SOME DIVERSIONSOFA MAN OF LETTERS

BYEDMUND GOSSE, C. B. 

LONDONWILLIAM HEINEMANN1920

_First published October 1919__New Impressions November 1919; February 1920_

_OTHER WORKS BY MR. EDMUND GOSSE_

_Northern Studies_. 1879. 

_Life of Gray_. 1882. 

_Seventeenth-Century Studies_. 1883. 

_Life of Congreve_. 1888. 

_A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature_. 1889. 

_Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F. R. S. _ 1890. 

_Gossip in a Library_. 1891. 

_The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance_. 1892. 

_Questions at Issue_. 1893. 

_Critical Kit-Kats_. 1896. 

_A Short History of Modern English Literature_. 1897. 

_Life and Letters of John Donne_. 1899. 

_Hypolympia_. 1901. 

_Life of Jeremy Taylor_. 1904. 

_French Profiles_. 1904. 

_Life of Sir Thomas Browne_. 1905. 

_Father and Son_. 1907. 

_Life of Ibsen_. 1908. 

_Two Visits to Denmark_. 1911. 

_Collected Poems_. 1911. 

_Portraits and Sketches_. 1912. 

_Inter Arma_. 1916. 

_Three French Moralists_. 1918. 

TO

EVAN CHARTERIS

CONTENTS

 PAGE

Preface: On Fluctuations of Taste 1

The Shepherd of the Ocean 13

The Songs of Shakespeare 29

Catharine Trotter, the Precursor of the Bluestockings 37

The Message of the Wartons 63

The Charm of Sterne 91

The Centenary of Edgar Allen Poe 101

The Author of "Pelham" 115

The Challenge of the Brontës 139

Disraeli's Novels 151

Three Experiments in Portraiture-- I. Lady Dorothy Nevill 181 II. Lord Cromer 196 III. The Last Days of Lord Redesdale 216

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 231

Some Soldier Poets 259

The Future of English Poetry 287

The Agony of the Victorian Age 311

Index 338

PREFACE:

ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE

When Voltaire sat down to write a book on Epic Poetry, he dedicated hisfirst chapter to "Differences of Taste in Nations. " A critic of to-daymight well find it necessary, on the threshold of a general inquiry, toexpatiate on "Differences of Taste in Generations. " Changes of standardin the arts are always taking place, but it is only with advancingyears, perhaps, that we begin to be embarrassed by the recurrence ofthem. In early youth we fight for the new forms of art, for the newæsthetic shibboleths, and in that happy ardour of battle we have no timeor inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess. But the yearsglide on, and, behold! one morning, we wake up to find our ownpredilections treated with contempt, and the objects of our own idolatryconsigned to the waste-paper basket. Then the matter becomes serious, and we must either go on struggling for a cause inevitably lost, or wemust give up the whole matter in indifference. This week I read, overthe signature of a very clever and very popular literary character ofour day, the remark that Wordsworth's was "a genteel mind of the thirdrank. " I put down the newspaper in which this airy dictum was printed, and, for the first time, I was glad that poor Mr. Matthew Arnold was nolonger with us. But, of course, the evolutions of taste must go on, whether they hurt the living and the dead, or no. 

Is there, then, no such thing as a permanent element of poetic beauty?The curious fact is that leading critics in each successive generationare united in believing that there is, and that the reigning favouriteconforms to it. The life of a reputation is like the life of a plant, and seems, in these days, to be like the life of an annual. We watch theseed, admiration for Wordsworth, planted about 1795, shoot obscurelyfrom the ground, and gradually clothe itself with leaves till about1840; then it bursts into blossom of rapturous praise, and about 1870 ishung with clusters of the fruit of "permanent" appreciation. In 1919, little more than a century from its first evolution in obscurity, itrecedes again in the raggedness of obloquy, and cumbers the earth, asdim old "genteel" Wordsworth, whom we are assured that nobody reads. Butwhy were "the best judges" scornful in 1800 and again in 1919 of whatgave the noblest and the most inspiriting pleasure to "the best judges"in 1870? The execution of the verse has not altered, the conditions ofimagination seem the same, why then is the estimate always changing? Isevery form of poetic taste, is all trained enjoyment of poetry, merely agraduated illusion which goes up and down like a wave of the sea andcarries "the best judges" with it? If not, who is right, and who iswrong, and what is the use of dogmatising? Let us unite to quit all vainambition, and prefer the jangle of the music-halls, with its direct"æsthetic thrill. "

So far as I know, the only philosopher who has dared to face thisproblem is Mr. Balfour, in the brilliant second chapter of his"Foundations of Belief. " He has there asked, "Is there any fixed andpermanent element in beauty?" The result of his inquiry isdisconcerting; after much discussion he decides that there is not. Mr. Balfour deals, in particular, with only two forms of art, Music andDress, but he tacitly includes the others with them. It is certain thatthe result of his investigations is the singularly stultifying one thatwe are not permitted to expect "permanent relations" in or behind thefeeling of poetic beauty, which may be indifferently awakened by Blaketo-day and by Hayley to-morrow. If the critic says that the verse ofBlake is beautiful and that of Hayley is not, he merely "expoundscase-made law. " The result seems to be that no canons of taste exist;that what are called "laws" of style are enacted only for those who makethem, and for those whom the makers can bully into accepting theirlegislation, a new generation of lawbreakers being perfectly free torepeal the code. Southey yesterday and Keats to-day; why not Southeyagain to-morrow, or perhaps Tupper? Such is the cynical _cul-de-sac_into which the logic of a philosopher drives us. 

We have had in France an example of _volte-face_ in taste which Iconfess has left me gasping. I imagine that if Mr. Balfour was able tospare a moment from the consideration of fiscal reform, he must havespent it in triumphing over the fate of M. Sully-Prudhomme. In the monthof September 1906 this poet closed, after a protracted agony, "that longdisease, his life. " He had compelled respect by his courage in the faceof hopeless pain, and, one might suppose, some gratitude by theabundance of his benefactions. His career was more than blameless, itwas singularly exemplary. Half-blind, half-paralysed, for a long timevery poor, pious without fanaticism, patient, laborious, devoted to hisfriends, he seems to have been one of those extraordinary beings whosefortitude in the face of affliction knows no abatement. It would beridiculous to quote any of these virtues as a reason for admiring thepoetry of Sully-Prudhomme. I mention them merely to show that there wasnothing in his personal temperament to arouse hatred or in his personalconditions to excuse envy. Nothing to account for the, doubtless, entirely sincere detestation which his poetry seemed to awaken in all"the best minds" directly he was dead. 

As every one knows, from about 1870 to 1890, Sully-Prudhomme was, without a rival, the favourite living poet of the French. Victor Hugowas there, of course, until 1885--and posthumously until much later--buthe was a god, and the object of idolatry. All who loved human poetry, the poetry of sweetness and light, took Sully-Prudhomme to their heartof hearts. The _Stances et Poèmes_ of 1865 had perhaps the warmestwelcome that ever the work of a new poet had in France. ThéophileGautier instantly pounced upon _Le Vase Brisé_ (since too-famous) andintroduced it to a thousand school-girls. Sainte-Beuve, though grown oldand languid, waked up to celebrate the psychology and the music of thisnew poetry, so delicate, fresh and transparent. An unknown beauty ofextreme refinement seemed to have been created in it, a beauty made upof lucidity, pathos and sobriety. Readers who are now approachingseventy will not forget with what emotion they listened, for instance, to that dialogue between the long-dead father and the newly-buried son, which closes:--

 "J' ai laissé ma sœur et ma mère Et les beaux livres que j' ai lus; Vous n'avez pas de bru, mon père, On m'a blesse, je n'aime plus. "

 "De tes aïeux compte le nombre, Va baiser leurs fronts inconnus, Et viens faire ton lit dans l'ombre A côté des derniers venus. 

 "Ne pleure pas, dors dans l'argile En espérant le grand reveit. " "O père, qu'il est difficile De ne plus penser au soleil!"

This body of verse, to which was presently added fresh collections--_LesEpreuves_ (1886), _Les Vaines Tendresses_ (1875), _Le Prisme_(1886), --was welcomed by the elder Sanhedrim, and still morevociferously and unanimously by the younger priesthood of criticism. Itpleased the superfine amateurs of poetry, it was accepted withenthusiasm by the thousands who enjoy without analysing their enjoyment. In 1880, to have questioned that Sully-Prudhomme was a very noble poetwould have been like challenging Tennyson in 1870, or Cowley in 1660. Jules Lemaître claimed that he was the greatest artist in symbols thatFrance had ever produced. Brunetière, so seldom moved by modernliterature, celebrated with ardour the author of _Les Vaines Tendresses_as having succeeded better than any other writer who had ever lived intranslating into perfect language the dawn and the twilight of emotion. That Gaston Paris and M. Anatole France competed in lofty praise of thelyrics of Sully-Prudhomme, is perhaps less remarkable than that PaulVerlaine, whom all the younger schools still look upon as their apostleand guide, declared, in reviewing _Les Ecuries d'Augias_, that the forceof style of Sully-Prudhomme was excelled only by the beauty of hisdetail. It is needless to multiply examples of the unanimous praisegiven by the divers schools of criticism to Sully-Prudhomme up to about1890. His was, perhaps, the least contested literary glory of France. 

His death startlingly reminded us that this state of things had to beentirely reversed. It is true that the peculiar talent ofSully-Prudhomme, being almost exclusively lyrical, scarcely survived hisyouth, and that he cumbered his moon of sands with two huge and clumsywrecks, _La Justice_ (1878) and _Le Bonheur_ (1898), round which thefeet of the fairies could hardly be expected to trip. One must be anacademician and hopelessly famous before one dares to inflict twoelephantine didactic epics on one's admirers. Unfortunately, too, thepoet undertook to teach the art of verse in his _Réflexions_ (1892) andhis _Testament Poétique_ (1901), brochures which greatly irritated theyoung. It is probably wise for academicians, whether poets or thereverse, to sit beside their nectar, and not to hurl bolts down into thevalley. But, behind these errors of judgment, there they remain--thoseearly volumes, which seemed to us all so full of exquisite littlemasterpieces. Why is it that nobody, except a few elderly persons, anylonger delights in them? The notices which Sully-Prudhomme's deathawakened in the Paris Press were either stamped with the mark of oldcontemporary affection, or else, when they were not abusive, were asfrigid as the tomb itself. "Ses tendresses sucrées, sirupeuses, sontvaines en effet, " said a critic of importance! Indeed, it would appearso; and where are the laurels of yester-year?

To those who were young when Sully-Prudhomme entered into hisimmortality it seems impossible to realise that the glory has alreadydeparted. Gaston Paris celebrated "the penetrating sincerity and theexquisite expression of feeling" which distinguished Sully-Prudhommeabove all other poets. He was the bard of the inner life, sincere anddignified, full of melancholy reverie. A great critic compared _La VoteLactic_ and _Les Stalactites_ with the far-off sound of bells heard downsome lovely valley in a golden afternoon. Yet the images and thelanguage were precise; Sully-Prudhomme was a mathematician, and if hewas reproached with anything like a fault, it was that his style wasslightly geometrical. It would be otiose to collect any more tributes tohis genius, as it appeared to all Frenchmen, cultivated orsemi-cultivated, about the year 1880. With an analysis ofSully-Prudhomme's poetry I am not here concerned, but with the questionof why it is that such an authority as Rémy de Gourmont could, in 1907, without awakening any protest among persons under fifty say that it wasa "sort of social crime" to impose such balderdash as the verse ofSully-Prudhomme on the public. 

It is not needful to quote other living critics, who may think suchprolongation of their severities ungraceful. But a single contrast willsuffice. When, in 1881, Sully-Prudhomme was elected to the FrenchAcademy, expert opinion throughout the Press was unanimous in admittingthat this was an honour deservedly given to the best lyric poet of theage. In 1906, when a literary journal sent out this question, "Who isthe poet you love best?" and was answered by more than two hundredwriters of verse, the diversity of opinion was indeed excessive; suchpoets as Sainte-Beuve, as Brizeux, as Rodenbach, received votes, all thegreat masters received many. But Sully-Prudhomme, alone, received notone vote. A new generation had arisen, and one of its leaders, withcruel wit, transferred to the reputation of the author his own mostfamous line:--"N'y touchez pas, il est brisé. "

It is necessary to recollect that we are not dealing with the phenomenonof the inability of very astute literary people to recognise at once astartling new sort of beauty. When Robert Browning lent the best poemsof Keats to Mrs. Carlyle, she read them and returned them with theremark that "almost any young gentleman with a sweet tooth might beexpected to write such things. " Mrs. Carlyle was a very clever woman, but she was not quite "educated up to" Keats. The history of letters isfull of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of greatart which has not yet been "classed. " But we are here considering themuch stranger and indeed extremely disconcerting case of a product whichhas been accepted, with acclamation, by the judges of one generation, and is contemptuously hooted out of court by the next. It is not, onthis occasion, Sully-Prudhomme whom we are considering, but his critics. If Théophile Gautier was right in 1867, Rémy de Gourmont must have beenwrong in 1907; yet they both were honourable men in the world ofcriticism. Nor is it merely the dictum of a single man, which, howeveringenious, may be paradoxical. It is worse than that; it is the factthat one whole generation seems to have agreed with Gautier, and thatanother whole generation is of the same mind as Rémy de Gourmont. 

Then it is that Mr. Balfour, like Galuppi with his "cold music, " comesin and tells us that this is precisely what we have to expect. Allbeauty consists in the possession of certain relations, which beingwithdrawn, beauty disappears from the object that seemed to possess it. There is no permanent element in poetic excellence. We are not to demandany settled opinion about poetry. So Mr. Balfour seems to creak it, andwe want the heart to scold. But is it quite so certain that there is nofixed norm of beauty imaginable? Is it the fact that poetic pleasurecannot "be supposed to last any longer than the transient reactionbetween it" and the temporary prejudice of our senses? If this be true, then are critics of all men most miserable. 

Yet, deeply dejected as it leaves me to know that very clever peopledespise the "genteel third-rate mind" of Wordsworth, I am not quitecertain that I yield to Mr. Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic. That eminent philosopher seems to say "you find the poets, whom yourevered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old age. Well! Itis very sad, and perhaps it would annoy me too, if I were not aphilosopher. But it only shows how right I was to tell, you not toexpect permanent relations behind the feeling of beauty, since all isillusion, and there is no such thing as a principle of taste, but onlya variation of fashion. "

Is it, however, quite so certain, after all, that there is no standard?It must be admitted that there seems to be no fixed rule of taste, noteven a uniformity of practice or general tendency to agreement inparticular cases. But the whole study of the fine arts would lead todespair if we allowed ourselves to accept this admission as implyingthat no conceivable principle of taste exists. We may not be able toproduce it, like a yard-measure, and submit works of imagination to it, once and for all, in the eyes of a consternated public. But when weobserve, as we must allow, that art is no better at one age than atanother, but only different; that it is subject to modification, butcertainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationaryquality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained andunattainable, a positive norm of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, butin each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation toit. It is the moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and impossible exactlyto locate, yet revealed by the light it throws on distant portions ofthe sky. At all events, it appears to me that this is the only theory bywhich we can justify a continued interest in literature when it isattacked, now on one side, now on another, by the vicissitudes offashion. 

The essays which are here collected deal, for the most part, withfigures in the history of English literature which have suffered fromthe changes of fortune and the instability of taste. In every case, there has been something which is calculated to attract the sympathy andinterest of one who, like myself, has been closely concerned with twodistinct but not unrelated branches of his subject, the literarycharacter and the literary craft. More than fifty years havepassed--like a cloud, like a dream!--since I first saw my name printedbelow a passage of critical opinion. How many reputations, within thathalf-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed!We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyondHomer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to _The LotusEaters_, and the first _Légende des Siècles_ rejected as unreadable. Inface of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether itis on its head or its feet--"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels, "as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that security can only be foundin an incessant exploration of the by-ways of literary history andanalysis of the vagaries of literary character. To pursue this analysisand this exploration without bewilderment and without prejudice is tosum up the pleasures of a life devoted to books. 

_August 1919. _

THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN[1]

Three hundred years have gone by to-day since Sir Walter Raleigh wasbeheaded, in presence of a vast throng of spectators, on the scaffold ofOld Palace Yard in Westminster. General Gordon said that England is whather adventurers have made her, and there is not in all English history amore shining and violent specimen of the adventurous type than Raleigh. I am desired to deliver a brief panegyric on this celebrated freebooter, and I go behind the modern definition of the word "panegyric" (as apompous and ornamented piece of rhetoric) to its original significance, which was, as I take it, the reminder, to a great assembly of persons, of the reason why they have been brought together in the name of a manlong dead. Therefore I shall endeavour, in the short space of timeallotted to me, not so much to eulogise as to explain and to define whatSir Walter Raleigh was and represents. 

I suggest, therefore, before we touch upon any of the details of hiscareer and character, that the central feature of Raleigh, as he appearsto us after three hundred years, is his unflinching determination to seethe name of England written across the forehead of the world. Othersbefore him had been patriots of the purest order, but Raleigh was thefirst man who laid it down, as a formula, that "England shall by thefavour of God resist, repel and confound all whatsoever attemptsagainst her sacred kingdom. " He had no political sense nor skill instatecraft. For that we go to the Burghleys or the Cecils, crafty men ofexperience and judgment. But he understood that England had enemies andthat those enemies must be humbled and confounded. He understood thatthe road of England's greatness, which was more to him than all othergood things, lay across the sea. The time was ripe for the assertion ofEnglish liberty, of English ascendancy, too; and the opportunity of themoment lay in "those happy hands which the Holy Ghost hath guided, " thefortunate adventurers. Of these Raleigh was the most eminent as he wasalso, in a sense, the most unfortunate. 

A heavy shadow lay all over the Western world, the shadow of a fiercebird of prey hovering over its victim. Ever since Ferdinand expelled theMoors out of Granada, Spain had been nursing insensate dreams ofuniversal empire. She was endeavouring to destroy the infant system ofEuropean civilisation by every means of brutality and intrigue which theactivity of her arrogance could devise. The Kings of Spain, in theirruthless ambition, encouraged their people in a dream of Spanishworld-dominion. Their bulletins had long "filled the earth with theirvainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of victories"; they hadspread their propaganda "in sundry languages in print, " distributingbraggart pamphlets in which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals, of their successes against England, France, and Italy. They had "abusedand tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the Low Countries, and theyheld that the force of arms which they brandished would weigh againstjustice, humanity, and freedom in the servitude which they meant toinflict upon Europe. It was to be _Spanien über alles_. 

But there was one particular nation against which the malignity of thegreat enemy blazed most fiercely. The King of Spain blasphemouslyregarded himself as the instrument of God, and there was one countrywhich more than the rest frustrated his pious designs. This was England, and for that reason England was more bitterly hated than any otherenemy. The Spaniards did "more greedily thirst after English blood thanafter the lives of any other people of Europe. " The avowed purpose ofCastile was to destroy that maritime supremacy of England on which thevery existence of the English State depends. The significance of SirWalter Raleigh consists in the clairvoyance with which he perceived andthe energy with which he combated this monstrous assumption. Other nobleEnglishmen of his time, and before his time, had been clear-sighted andhad struck hard against the evil tyranny of Spanish dynastic militarism, but no other man before or since was so luminously identified withresistance. He struts upon the stage of battle with the limelight fullupon him. The classic writing of the crisis is contained in the _LastFight of the Revenge at Sea_ of 1591, where the splendid defiance andwarning of the Preface are like trumpets blown to the four quarters ofthe globe. Raleigh stands out as the man who above all others laboured, as he said, "against the ambitious and bloody pretences of theSpaniards, who, seeking to devour all nations, shall be themselvesdevoured. "

There is a blessing upon the meek of the earth, but I do not presentRaleigh to you as a humble-minded man. In that wonderful Elizabethan agethere were blossoming, side by side, the meekness of Hooker, thesubtlety of Bacon, the platonic dream of Spenser, the imperturbablewisdom of Shakespeare. Raleigh had no part in any of these, and tocomplain of that would be to grumble because a hollyhock is neither aviolet nor a rose. He had his enemies during his life and his detractorsever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. Hewas a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even toexcess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetualalternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himselfthat his "reason, " by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding weak, "and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due appreciation of hiscourage and nobility. For long years his violent and haughty temper madehim the most unpopular man in England, except in Devonshire, whereeverybody doted on him. He was "a man of desperate fortunes, " and he didnot shrink from violent methods. In studying his life we are amused, weare almost scandalised, at his snake-like quality. He moves withserpentine undulations, and the beautiful hard head is lifted fromambush to strike the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With hisprotestations, his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasivepertinacity, Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the "strongsilent" type of soldier which the nineteenth century invented forexclusive British consumption. 

In judging his character we must take into consideration not only thetimes in which he lived, but the leaders of English policy with whom hecame into collision. He was not thirty years of age, and still at theheight of his vivacity, when he was taken into the close favour of QueenElizabeth. There can be no question that he found in the temper of themonarch something to which his own nature intimately responded. TheQueen was an adventurer at heart, as he was, and she was an Englishmanof Englishmen. We are accustomed to laugh at the extravagance of thehomage which Raleigh paid to a woman old enough to be his mother, at thebravado which made him fling his new plush cloak across a puddle for theQueen to tread over gently, as Fuller tells us, "rewarding himafterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of sofair a footcloth, " or at the story of the rhymes the couple cut on theglass with their diamond rings. In all this, no doubt, there was thefashion of the time, and on Raleigh's part there was ambition and thedesire to push his fortunes without scruple. But there was, you may besure, more than that; there was the instinctive sympathy between the twowho hated with the most unflagging and the most burning hate the wickedaggression of Spain. We may be sure that Elizabeth never for a dayforgot that Pope Alexander VI. Had generously bestowed the Western worldon the Crown of Spain. Raleigh spoke a language which might beextravagant and which might be exasperating, which might, in fact, leadto outrageous quarrels between his Cynthia and himself, but which, atleast, that Cynthia understood. 

But in 1602, when Raleigh was fifty years of age and had his splendoursbehind him, there came another Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. James I. Wasthe type of the cautious man who only looks to the present, who hopes bystaving off a crisis till Tuesday that something fresh will "turn up" byWednesday. He was disposed, from the very first, to distrust and towaylay the plans of Raleigh. We are told, and can well believe it, thathe was "diffident" of Sir Walter's designs. He was uncomfortable in thepresence of that breezy "man of desperate fortunes. " A very excellentexample of the opposition of the two types is offered by the discussionabout the golden city of Manoa. Raleigh believed, and after alldisappointments continued to be sure, that in the heart of the swamps ofthe Orinoco there existed a citadel of magnificent wealth, an emporiumof diamonds and gold, from which Spain was secretly drawing the richeswith which she proposed to overwhelm civilisation. He struggled fornearly a quarter of a century to win this marvellous city for England. James I. Chopped in with his cold logic, and declined to believe thatany golden mine existed in Guiana "anywhere in nature, " as he craftilysaid. When Raleigh returned after his last miserable failure in May1617, the monarch spared no sneer and no reproof to the pirate of theseas. Of course, the King was right; there was no mine of diamonds, nogolden city. But the immense treasures that haunted Raleigh's dreamswere more real than reality; they existed in the future; he looked farahead, and our sympathies to-day, and our gratitude also, are all forthe noble and valorous knight who sailed out into the West searching foran unknown El Dorado. 

It is not so easy to defend the character of our hero against those who, like Hume, have objected to his methods in the prosecution of hisdesigns. To Hume, as to many others before and since, Raleigh seemed"extremely defective either in solid understanding, or morals, or both. "The excellent historians of the eighteenth century could not make uptheir minds whether he was a hero or an impostor. Did he believe in theGuiana mine, or was he, through all those strenuous years, hoodwinkingthe world? Had he any purpose, save to plunder the Spaniard? Perhaps hisown family doubted his sanity, for his son Walter, when he charged theSpanish settlement at San Thomé, pointed to the house of the littlecolony and shouted to his men: "Come on, this is the true mine, and nonebut fools would look for any other!" Accusations of bad faith, offactious behaviour, of disloyal intrigue, were brought up against SirWalter over and over again during the "day of his tempestuous life, drawn on into an evening" of ignominy and blood. These charges were the"inmost and soul-piercing wounds" of which he spoke, still "aching, "still "uncured. "

There is no need to recount to you the incidents of his life, but I mayremind you that after the failure of the latest expedition to SouthAmerica the Privy Council, under pressure from the Spanish Ambassador, gave orders to Sir Lewis Stukeley to bring the body of Sir WalterRaleigh speedily to London. This was the culmination of his fall, since, three days after Raleigh landed at Plymouth, the King had assured Spainthat "not all those who have given security for Raleigh can save himfrom the gallows. " His examination followed, and the publication of the_Apology for the Voyage to Guiana_. The trial dragged on, while JamesI. , in a manner almost inconceivable, allowed himself to be hurried andbullied by the insolent tyrant Philip II. If the English King did notmake haste to execute Raleigh the Spaniards would fetch him away andhang him in Madrid. In these conditions, and clutching at life as a manclutches at roots and branches when he is sliding down a precipice, theconduct of Raleigh has given cause to his critics to blaspheme. Hewriggled like an eel, he pretended to be sick, he pretended to be mad, in order to protract his examination. He prevaricated about his mine, about the French alliance, about the Spanish treaties, about his storesand instruments. Did he believe, or did he not believe, in the Empire ofthe Inca, in the Amazons or Republic of Women, in the gold lying hiddenin the hard white spar of El Dorado? We do not know, and his own latestefforts at explanation only cloud our counsel. He was perhaps really alittle mad at last, his feverish brain half-crazed by the movement onland and sea of the triumphant wealth of Spain. 

Let us never overlook that the master-passion of his whole career washatred of this tyrannous prosperity of England's most formidable rival. He acted impulsively, and even unjustly; there was much in his methodsthat a cool judgment must condemn; but he was fighting, with his back tothe wall, in order that the British race should not be crowded out ofexistence by "the proud Iberian. " He saw that if Spain were permitted toextend her military and commercial supremacy unchecked, there would bean end to civilisation. Democracy was a thing as yet undeveloped, butthe seeds of it were lying in the warm soil of English liberty, andRaleigh perceived, more vehemently than any other living man, that thecomplete victory of Spain would involve the shipwreck of England's hopesof future prosperity. Nor was he exclusively interested in England, though all his best hopes were ours. When he had been a lad at Oxford hehad broken away from his studies in 1569 to help the Protestant princesas a gentleman volunteer in France, and he took part in the famousbattle of Jarnac. He is supposed to have fought in France for six years. From early youth his mind was "bent on military glory, " and always inopposition to Spain. His escape from the bloody Vespers of SaintBartholomew had given him a deep distrust of the policy of Rome. TheSpaniard had "abused and tormented" the wretched inhabitants ofFlanders. Sir Walter Raleigh dreamed that by the combination in arms ofEngland, France, and the Low Countries, the Spaniards "might not only bepersuaded to live in peace, but all their swelling and overflowingstreams might be brought back into their natural channels and oldbanks. "

Raleigh stood out, as he put it himself, against "the continuance ofthis boundless ambition in mortal men. " The rulers in Madrid, transported by their own arrogance, had determined to impose theirreligion, their culture, their form of government, on the world. It wasa question whether the vastly superior moral and intellectual energy ofEngland and France would not be crushed beneath the heel of Spain. Raleigh was ready to sacrifice everything, to imperil his own soul, toprevent that. He says you might as well "root out the Christian religionaltogether" as join "the rest of all Europe to Spain. " In his zeal toprevent "the continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men, " helent himself to acts which we must not attempt to condone. There is nouse in trying to explain away the facts of his cruel and even savagefanaticism in Ireland when he was governor of Munster. He was always aptto be abruptly brutal to a man who crossed his path. But even his Irishcareer offers aspects on which we may dwell with pure pleasure. Nothingcould be more romantic than those adventures, like the feats of apaladin of the Faerie Queen, which he encountered in the great wood ofLismore; while the story of how he carried off Lord and Lady Roche fromtheir breakfast-table in their own castle of Ballyinharsh, and how herode with them up ravines and round precipices in that mad flight fromtheir retainers, is as rousing as any scene ever imagined by Dumas_père_. 

Raleigh called himself the Shepherd of the Ocean, and the name fits himwell, even though his flock were less like sheep than like a leash ofhunting leopards. His theory was that with a pack of small and activepinnaces he could successfully hunt the lumbering Spanish galleonswithout their being able to hit back. He was, in contradistinction tomany preceding English admirals, a cautious fighter at sea, and he says, in a striking passage of the _History of the World_, written towards theend of his career, "to clap ships together without any considerationbelongs rather to a madman than to a man of war. " He must have taken thekeenest interest in the gigantic failure of the Felicissima Armada in1588, but, tantalisingly enough, we have no record of his part in it. Onthe other hand, the two finest of his prose pamphlets, the _Relation ofthe Action in Cadiz Harbour_ and the incomparable _Report on the Fightin the Revenge_, supply us with ample materials for forming an idea ofhis value as a naval strategist. Raleigh's earliest biographer, Oldysthe antiquary, speaks of him as "raising a grove of laurels out of thesea, " and it is certainly upon that element that he reaches his highesteffect of prominence. It was at sea that he could give fullest scope tohis hatred of the tyrannous prosperity of Spain. He had to be at once agamekeeper and a poacher; he had to protect the legitimate interests ofEnglish shipping against privateers and pirates, while he was persuadedto be, or felt himself called upon to become, no little of a piratehimself. He was a passionate advocate of the freedom of the seas, andthose who look upon Raleigh as a mere hot-brained enthusiast should readhis little book called _Observations on Trade and Commerce_, written inthe Tower, and see what sensible views he had about the causes of thedepression of trade. These sage opinions did not check him, or hisfleets of hunting-pinnaces, from lying in wait for the heavy wallowingplate-ships, laden with Indian carpets and rubies and sandalwood andebony, which came swinging up to the equator from Ceylon or Malabar. The"freedom of the seas" was for Raleigh's ship, the _Roebuck_; it was byno means for the _Madre de Dios_. We find these moral inconsistencies inthe mind of the best of adventurers. 

A sketch of Raleigh's character would be imperfect indeed if itcontained no word concerning his genius as a coloniser. One of his maindeterminations, early in life, was "to discover and conquer unknownlands, and take possession of them in the Queen's name. " We celebrate inSir Walter Raleigh one of the most intelligent and imaginative of thefounders of our colonial empire. The English merchantmen before his timehad been satisfied with the determination to grasp the wealth of the NewWorld as it came home to Spain; it had not occurred to them to competewith the great rival at the fountain-head of riches. Even men like Drakeand Frobisher had been content with a policy of forbidding Spain, as thepoet Wither said, "to check our ships from sailing where they please. "South America was already mainly in Spanish hands, but North America wasstill open to invasion. It was Raleigh's half-brother, Sir HumphreyGilbert, who first thought of planting an English settlement in what isnow the United States, in 1578. But Gilbert had "no luck at sea, " asQueen Elizabeth observed, and it was Raleigh who, in 1584, took up thescheme of colonisation. He did not drop it until the death of Elizabeth, when, under the east wind of the new _régime_, the blossom of hiscolonial enterprises flagged. 

The motion for the ceremony of to-day originated with the authorities ofan important American city, which proudly bears the name of ouradventurer. The earliest settlement in what are now the United Stateswas made at Roanoke, in Virginia, on a day which must always beprominent in the annals of civilisation, August 17th, 1585. But thiscolony lasted only ten months, and it was not until nearly two yearslater that the fourth expedition which Raleigh sent out succeeded inmaintaining a perilous foothold in the new country. This was the littletrembling taper to which his own name was given, the twinkling sparkwhich is now the flourishing city of Raleigh in North Carolina. We maywell marvel at the pertinacity with which Sir Walter persisted, in theface of innumerable difficulties, in sending out one colonising fleetafter another, although, contrary to common legend, he himself never setfoot in North America. It was fortunate that at this period of hiscareer he was wealthy, for the attempts to plant settlements in the vastregion which he named Virginia cost him more than £40, 000. We note atall turns of his fortune his extraordinary tenacity of purpose, which heillustrated, as though by a motto, in the verses he addressed to acomrade towards the end of his imprisonment in the Tower:--

 "Change not! to change thy fortune 'tis too late; Who with a manly faith resolves to die May promise to himself a lasting State, Though not so great, yet free from infamy. "

So we may think of him in his prime, as he stood on the Hoe of Plymouthtwenty years before, a gallant figure of a man, bedizened with preciousstones, velvets, and embroidered damasks, shouting his commands to hiscaptains in a strong Devonshire accent. We think of him resolutelygazing westward always, with the light of the sea in his eyes. 

We come to the final scene which we are here to-day to commemorate. Little honour to the rulers of England in 1618 redounds from it, and yetwe may feel that it completed and even redeemed from decay the characterof Raleigh. This tragedy, which was almost a murder, was needed to roundoff the accomplishment of so strange and frantic a career of romanticviolence, and to stamp it with meaning. If Raleigh had been thrown fromhis horse or had died of the ague in his bed, we should have beendepressed by the squalid circumstances, we should have been lessconscious than we are now of his unbroken magnanimity. His failures andhis excesses had made him unpopular throughout England, and he was bothproud and peevish in his recognition of the fact. He declared that hewas "nothing indebted" to the world, and again that, "the common peopleare evil judges of honest things. " But the thirteen years of hisimprisonment caused a reaction. People forgot how troublesome he hadbeen and only recollected his magnificence. They remembered nothing butthat he had spent his whole energy and fortune in resisting thebrutality and avarice of the Spaniard. 

Then came the disgraceful scene of his cross-examination at Westminster, and the condemnation by his venal judges at the order of a paltry king. It became known, or shrewdly guessed, that Spain had sent to James I. Ahectoring alternative that Raleigh must be executed in London or sentalive for a like purpose to Madrid. The trial was a cowardly andignominious submission of the English Government to the insolence ofEngland's hereditary enemy. Raleigh seemed for the moment to have failedcompletely, yet it was really like the act of Samson, who slew more menat his death than in all his life. Samuel Pepys, who had some fineintuitions at a time when the national _moral_ was very low, spoke ofRaleigh as being "given over, as a sacrifice, " to our enemies. This hasbeen, in truth, the secret of his unfailing romantic popularity, and itis the reason of the emotion which has called us together here threehundred years after his death upon the scaffold. 

[Footnote 1: Address delivered at the Mansion House, October 29th, 1918, on occasion of the Tercentenary of Sir Walter Raleigh's death. ]

THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE

Among the "co-supremes and stars of love" which form the constellatedglory of our greatest poet there is one small splendour which we are aptto overlook in our general survey. But, if we isolate it from otherconsiderations, it is surely no small thing that Shakespeare created andintroduced into our literature the Dramatic Song. If with statisticalfinger we turn the pages of all his plays, we shall discover, notperhaps without surprise, that these contain not fewer than fiftystrains of lyrical measure. Some of the fifty, to be sure, are merestar-dust, but others include some of the very jewels of our tongue. They range in form from the sophisticated quatorzains of _The TwoGentlemen of Verona_ (where, however, comes "Who is Silvia?") to thereckless snatches of melody in _Hamlet_. But all have a character whichis Shakespearean, and this regardless of the question so often raised, and so incapable of reply, as to whether some of the wilder ones areShakespeare's composition or no. Whoever originally may have writtensuch scraps as "They bore him bare-faced on the bier" and "Come o'er thebourne, Bessy, to me, " the spirit of Shakespeare now pervades andpossesses them. 

Our poet was a prodigious innovator in this as in so many other matters. Of course, the idea and practice of musical interludes in plays was notquite novel. In Shakespeare's early youth that remarkable artist inlanguage, John Lyly, had presented songs in several of his plays, andthese were notable for what his contemporary, Henry Upchear, called"their labouring beauty. " We may notice that Lyly's songs were notprinted till long after Shakespeare's death, but doubtless he hadlistened to them. Peele and Greene had brilliant lyrical gifts, but theydid not exercise them in their dramas, nor did Lodge, whose novel ofRosalynde (1590) contains the only two precedent songs which we couldwillingly add to Shakespeare's juvenile repertory. But while I think itwould be rash to deny that the lyrics of Lodge and Lyly had their directinfluence on the style of Shakespeare, neither of those admirableprecursors conceived the possibility of making the Song an integral partof the development of the drama. This was Shakespeare's invention, andhe applied it with a technical adroitness which had never been dreamedof before and was never rivalled after. 

This was not apprehended by the early critics of our divine poet, andhas never yet, perhaps, received all the attention it deserves. We mayfind ourselves bewildered if we glance at what the eighteenth-centurycommentators said, for instance, about the songs in _Twelfth Night_. They called the adorable rhapsodies of the Clown "absurd" and"unintelligible"; "O Mistress mine" was in their ears "meaningless";"When that I was" appeared to them "degraded buffoonery. " They did notperceive the close and indispensable connection between the Clown's songand the action of the piece, although the poet had been careful to pointout that it was a moral song "dulcet in contagion, " and too good, exceptfor sarcasm, to be wasted on Sir Andrew and Sir Toby. The criticsneglected to note what the Duke says about "Come away, come away, Death, " and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this must notreally have been sung by Viola, all the while insensible to the poignantdramatic value of it as warbled by the ironic Clown in the presence ofthe blinded pair. But indeed the whole of _Twelfth Night_ is burdenedwith melody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and at eachchange of scene some unseen hand is overheard touching a harp-string. The lovely, infatuated lyrics arrive, dramatically, to relieve thismusical tension at its height. 

Rather different, and perhaps still more subtle, is the case of _AWinter's Tale_, where the musical obsession is less prominent, and wherethe songs are all delivered from the fantastic lips of Autolycus. Hereagain the old critics were very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts "Whendaffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn as white as driven snow" into onebag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as "two nonsensical songs" sungby "a pickpocket. " Dr. Warburton blushed to think that such "nonsense"could be foisted on Shakespeare's text. Strange that those learned menwere unable to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely humanand pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral part of thedrama. They complete the revelation of the complex temperament ofAutolycus, with his passion for flowers and millinery, his hystericalbalancing between laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his suddensentimentality, like the Clown's

 "Not a friend, not a friend greet My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown!"

It is in these subtle lyrical amalgams of humour and tenderness that thefirm hand of the creator of character reveals itself. 

But it is in _The Tempest_ that Shakespeare's supremacy as a writer ofsongs is most brilliantly developed. Here are seven or eight lyrics, andamong them are some of the loveliest things that any man has written. What was ever composed more liquid, more elastic, more delicatelyfairy-like than Ariel's First Song?

 "Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands: Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd, -- The wild waves whist. "

That is, not "kissed the wild waves, " as ingenious punctuators pretend, but, parenthetically, "kissed one another, --the wild waves being silentthe while. " Even fairies do not kiss waves, than which no embrace couldbe conceived less rewarding. Has any one remarked the echo of Marlowehere, from _Hero and Leander_, "when all is whist and still, Save that the sea playing on yellow sand Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land!"

But Marlowe, with all his gifts, could never have written the lyricalparts of _The Tempest_. This song is in emotional sympathy withFerdinand, and in the truest sense dramatic, not a piece of pretty versefoisted in to add to the entertainment. 

Ariel's Second Song has been compared with Webster's "Call for the robinredbreast" in _The White Devil_, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, ittolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty, " as Ferdinand callsit, is like a breath of the west wind over an æolian harp. Where, in anylanguage, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than in Ariel'sFourth Song, --"Where the bee sucks"? Dowden saw in Ariel the imaginativegenius of English poetry, recently delivered from Sycorax. If we glanceat Dry den's recension of _The Tempest_ we may be inclined to think thatthe "wicked dam" soon won back her mastery. With all respect to Dryden, what are we to think of his discretion in eking out Shakespeare'sinsufficiencies with such staves as this:--

 "Upon the floods we'll sing and play And celebrate a halcyon day; Great Nephew Aeolus make no noise, Muzzle your roaring boys. "

and so forth? What had happened to the ear of England in seventy years?

As a matter of fact the perfection of dramatic song scarcely survivedShakespeare himself. The early Jacobeans, Heywood, Ford, and Dekker inparticular, broke out occasionally in delicate ditties. But mostplaywrights, like Massinger, were persistently pedestrian. The only manwho came at all close to Shakespeare as a lyrist was John Fletcher, whose "Lay a garland on my hearse" nobody could challenge if it werefound printed first in a Shakespeare quarto. The three great songs in"Valentinian" have almost more splendour than any of Shakespeare's, though never quite the intimate beauty, the singing spontaneity of"Under the greenwood tree" or "Hark, hark, the lark. " It has grown to bethe habit of anthologists to assert Shakespeare's right to "Roses, theirsharp spikes being gone. " The mere fact of its loveliness and perfectiongives them no authority to do so; and to my ear the rather statelyprocession of syllables is reminiscent of Fletcher. We shall never becertain; and who would not swear that "Hear, ye ladies that are coy" wasby the same hand that wrote "Sigh no more, ladies, " if we were not sureof the contrary? But the most effective test, even in the case ofFletcher, is to see whether the trill of song is, or is not, an inherentportion of the dramatic structure of the play. This is the hall-mark ofShakespeare, and perhaps of him alone. 

CATHARINE TROTTER, THE PRECURSOR OF THE BLUESTOCKINGS

The practically complete absence of the Woman of Letters from ourtropical and profuse literature of the early and middle seventeenthcentury has often been observed with wonder. While France had herMadeleine de Scudéry and her Mlle. De Gournay and her Mère AngeliqueArnauld, Englishwomen of the Stuart age ventured upon no incursions intophilosophy, fiction, or theology. More and more eagerly, however, theyread books; and as a consequence of reading, they began at last towrite. The precious Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, hob-a-nobbed withevery Muse in her amazing divagations. But the earliest professionalwoman of letters was Aphra Behn, the novelist and playwright, to whosegenius justice has only quite lately been done by Mr. Montague Summers. Mrs. Behn died in 1689, and it seemed at first that she had left noheritage to her sex. But there presently appeared a set of femalewriters, who enlivened the last years of the century, but who were sooneclipsed by the wits of the age of Anne, and who have been entirelyforgotten. It is to the most interesting of these "transient phantoms"that I wish to draw attention. 

The extreme precocity of Catharine Trotter makes her seem to belong tothe age of Dryden, but she was in reality younger than Addison and mostof the other contemporaries of Pope. She was born on August 16th, 1679, the younger daughter of a naval officer, Captain David Trotter, R. N. ;her mother's maiden name had been Sarah Ballenden, probably of thewell-known Catholic family of that ilk. She "had the honour of beingnearly related to the illustrious families of Maitland, Duke ofLauderdale and Drummond, Earl of Perth. " The Jacobite fourth Earl ofPerth seems to have been the patron of Captain Trotter, of whom he wrotein 1684 that he was "an ornament to his country. " Apparently the gallantcaptain was attached to Trinity House, where his probity and integrityearned him the epithet of "honest David, " and where he attracted thenotice of George, first Lord Dartmouth, when that rising statesman wasappointed Master. Captain Trotter had served the Crown from his youth, "with great gallantry and fidelity, both by land and sea, " and had beenvery successful in the Dutch wars. He had a brother who was a commanderin the Navy. We get an impression of high respectability in the outer, but not outermost, circles of influential Scottish society. Doubtlessthe infancy of Catharine was spent in conditions of dependentprosperity. These conditions were not to last. When she was four yearsold Lord Dartmouth started on the famous expedition to demolish Tangier, and he took Captain Trotter with him as his commodore. In this affair, as before, the captain distinguished himself by his ability, and insteadof returning to London after Tangier he was recommended to King CharlesII. As the proper person to convoy the fleet of the Turkey Company toits destination. Apparently it was understood that this would be thefinal reward of his services and that he was to "make his fortune" outof the Turks. Unhappily, after convoying his charge safely toScanderoon, he fell sick of the plague that was raging there, and died, in the course of January 1684, in company with all the other officers ofhis ship. Every misfortune now ensued; the purser, who was thus left tohis own devices, helped himself to the money destined for the expensesof the voyage, while, to crown all, the London goldsmith in whose handsthe captain had left his private fortune took this occasion to gobankrupt. The King, in these melancholy circumstances, granted anAdmiralty pension to the widow, but when he died early in the followingyear this was no longer paid, and the unfortunate ladies of the Trotterfamily might well murmur:--

 "One mischief brings another on his neck, As mighty billows tumble in the seas. "

From the beginning of her fifth year, then, Catharine experienced theprecarious lot of those who depend for a livelihood on the charity ofmore or less distant relatives. We dimly see a presentable motherpiteously gathering up such crumbs as fell from the tables of theillustrious families with whom she was remotely connected. But the Dukeof Lauderdale himself was now dead, and the Earl of Perth had passed thezenith of his power. No doubt in the seventeenth century the protectionof poor relations was carried on more systematically than it is to-day, and certainly Mrs. Trotter contrived to live and to bring up her twodaughters genteelly. The first years were the worst; the accession ofWilliam III. Brought back to England and to favour Gilbert Burnet, whobecame Bishop of Salisbury in 1688, when Catharine was nine years old. Mrs. Trotter found a patron and perhaps an employer in the Bishop, andwhen Queen Anne came to the throne her little pension was renewed. 

There is frequent reference to money in Catharine Trotter's writings, and the lack of it was the rock upon which her gifts were finallywrecked. With a competency she might have achieved a much more prominentplace in English literature than she could ever afford to reach. Sheoffers a curious instance of the depressing effect of poverty, and weget the impression that she was never, during her long and virtuouscareer, lifted above the carking anxiety which deadens the imagination. As a child, however, she seems to have awakened hopes of a high order. She was a prodigy, and while little more than an infant she displayed anillumination in literature which was looked upon, in that age of femaledarkness, as quite a portent. She taught herself French, "by her ownapplication without any instructor, " but was obliged to accept someassistance in acquiring Latin and logic. The last-mentioned subjectbecame her particular delight, and at a very tender age she drew up "anabstract" of that science "for her own use. " Thus she prepared for herfuture communion with Locke and with Leibnitz. When she was very small, in spite of frequent conferences with learned members of the Church ofEngland, she became persuaded of the truth of Catholicism and joined theRoman communion. We may conjecture that this coincided with theconversion of her kinsman, Lord Chancellor Perth, but as events turnedout it cannot but have added to the sorrows of that much-tried woman, her mother. (It should be stated that Catharine resumed the Anglicanfaith when she was twenty-eight years of age. )

She was in her tenth year when the unhappy reign of James II. Came to aclose. Mrs. Trotter's connections were now in a poor plight. The newEarl of Lauderdale was in great distress for money; Lord Dartmouth, abandoned by the King in his flight, was thrown into the Tower, where hedied on October 25th, 1691, in which year the estates of the Earl ofPerth were sequestered and he himself hunted out of the country. Ruinsimultaneously fell on all the fine friends of our infant prodigy, andwe can but guess how it affected her. Yet there were plenty of otherJacobites left in London, and Catharine's first public appearance showsthat she cultivated their friendship. She published in 1693 a copy ofverses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recoveryfrom the smallpox; she was then fourteen years of age. Higgons was ayoung man of twenty-three, who had lately returned from the exiled courtin France, where he had distinguished himself by his agreeable manners, and who had just made a name for himself by poems addressed to Drydenand by a prologue to Congreve's _Old Batchelor_. He was afterwards tobecome famous for a little while as a political historian. CatharineTrotter's verses are bad, but she addresses Higgons as "lovely youth, "and claims his gratitude for her tribute in terms which are almostboisterous. This poem was not only her introduction to the public, but, through Bevil Higgons, was probably the channel of her acquaintance withCongreve and Dryden. 

Throughout her life she was fond of writing letters to celebratedpeople; she now certainly wrote to Congreve and doubtless to Dryden. Afreedom in correspondence ran in the family. Her poor mother is revealedto us as always "renewing her application" to somebody or other. We nextfind the youthful poet in relation with the Earl of Dorset, from whomshe must have concealed her Jacobite propensities. Dorset was the greatpublic patron of poetry under William III. , and Catharine Trotter, agedsixteen, having composed a tragedy, appealed to him for support. It wasvery graciously granted, and _Agnes de Castro_, in five acts and inblank verse, "written by a young lady, " was produced at the TheatreRoyal in 1695, under the "protection" of Charles Earl of Dorset andMiddlesex, Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household. The event causeda considerable commotion. No woman had written for the English stagesince the death of Mrs. Behn, and curiosity was much excited. Mrs. Verbruggen, that enchanting actress, but in male attire, recited aclever, ranting epilogue at the close of the performance, in which shesaid:--

 "'tis whispered here Our Poetess is virtuous, young and fair, "

but the secret was an open one. Wycherley, who contributed verses, knewall about it, and so did Mrs. Manley, while Powell and Colley Cibberwere among the actors. We may be sure that little Mistress Trotter'ssurprising talents were the subjects of much discussion at Will's CoffeeHouse, and that the question of securing her for the rival theatre wasanxiously debated at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Her success in Agnes deCastro was the principal asset which Drury Lane had to set that seasonagainst Congreve's splendid adventure with Love for Love. 

Agnes de Castro is an immature production, and shows a juvenileinsensibility to plagiarism, since the subject and treatment areborrowed implicitly from a French novel by Mlle. De Brillac, publishedin Paris and London a few years before. [2] The conception of court lifeat Coimbra in the fourteenth century is that of this French lady, and isinnocent of Portuguese local colour. But, as the dramatic work of a girlof sixteen, the play is rather extraordinary for nimble movement andadroit theatrical arrangements. It is evident that Catharine Trotter waswell versed in the stage traditions of her own day, and we may wonderhow a highly respectable girl of sixteen found her opportunity. TheEnglish playhouse under William III. Was no place for a very young lady, even if she wore a mask. There is a good deal of meritoriouscharacter-drawing in Agnes de Castro. The conception of a benevolent andtenderly forgiving Princess is well contrasted with the fierce purity ofAgnes and the infatuation of the Prince. Towards the close of the firstact there is a capital scene of exquisite confusion between thisgenerous and distracted trio. The opening of the third act, betweenElvira and her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has somestrong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with the stabbing of thePrincess and the accusation of Agnes by Elvira, is puerile, but wasdoubtless welcome to a sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but notat all an unpromising one. 

Early in 1696 _Agnes de Castro_, still anonymous, was published as abook, and for the next five or six years we find Catharine Trotterhabitually occupied in writing for the stage. Without question she didso professionally, though in what way dramatists at the close of theseventeenth century lived by their pens is difficult to conjecture. Avery rare play, _The Female Wits; or, the Triumvirate of Poets_, theauthorship of which has hitherto defied conjecture, was acted at DruryLane after Catharine Trotter had been tempted across to Lincoln's InnFields, and is evidently inspired by the intense jealousy whichsmouldered between the two great houses. The success of Miss Trotterincited two older ladies to compete with her; these were Mrs. Delariviere Manley, who was a discarded favourite of Barbara Villiers, and fat Mrs. Mary Pix, the stage-struck consort of a tailor. Theserather ridiculous women professed themselves followers of Catharine, andthey produced plays of their own not without some success. With her theyformed the trio of Female Wits who were mocked in the lively but, on thewhole, rather disappointing play I have just mentioned, in the course ofwhich it is spitefully remarked of Calista--who is Miss Trotter--thatshe has "made no small struggle in the world to get into print, " and is"now in such a state of wedlock to pen and ink that it will be verydifficult" for her "to get out of it. "

In acting _The Female Wits_ Mrs. Temple, who had played the Princess in_Agnes de Castro_, took the part of Calista, and doubtless, in thecoarse fashion of those days, made up exactly like poor CatharineTrotter, who was described as "a Lady who pretends to the learnedLanguages, and assumes to herself the name of a Critic. " This was acharacter, however, which she would not have protested against with muchvigour, for she had now quite definitely taken up the position of areformer and a pioneer. She posed as the champion of women'sintellectual rights, and she was accepted as representing in activeliterary work the movement which Mary Astell had recently foreshadowedin her remarkable _Serious Proposal to Ladies_ of 1694. We turn again to_The Female Wits_, and we find Marsilia (Mrs. Manley) describing Calistato Mrs. Wellfed (Mrs. Fix) as "the vainest, proudest, senseless Thing!She pretends to grammar! writes in mood and figure! does everythingmethodically!" Yet when Calista appears on the stage, Mrs. Manley rushesacross to fling her arms around her and to murmur: "O charmingest Nymphof all Apollo's Train, let me embrace thee!" Later on Calista says toMrs. Pix, the fat tailoress, "I cannot but remind you, Madam . .. I readAristotle in his own language"; and of a certain tirade in a play of BenJonson she insists: "I know it so well, as to have turn'd it intoLatin. " Mrs. Pix admits her own ignorance of all these things; she "cango no further than the eight parts of speech. " This brings down upon heran icy reproof from Calista: "Then I cannot but take the Freedom to say. .. You impose upon the Town. " We get the impression of a preciseness ofmanner and purpose which must have given Catharine a certain air ofpriggishness, not entirely unbecoming, perhaps, but very strange in thatloose theatre of William III. 

Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her complaining to thePrincess (afterwards Queen Anne) that she has become "the mark of illNature" through recommending herself "by what the other Sex think theirpeculiar Prerogative"--that is, intellectual distinction. CatharineTrotter was still only nineteen years of age when she produced hertragedy of _Fatal Friendship_, the published copy of which (1698) is allbegarlanded with evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of asuccession of "applausive copies" of verses. In these we are told thatshe had "checked the rage of reigning vice that had debauched thestage. " This was an allusion to the great controversy then just raisedby Jeremy Collier in his famous _Short View of the Immorality andProfaneness of the Stage_, in which all the dramatists of the day wereviolently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has thecourage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrellingwith her male colleagues. She takes the side of the decent women. 

 "You as your Sex's champion art come forth To fight their quarrel and assert their worth, "

one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds:--

 "You stand the first of stage-reformers too. "

The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with virtue and atvindicating the right of woman to assume "the tragic laurel. "

This was the most brilliant moment in the public career of ourbluestocking. _Fatal Friendship_ enjoyed a success which CatharineTrotter was not to taste again, and of all her plays it is the only onewhich has ever been reprinted. It is very long and extremelysentimental, and written in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporariessaid that it placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, incompany with Congreve and Granville "the polite, " who had written a_She-Gallants_, which was everything that Miss Trotter did not wish herplays to be. _Fatal Friendship_ has an ingenious plot, in which thequestion of money takes a prominence very unusual in tragedy. Almostevery character in the piece is in reduced circumstances. Felicia, sister to Belgard (who is too poor to maintain her), is wooed by thewealthy Roquelaure, although she is secretly married to Gramont, who isalso too poor to support a wife. Belgard, afraid that Gramont will makelove to Felicia (that is, to his own secret wife), persuades him--inorder that his best friend, Castalio, may be released from a debtor'sprison--bigamously to many Lamira, a wealthy widow. But Castalio is inlove with Lamira, and is driven to frenzy by Gramont's illegal marriage. It all depends upon income in a manner comically untragical. The quarrelbetween the friends in the fifth act is an effective piece ofstage-craft, but the action is spoiled by a ridiculous general butcheryat the close of all. However, the audience was charmed, and even "thestubbornest could scarce deny their Tears. "

_Fatal Friendship_ was played at the Lincoln's Inn Theatre, and no doubtit was Congreve who brought Miss Trotter over from Drury Lane. His warmfriendship for her had unquestionably a great deal to do with hersuccess and with the jealousy of her rivals. A letter exists in whichthe great dramatist acknowledges, in 1697, the congratulations of hisyoung admirer, and it breathes an eager cordiality. Congreve requestedBetterton to present him to Catharine Trotter, and his partiality forher company is mentioned by several writers. The spiteful author of _TheFemale Wits_ insinuates that Congreve made the looking-over ofCatharine's scenes "his pretence for daily visits. " Another satirist, in1698, describes Congreve sitting very gravely with his hat over hiseyes, "together with the two she-things called Poetesses which write forhis house, " half-hidden from the public in a little side-box. Farquhar, too, seeing the celebrated writer of _Fatal Friendship_ in the theatreon the third night of the performance of his _Love and a Bottle_, had"his passions wrought so high" by a sight of the beautiful author thathe wrote her a letter in which he called her "one of the fairest of thesex, and the best judge. " If Catharine Trotter, as the cynosure ofdelicacy, at the age of nineteen, sat through _Love and a Bottle_without a blush, even _her_ standard of decency was not very exacting. But in all this rough, coarse world of wit her reputation never suffereda rebuff. 

Encouraged by so much public and private attention, our young dramatistcontinued to work with energy and conscientiousness. But her effortswere forestalled by an event, or rather a condition of the nationaltemper, of which too little notice has been taken by literaryhistorians. The attacks on the stage for its indecency and blasphemy hadbeen flippantly met by the theatrical agents, but they had sunk deeplyinto the conscience of the people. There followed with alarmingabruptness a general public repulsion against the playhouses, and tothis, early in 1699, a roughly worded Royal Proclamation gave voice. During the whole of that year the stage was almost in abeyance, and evenCongreve, with _The Way of the World_, was unable to woo his audienceback to Lincoln's Inn. During this time of depression Catharine Trottercomposed at least two tragedies, which she was unable to get performed, while the retirement of Congreve in a paroxysm of annoyance must havebeen a very serious disadvantage to her. 

On May 1st, 1700, Dryden died, and with him a dramatic age passed away. What Miss Trotter's exact relations with the great poet had been isuncertain; she not only celebrated his death in a long elegy, in whichshe speaks on behalf of the Muses, but wrote another and more importantpoem, in which she gives very sound advice to the poetical beginner, whois to take Dryden as a model, and to be particularly careful to disdainSettle, Durfey, and Blackmore, typical poetasters of the period. Sherecommends social satire to the playwright:--

 "Let the nice well-bred beau himself perceive The most accomplished, useless thing alive; Expose the bottle-sparks that range the town, -- Shaming themselves with follies not their own, -- But chief these foes to virgin innocence, Who, while they make to honour vain pretence, With all that's base and impious can dispense. "

Honour to those who aim high and execute boldly!

 "If Shakespeare's spirit, with transporting fire, The animated scene throughout inspire; If in the piercing wit of Vanbrugh drest, Each sees his darling folly made a jest; If Garth's and Dryden's genius, through each line, In artful praise and well-turn'd satire shine, -- To us ascribe the immortal sacred flame. "

In this dead period of the stage Catharine Trotter found a warm friendand doubtless an efficient patron in a Lady Piers, of whom we should beglad to know more. Sir George Piers, the husband of this lady, was anofficer of rank under the Duke of Marlborough, later to become useful toCatharine Trotter. Meanwhile the latter returned to the Theatre Royal inDrury Lane, where, in 1701, under the patronage of Lord Halifax--Pope's"Bufo"--she produced her third tragedy, _The Unhappy Penitent_. Thededication of this play to Halifax is a long and interesting essay onthe poetry of the age. The author passes Dryden, Otway, Congreve, andLee under examination, and finds technical blemishes in them all:--

 "The inimitable Shakespeare seems alone secure on every side from an attack. I speak not here of faults against the rules of poetry, but against the natural Genius. He had all the images of nature present to him, studied her thoroughly, and boldly copied all her various features, for though he has chiefly exerted himself on the more masculine passions, 'tis as the choice of his judgment, not the restraint of his genius, and he has given us as a proof he could be every way equally admirable. "

Lady Piers wrote the prologue to _The Unhappy Penitent_ in verses betterturned than might have been expected. She did not stint praise to heryoung friend, whom she compares to the rising sun:--

 "Like him, bright Maid, Thy great perfections shine As awful, as resplendent, as divine!. .. Minerva and Diana guard your soul!"

_The Unhappy Penitent_ is not a pleasing performance: it is amorous andviolent, but yet dull. Catharine's theory was better than her practice. Nevertheless, it seems to have been successful, for the author some timeafterwards, speaking of the town's former discouragement of her dramas, remarks that "the taste is mended. " Later in 1701 she brought out atDrury Lane her only comedy, _Love at a Loss_, dedicated in mostenthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessingof my Fate, " the privilege of a share in her friendship. _Love at aLoss_ was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedywhich the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate methodof construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. Thefirst and only public section of Catharine Trotter's career was nowover, and she withdrew, a wayworn veteran at the age of twenty-two, tomore elevated studies. 

When _Love at a Loss_ was published the author had already left town, and after a visit to Lady Piers in Kent she now settled at Salisbury, atthe house of a physician, Dr. Inglis, who had married her only sister. Her growing intimacy with the family of Bishop Burnet may have hadsomething to do with her determination to make this city her home. Sheformed a very enthusiastic friendship with the Bishop's second lady, whowas an active theologian and a very intelligent woman. Our poetess wasfascinated by Mrs. Burnet. "I have not met, " she writes in 1701, "suchperfection in any of our sex. " She now visited in the best Wiltshiresociety. When the famous singer, John Abell, was in Salisbury, he gave aconcert at the palace, and Catharine Trotter was so enchanted that sherode out after him six miles to Tisbury to hear him sing again at LordArundell of Wardour's house. She had a great appreciation of theBishop's "volatile activity. " It is now that the name of Locke firstoccurs in her correspondence, and we gather that she came into somepersonal contact with him through a member of the Bishop'sfamily--George Burnet of Kemney, in Aberdeenshire--probably a cousin, with whom she now cultivated an ardent intellectual friendship. He leftEngland on a mission which occupied him from the middle of 1701 until1708, and this absence, as we may suspect, alone prevented theiracquaintance from ripening into a warmer feeling. The romance andtragedy of Catharine Trotter's life gather, it is plain, around thisGeorge Burnet, who was a man of brilliant accomplishments andinterested, like herself, in philosophical studies. 

These, it would appear, Catharine Trotter had never abandoned, but sheapplied herself to them closely at Salisbury, where she made somesuperior acquaintances. One of these was John Norris of Bemerton, whose_Theory of an Ideal and Intelligible World_ had just made somesensation. By the intermediary of George Burnet she came in touch withsome of the leading French writers of the moment, such as Malebrancheand Madame Dacier. There is a French poet, unnamed, who understandsEnglish, but he is gone to Rome before he can be made to read _The FatalFriendship_. Meanwhile, Catharine Trotter's obsession with the ideas ofLocke was giving some anxiety to her friends. That philosopher hadpublished his famous _Essay on the Human Understanding_ in 1690, and ithad taken several years for the opposition to his views, and inparticular to his theological toleration, to take effect. But in 1697there were made a number of almost simultaneous attacks on Locke'sposition. The circle at Salisbury was involved in them, for one of thesewas written by Norris of Bemerton, and another is attributed to a memberof the Burnet family. Catharine Trotter, who had studied Locke's laterworks with enthusiastic approval, was scandalised by the attacks, andsat down to refute them. This must have been in 1701. 

Although the intellectual society of Salisbury was prominent in takingthe conservative view of Locke, our bluestocking could not refrain fromtelling Mrs. Burnet what she had done, nor from showing her treatise tothat friend under vows of confidence. But Mrs. Burnet, who was impulsiveand generous, could not keep the secret; she spoke about it to theBishop, and then to Norris of Bemerton, and finally (in June 1702) toLocke himself. Locke was at Oates, confined by his asthma; he was oldand suffering, but still full of benevolence and curiosity, and he wasgraciously interested in his remarkable defender at Salisbury. As hecould not himself travel, he sent his adopted son to call on CatharineTrotter, with a present of books; this was Peter King, still a youngman, but already M. P. For Beer Alston, and later to become LordChancellor and the first Lord King of Ockham. George Burnet, writingfrom Paris, had been very insistent that Catharine should not publishher treatise, but she overruled his objections, and her _Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding_ appeared anonymously in May1702. People were wonderfully polite in those days, and Locke himselfwrote to his "protectress" a charming letter in which he told her thather "_Defence_ was the greatest honour my Essay could have procured me. "

She sent her _Defence_ to Leibnitz, who criticised it at considerablelength:--[3]

 "J'ai lu livre de Mlle. Trotter. Dans la dedicace elle exhorte M. Locke à donner des démonstrations de morale. Je crois qu'il aurait eu de la peine à y reussir. L'art de démontrer n'est pas son fait. Je tiens que nous nous appercevons sans raisonnement de ce qui est juste et injuste, comme nous nous appercevons sans raison de quelques theoremes de Geometrie; mais il est tousjours bon de venir à la démonstration. Justice et injustice ne dependent seulement de la nature humaine, mais de la nature de la substance intelligente en général; et Mlle. Trotter remarque fort bien qu'elle vient de la nature de Dieu et n'est point arbitraire. La nature de Dieu est tousjours fondée en raison. "

Notwithstanding all this, the commentators of Locke appear, withoutexception, to ignore the _Defence_, and it was probably never much readoutside the cultivated Salisbury circle. 

In this year, 1702, the health of Catharine Trotter began to give heruneasiness, and it was for this reason that she left Salisbury for awhile. She was once more living in that city, however, from May 1703 toMarch 1704, making a special study of geography. "My strength, " shewrites to George Burnet, "is very much impaired, and God knows whether Ishall ever retrieve it. " Her thoughts turned again to the stage, and inthe early months of 1703 she composed her fifth and last play, thetragedy of _The Revolution in Sweden_; "but it will not be ready forthe stage, " she says, "till next winter. " Her interest in philosophydid not flag. She was gratified by some communications, through Burnet, with Leibnitz, and she would have liked to be the intermediary betweenLocke and some philosophical "gentlemen" on the Continent, probablyMalebranche and Leibnitz, in a controversy. But this was hopeless, andshe writes (March 16th, 1704):--

 "Mr. Locke is unwilling to engage in controversy with the gentlemen you mention; for, I am informed, his infirmities have obliged him, for some time past, to desist from his serious studies, and only employ himself in lighter things, which serve to amuse and unbend the mind. "

Locke, indeed, had but six months more to live, and though he retainedhis charming serenity of spirit he was well aware that the endapproached. Never contentious or desirous of making a sensation, he wasleast of all, in his present precarious state, likely to enter intodiscussion with foreign philosophers. It does not appear that CatharineTrotter ever enjoyed the felicity of seeing in the flesh the greatestobject of her homage; but he occupied most of her thoughts. She wasrendered highly indignant by the efforts made by the reactionaries atOxford and elsewhere to discourage the writings of Locke and to throwsuspicion on their influence. She read over and over again hisphilosophical, educational, and religious treatises, and ever found themmore completely to her taste. If she had enjoyed the power to do so shewould have proclaimed the wisdom and majesty of Locke from everyhousetop, and she envied Lady Masham her free and constant intercoursewith so beautiful a mind. Catharine Trotter watched, but from adistance, the extinction of a life thus honoured, which came to apeaceful end at Oates on October 28th, 1704. The following passage doesnot appear--or I am much mistaken--to have attracted the attention ofLocke's biographers:--

 "I was very sensibly touched with the news of Mr. Locke's death. All the particulars I hear of it are that he retained his perfect senses to the last, and spoke with the same composedness and indifference on affairs as usual. His discourse was much on the different views a dying man has of worldly things; and that nothing gives him any satisfaction, but the reflection of what good he has done in his life. Lady Masham went to his chamber to speak to him on some, business; when he had answered in the same manner he was accustomed to speak, he desired her to leave the room, and, immediately after she was gone, turned about and died. "

She records that, after the death of Locke, Lady Masham communicatedwith Leibnitz, and Catharine is very indignant because a doubt had beensuggested as to whether the writer's thoughts and expressions were herown. This was calculated to infuriate Catharine Trotter, who outpours inforcible terms her just indignation:--

 "Women are as capable of penetrating into the grounds of things, and reasoning justly, as men are, who certainly have no advantage of us, but in their opportunities of knowledge. As Lady Masham is allowed by everybody to have great natural endowments, she has taken pains to improve them; and no doubt profited much by a long intimate society with so extraordinary a man as Mr. Locke. So that I see no reason to suspect a woman of her character would pretend to write anything that was not entirely her own. I pray, be more equitable to her sex than the generality of your's are, who, when anything is written by a woman that they cannot deny their approbation to, are sure to rob us of the glory of it by concluding 'tis not her own. "

This is the real voice of Catharine Trotter, raised to defend her sex, and conscious of the many intellectual indignities and disabilitieswhich they suffered. 

The first draft of _The Revolution in Sweden_ being now completed, shesent it to Congreve, who was living very quietly in lodgings in ArundellStreet. He allowed some time to go by before, on November 2nd, 1703, heacknowledged it. His criticism, which is extremely kind, is alsopenetrating and full. "I think the design in general, " he says, "verygreat and noble; the conduct of it very artful, if not too full ofbusiness which may run into length and obscurity. " He warns her againsthaving too much noise of fighting on the stage in her second act, andagainst offending probability in the third. The fourth act is confused, and in the fifth there are too many harangues. Catharine Trotter hasasked him to be frank, and so he is, but his criticism is practical andencouraging. This excellent letter deserves to be better known. 

To continue the history of Miss Trotter's fifth and last play, _TheRevolution in Sweden_ was at length brought out at the Queen's Theatrein the Haymarket, towards the close of 1704. It had every advantagewhich popular acting could give it, since the part of the hero, CountArwide, was played by Betterton; that of Constantia, the heroine, byMrs. Barry; Gustavus by Booth; and Christina by Mrs. Harcourt. In spiteof this galaxy of talent, the reception of the play was unfavourable. The Duchess of Marlborough "and all her beauteous family" graced thetheatre on the first night, but the public was cold and inattentive. Some passages of a particularly lofty moral tone provoked laughter. _TheRevolution in Sweden_, in fact, was shown to suffer from theineradicable faults which Congreve had gently but justly suggested. Itwas very long, and very dull, and very wordy, and we could scarcely finda more deadly specimen of virtuous and didactic tragedy. Catharine wasdreadfully disappointed, nor was she completely consoled by beingstyled--by no less a person than Sophia Charlotte, Queen ofPrussia--"The Sappho of Scotland. " She determined, however, to appeal toreaders against auditors, and when, two years later, after still furtherrevision, she published _The Revolution in Sweden_, she dedicated it inmost grateful terms to the Duke of Marlborough's eldest daughter, Henrietta Godolphin. 

How Miss Trotter came to be favoured by the Churchills appears fromvarious sources to be this. Her brother-in-law, Dr. Inglis, was nowphysician-general in the army, and was in personal relations with theGeneral. When the victory at Blenheim (August 1704) was announced, Catharine Trotter wrote a poem of welcome back to England. It is to besupposed that a manuscript copy of it was shown by Inglis to the Duke, with whose permission it was published about a month later. The poemenjoyed a tremendous success, for the Duke and Duchess and LordTreasurer Godolphin "and several others" all liked the verses and saidthey were better than any other which had been written on the subject. George Burnet, who saw the Duke in Germany, reported him highly pleasedwith her--"the wisest virgin I ever knew, " he writes. She now hoped, with the Duke's protection, to recover her father's fortune and be nolonger a burden to her brother-in-law. A pension of £20 from Queen Annegave her mother now a shadow of independence, but Catharine herself waswholly disappointed at that "settlement for my life" which she wasardently hoping for. I think that, if she had secured it, George Burnetwould have come back from Germany to marry her. Instead of that he senther learned messages from Bayle and from Leibnitz, who calls her "uneDemoiselle fort spirituelle. "

Catharine Trotter now left London and Salisbury, and took up her abodeat Ockham Mills, close to Ripley, in Surrey, as companion to an invalid, Mrs. De Vere. She probably chose this place on account of the Lockeconnection and the friendship of Peter King, since there is now much inher correspondence about Damaris, Lady Masham, and others in that circlein which George Burnet himself was intimate. But great changes wereimminent. Although her correspondence at this time is copious it is notalways very intelligible, and it is very carelessly edited. Her constantinterchange of letters with George Burnet leaves the real positionbetween them on many points obscure. In 1704, when he thought that hewas dying in Berlin, he wrote to Catharine Trotter that he had left her£100 in his will, and added: "Pray God I might live to give you muchmore myself. " He regrets that he had so easily "pulled himself from hercompany, " and suggests that if she had not left London to settle inSalisbury he would have stayed in England. Years after they had partedwe find him begging her to continue writing to him "at least once aweek. " She, on her part, tells him that he well knows that there is butone person she could ever think of marrying. He seems to have made herwant of vivid religious conviction the excuse for not proposing to her, but it is not easy to put aside the conviction that it was her want of afortune which actuated him most strongly. Finally, he tries to pique herby telling her that he "knows of parties" in the city of Hanover "whomight bring him much honour and comfort" were he "not afraid of losing(Catharine Trotter's) friendship. " They write to one another withextreme formality, but that proves nothing. A young woman, passionatelyin love with a man whom she had just accepted as her future husband, was expected, in 1705, to close her letter by describing herself as"Sir, your very humble servant. "

If George Burnet hinted of "parties" in Hanover, Catharine Trotter onher side could boast of Mr. Fenn, "a young clergyman of excellentcharacter, " who now laid an ardent siege to her heart. Embarrassed bythese attentions, she took the bold step of placing the matter beforeMr. Cockburn, a still younger clergyman, of even more excellentcharacter. The letter in which she makes this ingenuous declaration asto a father confessor is one of the tenderest examples extant of the"Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" form of correspondence. Mr. Cockburn, one of the minor clergy of the Salisbury set, did speak forhimself, and George Burnet having at length announced his own projectedmarriage with a lady of old acquaintance, Catharine Trotter hesitated nolonger but accepted the hand of Mr. Cockburn. They were married early in1708. Thackeray could have created an amusing romance out of therelations of these four people to one another, and in particular itwould have been very interesting to see what he would have made of thecharacter of George Burnet. 

Catharine Cockburn was now, after so eventful a life of emotional andintellectual experience, still a young woman, not far past hertwenty-eighth birthday. She was to survive for more than forty-threeyears, during which time she was to correspond much, to writepersistently, and to publish whenever opportunity offered. But I do notpropose to accompany her much further on her blameless career. Allthrough her married life, which was spent at various places far fromLondon, she existed almost like a plant in a Leyden jar. Constantgenteel poverty, making it difficult for her to buy books and impossibleto travel was supported by her with dignity and patience, but it dwarfedher powers. Her later writings, on philosophy, on morality, on theprinciples of the Christian religion, are so dull that merely to thinkof them brings tears into one's eyes. She who had sparkled as a girlwith Congreve and exchanged polite amenities with Locke lived on to seemodern criticism begin with Samuel Johnson and the modern novel startwith Samuel Richardson, but without observing that any change had comeinto the world of letters. Her husband, owing to his having fallen "intoa scruple about the oath of abjuration, " lost his curacy and "wasreduced to great difficulties in the support of his family. "Nevertheless--a perfect gentleman at heart--he "always prayed for theKing and Royal family by name. " Meanwhile, to uplift his spirits in thisdreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on theMosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. He remindsus of Dr. Primrose in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine. 

So little mark did poor Mrs. Cockburn make on her younger contemporariesthat she disappeared forthwith from literary history. Her works, especially her plays, have become so excessively rare as to be almostunprocurable. The brief narrative of her life and her activities which Ihave taken the liberty of presenting to-day would be hopelessly engulfedin obscurity, and we should know as little of Catharine Trotter as we doof Mary Pix, and Delariviere Manley, and many late seventeenth-centuryauthors more eminent than they, had it not been that in 1751, two yearsafter her death, all her papers were placed in the hands of an ingeniousclergyman, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Birch, who printed them for subscribersin two thick and singularly unpleasing volumes. This private edition wasnever reissued, and is now itself a rare book. It is the sort of bookthat for two hundred and fifty years must fatally have been destroyed aslumber whenever an old country mansion that contained it has beencleared out. 

During all that time no one, so far as I can discover, has evinced thesmallest interest in Catharine Trotter. We gain an idea of the blacknessof her obscurity when we say that even Mr. Austin Dobson appears to havenever heard of her. The champion of Locke and Clarke, the correspondentof Leibnitz and Pope, the friend of Congreve, the patroness of Farquhar, she seems to have slipped between two ages and to have lost her hold ontime. But I hope her thin little lady-like ghost, still hovering in aphantom-like transparence round the recognised seats of learning, willbe a little comforted at last by the polite attention of a few of myreaders. 

[Footnote 2: Around the story of Agnes de Castro there gathered a wholeliterature of fiction, which Mr. Montague Summers has investigated inhis _Works of Aphra Behn_, Vol. V. Pp. 211-212. ]

[Footnote 3: Printed in Otto Klopp's _Correspondance de Leibnitz avecl'Electrice Sophie_. Hanover, 1875. ]

TWO PIONEERS OF ROMANTICISM:

JOSEPH AND THOMAS WARTON[4]

The origins of the Romantic Movement in literature have been examined soclosely and so often that it might be supposed that the subject must beby this time exhausted. But no subject of any importance in literatureis ever exhausted, because the products of literature grow or decay, burgeon or wither, as the generations of men apply their ever-varyingorgans of perception to them. I intend, with your permission, to presentto you a familiar phase of the literary life of the eighteenth centuryfrom a fresh point of view, and in relation to two men whose surnamewarrants a peculiar emphasis of respect in the mouth of a WartonLecturer. It is well, perhaps, to indicate exactly what it is which alecturer proposes to himself to achieve during the brief hour in whichyou indulge him with your attention; it certainly makes his task theeasier if he does so. I propose, therefore, to endeavour to divine foryou, by scanty signs and indications, what it was in poetry, as itexisted up to the period of their childhood, which was stimulating tothe Wartons, and what they disapproved of in the verse which wasfashionable and popular among the best readers in their day. 

There is an advantage, which I think that our critics are apt toneglect, in analysing the character and causes of poetic pleasureexperienced by any sincere and enthusiastic reader, at any epoch ofhistory. We are far too much in the habit of supposing that whatwe--that is the most instructed and sensitive of us--admire now mustalways have been admired by people of a like condition. This has beenone of the fallacies of Romantic criticism, and has led people asillustrious as Keats into blaming the taste of foregoing generations asif it were not only heretical, but despicable as well. Young men to-dayspeak of those who fifty years ago expatiated in admiration of Tennysonas though they were not merely stupid, but vulgar and almost wicked, neglectful of the fact that it was by persons exactly analogous tothemselves that those portions of Tennyson were adored which the youngrepudiate to-day. Not to expand too largely this question of theoscillation of taste--which, however, demands more careful examinationthan it has hitherto received--it is always important to discover whatwas honestly admired at a given date by the most enthusiastic andintelligent, in other words by the most poetic, students of poetry. Butto do this we must cultivate a little of that catholicity of heart whichperceives technical merit wherever it has been recognised at an earlierdate, and not merely where the current generation finds it. 

Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of an Oxford professor of poetry, an old Jacobite of no observable merit beyond that of surrounding hisfamily with an atmosphere of the study of verse. The elder brother wasborn in 1722, the younger in 1728. I must be forgiven if I dwell alittle tediously on dates, for our inquiry depends upon the use of them. Without dates the whole point of that precedency of the Wartons, which Idesire to bring out, is lost. The brothers began very early to devotethemselves to the study of poetry, and in spite of the six years whichdivided them, they appear to have meditated in unison. Their writingsbear a close resemblance to one another, and their merits and theirfailures are alike identical. We have to form what broken impression wecan of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in thewoodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note withecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight ofbirds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomaswere alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things. " They avoided, with a certain disdain, the affectation of vague and conventionalreference to definite objects. 

Above all they read the poets who were out of fashion, and no doubt thelibrary of their father, the Professor of Poetry, was at their disposalfrom a very early hour. The result of their studies was a remarkableone, and the discovery was unquestionably first made by Joseph. He was, so far as we can gather, the earliest person in the modern world ofEurope to observe what vain sacrifices had been made by the classicists, and in particular by the English classicists, and as he walkedenthusiastically in the forest he formed a determination to reconquerthe realm of lost beauty. The moment that this instinct became apurpose, we may say that the great Romantic Movement, such as it hasenlarged and dwindled down to our own day, took its start. The Wartonswere not men of creative genius, and their works, whether in prose orverse, have not taken hold of the national memory. But the advance of agreat army is not announced by a charge of field-marshals. In thepresent war, the advance of the enemy upon open cities has generallybeen announced by two or three patrols on bicycles, who are the heraldsof the body. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the bicyclist-scouts whoprophesied of an advance which was nearly fifty years delayed. 

The general history of English literature in the eighteenth centuryoffers us little opportunity for realising what the environment could beof two such lads as the Wartons, with their enthusiasm, theirindependence, and their revolutionary instinct. But I will take the year1750, which is the year of Rousseau's first _Discours_ and therefore thedefinite starting-point of European Romanticism. You will perhaps findit convenient to compare the situation of the Wartons with what is thesituation to-day of some very modern or revolutionary young poet. In1750, then, Joseph was twenty-eight years of age and Thomas twenty-two. Pope had died six years before, and this was equivalent to the death ofSwinburne in the experience of our young man of to-day. Addison's deathwas as distant as is from us that of Matthew Arnold; and Thomson, whohad been dead two years, had left The _Castle of Indolence_ as anequivalent to Mr. Hardy's _Dynasts_. All the leading writers of the ageof Anne--except Young, who hardly belonged to it--were dead, but theWartons were divided from them only as we are from those of the age ofVictoria. I have said that Pope was not more distant from them thanSwinburne is from us, but really a more just parallel is with Tennyson. The Wartons, wandering in their woodlands, were confronted with aproblem such as would be involved, to a couple of youths to-day, inconsidering the reputation of Tennyson and Browning. 

There remains no doubt in my mind, after a close examination of suchdocuments as remain to us, that Joseph Warton, whose attitude hashitherto been strangely neglected, was in fact the active force in thisremarkable revolt against existing conventions in the world ofimaginative art. His six years of priority would naturally give him anadvantage over his now better-known and more celebrated brother. Moreover, we have positive evidence of the firmness of his opinions at atime when his brother Thomas was still a child. The preface to Joseph's_Odes_ of 1746 remains as a dated document, a manifesto, which admits ofno question. But the most remarkable of his poems, "The Enthusiast, " wasstated to have been written in 1740, when he was eighteen and hisbrother only twelve years of age. It is, of course, possible that theseverses, which bear no sign of juvenile mentality, were touched up at alater date. But this could only be a matter of diction, of revision, andwe are bound to accept the definite and repeated statement of Joseph, that they were essentially composed in 1740. If we accept this as afact, "The Enthusiast" is seen to be a document of extraordinaryimportance. I do not speak of the positive merit of the poem, which itwould be easy to exaggerate. Gray, in a phrase which has been muchdiscussed, dismissed the poetry of Joseph Warton by saying that he had"no choice at all. " It is evident to me that Gray meant by this tostigmatise the diction of Joseph Warton, which is jejune, verbose, andpoor. He had little magic in writing; he fails to express himself withcreative charm. But this is not what constitutes his interest for us, which is moreover obscured by the tameness of his Miltonic-Thomsonianversification. What should arrest our attention is the fact that here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasised and repeated whatwas entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria. "TheEnthusiast" is the earliest expression of full revolt against theclassical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literaturefor nearly a century. So completely is this expressed by Joseph Wartonthat it is extremely difficult to realise that he could not have comeunder the fascination of Rousseau, whose apprenticeship to love andidleness was now drawing to a close at Les Charmettes, and who was notto write anything characteristic until ten years later. 

But these sentiments were in the air. Some of them had vaguely occurredto Young, to Dyer, and to Shenstone, all of whom received from JosephWarton the ardent sympathy which a young man renders to his immediatecontemporaries. The Scotch resumption of ballad-poetry held the samerelation to the Wartons as the so-called Celtic Revival would to a youngpoet to-day; the _Tea-Table Miscellany_ dates from 1724, and AllanRamsay was to the author of "The Enthusiast" what Mr. Yeats is to us. But all these were glimmerings or flashes; they followed no system, theywere accompanied by no principles of selection or rejection. These wefind for the first time in Joseph Warton. He not merely repudiates theold formulas and aspirations, but he defines new ones. What is veryinteresting to observe in his attitude to the accepted laws of poeticalpractice is his solicitude for the sensations of the individual. Thesehad been reduced to silence by the neo-classic school in itsdetermination to insist on broad Palladian effects of light and line. The didactic and moral aim of the poets had broken the springs oflyrical expression, and had replaced those bursts of enthusiasm, thoseindiscretions, those rudenesses which are characteristic of a romanticspirit in literature, by eloquence, by caution, by reticence andvagueness. 

It is not necessary to indicate more than very briefly what theprinciples of the classic poetry had been. The time had passed whenreaders and writers in England gave much attention to the sources of thepopular poetry of their day. Malherbe had never been known here, and thevigorous _Art poétique_ of Boileau, which had been eagerly studied atthe close of the seventeenth century, was forgotten. Even the Prefacesof Dryden had ceased to be read, and the sources of authority were nowthe prose of Addison and the verse of Pope. To very young readers thesestood in the same relation as the writings of the post-Tennysoniancritics stand now. To reject them, to question their authority, waslike eschewing the essays of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. Inparticular, the _Essay on Criticism_ was still immensely admired andread; it had crystallised around cultivated opinion very much as the_Studies in the Renaissance_ did from 1875 onwards. It was the lastbrilliant word on the aims and experiences of poetical art, and howbrilliant it was can be judged by the pleasure with which we read itto-day, in spite of our total repudiation of every æsthetic dogma whichit conveys. It is immortal, like every supreme literary expression, andit stands before us in the history of poetry as an enduring landmark. This was the apparently impregnable fortress which the Wartons had thetemerity to bombard. 

Pope had said that Nature was the best guide to judgment, but what didhe mean by nature? He had meant the "rules, " which he declared were"Nature methodis'd" or, as we should say, systematised. The "rules" werethe maxims, rather than laws, expressed by Aristotle in a famoustreatise. The poet was to follow the Stagirite, "led"--as Pope says inone of those rare lines in which he catches, in spite of himself, theRomantic accent--"led by the light of the Mæonian Star. " Aristotleillustrated by Homer--that was to be the standard of all poeticexpression. But literature had wandered far from Homer, and we have tothink of what rules the _Essay on Criticism_ laid down. The poet was tobe cautious, "to avoid extremes": he must be conventional, never"singular"; there was constant reference to "Wit, " "Nature, " and "TheMuse, " and these were convertible terms. A single instance is luminous. We have the positive authority of Warburton for saying that Poperegarded as the finest effort of his skill and art as a poet theinsertion of the machinery of the Sylphs into the revised edition of_The Rape of the Lock_ (1714). Now this insertion was ingenious, brilliant, and in strict accordance with the practice of Vida and ofBoileau, both of whom it excelled. But the whole conception of it was asunlike that of Romanticism as possible. 

In particular, the tendency of the classic school, in its laterdevelopment, had been towards the exclusion of all but didactic andethical considerations from treatment in verse. Pope had given great andever-increasing emphasis to the importance of making "morals" prominentin poetry. All that he wrote after he retired to Twickenham, still ayoung man, in 1718, was essentially an attempt to gather together "moralwisdom" clothed in consummate language. He inculcated a moderation offeeling, a broad and general study of mankind, an acceptance of thebenefits of civilisation, and a suppression of individuality. Even in soviolent and so personal a work as the _Dunciad_ he expends all theresources of his genius to make his anger seem moral and his indignationa public duty. This conception of the ethical responsibility of versewas universal, and even so late as 1745, long after the composition ofWarton's "Enthusiast, " we find Blacklock declaring, with generalacceptance, that "poetical genius depends entirely on the quickness ofmoral feeling, " and that not to "feel poetry" was the result of having"the affections and internal senses depraved by vice. "

The most important innovation suggested by Joseph Warton was anoutspoken assertion that this was by no means the object or the propertheme of poetry. His verses and those of his brother, the _Essay onPope_ of the elder, the critical and historical writings of the younger, may be searched in vain for the slightest evidence of moral or didacticsentiment. The instructive and ethical mannerisms of the laterclassicists had produced some beautiful and more accomplished verse, especially of a descriptive order, but its very essence had excludedself-revelation. Dennis, at whom Pope taught the world to laugh, butwho was in several respects a better critic than either Addison orhimself, had come close to the truth sometimes, but was for ever edgedaway from it by the intrusion of the moral consideration. Dennis feelsthings æsthetically, but he blunders into ethical definition. The resultwas that the range of poetry was narrowed to the sphere of didacticreflection, a blunt description of scenery or objects being the onlyrelief, since

 "who could take offence While pure description held the place of sense?"

To have perceived the bankruptcy of the didactic poem is Joseph Warton'smost remarkable innovation. The lawlessness of the Romantic Movement, orrather its instinct for insisting that genius is a law unto itself, isfirst foreshadowed in "The Enthusiast, " and when the history of theschool comes to be written there will be a piquancy in tracing anantinomianism down from the blameless Wartons to the hedonist essays of, Oscar Wilde and the frenzied anarchism of the Futurists. Not lessremarkable, or less characteristic, was the revolt against the quietismof the classical school. "Avoid extremes, " Pope had said, andmoderation, calmness, discretion, absence of excitement had been laiddown as capital injunctions. Joseph Warton's very title, "TheEnthusiast, " was a challenge, for "enthusiasm" was a term of reproach. He was himself a scandal to classical reserve. Mant, in the course ofsome excellent lines addressed to Joseph Warton, remarks

 "Thou didst seek Ecstatic vision by the haunted stream Or grove of fairy: then thy nightly ear, As from the wild notes of some airy harp, Thrilled with strange music. "

The same excess of sensibility is still more clearly divulged inJoseph's own earliest verses:--

 "All beauteous Nature! by thy boundless charms Oppress'd, O where shall I begin thy praise, Where turn the ecstatic eye, _how ease my breast That pants with wild astonishment and love_?"

The Nature here addressed is a very different thing from the "Naturemethodis'd" of the _Essay on Criticism_. It is not to be distinguishedfrom the object of pantheistic worship long afterwards to be celebratedin widely differing language, but with identical devotion, by Wordsworthand Senancour, by Chateaubriand and Shelley. 

Closely connected with this attitude towards physical nature is thedetermination to deepen the human interest in poetry, to concentrateindividuality in passion. At the moment when the Wartons put forth theirideas, a change was taking place in English poetry, but not in thedirection of earnest emotion. The instrument of verse had reached anextraordinary smoothness, and no instance of its capability could bemore interesting than the poetry of Shenstone, with his perfectutterance of things essentially not worth saying. In the most importantwriters of that very exhausted moment, technical skill seems the onlyquality calling for remark, and when we have said all that sympathy cansay for Whitehead and Akenside, the truth remains that the one is vapid, the other empty. The Wartons saw that more liberty of imagination waswanted, and that the Muse was not born to skim the meadows, in short lowflights, like a wagtail. They used expressions which reveal theirambition. The poet was to be "bold, without confine, " and "imagination'schartered libertine"; like a sort of Alastor, he was

 "in venturous bark to ride Down turbulent Delight's tempestuous tide. "

These are aspirations somewhat absurdly expressed, but the aim of themis undeniable and noteworthy. 

A passion for solitude always precedes the romantic obsession, and inexamining the claim of the Wartons to be pioneers, we naturally look forthis element. We find it abundantly in their early verses. When Thomaswas only seventeen--the precocity of the brothers was remarkable--hewrote a "Pleasures of Melancholy, " in which he expresses his wish toretire to "solemn glooms, congenial to the soul. " In the early odes ofhis brother Joseph we find still more clearly indicated the intention towithdraw from the world, in order to indulge the susceptibilities of thespirit in solitary reflection. A curious air of foreshadowing thetheories of Rousseau, to which I have already referred, produces aneffect which is faintly indicated, but in its phantom way unique inEnglish literature up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency tothe sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in thepowerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts, but nothinghad been suggested in the pure Romantic style. 

In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist attitude tonature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration of feeling which was to becharacteristic of romance; an intention of escaping from the vanity ofmankind by an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recoveringprimitive manners by withdrawing into primitive conditions; a passionfor what we now consider the drawing-master's theory of thepicturesque--the thatched cottage, the ruined castle with the moonbehind it, the unfettered rivulet, the wilderness of

 "the pine-topped precipice Abrupt and shaggy. "

There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly attractive tothe next generation, that man in a state of civilisation was in adecayed and fallen condition, and that to achieve happiness he mustwander back into a Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundlyimpressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and had provedto the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker alike that

 "God and Nature link'd the general frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same. "

Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. He designed, orpretended to design, to emigrate to the backwoods of America, to live

 "With simple Indian swains, that I may hunt The boar and tiger through savannahs wild, Through fragrant deserts and through citron groves, "

indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active moral principlein social life, all the ecstasies, all the ravishing emotions, of anabandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the"little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale"in Pope's complacent _Fourth Epistle_, but an æolian harp hung in somecave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave across in solitude. 

 "Happy the first of men, ere yet confin'd To smoky cities. "

Already the voice is that of Obermann, of René, of Byron. 

Another point in which the recommendations of the Wartons far outran themediocrity of their execution was their theory of description. Tocomprehend the state of mind in which such pieces of stately verse asParnell's _Hermit_ or Addison's _Campaign_ could be regarded assatisfactory in the setting of their descriptive ornament we mustrealise the aim which those poets put before them. Nothing was to bementioned by its technical--or even by its exact name; no clear picturewas to be raised before the inner eye; nothing was to be left definiteor vivid. We shall make a very great mistake if we suppose thisconventional vagueness to have been accidental, and a still greater ifwe attribute it to a lack of cleverness. When Pope referred to thesudden advent of a heavy shower at a funeral in these terms--

 "'Tis done, and nature's various charms decay; See gloomy clouds obscure the cheerful day! Now hung with pearls the dropping trees appear, Their faded honours scatter'd on her bier, "

it was not because he had not the skill to come into closer touch withreality, but that he did not wish to do so. It had been plainly laiddown by Malherbe and confirmed by Boileau that objects should be namedin general, not in precise terms. We are really, in studying thedescriptive parts of the Classicist poets, very close to the theories ofMallarmé and the Symbolists which occupied us twenty years ago. Theobject of the poet was not to present a vivid picture to the reader, butto start in him a state of mind. 

We must recollect, in considering what may seem to us the sterility andstiffness of the English poets from 1660 to 1740, that they wereaddressing a public which, after the irregular violence and anarchicalfancy of the middle of the seventeenth century, had begun to yearn forregularity, common sense, and a moderation in relative variety. Thesimplest ideas should be chosen, and should depend for their poeticaleffect, not upon a redundant and gorgeous ornament, but solely uponelegance of language. There were certain references, certain channels ofimagery, which were purely symbolical, and these could be defended onlyon the understanding that they produced on the mind of the reader, instantly and without effort, the illustrative effect required. Forinstance, with all these neo-classicists, the mythological allusions, which seem vapid and ridiculous to us, were simplified metaphor and aquestion of style. In short, it rested the jaded imagination of Europe, after Gongora and Marini, Donne and D'Aubigné, to sink back on a poetrywhich had taken a vow to remain scrupulous, elegant, and selected. 

But the imagination of England was now beginning to be impatient ofthese bonds. It was getting tired of a rest-cure so prolonged. It askedfor more colour, more exuberance, more precise reproduction of visualimpressions. Thomson had summed up and had carried to greater lengthsthe instinct for scenery which had never entirely died out in England, except for a few years after the Restoration. It was left to JosephWarton, however, to rebel against the whole mode in which the cabbage oflandscape was shredded into the classical _pot-au-feu_. He proposesthat, in place of the mention of "Idalia's groves, " when Windsor Forestis intended, and of milk-white bulls sacrificed to Phoebus atTwickenham, the poets should boldly mention in their verses English"places remarkably romantic, the supposed habitation of druids, bards, and wizards, " and he vigorously recommends Theocritus as a model farsuperior to Pope because of the greater exactitude of his references toobjects, and because of his more realistic appeal to the imagination. Description, Warton says, should be uncommon, exact, not symbolic andallusive, but referring to objects clearly, by their real names. He verypertinently points out that Pope, in a set piece of extraordinarycleverness--which was to be read, more than half a century later, evenby Wordsworth, with pleasure--confines himself to rural beauty ingeneral, and declines to call up before us the peculiar beauties whichcharacterise the Forest of Windsor. 

A specimen of Joseph Warton's descriptive poetry may here be given, notfor its great inherent excellence, but because it shows his resistanceto the obstinate classic mannerism:--

 "Tell me the path, sweet wanderer, tell, To thy unknown sequestered cell, Where woodbines cluster round the door, Where shells and moss o'erlay the floor, And on whose top an hawthorn blows, Amid whose thickly-woven boughs Some nightingale still builds her nest, Each evening warbling thee to rest; Then lay me by the haunted stream, Rapt in some wild poetic dream, In converse while methinks I rove With Spenser through a fairy grove. "

To show how identical were the methods of the two brothers we maycompare the foregoing lines with the following from Thomas Warton's "Odeon the Approach of Summer" (published when he was twenty-five, andpossibly written much earlier):--

 "His wattled cotes the shepherd plaits; Beneath her elm the milkmaid chats; The woodman, speeding home, awhile Rests him at a shady stile; Nor wants there fragrance to dispense Refreshment o'er my soothèd sense; Nor tangled woodbine's balmy bloom, Nor grass besprent to breathe perfume, Nor lurking wild-thyme's spicy sweet To bathe in dew my roving feet; Nor wants there note of Philomel, Nor sound of distant-tinkling bell, Nor lowings faint of herds remote, Nor mastiff's bark from bosom'd cot; Rustle the breezes lightly borne O'er deep embattled ears of corn; Round ancient elms, with humming noise, Full loud the chafer-swarms rejoice. "

The youthful poet is in full revolt against the law which forbade hiselders to mention objects by their plain names. Here we notice at once, as we do in similar early effusions of both the Wartons, the directinfluence of Milton's lyrics. To examine the effect of the rediscoveryof Milton upon the poets of the middle of the eighteenth century wouldlead us too far from the special subject of our inquiry to-day. But itmust be pointed out that _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ had beenentirely neglected, and practically unknown, until a date long after therehabilitation of _Paradise Lost_. The date at which Handel set them tomusic, 1740, is that of the revived or discovered popularity of thesetwo odes, which then began to be fashionable, at all events among theyounger poets. They formed a bridge, which linked the new writers withthe early seventeenth century across the Augustan Age, and theirversification as well as their method of description were as muchresisted by the traditional Classicists as they were attractive, anddirectly preferred above those of Pope, by the innovators. JosephWarton, who attributed many of the faults of modern lyrical writing tothe example of Petrarch, sets Milton vehemently over against him, andentreats the poets "to accustom themselves to contemplate fully everyobject before they attempt to describe it. " They were above all to avoidnauseous repetition of commonplaces, and what Warton excellently calls"hereditary images. "

We must not, however, confine ourselves to a consideration of "TheEnthusiast" of 1740 and the preface to the _Odes_ of 1746. Certain ofthe expressions, indeed, already quoted, are taken from the two veryimportant critical works which the brothers published while they werestill quite young. We must now turn particularly to Joseph Warton's_Essay on the Genius of Pope_ of 1756, and to Thomas Warton's_Observations on the Faerie Queene_ of 1754. Of these the former is themore important and the more readable. Joseph's _Essay on Pope_ is anextraordinary production for the time at which it was produced. Let mesuggest that we make a great mistake in treating the works of oldwriters as if they had been always written by old men. I am trying topresent the Wartons to you as I see them, and that is as enthusiasticyouths, flushed with a kind of intellectual felicity, and dreaming howpoetry shall be produced as musicians make airs, by inspiration, not byrote. Remember that when they took their walks in the forest atHackwood, the whole world of culture held that true genius had expiredwith Pope, and this view was oracularly supported by Warburton andsuch-like pundits. I have already pointed out to you that Pope wasdivided from them not more than Swinburne is divided from us. Conceivetwo very young men to-day putting their heads together to devise ascheme of poetry which should entirely supersede that, not of Swinburneonly, but of Tennyson and Browning also, and you have the originalattitude of the Wartons. 

It is difficult for us to realise what was the nature of the spell whichPope threw over the literary conscience of the eighteenth century. Fortyyears after the revolt of the Wartons, Pope was still looked upon by theaverage critic as "the most distinguished and the most interesting Poetof the nation. " Joseph Warton was styled "the Winton Pedant" forsuggesting that Pope paid too dearly for his lucidity and lightness, andfor desiring to break up with odes and sonnets the oratorical mouldwhich gave a monotony of form to early eighteenth-century verse. His_Essay on Pope_, though written with such studied moderation that wemay, in a hasty reading, regard it almost as a eulogy, was so shockingto the prejudices of the hour that it was received with universaldisfavour, and twenty-six years passed before the author had the moralcourage to pursue it to a conclusion. He dedicated it to Young, who, alone of the Augustans, had admitted that charm in a melancholysolitude, that beauty of funereal and mysterious effects, which was tobe one of the leading characteristics of the Romantic School, and whodimly perceived the sublime and the pathetic to be "the two chief nervesof all genuine poetry. "

Warton's _Essay on the Genius of Pope_ is not well arranged, and, inspite of eloquent passages, as literature it does not offer muchattraction to the reader of the present day. But its thesis is one whichis very interesting to us, and was of startling novelty when it wasadvanced. In the author's own words it was to prove that "a clear headand acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to make a poet. " Thecustom of critics had been to say that, when supported by a profoundmoral sense, they were sufficient, and Pope was pointed to as theoverwhelming exemplar of the truth of this statement. Pope had takenthis position himself and, as life advanced, the well of pure poetry inhim had dried up more and more completely, until it had turned into asort of fountain of bright, dry sand, of which the _Epilogue to theSatires_, written in 1738, when Joseph Warton was sixteen years of age, may be taken as the extreme instance. The young author of the _Essay_made the earliest attempt which any one made to put Pope in his rightplace, that is to say, not to deny him genius or to deprecate theextreme pleasure readers found in his writings, but to insist that, bythe very nature of his gifts, his was genius of a lower rank than thatof the supreme poets, with whom he was commonly paralleled when he wasnot preferred to them all. 

Warton admitted but three supreme English poets--Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton--and he vehemently insisted that moral, didactic and panegyricalpoetry could never rise above the second class in importance. To assertthis was not merely to offend against the undoubted supremacy of Pope, but it was to flout the claims of all those others to whom the age gaveallegiance. Joseph Warton does not shrink from doing this, and he givesreason for abating the claims of all the classic favourites--Cowley, Waller, Dryden, Addison. When it was advanced against him that he showedarrogance in placing his opinion against that of a multitude of highlytrained judges, he replied that a real "relish and enjoyment of poetry"is a rare quality, and "a creative and glowing imagination" possessed byfew. When the _dicta_ of Boileau were quoted against him, he repudiatedtheir authority with scarcely less vivacity than Keats was to displayhalf a century later. 

Joseph Warton's _Essay_ wanders about, and we may acknowledge ourselvesmore interested in the mental attitude which it displays than in thedetail of its criticism. The author insists, with much force, on thevalue of a grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating apoetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore that Pope was soready to forget that "wit and satire are transitory and perishable, butnature and passion are eternal. " We need not then be surprised whenJoseph Warton boldly protests that no other part of the writings of Popeapproaches _Eloisa to Abelard_ in the quality of being "truly poetical. "He was perhaps led to some indulgence by the fact that this is the onecomposition in which Pope appears to be indebted to Milton's lyrics, butthere was much more than that. So far as I am aware, _Eloisa to Abelard_had never taken a high place with Pope's extreme admirers, doubtlessbecause of its obsession with horror and passion. But when we read how

 "o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves, Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves, Black melancholy sits, and round her throws A death-like silence and a dead repose, "

and still more when we reflect on the perpetual and powerful appealswhich the poem makes to emotion unbridled by moral scruple, we have nodifficulty in perceiving why _Eloisa to Abelard_ exercised so powerfulan attraction on Joseph Warton. The absence of ethical reservation, thelicence, in short, was highly attractive to him, and he rejoiced infinding Pope, even so slightly, even so briefly, faithless to hisformula. It is worth while to note that Joseph Warton's sympathy withthe sentimental malady of the soul which lies at the core of Romanticismpermitted him to be, perhaps, the first man since the Renaissance whorecognised with pleasure the tumult of the _Atys_ of Catullus and thefebrile sensibility of Sappho. 

Both brothers urged that more liberty of imagination was what Englishpoetry needed; that the lark had been shut up long enough in a gildedcage. We have a glimpse of Thomas Warton introducing the study of thegreat Italian classics into Oxford at a very early age, and we see himcrowned with laurel in the common-room of Trinity College at the age ofnineteen. This was in the year before the death of Thomson. No doubt hewas already preparing his _Observations on the Faerie Queene_, whichcame out a little later. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford before hewas thirty. Both the brothers took great pleasure in the study ofSpenser, and they both desired that the supernatural "machinery" ofAriosto, in common with the romance of _The Faerie Queene_, should becombined with a description of nature as untrimmed and unshackled aspossible. Thomas Warton, in his remarkable Oxford poem, "The PaintedWindow, " describes himself as

 "A faithless truant to the classic page, Long have I loved to catch the simple chime Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rhyme, "

and again he says:--

 "I soothed my sorrows with the dulcet lore Which Fancy fabled in her elfin age, "

that is to say when Spenser was writing "upon Mulla's shore. "

After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Queene of 1754 is ratherdisappointing. Thomas was probably much more learned as a historian ofliterature than Joseph, but he is not so interesting a critic. Still, hefollowed exactly the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge. His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is tempted to make tootiresome a display of it. Nevertheless, he is as thorough as his brotherin his insistence upon qualities which we have now learned to callRomantic, and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then spokeof with respect. He warmly recommends the _Morte d'Arthur_, which hadprobably not found a single admirer since 1634. When he mentions BenJonson, it is characteristic that it is to quote the line about "thecharmed boats and the enchanted wharves, " which sounds like a foretasteof Keats's "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas. " Thepublic of Warton's day had relegated all tales about knights, dragons, and enchanters to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage ininsisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and adultliterature. He certainly would have thoroughly enjoyed the romances ofMrs. Radcliffe, whom a later generation was to welcome as "the mightymagician bred and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitarycaverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition, " and he despisedthe neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, with firmness, thatepic poetry--and he is thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser--wouldnever have been written if the critical judgments current in 1754 hadbeen in vogue. 

Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto on Spenser, andno other part of the _Observations_ is so valuable as the pages in whichthose two poets are contrasted. He remarked the polish of the formerpoet with approval, and he did not shrink from what is violentlyfantastic in the plot of the _Orlando Furioso_. On that point he says, "The present age is too fond of manner'd poetry to relish fiction andfable, " but perhaps he did not observe that although there is nochivalry in _The Schoolmistress_, that accomplished piece was theindirect outcome of the Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists hadfought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to be tenebrous and vaguewas a merit with the precursors of Romanticism, or at least, withoutunfairness, we may say that they asserted the power of imagination tomake what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the fancy. Thistendency, which we first perceive in the Wartons, rapidly developed, andit led to the blind enthusiasm with which the vapourings of Macphersonwere presently received. The earliest specimens of _Ossian_ wererevealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no evidence ofany welcome which they received from either Joseph or Thomas. Thebrothers personally preferred a livelier and more dramatic presentation, and when Dr. Johnson laughed at Collins because "he loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters, " the laugh was really at the expense of hisschool-fellow Joseph Warton, to whom Collins seems to have owed hisboyish inspiration, although he was by a few months the senior. 

Johnson was a resolute opponent of the principles of the Wartons, thoughhe held Thomas, at least, in great personal regard. He objected to thebrothers that they "affected the obsolete when it was not worthy ofrevival, " and his boutade about their own poetry is well known:--

 "Phrase that time hath flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode and elegy and sonnet. "

This conservatism was not peculiar to Johnson; there was a generaltendency to resist the reintroduction into language and literature ofwords and forms which had been allowed to disappear. A generation later, a careful and thoughtful grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of beingdismissed as "a cockscomb" because he tried to enlarge our nationalvocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old libraries forglossaries of disused terms in order to display them in their ownwritings. This was not quite an idle charge; it is to be noted as one ofthe symptoms of active Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied withthe diction commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify byembroidering its texture with archaic and far-fetched words. Chatterton, who was not yet born when the Wartons formed and expressed their ideas, was to carry this instinct to a preposterous extreme in his Rowleyforgeries, where he tries to obtain a mediæval colouring by transferringwords out of an imperfect Anglo-Saxon lexicon, often without discerningthe actual meaning of those words. 

Both the Wartons continued, in successive disquisitions, to repeat theirdefinition of poetry, but it cannot be said that either of themadvanced. So far as Joseph is concerned, he seems early to havesuccumbed to the pressure of the age and of his surroundings. In 1766 hebecame head master of Winchester, and settled down after curiousescapades which had nothing poetical about them. In the head master of agreat public school, reiterated murmurs against bondage to the ClassicalGreeks and Romans would have been unbecoming, and Joseph Warton was aman of the world. Perhaps in the solitude of his study he murmured, asdisenchanted enthusiasts often murmur, "Say, are the days of blestdelusion fled?" Yet traces of the old fire were occasionally manifest;still each brother woke up at intervals to censure the criticism ofthose who did not see that imagination must be paramount in poetry, andwho made the mistake of putting "discernment" in the place of"enthusiasm. " I hardly know why it gives me great pleasure to learn that"the manner in which the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton read the CommunionService was remarkably awful, " but it must be as an evidence that hecarried a "Gothick" manner into daily life. 

The spirit of pedantry, so amicably mocked by the Wartons, took itsrevenge upon Thomas in the form of a barren demon named Joseph Ritson, who addressed to him in 1782 what he aptly called _A Familiar Letter_. There is hardly a more ferocious pamphlet in the whole history ofliterature. Ritson, who had the virulence of a hornet and the sameinsect's inability to produce honey of his own, was considered by thereactionaries to have "punched Tom Warton's historick body full ofdeadly holes. " But his strictures were not really important. Inmarshalling some thousands of facts, Warton had made perhaps a couple ofdozen mistakes, and Ritson advances these with a reiteration and aviolence worthy of a maniac. Moreover, and this is the fate of angrypedants, he himself is often found to be as dustily incorrect as Wartonwhen examined by modern lights. Ritson, who accuses Warton of "neverhaving consulted or even seen" the books he quotes from, and ofintentionally swindling the public, was in private life a vegetarian whois said to have turned his orphan nephew on to the streets because hecaught him eating a mutton-chop. Ritson flung his arrows far and wide, for he called Dr. Samuel Johnson himself "that great luminary, or ratherdark lantern of literature. "

If we turn over Ritson's distasteful pages, it is only to obtain fromthem further proof of the perception of Warton's Romanticism by anadversary whom hatred made perspicacious. Ritson abuses the _History ofEnglish Poetry_ for presuming to have "rescued from oblivion irregularbeauties" of which no one desired to be reminded. He charges Warton withrecommending the poetry of "our Pagan fathers" because it is untouchedby Christianity, and of saying that "religion and poetry areincompatible. " He accuses him of "constantly busying himself withpassages which he does not understand, because they appeal to his earor his fancy. " "Old poetry, " Ritson says to Warton, "is the same thingto you, sense or nonsense. " He dwells on Warton's marked attraction towhatever is prodigious and impossible. The manner in which theseaccusations are made is insolent and detestable; but Ritson hadpenetration, and without knowing what he reached, in some of thesediatribes he pierced to the heart of the Romanticist fallacy. 

It is needful that I should bring these observations to a close. I hopeI have made good my claim that it was the Wartons who introduced intothe discussion of English poetry the principle of Romanticism. To use ametaphor of which both of them would have approved, that principle wasto them like the mystical bowl of ichor, the _ampolla_, which Astolphowas expected to bring down from heaven in the _Orlando Furioso_. If Ihave given you an exaggerated idea of the extent to which they foresawthe momentous change in English literature, I am to blame. No doubt byextracting a great number of slight and minute remarks, and by puttingthem together, the critic may produce an effect which is too emphatic. But you will be on your guard against such misdirection. It is enoughfor me if you will admit the priority of the intuition of the brothers, and I do not think that it can be contested. 

Thomas Warton said, "I have rejected the ideas of men who are the mostdistinguished ornaments" of the history of English poetry, and heappealed against a "mechanical" attitude towards the art of poetry. Thebrothers did more in rebelling against the Classic formulas than instarting new poetic methods. There was an absence in them of "the pompsand prodigality" of genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. Theybegan with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness of expression, nostore of energy. It needed a nature as unfettered as Blake's, as wideas Wordsworth's, as opulent as Keats's, to push the Romantic attack onto victory. The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices andvagaries of emotion, was there; there was present in both brothers, while they were still young, an extreme sensibility. The instinct waspresent in them, but the sacred fire died out in the vacuum of theirsocial experience, and neither Warton had the energy to build up a stylein prose or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then theysuccumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimesno light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they madesome sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arrivingat Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and failing to observe its beauties. Weare told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to growcold, " and he was an ineffective poet laureate. His brother Joseph feltthe necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without attainingmore than a muffled and a second-rate effect. 

All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to makeitself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy of thepoetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some faintconception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbé Du Bos had laid downin his celebrated _Réflexions_ (1719) that the poet's art consists ofmaking a general moral representation of incidents and scenes, andembellishing it with elegant images. This had been accepted and actedupon by Pope and by all his followers. To have been the first toperceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which excluded allimagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to demand respectfulattention from the historian of Romanticism, and this attention is dueto Joseph and Thomas Warton. 

[Footnote 4: Delivered, as the Warton Lecture, before the BritishAcademy, October 27th, 1915. ]

THE CHARM OF STERNE[5]

It is exactly two hundred years to-night since there was born, atClonmel, in Ireland, a son to a subaltern in an English regiment justhome from the Low Countries. "My birthday, " Laurence Sterne tells us, "was ominous to my poor father, who was, the day after our arrival, withmany other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide worldwith a wife and two children. " The life of the new baby was one ofperpetual hurry and scurry; his mother, who had been an old campaigner, daughter of what her son calls "a noted suttler" called Nuttle, had beenthe widow of a soldier before she married Roger Sterne. In theextraordinary fashion of the army of those days, the regiment washurried from place to place--as was that of the father of the infantBorrow a century later--and with it hastened the unhappy Mrs. Sterne, for ever bearing and for ever losing children, "most rueful journeys, "marked by a long succession of little tombstones left behind. Finally, at Gibraltar, the weary father, pugnacious to the last, picked a quarrelabout a goose and was pinked through the body, surviving in a thoroughlydamaged condition, to die, poor exhausted pilgrim of Bellona, inbarracks in Jamaica. 

It would be difficult to imagine a childhood better calculated than thisto encourage pathos in a humorist and fun in a sentimentalist. Hisaccount, in his brief autobiography, of the appearance anddisappearance of his hapless brothers and sisters is a proof of howearly life appealed to Laurence Sterne in the dappled colours of anApril day. We read there of how at Wicklow "we lost poor Joram, a prettyboy"; how "Anne, that pretty blossom, fell in the barracks of Dublin";how little Devijehar was "left behind" in Carrickfergus. We know notwhether to sob or to giggle, so tragic is the rapid catalogue of dyingbabies, so ridiculous are their names and fates. Here, then, I think, wehave revealed to us the prime characteristic of Sterne, from which allhis other characteristics branch away, for evil or for good. As no otherwriter since Shakespeare, and in a different and perhaps more intimateway than even Shakespeare, he possessed the key of those tears thatsucceed the hysteria of laughter, and of that laughter which succeedsthe passion of tears. From early childhood, and all through youth andmanhood, he had been collecting observations upon human nature in theserapidly alternating moods. 

He observed it in its frailty, but being exquisitely frail himself, hewas no satirist. A breath of real satire would blow down the wholedelicate fabric of _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_. Sterne pokes fun at people and things; he banters the extravagance ofprivate humour; but it is always with a consciousness that he is himselfmore extravagant than any one. If we compare him for a moment withRichardson, who buttonholes the reader in a sermon; or with Smollett, who snarls and bites like an angry beast; we feel at once that Sternecould not breathe in the stuffiness of the one or in the tempest of theother. Sympathy is the breath of his nostrils, and he cannot existexcept in a tender, merry relation with his readers. His own ideal, surely, is that which he attributed to the fantastic and gentle Yorick, who never could enter a village, but he caught the attention of old andyoung. "Labour stood still as he passed; the bucket hung suspended inthe middle of the well; the spinning-wheel forgot its round, evenchuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he had gotout of sight. " Like Yorick, Sterne loved a jest in his heart. 

There are, it seems to me, two distinct strains in the intellectualdevelopment of Sterne, and I should like to dwell upon them for amoment, because I think a lack of recognition of them has been apt todarken critical counsel in the consideration of his writings. You willremember that he was forty-six years of age before he took up thebusiness of literature seriously. Until that time he had been a countryparson in Yorkshire, carrying his body, that "cadaverous bale of goods, "from Sutton to Stillington, and from Stillington to Skelton. He hadspent his life in riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philanderingin company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from aclerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such an artistfor his destined labours as a painter of the oddities of averageEnglishmen. But by the side of this indolent search after the enjoymentof the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature inwhich he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolenceprompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no humanbeing would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning ofthose writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is foundtottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps moredeeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde deVerville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth centurywere familiar to him and to him alone in England. 

Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two streams flowing in hisbrain, and these were, like everything else about him, inconsistent withone another. The faithful tender colour of modern life competed withthe preposterous oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started theannals of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant, andthere is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and entertainedreaders of that day. But it no longer entertains us very much, and it isthe source of considerable injustice done by modern criticism to thereal merits of Sterne. When so acute a writer as Bagehot condemns muchof _Tristram Shandy_ as "a sort of antediluvian fun, in which uncouthsaurian jokes play idly in an unintelligible world, " he hits the nail onthe head of why so many readers nowadays turn with impatience from thatwork. But they should persevere, for Sterne himself saw his error, andgradually dropped the "uncouth saurian jokes" which he had filched outof Burton and Beroalde, relying more and more exclusively on his ownrich store of observations taken directly from human nature. In theadorable seventh volume of _Tristram_, and in _The Sentimental Journey_, there is nothing left of Rabelais except a certain rambling artifice ofstyle. 

The death of Sterne, at the age of fifty-four, is one of those eventswhich must be continually regretted, because to the very end of his lifehe was growing in ease and ripeness, was discovering more perfect modesof self-expression, and was purging himself of his compromisingintellectual frailties. It is true that from the very first hisexcellences were patent. The portrait of my Uncle Toby, which Hazlitttruly said is "one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature, "occurs, or rather begins, in the second volume of _Tristram Shandy_. Butthe marvellous portraits which the early sections of that work containare to some extent obscured, or diluted, by the author's determinationto gain piquancy by applying old methods to new subjects. Frankly, muchas I love Sterne, I find Kunastrockius and Lithopaedus a bore. I suspectthey have driven more than one modern reader away from the enjoyment of_Tristram Shandy_. 

Towards the end of the eighteenth century a leading Dissenting minister, the Rev. Joseph Fawcett, said in answer to a question: "Do I _like_Sterne? Yes, to be sure I should deserve to be hanged if I didn't!" Thatwas the attitude of thoughtful and scrupulous people of cultivation morethan one hundred years ago. But it was their attitude only on someoccasions. There is no record of the fact, but I am ready to believethat Mr. Fawcett may, with equal sincerity, have said that Sterne was agodless wretch. We know that Bishop Warburton presented him with a purseof gold, in rapturous appreciation of his talents, and then in adifferent mood described him as "an irrevocable scoundrel. " No one elsehas ever flourished in literature who has combined such alternatingpowers of attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at onemoment, and we dislike him no less violently at another. He is attar ofroses to-day and asafœtida to-morrow, and it is not by any means easyto define the elements which draw us towards him and away from him. LikeYorick, he had "a wild way of talking, " and he wrote impetuously andimpudently "in the naked temper which a merry heart discovered. " As he"seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost, and withoutmuch ceremony, he had but too many temptations in life of scattering hiswit and his humour, his gibes and his jests, about him. "

So that even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would have hadmanifold opportunities of giving offence and causing scandal. But liewas not only a humorist with "a thousand little sceptical notions todefend, " but he was a sentimentalist as well. Those two characteristicshe was constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentalityand humour are in reality like oil and wine. He would exasperate hisreaders by throwing his wig in their faces at the moment when they wereweeping, or put them out of countenance by ending a farcical story on amelancholy note. A great majority of Englishmen like to be quite sure ofthe tone of what they read; they wish an author to be straightforward;they dread irony and they loathe impishness. Now Sterne is the mostimpish of all imaginative writers. He is what our grandmothers, indescribing the vagaries of the nursery, used to call "a limb of Satan. "Tristram Shandy, in his light-hearted way, declared that "there's not somuch difference between good and evil as the world is apt to imagine. "No doubt that is so, but the world does not like its preachers to playfast and loose with moral definitions. 

The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against the seriousness, the ponderosity, of previous prose literature in England. We talk of theheaviness of the eighteenth century, but the periods of even suchmasters of solid rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledownin comparison with the academic prose of the seventeenth century. Beforethe eighteenth century is called lumbering, let us set a page of Humeagainst a page of Hobbes, or a passage out of Berkeley by a passage outof Selden. Common justice is seldom done to the steady clarification ofEnglish prose between 1660 and 1750, but it was kept within formal linesuntil the sensitive recklessness of Sterne broke up the mould, and gaveit the flying forms of a cloud or a wave. He owed this beautifulinspiration to what Nietzsche calls his "squirrel-soul, " which leapedfrom bough to bough, and responded without a trace of conventionalrestraint to every gust of emotion. Well might Goethe be inspired todeclare that Sterne was the most emancipated spirit of his century. 

His very emancipation gives us the reason why Sterne's admirers nowadaysare often divided in their allegiance to him. A frequent part of hishumour deals very flippantly with subjects that are what we have beentaught to consider indelicate or objectionable. It is worse than uselessto try to explain this foible of his away, because he was aware of itand did it on purpose. He said that "nothing but the more gross andcarnal parts of a composition will go down. " His indecency was objectedto in his own age, but not with any excluding severity. And I would liketo call your attention to the curious conventionality of our views onthis subject. Human nature does not change, but it changes its modes ofexpression. In the eighteenth century very grave people, even bishops, allowed themselves, in their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting. Yet they would have been scandalised by the tragic treatment of sex byour more audacious novelists of to-day. We are still interested in thesematters, but we have agreed not to joke about them. I read the other daya dictum of one of those young gentlemen who act as our moral policemen:he prophesied that a jest on a sexual subject would, in twenty years, benot merely reprehensible, as it is now, but unintelligible. Very proper, no doubt, only do not let us call this morality, it is only a change ofhabits. 

Sterne is not suited to readers who are disheartened at irrelevancy. Itis part of his charm, and it is at the same time his most whimsicalhabit, never to proceed with his story when you expect him to do so, andto be reminded by his own divagations of delightful side-issues whichlead you, entranced, whither you had no intention of going. He did notmerely not shun occasions of being irrelevant, but he sought them outand eagerly cultivated them. Remember that a whole chapter of _Tristram_is devoted to the _attitude_ of Corporal Trim as he prepared himself toread the Sermon. Sterne kept a stable of prancing, plump littlehobby-horses, and he trotted them out upon every occasion. But this iswhat makes his books the best conversational writing in the Englishlanguage. He writes for all the world exactly as though he were talkingat his ease, and we listen enchanted to the careless, frolicking, idle, penetrating speaker who builds up for us so nonchalantly, withpersistent but unobtrusive touch upon touch, the immortal figures of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim, Yorick, the Widow Wadman, and so many more. 

This, I am inclined to think, in drawing this brief sketch to an end, isSterne's main interest for ourselves. He broke up the rhetorical mannerof composition, or, rather, he produced an alternative manner which wasgradually accepted and is in partial favour still. I would ask you toread for yourselves the scene of the ass who blocked the way forTristram at Lyons, and to consider how completely new that method ofdescribing, of facing a literary problem, was in 1765. I speak here toan audience of experts, to a company of authors who are accustomed to aclose consideration of the workmanship of their _métier_. I ask themwhere, at all events in English, anything like that scene had been foundbefore the days of Sterne. Since those days we have never been withoutit. 

To trace the Shandean influence down English literature for the lastcentury and a half would take me much too long for your patience. InDickens, in Carlyle, even in Ruskin, the Shandean element is oftenpresent and not rarely predominant. None of those great men would haveexpressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence Sterne. And comingdown to our own time, I see the influence of Sterne everywhere. Thepathos of Sir James Barrie is intimately related to that of the creatorof Uncle Toby and Maria of Moulines, while I am not sure that of all thebooks which Stevenson read it was not the _Sentimental Journey_ whichmade the deepest impression upon him. 

[Footnote 5: Address delivered to the Authors' Club, November 24th, 1913]

THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

In the announcements of the approaching celebration of the centenary ofPoe in this country, the fact of his having been a poet was concealed. Perhaps his admirers hoped that it might be overlooked, as withoutimportance, or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events, thestatement that the revels on that occasion would be conducted by SirArthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to prove that it was the prosewriter of "The Black Cat" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue, " and notthe verso writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be the centreof attention. On that side of Poe's genius, therefore, although it isillustrated by such masterpieces of sullen beauty as "The Fall of theHouse of Usher" and such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as "The GoldBug, " I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think theimportance of these tales very slight by the side of that of the bestpoems. Edgar Poe was, in my opinion, one of the most significant poeticartists of a century rich in poetic artists, and I hold it to be forthis reason, and not because he wrote thrilling "detective" stories, that he deserves persistent commemoration. 

The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of the nineteenthcentury has not been easily or universally admitted, and it is onlynatural to examine both the phenomena and the causes of the objectionsso persistently brought against it. In the first instance, if the fameof Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced firmly, and itwas encouraged from the beginning by the experts, by the cultivatedminority. Poe, on the other hand, was challenged, and his credentialswere grudgingly inspected, by those who represented the finest cultureof his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism are notquite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal of Americanletters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood of Boston, and it wasill-prepared to believe that anything poetical could deserve salvationif it proceeded from a place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, theson of Irish strolling players, called "The Virginia Comedians, " settledin the South and was educated in England. By an odd coincidence, it nowappears that he actually was a native, as it were by accident, of Bostonitself. In the words of the Psalmist, "Lo! there was he born!" ThisGentile poet, such was the then state of American literature, could notarrive on earth elsewhere than in the Jerusalem of Massachusetts. Butthat concession was not known to the high priests, the Lowells, theHolmeses, the Nortons, to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder fromJavan or Gadire. 

Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality as to findhimself isolated. Everything new is regarded with suspicion and dislikeby the general world of readers, and usually by the leaders of criticismas well. Yet the daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaronand his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded Poe, Wordsworthand Coleridge had been derided, but they had enjoyed the emphaticapprobation of one another and of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah ofletters, yet he was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. EvenKeats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch reviewers behindthe confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and Reynolds. At a still later momentRossetti and Morris would shelter themselves securely, and evenserenely, from the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower ofthe praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set against thestupidity of the world at large the comfortable cleverness of a fewstrong persons of taste, founded, as all good taste must be, uponprinciples. The poet could pride himself on his eclecticism, on hisrecognition within, as Keats said, "a little clan. " But Poe's misfortunewas to have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely thosepersons who represented, and on the whole justly represented, good tastein America. 

His behaviour in this predicament was what might have been expected froma man whose genius was more considerable than his judgment or hismanners. He tried, at first, to conciliate the New England authorities, and he flattered not merely the greater planets but some of the verylittle stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher P. Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that his blandishmentswere of no avail, he turned savage, and tried to prove that he did notcare, by being rude to Bryant and Longfellow. He called the whole solemnSanhedrim a college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, heclosed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central aim and objectof the excellent men who at that time ruled American literature was toprove that, in what this impertinent young man from Virginia called theFrog Pond, the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, itshome of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the recognition ofEurope, which began to flow in richly just as Poe ceased to be able toenjoy it, the prestige of this remarkable poet might have beensuccessfully annihilated. 

Nor was it only the synod of Boston wits who issued the edict that heshould be ignored, but in England also many good judges of literature, especially those who belonged to the intellectual rather than theartistic class, could not away with him. I recollect hearing LeslieStephen say, now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms ofpraise for Poe was "simply preposterous. " And one whom I admire soimplicitly that I will not mention his name in a context which is notfavourable to his judgment, wrote (in his haste) of Poe's "singularlyvalueless verses. "

This opposition, modified, it is true, by the very different attitudeadopted by Tennyson and most subsequent English poets, as well as byBaudelaire, Mallarmé and the whole younger school in France, wasobstinately preserved, and has not wholly subsided. It would be atactical mistake for those who wish to insist on Poe's supremacy in hisown line to ignore the serious resistance which has been made to it. Inthe canonisation-trial of this whimsical saint, the Devil's advocates, it may be confessed, are many, and their objections are imposing. It ispossible that local pique and a horror of certain crude surroundings mayhave had something to do with the original want of recognition in NewEngland, but such sources of prejudice would be ephemeral. Thereremained, and has continued to remain, in the very essence of Poe'spoetry, something which a great many sincere and penetrating lovers ofverse cannot endure to admit as a dominant characteristic of the art. 

To recognise the nature of this quality is to take the first steptowards discovering the actual essence of Poe's genius. His detractorshave said that his verses are "singularly valueless. " It is thereforenecessary to define what it is they mean by "value. " If they mean aninculcation, in beautiful forms, of moral truth; if they mean asuccession of ideas, clothed in exalted and yet definite language; ifthey are thinking of what stirs the heart in reading parts of _Hamlet_and _Comus_, of what keeps the pulse vibrating after the "Ode to Duty"has been recited; then the verses of Poe are indeed without value. Apoet less gnomic than Poe, one from whom less, as they say in thesuburbs, "can be learned, " is scarcely to be found in the whole range ofliterature. His lack of curiosity about moral ideas is so complete thatevil moves him no more than good. There have been writers of eccentricor perverse morality who have been so much irritated by the preaching ofvirtue that they have lent their genius to the recommendation of vice. This inversion of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that isvaguely called "immoral" in imaginative literature. But Edgar Poe is asinnocent of immorality as he is of morality. No more innocuous flowersthan his are grown through the length and breadth of Parnassus. There ishardly a phrase in his collected writings which has a bearing upon anyethical question, and those who look for what Wordsworth called "chainsof valuable thoughts" must go elsewhere. 

In 1840 they might, in New England, go to Bryant, to Emerson, toHawthorne; and it is more than excusable that those who wereendeavouring to refine the very crude community in the midst of whichthey were anxiously holding up the agate lamp of Psyche, should seenothing to applaud in the vague and shadowy rhapsodies then being issuedby a dissipated hack in Philadelphia. What the New England criticswanted, patriotically as well as personally, was as little like"Ulalume" as can possibly be conceived. They defined what poetry shouldbe--there was about that time a mania for defining poetry--and whattheir definition was may be seen no less plainly in the American _Fablefor Critics_ than in the preface to the English _Philip van Artevelde_. It was to be picturesque, intellectual, pleasing; it was to deal, aboveall, with moral "truths"; it was to avoid vagueness and to give nouncertain sound; it was to regard "passion" with alarm, as the sirenwhich was bound sooner or later to fling a bard upon the rocks. It isnot necessary to treat this conception of poetry with scorn, nor toreject principles of precise thought and clear, sober language, whichhad been illustrated by Wordsworth in the present and by Gray in thepast. The ardent young critics of our own age, having thrown off allrespect for the traditions of literature, speak and write as if to them, and them alone, had been divinely revealed the secrets of taste. They donot give themselves time to realise that in Apollo's house there aremany mansions. 

It is sufficient for us to note here that the discomfort of Poe'sposition resided in the fact that he was not admitted into so much asthe forecourt of the particular mansion inhabited by Bryant and Lowell. There is a phrase in one of his own rather vague and "valueless" essays(for Poe was a poor critic) which, as it were accidentally, describeshis ideal in poetry, although it is not his own verse of which he isspeaking. He described--in 1845, when his ripe genius had just broughtforth "The Raven"--the poetic faculty as producing "a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight. " Thisshadowy but absorbing and mastering pleasure impregnated his own bestwritings to such a degree that it gives us the measure of his unlikenessto his contemporaries, and states the claim of his individuality. Without precisely knowing it or perceiving his revolution, in an age ofintelligent, tame, lucid and cautiously-defined poetry, Edgar Poeexpressed the emotions which surged within him in numbers that were, even to excess, "dreamy, wild, indefinite and indefinable. "

His early verses are remarkably exempt from the influences which wemight expect to find impressed on them. He imitated, as every man ofgenuine originality imitates while he learns his trade, but his modelswere not, as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley; theywere Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and Scott, Poe foundnothing to transfer to his own nature, and the early imitations, therefore, left no trace on him. Brief as is the volume of his poems, half of it might be discarded without much regret. Scattered among hisByron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces which revealto us that, while he was still almost a child, the true direction of hisgenius was occasionally revealed to him. The lyric "To Helen, " which issaid to have been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in thepeculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to characterise hismature poems:--

 "On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. "

This was not published, however, until the author was two-and-twenty, and it may have been touched up. Here is a fragment of a suppressedpoem, "Visit of the Dead, " which Poe certainly printed in his eighteenthyear:--

 "The breeze, the breath of God, is still, And the mist upon the hill, Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken, Is a symbol and a token; How it hangs upon the trees, A mystery of mysteries!"

This is not so perfect, but it is even more than "To Helen" symptomaticof Poe's peculiar relation to the poetic faculty as fostering a state ofindefinite and indeed indefinable delight. And from these faintbreathings how direct is the advance to such incomparable specimens ofsymbolic fancy as "The City in the Sea, " "The Sleeper, " and finally"Ulalume"!

The determination to celebrate, in a minor key, indefinite andmelancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than which none more dangerouscan be placed in the path of a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, andhe was protected, and permanent value was secured for his poetry, by thepossession of one or two signal gifts to which attention must now bepaid. He cultivated the indefinite, but, happily for us, in language sodefinite and pure that when he succeeds it is with a cool fulness, anabsence of all fretting and hissing sound, such as can rarely beparalleled in English literature. The finest things in Milton's 1645volume, Wordsworth at his very best, Tennyson occasionally, Collins insome of his shorter odes, have reached that perfection of syllabicsweetness, that clear sound of a wave breaking on the twilight sands, which Poe contrives to render, without an effort, again and again:--

 "By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, [6] nam'd Night, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule, From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime. Out of space, out of time. "

The present moment is one in which the reaction against plastic beautyin poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appealagainst it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence inthe younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as thoughhe were preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is donepurposely, and in accordance with mysterious harmonic laws entirelybeyond the comprehension of ordinary ears, makes the matter worse. Thereis no heresiarch so dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegatinglife, and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, thatthe twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage for cacophony. Heholds something of the same place in relation to Swinburne and Poe, thatDonne did to Spenser three hundred years ago. In this condition ofthings it may seem useless to found any claim for Poe on the ground ofthe exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We may hope, however, some day to regain the use of our ears, and to discover oncemore that music and metre are utterly distinct arts. When thatre-discovery has been made, Poe will resume his position as one of themost uniformly melodious of all those who have used the Englishlanguage. 

Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection of his prosodyhave occasionally objected that in the most popular examples of it, "TheRaven" and "The Bells, " he obtains his effect by a trick. It might beobjected, with equal force, that Victor Hugo in "Les Djinns" and evenTennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" made use of "tricks. " On the other hand, if the charge be deserved, it seems odd that in the course of nearlyseventy years no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat thewonderful experiment. In each poem there are what must be judgeddefinite errors against taste in detail--Poe's taste was never verysure--but the skill of the long voluptuous lamentation, broken at equalintervals by the croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation, as if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of the bells, is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in keeping with thepersonal genius of the writer, that it is surely affectation to deny itsvalue. 

It is not, however, in "The Bells" or in "The Raven, " marvellous as arethese _tours de force_, that we see the essential greatness of Poerevealed. The best of his poems are those in which he deals lessboisterously with the sentiment of mystery. During the latest months ofhis unhappy life, he composed three lyrics which, from a technicalpoint of view, must be regarded not only as the most interesting, whichhe wrote, but as those which have had the most permanent effect uponsubsequent literature, not in England merely, but in France. These are"Ulalume, " "Annabel Lee, " "For Annie. " One of Poe's greatest inventionswas the liquidation of stanzaic form, by which he was able to mould itto the movements of emotion without losing its essential structure. Manypoets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to do it with thestanza. In the three latest lyrics this stanzaic legerdemain ispractised with an enchanting lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous andelastic grace. Perhaps, had it been subjected to the poet's latestrevision, "For Annie" would have been the most wonderful of all in thesensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluctuations ofsentiment. 

We may, then, briefly summarise that Poe's first claim to commemorationis that he was the pioneer in restoring to the art of poetry a facultywhich it had almost lost in its attempt to compete with science andphilosophy. It had become the aim of the poets to state facts; it wasgiven to Poe to perceive that no less splendid a future lay before thosewho only hinted feelings. He was the earliest modern poet whosubstituted the symbol for the exact description of an object or anevent. That "expression directe, " about which the French have beendebating for the last quarter of a century, and over which M. AdolpheRetté and M. Albert Mockel periodically dispute like Fathers of theChurch, was perceived and was deliberately repudiated by Poe eightyyears ago. He was deeply impregnated with the sense that the harmony ofimagination is not destroyed, but developed, by drawing over a subjectveil after veil of suggestion. His native temperament aided him in hisresearch after the symbol. He was naturally a cultivator of terror, onewho loved to people the world with strange and indefinable powers. Hisdreams were innocent and agitating, occupied with supernatural terrors, weighed upon by the imminence of shadowy presentments. He trembled at heknew not what; in this he was related to the earliest poets of theworld, and in his perpetual recurrence to symbol he recalls the actionof their alarms. 

The cardinal importance, then, of Poe as a poet is that he restored topoetry a primitive faculty of which civilisation seemed successfully tohave deprived her. He rejected the doctrinal expression of positivethings, and he insisted upon mystery and symbol. He endeavoured toclothe unfathomable thoughts and shadowy images in melody that was likethe wind wandering over the strings of an æolian harp. In other words, he was the pioneer of a school which has spread its influence to theconfines of the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature. He was the discoverer and the founder of Symbolism. 

1909. 

[Footnote 6: A shocking false quantity; but how little that would matterto Poe]

THE AUTHOR OF "PELHAM"

One hundred and twenty years have nearly passed since the birth ofBulwer-Lytton, and he continues to be suspended in a dim and ambiguousposition in the history of our literature. He combined extraordinaryqualities with fatal defects. He aimed at the highest eminence, andfailed to reach it, but he was like an explorer, who is diverted fromthe main ascent of a mountain, and yet annexes an important table-landelsewhere. Bulwer-Lytton never secured the ungrudging praise of the bestjudges, but he attained great popularity, and has even now not whollylost it. He is never quoted as one of our great writers, and yet heholds a place of his own from which it is improbable that he will everbe dislodged. Although he stood out prominently among his fellows, andalthough his career was tinged with scandal and even with romance, verylittle has been known about him. Curiosity has been foiled by thediscretion of one party and the malignity of another. The public has notbeen in a position to know the truth, nor to possess the real portraitof a politician and a man of letters who has been presented as an angeland as a gargoyle, but never as a human being. Forty years after hisdeath the candour and the skill of his grandson reveal him to us at lastin a memoir of unusual excellence. 

In no case would Lord Lytton's task have been an easy one, but it musthave been made peculiarly difficult by the work of those who hadpreceded him. Of these, the only one who deserves serious attention isRobert Lytton, who published certain fragments in 1883. That the sonwished to support the memory of his father is unquestionable. But it isdifficult to believe that he intended his contribution to be more thanan aid to some future biographer's labour. He scattered his materialabout him in rough heaps. Apart from the "Literary Remains, " whichdestroyed the continuity of even such brief biography as he gave, RobertLytton introduced a number of chapters which are more or less of thenature of essays, and are often quite foreign to his theme. Moreover, hededicated several chapters to literary criticism of his father's works. It is, in fact, obvious to any one who examines the two volumes of 1883which Robert Lytton contrived to fill, that he was careful to contributeas little as he possibly could to the story which he had started out torelate. Although there is much that is interesting in the memoirs of1883, the reader is continually losing the thread of the narrative. Thereason is, no doubt, that Robert Lytton stood too close to his parents, had seen too much of their disputes, was too much torn by the agonies ofhis own stormy youth, and was too sensitively conscious of the scandal, to tell the story at all. We have the impression that, in order toforestall any other biography, he pretended himself to write a bookwhich he was subtle enough to make unintelligible. 

This baffling discretion, this feverish race from hiding-place tohiding-place, has not only not been repeated by Lord Lytton in the new_Life_, but the example of his father seems to have positivelyemphasised his own determination to be straightforward and lucid. I knowno modern biography in which the writer has kept more rigidly to thebusiness of his narrative, or has less successfully been decoyed asideby the sirens of family vanity. It must have been a great difficulty tothe biographer to find his pathway cumbered by the volumes of 1883, setby his father as a plausible man-trap for future intruders. LordLytton, however, is the one person who is not an intruder, and he wasthe only possessor of the key which his father had so diplomaticallyhidden. His task, however, was further complicated by the circumstancethat Bulwer-Lytton himself left in MS. An autobiography, dealing veryfully with his own career and character up to the age of twenty-two. Theredundancy of all the Lyttons is amazing. Bulwer-Lytton would not havebeen himself if he had not overflowed into reflections which swelled hisvaluable account of his childhood into monstrous proportions. LordLytton, who has a pretty humour, tells an anecdote which will be readwith pleasure:--

 "An old woman, who had once been one of Bulwer-Lytton's trusted domestic servants, is still living in a cottage at Knebworth. One day she was talking to me about my grandfather, and inadvertently used an expression which summed him up more perfectly than any elaborate description could have done. She was describing his house at Copped Hall, where she had been employed as caretaker, and added: 'In one of his attacks of _fluency_, I nursed him there for many weeks. ' 'Pleurisy, ' I believe, was what she meant. "

The bacillus of "_fluency_" interpenetrates the Autobiography, theletters, the documents of every kind, and at any moment this diseasewill darken Bulwer-Lytton's brightest hours. But curtailed by hisgrandson, and with its floral and heraldic ornaments well pared away, the Autobiography is a document of considerable value. It is writtenwith deliberate candour, and recalls the manner of Cobbett, a writerwith whom we should not expect to find Bulwer-Lytton in sympathy. It isprobable that the author of it never saw himself nor those whosurrounded him in precisely their true relation. There was somethingradically twisted in his image of life, which always seems to havepassed through a refracting surface on its way to his vision. No doubtthis is more or less true of all experience; no power has given us thegift "to see ourselves as others see us. " But in the case ofBulwer-Lytton this refractive habit of his imagination produced agreater swerving aside from positive truth than is usual. The result isthat an air of the fabulous, of the incredible, is given to hisnarratives, and often most unfairly. 

A close examination, in fact, of the Autobiography results in confirmingthe historic truth of it. What is surprising is not, when we come toconsider them, the incidents themselves, but Bulwer-Lytton's odd way ofnarrating them. Lord Lytton, without any comment, provides us withcurious material for the verification of his grandfather's narrative. Heprints, here and there, letters from entirely prosaic persons whichtally, often to a surprising degree, with the extravagant statements ofBulwer-Lytton. To quote a single instance, of a very remarkablecharacter, Bulwer-Lytton describes the effect his scholarship produced, at the age of seventeen, upon sober, elderly people, who were dazzledwith his accomplishments and regarded him as a youthful prodigy. It isthe sort of confession, rather full-blooded and lyrical, which we mighteasily set down to that phenomenon of refraction. But Lord Lytton printsa letter from Dr. Samuel Parr (whom, by the way, he calls "a man ofsixty-four, " but Parr, born in 1747, was seventy-four in 1821), whichconfirms the autobiographer's account in every particular. The aged Whigchurchman, who boasted a wider knowledge of Greek literature than anyother scholar of his day, and whose peremptory temper was matter oflegend, could write to this Tory boy a long letter of enthusiasticcriticism, and while assuring Bulwer-Lytton that he kept "all theletters with which you have honoured me, " could add: "I am proud ofsuch a correspondent; and, if we lived nearer to each other, I shouldexpect to be very happy indeed in such a friend. " Letters of this kind, judiciously printed by Lord Lytton in his notes, serve to call us backfrom the nebulous witchcraft in which Bulwer-Lytton was so fond ofwrapping up the truth, and to remind us that, in spite of thenecromancer, the truth is there. 

From the point where the fragment of autobiography closes, although forsome time much the same material is used and some of the same lettersare quoted, as were quoted and used by Robert Lytton, the presentationof these is so different that the whole effect is practically one ofnovelty. But with the year 1826, when Edward Bulwer-Lytton, at the ageof three-and-twenty, became engaged to Rosina Doyle Wheeler, all ispositively new. The story of the marriage, separation, and subsequentrelations has never before been presented to the world with any approachto accuracy or fulness. No biographical notices of Bulwer-Lytton eventouch on this subject, which has been hitherto abandoned to the gossipof irresponsible contemporaries. It is true that a Miss Devey composed a"Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton, " in which the tale was told. This work wasimmediately suppressed, and is inaccessible to the public; but the onlyperson who is known to be familiar with its contents reports that it"contains fragments of the narrative, obviously biassed, whollyinaccurate, and evidently misleading. " So far as the general public isconcerned, Lord Lytton's impartial history of the relations between hisgrandfather and his grandmother is doubtless that portion of his bookwhich will be regarded as the most important. I may, therefore, dwellbriefly upon his treatment of it. 

The biographer, in dealing with a subject of this incalculabledifficulty, could but lay himself open to the censure of those whodislike the revelation of the truth on any disagreeable subject. Thislion, however, stood in the middle of his path, and he had either towrestle with it or to turn back. Lord Lytton says in his preface that itwas necessary to tell all or nothing of the matrimonial adventures ofhis grandparents, but, in reality, this was not quite the alternative, which was to tell the truth or to withdraw from the task of writing aLife of Bulwer-Lytton. The marriage and its results were so predominantin the career of the man, and poisoned it so deeply to the latest hourof his consciousness, that to attempt a biography of him without clearreference to them would have been like telling the story of Nessus theCentaur without mentioning the poisoned arrow of Heracles. But LordLytton shall give his own apology:--

 "As it was impossible to give a true picture of my grandfather without referring to events which overshadowed his whole life, and which were already partially known to the public, I decided to tell the whole story as fully and as accurately as possible, in the firm belief that the truth can damage neither the dead nor the living. The steps which led to the final separation between my grandparents, and the forces which brought about so disastrous a conclusion of a marriage of love, apart from their biographical interest, afford a study of human nature of the utmost value; and so great are the moral lessons which this story contains, that I venture to hope that the public may find in much that is tragic and pitiful much also that is redeeming, and that the ultimate verdict of posterity may be that these two unfortunate people did not suffer entirely in vain. "

His story, therefore, is not written with any partiality, and it seemsto be as full and as truthful as the ample materials at the author'sdisposal permitted. The reader will conjecture that Lord Lytton couldhave given many more details, but apart from the fact that they wouldoften have been wholly unfit for publication, it is difficult to seethat they would in any degree have altered the balance of the story, ormodified our judgment, which is quite sufficiently enlightened by thecopious letters on both sides which are now for the first time printed. 

Voltaire has remarked of love that it is "de toutes les passions la plusforte, parce qu'elle attaque, à la fois, la tête, le cœur, le corps. "It is a commonplace to say that Edward Bulwer's whole career might havebeen altered if he had never met Rosina Wheeler, because this is true inmeasure of every strong juvenile attachment: but it is rarely indeed socopiously or so fatally true as it was in his case. His existence wasoverwhelmed by this event; it was turned topsy-turvey, and it neverregained its equilibrium. In this adventure all was exaggerated; therewas excess of desire, excess of gratification, an intense weariness, aconsuming hatred. 

On the first evening when the lovers met, in April 1826, an observer, watching them as they talked, reflected that Bulwer's "bearing had thataristocratic something bordering on _hauteur_" which reminded theonlooker "of the passage, 'Stand back; I am holier than thou!'" The sameobserver, dazzled, like the rest of the world, by the loveliness of MissWheeler, judged that it would be best "to regard her as we do somebeautiful caged wild creature of the woods--at a safe and securedistance. " It would have preserved a chance of happiness forBulwer-Lytton to possess something of this stranger's clairvoyance. Itwas not strange perhaps, but unfortunate, that he did not notice--orrather that he was not repelled by, for he did notice--the absence ofmoral delicacy in the beautiful creature, the radiant and seductiveLamia, who responded so instantly to his emotion. He, the mostfastidious of men, was not offended by the vivacity of a young lady whocalled attention to the vulgarity of her father's worsted stockings andhad none but words of abuse for her mother. These things, indeed, disconcerted the young aristocrat, but he put them down to a lack oftraining; he persuaded himself that these were superficial blemishes andcould be remedied; and he resigned his senses to the intoxication ofRosina's beauty. 

At first--and indeed to the last--she stimulated his energy and hisintellect. His love and his hatred alike spurred him to action. InAugust 1826, in spite of the violent opposition of his mother, he andRosina were betrothed. By October Mrs. Bulwer had so far prevailed thatthe engagement was broken off, and Edward tossed in a whirlpool ofanger, love, and despair. It took the form of such an attack of"fluency" as was never seen before or after. Up to that time he had beenan elegant although feverish idler. Now he plunged into a strenuous lifeof public and private engagements. He prepared to enter the House ofCommons; he finished _Falkland_, his first novel; he started thecomposition of _Pelham_ and of another "light prose work, " which mayhave disappeared; he achieved a long narrative in verse, _O'Neill, orthe Rebel_; and he involved himself in literary projects without boundand without end. The aim of all this energy was money. It is true thathe had broken off his betrothal; but it was at first only a pretence atestrangement, to hoodwink his mother. He was convinced that he could notlive without possessing Rosina, and as his mother held the strings ofthe common purse, he would earn his own income and support a wife. 

Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, who had a Roman firmness, was absolutely determinedthat her son should not marry "a penniless girl whose education had beenso flagrantly neglected, who was vain and flighty, with a mocking humourand a conspicuous lack of principle. " At this point the story becomesexceedingly interesting. A Balzac would strip it of its romantictrappings, and would penetrate into its physiology. Out of Rosina'ssight, and diverted by the excess of his literary labours, Edward'sinfatuation began to decline. His mother, whose power of character wouldhave been really formidable if it had been enforced by sympathy or evenby tact, relaxed her opposition; and instantly her son, himself, nolonger attacked, became calmer and more clear-sighted. Rosina's faultswere patent to his memory; the magic of her beauty less invincible. Within a month all was changed again. Rosina fretted herself into whatshe contrived to have reported to Bulwer-Lytton as an illness. Shebegged for an interview, and he went with reluctance to bid her farewellfor ever. It was Bulwer-Lytton's habit to take with him a masterpiece ofliterature upon every journey. It seems unfortunate that on thisoccasion _The Tempest_ was not his companion, for it might have warnedhim, as Prospero warned Ferdinand, against the fever in the blood:--

 "No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow; but barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew The union of your bed, with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it, both. "

When his short interview, which was to have been a final one, was over, that had happened which made a speedy marriage necessary, whatever theconsequences might be. 

The new conditions were clearly stated to old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, butthat formidable lady belonged to an earlier generation, and saw noreason for Quixotic behaviour. Her conscience had been trained in theeighteenth century, and all her blame was for Rosina Wheeler. Tornbetween his duty and his filial affection, Bulwer-Lytton now passedthrough a period of moral agony. He wrote to his mother: "I am far toowretched, and have had too severe a contest with myself, not to look tothe future rather with despondency than pleasure, and the view you takeof the matter is quite enough to embitter my peace of mind. " MissWheeler, not unnaturally stung to anger, used disrespectful expressionsregarding Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, and these bickerings filled the lover andson with indignation. His life, between these ladies, grew to be hardlyworth living, and in the midst of one such crisis this brilliant youngdandy of four-and-twenty wrote:--"I feel more broken-hearted, despondent, and sated than any old valetudinarian who has seen all hisold hopes and friends drop off one by one, and finds himself left forthe rest of his existence to the solitary possession of gloom and gout. "Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton fought fiercely to the last, and Edward determined toclose the matter; on August 29th, 1827, he married Rosina. 

At first, in spite of, and even because of, the wild hostility of hismother, the marriage seemed successful. The rage of the mother drove thehusband to the wife. Lord Lytton has noted that in later years all thathis grandfather and his grandmother said about one another wasunconsciously biassed by their memory of later complications. NeitherBulwer-Lytton nor Rosina could give an accurate history of theirrelations at the beginning, because the mind of each was prejudiced bytheir knowledge of the end. Each sought to justify the hatred which bothhad lived to feel, by representing the other as hateful from the first. But the letters survive, and the recollections of friends, to prove thatthis was entirely untrue. It must be admitted that their union was neverbased upon esteem, but wholly upon passion, and that from the first theylacked that coherency of relation, in moral respects, which was neededto fix their affections. But those who have dimly heard how bitterlythese two unfortunate people hated one another in later life will beastonished to learn that they spent the two first years together likeinfatuated turtle-doves. 

Their existence was romantic and absurd. Cut off from all support by theimplacable anger of old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, they depended on a combinedincome of £380 a year and whatever the husband could make to increaseit. Accordingly they took a huge country house, Woodcot in Oxon, andlived at the rate of several thousands a year. There they basked in anaffluent splendour of bad taste which reminds us of nothing in the worldso much as of those portions of _The Lady Flabella_ which Mrs. Wititterly was presently to find so soft and so voluptuous. Thefollowing extract from one of Rosina's lively letters-and she was a verysprightly correspondent--gives an example of her style, of her husband'sPelhamish extravagance, and of the gaudy recklessness of their manner oflife. They had now been married nearly two years:--

 "How do you think my audacious husband has spent his time since he has been in town? Why, he must needs send me down what he termed a little Christmas box, which was a huge box from Howel and James's, containing only eight Gros de Naples dresses of different colours not made up, four Gros des Indes, two merino ones, four satin ones, an amber, a black, a white and a blue, eight pocket handkerchiefs that look as if they had been spun out of lilies and air and _brodée_ by the fairies, they are so exquisitely fine and so beautifully worked. Four pieces (16 yards in each) of beautiful white blonde, two broad pieces and two less broad, a beautiful and very large blue real cashmere shawl, a Chantilly veil that would reach from this to Dublin, and six French long pellerines very richly embroidered on the finest India muslin, three dozen pair of white silk stockings, one dozen of black, a most beautiful black satin cloak with very pretty odd sort of capes and trimmed round and up the sides with a very broad band of a new kind of figured plush--I forget what they call it (it came from Paris), and a hat of the same--such a hat as can only be made in the Rue Vivienne. You would think that this 'little Christmas box' would have been enough to have lasted for some time. However, he thought differently, for on New Year's morning before I was out of bed, there came a parcel by the mail, which on opening proved to be a large red Morocco case containing a bright gold chain, a yard and a half long, with the most beautiful and curious cross to it that I ever saw--the chain is as thick as my dead gold necklace, and you may guess what sort of a thing it is when I tell you that I took it to a jeweller here to have it weighed, and it weighed a pound all but an ounce. The man said it never was made for less than fifty guineas, but that he should think it had cost more. "

Rosina, who has only £80 a year of her own, will not be outdone, andcannot "resist ordering" Edward "a gold toilette, which he has longwished for. .. . Round the rim of the basin and the handle of the ewer Ihave ordered a wreath of _narcissus_ in dead gold, which, for Mr. Pelham, you'll own, is not a bad idea. "

It would be expected that all this crazy display would lead the youngcouple rapidly and deeply into debt. That it did not do so is the mostcurious phase of the story. Bulwer-Lytton immediately, and apparentlywithout the slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry thesober record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott alone may beheld to have equalled it. The giants of popular fiction did, indeed, enjoy larger single successes than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them, not Dickens himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrotesold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. Even hispoetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, always sold. He didnot know what failure was; he made money by _Devereux_; even _The NewTimon_ went into many editions. To earn what was required, however--andin these early years he seems to have made £3000 his minimum of needfulreturn--to live in the insane style which his wife and he demanded, anenormous nervous strain was required. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper hadalways been warm and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree. His mother continued to exasperate him; his wife suddenly failed toplease him; his health waned; and he became the most miserable of men;yet without ceasing for a moment to be the most indefatigable ofauthors. The reader will follow the evolution of the tragedy, which isof poignant interest, in Lord Lytton's pages. The whole story is one ofthe most extraordinary in the history of literature. 

It has been a feature of Bulwer-Lytton's curious posthumous fortune thathe has seemed solitary in his intellectual if not in his political andsocial action. We think of him as one of those morose and lonely beesthat are too busy gathering pollen to join the senate of the hive, andare dwellers in the holes of the rocks. It is quite true that, with apainful craving for affection, he had not the genius of friendship. Thegeneral impression given by his biography is one of isolation; in "thesea of life" he was one of those who are most hopelessly "enisled. "Nothing is sadder than this severance of a delicate and sensitivetemperament from those who surround it closely and to whom it stretchesout its arms in vain. But a careful reading of these interesting volumesleaves us in no doubt of the cause of this loneliness. Bulwer-Lytton, with all his ardour and his generosity, was devoid of the gift ofsympathy. In characters of a simpler mould a natural kindliness may takethe place of comprehension. But Bulwer-Lytton had a lively and proteanfancy which perpetually deceived him. In human relations he was alwaysmoving, but always on the wrong track. 

The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify thisunfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are even too eloquent, forBulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself with his own verbosity; they are meantto be kind, they are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise anddignified and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial narrative, that they scarcely ever failed to exasperate the receiver. His dealingswith his son, of whom he was exquisitely proud and sensitively fond, areof the saddest character, because of the father's want of comprehension, haste of speech and intolerance of temper. The very fact that a son, awife, or a mother could with impunity be addressed in terms ofexaggerated sensibility, because there could be no appeal, was a snareto the too-ready pen of Bulwer-Lytton, which, poured out its oceans ofink without reflection and without apprehension. If violent offence weregiven, the post went out again later in the day, and equally violentself-humiliation would restore the emotional balance. But what could notbe restored was the sense of confidence and domestic security. 

In his contact with other literary men of his own age more restraint wasnecessary, and we learn from Lord Lytton's pages of valuable andprolonged acquaintanceships which were sometimes almost friendships. Hiscompany was much sought after, and occasionally by very odd persons. Lord Lytton prints a series of most diverting letters from the notoriousHarriette Wilson, who, in spite of the terror into which her "Memoirs"had thrown society, desired to add the author of _Pelham_ to the aviaryof her conquests. But the snare was set in vain before the eyes of soshrewd a bird as Bulwer-Lytton; he declined to see the lady, but he kepther amazing letters. This was in 1829, when the novelist seems to havehad no literary or political associates. But by 1831, we find himediting the _New Monthly Magazine_, and attaching himself to LordMelbourne and Lord Durham on the one hand and to Disraeli and Dickens onthe other. When to these we have added Lady Blessington and LetitiaLandon, we have mentioned all those public persons with whomBulwer-Lytton seems to have been on terms of intimacy during his earlymanhood. All through these years he was an incessant diner-out andparty-goer, and the object of marvellous adulation, but he passedthrough all this social parade as though it had been a necessary portionof the exterior etiquette of life. Why he fatigued himself by theseformal exercises, in which he seems to have found no pleasure, it isimpossible to conceive, but a sense of the necessity of parade wasstrangely native to him. 

He had, however, one close and constant friend. John Forster was by farthe most intimate of all his associates throughout his career. Bulwer-Lytton seems to have met him first about 1834, when he wastwenty-eight and Forster only twenty-two. In spite of this disparity inage, the younger man almost at once took a tone of authority such as theelder seldom permitted in an acquaintance. Forster had all the giftswhich make a friend valuable. He was rich in sympathy and resource, histemper was reasonable, he comprehended a situation, he knew how to holdhis own in argument and yet yield with grace. Lord Lytton prints a veryinteresting character-sketch of Forster, which he has found among hisgrandfather's MSS. It is a tribute which does equal credit to him whomakes it and to him of whom it is made:--

 "John Forster. .. . A most sterling man, with an intellect at once massive and delicate. Few, indeed, have his strong practical sense and sound judgment; fewer still unite with such qualities his exquisite appreciation of latent beauties in literary art. Hence, in ordinary life, there is no safer adviser about literary work, especially poetry; no more refined critic. A large heart naturally accompanies so masculine an understanding. He has the rare capacity for affection which embraces many friendships without loss of depth or warmth in one. Most of my literary contemporaries are his intimate companions, and their jealousies of each other do not diminish their trust in him. More than any living critic, he has served to establish reputations. Tennyson and Browning owed him much in their literary career. Me, I think, he served in that way less than any of his other friends. But, indeed, I know of no critic to whom I have been much indebted for any position I hold in literature. In more private matters I am greatly indebted to his counsels. His reading is extensive. What faults he has lie on the surface. He is sometimes bluff to rudeness. But all such faults of manner (and they are his only ones) are but trifling inequalities in a nature solid and valuable as a block of gold. "

This was written with full experience, as the names of Tennyson andBrowning will remind us, for Bulwer-Lytton was slow to admit the valueof these younger talents. His relations with Tennyson have always beenknown to be unfortunate; as they are revealed in Lord Lytton's biographythey approach the incredible. He met Browning at Covent Garden Theatreduring the Macready "revival" of the poetic stage, but it was not untilafter the publication of _Men and Women_ that he became conscious ofBrowning's claim, which he then very grudgingly admitted. He wasgrateful to Browning for his kindness to Robert Lytton in Italy, but henever understood his genius or his character. 

What, however, we read with no less pleasure than surprise are theevidences of Bulwer-Lytton's interest in certain authors of a latergeneration, of whom the general public has never suspected him to havebeen aware. Something almost like friendship sprang up as lately as 1867between him and a man whom nobody would suppose him to admire, MatthewArnold. It sometimes happens that a sensitive and petulant artist findsit more easy to acknowledge the merits of his successors than to endurethose of his immediate contemporaries. The _Essays in Criticism_ and_The Study of Celtic Literature_ called forth from the author of _MyNovel_ and _The Caxtons_ such eulogy as had never been spared for thewritings of Thackeray or Carlyle. Matthew Arnold appeared toBulwer-Lytton to have "brought together all that is most modern insentiment, with all that is most scholastic in thought and language. "Arnold was a guest at Knebworth, and brought the Duke of Genoa with him. He liked Bulwer-Lytton, and their relations became very cordial andlasted for some years; Arnold has given an amusing, but verysympathetic, account of the dignified hospitalities of Knebworth. 

No revelation in Lord Lytton's volumes is, however, more pleasing ormore unexpected than his grandfather's correspondence with Swinburne. Itis thought that he heard of him through Monckton Milnes; at all events, he was an early reader of _Atalanta in Calydon_. When, in 1866, all thefuries of the Press fell shrieking on _Poems and Ballads_, Bulwer-Lyttontook a very generous step. He wrote to Swinburne, expressing hissympathy and begging him to be calm. The young poet was extremelytouched, and took occasion to beg the elder writer for his advice, thepublisher having, without consulting him, withdrawn his volume fromsale. Bulwer-Lytton's reply was a most cordial invitation to stay withhim at Knebworth and talk the matter over. Swinburne gratefullyaccepted, and John Forster was asked to meet him. It was Bulwer-Lytton, it appears, who found another publisher for the outraged volume, andhelped Swinburne out of the scrape. He was always kindness itself if anappeal was made to his protection, and to his sense of justice. However, pleasant as the visit to Knebworth was, there is no evidence that it wasrepeated. Bulwer-Lytton considered Swinburne's opinions preposterous, and indeed if he told Swinburne, as in 1869 he told his son Robert, thatVictor Hugo was "but an epileptic dwarf in a state of galvanism, " theremust have been wigs on the green at Knebworth. 

The student of the biography, if he is already familiar with the morecharacteristic works of Bulwer-Lytton, will find himself for the firsttime provided with a key to much that has puzzled him in the nature ofthat author. The story itself, apart from the tragic matrimonial troublewhich runs through it like a blood-red cord, is of unusual interest. Itis a story of strife, without repose, without enjoyment, but with a gooddeal of splendour and satisfaction. Almost to the end Bulwer-Lytton wasengaged in struggle. As an ambitious social being he was fighting theworld; as an author he was battling with his critics; as a statesman hewas always in the wild storm of party politics. As a private individualhe was all the time keeping his head up against the tide of socialscandal which attacked him when he least expected it, and oftenthreatened to drown him altogether. This turmoil contrasts with the calmof the evening years, after the peerage had been won, the ambitionsatisfied, the literary reputation secured. 

Few writers have encountered, in their own time and after their death, so much adverse criticism, and yet have partly survived it. It is hardlyrealised, even perhaps by Lord Lytton, how unwilling the reviewers wereto give credit to his grandfather. He never found favour in their eyes, and it was a matter of constant resentment with him that they did him, as he thought, injustice. The evidence of his wounded feelings isconstant in his letters. The Quarterly Review never mentioned himwithout contempt until 1865, when the publication of his works, inforty-three volumes, forced it to consider this indefatigable andpopular writer with a measure of respect. Sir Walter Scott, with hisuniversal geniality, read _Pelham_ in 1828 and "found it veryinteresting: the light is easy and gentlemanlike, the dark very grandand sombrous. " He asked who was the author, and he tried to interest hisson-in-law in the novel. But Lockhart was implacable: "_Pelham_, " hereplied, "is writ by a Mr. Bulwer, a Norfolk squire, and horrid puppy. Ihave not read the book, from disliking the author. " Lockhart, however, did read _Devereux_, and three years afterwards, when reviewing someother novel, he said of the historical characters in that romance: "Itseems hard to disquiet so many bright spirits for the sole purpose ofshowing that they _could_ be dull. " That was the attitude of the highercriticism to Bulwer-Lytton from, let us say, 1830 to 1860; he was "ahorrid puppy" and he was also "dull. "

But this was far from being the opinion of the reading public. We haveseen that he never failed, and sometimes he soared into the veryempyrean of popularity. In 1834, when he published _The Last Days ofPompeii_, again in 1837 when he published _Ernest Maltravers_, theecstasy of his adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under themask of anonymity which he chose to assume. This was just before theoutburst of the great school of Victorian novelists; Bulwer had as yetpractically no one but Disraeli to compete with. These two, the authorof _Pelham_ and the author of _Vivian Grey_, raced neck and neck at thehead of the vast horde of "fashionable" novel-writers; now all but themforgotten. In Bulwer-Lytton's romances the reader moved among exaltedpersonages, alternately flippant and sinister; a "mournful enthusiasm"was claimed for the writer by the readers of his day. It was the latestand most powerful development of that Byronic spirit which had been soshortlived in verse, but which was to survive in prose untilBulwer-Lytton adopted his _Caxtons_ manner in the middle of the century. As always in Byronic periods, the portrait of the author himself wassearched for among his most fatal conceptions. To the young librarysubscriber the stoical, solitary figure of Mordaunt, in _The Disowned_, was exactly what was wanted as a representation of the mysteriousnovelist himself. Pelham was the apotheosis of the man of fashion, andit is amusing to read how, when the Bulwer-Lyttons travelled, they weregazed at in reverence as the Pelham and the Pelhamess. 

It would be difficult to improve upon the language used so early as 1832by one of the very few critics who attempted to do justice toBulwer-Lytton's merits. The _Edinburgh Review_ found in him "a stylevigorous and pliable, sometimes strangely incorrect, but often risinginto a touching eloquence. " Ten years later such was the private opinionof D. G. Rossetti, who was "inspired by reading _Rienzi_ and _ErnestMaltravers_, which is indeed a splendid work. " Now that we look back atBulwer-Lytton's prodigious compositions, we are able to perceive morejustly than did the critics of his own day what his merits were. For onething, he was extraordinarily versatile. If we examine his books, wemust be astonished at their variety. He painted the social life of hisown day, he dived into spectral romance, he revived the beautifulceremonies of antiquity, he evoked the great shades of English and ofContinental history, he made realistic and humorous studies ofmiddle-class life, he engaged in vehement controversy on topics of thehour, he prophesied of the order of the future, he wrote comedies andtragedies, epics and epistles, satires and lyrics. His canvasses weremyriad and he crowded every one of them with figures. At his mostByronic moment he flung his dark cloak aside, and danced in motleythrough _Paul Clifford_, with its outrageous caricature of George IV. And his Ministers as a gang of Hounslow highwaymen. Perhaps his bestclaim to regard is the insatiability of his human curiosity, evinced inthe almost infinite variety of his compositions. 

The singular being who wrote so large a library of works and whoseactual features have so carefully been concealed from the public, willbe known at last. The piety of his grandson has presented him to us withno reservations and no false lights. Here he stands, this half-fabulousbeing, not sheathed in sham armour and padding the stage in buskins, buta real personality at length, "with all his weaknesses and faults, hisprejudices, affectations, vanities, susceptibilities, andeccentricities, and also with all his great qualities of industry, courage, kindness of heart; sound judgment, patience, and perseverance. "Lord Lytton has carried through to the close a biographical enterpriseof unusual difficulty, and he deserves the thanks of all students ofEnglish literature. 

THE CHALLENGE OF THE BRONTËS[7]

Although I possess in no degree the advantage which so many of themembers of your society enjoy in being personally connected with thescenes and even, perhaps, with the characters associated with the Brontëfamily, I cannot begin my little address to you to-day without someinvocation of the genius of the place. We meet at Dewsbury because theimmortal sisters were identified with Dewsbury. Is it then notimperative that for whatever picture of them I may endeavour to presentbefore you this afternoon, Dewsbury should form the background?Unfortunately, however, although in the hands of a skilful painter thefigures of the ladies may glow forth, I fear that in the matter oftaking Dewsbury as the background some vagueness and some darkness areinevitable. In the biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and of Mr. ClementShorter, as well as in the proceedings of your society, I have searchedfor evidences of the place Dewsbury took in the lives of the Brontës. What I find--I expect you to tell me that it is not exhaustive--is this. Their father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, was curate here from 1809 to1811. In 1836, when Charlotte was twenty, Miss Wooler transferred herschool from Roe Head to Heald's House at the top of Dewsbury Moor. Inthis school, where Charlotte had been a pupil since 1831, she was now agoverness, and a governess she remained until early in 1838. In April ofthat year Miss Wooler was taken ill and Charlotte was for a little whilein charge. Then there was an explosion of temper, of some kind, andCharlotte went back to Haworth. 

That, then, in the main, is the limit of what the scrupulous Muse ofhistory vouchsafes to tell us about Charlotte Brontë's relation toDewsbury. But it also supplies us with one or two phrases which I cannotbring myself to spare you. In January 1838, Charlotte reviews herexperience at Dewsbury Moor; "I feel, " she says, "in nothing better, nothing humbler nor purer. " Again, in 1841, after there had passed timeenough to mellow her exacerbations, she continues to express herselfwith vigour. Miss Wooler is making overtures to Charlotte and Emily totake over the school at Heald's House; perhaps a place might be foundfor Anne as well. Miss Wooler, one of the kindest of women, is mostthoughtful, most conciliatory. Charlotte will have none of the idea; sheputs it roughly from her. Of Dewsbury she has nothing to say but that"it is a poisoned place for me. " This is all we know of Charlotte'srelation to Dewsbury, yet nothing, you will tell me, in Froude's phrase, to what the angels know. Well, I must be frank with you and say that Iam afraid the angels have been inclined to record exceedingly little ofCharlotte Brontë's residence in your inoffensive neighbourhood. I haveto paint a background to my picture, and I find none but the gloomiestcolours. They have to be what the art-critics of the eighteenth centurycalled "sub-fusc. " But it is not the fault of Dewsbury, it is the fault, or the misfortune, of our remarkable little genius. She was here, inthis wholesome and hospitable vicinity, for several months, during whichtime "she felt in nothing better, neither humbler nor purer, " andlooking back upon it, she had to admit that it was "a poisoned place"to her. 

I cannot help fancying that you will agree with me, that on such anoccasion as the present, and especially when dealing with a group ofwriters about whom so much as has been said as about the Brontës, it iswise not to cover too wide a ground, but to take, and keep to, oneaspect of the subject. Our little excursion into the history seems tohave given us, under the heading "Dewsbury, " a rather grim text, fromwhich, nevertheless, we may perhaps extract some final consolation. Letme say at the outset that for the grimness, for the harshness, Dewsburyis not at all to blame. I fancy that if, in the years from 1836 to 1838, the Brontë girls had been visitors to Kubla Khan, and had been fed onhoney by his myrmidons at Xanadu, that pleasure-dome would yet have been"poisoned" to them. It was not poverty, and cold, and the disagreeableposition of a governess, it was not the rough landscape of your moors, nor its lack of southern amenity which made Charlotte wretched here. Itwas not in good Miss Wooler, nor in the pupils, nor in the visitors atHeald's House that the mischief lay, it was in the closed and patientcrater of Charlotte's own bosom. And I am almost persuaded that, if youhad lived in Dewsbury sixty-five years ago, you would have heard on veryquiet days a faint subterranean sound which you would never have beenable to guess was really the passion, furiously panting, shut up in theheart of a small, pale governess in Heald's House schoolroom. 

If you accuse me of fatalism, I am helpless in your hands, for I confessI do not see how it could be otherwise, and do scarcely wish that itcould have been. Let us not be too sentimental in this matter. Figuresin literature are notable and valuable to us for what they give us. Themore personal and intense and definite that is, the greater the gift, the more strenuous the toil and the more severe the initiation whichlead to its expression. The Brontës had a certain thing to learn togive; what that was we shall presently try to note. But whatever we findit to be, we start with allowing that it was extremely and boldlyoriginal. It was not to be mastered by lying upon padded sofas andtoying with a little Berlin wool-work. It involved pain, resistance, astern revision of things hitherto taken for granted. The secrets whichthey designed to wring from nature and from life were not likely to berevealed to the self-indulgent and the dilettante. The sisters had amessage from the sphere of indignation and revolt. In order that theyshould learn it as well as teach it, it was necessary that they shouldarrive on the scene at an evil hour for their own happiness. _Jane Eyre_and _Shirley_ and _Villette_ could not have been written unless, forlong years, the world had been "a poisoned place" for Charlotte Brontë. 

It has been excellently said by Mrs. Humphry Ward that in many respects, and to the very last, the Brontës challenge no less than they attractus. This is an aspect which, in the midst of rapturous modernheroine-worship, we are apt to forget. Thackeray, who respected thegenius of the family, and was immensely kind to the author of _JaneEyre_, never really felt comfortable in her company. We know how hestole out of his own front-door, and slipped away into the night toescape her. "A very austere little person, " he called her, and we mayput what emphasis on the austerity we will. I feel sure that anymaladroit "white-washing of Charlotte" will tend, sooner or later, good-natured though it may be, in a failure to comprehend what shereally was, in what her merit consisted, what the element in her wasthat, for instance, calls us here together nearly half a century aftershe completed her work and passed away. Young persons of genius verycommonly write depressing books; since, the more vivid an unripecreature's impression of life is, the more acute is its distress. It isonly extremely stupid Sunday-school children who shout in chorus, "Weare so happy, happy, happy!" Genius thrown naked, with exposed nerves, on a hard indifferent world, is never "happy" at first. Earth is a"poisoned place" to it, until it has won its way and woven its garmentsand discovered its food. 

But in the case of Charlotte Brontë, unhappiness was more than juvenilefretfulness. All her career was a revolt against conventionality, against isolation, against irresistible natural forces, such as climateand ill-health and physical insignificance. Would this insubmissivespirit have passed out of her writings, as it passed, for instance, outof those of George Sand? I am not sure, for we see it as strongly, though more gracefully and skilfully expressed, in _Villette_ as in theearly letters which her biographers have printed. Her hatred of what wascommonplace and narrow and obvious flung her against a wall ofprejudice, which she could not break down. She could only point to it byher exhausting efforts; she could only invite the generation whichsucceeded her to bring their pickaxes to bear upon it. Hence, to thevery last, she seems, more than any other figure in our literature, tobe forever ruffled in temper, for ever angry and wounded and indignant, rejecting consolation, crouched like a sick animal in the cavern of herown quenchless pride. This is not an amiable attitude, nor is ithistorically true that this was Charlotte Brontë's constant aspect. ButI will venture to say that her amiabilities, her yielding moods, arereally the unessential parts of her disposition, and that a certainadmirable ferocity is the notable feature of her intellectual character. 

Her great heart was always bleeding. Here at Dewsbury, in the years weare contemplating, the hemorrhage was of the most doleful kind, for itwas concealed, suppressed, it was an inward flow. When once she becamean author the pain of her soul was relieved. She said, in 1850, lookingback on the publication of the hapless first volume of poems, "The mereeffort to succeed gave a wonderful zest to existence. " Then, a littlelater, when no one had paid the slightest attention to the slender trioof maiden voices, "Something like the chill of despair began to invadetheir hearts. " With a less powerful inspiration, they must have ceasedto make the effort; they must have succumbed in a melancholy oblivion. But they were saved by the instinct of a mission. It was not theirprivate grief which primarily stirred them. What urged them on was thedim consciousness that they gave voice to a dumb sense of the sufferingof all the world. They had to go on working; they had to pursue theircourse, though it might seem sinister or fatal; their business was tomove mankind, not to indulge or please it. They "must be honest; theymust not varnish, soften, or conceal. "

What Charlotte Brontë was learning to do in her grim and, let us admitit, her unlovely probation on Dewsbury Moor, was to introduce a freshaspect of the relations of literature to life. Every great writer has anew note; hers was--defiance. All the aspects in which life presenteditself to her were distressing, not so much in themselves as in herself. She rebelled against the outrages of poverty, and she drank to its dregsthe cup of straitened circumstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer, and she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheerfulnessmight have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She wrung from thesepositions their last drop of bitterness. A very remarkable instance ofthis may be found in her relation to the Sidgwick family, who, byuniversal report, were generous, genial, and unassuming. To CharlotteBrontë these kindly, if somewhat commonplace folk, grew to seem what aTurkish pasha seems to the inhabitants of a Macedonian village. It wasnot merely the surroundings of her life--it was life itself, in itsgeneral mundane arrangements, which was intolerable to her. She frettedin it, she beat her wings against its bars, and she would have done thesame if those bars had been of gold, and if the fruits of paradise hadbeen pushed to her between them. This, I think, is why the expression ofher anger seems too often disproportionate, and why her irony is so aptto be preposterous. She was born to resist being caged in any form. Herdefiance was universal, and often it was almost indiscriminate. 

Do not let us presume to blame this insubmission. Still less let uscommit the folly of minimising it. A good cheerful little CharlotteBrontë, who thought the best of everybody, who gaily took her placewithout a grudging sigh, whose first aim was to make those about herhappy and to minister to their illusions, would have been a much morewelcome inmate of Miss Wooler's household than the cantankerousgoverness whom nobody could please, whose susceptibilities were alwayson edge, whose lonely arrogance made her feared by all but one or twowho timidly persisted in loving her. But such a paragon of the obviousvirtues would have passed as the birds pass and as the flowers. Shewould have left no mark behind. She would never have enriched theliterature of England by one of its master-evidences of the force ofhuman will. She would never have stirred hundreds of thousands ofconsciences to a wholesome questioning of fate and their own souls. 

Let us endeavour to pursue the inquiry a few steps further. It isimpossible to separate the ethical conditions of an author's mind fromthe work that he produces. The flower requires the soil; it betrays inits colour and its perfume the environment of its root. The moralconstitution of the writer is reflected in the influence of the writtenpage. This is the incessant contention; on one hand the independence ofart asserts itself; on the other, it is impossible to escape from theimplicit influence of conduct upon art. There have been few writers ofany age in whom this battle raged more fiercely than it did in CharlotteBrontë. Her books, and those of her sisters, seem anodyne enough to-day;to readers of a sensitive species they seemed, when they were published, as dangerous as _Werther_ had been, as seductive as the _NouvelleHeloïse_. The reason of this was, in the main, the spirit of revoltwhich inspired them. There was something harsh and glaring in theirlandscape; there was that touch of Salvator Rosa which one of theirearliest critics observed in them. But more essential was thestubbornness, the unflinching determination to revise all acceptedformulas of conduct, to do this or that, not because it was usual to doit, but because it was rational, and in harmony with human nature. 

Into an age which had become almost exclusively utilitarian, and inwhich the exercise of the imagination, in its real forms, was sedulouslydiscountenanced, Charlotte Brontë introduced passion in the sphere ofprose fiction, as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirtyyears earlier. It was an inestimable gift; it had to come to us, fromCharlotte Brontë or another, to save our literature from a decline intotriviality and pretension. But she suffered, as Byron had suffered, inthe direct ratio of her originality. If a writer employs passion in anage which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessities ofliterary vitality he is safe to be accused of perverting his readers. Balzac says, "When nothing else can be charged against an author, thereproach of immorality is thrown at his head. " When we study the recordof the grim life of the sisters at Haworth, like that of three youngsoldiers round a camp-fire with the unseen enemy prowling in thedarkness just out of their sight--when we think of the strenuous vigil, the intractable and indomitable persistence, the splendour of theartistic result--we may console ourselves in our anger at the insultsthey endured, by reflecting how little they cared. And their nobleindifference to opinion further endears them to us. We may repeat ofthem all what Charlotte in a letter once said of Emily, "A certainharshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes me cling toher more. "

This insubmissiveness, which was the unconscious armour given to protecther against the inevitable attacks of fortune, while, on the other hand, it was the very sign-manual of Charlotte's genius, was, on the other, adrawback from which she did not live long enough to emancipate hernature. It is responsible for her lack of interest in what is delicateand complex; it excused to herself a narrowness of vision which we aresometimes tempted to find quite distressing. It is probably the cause ofa fault that never quits her for long, a tendency to make her charactersexpress themselves with a lyrical extravagance which sometimes comesclose to the confines of rodomontade. Charlotte Brontë never arrives atthat mastery of her material which permits the writer to stand apartfrom his work, and sway the reader with successive tides of emotionwhile remaining perfectly calm himself. Nor is she one of those whosevisible emotion is nevertheless fugitive, like an odour, and evaporates, leaving behind it works of art which betray no personal agitation. Onthe contrary, her revolt, her passion, all the violence of hersensibility, are present on her written page, and we cannot read it withserenity or with a merely captious curiosity, because her own eagerspirit, immortal in its active force, seems to throb beside it. 

The aspect of Charlotte Brontë which I have tried to indicate to youto-day, and which I have sketched thus hastily and slightly against thebackground of her almost voiceless residence in Dewsbury, is far frombeing a complete or unique one. I offer it to you only as a single facetof her wonderful temperament, of the rich spectacle of her talent. Ihave ventured to propose it, because, in the multiplication of honoursand attentions, the tendency to deify the human, to remove thosephenomena of irregularity which are the evidence of mortal strength, grows irresistible, and we find ourselves, unconsciously, substituting awaxen bust, with azure eyes and golden hair, for the homely featureswhich (if we could but admit it) so infinitely better match the honeststories. Let us not busy ourselves to make excuse for our austere littlegenius of the moors. Let us be content to take her exactly as she was, with her rebellion and her narrowness, her angers and her urgencies, perceiving that she had to be this sorrowful offspring of a poisonedworld in order to clear the wells of feeling for others, and to win fromemancipated generations of free souls the gratitude which is due to aprecursor. 

[Footnote 7: Address delivered before the Brontë Society in the TownHall of Dewsbury, March 28th, 1903. ]

THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN DISRAELI

It is not easy for a man whose sovereign ambition is seen to be leadinghim with great success in a particular direction to obtain due creditfor what he accomplishes with less manifest success in another. There isno doubt that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until verylately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a politician. But hewas an author long before he became a statesman, and it certainly is alittle curious that even in his youth, although he was alwayscommercially successful with his books, they were never, as we say, "taken seriously" by the critics. His earliest novels were largelybought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were barely accepted ascontributions to literature. If we look back to the current criticism ofthose times, we find such a book as _Dacre_, a romance by the Countessof Morley, which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity anda consideration never accorded to _The Young Duke_ or to _HenriettaTemple_. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in the manner of Lucian andSwift, which seem to us among the most durable ornaments of lightliterature in the days of William IV. , were read and were laughed at, but were not critically appraised. 

So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life, such books as_Coningsby_ and _Tancred_ were looked upon as amusing commentaries onthe progress of a strenuous politician, not by any means, or by anyresponsible person, as possible minor classics of our language. And athis third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faultswhich now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we arenow ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his mostbrilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had beenundistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowersof the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and thenforgotten. " It is only since the beginning of the present century that aconviction has been gaining ground that some of these books were inthemselves durable, not because they were the work of a man who becamePrime Minister of England and made his sovereign Empress of India, butas much or as little as if they had been composed by a recluse in ahermitage. This impression has now become so general with enlightenedcritics that the danger seems to be that we should underrate certainexcesses of rhetoric and the Corinthian mode the errors of which used tobe over-emphasised, but should not, in a comparative survey of Victorianliterature, be neglected as serious drawbacks to our perfect enjoymentof the high-spirited, eloquent, and ardent writings of BenjaminDisraeli. It is in this spirit of moderation that I now attempt a rapidsketch of his value as an English author. 

I

There is, perhaps, no second example of a writer whose work is divided, as is that of Disraeli, into three totally distinct periods. Otherauthors, as for example, the poet Crabbe, and in a less marked degreeRogers, have abandoned the practice of writing for a considerable numberof years, and then have resumed it. But the case of Disraeli seems to beunique as that of a man who pursued the writing, of books with greatardour during three brief and independent spaces of time. We have hisfirst and pre-Parliamentarian period, which began with _Vivian Grey_(1826) and closed with _Venetia_ (1837). We have a second epoch, openingwith _Coningsby_ (1844) and ending with _Tancred_ (1847), during whichtime he was working out his political destiny; and we have the novelswhich he wrote after he had won the highest distinction in the State. Certain general characteristics are met with in all these three classes, but they have also differences which require to be noted and accountedfor. It will, therefore, be convenient to treat them successively. 

As oblivion scatters its poppy over the prose fiction of the reigns ofGeorge IV. And William IV. , it becomes in creasingly dangerous thatcriticism should take the early "fashionable" novels of Disraeli assolitary representations of literary satire or observation. It is truethat to readers of to-day this class of romance is exclusivelysuggestive of _Vivian Grey_ and its fellows, with perhaps the _Pelham_of Bulwer. But this was not the impression of the original readers ofthese novels, who were amused by them, but found nothing revolutionaryin their treatment of society. In the course of _The Young Duke_, written in 1829, Disraeli suggests an amiable rivalry with the romances"written by my friends Mr. Ward and Mr. Bulwer. " The latter name hadonly just risen above the horizon, but that of Plumer Ward, forgotten asit now is, was one to conjure by. Ward was the author of _Tremaine_(1825) and _De Vere_ (1827), two novels of the life of a modern Englishgentleman, which seems to a reader to-day to be insipid and dull enough. But they contained "portraits" of public persons, they undertook to holdthe mirror up to the political and fashionable world of London, and theylashed that fastidiousness which was considered to be the foible of theage. 

The books of Plumer Ward, who was an accomplished personage in advancingyears, were treated with marked distinction in the press, and werewelcomed by critics who deigned to take little notice of even such booksas _Granby_ and _Dacre_. But the stories of the youthful Disraelibelonged to a class held in still less esteem than those just mentioned. They had to hold their own as best they might in rivalry with a hugeflight of novels of fashionable life, all of them curiously similar ingeneral treatment. Above these the romances of Plumer Ward rose in asort of recognised dignity, as two peaks around which were crowdedinnumerable hillocks. It is necessary to recall readers of to-day, whothink of _Vivian Grey_ as a work of amazing novelty, to the fact thatthe _genre_ it represents to us was one which had been lifted into highcredit the year before by the consecrated success of _Tremaine_, and wasat that moment cultivated by a multitude of minor novelists. 

There was, however, a distinction, and it lay in the greater fund ofanimal spirits which Disraeli brought to his business. _Vivian Grey_ wasabsurd, but it was fresh and popular, and it pleased at once. As theopening work of a literary career, it promised well; the impertinentyoung gentleman dashed off to Parnassus at a gallop. It was a bold bidfor personal distinction, which the author easily perceived already tobe "the only passport to the society of the great in England. " _VivianGrey_ is little more than a spirited and daring boy's book; Disraelihimself called it "a hot and hurried sketch. " It was a sketch of what hehad never seen, yet of what he had begun to foresee with amazinglucidity. It is a sort of social fairy-tale, where every one hasexquisite beauty, limitless wealth, and exalted rank, where theimpossible and the hyperbolic are the only homely virtues. There hasalways been a tendency to exalt _Vivian Grey_ at the expense of _TheYoung Duke_ (1831), Disraeli's next leading permanence; and, indeed, theformer has had its admirers who have preferred it to all the others inthis period. The difference is, however, not so marked as might besupposed. In _The Young Duke_ the manner is not so burlesque, but thereis the same roughness of execution, combined with the same rush andfire. In either book, what we feel to-day to be the great objection toour enjoyment is the lack of verisimilitude. Who can believe in theexistence of persons whose titles are the Earl of Fitz-Pompey and BaronDeprivyseal, or whose names are Lady Aphrodite and Sir Carte Blanche?The descriptions are "high-falutin" beyond all endurance, and there isparticularly noticeable a kind of stylistic foppery, which is alwayshovering between sublimity and a giggle. 

But here is an example, from _Vivian Grey_, of Disraeli's earliestmanner:--

 "After a moment had passed, he was pouring forth in a rapid voice, and incoherent manner, such words as men speak only once. He spoke of his early follies, his misfortunes, his misery; of his matured views, his settled principles, his plans, his prospects, his hopes, his happiness, his bliss; and when he had ceased, he listened, in his turn, to some small still words, which made him the happiest of human beings. He bent down, he kissed the soft silken cheek which now he could call his own. Her hand was in his; her head sank upon his breast. Suddenly she clung to him with a strong clasp. 'Violet! my own, my dearest; you are overcome. I have been rash, I have been imprudent. Speak, speak, my beloved! say, you are not ill!'

 "She spoke not, but clung to him with a fearful strength, her head still upon his breast, her full eyes closed. Alarmed, he raised her off the ground, and bore her to the river-side. Water might revive her. But when he tried to lay her a moment on the bank, she clung to him gasping, as a sinking person clings to a stout swimmer. He leant over her; he did not attempt to disengage her arms; and, by degrees, by very slow degrees, her grasp loosened. At last her arms gave way and fell by her side, and her eyes partly opened. 

 "'Thank God! Violet, my own, my beloved, say you are better!'

 "She answered not, evidently she did not know him, evidently she did not see him. A film was on her sight, and her eye was glassy. He rushed to the water-side, and in a moment he had sprinkled her temples, now covered with a cold dew. Her pulse beat not, her circulation seemed suspended. He rubbed the palms of her hands, he covered her delicate feet with his coat, and then rushing up the bank into the road, he shouted with frantic cries on all sides. No one came, no one was near. Again, with a cry of fearful anguish, he shouted as if an hyena were feeding on his vitals. No sound; no answer. The nearest cottage was above a mile off. He dared not leave her. Again he rushed down to the water-side. Her eyes were still open, still fixed. Her mouth also was no longer closed. Her hand was stiff, her heart had ceased to beat. He tried with the warmth of his own body to revive her. He shouted, he wept, he prayed. All, all in vain. Again he was in the road, again shouting like an insane being. There was a sound. Hark! It was but the screech of an owl!

 "Once more at the river-side, once more bending over her with starting eyes, once more the attentive ear listening for the soundless breath. No sound! not even a sigh! Oh! what would he have given for her shriek of anguish! No change had occurred in her position, but the lower part of her face had fallen; and there was a general appearance which struck him with awe. Her body was quite cold, her limbs stiffened. He gazed, and gazed, and gazed. He bent over her with stupor rather than grief stamped on his features. It was very slowly that the dark thought came over his mind, very slowly that the horrible truth seized upon his soul. He gave a loud shriek, and fell on the lifeless body of VIOLET FANE!"

A line in Disraeli's unfortunate tragedy of _Alarcos_ patheticallyadmits: "Ay! ever pert is youth that baffles age!" The youth of Disraeliwas "pert" beyond all record, and those who cannot endure to be teasedshould not turn to his early romances, or, indeed, to any of hiswritings. _Henrietta Temple_ is the boldest attempt he ever made to tella great consecutive story of passion, and no doubt there have been thosewho have palpitated over the love-at-first-sight of Ferdinand Armine andHenrietta Temple. But Disraeli's serious vein is here over-luscious; thelove-passages are too emphatic and too sweet. An early critic spoke ofthis _dulcia vitia_ of style which we meet with even in _ContariniFleming_ as the sin by which the young author was most easily beset. Hisattempts at serious sentiment and pompous reflection are too oftendeplorable, because inanimate and stilted. When he warns a heroineagainst an error of judgment by shouting, "'Tis the madness of the fawnwho gazes with adoration on the lurid glare of the anaconda's eye, " ormurmurs, "Farewell, my lovely bird; I'll soon return to pillow in thynest, " we need all the stimulus of his irony and his velocity to carryus over such marshlands of cold style. 

Of these imperfections, fewer are to be found in _Venetia_ and fewest in_Contarini Fleming_. This beautiful romance is by far the best ofDisraeli's early books, and that in which his methods at this period canbe most favourably studied. A curious shadow of Disraeli himself isthrown over it all; it cannot be styled in any direct sense anautobiography, and yet the mental and moral experiences of the authoranimate every chapter of it. This novel is written with far more easeand grace than any previous book of the author's, and Contarini gives areason which explains the improvement in his creator's manner when heremarks: "I wrote with greater facility than before, because myexperience of life was so much increased that I had no difficulty inmaking my characters think and act. " _Contarini Fleming_ belongs to1831, when its writer, at the comparatively ripe age of twenty-seven, had already seen a vast deal of man and of the world of Europe. 

We are not to believe the preposterous account that Contarini-Disraeligives of his methods of composition:--

 "My thoughts, my passion, the rush of my invention, were too quick for my pen. Page followed page; as a sheet was finished I threw it on the floor; I was amazed at the rapid and prolific production, yet I could not stop to wonder. In half a dozen hours I sank back exhausted, with an aching frame. I rang the bell, ordered some refreshment, and walked about the room. The wine invigorated me and warmed up my sinking fancy, which, however, required little fuel. I set to it again, and it was midnight before I retired to bed. "

At this rate we may easily compute that the longest of his novels wouldbe finished in a week. _Contarini Fleming_ seems to have occupied himthe greater part of a year. He liked the public to think of him, exquisitely habited, his long essenced hair falling about his eyes, flinging forth a torrent of musky and mellifluous improvisation; as amatter of fact he was a very hard worker, laborious in the arts ofcomposition. 

It is to be noted that the whole tone of _Contarini Fleming_ isintensely literary. The appeal to the intellectual, to the fastidiousreader is incessant. This is an attitude always rare in English fiction, but at that epoch almost unknown, and its presence in the writings ofDisraeli gives them a cachet. Under all the preposterous conversation, all the unruly turmoil of description, there runs a strong thread ofentirely sober, political, and philosophical ambition. Disraeli strivingwith all his might to be a great poet, of the class of Byron and Goethe, a poet who is also a great mover and master of men--this is what ismanifest to us throughout _Contarini Fleming_. It is almost patheticallymanifest, because Disraeli--whatever else he grew to be--never became apoet. And here, too, his wonderful clairvoyance, and his command overthe vagaries of his own imagination, come into play, for he neverpersuades himself, with all his dithyrambics, that Contarini is quite apoet. 

A new influence is felt upon his style, and it is a highly beneficialone. Up to this date, Disraeli had kept Byron before him, and in hisserious moments he had endeavoured to accomplish in prose what themysterious and melancholy poet of the preceding generation had done inverse. The general effect of this Byronism, in spite of a certainbuoyancy which carried the reader onwards, had been apt to be wearisome, in consequence of the monotony of effort. The fancy of the author hadbeen too uniformly grandiose, and in the attempt to brighten it up hehad sometimes passed over into positive failure. The most unyieldingadmirers of his early novels can hardly contradict a reader whocomplains that he finds the adventures of the bandits at Jonstornainsupportable and the _naïveté_ of Christiana mawkish. There are pagesin _Alroy_ that read as if they were written for a wager, to see howmuch balderdash the public will endure. Disraeli seems to have beenconscious of this weakness, and he tried to relieve the pompous gravityof his passionate scenes by episodes of irony and satire. From hisearliest days these were apt to be very happy; they were inspired, especially in the squibs, by Lucian and Swift. 

But in _Contarini Fleming_ we detect a new flavour, and it is a veryfortunate one. The bitterness of Swift was never quite in harmony withthe genius of Disraeli, but the irony of Voltaire was. The effect ofreading _Zadig_ and _Candide_ was the completion of the style ofDisraeli; that "strange mixture of brilliant fantasy and poignant truth"which he rightly perceived to be the essence of the philosophic _contes_of Voltaire, finished his own intellectual education. Henceforth he doesnot allow his seriousness to overweigh his liveliness; if he detects atendency to bombast, he relieves it with a brilliant jest. Count deMoltke and the lampoons offer us a case to our hand; "he was just theold fool who would make a cream cheese, " says Contarini, and thestartled laugh which greets him is exactly of the same order as thosewhich were wont to reward the statesman's amazing utterances inParliament. 

In spite of a certain undeniable insipidity, the volumes of _ContariniFleming_ cannot but be read with pleasure. The mixture of Byron andVoltaire is surprising, but it produces some agreeable effects. There isa dash of Shelley in it, too, for the life on the isle of Paradise withAlcesté Contarini is plainly borrowed from _Epiphsychidion_. Disraelidoes not even disdain a touch of "Monk" Lewis without hisvoluptuousness, and of Mrs. Radcliffe without her horrors, for he isbent on serving up an olio entirely in the taste of the day. But throughit all he is conspicuously himself, and the dedication to beauty and theextraordinary intellectual exultation of such a book as _ContariniFleming_ are borrowed from no exotic source. 

It is impossible to overlook the fascination which Venice exercisesover Disraeli in these early novels. Contarini's great ambition was toindite "a tale which should embrace Venice and Greece. " Byron's _Lifeand Letters_ and the completion of Rogers' _Italy_ with Turner'sparadisaical designs had recently awakened to its full the romanticinterest which long had been gathering around "the sun-girt city. "Whenever Disraeli reaches Venice his style improves, and if he mournsover her decay, his spirits rise when he has to describe herenchantments by moonlight. He reserves his most delicate effects forGreece and Venice:--

 "A Grecian sunset! The sky is like the neck of a dove! the rocks and waters are bathed with a violet light. Each moment it changes; each moment it shifts into more graceful and more gleaming shadows. And the thin white moon is above all; the thin white moon, followed by a single star, like a lady by a page. "

There are many passages as sumptuous as this in _Venetia_, the romanceabout Byron and Shelley, which Disraeli was thought indiscreet inpublishing so soon after Byron's death. In the story the heroine Venetiais the daughter of Shelley (Marmion Herbert) and the bride of Byron(Lord Cadurcis). Marmion is a most melodramatic figure, but theindiscretions are not noticeable nowadays, while the courage with whichthe reviled and hated Shelley is described in the preface to LordLyndhurst as one of "the most renowned and refined spirits that haveadorned these our latter days" is highly characteristic of Disraeli. Thereception of Lord Cadurcis in the House of Peers and the subsequent riotin Palace Yard mark, perhaps, the highest point in direct narrativepower which the novelist had yet reached; but _Venetia_ was not liked, and Disraeli withdrew from literature into public life. 

II

When Disraeli resumed the art of the novelist, he was no longer talkingof what lay outside his experience when he touched on politics. In 1837he had entered the House at last, as Member for Maidstone, and althoughhis enemies roared him down on the first occasion of his rising tospeak, he soon learned how to impose his voice on Parliament. In 1839his declaration that "the rights of labour are as sacred as the rightsof property" made him famous, and in 1841 he was one of Sir RobertPeel's Conservative army in the House. Then followed the formation ofthe Young England Party, with Disraeli as one of its leaders; these menbroke away from Peel, and held that the Tory Party required stringentreform from within. It was in 1843 that Henry Thomas Hope, of Deepdene, urged, at a meeting of the Young Englanders, the expediency ofDisraeli's "treating in a literary form those views and subjects whichwere the matter of their frequent conversations. " Disraeli instantlyreturned to literary composition, and produced in quick succession thefour books which form the second section of his work as an author; theseare _Coningsby_, _Sybil_, _Tancred_, and the _Life of Lord GeorgeBentinck_. 

In this group of books we observe, in the first place, a great advancein vitality and credibility over the novels of the earlier period. Disraeli is now describing what he knows, no longer what he hopes inprocess of time to know. He writes from within, no longer from withoutthe world of political action. These three novels and a biography arecuriously like one another in form, and all equally make a claim to beconsidered not mere works of entertainment, but serious contributions topolitical philosophy. The assumption is borne out by the character ofthe books, each of which had a definite aim and purpose. _Coningsby_was designed to make room for new talent in the Tory Party by anunflinching attack on the "mediocrities. " In _Sybil_ the heartless abuseof capital and the vices of class distinction are exposed. _Tancred_ isa vision of better things to follow upon the reforms already indicated. In _Lord George Bentinck_, under the guise of a record of the strugglebetween Protection and Free Trade, we have a manual of personal conductas applied to practical politics. 

In all these works narrative pure and simple inclines to take asecondary place. It does so least in _Coningsby_ which, as a story, isthe most attractive book of Disraeli's middle period, and one of themost brilliant studies of political character ever published. The taleis interspersed with historical essays, which impede its progress butadd to its weight and value. Where, however, the author throws himselfinto his narrative, the advance he has made in power, and particularlyin truth of presentment, is very remarkable. In the early group of hisnovels he had felt a great difficulty in transcribing conversations soas to produce a natural and easy effect. He no longer, in _Coningsby_, is confronted by this artificiality. His dialogues are now generallyremarkable for their ease and nature. The speeches of Rigby (whorepresents John Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for LordHertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the laughable chorusof Taper and Tadpole, who never "despaired of the Commonwealth, " areoften extremely amusing. In _Coningsby_ we have risen out of therose-coloured mist of unreality which hung over books like _The YoungDuke_ and _Henrietta Temple_. The agitated gentleman whose peerage hangsin the balance, and who on hearing that the Duke of Wellington is withthe King breathes out in a sigh of relief "Then there _is_ aProvidence, " is a type of the subsidiary figure which Disraeli had nowlearned to introduce with infinite lightness of irony. 

Disraeli had a passion for early youth, and in almost all his books hedwells lovingly upon its characteristics. It is particularly in_Contarini Fleming_ and in _Coningsby_--that is to say, in the bestnovels of his first and of his second period--that he lingers over thepicture of schoolboy life with tenderness and sympathy. We have only tocompare them, however, to see how great an advance he had made in tenyears in his power of depicting such scenes. The childish dreams ofContarini are unchecked romance, and though the friendship with Musæusis drawn with delicacy and insight, and though that is an extremelypretty scene where Christiana soothes the pride of Contarini, yet amanliness and a reality are missing which we find in the wonderful Etonscenes of _Coningsby_. 

Disraeli's comprehension of the feelings of half-grown ambitious boys ofgood family was extraordinary, and when we consider that he had neverbeen to a public school, his picture of the life and conversation atEton is remarkable for its fidelity to nature. The relation of the elderschoolboys to one another--a theme to which he was fond of recurring--istreated in a very adroit and natural spirit, not without a certainDorian beauty. This preoccupation with the sentiments and passions ofschoolboys was rather crudely found fault with at the time. We need haveno difficulty in comprehending the pleasure he felt in watching theexpansion of those youthful minds from whom he hoped for all that was tomake England wise and free. The account of Coningsby's last night atEton is one of the most deeply felt pages which Disraeli ever composed, and here it may be said that the careful avoidance of all humour--an actof self-denial which a smaller writer would not have been capable of--isjustified by the dignified success of a very dangerous experiment. 

The portraiture of living people is performed with the greatestgood-nature. It is difficult to believe that the most sensitive and themost satirised could really be infuriated, so kindly and genial is thecaricaturing. We are far here from Swift's bludgeon and from Voltaire'spoisoned needle. The regeneration of the social order in England, asDisraeli dreamed it, involved the removal of some mediocrities, but hewas neither angry nor impatient. The "brilliant personages who had justscampered up from Melton, thinking it probable that Sir Robert mightwant some moral Lords of the Bedchamber, " and the Duke, who "might haveacquired considerable information, if he had not in his youth made somany Latin verses, " were true to their principles, and would scarcelyhave done more than blush faintly when he poked his fun at them. Of allthe portraits none is more interesting than that of the dark, palestranger, Sidonia, as he revealed himself to Coningsby at the inn in theforest, over the celebrated dish of "still-hissing bacon and eggs thatlooked like tufts of primroses. " This was a figure which was to recur, and to become in the public mind almost coincident with that of Disraelihimself. 

When we pass from _Coningsby_ to _Sybil_ we find the purely narrativeinterest considerably reduced in the pursuit of a scheme of politicalphilosophy. This is of all Disraeli's novels the one which mostresembles a pamphlet on a serious topic. For this reason it has neverbeen a favourite among his works, and his lighter readers have passed itover with a glance. _Sybil_, however, is best not read at all if it isnot carefully studied. In the course of _Coningsby_, that young hero hadfound his way to Manchester, and had discovered in it a new world, "poignant with new ideas, and suggestive of new trains of thought andfeeling. " His superficial observation had revealed many incongruities inour methods of manipulating wealth, and Disraeli had sketched theportrait of Mr. Jawster Sharp with a superfluity of sarcastic wit. Butit was not until somewhat later that the condition of theworking-classes in our northern manufacturing districts began to attracthis most serious attention. The late Duke of Rutland, that illustriousand venerable friend who alone survived in the twentieth century to bearwitness to the sentiments of Young England, told me that he accompaniedDisraeli on the journey which led to the composition of Sybil, and thathe never, in long years of intimacy, saw him so profoundly moved as hewas at the aspect of the miserable dwellings of the hand-loom workers. 

All this is reflected on the surface of _Sybil_, and, notwithstandingcurious faults in execution, the book bears the impress of a deep andtrue emotion. Oddly enough, the style of Disraeli is never more stiltedthan it is in the conversations of the poor in this story. When Gerard, the weaver, wishes to prevent the police-inspector from arresting hisdaughter, he remarks: "Advance and touch this maiden, and I will fellyou and your minions like oxen at their pasture. " Well may the serjeantanswer, "You _are_ a queer chap. " Criticism goes further and says, "Youare a chap who never walked in wynd or factory of a Yorkshire town. "This want of nature, which did not extend to Disraeli's conversationsamong well-to-do folks, was a real misfortune, and gave _Sybil_ nochance of holding its own in rivalry with such realistic studies of thedepression of trade in Manchester as Mrs. Gaskell was presently toproduce, nor with the ease of dialogue in Dickens' Christmas Stories, which were just now (in 1845) running their popular course. A happiersimplicity of style, founded on a closer familiarity, would have givenfresh force to his burning indignation, and have helped the cause ofDevils-dust and Dandy Mick. But the accident of stilted speech must notblind us to the sincere and glowing emotion that inspired the picturesof human suffering in _Sybil_. 

Then followed _Tancred_, which, as it has always been reported, continued to the last to be the author's favourite among his literaryoffspring. Disraeli had little sympathy with either of the great partieswhich in that day governed English political life. As time went on, hebecame surer than ever of the degeneracy of modern society, and he beganto despair of discovering any cure for it. In _Tancred_ he laid aside ingreat measure his mood of satirical extravagance. The whole of this bookis steeped in the colours of poetry--of poetry, that is to say, as theflorid mind of Disraeli conceived it. It opens--as all his books love toopen--with the chronicle of an ardent and innocent boy's career. This iscommonplace, but when Tancred, who is mainly the author's customary typeof young Englishman born in the purple, arrives in the Holy Land, aflush of pure romance passes over the whole texture of the narrative. Real life is forgotten, and we move in a fabulous, but intenselypicturesque, world of ecstasy and dream. 

The Prerogation of Judaism, as it had been laid down by Sidonia in_Coningsby_, is emphasised and developed, and is indeed made the centraltheme of the story in _Tancred_. This novel is inspired by an outspokenand enthusiastic respect for the Hebrew race and a perfect belief in itsfuture. In the presence of the mighty monuments of Jerusalem, Disraeliforgets that he is a Christian and an ambitious member of the EnglishParliament. His only solicitude is to recover his privileges as a Jew, and to recollect that he stands in the majestic cradle of his race. Hebecomes interpenetrated with solemn mysticism; a wind of faith blows inhis hair. He cries, "God never spoke except to an Arab, " and we aretherefore not surprised to find an actual Divine message presentlypronounced in Tancred's ears as he stands on the summit of Mount Sinai. This is, perhaps, the boldest flight of imagination which occurs in thewritings of Disraeli. Tancred endeavours to counteract the purelyHebraic influences of Palestine by making a journey of homage toAstarte, a mysterious and beautiful Pagan queen--an "Aryan, " as he lovesto put it--who reigns in the mountains of Syria. But even she does notencourage him to put his trust in the progress of Western Europe. 

_Tancred_ is written in Disraeli's best middle style, full, sonorous, daring, and rarely swelling into bombast. It would even be too uniformlygrave if the fantastic character of Facredeen did not relieve thesolemnity of the discourse with his amusing tirades. Like that of allDisraeli's novels, the close of this one is dim and unsatisfactory. Ifthere is anything that the patient reader wants to know it is how theDuke and Duchess of Bellemont behaved to the Lady of Bethany when theyarrived at Jerusalem and found their son in the kiosk under herpalm-tree. But this is curiosity of a class which Disraeli is notunwilling to awaken, but which he never cares to satisfy. He places theproblems in a heap before us, and he leaves us to untie the knots. It isa highly characteristic trait of his mind as a writer that he is forever preoccupied with the beginnings of things, and as little aspossible with their endings. 

It is not, however, from _Tancred_ but from _Coningsby_, that we takeour example of Disraeli's second manner:--

 "Even to catch Lord Monmouth's glance was not an easy affair; he was much occupied on one side by the great lady, on the other were several gentlemen who occasionally joined in the conversation. But something must be done. 

 "There ran through Coningsby's character, as we have before mentioned, a vein of simplicity which was not its least charm. It resulted, no doubt, in a great degree from the earnestness of his nature. There never was a boy so totally devoid of affectation, which was remarkable, for he had a brilliant imagination, a quality that, from its fantasies, and the vague and indefinite desires it engenders, generally makes those whose characters are not formed, affected. The Duchess, who was a fine judge of character, and who greatly regarded Coningsby, often mentioned this trait as one which, combined with his great abilities and acquirements so unusual at his age, rendered him very interesting. In the present instance it happened that, while Coningsby was watching his grandfather, he observed a gentleman advance, make his bow, say and receive a few words and retire. This little incident, however, made a momentary diversion in the immediate circle of Lord Monmouth, and before they could all resume their former talk and fall into their previous positions, an impulse sent forth Coningsby, who walked up to Lord Monmouth, and standing before him, said, "'How do you do, grandpapa?'

 "Lord Monmouth beheld his grandson. His comprehensive and penetrating glance took in every point with a flash. There stood before him one of the handsomest youths he had ever seen, with a mien as graceful as his countenance was captivating; and his whole air breathing that freshness and ingenuousness which none so much appreciates as the used man of the world. And this was his child; the only one of his blood to whom he had been kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that Lord Monmouth's heart was touched; but his good-nature effervesced, and his fine taste was deeply gratified. He perceived in an instant such a relation might be a valuable adherent; an irresistible candidate for future elections: a brilliant tool to work out the Dukedom. All these impressions and ideas, and many more, passed through the quick brain of Lord Monmouth ere the sound of Coningsby's words had seemed to cease, and long before the surrounding guests had recovered from the surprise which they had occasioned them, and which did not diminish, when Lord Monmouth, advancing, placed his arms round Coningsby with a dignity of affection that would have become Louis XIV. , and then, in the high manner of the old Court, kissed him on each cheek. 

 "'Welcome to your home, ' said Lord Monmouth. 'You have grown a great deal. '

 "Then Lord Monmouth led the agitated Coningsby to the great lady, who was a Princess and an Ambassadress, and then, placing his arm gracefully in that of his grandson, he led him across the room, and presented him in due form to some royal blood that was his guest, in the shape of a Russian Grand Duke. His Imperial Highness received our hero as graciously as the grandson of Lord Monmouth might expect; but no greeting can be imagined warmer than the one he received from the lady with whom the Grand Duke was conversing. She was a dame whose beauty was mature, but still radiant. Her figure was superb; her dark hair crowned with a tiara of curious workmanship. Her rounded arm was covered with costly bracelets, but not a jewel on her finely-formed bust, and the least possible rouge on her still oval cheek. Madame Colonna retained her charms. "

III

Nearly a quarter of a century passed, during which Disraeli slowly roseto the highest honours in the State. Lord Derby died, and the novelist, already Leader of the House of Commons, found himself called to be PrimeMinister of England. His first administration, however, was brief, andin the last days of 1868 he resigned in favour of Mr. Gladstone. TheLiberals were in for five years, and Disraeli, in opposition, found asort of tableland stretch in front of him after so much arduousclimbing. It was at this moment, shortly after the resignation of theTory Minister, that the publisher of a magazine approached him with therequest that he would write a novel to appear in its pages. He wasoffered, it is said, a sum of money far in excess of what any one, atthat time, had ever received for "serial rights. " Disraeli refused theoffer, but it may have drawn his thoughts back to literature, and in thecourse of 1869, after the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland wascompleted, he found time to write what is unquestionably the greatest ofhis literary works--the superb ironic romance of _Lothair_. 

Eminent as he was and eminently successful, Disraeli was far, in 1870, from having conquered public opinion in England. The reception of hisnew novel was noisy, and enjoyed to the full the clamours ofadvertisement, but it was not favourable. The critics laughed it toscorn, and called it a farce and a failure. The _Quarterly Review_, inthe course of a savage diatribe, declared that it was "as dull asditch-water and as flat as a flounder, " and in a graver mood reproved itas a mere "bid for the bigoted voices of Exeter Hall. " Some of thecriticisms were not wanting in acumen. It was perceived at once that, asTheodora Campion is the heroine of the book, it was an error in art tokill her off in the middle of it. Moreover, it is only fair to admitthat if the stormy Parliamentarian life Disraeli had led so long hadgiven him immense personal advantages, it had also developed somedefects. It had taught him boundless independence and courage, it hadgiven him a rare experience of men and manners, and it had lifted hissatire far above petty or narrow personal considerations. But it hadencouraged a looseness of utterance, a mixture of the colloquial and thebombastic, which was unfortunate. In the best parts of _Coningsby_ andof _Tancred_ he had shown himself a very careless writer of English. But_Lothair_, even in its corrected form--and the first edition is amiracle of laxity--is curiously incorrect. It reads as though it weretaken down from the flowing speech of a fine orator, not as though itwere painfully composed in a study; it contains surprising ellipses, strange freaks of grammar. There was all this, and more, to encouragethe critics, whom Disraeli had gone out of his way to affront in aviolent epigram, to attack _Lothair_ with contempt and resentment. 

The critics took irony for timidity; they thought that the sardonicnovelist was the dupe of the splendours which he invented and gloatedover. But if one thing is more evident than another to-day it is thatthis gorgeous story of a noble boy, whose guardians, a Presbyterian earland a Roman cardinal, quarrelled for his soul and for his acres, is animmense satire from first to last. In Disraeli's own words, used inanother sense, the keynote of _Lothair_ is "mockery blended with Ioniansplendour. " Never had he mocked so dauntlessly, never had his fancy beenmore exuberant, and those who criticise the magnificence must realisethat it was intentional. It was thus that Disraeli loved to see life, and, most of all, the life he laughed at. He had always been gorgeous, but he let himself go in _Lothair_; all is like the dream of a Lorenzodei Medicis or an Aurungzebe. Nothing is done by halves. Muriel Towerswas set on "the largest natural lake that inland England boasts"--somelake far larger than Windermere and entirely unsuspected by geographers. This piece of water is studded with "green islands, " which is natural. But the author cannot stay his hand: this largest of the English lakesis also alive with "golden gondolas, " which are rarer objects. In one ofthe odd little flashes of self-criticism which illuminate the bookLothair says of a certain northern garden, with its fanes and itsfountains, its glittering statues and its Babylonian terraces, thatthere are "perhaps too many temples. "

There are perhaps too many temples in the landscape of _Lothair_, butthey were put in on purpose. The splendour is part of the satire. Whenthe hero has ordered an architect to make some plans for a building, thedoor opens and servants enter bearing "a large and magnificent portfolioof morocco, made of prelatial purple with broad bands of gold andalternate ornaments of a cross and a coronet. " It is the sort ofportfolio that Belshazzar might have used, but no English master-buildersince time began ever launched forth into such splendour. This ischaracteristic of Disraeli and of his book; it pleased him to wrap allhis fancies in jewelled cloth of gold. He chose that the world shouldconsist of nothing but Tudor palaces in colossal parks, and that timeshould be no other than a perpetual Holy Week of golden ceremonial. Heknew his public, and that it adored these follies. He spoke to them inthe language that they loved, but in a tone of the most seraphicaldisdain and irony. 

What marks the whole of Disraeli's writings more than any other qualityis the buoyant and radiant temperament of their author. In _Lothair_ heis like an inspired and enfranchised boy, set free from all the trammelsof reality, and yet bringing to the service of his theme the results ofan extraordinary inherited experience. If the picture is not real, wemay take courage to say that it is far better than reality--more rich, more entertaining, more intoxicating. We have said that it is carelesslywritten, but that is part of the author's superb self-confidence, andwhen he is fortunately inspired, he obtains here an ease of style, amastery which he had never found before. The sureness of his touch isseen in the epigrams which strew the pages of _Lothair_, and have becomepart of our habitual speech--the phrase about eating "a little fruit ona green bank with music"; that which describes the hansom cab, "'Tis thegondola of London. " This may lead us on to the consideration thatDisraeli is one of those who have felt most vividly and expressed mostgaily the peculiar physical beauty of London. He saw the Park as thetrue Londoner sees it--when "the chestnuts are in silver bloom, and thepink may has flushed the thorns, and banks of sloping turf are radiantwith plots of gorgeous flowers; when the water glitters in the sun, andthe air is fragrant with that spell which only can be found inmetropolitan mignonette. " He describes as no one else has ever done withequal mastery a stately and successful house-party in a great countrymansion. He had developed, when he composed _Lothair_, a fuller sense ofbeauty than he had ever possessed before, but it revelled in forms thatwere partly artificial and partly fabulous. An example of these formsmay now be welcome:--

 "Mr. Giles took an early easy opportunity of apprising Lady Farringford that she had nearly met Cardinal Grandison at dinner, and that his Eminence would certainly pay his respects to Mrs. Putney Giles in the evening. As Lady Farringford was at present a high ritualist, and had even been talked of as 'going to Rome, ' this intelligence was stunning, and it was observed that her Ladyship was unusually subdued during the whole of the second course. 

 "On the right of Lothair sate the wife of a Vice-Chancellor, a quiet and pleasing lady, to whom Lothair, with natural good breeding, paid snatches of happy attention, when he could for a moment with propriety withdraw himself from the blaze of Apollonia's coruscating conversation. Then there was a rather fierce-looking Red Ribbon, medalled as well as be-starred, and the Red Ribbon's wife, with a blushing daughter, in spite of her parentage not yet accustomed to stand fire. A partner and his unusually numerous family had the pleasure also of seeing Lothair for the first time, and there were no less than four M. P. 's, one of whom was even in office. 

 "Apollonia was stating to Lothair, with brilliant perspicuity, the reasons which quite induced her to believe that the Gulf Stream had changed its course, and the political and social consequences that might accrue. 

 "'The religious sentiment of the Southern races must be wonderfully affected by a more rigorous climate, ' said Apollonia. 'I cannot doubt, ' she continued, 'that a series of severe winters at Rome might put an end to Romanism. 

 "'But is there any fear that a reciprocal influence might be exercised on the Northern nations?' inquired Lothair. 'Would there be any apprehension of our Protestantism becoming proportionately relaxed?'

 "'Of course not, ' said Apollonia. 'Truth cannot be affected by climate. Truth is truth alike in Palestine and Scandinavia. '

 "'I wonder what the Cardinal would think of this, ' said Lothair, 'who, you tell me, is coming to you this evening. '

 "'Yes, I am most interested to see him, though he is the most puissant of our foes. Of course he would take refuge in sophistry; and science, you know, they deny. '

 "'Cardinal Grandison is giving some lectures on science, ' said the Vice-Chancellor's lady, quietly. 

 "'It is remorse, ' said Apollonia. 'Their clever men can never forget that unfortunate affair of Galileo, and think they can divert the indignation of the nineteenth century by mock zeal about red sandstone or the origin of species. '

 "'And are you afraid of the Gulf Stream?' inquired Lothair of his calmer neighbour. 

 "'I think we want more evidence of a change. The Vice-Chancellor and I went down to a place we have near town on Saturday, where there is a very nice piece of water; indeed, some people call it a lake; it was quite frozen, and my boys wanted to skate, but that I would not permit. '

 "'You believe in the Gulf Stream to that extent, ' said Lothair; 'no skating. '

 "The Cardinal came early; the ladies had not long left the dining-room. They were agitated when his name was announced; even Apollonia's heart beat; but then that might be accounted for by the inopportune recollection of an occasional correspondence with Caprera. 

 "Nothing could exceed the simple suavity with which the Cardinal appeared, approached, and greeted them. He thanked Apollonia for her permission to pay his respects to her, which he had long wished to do; and then they were all presented, and he said exactly the right thing to every one. "

Disraeli began his career, as I have pointed out in the earlier part ofthis essay, as a purveyor of entertainment to the public in a popularand not very dignified kind. He contended with the crowd of fashionablenovelists whose books consoled the leisure of Mrs. Wititterly as shereclined on the drawing-room sofa. He found rivals in Bulwer and Mrs. Gore, and a master in Plumer Ward. His brilliant stories sold, but atfirst they won him little advantage. Slowly, by dint of his inherentforce of genius, his books have not merely survived their innumerablefellows, but they have come to represent to us the form and character ofa whole school; nay, more, they have come to take the place in ourmemories of a school which, but for them, would have utterly passed awayand been forgotten. Disraeli, accordingly, is unique, not merely becausehis are the only fashionable novels of the pre-Victorian era which anyone ever reads nowadays, but because in his person that ineffable mannerof the "thirties" reaches an isolated sublimity and finds a permanentplace in literature. But if we take a still wider view of the literarycareer of Disraeli, we are bound to perceive that the real source of theinterest which his brilliant books continue to possess is the evidencetheir pages reveal of the astonishing personal genius of the man. Dowhat we will, we find ourselves looking beyond Contarini Fleming andSidonia and Vivian Grey to the adventurous Jew who, by dint of infiniteresolution and an energy which never slept, conquered all the prejudicesof convention, and trod English society beneath his foot in thetriumphant irony of success. It is the living Disraeli who is alwaysmore salient than the most fascinating of his printed pages. 

THREE EXPERIMENTS IN PORTRAITURE

I

LADY DOROTHY NEVILL

AN OPEN LETTER

 Dear Lady Burghclere, When we met for the first time after the death of our friend, you desired me to produce what you were kind enough to call "one of my portraits. " But the art of the portrait-writer is capricious, and at that time I felt wholly disinclined for the adventure. I excused myself on the ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent charm and petulant wit of Lady Dorothy were insuperable. I partly think so still, but your command has lingered in my memory all these months, and I have determined to attempt to obey you, although what I send you can be no "portrait, " but a few leaves torn out of a painter-writer's sketch-book. 

 The existence of the three published volumes does, after all, not preclude a more intimate study, because they are confessedly exterior. They represent what she saw and heard, not what others perceived in her. In the first place, they are very much better written than she would have written them herself. I must dwell presently on the curious fact that, with all her wit, she possessed no power of sustained literary expression. Her Memoirs were composed, as you know, by Mr. Ralph Nevill, who is a practised writer and not otherwise could they have been given to the public. On this point her own evidence is explicit. She wrote to me, in all the excitement of the success of the volume of 1906: "The Press has been wonderfully good to my little efforts, but to Ralph the better part is due, as, out of the tangled remnants of my brain, he extracted these old anecdotes of my early years. " This is as bravely characteristic of her modesty as it is of her candour, but I think it shows that there is still room for some record of the more intimate features of her charming and elusive character. I take up my pencil, but with little hope of success, since no more formidable task could be set me. I will at least try to be, as she would have scorned me for not being, sincere. 

 My friendship with Lady Dorothy Nevill occupied more than a quarter of a century. I met her first in the house of Sir Redvers and Lady Audrey Buller in the winter of 1887, soon after their return from Ireland. She had done me the great honour of desiring that I should be invited to meet her. She had known my venerable relative, the zoologist, Thomas Bell of Selborne, and she had corresponded in years long past, about entomology, with my father. We talked together on that first occasion for hours, and it seems to me that I was lifted, without preliminaries, into her intimacy. From that afternoon, until I drank tea with her for the last time, ten days before her death, the precious link was never loosened. 

 In 1887, her great social popularity had not begun. She was, I now know, already near sixty, but it never occurred to me to consider her age. She possessed a curious static quality, a perennial youthfulness. Every one must have observed how like Watts' picture of her at twenty she still was at eighty-six. This was not preserved by any arts or fictile graces. She rather affected, prematurely, the dress and appearance of an elderly woman. I remember her as always the same, very small and neat, very pretty with her chiselled nose, the fair oval of her features, the slightly ironic, slightly meditative smile, the fascinating colour of the steady eyes, beautifully set in the head, with the eyebrows rather lifted as in a perpetual amusement of curiosity. Her head, slightly sunken into the shoulders, was often poised a little sideways, like a bird's that contemplates a hemp-seed. She had no quick movements, no gestures; she held herself very still. It always appeared to me that, in face of her indomitable energy and love of observation, this was an unconscious economy of force. It gave her a very peculiar aspect; I remember once frivolously saying to her that she looked as though she were going to "pounce" at me; but she never pounced. When she had to move, she rose energetically and moved with determination, but she never wasted a movement. Her physical strength--and she such a tiny creature--seemed to be wonderful. She was seldom unwell, although, like most very healthy people, she bewailed herself with exaggerated lamentations whenever anything was the matter with her. But even on these occasions she defied what she called "coddling. " Once I found her suffering from a cold, on a very chilly day, without a fire, and I expostulated. She replied, with a sort of incongruity very characteristic of her, "Oh! none of your hot bottles for me!" In her last hours of consciousness she battled with the doctor's insistence that she must have a fire in her bedroom, and her children had to conceal the flame behind screens because she threatened to get out of bed and put it out. Her marvellous physical force has to be insisted on, for it was the very basis of her character. 

 Her humorous petulance, her little sharp changes of voice, the malice of her downcast eyes, the calmness of her demure and easy smile--how is any impression to be given of things so fugitive? Her life, which had not been without its troubles and anxieties, became one of prolonged and intense enjoyment. I think that this was the main reason of the delight which her company gave to almost every one. She was like a household blaze upon a rainy day, one stretched out one's hands to be warmed. She guarded herself against the charge of being amiable. "It would be horrid to be amiable, " she used to say, and, indeed, there was always a touch of sharpness about her. She was amused once because I told her she was like an acidulated drop, half sweet and half sour. "Oh! any stupid woman can be sweet, " she said, "it's often another name for imbecile. "

 She had curious little prejudices and antipathies. I never fathomed the reason of her fantastic horror of the feasts of the Church, particularly of Christmas. She always became curiously agitated as the month of December waned. In her notes she inveighed, in quaint alarm, against the impending "Christmas pains and penalties. " I think she disliked the disturbance of social arrangements which these festivals entailed. But there was more than that. She was certainly a little superstitious, in a mocking, eighteenth-century sort of way, as Madame du Deffand might have been. She constantly said, and still more frequently wrote, "D. V. " after any project, even of the most frivolous kind. The idea was that one should be polite all round, in case of any contingency. When she was in the Riviera, she was much interested to hear that the Prince of Monaco had built and endowed a handsome church at Monte Carlo. "Very clever of him, " she said, "for you never can tell. "

 Lady Dorothy's entire absence of affectation was eminently attractive. She would be mistress of herself, though China fell. Her strange little activities, her needlework, her paperwork, her collections, were the wonder of everybody, but she did not require approval; she adopted them, in the light of day, for her own amusement. She never pushed her peculiarities on the notice of visitors, but, at the same time, if discovered in the act of some incredible industry, she went on with it calmly. When she was in Heidelberg in 1892 and successive years, what interested her was the oddity of the students' life; she expatiated to me on their beer and their sabre-cuts. Whenever I went abroad of late years, I was exhorted to send her picture post-cards from out-of-the-way places, and "Remember that I like vulgar ones best, " she added imperturbably. The story is perhaps known to you of how, in a circle of superfine ladies, the conversation turned to food, and the company outdid one another in protestations of delicacy. This one could only touch a little fruit, and that one was practically confined to a cup of tea. Lady Dorothy, who had remained silent and detached, was appealed to as to her opinion. In a sort of loud cackling--a voice she sometimes surprisingly adopted--she replied, "Oh, give me a blow-out of tripe and onions!" to the confusion of the _précieuses_. She had a wholesome respect for food, quite orthodox and old-fashioned, although I think she ate rather markedly little. But she liked that little good. She wrote to me once from Cannes, "This is not an intellectual place, but then the body rejoices in the cooking, and thanks God for that. " She liked to experiment in foods, and her guests sometimes underwent strange surprises. One day she persuaded old Lord Wharncliffe, who was a great friend of hers, to send her a basket of guinea-pig, and she entertained a very distinguished company on a fricassee of this unusual game. She refused to say what the dish was until every one had heartily partaken, and then Mr. George Russell turned suddenly pale and fled from the room. "Nothing but fancy, " remarked the hostess, composedly. When several years ago there was a proposal that we should feed upon horse-flesh, and a purveyor of that dainty opened a shop in Mayfair, Lady Dorothy was one of the first of his customers. She sallied forth in person, followed by a footman with a basket, and bought a joint in the presence of a jeering populace. 

 She had complete courage and absolute tolerance. Sometimes she pretended to be timid or fanatical, but that was only her fun. Her toleration and courage would have given her a foremost place among philanthropists or social reformers, if her tendencies had been humanitarian. She might have been another Elizabeth Fry, another Florence Nightingale. But she had no impulse whatever towards active benevolence, nor any interest in masses of men and women. And, above all, she was not an actor, but a spectator in life, and she evaded, often with droll agility, all the efforts which people made to drag her into propagandas of various kinds. She listened to what they had to say, and she begged for the particulars of specially awful examples of the abuses they set out to remedy. She was all sympathy and interest, and the propagandist started with this glittering ally in tow; but he turned, and where was she? She had slipped off, and was in contemplation of some other scheme of experience. 

 She described her life to me, in 1901, as a "treadmill of friendship, perpetually on the go"; and later she wrote: "I am hampered by perpetual outbursts of hospitality in every shape. " Life was a spectacle to her, and society a congeries of little _guignols_, at all of which she would fain be seated, in a front stall. If she complained that hospitality "hampered" her, it was not that it interfered with any occupation or duty, but simply that she could not eat luncheon at three different houses at once. I remember being greatly amused when I congratulated her on having enjoyed some eminent public funeral, by her replying, grudgingly: "Yes--but I lost another most interesting ceremony through its being at the same hour. " She grumbled: "People are tugging me to go and see things, " not from any shyness of the hermit or reluctance to leave her home, but simply because she would gladly have yielded to them all. "Such a nuisance one can't be in two places at once, like a bird!" she remarked to me. 

 In this relation, her attitude to country life was droll. After long indulgence in her amazing social energy in London, she would suddenly become tired. The phenomenon never ceased to surprise her; she could not recollect that she had been tired before, and this must be the end of all things. She would fly to the country; to Dorsetshire, to Norfolk, to Haslemere, to what she called "the soberness of Ascot. " Then would come letters describing the bliss of rural calm. "Here I am! Just in time to save my life. For the future, no clothes and early hours. " That lasted a very short while. Then a letter signed "Your recluse, D. N. , " would show the dawn of a return to nature. Then _boutades_ of increasing vehemence would mark the rising impatience. Sept 12: "How dreadful it is that the country is so full of ladies. " Sept. 15: "I am surrounded by tall women and short women, all very tiresome. " Sept. 20: "So dull here, except for one pleasant episode of a drunken housemaid. " Sept. 23: "Oh! I am so longing for the flesh-pots of dear dirty old London"; and then one knew that her return to Charles Street would not be long delayed. She was very fond indeed of country life, for a short time, and she was interested in gardens, but she really preferred streets. "Eridge is such a paradise--especially the quadrupeds, " she once wrote to me from a house in which she found peculiar happiness. But she liked bipeds best. 

 However one may postpone the question, sooner or later it is necessary to consider the quality of Lady Dorothy Nevill's wit, since all things converge in her to that. But her wit is so difficult to define that it is not surprising that one avoids, as long as possible, coming actually to grips with it. We may lay the foundation of a formula, perhaps, by saying that it was a compound of solid good sense and an almost reckless whimsicality of speech. The curious thing about it was that it was not markedly intellectual, and still less literary. It had not the finish of such wit as is preserved in anthologies of humour. Every one who enjoyed the conversation of Lady Dorothy must have perceived with annoyance how little he could take away with him. Her phrases did not often recur to please that inward ear, "which is the bliss of solitude. " What she said seemed at the time to be eminently right and sane; it was exhilarating to a high degree; it was lighted up by merriment, and piquancy, and salt; but it was the result of a kind of magic which needed the wand of the magician; it could not be reproduced by an imitator. It is very unfortunate, but the fact has to be faced. When we tell our grandchildren that Lady Dorothy Nevill was the finest female wit of her age, they will ask us for examples of her talent, and we shall have very few to give. 

 She liked to discuss people better than books or politics or principles, although she never shrank from these. But it was what she said about human beings that kept her interlocutors hanging on her lips. She made extraordinarily searching strictures on persons, without malice, but without nonsense of any kind. Her own favourites were treated with reserve in this respect: it was as though they were put in a pen by themselves, not to be criticised so long as they remained in favour; and she was not capricious, was, on the contrary, conspicuously loyal. But they always had the impression that it was only by special licence that they escaped the criticism that every one else was subjected to. Lady Dorothy Nevill was a stringent observer, and no respecter of persons. She carried a bow, and shot at folly as it flew. But I particularly wish to insist on the fact that her arrows, though they were feathered, were not poisoned. 

 Light was thrown on the nature of Lady Dorothy's wit by her correspondence. She could in no accepted sense be called a good letter-writer, although every now and then brilliantly amusing phrases occurred in her letters. I doubt whether she ever wrote one complete epistle; her correspondence consisted of tumultuous, reckless, sometimes extremely confused and incorrect notes, which, however, repeated--for those who knew how to interpret her language--the characteristics of her talk. She took no pains with her letters, and was under no illusion about their epistolary value. In fact, she was far too conscious of their lack of form, and would sign them, "Your incompetent old friend"; there was generally some apology for "this ill-written nonsense, " or "what stuff this is, not worth your reading!" She once wrote to me: "I should like to tell you all about it, but alas! old Horace Walpole's talent has not descended on me. " Unfortunately, that was true; so far as literary expression and the construction of sentences went, it had not. Her correspondence could never be given to the world, because it would need to be so much revised and expanded and smoothed out that it would no longer be hers at all. 

 Nevertheless, her reckless notes were always delightful to receive, because they gave the person to whom they were addressed a reflection of the writer's mood at the moment. They were ardent and personal, in their torrent of broken sentences, initials, mis-spelt names and nouns that had dropped their verbs. They were not so good as her talk, but they were like enough to it to be highly stimulating and entertaining; and in the course of them phrases would be struck out, like sparks from flint, which were nearly as good, and of the very same quality, as the things she used to say. She wrote her letters on a fantastic variety of strangely coloured paper, pink and blue and snuff-brown, violet and green and grey, paper that was stamped with patterns like a napkin, or frilled like a lace handkerchief, or embossed with forget-me-nots like a child's valentine. She had tricks of time-saving; always put "I" for "one, " and "x" for "cross, " a word which she, who was never cross, loved to use. "I did not care for any of the guests; we seemed to live in a storm of x questions and crooked answers, " she would write, or "I am afraid my last letter was rather x. "

 Lady Dorothy, as a letter-writer, had no superstitious reverence for the parts of speech. Like M. Bergeret, she "se moquait de l'orthographie comme une chose méprisable. " The spelling in her tumultuous notes threw a light upon that of very fine ladies in the seventeenth century. She made no effort to be exact, and much of her correspondence was made obscure by initials, which she expected her friends to interpret by divination. From a withering denunciation of the Government she expressly excepts Mr. John Burns and "that much-abused Mr. Birhell, whom I like. " From about 1899 to 1903, I think that Lord Wolseley was the friend who occupied most of her thoughts. In her letters of those years the references to him are incessant, but when he is not "the F. M. " and "our C. C. , " she rings the changes on all possible forms of his name, from "Wollesley" to "Walsey. " When she wrote to me of the pleasure she had had in meeting "the Abbot Guaschet, " it took me a moment to recognise the author of _English Monastic Life_. She would laugh herself at her spelling, and would rebut any one who teased her about it by saying, "Oh! What does it matter? I don't pretend to be a bright specimen--like you!" When she made arrangements to come to see me at the House of Lords, which she frequently did, she always wrote it "the Lord's House, " as though it were a conventicle. 

 One curious observation which the recipient of hundreds of her notes is bound to make, is the remarkable contrast between the general tone of them and the real disposition of their writer. Lady Dorothy Nevill in person was placid, indulgent, and calm; she never raised her voice, or challenged an opinion, or asserted her individuality. She played, very consistently, her part of the amused and attentive spectator in the theatre of life. But in her letters she pretended to be, or supposed herself called upon to seem, passionate and distracted. They are all twinkling with humorous or petulant exaggeration. She happens to forget an engagement, which was of no sort of importance, and this is how she apologises:--

 "To think that every hour since you said you would come I have repeated to myself--Gosse at 5, Gosse at 5, and then after all to go meandering off and leaving you to cuss and swear on the doorstep, and you will never come again now, really. No punishment here or hereafter will be too much for me. Lead me to the Red Hill Asylum, and leave me there. "

 This was written nearly twenty years ago, and she was not less vivacious until the end. Lord Lansdowne tells me of an anonymous letter which he once received, to which she afterwards pleaded guilty. A cow used to be kept at the back of Lansdowne House, and the animal, no doubt feeling lonely, was in the habit of lowing at all sorts of hours. The letter, which was supposed to voice the complaint of the neighbours in Charles Street, was couched in the broadest Wiltshire dialect, and ended with the postscript: "Dang 'un, there 'ee goes again!" As a matter of fact, her letters, about which she had no species of vanity or self-consciousness, were to her merely instruments of friendship. There was an odd mingling of affection and stiffness in them. She marshalled her acquaintances with them, and almost invariably they were concerned with arrangements for meeting or explanations of absence. In my own experience, I must add that she made an exception when her friends were abroad, when she took considerable pains to tell them the gossip, often in surprising terms. I was once regaled with her experiences as the neighbour of a famous African magnate, and with the remark, "Mrs. ----, " a London fine lady of repute, "has been here, and has scraped the whole inside out of Mr. ----, and gone her way rejoicing. " Nor did she spare the correspondent himself:--

 "Old Dr. ---- has been here, and tells me he admires you very much; but I believe he has lost his memory, and he never had good taste at any time. "

 This was not a tribute which self-esteem could hug to its bosom. Of a very notorious individual she wrote to me:--

 "I thought I should never be introduced to him, and I had to wait 100 years, but everything is possible in the best of worlds, and he was very satisfactory at last. " Satisfactory! No word could be more characteristic on the pen of Lady Dorothy. To be "satisfactory, " whether you were the President of the French Republic or Lord Wolseley or the Human Elephant (a pathetic freak in whom she took a great interest), was to perform on the stage of life, in her unruffled presence, the part which you had been called upon by Providence to fill. Even a criminal might be "satisfactory" if he did his job thoroughly. The only entirely unsatisfactory people were those who were insipid, conventional, and empty. "The first principle of society should be to extinguish the bores, " she once said. I remember going with her to the Zoo in 1898, and being struck with a remark which she made, not because it was important, but because it was characteristic. We were looking at the wolves which she liked; and then, close by, she noticed some kind of Indian cow. "What a bore for the wolves to have to live opposite a cow!" and then, as if talking to herself, "I do hate a ruminant!"

 Her relations to literature, art, and science were spectacular also. She was a sympathetic and friendly onlooker, always on the side of those things against the Philistines, but not affecting special knowledge herself. She was something of a virtuoso. She once said, "I have a passion for reading, but on subjects which nobody else will touch, " and this indicated the independence of her mind. She read to please herself, and to satisfy her thirst for experience. When our friendship began, Zola was in the act of producing the tremendous series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. It was one of our early themes of conversation. Zola was then an object of shuddering horror to the ordinary English reader. Lady Dorothy had already read _L'Assommoir_, and had not shrunk from it; so I ventured to tell her of _La Terre_, which was just appearing. She wrote to me about it: "I have been reading Zola. He takes the varnish off rural life, I must say. Oh! these horrid demons of Frenchmen know how to write. Even the most disgusting things they know how to describe poetically. I wish Zola could describe Haslemere with all the shops shut, rain falling, and most of the inhabitants in their cups. " She told me later--for we followed our Zola to _Lourdes_ and _Paris_--that some young Oxford prig saw _La Bête Humaine_ lying on the table at Charles Street, and remarked that Lady Dorothy could surely not be aware that that was "no book for a lady. " She said, "I told him it was just the book for me!"

 She read Disraeli's novels over again, from time to time, with a renewal of sentiment. "I am dedicating my leisure hours to _Endymion_. What a charm after the beef and mutton of ordinary novels!" She gradually developed a cult for Swinburne, whom she had once scorned; in her repentance after his death, she wrote: "I never hear enough about that genius Swinburne! My heart warms when I think of him and read his poems. " I think she was very much annoyed that he had never been a visitor at Charles Street. When Verlaine was in England, to deliver a lecture, in 1894, Lady Dorothy was insistent that, as I was seeing him frequently, I should bring the author of _Parallelement_ to visit her. She said--I think under some illusion--"Verlaine is one of my pet poets, though, " she added, "not of this world. " I was obliged to tell her that neither Verlaine's clothes, nor his person, nor his habits, admitted of his being presented in Mayfair, and that, indeed, it was difficult to find a little French eating-house in Soho where he could be at home. She then said: "Why can't you take me to see him in this eating-house?" I had to explain that of the alternatives that was really the least possible. She was not pleased. 

 Nor am I pleased with this attempt of mine to draw the features of our wonderful fairy friend. However I may sharpen the pencil, the line it makes is still too heavy. I feel that these anecdotes seem to belie her exquisite refinement, the rapidity and delicacy of her mental movement. To tell them is like stroking the wings of a moth. Above all, it is a matter of despair to attempt to define her emotional nature. Lady Dorothy Nevill was possessed neither of gravity nor of pathos; she was totally devoid of sentimentality. This made it easy for a superficial observer to refuse to believe that the author of so many pungent observations and such apparently volatile cynicism had a heart. When this was once questioned in company, one who knew her well replied: "Ah! yes, she has a heart, and it is like a grain of mustard-seed!" But her kindliness was shown, with great fidelity, to those whom she really honoured with her favour. I do not know whether it would be strictly correct to say that she had the genius of friendship, because that supposes a certain initiative and action which were foreign to Lady Dorothy's habits. But she possessed, to a high degree, the genius of comradeship. She held the reins very tightly, and she let no one escape whom she wished to retain. She took immense pains to preserve her friendships, and indeed became, dear creature, a little bit tyrannical at last. Her notes grew to be excessively emphatic. She would begin a letter quite cheerfully with "Oh, you demon!" or complain of "total and terrible neglect of an old friend; I could fill this sheet of paper with an account of your misdeeds!" She was ingenious in reproach: "I cannot afford to waste penny after penny, and no assets forthcoming, " or "I have only two correspondents, and one of them is a traitor; I therefore cease to write to you for ever!" This might sound formidable, but it was only one of the constant surprises of her humour, and would be followed next day by the most placable of notelets. 

 Her curiosity with regard to life spread to her benevolences, which often took somewhat the form of voyages of discovery. Among these her weekly excursion to the London Hospital, in all weathers and in every kind of cheap conveyance, was prominent. I have to confess that I preferred that a visit to her should not be immediately prefaced by one of these adventures among the "pore dear things" at the hospital, because that was sure to mean the recital of some gruesome operation she had heard of, or the details of some almost equally gruesome cure. She enjoyed the whole experience in a way which is blank to the professional humanitarian, but I suspect the "pore dear things" appreciated her listening smile and sympathetic worldliness much more than they would have done the admonitions of a more conscious philanthropist. 

 And, indeed, in retrospect, it is her kindliness that shines forth. She followed all that her friends did, everything that happened to those who were close to them. She liked always to receive the tribute of what she called my "literary efforts, " and was ruthlessly sharp in observing announcements of them: "Publishing again, and of course no copy for poor old me, " when not a volume had yet left the binders. She took up absurd little phrases with delightful _camaraderie_; I have forgotten why at one time she took to signing herself "Your Koh-i-Noor, " and wrote: "If I can hope to be the Koh-i-Noor of Mrs. Gosse's party, I shall be sure to come on Monday. " One might go on indefinitely reviving these memories of her random humour and kindly whimsicality. But I close on a word of tenderer gravity, which I am sure will affect you. She had been a little tyrannical, as usual, and perhaps thought the tone of her persiflage rather excessive; a few hours later came a second note, which began: "You have made my life happier for me these last years--you, and Lady Airlie, and dearest Winifred. " From her who never gave way to sentimentality in any form, and who prided herself on being as rigid as a nut-cracker, this was worth all the protestations of some more ebullient being. And there, dear Lady Burghclere, I must leave this poor sketch for such approval as you can bring yourself to give it. 

 Very faithfully yours, EDMUND GOSSE. _January 1914. _

II

LORD CROMER AS A MAN OF LETTERS

In the obituary notices which attended the death of Lord Cromer, it wasnecessary and proper that almost the whole space at the command of thewriters should be taken up by a sketch of his magnificent work as anadministrator, or, as the cant phrase goes, "an empire-builder. " Forthirty years, during which time he advanced to be one of the mostpowerful and efficient of proconsuls, he held a place in the politicalworld which arrested the popular imagination, and must continue tooutweigh all other aspects of his character. Of this side of LordCromer's splendid career I am not competent to say a word. But therewas another facet of it, one more private and individual, which becameprominent after his retirement, I mean his intellectual and literaryactivity, which I had the privilege of observing. It would be a pity, perhaps, to let this be wholly submerged, and I propose to give, from myown recollection, some features of it. Lord Cromer was the author of sixor seven published volumes, but these are before the public, and it isneedless to speak much about them. What may be found more interestingare a few impressions of his attitude towards books and towards ideas. 

On the first occasion on which I met him, he was characteristic. It wassome fifteen years ago, at the time when the brilliant young politicianswho called themselves (or were rather ineptly called) the Hooligans hadthe graceful habit of asking some of their elders to dine with them in aprivate room of the House of Commons. At one of these little dinners theonly guests were Lord Cromer and myself. I had never seen him before, and I regarded him with some awe and apprehension, but no words hadpassed between us, when the division-bell rang, and our youthful hostsdarted from the room. 

The moment we were left alone, Lord Cromer looked across the desertedtablecloth and said quietly, as though he were asking me to pass thesalt, "Where is Bipontium?" I was driven by sheer fright into anexercise of intelligence, and answered at once, "I should think it mustbe the Latin for Zweibrücken. Why?" "Oh! I saw this afternoon that myedition of Diodorus Siculus was printed _ex typographia societatisBipontinæ_, and I couldn't imagine for the life of me what 'Bipontium'was. No doubt you're quite right. " Nothing could be more characteristicof Lord Cromer's habit of mind than this sudden revulsion of ideas. Hisactive brain needed no preparation to turn from subject to subject, butseemed to be always ready, at a moment's notice, to take up a freshline of thought with ardour. What it could not endure was to be leftstranded with no theme on which to expatiate. In succeeding years, whenit was often my daily enjoyment to listen to Lord Cromer's desultoryconversation, as it leaped from subject to subject, I often thought ofthe alarming way in which "Bipontium" had pounced upon me at thedinner-table in the House of Commons. 

Some years passed before I had the privilege of renewing my experienceof that evening. It was not until after his retirement from Egypt in theautumn of 1907 that I saw him again, and not then for some months. Hereturned, it will be remembered, in broken health. He used to say thatwhen King Edward VII. Wrote out to Cairo, strongly pressing him to stay, he had replied, in the words of Herodotus, "I am too old, oh King, andtoo inactive; so bid thou one of the younger men here to do thesethings. " He very soon, however, recovered elasticity of mind and bodywhen the load of office was removed from his shoulders, and "inactive"was the last epithet which could ever be applied to Lord Cromer. Hebegan to attend the House of Lords, but, like a wise man, he was in nohurry to speak there till he had grown accustomed to the tone of theplace. His earliest utterance (I may note the date, February 6th, 1908)we listened to with equal respect and curiosity; this was a new elementfrom which much enjoyment might be expected. 

This maiden speech was not long, but it produced a very happyimpression. The subject was the Anglo-Russian Convention, of which theorator cordially approved, and I recall that a certain sensation wascaused by Lord Cromer's dwelling on the dangers of the Pan-Islamiteintrigues in Egypt. This is the sort of thing that the House of Lordsenjoys--a man of special knowledge speaking, almost confidentially, ofmatters within his professional competency. During that year and thenext Lord Cromer spoke with increasing frequency. There were greatdifferences of opinion with regard to his efficiency in Parliament. Imay acknowledge that I was not an unmeasured admirer of his oratory. When he rose from his seat on the Cross-bench, and advanced towards thetable, with a fine gesture of his leonine head, sympathy was alwaysmingled with respect. His independence and his honesty were patent, andhis slight air of authority satisfactory. His public voice was notunpleasing, but when he was tired it became a little veiled, and he hadthe sad trick of dropping it at the end of his sentences. I confess thatI sometimes found it difficult to follow what he was saying, and I donot think that he understood how to fill a large space with his voice. He spoke as a man accustomed to wind up the debates of a council sittinground a table, rather than as a senator addressing the benches ofParliament. 

He was interested in the art of eloquence, and fond of criticising inprivate the methods of other speakers. He had a poor opinion of muchstudied oratory, and used to declare that no one had ever convinced himby merely felicitous diction. Perhaps he did not sufficiently realisethat his own strength of purpose offered rather a granitic surface topersuasion. But no doubt he was right in saying that, coming as he didfrom the florid East, he found English eloquence more plain andbusinesslike than he left it. He used to declare that he never spokeimpromptu if he could possibly help doing so, and he made great fun ofthe statesmen who say, "Little did I think when I came down to thisHouse to-day that I should be called upon to speak, " and then pour outby heart a Corinthian discourse. Lord Cromer always openly and franklyprepared his speeches, and I have seen him entranced in the process. Ashe always had a classical reference for everything he did, he was in thehabit of mentioning that Demosthenes also was unwilling to "put hisfaculty at the mercy of Fortune. "

He became an habitual attendant at the House of Lords, and, while it wassitting, he usually appeared in the Library about an hour before theHouse met. He took a very lively interest in what was going on, examining new books, and making a thousand suggestions. If the Lords'Library contains to-day one of the most complete collections of Latinand Greek literature in the country, this is largely due to the zeal ofLord Cromer, who was always egging me on to the purchase of freshrarities. He was indefatigable in kindness, sending me booksellers'catalogues in which curious texts were recorded, and scouring even Parisand Leipzig in our behalf. When I entered into this sport so heartily asto provide the Greek and Latin Fathers also for their Lordships, LordCromer became unsympathetic. He had no interest whatever in Origen orTertullian, and I think it rather annoyed him to recall that several ofthese oracles of the early Church had written in Greek. Nothing inhistory or philosophy or poetry which the ancient world had handed downto us came amiss to Lord Cromer, but I think he considered it ratherimpertinent of the Fathers to have presumed to use the language ofAttica. He had not an ecclesiastical mind. 

Lord Cromer's familiar preoccupation with the classics was a point inhis mental habits which deserves particular attention. I have alwayssupposed that he inherited it from his mother, the Hon. Mrs. Baring, whowas a Windham. She was a woman of learning; and she is said to havediscomfited Sir William Harcourt at a dinner-table by quoting Lucan indirect disproof of a statement about the Druids which he had been rashenough to advance. She sang the odes of Anacreon to her son in hisinfancy, and we may conjecture that she sowed in his bosom the seeds ofhis love of antiquity. Lord Cromer made no pretension to be what iscalled an "exact" scholar, but I think it is a mistake to say, as hasbeen alleged, that he did not take up the study of Latin and Greek untilmiddle life. It is true that he enjoyed no species of universitytraining, but passed from Woolwich straight into the diplomatic service. In 1861, at the age of twenty, he was appointed A. D. C. To Sir HenryStorks in the Ionian Islands, and I believe that one of the first thingshe did was to look about for an instructor in ancient Greek. He foundone in a certain Levantine in Corfu, whose name was Romano, and theirstudies opened with the odes of Anacreon. Whether this was acoincidence, or a compliment to Mrs. Baring, I do not know. This is arather different account from what Lord Cromer gave in the preface tohis _Paraphrases_, but I report it on his own later authority. 

If his scholarship was not professorial, it was at least founded upon agenuine and enduring love of the ancient world. I suppose that for fiftyyears, after the episode in Corfu, however busy he was, however immersedin Imperial policy, he rarely spent a day without some communing withantiquity. He read Latin, and still more Greek, not in the spirit of apedant or a pedagogue, but genuinely for pleasure and refreshment. Hehad no vanity about it, and if he had any doubt as to the meaning of apassage he would "consult the crib, " as he used to say. We mayconjecture further that he did not allow his curiosity to be balked bythe barrier of a hopelessly obscure passage, but leaped over it, andwent on. He always came back to Homer, whom he loved more than any otherwriter of the world, and particularly to the _Iliad_, which I think heknew nearly by heart. But he did not, as some pundits consider dignifiedand necessary, confine himself to the reading of the principal classicsin order to preserve a pure taste. On the contrary, Lord Cromer, especially towards the close of his life, pushed up into all the bywaysof the Silver Age. As he invariably talked about the books he happenedto be reading, it was easy to trace his footsteps. Eight or nine yearsago he had a sudden passion for Empedocles, whose fragments he had foundcollected and translated by Mr. Leonard, an American. Lord Cromer usedto march into the Library, and greet me by calling out, "Do you know?Empedocles says" something or other, probably some parallelism with amodern phrase, the detection of which always particularly amused LordCromer. 

In 1908 he took a fancy to Theognis, whose works I procured for him atthe House of Lords, since he happened not to possess that writer at 36Wimpole Street. He would settle himself in an armchair in thesmoking-room, his eyes close to the book, and plunge into those darkwaters of the gnomic elegist. He loved maxims and the expression ofprinciples, and above all, as I have said, the discovery of identitiesof thought between the modern and the ancient world. He was delightedwhen he found in Theognis the proverb about having an ox on the tongue. I suppose this was quite well known to the learned, but the charm of thematter for Lord Cromer was that he was not deterred by any fear ofacademic criticism, and found out these things for himself. He readTheognis as other people read Rudyard Kipling, for stimulus andpleasure. He swept merely "scholarly" questions aside. He read his_Iliad_ like a love-letter, but he was bored to death by discussionsabout the authorship of the Homeric epics. 

In one matter, the serene good sense which was so prominentlycharacteristic of Lord Cromer tinged his attitude towards the classics. He was not at all like Thomas Love Peacock, who entreated his friends todesist from mentioning anything that had happened in the world for thelast 2, 000 years. On the contrary, Lord Cromer was always bent onbinding the old and the new together. It was very noticeable in hisconversation that he was fond of setting classic instances side by sidewith modern ones. If books dealt with this parallelism, they exercised acharm over Lord Cramer's imagination which may sometimes have led him alittle astray about their positive value. I recall a moment when he wascompletely under the sway of M. Ferrero's _Greatness and Decline ofRome_, largely because of the pertinacity with which the Italianhistorian compares Roman institutions with modern social arrangements. It was interesting to the great retired proconsul to discover thatAugustus "considered that in the majority of cases subject peoples hadto be governed through their own national institutions. " It is scarcelynecessary to point out that these analogies form the basis of what is, perhaps, Lord Cromer's most important late essay, his _Ancient andModern Imperialism_. 

In a practical administration of India and Egypt, those oceans ofunplumbed antiquity, the ordinary British official has neither time nortaste to do more than skim the surface of momentary experience. But LordCromer had always been acutely aware of the mystery of the East, andalways looked back into the past with deep curiosity. Sometimes themodern life in Egypt, exciting as it was, almost seemed to him aphantasmagoria dancing across the real world of Rameses. This tendencyof thought coloured one branch of his reading; he could not bear to missa book which threw any light on the social and political manners ofantiquity. Works like Fowler's _Social Life at Rome_ or Marquardt's _LeCulte chez les Romains_ thrilled him with excitement and animated hisconversation for days. He wanted, above all things, to realise how theancients lived and what, feelings actuated their behaviour. On oneoccasion, in a fit of gaiety, I ventured to tell him that he reminded meof Mrs. Blimber (in _Dombey and Son_), who could have died contented hadshe visited Cicero in his retirement at beautiful Tusculum. "Well!"replied Lord Cromer, laughing, "and a very delightful visit that wouldbe. "

In the admirable appreciation contributed to the _Times_ by "C. " (ourother proconsular "C. "!) it was remarked that the "quality of mentalbalance is visible in all that Lord Cromer wrote, whether, in hisofficial despatches, his published books, or his privatecorrespondence. " It was audible, too, in his delightful conversation, which was vivid, active, and yet never oppressive. He spoke with thefirm accent of one accustomed to govern, but never dictatorially. Hisvoice was a very agreeable one, supple and various in its tones, neitherloud nor low. Although he had formed the life-long habit of expressinghis opinions with directness, he never imposed them unfairly, or tookadvantage of his authority. On the contrary, there was somethingextremely winning in his eagerness to hear the reply of hisinterlocutor. "Well, there's a great deal in that, " he would graciouslyand cordially say, and proceed to give the opposing statement whatbenefit he thought it deserved. He could be very trenchant, but I do notthink that any one whom he had advanced to the privilege of hisconfidence can remember that he was so to a friend. 

The attitude of Lord Cromer to life and letters--I speak, of course, only of what I saw in the years of his retirement from office--was notexactly representative of our own or even of the last century. He wouldhave been at home in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, before the French Revolution. I judge him to have been born with aninflexible and commanding character, which in the person of many menexposed to such dangerous successes as he enjoyed might have degeneratedinto tyranny. On Lord Cromer, on the other hand, time produced ahumanising and mellowing effect. It may very well prove that he hasstamped his mark on the East of the twentieth century, as Turgot did hison the West of the nineteenth century; but without straying into theperilous fields of prophecy we are safe in recording the impression thatLord Cromer was not altogether a man of to-day; he looked forward and helooked backward. Probably the nearest counterpart to his manner of mindand conversation may be found in the circle of whom we read in the_Diary_ of Fanny Burney. We can conceive Lord Cromer leaning against theCommittee Box in earnest conversation with Mr. Windham and Mr. Burke atWarren Hastings' trial. We can restore the half-disdainful gesture withwhich he would drop an epigram ("from the Greek") into the Bath EastonVase. His politeness and precision, his classical quotations, hishumour, his predilections in literature and art, were those of the innercircle of Whigs nearly a century and a half ago, and I imagine thattheir talk was very much like his. 

He was fond of repeating Bagehot's description of the Whigs, and itseems to me to apply so exactly to himself that I will quote part ofit:--

 "Perhaps as long as there has been a political history in this country there have been certain men of a cool, moderate, resolute firmness, not gifted with high imagination, little prone to enthusiastic sentiment, heedless of large theories and speculations, careless of dreamy scepticism, with a clear view of the next step, and a wise intention to take it; a strong conviction that the elements of knowledge are true, and a steady belief that the present would, can, and should be quietly improved. "

In a full analysis of Lord Cromer's character, I think that every clauseof this description might be expanded with illustrations. In theintellectual domain, Bagehot's words, "little prone to enthusiasticsentiment, " seem made to fit Lord Cromer's detachment from all thetendencies of romanticism. His literary tastes were highly developedand eagerly indulged, but they were all in their essencepre-Revolutionary. Those who are familiar with a book once famous, the_Diary of a Lover of Literature_ of Thomas Green, written down to thevery end of the eighteenth century, have in their hands a volume inwhich the very accents of Lord Cromer may seem to be heard. Isaacd'Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors in the dust;Lord Cromer had a short way with many of the writers most fashionable atthis moment. When he was most occupied with the resuscitations ofancient manners, of which I have already spoken, I found to my surprisethat he had never read _Marius the Epicurean_. I recommended it to him, and with his usual instant response to suggestion, he got it at once andbegan reading it. But I could not persuade him to share my enthusiasm, and, what was not like him, he did not read _Marius_ to the end. Therichness and complication of Pater's style annoyed him. He liked proseto be clear and stately; he liked it, in English, to be Addisonian. EvenGibbon-though he read _The Decline and Fall_ over again, very carefully, so late as 1913--was not entirely to his taste. He enjoyed the limpidityand the irony, but the sustained roll of Gibbon's antitheses vexed him alittle. He liked prose to be quite simple. 

In many ways, Lord Cromer, during those long and desultory conversationsabout literature which will be so perennial a delight to look back upon, betrayed his constitutional detestation of the Romantic attitude. Hebelieved himself to be perfectly catholic in his tastes, and resentedthe charge of prejudice. But he was, in fact, irritated by the excessesand obscurities of much that is fashionable to-day in the world ofletters, and he refused his tribute of incense to several popular idols. He thought that, during the course of the nineteenth century, Germaninfluences had seriously perturbed the balance of taste in Europe. I donot know that Lord Cromer had pursued these impressions very far, orthat he had formed any conscious theory with regard to them. But he wasvery "eighteenth century" in his suspicion of enthusiasm, and I alwaysfound him amusingly impervious to ideas of a visionary or mysticalorder. It was impossible that so intelligent and omnivorous a reader ashe should not be drawn to the pathetic figure of Pascal, but he waspuzzled by him. He described him as "manifestly a man full of contrasts, difficult to understand, and as many-sided as Odysseus. " On anotheroccasion, losing patience with Pascal, he called him "a half-lunatic manof genius. " Fénélon annoyed him still more; the spiritual experiences ofthe Archbishop of Cambrai he found "almost incomprehensible. " Hissurprising, but after all perfectly consistent, comment on both Fénélonand Pascal was, "How much more easy Buffon is to understand!"

He recommended all young men who intend to take a part in politicscarefully to study pre-Revolutionary history, and one of his objectionsto the romantic literature of Rousseau downwards was that it did nothelp such study. It was too individualistic in its direction. It tended, moreover, Lord Cromer thought, to disturb the balance of judgment, that"level-headedness" which he valued so highly, and had exercised withsuch magnificent authority. He disliked the idea that genius involved alack of sanity, or, in other words, of self-command. He regretted thatDryden had given general currency to this idea by his famous lines in_Absalom and Achitophel_:--

 "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide;"

but Lord Cromer was himself, perhaps, too ready to account by insanityfor every odd or confused expression in literature. He had nothing tosay about Mazzini, whom he swept aside impatiently, except that he "wasa semi-lunatic, " and I have heard him declare of Chatterton andVerlaine--a strange couple--that they were a pair of madmen. He objectedviolently to Baudelaire, but I think he knew very little about thatpoet's works. 

If I mention these things, it is because they seem to be necessary togive human character to any sketch of the mind of Lord Cromer. Hehimself hated mere eulogy, which he said had ruined most of thebiographies of the world. The official lives of Disraeli and Gladstonedid not escape a measure of his blame in this respect, and it will berecalled that resentment against what he thought a shadowless portraitled to his own very vivacious paper on Disraeli, which he afterwardsissued as a pamphlet. He was an avid reader of memoirs, and of politicalmemoirs in particular, but he almost always passed upon them the samecriticism--that they were too _public_. "I don't want Mr. ----, " hewould say, "to tell me what I can learn for myself by turning up thefile of the _Morning Post_. I want him to tell me what I can't find outelsewhere. And he need not be so very much afraid of hinting that hishero had faults, for if he had not had defects we should never haveheard of his qualities. We are none of us perfect, and we don't want apriggish biographer to pretend that we are. " He was speaking here mainlyof political matters; but Lord Cromer's training and experience had astrong bearing on his literary tastes. With him politics reacted onliterature, although he liked to fancy that he kept them wholly apart. 

No doubt a selection from his correspondence will one day be given tothe world, for he was a vivid, copious, and daring letter-writer. Isuppose that he wrote to each of his friends mainly on the subject whichabsorbed that friend most, and as his own range of sympathies andinterests was very wide, it is probable that his letters will proveexcellent general reading. As in so many other of the departments oflife, Lord Cromer did not think letter-writing a matter to be lightlyregarded or approached without responsibility. He said:--

 "There are two habits which I have contracted, and which I have endeavoured to pass on to my children, as I have found them useful. One is to shut the door after me when I leave the room, and the other is always to affix the day of the month and the year to every document, however unimportant, that I sign. I have received numbers of letters, not only from women, one of whose numerous privileges it is to be vague, but also from men in high official positions, dated with the day of the week only. When the document is important, such a proceeding is a fraud on posterity. "

He often, both in conversation and in letters, took up one of hisfavourite classic tags, and wove a shrewd modern reflection round it. For instance, a couple of years before the war, a phrase of Aristotlerecommending a ruthless egotism in the conduct of war, led him to say:--

 "I think that at times almost every modern nation has acted on this principle, though they gloss it over with fine words. Its principal exponents of late have unquestionably been the Hohenzollerns. "

And, in connection with the axiom of Thucydides that war educatesthrough violence, he wrote, about the same time:--

 "The Germans, who, in spite of their culture, preserve a strain of barbarism in their characters, are the modern representatives of this view. There is just this amount of truth in it--that at the cost of undue and appalling sacrifices, war brings out certain fine qualities in individuals, and sometimes in nations. "

This may, surely, be taken as a direct prophecy of the magnificenteffort of France. Lord Cromer's reflections, thrown off in the warmth ofpersonal contact, often had a pregnant directness. For instance, howgood this is:--

 "The prejudice against the Bœotians was probably in a large measure due to the fact that, as the late Lord Salisbury might have said, they 'put their money on the wrong horse' during the Persian war. So also, it may be observed, did the oracle at Delphi. "

Lord Cromer's public speeches and published writings scarcely give ahint of his humour, which was lambent and sometimes almost boyish. Heloved to be amused, and he repaid his entertainer by being amusing. Isuppose that after his return from Cairo he allowed this feature of hischaracter a much freer run. The legend used to be that he was lookedupon in Egypt as rather grim, and by no means to be trifled with. He wasnot the man, we may be sure, to be funny with a Young Turk, or to crackneedless jokes with a recalcitrant Khedive. But retirement softened him, and the real nature of Lord Cromer, with its elements of geniality andsportiveness, came into full play. 

Eight years ago, I regret to admit, Mr. Lloyd George was not theuniversal favourite in the House of Lords that he has since become. LordCromer was one of those who were not entirely reconciled to thefinancial projects of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. He comparedthe Chancellor with Pescennius Niger, "who aspired to be Emperor after the death of Pertinax, and was already Governor of Syria. On being asked by the inhabitants of that province to diminish the land tax, he replied that, so far as he was concerned, not only would he effect no diminution, but he regretted that he could not tax the air which they breathed. "

The strained relations between Mr. Lloyd George and the House of Lordsinspired Lord Cromer with a really delightful parallel from Dryden's_Absalom and Achitophel_ (which, by the way, was one of his favouritepoems):--

 "Thus, worn or weakened, well or ill content, Submit they must to DAVID'S government; Impoverished and deprived of all command, Their taxes doubled as they lost their land; And--what was harder yet to flesh and blood, Their gods disgraced, and burnt like common wood. "

When he pointed this out to me, I entreated him to introduce it into aspeech on the Budget. But he said that he was not sure of his audience, and then it was most painful to an orator to make a literary referencewhich was not taken up. Once at Sheffield, when he was urging thenecessity of a strong Navy upon a large public meeting, he quotedSwinburne's splendid lines:--

 "All our past comes wailing in the wind, And all our future thunders on the sea, "

without producing any effect at all. But the House of Lords is not anilliterate audience, and I recollect that on one occasion, when LordCromer himself was speaking on preferential treatment for the Colonies, and quoted Prior:--

 "Euphemia (that is Preference) serves to grace my measure, But Chloe (that is Protection) is my real flame, "

the Peers received the couplet with hilarious appreciation. 

He was very entertaining about the oddities of his life in the East, andhis stories were numberless. One was of a petition which he oncereceived from a young Egyptian with a grievance, which opened with thesewords:--

 "O Hell! Lordship's face grow red when he hear quite ghastly behaviour of Public Works Department towards our humble servant. "

He used to repeat these things with an inimitable chuckle of enjoyment. 

We have been told that he who blows through bronze may breathe throughsilver. The severe preoccupations of Lord Cromer's public life did notprevent him from sedulously cultivating the art of verse. In 1903, before his retirement from Egypt, he published a volume of _Paraphrasesand Translations from the Greek_, in the preparation or selection ofwhich I believe that he enjoyed the advice of Mr. Mackail. It was ratherunlucky that, with a view to propitiate the angry critics, Lord Cromerprefixed to this little book a preface needlessly modest. He had nocause to apologise so deeply for exercises which were both elegant andlearned. It is a curious fact that, in this collection of paraphrases, the translator did not touch the Attic authors whom he knew so well--heused to copy out pages of Æschylus and Sophocles in his loose Greekscript, with notes of his own--but dealt entirely with lyric andepigrammatic poets of the Alexandrian age. Perhaps it seemed to him lessdaring to touch them than to affront Æschylus. He was not quite sureabout these verses of his; he liked them, and then he was afraid thatthey were unworthy of the original. Out in Cairo it was so difficult, hesaid, to get a critical opinion. 

Among his unpublished translations there is one, from a fragment ofEuripides, which should not be lost, if only because Lord Cromer himselfliked it better than any other of his versions. It runs:--

 "I learn what may be taught; I seek what may be sought; My other wants I dare To ask from Heaven in prayer. "

Of his satirical _vers-de-société_, which it amused him to distribute inprivate, he never, I believe, gave any to the world, but they deservepreservation. Some serious reflections on the advantages of the Britishoccupation of Egypt close with the quotation:--

 "Let them suffice for Britain's need-- No nobler prize was ever won-- The blessings of a people freed, The consciousness of duty done. "

These were, in a high degree, the rewards of Lord Cromer himself. 

After his settlement in London, Mr. T. E. Page sent him a book, called_Between Whiles_, of English verse translated into Latin and Greek. LordCromer was delighted with this, and the desire to write in metrereturned to him. He used to send his friends, in letters, littletriolets and epigrams, generally in English, but sometimes in Greek. Buthe was more ambitious than this. So lately as February 1911, during thecourse of one of our long conversations upon literature, he asked me tosuggest a task of translation on which he could engage. It was just themoment when he was particularly busy with Constitutional Free Trade andWoman Suffrage and other public topics, but that made no difference. Ithad always seemed to me that he had been most happy in his versions ofthe Bucolic poets, and so I urged him to continue his translations byattempting the _Europa_ of Moschus. He looked at it, and pronounced itunattractive. I was therefore not a little surprised to receive aletter, on March 25th, in which he said:--

 "Not sleeping very well last night, I composed in my head these few lines merely as a specimen to begin _Europa_:--

 "When dawn is nigh, at the third watch of night, What time, more sweet than honey of the bee, Sleep courses through the brain some vision bright, To lift the veil which hides futurity, Fair Cypris sent a fearful dream to mar The slumbers of a maid whose frightened eyes Pictured the direful clash of horrid war, And she, Europa, was the victor's prize. "

 "They are, of course, only a first attempt, and I do not think much of them myself. But do you think the sort of style and metre suitable?"

He went steadily on till he completed the poem, and on April 27th Ireceived a packet endorsed "Patched-up Moschus returned herewith. " Sofar as I know, this version of the _Europa_, conducted with great spiritin his seventieth year, has never been published. It is the longest andmost ambitious of all his poetical experiments. 

Lord Cromer was fond of saying that he considered the main beauty ofGreek poetry to reside in its simplicity. In all his verses he aimed atlimpidity and ease. He praised the Greek poets for not rhapsodisingabout the beauties of nature, and this was very characteristic of hisown eighteenth-century habit of mind. His general attitude to poetry, which he read incessantly and in four languages, was a little difficultto define. He was ready to give lists of his life-long prime favourites, and, as was very natural, these differed from time to time. But one listof the books he had "read more frequently than any other" consisted ofthe _Iliad_, the Book of Job, _Tristram Shandy_, and _Pickwick_, towhich he added _Lycidas_ and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It wouldrequire a good deal of ingenuity to bring these six masterpieces intoline. He was consistent in declaring that the 28th chapter of Job was"the finest bit of poetry ever written. "

He was violently carried away in 1912 by reading Mr. Livingstone's bookon _The Greek Genius_. It made him a little regret the pains he hadexpended on the Hymns of Callimachus and the Bucolics of Theocritus, and he thought that perhaps he ought to have confined himself to theseverer and earlier classics. But surely he had followed his instinct, and it would have been a pity if he had narrowed his range. It was themodernness of the Alexandrian authors, and perhaps their Egyptianflavour, which had justly attracted him. He did not care very much foran antiquity which he could not revivify for his own vision. I urged himto read a book which had fascinated me, _The Religion of Numa_, by alearned American, the late Mr. Jesse Carter. Lord Cromer read it withrespect, but he admitted that those earliest Roman ages were too remoteand cold for him. 

Lord Cromer was very much annoyed with Napoleon for having laid it downthat _après soixante ans, un homme ne vaut rien_. The rash dictum hadcertainly no application to himself. It is true that, under the strainof the long tropical years, his bodily health declined as he approachedthe age of sixty. But his mental activity, his marvellous receptivity, were not merely maintained, but seemed steadily to advance. He continuedto be consumed by that lust for knowledge, _libido sciendi_, which headmired in the ancient Greeks. When the physicians forbade him, fouryears ago, to expend his failing strength any longer on political andsocial propaganda, instead of retiring, as most men of his age wouldhave done, to dream in the recesses of his library, he plunged withrenewed ardour into the one occupation still permitted to him:literature. The accident of his publishing a criticism which excitedwide popular attention led to his becoming, when past his seventiethbirthday, a "regular reviewer" for the _Spectator_, where the veryfrequent papers signed "C. " became a prominent feature. Those articleswere, perhaps, most remarkable for the light they threw on the writer'sown temperament, on his insatiable desire for knowledge. Lord Cromer'scuriosity in all intellectual directions was, to the last, like that ofa young man beginning his mental career; and when he adopted theposition, so uncommon in a man of his experience and authority, of areviewer of current books, it was because he wished to share with othersthe excitement he himself enjoyed in the tapping of fresh sources ofinformation. 

III

THE LAST DAYS OF LORD REDESDALE

The publication of Lord Redesdale's _Memories_--which was one of themost successful autobiographies of recent times--familiarised thousandsof readers with the principal adventures of a very remarkable man, but, when all was said and done, left an incomplete impression of his tasteand occupations on the minds of those who were not familiar with hisearlier writings. His literary career had been a very irregular one. Hetook up literature rather late, and produced a book that has become aclassic--_Tales of Old Japan_. He did not immediately pursue thissuccess, but became involved in public activities of many kinds, whichdistracted his attention. In his sixtieth year he brought out _TheBamboo Garden_, and from that time--until, in his eightieth year, hedied in full intellectual energy--he constantly devoted himself to theart of writing. His zeal, his ambition, were wonderful; but it wasimpossible to overlook the disadvantage from which that ambition andthat zeal suffered in the fact that for the first sixty years of hislife the writer had cultivated the art but casually and sporadically. Heretained, in spite of all the labour which he expended, a certainstiffness, an air of the amateur, of which he himself was always acutelyconscious. 

This did not interfere with the direct and sincere appeal made togeneral attention by the 1915 _Memories_, a book so full of genialityand variety, so independent in its judgments and so winning in itsingenuousness, that its wider popularity could be the object of nosurprise. But, to those who knew Lord Redesdale intimately, it mustalways appear that his autobiography fails to explain him from what wemay call the subjective point of view. It tells us of his adventures andhis friendships, of the strange lands he visited and of the unexpectedconfidences he received, but it does not reveal very distinctly thecharacter of the writer. There is far more of his intellectualconstitution, of his personal tastes and mental habits, in the volume ofessays of 1912, called _A Tragedy in Stone_, but even here much is leftunsaid and even unsuggested. 

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Lord Redesdale was the redundantvitality of his character. His nature swarmed with life, like a drop ofpond-water under a microscope. There cannot be found room in any onenature for all the qualities, and what he lacked in some degree wasconcentration. But very few men who have lived in our complicated agehave done well in so many directions as he, or, aiming widely, havefailed in so few. He shrank from no labour and hesitated before nodifficulty, but pushed on with an extraordinary energy along manyvarious lines of activity. But the two lines in which he most desiredand most determined to excel, gardening and authorship, are scarcely tobe discerned, except below the surface, in his _Memories_. Next to hisbooks, what he regarded with most satisfaction was his wonderful gardenat Batsford, and of this there is scarcely a word of record in theautobiography. He had always intended to celebrate this garden, and whenhe was preparing to return to Batsford in 1915 he wrote to me that hewas going to write an _Apologia pro Horto meo_, as long before he hadcomposed one _pro Banibusis meis_. A book which should combine with thefreest fancies of his intellect a picture of the exotic groves ofBatsford was what was required to round off Lord Redesdale's literaryadventures. It will be seen that he very nearly succeeded in thussetting the top-stone on his literary edifice. 

One reason, perhaps, why Batsford, which was ever present to histhoughts, is so very slightly and vaguely mentioned in Lord Redesdale's_Memories_, may be the fact that from 1910 onwards he was not living init himself, and that it was irksome to him to magnify in printhorticultural beauties which were for the time being in the possessionof others. The outbreak of the war, in which all his five sons wereinstantly engaged, was the earliest of a series of changes whichcompletely altered the surface of Lord Redesdale's life. Batsford cameonce more into his personal occupation, and at the same time it becameconvenient to give up his London house in Kensington Court. Many thingscombined to transform his life in the early summer of 1915. His eldestson, Major the Hon. Clement Mitford, after brilliantly distinguishinghimself in battle, was received by the King and decorated, to therapturous exultation of his father. Major Mitford returned to the Frenchfront, only to fall on May 13th, 1915. 

At this time I was seeing Lord Redesdale very frequently, and I couldnot but be struck by the effect of this blow upon his temperament. Afterthe first shock of sorrow, I observed in him the determination not toallow himself to be crushed. His dominant vitality asserted itselfalmost with violence, and he seemed to clench his tooth in defiance ofthe assault on his individuality. It required on the part of so old aman no little fortitude, for it is easier to bear a great and heroicbereavement than to resist the wearing vexation of seeing one's systemof daily occupation crumbling away. Lord Redesdale was pleased to begoing again to Batsford, which had supplied him in years past with somuch sumptuous and varied entertainment, but it was a matter of alarmwith him to give up all, or almost all, the various ties with Londonwhich had meant so much to his vividly social nature. 

Meanwhile, during the early months of 1915 in London, he had plenty ofemployment in finishing and revising his _Memories_, which it had takenhim two years to write. This was an occupation which bridged over thehorrid chasm between his old active life in London, with its thousandinterests, and the uncertain and partly dreaded prospect of exile in thebamboo-gardens of a remote corner of Gloucestershire, where he foresawthat deafness must needs exclude him from the old activities of locallife. 

He finished revising the manuscript of his _Memories_ in July, and thenwent down, while the actual transference of his home was taking place, to the Royal Yacht Squadron Castle, Cowes, where he had been accustomedto spend some of the most enjoyable hours of his life. But this scene, habitually thronged with people, and palpitating with gaiety, in themidst of which Lord Redesdale found himself so singularly at home, wasnow, more than perhaps any other haunt of the English sportsman, incomplete eclipse. The weather was lovely, but there were no yachts, noold chums, no charming ladies. "It is very dull, " he wrote; "the soleinhabitant of the Club besides myself was Lord Falkland, and now he isgone. " In these conditions Lord Redesdale became suddenly conscious thatthe activity of the last two or three years was over, that the aspect ofhis world had changed, and that he was in danger of losing that holdupon life to which he so resolutely clung. In conditions of this kind healways turned to seek for something mentally "craggy, " as Byron said, and at Cowes he wonderfully found the writings of Nietzsche. The resultis described in a remarkable letter to myself (July 28th, 1915), whichI quote because it marks the earliest stage in the composition of hislast unfinished book:--

 "I have been trying to occupy myself with Nietzsche, on the theory that there must be something great about a man who exercised the immense influence that he did. But I confess I am no convert to any of his various moods. Here and there I find gems of thought, but one has to wade through a morass of blue mud to get at them. Here is a capital saying of his which may be new to you--in a letter to his friend Rohde he writes: 'Eternally we need midwives in order to be delivered of our thoughts, ' We cannot work in solitude. 'Woe to us who lack the sunlight of a friend's presence. '

 "How true that is! When I come down here, I think that with so much time on my hands I shall be able to get through a pile of work. Not a bit of it! I find it difficult even to write a note. To me it is an imperative necessity to have the sympathetic counsel of a friend. "

The letter continued with an impassioned appeal to his correspondent tofind some definite intellectual work for him to undertake. "You make medare, and that is much towards winning a game. You must sharpen my wits, which are blunt enough just now. " In short, it was a cry from the islandof boredom to come over the water and administer first-aid. 

Accordingly, I started for Cowes, and was welcomed at the pier with allmy host's habitual and vivacious hospitality. Scarcely were we seated inour wicker-chairs in face of the Solent, not twinkling as usual withpleasure-sails, but sinister with strange instruments of warfare, thanhe began the attack. "What am I to do with myself?" was the instantquestion; "what means can I find of occupying this dreadful void ofleisure?" To which the obvious reply was: "First of all, you mustexhibit to me the famous attractions of Cowes!" "There are none, " hereplied in comic despair, but we presently invented some, and my visit, which extended over several radiant days of a perfect August, wasdiversified with walks and excursions by land and water, in which mycompanion was as active and as ardent as though he had been nineteeninstead of seventy-nine. In a suit picturesquely marine, with hisbeautiful silver hair escaping from a jaunty yachting cap, he was thelast expression of vivacity and gaiety. 

The question of his intellectual occupation in the future came, however, incessantly to the front; and our long talks in the strange and uncannysolitude of the Royal Yacht Squadron Castle always came to this: Whattask was he to take up next? His large autobiography was now coming backto him from the printers in packets of proof, with which he was closetednight and morning; and I suggested that while this was going on therewas no need for him to think about future enterprises. To tell thetruth, I had regarded the _Memories_ as likely to be the final labour ofLord Redesdale's busy life. It seemed to me that at his advanced age hemight now well withdraw into dignified repose. I even hinted so much interms as delicate as I could make them, but the suggestion was not wellreceived. I became conscious that there was nothing he was so littleprepared to welcome as "repose"; that, in fact, the terror whichpossessed him was precisely the dread of having to withdraw from thestage of life. His deafness, which now began to be excessive, closed tohis eager spirit so many of the avenues of experience, that he was morethan ever anxious to keep clear those that remained to him, and ofthese, literary expression came to be almost the only one left. In theabsence of a definite task his path in this direction led throughdarkness. 

But it was not until after several suggestions and many conversationsthat light was found. The friend so pressingly appealed to returned toLondon, where he was stern in rejecting several projects, hotly flung athis head and then coldly abandoned. A study of the Empress MariaTheresa, suggested by a feverish perusal of Pechler, was the latest andleast attractive of these. Lord Redesdale then frankly demanded that asubject should be found for him. "You have brought this upon yourself, "he said, "by encouraging me to write. " What might prove the scheme of avery pleasant book then occurred to me, and I suggested to the fiery andimpatient author, who had by this time retired for good to Batsford, that he should compose a volume of essays dealing with things ingeneral, but bound together by a constantly repeated reference to hiswild garden of bamboos and the Buddha in his secret grove. The authorwas to suppose himself seated with a friend on the terrace at the top ofthe garden, and to let the idea of the bamboo run through the wholetissue of reflections and reminiscences like an emerald thread. LordRedesdale was enchanted, and the idea took fire at once. He replied:--

 "You are Orpheus, with his lute moving the rocks and stones! I shall work all my conceits into your plan, and am now proceeding to my garden shrine to meditate on it. I will try to make a picture of the VELUVANA, the bamboo-garden which was the first Vikara or monastery of Buddha and his disciples. There I will sit, and, looking on the great statue of Buddha in meditation, I shall begin to arrange all sorts of wild imaginings which may come into my crazy brain. "

In this way was started the book, of which, alas! only such fragmentswere composed as form the earlier part of the volume published after hisdeath. It is, however, right to point out that for the too-briefremainder of his life Lord Redesdale was eagerly set on the scheme ofwhich a hint has just been given. The _Veluvana_ was to be the crowningproduction of his literary life, and it was to sum up the wisdom of theEast and the gaiety of the West. He spoke of it incessantly, in lettersand conversation. "That will do to go into _Veluvana_, " was his cry whenhe met with anything rare or strange. For instance, on September 15th, 1915, he wrote to me:--

 "To-day, all of a sudden I was struck by the idea that plants, having many human qualities, may also in some degree have human motives--that they are not altogether mere automata--and as I thought, I began to imagine that I could detect something resembling purpose in the movements of certain plants. I have jotted down a few notes, and you will see when I expand them that at any rate the idea calls attention to the movements themselves, some of which seem never to have been noticed at all, or certainly at best very inadequately. You will see that this brings in the bamboo-garden and Buddha, and so keeps to the scheme of _Veluvana_. "

The monasteries of twelfth-century Japanese Buddhism, which he hadvisited long before in the neighbourhood of Kioto, now recurred to hismemory, and he proposed to describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differedfrom an Indian Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinaryinterest, and wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back to hisJapanese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow's famous dictionary. He wrote to me:--

 "No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did in the early days of our intercourse with Japan. He was a valuable asset to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his energy and force of character, would never have succeeded as he did without Satow. Aston was another very strong man. "

These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit of_Veluvana_, but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale wrote in thisdirection proved to be too slight for publication. He met with someexpressions of extremely modern Japanese opinion which annoyed him, andto which he was tempted to give more attention than they deserve. Itbegan to be obvious that the enterprise was one for which greatconcentration of effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was notto be secured at will, were imperatively needed. In leaving London, hewas not content, and no one could have wished him to be willing, tobreak abruptly all the cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee ofthe National Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, stilloccupied with the administration of the Wallace Collection, and he didnot abate his interest in these directions. They made it necessary thathe should come up to town every other week. This made up in some measurefor the inevitable disappointment of finding that in Gloucestershire hisdeafness now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly dutieswhich had in earlier years diversified and entertained his country life. He had been a great figure among the squires and farmers of theCotswolds, but all this was now at an end, paralysed by the hopelessdecay of his hearing. It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do anyuseful war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon his penand his flying visits to London for refreshment. He was a remarkablygood letter-writer, and he now demanded almost pathetically to be fedwith the apples of correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915):--

 "Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of taking a part any longer in the doings of the great world. The Country Mouse--even if the creature were able to scuttle back into the cellars of the great--would still be out of all communion with the mighty, owing to physical infirmity. And now comes the kind Town Mouse and tells him all that he most cares to know. "

He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the most of both. "Ihate the autumn, " he said, "for it means the death of the year, but Itry to make the death of the garden as beautiful as possible. " Among hisplants, and up and down the high places of his bamboo-featheredrockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he could nolonger hear into small dark pools full of many-coloured water-lilies, his activity was like that of a boy. He had the appearance, the tastes, the instincts of vigorous manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limitof such gifts, and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him bythe one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by this time becomealmost impenetrable to sound. 

Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened his mentalforce. With the arrival of his eightieth year, his activity andcuriosity of intellect were certainly rather increased than abated. Hewrote to me from Batsford (December 28th, 1915):--

 "I have been busy for the last two months making a close study of Dante. I have read all the _Inferno_ and half of the _Purgatorio_. It is hard work, but the 'readings' of my old schoolfellow, W. W. Vernon, are an incalculable help, and now within the last week or two has appeared Hoare's Italian Dictionary, published by the Cambridge University Press. A much-needed book, for the previous dictionaries were practically useless except for courier's work. How splendid Dante is! But how sickening are the Commentators, Benvenuto da Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of them! They won't let the poet say that the sun shone or the night was dark without seeing some hidden and mystic meaning in it. They always seem to _chercher midi à quatorze heures_, and irritate me beyond measure. There is invention enough in Dante without all their embroidery. But this grubbing and grouting seems to be infectious among Dante scholars--they all catch the disease. "

He flung himself into these Italian studies with all his accustomedardour. He corresponded with the eminent veteran of Dante scholarship, the Honourable W. W. Vernon, whom he mentions in the passage just quoted, and Mr. Vernon's letters gave him great delight. He wrote to me again:--

 "This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. Of course, I knew the catch quotations in Dante, but I never before attempted to read him. The difficulty scared me. "

Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction. He worked awayfor hours at a time, braving the monotonies of the _Purgatorio_ withoutflagging, but he broke down early in the _Paradiso_. He had no sympathywhatever with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was extremely boredby the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the Empyrean. I confess I tookadvantage of this to recall his attention to _Veluvana_, for which itwas no longer possible to hope that the author would collect anymaterial out of Dante. 

An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on Russian history duringthe Long Vacation of 1916 was a compliment to the value of the Russianchapters of his _Memories_, but it was another distraction. It took histhoughts away from _Veluvana_, although he protested to me that hecould prepare his Cambridge address, and yet continue to marshal hisfancies for the book. Perhaps I doubted it, and dared to disapprove, forhe wrote (March 17th, 1916):--

 "You scold me for writing too much. That is the least of my troubles! You must remember that debarred as I am from taking part in society, the Three R's alone remain to me, and, indeed, of those only two--for owing to my having enjoyed an Eton education in days when arithmetic was deemed to be no part of the intellectual panoply of a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide! I am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time. "

He was really composing more actively than he himself realised. Aboutthis time he wrote:--

 "Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford--not the Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible--but the unhappy hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in Paris--all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be told that he had many admirable points. "

At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redesdale was veryremarkable. He had settled down into his life at Batsford, diversifiedby the frequent dashes to London. His years seemed to sit upon him morelightly than ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown back, the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the externalsymbols of an inner man perpetually fresh, ready for adventure anddelighted with the pageant of existence. He found no fault at all withlife, save that it must leave him, and he had squared his shoulders notto give way to weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just thatvisible determination to be strong. But the features of his characterhad none of those mental wrinkles, those "rides de l'esprit, " whichMontaigne describes as proper to old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltlessof the old man's self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. Hiscuriosity and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, and so, inspite of his amusing violence in denouncing his own forgetfulness, washis memory of passing events. In the petulance of his optimism he waslike a lad. 

There was no change in the early part of last year, although it wasmanifest that the incessant journeying between Batsford and Londonexhausted him. The garden occupied him more and more, and he wasdistracted by the great storm of the end of March, which blew down anddestroyed at the head of the bridge the wonderful group of cypresses, which he called "the pride of my old age. " But, after a gesture ofdespair, he set himself energetically to repair the damage. He was inhis usual buoyant health when the very hot spell in May tempted him outon May 18th, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbrook, abeautiful village on his Oxfordshire property, of which he wasparticularly fond. He was not successful, and in a splenetic mood heflung himself at full length upon a bank of wet grass. He was notallowed to remain there long, but the mischief was done, and in a fewhours he was suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result might nothave been serious had it not been that in a few days' time he was due tofulfil certain engagements in town. Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale morethan not to keep a pledge. In all such matters he prided himself onbeing punctual and trustworthy, and he refused to change his plans bystaying at home. 

Accordingly, on May 23rd he came to London to transact some business, and to take the chair next day at a meeting of the Royal Society ofLiterature, of which he was a vice-president. This meeting took place inthe afternoon, and he addressed a crowded assembly, which greeted himwith great warmth. Those who were present, and saw his bright eyes andheard his ringing voice, could have no suspicion that they would see himagain no more. His intimate friends alone perceived that he was making asuperlative effort. There followed a very bad night, and he went down toBatsford next day, going straight to his bed, from which he never roseagain. His condition, at first, gave rise to little alarm. The disease, which proved to be catarrhal jaundice, took its course; but for a longtime his spirit and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him andfilled those around him with hope. There was no disturbance of mind tothe very last. In a shaky hand, with his stylograph, he continued tocorrespond with certain friends, about politics, and books, and evenabout Veluvana. In the beginning of August there seemed to be symptomsof improvement, but these were soon followed by a sudden and finalrelapse. Even after this, Lord Redesdale's interest and curiosity weresustained. In his very last letter to myself, painfully scrawled onlyone week before his death, he wrote:--

 "Have you seen Ernest Daudet's book just published, _Les auteurs de la guerre de_ 1914? Bismarck is the subject of the first volume; the second will deal with the Kaiser and the Emperor Joseph; and the third with _leurs complices_. I know E. D. , he is a brother of Alphonse, and is a competent historian. His book is most illuminating. Of course there are exaggerations, but he is always well _documenté_, and there is much in his work that is new. I don't admire his style. The abuse of the historic present is bad enough, but what can be said in favour of the historic future with which we meet at every step? It sets my teeth on edge. "

But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later he passed into anunconscious state, dying peacefully at noon on August 17th, 1916. He wassaved, as he had wished to be, from all consciousness of decrepitude. 

THE LYRICAL POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY

When, about Christmas time in 1898, Mr. Hardy's admirers, who wereexpecting from him a new novel, received instead a thick volume ofverse, there was mingled with their sympathy and respect a littledisappointment and a great failure in apprehension. Those who were notrude enough to suggest that a cobbler should stick to his last, remindedone another that many novelists had sought relaxation by trifling withthe Muses. Thackeray had published _Ballads_, and George Eliot hadexpatiated in a _Legend of Jubal_. No one thought the worse of_Coningsby_ because its author had produced a _Revolutionary Epic_. Ittook some time for even intelligent criticism to see that the new_Wessex Poems_ did not fall into this accidental category, and still, after twenty years, there survives a tendency to take the verse of Mr. Hardy, abundant and solid as it has become, as a mere subsidiary andornamental appendage to his novels. It is still necessary to insist onthe complete independence of his career as a poet, and to point out thatif he had never published a page of prose he would deserve to rank highamong the writers of his country on the score of the eight volumes ofhis verse. It is as a lyrical poet, and solely as a lyrical poet, that Ipropose to speak of him to-day. 

It has been thought extraordinary that Cowper was over fifty when hepublished his first secular verses, but Mr. Hardy was approaching hissixtieth year when he sent _Wessex Poems_ to the press. Suchself-restraint--"none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and withmore unwearied spirit none shall"--has always fascinated the genuineartist, but few have practised it with so much tenacity. When the workof Mr. Hardy is completed, nothing, it is probable, will more strikeposterity than its unity, its consistency. He has given proof, as scarceany other modern writer has done, of tireless constancy of resolve. Hisnovels formed an unbroken series from the _Desperate Remedies_ of 1871to _The Well-Beloved_ of 1897. In the fulness of his success, andunseduced by all temptation, he closed that chapter of his career, andhas kept it closed. Since 1898 he has been, persistently andperiodically, a poet and nothing else. That he determined, for reasonsbest left to his own judgment, to defer the exhibition of his verseuntil he had completed his work in prose, ought not to prejudicecriticism in its analysis of the lyrics and the colossal dramaticpanorama. Mr. Hardy, exclusively as a poet, demands our undividedattention. 

It is legitimate to speculate on other probable causes of Mr. Hardy'sdelay. From such information as lies scattered before us, we gather thatit was from 1865 to 1867 that he originally took poetry to be hisvocation. The dated pieces in the volume of 1898 help us to form an ideaof the original character of his utterance. On the whole it was verymuch what it remains in the pieces composed after a lapse of half acentury. Already, as a very young man, Mr. Hardy possessed hisextraordinary insight into the movements of human character, and hiseloquence in translating what he had observed of the tragedy and pain ofrustic lives. No one, for sixty years, had taken so closely to heart theadmonitions of Wordsworth in his famous Preface to the 1800 edition of_Lyrical Ballads_ to seek for inspiration in that condition where "thepassions of men are incorporated with the beautiful forms of nature. "But it may well be doubted whether Mr. Hardy's poems would have beenreceived in the mid-Victorian age with favour, or even have beencomprehended. Fifty years ahead of his time, he was asking in 1866 fornovelty of ideas, and he must have been conscious that his questioningwould seem inopportune. He needed a different atmosphere, and he leftthe task of revolt to another, and, at first sight, a very unrelatedforce, that of the _Poems and Ballads_ of the same year. But Swinburnesucceeded in his revolution, and although he approached the art from anopposite direction, he prepared the way for an ultimate appreciation ofMr. Hardy. 

We should therefore regard the latter, in spite of his silence of fortyyears, as a poet who laboured, like Swinburne, at a revolution againstthe optimism and superficial sweetness of his age. Swinburne, it istrue, tended to accentuate the poetic side of poetry, while Mr. Hardydrew verse, in some verbal respects, nearer to prose. This does notaffect their common attitude, and the sympathy of these great artistsfor one another's work has already been revealed, and will be still moreclearly exposed. But they were unknown to each other in 1866, when toboth of them the cheap philosophy of the moment, the glitteringfemininity of the "jewelled line, " the intense respect for Mrs. Grundyin her Sunday satin, appeared trumpery, hateful, and to be trampledupon. We find in Mr. Hardy's earliest verse no echo of the passionatebelief in personal immortality which was professed by Ruskin andBrowning. He opposed the Victorian theory of human "progress"; theTennysonian beatific Vision seemed to him ridiculous. He rejected theidea of the sympathy and goodness of Nature, and was in revolt againstthe self-centredness of the Romantics. We may conjecture that hecombined a great reverence for _The Book of Job_ with a considerablecontempt for _In Memoriam_. 

This was not a mere rebellious fancy which passed off; it was somethinginherent that remained, and gives to-day their peculiar character to Mr. Hardy's latest lyrics. But before we examine the features of thispersonal mode of interpreting poetry to the world, we may collect whatlittle light we can on the historic development of it. In the piecesdated between 1865 and 1867 we find the germ of almost everything whichhas since characterised the poet. In "Amabel" the ruinous passage ofyears, which has continued to be an obsession with Mr. Hardy, is alreadycrudely dealt with. The habit of taking poetical negatives of smallscenes--"your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, and a pond edgedwith grayish leaves" ("Neutral Times")--which had not existed in Englishverse since the days of Crabbe, reappears. There is marked already asense of terror and resentment against the blind motions of chance--In"Hap" the author would positively welcome a certainty of divine hatredas a relief from the strain of depending upon "crass casualty. " Here andthere in these earliest pieces an extreme difficulty of utterance isremarkable in the face of the ease which the poet attained afterwards inthe expression of his most strange images and fantastic revelations. Weread in "At a Bridal":--

 "Should I, too, wed as slave to Mode's decree, And each thus found apart, of false desire A stolid line, whom no high aims will fire As had fired ours could ever have mingled we!"

This, although perfectly reducible, takes time to think out, and at ahasty glance seems muffled up in obscurity beyond the darkness of Donne;moreover, it is scarcely worthy in form of the virtuoso which Mr. Hardywas presently to become. Perhaps of the poems certainly attributable tothis earliest period, the little cycle of sonnets called "She to Him"gives clearest promise of what was coming. The sentiment is that ofRonsard's famous "Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à lachandelle, " but turned round, as Mr. Hardy loves to do, from the man tothe woman, and embroidered with ingenuities, such as where the lattersays that as her temperament dies down the habit of loving will remain, and she be

 "Numb as a vane that cankers on its point, True to the wind that kissed ere canker came, "

which attest a complexity of mind that Ronsard's society knew nothingof. 

On the whole, we may perhaps be safe in conjecturing that whatever thecause, the definite dedication to verse was now postponed. Meanwhile, the writing of novels had become the business of Mr. Hardy's life, andten years go by before we trace a poet in that life again. But it isinteresting to find that when the great success of _Far from the MaddingCrowd_ had introduced him to a circle of the best readers, therefollowed an effect which again disturbed his ambition for the moment. Mr. Hardy was once more tempted to change the form of his work. Hewished "to get back to verse, " but was dissuaded by Leslie Stephen, whoinduced him to start writing _The Return of the Native_ instead. OnMarch 29th, 1875, Coventry Patmore, then a complete stranger, wrote toexpress his regret that "such almost unequalled beauty and power asappeared in the novels should not have assured themselves theimmortality which would have been conferred upon them by the form ofverse. " This was just at the moment when we find Mr. Hardy'sconversations with "long Leslie Stephen in the velveteen coat"obstinately turning upon "theologies decayed and defunct, the origin ofthings, the constitution of matter, and the unreality of time. " To thisperiod belongs also the earliest conception of _The Dynasts_, an oldnote-book containing, under the date June 20th, 1875, the suggestionthat the author should attempt "An Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815. "

To this time also seems to belong the execution of what has proved themost attractive section of Mr. Hardy's poetry, the narratives, or shortWessex ballads. The method in which these came into the world is verycurious. Many of these stories were jotted down to the extent of astanza or two when the subject first occurred to the author. Forinstance, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's, " first published by LionelJohnson in 1894, had been begun as early as 1867, and was finished tenyears later. The long ballad of "Leipzig" and the savage "SanSebastian, " both highly characteristic, were also conceived and a fewlines of each noted down long before their completion. "Valenciennes, "however, belongs to 1878, and the "Dance at the Phœnix, " of which thestanza beginning "'Twas Christmas" alone had been written years before, seems to have been finished about the same time. What evidence is beforeus goes to prove that in the 'seventies Mr. Hardy became a completemaster of the art of verse, and that his poetic style was by this timefixed. He still kept poetry out of public sight, but he wrote during thenext twenty years, as though in a backwater off the stream of hisnovels, the poems which form the greater part of the volume of 1898. Ifno other collection of his lyrical verse existed, we should miss amultitude of fine things, but our general conception of his genius wouldbe little modified. 

We should judge carelessly, however, if we treated the subsequentvolumes as mere repetitions of the original _Wessex Poems_. They presentinteresting differences, which I may rapidly note before I touch on thefeatures which characterise the whole body of Mr. Hardy's verse. _Poemsof the Past and Present_, which came out in the first days of 1902, could not but be in a certain measure disappointing, in so far as itparalleled its three years' product with that of the thirty years of_Wessex Poems_. Old pieces were published in it, and it was obvious thatin 1898 Mr. Hardy might be expected to have chosen from what used to becalled his "portfolio" those specimens which he thought to be mostattractive. But on further inspection this did not prove to be quite thecase. After pondering for twelve years on the era of Napoleon, hispreoccupation began in 1887 to drive him into song:--

 "Must I pipe a palinody, Or be silent thereupon?"

He decides that silence has become impossible:--

 "Nay; I'll sing 'The Bridge of Lodi'-- That long-loved, romantic thing, Though none show by smile or nod, he Guesses why and what I sing!"

Here is the germ of _The Dynasts_. But in the meantime the crisis of theBoer War had cut across the poet's dream of Europe a hundred years ago, and a group of records of the Dorsetshire elements of the British armyat the close of 1899 showed in Mr. Hardy's poetry what had not beensuspected there--a military talent of a most remarkable kind. Anotherset of pieces composed in Rome were not so interesting; Mr. Hardy alwaysseems a little languid when he leaves the confines of his native Wessex. Another section of _Poems of the Past and Present_ is severely, almostdidactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language the daringthought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's reverie, that God Himselfhas forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere, " this "taintedball, " "so poor a thing, " and has left all human life to be theplaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by "TheDarkling Thrush, " which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy canlet himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those in "On a FineMorning":--

 "Whence comes Solace? Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being; Not from noting Life's conditions, Not from heeding Time's monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing on the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem. "

Eight years more passed, years marked by the stupendous effort of _TheDynasts_, before Mr. Hardy put forth another collection of lyricalpoems. _Time's Laughingstocks_ confirmed, and more than confirmed, thehigh promise of _Wessex Poems_. The author, in one of his modestprefaces, where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our anxietynot to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope that _Time'sLaughingstocks_ will, as a whole, take the "reader forward, even if notfar, rather than backward. "

The book, indeed, does not take us "far" forward, simply because thewriter's style and scope were definitely exposed to us already, and yetit does take us "forward, " because the hand of the master isconspicuously firmer and his touch more daring. The _Laughingstocks_themselves are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division andisolation, of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. Nolandscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than the night-pictures in"The Revisitation, " where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on tothe gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) hisancient mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation ofeach to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document for the futureis "Reminiscences of a Dancing Man"? If only Shakespeare could have leftus such a song of the London in 1585! But the power of the poetculminates in the pathos of "The Tramp Woman"--perhaps the greatest ofall Mr. Hardy's lyrical poems--and in the horror of "A Sunday Morning'sTragedy. "

It is noticeable that _Time's Laughingstocks_ is, in some respects, amore daring collection than its predecessors. We find the poet hereentirely emancipated from convention, and guided both in religion andmorals exclusively by the inner light of his reflection. His energy nowinteracts on his clairvoyance with a completeness which he had neverquite displayed before, and it is here that we find Mr. Hardy'sutterance peculiarly a quintessence of himself. Especially in thenarrative pieces--which are often Wessex novels distilled into awine-glass, such as "Rose-Ann, " and "The Vampirine Fair"--he allows noconsiderations of what the reader may think "nice" or "pleasant" toshackle his sincerity or his determination; and it is therefore to_Time's Laughingstocks_ that the reader who wishes to become intimatelyacquainted with Mr. Hardy as a moralist most frequently recurs. Wenotice here more than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy's sympathy withthe local music of Wessex, and especially with its expression by thevillage choir, which he uses as a spiritual symbol. Quite a largesection of _Time's Laughingstocks_ takes us to the old-fashioned galleryof some church, where the minstrels are bowing "New Sabbath" or "MountEphraim, " or to a later scene where the ghosts, in whose melancholyapparition Mr. Hardy takes such pleasure, chant their goblin melodiesand strum "the viols of the dead" in the moonlit churchyard. The veryessence of Mr. Hardy's reverie at this moment of his career is to befound, for instance, in "The Dead Quire, " where the ancientphantom-minstrels revenge themselves on their gross grandsons outsidethe alehouse. 

Almost immediately after the outbreak of the present war Mr. Hardypresented to a somewhat distraught and inattentive public anothercollection of his poems. It cannot be said that _Satires ofCircumstance_ is the most satisfactory of those volumes; it is, perhaps, that which we could with the least discomposure persuade ourselves tooverlook. Such a statement refers more to the high quality of otherpages than to any positive decay of power or finish here. There is noless adroitness of touch and penetration of view in this book thanelsewhere, and the poet awakens once more our admiration by his skill ingiving poetic value to minute conditions of life which have escaped lesscareful observers. But in _Satires of Circumstance_ the ugliness ofexperience is more accentuated than it is elsewhere, and is flung in ourface with less compunction. The pieces which give name to the volume areonly fifteen in number, but the spirit which inspires them is veryfrequently repeated in other parts of the collection. That spirit is oneof mocking sarcasm, and it acts in every case by presenting abeautifully draped figure of illusion, from which the poet, like asardonic showman, twitches away the robe that he may display a skeletonbeneath it. We can with little danger assume, as we read the _Satires ofCircumstance_, hard and cruel shafts of searchlight as they seem, thatMr. Hardy was passing through a mental crisis when he wrote them. Thisseems to be the _Troilus and Cressida_ of his life's work, the book inwhich he is revealed most distracted by conjecture and most overwhelmedby the miscarriage of everything. The wells of human hope have beenpoisoned for him by some condition of which we know nothing, and eventhe picturesque features of Dorsetshire landscape, that have alwaysbefore dispersed his melancholy, fail to win his attention:--

 "Bright yellowhammers Made mirthful clamours, And billed long straws with a bustling air, And bearing their load, Flew up the road That he followed alone, without interest there. "

The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of thismood, is "The Newcomer's Wife, " with the terrible abruptness of its laststanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a workof art, but only to comment upon its execution. Of the merit of thesemonotonously sinister _Satires of Circumstance_ there can be noquestion; whether the poet's indulgence in the mood which gave birth tothem does not tend to lower our moral temperature and to lessen therebound of our energy, is another matter. At all events, every one mustwelcome a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to havewakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense of a new chapter inhistory. 

In the fourth year of the war the veteran poet published _Moments ofVision_. These show a remarkable recovery of spirit, and an ingenuitynever before excelled. With the passage of years Mr. Hardy, observingeverything in the little world of Wessex, and forgetting nothing, hasbecome almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said so, "knowing, " with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. He has learnedto track the windings of the human heart with the familiarity of agamekeeper who finds plenty of vermin in the woods, and who nails whathe finds, be it stoat or squirrel, to the barn-door of his poetry. Butthere is also in these last-fruits of Mr. Hardy's mossed tree much thatis wholly detached from the bitterness of satire, much that simplyrecords, with an infinite delicacy of pathos, little incidents of thepersonal life of long ago, bestowing the immortality of art on thesefugitive fancies in the spirit of the Japanese sculptor when he chiselsthe melting of a cloud or the flight of an insect on his sword hilt:--

 "I idly cut a parsley stalk And blew therein towards the moon; I had not thought what ghosts would walk With shivering footsteps to my tune. 

 "I went and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bye-gone look. 

 "I lipped rough rhymes of chance not choice, I thought not what my words might be; There came into my ear a voice That turned a tenderer verse for me. "

We have now in brief historic survey marshalled before us the variousvolumes in which Mr. Hardy's lyrical poetry was originally collected. Before we examine its general character more closely, it may be well tocall attention to its technical quality, which was singularlymisunderstood at first, and which has never, we believe, been boldlyfaced. In 1898, and later, when a melodious _falsetto_ was much infashion amongst us, the reviewers found great fault with Mr. Hardy'sprosody; they judged him as a versifier to be rude and incorrect. Asregards the single line, it may be confessed that Mr. Hardy, in hisanxiety to present his thought in an undiluted form, is not infrequentlyclogged and hard. Such a line as

 "Fused from its separateness by ecstasy"

hisses at us like a snake, and crawls like a wounded one. Mr. Hardy isapt to clog his lines with consonants, and he seems indifferent to thestiffness which is the consequence of this neglect. Ben Jonson said that"Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging"; perhaps we may goso far as to say that Mr. Hardy, for his indifference to a mellifluousrun lays himself open to a mild rebuke. He is negligent of that eternalornament of English verse, audible intricacy, probably because ofSwinburne's abuse of it. But most of what is called his harshness shouldrather be called bareness, and is the result of a revolt, conscious orunconscious, against Keats' prescription of "loading the rifts withore. "

In saying this, all has been said that an enemy could in justice say inblame of his metrical peculiarities. Unquestionably he doesoccasionally, like Robert Browning, err in the direction of cacophony. But when we turn to the broader part of prosody, we must perceive thatMr. Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a very correct and admirablemetricist. His stanzaic invention is abundant; no other Victorian poet, not even Swinburne, has employed so many forms, mostly of his owninvention, and employed them so appropriately, that is to say, in soclose harmony with the subject or story enshrined in them. To take anexample from his pure lyrics of reflection first, from "TheBullfinches":--

 "Brother Bulleys, let us sing From the dawn till evening! For we know not that we go not When the day's pale visions fold Unto those who sang of old, "

in the exquisite fineness and sadness of the stanza we seem to hear thevery voices of the birds warbling faintly in the sunset. Again, thehurried, timid irresolution of a lover always too late is marvellouslyrendered in the form of "Lizbie Browne":--

 "And Lizbie Browne, Who else had hair Bay-red as yours, Or flesh so fair Bred out of doors, Sweet Lizbie Browne?"

On the other hand, the fierceness of "I said to Love" is interpreted ina stanza that suits the mood of denunciation, while "Tess's Lament"wails in a metre which seems to rock like an ageing woman seated alonebefore the fire, with an infinite haunting sadness. 

It is, however, in the narrative pieces, the little _Wessex Tales_, that Mr. Hardy's metrical imagination is most triumphant. No two ofthese are identical in form, and for each he selects, or more ofteninvents, a wholly appropriate stanza. He makes many experiments, one ofthe strangest being the introduction of rhymeless lines at regularintervals. Of this, "Cicely" is an example which repays attention:--

 "And still sadly onward I followed, That Highway the Icen Which trails its pale riband down Wessex O'er lynchet and lea. 

 "Along through the Stour-bordered Forum, Where legions had wayfared, And where the slow river up-glasses Its green canopy";

and one still more remarkable is the enchanting "Friends Beyond, " towhich we shall presently recur. The drawling voice of a weary oldcampaigner is wonderfully rendered in the stanza of "Valenciennes":--

 "Well: Heaven wi' its jasper halls Is now the on'y town I care to be in. . Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls As we did Valencieën!"

whereas for long Napoleonic stories like "Leipzig" and "The Peasant'sConfession, " a ballad-measure which contemporaries such as Southey orCampbell might have used is artfully chosen. In striking contrast wehave the elaborate verse-form of "The Souls of the Slain, " in which thethrobbing stanza seems to dilate and withdraw like the very cloud ofmoth-like phantoms which it describes. It is difficult to follow outthis theme without more frequent quotation than I have space, for here, but the reader who pursues it carefully will not repeat the rumour thatMr. Hardy is a careless or "incorrect" metricist. He is, on thecontrary, a metrical artist of great accomplishment. 

The conception of life revealed in his verses by this careful artist isone which displays very exactly the bent of his temperament. During thewhole of his long career Mr. Hardy has not budged an inch from hisoriginal line of direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treatedwith scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of "those purblindDoomsters, " accident, chance, and time, from whom he has had to endureinjury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating theHardy doctrine in its extreme form, but it is not stating it toostrongly. This has been called his "pessimism, " a phrase to which someadmirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have objected. But, of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just as Browning is an optimist, just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling withwords in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision inthought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal forceswhich beleaguer human life is a "pessimistic" one, or else words have nomeaning. 

Yet it is needful to define in what this pessimism consists. It is notthe egotism of Byron or the morbid melancholy of Chateaubriand. It isdirected towards an observation of others, not towards an analysis ofself, and this gives it more philosophical importance, because althoughromantic peevishness is very common among modern poets, and althoughennui inspires a multitude of sonnets, a deliberate and imaginativestudy of useless suffering in the world around us is rare indeed amongthe poets. It is particularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although oneof the most profoundly tragic of all modern writers, is neithereffeminate nor sickly. His melancholy could never have dictated thethird stanza of Shelley's "Lines written in Dejection in the Bay ofNaples. " His pessimism is involuntary, forced from him by his experienceand his constitution, and no analysis could give a better definition ofwhat divides him from the petulant despair of a poet like Leopardi thanthe lines "To Life":--

 "O life, with the sad scared face, I weary of seeing thee, And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace, And thy too-forced pleasantry!

 "I know what thou would'st tell Of Death, Time, Destiny-- I have known it long, and know, too, well What it all means for me. 

 "But canst thou not array Thyself in rare disguise, And feign like truth, for one mad day, That Earth is Paradise?

 "I'll tune me to the mood, And mumm with thee till eve, And maybe what as interlude I feign, I shall believe!"

But the mumming goes no deeper than it does in the exquisite poem of"The Darkling Thrush, " where the carolings of an aged bird, on a frostyevening, are so ecstatic that they waken a vague hope in the listener'smind that the thrush may possibly know of "some blessed hope" of whichthe poet is "unaware. " This is as far as Mr. Hardy ever gets on theblest Victorian pathway of satisfaction. 

There are certain aspects in which it is not unnatural to see a parallelbetween Mr. Hardy and George Crabbe. Each is the spokesman of adistrict, each has a passion for the study of mankind, each has gainedby long years of observation a profound knowledge of local humancharacter, and each has plucked on the open moor, and wears in his coat, the hueless flower of disillusion. But there is a great distinction inthe aim of the two poets. Crabbe, as he describes himself in _The ParishRegister_, was "the true physician" who "walks the foulest ward. " He wasutilitarian in his morality; he exposed the pathos of tragedy bydwelling on the faults which led to it, forgetful of the fatality whichin more consistent moments he acknowledged. Crabbe was realistic with amoral design, even in the _Tales of the Hall_, where he made a gallanteffort at last to arrive at a detachment of spirit. No such effort isneeded by Mr. Hardy, who has none of the instinct of a preacher, and whoconsiders moral improvement outside his responsibility. He admits, withhis great French contemporary, that

 "Tout désir est menteur, toute joie éphémère, Toute liqueur au fond de la coupe est amère, "

but he is bent on discovering the cause of this devastation, and notdisposed to waste time over its consequences. At the end he produces apanacea which neither Crabbe nor Byron dreamed of--resignation. 

But the poet has not reached the end of his disillusion. He thinks tosecure repose on the breast of Nature, the _alma mater_, to whom Goetheand Wordsworth and Browning each in his own way turned, and wererewarded by consolation and refreshment. We should be prepared to findMr. Hardy, with his remarkable aptitude for the perception of naturalforms, easily consoled by the influences of landscape and the inanimateworld. His range of vision is wide and extremely exact; he has the giftof reproducing before us scenes of various character with a vividnesswhich is sometimes startling. But Mr. Hardy's disdain of sentimentality, and his vigorous analysis of the facts of life, render him insensiblenot indeed to the mystery nor to the beauty, but to the imaginedsympathy, of Nature. He has no more confidence in the visible earth thanin the invisible heavens, and neither here nor there is he able topersuade himself to discover a counsellor or a friend. In thisconnection, we do well to follow the poet's train of thought in thelyric called "In a Wood, " where he enters a copse dreaming that, in thatrealm of "sylvan peace, " Nature would offer "a soft release from man'sunrest. " He immediately observes that the pine and the beech arestruggling for existence, and trying to blight each other with drippingpoison. He sees the ivy eager to strangle the elm, and the hawthornschoking the hollies. Even the poplars sulk and turn black under theshadow of a rival. In the end, filled with horror at all these crimes ofNature, the poet flees from the copse as from an accursed place, and hedetermines that life offers him no consolation except the company ofthose human beings who are as beleaguered as himself:--

 "Since, then, no grace I find Taught me of trees, Turn I back to my kind Worthy as these. There at least smiles abound, There discourse trills around, There, now and then, are found, Life-loyalties. "

It is absurd, he decides, to love Nature, which has either no responseto give, or answers in irony. Let us even avoid, as much as we can, deepconcentration of thought upon the mysteries of Nature, lest we becomedemoralised by contemplating her negligence, her blindness, herimplacability. We find here a violent reaction against the poetry ofegotistic optimism which had ruled the romantic school in England formore than a hundred years, and we recognise a branch of Mr. Hardy'soriginality. He has lifted the veil of Isis, and he finds beneath it, not a benevolent mother of men, but the tomb of an illusion. One shortlyric, "Yell'ham-Wood's Story, " puts this, again with a sylvan setting, in its unflinching crudity:--

 "Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan, And Clyffe-hill Clump says 'Yea!' But Yell'ham says a thing of its own: It's not, 'Gray, gray, Is Life alway!' That Yell'ham says, Nor that Life is for ends unknown. 

 "It says that Life would signify A thwarted purposing: That we come to live, and are called to die. Yes, that's the thing In fall, in spring, That Yell'ham says:-- Life offers--to deny!'"

It is therefore almost exclusively to the obscure history of those whosuffer and stumble around him, victims of the universal disillusion, menand women "come to live but called to die, " that Mr. Hardy dedicates hispoetic function. "Lizbie Browne" appeals to us as a typical instance ofhis rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and if we compareit with such poems of Wordsworth's as "Lucy Gray" or "Alice Fell" we seethat he starts by standing much closer to the level of the subject thanhis great predecessor does. Wordsworth is the benevolent philosophersitting in a post-chaise or crossing the "wide moor" in meditation. Mr. Hardy is the familiar neighbour, the shy mourner at the grave; hisrelation is a more intimate one: he is patient, humble, un-upbraiding. Sometimes, as in the remarkable colloquy called "The Ruined Maid, " hissympathy is so close as to offer an absolute flout in the face to thesystem of Victorian morality. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is not concerned withsentimental morals, but with the primitive instincts of the soul, applauding them, or at least recording them with complacency, even whenthey outrage ethical tradition, as they do in the lyric narrative called"A Wife and Another. " The stanzas "To an Unborn Pauper Child" sum upwhat is sinister and what is genial in Mr. Hardy's attitude to theunambitious forms of life which he loves to contemplate. 

His temperature is not always so low as it is in the class of poems towhich we have just referred, but his ultimate view is never moresanguine. He is pleased sometimes to act as the fiddler at a dance, surveying the hot-blooded couples, and urging them on by the lilt ofhis instrument, but he is always perfectly aware that they will have "topay high for their prancing" at the end of all. No instance of this ismore remarkable than the poem called "Julie-Jane, " a perfect example ofMr. Hardy's metrical ingenuity and skill, which begins thus:--

 "Sing; how 'a would sing! How 'a would raise the tune When we rode in the waggon from harvesting By the light o' the moon!

 "Dance; how 'a would dance! If a fiddlestring did but sound She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance, And go round and round. 

 "Laugh; how 'a would laugh! Her peony lips would part As if none such a place for a lover to quaff At the deeps of a heart, "

and which then turns to the most plaintive and the most irreparabletragedy, woven, as a black design on to a background of gold, upon thisbasis of temperamental joyousness. 

Alphonse Daudet once said that the great gift of Edmond de Goncourt wasto, "_rendre l'irrendable_. " This is much more true of Mr. Hardy than itwas of Goncourt, and more true than it is of any other English poetexcept Donne. There is absolutely no observation too minute, no flutterof reminiscence too faint, for Mr. Hardy to adopt as the subject of ametaphysical lyric, and his skill in this direction has grown upon him;it is nowhere so remarkable as in his latest volume, aptly termed_Moments of Vision_. Everything in village life is grist to his mill; heseems to make no selection, and his field is modest to humility and yetpractically boundless. We have a poem on the attitude of two people withnothing to do and no book to read, waiting in the parlour of an hotelfor the rain to stop, a recollection after more than forty years. Thatthe poet once dropped a pencil into the cranny of an old church where hewas sketching inspires an elaborate lyric. The disappearance of a rottedsummer-house, the look of a row of silver drops of fog condensed on thebar of a gate, the effect of candlelight years and years ago on awoman's neck and hair, the vision of a giant at a fair, led by a dwarfwith a red string--such are amongst the subjects which awaken in Mr. Hardy thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears, and call forinterpretation in verse. The skeleton of a lady's sunshade, picked up onSwanage Cliffs, the pages of a fly-blown Testament lying in a railwaywaiting-room, a journeying boy in a third-class carriage, with histicket stuck in the band of his hat--such are among the themes whichawake in Mr. Hardy's imagination reveries which are always whollyserious and usually deeply tragic. 

Mr. Hardy's notation of human touches hitherto excluded from the realmof poetry is one of the most notable features of his originality. Itmarked his work from the beginning, as in the early ballad of "TheWidow, " where the sudden damping of the wooer's amatory ardour inconsequence of his jealousy of the child is rendered with extraordinaryrefinement. The difficulty of course is to know when to stop. There isalways a danger that a poet, in his search after the infinitelyingenious, may lapse into _amphigory_, into sheer absurdity andtriviality, which Cowper, in spite of his elegant lightness, does notalways escape. Wordsworth, more serious in his intent, fell headlong inparts of _Peter Bell_, and in such ballads as "Betty Foy. " Mr. Hardy, whatever the poverty of his incident, commonly redeems it by the oddityof his observation; as in "The Pedigree":--

 "I bent in the deep of night Over a pedigree the chronicler gave As mine; and as I bent there, half-unrobed, The uncurtained panes of my window-square Let in the watery light Of the moon in its old age: And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past Where mute and cold it globed Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave. "

Mr. Hardy's love of strange experiences, and of adventures founded on abalance of conscience and instinct, is constantly exemplified in thoseballads and verse-anecdotes which form the section of his poetry mostappreciated by the general public. Among these, extraordinarilyrepresentative of the poet's habit of mind, is "My Cicely, " a tale ofthe eighteenth century, where a man impetuously rides from Londonthrough Wessex to be present at the funeral of the wrong woman; as hereturns, by a coincidence, he meets the right woman, whom he used tolove, and is horrified at "her liquor-fired face, her thick accents. " Hedetermines that by an effort of will the dead woman (whom he never saw)shall remain, what she seemed during his wild ride, "_my_ Cicely, " andthe living woman be expunged from memory. A similar deliberate electingthat the dream shall hold the place of the fact is the motive of "TheWell-Beloved. " The ghastly humour of "The Curate's Kindness" is a sortof reverse action of the same mental subtlety. Misunderstanding takes avery prominent place in Mr. Hardy's irony of circumstance; as, almosttoo painfully, in "The Rash Bride, " a hideous tale of suicide followingon the duplicity of a tender and innocent widow. 

The grandmother of Mr. Hardy was born in 1772, and survived until 1857. From her lips he heard many an obscure old legend of the life of Wessexin the eighteenth century. Was it she who told him the terrible Exmoorstory of "The Sacrilege;" the early tale of "The Two Men, " which mightbe the skeleton-scenario for a whole elaborate novel; or thatincomparable comedy in verse, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's, " with itssplendid human touch at the very end? We suspect that it was; andperhaps at the same source he acquired his dangerous insight into thefemale heart, whether exquisitely feeble as in "The Home-coming" withits delicate and ironic surprise, or treacherous, as in the desolatingballad of "Rose-Ann. " No one, in prose or verse, has expatiated morepoignantly than Mr. Hardy on what our forefathers used to call "cases ofconscience. " He seems to have shared the experiences of souls to whomlife was "a wood before your doors, and a labyrinth within the wood, andlocks and bars to every door within that labyrinth, " as Jeremy Taylordescribes that of the anxious penitents who came to him to confession. The probably very early story of "The Casterbridge Captains" is adelicate study in compunction, and a still more important example is"The Alarm, " where the balance of conscience and instinct gives to whatin coarser hands might seem the most trivial of actions a momentouscharacter of tragedy. 

This is one of Mr. Hardy's studies in military history, where he isalmost always singularly happy. His portraits of the non-commissionedofficer of the old service are as excellent in verse as they are in theprose of _The Trumpet-Major_ or _The Melancholy Hussar_. The reader ofthe novels will not have to be reminded that "Valenciennes" and theother ballads have their prose-parallel in Simon Burden's reminiscencesof Minden. Mr. Hardy, with a great curiosity about the science of warand a close acquaintance with the mind of the common soldier, haspondered on the philosophy of fighting. "The Man he Killed, " written in1902, expresses the wonder of the rifleman who is called upon to shoothis brother-in-arms, although

 "Had he and I but met, By some old ancient inn, We should have set us down to wet Right many a nipperkin. "

In this connection the _Poems of War and Patriotism_, which form animportant part of the volume of 1918, should be carefully examined bythose who meditate on the tremendous problems of the moment. 

A poet so profoundly absorbed in the study of life could not fail tospeculate on the probabilities of immortality. Here Mr. Hardy presentsto us his habitual serenity in negation. He sees the beautiful humanbody "lined by tool of time, " and he asks what becomes of it when itsdissolution is complete. He sees no evidence of a conscious state afterdeath, of what would have to be, in the case of aged or exhaustedpersons, a revival of spiritual force, and on the whole he isdisinclined to cling to the faith in a future life. He holds that theimmortality of a dead man resides in the memory of the living, his"finer part shining within ever-faithful hearts of those bereft. " Hepursues this theme in a large number of his most serious and affectinglyrics, most gravely perhaps in "The To-be-Forgotten" and in "TheSuperseded. " This sense of the forlorn condition of the dead, survivingonly in the dwindling memory of the living, inspires what has someclaims to be considered the loveliest of all Mr. Hardy's poems, "FriendsBeyond, " which in its tenderness, its humour, and its pathos contains ina few pages every characteristic of his genius. 

His speculation perceives the dead as a crowd of slowly vanishingphantoms, clustering in their ineffectual longing round the footsteps ofthose through whom alone they continue to exist. This conception hasinspired Mr. Hardy with several wonderful visions, among which thespectacle of "The Souls of the Slain" in the Boer War, alighting, likevast flights of moths, over Portland Bill at night, is the mostremarkable. It has the sublimity and much of the character of someapocalyptic design by Blake. The volume of 1902 contains a whole groupof phantasmal pieces of this kind, where there is frequent mention ofspectres, who address the poet in the accents of nature, as in theunrhymed ode called "The Mother Mourns. " The obsession of old age, withits physical decay ("I look into my glass"), the inevitable divisionwhich leads to that isolation which the poet regards as the greatest ofadversities ("The Impercipient"), the tragedies of moral indecision, thecontrast between the tangible earth and the bodyless ghosts, and endlessrepetition of the cry, "Why find we us here?" and of the question "Hassome Vast Imbecility framed us in jest, and left us now tohazardry?"--all start from the overwhelming love of physical life andacquaintance with its possibilities, which Mr. Hardy possesses to aninordinate degree. 

It would be ridiculous at the close of an essay to attempt anydiscussion of the huge dramatic panorama which many believe to be Mr. Hardy's most weighty contribution to English literature. The spacioustheatre of _The Dynasts_ with its comprehensive and yet conciserealisations of vast passages of human history, is a work which callsfor a commentary as lengthy as itself, and yet needs no commentary atall. No work of the imagination is more its own interpreter than thissublime historic peep-show, this rolling vision of the Napoleonicchronicle drawn on the broadest lines, and yet in detail made up ofintensely concentrated and vivid glimpses of reality. But the subject ofmy present study, the lyrical poetry of Mr. Hardy, is not largelyillustrated in _The Dynasts_, except by the choral interludes of thephantom intelligences, which have great lyrical value, and by three orfour admirable songs. 

When we resume the effect which the poetry of Mr. Hardy makes upon thecareful reader, we note, as I have indicated already, a sense of unityof direction throughout. Mr. Hardy has expressed himself in a thousandways, but has never altered his vision. From 1867 to 1917, through halfa century of imaginative creation, he has not modified the largeoutlines of his art in the smallest degree. To early readers of hispoems, before the full meaning of them became evident, his voice soundedinharmonious, because it did not fit in with the exquisite melodies ofthe later Victorian age. But Mr. Hardy, with characteristic pertinacity, did not attempt to alter his utterance in the least, and now we can allperceive, if we take the trouble to do so, that what seemed harsh in hispoetry was his peculiar and personal mode of interpreting his thoughtsto the world. 

As in his novels so in his poems, Mr. Hardy has chosen to remain local, to be the interpreter for present and future times of one rich andneglected province of the British realm. From his standpoint there hecontemplates the wide aspect of life, but it seems huge and misty tohim, and he broods over the tiny incidents of Wessex idiosyncracy. Hisirony is audacious and even sardonic, and few poets have been lesssolicitous to please their weaker brethren. But no poet of modern timeshas been more careful to avoid the abstract and to touch upon the real. 

SOME SOLDIER POETS

The two years which preceded the outbreak of the war were marked in thiscountry by a revival of public interest in the art of poetry. To thismovement coherence was given and organisation introduced by Mr. EdwardMarsh's now-famous volume entitled _Georgian Poetry_. The effect of thiscollection--for it is hardly correct to call it an anthology--of thebest poems written by the youngest poets since 1911 was two-fold; itacquainted readers with work few had "the leisure or the zeal toinvestigate, " and it brought the writers themselves together in acorporate and selected relation. I do not recollect that this had beendone--except prematurely and partially by _The Germ_ of 1850--since the_England's Parnassus_ and _England's Helicon_ of 1600. In point of factthe only real precursor of Mr. Marsh's venture in our whole literatureis the _Songs and Sonnettes_ of 1557, commonly known as _Tottel'sMiscellany_. Tottel brought together, for the first time, the lyrics ofWyatt, Surrey, Churchyard, Vaux, and Bryan, exactly as Mr. Marsh calledpublic attention to Rupert Brooke, James Elroy Flecker and the rest ofthe Georgians, and he thereby fixed the names of those poets, as Mr. Marsh has fixed those of our youngest fledglings, on the roll of Englishliterature. 

The general tone of the latest poetry, up to the moment of the outbreakof hostilities, was pensive, instinct with natural piety, given somewhatin excess to description of landscape, tender in feeling, essentiallyunaggressive except towards the clergy and towards other versifiers ofan earlier generation. There was absolutely not a trace in any one ofthe young poets of that arrogance and vociferous defiance which markedGerman verse during the same years. These English shepherds might hit attheir elders with their staves, but they had turned their swords intopruning-hooks and had no scabbards to rattle. This is a point whichmight have attracted notice, if we had not all been too drowsy in thelap of our imperial prosperity to observe the signs of the times inBerlin. Why did no one call our attention to the beating of the big drumwhich was going on so briskly on the Teutonic Parnassus? At all events, there was no echo of such a noise in the "chambers of imagery" whichcontained Mr. Gordon Bottomley, or in Mr. W. H. Davies' wandering "songsof joy, " or on "the great hills and solemn chanting seas" where Mr. JohnDrinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And the guns of August 1914found Mr. W. W. Gibson encompassed by "one dim, blue infinity of starrypeace. " There is a sort of German _Georgian Poetry_ in existence; intime to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr. Marsh may throwa side-light on the question, Who prepared the War?

The youngest poets were more completely taken by surprise in August 1914than their elders. The earliest expressions of lyric military feelingcame from veteran voices. It was only proper that the earliest of allshould be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with theprophecy:--

 "Much suffering shall cleanse thee! But thou through the flood Shalt win to Salvation, To Beauty through blood. "

As sensation, however, followed sensation in those first terrific andbewildering weeks, much was happening that called forth with the utmostexuberance the primal emotions of mankind; there was full occasion for

 "exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind. "

By September a full chorus was vocal, led by our national veteran, Mr. Thomas Hardy, with his _Song of the Soldiers_:--

 "What of the faith and fire within us, Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, To hazards whence no tears can win us; What of the faith and fire within us, Men who march away?"

Already, before the close of the autumn of 1914, four or fiveanthologies of war-poems were in the press, and the desire of thegeneral public to be fed with patriotic and emotional verse wasmanifested in unmistakable ways. We had been accustomed for some timepast to the issue of a multitude of little pamphlets of verse, oftenvery carefully written, and these the critics had treated with anindulgence which would have whitened the hair of the stern reviewers offorty years ago. The youthful poets, almost a trade-union in themselves, protected one another by their sedulous generosity. It was very unusualto see anything criticised, much less "slated"; the balms of praise werepoured over every rising head, and immortalities were predicted by thedozen. Yet, as a rule, the sale of these little poetic pamphlets hadbeen small, and they had been read only by those who had a definiteobject in doing so. 

The immediate success of the anthologies, however, proved that the warhad aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse, an attentionanxious to be stirred or soothed by the assiduous company of poets whohad been ripening their talents in a little clan. These had now aneager world ready to listen to them. The result was surprising; we mayeven, without exaggeration, call it unparalleled. There had neverbefore, in the world's history, been an epoch which had tolerated andeven welcomed such a flood of verse as was poured forth over GreatBritain during the first three years of the war. Those years saw thepublication, as I am credibly informed, of more than five hundredvolumes of new and original poetry. It would be the silliestcomplaisance to pretend that all of this, or much of it, or any but avery little of it, has been of permanent value. Much of it was windy andsuperficial, striving in wild vague terms to express great agitationswhich were obscurely felt by the poet. There was too much of the bathosof rhetoric, especially at first; too much addressing the German as"thou fell, bloody brute, " and the like, which broke no bones and tookno trenches. 

When once it was understood that, as a cancelled line in Tennyson's_Maud_ has it, "The long, long canker of peace was over and done, "

the sentiments of indignation and horror made themselves felt withconsiderable vivacity. In this direction, however, none of the youngestpoets approached Sir Owen Seaman in the vigour of their invective. Mostof them seemed to be overpowered by the political situation, and fewcould free themselves from their inured pacific habit of speech. Evenwhen they wrote of Belgium, the Muse seemed rather to weep than tocurse. Looking back to the winter of 1914, it is almost pathetic toobserve how difficult it was for our easy-going British bards to hatethe Germans. There was a good deal of ineffective violence, andconsiderable misuse of technical terms, caused, in many cases, by a toohasty reference to newspaper reports of gallantry under danger, in thecourse of which the more or less obscure verbiage of military sciencewas picturesquely and inaccurately employed. As the slightly censoriousreader looks back upon these poems of the beginning of the War, hecannot resist a certain impatience. In the first place, there is afamily likeness which makes it impossible to distinguish one writer fromanother, and there is a tendency to a smug approval of Britishprejudice, and to a horrible confidence in England's power of "muddlingthrough, " which look rather ghastly in the light of subsequentstruggles. 

There was, however, a new spirit presently apparent, and a muchhealthier one. The bards became soldiers, and in crossing over to Franceand Flanders, each had packed his flute in his kit. They began to sendhome verses in which they translated into music their actual experiencesand their authentic emotions. We found ourselves listening to young menwho had something new, and what was better, something noble to say tous, and we returned to the national spirit which inspired the Chansonsde Geste in the eleventh century. To the spirit--but not in the least tothe form, since it is curious that the war-poetry of 1914-17 was, evenin the most skilful hands, poetry on a small scale. The two greatest ofthe primal species of verse, the Epic and the Ode, were entirelyneglected, except, as will later be observed, in one notable instance byMajor Maurice Baring. As a rule, the poets constrained themselves toobserve the discipline of a rather confined lyrical analysis in forms ofthe simplest character. Although particular examples showed a rarefelicity of touch, and although the sincerity of the reflection in manycases hit upon very happy forms of expression, it is impossible tooverlook the general monotony. There used to be a story that theJapanese Government sent a committee of its best art-critics to studythe relative merits of the modern European painters, and that theyreturned with the bewildered statement that they could make no report, because all European pictures were exactly alike. A student fromPatagonia might conceivably argue that he could discover no differencewhatever between our various poets of the war. 

This would be unjust, but it is perhaps not unfair to suggest that thedetermined resistance to all restraint, which has marked the latestschool, is not really favourable to individuality. There has been a verygeneral, almost a universal tendency to throw off the shackles of poeticform. It has been supposed that by abandoning the normal restraints, orartificialities, of metre and rhyme, a greater directness and fidelitywould be secured. Of course, if an intensified journalistic impressionis all that is desired, "prose cut up into lengths" is the readiestby-way to effect. But if the poets desire--and they all do desire--tospeak to ages yet unborn, they should not forget that all the experienceof history goes to prove discipline not unfavourable to poeticsincerity, while, on the other hand, the absence of all restraint isfatal to it. Inspiration does not willingly attend upon flagging metreand discordant rhyme, and never in the whole choral progress from Pindardown to Swinburne has a great master been found who did not exult in thestubbornness of "dancing words and speaking strings, " or who did notfind his joy in reducing them to harmony. The artist who avoids alldifficulties may be pleased with the rapidity of his effect, but he willhave the vexation of finding his success an ephemeral one. The oldadvice to the poet, in preparing the rich chariot of the Muse, stillholds good:--

 "Let the postillion, Nature, mount, but let The coachman, Art, be set. "

Too many of our recent rebellious bards fancy that the coach will driveitself, if only the post-boy sticks his heels hard into Pegasus. 

It is not, however, the object of this essay to review all the poetrywhich was written about the war, nor even that part of it which owed itsexistence to the strong feeling of non-combatants at home. I propose tofix our attention on what was written by the young soldiers themselvesin their beautiful gallantry, verse which comes to us hallowed by theglorious effort of battle, and in too many poignant cases by theultimate sacrifice of life itself. The poet achieves his highest meed ofcontemporary glory, if

 "some brave young man's untimely fate In words worth, dying for he celebrate, "

and when he is himself a young man striving for the same deathlesshonour on the same field of blood it is difficult to conceive ofcircumstances more poignant than those which surround his effort. Onmany of these poets a death of the highest nobility set the seal ofeternal life. They were simple and passionate, radiant and calm, theyfought for their country, and they have entered into glory. This alonemight be enough to say in their praise, but star differeth from star inbrightness, and from the constellation I propose to select half a dozenof the clearest luminaries. What is said in honest praise of these maybe said, with due modification, of many others who miss merely thepolish of their accomplishment. It is perhaps worth noticing, inpassing, that most of the poets are men of university training, and thatcertain literary strains are common to the rank and file of them. Theinfluence of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti is almostentirely absent. The only one of the great Victorians whom they seem tohave read is Matthew Arnold, but it is impossible to help observing thatthe _Shropshire Lad_ of Mr. A. E. Housman was in the tunic-pocket ofevery one of them. Among the English poets of the past, it is mainly theso-called "metaphysical" writers in the seventeenth century whom theystudied; Donne seems to have been a favourite with them all, and Vaughanand Treherne were not far behind. 

The spontaneous instinct of readers has taken the name of Rupert Brooketo illustrate the poetic spirit of the great war in a superlativedegree. His posthumous volume, brought out in May 1915, a few weeksafter his death, has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, thanthat of all the other poems of the war put together. He has become asort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is to English sentimentwhat Charles Péguy is to France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of hiscountry. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Péguy norBrooke had the opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, asit seemed for the moment, obscurely. Rupert Brooke was a pawn in thedark and dolorous flight from Antwerp. He died in the Ægean, betweenEgypt and Gallipoli, having never seen a Turkish enemy. So Péguy fadedout of sight on the very opening day of the battle of the Marne, yeteach of these young men was immediately perceived to have embodied thegallantry of his country. The extraordinary popularity of Rupert Brookeis due to the excellence of his verse, to the tact with which it waspresented to the public, but also to a vague perception of hisrepresentative nature. He was the finest specimen of a certain typeproduced at the universities, and then sacrificed to our nationalnecessity. 

It is needless to describe the verses of Rupert Brooke, which haveattained a circulation which any poet might envy. They are comprised intwo slender volumes, that above mentioned, and one of 1911, publishedwhile he was still at Cambridge. He was born in 1887, and when he diedoff Skyros, in circumstances of the most romantic pathos, he had notcompleted his twenty-eighth year. He was, unlike the majority of hiscontemporaries, a meticulous and reserved writer, little inclined to bepleased with his work, and cautious to avoid the snare of improvisation. Hence, though he lived to be older than did Keats or Fergusson, he lefta very slender garland of verse behind him, in which there is scarcely apetal which is not of some permanent value. For instance, in the volumeof 1911 we found not a few pieces which then seemed crude in taste andpetulant in temper; but even these now illustrate a most interestingcharacter of which time has rounded the angles, and we would not haveotherwise what illustrates so luminously--and so divertingly--thatprecious object, the mind of Rupert Brooke. 

Yet there is a danger that this mind and character may bemisinterpreted, even by those who contemplate the poet's memory withidolatry. There is some evidence of a Rupert Brooke legend in theprocess of formation, which deserves to be guarded against not lessjealously than the R. L. Stevenson legend of a few years ago. We knowthat for some people gold and lilies are not properly honoured untilthey are gilded and painted. Rupert Brooke was far from being either aplaster saint or a vivid public witness. He was neither a trumpet nor atorch. He lives in the memory of those who knew him as a smiling andattentive spectator, eager to watch every flourish of the pageantry oflife. Existence was a wonderful harmony to Rupert Brooke, who wasdetermined to lose no tone of it by making too much noise himself. Incompany he was not a great talker, but loved to listen, with sparklingdeference, to people less gifted than himself if only they hadexperience to impart. He lived in a fascinated state, bewitched withwonder and appreciation. His very fine appearance, which seemed to glowwith dormant vitality, his beautiful manners, the quickness of hisintelligence, his humour, were combined under the spell of a curiousmagnetism, difficult to analyse. When he entered a room, he seemed tobring sunshine with him, although he was usually rather silent, andpointedly immobile. I do not think it would be easy to recollect anyutterance of his which was very remarkable, but all he said and didadded to the harmonious, ardent, and simple effect. 

There is very little of the poetry of Rupert Brooke which can bedefinitely identified with the war. The last six months of his life, spent in conditions for which nothing in his previous existence inCambridge or Berlin, in Grantchester or Tahiti, had in the leastprepared him, were devoted--for we must not say wasted--to breaking upthe _cliché_ of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there remainto us the five immortal Sonnets, which form the crown of Rupert Brooke'sverse, and his principal legacy to English literature. Our record wouldbe imperfect without the citation of one, perhaps the least hackneyed ofthese:--

 "Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality. 

 "Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth, Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain. Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage. "

If the fortune of his country had not disturbed his plans, it is morethan probable that Rupert Brooke would have become an enlightened andenthusiastic professor. Of the poet who detains us next it may be saidthat there was hardly any walk of life, except precisely this, which hecould not have adorned. Julian Grenfell, who was a poet almost byaccident, resembled the most enlightened of the young Italian noblemenof the Renaissance, who gave themselves with violence to a surfeit ofknowledge and a riot of action. He was a humanist of the type of thefifteenth century, soldier, scholar, and man of pleasure, such as weread of in Vespasiano's famous book. Everything he did was done in theservice of St. Epicurus, it was done to _darsi buon tempo_, as theTuscans used to say. But this was only the superficial direction takenby his energy; if he was imperious in his pleasures, he was earnest inhis pursuit of learning; there was a singular harmony in the exercise ofthe physical, intellectual, and emotional faculties at his disposal. Julian Grenfell was a master of the body and of the mind, an unrivalledboxer, a pertinacious hunter, skilled in swimming and polo, a splendidshot, a swift runner, and an unwearying student. That an athlete soaccomplished should have had time left for intellectual endowments isamazing, but his natural pugnacity led him to fight lexicons as hefought the wild boar, and with as complete success. 

The record of the brief and shining life of Julian Grenfell has beentold in an anonymous record of family life which is destined toreverberate far beyond the discreet circle of friends to which it isprovisionally addressed. It is a document of extraordinary candour, tact, and fidelity, and it is difficult to say whether humour or courageis the quality which illuminates it most. It will be referred to byfuture historians of our race as the most vivid record which has beenpreserved of the red-blooded activity of a spirited patrician family atthe opening of the twentieth century. It is partly through his place atthe centre of this record that, as one of the most gifted of his elderfriends has said, the name of Julian Grenfell will be linked "with allthat is swift and chivalrous, lovely and courageous, " but it is alsothrough his rare and careless verses. 

Julian Grenfell, who was born to excel with an enviable ease, was not apoet by determination. In a family where everything has been preserved, no verses of his that are not the merest boyish exercises are known toexist previous to the war. He was born in 1888, and he became aprofessional soldier in India in 1911. He was on his way home from SouthAfrica when hostilities broke out, and he was already fighting inFlanders in October 1914. After a very brilliant campaign, in the courseof which he won the D. S. O. And was twice mentioned in despatches, he wasshot in the head near Ypres and died of his wounds at Boulogne on May26th, 1915. During these months in France, by the testimony of all whosaw him and of all to whom he wrote, his character received its finaltouch of ripeness. Among his other attainments he abruptly discoveredthe gift of noble gnomic verse. On receiving news of the death of RupertBrooke, and a month before his own death, Julian Grenfell wrote theverses called "Into Battle, " which contain the unforgettable stanzas:--

 "The fighting man shall from the sun Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth; Speed with the light-foot winds to run, And with the trees to newer birth. .. . 

 "The woodland trees that stand together, They stand to him each one a friend; They gently speak in the windy weather; They guide to valley and ridge's end. 

 "The kestrel hovering by day, And the little owls that call by night, Bid him be swift and keen as they, As keen of ear, as swift of sight. 

 "The blackbird sings to him 'Brother, brother, If this be the last song you shall sing, Sing well, for you may not sing another, Brother, sing. '"

The whole of this poem is memorable, down to its final propheticquatrain:--

 "The thundering line of battle stands, And in the air Death moans and sings; But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, And Night shall fold him in soft wings. "

"Could any other man in the British Army have knocked out a heavy-weightchampion one week and written that poem the next?" a brother officerasked. "Into Battle" remains, and will probably continue to remain, theclearest lyrical expression of the fighting spirit of England in whichthe war has found words. It is a poem for soldiers, and it gives nobleform to their most splendid aspirations. Julian Grenfell wrote, as heboxed and rode, as he fought in the mud of Flanders, as the idealsporting Englishman of our old, heroic type. 

The ancient mystery of verse is so deeply based on tradition that it isnot surprising that all the strange contrivances of twentieth-centurywarfare have been found too crabbed for our poets to use. When greatMarlborough, as Addison puts it, "examin'd all the dreadful scenes ofwar" at Blenheim, he was really in closer touch with Marathon than withthe tanks and gas of Ypres. But there is one military implement sobeautiful in itself, and so magical in the nature of its service, thatit is bound to conquer a place in poetry. The air-machine, to quote _TheCampaign_ once more, "rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm. " Butthe poets are still shy of it. In French it has, as yet, inspired butone good poem, the "Plus haut toujours!" of Jean Allard-Méeus, a hymn ofreal aerial majesty. In English Major Maurice Baring's ode "In Memoriam:A. H. " is equally unique, and, in its complete diversity fromAllard-Méeus' rhapsody, suggests that the aeroplane has a wide fieldbefore it in the realms of imaginative writing. Major Baring's subjectis the death of Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas, who was killed on November3rd, 1916. This distinguished young statesman and soldier had just beenpromoted, after a career of prolonged gallantry in the air, and wouldhave flown no more, if he had returned in safety to our front on thatfatal day. 

Major Baring has long been known as an excellent composer of sonnets andother short pieces. But "In Memoriam: A. H. " lifts him to a positionamong our living poets to which he had hardly a pretension. In a longirregular threnody or funeral ode, the great technical difficulty is tosupport lyrical emotion throughout. No form of verse is more liable tolapses of dignity, to dull and flagging passages. Even Dryden in _AnneKilligrew_, even Coleridge in the _Departing Year_, have not been ableto avoid those languors. Many poets attempt to escape them by a use ofswollen and pompous language. I will not say that Major Baring has beenuniversally successful, where the success of the great masters is onlyrelative, but he has produced a poem of great beauty and originality, which interprets an emotion and illustrates an incident the poignancy ofwhich could scarcely be exaggerated. I have no hesitation in assertingthat "A. H. " is one of the few durable contributions to the literature ofthe present war. 

It is difficult to quote effectively from a poem which is constructedwith great care on a complicated plan, but a fragment of Major Baring'selegy may lead readers to the original:--

 "God, Who had made you valiant, strong and swift And maimed you with a bullet long ago, And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift, And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow, Gave back your youth to you, And packed in moments rare and few Achievements manifold And happiness untold, And bade you spring to Death as to a bride, In manhood's ripeness, power and pride, And on your sandals the strong wings of youth. "

There is no rhetoric here, no empty piling up of fine words; it is aclosely followed study in poetical biography. 

The water has its marvels like the air, but they also have hardly yetsecured the attention of the poets. In _A Naval Motley_, by Lieut. N. M. F. Corbett, published in June 1916, we encounter the submarine:--

 "Not yours to know delight In the keen hard-fought fight, The shock of battle and the battle's thunder; But suddenly to feel Deep, deep beneath the keel The vital blow that rives the ship asunder!"

A section of the new war-poetry which is particularly pathetic is thatwhich is inspired by the nostalgia of home, by the longing in the midstof the guns and the dust and the lice for the silent woodlands and coolwaters of England. When this is combined with the sense of extremeyouth, and of a certain brave and beautiful innocence, the poignancy ofit is almost more than can be borne. The judgment is hampered, and onedoubts whether one's critical feeling can be trusted. This particularspecies of emotion is awakened by no volume more than by the slender_Worple Flit_ of E. Wyndham Tennant, who died on the Somme in September1916. He was only nineteen when he fell, at an age when, on the onehand, more precocious verse than his has been written, and when yet, onthe other, some of the greatest poets had not achieved a mastery ofwords equal to that already possessed by this young Wykehamist. Thevoice is faltering, and there is a want of sureness in the touch; themetrical hammer does not always tap the centre of the nail's head. Butwhat pathos in the sentiment, what tenderness in the devotion to beauty!Tennant had, we may suppose, read Flecker before he wrote "How shall Itell you of the roads that stretch away?"; or was it merely the familylikeness in the generation? But I know not what but his own genius canhave inspired the "Home Thoughts in Laventie, " a poem about a littlegarden left unravished among the rubble of the wrecked village, a poemwhich ends thus:--

 "I saw green banks of daffodil, Slim poplars in the breeze, Great tan-brown hares in gusty March A-courting on the leas. And meadows, with their glittering streams--and silver-scurrying dace-- Home, what a perfect place. "

Among these boy-poets, so cruelly and prematurely snatched from thepaternal earth, Tennant suggests to us the possibility that a talent ofvery high order was quenched by death, because in few of them do we findso much evidence of that "perception and awe of Beauty" which Plotinusheld to be the upward path to God. 

In June 1917 there was published a slender volume which is in severalways the most puzzling and the most interesting of all that lie upon mytable to-day. This is the _Ardours and Endurances_ of Lieut. RobertNichols. I knew nothing of the author save what I learned from hiswritings, that he is very young, that he went out from Oxford early inthe war, that he was fighting in Flanders before the end of 1914, thathe was wounded, perhaps at Loos, in 1915, and that he was long inhospital. I felt the hope, which later information has confirmed, thathe was still alive and on the road to recovery. Before _Ardours andEndurances_ reached me, I had met with _Invocation_, a smaller volumepublished by Lieut. Nichols in December 1915. There has rarely been amore radical change in the character of an artist than is displayed by acomparison of these two collections. _Invocation_, in which the wartakes a small and unconvincing place, is creditable, though ratheruncertain, in workmanship, and displays a tendency towards experiment inrich fancy and vague ornament. In _Ardours and Endurances_ the sameaccents are scarcely to be detected; the pleasant boy has grown into awarworn man; while the mastery over the material of poetic art hasbecome so remarkable as to make the epithet "promising" otiose. There isno "promise" here; there is high performance. 

Alone among the poets before me, Lieut. Nichols has set down a reasonedsequence of war impressions. The opening Third of his book, and by farits most interesting section, consists of a cycle of pieces in which thepersonal experience of fighting is minutely reported, stage by stage. Wehave "The Summons, " the reluctant but unhesitating answer to the call inEngland, the break-up of plans; then the farewell to home, "the place ofcomfort. " "The Approach, " in three successive lyrics, describes thearrival at the Front. "Battle, " in eleven sections, reproduces themental and physical phenomena of the attack. "The Dead, " in fourinstalments, tells the tale of grief. "The Aftermath, " withextraordinary skill, records in eight stages the gradual recovery ofnerve-power after the shattering emotions of the right. The firstsection of "Battle, " as being shorter than the rest, may be quoted infull as an example of Lieut. Nichols's method:--

 "It is mid-day: the deep trench glares-- A buzz and blaze of flies-- The hot wind puffs the giddy airs, The great sun rakes the skies, "No sound in all the stagnant trench Where forty standing men Endure the sweat and grit and stench, Like cattle in a pen. 

 "Sometimes a sniper's bullet whirs Or twangs the whining wire; Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs As in hell's forging fire. 

 "From out a high cool cloud descends An aeroplane's far moan; The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends, The black speck travels on. 

 "And sweating, dizzied, isolate In the hot trench beneath, We bide the next shrewd move of fate Be it of life or death. "

This is painfully vivid, but it is far exceeded in poignancy by whatfollows. Indeed it would be difficult to find in all literature, fromthe wail of David over Jonathan downward, such an expression of thehopeless longing for an irrecoverable presence as informs the brokenmelodies, the stanzas which are like sobs, of the fifth section of_Ardours and Endurances_:--

 "In a far field, away from England, lies A Boy I friended with a care like love; All day the wide earth aches, the cold wind cries, The melancholy clouds drive on above. 

 "There, separate from him by a little span, Two eagle cousins, generous, reckless, free, Two Grenfells, lie, and my Boy is made man, One with these elder knights of chivalry. "

It is difficult to qualify, it seems almost indelicate to intrude upon, such passionate grief. These poems form a revelation of the agony of aspirit of superabundant refinement and native sensuousness suddenlystunned, and as it were momentarily petrified, by horrible spiritualanguish. If the strain were not relieved by the final numbers of"Aftermath, " where the pain of the soul is abated, and where the poet, scarred and shattered, but "free at last, " snaps the chain of despair, these poems would be positively intolerable. 

In the closeness of his analysis and in the accurate heaping up of exactand pregnant observations, Lieut. Nichols comes closer than any other ofthese English poets to the best of the French paladins, of whom I wrotein _Three French Moralists_. One peculiarity which he shares with themis his seriousness: there is no trace in him of the English cheerfulnessand levity. Most of our war-writers are incorrigible Mark Tapleys. ButLieut. Nichols, even when he uses colloquial phrases--and he introducesthem with great effect--never smiles. He is most unlike the French, onthe other hand, in his general attitude towards the war. He has nomilitary enthusiasm, no aspiration after _gloire_. Indeed, the mostcurious feature of his poetry is that its range is concentrated on thefew yards about the trench in which he stands. He seems to have nonational view of the purpose of the war, no enthusiasm for the cause, noanger against the enemy. There is but a single mention of the Germansfrom beginning to end; the poet does not seem to know of theirexistence. His experiences, his agonies, his despair, are what a purelynatural phenomenon, such as the eruption of a volcano or the chaos of anearthquake, might cause. We might read his poems over and over againwithout forming the slightest idea of what all the distress was about, or who was guilty, or what was being defended. This is a mark of greatartistic sincerity; but it also points to a certain moral narrowness. Lieut. Robert Nichols' "endurances" are magnificently described, but weare left in the dark regarding his "ardours. " We are sure of one thing, however, that none of us may guess what such a talent, in one still soyoung, may have in store for us; and we may hope for broader viewsexpressed in no less burning accents. 

There could hardly be a more vivid contrast than exists between themelancholy passion of Lieut. Nichols and the fantastic high spirits ofCaptain Robert Graves. He again is evidently a very young man, who wasbut yester-year a jolly boy at the Charterhouse. He has always meant tobe a poet; he is not one of those who have been driven into verse by thestrenuous emotion of the war. In some diverting prefatory lines to _Overthe Brazier_ he gives us a picture of the nursery-scene when a brightgreen-covered book bewitched him by its "metre twisting like a chain ofdaisies, with great big splendid words. " He has still a wholesome hungerfor splendid words; he has kept more deliberately than most of hiscompeers a poetical vocation steadily before him. He has his moments ofdejection when the first battle faces him:--

 "Here's an end to my art! I must die and I know it, With battle-murder at my heart-- Sad death, for a poet!

 "Oh, my songs never sung, And my plays to darkness blown! I am still so young, so young, And life was my own. "

But this mood soon passes, and is merged in the humoristic and fantasticelation characteristic of this buoyant writer, whose whim it is to meetthe tragedy not mournfully but boisterously. Where by most of thesoldier-bards the subjective manner is a little over-done, it isimpossible not to welcome so objective a writer as Captain Graves, fromwhose observations of the battle of La Bassée I quote an episode:--

THE DEAD FOX HUNTER

 "We found the little captain at the head; His men lay well aligned. We touched his hand, stone-cold, and he was dead, And they, all dead behind, Had never reached their goal, but they died well; They charged in line, and in the same line fell. 

 "The well-known rosy colours of his face Were almost lost in grey. We saw that, dying and in hopeless case, For others' sake that day He'd smothered all rebellious groans: in death His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth. 

 "For those who live uprightly and die true Heaven has no bars or locks, And serves all taste. .. . Or what's for him to do Up there, but hunt the fox? Angelic choirs? No, Justice must provide For one who rode straight and at hunting died. 

 "So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came, Why, it must find one now: If any shirk and doubt they know the game, There's one to teach them how: And the whole host of Seraphim complete Must jog in scarlet to his opening Meet. "

I have a notion that this is a gallant poem which Englishmen will notallow to be forgotten. The great quality of Captain Graves' verse atpresent is its elated vivacity, which neither fire, nor pain, nor griefcan long subdue. Acutely sensitive to all these depressing elements, hisanimal spirits lift him like an aeroplane, and he is above us in amoment, soaring through clouds of nonsense under a sky of unruffledgaiety. In our old literature, of which he is plainly a student, he hasfound a neglected author who is wholly to his taste. This is Skelton, Henry VIII's Rabelaisian laureate. Captain Graves imitates, with a greatdeal of bravado, those breathless absurdities, _The Tunning of ElinoreRummyng_ and _Colin Clout_. He likes rough metre, bad rhymes and squalidimages: we suspect him of an inclination to be rude to his immediatepredecessors. But his extreme modernness--"Life is a cliché--I wouldfind a gesture of my own"--is, in the case of so lively a songster, anevidence of vitality. He promises a new volume, to be called _Fairiesand Fusiliers_, and it will be looked forward to with anticipation. 

All these poets seem to be drawn into relation to one another. RobertGraves and Siegfried Sassoon are both Fusiliers, and they publish aστιχομυθία "on Nonsense, " just as Cowley and Crashaw did "on Hope" twocenturies and a half ago. Lieut. Sassoon's own volume is later thanthose which we have hitherto examined, and bears a somewhat differentcharacter. The gallantry of 1915 and the optimism of 1916 have passedaway, and in Lieut. Sassoon's poems their place is taken by a sense ofintolerable weariness and impatience: "How long, O Lord, how long?" Thename-piece of the volume, and perhaps its first in execution, is amonologue by an ignorant and shrewd old huntsman, who looks back overhis life with philosophy and regret. Like Captain Graves, he is hauntedwith the idea that there must be fox-hounds in Heaven. All Lieut. Sassoon's poems about horses and hunting and country life generallybetray his tastes and habits. This particular poem hardly touches on thewar, but those which follow are absorbed by the ugliness, lassitude, andhorror of fighting. Lieut. Sassoon's verse has not yet secured thequality of perfection; he is not sufficiently alive to the importance ofalways hitting upon the best and only word. He is essentially asatirist, and sometimes a very bold one, as in "The Hero, " where thedeath of a soldier is announced home in "gallant lies, " so that hismother brags to her neighbours of the courage of her dead son. At theclose of all this pious make-believe, the Colonel

 "thought how 'Jack, ' cold-footed, useless swine, Had panicked down the trench that night the mine Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried To get sent home; and how, at last, he died, Blown to small bits";

or, again, as in "Blighters, " where the sentimentality of London iscontrasted with the reality in Flanders:

 "The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din, 'We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!

 "I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls, Lurching to rag-time tunes, or 'Home, sweet Home!'-- And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume. "

It is this note of bitter anger, miles away from the serenity of RupertBrooke, the lion-heart of Julian Grenfell, the mournful passion ofRobert Nichols, which differentiates Lieut. Sassoon from his fellows. They accept the war, with gallantry or with resignation; he detests itwith wrathful impatience. He has much to learn as an artist, for hisdiction is often hard, and he does not always remember that Horace, "when he writ on vulgar subjects, yet writ not vulgarly. " But he hasforce, sincerity, and a line of his own in thought and fancy. Aconsiderable section of his poetry is occupied with studies of men hehas observed at the Front, a subaltern, a private of the Lancashires, conscripts, the dross of a battle-field, the one-legged man ("Thank God, they had to amputate!"), the sniper who goes crazy--savage, disconcerting silhouettes drawn roughly against a lurid background. 

The bitterness of Lieut. Sassoon is not cynical, it is the rage ofdisenchantment, the violence of a young man eager to pursue other aims, who, finding the age out of joint, resents being called upon to help tomend it. His temper is not altogether to be applauded, for suchsentiments must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they canhardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty and courage. Lieut. Sassoon, who, as we learn, has twice been severely wounded andhas been in the very furnace of the fighting, has reflected, moreperhaps than his fellow-singers, about the causes and conditions of thewar. He may not always have thought correctly, nor have recorded hisimpressions with proper circumspection, but his honesty must berespectfully acknowledged. 

I have now called attention to those soldier-writers of verse who, in myjudgment, expressed themselves with most originality during the war. There is a temptation to continue the inquiry, and to expatiate onothers of only less merit and promise. Much could be said of CharlesHamilton Sorley, who gave evidence of precocious literary talent, thoughless, I think, in verse, since the unmistakable singing faculty isabsent in _Marlborough_ (Cambridge University Press, 1916), than inprose, a form in which he already excelled. Sorley must have shownmilitary gifts as well as a fine courage, for when he was killed inaction in October 1915, although he was but twenty years of age, he hadbeen promoted captain. In the universal sorrow, few figures awaken moreregret, than his. Something, too, had I space, should be said about theminstrels who have been less concerned with the delicacies ofworkmanship than with stirring the pulses of their auditors. In thiskind of lyric "A Leaping Wind from England" will long keep fresh thename of W. N. Hodgson, who was killed in the battle of the Somme. Hisverses were collected in November 1916. The strange rough drum-taps ofMr. Henry Lawson, published in Sydney at the close of 1915, and those ofMr. Lawrence Rentoul, testify to Australian enthusiasm. Most of thesoldier-poets were quite youthful; an exception was R. E. Vernède, whose_War Poems_ (W. Heinemann, 1917) show the vigour of moral experience. Hewas killed in the attack on Harrincourt, in April 1917, having nearlyclosed his forty-second year. To pursue the list would only be to makemy omissions more invidious. 

There can be no healthy criticism where the principle of selection isneglected, and I regret that patriotism or indulgence has tempted somany of those who have spoken of the war-poets of the day to plasterthem with indiscriminate praise. I have here mentioned a few, in whosehonour even a little excess of laudation may not be out of place. Butthese are the exceptions, in a mass of standardised poetry made topattern, loosely versified, respectable in sentiment, uniformlymeditative, and entirely without individual character. The reviewers whoapplaud all these ephemeral efforts with a like acclaim, and who saythat there are hundreds of poets now writing who equal if they do notexcel the great masters of the past, talk nonsense; they talk nonsense, and they know it. They lavish their flatteries in order to widen thecircle of their audience. They are like the prophets of Samaria, whodeclared good unto the King of Israel with one mouth; and we need aMicaiah to clear the scene of all such flatulent Zedekiahs. It is nottrue that the poets of the youngest generation are a myriad Shelleys andBurnses and Bérangers rolled into one. But it is true that they carry onthe great tradition of poetry with enthusiasm, and a few of them withhigh accomplishment. 

1917. 

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY[8]

 "J'ai vu le cheval rose ouvrir ses ailes d'or, Et, flairant le laurier que je tenais encor, Verdoyant à jamais, hier comme aujourd'hui, Se cabrer vers le Jour et ruer vers la Nuit. "

HENRI DE RÉGNIER. 

In venturing this afternoon to address an audience accustomed to listento those whose positive authority is universally recognised, and intaking for my theme a subject not, like theirs, distinct in itsdefinitions or consecrated by tradition and history, I am aware that Iperform what you may, if you choose, call an act of blameworthyaudacity. My subject is chimerical, vague, and founded on conjectureswhich you may well believe yourselves at least as well fitted as I am topropound. Nevertheless, and in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I inviteyou to join with me in some reflections on what is the probable courseof English poetry during, let us say, the next hundred years. If Ihappen to be right, I hope some of the youngest persons present willsay, when I am long turned to dust, what an illuminating prophet I was. If I happen to be wrong, why, no one will remember anything at all aboutthe matter. In any case we may possibly be rewarded this afternoon bysome agreeable hopes and by the contemplation of some pleasantanalogies. 

Our title takes for granted that English poetry will continue, withwhatever fluctuations, to be a living and abiding thing. This I mustsuppose that you all accede to, and that you do not look upon poetry asan art which is finished, or the harvest of classic verse as one whichis fully reaped and garnered. That has been believed at one time andanother, in various parts of the globe. I will mention one instance inthe history of our own time: a quarter of a century ago, the practice ofwriting verse was deliberately abandoned in the literatures of the threeScandinavian countries, but particularly in that of Norway, where nopoetry, in our sense, was written from about 1873 to 1885. It almostdied out here in England in the middle of the fifteenth century; it ranvery low in France at the end of the Middle Ages. But all theseinstances, whether ancient or modern, of the attempt to prove prose asufficing medium for all expression of human thought have hithertofailed, and it is now almost certain that they will more and morelanguidly be revived, and with less and less conviction. 

It was at one of the deadliest moments in the life of the art in Englandthat George Gascoigne remarked, in his _Epistle to the Reverend Divine_(1574) that "It seemeth unto me that in all ages Poetry hath been notonly permitted, but also it hath been thought a right good thing. "Poetry has occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in all ages, andyou will remember that Plato, who excluded the poets from hisphilosophical Utopia, was nevertheless an exquisite writer of lyricalverse himself. So, to come down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetryout of the living language of his country, had been one of the mostskilful of prosodical proficients. Such instances may allay our alarm. There cannot be any lasting force in arguments which remind us of thepious confessions of a redeemed burglar. It needs more than the zeal ofa turncoat to drive Apollo out of Parnassus. 

There will, therefore, we may be sure, continue to be English poetrywritten and printed. Can we form any idea of the probable character ofit? There exists, in private hands, a picture by that ingeniouswater-colour painter of the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin. Itis very fantastic, and means what you like, but it represents Pegasus, the horse of the Muses, careering in air on the vast white arc of hiswings, against a sky so dark that it must symbolise the obscurediscourse of those who write in prose. You are left quite doubtfulwhether he will strike the rocky terrace in the foreground with hisslender, silver hooves, or will swoop down into the valley below, orwill soar to heaven and out of sight. You are left by the painter in apleasant uncertainty, but Hippocrene may break out anywhere, and of thevivacious courser himself all that we can be sure of is that we arecertain to see him alighting before us when we least expect him. 

We may put our trust in the persistence of Pegasus through hisapparently aimless gyrations, and in the elasticity of the poeticalspirit, and yet acknowledge that there are difficulties in the way ofbelieving that verse will continue to be written in the English languagefor a quite indefinite period. Perhaps we may as well face one or two ofthese difficulties at once. The principal danger, then, to the future ofpoetry seems to me to rest in the necessity of freshness of expression. Every school of verse is a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, becauseits leaders have become capable of new forms of attractive expression;its crest is some writer, or several writers, of genius, who combineskill and fire and luck at a moment of extreme opportuneness; and thenthe wave breaks, because later writers cannot support the ecstasy, andmerely repeat formulas which have lost their attractiveness. Shirleywould have been a portent, if he had flourished in 1595 and had writtenthen as he did in 1645. Erasmus Darwin would be one of the miracles ofprosody if _The Loves of the Plants_ could be dated 1689 instead of1789. There must always be this fluctuation, this rise and fall invalue, and what starts each new wave mounting out of the trough of thelast is the instinctive demand for freshness of expression. _CantateDomino_ is the cry of youth, sing a _new_ song unto the Lord. 

But with the superabundant circulation of language year after year, weekafter week, by a myriad careful scribes, the possibilities of freshnessgrow rarer and rarer. The obvious, simple, poignant things seem to haveall been said. It is not merely that the actual poems, like Gray's_Elegy_, and much of _Hamlet_, and some of Burns's songs, have beenmanipulated so often, and put to such pedestrian uses, that they arelike rubbed coins, and begin to lose the very features of Apollo and thescript of the Muses, but that the road seems closed to future bards whowish to speak with simplicity of similar straightforward things. Inseveral of the literatures of modern Europe--those which began late, orstruggled long against great disadvantages--it is still possible toproduce pleasure by poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectlylimpid language. But with us in England, I confess that it seems to mecertain that whatever we retain, we can never any more have patience tolisten to a new shepherd piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generationis likely to be more acutely preoccupied than the last with the desirefor novelty of expression. Accordingly, the sense of originality, whichis so fervently demanded from every new school of writers, will forcethe poets of the future to sweep away all recognised impressions. Theconsequence must be, I think--I confess so far as language is concernedthat I see no escape from this--that the natural uses of English and theobvious forms of our speech will be driven from our national poetry, asthey are even now so generally being driven. 

No doubt, in this condition, the originality of those who do contrive towrite strongly and clearly will be more vigorously evident than ever. The poets will have to gird up their loins and take their sword in theirhands. That wise man of the eighteenth century, to whom we never applywithout some illuminating response, recommends that "Qui saura penser delui-même et former de nobles idées, qu'il prenne, s'il pent, la manièreet le tour élevé des maîtres. " These are words which should inspireevery new aspirant to the laurel. "S'il peut"; you see that Vauvenarguesputs it so, because he does not wish that we should think that suchvictories as these are easy, or that any one else can help us to producethem. They are not easy, and they will be made more and more hard by therubbed-out, conventionalised coinage of our language. 

In this matter I think it probable that the little peoples and theprovinces which cultivate a national speech, will long find a greatfacility in expressing themselves in verse. I observe that it hasrecently been stated that Wales, which has always teemed with vernacularpoets, has never possessed so many as she does at this time. I amdebarred by what Keats called "giant ignorance" from expressing anopinion on the subject, but I presume that in Welsh the resources oflanguage are far from being so seriously exhausted as we have seen thatthey are in our own complicated sphere, where the cultivation of all thehigher forms of poetic diction through five centuries has made simpleexpression extremely difficult. I am therefore ready to believe that inWelsh, as in Gaelic and in Erse, the poets have still wide fields oflyric, epic, and dramatic art untilled. We have seen, in the latter halfof the nineteenth century, Provençal poets capable of producing simpleand thrilling numbers which are out of the reach of their sophisticatedbrethren who employ the worn locutions of the French language. 

In new generations there is likely, we may be sure, to occur lessdescription of plain material objects, because the aspect of these hasalready received every obvious tribute. So also there can hardly fail tobe less precise enumeration of the primitive natural emotions, becausethis also has been done already, and repeated to satiety. It will notany longer satisfy to write

 "The rose is red, the violet blue, And both are sweet, and so are you. "

Reflections of this order were once felt to be exquisite, and they wereso still as lately as when Blake and Wordsworth were young. But it isquite impossible that we should ever go back to them. Future poets willseek to analyse the redness of the rose, and will scout, as a fallaciousobservation, the statement that the violet is blue. All schemes of artbecome mechanical and insipid, and even their _naïvetés_ lose theirsavour. Verse of excellent quality, in this primitive manner, can now bewritten to order by any smart little boy in a Grammar-school. 

We have agreed, however, to believe that poetry, as an art, in one shapeor another, will escape from the bankruptcy of language, and thatPegasus, with whatever strange and unexpected gambollings, will continueto accompany us. But of one thing we may be quite sure, that it willonly be at the cost of much that we at present admire and enjoy that thecontinuity of the art of verse will be preserved. If I could suddenlypresent to you some characteristic passages of the best English poetryof 1963, I doubt extremely whether I should be able to persuade you oftheir merit. I am not sure that you would understand what the poetintended to convey, any more than the Earl of Surrey would haveunderstood the satires of Donne, or Coleridge have enjoyed the odes ofGeorge Meredith. Young minds invariably display their vitality byattacking the accepted forms of expression, and then they look aboutfor novelties, which they cultivate with what seems to their elders tobe extravagance. Before we attempt to form an idea, however shadowy, ofwhat poetry will be in the future, we must disabuse ourselves of thedelusion that it will be a repetition of what is now produced andaccepted. Nor can we hope by any exercise of philosophy to do away withthe embarrassing and painful, but after all perhaps healthful antagonismbetween those who look forward and those who live in the past. Theearnestness expended on new work will always render young men incapableof doing justice to what is a very little older than themselves; and thepiety with which the elderly regard what gave them full satisfaction intheir days of emotional freshness will always make it difficult for themto be just to what seems built on the ruins of what they loved. 

If there is any feature which we can scarcely be wrong in detecting inour vision of the poetry of the future it is an elaboration which mustfollow on the need for novelty of which I have spoken. I expect to findthe modern poet accepting more or less consciously an ever-increasingsymbolic subtlety of expression. If we could read his verses, which arestill unwritten, I feel sure that we should consider them obscure. Thatis to say, we should find that in his anxiety not to repeat what hadbeen said before him, and in his horror of the trite and thesuperficial, he will achieve effect and attach interest _obscuris verainvolvens_--wrapping the truth in darkness. The "darkness" will berelative, as his own contemporaries, being more instructed andsophisticated than we are, will find those things transparent, or atleast translucent, which remain opaque enough to us. And, of course, asepithets and adjectives that seem fresh to us will smell of the inkhornto him, he will have to exert his ingenuity to find parallelexpressions which would startle us by their oddity if we met with themnow. 

A danger, therefore, which the poets of the future will need all theiringenuity to avoid, will be the cultivation of a patent artificiality, aforcing of the note until it ceases to rouse an echo in the human heart. There will be a determination to sweep away all previously recognisedimpressions. Affectation, that is to say the obtaining of an effect byillegitimate means, is an offence against the Muses which they neverfail to avenge by oblivion or by a curtailed and impeded circulation. Wemay instructively examine the history of literature with specialattention to this fault, and we find it in all cases to have been fatal. It was fatal to the poetry of Alexandria, which closed, as you know, inan obscurity to which the title of Lycophrontic darkness has been givenfrom the name of its most extravagant exponent. It was fatal to severalhighly-gifted writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, whoendeavoured to give freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic ornament; Ineed only remind you of the impenetrable cloud or fog, by CyrilTourneur, called _The Transform'd Metamorphosis_, and of the crypticrhymed dramas of Lord Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I thinkdesperately perilous to a beautiful talent of our own age, the amiableStéphane Mallarmé. Nothing, I feel, is more dangerous to the health ofpoetry than the praise given by a group of irresponsible disciples toverse which transfers commonplace thought to an exaggerated, violent, and involved scheme of diction, and I confess that I should regard thefuture of poetry in this country with much more apprehension than I do, if I believed that the purely learned poet, the prosodical pedant, wasdestined to become paramount amongst us. That would, indeed, threatenthe permanence of the art; and it is for this reason that I look with acertain measure of alarm on the excess of verbiage about versificationwhich attends not merely criticism--for that matters little--but theactual production and creation. I am confident, however, that the commonsense of readers will always bring about a reaction in favour of sanityand lucidity. 

One great objection to the introduction of a tortured and affected styleinto verse-writing is the sacrifice which has to be made of that dignityand sweetness, that suave elevation, which marks all successfulmasterpieces. Perhaps as difficult a quality to attain as any which thepoetry of the future will be called upon to study is stateliness, whatthe French call "la vraie hauteur. " This elevation of style, thisdignity, is foreign to democracies, and it is hard to sustain it in therude air of modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw itdegenerate for a century and a half, into pomposity relieved byflatness. It is apt to become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation ofempty fine phrases. If we examine the serious poetry of the end of theseventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century--especiallyin the other countries of Europe, for England was never without some dewon the threshing-floor--if we examine it in France, for instance, between Racine and André Chenier, we are obliged to recognise that itwas very rarely both genuine and appropriate. The Romantic Revival, which we are beginning ungratefully to decry, did at least restore topoetry the sense of a genuine stateliness of expression, which once moregave it the requisite dignity, and made it a vehicle for the vital andthe noble sentiments of humanity. 

Let us now turn, in our conjectural survey, from the form to thesubjects with which the poetry of the future is likely to be engaged. Here we are confronted with the fact that, if we examine the whole ofhistory, we see that the domain of verse has been persistently narrowedby the incursions of a more and more powerful and wide embracing prose. At the dawn of civilisation poetry had it all its own way. Ifinstruction was desired upon any sphere of human knowledge or energy, the bard produced it in a prosodical shape, combining with the dignityof form the aid which the memory borrowed from a pattern or a song. Thusyou conceive of a Hesiod before you think of a Homer, and the earliestpoetry was probably of a purely didactic kind. As time went on, prose, with its exact pedestrian method, took over more and more completely thewhole province of information, but it was not until the nineteenthcentury that the last strongholds of the poetry of instruction werestormed. I will, if you please, bring this home to you by an examplewhich may surprise you. 

The subject which I have taken the liberty of discussing with you thisafternoon has not often occupied the serious attention of critics. Butit was attempted, by no less a person than Wordsworth, more than ahundred years ago. I make no excuse for repeating to you the remarkablepassage in which he expressed his convictions in the famous Preface of1800:--

 "If the labours of men of science, --Wordsworth said, --should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. "

It is plain, then, that, writing in the year 1800, Wordsworth believedthat a kind of modified and sublimated didactic poetry would come intovogue in the course of the nineteenth century. He stood on the thresholdof a new age, and he cast his vatic gaze across it much in the samespirit as we are trying to do to-day. But if any warning were needed toassure us of the vanity of prophesying, it would surely be the error ofone so sublimely gifted and so enriched with the spoils of meditation. The belief of Wordsworth was that the poetry of the future would deal, in some vaguely inspired fashion, with the discoveries of science. Butwhen we look back over the field of 113 years, how much do we find ournational poetry enriched with ore from the mines of mineralogy or botanyor chemistry? It is difficult to see that there has been so much as aneffort made to develop poetry in this or in any similar direction. Perhaps the nearest approach to what Wordsworth conceived as probablewas attempted by Tennyson, particularly in those parts of _In Memoriam_where he dragged in analogies to geological discoveries and thebiological theories of his time. Well, these are just those parts ofTennyson which are now most universally repudiated as lifeless andjejune. 

Wordsworth did not confine himself to predicting a revival of didacticpoetry, the poetry of information, such as, in a very crude form, hadprevailed all over Europe in his own childhood, but he conceived a widesocial activity for writers of verse. He foresaw that the Poet would"bind together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of humansociety, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. " Isuppose that in composing those huge works, so full of scatteredbeauties, but in their entirety so dry and solid, _The Excursion_ and_The Prelude_, he was consciously attempting to inaugurate this schemeof a wide and all-embracing social poetry. Nor do I suppose that effortsof this kind will ever cease to be made. We have seen a gifted writer inwhom the memory is perhaps even more surprisingly developed than theimagination, employ the stores of his experience to enrich a socialpoetry the elements of which, prima facie, should be deeply attractiveto us all. But I do not know that the experiments of Mr. RudyardKipling, brilliant as they are, are calculated to encourage the poets ofthe future to pursue their lyric celebration of machinery and sociologyand the mysteries of natural religion. Already is it not that portion ofhis work which we approach with most languor, in spite of itsoriginality and its outlook upon "the vast empire of human society"? Andlesser poets than he who seek for popularity by such violent means arenot, I think, rewarded by the distinguished loyalty of the best readers. We are startled by their novelty, and we admire them for the moment; butwhen, a few years later, we return to them, we are apt to observe withdistress how

 "their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw. "

If, therefore, I venture upon a prophecy, where all the greaterprophets, my predecessors, have failed, it is to suggest that the energyof future poets will not be largely exercised on themes of this intrepidsocial character, but that as civilisation more and more tightly layshold upon literature, and excludes the purest form of it from oneprovince after another, poetry will, in its own defence, cultivate moreand more what Hazlitt calls "a mere effusion of natural sensibility. "Hazlitt used the phrase in derision, but we may accept it seriously, andnot shrink from adopting it. In most public remarks about current andcoming literature in the abstract, I marvel at the confidence with whichit is taken for granted that the sphere of interest occupied by writersof the imagination is sure to grow wider and wider. It is expected toembrace the world, to take part in a universal scheme of pacification, to immortalise imperial events, to be as public as possible. But surelyit is more and more clearly proved that prose is the suitable medium forsuch grandiose themes as these. Within the last year our minds have beengalvanised into collective sympathy by two great sensations ofcatastrophe, each case wearing the most thrilling form that tragedy cantake in the revolt of nature against the feverish advances of mankind. Isuppose we may consider the destruction of the Titanic and the loss ofCaptain Scott's expedition as two absolutely typical examples of what isthought by journalists to be fitting material for poetry. Yet by commonconsent, these tragic occurrences did not awaken our numerous poets toany really remarkable effort, lyrical or elegiac. No ode or threnodycould equal in vibrating passion Captain Scott's last testament. Theseare matters in which the fullness of a wholly sincere statement in prosedoes not require, does not even admit, the introduction of the symbol. The impact of the sentiments of horror and pity is too sudden andforcible. 

My own view is that, whether to its advantage or not, the poetry of thefuture is likely to be very much occupied with subjects, and with thosealone, which cannot be expressed in the prose of the best-editednewspaper. In fact, if I were to say what it is which I think comingpoets will have more and more to be on their guard against, I shoulddefine it as a too rigid determination never to examine subjects whichare of collective interest to the race at large. I dread lest theintense cultivation of the Ego, in minutest analysis and microscopicalobservation of one's self, should become the sole preoccupation of thefuture poet. I will not tell you that I dread lest this should be one ofhis principal preoccupations, for that would be to give way to a cheerypiece of mid-Victorian hypocrisy which would be unworthy of you and ofme alike. The time is past when intelligent persons ought to warnwriters of the imagination not to cultivate self-analysis, since it isthe only safeguard against the follies of an unbridled romanticism. Butalthough the ivory tower offers a most valuable retreat, and althoughthe poets may be strongly recommended to prolong their _villeggiatura_there, it should not be the year-long habitation of any healthyintelligence. 

I do not question that the closing up of the poetic field, the dependingmore and more completely for artistic effect upon an "effusion ofnatural sensibility, " will isolate the poet from his fellows. He will betempted, in the pursuit of the symbol which illustrates his emotion, todraw farther and farther away from contact with the world. He will wraphis singing-robes not over his limbs only, but over his face, and treathis readers with exemplary disdain. We must be prepared, or oursuccessors must, to find frequently revealed the kind of poet who notmerely sees nothing superior to himself, but nothing except himself. Iam not concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blameworthy;the moralist of the future must attend to that. But I can believe thatthis unyielding and inscrutable attitude may produce some fine artisticeffects. I can believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained bythis sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although I am notprepared to say at what loss of other qualities. It is clear that such awriter will not allow the public to dictate to him the nature or form ofhis lyric message, and he will have to depend for success entirely onthe positive value of his verse. 

The isolation of the poets of the future is likely to lead them to bandthemselves more closely together for mutual protection against thereasonable world. The mystery of verse is like other abstruse andrecondite mysteries--it strikes the ordinary fleshly man as absurd. Theclaim of the poet on human sympathy, if we regard it merely from theworld's standpoint, is gratuitous, vague, and silly. In an entirelysensible and well-conducted social system, what place will there be forthe sorrows of Tasso and Byron, for the rage of Dante, for themisanthropy of Alfred de Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for therowdiness of Marlowe?--the higher the note of the lyre, the moreridiculous is the attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public applaudsthe violence of Diogenes when he tramples on the pride of the poets witha greater pride than theirs. I cannot help thinking that this attitudeof the sacred bard, maundering from the summit of his ivory tower, andhollowed out and made haggard by a kind of sublime moral neuralgia, willhave to be abandoned as a relic of the dead romantic past. So far as itis preserved by the poets of the future it will be peculiar to thosemonasteries of song, those "little clans, " of which I am now about tospeak as likely more and more to prevail. 

In France, where the interest in poetry has, during the last generation, been far more keen and more abundant than anywhere else in the world, wealready see a tendency to the formation of such experimental houses ofsong. There has been hitherto no great success attending any one ofthese bodies, which soon break up, but the effort to form them isperhaps instructive. I took considerable interest in the Abbaye deCreteil, which was a collectivist experiment of this kind. It wasfounded in October 1906, and it was dissolved in consequence of internaldissensions in January 1908. It was an attempt to create, in defianceof the public, in contemptuous disregard of established "literaryopinion, " a sort of prosodical chapel or school of poetry. It was to bethe active centre of energy for a new generation, and there were fivefounders, each of whom was highly ambitious to distinguish himself inverse. At Creteil there was a printing-press in a great park, so thatthe members should be altogether independent of the outside world. Thepoets were to cultivate the garden and keep house with the sale of theproduce. When not at work, there were recitations, discussions, exhibitions of sketches, for they were mixed up with the latest vagariesof the Cubists and Post-impressionists. 

This particular experiment lasted only fifteen months, and I cannotconscientiously say that I think it was in any way a success. No oneamong the abbatical founders of Creteil had, to be quite frank, anymeasure of talent in proportion to his daring. They were involved invague and nebulous ideas, mixed up with what I am afraid I must callcharlatans, the refuse and the wreckage of other arts. Yet I considerthat it is interesting to note that the lay monks of Creteil were in asense correct when they announced that they were performing "a heroicact, " an act symbolical of the way in which poetry would in the futuredisdainfully protect itself against the invasion of common sense, thedreadful impact of the sensual world. I think you will do well, if youwish to pursue the subject of our conjectural discourse, to keep youreye on this tendency to a poetical collectivism. We have not noticedmuch evidence of it yet in England, but it is beginning to stir a gooddeal in France and Italy. After all, the highest poetry is a mysteriousthing, like the practices of the Society of Rosicrucians, of whom it wassaid, "Our House of the Holy Ghost, though a hundred thousand men shouldhave looked upon it, is yet doomed to remain untouched, imperturbable, out of sight, and unrevealed to the whole godless world for ever. " If Iam sure of anything, it is that the Poets of the Future will look uponmassive schemes of universal technical education, and such democraticreforms as those which are now occupying the enthusiasm and energy ofLord Haldane, as peculiarly hateful expositions of the godlessness of agodless world. 

To turn to another branch of our subject, it appears to me possible thatsexual love may cease to be the predominant theme in the lyrical poetryof the future. Erotic sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied theimaginative art of the past. In particular, the poets of the latenineteenth century were interested to excess in love. There was a sortof obsession of sex among them, as though life presented no otherphenomenon worthy of the attention of the artist. All over Europe, withthe various tincture of differing national habit and custom, this wasthe mark of the sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately andcraftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples which will easilyoccur to your memory, rankly, as with the tiresome persistence of aslightly stale perfume, an irritating odour of last night's opopanax orvervain. And this is the one point, almost I think the only point, inwhich the rather absurd and certainly very noisy and hoydenishmanifestoes of the so-called Futurists, led by M. Marinetti and his crewof iconoclasts, are worthy of our serious attention. It is a plank intheir platform to banish eroticism, of the good kind and of the bad, from the poetic practice of the future. I do not, to say the truth, findmuch help for the inquiry we have taken up to-day, in the manifestoes ofthese raucous young gentlemen, who, when they have succeeded in flingingthe ruins of the architecture of Venice into its small stinking canals, will find themselves hard put to it to build anything beautiful in theplace of them. But in their reaction against "the eternal feminine, "they may, I think, very possibly be followed by the serious poets of thefuture. 

Those who have watched rather closely the recent developments of poetryin England have been struck with the fact that it tends more and more inthe direction of the dramatic, not necessarily in the form of what isknown as pure drama, particularly adapted for representation tolistening audiences behind the footlights, but in the increased study oflife in its exhibitions of energy. This may seem to be inconsistent withthe tendency, of which I spoke just now, to withdraw from the worlditself, either into an egotistical isolation or into some cloisteredassociation of more or less independent figures united only in arebellious and contemptuous disdain of public opinion. But theinconsistency may very well be one solely in appearance. It may wellhappen that the avoidance of all companionship with the stereotypedsocial surfaces of life, the ignorance--really, the happy and hieraticignorance--of what "people" in the fussy sense, are supposed to besaying and doing, may actually help the poet to come more fruitfully andpenetratingly to what lies under the surface, to what is essential andpermanent and notable in the solid earth of human character. Hence, Ithink it not improbable that the poetry of the future may become moreand more dramatic, although perhaps by a series of acts of definitecreation, rather than as the result of observation, which will be leftto the ever-increasing adroitness of the brilliant masters of our prose. 

As a result of this obsession in creative drama, I suppose that we mayexpect to find in the poetry of the future a more steady hope formankind than has up to the present time been exhibited. The result of anexcessive observation of the startling facts of life, a work appropriateto the violent energy of realistic prose, has been a generalexaggeration of the darker tints, an insistence on that prominence ofwhat was called the "sub-fusc" colours which art-critics of a centuryago judged essential to sublimity in all art. In Continental literature, and particularly in the very latest Russian drama, this determination tosee blackness and blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene ofexistence as a Valley of the Shadow of Despair, has been painfullyfrequent. In England we had a poet of considerable power, whose tragicfigure crossed me in my youth, in whose work there is not a single gleamof hope or dignity for man;--I mean the unfortunate James Thomson, author of _The City of Dreadful Night_. I cannot but believe that thepoetry of the future, being more deeply instructed, will insist lessemphatically upon human failure and less savagely upon the revolt ofman. I anticipate in the general tone of it an earnestness, a fullnessof tribute to the noble passion of life, an utterance simple and direct. I believe that it will take as its theme the magnificence of thespectacle of Man's successful fight with Nature, not the grotesque andsqualid picturesqueness of his occasional defeat. 

It has been admirably said, in a charming essay, that "History may beabstract, science may be frankly inhuman, even art may be purely formal;but poetry must be full of human life. " This consideration, I think, maymake us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate maintenance of poeticexpression. For humanity will always be with us, whatever changes may beintroduced into our social system, whatever revolutions may occur inreligion, in legality, in public order, or in the stratification ofcomposite life. I confess the only atmosphere in which it is impossiblefor me to conceive of poetry as able to breathe would be one of completeand humdrum uniformity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time, but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme socialisticreformers. As long as there is such variety of individual actionpossible as will give free scope to the energies and passions, thehopes and fears, of mankind, so long I think the element of plasticimagination will be found to insist on expression in the mode of formalart. It is quite possible that, as a result of extended knowledge and ofthe democratic instinct, a certain precipitant hardness of design, suchas was presented in the nineteenth century by Tennyson in the blankverse lyrics in _The Princess_, by Browning in the more brilliant partsof _One Word More_, by Swinburne in his fulminating _Sapphics_, may beas little repeated as the analogous hardness of Dryden in _MacFlecknoe_or the lapidary splendour of Gray in his _Odes_. I should rather look, at least in the immediate future, for a revival of the liquid ease ofChaucer or the soft redundancies of _The Faerie Queene_. The remarkableexperiments of the Symbolists of twenty years ago, and their effect uponthe whole body of French verse, leads me to expect a continuous movementin that direction. 

It is difficult indeed to speak of the probable future of poetry withoutintroducing the word Symbolism, over which there has raged so much windywarfare in the immediate past. I cannot help believing that the immenseimportance of this idea is one of the principal--perhaps the greatestdiscovery with regard to poetry which was made in the last generation. Symbols, among the ancient Greeks, were, if I mistake not, the signs bywhich the initiated worshippers of Ceres or Cybele recognised theirmysterious unison of heart. A symbol is an indication of an object, inopposition to a direct description of the same; it arouses the idea ofit in the awakened soul; rings a bell, for we may almost put it so, which at once rouses the spirit and reminds it of some special event orimminent service. The importance of making this the foremost feature ofpoetry is not new, although it may be said that we have only lately, andonly partially, become aware of its value. But, really, if you willconsider it, all that the Symbolists have been saying is involved inBacon's phrase that "poetry conforms the shows of things to the desiresof the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things. " Therecould never be presented a subject less calculated to be wound up with arhetorical flourish or to close in pompous affirmation than that which Ihave so temerariously brought before you this afternoon. I hope that youwill not think that your time has been wasted while we have touched, lightly and erratically, like birds on boughs, upon some of the probableor possible features of the poetry of the future. Whatever you, or I, orthe wisest of professors, may predict on this theme of the unborn poets, we may be certain that there will

 "hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue"

of ours can "digest. " I began with the rococo image of a Pegasus, poisedin the air, flashing and curvetting, petulantly refusing to alight onany expected spot. Let me return to it in closing, that I may suggestour only sage attitude to be one of always watching for his inevitablearrival, ready to put grateful lips to the waters of Hippocrene as soonas ever they bubble from the blow of his hoof. 

[Footnote 8: Address delivered before the English Association, May 30, 1913. ]

THE AGONY OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

For a considerable time past everybody must have noticed, especially inprivate conversation, a growing tendency to disparagement and evenridicule of all men and things, and aspects of things, which can bedefined as "Victorian. " Faded habits of mind are lightly dismissed astypical of the Victorian Age, and old favourite poets, painters, andmusicians are treated with the same scorn as the glued chairs and glassbowls of wax flowers of sixty years ago. The new generation are hardlywilling to distinguish what was good from what was bad in the time oftheir grandmothers. With increasing audacity they repudiate theVictorian Age as a _sæclum insipiens et infacetum_, and we meeteverywhere with the exact opposite of Montaigne's "Je les approuve tousTun après l'autre, quoi qu'ils disent. " Our younger contemporaries areslipping into the habit of approving of nothing from the moment thatthey are told it is Victorian. 

This may almost be described as an intellectual and moral revolution. Every such revolution means some liberation of the intellect frombondage, and shows itself first of all in a temper of irreverence; theformulas of the old faith are no longer treated with respect andpresently they are even ridiculed. It is useless to close our eyes tothe fact that a spirit of this kind is at work amongst us, underminingthe dignity and authority of objects and opinions and men that seemedhalf a century ago to be more perennial than bronze. Successive oratorsand writers have put the public in possession of arguments, andespecially have sparkled in pleasantries, which have sapped the veryfoundations of the faith of 1850. The infection has attacked us all, andthere is probably no one who is not surprised, if he seriously reflects, to realise that he once implicitly took his ideas of art from Ruskin andof philosophy from Herbert Spencer. These great men are no longerregarded by anybody with the old credulity; their theories and theirdogmas are mined, as were those of the early eighteenth century inFrance by the Encyclopædists, by a select class of destructive critics, in whose wake the whole public irregularly follows. The ordinaryunthinking man accepts the change with exhilaration, since in thiscountry the majority have always enjoyed seeing noses knocked offstatues. But if we are to rejoice in liberation from the bondage of theVictorian Age we ought to know what those bonds were. 

The phenomena of the decadence of an age are never similar to those ofits rise. This is a fact which is commonly overlooked by the opponentsof a particular section of social and intellectual history. In theinitial stages of a "period" we look for audacity, fire, freshness, passion. We look for men of strong character who will hew a channelalong which the torrent of new ideals and subversive sentiments canrush. But this violence cannot be expected to last, and it would lead toanarchy if it did. Slowly the impetus of the stream diminishes, theriver widens, and its waters reach a point where there seems to be nofurther movement in their expanse. No age contains in itself theelements of endless progress; it starts in fury, and little by littlethe force of it declines. Its decline is patent--but not until longafterwards--in a deadening of effort, in a hardening of style. Drydenleads on to Pope, Pope points down to Erasmus Darwin, after whom theworld can but reject the whole classical system. The hungry sheep of anew generation look up and are not fed, and this is the vision whichseems to face us in the last adventures of the schools of yesterday. 

But what is, or was, the Victorian Age? The world speaks glibly of it asthough it were a province of history no less exactly defined than thecareer of a human being from birth to death; but in practice no oneseems in a hurry to mark out its frontiers. Indeed, to do so is anintrepid act. If the attempt is to be made at all, then 1840, the yearof Queen Victoria's marriage with Prince Albert, may be suggested as thestarting-point, and 1890 (between the death-dates of Browning, Newman, and Tennyson) as the year in which the Victorian Age is seen sinkinginto the sands. Nothing could be vaguer, or more open to contention indetail, than this delineation, but at all events it gives ourdeliberations a frame. It excludes _Pickwick_, which is the typicalpicture of English life under William IV. , and _Sartor Resartus_, whichwas the tossing of the bound giant in his sleep; but it includes thetwo-volume Tennyson, "chiefly lyrical, " the stir of the Corn Lawagitation, the Tractarian Crisis of 1841, and the _History of the FrenchRevolution and Past and Present_, when the giant opened his eyes andfought with his chains. Darwin was slowly putting together the notes hehad made on the Beagle, and Hugh Miller was disturbing convention by hisexplorations of the Old Red Sandstone. Most of all, the discussion ofpermanent and transient elements in Christianity was taking a foremostplace in all strata of society, not merely in the form of the contestaround _Tract 90_, but in the divergent directions of Colenso, theSimeon Evangelicals, and Maurice. 

The Victorian Age began in rancour and turmoil. This is an element whichwe must not overlook, although it was in a measure superficial. A seriesof storms, rattling and recurrent tempests of thunder and lightning, swept over public opinion, which had been so calm under George IV. Andso dull under William IV. Nothing could exceed the discord ofvituperation, the Hebraism of Carlyle denouncing the Vaticanism ofWiseman, "Free Kirk and other rubbish" pitted against "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic spectralities. " This theological tension marksthe first twenty years and then slowly dies down, after the passionexpended over _Essays and Reviews_. It was in 1840 that we findMacaulay, anxious to start a scheme of Whig reform and to cut arespectable figure as Secretary of State for War, unable to get tobusiness because of the stumbling-block of religious controversy. Everything in heaven and earth was turned into "a theological treatise, "and all that people cared about was "the nature of the sacraments, theoperation of holy orders, the visibility of the Church and baptismalregeneration. " The sitting member goes down to Edinburgh to talk to hisconstituents about Corn Laws and Sugar Duties and the Eastern Question;he is met by "a din" of such objections as "Yes, Mr. Macaulay, that isall very well for a statesman, but what becomes of the headship of ourLord Jesus Christ?"

If the Victorian Age opened in a tempest of theology, it was onlynatural that it should cultivate a withering disdain for those who hadattempted to reform society on a non-theological basis. In sharpcontradistinction to the indulgence of the Georgian period forphilosophic speculation, England's interest in which not even her longcontinental wars had been able to quench, we find with the accession ofVictoria the credit of the French thinkers almost abruptly falling. Voltaire, never very popular in England, becomes "as mischievous amonkey as any of them"; the enthusiasm for Rousseau, which had reachedextravagant proportions, completely disappears, and he is merely theslanderous sceptic, who, after soaking other people's waistcoats withhis tears, sent his own babies to the Foundling Hospital. The influenceof the French eighteenth-century literature on the mind of England wasfirst combated and then baldly denied. The premier journalist of the agedeclared, with the satisfaction of a turkey-cock strutting round hisyard, that no trace of the lowest level of what could be calledpopularity remained in England to the writers of France, and he felthimself "entitled to treat as an imbecile conceit the pretence" that aFrench school of thought survived in Great Britain. Such was thePodsnappery of the hour in its vigilance against moral and religioustaint. 

Notwithstanding, or perhaps we ought to say inevitably conducted bythese elements of passion and disdain, the infant Victorian Age passedrapidly into the great political whirlpool of 1846, with its violentconcentration of enthusiasm on the social questions which affected thewelfare of the masses, with, in short, its tremendous upheaval of apractical radicalism. From that time forth its development bafflesanalysis. Whatever its present enemies may allege to its discredit, theycannot pretend that it was languid or monotonous. No Age hitherto livedout upon the world's surface has been so multiform or so busy; nonedefies the art of the historian to such a bewildering degree. Its latestcritic does not exaggerate when he says that our fathers and ourgrandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity ofinformation concerning it "that the industry of a Ranke would besubmerged by it and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. "This is manifestly true, and it is evident that an encyclopædia would berequired to discuss all the divisions of so tremendous a subject. If welook over too wide a horizon we lose our bearings altogether. We get ahopelessly confused notion of the course of progress; we seeexperiments, criticisms, failures, but who is to assure us what was thetendency of evolution?

Mr. Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" has arrived at the verymoment when all readers are prepared to discuss the age he deals with, and when public opinion is aware of the impatience which has been"rising in the bosom of a man like smoke" under the pressure of theinsistent praise of famous men. The book has attracted a very remarkabledegree of notice; it has been talked about wherever people have mettogether; and has received the compliment of being seriously displayedbefore the University of Oxford by one of the most eminent of theVictorian statesmen whom Oxford has produced. If we look into the causesof this success, enjoyed by the earliest extended book of a writeralmost unknown, a book, too, which pretends to no novelty of matter ormystery of investigation, we find them partly in the preparedness of thepublic mind for something in the way of this exposure, but partly alsoin the skill of the writer. Whatever else may be said of Mr. LyttonStrachey, no one can deny that he is very adroit, or that he possessesthe art of arresting attention. 

It is part of this adroitness that he contrives to modify, and for along time even to conceal the fact that his purpose is to damage anddiscredit the Victorian Age. He is so ceremonious in his approach, socareful to avoid all brusqueness and coarseness, that his real aim maybe for awhile unobserved. He even professes to speak "dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions. " We may admit the want ofpassion and perhaps the want of partiality, but we cannot avoid seeingthe ulterior intention, which is to undermine and belittle thereputation of the great figures of the Victorian Age. When theprodigious Signor Marinetti proposes to hurl the "leprous palaces" ofhis native city into her "fetid canals, " and to build in their placewarehouses and railway stations, he does not differ in essentialattitude from Mr. Lytton Strachey, delicately "laying bare the facts ofsome cases. " The only real difference consists in the finer tact, thegreater knowledge of history--in short, the superior equipment of theEnglish iconoclast. Each of them--and all the troop of opponents whogrumble and mutter between their extremes--each of them is roused by anintense desire to throw off the shackles of a dying age, in which theyhave taught themselves chiefly to see affectation, pomposity, avirtuosity more technical than emotional, and an exasperating monotonyof effect. 

Mr. Strachey has conducted his attack from the point of view ofbiography. He realises the hopelessness of writing a history of theVictorian Age; it can only be dealt with in detail; it must be nibbledinto here and there; discredited piecemeal; subjected to the ravages ofthe white ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians lendthemselves to this insidious kind of examination, because what was worstin the pretentiousness of their age is to be found enshrined in theStandard Biographies (in two volumes, post octavo) under which most ofthem are buried. Mr. Strachey has some criticism of these monsters whichcould hardly be bettered:

 "Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and bear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. "

It is impossible not to agree with this pungent criticism. Every candidreader could point to a dozen Victorian biographies which deserve Mr. Strachey's condemnation. For instance, instead of taking up any of thespecimens which he has chosen for illustration, we need only refer thereader's memory to the appendix of "Impressions, " by a series of elderlyfriends, which closes the official _Life of Tennyson_, published in1897. He will find there an expression of the purest Victorian optimism. The great object being to foist on the public a false and superhumanpicture of the deceased, a set of illustrious contemporaries--whothemselves expected to be, when they died, transfigured in likemanner--form a bodyguard around the corpse of the poet and emit their"tedious panegyric. " In this case, more even than in any of theinstances which Mr. Strachey has taken, the contrast between the realman and the funereal image is positively grotesque. 

Without question this contrast is not a little responsible for thediscredit into which the name of Tennyson has fallen. Lord Selbornefound nothing in Tennyson "inconsistent with the finest courtesy and thegentlest heart. " Dr. Jowett had preserved through forty years "anever-increasing wonder at the depth of his thought, " and emphaticallystated that he "was above such feelings as a desire of praise, or fearof blame. " (Tennyson, who was thirsty for ceaseless laudation, and towhom a hint of censure was like the bite of a mosquito!) Frederick Myersejaculated, "How august, how limitless a thing was Tennyson's ownspirit's upward flight!" The Duke of Argyll, again, during the space offorty years, had found him "always reverent, hating all levity orflippancy, " and was struck by his possessing "the noblest humility Ihave ever known. " Lord Macaulay, who "had stood absolutely aloof, " oncehaving been permitted to glance at the proof-sheets of _Guenevere_, was"absolutely subdued" to "unfeigned and reverent admiration. " The dukewas the glad emissary who was "the medium of introduction, " and herecognised in Macaulay's subjugation "a premonition" of Tennyson'scomplete "conquest over the living world and over the generations thatare to come. "

Thus the priesthood circled round their idol, waving their censers andshouting their hymns of praise, while their ample draperies effectivelyhid from the public eye the object which was really in the centre oftheir throng, namely, a gaunt, black, touzled man, rough in speech, brooding like an old gipsy over his inch of clay pipe stuffed with shag, and sucking in port wine with gusto--"so long as it is black and sweetand strong, I care not!" Their fault lay, not in their praise, which wasmuch of it deserved, but in their deliberate attempt in the interests ofwhat was Nice and Proper--gods of the Victorian Age--to conceal what anyconventional person might think not quite becoming. There were to be noshadows in the picture, no stains or rugosities on the smooth bust ofrosy wax. 

On the pretext, therefore, of supplying a brief and above all acomplimentary set of portraits, Mr. Strachey takes the biography of anecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man ofadventure, and tells them over again in his own way. The four figures hechooses are all contemporary, and yet, so implacably does time hurry usalong, all would be very old if they still survived. Three of them couldhardly survive, for Cardinal Manning and Dr. Arnold would be far over ahundred, and Florence Nightingale in her ninety-ninth year; the fourth, General Gordon, would be eighty-five. The motto of Mr. Strachey is "Putnot your trust in the intellectual princes of the Victorian Age, " or, atleast, in what their biographers have reported of them; they were notdemi-gods in any sense, but eccentric and forceful figures working dimlytowards aims which they only understood in measure, and which veryoften were not worth the energy which they expended on them. Thisattitude alone would be enough to distinguish Mr. Strachey from thepurveyors of indiscriminate praise, and in adopting it he emphasises hisdeliberate break with the age of which they were the envy and theornament. Given his 1918 frame of mind, no blame can attach to him foradopting this gesture. At moments when the tradition of a people hasbeen violently challenged there have always ensued these abrupt acts ofwhat to the old school seems injustice. If Mr. Lytton Strachey isreproached with lack of respect, he might reply: In the midst of arevolution, who is called on to be respectful to the fallen monarch?Extreme admiration for this or that particular leader, the principle ofVictorian hero-worship, is the very heresy, he might say, which I haveset out to refute. 

When St. John the Divine addressed his Apocalypse to the Angels of theSeven Churches, he invented a system of criticism which is worthy of allacceptation. He dwelt first upon the merits of each individual church;not till he had exhausted them did he present the reverse of the coin. In the same spirit, critics who, in the apostle's phrase, have"something against" Mr. Lytton Strachey, will do well to begin byacknowledging what is in his favour. In the first place, he writessensibly, rapidly, and lucidly--without false ornament of any kind. Someof his pages might, with advantage, be pinned up opposite thewriting-tables of our current authors of detestable pseudo-Meredithianand decayed Paterese. His narrative style is concise and brisk. His bookmay undoubtedly best be compared among English classics with _Whiggismin its Relations to Literature_, although it is less discursive and doesnot possess the personal element of that vivacious piece of polemic. Inthis recurrence of Mr. Strachey to a pellucid stream of prose we see anargument against his own theory of revolt. The procedure of the arts, the mechanical tricks of the trade, do they really improve or declinefrom age to age? Are they not, in fact, much more the result ofindividual taste than of fashion? There seems to be no radical change inthe methods of style. The extravagant romanticism of rebellion againstthe leaders of the Victorian Age finds at length an exponent, and beholdhe writes as soberly as Lord Morley, or as Newman himself!

The longest of these biographies is that of Cardinal Manning, and it isthe one with which Mr. Lytton Strachey has taken most pains. Brieferthan the briefest of the _English Men of Letters_ series of biographies, it is yet conducted with so artful an economy as to give the impression, to an uninstructed reader, that nothing essential about the career ofManning has been omitted. To produce this impression gifts of a veryunusual order were required, since the writer, pressed on all sides by aplethora of information, instead of being incommoded by it, had to seemto be moving smoothly in an atmosphere of his own choosing, and to becompletely unembarrassed by his material. He must have the air ofsaying, in Froude's famous impertinence, "This is all we know, and morethan all, yet nothing to what the angels know. " In the face of a wholeliterature of controversy and correspondence, after a storm of Purcelland Hutton, Ward and Mozley and Liddon tearing at one another's throats, Mr. Lytton Strachey steps delicately on to the stage and says, in a lowvoice, "Come here and I will tell you all about a funny ecclesiastic whohad a Hat, and whose name was Henry Edward Manning. It will not take uslong, and ever afterwards, if you hear that name mentioned, you willknow everything about him which you need to remember. " It is audacious, and to many people will seem shocking, but it is very cleverly done. 

The study of Florence Nightingale is an even better example of Mr. Strachey's method, since she is the one of his four subjects for whom hebetrays some partiality. "The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facilefancy painted her, " and it has greatly entertained Mr. Strachey to chipthe Victorian varnish off and reveal the iron will beneath. His firstchapter puts it in one of his effective endings:--

 "Her mother was still not quite resigned; surely Florence might at least spend the summer in the country. At this, indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost wept. 'We are ducks, ' she said with tears in her eyes, 'who have hatched a wild swan. ' But the poor lady was wrong; it was not a swan that they had hatched, it was an eagle. "

It is therefore as an eagle, black, rapacious, with hooked bill andcrooked talons, that he paints Miss Nightingale; and the Swan ofScutari, the delicate Lady with the Lamp, fades into a fable. Mr. Strachey glorifies the demon that possessed this pitiless, rushingspirit of philanthropy. He gloats over its ravages; its irresistibleviolence of purpose. It is an evident pleasure to him to be able todetach so wild a figure from the tameness of the circumambient scene, and all his enmity to the period comes out in the closing pages, inwhich he describes how the fierce philanthropist lived so long that theVictorian Age had its revenge upon her, and reduced her, a smiling, fatold woman, to "compliance and complacency. " It is a picture which willgive much offence, but it is certainly extremely striking, and Mr. Strachey can hardly be accused of having done more than deepen theshadows which previous biographers had almost entirely omitted. 

In this study, if the author is unusually indulgent to his subject, heis relatively severer than usual to the surrounding figures. To some ofthem, notably to Arthur Hugh Clough, he seems to be intolerably unjust. On the other hand, to most of those public men who resisted the work ofFlorence Nightingale it is difficult to show mercy. Mr. Strachey is socontemptuous, almost so vindictive, in his attitude to Lord Panmure, that the reader is tempted to take up the cudgels in defence of anofficial so rudely flouted. But, on reflection, what is there that canbe said in palliation of Lord Panmure? He was the son of a man of whomhis own biographer has admitted that "he preserved late into the[nineteenth] century the habits and passions--scandalous andunconcealed--which had, except in his case, passed away. He was devotedto his friends so long as they remained complaisant, and violent andimplacable to all who thwarted him. --His uncontrollable temper alienatedhim from nearly all his family in his latter years. In private life hewas an immovable despot. "

This was the father of Fox Maule, second Baron Panmure, of whom Mr. Strachey has so much to say. Evidently he was a Regency type, as the sonwas a Victorian. Determined not to resemble his father, Fox Maule earlybecame a settled and industrious M. P. , and in 1846 Lord John Russellmade him Secretary of War. He held the same post under Lord Palmerstonfrom 1855 to 1858. Nothing could dislodge him from office; not even thefamous despatch "Take care of Dawb" could stir him. In 1860 he becameeleventh Earl of Dalhousie. He died two years later, having enjoyedevery distinction, even that of President of the Royal Military Asylum. He was "unco guid, " as pious as his father had been profane, but he hadno social or political or intellectual merit of any kind which can atthis distance of time be discerned. Florence Nightingale called him theBison, and his life's energy seems to have been expended in trying, often with success, to frustrate every single practical reform whichshe suggested. To the objection that Mr. Strachey has depicted theheroine as "an ill-tempered, importunate spinster, who drove a statesmanto his death, " he might conceivably reply that if history, grown calmwith the passage of years, does so reveal her, it is rather absurd to goon idealising her. Why not study the real Eagle in place of the fabulousSwan? It is difficult to condemn Mr. Strachey along this line ofargument. 

The early Victorians liked what was definable and tangible; they were"ponderous mechanists of style. " Even in their suggestions of changethey preserved an impenetrable decorum of demeanour, a studied progress, a deep consciousness of the guiding restraint of tradition uponcharacter. Their preoccupation with moral ideas tinged the whole oftheir surroundings, their literature, their art, their outlook uponlife. That the works of Mr. Charles Dickens, so excruciatingly funny, should have been produced and appreciated in the midst of this intenseepoch of exhortation seems a paradox, till we recollect how carefulDickens is, when his laughter is loudest, never to tamper with "the deepsense of moral evil. " This apprehension of the rising immorality of theworld, against which the only rampart was the education of "a thoroughEnglish gentleman, Christian, manly and enlightened" was dominant in nospirit more than in that of Mr. Thomas Arnold, of whom Mr. Stracheygives a somewhat deterrent portrait. It is deterrent, because we havepassed, in three-quarters of a century, completely out of the atmospherein which Dr. Arnold moved and breathed. We are not sure that Mr. Strachey acted very wisely in selecting Dr. Arnold for one of his foursubjects, since the great schoolmaster was hardly a Victorian at all. When he entered the Church George III. Was on the throne; hisaccomplishment at Rugby was started under George IV. ; he died when theVictorian Age was just beginning. He was a forerunner, but hardly acontemporary. 

Although in his attitude to the great Rugby schoolmaster Mr. Stracheyshows more approbation than usual, this portrait has not given universalsatisfaction. It has rather surprisingly called forth an indignantprotest from Dr. Arnold's granddaughter. Yet such is the perversity ofthe human mind that the mode in which Mrs. Humphry Ward "perstringes"the biographer brings us round to that biographer's side. For Mrs. Wardhas positively the indiscretion, astounding in a writer of her learningand experience, to demand the exclusion of irony from the legitimateweapons of the literary combatant. This is to stoop to sharing one ofthe meanest prejudices of the English commonplace mind, which has alwaysresented the use of that delicate and pointed weapon. Moreover, Mrs. Ward does not merely adopt the plebeian attitude, but she deliversherself bound hand and foot to the enemy by declaring the use of ironyto be "unintelligent. " In support of this amazing statement she quotessome wandering phrase of Sainte-Beuve. By the light of recentrevelations, whether Sainte-Beuve was ironical or not, he was certainlyperfidious. But, to waive that matter, does Mrs. Humphry Ward considerthat Swift and Lucian and Machiavelli were, as she puts it, "doomed tofailure" because they used irony as a weapon? Was Heine and is AnatoleFrance conspicuous for want of intelligence? And, after all, ought notMrs. Ward to remember that if she had a very serious grandfather, shehad a still more celebrated uncle, who wrote _Friendship's Garland_?

While no one else will seriously blame Mr. Strachey for employing ironyin his investigation of character, the subject leads on to what may beregarded as a definite fault in his method. A biographer should besympathetic; not blind, not indulgent, but _sympathetic_. He should beable to enter into the feelings of his subjects, and be anxious to doso. It is in sympathy, in imaginative insight, that Mr. Strachey fails. His personages are like puppets observed from a great height by anamiable but entirely superior intelligence. The peculiar aim of Mr. Strachey, his desire to lower our general conception of the VictorianAge, tempts him to exaggerate this tendency, and he succumbs to thetemptation. His description of Lord Acton at Rome in 1870--"he despisedLord Acton almost as much as he disliked him"--is not ironic, it iscontemptuous. Arthur Hugh Clough presents no aspect to Mr. Strachey butthat of a timid and blundering packer-up of parcels; one might conceivethat the biographer had never contemplated the poet in any othercapacity than, with sealing-wax in his hand and string between his lips, shuddering under the eye of Miss Nightingale. The occasional referencesto Lord Wolseley suggest an unaccountable hurrying figure of pygmy size, which Mr. Strachey can only just discern. This attitude of hoveringsuperiority is annoying. 

But it reaches a more dangerous importance when it affects spiritualmatters. The author interests himself, from his great height, in themovements of his Victorian dwarfs, and notices that they areparticularly active, and prone to unusual oddity of movement, when theyare inspired by religious and moral passion. Their motions attract hisattention, and he describes them with gusto and often with wit. Hissketch of Rome before the Œcumenical Council is an admirably studiedpage. Miss Nightingale's ferocity when the War Office phalanx closed itsranks is depicted in the highest of spirits; it is impossible not to beriveted by the scene round Cardinal Manning's death-bed; but what didthose manifestations mean? To Mr. Strachey it is evident that the fun ofthe whole thing is that they meant nothing at all; they were only partof the Victorian absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, asa personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates the feelingsof Newman or Keble as a naturalist might the contortions of an insect. The ceremonies and rites of the Church are objects of subdued hilarityto him, and in their presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it issolely to prevent his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. Whenthe subject of Baptismal Regeneration agitates the whole pious world ofEngland Mr. Strachey seems to say, looking down with exhilaration on theanthill beneath him, "The questions at issue are being taken veryseriously by a large number of persons. How Early Victorian of them!"Mr. Strachey has yet to learn that questions of this kind are "takenseriously" by serious people, and that their emotion is both genuine anddeep. He sees nothing but alcoholic eccentricity in the mysticism ofGordon. His cynicism sometimes carries him beyond the confines of goodtaste, as in the passage where he refers to the large and dirty ears ofthe Roman cardinals. Still worse is the query as to what became of thesoul of Pope Pius IX. After his death. 

These are errors in discretion. A fault in art is the want of care whichthe author takes in delineating his minor or subordinate figures. Hegives remarkable pains, for example, to his study of General Gordon, buthe is indifferent to accuracy in his sketches of the persons who cameinto contact, and often into collision, with Gordon. In this heresembles those French painters, such as Bastien Lepage, who focus theireye on one portion of their canvas, and work that up to a highperfection, while leaving the rest of the picture misty and vague. Evenin that case the subordinate figures, if subdued in fogginess, shouldnot be falsely drawn, but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portraitof Gordon, is willing to leave his Baring and Hartington and Wolseleyinexact as well as shadowy. The essay on General Gordon, indeed, is theleast successful of the four monographs. Dexterous as he is, Mr. Strachey has not had the material to work upon which now exists toelucidate his other and earlier subjects. But it is difficult to accountfor his apparently not having read Mr. Bernard Holland's life of theDuke of Devonshire, which throws much light, evidently unknown to Mr. Strachey, on the Gordon relief expedition. He ought to know that SirEvelyn Baring urged the expedition, while Chamberlain was one of itsopponents. Mr. Strachey does not seem to have noticed how much the issuewas confused by conflicting opinions as to whether the route to be takenshould be by Suakin or up the Nile. 

No part of his book is more vigorous or picturesque than the chapterdealing with the proclamation of Papal Infallibility. But here again oneis annoyed by the glibness with which Mr. Strachey smoothly asserts whatare only his conjectures. 

In his account of Manning's reception in Rome--and this is of centralimportance in his picture of Manning's whole career--he exaggerates thepersonal policy of Pio Nono, whom he represents as more independent ofthe staff of the Curia than was possible. Rome has never acknowledgedthe right of the individual, even though that individual be the Pope, toan independent authority. Mr. Odo Russell was resident secretary in Romefrom 1858 to 1870, and his period of office was drawing to a close whenManning arrived; he was shortly afterwards removed to become AssistantUnder Secretary of State at our Foreign Office. The author of _EminentVictorians_ is pleased to describe "poor Mr. Russell" as little betterthan a fly buzzing in Manning's "spider's web of delicate and clingingdiplomacy. " It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenesthat Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was byno means deficient in decision or force of character, as was evidencedwhen, some months later, he explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons forstating to Bismarck, without instructions from the government, that theBlack Sea question was one on which Great Britain might be compelled togo to war with or without allies. Lord Morley's _Life of Gladstone_(vol. Ii. , p. 354) is explicit on this interesting point. Theinformation which, by special permission of the Pope, Cardinal Manningwas able to give to him on all that was going on in the Council was, ofcourse, of great value to Odo Russell, but his views on other aspects ofthe question were derived from quite different sources. 

In this respect he had the advantage of the Cardinal, both on account ofhis diplomatic position and of his long and intimate knowledge both ofVatican policy and of the forces which the Curia has at its command. Onthe strength of those forces, and on the small amount of effectivesupport which British opposition to the Decree of Infallibility waslikely to receive from the Catholic Powers, he no doubt held strongopinions. Some years later he did not conceal his conviction that PrinceBismarck would be worsted in his conflict with Rome on the EducationLaws, and the event proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This isan example of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficialtreatment of political events which were conducted in secret, and withevery circumstance of mystery. 

Several of the characteristics which diversify Mr. Strachey's remarkablevolume are exemplified in the following quotation. It deals with thefuneral of Cardinal Manning:--

 "The route of the procession was lined by vast crowds of working people, whose imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been touched. Many who had hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their best friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man's spirit that moved them? Or was it his valiant disregard of common custom and those conventional reserves and poor punctilios, which are wont to hem about the great? Or was it something untameable in his glances and in his gestures? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him of the antique organisation of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing to-day. And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten trophy, the Hat. "

Longinus tells us that "a just judgment of style is the final fruit oflong experience. " In the measured utterances of Mr. Asquith we recognisethe speech of a man to whom all that is old and good is familiar, and inwhom the art of finished expression has become a habit. No moreelegantly balanced, no more delicately perceptive mind than his hasappeared of recent times in our midst, and there is something in theequipoise of his own genius which points Mr. Asquith out as a judgepeculiarly well fitted to sit in judgment upon rival ages. In hisRomanes lecture there was but one thing to be regretted: the restrictedspace which it offered for the full expansion of the theme. Mr. Asquithexcels in swift and rapid flights, but even for him the Victorian Age istoo broad a province to be explored within one hour. He endeavoured tolighten his task by excluding theology and politics, and indeed but forsuch self-denial he could scarcely have moved at all in so dense an air. He was able, however, having thrown out so much formidable ballast, torise above his subject, and gazing at the Victorian Age, as it recedes, he declared it to have been very good. The young men who despise andattack that Age receive no support in any particular from Mr. Asquith. 

He dwells on the fecundity of the literature of the Victorian Age in itsmiddle period, and especially on the publications which adorned thedecade from 1850 to 1859. He calls those years, very justly, "marvellousand almost unexampled" in their rich profusion. I may suggest that theonly rival to them in our history is the period from 1590 to 1600, whichsaw the early plays of Shakespeare, the _Faerie Queene_, the _Arcadia_, the _Ecclesiastical Polity_, _Tamburlaine_, _The Discovery of Guiana_, and Bacon's _Essays_. If the works catalogued by Mr. Asquith do notequal these in intensity, they excel them by the breadth of the groundthey cover, extending from Browning to Darwin and from Thackeray toRuskin. Moreover, the Oxford list might have included _Lavengro_ andNewman's _Lectures_, and Herbert Spencer's _Social Statics_. The onlythird decade worthy to be named with those of 1590 and 1850 is thatwhich opens in 1705, and is illuminated by the names of Pope, Shaftesbury, Swift, Arbuthnot, Defoe, Steele, Addison, and Berkeley. Itis pleasant to compare these three magnificently flowering epochs, butnot profitable if we attempt to weigh one against the other. They arecomparable only in the splendour of their accomplishment. 

It is more difficult to fit science into our scheme of the Victorian Agethan to find places there for Art and Literature. Perhaps the reason ofthis is that the latter were national in their character, whereasscientific inquiry, throughout the nineteenth century, was carried onupon international lines, or, at least, in a spirit unprecedentedlynon-provincial. The vast achievements of science, practical andtheoretical, were produced for the world, not for a race. Mr. Asquithspeaks with justice and eloquence of the appearance of Darwin's _Originof Species_ which he distinguishes as being "if not actually the mostimportant, certainly the most interesting event of the Age, " and hisremarks on the fortune of that book are excellent. No one canover-estimate the value of what we owe to Darwin. But perhaps aFrenchman might speak in almost the same terms of Claude Bernard, whoselife and work ran parallel with Darwin's. If the _Origin of Species_made an epoch in 1859, the _Introduction à la médicine expérimental_made another in 1865. Both these books, as channels by which theexperimental labours of each investigator reached the prepared andinstructed public, exercised at once, and have continued ever since toexercise, an enormous effect on thought as well as on knowledge. Theytransformed the methods by which man approaches scientificinvestigation, and while they instructed they stimulated a new ardourfor instruction. In each case the value of the discovery lay in thevalue of the idea which led to the discovery, and, as some one has saidin the case of Claude Bernard, they combined for the first time theoperations of science and philosophy. The parallel between these twocontemporaries extends, in a measure, to their disciples and successors, and seems to suggest that Mr. Asquith in his generous and difficultestimate may have exaggerated the purely Victorian element in thescience of the age of Darwin. This only accentuates the difficulty, andhe may perhaps retort that there is an extreme danger in suggesting whatdoes and what does not form a part of so huge a system. 

Justifiably Mr. Asquith takes it for granted that the performance of thecentral years of the Victorian Age was splendid. With those who denymerit to the writers and artists of the last half century it isdifficult to reach a common ground for argument. What is to be thecriterion of taste if all the multiform exhibitions of it which passedmuster from 1840 to 1890 are now to be swept away with contumely?Perhaps indeed it is only among those extravagant romanticists who aretrying to raise entirely new ideals, unrelated to any existing forms ofart and literature, that we find a denial of all merit to the Victorianmasters. Against this caricature of criticism, this Bolshevism, it wouldbe hopeless to contend. But there is a large and growing class of moremoderate thinkers who hold, in the first place, that the merit of theleading Victorian writers has been persistently over-estimated, and thatsince its culmination the Victorian spirit has not ceased to decay, arriving at length at the state of timidity and repetition whichencourages what is ugly, narrow, and vulgar, and demands nothing betterthan a swift dismissal to the dust-bin. 

Every stratum of society, particularly if it is at all sophisticated, contains a body of barbarians who are usually silent from lack ofoccasion to express themselves, but who are always ready to seize anopportunity to suppress a movement of idealism. We accustom ourselves tothe idea that certain broad principles of taste are universallyaccepted, and our respectable newspapers foster this benevolent delusionby talking habitually "over the heads, " as we say, of the majority oftheir readers. They make "great music for a little clan, " and nothingcan be more praiseworthy than their effort, but, as a matter of fact, with or without the aid of the newspapers, the people who really carefor literature or art, or for strenuous mental exercise of any kind, arerelatively few. If we could procure a completely confidential statementof the number of persons to whom the names of Charles Lamb andGainsborough have a distinct meaning, and still more of those who cansummon up an impression of the essays of the one and of the pictures ofthe other, we should in all probability be painfully startled. Yet sincethese names enjoy what we call a universal celebrity, what must be thepopular relation to figures much less prominent?

The result of this tyranny of fame, for so it must appear to all thosewho are inconvenienced by the expression of it, is to rouse a sullentendency to attack the figures of art and literature whenever therearrives a chance of doing that successfully. Popular audiences canalways be depended upon to cheer the statement of "a plain man" that heis not "clever" enough to understand Browning or Meredith. An assurancethat life is too short to be troubled with Henry James wakes the lowermiddle class to ecstasy. An opportunity for such protests is provided byour English lack of critical tradition, by our accepted habit of saying, "I do hate" or "I must say I rather like" this or that without referenceto any species of authority. This seems to have grown with dangerousrapidity of late years. It was not tolerated among the Victorians, whocarried admiration to the highest pitch. They marshalled it, theydefined it, they turned it from a virtue into a religion, and called itHero Worship. Even their abuse was a kind of admiration turned insideout, as in Swinburne's diatribes against Carlyle, who himself foughtagainst the theory of Darwin, not philosophically, but as though it werea personal insult to himself. Such violence of taste is now gone out offashion; every scribbler and dauber likes to believe himself on a levelwith the best, and the positive criterion of value which sincereadmiration gave is lost to us. Hence the success of Mr. Lytton Strachey. 

But the decline of ardour does not explain the whole position, which wehave to face with firmness. Epochs come to an end, and before they havetheir place finally awarded to them in history they are bound to enduremuch vicissitude of fortune. No amount of sarcasm or of indignantprotest will avail to conceal the fact that we stand to-day at theporch, that much more probably we have already penetrated far into thevestibule, of a new age. What its character will be, or what itsprincipal products, it is absolutely impossible for us as yet toconjecture. Meanwhile the Victorian Age recedes, and it loses size andlustre as we get further and further away from it. When what was called"Symbolism" began to act in urgent and direct reaction to the aims ofthose still in authority, the old order received its notice to quit, butthat was at least five and twenty years ago, and the change is notcomplete. Ages so multiform and redundant and full of blood as theVictorian take a long time to die; they have their surprising recoveriesand their uncovenanted convalescences. But even they give up the ghostat length, and are buried hastily with scant reverence. The time hasdoubtless come when aged mourners must prepare themselves to attend theobsequies of the Victorian Age with as much decency as they can muster. 

1918. 

INDEX

Abbaye de Creteil, 303-4Acton, Lord, 328Addison, J. , relation of, to Romanticists, 70-1; 68, 76, 82_Agnes de Castro_, by Catharine Trotter, 43-5Akenside, 74Allard-Méeus, J. , 273_Alroy_, by B. Disraeli, 161American criticism, and Edgar Allan Poe, 104, 105Anne, Queen, 58_Annabel Lee_, by E. A. Poe, 103, 112Argyll, Duke of, 320Ariosto, 84, 85Arnauld, Angelique, 39Arnold, M. , 3, 68, 71, 133, 267Arnold, Dr. T. , Mr. Strachey's portrait of, 326-7Asquith, Mr. , Romanes lecture of, 332-5

Bacon, 17Bagehot, W. , 96Balfour, A. J. , _re_ standards of taste, 4, 5, 10Ballenden, Sarah, 40Baring, M. , poems of, 265, 273-5Barrie, Sir J. , 100Barry, Mrs. , 57Batsford, Lord Redesdale at, 217-8, 222, 224-8, 229Baudelaire, 106Bayle, 59Behn, Aphra, 39Bell, T. , of Selborne, 182Berkeley, 98Betterton, 48, 57Birch, Rev. Dr. , 61Blake, W. , 5, 90Blessington, Lady, 131Boileau, 70, 77, 82Booth, 57Bottomley, G. , 262Bridges, R. , War poetry of, 161; 110de Brillac, Mlle. , 44Brontë, Charlotte, dislike of Dewsbury, 142-3; message of, arose from pain and resistance, 144; her unhappiness, its causes, 145-6; defiance the note of her writings, 146-50Brontë, Emily, 149Brontës, The Challenge of the, address delivered on, 141-50; their connexion with Dewsbury, 141-2Brooke, Rupert, poems of, 268-70Browning, R. , 9, 81, 132Brunetière, 7Bruxambille, 95Bryant, 107, 108Bulwer-Lytton, E. , ambiguity of his position in literature, 117; R. Lytton's biography, 118, 121; Lord Lytton's biography, 117, 118-9, 120, 122, 129, 130, 131, 133, 137; autobiography, 119-20; story of matrimonial troubles, 121-9; character, 129-30; acquaintances and friends, 130-2; relations with contemporary writers and poets, 132-4; stormy life, 134; unfavourable attitude of critics towards, 134-5; popularity of his writings, 135-6; versatility and merits, 136-7; 178Bulwer-Lytton, Mrs. , opposition to Bulwer-Lytton's marriage, 124-7Burghclere, Lady, open letter to, on Lady D. Nevill, 181-96Burnet, George, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop, patron of the Trotters, 41, 52, 53Burnet, Mrs. , 52, 53Burney, Dr. , 33Burton, 96Byron, 76, 104, 108, 148, 161-2

Carlyle, 100Carlyle, Mrs. , her opinion of Keats, 9Catullus, 84Charles II, 40, 41Chateaubriand, 74Chatterton, 87Cibber, Colley, 44Classic poetry, Romanticists' revolt against principles of, 70-90Clough, A. H. , 325, 328Cockburn, Mr. , 60, 61Coleridge, 104, 108, 274Collier, Jeremy, attack on stage immorality, 47Collins, 86, 110Colonisation, England's debt to Walter Raleigh, 24-5Congreve, Catherine Trotter's relations with, 43, 47, 48, 50; 57, 58_Coningsby_, by B. Disraeli, 153, 164, 165-6, 169, 170-2, 173_Contarini Fleming_, by B. Disraeli, 159-61, 162Corbett, N. M. F. , poems of, 275Cowes in war time, 219-21Cowley, 82Cowper, 253Crabbe, G. , Hardy compared with, 248Cranch, C. P. , 105Cromer, Lord, essay on, 196-216; intellectual and literary activity, 197-8; as a speaker, 198-200; interest in House of Lords Library, 200; classical tastes, 200-203; conversation, attitude to life and letters, 204-8; correspondence and reflections, 208-10; humour, 210-12; verse, 212-15; literary activities, 215-16

Dacier, Mme. , 52_Dacre_, by Countess of Morley, 153, 156Dante, 225-6Dartmouth, George, Earl of, 40, 42D'Aubigné, 78Daudet, A. , 252Daudet, E. , 229-30Davies, W. H. , 262De Vere, Mrs. , 59Devey, Miss, "Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton, " by, 121Dewsbury, the Brontës' connexion with, 141-2Dickens, C, 100, 128, 131Disraeli, B. , novels of, address, 153-78; not taken seriously as an author, 153-4; three periods of writing, 154-5; contemporary fiction, 155-6; _Vivian Grey_, 156-9; _The Young Duke_, 157; _Henrietta Temple_, 159; _Contarini Fleming_, 159-60; Byron's influence on, 161; Voltaire's influence on, 162; fascinated by Venice, 163; _Venetia_, 163; Parliamentary experience and literary results, 164; _Coningsby_, 165-6; _Sybil_, 167-8; _Tancred_, 169-72; Prime Minister, 172; _Lothair_, 173-8; 131, 135Donne, J. , 78, 111, 236, 244, 252Dorset, Charles, Earl of, 43Dowden, 34Doyle, Sir A. C. , 103Dryden, 34, 49, 50, 70, 82, 274Du Bos, Abbé, 90Durham, Lord, 131Dyer, 70

Elizabeth, Queen, sympathy between Raleigh and, 18_Eloisa to Abelard_, by Pope, its appeal to Romanticists, 83-4Emerson, 107_Eminent Victorians_, by Lytton Strachey, review of, 318-32English Poetry, The Future of, 289-309; instances of national lapses in poetic output, 290; necessity of novelty of expression and difficulties arising, 291-2; advantages of vernacular poetry, 293; future poetry bound to dispense with obvious description and reflection and to take on greater subtlety of expression, 294-7; Wordsworth's speculations concerning nineteenth-century poetry, 298-9; prospect of social poetry, 299-301; "effusion of natural sensibility" more probable, 302-3; French experiments, 303-4; as to disappearance of erotic poetry, 305-6; dramatic poetry and symbolism, 306-9_Essay on Criticism_, by Pope, Romanticists' attack upon, 71-4_Essay on Genius of Pope_, by J. Warton, 80-3

Farquhar, 48_Fatal Friendship_, by C. Trotter, 47-8Fawcett, Rev. J. , 97Fenn, Mr. , 60Fletcher, John, songs of, 35_For Annie_, by E. A. Poe, 112Ford, songs of, 35Forster, John, 131-2, 133France, Anatole, 7

Gaskell, Mrs. , 141Gautier, T. , 6, 10Genoa, Duke of, 133Georgian poetry, its pre-war characteristics, 261-2Gibbon, 98Gibson, W. W. , 262Gilbert, Sir H. , 25Gilpin, 87Godolphin, Henrietta, 58Goethe, 161de Goncourt, E. , 252Gongora, 78Gordon, General, 15; Mr. Strachey's portrait of, 329-30Gore, Mrs. , 178de Gourmont, Rémy, his opinion of Sully-Prudhomme, 9, 10de Gournay, Mlle. , 39Granville, 47Graves, R. , poetry of, 280-1Gray, 89, 108Greene, 32Grenfell, J. , poems of, 271-3Guiana, Raleigh's "gold mine" in, 20

Halifax, Lord, 50Handel, 80Harcourt, Mrs. , 57Hardy, Thomas, lyrical poetry of, 233-58; independence of his career as a poet, 233-4; unity and consistence of his poetry, 234; sympathy with Swinburne, 235; historic development of lyrics, 236; novel writing interfering with, 237-8; place of poetry in his literary career, 238; "Wessex Ballads" and "Poems of Past and Present, " 238-40; "The Dynasts" and "Times' Laughing Stocks, " 240-2; "Satires of Circumstance, " 242-3; "Moments of Vision, " 243-4; technical quality of his poetry, 244; metrical forms, 245-6; pessimistic conception of life, 247-8; compared with Crabbe, 248; consolation found by, 249-51; compared with Wordsworth, 251; human sympathy, 251; range of subjects, 252-5; speculations on immortality, 256; "The Dynasts, " 68, 257; unchangeableness of his art, 257-8; "Song of the Soldiers, " 263Hawthorne, 107Hayley, 5Hazlitt, 301_Henrietta Temple_, by B. Disraeli, 153, 159Heywood, songs of, 35Higgons, Bevil, 43Hobbes, 98Hodgson, W. N. , 284Homer, 12Hooker, 17Hope, H. T. , 164Housman, A. E. , 268Hugo, V. , 6, 12, 111, 134Hume, 98Hunt, Leigh, 104

Inglis, Dr. , 51, 58Ireland, Raleigh in, 23

James I, distrust and treatment of Raleigh, 19, 20, 21James II, 42Johnson, Dr. , his opinion of the Wartons, 86, 98Jowett, Dr. , 320

Keats, Mrs. Carlyle's opinion of, 9; 5, 90, 104, 105King, Peter, 53, 59Kipling, R. , poetry of, 300

Landon, Letitia, 131Lansdowne, Lord, 191Lauderdale, Earl of, 42Lauderdale, Maitland, Duke of, 40, 41Lawson, H. , poems of, 284Lee, 50Leibnitz, 42, 54, 55, 56, 59Lemaître, J. , 7Lewis, "Monk, " 162Locke, Catharine Trotter's defence of, 53-5; death of, 55; 42Lockhart, 135Lodge, 32_Lothair_, by B. Disraeli, 173-8_Love at a Loss_, by Catharine Trotter, 51Lowell, 108Lucas, Lord, 274Lyly, John, 31Lytton, Bulwer-, _see_ Bulwer-Lytton. Lytton, Lord, biography of Bulwer-Lytton, 117, 118-19, 120, 122, 129, 130, 131, 133, 137Lytton, R. , biography of Bulwer-Lytton, 118, 121

Macaulay, Lord, 320-1Macpherson, 86Malebranche, 52Malherbe, 70, 77Mallarmé, 77, 106Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, 85Manley, Mrs. , 44, 45, 46, 61Manning, Cardinal, Mr. Strachey's portrait of, 323, 330-2Manoa, 19Mant, 73Marinetti, M. , 305, 318Marini, 78Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, 57Marlborough, Duke of, Catharine Trotter's poem of welcome to, 58Marlowe, songs of, 34Marsh, E. , 261Masham, Lady, 55, 56, 59Massinger, 35Melbourne, Lord, 131_Memories_, by Lord Redesdale, 216, 217, 219, 221Milton, influence upon eighteenth-century poetry, 79; 82, 110Mitford, Major Hon. C, 218Mockel, A. , 112_Moments of Vision_, by T. Hardy, 243-4Monckton-Milnes, Sir R. , 133Morris, 104Myers, F. , 320

Nevill, Lady Dorothy, Open Letter to Lady Burghclere on, 181-96; memoirs of, 181-2; writer's friendship with, 152; appearance and physical strength, 183-4; characteristics, 184-5; a spectator of life, 186-7; attitude to the country, 187; wit, conversation and correspondence, 187-92; relation to literature and art, 192-4; emotional nature, 194-6Nevill, Ralph, Memoirs of Lady D. Nevill by, 181-2Newcastle, Margaret, Duchess of, 39Nichols, R. , poetry of, 276-80Nietzsche, 219-20Nightingale, Florence, Mr. Strachey's Life of, 324Norris, John, 52, 53

Obermann, 76_Observations on the Faerie Queene_, by T. Warton, 84-6_Ode on the Approach of Summer_, by T. Warton, 79_Odes_, by J. Warton, 69, 75, 80Otway, 50

Panmure, Lord, 325-6Paris, Gaston, 7, 8Parnell, 76Parr, Dr. S. , 120Pater, W. , 71Patmore, C. , 237Peacock, 104Peele, 32Péguy, C. , 268_Pelham_, by Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, the author of, 117-37; 135, 155Pepys, S. , 27Perth, 4th Earl of, 40, 42_Philip van Artevelde_, by H. Taylor, 107Piers, Lady, 50, 51Piers, Sir G. , 50Pix, Mrs. Mary, 45, 46, 61Poe, E. A. , centenary of, address on, 103-13; importance as a poet ignored, 103; original want of recognition of, 104-5; his reaction to unfriendly criticism, 105-6; essential qualities of his genius, 106-7; contemporary conception of poetry, 107-8; his ideal of poetry, 108; influences upon, 108-9; early verses, poetic genius in, 109; melodiousness of, 110-11; symbolism of, 112-13_Poems and Ballads_, by A. C. Swinburne, Bulwer-Lytton's support of, 133-4_Poems of Past and Present_, by T. Hardy, 238-40Pope, Romanticists' revolt against classicism of, 70-90; 68Prussia, Sophia Charlotte, Queen of, 58

Rabelais, 90Radcliffe, Mrs. , 85, 162Raleigh, North Carolina, foundation of, 25-6Raleigh, W. , junr. , 20Raleigh, Sir W. , address delivered on Tercentenary celebration of, 15-27; patriotism and hatred of Spain, 15-17, 21-2; character, 18; adventurous nature, 18-19; James I and, 19-20; his El Dorado dreams, 20; fall and trial, 21; savage aspects of, 23; as a naval strategist, 23-4; genius as coloniser, 24-5; imprisonment and execution, 26-7Ramsay, Allan, 70Redesdale, Lord, last days of, 216-30; literary career, 216-7; vitality: pride in authorship and garden, 217-8; death of son, 218; "Memories, " 219; loneliness and problem of occupying his time, 219-22; origin of last book, its theme, 222-4; last days, 224-30René, 76Rentoul, L. , poems of, 284Retté, A. , 112Reynolds, 104Ritson, Joseph, attack upon T. Warton, 88-9Roanoke, Virginia, British settlement in, 25Roche, Lord and Lady, 23Romanticism, Two Pioneers of, Joseph and Thomas Warton, address on, 65-90Romantic movement, features of, 71-90Rossetti, D. G. , 104, 136Rousseau, J. J. , English Romanticists' relation to, 68, 68, 75Ruskin, 100Russell, Odo, 330

Sainte-Beuve, 6Sappho, 84Sassoon, S. , poems of, 282-4_Satires of Circumstance_, by T. Hardy, 242-3Satow, Sir E. , 223Scott, Sir W. , 108, 128, 135Scudéry, M. De, 39Seaman, Sir G. , war invective of, 264Selbourne, Lord, 320Selden, 98Senancour, 74_Sentimental Journey_, The, by L. Sterne, 96, 100Seventeenth century, English women writers of, 39Shakespeare, the Songs of, 31-5; their dramatic value, 31-3; lyrical qualities, 33-5; comparison with contemporary lyricists, 35; 17, 82Shelley, 74, 104, 108, 162Shenstone, 70_Shepherd of the Ocean, The_, 15-27Shorter, C. , 141Some Soldier Poets, 261-85; outbreak of war poetry, 262-3; mildness of British Hymns of Hate, 264-5; military influence upon poetic feeling, 265-6; tendency to dispense with form, 266; common literary influences, 267-8; Rupert Brooke, 268-70; J. Grenfell, 271-3; M. Baring, 273-5; N. M. F. Corbett, 275; E. W. Tennant, 275; R. Nichols, 276-80; R. Graves, 280-1; S. Sassoon, 282-4; C. H. Sorley, W. N. Hodgson, K. Lawson, L. Rentoul, R. E. Vernède, 284Sorley, C. H. , poems of, 284Southey, 5, 104Spain, Anglo-Spanish rivalry in days of Walter Raleigh, 16-17, 21-3, 24Spenser, 17, 82, 84, 111Stephen, Sir Leslie, 106, 237Sterne, Laurence, Essay on the Charm of, 93-100; birth and childhood, 93-4; temperament, 94-5; intellectual development, 95-6; alternation of feeling about, 97; English literature's debt to, 98; his "indelicacy, " 99; irrelevancy, 99; Shandean influences upon literature, 100Sterne, Mrs. , 93Sterne, Roger, 93Stevenson, R. L. , 100Strachey, Lytton, "Eminent Victorians" by, review of, 318-32Stukeley, Sir L. , 21Sully-Prudhomme, fluctuations in taste as regards, 5-9Sumners, Montagu, 39Swinburne, A. C, Bulwer-Lytton and, 133-4; Hardy's sympathy with, 235; 68, 81, 111Symbolism and poetry, 308-9

_Tales of Old Japan_, by Lord Redesdale, 216_Tancred_, by B. Disraeli, 153Taste, fluctuations in, 3-12; regarding Wordsworth, 3-4; Mr. Balfour's conclusions, 4-5, 10; volte-face concerning Sully-Prudhomme, 5-10_Tea-Table Miscellany_, 70Temple, Mrs. , 45Tennant, E. W. , poetry of, 275Tennyson, Victorian opinion of, 320-1; 7, 12, 81, 106, 116, 132, 299Thackeray, 144_The Bamboo Garden_, by Lord Redesdale, 216_The Bells_, by E. A. Poe, 111_The Dynasts_, by T. Hardy, 240, 257_The Enthusiast_, by Joseph Warton, importance of, 69, 73_The Female Wits_, by Catharine Trotter, 45-6_The Raven_, by E. A. Poe, 108, 111_The Revolution in Sweden_, by Catharine Trotter, 57-8_The Unhappy Penitent_, by Catharine Trotter, 50-1_The Young Duke_, by B. Disraeli, 153, 157Thomson, James, 78, 307Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_, 68_Times' Laughing Stocks_, by T. Hardy, 240-2Tottel's Miscellany, 261_Tristram Shandy_, by L. Sterne, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100Trotter, Capt. D. , R. N. , 40Trotter, Catharine, 39-62; precocity, 39, 42; parentage, 40; poverty, 41-2; early verses, 43; correspondence with celebrated people, 43; _Agnes de Castro_, 43-5; _The Female Wits_, 45-6; _Fatal Friendship_, 47-9; elegy on Dryden's death, 49-50; _The Unhappy Penitent_, 50-1; _Love at a Loss_, 51; friendship with the Burnets, 52; philosophical studies, 42, 52-3; enthusiasm for Locke, 53, 55; _The Revolution in Sweden_, 54, 57; correspondence with Leibnitz, 55; indignation at aspersions on feminine intellectuality, 56-7; poem of welcome to Marlborough, 58; attachment to G. Burnet, 59-60; marriage with Mr. Cockburn, 60; later life, 60-1Trotter, Mrs. , poverty of, 41Tupper, 5Turkey Company, 40

_Ulalume_, by E. A. Poe, 103, 107, 109, 112Upchear, Henry, 31

_Veluvana_, by Lord Redesdale, theme of, 222-4, 226_Venetia_, by B. Disraeli, 163Venice, its fascination for Disraeli, 163Verbruggen, Mrs. , 45Verlaine, Paul, 7Vernède, R. E. , poems of, 284de Verville, B. , 95, 95, 96Victorian Age, the Agony of, 313-37Virgil, 12_Vivian Grey_, by B. Disraeli, 155, 156, 157-9Voltaire, 3, 162

Waller, 82Warburton, Dr. , 33, 81, 97Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 144, 327Ward, Plumer, novels of, 155, 156, 178Warton, Joseph and Thomas; Two Pioneers of Romanticism, address on, 65-90; parentage and early habits, 66-7; heralds of romantic movement, 67; literary contemporaries and atmosphere, 68; Joseph, the leading spirit, 68-9; _The Enthusiast_, its romantic qualities, 69; their revolt against principles of classic poetry, 70-4; characteristic features of early Romanticism, 74-9; Miltonic influence, 79-80; _Essay on the Genius of Pope_, 80-4; _Observations on the Faerie Queene_, 84-6; Johnson's criticism of, 86-7; Ritson's attack upon Thomas, 88; defects of, 89-90Webster's _White Devil_, 34_Wessex Ballads_, by T. Hardy, 238-40Wheeler, R. D. (Lady Lytton), Miss Devey's Life of, 121; story of marriage with Bulwer-Lytton, 121-9Whitehead, 74William III, 41Willis, N. P. , 105Wilson, Harriette, 130-1Wolseley, Lord, 328Wooler, Miss, 141, 142, 143Wordsworth, Hardy compared with, 251; speculations concerning future poetry, 298-9; 3, 4, 10, 74, 78, 90, 104, 107, 108, 110, 253Wycherley, 44

Yeats, 70Young, 68, 69, 81

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