APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE

By WALTER HORATIO PATER

E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph. D. Electronic Version 1. 0 / Date10-12-01

NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

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Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliteratedPater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it can be viewed at my site, http://www. Ajdrake. Com/etexts, aVictorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Paterand many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions. 

CONTENTS

Style: 5-38

Wordsworth: 39-64

Coleridge: 65-104

Charles Lamb: 105-123

Sir Thomas Browne: 124-160

"Love's Labours Lost": 161-169

"Measure for Measure": 170-184

Shakespeare's English Kings: 185-204

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 205-218

Feuillet's "La Morte": 219-240

Postscript: 241-261

APPRECIATIONS

STYLE

[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part indifferentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex objectinto its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses toconfuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense ofachieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, forinstance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws andcharacteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On theother hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinctionbetween prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have beentempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and thisagain is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciationof a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needsmake the most of things. Critical efforts to limit art a priori, byanticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material withwhich this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, orthe prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language of men, are alwaysliable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production; and whileprose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesquewith Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical andintimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted orflorid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless toprotest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely andnarrowly confined to mainly practical ends--a kind of "goodround-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry might not touchprosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as withBrowning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson. Insubordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, inall literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry sothe beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism toestimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to lookfor those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that toohas, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions, the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, thelogical structure:--how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify inprose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating itas out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of anestimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there. 

[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved toemphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest againsttheir confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effectfrom one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth, his sense of prosaicexcellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not onlyfervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, allunconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up correctness, thathumble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is reallya less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect masteryof the relative pronoun. It might have been foreseen that, in therotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find itsassertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectualneeds, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literaryform, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectivelyenlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetryhe regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence orpresence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for himthe opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, asthe essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative andunimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between"the literature of power and the literature of knowledge, " in theformer of which the composer gives us [8] not fact, but his peculiarsense of fact, whether past or present. 

Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher oppositionof poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology ofthe last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but oneonly beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certainqualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to theliterature of fact, apply still more to the literature of theimaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse andprose, so far as either is really imaginative--certain conditions oftrue art in both alike, which conditions may also contain in them thesecret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiarexcellences of either. 

The line between fact and something quite different from external factis, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasivewriters generally, how difficult to define the point where, from timeto time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, mustconsist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading--a theorem nolonger, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer'sspirit, to think with him, if one can or will--an expression no longerof fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present, in either case changed somewhat from the actual [9] world. In science, on the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule, we have a literary domain where the imagination may be thought to bealways an intruder. And as, in all science, the functions ofliterature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, soall the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducibleto various kinds of pains-taking; this good quality being involved inall "skilled work" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in historyespecially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on theborders of science, will still take the place of fact, in variousdegrees. Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthfulintention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needsselect, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, somethingthat comes not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbonmoulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus, Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of thepast, each, after his own sense, modifies--who can tell where and towhat degree?--and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, ashe thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper. For just inproportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes tobe the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of hissense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art(as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of hispresentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions ofliterature also, truth--truth to bare fact, there--is the essence ofsuch artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the longrun only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the fineraccommodation of speech to that vision within. 

--The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as beingpreferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. Inliterature, as in every other product of human skill, in the mouldingof a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense assertsitself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and aboveits primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, ofcourse, in the first instance) there, "fine" as opposed to merelyserviceable art, exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which isin any way imitative or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, orincident--is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, ofa specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power. 

Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature--thistranscript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, asmodified by human preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms. It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, orrich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as itsrepresentation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being onlyone department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may bethought, being the special art of the modern world. That imaginativeprose should be the special and opportune art of the modern worldresults from two important facts about the latter: first, the chaoticvariety and complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue, the really master currents of the present time incalculable--acondition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verseform, so that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth centuryhas been lawless verse; and secondly, an all-pervading naturalism, acuriosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving acertain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be theless ambitious form of literature. And prose thus asserting itself asthe special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, willbe, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in itsexcellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latestexperience--an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. Its beauties willbe not exclusively "pedestrian": it will exert, in due measure, all thevaried charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12]or Michelet, or Newman, at their best, gives its musical value to everysyllable. *

The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he . Proposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and thescholarly conscience--the male conscience in this matter, as we mustthink it, under a system of education which still to so large an extentlimits real scholarship to men. In his self-criticism, he supposesalways that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily, considerately, though without consideration for him, over the groundwhich the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For thematerial in which he works is no more a creation of his own than thesculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and contendingtongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has itsown abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summaryrecognition of which scholarship consists. A writer, full of a matterhe is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws, the limitations of vocabulary, structure, and the like, as arestriction, but if a [13] real artist will find in them anopportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties of hismedium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of sensibility, of refined usage. Exclusiones debitae--the exclusions, or rejections, which nature demands--we know how large a part these play, according toBacon, in the science of nature. In a somewhat changed sense, we mightsay that the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of thoserejections demanded by the nature of his medium, the material he mustuse. Alive to the value of an atmosphere in which every term finds itsutmost degree of expression, and with all the jealousy of a lover ofwords, he will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majorityof those who use them to efface the distinctions of language, thefacility of writers often reinforcing in this respect the work of thevulgar. He will feel the obligation not of the laws only, but of thoseaffinities, avoidances, those mere preferences, of his language, whichthrough the associations of literary history have become a part of itsnature, prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license, many a gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive. His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience inliterature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyedillustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned. Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and renunciation, having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minuteconsideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail, being a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive too, that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, andtherefore, indirectly, with the reader himself also, that he has thescience of the instrument he plays on, perhaps, after all, with afreedom which in such case will be the freedom of a master. 

For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is reallyvindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire systemof composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak ofthe manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art. Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no Englishequivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of therules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, whichlike the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will stillfurther illustrate good taste. --The right vocabulary! Translators havenot invariably seen how all-important that is in the work oftranslation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction;whereas, if the original be first-rate, one's first care should be withits elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducibleby an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word afterword, as [15] the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so onlyeach word or syllable be not of false colour, to change my illustrationa little. 

Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowedand searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he wouldselect in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of thewords he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; anddoing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in searchof an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets avocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in thestrictest sense original. That living authority which language needslies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognising always that everylanguage possesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own, expand at once and purify its very elements, which must needs changealong with the changing thoughts of living people. Ninety years ago, for instance, great mental force, certainly, was needed by Wordsworth, to break through the consecrated poetic associations of a century, andspeak the language that was his, that was to become in a measure thelanguage of the next generation. But he did it with the tact of ascholar also. English, for a quarter of a century past, has beenassimilating the phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, thephraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty yearsago; in part also the [16] language of mystical theology: and none butpedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources. Formany years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation ofthe vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitivescholarship--in a liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too, for after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex matter to grapple with. The literary artist, therefore, will be well aware of physical science; science also attaining, in itsturn, its true literary ideal. And then, as the scholar is nothingwithout the historic sense, he will be apt to restore not reallyobsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer edge of words still inuse: ascertain, communicate, discover--words like these it has beenpart of our "business" to misuse. And still, as language was made forman, he will be no authority for correctnesses which, limiting freedomof utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as if one vowednot to say "its, " which ought to have been in Shakespeare; "his""hers, " for inanimate objects, being but a barbarous and reallyinexpressive survival. Yet we have known many things like this. RacySaxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermixreadily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in "secondintention. " In this late day certainly, no critical process can beconducted reasonably without eclecticism. Of [17] such eclecticism wehave a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time. Howillustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of thephraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are thewritings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarshipthroughout!

A scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave somethingto the willing intelligence of his reader. "To go preach to the firstpasser-by, " says Montaigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance of thefirst I meet, is a thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact, naturallydistressing to the scholar, who will therefore ever be shy of offeringuncomplimentary assistance to the reader's wit. To really strenuousminds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuouseffort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate graspof the author's sense. Self-restraint, a skilful economy of means, ascêsis, that too has a beauty of its own; and for the reader supposedthere will be an aesthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness ofstyle which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from everysentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word tothought, in the logically filled space connected always with thedelightful sense of difficulty overcome. 

Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, veryvarious demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not[18] only scholars, but all disinterested lovers of books, will alwayslook to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistralrefuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world. A perfect poemlike Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of atheory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something ofthe uses of a religious "retreat. " Here, then, with a view to thecentral need of a select few, those "men of a finer thread" who haveformed and maintain the literary ideal, everything, every componentelement, will have undergone exact trial, and, above all, there will beno uncharacteristic or tarnished or vulgar decoration, permissibleornament being for the most part structural, or necessary. As thepainter in his picture, so the artist in his book, aims at theproduction by honourable artifice of a peculiar atmosphere. "Theartist, " says Schiller, "may be known rather by what he omits"; and inliterature, too, the true artist may be best recognised by his tact ofomission. For to the grave reader words too are grave; and theornamental word, the figure, the accessory form or colour or reference, is rarely content to die to thought precisely at the right moment, butwill inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long "brain-wave" behind itof perhaps quite alien associations. 

Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort ofscholarly attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending. But the trueartist allows for it. He will remember that, as the very word ornamentindicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one beauty" of allliterary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose andverse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in itsfullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or inStendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned, with hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things. Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:--heknows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence towhich any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject. Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that doesnot hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will neverdepart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains aponderable something thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he willstill question its serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford, to attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, justthen?--Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles. For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particleof invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of [20] the finishedwork to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's fancy, in therough-hewn block of stone. 

And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all otheraccidental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not ofspecific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery whichlanguage as such carries in it. A lover of words for their own sake, to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constantobserver of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not only forobviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixedin all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of it. Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elementsor particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the firstthat occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to theresources of expression. The elementary particles of language will berealised as colour and light and shade through his scholarly living inthe full sense of them. Still opposing the constant degradation oflanguage by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat colouredglass as if it were clear; and while half the world is using figureunconsciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latentfigurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formedpersonification--a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, [21]because it has no really rhetorical motive--which plays so large a partthere, and, as in the case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulouslyexact of it, from syllable to syllable, its precise value. 

So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary artarising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, theessential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingentornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and goodtaste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimatequality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artisthimself. The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrentto the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in allother art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed, everywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees theend in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part isconscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, withundiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition ofliterary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of theartist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity ofmind in style. 

An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whoseworks illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, andwith obvious repression or economy of a fine [22] rhetorical gift)wrote a book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, toshow that all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing, ineach and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity withitself, of the apprehending mind. All the laws of good writing aim ata similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by whichthe word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has itsessential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, aswith the names of simple sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, asimilar unity with its subject and with itself:--style is in the rightway when it tends towards that. All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension orview. So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always itslogic, its comprehensive reason--insight, foresight, retrospect, insimultaneous action--true, most of all, of the literary art, as beingof all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence. Such logical coherency may be evidenced not merely in the lines ofcomposition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it byno means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in thebuilding of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive, discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of theentire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child'sexpression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously intricate sentence; the sentence, born with the integrityof a single word, relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you lookclosely, you can see much contrivance, much adjustment, to bring ahighly qualified matter into compass at one view. For the literaryarchitecture, if it is to be rich and expressive, involves not onlyforesight of the end in the beginning, but also development or growthof design, in the process of execution, with many irregularities, surprises, and afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessarybeing subsumed under the unity of the whole. As truly, to the lack ofsuch architectural design, of a single, almost visual, image, vigorously informing an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition, which shall be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true fromfirst to last to that vision within, may be attributed those weaknessesof conscious or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, motive, ormember of the whole matter, indicating, as Flaubert was aware, anoriginal structure in thought not organically complete. With suchforesight, the actual conclusion will most often get itself written outof hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished. Withsome strong and leading sense of the world, the [24] tight hold ofwhich secures true composition and not mere loose accretion, theliterary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, setting joint tojoint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardour, retracingthe negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that hemay give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress, readjustingmere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or at least notinterrupt him on his way; and then, somewhere before the end comes, isburdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes delivered of it, leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds himself at an end, but in all the freshness of volition. His work now structurallycomplete, with all the accumulating effect of secondary shades ofmeaning, he finishes the whole up to the just proportion of thatante-penultimate conclusion, and all becomes expressive. The house hehas built is rather a body he has informed. And so it happens, to itsgreater credit, that the better interest even of a narrative to berecounted, a story to be told, will often be in its second reading. And though there are instances of great writers who have been noartists, an unconscious tact sometimes directing work in which we maydetect, very pleasurably, many of the effects of conscious art, yet oneof the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in thecritical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure, and thepervading sense of it [25] as we read. Yet of poetic literature too;for, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed isone of the forms of the imagination. 

That is the special function of mind, in style. Mind and soul:--hardto ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enoughpractically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, witheach other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance ofpreponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era ofpreponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is afact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing language, ofattracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtletywhich makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration. By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objectiveindications of design in his work, legible to all. By soul, he reachesus, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrantsympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose butapprove where we recognise it; soul may repel us, not because wemisunderstand it. The way in which theological interests sometimesavail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of theforce I mean to indicate generally in literature, by the word soul. Ardent religious persuasion may exist, may make its way, withoutfinding any equivalent heat in language: or, again, it may enkindle[26] words to various degrees, and when it really takes hold of themdoubles its force. Religious history presents many remarkableinstances in which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconsciousliterary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathwayfrom one to another. "The altar-fire, " people say, "has touched thoselips!" The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-Book, thewritings of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times:--there, we haveinstances of widely different and largely diffused phases of religiousfeeling in operation as soul in style. But something of the same kindacts with similar power in certain writers of quite other thantheological literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiarsense of theirs. Most easily illustrated by theological literature, this quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence. At their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, "prophets";such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter, butof their matter as allied to, in "electric affinity" with, peculiarform, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic contact, onwhich account it is that it may be called soul, as opposed to mind, instyle. And this too is a faculty of choosing and rejecting what iscongruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity--unity of atmospherehere, as there of design--soul securing colour (or perfume, might [27]we say?) as mind secures form, the latter being essentially finite, theformer vague or infinite, as the influence of a living person ispractically infinite. There are some to whom nothing has any realinterest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person; andit is they who best appreciate the quality of soul in literary art. They seem to know a person, in a book, and make way by intuition: yet, although they thus enjoy the completeness of a personal information, itis still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that itdoes but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being differentfrom, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containingthat plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet inwhat is there expressed. 

If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhapsrank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence, acurious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year, recordswhat seems to have been his one other passion--a series of letterswhich, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed anguish, itstone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in which thewhole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes supposed, oneof his own fictions. Writing to Madame X. Certainly he does display, by "taking thought" mainly, by constant and delicate pondering, as inhis love for literature, a heart really moved, but [28] still more, andas the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his work. Madame X. , too, is a literary artist, and the best gifts he can send her are preceptsof perfection in art, counsels for the effectual pursuit of that betterlove. In his love-letters it is the pains and pleasures of art heinsists on, its solaces: he communicates secrets, reproves, encourages, with a view to that. Whether the lady was dissatisfied with suchdivided or indirect service, the reader is not enabled to see; but seesthat, on Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival ofwhat was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitaryand exclusive one. 

I must scold you (he writes) for one thing, which shocks, scandalisesme, the small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regardsglory be it so: there, I approve. But for art!--the one thing in lifethat is good and real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--preferthe adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty?Well! I tell you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the onething I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with thebeautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable, what not?--

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and counteverything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all beside whenit is established on a large basis. Work! God wills it. That, itseems to me, is clear. --+

I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I repeat tomyself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are forever returning, and cause you pain, you love them so much. I observethat I no longer laugh much, and am no longer depressed. I am ripe. You talk of my serenity, and envy me. It may well surprise you. Sick, [29] irritated, the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, Icontinue my labour like a true working-man, who, with sleeves turnedup, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troublinghimself whether it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not likethat formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my willhas counted for something in the matter. --

Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect ofideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician weresomething else than healing, of the painter than painting-as if the endof art were not, before all else, the beautiful. 

What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursuedwith so much fervour, with so much self-command? Let us hear asympathetic commentator:--

Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way ofexpressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman labour for thediscovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. Inthis way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, andwhen a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seekinganother, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got holdof the unique word. .. . A thousand preoccupations would beset him atthe same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in hisspirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns ofexpression, there is but one--one form, one mode--to express what Iwant to say. 

The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude ofwords, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!--theunique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutelyproper to the single mental presentation or vision within. 

[30] In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent andremovable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but whichit can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availingitself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibilityof which constitutes it a fine art. 

One seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there, the ideaof a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between arelative, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative, somewhere in the world of language--both alike, rather, somewhere inthe mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, inventive--meetingeach other with the readiness of "soul and body reunited, " in Blake'srapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theoryphilosophical expression. --

There are no beautiful thoughts (he would say) without beautiful forms, and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a physical bodythe qualities which really constitute it--colour, extension, and thelike--without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, withoutdestroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from theidea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form. 

All, the recognised flowers, the removable ornaments of literature(including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully considered[31] by him) counted, certainly; for these too are part of the actualvalue of what one says. But still, after all, with Flaubert, thesearch, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth, or winsome, orforcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but quite simply andhonestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. The first conditionof this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained yourown sense exactly. Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to thereader, --I want you to see precisely what I see. Into the mindsensitive to "form, " a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, isever penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympatheticselection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visiblevesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within, nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined, enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just atthose doubtful points that the function of style, as tact or taste, intervenes. The unique term will come more quickly to one thananother, at one time than another, according also to the kind of matterin question. Quickness and slowness, ease and closeness alike, havenothing to do with the artistic character of the true word found atlast. As there is a charm of ease, so there is also a special charm inthe signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards a due end, asso often with Flaubert himself--in the style which has [32] beenpliant, as only obstinate, durable metal can be, to the inherentperplexities and recusancy of a certain difficult thought. 

If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps we should never have guessed howtardy and painful his own procedure really was, and after reading hisconfession may think that his almost endless hesitation had much to dowith diseased nerves. Often, perhaps, the felicity supposed will bethe product of a happier, a more exuberant nature than Flaubert's. Aggravated, certainly, by a morbid physical condition, that anxiety in"seeking the phrase, " which gathered all the other small ennuis of areally quiet existence into a kind of battle, was connected with hislifelong contention against facile poetry, facile art--art, facile andflimsy; and what constitutes the true artist is not the slowness orquickness of the process, but the absolute success of the result. Aswith those labourers in the parable, the prize is independent of themere length of the actual day's work. "You talk, " he writes, odd, trying lover, to Madame X. --

"You talk of the exclusiveness of my literary tastes. That might haveenabled you to divine what kind of a person I am in the matter of love. I grow so hard to please as a literary artist, that I am driven todespair. I shall end by not writing another line. "

"Happy, " he cries, in a moment of discouragement at that patientlabour, which for him, certainly, was the condition of a greatsuccess--[33]

Happy those who have no doubts of themselves! who lengthen out, as thepen runs on, all that flows forth from their brains. As for me, Ihesitate, I disappoint myself, turn round upon myself in despite: mytaste is augmented in proportion as my natural vigour decreases, and Iafflict my soul over some dubious word out of all proportion to thepleasure I get from a whole page of good writing. One would have tolive two centuries to attain a true idea of any matter whatever. WhatBuffon said is a big blasphemy: genius is not long-continued patience. Still, there is some truth in the statement, and more than peoplethink, especially as regards our own day. Art! art! art! bitterdeception! phantom that glows with light, only to lead one on todestruction. .. 

Again--

I am growing so peevish about my writing. I am like a man whose ear istrue but who plays falsely on the violin: his fingers refuse toreproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the inward sense. Then the tears come rolling down from the poor scraper's eyes and thebow falls from his hand. 

Coming slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much labourof mind, but also with so much lustre, to Gustave Flaubert, thisdiscovery of the word will be, like all artistic success and felicity, incapable of strict analysis: effect of an intuitive condition of mind, it must be recognised by like intuition on the part of the reader, anda sort of immediate sense. In every one of those masterly sentences ofFlaubert there was, below all mere contrivance, shaping andafterthought, by some happy instantaneous concourse of the variousfaculties of the mind with each other, the exact apprehension of whatwas needed to carry the meaning. And that it fits with absolutejustice will be a judgment of [34] immediate sense in the appreciativereader. We all feel this in what may be called inspired translation. Well! all language involves translation from inward to outward. Inliterature, as in all forms of art, there are the absolute and themerely relative or accessory beauties; and precisely in that exactproportion of the term to its purpose is the absolute beauty of style, prose or verse. All the good qualities, the beauties, of verse also, are such, only as precise expression. 

In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the oneindispensable beauty is, after all, truth:--truth to bare fact in thelatter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from men'sordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truthhere as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, thevraie vérité. And what an eclectic principle this really is! employingfor its one sole purpose--that absolute accordance of expression toidea--all other literary beauties and excellences whatever: how manykinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same timesafeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evocation of"the phrase, " are equally good art. Say what you have to say, what youhave a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact mannerpossible, with no surplusage:--there, is the justification of thesentence so fortunately born, "entire, smooth, and round, " that itneeds no punctuation, and also [35] (that is the point!) of the mostelaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration. Here is theoffice of ornament: here also the purpose of restraint in ornament. Asthe exponent of truth, that austerity (the beauty, the function, ofwhich in literature Flaubert understood so well) becomes not thecorrectness or purism of the mere scholar, but a security against theotiose, a jealous exclusion of what does not really tell towards thepursuit of relief, of life and vigour in the portraiture of one'ssense. License again, the making free with rule, if it be indeed, aspeople fancy, a habit of genius, flinging aside or transforming allthat opposes the liberty of beautiful production, will be but faith toone's own meaning. The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir isnothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Misérables is nothing initself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only redoubled beauty--the phrase so large and so precise at the sametime, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation ofwords to their matter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be ofprofit only so far as they too really serve to bring out the original, initiative, generative, sense in them. 

In this way, according to the well-known saying, "The style is theman, " complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense ofwhat he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautionsregarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to themedium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing isto be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristicor expressive, finds thus its justification, the sumptuous good tasteof Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified, yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been hisportrait by Raffaelle, in full consular splendour, on his ivory chair. 

A relegation, you may say perhaps--a relegation of style to thesubjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soontransform it into mannerism. Not so! since there is, under theconditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every lineamentof the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word, recognisable by the sensitive, by others "who have intelligence" in thematter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in the evanescent anddelicate region of human language. The style, the manner, would be theman, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices, involuntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of whatis most real to him. But let us hear our French guide again. --

Styles (says Flaubert's commentator), Styles, as so many [37] peculiarmoulds, each of which bears the mark of a particular writer, who is topour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of histheory. What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certainabsolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in all its intensityand colour. For him the form was the work itself. As in livingcreatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contourand external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in awork of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, themeasure, the rhythm--the form in all its characteristics. 

If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritableapprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal. "

I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that proseliterature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, asothers, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assignedthat place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, theopposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to theimagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as freeand various as those which music presents to it through sense. Andcertainly the tendency of what has been here said is to bringliterature too under those conditions, by conformity to which musictakes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of allart whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible todistinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from theexpression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in theabsolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be [38] butfulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art. 

Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between greatart and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at allevents, not on its form, but on the matter. Thackeray's Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of itsinterests. It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth ofthe note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatnessof literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, LesMisérables, The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions Ihave tried to explain as constituting good art;--then, if it be devotedfurther to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of theoppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or tosuch presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relationto the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, orimmediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also greatart; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind andsoul--that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, ithas something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, itsarchitectural place, in the great structure of human life. 

1888. 

NOTES

12. *Mr. Saintsbury, in his Specimens of English Prose, from Malory toMacaulay, has succeeded in tracing, through successive Englishprose-writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in them, of whichthis admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover. English Prose, from Mandeville to Thackeray, more recently "chosen andedited" by a younger scholar, Mr. Arthur Galton, of New College, Oxford, a lover of our literature at once enthusiastic and discreet, aims at a more various illustration of the eloquent powers of Englishprose, and is a delightful companion. 

28. +In the original, the quoted material is not indented but insteadappears in a smaller typeface; I have chosen to indent the materialhalf an inch to make it easier to read. 

WORDSWORTH

[39] SOME English critics at the beginning of the present century had agreat deal to say concerning a distinction, of much importance, as theythought, in the true estimate of poetry, between the Fancy, and anothermore powerful faculty--the Imagination. This metaphysical distinction, borrowed originally from the writings of German philosophers, andperhaps not always clearly apprehended by those who talked of it, involved a far deeper and more vital distinction, with which indeed alltrue criticism more or less directly has to do, the distinction, namely, between higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet'sperception of his subject, and in his concentration of himself upon hiswork. Of those who dwelt upon the metaphysical distinction between theFancy and the Imagination, it was Wordsworth who made the most of it, assuming it as the basis for the final classification of his poeticalwritings; and it is in these writings that the deeper and more vitaldistinction, which, as I have said, underlies the metaphysical [40]distinction, is most needed, and may best be illustrated. 

For nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's ownpoetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work ofalmost no character at all. He has much conventional sentiment, andsome of that insincere poetic diction, against which his most seriouscritical efforts were directed: the reaction in his political ideas, consequent on the excesses of 1795, makes him, at times, a meredeclaimer on moral and social topics; and he seems, sometimes, to forcean unwilling pen, and write by rule. By making the most of theseblemishes it is possible to obscure the true aesthetic value of hiswork, just as his life also, a life of much quiet delicacy andindependence, might easily be placed in a false focus, and made toappear a somewhat tame theme in illustration of the more obviousparochial virtues. And those who wish to understand his influence, andexperience his peculiar savour, must bear with patience the presence ofan alien element in Wordsworth's work, which never coalesced with whatis really delightful in it, nor underwent his special power. Who thatvalues his writings most has not felt the intrusion there, from time totime, of something tedious and prosaic? Of all poets equally great, hewould gain most by a skilfully made anthology. Such a selection wouldshow, in truth, not so much what he was, or to himself or others [41]seemed to be, as what, by the more energetic and fertile quality in hiswritings, he was ever tending to become. And the mixture in his work, as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss theleast promising composition even, lest some precious morsel should belying hidden within--the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single wordperhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almostthe whole of which may be tame enough. He who thought that in allcreative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipientmind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a measurewas sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; andhe has permitted the impress of these too to remain in his work. Andthis duality there--the fitfulness with which the higher qualitiesmanifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his poetry of a powernot altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes whenit will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in itself; so that that oldfancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divinepossession, seems almost literally true of him. 

This constant suggestion of an absolute duality between higher andlower moods, and the work done in them, stimulating one always to lookbelow the surface, makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent sort oftraining towards the things of art and poetry. It begets in those, [42] who, coming across him in youth, can bear him at all, a habit ofreading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration andcollectedness of mind in the right appreciation of poetry, anexpectation of things, in this order, coming to one by means of a rightdiscipline of the temper as well as of the intellect. He meets us withthe promise that he has much, and something very peculiar, to give us, if we will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to have the secretof a special and privileged state of mind. And those who haveundergone his influence, and followed this difficult way, are likepeople who have passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, bysubmitting to which they become able constantly to distinguish in art, speech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive, from that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive. 

But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels foroneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiarinfluence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate ofit, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent, hadthe writer himself purged away that alien element. How perfect wouldhave been the little treasury, shut between the covers of how thin abook! Let us suppose the desired separation made, the electric threaduntwined, the golden pieces, [43] great and small, lying aparttogether. * What are the peculiarities of this residue? What specialsense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does he satisfy?What are the subjects and the motives which in him excite theimaginative faculty? What are the qualities in things and personswhich he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey toothers, in an extraordinary way?

An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, whichweighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has beenremarked as a fact in mental history again and again. It revealsitself in many forms; but is strongest and most attractive in what isstrongest and most attractive in modern literature. It is exemplified, almost equally, by writers as unlike each other as Senancour andThéophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the history of the humanmind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, fromChateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it has doubtless some latent connexionwith those pantheistic theories which locate an intelligent soul inmaterial things, and have largely exercised men's minds in some modernsystems of philosophy: it is traceable even in [44] the graver writingsof historians: it makes as much difference between ancient and modernlandscape art, as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaicand a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Of this new sense, thewritings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression: he ismore simply and entirely occupied with it than any other poet, thoughthere are fine expressions of precisely the same thing in so differenta poet as Shelley. There was in his own character a certaincontentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found unitedwith a sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence. His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly feltincidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls intobroad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces. What it mostresembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemishpainters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet, systematic industry. This placid life matured a quite unusualsensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of thenatural world--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo andits echo. The poem of Resolution and Independence is a storehouse ofsuch records: for its fulness of imagery it may be compared to Keats'sSaint Agnes' Eve. To [45] read one of his longer pastoral poems forthe first time, is like a day spent in a new country: the memory iscrowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents--

 The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze On some grey rock;--

 The single sheep and the one blasted tree And the bleak music from that old stone wall;--

 In the meadows and the lower ground Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;--

 And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears. 

Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visibleimagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous, inthe noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble sound as evenmoulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as somethingactually "profaned" by colour, by visible form, or image. 

He has a power likewise of realising, and conveying to theconsciousness of the reader, abstract and elementaryimpressions--silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, thewhole complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expressionof desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particularfolding of the hills. In the airy building of the brain, a special dayor hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, aspirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional [46]insight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one'shistory, and acts there, as a separate power or accomplishment; and hehas celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit, " which, ashe says, resides in these "particular spots" of time. 

It is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation thereon, that we see him retiring in his but lately published poem of TheRecluse--taking leave, without much count of costs, of the world ofbusiness, of action and ambition; as also of all that for the majorityof mankind counts as sensuous enjoyment. *

And so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworththe assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him everynatural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spirituallife, to be [47] capable of a companionship with man, full ofexpression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse. An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leavesor water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly, by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the passingspace of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. It waslike a "survival, " in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man ofletters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitivecondition, which some philosophers have traced in the general historyof human culture, wherein all outward objects [48] alike, includingeven the works of men's hands, were believed to be endowed withanimation, and the world was "full of souls"--that mood in which theold Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strangeaftergrowths. 

In the early ages, this belief, delightful as its effects on poetryoften are, was but the result of a crude intelligence. But, inWordsworth, such power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, ininanimate things, came of an exceptional susceptibility to theimpressions of eye and ear, and was, in its essence, a kind ofsensuousness. At least, it is only in a temperament exceptionallysusceptible on the sensuous side, that this sense of the expressivenessof outward things comes to be so large a part of life. That he awakened"a sort of thought in sense, " is Shelley's just estimate of thiselement in Wordsworth's poetry. 

And it was through nature, thus ennobled by a semblance of passion andthought, that he approached the spectacle of human life. Human life, indeed, is for him, at first, only an additional, accidental grace onan expressive landscape. When he thought of man, it was of man as inthe presence and under the influence of these effective naturalobjects, and linked to them by many associations. The close connexionof man with natural objects, the habitual association of his thoughtsand feelings with a particular spot of earth, has sometimes seemed to[49] degrade those who are subject to its influence, as if it did butreinforce that physical connexion of our nature with the actual limeand clay of the soil, which is always drawing us nearer to our end. But for Wordsworth, these influences tended to the dignity of humannature, because they tended to tranquillise it. By raising nature tothe level of human thought he gives it power and expression: he subduesman to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth andcoolness and solemnity. The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman"stepping westward, " are for him natural objects, almost in the samesense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath. In thissense the leader of the "Lake School, " in spite of an earnestpreoccupation with man, his thoughts, his destiny, is the poet ofnature. And of nature, after all, in its modesty. The English lakecountry has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function ofWordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul ofapparently little or familiar things, would have found its true testhad he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life. The glories of Italy and Switzerland, though he did write a littleabout them, had too potent a material life of their own to servegreatly his poetic purpose. 

Religious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural regrets ofthe human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for the [50]perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corruption, hasalways had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attachthemselves to actual scenes and places. Now what is true of iteverywhere, is truest of it in those secluded valleys where onegeneration after another maintains the same abiding-place; and it wason this side, that Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly. Consisting, as it did so much, in the recognition of local sanctities, in the habit of connecting the stones and trees of a particular spot ofearth with the great events of life, till the low walls, the greenmounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full of voices, and a sortof natural oracles, the very religion of these people of the dalesappeared but as another link between them and the earth, and wasliterally a religion of nature. It tranquillised them by bringing themunder the placid rule of traditional and narrowly localisedobservances. "Grave livers, " they seemed to him, under this aspect, with stately speech, and something of that natural dignity of manners, which underlies the highest courtesy. 

And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnised inproportion as his daily life and occupations brought him intocompanionship with permanent natural objects, his very religion formingnew links for him with the narrow limits of the valley, the low vaultsof his church, the rough stones of his [51] home, made intense for himnow with profound sentiment, Wordsworth was able to appreciate passionin the lowly. He chooses to depict people from humble life, because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole moreimpassioned, certainly more direct in their expression of passion, thanother men: it is for this direct expression of passion, that he valuestheir humble words. In much that he said in exaltation of rural life, he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that perfectfidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise features ofthe picture within, without which any profound poetry is impossible. It was not for their tameness, but for this passionate sincerity, thathe chose incidents and situations from common life, "related in aselection of language really used by men. " He constantly endeavours tobring his language near to the real language of men: to the reallanguage of men, however, not on the dead level of their ordinaryintercourse, but in select moments of vivid sensation, when thislanguage is winnowed and ennobled by excitement. There are poets whohave chosen rural life as their subject, for the sake of itspassionless repose, and times when Wordsworth himself extols the merecalm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of poeticalculture. But it was not for such passionless calm that he preferredthe scenes of pastoral life; and the meditative poet, sheltering [52]himself, as it might seem, from the agitations of the outward world, isin reality only clearing the scene for the great exhibitions ofemotion, and what he values most is the almost elementary expression ofelementary feelings. 

And so he has much for those who value highly the concentratedpresentment of passion, who appraise men and women by theirsusceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacleof it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of theirdaily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those greatelementary feelings, lifting and solemnising their language and givingit a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to Michaelby the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble childrenof the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls. In thisrespect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George Sand, in thoseof her novels which depict country life. With a penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with the masters of the sentiment ofpity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor Hugo, he collects all thetraces of vivid excitement which were to be found in that pastoralworld--the girl who rung her father's knell; the unborn infant feelingabout its mother's heart; the instinctive touches of children; thesorrows of the wild creatures, even--their home-sickness, their strangeyearnings; the tales of passionate regret that hang [53] by a ruinedfarm-building, a heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilderand deflower these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for theoverthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness forpersonal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged--their patheticwanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on thestormy seas"; the wild woman teaching her child to pray for herbetrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that ofthe young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;--all thepathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, theirwonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures ofchildren, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; theiryearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at theirearly toil. A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over thisstrange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised theimage, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction hascaught from him. 

He pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and reading deeplyin the history of his own mind, seems at times to have passed theborders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent enough, had hecared to note such inconsistencies, with those traditional beliefs, which [54] were otherwise the object of his devout acceptance. Thinking of the high value he set upon customariness, upon all that ishabitual, local, rooted in the ground, in matters of religioussentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one tethered down to aworld, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad outlook, a worldprotected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence of received ideas. But he is at times also something very different from this, andsomething much bolder. A chance expression is overheard and placed ina new connexion, the sudden memory of a thing long past occurs to him, a distant object is relieved for a while by a random gleam oflight--accidents turning up for a moment what lies below the surface ofour immediate experience--and he passes from the humble graves andlowly arches of "the little rock-like pile" of a Westmoreland church, on bold trains of speculative thought, and comes, from point to point, into strange contact with thoughts which have visited, from time totime, far more venturesome, perhaps errant, spirits. 

He had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminiscencesand forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behindus, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines ofconnexion. Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on theseendless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a pledgeto him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back also tothat mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence--the fancy ofthe Platonists--the old heresy of Origen. It was in this mood that heconceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, whenthe relics of Paradise still clung about the soul--a childhood, as itseemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, inthe passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, overagain, in the passing away of actual youth. It is this ideal childhoodwhich he celebrates in his famous Ode on the Recollections ofChildhood, and some other poems which may be grouped around it, such asthe lines on Tintern Abbey, and something like what he describes wasactually truer of himself than he seems to have understood; for his ownmost delightful poems were really the instinctive productions ofearlier life, and most surely for him, "the first diviner influence ofthis world" passed away, more and more completely, in his contact withexperience. 

Sometimes as he dwelt upon those moments of profound, imaginativepower, in which the outward object appears to take colour andexpression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observantmind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself, flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when hewould the destroyer, of the world in which he lived--that old isolatingthought of many a brain-sick mystic of ancient and modern times. 

[56] At other times, again, in those periods of intense susceptibility, in which he appeared to himself as but the passive recipient ofexternal influences, he was attracted by the thought of a spirit oflife in outward things, a single, all-pervading mind in them, of whichman, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but moments--that olddream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things and their grave, inwhich some had desired to lose themselves, and others had becomeindifferent to the distinctions of good and evil. It would come, sometimes, like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust in his cell: thenetwork of man and nature was seen to be pervaded by a common, universal life: a new, bold thought lifted him above the furrow, abovethe green turf of the Westmoreland churchyard, to a world altogetherdifferent in its vagueness and vastness, and the narrow glen was fullof the brooding power of one universal spirit. 

And so he has something, also, for those who feel the fascination ofbold speculative ideas, who are really capable of rising upon them toconditions of poetical thought. He uses them, indeed, always with avery fine apprehension of the limits within which alone philosophicalimaginings have any place in true poetry; and using them only forpoetical purposes, is not too careful even to make them consistent witheach other. To him, theories which for other men [57] bring a world oftechnical diction, brought perfect form and expression, as in those twolofty books of The Prelude, which describe the decay and therestoration of Imagination and Taste. Skirting the borders of thisworld of bewildering heights and depths, he got but the first excitinginfluence of it, that joyful enthusiasm which great imaginativetheories prompt, when the mind first comes to have an understanding ofthem; and it is not under the influence of these thoughts that hispoetry becomes tedious or loses its blitheness. He keeps them, too, always within certain ethical bounds, so that no word of his couldoffend the simplest of those simple souls which are always the largestportion of mankind. But it is, nevertheless, the contact of thesethoughts, the speculative boldness in them, which constitutes, at leastfor some minds, the secret attraction of much of his best poetry--thesudden passage from lowly thoughts and places to the majestic forms ofphilosophical imagination, the play of these forms over a world sodifferent, enlarging so strangely the bounds of its humble churchyards, and breaking such a wild light on the graves of christened children. 

And these moods always brought with them faultless expression. Inregard to expression, as with feeling and thought, the duality of thehigher and lower moods was absolute. It belonged to the higher, theimaginative mood, and was the pledge of its reality, to bring the [58]appropriate language with it. In him, when the really poetical motiveworked at all, it united, with absolute justice, the word and the idea;each, in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one with theother, by that fusion of matter and form, which is the characteristicof the highest poetical expression. His words are themselves thoughtand feeling; not eloquent, or musical words merely, but that sort ofcreative language which carries the reality of what it depicts, directly, to the consciousness. 

The music of mere metre performs but a limited, yet a very peculiar andsubtly ascertained function, in Wordsworth's poetry. With him, metreis but an additional grace, accessory to that deeper music of words andsounds, that moving power, which they exercise in the nobler prose noless than in formal poetry. It is a sedative to that excitement, anexcitement sometimes almost painful, under which the language, alike ofpoetry and prose, attains a rhythmical power, independent of metricalcombination, and dependent rather on some subtle adjustment of theelementary sounds of words themselves to the image or feeling theyconvey. Yet some of his pieces, pieces prompted by a sort ofhalf-playful mysticism, like the Daffodils and The Two April Mornings, are distinguished by a certain quaint gaiety of metre, and rival bytheir perfect execution, in this respect, similar pieces among our ownElizabethan, or contemporary French poetry. 

[59] And those who take up these poems after an interval of months, oryears perhaps, may be surprised at finding how well old favouriteswear, how their strange, inventive turns of diction or thought stillsend through them the old feeling of surprise. Those who lived aboutWordsworth were all great lovers of the older English literature, andoftentimes there came out in him a noticeable likeness to our earlierpoets. He quotes unconsciously, but with new power of meaning, aclause from one of Shakespeare's sonnets; and, as with some other men'smost famous work, the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood had itsanticipator. * He drew something too from the unconscious mysticism ofthe old English language itself, drawing out the inward significance ofits racy idiom, and the not wholly unconscious poetry of the languageused by the simplest people under strong excitement--language, therefore, at its origin. 

The office of the poet is not that of the moralist, and the first aimof Wordsworth's poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind ofpleasure. But through his poetry, and through this pleasure in it, hedoes actually convey to the reader an extraordinary wisdom in thethings of practice. One lesson, if men must have lessons, he conveysmore clearly than all, the supreme importance of contemplation in theconduct of life. 

[60] Contemplation--impassioned contemplation--that, is with Wordsworththe end-in-itself, the perfect end. We see the majority of mankindgoing most often to definite ends, lower or higher ends, as their owninstincts may determine; but the end may never be attained, and themeans not be quite the right means, great ends and little ones alikebeing, for the most part, distant, and the ways to them, in this dimworld, somewhat vague. Meantime, to higher or lower ends, they movetoo often with something of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoblegait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxietyto bear grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of evengreat ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit andtemper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world, at itsvery sources. We understand this when it is a question of mean, or ofintensely selfish ends--of Grandet, or Javert. We think it badmorality to say that the end justifies the means, and we know how falseto all higher conceptions of the religious life is the type of one whois ready to do evil that good may come. We contrast with such dark, mistaken eagerness, a type like that of Saint Catherine of Siena, whomade the means to her ends so attractive, that she has won for herselfan undying place in the House Beautiful, not by her rectitude of soulonly, but by its "fairness"--by those quite different qualities [61]which commend themselves to the poet and the artist. 

Yet, for most of us, the conception of means and ends covers the wholeof life, and is the exclusive type or figure under which we representour lives to ourselves. Such a figure, reducing all things tomachinery, though it has on its side the authority of that old Greekmoralist who has fixed for succeeding generations the outline of thetheory of right living, is too like a mere picture or description ofmen's lives as we actually find them, to be the basis of the higherethics. It covers the meanness of men's daily lives, and much of thedexterity with which they pursue what may seem to them the good ofthemselves or of others; but not the intangible perfection of thosewhose ideal is rather in being than in doing--not those manners whichare, in the deepest as in the simplest sense, morals, and without whichone cannot so much as offer a cup of water to a poor man withoutoffence--not the part of "antique Rachel, " sitting in the company ofBeatrice; and even the moralist might well endeavour rather to withdrawmen from the too exclusive consideration of means and ends, in life. 

Against this predominance of machinery in our existence, Wordsworth'spoetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest. Justifyrather the end by the means, it seems to say: whatever may become ofthe fruit, make sure of [62] the flowers and the leaves. It was justlysaid, therefore, by one who had meditated very profoundly on the truerelation of means to ends in life, and on the distinction between whatis desirable in itself and what is desirable only as machinery, thatwhen the battle which he and his friends were waging had been won, theworld would need more than ever those qualities which Wordsworth waskeeping alive and nourishing. *

That the end of life is not action but contemplation--being as distinctfrom doing--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape orother, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry, in art, ifyou enter into their true spirit at all; you touch this principle, in ameasure: these, by their very sterility, are a type of beholding forthe mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art, is tomake life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encouragesuch treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry. Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient or morerecent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of impassionedcontemplation. Their work is, not to teach lessons, or enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends; but to withdraw the thoughts fora little while from the mere machinery of life, to fix [63] them, withappropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man'sexistence which no machinery affects, "on the great and universalpassions of men, the most general and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature, "--on "the operations of the elementsand the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and sunshine, onthe revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss of friendsand kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude and hope, onfear and sorrow. " To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotionsis the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry likeWordsworth's is a great nourisher and stimulant. He sees nature fullof sentiment and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature, passionate, excited, in strange grouping and connexion with thegrandeur and beauty of the natural world:--images, in his own words, "of man suffering, amid awful forms and powers. "

Such is the figure of the more powerful and original poet, hidden away, in part, under those weaker elements in Wordsworth's poetry, which forsome minds determine their entire character; a poet somewhat bolder andmore passionate than might at first sight be supposed, but not too boldfor true poetical taste; an unimpassioned writer, you might sometimesfancy, yet thinking the chief aim, in life and art alike, to be acertain deep emotion; seeking most often the great [64] elementarypassions in lowly places; having at least this condition of allimpassioned work, that he aims always at an absolute sincerity offeeling and diction, so that he is the true forerunner of the deepestand most passionate poetry of our own day; yet going back also, withsomething of a protest against the conventional fervour of much of thepoetry popular in his own time, to those older English poets, whoseunconscious likeness often comes out in him. 

1874. 

NOTES

43. *Since this essay was written, such selections have been made, withexcellent taste, by Matthew Arnold and Professor Knight. 

46-47. *In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition ofThe Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work wasintended to be introductory to The Recluse; and that The Recluse, ifcompleted, would have consisted of three parts. The second part is TheExcursion. The third part was only planned; but the first book of thefirst part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in manuscript, it is said, in no great condition of forwardness for the printers. This book, now for the first time printed in extenso (a very noblepassage from it found place in that prose advertisement to TheExcursion), is included in the latest edition of Wordsworth by Mr. JohnMorley. It was well worth adding to the poet's great bequest toEnglish literature. A true student of his work, who has formulated forhimself what he supposes to be the leading characteristics ofWordsworth's genius, will feel, we think, lively interest in testingthem by the various fine passages in what is here presented for thefirst time. Let the following serve for a sample:--

 Thickets full of songsters, and the voice Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound Heard now and then from morn to latest eve, Admonishing the man who walks below Of solitude and silence in the sky:-- These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth Have also these, but nowhere else is found, Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found The one sensation that is here; 'tis here, Here as it found its way into my heart In childhood, here as it abides by day, By night, here only; or in chosen minds That take it with them hence, where'er they go. --'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense Of majesty, and beauty, and repose, A blended holiness of earth and sky, Something that makes this individual spot, This small abiding-place of many men, A termination, and a last retreat, A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will, A whole without dependence or defect, Made for itself, and happy in itself, Perfect contentment, Unity entire. 

59. *Henry Vaughan, in The Retreat. 

62. *See an interesting paper, by Mr. John Morley, on "The Death of Mr. Mill, " Fortnightly Review, June 1873. 

COLERIDGE*

[65] FORMS of intellectual and spiritual culture sometimes exercisetheir subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing fromthem. Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spiriton its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temperthat what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once, even from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law ofdevelopment evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life, andrepresses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earliergrowth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit thewhole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes thespectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined bythe antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens themwhile they contend against it. Weaker minds fail to perceive thechange: the clearest minds abandon themselves to it. To [66] feel thechange everywhere, yet not abandon oneself to it, is a situation ofdifficulty and contention. Communicating, in this way, to the passingstage of culture, the charm of what is chastened, high-strung, athletic, they yet detach the highest minds from the past, by pressinghome its difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such has beenthe charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion. It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those oldermethods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy ofour day has triumphed. 

Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the"relative" spirit in place of the "absolute. " Ancient philosophysought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought ina necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a classification by"kinds, " or genera. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightlyknown, except relatively and under conditions. The philosophicalconception of the relative has been developed in modern times throughthe influence of the sciences of observation. Those sciences revealtypes of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refinementsof change. Things pass into their opposites by accumulation ofundefinable quantities. The growth of those sciences consists in acontinual analysis of facts of rough and general observation intogroups of facts more precise and minute. 

[67] The faculty for truth is recognised as a power of distinguishingand fixing delicate and fugitive detail. The moral world is ever incontact with the physical, and the relative spirit has invaded moralphilosophy from the ground of the inductive sciences. There it hasstarted a new analysis of the relations of body and mind, good andevil, freedom and necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yieldingto a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an organism increases in perfection, the conditions of itslife become more complex. Man is the most complex of the products ofnature. Character merges into temperament: the nervous system refinesitself into intellect. Man's physical organism is played upon not onlyby the physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance, the vibration of long-past acts reaching him in the midst of the neworder of things in which he lives. When we have estimated theseconditions he is still not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of therace, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through themedium of language and current ideas. It seems as if the most oppositestatements about him were alike true: he is so receptive, all theinfluences of nature and of society ceaselessly playing upon him, sothat every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a strayword, or glance, or touch. It is the truth of these relations thatexperience [68] gives us, not the truth of eternal outlines ascertainedonce for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linkedconditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change--and bids us, by a constant clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting ofanalysis, to make what we can of these. To the intellect, the criticalspirit, just these subtleties of effect are more precious than anythingelse. What is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy ofexpression. It is no vague scholastic abstraction that will satisfythe speculative instinct in our modern minds. Who would change thecolour or curve of a rose-leaf for that ousia akhrômatos, askhêmatistos, anaphês+--that colourless, formless, intangible, being--Plato put so high? For the true illustration of the speculativetemper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense, understanding, individuality, but one such as Goethe, to whom every moment of lifebrought its contribution of experimental, individual knowledge; by whomno touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded. 

Now the literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle againstthe relative spirit. With a strong native bent towards the tracking ofall questions, critical or practical, to first principles, he is everrestlessly scheming to "apprehend the absolute, " to affirm iteffectively, to get it acknowledged. It was an effort, surely, aneffort of sickly thought, that saddened his [69] mind, and limited theoperation of his unique poetic gift. 

So what the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge'sprose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet, inthose grey volumes, we have the larger part of the production of onewho made way ever by a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, oflanguage, above all by the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminousideas. Perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess ofseriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, butfrom a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shadeof unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which maybe thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstractquestions. The humanist, the possessor of that complete culture, doesnot "weep" over the failure of "a theory of the quantification of thepredicate, " nor "shriek" over the fall of a philosophical formula. Akind of humour is, in truth, one of the conditions of the just mentalattitude, in the criticism of by-past stages of thought. Humanitycannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than a man of goodsense can afford to be too serious in looking back upon his ownchildhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first of his spiritualancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true humanist, holds histheories lightly, glances with a somewhat blithe and naiveinconsequence from [70] one view to another, not anticipating theburden of importance "views" will one day have for men. In reading himone feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to saythat external prosperity was not necessarily happiness. But onColeridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection that has sincecome into the world, with which for us the air is full, which the"children in the market-place" repeat to each other. His very languageis forced and broken lest some saving formula should belost--distinctities, enucleation, pentad of operative Christianity; hehas a whole armoury of these terms, and expects to turn the tide ofhuman thought by fixing the sense of such expressions as "reason, ""understanding, " "idea. " Again, he lacks the jealousy of a true artistin excluding all associations that have no colour, or charm, orgladness in them; and everywhere allows the impress of a somewhatinferior theological literature. 

"I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation:" soColeridge sums up his childhood, with its delicacy, its sensitiveness, and passion. But at twenty-five he was exercising a wonderful charm, and had already defined for himself his peculiar line of intellectualactivity. He had an odd, attractive gift of conversation, or rather ofmonologue, as Madame de Staël observed of him, full of bizarreries, with the rapid alternations of a dream, and here or there an unexpectedsummons into a world [71] strange to the hearer, abounding in imagesdrawn from a sort of divided imperfect life, the consciousness of theopium-eater, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only inpart, and, blent with all this, passages of deep obscurity, precious, if at all, only for their musical cadence, echoes in Coleridge of theeloquence of those older English writers of whom he was so ardent alover. And all through this brilliant early manhood we may discern thepower of the "Asiatic" temperament, of that voluptuousness, which isconnected perhaps with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almostmystical communion of touch, between nature and man. "I am muchbetter, " he writes, "and my new and tender health is all over me like avoluptuous feeling. " And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiringgift he has had as a speculative thinker, is the vibration of theinterest he excited then, the propulsion into years which clouded hisearly promise of that first buoyant, irresistible, self-assertion. Sogreat is even the indirect power of a sincere effort towards the ideallife, of even a temporary escape of the spirit from routine. 

In 1798 he visited Germany, then, the only half-known, "promised land, "of the metaphysical, the "absolute, " philosophy. A beautiful fragmentof this period remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken. His excitement still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states [72] ofmind, are self-expressive: they loosen the tongue, they fill thethoughts with sensuous images, they harmonise one with the world ofsight. We hear of the "rich graciousness and courtesy" of Coleridge'smanner, of the white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, thefull, almost animal lips--that whole physiognomy of the dreamer, already touched with narcotism. One says, of the beginning of one ofhis Unitarian sermons: "His voice rose like a stream of rich, distilledperfumes;" another, "He talks like an angel, and does--nothing!"

The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, The Biographia Literaria: thosebooks came from one whose vocation was in the world of the imagination, the theory and practice of poetry. And yet, perhaps, of all books thathave been influential in modern times, they are furthest from artisticform--bundles of notes; the original matter inseparably mixed up withthat borrowed from others; the whole, just that mere preparation for anartistic effect which the finished literary artist would be careful oneday to destroy. Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristicof Coleridge. He sometimes attempts to reduce a phase of thought, subtle and exquisite, to conditions too rough for it. He uses a purelyspeculative gift for direct moral edification. Scientific truth is athing fugitive, relative, full of fine gradations: he tries to fix itin absolute formulas. The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, are [73]efforts to propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the lessethereal fabric of a written book; and it is only here or there thatthe poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit. 

De Quincey said of him that "he wanted better bread than can be madewith wheat:" Lamb, that from childhood he had "hungered for eternity. "Yet the faintness, the continuous dissolution, whatever its cause, which soon supplanted the buoyancy of his first wonderful years, hadits own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to the "BeautifulSoul" in Wilhelm Meister, a faint religious ecstasy--that "singing inthe sails" which is not of the breeze. Here again is one of hisoccasional notes:--

"In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yondermoon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem rather to beseeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something withinme, that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscurefeeling, as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgottenor hidden truth of my inner nature. While I was preparing the pen tomake this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it. "

What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodilydistemper there is in that!

Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; [74] but he had onesingular intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste fortranscendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when thatphilosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself withan impressive literary movement. He had the good luck to light upon itin its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen. What anopportunity for one reared on the colourless analytic Englishphilosophies of the last century, but who feels an irresistibleattraction towards bold metaphysical synthesis! How rare are suchoccasions of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy, chiefly as systematised by the mystic Schelling, Coleridge applied withan eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology, and poeticor artistic criticism. It is in his theory of poetry, of art, that hecomes nearest to principles of permanent truth and importance: that isthe least fugitive part of his prose work. What, then, is the essenceof his philosophy of art--of imaginative production?

Generally, it may be described as an attempt to reclaim the world ofart as a world of fixed laws, to show that the creative activity ofgenius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lowerproducts of the laws of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its owninadequacy in dealing with the greater works of art, is sometimestempted to make too much of those dark and capricious suggestions ofgenius, which even [75] the intellect possessed by them is unable toexplain or recall. It has seemed due to the half-sacred character ofthose works to ignore all analogy between the productive process bywhich they had their birth, and the simpler processes of mind. Coleridge, on the other hand, assumes that the highest phases ofthought must be more, not less, than the lower, subject to law. 

With this interest, in the Biographia Literaria, he refines Schelling's"Philosophy of Nature" into a theory of art. "There can be noplagiarism in philosophy, " says Heine:--Es giebt kein Plagiat in derPhilosophie, in reference to the charge brought against Schelling ofunacknowledged borrowing from Bruno; and certainly that which is commonto Coleridge and Schelling and Bruno alike is of far earlier originthan any of them. Schellingism, the "Philosophy of Nature, " is indeeda constant tradition in the history of thought: it embodies a permanenttype of the speculative temper. That mode of conceiving nature as amirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced up to thefirst beginnings of Greek speculation. There are two ways ofenvisaging those aspects of nature which seem to bear the impress ofreason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which regards themmerely as marks of design, which separates the informing mind from itsresult in nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is thepantheistic way, which identifies the two, which [76] regards natureitself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind asthough vaster in scope than the human. Partly through the influence ofmythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception ofnature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. Thisunfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrifiedinto an idea, is the force which gives unity of aim to Greekphilosophy. Little by little, it works out the substance of theHegelian formula: "Whatever is, is according to reason: whatever isaccording to reason, that is. " Experience, which has graduallysaddened the earth's colours for us, stiffened its motions, withdrawnfrom it some blithe and debonair presence, has quite changed thecharacter of the science of nature, as we understand it. The"positive" method, in truth, makes very little account of marks ofintelligence in nature: in its wider view of phenomena, it sees thatthose instances are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences: itabsorbs them in the larger conception of universal mechanical law. Butthe suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for release, andintercourse with the intellect of man through true ideas, has neverceased to haunt a certain class of minds. Started again and again insuccessive periods by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each casethe thought may have seemed paler and more fantastic amid the growing[77] consistency and sharpness of outline of other and more positiveforms of knowledge. Still, wherever the speculative instinct has beenunited with a certain poetic inwardness of temperament, as in Bruno, inSchelling, there that old Greek conception, like some seed floating inthe air, has taken root and sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inwardupon himself, driven from "life in thought and sensation" to life inthought only, feels already, in his dark London school, a thread of theGreek mind on this matter vibrating strongly in him. At fifteen he isdiscoursing on Plotinus, as in later years he reflects from Schellingthat flitting intellectual tradition. He supposes a subtle, sympatheticco-ordination between the ideas of the human reason and the laws of thenatural world. Science, the real knowledge of that natural world, isto be attained, not by observation, experiment, analysis, patientgeneralisation, but by the evolution or recovery of those ideasdirectly from within, by a sort of Platonic "recollection"; every groupof observed facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate idea isstruck upon them from the mind of a Newton, or a Cuvier, the genius inwhom sympathy with the universal reason becomes entire. In the nextplace, he conceives that this reason or intelligence in nature becomesreflective, or self-conscious. He fancies he can trace, through allthe simpler forms of life, fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the[78] human mind. The whole of nature he regards as a development ofhigher forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematicchange. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axis of crystalform, the trance-like life of plants, the animal troubled by strangeirritabilities, are stages which anticipate consciousness. All throughthe ever-increasing movement of life that was shaping itself; everysuccessive phase of life, in its unsatisfied susceptibilities, seemingto be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current oflife on its confines, the "shadow of approaching humanity" graduallydeepening, the latent intelligence winning a way to the surface. Andat this point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice:rather it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest tothe very highest acts of the conscious intelligence, there is anotherseries of refining shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the limitations of the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of modifying and centralising what it receivesfrom without, according to the pattern of an inward ideal. At last, inimaginative genius, ideas become effective: the intelligence of nature, all its discursive elements now connected and justified, is clearlyreflected; the interpretation of its latent purposes being embodied inthe great central products of creative art. The secret of creative[79] genius would be an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature, withthe reasonable soul antecedent there. Those associative conceptions ofthe imagination, those eternally fixed types of action and passion, would come, not so much from the conscious invention of the artist, asfrom his self-surrender to the suggestions of an abstract reason orideality in things: they would be evolved by the stir of nature itself, realising the highest reach of its dormant reason: they would have akind of prevenient necessity to rise at some time to the surface of thehuman mind. 

It is natural that Shakespeare should be the favourite illustration ofsuch criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first suggestion inShakespeare is that of capricious detail, of a waywardness that playswith the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenesis the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, ofHamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving freely is curved round as if bysome law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identitymakes itself visible amid an abounding variety. This unity or identityColeridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a naturalorganism, and the associative act which effected it into somethingclosely akin to the primitive power of nature itself. "In theShakespearian drama, " he says, "there is a vitality which grows andevolves itself from within. "

[80] Again--

He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ fromwithin, by the imaginative power, according to the idea. For as thepower of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives which suppose each other. 

Again--

The organic form is innate: it shapes, as it develops, itself fromwithin, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with theperfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime, genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, isequally inexhaustible in forms: each exterior is the physiognomy of thebeing within, and even such is the appropriate excellence ofShakespeare, himself a nature humanised, a genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper eventhan our consciousness. +

In this late age we are become so familiarised with the greater worksof art as to be little sensitive of the act of creation in them: theydo not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only sometimes, inproductions which realise immediately a profound influence and enforcea change in taste, we are actual witnesses of the moulding of anunforeseen type by some new principle of association; and to thatphenomenon Coleridge wisely recalls our attention. What makes his viewa one-sided one is, that in it the artist has become almost amechanical agent: instead of the most luminous and self-possessed phaseof consciousness, the associative act in art or poetry is made to looklike some blindly organic process of assimilation. The work of art islikened to a living organism. That expresses [81] truly the sense of aself-delighting, independent life which the finished work of art givesus: it hardly figures the process by which such work was produced. Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements towards therealisation of a type. By exquisite analysis the artist attainsclearness of idea; then, through many stages of refining, clearness ofexpression. He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderesttone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting hand or fancymove at large, gradually enforcing flaccid spaces to the higher degreeof expressiveness. The philosophic critic, at least, will value, evenin works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of theunderstanding in them, their logical process of construction, thespectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford. 

Coleridge's prose writings on philosophy, politics, religion, andcriticism, were, in truth, but one element in a whole lifetime ofendeavours to present the then recent metaphysics of Germany to Englishreaders, as a legitimate expansion of the older, classical and nativemasters of what has been variously called the a priori, or absolute, orspiritual, or Platonic, view of things. His criticism, his challengefor recognition in the concrete, visible, finite work of art, of thedim, unseen, comparatively infinite, soul or power of the artist, maywell be [82] remembered as part of the long pleading of German culturefor the things "behind the veil. " To introduce that spiritualphilosophy, as represented by the more transcendental parts of Kant, and by Schelling, into all subjects, as a system of reason in them, oneand ever identical with itself, however various the matter throughwhich it was diffused, became with him the motive of an unflaggingenthusiasm, which seems to have been the one thread of continuity in alife otherwise singularly wanting in unity of purpose, and in which hewas certainly far from uniformly at his best. Fragmentary and obscure, but often eloquent, and always at once earnest and ingenious, thosewritings, supplementing his remarkable gift of conversation, weredirectly and indirectly influential, even on some the furthest removedfrom Coleridge's own masters; on John Stuart Mill, for instance, andsome of the earlier writers of the "high-church" school. Like hisverse, they display him also in two other characters--as a student ofwords, and as a psychologist, that is, as a more minute observer orstudent than other men of the phenomena of mind. To note the reconditeassociations of words, old or new; to expound the logic, the reasonablesoul, of their various uses; to recover the interest of older writerswho had had a phraseology of their own--this was a vein of inquiryallied to his undoubted gift of tracking out and analysing curiousmodes of thought. A [83] quaint fragment of verse on Human Life mightserve to illustrate his study of the earlier English philosophicalpoetry. The latter gift, that power of the "subtle-souledpsychologist, " as Shelley calls him, seems to have been connected withsome tendency to disease in the physical temperament, something of amorbid want of balance in those parts where the physical andintellectual elements mix most closely together, with a kind of languidvisionariness, deep-seated in the very constitution of the "narcotist, "who had quite a gift for "plucking the poisons of self-harm, " and whichthe actual habit of taking opium, accidentally acquired, did butreinforce. This morbid languor of nature, connected both with hisfitfulness of purpose and his rich delicate dreaminess, qualifiesColeridge's poetic composition even more than his prose; his verse, with the exception of his avowedly political poems, being, unlike thatof the "Lake School, " to which in some respects he belongs, singularlyunaffected by any moral, or professional, or personal effort orambition, --"written, " as he says, "after the more violent emotions ofsorrow, to give him pleasure, when perhaps nothing else could;" butcoming thus, indeed, very close to his own most intimately personalcharacteristics, and having a certain languidly soothing grace orcadence, for its most fixed quality, from first to last. After somePlatonic soliloquy on a flower opening on a fine day in February, hegoes on-- [84]

 Dim similitudes Weaving in mortal strains, I've stolen one hour From anxious self, life's cruel taskmaster! And the warm wooings of this sunny day Tremble along my frame and harmonise The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes Played deftly on a sweet-toned instrument. 

The expression of two opposed, yet allied, elements of sensibility inthese lines, is very true to Coleridge:--the grievous agitation, thegrievous listlessness, almost never entirely relieved, together with acertain physical voluptuousness. He has spoken several times of thescent of the bean-field in the air:--the tropical touches in a chillyclimate; his is a nature that will make the most of these, which findsa sort of caress in such things. Kubla Khan, the fragment of a poemactually composed in some certainly not quite healthy sleep, is perhapschiefly of interest as showing, by the mode of its composition, howphysical, how much of a diseased or valetudinarian temperament, in itsmoments of relief, Coleridge's happiest gift really was; and side byside with Kubla Khan should be read, as Coleridge placed it, the Painsof Sleep, to illustrate that retarding physical burden in histemperament, that "unimpassioned grief, " the source of which lay sonear the source of those pleasures. Connected also with this, andagain in contrast with Wordsworth, is the limited quantity of hispoetical performance, as he himself [85] regrets so eloquently in thelines addressed to Wordsworth after his recitation of The Prelude. Itis like some exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little in thesomewhat un-english air of Coleridge's own south-western birthplace, but never quite well there. 

In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume ofpoems--the Lyrical Ballads. What Wordsworth then wrote alreadyvibrates with that blithe impulse which carried him to final happinessand self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness andobscure dejection which clung like some contagious damp to all hiswork. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and penetrativeconviction of the existence of certain latent affinities between natureand the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and nature with akind of "heavenly alchemy. "

 My voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual mind (And the progressive powers, perhaps, no less Of the whole species) to the external world Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too, The external world is fitted to the mind; And the creation, by no lower name Can it be called, which they with blended might Accomplish. 

In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over theaspects and transitions of nature--a reflective, though altogetherunformulated, analysis of them. 

[86] There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction asdeep as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himselfto the dream, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the firstcondition of such abandonment must be an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the Lines composed above Tintern without feeling howpotent the physical element was among the conditions of Wordsworth'sgenius--"felt in the blood and felt along the heart. "

 My whole life I have lived in quiet thought!

The stimulus which most artists require of nature he can renounce. Heleaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains that he may reflectglory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the floatingthistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the air. Coleridge's temperament, aei en sphodra orexei, + with its faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that. 

 My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within. 

Wordsworth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere ofmind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, [87] alittle cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary)good fortune, kept his conviction of a latent intelligence in naturewithin the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to thosedelicate and subdued shades of expression which alone perfect artallows. In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast ofgenius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became aphilosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much aspossible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of thetranscendental schools of Germany. 

The period of Coleridge's residence at Nether Stowey, 1797-1798, wasfor him the annus mirabilis. Nearly all the chief works by which hispoetic fame will live were then composed or planned. What shapesitself for criticism as the main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic life, is not, as with most true poets, the gradual development of a poeticgift, determined, enriched, retarded, by the actual circumstances ofthe poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through one short season, of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafterdeteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age. Connecting this phenomenon with the leading motive of his prosewritings, we might note it as the deterioration of a productive orcreative power into one merely metaphysical or discursive. In hisunambitious conception of his function as a poet, and in the verylimited quantity of his [88] poetical performance, as I have said, hewas a contrast to his friend Wordsworth. That friendship withWordsworth, the chief "developing" circumstance of his poetic life, comprehended a very close intellectual sympathy; and in suchassociation chiefly, lies whatever truth there may be in the popularclassification of Coleridge as a member of what is called the "LakeSchool. " Coleridge's philosophical speculations do really turn on theideas which underlay Wordsworth's poetical practice. His prose worksare one long explanation of all that is involved in that famousdistinction between the Fancy and the Imagination. Of what isunderstood by both writers as the imaginative quality in the use ofpoetic figures, we may take some words of Shakespeare as an example. --

 My cousin Suffolk, My soul shall thine keep company to heaven Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast. 

The complete infusion here of the figure into the thought, so vividlyrealised, that, though birds are not actually mentioned, yet the senseof their flight, conveyed to us by the single word "abreast, " comes tobe more than half of the thought itself:--this, as the expression ofexalted feeling, is an instance of what Coleridge meant by Imagination. And this sort of identification of the poet's thought, of himself, withthe image or figure which serves him, is the secret, sometimes, [89] ofa singularly entire realisation of that image, such as makes theselines of Coleridge, for instance, "imaginative"--

 Amid the howl of more than wintry storms, The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours Already on the wing. 

There are many such figures both in Coleridge's verse and prose. Hehas, too, his passages of that sort of impassioned contemplation on thepermanent and elementary conditions of nature and humanity, whichWordsworth held to be the essence of a poet; as it would be his properfunction to awaken such contemplation in other men--those "moments, " asColeridge says, addressing him--

 Moments awful, Now in thy inner life, and now abroad, When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received The light reflected, as a light bestowed. 

The entire poem from which these lines are taken, "composed on thenight after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of anindividual mind, " is, in its high-pitched strain of meditation, and inthe combined justice and elevation of its philosophical expression--

 high and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted;

wholly sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of whichthe subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the "Lakepoetry. " [90] The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophicallyimaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's mostsustained effort of this kind. 

It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of externalnature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of themain tendencies of the "Lake School"; a tendency instinctive, and nomere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. That record of the

 green light Which lingers in the west, and again, of

 the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green, which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs nodefence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for theminute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he wrote--acloseness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to dowith that idealistic philosophy which sees in the external world nomere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informedand made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwellingintelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelleytoo is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape whichfollowed him. "I had found, " Coleridge tells us, [91]

 That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive Their finer influence from the world within; Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye Traces no spot, in which the heart may read History and prophecy:. .. 

and this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form andprocess, but such minute realism as this--

 The thin grey cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull;

or this, which has a touch of "romantic" weirdness--

 Nought was green upon the oak But moss and rarest misletoe

or this--

 There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky

or this, with a weirdness, again, like that of some wild French etcher--

 Lo! the new-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light (With swimming phantom light o'erspread, But rimmed and circled with a silver thread) I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling The coming on of rain and squally blast. 

He has a like imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseenprocesses of nature, its "ministries" [92] of dew and frost, forinstance; as when he writes, in April--

 A balmy night! and though the stars be dim, Yet let us think upon the vernal showers That gladden the green earth, and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars. 

Of such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instancethan the description of The Dell, in Fears in Solitude--

 A green and silent spot amid the hills, A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place No singing skylark ever poised himself-- But the dell, Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, The level sunshine glimmers with green light:--

 The gust that roared and died away To the distant tree--

 heard and only heard In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass. 

This curious insistence of the mind on one particular spot, till itseems to attain actual expression and a sort of soul in it--a mood socharacteristic of the "Lake School"--occurs in an earnest politicalpoem, "written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion"; andthat silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fearsof the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of the place, maintained all through them, gives a true poetic unity to the piece. Good political poetry--[93] political poetry that shall be permanentlymoving--can, perhaps, only be written on motives which, for those theyconcern, have ceased to be open questions, and are really beyondargument; while Coleridge's political poems are for the most part onopen questions. For although it was a great part of his intellectualambition to subject political questions to the action of thefundamental ideas of his philosophy, he was nevertheless an ardentpartisan, first on one side, then on the other, of the actual politicsproper to the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, where there is still room for much difference of opinion. Yet TheDestiny of Nations, though formless as a whole, and unfinished, presents many traces of his most elevated manner of speculation, castinto that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, ineffect, the language itself is inseparable from, or essentially a partof, the thought. France, an Ode, begins with a famous apostrophe toLiberty--

 Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause, Whose pathless march no mortal may control! Ye Ocean-waves! that wheresoe'er ye roll, Yield homage only to eternal laws! Ye Woods! that listen to the night-bird's singing, Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined, Save when your own imperious branches swinging, Have made a solemn music of the wind! Where like a man beloved of God, Through glooms which never woodman trod, How oft, pursuing fancies holy, [94]

 My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound, Inspired, beyond the guess of folly, By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound! O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high! And O ye Clouds that far above me soar'd!

 Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky! Yea, everything that is and will be free! Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be, With what deep worship I have still adored The spirit of divinest liberty. 

And the whole ode, though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal tothat exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly inindignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the FrenchRepublic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines, really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effectwhich the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France, is only to be found in nature:--

 Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!

In his changes of political sentiment, Coleridge was associated withthe "Lake School"; and there is yet one other very different sort ofsentiment in which he is one with that school, yet all himself, hissympathy, namely, with the animal world. That was a sentimentconnected at once with the love of outward nature in himself and in the"Lake School, " and its assertion of the natural affections in theirsimplicity; with the homeliness and pity, consequent upon [95] thatassertion. The Lines to a Young Ass, tethered--

 Where the close-eaten grass is scarcely seen, While sweet around her waves the tempting green, which had seemed merely whimsical in their day, indicate a vein ofinterest constant in Coleridge's poems, and at its height in hisgreatest poems--in Christabel, where it has its effect, as it wereantipathetically, in the vivid realisation of the serpentine element inGeraldine's nature; and in The Ancient Mariner, whose fate isinterwoven with that of the wonderful bird, at whose blessing of thewater-snakes the curse for the death of the albatross passes away, andwhere the moral of the love of all creatures, as a sort of religiousduty, is definitely expressed. 

Christabel, though not printed till 1816, was written mainly in theyear 1797: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was printed as acontribution to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798; and these two poems belongto the great year of Coleridge's poetic production, his twenty-fifthyear. In poetic quality, above all in that most poetic of allqualities, a keen sense of, and delight in beauty, the infection ofwhich lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of proportion toall his other compositions. The form in both is that of the ballad, with some of its terminology, and some also of its quaint conceits. They connect themselves with that revival of ballad literature, ofwhich Percy's Relics, and, in another [96] way, Macpherson's Ossian aremonuments, and which afterwards so powerfully affected Scott--

 Young-eyed poesy All deftly masked as hoar antiquity. 

The Ancient Mariner, as also, in its measure, Christabel, is a"romantic" poem, impressing us by bold invention, and appealing to thattaste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a shudder, towhich the "romantic" school in Germany, and its derivations in Englandand France, directly ministered. In Coleridge, personally, this tastehad been encouraged by his odd and out-of-the-way reading in theold-fashioned literature of the marvellous--books like Purchas'sPilgrims, early voyages like Hakluyt's, old naturalists and visionarymoralists, like Thomas Burnet, from whom he quotes the motto of "TheAncient Mariner, Facile credo, plures esse naturas invisibiles quamvisibiles in rerum universitate, etc. " Fancies of the strange thingswhich may very well happen, even in broad daylight, to men shut upalone in ships far off on the sea, seem to have occurred to the humanmind in all ages with a peculiar readiness, and often have about them, from the story of the stealing of Dionysus downwards, the fascinationof a certain dreamy grace, which distinguishes them from other kinds ofmarvellous inventions. This sort of fascination The Ancient Marinerbrings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the dreamy [97]grace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge'swork so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from a spiritual worldin almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have akind of crudity or coarseness. Coleridge's power is in the veryfineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings hometo our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are--the skeletonship, the polar spirit, the inspiriting of the dead corpses of theship's crew. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner has the plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and the general aspect of life, whichbelongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of acredible experience in our dreams. Doubtless, the mere experience ofthe opium-eater, the habit he must almost necessarily fall into ofnoting the more elusive phenomena of dreams, had something to do withthat: in its essence, however, it is connected with a more purelyintellectual circumstance in the development of Coleridge's poeticgift. Some one once asked William Blake, to whom Coleridge has manyresemblances, when either is at his best (that whole episode of there-inspiriting of the ship's crew in The Ancient Mariner beingcomparable to Blake's well-known design of the "Morning Stars singingtogether") whether he had ever seen a ghost, and was surprised when thefamous seer, who ought, one might think, to have seen so many, answeredfrankly, "Only [98] once!" His "spirits, " at once more delicate, andso much more real, than any ghost--the burden, as they were theprivilege, of his temperament--like it, were an integral element in hiseveryday life. And the difference of mood expressed in that questionand its answer, is indicative of a change of temper in regard to thesupernatural which has passed over the whole modern mind, and of whichthe true measure is the influence of the writings of Swedenborg. Whatthat change is we may see if we compare the vision by which Swedenborgwas "called, " as he thought, to his work, with the ghost which calledHamlet, or the spells of Marlowe's Faust with those of Goethe's. Themodern mind, so minutely self-scrutinising, if it is to be affected atall by a sense of the supernatural, needs to be more finely touchedthan was possible in the older, romantic presentment of it. Thespectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as

 The blot upon the brain, That will show itself without;

and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which, according to the scepticism, latent at least, in so much of our modernphilosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra afterall. 

It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, fruit ofhis more delicate [99] psychology, that Coleridge infuses into romanticadventure, itself also then a new or revived thing in Englishliterature; and with a fineness of weird effect in The Ancient Mariner, unknown in those older, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. Itis a flower of medieval or later German romance, growing up in thepeculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and putting forth in it wholly new qualities. The quaint prosecommentary, which runs side by side with the verse of The AncientMariner, illustrates this--a composition of quite a different shade ofbeauty and merit from that of the verse which it accompanies, connecting this, the chief poem of Coleridge, with his philosophy, andemphasising therein that psychological interest of which I have spoken, its curious soul-lore. 

Completeness, the perfectly rounded wholeness and unity of theimpression it leaves on the mind of a reader who fairly gives himselfto it--that, too, is one of the characteristics of a really excellentwork, in the poetic as in every other kind of art; and by thiscompleteness, The Ancient Mariner certainly gains upon Christabel--acompleteness, entire as that of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, or Keats'sSaint Agnes' Eve, each typical in its way of such wholeness or entiretyof effect on a careful reader. It is Coleridge's one great completework, the one really finished thing, in a life of many beginnings. Christabel remained a fragment. In The Ancient Mariner [100] thisunity is secured in part by the skill with which the incidents of themarriage-feast are made to break in dreamily from time to time upon themain story. And then, how pleasantly, how reassuringly, the wholenightmare story itself is made to end, among the clear fresh sounds andlights of the bay, where it began, with

 The moon-light steeped in silentness, The steady weather-cock. 

So different from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in regard to thiscompleteness of effect, Christabel illustrates the same complexion ofmotives, a like intellectual situation. Here, too, the work is of akind peculiar to one who touches the characteristic motives of the oldromantic ballad, with a spirit made subtle and fine by modernreflection; as we feel, I think, in such passages as--

 But though my slumber had gone by, This dream it would not pass away-- It seems to live upon mine eye;

and--

 For she, belike, hath drunken deep Of all the blessedness of sleep;

and again--

 With such perplexity of mind As dreams too lively leave behind. 

And that gift of handling the finer passages of human feeling, at oncewith power and delicacy, which was another result of his finerpsychology, [101] of his exquisitely refined habit of self-reflection, is illustrated by a passage on Friendship in the Second Part--

 Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love, Doth work like madness in the brain. And thus it chanced, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother They parted--ne'er to meet again! But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining-- They stood aloof the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between; But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been. 

I suppose these lines leave almost every reader with a quickened senseof the beauty and compass of human feeling; and it is the sense of suchrichness and beauty which, in spite of his "dejection, " in spite ofthat burden of his morbid lassitude, accompanies Coleridge himselfthrough life. A warm poetic joy in everything beautiful, whether it bea moral sentiment, like the friendship of Roland and Leoline, or onlythe flakes of falling light from the water-snakes--this joy, visitinghim, now and again, after sickly dreams, in sleep or waking, as arelief not to be forgotten, [102] and with such a power of felicitousexpression that the infection of it passes irresistibly to thereader--such is the predominant element in the matter of his poetry, ascadence is the predominant quality of its form. "We bless thee for ourcreation!" he might have said, in his later period of definitereligious assent, "because the world is so beautiful: the world ofideas--living spirits, detached from the divine nature itself, toinform and lift the heavy mass of material things; the world of man, above all in his melodious and intelligible speech; the world of livingcreatures and natural scenery; the world of dreams. " What he reallydid say, by way of A Tombless Epitaph, is true enough of himself--

 Sickness, 'tis true, Whole years of weary days, besieged him close, Even to the gates and inlets of his life! But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm, And with a natural gladness, he maintained The citadel unconquered, and in joy Was strong to follow the delightful Muse. For not a hidden path, that to the shades Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads, Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill There issues from the fount of Hippocrene, But he had traced it upward to its source, Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell, Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled Its med'cinable herbs. Yea, oft alone, Piercing the long-neglected holy cave, The haunt obscure of old Philosophy, He bade with lifted torch its starry walls Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame

[103]

 Of odorous lamps tended by saint and sage. O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts! O studious Poet, eloquent for truth! Philosopher! contemning wealth and death, Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love. 

The student of empirical science asks, Are absolute principlesattainable? What are the limits of knowledge? The answer he receivesfrom science itself is not ambiguous. What the moralist asks is, Shallwe gain or lose by surrendering human life to the relative spirit?Experience answers that the dominant tendency of life is to turnascertained truth into a dead letter, to make us all the phlegmaticservants of routine. The relative spirit, by its constant dwelling onthe more fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breakingthrough a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and givingelasticity to inflexible principles, begets an intellectual finesse ofwhich the ethical result is a delicate and tender justice in thecriticism of human life. Who would gain more than Coleridge bycriticism in such a spirit? We know how his life has appeared whenjudged by absolute standards. We see him trying to apprehend the"absolute, " to stereotype forms of faith and philosophy, to attain, ashe says, "fixed principles" in politics, morals, and religion, to fixone mode of life as the essence of life, refusing to see the parts asparts only; and all the time his own pathetic history pleads for a more[104] elastic moral philosophy than his, and cries out against everyformula less living and flexible than life itself. 

"From his childhood he hungered for eternity. " There, after all, isthe incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of anyelementary type of life must always be precious to humanity, andColeridge is a true flower of the ennuyé, of the type of René. Morethan Childe Harold, more than Werther, more than René himself, Coleridge, by what he did, what he was, and what he failed to do, represents that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness, that endless regret, the chords of which ring all through our modernliterature. It is to the romantic element in literature that thosequalities belong. One day, perhaps, we may come to forget the distanthorizon, with full knowledge of the situation, to be content with "whatis here and now"; and herein is the essence of classical feeling. Butby us of the present moment, certainly--by us for whom the Greekspirit, with its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair, tryphês, habrotêtos, khlidês, kharitôn, himerou, pothou patêr+, isitself the Sangrail of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with hispassion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, hisfaintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still beranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of ourlife. 

1865, 1880. 

NOTES

65. *The latter part of this paper, like that on Dante GabrielRossetti, was contributed to Mr. T. H. Ward's English Poets. 

68. +Transliteration: ousia akhrômatos, askhêmatistos, anaphês. Translation: "the colorless, utterly formless, intangible essence. "Phaedrus 247C. 

80. +The two passages are not indented in the original; they are insmaller typeface that makes for difficult reading. 

86. +Transliteration: aei en sphodra orexei. Translation: "alwaysgreatly yearning. "

104. +Transliteration: tryphês, habrotêtos, khlidês, kharitôn, himerou, pothou patêr. Translation: "Of daintiness, delicacy, luxury, graces, father of desire. "

CHARLES LAMB

[105] THOSE English critics who at the beginning of the present centuryintroduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thoughttransplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between theFancy and the Imagination, made much also of the cognate distinctionbetween Wit and Humour, between that unreal and transitory mirth, whichis as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter whichblends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, andwhich, in its most exquisite motives, is one with pity--the laughter ofthe comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less expressive than his moods ofseriousness or solemnity, of that deeply stirred soul of sympathy inhim, as flowing from which both tears and laughter are alike genuineand contagious. 

This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindredcritics applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of ourolder English writers. And as the distinction between imagination andfancy, made popular by Wordsworth, [106] found its best justificationin certain essential differences of stuff in Wordsworth's own writings, so this other critical distinction, between wit and humour, finds asort of visible interpretation and instance in the character andwritings of Charles Lamb;--one who lived more consistently than mostwriters among subtle literary theories, and whose remains are stillfull of curious interest for the student of literature as a fine art. 

The author of the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, comingto the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is truepreeminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepenedby the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself, which is characteristic of the temper of the later generation; andtherewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which with pity humourproceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for example, freer and moreboisterous. 

To this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our literature, the writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the last quarter ofthe eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, are atransition; and such union of grave, of terrible even, with gay, we maynote in the circumstances of his life, as reflected thence into hiswork. We catch the aroma of a singular, homely sweetness about hisfirst years, spent on Thames' side, amid the red [107] bricks andterraced gardens, with their rich historical memories of old-fashionedlegal London. Just above the poorer class, deprived, as he says, ofthe "sweet food of academic institution, " he is fortunate enough to bereared in the classical languages at an ancient school, where hebecomes the companion of Coleridge, as at a later period he was hisenthusiastic disciple. So far, the years go by with less than theusual share of boyish difficulties; protected, one fancies, seeing whathe was afterwards, by some attraction of temper in the quaint child, small and delicate, with a certain Jewish expression in his clear, brown complexion, eyes not precisely of the same colour, and a slowwalk adding to the staidness of his figure; and whose infirmity ofspeech, increased by agitation, is partly engaging. 

And the cheerfulness of all this, of the mere aspect of Lamb's quietsubsequent life also, might make the more superficial reader think ofhim as in himself something slight, and of his mirth as cheaply bought. Yet we know that beneath this blithe surface there was something of thefateful domestic horror, of the beautiful heroism and devotedness too, of old Greek tragedy. His sister Mary, ten years his senior, in asudden paroxysm of madness, caused the death of her mother, and wasbrought to trial for what an overstrained justice might have construedas the greatest of crimes. She was [108] released on the brother'spledging himself to watch over her; and to this sister, from the age oftwenty-one, Charles Lamb sacrificed himself, "seeking thenceforth, "says his earliest biographer, "no connexion which could interfere withher supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain andcomfort her. " The "feverish, romantic tie of love, " he cast away inexchange for the "charities of home. " Only, from time to time, themadness returned, affecting him too, once; and we see the brother andsister voluntarily yielding to restraint. In estimating the humour ofElia, we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this greatmisfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story. Sohe becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, adramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre. Rosamund Grey, written in his twenty-third year, a story with somethingbitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptiblein it, strikes clearly this note in his work. 

For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift, of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonouslabour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very important thing;availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them a little, chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned with theturning of the tides of the great world. And yet this very modesty, this unambitious [109] way of conceiving his work, has impressed uponit a certain exceptional enduringness. For of the remarkable Englishwriters contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied withideas of practice--religious, moral, political--ideas which have since, in some sense or other, entered permanently into the generalconsciousness; and, these having no longer any stimulus for ageneration provided with a different stock of ideas, the writings ofthose who spent so much of themselves in their propagation have lost, with posterity, something of what they gained by them in immediateinfluence. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley even--sharing so largely inthe unrest of their own age, and made personally more interestingthereby, yet, of their actual work, surrender more to the mere courseof time than some of those who may have seemed to exercise themselveshardly at all in great matters, to have been little serious, or alittle indifferent, regarding them. 

Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller inEngland than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making of prose herealises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keatsin the making of verse. And, working ever close to the concrete, tothe details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and withno part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mereabstract theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect [110] also, in a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem, withgreat matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especiallyin its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much ofthe whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way witha perfect understanding of it. What sudden, unexpected touches ofpathos in him!--bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, theWeltschmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, is ever present withhim: but what a gift also for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties, of enjoyment actually refined by the need of some thoughtful economiesand making the most of things! Little arts of happiness he is ready toteach to others. The quaint remarks of children which another wouldscarcely have heard, he preserves--little flies in the priceless amberof his Attic wit--and has his "Praise of chimney-sweepers" (as WilliamBlake has written, with so much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper'sSong) valuing carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of whitesheets in stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story, anticipating something of the mood of our deep humourists of the lastgeneration. His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident, or unkindness of nature, blindness for instance, or fateful disease ofmind like his sister's, has something primitive in its largeness; andon behalf of ill-used animals he is early in composing a Pity's Gift. 

[111] And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead do care atall for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare andWebster have been stirred, after so long converse with things thatstopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his exquisiteappreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth too; for, what has not been observed so generally as the excellence of hisliterary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of painting also. Itwas as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare's selffirst, for instance, and then for Shakespeare's readers, that that toowas done: he has the true scholar's way of forgetting himself in hissubject. For though "defrauded, " as we saw, in his young years, "ofthe sweet food of academic institution, " he is yet essentially ascholar, and all his work mainly retrospective, as I said; his ownsorrows, affections, perceptions, being alone real to him of thepresent. "I cannot make these present times, " he says once, "presentto me. "

Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable, but for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. "Thebook is such as I am glad there should be, " he modestly says of theSpecimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time ofShakespeare; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the veryquintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume ofElizabethan poetry being [112] sorted, and stored here, with a sort ofdelicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winningfor these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after anotherof enthusiastic students. Could he but have known how fresh a sourceof culture he was evoking there for other generations, through allthose years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp on thelimitation of his time by business, and sigh for a better fortune inregard to literary opportunities!

To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literarycharm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle;and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--he seeming tohimself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that ofwhich for them he is really the creator--this is the way of hiscriticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, orlightest essay or conversation. It is in such a letter, for instance, that we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the genius andwritings of Defoe. 

Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of theirproduction to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, heseems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth orShakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities which have swayedtheir actual work; or "puts up, " and takes, the one morsel of goodstuff in an old, forgotten writer. Even [113] in what he says casuallythere comes an aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in chance turnand phrase, of the great masters of style, the old masters. Godwin, seeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil, takes it for a choicefragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in findingthe author. His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reachesthe length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia onPopular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of SirThomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, bydisinterested study, of those elements of the man which were the realsource of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, readyto say what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continuallyoverawes one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar. Forit is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradationsof expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, ofvocabulary--things, alas! dying out in the English literature of thepresent, together with the appreciation of them in our literature ofthe past--that his literary mission is chiefly concerned. And yet, delicate, refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writesof giants, such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a straynote, you catch the sense of veneration with which those great names inpast literature and art brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished[114] impressibility by the great effects in them. Reading, commentingon Shakespeare, he is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormysky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits mightseem to be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as heanalyses it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he tooknows the secret of fine, significant touches like theirs. 

There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress, surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred sovividly into The Rake's Progress, or Marriage à la Mode, concerningwhich we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthlessin themselves, they have come to please us at last as thingspicturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our differentage. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture--types ofcast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant topreserve--we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in themthe veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by itsmore solemn and self-conscious deposits; like those tricks ofindividuality which we find quite tolerable in persons, because theyconvey to us the secret of lifelike expression, and with regard towhich we are all to some extent humourists. But it is part of theprivilege of the genuine humourist to anticipate this pensive mood withregard to the ways and things [115] of his own day; to look upon thetricks in manner of the life about him with that same refined, purgedsort of vision, which will come naturally to those of a latergeneration, in observing whatever may have survived by chance of itsmere external habit. Seeing things always by the light of anunderstanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of thewhole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outwardmode or fashion, always in strict connexion with the spiritualcondition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lambanticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics ofplaces, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now andin advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemnas mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the traditionof such fashion or accent. "The praise of beggars, " "the cries ofLondon, " the traits of actors just grown "old, " the spots in "town"where the country, its fresh green and fresh water, still lingered on, one after another, amidst the bustle; the quaint, dimmed, justplayed-out farces, he had relished so much, coming partly through themto understand the earlier English theatre as a thing once really alive;those fountains and sun-dials of old gardens, of which he entertainssuch dainty discourse:--he feels the poetry of these things, as thepoetry of things old indeed, but surviving [116] as an actual part ofthe life of the present; and as something quite different from thepoetry of things flatly gone from us and antique, which come back tous, if at all, as entire strangers, like Scott's old Scotch-borderpersonages, their oaths and armour. Such gift of appreciation depends, as I said, on the habitual apprehension of men's life as a whole--itsorganic wholeness, as extending even to the least things in it--of itsoutward manner in connexion with its inward temper; and it involves afine perception of the congruities, the musical accordance betweenhumanity and its environment of custom, society, personal intercourse;as if all this, with its meetings, partings, ceremonies, gesture, tonesof speech, were some delicate instrument on which an expert performeris playing. 

These are some of the characteristics of Elia, one essentially anessayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, "never judging, " as hesays, "system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars;" saying allthings as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of pastime, yetsucceeding thus, "glimpse-wise, " in catching and recording morefrequently than others "the gayest, happiest attitude of things;" acasual writer for dreamy readers, yet always giving the reader so muchmore than he seemed to propose. There is something of the follower ofGeorge Fox about him, and the Quaker's belief in the inward lightcoming to one passive, [117] to the mere wayfarer, who will be sure atall events to lose no light which falls by the way--glimpses, suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions, profound thoughts of oldphilosophers, hints of the innermost reason in things, the fullknowledge of which is held in reserve; all the varied stuff, that is, of which genuine essays are made. 

And with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is, below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing atall--a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that modernsubjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element inliterature. What he designs is to give you himself, to acquaint youwith his likeness; but must do this, if at all, indirectly, beingindeed always more or less reserved, for himself and his friends;friendship counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous ofanything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort ofinsincerity, to which he assigns its quaint "praise"; this lover ofstage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificialityof play to sweeten the intercourse of actual life. 

And, in effect, a very delicate and expressive portrait of him does putitself together for the duly meditative reader. In indirect touches ofhis own work, scraps of faded old letters, what others remembered ofhis talk, the man's likeness emerges; what he laughed and wept at, [118] his sudden elevations, and longings after absent friends, hisfine casuistries of affection and devices to jog sometimes, as he says, the lazy happiness of perfect love, his solemn moments of higherdiscourse with the young, as they came across him on occasion, and wentalong a little way with him, the sudden, surprised apprehension ofbeauties in old literature, revealing anew the deep soul of poetry inthings, and withal the pure spirit of fun, having its way again;laughter, that most short-lived of all things (some of Shakespeare'seven being grown hollow) wearing well with him. Much of all this comesout through his letters, which may be regarded as a department of hisessays. He is an old-fashioned letter-writer, the essence of the oldfashion of letter-writing lying, as with true essay-writing, in thedexterous availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in theprosecution of deeper lines of observation; although, just as with therecord of his conversation, one loses something, in losing the actualtones of the stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he haltedalso in composition, composing slowly and by fits, "like a Flemishpainter, " as he tells us, so "it is to be regretted, " says the editorof his letters, "that in the printed letters the reader will lose thecurious varieties of writing with which the originals abound, and whichare scrupulously adapted to the subject. "

Also, he was a true "collector, " delighting [119] in the personalfinding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him bythe little accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither'sEmblems, "that old book and quaint, " long-desired, when he finds it atlast, he values none the less because a child had coloured the plateswith his paints. A lover of household warmth everywhere, of thattempered atmosphere which our various habitations get by men's livingwithin them, he "sticks to his favourite books as he did to hisfriends, " and loved the "town, " with a jealous eye for all itscharacteristics, "old houses" coming to have souls for him. Theyearning for mere warmth against him in another, makes him content, allthrough life, with pure brotherliness, "the most kindly and naturalspecies of love, " as he says, in place of the passion of love. Brotherand sister, sitting thus side by side, have, of course, theiranticipations how one of them must sit at last in the faint sun alone, and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely what amount ofmelancholy really accompanied for him the approach of old age, sosteadily foreseen; make us note also, with pleasure, his successivewakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious musing over whatis gone and what remains, of life. In his subtle capacity for enjoyingthe more refined points of earth, of human relationship, he could throwthe gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or threadbare; hasa care for the [120] sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations ofvery weak people, down to their little pathetic "gentilities, " even;while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost likeShakespeare. 

And that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what isaccustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging tohome and the earth, was congruous also with that love for theaccustomed in religion, which we may notice in him. He is one of thelast votaries of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings ofhope and awe, which may be described as the religion of men of letters(as Sir Thomas Browne has his Religion of the Physician) religion asunderstood by the soberer men of letters in the last century, Addison, Gray, and Johnson; by Jane Austen and Thackeray, later. A high way offeeling developed largely by constant intercourse with the great thingsof literature, and extended in its turn to those matters greater still, this religion lives, in the main retrospectively, in a system ofreceived sentiments and beliefs; received, like those great things ofliterature and art, in the first instance, on the authority of a longtradition, in the course of which they have linked themselves in athousand complex ways to the conditions of human life, and no morequestioned now than the feeling one keeps by one of the greatness--say!of Shakespeare. For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes [121]the solemn background on which the nearer and more exciting objects ofhis immediate experience relieve themselves, borrowing from it anexpression of calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a profoundquiet, that quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy, working, we might say, on the principle of the opus operatum, almostwithout any co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of thehigher self. And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attunedtemperament mere physical stillness has its full value; such naturesseeming to long for it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, witha sort of mystical sensuality. 

The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the valueof reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour, and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidentalcharacter of his work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in hislife, a genuinely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at its darkestin those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, is always there, though notalways realised either for himself or his readers, and restrainedalways in utterance. It gives to those lighter matters on the surfaceof life and literature among which he for the most part moved, awonderful force of expression, as if at any moment these slight wordsand fancies might pierce very far into the deeper soul of things. Inhis writing, as in his [122] life, that quiet is not the low-flying ofone from the first drowsy by choice, and needing the prick of somestrong passion or worldly ambition, to stimulate him into all theenergy of which he is capable; but rather the reaction of nature, afteran escape from fate, dark and insane as in old Greek tragedy, followingupon which the sense of mere relief becomes a kind of passion, as withone who, having narrowly escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thingfor grateful tears in just sitting quiet at home, under the wall, tillthe end of days. 

He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles theplaces he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell--London, sixty-five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and theTemple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond tonorth and south the fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, "with theirliving trees, " the thoughts wander "from the hard wood of thedesk"--fields fresher, and coming nearer to town then, but in one ofwhich the present writer remembers, on a brooding early summer's day, to have heard the cuckoo for the first time. Here, the surface ofthings is certainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, wherethe child goes a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things more aptto respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much differencebetween rain and sunshine, nowhere do the [123] clouds roll togethermore grandly; those quaint suburban pastorals gathering a certainquality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with itsweighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome andbleached stone steeples. 

1878. 

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

[124] ENGLISH prose literature towards the end of the seventeenthcentury, in the hands of Dryden and Locke, was becoming, as that ofFrance had become at an earlier date, a matter of design and skilledpractice, highly conscious of itself as an art, and, above all, correct. Up to that time it had been, on the whole, singularlyinformal and unprofessional, and by no means the literature of the "manof letters, " as we understand him. Certain great instances there hadbeen of literary structure or architecture--The Ecclesiastical Polity, The Leviathan--but for the most part that earlier prose literature iseminently occasional, closely determined by the eager practical aims ofcontemporary politics and theology, or else due to a man's own nativeinstinct to speak because he cannot help speaking. Hardly aware of thehabit, he likes talking to himself; and when he writes (still inundress) he does but take the "friendly reader" into his confidence. The type of this literature, obviously, is not Locke or Gibbon, but, above all others, Sir Thomas [125] Browne; as Jean Paul is a goodinstance of it in German literature, always in its developments so muchlater than the English; and as the best instance of it in Frenchliterature, in the century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whomindeed, in a great measure, all those tentative writers, or essayists, derive. 

It was a result, perhaps, of the individualism and liberty of personaldevelopment, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of theReformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective, "as people say, of the singularities of personal character. Browne, too, bookish as he really is claims to give his readers a matter, "notpicked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds andtares" of his own brain. The faults of such literature are what we allrecognise in it: unevenness, alike in thought and style; lack ofdesign; and caprice--the lack of authority; after the full play ofwhich, there is so much to refresh one in the reasonable transparencyof Hooker, representing thus early the tradition of a classicalclearness in English literature, anticipated by Latimer and More, andto be fulfilled afterwards in Butler and Hume. But then, in recompensefor that looseness and whim, in Sir Thomas Browne for instance, we havein those "quaint" writers, as they themselves understood the term(coint, adorned, but adorned with all the curious ornaments of theirown predilection, provincial [126] or archaic, certainly unfamiliar, and selected without reference to the taste or usages of other people)the charm of an absolute sincerity, with all the ingenuous and racyeffect of what is circumstantial and peculiar in their growth. 

The whole creation is a mystery and particularly that of man. At theblast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bareword they started out of nothing. But in the frame of man He playedthe sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create as to make him. When He had separated the materials of other creatures, thereconsequently resulted a form and soul: but having raised the walls ofman, He was driven to a second and harder creation--of a substance likeHimself, an incorruptible and immortal soul. 

There, we have the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, in exact expression ofhis mind!--minute and curious in its thinking; but with an effect, onthe sudden, of a real sublimity or depth. His style is certainly anunequal one. It has the monumental aim which charmed, and perhapsinfluenced, Johnson--a dignity that can be attained only in such mentalcalm as follows long and learned pondering on the high subjects Browneloves to deal with. It has its garrulity, its various levels ofpainstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, togetherwith much, to us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazysummer afternoon down at Norwich. And all is so oddly mixed, showing, in its entire ignorance of self, how much he, and the sort ofliterature he represents, really stood in need of technique, [127] of aformed taste in literature, of a literary architecture. 

And yet perhaps we could hardly wish the result different, in him, anymore than in the books of Burton and Fuller, or some other similarwriters of that age--mental abodes, we might liken, after their ownmanner, to the little old private houses of some historic town groupedabout its grand public structures, which, when they have survived atall, posterity is loth to part with. For, in their absolute sincerity, not only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves ("the uniquepeculiarity of the writer's mind, " being, as Johnson says of Browne, "faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his work") but, evenmore than mere professionally instructed writers, they belong to, andreflect, the age they lived in. In essentials, of course, even Browneis by no means so unique among his contemporaries, and so singular, ashe looks. And then, as the very condition of their work, there is anentire absence of personal restraint in dealing with the public, whosehumours they come at last in a great measure to reproduce. To speakmore properly, they have no sense of a "public" to deal with, atall--only a full confidence in the "friendly reader, " as they love tocall him. Hence their amazing pleasantry, their indulgence in theirown conceits; but hence also those unpremeditated wildflowers of speechwe should [128] never have the good luck to find in any more formalkind of literature. 

It is, in truth, to the literary purpose of the humourist, in theold-fashioned sense of the term, that this method of writing naturallyallies itself--of the humourist to whom all the world is but aspectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardlya sense of the distinction between great and little among things thatare at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called outespecially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character inthe things or the people around him. Certainly, in an age stirred bygreat causes, like the age of Browne in England, of Montaigne inFrance, that is not a type to which one would wish to reduce all men ofletters. Still, in an age apt also to become severe, or even cruel(its eager interest in those great causes turning sour on occasion) thecharacter of the humourist may well find its proper influence, throughthat serene power, and the leisure it has for conceiving secondthoughts, on the tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the fiercewills around it. Something of such a humourist was Browne--not callousto men and their fortunes; certainly not without opinions of his ownabout them; and yet, undisturbed by the civil war, by the fall, andthen the restoration, of the monarchy, through that long quiet life(ending at last on the day [129] himself had predicted, as if at themoment he had willed) in which "all existence, " as he says, "had beenbut food for contemplation. "

Johnson, in beginning his Life of Browne, remarks that Browne "seems tohave had the fortune, common among men of letters, of raising littlecuriosity after their private life. " Whether or not, with the exampleof Johnson himself before us, we can think just that, it is certainthat Browne's works are of a kind to directly stimulate curiosity abouthimself--about himself, as being manifestly so large a part of thoseworks; and as a matter of fact we know a great deal about his life, uneventful as in truth it was. To himself, indeed, his life atNorwich, as he gives us to understand, seemed wonderful enough. "Ofthese wonders, " says Johnson, "the view that can now be taken of hislife offers no appearance. " But "we carry with us, " as Browne writes, "the wonders we seek without us, " and we may note on the other hand, acircumstance which his daughter, Mrs. Lyttleton, tells us of hischildhood: "His father used to open his breast when he was asleep, andkiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that theHoly Ghost would take possession there. " It was perhaps because the soninherited an aptitude for a like profound kindling of sentiment in thetaking of his life, that, uneventful as it was, [130] commonplace as itseemed to Johnson, to Browne himself it was so full of wonders, and sostimulates the curiosity of his more careful reader of to-day. "Whatinfluence, " says Johnson again, "learning has had on its possessors maybe doubtful. " Well! the influence of his great learning, of hisconstant research on Browne, was its imaginative influence--that itcompleted his outfit as a poetic visionary, stirring all the strange"conceit" of his nature to its depths. 

Browne himself dwells, in connexion with the first publication(extorted by circumstance) of the Religio Medici, on the natural"inactivity of his disposition"; and he does, as I have said, pass veryquietly through an exciting time. Born in the year of the GunpowderPlot, he was not, in truth, one of those clear and clarifying soulswhich, in an age alike of practical and mental confusion, cananticipate and lay down the bases of reconstruction, like Bacon orHooker. His mind has much of the perplexity which was part of theatmosphere of the time. Not that he is without his own definiteopinions on events. For him, Cromwell is a usurper, the death ofCharles an abominable murder. In spite of what is but an affectation, perhaps, of the sceptical mood, he is a Churchman too; one of those whoentered fully into the Anglican position, so full of sympathy withthose ceremonies and observances [131] which "misguided zeal termssuperstition, " that there were some Roman Catholics who thought thatnothing but custom and education kept him from their communion. At theRestoration he rejoices to see the return of the comely Anglican orderin old episcopal Norwich, with its ancient churches; the antiquity, inparticular, of the English Church being, characteristically, one of thethings he most valued in it, vindicating it, when occasion came, against the "unjust scandal" of those who made that Church a creationof Henry the Eighth. As to Romanists--he makes no scruple to "entertheir churches in defect of ours. " He cannot laugh at, but ratherpities, "the fruitless journeys of pilgrims--for there is something init of devotion. " He could never "hear the Ave Mary! bell without anoraison. " At a solemn procession he has "wept abundantly. " HowEnglish, in truth, all this really is! It reminds one how some of themost popular of English writers, in many a half-conscious expression, have witnessed to a susceptibility in the English mind itself, in spiteof the Reformation, to what is affecting in religious ceremony. Only, in religion as in politics, Browne had no turn for disputes; wassuspicious of them, indeed; knowing, as he says with true acumen, that"a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet beforced to surrender, " even in controversies not [132] necessarilymaladroit--an image in which we may trace a little contemporarycolouring. 

The Enquiries into Vulgar Errors appeared in the year 1646; a yearwhich found him very hard on "the vulgar. " His suspicion, in theabstract, of what Bacon calls Idola Fori, the Idols of theMarket-place, takes a special emphasis from the course of events abouthim: "being erroneous in their single numbers, once huddled together, they will be error itself. " And yet, congruously with a dreamysweetness of character we may find expressed in his very features, heseems not greatly concerned at the temporary suppression of theinstitutions he values so much. He seems to possess some inwardPlatonic reality of them--church or monarchy--to hold by in idea, quitebeyond the reach of Roundhead or unworthy Cavalier. In the power ofwhat is inward and inviolable in his religion, he can still take note:"In my solitary and retired imagination (neque enim cum porticus aut melectulus accepit, desum mihi) I remember I am not alone, and thereforeforget not to contemplate Him and His attributes who is ever with me. "

His father, a merchant of London, with some claims to ancient descent, left him early in possession of ample means. Educated at Winchesterand Oxford, he visited Ireland, France, and Italy; and in the year1633, at the age of twenty-eight, became Doctor of Medicine at Leyden. Three years later he established himself as a physician [133] atNorwich for the remainder of his life, having married a lady, describedas beautiful and attractive, and affectionate also, as we may judgefrom her letters and postscripts to those of her husband, in anorthography of a homeliness amazing even for that age. Dorothy Brownebore him ten children, six of whom he survived. 

Their house at Norwich, even then an old one it would seem, must havegrown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet ofantiquities--antiquities properly so called; his old Roman, orRomanised British urns, from Walsingham or Brampton, for instance, andthose natural objects which he studied somewhat in the temper of acuriosity-hunter or antiquary. In one of the old churchyards ofNorwich he makes the first discovery of adipocere, of which grimsubstance "a portion still remains with him. " For his multifariousexperiments he must have had his laboratory. The old window-stanchionshad become magnetic, proving, as he thinks, that iron "acquiresverticity" from long lying in one position. Once we find him re-tilingthe place. It was then, perhaps, that he made the observation thatbricks and tiles also acquire "magnetic alliciency"--one's whole house, one might fancy; as indeed, he holds the earth itself to be a vastlodestone. 

The very faults of his literary work, its desultoriness, the time itcosts his readers, that [134] slow Latinity which Johnson imitated fromhim, those lengthy leisurely terminations which busy posterity willabbreviate, all breathe of the long quiet of the place. Yet he is byno means indolent. Besides wide book-learning, experimental researchat home, and indefatigable observation in the open air, he prosecutesthe ordinary duties of a physician; contrasting himself indeed withother students, "whose quiet and unmolested doors afford no suchdistractions. " To most persons of mind sensitive as his, his chosenstudies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as theydid, upon death and decay. It is well, perhaps, that life should besomething of a "meditation upon death": but to many, certainly, Browne's would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one's ownfuneral. A museum is seldom a cheerful place--oftenest induces thefeeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne thewhole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of asomewhat mortified kind. Only, for him (poetic dream, or philosophicapprehension, it was this which never failed to evoke his wonderfulgenius for exquisitely impassioned speech) over all those uglyanatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics, there was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, oneday to reassert itself--stranger far than any fancied odylicgravelights!

[135] When Browne settled at Norwich, being then about thirty-six yearsold, he had already completed the Religio Medici; a desultorycollection of observations designed for himself only and a few friends, at all events with no purpose of immediate publication. It had beenlying by him for seven years, circulating privately in his ownextraordinarily perplexed manuscript, or in manuscript copies, when, in1642, an incorrect printed version from one of those copies, "muchcorrupted by transcription at various hands, " appeared anonymously. Browne, decided royalist as he was in spite of seeming indifference, connects this circumstance with the unscrupulous use of the press forpolitical purposes, and especially against the king, at that time. Just here a romantic figure comes on the scene. Son of the unfortunateyoung Everard Digby who perished on the scaffold for some half-heartedparticipation in the Gunpowder Plot, Kenelm Digby, brought up in thereformed religion, had returned in manhood to the religion of hisfather. In his intellectual composition he had, in common with Browne, a scientific interest, oddly tinged with both poetry and scepticism: hehad also a strong sympathy with religious reaction, and a more thansentimental love for a seemingly vanishing age of faith, which he, forone, would not think of as vanishing. A copy of that surreptitiousedition of the Religio Medici found him a prisoner on suspicion of atoo active [136] royalism, and with much time on his hands. 

The Roman Catholic, although, secure in his definite orthodoxy, hefinds himself indifferent on many points (on the reality of witchcraft, for instance) concerning which Browne's more timid, personally groundedfaith might indulge no scepticism, forced himself, nevertheless, todetect a vein of rationalism in a book which on the whole muchattracted him, and hastily put forth his "animadversions" upon it. Browne, with all his distaste for controversy, thus found himselfcommitted to a dispute, and his reply came with the correct edition ofthe Religio Medici published at last with his name. There have beenmany efforts to formulate the "religion of the layman, " which might berightly understood, perhaps, as something more than what is called"natural, " yet less than ecclesiastical, or "professional" religion. Though its habitual mode of conceiving experience is on a differentplane, yet it would recognise the legitimacy of the traditionalreligious interpretation of that experience, generally and byimplication; only, with a marked reserve as to religious particulars, both of thought and language, out of a real reverence or awe, as properonly for a special place. Such is the lay religion, as we may find itin Addison, in Gray, in Thackeray; and there is something of aconcession--a concession, on second thoughts--about it. Browne'sReligio Medici is designed as the expression of a mind [137] moredifficult of belief than that of the mere "layman, " as above described;it is meant for the religion of the man of science. Actually, it issomething less to the point, in any balancing of the religious againstthe worldly view of things, than the religion of the layman, as justnow defined. For Browne, in spite of his profession of boisterousdoubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothingof the character of a concession. He holds that there has neverexisted an atheist. Not that he is credulous; but that his religion isonly the correlative of himself, his peculiar character and education, a religion of manifold association. For him, the wonders of religion, its supernatural events or agencies, are almost natural facts orprocesses. "Even in this material fabric, the spirits walk as freelyexempt from the affection of time, place and motion, as beyond theextremest circumference. " Had not Divine interference designed toraise the dead, nature herself is in act to do it--to lead out the"incinerated soul" from the retreats of her dark laboratory. CertainlyBrowne has not, like Pascal, made the "great resolution, " by theapprehension that it is just in the contrast of the moral world to theworld with which science deals that religion finds its proper basis. It is from the homelessness of the world which science analyses sovictoriously, its dark unspirituality, wherein the soul he is consciousof seems such a [138] stranger, that Pascal "turns again to his rest, "in the conception of a world of wholly reasonable and moral agencies. For Browne, on the contrary, the light is full, design everywhereobvious, its conclusion easy to draw, all small and great things markedclearly with the signature of the "Word. " The adhesion, the difficultadhesion, of men such as Pascal, is an immense contribution toreligious controversy; the concession, again, of a man like Addison, ofgreat significance there. But in the adhesion of Browne, in spite ofhis crusade against "vulgar errors, " there is no real significance. The Religio Medici is a contribution, not to faith, but to piety; arefinement and correction, such as piety often stands in need of; ahelp, not so much to religious belief in a world of doubt, as to themaintenance of the religious mood amid the interests of a secularcalling. 

From about this time Browne's letters afford a pretty clear view of hislife as it passed in the house at Norwich. Many of these lettersrepresent him in correspondence with the singular men who shared hisown half poetic, half scientific turn of mind, with that impressibilitytowards what one might call the thaumaturgic elements in nature whichhas often made men dupes, and which is certainly an element in thesomewhat atrabiliar mental complexion of that age in England. Hecorresponds seriously with William Lily, the astrologer; is acquainted[139] with Dr. Dee, who had some connexion with Norwich, and has"often heard him affirm, sometimes with oaths, that he had seentransmutation of pewter dishes and flagons into silver (at least) whichthe goldsmiths at Prague bought of him. " Browne is certainly an honestinvestigator; but it is still with a faint hope of something like thatupon fitting occasion, and on the alert always for surprises in nature(as if nature had a rhetoric, at times, to deliver to us, like thosesudden and surprising flowers of his own poetic style) that he listensto her everyday talk so attentively. Of strange animals, strange cures, and the like, his correspondence is full. The very errors he combatsare, of course, the curiosities of error--those fascinating, irresistible, popular, errors, which various kinds of people haveinsisted on gliding into because they like them. Even his heresieswere old ones--the very fossils of capricious opinion. 

It is as an industrious local naturalist that Browne comes before usfirst, full of the fantastic minute life in the fens and "Broads"around Norwich, its various sea and marsh birds. He is something of avivisectionist also, and we may not be surprised at it, perhaps, in anage which, for the propagation of truth, was ready to cut off men'sears. He finds one day "a Scarabaus capricornus odoratus, " which hetakes "to be mentioned by Monfetus, folio 150. He saith, 'Nucemmoschatam et cinnamomum vere spirat'--[140] but to me it smelt likeroses, santalum, and ambergris. " "Musca tuliparum moschata, " again, "is a small bee-like fly of an excellent fragrant odour, which I haveoften found at the bottom of the flowers of tulips. " Is this withinthe experience of modern entomologists?

The Garden of Cyrus, though it ends indeed with a passage of wonderfulfelicity, certainly emphasises (to say the least) the defects ofBrowne's literary good qualities. His chimeric fancy carries him hereinto a kind of frivolousness, as if he felt almost too safe with hispublic, and were himself not quite serious, or dealing fairly with it;and in a writer such as Browne levity must of necessity be a littleponderous. Still, like one of those stiff gardens, half-way betweenthe medieval garden and the true "English" garden of Temple or Walpole, actually to be seen in the background of some of the conventionalportraits of that day, the fantasies of this indescribable expositionof the mysteries of the quincunx form part of the complete portrait ofBrowne himself; and it is in connexion with it that, once or twice, thequaintly delightful pen of Evelyn comes into the correspondence--inconnexion with the "hortulane pleasure. " "Norwich, " he writes toBrowne, "is a place, I understand, much addicted to the flowery part. "Professing himself a believer in the operation "of the air and geniusof gardens upon human spirits, towards virtue and sanctity, " he is allfor [141] natural gardens as against "those which appear like gardensof paste-board and march-pane, and smell more of paint than of flowersand verdure. " Browne is in communication also with Ashmole andDugdale, the famous antiquaries; to the latter of whom, who had writtena work on the history of the embanking of fens, he communicates thediscovery of certain coins, on a piece of ground "in the nature of anisland in the fens. "

Far more interesting certainly than those curious scientific letters isBrowne's "domestic correspondence. " Dobson, Charles the First's"English Tintoret, " would seem to have painted a life-sized picture ofSir Thomas Browne and his family, after the manner of those big, urbane, family groups, then coming into fashion with the Dutch Masters. Of such a portrait nothing is now known. But in these old-fashioned, affectionate letters, transmitted often, in those troublous times, withso much difficulty, we have what is almost as graphic--a numerousgroup, in which, although so many of Browne's children died young, hewas happy; with Dorothy Browne, occasionally adding her charming, ill-spelt postscripts to her husband's letters; the religious daughterwho goes to daily prayers after the Restoration, which brought Brownethe honour of knighthood; and, above all, two Toms, son and grandson ofSir Thomas, the latter being the son of Dr. Edward Browne, [142] nowbecome distinguished as a physician in London (he attended John, Earlof Rochester, in his last illness at Woodstock) and his childishexistence as he lives away from his proper home in London, in the oldhouse at Norwich, two hundred years ago, we see like a thing of to-day. 

At first the two brothers, Edward and Thomas (the elder) are togetherin everything. Then Edward goes abroad for his studies, and Thomas, quite early, into the navy, where he certainly develops into awonderfully gallant figure; passing away, however, from thecorrespondence, it is uncertain how, before he was of full age. Fromthe first he is understood to be a lad of parts. "If you practise towrite, you will have a good pen and style:" and a delightful, boyishjournal of his remains, describing a tour the two brothers made inSeptember 1662 among the Derbyshire hills. "I received your two lastletters, " he writes to his father from aboard the Marie Rose, "and giveyou many thanks for the discourse you sent me out of Vossius: De motumarium et ventorum. It seemed very hard to me at first; but I have nowbeaten it, and I wish I had the book. " His father is pleased to thinkthat he is "like to proceed not only a good navigator, but a goodscholar": and he finds the much exacting, old classical prescriptionfor the character of the brave man fulfilled in him. On 16th July 1666the young man writes--still from the Marie Rose--

[143] If it were possible to get an opportunity to send as often as Iam desirous to write, you should hear more often from me, being now sonear the grand action, from which I would by no means be absent. Iextremely long for that thundering day: wherein I hope you shall hearwe have behaved ourselves like men, and to the honour of our country. I thank you for your directions for my ears against the noise of theguns, but I have found that I could endure it; nor is it so intolerableas most conceive; especially when men are earnest, and intent upontheir business, unto whom muskets sound but like pop-guns. It isimpossible to express unto another how a smart sea-fight elevates thespirits of a man, and makes him despise all dangers. In and after allsea-fights, I have been very thirsty. 

He died, as I said, early in life. We only hear of him later inconnexion with a trait of character observed in Tom the grandson, whosewinning ways, and tricks of bodily and mental growth, are duly recordedin these letters: the reader will, I hope, pardon the followingextracts from them:--

Little Tom is lively. .. . Frank is fayne sometimes to play him asleepwith a fiddle. When we send away our letters he scribbles a paper andwill have it sent to his sister, and saith she doth not know how manyfine things there are in Norwich. .. . He delights his grandfather whenhe comes home. 

Tom gives you many thanks for his clothes (from London). He hasappeared very fine this King's day with them. 

Tom presents his duty. A gentleman at our election asked Tom who heewas for? and he answered, "For all four. " The gentleman replied thathe answered like a physician's son. 

Tom would have his grandmother, his aunt Betty, and Frank, valentines:but hee conditioned with them that they should give him nothing of anykind that hee had ever had or seen before. 

[144] "Tom is just now gone to see two bears which are to be shown. ""Tom, his duty. He is begging books and reading of them. " "Theplayers are at the Red Lion hard by; and Tom goes sometimes to see aplay. "

And then one day he stirs old memories--

The fairings were welcome to Tom. He finds about the house diversthings that were your brother's (the late Edward's), and Bettysometimes tells him stories about him, so that he was importunate withher to write his life in a quarter of a sheet of paper, and read itunto him, and will have still more added. 

Just as I am writing (learnedly about a comet, 7th January 1680-81) Tomcomes and tells me the blazing star is in the yard, and calls me to seeit. It was but dim, and the sky not clear. .. . I am very sensible ofthis sharp weather. +

He seems to have come to no good end, riding forth one stormy night. Requiescat in pace!

Of this long, leisurely existence the chief events were Browne's rareliterary publications; some of his writings indeed having been leftunprinted till after his death; while in the circumstances of the issueof every one of them there is something accidental, as if the worldmight have missed it altogether. Even the Discourse of Vulgar Errors, the longest and most elaborate of his works, is entirely discursive andoccasional, coming to an end with no natural conclusion, but onlybecause the writer chose to leave off just there; and few probably havebeen the readers of the book as a consecutive whole. At times indeed weseem to have in it observations only, or notes, preliminary to somemore orderly composition. Dip into it: read, for [145] instance, thechapter "Of the Ring-finger, " or the chapters "Of the Long Life of theDeer, " and on the "Pictures of Mermaids, Unicorns, and some Others, "and the part will certainly seem more than the whole. Try to read itthrough, and you will soon feel cloyed;--miss very likely, its realworth to the fancy, the literary fancy (which finds its pleasure ininventive word and phrase) and become dull to the really vivid beautiesof a book so lengthy, but with no real evolution. Though there arewords, phrases, constructions innumerable, which remind one how muchthe work initiated in France by Madame de Rambouillet--work, done forEngland, we may think perhaps imperfectly, in the next century byJohnson and others--was really needed; yet the capacities of Browne'smanner of writing, coming as it did so directly from the man, are felteven in his treatment of matters of science. As with Buffon, his full, ardent, sympathetic vocabulary, the poetry of his language, a poetryinherent in its elementary particles--the word, the epithet--helps tokeep his eye, and the eye of the reader, on the object before it, andconduces directly to the purpose of the naturalist, the observer. But, only one half observation, its other half consisting of veryout-of-the-way book-lore, this work displays Browne still in thecharacter of the antiquary, as that age understood him. He is a kindof Elias Ashmole, but dealing with natural objects; which are for him, in the first [146] place, and apart from the remote religious hints andintimations they carry with them, curiosities. He seems to have notrue sense of natural law, as Bacon understood it; nor even of thatimmanent reason in the natural world, which the Platonic traditionsupposes. "Things are really true, " he says, "as they correspond untoGod's conception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformityunto that intellect, in whose idea they had their firstdeterminations. " But, actually, what he is busy in the record of, arematters more or less of the nature of caprices; as if things, afterall, were significant of their higher verity only at random, and in asort of surprises, like music in old instruments suddenly touched intosound by a wandering finger, among the lumber of people's houses. Nature, "the art of God, " as he says, varying a little a phrase usedalso by Hobbes, in a work printed later--Nature, he seems to protest, is only a little less magical, its processes only a little less in theway of alchemy, than you had supposed. We feel that, as with thatdisturbed age in England generally (and it is here that he, with it, isso interesting, curious, old-world, and unlike ourselves) his supposedexperience might at any moment be broken in upon by a hundred forms ofa natural magic, only not quite so marvellous as that older sort ofmagic, or alchemy, he is at so much pains to expose; and the largepromises of which, its large words too, he still regretfully enjoys. 

[147] And yet the Discourse of Vulgar Errors, seeming, as it oftendoes, to be a serious refutation of fairy tales--arguing, for instance, against the literal truth of the poetic statement that "The pigeon hathno gall, " and such questions as "Whether men weigh heavier dead thanalive?" being characteristic questions--is designed, with muchambition, under its pedantic Greek title Pseudodoxia Epidemica, as acriticism, a cathartic, an instrument for the clarifying of theintellect. He begins from "that first error in Paradise, " wonderingmuch at "man's deceivability in his perfection, "--"at such grossdeceit. " He enters in this connexion, with a kind of poetry ofscholasticism which may interest the student of Paradise Lost, intowhat we may call the intellectual and moral by-play of the situation ofthe first man and woman in Paradise, with strange queries about it. Did Adam, for instance, already know of the fall of the Angels? Did hereally believe in death, till Abel died? It is from Julius Scaligerthat he takes his motto, to the effect that the true knowledge ofthings must be had from things themselves, not from books; and he seemsas seriously concerned as Bacon to dissipate the crude impressions of afalse "common sense, " of false science, and a fictitious authority. Inverting, oddly, Plato's theory that all learning is but reminiscence, he reflects with a sigh how much of oblivion must needs be involved inthe getting of any true knowledge. "Men that [148] adore times past, consider not that those times were once present (that is, as our ownare) and ourselves unto those to come, as they unto us at present. "That, surely, coming from one both by temperament and habit so great anantiquary, has the touch of something like an influence in theatmosphere of the time. That there was any actual connexion betweenBrowne's work and Bacon's is but a surmise. Yet we almost seem to hearBacon when Browne discourses on the "use of doubts, and the advantageswhich might be derived from drawing up a calendar of doubts, falsehoods, and popular errors;" and, as from Bacon, one gets theimpression that men really have been very much the prisoners of theirown crude or pedantic terms, notions, associations; that they have beenvery indolent in testing very simple matters--with a wonderful kind of"supinity, " as he calls it. In Browne's chapter on the "Sources ofError, " again, we may trace much resemblance to Bacon's strikingdoctrine of the Idola, the "shams" men fall down and worship. Takingsource respectively, from the "common infirmity of human nature, " fromthe "erroneous disposition of the people, " from "confident adherence toauthority, " the errors which Browne chooses to deal with may beregistered as identical with Bacon's Idola Tribus, Fori, Theatri; theidols of our common human nature; of the vulgar, when they gettogether; and of the learned, when they get together. 

[149] But of the fourth species of error noted by Bacon, the IdolaSpecus, the Idols of the Cave, that whole tribe of illusions, which are"bred amongst the weeds and tares of one's own brain, " Browne tells usnothing by way of criticism; was himself, rather, a lively example oftheir operation. Throw those illusions, those "idols, " into concreteor personal form, suppose them introduced among the other forces of anactive intellect, and you have Sir Thomas Browne himself. Thesceptical inquirer who rises from his cathartic, his purging of error, a believer in the supernatural character of pagan oracles, and a crueljudge of supposed witches, must still need as much as ever thatelementary conception of the right method and the just limitations ofknowledge, by power of which he should not just strain out a singleerror here or there, but make a final precipitate of fallacy. 

And yet if the temperament had been deducted from Browne's work--thatinherent and strongly marked way of deciding things, which has guidedwith so surprising effect the musings of the Letter to a Friend, andthe Urn-Burial--we should probably have remembered him little. Pity!some may think, for himself at least, that he had not lived earlier, and still believed in the mandrake, for instance; its fondness forplaces of execution, and its human cries "on eradication, with hazardof life to them that pull it up. " "In philosophy, " he observes, meaning to contrast [150] his free-thinking in that department with hisorthodoxy in religion--in philosophy, "where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself:" which is true, we maythink, in a further sense than he meant, and that it was the"paradoxical" that he actually preferred. Happy, at all events, hestill remained--undisturbed and happy--in a hundred nativeprepossessions, some certainly valueless, some of them perhapsinvaluable. And while one feels that no real logic of fallacies hasbeen achieved by him, one feels still more how little the constructionof that branch of logical inquiry really helps men's minds; fallacy, like truth itself, being a matter so dependent on innate gift ofapprehension, so extra-logical and personal; the original perceptioncounting for almost everything, the mere inference for so little! Yes!"A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet beforced to surrender, " even in controversies not necessarily maladroit. 

The really stirring poetry of science is not in guesses, or faciledivinations about it, but in its larger ascertained truths--the orderof infinite space, the slow method and vast results of infinite time. For Browne, however, the sense of poetry which so overmasters hisscientific procedure, depends chiefly on its vaguer possibilities; theempirical philosophy, even after Bacon, being still dominated by atemper, resultant from the general unsettlement of men's [151] minds atthe Reformation, which may be summed up in the famous question ofMontaigne--Que sçais-je? The cold-blooded method of observation andexperiment was creeping but slowly over the domain of science; and suchunreclaimed portions of it as the phenomena of magnetism had an immensefascination for men like Browne and Digby. Here, in those parts ofnatural philosophy "but yet in discovery, " "the America and untravelledparts of truth, " lay for them the true prospect of science, like thenew world itself to a geographical discoverer such as Raleigh. Andwelcome as one of the minute hints of that country far ahead of them, the strange bird, or floating fragment of unfamiliar vegetation, whichmet those early navigators, there was a certain fantastic experiment, in which, as was alleged, Paracelsus had been lucky. For Browne andothers it became the crucial type of the kind of agency in naturewhich, as they conceived, it was the proper function of science toreveal in larger operation. "The subject of my last letter, " says Dr. Henry Power, then a student, writing to Browne in 1648, the last yearof Charles the First, "being so high and noble a piece of chemistry, invites me once more to request an experimental eviction of it fromyourself; and I hope you will not chide my importunity in thispetition, or be angry at my so frequent knockings at your door toobtain a grant of so great and admirable a [152] mystery. " What theenthusiastic young student expected from Browne, so high and noble apiece of chemistry, was the "re-individualling of an incineratedplant"--a violet, turning to freshness, and smelling sweet again, outof its ashes, under some genially fitted conditions of the chemic art. 

Palingenesis, resurrection, effected by orderly prescription--the"re-individualling" of an "incinerated organism"--is a subject whichaffords us a natural transition to the little book of the Hydriotaphia, or Treatise of Urn-Burial--about fifty or sixty pages--which, togetherwith a very singular letter not printed till after Browne's death, isperhaps, after all, the best justification of Browne's literaryreputation, as it were his own curiously figured urn, andtreasure-place of immortal memory. 

In its first presentation to the public this letter was connected withBrowne's Christian Morals; but its proper and sympathetic collocationwould be rather with the Urn-Burial, of which it is a kind of prelude, or strikes the keynote. He is writing in a very complex situation--toa friend, upon occasion of the death of a common friend. The deceasedapparently had been little known to Browne himself till his recentvisits, while the intimate friend to whom he is writing had been absentat the time; and the leading motive of Browne's letter is the deepimpression he has received during those visits, of a sort of [153]physical beauty in the coming of death, with which he still surprisesand moves his reader. There had been, in this case, a tardiness andreluctancy in the circumstances of dissolution, which had permittedhim, in the character of a physician, as it were to assist at thespiritualising of the bodily frame by natural process; a wonderful newtype of a kind of mortified grace being evolved by the way. Thespiritual body had anticipated the formal moment of death; the alertsoul, in that tardy decay, changing its vesture gradually, and as ifpiece by piece. The infinite future had invaded this life perceptiblyto the senses, like the ocean felt far inland up a tidal river. Nowhere, perhaps, is the attitude of questioning awe on the thresholdof another life displayed with the expressiveness of this unique morselof literature; though there is something of the same kind, in anotherthan the literary medium, in the delicate monumental sculpture of theearly Tuscan School, as also in many of the designs of William Blake, often, though unconsciously, much in sympathy with thoseunsophisticated Italian workmen. With him, as with them, and with thewriter of the Letter to a Friend upon the occasion of the death of hisintimate Friend, --so strangely! the visible function of death is but torefine, to detach from aught that is vulgar. And this elfin letter, really an impromptu epistle to a friend, affords the best possiblelight on the general temper of the man [154] who could be moved by theaccidental discovery of those old urns at Walsingham--funeral relics of"Romans, or Britons Romanised which had learned Roman customs"--to thecomposition of that wonderful book the Hydriotaphia. He had drawn up ashort account of the circumstance at the moment; but it was after tenyears' brooding that he put forth the finished treatise, dedicated toan eminent collector of ancient coins and other rarities, withcongratulations that he "can daily command the view of so many imperialfaces, " and (by way of frontispiece) with one of the urns, "drawn witha coal taken out of it and found among the burnt bones. " The discoveryhad resuscitated for him a whole world of latent observation, fromlife, from out-of-the-way reading, from the natural world, and fusedinto a composition, which with all its quaintness we may well pronounceclassical, all the heterogeneous elements of that singular mind. Thedesire to "record these risen ashes and not to let them be buried twiceamong us, " had set free, in his manner of conceiving things, somethingnot wholly analysable, something that may be properly called genius, which shapes his use of common words to stronger and deeper senses, ina way unusual in prose writing. Let the reader, for instance, tracehis peculiarly sensitive use of the epithets thin and dark, both hereand in the Letter to a Friend. 

Upon what a grand note he can begin and end [155] chapter or paragraph!"When the funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over:" "And alarge part of the earth is still in the urn unto us. " Dealing with avery vague range of feelings, it is his skill to associate them to verydefinite objects. Like the Soul, in Blake's design, "exploring therecesses of the tomb, " he carries a light, the light of the poeticfaith which he cannot put off him, into those dark places, "the abodeof worms and pismires, " peering round with a boundless curiosity and nofear; noting the various casuistical considerations of men's last formof self-love; all those whims of humanity as a "student of perpetuity, "the mortuary customs of all nations, which, from their very closenessto our human nature, arouse in most minds only a strong feeling ofdistaste. There is something congruous with the impassive piety of theman in his waiting on accident from without to take start for the work, which, of all his work, is most truly touched by the "divine spark. "Delightsome as its eloquence is actually found to be, that eloquence isattained out of a certain difficulty and halting crabbedness ofexpression; the wretched punctuation of the piece being not the onlycause of its impressing the reader with the notion that he is butdealing with a collection of notes for a more finished composition, andof a different kind; perhaps a purely erudite treatise on its subject, with detachment of all personal colour now adhering [156] to it. Outof an atmosphere of all-pervading oddity and quaintness--the quaintnessof mind which reflects that this disclosing of the urns of the ancientshath "left unto our view some parts which they never beheldthemselves"--arises a work really ample and grand, nay! classical, as Isaid, by virtue of the effectiveness with which it fixes a type inliterature; as, indeed, at its best, romantic literature (and Browne isgenuinely romantic) in every period attains classical quality, givingtrue measure of the very limited value of those well-worn criticaldistinctions. And though the Urn-Burial certainly has much of thecharacter of a poem, yet one is never allowed to forget that it wasdesigned, candidly, as a scientific treatise on one department ofancient "culture" (as much so as Guichard's curious old French book onDivers Manners of Burial) and was the fruit of much labour, in the wayespecially of industrious selection from remote and difficult writers;there being then few or no handbooks, or anything like our modernshortcuts to varied knowledge. Quite unaffectedly, a curious learningsaturates, with a kind of grey and aged colour most apt and congruouswith the subject-matter, all the thoughts that arise in him. His greatstore of reading, so freely displayed, he uses almost as poetically asMilton; like him, profiting often by the mere sonorous effect of someheroic or ancient name, which he can adapt to that same sort of learnedsweetness of [157] cadence with which so many of his single sentencesare made to fall upon the ear. 

Pope Gregory, that great religious poet, requested by certain eminentpersons to send them some of those relics he sought for so devoutly inall the lurking-places of old Rome, took up, it is said, a portion ofcommon earth, and delivered it to the messengers; and, on theirexpressing surprise at such a gift, pressed the earth together in hishand, whereupon the sacred blood of the Martyrs was beheld flowing outbetween his fingers. The veneration of relics became a part ofChristian (as some may think it a part of natural) religion. All overRome we may count how much devotion in fine art is owing to it; and, through all ugliness or superstition, its intention still speaksclearly to serious minds. The poor dead bones, ghastly andforbidding:--we know what Shakespeare would have felt aboutthem. --"Beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was aman!" And it is with something of a similar feeling that Browne isfull, on the common and general ground of humanity; an awe-strickensympathy with those, whose bones "lie at the mercies of the living, "strong enough to unite all his various chords of feeling into a singlestrain of impressive and genuine poetry. His real interest is in whatmay be called the curiosities of our common humanity. As another mightbe moved at the sight of Alexander's bones, or Saint Edmund's, or SaintCecilia's, [158] so he is full of a fine poetical excitement at suchlowly relics as the earth hides almost everywhere beneath our feet. But it is hardly fair to take our leave amid these grievous images ofso happy a writer as Sir Thomas Browne; so great a lover of the openair, under which much of his life was passed. His work, late onenight, draws to a natural close:--"To keep our eyes open longer, " hebethinks himself suddenly, "were but to act our Antipodes. Thehuntsmen are up in America!"

What a fund of open-air cheerfulness, there! in turning to sleep. Still, even when we are dealing with a writer in whom mere style countsfor so much as with Browne, it is impossible to ignore his matter; andit is with religion he is really occupied from first to last, hardlyless than Richard Hooker. And his religion, too, after all, was areligion of cheerfulness: he has no great consciousness of evil inthings, and is no fighter. His religion, if one may say so, was allprofit to him; among other ways, in securing an absolute staidness andplacidity of temper, for the intellectual work which was the properbusiness of his life. His contributions to "evidence, " in the ReligioMedici, for instance, hardly tell, because he writes out of view of areally philosophical criticism. What does tell in him, in thisdirection, is the witness he brings to men's instinct of survival--the"intimations of immortality, " as Wordsworth terms them, which [159]were natural with him in surprising force. As was said of Jean Paul, his special subject was the immortality of the soul; with an assuranceas personal, as fresh and original, as it was, on the one hand, inthose old half-civilised people who had deposited the urns; on theother hand, in the cynical French poet of the nineteenth century, whodid not think, but knew, that his soul was imperishable. He lived inan age in which that philosophy made a great stride which ends withHume; and his lesson, if we may be pardoned for taking away a "lesson"from so ethical a writer, is the force of men's temperaments in themanagement of opinion, their own or that of others;--that it is notmerely different degrees of bare intellectual power which cause men toapproach in different degrees to this or that intellectual programme. Could he have foreseen the mature result of that mechanical analysiswhich Bacon had applied to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, thereis no reason to think that he would have surrendered his own chosenhypothesis concerning them. He represents, in an age, the intellectualpowers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, that class of minds towhich the supernatural view of things is still credible. Thenon-mechanical theory of nature has had its grave adherents since: tothe non-mechanical theory of man--that he is in contact with a moralorder on a different plane from the [160] mechanical order--thousands, of the most various types and degrees of intellectual power, alwaysadhere; a fact worth the consideration of all ingenuous thinkers, if(as is certainly the case with colour, music, number, for instance)there may be whole regions of fact, the recognition of which belongs toone and not to another, which people may possess in various degrees;for the knowledge of which, therefore, one person is dependent uponanother; and in relation to which the appropriate means of cognitionmust lie among the elements of what we call individual temperament, sothat what looks like a pre-judgment may be really a legitimateapprehension. "Men are what they are, " and are not wholly at the mercyof formal conclusions from their formally limited premises. Brownepasses his whole life in observation and inquiry: he is a genuineinvestigator, with every opportunity: the mind of the age all aroundhim seems passively yielding to an almost foregone intellectual result, to a philosophy of disillusion. But he thinks all that a prejudice;and not from any want of intellectual power certainly, but from someinward consideration, some afterthought, from the antecedentgravitation of his own general character--or, will you say? from thatunprecipitated infusion of fallacy in him--he fails to draw, unlikealmost all the rest of the world, the conclusion ready to hand. 

1886. 

NOTES

144. +In the original, this quotation, like several above it, is notindented; it is in smaller type. Return. 

"LOVE'S LABOURS LOST"

[161] Love's Labours Lost is one of the earliest of Shakespeare'sdramas, and has many of the peculiarities of his poems, which are alsothe work of his earlier life. The opening speech of the king on theimmortality of fame--on the triumph of fame over death--and the noblerparts of Biron, display something of the monumental style ofShakespeare's Sonnets, and are not without their concerts of thoughtand expression. This connexion of Love's Labours Lost withShakespeare's poems is further enforced by the actual insertion in itof three sonnets and a faultless song; which, in accordance with hispractice in other plays, are inwoven into the argument of the pieceand, like the golden ornaments of a fair woman, give it a peculiar airof distinction. There is merriment in it also, with choiceillustrations of both wit and humour; a laughter, often exquisite, ringing, if faintly, yet as genuine laughter still, though sometimessinking into mere burlesque, which has not lasted quite so well. AndShakespeare [162] brings a serious effect out of the trifling of hischaracters. A dainty love-making is interchanged with the morecumbrous play: below the many artifices of Biron's amorous speeches wemay trace sometimes the "unutterable longing;" and the lines in whichKatherine describes the blighting through love of her younger sisterare one of the most touching things in older literature. * Again, howmany echoes seem awakened by those strange words, actually said injest! "The sweet war-man (Hector of Troy) is dead and rotten; sweetchucks, beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was aman!"--words which may remind us of Shakespeare's own epitaph. In thelast scene, an ingenious turn is given to the action, so that the piecedoes not conclude after the manner of other comedies. --

 Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill:

and Shakespeare strikes a passionate note across it at last, in theentrance of the messenger, who announces to the princess that the kingher father is suddenly dead. 

The merely dramatic interest of the piece is slight enough; only justsufficient, indeed, to form the vehicle of its wit and poetry. Thescene--a park of the King of Navarre--is unaltered throughout; and theunity of the [163] play is not so much the unity of a drama as that ofa series of pictorial groups, in which the same figures reappear, indifferent combinations but on the same background. It is as ifShakespeare had intended to bind together, by some inventive conceit, the devices of an ancient tapestry, and give voices to its figures. Onone side, a fair palace; on the other, the tents of the Princess ofFrance, who has come on an embassy from her father to the King ofNavarre; in the midst, a wide space of smooth grass. 

The same personages are combined over and over again into a series ofgallant scenes--the princess, the three masked ladies, the quaint, pedantic king; one of those amiable kings men have never loved enough, whose serious occupation with the things of the mind seems, by contrastwith the more usual forms of kingship, like frivolity or play. Some ofthe figures are grotesque merely, and all the male ones at least, alittle fantastic. Certain objects reappearing from scene toscene--love-letters crammed with verses to the margin, and lovers'toys--hint obscurely at some story of intrigue. Between these groups, on a smaller scale, come the slighter and more homely episodes, withSir Nathaniel the curate, the country-maid Jaquenetta, Moth or Mote theelfin-page, with Hiems and Ver, who recite "the dialogue that the twolearned men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo. " Theladies are [164] lodged in tents, because the king, like the princessof the modern poet's fancy, has taken a vow

 to make his court a little Academe, and for three years' space no woman may come within a mile of it; andthe play shows how this artificial attempt was broken through. For theking and his three fellow-scholars are of course soon forsworn, andturn to writing sonnets, each to his chosen lady. Thesefellow-scholars of the king--"quaint votaries of science" at first, afterwards "affection's men-at-arms"--three youthful knights, gallant, amorous, chivalrous, but also a little affected, sporting always acurious foppery of language, are, throughout, the leading figures inthe foreground; one of them, in particular, being more carefullydepicted than the others, and in himself very noticeable--a portraitwith somewhat puzzling manner and expression, which at once catches theeye irresistibly and keeps it fixed. 

Play is often that about which people are most serious; and thehumourist may observe how, under all love of playthings, there isalmost always hidden an appreciation of something really engaging anddelightful. This is true always of the toys of children: it is oftentrue of the playthings of grown-up people, their vanities, theirfopperies even, their lighter loves; the cynic would add their pursuitof fame. Certainly, this is true without exception [165] of theplaythings of a past age, which to those who succeed it are always fullof a pensive interest--old manners, old dresses, old houses. For whatis called fashion in these matters occupies, in each age, much of thecare of many of the most discerning people, furnishing them with a kindof mirror of their real inward refinements, and their capacity forselection. Such modes or fashions are, at their best, an example ofthe artistic predominance of form over matter; of the manner of thedoing of it over the thing done; and have a beauty of their own. It isso with that old euphuism of the Elizabethan age--that pride of daintylanguage and curious expression, which it is very easy to ridicule, which often made itself ridiculous, but which had below it a real senseof fitness and nicety; and which, as we see in this very play, andstill more clearly in the Sonnets, had some fascination for the youngShakespeare himself. It is this foppery of delicate language, thisfashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupiedin Love's Labours Lost. He shows us the manner in all its stages;passing from the grotesque and vulgar pedantry of Holofernes, throughthe extravagant but polished caricature of Armado, to become thepeculiar characteristic of a real though still quaint poetry in Bironhimself, who is still chargeable even at his best with just a littleaffectation. As Shakespeare laughs broadly at it in Holofernes orArmado, so he [166] is the analyst of its curious charm in Biron; andthis analysis involves a delicate raillery by Shakespeare himself athis own chosen manner. 

This "foppery" of Shakespeare's day had, then, its really delightfulside, a quality in no sense "affected, " by which it satisfies a realinstinct in our minds--the fancy so many of us have for an exquisiteand curious skill in the use of words. Biron is the perfect flower ofthis manner:

 A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight:

--as he describes Armado, in terms which are really applicable tohimself. In him this manner blends with a true gallantry of nature, and an affectionate complaisance and grace. He has at times some ofits extravagance or caricature also, but the shades of expression bywhich he passes from this to the "golden cadence" of Shakespeare's ownmost characteristic verse, are so fine, that it is sometimes difficultto trace them. What is a vulgarity in Holofernes, and a caricature inArmado, refines itself with him into the expression of a nature trulyand inwardly bent upon a form of delicate perfection, and isaccompanied by a real insight into the laws which determine what isexquisite in language, and their root in the nature of things. He canappreciate quite the opposite style--

 In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes;

he knows the first law of pathos, that

 Honest plain words best suit the ear of grief. 

[167] He delights in his own rapidity of intuition; and, in harmonywith the half-sensuous philosophy of the Sonnets, exalts, a littlescornfully, in many memorable expressions, the judgment of the senses, above all slower, more toilsome means of knowledge, scorning some whofail to see things only because they are so clear:

 So here you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes:--

as with some German commentators on Shakespeare. Appealing always toactual sensation from men's affected theories, he might seem to despiselearning; as, indeed, he has taken up his deep studies partly in sport, and demands always the profit of learning in renewed enjoyment. Yet hesurprises us from time to time by intuitions which could come only froma deep experience and power of observation; and men listen to him, oldand young, in spite of themselves. He is quickly impressible to theslightest clouding of the spirits in social intercourse, and has hismoments of extreme seriousness: his trial-task may well be, as Rosalineputs it--

 To enforce the pained impotent to smile. 

But still, through all, he is true to his chosen manner: that gloss ofdainty language is a second nature with him: even at his best he is notwithout a certain artifice: the trick of playing on words never desertshim; and [168] Shakespeare, in whose own genius there is an element ofthis very quality, shows us in this graceful, and, as it seems, studied, portrait, his enjoyment of it. 

As happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most parthidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain ofhis characters in which we feel that there is something ofself-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtleand ingenious creations that we feel this--in Hamlet and King Lear--asin those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, whilefar from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiarhappiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures whichpossess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no manbut would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of artwhich, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wroughtof the choicest material. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, belongs tothis group of Shakespeare's characters--versatile, mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the

 nimble spirits of the arteries, the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate. Acareful delineation of minor, yet expressive traits seems to mark themout as the characters of his predilection; [169] and it is hard not toidentify him with these more than with others. Biron, in Love'sLabours Lost, is perhaps the most striking member of this group. Inthis character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfectlevel of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become ableto stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry. 

1878. 

NOTES

162. *Act V. Scene II. Return. 

"MEASURE FOR MEASURE"

[170] IN Measure for Measure, as in some other of his plays, Shakespeare has remodelled an earlier and somewhat rough composition to"finer issues, " suffering much to remain as it had come from the lessskilful hand, and not raising the whole of his work to an equal degreeof intensity. Hence perhaps some of that depth and weightiness whichmake this play so impressive, as with the true seal of experience, likea fragment of life itself, rough and disjointed indeed, but forced toyield in places its profounder meaning. In Measure for Measure, incontrast with the flawless execution of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespearehas spent his art in just enough modification of the scheme of theolder play to make it exponent of this purpose, adapting its terribleessential incidents, so that Coleridge found it the only painful workamong Shakespeare's dramas, and leaving for the reader of to-day morethan the usual number of difficult expressions; but infusing a lavishcolour and a profound significance into it, so that under his [171]touch certain select portions of it rise far above the level of all buthis own best poetry, and working out of it a morality so characteristicthat the play might well pass for the central expression of his moraljudgments. It remains a comedy, as indeed is congruous with the bland, half-humorous equity which informs the whole composition, sinking fromthe heights of sorrow and terror into the rough scheme of the earlierpiece; yet it is hardly less full of what is really tragic in man'sexistence than if Claudio had indeed "stooped to death. " Even thehumorous concluding scenes have traits of special grace, retaining inless emphatic passages a stray lire or word of power, as it seems, sothat we watch to the end for the traces where the nobler hand hasglanced along, leaving its vestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully, in the rising of the style. 

The interest of Measure for Measure, therefore, is partly that of anold story told over again. We measure with curiosity that variety ofresources which has enabled Shakespeare to refashion the originalmaterial with a higher motive; adding to the intricacy of the piece, yet so modifying its structure as to give the whole almost the unity ofa single scene; lending, by the light of a philosophy which dwells muchon what is complex and subtle in our nature, a true human propriety toits strange and unexpected turns of feeling and character, to incidentsso [172] difficult as the fall of Angelo, and the subsequentreconciliation of Isabella, so that she pleads successfully for hislife. It was from Whetstone, a contemporary English writer, thatShakespeare derived the outline of Cinthio's "rare history" of Promosand Cassandra, one of that numerous class of Italian stories, likeBoccaccio's Tancred of Salerno, in which the mere energy of southernpassion has everything its own way, and which, though they may repelmany a northern reader by a certain crudity in their colouring, seem tohave been full of fascination for the Elizabethan age. This story, asit appears in Whetstone's endless comedy, is almost as rough as theroughest episode of actual criminal life. But the play seems never tohave been acted, and some time after its publication Whetstone himselfturned the thing into a tale, included in his Heptameron of CivilDiscourses, where it still figures as a genuine piece, with touches ofundesigned poetry, a quaint field-flower here and there of diction orsentiment, the whole strung up to an effective brevity, and with thefragrance of that admirable age of literature all about it. Here, then, there is something of the original Italian colour: in thisnarrative Shakespeare may well have caught the first glimpse of acomposition with nobler proportions; and some artless sketch from hisown hand, perhaps, putting together his first impressions, insinuateditself between Whetstone's work and the play as we actually read it. Out [173] of these insignificant sources Shakespeare's play rises, fullof solemn expression, and with a profoundly designed beauty, the newbody of a higher, though sometimes remote and difficult poetry, escaping from the imperfect relics of the old story, yet not whollytransformed, and even as it stands but the preparation only, we mightthink, of a still more imposing design. For once we have in it a realexample of that sort of writing which is sometimes described assuggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hintsonly, brings into distinct shape the reader's own half-developedimaginings. Often the quality is attributed to writing merely vagueand unrealised, but in Measure for Measure, quite certainly, Shakespeare has directed the attention of sympathetic readers alongcertain channels of meditation beyond the immediate scope of his work. 

Measure for Measure, therefore, by the quality of these higher designs, woven by his strange magic on a texture of poorer quality, is hardlyless indicative than Hamlet even, of Shakespeare's reason, of his powerof moral interpretation. It deals, not like Hamlet with the problemswhich beset one of exceptional temperament, but with mere human nature. It brings before us a group of persons, attractive, full of desire, vessels of the genial, seed-bearing powers of nature, a gaudy existenceflowering out over the old court and city of Vienna, a spectacle of thefulness and [174] pride of life which to some may seem to touch theverge of wantonness. Behind this group of people, behind their variousaction, Shakespeare inspires in us the sense of a strong tyranny ofnature and circumstance. Then what shall there be on this side ofit--on our side, the spectators' side, of this painted screen, with itspuppets who are really glad or sorry all the time? what philosophy oflife, what sort of equity?

Stimulated to read more carefully by Shakespeare's own profoundertouches, the reader will note the vivid reality, the subtle interchangeof light and shade, the strongly contrasted characters of this group ofpersons, passing across the stage so quickly. The slightest of them isat least not ill-natured: the meanest of them can put forth a plea forexistence--Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live!--they arenever sure of themselves, even in the strong tower of a coldunimpressible nature: they are capable of many friendships and of atrue dignity in danger, giving each other a sympathetic, if transitory, regret--one sorry that another "should be foolishly lost at a game oftick-tack. " Words which seem to exhaust man's deepest sentimentconcerning death and life are put on the lips of a gilded, witlessyouth; and the saintly Isabella feels fire creep along her, kindlingher tongue to eloquence at the suggestion of shame. In places theshadow deepens: death intrudes itself on the scene, as among other[175] things "a great disguiser, " blanching the features of youth andspoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with itsdisgraceful associations. As in Orcagna's fresco at Pisa, it comescapriciously, giving many and long reprieves to Barnardine, who hasbeen waiting for it nine years in prison, taking another thence byfever, another by mistake of judgment, embracing others in the midst oftheir music and song. The little mirror of existence, which reflectsto each for a moment the stage on which he plays, is broken at last bya capricious accident; while all alike, in their yearning for untastedenjoyment, are really discounting their days, grasping so hastily andaccepting so inexactly the precious pieces. The Duke's quaint butexcellent moralising at the beginning of the third act does butexpress, like the chorus of a Greek play, the spirit of the passingincidents. To him in Shakespeare's play, to a few here and there inthe actual world, this strange practical paradox of our life, so unwisein its eager haste, reveals itself in all its clearness. 

The Duke disguised as a friar, with his curious moralising on life anddeath, and Isabella in her first mood of renunciation, a thing "ensky'dand sainted, " come with the quiet of the cloister as a relief to thislust and pride of life: like some grey monastic picture hung on thewall of a gaudy room, their presence cools the heated air of the piece. For a moment we [176] are within the placid conventual walls, whitherthey fancy at first that the Duke has come as a man crossed in love, with Friar Thomas and Friar Peter, calling each other by their homely, English names, or at the nunnery among the novices, with their littlelimited privileges, where

 If you speak you must not show your face, Or if you show your face you must not speak. 

Not less precious for this relief in the general structure of thepiece, than for its own peculiar graces is the episode of Mariana, acreature wholly of Shakespeare's invention, told, by way of interlude, in subdued prose. The moated grange, with its dejected mistress, itslong, listless, discontented days, where we hear only the voice of aboy broken off suddenly in the midst of one of the loveliest songs ofShakespeare, or of Shakespeare's school, * is the pleasantest of manyglimpses we get here of pleasant places--the field without the town, Angelo's garden-house, the consecrated fountain. Indirectly it hassuggested two of the most perfect compositions among the poetry of ourown generation. Again it is a picture within a picture, but withfainter lines and a greyer atmosphere: we have here the same passions, the same wrongs, the same continuance of affection, the same crying outupon death, as in the nearer and larger piece, though softened, andreduced to the mood of a more dreamy scene. 

[177] Of Angelo we may feel at first sight inclined to say only guardae passa! or to ask whether he is indeed psychologically possible. Inthe old story, he figures as an embodiment of pure and unmodified evil, like "Hyliogabalus of Rome or Denis of Sicyll. " But the embodiment ofpure evil is no proper subject of art, and Shakespeare, in the spiritof a philosophy which dwells much on the complications of outwardcircumstance with men's inclinations, turns into a subtle study incasuistry this incident of the austere judge fallen suddenly intoutmost corruption by a momentary contact with supreme purity. But themain interest in Measure for Measure is not, as in Promos andCassandra, in the relation of Isabella and Angelo, but rather in therelation of Claudio and Isabella. 

Greek tragedy in some of its noblest products has taken for its themethe love of a sister, a sentiment unimpassioned indeed, purifying bythe very spectacle of its passionlessness, but capable of a fierce andalmost animal strength if informed for a moment by pity and regret. Atfirst Isabella comes upon the scene as a tranquillising influence init. But Shakespeare, in the development of the action, brings quitedifferent and unexpected qualities out of her. It is hischaracteristic poetry to expose this cold, chastened personality, respected even by the worldly Lucio as "something ensky'd and sainted, and almost an immortal spirit, " to two [178] sharp, shameful trials, and wring out of her a fiery, revealing eloquence. Thrown into theterrible dilemma of the piece, called upon to sacrifice that cloistralwhiteness to sisterly affection, become in a moment the ground ofstrong, contending passions, she develops a new character and showsherself suddenly of kindred with those strangely conceived women, likeWebster's Vittoria, who unite to a seductive sweetness something of adangerous and tigerlike changefulness of feeling. The swift, vindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this white spirit, and, stripped in a moment of all convention, she stands before usclear, detached, columnar, among the tender frailties of the piece. Cassandra, the original of Isabella in Whetstone's tale, with thepurpose of the Roman Lucretia in her mind, yields gracefully enough tothe conditions of her brother's safety; and to the lighter reader ofShakespeare there may seem something harshly conceived, orpsychologically impossible even, in the suddenness of the changewrought in her, as Claudio welcomes for a moment the chance of lifethrough her compliance with Angelo's will, and he may have a sense hereof flagging skill, as in words less finely handled than in thepreceding scene. The play, though still not without traces of noblerhandiwork, sinks down, as we know, at last into almost homely comedy, and it might be supposed that just here the grander manner [179]deserted it. But the skill with which Isabella plays upon Claudio'swell-recognised sense of honour, and endeavours by means of that toinsure him beforehand from the acceptance of life on baser terms, indicates no coming laxity of hand just in this place. It was ratherthat there rose in Shakespeare's conception, as there may for thereader, as there certainly would in any good acting of the part, something of that terror, the seeking for which is one of the notes ofromanticism in Shakespeare and his circle. The stream of ardentnatural affection, poured as sudden hatred upon the youth condemned todie, adds an additional note of expression to the horror of the prisonwhere so much of the scene takes place. It is not here only thatShakespeare has conceived of such extreme anger and pity as putting asort of genius into simple women, so that their "lips drop eloquence, "and their intuitions interpret that which is often too hard or fine formanlier reason; and it is Isabella with her grand imaginative diction, and that poetry laid upon the "prone and speechless dialect" there isin mere youth itself, who gives utterance to the equity, the finerjudgments of the piece on men and things. 

From behind this group with its subtle lights and shades, its poetry, its impressive contrasts, Shakespeare, as I said, conveys to us astrong sense of the tyranny of nature and [180] circumstance over humanaction. The most powerful expressions of this side of experience mightbe found here. The bloodless, impassible temperament does but wait forits opportunity, for the almost accidental coherence of time withplace, and place with wishing, to annul its long and patientdiscipline, and become in a moment the very opposite of that whichunder ordinary conditions it seemed to be, even to itself. The mereresolute self-assertion of the blood brings to others specialtemptations, temptations which, as defects or over-growths, lie in thevery qualities which make them otherwise imposing or attractive; thevery advantage of men's gifts of intellect or sentiment being dependenton a balance in their use so delicate that men hardly maintain italways. Something also must be conceded to influences merely physical, to the complexion of the heavens, the skyey influences, shifting as thestars shift; as something also to the mere caprice of men exercisedover each other in the dispensations of social or political order, tothe chance which makes the life or death of Claudio dependent onAngelo's will. 

The many veins of thought which render the poetry of this play soweighty and impressive unite in the image of Claudio, a flowerlikeyoung man, whom, prompted by a few hints from Shakespeare, theimagination easily clothes with all the bravery of youth, as he crossesthe stage before us on his way to death, coming so [181] hastily to theend of his pilgrimage. Set in the horrible blackness of the prison, with its various forms of unsightly death, this flower seems thebraver. Fallen by "prompture of the blood, " the victim of a suddenlyrevived law against the common fault of youth like his, he finds hislife forfeited as if by the chance of a lottery. With that instinctiveclinging to life, which breaks through the subtlest casuistries of monkor sage apologising for an early death, he welcomes for a moment thechance of life through his sister's shame, though he revolts hardlyless from the notion of perpetual imprisonment so repulsive to thebuoyant energy of youth. Familiarised, by the words alike of friendsand the indifferent, to the thought of death, he becomes gentle andsubdued indeed, yet more perhaps through pride than real resignation, and would go down to darkness at last hard and unblinded. Called uponsuddenly to encounter his fate, looking with keen and resolute profilestraight before him, he gives utterance to some of the central truthsof human feeling, the sincere, concentrated expression of the recoilingflesh. Thoughts as profound and poetical as Hamlet's arise in him; andbut for the accidental arrest of sentence he would descend into thedust, a mere gilded, idle flower of youth indeed, but with what areperhaps the most eloquent of all Shakespeare's words upon his lips. 

As Shakespeare in Measure for Measure has [182] refashioned, after anobler pattern, materials already at hand, so that the relics of othermen's poetry are incorporated into his perfect work, so traces of theold "morality, " that early form of dramatic composition which had forits function the inculcating of some moral theme, survive in it also, and give it a peculiar ethical interest. This ethical interest, thoughit can escape no attentive reader, yet, in accordance with thatartistic law which demands the predominance of form everywhere over themere matter or subject handled, is not to be wholly separated from thespecial circumstances, necessities, embarrassments, of these particulardramatic persons. The old "moralities" exemplified most often somerough-and-ready lesson. Here the very intricacy and subtlety of themoral world itself, the difficulty of seizing the true relations of socomplex a material, the difficulty of just judgment, of judgment thatshall not be unjust, are the lessons conveyed. Even in Whetstone's oldstory this peculiar vein of moralising comes to the surface: eventhere, we notice the tendency to dwell on mixed motives, the contendingissues of action, the presence of virtues and vices alike in unexpectedplaces, on "the hard choice of two evils, " on the "imprisoning" ofmen's "real intents. " Measure for Measure is full of expressions drawnfrom a profound experience of these casuistries, and that ethicalinterest becomes predominant in it: it is no longer Promos and [183]Cassandra, but Measure for Measure, its new name expressly suggestingthe subject of poetical justice. The action of the play, like theaction of life itself for the keener observer, develops in us theconception of this poetical justice, and the yearning to realise it, the true justice of which Angelo knows nothing, because it lies for themost part beyond the limits of any acknowledged law. The idea ofjustice involves the idea of rights. But at bottom rights areequivalent to that which really is, to facts; and the recognition ofhis rights therefore, the justice he requires of our hands, or ourthoughts, is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmostnature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which reallyis in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence afiner knowledge through love. 

 'Tis very pregnant: The jewel that we find we stoop and take it, Because we see it; but what we do not see We tread upon, and never think of it. 

It is for this finer justice, a justice based on a more delicateappreciation of the true conditions of men and things, a true respectof persons in our estimate of actions, that the people in Measure forMeasure cry out as they pass before us; and as the poetry of this playis full of the peculiarities of Shakespeare's poetry, so in its ethicsit is an epitome of Shakespeare's moral judgments. They are the moraljudgments of [184] an observer, of one who sits as a spectator, andknows how the threads in the design before him hold together under thesurface: they are the judgments of the humourist also, who follows witha half-amused but always pitiful sympathy, the various ways of humandisposition, and sees less distance than ordinary men between what arecalled respectively great and little things. It is not always thatpoetry can be the exponent of morality; but it is this aspect of moralswhich it represents most naturally, for this true justice is dependenton just those finer appreciations which poetry cultivates in us thepower of making, those peculiar valuations of action and its effectwhich poetry actually requires. 

1874. 

NOTES

176. *Fletcher, in the Bloody Brother, gives the rest of it. Return. 

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS

[185]

 A brittle glory shineth in this face: As brittle as the glory is the face. 

THE English plays of Shakespeare needed but the completion of oneunimportant interval to possess the unity of a popular chronicle fromRichard the Second to Henry the Eighth, and possess, as they actuallystand, the unity of a common motive in the handling of the variousevents and persons which they bring before us. Certain of his historicdramas, not English, display Shakespeare's mastery in the developmentof the heroic nature amid heroic circumstances; and had he chosen, fromEnglish history, to deal with Coeur-de-Lion or Edward the First, theinnate quality of his subject would doubtless have called into playsomething of that profound and sombre power which in Julius Caesar andMacbeth has sounded the depths of mighty character. True, on the whole, to fact, it is another side of kingship which he has made prominent inhis English histories. The irony [186] of kingship--average humannature, flung with a wonderfully pathetic effect into the vortex ofgreat events; tragedy of everyday quality heightened in degree only bythe conspicuous scene which does but make those who play their partsthere conspicuously unfortunate; the utterance of common humanitystraight from the heart, but refined like other common things forkingly uses by Shakespeare's unfailing eloquence: such, unconsciouslyfor the most part, though palpably enough to the careful reader, is theconception under which Shakespeare has arranged the lights and shadowsof the story of the English kings, emphasising merely the light andshadow inherent in it, and keeping very close to the originalauthorities, not simply in the general outline of these dramatichistories but sometimes in their very expression. Certainly thehistory itself, as he found it in Hall, Holinshed, and Stowe, thosesomewhat picturesque old chroniclers who had themselves an eye for thedramatic "effects" of human life, has much of this sentiment alreadyabout it. What he did not find there was the natural prerogative--suchjustification, in kingly, that is to say, in exceptional, qualities, ofthe exceptional position, as makes it practicable in the result. It isno Henriade he writes, and no history of the English people, but thesad fortunes of some English kings as conspicuous examples of theordinary human condition. As in a children's [187] story, all princesare in extremes. Delightful in the sunshine above the wall into whichchance lifts the flower for a season, they can but plead somewhat moretouchingly than others their everyday weakness in the storm. Such isthe motive that gives unity to these unequal and intermittentcontributions toward a slowly evolved dramatic chronicle, which itwould have taken many days to rehearse; a not distant story from reallife still well remembered in its general course, to which people mightlisten now and again, as long as they cared, finding human nature atleast wherever their attention struck ground in it. 

He begins with John, and allows indeed to the first of these Englishkings a kind of greatness, making the development of the play centre inthe counteraction of his natural gifts--that something of heroic forceabout him--by a madness which takes the shape of reckless impiety, forced especially on men's attention by the terrible circumstances ofhis end, in the delineation of which Shakespeare triumphs, setting, with true poetic tact, this incident of the king's death, in all thehorror of a violent one, amid a scene delicately suggestive of what isperennially peaceful and genial in the outward world. Like the sensualhumours of Falstaff in another play, the presence of the bastardFaulconbridge, with his physical energy and his unmistakable familylikeness--"those limbs [188] which Sir Robert never holp to make"*contributes to an almost coarse assertion of the force of nature, ofthe somewhat ironic preponderance of nature and circumstance over men'sartificial arrangements, to, the recognition of a certain potentnatural aristocracy, which is far from being always identical with thatmore formal, heraldic one. And what is a coarse fact in the case ofFaulconbridge becomes a motive of pathetic appeal in the wan andbabyish Arthur. The magic with which nature models tiny and delicatechildren to the likeness of their rough fathers is nowhere more justlyexpressed than in the words of King Philip. --

 Look here upon thy brother Geoffrey's face These eyes, these brows were moulded out of his: This little abstract doth contain that large Which died in Geoffrey; and the hand of time Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume. 

It was perhaps something of a boyish memory of the shocking end of hisfather that had distorted the piety of Henry the Third intosuperstitious terror. A frightened soul, himself touched with thecontrary sort of religious madness, doting on all that was alien fromhis father's huge ferocity, on the genialities, the soft gilding, oflife, on the genuine interests of art and poetry, to be credited morethan any other person with the deep religious expression of [189]Westminster Abbey, Henry the Third, picturesque though useless, butcertainly touching, might have furnished Shakespeare, had he filled upthis interval in his series, with precisely the kind of effect he tendstowards in his English plays. But he found it completer still in theperson and story of Richard the Second, a figure--"that sweet lovelyrose"--which haunts Shakespeare's mind, as it seems long to havehaunted the minds of the English people, as the most touching of allexamples of the irony of kingship. 

Henry the Fourth--to look for a moment beyond our immediate subject, inpursuit of Shakespeare's thought--is presented, of course, in generaloutline, as an impersonation of "surviving force:" he has a certainamount of kingcraft also, a real fitness for great opportunity. Butstill true to his leading motive, Shakespeare, in King Henry theFourth, has left the high-water mark of his poetry in the soliloquywhich represents royalty longing vainly for the toiler's sleep; whilethe popularity, the showy heroism, of Henry the Fifth, is used to giveemphatic point to the old earthy commonplace about "wild oats. " Thewealth of homely humour in these plays, the fun coming straight home toall the world, of Fluellen especially in his unconscious interview withthe king, the boisterous earthiness of Falstaff and his companions, contribute to the same effect. The keynote of [190] Shakespeare'streatment is indeed expressed by Henry the Fifth himself, the greatestof Shakespeare's kings. --"Though I speak it to you, " he says incognito, under cover of night, to a common soldier on the field, "I think theking is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me:all his senses have but human conditions; and though his affections behigher mounted than ours yet when they stoop they stoop with likewing. " And, in truth, the really kingly speeches which Shakespeareassigns to him, as to other kings weak enough in all but speech, arebut a kind of flowers, worn for, and effective only as personalembellishment. They combine to one result with the merely outward andceremonial ornaments of royalty, its pageantries, flaunting so naively, so credulously, in Shakespeare, as in that old medieval time. Andthen, the force of Hotspur is but transient youth, the common heat ofyouth, in him. The character of Henry the Sixth again, roi fainéant, with La Pucelle* for his counterfoil, lay in the direct course ofShakespeare's design: he has done much to fix the sentiment of the"holy Henry. " Richard the Third, touched, like John, with an effect ofreal heroism, is spoiled like him by something of criminal madness, andreaches his highest level of tragic expression [191] when circumstancesreduce him to terms of mere human nature. --

 A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

The Princes in the Tower recall to mind the lot of young Arthur:--

 I'll go with thee, And find the inheritance of this poor child, His little kingdom of a forced grave. 

And when Shakespeare comes to Henry the Eighth, it is not thesuperficial though very English splendour of the king himself, but thereally potent and ascendant nature of the butcher's son on the onehand, and Katharine's subdued reproduction of the sad fortunes ofRichard the Second on the other, that define his central interest. *

With a prescience of the Wars of the Roses, of which his errors werethe original cause, it is Richard who best exposes Shakespeare's ownconstant sentiment concerning war, and especially that sort of civilwar which was then recent in English memories. The soul ofShakespeare, certainly, was not wanting in a sense of the magnanimityof warriors. The grandiose aspects of war, its magnificentapparelling, he records [192] monumentally enough--the "dressing of thelists, " the lion's heart, its unfaltering haste thither in all thefreshness of youth and morning. --

 Not sick although I have to do with death-- The sun doth gild our armour: Up, my Lords!-- I saw young Harry with his beaver on, His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd, Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury. 

Only, with Shakespeare, the afterthought is immediate:--

 They come like sacrifices in their trim. 

--Will it never be to-day? I will trot to-morrow a mile, and my wayshall be paved with English faces. 

This sentiment Richard reiterates very plaintively, in association withthe delicate sweetness of the English fields, still sweet and fresh, like London and her other fair towns in that England of Chaucer, forwhose soil the exiled Bolingbroke is made to long so dangerously, whileRichard on his return from Ireland salutes it--

 That pale, that white-fac'd shore, -- As a long-parted mother with her child. -- So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth! And do thee favour with my royal hands. --

Then (of Bolingbroke)

 Ere the crown he looks for live in peace, Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons Shall ill become the flower of England's face; Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace To scarlet indignation, and bedew My pastures' grass with faithful English blood. --

[193]

 Why have they dared to march?--

asks York, So many miles upon her peaceful bosom, Frighting her pale-fac'd visages with war?--

waking, according to Richard, Our peace, which in our country's cradle, Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep:--

bedrenching "with crimson tempest"

 The fresh green lap of fair king Richard's land:--

frighting "fair peace" from "our quiet confines, " laying

 The summer's dust with showers of blood, Rained from the wounds of slaughter'd Englishmen:

bruising

 Her flowerets with the armed hoofs Of hostile paces. 

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to note in this play a peculiar recoilfrom the mere instruments of warfare, the contact of the "rude ribs, "the "flint bosom, " of Barkloughly Castle or Pomfret or

 Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower:

the

 Boisterous untun'd drums With harsh-resounding trumpets' dreadful bray And grating shock of wrathful iron arms. 

It is as if the lax, soft beauty of the king took effect, at least bycontrast, on everything beside. One gracious prerogative, certainly, Shakespeare's [194] English kings possess: they are a very eloquentcompany, and Richard is the most sweet-tongued of them all. In noother play perhaps is there such a flush of those gay, fresh, variegated flowers of speech--colour and figure, not lightly attachedto, but fused into, the very phrase itself--which Shakespeare cannothelp dispensing to his characters, as in this "play of the Deposing ofKing Richard the Second, " an exquisite poet if he is nothing else, fromfirst to last, in light and gloom alike, able to see all thingspoetically, to give a poetic turn to his conduct of them, andrefreshing with his golden language the tritest aspects of that ironiccontrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual necessitiesof his destiny. What a garden of words! With him, blank verse, infinitely graceful, deliberate, musical in inflexion, becomes indeed atrue "verse royal, " that rhyming lapse, which to the Shakespearian ear, at least in youth, came as the last touch of refinement on it, beinghere doubly appropriate. His eloquence blends with that fatal beauty, of which he was so frankly aware, so amiable to his friends, to hiswife, of the effects of which on the people his enemies were so muchafraid, on which Shakespeare himself dwells so attentively as the"royal blood" comes and goes in the face with his rapid changes oftemper. As happens with sensitive natures, it attunes him to acongruous suavity of manners, by which anger itself became flattering:[195] it blends with his merely youthful hopefulness and high spirits, his sympathetic love for gay people, things, apparel--"his cote of goldand stone, valued at thirty thousand marks, " the novel Italian fashionshe preferred, as also with those real amiabilities that made peopleforget the darker touches of his character, but never tire of thepathetic rehearsal of his fall, the meekness of which would have seemedmerely abject in a less graceful performer. 

Yet it is only fair to say that in the painstaking "revival" of KingRichard the Second, by the late Charles Kean, those who were very youngthirty years ago were afforded much more than Shakespeare's play couldever have been before--the very person of the king based on the statelyold portrait in Westminster Abbey, "the earliest extant contemporarylikeness of any English sovereign, " the grace, the winning pathos, thesympathetic voice of the player, the tasteful archaeology confrontingvulgar modern London with a scenic reproduction, for once reallyagreeable, of the London of Chaucer. In the hands of Kean the playbecame like an exquisite performance on the violin. 

The long agony of one so gaily painted by nature's self, from his"tragic abdication" till the hour in which he

 Sluiced out his innocent soul thro' streams of blood, was for playwrights a subject ready to hand, and [196] became early thetheme of a popular drama, of which some have fancied survivingfavourite fragments in the rhymed parts of Shakespeare's work. 

 The king Richard of Yngland Was in his flowris then regnand: But his flowris efter sone Fadyt, and ware all undone:--

says the old chronicle. Strangely enough, Shakespeare supposes him anover-confident believer in that divine right of kings, of which peoplein Shakespeare's time were coming to hear so much; a general right, sealed to him (so Richard is made to think) as an ineradicable personalgift by the touch--stream rather, over head and breast andshoulders--of the "holy oil" of his consecration at Westminster; not, however, through some oversight, the genuine balm used at thecoronation of his successor, given, according to legend, by the BlessedVirgin to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Richard himself found that, itwas said, among other forgotten treasures, at the crisis of hischanging fortunes, and vainly sought reconsecrationtherewith--understood, wistfully, that it was reserved for his happierrival. And yet his coronation, by the pageantry, the amplitude, thelearned care, of its order, so lengthy that the king, then only elevenyears of age, and fasting, as a communicant at the ceremony, wascarried away in a faint, fixed the type under which it has ever [197]since continued. And nowhere is there so emphatic a reiteration as inRichard the Second of the sentiment which those singular rites werecalculated to produce. 

 Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed king, --

as supplementing another, almost supernatural, right. --"Edward's sevensons, " of whom Richard's father was one, Were as seven phials of his sacred blood. 

But this, too, in the hands of Shakespeare, becomes for him, like anyother of those fantastic, ineffectual, easily discredited, personalgraces, as capricious in its operation on men's wills as merelyphysical beauty, kindling himself to eloquence indeed, but only givingdouble pathos to insults which "barbarism itself" might havepitied--the dust in his face, as he returns, through the streets ofLondon, a prisoner in the train of his victorious enemy. 

 How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face!

he cries, in that most poetic invention of the mirror scene, which doesbut reinforce again that physical charm which all confessed. The senseof "divine right" in kings is found to act not so much as a secret ofpower over others, as of infatuation to themselves. And of all thosepersonal gifts the one which alone never altogether fails him is justthat royal utterance, his [198] appreciation of the poetry of his ownhapless lot, an eloquent self-pity, infecting others in spite ofthemselves, till they too become irresistibly eloquent about him. 

In the Roman Pontifical, of which the order of Coronation is really apart, there is no form for the inverse process, no rite of"degradation, " such as that by which an offending priest or bishop maybe deprived, if not of the essential quality of "orders, " yet, one byone, of its outward dignities. It is as if Shakespeare had had in mindsome such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical or militaryones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the last touch ofunkindness to the execution of its sentences, in the scene whereRichard "deposes" himself, as in some long, agonising ceremony, reflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement ofintelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicity ofpoetic invention, which puts these pages into a very select class, withthe finest "vermeil and ivory" work of Chatterton or Keats. 

 Fetch hither Richard that in common view He may surrender!--

And Richard more than concurs: he throws himself into the part, realises a type, falls gracefully as on the world's stage. --Why is hesent for?

 To do that office of thine own good will Which tired majesty did make thee offer. --

 Now mark me! how I will undo myself. 

[199] "Hath Bolingbroke deposed thine intellect?" the Queen asks him, on his way to the Tower:--

 Hath Bolingbroke Deposed thine intellect? hath he been in thy heart?

And in truth, but for that adventitious poetic gold, it would be only"plume-plucked Richard. "--

 I find myself a traitor with the rest, For I have given here my soul's consent To undeck the pompous body of a king. 

He is duly reminded, indeed, how

 That which in mean men we entitle patience Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts. 

Yet at least within the poetic bounds of Shakespeare's play, throughShakespeare's bountiful gifts, his desire seems fulfilled. --

 O! that I were as great As is my grief. 

And his grief becomes nothing less than a central expression of allthat in the revolutions of Fortune's wheel goes down in the world. 

No! Shakespeare's kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men:rather, little or quite ordinary humanity, thrust upon greatness, withthose pathetic results, the natural self-pity of the weak heightened inthem into irresistible appeal to others as the net result of theirroyal prerogative. One after another, they seem to lie composed inShakespeare's embalming pages, with just that touch of nature aboutthem, [200] making the whole world akin, which has infused into theirtombs at Westminster a rare poetic grace. It is that irony ofkingship, the sense that it is in its happiness child's play, in itssorrows, after all, but children's grief, which gives its finer accentto all the changeful feeling of these wonderful speeches:--the greatmeekness of the graceful, wild creature, tamed at last. --

 Give Richard leave to live till Richard die!

his somewhat abject fear of death, turning to acquiescence at momentsof extreme weariness:--

 My large kingdom for a little grave! A little little grave, an obscure grave!--

his religious appeal in the last reserve, with its bold reference tothe judgment of Pilate, as he thinks once more of his "anointing. "

And as happens with children he attains contentment finally in themerely passive recognition of superior strength, in the naturalness ofthe result of the great battle as a matter of course, and experiencessomething of the royal prerogative of poetry to obscure, or at least toattune and soften men's griefs. As in some sweet anthem of Handel, thesufferer, who put finger to the organ under the utmost pressure ofmental conflict, extracts a kind of peace at last from the mere skillwith which he sets his distress to music. --

 Beshrew thee, Cousin, that didst lead me forth Of that sweet way I was in to despair!

[201] "With Cain go wander through the shades of night!" cries the newking to the gaoler Exton, dissimulating his share in the murder he isthought to have suggested; and in truth there is something of themurdered Abel about Shakespeare's Richard. The fact seems to be thathe died of "waste and a broken heart:" it was by way of proof that hisend had been a natural one that, stifling a real fear of the face, theface of Richard, on men's minds, with the added pleading now of alldead faces, Henry exposed the corpse to general view; and Shakespeare, in bringing it on the stage, in the last scene of his play, does butfollow out the motive with which he has emphasised Richard's physicalbeauty all through it--that "most beauteous inn, " as the Queen saysquaintly, meeting him on the way to death--residence, then soon to bedeserted, of that wayward, frenzied, but withal so affectionate soul. Though the body did not go to Westminster immediately, his tomb, That small model of the barren earth Which serves as paste and cover to our bones, *

the effigy clasping the hand of his youthful consort, was alreadyprepared there, with "rich [202] gilding and ornaments, " monument ofpoetic regret, for Queen Anne of Bohemia, not of course the "Queen" ofShakespeare, who however seems to have transferred to this second wifesomething of Richard's wildly proclaimed affection for the first. Inthis way, through the connecting link of that sacred spot, our thoughtsonce more associate Richard's two fallacious prerogatives, his personalbeauty and his "anointing. "

According to Johnson, Richard the Second is one of those plays whichShakespeare has "apparently revised;" and how doubly delightfulShakespeare is where he seems to have revised! "Would that he hadblotted a thousand"--a thousand hasty phrases, we may venture once moreto say with his earlier critic, now that the tiresome Germansuperstition has passed away which challenged us to a dogmatic faith inthe plenary verbal inspiration of every one of Shakespeare's clowns. Like some melodiously contending anthem of Handle's, I said, ofRichard's meek "undoing" of himself in the mirror-scene; and, in fact, the play of Richard the Second does, like a musical composition, possess a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple continuity, an evenness in execution, which are rare in the great dramatist. WithRomeo and Juliet, that perfect symphony (symphony of three independentpoetic forms set in a grander one* which it is the merit of German[203] criticism to have detected) it belongs to a small group of plays, where, by happy birth and consistent evolution, dramatic formapproaches to something like the unity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, asong, a single strain of music. Which sort of poetry we are to accountthe highest, is perhaps a barren question. Yet if, in art generally, unity of impression is a note of what is perfect, then lyric poetry, which in spite of complex structure often preserves the unity of asingle passionate ejaculation, would rank higher than dramatic poetry, where, especially to the reader, as distinguished from the spectatorassisting at a theatrical performance, there must always be a sense ofthe effort necessary to keep the various parts from flying asunder, asense of imperfect continuity, such as the older criticism vainlysought to obviate by the rule of the dramatic "unities. " It followsthat a play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as itapproaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad werestill lying at the root of it, all the various expression of theconflict of character and circumstance falling at last into the compassof a single melody, or musical theme. As, historically, the earliestclassic drama arose out of the chorus, from which this or that person, this or that episode, detached itself, so, into the unity of a choricsong the perfect drama ever tends to return, its intellectual scopedeepened, complicated, enlarged, but still with an unmistakable [204]singleness, or identity, in its impression on the mind. Just there, inthat vivid single impression left on the mind when all is over, not inany mechanical limitation of time and place, is the secret of the"unities"--the true imaginative unity--of the drama. 

1889. 

NOTES

188. *Elinor. Do you not read some tokens of my son (Coeur-de-Lion) In the large composition of this man?

190. *Perhaps the one person of genius in these English plays. 

 The spirit of deep prophecy she hath, Exceeding the nine Sibyls of old Rome: What's past and what's to come she can descry. 

191. *Proposing in this paper to trace the leading sentiment inShakespeare's English Plays as a sort of popular dramatic chronicle, Ihave left untouched the question how much (or, in the case of Henry theSixth and Henry the Eighth, how little) of them may be really his: howfar inferior hands have contributed to a result, true on the whole tothe greater, that is to say, the Shakespearian elements in them. 

201. *Perhaps a double entendre:--of any ordinary grave, as comprising, in effect, the whole small earth now left to its occupant or, of such atomb as Richard's in particular, with its actual model, or effigy, ofthe clay of him. Both senses are so characteristic that it would be apity to lose either. 

202. *The Sonnet: the Aubade: the Epithalamium. 

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

[205] IT was characteristic of a poet who had ever something about himof mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with a nameit may seem now established in English literature, to a special andlimited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind of exquisitefame before they were in the full sense published. The BlessedDamozel, although actually printed twice before the year 1870, waseagerly circulated in manuscript; and the volume which it now openscame at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the poet, whosepictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind ofinterest. For those poems were the work of a painter, understood tobelong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school then risinginto note; and the reader of to-day may observe already, in The BlessedDamozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chiefcharacteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, inproportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristicswhich are most markedly personal and his own. Common [206] to thatschool and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was thequality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of thatearliest poem--a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate useof the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance ofa poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetrywas called upon to be. At a time when poetic originality in Englandmight seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one new poetmore, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakably novel, yet felt to be no mere tricks of manner adoptedwith a view to forcing attention--an accent which might rather count asthe very seal of reality on one man's own proper speech; as that speechitself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things hereally felt and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to hisreaders, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, soreal and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expressionin his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within. That he had this gift of transparency in language--the control of astyle which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mentalmotion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper theoutline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by avolume of typically perfect translations from the delightful butdifficult [207] "early Italian poets:" such transparency being indeedthe secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belongto one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal andeven recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimescomplex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see, deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript ofthat peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knewit. 

One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness ofsensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and wasstrange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold barof heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, arebut examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as thepictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has showna similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such definition ofoutline is indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles thegreat Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by familycircumstances, he was ever a lover--a "servant and singer, " faithful asDante, "of Florence and of Beatrice"--with some close inwardconformities of genius also, independent of any mere circumstances ofeducation. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wiselythough agreeably to the practice of his time, [208] that poetryrejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without questionon his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing andpresenting things is particularisation. "Tell me now, " he writes, forVillon's

 Dictes-moy où, n'en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine--

 Tell me now, in what hidden way is Lady Flora the lovely Roman:

--"way, " in which one might actually chance to meet her; theunmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent onthe definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in thesearch after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else wouldhave written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalentto place or region. 

And this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of hisconformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of hispersonifications--his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life fromhim. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit ofLove, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole "populace" ofspecial hours and places, "the hour" even "which might have been, yetmight not be, " are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulatevoices. 

[209]

 Stands it not by the door-- Love's Hour--till she and I shall meet; With bodiless form and unapparent feet That cast no shadow yet before, Though round its head the dawn begins to pour The breath that makes day sweet?--

 Nay, why Name the dead hours? I mind them well: Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell With desolate eyes to know them by. 

Poetry as a mania--one of Plato's two higher forms of "divine"mania--has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the"defect of its quality, " into which it may lapse in its moment ofweakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poeticanthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there inhis work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising ofabstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of thescholastic realism of the Middle Age. 

In Love's Nocturn and The Stream's Secret, congruously perhaps with acertain feverishness of soul in the moods they present, there is attimes a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism--

 Pity and love shall burn In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands; And from the living spirit of love that stands Between her lips to soothe and yearn, Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn And loose my spirit's bands. 

[210] But even if we concede this; even if we allow, in the very planof those two compositions, something of the literary conceit--whatexquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, asthey stand! In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty ofwater, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, howsubtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of sleepand dreams! In both of them, with much the same attitude and tone, Love--sick and doubtful Love--would fain inquire of what lies below thesurface of sleep, and below the water; stream or dream being forced tospeak by Love's powerful "control"; and the poet would have it foretellthe fortune, issue, and event of his wasting passion. Such artifices, indeed, were not unknown in the old Provençal poetry of which Dante hadlearned something. Only, in Rossetti at least, they are redeemed by aserious purpose, by that sincerity of his, which allies itself readilyto a serious beauty, a sort of grandeur of literary workmanship, to agreat style. One seems to hear there a really new kind of poeticutterance, with effects which have nothing else like them; as there isnothing else, for instance, like the narrative of Jacob's Dream inGenesis, or Blake's design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, orAddison's Nineteenth Psalm. 

With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, commonthings--dawn, [211] noon, night--are full of human or personalexpression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scatteredup and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broadopen-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon thepicturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time--the"hollow brimmed with mist, " or the "ruined weir, " as he sees it fromone of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his "house oflife" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic beryl)attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial ordescriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which iscertainly also one half of the charm, in that other, more remote andmystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature, after all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does butincorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion. Every oneunderstands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what aweirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into "thewhite-flower'd elder-thicket, " when Godiva saw it "gleam through theGothic archways in the wall, " at the end of her terrible ride. ToRossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at everymoment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditionsof man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives asingular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite[212] to him. But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love--oflove based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or materialbeauty--which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers;Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory, Oblivion, and the like. Rossetti is one of those who, in the words ofMérimée, se passionnent pour la passion, one of Love's lovers. 

And yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty asmaterial, is partly misleading. Spirit and matter, indeed, have beenfor the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism byschoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are. Inour actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which thewords matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricablyinto each other. Practically, the church of the Middle Age by itsaesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in theresurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manicheanopposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men's way of takinglife; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its spirit. To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, thematerial and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritualattains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material losesits earthiness and impurity. And here again, by force of instinct, Rossetti [213] is one with him. His chosen type of beauty is one, Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought, Nor Love her body from her soul. 

Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuousalso, or material. The shadowy world, which he realises so powerfully, has still the ways and houses, the land and water, the light anddarkness, the fire and flowers, that had so much to do in the mouldingof those bodily powers and aspects which counted for so large a part ofthe soul, here. 

For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other, swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius, mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the greatundeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a worldwhere all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of thoseaffections--of the great love so determined; its casuistries, itslanguor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or unfortunatecollisions with those other great matters; how it looks, as the longday of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them: all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic, reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse, and especially of what hedesigned as his chief poetic work, "a work to be called The House ofLife, " towards which the majority of his sonnets and songs werecontributions. 

[214] The dwelling-place in which one finds oneself by chance ordestiny, yet can partly fashion for oneself; never properly one's ownat all, if it be changed too lightly; in which every object has itsassociations--the dim mirrors, the portraits, the lamps, the books, thehair-tresses of the dead and visionary magic crystals in the secretdrawers, the names and words scratched on the windows, windows openupon prospects the saddest or the sweetest; the house one must quit, yet taking perhaps, how much of its quietly active light and colouralong with us!--grown now to be a kind of raiment to one's body, as thebody, according to Swedenborg, is but the raiment of the soul--underthat image, the whole of Rossetti's work might count as a House ofLife, of which he is but the "Interpreter. " And it is a "haunted"house. A sense of power in love, defying distance, and those barrierswhich are so much more than physical distance, of unutterable desirepenetrating into the world of sleep, however "lead-bound, " was one ofthose anticipative notes obscurely struck in The Blessed Damozel, and, in his later work, makes him speak sometimes almost like a believer inmesmerism. Dream-land, as we said, with its "phantoms of the body, "deftly coming and going on love's service, is to him, in no mere fancyor figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion of, oraddition to, our waking life; and he did well perhaps to wait carefullyupon sleep, for the lack [215] of it became mortal disease with him. One may even recognise a sort of morbid and over-hasty making-ready fordeath itself, which increases on him; thoughts concerning it, itsimageries, coming with a frequency and importunity, in excess, onemight think, of even the very saddest, quite wholesome wisdom. 

And indeed the publication of his second volume of Ballads and Sonnetspreceded his death by scarcely a twelvemonth. That volume bearswitness to the reverse of any failure of power, or falling-off from hisearly standard of literary perfection, in every one of his thenaccustomed forms of poetry--the song, the sonnet, and the ballad. Thenewly printed sonnets, now completing The House of Life, certainlyadvanced beyond those earlier ones, in clearness; his dramatic power inthe ballad, was here at its height; while one monumental, gnomic piece, Soothsay, testifies, more clearly even than the Nineveh of his firstvolume, to the reflective force, the dry reason, always at work behindhis imaginative creations, which at no time dispensed with a genuineintellectual structure. For in matters of pure reflection also, Rossetti maintained the painter's sensuous clearness of conception; andthis has something to do with the capacity, largely illustrated by hisballads, of telling some red-hearted story of impassioned action witheffect. 

Have there, in very deed, been ages, in which [216] the externalconditions of poetry such as Rossetti's were of more spontaneous growththan in our own? The archaic side of Rossetti's work, his preferencesin regard to earlier poetry, connect him with those who have certainlythought so, who fancied they could have breathed more largely in theage of Chaucer, or of Ronsard, in one of those ages, in the words ofStendhal--ces siècles de passions où les âmes pouvaient se livrerfranchement à la plus haute exaltation, quand les passions qui font lapossibilité We may think, perhaps, that such old time as that has neverreally existed except in the fancy of poets; but it was to find it, that Rossetti turned so often from modern life to the chronicle of thepast. Old Scotch history, perhaps beyond any other, is strong in thematter of heroic and vehement hatreds and love, the tragic Mary herselfbeing but the perfect blossom of them; and it is from that history thatRossetti has taken the subjects of the two longer ballads of his secondvolume: of the three admirable ballads in it, The King's Tragedy (inwhich Rossetti has dexterously interwoven some relics of James's ownexquisite early verse) reaching the highest level of dramatic success, and marking perfection, perhaps, in this kind of poetry; which, in theearlier volume, gave us, among other pieces, Troy Town, Sister Helen, and Eden Bower. 

Like those earlier pieces, the ballads of the [217] second volume bringwith them the question of the poetic value of the "refrain"--

 Eden bower's in flower: And O the bower and the hour!

--and the like. Two of those ballads--Troy Town and Eden Bower, areterrible in theme; and the refrain serves, perhaps, to relieve theirbold aim at the sentiment of terror. In Sister Helen again, therefrain has a real, and sustained purpose (being here duly varied also)and performs the part of a chorus, as the story proceeds. Yet even inthese cases, whatever its effect may be in actual recitation, it mayfairly be questioned, whether, to the mere reader their actual effectis not that of a positive interruption and drawback, at least in piecesso lengthy; and Rossetti himself, it would seem, came to think so, forin the shortest of his later ballads, The White Ship--that old truehistory of the generosity with which a youth, worthless in life, flunghimself upon death--he was contented with a single utterance of therefrain, "given out" like the keynote or tune of a chant. 

In The King's Tragedy, Rossetti has worked upon motive, broadly human(to adopt the phrase of popular criticism) such as one and all mayrealise. Rossetti, indeed, with all his self-concentration upon hisown peculiar aim, by no means ignored those general interests which areexternal to poetry as he conceived it; as he has [218] shown here andthere, in this poetic, as also in pictorial, work. It was but that, ina life to be shorter even than the average, he found enough to occupyhim in the fulfilment of a task, plainly "given him to do. " Perhaps, if one had to name a single composition of his to readers desiring tomake acquaintance with him for the first time, one would select: TheKing's Tragedy--that poem so moving, so popularly dramatic, andlifelike. Notwithstanding this, his work, it must be conceded, certainly through no narrowness or egotism, but in the faithfulness ofa true workman to a vocation so emphatic, was mainly of the esotericorder. But poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: itmay reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of commonthings, after Gray's way (though Gray too, it is well to remember, seemed in his own day, seemed even to Johnson, obscure) or it mayactually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon inthemselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal fromtheir very birth. Rossetti did something, something excellent, of theformer kind; but his characteristic, his really revealing work, lay inthe adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order ofphenomena, in the creation of a new ideal. 

1883. 

FEUILLET'S "LA MORTE"

[219] IN his latest novel M. Octave Feuillet adds two charming peopleto that chosen group of personages in which he loves to trace thedevelopment of the more serious elements of character amid therefinements and artifices of modern society, and which make such goodcompany. The proper function of fictitious literature in affording usa refuge into a world slightly better--better conceived, or betterfinished--than the real one, is effected in most instances less throughthe imaginary events at which a novelist causes us to assist, than bythe imaginary persons to whom he introduces us. The situations of M. Feuillet's novels are indeed of a real and intrinsicimportance:--tragic crises, inherent in the general conditions of humannature itself, or which arise necessarily out of the special conditionsof modern society. Still, with him, in the actual result, they becomesubordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life, to thecharacters they help to form. Often, his most attentive reader willhave forgotten the actual details of his plot; while [220] the soul, tried, enlarged, shaped by it, remains as a well-fixed type in thememory. He may return a second or third time to Sibylle, or Le Journald'une Femme, or Les Amours de Philippe, and watch, surprised afresh, the clean, dainty, word-sparing literary operation (word-sparing, yetwith no loss of real grace or ease) which, sometimes in a few pages, with the perfect logic of a problem of Euclid, complicates and thenunravels some moral embarrassment, really worthy of a trained dramaticexpert. But the characters themselves, the agents in those difficult, revealing situations, such a reader will recognise as old acquaintancesafter the first reading, feeling for them as for some gifted andattractive persons he has known in the actual world--Raoul de Chalys, Henri de Lerne, Madame de Técle, Jeanne de la Roche-Ermel, Maurice deFrémeuse, many others; to whom must now be added Bernard and Aliette deVaudricourt. 

"How I love those people!" cries Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, of Madamede Sévigné and some other of her literary favourites in the days of theGrand Monarch. "What good company! What pleasure they took in highthings! How much more worthy they were than the people who livenow!"--What good company! That is precisely what the admirer of M. Feuillet's books feels as one by one he places them on his book-shelf, to be sought again. What is proposed here is not to tell his laststory, [221] but to give the English reader specimens of his mostrecent effort at characterisation. 

It is with the journal of Bernard himself that the story opens, September 187-. Bernard-Maurice Hugon de Montauret, Vicomte deVaudricourt, is on a visit to his uncle, the head of his family, at LaSavinière, a country-house somewhere between Normandy and Brittany. This uncle, an artificial old Parisian in manner, but honest inpurpose, a good talker, and full of real affection for his heirBernard, is one of M. Feuillet's good minor characters--one of thequietly humorous figures with which he relieves his more seriouscompany. Bernard, with whom the refinements of a man of fashion in theParisian world by no means disguise a powerful intelligence cultivatedby wide reading, has had thoughts during his tedious stay at LaSavinière of writing a history of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, the library of a neighbouring château being rich in memoirs of thatperiod. Finally, he prefers to write his own story, a story so muchmore interesting to himself; to write it at a peculiar crisis in hislife, the moment when his uncle, unmarried, but anxious to perpetuatehis race, is bent on providing him with a wife, and indeed has one inview. 

The accomplished Bernard, with many graces of person, by his ownconfession, takes nothing seriously. As to that matter of religiousbeliefs, "the breeze of the age, and of science, has blown [222] overhim, as it has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty spacethere. " Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departing fromhim, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from all intelligent maleParisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, a gaiety, serene andimperturbable, has been the mainstay of his happily constitutedcharacter. The girl to whom his uncle desires to see him united--odd, quixotic, intelligent, with a sort of pathetic and delicate grace, andherself very religious--belongs to an old-fashioned, devout family, . Resident at Varaville, near by. M. Feuillet, with half a dozen finetouches of his admirable pencil makes us see the place. And theenterprise has at least sufficient interest to keep Bernard in thecountry, which the young Parisian detests. "This piquant episode of mylife, " he writes, "seems to me to be really deserving of study; to beworth etching off, day by day, by an observer well informed on thesubject. "

Recognising in himself, though as his one real fault, that he can takenothing seriously in heaven or earth, Bernard de Vaudricourt, like allM. Feuillet's favourite young men, so often erring or corrupt, is a manof scrupulous "honour. " He has already shown disinterestedness inwishing his rich uncle to marry again. His friends at Varaville thinkso well-mannered a young man more of a Christian than he really is;and, at all events, he will never owe his happiness to a falsehood. Ifhe has great faults, [223] hypocrisy at least is no part of them. Inoblique paths he finds himself ill at ease. Decidedly, as he thinks, he was born for straight ways, for loyalty in all his enterprises; andhe congratulates himself upon the fact. 

In truth, Bernard has merits which he ignores, at least in this firstpart of his journal: merits which are necessary to explain theinfluence he is able to exercise from the first over such a characteras Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. His charm, in fact, is in the union ofthat gay and apparently wanton nature with a genuine power ofappreciating devotion in others, which becomes devotion in himself. With all the much-cherished elegance and worldly glitter of hispersonality, he is capable of apprehending, of understanding and beingtouched by the presence of great matters. In spite of that happylightness of heart, so jealously fenced about, he is to be whollycaught at last, as he is worthy to be, by the serious, the generousinfluence of things. In proportion to his immense worldly strength ishis capacity for the immense pity which breaks his heart. 

In a few life-like touches M. Feuillet brings out, as if it were indeeda thing of ordinary existence, the simple yet delicate life of a Frenchcountry-house, the ideal life in an ideal France. Bernard is paying amorning visit at the old turreted home of the "prehistoric" Courteheusefamily. Mademoiselle Aliette de Courteheuse, a studious girl, though abold and excellent rider [224] --Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, "with herhair of that strange colour of fine ashes"--has conducted her visitorto see the library:

One day she took me to see the library, rich in works of theseventeenth century and in memoirs relating to that time. I remarkedthere also a curious collection of engravings of the same period. "Your father, " I observed, "had a strong predilection for the age ofLouis the Fourteenth. "

"My father lived in that age, " she answered gravely. And as I lookedat her with surprise, and a little embarrassed, she added, "He made melive there too, in his company. "

And then the eyes of this singular girl filled with tears. She turnedaway, took a few steps to suppress her emotion, and returning, pointedme to a chair. Then seating herself on the step of the book-case, shesaid, "I must explain my father to you. "

She was half a minute collecting her thoughts: then, speaking with anexpansion of manner not habitual with her, hesitating, and blushingdeeply, whenever she was about to utter a word that might seem a shadetoo serious for lips so youthful:--"My father, " she proceeded, "died ofthe consequences of a wound he had received at Patay. That may showyou that he loved his country, but he was no lover of his own age. Hepossessed in the highest degree the love of order; and order was athing nowhere to be seen. He had a horror of disorder; and he saw iteverywhere. In those last years, especially, his reverence, hisbeliefs, his tastes, all alike were ruffled to the point of actualsuffering, by whatever was done and said and written around him. Deeply saddened by the conditions of the present time, he habituatedhimself to find a refuge in the past, and the seventeenth century moreparticularly offered him the kind of society in which he would havewished to live--a society, well-ordered, polished, lettered, believing. More and more he loved to shut himself up in it. More and more also heloved to make the moral discipline and the literary tastes of thatfavourite age prevail in his own household. You may even have remarkedthat he carried his predilection into minute matters of arrangement anddecoration. You can see from this window the straight paths, the boxin [225] patterns, the yew trees and clipped alleys of our garden. Youmay notice that in our garden-beds we have none but flowers of theperiod--lilies, rose-mallows, immortelles, rose-pinks, in short whatpeople call parsonage flowers--des fleurs de curé. Our old silvantapestries, similarly, are of that age. You see too that all ourfurniture, from presses and sideboards, down to our little tables andour arm-chairs, is in the severest style of Louis the Fourteenth. Myfather did not appreciate the dainty research of our modern luxury. Hemaintained that our excessive care for the comforts of life weakenedmind as well as body. That, " added the girl with a laugh, --"that iswhy you find your chair so hard when you come to see us. "

Then, with resumed gravity--"It was thus that my father endeavoured, bythe very aspect and arrangement of outward things, to promote inhimself the imaginary presence of the epoch in which his thoughtsdelighted. As for myself--need I tell you that I was the confidant ofthat father, so well-beloved: a confidant touched by his sorrows, fullof indignation at his disappointments, charmed by his consolations. Here, precisely--surrounded by those books which we read together, andwhich he taught me to love--it is here that I have passed thepleasantest hours of my youth. In common we indulged our enthusiasmfor those days of faith; of the quiet life; its blissful hours ofleisure well-secured; for the French language in its beauty and purity;the delicate, the noble urbanity, which was then the honour and thespecial mark of our country, but has ceased to be so. "

She paused, with a little confusion, as I thought, at the warmth of herlast words. 

And then, just to break the silence, "You have explained, " I said, "animpression which I have experienced again and again in my visits here, and which has sometimes reached the intensity of an actual illusion, though a very agreeable one. The look of your house, its style, itstone and keeping, carried me two centuries back so completely that Ishould hardly have been surprised to hear Monsieur le Prince, Madame dela Fayette, or Madame de Sévigné herself, announced at yourdrawing-room door. "

"Would it might be!" said Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. [226] "Ah!Monsieur, how I love those people! What good company! What pleasurethey took in high things! How much more worthy they were than thepeople who live now!" I tried to calm a little this retrospectiveenthusiasm, so much to the prejudice of my contemporaries and ofmyself. "Most truly, Mademoiselle, " I said, "the age which you regrethad its rare merits--merits which I appreciate as you do. But then, need one say that that society, so regular, so choice in appearance, had, like our own, below the surface, its troubles, its disorders? Isee here many of the memoirs of that time. I can't tell exactly whichof them you may or may not have read, and so I feel a certaindifficulty in speaking. "

She interrupted me: "Ah!" she said, with entire simplicity, "Iunderstand you. I have not read all you see here. But I have readenough of it to know that my friends in that past age had, like thosewho live now, their passions, their weaknesses, their mistakes. But, as my father used to say to me, all that did but pass over a ground ofwhat was solid and serious, which always discovered itself again anew. There were great faults then; but there were also great repentances. There was a certain higher region to which everything conducted--evenwhat as evil. " She blushed deeply: then rising a little suddenly, "Along speech!" she said: "Forgive me! I am not usually so verytalkative. It is because my father was in question; and I should wishhis memory to be as dear and as venerable to all the rest of the worldas it is to me. "

We pass over the many little dramatic intrigues and misunderstandings, with the more or less adroit interferences of the uncle, which raiseand lower alternately Bernard's hopes. M. Feuillet has more than oncetried his hand with striking success in the portraiture of Frenchecclesiastics. He has drawn none better than the Bishop of Saint-Méen, uncle of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, to whose interests he is devoted. Bernard feels that to gain the influence of this prelate [227] would beto gain his cause; and the opportunity for an interview comes. 

Monseigneur de Courteheuse would seem to be little over fifty years ofage: he is rather tall, and very thin: the eyes, black and full oflife, are encircled by a ring of deep brown. His speech and gestureare animated, and, at times, as if carried away. He adopts frequentlya sort of furious manner which on a sudden melts into the smile of anhonest man. He has beautiful silvery hair, flying in vagrant locksover his forehead, and beautiful bishop's hands. As he becomes calm hehas an imposing way of gently resettling himself in his sacerdotaldignity. To sum up: his is a physiognomy full of passion, consumedwith zeal, yet still frank and sincere. 

I was hardly seated, when with a motion of the hand he invited me tospeak. 

"Monseigneur!" I said, "I come to you (you understand me?) as to mylast resource. What I am now doing is almost an act of despair; for itmight seem at first sight that no member of the family of Mademoisellede Courteheuse must show himself more pitiless than yourself towardsthe faults with which I am reproached. I am an unbeliever: you are anapostle! And yet, Monseigneur, it is often at the hands of saintlypriests, such as yourself, that the guilty find most indulgence. Andthen, I am not indeed guilty: I have but wandered. I am refused thehand of your niece because I do not share her faith--your own faith. But, Monseigneur, unbelief is not a crime, it is a misfortune. I knowpeople often say, a man denies God when by his own conduct he hasbrought himself into a condition in which he may well desire that Goddoes not exist. In this way he is made guilty, or, in a sense, responsible for his incredulity. For myself, Monseigneur, I haveconsulted my conscience with an entire sincerity; and although my youthhas been amiss, I am certain that my atheism proceeds from no sentimentof personal interest. On the contrary, I may tell you with truth thatthe day on which I perceived my faith come to nought, the day on whichI lost hope in God, I shed the bitterest tears of my life. In spite ofappearances, I am not so light a spirit as people think. I am not oneof those for whom God, when He disappears, [228] leaves no sense of avoid place. Believe me!--a man may love sport, his club, his worldlyhabits, and yet have his hours of thought, of self-recollection. Doyou suppose that in those hours one does not feel the frightfuldiscomfort of an existence with no moral basis, without principles, with no outlook beyond this world? And yet, what can one do? Youwould tell me forthwith, in the goodness, the compassion, which I readin your eyes; Confide to me your objections to religion, and I will tryto solve them. Monseigneur, I should hardly know how to answer you. My objections are 'Legion!' They are without number, like the stars inthe sky: they come to us on all sides, from every quarter of thehorizon, as if on the wings of the wind; and they leave in us, as theypass, ruins only, and darkness. Such has been my experience, and thatof many others; and it has been as involuntary as it is irreparable. "

"And I--Monsieur!" said the bishop, suddenly, casting on me one of hisaugust looks, "Do you suppose that I am but a play-actor in mycathedral church?"

"Monseigneur!"

"Yes! Listening to you, one would suppose that we were come to aperiod of the world in which one must needs be either an atheist or ahypocrite! Personally, I claim to be neither one nor the other. "

"Need I defend myself on that point, Monseigneur? Need I say that Idid not come here to give you offence?"

"Doubtless! doubtless! Well, Monsieur, I admit; not without greatreserves, mind! for one is always more or less responsible for theatmosphere in which he lives, the influences to which he is subject, for the habitual turn he gives to his thoughts; still, I admit that youare the victim of the incredulity of the age, that you are altogetherguiltless in your scepticism, your atheism! since you have no fear ofhard words. Is it therefore any the less certain that the union of afervent believer, such as my niece, with a man like yourself would be amoral disorder of which the consequences might be disastrous? Do youthink it could be my duty, as a relative of Mademoiselle deCourteheuse, her spiritual father, as a prelate of the Church, to lendmy hands to such disorder, to preside over the shocking union of twosouls separated by the whole width of heaven?"

[229] The bishop, in proposing that question, kept his eyes fixedardently on mine. 

"Monseigneur, " I answered, after a moment's embarrassment, "you know aswell as, and better than I, the condition of the world, and of ourcountry, at this time. You know that unhappily I am not an exception:that men of faith are rare in it. And permit me to tell you my wholemind. If I must needs suffer the inconsolable misfortune of renouncingthe happiness I had hoped for, are you quite sure that the man to whomone of these days you will give your niece may not be something morethan a sceptic, or even an atheist?"

"What, Monsieur?"

"A hypocrite, Monseigneur! Mademoiselle de Courteheuse is beautifulenough, rich enough, to excite the ambition of those who may be lessscrupulous than I. As for me, if you now know that I am a sceptic, youknow also that I am a man of honour: and there is something in that!"

"A man of honour!" the bishop muttered to himself, with a littlepetulance and hesitation. "A man of honour! Yes, I believe it!"Then, after an interval, "Come, Monsieur, " he said gently, "your caseis not as desperate as you suppose. My Aliette is one of those youngenthusiasts through whom Heaven sometimes works miracles. " And Bernardrefusing any encouragement of that hope (the "very roots of faith aredead" in him for ever) "since you think that, " the bishop answers, "itis honest to say so. But God has His ways!"

Soon after, the journal comes to an end with that peculiar crisis inBernard's life which had suggested the writing of it. Aliette, withthe approval of her family, has given him her hand. Bernard accepts itwith the full purpose of doing all he can to make his wife as happy asshe is charming and beloved. The virginal first period of theirmarried life in their dainty house in Paris--the pure and beautifulpicture of the mother, the father, and at last the child, a little[230] girl, Jeanne--is presented with M. Feuillet's usual grace. Certain embarrassments succeed; the development of what was ill-matchedin their union; but still with mutual loyalty. A far-reachingacquaintance with, and reflection upon, the world and its ways, especially the Parisian world, has gone into the apparently slighttexture of these pages. The accomplished playwright may be recognisedin the skilful touches with which M. Feuillet, unrivalled, as hisregular readers know, in his power of breathing higher notes into thefrivolous prattle of fashionable French life, develops the tragic germin the elegant, youthful household. Amid the distractions of asociety, frivolous, perhaps vulgar, Aliette's mind is still set ongreater things; and, in spite of a thousand rude discouragements, shemaintains her generous hope for Bernard's restoration to faith. Oneday, a little roughly, he bids her relinquish that dream finally. Shelooks at him with the moist, suppliant eyes of some weak animal at bay. Then his native goodness returns. In a softened tone he owns himselfwrong. 

"As to conversions;--no one must be despaired of. Do you remember M. De Rancé? He lived in your favourite age;--M. De Rancé. Well! beforehe became the reformer of La Trappe he had been a worldling like me, and a great sceptic--what people called a libertine. Still he became asaint! It is true he had a terrible reason for it. Do you know whatit was converted him?"

Aliette gave a sign that she did not know. 

"Well! he returned to Paris after a few days' absence. He [231] ranstraight to the lady he loved; Madame Montbazon, I think: he went up alittle staircase of which he had the key, and the first thing he saw onthe table in the middle of the room was the head of his mistress, ofwhich the doctors were about to make a post-mortem examination. "

"If I were sure, " said Aliette, "that my head could have such power, Iwould love to die. "

She said it in a low voice, but with such an accent of loving sinceritythat her husband had a sensation of a sort of painful disquiet. Hesmiled, however, and tapping her cheek softly, "Folly!" he said. "Ahead, charming as yours, has no need to be dead that it may workmiracles!"

Certainly M. Feuillet has some weighty charges to bring against theParisian society of our day. When Aliette revolts from a world ofgossip, which reduces all minds alike to the same level of vulgarmediocrity, Bernard, on his side, can perceive there a deterioration ofmoral tone which shocks his sense of honour. As a man of honour, hecan hardly trust his wife to the gaieties of a society which welcomesall the world "to amuse itself in undress. "

It happened that at this perplexed period in the youthful household, one and the same person became the recipient both of the tearfulconfidences of Madame de Vaudricourt and those of her husband. It wasthe Duchess of Castel-Moret [she is another of M. Feuillet's admirableminor sketches] an old friend of the Vaudricourt family, and the onlywoman with whom Aliette since her arrival in Paris had formed a kind ofintimacy. The Duchess was far from sharing, on points of morality, andabove all of religion, the severe and impassioned orthodoxy of heryoung friend. She had lived, it is true, an irreproachable life, butless in consequence of defined principles than by instinct and naturaltaste. She admitted to herself that she was an honest woman as a resultof her birth, and had no further merit in the matter. She was old, verycareful of [232] herself, and a pleasant aroma floated about her, belowher silvery hair. People loved her for her grace--the grace of anothertime than ours--for her wit, and her worldly wisdom, which she placedfreely at the disposal of the public. Now and then she made a match:but her special gift lay rather in the way in which she came to therescue when a marriage turned out ill. And she had no sinecure: theresult was that she passed the best part of her time in repairingfamily rents. That might "last its time, " she would say. "And then weknow that what has been well mended sometimes lasts better than what isnew. "

A little later, Bernard, in the interest of Aliette, has chivalrouslydetermined to quit Paris. At Valmoutiers, a fine old place in theneighbourhood of Fontainebleau, they established themselves for acountry life. Here Aliette tastes the happiest days since hermarriage. Bernard, of course, after a little time is greatly bored. But so far they have never seriously doubted of their great love foreach other. It is here that M. Feuillet brings on the scene a kind ofcharacter new in his books; perhaps hardly worthy of the other companythere; a sort of female Monsieur de Camors, but without his grace andtenderness, and who actually commits a crime. How would the morbidcharms of M. De Camors have vanished, if, as his wife once suspected ofhim, he had ever contemplated crime! And surely, the showy insolentcharms of Sabine de Tallevaut, beautiful, intellectually gifted, supremely Amazonian, yet withal not drawn with M. Feuillet's usualfineness, scarcely hold out for the reader, any more than for [233]Bernard himself, in the long run, against the vulgarising touch of hercold wickedness. Living in the neighbourhood of Valmoutiers, in asomewhat melancholy abode (the mystery of which in the eyes of Bernardadds to her poetic charm) with her guardian, an old, rich, freethinkingdoctor, devoted to research, she comes to Valmoutiers one night in hiscompany on the occasion of the alarming illness of the only child. They arrive escorted by Bernard himself. The little Jeanne, wrapped inher coverlet, was placed upon the table of her play-room, which wasilluminated as if for a party. The illness, the operation (skilfullyperformed by the old doctor) which restores her to life, are describedwith that seemingly simple pathos in which M. Feuillet's consummate arthides itself. Sabine remains to watch the child's recovery, andbecomes an intimate. In vain Bernard struggles against the first realpassion of his life;--does everything but send its object out of hissight. Aliette has divined their secret. In the fatal illness whichfollows soon after, Bernard watches over her with tender solicitude;hoping against hope that the disease may take a favourable turn. 

"My child, " he said to her one day, taking the hand which she abandonedto him, "I have just been scolding old Victoire. She is losing herhead. In spite of the repeated assurances of the doctors, she isalarmed at seeing you a little worse than usual to-day, and has had theCuré sent for. Do you wish to see him?"

"Pray let me see him!"

[234] She sighed heavily, and fixed upon her husband her large blueeyes, full of anguish--an anguish so sharp and so singular that he feltfrozen to the marrow. 

He could not help saying with deep emotion, "Do you love me no longer, Aliette?"

"For ever!" murmured the poor child. 

He leaned over her with a long kiss upon the forehead. She saw tearsstealing from the eyes of her husband, and seemed as if surprised. 

Soon afterwards Aliette is dead, to the profound sorrow of Bernard. Less than two years later he has become the husband of MademoiselleTallevaut. It was about two years after his marriage with Sabine thatBernard resumed the journal with which we began. In the pages which henow adds he seems at first unchanged. How then as to that story of M. De Rancé, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head of his deadmistress; an incident which the reader of La Morte will surely havetaken as a "presentiment"? Aliette had so taken it. "A head socharming as yours, " Bernard had assured her tenderly, "does not need tobe dead that it may work miracles!"--How, in the few pages that remain, will M. Feuillet justify that, and certain other delicate touches ofpresentiment, and at the same time justify the title of his book?

The journal is recommenced in February. On the twentieth of AprilBernard writes, at Valmoutiers:

Under pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come to pass aweek at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air. By my orders they havekept Aliette's room under lock and key since [235] the day when sheleft it in her coffin. To-day I re-entered it for the first time. There was a vague odour of her favourite perfumes. My poor Aliette!why was I unable, as you so ardently desired, to share your gentlecreed, and associate myself to the life of your dreams, the life ofhonesty and peace? Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems tome like paradise. What a terrible scene it was, here in this room!What a memory! I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a lookalmost of terror! and how quickly she died! I have taken the room formy own. But I shall not remain here long. I intend to go for a fewdays to Varaville. I want to see my little girl: her dear angel's face. 

VALMOUTIERS, April 22. --What a change there has been in the world sincemy childhood: since my youth even! what a surprising change in so shorta period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing! Then we were, as itwere, impregnated with the thought of God--a just God, but benevolentand fatherlike. We really lived under His eyes, as under the eyes of aparent, with respect and fear, but with confidence. We felt sustainedby His invisible but undoubted presence. We spoke to Him, and itseemed that He answered. And now we feel ourselves alone--as it wereabandoned in the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard, savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle forexistence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements, letloose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, withno appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above us, in place ofthe good God of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse thannothing--a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares nothing at allabout us. 

The aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter, islately dead. Bernard proposes to take the child away with him toParis. The child's old nurse objects. On April the twenty-seventh, Bernard writes:

For a moment--for a few moments--in that room where I have beenshutting myself up with the shadow of my poor [236] dead one, ahorrible thought had come to me. I had driven it away as an insanefancy. But now, yes! it is becoming a reality. Shall I write this?Yes! I will write it. It is my duty to do so; for from this momentthe journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart, is but my last will andtestament. If I should disappear from the world, the secret must notdie with me. It must be bequeathed to the natural protectors of mychild. Her interests, if not her life, are concerned therein. 

Here, then, is what passed: I had not arrived in time to render my lastduty to Madame de Courteheuse. The family was already dispersed. Ifound here only Aliette's brother. To him I communicated my planconcerning the child, and he could but approve. My intention was tobring away with Jeanne her nurse Victoire, who had brought her up, asshe brought up her mother. But she is old, and in feeble health, and Ifeared some difficulties on her part; the more as her attitude towardsmyself since the death of my first wife has been marked by an ill graceapproaching to hostility. I took her aside while Jeanne was playing inthe garden. 

"My good Victoire, " I said, "while Madame de Courteheuse was living, Iconsidered it a duty to leave her granddaughter in her keeping. Besides, no one was better fitted to watch over her education. Atpresent my duty is to watch over it myself. I propose therefore to takeJeanne with me to Paris; and I hope that you may be willing toaccompany her, and remain in her service. " When she understood myintention, the old woman, in whose hands I had noticed a fainttrembling, became suddenly very pale. She fixed her firm, grey eyesupon me: "Monsieur le Comte will not do that!"

"Pardon me, my good Victoire, that I shall do. I appreciate your goodqualities of fidelity and devotion. I shall be very grateful if youwill continue to take care of my daughter, as you have done soexcellently. But for the rest, I intend to be the only master in myown house, and the only master of my child. " She laid a hand upon myarm: "I implore you, Monsieur, don't do this!" Her fixed look did notleave my face, and seemed to be questioning me to the very bottom of mysoul. "I have never believed it, " she murmured, "No! I [237] nevercould believe it. But if you take the child away I shall. "

"Believe what, wretched woman? believe what?"

Her voice sank lower still. "Believe that you knew how her mother cameby her death; and that you mean the daughter to die as she did. "

"Die as her mother did?"

"Yes! by the same hand!"

The sweat came on my forehead. I felt as it were a breathing of deathupon me. But still I thrust away from me that terrible light on things. 

"Victoire!" I said, "take care! You are no fool: you are somethingworse. Your hatred of the woman who has taken the place of my firstwife--your blind hatred--has suggested to you odious, nay! criminalwords. "

"Ah! Ah! Monsieur", she cried with wild energy. "After what I havejust told you, take your daughter to live with that woman if you dare. "

I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses. Then, returning to the old woman, "Yet how can I believe you?" I asked. "Ifyou had had the shadow of a proof of what you give me to understand, how could you have kept silence so long? How could you have allowed meto contract that hateful marriage?"

She seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler. "Monsieur, itis because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oath on thecrucifix to keep that secret for ever. "

"Yet not with me, in fact, --not with me!" And I, in turn, questionedher; my eyes upon hers. She hesitated: then stammered out, "True! notwith you! because she believed, poor little soul! that. .. "

"What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice? Tellme!" Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. "Is it possible, my God, is it possible? But come, sit by me here, and tell me all you know, all you saw. At what time was it you noticed anything--the precisemoment?" For in truth she had been suffering for a long time past. 

Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's [238] crime--we mustpardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary worldM. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of fullyknowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised her in thevery act, and did not credit her explanation. "When I surprised her, "she goes on:

"It may already have been too late--be sure it was not the first timeshe had been guilty--my first thought was to give you information. ButI had not the courage. Then I told Madame. I thought I saw plainlythat I had nothing to tell she was not already aware of. Neverthelessshe chided me almost harshly. 'You know very well, ' she said, 'that myhusband is always there when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. Sothat he too would be guilty. Rather than believe that, I would acceptdeath at his hands a hundred times over!' And I remember, Monsieur, how at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from thelittle boudoir, and brought her a glass of valerian. She cast on me aterrible look and drank. A few minutes afterwards she was so ill thatshe thought the end was come. She begged me to give her her crucifix, and made me swear never to utter a word concerning our suspicions. Itwas then I sent for the priest. I have told you, Monsieur, what Iknow; what I have seen with my own eyes. I swear that I have saidnothing but what is absolutely true. " She paused. I could not answerher. I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them tomy forehead, and wept like a child. 

May 10. --She died believing me guilty! The thought is terrible to me. I know not what to do. A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet. "Yes!" she said to herself, "my husband is a murderer; what he isgiving me is poison, and he knows it. " She died with that thought inher mind--her last thought. And she will never, never know that it wasnot so; that I am innocent; that the thought is torment to me: that Iam the most unhappy of men. Ah! God, all-powerful! if you indeedexist, you see what I suffer. Have pity on me!

Ah! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between [239] herand me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew the truth. But Ifind it impossible! impossible!

June. --That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she will neverbe undeceived. 

All seems so completely ended when one dies. All returns to its firstelements. How credit that miracle of a personal resurrection? and yetin truth all is mystery, --miracle, around us, about us, withinourselves. The entire universe is but a continuous miracle. Man's newbirth from the womb of death--is it a mystery less comprehensible thanhis birth from the womb of his mother?

Those lines are the last written by Bernard de Vaudricourt. His health, for some time past disturbed by grief, was powerless against theemotions of the last terrible trial imposed on him. A malady, theexact nature of which was not determined, in a few days assumed amortal character. Perceiving that his end was come, he causedMonseigneur de Courteheuse to be summoned--he desired to die in thereligion of Aliette. Living, the poor child had been defeated: sheprevailed in her death. 

Two distinguished souls! deux êtres d'élite--M. Feuillet thinks--whosefine qualities properly brought them together. When Mademoiselle deCourteheuse said of the heroes of her favourite age, that theirpassions, their errors, did but pass over a ground of what was solidand serious, and which always discovered itself afresh, she wasunconsciously describing Bernard. Singular young brother of Monsieurde Camors--after all, certainly, more fortunate than he--he belongs tothe age, which, if it had great faults, had also great repentances. Inappearance, frivolous; with all the light charm of the world, yet withthat impressibility to great things, according to the law which makesthe best of M. Feuillet's [240] characters so interesting; above all, with that capacity for pity which almost everything around him tendedto suppress; in real life, if he exists there, and certainly in M. Feuillet's pages, it is a refreshment to meet him. 

1886. 

POSTSCRIPT

ainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnon neôterôn+

[241] THE words, classical and romantic, although, like many othercritical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understoodthem too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies inthe history of art and literature. Used in an exaggerated sense, toexpress a greater opposition between those tendencies than reallyexists, they have at times tended to divide people of taste intoopposite camps. But in that House Beautiful, which the creative mindsof all generations--the artists and those who have treated life in thespirit of art--are always building together, for the refreshment of thehuman spirit, these oppositions cease; and the Interpreter of the HouseBeautiful, the true aesthetic critic, uses these divisions, only so faras they enable him to enter into the peculiarities of the objects withwhich he has to do. The term classical, fixed, as it is, to awell-defined literature, and a well-defined group in art, is clear, indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard, and merelyscholastic [242] sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never havediscovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, andchiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered aboutit--people who would never really have been made glad by any Venusfresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece andRome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid andtame. 

And as the term, classical, has been used in a too absolute, andtherefore in a misleading sense, so the term, romantic, has been usedmuch too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The sense in whichScott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this; that, in oppositionto the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strangeadventure, and sought it in the Middle Age. Much later, in a Yorkshirevillage, the spirit of romanticism bore a more really characteristicfruit in the work of a young girl, Emily Brontë, the romance ofWuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of CatherineLinton, and of Heathcliffe--tearing open Catherine's grave, removingone side of her coffin, that he may really lie beside her indeath--figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicatelybeautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit. InGermany, again, [243] that spirit is shown less in Tieck, itsprofessional representative, than in Meinhold, the author of Sidoniathe Sorceress and the Amber-Witch. In Germany and France, within thelast hundred years, the term has been used to describe a particularschool of writers; and, consequently, when Heine criticises theRomantic School in Germany--that movement which culminated in Goethe'sGoetz von Berlichingen; or when Théophile Gautier criticises theromantic movement in France, where, indeed, it bore its mostcharacteristic fruits, and its play is hardly yet over where, by acertain audacity, or bizarrerie of motive, united with faultlessliterary execution, it still shows itself in imaginative literature, they use the word, with an exact sense of special artistic qualities, indeed; but use it, nevertheless, with a limited application to themanifestation of those qualities at a particular period. But theromantic spirit is, in reality, an ever-present, an enduring principle, in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought and stylewhich that, and other similar uses of the word romantic reallyindicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widelyworking influence. 

Though the words classical and romantic, then, have acquired an almosttechnical meaning, in application to certain developments of German andFrench taste, yet this is but one variation of an old opposition, whichmay be traced from the [244] very beginning of the formation ofEuropean art and literature. From the first formation of anything likea standard of taste in these things, the restless curiosity of theirmore eager lovers necessarily made itself felt, in the craving for newmotives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of style. Hence, the opposition between the classicists and the romanticists--betweenthe adherents, in the culture of beauty, of the principles of liberty, and authority, respectively--of strength, and order or what the Greekscalled kosmiotês. +

Sainte-Beuve, in the third volume of the Causeries du Lundi, hasdiscussed the question, What is meant by a classic? It was a questionhe was well fitted to answer, having himself lived through many phasesof taste, and having been in earlier life an enthusiastic member of theromantic school: he was also a great master of that sort of "philosophyof literature, " which delights in tracing traditions in it, and the wayin which various phases of thought and sentiment maintain themselves, through successive modifications, from epoch to epoch. His aim, then, is to give the word classic a wider and, as he says, a more generoussense than it commonly bears, to make it expressly grandiose etflottant; and, in doing this, he develops, in a masterly manner, thosequalities of measure, purity, temperance, of which it is the especialfunction of classical art [245] and literature, whatever meaning, narrower or wider, we attach to the term, to take care. 

The charm, therefore, of what is classical, in art or literature, isthat of the well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen overand over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty ofits artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil, charm offamiliarity. There are times, indeed, at which these charms fail towork on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us. "Romanticism, " says Stendhal, "is the art of presenting to people theliterary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatestpossible pleasure to their grandfathers. " But then, beneath allchanges of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere abstractproportion--of music--which what is classical in literature possesses, still maintains itself in the best of us, and what pleased ourgrandparents may at least tranquillise us. The "classic" comes to usout of the cool and quiet of other times; as the measure of what a longexperience has shown will at least never displease us. And in theclassical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the lastcentury, the essentially classical element is that quality of order inbeauty, which they possess, indeed, [246] in a pre-eminent degree, andwhich impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else in them. 

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes theromantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixedelement in every artistic organisation, it is the addition of curiosityto this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic temper. Curiosity and the desire of beauty, have each their place in art, as inall true criticism. When one's curiosity is deficient, when one is noteager enough for new impressions, and new pleasures, one is liable tovalue mere academical proprieties too highly, to be satisfied withworn-out or conventional types, with the insipid ornament of Racine, orthe prettiness of that later Greek sculpture, which passed so long fortrue Hellenic work; to miss those places where the handiwork of nature, or of the artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulatingproducts of art a mere irritation. And when one's curiosity is inexcess, when it overbalances the desire of beauty, then one is liableto value in works of art what is inartistic in them; to be satisfiedwith what is exaggerated in art, with productions like some of those ofthe romantic school in Germany; not to distinguish, jealously enough, between what is admirably done, and what is done not quite so well, inthe writings, for instance, of Jean Paul. And if I had to give [247]instances of these defects, then I should say, that Pope, in commonwith the age of literature to which he belonged, had too littlecuriosity, so that there is always a certain insipidity in the effectof his work, exquisite as it is; and, coming down to our own time, thatBalzac had an excess of curiosity--curiosity not duly tempered with thedesire of beauty. 

But, however falsely those two tendencies may be opposed by critics, orexaggerated by artists themselves, they are tendencies really at workat all times in art, moulding it, with the balance sometimes a littleon one side, sometimes a little on the other, generating, respectively, as the balance inclines on this side or that, two principles, twotraditions, in art, and in literature so far as it partakes of thespirit of art. If there is a great overbalance of curiosity, then, wehave the grotesque in art: if the union of strangeness and beauty, under very difficult and complex conditions, be a successful one, ifthe union be entire, then the resultant beauty is very exquisite, veryattractive. With a passionate care for beauty, the romantic spiritrefuses to have it, unless the condition of strangeness be firstfulfilled. Its desire is for a beauty born of unlikely elements, by aprofound alchemy, by a difficult initiation, by the charm which wringsit even out of terrible things; and a trace of distortion, of thegrotesque, may perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression, about its [248] ultimate grace. Its eager, excited spirit will havestrength, the grotesque, first of all--the trees shrieking as you tearoff the leaves; for Jean Valjean, the long years of convict life; forRedgauntlet, the quicksands of Solway Moss; then, incorporate with thisstrangeness, and intensified by restraint, as much sweetness, as muchbeauty, as is compatible with that. Énergique, frais, etdispos--these, according to Sainte-Beuve, are the characteristics of agenuine classic--les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques parcequ'ils sont vieux, mais parce qu'ils sont énergiques, frais, et dispos. Energy, freshness, intelligent and masterly disposition:--these arecharacteristics of Victor Hugo when his alchemy is complete, in certainfigures, like Marius and Cosette, in certain scenes, like that in theopening of Les Travailleurs de la Mer, where Déruchette writes the nameof Gilliatt in the snow, on Christmas morning; but always there is acertain note of strangeness discernible there, as well. 

The essential elements, then, of the romantic spirit are curiosity andthe love of beauty; and it is only as an illustration of thesequalities, that it seeks the Middle Age, because, in the over-chargedatmosphere of the Middle Age, there are unworked sources of romanticeffect, of a strange beauty, to be won, by strong imagination, out ofthings unlikely or remote. 

Few, probably, now read Madame de Staël's [249] De l'Allemagne, thoughit has its interest, the interest which never quite fades out of workreally touched with the enthusiasm of the spiritual adventurer, thepioneer in culture. It was published in 1810, to introduce to Frenchreaders a new school of writers--the romantic school, from beyond theRhine; and it was followed, twenty-three years later, by Heine'sRomantische Schule, as at once a supplement and a correction. Boththese books, then, connect romanticism with Germany, with the namesespecially of Goethe and Tieck; and, to many English readers, the ideaof romanticism is still inseparably connected with Germany--thatGermany which, in its quaint old towns, under the spire of Strasburg orthe towers of Heidelberg, was always listening in rapt inaction to themelodious, fascinating voices of the Middle Age, and which, now that ithas got Strasburg back again, has, I suppose, almost ceased to exist. But neither Germany, with its Goethe and Tieck, nor England, with itsByron and Scott, is nearly so representative of the romantic temper asFrance, with Murger, and Gautier, and Victor Hugo. It is in Frenchliterature that its most characteristic expression is to be found; andthat, as most closely derivative, historically, from such peculiarconditions, as ever reinforce it to the utmost. 

For, although temperament has much to do with the generation of theromantic spirit, and [250] although this spirit, with its curiosity, its thirst for a curious beauty, may be always traceable in excellentart (traceable even in Sophocles) yet still, in a limited sense, it maybe said to be a product of special epochs. Outbreaks of this spirit, that is, come naturally with particular periods--times, when, in men'sapproaches towards art and poetry, curiosity may be noticed to take thelead, when men come to art and poetry, with a deep thirst forintellectual excitement, after a long ennui, or in reaction against thestrain of outward, practical things: in the later Middle Age, forinstance; so that medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposedto Greek and Roman poetry, as romantic poetry to the classical. Whatthe romanticism of Dante is, may be estimated, if we compare the linesin which Virgil describes the hazel-wood, from whose broken twigs flowsthe blood of Polydorus, not without the expression of a real shudder atthe ghastly incident, with the whole canto of the Inferno, into whichDante has expanded them, beautifying and softening it, meanwhile, by asentiment of profound pity. And it is especially in that period ofintellectual disturbance, immediately preceding Dante, amid which theromance languages define themselves at last, that this temper ismanifested. Here, in the literature of Provence, the very name ofromanticism is stamped with its true signification: here we have indeeda romantic world, grotesque [251] even, in the strength of itspassions, almost insane in its curious expression of them, drawing allthings into its sphere, making the birds, nay! lifeless things, itsvoices and messengers, yet so penetrated with the desire for beauty andsweetness, that it begets a wholly new species of poetry, in which theRenaissance may be said to begin. The last century was pre-eminently aclassical age, an age in which, for art and literature, the element ofa comely order was in the ascendant; which, passing away, left a hardbattle to be fought between the classical and the romantic schools. Yet, it is in the heart of this century, of Goldsmith and Stothard, ofWatteau and the Siècle de Louis XIV. --in one of its central, if notmost characteristic figures, in Rousseau--that the modern or Frenchromanticism really originates. But, what in the eighteenth century isbut an exceptional phenomenon, breaking through its fair reserve anddiscretion only at rare intervals, is the habitual guise of thenineteenth, breaking through it perpetually, with a feverishness, anincomprehensible straining and excitement, which all experience to somedegree, but yearning also, in the genuine children of the romanticschool, to be énergique, frais, et dispos--for those qualities ofenergy, freshness, comely order; and often, in Murger, in Gautier, inVictor Hugo, for instance, with singular felicity attaining them. 

It is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in [252] fact, that Frenchromanticism, with much else, begins: reading his Confessions we seemactually to assist at the birth of this new, strong spirit in theFrench mind. The wildness which has shocked so many, and thefascination which has influenced almost every one, in the squalid, yeteloquent figure, we see and hear so clearly in that book, wanderingunder the apple-blossoms and among the vines of Neuchâtel or Veveyactually give it the quality of a very successful romantic invention. His strangeness or distortion, his profound subjectivity, hispassionateness--the cor laceratum--Rousseau makes all men in love withthese. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai sus. Mais si jene vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. "I am not made like any oneelse I have ever known: yet, if I am not better, at least I amdifferent. " These words, from the first page of the Confessions, anticipate all the Werthers, Renés, Obermanns, of the last hundredyears. For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the spirit of thewhole world; and thirty years afterwards, what in him was apeculiarity, became part of the general consciousness. A storm wascoming: Rousseau, with others, felt it in the air, and they helped tobring it down: they introduced a disturbing element into Frenchliterature, then so trim and formal, like our own literature of the ageof Queen Anne. 

In 1815 the storm had come and gone, but had left, in the spirit of"young France, " the [253] ennui of an immense disillusion. In the lastchapter of Edgar Quinet's Revolution Française, a work itself full ofirony, of disillusion, he distinguishes two books, Senancour's Obermannand Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme, as characteristic of thefirst decade of the present century. In those two books we detectalready the disease and the cure--in Obermann the irony, refined into aplaintive philosophy of "indifference"--in Chateaubriand's Génie duChristianisme, the refuge from a tarnished actual present, a present ofdisillusion, into a world of strength and beauty in the Middle Age, asat an earlier period--in René and Atala--into the free play of them insavage life. It is to minds in this spiritual situation, weary of thepresent, but yearning for the spectacle of beauty and strength, thatthe works of French romanticism appeal. They set a positive value onthe intense, the exceptional; and a certain distortion is sometimesnoticeable in them, as in conceptions like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, orGwynplaine, something of a terrible grotesque, of the macabre, as theFrench themselves call it; though always combined with perfect literaryexecution, as in Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse, or the scene of the"maimed" burial-rites of the player, dead of the frost, in hisCapitaine Fracasse--true "flowers of the yew. " It becomes grim humourin Victor Hugo's combat of Gilliatt with the devil-fish, or theincident, with all its ghastly comedy drawn [254] out at length, of thegreat gun detached from its fastenings on shipboard, inQuatre-Vingt-Trieze (perhaps the most terrible of all the accidentsthat can happen by sea) and in the entire episode, in that book, of theConvention. Not less surely does it reach a genuine pathos; for thehabit of noting and distinguishing one's own most intimate passages ofsentiment makes one sympathetic, begetting, as it must, the power ofentering, by all sorts of finer ways, into the intimate recesses ofother minds; so that pity is another quality of romanticism, bothVictor Hugo and Gautier being great lovers of animals, and charmingwriters about them, and Murger being unrivalled in the pathos of hisScènes de la Vie de Jeunesse. Penetrating so finely into allsituations which appeal to pity, above all, into the special orexceptional phases of such feeling, the romantic humour is not afraidof the quaintness or singularity of its circumstances or expression, pity, indeed, being of the essence of humour; so that Victor Hugo doesbut turn his romanticism into practice, in his hunger and thirst afterpractical Justice!--a justice which shall no longer wrong children, oranimals, for instance, by ignoring in a stupid, mere breadth of view, minute facts about them. Yet the romanticists are antinomian, too, sometimes, because the love of energy and beauty, of distinction inpassion, tended naturally to become a little bizarre, plunging into the[255] Middle Age, into the secrets of old Italian story. Are we in theInferno?--we are tempted to ask, wondering at something malign in somuch beauty. For over all a care for the refreshment of the humanspirit by fine art manifests itself, a predominant sense of literarycharm, so that, in their search for the secret of exquisite expression, the romantic school went back to the forgotten world of early Frenchpoetry, and literature itself became the most delicate of thearts--like "goldsmith's work, " says Sainte-Beuve, of Bertrand's Gaspardde la Nuit--and that peculiarly French gift, the gift of exquisitespeech, argute loqui, attained in them a perfection which it had neverseen before. 

Stendhal, a writer whom I have already quoted, and of whom Englishreaders might well know much more than they do, stands between theearlier and later growths of the romantic spirit. His novels are richin romantic quality; and his other writings--partly criticism, partlypersonal reminiscences--are a very curious and interesting illustrationof the needs out of which romanticism arose. In his book on Racine andShakespeare, Stendhal argues that all good art was romantic in its day;and this is perhaps true in Stendhal's sense. That little treatise, full of "dry light" and fertile ideas, was published in the year 1823, and its object is to defend an entire independence and liberty in thechoice and treatment of subject, both in [256] art and literature, against those who upheld the exclusive authority of precedent. Inpleading the cause of romanticism, therefore, it is the novelty, bothof form and of motive, in writings like the Hernani of Victor Hugo(which soon followed it, raising a storm of criticism) that he ischiefly concerned to justify. To be interesting and reallystimulating, to keep us from yawning even, art and literature mustfollow the subtle movements of that nimbly-shifting Time-Spirit, orZeit-Geist, understood by French not less than by German criticism, which is always modifying men's taste, as it modifies their manners andtheir pleasures. This, he contends, is what all great workmen hadalways understood. Dante, Shakespeare, Molière, had exercised anabsolute independence in their choice of subject and treatment. Toturn always with that ever-changing spirit, yet to retain the flavourof what was admirably done in past generations, in the classics, as wesay--is the problem of true romanticism. "Dante, " he observes, "waspre-eminently the romantic poet. He adored Virgil, yet he wrote theDivine Comedy, with the episode of Ugolino, which is as unlike theAeneid as can possibly be. And those who thus obey the fundamentalprinciple of romanticism, one by one become classical, and are joinedto that ever-increasing common league, formed by men of all countries, to approach nearer and nearer to perfection. "

Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, [257] is in itsessential characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at alltimes, in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, andthe amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one by one, than the peculiarity of a time or a school. Depending on the varyingproportion of curiosity and the desire of beauty, natural tendencies ofthe artistic spirit at all times, it must always be partly a matter ofindividual temperament. The eighteenth century in England has beenregarded as almost exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, atype of so much which breaks through what are conventionally thoughtthe influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in it, and the reaction in favour of naturalism in poetry begins in thatcentury, early. There are, thus, the born romanticists and the bornclassicists. There are the born classicists who start with form, towhose minds the comeliness of the old, immemorial, well-recognisedtypes in art and literature, have revealed themselves impressively; whowill entertain no matter which will not go easily and flexibly intothem; whose work aspires only to be a variation upon, or study from, the older masters. "'Tis art's decline, my son!" they are alwayssaying, to the progressive element in their own generation; to thosewho care for that which in fifty years' time every one will be caringfor. On the other hand, there are the born romanticists, who startwith an original, [258] untried matter, still in fusion; who conceivethis vividly, and hold by it as the essence of their work; who, by thevery vividness and heat of their conception, purge away, sooner orlater, all that is not organically appropriate to it, till the wholeeffect adjusts itself in clear, orderly, proportionate form; whichform, after a very little time, becomes classical in its turn. 

The romantic or classical character of a picture, a poem, a literarywork, depends, then, on the balance of certain qualities in it; and inthis sense, a very real distinction may be drawn between good classicaland good romantic work. But all critical terms are relative; and thereis at least a valuable suggestion in that theory of Stendhal's, thatall good art was romantic in its day. In the beauties of Homer andPheidias, quiet as they now seem, there must have been, for those whoconfronted them for the first time, excitement and surprise, thesudden, unforeseen satisfaction of the desire of beauty. Yet theOdyssey, with its marvellous adventure, is more romantic than theIliad, which nevertheless contains, among many other romantic episodes, that of the immortal horses of Achilles, who weep at the death ofPatroclus. Aeschylus is more romantic than Sophocles, whosePhiloctetes, were it written now, might figure, for the strangeness ofits motive and the perfectness of its execution, as typically romantic;while, of Euripides, it may be said, that his method in [259] writinghis plays is to sacrifice readily almost everything else, so that hemay attain the fulness of a single romantic effect. These twotendencies, indeed, might be applied as a measure or standard, allthrough Greek and Roman art and poetry, with very illuminating results;and for an analyst of the romantic principle in art, no exercise wouldbe more profitable, than to walk through the collection of classicalantiquities at the Louvre, or the British Museum, or to examine somerepresentative collection of Greek coins, and note how the element ofcuriosity, of the love of strangeness, insinuates itself into classicaldesign, and record the effects of the romantic spirit there, the tracesof struggle, of the grotesque even, though over-balanced here bysweetness; as in the sculpture of Chartres and Rheims, the realsweetness of mind in the sculptor is often overbalanced by thegrotesque, by the rudeness of his strength. 

Classicism, then, means for Stendhal, for that younger enthusiasticband of French writers whose unconscious method he formulated intoprinciples, the reign of what is pedantic, conventional, and narrowlyacademical in art; for him, all good art is romantic. To Sainte-Beuve, who understands the term in a more liberal sense, it is thecharacteristic of certain epochs, of certain spirits in every epoch, not given to the exercise of original imagination, but rather to theworking out of refinements of manner on some [260] authorised matter;and who bring to their perfection, in this way, the elements of sanity, of order and beauty in manner. In general criticism, again, it meansthe spirit of Greece and Rome, of some phases in literature and artthat may seem of equal authority with Greece and Rome, the age of Louisthe Fourteenth, the age of Johnson; though this is at best anuncritical use of the term, because in Greek and Roman work there aretypical examples of the romantic spirit. But explain the terms as wemay, in application to particular epochs, there are these two elementsalways recognisable; united in perfect art--in Sophocles, in Dante, inthe highest work of Goethe, though not always absolutely balancedthere; and these two elements may be not inappropriately termed theclassical and romantic tendencies. 

Material for the artist, motives of inspiration, are not yet exhausted:our curious, complex, aspiring age still abounds in subjects foraesthetic manipulation by the literary as well as by other forms ofart. For the literary art, at all events, the problem just now is, toinduce order upon the contorted, proportionless accumulation of ourknowledge and experience, our science and history, our hopes anddisillusion, and, in effecting this, to do consciously what has beendone hitherto for the most part too unconsciously, to write our Englishlanguage as the Latins wrote theirs, as the [261] French write, asscholars should write. Appealing, as he may, to precedent in thismatter, the scholar will still remember that if "the style is the man"it is also the age: that the nineteenth century too will be found tohave had its style, justified by necessity--a style very different, alike from the baldness of an impossible "Queen Anne" revival, and anincorrect, incondite exuberance, after the mode of Elizabeth: that wecan only return to either at the price of an impoverishment of form ormatter, or both, although, an intellectually rich age such as oursbeing necessarily an eclectic one, we may well cultivate some of theexcellences of literary types so different as those: that in literatureas in other matters it is well to unite as many diverse elements as maybe: that the individual writer or artist, certainly, is to be estimatedby the number of graces he combines, and his power of interpenetratingthem in a given work. To discriminate schools, of art, of literature, is, of course, part of the obvious business of literary criticism: but, in the work of literary production, it is easy to be overmuch occupiedconcerning them. For, in truth, the legitimate contention is, not ofone age or school of literary art against another, but of allsuccessive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to thesubstance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form. 

NOTES

241. +Transliteration: ainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnonneôterôn. Translation: "Praise wine for its age, but the song in firstbloom. Pindar, Odes, Book O, Poem 9, Line 47. 

244. +Transliteration: kosmiotês. Liddell and Scott definition:"propriety, decorum, orderly behavior. "