imitate, but never match. A constant reference tothe statutes which taste has codified would only bewilder the creativeinstinct. Criticism can at best teach writers without genius what is tobe avoided or imitated. It cannot communicate life; and its effect, whenreduced to rules, has commonly been to produce that correctness which isso praiseworthy and so intolerable. It cannot give taste, it can onlydemonstrate who has had it. Lessing's essays in this kind were of serviceto German literature by their manliness of style, whose example was wortha hundred treatises, and by the stimulus there is in all originalthinking. Could he have written such a poem as he was capable ofconceiving, his influence would have been far greater. It is the livingsoul, and not the metaphysical abstraction of it, that is genetic inliterature. If to do were as easy as to know what were good to be done!It was out of his own failures to reach the ideal he saw so clearly, thatLessing drew the wisdom which made him so admirable a critic. Even here, too, genius can profit by no experience but its own. For, in spite of Herr Stahr's protest, we must acknowledge the truth ofLessing's own characteristic confession, that he was no poet. A man ofgenius he unquestionably was, if genius may be claimed no less for forcethan fineness of mind, --for the intensity of conviction that inspires theunderstanding as much as for that apprehension of beauty which givesenergy of will to imagination, --but a poetic genius he was not. His mindkindled by friction in the process of thinking, not in the flash ofconception, and its delight is in demonstration, not in bodying forth. His prose can leap and run, his verse is always thinking of its feet. Yetin his "Minna" and his "Emilia"[161] he shows one faculty of thedramatist, that of construction, in a higher degree than any otherGerman. [162] Here his critical deductions served him to some purpose. Theaction moves rapidly, there is no speechifying, and the parts arecoherent. Both plays act better than anything of Goethe or Schiller. Butit is the story that interests us, and not the characters. These are not, it is true, the incorporation of certain ideas, or, still worse, ofcertain dogmas, but they certainly seem something like machines by whichthe motive of the play is carried on; and there is nothing of thatinterplay of plot and character which makes Shakespeare more real in thecloset than other dramatists with all the helps of the theatre. It is astriking illustration at once of the futility of mere critical insightand of Lessing's want of imagination, that in the Emilia he should havethought a Roman motive consistent with modern habits of thought, and thatin Nathan he should have been guilty of anachronisms which violate notonly the accidental truth of fact, but the essential truth of character. Even if we allowed him imagination, it must be only on the lower plane ofprose; for of verse as anything more than so many metrical feet he hadnot the faintest notion. Of that exquisite sympathy with the movement ofthe mind, with every swifter or slower pulse of passion, which proves itanother species from prose, the very [Greek: aphroditae kai lura] ofspeech, and not merely a higher one, he wanted the fineness of sense toconceive. If we compare the prose of Dante or Milton, though both wereeloquent, with their verse, we see at once which was the most congenialto them. Lessing has passages of freer and more harmonious utterance insome of his most careless prose essays, than can be found in his Nathanfrom the first line to the last. In the _numeris lege solutis_ he isoften snatched beyond himself, and becomes truly dithyrambic; in hispentameters the march of the thought is comparatively hampered andirresolute. His best things are not poetically delicate, but have thetougher fibre of proverbs. Is it not enough, then, to be a greatprose-writer? They are as rare as great poets, and if Lessing have thegift to stir and to dilate that something deeper than the mind whichgenius only can reach, what matter if it be not done to music? Of hisminor poems we need say little. Verse was always more or less mechanicalwith him, and his epigrams are almost all stiff, as if they were badtranslations from the Latin. Many of them are shockingly coarse, and inliveliness are on a level with those of our Elizabethan period. HerrStahr, of course, cannot bear to give them up, even though Gervinus bewilling. The prettiest of his shorter poems (_Die Namen_)has beenappropriated by Coleridge, who has given it a grace which it wants in theoriginal. His Nathan, by a poor translation of which he is chiefly knownto English readers, is an Essay on Toleration in the form of a dialogue. As a play, it has not the interest of Minna or Emilia, though theGermans, who have a praiseworthy national stoicism where one of theirgreat writers is concerned, find in seeing it represented a gravesatisfaction, like that of subscribing to a monument. There is a soberlustre of reflection in it that makes it very good reading; but it wantsthe molten interfusion of thought and phrase which only imagination canachieve. As Lessing's mind was continually advancing, --always open to newimpressions, and capable, as very few are, of apprehending themany-sidedness of truth, --as he had the rare quality of being honest withhimself, --his works seem fragmentary, and give at first an impression ofincompleteness. But one learns at length to recognize and value this veryincompleteness as characteristic of the man who was growing lifelong, andto whom the selfish thought that any share of truth could be exclusively_his_ was an impossibility. At the end of the ninety-fifth number of the_Dramaturgie_ he says: "I remind my readers here, that these pages are byno means intended to contain a dramatic system. I am accordingly notbound to solve all the difficulties which I raise. I am quite willingthat my thoughts should seem to want connection, --nay, even to contradicteach other, --if only there are thoughts in which they [my readers] findmaterial for thinking themselves. I wish to do nothing more than scatterthe _fermenta cognitionis_. " That is Lessing's great praise, and givesits chief value to his works, --a value, indeed, imperishable, and of thenoblest kind. No writer can leave a more precious legacy to posteritythan this; and beside this shining merit, all mere literary splendorslook pale and cold. There is that life in Lessing's thought whichengenders life, and not only thinks for us, but makes us think. Notsceptical, but forever testing and inquiring, it is out of the cloud ofhis own doubt that the flash comes at last with sudden and vividillumination. Flashes they indeed are, his finest intuitions, and of verydifferent quality from the equable north-light of the artist. He felt it, and said it of himself, "Ever so many flashes of lightning do not makedaylight. " We speak now of those more rememberable passages where hishighest individuality reveals itself in what may truly be called apassion of thought. In the "Laocoön" there is daylight of the serenesttemper, and never was there a better example of the discourse of reason, though even that is also a fragment. But it is as a nobly original man, even more than as an original thinker, that Lessing is precious to us, and that he is so considerable in Germanliterature. In a higher sense, but in the same kind, he is to Germanswhat Dr. Johnson is to us, --admirable for what he was. Like Johnson's, too, but still from a loftier plane, a great deal of his thought has adirect bearing on the immediate life and interests of men. His genius wasnot a St. Elmo's fire, as it so often is with mere poets, --as it was inShelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the points ofhis thought, --but was interfused with his whole nature and made a part ofhis very being. To the Germans, with their weak nerve of sentimentalism, his brave common-sense is a far wholesomer tonic than the cynicism ofHeine, which is, after all, only sentimentalism soured. His jealousy formaintaining the just boundaries whether of art or speculation may warnthem to check with timely dikes the tendency of their thought to diffuseinundation. Their fondness in aesthetic discussion for a nomenclaturesubtile enough to split a hair at which even a Thomist would havedespaired, is rebuked by the clear simplicity of his style. [163] But heis no exclusive property of Germany. As a complete man, constant, generous, full of honest courage, as a hardy follower of Thought wherevershe might lead him, above all, as a confessor of that Truth which isforever revealing itself to the seeker, and is the more loved becausenever wholly revealable, he is an ennobling possession of mankind. Lethis own striking words characterize him:-- "Not the truth of which any one is, or supposes himself to be, possessed, but the upright endeavor he has made to arrive at truth, makes the worthof the man. For not by the possession, but by the investigation, of truthare his powers expanded, wherein alone his ever-growing perfectionconsists. Possession makes us easy, indolent, proud. "If God held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left nothingbut the ever-restless instinct for truth, though with the condition offor ever and ever erring, and should say to me, Choose! I should bowhumbly to his left hand, and say, Father, give! pure truth is for Theealone!" It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. Thedust-cloud of notoriety which follows and envelopes the men who drivewith the wind bewilders contemporary judgment. Lessing, while he lived, had little reward for his labor but the satisfaction inherent in all workfaithfully done; the highest, no doubt, of which human nature is capable, and yet perhaps not so sweet as that sympathy of which the world's praiseis but an index. But if to perpetuate herself beyond the grave in healthyand ennobling influences be the noblest aspiration of the mind, and itsfruition the only reward she would have deemed worthy of herself, then isLessing to be counted thrice fortunate. Every year since he was laidprematurely in the earth has seen his power for good increase, and madehim more precious to the hearts and intellects of men. "Lessing, " saidGoethe, "would have declined the lofty title of a Genius; but hisenduring influence testifies against himself. On the other hand, we havein literature other and indeed important names of men who, while theylived, were esteemed great geniuses, but whose influence ended with theirlives, and who, accordingly, were less than they and others thought. For, as I have said, there is no genius without a productive power thatcontinues forever operative. "[164] Footnotes: [147] G. E. Lessing. _Sein Leben und seine Werke_. Von Adolf Stahr. Vermehrte und verbesserte Volks-Ausgabe. Dritte Auflage Berlin. 1864. _The Same_. Translated by E. P. Evans, Ph. D. , Professor, &c. In the University of Michigan. Boston: W. V. Spencer. 1866. 2 vols. G. E. Lessing's Sämmtliche Schriften, herausgegeben von Karl Lachmann. 1853-57. 12 Bände. [148] "If I write at all, it is not possible for me to write otherwise than just as I think and feel. "--Lessing to his father, 21st December, 1767. [149] "I am sure that Kleist would rather have taken another wound with him into his grave than have such stuff jabbered over him (_sich solch Zeug nachschwatzen lassen_). " Lessing to Gleim, 6th September 1759. [150] Letter to Klotz, 9th June, 1766. [151] Herr Stahr heads the fifth chapter of his Second Book, "Lessing at Wittenberg. December, 1751, to November, 1752. " But we never feel quite sure of his dates. The Richier affair puts Lessing in Berlin in December, 1751, and he took his Master's degree at Wittenberg, 29th April, 1752. We are told that he finally left Wittenberg "toward the end" of that year. He himself, writing from Berlin in 1754, says that he has been absent from that city _nur ein halbes Jahr_ since 1748. There is only one letter for 1762, dated at Wittenberg, 9th June. [152] "Ramler, " writes Georg Forster, "ist die Ziererei, die Eigenliebe die Eitelkeit in eigener Person. " [153] Lessing to Von Murr, 25th November, 1768. The whole letter is well worth reading. [154] A favorite phrase of his, which Egbert has preserved for us with its Saxon accent, was, _Es kommt doch nischt dabey heraus_, implying that one might do something better for a constancy than shearing twine. [155] I find surprisingly little about Lessing in such of the contemporary correspondence of German literary men as I have read. A letter of Boie to Merck (10 April, 1775) gives us a glimpse of him. "Do you know that Lessing will probably marry Reiske's widow and come to Dresden in place of Hagedorn? The restless spirit! How he will get along with the artists, half of them, too, Italians, is to be seen. .. . Liffert and he have met and parted good friends. He has worn ever since on his finger the ring with the skeleton and butterfly which Liffert gave him. He is reported to be much dissatisfied with the theatrical filibustering of Goethe and Lenz, especially with the remarks on the drama in which so little respect is shown for his Aristotle, and the Leipzig folks are said to be greatly rejoiced at getting such an ally. " [156] To his brother Karl, 20th April, 1774. [157] To the same, 20th March, 1777. [158] To the same, 2d February, 1774. [159] Gervinus, IV. 62. [160] It should be considered, by those sagacious persons who think that the most marvellous intellect of which we have any record could not master so much Latin and Greek as would serve a sophomore, that Shakespeare must through conversation have possessed himself of whatever principles of art Ben Jonson and the other university men had been able to deduce from their study of the classics. That they should not have discussed these matters over their sack at the Mermaid is incredible; that Shakespeare, who left not a drop in any orange he squeezed, could not also have got all the juice out of this one, is even more so. [161] In "Minna" and "Emilia" Lessing followed the lead of Diderot. In the Preface to the second edition of Diderot's _Théâtre_, he says: "I am very conscious that my taste, without Diderot's example and teaching, would have taken quite another direction. Perhaps one more my own, yet hardly one with which my understanding would in the long run have been so well content. " Diderot's choice of prose was dictated and justified by the accentual poverty of his mother-tongue, Lessing certainly revised his judgment on this point (for it was not equally applicable to German), and wrote his maturer "Nathan" in what he took for blank verse. There was much kindred between the minds of the two men. Diderot always seems to us a kind of deboshed Lessing. Lessing was also indebted to Burke, Hume, the two Wartons, and Hurd, among other English writers. Not that he borrowed anything of them but the quickening of his own thought. It should be remembered that Rousseau was seventeen, Diderot and Sterne sixteen, and Winckelmann twelve years older than Lessing. Wieland was four years younger. [162] Goethe's appreciation of Lessing grew with his years. He writes to Lavater, 18th March, 1781: "Lessing's death has greatly depressed me. I had much pleasure in him and much hope of him. " This is a little patronizing in tone. But in the last year of his life, talking with Eckermann, he naturally antedates his admiration, as reminiscence is wont to do: "You can conceive what an effect this piece (_Minna_)had upon us young people. It was, in fact, a shining meteor. It made us aware that something higher existed than anything whereof that feeble literary epoch had a notion. The first two acts are truly a masterpiece of exposition, from which one learned much and can always learn. " [163] Nothing can be droller than the occasional translation by Vischer of a sentence of Lessing into his own jargon. [164] Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, III. 229. ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. [165] "We have had the great professor and founder of the philosophy of Vanityin England. As I had good opportunities of knowing his proceedings almostfrom day to day, he left no doubt in my mind that he entertained noprinciple either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding butvanity; with this vice he was possessed to a degree little short ofmadness. Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for everyindividual with whom the professors come in contact, form the characterof the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, thistheir hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labor, as well asthe tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honorsthe giver and the receiver, and then pleads his beggary as an excuse forhis crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by theremotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as asort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, andsends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young, but bears are not philosophers. " This was Burke's opinion of the only contemporary who can be said torival him in fervid and sustained eloquence, to surpass him in grace andpersuasiveness of style. Perhaps we should have been more thankful to himif he had left us instead a record of those "proceedings almost from dayto day" which he had such "good opportunities of knowing, " but itprobably never entered his head that posterity might care as much aboutthe doings of the citizen of Geneva as about the sayings of even aBritish Right Honorable. Vanity eludes recognition by its victims in moreshapes, and more pleasing, than any other passion, and perhaps had Mr. Burke been able imaginatively to translate Swiss Jean Jacques into IrishEdmund, he would have found no juster equivalent for the obnoxioustrisyllable than "righteous self-esteem. " For Burke was himself also, inthe subtler sense of the word, a sentimentalist, that is, a man who tookwhat would now be called an aesthetic view of morals and politics. No manwho ever wrote English, except perhaps Mr. Ruskin, more habituallymistook his own personal likes and dislikes, tastes and distastes, forgeneral principles, and this, it may be suspected, is the secret of allmerely eloquent writing. He hints at madness as an explanation ofRousseau, and it is curious enough that Mr. Buckle was fain to explain_him_ in the same way. It is not, we confess, a solution that we findvery satisfactory in this latter case. Burke's fury against the FrenchRevolution was nothing more than was natural to a desperate man inself-defence. It was his own life, or, at least, all that made life dearto him, that was in danger. He had all that abstract political wisdomwhich may be naturally secreted by a magnanimous nature and a sensitivetemperament, absolutely none of that rough-and-tumble kind which is soneedful for the conduct of affairs. Fastidiousness is only another formof egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in thenarrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistakeit for what they are seeking. Burke's hatred of Rousseau was genuine andinstinctive. It was so genuine and so instinctive as no hatred can be butthat of self, of our own weaknesses as we see them in another man. Butthere was also something deeper in it than this. There was mixed with itthe natural dread in the political diviner of the political logician, --inthe empirical, of the theoretic statesman. Burke, confounding the idea ofsociety with the form of it then existing, would have preserved that asthe only specific against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that society as itthen existed was but another name for anarchy, would have reconstitutedit on an ideal basis. The one has left behind him some of the profoundestaphorisms of political wisdom; the other, some of the clearest principlesof political science. The one, clinging to Divine right, found in thefact that things were, a reason that they ought to be; the other, aimingto solve the problem of the Divine order, would deduce from thatabstraction alone the claim of anything to be at all. There seems a mereoppugnancy of nature between the two, and yet both were, in differentways, the dupes of their own imaginations. Now let us hear the opinion of a philosopher who _was_ a bear, whetherbears be philosophers or not. Boswell had a genuine relish for what wassuperior in any way, from genius to claret, and of course he did not letRousseau escape him. "One evening at the Mitre, Johnson saidsarcastically to me, 'It seems, sir, you have kept very good companyabroad, --Rousseau and Wilkes!' I answered with a smile, 'My dear sir, youdon't call Rousseau bad company; do you really think _him_ a bad man?'Johnson: 'Sir, if you are talking jestingly of this, I don't talk withyou. If you mean to be serious, I think him one of the worst of men, arascal who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been. Three orfour nations have expelled him, and it is a shame that he is protected inthis country. Rousseau, sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign asentence for his transportation, than that of any felon who has gone fromthe Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work inthe plantations. '" _We_ were the plantations then, and Rousseau wasdestined to work there in another and much more wonderful fashion thanthe gruff old Ursa Major imagined. However, there is always a refreshingheartiness in his growl, a masculine bass with no snarl in it. TheDoctor's logic is of that fine old crusted Port sort, the nativemanufacture of the British conservative mind. Three or four nations_have_, therefore England ought. A few years later, had the Doctor beenliving, if three or four nations had treated their kings as France didhers, would he have thought the _ergo_ a very stringent one for England? Mr. Burke, who could speak with studied respect of the Prince of Wales, and of his vices with that charity which thinketh no evil and can affordto think no evil of so important a living member of the BritishConstitution, surely could have had no unmixed moral repugnance forRousseau's "disgustful amours. " It was because they were _his_ that theywere so loathsome. Mr. Burke was a snob, though an inspired one. Dr. Johnson, the friend of that wretchedest of lewd fellows, Richard Savage, and of that gay man about town, Topham Beauclerk, --himself sprung from anamour that would have been disgustful had it not been royal, --must alsohave felt something more in respect of Rousseau than the mere repugnanceof virtue for vice. We must sometimes allow to personal temperament itsright of peremptory challenge. Johnson had not that fine sensitiveness tothe political atmosphere which made Burke presageful of coming tempest, but both of them felt that there was something dangerous in this man. Their dislike has in it somewhat of the energy of fear. Neither of themhad the same feeling toward Voltaire, the man of supreme talent, but bothfelt that what Rousseau was possessed by was genius, with its terribleforce either to attract or repel. "By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. " Burke and Johnson were both of them sincere men, both of them men ofcharacter as well as of intellectual force; and we cite their opinions ofRousseau with the respect which is due to an honest conviction which hasapparent grounds for its adoption, whether we agree with it or no. But itstrikes us as a little singular that one whose life was so full of moralinconsistency, whose character is so contemptible in many ways, in somewe might almost say so revolting, should yet have exercised so deep andlasting an influence, and on minds so various, should still be an objectof minute and earnest discussion, --that he should have had such vigor inhis intellectual loins as to have been the father of Châteaubriand, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, and many more in literature, in politicsof Jefferson and Thomas Paine, --that the spots he had haunted should drawpilgrims so unlike as Gibbon and Napoleon, nay, should draw them still, after the lapse of near a century. Surely there must have been a basis ofsincerity in this man seldom matched, if it can prevail against so manyreasons for repugnance, aversion, and even disgust. He could not havebeen the mere sentimentalist and rhetorician for which therough-and-ready understanding would at first glance be inclined tocondemn him. In a certain sense he was both of these, but he wassomething more. It will bring us a little nearer the point we are aimingat if we quote one other and more recent English opinion of him. Mr. Thomas Moore, returning pleasantly in a travelling-carriage from atrip to Italy, in which he had never forgotten the poetical shop at home, but had carefully noted down all the pretty images that occurred to himfor future use, --Mr. Thomas Moore, on his way back from a visit to hisnoble friend Byron, at Venice, who had there been leading a life so grossas to be talked about, even amid the crash of Napoleon's fall, and whowas just writing "Don Juan" for the improvement of the world, --Mr. ThomasMoore, fresh from the reading of Byron's Memoirs, which were soscandalous that, by some hocus-pocus, three thousand guineas afterwardfound their way into his own pocket for consenting to suppress them, --Mr. Thomas Moore, the _ci-devant_ friend of the Prince Regent, and the authorof Little's Poems, among other objects of pilgrimage visits _LesCharmettes_, where Rousseau had lived with Madame de Warens. So good anopportunity for occasional verses was not to be lost, so good a text fora little virtuous moralizing not to be thrown away; and accordingly Mr. Moore pours out several pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sensualityof the dead man of genius. There was no horror for Byron. Toward him allwas suavity and decorous _bienséance_. That lively sense of benefits tobe received made the Irish Anacreon wink with both his little eyes. Inthe judgment of a liberal like Mr. Moore, were not the errors of a lordexcusable? But with poor Rousseau the case was very different. The son ofa watchmaker, an outcast from boyhood up, always on the perilous edge ofpoverty, --what right had he to indulge himself in any immoralities? So itis always with the sentimentalists. It is never the thing in itself thatis bad or good, but the thing in its relation to some conventional andmostly selfish standard. Moore could be a moralist, in this case, withoutany trouble, and with the advantage of winning Lord Lansdowne's approval;he could write some graceful verses which everybody would buy, and forthe rest it is not hard to be a stoic in eight-syllable measure and atravelling-carriage. The next dinner at Bowood will taste none the worse. Accordingly he speaks of "The mire, the strife And vanities of this man's life, Who more than all that e'er have glowed With fancy's flame (and it was his In fullest warmth and radiance) showed What an impostor Genius is; How, with that strong mimetic art Which forms its life and soul, it takes All shapes of thought, all hues of heart, Nor feels itself one throb it wakes; How, like a gem, its light may shine, O'er the dark path by mortals trod, Itself as mean a worm the while As crawls at midnight o'er the sod; * * * * * How, with the pencil hardly dry From coloring up such scenes of love And beauty as make young hearts sigh, And dream and think through heaven they rove, " &c. , &c. Very spirited, is it not? One has only to overlook a littlethreadbareness in the similes, and it is very good oratorical verse. Butwould we believe in it, we must never read Mr. Moore's own journal, andfind out how thin a piece of veneering his own life was, --how he lived insham till his very nature had become subdued to it, till he couldpersuade himself that a sham could be written into a reality, andactually made experiment thereof in his Diary. One verse in this diatribe deserves a special comment, -- "What an impostor Genius is!" In two respects there is nothing to be objected to in it. It is of eightsyllables, and "is" rhymes unexceptionably with "his. " But is there theleast filament of truth in it? We venture to assert, not the least. Itwas not Rousseau's genius that was an impostor. It was the one thing inhim that was always true. We grant that, in allowing that a man hasgenius. Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whosepower a man is. That is the very difference between them. We might turnthe tables on Moore, the man of talent, and say truly enough, What animpostor talent is! Moore talks of the mimetic power with a totalmisapprehension of what it really is. The mimetic power had nothingwhatever to do with the affair. Rousseau had none of it; Shakespeare hadit in excess; but what difference would it make in our judgment of Hamletor Othello if a manuscript of Shakespeare's memoirs should turn up, andwe should find out that he had been a pitiful fellow? None in the world;for he is not a professed moralist, and his life does not give thewarrant to his words. But if Demosthenes, after all his Philippies, throws away his shield and runs, we feel the contemptibleness of thecontradiction. With genius itself we never find any fault. It would be anover-nicety that would do that. We do not get invited to nectar andambrosia so often that we think of grumbling and saying we have better athome. No; the same genius that mastered him who wrote the poem masters usin reading it, and we care for nothing outside the poem itself. How theauthor lived, what he wore, how he looked, --all that is mere gossip, about which we need not trouble ourselves. Whatever he was or did, somehow or other God let him be worthy to write _this_, and that isenough for us. We forgive everything to the genius; we are inexorable tothe man. Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, --what have their biographies to dowith us? Genius is not a question of character. It may be sordid, likethe lamp of Aladdin, in its externals; what care we, while the touch ofit builds palaces for us, makes us rich as only men in dream-land arerich, and lords to the utmost bound of imagination? So, when people talkof the ungrateful way in which the world treats its geniuses, they speakunwisely. There is no work of genius which has not been the delight ofmankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not, sooner or later, responded. But the man whom the genius takes possessionof for its pen, for its trowel, for its pencil, for its chisel, _him_ theworld treats according to his deserts. Does Burns drink? It sets him togauging casks of gin. For, remember, it is not to the practical worldthat the genius appeals; it _is_ the practical world which judges of theman's fitness for its uses, and has a right so to judge. No amount ofpatronage could have made distilled liquors less toothsome to RobbieBurns, as no amount of them could make a Burns of the Ettrick Shepherd. There is an old story in the _Gesta Romanorum_ of a priest who was foundfault with by one of his parishioners because his life was in painfuldiscordance with his teaching. So one day he takes his critic out to astream, and, giving him to drink of it, asks him if he does not find itsweet and pure water. The parishioner, having answered that it was, istaken to the source, and finds that what had so refreshed him flowed frombetween the jaws of a dead dog. "Let this teach thee, " said the priest, "that the very best doctrine may take its rise in a very impure anddisgustful spring, and that excellent morals may be taught by a man whohas no morals at all. " It is easy enough to see the fallacy here. Had theman known beforehand from what a carrion fountain-head the stream issued, he could not have drunk of it without loathing. Had the priest merelybidden him to _look_ at the stream and see how beautiful it was, insteadof tasting it, it would have been quite another matter. And this isprecisely the difference between what appeals to our aesthetic and to ourmoral sense, between what is judged of by the taste and the conscience. It is when the sentimentalist turns preacher of morals that weinvestigate his character, and are justified in so doing. He may expressas many and as delicate shades of feeling as he likes, --for this thesensibility of his organization perfectly fits him, no other person coulddo it so well, --but the moment he undertakes to establish his feeling asa rule of conduct, we ask at once how far are his own life and deed inaccordance with what he preaches? For every man feels instinctively thatall the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovelyaction; and that while tenderness of feeling and susceptibility togenerous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is anachievement of the will and a quality of the life. Fine words, says ourhomely old proverb, butter no parsnips; and if the question be how torender those vegetables palatable, an ounce of butter would be worth morethan all the orations of Cicero. The only conclusive evidence of a man'ssincerity is that he give _himself_ for a principle. Words, money, allthings else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes agift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whateverit may be, has taken possession of him. From that sincerity his wordsgain the force and pertinency of deeds, and his money is no longer thepale drudge 'twixt man and man, but, by a beautiful magic, what erewhilebore the image and superscription of Caesar seems now to bear the imageand superscription of God. It is thus that there is a genius forgoodness, for magnanimity, for self-sacrifice, as well as for creativeart; and it is thus that by a more refined sort of Platonism the InfiniteBeauty dwells in and shapes to its own likeness the soul which gives itbody and individuality. But when Moore charges genius with being animpostor, the confusion of his ideas is pitiable. There is nothing sotrue, so sincere, so downright and forthright, as genius. It is alwaystruer than the man himself is, greater than he. If Shakespeare the manhad been as marvellous a creature as the genius that wrote his plays, that genius so comprehensive in its intelligence, so wise even in itsplay, that its clowns are moralists and philosophers, so penetrative thata single one of its phrases reveals to us the secret of our owncharacter, would his contemporaries have left us so wholly without recordof him as they have done, distinguishing him in no wise from hisfellow-players? Rousseau, no doubt, was weak, nay, more than that, was sometimesdespicable, but yet is not fairly to be reckoned among the herd ofsentimentalists. It is shocking that a man whose preaching made itfashionable for women of rank to nurse their own children should havesent his own, as soon as born, to the foundling hospital, still moreshocking that, in a note to his _Discours sur l'Inégalité_, he shouldspeak of this crime as one of the consequences of our social system. Butfor all that there was a faith and an ardor of conviction in him thatdistinguish him from most of the writers of his time. Nor were hispractice and his preaching always inconsistent. He contrived to payregularly, whatever his own circumstances were, a pension of one hundred_livres_ a year to a maternal aunt who had been kind to him in childhood. Nor was his asceticism a sham. He might have turned his gift into lacedcoats and _châteaux_ as easily as Voltaire, had he not held it too sacredto be bartered away in any such losing exchange. But what is worthy of especial remark is this, --that in nearly all thathe wrote his leading object was the good of his kind, and that throughall the vicissitudes of a life which illness, sensibility of temperament, and the approaches of insanity rendered wretched, --the associate ofinfidels, the foundling child, as it were, of an age without belief, least of all in itself, --he professed and evidently felt deeply a faithin the goodness both of man and of God. There is no such thing asscoffing in his writings. On the other hand, there is no stereotypedmorality. He does not ignore the existence of scepticism; he recognizesits existence in his own nature, meets it frankly face to face, and makesit confess that there are things in the teaching of Christ that aredeeper than its doubt. The influence of his early education at Geneva isapparent here. An intellect so acute as his, trained in the school ofCalvin in a republic where theological discussion was as much theamusement of the people as the opera was at Paris, could not fail to be agood logician. He had the fortitude to follow his logic wherever it ledhim. If the very impressibility of character which quickened hisperception of the beauties of nature, and made him alive to the charm ofmusic and musical expression, prevented him from being in the highestsense an original writer, and if his ideas were mostly suggested to himby books, yet the clearness, consecutiveness, and eloquence with which hestated and enforced them made them his own. There was at least thatoriginal fire in him which could fuse them and run them in a novel mould. His power lay in this very ability of manipulating the thoughts ofothers. Fond of paradox he doubtless was, but he had a way of puttingthings that arrested attention and excited thought. It was, perhaps, thisvery sensibility of the surrounding atmosphere of feeling andspeculation, which made Rousseau more directly influential oncontemporary thought (or perhaps we should say sentiment) than any writerof his time. And this is rarely consistent with enduring greatness inliterature. It forces us to remember, against our will, the oratoricalcharacter of his works. They were all pleas, and he a great advocate, with Europe in the jury-box. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquenceproduces conviction for the moment, but it is only by truth to nature andthe everlasting intuitions of mankind that those abiding influences arewon that enlarge from generation to generation. Rousseau was in manyrespects--as great pleaders always are--a man of the day, who must needsbecome a mere name to posterity, yet he could not but have had in himsome not inconsiderable share of that principle by which man eternizeshimself. For it is only to such that the night cometh not in which no manshall work, and he is still operative both in politics and literature bythe principles he formulated or the emotions to which he gave a voice sopiercing and so sympathetic. In judging Rousseau, it would be unfair not to take note of the malariousatmosphere in which he grew up. The constitution of his mind was thusearly infected with a feverish taint that made him shiveringly sensitiveto a temperature which hardier natures found bracing. To him this roughworld was but too literally a rack. Good-humored Mother Nature commonlyimbeds the nerves of her children in a padding of self-conceit thatserves as a buffer against the ordinary shocks to which even a life ofroutine is liable, and it would seem at first sight as if Rousseau hadbeen better cared for than usual in this regard. But as his self-conceitwas enormous, so was the reaction from it proportionate, and the frettingsuspiciousness of temper, sure mark of an unsound mind, which renderedhim incapable of intimate friendship, while passionately longing for it, became inevitably, when turned inward, a tormenting self-distrust. Todwell in unrealities is the doom of the sentimentalist; but it should notbe forgotten that the same fitful intensity of emotion which makes themreal as the means of elation, gives them substance also for torture. Tooirritably jealous to endure the rude society of men, he steeped hissenses in the enervating incense that women are only too ready to burn. If their friendship be a safeguard to the other sex, their homage isfatal to all but the strongest, and Rousseau was weak both by inheritanceand early training. His father was one of those feeble creatures for whoma fine phrase could always satisfactorily fill the void thatnon-performance leaves behind it. If he neglected duty, he made up for itby that cultivation of the finer sentiments of our common nature whichwaters flowers of speech with the brineless tears of a flabby remorse, without one fibre of resolve in it, and which impoverishes the characterin proportion as it enriches the vocabulary. He was a very Apicius inthat digestible kind of woe which makes no man leaner, and had a favoritereceipt for cooking you up a sorrow _à la douleur inassouvie_ that hadjust enough delicious sharpness in it to bring tears into the eyes bytickling the palate. "When he said to me, 'Jean Jacques, let us speak ofthy mother, ' I said to him, 'Well, father, we are going to weep, then, 'and this word alone drew tears from him. 'Ah !' said he, groaning, 'giveher back to me, console me for her, fill the void she has left in mysoul!'" Alas! in such cases, the void she leaves is only that she found. The grief that seeks any other than its own society will erelong want anobject. This admirable parent allowed his son to become an outcast atsixteen, without any attempt to reclaim him, in order to enjoy unmolesteda petty inheritance to which the boy was entitled in right of his mother. "This conduct, " Rousseau tells us, "of a father whose tenderness andvirtue were so well known to me, caused me to make reflections on myselfwhich have not a little contributed to make my heart sound. I drew fromit this great maxim of morals, the only one perhaps serviceable inpractice, to avoid situations which put our duties in opposition to ourinterest, and which show us our own advantage in the wrong of another, sure that in such situations, _however sincere may be one's love ofvirtue_, it sooner or later grows weak without our perceiving it, _andthat we become unjust and wicked in action without having ceased to bejust and good in soul_. " This maxim may do for that "fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercisedand unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks its adversary, " whichMilton could not praise, --that is, for a manhood whose distinction it isnot to be manly, --but it is chiefly worth notice as being thecharacteristic doctrine of sentimentalism. This disjoining of deed fromwill, of practice from theory, is to put asunder what God has joined byan indissoluble sacrament. The soul must be tainted before the actionbecome corrupt; and there is no self-delusion more fatal than that whichmakes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, whilethe life is grovelling and sensual, --witness Coleridge. In his case wefeel something like disgust. But where, as in his son Hartley, there ishereditary infirmity, where the man sees the principle that might rescuehim slip from the clutch of a nerveless will, like a rope through thefingers of a drowning man, and the confession of faith is the moan ofdespair, there is room for no harsher feeling than pity. Rousseau showedthrough life a singular proneness for being convinced by his owneloquence; he was always his own first convert; and this reconciles hispower as a writer with his weakness as a man. He and all like him mistakeemotion for conviction, velleity for resolve, the brief eddy of sentimentfor the midcurrent of ever-gathering faith in duty that draws to itselfall the affluents of conscience and will, and gives continuity of purposeto life. They are like men who love the stimulus of being underconviction, as it is called, who, forever getting religion, never getcapital enough to retire upon and spend for their own need and the commonservice. The sentimentalist is the spiritual hypochondriac, with whom fanciesbecome facts, while facts are a discomfort because they will not beevaporated into fancy. In his eyes, Theory is too fine a dame to confesseven a country-cousinship with coarse handed Practice, whose homely wayswould disconcert her artificial world. The very susceptibility that makeshim quick to feel, makes him also incapable of deep and durable feeling. He loves to think he suffers, and keeps a pet sorrow, a blue-devilfamiliar, that goes with him everywhere, like Paracelsus's black dog. Hetakes good care, however, that it shall not be the true sulphurousarticle that sometimes takes a fancy to fly away with his conjurer. Renésays: "In my madness I had gone so far as even to wish I might experiencea misfortune, so that my suffering might at least have a real object. "But no; selfishness is only active egotism, and there is nothing andnobody, with a single exception, which this sort of creature will notsacrifice, rather than give any other than an imaginary pang to his idol. Vicarious pain he is not unwilling to endure, nay, will even commitsuicide by proxy, like the German poet who let his wife kill herself togive him a sensation. Had young Jerusalem been anything like Goethe'sportrait of him in Werther, he would have taken very good care not toblow out the brains which he would have thought only too precious. Realsorrows are uncomfortable things, but purely aesthetic ones are by nomeans unpleasant, and I have always fancied the handsome young Wolfgangwriting those distracted letters to Auguste Stolberg with a looking-glassin front of him to give back an image of his desolation, and finding itrather pleasant than otherwise to shed the tear of sympathy with selfthat would seem so bitter to his fair correspondent. The tears that havereal salt in them will keep; they are the difficult, manly tears that areshed in secret; but the pathos soon evaporates from that fresh-water withwhich a man can bedew a dead donkey in public, while his wife is having agood cry over his neglect of her at home. We do not think the worse ofGoethe for hypothetically desolating himself in the fashion aforesaid, for with many constitutions it is as purely natural a crisis asdentition, which the stronger worry through, and turn out very sensible, agreeable fellows. But where there is an arrest of development, and theheartbreak of the patient is audibly prolonged through life, we have aspectacle which the toughest heart would wish to get as far away from aspossible. We would not be supposed to overlook the distinction, too often lostsight of, between sentimentalism and sentiment, the latter being a veryexcellent thing in its way, as genuine things are apt to be. Sentiment isintellectualized emotion, emotion precipitated, as it were, in prettycrystals by the fancy. This is the delightful staple of the poets ofsocial life like Horace and Béranger, or Thackeray, when he too rarelyplayed with verse. It puts into words for us that decorous average offeeling to the expression of which society can consent without danger ofbeing indiscreetly moved. It is excellent for people who are willing tosave their souls alive to any extent that shall not be discomposing. Itis even satisfying till some deeper experience has given us a hungerwhich what we so glibly call "the world" cannot sate, just as a water-iceis nourishment enough to a man who has had his dinner. It is thesufficing lyrical interpreter of those lighter hours that should makepart of every healthy man's day, and is noxious only when it palls men'sappetite for the truly profound poetry which is very passion of very soulsobered by afterthought and embodied in eternal types by imagination. True sentiment is emotion ripened by a slow ferment of the mind andqualified to an agreeable temperance by that taste which is theconscience of polite society. But the sentimentalist always insists ontaking his emotion neat, and, as his sense gradually deadens to thestimulus, increases his dose till he ends in a kind of moral deliquium. At first the debaucher, he becomes at last the victim of his sensations. Among the ancients we find no trace of sentimentalism. Their masculinemood both of body and mind left no room for it, and hence the bracingquality of their literature compared with that of recent times, its tonicproperty, that seems almost too astringent to palates relaxed by adaintier diet. The first great example of the degenerate modern tendencywas Petrarch, who may be said to have given it impulse and direction. Amore perfect specimen of the type has not since appeared. An intellectualvoluptuary, a moral _dilettante_, the first instance of that character, since too common, the gentleman in search of a sensation, seeking asolitude at Vaucluse because it made him more likely to be in demand atAvignon, praising philosophic poverty with a sharp eye to the next richbenefice in the gift of his patron, commending a good life but carefulfirst of a good living, happy only in seclusion but making a dangerousjourney to enjoy the theatrical show of a coronation in the Capitol, cherishing a fruitless passion which broke his heart three or four timesa year and yet could not make an end of him till he had reached the ripeage of seventy and survived his mistress a quarter of a century, --surelya more exquisite perfection of inconsistency would be hard to find. When Petrarch returned from his journey into the North of Europe in 1332, he balanced the books of his unrequited passion, and, finding that he hadnow been in love seven years, thought the time had at last come to calldeliberately on Death. Had Death taken him at his word, he would haveprotested that he was only in fun. For we find him always taking goodcare of an excellent constitution, avoiding the plague with commendableassiduity, and in the very year when he declares it absolutely essentialto his peace of mind to die for good and all, taking refuge in thefortress of Capranica, from a wholesome dread of having his throat cut byrobbers. There is such a difference between dying in a sonnet with acambric handkerchief at one's eyes, and the prosaic reality of demisecertified in the parish register! Practically it is inconvenient to bedead. Among other things, it puts an end to the manufacture of sonnets. But there seems to have been an excellent understanding between Petrarchand Death, for he was brought to that grisly monarch's door so often, that, otherwise, nothing short of a miracle or the nine lives of thatanimal whom love also makes lyrical could have saved him. "I consent, " hecries, "to live and die in Africa among its serpents, upon Caucasus, orAtlas, if, while I live, to breathe a pure air, and after my death alittle corner of earth where to bestow my body, may be allowed me. Thisis all I ask, but this I cannot obtain. Doomed always to wander, and tobe a stranger everywhere, O Fortune, Fortune, fix me at last to some onespot! I do not covet thy favors. Let me enjoy a tranquil poverty, let mepass in this retreat the few days that remain to me!" The pathetic stopof Petrarch's poetical organ was one he could pull out at pleasure, --andindeed we soon learn to distrust literary tears, as the cheap subterfugefor want of real feeling with natures of this quality. Solitude with himwas but the pseudonyme of notoriety. Poverty was the archdeaconry ofParma, with other ecclesiastical pickings. During his retreat atVaucluse, in the very height of that divine sonneteering love of Laura, of that sensitive purity which called Avignon Babylon, and rebuked thesinfulness of Clement, he was himself begetting that kind of childrenwhich we spell with a _b_. We believe that, if Messer Francesco had beenpresent when the woman was taken in adultery, he would have flung thefirst stone without the slightest feeling of inconsistency, nay, with asublime sense of virtue. The truth is, that it made very littledifference to him what sort of proper sentiment he expressed, provided hecould do it elegantly and with unction. Would any one feel the difference between his faint abstractions and thePlatonism of a powerful nature fitted alike for the withdrawal of idealcontemplation and for breasting the storms of life, --would any one knowhow wide a depth divides a noble friendship based on sympathy of pursuitand aspiration, on that mutual help which souls capable ofself-sustainment are the readiest to give or to take, and a simulatedpassion, true neither to the spiritual nor the sensual part of man, --lethim compare the sonnets of Petrarch with those which Michel Angeloaddressed to Vittoria Colonna. In them the airiest pinnacles of sentimentand speculation are buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, and ofan actual, not fancied experience, and the depth of feeling is measuredby the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch's allingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are cold, but thecoldness of the one is self-restraint, while the other chills withpretence of warmth. In Michel Angelo's, you feel the great architect; inPetrarch's the artist who can best realize his conception in the limitsof a cherry-stone. And yet this man influenced literature longer and morewidely than almost any other in modern times. So great is the charm ofelegance, so unreal is the larger part of what is written! Certainly I do not mean to say that a work of art should be looked at bythe light of the artist's biography, or measured by our standard of hischaracter. Nor do I reckon what was genuine in Petrarch--his love ofletters, his refinement, his skill in the superficial graces of language, that rhetorical art by which the music of words supplants their meaning, and the verse moulds the thought instead of being plastic to it--afterany such fashion. I have no ambition for that character of _valet dechambre_ which is said to disenchant the most heroic figures into mereevery-day personages, for it implies a mean soul no less than a servilecondition. But we have a right to demand a certain amount of reality, however small, in the emotion of a man who makes it his business toendeavor at exciting our own. We have a privilege of nature to shiverbefore a painted flame, how cunningly soever the colors be laid on. Yetour love of minute biographical detail, our desire to make ourselvesspies upon the men of the past, seems so much of an instinct in us, thatwe must look for the spring of it in human nature, and that somewhatdeeper than mere curiosity or love of gossip. It should seem to arisefrom what must be considered on the whole a creditable feeling, namely, that we value character more than any amount of talent, --the skill to_be_ something, above that of doing anything but the best of its kind. The highest creative genius, and that only, is privileged from arrest bythis personality, for there the thing produced is altogether disengagedfrom the producer. But in natures incapable of this escape fromthemselves, the author is inevitably mixed with his work, and we have afeeling that the amount of his sterling character is the security for thenotes he issues. Especially we feel so when truth to self, which isalways self-forgetful, and not truth to nature, makes an essential partof the value of what is offered us; as where a man undertakes to narratepersonal experience or to enforce a dogma. This is particularly true asrespects sentimentalists, because of their intrusive self-consciousness;for there is no more universal characteristic of human nature than theinstinct of men to apologize to themselves for themselves, and to justifypersonal failings by generalizing them into universal laws. A man wouldbe the keenest devil's advocate against himself, were it not that he hasalways taken a retaining fee for the defence; for we think that theindirect and mostly unconscious pleas in abatement which we read betweenthe lines in the works of many authors are oftener written to setthemselves right in their own eyes than in those of the world. And in thereal life of the sentimentalist it is the same. He is under the wretchednecessity of keeping up, at least in public, the character he hasassumed, till he at last reaches that last shift of bankruptself-respect, to play the hypocrite with himself. Lamartine, afterpassing round the hat in Europe and America, takes to his bed fromwounded pride when the French Senate votes him a subsidy, and sheds tearsof humiliation. Ideally, he resents it; in practical coin, he will acceptthe shame without a wry face. George Sand, speaking of Rousseau's "Confessions, " says that anautobiographer always makes himself the hero of his own novel, and cannothelp idealizing, even if he would. But the weak point of allsentimentalists is that they always have been, and always continue underevery conceivable circumstance to be, their own ideals, whether they arewriting their own lives or no. Rousseau opens his book with thestatement: "I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture tobelieve myself unlike any that exists. If I am not worth more, at least Iam different. " O exquisite cunning of self-flattery! It is this veryimagined difference that makes us worth more in our own foolish sight. For while all men are apt to think, or to persuade themselves that theythink, all other men their accomplices in vice or weakness, they are notdifficult of belief that they are singular in any quality or talent onwhich they hug themselves. More than this; people who are truly originalare the last to find it out, for the moment we become conscious of avirtue it has left us or is getting ready to go. Originality does notconsist in a fidgety assertion of selfhood, but in the faculty of gettingrid of it altogether, that the truer genius of the man, which commerceswith universal nature and with other souls through a common sympathy withthat, may take all his powers wholly to itself, --and the truly originalman could no more be jealous of his peculiar gift, than the grass couldtake credit to itself for being green. What is the reason that allchildren are geniuses, (though they contrive so soon to outgrow thatdangerous quality, ) except that they never cross-examine themselves onthe subject? The moment that process begins, their speech loses its giftof unexpectedness, and they become as tediously impertinent as the restof us. If there never was any one like him, if he constituted a genus inhimself, to what end write confessions in which no other human beingcould ever be in a condition to take the least possible interest? All menare interested in Montaigne in proportion as all men find more ofthemselves in him, and all men see but one image in the glass which thegreatest of poets holds up to nature, an image which at once startles andcharms them with its familiarity. Fabulists always endow their animalswith the passions and desires of men. But if an ox could dictate hisconfessions, what glimmer of understanding should we find in those bovineconfidences, unless on some theory of pre existence, some blank misgivingof a creature moving about in worlds not realized? The truth is, that werecognize the common humanity of Rousseau in the very weakness thatbetrayed him into this conceit of himself; we find he is just like therest of us in this very assumption of essential difference, for among allanimals man is the only one who tries to pass for more than he is, and soinvolves himself in the condemnation of seeming less. But it would be sheer waste of time to hunt Rousseau through all hisdoublings of inconsistency, and run him to earth in every new paradox. His first two books attacked, one of them literature, and the othersociety. But this did not prevent him from being diligent with his pen, nor from availing himself of his credit with persons who enjoyed all theadvantages of that inequality whose evils he had so pointedly exposed. Indeed, it is curious how little practical communism there has been, howfew professors it has had who would not have gained by a generaldividend. It is perhaps no frantic effort of generosity in a philosopherwith ten crowns in his pocket when he offers to make common stock with aneighbor who has ten thousand of yearly income, nor is it an uncommonthing to see such theories knocked clean out of a man's head by thedescent of a thumping legacy. But, consistent or not, Rousseau remainspermanently interesting as the highest and most perfect type of thesentimentalist of genius. His was perhaps the acutest mind that was evermated with an organization so diseased, the brain most far-reaching inspeculation that ever kept itself steady and worked out its problems amidsuch disordered tumult of the nerves. [166] His letter to the Archbishopof Paris, admirable for its lucid power and soberness of tone, and his_Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques_, which no man can read and believe him tohave been sane, show him to us in his strength and weakness, and give usa more charitable, let us hope therefore a truer, notion of him than hisown apology for himself. That he was a man of genius appears unmistakablyin his impressibility by the deeper meaning of the epoch in which helived. Before an eruption, clouds steeped through and through withelectric life gather over the crater, as if in sympathy and expectation. As the mountain heaves and cracks, these vapory masses are seamed withfire, as if they felt and answered the dumb agony that is struggling forutterance below. Just such flashes of eager sympathetic fire breakcontinually from the cloudy volumes of Rousseau, the result at once andthe warning of that convulsion of which Paris was to be the crater andall Europe to feel the spasm. There are symptoms enough elsewhere of thatwant of faith in the existing order which made the Revolutioninevitable, --even so shallow an observer as Horace Walpole could forebodeit so early as 1765, --but Rousseau more than all others is theunconscious expression of the groping after something radically new, theinstinct for a change that should be organic and pervade every fibre ofthe social and political body. Freedom of thought owes far more to thejester Voltaire, who also had his solid kernel of earnest, than to thesombre Genevese, whose earnestness is of the deadly kind. Yet, for goodor evil, the latter was the father of modern democracy, and with out himour Declaration of Independence would have wanted some of those sentencesin which the immemorial longings of the poor and the dreams of solitaryenthusiasts were at last affirmed as axioms in the manifesto of a nation, so that all the world might hear. Though Rousseau, like many other fanatics, had a remarkable vein ofcommon sense in him, (witness his remarks on duelling, onlandscape-gardening, on French poetry, and much of his thought oneducation, ) we cannot trace many practical results to his teaching, leastof all in politics. For the great difficulty with his system, if systemit may be called, is, that, while it professes to follow nature, it notonly assumes as a starting-point that the individual man may be made overagain, but proceeds to the conclusion that man himself, that humannature, must be made over again, and governments remodelled on a purelytheoretic basis. But when something like an experiment in this directionwas made in 1789, not only did it fail as regarded man in general, buteven as regards the particular variety of man that inhabited France. TheRevolution accomplished many changes, and beneficent ones, yet it leftFrance peopled, not by a new race without traditions, but by Frenchmen. Still, there could not but be a wonderful force in the words of a manwho, above all others, had the secret of making abstractions glow withhis own fervor; and his ideas--dispersed now in the atmosphere of thought--have influenced, perhaps still continue to influence, speculativeminds, which prefer swift and sure generalization to hesitating anddoubtful experience. Rousseau has, in one respect, been utterly misrepresented andmisunderstood. Even Châteaubriand most unfilially classes him andVoltaire together. It appears to me that the inmost core of his being wasreligious. Had he remained in the Catholic Church he might have been asaint. Had he come earlier, he might have founded an order. His wasprecisely the nature on which religious enthusiasm takes the strongesthold, --a temperament which finds a sensuous delight in spiritual things, and satisfies its craving for excitement with celestial debauch. He hadnot the iron temper of a great reformer and organizer like Knox, who, true Scotchman that he was, found a way to weld this world and the othertogether in a cast-iron creed; but he had as much as any man ever hadthat gift of a great preacher to make the oratorical fervor whichpersuades himself while it lasts into the abiding conviction of hishearers. That very persuasion of his that the soul could remain purewhile the life was corrupt, is not unexampled among men who have leftholier names than he. His "Confessions, " also, would assign him to thatclass with whom the religious sentiment is strong, and the moral natureweak. They are apt to believe that they may, as special pleaders say, confess and avoid. Hawthorne has admirably illustrated this in thepenance of Mr. Dimmesdale. With all the soil that is upon Rousseau, Icannot help looking on him as one capable beyond any in his generation ofbeing divinely possessed; and if it happened otherwise, when we rememberthe much that hindered and the little that helped in a life and time likehis, we shall be much readier to pity than to condemn. It was his veryfitness for being something better that makes him able to shock us sowith what in too many respects he unhappily was. Less gifted, he had beenless hardly judged. More than any other of the sentimentalists, exceptpossibly Sterne, he had in him a staple of sincerity. Compared withChâteaubriand, he is honesty, compared with Lamartine, he is manlinessitself. His nearest congener in our own tongue is Cowper. In the whole school there is a sickly taint. The strongest mark whichRousseau has left upon literature is a sensibility to the picturesque inNature, not with Nature as a strengthener and consoler, a wholesome tonicfor a mind ill at ease with itself, but with Nature as a kind of feminineecho to the mood, flattering it with sympathy rather than correcting itwith rebuke or lifting it away from its unmanly depression, as in thewholesomer fellow-feeling of Wordsworth. They seek in her an accessary, and not a reproof. It is less a sympathy with Nature than a sympathy withourselves as we compel her to reflect us. It is solitude, Nature for herestrangement from man, not for her companionship with him, --it isdesolation and ruin, Nature as she has triumphed over man, --with whichthis order of mind seeks communion and in which it finds solace. It iswith the hostile and destructive power of matter, and not with the spiritof life and renewal that dwells in it, that they ally themselves. And inhuman character it is the same. St. Preux, René, Werther, Manfred, Quasimodo, they are all anomalies, distortions, ruins, --so much easier isit to caricature life from our own sickly conception of it, than to paintit in its noble simplicity; so much cheaper is unreality than truth. Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, --the one trivial andordinary, the other sacred and recluse; one which he carries to societyand the dinner-table, the other in which his youth and aspiration survivefor him, and which is a confidence between himself and God. Both may beequally sincere, and there need be no contradiction between them, anymore than in a healthy man between soul and body. If the higher life bereal and earnest, its result, whether in literature or affairs, will bereal and earnest too. But no man can produce great things who is notthoroughly sincere in dealing with himself, who would not exchange thefinest show for the poorest reality, who does not so love his work thathe is not only glad to give himself for it, but finds rather a gain thana sacrifice in the surrender. The sentimentalist does not think of whathe does so much as of what the world will think of what he does. Hetranslates should into would, looks upon the spheres of duty and beautyas alien to each other, and can never learn how life rounds itself to anoble completeness between these two opposite but mutually sustainingpoles of what we long for and what we must. Did Rousseau, then, lead a life of this quality? Perhaps, when weconsider the contrast which every man who looks backward must feelbetween the life he planned and the life which circumstance within himand without him has made for him, we should rather ask, Was this the lifehe meant to lead? Perhaps, when we take into account his faculty ofself-deception, --it may be no greater than our own, --we should ask, Wasthis the life he believed he led? Have we any right to judge this manafter our blunt English fashion, and condemn him, as we are wont to do, on the finding of a jury of average householders? Is French realityprecisely our reality? Could we tolerate tragedy in rhymed alexandrines, instead of blank verse? The whole life of Rousseau is pitched on thisheroic key, and for the most trivial occasion he must be ready with thesublime sentiments that are supposed to suit him rather than it. It isone of the most curious features of the sentimental ailment, that, whileit shuns the contact of men, it courts publicity. In proportion assolitude and communion with self lead the sentimentalist to exaggeratethe importance of his own personality, he comes to think that the leastevent connected with it is of consequence to his fellow-men. If he changehis shirt, he would have mankind aware of it. Victor Hugo, the greatestliving representative of the class, considers it necessary to let theworld know by letter from time to time his opinions on every conceivablesubject about which it is not asked nor is of the least value unless weconcede to him an immediate inspiration. We men of colder blood, in whomself-consciousness takes the form of pride, and who have deified_mauvaise honte_ as if our defect were our virtue, find it especiallyhard to understand that artistic impulse of more southern races to _pose_themselves properly on every occasion, and not even to die without sometribute of deference to the taste of the world they are leaving. Was noteven mighty Caesar's last thought of his drapery? Let us not condemnRousseau for what seems to us the indecent exposure of himself in his"Confessions. " Those who allow an oratorical and purely conventional side disconnectedwith our private understanding of the facts, and with life, in whicheverything has a wholly parliamentary sense where truth is madesubservient to the momentary exigencies of eloquence, should becharitable to Rousseau. While we encourage a distinction whichestablishes two kinds of truth, one for the world, and another for theconscience, while we take pleasure in a kind of speech that has norelation to the real thought of speaker or hearer, but to the rostrumonly, we must not be hasty to condemn a sentimentalism which we do ourbest to foster. We listen in public with the gravity or augurs to what wesmile at when we meet a brother adept. France is the native land ofeulogy, of truth padded out to the size and shape demanded by_comme-il-faut_. The French Academy has, perhaps, done more harm by thevogue it has given to this style, than it has done good by its literarypurism; for the best purity of a language depends on the limpidity of itssource in veracity of thought. Rousseau was in many respects a typicalFrenchman, and it is not to be wondered at if he too often fell in withthe fashion of saying what was expected of him, and what he thought dueto the situation, rather than what would have been true to his inmostconsciousness. Perhaps we should allow something also to the influence ofa Calvinistic training, which certainly helps men who have the leastnatural tendency towards it to set faith above works, and to persuadethemselves of the efficacy of an inward grace to offset an outward andvisible defection from it. As the sentimentalist always takes a fanciful, sometimes an unreal, lifefor an ideal one, it would be too much to say that Rousseau was a man ofearnest convictions. But he was a man of fitfully intense ones, as suitedso mobile a temperament, and his writings, more than those of any otherof his tribe, carry with them that persuasion that was in him while hewrote. In them at least he is as consistent as a man who admits new ideascan ever be. The children of his brain he never abandoned, but clung tothem with paternal fidelity. Intellectually he was true and fearless;constitutionally, timid, contradictory, and weak; but never, if weunderstand him rightly, false. He was a little too credulous of sonoroussentiment, but he was never, like Châteaubriand or Lamartine, the lackeyof fine phrases. If, as some fanciful physiologists have assumed, therebe a masculine and feminine lobe of the brain, it would seem that in menof sentimental turn the masculine half fell in love with and made an idolof the other, obeying and admiring all the pretty whims of this _folle dulogis_. In Rousseau the mistress had some noble elements of character, and less taint of the _demi-monde_ than is visible in more recent casesof the same illicit relation. Footnotes: [165] _Histoire des Idées Morales et Politiques en France au XVIIIme Siecle. _ Par M. Jules Barni, Professeur à l'Académie de Genève, Tome II. Paris, 1867. [166] Perhaps we should except Newton.