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Literary and General Lectures and Essays

by Charles Kingsley · English · Gutenberg #11026 · 538,209 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Literary and General Lectures and Essays

Author: Charles Kingsley


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11026]
                Most recently updated: December 23, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11026

Credits: Transcribed by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY AND GENERAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS ***




Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




LITERARY AND GENERAL ESSAYS




Contents:  {0}
   The Stage as it was Once
   Thoughts on Shelley and Byron
   Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope
   Tennyson
   Burns and his School
   The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art
   On English Composition
   On English Literature
   Grots and Groves
   Hours with the Mystics
   Frederick Denison Maurice:  In Memoriam



THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE {1}



Let us think for a while upon what the Stage was once, in a republic
of the past--what it may be again, I sometimes dream, in some
republic of the future.  In order to do this, let me take you back in
fancy some 2314 years--440 years before the Christian era, and try to
sketch for you--alas! how clumsily--a great, though tiny people, in
one of their greatest moments--in one of the greatest moments, it may
be, of the human race.  For surely it is a great and a rare moment
for humanity, when all that is loftiest in it--when reverence for the
Unseen powers, reverence for the heroic dead, reverence for the
fatherland, and that reverence, too, for self, which is expressed in
stateliness and self-restraint, in grace and courtesy; when all
these, I say, can lend themselves, even for a day, to the richest
enjoyment of life--to the enjoyment of beauty in form and sound, and
of relaxation, not brutalising, but ennobling.

Rare, alas! have such seasons been in the history of poor humanity.
But when they have come, they have lifted it up one stage higher
thenceforth.  Men, having been such once, may become such again; and
the work which such times have left behind them becomes immortal.


A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.


Let me take you to the then still unfurnished theatre of Athens, hewn
out of the limestone rock on the south-east slope of the Acropolis.

Above are the new marble buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the
statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white
against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athene
Promachos, fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and
colonnades.  In front, and far below, gleams the blue sea, and
Salamis beyond.

And there are gathered the people of Athens--fifty thousand of them,
possibly, when the theatre was complete and full.  If it be fine,
they all wear garlands on their heads.  If the sun be too hot, they
wear wide-brimmed straw hats.  And if a storm comes on, they will
take refuge in the porticoes beneath; not without wine and cakes, for
what they have come to see will last for many an hour, and they
intend to feast their eyes and ears from sunrise to sunset.  On the
highest seats are slaves and freedmen, below them the free citizens;
and on the lowest seats of all are the dignitaries of the republic--
the priests, the magistrates, and the other [Greek]--the fair and
good men--as the citizens of the highest rank were called, and with
them foreign ambassadors and distinguished strangers.  What an
audience! the rapidest, subtlest, wittiest, down to the very cobblers
and tinkers, the world has ever seen.  And what noble figures on
those front seats; Pericles, with Aspasia beside him, and all his
friends--Anaxagoras the sage, Phidias the sculptor, and many another
immortal artist; and somewhere among the free citizens, perhaps
beside his father Sophroniscus the sculptor, a short, square, pug-
nosed boy of ten years old, looking at it all with strange eyes--"who
will be one day," so said the Pythoness at Delphi, "the wisest man in
Greece"--sage, metaphysician, humorist, warrior, patriot, martyr--for
his name is Socrates.

All are in their dresses of office; for this is not merely a day of
amusement, but of religions ceremony; sacred to Dionysos--Bacchus,
the inspiring god, who raises men above themselves, for good--or for
evil.

The evil, or at least the mere animal aspect of that inspiration, was
to be seen in forms grotesque and sensuous enough in those very
festivals, when the gayer and coarser part of the population, in town
and country, broke out into frantic masquerade--of which the silly
carnival of Rome is perhaps the last paltry and unmeaning relic--
"when," as the learned O. Muller says, "the desire of escaping from
self into something new and strange, of living in an imaginary world,
broke forth in a thousand ways; not merely in revelry and solemn
though fantastic songs, but in a hundred disguises, imitating the
subordinate beings--satyrs, pans, and nymphs, by whom the god was
surrounded, and through whom life seemed to pass from him into
vegetation, and branch off into a variety of beautiful or grotesque
forms--beings who were ever present to the fancy of the Greeks, as a
convenient step by which they could approach more nearly to the
presence of the Divinity."  But even out of that seemingly bare
chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis,
Cratinus, and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which
remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais
alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the
whole universe goes mad--but with a subtle method in its madness.

Yes, so it has been, under some form or other, in every race and
clime--ever since Eve ate of the magic fruit, that she might be as a
god, knowing good and evil, and found, poor thing, as most have
since, that it was far easier and more pleasant to know the evil than
to know the good.  But that theatre was built that men might know
therein the good as well as the evil.  To learn the evil, indeed,
according to their light, and the sure vengeance of Ate and the
Furies which tracks up the evil-doer.  But to learn also the good--
lessons of piety, patriotism, heroism, justice, mercy, self-
sacrifice, and all that comes out of the hearts of men and women not
dragged _below_, but raised _above_ themselves; and behind all--at
least in the nobler and earlier tragedies of AEschylus and Sophocles,
before Euripides had introduced the tragedy of mere human passion;
that sensation tragedy, which is the only one the world knows now,
and of which the world is growing rapidly tired--behind all, I say,
lessons of the awful and unfathomable mystery of human existence--of
unseen destiny; of that seemingly capricious distribution of weal and
woe, to which we can find no solution on this side the grave, for
which the old Greek could find no solution whatsoever.

Therefore there was a central object in the old Greek theatre, most
important to it, but which did not exist in the old Roman, and does
not exist in our theatres, because our tragedies, like the Roman, are
mere plays concerning love, murder, and so forth, while the Greek
were concerning the deepest relations of man to the Unseen.

The almost circular orchestra, or pit, between the benches and the
stage, was empty of what we call spectators--because it was destined
for the true and ideal spectators--the representatives of humanity;
in its centre was a round platform, the [Greek]--originally the altar
of Bacchus--from which the leader of these representatives, the
leader of the Chorus, could converse with the actors on the stage and
take his part in the drama; and round this thymele the Chorus ranged
with measured dance and song, chanting, to the sound of a simple
flute, odes such as the world had never heard before or since, save
perhaps in the temple-worship at Jerusalem.  A chorus now, as you
know, merely any number of persons singing in full harmony on any
subject.  The Chorus was then in tragedy, and indeed in the higher
comedy, what Schlegel well calls "the ideal spectator"--a personified
reflection on the action going on, the incorporation into the
representation itself of the sentiments of the poet, as the spokesman
of the whole human race.  He goes on to say (and I think truly),
"that the Chorus always retained among the Greeks a peculiar national
signification, publicity being, according to their republican
notions, essential to the completeness of every important
transaction."  Thus the Chorus represented idealised public opinion;
not, of course, the shifting hasty public opinion of the moment--to
that it was a conservative check, and it calmed it to soberness and
charity--for it was the matured public opinion of centuries; the
experience, and usually the sad experience, of many generations; the
very spirit of the Greek race.

The Chorus might be composed of what the poet would.  Of ancient
citizens, waiting for their sons to come back from the war, as in the
"Agamemnon" of AEschylus; of sea-nymphs, as in his "Prometheus
Bound;" even of the very Furies who hunt the matricide, as in his
"Eumenides;" of senators, as in the "Antigone" of Sophocles; or of
village farmers, as in his "OEdipus at Colonos"--and now I have named
five of the greatest poems, as I hold, written by mortal man till
Dante rose.  Or it may be the Chorus was composed--as in the comedies
of Aristophanes, the greatest humorist the world has ever seen--of
birds, or of frogs, or even of clouds.  It may rise to the level of
Don Quixote, or sink to that of Sancho Panza; for it is always the
incarnation of such wisdom, heavenly or earthly, as the poet wishes
the people to bring to bear on the subject-matter.

But let the poets themselves, rather than me, speak awhile.  Allow me
to give you a few specimens of these choruses--the first as an
example of that practical and yet surely not un-divine wisdom, by
which they supplied the place of our modern preacher, or essayist, or
didactic poet.

Listen to this of the old men's chorus in the "Agamemnon," in the
spirited translation of my friend Professor Blackie:


   'Twas said of old, and 'tis said to-day,
   That wealth to prosperous stature grown
      Begets a birth of its own:
   That a surfeit of evil by good is prepared,
   And sons must bear what allotment of woe
      Their sires were spared.
   But this I refuse to believe:  I know
      That impious deeds conspire
   To beget an offspring of impious deeds
      Too like their ugly sire.
But whoso is just, though his wealth like a river
Flow down, shall be scathless:  his house shall rejoice
   In an offspring of beauty for ever.

   The heart of the haughty delights to beget
   A haughty heart.  From time to time
   In children's children recurrent appears
      The ancestral crime.
When the dark hour comes that the gods have decreed
And the Fury burns with wrathful fires,
   A demon unholy, with ire unabated,
   Lies like black night on the halls of the fated;
   And the recreant Son plunges guiltily on
      To perfect the guilt of his Sires.

But Justice shines in a lowly cell;
In the homes of poverty, smoke-begrimed,
With the sober-minded she loves to dwell.
   But she turns aside
From the rich man's house with averted eye,
The golden-fretted halls of pride
Where hands with lucre are foul, and the praise
Of counterfeit goodness smoothly sways;
And wisely she guides in the strong man's despite
   All things to an issue of RIGHT.


Let me now give you another passage from the "Eumenides"--or
"Furies"--of AEschylus.

Orestes, Prince of Argos, you must remember, has avenged on his
mother Clytemnestra the murder of his father, King Agamemnon, on his
return from Troy.  Pursued by the Furies, he takes refuge in the
temple of Apollo at Delphi, and then, still Fury-haunted, goes to
Athens, where Pallas Athene, the warrior-maiden, the tutelary goddess
of Athens, bids him refer his cause to the Areopagus, the highest
court of Athens, Apollo acting as his advocate, and she sitting as
umpire in the midst.  The white and black balls are thrown into the
urn, and are equal; and Orestes is only delivered by the decision of
Athene--as the representative of the nearer race of gods, the
Olympians, the friends of man, in whose likeness man is made.  The
Furies are the representatives of the older and darker creed--which
yet has a depth of truth in it--of the irreversible dooms which
underlie all nature; and which represent the Law, and not the Gospel,
the consequence of the mere act, independent of the spirit which has
prompted it.

They break out in fury against the overbearing arrogance of these
younger gods.  Athene bears their rage with equanimity, addresses
them in the language of kindness, even of veneration, till these so
indomitable beings are unable to withstand the charm of her mild
eloquence.  They are to have a sanctuary in the Athenian land, and to
be called no more Furies (Erinnys), but Eumenides--the _well-
conditioned_--the kindly goddesses.  And all ends with a solemn
precession round the orchestra, with hymns of blessing, while the
terrible Chorus of the Furies, clothed in black, with blood-stained
girdles, and serpents in their hair, in masks having perhaps somewhat
of the terrific beauty of Medusa-masks, are convoyed to their new
sanctuary by a procession of children, women, and old men in purple
robes with torches in their hands, after Athene and the Furies have
sung, in response to each other, a chorus from which I must beg leave
to give you an extract or two:


Eldest Fury (Leader of the Chorus).

Far from thy dwelling, and far from thy border,
By the grace of my godhead benignant I order
The blight which may blacken the bloom of the trees.
Far from thy border, and far from thy dwelling,
Be the hot blast which shrivels the bud in its swelling,
The seed-rotting taint, and the creeping disease.
Thy flocks be still doubled, thy seasons be steady,
And when Hermes is near thee, thy hand be still ready
   The Heaven-dropt bounty to seize.

Athene.

Hear her words, my city's warders--
Fraught with blessings, she prevaileth
With Olympians and Infernals,
Dread Erinnys much revered.
Mortal faith she guideth plainly
To what goal she pleaseth, sending
Songs to some, to others days
With tearful sorrows dulled.

Furies.

   Far from thy border
   The lawless disorder
That sateless of evil shall reign;
   Far from thy dwelling,
   The dear blood welling,
That taints thine own hearth with the slain.
   When slaughter from slaughter
   Shall flow like the water,
And rancour from rancour shall grow
   But joy with joy blending,
   Live, each to all lending;
And hating one-hearted the foe.
   When bliss hath departed;
   From love single-hearted,
A fountain of healing shall flow.

Athene.

Wisely now the tongue of kindness
Thou hast found, the way of love.
And these terror-speaking faces
Now look wealth to me and mine.
Her so willing, ye more willing,
Now receive.  This land and city,
On ancient right securely throned,
Shall shine for evermore.

Furies.

Hail, and all hail, mighty people, be greeted,
On the sons of Athena shines sunshine the clearest.
Blest people, near Jove the Olympian seated.
And dear to the maiden his daughter the dearest.
Timely wise 'neath the wings of the daughter ye gather,
And mildly looks down on her children the Father.


Those of you here who love your country as well as the old Athenians
loved theirs, will feel at once the grand political significance of
such a scene, in which patriotism and religion become one--and feel,
too, the exquisite dramatic effect of the innocent, the weak, the
unwarlike, welcoming among them, without fear, because without guilt,
those ancient snaky-haired sisters, emblems of all that is most
terrible and most inscrutable, in the destiny of nations, of
families, and of men:


To their hallowed habitations
'Neath Ogygian earth's foundations
In that darksome hall
Sacrifice and supplication
Shall not fail.  In adoration
Silent worship all.


Listen again, to the gentler patriotism of a gentler poet, Sophocles
himself.  The village of Colonos, a mile from Athens, was his
birthplace; and in his "OEdipus Coloneus," he makes his Chorus of
village officials sing thus of their consecrated olive grove:


   In good hap, stranger, to these rural seats
   Thou comest, to this region's blest retreats,
   Where white Colonos lifts his head,
   And glories in the bounding steed.
Where sadly sweet the frequent nightingale
   Impassioned pours his evening song,
And charms with varied notes each verdant vale,
   The ivy's dark-green boughs among,
   Or sheltered 'neath the clustering vine
   Which, high above him forms a bower,
   Safe from the sun or stormy shower,
   Where frolic Bacchus often roves,
And visits with his fostering nymphs the groves,
   Bathed in the dew of heaven each morn,
   Fresh is the fair Narcissus born,
   Of those great gods the crown of old;
   The crocus glitters, robed in gold.
Here restless fountains ever murmuring glide,
   And as their crisped streamlets play,
To feed, Cephisus, thine unfailing tide,
   Fresh verdure marks their winding way.
   Here oft to raise the tuneful song
   The virgin band of Muses deigns,
And car-borne Aphrodite guides her golden reins.


Then they go on, this band of village elders, to praise the gods for
their special gifts to that small Athenian land.  They praise Pallas
Athene, who gave their forefathers the olive; then Poseidon--Neptune,
as the Romans call him--who gave their forefathers the horse; and
something more--the ship--the horse of the sea, as they, like the old
Norse Vikings after them, delighted to call it


Our highest vaunt is this--Thy grace,
   Poseidon, we behold,
The ruling curb, embossed with gold,
Controls the courser's managed pace,
Though loud, oh king, thy billows roar,
Our strong hands grasp the labouring oar,
And while the Nereids round it play,
Light cuts our bounding bark its way.


What a combination of fine humanities!  Dance and song, patriotism
and religion, so often parted among us, have flowed together into one
in these stately villagers; each a small farmer; each a trained
soldier, and probably a trained seaman also; each a self-governed
citizen; and each a cultured gentleman, if ever there were gentlemen
on earth.

But what drama, doing, or action--for such is the meaning of the
word--is going on upon the stage, to be commented on by the
sympathising Chorus?

One drama, at least, was acted in Athens in that year--440 B.C.--
which you, I doubt not, know well--"Antigone," that of Sophocles,
which Mendelssohn has resuscitated in our own generation, by setting
it to music, divine indeed, though very different from the music to
which it was set, probably by Sophocles himself, at its first, and
for aught we know, its only representation; for pieces had not then,
as now, a run of a hundred nights and more.  The Athenian genius was
so fertile, and the Athenian audience so eager for novelty, that new
pieces were demanded, and were forthcoming, for each of the great
festivals, and if a piece was represented a second time it was
usually after an interval of some years.  They did not, moreover,
like the moderns, run every night to some theatre or other, as a part
of the day's amusement.  Tragedy, and even comedy, were serious
subjects, calling out, not a passing sigh, or passing laugh, but all
the higher faculties and emotions.  And as serious subjects were to
be expressed in verse and music, which gave stateliness, doubtless,
even to the richest burlesques of Aristophanes, and lifted them out
of mere street-buffoonery into an ideal fairyland of the grotesque,
how much more stateliness must verse and music have added to their
tragedy!  And how much have we lost, toward a true appreciation of
their dramatic art, by losing almost utterly not only the laws of
their melody and harmony, but even the true metric time of their
odes!--music and metre, which must have surely been as noble as their
poetry, their sculpture, their architecture, possessed by the same
exquisite sense of form and of proportion.  One thing we can
understand--how this musical form of the drama, which still remains
to us in lower shapes, in the oratorio, in the opera, must have
helped to raise their tragedies into that ideal sphere in which they
all, like the "Antigone," live and move.  So ideal and yet so human;
nay rather, truly ideal, because truly human.  The gods, the heroes,
the kings, the princesses of Greek tragedy were dear to the hearts of
Greek republicans, not merely as the founders of their states, not
merely as the tutelary deities, many of them, of their country:  but
as men and women like themselves, only more vast; with mightier
wills, mightier virtues, mightier sorrows, and often mightier crimes;
their inward free-will battling, as Schlegel has well seen, against
outward circumstance and overruling fate, as every man should battle,
unless he sink to be a brute.  "In tragedy," says Schlegel--uttering
thus a deep and momentous truth--"the gods themselves either come
forward as the servants of destiny and mediate executors of its
decrees, or approve themselves godlike only by asserting their
liberty of action and entering upon the same struggles with fate
which man himself has to encounter."  And I believe this, that this
Greek tragedy, with its godlike men and manlike gods, and heroes who
had become gods by the very vastness of their humanity, was a
preparation, and it may be a necessary preparation, for the true
Christian faith in a Son of Man, who is at once utterly human and
utterly divine.  That man is made in the likeness of God--is the root
idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive,
without which neither the Greek Tragedies nor the Homeric Poems, six
hundred years before them, could have been composed.  Doubtless the
idea that man was like a god degenerated too often into the idea that
the gods were like men, and as wicked.  But that travestie of a great
truth is not confined to those old Greeks.  Some so-called Christian
theories--as I hold--have sinned in that direction as deeply as the
Athenians of old.

Meanwhile, I say, that this long acquiescence in the conception of
godlike struggle, godlike daring, godlike suffering, godlike
martyrdom; the very conception which was so foreign to the
mythologies of any other race--save that of the Jews, and perhaps of
our own Teutonic forefathers--did prepare, must have prepared men to
receive as most rational and probable, as the satisfaction of their
highest instincts, the idea of a Being in whom all those partial rays
culminated in clear, pure light; of a Being at once utterly human and
utterly divine; who by struggle, suffering, self-sacrifice, without a
parallel, achieved a victory over circumstance and all the dark
powers which beleaguer main without a parallel likewise.

Take, as an example, the figure which you know best--the figure of
Antigone herself--devoting herself to be entombed alive, for the sake
of love and duty.  Love of a brother, which she can only prove, alas!
by burying his corpse.  Duty to the dead, an instinct depending on no
written law, but springing out of the very depth of those blind and
yet sacred monitions which prove that the true man is not an animal,
but a spirit; fulfilling her holy purpose, unchecked by fear,
unswayed by her sisters' entreaties.  Hardening her heart
magnificently till her fate is sealed; and then after proving her
godlike courage, proving the tenderness of her womanhood by that
melodious wail over her own untimely death and the loss of marriage
joys, which some of you must know from the music of Mendelssohn, and
which the late Dean Milman has put into English thus:


Come, fellow-citizens, and see
The desolate Antigone.
On the last path her steps shall treed,
Set forth, the journey of the dead,
Watching, with vainly lingering gaze,
Her last, last sun's expiring rays.

Never to see it, never more,
For down to Acheron's dread shore,
A living victim am I led
To Hades' universal bed.
To my dark lot no bridal joys
Belong, nor o'er the jocund noise
Of hymeneal chant shall sound for me,
But death, cold death, my only spouse shall be.

Oh tomb!  Oh bridal chamber!  Oh deep-delved
And strongly-guarded mansion!  I descend
To meet in your dread chambers all my kindred,
Who in dark multitudes have crowded down
Where Proserpine received the dead.  But I,
The last--and oh how few more miserable!--
Go down, or ere my sands of life are run.


And let me ask you whether the contemplation of such a self-sacrifice
should draw you, should have drawn those who heard the tale nearer
to, or farther from, a certain cross which stood on Calvary some 1800
years ago?  May not the tale of Antigone heard from mother or from
nurse have nerved ere now some martyr-maiden to dare and suffer in an
even holier cause?

But to return.  This set purpose of the Athenian dramatists of the
best school to set before men a magnified humanity, explains much in
their dramas which seems to us at first not only strange but faulty.
The masks which gave one grand but unvarying type of countenance to
each well-known historic personage, and thus excluded the play of
feature, animated gesture, and almost all which we now consider as
"acting" proper; the thick-soled cothurni which gave the actor a more
than human stature; the poverty (according to our notions) of the
scenery, which usually represented merely the front of a palace or
other public place, and was often though not always unchanged during
the whole performance; the total absence, in fact, of anything like
that scenic illusion which most managers of theatres seem now to
consider as their highest achievement; the small number of the
actors, two, or at most three only, being present on the stage at
once,--the simplicity of the action, in which intrigue (in the
playhouse sense) and any complication of plot are utterly absent; all
this must have concentrated not the eye of the spectator on the
scene, but his ear upon the voice, and his emotions on the personages
who stood out before him without a background, sharp-cut and clear as
a group of statuary, which is the same, place it where you will,
complete in itself--a world of beauty, independent of all other
things and beings save on the ground on which it needs must stand.
It was the personage rather than his surroundings, which was to be
impressed by every word on the spectator's heart and intellect; and
the very essence of Greek tragedy is expressed in the still famous
words of Medea:


Che resta?  Io.


Contrast this with the European drama--especially with the highest
form of it--our own Elizabethan.  It resembles, as has been often
said in better words than mine, not statuary but painting.  These
dramas affect colour, light, and shadow, background whether of town
or country, description of scenery where scenic machinery is
inadequate, all, in fact, which can blend the action and the actors
with the surrounding circumstances, without letting them altogether
melt into the circumstances; which can show them a part of the great
whole, by harmony or discord with the whole universe, down to the
flowers beneath their feet.  This, too, had to be done:  how it
became possible for even the genius of a Shakespeare to get it done,
I may with your leave hint to you hereafter.  Why it was not given to
the Greeks to do it, I know not.

Let us at least thank them for what they did.  One work was given
them, and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled
before; as it will never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks'
work was done not for themselves alone but for all races in all
times; and Greek Art is the heirloom of the whole human race; and
that work was to assert in drama, lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic,
the dignity of man--the dignity of man which they perceived for the
most part with their intense aesthetic sense, through the beautiful
in man.  Man with them was divine, inasmuch as he could perceive
beauty and be beautiful himself.  Beauty might be physical,
aesthetic, intellectual, moral.  But in proportion as a thing was
perfect it revealed its own perfection by its beauty.  Goodness
itself was a form--though the highest form--of beauty.  [Greek] meant
both the physically beautiful and the morally good; [Greek] both the
ugly and the bad.

Out of this root-idea sprang the whole of that Greek sculpture, which
is still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of
the world.

Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods.  This is an
historic fact.  Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in
Greece save those of deities.  But of what form?  We all know that
the usual tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or
less monstrous.  Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was
certainly with the Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic
races of Syria and Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions
which they attributed to those objects of their dread, appeasable
alone by human sacrifice.  Or the monstrosity, as with the hawk-
headed or cat-headed Egyptian idols, the winged bulls of Nineveh and
Babylon, the many-handed deities of Hindostan--merely symbolised
powers which could not, so the priest and the sculptor held, belong
to mere humanity.  Now, of such monstrous forms of idols, the records
in Greece are very few and very ancient--relics of an older worship,
and most probably of an older race.  From the earliest historic
period, the Greek was discerning more and more that the divine could
be best represented by the human; the tendency of his statuary was
more and more to honour that divine, by embodying it in the highest
human beauty.

In lonely mountain shrines there still might linger, feared and
honoured, dolls like those black virgins, of unknown antiquity, which
still work wonders on the European continent.  In the mysterious
cavern of Phigalia, for instance, on the Eleatic shore of
Peloponnese, there may have been in remote times--so the legend ran--
an old black wooden image, a woman with a horse's head and mane, and
serpents growing round her head, who held a dolphin in one hand and a
dove in the other.  And this image may have been connected with old
nature-myths about the marriage of Demeter and Poseidon--that is, of
encroachments of the sea upon the land; and the other myths of
Demeter, the earth-mother, may have clustered round the place, till
the Phigalians were glad--for it was profitable as well as
honourable--to believe that in their cavern Demeter sat mourning for
the loss of Proserpine, whom Pluto had carried down to Hades, and all
the earth was barren till Zeus sent the Fates, or Iris, to call her
forth, and restore fertility to the world.  And it may be true--the
legend as Pausanias tells it 600 years after--that the old wooden
idol having been burnt, and the worship of Demeter neglected till a
famine ensued, the Phigalians, warned by the Oracle of Delphi, hired
Onatas, a contemporary of Polygnotus and Phidias, to make them a
bronze replica of the old idol, from some old copy and from a drama
of his own.  The story may be true.  When Pausanias went thither, in
the second century after Christ, the cave and the fountain, and the
sacred grove of oaks, and the altar outside, which was to be polluted
with the blood of no victim--the only offerings being fruits and
honey, and undressed wool--were still there.  The statue was gone.
Some said it had been destroyed by the fall of the cliff; some were
not sure that it had ever been there at all.  And meanwhile
Praxiteles had already brought to perfection (Paus. 1, 2, sec. 4) the
ideal of Demeter, mother-like, as Here--whom we still call Juno now--
but softer-featured, and her eyes more closed.

And so for mother earth, as for the rest, the best representation of
the divine was the human.  Now, conceive such an idea taking hold,
however slowly, of a people of rare physical beauty, of acutest eye
for proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human
figure such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and
gifted, moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that inmate
diligence, of which Mr. Carlyle has said, "that genius is only an
infinite capacity of taking pains," and we can understand somewhat of
the causes which produced those statues, human and divine, which awe
and shame the artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called
civilisation--we can understand somewhat of the reverence for the
human form, of the careful study of every line, the storing up for
use each scattered fragment of beauty of which the artist caught
sight, even in his daily walks, and consecrating it in his memory to
the service of him or her whom he was trying to embody in marble or
in bronze.  And when the fashion came in of making statues of victors
in the games, and other distinguished persons, a new element was
introduced, which had large social as well as artistic results.  The
sculptor carried his usual reverence into his careful delineation of
the victor's form, while he obtained in him a model, usually of the
very highest type, for perfecting his idea of some divinity.  The
possibility of gaining the right to a statue gave a fresh impulse to
all competitors in the public games, and through them to the
gymnastic training throughout all the states of Greece, which made
the Greeks the most physically able and graceful, as well as the most
beautiful people known to the history of the human race,--a people
who, reverencing beauty, reverenced likewise grace or acted beauty,
so utterly and honestly, that nothing was too humble for a free man
to do, if it were not done awkwardly and ill.  As an instance,
Sophocles himself--over and above his poetic genius, one of the most
cultivated gentlemen, as well as one of the most exquisite musicians,
dancers, and gymnasts, and one of the most just, pious, and gentle of
all Greece--could not, by reason of the weakness of his voice, act in
his own plays, as poets were wont to do, and had to perform only the
office of stage-manager.  Twice he took part in the action, once as
the blind old Thamyris playing on the harp, and once in his own lost
tragedy, the "Nausicaa."  There in the scene in which the Princess,
as she does in Homer's "Odyssey," comes down to the sea-shore with
her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then to play at ball--
Sophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one thing he
could do better than any there--and, dressed in women's clothes,
among the lads who represented the maidens, played at ball before the
Athenian people.

Just sixty years after the representation of the "Antigone," 10,000
Greeks, far on the plains of Babylon, cut through the whole Persian
army, as the railway train cuts through a herd of buffalo, and then
losing all their generals by treacherous warfare, fought their way
north from Babylon to Trebizond on the Black Sea, under the guidance
of a young Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, who had never served in the
army before.  The retreat of Xenophon and his 10,000 will remain for
ever as one of the grandest triumphs of civilisation over brute
force:  but what made it possible?  That these men, and their
ancestors before them, had been for at least 100 years in _training_,
physical, intellectual, and moral, which made their bodies and their
minds able to dare and suffer like those old heroes of whom their
tragedy had taught them, and whose spirits they still believed would
help the valiant Greek.  And yet that feat, which looks to us so
splendid, attracted, as far as I am aware, no special admiration at
the time.  So was the cultivated Greek expected to behave whenever he
came in contact with the uncultivated barbarian.

But from what had sprung in that little state, this exuberance of
splendid life, physical, aesthetic, intellectual, which made, and
will make the name of Athens and of the whole cluster of Greek
republics for ever admirable to civilised man?  Had it sprung from
long years of peaceful prosperity?  From infinite making of money and
comfort, according to the laws of so-called political economy, and
the dictates of enlightened selfishness?  Not so.  But rather out of
terror and agony, and all but utter ruin--and out of a magnificent
want of economy, and the divine daring and folly of self-sacrifice.

In Salamis across the strait a trophy stood, and round that trophy,
forty years before, Sophocles, the author of "Antigone," then sixteen
years of age, the loveliest and most cultivated lad in Athens,
undraped like a faun, with lyre in hand, was leading the Chorus of
Athenian youths, and singing to Athene, the tutelary goddess, a hymn
of triumph for a glorious victory--the very symbol of Greece and
Athens, springing up into a joyous second youth after invasion and
desolation, as the grass springs up after the prairie fire has
passed.  But the fire had been terrible.  It had burnt Athens at
least, down to the very roots.  True, while Sophocles was dancing,
Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at Salamis, as his father
Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years before, was fleeing back
to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of slaves and mercenaries to
be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by sea at Mycale.  The
bold hope was over, in which the Persian, ever since the days of
Cyrus, had indulged--that he, the despot of the East, should be the
despot of the West likewise.  It seemed to them as possible, though
not as easy, to subdue the Aryan Greek, as it had been to subdue the
Semite and the Turanian, the Babylonian and the Syrian; to riffle his
temples, to destroy his idols, carry off his women and children as
colonists into distant lands, as they had been doing with all the
nations of the East.  And they had succeeded with isolated colonies,
isolated islands of Greeks, and the shores of Asia Minor.  But when
they dared, at last, to attack the Greek in his own sacred land of
Hellas, they found they had bearded a lion in his den.  Nay rather--
as those old Greeks would have said--they had dared to attack Pallas
Athene, the eldest daughter of Zeus--emblem of that serene and pure
divine wisdom, of whom Solomon sang of old:  "The Lord possessed me
in the beginning of His way, before His works of old.  When He
prepared the heavens, I was there, when He appointed the foundation
of the earth, then was I by him, as one brought up with Him, and I
was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him:  rejoicing in the
habitable part of His earth; _and_ my _delight was with the sons of
men_"--to attack Athene and her brother Apollo, Lord of light, and
beauty, and culture, and grace, and inspiration--to attack them, not
in the name of Ormuzd, nor of any other deity, but in the name of
mere brute force and lust of conquest.  The old Persian spirit was
gone out of them.  They were the symbols now of nothing save
despotism and self-will, wealth and self-indulgence.  They, once the
children of Ormuzd or light, had become the children of Ahriman or
darkness; and therefore it was, as I believe, that Xerxes' 1000
ships, and the two million (or, as some have it, five million) human
beings availed naught against the little fleets and little battalions
of men who believed with a living belief in Athene and Apollo, and
therefore--ponder it well, for it is true--with a living belief,
under whatsoever confusions and divisions of personality, in a God
who loved, taught, inspired men, a just God who befriended the
righteous cause, the cause of freedom and patriotism, a Deity, the
echo of whose mind and will to man was the song of Athene on Olympus,
when she


Chanted of order and right, and of foresight, and order of peoples;
Chanted of labour and craft, wealth in the port and the garner;
Chanted of valour and fame, and the man who can fall with the
foremost,
Fighting for children and wife, and the field which his father
bequeathed him.
Sweetly and cunningly sang she, and planned new lessons for mortals.
Happy who hearing obey her, the wise unsullied Athene.


Ah, that they had always obeyed her, those old Greeks.  But
meanwhile, as I said, the agony had been extreme.  If Athens had
sinned, she had been purged as by fire; and the fire--surely of God--
had been terrible.  Northern Greece had either been laid waste with
fire and sword, or had gone over to the Persian, traitors in their
despair.  Attica, almost the only loyal state, had been overrun; the
old men, women, and children had fled to the neighbouring islands, or
to the Peloponnese.  Athens itself had been destroyed; and while
young Sophocles was dancing round the trophy at Salamis, the
Acropolis was still a heap of blackened ruins.

But over and above their valour, over and above their loyalty, over
and above their exquisite aesthetic faculty, these Athenians had a
resilience of self-reliant energy, like that of the French--like that
of the American people after the fire of Chicago; and Athens rose
from her ashes to be awhile, not only, as she had nobly earned by
suffering and endurance, the leading state in Greece, but a mighty
fortress, a rich commercial port, a living centre of art, poetry,
philosophy, such as this earth has never seen before or since.

On the plateau of that little crag of the Acropolis some eight
hundred feet in length, by four hundred in breadth--about the size
and shape of the Castle Rock at Edinburgh--was gathered, within forty
years of the battle of Salamis, more and more noble beauty than ever
stood together on any other spot of like size.

The sudden relief from crushing pressure, and the joyous
consciousness of well-earned honours, made the whole spirit-nature of
the people blossom out, as it were, into manifold forms of activity,
beauty, research, and raised, in raising Greece, the whole human race
thenceforth.

What might they not have done--looking at what they actually did--for
the whole race of man?

But no--they fell, even more rapidly than they rose, till their grace
and their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the
willing ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality,
the vice of the whole old world--the Scapia or Figaro of the old
world--infinitely able, but with all his ability consecrated to the
service of his own base self.  The Greekling--as Juvenal has it--in
want of a dinner, would climb somehow to heaven itself, at the
bidding of his Roman master.

Ah what a fall!  And what was the inherent weakness which caused that
fall?

I say at once--want of honesty.  The Greek was not to be depended on;
if it suited him, he would lie, betray, overreach, change sides, and
think it no sin.  He was the sharpest of men.  Sharp practice, in our
modern sense of the word, was the very element in which he floated.
Any scholar knows it.  In the grand times of Marathon and Salamis,
down to the disastrous times of the Peloponnesian War and the thirty
tyrants, no public man's hands were clean, with the exception,
perhaps, of Aristides, who was banished because men were tired of
hearing him called the Just.  The exciting cause of the Peloponnesian
war, and the consequent downfall of Athens, was not merely the
tyranny she exercised over the states allied to her, it was the sharp
practice of the Athenians, in misappropriating the tribute paid by
the allies to the decoration of Athens.  And in laying the
foundations of the Parthenon was sown, by a just judgment, the seed
of ruin for the state which gloried in it.  And if the rulers were
such, what were the people?  If the free were such, what were the
slaves?

Hence, weakness at home and abroad, mistrust of generals and
admirals, paralysing all bold and clear action, peculations and
corruptions at home, internecine wars between factions inside states,
and between states or groups of states, revolutions followed by
despotism, and final exhaustion and slavery--slavery to a people who
were coming across the western sea, hard-headed, hard-hearted, caring
nothing for art, or science, whose pleasures were coarse and cruel,
but with a certain rough honesty, reverence for country, for law, and
for the ties of a family--men of a somewhat old English type, who had
over and above, like the English, the inspiring belief that they
could conquer the whole world, and who very nearly succeeded in that-
-as we have, to our great blessing, not succeeded--I mean, of course,
the Romans.



THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON {35}



The poets, who forty years ago proclaimed their intention of working
a revolution in English literature, and who have succeeded in their
purpose, recommended especially a more simple and truthful view of
nature.  The established canons of poetry were to be discarded as
artificial; as to the matter, the poet was to represent mere nature
as he saw her; as to form, he was to be his own law.  Freedom and
nature were to be his watchwords.

No theory could be more in harmony with the spirit of the age, and
the impulse which had been given to it by the burning words of Jean
Jacques Rousseau.  The school which arose expressed fairly the unrest
and unruliness of the time, its weariness of artificial restraint and
unmeaning laws, its craving after a nobler and a more earnest life,
its sense of a glory and mystery in the physical universe, hidden
from the poets of the two preceding centuries, and now revealed by
science.  So far all was hopeful.  But it soon became apparent, that
each poet's practical success in carrying out the theory was,
paradoxically enough, in inverse proportion to his belief in it; that
those who like Wordsworth, Southey, and Keats, talked most about
naturalness and freedom, and most openly reprobated the school of
Pope, were, after all, least natural and least free; that the balance
of those excellences inclined much more to those who, like Campbell,
Rogers, Crabbe, and Moore, troubled their heads with no theories, but
followed the best old models which they knew; and that the rightful
sovereign of the new Parnassus, Lord Byron, protested against the new
movement, while he followed it; upheld to the last the models which
it was the fashion to decry, confessed to the last, in poetry as in
morals, "Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor," and uttered again
and again prophecies of the downfall of English poetry and English
taste, which seem to be on the eve of realisation.

Now no one will, we presume, be silly enough to say that humanity has
gained nothing by all the very beautiful poetry which has been poured
out on it during the last thirty years in England.  Nevertheless,
when we see poetry dying down among us year by year, although the age
is becoming year by year more marvellous and inspiring, we have a
right to look for some false principle in a school which has had so
little enduring vitality, which seems now to be able to perpetuate
nothing of itself but its vices.

The answer so easy twenty years ago, that the new poetry was spoiled
by an influx of German bad taste, will hardly hold good now, except
with a very few very ignorant people.  It is now known, of course,
that whatsoever quarrel Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe may have had
with Pope, it was not on account of his being too severe an artist,
but too loose a one; not for being too classical, but not classical
enough; that English poets borrowed from them nothing but their most
boyish and immature types of thought, and that these were reproduced,
and laughed at here, while the men themselves were writing works of a
purity, and loftiness, and completeness, unknown to the world--except
in the writings of Milton--for nearly two centuries.  This feature,
however, of the new German poetry, was exactly the one which no
English poet deigned to imitate, save Byron alone; on whom,
accordingly, Goethe always looked with admiration and affection.  But
the rest went their way unheeding; and if they have defects, those
defects are their own; for when they did copy the German taste, they,
for the most part, deliberately chose the evil, and refused the good;
and have their reward in a fame which we believe will prove itself a
very short-lived one.

We cannot deny, however, that, in spite of all faults, these men had
a strength.  They have exercised an influence.  And they have done so
by virtue of seeing a fact which more complete, and in some cases
more manly poets, did not see.  Strangely enough, Shelley, the man
who was the greatest sinner of them all against the canons of good
taste, was the man who saw that new fact, if not most clearly, still
most intensely, and who proclaimed it most boldly.  His influence,
therefore, is outliving that of his compeers, and growing and
spreading, for good and for evil; and will grow and spread for years
to come, as long as the present great unrest goes on smouldering in
men's hearts, till the hollow settlement of 1815 is burst asunder
anew, and men feel that they are no longer in the beginning of the
end, but in the end itself, and that this long thirty years' prologue
to the reconstruction of rotten Europe is played out at last, and the
drama itself begun.

Such is the way of Providence; the race is not to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong, nor the prophecy to the wise.  The Spirit
bloweth where He listeth, and sends on his errands--those who deny
Him, rebel against Him--profligates, madmen, and hysterical
Rousseaus, hysterical Shelleys, uttering words like the east wind.
He uses strange tools in His cosmogony:  but He does not use them in
vain.  By bad men if not by good, by fools if not by wise, God's work
is done, and done right well.

There was, then, a strength and a truth in all these men; and it was
this--that more or less clearly, they all felt that they were
standing between two worlds; and the ruins of an older age; upon the
threshold of a new one.  To Byron's mind, the decay and rottenness of
the old was, perhaps, the most palpable; to Shelley's, the possible
glory of the new.  Wordsworth declared--a little too noisily, we
think, as if he had been the first to discover the truth--the dignity
and divineness of the most simple human facts and relationships.
Coleridge declares that the new can only assume living form by
growing organically out of the old institutions.  Keats gives a sad
and yet a wholesome answer to them both, as, young and passionate, he
goes down with Faust "to the Mothers"--


   To the rich warm youth of the nations,
Childlike in virtue and faith, though childlike in passion and
pleasure,
Childlike still, still near to the gods, while the sunset of Eden
Lingered in rose-red rays on the peaks of Ionian mountains.


And there, amid the old classic forms, he cries:  "These things, too,
are eternal--


A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.


These, or things even fairer than they, must have their place in the
new world, if it is to be really a home for the human race."  So he
sings, as best he can, the half-educated and consumptive stable-
keeper's son, from his prison-house of London brick, and in one
mighty yearn after that beauty from which he is debarred, breaks his
young heart, and dies, leaving a name not "writ in water," as he
dreamed, but on all fair things, all lovers' hearts, for evermore.

Here, then, to return, is the reason why the hearts of the present
generation have been influenced so mightily by these men, rather than
by those of whom Byron wrote, with perfect sincerity:


Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe will try
'Gainst you the question with posterity.


These lines, written in 1818, were meant to apply only to Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and Southey.  Whether they be altogether just or unjust
is not now the question.  It must seem somewhat strange to our young
poets that Shelley's name is not among those who are to try the
question of immortality against the Lake School; and yet many of his
most beautiful poems had been already written.  Were, then, "The
Revolt of Islam" and "Alastor" not destined, it seems, in Byron's
opinion, to live as long as the "Lady of the Lake" and the "Mariners
of England?"  Perhaps not.  At least the omission of Shelley's name
is noteworthy.  But still more noteworthy are these words of his to
Mr. Murray, dated January 23, 1819:

"Read Pope--most of you don't--but do . . . and the inevitable
consequence would be, that you would burn all that I have ever
written, and all your other wretched Claudians of the day (except
Scott and Crabbe) into the bargain."

And here arises a new question--Is Shelley, then, among the
Claudians?  It is a hard saying.  The present generation will receive
it with shouts of laughter.  Some future one, which studies and
imitates Shakespeare instead of anatomising him, and which gradually
awakens to the now forgotten fact, that a certain man named Edmund
Spenser once wrote a poem, the like of which the earth never saw
before, and perhaps may never see again, may be inclined to acquiesce
in the verdict, and believe that Byron had a discrimination in this
matter, as in a hundred more, far more acute than any of his
compeers, and had not eaten in vain, poor fellow, of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil.  In the meanwhile, we may perceive in the
poetry of the two men deep and radical differences, indicating a
spiritual difference between them even more deep, which may explain
the little notice which Byron takes of Shelley's poetry, and the fact
that the two men had no deep sympathy for each other, and could not
in any wise "pull together" during the sojourn in Italy.  Doubtless,
there were plain outward faults of temper and character on both
sides; neither was in a state of mind which could trust itself, or be
trusted by those who loved them best.  Friendship can only consist
with the calm and self-restraint and self-respect of moral and
intellectual health; and both were diseased, fevered, ready to take
offence, ready, unwittingly, to give it.  But the diseases of the two
were different, as their natures were; and Shelley's fever was not
Byron's.

Now it is worth remarking, that it is Shelley's form of fever, rather
than Byron's, which has been of late years the prevailing epidemic.
Since Shelley's poems have become known in England, and a timid
public, after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain which
was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to sip, and then,
finding the magic water at all events sweet enough, to quench its
thirst with unlimited draughts, Byron's fiercer wine has lost favour.
Well--at least the taste of the age is more refined, if that be
matter of congratulation.  And there is an excuse for preferring
champagne to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and
quassia, salt and cocculus indicus.  Nevertheless, worse ingredients
than oenanthic acid may lurk in the delicate draught, and the Devil's
Elixir may be made fragrant, and sweet, and transparent enough, as
French moralists well know, for the most fastidious palate.  The
private sipping of eua-de-cologne, say the London physicians, has
increased mightily of late; and so has the reading of Shelley.  It is
not surprising.  Byron's Corsairs and Laras have been, on the whole,
impossible during the thirty years' peace! and piracy and profligacy
are at all times, and especially nowadays, expensive amusements, and
often require a good private fortune--rare among poets.  They have,
therefore, been wisely abandoned as ideals, except among a few young
persons, who used to wear turn-down collars, and are now attempting
moustaches and Mazzini hats.  But even among them, and among their
betters--rather their more-respectables--nine-tenths of the bad
influence which is laid at Byron's door really is owing to Shelley.
Among the many good-going gentlemen and ladies, Byron is generally
spoken of with horror--he is "so wicked," forsooth; while poor
Shelley, "poor dear Shelley," is "very wrong, of course," but "so
refined," "so beautiful," "so tender"--a fallen angel, while Byron is
a satyr and a devil.  We boldly deny the verdict.  Neither of the two
are devils; as for angels, when we have seen one, we shall be better
able to give an opinion; at present, Shelley is in our eyes far less
like one of those old Hebrew and Miltonic angels, fallen or unfallen,
than Byron is.  And as for the satyr; the less that is said for
Shelley, on that point, the better.  If Byron sinned more desperately
and flagrantly than he, it was done under the temptations of rank,
wealth, disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal
nature, to which Shelley's passions were


As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.


At all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into
a religion and proclaim the worship of uncleanness as the last and
highest ethical development of "pure" humanity.  No--Byron may be
brutal; but he never cants.  If at moments he finds himself in hell,
he never turns round to the world and melodiously informs them that
it is heaven, if they could but see it in its true light.

The truth is, that what has put Byron out of favour with the public
of late has been not his faults but his excellences.  His artistic
good taste, his classical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred
of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable
habit of being always intelligible--these are the sins which condemn
him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping,
spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Shelley in secret,
and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and
pompous sentimentalism.  The age is an effeminate one, and it can
well afford to pardon the lewdness of the gentle and sensitive
vegetarian, while it has no mercy for that of the sturdy peer proud
of his bull neck and his boxing, who kept bears and bull-dogs,
drilled Greek ruffians at Missoloughi, and "had no objection to a pot
of beer;" and who might, if he had reformed, have made a gallant
English gentleman; while Shelley, if once his intense self-opinion
had deserted him, would have probably ended in Rome as an Oratorian
or a Passionist.

We would that it were only for this count that Byron has had to make
way for Shelley.  There is, as we said before, a deeper moral
difference between the men, which makes the weaker, rather than the
stronger, find favour in young men's eyes.  For Byron has the most
intense and awful sense of moral law--of law external to himself.
Shelley has little or none; less, perhaps, than any known writer who
has ever meddled with moral questions.  Byron's cry is, I am
miserable because law exists; and I have broken it, broken it so
habitually, that now I cannot help breaking it.  I have tried to
eradicate the sense of it by speculation, by action; but I cannot--


The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.


There is a moral law independent of us, and yet the very marrow of
our life, which punishes and rewards us by no arbitrary external
penalties, but by our own consciousness of being what we are:


The mind which is immortal, makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts;
Is its own origin of ill, and end--
And its own place and time--its innate sense
When stript of this mortality derives
No colour from the fleeting things about,
But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.


This idea, confused, intermitted, obscured by all forms of evil--for
it was not discovered, but only in the process of discovery--is the
one which comes out with greater and greater strength, through all
Corsairs, Laras, and Parasinas, till it reaches its completion in
"Cain" and in "Manfred," of both of which we do boldly say, that if
any sceptical poetry at all be right, which we often question, they
are right and not wrong; that in "Cain," as in "Manfred," the awful
problem which, perhaps, had better not have been put at all, is
nevertheless fairly put, and the solution, as far as it is seen,
fairly confessed; namely, that there is an absolute and eternal law
in the heart of man which sophistries of his own or of other beings
may make him forget, deny, blaspheme; but which exists eternally, and
will assert itself.  If this be not the meaning of "Manfred,"
especially of that great scene in the chamois hunter's cottage, what
is?--If this be not the meaning of "Cain," and his awful awakening
after the murder, not to any mere dread of external punishment, but
to an overwhelming, instinctive, inarticulate sense of having done
wrong, what is?

Yes; that law exists, let it never be forgotten, is the real meaning
of Byron, down to that last terrible "Don Juan," in which he sits
himself down, in artificial calm, to trace the gradual rotting and
degradation of a man without law, the slave of his own pleasures; a
picture happily never finished, because he who painted it was taken
away before he had learnt, perhaps when he was beginning to turn back
from--the lower depth within the lowest deep.

Now to this whole form of consciousness, poor Shelley's mind is
altogether antipodal.  His whole life through was a denial of
external law, and a substitution in its place of internal sentiment.
Byron's cry is:  There is a law, and therefore I am miserable.  Why
cannot I keep the law?  Shelley's is:  There is a law, and therefore
I am miserable.  Why should not the law be abolished?--Away with it,
for it interferes with my sentiments--Away with marriage, "custom and
faith, the foulest birth of time."--We do not wish to follow him down
into the fearful sins which he defended with the small powers of
reasoning--and they were peculiarly small--which he possessed.  Let
any one who wishes to satisfy himself of the real difference between
Byron's mind and Shelley's, compare the writings in which each of
them treats the same subject--namely, that frightful question about
the relation of the sexes, which forms, evidently, Manfred's crime;
and see if the result is not simply this, that Shelley glorifies what
Byron damns.  "Lawless love" is Shelley's expressed ideal of the
relation of the sexes; and his justice, his benevolence, his pity,
are all equally lawless.  "Follow your instincts," is his one moral
rule, confounding the very lowest animal instincts with those lofty
ideas of might, which it was the will of Heaven that he should
retain, ay, and love, to the very last, and so reducing them all to
the level of sentiments.  "Follow your instincts"--But what if our
instincts lead us to eat animal food?  "Then you must follow the
instincts of me, Percy Bysshe Shelley.  I think it horrible, cruel;
it offends my taste."  What if our instincts lead us to tyrannise
over our fellow-men?  "Then you must repress those instincts.  I,
Shelley, think that, too, horrible and cruel."  Whether it be
vegetarianism or liberty, the rule is practically the same--sentiment
which, in his case, as in the case of all sentimentalists, turns out
to mean at last, not the sentiments of mankind in general, but the
private sentiments of the writer.  This is Shelley; a sentimentalist
pure and simple; incapable of anything like inductive reasoning;
unable to take cognisance of any facts but those which please his
taste, or to draw any conclusion from them but such as also pleases
his taste; as, for example, in that eighth stanza of the "Ode to
Liberty," which, had it been written by any other man but Shelley,
possessing the same knowledge as he, one would have called a wicked
and deliberate lie--but in his case, is to be simply passed over with
a sigh, like a young lady's proofs of table-turning and rapping
spirits.  She wished to see it so--and therefore so she saw it.

For Shelley's nature is utterly womanish.  Not merely his weak
points, but his strong ones, are those of a woman.  Tender and
pitiful as a woman; and yet, when angry, shrieking, railing,
hysterical as a woman.  The physical distaste for meat and fermented
liquors, coupled with the hankering after physical horrors, are
especially feminine.  The nature of a woman looks out of that wild,
beautiful, girlish face--the nature:  but not the spirit; not


The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill.


The lawlessness of the man, with the sensibility of the woman. . . .
Alas for him!  He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for
were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than
without?  His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate,
peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole being, blackens
the very face of nature to him:  but he will not confess himself in
the wrong.  Once only, if we recollect rightly, the truth flashes
across him for a moment, and the clouds of selfish sorrow:


Alas, I have nor hope nor health,
   Nor peace within, nor calm around;
Nor that content surpassing wealth
   The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned.


"Nor"--alas for the spiritual bathos, which follows that short gleam
of healthy feeling, and coming to himself--


   --fame nor power, nor love, nor leisure,
   Others I see whom these surround,
   Smiling they live and call life pleasure,
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure!


Poor Shelley!  As if the peace within, and the calm around, and the
content surpassing wealth, were things which were to be put in the
same category with fame, and power, and love, and leisure.  As if
they were things which could be "dealt" to any man; instead of
depending (as Byron, who, amid all his fearful sins, was a man, knew
well enough) upon a man's self, a man's own will, and that will
exerted to do a will exterior to itself, to know and to obey a law.
But no, the cloud of sentiment must close over again, and


Yet now despair itself is mild
   Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
   And weep away this life of care,
Which I have borne, and still must bear,
   Till death like sleep might seize on me,
And I might feel in the warm air,
   My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony!


Too beautiful to laugh at, however empty and sentimental.  True:  but
why beautiful?  Because there is a certain sincerity in it, which
breeds coherence and melody, which, in short, makes it poetry.  But
what if such a tone of mind be consciously encouraged, even
insincerely affected as the ideal state for a poet's mind, as his
followers have done?

The mischief which such a man would do is conceivable enough.  He
stands out, both by his excellences and his defects, as the spokesman
and ideal of all the unrest and unhealth of sensitive young men for
many a year after.  His unfulfilled prophecies only help to increase
that unrest.  Who shall blame either him for uttering those
prophecies, or them for longing for their fulfilment?  Must we not
thank the man who gives us fresh hope that this earth will not be
always as it is now?  His notion of what it will be may be, as
Shelley's was, vague, even in some things wrong and undesirable.
Still, we must accept his hope and faith in the spirit, not in the
letter.  So have thousands of young men felt, who would have shrunk
with disgust from some of poor Shelley's details of the "good time
coming."  And shame on him who should wish to rob them of such a
hope, even if it interfered with his favourite "scheme of unfulfilled
prophecy."  So men have felt Shelley's spell a wondrous one--perhaps,
they think, a life-giving regenerative one.  And yet what dream at
once more shallow and more impossible?  Get rid of kings and priests;
marriage may stay, pending discussions on the rights of women.  Let
the poet speak--what he is to say being, of course, a matter of
utterly secondary import, provided only that he be a poet; and then
the millennium will appear of itself, and the devil be exorcised with
a kiss from all hearts--except, of course, these of "pale priests"
and "tyrants with their sneer of cold command" (who, it seems, have
not been got rid of after all), and the Cossacks and Croats whom they
may choose to call to their rescue.  And on the appearance of the
said Cossacks and Croats, the poet's vision stops short, and all is
blank beyond.  A recipe for the production of millenniums which has
this one advantage, that it is small enough to be comprehended by the
very smallest minds, and reproduced thereby, with a difference, in
such spasmodic melodies as seem to those small minds to be imitations
of Shelley's nightingale notes.

For nightingale notes they truly are.  In spite of all his faults--
and there are few poetic faults in which he does not indulge, to
their very highest power--in spite of his "interfluous" and
"innumerous," and the rest of his bad English--in spite of bombast,
horrors, maundering, sheer stuff and nonsense of all kinds, there is
a plaintive natural melody about this man, such as no other English
poet has ever uttered, except Shakespeare in some few immortal songs.
Who that has read Shelley does not recollect scraps worthy to stand
by Ariel's song--chaste, simple, unutterably musical?  Yes, when he
will be himself--Shelley the scholar and the gentleman and the
singer--and leave philosophy and politics, which he does not
understand, and shriekings and cursings, which are unfit for any
civilised and self-respecting man, he is perfect.  Like the American
mocking-bird, he is harsh only when aping other men's tunes--his true
power lies in his own "native wood-notes wild."

But it is not this faculty of his which has been imitated by his
scholars; for it is not this faculty which made him their ideal,
however it may have attracted them.  All which sensible men deplore
in him is that which poetasters have exalted in him.  His morbidity
and his doubt have become in their eyes his differential energy,
because too often, it was all in him with which they had wit to
sympathise.  They found it easy to curse and complain, instead of
helping to mend.  So had he.  They found it pleasant to confound
institutions with the abuses which defaced them.  So had he.  They
found it pleasant to give way to their spleen.  So had he.  They
found it pleasant to believe that the poet was to regenerate the
world, without having settled with what he was to regenerate it.  So
had he.  They found it more pleasant to obey sentiment than inductive
laws.  So had he.  They found it more pleasant to hurl about enormous
words and startling figures than to examine reverently the awful
depths of beauty which lie in the simplest words and the severest
figures.  So had he.

And thus arose a spasmodic, vague, extravagant, effeminate, school of
poetry, which has been too often hastily and unfairly fathered upon
Byron.  Doubtless Byron has helped to its formation; but only in as
far as his poems possess, or rather seem to possess, elements in
common with Shelley's.  For that conscious struggle against law, by
which law is discovered, may easily enough be confounded with the
utter repudiation of it.  Both forms of mind will discuss the same
questions; both will discuss them freely, with a certain plainness
and daring, which may range through all grades, from the bluntness of
Socrates down to reckless immodesty and profaneness.  The world will
hardly distinguish between the two; it did not in Socrates' case,
mistaking his reverent irreverence for Atheism, and martyred him
accordingly, as it has since martyred Luther's memory.  Probably,
too, if a living struggle is going on in the writer's mind, he will
not have distinguished the two elements in himself; he will be
profane when he fancies himself only arguing for truth; he will be
only arguing for truth, where he seems to the respectable undoubting
to be profane.  And in the meanwhile, whether the respectable
understand him or not, the young and the inquiring, much more the
distempered, who would be glad to throw off moral law, will
sympathise with him often more than he sympathises with himself.
Words thrown off in the heat of passion; shameful self-revealings
which he has written with his very heart's blood:  ay, even fallacies
which he has put into the mouths of dramatic characters for the very
purpose of refuting them, or at least of calling on all who read to
help him to refute them, and to deliver him from the ugly dream--all
these will, by the lazy, the frivolous, the feverish, the
discontented, be taken for integral parts and noble traits of the man
to whom they are attracted, by finding that he, too, has the same
doubts and struggles as themselves, that he has a voice and art to be
their spokesman.  And hence arises confusion on confusion,
misconception on misconception.  The man is honoured for his
dishonour.  Chronic disease is taken for a new type of health; and
Byron is admired and imitated for that which Byron is trying to tear
out of his own heart, and trample under foot as his curse and bane,
something which is not Byron's self, but Byron's house-fiend, and
tyrant, and shame.  And in the meanwhile that which calls itself
respectability and orthodoxy, and is--unless Augustine lied--neither
of them, stands by; and instead of echoing the voice of Him who said:
"Come to me ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you
rest," mumbles proudly to itself, with the Pharisees of old:  "This
people, which knoweth not the law, is accursed."

We do not seek to excuse Byron any more than we do Shelley.  They
both sinned.  They both paid bitter penalty for their sin.  How far
they were guilty, or which of them was the more guilty, we know not.
We can judge no man.  It is as poets and teachers, not as men and
responsible spirits; not in their inward beings, known only to Him
who made them, not even to themselves, but in their outward
utterance, that we have a right to compare them.  Both have done
harm.  Neither have, we firmly believe, harmed any human being who
had not already the harm within himself.  It is not by introducing
evil, but by calling into consciousness and more active life evil
which was already lurking in the heart, that any writer makes men
worse.  Thousands doubtless have read Byron and Shelley, and worse
books, and have risen from them as pure as when they sat down.  In
evil as well as in good, the eye only sees that which it brings with
it the power of seeing--say rather, the wish to see.  But it is
because, in spite of all our self-glorifying paeans, our taste has
become worse and not better, that Shelley, the man who conceitedly
despises and denies law, is taking the place of Byron, the man who
only struggles against it, and who shows his honesty and his
greatness most by confessing that his struggles are ineffectual;
that, Titan as he may look to the world, his strength is misdirected,
a mere furious weakness, which proclaims him a slave in fetters,
while prurient young gentlemen are fancying him heaping hills on
hills, and scaling Olympus itself.  They are tired of that notion,
however, now.  They have begun to suspect that Byron did not scale
Olympus after all.  How much more pleasant a leader, then, must
Shelley be, who unquestionably did scale his little Olympus--having
made it himself first to fit his own stature.  The man who has built
the hay-rick will doubtless climb it again, if need be, as often as
desired, and whistle on the top, after the fashion of the rick-
building guild, triumphantly enough.  For after all Shelley's range
of vision is very narrow, his subjects few, his reflections still
fewer, when compared, not only with such a poet as Spenser, but with
his own contemporaries; above all with Byron.  He has a deep heart,
but not a wide one; an intense eye, but not a catholic one.  And,
therefore, he never wrote a real drama; for in spite of all that has
been said to the contrary, Beatrice Cenci is really none other than
Percy Bysshe Shelley himself in petticoats.

But we will let them both be.  Perhaps they know better now.

One very ugly superstition, nevertheless, we must mention, of which
these two men have been, in England at least, the great hierophants;
namely, the right of "genius" to be "eccentric."  Doubtless there are
excuses for such a notion; but it is one against which every wise man
must set his face like a flint; and at the risk of being called a
"Philister" and a "flunky," take part boldly with respectability and
this wicked world, and declare them to be for once utterly in the
right.  Still there are excuses for it.  A poet, especially one who
wishes to be not merely a describer of pretty things, but a "Vates"
and seer of new truth, must often say things which other people do
not like to say, and do things which others do not like to do.  And,
moreover, he will be generally gifted, for the very purpose of
enabling him to say and do these strange things, with a sensibility
more delicate than common, often painful enough to himself.  How easy
for such a man to think that he has a right not to be as other men
are; to despise little conventionalities, courtesies, even decencies;
to offend boldly and carelessly, conscious that he has something
right and valuable within himself which not only atones for such
defects, but allows him to indulge in them, as badges of his own
superiority!  This has been the notion of artistic genius which has
spread among us of late years, just in proportion as the real amount
of artistic genius has diminished; till we see men, on the mere
ground of being literary men, too refined to keep accounts, or pay
their butchers' bills; affecting the pettiest absurdities in dress,
in manner, in food; giving themselves credit for being unable to bear
a noise, keep their temper, educate their own children, associate
with their fellow-men; and a thousand other paltry weaknesses,
morosenesses, self-indulgences, fastidiousnesses, vulgarities--for
all this is essentially vulgar, and demands, not honour and sympathy,
but a chapter in Mr. Thackeray's "Book of Snobs."  Non sic itur ad
astra.  Self-indulgence and exclusiveness can only be a proof of
weakness.  It may accompany talent, but it proves that talent to be
partial and defective.  The brain may be large, but the manhood, the
"virtus," is small, where such things are allowed, much more where
they are gloried in.  A poet such a man may be, but a world poet
never.  He is sectarian, a poetical Quaker, a Puritan, who,
forgetting that the truth which he possesses is equally the right and
inheritance of every man he meets, takes up a peculiar dress or
phraseology, as symbols of his fancied difference from his human
brothers.  All great poets, till Shelley and Byron, as far as we can
discern, have been men especially free from eccentricities; careful
not merely of the chivalries and the respectabilities, but also of
the courtesies and the petty conventionalities, of the age in which
they lived; altogether well-bred men of the world.  The answer, that
they learnt the ways of courts, does not avail; for if they had had
no innate good-breeding, reticence, respect for forms and customs,
they would never have come near courts at all.  It is not a question
of rank and fashion, but of good feeling, common sense,
unselfishness.  Goethe, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Rabelais,
Ariosto, were none of them high-born men; several of them low-born;
who only rose to the society of high-horn men because they were
themselves innately high-bred, polished, complete, without
exaggerations, affectations, deformities, weaknesses of mind and
taste, whatever may have been their weaknesses on certain points of
morals.  The man of all men most bepraised by the present generation
of poets, is perhaps Wolfgang von Goethe.  Why is it, then, that of
all men he is the one whom they strive to be most unlike?

And if this be good counsel for the man who merely wishes--and no
blame to him--to sing about beautiful things in a beautiful way, it
applies with tenfold force to the poet who desires honestly to
proclaim great truths.  If he has to offend the prejudices of the
world in important things, that is all the more reason for his bowing
to those prejudices in little things, and being content to be like
his neighbours in outward matters, in order that he may make them
like himself in inward ones.  Shall such a man dare to hinder his own
message, to drive away the very hearers to whom he believes himself
to be sent, for the sake of his own nerves, laziness, antipathies,
much more of his own vanity and pride?  If he does so, he is
unfaithful to that very genius on which he prides himself.  He denies
its divinity, by treating it as his own possession, to be displayed
or hidden as he chooses, for his own enjoyment, his own self-
glorification.  Well for such a man if a day comes to him in which he
will look back with shame and self-reproach, not merely on every
scandal which he may have caused by breaking the moral and social
laws of humanity, by neglecting to restrain his appetites, pay his
bills, and keep his engagements; but also on every conceited word and
look, every gaucherie and rudeness, every self-indulgent moroseness
and fastidiousness, as sins against the sacred charge which has been
committed to him; and determine with that Jew of old, who, to judge
from his letter to Philemon, was one of the most perfect gentlemen of
God's making who ever walked this earth, to become "all things to all
men, if by any means he may save some."



ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE



On reading this little book, {61} and considering all the exaggerated
praise and exaggerated blame which have been lavished on it, we could
not help falling into many thoughts about the history of English
poetry for the last forty years, and about its future destiny.  Great
poets, even true poets, are becoming more and more rare among us.
There are those even who say that we have none; an assertion which,
as long as Mr. Tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty of denying.
But were he, which Heaven forbid, taken from us, whom have we to
succeed him?  And he, too, is rather a poet of the sunset than of the
dawn--of the autumn than of the spring.  His gorgeousness is that of
the solemn and fading year; not of its youth, full of hope,
freshness, gay and unconscious life.  Like some stately hollyhock or
dahlia of this month's gardens, he endures while all other flowers
are dying; but all around is winter--a mild one, perhaps, wherein a
few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on; but, like all mild
winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, too, are not without
their gaudiness, even their beauty, although bred only from the decay
of higher organisms, the plagiarists of the vegetable world.  Such is
poetry in England; while in America the case is not much better.
What more enormous scope for new poetic thought than that which the
New World gives?  Yet the American poets, even the best of them, look
lingeringly and longingly back to Europe and her legends; to her
models, and not to the best of them--to her criticism, and not to the
best of that--and bestow but a very small portion of such genius as
they have on America and her new forms of life.  If they be nearer to
the spring than we, they are still deep enough in the winter.  A few
early flowers may be budding among them, but the autumn crop is still
in somewhat shabby and rain-bedrabbled bloom.  And for us, where are
our spring flowers?  What sign of a new poetic school?  Still more,
what sign of the healthy resuscitation of any old one?

"What matter, after all?" one says to oneself in despair, re-echoing
Mr. Carlyle.  "Man was not sent into the world to write poetry.  What
we want is truth.  Of the former we have enough in all conscience
just now.  Let the latter need be provided for by honest and
righteous history, and as for poets, let the dead bury their dead."
And yet, after all, man will write poetry, in spite of Mr. Carlyle:
nay, beings who are not men, but mere forked radishes, will write it.
Man is a poetry-writing animal.  Perhaps he was meant to be one.  At
all events, he can no more be kept from it than from eating.  It is
better, with Mr. Carlyle's leave, to believe that the existence of
poetry indicates some universal human hunger, whether after "the
beautiful," or after "fame," or after the means of paying butchers'
bills; and accepting it as a necessary evil which must be committed,
to see that it be committed as well, or at least as little ill, as
possible.  In excuse of which we may quote Mr. Carlyle against
himself, reminding him of a saying of Goethe once bepraised by him in
print:  "We must take care of the beautiful, for the useful will take
care of itself."

And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his Dunciad, did the beautiful
require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care
of itself; and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care
of it evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this
present time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith's poems is to be
taken as a fair expression of "the public taste."

Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander Smith is not the
object of our reproaches:  but Mr. Alexander Smith's models and
flatterers.  Against him we have nothing whatsoever to say; for him,
very much indeed.

Very young, as is said, self-educated, drudging for his daily bread
in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of brick and mortar, he has seen
the sky, the sun and moon--and, moreover, the sea, report says, for
one day in his whole life; and this is nearly the whole of his
experience in natural objects.  And he has felt, too painfully for
his peace of mind, the contrast between his environment and that of
others--his means of culture and that of others--and, still more
painfully, the contrast between his environment and culture, and that
sense of beauty and power of melody which he does not deny that he
has found in himself, and which no one can deny who reads his poems
fairly; who reads even merely the opening page and key-note of the
whole:


For as a torrid sunset burns with gold
Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul
A passion burns from basement unto cope.
Poesy, poesy, I'd give to thee
As passionately my rich laden years,
My bubble pleasures, and my awful joys,
_As Hero gave her trembling sighs to find
Delicious death on wet Leander's lip_.
Bare, bald, and tawdry, as a fingered moth
Is my poor life; but with one smile thou canst
Clothe me with kingdoms.  Wilt thou smile on me?
Wilt bid me die for thee?  Oh fair and cold!
As well may some wild maiden waste her love
Upon the calm front of a marble Jove.


Now this scrap is by no menus a fair average specimen of Mr. Smith's
verse.  But is not the self-educated man who could teach himself,
amid Glasgow smoke and noise, to write such a distich as that
exquisite one which we have given in italics, to be judged lovingly
and hopefully?

What if he has often copied?  What if, in this very scrap, chosen
almost at random, there should be a touch from Tennyson's "Two
Voices?"  And what if imitations, nay, caricatures, be found in
almost every page?  Is not the explanation simple enough, and rather
creditable than discreditable to Mr. Smith?  He takes as his models
Shelley, Keats, and their followers.  Who is to blame for that?  The
Glasgow youth, or the public taste, which has been exalting these
authors more and more for the last twenty years as the great poets of
the nineteenth century?  If they are the proper ideals of the day,
who will blame him for following them as closely as possible--for
saturating his memory so thoroughly with their words and thoughts
that he reproduces them unconsciously to himself?  Who will blame him
for even consciously copying their images, if they have said better
than he the thing which he wants to say, in the only poetical dialect
which he knows?  He does no more than all schools have done, copy
their own masters; as the Greek epicists and Virgil copied Homer; as
all succeeding Latin epicists copied Virgil; as Italians copied
Ariosto and Tasso; as every one who can copies Shakespeare; as the
French school copied, or thought they copied, "The Classics," and as
a matter of duty used to justify any bold image in their notes, not
by its originality, but by its being already in Claudian, or Lucan,
or Virgil, or Ovid; as every poetaster, and a great many who were
more than poetasters, twenty years ago, used to copy Scott and Byron,
and as all poetasters now are copying the very same models as Mr.
Smith, and failing while he succeeds.

We by no means agree in the modern outcry for "originality."  Is it
absolutely demanded that no poet shall say anything whatsoever that
any other poet has said?  If so, Mr. Smith may well submit to a blame
which he will bear in common with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Pope, and
many another great name; and especially with Raphael himself, who
made no scruple of adopting not merely points of style, but single
motives and incidents, from contemporaries and predecessors.  Who can
look at any of his earlier pictures, the Crucifixion for instance, at
present in Lord Ward's gallery at the Egyptian Hall, without seeing
that he has not merely felt the influence of Perugino, but copied
him; tried deliberately to be as like his master as he could?  Was
this plagiarism?  If so, all education, it would seem, must be a mere
training in plagiarism.  For how is the student to learn, except by
copying his master's models?  Is the young painter or sculptor a
plagiarist because he spends the first, often the best, years of his
life in copying Greek statues; or the schoolboy, for toiling at the
reproduction of Latin metres and images, in what are honestly and
fittingly called "copies" of verses.  And what if the young artist
shall choose, as Mr. Smith has done, to put a few drawings into the
exhibition, or to carve and sell a few statuettes?  What if the
schoolboy, grown into a gownsman, shall contribute his share to a set
of "Arundines Cami" or "Prolusiones Etonienses?"  Will any one who
really knows what art or education means complain of them for having
imitated their models, however servilely?  Will he not rather hail
such an imitation as a fair proof, first of the student's reverence
for authority--a more important element of "genius" than most young
folks fancy--and next, of his possessing any artistic power
whatsoever?  For, surely, if the greater contains the less, the power
of creating must contain that of imitating.  A young author's power
of accurate imitation is, after all, the primary and indispensable
test of his having even the capability of becoming a poet.  He who
cannot write in a style which he does know, will certainly not be
able to invent a new style for himself.  The first and simplest form
in which any metrical ear, or fancy, or imagination, can show itself,
must needs be in imitating existing models.  Innate good taste--that
is, true poetic genius--will of course choose the best models in the
long run.  But not necessarily at first.  What shall be the student's
earliest ideal must needs be determined for him by circumstance, by
the books to which he has access, by the public opinion which he
hears expressed.  Enough if he chooses, as Raphael did, the best
models which he knows, and tries to exhaust them, and learn all he
can from them, ready to quit them hereafter when he comes across
better ones, yet without throwing away what he has learnt.  "Be
faithful in a few things, and thou shalt become ruler over many
things," is one of those eternal moral laws which, like many others,
holds as true of art as it does of virtue.

And on the whole, judging Mr. Alexander Smith by this rule, he has
been faithful over a few things, and therefore we have fair hope of
him for the future.  For Mr. Smith does succeed, not in copying one
poet, but in copying all, and very often in improving on his models.
Of the many conceits which he has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, there is
hardly one which he has not made more true, more pointed and more
sweet; nay, in one or two places, he has dared to mend John Keats
himself.  But his whole merit is by no means confined to the faculty
of imitation.  Though the "Life Drama" itself is the merest cento of
reflections and images, without coherence or organisation, dramatic
or logical, yet single scenes, like that with the peasant and that
with the fallen outcast, have firm self-consistency and clearness of
conception; and these, as a natural consequence, are comparatively
free from those tawdry spangles which deface the greater part of the
poem.  And, moreover, in the episode of "The Indian and the Lady,"
there is throughout a "keeping in the tone," as painters say, sultry
and languid, yet rich and full of life, like a gorgeous Venetian
picture, which augurs even better for Mr. Smith's future success than
the two scenes just mentioned; for consistency of thought may come
with time and training; but clearness of inward vision, the faculty
of imagination, can be no more learnt than it can be dispensed with.
In this, and this only it is true that poeta nascitur non fit; just
as no musical learning or practice can make a composer, unless he
first possess an innate ear for harmony and melody.  And it must be
said that it is just in the passages where Mr. Smith is not copying,
where he forgets for awhile Shelley, Keats, and the rest, and is
content to be simply himself, that he is best; terse, vivid, sound,
manly, simple.  May he turn round some day, and deliberately pulling
out all borrowed feathers, look at himself honestly and boldly in the
glass, and we will warrant him, on the strength of the least gaudy,
and as yet unpraised passages in his poems, that he will find himself
after all more eagle than daw, and quite well plumed enough by nature
to fly at a higher, because for him a more natural, pitch than he has
yet done.

True, he has written a great deal of nonsense; nonsense in matter as
well as in manner.  But therein, too, he has only followed the
reigning school.  As for manner, he does sometimes, in imitating his
models, out-Herod Herod.  But why not?  If Herod be a worthy king,
let him be by all means out-Heroded, if any man can do it.  One
cannot have too much of a good thing.  If it be right to bedizen
verses with metaphors and similes which have no reference, either in
tone or in subject, to the matter in hand, let there be as many of
them as possible.  If a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let
the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's
harness-maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric
splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin
and severe simplicity--not to say utility and comfort.  If poetic
diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have
it as poetical as possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical,
abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or
caprice of man can make it.  If it be correct to express human
thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic,
and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an
entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they
are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as
possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible.  If
Marino and Cowley be greater poets than Ariosto and Milton, let young
poets imitate the former with might and main, and avoid spoiling
their style by any perusal of the too-intelligible common sense of
the latter.  If Byron's moral (which used to be thought execrable) be
really his great excellence, and his style (which used to be thought
almost perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us have
his moral without his style, his matter without his form; or--that we
may be sure of never falling for a moment into his besetting sins of
terseness, grace, and completeness--without any form at all.  If
poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be
as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, Virgil or Horace,
Shakespeare or Spenser, Dante or Tasso, let those too-idolised names
be erased henceforth from the calendar; let the "Ars Poetica" be
consigned to flames, and Martinus Scriblerus's "Art of Sinking"
placed forthwith on the list of the Committee of Council for
Education, that not a working man in England may he ignorant that,
whatsoever superstitions about art may have haunted the benighted
heathens who built the Parthenon, nous avons change tout cela.  In
one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style
in which almost every one has been trying to write it since Pope and
plain sense went out, and Shelley and the seventh heaven came in, let
it be so written; and let him who most perfectly so "sets the age to
music," he presented by the assembled guild of critics, not with the
obsolete and too classic laurel, but with an electro-plated brass
medal, bearing the due inscription, "Ars est nescire artem."  And
when, in twelve months' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps
decried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider
himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will
not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the
sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.

In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very
excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by
their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded;
naturalness produced by studious art; sublimity by strict self-
restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a
morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than
the one now in vogue among the poetasters, by honest faith in God.
If he be shocked by certain peculiarities of diction, and by the
fondness for perpetual antitheses, let him remember, that what seems
strange to our day was natural and habitual in Pope's; and that, in
the eyes of our grandchildren, Keats's and Shelley's peculiarities
will seem as monstrous as Pope's or Johnson's do in ours.  But if,
misled by the popular contempt for Pope, be should he inclined to
answer this advice with a shrug and a smile, we entreat him and all
young poets, to consider, line by line, word by word, sound by sound,
only those once well-known lines, which many a brave and wise man of
fifty years ago would have been unable to read without honourable
tears:


In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,
The floor of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter, dangling from that bed,
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies.  Alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
Or just as gay, at Council, in a ring
Of mimic statesmen, and their merry king,
No wit to flatter, left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.


Yes; Pope knew, as well as Wordsworth and our "Naturalisti," that no
physical fact was so mean or coarse as to be below the dignity of
poetry--when in its right place.  He could draw a pathos and
sublimity out of the dirty inn chamber, such as Wordsworth never
elicited from tubs and daffodils--because he could use them according
to the rules of art, which are the rules of sound reason and of true
taste.

The answer to all this is ready nowadays.  We are told that Pope
could easily be great in what he attempted, because he never
attempted any but small matters; easily self-restraining, because his
paces were naturally so slow; above all, easily clear, because he is
always shallow; easily full of faith in what he did believe, because
he believed so very little.  On the two former counts we may have
something to say hereafter.  On the two latter, we will say at once,
that if it be argued, as it often is, that the reason of our modern
poetical obscurity and vagueness lies in the greater depth of the
questions which are now agitating thoughtful minds, we do utterly
deny it.  Human nature, human temptations, human problems, are
radically the same in every age, by whatsoever outward difference of
words they may seem distinguished.  Where is deeper philosophic
thought, true or false, expressed in verse, than in Dante, or in
Spenser's two cantos of "Mutabilities"?  Yet if they are difficult to
understand, their darkness is that of the deep blue sea.  Vague they
never are, obscure they never are, because they see clearly what they
want to say, and how to say it.  There is always a sound and coherent
meaning in them, to be found if it be searched for.

The real cause of this modern vagueness is rather to be found in
shallow and unsound culture, and in that inability, or carelessness
about seeing any object clearly, which besets our poets just now; as
the cause of antique clearness lies in the nobler and healthier
manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of thought, the
sounder philosophic and critical training, which enabled Spenser and
Milton to draw up a state paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics,
with the same manful possession of their subject which gives grace
and completeness to the "Penseroso" or the "Epithalamion."  And if
our poets have their doubts, they should remember, that those to whom
doubt and inquiry are real and stern, are not inclined to sing about
them till they can sing poems of triumph over them.  There has no
temptation taken our modern poets save that which is common to man--
the temptation of wishing to make the laws of the universe and of art
fit them, as they do not feel inclined to make themselves fit the
laws, or care to find them out.

What!  Do you wish, asks some one, a little contemptuously, to
measure the great growing nineteenth century by the thumb-rule of
Alexander Pope?  No.  But to measure the men who write in the
nineteenth century by a man who wrote in the eighteenth; to compare
their advantages with his, their circumstances with his:  and then,
if possible, to make them ashamed of their unmanliness.  Have you
young poets of this day, your struggles, your chagrins?  Do you think
the hump-backed dwarf, every moment conscious at once of his
deformity and his genius--conscious, probably, of far worse physical
shame than any deformity can bring, "sewed up in buckram every
morning, and requiring a nurse like a child"--caricatured, lampooned,
slandered, utterly without fault of his own--insulted and rejected by
the fine lady whom he had dared to court in reality, after being
allowed and allured to flirt with her in rhyme--do you suppose that
this man had nothing to madden him--to convert him into a sneering
snarling misanthrope?  Yet was there one noble soul who met him who
did not love him, or whom he did not love?  Have you your doubts?  Do
you find it difficult to make your own speculations, even your own
honest convictions, square with the popular superstitions?  What were
your doubts, your inward contradictions, to those of a man who, bred
a Papist, and yet burning with the most intense scorn and hatred of
lies and shams, bigotries and priestcrafts, could write that "Essay
on Man"?  Read that, young gentlemen of the Job's-wife school, who
fancy it a fine thing to tell your readers to curse God and die, or,
at least, to show the world in print how you could curse God by
divine right of genius, if you chose, and be ashamed of your cowardly
wailings.

Alexander Pope went through doubt, contradiction, confusion, to which
yours are simple and light; and conquered.  He was a man of like
passions with yourselves; infected with the peculiar vices of his
day; narrow, for his age was narrow; shallow, for his age was
shallow; a bon-vivant, for his age was a gluttonous and drunken one;
bitter, furious, and personal, for men round him were such; foul-
mouthed often, and indecent, as the rest were.  Nay, his very power,
when he abuses it for his own ends of selfish spite and injured
vanity, makes him, as all great men can be (in words at least, for in
life he was far better than the men around him), worse than his age.
He can out-rival Dennis in ferocity, and Congreve in filth.  So much
the worse for him in that account which he has long ago rendered up.
But in all times and places, as far as we can judge, the man was
heart-whole, more and not less righteous than his fellows.  With his
whole soul he hates what is evil, as far as he can recognise it.
With his whole soul he loves what is good, as far as he can recognise
that.  With his soul believes that there is a righteous and good God,
whose order no human folly or crime can destroy; and he will say so;
and does say it, clearly, simply, valiantly, reverently, in his
"Essay on Man."  His theodicy is narrow; shallow, as was the
philosophy of his age.  But as far as it goes, it is sound--faithful
to God, and to what he sees and knows.  Man is made in God's image.
Man's justice is God's justice; man's mercy is God's mercy; man's
science, man's critic taste, are insights into the laws of God
himself.  He does not pretend to solve the great problem.  But he
believes that it is solved from all eternity; that God knows, God
loves, and God rules; that the righteous and faithful man may know
enough of the solution to know his duty, to see his way, to justify
God; and as much as he knows he tells.  There were in that diseased
sensitive cripple no vain repinings, no moon-struck howls, no impious
cries against God:  "Why hast thou made me thus?"  To him God is a
righteous God, a God of order.  Science, philosophy, politics,
criticism, poetry, are parts of His order--they are parts of the
appointed onward path for mankind; there are eternal laws for them.
There is a beautiful and fit order, in poetry, which is part of God's
order, which men have learnt ages ago, for they, too, had their
teaching from above; to offend against which is absolutely wrong, an
offence to be put down mildly in those who offend ignorantly; but
those who offend from dulness, from the incapacity to see the
beautiful, or from carelessness about it, when praise or gain tempts
them the other way, have some moral defect in them; they are what
Solomon calls fools:  they are the enemies of man; and he will "hate
them right sore, even as though they were his own enemies"--which
indeed they were.  He knows by painful experience that they deserve
no quarter; that there is no use giving them any; to spare them is to
make them insolent; to fondle the reptile is to be bitten by it.
True poetry, as the messenger of heavenly beauty, is decaying; true
refinement, true loftiness of thought, even true morality, are at
stake.  And so he writes his "Dunciad."  And would that he were here,
to write it over again, and write it better!

For write it again he surely would.  And write it better he would
also.  With the greater cleanliness of our time, with all the
additional experience of history, with the greater classical,
aesthetic, and theological knowledge of our day, the sins of our
poets are as much less excusable than those of Eusden, Blackmore,
Cibber, and the rest, as Pope's "Dunciad" on them would be more
righteously severe.  What, for instance, would the author of the
"Essay on Man" say to anyone who now wrote p. 137 (for it really is
not to be quoted) of the "Life Drama" as the thoughts of his hero,
without any after atonement for the wanton insult it conveys toward
him whom he dares in the same breath to call "Father," simply because
he wants to be something very fine and famous and self-glorifying,
and Providence keeps him waiting awhile?  Has Pope not said it
already?


Persist, by all divine in man unawed,
But learn, ye dunces, not to scorn your God!


And yet no; the gentle goddess would now lay no such restriction on
her children, for in Pope's day no man had discovered the new poetic
plan for making the divine in man an excuse for scorning God, and
finding in the dignity of "heaven-born genius" free licence to
upbraid, on the very slightest grounds, the Being from whom the said
genius pretends to derive his dignity.  In one of his immortal saws
he has cautioned us against "making God in man's image."  But it
never entered into his simple head that man would complain of God for
being made in a lower image than even his own.  Atheism he could
conceive of; the deeper absurdity of Authotheism was left for our
more enlightened times and more spiritual muses.

It will be answered that all this blasphemy is not to be attributed
to the author, but to the man whose spiritual development he intends
to sketch.  To which we reply that no man has a right to bring his
hero through such a state without showing how he came out of the
slough as carefully as how he came into it, especially when the said
hero is set forth as a marvellously clever person; and the last
scene, though full of beautiful womanly touches, and of a higher
morality than the rest of the book, contains no amende honorable, not
even an explanation of the abominable stuff which the hero has been
talking a few pages back.  He leaps from the abyss to the seventh
heaven; but, unfortunately for the spectators, he leaps behind the
scenes, and they are none the wiser.  And next; people have no more
right even for dramatic purposes, to put such language into print for
any purpose whatsoever, than they have to print the grossest
indecencies, or the most disgusting details of torture and cruelty.
No one can accuse this magazine of any fondness for sanctimonious
cant or lip-reverence; but if there be a "Father in Heaven," as Mr.
Smith confesses that there is, or even merely a personal Deity at
all, some sort of common decency in speaking of Him should surely be
preserved.  No one would print pages of silly calumny and vulgar
insult against his earthly father, or even against a person for whom
he had no special dislike, and then excuse it by, "Of course, I don't
think so:  but if anyone did think so, this would be a very smart way
of saying what he thought."  Old Aristotle would call such an act
"banauson"--in plain English, blackguard; and we do not see how it
can be called anything else, unless in the case of some utter brute
in human form, to whom "there is no coenum, and therefore no
obscoenum; no fanum, and therefore no profanum."  The common sense of
mankind in all ages has condemned this sort of shamelessness, even
more than it has insults to parental and social ties, and to all
which raises man above the brute.  Let Mr. Smith take note of this,
and let him, if he loves himself, mend speedily; for of all styles
wherein to become stereotyped the one which he has chosen is the
worst, because in it the greatest amount of insincerity is possible.
There is a Tartarus in front of him as well as an Olympus; a hideous
possibility very near him of insincere impiety merely for the purpose
of startling; of lawless fancy merely for the purpose of glittering;
and a still more hideous possibility of a revulsion to insincere
cant, combined with the same lawless fancy, for the purpose of
keeping well with the public, in which to all appearances one of our
most popular novelists, not to mention the poet whose writings are
most analogous to Mr. Smith's, now lies wallowing.

Whether he shall hereafter obey his evil angel, and follow him, or
his good angel, and become a great poet, depends upon himself; and
above all upon his having courage to be himself, and to forget
himself, two virtues which, paradoxical as it may seem, are
correlatives.  For the "subjective" poet--in plain words, the
egotist--is always comparing himself with every man he meets, and
therefore momentarily tempted to steal bits of their finery wherewith
to patch his own rents; while the man who is content to be simply
what God has made him, goes on from strength to strength developing
almost unconsciously under a divine education, by which his real
personality and the salient points by which he is distinguished from
his fellows, become apparent with more and more distinctness of form,
and brilliance of light and shadow, as those well know who have
watched human character attain its clearest and grandest as well as
its loveliest outlines, not among hankerers after fame and power, but
on lonely sickbeds, and during long unknown martyrdoms of humble
self-sacrifice and loving drudgery.

But whether or not Mr. Smith shall purify himself--and he can do so,
if he will, right nobly--the world must be purified of his style of
poetry, if men are ever, as he hopes, to "set his age to music;" much
more if they are once more to stir the hearts of the many by Tyrtaean
strains, such as may be needed before our hairs are gray.  The
"poetry of doubt," however pretty, would stand us in little stead if
we were threatened with a second Armada.  It will conduce little to
the valour, "virtus," manhood of any Englishman to be informed by any
poet, even in the most melodious verse, illustrated by the most
startling and pan cosmic metaphors.  "See what a highly-organised and
peculiar stomach-ache I have had!  Does it not prove indisputably
that I am not as other men are?"  What gospel there can be in such a
message to any honest man who has either to till the earth, plan a
railroad, colonise Australia, or fight his country's enemies, is hard
to discover.  Hard indeed to discover how this most practical, and
therefore most poetical, of ages, is to be "set to music," when all
those who talk about so doing persist obstinately in poring, with
introverted eyes, over the state of their own digestion--or creed.

What man wants, what art wants, perhaps what the Maker of them both
wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other
men are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language
which all men can understand.  This is the only road to that gift of
prophecy which most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to
arrogate to themselves.  We can only tell what man will be by fair
induction, by knowing what he is, what he has been.

And it is most noteworthy that in this age, in which there is more
knowledge than there ever was of what man has been, and more
knowledge, through innumerable novelists, and those most subtle and
finished ones, of what man is, that poetry should so carefully avoid
drawing from this fresh stock of information in her so-confident
horoscopes of what man will be.

There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the common-
sense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge.
Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether
fragmentary--disjecta membra poetarum; they need some uniting idea.
And what idea?

Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh.  Nevertheless we
answer simply, What our poets want is faith.

There is little or no faith nowadays.  And without faith there can be
no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm coherent
belief.  And a poetry of doubt, even a sceptical poetry, in its true
sense, can never possess clear and sound form, even organic form at
all.  How can you put into form that thought which is by its very
nature formless?  How can you group words round a central idea when
you do not possess a central idea?  Shakespeare in his one sceptic
tragedy has to desert the pure tragic form, and Hamlet remains the
beau-ideal of "the poetry of doubt."  But what would a tragedy be in
which the actors were all Hamlets, or rather scraps of Hamlets?  A
drama of Hamlet is only possible because the one sceptic is
surrounded by characters who have some positive faith, who do their
work for good or evil undoubtingly while he is speculating about his.
And both Ophelia, and Laertes, Fortinbras, the king, yea the very
grave-digger, know well enough what they want, whether Hamlet does or
not.  The whole play is, in fact, Shakespeare's subtle reductio ad
absurdum of that very diseased type of mind which has been for the
last forty years identified with "genius"--with one difference,
namely, that Shakespeare, with his usual clearness of conception,
exhibits the said intellectual type pure and simple, while modern
poets degrade and confuse it, and all the questions dependent on it,
by mixing it up unnecessarily with all manner of moral weaknesses,
and very often moral crimes.

But the poet is to have a faith nowadays of course--a "faith in
nature."  This article of Wordsworth's poetical creed is to be
assumed as the only necessary one, and we are to ignore altogether
the somewhat important fact that he had faith in a great deal besides
nature, and to make that faith in nature his sole differentia and
source of inspiration.  Now we beg leave to express not merely our
want of faith in this same "faith in nature," but even our ignorance
of what it means.  Nature is certain phenomena, appearances.  Faith
in them is simply to believe that a red thing is red, and a square
thing square; a sine qua non doubtless in poetry, as in carpentry,
but which will produce no poetry, but only Dutch painting and
gardeners' catalogues--in a word, that lowest form of art, the merely
descriptive; and into this very style the modern naturalist poets,
from the times of Southey and Wordsworth, have been continually
falling, and falling therefore into baldness and vulgarity.  For mere
description cannot represent even the outlines of a whole scene at
once, as the daguerreotype does; they must describe it piecemeal.
Much less can it represent that whole scene at once in all its
glories of colour, glow, fragrance, life, motion.  In short, it
cannot give life and spirit.  All merely descriptive poetry can do is
to give a dead catalogue--to kill the butterfly, and then write a
monograph on it.  And, therefore, there comes a natural revulsion
from the baldness and puerility into which Wordsworth too often fell
by indulging his false theories on these matters.

But a revulsion to what?  To the laws of course which underlie the
phenomena.  But again--to which laws?  Not merely to the physical
ones, else Turner's "Chemistry" and Watson's "Practice of Medicine"
are great poems.

True, we have heard Professor Forbes's book on Glaciers called an
epic poem, and not without reason:  but what gives that noble book
its epic character is neither the glaciers nor the laws of them, but
the discovery of those laws:  the methodic, truthful, valiant,
patient battle between man and nature, his final victory, his
wresting from her the secret which had been locked for ages in the
ice-caves of the Alps, guarded by cold and fatigue, danger and
superstitious dread.  For Nature will be permanently interesting to
the poet, and appear to him in a truly poetic aspect, only in as far
as she is connected by him with spiritual and personal beings, and
becomes in his eyes either a person herself, or the dwelling and
organ of persons.  The shortest scrap of word-painting, as Thomson's
"Seasons" will sufficiently prove, is wearisome and dead, unless
there be a living figure in the landscape, or unless, failing a
living figure, the scene is deliberately described with reference to
the poet or the reader, not as something in itself, but as something
seen by him, and grouped and subordinated exactly as it would strike
his eye and mind.  But even this is insufficient.  The heart of man
demands more, and so arises a craving after the old nature-mythology
of Greece, the old fairy legends of the Middle Age.  The great poets
of the Renaissance both in England and in Italy had a similar
craving.  But the aspect under which these ancient dreams are
regarded by them is most significantly different.  With Spenser and
Ariosto, fairies and elves, gods and demons, are regarded in their
fancied connection with man.  Even in the age of Pope, when the gods
and the Rosicrucian Sylphs have become alike "poetical machinery,"
this is their work.  But among the moderns it is as connected with
Nature, and giving a soul and a personality to her, that they are
most valued.  The most pure utterance of this feeling is perhaps
Schiller's "Gods of Greece," where the loss of the Olympians is
distinctly deplored, because it has unpeopled, not heaven, but earth.
But the same tone runs through Goethe's classical "Walpurgis Night,"
where the old human "twelve gods," the antitypes and the friends of
men, in whom our forefathers delighted, have vanished utterly, and
given place to semi-physical Nereides, Tritons, Telchines, Psylli,
and Seismos himself.

Keats, in his wonderful "Endymion," contrived to unite the two
aspects of Greek mythology as they never had been united before,
except by Spenser in his "Garden of Adonis."  But the pantheistic
notion, as he himself says in "Lamia," was the one which lay nearest
his heart; and in his "Hyperion" he begins to deal wholly with the
Nature gods, and after magnificent success, leaves the poem
unfinished, most probably because he had become, as his readers must,
weary of its utter want of human interest.  For that, after all, is
what is wanted in a poetical view of Nature; and that is what the
poet, in proportion to his want of dramatic faculty, must draw from
himself.  He must--he does in these days--colour Nature with the
records of his own mind, and bestow a factitious life and interest on
her by making her reflect his own joy or sorrow.  If he be out of
humour, she must frown; if he sigh, she must roar; if he be--what he
very seldom is--tolerably comfortable, the birds have liberty to
sing, and the sun to shine.  But by the time that he has arrived at
this stage of his development, or degradation, the poet is hardly to
be called a strong man, he who is so munch the slave of his own moods
that he must needs see no object save through them, is not very
likely to be able to resist the awe which nature's grandeur and
inscrutability brings with it, and to say firmly, and yet reverently:


Si fractus illibatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinae.


He feels, in spite of his conceit, that nature is not going his way,
or looking his looks, but going what he calls her own way, what we
call God's way.  At all events, he feels that he is lying, when he
represents the great universe as turned to his small set of Pan's
pipes and all the more because he feels that, conceal it as he will,
those same Pan's pipes are out of tune with each other.  And so
arises the habit of impersonating nature, not after the manner of
Spenser (whose purity of metaphor and philosophic method, when he
deals with nature, is generally even more marvellous than the
richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in her single and
accidental phenomena; and of ascribing not merely animal passions or
animal enjoyment, but human discursive intellect and moral sense, to
inanimate objects, and talking as if a stick or a stone were more of
a man than the poet is--as indeed they very often may be.

These, like everything else, are perfectly right in their own place--
where they express passion, either pleasurable or painful, passion,
that is, not so intense as to sink into exhaustion, or to be
compelled to self-control by the fear of madness.  In these two
cases, as great dramatists know well enough, the very violence of the
emotion produces perfect simplicity, as the hurricane blows the sea
smooth.  But where fanciful language is employed to express the
extreme of passion, it is felt to be absurd, and is accordingly
called rant and bombast:  and where it is not used to express passion
at all, but merely the quiet and normal state of the poet's mind, or
of his characters, with regard to external nature; when it is
considered, as it is by most of our modern poets, the staple of
poetry, indeed poetic diction itself, so that the more numerous and
the stranger conceits an author can cram into his verses, the finer
poet he is; then, also, it is called rant and bombast, but of the
most artificial, insincere, and (in every sense of the word)
monstrous kind; the offspring of an effeminate nature-worship,
without self-respect, without true manhood, because it exhibits the
poet as the puppet of his own momentary sensations, and not as a man
superior to nature, claiming his likeness to the Author of nature, by
confessing and expressing the permanent laws of Nature, undisturbed
by fleeting appearances without, or fleeting tempers within.  Hence
it is that, as in all insincere and effete times, the poetry of the
day deals more and more with conceits, and less and less with true
metaphors.  In fact, hinc illae lachrymae.  This is, after all, the
primary symptom of disease in the public taste, which has set us on
writing this review--that critics all round are crying:  "An ill-
constructed whole, no doubt; but full of beautiful passages"--the
word "passages" turning out to mean, in plain English, conceits.  The
simplest distinction, perhaps, between an image and a conceit is
this--that while both are analogies, the image is founded on an
analogy between the essential properties of two things--the conceit
on an analogy between its accidents.  Images, therefore, whether
metaphors or similes, deal with laws; conceits with private
judgments.  Images belong to the imagination, the power which sees
things according to their real essence and inward life, and conceits
to the fancy or phantasy, which only see things as they appear.

To give an example or two from the "Life Drama:"


   His heart holds a deep hope,
As holds the wretched West the sunset's corse--
Spit on, insulted by the brutal rains.

   The passion-panting sea
Watches the unveiled beauty of the stars
Like a great hungry soul.

   Great spirits,
Who left upon the mountain-tops of Death
A light that made them lovely.

   The moon,
Arising from dark waves which plucked at her.


And hundreds, nay, thousands more in this book, whereof it must be
said, that beautiful or not, in the eyes of the present generation--
and many of them are put into very beautiful language, and refer to
very beautiful natural objects--they are not beautiful really and in
themselves, because they are mere conceits; the analogies in them are
fortuitous, depending not on the nature of the things themselves, but
on the private fancy of the writer, having no more real and logical
coherence than a conundrum or a pun; in plain English, untrue, only
allowable to Juliets or Othellos; while their self-possession, almost
their reason, is in temporary abeyance under the influence of joy or
sorrow.  Every one must feel the exquisite fitness of Juliet's
"Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds," etc., for one of her
character, in her circumstances:  every one, we trust, and Mr. Smith
among the number, will some day feel the exquisite unfitness of using
such conceits as we have just quoted, or any other, page after page,
for all characters and chances.  For the West is not wretched; the
rains never were brutal yet, and do not insult the sun's corpse,
being some millions of miles nearer us than the sun, but only have
happened once to seem to do so in the poet's eyes.  The sea does not
pant with passion, does not hunger after the beauty of the stars;
Death has no mountain-tops, or any property which can be compared
thereto; and "the dark waves"--in that most beautiful conceit which
follows, and which Mr. Smith has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, improving
it marvellously nevertheless--do not "pluck at the moon," but only
seem to do so.  And what constitutes the beauty of this very conceit-
-far the best of those we have chosen--but that it looks so very like
an image, so very like a law, from being so very common and customary
an ocular deception to one standing on a low shore at night?

Or, again, in a passage which has been already often quoted as
exquisite, and in its way is so:


   The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride;
And in the fulness of his marriage joy
He decorates her tawny brow with shells,
Retires a pace, to see how fair she looks,
Then proud, runs up to kiss her.


Exquisite?  Yes; but only exquisitely pretty.  It is untrue--a false
explanation of the rush and recoil of the waves.  We learn nothing by
these lines; we gain no fresh analogy between the physical and the
spiritual world, not even between two different parts of the physical
world.  If the poetry of this age has a peculiar mission, it is to
declare that such an analogy exists throughout the two worlds; then
let poetry declare it.  Let it set forth a real intercommunion
between man and nature, grounded on a communion between man and God,
who made nature.  Let it accept nature's laws as the laws of God.
Truth, scientific truth, is the only real beauty.  "Let God be true,
and every man a liar."

Now, be it remembered that by far the greater proportion of this book
consists of such thoughts as these; and that these are what are
called its beauties; these are what young poets try more and more
daily to invent--conceits, false analogies.  Be it remembered, that
the affectation of such conceits has always marked the decay and
approaching death of a reigning school of poetry; that when, for
instance, the primeval forest of the Elizabethan poets dwindled down
into a barren scrub of Vaughans, and Cowleys, and Herberts, and
Crashawes, this was the very form in which the deadly blight
appeared.  In vain did the poetasters, frightened now and then at
their own nonsense, try to keep up the decaying dignity of poetry by
drawing their conceits, as poetasters do now, from suns and galaxies,
earthquakes, eclipses, and the portentous, and huge and gaudy in
Nature; the lawlessness and irreverence for Nature, involved in the
very worship of conceits, went on degrading the tone of the conceits
themselves, till the very sense of true beauty and fitness seemed
lost; and a pious and refined gentleman like George Herbert could
actually dare to indite solemn conundrums to the Supreme Being, and
believe that he was writing devout poetry, and "looking through
nature up to nature's God," when he delivered himself thus in one of
his least offensive poems (for the most sacred and most offensive of
them we dare not quote, lest we incur the same blame which we have
bestowed on Mr. Smith, and sing of Church festivals as--)


Marrow of time, eternity in brief,
Compendiums epitomised, the chief
Contents, the indices, the title-pages
Of all past, present, and succeeding ages,
Sublimate graces, antedated glories;
   The cream of holiness.
      The inventories
   Of future blessedness,
The florilegia of celestial stories,
Spirit of Joys, the relishes and closes
Of angels' music, pearls dissolved, roses
Perfumed, sugar'd honeycombs.


That manner, happily for art, was silenced by the stern truth-loving
common sense of the Puritans.  Whatsoever else, in their crusade
against shams, they were too hasty in sweeping away, they were right,
at least, in sweeping away such a sham as that.  And now, when a
school has betaken itself to use the very same method in the cause of
blasphemy, instead of in that of cant, the Pope himself, with his
Index Prohibitus, might be a welcome guest, if he would but stop the
noise, and compel our doting Muses to sit awhile in silence, and
reconsider themselves.

In the meanwhile, poets write about poets, and poetry, and guiding
the age, and curbing the world, and waking it, and thrilling it, and
making it start, and weep, and tremble, and self-conceit only knows
what else; and yet the age is not guided, or the world curbed, or
thrilled, or waked, or anything else, by them.  Why should it be?
Curb and thrill the world?  The world is just now a most practical
world; and these men are utterly unpractical.  The age is given up to
physical science; these men disregard and outrage it in every page by
their false analogies.  If they intend, as they say, to link heaven
and earth by preaching the analogy of matter and spirit, let them, in
the name of common prudence, observe the laws of matter, about which
the world does know something, and show their coincidence with the
laws of spirit--if indeed they know anything about the said laws.
Loose conceits, fancies of the private judgment, were excusable
enough in the Elizabethan poets.  In their day, nature was still
unconquered by science; medieval superstitions still lingered in the
minds of men and the magical notions of nature which they had
inherited from the Middle Age received a corroboration from those
neoplatonist dreamers, whom they confounded with the true Greek
philosophers.  But, now that Bacon has spoken, and that Europe has
obeyed him, surely, among the most practical, common sense, and
scientific nation of the earth, severely scientific imagery, imagery
drawn from the inner laws of nature, is necessary to touch the hearts
of men.  They know that the universe is not such as poets paint it;
they know that these pretty thoughts are only pretty thoughts,
springing from the caprice, the vanity, very often from the
indigestion of the gentlemen who take the trouble to sing to them;
and they listen, as they would to a band of street musicians, and
give them sixpence for their tune, and go on with their work.  The
tune outside has nothing to do with the work inside.  It will not
help them to be wiser, abler, more valiant--certainly not more
cheerful and hopeful men, and therefore they care no more for it than
they do for an opera or a pantomime, if as much.  Whereupon the poets
get disgusted with the same hard-hearted prosaic world--which is
trying to get its living like an industrious animal as it is--and
demand homage--for what?  For making a noise, pleasant or otherwise?
For not being as other men are?  For pleading "the eccentricities of
genius" as an excuse for sitting like naughty children in the middle
of the schoolroom floor, in everybody's way, shouting and playing on
penny trumpets, and when begged to be quiet, that other people may
learn their lessons, considering themselves insulted, and pleading
"genius"?  Genius!--hapless byword, which, like charity, covers
nowadays the multitude of sins, all the seven deadly ones included!
Is there any form of human folly which one has not heard excused by
"He is a genius, you know--one must not judge him by common rules."
Poor genius, to have come to this!  To be, when confessed, not a
reason for being more of a man than others, but an excuse for being
less of a man, less amenable than the herd to the common laws of
humanity, and therefore less able than they to comprehend its common
duties, common temptations, common sins, common virtues, common
destinies.  Of old the wise singer did by virtue of feeling with all,
and obeying with all, learn to see for all, to see eternal laws,
eternal analogies, eternal consequences, and so became a seer, vates,
prophet; but now he is become a genius, a poetical pharisee, a
reviler of common laws and duties, the slave of his own private
judgment, who prophesies out of his own heart, and hath seen nothing
but only the appearances of things distorted and coloured by
"genius."  Heaven send the word, with many more, a speedy burial!

And what becomes of artistic form in the hands of such a school?
Just what was to be expected.  It is impossible to give outward form
to that which is in its very nature formless, like doubt and
discontent.  For on such subjects thought itself is not defined; it
has no limit, no self-coherence, not even method or organic law.  And
in a poem, as in all else, the body must be formed according to the
law of the inner life; the utterance must be the expression, the
outward and visible antetype of the spirit which animates it.  But
where the thought is defined by no limits, it cannot express itself
in form, for form is that which has limits.  Where it has no inward
unity it cannot have any outward one.  If the spirit be impatient of
all moral rule, its utterance will be equally impatient of all
artistic rule; and thus, as we are now beginning to discover from
experience, the poetry of doubt will find itself unable to use those
forms of verse which have been always held to be the highest--
tragedy, epic, the ballad, and lastly, even the subjective lyrical
ode.  For they, too, to judge by every great lyric which remains to
us, require a groundwork of consistent self-coherent belief; and they
require also an appreciation of melody even more delicate, and a
verbal polish even more complete than any other form of poetic
utterance.  But where there is no melody within, there will be no
melody without.  It is in vain to attempt the setting of spiritual
discords to physical music.  The mere practical patience and self-
restraint requisite to work out rhythm when fixed on, will be
wanting; nay, the fitting rhythm will never be found, the subject
itself being arhythmic; and thus we shall have, or, rather, alas! do
have, a wider and wider divorce of sound and sense, a greater and
greater carelessness for polish, and for the charm of musical
utterance, and watch the clear and spirit-stirring melodies of the
older poets swept away by a deluge of half-metrical prose-run-mad,
diffuse, unfinished, unmusical, to which any other metre than that in
which it happens to have been written would have been equally
appropriate, because all are equally inappropriate.  Where men have
nothing to sing, it is not of the slightest consequence how they sing
it.

While poets persist in thinking and writing thus, it is in vain for
them to talk loud about the poet's divine mission, as the prophet of
mankind, the swayer of the universe, and so forth.  Not that we
believe the poet simply by virtue of being a singer to have any such
power.  While young gentlemen are talking about governing heaven and
earth by verse, Wellingtons and Peels, Arkwrights and Stephensons,
Frys, and Chisholms, are doing it by plain practical prose; and even
of those who have moved and led the hearts of men by verse, every
one, as far as we know, has produced his magical effects by poetry of
the very opposite forum to that which is now in fashion.  What poet
ever had more influence than Homer?  What poet is more utterly
antipodal to our modern schools?  There are certain Hebrew psalms,
too, which will be confessed, even by those who differ most from
them, to have exercised some slight influence on human thought and
action, and to be likely to exercise the same for some time to come.
Are they any more like our modern poetic forms than they are like our
modern poetic matter?  Ay, even in our own time, what has been the
form, what the temper, of all poetry, from Korner and Heine, which
has made the German heart leap up, but simplicity, manhood,
clearness, finished melody, the very opposite, in a word, of our new
school?  And to look at home, what is the modern poetry which lives
on the lips and in the hearts of Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen?  It
is not only simple in form and language, but much of it fitted, by a
severe exercise of artistic patience, to tunes already existing.  Who
does not remember how the "Marseillaise" was born, or how Burns's
"Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled," or the story of Moore's taking the
old "Red Fox March," and giving it a new immortality as "Let Erin
remember the days of old," while poor Emmett sprang up and cried,
"Oh, that I had twenty thousand Irishmen marching to that tune!"  So
it is, even to this day, and let those who hanker after poetic fame
take note of it; not a poem which is now really living but has gained
its immortality by virtue of simplicity and positive faith.

Let the poets of the new school consider carefully Wolfe's "Sir John
Moore," Campbell's "Hohenlinden," "Mariners of England," and "Rule
Britannia," Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and "Bridge of Sighs," and
then ask themselves, as men who would be poets:  Were it not better
to have written any one of those glorious lyrics than all which John
Keats has left behind him?  And let them be sure that, howsoever they
may answer the question to themselves, the sound heart of the English
people has already made its choice; and that when that beautiful
"Hero and Leander," in which Hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers
at their own weapons, by virtue of the very terseness, clearness, and
manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the
Crashawes and Marinos, his "Song of the Shirt" and his "Bridge of
Sighs" will be esteemed by great new English nations far beyond the
seas, for what they are--two of the most noble lyric poems ever
written by an English pen.  If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of
the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find
them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new
time, they will find them there.  If they want the truly sublime and
the awful, they will find them there also.  But they will find none
of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a metaphor; no taint of
this new poetic diction into which we have now fallen, after all our
abuse of the far more manly and sincere "poetic diction" of the
eighteenth century; they will find no loitering by the way to argue
and moralise, and grumble at Providence, and show off the author's
own genius and sensibility; they will find, in short, two real works
of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what they
want to say, and saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the
calmest, the most finished words.  Saying it!--rather taught to say
it.  For if that "divine inspiration of poets," of which the
poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have indeed, as
all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather
be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from unrighteous man to a
righteous God, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems
to be that mere passionate sensibility, which our modern Draco once
described when speaking of poor John Keats, as an infinite hunger
after all manner of pleasant things, crying to the universe:  'Oh
that thou wert one great lump of sugar, that I might suck thee!'"

Our task is ended.  We have given as plainly as we can our reasons
for the opinion which this magazine has expressed several times
already, that with the exception of Mr. Allingham, our young poets
are a very hopeless generation, and will so continue unless they
utterly repent and amend.  If they do not choose to awaken themselves
from within, all that is left for us is to hope that they may be
awakened from without, or by some radical revulsion in public taste
be shown their own real value and durability, and compelled to be
true and manly under pain of being laughed at and forgotten.  A
general war might, amid all its inevitable horrors, sweep away at
once the dyspeptic unbelief, the insincere bigotry, the effeminate
frivolity which now paralyses our poetry as much as it does our
action, and strike from England's heart a lightning flash of noble
deeds, a thunder peal of noble song.  Such a case is neither an
impossible nor a far-fetched one; let us not doubt that by some other
means if not by that, the immense volume of thought and power which
is still among us will soon find its utterance, and justify itself to
after ages by showing in harmonious and self-restrained poetry its
kinship to the heroic and the beautiful of every age and clime.  And
till then, till the sunshine and the thaw shall come, and the spring
flowers burst into bud and bloom, heralding a new golden year in the
world's life, let us even be content with our pea-green and orange
fungi; nay, even admire them as not without their own tawdry beauty,
their clumsy fitness; for after all, they are products of nature,
though only of her dyspepsia; and grow and breed--as indeed cutaneous
disorders do--by an organic law of their own; fulfilling their little
destiny, and then making, according to Professor Way, by no means bad
manure.  And so we take our leave of Mr. Alexander Smith, entreating
him, if these pages meet his eye, to consider three things, namely,
that in as far as he has written poetry, he is on the road to ruin by
reason of following the worst possible models.  That in as far as the
prevailing taste has put these models before him, he is neither to
take much blame to himself, nor to be in anywise disheartened for the
future.  That in as far as he shall utterly reverse his whole poetic
method, whether in morals or in aesthetics, leave undone all that he
has done, and do all that he has not done, he will become, what he
evidently, by grace of God, can become if he will, namely, a lasting
and a good poet.



TENNYSON {103}



Critics cannot in general be too punctilious in their respect for an
incognito.  If an author intended us to know his name, he would put
it on his title-page.  If he does not choose to do that, we have no
more right to pry into his secret than we have to discuss his family
affairs or open his letters.  But every rule has its exceptional
cases; and the book which stands first upon our list is surely such.
All the world, somehow or other, knows the author.  His name has been
mentioned unhesitatingly by several reviews already, whether from
private information, or from the certainty which every well-read
person must feel that there is but one man in England possessed at
once of poetic talent and artistic experience sufficient for so noble
a creation.  We hope, therefore, that we shall not be considered
impertinent if we ignore an incognito which all England has ignored
before us, and attribute "In Memoriam" to the pen of the author of
"The Princess."

Such a course will probably be the more useful one to our readers;
for this last work of our only living great poet seems to us at once
the culmination of all his efforts and the key to many difficulties
in his former writings.  Heaven forbid that we should say that it
completes the circle of his powers.  On the contrary, it gives us
hope of broader effort in new fields of thought and forms of art.
But it brings the development of his Muse and of his Creed to a
positive and definite point.  It enables us to claim one who has been
hitherto regarded as belonging to a merely speculative and peirastic
school as the willing and deliberate champion of vital Christianity,
and of an orthodoxy the more sincere because it has worked upward
through the abyss of doubt; the more mighty for good because it
justifies and consecrates the aesthetics and the philosophy of the
present age.  We are sure, moreover, that the author, whatever right
reasons he may have had for concealing his own name, would have no
quarrel against us for alluding to it, were he aware of the idolatry
with which every utterance of his is regarded by the cultivated young
men of our day, especially at the universities, and of the infinite
service of which this "In Memoriam" may be to them, if they are
taught by it that their superiors are not ashamed of faith, and that
they will rise instead of falling, fulfil instead of denying the
cravings of their hearts and intellects, if they will pass upwards
with their teacher from the vague though noble expectations of
"Locksley Hall," to the assured and everlasting facts of the proem to
"In Memoriam"--in our eyes the noblest Christian poem which England
has produced for two centuries.

To explain our meaning, it will be necessary, perhaps, to go back to
Mr. Tennyson's earlier writings, of which he is said to be somewhat
ashamed now--a fastidiousness with which we will not quarrel; for it
should be the rule of the poet, forgetting those things which are
behind, to press on to those things which are before, and "to count
not himself to have apprehended but--" no, we will not finish the
quotation; let the readers of "In Memoriam" finish it for themselves,
and see how, after all, the poet, if he would reach perfection, must
be found by Him who found St. Paul of old.  In the meantime, as a
true poet must necessarily be in advance of his age, Mr. Tennyson's
earlier poems, rather than these latter ones, coincide with the
tastes and speculations of the young men of this day.  And in
proportion, we believe, as they thoroughly appreciate the distinctive
peculiarities of those poems, will they be able to follow the author
of them on his upward path.

Some of our readers, we would fain hope, remember as an era in their
lives the first day on which they read those earlier poems; how,
fifteen years ago, Mariana in the Moated Grange, "The Dying Swan,"
"The Lady of Shalott," came to them as revelations.  They seemed to
themselves to have found at last a poet who promised not only to
combine the cunning melody of Moore, the rich fulness of Keats, and
the simplicity of Wordsworth, but one who was introducing a method of
observing nature different from that of all the three and yet
succeeding in everything which they had attempted, often in vain.
Both Keats and Moore had an eye for the beauty which lay in trivial
and daily objects.  But in both of them, there was a want of deep
religious reverence, which kept Moore playing gracefully upon the
surface of phenomena without ever daring to dive into their laws or
inner meaning; and made poor Keats fancy that he was rather to render
nature poetical by bespangling her with florid ornament, than simply
to confess that she was already, by the grace of God, far beyond the
need of his paint and gilding.  Even Wordsworth himself had not full
faith in the great dicta which he laid down in his famous
Introductory Essay.  Deep as was his conviction that nature bore upon
her simplest forms the finger-mark of God, he did not always dare
simply to describe her as she was, and leave her to reveal her own
mystery.  We do not say this in depreciation of one who stands now
far above human praise or blame.  The wonder is, not that Wordsworth
rose no higher, but that, considering the level on which his taste
was formed, he had power to rise to the height above his age which he
did attain.  He did a mighty work.  He has left the marks of his
teaching upon every poet who has written verses worth reading for the
last twenty years.  The idea by which he conquered was, as Coleridge
well sets forth, the very one which, in its practical results on his
own poetry, procured him loud and deserved ridicule.  This, which
will be the root idea of the whole poetry of this generation, was the
dignity of nature in all her manifestations, and not merely in those
which may happen to suit the fastidiousness or Manichaeism of any
particular age.  He may have been at times fanatical on his idea, and
have misused it, till it became self-contradictory, because he could
not see the correlative truths which should have limited it.  But it
is by fanatics, by men of one great thought, that great works are
done; and it is good for the time that a man arose in it of fearless
honesty enough to write Peter Bell and the Idiot Boy, to shake all
the old methods of nature-painting to their roots, and set every man
seriously to ask himself what he meant, or whether he meant anything
real, reverent, or honest, when he talked about "poetic diction," or
"the beauties of nature."  And after all, like all fanatics,
Wordsworth was better than his own creed.  As Coleridge thoroughly
shows in the second volume of the "Biographia Literaria," and as may
be seen nowhere more strikingly than in his grand posthumous work,
his noblest poems and noblest stanzas are those in which his true
poetic genius, unconsciously to himself, sets at naught his own
pseudo-naturalist dogmas.

Now Mr. Tennyson, while fully adopting Wordsworth's principle from
the very first, seemed by instinctive taste to have escaped the
snares which had proved too subtle both for Keats and Wordsworth.
Doubtless there are slight niaiseries, after the manner of both those
poets, in the first editions of his earlier poems.  He seems, like
most other great artists, to have first tried imitations of various
styles which already existed, before he learnt the art of
incorporating them into his own, and learning from all his
predecessors, without losing his own individual peculiarities.  But
there are descriptive passages in them also which neither Keats nor
Wordsworth could have written, combining the honest sensuous
observation which is common to them both, with a self-restrained
simplicity which Keats did not live long enough to attain, and a
stately and accurate melody, an earnest songfulness (to coin a word)
which Wordsworth seldom attained, and from his inaccurate and
uncertain ear, still seldomer preserved without the occurrence of a
jar or a rattle, a false quantity, a false rapture, or a bathos.  And
above all, or rather beneath all--for we suspect that this has been
throughout the very secret of Mr. Tennyson's power--there was a hush
and a reverent awe, a sense of the mystery, the infinitude, the
awfulness, as well as of the mere beauty of wayside things, which
invested these poems as wholes with a peculiar richness, depth, and
majesty of tone, beside which both Keats's and Wordsworth's methods
of handling pastoral subjects looked like the colouring of Julio
Romano or Watteau by the side of Correggio or Titian.

This deep simple faith in the divineness of Nature as she appears,
which, in our eyes, is Mr. Tennyson's differentia, is really the
natural accompaniment of a quality at first sight its very opposite,
and for which he is often blamed by a prosaic world; namely, his
subjective and transcendental mysticism.  It is the mystic, after
all, who will describe Nature most simply, because he sees most in
her; because he is most ready to believe that she will reveal to
others the same message which she has revealed to him.  Men like
Behmen, Novalis, and Fourier, who can soar into the inner cloud-world
of man's spirit, even though they lose their way there, dazzled by
excess of wonder--men who, like Wordsworth, can give utterance to
such subtle anthropologic wisdom as the "Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality," will for that very reason most humbly and patiently
"consider the lilies of the field, how they grow."  And even so it is
just because Mr. Tennyson is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and
what an ignorant and money-getting generation, idolatrous of mere
sensuous activity, calls "dreamy," that he has become the greatest
naturalistic poet which England has seen for several centuries.  The
same faculty which enabled him to draw such subtle subjective
pictures of womanhood as Adeline, Isabel, and Eleanor, enabled him to
see, and therefore simply to describe, in one of the most distinctive
and successful of his earlier poems, how


The creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
   And the willow branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
   And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.


No doubt there are in the earlier poems exceptions to this style--
attempts to adorn nature, and dazzle with a barbaric splendour akin
to that of Keats--as, for instance, in the "Recollections of the
Arabian Nights."  But how cold and gaudy, in spite of individual
beauties, is that poem by the side of either of the Marianas, and
especially of the one in which the scenery is drawn, simply and
faithfully, from those counties which the world considers the
quintessence of the prosaic--the English fens.


Upon the middle of the night
   Waking she heard the night-fowl crow;
The cock sang out an hour ere light:
   From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her:  without hope of change,
   In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,
   Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.

* * * * *

About a stone-cast from the wall
   A sluice with blackened waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
   The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
   All silver-green with gnarled bark,
   For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray,


Throughout all these exquisite lines occurs but one instance of what
the vulgar call "poetic diction."  All is simple description, in
short and Saxon words, and yet who can deny the effect to be perfect-
-superior to any similar passage in Wordsworth?  And why?  Because
the passage quoted, and indeed the whole poem, is perfect in what
artists call tone--tone in the metre and in the sound of the words,
as well as in the images and the feelings expressed.  The weariness,
the dreariness, the dark mysterious waste, exist alike within and
without, in the slow monotonous pace of the metre and the words, as
well as in the boundless fen, and the heart of her who, "without hope
of change, in sleep did seem to walk forlorn."

The same faith in Nature, the same instinctive correctness in melody,
springing from that correct insight into Nature, ran through the
poems inspired by medieval legends.  The very spirit of the old
ballad writers, with their combinations of mysticism and objectivity,
their freedom from any self-conscious attempt at reflective epithets
or figures, runs through them all.  We are never jarred in them, as
we are in all the attempts at ballad-writing and ballad-restoring
before Mr. Tennyson's time, by discordant touches of the reflective
in thought, the picturesque in Nature, or the theatric in action.  To
illustrate our meaning, readers may remember the ballad of "Fair
Emmeline," in Bishop Percy's "Reliques."  The bishop confesses, if we
mistake not, to have patched one end of the ballad.  He need not have
informed us of that fact, while such lines as these following meet
our eyes:


      The Baron turned aside,
And wiped away the rising tears
   He proudly strove to hide.


No old ballad writer would have used such a complicated concetto.
Another, and even a worse instance is to be found in the difference
between the old and new versions of the grand ballad of "Glasgerion."
In the original, we hear how the elfin harper could


Harp fish out of the water,
   And water out of a stone,
And milk out of a maiden's breast
   That bairn had never none.


For which some benighted "restorer" substitutes--


Oh, there was magic in his touch,
   And sorcery in his string!


No doubt there was.  But while the new poetaster informs you of the
abstract notion, the ancient poet gives you the concrete fact; as Mr.
Tennyson has done with wonderful art in his exquisite "St. Agnes,"
where the saint's subjective mysticism appears only as embodied in
objective pictures:


Break up the heavens, oh Lord! and far
   Through all yon starlight keen
Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star,
In raiment white and clean.


Sir Walter Scott's ballads fail just on the same point.  Even
Campbell cannot avoid an occasional false note of sentiment.  In Mr.
Tennyson alone, as we think, the spirit of the Middle Age is
perfectly reflected; its delight, not in the "sublime and
picturesque," but in the green leaves and spring flowers for their
own sake--the spirit of Chaucer and of the "Robin Hood Garland"--the
naturalism which revels as much in the hedgerow and garden as in
Alps, and cataracts, and Italian skies, and the other strong
stimulants to the faculty of admiration which the palled taste of an
unhealthy age, from Keats and Byron down to Browning, has rushed
abroad to seek.  It is enough for Mr. Tennyson's truly English spirit
to see how


On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road runs by
      To many-tower'd Camelot.


Or how


In the stormy east wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
      Over tower'd Camelot.


Give him but such scenery as that which he can see in every parish in
England, and he will find it a fit scene for an ideal myth, subtler
than a casuist's questionings, deep as the deepest heart of woman.

But in this earlier volume the poet has not yet arrived at the art of
combining his new speculations on man with his new mode of viewing
Nature.  His objective pieces are too exclusively objective, his
subjective too exclusively subjective; and where he deals with
natural imagery in these latter, he is too apt, as in "Eleanore," to
fall back upon the old and received method of poetic diction, though
he never indulges in a commonplace or a stock epithet.  But in the
interval between 1830 and 1842 the needful interfusion of the two
elements has taken place.  And in "Locksley Hall" and the "'Two
Voices" we find the new doubts and questions of the time embodied
naturally and organically, in his own method of simple natural
expression.  For instance, from the Search for Truth in the "Two
Voices"--


Cry, faint not, climb:  the summits lope
Beyond the furthest flights of hope,
Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope.

Sometimes a little corner shines
As over rainy mist inclines
A gleaming crag with belts of pines.

"I will go forward," sayest thou;
"I shall not fail to find her now.
Look up, the fold is on her brow."


Or again, in "Locksley Hall," the poem which, as we think deservedly,
has had most influence on the minds of the young men of our day:


Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,
And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;
And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men;
Men, my brothers, men the workers, over reaping something new:
That which they have done but earnest of the things which they shall
do:


and all the grand prophetic passage following, which is said, we know
not how truly, to have won for the poet the respect of that great
statesman whose loss all good men deplore.

In saying that "Locksley Hall" has deservedly had so great an
influence over the minds of the young, we shall, we are afraid, have
offended some who are accustomed to consider that poem as Werterian
and unhealthy.  But, in reality, the spirit of the poem is simply
anti-Werterian.  It is man rising out of sickness into health--not
conquered by Werterism, but conquering his selfish sorrow, and the
moral and intellectual paralysis which it produces, by faith and
hope--faith in the progress of science and civilisation, hope in the
final triumph of good.  Doubtless, that is not the highest
deliverance--not a permanent deliverance at all.  Faith in God and
hope in Christ alone can deliver a man once and for all from
Werterism, or any other moral disease; that truth was reserved for
"In Memoriam:" but as far as "Locksley Hall" goes, it is a step
forward--a whole moral aeon beyond Byron and Shelley; and a step,
too, in the right direction, just because it is a step forward--
because the path of deliverance is, as "Locksley Hall" sets forth,
not backwards towards a fancied paradise of childhood--not backward
to grope after an unconsciousness which is now impossible, an
implicit faith which would be unworthy of the man, but forward on the
road on which God has been leading him, carrying upward with him the
aspirations of childhood, and the bitter experience of youth, to help
the organised and trustful labour of manhood.  There are, in fact,
only two deliverances from Werterism possible in the nineteenth
century; one is into Popery, and the other is--


   Forward, forward, let us range;
Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change;
Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.


But such a combination of powers as Mr. Tennyson's naturally develop
themselves into a high idyllic faculty; for it is the very essence of
the idyl to set forth the poetry which lies in the simpler
manifestations of Man and Nature; yet not explicitly, by a reflective
moralising on them, as almost all our idyllists--Cowper, Gray,
Crabbe, and Wordsworth--have been in the habit of doing, but
implicitly, by investing them all with a rich and delightful tone of
colouring, perfect grace of manner, perfect melody of rhythm, which,
like a gorgeous summer atmosphere, shall glorify without altering the
most trivial and homely sights.  And it is this very power, as
exhibited in the "Lord of Burleigh," "Audley Court," and the
"Gardener's Daughter," which has made Mr. Tennyson, not merely the
only English rival of Theocritus and Bion, but, in our opinion, as
much their superior as modern England is superior to ancient Greece.

Yet in "The Princess," perhaps, Mr. Tennyson rises higher still.  The
idyllic manner alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even the
sublime, by such imperceptible gradations, and continual delicate
variations of key, that the harmonious medley of his style becomes
the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet harmonious
fairyland in which his fancy ranges.  In this work, too, Mr. Tennyson
shows himself more than ever the poet of the day.  In it more than
ever the old is interpenetrated with the new--the domestic and
scientific with the ideal and sentimental.  He dares, in every page,
to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled
clumsiness and archaism of his compeers shrinks, as unpoetical.
Though, as we just said, his stage is an ideal fairyland, yet he has
reached the ideal by the only true method--by bringing the Middle Age
forward to the Present one, and not by ignoring the Present to fall
back on a cold and galvanised Medievalism; and thus he makes his
"Medley" a mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed of its own new
art and science, its own new temptations and aspirations, and yet
grounded on, and continually striving to reproduce, the forms and
experiences of all past time.  The idea, too, of "The Princess" is an
essentially modern one.  In every age women have been tempted, by the
possession of superior beauty, intellect, or strength of will, to
deny their own womanhood, and attempt to stand alone as men, whether
on the ground of political intrigue, ascetic saintship, or
philosophic pride.  Cleopatra and St. Hedwiga, Madame de Stael and
the Princess, are merely different manifestations of the same self-
willed and proud longing of woman to unsex herself, and realise,
single and self-sustained, some distorted and partial notion of her
own as to what the "angelic life" should be.  Cleopatra acted out the
pagan ideal of an angel; St. Hedwiga, the medieval one; Madame de
Stael hers, with the peculiar notions of her time as to what
"spirituel" might mean; and in "The Princess" Mr. Tennyson has
embodied the ideal of that nobler, wider, purer, yet equally
fallacious, because equally unnatural, analogue, which we may meet
too often up and down England now.  He shows us the woman, when she
takes nor stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, working
out her own moral punishment, by destroying in herself the tender
heart of flesh:  not even her vast purposes of philanthropy can
preserve her, for they are built up, not on the womanhood which God
has given her, but on her own self-will; they change, they fall, they
become inconsistent, even as she does herself, till, at last, she
loses all feminine sensibility; scornfully and stupidly she rejects
and misunderstands the heart of man; and then falling from pride to
sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity, she punishes sisterly
love as a crime, robs the mother of her child, and becomes all but a
vengeful fury, with all the peculiar faults of woman, and none of the
peculiar excellences of man.

The poem being, as its title imports, a medley of jest and earnest,
allows a metrical licence, of which we are often tempted to wish that
its author had not availed himself; yet the most unmetrical and
apparently careless passages flow with a grace, a lightness, a
colloquial ease and frolic, which perhaps only heighten the effect of
the serious parts, and serve as a foil to set off the unrivalled
finish and melody of these latter.  In these come out all Mr.
Tennyson's instinctive choice of tone, his mastery of language, which
always fits the right word to the right thing, and that word always
the simplest one, and the perfect ear for melody which makes it
superfluous to set to music poetry which, read by the veriest
schoolboy, makes music of itself.  The poem, we are glad to say, is
so well known that it seems unnecessary to quote from it; yet there
are here and there gems of sound and expression of which, however
well our readers may know them, we cannot forbear reminding them
again.  For instance, the end of the idyl in book vii. beginning
"Come down, O maid" (the whole of which is perhaps one of the most
perfect fruits of the poet's genius):


Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.


Who, after three such lines, will talk of English as a harsh and
clumsy language, and seek in the effeminate and monotonous Italian
for expressive melody of sound?  Who cannot hear in them the rapid
rippling of the water, the stately calmness of the wood-dove's note,
and, in the repetition of short syllables and soft liquids in the
last line, the


Murmuring of innumerable bees?


Or again, what combination of richness with simplicity in such a
passage as this:


   Breathe upon my brows;
In that fine air I tremble, all the past
Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this
I scarce believe, and all the rich to come
Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning leaves.


How Mr. Tennyson can have attained the prodigal fulness of thought
and imagery which distinguishes this poem, and especially the last
canto, without his style ever becoming overloaded, seldom even
confused, is perhaps one of the greatest marvels of the whole
production.  The songs themselves, which have been inserted between
the cantos in the last edition of the book, seem, perfect as they
are, wasted and smothered among the surrounding fertility; till we
discover that they stand there, not merely for the sake of their
intrinsic beauty, but serve to call back the reader's mind, at every
pause in the tale of the Princess's folly, to that very healthy ideal
of womanhood which she has spurned.

At the end of the first canto, fresh from the description of the
female college, with its professoresses, and hostleresses, and other
utopian monsters, we turn the page, and--


As through the land at eve we went,
   And pluck'd the ripen'd ears.
We fell out, my wife and I,
   And kissed again with tears:

And blessings on the falling-out
   That all the more endears,
When we fall out with those we love,
   And kiss again with tears!

For when we came where lies the child
   We lost in other years,
There above the little grave,
   We kissed again with tears.


Between the next two cantos intervenes the well-known cradle-song,
perhaps the best of all; and at the next interval is the equally
well-known bugle-song, the idea of which is that of twin-labour and
twin-fame, in a pair of lovers:


Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.


In the next, the memory of wife and child inspirits the soldier in
the field; in the next, the sight of the fallen hero's child opens
the sluices of his widow's tears; and in the last, and perhaps the
most beautiful of all, the poet has succeeded, in the new edition, in
superadding a new form of emotion to a canto in which he seemed to
have exhausted every resource of pathos which his subject allowed;
and prepares us for the triumph of that art by which he makes us,
after all, love the heroine whom he at first taught us to hate and
despise, till we see that the naughtiness is after all one that must
be kissed and not whipped out of her, and look on smiling while she
repents, with Prince Harry of old, "not in sackcloth and ashes, but
in new silk and old sack:"


Ask me no more:  the moon may draw the sea;
   The cloud may stoop from Heaven and take the shape,
   With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;
But, O too fond, when have I answered thee?
      Ask me no more.

Ask me no more:  what answer should I give?
   I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:
   Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!
Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;
      Ask me no more.

Ask me no more:  thy fate and mine are seal'd:
   I strove against the stream and all in vain:
   Let the great river take me to the main:
No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;
      Ask me no more.


We now come to "In Memoriam;" a collection of poems on a vast variety
of subjects, but all united, as their name implies, to the memory of
a departed friend.  We know not whether to envy more--the poet the
object of his admiration, or that object the monument which has been
consecrated to his nobleness.  For in this latest and highest volume,
written at various intervals during a long series of years, all the
poet's peculiar excellences, with all that he has acquired from
others, seem to have been fused down into a perfect unity, and
brought to bear on his subject with that care and finish which only a
labour of love can inspire.  We only now know the whole man, all his
art, all his insight, all his faculty of discerning the piu nell'
uno, and the uno nell' piu.  As he says himself:


My love has talked with rocks and trees,
   He finds on misty mountain-ground,
   His own vast shadow glory-crowned;
He sees himself in all he sees.


Everything reminds him of the dead.  Every joy or sorrow of man,
every aspect of nature, from


The forest crack'd, the waters, curl'd,
   The cattle huddled on the lea.

The thousand waves of wheat
That ripple round the lonely grange.


In every place where in old days they had met and conversed; in every
dark wrestling of the spirit with the doubts and fears of manhood,
throughout the whole outward universe of Nature, and the whole inward
universe of spirit, the soul of his dead friend broods--at first a
memory shrouded in blank despair, then, a living presence, a
ministering spirit, answering doubts, calming fears, stirring up
noble aspirations, utter humility, leading the poet upward, step by
step, to faith, and peace, and hope.  Not that there runs throughout
the book a conscious or organic method.  The poems seem often merely
to be united by the identity of their metre, so exquisitely chosen,
that while the major rhyme in the second and third lines of each
stanza gives the solidity and self-restraint required by such deep
themes, the mournful minor rhyme of each first and fourth line always
leads the ear to expect something beyond, and enables the poet's
thoughts to wander sadly on, from stanza to stanza and poem to poem,
in an endless chain of


Linked sweetness long drawn out.


There are records of risings and fallings again, of alternate cloud
and sunshine, throughout the book; earnest and passionate, yet never
bitter; humble, yet never abject; with a depth and vehemence of
affection "passing the love of woman," yet without a taint of
sentimentality; self-restrained and dignified, without ever narrowing
into artificial coldness; altogether rivalling the sonnets of
Shakespeare; and all knit together into one spiritual unity by the
proem at the opening of the volume--in our eyes, the noblest English
Christian poem which several centuries have seen.

We shall not quote the very poems which we should most wish to sink
into men's hearts.  Let each man find for himself those which suit
him best, and meditate on them in silence.  They are fit only to be
read solemnly in our purest and most thoughtful moods, in the
solitude of our chamber, or by the side of those we love, with thanks
to the great heart who has taken courage to bestow on us the record
of his own friendship, doubt, and triumph.

It has been often asked why Mr. Tennyson's great and varied powers
had never been concentrated on one immortal work.  The epic, the
lyric, the idyllic faculties, perhaps the dramatic also, seemed to be
all there, and yet all sundered, scattered about in small fragmentary
poems.  "In Memoriam," as we think, explains the paradox.  Mr.
Tennyson had been employed on higher, more truly divine, and yet more
truly human work than either epos or drama.  Within the unseen and
alone truly Real world which underlies and explains this mere time-
shadow, which men miscall the Real, he had been going down into the
depths, and ascending into the heights, led, like Dante of old, by
the guiding of a mighty spirit.  And in this volume, the record of
seventeen years, we have the result of those spiritual experiences in
a form calculated, as we believe, to be a priceless benefit to many
an earnest seeker in this generation, and perhaps to stir up some who
are priding themselves on a cold dilettantism and barren epicurism,
into something like a living faith and hope.  Blessed and delightful
it is to find, that even in these new ages the creeds which so many
fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the final and highest
succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast, but of the subtle
artist and the daring speculator.  Blessed it is to find the most
cunning poet of our day able to combine the complicated rhythm and
melody of modern times with the old truths which gave heart to
martyrs at the stake; and to see in the science and the history of
the nineteenth century new and living fulfilments of the words which
we learnt at our mother's knee.  Blessed, thrice blessed, to find
that hero-worship is not yet passed away; that the heart of man still
beats young and fresh; that the old tales of David and Jonathan,
Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his
nameless friend, of "love passing the love of woman," ennobled by its
own humility, deeper than death, and mightier than the grave, can
still blossom out, if it be but in one heart here and there, to show
men still how, sooner or later, "he that loveth knoweth God, for God
is love."



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL {127}



Four faces among the portraits of modern men, great or small, strike
us as supremely beautiful; not merely in expression, but in the form
and proportion and harmony of features:  Shakespeare, Raffaelle,
Goethe, Burns.  One would expect it to be so; for the mind makes the
body, not the body the mind; and the inward beauty seldom fails to
express itself in the outward, as a visible sign of the invisible
grace or disgrace of the wearer.  Not that it is so always.  A Paul,
Apostle of the Gentiles, may be ordained to be "in presence weak, in
speech contemptible," hampered by some thorn in the flesh--to
interfere apparently with the success of his mission, perhaps for the
same wise purpose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athenians,
the worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest of human bodies,
that they, or rather those of them to whom eyes to see had been
given, might learn, that soul is after all independent of matter, and
not its creature and its slave.  But, in the generality of cases,
physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, if not,
alas! what the man might have been, still what he has become.  Yet
even this former problem, what he might have been, may often be
solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and
weakness have had their will upon the features; and, therefore, when
we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we alluded, in each case, to
the earliest portraits of each genius which we could recollect.
Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of
Robert Burns an honourable station among them.  Of Shakespeare's we
do not speak, for it seems to us to combine in itself the elements of
all the other three; but of the rest, we question whether Burns be
not, after all, if not the noblest, still the most lovable--the most
like what we should wish that of a teacher of men to be.  Raffaelle--
the most striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the full-face pencil
sketch by his own hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford--though
without a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melancholy,
formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence.  His is a
face to be kissed, not worshipped.  Goethe, even in his earliest
portraits, looks as if his expression depended too much on his own
will.  There is a self-conscious power, and purpose, and self-
restraint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious lineaments, which
might win worship, and did; but not love, except as the child of
enthusiasm or of relationship.  But Burns's face, to judge of it by
the early portrait of him by Nasmyth, must have been a face like that
of Joseph of old, of whom the Rabbis relate, that he was mobbed by
the Egyptian ladies whenever he walked the streets.  The magic of
that countenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may
explain many a sad story.  The features certainly are not perfectly
regular; there is no superabundance of the charm of mere animal
health in the outline or colour:  but the marks of intellectual
beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of being but too
triumphant among a people of deep thought and feeling.  The lips,
ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of passion and the faculty of
enjoyment, are parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of
the heart; the features are rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the
bones show thought massively and manfully everywhere; the eyes laugh
out upon you with boundless good humour and sweetness, with simple,
eager, gentle surprise--a gleam as of the morning star, looking forth
upon the wonder of a new-born world--altogether


A station like the herald Mercury,
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.


Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence--a rich
flow of spirits and fulness of health and life--a deep sense of
wonder and beauty in the earth and man--an instinct of the dynamic
and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material
universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular and
unscientific, all but superstitious--turn him loose in any country in
Europe, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it will
not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope.

And what an age in which to be turned loose!--for loose he must go,
to solve the problem of existence for himself.  The grand simple old
Scottish education which he got from his parents must prove narrow
and unsatisfying for so rich and manifold a character; not because it
was in itself imperfect; not because it did not contain implicitly
all things necessary for his "salvation"--in every sense, all laws
which he might require for his after-life guidance; but because it
contained so much of them as yet only implicitly; because it was not
yet conscious of its own breadth and depth, and power of satisfying
the new doubts and cravings of such minds and such times as Burns's.
It may be that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it was to
be taught that it must awaken and expand and renew its youth in
shapes equally sound, but more complex and scientific.  But it had
not done so then.  And when Burns found himself gradually growing
beyond his father's teaching in one direction, and tempted beyond it
in another and a lower one, what was there in those times to take up
his education at the point where it had been left unfinished?  He saw
around him in plenty animal good-nature and courage, barbaric honesty
and hospitality--more, perhaps, than he would see now; for the upward
progress into civilised excellences is sure to be balanced by some
loss of savage ones--but reckless, shallow, above all, drunken.  It
was a hard-drinking, coarse, materialist age.  The higher culture, of
Scotland especially, was all but exclusively French--not a good kind,
while Voltaire and Volney still remained unanswered, and "Les
Liaisons Dangereuses" were accepted by all young gentlemen, and a
great many young ladies who could read French, as the best account of
the relation of the sexes.

Besides, the philosophy of that day, like its criticism, was
altogether mechanical, nay, as it now seems, materialist in its
ultimate and logical results.  Criticism was outward, and of the form
merely.  The world was not believed to be already, and in itself,
mysterious and supernatural, and the poet was not defined as the man
who could see and proclaim that supernatural element.  Before it was
admired, it was to be raised above nature into the region of "the
picturesque," or whatnot; and the poet was the man who gave it this
factitious and superinduced beauty, by a certain "kompsologia" and
"meteoroepeia," called "poetic diction," now happily becoming
extinct, mainly, we believe, under the influence of Burns, although
he himself thought it his duty to bedizen his verses therewith, and
though it was destined to flourish for many a year more in the temple
of the father of lies, like a jar of paper flowers on a Popish altar.

No wonder that in such a time, a genius like Burns should receive not
only no guidance, but no finer appreciation.  True; he was admired,
petted, flattered; for that the man was wonderful no one could doubt.
But we question whether he was understood; whether, if that very
flowery and magniloquent style which we now consider his great
failing had been away, he would not have been passed over by the many
as a writer of vulgar doggrel.  True, the old simple ballad-muse of
Scotland still dropped a gem from her treasures, here and there, even
in the eighteenth century itself--witness "Auld Robin Gray."  But who
suspected that they were gems, of which Scotland, fifty years
afterwards, would be prouder and more greedy than of all the second-
hand French culture which seemed to her then the highest earthly
attainment?  The Review of Burns in an early number of the "Edinburgh
Review," said to be from the pen of the late Lord Jeffrey, shows, as
clearly as anything can, the utterly inconsistent and bewildered
feeling with which the world must have regarded such a phenomenon.
Alas! there was inconsistency and bewilderment enough in the
phenomenon itself, but that only made confusion worse confounded; the
confusion was already there, even in the mind of the more practical
literary men, who ought, one would have thought, also to have been
the most deep-sighted.  But no.  The reviewer turns the strange thing
over and over, and inside out--and some fifteen years after it has
vanished out of the world, having said out its say and done all that
it had to do, he still finds it too utterly abnormal to make up his
mind about in any clear or consistent way, and gets thoroughly cross
with it, and calls it hard names, because it will not fit into any
established pigeon-hole or drawer of the then existing
anthropological museum.  Burns is "a literary prodigy," and yet it is
"a derogation" to him to consider him as one.  And that we find, not
as we should have expected, because he possessed genius, which would
have made success a matter of course in any rank, but because he was
so well educated--"having acquired a competent knowledge of French,
together with the elements of Latin and Geometry," and before he had
composed a single stanza, was "far more intimately acquainted with
Pope, Shakespeare, and Thomson, than nine-tenths of the youths who
leave school for the university," etc. etc.--in short, because he was
so well educated, that his becoming Robert Burns, the immortal poet,
was a matter of course and necessity.  And yet, a page or two on, the
great reason why it was more easy for Robert Burns the cottar to
become an original and vigorous poet, rather than for any one of "the
herd of scholars and academical literati," who are depressed and
discouraged by "perusing the most celebrated writers, and conversing
with the most intelligent judges," is found to be, that "the
literature and refinement of the age do not exist for a rustic and
illiterate individual; and consequently the present time is to him
what the rude times of old were to the vigorous writer who adorned
them."  In short the great reason of Robert Burns's success was that
he did not possess that education the possession of which proves him
to be no prodigy, though the review begins by calling him one, and
coupling him with Stephen Duck and Thomas Dermody.

Now if the best critic of the age, writing fifteen years after
Burns's death, found himself between the horns of such a dilemma'--
which indeed, like those of an old Arnee bull, meet at the points,
and form a complete circle of contradictions--what must have been the
bewilderment of lesser folk during the prodigy's very lifetime? what
must, indeed, have been his own bewilderment at himself, however
manfully he may have kept it down?  No wonder that he was unguided,
either by himself or by others.  We do not blame them; him we must
deeply blame; yet not as we ought to blame ourselves, did we yield in
the least to those temptations under which Burns fell.

Biographies of Burns, and those good ones, according to the standard
of biographies in these days, are said to exist; we cannot say that
we have as yet cared to read them.  There are several other
biographies, even more important, to be read first, when they are
written.  Shakespeare has found as yet no biographer; has not even
left behind him materials for a biography, such at least as are
considered worth using.  Indeed, we question whether such a biography
would be of any use whatever to the world; for the man who cannot, by
studying his dramas in some tolerably accurate chronological order,
and using as a running accompaniment and closet commentary those awe-
inspiring sonnets of his, attain to some clear notion of what sort of
life William Shakespeare must have led, would not see him much the
clearer for many folios of anecdote.  For after all, the best
biography of every sincere man is sure to be his own works; here he
has set down, "transferred as in a figure," all that has happened to
him, inward or outward, or rather, all which has formed him, produced
a permanent effect upon his mind and heart; and knowing that, you
know all you need know, and are content, being glad to escape the
personality and gossip of names and places, and of dates even, except
in as far as they enable you to place one step of his mental growth
before or after another.  Of the honest man this holds true always;
and almost always of the dishonest man, the man of cant, affectation,
hypocrisy; for even if he pretend in his novel or his poem to be what
he is not, he still shows you thereby what he thinks he ought to have
been, or at least what he thinks that the world thinks he ought to
have been, and confesses to you, in the most naive and confidential
way, like one who talks in his sleep, what learning he has or has not
had; what society he has or has not seen, and that in the very act of
trying to prove the contrary.  Nay, the smaller the man or woman, and
the less worth deciphering his biography, the more surely will he
show you, if you have eyes to see and time to look, what sort of
people offended him twenty years ago; what meanness he would have
liked "to indulge in," if he had dared, when young, and for what
other meanness he relinquished it, as he grew up; of what periodical
he stood in awe when he took pen in hand, and so forth.  Whether his
books treat of love or political economy, theology or geology, it is
there, the history of the man legibly printed, for those who care to
read it.  In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be
found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things
which happened to himself, and moreover of the most notable things
which went on in Scotland between 1759 and 1796.

This latter assertion may seem startling, when we consider that we
find in these poems no mention whatsoever of the discoveries of
steamboats and spinning-jennies, the rise of the great manufacturing
cities, the revolution in Scottish agriculture, or even in Scottish
metaphysics.  But after all, the history of a nation is the history
of the men, and not of the things thereof; and the history of those
men is the history of their hearts, and not of their purses, or even
of their heads; and the history of one man who has felt in himself
the heart experiences of his generation, and anticipated many
belonging to the next generation, is so far the collective history of
that generation, and of much--no man can say how much--of the next
generation; and such a man, bearing within his single soul two
generations of working-men, we take Robert Burns to have been; and
his poems, as such, a contemporaneous history of Scotland, the equal
to which we are not likely to see written for this generation, or
several to come.

Such a man sent out into such an age, would naturally have a hard and
a confused battle to fight, would probably, unless he fell under the
guidance of some master-mind, end se ipso minor, stunted and sadly
deformed, as Burns did.  His works are after all only the disjecta
membra poetae; full of hints of a great might-have-been.  Hints of
the keenest and most dramatic appreciation of human action and
thought.  Hints of an unbounded fancy, playing gracefully in the
excess of its strength, with the vastest images, as in that robe of
the Scottish Muse, in which


Deep lights and shades, bold mingling, threw
      A lustre grand,
And seem'd to my astonished view
      A well-known land.


The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, might be a
translation from Dante's "Paradiso," so broad, terse, vivid, the
painter's touch.  Hints, too, of a humour, which, like that of
Shakespeare, rises at times by sheer depth of insight into the
sublime; as when


Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch
Just like a winking baudrons.


Hints of a power of verbal wit, which, had it been sharpened in such
a perpetual word-battle as that amid which Shakespeare lived from the
age of twenty, might have rivalled Shakespeare's own; which even now
asserts its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten phrases
scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the
memory of every reader.  And as for his tenderness--the quality
without which all other poetic excellence is barren--it gushes forth
toward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one exception,
namely, the hypocrite, ever alike "spiacente a Dio e ai nemici sui;"
and therefore intolerable to Robert Burns's honesty, whether he be
fighting for or against the cause of right.  Again we say, there are
evidences of a versatile and manifold faculty in this man, which,
with a stronger will and a larger education, might have placed him as
an equal by the side of those great names which we mentioned together
with his at the commencement of this article.

But one thing Burns wanted; and of that one thing his age helped to
deprive him--the education which comes by reverence.  Looking round
in such a time, with his keen power of insight, his keen sense of
humour, what was there to worship?  Lord Jeffrey, or whosoever was
the author of the review in the "Edinburgh," says disparagingly, that
Burns had as much education as Shakespeare.  So he very probably had,
if education mean book-learning.  Nay, more, of the practical
education of the fireside, the sober, industrious, God-fearing
education, and "drawing out" of the manhood, by act and example,
Burns may have had more under his good father than Shakespeare under
his; though the family life of the small English burgher in
Elizabeth's time would have generally presented, as we suspect, the
very same aspect of staid manfulness and godliness which a Scotch
farmer's did fifty years ago.  But let that be as it may, Burns was
not born into an Elizabethan age.  He did not see around him Raleighs
and Sidneys, Cecils and Hookers, Drakes and Frobishers, Spensers and
Jonsons, Southamptons and Willoughbys, with an Elizabeth, guiding and
moulding the great whole, a crowned Titaness, terrible, and strong,
and wise--a woman who, whether right or wrong, bowed the proudest, if
not to love, yet still to obey.

That was the secret of Shakespeare's power.  Heroic himself, he was
born into an age of heroes.  You see it in his works.  Not a play but
gives patent evidence that to him all forms of human magnanimity were
common and wayside flowers--among the humours of men which he and Ben
Jonson used to wander forth together to observe.  And thus he could
give living action and speech to the ancient noblenesses of Rome and
the Middle Age; for he had walked and conversed with them, unchanged
in everything but in the dress.  Had he known Greek literature he
could have recalled to imperishable life such men as Cimon and
Aristides, such deeds as Marathon and Salamis.  For had we not had
our own Salamis acted within a few years of his birth; and were not
the heroes of it still walking among men?  It was surely this
continual presence of "men of worship," this atmosphere of admiration
and respect and trust, in which Shakespeare must have lived, which
tamed down the wild self-will of the deer-stealing fugitive from
Stratford, into the calm large-eyed philosopher, tolerant and loving,
and full of faith in a species made in the likeness of God.  Not so
with Burns.  One feels painfully in his poems the want of great
characters; and still more painfully that he has not drawn them,
simply because they were not there to draw.  That he has a true eye
for what is noble, when he sees it, let his "Lament for Glencairn"
testify, and the stanzas in his "Vision," in which, with a high-bred
grace which many a courtly poet of his day might have envied, he
alludes to one and another Scottish worthy of his time.  There is no
vein of saucy and envious "banausia" in the man; even in his most
graceless sneer, his fault--if fault it be--is, that he cannot and
will not pretend to respect that which he knows to be unworthy of
respect.  He sees around him and above him, as well as below him, an
average of men and things dishonest, sensual, ungodly, shallow,
ridiculous by reason of their own lusts and passions, and he will not
apply to the shams of dignity and worth, the words which were meant
for their realities.  After all, he does but say what every one round
him was feeling and thinking; but he said it; and hypocritical
respectability shrank shrieking from the mirror of her own inner
heart.  But it was all the worse for him.  In the sins of others he
saw an excuse for his own.  Losing respect for and faith in his
brother-men, he lost, as a matter of course, respect for himself,
faith in himself.  The hypocrisy which persecutes in the name of law,
whether political or moral, while in private it transgresses the very
law which is for ever on its tongue, is turned by his passionate and
sorely-tempted character into a too easy excuse for disbelieving in
the obligation of any law whatsoever.  He ceases to worship, and
therefore to be himself worshipful--and we know the rest.

"He might have still worshipped God?"  He might, and surely amid all
his sins, doubts, and confusions, the remembrance of the old faith
learned at his parent's knee, does haunt him still as a beautiful
regret--and sometimes, in his bitterest hours, shine out before his
poor broken heart as an everlasting Pharos, lighting him homewards
after all.  Whether he reached that home or not, none on earth can
tell.  But his writings show, if anything can, that the vestal-fire
of conscience still burned within, thou

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