Shelburne Essays, Third Series

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Title: Shelburne Essays, Third Series

Author: Paul Elmer More

Release date: April 14, 2012 [eBook #39447]

Language: English

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SHELBURNE ESSAYS

PAUL ELMER MORE

THIRD SERIES

[Greek: Tini chre krinesthai ta mellonta kalos krithesesthai;
ar' ouk empeiriai te kai phronesei kai logoi;]
PLATO, _Republic_.

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1905

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

* * * * *

The last essay in this volume, though written several years
ago, has never before been printed. For permission to reprint
the other essays thanks are due to the publishers of the
_Atlantic Monthly_, the _Independent_, and the New York
_Evening Post_.

* * * * *

CONTENTS

PAGE
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 1
WHITTIER THE POET 28
THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE 54
THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH HISTORY 82
SWINBURNE 100
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 124
WHY IS BROWNING POPULAR? 143
A NOTE ON BYRON'S "DON JUAN" 166
LAURENCE STERNE 177
J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 213
THE QUEST OF A CENTURY 244

SHELBURNE ESSAYS

THIRD SERIES

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER

If, as I sometimes think, a man's interest in letters is almost the
surest measure of his love for Letters in the larger sense of the word,
the busy schoolmaster of Olney ought to stand high in favour for the
labour he has bestowed on completing and rearranging the _Correspondence
of William Cowper_.[1] It may be that Mr. Wright's competence as an
editor still leaves something to be desired. Certainly, if I may speak
for my own taste, he has in one respect failed to profit by a golden
opportunity; it needed only to print the more intimate poems of Cowper
in their proper place among the letters to have produced a work doubly
interesting and perfectly unique. The correspondence itself would have
been shot through by a new light, and the poetry might have been
restored once more to its rightful seat in our affections. The fact is
that not many readers to-day can approach the verse of the eighteenth
century in a mood to enjoy or even to understand it. We have grown so
accustomed to over-emphasis in style and wasteful effusion in sentiment
that the clarity and self-restraint of that age repel us as ungenuine;
we are warned by a certain _frigus_ at the heart to seek our comfort
elsewhere. And just here was the chance for an enlightened editor. So
much of Cowper's poetry is the record of his own simple life and of the
little adventures that befell him in the valley of the Ouse, that it
would have lost its seeming artificiality and would have gained a fresh
appeal by association with the letters that relate the same events and
emotions. How, for example, the quiet grace of the fables (and good
fables are so rare in English!) would be brought back to us again if we
could read them side by side with the actual stories out of which they
grew. There is a whole charming natural history here of beast and bird
and insect and flower. The nightingale which Cowper heard on New Year's
Day sings in a letter as well as in the poem; and here, to name no
others, are the incidents of the serpent and the kittens, and of that
walk by the Ouse when the poet's dog Beau brought him the water lily.
Or, to turn to more serious things, how much the pathetic stanzas _To
Mary_ would gain in poignant realism if we came upon them immediately
after reading the letters in which Cowper lays bare his remorse for the
strain his malady had imposed upon her.

A still more striking example would be the lines written _On the Receipt
of My Mother's Picture_. By a literary tradition these are reckoned
among the most perfect examples of pathos in the language, and yet how
often to-day are they read with any deep emotion? I suspect no tears
have fallen on that page for many a long year.

Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine--thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"

* * * * *

Short-lived possession! but the record fair,
That memory keeps of all thy kindness there,
Still outlives many a storm that has effaced
A thousand other themes less deeply traced.
Thy nightly visits to my chamber made,
That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid;
Thy morning bounties as I left my home,
The biscuit or confectionary plum:
The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed
By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed:
All this, and more enduring still than all,
Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,--

do you not feel the expression here, the very balance of the rhymes,
to stand like a barrier between the poet's emotion and your own
susceptibility? And that _confectionary plum_--somehow the savour of
it has long ago evaporated. Even the closing lines--

Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tost,
Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost--

need some allowance to cover their artificial mode. And it is just this
allowance that association with the letters would afford; the mind would
pass without a shock from the simple recital in prose of Cowper's ruined
days to these phrases at once so metaphorical and so conventional, and
would find in them a new power to move the heart. Or compare with the
sentiment of the poem this paragraph from the letter to his cousin, Mrs.
Bodham--all of it a model of simple beauty:

The world could not have furnished you with a present so
acceptable to me, as the picture you have so kindly sent me.
I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a
trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should
have felt, had the dear original presented herself to my embraces.
I kissed it and hung it where it is the last object that I see at
night, and, of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the
morning. She died when I completed my sixth year; yet I remember
her well, and am an ocular witness of the great fidelity of the
copy. I remember, too, a multitude of the maternal tendernesses
which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to
me beyond expression.

To read together the whole of this letter and of the poem is something
more than a demonstration of what might be accomplished by a skilful
editor; it is a lesson, too, in that quality of restrained dignity, I
had almost said of self-respect, which we find it so difficult to
impress on our broken modern style.

Some day, no doubt, we shall have such an interwoven edition of Cowper's
prose and verse, to obtain which we would willingly sacrifice a full
third of the letters if this were necessary. Meanwhile, let us be
thankful for whatever fresh light our Olney editor has thrown on the
correspondence, and take the occasion to look a little more closely into
one of the strangest and most tragic of literary lives. William Cowper
was born at Great Berkhampstead in 1731. His father, who was rector of
the parish, belonged to a family of high connections, and his mother,
Anne Donne, was also of noble lineage, claiming descent through four
different lines from Henry III. The fact is of some importance, for the
son was very much the traditional gentleman, and showed the pride of
race both in his language and manners. He himself affected to think more
of his kinship to John Donne, of poetical memory, than of his other
forefathers, and, half in play, traced the irritability of his temper
and his verse-mongering back to that "venerable ancestor, the Dean of
St. Paul's."[2] It is fanciful, but one is tempted to lay upon the old
poet's meddling with coffins and ghastly thoughts some of the
responsibility for the younger man's nightly terrors. "That which we
call life is but _Hebdomada mortium_, a week of death, seven days, seven
periods of life spent in dying," preached Donne in his last sermon, and
an awful echo of the words might seem to have troubled his descendant's
nerves. But that is not yet. As a boy and young man Cowper appears to
have been high-spirited and natural. At Westminster School he passed
under the instruction of Vincent Bourne, so many of whose fables he was
to translate in after years, and who, with Milton and Prior, was most
influential in forming his poetical manner.

I love the memory of Vinny Bourne [he wrote in one of his
letters]. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus,
Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except
Ovid.... He was so good-natured, and so indolent, that I lost more
than I got by him; for he made me as idle as himself. He was such
a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for
everything that could disgust you in his person.... I remember
seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks and box
his ears to put it out again.

After leaving Westminster he spent a few months at Berkhampstead, and
then came to London under the pretext of studying law, living first
with an attorney in Southampton Row and afterwards taking chambers in
the Middle Temple. Life went merrily for a while. He was a fellow
student with Thurlow, and there he was, he "and the future Lord
Chancellor, constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and
making giggle, instead of studying the law. Oh, fie, cousin!" he adds,
"how could you do so?" This pretty "Oh fie!" introduces us to one who
was to be his best and dearest correspondent, his cousin Harriet Cowper,
afterwards Lady Hesketh, and who was to befriend him and cheer him in a
thousand ways. It may introduce us also to Harriet's sister, Theodora,
with whom Cowper, after the fashion of idle students, fell thoughtlessly
in love. He would have married her, too, bringing an incalculable
element into his writing which I do not like to contemplate; for it is
the way of poets to describe most ideally what fortune has denied them
in reality, and Cowper's task, we know, was to portray in prose and
verse the quiet charms of the family. But the lady's father, for reasons
very common in such cases, put an end to that danger. Cowper took the
separation easily enough, if we may judge from the letters of the
period; but to Theodora, one fancies, it meant a life of sad memories.
They never exchanged letters, but in after years, when Lady Hesketh
renewed correspondence with Cowper and brought him into connection with
his kinsfolk, Theodora, as "Anonymous," sent money and other gifts to
eke out his slender living. It is generally assumed that the recipient
never guessed the name of his retiring benefactress, but I prefer to
regard it rather as a part of his delicacy and taste to affect ignorance
where the donor did not wish to be revealed, and think that his
penetration of the secret added a kind of wistful regret to his
gratitude. "On Friday I received a letter from dear Anonymous," he
writes to Lady Hesketh, "apprising me of a parcel that the coach would
bring me on Saturday. Who is there in the world that has, or thinks he
has, reason to love me to the degree that he does? But it is no matter.
He chooses to be unknown, and his choice is, and ever shall be, so
sacred to me, that if his name lay on the table before me reversed, I
would not turn the paper about that I might read it. Much as it would
gratify me to thank him, I would turn my eyes away from the forbidden
discovery." Could there be a more tactful way of conveying his thanks
and insinuating his knowledge while respecting Theodora's reserve?

But all this was to come after the great change in Cowper's life. As
with Charles Lamb, a name one likes to link with his, the terrible
shadow of madness fell upon him one day, never wholly to rise. The story
of that calamity is too well known to need retelling in detail. A first
stroke seized him in his London days, but seems not to have been
serious. He recovered, and took up again the easy life that was in
retrospect to appear to him so criminally careless. In order to
establish him in the world, his cousin, Major Cowper, offered him the
office of Clerk of the Journals to the House of Lords. There was,
however, some dispute as to the validity of the donor's powers, and it
became necessary for Cowper to prove his competency at the bar of the
House. The result was pitiable. Anxiety and nervous dread completely
prostrated him. After trying futilely to take his own life, he was
placed by his family in a private asylum at St. Albans, where he
remained about a year and a half. His recovery took the form of
religious conversion and a rapturous belief in his eternal salvation.
Instead of returning to London, he went to live in the town of
Huntingdon, drawn thither both by the retirement of the place and its
nearness to Cambridge, where his brother John resided. Here he became
acquainted with the Unwins:

... the most agreeable people imaginable; quite sociable, and as
free from the ceremonious civility of country gentlefolks as any I
ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation than a
stranger, and their house is always open to me. The old gentleman
carries me to Cambridge in his chaise. He is a man of learning and
good sense, and as simple as Parson Adams. His wife has a very
uncommon understanding, has read much to excellent purpose, and is
more polite than a duchess. The son, who belongs to Cambridge, is
a most amiable young man, and the daughter quite of a piece with
the rest of the family. They see but little company, which suits
me exactly; go when I will, I find a house full of peace and
cordiality in all its parts.

The intimacy ripened and Cowper was taken into the family almost as one
of its members. But trouble and change soon broke into this idyllic
home. Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horse and killed; the son was called
away to a charge; the daughter married. Meanwhile, Mrs. Unwin and Cowper
had gone to live at Olney, a dull town on the Ouse, where they might
enjoy the evangelical preaching of that reformed sea-captain and
slave-dealer, the Rev. John Newton.

The letters of this period are filled with a tremulous joy; it was as if
one of the timid animals he loved so well had found concealment in the
rocks and heard the baying of the hounds, thrown from the scent and far
off. "For my own part," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "who am but as a
Thames wherry, in a world full of tempest and commotion, I know so well
the value of the creek I have put into, and the snugness it affords me,
that I have a sensible sympathy with you in the pleasure you find in
being once more blown to Droxford." Books he has in abundance, and happy
country walks; friends that are more than friends to occupy his heart,
and quaint characters to engage his wit. He finds an image of his days
in Rousseau's description of an English morning, and his evenings differ
from them in nothing except that they are still more snug and quieter.
His talk is of the mercies and deliverance of God; he is eager to
convert the little world of his correspondents to his own exultant
peace; and, it must be confessed, only the charm and breeding of his
language save a number of these letters from the wearisomeness of
misplaced preaching.

Cowper removed with Mrs. Unwin to Olney in 1767. Six years later came
the miraculous event which changed the whole tenor of his life and which
gave the unique character to all the letters he was to write thereafter.
He was seized one night with a frantic despondency, and again for a year
and a half, during all which time Mr. Newton cared for him as for a
brother, suffered acute melancholia. He recovered his sanity in ordinary
matters, but the spring of joy and peace had been dried up within him.
Thenceforth he never, save for brief intervals, could shake off the
conviction that he had been abandoned by God--rather that for some
inscrutable reason God had deliberately singled him out as a victim of
omnipotent wrath and eternal damnation. No doubt there was some physical
origin, some lesion of the nerves, at the bottom of this disease, but
the peculiar form of his mania and its virulence can be traced to causes
quite within the range of literary explanation. He was a scapegoat of
his age; he accepted with perfect faith what other men talked about, and
it darkened his reason. Those were the days when a sharp and unwholesome
opposition had arisen between the compromise of the Church with worldly
forms and the evangelical absolutism of Wesley and Whitefield and John
Newton. Cowper himself, on emerging from his melancholia at St. Albans,
had adopted the extreme Calvinistic tenets in regard to the divine
omnipotence. Man was but a toy in the hands of an arbitrary Providence;
conversion was first a recognition of the utter nullity of the human
will; and there was no true religion, no salvation, until Grace had
descended freely like a fire from heaven and devoured this offering of a
man's soul. To understand Cowper's faith one should read his letter of
March 31, 1770, in which he relates the death-bed conversion of his
brother at Cambridge. Now John was a clergyman in good standing, a man
apparently of blameless life and Christian faith, yet to himself and to
William he was without hope until the miracle of regeneration had been
wrought upon him. After reading Cowper's letter one should turn to
Jonathan Edwards's treatise on _The Freedom of the Will_, and follow the
inexorable logic by which the New England divine proves that God must be
the source of all good and evil, of this man's salvation and that man's
loss: "If once it should be allowed that things may come to pass without
a Cause, we should not only have no proof of the Being of God, but we
should be without evidence of anything whatsoever but our own
immediately present ideas and consciousness. For we have no way to prove
anything else but by arguing from effects to causes." Yet the
responsibility of a man abides through all his helplessness: "The Case
of such as are given up of God to Sin and of fallen Man in general,
proves moral Necessity and Inability to be consistent with
blameworthiness." Good Dr. Holmes has said somewhere in his jaunty way
that it was only decent for a man who believed in this doctrine to go
mad. Well, Cowper believed in it; there was no insulating pad of worldly
indifference between his faith and his nerves, and he went mad.

And he was in another way the victim of his age. We have heard him
comparing his days at Huntingdon with _Rousseau's description of an
English morning_. Unfortunately, the malady also which came into the
world with Rousseau, the morbid exaggeration of personal consciousness,
had laid hold of Cowper. Even when suffering from the earlier stroke he
had written these words to his cousin: "I am of a very singular temper,
and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with"; and this
sense of his singularity follows him through life. During the Huntingdon
days it takes the form of a magnified confidence that Heaven is
peculiarly concerned in his rescue from the fires of affliction; after
the overthrow at Olney it is reversed, and fills him with the certainty
that God has marked him out among all mankind for the special display of
vengeance:

This all-too humble soul would arrogate
Unto itself some signalising hate
From the supreme indifference of Fate!

Writing to his mentor, John Newton (who had left Olney), he declares
that there is a mystery in his destruction; and again to Lady Hesketh:
"Mine has been a life of wonders for many years, and a life of wonders I
in my heart believe it will be to the end." More than once in reply to
those who would console him he avers that there is a singularity in his
case which marks it off from that of all other men, that Providence has
chosen him as a special object of its hostility. In Rousseau, whose
mission was to preach the essential goodness of mankind, the union of
aggravated egotism with his humanitarian doctrine brought about the
conviction that the whole human race was plotting his ruin. In Cowper,
whose mind dwelt on the power and mercies of Providence, this
self-consciousness united with his Calvinism to produce the belief that
God had determined to ensnare and destroy his soul. Such was the strange
twist that accompanied the birth of romanticism in France and in
England.

The conviction came upon Cowper through the agency of dreams and
imaginary voices. The depression first seized him on the 24th of
January, 1773. About a month later a vision of the night troubled his
sleep, so distinct and terrible that the effect on his brain could never
be wholly dispelled. Years afterwards he wrote to a friend:

My thoughts are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave
as that of a bishop's servants. They turn upon spiritual subjects;
but the tallest fellow and the loudest among them all is he who
is continually crying with a loud voice, _Actum est de te;
periisti!_ You wish for more attention, I for less. Dissipation
[distraction] itself would be welcome to me, so it were not a
vicious one; but however earnestly invited, is coy, and keeps at a
distance. Yet with all this distressing gloom upon my mind, I
experience, as you do, the slipperiness of the present hour, and
the rapidity with which time escapes me. Every thing around us,
and every thing that befalls us, constitutes a variety, which,
whether agreeable or otherwise, has still a thievish propensity,
and steals from us days, months, and years, with such unparalleled
address, that even while we say they are here, they are gone.

That apparently was the sentence which sounded his doom on the night of
dreams: _Actum est de te; periisti_--it is done with thee, thou hast
perished! and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, or wise counsel
could ever, save for a little while, lull him to forgetfulness. He might
have said to his friends, as Socrates replied to one who came to offer
him deliverance from jail: "Such words I seem to hear, as the mystic
worshippers seem to hear the piping of flutes; and the sound of this
voice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear no other."

But it must not be supposed from all this that Cowper's letters are
morbid in tone or filled with the dejection of melancholia. Their merit,
on the contrary, lies primarily in their dignity and restraint, in a
certain high-bred ease, which is equally manifest in the language and
the thought. Curiously enough, after the fatal visitation religion
becomes entirely subordinate in his correspondence, and only at rare
intervals does he allude to his peculiar experience. He writes for the
most part like a man of the world who has seen the fashions of life and
has sought refuge from their vanity. If I were seeking for a comparison
to relieve the quality of these Olney letters (and it is these that form
the real charm of Cowper's correspondence), I would turn to Charles
Lamb. The fact that both men wrote under the shadow of insanity brings
them together immediately, and there are other points of resemblance.
Both are notable among English letter-writers for the exquisite grace of
their language, but if I had to choose between the two the one whose
style possessed the most enduring charm, a charm that appealed to the
heart most equally at all seasons and left the reader always in that
state of quiet satisfaction which is the office of the purest taste, I
should name Cowper. The wit is keener in Lamb and above all more artful;
there is a certain petulance of humour in him which surprises us oftener
into laughter, the pathos at times is more poignant; but the effort to
be entertaining is also more apparent, and the continual holding up of
the mind by the unexpected word or phrase becomes a little wearisome in
the end. The attraction of Cowper's style is in the perfect balance of
the members, an art which has become almost lost since the eighteenth
century, and in the spirit of repose which awakens in the reader such a
feeling of easy elevation as remains for a while after the book is laid
down. Lamb is of the city, Cowper of the fields. Both were admirers of
Vincent Bourne; Lamb chose naturally for translation the poems of city
life--_The Ballad Singers_, _The Rival Bells_, the _Epitaph on a Dog_:

Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie,
That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted,
Had he occasion for that staff, with which
He now goes picking out his path in fear
Over the highways and crossings, but would plant
Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,
A firm foot forward still, till he had reached
His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide
Of passers-by in thickest confluence flowed:
To whom with loud and passionate laments
From morn to eve his dark estate he wailed.

Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and country-pieces--_The
Glowworm_, _The Jackdaw_, _The Cricket:_

Little inmate, full of mirth,
Chirping on my kitchen hearth,
Wheresoe'er be thine abode,
Always harbinger of good,
Pay me for thy warm retreat,
With a song more soft and sweet;
In return thou shalt receive
Such a strain as I can give.

* * * * *

Though in voice and shape they be
Formed as if akin to thee,
Thou surpassest, happier far,
Happiest grasshoppers that are;
Theirs is but a summer song,
Thine endures the winter long,
Unimpaired, and shrill, and clear,
Melody throughout the year.

Neither night nor dawn of day
Puts a period to thy play:
Sing, then--and extend thy span
Far beyond the date of man;
Wretched man, whose years are spent
In repining discontent,
Lives not, aged though he be,
Half a span, compared with thee.

There is in the blind beggar something of the quality of Lamb's own
life, with its inherent loneliness imposed by an ever-present grief in
the midst of London's noisy streets; and in the verses to the cricket it
is scarcely fanciful to find an image of Cowper's "domestic life in
rural leisure passed." Lamb was twenty-five when Cowper died, in the
year 1800. One is tempted to continue in the language of fable and ask
what would have happened had the city mouse allured the country mouse to
visit his chambers in Holborn or Southampton buildings. To be sure there
was no luxury of purple robe and mighty feast in that abode; but I think
the revelry and the wit, and that hound of intemperance which always
pursued poor Lamb, would have frightened his guest back to his
hiding-place in the wilderness:

... me silva cavusque
Tutus ab insidiis tenui solabitur ervo!

Cowper, in fact, was the first writer to introduce that intimate union
of the home affections with the love of country which, in the works of
Miss Austen and a host of others, was to become one of the unique charms
and consolations of English literature. And the element of austere gloom
in his character, rarely exposed, but always, we know, in the
background, is what most of all relieves his letters from insipidity.
Lamb strove deliberately by a kind of crackling mirth to drown the sound
of the grave inner voice; Cowper listened reverently to its admonitions,
even to its threatenings; he spoke little of what he heard, but it
tempered his wit and the snug comfort of his life with that profounder
consciousness of what, disguise it as we will, lies at the bottom of the
world's experience. We call him mad because he believed himself
abandoned of God, and shuddered with remorseless conviction. Put aside
for a moment the language of the market place, and be honest with
ourselves: is there not a little of our fate, of the fate of mankind, in
Cowper's desolation? After all, was his melancholy radically different
from the state of that great Frenchman, a lover of his letters withal,
Sainte-Beuve, who dared not for a day rest from benumbing labour lest
the questionings of his own heart should make themselves heard, and who
wrote to a friend that no consolation could reach that settled sadness
which was rooted in _la grande absence de Dieu?_

It is not strange that the society from which Cowper fled should have
seemed to him whimsical and a little mad. "A line of Bourne's," he says,
"is very expressive of the spectacle which this world exhibits,
tragi-comical as the incidents of it are, absurd in themselves, but
terrible in their consequences:

Sunt res humanae flebile ludibrium."

Nor is it strange that he wondered sometimes at the gayety of his own
letters: "It is as if Harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy
chamber, where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations
would be unseasonable, at any rate, but more especially so if they
should distort the features of the mournful attendants into laughter."
But it is not the humour of the letters that attracts us so much as
their picture of quiet home delights in the midst of a stormy world. We
linger most over the account of those still evenings by the fireside,
while Mrs. Unwin, and perhaps their friend Lady Austen, was busy with
her needles--

Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!--

and while Cowper read aloud from some book of travels and mingled his
comments with the story of the wanderer:

My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions that I seem
to partake with the navigators in all the dangers they
encountered. I lose my anchor; my mainsail is rent into shreds; I
kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all
this without moving from the fireside.

And here I cannot but regret again that we have not an edition of these
letters interspersed with the passages of _The Task_, which describe the
same scenes. I confess that two-thirds at least of that poem is indeed a
task to-day. The long tirades against vice, and the equally long
preaching of virtue, all in blank verse, lack, to my ear, the vivacity
and the sustaining power of the earlier rhymed poems, such as _Hope_
(that superb moralising on the poet's own life) and _Retirement_, to
name the best of the series. But the fourth book of _The Task_, and,
indeed, all the exquisite genre pictures of the poem:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in--

all this intimate correspondence with the world in verse is not only
interesting in itself, but gains a double charm by association with the
letters. "We were just sitting down to supper," writes Cowper to Mrs.
Unwin's son, "when a hasty rap alarmed us. I ran to the hall window, for
the hares being loose, it was impossible to open the door." It is
fortunate for the reader if his memory at these words calls up those
lines of _The Task_:

One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar; she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here beneath a roof like mine.
Yes--thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand
That feeds thee; _thou mayst frolic on the floor
At evening_, and at night retire secure
To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed;
For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged
All that is human in me, to protect
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.
If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave;
And when I place thee in it, sighing say,
I knew at least one hare that had a friend.

How much of the letters could be illustrated in this way--the walks
about Olney, the gardening, the greenhouse, the lamentations over the
American Rebellion, the tirades against fickle fashions, and a thousand
other matters that go to make up their quiet yet variegated substance.
For it must not be supposed that Cowper, in these Olney days at least,
was ever dull. I will quote the opening paragraph of one other
letter--to his friend the Rev. William Bull, great preacher of Newport
Pagnell, and, alas! great smoker,[3] "smoke-inhaling Bull," "Dear
Taureau"--as a change from the more serious theme, and then pass on:

_Mon aimable et tres cher Ami_--It is not in the power of chaises
or chariots to carry you where my affections will not follow you;
if I heard that you were gone to finish your days in the Moon, I
should not love you the less; but should contemplate the place of
your abode, as often as it appeared in the heavens, and
say--Farewell, my friend, forever! Lost, but not forgotten! Live
happy in thy lantern, and smoke the remainder of thy pipes in
peace! Thou art rid of Earth, at least of all its cares, and so
far can I rejoice in thy removal.

Might not that have been written by Lamb to one of his cronies--by a
Lamb still of the eighteenth century?

But the Olney days must come to a close. After nineteen years of
residence there Cowper and his companion (was ever love like theirs,
that was yet not love!) were induced to move to Weston Lodge, a more
convenient house in the village of Weston Underwood, not far away.
Somehow, with the change, the letters lose the freshness of their
peculiar interest. We shall never again find him writing of his home as
he had written before of Olney:

The world is before me; I am not shut up in the Bastille; there
are no moats about my castle, _no locks upon my gates of which I
have not the key_; but an invisible, uncontrollable agency, a
local attachment, an inclination more forcible than I ever felt,
even to the place of my birth, serves me for prison-walls, and for
bounds which I cannot pass.... The very stones in the garden-walls
are my intimate acquaintance. I should miss almost the minutest
object, and be disagreeably affected by its removal, and am
persuaded that, were it possible I could leave this incommodious
nook for a twelvemonth, I should return to it again with rapture,
and be transported with the sight of objects which to all the
world beside would be at least indifferent; some of them perhaps,
such as the ragged thatch and the tottering walls of the
neighbouring cottages, disgusting. But so it is, and it is so,
because here is to be my abode, and because such is the
appointment of Him that placed me in it.

Often while reading the letters from Weston one wishes he had never
turned the key in the lock of that beloved enclosure. Fame had come to
him now. His correspondence is distributed among more people; he is
neither quite of the world, nor of the cloister. Above all, he is
busy--endlessly, wearisomely busy--with his translation of Homer. I have
often wondered what the result would have been had his good friends and
neighbours the Throckmortons converted him from his rigid Calvinism to
their own milder Catholic faith, and set him in spiritual comfort to
writing another _Task_. Idle conjecture! For the rest of his life he
toiled resolutely at a translation which the world did not want and
which brought its own tedium into his letters. And then comes the
pitiful collapse of Mrs. Unwin, broken at last by the long vigil over
her sick companion:

The twentieth year is well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast;
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow--
'T was my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!

The end is tragic, terrible. In 1794, Cowper sank into a state of
melancholia, in which for hours he would walk backward and forward in
his study like a caged tiger. Mrs. Unwin was dying. At last a cousin,
the Rev. John Johnson, took charge of the invalids and carried them away
into Norfolk. The last few letters, written in Cowper's ever-dwindling
moments of sanity, are without a parallel in English. The contrast of
the wild images with the stately and restrained language leaves an
impression of awe, almost of fear, on the mind. "My thoughts," he writes
to Lady Hesketh, "are like loose and dry sand, which the closer it is
grasped slips the sooner away"; and again to the same faithful friend
from Mundesley on the coast:

The cliff is here of a height that it is terrible to look down
from; and yesterday evening, by moonlight, I passed sometimes
within a foot of the edge of it, from which to have fallen would
probably have been to be dashed in pieces. But though to have been
dashed in pieces would perhaps have been best for me, I shrunk
from the precipice, and am waiting to be dashed in pieces by other
means. At two miles distance on the coast is a solitary pillar of
rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at the high-water mark. I
have visited it twice, and have found it an emblem of myself. Torn
from my natural connections, I stand alone and expect the storm
that shall displace me.

There is in this that sheer physical horror which it is not good to
write or to read. Somewhere in his earlier letters he quotes the
well-known line of Horace: "We and all ours are but a debt to death."
How the commonplace words come back with frightfully intensified meaning
as we read this story of decay! It is not good, I say, to see the
nakedness of human fate so ruthlessly revealed. The mind reverts
instinctively from this scene to the homely life at Olney. Might it not
be that if Cowper had remained in that spot where the very stones of the
garden walls were endeared to him, if he had never been torn from his
natural connections--might it not be that he would have passed from the
world in the end saddened but not frenzied by his dreams? At least in
our thoughts let us leave him, not standing alone on the crumbling cliff
over a hungry sea, but walking with his sympathetic companion arm in arm
in the peaceful valley of the Ouse.

WHITTIER THE POET

Last month we took the new edition of Cowper's Letters as an occasion to
consider the life of the poet, who brought the quiet affections of the
home into English literature, and that may be our excuse for waiving the
immediate pressure of the book-market and turning to the American poet
whose inspiration springs largely from the same source. Different as the
two writers are in so many respects, different above all in their
education and surroundings, yet it would not be difficult to find points
of resemblance to justify such a sequence. In both the spirit of
religion was bound up with the cult of seclusion; to both the home was a
refuge from the world; to both this comfort was sweetened by the care of
a beloved companion, though neither of them ever married. But, after
all, no apology is needed, I trust, for writing about a poet who is very
dear to me as to many others, and who has suffered more than most at the
hands of his biographers and critics.

It should seem that no one could go through Whittier's poems even
casually without remarking the peculiar beauty of the idyl called _The
Pennsylvania Pilgrim_. It is one of the longest and, all things
considered, quite the most characteristic of his works. Yet Mr. Pickard
in his official biography brings the poem into no relief; Professor
Carpenter names it in passing without a word of comment; and Colonel
Higginson in his volume in the English Men of Letters Series does not
mention it at all--but then he has a habit of omitting the essential.
Among those who have written critically of American literature the poem
is not even named, so far as I am aware, by Mr. Stedman or by Professors
Richardson, Lawton, Wendell, and Trent. I confess that this conspiracy
of silence, as I hunted through one historian and critic after another,
grew disconcerting, and I began to distrust my own judgment until I
chanced upon a confirmation in two passages of Whittier's letters.
Writing of _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ to his publisher in May, 1872, he
said: "I think honestly it is as good as (if not better than) any long
poem I have written"; and a little later to Celia Thaxter: "It is as
long as _Snow-Bound_, and better, but nobody will find it out." One
suspects that all these gentlemen in treating of Whittier have merely
followed the line of least resistance, without taking much care to form
an independent opinion; and the line of least resistance has a miserable
trick of leading us astray. In the first place, Whittier's share in the
Abolition and other reforming movements bulks so large in the
historians' eyes that sometimes they seem almost to forget Whittier the
poet. And the critics have taken the same cue. "Whittier," says one of
them, "will be remembered even more as the trumpet-voice of Emancipation
than as the peaceful singer of rural New England."

The error, if it may be said with reverence, can be traced even higher,
and in Whittier we meet only one more witness to the unconcern of Nature
over the marring of her finer products. The wonder is not that he turned
out so much that is faulty, but that now and then he attained such
exquisite grace. Whittier was born, December 17, 1807, in East
Haverhill, in the old homestead which still stands, a museum now, hidden
among the hills from any other human habitation. It is a country not
without quiet charm, though the familiar lines of _Snow-Bound_ make us
think of it first as beaten by storm and locked in by frost. And,
notwithstanding the solace of an affectionate home, life on the farm was
unnecessarily hard. The habits of the grim pioneers had persisted and
weighed heavily on their dwindled descendants. Thus the Whittiers, who
used to drive regularly to the Quaker meeting at Amesbury, eight miles
distant, are said to have taken no pains to protect themselves from the
bleakest weather. The poet suffered in body all his life from the rigour
of this discipline; nor did he suffer less from insufficiency of mental
training. Not only was the family poor, but it even appears that the
sober tradition of his people looked askance at the limited means of
education at hand. Only at the earnest solicitation of outsiders was the
boy allowed to attend the academy at Haverhill. Meanwhile, he was a
little of everything: farm worker, shoemaker, teacher--he seems to have
shifted about as chance or necessity directed. There were few--he has
told us how few--books in the house, and little time for reading those
he could borrow. But if he read little, he wrote prodigiously. The story
of his first printed poem in the _Free Press_ of Newburyport and of the
encouragement given him by the far-sighted editor, William Lloyd
Garrison, is one of the best known and most picturesque incidents in
American letters. The young poet--he was then nineteen--was launched;
from that time he became an assiduous writer for the press, and was at
intervals editor of various country or propagandist newspapers.

The great currents of literary tradition reached him vaguely from afar
and troubled his dreams. Burns fell early into his hands, and the
ambition was soon formed of transferring the braes and byres of Scotland
to the hills and folds of New England. The rhythms of Thomas Moore rang
seductively in his ears. Byron, too, by a spirit of contrast, appealed
to the Quaker lad, and one may read in Mr. Pickard's capital little
book, _Whittier-Land_, verses and fragments of letters which show how
deeply that poison of the age had bitten into his heart. But the
influence of those sons of fire was more than counteracted by the gentle
spirit of Mrs. Hemans--indeed, the worst to be said of Whittier is that
never, to the day of his death, did he quite throw off allegiance to
the facile and innocent muse of that lady. It is only right to add that
in his later years, especially in the calm that followed the civil war,
he became a pretty widely read man, a man of far more culture than he is
commonly supposed to have been.

Such was the boy, then--thirsting for fame, scantily educated, totally
without critical guidance or environment, looking this way and that--who
was thrust under the two dominant influences of his time and place. To
one of these, transcendentalism, we owe nearly all that is highest, and
unfortunately much also that is most inchoate, in New England
literature. Its spirit of complacent self-dependence was dangerous at
the best, although in Whittier I cannot see that it did more than
confirm his habit of uncritical prolixity; it could offer no spiritual
seduction to one who held liberally the easy doctrine of the Friends.
But to the other influence he fell a natural prey. The whole tradition
of the Quakers--the memory of Pastorius, whom he was to sing as the
Pennsylvania Pilgrim; the inheritance of saintly John Woolman, whose
Journal he was to edit--prepared him to take part in the great battle of
the Abolitionists. From that memorable hour when he met Garrison face to
face on his Haverhill farm to the ending of the war in 1865, he was no
longer free to develop intellectually, but was a servant of reform and
politics. I am not, of course, criticising that movement or its
achievement; I regret only that one whose temper and genius called for
fostering in quiet fields should have been dragged into that stormy
arena. As he says in lines that are true if not elegant:

Hater of din and riot,
He lived in days unquiet;
And, lover of all beauty,
Trod the hard ways of duty.

It is not merely that political interests absorbed the energy which
would otherwise have gone to letters; the knowledge of life acquired
might have compensated and more than compensated for less writing, and,
indeed, he wrote too much as it was. The difficulty is rather that "the
pledged philanthropy of earth" somehow militates against art, as
Whittier himself felt. Not only the poems actually written to forward
the propaganda are for the most part dismal reading, but something of
their tone has crept into other poems, with an effect to-day not far
from cant. Twice the cry of the liberator in Whittier rose to noble
writing. But in both cases it is not the mere pleading of reform but a
very human and personal indignation that speaks. In _Massachusetts to
Virginia_ this feeling of outrage calls forth one of the most stirring
pieces of personification ever written, nor can I imagine a day when a
man of Massachusetts shall be able to read it without a tingling of the
blood, or a Virginian born hear it without a sense of unacknowledged
shame; in _Ichabod_ he uttered a word of individual scorn that will rise
up for quotation whenever any strong leader misuses, or is thought to
misuse, his powers. Every one knows the lines in which Webster is
pilloried for his defection:

Of all we loved and honoured, naught
Save power remains;
A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled;
When faith is lost, when honour dies,
The man is dead!

Then pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!

It is instructive that only when his note is thus pierced by individual
emotion does the reformer attain to universality of appeal.
Unfortunately most of Whittier's slave songs sink down to a dreary
level--down to the almost humorous pathos of the lines suggested by
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_:

Dry the tears for holy Eva,
With the blessed angels leave her....

What he needed above everything else, what his surroundings were least
of all able to give him, was a canon of taste, which would have driven
him to stiffen his work, to purge away the flaccid and set the genuinely
poetical in stronger relief--a purely literary canon which would have
offset the moralist and reformer in him, and made it impossible for him
(and his essays show that the critical vein was not absent by nature) to
write of Longfellow's _Psalm of Life_: "These nine simple verses are
worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth.
They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we
live--the moral steam enginery of an age of action." While Tennyson and
Matthew Arnold were writing in England, the earlier tradition had not
entirely died out in America that the first proof of genius is an
abandonment of one's mind to temperament and "inspiration." Byron had
written verse as vacillating and formless as any of Whittier's; Shelley
had poured forth page after page of effusive vapourings; Keats learned
the lesson of self-restraint almost too late; Wordsworth indulged in
platitudes as simpering as "holy Eva"; but none of these poets suffered
so deplorably from the lack of criticism as the finest of our New
England spirits. The very magnificence of their rebellion, the depth and
originality of their emotion, were a compensation for their licence,
were perhaps inevitably involved in it. The humbler theme of Whittier's
muse can offer no such apology; he who sings the commonplace joys and
cares of the heart needs above all to attain that _simplex munditiis_
which is the last refinement of taste; lacking that, he becomes himself
commonplace. And Whittier knew this. In the Proem to the first general
collection of his poems, he wrote:

Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,
No rounded art the lack supplies;
Unskilled the subtle line to trace,
Or softer shades of Nature's face,
I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.

Nor mine the seer-like power to show
The secrets of the heart and mind;
_To drop the plummet line below
Our common world of joy and woe,
A more intense despair or brighter hope to find._

But at this point we must part company with his confession. His reward
is not that he showed "a hate of tyranny intense" or laid his gifts on
the shrine of Freedom, but that more completely than any other poet he
developed the peculiarly English _ideal of the home_ which Cowper first
brought intimately into letters, and added to it those _homely comforts
of the spirit_ which Cowper never felt. With Longfellow he was destined
to throw the glamour of the imagination over "our common world of joy
and woe."

Perhaps something in his American surroundings fitted him peculiarly for
this humbler role. The fact that the men who had made the new colony
belonged to the middle class of society tended to raise the idea of
home into undisputed honour, and the isolation and perils of their
situation in the earlier years had enhanced this feeling into something
akin to a cult. America is still the land of homes. That may be a lowly
theme for a poet; to admire such poetry may, indeed it does, seem to
many to smack of a bourgeois taste. And yet there is an implication here
that carries a grave injustice. For myself, I admit that Whittier is one
of the authors of my choice, and that I read him with ever fresh
delight; I even think there must be something spurious in that man's
culture whose appreciation of Milton or Shelley dulls his ear to the
paler but very refined charm of Whittier. If truth be told, there is
sometimes a kind of exquisite content in turning from the pretentious
poets who exact so much of the reader to the more immediate appeal of
our sweet Quaker. In comparison with those more exalted muses his nymph
is like the nut-brown lass of the old song--

But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say No.

And often, after fatiguing the brain with the searchings and inquisitive
flight of the Masters, we are ready to say with Whittier:

I break my pilgrim staff, I lay
Aside the toiling oar;
The angel sought so far away
I welcome at my door.

There, to me at least, and not in the ballads which are more generally
praised, lies the rare excellence of Whittier. True enough, some of
these narrative poems are spirited and admirably composed. Now and then,
as in _Cassandra Southwick_, they strike a note which reminds one
singularly of the real ballads of the people; in fact, it would not be
fanciful to discover a certain resemblance between the manner of their
production and of the old popular songs. Their publication in obscure
newspapers, from which they were copied and gradually sent the rounds of
the country, is not essentially different from the way in which many of
the ballads were probably spread abroad. The very atmosphere that
surrounded the boy in a land where the traditions of border warfare and
miraculous events still ran from mouth to mouth prepared him for such
balladry. Take, for example, this account of his youth from the
Introduction to _Snow-Bound_:

Under such circumstances story-telling was a necessary resource in
the long winter evenings. My father when a young man had traversed
the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures with
Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in the French
villages. My uncle was ready with his record of hunting and
fishing, and, it must be confessed, with stories, which he at
least half-believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, who
was born in the Indian-haunted region of Somersworth, New
Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth, told us of the inroads
of the savages, and the narrow escape of her ancestors.

No doubt this legendary training helped to give more life to Whittier's
ballads and border tales than ordinarily enters into that rather
factitious form of composition; and for a while he made a deliberate
attempt to create out of it a native literature. But the effect was
still deeper, by a kind of contrast, on his poetry of the home. After
several incursions into the world as editor and agitator, he was
compelled by ill health to settle down finally in the Amesbury house,
which he had bought in 1836; and there with little interruption he lived
from his thirty-third to his eighty-fifth year, the year of his death.
In _Snow-Bound_ his memory called up a picture of the old Haverhill
homestead, unsurpassed in its kind for sincerity and picturesqueness; in
poem after poem he celebrated directly or indirectly "the river hemmed
with leaning trees," the hills and ponds, the very roads and bridges of
the land about these sheltered towns. On the one hand, the recollection
of the wilder life through which his parents had come added to the
snugness and intimacy of these peaceful scenes, and, on the other hand,
the encroachment of trade and factories into their midst lent a
poignancy of regret for a grace that was passing away. Mr. Pickard's
little guide-book, to which I have already referred, brings together
happily the innumerable allusions of local interest; there is no spot in
America, not even Concord, where the light of fancy lies so
entrancingly:

A tender glow, exceeding fair,
A dream of day without its glare.

For it must be seen that the crudeness of Whittier's education, and the
thorny ways into which he was drawn, marred a large part, but by no
means all, of his work. There are a few poems in his collection of an
admirable craftsmanship in that genre which is none the less
difficult--which I sometimes think is almost more difficult--because it
lies so perilously near the trivial and mean. There are others which
need only a little pruning, perhaps a little heightening here and there,
to approach the same perfection of charm. Especially they have that
harmony of tone which arises from the unspoiled sincerity of the writer
and ends by subduing the reader to a restful sympathy with their mood.
No one can read much in Whittier without feeling that these hills and
valleys about the Merrimac have become one of the inalienable domiciles
of the spirit--a familiar place where the imagination dwells with
untroubled delight. Even the little things, the flowers and birds of the
country, are made to contribute to the sense of homely content. There is
one poem in particular which has always seemed to me significant of
Whittier's manner, and a comparison of it with the famous flower poems
of Wordsworth will show the difference between what I call the poetry
of the hearth and the poetry of intimate nature. It was written to
celebrate a gift of _Pressed Gentian_ that hung at the poet's window,
presenting to wayside travellers only a "grey disk of clouded glass":

They cannot from their outlook see
The perfect grace it hath for me;
For there the flower, whose fringes through
The frosty breath of autumn blew,
Turns from without its face of bloom
To the warm tropic of my room,
As fair as when beside its brook
The hue of bending skies it took.

So from the trodden ways of earth
Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth,
And offer to the careless glance
The clouding grey of circumstance....

There is not a little of self-portraiture in this image of the flower,
and it may be that some who have written of Whittier patronisingly are
like the hasty passer-by--they see only the _grey disk of clouded
glass_.

And the emotion that furnishes the loudest note to most poets is subdued
in Whittier to the same gentle tone. To be sure, there is evidence
enough that his heart in youth was touched almost to a Byronic
melancholy, and he himself somewhere remarks that "Few guessed beneath
his aspect grave, What passions strove in chains." But was there not a
remnant of self-deception here? Do not the calmest and wisest of us
like to believe we are calm and wise by virtue of vigorous
self-repression? Wordsworth, we remember, explained the absence of love
from his poetry on the ground that his passions were too violent to
allow any safe expression of them. Possibly they were. Certainly, in
Whittier's verse we have no reflection of those tropic heats, but only
"the Indian summer of the heart." The very title, _Memories_, of his
best-known love poem (based on a real experience, the details of which
have recently been revealed) suggests the mood in which he approaches
this subject. It is not the quest of desire he sings, but the
home-coming after the frustrate search and the dreaming recollection by
the hearth of an ancient loss. In the same way, his ballad _Maud
Muller_, which is supposed to appeal only to the unsophisticated, is
attuned to that shamelessly provincial rhyme,

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

It is a little so with us all, perhaps, as it was with the judge and the
maiden; only, as we learn the lesson of years, the disillusion is likely
to be mingled strangely with relief, and the sadness to take on a most
comfortable and flattering Quaker drab--as it did with our "hermit of
Amesbury."

If love was a memory, religion was for Whittier a hope and an
ever-present consolation--peculiarly a consolation, because he brought
into it the same thought of home-coming that marks his treatment of
nature and the passions. Partly, this was due to his inherited creed,
which was tolerant enough to soften theological dispute: "Quakerism," he
once wrote to Lucy Larcom, "has no Church of its own--it belongs to the
Church Universal and Invisible." In great part the spirit of his faith
was private to him; it even called for a note of apology to the sterner
of his brethren:

O friends! with whom my feet have trod
The quiet aisles of prayer,
Glad witness to your zeal for God
And love of man I bear.

I trace your lines of argument;
Your logic linked and strong
I weigh as one who dreads dissent,
And fears a doubt as wrong.

But still my human hands are weak
To hold your iron creeds:
Against the words ye bid me speak
My heart within me pleads....

And the inimitably tender conclusion:

And so beside the Silent Sea
I wait the muffled oar;
No harm from Him can come to me,
On ocean or on shore.

I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.

O brothers! if my faith is vain,
If hopes like these betray,
Pray for me that my feet may gain
The sure and safer way.

And Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen
Thy creatures as they be,
Forgive me if too close I lean
My human heart on Thee!

Not a strenuous mood it may be, or very exalted--not the mood of the
battling saints, but one familiar to many a troubled man in his hours of
simpler trust. We have been led to Whittier through the familiar poetry
of Cowper; consider what it would have been to that tormented soul if
for one day he could have forgotten the awe of his divinity and _leaned
his human heart on God_. It is not good for any but the strongest to
dwell too much with abstractions of the mind. And, after all, change the
phrasing a little, substitute if you choose some other intuitive belief
for the poet's childlike faith, and you will be surprised to find how
many of the world's philosophers would accept the response of Whittier:

We search the world for truth; we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful,
From graven stone and written scroll,
From all old flower-fields of the soul;
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our mothers read.

Such a rout of the intellect may seem ignominious, but is it any more so
than the petulance of Renan because all his learning had only brought
him to the same state of skepticism as that of the gamin in the streets
of Paris? Our tether is short enough, whichever way we seek escape. It
is worth noting that in his essay on Baxter (he who conceived of the
saints' rest in a very different spirit) Whittier blames that worthy
just for the exaltation of his character. "In our view," he says, "this
was its radical defect. He had too little of humanity, he felt too
little of the attraction of this world, and lived too exclusively in the
spiritual and the unearthly."

And if Whittler's faith was simple and human, his vision of the other
world was strangely like the remembrance of a home that we have left in
youth. There is a striking expression of this in one of his prose tales,
now almost forgotten despite their elements of pale but very genuine
humour and pathos, as if written by an attenuated Hawthorne. The good
physician, Dr. Singletary, and his friends are discussing the future
life, and says one of them:

"Have you not felt at times that our ordinary conceptions of
heaven itself, derived from the vague hints and Oriental imagery
of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate to our human wants and
hopes? How gladly would we forego the golden streets and gates of
pearl, the thrones, temples, and harps, for the sunset lights of
our native valleys; the woodpaths, where moss carpets are woven
with violets and wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low of
cattle, the hum of bees in the apple-blossoms--the sweet, familiar
voices of human life and nature! In the place of strange
splendours and unknown music, should we not welcome rather
whatever reminded us of the common sights and sounds of our old
home?"

It was eminently proper that, as the poet lay awaiting death, with his
kinsfolk gathered about him, one of them should have recited the stanzas
of his psalm _At Last_:

When on my day of life the night is falling,
And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown,
I hear far voices out of darkness calling
My feet to paths unknown,

Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant,
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay;
O Love Divine, O Helper ever present,
Be Thou my strength and stay!

* * * * *

I have but Thee, my Father! let Thy spirit
Be with me then to comfort and uphold;
No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit,
Nor street of shining gold.

Suffice it if--my good and ill unreckoned,
And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace--
I find myself by hands familiar beckoned
Unto my fitting place.

I would not call this the highest religious poetry, pure and sweet as it
may be. Something still is lacking, but to see that want fulfilled one
must travel out of Whittier's age, back through all the eighteenth
century, back into the seventeenth. There you will find it in Vaughan
and Herbert and sometimes in Marvell--poets whom Whittier read and
admired. Take two poems from these two ages, place them side by side,
and the one thing needed fairly strikes the eyes. The first poem
Whittier wrote after the death of his sister Elizabeth (who had been to
him what Mrs. Unwin had been to Cowper) was _The Vanishers_, founded on
a pretty superstition he had read in Schoolcraft:

Sweetest of all childlike dreams
In the simple Indian lore
Still to me the legend seems
Of the shapes who flit before.

Flitting, passing, seen, and gone,
Never reached nor found at rest,
Baffling search, but beckoning on
To the Sunset of the Blest.

From the clefts of mountain rocks,
Through the dark of lowland firs,
Flash the eyes and flow the locks
Of the mystic Vanishers!

Now Vaughan, too, wrote a poem on those gone from him:

They are all gone into the world of light,
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress'd,
After the sun's remove.

I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.

It is not a fair comparison to set one of Whittier's inferior
productions beside this superbest hymn of an eloquent age; but would any
religious poem of the nineteenth century, even the best of them, fare
much better? There is indeed one thing lacking, and that is _ecstasy_.
But ecstasy demands a different kind of faith from that of Whittier's
day or ours, and, missing that, I do not see why we should begrudge our
praise to a genius of pure and quiet charm.

I have already intimated that too complete a preoccupation with the
reforming and political side of Whittier's life has kept the biographers
from recognising that charm in what he himself regarded as his best
poem. In 1872, in the full maturity of his powers and when the national
peace had allowed him to indulge the peace in his own heart, he wrote
his exquisite idyl, _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_. Perhaps the mere name of
the poem may suggest another cause why it has been overlooked. Whittier
has always stood pre-eminently as the exponent of New England life, and
for very natural reasons. And yet it would not be difficult to show
from passages in his prose works that his heart was never quite at ease
in that Puritan land. The recollection of the sufferings which his
people had undergone for their faith' sake rankled a little in his
breast, and he was never in perfect sympathy with the austerity of New
England traditions. We catch a tone of relief as he turns in imagination
to the peace that dwelt "within the land of Penn":

Who knows what goadings in their sterner way
O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite grey,
Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay?

What hate of heresy the east-wind woke?
What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke
In waves that on their iron coast-line broke?

It was no doubt during his early residence in Philadelphia that he
learned the story of the good Pastorius, who, in 1683, left the
fatherland and the society of the mystics he loved to lead a colony of
Friends to Germantown. The Pilgrim's life in that bountiful valley
between the Schuylkill and the Delaware--

Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay
Along the wedded rivers--

offered to Whittier a subject admirably adapted to his powers. Here the
faults of taste that elsewhere so often offend us are sunk in the
harmony of the whole and in the singular unity of impression; and the
lack of elevation that so often stints our praise becomes a suave and
mellow beauty. All the better elements of his genius are displayed here
in opulent freedom. The affections of the heart unfold in unembittered
serenity. The sense of home seclusion is heightened by the presence of
the enveloping wilderness, but not disturbed by any harsher contrast.
Within is familiar joy and retirement unassailed--not without a touch of
humour, as when in the evening, "while his wife put on her look of
love's endurance," Pastorius took down his tremendous manuscript--

And read, in half the languages of man,
His _Rusca Apium_, which with bees began,
And through the gamut of creation ran.

(The manuscript still exists; pray heaven it be never published!) Now
and then the winter evenings were broken by the coming of some welcome
guest--some traveller from the Old World bringing news of fair Von
Merlau and the other beloved mystics; some magistrate from the young
city,

Lovely even then
With its fair women and its stately men
Gracing the forest court of William Penn;

or some neighbour of the country, the learned Swedish pastor who, like
Pastorius, "could baffle Babel's lingual curse,"

Or painful Kelpius, from his forest den
By Wissahickon, maddest of good men.

Such was the life within, and out of doors were the labours of the
gardener and botanist, while

the seasons went
Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent
Of their own calm and measureless content.

The scene calls forth some of Whittier's most perfect lines of
description. Could anything be more harmonious than this, with its
economy of simple grace,

Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed?

No poem would be thoroughly characteristic of Whittier without some echo
of the slavery dispute, and our first introduction to Pastorius is,
indeed, as to a baffled forerunner of John Woolman. But the question
here takes on its most human and least political form; it lets in just
enough of the outside world of action to save the idyl from unreality.
Nor could religion well be absent; rather, the whole poem may be called
an illustration through the Pilgrim's life of that Inner Guide, speaking
to him not with loud and controversial tones, as it spoke to George Fox,
but with the still, small voice of comfortable persuasion:

A Voice spake in his ear,
And lo! all other voices far and near
Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear.
The Light of Life shone round him; one by one
The wandering lights, that all misleading run,
Went out like candles paling in the sun.

The account of the grave Friends, unsummoned by bells, walking
meeting-ward, and of the gathered stillness of the room into which only
the songs of the birds penetrated from without, is one of the happiest
passages of the poem. How dear those hours of common worship were to
Whittier may be understood from another poem, addressed to a visitor who
asked him why he did not seek rather the grander temple of nature:

But nature is not solitude;
She crowds us with her thronging wood;
Her many hands reach out to us,
Her many tongues are garrulous;
Perpetual riddles of surprise
She offers to our ears and eyes.

* * * * *

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on every side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventieth birthday Longfellow
wrote a sonnet on _The Three Silences of Molinos_--the silence of
speech, of desire, and of thought, through which are heard "mysterious
sounds from realms beyond our reach." Perhaps only one who at some time
in his life has caught, or seemed to catch, those voices and melodies is
quite able to appreciate the charm of Whittier through the absence of so
much that calls to us in other poets.

THE CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVE

It is a hundred years since Sainte-Beuve was born in the Norman city
that looks over toward England, and more than a generation has passed
since his death just before the war with Germany.[4] Yesterday three
countries--France, Belgium, and Switzerland--were celebrating his
centenary with speeches and essays and dinners, and the singing of
hymns. At Lausanne, where he had given his lectures on _Port-Royal_, and
had undergone not a little chagrin for his pains, the University
unveiled a bronze medallion of his head,--a Sainte-Beuve disillusioned
and complex, writes a Parisian journalist, with immoderate forehead
radiating a cold serenity, while the lips are contracted into a smile at
once voluptuous and sarcastic, as it were an Erasmus grown fat, with a
reminiscence of Baudelaire in the ironic mask of the face. It is
evidently the "Pere Beuve" as we know him in the portraits, and it is
not hard to imagine the lips curling a little more sardonically at the
thought of the change that has come since he was a poverty-stricken
hack and his foibles were the ridicule of Paris.

Yet through all these honours I cannot help observing a strain of
reluctance, as so often happens with a critic who has made himself
feared by the rectitude of his judgments. There has, for one thing, been
a good deal of rather foolish scandal-mongering and raking up of old
anecdotes about his gross habits. Well, Sainte-Beuve was sensual. "Je
suis du peuple ainsi que mes amours," he was wont to hum over his work;
and when that work was finished, his secretary tells us how he used to
draw a hat down over his face (that face _dont le front demesurement
haut rayonne de serenite froide_), and go out on the street for any
chance liaison. There is something too much of these stories in what is
written of Sainte-Beuve to-day; and in the estimate of his intellectual
career too little emphasis is laid on what was stable in his opinions,
and too much emphasis on the changes of his religious and literary
creed. To be sure, these mutations of belief are commonly cited as his
preparation for the art of critic, and in a certain sense this is right.
But even then, if by critic is meant one who merely decides the value of
this or that book, the essential word is left unsaid. He was a critic,
and something more; he was, if any man may claim such a title, the
_maitre universel_ of the century, as, indeed, he has been called.

And the time of his life contributed as much to this position of Doctor
Universalis as did his own intelligence. France, during those years from
the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second Empire, was the
seething-pot of modern ideas, and the impression left by the history of
the period is not unlike that of watching the witch scenes in _Macbeth_.
The eighteenth century had been earnest, mad in part, but its intention
was comparatively single,--to tear down the fabric of authority, whether
political or religious, and allow human nature, which was fundamentally
good, though depraved by custom, to assert itself. And human nature did
assert itself pretty vigorously in the French Revolution, proving, one
might suppose, if it proved anything, that its foundation, like its
origin, is with the beasts. To the men who came afterward that
tremendous event stood like a great prism between themselves and the
preceding age; the pillar of light toward which they looked for guidance
was distorted by it and shattered into a thousand coloured rays. For
many of them, as for Sainte-Beuve, it meant that the old humanitarian
passion remained side by side with a profound distrust of the popular
heart; for all, the path of reform took the direction of some individual
caprice or ideal. There were democrats and monarchists and imperialists;
there was the rigid Catholic reaction led by Bonald and de Maistre, and
the liberal Catholicism of Lamennais; there was the socialism of
Saint-Simon, mixed with notions of a religious hierarchy, and other
schemes of socialism innumerable; while skepticism took every form of
condescension or antagonism. Literature also had its serious mission,
and the battle of the romanticists shook Paris almost as violently as a
political revolution. Through it all science was marching with steady
gaze, waiting for the hour when it should lay its cold hand on the heart
of society.

And with all these movements Sainte-Beuve was more or less intimately
concerned. As a boy he brought with him to Paris the pietistic
sentiments of his mother and an aunt on whom, his father being dead, his
training had devolved. Upon these sentiments he soon imposed the
philosophy of the eighteenth century, followed by a close study of the
Revolution. It is noteworthy that his first journalistic work on the
_Globe_ was a literary description of the places in Greece to which the
war for independence was calling attention, and the reviewing of various
memoirs of the French Revolution. From these influences he passed to the
_cenacle_ of Victor Hugo, and became one of the champions of the new
romantic school. Meanwhile literature was mingled with romance of
another sort, and the story of the critic's friendship for the haughty
poet and of his love for the poet's wife is of a kind almost
incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon mind. It may be said in passing that
the letters of Sainte-Beuve to M. and Mme. Hugo, which have only to-day
been recovered and published in the _Revue de Paris_, throw rather a
new light on this whole affair. They do not exculpate Sainte-Beuve, but
they at least free him from ridicule. His successful passion for Mme.
Hugo, with its abrupt close when Mme. Hugo's daughter came to her first
confession, and his tormented courtship of Mme. d'Arbouville in later
years, were the chief elements in that _education sentimentale_ which
made him so cunning in the secrets of the feminine breast.

But this is a digression. Personal and critical causes carried him out
of the camp of Victor Hugo into the ranks of the Saint-Simonians, whom
he followed for a while with a kind of half-detached enthusiasm.
Probably he was less attracted by the hopes of a mystically regenerated
society, with Enfantin as its supreme pontiff, than by the desire of
finding some rest for the imagination in this religion of universal
love. At least he perceived in the new brotherhood a relief from the
strained individualism of the romantic poets, and the same instinct, no
doubt, followed him from Saint-Simonism into the fold of Lamennais.
There at last he thought to see united the ideals of religion and
democracy, and some of the bitterest words he ever wrote were in memory
of the final defalcation of Lamennais, who, as Sainte-Beuve said, saved
himself but left his disciples stranded in the mire. Meanwhile this
particular disciple had met new friends in Switzerland, and through
their aid was brought at a critical moment to Lausanne to lecture on
_Port-Royal_. There he learned to know and respect Vinet, the
Protestant theologian and critic, who, with the help of his good friends
the Oliviers, undertook to convert the wily Parisian to Calvinism.
Saint-Beuve himself seems to have gone into the discussion quite
earnestly, but for one who knows the past experiences of that subtle
twister there is something almost ludicrous in the way these anxious
missionaries reported each accession and retrogression of his faith. He
came back to Paris a confirmed and satisfied doubter, willing to
sacrifice to the goddess Chance as the blind deity of this world,
convinced of materialism and of the essential baseness of human nature,
yet equally convinced that within man there rules some ultimate
principle of genius or individual authority which no rationalism can
explain, and above all things determined to keep his mind open to
whatever currents of truth may blow through our murky human atmosphere.
He ended where he began, in what may be called a subtilised and refined
philosophy of the eighteenth century, with a strain of melancholy quite
peculiar to the baffled experience of the nineteenth. His aim henceforth
was to apply to the study of mankind the analytical precision of
science, with a scientific method of grouping men into spiritual
families.

Much has been made of these varied twistings of Sainte-Beuve's, both for
his honour and dishonour. Certainly they enabled him to insinuate
himself into almost every kind of intelligence and report of each
author as if he were writing out a phase of his own character; they made
him in the end the spokesman of that eager and troubled age whose
ferment is to-day just reaching America. France scarcely holds the place
of intellectual supremacy once universally accorded her, yet to her
glory be it said that, if we look anywhere for a single man who summed
up within himself the life of the nineteenth century, we instinctively
turn to that country. And more and more it appears that to Sainte-Beuve
in particular that honour must accrue. His understanding was more
comprehensive than Taine's or Renan's, more subtle than that of the
former, more upright than that of the latter, more single toward the
truth and more accurate than that of either. He never, as did Taine,
allowed a preconceived idea to warp his arrangement of facts, nor did he
ever, at least in his mature years, allow his sentimentality, as did
Renan, to take the place of judgment. Both the past and the present are
reflected in his essays with equal clearness.

On the other hand, this versatility of experience has not seldom been
laid to lightness and inconsistency of character. I cannot see that the
charge holds good, unless it be directed also against the whole age
through which he passed. If any one thing has been made clear by the
publishing of Sainte-Beuve's letters and by the closer investigation of
his life, it is that he was in these earlier years a sincere seeker
after religion, and was only held back at the last moment by some
invincible impotence of faith from joining himself finally with this or
that sect. And he was thus an image of the times. What else is the
meaning of all those abortive attempts to amalgamate religion with the
humanitarianism left over from the eighteenth century, but a searching
for faith where the spiritual eye had been blinded? I should suppose
that Sainte-Beuve's refusal in the end to speak the irrevocable word of
adhesion indicated rather the clearness of his self-knowledge than any
lightness of procedure. Nor is his inconsistency, whether religious or
literary, quite so great as it is sometimes held up to be. The
inheritance of the eighteenth century was strong upon him, while at the
same time he had a craving for the inner life of the spirit. Naturally
he felt a powerful attraction in the preaching of such men as
Saint-Simon and Lamennais, who boasted to combine these two tendencies;
but the mummery of Saint-Simonism and the instability of Mennaisianism,
when it came to the test, too soon exposed the lack of spiritual
substance in both. With this revelation came a growing distrust of human
nature, caused by the political degeneracy of France, and by a kind of
revulsion he threw himself upon the Jansenism which contained the
spirituality the other creeds missed, and which based itself frankly on
the total depravity of mankind. He was too much a child of the age to
breathe in that thin air, and fell back on all that remained to
him,--inquisitive doubt and a scientific demand for positive truth. It
is the history of the century.

And in literature I find the same inconstancy on the surface, while at
heart he suffered little change. Only here his experience ran counter to
the times, and most of the opprobrium that has been cast on him is due
to the fact that he never allowed the clamour of popular taste and the
warmth of his sympathy with present modes to drown that inner critical
voice of doubt. As a standard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanticists
he still maintained his reserves, and, on the other hand, long after he
had turned renegade from that camp he still spoke of himself as only
_demi-converti_. The proportion changed with his development, but from
beginning to end he was at bottom classical in his love of clarity and
self-restraint, while intensely interested in the life and aspirations
of his own day. There is in one of the recently published letters to
Victor Hugo a noteworthy illustration of this steadfastness. It was, in
fact, the second letter he wrote to the poet, and goes back to 1827, the
year of _Cromwell_. On the twelfth of February, Hugo read his new
tragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evidently warm in expressions
of praise. But in the seclusion of his own room the critical instinct
reawoke in him, and he wrote the next day a long letter to the
dramatist, not retracting what he had said, but adding certain
reservations and insinuating certain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiques
rentrent dans une seule que je m'etais deja permis d'adresser a votre
talent, l'exces, l'abus de la _force_, et passez-moi le mot, la
_charge_." Is not the whole of his critical attitude toward the men of
his age practically contained in this rebuke of excess, and
over-emphasis, and self-indulgence? And Sainte-Beuve when he wrote the
words was just twenty-three, was in the first ardour of his attachment
to the giant--the Cyclops, he seemed to Sainte-Beuve later--of the
century.

But after all, it is not the elusive seeker of these years that we think
of when Sainte-Beuve is named, nor the author of those many
volumes,--the _Portraits_, the _Chateaubriand_, even the
_Port-Royal_,--but the writer of the incomparable _Lundis_. In 1849 he
had returned from Liege after lecturing for a year at the University,
and found himself abounding in ideas, keen for work, and without regular
employment. He was asked to contribute a critical essay to the
_Constitutionnel_ each Monday, and accepted the offer eagerly. "It is
now twenty-five years," he said, "since I started in this career; it is
the third form in which I have been brought to give out my impressions
and literary judgments." These first _Causeries_ continued until 1860,
and are published in fourteen solid volumes. There was a brief respite
then, and in 1861 he began the _Nouveaux Lundis_, which continued in the
_Moniteur_ and the _Temps_ until his last illness in 1869, filling
thirteen similar volumes. Meanwhile his mother had died, leaving him a
house in Paris and a small income, and in 1865 he had been created a
senator by Napoleon III. at the instigation of the Princesse Mathilde.

In his earlier years he had been poor and anxious, living in a student's
room, and toiling indefatigably to keep the wolf from the door. At the
end he was rich, and had command of his time, yet the story of his
labours while writing the latest _Lundis_ is one of the heroic examples
of literature. "Every Tuesday morning," he once wrote to a friend, "I go
down to the bottom of a pit, not to reascend until Friday evening at
some unknown hour." Those were the days of preparation and plotting.
From his friend M. Cheron, who was librarian of the Bibliotheque
Imperiale, came memoirs and histories and manuscripts,--whatever might
serve him in getting up his subject. Late in the week he wrote a rough
draft of the essay, commonly about six thousand words long, in a hand
which no one but himself could decipher. This task was ordinarily
finished in a single day, and the essay was then dictated off rapidly to
a secretary to take down in a fair copy. That must have been a strenuous
season for the copyist, for Sainte-Beuve read at a prodigious rate,
showing impatience at any delay, and still greater impatience at any
proposed alteration. Indeed, during the whole week of preparation he was
so absorbed in his theme as to ruffle up at the slightest opposition.
In the evening he would eat a hearty dinner, and then walk out with his
secretary to the outer Boulevards, the Luxembourg, or the Place
Saint-Sulpice, for his digestion, talking all the while on the coming
_Lundi_ with intense absorption. And woe to the poor companion if he
expressed any contradiction, or hinted that the subject was trivial,--as
indeed it often was, until the critic had clothed it with the life of
his own thought. "In a word," Sainte-Beuve would cry out savagely, "you
wish to hinder me in writing my article. The subject has not the honour
of your sympathy. Really it is too bad." Whereupon he would turn angrily
on his heel and stride home. The story explains the nature of
Sainte-Beuve's criticism. For a week he lived with his author; "he
belonged body and soul to his model! He embraced it, espoused it,
exalted it!"--with the result that some of this enthusiasm is
transmitted to the reader, and the essays are instinct with life as no
other critic's work has ever been. The strain of living thus
passionately in a new subject week after week was tremendous, and it is
not strange that his letters are filled with complaints of fatigue, and
that his health suffered in spite of his robust constitution. Nor was
the task ended with the dictation late Friday night. Most of Saturday
and Sunday was given up to proofreading, and at this time he invited
every suggestion, even contradiction, often practically rewriting an
essay before it reached the press. Monday he was free, and it was on
that day occurred the famous Magny dinners, when Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert,
Renan, the Goncourts, and a few other chosen spirits, met and talked as
only Frenchmen can talk. Every conceivable subject was passed under the
fire of criticism; nothing was held sacred. Only one day a luckless
guest, after faith in religion and politics and morals had been laughed
away, ventured to intimate that Homer as a canon of taste was merely a
superstition like another; whereupon such a hubbub arose as threatened
to bring the dinners to an end at once and for all. The story is told in
the _Journal_ of the Goncourts, and it was one of the brothers, I
believe, who made the perilous insinuation. Imagine, if you can, a party
of Englishmen taking Homer, or any other question of literary faith,
with tragic seriousness. Such an incident explains many things; it
explains why English literature has never been, like the French, an
integral part of the national life.

And the integrity of mind displayed in the _Lundis_ is as notable as the
industry. From the beginning Sainte-Beuve had possessed that inquisitive
passion for the truth, without which all other critical gifts are as
brass and tinkling cymbals. Nevertheless, it is evident that he did not
always in his earlier writings find it expedient to express his whole
thought. He was, for example, at one time the recognised herald of the
romantic revolt, and naturally, while writing about Victor Hugo, he did
not feel it necessary to make in public such frank reservations as his
letters to that poet contain. His whole thought is there, perhaps, but
one has to read between the lines to get it. And so it was with the
other men and movements with which he for a while allied himself. With
the _Lundis_ came a change; he was free of all entanglements, and could
make the precise truth his single aim. No doubt a remnant of personal
jealousy toward those who had passed him in the race of popularity
embittered the critical reservations which he felt, but which might
otherwise have been uttered more genially. But quite as often this
seeming rancour was due to the feeling that he had hitherto been
compelled to suppress his full convictions, to a genuine regret for the
corrupt ways into which French literature was deviating. How nearly the
exigencies of a hack writer had touched him is shown by a passage in a
letter to the Oliviers written in 1838. His Swiss friend was debating
whether he should try his fortunes in Paris as a contributor to the
magazines, and had asked for advice. "But where to write? what to
write?" replied Sainte-Beuve; "if one could only choose for himself! You
must wait on opportunity, and in the long run this becomes a transaction
in which conscience may be saved, but every ideal perishes,"--_dans
laquelle la conscience peut toujours etre sauve mais ou tout ideal
perit._ Just about this time he was thinking seriously of migrating with
the Oliviers to this country. It would be curious to hear what he might
have written from New York to one who contemplated coming there as a
hack writer. As for the loss of ideals, his meaning, if it needs any
elucidation, may be gathered from a well-known passage in one of his
books:

The condition of man ordinarily is no more than a succession of
servitudes, and the only liberty that remains is now and then to
effect a change. Labour presses, necessity commands, circumstances
sweep us along: at the risk of seeming to contradict ourselves or
give ourselves the lie, we must go on and for ever recommence; we
must accept whatever employments are offered, and even though we
fill them with all conscientiousness and zeal we raise a dust on
the way, we obscure the images of the past, we soil and mar our
own selves. And so it is that before the goal of old age is
reached, we have passed through so many lives that scarcely, as we
go back in memory, can we tell which was our true life, that for
which we were made and of which we were worthy, the life which we
would have chosen.

Those were the words with which he had closed his chapters on
_Chateaubriand_; yet through all his deviations he had borne steadily
toward one point. In after years he could write without presumption to a
friend: "If I had a device, it would be the _true_, the _true_ alone;
and the beautiful and the good might come out as best they could." There
are a number of anecdotes which show how precious he held this integrity
of mind. The best known is the fact that, in the days before he was
appointed senator, and despite the pressure that was brought to bear on
him, he still refused to write a review of the Emperor's _History of
Caesar_.

Both the sense of disillusion, which was really inherent in him from his
youth, and the passion for truth hindered him in his "creative" work,
while they increased his powers as a critic. He grew up, it must be
remembered, in the midst of the full romantic tide, and as a writer of
verse there was really no path of great achievement open to him save
that of Victor Hugo and Lamartine and the others of whose glory he was
so jealous. Whatever may have been the differences of those poets, in
one respect they were alike: they all disregarded the subtle _nuance_
wherein the truth resides, and based their emotions on some grandiose
conception, half true and half false; nor was this mingling of the false
and true any less predominant in one of Hugo's political odes than in
Lamartine's personal and religious meditations. Now, the whole bent of
Sainte-Beuve's intellect was toward the subtle drawing of distinctions,
and even to-day a reader somewhat romantically and emotionally inclined
resents the manner in which his scalpel cuts into the work of these
poets and severs what is morbid from what is sound. That is criticism;
but it may easily be seen that such a habit of mind when carried to
excess would paralyse the poetic impulse. The finest poetry, perhaps, is
written when this discriminating principle works in the writer strongly
but unconsciously; when a certain critical atmosphere about him
controls his taste, while not compelling him to dull the edge of impulse
by too much deliberation. Boileau had created such an atmosphere about
Moliere and Racine; Sainte-Beuve had attempted, but unsuccessfully, to
do the same for the poets of the romantic renaissance. His failure was
due in part to a certain lack of impressiveness in his own personality,
but still more to the notions of individual licence which lay at the
very foundation of that movement. There is a touch of real pathos in his
superb tribute to Boileau:

Let us salute and acknowledge to-day the noble and mighty harmony
of the _grand siecle_. Without Boileau, and without Louis XIV.,
who recognised Boileau as his Superintendent of Parnassus, what
would have happened? Would even the most talented have produced in
the same degree what forms their surest heritage of glory? Racine,
I fear, would have made more plays like _Berenice_; La Fontaine
fewer _Fables_ and more _Contes_; Moliere himself would have run
to _Scapins_, and might not have attained to the austere eminence
of _Le Misanthrope_. In a word, each of these fair geniuses would
have abounded in his natural defects. Boileau, that is to say, the
common sense of the poet-critic authorised and confirmed by that
of a great king, constrained them and kept them, by the respect
for his presence, to their better and graver tasks. And do you
know what, in our days, has failed our poets, so strong at their
beginning in native ability, so filled with promise and happy
inspiration? There failed them a Boileau and an enlightened
monarch, the twain supporting and consecrating each other. So it
is these men of talent, seeing themselves in an age of anarchy
and without discipline, have not hesitated to behave accordingly;
they have behaved, to be perfectly frank, not like exalted
geniuses, or even like men, but like schoolboys out of school. We
have seen the result.

Nobler tribute to a great predecessor has not often been uttered, and in
contrast one remembers the outrage that has been poured on Boileau's
name by the later poets of France and England. One recalls the scorn of
the young Keats, in those days when he took licence upon himself to
abuse the King's English as only a wilful genius can:

Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist face to face,
And did not know it,--no, they went about,
Holding a poor decrepit standard out
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!

I am not one to fling abuse on the school of Dryden and Pope, yet the
eighteenth century may to some minds justify the charge of Keats and the
romanticists. Certainly the critical restraint of French rules, passing
to England at a time when the tide of inspiration had run low, induced a
certain aridity of manner. But consider for a moment what might have
been the result in English letters if the court of Elizabeth had
harboured a man of authority such as Boileau, or, to put it the other
way, if the large inspiration of those poets and playwrights had not
come before the critical sense of the land was out of its swaddling
clothes. What might it have been for us if a Boileau and an Elizabeth
together had taught Shakespeare to prune his redundancies, to
disentangle his language at times, to eliminate the relics of barbarism
in his denouements; if they had compelled the lesser dramatists to
simplify their plots and render their characters conceivable moral
agents; if they had instructed the sonneteers in common sense and in the
laws of the sonnet; if they had constrained Spenser to tell a
story,--consider what this might have meant, not only to the writers of
that day, but to the tradition they formed for those that were to come
after. We should have had our own classics, and not been forced to turn
to Athens for our canons of taste. There would not have been for our
confusion the miserable contrast between the "correctness" of Queen
Anne's day and the creative genius of Elizabeth's, but the two together
would have made a literature incomparable for richness and judgment. It
is not too much to say that the absence of such a controlling influence
at the great expansive moment of England is a loss for which nothing can
ever entirely compensate in our literature.

Such was the office which Sainte-Beuve sought to fulfil in the France of
his own day. That conscious principle of restraint might, he thought,
when applied to his own poetical work, introduce into French literature
a style like that of Cowper's or Wordsworth's in England; and to a
certain extent he was successful in this attempt. But in the end he
found the Democritean maxim too strong for him: _Excludit sanos Helicone
poetas_; and, indeed, the difference between the poet and the critic may
scarcely be better defined than in this, that in the former the
principle of restraint works unconsciously and from without, whereas in
the latter it proceeds consciously and from within. And finding himself
debarred from Helicon (not by impotence, as some would say, but by
excess of self-knowledge), he deliberately undertook to introduce a
little more sanity into the notions of his contemporaries. I have shown
how at the very beginning of his career he took upon himself privately
such a task with Hugo. It might almost be said that the history of his
intellect is summed up in his growth toward the sane and the simple;
that, like Goethe, from whom so much of his critical method derives, his
life was a long endeavour to supplant the romantic elements of his taste
by the classical. What else is the meaning of his attack on the excesses
of Balzac? or his defence of Erasmus (_le droit, je ne dis des tiedes,
mais des neutres_), and of all those others who sought for themselves a
governance in the law of proportion? In one of his latest volumes he
took the occasion of Taine's _History of English Literature_ to speak
out strongly for the admirable qualities of Pope:

I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sacrifice of
the writers and poets whom I will call the moderate. For a long
time they had all the honours: one pleaded for Shakespeare, for
Milton, for Dante, even for Homer; no one thought it necessary to
plead for Virgil, for Horace, for Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope,
Tasso,--these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the
first have completely gained their cause, and matters are quite
the other way about: the great and primitive geniuses reign and
triumph; even those who come after them in invention, but are
still naive and original in thought and expression, poets such as
Regnier and Lucretius, are raised to their proper rank; while the
moderate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the classics
to our fathers, we tend to make subordinate, and, if we are not
careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. Something like disdain
and contempt (relatively speaking) will soon be their portion. It
seems to me that there is room for all, and that none need be
sacrificed. Let us render full homage and complete reverence to
those great human forces which are like the powers of nature, and
which like them burst forth with something of strangeness and
harshness; but still let us not cease to honour those other forces
which are more restrained, and which, in their less explosive
expression, clothe themselves with elegance and sweetness.

And this love of the golden mean, joined with the long wanderings of his
heart and his loneliness, produced in him a preference for scenes near
at hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So it was that the idyllic
tales of George Sand touched him quickly with their strange romance of
the familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that school had sought out
the nature of India, the savannahs of America, the forests of Canada.
"Here," he says, "are discoveries for you,--deserts, mountains, the
large horizons of Italy; what remained to discover? That which was
nearest to us, here in the centre of our own France. As happens always,
what is most simple comes at the last." In the same way he praised the
refined charm of a poet like Cowper, and sought to throw into relief the
purer and more homely verses of a Parny: "If a little knowledge removes
us, yet greater knowledge brings us back to the sentiment of the
beauties and graces of the hearth." Indeed, there is something almost
pathetic in the contrast between the life of this laborious recluse,
with his sinister distrust of human nature, and the way in which he
fondles this image of a sheltered and affectionate home.

But the nineteenth century was not the seventeenth, neither was
Sainte-Beuve a Boileau, to stem the current of exaggeration and egotism.
His innate sense of proportion brought him to see the dangerous
tendencies of the day, and, failing to correct them, he sank deeper into
that disillusion from which his weekly task was a long and vain labour
of deliverance. He took to himself the saying of the Abbe Galiani:
"Continue your works; it is a proof of attachment to life to compose
books." Yet it may be that this very disillusion was one of the elements
of his success; for after all, the real passion of literature, that
perfect flower of the contemplative intellect, hardly comes to a man
until the allurement of life has been dispelled by many experiences,
each bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps, when the hope
of love (the _spes animi credula mutui_) and the visions of ambition,
the belief in pleasure and the luxury of grief, have lost their sting,
do we turn to books with the contented understanding that the shadow is
the reality, and the seeming reality of things is the shadow. At least
for the critic, however it may be for the "creative" writer, this final
deliverance from self-deception would seem to be necessary. Nor do I
mean any invidious distinction when I separate the critic from the
creative writer in this respect. I know there is a kind of hostility
between the two classes. The poet feels that the critic by the very
possession of this self-knowledge sets himself above the writer who
accepts the inspiration of his emotions unquestioningly, while the
critic resents the fact that the world at large looks upon his work as
subordinate, if not superfluous. And yet, in the case of criticism, such
as Sainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almost ceases to exist.
No stigma attaches to the work of the historian who recreates the
political activities of an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vast bridge
between the past and the present. Yet, certainly, the best and most
durable acts of mankind are the ideals and emotions that go to make up
its books, and to describe and judge the literature of a country, to
pass under review a thousand systems and reveries, to point out the
meaning of each, and so write the annals of the human spirit, to pluck
out the heart of each man's mystery and set it before the mind's eye
quivering with life,--if this be not a labour of immense creative energy
the word has no sense to my ears. We read and enjoy, and the past slips
unceasingly from our memory. We are like the foolish peasant: the river
of history rolls at our feet, and for ever will roll, while we stand and
wait. And then comes this magician, who speaks a word, and suddenly the
current is stopped; who has power like the wizards of old to bid the
tide turn back upon itself, and the past becomes to us as the present,
and we are made the lords of time. I do not know how it affects others,
but for me, as I look at the long row of volumes which hold the
interpretation of French literature, I am almost overwhelmed at the
magnitude of this man's achievement.

Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, because he was primarily a
critic, drew his knowledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it
were, at second hand. The very contrary is true. As a younger man, he
had mixed much with society, and even in his later years, when, as he
says, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still, through his friendship
with the Princesse Mathilde and others of the great world, kept in close
touch with the active forces of the Empire. As a matter of fact, every
one knows, who has read at all in his essays, that he was first of all a
psychologist, and that his knowledge of the human breast was quite as
sure as his acquaintance with libraries. He might almost be accused of
slighting the written word in order to get at the secret of the writer.
What attracted him chiefly was that middle ground where life and
literature meet, where life becomes self-conscious through expression,
and literature retains the reality of association with facts. "A little
poesy," he thought, "separates us from history and the reality of
things; much of poesy brings us back." Literature to him was one of the
arts of society. Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch was
never surer and his eloquence more communicable, than when he was
dealing with the great ladies who guided the society of the eighteenth
century and retold its events in their letters and memoirs,--Mme. du
Deffand, Mme. de Grafigny, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and those who preceded
and followed. Nowhere does one get closer to the critic's own
disappointment than when he says with a sigh, thinking of those
irrecoverable days: "Happy time! all of life then was turned to
sociability." And he was describing his own method as a critic, no less
than the character of Mlle. de Lespinasse, when he wrote: "Her great art
in society, one of the secrets of her success, was to feel the
intelligence _(l'esprit)_ of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to
forget her own. Her conversation was never either above or below those
with whom she spoke; she possessed measure, proportion, rightness of
mind. She reflected so well the impressions of others, and received so
visibly the influence of their intelligence, that they loved her for the
success she helped them to attain. She raised this disposition to an
art. 'Ah!' she cried one day, 'how I long to know the foible of every
one!'" And this love of the social side of literature, this hankering
after _la bella scuola_ when men wrote under the sway of some central
governance, explains Sainte-Beuve's feeling of desolation amidst the
scattered, individualistic tendencies of his own day.

There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's critical art,--his treatment of
literature as a function of social life, and his search in all things
for the golden mean. There we find his strength, and there, too, his
limitation. If he fails anywhere, it is when he comes into the presence
of those great and imperious souls who stand apart from the common
concerns of men, and who rise above our homely mediocrities, not by
extravagance or egotism, but by the lifting wings of inspiration. He
could, indeed, comprehend the ascetic grandeur of a Pascal or the
rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, but he was distrustful of that fervid
breath of poesy that comes and goes unsummoned and uncontrolled. It is a
common charge against him that he was cold to the sublime, and he
himself was aware of this defect, and sought to justify it. "Il ne faut
donner dans le sublime," he said, "qu'a la derniere extremite et a son
corps defendant." Something of this, too, must be held to account for
the haunting melancholy that he could forget, but never overcome. He
might have lived with a kind of content in the society of those refined
and worldly women of the eighteenth century, but, missing the solace of
that support, he was unable amid the dissipated energies of his own age
to rise to that surer peace that needs no communion with others for its
fulfilment. Like the royal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the
highest degree of culture, which is religion. He strove for that during
many years, but alone he could not attain to it. As early as 1839 he
wrote, while staying at Aigues-Mortes: "My soul is like this beach,
where it is said Saint Louis embarked: the sea and faith, alas! have
long since drawn away." One may excuse these limitations as the "defect
of his quality," as indeed they are. But more than that, they belong to
him as a French critic, as they are to a certain degree inherent in
French literature. That literature and language, we have been told by no
less an authority than M. Brunetiere, are pre-eminently social in their
strength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuve was indirectly justifying
his own method when he pointed to the example of Voltaire, Moliere, La
Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the great ancestors. "They have all,"
he said, "a corner from which they mock at the sublime." I am even
inclined to think that these qualities explain why England has never
had, and may possibly never have, a critic in any way comparable to
Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glory of English literature lies in the very
field where French is weakest, in the lonely and unsociable life of the
spirit, just as the faults of English are due to its lack of discipline
and uncertainty of taste. And after all, the critical temperament
consists primarily in just this linking together of literature and life,
and in the levelling application of common sense.

Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, indeed almost inconceivable
in English, he is still immensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable,
to us for that very reason. There is nothing more wholesome than to dip
into this strong and steady current of wise judgment. It is good for us
to catch the glow of his masterful knowledge of letters and his faith in
their supreme interest. His long row of volumes are the scholar's Summa
Theologiae. As John Cotton loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of
Calvin before he went to sleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve,
sure of his never-failing abundance and his ripe intelligence.

THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH HISTORY

Like many another innocent, no doubt, I was seduced not long ago by the
potent spell of Mr. Andrew Lang's name into reading his voluminous
_History of Scotland_. Being too, like Mr. Lang, sealed of the tribe of
Sir Walter, and knowing in a general way some of the romantic features
of Scotch annals, I was led to suppose that these bulky volumes would be
crammed from cover to cover with the pageantry of fair Romance. Alas, I
soon learned, as I have so often learned before, that a little knowledge
is a dangerous thing; and I was taught, moreover, a new application of
several well-worn lines of Milton. Amid the inextricable feuds of
Britons, Scots, Picts, and English; amid the incomprehensible medley of
Bruces, Balliols, Stuarts, Douglases, Plantagenets, and Tudors; amid the
horrid tumult of Roberts, Davids, Jameses, Malcolms (may their tribes
decrease!), Mr. Lang's reader, if he be of alien blood and foreign
shores, wanders helpless and utterly bewildered. On leaving that _selva
oscura_ I felt not unlike Milton's courageous hero (in courage only, I
trust) before the realm of Chaos and eldest Night, where naught was
perceptible but eternal anarchy and noise of endless wars. Yet with
this bold adventurer it might be said by me:

I come no spy,
With purpose to explore or to disturb
The secrets of your realm; but by constraint
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Led through your spacious empire up to light.

For throughout the labyrinth of all this anfractuous narrative
there was indeed one guiding ray of light. As often as the author
by way of anecdote or allusion--and happily this occurred pretty
frequently--mentioned the works of Scott, a new and powerful interest
was given to the page. The very name of Scott seemed providentially
symbolical of his office in literature, and through him Scots history
has become a theme of significance to all the world.

On the other hand, one is equally impressed by the fact that the novels
owe much of their vitality to the manner in which they voice the spirit
of the national life; and we recognise the truth, often maintained and
as often disputed, that the final verdict on a novelist's work is
generally determined by the authenticity of his portraiture, not of
individuals, but of a people, and consequently by the lasting
significance of the phase of society or national life portrayed.

The conditions of the novel should seem in this respect to be quite
different from those of the poem. We are conscious within ourselves of
some principle of isolation and exclusion--the _principium
individuationis_, as the old schoolmen called it--that obstructs the
completion of our being, of some contracting force of nature that dwarfs
our sympathies with our fellow-men, that hinders the development of our
full humanity, and denies the validity of our hopes; and the office of
the imagination and of the imaginative arts is for a while to break down
the walls of this narrowing individuality and to bestow on us the
illusion of unconfined liberty.

But if the end of the arts is the same, their methods are various, and
this variety extends even to the different genres of literature. The
manner of the epic, and in a still higher degree of the tragedy, is so
to arouse the will and understanding that their clogging limitations
seem to be swept away, until through our sympathy with the hero we feel
ourselves to be acting and speaking the great passions of humanity in
their fullest and freest scope; for this reason we call the characters
of the poem types, and we believe that the poet under the impulse of his
inspiration is carried into a region above our vision, where, like the
exalted souls in Plato's dream, he beholds face to face the great ideas
of which our worldly life and circumstances are but faulty copies. In
this way Achilles stands as the perfect warrior, and Odysseus as the
enduring man of wiles; Hamlet is the man of doubts, and Satan the
creature of rebellious pride. It may be that this effort or inspiration
of the poet to represent mankind in idealised form will account in part
for the peculiar tinge of melancholy that is commonly an attribute of
the artistic temperament,--for the brooding uncertainty of Shakespeare,
if as many think Hamlet is the true voice of his heart, for the feeling
of baffled despair which led Goethe to create Faust, and for the
self-tormenting of Childe Harold. It is because the dissolving power of
genius and the personality of the man can never be quite reconciled; he
is detached from nature and attached to her at the same time. On the one
hand his genius draws him to contemplate life with the disinterestedness
of a mind free from the attachments of the individual, while on the
other hand his own personality, often of the most ardent character,
drags him irresistibly to seek the satisfaction of individual emotions.
Like the Empedocles of Matthew Arnold, baffled in the ineffable longing
to escape themselves, these bearers of the divine light are haled
unwillingly

Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life.

What to the reader is merely a pleasant and momentary illusion, or a
salutary excitation from without, is in the creative poet a partial
dissolution of his own personality. Shakespeare was not dealing in empty
words when he likened the poet to the lover and the lunatic as being of
imagination all compact; nor was Plato speaking mere metaphor when he
said that "the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is
no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses
and the mind is no longer in him." In the hour of inspiration some
darkened window is opened on the horizon to eyes that are ordinarily
confined within the four walls of his meagre self, a door is thrown open
to the heaven-sweeping gales, he hears for a brief while the voice of
the Over-soul speaking a language that with all his toil he can barely
render into human speech;--and when at last the door is closed, the
vision gone, and the voice hushed, he sits in the darkened chamber of
his own person, silent and forlorn.

I would not presume to describe absolutely the inner state of the poet
when life appears to him in its ideal form, but the means by which he
conveys his illusion to the reader is quite clear. The rhythm of his
verse produces on the mind something of the stimulating effect of music
and this effect is enhanced by the use of language and metaphor lifted
out of the common mould. Prose, however, has no such resources to impose
on the fancy a creation of its own, in which the individual will is
raised above itself. On the contrary, the office of the novel--and this
we see more clearly as fiction grows regularly more realistic--is to
represent life as controlled by environment and to portray human beings
as the servants of the flesh. This, I take it, was the meaning of
Goethe in his definition of the genres: "In the novel sentiments and
events chiefly are exhibited, in the drama characters and deeds." The
procedure of the novel must be, so to speak, a passive one. It depicts
man as a creature of circumstance, and its only method of escape is so
to encompass the individual in circumstance as to lend to his separate
life something of the pomp of universality. It effects its purpose by
breadth rather than by exaltation. Its truest aim is not to represent
the actions of a single man as noteworthy in themselves, but to
represent the life of a people or a phase of society; in the great sweep
of human activity something of the same largeness and freedom is
produced as in the poetic idealisation of the individual will in the
drama. Thus it happens that the artistic validity of a novel depends
first of all on the power of the author to portray broadly and
veraciously some aspect of this wider existence.

Balzac, in some respects the master novelist, was clearly conscious of
this aim of his art; and his _Comedie Humaine_ is a supreme effort to
grasp the whole range of French society. Nor would it be difficult in
the case of the greater English novelists to show that unwittingly--an
Englishman rarely if ever has the same knowledge of his art as a
Frenchman--they obeyed the same law. We admire Fielding and Smollett not
so much for their individual characterisations as for the joy we feel in
escaping our conventional timidity in the old-time tumultuous country
life of England, with all its rude strength and even its vulgarity. By a
natural contrast we read Jane Austen for her picture of rural security
and stability, and are glad to forget the vexations and uncertainties of
life's warfare in that gentle round of society, where greed and passion
are reduced to petty foibles, and where the errors of mankind only
furnish material for malicious but innocent satire. With Thackeray we
put on the veneer of artificial society which was the true idealism
inherited by him from the eighteenth century; and we move more freely
amidst that _gai monde_ because there runs through the story of it such
a biting satire of worldliness and snobbishness as flatters us with the
feeling of our own superiority. In Dickens we are carried into the very
opposite field of life, and for a while we move with those who are the
creatures of grotesque whims and emotions: caricatures we call his
people, but deep in our hearts we know that each of us longs at times to
be as humanity is in Dickens's world, the perfect and unreflecting
creature of his dearest whim--for this too is liberty. Thus it is that
the interest of the novel depends as much, or almost as much, on the
intrinsic value of the national life or phase of society reproduced as
on the skill of the writer. The prose author is in this respect far less
a free agent than the poet and far more the subject of his environment;
for he deals less with the unchanging laws of character and more with
what he perceives outwardly about him. It is this fact which leads many
readers to prefer the English novelists to the French, although the
latter are unquestionably the greater masters of their craft.

Now the peculiar good fortune of Scott in this matter was most strongly
brought home to me in reading the narrative work of Mr. Lang. Fine and
entertaining as are Scott's more professedly historical novels, such as
_Ivanhoe_ and _Quentin Durward_, I do not believe they could ever have
resisted the invasion of time were they not bolstered up by the stories
that deal more directly with the realities of Scotch life. There is, to
be sure, in the foreign tales a wonderfully pure vein of romance; but
romantic writing in prose cannot endure unless firmly grounded in
realism, or unless, like Hawthorne's work, it is surcharged with
spiritual meanings. Not having the power possessed by verse to convey
illusion, it lacks also the vitality of verse. Younger readers may take
naturally to _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_, because very little is
required to evoke illusion with them. More mature readers turn oftenest
to _Guy Mannering_ and those tales in which the romance is the realism
of Scotch life, finding here a fulness of interest that is more than a
compensation for the frequent slovenliness of Scott's language and for
the haphazard construction of his plots.

These negligences of the indifferent craftsman might, perhaps, need no
such compensation, for we have grown hardened at last to slovenliness
in fiction. But there are other limitations to Scott's powers that show
more clearly how much of his fame rests on the substratum of national
life on which he builds. An infinite variety of characters, from kings
in the council hall down to strolling half-witted gaberlunzies, move
through the pages of his novels; but, and the fact is notorious, the
great Scotchman was little better at painting the purple light of young
desire than was our own Cooper. There is something like love-making in
_Rob Roy_, and Di Vernon has been signalised by Mr. Saintsbury as one of
his five chosen heroines; but in general the scenes that form the
ecstasy of most romance are dead and perfunctory in Scott. And this is
the more remarkable since we know that he himself was a lover--and a
disappointed lover, which is vastly more to the point in art, as all the
world knows. But in fact this inability to portray the softer emotions
is not an isolated phenomenon in Scott; he skims very lightly over most
of the deeper passions of the heart, seeming to avoid them except in so
far as they express themselves in action. His novels contain no adequate
picture of remorse or hatred, love or jealousy; neither do they contain
any such psychological analysis of the emotions as has made the fame of
subsequent writers. But there is an infinite variety of characters in
action, and a perfect understanding of that form of the imagination
which displays itself in whimsicalities corresponding to the
"originals" or "humourists" of the Elizabethan comedy.

The numberless quotations from "old plays" at the head of Scott's
chapters are not without significance. At times he approaches closer to
Shakespeare than any other writer, whether of prose or verse. In one
scene at least in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, where he describes the
"singular and gloomy delight" of the three old cummers about the body of
their contemporary, he lets us know that he has in mind the meeting of
the witches in _Macbeth_, and I think on the whole he excels the
dramatist in his own field. After all is said, the Shakespearian
witch-scene is an arbitrary exercise of the fancy, which fails to carry
with it a complete sense of reality: the illusion is not fully
maintained. The dialogue in the novelist, on the contrary, is instinct
with thrilling suggestiveness, for the very reason that it is based on
the groundwork of national character. The superstitious awe is here
simple realism, from the beginning of the scene down to the warning cry
of the paralytic hag from the cottage:

"He's a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master," said Annie
Winnie, "and a comely personage--broad in the shouthers, and
narrow around the lunyies. He wad mak a bonny corpse; I wad like
to hae the streiking and winding o' him."

"It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie," returned the
octogenarian, her companion, "that hand of woman, or of man
either, will never straught him; dead-deal will never be laid on
his back, make you your market of that, for I hae it frae a sure
hand."

"Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground then, Ailsie
Gourlay? Will he die by the sword or the ball, as his forbears hae
dune before him, mony ane o'them?"

"Ask nae mair questions about it--he'll no be graced sae far,"
replied the sage.

"I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Ailsie Gourlay. But wha
tell'd ye this?"

"Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie," answered the sibyl.
"I hae it frae a hand sure eneugh."

"But ye said ye never saw the foul thief," reiterated her
inquisitive companion.

"I hae it frae as sure a hand," said Ailsie, "and frae them that
spaed his fortune before the sark gaed ower his head."

"Hark! I hear his horse's feet riding aff," said the other; "they
dinna sound as if good luck was wi' them."

"Mak haste, sirs," cried the paralytic hag from the cottage, "and
let us do what is needfu', and say what is fitting; for, if the
dead corpse binna straughted, it will girn and thraw, and that
will fear the best o' us."

But more often Scott approaches the lesser lights of the Elizabethan
comedians, whose work is in general subject to the same laws as the
novel, and who filled their plays with whimsical creatures--

Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more,
Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage.

You cannot read through the _dramatis personae_ of one of these plays
(Witgood, Lucre, Hoard, Limber, Kix, Lamprey, Spichcock, Dampit, etc.)
without being reminded of the long list of originals that figure in the
Scotch novels; and in one case at least, Baron Bradwardine of
_Waverley_, Scott goes out of his way to compare him with a character of
Ben Jonson's. And you cannot but feel that Scott has surpassed his
models on their own ground, partly because his genius was greater and
partly because the novel is a wider and freer field for such characters
than the drama--at least when the drama is deprived of its stage
setting. But Scott's greatest advantage is due to the fact that what in
England was mainly an exaggeration of the more unsociable traits of
character seems in Scotland to reach down to the very foundation of the
popular life. His characters are not the creation of individual
eccentricities only, but spring from an inexhaustible quaintness of the
national temper. From every standpoint we are led back to consider the
greatness of the author as depending on his happy genius in finding a
voice for a rare and noteworthy phase of society.

Much of the Scotch temperament, its self-dependence, clan attachments,
cunning, its gloomy exaltations relieved at times by a wide and serene
prospect, may be traced, as Buckle has so admirably shown, to the
physical conditions of the land; and in reading the history of Scotland,
with its stories of the adventures of Wallace and Bruce and its battles
of Bannockburn and Prestonpans, it seems quite fitting that the wild
scenery of the country should be constantly associated with the deeds
of its heroes. There is something of charm in the very names of the
landscape--in the haughs, corries, straths, friths, burns, and braes.
The fascination of the Scotch lakes and valleys was one of the first to
awaken the world to an admiration of savage nature, as we may read in
Gray's letters; and Scott, from Waverley's excursion into the wild
fastnesses of highland robbers and chiefs to the lonely sea-scenes of
Zetland in _The Pirate_, has carried us through a succession of natural
pictures such as no other novelist ever conceived. And he has maintained
always that most difficult art of describing minutely enough to convey
the illusion of a particular scene and broadly enough to evoke those
general emotions which alone justify descriptive writing. Perhaps his
most notable success is the visit of Guy Mannering to Ellangowan, where
sea, sky, and land unite to form a picture of strangely luminous beauty.
He not only succeeded in exciting a new romantic interest in Scotch
scenery, but he has actually added to the market price of properties. It
is said that his descriptions are mentioned in the title deeds of
various estates as forming a part of their transmitted value.

But the scenery depicted by Scott is only the setting of a curious and
paradoxical life, and it is the light thrown on this life that lends the
chief interest to Mr. Lang's History. Owing in part to the peculiar
position and formation of the land, and in part to the strain of Celtic
blood in the Highland tribes, there was bred in the Scotch people an
unusual mingling of romance and realism, of imagination and worldly
cunning, that sets them quite apart from other races; and this
paradoxical mingling of opposite tendencies shows itself in the quality
of their politics, their religion, and in all their social manners.

Not the least interesting of Mr. Lang's chapters is that in which he
analyses the feudal chivalry of Scotland, and explains how it rested on
a more imaginative basis than in other countries; how the power of the
chief hung on unwritten rights instead of formal charters, and how the
loyalty of the clansmen was exalted to the highest pitch of personal
enthusiasm. But to complete the picture one should read Buckle's
scathing arraignment of a loyalty which was ready to sell its king and
was no purer than the faith that holds together a band of murderous
brigands. So, too, in religion the Scotch were perhaps more given to
superstition, and were more ready to sacrifice life and all else for
their belief than any other people of Europe, except the Spaniards,
while at the same time their bigotry never interfered with a vein of
caution and shrewd worldliness. There is in _Waverley_ an admirable
example at once of this paradoxical nature, and of the true basis of
Scott's strength. In the loyalism of Flora MacIvor he has attempted to
embody an ideal of the imagination not based on this national mingling
of qualities--though, of course, isolated individuals of that heroic
type may have existed in the land; and as a result he has produced a
character that leaves the reader perfectly cold and unconvinced. But the
moment Waverley comes from the MacIvors and descends to the real life of
Scotland, mark the change. We are immediately put on terra firma by the
cautious reply of Waverley's guide when asked if it is Sunday: "Could na
say just preceesely; Sunday seldom cam aboon the pass of Bally-Brough."
Consider the mixture of bigotry and worldly greed in Mr. Ebenezer
Cruikshanks, the innkeeper, who compounds for the sin of receiving a
traveller on fastday by doubling the tariff. In any other land Mr.
Ebenezer Cruikshank would have been a hypocrite and a scoundrel; in
Scotland his religious fervour is quite as genuine as his cunning; and
the very audacity of the combination carries with it the conviction of
realism.

The same contrast of qualities will be found to mark the lesser traits
of character. Consider the long list of servants and retainers with
their stiff-necked devotion and their incorrigible self-seeking. In one
of his notes Scott relates the story of a retainer who when ordered to
leave his master's service replied: "In troth, and that will I not; if
your honour disna ken when ye hae a gude servant, I ken when I hae a
gude master, and go away I will not." At another time, when his master
cried out in vexation: "John, you and I shall never sleep under the
same roof again!" the fellow calmly retorted, "Where the deil can your
honour be ganging?" In like manner the mixture of devotion and
self-seeking in that quaintest of followers, Richie Moniplies, is worth
a thousand false idealisations. To read almost on the same page his
immovable loyalty to Nigel and his brazen treachery in presenting his
own petition first to the King, is to gain at once an entrance into a
new region of psychology and to acquire a truer understanding of Scotch
history. At another time, when catechised about the alleged spirit in
Master Heriot's house, the good Moniplies gives an example of combined
superstition, scepticism, and cunning, which must be read at length--and
all the world has read it--to be appreciated. Perhaps the most useful
illustration to be gained from this same Moniplies is the strange
contrast of solemnity and humour, of reverence and familiarity,
exhibited by him. I need not repeat the description of that
"half-pedant, half-bully," nor quote the whole of his account of meeting
with the King; let it be enough to call attention to the curious
mingling of mirth and solemnity in the way he apostrophises the royal
James: "My certie, lad, times are changed since ye came fleeing down the
backstairs of auld Holyrood House, in grit fear, having your breeks in
your hand without time to put them on, and Frank Stewart, the wild Earl
of Bothwell, hard at your haunches." There is in the temper of worthy
Moniplies something wholly different from the boisterous humour of
England and from the dry laughter of America; and this is due to the
continually upcropping substratum of imagination and romance in his
character. He would resemble the grotesque seriousness of Don Quixote,
were it not for a strain of sourness and suspicion that are quite
foreign to the generous Hidalgo.

So we might follow the paradox of Scotch character through its union of
gloomy moroseness with homely affections, of unrestrained emotionalism
with cold calculation, of awesome second-sight with the cheapest
charlatanry. In the end, perhaps, all these contradictions would resolve
themselves into the one peculiar anomaly of seeing the free romance of
enthusiasm rising like a flower--a flower often enough of sinister
aspect--out of the most prosaic grossness. Certainly it is the chief
interest of Scotch history--by showing that these contradictions
actually exist in the national temperament and by explaining so far as
may be their origin--to confirm for us our belief in what may be called
the realism of Scott's romance. This is that guiding thread which leads
the weary voyager through the mists and chaotic confusions of Caledonian
annals up to light. And in that region of light what wonderful cheer for
the soul! Here, if anywhere in prose, the illusions of the imagination
may take pleasant possession of our heart, for they come with the
authority of a great national experience and walk hand in hand with the
soberest realities. Even the wild enthusiasm of a Meg Merrilies barely
awakens the voice of slumbering scepticism in the midst of our secure
conviction. And sojourning for a while in that world of strange
enchantment we seem to feel the limitations that vex our larger hopes
and hem in our wills broken down at the command of a magic voice. It is
as if that incompleteness of our nature, which the schoolmen called in
their fantastic jargon the _principium individuationis_ and ascribed to
the bondage of these material bodies, were for a time forgotten, while
we form a part of that free and complex existence so faithfully
portrayed in the Scotch novels.

SWINBURNE

It is no more than fair to confess at the outset that my knowledge of
Swinburne's work until recently was of the scantiest. The patent faults
of his style were of a kind to warn me away, and it might be equally
true that I was not sufficiently open to his peculiar excellences.
Gladly, therefore, I accepted the occasion offered by the new edition of
his Collected Poems[5] to enlarge my acquaintance with one of the
much-bruited names of the age. Nor did it seem right to trust to a hasty
impression. The six volumes of his poems, together with the plays and
critical essays, have lain on my table for several months, the
companions of many a long day of leisure and the relish thrown in
between other readings of pleasure and necessity. Yet even now I must
admit something alien to me in the man and his work; I am not sure that
I always distinguish between what is spoken with the lips only and what
springs from the poet's heart. Possibly the lack of biographical
information is the partial cause of this uncertainty, for by a curious
anomaly Swinburne, one of the most egotistical writers of the century,
has shown a fine reticence in keeping the details of his life from the
public. He was, we know, born in London, in 1837, of an ancient and
noble family, his father, as befitted one whose son was to sing of the
sea so lustily, being an admiral in the navy. His early years were
passed either at his grandfather's estate in Northumbria or at the home
of his parents in the Isle of Wight. From Eton he went, after an
interval of two years, to Balliol College, Oxford, leaving in 1860
without a degree. The story runs that he knew more Greek than his
examiners, but failed to show a proper knowledge of Scripture. If the
tale is true, he made up well in after years for the deficiency, for few
of our poets have been more steeped in the language of the Bible. In
London he came under the influence of many of the currents moving below
the surface; the spell of that master of souls, Rossetti, touched him,
and the dominance of the ardent Mazzini. Since 1879 he has lived at "The
Pines," on the edge of Wimbledon Common, with Mr. Watts-Dunton, in what
appears to be an ideal atmosphere of sympathetic friendship. Mr.
Douglas's recent indiscretion on _Theodore Watts-Dunton_ tells nothing
of the life in this scholarly retreat, but it does contain many
photogravures of the works of art, the handicraft of Rossetti largely,
which adorn the dwelling with beautiful memories.

Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life, nor do the few other
events recorded or the authentic anecdotes help us much to a more
intimate knowledge of the man. Yet he has the ambiguous gift of
awakening curiosity. Probably the first question most people ask on
laying down his _Poems and Ballads_ (that _peche de jeunesse_, as he
afterwards called it) is to know how much of the book is "true." Mr.
Swinburne has expressed a becoming contempt for "the scornful or
mournful censors who insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or
sensation attempted or achieved in it as either confessions of positive
fact or excursions of absolute fancy." One does not like to be classed
among the _scornful or mournful_, and yet I should feel much easier in
my appreciation of the _Poems and Ballads_ if I knew how far they were
based on the actual experience of the author. The reader of Swinburne
feels constantly as if his feet were swept from the earth and he were
carried into a misty mid-region where blind currents of air beat hither
and thither; he longs for some anchor to reality. In the later books
this sensation becomes almost painful, and it is because the earlier
publications, the _Atalanta_ and the first _Poems and Ballads_, contain
more of definable human emotion, whatever their relation to fact may be,
that they are likely to remain the most popular and significant of
Swinburne's works.

The publication of _Atalanta_ at the age of twenty-eight made him
famous, _Poems and Ballads_ the next year made him almost infamous. The
alarm aroused in England by _Dolores_ and _Faustine_ still vibrates in
our ears as we repeat the wonderful rhythms. The impression is deepened
by the remarkable unity of feeling that runs through these voluble
songs--the feeling of infinite satiety. The satiety of the flesh hangs
like a fatal web about the _Laus Veneris_; the satiety of disappointment
clings "with sullen savour of poisonous pain" to _The Triumph of Time_;
satiety speaks in the _Hymn to Proserpine_, with its regret for the
passing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief in the unnatural
passion of _Anactoria_--

Clothed with deep eyelids under and above--
Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love;

turns to the abominations of cruelty in _Faustine_; sings enchantingly
of rest in _The Garden of Proserpine_--

Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep,
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

Now the acquiescence of weariness may have its inner compensations, even
its sacred joys; but satiety with its torturing impotence and its
hungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the most immoral word in the
language; its unashamed display causes a kind of physical revulsion in
any wholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swinburne, when he wrote
these poems, had little knowledge or experience of the world, but, as
sometimes happens with unbalanced natures, had sucked poison from his
classical reading until his brain was in a kind of ferment. While in
this state he fell under the spell of Baudelaire's deliberate perversion
of the passions, with results which threw the innocent Philistines of
England into a fine bewilderment of horror. That the poet's own heart
was sound at core, and that his satiety was of the imagination and not
of the body, would seem evident from the abruptness with which he
passed, under a more wholesome stimulus, to a very different mood.
Unfortunately, his maturer productions are lacking in the quality of
human emotion which, however derived, pulsates in every line of the
_Poems and Ballads_. There is a certain contagion in such a song as
_Dolores_. Taking all things into consideration, and with all one's
repulsion for its substance, that poem is still the most effective of
Swinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blended emotion and music. It
is a personification of the mood which produced the whole book, a cry
of the tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It is filled with regret
for a past of riotous pleasure; it pants with the lust of blood; it is
gorgeous and heavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the swaying of
bodies drunken with voluptuousness:

Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;
Thou art fed with perpetual breath,
And alive after infinite changes,
And fresh from the kisses of death;
Of languors rekindled and rallied,
Of barren delights and unclean,
Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid
And poisonous queen.

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them, and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice;
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,
These crown and caress thee and chain,
O splendid and sterile Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

No doubt you will find here in germ all that was to mar the poet's later
work. The rhythm lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked
out of the rapid flux of images; the thought has no sure control over
the words. Dolores is almost in the same breath the queen of languors
and raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostile criticism might find
in the stanzas a succession of contradictions. Compare the poem with the
few lines in _Jenny_ where Rossetti has expressed the same idea of
man's inveterate lust:

Like a toad within a stone
Seated while Time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For Man's transgression at the first--

and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of
mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the
fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the
intoxication of words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this
poem of _Dolores_ there does arise in the end a very real and memorable
mood--real after the fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by
painting or sculpture.

The _Poems and Ballads_ are splendid but _malsain_; they are impressive
and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly
or indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on passing
to the _Songs Before Sunrise_ (published in 1871) is extraordinary.
During the five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master
passions of Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating
effect--the passion of Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforth
the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an
obsession. Now, heaven forbid that one should say or think anything in
despite of Liberty! The mere name conjures up recollections of glory
and pride, and in it the hopes of the future are involved. And yet the
very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly liable to misuse. To
this man it means one thing, and to another another, and many might cry
out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked word, and I
followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly nothing
is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing
those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like,
abstracted of very definite events and very precise imagery. To
Swinburne the sound of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of
frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the poems on this theme
are lifted up with a superb and genuine lyric enthusiasm. The _Eve of
Revolution_, for instance, with which the _Songs Before Sunrise_ open,
rings with the stirring noise of trumpets:

I hear the midnight on the mountains cry
With many tongues of thunders, and I hear
Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky
With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,
And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,
Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear....

But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their
meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the
worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer hymns to liberty are
nearly unreadable--at least if any one can endure to the end of _A Song
of Italy_, it is not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that
came out year after year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of
liberty, when it is not empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too
often it is Kipling's gross idolatry of England uttered in a kind of
hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of estrangement between
England and France to speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching
Still from the chain they crave"; and one needed not to sympathise with
the Boers in the South African war to feel something like disgust at
Swinburne's abuse:

....... the truth whose witness now draws near
To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam,
Down out of life.

Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and
Miltonic indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to
Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."

I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner
and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast
amusement of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag
and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and
acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. "The poet's got the best of
it, as usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in
Cockspur Street, and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which,
whatever the distance, he invariably remunerates with one shilling.
Consequently, when, as to-day, it's a case of two miles beyond the
radius, there's the devil's own row; but in the matter of imprecation
the poet is more than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of it,
gallops off as though he had been rated by Beelzebub himself." Really,
'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a comment on not a few of
Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty.

Not less noble in significance is that other word, the sea, which
Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the
weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of
course only follow the best traditions of English poetry from _Beowulf_
to _The Seven Seas_ of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor
is it the world of water alone that dominates his imagination, but with
it the winds and the panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in
the _Poems and Ballads_ there is a hint of the sympathy between the poet
and this realm of water and air. One of the finest passages in _The
Triumph of Time_ is that which begins:

I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.

But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for
the salt spray of ocean, and it is only with the _Songs Before Sunrise_,
with the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the
wide sea "that makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill,
fierce climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some
wave-tossed mariner who should take refuge in the cave of Aeolus; at
least he is forced to admire the genius that presides over the gusty
concourse:

Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro
Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras
Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.
Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis
Circum claustra fremunt.

The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a
picture of Swinburne in the _Recollections_ of the late Henry Treffry
Dunn which almost personifies him as the storm-king:

It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing twilight,
heavy thunder-clouds were rolling up. The door opened and
Swinburne entered. He appeared in an abstracted state, and for a
few minutes sat silent. Soon, something I had said anent his last
poem set his thoughts loose. Like the storm that had just broken,
so he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the storm
increased, he got more and more excited and carried away by the
impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a torrent of splendid verse
that seemed like some grand air with the distant peals of thunder
as an intermittent accompaniment. And still the storm waxed more
violent, and the vivid flashes of lightning became more frequent.
But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst he paced up
and down the room, pouring out bursts of passionate declamation,
faint electric sparks played round the wavy masses of his
luxuriant hair.... Amidst the rattle of the thunder he still
continued to pour out his thoughts, his voice now sinking low and
sad, now waxing louder as the storm listed.

The scattered poems in his later books that rise above the _Poems and
Ballads_ with a kind of grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part
filled with echoes of wind and water. That haunting picture of crumbling
desolation, _A Forsaken Garden_, lies "at the sea-down's edge between
windward and lee." One of the few poems that seem to contain the cry of
a real experience, _At a Month's End_, combines this aspect of nature
admirably with human emotion:

Silent we went an hour together,
Under grey skies by waters white.
_Our hearts were full of windy weather,
Clouds and blown stars and broken light._

And the sensation left from a reading of _Tristram of Lyonesse_ is of a
vast phantasmagoria, in which the beating of waves and the noise of
winds, the light of dawns breaking on the water, and the floating web of
stars, are jumbled together in splendid but inextricable confusion. So
the coming of love upon Iseult, as she sails over the sea with
Tristram, takes this magnificent comparison:

And as the august great blossom of the dawn
Burst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawn
Seemed on the fiery water a flower afloat,
So as a fire the mighty morning smote
Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour
Her whole soul's one great mystical red flower
Burst....

Further on the long confession of her passion at Tintagel, while
Tristram has gone over-sea to that other Iseult, will be broken by those
thundering couplets:

And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind,
And as a breaking battle was the sea.

But even to allude to all the passages of this kind in the poem--the
swimming of Tristram, his rowing, and the other scenes--would fill an
essay. In the end it must be confessed that this monotony of tone grows
fatiguing. The rhythmic grace of the metre is like a bubble blown into
the air, floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence--but when it
touches earth, it bursts. There lies the fatal weakness of all this
frenzy over liberty and this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; it has
no basis in the homely facts of the heart. Read the account of Tristram
and Iseult in the wilderness bower; it is all very beautiful, but you
wonder why it leaves you so cold. There is not a single detail to fix an
image of the place in the mind, not a word to denote that we are
dealing with the passion of individual human beings. Then turn to the
same episode in the old poem of Gottfried von Strassburg; read the scene
where the forsaken King Mark, through a window of their forest grotto,
beholds the lovers lying asleep with the sword of Tristram stretched
between them:

He gazed on his heart's delight, Iseult, and deemed that never
before had he seen her so fair. She lay sleeping, with a flush as
of mingled roses on her cheek, and her red and glowing lips apart;
a little heated by her morning wandering in the dewy meadow and by
the spring. On her head was a chaplet woven of clover. A ray of
sunlight from the little window fell upon her face, and as Mark
looked upon her he longed to kiss her, for never had she seemed so
fair and so lovable as now. And when he saw how the sunlight fell
upon her he feared lest it harm her, or awaken her, so he took
grass and leaves and flowers, and covered the window therewith,
and spake a blessing on his love and commended her to God, and
went his way, weeping.

It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, but it is good also to
have the feet well planted on earth. If another example of Swinburne's
abstraction from human interest were desired, one might take that
rhapsody of the wind-beaten waters and "land that is lonelier than
ruin," called _By the North Sea_. The picture of desolate and barren
waste is one of the most powerful creations in his later works (it was
published in 1880), yet there is still something wanting to stamp the
impression into the mind. You turn from it, perhaps, to Browning's
similar description in _Childe Roland_ and the reason is at once clear.
You come upon the line: "One stiff, blind horse, his every bone
a-stare," and pause. There is in Swinburne's poem no single touch which
arrests the attention in this way, concentrating the effect, as it were,
to a burning point, and bringing out the symbolic relation to human
life. Yet I cannot pass from this subject without noticing what may
appear a paradoxical phase of Swinburne's character. Only when he lowers
his gaze from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to the
instinctive ways of little children does his art become purely human. It
would be easy to select a full dozen of the poems dealing with
child-life and the tender love inspired by a child that touch the heart
with their pure and chastened beauty. I should feel that an essential
element of his art were left unremarked if I failed to quote some such
examples as these two roundels on _First Footsteps_ and a _A Baby's
Death_:

A little way, more soft and sweet
Than fields aflower with May,
A babe's feet, venturing, scarce complete
A little way.

Eyes full of dawning day
Look up for mother's eyes to meet,
Too blithe for song to say.

Glad as the golden spring to greet
Its first live leaflet's play,
Love, laughing, leads the little feet
A little way.

* * * * *

The little feet that never trod
Earth, never strayed in field or street,
What hand leads upward back to God
The little feet?

A rose in June's most honied heat,
When life makes keen the kindling sod,
Was not more soft and warm and sweet.

Their pilgrimage's period
A few swift moons have seen complete
Since mother's hands first clasped and shod
The little feet.

Despite the artificiality of the French form and a kind of revolving
dizziness of movement, one catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of
feeling not unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! that such long
years." Swinburne himself might not relish the comparison, which is none
the less just.

It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large body of work in a
phrase, yet with Swinburne we shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a
characterisation in the one word _motion_. Both the beauty and the fault
of his extraordinary rhythms are exposed in that term, and certainly his
first claim to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations. There had
been nothing in English comparable to the steady swell, like the waves
of a subsiding sea, in the lines of _Atalanta_ and the _Poems and
Ballads_. They brought a new sensuous pleasure into our poetry. But with
time this cadenced movement developed into a kind of giddy race which
too often left the reader belated and breathless. Little tricks of
composition, such as a repeated caesura after the seventh syllable of the
pentameter, were employed to heighten the speed. Moreover, the longer
lines in many of the poems are not organic, but consist of two or more
short lines huddled together, the effect being to eliminate the natural
resting-places afforded by the sense. And occasionally his metre is
merely wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which with its
combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly
irritating:

Hills and _valleys_ where April _rallies_ his radiant squadron of
flowers and _birds_,
Steep strange _beaches_ and lustrous _reaches_ of fluctuant sea that
the land _engirds_,
Fields and _downs_ that the sunrise _crowns_ with life diviner than
lives in _words_,--

a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle.

And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of English poets, it is due in
large part to this same element of motion. A poem may move swiftly and
still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as the thought is simple and
concrete; witness the works of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, the
thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection, so long as the
metre forces a continual pause in the reading; witness Browning. Now, no
one will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages with thought; it is
not there the obscurity lies. The difficulty is with the number and the
peculiarly vague quality of his metaphors. Let me illustrate what I mean
by this vagueness. I open one of the volumes at random and my eye rests
on this line in _A Channel Passage_:

As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life
or of sleep.

If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his
mind, he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open to
_Walter Savage Landor_ and find this passage marked:

High from his throne in heaven Simonides,
Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears
That the everlasting sun of all time sees
All golden, molten from the forge of years.

The sentiment is simple enough, and it might be sufficient to feel the
force of this in a general way, were it not that the metaphorical
expression almost compels one to pause and form an image of the whole
before proceeding. Such an image is, no doubt, possible; but the
mingling of abstract and concrete terms makes the act of visualisation
slow and painful. At the same time the rhythm is swift and continuous,
so that any pause in the reading demands a deliberate effort of the
will. The result is a form of obscurity which in many of the poems is
almost prohibitive for an indolent man--and are not the best readers
always a little indolent? And there is another habit--trick, one might
say--which increases this vagueness of metaphor in a curious manner.
Constantly he uses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and then repeats
it as an abstract personification. I find an example to hand in the
stanzas written _At a Dog's Grave_:

The shadow shed round those we love shines bright
As _love's_ own face.

It is only a mannerism such as another, but it recurs with sufficient
frequency to have an appreciable effect on the mind.

Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were only an occasional appearance,
the difficulty would be slight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderable
portion of Swinburne's work is made up of a stream of half-visualised
abstractions that crowd upon one another with the motion of clouds
driven below the moon. He is more like Walt Whitman in this respect than
any other poet in the language. Whitman is concrete and human and very
earthly, but, with this difference, there is in both writers the same
thronging procession of images which flit by without allowing the reader
to concentrate his attention upon a single impression; they are both
poets of vast and confused motion. Swinburne is notable for his want of
humour, yet he is keen enough to see how close this flux of
high-sounding words lies to the absurd. In the present collected edition
of his poems he has included _The Heptalogia, or Seven against Sense_, a
series of parodies which does not spare his own mannerisms. Some
scandalised Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be told that
_Nephelidia_ was a parody:

Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch
on the temples of terror,
Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead
who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death:
Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional
exquisite error,
Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by
beatitude's breath.

Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style are there--the long
breathless lines with their flowing dactyls or anapaests, the unabashed
alliteration, the stream of half-visualised images, the trick of
following an epithet with its own abstract substantive, the sense of
motion, and above all the accumulation of words. Of this last trait of
verbosity I have said nothing, for the reason that it is too notorious
to need mentioning. It may not, however, be superfluous to point out a
little more precisely the special form his tautology assumes. He is
never more graphic and nearer to nature than when he describes the
ecstasy of swimming at sea. He is himself passionately fond of the
exercise, and once at least was almost drowned in the Channel. Let us
take, then, a stanza from _A Swimmer's Dream_:

All the strength of the waves that perish
Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs,
Sighs for love of the life they cherish,
Laughs to know that it lives and dies,
Dies for joy of its life, and lives
Thrilled with joy that its brief death gives--
Death whose laugh or whose breath forgives
Change that bids it subside and rise.

Pass the fault of beginning with the abstraction "strength"--the first
two lines are graphic and reproduce a real sensation; the second two
lines are an explanatory repetition; the last four dissolve both image
and emotion into a flood of words. It is the common procedure in the
later poems; it renders the regular dramas (with the exception of the
earlier _Chastelard_) almost intolerably tedious.

And what is the impression of the man himself that remains after living
with his works for several months? The frankness with which he parodies
his own eccentricities might seem to indicate a becoming modesty, and
yet that is scarcely the word that rises first to the lips. Indeed, when
I read in the very opening of the Dedicatory Epistle that precedes the
present edition of his poems such a statement as that "he finds nothing
that he could wish to cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page he has
ever laid before his reader," I was prepared for a character quite the
contrary of modest, and as I turned page after page, there became fixed
in my mind a feeling that I should hesitate to call personal
repulsion--a feeling of annoyance at least, for which no explanation was
present. Only when I reached _Atalanta in Calydon_, in the fourth
volume, did the reason of this become evident. That poem, exquisite in
many ways, is filled with talk of time and gods, of love and hate, of
life and death, of all high-sounding words that lend gravity to poetry,
and yet in the end it is itself light and not grave. The very needless
reiteration of these words, their bandying from verse to verse, deprives
them of impressiveness. No, a true poet who respects the sacredness of
noble ideas, who cherishes some awe for the mysteries, does not buffet
them about as a shuttlecock; he uses them sparingly and only when the
thought rises of necessity to those heights. There is a lack of
emotional breeding, almost an indecency, in Swinburne's easy familiarity
with these great things of the spirit.

And this judgment is confirmed by turning to his prose. I trust it is
not prejudice, but after a while the vociferous and endless praise of
Victor Hugo in his essays had a curious effect upon me. I began to ask:
Is the critic really thinking of Hugo alone, or is half of this frenzied
adulation meant for his own artistic methods? "Malignity and meanness,
platitude and perversity, decrepitude of cankered intelligence and
desperation of universal rancor," he exclaims against Sainte-Beuve; and
over the other critics of his idol he cries out, "The lazy malignity of
envious dullness is as false and fatuous as it is common and easy." Can
one avoid the surmise that he has more than Hugo to avenge in such
tirades? It is the same with every one who is opposed to his own notions
of art. Of Walt Whitman it is: "The dirty, clumsy paws of a harper whose
plectrum is a muckrake." Of a French classicist: "It is the business of
a Nisard to pass judgment and to bray." And of those who intimate (he is
ostensibly defending Rossetti) that beauty and power of expression can
accord with emptiness or sterility of matter: "This flattering unction
the very foolishest of malignants will hardly in this case be able to
lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls his soul." Sometimes, I
admit, this manner of invective rises to a sublimity of fury that sounds
like nothing so much as a combination of Carlyle and Shelley. For
example: "The affection was never so serious as to make it possible for
the most malignant imbecile to compare or to confound him [Jowett] with
such morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead
Sea as Mark Pattison, or such renascent blossoms of the Italian
renascence as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is
now in Aretino's bosom." It's not criticism; it's not fair to Mark
Pattison or to John Addington Symonds, but it is sublime. It is a storm
of wind only, but it leaves a devastated track.

Enough has been said to indicate the trait of character that prevails
through these pages of eulogy and vituperation. It is not nice to apply
so crass a word as _conceit_ to one who undoubtedly belongs to the
immortals of our pantheon, yet the expression forces itself upon me.
Listen to another of his outbursts, this time against Matthew Arnold:
"His inveterate and invincible Philistinism, his full community of
spirit and faith, in certain things of import, with the vulgarest
English mind!" Does not the quality begin to define itself more exactly?
There is a phrase they use in France, _epater le bourgeois_, of those
artistic souls who contrast themselves by a kind of ineffable contempt
with commonplace humanity, and who take pleasure in tweaking the nose,
so to speak, of the amiable plebeian. Have a care, gentlemen! The
Philistine has a curious trick of revenging himself in the long run. For
my own part, when it comes to a breach between the poetical and the
prosaic, I take my place submissively with the latter. There is at least
a humble safety in retaining one's pleasure in certain things of import
with the vulgarest English mind, and if it were obligatory to choose
between them (as, happily, it is not) I would surrender the wind-swept
rhapsodies of Swinburne for the homely conversation of Whittier.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Probably the first impression one gets from reading the _Complete
Poetical Works_ of Christina Rossetti, now collected and edited by her
brother, Mr. W. M. Rossetti,[6] is that she wrote altogether too much,
and that it was a doubtful service to her memory to preserve so many
poems purely private in their nature. The editor, one thinks, might well
have shown himself more "reverent of her strange simplicity." For page
after page we are in the society of a spirit always refined and
exquisite in sentiment, but without any guiding and restraining artistic
impulse; she never drew to the shutters of her soul, but lay open to
every wandering breath of heaven. In comparison with the works of the
more creative poets her song is like the continuous lisping of an aeolian
harp beside the music elicited by cunning fingers. And then, suddenly,
out of this sweet monotony, moved by some stronger, clearer breeze of
inspiration, there sounds a strain of wonderful beauty and flawless
perfection, unmatched in its own kind in English letters. An anonymous
purveyor of anecdotes has recently told how one of these more exquisite
songs called forth the enthusiasm of Swinburne. It was just after the
publication of _Goblin Market and Other Poems_, and in a little company
of friends that erratic poet and critic started to read aloud from the
volume. Turning first to the devotional paraphrase which begins with
"Passing away, saith the World, passing away," he chanted the lines in
his own emphatic manner, then laid the book down with a vehement
gesture. Presently he took it up again, and a second time read the poem
through, even more impressively. "By God!" he exclaimed at the end,
"that's one of the finest things ever written!"

Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day,
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey,
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:
With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.
Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day:
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.

And Swinburne, somewhat contrary to his wont, was right. Purer
inspiration, less troubled by worldly motives, than these verses cannot
be found. Nor would it be difficult to discover in their brief compass
most of the qualities that lend distinction to Christina Rossetti's
work. Even her monotone, which after long continuation becomes monotony,
affects one here as a subtle device heightening the note of subdued
fervour and religious resignation; the repetition of the rhyming vowel
creates the feeling of a secret expectancy cherished through the
weariness of a frustrate life. If there is any excuse for publishing the
many poems that express the mere unlifted, unvaried prayer of her heart,
it is because their monotony may prepare the mind for the strange
artifice of this solemn chant. But such a preparation demands more
patience than a poet may justly claim from the ordinary reader. Better
would be a volume of selections from her works, including a number of
poems of this character. It would stand, in its own way, supreme in
English literature,--as pure and fine an expression of the feminine
genius as the world has yet heard.

It is, indeed, as the flower of strictly feminine genius that Christina
Rossetti should be read and judged. She is one of a group of women who
brought this new note into Victorian poetry,--Louisa Shore, Jean
Ingelow, rarely Mrs. Browning, and, I may add, Mrs. Meynell. She is like
them, but of a higher, finer strain than they ([Greek: kalai de te
pasai]), and I always think of her as of her brother's Blessed Damozel,
circled with a company of singers, yet holding herself aloof in chosen
loneliness of passion. She, too, has not quite ceased to yearn toward
earth:

And still she bowed herself and stooped
Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.

I have likened the artlessness of much of her writing to the sweet
monotony of an aeolian harp; the comparison returns as expressing also
the purely feminine spirit of her inspiration. There is in her a passive
surrender to the powers of life, a religious acquiescence, which wavers
between a plaintive pathos and a sublime exultation of faith. The great
world, with its harsh indifference for the weak, passes over her as a
ruinous gale rushes over a sequestered wood-flower; she bows her head,
humbled but not broken, nor ever forgetful of her gentle mission,--

And strong in patient weakness till the end.

She bends to the storm, yet no one, not the great mystics nor the
greater poets who cry out upon the sound and fury of life, is more
constantly impressed by the vanity and fleeting insignificance of the
blustering power, or more persistently looks for consolation and joy
from another source. But there is a difference. Read the masculine poets
who have heard this mystic call of the spirit, and you feel yourself in
the presence of a strong will that has grasped the world, and, finding
it insufficient, deliberately casts it away; and there is no room for
pathetic regret in their ruthless determination to renounce. But this
womanly poet does not properly renounce at all, she passively allows the
world to glide away from her. The strength of her genius is endurance:

She stands there like a beacon through the night,
A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is--
She stands alone, a wonder deathly-white:
She stands there patient, nerved with inner might,
Indomitable in her feebleness,
Her face and will athirst against the light.

It is characteristic of her feminine disposition that the loss of the
world should have come to her first of all in the personal relation of
love. And here we must signalise the chief service of the editor toward
his sister. It was generally known in a vague way, indeed it was easy to
surmise as much from her published work, that Christina Rossetti bore
with her always the sadness of unfulfilled affection. In the
introductory Memoir her brother has now given a sufficiently detailed
account of this matter to remove all ambiguity. I am not one to wish
that the reserves and secret emotions of an author should be displayed
for the mere gratification of the curious; but in this case the
revelation would seem to be justified as a needed explanation of poems
which she herself was willing to publish. Twice, it appears, she gave
her love, and both times drew back in a kind of tremulous awe from the
last step. The first affair began in 1848, before she was eighteen, and
ran its course in about two years. The man was one James Collinson, an
artist of mediocre talent who had connected himself with the
Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood. He was originally a Protestant, but had
become a Roman Catholic. Then, as Christina refused to ally herself to
one of that faith, he compliantly abandoned Rome for the Church of
England. His conscience, however, which seems from all accounts to have
been of a flabby consistency, troubled him in the new faith, and he soon
reverted to Catholicism. Christina then drew back from him finally. It
is not so easy to understand why she refused the second suitor, with
whom she became intimately acquainted about 1860, and whom she loved in
her own retiring fashion until the day of her death. This was Charles
Bagot Cayley, a brother of the famous Cambridge mathematician, himself a
scholar and in a small way a poet. Some idea of the man may be obtained
from a notice of him written by Mr. W. M. Rossetti for the _Athenaeum_
after his death. "A more complete specimen than Mr. Charles Cayley,"
says Mr. Rossetti, "of the abstracted scholar in appearance and
manner--the scholar who constantly lives an inward and unmaterial life,
faintly perceptive of external facts and appearances--could hardly be
conceived. He united great sweetness to great simplicity of character,
and was not less polite than unworldly." One might suppose that such a
temperament was peculiarly fitted to join with that of the secluded
poetess, and so, to judge from her many love poems, it actually was. Of
her own heart or of his there seems to have been no doubt in her mind.
Even in her most rapturous visions of heaven, like the yearning cry of
the Blessed Damozel, the memory of that stilled passion often breaks
out:

How should I rest in Paradise,
Or sit on steps of heaven alone?
If Saints and Angels spoke of love,
Should I not answer from my throne,
Have pity upon me, ye my friends,
For I have heard the sound thereof?

She seems even not to have been unfamiliar with the hope of joy, and I
would persuade myself that her best-known lyric of gladness, "My heart
is like a singing-bird," was inspired by the early dawning of this
passion. But the hope and the joy soon passed away and left her only the
solemn refrain of acquiescence: "Then I answered: Yea." Her brother can
give no sufficient explanation of this refusal on her part to accept the
happiness almost within her hand, though he hints at lack of religious
sympathy between the two. Some inner necessity of sorrow and
resignation, one almost thinks, drew her back in both cases, some
perception that the real treasure of her heart lay not in this world:

A voice said, "Follow, follow": and I rose
And followed far into the dreamy night,
Turning my back upon the pleasant light.
It led me where the bluest water flows,
And would not let me drink: where the corn grows
I dared not pause, but went uncheered by sight
Or touch: until at length in evil plight
It left me, wearied out with many woes.
Some time I sat as one bereft of sense:
But soon another voice from very far
Called, "Follow, follow": and I rose again.
Now on my night has dawned a blessed star:
Kind steady hands my sinking steps sustain,
And will not leave me till I go from hence.

It might seem that here was a spirit of renunciation akin to that of the
more masculine mystics; indeed, a great many of her poems are,
unconsciously I presume, almost a paraphrase of that recurring theme of
the Imitation: "Nolle consolari ab aliqua creatura," and again: "Amore
igitur Creatoris, amorem hominis superavit; et pro humano solatio,
divinum beneplacitum magis elegit." She, too, was unwilling to find
consolation in any creature, and turned from the love of man to the love
of the Creator; yet a little reading of her exquisite hymns will show
that this renunciation has more the nature of surrender than of
deliberate choice:

He broke my will from day to day;
He read my yearnings unexprest,
And said them nay.

The world is withheld from her by a power above her will, and always
this power stands before her in that peculiarly personal form which it
is wont to assume in the feminine mind. Her faith is a mere transference
to heaven of a love that terrifies her in its ruthless earthly
manifestation; and the passion of her life is henceforth a yearning
expectation of the hour when the Bridegroom shall come and she shall
answer, Yea. Nor is the earthly source of this love forgotten; it abides
with her as a dream which often is not easily distinguished from its
celestial transmutation:

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

It is this perfectly passive attitude toward the powers that command her
heart and her soul--a passivity which by its completeness assumes the
misguiding semblance of a deliberate determination of life--that makes
her to me the purest expression in English of the feminine genius. I
know that many would think this pre-eminence belongs to Mrs. Browning.
They would point out the narrowness of Christina Rossetti's range, and
the larger aspects of woman's nature, neglected by her, which inspire
some of her rival's best-known poems. To me, on the contrary, it is the
very scope attempted by Mrs. Browning that prevents her from holding the
place I would give to Christina Rossetti. So much of Mrs. Browning--her
political ideas, her passion for reform, her scholarship--simply carries
her into the sphere of the masculine poets, where she suffers by an
unfair comparison. She would be a better and less irritating writer
without these excursions into a field for which she was not entirely
fitted. The uncouthness that so often mars her language is partly due to
an unreconciled feud between her intellect and her heart. She had
neither a woman's wise passivity nor a man's controlling will. Even
within the range of strictly feminine powers her genius is not simple
and typical. And here I must take refuge in a paradox which is like
enough to carry but little conviction. Nevertheless, it is the truth. I
mean to say that probably most women will regard Mrs. Browning as the
better type of their sex, whereas to men the honour will seem to belong
to Miss Rossetti; and that the judgment of a man in this matter is more
conclusive than a woman's. This is a paradox, I admit, yet its solution
is simple. Women will judge a poetess by her inclusion of the larger
human nature, and will resent the limiting of her range to the qualities
that we look upon as peculiarly feminine. The passion of Mrs. Browning,
her attempt to control her inspiration to the demands of a shaping
intellect, her questioning and answering, her larger aims, in a word her
effort to create,--all these will be set down to her credit by women who
are as appreciative of such qualities as men, and who will not be
annoyed by the false tone running through them. Men, on the contrary,
are apt, in accepting a woman's work or in creating a female character,
to be interested more in the traits and limitations which distinguish
her from her masculine complement. They care more for the _idea_ of
woman, and less for woman as merely a human being. Thus, for example, I
should not hesitate to say that in this ideal aspect Thackeray's
heroines are more womanly than George Eliot's,--though I am aware of
the ridicule to which such an opinion lays me open; and for the same
reason I hold that Christina Rossetti is a more complete exemplar of
feminine genius, and, as being more perfect in her own sphere, a better
poet than Mrs. Browning. That disconcerting sneer of Edward
FitzGerald's, which so enraged Robert Browning, would never have
occurred to him, I think, in the case of Miss Rossetti.

There is a curious comment on this contrast in the introduction to
Christina Rossetti's _Monna Innominata_, a sonnet-sequence in which she
tells her own story in the supposed person of an early Italian lady.
"Had the great poetess of our own day and nation," she says, "only been
unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to
bequeath to us, in lieu of the _Portuguese Sonnets_, an inimitable
'donna innominata' drawn not from fancy, but from feeling, and worthy to
occupy, a niche beside Beatrice and Laura." Now this sonnet-sequence of
Miss Rossetti's is far from her best work, and holds a lower rank in
every way than that passionate self-revelation of Mrs. Browning's; yet
to read these confessions of the two poets together is a good way to get
at the division between their spirits. In Miss Rossetti's sonnets all
those feminine traits I have dwelt on are present to a marked, almost an
exaggerated, degree. They are harmonious within themselves, and filled
with a quiet ease; only the higher inspiration is lacking to them in
comparison with her _Passing Away_, and other great lyrics. In Mrs.
Browning, on the contrary, one cannot but feel a disturbing element. The
very tortuousness of her language, the straining to render her emotion
in terms of the intellect, introduces a quality which is out of harmony
with the ground theme of feminine surrender. More than that, this
submission to love, if looked at more closely, is itself in large part
such as might proceed from a man as well as from a woman, so that there
results an annoying confusion of masculine and feminine passion. Take,
for instance, the twenty-second of the _Portuguese Sonnets_, one of the
most perfect in the series:

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, drawing nigher and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curved point,--What bitter wrong
Can earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us, and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved,--where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

That is noble verse, undoubtedly. The point is that it might just as
well have been written by a man to a woman as the contrary; it would,
for example, fit perfectly well into Dante Gabriel Rossetti's _House of
Life_. There is here no passivity of soul; the passion is not that of
acquiescence, but of determination to press to the quick of love. Only,
perhaps, a certain falsetto in the tone (if the meaning of that word may
be so extended) shows that, after all, it was written by a woman, who in
adopting the masculine pitch loses something of fineness and
exquisiteness.

A single phrase of the sonnet, that "deep, dear silence," links it in my
mind with one of Christina Rossetti's not found in the _Monna
Innominata_, but expressing the same spirit of resignation. It is
entitled simply _Rest_:

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies,
Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth
Of all that irked her from the hour of birth;
_With stillness that is almost Paradise.
Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,
Silence more musical than any song;_
Even her very heart has ceased to stir:
Until the morning of Eternity
Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be;
And when she wakes she will not think it long.

Am I misguided in thinking that in this stillness, this silence more
musical than any song, the feminine heart speaks with a simplicity and
consummate purity such as I quite fail to hear in the _Portuguese
Sonnets_, admired as those sonnets are? Nor could one, perhaps, find in
all Christina Rossetti's poems a single line that better expresses the
character of her genius than these magical words: "With stillness that
is almost Paradise." That is the mood which, with the passing away of
love, never leaves her; that is her religion; her acquiescent Yea, to
the world and the soul and to God. Into that region of rapt stillness it
seems almost a sacrilege to penetrate with inquisitive, critical mind;
it is like tearing away the veil of modesty. I will not attempt to bring
out the beauty of her mood by comparing it with that of the more
masculine quietists, who reach out and take the kingdom of Heaven by
storm, and whose prayer is, in the words of Tennyson:

Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.

It will be better to quote one other poem, perhaps her most perfect work
artistically, and to pass on:

UP-HILL

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

The culmination of her pathetic weariness is always this cry for rest, a
cry for supreme acquiescence in the will of Heaven, troubled by no
personal volition, no desire, no emotion, save only love that waits for
blessed absorption. Her latter years became what St. Teresa called a
long "prayer of quiet"; and her brother's record of her secluded life in
the refuge of his home, and later in her own house on Torrington Square,
reads like the saintly story of a cloistered nun. It might be said of
her, as of one of the fathers, that she needed not to pray, for her life
was an unbroken communion with God. And yet that is not all. It is a
sign of her utter womanliness that envy for the common affections of
life was never quite crushed in her heart. Now and then through this
monotony of resignation there wells up a sob of complaint, a note not
easy, indeed, to distinguish from that _amari aliquid_ of jealousy,
which Thackeray, cynically, as some think, always left at the bottom of
his gentlest feminine characters. The fullest expression of this feeling
is in one of her longer poems, _The Lowest Room_, which contrasts the
life of two sisters, one of whom chooses the ordinary lot of woman with
home and husband and children, while the other learns, year after
tedious year, the consolation of lonely patience. The spirit of the poem
is not entirely pleasant. The resurgence of personal envy is a little
disconcerting; and the only comfort to be derived from it is the proof
that under different circumstances Christina Rossetti might have given
expression to the more ordinary lot of contented womanhood as perfectly
as she sings the pathos and hope of the cloistered life. Had that first
voice, which led her "where the bluest water flows," suffered her also
to quench the thirst of her heart, had not that second voice summoned
her to follow, this might have been. But literature, I think, would have
lost in her gain. As it is, we must recognise that the vision of
fulfilled affection and of quiet home joys still troubled her, in her
darker hours, with a feeling of embittered regret. Two or three of the
stanzas of _The Lowest Room_ even evoke a reminiscence of that scene in
Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_, where the "shrill and lamentable
cry" breaks through the silence of the shadowy congregation:

In all eternity I had one chance,
One few years' term of gracious human life,
The splendours of the intellect's advance,
The sweetness of the home with babes and wife.

But if occasionally this residue of bitterness in Christina Rossetti
recalls the more acrid genius of James Thomson, yet a comparison of the
two poets (and such a comparison is not fantastic, however unexpected it
may appear) would set the feminine character of our subject in a
peculiarly vivid light. Both were profoundly moved by the evanescence of
life, by the deceitfulness of pleasure, while both at times, Thomson
almost continually, were troubled by the apparent content of those who
rested in these joys of the world. Both looked forward longingly to the
consummation of peace. In his call to _Our Lady of Oblivion_ Thomson
might seem to be speaking for both, only in a more deliberately
metaphorical style:

Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep;
Down, down, far hidden in thy duskiest cave;
While all the clamorous years above me sweep
Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave
On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance,
A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance
The restful rapture of the inviolate grave.

But the roads by which the two would reach this "silence more musical
than any song" were utterly different. With an intellect at once
mathematical and constructive, Thomson built out of his personal
bitterness and despair a universe corresponding to his own mood, a
philosophy of atheis

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