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A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle · English · Gutenberg #19647 · 507,328 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Hero and Some Other Folks

Author: William A. Quayle


        
Release date: October 27, 2006 [eBook #19647]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19647

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HERO AND SOME OTHER FOLKS ***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



A HERO AND SOME OTHER FOLKS

by

WILLIAM A. QUAYLE

Author of "The Poet's Poet and Other Essays"







Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye
New York: Eaton & Mains
Copyright, 1900, by
The Western Methodist Book Concern




_To think some one will care to listen to us, and to believe we do not
speak to vacant air but to listening hearts, is always sweet.  That
friends have listened to this author's spoken and written words with
apparent gladness emboldens him to believe they will give him hearing
once again._

_May some one's eyes be lightened, some one's burden be lifted from his
shoulders for an hour of rest, some one's landscape grow larger,
fairer, and more fruitful, because these essays have been written._

WILLIAM A. QUAYLE.




Contents


    I. JEAN VALJEAN
   II. SOME WORDS ON LOVING SHAKESPEARE
  III. CALIBAN
   IV. WILLIAM THE SILENT
    V. THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY
   VI. ICONOCLASM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
  VII. TENNYSON THE DREAMER
 VIII. THE AMERICAN HISTORIANS
   IX. KING ARTHUR
    X. THE STORY OF THE PICTURES
   XI. THE GENTLEMAN IN LITERATURE
  XII. THE DRAMA OF JOB




A Hero and Some Other Folks


I

Jean Valjean

The hero is not a luxury, but a necessity.  We can no more do without
him than we can do without the sky.  Every best man and woman is at
heart a hero-worshiper.  Emerson acutely remarks that all men admire
Napoleon because he was themselves in possibility.  They were in
miniature what he was developed.  For a like though nobler reason, all
men love heroes.  They are ourselves grown tall, puissant, victorious,
and sprung into nobility, worth, service.  The hero electrifies the
world; he is the lightning of the soul, illuminating our sky,
clarifying the air, making it thereby salubrious and delightful.  What
any elect spirit did, inures to the credit of us all.  A fragment of
Lowell's clarion verse may stand for the biography of heroism:


  "When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad
      earth's aching breast
  Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east
      to west;
  And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within
      him climb
  To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
  Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem
      of Time;"

such being the undeniable result and history of any heroic service.

But the world's hero has changed.  The old hero was Ulysses, or
Achilles, or Aeneas.  The hero of Greek literature is Ulysses, as
Aeneas is in Latin literature.  But to our modern thought these heroes
miss of being heroic.  We have outgrown them as we have outgrown dolls
and marbles.  To be frank, we do not admire Aeneas nor Ulysses.  Aeneas
wept too often and too copiously.  He impresses us as a big cry-baby.
Of this trinity of classic heroes--Ulysses, Aeneas, and
Achilles--Ulysses is least obnoxious.  This statement is cold and
unsatisfactory, and apparently unappreciative, but it is candid and
just.  Lodge, in his "Some Accepted Heroes," has done service in
rubbing the gilding from Achilles, and showing that he was gaudy and
cheap.  We thought the image was gold, which was, in fact, thin gilt.
Achilles sulks in his tent, while Greek armies are thrown back defeated
from the Trojan gates.  In nothing is he admirable save that, when his
pouting fit is over and when he rushes into the battle, he has might,
and overbears the force opposing him as a wave does some petty
obstacle.  But no higher quality shines in his conquest.  He is vain,
brutal, and impervious to high motive.  In Aeneas one can find little
attractive save his filial regard.  He bears Anchises on his shoulders
from toppling Troy; but his wanderings constitute an Odyssey of
commonplaces, or chance, or meanness.  No one can doubt Virgil meant to
create a hero of commanding proportions, though we, looking at him from
this far remove, find him uninteresting, unheroic, and vulgar; and why
the goddess should put herself out to allay tempests in his behalf, or
why hostile deities should be disturbed to tumble seas into turbulence
for such a voyager, is a query.  He merits neither their wrath nor
their courtesy.  I confess to liking heroes of the old Norse mythology
better.  They, at least, did not cry nor grow voluble with words when
obstacles obstructed the march.  They possess the merit of tremendous
action.  Aeneas, in this regard, is the inferior of Achilles.  Excuse
us from hero worship, if Aeneas be hero.  In this old company of
heroes, Ulysses is easy superior.  Yet the catalogue of his virtues is
an easy task.  Achilles was a huge body, associated with little brain,
and had no symptom of sagacity.  In this regard, Ulysses outranks him,
and commands our respect.  He has diplomacy and finesse.  He is not
simply a huge frame, wrestling men down because his bulk surpasses
theirs.  He has a thrifty mind.  He is the man for councils of war,
fitted to direct with easy mastery of superior acumen.  His
fellow-warriors called him "crafty," because he was brainy.  He was
schooled in stratagem, by which he became author of Ilium's overthrow.
Ulysses was shrewd, brave, balanced--possibly, though not conclusively,
patriotic--a sort of Louis XI, so far as we may form an estimate, but
no more.  He was selfish, immoral, barren of finer instincts, who was
loved by his dog and by Penelope, though for no reason we can discover.
Ten years he fought before Troy, and ten years he tasted the irony of
the seas--in these episodes displaying bravery and fortitude, but no
homesick love for Penelope, who waited at the tower of Ithaca for him,
a picture of constancy sweet enough to hang on the palace walls of all
these centuries.  We do not think to love Ulysses, nor can we work
ourselves up to the point of admiration; and he is the best hero
classic Rome and Greece can offer.  No!  Register, as the modern sense
of the classic hero, we do not like him.

He is not admirable, yet is not totally lacking in power to command
attention.  What is his quality of appeal to us?  This: He is action;
and action thrills us.  The old hero was, in general, brave and
brilliant.  He had the tornado's movement.  His onset redeems him.  He
blustered, was spectacular, heartless, and did not guess the meaning of
purity; but he was warrior, and the world enjoys soldiers.  And this
motley hero has been attempted in our own days.  He was archaic, but
certain have attempted to make him modern.  Byron's Don Juan is the old
hero, only lost to the old hero's courage.  He is a villain, with not
sense enough to understand he is unattractive.  He is a libertine at
large, who thinks himself a gentleman.  Don Juan is as immoral,
impervious to honor, and as villainous as the Greek gods.  The
D'Artagnan romances have attempted the old hero's resuscitation.  The
movement of the "Three Musketeers" is mechanical rather than human.
D'Artagnan's honor is limited to his fealty to his king.  He has no
more sense of delicacy toward women, or honor for them as women, than
Achilles had.  Some of his doings are too defamatory to be thought of,
much less mentioned.  No!  Excuse me from D'Artagnan and the rest of
Dumas' heroes.  They may be French, but they are not heroic.  About
Dumas' romances there is a gallop which, with the unwary, passes for
action and art.  But he has not, of his own motion, conceived a single
woman who was not seduced or seducible, nor a single man who was not a
libertine; for "The Son of Porthros" [Transcriber's note: Porthos?] and
his bride are not of Dumas' creation.  He is not open to the charge of
having drawn the picture of one pure man or woman.  Zola is the natural
goal of Dumas; and we enjoy neither the route nor the terminus.  Louis
XIV, Charles II, and George IV are modeled after the old licentious
pretense at manhood, but we may all rejoice that they deceive nobody
now.  Our civilization has outgrown them, and will not, even in second
childhood, take to such playthings.

But what was the old hero's chief failure?  The answer is, He lacked
conscience.  Duty had no part in his scheme of action, nor in his
vocabulary of word or thought.  Our word "virtue" is the bodily
importation of the old Roman word "virtus," but so changed in meaning
that the Romans could no more comprehend it than they could the
Copernican theory of astronomy.  With them, "virtus" meant
strength--that only--a battle term.  The solitary application was to
fortitude in conflict.  With us, virtue is shot through and through
with moral quality, as a gem is shot through with light, and
monopolizes the term as light monopolizes the gem.  This change is
radical and astonishing, but discloses a change which has
revolutionized the world.  The old hero was conscienceless--a
characteristic apparent in Greek civilization.  What Greek patriot,
whether Themistocles or Demosthenes, applied conscience to patriotism?
They were as devoid of practical conscience as a Metope of the
Parthenon was devoid of life.  Patriotism was a transient sentiment.
Demosthenes could become dumb in the presence of Philip's gold; and in
a fit of pique over mistreatment at the hands of his brother-citizens,
Themistocles became a traitor, and, expatriated, dwelt a guest at the
Persian court.  Strangely enough--and it is passing strange--the most
heroic personality in Homer's Iliad, the Greek's "Bible of heroisms,"
was not the Atridae, whether Agamemnon or Menelaus; not Ajax nor
Achilles, nor yet Ulysses; but was Hector, the Trojan, who appears to
greater advantage as hero than all the Grecian host.  And Homer was a
Greek!  This is strange and unaccountable irony.  Say once more, the
old hero's lack was conscience.  He, like his gods and goddesses, who
were deified infamies, was a studied impurity.  Jean Valjean is a hero,
but a hero of a new type.

Literature is a sure index of a civilization.  Who cares to settle in
his mind whether the world grows better, may do so by comparing
contemporaneous literature with the reading of other days.  "The
Heptameron," of Margaret of Navarre, is a book so filthy as to be
nauseating.  That people could read it from inclination is unthinkable;
and to believe that a woman could read it, much less write it, taxes
too sorely our credulity.  In truth, this work did not, in the days of
its origin, shock the people's sensibilities.  A woman wrote it, and
she a sister of Francis I of France, and herself Queen of Navarre, and
a pure woman.  And her contemporaries, both men and women, read it with
delight, because they had parted company with blushes and modesty.
Zola is less voluptuous and filthy than these old tales.  Some things
even Zola curtains.  Margaret of Navarre tears the garments from the
bodies of men and women, and looks at their nude sensuality smilingly.
Of Boccaccio's "Decameron," the same general observations hold; save
that they are less filthy, though no less sensual.  In the era
producing these tales, witness this fact: The stories are represented
as told by a company of gentlemen and ladies, the reciter being
sometimes a man, sometimes a woman; the place, a country villa, whither
they had fled to escape a plague then raging in Florence.  The people,
so solacing themselves in retreat from a plague they should have
striven to alleviate by their presence and ministries, were the
gentility of those days, representing the better order of society, and
told stories which would now be venal if told by vulgar men in some
tavern of ill-repute.  That Boccaccio should have reported these tales
as emanating from such a company is proof positive of the immodesty of
those days, whose story is rehearsed in the "Decameron."  Rousseau's
"Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current morality
in his age.  Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs
are the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any
moral sensitiveness; and while Rousseau could not be accused of being
sensual, nor amorous and heartless as Goethe, he yet shows so crude a
moral state as to render him unwholesome to any person of ordinary
morals in the present day.  His "Confessions," instead of being naive,
strike me as being distinctly and continuously coarse.  A man and woman
who could give their children deliberately to be farmed out, deserting
them as an animal would not, and this with no sense of loss or
compunction, nor even with a sense of the inhumanity of such
procedure--such a man and woman tell us how free-love can degrade a
natively virtuous mind.  Such was Rousseau; and his "Confessions" are
like himself, unblushing, because shameless.  These books reflect their
respective ages, and are happily obsolete now.  Such memoirs and
fictions in our day are unthinkable as emanating from respectable
sources; and if written would be located in vile haunts in the purlieus
of civilization.  Gauged by such a test, the world is seen to be
better, and immensely better.  We have sailed out of sight of the old
continent of coarse thinking, and are sailing a sea where purity of
thought and expression impregnate the air like odors.  The old hero,
with his lewdness and rhodomontade, is excused from the stage.  We have
had enough of him.  Even Cyrano de Bergerac is so out of keeping with
the new notion of the heroic, that the translator of the drama must
apologize for his hero's swagger.  We love his worth, though despising
his theatrical air and acts.  We are done with the actor, and want the
man.  And this new hero is proof of a new life in the soul, and,
therefore, more welcome than the glad surprise of the first
meadow-lark's song upon the brown meadows of the early spring.

A reader need not be profound, but may be superficial, and yet discover
that Jean Valjean is fashioned after the likeness of Jesus.  Michael
Angelo did not more certainly model the dome of St. Peter's after
Brunelleschi's dome of the Duomo than Hugo has modeled his Valjean
after Christ.  We are not necessarily aware of ourselves, nor of our
era, until something discovers both to us, as we do not certainly know
sea air when we feel it.  I doubt if most men would recognize the tonic
of sea air if they did not know the sea was neighbor to them.  We sight
the ocean, and then know the air is flooded with a health as ample as
the seas from which it blows.  So we can not know our intellectual air
is saturated with Christ, because we can not go back.  We lack
contemporaneous material for contrast.  We are, ourselves, a part of
the age, as of a moving ship, and can not see its motion.  We can not
realize the world's yesterdays.  We know them, but do not comprehend
them, since between apprehending and comprehending an epoch lie such
wide spaces.  "Quo Vadis" has done good in that it has popularized a
realization of that turpitude of condition into which Christianity
stepped at the morning of its career; for no lazar-house is so vile as
the Roman civilization when Christianity began--God's angel--to trouble
that cursed pool.  Christ has come into this world's affairs
unheralded, as the morning does not come; for who watches the eastern
lattices can see the morning star, and know the dawn is near.  Christ
has slipped upon the world as a tide slips up the shores, unnoted, in
the night; and because we did not see him come, did not hear his
advent, his presence is not apparent.  Nothing is so big with joy to
Christian thought as the absolute omnipresence of the Christ in the
world's life.  Stars light their torches in the sky; and the sky is
wider and higher than the stars.  Christ is such a sky to modern
civilization.

Plainly, Jean Valjean is meant for a hero.  Victor Hugo loves heroes,
and has skill and inclination to create them.  His books are
biographies of heroism of one type or another.  No book of his is
heroless.  In this attitude he differs entirely from Thackeray and
Hawthorne, neither of whom is particularly enamored of heroes.
Hawthorne's romances have not, in the accepted sense, a single hero.
He does not attempt building a character of central worth.  He is
writing a drama, not constructing a hero.  In a less degree, this is
true of Thackeray.  He truly loves the heroic, and on occasion depicts
it.  Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome are mighty men of worth, but are
exceptions to Thackeray's method.  He pokes fun at them even.  "Vanity
Fair" he terms a novel without a hero.  He photographs a procession.
"The Virginians" contains no character which can aspire to centrality,
much less might.  He, loving heroes, attempts concealing his passion,
and, if accused of it, denies the accusation.  After reading all his
writings, no one could for a moment claim that Thackeray was the
biographer of heroes.  He is a biographer of meanness, and times, and
sham aristocracy and folks, and can, when he cares to do so, portray
heroism lofty as tallest mountains.  With Hugo all is different.  He
will do nothing else than dream and depict heroism and heroes.

He loves them with a passion fervent as desert heats.  His pages are
ablaze with them.  Somebody lifting up the face, and facing God in some
mood or moment of briefer or longer duration--this is Hugo's method.
In "Toilers of the Sea," Galliatt, by almost superhuman effort, and
physical endurance and fortitude and fertility in resource, defeats
octopus and winds and rocks and seas, and in lonely triumph pilots the
wreck home--and all of this struggle and conquest for love!  He is a
somber hero, but a hero still, with strength like the strength of ten,
since his love is as the love of a legion.  The power to do is his, and
the nobility to surrender the woman of his love; and there his nobility
darkens into stoicism, and he waits for the rising tide, watching the
outgoing ship that bears his heart away unreservedly--waits, only eager
that the tide ingulf him.

In "Ninety-Three," the mother of the children in the burning tower is
heroine.  In "By Order of the King," Dea is heroic, and spotless as
"Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat;" and Ursus, a vagabond, is
fatherhood in its sweet nobleness; and Gwynplaine, disfigured and
deserted--a little lad set ashore upon a night of hurricane and snow,
who, finding in his wanderings a babe on her dead mother's breast,
rescues this bit of winter storm-drift, plodding on through untracked
snows, freezing, but no more thinking to drop his burden than the
mother thought to desert it--Gwynplaine is a hero for whose deed an
epic is fitting.  Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, found, after
long years, holding in his skeleton arms a bit of woman's drapery and a
woman's skeleton--Quasimodo, hideous, herculean, hungry-hearted,
tender, a hunchback, yet a lover and a man--who denies to Quasimodo a
hero's laurels?  In "Les Miserables" are heroes not a few.  Gavroche,
that green leaf blown about Paris streets; Fantine, the mother;
Eponine, the lover; Bishop Bienvenu, the Christian; Jean Valjean, the
man,--all are heroic folk.  Our hearts throb as we look at them.
Gavroche, the lad, dances by as though blown past by the gale.
Fantine, shorn of her locks of gold; Fantine, with her bloody lips,
because her teeth have been sold to purchase medicine for her sick
child--her child, yet a child of shame; Fantine, her mother's love
omnipotent, lying white, wasted, dying, expectantly looking toward the
door, with her heart beating like a wild bird, beating with its wings
against cage-bars, anxious for escape; Fantine, watching for her child
Cossette, watching in vain, but watching; Fantine, dying, glad because
Monsieur Madeleine has promised he will care for Cossette as if the
babe were his; Fantine, dead, with her face turned toward the door,
looking in death for the coming of her child,--Fantine affects us like
tears and sobbing set to music.  Look at her; for a heroine is dead.
And Eponine, with the gray dawn of death whitening her cheeks and
gasping, "If--when--if when," now silent, for she is choked by the rush
of blood and stayed from speech by fierce stabs of pain, but
continuing, "When I am dead--a favor--a favor, Monsieur Marius [silence
once again to wrestle with the throes of death]--a favor--a favor when
I am dead [now her speech runs like frightened feet], if you will kiss
me; for indeed, Monsieur Marius, I think I loved you a little--I--I
shall feel--your kiss--in death."  Lie quiet in the darkening night,
Eponine!  Would you might have a queen's funeral, since you have shown
anew the moving miracle of woman's love!

Bishop Bienvenu is Hugo's hero as saint; and we can not deny him beauty
such as those "enskied and sainted" wear.  This is the romancist's
tribute to a minister of God; and sweet the tribute is.  With not a
few, the bishop is chief hero, next to Jean Valjean.  He is redemptive,
like the purchase money of a slave.  He is quixotic; he is not balanced
always, nor always wise; but he falls on the side of Christianity and
tenderness and goodness and love--a good way to fall, if one is to fall
at all.  We love the bishop, and can not help it.  He was good to the
poor, tender to the unerring, illuminative to those who were in the
moral dark, and came over people like a sunrise; crept into their
hearts for good, as a child creeps up into its father's arms, and
nestles there like a bird.  Surely we love the bishop.  He is a hero
saint.  To be near him was to be neighborly with heaven.  He was ever
minding people of God.  Is there any such office in earth or heaven?
To look at this bishop always puts our heart in the mood of prayer, and
what helps us to prayer is a celestial benefit.  The pertinent fact in
him is, that he is not greatness, but goodness.  We do not think of
greatness when we see him or hear him, but we think with our hearts
when he is before our eyes.  Goodness is more marketable than
greatness, and more necessary.  Goodness, greatness!  Brilliancy is a
cheap commodity when put on the counter beside goodness; and Bishop
Bienvenu is a romancer's apotheosis of goodness, and we bless him for
this deification.

The bishop was merchantman, freighting ships.  His wharves are wide,
his fleet is great, his cargoes are many.  Only he is freighting ships
for heaven.  No bales of merchandise nor ingots of iron, but souls for
whom Christ died,--these are his cargoes; and had you asked him, "What
work to-day?" a smile had flooded sunlight along his face while he,
said, "Freighting souls with God to-day, and lading cargoes for the
skies."  This is royal merchandise.  The Doge of Venice annually flung
a ring into the sea as sign of Venice's nuptials with the Adriatic; but
Bishop Bienvenu each day wedded himself and the world to heaven, and he
comes

  "O'er my ear like the sweet south,
  That breathes upon a bank of violets,
  Stealing and giving odor."


Hugo paints with sunset tints and with lightning's lurid light; his
contrasts are fierce, his backgrounds are often as black as a
rain-cloud.  He paints with the mad rush of a Turner.  He is fierce in
hates and loves.  He does nothing by moderation.  Calmness does not
belong to him.  He is tempestuous always; but tempests are magnificent
and purifying to the air.  Hugo is painting, and painting heroes, and
his hero of heroes is Valjean.  Jean Valjean is conscience.  In
Macbeth, conscience is warring and retributive.  In Richard III,
conscience, stifled in waking, speaks in dreams, and is menace, like a
sword swung by a maniac's hands.  In Arthur Dimmesdale, conscience is
lacerative.  In Jean Valjean, conscience is regulative, creative,
constructive.  Jean Valjean is conscience, and conscience is king.
What the classic heroes lacked, Jean Valjean possesses.

The setting of this character is entirely modern.  "Les Miserables" is
a story of the city and of poverty, and can not be dissociated from
them by any wrench of thought, however violent.  Not that urban life or
poverty are new elements in the school of suffering.  They are not new,
as pain is not new.  This is the difference.  In the old ages, the city
and poverty were taken as matters of course.  Comfort was not a classic
consideration.  The being alive to conditions, sensitive to suffering,
eager for diminution of the world's woes, is a modern thought, a Christ
thought.  Sociology is an application of Christ's teaching.  He founded
this science.  Rome was the monster city of the empire, and possibly
the monster city of ancient geography, and contained approximately, at
its most populous period, two and one half millions of inhabitants.
Man is gregarious as the flocks; he seems to fear solitude, and flees
what he fears.  Certain we are that in America, one hundred years ago,
less than one-thirtieth of the population was in cities; now, about
one-third is in city communities; and European cities are outgrowing
American cities.  In other words, at the present time, cities are
growing in a ratio totally disproportionate to the growth of
population; and this, not in the New World simply, but in the Old.
London has nearly as many citizens as England had in the time of the
Puritan Revolution.  Men are nucleating in a fashion foreboding, but
certain.  A symptom of the city life is, that he who is city bred knows
no life apart from his city.  He belongs to it as essentially as the
Venetian belonged to Venice.  The community is a veritable part of the
man's self.  Note this in Jean Valjean.  It never occurs to him to
leave Paris.  Had he been a tree rooted in the soil along the Seine, he
had not been more stationary.  Men live, suffer, die, and hug their
ugly tenements as parasites of these dilapidations, and draw their
life-saps from such a decayed trunk.  This human instinct for
association is mighty in its impulsion.  Not a few, but multitudes,
prefer to be hungry and cold and live in a city to living with
abundance of food and raiment in the country.  Any one can see this at
his alley or in his neighboring street.  It is one of the latent
insanities of the soul.  The city is a live wire, and will not let go
of him who grasps it.  There is a stream of life pouring into cities,
but no stream flowing into the country.  The tide runs up the shore and
back into the deep seas; not so these human tides.  They pour into the
Dead Sea basin of the urban community.  Jean Valjean was a complete
modern in his indissoluble identification with the city.  As a matter
of course, his was the criminal instinct, superadded to the gregarious
instinct, which hides in a city labyrinth rather than the forests of
the Amazon.  Yet, taken all in all, he evidently is a thorough modern
in his urban instinct.  The world was big, and he had gold for passage
across seas; and there he had, in reason, found entire safety; but such
a thought never entered his mind.  Paris was the only sea he knew; here
his plans for escape and plans for life clung tenaciously as a dead
man's hand.

The second element of background for Jean Valjean is poverty.  The
people of this drama are named "the miserable ones."  And poverty is
modern and a modern question.  All socialists, anarchists, and
communists talk of poverty; this is their one theme.  Superficial
social reformers make poverty responsible for the total turpitude of
men.  Men are poor, hence criminal.  Jean Valjean is poor--miserably
poor; sees his sister's children hungry, and commits crime, is a thief;
becomes a galley slave as punitive result.  Ergo, poverty was the cause
of crime, and poverty, and not Valjean, must be indicted; so runs the
argument.  This conclusion we deny.  Let us consider.  Poverty is not
unwholesome.  The bulk of men are poor, and always have been.  Poverty
is no new condition.  Man's history is not one of affluence, but one of
indigence.  This is a patent fact.  But a state of lack is not
unwholesome, but on the contrary does great good.  Poverty has supplied
the world with most of the kings it boasts of.  Palaces have not
cradled the kings of thought, service, and achievement.  What greatest
poet had luxury for a father?  Name one.  Poverty is the mother of
kings.  Who censures poverty censures the home from whose doors have
passed the most illustrious of the sons of men.  Christ's was a poverty
so keen and so parsimonious that Occidentals can not picture it.  More,
current social reformers assume that the poor are unhappy; though if
such reformers would cease dreaming, and learn seeing, they would
reverse their creed.  Riches do not command joy; for joy is not a
spring rising from the depths where gold is found and gems gathered.
Most men are poor, and most men are happy, or, if they are not, they
may trace their sadness to sources other than lack of wealth.  The best
riches are the gifts of God, and can not be shut off by any sluicing;
the choicest riches of the soul, such as knowledge and usefulness and
love and God, are not subject to the tariff of gold.  Poverty, we
conclude, is not in itself grievous.  Indeed, there are in poverty
blessings which many of us know, and from which we would not be
separated without keen regret.  But penury is hard.  When poverty
pinches like winter's night, when fuel fails, and hunger is our
company, then poverty becomes harsh and unpalatable, and not to be
boasted of; though even penury has spurred many a sluggish life to
conquering moods.  When a man lies with his face to the wall,
paralytic, helpless, useless, a burden to himself and others, and hears
the rub of his wife washing for a livelihood--and he loves her so; took
her to his home in her fair girlhood, when her beauty bloomed like a
garden of roses, and promised to keep her, and now she works for him
all day and into the dark night, and loves to; but he turns his face to
the wall, puts his one movable hand against his face, sobs so that his
tears wash through his fingers and wet his pillow as with driving
rain,--then poverty is pitiful.  Or, when one sees his children hungry,
tattered, with lean faces and eyes staring as with constant fear; sees
them huddling under rags or cowering at a flicker meant for
flame,--then poverty is hard; and then, "The poor always ye have with
you," said our Christ, which remember and be pitiful!

But such penury, even, does not require crime.  Valjean became a
criminal from poverty; but himself felt now, as the days slipped from
his life-store, that crime was not necessary.  Theft is bad economics.
The criminals on the dockets are not those pinched with poverty, as one
may assure himself if he gives heed to criminal dockets.  People prefer
crime as a method of livelihood.  These are criminals.  The "artful
dodger," in "Oliver Twist," is a picture of the average criminal.
Honest poverty need not steal.  In the writer's own city, the other
day, a man accused of theft pleaded his children's poverty as
palliative of his crime; but in that city was abundant help for worthy
poverty.  That man lacked an absolute honesty.  He and his could have
been fed and clothed, and himself maintained his manly dignity and
uncorrupted honesty.  To blame society with criminality is a current
method, but untrue and unwise; for thus we will multiply, not decimate,
criminals.  The honest man may be in penury; but he will have help, and
need not shelter in a jail.  Thus, then, these two items of modernity
paint background for Jean Valjean's portrait; and in Jean Valjean,
To-day has found a voice.

This man is a criminal and a galley slave, with yellow passport--his
name, Jean Valjean.  Hear his story.  An orphan; a half-sullen lad,
reared by his sister; sees her husband dead on a bed of rags, with
seven orphans clinging in sobs to the dead hands.  Jean Valjean labors
to feed this motley company; denies himself bread, so that he may slip
food into their hands; has moods of stalwart heroism; and never having
had a sweetheart--pity him!--toils on, hopeless, under a sky robbed of
blue and stars; leading a life plainly, wholly exceptional, and out of
work in a winter when he was a trifle past twenty-six; hears his
sister's children crying, "Bread, bread, give bread;" rises in sullen
acerbity; smites his huge fist through a baker's window, and steals a
loaf; is arrested, convicted, sent to the galleys, and herded with
galley slaves; attempts repeated escapes, is retaken, and at the age of
forty-six shambles out of his galley slavery with a yellow passport,
certifying this is "a very dangerous man;" and with a heart on which
brooding has written with its biting stylus the story of what he
believes to be his wrongs, Jean Valjean, bitter as gall against
society, has his hands ready, aye, eager, to strike, no matter whom.
Looked at askance, turned from the hostel, denied courtesy, food, and
shelter, the criminal in him rushes to the ascendant, and he thrusts
the door of the bishop's house open.  Listen, he is speaking now, look
at him!  The bishop deals with him tenderly, as a Christian ought;
sentimentally, but scarcely wisely.  He has sentimentality rather than
sentiment in his kindness; he puts a premium on Jean Valjean becoming a
criminal again.  To assume everybody to be good, as some
philanthropists do, is folly, being so transparently false.  The good
bishop--bless him for his goodness!--who prays God daily not to lead
him into temptation, why does he lead this sullen criminal into
temptation?  Reformatory methods should be sane.  The bishop's methods
were not sane.  He meant well, but did not quite do well.  Jean
Valjean, sleeping in a bed of comfort, grows restless, wakens, rises,
steals what is accessible, flees, is arrested, brought back, is
exonerated by the bishop's tenderness, goes out free; steals from the
little Savoyard, cries after the retreating lad to restore him his
coin, tails to bring him back; fights with self, and with God's good
help rises in the deep dark of night from the bishop's steps; walks out
into a day of soul, trudges into the city of M----, to which he finds
admission, not by showing the criminal's yellow passport, but by the
passport of heroism, having on entrance rescued a child from a burning
building; becomes a citizen, invents a process of manufacturing jet,
accumulates a fortune, spends it lavishly in the bettering of the city
where his riches were acquired; is benefactor to employee and city, and
is called "Monsieur;" and after repeated refusals, becomes "Monsieur
the Mayor;" gives himself up as a criminal to save a man unjustly
accused, is returned to the galleys for the theft of the little
Savoyard's forty-sous coin; by a heroic leap from the yardarm, escapes;
seeks and finds Cossette, devotes his life to sheltering and loving
her; runs his gauntlet of repeated perils with Javert, grows steadily
in heroism, and sturdy, invigorating manhood; dies a hero and a saint,
and an honor to human kind,--such is Jean Valjean's biography in meager
outline.  But the moon, on a summer's evening, "a silver crescent
gleaming 'mid the stars," appears hung on a silver cord of the full
moon's rim; and, as the crescent moon is not the burnished silver of
the complete circle, so no outline can include the white, bewildering
light of this heroic soul.  Jean Valjean is the biography of a redeemed
life.  The worst life contains the elements of redemption, as words
contain the possibility of poetry.  He was a fallen, vicious, desperate
man; and from so low a level, he and God conspired to lift him to the
levels where the angels live, than which a resurrection from the dead
is no more potent and blinding miracle.  Instead of giving this book
the caption, "Jean Valjean," it might be termed the "History of the
Redemption of a Soul;" and such a theme is worthy the study of this
wide world of women and of men.

Initial in this redemptive work was the good bishop, whose words, "Jean
Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good," never
lost their music or might to Valjean's spirit.  Some man or woman
stands on everybody's road to God.  And Jean Valjean, with the bishop's
words sounding in his ears--voices that will not silence--goes out with
his candlesticks, goes trembling out, and starts on his anabasis to a
new life; wandered all day in the fields, inhaled the odors of a few
late flowers, his childhood being thus recalled; and when the sun was
throwing mountain shadows behind hillocks and pebbles, as Jean Valjean
sat and pondered in a dumb way, a Savoyard came singing on his way,
tossing his bits of money in his hands; drops a forty-sous piece near
Jean Valjean, who, in a mood of inexplicable evil, places his huge foot
upon it, nor listened to the child's entreaty, "My piece, monsieur;"
and eager and more eager grows a child whose little riches were
invaded, "My piece, my white piece, my silver;" and in his voice are
tears--and what can be more touching than a child's voice touched with
tears?  "My silver;" and the lad shook the giant by the collar of his
blouse--"I want my silver, my forty-sous piece"--and began to cry.  A
little lad a-sobbing!  Jean Valjean, you who for so many years "have
talked but little and never laughed;" Jean Valjean, pity the child;
give him his coin.  You were bought of the bishop for good.  But in
terrible voice he shouts: "Who is there?  You here yet?  You had better
take care of yourself;" and the little lad runs, breathless and
sobbing.  Jean Valjean hears his sobbing, but made no move for
restitution until the little Savoyard has passed from sight and
hearing, when, waking as from some stupor, he rises, cries wildly
through the night, "Petit Gervais!  Petit Gervais!" and listened,
and--no answer.  Then he ran, ran toward restitution.  Too late! too
late!  "Petit Gervais!  Petit Gervais!  Petit Gervais!" and, to a
priest passing, "Monsieur, have you seen a child go by--a little
fellow--Petit Gervais is his name?"  And he calls him again through the
empty night; and the lad hears him not.  There is no response, and for
the first time since he passed to the galleys, Jean Valjean's heart
swells, and he bursts into tears; for he was horrified at himself.  His
hardness had mastered him, even when the bishop's tenderness had thawed
his winter heart.  Jean Valjean was now afraid of himself, which is
where moral strength has genesis.  He goes back--back where?  No
matter, wait.  He sees in his thought--in his thought he sees the
bishop, and wept, shed hot tears, wept bitterly, with more weakness
than a woman, with more terror than a child, and his life seemed
horrible; and he walks--whither?  No matter.  But, past midnight, the
stage-driver saw, as he passed, a man in the attitude of prayer,
kneeling upon the pavement in the shadow before the bishop's door; and
should you have spoken, "Jean Valjean!" he would not have answered you.
He would not have heard.  He is starting on a pilgrimage of manhood
toward God.  He saw the bishop; now he sees God, and here is hope; for
so is God the secret of all good and worth, a thing to be set down as
the axiom of religion and life.  A conscience long dormant is now
become regnant.  Jean Valjean is a man again!

Goodness begets goodness.  He climbed; and the mountain air and azure
and fountains of clear waters, spouting from cliffs of snow and the far
altitudes, fed his spirit.  God and he kept company, and, as is meet,
goodness seemed native to him as lily blooms to lily stems.  God was
his secret, as God is the secret of us all.  To scan his process of
recovery is worth while.  The bishop reminded him of God.  Goodness and
love in man are wings to help us soar to where we see that service,
love, and goodness are in God--see that God is good and God is love.
Seeing God, Jean Valjean does good.  Philanthropy is native to him;
gentleness seems his birthright; his voice is low and sweet; his
face--the helpless look to it for help; his eyes are dreamy, like a
poet's; he loves books; he looks not manufacturer so much as he looks
poet; he passes good on as if it were coin to be handled; he suffers
nor complains; his silence is wide, like that of the still night; he
frequently walks alone and in the country; he becomes a god to Fantine,
for she had spit upon him, and he had not resented; he adopts means for
the rescue of Cossette.  In him, goodness moves finger from the lips,
breaks silence, and becomes articulate.  Jean Valjean is brave,
magnanimous, of sensitive conscience, hungry-hearted, is possessed of
the instincts of motherhood, bears being misjudged without complaint,
is totally forgetful of himself, and is absolute in his loyalty to
God--qualities which lift him into the elect life of manhood.

Jean Valjean was brave.  He and fear never met.  The solitary fear he
knew was fear of himself, and lest he might not live for good as the
bishop had bidden him; but fear from without had never crossed his
path.  His was the bravery of conscience.  His strength was prodigious,
and he scrupled not to use it.  Self-sparing was no trait of his
character.  Like another hero we have read of, he would "gladly spend
and be spent" for others, and bankrupt himself, if thereby he might
make others rich.  There is a physical courage, brilliant as a shock of
armies, which feels the conflict and leaps to it as the storm-waves
leap upon the sword edges of the cliffs--a courage which counts no
odds.  There is another courage, moral rather than physical.  Valjean
possessed both, with moral courage in ascendency.  He has the agility
and strength sometimes found in criminals.  He is now in the galleys
for life.  One day, while engaged in furling sail, a sailor has toppled
from the yard; but in falling caught a rope, but hangs, swinging
violently, like some mad pendulum.  The height is dizzying.  Death
seems certain, when a convict, clad in red, and with a green cap, runs
up for rescue, lets himself down alongside of the swaying sailor, now
in the last extremity of weakness, and ready to drop like a winter
leaf.  Valjean (for it is he) oscillates violently to and fro while the
throng below watch breathlessly.  His peril is incredible, but his is a
bravery which does not falter, and a skill which equals bravery.
Valjean is swayed in the wind as the swaying sailor, until he catches
him in his arm, makes him fast to the rope, clambers up, reaches the
yard, hauls up the sailor, and carries him to a place of safety.  And
the throng below, breathless till now, applauded and cried, "This man
must be pardoned."  Then it is that he, free once more, leaps
down--falls from the dizzying height, the multitude thinks--leaps down
into the seas, and wins liberty.  Jean Valjean is heroic.  His moral
courage, which is courage at its noon, is discovered best in his rescue
of Fauchelevent, old, and enemy--an enmity engendered by Madeleine's
prosperity--to Monsieur Madeleine.  The old man has fallen under his
cart, and is being surely crushed to death.  The mayor joins the crowd
gathered about the unfortunate car-man; offers a rising price for one
who will go under the cart and rescue the old man.  Javert is
there--keen of eye and nostril as a vulture--and Jean Valjean is his
prey.  He believes the mayor to be Jean Valjean, and, as the mayor
urges some one to rescue the perishing man, says, with speech cold as
breath from a glacier, "I have known but one man who was equal to this
task, and he was a convict and in the galleys."  The old man moans,
"How it crushes me!" and, hearing that cry, under the cart the mayor
crawls; and while those beside hold their breath, he, lying flat under
the weight, lifts twice, ineffectually, and, with one herculean effort,
lifts again, and the cart slowly rises, and many willing hands helping
from without, the old man is saved; and Monsieur Madeleine arises,
pale, dripping with sweat, garments muddy and torn, while the old man
whom he has rescued kisses his knees and calls him the good God.  And
the mayor looks at Javert with tranquil eye, though knowing full well
that this act of generous courage in the rescue of an enemy has doomed
himself.  This is moral courage of celestial order.

His magnanimity is certainly apparent,--in the rescue of his enemy,
Fauchelevent; in his release of his arch-enemy, Javert; in his presence
within the barricade to protect Marius, who had, as a lover, robbed him
of the one blossom that had bloomed in the garden of his heart, save
only the passing bishop and the abiding God.  No pettiness is in him.
He loves and serves after a fashion learned of Christ.  If compelled to
admire his courage, we are no less compelled to pay homage to his
magnanimity.

His was a hungry heart.  Love he had never known; he had never had a
sweetheart.  And now all pent-up love of a long life empties its
precious ointment on the head of Cossette.  He was all the mother she
ever knew or needed to know.  Heaven made her rich in such maternity as
his.  Mother instinct is in all good lives, and belongs to man.
Maternity and paternity are met in the best manhood.  The tenderness of
motherhood must soften a man's touch to daintiness, like an evening
wind's caress, before fatherhood is perfect.  All his youthhood, which
knew not any woman's lips to kiss; all his manhood, which had never
shared a hearth with wife or child,--all this unused tenderness now
administers to the wants of this orphan, Cossette.  His rescue of her
from the Thenardiers is poetry itself.  He had the instincts of a
gentleman.  The doll he brought her for her first Christmas gift was
forerunner of a thousand gifts of courtesy and love.  See, too, the
mourning garments he brought and laid beside her bed the first morning
he brought her to his garret, and watched her slumber as if he had been
appointed by God to be her guardian angel.  To him life henceforth
meant Cossette.  He was her servant always.  For her he fought for his
life as if it had been an unutterable good.  He lost himself, which is
the very crown of motherhood's devotion.  He was himself supplanted in
her affections by her lover, Marius, and his heart was stabbed as if by
poisoned daggers; for was not Cossette wife, daughter, sister, brother,
mother, father, friend--all?  But if his heart was breaking, she never
guessed it.  He hid his hurt, though dying of heartbreak.

Then, too, Jean Valjean is misjudged, and by those who should have
trusted him as they trusted God.  We find it hard to be patient with
Marius, and are not patient with Cossette.  Her selfishness is not to
be condoned.  Her contrition and her tears come too late.  Though
Valjean forgives her, we do not forgive her.  She deserves no
forgiveness.  Marius's honor was of the amateur order, lacking depth
and breadth.  He was superficial, judging by hearing rather than by
eyes and heart.  We have not patience to linger with his wife and him,
but push past them to the hero spirit, whom they have not eyes to see
nor hearts to understand.  Jean Valjean misjudged, and by Marius and
Cossette!  Impossible!  Javert may do that; Fantine, not knowing him,
may do that, but once knowing him she had as lief distrusted day to
bring the light as to have distrusted him.  Misjudged, and by those he
loved most, suffered for, more than died for!  Poor Valjean!  This
wakes our pity and our tears.  Before, we have watched him, and have
felt the tug of battle on him; now the mists fall, and we put our hands
before our eyes and weep.  This saint of God misjudged by those for
whom he lives!  Yet this is no solitary pathos.  Were all hearts'
history known, we should know how many died misjudged.  All Jean
Valjean does has been misinterpreted.  We distrust more and more
circumstantial evidence.  It is hideous.  No jury ought to convict a
man on evidence of circumstances.  Too many tragedies have been enacted
because of such.  Marius thought he was discerning and of a sensitive
honor.  He thought it evident that Jean Valjean had slain Javert, and
had slain Monsieur Madeleine, whose fortune he has offered as
Cossette's marriage portion.  Poor Jean Valjean!  You a murderer, a
marauder--you!  Marius acts with frigid honor.  Valjean will not live
with Marius and Cossette, being too sensitive therefor, perceiving
himself distrusted by Marius, but comes to warm his hands and heart at
the hearth of Cossette's presence; and he is stung when he sees no fire
in the reception-room.  The omission he can not misinterpret.  He goes
again, and the chairs are removed.  Marius may have honor, but his
honor is cruel, like an inquisitor with rack and thumbscrew; and then
Jean Valjean goes no more, but day by day suns his heart by going far
enough to look at the house where Cossette is--no more; then his eyes
are feverish to catch sight of her habitation as parched lips drink at
desert springs.  Misjudged!  O, that is harder to bear than all his
hurts!

Then we will not say of Valjean, "He has conscience," but rather, we
will say, "He is conscience."  Valjean's struggle with conscience is
one of the majestic chapters of the world's literature, presenting, as
it does, the worthiest and profoundest study of Christian conscience
given by any dramatist since Christ opened a new chapter for conscience
in the soul.  Monsieur Madeleine, the mayor, is rich, respected,
honored, is a savior of society, sought out by the king for political
preferment.  One shadow tracks him like a nightmare.  Javert is on his
track, instinct serving him for reason.  At last, Javert himself thinks
Jean Valjean has been found; for a man has been arrested, is to be
tried, will doubtless be convicted, seeing evidence is damning.  Now,
Monsieur Madeleine, mayor of M----, your fear is all but ended.  An
anodyne will be administered to your pain.  Jean Valjean has known many
a struggle.  He thought his fiercest battles fought; but all his
yesterdays of conflict are as play contests and sham battles matched
with this.  Honor, usefulness, long years of service, love,
guardianship of Cossette, and fealty to a promise given a dying
mother--all beckon to him.  He is theirs; and has he not suffered
enough?  More than enough.  Let this man alone, that is all.  Let him
alone!  He sees it.  Joy shouts in his heart, "Javert will leave me in
quiet."  "Let us not interfere with God," and his resolution is formed.
But conscience looks into his face.  Ha! the bishop, too, is beside
him.  Conscience speaks, and is saying, "Let the real Valjean go and
declare himself."  This is duty.  Conscience speaks, and his words are
terrible, "Go, declare thyself."  Jean Valjean's sin is following him.
That evening he had robbed Petit Gervais; therefore he is imperiled.
Sin finds man out.  But the fight thickens, and Valjean thinks to
destroy the mementos of his past, and looks fearfully toward the door,
bolted as it is, and gathers from a secret closet his old blue blouse,
an old pair of trousers, an old haversack, and a great thorn stick, and
incontinently flings them into the flames.  Then, noticing the silver
candlesticks, the bishop's gifts, "These, too, must be destroyed," he
says, and takes them in his hands, and stirs the fire with one of the
candlesticks, when he hears a voice clamoring, "Jean Valjean!  Jean
Valjean!  Jean Valjean!"  Conscience and a battle, but the battle was
not lost; for you see him in the prisoners' dock, declaring, "I am Jean
Valjean;" and those of the court dissenting, he persisted, declared his
recognition of some galley prisoners, urging still, "I am Jean Valjean;
you see clearly that I am Jean Valjean;" and those who saw and heard
him were dazed; and he said: "All who are here think me worthy of pity,
do you not?  Do you not?  Great God!  When I think of what I was on the
point of doing, I think myself worthy of envy;" and he was gone.  And
next, Javert is seizing him fiercely, brutally, imperiously, as a
criminal for whom there is no regard.  With this struggle of conscience
and its consequent victory, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" becomes
tawdry and garish.  The sight moves us as the majestic minstrelsy of
seas in tempest.  No wonder that they who looked at Valjean, as he
stood declaring himself to be the real Valjean, were blinded with a
great light.

And his heart is so hungry, and his loyalty to God so urgent and so
conquering.  Jean Valjean has suffered much.  Ulysses, buffeted by wars
and stormy seas, has had a life of calm as compared with this new hero.
Ulysses' battles were from without; Valjean's battles were from within.
But if he has suffered greatly, he has also been greatly blessed.
Struggle for goodness against sin is its own reward.  We do not give
all and get nothing.  There are compensations.  Recompense of reward
pursues goodness as foam a vessel's track.  If Jean Valjean loved
Cossette with a passion such as the angels know; if she was his sun,
and made the spring, there was a sense in which Cossette helped
Valjean.  There was response, not so much in the return of love as in
that he loved her; and his love for her helped him in his dark hours,
helped him when he needed help the most, helped him on with God.  He
needs her to love, as our eyes need the fair flowers and the blue sky.
His life was not empty, and God had not left himself without witness in
Jean Valjean's life; for he had had his love for Cossette.

But he is bereft.  Old age springs on him suddenly, as Javert had done
in other days.  He has, apparently without provocation, passed from
strength to decrepitude.  Since he sees Cossette no more, he has grown
gray, stooped, decrepit.  There is no morning now, since he does not
see Cossette.  You have seen him walking to the corner to catch sight
of her house.  How feeble he is!  Another day, walking her way, but not
so far; and the next, and the next, walking; but the last day he goes
scarce beyond his own threshold.  And now he can not go down the
stairs; now he is in his own lonely room, alone.  He sees death camping
in his silent chamber, but feels no fright.  No, no! rather,

  "Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field
  Approaching, called.
       *     *     *     *     *     *
  For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck
  See, through the gray skirts of a lifting squall,
  The boat that bears the hope of life approach
  To save the life despaired of, than he saw
  Death dawning on him, and the close of all."


But Cossette, Cossette!  To see her once.  Just once, only once!  To
touch her hand--O that were heaven!  But he says to his heart, "I shall
not touch her hand, and I shall not see her face--no more, no more!"
And the little garments he brought her when he took her from her
slavery with the Thenardiers, there they are upon his bed, where he can
touch them, as if they were black tresses of the woman he had loved and
lost.  The bishop's candlesticks are lit.  He is about to die, and
writes in his poor, sprawling fashion to Cossette--writes to her.  He
fronts her always, as the hills front the dawn.  He ceases, and sobs
like a breaking heart.  O!  "She is a smile that has passed over me.  I
shall never see her again!"  And the door dashes open; Marius and
Cossette are come.  Joy, joy to the old heart!  Jean Valjean thinks it
is heaven's morning.  Marius has discovered that Jean Valjean is not
his murderer, but his savior; that he has, at imminent peril of his
life, through the long, oozy quagmire of the sewer, with his giant
strength, borne him across the city, saved him; and now, too late,
Marius began to see in Jean Valjean "a strangely lofty and saddened
form," and has come to take this great heart home.  But God will do
that himself.  Jean Valjean is dying.  He looks at Cossette as if he
would take a look which would endure through eternity, kisses a fold of
her garment, and half articulates, "It--is--nothing to die;" then
suddenly rises, walks to the wall, brings back a crucifix, lays it near
his hand.  "The Great Martyr," he says; fondles Marius and Cossette;
sobs to Cossette, "Not to see you broke my heart;" croons to himself,
"You love me;" puts his hands upon their heads in a caress, saying, "I
do not see clearly now."  Later he half whispered, "I see a light!"
And a man and woman are raining kisses on a dead man's hands.  And on
that blank stone, over a nameless grave in the cemetery of Pere la
Chaise, let some angel sculptor chisel, "Here lies Jean Valjean, Hero."




II

Some Words on Loving Shakespeare

What a soul wants is to feel itself of service.  Life's chances seem
drunk up like the dews from morning flowers in burning summer times.
To risk literary adventure after these centuries of thinking and saying
(and such thinking and such saying!), requires the audacity of a
simpleton or the boldness of the old discoverers.  Every patch of
literary ground seems occupied, as those fertile valleys lifting from
sea-levels along a shining stream to the far hills and fair.  So much
has been said on Shakespeare, and he has stung men to such profound and
fertile sayings, that to speak of him seems an impertinence.  I have
never seen an essay on Shakespeare I have not run to read.  Whoever
holds the cup, I will drain it dry, if filled with wine from this rare
vintage.  Practically all our great writers have dreamed of him, and
told their dreams; and many a writer who makes no claim to greatness
has done the same.  Some people you can not keep your eyes off of; and
of these Shakespeare is one.  Who has n't talked of him?  When Alfred
Tennyson lay dying in the white moonlight, his son tells how he held
the play of Cymbeline in his dying hands, as was fitting, seeing he had
held it in his living hands through many golden years.  Than this dying
tribute, Shakespeare never had more gracious compliment paid his
genius.  Who passes Shakespeare in his library without a caress of eye
or hand?  I would apologize if I were guilty of such a breach of
literary etiquette.  Boswell's Johnson edited Shakespeare; and Charles
Lamb and Goethe and DeQuincey and Coleridge and Taine and Lowell and
Carlyle and Emerson have written of him, some of them greatly.  I
wonder Macaulay kept hands from him, but probably because he was the
historian of action rather than letters; and after reading what these
have said, how can one be but silenced?

But it has seemed to me that, while there was a wilderness of writing
about Shakespeare as a genius and as a whole, there was co-operative
dearth of writings on the individual dramas.  Authors content
themselves with writing on the dramatist, and neglect to write upon the
dramas.  If this be true, may there not be an unoccupied plot of ground
where a late-comer may pitch tent, as under the hemlocks by some
babbling water, and feel himself in some real way proprietary?  I have
discovered a growing feeling in my thought that enough has not been
said, and can not be said, about the Macbeths and Tempests and Lears
and Hamlets.

Shakespeare is too massive to be discussed in an hour.  One essay will
not suffice for him.  He is as a mountain, whose majesty and
multitudinous beauty, meaning, and magnitude and impress, must be
gotten by slow processes in journeying about it through many days.  Who
sits under its pines at noon, lies beside its streams for rest, walks
under its lengthening shadows as under a cloud, and has listened to the
voices of its waterfalls, thrilling the night and calling to the
spacious firmament as if with intent to be heard "very far off," has
thus learned the mountain, vast of girth, kingly in altitude, perpetual
in sovereignty.  We study a world's circumference by segments; nor let
us suppose we can do other by this cosmopolitan Shakespeare.  He, so
far as touches our earth horizon, is ubiquitous.  Looking at him
sum-totally, we _feel_ his mass, and say we have looked upon majesty.
But as a mountain is, in circumference and altitude, always beckoning
us on, as if saying, "My summit is not far away, but near," and so
spurring our laggard steps to espouse the ascent, and toiling on, on,
still on, a little further--only a little further--till heart and flesh
all but fail and faint, but for the might of will, we fall to rise
again, and try once more, till we fall upon the summit, and lie on
thresholds leading to the stars.  The mountain understated its
magnitude to us--not of intent, but in simple modesty.  I think it did
not itself know its mass.  Greatness has a subtle self-depreciation;
and we shall come to know our huge Shakespeare only by approaching him
on foot.  He must be studied in fragments.  His plays, if I may be
pardoned for coining a word, need not an omnigraph, but monographs.
Let Shakespeare be, and give eye and ear to his history, comedy,
tragedy; and when we have done with them, one by one, we shall discover
how the aggregated mass climbs taller than highest mountains.  This
method, in tentative fashion, I propose to apply in some studies in
this volume, or other volumes, believing that the company of those who
love Shakespeare can never be large enough for his merits, and that
many are kept away from the witchery of him because they do not well
know the fine art of approaching him.  I would, therefore, be a
doorkeeper, and throw some doors wide open, that men and women may
unhindered enter.  This essay aims to stand as a porter at the gate.
We shall never overestimate Shakespeare, because we can not.  Some men
and things lie beyond the danger of hyperbole.  No exaggeration is
possible concerning them, seeing they transcend all dreams.  Space can
not be conceived by the most luxuriant imagination, holding, as it
does, all worlds, and capable of holding another universe besides, and
with room to spare.  Clearly, we can not overestimate space.  Thought
and vocabulary become bankrupt when they attempt this bewildering deed.
Genius is as immeasurable as space.  Shakespeare can not be measured.
We can not go about him, since life fails, leaving the journey not
quite well begun.  Yet may we attempt what can not be performed,
because each attempt makes us worthy, and we are measured, not by what
we achieve, but by what we attempt, as Lowell writes:

  "Grandly begin!  Though thou have time
  But for one line, be that sublime:
  Not failure, but low aim, is crime."


The eaglet's failure in attempted flight teaches him to outsoar clouds.
We are not so greatly concerned that we find the sources of the Nile as
that we search for them.  In this lie our triumph and reward.

Besides all this, may there not be a place for more of what may be
named inspirational literature?  Henry Van Dyke has coined a happy
phrase in giving title to his delightful volume on "The Poetry of
Tennyson," calling his papers "Essays in Vital Criticism."  I like the
thought.  Literature is life, always that, in so far as literature is
great; for literature tells our human story.  Essayist, novelist, poet,
are all doing one thing, as are sculptor, painter, architect.  Of
detail criticism ("dry-as-dust" criticism, to use Carlyle's term) there
is much, though none too much, which work requires scholarship and
painstaking, and is necessary.  Malone is a requirement of
Shakespearean study.  But, candidly, is verbal, textual criticism the
largest, truest criticism?  Dust is not man, though man is dust.  No
geologist's biography of the marble from Carrara, nor a biographer's
sketch of the sculptor, will explain the statue, nor do justice to the
artist's conception.  I, for one, want to feel the poet's pulse-beat,
brain-beat, heart-beat.  What does he mean?  Let us catch this
speaker's words.  What was that he said?  Let me feel sure I have his
meaning.  We may break a poem up into bits, like pieces of branches
picked up in a woodland path; but is this what the poet would have
desired?  He takes lexicons and changes them into literatures, begins
with words, ends with poems.  His art was synthetic.  He was not a
crab, to move backward, but a man, to move forward; and his poetry is
not debris, like the broken branch, but is exquisite grace and moving
music.  Tears come to us naturally, like rain to summer clouds, when we
have read his words.  Much criticism is dry as desiccated foods, though
we can not believe this is the nobler criticism, since God's growing
fruit is his best fruit.  A tree with climbing saps and tossing
branches, fertile in shade and sweet with music, is surely fairer and
truer than a dead, uprooted, prostrate, decaying trunk.  This, then,
would I aspire humbly to do with Shakespeare or another, to help men to
his secret; for to admit men to any poet's provinces is nothing other
than to introduce them

  "To the island valley of Avilion,
  Where falls not hail nor rain nor any snow,
  Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
  Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns,
  And bowery hollows crowned with summer seas."


There is no trace of exaggeration in saying: Many people frequent
theaters ostensibly for the purpose of understanding the great
dramatists, and, leading thereto, seeing noted tragedians act Lear,
Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and at the end of years of
attendance have no conception of these dramas as a whole.  They had
heard one voice among the many; but when the many voices blended, what
all meant they can not begin to guess.  What playgoer will give a valid
analysis of King Lear?  Ask him, and his ideas will be chaotic as
clouds on a stormy night.  Not even the elder Kean is the best
interpreter of Shakespeare; for the dramatist reserves that function to
himself--Shakespeare is his own best interpreter.  Dream over his plays
by moonlit nights; pore over his pages till chilly skies grow gray with
dawn; read a play without rising from the ingratiating task, and you,
not a tragedian, will have a conception of the play.  I will rather
risk getting at an understanding of beautiful, bewitching Rosalind by
reading and rereading "As You Like It," than by all theaters and
stage-scenes and players.  A dramatist is his own best interpreter.
The most discerning critics of the great dramas are not theater-goers.
The theater runs to eyes; study runs to thought.  In a theater the
actor thinks for us; in a study we think for ourselves.  For
contemporaries of "The Letters of Junius" to attempt guessing who
Junius was, was plainly exhilarating as a walk at morning along a
country lane.  To attempt the interpretation of a Shakespeare's tragedy
for yourself is no less so.  Believe in your own capabilities, and test
your own powers.  Conceive of Shakespeare's folk, not as dead and past,
but as living.  These men and women, among whom we move, are those
among whom Shakespeare moved.  Ages change customs and costumes, but
not characters.  Bring Shakespeare down to now, and see how rational
his men and women become; and we, as central to his movement, may begin
to reckon on the periodicity of souls as of comets.  I would have
people inherit Shakespeare as they inherit Newton's discoveries or
Columbus's new world.

And as we know, we shall learn to trust, Shakespeare.  He is uniformly
truthful.  He may sin against geographical veracity, as when he names
Bohemia a maritime province; or he may give Christian reasonings to
ancient heathen; but these are _errata_, not falsehoods; and besides,
these are mistakes of a colorist, or in background of figure-painting,
and do not touch the real province of the dramatist, whose office is
not to paint landscapes, but figures--and figures not of physique, but
of soul--the delineation of character being the dramatist's business.
Here is Shakespeare always accurate.  To argue with him savors of
petulancy or childish ignorance or egotism.  Some people ourselves have
met had no sense of character, as some have no sense of color.  They do
not perceive logical continuity here, as in reasoning, but approach
each person as an isolated fact, whereas souls are a series--men
repeating men, women repeating women, in large measure, as a child
steps in his father's tracks across a field of snow in winter.  Other
people seem intuitively to read character, being able to shut their
eyes and see more than others with eyes open, having a faculty for
practical psychology, which is little less than miracle, as in
Tennyson, who was not a man among men--being shy as a whip-poor-will,
seclusive as flowers which haunt the woodland shadows--yet those
reading him must know how accurately he reads the human heart; and his
characterization of Guinevere, Pelleas, Bedivere, Enid, the lover in
Maud, a Becket, the Princess, Philip, Enoch Arden, and Dora, are, in
accuracy, as

   "Perfect music unto noble words."

Some people are born to this profound insight as storm-petrels for the
seas, needing not to be tutored, and are as men and women to whom we
tell our secrets, scarce knowing why we do.  But Shakespeare knows what
the sphinx thinks, if anybody does.  His genius is penetrative as cold
midwinter entering every room, and making warmth shiver in ague fits.
I think Shakespeare never errs in his logical sequence in character.
He surprises us, seems unnatural to us, but because we have been
superficial observers; while genius will disclose those truths to which
we are blind.  Recur to Ophelia, whom Goethe has discussed with such
insight.  Ophelia is, to our eyes and ears, pure as air.  We find no
fault in her.  Certainly, from any standpoint, her conduct is
irreproachable; yet, surprisingly enough, when she becomes insane, she
sings tainted songs, and salacious suggestions are on her lips, which
in sane hours never uttered a syllable of such a sort.  And Shakespeare
is wrong?  No; follow him.  Thoughts are like rooms when shutters are
closed and blinds down, and can not, therefore, be seen.  We tell our
thoughts, or conceal them, according to our desire or secretiveness,
and speech may or may not be a full index to thought; and Shakespeare
would indicate that fair Ophelia, love-lorn and neglected; fair
Ophelia, whose words and conduct were unexceptional, even to the sharp
eyes of a precisian--fair Ophelia cherished thoughts not meet for
maidenhood, and in her heart toyed with voluptuousness.  I know nothing
more accurate; and the penetration of this poet seems, for the moment,
something more than human.  After a single example, such as adduced,
would not he be guilty of temerity who would question Shakespeare's
accuracy in character delineation?  The sum of what has been said on
this point is, distrust yourself rather than Shakespeare; and when your
notions and his are not coincident, or when, more strongly stated, you
feel sure that here for once he is inaccurate, reckon that he is
profounder than you, and do you begin to seek for a hidden path as one
lost in a wilderness, when, in all probability, you will discover that
what you deemed inexact was in reality a profounder truth than had come
under your observation.  Nor would a discussion of Shakespeare's
truthfulness be rounded out should his value as historian be omitted.
He is profoundest of philosophical historians, compelling the motives
in historic personages to disclose themselves, while, in the main, his
historical data are correct as understood in his day.  He has not
juggled with facts, though in instances where he has taken liberty with
events he has, by such change in historic setting, made the main issues
more apparent.  Some one has said that simply as historian of England
Shakespeare has done nobly by his country, which remark I, for one,
think accurate.  Beginning with King John, he keeps the main channels
of English history to the birth of Elizabeth, where, in a spirit of
subtle courtesy, he makes the destination of his historical studies.
If the purpose of noble history be to make us understand men and,
consequently, measures, then is Shakespeare still the greatest English
historian.  Richard III never becomes so understandable as in the
drama; and Henry IV is a figure clearly seen, as if he stood in the
sunlight before our eyes, so that any one conversant with these
history-plays is fortified against all stress in solid knowledge and
profound insight into turbulent eras of Anglo-Saxon history; for
Shakespeare has given us history carved in relief, as are the metopes
of the Parthenon.  For knowledge psychologically and historically
accurate commend me to William Shakespeare, historian.

The lover is Shakespeare's main thesis; and his lovers--men and
women--never violate the proprieties of love.  What his lovers do has
been done and will be done.  Helena, in "All's Well that Ends Well," is
a true phase of womanhood; and in those days of the more general
infidelity and lordship of man, more common than now--though now this
picture is truthful--woman has a power of self-sacrifice and rigorous
self-denial when in love, which, as it is totally unconscious on her
part, is as totally inexplicable on our part.  Life is not a condition
easily explained.  The heart of simplest man or woman is a mystery,
compared with which the sphinx is an open secret.  The vagaries of love
in life are the vagaries of love in Shakespeare.  Life was his book,
which he knew by heart.  Rosalind, in "As You Like It," is a portrait
both fair and accurate.  We have seen Rosalind, and the sight of her
was good for the eyes.  To read Shakespeare is to be told what we
ourselves have seen, we not recognizing the people we had met until he
whispers in our ears, "You have seen her and him;" whereat we answer,
"Yes, truly, so we have, though we did not know it till you told us."

Shakespeare is philosopher of both sexes, though this is not the rule,
as we will readily agree, thinking over the great portrait painters of
character.  To state a single illustrative case: Hall Caine must be
allowed to have framed some mighty men, tragic, or melodramatic
sometimes, somber always, but men of bulk and character.  Pete, in "The
Manxman," is a creation sufficient to make the artist conceiving him
immortal; and Red Jason is no less real, manly, mighty, self-mastering,
self-surrendering.  Caine's men are giants; but his women do not
satisfy and seldom interest us, with an exception in a few cases--as
with Naomi in "The Scape Goat," and Greeba, wife of Michal Sunlocks;
though Naomi is little more than a figure seen at a doorway, standing
in the sun; for she has not forged a character up to the time when her
lover puts arm about her, as she droops above her dying father, when
his vast love would make him immortal for her sake.  Glory Quayle is
interesting, but unsatisfactory.  My belief is that Tolstoi has drawn
no man approaching his astonishing Anna Karenina.  Shakespeare is
ambidexter here.  All things are seemingly native to him; for he is
never at a loss.  Not words, thoughts, dreams, images, music, fail him
for a moment even.  Who found him feeling for a word?  Did we not find
them ready at his hand as Ariel was ready to serve Prospero?  Lear,
Prospero, Brutus, Cassius, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, Hamlet, are as
crowning creations as Cleopatra, Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Katharine the
Shrew, Imogen, or Cordelia.  We know not which to choose, as one who
looks through a mountain vista to the sea, declaring each view fairer
than the last, yet knowing if he might choose any one for a perpetual
possession he could not make decision.  We are incapable of choosing
between Shakespeare's men and his women.

Small volumes are best for reading Shakespeare, for this reason: In
large volumes the dramas get lost to your thought, as a nook of beauty
is apt to get lost in the abundant beauty of summer hills, solely
because there are so many; but when put into small volumes, each play
becomes individualized, made solitary, and stands out like a tree
growing in a wide field alone.  Do not conceive of Shakespeare's plays
as marble column, pediment, frieze, metope, built into a Parthenon, but
conceive of each play as a Parthenon; for I think it certain each one
might have stood solitary on cape or hill, as those old Greeks built
temples to their tutelar deities.  He wrote so much and so greatly as
to bewilder us, just as night does with her multitudinous stars.  Who
maps the astral globe will divide his heavens into sections, so he may
chart his constellations.  The like must be done with Shakespeare.  A
great painting is always at more of an advantage in a room of its own
than in a gallery, since each picture is in a way a distraction,
stealing a trifle of beauty from its fellow, though adding nothing to
itself thereby.  "Come," we say to a dear friend from whom we have been
parted for a long time, "come, let me have you alone," and you walk
across a field, and sit in the singing shadows of the pines--you
appropriate your friend.  Do the same with a poem; for in such a
wilderness of beauty send majesty as Shakespeare's plays this need
becomes imperative.  Pursuant to this suggestion, I recur to a previous
thought on Shakespearean criticism that, rich as it is, is defective in
this individualization--so much being written on the whole, so little
in comparison on the parts.  Each drama fills our field of vision, and
justifies a dissertation.  Each dialogue of Plato demands an essay by
Jowett.  How well, then, may each dialogue of Shakespeare demand a
separate study!  There is distinct gain in looking at a landscape from
a window, sitting a little back from the window-sill, the view being
thus framed as a picture, and the superfluous horizon cut off; and the
relevancies, as I may say, are included and the irrelevancies excluded;
for in looking at too much we are losers, not gainers, the eye failing
to catch the entirety of meaning.  Here is the advantage of the
landscape painter, who seizes the view to which we should restrict our
eyes, bringing into compass of canvas what we should have brought into
compass of sky and scene, but did not.  So these window views of
Shakespeare are what we greatly need now, and are what Hudson and Rolfe
and Ulrici and the various editors of note have given.

But after all, the best interpretation of a drama or any poem is to be
gained first hand, nothing being clearer than that every poem
challenges individual interpretation, as if saying, "What do you think
I mean?"  There is too much knowing productions by proxy, of being
conversant with what every sort of body thinks about Hamlet, but
ourselves being a void so far as distinctively individual opinion goes.
A poem, like the Scriptures, is its own best interpreter; and there is
always scope for the personal equation in judging literature, because
criticism is empiricism in any case, being opinion set against opinion.
Different people think different things, and that is the end.  Literary
criticism can never be an exact science, and everybody may have and
should have an opinion.  Great productions have never had their meaning
exhausted, since meanings are an infinite series.  So, to get an
interpretation of Cymbeline, say, get into the midst of the drama, as
if it were a stream and you a boatman in your boat.  Commit you to the
drama's flood, omitting for a time what others have thought, and read
as if the poem were a fresh manuscript found by you, and read with such
avidity as scholars of the Renaissance knew when a palimpsest of
Tacitus or Theocritus was found.  Let your imagination, as well as the
poet's, spread wings.  Become creative yourself; for this is true: No
one can rightly conceive any work of imagination and be himself
unimaginative.  Read and re-read, and at length, like the cliffs of
shore rising out of ocean mists, dim, but stable and increasingly
palpable, will come a scheme of meaning.  Miss nothing.  Let no beauty
elude you.  Odors must not waste; we, in a spirit of lofty economy,
must inhale them.  Watch the drift of verbal trifles; for Shakespeare
uses no superfluities.  His meaning dominates his method; his
modulations are prophetic.  See, therefore, that he does not elude you,
escaping at some path or shadow, but cling to his garments, however
swiftly he runs.  Such study will bear fruit of sure triumph in your
conceiving a hidden import of a great drama.  This method of
self-assertiveness in reading is logical and invigorating.  Think as
well as be thought for.

Of all poets, Shakespeare is richest in the material of simile.  He
thought in pictures, which is another way of saying he wooed
comparatives.  Thought is inert; and he is greatest in expression who
can supply his thinking with ruddy blood, flush the pallid cheek, make
the dull eye bright, and make laughter run across the face like ripples
of sunshine across water touched by the wind.  In Shakespeare's turn of
phrase and use of figure is a fertility of suggestion such as even
Dante can not approximate.  He is unusual, which is a merit; for thus
is mind kept on the alert, like a sentinel fearing surprise.  Of this
an essay might be filled with illustrations.  He does not try to use
figures, but can not keep from using them.  As stars flash into light,
so he flashes into metaphor, metonymy, trope, personification, or
simile.  Because he sees everything, is he fertile in suggestion, and
his comparisons are numerous as his thoughts.  See how his figures
multiply as you have seen foam-caps multiply on waves when the wind
rises on the sea!

  "We burn daylight."

  "Nay, the world 's my oyster,
  Which I with sword shall open."

  "I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted."

      "My library
  Was dukedom large enough."

  "Into the eye and prospect of his soul."

  "Make a swan-like end,
  Fading in music."

  "Those blessed candles of the night."

  "The schoolboy, with his satchel
  And shining, morning face."

  "Like an unseasonable stormy day,
  Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores."

  "He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines."

  "And must I ravel out
  My weaved-up follies?"

  "Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me
  To this submission."

  "The gaudy, babbling, and remorseless day
  Is crept into the bosom of the sea."

  "There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
  Would men observingly distill it out."

  "He hath a tear for pity, and a hand
  Open as day for melting charity."

  "That daffed the world aside,
  And bid it pass."

  "He is come to ope
  The purple testament of bleeding war."

  "She sat, like patience on a monument,
  Smiling at grief."

  "That strain again; it had a dying fall:
  O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
  That breathes upon a bank of violets,
  Stealing and giving odor."

  "For courage mounts with occasion."

      "Here I and sorrows sit;
  Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it."

  "Death's dateless night."

  "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,
  Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man."

    "The tongues of dying men
  Enforce attention like deep harmony."

  "Falstaff sweats to death,
  And lards the lean earth as he walks along."

  "I have set my life upon a cast,
  And I will stand the hazard of the die."

      "'T is better to be lowly born,
  And range with humble livers in content,
  Than be perked up in glistering grief,
  And wear a golden sorrow."

  "An old man broken with the storms of state."

  "Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye."

  "Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
  Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops."

  "Within the book and volume of my brain."

  "One vial full of Edward's blood is cracked,
   And all the precious liquor spilt."


In such quest as this, one is enticed as if he followed the windings of
a stream under the shadows of the trees.  Past waterfall and banks of
flowers and choiring of the birds, he goes on forever, except he force
himself to pause.  Shakespeare is always an enticement, whose turns of
poetic thought and verbiage are a pure delight.  Note this quality in
the quotations--a word naturally expresses a thought.  Shakespeare's
figures express a series of thoughts as varied landscapes seen in
pictures; in consequence, to read him is to see resemblances in things,
because we have sharpened vision and can not, after reading him, be
blind as we were before, but feel the plethora of our world with the
poetic.  After he has spoken for us and to us, the world's capacity is
enlarged; we are, in truth, not so much as those who have read poetry
as we are like those who have seen the world pass before our eyes.  We
thought the world a stream run dry; but lo! the bed is full of waters,
flooded from remote hills, where snowdrifts melt and make perpetual
rivers.  After hearing him, we expect things of our world; its
fertility seems so exhaustless.

Shakespeare has no hint of invalidism about him, but is the person, not
the picture, of perfect health.  Not an intimation of the hypochondriac
nor of the convalescent do I find in him.  He is healthy, and his voice
rings out like a bell on a frosty night.  Take his hand, and you feel
shaking hands, not with Aesculapius, but with Health.  To be ailing
when Shakespeare is about is an impertinence for which you feel
compelled to offer apology.  Does not this express our feeling about
this poet?  He is well, always well, and laughs at the notion of
sickness.  He starts a-walking, and unconsciously runs, as a schoolboy
after school.  His smile breaks into ringing laughter; and he, not you,
knows why he either smiles or laughs.  He and sunlight seem close of
kin.  A mountain is a challenge he never refuses, but scales it by
bounds, like a deer when pursued by the hunter and the hound.  He is
not tonic, but bracing air and perfect health and youth, which makes
labor a holiday and care a jest.  Shakespeare is never morose.  Dante
is the picture of melancholy, Shakespeare the picture of resilient joy.
Tennyson beheld "three spirits, mad with joy, dash down upon a wayside
flower;" and our dramatist is like them.  Life laughs on greeting him;
the grave grows dim to sight when he is near, and you see the deep sky
instead, and across it wheel wild birds in happy motion.  In Tennyson
is perpetual melancholy--the mood and destiny of poetry, as I
suppose--but Shakespeare is not melancholy, nor does he know how to be.
His face is never sad, I think, and he is fonder of Jack Falstaff than
we are apt to suppose; for health riots in his blood.  He weeps, smiles
breaking through his weeping, and he turns from the grave of tragedy
with laughter leaning from his eyes.  Aeschylus is a poet whose face
was never lit even with the candle-light of smiles; but Shakespeare,
writer of tragedy, is our laughing poet.  This plainly confounds our
philosophy of poetry, since humor is not poetry; but he binds humor to
his car as Achilles, Hector, and laughs at our upset philosophies,
crying: "This is my Lear, weep for him; this my Hamlet, break your
hearts for him; this my Desdemona, grow tender for her woe,--but
enough: this is my Rosalind and my Miranda, my Helena and Hermione, my
Orlando and Ferdinand, my Bassanio and Leontes; laugh with them"--and
you render swift obedience, saying, with Lord Boyet, in "Love's Labor
Lost,"

  "O, I am stabbed with laughter!"


He is court jester, at whose quips the generations make merry.  You can
not be somber nor sober long with him, though he is deep as seas, and
fathomless as air, and lonely as night, and sad betimes as autumn.  He
is not frivolous, but is joyous.  The bounding streams, the singing
trees, the leaping stags along the lake, the birds singing morning
awake,--Shakespeare incorporates all these in himself.  He is what may
be named, in a spiritual sense, this world's animal delight in life.
There is a view of life sullen as November; and to be sympathetic with
this mood is to ruin life and put out all its lights.  Shakespeare's
resiliency of spirit would teach us what a dispassionate study of our
own nature would have taught us, that to succumb to this gloom is not
natural; to feel the weight of burdens all the time would conduct to
insanity or death; therefore has God made bountiful provision against
such outcome in the lift of cloud and lightening of burden.  We forget
sleep is God's rest-hour for spirit; and, besides, we read in God's
Book how, "at eventide, it shall be light," an expression at once of
exquisite poetry and acute observation.  Our lives are healthy when
natural.  The crude Byronic misanthropy, even though assumed, finds no
favor in Shakespeare's eyes.

Shakespeare is this world's poet--a truth hinted at before, but now
needing amplifying a trifle.  There is in him this-worldliness, but not
other-worldliness, his characters not seeming to the full to have a
sense of the invisible world.  He is love's poet.  His lovers are
imperishable because real.  He is love's laureate.  Yet are his loves
of this world.  True, there are spurts of flight, as of an eagle with
broken wing, when, as in Hamlet, he faults this world and aspires
skyward, yet does not lose sight of the earth, and, like the wounded
eagle in "Sohrab and Rustum," lies at last

  "A heap of fluttering feathers."


Plainly, Shakespeare was a voyager in this world, and a discoverer,
sailing all seas and climbing tallest altitudes to their far summits;
but flight was not native to him, as if he had said:

  "We have not wings, we can not soar;
  But we have feet to scale, and climb."


I can not think him spiritual in the gracious sense.  His contemporary,
Edmund Spenser, was spiritual, as even Milton was not.  This world made
appeal to this poet of the Avon on the radiant earthly side; the very
clouds flamed with a glory borrowed from the sun as he looked on them.
His world was very fair.  In more than a poetic sense was

  "All the world a stage."


Life was a drama, hastening, shouting, exhilarating, turbulent, free,
roistering, but as triumphant as Elizabeth's fleet and God's stormy
waters were over Philip's great Armada.  Hamlet was the terribly tragic
conception in Shakespeare because he was hopeless.  Can you conceive
Shakespeare writing "In Memoriam?"  Tennyson was pre-eminently
spiritual, and "In Memoriam" is his breath dimming the window-pane on
which he breathed.  That was Tennyson's life, but was patently no brave
part of Shakespeare.  He knew to shape tragedy, such as Romeo and
Juliet; but how to send abroad a cry like Enoch Arden's prayer lay not
in him.  He compassed our world, but found no way to leave what proved
a waterlogged ship; and how to pilot to

  "The undiscovered country, from whose bourne
  No traveler returns,"

puzzles Shakespeare's will as it had Hamlet's.

So not even our great Shakespeare can monopolize life.  Some landscapes
have not lain like a picture beneath his eyes; he did not exhaust
poetry nor life, and room is still left for

  "New men, strange faces, other minds,"

for whom,

  "Though much is taken, much abides; and though
  We are not that strength which in old days
  Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are--
  One equal temper of heroic hearts,
  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."




III

Caliban

Your great poet is eminently sane.  Not that this is the conception
current concerning him--the reverse being the common idea--that a poet
is a being afflicted with some strange and unclassified rabies.  He is
supposed to be possessed, like the Norwegian Berserker, whose frenzy
amounted to volcanic tumult.  The genesis of misconceptions, however,
is worth one's while to study; for in a majority of cases there is in
the misconception a sufficient flavoring of truth to make the erroneous
notion pass as true.  At bottom, the human soul loves truth, nor
willingly believes or receives a lie.  Our intellectual sin is
synecdoche, the putting a part truth for a whole truth.  Generalization
is dangerous intellectual exercise.  Our premise is insufficient, and
our conclusion is self-sufficient, like some strutting scion of a
decayed house.  Trace the origin of this idea of a poet's non-sanity.
He was not ordinary, as other men, but was extraordinary, and as such
belonged to the upper rather than the lower world; for we must be
convinced how wholly the ancients kept the super-earthly in mind in
their logical processes--an attitude wise and in consonance with the
wisest of this world's thinking.  Heaven must not be left out of our
computations, just as the sun must not be omitted in writing the
history of a rose or a spike of golden-rod.  In harmony with this
exalted origin of the poet went the notion that he was under an
afflatus.  A breath from behind the world blew in his face; nay, more,
a breath from behind the world blew noble ideas into his soul, and he
spake as one inspired of the gods.  This conception of a poet is high
and worthy; nothing gross grimes it with common dust.  Yet from so
noble a thought--because the thought was partial--grew the gross
misconception of the poet as beyond law, as not amenable to social and
moral customs, as one who might transgress the moral code with
impunity, and stand unreproved, even blameless.  He was thought to be
his own law--a man whose course should no more be reproved or hindered
than the winds.  The poet's supremacy brought us to a wrong conclusion.
The philosopher we assumed to be balanced, the poet to be unbalanced.
Shelley, and Poe, and Heine, and Byron, and Burns elucidate this
erroneous hypothesis of the poet.  We pass lightly their misrule of
themselves with a tacit assumption of their genius having shaken and
shocked their moral faculties as in some giant perturbation.

I now recur to the initial suggestion, that the great poet is sane.
The poet is yet a man, and man is more than poet.  Manhood is the regal
fact to which all else must subordinate itself.  Nothing must be
allowed to disfranchise manhood; and he who manumits the poet from
social and ethical bonds is not logical, nor penetrative into the dark
mystery of soul, nor is he the poet's friend.  Nor is he a friend who
assumes that the poet, because a poet, moves in eccentric paths rather
than in concentric circles.  Hold with all tenacity to the poet's
sanity.  He is superior, and lives where the eagles fly and stars run
their far and splendid courses; but he is still man, though man grown
tall and sublime.  To the truth of this view of the great poet bear
witness Aeschylus, and Dante, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and
Tennyson, and Browning, in naming whom we are lighting on high summits,
as clouds do, and leaving the main range of mountains untouched.
Shakespeare is absolutely sane.  Not Blondin, crossing Niagara on a
thread for a pathway, was so absolute in his balance as Shakespeare.
He saw all the world.  Nor is this all; for there are those who see an
entire world, but see it distorted as an anamorphism.  There is a
cartoon world, where everybody is apprehended as taking on other shapes
than his own, and is valued in proportion as he is susceptible of
caricature.  But plate-glass is better for looking through than is a
prism.  What men need is eyes which are neither far-sighted nor
near-sighted, but right-sighted.  Shakespeare was that.  There is no
hint of exaggeration in his characters.  They are people we have met on
journeys, and some of whom we have known intimately.  To be a poet it
is not necessary to be a madman--a doctrine wholesome and encouraging.
I lay down, then, as one of the canons for testing a poet's greatness,
this, "Is he sane?" and purpose applying the canon to Robert Browning,
giving results of such application rather than the _modus operandi_ of
such results.  I assert that he bears the test.  No saner man than
Browning ever walked this world's streets.  He was entirely human in
his love of life for its own sake, in his love of nature and friends
and wife and child.  His voice, in both speech and laughter, had a ring
and joyousness such as reminded us of Charles Dickens in his youth.
His appreciation of life was intense and immense.  This world and all
worlds reported to him as if he were an officer to whom they all, as
subalterns, must report.  The pendulum in the clock on a lady's
mantel-shelf is not more natural than the pendulum swung in a cathedral
tower, though the swing of the one is a slight and the swing of the
other a great arc.  Browning is a pendulum whose vibrations touch the
horizons.  He does business with fabulous capital and on a huge scale,
and thinks, sees, serves, and loves after a colossal fashion, but is as
natural in his large life as a lesser man is in his meager life.
"Caliban upon Setebos" is a hint of the man's immense movement of soul
and his serene rationality.

Browning will be preacher; and as preachers do--and do wisely--he takes
a text from the Scriptures, finding in a psalm a sentence embodying the
thought he purposes elaborating, as a bud contains the flower.  The
Bible may safely be asserted to be the richest treasure-house of
suggestive thought ever discovered to the soul.  In my conviction, not
a theme treated in the domain of investigation and reason whose
chapters may not be headed from the Book Divine.  In his "Cleon,"
Browning has taken his text from the words of Paul; in "Caliban upon
Setebos," his text is found in Asaph's psalm, and the words are, "Thou
thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."  A word will
set a great brain on fire, as if the word were a torch and the brain a
pine-forest, and to thoughtful minds it must be deeply interesting to
know that this study in psychology, which stands distinctly alone in
English literature and in universal literature, was suggested by a
phrase from the Book of God.

To begin with, Caliban is one of Shakespeare's finest conceptions in
creative art.  Caliban is as certain in our thoughts as Ferdinand,
Miranda, or Prospero.  He is become, by Shakespeare's grace, a person
among us who can not be ignored.  Study his biography in "The Tempest,"
and find how masterly the chief dramatist was in rendering visible
those forms lying in the shadow-land of psychology.  As Dowden has
suggested, doubtless Caliban's name is a poet's spelling, or anagram,
of "cannibal;" and, beyond question, Setebos is a character in
demonology, taken from the record of the chronicler of Magellan's
voyages, who pictures the Patagonians, when taken captive, as roaring,
and "calling on their chief devil, Setebos."  So far the historical
setting of Caliban and Sycorax and Setebos.  In character, Caliban and
Jack Falstaff are related by ties closer than those of blood.  Both are
bestial, operating in different departments of society; but in the
knight, as in the slave, only animal instincts dominate.  Lust is
tyrant.  Animality destroys all manhood, and lowers to the slush and
ooze of degradation every one given over to its control.  A man
degraded to the gross level of a beast because he prefers the animal to
the spiritual--this is Caliban.  His mind is atrophied, in part,
because lust sins against reason.  Caliban is Prospero's slave, but he
is lust's slave more--a slavery grinding and ignominious as servitude
to Prospero can be.  Prospero must always, in the widest sense, lord it
over Caliban, with his diminished understanding and aggravated
appetites, who vegetates rather than lives.  His days are narrow as the
days of browsing sheep and cattle; but his soul knows the lecherous
intent, the petty hate, the cankerous envy, the evil discontents,
indigenous only to the soul of man.  Plainly, Caliban is man, not
beast; for his proclivities, while bestial, are still human.  In a
beast is a certain dignity, in that action is instinctive, irrevocable,
and so far necessary.  Caliban is not so.  He might be other than he
is.  He is depraved, but yet a man, as Satan was an angel, though
fallen.  The most profligate man has earmarks of manhood on him that no
beast can duplicate.  And Caliban (on whom Prospero exhausts his
vocabulary of epithets) attempting rape on Miranda; scowling in
ill-concealing hate in service; playing truant in his task when from
under his master's eyes; traitor to Prospero, and, as a co-conspirator
with villains like himself, planning his hurt; a compound of spleen,
malignancy, and murderous intent; irritated under conditions; failing
to seize moral and manly positions with such ascendency as grows out of
them, yet full of bitter hate toward him who wears the supremacy won by
moral worth and mastery,--really, Caliban seems not so foreign to our
knowledge after all.  Such is Shakespeare's Caliban.

Him Browning lets us hear in a monologue.  Whoever sets man or woman
talking for us does us a service.  To be a good listener is to be
astute.  When anybody talks in our hearing, we become readers of pages
in his soul.  He thinks himself talking about things; while we, if
wise, know he is giving glimpses of individual memorabilia.  Caliban is
talking.  He is talking to himself.  He does not know anybody is
listening; therefore will there be in him nothing theatrical, but his
words will be sincere.  He plays no part now, but speaks his soul.

Browning is nothing if not bold.  He attempts things audacious as the
voyages of Ulysses.  Nothing he has attempted impresses me as more
bold, if so bold, as this exploit of entering into the consciousness of
a besotted spirit, and stirring that spirit to frame a system of
theology.  Nansen's tramp along the uncharted deserts of the Polar
winter was not more brilliant in inception and execution.  Caliban is a
theorist in natural theology.  He is building a theological system as
certainly as Augustine or Calvin or Spinoza did.  This poem presents
that satire which constitutes Browning's humor.  Conceive that he here
satirizes those omniscient rationalists who demolish, at a touch, all
supernatural systems of theology, and proceed to construct purely
natural systems in their place as devoid of vitality and inspiration as
dead tree-trunks are of vital saps.  So conceive this dramatic
monologue, and the baleful humor appears, and is captivating in its
biting sarcasm and unanswerable argument.  Caliban is, in his own
opinion, omniscient.  He trusts himself absolutely.  He is as
infallible as the Positivists, and as full of information as the
Agnostics, absurd as such an attitude on their part must appear; for,
as Romanes has shown in his "Thoughts on Religion," the Agnostic must
simply assert his inability to know, and must not dogmatize as to what
is or is not.  So soon as he does, he has ceased to be a philosophic
Agnostic.  Caliban's theology, though grotesque, is not a whit more so
than much which soberly passes in our day for "advanced thinking" and
"new theology."

Some things are apparent in Caliban.  He is a man, not a beast, in that
no beast has any commerce with the thought of God.  Man is declared
man, not so much by thinking or by thinking's instrument--language--as
by his moral nature.  Man prays; and prayer is the imprimatur of man's
manhood.  Camels kneel for the reception of their burdens, but never
kneel to God.  Only man has a shrine and an altar.  Such things, we are
told, are signs of an infantile state of civilization and superstition;
but they may be boldly affirmed to be, in fact, infallible signs of the
divinity of the human soul.  Caliban is thinking of his god, brutal,
devilish; yet he thinks of a god, and that is a possibility as far
above the brute as stars are above the meadow-lands.  He has a
divinity.  He is dogmatist, as ignorance is bound to be.  He knows; and
distrust of himself or his conclusions is as foreign to him as to the
rationalists of our century and decade.  Caliban makes a god.  The
attempt would be humorous were it not pathetic.  If his conclusions are
absurd, they are what might be anticipated when man engages in the task
of god-making.  "Caliban upon Setebos" is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of
the attempt of man to create God.  God rises not from man to the
firmament, but falls from the firmament to man.  God does not ascend as
the vapor, but descends as the light.  This is the wide meaning of this
uncanny poem.  It is the sanity of the leading poet of the nineteenth
century, and the greatest poet since Shakespeare, who saw clearly the
inanity of so-called scientific conclusions and godless theories of the
evolution of mankind.  Mankind can not create God.  God creates
mankind.  All the man-made gods are fashioned after the similitude of
Caliban's Setebos.  They are grotesque, carnal, devilish.  Paganism was
but an installment of Caliban's theory.  God was a bigger man or woman,
with aggravated human characteristics, as witness Jove and Venus and
Hercules and Mars.  Greek mythology is a commentary on Caliban's
monologue.  For man to evolve a god who shall be non-human, actually
divine in character and conduct, is historically impossible.  No man
could create Christ.  The attempt to account for religion by evolution
is a piece of sorry sarcasm.  Man has limitations.  Here is one.  By
evolution you can not explain language, much less religion.  Such is
the lesson of "Caliban upon Setebos."  Shakespeare created a brutalized
man, a dull human slave, whom Prospero drove as he would have driven a
vicious steed.  This only, Shakespeare performed.  Browning proposed to
give this man to thought, to surrender him to the widest theme the mind
has knowledge of--to let him reason on God.  How colossal the
conception!  Not a man of our century would have cherished such a
conception but Robert Browning.  The design was unique, needful,
valuable, stimulative.  The originality, audacity, and brilliancy of
the attempt are always a tonic to my brain and spiritual nature.  With
good reason has this poem been termed "extraordinary;" and that thinker
and critic, James Mudge, has named it "the finest illustration of
grotesque art in the language."

The picture of Caliban sprawling in the ooze, brute instincts regnant,
is complete and admirable.  Stealing time from service to be truant
(seeing Prospero sleeps), he gives him over to pure animal enjoyment,
when, on a sudden, from the cavern where he lies,

  "He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
  And recross till they weave a spider web,
  Meshes of fire,
  And talks to his own self howe'er he please,
  Touching that other whom his dam called God;"

but talks of God, not as a promise of a better life, but purely of an
evil mind,

  "Because to talk about Him vexes Prospero!
  And it is good to cheat the pair [Miranda and
        Prospero], and gibe,
  Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech."


What a motive for thinking on the august God!  He now addresses himself
to the conceiving of a divinity.  He thrusts his mother's beliefs aside
rudely, as a beast does the flags that stand along its way in making
journey to the stream to slake its thirst.  He is grossly
self-sufficient.  He is boor and fool conjoined.  Where wise men and
angels would move with reverent tread and forehead bent to earth, he
walks erect, unhumbled; nay, without a sense of worship.  How could he
or another find God so?  The mood of prayer is the mood of finding God.
Who seeks Him must seek with thought aflame with love.  Caliban's
reasoning ambles like a drunkard staggering home from late debauch.
His grossness shames us.  And yet were he only Caliban, and if he were
all alone, we could forget his maudlin speech--but he is more.  He is a
voice of our own era.  His babblings are not more crude and
irreverential than much that passes for profound thinking.  Nay,
Caliban is our contemporaneous shame.  He asserts (he does not
think--he asserts, settles questions with a word) that Setebos created
not all things--the world and sun--

  "But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;"

and this goodly frame of ocean and of sky and earth came of Setebos.

        "Being ill at ease,
  He hated that he can not change his cold
  Nor cure its ache."


His god is selfishness, operating on a huge scale.  But more, he

  "Made all we see and us in spite: how else?
  But did in envy, listlessness, or sport
  Make what himself would fain in a manner be--
  Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
  Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while."


Made them to plague, as Caliban would have done.  And caprice is
Setebos's method.  He does things wantonly.  No noble master passion
flames in him.  No goodness blesses him.  Such a god Caliban makes, so
that it is odds whether Caliban make God or God make Caliban.  Be sure,
a man-made god is like the man who made him.  The sole explanation of
God, "who dwelleth in light which no man can approach unto," and who is
whiter than the light in which he dwells, is, he is not myth, man-made.
God made man, and revealed to him the Maker.  Thus only do we explain
the surpassing picture the prophets and the Christ and the evangelists
have left us of the mighty God.  Caliban will persist in the belief
that the visible system was created in Setebos's moment of being ill at
ease and in cruel sportiveness.  Nature is a freak of a foul mind.  But
Caliban's god is not solitary.  How hideous were the Aztec gods!  They
were pictured horrors.  Montezuma's gods were Caliban's.  Caliban's
Setebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a Hindoo Krishna.  And
the Greek and Norse gods were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamed
them.  Who says, after familiarizing himself with the religions of the
world, that Caliban or his theology is myth?  Setebos has no morals.
He has might.  But this was Jupiter.  Read "Prometheus Bound," and know
a Greek conception of Greek Zeus:

  "Such shows nor right nor wrong in him,
  Nor kind nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
  Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
  That march now from the mountain to the sea;
  Let twenty pass and stone the twenty-first,
  Loving not, hating not, just choosing so."


How hideous this god, decrepit in all save power!  But for argument,
suppose

        "He is good i' the main,
  Placable if his mind and ways were guessed,
  But rougher than his handiwork, be sure."


Caliban thinks Setebos is himself a creature, made by something he
calls "Quiet;" and what is this but the Gnostic notion of aeons and
their subordination to the great, hid God?  No, this brief dramatic
lyric is far from being an imagination.  Rather say it is a chapter
taken from the history of man's traffic in gods.  Setebos is creative;
lacks moral qualities in that he may be evil or good; acts from spleen,
and by simple caprice; is loveless; to be feared, deceived, tricked, as
Caliban tricks Prospero,--so run the crude theological speculations of
this man.  He gets no step nearer truth.  He walks in circles.  He is
shut in by common human limitations.  Man can not dream about the sky
until he has seen a sky, nor can he dream out God till God has been
revealed.  Caliban is no more helpless here than other men.  His
failure in theology is a picture of the failure of all men.  God must
show himself at Sinais and at Calvarys, at cross and grave and
resurrection and ascension; must pass from the disclosure of his being
the "I Am" to those climacteric moments of the world when he discovered
to us that he was the "I am Love" and the "I am the Resurrection and
the Life."  God is

        "Terrible: watch his feats in proof!
  One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope,
  He hath a spite against me, that I know,
  Just as He favors Prospero; who knows why?
  So it is all the same as well I find.
  . . .  So much for spite."


There is no after-life.

        "He doth His worst in this our life,
  Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
  Saving last pain for worst--with which, an end.
  Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
  Is, not to seem too happy."


Poor Caliban, not to have known that in the summer of man's joy our God
grows glad!  All he hopes is,

        "Since evils sometimes mend,
  Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
  That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
  And conquer Setebos, or likelier he
  Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die."


This is tragic as few tragedies know how to be.  Setebos is mean,
revengeful, fitful, spiteful, everything but good and noble; and his
votary will live to hope that he will either be conquered by a mightier
or will slumber forever!

So Caliban creates a god, a cosmogony, a theology; gets no thought of
goodness from God or for himself; gets no sign of reformation in
character; rises not a cubit above the ground where he constructs his
monologue; puts into God only what is in Caliban; has no faint hint of
love toward him from God, or from him toward God, when suddenly

        "A curtain o'er the world at once!
  Crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes,
  There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
  It was fool's play, this prattling!  Ha!  The wind
  Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,
  And fast invading fires begin!  White blaze--
  A tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there,
  His thunder follows!  Fool to gibe at Him!
  Lo!  'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!"


And there, like a groveling serpent in the ooze, there lies Caliban,
abject in fear, with not a ray of love.  Hopeless, loveless, see him
lie--a spectacle so sad as to make the ragged crags of ocean weep!

So pitiful a theology, yet no more pitiful than theologies created in
our own epoch.  Men, not brutal but opinionated, assume to comprehend
all things, God included.  They destroy and create theologies with the
flippant egotism of a French chevalier of the days of the Grand
Monarch.  They settle matters with a "Thus it is, and thus it is not."
Would not those men do well to read the parable, "Caliban upon
Setebos?"  Grant Allen and Huxley would be generously helped; for the
more they would lose in dogmatism, so much the more would they gain in
wisdom.  And what is true of them is true of others of their
fraternity.  This irony of Browning's is caustic, but very wholesome.
Barren as Caliban's theology is, certain contemporary theologies are
not less so.  A day to suffer and enjoy--and then the night, long,
dark, dreamless, eternal!

How sane Browning was!  What breadth of meaning is here disclosed!
What preacher of this century has preached a more inspired sermon than
"Caliban upon Setebos?"  He saw the irrationality of rationalism.  He
knew that knowledge of God came, as the new earth, "down from God out
of heaven."  Men will do better to receive theologies from God than to
create them.  A life we may live, having the Pattern "showed us in the
mount."  Christ gives the lie to Caliban's estimate of Deity.  Not
spite, nor misused might, nor caprice, nor life surcharged with either
indifference or spleen; but love and ministry and fertile thought and
wide devotion to others' good, an oblation of Himself--this is God, of
whom Caliban had no dream, and of whom the Christ was exegete.




IV

William the Silent

Few illustrious characters are so little known as William the Silent.
His face has faded from the sky of history as glory from a sunset
cloud; though, on attention, reasons why this is so may not be
difficult to find.  Some of them are here catalogued: He did not live
to celebrate the triumph of his statesmanship.  The nation whose
autonomy and independence he secured is no longer a Republic, and so
has, in a measure, ceased to bear the stamp of his genius.  The narrow
limits of his theater of action; for the Belgic States were a trifling
province of Philip Second's stupendous empire, stretching, as it did,
from Italy to the farthest western promontory of the New World.  A
theater is something.  Throw a heroic career on a world theater, such
as Julius Caesar had, and men will look as they would on burning
Moscow.  The scene prevents obscuration.  And last, Holland has, in our
days, passed into comparative inconsequence, and presents few symptoms
of that strength which once aspired to the rulership of the oceans.

The Belgic provinces were borrowed from the ocean by an industry and
audacity which must have astonished the sea, and continues a glory to
those men who executed the task, and to all men everywhere as well,
since deeds of prowess or genius, wrought by one man or race, inure to
the credit of all men and all races, achievement being, not local, but
universal.  These Netherlands, lying below sea-levels, became the
garden-spot of Europe, nurturing a thrifty, capable people, possessing
positive genius in industry, so that they not only grew in their
fertile soil food for nations, if need be, but became weavers of
fabrics for the clothing of aristocracies in remote nations; this, in
turn, leading of necessity to a commerce which was, in its time, for
the Atlantic what that of Venice had been to the Mediterranean; for the
Netherlanders were as aquatic as sea-birds, seeming to be more at home
on sea than on dry land.  This is a brief survey of those causes which
made Flanders, though insignificant in size, a principality any king
might esteem riches.  In the era of William the Silent the Netherlands
had reached an acme of relative wealth, influence, and commanding
importance, and supplied birthplace and cradle to the Emperor Charles
V, who, for thirty-seven years (reaching from 1519 to 1556) was the
controlling force in European politics.  This ruler was grandson of
Ferdinand and Isabella, and thus of interest to Americans, whose
thought must be riveted on any one connected, however remotely, with
the discovery of this New World, which supplies a stage for the latest
and greatest experiment in civilization and liberty, religion, and
individual opportunity.  Low as Spain has now fallen, we can not be
oblivious to the fact how that, on a day, Columbus, rebuffed by every
ruler and every court, found at the Spanish court a queen who listened
to his dream, and helped the dreamer, because the enthusiasm and
eloquence of this arch-pleader lifted this sovereign, for a moment at
least, above herself toward the high level where Columbus himself
stood; and that she staked her jewels on the casting of this die must
always glorify Queen Isabella, and shine some glory on the nation whose
sovereign she was.  For such reason we are predisposed in Charles V's
favor.  He is as a messenger from one we love, whom we love because of
whence he comes.  His mother, Joanna, died, crazed and of a broken
heart, from the indifference, perfidy, and neglect of her husband,
Philip, Archduke of Austria.  Her story reads like a novelist's plot,
and reasonably too; for every fiction of woman's fidelity in love and
boundlessness and blindness of affection is borrowed from living
woman's conduct.  Woman originates heroic episodes, her love surviving
the wildest winter of cruelty and neglect, as if a flower prevailed
against an Arctic climate, despite the month-long night and severity of
frosts, and still opened petals and dispensed odors as blossoming in
daytime and sunlight of a far, fair country.

The story of Joanna and Mary Tudor read surprisingly alike.  In reading
these old chronicles, one would think woman's lot was melancholy as a
dreary day of uninterrupted rain.  Doubtless her lot is ameliorated in
these better days, when she is not chattel but sovereign, and gives her
hand where her heart has gone before.  But Queen Mary, dying alone,
longing for her Philip, who cared for her as much as a falcon for
singing-birds, turning her dying eyes southward where her Philip was,
moaning, "On my heart, when I am dead, you will find Philip's name
written!"--Mary Tudor was an echo of the pain and cry of Joanna,
Philip's grandmother, a princess lacking in beauty of person and in
sprightliness and culture of mind.  Indeed, her intellect was weak to
the verge of insanity; her love for her husband, the Archduke of
Austria, doting, and its exhibition extravagant; and her jealousy, for
whose exercise there was ample opportunity, insane and passionate.  One
thing she was, and that--a lover.  Her husband was a sun; and the less
he shined on her, the more did she pine for his light.  Than this, the
history of kingly conjugal relations has few sadder chapters.  Archduke
Philip was young, engaging, affable, fond of society, preferring the
Netherlands to Spain, and anything to his wife's companionship.  Joanna
and Philip were prospective heirs to the crowns of Castile and Aragon,
and, as was clearly wise, were urged by Queen Isabella to come to
Spain, and be acknowledged as expectant sovereigns by the Cortes of
both kingdoms.  This was done.  Here Duke Philip grew restless, eager
for the Netherlands, and, despite the entreaties of Ferdinand,
Isabella, and his wife, set out for the Low Countries three days before
Christmas, leaving his wife alone to give birth to a son, than which a
more heartless deed has not been credited even to the account of a
king.  But without him, Joanna sunk into a hopeless and irremediable
melancholy; and was sullenly restless without him till his return to
Brussels in the succeeding year.  Philip's coldness inflamed her ardor.
Three months after Joanna and Philip had been enthroned sovereigns of
Castile, Philip sickened and died with his brief months of kingship.
His death totally disordered an understanding already pitifully weak.
Her grief was tearless and pitiful.  To quote the words of Prescott:
"Her grief was silent and settled.  She continued to watch the dead
body with the same tenderness and attention as if it had been alive,
and though at last she permitted it to be buried, she soon removed it
from the tomb to her own apartment;" and she made it "her sole
employment to bewail the loss and pray for the soul of her husband."
Of such a weak though loyal and sorrowing mother was Charles V born at
Ghent, February 24, 1500, who, at the age of sixteen, was left by the
will of his godfather, Ferdinand, sole heir of his dominions; and at
the age of nineteen he was chosen Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Fortune conspired to do him homage.  Charles was little inclined to the
study of the humanities, but fond of martial exercise, and, though
neglecting general learning, studied, with avidity and success, history
and the theory and practice of government, and accustomed himself to
practical management of affairs in the government of the Netherlands,
as early as 1515 attending the deliberations of the Privy Council.  He
was, as a youth, a prince of whom a realm would naturally feel proud,
though he scarcely displayed those qualities which were afterward his
chief characteristics.  In 1516, King Ferdinand, dying, left Cardinal
Ximenes regent of Castile, thus bringing Charles into contact with one
of the foremost statesmen of Spanish history.  Ximenes was rigorously
ascetic in his life, and absolutely irreproachable in his morals, in an
age when the clergy were excessively corrupt.  He doubled his fasts,
wore a hair shirt, slept on the bare ground, scourged himself with
assiduity and ardor; became the confessor of Queen Isabella, and
therefore of great political importance, inasmuch as she followed his
counsel, not alone in things spiritual, but also in things temporal.
Severe in his sanctity, he demanded the same of his brethren, and
reformed the Franciscans, over whom he had been put despite frantic
opposition.  In the face of his own disinclination and determined
refusal to accept the office, he was impelled, by means of a second
papal bull, to accept the episcopate of Toledo, the highest
ecclesiastical honor in Spain; but under his episcopal robes still wore
his coarse monk's frock.  The nobles of Castile were agreed to intrust
that kingdom's affairs in his hands at the death of Philip, and after
the death of Ferdinand the regency devolved upon him; and in the midst
of a turbulent nobility, he ruled as born to kingship.  Charles
continued him in power after he had assumed the kingdom, but made such
lawless demands on the Spanish people as to bring Ximenes into ill
favor among those for whom he administered.  At the last he tasted that
ingratitude so characteristic of Charles, and was virtually superseded
in his regency, but had lived long enough to disclose a mind and force
which entitle him to a high rank among the statesmen of the world.  At
the beginning of his reign, Charles had begun that series of
ingratitudes and betrayals which ended only with his abdication.
Charles V was a braggadocio, a tyrant, a sensualist, without honor, and
without nobility.  The surprise grows on us, perceiving such a man
courted, feted, honored, and arbiter of the destinies of Europe for
thirty-seven years.  I do not find one virtue in him.  In Julius
Caesar, a voluptuary and red with carnage, there were yet multitudinous
virtues.  We do not wonder men loved him and were glad to die for him.
He had a soul, and honor, and remembrance of friendship.  He was a
genius, superlative and bewildering.  We can forget and forgive some
things in such a man; but for such a sovereign as Charles V, what can
we say, save that he was not so execrable as Philip II, his son?
Charles, being Flemish in birth, both Flanders and himself considered
him less Spaniard than Belgian.  He was Emperor first and King of Spain
afterward; and in Flanders he set the pageant of his abdication.

In the court of Charles V, William the Silent was reared, being sent
hither of his father, at Charles's request, to be brought up in the
emperor's household as a prospective public servant, and was dear to
the monarch, so far as any one could be dear to him; and the emperor,
at his abdication, leaned on Orange, then a youth of but twenty-one.
To what an extent he comprehended so humane a sentiment, Charles had
been tender with the Netherlands because of his life-long relation to
its people.  He looked a Netherlander rather than a Spaniard, and felt
one, so that, so far as he showed favors, he showed them to this
opulent people.  Charles, with his many faults, had yet a rude
geniality, which softened or seemed to soften his asperity toward those
about him.

In Philip, his son, was not even this slight redemptive quality.  On
October 25, 1555, at the age of fifty-five, worn out prematurely with
lecherousness, gormandizing, lust of power, and recent defeats, Charles
V abdicated in favor of his son, Philip.  As they two stand on the dais
at this solemn ceremony, it were well to take a close look at father
and son.  They are contrasts, as pronounced as valley and mountain, and
yet possess characteristics of evil in common.  Charles was knit
together like an athlete, his shoulders were broad and his chest deep;
his face was ugly to the measure of hideousness; his lower jaw
protruded so as to make it impossible for his teeth to meet, and his
speech was for that reason barely intelligible.  A voracious eater, an
incessant talker, adventurous, a born soldier, fond of tournament,
spectacular in war and peace and abdication, now crippled in hands and
legs, he stands, a picture of decrepitude, ready to give away a crown
he can no longer wear.  Philip, the son, is thin and fragile to look
upon, diminutive in stature; in face, resembling his father in "heavy,
hanging lip, vast mouth, and monstrously protruding lower jaw.  His
complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short,
and pointed.  He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a
Spaniard.  His demeanor in public was silent, almost sepulchral.  He
looked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech,
embarrassed, and even suffering in manner."  Such is the new king as we
see him; and Motley has put our observations into words for us.  But if
in looks there were manifest resemblances and extreme divergencies, in
character they were wide apart.  Charles was soldier, first and always;
Philip was a man for the cabinet, having neither inclination nor
ability for generalship.  To lead an army was Charles's pride and
delight--things Philip could not and would not attempt.  Charles was
for the open air, sky, continent; Philip was for the cloister, and
spent his life immured as if he had been a monk.  In Charles was
bravado, impudence, intolerable egotism, atrocious lack of honor, but
there was a dash about him as about Marshal Ney or Prince Joachin
Murat; Philip was stolid, vindictive, incapable of enthusiasm or
friendship.  Charles ruled Spain as a principality; Philip held the
world as a principality of Spain.  As has been indicated, Charles was
Spanish in relationship and not in disposition; Philip was Spaniard to
the exclusion of all else.  Charles, if he was anything, was brilliant;
Philip was as lacking in color as a bank of winter clouds, no more
conceiving brilliancy than he conceived of greatness of soul or manly
honor.

In Spanish character were chivalrous qualities, mixed with ferocity and
pitiless cruelty.  Pizarro and Cortes were attractive; we like to look
at them a second time.  Much we condemn, but much we admire.  Their
sagacity, their prowess, their heroic spirit, take us captive despite
their baser qualities.  In them was duplicity, revenge, bigotry,
heathenish cruelty; but these were not all the qualities the inventory
discovered.  In Philip, however, were all the Spanish villainies
without the Spanish virtues.  He is blessed with scarcely a redeeming
quality.  His excellencies were a stolid inability to believe himself
defeated, which, had it been joined to patriotism and intelligent
action, had risen to the heroic; he was loyal to his convictions; and
he was painstakingly laborious, and worked in his cabinet like a paid
clerk.  In truth, his disposition for and ability to work are among the
most marked instances in history.  Not Julius Caesar himself worked
with more unflagging industry.  But Philip had no illuminated moments.
His toil was blind, like a mole's progress.  He read and annotated all
state dispatches; wrote many long epistles with his own hand, eschewing
secretarial aid.  He had a mind capacious for minutiae; was colossally
egotistical; was as little cast down by defeat as elevated by triumph,
which is in itself a quality of heroic mold, but viewed narrowly turns
out to be imperturbable phlegmaticism and self-assurance, which simply
underrated disasters, making himself oblivious to them as if they did
not exist.  He was possessor of the greatest realm ever swayed by a
single scepter.  He affected to be proprietor of the seas; he thought
Flanders a garden to be tilled to supply his table, and its wealth,
gold for him to squander on Armadas.  Italian provinces were his, and
Spain was his; and the Western Hemisphere, by his own daring
assumption, and the generosity of the papal gift, and the toils of
Ponce de Leon and de Soto and Coronado and Pizarro and Cortes, was his.
Compared with the wide and bewildering extent of his kingdom, the Roman
Empire was a dukedom.  His empire spurred him to world-dominion, and he
used his patrimony and its fabulous wealth to attempted enforcement of
his claim to the sovereignty of England and Western Europe.  His
ambition was in nothing less than Alexander's, but his conception of
means adequate to campaigns was meager.  A task he could see and a
kingdom he could desire, but adequacy of preparation for world-conquest
never crept into his thought.  He was as niggardly in supplying his
generals and armies as Queen Elizabeth, and all but as voluble in abuse
of his servants in the field or cabinet, and as thankless to those who
had wrought his will.  Parma, and Requesens, and Don John, and Alva, he
drove almost frantic by his excessive demands and expectations, coupled
with his entire inadequacy in preparation and supplies.  His soldiers
were always on the point of mutiny for food, or clothing, or pay, or
all together.  However, this ought in fairness to be said, that the
only contemporary Government which did pay its soldiers promptly and
fairly was the Netherlands, one reason worth weighing why, under Prince
Maurice in particular, Flemish armies made such vigorous head against
Spanish aggressions.

Just two people Philip gave consideration to--himself and the pope.
His narrow nature, while not capable of enthusiasm, was capable of a
tenacious and unflagging loyalty.  What in a manly spirit or in a
martyr would have bloomed into nobility, devotion, and self-sacrifice,
in a man like Philip became a settled cruelty and bigotry which finds
few parallels in the annals of the world.  He was a creature of the
Church, as he conceived all in his dominions were creatures to him.
Free will and the right to conviction he did not claim for himself and
would not consider for others.  The world was an autocracy, universal,
necessary, the pope as chief tyrant and Philip under-lord--he must obey
the pope; the people must obey him.  To Philip these conclusions were
axiomatic, and therefore not subjects for debate.  That all his
subjects did not readily concede to him the right to be the director of
their conscience was looked upon as unreasoning stubbornness, to be
punished with block and rack, and prison and stake.

Philip is anomalous.  We can not get into a mind like his.  Statesman
he was not; for the nurture of national wealth, such as Cromwell and
Caesar planned for, he was incapable of.  His idea of statesmanship was
that his kingdom was a cask, into which he should insert a spigot and
draw.  This was government of an ideal order, Philip being judge.  The
divine right of kings was a foregone conclusion, antagonism to which
was heresy.  Here let us not blame Philip; for this was the temper of
his era, and to have anticipated in him larger views than those of his
contemporaries is not just.  To this notion was his whole nature keyed.
He commanded the Netherlands to be faithful Catholics.  What more was
needed?  Let this be the end.  So reasoned the Spanish autocrat; and
fealty to religious convictions on his subjects' part seemed to him
nothing but settled obstinacy, to be burned out with martyrs' fires or
cut out with swords swung by Alva's cruel hands.

Philip was the ideal bigot.  How far bigotry is native to the soul may
well be a question for grave discussion, demanding possibly more
attention than has been accorded it hitherto.  And how far is bigotry
to be looked on as a vice?  Though this question will be laughed down,
as if to ask it were to stultify the asker; but not so fast, since
bigotry is not all bad.  To hold an opinion is considered a virtue.  To
hold an opinion of righteousness against all odds for conscience' sake,
we rightly account heroism.  Is not a lover or a patriot a bigot?  Or
if not, where does he miss of being?  We are to hold opinion and not
become opinionated, a thing discovered to be difficult in an extreme
degree.

Bigotry is an excess of a virtue, and to pass from conscientiousness to
bigotry is not a long nor difficult journey.  All views are not equally
true.  This every sane mind holds as self-evident.  There is a
liberalism at this point which would run, if let go its logical course,
to the sophist fallacy that truth did not exist, and therefore one view
was as just as another--an attitude repugnant to all fine ethical
natures.  Now, conceiving we have the truth, we must, in reason and in
conscience, be in so far intolerant to those who antagonize the truth.
The theist is intolerant toward the atheist; truth is intolerant toward
falsehood; good is intolerant toward evil; God intolerant toward sin.
Righteousness is always intolerant; and any one advocating unlimited
intellectual tolerance is breaking down the primary distinctions
between falsehood and truth.  Some things are true and their opposites
false.  Jesus put the case in an immortal phrase: "Ye can not serve God
and Mammon."  The query, then, is, Where does this intolerance of truth
pass into bigotry?  For I think it easy to see that this passage is but
a step, nor is the dividing line so easy to discover as we might wish.
Ask this question, to illustrate our dilemma, "What is the difference
between legitimate competition and monopoly?"  An answer rises to the
lip instanter, but is no sooner given than perceived to be invalid.  A
like closeness of relation exists between the virtue of intolerance and
the vice of intolerance, a synonym of which is bigotry.  Virtue is
intolerant of vice, and there are great verities in the kingdom of God
to be held if life must pay the price of their retention.  This is the
explanation of martyrs, whose office is to witness to truth by cross
and sword and fagot.  The Reformation stands for the right of free
judgment in things appertaining to religion, thought, and politics.
Luther was liberator of Europe, and through Europe of the world, in the
three departments where life lives its thrilling story.  A tolerant
intolerance holds with strong hand to truth, but demands for others
what it demands for itself; namely, the right to interpret and follow
truth so far as such procedure does not interfere with the rights of
another.  Tolerance of this sort does not destroy, nor yet surrender,
conviction.  Bigotry demands the enforcement of its opinions upon all,
and is a reign of compulsion.  Applying this argument to Philip, a
noteworthy bigot, we see how it was his right to be a Roman Catholic
and to be a zealous propagandist, since kingship does not hinder a king
from being a man, with a man's religious rights and duties.  Philip's
fault lay in his not allowing to others the right of religious freedom
himself possessed.  He stands, to this hour, a perfect specimen of
intolerance.

Under sovereignty such as this was William the Silent citizen.
William, Prince of Orange, was born in Nassau, April 23, 1533, and was
assassinated at the convent of St. Agatha, in Delft, July 10, 1584,
when a trifle over fifty-one years of age.  Let us get our
chronological bearings accurately: Luther died in 1546; Lepanto was
fought in 1571; the Massacre of St. Bartholomew occurred in 1572; the
Invincible Armada was destroyed in 1588; Philip was crowned king in
October of 1555, and died at the Escurial in 1598; the Spanish
Inquisition was established in 1480 by Ferdinand and Isabella; the
Edict of Nantes was promulgated in 1598; Queen Elizabeth Tudor ascended
her throne in 1558; America received her first permanent colony in
1585, at St. Augustine, Florida.  From this assemblage of dates, we see
in what a ferment of momentous civil, religious, and political events
the Prince of Orange found his life cast.  We may not choose our time
to live, not yet our time to die; but some eras are spacious above
others, not length, but achievement, making an age illustrious.
William the Silent's age was a maelstrom of events, and there were no
quiet waters; and this appears certain: The dominant force of those
turbulent times was religious, by which I mean that religion is the key
of all movements, politics being shaped by theological dogmas and
purposes.  These dates certify to the omnipresence of religious
movement; for the Inquisition, Lepanto, the great Armada, the Edict of
Nantes, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, are all ecclesiastical in
intent, by which is not at all meant they were good, but were perverted
religious views, in which human wickedness, ambition, and bigotry
pre-empted religion, and used it as a medium of expression, and in turn
were used by the thing they had fostered.  No more prevalent
misconception prevails than that religion is the cause of outrageous
violence, disorder, and misconduct; the truth being, rather, men's
passions, under guise of religion, rush their own wanton course.  In
this particular era of history, all movements were religious, as has
been shown; and Philip thought himself the apostle of religion, chosen
of God, and was used by the Roman Catholic Church, and, as a wise
historian affirms, "In fanatical enthusiasm for Catholicism, he was
surpassed by no man who ever lived."  His religion and his ambition
were fellow-conspirators.  Philip II of Spain was a Roman Catholic
fanatic; Charles IX of France was a weak mind, of no definite religious
conviction, but used by the Catholics to bring about the massacre of
seventy thousand Huguenots; Henry IV of France was probably a Huguenot
in genuine feeling, but a political trimmer, a daring and brilliant
soldier, a frenzied devotee of women, religion giving him small
concern, and his change from Huguenotism to Catholicism a circumstance
as trifling as the exchange of his hunter's paraphernalia for court
apparel; Queen Elizabeth was as nearly devoid of religious instincts as
is possible for a woman, though her purposes and position in politics
drove her to the Protestant cause; William of Orange was born a
Protestant, reared a Catholic, first in the household of the Regent of
the Low countries, and afterward at the court of Charles V, suffered
revulsion of sentiment under the unthinkable atrocities of the
Inquisition as carried on in the Netherlands, till at last he became a
Protestant of the most pronounced and honest type.

In Prince William's time, modern Europe was in the alembic, a
circumstance which makes his epoch so engrossing to the student of
modern history.  Protestantism became a new political, social,
intellectual, and religious order.  Even apart from his religious
significance, Martin Luther is the marked figure of the sixteenth
century.  Columbus discovered a New World; Luther peopled it with civil
and religious forces.  Puritanism was the flower of that earlier-day
Protestantism.  Besides, the Walloons settled New Amsterdam; the
Huguenots, the Carolinas; the Anglicans, Virginia; the Lutherans, New
Sweden.  From the standpoint of statesmanship, Luther was shaping
peoples for a New World, and was the commanding personality of those
stormy years in which, like a warrior who never knew fatigue, he fought
the battles of the living God.  Unquestionably, the Reformation meant
liberty in conscience, intellect and citizenship, which are the
quintessence of modern civilization.  In those years, during which
William the Silent was a prodigious force, Protestantism was troubling
the waters.  New religious ideas must ultimate in new political
institutions, of which the Dutch Republic was a sort of first draft,
and the United States of America an edited and perfected draft.

Protestantism was in justifiable revolt against Roman Catholicism, a
foe to progress and liberty in religion, then and now, and now not less
than then.  It was intolerance run mad, whose method was the
Inquisition.  One can not say a good word for this system, where
Jesuitism finds home and inspiration, where the end justifies the
means, and any diabolism passes for saintliness if done for the
advancement of the "true faith."  Yet here, as always, we must be on
guard, supposing this to be a fruit of religion; rather is it selfish
human nature, taking an ecclesiastical system to do business in, thus
availing itself of the religious impulse in the soul to work out a
purely earthly interest.  Early Christianity, as all pure Christianity,
presses Christ's method of making appeal to the individual, impressing
him with a sense of his sin and his lost estate; of the necessity of
repentance; of salvation from sin by faith in a Divine Christ.  When
Christianity came to the throne with Constantine, when ultimately
masses of people were baptized on compulsion, Christianity took on the
pomp and paraphernalia of heathenism, so as to make appeal to the
sensuous element in heathen nature; in a word, Christianity became as
much or more heathen than Christian, and this mongrel of Christianity
and heathenism is Roman Catholicism.  Root, stem, and branch, it is
hostile to the Word of God, and, as every such system must do, darkened
the consciences of men.  We may not forget, however, its essential
religious and scholastic services in earlier years, nor that it has
nurtured some of the saints among the centuries.  Catholicism has a
basis of Christianity, and, could the excrescences be hewn away, and
this foundation be again discovered, then for Roman Catholicism would
dawn a new and greater era.  But as the system stands, it affected
temporal sovereignty, it humbled kings, and gave away empires.  Pope
Leo X was not a bad man, being so far superior to Alexander XII as to
preclude comparison.  Many popes had been so vile as to have shocked
even the moral indifference of those times; but Leo X, son of Lorenzo
the Magnificent, heir of the traditions in companionship and the
humanities which had made Florence illustrious,--Leo, cultivated,
brilliant, clean in his personal life, had assembled around him men
reasonably good.  His aesthetic inclinations were running him deeply in
debt, and to fill the bankrupt treasury, His Holiness commissioned
Tetzel to sell indulgences--a practice repugnant to moral instinct, to
the dignity of the Church, and the honor of our God, and yet a practice
continued by Romanism in our own day and under our own eyes.  To
suppose that Romanism has reformed is current with intelligent persons,
though no supposition could be more erroneous.  All those beliefs
prevalent in the days of Luther are affirmed at this hour, with the
addition of the doctrine of papal infallibility and the immaculate
conception.  To-day indulgences are sold in the United States,
noticeably so in Arizona; and a son of a bishop in the Methodist
Episcopal Church, because his name chanced to have a foreign flavor,
was written to and offered one year's indulgences for twenty-five
dollars!  Catholicism has not changed.  The Inquisition was abolished
in Spain by Napoleon in 1808, re-established after the Spaniards had
reassumed their government, and finally abolished by the Cortes in
1820.  The system of Catholicism is leprous, and in the age of William
the Silent had power and political ascendency so as to command rack and
fagot, and dungeons so deep as that from them no cry could reach any
ear save God's; and in the person of the mean, sullen, and
indefatigable Philip had apt instrument.

When the Prince of Orange was ambassador in the court of France, Henry
II, supposing him to be privy to his master's plans, on a
hunting-excursion, casually mentioned a private treaty with Alva to
join with Philip to exterminate heresy from their joint kingdoms.
Small wonder if Orange, riding beside French royalty that day, grew
pitiful toward unsuspicious, doomed thousands, and pitiless toward
Philip and his Spanish soldiers and followers, or that, to use his own
words from the famous "Apology," "From that moment I determined in
earnest to clear the Spanish venom from the land."  Watch his flushed
face; his eyes, like coals taken fresh from an altar of vengeance; his
hand, nervously fingering his sword-hilt; his form, dilating as if for
the first time he guessed he had come to manhood,--and I miss in
reckoning if we are not looking on the person of a patriot.  For this
William of Orange and Nassau is William the Silent, keeping his
dreadful secret; but keeping the secret, too, that the Inquisition and
Catholicism, and Spain, and Philip have an enemy whose hostility can
only be silenced by a bullet.  The day the French king gave William
this fatal confidence was an epoch in the life of William and of Europe.

His life divides into two periods, this dialogue between himself and
Henry II closing the one and opening the other.  With that fatal
confidence his youth ended and his manhood began.  Get a closer view of
his youth.  From his fifteenth to his twenty-first year he was in
constant attendance at the court of Charles V, who loved, trusted, and
honored him.  He was at this age, rich, frivolous, spendthrift; in
short, a petted nobleman of the greatest monarch in Christendom.  He
had evident gifts; was generous to lavishness; mortgaged his estate to
gratify his luxurious tastes; was given to political expediency, caring
less for conviction than popularity with his sovereign; wearing his
religion, if he may be said to have possessed any, as lightly as a
lady's favor; lacking in reverence, he was flippant rather than
irreligious, but a youth of fashion, pleasure, and luxury.  Charles V,
discovering in him extraordinary parts, invested him, at the age of
twenty-two, with command of the imperial forces before Marienburg, and
at his abdication leaned affectionately on William's shoulder.  Count
Egmont alone excepted, Orange was the most distinguished Flemish
nobleman who passed from Charles to Philip as part of the emperor's
bequest.  Early in Philip's reign, Orange was made one of the king's
counselors and Knight of the Golden Fleece, at that time most coveted
and honorable of any military knighthood.  At the age of twenty-six, he
was one of the peace commissioners between Henry II and Philip II, and
at this time he came into possession of that secret which changed his
life.  Here ends the youth of William of Nassau.  Let us get this man
more clearly in the eye.  He was above middle height, spare, sinewy;
dark in complexion; had gentle brown eyes, auburn hair and beard; face
thin, nose aquiline; head small, but well formed; his hair luxuriant,
his beard trimmed to a point; about his neck the superb collar of the
Golden Fleece.  He is married, and his home is Breda.

Between the young king and his Flemish Stadtholder was never any warmth
of feeling.  When Orange, pursuant to his resolution formed in the
French king's presence, spurred the States to demand the removal of the
Spanish soldiers from the Netherlands, with a pertinacity dogged and
changeless till the king, in sheer desperation, acquiesced in the just
demand, though with a chagrin of spirit toward the instrument of his
defeat which became settled hatred, and never lifted from his heart for
a moment in those long succeeding years, when the king, like a recluse
in the Escurial, brooded over his defeat.  His troops forced from
Flemish territories, Philip himself departed from a region he had never
loved and had scarcely tolerated, departed, not to return any more,
save by proxy of fire and sword, and cruel soldiery, and more cruel
generals--the pitiless Parmas and Alvas--and departing, he embraced the
other noblemen with such cold warmth as was native to him, but
upbraided Orange bitterly for the action of the States, and when Orange
replied the action was not his, but the States-General, Philip, beside
himself with rage, cried, "Not the States, but you! you! you!"  Thus
King Philip passed into Spain, and the Prince of Orange into the second
era of his life.

Macaulay has written the life of William III with such warmth, glow,
fullness, and art as to have rendered other biographies superfluous.
The history of William III was the history of England during his reign.
He was England at its best.  William the Silent was the Netherlands at
their best.  Motley has written "The Rise of the Dutch Republic," and
in so doing has written a glowing narrative of the origin of the
Netherland Republic; and has besides, in the same breath, given a
biography of William the Silent.  What nobler eulogy could be
pronounced than to say a man's life was his country's history during
his lifetime?  Motley's thrilling narrative is the worthiest life of
William written.  Read Motley, and the last greatest word shall have
been told you regarding this hero of the sixteenth century.  In
Prescott's "Philip the Second" may be found an incomplete
characterization of the prince, without the unfavorable attitude toward
Philip or the laudatory view of William presented in Motley.  These two
American historians have approached their theme with such ampleness of
scholastic research and elaborate access to and use of the
correspondence of Margaret, Parma, Alva, Granvelle, Don John of
Austria, William, and Philip, as practically to exhaust the sources of
information on this tragic reign, at the same time shutting off much of
possibility from the future historian.  William has at last, in Motley,
found a biographer for whom any illustrious character might be
thankful.  So elaborate and complete were these researches that Miss
Putnam, in her "William the Silent," has scarcely developed a single
new fact, and has in all cases conceded the thoroughness and
sufficiency of Motley's investigations.  The present writer's apology
for attempting what has been done so incomparably well is, that he
feels an essay of moderate length, which, because of its brevity, may
find an audience, is a desideratum in English literature, this essay to
point out the heroic proportions of William; enough so, if may be, to
lend eagerness to those who read, so they may be decoyed into perusing
Motley's noble histories.  I would help a reader of this essay to see
the theater and actors, and to that end lift this curtain.

Philip having, on August 26, 1559, sailed from Flushing, Spainward,
William's lifework properly began.  At this date, his attitude has not
developed, but stands as a block of marble a sculptor has chiseled
enough to show a statue is intended, but not sufficiently to disclose
the sculptor's purpose.  One thing alone was definite and unalterable,
to combat the introduction of the Inquisition and the extermination of
the Protestant Netherlanders by aid from the Spanish soldiery.  The
first checkmate given Philip's nefarious scheme was when the
States-General compelled his removal of the troops, though at this time
William was still Catholic in religion and a loyal subject of Philip,
being in no sense a revolutionist.  He was easily the first citizen of
the Netherlands; twenty-six years of age; not matured, but maturing;
not faultless, but in process of being fashioned for a distinguished
career of patriotism and catholicity.  Our full selves bloom slowly.
Our life is no mushroom, but a tree, and a tree requires long
growth-periods.  Orange was so.  A grave, moral, and patriotic purpose
in itself suffices to shape a career of grandeur and service.  Had he
been told he would die a Protestant and a rebel, he would have been
instant to deny the charge, and this through no duplicity, but from
lack of knowledge of his own soul temper, coupled with an inability to
forecast a stormy future.  We can not walk by sight in action and
politics any more than in religion--a thing the prince found out as the
turbulent years passed.  He has been vehemently accused of duplicity.
He has been depicted as hypocrite and plotter against his rightful
sovereign.  I find no marks of this on him.  That he had ambition is
not to be argued; but ambition is no sin if worthily directed.  He did
things not consonant with our ethics, belonging, in that sense, to his
age, an age of diplomatic duplicity.  He did not tell all he knew.  He
had in his pay the king's private secretary, and received a copy of any
letter the king wrote; and when at last the secretary's treason was
discovered, he paid the penalty of his perfidy by being torn in pieces
by four horses; yet bribery of employees was common then, and was a
practice of every potentate, and was what Philip did in every court in
Christendom.  Absolute fealty was all but unknown.  Each man was
believed to have his price, and the belief, in most instances, was not
erroneous.  Besides, William was in a state of perpetual war with
Philip, and war makes its own code, and justifies the otherwise
unjustifiable, and but for this subtle surveillance of the king's
intention, no stand could have been made against his treachery and
encroachments; for he was the sum of duplicities, deceiving everybody,
those nearest to him and most intimately in his counsels no less than
his foes.  Duplicity was native to him as respiration.  Granvelle, who
in treacherous diplomacy was not inferior to Macchiavelli, him Philip
deceived.  Such a king, William met by finesse and deception against
finesse and deception.  To judge a statesman of the sixteenth century
by the ethics of the nineteenth century is studied injustice.  He is
accused of evasion in his marriage with Anne of Saxony, and the
accusation is, in my conviction, just; but probably at that juncture in
his career his religious notions were in a state of ferment, himself as
yet knowing not what he would be.  In any case, however, to use the
words of Putnam, "From the expediency of his youth he grew gradually to
a high standard of honor."  In the stress of the battle for liberty,
when he was reduced to counting his very garments, his luxurious habits
slipped from him, and disinterestedness grew upon him.  Cromwell was
formed when first we saw him; Orange grows before our eyes, as we have
watched the blooming of some sacred flower.  Orange was no saint.  Who
so thinks him, thinks amiss.  He had manifold faults, as what man has
not?  But that the growing purpose of his life was heroic and single,
and that he devoted a laborious manhood to the enfranchisement of his
country and religion, no fair historian can deny.  His career naturally
oscillated between the general and the statesman, the statesman being
in the ascendant.  Some men are primarily soldiers; secondarily,
statesmen; as was Sulla or Marlborough.  In others, the statesman
stands first, the soldier in them being second, as in Julius Caesar,
whose widest achievements always spring out of his statesmanship as
naturally as a plant out of the soil.  At this point, Caesar and
William the Silent touch, by which is not meant that in either field
William approximates Caesar; for Julius Caesar is one of the few
greatest products of the world.  William fought because he must; he was
statesman because he would.

Philip never swerved from his purpose; but though his Armadas were
wrecked and his treasure galleons seized, in his cabinet he set himself
to rigorous purpose, demanding impossibilities of his commanders,
paying his soldiers ill if at all, equipping his expeditions
insufficiently, but never failing in his demands on his servants.  In
harmony with this dogged persistency of purpose, he never changed from
his plan of making the Netherlands Roman Catholic, giving his subjects'
scruples no thought.  He had commanded--let that suffice; his
instruments Margaret, and Alva, and Requesens, and Don John, and Parma,
and the Inquisition, with which atrocious instrument of propagandism
the reader is doubtless familiar.  To 1546 no symptom of disloyalty
toward the king is visible in William; he was jubilant rather, feeling
the grievances could be remedied if only Cardinal Granvelle's authority
were lessened.  His own involved finances troubled him, and to them he
gave such vigilant attention as to reduce his debts to the point where
they gave him no concern.  Above financial difficulties, were those
connected with his wife, Anne, who proved half-mad and wholly lacking
in virtue, though, in truth, her life was far from being a joyous one,
if such were possible to a character like hers.  How much of blame
attaches to the prince for this estrangement can not now be discovered;
suffice it to say, no lack in his conduct could excuse lack of virtue
in her.  William was lonely, and writes his brother Louis to come to
him, if only for a fortnight.  So far as surfaces may indicate, his
relations with Philip were at this period placid, and himself loyal,
only he is alert always to avert any encroachment of tyranny.  Philip,
undeterred by all his fair words and promises, supported by royal
honor, spoken to Count Egmont, who had been sent to the Escurial to
make formal protest in behalf of the nobles against religious
persecution, not so much as a question of tolerance as a question of
wisdom, seeing all the nobles were sincere Catholics, and the further
impossibility of enforcing such an edict,--Philip, in the face of these
advices and in the face of his promises, sent, in 1565, peremptory
orders to Margaret of Parma, Regent of the Netherlands, to proceed
against heretics.  So Philip's duplicity was revealed and the die cast.
One thing was fortunate: the worst was known.  Protests poured in, a
veritable flood--protests against all Inquisitorial methods in a land
accustomed to liberty--the prince, meantime, remaining moderate, to the
exasperation of the Protestants, whose blood boiled at the prospect of
an Inquisition in their midst and for their extermination.  From Breda,
William watched evils take shape, his very calm giving him advantage in
forming accurate judgment of the magnitude of opposition on which he
might rely, concurring in a remonstrance drawn up in March of 1566; and
in the latter part of this month he went to a meeting of the Council at
Brussels, where he spoke frankly against the measures of the king,
urging moderation on this ground, "To see a man burn for his opinion
does harm to the people, and does nothing to maintain religion;" and in
the ensuing April, Brederode presented the remonstrance, Margaret the
Regent replying she could not--_i.e._, dared not--suspend the
Inquisition.  Thus were the famous "Beggars" ushered into history.
Prince William, nothing revolutionary in character, still counseled
quiet till all his hopes were frustrated and all his fears realized,
when, on August 18th, in an annual festival of Antwerp Catholicism, a
tumult arose over the wooden Virgin, and rebellion against Philip II
was actually inaugurated; for from this hour the Confederates armed and
strengthened themselves against the policy and duplicity of Margaret
the regent and Philip the king, having accurate knowledge of the
character of each.  Orange is still on the side of submission, and
Motley, than whom there is no better authority, thinks September the
month of his considering seriously forcibly resisting Philip's
encroachments; for now, through a trusted messenger, he puts on guard
Count Egmont, whose sanguine temperament leads him still to put
reliance in Philip's fair words.  Evidently we have come to the
beginning of the end.  Erelong, William of Orange will be a rebel.

The second period of William's life, stretching from Henry II's
revelation to the prince's death, is divisible into two parts--part
first reaching to the outbreak at Antwerp, in which, though on the
defensive, he was yet actually loyal; part second beginning with the
Antwerp outbreak, when he saw Philip clearly, and as a patriot, and
loving the Netherlands more than he loved a foreign and tyrannical
king, he, in a lesser or greater degree, meditated rebellion.  We are
now come to the last stage in the journey of the prince.  Events had
more doom in them than he or any man could guess, and marched on like
an army at double quick.  In March, 1567, came Philip's order
commanding every Flemish functionary (each of whom had taken oath at
the beginning of his reign) to take a new oath, demanding "every man in
his service, without any exception whatever, should now renew his oath
of fealty," said oath reading, "Demanding a declaration from every
person in office as to his intention to carry out His Majesty's will,
without limitation or restriction," which William, refusing to take,
offered his resignation to the regent; and the breach was made.  On
April 10, 1567, Orange wrote Philip his intention of withdrawing from
the Royal Council, and on the day following, leaving his office vacant,
departed from Antwerp for Breda; and the breach was complete, and
William the Silent was calendared as a traitor.  In May, Alva set out
from Spain with an army to subdue the rebellious Flemings; and Philip,
sinister, pugnacious, relentless, was seen a life-size figure.  Philip
was now himself.  In September, Prince Maurice was born and christened
with Lutheran rites, the Prince of Orange thus beginning his hegira
from the Church of Rome.  In the spring of 1568, Orange formally took
up arms against these Spanish invaders; and in October, 1573, he
formally became a Protestant, thus becoming a civil and ecclesiastical
refugee.

Thus far events have been given in their chronological order, a process
needful no longer, the steps having been shown by which William of
Orange, a Catholic prince, loyal to and trusted by Charles V, has come
to be a rebel against the Church and Philip II, with a price put upon
his head.  His remaining life is one long, bloody, tireless, valorous,
magnificent, though often hopeless, effort to consummate the freeing of
his native land from ecclesiastical and civil tyranny.

William the Silent must be studied as soldier, for such he
unquestionably was.  Men are best pictured by comparisons.  William was
cool, deliberate, judicial, eloquent on occasion, but not magnetic.
His qualities were not such as blaze in a battle-charge, such as
Marshal Murat knew to lead.  Those methods were entirely foreign to
him.  He has even been accused of cowardice, though, so far as I can
judge, without justice.  His circumstances--the lack of armies; the
sluggard patriotism of his countrymen; his constant negotiations, not
to say intrigues, with many persons; his perpetual efforts to raise
moneys to equip forces to carry on the patriotic warfare--seem to have
left him scant time to lead armies in person.  His retirement to Breda
on his first break with his sovereign was deliberate, open, and manly.
If naturally timid, to quote Motley, "he was certainly possessed of
perfect courage at last.  In siege and battle, in the deadly air of
pestilential cities, in the long exhaustion of mind and body, which
comes from unduly protracted labor and anxiety, amid the countless
conspiracies of assassins, he was daily exposed to death in every
shape.  Within two years, five different attempts against his life had
been discovered.  Rank and fortune were offered to any malefactor who
would compass his murder.  He had already been shot through the head
and almost mortally wounded.  Under such circumstances, even a brave
man might have seen a pitfall at every step, a dagger in every hand,
and poison in every cup.  On the contrary, he was ever cheerful, and
hardly took more precaution than usual."  Surely these are not marks of
cowardice.  Compare William with Henry IV of France, and Count Egmont,
hero of St. Quentin's.  They were soldiers, never statesmen.  Henry was
goaded by impulse.  He, on the now classic field of Ivry, calling his
soldiers to follow where his white plume leads, is a hero-soldier
figure; and Egmont, generous, impulsive, magnetic, chivalrous, devoid
of forecast, had, at St. Quentin's, administered such defeat as "France
had not experienced since the battle of Agincourt."  He was a brilliant
soldier, and burnt like lightnings before men's eyes.  Both these
commanders were dramatic, and compelled victory, so as to merit the
rank of soldiers forever.  William the Silent falls not in such
company.  His campaigns were not brilliant, though many generals who
are accounted great are devoid of this quality.  He was not the soldier
his son Maurice was, who was properly ranked as a brilliant soldier,
and in quality of action takes his place beside Henry IV and Count
Egmont.  His soldiership, however, monopolized his genius, using all
its fire.  Fortunate it was for the Netherlands that William was more
statesman than soldier; but equally fortunate for them that he was
enough of a soldier to baffle Requesens, Alva, and Parma.  We measure
power by obstacles mastered.  Apply this test to Orange, and he will
stand huge of bulk as mountain ranges; for Alva and Parma were among
the chief generals of their century, with royal authority and equipment
(inadequate enough, truly, but still an equipment), with royal credit
and prestige, with the taxes of the provinces to supply the exchequer;
and these generals Orange met, hampered with lack of arms, men, funds,
moral support; with mercenary troops, unreliable and mutinous, hired
much of the time with moneys raised by mortgaging his own estates, and
backed up by a supine and a divided people, himself clothed with no
authority compelling subordination, and, with the exception of his
brother Louis (who was slain at the battle of Mookerheyde), without a
single captain of generous military capacity,--with such odds,
seemingly insuperable, William of Orange met the chief captains of his
generation, and made head against them, creeping forward, as the tides
do, till they own the shore.  When these facts are co-ordinated, his
achievements become phenomenal.  His resiliency was tremendous.  In
some significant regards, his military career finds parallel in General
Washington.

In a remarkable particular, William the Silent resembles Quintus
Sertorius; namely, that each, while rebel against his Government,
fought in the name of his Government.  Mommsen says: "It may be doubted
whether any Roman statesman of the earlier period can be compared in
point of versatile talent to Sertorius," who, though in rebellion
against Rome, did all he did in the name of Rome, fought battles,
levied tributes, enfranchised cities, remodeled communities; in short,
did in Spain what, in a later period, Julius Caesar did in Gaul.
William the Silent for years carried on his warfare in Philip's name,
tacitly assuming that Philip's agents were at fault, and not Philip's
self, and that himself was the king's true representative in the Low
Countries.  William made war in the king's name, Granvelle, in the
earlier stages of the rebellion, being named as the agent of
oppression; while, in fact, that remarkable man and sagacious statesman
was hopelessly subordinate to his master, though harmonious with him.
As yet, the Netherlands had not conceived the extent of Philip's
tyranny, bigotry, and duplicity.  Another similarity between the Dutch
and Roman outlaw was, that both were statesmen rather than generals,
having commanding outlook on their eras; and although each was,
perforce, captain of a host, his signal service was as shaper of a
realm.

Here lies William the Silent's chosen might.  He was born diplomat.
Philip himself kept State secrets behind no more impenetrable reserve
than William.  His statesmanship was wrought into his patriotism like
glancing colors in silk; and he stands a patriot whose services no one
can overestimate, and a champion of liberty the most valiant and
sagacious known prior to the Puritan Rebellion.  Seventeen provinces
constituted the Netherlands.  By the pacification of Ghent, in 1576, a
union was formed among certain of these, in which, for the first time,
religious tolerance was asserted and applied--Catholics to allow
Protestants to worship as they would, and Protestants to do the like by
Catholics.  This pacification, in its specifications, was an unheard-of
gain for Protestantism and for liberty, and constituted William's chief
triumph up to that date.  The Netherlands were peopled with varied
populations, with all but innumerable conflicting interests and
dispositions, so much so that union seemed impossible.  This is partial
explanation why Prince William suffered more from the inaction and
suspicion of his own countrymen than from all Philip's machinations.
His patience was something godlike.  No people known to history appear
to less advantage or show less love of liberty, or even common
self-respect, than these Belgic provinces through many years.  They
were so abject, so schooled to suffer and resent nothing, that even the
horrors of the Spanish Inquisition did not lift them into rebellion,
nor yet the savage cruelties of Alva, nor the execution of Count Egmont
and Count Horn, though the atrocities of Spanish mutineers did at last
expedite those deliberations which ultimated in the pacification of
Ghent.  I have wondered many, many times.  Orange did not lose faith in
his countrymen and give them over to their servitude.  His fortitude
sustained him, and his patience held as if it had been a steel cable,
and his natural cheerfulness was of unquestionable service in keeping
him from losing heart.  Almost every leader proved false to him, some
of his own relations included, and he kept on!  He must use the men he
had.  A great cause requires and equips a great leader.  It was so in
William.  His country and its cause had him, and in him was rich.  He
saw worth in men, and built on that.  That men betrayed him did not
unseat his faith in men.  He did what every statesman does, had faith
in men, appealed to their possibilities, to their prospective rather
than their present selves, and so helped them to what they ought to be.
He lifted them up to his levels, and they stood peers in manhood and
patriotism.  Many failed him; but many did not.  Much discouraged, but,
specially later in his career, much encouraged him.  Deeds of heroism
so incredible as to read like a romance,--such deeds were not rare,
rather common.  The siege of Maestrich takes rank among the heroic
episodes in the battles for human liberty.  One's blood grows fairly
frantic in reading the thrilling story, and a man is glad he is a man
and brother to men who could do feats so superb; and the flooding of
the lands in raising the siege of Leyden is to be classed among the
deathless sacrifices for dear liberty.  For these and all such lofty
flights of courage and success, William was the inspiration.  He was
never defeated by defeat.  Liberty must not fail.  The Provinces
trusted him in their hearts, and so long as he remained firm,
self-sacrificing, undisturbed, the people (so he argued) could be
relied on to trust in him and to justify his trust in them.  In behalf
of freedom, no sacrifice or achievement was other than feasible to him.
He loaded his estate with debt for the common good.  Through many years
penury was his portion.  Great events marshaled themselves about him as
if he were their necessary captain.  He knew the art of inspiring men,
which is, at last, the mightiest resource of a great soul.  He knew how
to deal with men,--the finest of the arts.  In his roused moments his
eloquence, whether spoken or written, swayed men's judgments and nerved
their hearts.  Motley says, "His influence on his auditors was
unexampled in the annals of his country or age."  His memory lost
nothing; his ability to read men ranks him with Richelieu; he was
cautious, politic, but not slow, though his uniform habit of caution
robbed his acts of the fine flavor of spontaneity; he was painstaking,
and as laborious as Philip, which is the last effort of comparison,
seeing Philip's industry was all but without precedent.  If he flooded
coasts and inlands by the seas he emptied on them as if the seas were
his, he also inundated courts of kings and assemblies of nobles with
appeals, remonstrances, or letters of instruction or information.  He
lacked nothing of being ubiquitous, and was the moving spirit of all
occasions where liberty had followers.  Nothing eluded nor bewildered
him, from which observations Motley's estimate stands justified; for he
called him "The first statesman of his age."  Compare him with Don John
of Austria, hero of Lepanto, who was natural son of Emperor Charles V,
vivacious, romantic, brilliant, and conqueror of the Turks at Lepanto,
whence his name had risen, like a star, to flame at the eastern window
of every court in Christendom.  Made governor of the Netherlands, he
found himself beset by difficulties through which sword and troop could
not cut his way.  Harassed by the distrust, unfaithfulness, and
meanness of Philip; hedged by the sagacious statecraft of his
adversary, William of Orange, he attempted the role of war; found
himself defeated by an invisible antagonist, whose name haunted his
days and nights--the name was "Father William"--at last, flared up like
an expiring lamp, and died.  Such the conqueror of Lepanto when brought
to cope with William the Silent.  William stood possessed of vast
character-resources, so that what was lacking in supplies he made up in
himself.

William of Orange, and Philip, King of Spain and the Western
Hemisphere, challenge comparison.  Philip was statesman in that his
powers were adapted to the cabinet rather than the battle; and Philip
may pass for a statesman in some particulars.  Painstaking, laborious,
with real ability in choice of servants to execute his will, and
keeping eyes on the horizons of the greatest empire the world had seen,
he peopled this wide world of his with hopeless projects, since his
ambition was topless as skies of night.  His claims were fantastic or
great, as you might elect to call them; for he claimed both England and
France as provinces of his empire, keeping at the respective courts
secret agents, with lavish gold for corrupting those sovereigns'
servants.  His reign is a sort of free fight with him on everybody, he
keeping every item under his own surveillance, but displaying no
capacity to do other that baldly claim and attempt.  He could not
compass his designs.  There were no compensations in his reign.  He
lost and never gained.  England defeated him at home and abroad.  The
Dutch defied him, and won their liberty after bitter years of struggle.
His every effort to subdue them failed.  Though the Inquisition
murdered from fifty to one hundred thousand of his most industrious
subjects, this done, and still failure!  He trusted no man.  He
probably poisoned his own son, Don Carlos.  His treachery was black as
Caesar Borgia's; and to his chosen counselors he wrote interminable
lies, apparently deeming lying a virtue.  He offered fabulous sums of
money for the assassination of Queen Elizabeth, of King Henry IV, and
of William, Prince of Orange, and finally gave William's estate to the
relatives of Gerard, the assassin of the prince.  Philip was
painstaking, not sagacious.  While admiring his industry, I can not
bring myself to the point of believing he had greatness.  A superior
chief clerk he was, and an inferior king.

William the Silent, Prince of Orange, moneyless, resourceless, defeated
the richest empire of the world without winning a single decisive
victory.  So viewed, he is a statesman of magnificent proportions.  At
his death, fifteen out of the seventeen provinces were in rebellion;
and had he lived, there can be no rational doubt the remaining two had
rebelled and the seventeen become free.  As it was, seven provinces won
their liberty, and in 1648, at the Peace of Westphalia, were
acknowledged as a sovereign State and free from Spain.

William was importuned, vehemently importuned, to become king.  He
refused, as Cromwell in a later day refused, though, had Cromwell
become king, there is no reason why he might not have handed down his
scepter to his son.  What sealed Richard Cromwell's fate was that he
was not a king, the English wishing to feel they had a hereditary head.
This was the mistake of the Prince of Orange.  While his refusal of
regal honors reflected credit on his manhood and disinterested
patriotism, that refusal was a weakness to the cause of liberty.  About
a king men of those days would have rallied as about no Stadtholder;
for the Flemings were never essentially republican in instincts.
Freemen they learned to be; republicans they never learned to be.  Had
William of Orange become king, then had his son, as sovereign, led his
subjects to battle.  As yet Europe was not ready for a commonwealth.
As the case stood, William lived, loving his country with an ingenuous
affection; was a patriot statesman, whose reward for years of toil,
which seamed his brow at the age of forty as if he had been seventy,
was an impoverished estate, but an imperishable fame.

On July 10, 1584, Belthazer Gerard shot "Father William" in his own
home, and he, falling, cried: "My God, have pity on my soul!  I am
sorely wounded!  My God, have pity on my soul and this poor people!"
and this, save his whispered "Yes" to his sister's eager inquiry if he
trusted his soul to Jesus, were his last words, so that, as his country
had been his thought through many turbulent years, so was it his last
thought and love--a fitting word for a patriot such as he to leave on
his dead lips.  Let the historian's verdict stand as ours, "His life
was a noble Christian epic."

A statesman is a man of his own and succeeding ages, and in him,
therefore, is much anticipatory.  He outruns his time.  The vision
William the Silent had, which outran the simple patriot in him, was the
vision of religious tolerance.  This might serve him for crown had he
no other.  What the world has learned to do, that this Dutch prince
taught--virtually first of modern statesmen.  In an utterly intolerant
age and country, he apostled manly tolerance.  In a later day, John of
Barneveldt came to the block because he was an Arminian.  Protestants,
though never wholesale persecutors, had yet to learn this wise man's
lesson.  And this must rank among the underscored virtues of this old
soldier of liberty, that he wished men to worship God without
molestation.  Nor did this tolerance grow out of indifference to
religion.  In youth he was careless of Divine matters, and thought
little of religion.  But so sagacious and so burdened a man as he grew
to feel need of strength beyond the help of man.  In his mature years
he was from conviction a Christian in the Protestant Church, and his
life walked on high levels to the end.  God was to him as to
innumerable souls, "a refuge and strength and a very present help in
time of trouble;" and in death he committed his soul to God.  By worth
and service; by fortitude and patriotism; by long years of devotion to
the task of breaking the scepter of tyranny; by genius burning as the
light, and goodness purifying itself as years marched past,--by these
attributes has William the Silent, Prince of Orange, earned a right to
stand erect among the world's immortals.




V

The Romance of American Geography

In traveling over the undulating prairies of many States of the Union,
huge granite boulders are seen lying solitary, as if dropped by some
passing cloud, having no kindred in the rocky formations environing,
but being absolute foreigners in a strange land.  There they lie,
prone, chiseled by some forgotten art, and so solitary as to bring a
tinge of melancholy to the reflection of the thoughtful.  In certain
regions these boulders are so numerous and so various in size as to be
used in building foundations, and sometimes entire habitations.  These
rocks were dropped in remote centuries by passing icebergs, and are
solitary memorials of the ice-drift across our continent.  The crafts
on which they voyaged were wrecked long ago.  They were passengers on

  "Some shattered berg, that, pale and lone,
  Drifts from the white north to the tropic zone,
      And in the burning day
      Melts peak by peak away,
      Till on some rosy even
    It dies, with sunlight blessing it."

This instance may be taken as a parable, suggesting the history
embodied in names of localities, lakes, straits, rivers, cities,
hamlets, States.  Those names are the debris of a dead era; and for
one, I can not escape the wonder and the pathos of these shattered
yesterdays, which have a voice, calling, as in hoarse whispers sad with
tears, "We are not, but we were."

Though we are little given to so esteeming the study, there is romance
in geography, learned by us when lads and lasses--not because we would,
but because we must--and such study was difficult and unsavory.  The
catalogue of names we learned, perforce, was dreary as the alphabet;
and not a memory of pleasure lingers about the book in which we
studied, save that, in cramped, sprawling hand, upon the margin is
written the name of some little sweetheart beside our own,--and dead
long since.  No, geography was not romantic.  That was a possession we
never suspected.  But romance is ubiquitous, like flowers of spring,
sheltering where we little anticipate.

To a lover of history, however, few studies will prove so fascinating
as a study of names in geography.  Finding a few at random, feel the
thrill of the history they embody--history and reminiscence:
Providence, Roger Williams named the city so when himself was a
refugee; Fort Wayne, named for General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, who
destroyed the Indian scourge in the Northwest Territory in 1792;
Raleigh, so yclept for that chiefest friend of American colonization
among Englishmen, Sir Walter Raleigh; Council Grove, because, in the
Indian days, there, in a grove--rare in the prairie country of
Kansas--the Red Men met for counsel; Astoria, bearing name of that
famous fortune-maker in the fur country of the West and North; Buffalo
Lake, reminding us that there the buffalo tramped in days seeming now
so remote, when the buffalo rode, like a mad cavalry troop, across the
wide interior plains of our continent; Eagle River, for here this royal
bird used to love to linger as if it were his native stream.  These are
the scattered, miscellaneous reminiscences of men and acts, and things
and achievements.  In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to
the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to
life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant
characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought,
with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his
tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom.  Him and
his history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light,
this name embodies.  What an archive of history does such a name
become!  Portage is a name pregnant with memories of the old days of
discovery, when America was still an unknown limit.  "Grand Portage"
you shall see on the map, neighboring the Great Lakes, whereby you see,
as through a magic glass, the boats, loaded on the shoulders when
navigation was no longer possible, and the journey made over the
watershed till a stream was followed far enough to float the birch-bark
canoe once more.  Prairie is another word full of interest.  Pampas is
a word, Peruvian in origin, designating the prairies of South America;
while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow.  Pampas is the Peruvian
word for field.  The words are synonyms, but come from different
hemispheres of the world.  Does it not seem strange that a word
descriptive of these treeless wildernesses of North America should be a
gift, not of the Indian hunter who used to scurry across them swift as
an arrow of death, but should really be the gift of those hardy and
valorous French voyagers who had no purpose of fastening a name on the
flower-sown, green meadows that swayed in the wind like some emerald
sea?  So the Incas have christened the plains of South America, and the
French adventurer the plains of North America!  Though, who that
crosses our prairies, sweet with green, and lit with flowers like lamps
of many-colored fires, thinks he is speaking the speech of the French
trapper of long ago?  Savannah is an Indian word, meaning meadow, and
gives name to these dank meadowlands under warmer skies, where reeds
and swamp-grasses grow; and the name of Savannah in Georgia is thus
bestowed.  How much we owe!  Who has not helped us?  Nor does the
traveler through the castellated steeps of the "Bad Lands" know, nor
probably does he care, that this caption came from the far-traveling
French trapper, whose venturesome and tireless feet have made him at
home in all places on our continent.  How valuable, however, must be
these names to one who cares to familiarize himself with the knowledge
and romance of those pioneers of geography!  Of like origin is "butte."
The voyager saw those isolated peaks, too high to be called hills and
too low to be called mountains, and said they are buttes
(knolls)--names which cling to them as tenaciously as their shadows.

In a word, I have found this study a breath blown from far mountain
ranges of history; and this breath upon the face has made an hour of
life grow young and beautiful, for which reason I now write the story
of my pleasure.  The North American continent lends itself with
peculiar grace to such a study as is here suggested, because its story
lies under the eyes of history.  'Twas scarcely an hour ago, in the
world's day, since Columbus found out this continent, and, with a
giant's hand, swung its huge doors inward for the centuries to enter;
and all those discoveries are our commonplace knowledge.  What tribes
were here, Prescott and Parkman have told us in thrilling narratives;
and columns of eager colonists we have seen press their way along the
seashore, into forests, over mountains, across deserts, never halting,
save to catch breath as a climber of a mountain does,--on, on, till a
continent is white with the tents of millions.  But the Indian
aborigine, for whom the tepee was portable habitation, and the stretch
of plain and hill and lake and river, hunting-ground or
battle-ground,--the Indian is mainly the reminiscence of an old man's
straggling speech; and these names he has left, clinging to lake and
river and hamlet, are his memorial.  In Montezuma's empire, where once
a barbaric splendor held court and set in tragic splendor, lurid even
yet at these centuries' remove, what is left save a vocabulary or a
broken idol lying black and foreboding in some mountain stream?  Or
those discoverers whose adventurous deeds are part of the world's
chosen treasure, what but their names are written on the streams or
hills?  The import of these observations is this, that from American
geography we may, with reasonable accuracy and detail, decipher this
romantic history.  In those newer parts of our continent names have too
often lost the flavor of history; have, in truth, done so, save in
isolated instances.  The "Smithtons" and "Griggsby Stations" are
monotonous and uninteresting, and the Tombstones are little short of
sacrilege.  In the crush of movers' wagons there appeared to be a
scramble for names of any sort.  Places multiply, imagination is
asleep, and names nearest at hand are most readily laid hold of; yet,
even in such a dearth of originality and poetry, scant names flash out
which remind you of the morning names in our continent's history.  A
Springdale reminds you that colonists here found a dale, gladdened with
living springs; or an Afton suggests how some exiled Scot salved his
heart by keeping near his exile a name he loved.  Our day will, in the
main, attach names for simple convenience, as they put handles on
shovels.  Such names, of course, are meaningless.  The day for
inventing names is past, or seems so.  We beg or borrow, as the
surveyor who marched across the State of New York, with theodolite and
chain and a classical atlas, and blazed his way with Rome, and Illyria,
and Syracuse, and Ithaca,--a procedure at once meaningless and dense.
Greece nor Rome feels at home among us, nor should they.

History is a method of remembrance, and names are a method of
remembrance also, the two conspiring to the same end.  When the Saxon,
sailing across seas, found a rude home in England, he named his new
home Saxonland, and there are East and West and South Saxons; and so,
Essex and Wessex and Sussex.  In like manner, emigrants from various
shores across the grim Atlantic kept the memory and names of that dear
land from which they sailed; and by running your eyes over those
earlier colonies, you shall see names--aboriginal and imported--and so
learn, in an infallible way, who first pitched tents on that soil.
This tracking dead races over seas by the local designations they have
left has always fascinated my thought.  Those names are verily planted
in the earth, and grow like trees that refuse to die.  Through
centuries of turbulence and slaughter and racial transplanting, see how
some Roman words stay and refuse to go, knowing as little of retreat as
a Roman legion!  "Chester" and "coin," as good old English terminals,
are tense with interest, since they as plainly record history as did
minstrels in old castle hall.  Chester is the Roman "castra," camp, and
where the name occurs across Britain, indicates with undeviating
fidelity that there, in remote decades, Roman legions camped and the
Roman argent eagle flashed back morning to the sun.  Coin is a
contraction for "colonia," indicating that at the place so designated a
Roman colonia received honors at the hands of the Roman Senate.  In
other words, these locative terminals are as certainly bequeathed
England by the Roman occupancy as is London Tower.  "Ton" is historical
too, but is footprint of another passing race--namely the Gaul,
defeated of Caesar on many a bloody field--and is a contraction of
"tuin," meaning garden, appearing in Ireland as "dun," meaning
garrison, both indicating an inclosure, and so becoming a frequent
terminal for names of cities, as Huntingtuin or tun, probably
originally a hunting-tower or hamlet.  A second form of "ton" is our
ordinary "town," which, as often as we use, we are speaking the tongue
of the Trans-Alpine Gauls, taking a syllable from the word of a
half-forgotten people.  From yet another source is the locative "ham."
Chester is of Roman origin, tun is of Gaelic; but "ham" is Anglo-Saxon,
and means village, whence the sweet word home.  Witness the use of this
suffix in Effingham and the like.  "Stoke" and "beck" and "worth" are
also Saxon.  "Thorpe" and "by" are Danish, as in Althorp and Derby.
These reminiscent instances from over seas will serve to illuminate the
thought under discussion--the historical element embodied in the names
of localities.  As in these three locatives we track three distinct
peoples through England, we may, by the same method, fall on the
footprints of divers civilizations in our New World.

Thus far we have touched at random, as one does on a holiday.  Now,
seriously, as on a journey of discovery, may we take staff in hand to
trace, if possible, the elusive march of populations by the ashes of
their campfires, as Evangeline did the wanderings of Gabriel, her
beloved.

The Dutch, more's the pity, have left scant memorials of their American
empire.  "Knickerbocker's History of New York" has effectually laughed
them out of court; but, notwithstanding, they were mighty men, whose
idiosyncrasies we readily catch at as a jest, but whose greatness
breaks on us slowly, as great matters must.  "Kill" was a Dutch word,
meaning creek, a terminal appearing in many of the few words they have
left us, such as Fishkill, Peekskill, Wynantskill, Catskill.  Along the
banks of streams, with names like these, one could see ragged Rip Van
Winkle, with his dog and gun, with shambling hunter's gait, or come
silently on solemn Dutch burghers, solemnly playing ninepins in the
shadows.  Brooklyn (Breuchelin) is Dutch, as are Orange, Rensselaer,
Stuyvesant, Rhinebeck, Rhinecliff, Vanbrunt, Staatsburg, Rotterdam,
Hague, Nassau, Walloonsack, Yonkers, and Zurich.  Wallabout, a borough
of Brooklyn (Waalbogt), means Walloon's Bay, thus having a
religio-historical significance.  Nor dare we omit that river, noble as
an epic, named after a Dutch discoverer, who, first of Europeans, flung
the swaying shadows of foreign sails on its beautiful waters.  Hudson
is a prince among triumphant and adventurous discoverers.  And I never
sail past the Palisades, by summer or gorgeous autumn, when all the
hills are blood and flame, without reverting in thought to Hudson, who
gave the stream to our geography and his name to the stream, nor forget
that he was set adrift in the remote and spacious sea, which likewise
bears his name; though well it may, for it is doubtless his grave; for,
set adrift by mutineers, he was crushed by icefloes, or fell asleep in
death in that winter sea.  But Hudson River and Hudson Bay will make
him as immortal as this continent.  All men shall know by them that
Heinrich Hudson hath sailed this way.  So much, then, for following
along dim paths once trod by a Dutch burgher's tramp of empire.

Of the Swedes, who, under their victorious king, Gustavus Adolphus, the
Protestant, settled New Sweden (now known as New Jersey), are left only
dim footprints, the path of them being all but lost, though,
fortunately, sufficiently plain to trace the emigration of a race.
These Swedish emigrants and founders of what they hoped would prove a
State, never attained a supremacy, their enemies, who were their
immediate neighbors and fellow-emigrants from Protestant States, so
speedily overwhelming them--first the Dutch, succeeded by the
inevitable Saxon.  Bergen, the first Swedish settlement, in comparative
isolation, still whispers the story of Gustavus Adolphus's statecraft
and vision, and seems a solitary survivor of an old camp of emigrants
voyaging by stream and plain, and all slain by famine and disease and
Indian stealth and pioneer's hardship, save himself.  Nordhoff and
Stockholm and Pavonta are scattered reminders of an attempted
sovereignty which is no more.

Protestantism made valorous attempt to preempt this New World of North
America for civil and religious liberty and the Reformed faith.  A look
at their breadth of plan must be a benefit to us and a praise to those
who planned so large things for the glory of God.  That they acted
independently of each other shows how wide-spread this thirst for
liberty and this love for the kingdom of God.  I know few things that
stir me more.  Swedish Lutherans settled New Sweden; the Dutch Walloons
settled New Holland; the Baptists, Rhode Island; the Quakers,
Pennsylvania; the Huguenots, the Carolinas; the Puritans, New England.
The Anglican Church only incidentally, and not of intention, settled
Virginia.  Catholicism seized and holds South America, Central America,
and Mexico, but in the United States was represented only by the colony
of Maryland, planted by Lord Baltimore, and bears mark of his religious
faith in naming his plantation after Mary, the Catholic queen, his own
name appearing in the name of its present metropolis, Baltimore.  In
days when in England the Catholic was under ban, he founded this colony
as a Canaan for Roman Catholics.  Spanish Catholics worked their way
along the Pacific Coast, and French Catholicism sailed up the St.
Lawrence and down the Mississippi, though the latter territory now
belongs to the Protestant faith.  Admiral Coligny, an illustrious son
of France, attempted planting the Huguenots in America, though this
colonizing experiment has left scant memorial of Huguenot occupancy,
because the destruction of this colony by Spanish Catholics was so
sudden and so utter; yet the Carolinas are witness to this hazard and
hope, bearing the name of the infamous King Charles IX.  How terrible
is the irony when we recall how this same ruler, after whom Coligny
named his land of refuge for persecuted Protestants, was author of the
most malignant religious massacre on record--the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew!  In Beaufort and Carteret may be discovered reminiscences
of an expedition whose close was disastrous, yet heroic.

Everybody has contributed to giving names to the States; therefore
attention to them as a class is fitting.  England gave name to
Maryland, as suggested in another paragraph; to New York, named in
honor of the Duke of York, afterward known as James II, of evil memory;
Virginia, so styled by Sir Walter Raleigh, that pattern of chivalry, in
honor of his queen, Elizabeth; New Jersey, after Jersey, the island;
Rhode Island, after the Island of Rhodes; Delaware, after Lord de la
Warre, early governor of Virginia; Pennsylvania, after William Penn,
the good; New Hampshire, after Hampshire, in England, as New England
was, in love, called after the motherland; Georgia, named for George
II, by philanthropic General Oglethorpe, who brought hither his colony
of debtors,--such the contributions of England to our commonwealth of
names.  America has supplied one State a name, Washington; and who more
or so worthy to write his name upon a State as George Washington, first
Commander-in-chief and Preside

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