	Leslie Stephen: Studies of a Biographer, vol. 2
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<bastard title>

	STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

<bastard title, verso>

	_All rights reserved_

<title page>

	STUDIES OF
	A BIOGRAPHER

	_By_ LESLIE STEPHEN

	[[ DESORMAIS floral device ]]

	VOL. II

	LONDON
	_DUCKWORTH and CO._
	3 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.
	1898

<title page, verso>

	Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty

<table of contents>

	CONTENTS
					   PAGE
	THE STORY OF SCOTT’S RUIN .  .  .  <? p1>
	THE IMPORTATION OF GERMAN .  .  .  <? p38>
	MATTHEW ARNOLD   .  .  .  .  .  .  <? p76>
	JOWETT’S LIFE .  .  .  .  .  .  .  <? p123>
	OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES  .  .  .  .  <? p160>
	LIFE OF TENNYSON .  .  .  .  .  .  <? p196>
	PASCAL  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  <? p241>

<text>
	STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

<chapter>
	THE STORY OF SCOTT’S RUIN<! p1>

Mr. Andrew Lang, in his _Life of J. G. Lockhart,_
has succeeded, in spite of the want of
adequate materials, in drawing a most interesting
portrait. Lockhart’s _Life of Scott,_ though it
made all readers love the subject, did not persuade
every one to love the author. The man,
indeed, who could display such reverent and
loyal affection was certainly lovable; and yet
he contrived to keep his own fine qualities in
the background. Lockhart, in truth, was one
of the men who are predestined to be generally
misunderstood. He was an intellectual aristocrat,
fastidious and over-sensitive, with very fine
perceptions, but endowed with rather too hearty
a scorn of fools as well as of folly. Circumstances
had tempted him in early youth to give
free utterance to his contempt, and occasionally,
moreover, to forget that courtesy is due even
to vulgar antagonists. In later life, the shyness,
due to a sensitive nature, was mistaken, as is so
often the case, for supercilious pride, and the
unwillingness to wear his heart on his sleeve
for coldness and want of sympathy. Such men
have to be content with scanty appreciation from
outside, and Lockhart had to pass for an incarnation
of the cynical variety of Toryism. Mr.
Lang, it is to be hoped, has appealed successfully
from the erroneous judgment hitherto too
often passed. There is, however, one point
upon which I am forced to think that he has
been a little too lenient. It concerns Lockhart’s
controversy<*> in regard to the causes of Scott’s

<footnote>
  _The Ballantyne Humbug Handled, etc._ (1839) is an answer to a
‘refutation’ of Lockhart’s statements in the _Life_ by Ballantyne’s
trustees. They made a ‘reply,’ to which Lockhart gave no answer.
</>

financial difficulties. In the _Life of Scott_ Lockhart
had the very difficult task of accounting
for his father-in-law’s misfortunes, and it was
of course to be expected that the other persons
concerned should not be satisfied with the statement.
If, indeed, he was not quite impartial, it
is impossible to blame him severely for dealing a
little too tenderly with the character which he so
loved and honoured. Mr. Lang defends him,
too, upon the ground that he had in his first
edition told the story honestly, although, in the
heat of controversy, he incautiously accepted a
position attributed to him by his antagonists.
Instead of replying, as he might have replied,
‘You are only repeating my own admissions,’
he tried to withdraw from the admissions which
he had virtually made. There is, I think, much
truth in this, though I cannot discuss the point.
But I also think it impossible to read Lockhart’s
pamphlet without regret, not only because, as
Mr. Lang of course agrees, its insolent tone
betrays excessive irritation, but because it is
really, if unintentionally, unjust to other persons
concerned. The interest of the question consists
chiefly in its bearing upon Scott’s character,
though Mr. Lang’s main concern in the matter
is of course with Lockhart. Having lately had
occasion to go over the controversy with a view
to an article in the _Dictionary of National
Biography,_ I venture to say something of Scott’s
share in the matter. The shortest plan is to tell
what seems to me to be the true story, from
which it may incidentally appear how far it was
slurred or softened in Lockhart’s hands. That,
however, is for me a matter of minor importance.

  First, I must notice one difficulty. Mr. Lang
observes that he is not an adept in financial
matters, and is unable to unravel the mysteries
of complex accounts dealing with elaborate commercial
transactions. I am certainly not more
competent than he; but I do not think that
any profound insight into the accounts is really
necessary. We need only take for granted one
little device which, when explained, as one’s
commercial friends are always glad to do, is
rather of charming simplicity than mysterious
complication. Scott wishes to borrow money.
He gets the loan the more easily because he can
say Constable will also be responsible: ‘he will
repay you if I can’t.’ The fiction is that
Constable owes Scott a debt already, and that
Scott can therefore hand over this debt to his
own creditors. Meanwhile, the fact is that no
such debt exists. Constable admits it because
he accepts a reciprocal service from Scott. He
borrows money, stating that Scott will be responsible.
The credit of each therefore helps the
other. But now, if either is unable to pay, the
other has to pay the debts of both. This was
what actually happened. Constable failed, and
Scott found himself suddenly liable not only
for his own debts, but for some £40,000 raised
by Constable. That, as everybody agrees, was
the immediate cause of the catastrophe. The
question is, who was to blame; and especially
why Scott, who had been making an unprecedented
income by his pen, and who had an
independent income of his own, should have been
borrowing large sums, and borrowing them in
this undesirable fashion? That, again, is in
general terms answered by obvious facts. Scott
wanted money because he had set up as a landed
proprietor, built a fine house, collected curiosities,
and indulged in expensive hospitality. To understand
the position, however, so as to apportion the
responsibility, we have to look a little more closely
at the previous history, which, though indicated, is
mixed up with other matters in Lockhart’s _Life._

  Scott, then, had formed a characteristic connection—
characteristic because there never was a
man who took greater satisfaction in helping a
poor friend. To be a staunch patron of his
followers and a staunch adherent of his leaders
was an essential article in his ideal of manly duty,
and his whole life is a series of such services.
He had thus taken up James Ballantyne. They
had met when they were both schoolboys and
Scott already an accomplished spinner of boyish
stories. They had met again at a club which
Scott frequented in his early days at the Bar. A
little later Ballantyne set up as a printer, and
was publishing a newspaper at Kelso. Scott then
employed Ballantyne to print some of his early
ballads. He showed the result as a creditable
specimen of his friend’s skill, and then suggested
to Ballantyne to come to Edinburgh and take
advantage of his good report. Ballantyne accordingly
set up the ‘Border Press’ in 1802. The
press speedily obtained a good character, and
Scott, now beginning his literary career, was able
to bring a steady flow of custom to his friend.
So far the scheme was carried out successfully,
and the printing business not only succeeded for
the time, but attained permanent prosperity. It
survived the ruin of Scott’s fortunes and enabled
Ballantyne ultimately to provide for his family.
There was unfortunately one difficulty. Ballantyne
had not sufficient capital for his trade, and
was forced from the first to carry it on partly
with borrowed money. How far he was incompetent
as a man of business was afterwards matter
of argument; but there can be no doubt that he
was, as he himself admits, always embarrassed,
and that he was regarded with distrust in business
circles. Scott had lent him money, but on a
renewed application for help took (in 1805) a
most unfortunate step. He thought it imprudent
to lend more, but consented to become an unavowed
partner in the business. Ballantyne gave
employment in the firm to his brother John, a
shifty, harum-scarum person, and the two Ballantynes
became Scott’s trusted agents and courtiers.
Lockhart has drawn portraits of the Ballantynes
so vivid that, after making allowance for some
unintentional caricature, it is impossible to doubt
that they are sketches from the life by a very
keen observer. The nicknames ‘Rigdum Funnidos’
and ‘Aldiborontiphoscophornio’ are sufficient
indications of Scott’s own view of their
characters. He saw and enjoyed their absurdities
and weaknesses, but, in his tolerant fashion, liked
them none the worse. It is all very well to have
friends who tickle your sense of humour; but, in
such cases, it is desirable to maintain a certain
distance, and not to become responsible for their
foibles. Scott, however, felt bound to stick by
his clients through thick and thin. They came
to be the intermediaries between him and the
outside world. He had to be approached through
his little court; and as they had their own
interests—and John at least was given to roundabout
intrigues—Scott’s own reputation suffered
from this indefinite and secret connection.
Murray and Longman, instead of making a
direct bargain with the author himself, had to
negotiate through these inferior auxiliaries, and
were far from pleased with their manœuvres.

  There can be no doubt, too, that, as Lockhart
says, the connection led Scott into practising concealments
of various kinds in a way hardly worthy
of his character. He had begun by communicating
all his early works to his friends before
publication. After this connection was formed he
indulged in mystification. The great secret as
to the _Waverley Novels_ was in all probability
really due to this. He had been annoyed by
hearing that publishers thought that his name was
becoming ‘too cheap.’ The later poems had not
equalled the circulation of their predecessors.
Scott had now begun to look at the matter from
the publisher’s as well as from the author’s point
of view, and probably thought that it might be as
well not to risk injury to his fame by an unsuccessful
attempt in a new line. He would at least wait
till success or failure was decided. Once begun,
the mystery was rather attractive than otherwise,
and it amused him to keep back the revelation.
The whole system, however, put Scott in an unsatisfactory
position, which soon became more marked.

  In 1809 Scott took another step which made
the situation far more serious. He was already
connected in various ways with the great
Constable, who had paid what was thought a fancy
price for _Marmion,_ had published Scott’s great edition
of Dryden, and was following it by the edition
of Swift. Constable was also publisher of the
_Edinburgh Review,_ to which Scott had contributed
many articles. But now Scott set up the firm
of ‘John Ballantyne and Co.’ in direct competition
with Constable. Jeffrey’s review of
_Marmion_ in the _Edinburgh_ and the offence
taken by Scott at the language of Constable’s
partner are suggested as the special occasions of
the breach. But there were other and deeper
reasons. Scott’s political zeal was at this time
becoming militant. The beginning of the Peninsular
war had stimulated party passions. It
roused the Tories, who could now claim to be
supporters of a patriotic uprising against military
despotism. It alarmed the Whigs, who saw a
boundless vista of new Continental complications,
debt and taxation. The _Edinburgh Review_ had
become unequivocably Whiggish, and just at this
time excited Scott’s warmest indignation by an article
proving the utter hopelessness of this new military
venture. He at once took up most energetically
the scheme for starting the _Quarterly Review_
as an antidote to the poison of the _Edinburgh._
He wrote articles for it himself, enlisted recruits
on all sides, and soon threw down the gauntlet to
his antagonist. His publishing project fell in with
this scheme. The new firm would enable him to
garrison Edinburgh and organise what literary
faculty there might be in the Tory party. It
would act in alliance with Murray, the publisher
of the _Quarterly,_ and it would publish an _Edinburgh
Annual Register,_ which should enable him
to expound the true version of contemporary
history. He has thus concocted, as he tells
Morritt (January 1809), ‘a grand scheme of
opposition to the proud critics of Edinburgh.’
The Whigs should no longer have it in their
power to suppress wholesome literature. Besides
defending the good cause, he would be able to
help needy friends. Southey, for example, was to
be the main historian of the _Register._ And
then there were more purely literary purposes in
which Scott was greatly interested. He had
already edited some valuable historical collections,
and had further enterprises in hand. Here,
unluckily, was a weak point. Although no one
was ever better able than Scott to please the public
taste, he was a curiously bad judge of their taste
in literature generally. He judged other men’s
likings, as we must all more or less do, by his
own. What interested him would interest them.
He was fascinated by local ballads and the old
antiquarian researches which threw light upon
ancient manners and customs. The public was
equally fascinated by the vivid imagery generated
in his imagination when supplied with such
materials; and he seems to have inferred that it
must share his taste for the raw material itself.
Acting upon this principle and upon his ardent
belief in the talents of his friends, he undertook
to publish masses of unsaleable literature. A
huge dead-weight of stock presently accumulated
in the warehouses of ‘John Ballantyne and Co.’
A ponderous _History of the Culdees,_ written by
a valued friend; a heavy volume of ‘Tixall
poetry,’ which cost £2000; an edition of
Beaumont and Fletcher, undertaken by a wandering
German whom he most generously protected
till the poor man’s death; Miss Seward’s _Poems,_
a burden which he had incurred from rather
excessive civility to one of the early recognisers of
his talent; these and other failures, encumbered
the new firm. The new _Register_ itself caused a
loss of over £1000 a year; and, considering that
the Ballantynes had insufficient capital and did not
enjoy a good reputation for solvency, it is no
wonder that the venture was in grievous difficulties
after three or four years. By 1813 they were at
the verge of bankruptcy. The cause, as James
Ballantyne admitted, was clear enough: ‘beginning
in debt, without capital, and always heavily
in advance.’ Magnificent schemes with insufficient
means are a very obvious short cut to ruin; and
the only wonder seems to be that Scott managed
to escape at the time. Scott, however, showed
abundant energy as well as buoyancy and courage.
He was obliged to consent to make an application
to the rival against whom he had been, as he said,
preparing his bombs. The personal quarrel had
speedily blown over, and Constable now agreed to
look into the books. It appeared that Ballantyne
and Co. would become liable for about £15,000
within the next year, and that all their assets, if
they could be realised, would be about equal to
their liabilities. As, however, the times were
hard, it was necessary to get some temporary help.
Scott applied to the Duke of Buccleuch, as the
chief of his clan, and the Duke’s guarantee enabled
him to raise the necessary sum. But, further, it
was decided that the publishing business must be
given up altogether. The printing was substantially
a sound business, and might still be carried
on. Scott accepted the position. He set most
vigorously to work to extricate himself, and, after
a sharp struggle, with apparently complete success.
He complained, and it seems quite justly, of the
conduct of the Ballantynes. They had not looked
things fairly in the face, and had kept both themselves
and him in darkness. He reproaches them,
but with good temper and with friendly assurances.
The misfortune, indeed, appears to have been that
he did not complain enough. He was too good-
natured, or felt too strongly his own responsibility
for the misfortunes of the firm, to break off all
connection with business and make himself once
for all independent.

  The publishing business, however, was finally
abandoned. John Ballantyne became an auctioneer,
though Scott continued to employ him in negotiations
with publishers. The masses of unsaleable
stock were gradually disposed of in various
bargains for the sale of _Waverley Novels,_ which
began to appear in 1814; and it might be hoped
that the whole disastrous muddle was finally at an
end. John Ballantyne believed, in fact, that this
result had been achieved. He says, in a memorandum
quoted by Lockhart, that, owing to the
‘consummate wisdom and resolution’ of the first
partner, the business had been finally wound up
with a balance of £1000 to the good. Scott
himself supposed that the toils were fairly broken.
He was before long able to return the bond to the
Duke of Buccleuch, and thought that the embarrassments
were finally over, and that he had
a right to spend freely the large income which
was now beginning to flow in from the _Waverley
Novels._ Even at the worst, it must be added,
Scott could still say at this time that no man could
ultimately be a loser by him. He had an independent
income and unencumbered property. A
bankruptcy would have been serious and discreditable,
but even in that case all his creditors would
have been ultimately paid.

  This, then, was the end of the first act of the
drama. If John Ballantyne’s statement could be
accepted, the result would be that Scott had
finally got rid of his publishing encumbrances.
He had engaged in dangerous speculations, and
could not be acquitted of rashness. But he had
saved himself and his partners, and had never got
entirely beyond his depth. The printing business
appears to have been bringing in at a later time
a profit of nearly £2000 a year, and involved no
speculative risks. Unfortunately, there was a
sequel. Lockhart tells us that John Ballantyne
was under a delusion, and that, when the publishing
was abandoned, the printing business, which
had got inextricably mixed up with it, took
over debts to the amount of £10,000. It is
not easy to make out how far this statement
is admitted by the other side. Anyhow, such
a debt might easily have been extinguished by
a man who was soon making £8000 a year by
his novels, besides having an independent income.
To explain the catastrophe which followed, we
must first observe the facts which came out in
Lockhart’s controversy with Ballantyne’s trustees.
In 1816 James Ballantyne wished to marry, and
the young woman’s relations said that he ought to
show that he was clear of debt. Hereupon Scott
agreed that Ballantyne should give up for a time
all his interest in the business, and should henceforth
be employed as a manager with a fixed salary
of £400 a year. During the following six years,
therefore, ‘Ballantyne and Co.’ meant really Scott
himself. He was the sole proprietor, and had,
of course, a right to do with it whatever he
pleased. In 1822, however, a new arrangement
was made. Scott agreed to take Ballantyne again
into partnership in the business of which he
speaks as ‘now so flourishing.’ The profits were
henceforth to be equally divided, Scott’s influence
and custom being regarded as equivalent to
Ballantyne’s labour as a manager. The partners
were only to draw moderate sums, so that the
debt might be extinguished. This debt, however,
implies a remarkable state of things. Scott, in a
document called a ‘missive letter,’ which shows
his thorough familiarity with the facts, agrees that
he is to be personally responsible for the bills due
at that time by the firm. They then amounted
to something like £30,000. Between this time
and the crash at the end of 1825 the debts had
increased to about £46,000. This debt, increased
by the additional liability caused by Constable’s
failure, brought about Scott’s ruin; and the
problem remains—who was responsible for the
accumulation? On one point, of course, there
can be no dispute. If Scott had shown the
same prudence during the later period as he did
during the first crisis, he would have freed himself
from all difficulty. He chose, that is, to spend
his income, when he ought to have been paying
off his debts. He had, it is true, his landed
estate to show for it, and although, as Lockhart
tells us, he had been induced to pay extravagant
prices, he might take this to be a good investment.
But, in point of fact, he seems to have been
curiously unaware that he was incurring any risk;
and the settlement of Abbotsford upon his eldest
son in 1825, which, if valid, put the property
beyond the reach of his creditors, would have been
inexcusable if any such alarm had occurred to him.

  Now Lockhart’s _Life_ goes to suggest the
theory against which Ballantyne’s trustees really
protested. The immediate cause, according to
Lockhart’s view, was Ballantyne’s shiftlessness
and incapacity. Ballantyne was, says Lockhart,
an excellent reader of proofs, and made many
valuable literary suggestions to his great friend.
But he was also a muddle-headed and lazy man
of business, who never looked into his accounts or
made out a genuine balance-sheet. When bills
became due he met them by drawing fresh bills,
and never troubled himself about the ultimate
result. Therefore, it is to be inferred, that unfortunate
nest-egg of debt, which was left when
the publishing business was wound up, continued
to accumulate by a kind of automatic process.
If I never look into my affairs, allow all my
subordinates to go their own way without check,
and always pay my debts by fresh borrowing,
it is very easy to understand that my liabilities
will increase, apparently of themselves. Meanwhile,
one has to ask, what was Scott doing?
Lockhart admits, or rather asserts, this to be a
puzzle. Scott, he says, was in his domestic
affairs the most businesslike of men. He kept
minute accounts of details, and could have told
you all that he spent upon turnpikes for the last
thirty years. Yet, either ‘occupied with his
romantic creations,’ as Lockhart once ventures
to suggest, or absorbed in building, planting, and
entertaining, he passively allowed Ballantyne to
go on piling up this ruinous burden. This, we
must add, is the more surprising when we remember
Scott’s energy in dealing with his previous
difficulties. Then he had set to work like
a man, administered most excellent advice to his
partners, and by judicious management regained
a position of practical independence.

  This gives the real issue between Lockhart and
Ballantyne’s trustees; and here I may confess to
being not quite clear as to the meaning of the
financial statements. The first point is the
debt of some £30,000, for which Scott undertook
the personal responsibility in 1822. How did
it originate? On Lockhart’s theory, it was entirely
the result of the original debt incurred by
the publishing concern, which had been taken
over by the printing concern and had been
allowed to accumulate under Ballantyne’s ineffectual
management. On the theory of Ballantyne’s
trustees, on the contrary, that debt had
been completely extinguished; and the accumulation
of debt was simply due to Scott’s expenditure
upon Abbotsford. I cannot discover that
either statement is proved by definite figures;
but there are some obvious difficulties in accepting
Lockhart’s version, and a brief consideration
of them seems to make the case tolerably clear.
In the first place, Scott obviously and admittedly
wanted money. In the middle of the early
crisis he had begun his purchases of land. They
had no doubt seemed justifiable because he had
at the same time tapped the great spring of
wealth opened by _Waverley_ (1814). During the
eleven years which succeeded he achieved the
intellectual feat which still commands astonishment.
All the great novels had been produced
in that brief period. While achieving this performance
he was spending his new income with
equal lavishness. If both the income and the
expenditure had been in hard cash, the proceeding
might have been justified. Unfortunately, neither
was true. He received for some of his copyrights
bonds which were never actually paid off;
and he had to raise new loans in order to buy
new land, build his house, and carry out improvements.
The result was an intricate network
of engagements, through which it is not
wonderful that a man who was all the time
regularly doing his official duties and engaged in
every kind of social amusement, did not clearly
see his way. It is a marvel that he found time
for half his occupations, and no wonder if time
was wanting for a clear appreciation of his
financial position. Meanwhile, it is also clear
that he might naturally raise some of the sums
required upon the credit of the printing-office.
It was entirely, as we have seen, his own concern
from 1816 till 1822, and he had therefore a
perfect right to raise money for his own purposes
in the name of ‘Ballantyne and Co.’ Ballantyne’s
trustees ask, in fact, a question to which, as
Lockhart never answered their ‘reply,’ we cannot
tell what answer he might have given; but it
seems sufficiently conclusive: why, that is, should
Scott have acknowledged himself to be personally
responsible for the debt of 1822, unless he were
aware that it had been incurred for his own use?
The careful document, in which he describes the
state of the obligations between himself and James
Ballantyne, shows his precise knowledge of the
case, and no disposition to abandon any claim
which he really had upon his partner. Debts
due to him from Ballantyne are clearly set out,
and the means of repayment carefully prescribed.
It seems to be impossible to suppose that Scott
should have taken this debt upon his own
shoulders exclusively, if he had thought that it
was caused by Ballantyne’s careless management.

  But, in the next place, it is equally impossible
to hold that the debt had been incurred without
Scott’s knowledge. The imaginary pictures of
Scott absorbed in ‘romantic creations’ and allowing
Ballantyne to arrange all the bill-discounting,
is a bit of rhetoric which fell in with the conventional
ideas of the poetic dreamer, but was
quite at variance with the reality. Scott had
plenty of romantic fancies, but they did not in
the least prevent him from being also a keen
man of business. The documents published by
Ballantyne’s trustees leave no doubt upon this
point. He received regular accounts of the bills
that were to fall due, and of the provision for
meeting them. He asks for explanations, receives
schemes of financial operations from the
Ballantynes, and devises schemes himself. He
goes into such minutiæ that upon one occasion
he writes to Ballantyne, when enclosing some
bills, ‘Be cautious to fill up the dates with ink of
the same description, for bankers look sharp to
this!’ It is impossible to hold that the man who
could have an eye to such points was so innocent
as to be unaware of the true nature of the transactions
for which he was responsible. James
Ballantyne was himself alarmed. ‘When I reflect,’
he writes to his brother, ‘how many bills
I have paid for Sir Walter Scott on verbal orders
and mere notes, which I thought no more about,
I absolutely quake for the aspect under which I
might be considered were he to die.’ There are
transactions, he says, which he, as an ignorant
accountant, could not explain, and he would have
to ‘stand upon character alone.’ Lockhart had
indeed qualified his statement of Scott’s ignorance
by saying that, though cognisant of the
general facts, he did not know how the proceeds
of the bills were applied. This, as the trustees
naturally reply, amounts to an abandonment of
the case. It is plain that Scott was not only
informed of what was being done, but actively
directed, arranged, and suggested plans for carrying
on the transactions. It is difficult, then, to
suppose that Scott, when assuming the debt, did
not actually admit that it was due to his own
wants. It continued to accumulate after Ballantyne’s
acceptance of a partnership, and the question
remains whether it was still caused by Scott’s
personal expenditure. Lockhart admits that in
cases of emergency Scott might obtain an advance
from the company. One such emergency, for
example, was the purchase of a commission for
his son. He declares, however, that Scott never
failed, on receiving payment for a new novel, to
replace the advances; and further declares that
he showed ‘anxious delicacy’ when asking for
such accommodation. The trustees, in answer to
this, publish an account of the actual sums drawn
from the business by Scott during Ballantyne’s
partnership (1822-26). The statement, which
is presumably authentic, includes such items as a
sum of over £7000 for building at Abbotsford,
£5000 for his son’s commission, and near £900
to a wine merchant, and the general result is that
‘Ballantyne and Co.’ had paid on Scott’s account,
in the period of the partnership (1822-26),
£15,000 more than they had received from him.
Lockhart’s assertion must therefore have a more
limited meaning. After Scott had again taken
Ballantyne into partnership he had of course no
right to spend the money of the firm for his
own purposes. When he obtained an advance
he remained personally responsible, and he no
doubt ‘replaced’ it by acknowledging the obligation
in some form or other. The result would
be, I presume, that Scott personally was debtor to
the firm for a considerable sum, and, as things
turned out, a bad debtor. It seems probable,
indeed, to the ignorant in such matters, that in
point of fact neither Scott nor Ballantyne had by
this time any distinct understanding of their
affairs; and that Scott might suppose himself to
have replaced money when the effect of the complicated
operations in which they were engaged
might really be quite different. Ballantyne seems
also, as far as one can dimly discern, to have
been drawing more money from the business than
he should have done, for the trustees admit that
he too was a sinner, though less of a sinner than
Lockhart maintained, and far less of a sinner than
his partner.

  These facts, which seem to be indisputable,
entirely dispose of the theory suggested, if not
explicitly set forth, by Lockhart. Scott was not
in the position of a mere passenger leaving the
command of his ship to an incompetent commander.
He was actively superintending and giving orders
at every stage of a critical navigation. Nor was it
his whole error that he spent his money as it came
in without applying it to check the automatic
growth of the debt which was swallowing up all
the profits of the business. He was actually
drawing funds from the business in order to carry
on a system of unproductive expenditure. What
is true is that, for some reason or other, he was
strangely unconscious of the danger. Lockhart
remarks that a letter which Scott wrote in May
1825, a few months before the crash, is ‘as remarkable
a document as was ever penned.’ It
was an emphatic and most judicious warning to his
friend Terry against undertaking the management
of a theatre without sufficient capital. He insists
upon the advantage of ‘solid cash,’ and the inevitable
ruin of a business which is ‘pinched for
money’ and ‘gets into the circle of discounting
bills.’ Every word is precisely applicable to his
own affairs, and we need only substitute ‘publishing’
for theatrical speculation to make it a sermon upon
himself. Everything, indeed, shows that his
misfortune came upon him as a stunning surprise;
and the heroic spirit with which he afterwards
sacrificed health and life in the effort to redeem
his honour proves unmistakably that, if he was
under a strange blindness, it was not because his
transactions had lowered his moral sense. The
explanation of his strange ignorance depends partly
upon his relations to Constable. Constable was,
as he fully believed, a man of solid wealth. Nobody
supposed, he remarks in his _Diary,_ that
Constable’s house was worth less than £150,000.
There were ‘great profits on almost all the
adventures’ and ‘no bad speculations.’ The
impression was natural enough from the outside.
Constable was not only energetic, but shrewd;
and the schemes which he started ultimately succeeded
and justified the soundness of his judgment.
Now, if the opinion of his solvency had really been
correct, Scott’s position would at least have been
comparatively secure. He had, as he admitted,
been indulging in expensive tastes; but Abbotsford
had now been finished, and he might well suppose
that he would not require to accumulate new debts,
and could gradually put an end to the system of
mutual accommodation. In fact, it seems that if
Constable could have got safely through the great
commercial crisis of 1825, Scott would also have
surmounted his difficulties, as he had done in the
old troubles of 1813-14. Constable, unfortunately,
turned out to have been in a position
similar to Scott’s. He had from the first been
carrying on his business with insufficient capital,
and the profits of his successful speculations had
been constantly eaten away by the discounts and
interest on loans. He had got into intricate
relations with his London agents, Hurst, Robinson
and Co., who appear at the period of excitement to
have been indulging in reckless speculations, and
the consequence was that, when one of the three
houses failed, the others collapsed like a house of
cards. Scott had said that Constable was as ‘firm
as Ben Lomond.’ What he took for solid rock
really rested upon rotten foundations.

  That Scott should have felt this implicit confidence
is sufficiently explicable. When the publishing
business collapsed Constable had come to
his help; and in a short time the former rival had
become a close ally. They had a genuine regard
for each other. Although their alliance did not
imply purely altruistic motives, their interests were
identical. Constable saw in Scott’s writings the
best of all his speculations. The _Waverley Novels_
and the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ were apparently
the backbone of his business. He very naturally
wished to monopolise the most popular and most
fertile author of the day. He looked upon Scott
as a perpetual fountain of popular literature, which
could be so directed as to make the fortunes of
both. He did everything to stimulate Scott’s
natural disposition to write. Scott himself thought
that his best things were those which came most
easily, and was perfectly ready to be stimulated.
He was delighted to pour out novel after novel,
and to bargain for new novels, yet unwritten and
even undesigned. When he wanted more money
to buy land, he was ready to take advantage of
this easy method of providing funds; and Constable
did not discourage him. He could pay for
them at least in credit, and was always ready to
propose new enterprises. He gave Scott £1000
for _Halidon Hill_—a trifle turned out in two rainy
mornings—rejoiced in having made such a bargain,
and suggested that Scott might add to his income
by writing such a thing once a quarter. Scott,
again, he observed, might make £6000 by an
edition of the English poets, ‘as an occasional
relief from more important labours.’ He was to
edit Shakespeare with Lockhart, and was to contribute
to the _Miscellany,_ which was to be a perfect
mine of wealth, as indeed it turned out to be
in the main a judicious speculation. It was only
in the last years that Constable seems to have
reflected that even Scott might possibly overwrite
himself; and even then he rather proposed that
some of the energy might be diverted to other
ends, such as history or editing, than that it should
be diminished. A publisher, who was thus doing
all in his power to stimulate the productivity of an
author, would hardly be inclined to raise any difficulty
as to advances or to encourage any doubts as
to his own power of paying for the work to be
done. Some two years before the crash he had
become a little alarmed at the amount of floating
obligations, and suggested to Scott the advisability
of reducing the quantity of bills. Scott took the
suggestion in good part, and proposed, though
apparently without carrying out the scheme, to
take measures accordingly. Without attributing
to Constable anything worse than an over-sanguine
view of things, it is obvious how Scott would inevitably
be affected. Here was the ‘Napoleon of
publishers,’ the shrewdest of speculators, the most
solid, steady, and respectable of men, constantly
asking for more. Why should he ask for more?
The answer which would suggest itself to any
author would no doubt be—because he was making
a good thing of it. Scott would take it for granted
that all this eagerness and readiness to propose
new work meant that the great publisher was
growing as rich as he was, apparently at least,
growing rich himself. No doubt, if Scott had been
a man of business so far as to be behind the scenes
of commercial transactions, he might have heard
rumours suggestive of a different explanation.
Constable’s operations had apparently suggested
doubts to competent observers in his own trade.
Scott, however, had fifty other occupations, and it
is not strange that his confidence in Constable’s
solvency was equal to Constable’s confidence in his
literary capacity. One of the assumptions which
he took to be certain was thus altogether fallacious,
and the danger was sprung upon him from
the quarter where he supposed himself to be
absolutely safe.

  I suggest this, of course, not by way of justifying,
but of partly explaining, Scott’s illusions. He had
been led into the original business by a generous wish
to serve a friend. Gradually this had expanded
into the grand scheme for putting himself at the
head of a great house which should encourage
authors, diffuse sound literature, and disseminate
sound political doctrine. When his curious want
of appreciation of public taste, and his trust in
men of inferior education and character, brought
him into apparently hopeless difficulties, he seems
to have faced the crisis like a man, to have seen
the real evils of the case, and to have extricated
himself by sound judgment and firmness. Just at
this moment, however, he ‘struck oil,’ if I may say
so, by the publication of _Waverley,_ and suddenly
discovered that his brains would bring him wealth,
and his wealth might place him in the ideal position
of landed proprietor. Upon the morality
of that ambition it is needless to dilate. Some
people regard it simply as a proof of snobbishness
or vulgar rapacity, the desire of an upstart for a
fine house and showy establishment. With them
I need not argue, if only because the answer is
given with admirable clearness in Lockhart’s concluding
chapter. He shows how Scott’s whole life
was moulded by the passionate desire to carry on
the old traditions and preserve the ancient virtues
of his race. Of course, he was in some degree an
anachronism and Abbotsford a sham. That may
be taken for granted, and enlightened persons may
condemn him as a reactionary supporter of extinct
prejudices. Only, allowing that the poor man
held his convictions, we must also admit that he
was not aiming at vulgar display, but at discharging
what he took to be a most important
social function: protecting his dependants, and
supporting his superiors; helping innumerable
poor friends and distressed authors; taking an
active part in all patriotic movements, and diffusing
the most genial goodwill throughout the
whole circle of his influence. That this involved
a certain ‘worldliness,’ and a curious mixture of
the shrewd commonsense of the lawyer with the
romantic visions of the enthusiast, is fully admitted
by Lockhart, who also shows in general
terms how it led to these financial embarrassments.
But Lockhart’s natural desire to shield Scott’s
memory involved here what seems to me a misrepresentation
of the facts. The curious combination,
that is, between the romantic and the
business elements shows itself in a way which
Lockhart has to ignore. Scott, he says ‘studiously
escaped from whatever could have interfered with
his own enjoyment’; put, that is, both his official
business and his bill transactions out of his mind
in order to retire to the world of the _Waverley
Novels,_ or to throw himself into social distractions.

  This theory, though we may partly accept it,
is pushed too far, if, with Lockhart, we take it to
imply that Scott chose to remain ignorant of
Ballantyne’s conduct of his business. There it
plainly conflicts with hard facts. The truth is,
apparently, that Scott’s romance took a peculiar
turn. It implied, in particular, a very low
estimate of the value of written romances. No
great author ever had a lower opinion of the
claims of authors upon the gratitude of mankind.
It appeared to him, as we know, perfectly absurd
to suppose that the writer of his ‘bits of novels,’
could be worth the attention of the hero of
Waterloo. Ardently as he loved literature, he
reckoned literature in general, and his own in
particular, to be the harmless amusement of life,
and only worth considering as an ornamental
appendage. I suspect that his view has much
more to be said for it in many senses than
authors will generally admit. Certainly, it often
took the attractive form of personal modesty and
of superiority to the fretful touchiness of the
ordinary man of letters. Lockhart reports a
conversation with Miss Edgeworth in which Scott
spoke with deep feeling of the folly of thinking
of real life as only material for art. He had,
he said, heard ‘higher sentiments’ from the
uncultivated than he had ever read in books; and
he declared that authors would never learn their
true calling till they had taught themselves ‘to
consider everything as moonshine compared with
the education of the heart.’ Miss Edgeworth’s
comment was that, whereas Swift professed to
have written that ‘people might treat him like a
great lord,’ Scott wrote that ‘he might be able to
treat his people as a great lord ought to do.’
We may paraphrase this by saying that, in Scott’s
view the active duties of life were the substantive
and the literary activity the mere adjective supplying
the graces, or at most stimulating the affections,
which had a more important function elsewhere.
Miss Edgeworth’s interpretation represents the
better aspect of the doctrine. There is, of
course, another application which is a good deal
more doubtful. Scott accepted with complete
frankness the view that his own writings were
to be entirely subordinate. No doubt, as they
expressed his Toryism, his patriotism, his hearty
appreciation of manly, independent, and domestic
and social affections, they helped to propagate his
ideal of life; but they were also distinctly and
most avowedly written to sell. He wanted to
live his romance more than to write it. The
desire may remind us of Milton’s doctrine that
the man who would write an heroic poem should
be ‘himself a true poem.’ Only, Milton lived in
order to write _Paradise Lost,_ whereas Scott wrote
_Waverley_ in order to live in his own fashion, and
that fashion involved anachronisms not of the
truly heroic kind. The result, too, was not what
Lockhart implies. This romance did not take
him away from the world of bankers’ books and
balance-sheets. On the contrary, it gave such a
charm to the position which he desired that he
accepted them as a necessary, though no doubt a
very disagreeable, part of the process. All the
bill-discounting represented painful thought and
recurring anxiety, from which we may well believe
that he was glad to escape, whether to writing in
his study or superintending Tom Purdie and his
labourers. Probably, too, it prevented him from
making such an accurate investigation as would
have roused him while there was yet time. But,
clearly, the disagreeableness of the task, did not
prevent him from going into even the minute
details and regulating all the ultimately ruinous
negotiations. The end, unfortunately, sanctified
the means; and he forgot his prudence in the
delight of being able for a time to realise his
fondest dreams. To himself, no doubt, it seemed
that when he had got rid of the publishing house,
the legacy which it left of unpaid liabilities was a
mere remnant of botheration, which would be
gradually wound up. The consummation was
postponed from month to month as new temptations
arose to invest his money at Abbotsford, and
the mass of floating liabilities grew rapidly, though
quietly, without prompting any sufficient effort at
extrication. When he had once fairly finished
his new mansion and rounded off his estates, he
fancied that he would be able to shorten sail and
bring all this intricate system of accommodation
into order. The catastrophe at the end of 1825
destroyed all his chances, and led to that heroic
effort which makes it seem almost indecent even
to try to investigate the facts. Yet, on the
whole, it is as well to know the facts, even about
a man whom one loves; and it seems to me that,
though it is impossible for any one, as it certainly
is for me, to unravel the details, the main results
are sufficiently unmistakable.

<chapter>
	THE IMPORTATION OF GERMAN<! p38>

When did Englishmen begin to learn German?
That is a question upon which I have made some
occasional notes, and I am glad to find it discussed
in a book recently published by Mr. G. Herzfeld
upon William Taylor of Norwich.<*> Mr. Herzfeld

<footnote>
  _William Taylor von Norwich; eine Studie über den Einfluss der
neueren Deutschen Literatur en England._ Von Georg. Herzfeld.
Halle, 1897.
</>

has made a thorough study of his author, and
gives the result in a very interesting little book.
He does not here go into the wider subject of the
influence of the German upon (what we are pleased
to call) the English mind; but he incidentally
illustrates the process by describing one of the
channels through which Englishmen were first
informed of the existence of such men as Lessing,
Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. Hereafter, it may be
hoped, he will deal with other lines of influence.
Meanwhile, I will venture, with Mr. Herzfeld’s
help and such other notices as I have gathered, to
make what contribution I can to this passage in
literary history.<*>

<footnote>
  Mr. Herzfeld has been good enough to send me some notes of
which I have taken advantage below.
</>

  It is a familiar fact that no Englishman read
German literature in the eighteenth century. One
sufficient reason was that there was no German
literature to read. When philosophers such as
Leibnitz and Wolff expounded their doctrines in
French and Latin, when the great Frederick sat
at the feet of Voltaire, and regarded his own
literature as barbarous, foreigners could not be
expected to qualify themselves for puzzling out
the intricacies of an old-fashioned German sentence.
The first-fruits of the independent
German movement had no overpowering charm.
I never read Klopstock’s _Messiah_ myself, but I
am told by those who have, that if the perusal of
that work were the sole reward of a victorious
wrestle with German, the game might scarcely
be worth the candle. Here and there we
find men induced to go through the struggle.
Early in the century the admirable William
Law, of _The Serious Call,_ studied German
that he might translate the mystical works of
Jacob Böhme, to whom he was attracted, as
in later years Coleridge was attracted by the
mysticism of Schelling.<*> A very different man,

<footnote>
  Law’s translation, however, was not the first.
</>

the jovial, turbulent Carteret had—as Swift told
him—carried away from Oxford more Greek,
Latin, and philosophy than became a person of
his rank. Moreover, as we learn elsewhere, he
could talk French, Italian, and Spanish; and to
this it is added that he went so far as to study
German, ‘to ingratiate himself with his Sovereign.’
His contemporary Chesterfield possibly took the
hint. I am not aware that he knew German
himself; but he certainly impressed the importance
of the study upon his son, and was pleased
to hear that the young man—if his manners might
still be improvable—could talk German perfectly.
The average English nobleman probably knew
French then as well as he does now. Voltaire
declares that Bolingbroke—one of whose early
essays was published in French—spoke French
with unsurpassed energy and precision. The
young nobleman on his grand tour was easily
admitted with his tutor to French society, and it
is enough to mention the names of Horace
Walpole, Hume, and Adam Smith, to suggest
the importance of the relations which sometimes
sprang up. But even in German Courts the
travellers needed no German; and the home-
staying British author remained in absolute and
contented ignorance. Macaulay remarks that the
members of Johnson’s Club were ignorant of the
very existence of Wieland or Lessing. Johnson
knew no German, although he twice took up
‘Low Dutch’ in order to satisfy himself that his
power of learning had not decayed. From a talk
at the club (3rd April, 1778) recorded by
Boswell, we find that Johnson had discovered that
‘stroem’ is allied to ‘stream,’ and that Burke had
recognised ‘rosebuds’ as the equivalent of ‘roes-
knopies.’ Neither of them makes a reference to
‘High Dutch,’ and the philological knowledge
implied is of the shallowest. Boswell, who had
studied at Utrecht and gone to Berlin, apparently
did not take, or he would surely have recorded,
any part in the talk. We may infer that he
was equally ignorant, though it is strange to think
of Boswell in a country where he could not report
a common conversation. Gibbon is, of course,
the typical instance of this ignorance. He was
not a man to shrink from study; he had travelled
in German Switzerland, he began a history of
Switzerland, and in later years he wrote upon the
antiquities of the House of Brunswick. Yet it
never seems to have occurred to him that it was
even possible to learn German, and his only resource
was to obtain from his friends translations
of the necessary documents.<*> Robertson, who

<footnote>
  Gibbon, as Mr. Herzfeld writes to me, must have learned something
of the importance of German literature from the poet Matthison,
whom he met at Lausanne in his later stay there. Their conversation
is noticed in the _Monthly Review_ for 1797 (vol. xxiii. p.
522, etc.).
</>

with Gibbon and Hume made up the triumvirate
of leading historians, could also write upon
Charles =v.= without, I believe, any knowledge of
German. It would, I imagine, be difficult to find
a single direct reference to a German book in the
whole English literature of the eighteenth century.
As the century draws to an end, indications of an
interest in the language crop up occasionally.
Watt, of the steam-engine, learned German in his
youth, to be able to read some scientific treatise,
and revived the knowledge for the amusement of
his old age. When Home Tooke, retiring for a
time from political agitation, made his shrewd
and eccentric dash into philology, he saw the
importance of some knowledge of the Teutonic
languages. The references, however, in _The
Diversions of Purley_ seem to imply that, though
he had learned something of Anglo-Saxon and
Gothic, he knew little of modern German. The
most remarkable case, perhaps, of an early study
of German is that of Herbert Marsh, the Bishop
of Peterborough. He had gone in 1785 to study
at Leipzig after finishing his Cambridge course;
and brought back a knowledge of the language
which must have been almost unrivalled. In 1801
he published a tract written, it is said, ‘in pure
vernacular German.’ It brought him the patronage
of Pitt, whose policy it defended, and gave him,
it seems, his first step towards a bishopric.<*> Other

<footnote>
  Marsh, as Mr. Herzfeld tells me, contributed two political articles
in German to Wieland’s _Teutscher Merkur_ in 1798.
</>

results of his German studies might rather have
checked his preferment. He gave lectures at
Cambridge before the end of the century,
influenced by the teaching of Michaelis. They
dealt with ‘the origin and composition of the first
three Gospels,’ and, according to Mark Pattison,
show the only trace at that period of ‘honest
critical inquiry.’ The seeds, however, remained
barren when transplanted to British soil, and
Pattison complains in 1861 that English divines
were still unable to appreciate the method. Marsh
was suspected of heterodoxy, but amply vindicated
himself and made himself known in later years in
certain smart controversies, where he horrified
the Evangelical and the Bible Society by arguing
that the use of such edged tools as Biblical
criticism should be reserved to orthodox experts.

  In the last half of the century, however, many
who were neither critics nor men of science were
beginning to be interested in German. The
translator had long been one of the proverbial
denizens of a bookseller’s garret. Johnson and
Goldsmith had both toiled in that lamentable
prison-house. Voltaire, Rousseau, and their compatriots
had been speedily done into English, and
the existence of a new field for exploitation began
to be recognised. The German literature at its
start was profoundly influenced by English models.
That ‘heavenly book,’ _Clarissa Harlowe,_ for
instance, was welcomed by Mrs. Klopstock’s
charming homage as warmly as by any of the
incense of Richardson’s domestic circle. How
deeply many famous Germans drank from English
sources is matter of familiar history. The compliment
was now to be returned. Mr. Herzfeld
has collected many illustrations. Gessner’s _Death
of Abel_ was translated in 1761, and twenty editions
appeared by 1799. Klopstock’s _Messiah_
was first translated in 1763, and one of Wieland’s
dialogues in 1771. Other translations from
Wieland came out before 1796, when Sotheby’s
well-known translation of _Oberon_ was published.
Haller’s philosophical romance, _Usong,_ was translated
in 1772. Lessing was first made known by
his _Fables_ in 1773. _Nathan_ followed in 1781,
and _Minna von Barnhelm_ was adapted for the
stage in 1786. _The Sorrows of Werther_ reached
English readers in 1779, and its popularity was
shown by numerous translations and adaptations.
During the last decade of the century there was a
flush of enthusiasm for German literature, of which
I shall presently speak. Englishmen seem to have
suddenly become aware of the great literary movement
in Germany; and possibly the war with
France had some tendency to turn the British
mind towards our Continental allies.

  In the year 1792 Schiller’s _Robbers_ was translated
by Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee), and
the fact marks an important movement at Edinburgh,
then almost the chief literary centre in
Britain. Tytler encouraged Scott’s early studies
of German, and had apparently been himself
started in that direction by Henry Mackenzie,
the ‘Scottish Sterne’ (a sadly significant title!),
author of _The Man of Feeling,_ and the great link
between the two generations of Hume and Adam
Smith on one side, and Scott and Jeffrey on the
other. In 1788 Mackenzie read a paper before
the Royal Society of Edinburgh, giving an
account of the German theatre. The German
theatre was at the time known to him only
through French translations; but his paper had
at least one important effect: it had a serious
influence upon the career of Scott. Scott was
then only sixteen; but his curiosity was aroused,
and about 1792, as he has told us, he, with some
friends, formed a little society for the study of
German. The lads engaged a Dr. Willich (of
whom I should be glad to know more) as a tutor.
Scott reports that poor Willich had a noisy and
irreverent class; they laughed instead of weeping
at Gessner’s _Death of Abel_; and Scott at least
showed a lordly indifference to grammar, and
worried his way into some understanding of the
language by main force. Willich, I suspect,
considered that his most promising pupil was Mr.
John MacFarlane, who took to the study of
philosophy while the rest went off to literature.
MacFarlane lived till 1848, but does not appear
to have made much of the philosophy. His life,
at least in a biographical dictionary, gives no
traces of any such result. Willich had himself
attended Kant’s lectures, and soon afterwards
published a book or two intended to indoctrinate
Britons. What became of him I do not know,
but one hopes that he had not to support himself
by teaching Kant.<*>

<footnote>
  Mr. Herzfeld informs me that Willich was physician to the
Saxon Ambassador, Count Brühl, who passed more than 30 years
in England. The Count’s daughter, Dorothy, married Hugh Scott
of Harden, and it was probably through her influence that Willich
went to Edinburgh. He wrote a life of Kotzebue, published as
an Appendix to Miss Plumptre’s translation of _Lover’s Vows_; and
a translation of Hufeland’s _Makrobiotik._
</>

  The history of the actual introduction of
German philosophy lies beyond me; but a few
external facts may illustrate the difficulty of that
performance before we look at the purely literary
movement. In those days philosophy in Great
Britain was pretty well confined to the Scottish
professors. The rising genius of the period was
Thomas Brown, six years younger than Scott, but
a singularly precocious youth. At the early age
of four, so his biographer declares ‘on most satisfactory
evidence,’ he was found comparing the
Gospel narratives to test their consistency. At
twelve or thirteen he was publishing a poem in
a magazine; at sixteen arguing a psychological
question with the great Dugald Stewart; and
by twenty publishing a confutation of Darwin
(Erasmus, not Charles). Such a youth was made
to be an Edinburgh Reviewer. Brown was an
exceedingly able man, and might have made a
greater mark but for an unfortunate impression
that he could eclipse Pope’s poetry as well as
Kant’s philosophy. The second number of the
_Review_ contains his judgment of Kant. I dare
say that it may be as good as some more ponderous
lucubrations on the same theme. Anyhow,
it shows that happy audacity which makes a
modern critic’s mouth water. Nobody is now
allowed to touch upon Kant without swallowing
a preliminary library. In those happier days the
critic did not even profess to have read the
original. An amiable and excellent Frenchman,
Charles Villers, had been driven to Göttingen
by the French Revolution. There he had fallen
in love with the country and its philosophy, and
had published a ‘luminous analysis’ of Kant
in 1801 for the benefit of Frenchmen. This
account was quite enough for Brown, who was
thus enabled to put Kant in his proper place
with the infallible judgment of a reviewer of
those pleasant days. A contemporary account of
Kant’s doctrines is given in the edition of the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ of the same period. The
Editor had found it necessary to call in a German
refugee to throw light upon that mysterious topic.
The refugee did his best; but the Editor would
not be responsible for inoculating the British
mind. Kant’s opinions, as he sarcastically
observes in his own person, are not very likely
to reach posterity: our own countrymen will not
prefer the dark lantern of Kant to the luminous
torch of Bacon; and as Kant’s works have a
manifest tendency to atheism, it is not to be
regretted that they are already much neglected
in Germany, and will probably soon fall into
utter oblivion. There are moments in which the
superabundant zeal of later commentators tempts
one to wish that they had.<*> What that refugee

<footnote>
  The Editor was George Gleig, afterwards Bishop of Brechin.
The article is substantially reproduced in Chalmers’s _Biographical
Dictionary._
</>

thought of his Editor must be unknown; but
another quaint illustration of the sufferings of
early Kantians is significant. There lived in
London at this time a jeweller named Thomas
Wirgman.<*> De Morgan, in his _Budget of Paradoxes,_

<footnote>
  I should be very glad to hear more of him. His father or
grandfather probably kept the well-known toy-shop in St. James’s
Street, where Johnson bought silver buckles in 1778.
</>

describes him as ‘cracky and vagarious’
and an ‘itinerant paradoxer.’ ‘I’ll make it
clear to you,’ he said one day to De Morgan.
‘Suppose a number of goldfishes in a glass bowl.
Well, I come with my cigar and go puff, puff,
puff over the bowl until there is a little cloud of
smoke. Now tell me, what will the goldfishes
say to that?’ ‘I should imagine,’ replied De
Morgan, ‘that they would not know what to
make of it.’ ‘By Jove!’ said Wirgman, ‘you
are a Kantian!’ I guess that Wirgman’s report
of the conversation would have been different.
Wirgman seems to have been a man of real
acuteness, and wrote certain expositions of Kant
which, as good judges have said, show real comprehension.
They are partly to be found in a
work called the _Encyclopædia Londonensis,_ which
I take to have died in competition with superior
rivals. From a separately printed copy of Wirgman’s
contributions, I take an account of the poor
man’s attempts to make converts.

  Wirgman had been taken in 1795 by his friend
H. J. Richter<*> to hear some lectures upon Kant

<footnote>
  Richter was a water-colour painter of German origin, who in
1819 published a book called _Daylight,_ expounding Kant, and
giving a ‘discovery in the art of painting.’ I have not seen it.—
See _Dictionary of National Biography._
</>

by Professor Nitsch, who in the following year
published a ‘general view’ of the philosophy.
Wirgman became an enthusiast; he learned
German, studied all Kant’s works, and found
that, among other merits, their clearness made
them especially suitable for the rising generation.
He taught their philosophy to his own boys when
they were fourteen, and wrote his essay for the
_Encyclopædia_ in 1812. Feeling, however, that
he was, as he said to De Morgan, only an ‘old
brute of a jeweller,’ he sought for a worthier
interpreter. Who, he asked himself, was the
first metaphysician in the country? Obviously
that ‘elegant and accomplished scholar,’ Dugald
Stewart. Stewart was the light of Edinburgh;
of him even the Edinburgh Reviewers spoke
respectfully, and to him the Whig nobles sent
their sons to be brought up on sound principles.
Stewart, moreover, had just announced his intention
of completing his _Analysis of the Intellectual
Faculties._ To Stewart, therefore, Wirgman sent
a copy of his own work. It was intended to
show the great man that the task which he was
attempting had been definitively achieved in
Germany thirty years before. Stewart—as
Wirgman assumed—being a philosopher, and
therefore devoted to truth exclusively, would
naturally be delighted at finding himself eclipsed,
and would at once become an effective propagator
of Kantism. If, however, he felt any doubts, he
could note them on the blank pages of Wirgman’s
treatise, and have them satisfactorily solved.
Alas! Stewart replied, ‘with the greatest politeness,’
that he had not time to read Wirgman.
Wirgman, rebuffed for the moment, returned to
the charge; when poor Stewart explained, still
with the utmost politeness, that, ‘at the age of
three-score,’ he could not be bothered with new
systems of philosophy. Wirgman derived a
slight consolation from interviewing Madame de
Staël when she came to England in 1814. She
had written upon Kant in her book on Germany
(1813), but confessed that she must leave metaphysical
minutiæ to ‘plodding reasoners.’ She
agreed, however, to bestow ‘a few instants’—
probably they had to be more than a few—
upon Wirgman, and was curious to know from
him what progress Kant was making in this
‘commercial country.’ The answer must have
been discouraging. In 1816, however, Stewart
published another essay, and now said that he
had tried Kant in the Latin version—he knew
no German—and had ‘always been forced to
abandon the undertaking in despair, partly from
the scholastic barbarism of the style, and partly
from utter inability to unriddle the author’s
meaning.’ Wirgman would not yet give him
up, though deeply grieved. Another appeal to
Stewart brought more ‘politeness,’ and a promise
of a subscription to a projected translation by
Wirgman. The old gentleman, however, was
incorrigible. In 1821 his offences culminated.
He gave in his _Dissertation_ what professed to
be an account of Kant; but it was worse than
nothing. He had read Willich, and Nitsch, and
Madame de Staël, and toiled at certain Latin
treatises; he had even quoted Wirgman politely
in ‘Note ZZ,’ but he could still see nothing in
Kant except old errors clad in a new jargon.
Poor Wirgman laments in vain, appeals to the
love of truth, and deplores the hopeless blindness
of the prejudiced old professor; but his
lamentations excited no attention. The highest
compliment that he ever received, according to
De Morgan, was from James Mill, who told him
that ‘he did not understand Kant.’ It was, says
De Morgan, ‘a feather in Wirgman’s cap,’ that
such a man as James Mill should think this worth
saying. Alas! the grammar leaves it rather
doubtful whether the saying was that Mill himself
or that Wirgman did not understand Kant.
Probably Wirgman was meant, as Mill thought
himself capable of seeing through most things—
Kant’s philosophy included. With Stewart,
finally, we may couple his friend and admirer,
the great Dr. Parr. Parr had sent him a note
upon the etymology of the word ‘sublime.’ It
is abbreviated in Stewart’s works, because it
would have filled 250 pages. Parr, however,
though a monster of erudition, knew no German,
and gave up Kant from the irksomeness of
reading through an interpreter.<*> Obviously,

<footnote>
  Parr’s Works, i. p. 712.
</>

nothing short of the proverbial surgical operation
could have got Kant into the heads of these
worthy persons.<*>

<footnote>
  Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808) the chemist, father of the author
of _Death’s Textbook,_ had taught himself German, and is
mentioned, as Mr. Herzfeld tells me, in the _Teutscher Merkur_
as interested in Kantian philosophy. Beddoes was a friend of
Coleridge, Southey, and Davy, in the Bristol days, and probably
helped to stimulate Coleridge’s curiosity as to German.
</>

  Kantism, it seems, had not made much progress
in this ‘commercial country.’ It had, however,
excited a certain alarm. In 1814 Mrs. Hannah
More was terrified by a report that a Kantian Club
had recently existed in London.<*> Kantism, as

<footnote>
  Roberts’s _Hannah More,_ iii. p. 423.
</>

she surmised, meant some sort of poisonous doctrine,
probably more or less connected with the
teaching of Paine and Cobbett, whom she had
encountered in _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_
and other edifying works for the use of the poor.
A defence of Kant, by Wirgman’s friend Richter,
appeared in _The Morning Chronicle_ of 1814.
Richter declared that ‘morals and religious faith’
had, through Kant, at length found a ‘sanctuary
in the human mind,’ whence no scepticism could
ever displace them. Let us hope that Mrs.
Hannah More was comforted. Possibly the
report to which she refers was in some way connected
with Coleridge, who was making his last
pathetically feeble attempt to support himself by
lectures and journalism in London. The men
who were to be his disciples were already studying
German criticism and philosophy; and it is rather
curious that Wirgman makes no mention of him.
_The Friend_ (1810), little as it had circulated, had
made his claims as a philosopher known in most
influential circles. But Coleridge’s influence in
this direction belongs mainly to the rising generation.
He had gone to Germany in 1798, chiefly
with a view to qualifying himself as a philosopher;
and the fact illustrates the vague simmering of an
interest in German speculation, which showed that
the labours of Willich and Nitsch were not altogether
thrown away. The beacon on Highgate
Hill was only lighted in the later years of Wirgman’s
propaganda. Coleridge must, of course, be
regarded as the main channel through which
German philosophy began to influence Englishmen.
Other names would have to be mentioned in a
history of the subject. Mackintosh took Kant
and Fichte with him to India in 1806, and De
Quincey had studied German before his introduction
to Coleridge. But it was Coleridge,
whose singular power of stimulating other men,
even by fragmentary and irrelevant disquisitions,
first spread the notion that a profound esoteric
knowledge lay hid somewhere in the mysterious
depths of German philosophy. He helped himself,
as we know, a little too freely from that
source. The magical poetry which he produced
during his brief period of ‘flowering’ was, happily,
his own beyond all dispute. Yet in one way
Coleridge, too, illustrates the influence of German
poetical literature in the early period.

  This, however, takes us back to Scott. Scott’s
imagination had been stimulated by all manner of
congenial reading; in his boyhood he had read _The
Faerie Queen,_ and _Ossian,_ and Ariosto; he knew
Percy’s _Reliques_ by heart, and had been from
infancy saturated with Border legends and ballad
poetry; and had dabbled in ‘Anglo-Saxon and
the Norse sagas’ before Mackenzie’s paper introduced
him to German. The revelation of the
existence of a great literary movement among a
people allied to us both by blood and taste, who
reverenced Shakespeare and revolted against Racine
and Boileau, was naturally most stimulating, and
gave a sanction to his spontaneous home-bred
tastes. His first actual plunge into poetry was
made in 1796, when Miss Aitken repeated in
Dugald Stewart’s house a translation, by William
Taylor, of Bürger’s ballad _Lenore._ Scott, though
not present, heard how the society had been
‘electrified.’ He did not rest until he had got a
copy of Bürger’s poem. He sat down after supper,
and finished his translation at daybreak. The
enthusiasm was shared by others, including the
Laureate Pye, and when Scott published his ballad
(with _The Wild Huntsman_ added) he found rivals
in the field; and this, his first book, was a failure.
He took, however, to translating German
undauntedly; attacked _Götz von Berlichingen_ and
Schiller’s _Robbers,_ and wrote _The House of Aspen,_
adapted from a German play about the Vehm-
Gericht. Ballads, however, were more to his taste
than dramatic poetry, and at this point he came into
contact with another author, whose fame has long
faded. Matthew Gregory Lewis is chiefly known
at present by vague memoirs of _The Monk_ and by
Byron’s jingle: ‘I would give many a sugar-cane,
Mat. Lewis were alive again!’ Lewis should,
however, be one of the leading names in the history
of the German influence in England. He was
three years younger than Scott; but was already
famous. Lewis was the son of a man in the then
enviable position of a proprietor of large sugar
plantations; who could, therefore, live in England,
buy boroughs, and take part in the game of politics.
The son had distinguished himself as a boy actor
at Westminster, and in 1791 went to see his
mother, a beauty and a musician, who had separated
from his father and settled at Paris. In 1792
the lad, then only seventeen, went off to Weimar,
attracted by the fame of the great author of
Werther. He learned German, and his literary
ambition was roused. Mrs. Radcliffe had just
begun to work the vein first opened by Horace
Walpole, of ‘romances with supernatural machinery’
and mysterious feudal castles. Whether
Lewis was influenced by her or only by his new
German models I will not presume to say. Anyhow,
he wrote _The Monk,_ which was published in
his twentieth year (1795), and became a famous
author at a bound. He had the grace to remove
certain indecencies of which a respectable public
loudly complained, and, though much abused, was
accepted as a literary luminary in the eyes of
Scott when, a little later, he came to see his aristocratic
friends in Scotland. Lewis, indeed, was a
quaint contrast to the sturdy borderer. He was
diminutive in size, with eyes projecting ‘like an
insect’s,’ full of transparent vanity, intolerable
loquacity, and, it would seem, not a little of a snob.
His father had given him a seat in Parliament; he
furnished a cottage in the best taste of the day; he
was admitted to fashionable circles, was welcomed
by the Duchess of York at Oatlands, and was
familiar in later years with Byron and the questionable
dandies of the Regency. With all his foibles,
Lewis had some excellent qualities. Though he
was not an Abolitionist, he felt it to be a duty to
look into the position of his slaves for himself;
went twice to his estates in the West Indies, and
on the second visit caught the yellow fever, of
which he died. He had made a will, witnessed by
Byron and Shelley, intending to secure the welfare
of his slaves; and the posthumous ‘journal’ of his
voyage is a really interesting book, pronounced to
be ‘delightful’ by Coleridge. Lewis, too, had a
great facility for versification, a genuine ear for
metre, and some of his ballads (_Alonzo the Brave
and the Fair Imogene,_ for example) have still a
kind of lingering vitality. Lewis was a friend,
perhaps a rejected lover, of the lady known for
certain questionable memoirs who afterwards became
Lady Charlotte Bury. He visited her in
Scotland in 1798 and there met Scott, who,
though he laughed good-humouredly at the little
fop, was ready to receive him as a mentor. Lewis
could tell Scott of the great Germans whom he
had seen in the flesh. He was collecting ballads
for his projected _Tales of Wonder,_ and found a
promising recruit in the translator of _Lenore._ He
criticised Scott’s careless grammar and rhymes
with a good deal of acuteness, and actually got
a publisher to give £25 for the _Götz of Berlichingen._
Possibly, too, it was he who induced
Kean to think for a time of producing _The House
of Aspen,_ which, however, as Scott says, was
finally given up on account of the growing ridicule
of the German drama.

  Scott, we are told, was himself restrained from
German extravaganzas by the good taste of his
beloved William Erskine, and Lewis’s chief influence
seems to have been in encouraging the taste
for ballads which resulted in the _Border Minstrelsy_
and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel._ Lewis’s own
collection, the _Tales of Wonder,_ was a clumsy miscellany,
which fell flat when it at first appeared.
Meanwhile, he was one of the leaders in introducing
the passion for German plays which
marked the end of the century. The British
public, it must be confessed, did not show a
very discriminative taste. Lewis’s _Castle Spectre,_
founded on an early romance of his own, had a
run of sixty nights in 1798, and is said to have
made more money than any play for twenty years.
It was eclipsed next year by Sheridan’s _Pizarro,_
adapted from Kotzebue, which when published
passed through twenty-nine editions. _The
Stranger,_ also from Kotzebue, was performed in
1798, and two other translations appeared at the
same time. ‘Who has e’er been at Drury must
needs know _The Stranger,_’ according to the
authors of _Rejected Addresses,_ where an exposition
of the plot may be found. _The Stranger_ was
long popular, and, as Mr. Herzfeld remarks,
was seen by the youthful Pendennis, who
may well have been present in person at Drury
Lane on 3rd November 1828.<*> In 1798 again

<footnote>
  From some =mss.= of Thackeray recently sold, it appears that he
had amused himself by translating something of Kotzebue’s when
at Weimar.
</>

Mrs. Inchbald turned Kotzebue’s _Natural Son_
into _A Lover’s Vows,_ a play which, as it may be
remembered, greatly shocked Miss Fanny Price
when a performance was suggested by her cousins
at Mansfield Park. Poor old Cumberland, ‘Sir
Fretful Plagiary,’ had to lay hands upon Kotzebue
(in his _Joanna of Montfaucon_ in 1800), and explains
that, although he had always regarded the German
drama as a profanation of the English stage, he
had ‘strong reasons’—of a pecuniary nature,
apparently—for bowing to the evil principle.
Three out of six volumes of plays from the German
plays collected in 1806 are occupied by Kotzebue’s
works, others of which had been turned to account
by Holcroft, a contemporary playwright. The same
collection, which shows the contemporary taste,
includes a couple of Lessing’s plays (_Minna von
Bernhelm_ and _Emilia Galloti,_ which had been acted
in 1794), Schiller’s _Robbers,_ and Goethe’s _Stella._<*>

<footnote>
  Holcroft also published a series of translations of German, Italian,
French, and Spanish plays, chiefly by his daughter Fanny, in _The
Theatrical Recorder,_ 1805-6.
</>

Holcroft had been prevented by the wisdom of the
authorities from producing _The Robbers,_ though in
1799 J. G. Holman was allowed to give a properly
corrected version as _The Redcross Knights._ _Stella_
it seems, though translated in 1798, was never
performed. Its fame, however, is known to all
English readers through the inimitable _Rovers_ of
the Anti-Jacobin. The fact suggests a curious
oversight of later years. Carlyle afterwards
rebuked William Taylor for asserting that the
play ends by an agreement of the two ladies to
live with one husband. This, says Carlyle, is only
true of the French version. In point of fact, it
was also true of Goethe’s first redaction. If
Carlyle had forgotten this, he might surely have
remembered _The Lovers,_ where it is explicitly
quoted as the precedent for the catastrophe.

  Whether the wit of Canning and his friends
gave a death-blow to the ‘German Drama’—the
drama, that is, of which Kotzebue was the main
representative—must be uncertain. The fashion
was bound to vanish, one might think, as soon as
anybody set the example of laughing. It did not,
indeed, expire at once. Lewis produced a few
more ‘romances’ from the German in the next few
years, and wound up with the melodrama _Timour
the Tartar,_ produced in 1811 at Covent Garden,
to rival Colman’s popular _Bluebeard,_ and permit
the introduction of horses upon the stage. Coleridge’s
wrath was roused a little later by Maturin’s
_Bertram,_ which had been preferred to his own
_Zapolya._ In the _Biographia Literaria,_ really a
plaintive expostulation due to his sufferings from
want of due recognition, he was weak enough to
fall foul of his rival, and denounces _Bertram_ as an
incarnation of the obnoxious spirit. The ‘German’
drama, he explains, is not really German at
all. It was a bastard product of English sentimentalism.
The Germans had been reading
Young’s _Night Thoughts_ and Hervey’s _Meditations,_
and _Clarissa Harlowe._ They adapted the sickly
sentimentalism, fostered by these writers, to the
machinery of ruined castles and trap-doors, and
skeletons and dungeons, first turned to account in
the _Castle of Otranto._ The unhallowed brew
which resulted should properly be called the Jacobinical
drama, and its absurdities are illustrated by
a sharp attack upon Maturin’s drama. To most
people, Coleridge seemed to be repudiating a
heresy in which he was really a partaker. His
_Osorio_ (which Sheridan refused in 1797, and
which succeeded as _Remorse_ in 1813), if not of the
Kotzebue variety, showed, at least, the influence of
_The Robbers_ and _The Ghostseers._ The famous
translation of _Wallenstein,_ the first product of his
visit to Germany, would, indeed, have done something,
had it not remained in the Longmans’ warehouse,
to call attention to the higher German
drama. But, if one may judge from the translations,
little was really done to introduce Schiller’s
or Goethe’s best work to English readers till
Carlyle took up the duty more than twenty years
afterwards.

  Meanwhile, however, one worthy person, Mr.
Herzfeld’s hero, William Taylor, was diligently
hammering some knowledge of German into
English brains. Taylor was born at Norwich in
1765. Norwich was still at his birth one of the
leading manufacturing towns; and, like some of
its rivals, it had a small literary circle which, if
not superior to what might now be found there,
was more independent of London influences.
Philosophical societies were springing up in many
prominent towns, such as Liverpool, Manchester,
Newcastle, Birmingham, and Bristol, and such
names as Roscoe, Erasmus Darwin, Dalton,
Priestley, Wedgwood, Watt, Beddoes, and Davy
show that they included some real leaders in
science and literature. Norwich, we are told, was
called in a contemporary magazine the ‘English
Athens,’ probably to distinguish it from a city similarly
named in Scotland. A once famous Unitarian
divine, John Taylor, of Norwich, left descendants
of literary taste, of whom Sarah, married to John
Austin, became afterwards known as a translator
of German. There, too, lived the Aldersons, one
of whom became Mrs. Opie, and the Martineau
family, whose most honoured descendant is still
among us, and the Quaker Gurneys, including
the future Mrs. Fry. The great Dr. Parr was
schoolmaster there for a time, and so was William
Enfield, who translated (from the Latin) Brucker’s
great _History of Philosophy._ Norwich had, moreover,
the unique distinction of a home-bred
School of Art, of which ‘Old Crome’ was the
most distinguished member. Mackintosh looked
in occasionally upon circuit, with Basil Montagu.
Another visitor was Crabb Robinson. He went
to Germany partly at Taylor’s suggestion, visited
Weimar, crammed Mme. de Staël, it is said, in
German philosophy, and, as his diary shows, was
afterwards a zealous adherent of the Coleridge
circles, and eager to promote the spread of the
true faith. Altogether, Norwich could hold up
its head in the world of letters, and had some
outlook towards Germany. Miss Martineau
informs us that the society there was priggish,
which is not surprising; and Taylor’s first biographer
gives a quaint reason. The Norwich
manufacturer, he says, received more flattery than
he could give out. His clerks bowed to the earth
before him, whereas he had only to pay compliments
when signing formal letters of business to
correspondents. He was thus tempted to give
himself the airs of a merchant prince in some
mediæval city. William Taylor, in his boyhood,
was sent by his father, one of these proud manufacturers,
to learn languages abroad, and, after
acquiring French and Italian, went, in 1781, to
Germany. In 1782 he was provided with an
introduction to Goethe, though it is doubtful
whether he actually saw the great man. After
his return, Taylor settled down at Norwich for
life. His father retired from business with
a fortune, afterwards lost, and Taylor took a
leading position as a literary light in his native
city. There he remained, with few interruptions,
till his death in 1836. He never married, and
was a most devoted son to his parents. He
laboured conscientiously at literary pursuits until
his health broke down when he was about fifty.
His first biographer intimates that he did not
refrain as much as was desirable from drinks for
which his head was no longer sufficiently strong.
One little glimpse of him, apparently about 1820,
is given in _Lavengro_ (see chap. xxiii.). Taylor
is presented to us smoking steadily, calmly
expounding heterodox doctrines about Shakespeare
and the Bible, confessing, poor man, that his life
had been a failure, and recommending his young
friend to study German. He seems to have given
real encouragement to Borrow’s philological tastes.
Taylor’s first success was the translation of
_Lenore._ Soon afterwards he translated Lessing’s
_Nathan_ and Goethe’s _Iphigenia;_ but his main work
was contained in contributions to the old _Monthly
Review_—still edited when he began by the Griffiths
who had been Goldsmith’s taskmaster—and to
other reviews, _The Critical, The Annual,_ and so
forth, which have long since retired to the dustiest
shelves of old libraries. According to Hazlitt, as
Mr. Herzfeld reminds us, Taylor set the example
of the fuller reviews,<*> which in _The Edinburgh_

<footnote>
  When did the old form ‘reviewals’ go out? It is generally
used by Southey and his contemporaries.
</>

supplanted the old meagre analysis of books.
The claim would, I think, require modification.
More than thirty years before his predecessor,
Goldsmith had contributed genuine reviews to the
same periodical—to give no other instances. At
any rate, Taylor never took part in _The Edinburgh_
or its rivals. He wrote, we are told, 1750
articles upon a vast variety of topics, many of
them upon his speciality of German literature.
Out of these he constructed what he called his
_Historic Survey of German Poetry_ in 1830; and
thereby exposed himself to Carlyle’s criticism in
_The Edinburgh._ The review, as Mr. Herzfeld
argues, was in many ways unjust. Unfortunately,
it is probably the only thing by which Taylor is
faintly remembered. His _Life,_ however, has
some interest, chiefly from the long correspondence
with Southey, who had made his acquaintance
on a visit to Norwich in 1798, and, in spite
of growing divergence of opinion, kept up the
friendship till the last.

  Mr. Herzfeld generously seeks to vindicate his
hero from Carlyle’s criticisms. In one respect he
clearly makes out his case. Carlyle finds thirteen
errors in six pages and computes the number in
the whole upon that basis. Now these errors,
that about _Stella,_ for example, are partly Carlyle’s
own; and if his attention was ever called to the
facts, which I should take to be very doubtful, he
should, of course, have omitted, or greatly altered,
the passage before republishing the essay. So
much must be said in bare justice to Taylor; but
I cannot think that any one who tries to read the
book will doubt that Carlyle’s judgment was
substantially indisputable. He speaks, indeed, of
Taylor’s general abilities more respectfully than
might have been expected; he admits the value
of some of his criticisms and the excellence of
his poetical translation; and the criticism, severe
enough, is summed up in the phrase, not familiar
in English till Mathew Arnold gave it currency,
that Taylor was what Germans called a _Philister_—
‘every fibre of him is Philistine.’ That appears
to me to be true, though it might have been
rather taken for granted than insisted upon.
Taylor might have replied as the cats’-meat man,
according to Sam Weller, replied to the statement
that he was no gentleman—that is a ‘self-evident
proposition.’ I only notice it as illustrating the
change of sentiment. Carlyle, we know, looked
up to Goethe as the great prophet of the time.
It is a puzzle, not here to be considered, how
Carlyle came to be so profoundly impressed by a
man so diametrically opposed to him in many
ways; and it may be inquired whether Carlyle’s
Goethe was not something quite different from
the Goethe of other people, and, indeed, of historical
fact. Anyhow, to Carlyle, and to his
English contemporaries, German poetry, as well
as German philosophy and historical criticism, had
come as a revelation. It meant that a new light
had dawned upon the world: that an escape was
opened from that wicked old eighteenth century,
with its scepticism and its materialism, and that a
real survey must correspond to some appreciation
of the great spiritual revolution of the age. Now,
Taylor, as Carlyle puts it, had simply ‘no theorem
of Germany and its intellectual progress, not even
a false one.’ That is precisely the case. When,
for example, Taylor compares Goethe, Schiller,
and Kotzebue, and shows, in the proper formula
of critical balancing, how one is remarkable for
‘invention,’ and the second for ‘pathos,’ and
the third for ‘truth to nature,’ he has obviously
no glimmering of the relative proportions of
intellectual eminences. You cannot properly ‘compare’
Scott and Coleridge and ‘Monk’ Lewis.
Perhaps it is equally absurd to compare Taylor
himself with critics of a more philosophical kind.

  Taylor’s work, in fact, represents the state of
mind possible to intelligent persons at Norwich at
the end of the last century, and from that point
of view is highly creditable. The manufacturing
circles were inclined to be good sound Whigs in
politics, and inclined to Unitarianism in religion.
Taylor shared Fox’s early enthusiasm for the
French Revolution, and held to the good old cause
when Southey became a Tory. In religious
matters he seems to have deserted Priestley for
Erasmus Darwin, who spoke of Unitarianism as a
feather-bed for a dying Christian, and decidedly
preferred Voltaire’s reformation to Luther’s.
‘Religion,’ however, he admitted, ‘if a blemish
in the male is surely a grace in the female sex,’
and his freethinking, though tolerably obvious,
was not of the militant kind. He wished only
to be allowed to put forward his theories, which
are apt to be such as might have pleased
Mr. Casaubon in _Middlemarch._ He identified
Sesostris with Joshua, and Thales with Homer,
and even Jesus the son of Sirach with the
Founder of the Christian religion. He took the
Phœnix to be a myth under which the Egyptian
priests had couched a theory of comets; and, in
short, adopted fancies which might be admired in
provincial circles, but would hardly have excited
respect in a German University. His English,
when he wished to be impressive, was of the fine
old Johnsonian variety. Wieland, he says, ‘conceals
beneath the enthusiasm of a Wesley the
scepticism of a Hume. He binds his brow,
indeed, with the clusters of Engedi, strews along
his path the roses of Sharon, and culls the sweetest
lilies of the valley of Tirzah; but he employs
them rather as the gift of human than of angelic
hands, rather as the luxuries of taste than of faith.
With him, Magdalene, Salome, and the younger
Maria rather resemble the clad Graces pursuing
Apollo in the dance, and scattering perfumes in
his way, or the Gopia listening with mingled
love and devotion to the hymnings of Krishna,
while Cama strains his cany bow and mixes for
the nuptial feast his cup of five-fold joy, than’—
in short, the Christian saints. It is not surprising
that a gentleman who supposes that he must twist
language into contortions of this kind in order
to be eloquent, should be also very dry when he
has got off the high horse. But it is to be
admitted that, in spite of the queer pedantry and
the grotesque theories which could flourish in the
atmosphere of an old-fashioned country town,
there was really a good deal of solid sense, and,
what is, perhaps, more unexpected, a capacity for
turning out very decent verse translation. Even
Carlyle admits that his accounts of Klopstock and
Wieland are excellent; and, if the book be taken
as contemporary annals instead of philosophic
history, it might have passed muster very creditably.
Taylor had, at any rate, the merit of
studying German industriously for many years
under great disadvantages; with little access to
books or communication with living representatives
of the literature. He had inevitably lost
touch of the literary movement, earlier phases of
which he describes in rather wooden fashion.
His articles, though he never got much recognition
as a public teacher, probably did something
to spread a certain knowledge of the facts. They
were not put together as a book till his powers
were declining, and then naturally made a very
discontinuous and unequal performance, besides
representing an obsolete point of view.

  By the time of this publication, indeed, it was
generally understood that there was such a thing
as German literature, and that an enlightened
person should admire its great names. Coleridge
had been talking about the reason and the understanding
and object and subject from Highgate
Hill for some thirteen years. Byron, though he
knew no German, got Monk Lewis to read _Faust_
to him, and had dedicated _Sardanapalus_ (1821) to
Goethe as the ‘homage of a literary vassal to his
liege lord.’ Shelley had translated the prologue
of _Faust._ Hare and Thirlwall were translating
Niehbuhr. Pusey and H. J. Rose were arguing
about the causes of the terrible phenomenon,
German ‘Neologism.’ Sir W. Hamilton had gone
to Germany, and had been impressed by metaphysical
speculations utterly unknown to Stewart
and Brown. Carlyle had been long translating
and discoursing so far to very deaf ears. But
these and later developments are beyond me.
The history of the early explorers is, I think,
curious, if only as illustrating the difficulty of
persuading the Englishman to recognise the existence
of anything beyond his insular world, and
perhaps the later history would show how difficult
it is afterwards to induce him to turn his knowledge
to any account.

<chapter>

	MATTHEW ARNOLD<*>

<footnote>
  A lecture delivered at the Owens College, Manchester, 13th
November 1893.
</>

  When your Principal asked me to select a topic
for a lecture, I replied, in a moment of weakness,
that I would speak of Matthew Arnold. The
choice was partly suggested by an observation
made on a recent visit to the United States. It
struck me that Arnold’s merits were even more
fully recognised there than in his own country;
though I hope that here, too, they do not lack
appreciation. American opinion is probably not
infallible. Still, fame on the other side of the
Atlantic establishes a certain presumption of excellence.
It proves that a man’s influence was
not created by, and may sometimes indicate that
it has been partly obscured by, our local prejudices.
At any rate, the observation suggested
some thoughts, which, it occurred to me, might
be worth submitting to an English audience.
Well, I have been ever since repenting my
decision. The reasons against my enterprise
are indeed so strong that I am now almost afraid
to mention them. In the first place, I knew
Arnold personally, though I cannot boast of
having known him so intimately as to be provided
with reminiscences. At one of my meetings
with him, indeed, I do remember a remark
which was made, and which struck me at the
moment as singularly happy. Unfortunately, it
was a remark made by me and not by him.
Nothing, therefore, should induce me to report
it, although, if you attend to what I am about
to say, you will perhaps hear it, and, I hope,
recognise it by this description. But, though
our acquaintance was not so close as I could
have wished, it left me with a singularly strong
impression of Arnold’s personal charm. Though
some objects of my worship were to him mere
wooden idols; though I once satisfactorily confuted
him in an article, now happily forgotten
by myself and everybody else; though I was
once even his Editor, and forced in that capacity
to decline certain articles, on grounds, of course,
quite apart from literary merit; yet he was
always not only courteous but cordial, and, I
may almost say, affectionate in manner. He had
that obvious sweetness of nature, which it is
impossible not to recognise and not to love.
Though in controversy he took and gave many
shrewd blows, he always received them with a
courtesy, indicative not of mere policy or literary
tact, but of dislike to inflicting pain and of incapacity
for hating any tolerably decent antagonist
in flesh and blood. He was on excellent terms
with the classes whose foibles he ridiculed most
unsparingly, and even his own foibles were attractive.
He had his vanity; but vanity is a quality
to which moralists have never done justice. As
distinguished from conceit, from a sullen conviction
of your own superiority, it often implies
a craving for sympathy and a confidence in the
sincerity of your fellows, which is in the main,
as his certainly was, an amiable and attractive
characteristic. If it just savoured of intellectual
coxcombry, it was redeemed by a simplicity and
social amenity which showed that his nature had
resisted the ossifying process which makes most
of us commonplace and prosaic in later life.
Now, I dislike criticism of men whose personal
acquaintance I have valued. ‘I love Robertson,’
said Johnson, ‘and I won’t talk of his books,’
I feel the same, in a rather different sense, about
Arnold. It is difficult to reconcile the claims
of honest criticism and personal esteem. But,
besides this, I have a difficulty to which I must
refer at the risk of giving an impression of mock-
modesty. I feel, that is, the great difficulty of
speaking to purpose of a man whose intellectual
type was so different from my own. Had Arnold
been called upon to pronounce judgment upon
me, he must, however reluctantly, have set me
down as a Philistine. It is a word which I dislike;
but I cannot deny that, in his phraseology,
it would be indisputably appropriate. Arnold
was a typical Oxford man in the days when
Oxford was stirred by the ‘movement’ of which
it is supposed to be proper to speak respectfully.
I was taught in my childhood to regard
‘Puseyism’ and ‘Tractarianism’ with a vague
shuddering horror; and, as I grew older, I am
afraid that the horror only became milder as it
was mixed with something too like contempt.
The young leader whose opinions I assimilated
in college days belonged to a different and more
prosaic school. They scorned sentimentalism
and æsthetic revivals, and, if they took any
interest in speculative matters, read John Stuart
Mill, and were sound Utilitarians and orthodox
Political Economists. A hard-headed senior
wrangler is in his own conceit a superior being
to a flighty double first-class man. But perhaps
his solid conviction that he was in the right path
made him rather unfitted to judge of the sister
University. He thought her impulsive, ill-
balanced, too easily hurried into the pursuit
of all kinds of theological, philosophical, and
literary chimeras; and therefore was unjust to
her substantial merits and even to the intellectual
impulse which, with all its vagaries, was yet
better than stagnation. After all, I am probably
only trying to hint at the fundamental difference
between the poetic and the prosaic mind. We—
for I may perhaps assume that some of you
belong, like me, to the prosaic faction—feel,
when dealing with such a man as Arnold, at a
loss. He has intuitions where we have only
calculations; he can strike out vivid pictures
where we try laboriously to construct diagrams;
he shows at once a type where our rough statistical
and analytical tables fail to reveal more than a
few tangible facts; he perceives the spirit and
finer essence of an idea where it seems to slip
through our coarser fingers, leaving only a
residuum of sophistical paradox. In the long-
run, the prosaic weigher and measurer has one
advantage: he is generally in the right as far
as he goes. His tests may be coarser, but they
are more decisive and less dependent upon his
own fancies; but, when he tries to understand
his rival, to explain how at a bound the intuitive
perception has reached conclusions after which he
can only hobble on limping feet, he is apt to
make a bungle of it: to despise the power in
which he is so deficient: and probably to suggest
unreasonable doubts as to its reality and value.

  Here is, I feel, my real weakness in speaking
of Arnold; for I may certainly say at once that
Arnold, whatever else he was, was a genuine poet.
I do not dispute the general opinion of the day
that there were only two poets of the first rank
in his generation. Arnold must, on the whole,
take a lower place than Tennyson and Browning.
But, though I cannot avoid falling into the
method of comparison, I do not accept with
satisfaction the apparently implied doctrine that
poets can be satisfactorily arranged in order of
merit. We cannot give so many marks for style
and so many for pathos or descriptive power.
It is best to look at each poet by himself. We
need only distinguish between the sham and the
genuine article; and my own method of distinguishing
is a simple one. I believe in poetry
which learns itself by heart. There are poems
which dominate and haunt one; which, once
admitted, sting and cling to one; the tune of
which comes up and runs in one’s head at odd
moments; and which suddenly revive, after years
of forgetfulness, as vigorous and lively as ever.
Such poetry, as Wordsworth told Arnold, has
the characteristic of being ‘inevitable,’—a phrase
which has become something of a nuisance, but
cannot be always avoided. You feel that the
thing had to be said just as it was said; and that,
once so said, nothing said by anybody else will
just hit the same mark. Of course, this test,
being personal, is not conclusive. I remember,
I am ashamed to say it, some poetry which I
know to be trash, merely, I suppose, because it
jingles pleasantly; and I forget a great deal
which I know to be good because I can perceive
that it dominates other people; but then I do
my best to keep my tastes on such occasions to
myself. Now, Matthew Arnold’s poetry has,
in an eminent degree, the quality—if not of
inevitableness—of adhesiveness. I don’t know
whether my experience is peculiar; but I have
never got out of my head, since I read it, the
little poem about the Neckan, who sings his
plaintive song on the Baltic headlands, or the
charming verses—the last, I fancy, which he
wrote—about the dachshund Geist, whose grave
at Cobham should be a goal for all poetic
pilgrims. In certain of his more laboured poems,
I am conscious rather that I ought to admire
than that I do admire. To my brutal mind, the
recollection of the classical models is a source
of annoyance, as suggesting that the scholar is
in danger of suppressing the man. But there are
other poems which I love, if not because of, at
any rate in spite of, the classical propensities
which they reveal. ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ is
to me among the most delightful of modern
poems, though in it Arnold indulges, perhaps
more than enough, in the long-tailed Homeric
metaphor, which drags in upon principle all the
points on which the thing compared does not
resemble the object. I can always read ‘Tristram
and Iseult,’ and the ‘Church of Brou’ and
‘Empedocles on Etna’; and know that they
leave behind them a sense of sweetness and
delicacy and exquisite feeling, if they do not
present those vivid phrases into which the very
greatest men—the Dantes or Shakespeares—can
infuse their very life-blood. In his _Essays upon
Celtic Literature_—perhaps the most delightful of
his books—Arnold says that English poetry
derived three things mainly from Celtic sources:
its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and
its turn for natural magic. The distinction is
indicated with admirable fineness; and my perceptions
are not quite fine enough to follow it.
Keats, Arnold is able to perceive, is looking at
nature like a Greek when he asks

<verse>
What little town by river or seashore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel
Is emptied of its folk this pious morn?
</>

but becomes Celtic when he speaks of

<verse>
Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy-land forlorn!
</>

Possibly: but I am shy of endeavouring to discriminate
these exquisite essences, and I will not
attempt to say whether it is the power of style or
of magic, whether it is the presence of a Greek
or a Celtic mode of looking at nature, that
charms us in what is perhaps Arnold’s masterpiece,
the ‘Scholar Gipsy.’ Whether the exquisite
concluding stanzas, for example, be an instance
of the Greek or of the Celtic element, I know
not; but I am quite sure that they are delightful.
At his best Arnold reaches a felicity of style in
which Tennyson alone, of all our modern poets,
if Tennyson himself, was his superior. The comparison,
much as I dislike comparisons, may
suggest at least the question why Arnold’s popularity
is still, as I think it is, below his deserts.
One answer is obvious. I cannot doubt that
Arnold fully appreciated the greatest of contemporary
artists. But certain references to Tennyson
in his essays are significant. Arnold incidentally
quotes Tennyson’s ‘great, broad-shouldered,
genial Englishman,’ by way of illustrating his
favourite proposition that this broad-shouldered
personage was a ‘barbarian,’ and conspicuous for
insensibility to ideas. He refers with a certain
scorn to the self-complacency implied in the
phrase about freedom broadening slowly down
from precedent to precedent. Though Arnold
does not criticise the poetry, he evidently felt—
what, to say the truth, I think must be admitted
—that Tennyson interpreted the average—shall
I say, the Philistine or the commonplace English
sentiment?—a little too faithfully; but it may
be inferred—though Arnold does not draw the
inference—that the extraordinary popularity of
Tennyson was partly owing to the fact that he
could express what occurred to everybody in
language that could be approached by nobody.
Arnold, on the contrary, is, in all his poems,
writing for the cultivated, and even for a small
class of cultivated people. The ideas which he
expresses are not only such as do not commend
themselves, but sometimes such as are rather
annoying, to the average reader. The sentiments
peculiar to a narrow, however refined, class
are obviously so far less favourable to poetical
treatment. Arnold seems to admit this in his
occasional employment of that rhymeless metre
which corresponds to the borderland between
prose and poetry. A characteristic piece is that
upon ‘Heine’s Grave.’ We all remember the
description of England, the ‘Weary Titan,’ who
with deaf

<verse>
Ears, and labour-dimmed eyes,
Regarding neither to right
Nor left, goes passively by,
Staggering on to her goal, etc.
</>

and a phrase which tells us how the spirit of the
world, beholding men’s absurdity, let a sardonic
smile

<verse>
For one short moment wander o’er his lips—
_That smile was Heine._
</>

That, of course, is rather epigram than poetry.
It matters, indeed, very little whether we call it
by one name or another, so long as we allow
it to be effective. But writing of this kind, call
it poetry or prose, or a hybrid genus, in which
the critic shows through the poet, is not likely
to suit the popular mind. It presupposes a whole
set of reflections which are the property of a
special class. And the same may be said of the
particular mood which is specially characteristic
of Arnold. In the ‘Scholar Gipsy’ he laments
‘the strange disease of modern life,’

<verse>
With its sick hurry, its divided aims;
</>

speaks of us ‘light half-believers of our casual
creeds’; tells how the wisest of us takes dejectedly
‘his seat upon the intellectual throne,’
and lays bare his sad experience of wretched
days, and ‘all his hourly varied anodynes’;
while we, who are not the wisest, can only pine,
wish that the long, unhappy dream would end,
and keep as our only friend ‘sad patience, too
near neighbour to despair.’ This note jars upon
some people, who prefer, perhaps, the mild
resignation of the ‘Christian Year.’ I fail of
sympathy for the opposite reason. I cannot
affect to share Arnold’s discomfort. I have
never been able—doubtless it is a defect—to
sympathise with the Obermanns and Amiels whom
Arnold admired; excellent but surely effeminate
persons, who taste of the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge, and finding the taste bitter, go on
making wry faces over it all their lives; and,
admitting with one party that the old creeds
are doomed, assert with the other that all beauty
must die with them. The universe is open to a
great many criticisms; there is plenty of cause
for tears and for melancholy; and great poets in
all ages have, because they were great poets,
given utterance to the sorrows of their race. But
I don’t feel disposed to grumble at the abundance
of interesting topics or the advance of
scientific knowledge, because some inconveniences
result from both. I say all this simply as explaining
why the vulgar—including myself—fail
to appreciate these musical moans over spilt milk,
which represent rather a particular eddy in an
intellectual revolution than the deeper and more
permanent emotions of human nature. But I do
not mean to depreciate Arnold’s power; only to
suggest reasons for the want of a wider recognition.
The ‘Scholar Gipsy,’ for example, expresses
in certain passages sentiment which I must call
morbid, but for all that, even for me, it remains
one of the most exquisite poems in the language.

  This leads me to another point. In his essay
upon Joubert (_Essays in Criticism,_ p. 249), Arnold
spoke of literature as a ‘criticism of life.’ Elsewhere
(Introduction to Mr. H. Ward’s _Collection
of Poems_) he gave the same account of
poetry. But to poetry, he says in the same
breath, we shall have to turn for consolation,
and it will replace much of ‘what now passes
with us for religion and philosophy.’ If so, he
obviously cannot mean that poetry and criticism
are really the same thing. The phrase ‘criticism
of life’ gave great offence, and was much ridiculed
by some writers, who were apparently
unable to distinguish between an epigram and a
philosophical dogma. To them, indeed, Arnold’s
whole position was naturally abhorrent. For it
is not uncommon now to hear denunciations of
all attempts to connect art with morality and
philosophy. It is wicked, we are told, for a
poet, or a novelist, or a painter, to take any
moral consideration into account; and therefore
to talk of poetry as destined to do for us much
that philosophy and religion used to do is, of
course, manifestly absurd. I will not argue the
point at length, being content to observe that the
cry seems to me oddly superfluous. Of all the
dangers to which modern novelists, for example,
are exposed, that against which they are least required
to guard is the danger of being too philosophical.
They really may feel at their ease;
nor do I think that they need feel much alarmed
as to the risk of being too moral. Meanwhile,
it is my belief that nobody is the better in any
department of life or literature for being a fool or
a brute: and least of all in poetry. I cannot think
that a man is disqualified for poetry either by
thinking more deeply than others or by having a
keener perception of (I hope I may join the two
words) moral beauty. A perception of what it is
that makes a hero or saint is, I fancy, as necessary
to a great literary artist as a perception of what
it is that constitutes physical beauty to a painter.
The whole doctrine, in short, seems to me to he
a misstatement of the very undeniable and very
ancient truth that it is a poet’s business to present
types, for example, and not to give bare psychological
theory: not that he is the worse for
being even a deep philosopher or a subtle logician;
on the contrary, he is so far the better;
but that he is the worse if he gives the abstract
reasoning instead of incarnating his thought in
concrete imagery. And so, when Arnold called
poetry a criticism of life, he only meant to express
what seems to me to be an undeniable truth.
The Elgin marbles might, in his sense, be called a
criticism of the physique of the sight-seers. To
contrast their perfect forms and unapproachable
grace with the knock-kneed, spindle-shanked,
narrow-chested, round-shouldered product of
London slums who passes before them, is to
criticise the poor creature’s defects of structure
in the most effective way. In a similar sense,
when a poet or a novelist presents us with a type,
when Addison gives us a Roger de Coverley, or
Goldsmith a Vicar of Wakefield, or Scott a
Dandie Dinmont, or Thackeray a Colonel Newcome,
or Dickens a Mr. Creakle (I chose this
example of Dickens only because Arnold made
use of it himself), they present us with ideal
portraits which set off—more effectively than any
deliberate analysis—the actual human beings
known to us, who more or less represent similar
classes. In his essay upon the ‘Function of
Criticism,’ Arnold explained his lofty conception
of the art, and showed why, in his sense of the
word, it should be the main aim of all modern
literature. ‘Criticism,’ he said, ‘is the disinterested
endeavour to learn and propagate the
best that is known or thought in the world.’
The difference between poetry and criticism is
that one gives us the ideal and the other explains
to us how it differs from the real. What is latent
in the poet is made explicit in the critic. Arnold,
himself, even when he turned to criticism, was
primarily a poet. His judgments show greater
skill in seizing characteristic aspects than in giving
a logical analysis or a convincing proof. He goes
by intuition, not by roundabout logical approaches.
No recent English critic, I think, has approached
him in the art of giving delicate portraits of
literary leaders; he has spoken, for example,
precisely the right word, about Byron and Wordsworth.
Many of us, who cannot rival him, may
gain from Arnold’s writings a higher conception
of what will be our true function if we could discharge
it. He did, I think, more than any man to
impress upon his countrymen that the critic should
not be a mere combatant in a series of faction
fights, puffing friends, and saying to an enemy,
‘This will never do.’ The weak side, however,
of the poetical criticism is its tendency to be
‘subjective,’ that is, to reflect too strongly the
personal prejudices of the author. It must
virtually consist in giving the impression made
upon the critic; and, however delicate his perception
and wide his sympathy, he will be scarcely
human if his judgments are not affected by his
personal equation. No one could be more alive
to the danger than Arnold, and his most characteristic
teaching turns upon the mode of avoiding
it. There are times, no doubt, when he
relies too confidently upon the fineness of his
perception, and then obviously has a slight spasm
of diffidence. I have noticed how, in his _Essays
on Celtic Literature,_ he uses the true poetical or
intuitive method: he recognises the precise point
at which Shakespeare or Keats passes from the
Greek to the Celtic note; he trusts to the fineness
of his ear, like a musician who can detect
the slightest discord. And we feel perhaps that
a man who can decide, for example, an ethnological
question by such means, who can by simple
inspiration determine which are the Celtic and
which are the Teutonic and which are the Norman
elements in English character, is going a little
beyond his tether. Arnold obviously feels so
too. In the same book he speaks most respectfully
of the opposite or prosaic method. Zeuss,
the great Celtic scholar, is praised because he uses
a scientific test to determine the age of documents.
This test is that in Welsh and Irish the
letters _p_ and _t_ gradually changed into _b_ or _d_
(as if the Celts had caught a cold in their
head); that _map_ became _mab,_ and _coet, coed._
This, says Arnold, is a verifiable and scientific
test. When Arnold is himself trying to distinguish
the Celtic element in Englishmen, he starts
by remarking that a Frenchman would speak of
German _bêtise,_ but of English _gaucherie_: the
German is _balourd,_ and the Englishman _empêtré_;
and the German _niais_, while the Englishman is
_mélancolique._ We can hardly say that the difference
of meaning between _balourd_ and _empêtré_
is as clear as the difference of sound between
t and d: and Arnold is, perhaps, too much inclined
to trust to his intuitions, as if they were
equivalent to scientific and measurable statements.
The same tendency shows itself in his
curious delight in discovering catch-words, and
repeating them sometimes to weariness. He uses
such phrases as ‘sweetness and light’ with a certain
air of laying down a genuine scientific distinction,
as clear-cut and unequivocal as a chemist’s
analysis. He feels that he has thoroughly analysed
English characteristics when he has classified
his countrymen as ‘Philistines, Barbarians,
and the Populace.’ To fix a certain aspect of
things by an appropriate phrase is the process
which corresponded with him to a scientific
analysis. But may not this method merely lead
to the substitution of one set of prejudices for
another; the prejudices, say, of the fastidious
don for the prejudices of the coarser tradesman?
The Frenchman who calls the Englishman _empêtré_
may be as narrow-minded as the Englishman who
calls the Frenchman a frog-eater. Certainly,
Arnold would reply. What we need is to make
a stream of fresh thought play freely about our
stock ‘notions and habits.’<*> We have to get out

<footnote>
  _Culture and Anarchy_ (1893), p. 121.
</>

of an unfruitful and mechanical routine. Or, as
he puts it in another way, his one qualification for
teaching his countrymen is, he says, his belief in
the ‘primary needfulness of seeing things as they
really are, and of the greater importance of ideas
than of the machinery which exists for them.’<*>

<footnote>
  _St. Paul and Protestantism_ (1870), p. 70.
</>

That is, we want, above all things, to get rid of
prejudices in general, not of any special prejudice;
to have our opinions constructed out of
pure, impartial, unbiassed thought, free from all
baser alloy of mephitic vapours. The mere self-
willed assertion of our own fancies can never lift
us to the higher point of view which would reveal
our narrowness and ignorance. Hence the
vast importance of ‘culture’: the one thing needful;
which, again, in another view, is equivalent to
a frank submission of ourselves to the Zeitgeist.
The Zeitgeist, indeed, is an entity not quite easy
to define. But it at least supposes that genuine
philosophy and scientific thought is a reality; that
there is a real difference between the scholar and
the charlatan; that criticism in a wide sense has
achieved some permanent and definite results;
and that, although many antiquated prejudices
still survive and dominate us, especially in
England, and constitute the whole mental furniture
of the Philistine, they are doomed to decay,
and those who hold by them doomed to perish
with them. To recognise, therefore, the deep,
underlying currents of thought, to get outside of
the narrow limits of the popular prejudice, to
steep our minds in the best thought of the past,
and to be open to the really great thoughts of the
present, is the one salvation for the race and for
reasonable men. The English people, he often
said,<*> had entered the prison of Puritanism, and

<footnote>
  _Essays on Criticism,_ p. 70.
</>

had the key turned upon their spirit for two
centuries. To give them the key and to exhort
them to use it was his great aim. Heine had
called himself a ‘brave soldier in the war of the
liberation of humanity,’ and Arnold took service
in the same army. Only—and this was the
doctrine upon which he laid emphasis—to fight
effectually we must recognise the true leaders,
those who really spoke with authority, and who
were the true advanced guard in the march
to the land of promise. Your individualist
would only take off the fetters so as to allow
a free fight among the prisoners. The prophet
of culture alone can enable us to get free from
the prison-house itself. His strong sense of the
mischief of literary anarchy appeared in his once
famous essay upon the French Academy. Though
he guarded himself against recommending an
English institution, he was fascinated by the
charm of an acknowledged tribunal of good taste,
an outward and visible symbol of right reason,
of a body which, by its moral authority, should
restrain men from those excesses and faults of
taste into which even the greatest Englishmen are
apt to fall, and which should keep distinctly before
our minds the conviction that we only obtain
worthy intellectual liberty when we recognise the
necessity of subordination to the highest minds.
To imbibe the teaching of the Zeitgeist, to know
what is the true living thought of the age and who
are its great men, is to accept a higher rule, and
not merely (as he put it) to exchange the errors
of Miall for the errors of Mill: to become a
vulgar Freethinker instead of a vulgar Dissenter.

  The doctrine of culture is, of course, in some
sense the common property of all cultivated men.
Carlyle, like Arnold, wished for an exit from
Houndsditch and a relinquishment of Hebrew
old clothes. But Arnold detested Carlyle’s
Puritanism, and was alienated by his sulphurous
and volcanic explosiveness. Mill hated the
tyranny of the majority, and, of course, rejected
the Puritan theology. But Mill was a Benthamite,
and Benthamism was the natural doctrine of the
Philistine. Mill’s theories would lead, though
in spite of himself, to that consummation which
Arnold most dreaded—the general dominion of
the Commonplace: to the definitive imposition
upon the world of the code of the Philistine. To
define Arnold’s point of view, we should have, I
think, to consider what in our modern slang is
called his environment. Any one who reads the
life of his father will see how profound was the
influence upon the son. ‘Somewhere, surely, afar,’
as he says in the lines in Rugby Chapel,

<verse>
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm.
</>

Some of the force, may one say, had passed into
the younger man, though he had lost something
of the austere strength, and had gained much in
delicacy, and certainly in a sense of humour
curiously absent in the elder, as it is, I think, in
most good men. Dr. Arnold shared the fore-
bodings common at the period of the Reform
Bill. The old dogged Conservatism of the
George =iii.= and Eldon type was doomed. But
who was to profit by the victory? The Radicals,
led by Bentham and James Mill? That meant
confiscation and disestablishment in practice; and
in theory, materialism or atheism. This was the
‘liberalism’ denounced and dreaded by Newman.<*>

<footnote>
  _Culture and Anarchy,_ p. 23.
</>

But then, to Dr. Arnold, the Oxford Movement
itself meant a revival of superstition and sacerdotalism.
He held that there was a truer liberalism
than Benthamism, a liberalism of which Coleridge
expounded and suggested the philosophy: a
doctrine which could reanimate the old creeds by
exposing them to the light, and bring them into
harmony with the best modern thought. The
Church, neither plundered nor enslaved by superstition,
might be lifted to a higher intellectual
level, and become once more the great national
organ of spiritual influence and development.
Matthew Arnold always held to this aspiration.
He hoped that the Church might open its doors
to all dissenters—not only to Protestants, but
even in course of time to Roman Catholics.<*> He

<footnote>
  _St. Paul and Protestantism. _
</>

hated disestablishment, and even in the case of
the Church of Ireland, condemned a measure
which, though it removed an injustice, removed
it at the cost of an alliance with the narrow
dissenting prejudices. But the views of the
young man were also modified by the fascination
of the Newman school. Of Oxford he could
never speak without enthusiasm, if he could not
quite refrain from a touch of irony. ‘Adorable
dreamer!’ he exclaims,<*> ‘whose heart has been

<footnote>
  _Essays on Criticism,_ p. xvii.
</>

so romantic! who has given thyself prodigally,
given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine,
only not to the Philistines! Home of lost
causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular
names and impossible loyalties!’ Oxford, as
he says elsewhere,<*> had taught the truth that

<footnote>
  _Culture and Anarchy,_ p. 23.
</>

‘beauty and sweetness are essential characters
of a complete human perfection.’ Bad philosophies,
another critic (I think Professor Flint)
has said, when they die, go to Oxford. Arnold
admitted the badness of the philosophies, but
the beauty and sweetness, he would have added,
are immortal. The effect, therefore, upon him
was not to diminish his loyalty to philosophy;
no one more hated all obscurantism: his belief in
‘culture,’ in the great achievements of scholarship,
of science, of historical criticism, was part of his
nature. He was not the man to propose to put
back the hand of the dial, or to repel the intellectual
ocean with the mop of an orthodox Mrs.
Partington. But his keen appreciation of the beauty
of the old ideals governed his thought. He even
held<*> that the Christianity of the future would

<footnote>
  _Mixed Essays,_ p. 121.
</>

be Catholicism, though Catholicism ‘purged’ and
‘opening itself to the light,’ ‘conscious of its own
poetry, freed from its sacerdotal despotism, and
freed from its pseudo-scientific apparatus of
superannuated dogma.’ Meanwhile, his classical
training and his delight in the clearness and
symmetry of the great French writers affected
his taste. He has told us how his youthful
enthusiasm took him at one time to Paris, to
spend two months in seeing Rachel’s performances<*>

<footnote>
  _Irish Essays,_ p. 151.
</>

on the French stage, and at another, to
visit George Sand in her country retirement. And
then came the experience of his official career
which made him familiar with the educational
systems of France and Germany, and with the
chaotic set of institutions which represented an
educational system in England. The master-
thought, he says,<*> by which his politics were

<footnote>
  _Ibid._ p. 17.
</>

governed was the thought of the ‘bad civilisation
of the English middle-class.’ This was, in fact,
the really serious aim to which his whole literary
activity in later life converged. Condemned to
live and work among the middle-class, while
imbued with the ideas in which they were most
defective, loving, as he did, the beauty and freshness
of Oxford, the logical clearness and belief in
ideas of France, the devotion to scientific truth
and philosophical thoroughness in Germany, the
sight of the dogged British Philistine became to
him a perpetual grievance. The middle-class, as
he said in one of his favourite formulæ,<*> has a

<footnote>
  _Mixed Essays,_ p. 167.
</>

‘defective type of religion, a narrow range of
intellect and knowledge, a stinted sense of beauty,
and a low type of manners.’ Accordingly, the
function which he took for himself was to be a
thorn in the side of the Philistine: to pierce the
animal’s thick hide with taunts, delicate but
barbed; to invent nicknames which might reveal
to the creature his own absurdity; to fasten upon
expressions characteristic of the blatant arrogance
and complacent ineffable self-conceit of the vulgar
John Bull, and repeat them till even Bull might
be induced to blush. Somebody’s unlucky statement
that the English was the best breed in the
world; the motto about the ‘dissidence of dissent
and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion’;
the notice of Wragg—the woman who was taken
up for child-murder; the assertion of _The
Saturday Review_ that we were the most logical
people in the world; the roarings of the ‘young
lions of _The Daily Telegraph,_’ and their like,
which covered our impotence in European wars;
the truss-manufactory which ornamented the finest
site in Europe: upon these and other texts he
harped—perhaps with a little too much repetition
—in the hope of bringing to us some sense of our
defects. I must confess that, as a good Philistine,
I often felt, and hope I profited by the feeling,
that he had pierced me to the quick, and I submitted
to his castigations as I have had to, submit
to the probings of a dentist—I knew they were for
my good. And I often wished, I must also confess,
that I too had a little sweetness and light that
I might be able to say such nasty things of my
enemies. We who were young radicals in the
days when Arminius von Thunder-Ten Tronckh
was writing to _The Pall Mall Gazette,_ tried to
retort by calling him a mere dandy, a kid-gloved
Oxford coxcomb, who was thinking that revolutions
could be made with rosewater. I can see
now that we did not do justice to the real seriousness
of his purpose. You do not, we said sometimes,
propose any practical measure. He replied
fairly enough that it was not his business, nor the
business of philosophers and poets generally, to
mix in actual politics and draft Acts of Parliament.
They had to modify ideas. He might
have added that in his own sphere, he had made
very practical criticisms upon our educational
system; and had, for example, pointed out the
defects of English secondary education with a
clearness which is only now beginning to have
some recognition from practical politicians. But
it was no doubt his conviction that his countrymen
required less a change of machinery than an
intellectual change. What is indispensable, he
said,<*> is that we should not only _do_ to Ireland

<footnote>
  Preface to _Irish Essays._
</>

something different, but that we should _be_ something
different. A writer, however great a thinker
and artist, who deliberately proposes to change the
character of his countrymen, is undoubtedly undertaking
a superhuman task. If Philistinism be
really part of our character we shall be Philistines
to the end, let our Carlyles and Newmans or Mills
and Arnolds preach never so wisely and never so
frequently. And yet their preaching is not the
less useful: more useful, perhaps, than that of the
politicians who boast of keeping to the practical
and confine their energies to promoting such
measures as are likely to catch votes at the next
election. ‘To see things as they really are’: that,
he said, was his great aim; and it is clearly a good
one. And what is the great obstacle to seeing
things as they really are? The great obstacle is,
I take it, that we are ourselves part of the things
to be seen; and that there is an ancient and proverbial
difficulty about seeing ourselves. When
certain prejudices have become parts of our mental
furniture, when our primary data and our methods
of reasoning imply a set of local narrow assumptions,
the task of getting outside them is almost
the task of getting outside of our own skins.
Our pigtails, as the poet observes, persist in
hanging behind us in spite of all our circumgyrations.
The greatness of a thinker is measured by
the width of his intellectual horizon, or by the
height to which he can rise above the plane of
ordinary thought. Arnold’s free play of thought
implies the process by which he hoped to achieve
liberation for himself. Be yourself cultured, and
your eyes will be opened to the ugliness of the
Philistines. To be cultured, widen your intellectual
horizon, and steep yourself in the best
thought of all ages and all civilised men. If
Arnold, trusted a little too much to the æsthetic
perceptions thus generated, he succeeded, I think,
in reaching a position from which he both discerned
and portrayed most clearly some palpable
blots. Such a service is a great one, whatever
the accuracy of the judgment. It is good to
breathe a new atmosphere if only for a space. I
have more respect than he had for the masculine
common-sense of Macaulay—the great apostle, as
Arnold called him, of the Philistines—but, after
Macaulay’s unhesitating utterances of the old
Whig creed, which to him was an ultimate and
infallible gospel, Arnold’s utterances lift us at
once to a higher point of view. When one
attempts, under Arnold’s guidance, to assign to
the Whig his proper place in European history,
and to see how far he is from fully representing
the ultimate verdict of philosophy, whatever our
political creed—and mine is very different from
Arnold’s—he really helps us to cure the mind’s
eye of the cataract of dogged prejudice, of whose
very existence we were unconscious.

  His position was, no doubt, one which we may
call unpractical. He was a democrat in one sense:
for aristocracy was unfavourable to ideas, and the
Zeitgeist has condemned the system. Inequality,
as he said in a remarkable essay,<*> ‘materialises

<footnote>
  _Irish Essays,_ p. 91.
</>

our upper classes, vulgarises our middle classes,
brutalises our lower classes.’ He speaks as one
shocked, not less in his moral than in his æsthetic
capacity, by the ‘hardly human horror, the abjection
and uncivilisedness’ of the populace in Glasgow
and the East of London. He held that the
French Revolution, by promoting equality, had
raised the lower classes of France to a marked
superiority in civilisation above the corresponding
class in England. Democracy, he admitted, might
get too much of its own way in England. The
remedy was to be sought in a stronger action of
the central power. We have not, he complains,
the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to
antiquity, of the State; and the English hatred of
all authority has tended to make us drift towards
mere anarchy.<*> When Fawcett preached self-help,

<footnote>
  _Culture and Anarchy,_ p. 36.
</>

Arnold held that to exhort to self-help in England
was to carry coals to Newcastle. It was the parrot-
like repetition of old formulæ that made our
liberalism barren. Our danger was all the other way,
the danger of exaggerating the blessings of self-
will and self-assertion.<*> I do not quote Arnold’s

<footnote>
  _Irish Essays,_ p. 96.
</>

view to show that he was right, or to claim fore-
sight for his predictions. I doubt, for example,
whether any one would say now that we hear too
much of self-help, or that there is no danger on
the opposite side, or whether Arnold himself
would have been attracted by State Socialism.
He was, indeed, deliberately in the habit of giving
one side of a question without caring to add even
the corrections of which he himself approved.
That is natural in a man who wishes to stimulate
thought, rather than to preach any definite practical
conclusion. I only urge that there was a
real and very rare merit in such a position taken
by a man of so much insight. The effort to see
English life and society and thought, as a German
professor or a French politician might see it, to
get outside of the prejudices which are part of
ourselves, is itself a most useful experience. And
when such criticism is carried on with a singular
fulness of perception, with pungent flashes of
sarcasm, but with a power of speaking truths as
undeniable as they are unpleasant, and yet with so
much true urbanity—in spite of certain little
defects, when he seems to be rather forcing himself
to be humorous, and becomes liable to an
accusation of flippancy—in such a case, I say that
we owe the deepest gratitude to our critic. His
criticism is anything but final, but it is to be taken
into account by every man who believes in the
importance of really civilising the coming world.
How the huge, all-devouring monster which we
call Democracy is to be dealt with: how he is to
be coaxed or lectured or preached into taking as
large a dose as possible of culture, of respect for
true science and genuine thought, is really one of
the most pressing of problems. Some look on
with despair, doubting only by whatever particular
process we shall be crushed into a dead level of
monotonous mediocrity. I do not suppose that
Arnold or any one else could give any solution of
the great problems; what he could do, and did, I
think, more effectually than any one, was to wake
us out of our dull complacency—to help to break
through the stolid crust, whatever seeds may be
sown by other hands. Perhaps this explains why
he is read in America, where the Philistine is a
very conspicuous phenomenon and the ugly side
of middle-class mediocrity is even more prominent
than here.

  I have reserved to the last, in order that I may
pass lightly, the point which to Arnold himself
doubtless appeared to be the most important part
of his teaching—I mean, of course, the criticism
of religion, to which he devoted his last writings.
In his last books, Arnold preached a doctrine
which will hardly find many followers. He
seemed even to be taking pains to get into a
position scarcely intelligible to people who take
things practically. He poses, one may say, as
a literary critic; he disavows all logical system,
and declares almost ostentatiously that he is no
metaphysician; but his apparent conclusion is,
not that he is incompetent to speak of philosophy,
but that philosophy is mere pedantry, so far as it
is not poetry in disguise. The organ by which
we are to discover religious truth does not employ
the prosaic method of examining evidence, nor the
logical method of _à priori_ reasoning; but that
free play of thought which is our guide in letters:
the judgment, as he says, which insensibly forms
itself in a fair mind, familiar with the best thoughts
of the world. The prophet is inspired by the
Zeitgeist, and judges by a cultivated instinct, not
by systematic argument. The rather airy mode
of treating great problems which emerges is often
bewildering to the ordinary mind. The orthodox
may revolt against the easy confidence with which
the Zeitgeist puts aside ‘miracles’ and the supernatural,
—not as disproved, but as obviously not
worth the trouble of disproving. The agnostic is
amazed to find that Arnold, while treating all
theological dogma as exploded rubbish, expatiates
upon the supreme value of the sublimated essence
of theology. God, Arnold tells us, is not a term
of science, but a term of poetry and eloquence—
a term ‘thrown out’ at a not fully grasped object
of consciousness—a literary term, in short—with
various indefinite meanings for different people.<*>

<footnote>
  _Literature and Dogma,_ p. 12.
</>

The ‘magnified and non-natural man’ of whom
theologians speak is to be superseded by the
‘stream of tendency’ or the ‘not ourselves which
makes for righteousness’; and, in expressing his
contempt for the vulgar conceptions, he perhaps
sometimes forgot his usual good taste, as in the
famous reference to the three Lords Shaftesbury.
Such phrases might be taken for the scoffing which
he condemned in others. I glanced the other day
at a satirical novel, in which the writer asks
whether an old Irishwoman is to say, instead of
‘God bless you,’ ‘the stream of tendency bless
you.’ I then opened the preface to Arnold’s _God
and the Bible_ and found him making a similar
criticism upon Mr. Herbert Spencer. Nobody,
he observes, would say, ‘The unknowable is our
refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.’

  Arnold’s answer to his critic would, in fact,
have been that he never proposed that the old
Irishwoman should give up her form of expression.
He professed to be simply explaining her real
meaning. He apparently thought, as I have said,
that a modified form of Catholicism would be the
religion of the future; the modification amounting
to this, that it would only profess to be poetry
instead of science, and giving symbols ‘thrown
out’ at truth, not dogmas with the validity of
theorems in geometry. He argued not only that
the Hebrew religion itself is to be taken by us in
the poetical sense, but that by the prophets themselves
it was never understood differently. So
the text which says that ‘Man must be born of a
spirit’ means only that man must be born of an
influence; and, moreover, never meant anything
more. This was the original sense of the first
utterance, which was only twisted into pseudo-science
by later dogmatists. It follows that
orthodox theology is an ‘immense misunderstanding
of the Bible’—a misunderstanding because
it takes poetry for prose. By clearing away
the accretions we see that the Bible is to be read
throughout in this sense; and therefore that, to
restore its true value, we are not to throw it aside,
but to take it as the original authors meant us to
take it.

  The weakness of the poetic or imaginative
treatment is the tendency to confound a judgment
of beauty with a judgment of fact. A creed is
so charming or so morally stimulating that it
must be true. Arnold did not accept this way of
putting it. He had too genuine a respect for
the daylight of the understanding, too much
hearty loyalty to the Zeitgeist and scientific thought
to accept a principle which would lead to simple
reaction and recrudescence of superstition. He
unequivocally accepts the results obtained by
German critics, heavy-eyed and pedantic as they
may sometimes be, for he believes with all his
heart in thorough, unflinching, scholar-like research.
He will not shut his eyes or mistake
mere æsthetic pleasure for logical conviction.
But, he argues, the essence of the creed is precisely
its moral beauty; the power with which it expresses
certain ethical truths—its grasp of the
doctrine (to quote his favourite, though I cannot
think very fortunate, formula) that conduct is
three-fourths of life, that it is the essence of the
religion, or rather, is itself the religion; and that
the whole framework of historical fact and
ecclesiastical dogma is unimportant. We read
Homer, he says, for our enjoyment, and to turn
the book to our benefit.<*> We should read the

<footnote>
  _God and the Bible,_ p. 99.
</>

Bible in the same way. The truth of the Greek
or Hebrew mythology and history is irrelevant.
The true lights of the Christian Church, he says,<*>

<footnote>
  _Literature and Dogma,_ p. 290.
</>

are not Augustine and Luther or Bossuet, but à
Kempis and Tauler and St. Francis of Sales; not,
that is, the legislators or reformers or systematisers
of dogma, but the mystics and pietists and men
who have uttered the religious sentiment in the
most perfect form. It is characteristic that in his
book upon St. Paul, while dwelling enthusiastically
upon the apostle’s ethical teaching, he says nothing
of the work which to St. Paul himself, as to most
historians, must surely have seemed important,
the freeing of Christian doctrine from fetters of
Judaism; and treats the theological reasons by
which St. Paul justified his position as mere surplusage
or concessions to contemporary prejudice.

  The problem here suggested is a very wide one.
We may agree that the true value of a religion is
in its ethical force. We may admit that the
moral ideas embodied in its teaching are the only
part which is valuable when we cease to believe in
the history or the dogma; and that they still preserve
a very high value. We may still be edified
by Homer or by Æschylus, or by Socrates and
Epictetus, though we accept not a word of their
statements of fact or philosophy. But can the
essence of a religion be thus preserved intact when
its dogma and its historical assertions are denied?
Could St. Paul have spread the Church of the
Gentiles without the help of the theories which
Arnold regarded as accretions? Would the
beautiful spirit of the mystics have conquered the
world as well as touched the hearts of a few hermits
without the rigid framework of dogmas in which
they were set and the great ecclesiastical organisation
for which a definite dogmatic system was
required? We may love the mystical writers,
but, without the organisers of Churches and creeds,
can we believe that they would even have made a
church for the world? To set forth a great
moral ideal is undoubtedly an enormous service.
But the prosaic mind will ask, Is it enough to
present us with ideals? Do we not also require
statements of fact? It is all very well to say be
good, and to say this and that is the real meaning
of goodness; but to make men good, you have
also got to tell them why they should be good, and
to create a system of discipline and dogma for
effectually stimulating their love of goodness.

  I do not presume to discuss such a point here.
I confine myself to saying that Arnold’s solution
of the difficulty not only shows admirable candour
and courage, but may seem to correspond to the
most probable goal of the modern evolution of
thought. It often gives a singular impression to
compare the apologists of orthodoxy in the present
day with their predecessors of a past generation.
The old divine used to prove the historical
assertions of his creed by evidence and to
demonstrate its dogmas by reasoning. He tried,
at least, to ‘confute’ cavillers by argument. The
modern apologist entirely changes the system.
He admits that the evidence is inadequate, and that
the dogmas, as formerly understood, were really
false and repulsive. He accepts positions once
supposed to be essentially sceptical. And yet, all
the same, he ends by concluding that it does not
matter. The sceptic was in the right; but in
spite of this, believers are somehow justified.
That strikes some people as dishonest, and the
best excuse is that it is an approximation to
Arnold’s position. Agree fully and frankly that
the value of a creed is not to be tested by its historical
and philosophical validity; that it really
belongs to the sphere of poetry and provides
symbols for the emotions, not truths for the
understanding; that, therefore, all the argumentation
about ‘evidences’ and so forth is the application
of a totally inappropriate test; and you
certainly reach an intelligible position. It is moreover
one to which the modern mind, with its
growing indifference to the old controversies, its
apparently unaltered, if not growing, conviction
that some religion is necessary, combined with the
conviction that one set of dogmas is about as good
as another, may seem to be approximating. The
Churches would escape a good many difficulties,
and apologists a good deal of trouble, in connecting
their premisses with their conclusions, if
they could boldly follow Arnold and say that they
do not appeal to the reason but to the imagination.
Leave out the awkward words ‘I believe’; or
substitute, ‘I feign for purposes of edification,’ and
all would go right. Unity must be sought, not by
the triumph of one set of dogmas, but all equally
absolute, but by giving up dogma, or treating it as
essentially poetry, and admitting that to take it
as a prosaic statement of fact always is and always
has been a blunder. It is true that the prosaic
person has a difficulty in accepting this position.
He will not admit that, a religion is good for anything
when it abandons its ancient claims to give
genuine knowledge as well as providing modes
of utterance of our sentiments. The questions
which arise are those which upon Arnold’s method
seem to be passed over. It is his indifference to
them which gives sometimes the very erroneous
impression of a want of seriousness. Arnold was
undeniably and profoundly in earnest, though he
seems scarcely to have realised the degree in which,
to ordinary minds, he seemed to be offering not
stones, but mere vapour when asked for bread.
He felt that he was occupied with the most serious
of problems, and he saw at least some of the conditions
of successful treatment. On all sides his
loyalty to culture (the word has been a little spoilt
of late), his genuine and hearty appreciation of
scholarship and scientific thought, his longing to
set himself in the great current of intellectual
progress, are always attractive, and are the more
marked because of his appreciation (his excessive
appreciation, may I say?) of the ‘sweetness,’ if not
the light, of the Oxford Movement. If, indeed,
his appreciation was excessive, I am conscious, I
hope, of the value of the doctrine which led him.
We ought, he says,<*> to have an ‘infinite tenderness’

<footnote>
  _Literature and Dogma,_ p. 303.
</>

for the popular science of religion. It is
‘the spontaneous work of nature, the travail of
the human mind, to adapt to its grasp and employment
great ideas of which it feels the attraction.’
I feel the truth of this teaching more, I fear, than
I have acted upon it. I belong, as I have said, to the
prosaic class of mankind. We ought to catch at least
something of Arnold’s spirit, so far as to admit,
at least, that the great problem is to reconcile unflinching
loyalty to truth with tenderness ‘infinite,’
if possible, for the errors which are but a grasping
after truth. If Arnold combined the two tendencies
in a fashion of his own, he set a most
valuable example, even to those who cannot think
his method successful. He said of a great contemporary
that he was always beating the bush
without starting the hare. I am under the impression
that Arnold, if he started the hare, did
not quite catch it. But beating the bushes is an
essential preliminary. He stirred and agitated
many brains which could not be reached by sober
argument or by coarser invective, and he applied
good wholesome irritants to our stolid self-satisfaction.
When one remarks how little is left of
most philosophers in the way of positive result, and
yet remembers gratefully the service they have
done in the way of stimulus to thought, one may
feel grateful to a man who, while renouncing
all claims to be a philosopher, did more than most
philosophers to rouse us to new perception of our
needs and was one of the most effective agents in
breaking up old crusts of prejudice.

  Putting on a mask, sometimes of levity, sometimes
of mere literary dandyism, with an irony
which sometimes is a little too elaborate, but
which often expresses the keenest intelligence trying
to pass itself off as simplicity, he was a skirmisher,
but a skirmisher who did more than most heavily-
armed warriors, against the vast oppressive reign of
stupidity and prejudice. He made the old dragon
Philistinism (to use his phrase) wince at times,
and showed the ugliness and clumsiness of the
creature; and after all he did it in a spirit as
of one who recognised the monster was after all a
most kindly monster at bottom. He may be
enlisted in useful service if you can only apply
the goad successfully, and made effective, in his
ponderous way, like the Carthaginian elephants, if
only you can mount his neck and goad him in the
right direction. No single arm is sufficient for
such a task; the dragon shakes himself and goes to
sleep again in a stertorous and rather less complacent
fashion, let us hope; and we feel that the
struggle will too probably endure till we have
ceased to be personally interested.

  I cannot, indeed, get it out of my head that we
slow-footed and prosaic persons sometimes make
our ground surer; and that, for example, poor
Bishop Colenso, whom Arnold ridiculed as the
typical Philistine critic, did some good service
with his prosaic arithmetic. There are cases
in which the four rules are better than the finest
critical insight. But there is room for poets as
well as for arithmeticians; and Arnold, as at once
poet and critic, has the special gift—if I may
trust my own experience—of making one feel
silly and tasteless when one has uttered a narrow-
minded, crude, or ungenerous sentiment; and I
dip into his writings to receive a shock, unpleasant
at times, but excellent in its effects as an intellectual
tonic.

<chapter>
	JOWETT’S LIFE<*>

<footnote>
  _Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., Master of Balliol
College,_ Oxford. By Robert and Lewis Campbell. London, 1897.
</>

This life of Jowett by two of his most enthusiastic
and sympathetic disciples satisfies many
demands of the art of biography. Jowett himself
loved Boswell’s model work as it deserves to
be loved, and would have made it the standard of
excellence. The unique combination of circumstances
which enabled Boswell to turn out a
masterpiece has not, and probably never will, be
repeated. Jowett, in spite of some resemblances,
noted by his biographers, was not a Johnson;
and the biographers—the remark is, perhaps,
equivocal—are clearly not Boswells. Boswell
had the tact for selecting only such trifles as were
characteristic, and I fear that they do not fully
share that quality. Still, with the help of Jowett’s
letters and written meditations, they have brought
us face to face with the man; and should enable
us to form a distinct portrait of a very interesting
figure. One result may be emphatically recognised
at the outset. Nobody can lay down these
volumes without feeling that Jowett deserved the
affection of his friends. He had his weaknesses,
like Johnson; but we feel in his case, as in
Johnson’s, that the core of the man’s nature was
sweet, sound, and masculine. This is part of the
explanation of a problem which, I must confess,
has often appeared to me, as to others, to be
rather enigmatic. What was the secret and the
real nature of Jowett’s remarkable influence? I
had not the advantage of coming within his
personal sphere, nor even of belonging to his
beloved University. I had, however, the good
fortune of knowing at an early period some of
the group, among whom, as we are told, ‘there
sprang up what outsiders termed a sort of Jowett
worship.’ That group, it is added, did not form
a ‘mutual admiration society.’ One reason is
obvious: the bond of union was personal. The
worship of Newman or of Carlyle meant, as
a rule, sympathy with certain dogmas or the
acceptance of a particular set of shibboleths,
which at once marked a man as representing
a distinctive tendency in theology or politics.
This could certainly not be said of Jowett’s
worshippers. Jowett did not himself accept
any articulate philosophical doctrine. The
admiration, therefore, was mainly for the man
himself; and might be common to people who,
starting from a general liberalism—to use the
vaguest possible word—had reached very different
conclusions; and might be followers of Comte,
or of Hegel, or even careless Gallios, capable of
very sharp criticisms both of their master and of
each other. The outsider, meanwhile, was a little
in the dark as to the precise nature of a tie which
united the central member to disciples who dispersed
along so many diverging radii.

  The problem was the more difficult to a
member of the sister University. An interesting
essay might, I fancy, be written upon the nature
and origin of the difference between the Oxford
and the Cambridge spirit. Whatever the cause,
one distinction is marked. Oxford has long been
fertile in prophets; in men who cast a spell over
a certain number of disciples, and not only propagate
ideas, but exercise a personal sway. At
Cambridge no such leader, so far as I can
remember, presented himself in my time; and,
moreover, Cambridge men were generally inclined
to regard their apparent barrenness with a certain
complacency. Spiritual guides are troublesome
personages. A prophet, perhaps we thought, is
apt to be a bit of a humbug, and at any rate a
cause of humbug in others. We had some very
vigorous and excellent tutors, but they were
rather anxious to disavow than to assert any such
personal influence as is independent of downright
logical argument. Perhaps this was partly due
to the mathematical turn of Cambridge studies.
At the time when Oxford was dimly troubled
by the first rumours about German theology,
Cambridge reformers were chiefly concerned to
introduce a knowledge of the new methods of
mathematical analysis, to which Englishmen had
been blinded by a superstitious reverence for
Newton. That was an excellent aim; but, of
course, you cannot appeal to men’s ‘souls’ in
the name of the differential calculus. Even when
Cambridge men took to the study of classical
literature, they stuck to good, tangible matters
of grammatical construction without bothering
themselves about purely literary or philosophical
interests. They did not deny the existence of
the soul; but knew that it should be kept in its
proper place. It may be an estimable entity;
but it also generates ‘fads’ and futile enthusiasms
and gushing sentimentalisms. It should not be
unduly stimulated in early years, but kept in due
subordination to the calm understanding occupied
with positive matters of fact. The opposite view
is indicated by a remark of Jowett’s upon Dr.
Arnold. Arnold had his weak points intellectually,
says Jowett, ‘but in that one respect of
inspiring others with ideals, there has been no
one like him in modern times.’ Arnold, beyond
a doubt, was an admirable person; and few cases
of the value of influence as understood by Oxford
men are more remarkable. Considering the
shortness of his life and the limits of his position,
the impression which he made upon his
contemporaries is not short of surprising. To
the average reader of to-day it is probably interpreted
for the most part by _Tom Brown’s School-
days._ That is a charming book, even when one’s
schooldays are over; but it then suggests certain
misgivings. The Rugby men had their weaknesses.
‘“What a good man Walrond is!” said
Professor Sellar to Matthew Arnold. “Ah!”
replied Arnold, “we were all so good at Rugby.”
“Yes,” retorted Sellar, “but he kept it up.”’ They
all, as it seems to an outsider, ‘kept it up.’ The
very tone of voice of a true Rugbeian implied,
modestly but firmly, that he was endowed with
a ‘moral consciousness.’ He had a quasi-official
right to share the lofty view which he had
imbibed at the feet of the master. He always
seemed to be radiating virtuous influences. A
conscience is, no doubt, a very useful possession
in early years. But when a man has kept one
till middle life, he ought to have established a
certain _modus vivendi_ with it; it should be
absorbed and become part of himself—not a
separate faculty delivering oracular utterances.
The amiable weakness of the Rugby school was
a certain hypertrophy of the conscience. It had
become unpleasantly obtrusive and self-assertive.
In other words, they were decidedly apt to be
moral prigs.

  Jowett’s influence was not exactly of this kind,
but before asking what it was I must say something
of one problem which is forced upon us
by this book. Jowett was a man of wide philosophical
culture. He was prominent in Oxford
society during some remarkable intellectual
changes. He lived there for some fifty-seven
years. As an undergraduate he was a looker-on
at the singular and slightly absurd phenomenon
called the Oxford Movement, and keenly interested
in the contest finally brought to a head by
his friend W. G. Ward. Soon afterwards he
was a leading tutor, at a time when the most
vigorous youths at Oxford were inclining rather
in the direction of J. S. Mill, and some of them
becoming disciples of Comte. His edition of
St. Paul’s Epistles made him an arch-heretic
in the eyes of the High Church party, and his
simultaneous appointment to the Greek Professorship
gave the chance, of which its members were
foolish enough to avail themselves, of putting
him in the position of a martyr of free thought.
His share in the _Essays and Reviews_ (1860) made
him a representative man in a wider sphere.
Though we have now got to the stage of affecting
astonishment at the sensation produced by the
avowal of admitted truths in that work, nobody
who remembers the time can doubt that it marked
the appearance of a very important development
of religious and philosophical thought. The
controversy raised by _Essays and Reviews_ even
distracted men for a time from the far more
important issues raised by the publication of
Darwin’s _Origin of Species._ Jowett, then a little
over forty, was no doubt old enough to have
some settled convictions, but young enough to
be fully awake to the significance of the definite
invasion of the old system of thought by the new
doctrines of evolution and historical method.
When, in 1870, he became Master of Balliol
he was succeeded in the tutorship by his attached
friend, T. H. Green, who introduced the Hegelianism
which has since become so conspicuous
in English philosophy, and had already been
studied by Jowett. What may be the true
meaning and tendency of these varying phases
of opinion is a question to be answered by the
rising generation. This, at least, is evident—
Jowett was a man of mark and intellectual
authority at a time when vital questions were
being eagerly agitated and the most various
conclusions reached. What had he to say to
them? Will the future historian of English
thought be able to show that any of the important
contributions to speculation bear the
impress of Jowett’s intellect? The movement
of the different currents of thought is too wide
and complicated to be explained by any individual
influence; but we might look to such a man as
the best representative of some definite tendency,
or at least as having been a valuable expounder of
some important aspect.

  Is any phase of speculation marked by Jowett’s
personal stamp? That is the question which one
naturally asks about a man who is a well-known
writer upon philosophy, and one can hardly deny
that the answer must be unequivocally in the
negative. Jowett’s biographers hold that he
might have said something very important if
he had found time. He had himself a lasting
ambition to be a teacher. He had a habit of
drawing out plans for future work. At the age
of seventy he laid down a scheme for eight years
of work: one year upon Plato, two upon Moral
Philosophy, two upon a Life of Christ, one upon
Sermons, and two upon a History of Early Greek
Philosophy. We admire the sanguine spirit of
the man; we feel his illusions to be pathetic;
we envy the power of believing that at the fag-
end of life, tasks can still be achieved which,
taken separately, might well require years of
devotion at the period of highest vitality. To
most of us elders any similar fancies are as impossible
as fancies of a sledge-journey to the
North Pole. We may most sincerely regret that
we cannot cherish them. We might do more
than we shall ever actually do if we could only
continue to aim at a mark beyond our range; and
it must be placed to Jowett’s credit that the
impulse to work remained so vigorous when all
capacity for achievement was so soon to leave
him. But, also, one cannot help asking whether
Jowett at his best, and freed from the calls upon
his energy, which took up so large a part of his
time, could really have done anything great in
these directions? What could a Life of Christ
have been in his hands? ‘Can I write like
Renan?’ he asks himself; and the answer is too
clear. Could he have emulated the industry,
close scholarship, and minute criticism of a
German professor? That is, perhaps, still more
out of the question, and one cannot feel that his
failure has lost us anything more than an elegant
essay balancing inconsistent theories. Jowett’s
biographers think that he could have written
something of great value upon Moral Philosophy.
Happily a man may be an admirable moralist in
practice, though very vague in his theory of
morals. Jowett might have been an excellent
‘moralist’ in the old Johnsonian sense—a
forcible propounder of practical maxims for life
and conduct—but however good the spirit of
his discursions into ethics, they certainly do not
even suggest any new solution of the old difficulties.

  In speaking of Jowett’s general position in
these matters, Dr. Abbott remarks that he had
written passages in his edition of St. Paul’s
epistles, ‘such as no other man of his age has put
on paper.’ Later distractions, however, made him
‘wander into other paths.’ He spent years upon
his translations of Plato and Thucydides. He
was overwhelmed (it is not wonderful) by the
greatness of his self-imposed tasks; and the
‘harsh reception of his theological work’ disheartened
him and made him fear that his writing
might do as much harm as good. ‘His sensitive
nature received a wound from which it never
quite recovered.’ These remarks are characteristic,
and illustrate painfully the difficulty the
seeing oneself as others see us. It may not be
strange that Jowett could not understand the
impression which he was making; but to any one
else the probable reception was obvious. I confess
that I cannot see in the essays upon St. Paul
what Dr. Abbott sees in them. A cordial
admirer, I fully admit, is more likely to be right
than one who looks from outside and in a spirit
of antagonism. I cannot, indeed, believe by any
effort that the passages quite deserve this lofty
eulogy, but I gladly admit that Dr. Abbott probably
sees real merit to which I am blinded by
prejudice or want of sympathy. I read the book,
however, when it first appeared; I have turned
to it since to verify my impressions; and I confess
that I am afraid that they are such as would
inevitably occur to any man of plain understanding.
One instance will be ample. Jowett writes
an essay upon the theory of the Atonement. He
holds that the theory as ordinarily stated is
repulsive. No unsophisticated mind will accept
the doctrine that a just God pardons sinners in
consideration of the suffering of a perfectly innocent
man. In other words, the dogma as accepted
by the Salvation Army, or even by Butler, revolts
the conscience. He tries, therefore, to restate
it in a variety of ways, and admits that the doctrine,
turn and twist it as you will, remains morally
objectionable. He suggests by way of escape
that the erroneous version is produced by turning
rhetoric into logic and mistaking a metaphor, one
among many, for a kind of rigid legal formula.
That may be true; and we will also suppose that
St. Paul meant no more than a metaphor. But
a ‘metaphor,’ unless it be a mere phrase, ought
surely to indicate some truth that can be indicated,
if not accurately formulated. It is pathetic,
and it was once very puzzling, to see how Jowett
plays hide-and-seek with this ultimate difficulty.
One point is clear to him: the death of Christ
was ‘the greatest moral act ever done in this
world.’ It was greater, let us say, than the death
of Socrates or of any Christian martyr. If so,
it was the most stimulating of examples. But to
say that it was merely this is obviously to deprive
it of all the old theological significance. It is to
say nothing which might not be consistently
admitted by Renan, or even by Voltaire, or by
the most thorough-going Agnostic. Jowett can
only reply by referring to a ‘mystery,’ though
he admits that ‘there may seem to be a kind of
feebleness in falling back on mystery, when the
traditional language of ages is so clear and explicit.’
It amounts to saying, he admits, that we
not only know nothing, but apparently never can
know anything of the ‘objective act’ of reconciliation
between God and man. Meanwhile the
true difficulty is to see why there should be any
mystery at all. The whole mystery is created
by straining metaphors and ‘turning rhetoric into
logic’ Why not drop it?

  The difficulty, of course, is not peculiar to
Jowett. I mention it to illustrate the difficulty
of the intelligent youth who in those days tried
to adopt Jowett as a guide. Such a one felt, if
I may adapt one of Johnson’s phrases, as though
his master had pushed him over a cliff, and
advised him to fall softly, or perhaps assured him
that he was not falling at all. Before this time
Jowett had been flirting with Hegelianism, and,
without becoming a thorough-going disciple, was
apparently attracted by the opportunities afforded
by that system of saying and unsaying a thing at
the same time. He puts aside all logical difficulties
on the ground that somehow or other contradictory
assertions may both be true. ‘The
notion that no idea can be composed out of two
contradictory conceptions seems to arise out of
the analogy of the sensible world.’ A thing
cannot be both white and black (rather white and
not white) at the same time. But there is, it
appears, no absurdity in supposing that the
‘mental analysis even of a matter of fact should
involve us in contradictions.’ He imagines the
‘old puzzles of the Eleatics’ to be still insoluble,
and infers apparently that we may assume without
further trouble both that the will is free and that it
is not free. To some philosophers, I am aware,
this has a meaning; but to common sense it presents
itself simply as a very convenient plan for
taking both sides of any important question. In
later years, indeed, Jowett, while still having a
certain leaning towards Hegel, became suspicious
of metaphysics generally. Some knowledge of
metaphysics, he says, ‘is necessary to enable the
mind to get rid of them.’ Metaphysics ought,
as he was always saying, to be subordinate to
‘common sense,’ whereas Coleridge had said that
‘common sense should be based on metaphysics.’

  The effect was that he decided to treat all problems
in what he calls (in reference to free-will)
the ‘only rational way,’ that is, ‘historically.’
You are, that means, to accept beliefs as facts
without troubling about their reasons. The result
of this method is curiously given in some notes of
1886, which, as Dr. Abbott tells us, were his ‘last
reflections.’ This, says Jowett, is the age of facts
which are ‘too strong for ideas,’ and of criticism
which is ‘too strong for dogma.’ The Christian
religion may change till miracles become absurd;
the ‘hope of immortality’ mean ‘only the present
consciousness of goodness and of God’; the
‘personality of God, like the immortality of man,
pass into an idea’; ‘every moral act’ be acknowledged
to have a ‘physical antecedent,’ and
‘doctrines become unmeaning words.’ Yet, he
says, the essence of religion ‘may still be self-
sacrifice’ and so forth—‘a doctrine common to
Plato and to the Gospel.’ This (which is, of
course, a rough private note) surely amounts, as
the Germans say, to emptying out the baby with
the bath. Christianity will be evacuated of every
element which is not common to Plato. Indeed,
we may go further. Jowett proceeds to speak of
partly accepting Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Agnosticism;
and though he always spoke with dislike of
Comte and of Darwin, it is hard to see what
positive objection he could make to either.

  I confess, therefore, that I am simply puzzled
when I find Jowett professing a belief in ‘the best
form of Christianity,’ and his biographers fully
accepting the statements. A Christianity without
the supernatural, without doctrines, without immortality,
and without a ‘personal God’ seems to
be merely an alias for morality. Neither can I
share Prof. Campbell’s objection to a phrase
of Carlyle. Carlyle, as we are reminded, had
proposed an ‘exodus from Houndsditch,’ and
yet ‘the moment some one within the camp spoke
words of truth and soberness’ (that is, in the
_Essays and Reviews_ article), broke out with the
phrase ‘the sentinel who deserts should be shot.’
J. S. Mill, on the other hand, as we are reminded,
approved of clergymen who remained within the
Church so long as they could accept its formulæ

‘with common honesty.’ I agree with both Mill
and Carlyle. The prosecutors held sincerely that
the essayist was preaching doctrines utterly inconsistent
with Christianity. They not only held
this sincerely, but I cannot doubt that they were
right in their belief. Accept Jowett’s version and
the Christian services will become an elaborate
mystification. ‘Prayer,’ he says, ‘(for fine weather
and so forth), as at present conducted, is an
absurdity,’ or ‘an ambiguity of the worst kind.’
How then could he join in prayers, which involve
absurdity and ambiguity at every clause? How
at least could he complain that men believing in
the absurdities should try to turn him out? To
them he appeared as a ‘deserter,’ or rather a
traitor within the camp, and rightly so if judged
by the inevitable consequences of his actions.
Mill, no doubt, was also right in saying that
Jowett was justified in remaining so long as he
could do so in ‘common honesty.’ He did not
himself intend the consequences of his actions.
His friend Stanley, who, as Carlyle used to say,
was always boring holes in the bottom of the
Church of England, was yet firmly convinced
that he was helping the ship to float. I do not
doubt the absolute sincerity of his and Jowett’s
conviction. But their fellow-passengers, who
thought with equal sincerity that they were sending
the ship to the bottom, inevitably desired to
throw them overboard. Their good intention
was no proof of the soundness of their calculation.
Undoubtedly they meant well. ‘Destroy
the Church of England!’ said Charles Buller,
according to one of the best stories in this book.
‘You must be mad! It is the only thing between
us and real religion!’ Free the Church, that is,
from the fetters of Parliament and lay jurisdiction,
and you will hand it over to the fanatics.
There is doubtless much truth in the epigram,
and if for ‘real religion’ we read ‘fanaticism,’
Jowett might have accepted the saying. He
wished to keep the element of natural belief—
of ‘soberness and truth’—within the Church;
and while he could do so, consistently with ‘common
honesty,’ he was personally justified. But
there is another danger. When men of his ability
defend the use of superstitious observances as
‘metaphorical’ or popular versions of truths, they
may be playing into the hands of the superstitious.
They sanction a device which can be turned against
them. Other people will combine superstition
and reason to the profit of superstition. Divines
have lately discovered how to accept the critical
results which shocked readers of _Essays and
Reviews,_ and yet to accept the whole theory of
priestly magic. The compromise may result in
the enslavement of reason instead of the neutralising
of superstition. I know not what may be the
result to the Church of England, but the enterprise
attempted in the best possible faith by Jowett
and his friends, seems to be injurious to the higher
interests of intellectual honesty. It was a hopeless
endeavour to hide irreconcilable contrasts and pretend
that they did not exist.

  Jowett sincerely held ‘Christianity’ to be in
some shape the great force on the side of the
moral elevation of mankind. When removing
what seems to others the very essence of the
creed, he really supposed himself to be only
removing ‘incrustations.’ That he could hold
that position sincerely implies, as I fancy, an
intellectual weakness admitted by his biographers.
He catches aspects of opinions and expresses them
pithily, but he never can concentrate his mind or
bring his doctrine to a focus. His writing
becomes discontinuous, he wanders round and
round problems without distinctly answering them
or bringing the whole to an issue. He plays
with philosophical principles without ever exactly
saying Yes or No. And, therefore, he would
seem to be less qualified for exercising an influence
than more vigorous, if more one-sided,
men. What are you to make of a guide who,
so far from saying which is the right path, objects
to decidedly committing himself to any one?
His pupil Green could at least declare that Hegel
would take us out of the labyrinth; but Jowett
could only think that perhaps Hegel might lead
to some interesting points of view—not really
so much better than others. Maurice’s disciples,
again, complained, we are told, that Jowett
would persist in silence about their leader. ‘I
shall never join,’ he said in answer, ‘with that
modern Neoplatonism—it is so easy to substitute
one mysticism for another.’ The same view
perhaps made him dislike Carlyle and Froude
as romantics, if not charlatans. Newman and the
later ritualists represent for him the natural
enemies of common sense. But then where
would common sense lead? Voltaire, we may
say, was an incarnation of common sense, and
of Voltaire Jowett asserted, ‘somewhat perversely,’
that he had done more good than all the fathers
of the Church put together. The ‘perversity’ is
obvious, for Voltaire’s desire to crush the ‘_infame_’
was clearly not to Jowett’s taste. The school
which perhaps represented most clearly the development
of the eighteenth century philosophy
was that of J. S. Mill, but of the Utilitarians
Jowett always spoke with marked dislike. Young
men, as a rule, like a leader who has some distinct
aim, good or bad, and if Jowett were to be judged
by that test one would say that no one of his time
was less qualified to be a leader. To a distinct
view of the importance of some solution he seems
to have joined the profound conviction that no
conceivable solution would hold water. ‘He
stood,’ says one of his pupils, in a rather different
sense, ‘at the parting of many ways,’ and he
wrote, one must add, ‘No thoroughfare’ upon
them all.

  Jowett’s influence, then, was hardly that of a
consistent or confident guide in speculation. It
was not less real and perhaps something much
better, though to define it precisely would require
a personal knowledge which I do not possess.
There is abundant proof in these volumes of his
great power of attaching men of all varieties.
All his friendships, we are told, were life-long.
In spite of oddities and little asperities, he never
apparently had a personal quarrel. Like Dr.
Johnson, he loved women and children, and felt
as strongly as the doctor the importance of
‘keeping his friendships in repair.’ From the
earliest Oxford days he formed close alliances;
as the old friends dropped off, he drew new
recruits from his pupils; and he kept up intimacies
with many who had passed to wider
scenes of action. A man who is ‘nicknameable’
must be a good fellow, and the phrase ‘Old
Jowler,’ with its vague suggestion of a surly but
trusty watch-dog, fits a man who could attach in
spite of external crustiness. There is only one
aspect, however, upon which it may be permissible
for an outsider to dwell. Jowett, it strikes one
forcibly as one reads, was the last and one of the
finest products of the old school of ‘dons.’ He
came to the front before the old system had been
thrown into distraction by University Commissions,
and though he was an important leader
during the subsequent changes, he was never in
perfect sympathy with reformers who would
radically alter the system. I have often wished
that some skilful hand would draw a portrait of
the old college don before he is finally numbered
with the dodos. I present the suggestion to any
one in want of a setting for a novel of ‘sixty
years since.’ A college don was for the most
part a young clergyman anxious to succeed to a
living and marry a wife. For him, a fellowship
was a mere step on the path to comfort. But some
men, by external fate or idiosyncrasy, were doomed
to permanent celibacy. Then they took one of
two paths—either they acquired a taste in port-
wine and became soured, or mildly (sometimes
more than mildly) sybaritical; or else they
accepted the college in place of a family, and felt
for it a devotion such as an old monk may have
had for his convent. It was their world; their
whole ‘environment’; the object of a local
patriotism as intense as could ever animate
patriots in a wider sphere. A touching anecdote
tells how Whewell, the typical Cambridge don,
begged, when dying, to be raised in his bed that he
might have one more glance at the great court of
Trinity. That was the last flash of an enthusiastic
love for the scene so intimately associated with
boyish aspirations and manly energies. Jowett’s
love of Balliol was equally intense, and is the
most characteristic part of his career. Balliol had
absorbed him. ‘The college,’ he said, ‘is the
great good and comfort of my life.’ ‘Make the
college beautiful,’ was one of his last sayings.
Some men have joined equal devotion to a college
to a really low ideal of its true functions, but
Jowett’s ideal was worthy of a man of keen
intellectual interest in the great problems of his
day. His college deserved devotion; it had an
almost unique position; and, as outsiders must
grant, had ‘produced’ a longer list of eminent
men than almost any rival that can be mentioned.
The phrase ‘produced,’ too, had more than its
usual propriety. It is generally equivalent to
‘not extinguished,’ but it is undeniable that
Jowett somehow acted as a positive and lasting
stimulant upon his pupils.

  This dominant passion seems to explain and to
reconcile us to Jowett’s obvious foibles. To the
old dons of the narrower variety the college
became an ultimate end; if it taught young men,
it deserved gratitude for undertaking a troublesome
and strictly superfluous duty; and any
attempt to tamper with its constitution, in order
to make it a better school, was regarded as a
sacrilege. Jowett was free from this superstition
in its extremer form. He felt as strongly as any
reformer that colleges could only justify their
independence by thorough educational efficiency;
but he was equally clear that in point of fact their
efficiency could only be preserved by maintaining
their independence. The characteristic college
system was admirable in his eyes. An undergraduate
is not to be a mere student, after the
German fashion, but the member of a little
corporate body, imbibing a spirit of loyalty, and
subject to the discipline and the judicious direction
of the college tutors. This was the valuable
and even vital part of the English University,
system, which in Jowett’s hands, more than in
any one’s, was a reality. He never, we are told,
got over the shyness caused by his temperament;
he was capable of persistent silence and of decisive
snubbing; he could tell a youth, who addressed
him, to hold his tongue rather than talk such
nonsense; and one can very well believe that he
was not universally popular. Everybody is not
grateful for having his knuckles rapped at the
right moment, though the rap may represent a
sense of duty overpowering reluctance to speak.
At any rate, the tendency to administer a good
tonic, bitter or not, became part of his nature.
He was, as Professor Campbell puts it, an
‘irrepressible mentor.’ He had experience enough
to know what is the general fate of good advice,
especially when the recipient has no longer the
malleability of youth. But he advised at all
hazards, in season and out of season. When he
sees a friend in danger of relaxing his zeal, even
under the pressure of sorrow, he cannot help
applying the goad. He may help his friend at
least to ‘pull himself together’; and no doubt
there are times when it does a man good to have
a thorough shake. The advice, too, seems always
to have been prompted by genuine goodwill which
generally disarmed resentment. One feels, however,
that there is a certain humorous side to
the propensity. When a man sees his old school-
master, he generally looks back upon the old
emotion of awful reverence as a quaint memory
which has no living force left in it. But in
Jowett’s mind the relation seems to have presented
itself as though it were as permanent and indissoluble
as marriage. Once his pupil, you were
not the less his pupil, though you might have
become a judge, or a bishop, or a Cabinet
Minister. You were absorbed in State affairs
instead of the study of Plato; but you would still
be the better for a friendly crack of the old whip.
Jowett was charged with having thought too
much of genius in early years and of success in
later. He measured a man by what he achieved
and not by his capability of achieving; and was
accused of being a little too fond of the ‘great.’
This, again, coincides with the natural view of
the college tutor. He loves his pupils, it is true,
but he always loves them as members of the
college. He wishes to raise a harvest of first-class
men, and believes a first-class to be an
infallible indication of merit, and must be more
than human if he does not exaggerate its importance.
He wishes to see the college boards
ornamented with long lists of men distinguished
in their later career; to turn out men whose
portraits may be hung in the college hall; and
naturally thinks of it as a personal injury, or,
which is the same thing, as an injury to the
college, if some man of genius fails to obtain
tangible honours. It is not that the genius is
necessarily inferior—and Jowett could recognise,
when it was fairly put before him, the inadequacy
of success as a test of merit—but that the genius
has not fulfilled the true final end of man, the
glorification of his college. A man might fail at
the Bar or in Parliament, and yet be successful
in the eyes of ‘all-judging Jove’; but even Jove
could not think much of a man who failed to
promote the interests of Balliol. Unless he
could do something for the college he was of no
use in the world. Jowett’s interest in his pupils
was most admirable; he spared neither time nor
trouble as a tutor; he did more for his men as a
master than all the Cambridge heads of houses
(in my time, at least) put together; he was
the most generous and open-handed of men,
whenever the opportunity offered; if his shyness
made it hard for him to be on easy terms with
some of his pupils, he could at least be an
‘irrepressible’ and inexorable mentor. It was
the intense interest of a captain in his crew; and
the friendships, doubtless most genuine, were not
simply personal. Jowett, one fancies, could not
separate himself even in thought from Balliol;
membership of the college was not an accident
superadded to him or his friends, but an essential
part of their personal identity, and therefore it
was impossible to abstract from their effect on the
college. Perhaps, one may guess, this went for a
good deal in his own appreciation, if it existed, of
‘the great.’ Jowett, as Professor Campbell remarks,
became so practical from the time of his
coming to rule the college that some people
thought that he was losing his interest in theology.
He threw most of his energy into the task of
improving the college, materially as well as morally.
He spent his own money upon new buildings
and a new cricket-ground, and so forth, and
appealed to all his old friends to support him.
He had, that is, to acquire the great art of
stimulating the flow of subscriptions, and seems
to have become, if the word may be allowed,
a most accomplished ‘tout.’ Naturally, for this
purpose, as well as for advancing the interests of
his pupils, the support of the great and rich
was of the highest importance. They were the
predestined milch-cows who had to be skilfully
manipulated. It is impossible to learn that art
thoroughly without regarding your victims with
a certain complacency. In order that their power
and their purses are to be turned to the right
account, one must cultivate their sympathies, and,
without undue subservience, of which there seems
to be no ground for accusing Jowett, one must
adopt the mental attitude from which the value
of wealth and influence receives fair recognition.
They must be courted, not from snobbishness or
personal motives, but from a hearty appreciation
of their utility as possible supporters of the good
cause. Another peculiarity of the don has some
meaning too. The old college don often professed
to look down upon the outside world; but
was conscious at heart that the world is a little
inclined to retort by calling him a rusty pedant.
He was never better pleased than when he could
fairly show that he too was a man of true literary
and social culture—able to judge the last poem or
novel, as well as to lecture upon Plato and Æschylus.
Jowett’s cordial spirit of hospitality, was
fostered and stimulated by this sentiment. He
drew all manner of distinguished people to Balliol
Lodge in later years; he would show them—as he
could well show them in the time of H. J. S. Smith
—that Balliol too was a centre of enlightenment;
and he could prove to Oxford in general that
a college might be attractive to the foremost
statesmen and men of letters. He could do so,
of course, because his hospitality was thoroughly
spontaneous, and his friendship with eminent
writers, such as Tennyson, Browning, and George
Eliot, rested upon genuine appreciation. But
a certain additional flavour was given by the collection
in the shadow of the old college buildings of
people at home in circles wider than the academical.

  Jowett was Balliol and Balliol was Jowett.
His foibles—they do not seem to have been very
serious—were consequences of this tacit identification.
To make the college as great a factor
as possible in the higher ranks of English society,
to extend and strengthen its influence in every
direction, was to fulfil the main purpose of his
life. And that—as might be illustrated by the
history of larger societies which have tried to
influence the outside world—involves a certain
amount of mutual accommodation. ‘To do much
good,’ says Jowett, in 1883, ‘you must be a very
honest and able man, thinking of nothing else
day and night; and you must also be a considerable
piece of rogue, having many reticences and
concealments.’ ‘A good sort of roguery,’ he
adds, ‘is never to say a word against anybody,
however much they may deserve it.’ That is
a version of some very orthodox phrases about the
wisdom of the serpent and being all things to all
men. Jowett in this sense may be called a bit of
a ‘rogue’; only remembering that his roguery
meant no more than a little difficulty in distinguishing
between the interests of Balliol and
the interests of the universe. In one direction
it brought him into direct collision with a more
advanced wing of reformers. Pattison imagined
that the primary end of a university was to diffuse
intellectual light, and inferred the propriety of
devoting college revenues to the ‘endowment of
research.’ There, as we find, Jowett had his
reserves. He drew the line distinctly at the
point at which the interests of the university
might conflict with the interests of the colleges.
To divert money from ‘prize fellowships’ to professorships
was to sacrifice a stimulus to students
and a certain bond of connection between the
colleges and the outside world, in order to enable a
few men to devote themselves to ‘minute philosophy’
and elaborate pursuit of useless knowledge.
He looked with suspicion upon certain
tendencies of modern Oxford. The present
teaching, he says (about 1878), is ‘utterly bad for
students,’ but ‘flattering to the teacher.’ The old-
fashioned college tutor, if he did his duty, gave
‘catechetical’ lectures; that is, he dealt with
students individually, stimulated their minds, and
investigated their progress. The new professor
gives smart lectures, lets the pupils pick up what
crumbs they can, but aims at winning praise for
his eloquence and does not care whether his hearers
are really able to follow him or at most catch the
art of stringing smart phrases into a leading
article. He is, in short, thinking about himself
instead of his college, and has lost the old corporate
spirit which was so fully imbibed by Jowett.
Jowett’s conservatism may have been well or ill
judged; I am only concerned to say that it was
at least characteristic. The old college system
which he had worked so efficiently, must, he held,
in no case be lowered in efficiency. He looked
rather coldly, for example, upon the movement
for women’s education, because he thought it
likely to interfere at various points with the old
order, and evidently thought that Pattison’s ideas
were calculated to hamper the colleges without
better result than endowing facile orators and useless
investigation of trifles. It would diminish
the educational power of the colleges in order to
help the accumulation of useless knowledge dear
in the eyes of Dryasdust.

  The question as to the true theory of universities
is a wide one, and I will not venture even to
hint at any opinion about it. What is plain is
that Jowett substantially adhered to the older
doctrine. Even if ‘research’ were really stimulated
by substituting professors for college tutors
its value was doubtful. ‘Is learning of any use?’
he asks, and he replies that it is worse than useless
except as a stimulant to thought and imagination.
He thought that Green’s lectures did harm by
diverting lads from ‘poetry and literature’ to
wandering in the barren fields of metaphysics.
Young men, the implication seems to be, should
not aim at conquering any province of knowledge
—the conquest must be superficial or won at the
price of one-sided and narrow development. A
premature specialist is a mental cripple—a prodigy
made by bandaging the vital organs. And what
is true of metaphysics and ‘learning’ is equally
true of theology. If Jowett’s influence upon the
outside world was, as I have suggested, not altogether
good, it might well be excellent in the
college so understood. A man with a definite
creed is tempted to instil it into his pupils. He
will give them a ready-made set of dogmas, and
try to frighten them out of obnoxious lines of
inquiry. Jowett at least could not make the
college into a caucus for the support of a sect.
As Pater reports, part of his charm was owing to
‘a certain mystery about his own philosophic and
other opinions.’ He was throwing out suggestions,
not imposing opinions; going about like
a Socrates cross-examining and dislodging old prejudices
with a happy impartiality, not dogmatising
or enlisting recruits for any definite party. The
college was to be a gymnasium to strengthen the
mental fibre, not a place of drilling according to
any regulation. What was a defect in a philosopher
might be an excellence in a teacher. Of
the disciples of Newman, half were permanently
enslaved without ever looking at the doctrine
from the outside, and the other half, who ultimately
rebelled, suffered permanently from the
dislocating effect of the revulsion. Jowett’s pupils
had at least not to lament that their minds had
been put into a strait-waistcoat, injurious even if
ultimately thrown aside.

  In this sense we may understand Jowett’s
‘influence’ as identical with the influence of the
college which he did so much to mould. You
might not learn anything very definite, but you
were subject to a vigorous course of prodding
and rousing, which is perhaps the best of training
for early years. Jowett is judged from a wrong
point of view when we try to regard him as a
leader of thought; but his influence was excellent
as an irritant, which at least would not allow a
man to bury himself in intellectual slumbers. You
might be propelled in any direction, but at least
you would not stand still. How much has been
done by Balliol is not for me to say; but Jowett’s
real influence is to be found by considering him
as an intrinsic element of Balliol. And this may
suggest a final remark. The last ten years of
life, as Jowett frequently remarked, are the best:
best, because you are freest from care, freest from
illusion and fullest of experience. They must no
doubt be fullest of experience; they may be freest
from care, if you are head of a college, and have
no domestic ties; but, unluckily, the illusions which
have vanished generally include the illusion that
anything which you did at your best had any real
value, or that anything which you can do hereafter
will even reach the moderate standard of the old
work. One of the advantages of Jowett’s identification
of himself with his college was perhaps that
he was never freed from this illusion. He won
the advantage at a heavy price—the price of not
knowing the greatest happiness. But a man who
is swallowed up in a corporate body, which will
outlast himself, acquires a kind of derivative
immortality. His own life is only an element
in the more permanent life. His work could be
carried on by his successors, as the buildings which
he helped to erect would remain for future generations.
A man in that position might naturally
fancy that as his authority and his experience grew
with age he was stamping himself more effectively
upon the organism of which he was a member; and
in that sense hope, in spite of Dryden, to receive
from ‘the last dregs of life’ ‘what the first
sprightly runnings could not give.’ That is an
enviable frame of mind.

<chapter>

	OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES<*>

<footnote>
  _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes._ By John T.
Morse, Jr.
</>

Few modern writers have roused a stronger
feeling of personal affection than O. W. Holmes.
His friends, known and unknown, have naturally
looked forward to a life which might be complementary
to the autobiography implicitly contained
in his writings. Mr. Morse, to whom it has
fallen to supply this want, apologises by anticipation
for partially disappointing their expectations.
They will ask, he thinks, for more correspondence,
and his answer is the very conclusive one that
more correspondence is not forthcoming. Dr.
Holmes, it appears, disliked letter-writing; and,
although he systematically replied to hosts of
unknown admirers, wrote comparatively little to
his own circle of intimates. The unknown
admirers appear to have kept’ his answers to
themselves, considering them as autographs or
literary curiosities not to be dignified as ‘letters.’
I certainly regret with Mr. Morse that more of
these documents have not been sent to him.
There might have been formed a book which
I have often desiderated,—a model letter-writer
for the use of editors. It would have been exceedingly
welcome. The problem how to tell a
young author plainly that his rhymes are rubbish,
and yet give no pain to an innocent aspirant, has
weighed upon the souls of many sitters in the
critical chair. A young author once showed me
letters from two of the most distinguished men
of the time, one of whom, while not committing
himself, somehow suggested that he might be
addressing the coming Shakespeare; while the
other roundly declared that most lads had put
better work in their waste-paper basket. They
meant much the same thing, and Dr. Holmes
was one of the few men who might have fused
the two letters and combined courtesy with the
wholesome truth. I, for one, should have been
glad to have had the secret communicated, or, at
least, a few examples given of the method. It is
some comfort to be told that even his good-
nature was sometimes requited with abuse. In
any case, as Mr. Morse had not the materials, his
excuse is unanswerable. One good result is that
the life is given in two volumes of modest size;
and for the record of so simple a history that
seems to be ample. We do not, perhaps, know
very much more than an attentive reader could
infer from Dr. Holmes’s own writings; but the
facts are brought together in a definite and authentic
shape, and combined in a simple and agreeable
narrative.

  Every reader of the _Autocrat_ has his own distinct
image of the author. As he remarks himself in a
characteristic passage, there are three people on
each side of every dialogue; the real John, and
John’s ideal John, and Peter’s John; and no
doubt there may be a real Holmes, different both
from the Holmes of Holmes’s own imagination
and the reader’s Holmes. There are, however,
very few people of whom one believes that the
three have a more substantial identity. The true
man, as every one remarks, shows himself with all
his idiosyncrasies in every page of his writing.
This suggests certain difficulties for the writer.
Mr. Morse observes that the true Holmes was a
New Englander ‘from the central thread of his
marrow to his outermost rind.’ That is undeniable;
but Mr. Morse proceeds to answer that
nagging critic, who is invisibly present whenever
one writes, and who hereupon suggests that
Holmes was provincial. Mr. Morse replies that
no creative writer, except Shakespeare, who has
been cosmopolitan has also made himself a ‘place
in the hearts of mankind.’ I should myself reply
by denying that Shakespeare was an exception.
Nobody, surely, ever reflected more fully and
faithfully the great imaginative movement of his
own time; and, if we knew the people of Stratford-on-Avon
and the frequenters of the Globe Theatre
as we know the people of Scott’s Edinburgh, I
suspect that we should recognise the Shallows and
the Falstaffs of the plays as clearly as we recognise
Scott’s friends in the Waverley Novels. Or to
drop Shakespeare, who is apt, I sometimes fancy,
to intrude a little too often, was there ever any one
who was at once more full of personal and local
idiosyncrasies, and, at the same time, more
thoroughly ‘cosmopolitan,’ than Montaigne?—
one of the numerous list of authors to whom, as
Mr. Morse reminds us, Holmes has been compared.
A man surely need not cease to be
cosmopolitan because he is provincial, any more
than he ceases to be an athlete because he plays
the game of his country—cricket in England and
baseball in America. What interests us in the
sport is the display of strength and activity:
which may be shown in one game as well as
another. The great writer is great because he
displays a powerful intellect or a vivid imagination,
and does not cease to be great because he
applies his reasoning to particular questions or
casts his imagery into the artistic mould of the
day. There are obvious dangers in ‘provincialism.’
A man shut up in a village may be ignorant of
the thoughts that are stirring outside; he may
express himself in a dialect unintelligible to the
larger world, or his mind may be atrophied for
want of collision and excitement, and he may
therefore limit himself to trifles interesting to a
petty circle alone. But every man has got to be
incarnate at a particular time and place, and to
apply his mind to the questions which are stirring
in them. Holmes was not the less a New
Englander because he was also an individual; nor
the less a citizen of the great world because he
belonged to this particular province. The New
England of his day, whatever its limitations, was
seething with important movements as interesting,
in slightly different applications, on this side of
the Atlantic as well as on the other; and the fact
that Holmes looked at them from a New England
point of view does not show that he did not
appreciate their wider significance.

  His characteristic nationality has, however, one
result; namely, that in criticising Holmes one
seems to be criticising New England or the
United States. That is always a little awkward
for an Englishman. To speak of Americans is to
steer between opposite difficulties. One fears to
fall into the old tone, when poor Mrs. Trollope
and the critics of her day caused all the wrath of
the democrat under the sneers of kid-gloved
gentility, while, on the opposite side, there are
certain commonplaces about Shakespeare and
community of race, which are not precisely true,
and are apt to be flung back contemptuously in
one’s face. There is a more personal difficulty for
such Englishmen as have received the hospitality
of the society which Holmes frequented. Those
to whom the name recalls the actual presence and
the vivid memory of Emerson and Hawthorne and
Longfellow and Lowell, can hardly trust themselves
to speak with due critical coolness. A writer,
especially, who has many recollections, which, for
good reasons, he is unwilling to manufacture into
‘reminiscences,’ almost feels his tongue tied. I
think of a young gentleman who, in the heat of
the Civil War, was most courteously welcomed by
the men I have mentioned, and who is half afraid
to give full utterance to feelings which might
seem overstrained, and yet equally anxious not
to appear deficient in warmth of gratitude. I
must, however, venture to make a few of the remarks
about Holmes which are suggested by this
biography; though I am not quite sure whether
the vividness of certain very pleasant memories is
a qualification or the reverse.

  I have said that Holmes’s career was singularly
simple. He was born in 1809, and passed a long
life almost continuously at Boston and the immediate
neighbourhood, his only long absence
being caused by two years of medical studies at
Paris. On returning he set up as a physician
without obtaining much practice. He married in
1840, in 1847 became professor in the medical
school at Harvard, and held the office for thirty-five
years. He retired in 1882, at the age of seventy-three,
and survived as a venerated and happy old
man till 1894. His works are not voluminous;
and, though he had published some of his best
verses before he was thirty, he was nearly fifty
before he began the series of essays which really
made him famous. Few popular authors have
had a narrower escape from obscurity. He would,
in any case, have been remembered in his own
circle as a brilliant talker, and there would have
been some curiosity as to the writer of the _Last
Leaf_ and two or three other poems. But had it
not been for the judicious impulse given by his
friend Lowell which induced him to make his
appearance as the ‘autocrat,’ his reputation would
have resembled that of Wolfe, of ‘not a drum was
beat’ celebrity. Who, it would have been asked,
was the author of the few lines which we all know
by heart? and we should have turned up the
article devoted to him in a biographical dictionary.
But he would not have revealed himself with that
curious completeness upon which all his critics
have remarked. He often heard, as he says in an
interesting letter, that he ‘had unlocked the secret
of some heart which others, infinitely more famous,
infinitely more entitled to claim the freedom, have
failed to find opening for them.’ He cannot help
believing that ‘there is some human tone in his
written voice which sometimes finds a chord not
often set vibrating.’ The secret of this gift is not
hard to penetrate, though this biography will
enable readers to understand it a little more fully.
He remarks in the same letter that his life was
‘rather solitary than social’; and the society
which he did frequent was not in one of the
greatest centres of intellectual movement. In
certain ways, too, even Bostonians must admit
that the social atmosphere was of a kind to nip
some of the luxuriant growths congenial to older
abodes of art and letters. Holmes’s attachment to
his surroundings was as keen as if the conditions
had been of the most genial. Indeed, he illustrates
what has become a commonplace. Americans, as
Colonel Chester proved, often take with special
enthusiasm to genealogy; although the interest of
the study would at first sight appear to be less in
a country where the claims of long descent are
supposed to be ridiculous. This perhaps illustrates
the principle which accounts for Scottish
skill in gardening. The materials to be mastered
are not so multitudinous, and when you cannot
trust to nature your own energy may be stimulated.
So Holmes cherished whatever could be
called historically interesting in his own country,
because there was so little spontaneously supplied.
Men who live in the shadow of Westminster
Abbey or go to universities which the great men
of many centuries have filled with associations, are
apt to become a little bored with the topic. Holmes
loved the old ‘gambrel-roofed house’ in which he
was born, all the more because a house which
existed at the time of Washington represented
exceptional antiquity in America. The deluge of
growing civilisation sweeps away such relics of the
past so rapidly that their scarcity gives them
exceptional value. The buildings of Andover
Academy and of the Harvard University are not,
in themselves, comparable to Eton or to King’s
College, Cambridge. But they represent the only
persistent thread of historical continuity in the
country, and the affection which they excite is
proportioned, not to their absolute grandeur or
antiquity, but to the degree in which they have to
satisfy whatever instinctive affections there may be
in their alumni. Holmes certainly loved his old
home, and cherished his school and college associations
as ardently as if he had been born in a
Norman manor-house or played his boyish games
under the statue of Henry =vi.= As he grew up
his patriotism did not diminish in intensity. All
that happened was that he became qualified to
catch its comic aspects. When the ‘young fellow
they call John’ laid down the famous proposition
that ‘Boston State House is the hub of the solar
system,’ and adds that ‘you couldn’t pry that out
of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation
straightened out for a crowbar,’ the Autocrat accepts
the ‘satire of the remark,’ and admits that the
‘axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the
centre of each and every town and city.’ But he
does not pretend to conceal that the sentiment,
outrageous if literally accepted, tickles his fancy
agreeably. When we drink a man’s health after
dinner, we often express an estimate of his virtues
which we might sometimes shrink from maintaining
in cold blood. Yet our sentiment may be
essentially genuine, though we have dropped some
implied qualifications. Holmes as a man shares
the young fellow’s enthusiasm, though he wishes
us to understand that he is aware in cold blood
that it is not quite the whole truth. The little
deformed gentleman in the Professor is a still
more vigorous mouthpiece of the same sentiment.
‘A new race, and a whole new world for the new-
born human soul to work in! And Boston is the
brain of it, and has been any time these hundred
years! That’s all I claim for Boston, that it is
the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore
of the planet!’—in which respect its superiority to
Philadelphia and New York is easily demonstrated.
The little gentleman is one of Holmes’s most
spirited characters, and makes a very convenient
organ for the utterance of opinions not to be
turned into serious dogmas—but also not to be
overlooked. Boston is an ideal as well as a real
city; it represents ‘the American principle,’
whatever that may precisely be. It is the three-
hilled city as opposed to the seven-hilled city or
reason against Rome. Democratic America has a
different humanity from feudal Europe, ‘and so
must have a new divinity.’ Religion has to be
‘Americanised,’ and Boston is in the van of the
struggle.

  This might suggest a good many remarks to
which Holmes would, perhaps, leave his deformed
gentleman to reply. He has not committed himself
to an unreserved support of a personage who
reflects only one of his moods. One point, however,
has to be noticed. Holmes, like others, had
revolted against Calvinism as represented by the
Westminster Confession. Many pages in his
essays are directed against the old-fashioned creed;
and, as we are told, made him the object of warm
denunciations by the orthodox. Young people,
Mr. Morse informs us, were forbidden to read the
_Autocrat,_ and _Elsie Venner_ was regarded as a
dangerous manifesto. This, it must be admitted,
sounds strange at the present day. Were any
books ever more obviously harmless? People
who remember certain English controversies about
Maurice, which happened a little before the appearance
of the _Autocrat,_ may succeed in understanding
why, in the country of the Puritans, Holmes
should have passed for a heresiarch. Yet it now
requires an effort to put oneself in that position,
and certainly Holmes’s remarks would now hardly
excite a shudder in the best-regulated families.
Yet they represented what seems to have been the
most important passage of his mental history.
The old Puritanism, one may guess, appeared to
him in a new light when he had sat at the feet of
Parisian professors. The old Boston, at any rate,
was not quite the ‘hub of the universe’ in a physiological
point of view; and he fancied, when the
old and the new currents met, a good deal of the
sediment of old-fashioned dogma would be precipitated.
Still, the old problem which Calvinism
had answered in its own way came up in a new
form. The doctrine of hereditary sin might be
abandoned, but the problems of scientific ‘heredity’
took its place. Jonathan Edwards’s discussions
of moral responsibility have still a serious meaning
when they are dissociated from the ghastly visions
of hell-fire. Holmes gave more place to these
controversies than some of his readers liked; and
I need say nothing as to the merit of his own conclusions.
They interest us chiefly because they
give rise to that provoking book, _Elsie Venner._ I
call it ‘provoking’ merely because it will not
square nicely with any orthodox canons of criticism.
In the first place it has an air of being
didactic, or is a book with a tendency, or, in the
old-fashioned phrase, is a novel with a purpose. I
confess that I should have no objection to it upon
that ground. I always found _Sandford and Merton_
a delightful work in my childhood, and I partly
preserve that degrading taste. I like books with
a moral. Some authors, it is true, are cramped by
their morals, and occasionally tripped up into flat
absurdity. Still, a writer generally derives a certain
unction from the delusion that he is preaching
as well as story-telling; and so long as any one is
working with a will, and defying the critics and
all their ways, he has the root of the matter in him.
Holmes, it must be remarked, did not suppose
that he was proving anything in _Elsie Venner_; he
recognised the truth of the axiom propounded in
the _Rose and the Ring_ that blank verse is not
argument; and the imaginary behaviour of an
impossible being cannot possibly lead to any conclusion.
When we meet a being who is half
woman and half a snake it will be time to settle
the moral code forjudging her. Holmes, in fact,
says in his preface that he only took an imaginary
case in order to call attention to the same difficulty
in the common course of things. To that I can
see no objection. Clearly, every great tragedy
involves some interesting question of casuistry;
and casuistry may repay the debt by suggesting a
good plot for a novel. The only question is,
whether the extravagant hypothesis, be it purely
fantastic or contrived to illustrate a point in ethics,
has really been turned to good account. I confess
to a conflict of feeling which, I suspect, is shared
by others. The book makes me read it whenever
I take it up, and yet I am never satisfied. Perhaps
it is that I want more rattlesnake; I want to have
the thrill which my ancestors felt when they told
legends of were-wolves; I wish the snake-woman
to be as poetical as Coleridge’s Geraldine, to
tremble while I read, and to be encouraged in my
belief by such an infusion of science as will reconcile
me to the surroundings of the nineteenth
century in England. That is, no doubt, to wish
at the lowest that Holmes could have been combined
with Hawthorne—not to suggest the creator
of Caliban—and that their qualities could have
coalesced with as little interference as those of
Elsie and the snake. So much is suggested that
one wants a more complete achievement. The
fact is simply, I suppose, that Holmes had not the
essential quality of the inspired novelist. He did
not get fairly absorbed in his story and feel as
though he were watching, instead of, contriving,
the development of a situation. That, for example,
is the way in which Richardson declares himself to
have written, and which partly explains the fascination
to our forefathers of his moralising and long-
winded narratives. Holmes is distinctly a spectator
from outside, and his attention is too easily
distracted. I do not in the least object to a
novelist discoursing or supplying comments if it
be his natural vein; I am not simple-minded
enough to care for the loss of the illusion. But
the novelist should not give an analysis in place of
a concrete picture, or wander into irrelevant
remarks. Now, Holmes’s intellect is so lively and
unruly that the poor snake-lady gets too often
squeezed into the background. He is struck by
the peculiarities of New England villages, their
toasts, or their ‘co-lations,’ or their ‘hired men,’
and is immediately plunged into vivacious descriptions
and disquisitions. We have to change moods
too rapidly; to feel on one page a shudder at the
uncanny being, with something not human looking
out of her eyes; and, on the next, to be laughing
at the queer social jumble of a village gathering.
If, in spite of these artistic defects, the book somehow
takes so firm a grasp of one’s memory, it is
the stronger proof of the excellence of the
materials which form so curious a mosaic. After
all, the writer never goes to sleep, and that is a
remit which redeems a good many faults of design.

  One condition of the excellence of the _Autocrat_
and its successors is of course that in them this
irrepressible vivacity and versatility finds in him
a thoroughly appropriate field. They have, as we
see at once, the merits of the best conversation.
Mr. Morse, in speaking of this, assures us that
Holmes’s talk was still better than his writing.
We have unfortunately to take such statements on
faith. No one, except Boswell, has ever succeeded
in the difficult task of giving us a convincingly
accurate report of conversation, or rather of something
better than a report—a dramatic reflection
of the position which would be lost in a detailed
account. Would the talk at the theatre have
been as impressive as it appears if we could have
it reproduced by phonograph? Locke, it is said,
once wrote down the actual words of Shaftesbury
and some great men of the day, to show them
how trivial it looked on paper. The moral was,
if I remember rightly, that they ought to talk
about the origin of ideas instead of discussing
their hands at cards. But I fear that the test, if
applied to the very best of talk, would have a
depressing effect. The actual words dribbled out
at a century’s distance would be depressingly flat.
The brilliant things, even of the most brilliant
talker, are exceptional flashes; they are the few
diamonds among a mass of pebbles, and generally
want a good deal of polishing before they get
moulded into the famous gems which we admire.
The actual talk includes all the approximations
and the ramblings round about the point. The
‘master-bowman,’ as Tennyson puts it, may come
at last and hit the target in the centre; but even
he generally wastes a great many arrows in the
process. Then, of course, half the effect of most
good talk is dramatic; its success depends not
only upon what is said, but upon what is omitted
and upon the mental attitude of the moment of
the other players in the game. As Holmes says
himself, ‘The whole force of conversation depends
on how much you can take for granted’—that is,
in your hearers. I have no doubt of the excellence
of Holmes’s talk; but it was, I guess, partly
due to the fact that it was part of a spontaneous
concert. Talking is, as Holmes said, ‘one of the
fine arts,’ and it is one which requires above all
things a harmonious co-operation. The hearers
must join themselves, and must also act as an
effective sounding-board. They must catch the
ball quickly, and return it nimbly, or the best
performer will flag.

  Holmes found his best co-operators in his
famous ‘Saturday Club.’ He was always referring
to it fondly, and Mr. Morse produces various
testimonies to its merits. Lowell said that he
had never seen equally good society in London.
Colonel Higginson observes that Holmes and
Lowell were the most brilliant talkers he ever
heard, but suggests a qualification of this comparison.
They had not, he says, ‘the London
art of repression,’ and monopolised the talk too
much. They could, he intimates, overlook the
claims of their interlocutors. He once heard
Lowell demonstrating to the author of _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_ that _Tom Jones_ was the best novel
ever written; while Holmes was proving to her
husband, the divinity professor, that the pulpit
was responsible for all the swearing. Dr. and
Mrs. Beecher Stowe, it is implied, must have been
reduced to ciphers before they could be the passive
recipients of such doctrines. In spite of this, I
can easily believe that the Club deserved its fame.
The ‘art of repression,’ I fancy, is very often
superfluous in London. Conversation in ever-
shifting crowds requires stimulation more often
than restraint, and it is sometimes as hard to set
talk going in the fortuitous concurrence of human
atoms at a large party as to start a real exchange
of ideas in an excursion train. The best talk that
I have ever heard has certainly been in obscure
corners, where a few friends meet habitually, and
distribute their parts instinctively. A society
which included all the best scholars and men of
genius within reach of Boston had abundance of the
raw material of talk. They might be compared in
point of talent even with the men who met Johnson
at the ‘Turk’s Head,’ and certainly had as
great a variety of interest in men and books.
They had, it would seem, fewer jealousies, or,
as the sneerer would put it, were readier for
‘mutual admiration’; and such admiration, when
it has a fair excuse, is the best security for forming
the kind of soil in which the flower of talk
grows spontaneously.

  Talk, said Holmes, is ‘to me only spading up
the ground for crops of thought.’ He was half
his time ‘interviewing himself’ and looking for
his own thoughts, ‘as a schoolboy turns his
pockets inside out to find what is in them.’ The
_Autocrat_ is the outcome of this investigation. It
might have been more amusing to watch the actual
process; but a reader may be content to get the
fine extract. Holmes, as he intimates himself,
was his own Boswell. He had a quaint satisfaction
in following the career of Johnson, whose
age differed by exactly a century from his own,
and missed an old companion when he outlived
his parallel. It would be absurd to make a comparison,
as a Johnson fused with a Boswell would
have been a singularly different person. Indeed,
the most obvious peculiarity of Holmes’s mind is
one to which his ponderous predecessor could
make no pretension. Johnson went into conversation
like a gladiator into the arena; and if
Holmes could have met him the pair would have
been like a Spanish bull encountered by a dexterous
picador. Holmes would have been over his
head and behind his back, and stabbing him on
the flank with all manner of ingenious analogies,
and with squibs and crackers of fancy, instead of
meeting the massive charge face to face. To
invent an imaginary conversation between the
two is altogether beyond my powers, and I can
only hope that it is taking place somewhere in
Elysium. Holmes’s most peculiar excellence is
foreshadowed in a passage which Boswell quotes
from Barrow’s sermons as applicable to Wilkes.
‘Facetiousness,’ as Barrow says, among other
things, ‘raiseth admiration as signifying a nimble
sagacity of apprehension, a special felicity of
invention, a vivacity of spirit and reach of wit
more than vulgar; it seeming to argue a rare
quickness of parts, that one can fetch in remote
conceits applicable; a notable skill that he can
dexterously accommodate them to the purpose
before him; together with a lively briskness of
humour, not apt to damp those sportful flashes
of imagination. Where in Aristotle—’ but there
I had better stop. Barrow probably knew Holmes
as pre-existing in one of the ancestors who transmitted
to him the power of ‘fetching in remote
conceits.’ The _Autocrat_ might suggest a series
of riddles or problems for some future examiner
in English literature. Why is controversy like
the Hydrostatic Paradox? Why is a poem like
a meerschaum? What is the very obvious resemblance
between the pupil of the eye and the mind
of the bigot? In what respects may truths be
properly compared to dice and lies to marbles?
Why should a trustworthy friend be like a cheap
watch? How does the proper treatment for
Guinea-worm illustrate the best mode of treating
habitual drunkards? The answers to these and
many equally ingenious parallels illustrate Holmes’s
power of procuring analogies; and show, too, how
his talent had been polished in the conversational
arena. The commonest weakness of popular
writers in the eyes of severe critics is that they
resemble barristers addressing dull juries. Such
an one feels that he must not simply state a
reason, but pound it into a thick head by repetition.
When a joke seems to answer, he makes it
again and again till the stare of puzzled suspicion
that the man may be not quite serious passes into
the broad grin of steady conviction that he is
actually making a joke. The instrument upon
which Holmes had performed, the circle of congenial
friends, was, of course, far more responsive.
Still, an after-dinner criticism requires to be played
with and flashed in different lights if it is to win
the ear of the party. In that act of dexterously
manipulating a subtle analogy, playing with it
long enough to excite attention, and yet not so
long as to bore the intelligent, Holmes had certainly
become a master.

  Wit of this kind has a close affinity to logic;
and Holmes is the man of science playing with
a weapon available for more serious purposes.
According to himself, he played with it a little
too much in his professional capacity. A man who
could say that the ‘smallest fevers would be thankfully
received’ had not the excessive gravity which
we desire in our medical advisers. In some hands
the danger would be rather that the wit would be
too heavily weighted with the logic. Holmes succeeded
in making his logic sparkle and play over
the surface of his sentiment; and achieved the
feat happily described in the saying of his friend,
Thomas Appleton—famous for many good sayings—
that he had ‘put the electricity of the
climate into words.’ The force which may crush
a fallacy can also coruscate like mild summer
lightning. This logical tendency makes a characteristic
difference between Holmes and Charles
Lamb, the most obvious parallel to him in
our own language. Holmes, as became a quick
logician, was an unequivocal lover of clearness
and common sense. He may play with an extravagance,
as in the case of Boston, but he is
anxious always to show that he sees its extravagance.
Lamb loves the quaint and grotesque for
its own sake; falls in love with his prejudices;
delights in yielding to them unreservedly, and
caressing them and flouting the reasonable matter-of-fact
person, the solid Scot who demonstrates
that an absurdity is absurd. He may be quite
reasonable at bottom, but he will not condescend
to interpret his meaning to the hopelessly
commonplace. So, for example, he dilates upon
his ‘imperfect sympathy’ with the Jews. He
has, ‘in the abstract, no disrespect for them.
They are a piece of stubborn antiquity compared
with which Stonehenge is in its nonage.’ But, he
adds, ‘old prejudices cling about me. I cannot
shake off the old story of Hugh of Lincoln.’
Holmes meets some Jews ‘at the pantomime’
and remembers the same legend:—

<verse>
Up came their murderous deeds of old,
The grisly story Chaucer told;
And many an ugly tale beside,
Of children caught and crucified.
</>

  But Holmes makes this merely a pretext for a
reproach to narrow prejudices, and for pointing
out the superlative claims of the race upon the
regard of Christians. No doubt Lamb would
have been heartily pleased with Holmes’s application
of the story; but he is content to allow his
readers to find out for themselves that he is not
an embodiment of stupid antipathies. This is,
perhaps, to say that Lamb’s humour was more
thoroughly ingrained in his character; and the
effect appears in their literary tastes. Lamb
delights in the quaintness and mysticism of the
seventeenth century; likes to lose himself with
Sir Thomas Browne in an _O Altitudo!_ and so
loves the splendid audacities of the old dramatists
that he frequently loves even their extravagance.
Holmes, on the other hand, though born when
Lamb was thirty-five, adheres to the safe tradition
against which Lamb and his friends had revolted.
His real affinities are with the wits from Addison
to Goldsmith, the believers in reason and commonsense,
who had sharpened their brains, as he had
done, in small social gatherings. He liked to
call the hotel where his club met after Will’s
Coffeehouse sacred to Dryden; and he seems to
have regarded Emerson and his disciples much
as his English predecessors looked upon the
‘enthusiasts’ of their day. One of his most
characteristic letters is a very courteous reply,
written in 1846, to a remonstrance from Lowell,
who had complained that he did not attack war
and slavery in his poems. He does not differ
from Lowell in his judgment of those evils; but
he must follow his natural bent, and was glad to
leave these burning problems to more eloquent
advocates. It is quite clear, in fact, that his
natural predisposition made believers in what we
call ‘fads’ uncongenial. He saw their absurdities,
their one-sided extravagances, and their appeals to
a kind of inspired authority from the commonsense
point of view. Their vehemence and their
blindness to the practical shocked his taste and
kept him for the time at arm’s-length. And so,
in spite of his thorough patriotism, he was, in
some directions, a conservative and even an
aristocrat. He was for ‘Americanising’ religion
—for that meant making religion reasonable;
but not for Americanising literature, for the
phrase had been used to mean vulgarising. ‘I
go politically for equality,’ says he, ‘and socially
for _the_ quality.’ He wished, in short, to preserve
the traditions of refinement and harmony, suavity
and tact, which can, as he held, only be produced
in two or three generations lifted above squalor
and the hardening influences of coarse manual
labour. In literature, therefore, he was naturally
a purist; he was simply disgusted when it was
proposed to make a literary declaration of independence
by introducing broad jokes in
slang suited to a western backwood-man. He
shuddered at the thought of a possible President
of the Republic saying ‘häow’ instead of ‘what,’
or ‘urritation’ for irritation. Some lovely woman,
he hopes, will playfully withdraw the knife which
the great man is about to use as a fork, or sacrifice
herself by imitating his use of the implement
—‘how much harder than to plunge it into her
bosom like Lucretia!’ The true canons of good
literature, as of good behaviour, are founded upon
the eternal laws of good sense and good feeling:
and therefore a revolt against them is not the way
to independence, but to degeneration. Holmes,
of course, maintained that refinement was compatible
with democracy, and that a thorough
American might also be the most polished of
gentlemen. But he had the keenest contempt
for the confusion of mere eccentricity with originality,
or the theory that man gains real self-
respect by forgetting his manners. When the
Civil War broke out, Holmes most heartily
adopted the patriotic view of the situation, and
spoke, too, in the language of a thorough political
republican. He used the familiar shibboleth
without hesitation. His old sympathy with
abolitionists had been tempered by his fear that
their excessive devotion to a good cause might,
as he told Lowell, precipitate a frightful future
of ‘war and bloodshed.’ Here the sympathy
could have full play, and the enthusiasm be at
once with the man of reason and common-sense.

  Whether, as Holmes hoped, democracy will
prove to be the reign of reason and of true refinement
of respect for man as man, and also of
respect for the traditional culture, is not a question
to be asked here. The shorter and more
answerable problem concerns his own character.
Holmes shocked the orthodox by some of his
theories: and perhaps, if he had fully perceived
or uttered some of their consequences he would
have shocked them more. He might have been
respected: but to the ordinary reader he would
have appeared as a scoffer, or at least as a blast
from the nipping north-east air, blighting the
fairest flowers of old tradition. One can perhaps
fancy Holmes under other surroundings, producing
a book not unlike _Candide,_ incomparably
witty, but not exactly conciliatory to the other
side. But with all his power of ridicule Holmes
had not a touch of the satirist about him. He
shrinks from painting even his enemies in too
black colours. He can denounce bigotry, but he
always prefers to point out that the bigot in theory
may be the kindliest of men in practice. In one
of his early bits of pure fun, he tells how his
servant was thrown into a fit by reading some
of his merry lines:—

<verse>
Ten days and nights with sleepless eye
    I watched that wretched man;
Since then I never dare to write
    As funny as I can.
</>

  Certainly he never wrote as sharply as it is
abundantly plain that he could. He always
remembered that the other person was a human
being. It was very shocking to burn the witches,
but he could not find it in his heart to sentence
the burner to his own flames.

  If Holmes, that is, had revolted from his early
teachers he had never become bitter. This was,
perhaps, because he never grew to manhood.
He requests all but youthful readers to abstain
from one of his papers, and explains that ‘youthful’
includes some ‘from the age of twelve to
that of four-score years and ten.’ Youth is ‘something
in the soul which has no more to do with
the colour of the hair than the vein of gold in a
rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet
above it.’ No one has ever insisted upon that
text so emphatically and persistently. The ‘poems
of the class of 1829’ have no doubt been surpassed
in the highest qualities by some autobiographical
series that might be mentioned, but
their merits as occasional verse have an almost
unique personal interest. Every year from 1851
till 1889 sees the laureate of the old set of friends
proclaiming—as long as it can be done by even a
poetical fiction—that they are still ‘boys,’ and
when even the fiction would be too sad, still
claiming undying youth for the old affection.
So, as he says in 1884, after setting forth a
characteristic analogy:—

<verse>
So, link by link, our friendships part
    To loosen, break, and fall,
A narrowing zone; the loving heart
    Lives changeless through them all.
</>

  Although when Lamb wrote his pathetic _Old
Familiar Faces,_ bewailing the loss of school-
friends, he was a little over twenty, his mood
seems appropriate to one who, in the decline of
life, feels his solitude to be almost unbearable.
Humour which reveals the seamy side of life
generally goes with a melancholy temperament,
and Lamb’s sweetness is generally toned by the
sadness, due both to circumstance and to disposition.
It is Holmes’s special peculiarity that the
childish buoyancy remains almost to the end,
unbroken and irrepressible. He could hardly
indeed have sympathised with the doctrine that
heaven lies about us in our infancy, for we
cherish that—illusion is it or faith? when we are
forced to admit that we can only see the light of
common day. Holmes never seems to have lost
the early buoyancy—only to have acquired new
toys; even physiology, which he studied seriously
enough, and which is not generally regarded as
amusing, supplies him with intellectual playthings,
quaint fancies, and remote analogies to be tossed
about like balls by a skilful juggler. The early
poems, written in the pure extravagance of boyish
fun, like the _Spectre Pig_ and _The Mysterious
Visitor,_ show characteristics which may be overlaid
but are never obliterated. I don’t know
that any of his poems are more thoroughly himself
than the early lines on a portrait:—

<verse>
That thing thou fondly deem’st a nose,
    Unsightly though it be,—
In spite of all the world’s cold scorn,
    It may be much to thee.
</>

  The inimitable _One-Horse Shay_ was written
when he was near fifty, and the _Broomstick Train,_
almost equally full of fun, when he was over
eighty, and had sorrows enough to quench most
men’s last sparkles of vivacity. No human being
ever fought more gallantly with the old enemy
who defeats us all in the end.

  Holmes’s boyishness appears in his quaint love
of athletic sports, more eccentric in America when
he wrote than it seems to be at present; his love
of boxing and rowing and walking. We can
almost believe the Autocrat when he says that he
was tempted to put on the gloves with the
‘Benicia Boy,’ though that hero was of twice his
weight and half his age. His exuberant feelings
betray him into some bacchanalian lyrics, for
which he half apologises. He goes back in spirit
to the jovial old British squires who once possessed
his punch-bowl—

<verse>
I tell you there was generous warmth in good old English cheer,
I tell you ’twas a pleasant thought to bring its symbol here!
’Tis but the fool that loves excess; hast thou a drunken soul,
The fault is in thy shallow brain, not in my silver bowl.
</>

  This, indeed, may remind us that the everlasting
‘boy’ in Holmes is not to be confounded
with the young of the human species as known to
us by actual experience. The real boy is sometimes
a brute, who loves boxing and the punch-bowl
after the manner of brutes. Holmes’s
boyishness means the actual possession of such
qualities as are attributed to boys—rashly sometimes
—by loving mothers; the perfect simplicity,
the confiding trustfulness of a nature which has
not been soured into cynicism; and the confident
assumption that their own happiness implies the
general goodness of all their fellow-creatures.
Holmes’s early revolt against Calvinism had left to
him, as I have said, the belief that a Calvinist was
a really good man with an offensive dogma floating
on the surface of his mind. His heretical
outbursts might be taken in good part by the
judicious, because they remind even the orthodox
not so much of the assaults of a determined enemy
as of the naïve irreverence of a child who expresses
in pure simplicity his view of some accepted
dogma. He may have hit upon a really grave
objection, but it implies no personal antipathies.
This, as it requires no wizard to say, is the secret
of the method by which Holmes unlocked the
doors of so many hearts. The tenderness and
simplicity combined were irresistible passports to
admittance; even his logic appeared in the form
of a dazzling display of wit; and the pathos
touches us because it is presented without the
slightest tinge of affectation. Nobody can be at
once more feeling and more free from sentimentalism.
His compliments, always delicately turned
and sometimes exquisite, often remind me of
Boswell’s portrait of Garrick ‘playing round’
Johnson with a ‘fond vivacity,’ and looking up in
his face with a lively archness, till the old gentleman
was warmed into ‘gentle complacency.’ If
Garrick was presumably the better actor, he could
not have been more dexterous in administering
praise. But I need not try to expound what
every one perceives who has read his poems, such
especially as the famous _Last Leaf_ and _Dorothy Q.,_
and the _Chambered Nautilus._ The last of these,
I humbly confess, does not quite touch me as it
should, because it seems too ingenious. Like
Blanco White’s famous sonnet, it rather tempts
me, at least, to think what reply I could make to
the argument. But the _Last Leaf_ might be made
into the text of all that I wish to say. The
exquisite pathos of the verse about the mossy
marbles linked to the fun of the irresistible though
sinful ‘grin’ is the typical instance of Holmes’s
special combination of qualities. He is one of
the writers who are destined to live long—longer,
it may be, than some of greater intellectual force
and higher imagination, because he succeeds so
admirably in flavouring the milk of human kindness
with an element which is not acid, and yet
gets rid of the mawkishness which sometimes
makes good morality terribly insipid. This
biography, in spite of the scantiness of material,
falls in at every point with the impression derived
from the books, and leaves us with the satisfactory
conviction that we have no errata to correct
in our previous judgment.

<chapter>
	LIFE OF TENNYSON

  Every one, I presume, has read the deeply
interesting volumes in which Lord Tennyson has
paid most appropriate homage to the memory of
his father; and the life has probably suggested to
most of us some comments upon the familiar
poetry. A remark reported by Tennyson’s old
friend, Jowett, is a useful warning against over-
ambitious attempts in that direction. ‘There
was,’ said Tennyson, ‘one intellectual process in
the world of which he could not even entertain
an apprehension—that was’ (the process which
created) ‘the plays of Shakespeare.’ If Tennyson
could not imagine the Shakespearean intellect, it
is impossible for people who are not poets even to
guess at the Tennysonian. The most obvious of
his merits is the most tantalising to a would-be
explainer. It is especially difficult, as he observes,
and as other people have observed before him, to
be ‘at once commonplace and poetical’; to find
the one incomparable and magical phrase for the
thought which has been trying to get itself uttered
for centuries. There are interesting accounts in
these volumes of the way in which some of Tennyson’s
most perfect passages sprang from accidental
phrases, ‘rolled about’ in his mind; but phrases
may roll about in some minds for a very long time
to very little purpose. Leave a phrase to simmer
in your memory; brood over it, let it crystallize
into form in your mind, and the feat will be done.
It will, that is, if your mind is Tennysonian; but
there is the mystery. One trivial example comes
home to the Alpine traveller. He has seen and
tried for years to tell how he is impressed by his
beloved scenery, and annoyed by his own bungling
whenever he has tried to get beyond arithmetical
statements of hard geographical facts. And then
Tennyson, who was never in his life more than
7000 feet above the sea, just glances at the Monte
Rosa from the cathedral at Milan, and in a four-line
stanza gives the whole spirit of the scene to
perfection. It does not seem fair, but if justice
supposes an equal distribution of abilities, the world
is not remarkable for fairness. Tennyson’s superlative
skill in this art is too conspicuous and too
universally acknowledged to justify more than a
passing recognition of an undeniable truth. And,
perhaps, criticism of really great and familiar
poetry should be mainly reserved for the select few
who may without arrogance claim to be more or
less of the same spiritual order. One may, however,
say something upon various points suggested
by this biography, and especially as to the audience
which first listened to the new poetical revelation.

  I will begin with a few words as to my own
experience in regard to that matter. Tennyson
had already made his mark when I was a schoolboy;
and when I was at college all youths who professed
a literary turn knew the earlier poems by heart.
Ebullient Byronism was a thing of the past. There
was no longer any need for the missionary zeal
which had taken Cambridge men of an earlier
generation to propagate the worship of Shelley
at Oxford. ‘Chatter’ about that luminary was
already becoming commonplace; a mere repetition
of accepted poetical orthodoxy. Admiration of
Browning, though it was distinctly beginning, implied
a certain claim to esoteric appreciation. But
Tennyson’s fame was established, and yet had not
lost the full bloom of novelty. It was delightful
to catch a young man coming up from the country
and indoctrinate him by spouting _Locksley Hall_
and the _Lotus Eaters._ _In Memoriam_ had just
appeared when I was a freshman—Tennyson became
Poet Laureate in my first term—and _Maud_
came out the year after I had graduated. Any one
who cares to know by contemporary evidence how
Tennyson’s poetry affected the young men of that
period may turn to the essays of George Brimley,
a man of fine taste, who died prematurely, and
who, as librarian of Trinity, gave utterance to the
correct sentiment of Tennyson’s old college.
Tennyson, he declares, is doing for us of the
nineteenth century what Shakespeare and Chaucer
did for the England of their own days. Brimley
spoke for the civilised part of University
society: Tennyson’s friends, Thompson (afterwards
master) and W. G. Clark, the editor of Shakespeare,
were conspicuous in that exalted region;
and the younger generation all accepted the
Tennysonian faith as that becoming enlightened
persons. I only followed my companions when I
tacitly assumed that ‘poet’ was a phrase equivalent
to ‘Tennyson.’ The enthusiasm no doubt was
partly obligatory; to repudiate it would have been
to write oneself down an ass; but it was also
warm and spontaneous. For that one owes a debt
of gratitude to the poet not easily to be estimated.
It is a blessing to share an enthusiasm, and I hope,
rather than believe, that modern undergraduates
have some equally wholesome stimulus of the kind.
I do not think that we of the older generation have
changed our estimate of Tennyson’s merits, even
though our ‘enthusiasm’ may have subsided into
a more temperate warmth of approval. I mean,
however, our estimate of the old poems. One
could love them without putting the later works
on the same level. Some readers were sensible
of a considerable difficulty in that matter. The
first series of _Idylls of the King_ appeared in 1859.
This volume at once extended Tennyson’s popularity
beyond all previous limits. Ten thousand
copies were sold in the first week; hundreds went
off monthly; Tennyson made such a success in
the merely bookselling sense as to rival Scott,
Macaulay, and Dickens. The success, too, was
as marked if judged by some higher tests.
Thackeray wrote in ‘a rapture of gratitude’ to
acknowledge the greatest delight that had ever
come to him since he was a young man. The
Duke of Argyll reported that even Macaulay had
been conquered, and predicted, truly enough, that
many would appreciate the new poems who had
failed to appreciate the old. Mr. Gladstone welcomed
the _Idylls_ in the _Quarterly,_ and Jowett
wrote as enthusiastically as Thackeray. These
judgments, too, are still repeated, and Mr. Stopford
Brooke’s recent volume upon Tennyson
contains a long commentary, which, if more
discriminative, is still cordially reverential. I
have conscientiously tried to enlighten myself by
studying it, but even a knowledge that one ought
to be enthusiastic is a different thing from enthusiasm.
Not to recognise the wonderful literary
skill and the exceeding beauty of many passages
would, of course, imply more stupidity than any
one would willingly admit; but I am afraid that
from the publication of the _Idylls_ I had to admit
that I was not quite of the inner circle of true
worshippers. I am glad to shelter myself to some
extent behind higher authorities. Edward FitzGerald
confessed when the _Holy Grail_ appeared
(in 1870) that he was inclined to prefer the old
_Lady of Shalott_ method of dealing with the Round
Table to the elaborated epic poem. He supposed
that a bit must be wanting in the map of his brain,
but anyhow, while feeling ‘how pure, noble, and
holy’ the work was, he passed on to where the
old Lincolnshire farmer drew tears to his eyes.
He got back to ‘substantial rough-spun nature,’
and felt that the ‘old brute’ was ‘a more pathetic
phenomenon’ than the Knights of the Round
Table. This is only, as he explains, one of ‘old
Fitz’s crotchets’ (and it may be said incidentally
that FitzGerald’s letters, crotchety or not, are
among the best things in these volumes). Mr.
Ruskin, on the appearance of the first _Idylls,_ puts
virtually the same point in more formal language.
He thinks that ‘the true task of the modern poet’
should be to ‘give the intense, masterful, and
unerring transcript of an actuality.’ He is not
sure, he confesses, that he does not ‘feel the art
and finish in these poems a little more than he
likes to feel it.’ Upon this Lord Tennyson makes
an interesting remark. The _Idylls,_ he tells us,
were not carefully elaborated. ‘“Guinevere” and
“Elaine” were each written in a few weeks, and
hardly corrected at all.’ The poet, of course,
had been long brooding over them; and many
phrases had come to him from accidental suggestions,
and gone through a slow incubation; but
the actual execution was rapid. This, however,
does not quite meet the criticism. It is not a
question, I fancy, of the elaboration of the language,
but of the vividness and spontaneity of
the thought to be elaborated. The art becomes
obvious, because Tennyson seems not so much to
be inspired by an overmastering idea as to be
looking about for appropriate images to express
certain ethical and religious sentiments. He has
obviously seen the Northern farmer with his own
eyes; he has only contrived his knights, who
never seem to me to be clothed in real flesh
and blood. Jowett remarks that the ‘allegory in
the distance greatly strengthens, also elevates, the
meaning of the poem.’ To me, I humbly confess,
‘allegory,’ rightly or wrongly, means nuisance.
The ‘meaning’ which it sticks on to a poem is
precisely what the poem cannot properly ‘mean.’
The old _Morte d’Arthur,_ as it appeared with the
charming old setting, was one of the poems which
we all knew by heart. One of the charms was
surely that the behaviour of the persons was delightfully
illogical and absurd. Rather, perhaps,
it took one to the world in which true logic
demands illogical behaviour. Things take place
there according to a law of their own, which is
the more attractive just because it is preposterous
and apparently arbitrary. When Sir Bedivere
throws Excalibur into the lake, the whole proceeding
is, as indeed Sir Bedivere very properly
perceives and points out, contrary to all common-sense.
His reluctance gives us warning that we
have got into the world governed by phantastic
laws. Throwing a sword into a lake does not,
within ordinary experience, produce a barge
occupied by three queens with crowns of gold;
just as shooting an albatross does not, as a rule,
produce a dead calm and death of a ship’s crew
by thirst. But though things of dreamland follow
laws of their own, even dreamland has laws, and
they ought to be observed when once you get
there. The ‘Ancient Mariner’ was ridden by
a nightmare, and all things happened to him
according to the genuine laws of the nightmare
world. Arthur’s Round Table was a dream of
the mediæval imagination, and the historian of
its adventures should frankly put himself in the
corresponding attitude of mind. It lends itself
admirably to represent the ideals which were in
the minds of the dreamer, and therefore unconsciously
determined the constitution of the imaginary
world. But when the personages, instead
of obeying the laws of their own world, are converted
into allegory, they lose their dream reality
without gaining the reality of ordinary life. The
arbitrariness especially ceases to be delightful when
we suspect that the real creatures of the fancy
have become the puppets of a judicious moralist.
The question, What is the meaning? throws one’s
mind out of gear. When Sir Bedivere made his
second appearance somebody asked Tennyson
whether the three queens were not Faith, Hope,
and Charity. The poet replied that they were,
and that they were not. They might be the
Virtues or they might be the Three Graces.
There was, he said, an ‘allegorical, or perhaps
rather a parabolic, drift,’ in the poem; but he
added there was not a single fact or incident in
the _Idylls_ which might not be explained without
any mystery or allegory whatever. This explanation
may be very satisfactory to some readers, and
if they are satisfied, their state is the more gracious;
but I humbly confess that so soon as genuine inhabitants
of Fairyland can be interpreted as three
virtues or three graces, they cease to fascinate me.
In the _Holy Grail_ the mystical purpose is most
distinctly avowed. We are told to learn what it
means by studying the visions of Sir Percival, and
his ‘subsequent fall and nineteenth century temptations.’
The result of my study is that the
visions are turned into waking shams, and leave
a residuum of edifying sermon. The intrusion of
the nineteenth century is simply disenchantment.
If I want to be moral, I should get much more
instruction out of _Mme. Bovary_ or some other
‘masterful transcript of actuality’ than out of
Tristram and Iseult, and if I want to be romantic,
the likeness of King Arthur to the Prince Consort
takes all the vigour out of the prehistoric personage.
The Prince Consort, no doubt, deserved
Tennyson’s profound respect; but when we find
him masquerading among the Knights of the
Round Table, his admirable propriety of behaviour
looks painfully like insipidity and incapacity
for his position.

  This line of criticism is, of course, very
obvious; and, I admit, may be simply a proof of
the critic’s unsuitability. I desire simply to state
the historical fact that the publication of the _Idylls_
marks the point at which some disciples were
sensible of a partial refrigeration of their zeal.
The old Tennysonian power was not extinct;
many of the poems up to the last had all the old
exquisite charm, and the older poetry never lost it.
But from this time a certain class of admirers
—perhaps the duller class—felt that they dwelt
in the outer court, and that they could not
enter the inmost shrine with befitting reverence.
There was not, I must add, in my case at least, any
objection to the combination, as it is called, of
philosophy with poetry. ‘Your poetry,’ as Jowett
said to Tennyson, ‘has an element of philosophy
more to be considered than any regular philosophy
in England.’ ‘It is,’ he adds, ‘almost too much
impregnated with philosophy,’ although this again
‘will be to some minds its greatest charm.’
Tennyson himself was amused by discovering that
he had been talking Hegelianism without knowing
it. The fact is, I take it, that poetry in a mind
of great general power, not only may be, but cannot
help being, philosophy. Philosophy itself, it
may be plausibly urged, is in reality nothing but
poetry expressed by the cumbrous methods of
dialectical formulæ. It labours painfully to put
together ostensible reasons for the truth of the
conceptions of life and the world which are
directly presented in the poetic imagery. Tennyson’s
philosophy would have been present, though
not consciously indicated, if he had simply recast
the Arthurian legends in the spirit of the original
creators. Nor will I argue that dislike to allegory
is anything better than a prosaic prejudice, or,
perhaps, an application of some pretentious
æsthetic canon. Perhaps, indeed, the allegorical
form was not so much the stumbling-block as the
philosophical or ethical system itself which was
meant to be adumbrated. Or rather, for that, I
think, is the true account, we who fell off disliked
a philosophy which required to be insinuated
through an allegorical clothing. We were going
through an intellectual crisis; and if we exaggerated
its importance, Tennyson at least, as many
other utterances prove, and as his memoirs show
most convincingly, was equally impressed by the
greatness of the issues. But for that reason, we
(I repeat that by ‘we’ I only mean the wicked)
wanted something more downright and dogmatic.
A religious philosophy which hides itself behind
mythical figures and vague personifications of
abstract qualities; which can only be shadowed
forth and insinuated through a rehabilitated
romance, seemed inadequate and even effeminate.
We fancied that if it ventured into broad daylight
it would turn out to be mere commonplace disguised
or made of moonshine and flimsy sentimentalisms.
Or, possibly, we were not distinctly
aware that there really was any mystical meaning
at all, and simply felt that when such vital
questions were being raised, we could not be really
interested in this dim poetic land of unsubstantial
shadows. When, a little later, we began to know
what Omar Khàyyàm had said some eight centuries
before, we felt the power of a direct and intensely
powerful utterance of one mode of treating the
eternal problem.

  All this, it may be replied, is to explain that a
certain class of young men were partially alienated
from Tennyson’s poetry because they did not like
his philosophy; which is a proof that they were
æsthetically dull and philosophically grovelling.
I will not dispute the inference; I think, indeed,
that there is much to be said for it; and as I have
admitted my tendencies that way, I am obviously
disqualified from speaking as an impartial judge.
I only wish to urge, by way of extenuation at any
rate, that we were still accessible to other Tennysonian
influences, and, indeed, to poems in which
his doctrine finds a more direct utterance. I love
_In Memoriam,_ and should be sorry if I were forced
to admit that I could not understand the true
secret of its extraordinary beauty. Professor
Sidgwick contributes to this volume a most
interesting account of its influence upon him.
For certain reasons, I could not adopt all that he
says, and my intellectual dissent from Tennyson
begins, I may say, at an earlier stage; but I decline
to admit that I am for that reason incapable of
feeling the emotional power. Therefore, without
attempting to argue the æsthetical canons, I return
to the purely historical question suggested by
these volumes. Froude, in a letter to the author,
says that in his estimate, Tennyson stands ‘far
away, by the side of Shakespeare, above all other
English poets, with this relative superiority even
to Shakespeare, that he speaks the thoughts and
speaks to the perplexities and misgivings of his
own age.’ Froude adds characteristically that
Tennyson came before the world had become
inflated ‘with the vanity of progress, and there was
still an atmosphere in which such a soul could
grow. There will be no such others for many a
long age.’ It is rash, I think, to prophesy about
‘long ages,’ but Froude is at any rate a good
witness as to the facts. Froude had known better
than most people the doubts and perplexities by
which Tennyson’s contemporaries were distracted;
and though Froude’s own view remains rather a
mystery, the impression made upon a man so alive
to many sides of modern thought is no small proof
of Tennyson’s power. Now the memoirs ought
to show us how Tennyson was prepared for the
office of prophet. It has become common, as Mr.
Palgrave remarks in his reminiscences, to treat of
a poet as though he were ‘evolved by a natural
law’; and he gives an amusing instance in Taine’s
_à priori_ speculations as to the evolution of
Tennyson. Tennyson, as Taine suggested in a
conversation, must have been brought up in
luxury, and ‘surrounded with things of costly
beauty.’ Mr. Palgrave was able to upset this
theory, so far as concerned Tennyson’s personal
history. There is, of course, one absolute limit
to any such speculation. No human being can
presume to guess what are the conditions which
determine the innate qualities of a man of genius.
No one can say why such a plant, or a whole
family of such plants, should have suddenly sprung
up in a Lincolnshire vicarage, or why, a few years
after, a similar phenomenon should have presented
itself at Haworth. One can only ask how far the
genius was influenced by its ‘environment’? In
both cases it might seem at first sight to be most
unfavourable. The Brontës had an even less
congenial atmosphere in Yorkshire than the
Tennysons among the rough farmers of Lincolnshire.
And yet in both cases there is this much
similarity in the result, that, as the Brontës
became even fanatical admirers of the cross-
grained, hard-fisted Yorkshireman, Tennyson acquired
at least a keen imaginative sympathy with
the race of ‘Northern farmers.’ It would be as
easy as absurd to deduce from these instances a
general theory about the advantage of a bracing
atmosphere for sensitive plants. In the case of
Tennyson it must be admitted that the scantiness
of details in the earlier parts of the memoir is
rather tantalising. When Tennyson had become
famous, materials of course became abundant, and
Lord Tennyson tells us that he has had to make
selections from forty thousand letters. For the
early years, in which the mind and character were
being formed, he had had little beyond a few recollections
of his parents’ talk. One would gladly
know more of the crusty old grandfather who disinherited
his eldest son; and of the stalwart son
himself, six feet two in height, famous for social
geniality and yet given to fits of despondency, and
capable of being something of a tyrant in his
family. His soul, we are told, was ‘daily racked
by bitter fancies, and tossed about by stormy
troubles.’ He had strange adventures in Russia
and on the Continent. From the age of eleven the
son had this father for his sole instructor, and
must have profited, and also, one guesses, have
suffered from the ‘dominating force’ of the
paternal intellect. Then there is only a glimpse
of the charming aunt, who would ‘weep for hours’
over the infinite goodness of God. He had
damned most of her friends, and ‘picked out for
eternal salvation,’ her who was ‘no better than her
neighbours.’ One would like again to know more
even of the cook, who declared that if you
‘raäked out hell with a smaäll tooth coämb’ you
wouldn’t find the likes of her master and mistress.
Was this characteristic of the cook or of her
employers? It might conceivably be interpreted
as confirming a later statement that Tennyson’s
mother, being an angel, was undiscoverable in the
lower regions, and she appears to have been in
fact a most charming old lady, with a strong sense
of humour. There are hints enough here for a
hypothetical biography, with any number of
remarks about ‘heredity’ and ‘environment.’ All
that can be safely said is that Tennyson was obviously
a born poet, writing verses of unmistakable
promise at the age of fourteen and fifteen; even getting,
at the age of seventeen, £20 from a singularly
discriminative country bookseller for the volume
(written with his brother); and accumulating at
least the materials for other poems, including the
‘Ode to Memory,’ which, we are told, he considered
to be one of the best among his ‘very early and
peculiarly concentrated Nature poems.’ Personally,
I have always been grateful to it for one of
those life-giving touches which went far to reveal
or justify for me the charm of fen scenery. Whatever
the influences, Tennyson came up to Cambridge
as a poet, and even, it seems, as a man
already set aside for poetry. At Cambridge, at
any rate, he was contented to stand aside from the
ordinary competitions. Like other men of poetical
genius, he felt little respect for the regular studies
of the place; and melodiously complained that
the authorities ‘taught us nothing, feeding not the
heart.’ The heart, indeed, cannot be fed upon
Newton’s _Principia._ There might, I think, be
some reply to the charge of ‘lethargy’ made
against the University of that time: the place was
really waking up under the influence (among
others) of Julius Hare and Thirlwall and Whewell;
but, undoubtedly, the influence of his own contemporaries
was the really important matter for
Tennyson. There may be, in many ways, better
official teaching now; but the existing generation
must be congratulated if it includes any large admixture
of young men so keenly interested in
intellectual pursuits as were Tennyson’s special
circle. The Union had just ceased to be thrilled
by the eloquence of Charles Austin and Macaulay
and Praed, and their rivals who supplied recruits
to the ‘philosophical Radicals,’ and sought glory
in the Reform Bill agitation. Charles Buller, the
most beloved by his friends the Radicals, left
college soon after Tennyson came up; Maurice,
who had already founded the ‘apostles,’ with
Sterling, the most attractive of men, represented
the other school of Liberalism, which regarded Coleridge
as its oracle. Among Tennyson’s intimates
and warm friends in later life were such men as
Spedding, and Monckton Milnes, and Trench, and
many others keenly interested, at least, in the
literature of to-day. Edward FitzGerald, though
a contemporary, was not as yet known to Tennyson;
but Lord Houghton seems to have been fully
justified in saying that the Cambridge of those
days could boast a body of young men such as had
been rarely surpassed in promise. Chief among
them, in Tennyson’s opinion, and in that of many
good judges, was Arthur Hallam. Whatever
might be the dreariness of the lecture-room, a
young man of genius could have no reason to
complain that his lot was cast in barren places.
Tennyson in later years always looked back with
affection to those ‘dawn-golden times’; and,
indeed, his memory inspired phrases too familiar
for more than a passing allusion. To students
of the might-have-been, it might be tempting to
ask what would have happened if Tennyson had
gone to Oxford and come under the influence of
Newman and Hurrell Froude. The Dean of
Westminster tells us how, when he first met
Tennyson among his intimates, in 1841-2, he
was startled by their indifference to the Tractarian
Controversy, and to the questions which
interested the disciples of Arnold. Would an
Oxford-bred Tennyson have written another
_Christian Year,_ or achieved that poem which
Clough never succeeded in writing?

  Anyhow, the retrospective view of Tennyson’s
college life might suggest some melancholy reflections.
Death cut short some promising careers;
some, though they did good work, failed to make
a public mark: they have left an impression upon
their personal friends, but an impression of which
even the tradition will expire in the next generation;
and others, perhaps for want of some quality
of mind or character, eventually dropped behind
the real leaders of the time, and compounded with
the commonplace world. Why did not Tennyson
fall to the rear? Such a catastrophe must at one
time have seemed not improbable to an outside
observer. His friends, indeed, seem to have fully
recognised his abilities. He was, briefly, one of
the ‘mighty of the earth,’ said Blakesley. ‘He
was,’ says Fanny Kemble, whose brother John was
a college friend, ‘the great hero of the day.’ His
tall, powerful figure, his ‘Shakespearian’ head,
finely poised, ‘crowned with dark, wavy hair,’
made him look the character of the ‘coming poet’
as well as could be desired by a painter. The
striking point about him, then as afterwards, was
the ‘union of strength with refinement.’ And yet
one imagines that the college dons, the ‘lion-
like’ Whewell, for example, also conspicuous for
physical as well as intellectual prowess, must have
shaken their heads when Tennyson not only declined
to enter the Senate House competitions, but
apparently decided to become a mere looker-on at
life, and passed years in a quiet Bohemian company;
smoking pipes at intervals with Carlyle and joining
friends at the Cock; but mainly vegetating in
the country with no very obvious prospects, and
apparently surrendering his mind a little too unreservedly
to a ‘wise passiveness,’ though he might
be slowly secreting a few exquisite poems.

  That, no doubt, represents one aspect of Tennyson.
Mr. Lecky remarks that ‘nature evidently
intended him for the life of the quietest and most
secluded of country gentlemen, for a life spent
among books and flowers and a few intimate
friends,’ sheltered from all outside shocks. And
at the period to which the recollection refers (late
in the ’sixties) this was an obvious, though, as Mr.
Lecky of course recognises, very far indeed from
an exhaustive, judgment. The house at Farringford,
the Mecca of many future generations of
Tennysonians, looks as if it had been secreted, like
the shell of a mollusc, by the nature of the occupant.
The sweet English scenery, which no one
ever painted so well, and the sea, which he loved
like a true Englishman, show themselves through
the belt of wood, calculated to keep the profane
vulgar at a distance. It seemed a providential
_habitat_ for a man so very open to even petty
irritations. ‘A flea will annoy me,’ as he said to
Tyndall; ‘a fleabite will spread a square inch over
the surface of my skin. . . . I _am_ thin-skinned,
and I take no pains to hide it.’ And, indeed,
though the fact is fully admitted, it is perhaps less
conspicuous in these volumes than it was to casual
observers. They were apt to carry away the impression
that Tennyson must spend an unreasonably
large part of his time in fretting over the wounds
made by trumpery critics. The absolute simplicity
of the man, indeed, which was equally obvious,
suggested pity instead of contempt for what must
be regarded as an infirmity. No poet since Pope
was so sensitive to the assaults of Grub Street;
though happily he was altogether incapable of condescending
to Pope’s miserable methods of retort.
It is, however, easy to understand the view which
commended itself to Taine. His theory was that
Tennyson was a kind of refined epicurean; a man
lapping himself in British comfort against all disagreeable
sights and painful truths; averting his
eyes as much as possible from harsh contrasts and
harrowing doubts; and enveloped in a panoply
made from the soothing creeds of political and
religious opportunists, with only just enough of
the light of reason filtered through a screen of
tradition to pass for being at once liberal and
respectable. Though Taine had to give up his
theory as to Tennyson’s personal environment, he
still draws a picture of English country life as seen
from the railway—its well-ordered parks and neat
country houses embowered in well-ordered gardens
—and contrasts it with the stimulating, though
rough realities of Parisian life, among which his
favourite De Musset penetrated the true secret of
life. Taine naturally prefers De Musset, and his
criticism, though it is obviously from a partial outsider,
hits off one view which cannot be overlooked.
Matthew Arnold, as I have observed elsewhere,
introduces the ‘great, broad-shouldered genial
Englishman’ of the ‘Princess’ as a type of British
‘Philistinism,’ and intimates his opinion that the
creator is too much in sympathy with the type.

  It is equally true that no lover of Tennyson’s
poetry could admit Taine’s scornful account of
the _In Memoriam_ as the mourning of a correct
gentleman, wiping away his tears with a cambric
pocket-handkerchief. I can subscribe, on the
contrary, without hesitation, to the commonplace
British opinion that no poet has ever shown such
depths of tenderness or such skill in interweaving
the most delicate painting of nature with the
utterance of profound emotion. And this brings
us back to the biographical problem. Over twenty
years intervened between Tennyson’s departure
from Cambridge and the settlement in Farringford.
Here again, through no fault of Lord Tennyson,
we feel the want of a few more documents. No
doubt a reader may be content with what is expressed
or can be inferred from the poetry. Yet
the matter-of-fact personal history, if it could have
been told, would surely have had a deep interest.
In the first place, one would like to know, if a
purely prosaic person, something about the bare
pounds, shillings, and pence. Tennyson, as we
discover from a remark of Carlyle’s, inherited a
‘small annuity on his father’s decease’ (1831),
and chose to ‘club with his mother and sisters,’
and so to ‘live unpromoted and write poems.’ This
may be all very well for a bachelor; and we are glad
to discover that from 1850 his copyrights were producing
five hundred pounds a year, which, considering
the small bulk of his publications, shows that
he was doing remarkably well for a poet. In 1845,
however, he had still been in need of a pension;
and the smallness of his income was of serious
importance. He had met his future wife in 1836;
he had become engaged to her apparently in 1837,
and felt the need of making a livelihood. It was
from the vagueness of his expectations in that
direction that the correspondence between him and
Miss Sellwood was forbidden in 1840, and they
apparently did not meet again for ten years.
Meanwhile all his independent property was lost
about 1844, together with part of his brothers’
and sisters’, in an unfortunate speculation, and
distress caused ‘real hardship,’ and even an attack
of illness. He must, therefore, have gone through
a period of trial, affecting not only his pocket, but
his hopes of domestic happiness, of which one
would have liked to know a little more. That he
took his troubles bravely, whatever they may have
been, is proved by his literary history. Whatever
else he did, he never condescended to lower his
aims or the perfection of his workmanship. He
allowed his poetry to ripen in his mind, as though
he had been in possession of Taine’s hypothetical
luxuries; and, it would seem, he kept his feelings,
whatever they may have been, to himself. His
extreme sensibility led him to seek for the utmost
possible perfection; not to court immediate
popularity. The years of comparative non-
recognition must have been trying, and the relative
slightness of the personal record of these twenty
years is the more regrettable. Fuller materials,
had they been accessible, must have brought out
more distinctly the real strength which lay beneath
the morbidly sensitive outside. His ‘sensitiveness,’
as Mr. Lecky observes, ‘seemed to me,’ as it did
to others, curiously out of harmony with ‘his
large, powerful frame.’ Whether there is any
real incompatibility between athletic vigour and
delicacy of nervous organisation is a problem
which I must leave to physiologists. Another
instance of the same combination may be found,
for example, in Hawthorne; and, I dare say, in
plenty of other instances. Generally speaking, we
are inclined, with whatever reason, to anticipate
from an athletic giant more of the rollicking
vigour of a Christopher North than of the exquisite
workmanship which makes ‘jewels five
words long’—the power, as Johnson put it, of
hewing a colossus from a rock, not of carving
figures on cherry-stones. Tennyson, no doubt,
though this side of his character is a little in
the background, could have taken his part in one
of the jovial ‘Noctes,’ if he had been sure that no
reporters were present. But the massive physical
framework seems to be indicated by a certain
slowness which might pass into indolence. Your
giant may be sensitive, but he carries too much
ballast to be easily stirred to utterance. He is
contemplative or dreamy rather than impetuous
and excitable. If Shelley had put on more flesh,
he might have been equally poetical, but he would
not have indulged in the boyish explosions which
imply an excessive mobility of the nervous system.
Byron’s extraordinary alternations between corpulence
and thinness induced by starvation appear
to be clearly connected both with his power and
his weakness, and might be considered at length
in the essay which ought to be written upon the
relation between fat and poetry. But I must
not be led into such a digression here. One sees
in Tennyson’s portraits the deep, dreamy eyes
under, the noble brow, and recognises the man
predestined to be a thoughtful spectator of the
battle of life, rather than an active participator in
the superficial contrasts.

  And here, of course, we have the obvious
remarks about the spirit of his generation. Young
men were ceasing to feel the revolutionary inspiration,
though they were still accessible to the
utterances of the departing period. When Byron
died in 1824, Carlyle exclaimed that the news
came upon his heart ‘like a mass of lead’; he
felt a ‘painful twinge,’ as if he had lost a brother.
Tennyson, then only fourteen, felt the same news
to be an ‘awful calamity,’ and rushed out-of-doors
to write upon the sandstone, ‘Byron is dead.’ But
Byronism soon followed Byron. Shelley was unknown
to Tennyson, till his college days at least,
and the successor, though, of course, admiring his
predecessor’s marvellous powers, admitted that
Shelley was ‘after too much in the clouds’ for
him. Keats, on the other hand, he declared,
‘would have been among the very greatest of us
if he had lived. There is something of the inner-
most soul of the poet in everything he ever
wrote.’ ‘Wordsworth’s very best,’ he said, ‘is
the best in its way that has been sent out by the
moderns,’ and one is glad to hear that he was
once able to express to Wordsworth himself his
deep sense of the ‘obligation which all Englishmen
owed to him.’ From various scattered remarks it
is clear that Tennyson, like other poets, could be
an admirable critic of his brethren; but these
sayings are interesting as indicating his own
tendencies in early days. How much he actually
owed to Keats and Wordsworth must be uncertain.
Probably he would have been much the same had
he never read a line of either. But one may say
that he wished to utter teaching congenial to
Wordsworth’s in language as perfect as that of
Keats’s most finished workmanship. The famous
hypothetical addition to Wordsworth’s poems,

<verse>
A Mister Wilkinson, a Clergyman,
</>

the authorship of which was claimed both by
Tennyson and FitzGerald, indicates the weakness
which was naturally avoided by one who could
equally appreciate Keats. Like Keats’s, at any
rate, Tennyson’s poetry shows the dying-out of the
old fervour which had stimulated Wordsworth’s first
efforts, made Coleridge and Southey ‘pantisocratists,’
and inspired Byron and Shelley during the
days of the Holy Alliance. The movements of
1830, both in Europe and England, roused some
of Tennyson’s circle, such as Sterling and Kemble;
but, as far as one can infer from the indications,
both Tennyson and Arthur Hallam looked at
least doubtfully upon the Reform agitation in
England. The Tennysons, indeed, set the bells
ringing to the horror of the parson at Somersby
when the Bill was passed; but Hallam thought
that William =iv.,= when he met the ‘first assembly
of delegates from a sovereign people’ (that is, the
first Reformed Parliament), would perhaps be the
last King of England; and even Tennyson, a
little later, hopes against hope that there are still
true hearts in old England ‘that will never brook
the sight of Baal in the Sanctuary, and St. Simon’
(the leader of the famous sect) ‘in the Church of
Christ.’ The St. Simonians show what an ‘immense
mass of evil’ is in existence, and are ‘a
focus which gathers all its rays.’ The Reform
Bill was not to be a descent of Niagara, but a
passage over the rapids into a superficially quiet
reach. A judicious friend gives another view.
Sterling, he says, had been misled, like Shelley, by
the desire to abolish unjust institutions, but had
afterwards perceived that the right method was to
‘implant a principle with which selfishness cannot
coexist.’ Reformers would complain that they
must wait for a long time if they have first to
extirpate selfishness. With this we may associate
a criticism of Spedding upon the early poems,
which showed, he thought, over indulgence ‘in
the luxuries of the senses, a profusion of splendours,
harmonies, perfumes, gorgeous apparels,
luscious meats and drinks,’ and so forth, which
rather ‘pall upon the sense,’ and make the
outward obscure the inner world. The remark
falls in with Taine’s criticism. Such a Tennyson
might be too easily reconciled to the creature-
comforts of the upper classes in England and
become a mere dreaming Sybarite. His own view
of the situation is apparently given in the ‘Palace
of Art.’ It was a comment, as we are told,
upon a remark made to him at college by Trench:
‘Tennyson, we cannot live in art.’ The poem
itself is so marvellous a collection of those felicities
of description in which Tennyson is unapproachable,
that perhaps it rather raises the question why
the architect of the palace should not have stayed
there quietly and worshipped ‘art for art’ for the
rest of his days. The conversion comes rather
abruptly, but, at least, shows how much Tennyson’s
mind was occupied with the problem of how the
artist is to be also the moralist. I certainly do
not quarrel with his solution, which in some sense
worked itself out in _In Memoriam._ The moral
crisis through which he passed is indicated by the
‘Two Voices’ or ‘Thoughts of a Suicide’ (that is,
of somebody who decided not to commit suicide),
written contemporaneously with the first poems of
_In Memoriam,_ under a ‘cloud of overwhelming
sorrow.’ All joy, he said, was ‘blotted out’ of
his life and he ‘longed for death.’ He continued,
however, to write, and his writing does not suggest
unbroken gloom. He was finally, it would seem,
restored to full mental health by the love which
was to be the blessing of later years. If we may
not call it morbid, it is at least abnormal that the
loss of a college friend should cause not only
immoderate agony, but such prolonged depression.
Arthur Hallam may have deserved all that was
said of him, though for us he can only be, like
Sterling, a symbol of the virtue of friendship, a
type canonised by genius, but, like some other
saints, a little wanting in individuality. We cannot
define the merits which prompted eulogies in
some ways unparalleled in our literature. Lycidas,
as Tennyson and others have said, is a test of
poetical sensibility. I deny parenthetically that
there can be any universal test in such matters,
but the meaning is no doubt that it is a test of the
appreciation of such poetical merits as are independent
of the pathos of the theme. It is a test,
that is, precisely because the beauty of the poetry
does not imply any very keen sensibility about the
person ostensibly commemorated. Milton could
be noble and melodious, though one does not
suppose that he lost his appetite for breakfast for
a single day after hearing of King’s death. The
sincerity of Tennyson’s grief, on the contrary, is
implied in every section. He was, we are told,
profoundly impressed by Shakespeare’s sonnets
when he was writing _In Memoriam_, and we can
understand why at the time he then thought them
even greater than the plays. The intense passion
of some of the sonnets (‘no longer mourn for me
when I am dead,’ for example) equals or surpasses in
its way anything in _In Memoriam._ But, whatever
the solution of their mystery, they do not convince
me that Shakespeare was at any time disqualified by
his emotions from attending to the interests of the
Globe Theatre. As an embodiment of the purest
passion of friendship, the _In Memoriam_ is, I take
it, unapproachable; and, in spite of any reservations
upon other points, that must be, to some
minds, the great source of Tennyson’s power over
his readers. Mr. Palgrave ends his reminiscences
of Tennyson by saying that forty-three years of
friendship made him recognise ‘lovableness’ as
the ‘dominant note’ of his friend’s character.
That, I think, is also the impression, and certainly
there cannot be a better one, which is made by the
whole of this biography. Tennyson had his weaknesses,
which can be divined where filial reverence
properly refrains from an articulate statement or a
distinct insistence upon them. Nor, as I shall
say directly, can I admit without reservations some
other claims to our allegiance. But the unsurpassed
sweetness and tenderness of character is
evident in every chapter. It is impossible to read
the book without learning to love the man better.
It is needless to speak of the beauty of the
domestic life; needless, at any rate, to express
more than the sense of satisfaction that, for once,
a poet, of abnormally sensitive character even for
a poet, was surrounded by an atmosphere of
unbroken harmony for so many years. If he
lost Hallam, he always preserved the friendship of
Carlyle (tempered by an occasional growl); of
the inimitable FitzGerald, never less delightful
because he could never affect insincere admiration;
of the wise and placid Spedding, the ‘Pope,’ as
Tennyson called him, of the young men at Trinity;
of Maurice, revered by all who knew him for
saintliness of character if not for lucidity of intellect;
of the cordial and generous Kingsley, and of Mr.
Aubrey de Vere, and others who still live and
cherish his memory. If he was over-sensitive to
‘fleabites’ of petty criticism, the irritation never
embittered him; no ungenerous and ‘nasty’
remark about his contemporaries seems to mar
the impression of real dignity of character. He
thought a good deal about himself: most people
do; but any little vanity he shows is perfectly innocent
and consistent with substantial simplicity and
modesty. His foibles added a certain piquancy to
the sentiment of his friends: it is pleasant to feel
that you are petting a tender and childlike nature
as well as simply sitting at a great man’s feet.
Undoubtedly a man might be equally lovable and
yet unable to write a line which would not have
set Tennyson’s teeth on edge. But even Tennyson’s
astonishing sensibility to the ‘ music of
words,’ and his power of compressing into a
stanza the quintessence of sentiments or perceptions
which other men might dilute into volumes,
would have been thrown away without this singular
sweetness of character. When I read ‘Tears, Idle
Tears,’ I feel that a man might be forgiven even
by a stern moralist for devoting a lifetime to
stringing together a few melodious phrases as a
perpetual utterance of our better moods. Gray
did something of the kind; but Tennyson, though
not a voluminous poet, has probably left an unsurpassed
number of phrases which will live in the
memory both of gentle and simple—the most
punctilious ‘æsthete’ and the reader whose
ignorance, better than knowledge, allows him to
be charmed without knowing or asking why.

  If these volumes contain what we had all more
or less divined, they call attention to a claim
which may provoke more discussion. Jowett, as
we see, regarded Tennyson as a teacher of philosophy.
Maurice dedicated his most characteristic
volume to Tennyson as to one who has been a
great spiritual teacher; and Dr. Martineau, giving
an account of the meeting at the ‘Metaphysical
Society,’ speaks of Maurice’s fellowship of thought
with ‘the truest _vates_ of his age.’ It becomes an
outsider to treat these and other weighty testimonies
with all respect. And yet the insistence
upon this aspect of Tennyson’s work strikes one
perhaps as a little excessive. There is, of course,
no question as to the depth of Tennyson’s interest
in theological questions. The frequent recurrence
of this claim, however, tends, I think, to give an
impression that the famous line ought to have
been ‘A Mr. Tennyson, a clergyman,’ and to put
a little too much out of sight the fact that he was
not always in the pulpit. He could yield himself,
it is obvious, to perfectly unsophisticated enjoyment
of sensuous impressions; he could talk very effectively
and very humorously as a simple man of
letters, or even, if we may say so without offence,
as a man of this world capable of hearty contempt
for clerical as well as other cants and hypocrisies. I
have more than once had a similar surprise in reading
biographies of men whom I have seen in the
flesh; and the explanation is not far to seek.
Fuller tells us somewhere of the bishop who used
to go down to the cellar with his old friend and
chaplain, where they could throw their canonicals
aside, pledge each other in a good glass of wine,
and refresh their souls in a jolly conversation. No
doubt they showed on such occasions a side which
did not get into official biographies. Tennyson
certainly could doff his ‘canonicals’; but, however
this may be, it suggests another point which
demands some delicacy of handling. Professor
Sidgwick thinks that _In Memoriam_ expresses with
admirable clearness a true philosophical judgment
of certain tendencies of modern speculation. I
cannot discuss that problem on which Professor
Sidgwick speaks with authority as well as sympathy.
In any case the poetical merit of a work
does not depend upon its philosophical orthodoxy.
The orthodox, whoever they may be, can be
terribly vapid and the heretics much more inspiring.
A man would be a very narrow-minded
critic who was unable to admire any of the great
men from Lucretius to Dante who have embodied
the most radically opposite conceptions of
the world. But we must draw a line, as Tennyson
is reported to have said, between such poets as
Keats, Byron, and Shelley, and the ‘great sage
poets,’ at once thinkers and artists, such as
Æschylus, Shakespeare, ‘Dante, and Goethe.’
Can we think of Tennyson himself as belonging
to the highest class? Did he not only accept the
right view, whatever that may be, but express it
forcibly and majestically as one of the small class
which represents poetry thoroughly transfused
with philosophy? I at least cannot see my way
to such a conclusion; and the mere comparison
seems to me to suggest the real limitations to
Tennyson’s art. I will only notice what is
suggested by many passages in these volumes.
Carlyle, we are told, was first attracted to Tennyson
by the ‘Ulysses.’ He quotes in his first
letter to Tennyson the noble passage:—

<verse>
It may be that the gulf will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the happy isles
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.
</>

‘These lines,’ he says, ‘do not make me weep,
but there is in me what would fill whole lachrymatories
as I read.’<*> Afterwards Carlyle appears

<footnote>
  I remember to have heard Carlyle in his old age speak with
equal enthusiasm of this poem.
</>

to have suggested that Tennyson was wasting
his time by scribbling verses. Carlyle, late in life,
would occasionally quote the ‘Ulysses’ by way
of contrast with Tennyson’s later performances.
The old poem, he thought, had the true heroic
ring; and Tennyson himself, it may be remarked,
says that it was written soon after Hallam’s death,
and gave his feelings about fighting the battle of
life perhaps more simply than anything in _In
Memoriam._ Carlyle’s criticism came to this, that
Tennyson had declined into a comparatively
sentimental and effeminate line of writing, mere
‘æstheticisms’ instead of inspiring a courageous
spirit of confronting the spiritual crisis. The
_Idylls of the King_ could not be the epic of the
future, but at best a melodious version of conventional
and superficial solutions of the last problem.
King Arthur had (in Carlylese) too much of the
‘gigman’ to be a great leader of modern men.
The average critic, as we are frequently reminded
in these volumes, complained that Tennyson was
‘morbid.’ _Maud,_ in particular, gave that offence
in spite of irresistible beauties. Tennyson himself
argued that the critics confounded the author
with his creature. The hero of _Maud_ was only
a dramatic personage; he was a ‘morbid poetic
soul,’ and the poem was to be taken as ‘a little
_Hamlet._’ The original _Hamlet_ would itself be now
criticised, he thought, as ‘morbid.’ Mr. Gladstone,
who first took the poem to represent the
worship of Jingo, recanted on further consideration,
and discovered that Tennyson had only approved
of ‘lawful war’—which makes a great difference.
_Maud,_ I must say in passing, fell in, at any rate,
too easily with the curious delusion of the time
(embodied also in Kingsley’s _Two Years Ago_) that
the Crimean War implied the moral regeneration
of the country. Necessary or absurd, I don’t think
that the war can now be credited with that effect.
_Maud,_ I fancy, will be remembered for the surpassing
beauty of the love lyrics, and not from any
lively interest in a hero who is not only morbid,
but silly. Hamlet may have been morbid—an
interview with one’s father’s ghost is rather upsetting
—but at least he was not contemptible.
However, we will not for a moment identify the
gentleman in _Maud_ with Tennyson. Another
poem, ‘Despair,’ provoked, we are told, bitter criticism,
‘because the public did not recognise it as a
dramatic monologue.’ It is, I think—as I believe
the most ardent Tennysonians admit—a distinctly
inferior specimen of his art; but it expresses
something not purely dramatic. Tennyson himself
remarked that he would commit suicide if he
thought there was no ‘future life’; and his hero
acts upon that principle. He is equally shocked
by the ‘horrible know-nothing books,’ and by a
view of hell such as commended itself to Tennyson’s
aunt; and the suggestion is natural that the reasonable
course for a man equally horrified by both
opinions is to put an end to himself. It would
not be fair to lay any stress upon an admitted
shortcoming, and the ‘dramatic monologue’ argument
may be taken for what it is worth. But this,
too, is, I think, clear. When Tennyson is presented
to us as giving the true solution of the
doubts which beset our time, we should have some
positive as well as negative testimony to his merits.
We cannot, it is true, expect a full solution. A
gentleman is reported to have asked him whether
the existence of evil was not the great difficulty.
Tennyson certainly could not be expected to throw
much light upon Job’s difficulties, and seems to
have judiciously diverted the conversation by
referring to the ‘charge of the heavy brigade.’
No poet, and indeed no philosopher, can be asked
to solve the eternal problems off-hand. What we
do see, is that Tennyson, like many noble and
deep thinkers, was terribly perplexed by the alternatives
apparently offered: by his aversion on
one side to certain orthodox dogmas, and by his
dread and hatred of some tendencies which claim
at least to be scientific. His ideal hero was the
man who faced doubts boldly and attained clear
convictions of one kind or other. On the other
hand, he is always haunted by the fear of depriving
your sister of her ‘happy views’ (a woefully
feeble phrase, by the way, for Tennyson), and
praises a philosopher for keeping his doubts to
himself. The resulting attitude of mind may not
be morbid: certainly it may fairly be called
pathetic, and even those who do not sympathise
with his doctrine will do well to feel for his
distress. It may teach them, at least, what is in
any case worth knowing: why their teaching is so
repulsive to many tender and delicate minds. But
I confess to share Carlyle’s regret for the loss of the
old heroic tone of the ‘Ulysses.’ Noble poetry,
let us admit, may express either faith or scepticism:
a conviction that we know or that we can never
know; it may be openly pessimistic, or expressive
of an enthusiastic faith in the future; but Tennyson,
even in the _In Memoriam,_ always seems to me
to be like a man clinging to a spar left floating
after a shipwreck, knowing that it will not support
him, and yet never able to make up his mind to
strike out and take his chance of sinking or
swimming. That may be infinitely affecting, but
it is not the attitude of the poet who can give
a war-cry to his followers, or of the philosopher
who really dares to ‘face the spectres of the mind.’
He can lay them for the moment; but they are
always in the background, and suggest, too often,
rather a querulous protest against an ever-recurring
annoyance than any such mental victory as issues
in a coherent and settled conviction on either side.
I merely wish to indicate an impression, and will
not attempt to indicate the similar attitude in
regard to the great social and political movements.
I cannot, though my inability may be owing to
my own spiritual blindness, place him among the
‘great sage poets,’ but I have wished to intimate
that such as I am are not therefore disqualified
from appreciating his poetry in another capacity:
as a document indicating the effect of modern
movements of thought upon a mind of extraordinary
delicacy and a nature of admirable sweetness;
but, far more, as a perfect utterance of
emotions which are all equally beautiful in themselves
whatever the ‘philosophy’ with which they
are associated. The life, I believe, will help to
strengthen that impression, though I have only
attempted to notice some of the more obvious
remarks which it may suggest.

<chapter>

	PASCAL<*>

<footnote>
  Lecture before the West London Ethical Society, May 2, 1897.
</>

Pascal is one of the great men whose minds have
been fascinated by the eternal riddle of existence,
and have carried to a logical conclusion one typical
mode of meeting if not of answering it; and who
have also had the gift of coining thought into
language so terse and vivid as to be part of the
intellectual currency of all future generations. Yet
the thought even of such men had to be expressed
in the dialect and applied to the particular circumstances
of their time. It may be worth while,
therefore, to consider in what way Pascal’s view
was coloured by the conditions of the day, and
what are its true relations to the development of
thought. I make no claim to the special knowledge
which would be necessary for a full treatment
of the subject treatise, and am content to refer,
once for all, to Sainte-Beuve’s admirable _Port-Royal,_
in which the great critic has shown Pascal as a
living man among his surroundings, and pointed
out with incomparable skill his relation not only to
the religious and philosophical, but to the social,
political, and literary movements of a profoundly
interesting period. I shall only aim at setting out
one or two cardinal points.

  First of all, Pascal came at a great period: at
the time when philosophic systems were being
stirred by the influences named after Descartes and
Bacon; when the greatest minds were breaking
off the fetters of effete scholasticism; and when it
was possible for men of the highest order to take
a Pisgah sight of the promised land of knowledge
without being distracted and bewildered, like their
successors, in the complexity of actual explorations
of the region. In one respect Pascal was especially
qualified to take part in the new movement. The
philosophy of Descartes was essentially a philosophy
for mathematicians, for mathematics, at that time,
represented the decisive example of intellectual
progress. Metaphysics, it seems, might at last
become progressive if, instead of wearily rambling
round the old dialectical circle, it could adopt
similar methods. Descartes laid down the principle.
Spinoza’s _Ethics,_ appropriating the forms of geometrical
demonstration, and presenting the whole
universe as an incarnate Euclid, shows the rational
consummation of the experiment. Now, Pascal
was obviously a heaven-born mathematician. By
the age of twelve, we are told, he had thought out
for himself the elementary propositions of Euclid;
by nineteen he had invented and constructed a
calculating machine, and obtained results which
were important steps towards the differential calculus
developed by Newton and Leibnitz. In his
last years, when attacked by a bad toothache, he
returned to the studies which had long been thrown
aside, and in a few sleepless nights discovered
certain geometrical theorems. His results were
published, and the mathematicians of Europe challenged
to find out the proof. After three months’
labour, Wallis, the ablest English mathematician
of the day, produced a proof—not, it was said,
satisfactory. Patriotism induces me to add that
Wallis had no toothache to stimulate him. At an
early age, however, Pascal’s health had broken
down; from his eighteenth year until his death he
never had a day free from pain. His first conversion,
at the age of twenty-three, induced him to
throw aside scientific activity as a worldly vanity.
He became closely associated with the remarkable
Port-Royal community, and appeared as their
champion in the _Provincial Letters_ in 1656. The
_Provincial Letters_ marked an epoch in theological
disputes and in literature. His friends, when put
on their defence, had entangled themselves in
hopelessly intricate controversies, devoid apparently
of all human interest. Pascal put the point so
clearly and with such dexterous irony, that not
only the religious world but the world of laughers
and of sensible men—rightly powerful in France—
came to his side. When he had finished, the great
Society of Jesus was stamped with an opprobrium
from which it has never been able to free itself,
and Pascal had created, once for all, so the highest
authorities assure us, a model of admirable French
prose. He showed for the first time what we all
now know, the unrivalled fitness of his language
for clear, logical, convincing statement; and in
his hands the perfect form was the more impressive
because it everywhere indicates, and is yet never
perturbed by, profound conviction and a deep
glow of moral indignation. From controversy
with the Jesuits he turned to controversy with the
Rationalists. The _Pensées,_ as we have them now,
are but a fragment of an intended vindication of
Christianity. As we had them till lately, they
were a fragment distorted by the labours of pious
editors. After a year’s labour, Pascal had sunk,
into such feebleness that for the last four years of
his life he could only jot down disconnected
thoughts. And yet the book, pieced together by
well-intentioned friends, made an impression which
has hardly grown weaker with time. That a man,
dying before forty, immersed in ascetic practices,
and having to struggle against constant infirmity,
should have produced so great an effect in philosophy,
in science, and in literature, is astonishing;
and I think that, even among the great men of a
great time, there is no one who excites more the
sense of pure wonder at sheer intellectual power.

  What was the result of his thought? Eminent
critics have puzzled themselves as to whether
Pascal was a sceptic or a genuine believer;
having, I suppose, convinced themselves, by some
process not obvious to me, that there is an incompatibility
between the two characters. We shall
perhaps see the relation more clearly hereafter.
I can subscribe, at any rate, with one remark
made by Sainte-Beuve.<*> ‘You may not cease to

<footnote>
  _Causeries du Lundi,_ vol. v.
</>

be a sceptic,’ he says, ‘after reading Pascal; but
you must cease to treat believers with contempt’
—possibly because you will find how near they
come to being sceptics. At any rate, it is well
to unlearn contempt for anybody; and, if only
for that reason, it may be worth while to consider
Pascal’s position a little more closely. We shall
do so best, I think, by considering the central
theory which connects the _Letters_ and the
_Thoughts,_ and gives the real starting-point of
his speculation.

  The _Letters to a Provincial_ open by an exposition
of certain disputes about grace, which call
up faint memories of the endless and intricate
controversies of the time. The technical terms,
justification, sanctification, election, grace, predestination,
and the like, still occur in respectable
text-books of theology, like fossils which show
what strange monsters once cumbered the earth.
Yet the discussions were the temporary embodiment
of inquiries which still interest us profoundly
in a different dialect, and involve really
vital points of morality. The creed represented
by Jansenius has carried on an intermittent warfare
with its antagonist at the critical periods of
Christian theology. He had declared himself to
be simply reproducing the teaching of Augustine,
who had elaborated the teaching of St. Paul;
and, under the shelter of those infallible authorities,
Jansenius roundly declared that the whole
system accepted by Catholic divines of his day
was a perversion of the truth. The great
reformer Calvin had founded his edifice upon
the same base, and to make room for it had
demolished the authority of the Pope. Naturally
Jansenists were accused of sympathising with that
abominable heresiarch, and, strongly as they
denied the consequence, of being logically bound
to abandon either their doctrines or their loyalty
to the Roman Catholic Church. Augustine’s
authority, of course, might not be openly
assailed; how then did the doctrines of Calvin
and of Jansenius—professedly applications of
Augustine’s—differ from it and from each other
and from the accepted system? Such problems
presented a wide field for the subtlety of theologians,
and they were not slow to take advantage
of the opening and to pile up libraries of distinctions
and confutations and interpretations.
Beneath the technical phrases lay the real
question. What is virtue? Undoubtedly, according
to the theologian, it means conformity
to a divine law, and it implies the divine grace
which disposes the heart to conformity. But
which is the ultimate standing-point? Shall we
consider morality as a law imposed from without
and enforced by the sanctions of heaven and hell,
or as defining the state of the heart or the will,
which makes the ‘law’ the spontaneous expression
of conduct? ‘Law’ has in one case the
juridical sense, and refers to a compulsion exercised
upon the will; in the other, the scientific
sense, and refers to the intrinsic character of the
will itself. An emphasis upon one or other aspect
of the question leads to indefinitely varying shades
of opinion and a boundless exercise of metaphysical
subtlety. But one practical application meanwhile
shows its vital importance. If you can regard
morality simply as an ‘external’ law—comparable
to human law—and then, as a system of rules
enforced by spiritual penalties and administered
by priests, you leave the road open to all the
abuses which provoked the Reformation. The
Church holds the keys and can absolve sin. A
corrupt Church may use its power in the interests
of spiritual tyranny and pervert the morality of
which it becomes the official guardian. The
sinner escapes the consequences of his sins by
submitting to an external process: he is pardoned,
not because his heart is purified, but because he
has paid his fine to the representatives of God on
earth. The Reformers, therefore, insisted upon
the doctrine of justification by grace to cut up the
system of sacerdotal power at the roots. The
conversion of the heart, they said, was everything;
the external conformity nothing; and the
sacraments in general became mere commemorations
—useful so far as stimulating the imagination,
but not of themselves possessing any supernatural
charm.

  The Jansenists, accepting the same principle,
stopped short at the critical point. Though they
laid equal stress upon a change of heart, or ‘conversion,’
which has the same prominence with
them as with the Calvinists or our English
Methodists, they also held most strenuously that
the sacraments were divinely appointed means of
conversion. Thus they represented, as their
antagonists said, a semi-Protestantism, which had
illogically to combine a belief in the supernatural
character of the sacramental system and the priesthood
with an insistence upon the paramount
importance of the change of heart. This indicates
the line upon which Pascal came into
internecine struggle with the Jesuits. The
opening letters which touch upon certain problems
about sufficient and efficacious grace show
extraordinary skill, but are chiefly directed to
unmask the dexterous equivocation which enabled
one wing of his antagonists who really admitted
the Jansenists’ position to condemn it under cover
of an ambiguous term. These letters do not go
into the argument itself. But Pascal presently
advances to the moral problem. Then he comes
to close quarters: he denounces the Jesuits with
astonishing vigour as corrupters of morality at its
very source; as sanctioning lying, manslaughter,
and impurity; as teaching doctrines wholly opposed
to the law of Christ; and briefly as deserving
of all that the most bitter Protestants have
ever said of the Scarlet Lady. I have no pretensions
to judge of the justice of Pascal’s attacks,
though I cannot avoid a strong suspicion that he
hit some very weak points; but for my purpose
it is enough to assume his sincerity, which is
beyond a doubt, and, taking his statement of
facts for granted, to consider the logic of the
assault. What, then, was the system attacked?
The Jesuits, of course, were the most devoted
adherents of the Church, and in that capacity
the supporters of its system of government. The
Catholic is not only a believer in certain dogmas,
but a subject of a great ecclesiastical hierarchy.
He is governed throughout the whole sphere of
conduct by an elaborate code of law, the administration
of which is confided by the Church to the
confessor. The confessor must have some definite
rule to estimate the importance of sins and to
know the conditions of pardon. Such a law had
been elaborated by the casuists. They had put
together a code of spiritual legislation, coinciding
in some directions with the ordinary laws of the
State, but in others going into every conceivable
detail of conduct with which the merely human
legislator is incompetent to deal. It was, in
short, morality made into law. Here, then, we
have the utmost possible elaboration of that
view of morality against which the Jansenists
protested: the view which assimilates it to an
external or municipal law, differing from such
law only in the nature of the sanctions—in substituting
hell or purgatory for the gallows or the
prison—and the all-comprehensive nature of its
subject-matter. Not only every act which affects
others, but every act affecting the man himself,
and even his most secret thoughts or intentions,
may come within its purview.

  We must notice the way in which this system
presented itself to Pascal. The casuist, in the first
place, has to classify sins as the secular legislator
classifies crimes. This act, says the legislator, is
murder; that, only manslaughter. The law must
define, that it may not be arbitrary; it must define
by external or tangible facts because the judge
cannot look into the heart; and it must define
actions taken by themselves, and apart from the
life-history of each particular agent. Deliberate
killing under certain conditions is murder, whoever
commits the action and whatever his motive. It
follows that actions of the most varying moral
quality must be classed together. Murder, that is,
deliberate killing by any one not legally authorised,
may imply the deepest depravity or admit of
palliation to an indefinite degree. To assign the
moral guilt implied by the criminal act you would
have to take into account all the concrete circumstances
of the case—the man’s whole character,
position, training, and intellectual capacity; in
other words, to consider precisely the aspects
which the legislator is compelled to neglect. It
follows that the criminal law can only correspond
in a rough way, or on the average of cases, to the
moral law. But then the legislator does not
profess to identify his law with morals. When,
however, you profess, as the casuists professed,
that you are interpreting the moral law itself, and
declaring what is the morality of an action in the
sight of Omniscience; and when, at the same
time, you are forced to adopt the legislator’s
method—to classify acts apart from the agent, to
say this or that act is wrong whatever the concrete
circumstances or the motives which led to it; you
are at once both claiming to be a moralist and
omitting the characteristically moral aspect. You
are trying to define the intrinsic quality of conduct
by circumstances which are of necessity more or
less accidental. Here, as I think, is the fundamental
difficulty, though it is not presented exactly
in this way by Pascal.

  Pascal’s indignation was roused by results which
follow logically from this position. He specially
attacks the two great doctrines of the Jesuits—the
doctrine of ‘probability,’ and the doctrine of
‘intention.’ By their help morality may be
moulded and perverted to any extent. What,
then, are these doctrines? The analogy of law
gives the explanation. The English law, for
example, has been developed by familiar processes.
As new cases arise, they are decided by the judges,
who, while nominally applying the settled rules,
are in reality extending and modifying them.
Apart from direct legislation, the law is constantly
growing by such decisions, and each decision
becomes law by becoming a precedent. Now, in
the case of morality, new legislation was out of
the question. The law had been given once for
all in inspired writings. But the divine law
summed up the principle in a few maxims, and
what was necessary for the confessor was a system
of rules applicable to particular actions. ‘Do not
lie.’ But what precisely is lying? When is lying
a mortal or a venial sin? and are there any exceptions
when lying is right? The confessor must
have his rules, and they were given to him by the
casuist. The casuist composed the professional
text-book, and, so far as he gained authority, the
text-book eventually made the law, like the
decisions of the English judges. This is the
doctrine of ‘probability.’ When a writer of
gravity had said that this or that action was permissible,
his view became ‘probable,’ that is, it
made a precedent upon which you were entitled to
act. If a given action was permitted by any man
of authority, it could not be assumed to be a sin,
even though it had been condemned by others.
It would be hard, obviously, to punish a man for
doing something which had been declared to be
innocent by a judge of the high court. Such a
decision was at least law in the making, and, until
implicitly condemned by the Church, must be
regarded as establishing a presumption, and therefore
a right to act upon it. Hence morality
changed. The great Doctor Diana had by his
authority made opinions probable, and consequently
actions, sinful before, had now ceased to
be sins. Pascal found a happy illustration in the
case of one Jean d’Alba. He was a servant in a
Jesuit College, and confessed to the judges that he
had stolen some of the plate. He had, however,
looked into his masters’ books, and justified the
theft by an opinion of the excellent Pere Baumy.
A valet, that casuist had said, might steal some of
his master’s property if his wages were insufficient.
The opinion of Baumy was enough to establish a
probability: John held that his wages were insufficient,
and therefore could steal without sin.
The secular judges declined to accept the doctrine;
but Alba disappeared, and it is apparently implied
that his Jesuit masters had seen the force of his
appeal to their principles.

  The case shows how the law might be developed;
and another result shows how development might
amount to inversion. A great part is played in
English law by what are called legal fictions.
Lawyers have been able in many most important
cases to alter the law by ingenious devices for
applying to one case rules primarily and ostensibly
intended for others. The same system in casuistry
involved the doctrine of ‘intention,’ and its application
may be made clear by one very important
case. The Church had condemned usury absolutely.
It is wrong to take interest, because you
have only a right to the return of exactly what
you have lent. When it became clear that to
condemn usury was to condemn commerce, the
law had to be tacitly modified to conform to the
new conditions. The casuists achieved this result,
as Pascal tells us, by an ingenious device called
the _contrat Mohatra_—the main principle of which
is simple. I give £1000 to a man and agree to
receive £1100 a year hence. Have I not lent
money at ten per cent, and committed the sin of
usury? Not a bit of it! I simply bought goods
at a low price and paid the money. That, every
one agrees, is permissible. Soon afterwards,
indeed, I sold the same goods to the same man
at a much higher price, and allowed him to pay
me for them at a later date. These were two
separate transactions, and in each of them I was
perfectly justified. Therefore I was justified when
I combined the two. Considered from the legal
point of view, such devices may be a necessary
though clumsy and indirect mode of altering an
antiquated law. If the prohibition of usury be
superstitious, it may be well to circumvent it
by such circuitous means. But when the legal
method is applied to a moral law, when you at the
same time affirm the moral law to be divine and
immutable while you are eviscerating it of its
whole substance, you are playing fast and loose
with morality itself. The device in this case,
which admits of innumerable applications, is
what was called directing the intention. I elaborately
pretend, that is, to be doing one thing
when I am doing another, and succeed in getting
the benefit of one wicked action by doing two
actions, harmless separately and averting my mind
in each case from the action which is to be its
complement. So duelling is forbidden. But it
is surely not forbidden to defend my life or
honour. I may, again, tell a man without sin
that I am going to take a walk in a field and
shall probably have a sword by my side. If he
goes there, too, and attacks me, I may rightly
resist him, even by running him through the
body; and I shall have done nothing that does
not come under the head of self-defence. Pascal
says that, by similar devices, it was shown that a
member of a religious body might murder a man
who intended to spread scandal about his society,
and discusses the ingenious problem which had
been raised as to whether a Jesuit might not on
this ground murder a Jansenist. The murder had
been forbidden, but only for the reason that the
attacks of the Jansenists upon Jesuit morality
were too feeble to do real injury to their adversaries
—a ground which, as Pascal slyly observes,
it might be difficult to maintain on behalf of the
author of the _Provincial Letters._

  I have gone so far into this to point out the
real underlying contrast. Essentially the struggle
is between the view which assimilates the moral
law to the positive law, and that which makes it
define the heart or character; between the law
which says ‘do this’ and the law which says ‘be
this.’ The ultimate moral principles, understood
as defining the qualities of the heart, may claim to
be immutable and eternal. Love your neighbour
as yourself! it has been said, sums up the whole
of your duty to men, and is true in all times and
places. Substitute for this an external law—an
attempted catalogue of the precise actions which
I am to do if I love my neighbour—and you must
at once have innumerable exceptions and distinctions:
the law must alter as circumstances change;
and actions be classed under one clause or another,
according to superficial distinctions which sometimes,
as we see, enable you to get the benefit
of one crime by combining two innocent actions.
Therefore, if you attribute the immutability of
the internal law of the heart to the external law
of conduct, you are forced to equivocate and have
recourse to subterfuge. When, again, the process
is carried on, as Pascal held that the Jesuits were
carrying it on, with the distinct purpose of accommodating
the Church to the world, and obtaining
wider influence by lowering the price of obedience,
it is no wonder that he condemned, as the Puritan
in all ages condemns, the shuffler. Behind this
lies a still deeper question. From Pascal’s point
of view, forgiveness must be an empty word
except as a consequence of a change of heart: a
man should desire, not escape from the penalty of
an action, but purification of the soul from the
passion; not absolution won by the magic effect
of a sacrament, but conversion and regeneration.
From the Jesuit point of view the case was
inverted. Absolution must really remit sin, or
the power of the Church loses its virtue, and the
keys cease to turn the lock. In the Jesuit view,
you keep a debtor and creditor account: your
score must be fully cleared when the fine has been
paid for each separate sin. If the external law be
the moral law, conformity to it must be sufficient
in the sight of God as well as of the priest. One
striking consequence is given in the tenth letter,
where Pascal’s indignation raises him to the
highest pitch of eloquence. The problem occurred
as to what state of mind was sufficient to secure
absolution. Must your remorse imply love of
God, or is it enough to be afraid of hell?
Fear of hell may of course prevent a bad act, and
leave a corrupt heart. If, however, it secures
obedience, does it not remove guilt? The
Jesuits, according to Pascal, accepted the result
implied by their logic. Suarez thought it enough
if one loved God at any time before death:
Vasquez, if in ‘the article of death’; others if at
baptism; others, if on fast days. Hurtado de
Mendoza considered that one ought to love God
once every year; Coninck, once in three or four
years; Henriquez, every five years; while Father
Sirmonet decided after discussing these opinions
that one need not love God at all if one obeyed
His other commands. God, he argued, wants us
to love Him simply in order that we may obey
His laws. If, then, we can obey Him without
love, He would be unreasonable to insist upon
a different motive. Queen Victoria, we may say,
may demand obedience from her subjects, but she
does not claim a legal right to their personal
affection. That singular avowal rouses Pascal to
one of those passages which score an indelible
brand upon the adversary. The love of God was
the great commandment, and the Jesuits have
succeeded in explaining it away and paying God
compliments for not enforcing so harsh a law.

  Here we reach Pascal’s fundamental point: To
be good is to love God. The sinner’s heart, then,
must be changed; not the correct blood fee paid
for a homicide. No mere external operation can
avail to reconcile man to God. Then, we may
infer, dipping a baby in water will not avert
damnation? From that conclusion, which appears
to be plausible, Pascal recoiled, though he saw the
difficulty. We shall see his answer. Meanwhile,
another perplexity follows. You demand a change
of heart: but how can the heart be changed? Can
a being change not only his conduct but himself?
If not, the change must be supernatural. Nothing
but divine grace can make the man good. St.
Paul and Augustine and Calvin have given definite
form to this result by the doctrine of predestination.
What, then, becomes of the freewill which,
it was urged, was essential to merit? You give
a higher place to morality by making it a function
of the heart instead of a restraint upon actions;
but in doing so you have made it unattainable by
man, and therefore destroyed his responsibility.
The theory of grace, as St. Paul put it, makes
man the pot in the hands of the potter. The
Creator and not the creature is the true cause
both of vice and virtue. Admit that man can do
nothing without grace, and he becomes a mere
automaton moved by the arbitrary power of God.
Suppose him, on the other hand, able to do something,
and that God will always help him, and
then you virtually make him do everything; for
the grace of God is, so to speak, a constant condition
which will be an inevitable consequence of the
man’s freewill. Pascal, of course, was sensible of
this logical difficulty, and in dealing with it falls
into subtleties resembling those of his enemies.
It indeed appears to be impossible, except by the
help of merely verbal distinctions, to divide the
provinces of the two, or to make anything of
either without virtually mixing up everything.

  This problem is one which still exercises many
minds in different dialects; and I, of course, am
content to notice the fact. It indicates also the
connection between the _Provincial Letters_ and the
_Thoughts._ The problem which has met Pascal in
the controversy with the Jesuits is really besetting
him in the _Thoughts,_ and there he finds the solution
which on one side is sceptical and on the other
orthodox. For Pascal, as for the great men whom
he follows, the starting-point is precisely this
identification of all goodness with divine grace.
Augustine, more fitly than Spinoza, might be
called ‘God intoxicated,’ and in the _Confessions_
we have the most impressive example of an
imagination which interprets the world as everywhere
permeated by the divine presence and the
heart moved by a sense of personal relation to its
Creator. Pascal gives an embodiment of the same
pervading sentiment, and his work involves one
dominant thought: If you attribute every good
impulse to the Creator, what is left for the
creature? Clearly only the bad or the absolutely
neutral. Belief in divine grace, thus understood,
has, therefore, for its correlative doctrine the corruption
of man. If all that is good be supernatural,
the natural must be other than good.
And this is, in fact, the doctrine around which
all Pascal’s _Pensées_ revolve. The doctrine of the
corruption of human nature is, he says, mysterious,
and yet it is this mystery alone which makes man
intelligible to himself. Christianity, he says, reveals
two great truths: the corruption of man’s
nature and the redemption through Christ. It
is in passing these two opposite poles of truth
alternately that he sometimes appears as a sceptic
and sometimes as a humble believer. He joins
hands at moments with the sceptics and the
pessimists: he even outdoes their strongest assertions;
and at the next moment he is prostrating
himself before the Church, accepting mysteries,
adoring the sacraments, and arguing for the most
groundless traditions, and believing (I say it with
a certain sense of shame) in the most trumpery of
modern ‘miracles.’ The modern agnostic or the
modern worshipper at Lourdes may equally find
support in his _dicta._ Is this an inconsistency or
a deeper insight than that of either side? At any
rate, in this lies, I think, the great interest of
Pascal. The extraordinary force with which he
sums up both sets of convictions casts into the
shade all the feebler repetitions of similar combinations
of faith and scepticism. The half-
hearted unbelievers who turn sentimental over the
charms of decayed superstition, and the half-
hearted believers who flirt with scepticism to
prove that a lie is as good as a truth, may equally
derive inspiration from Pascal, but fail to equal
his charm because they have not his earnestness
and intellectual courage, and what we might almost
call the brutal frankness of his avowals. Whatever
we may think of his philosophy, every line
indicates a consuming desire for a genuine standing-ground
which at least commands respect.

  Let us turn first to the sceptical side of Pascal.
He begins the _Pensées_ by showing us men poised
between the two infinites. It is a curious proof of
his power that the mathematical illustration near
the beginning—the passage in which he imagines
a mite, and then the smallest corpuscle in the
mite’s body, and then a new universe within the
corpuscle, and a mite in that universe, and so
forth—which, in other hands, would appear as
quaint or extravagant<*>—is made profoundly impressive

<footnote>
  A curious application of the same illustration may be found in
De Morgan’s _Budget of Paradoxes,_ p. 321, where it is used not to
depress but to exalt human intelligence, by showing how far it can
push the ‘evaluation of π.’
</>

by the throb of emotion indicated. Man,
then is a mere speck in the universe, placed
between the two abysses of the infinite and of
nothingness, unable to comprehend either; floating
on a vast ocean, where as soon as he grasps
a fact it changes and vanishes on his hands;
where he burns with desire to find a firm base
for a structure of belief, and where the whole
foundation is always crumbling and the earth
opening to the abysses. This, he says, is the
misery of man; and yet the misery proves his
greatness. Man is great because he knows his
misery. He is a reed, the feeblest in nature;
but yet he is a ‘thinking reed.’ A vapour, a drop
of water might kill him; but should the whole
universe crush him, he is nobler than it, for
he knows that he is crushed, and the universe
knows not that it crushes. He is great as a discrowned
king. His present state proves his
misery; but his perception that it is misery
proves that he has fallen from a higher state, and
suggests that that state may be restored.

  Then Pascal proceeds to examine human nature,
and concentrates in his maxims the pith of many
students who have preached upon the text, ‘Vanity
of Vanities.’ The self-conceit of man; the emptiness
of his aim; his heartless search for distractions;
his hopeless enslavement to the illusions of the
imagination; his substitution of custom for reason
—all the futile speculations and windy ways of
men—are described with a keen insight which
reveals to us the countryman of Rochefoucauld
and the student of Montaigne. The name of
Montaigne is especially significant. Pascal’s own
experience of the actual world had been brief,
though a brief experience was much to so penetrating
a mind. He had been behind the scenes
of ecclesiastical intrigues, and had looked on at
the Fronde in France and at the Civil War in
England. Politics seemed to him a vast game
played for mere personal ends and decided by
accident. Cromwell would have ravaged all
Christendom but for a grain of sand in his passages;
and, if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter the whole
face of the earth would have been changed. In
this sphere of meditation, however, Montaigne
had been Pascal’s great teacher. A conversation
in which he gave his opinion of Montaigne and
Epictetus is of singular significance; and many
sentences of Montaigne have passed almost without
alteration into his own pages. Of Montaigne,
certainly one of the most delightful of all writers
to the worldly, I need only say this: that he
reveals (among other things) the impression made
upon a most discursive and wayward but strangely
shrewd and humorous observer by the bitter controversies
and religious wars of the sixteenth
century. His amazing good temper and humorous
delight in conversation enables him to explore with
unfailing amusement the multitudinous foibles of
human nature—the ambitions, and self-seekings,
and hypocrisies displayed by the actors in the
great tragi-comedy of life. The inevitable philosophical
conclusion for such a man is the famous
_que sais-je?_ of Montaigne’s motto—in other words,
complete scepticism. This conclusion, too, is explicitly
drawn, often in words adopted by Pascal,
in Montaigne’s most elaborate essay on the
_Apology of Raymond de Sebonde._ Here, in a
comment upon a professed demonstration of
natural theology, Montaigne, in his queer discursive
fashion, manages to intimate his own
opinion. It is, briefly, that man is but one of the
animals—a doctrine confirmed, it is true, by a set
of anecdotes as to elephants and dogs which would
startle even the editor of the _Spectator_—that the
reason of which we boast is thus little more than a
blind custom, and that to suppose man capable by
reason of attaining to a knowledge of the Deity
is the height of absurdity, As Sir W. Hamilton
did long afterwards, he quotes the Athenian inscription,
‘To the Unknown God,’ as the last
word of religious philosophy. He will confute
the unbeliever, he says, by trampling human pride
under his feet; by making men feel their inanity
and the feebleness of their reason, bow their heads
and bite the earth under the authority of Divine
Majesty. And of this method Pascal in the conversation
expresses his cordial approval. He loves
to see Montaigne humiliate the pride of reason by
its own arms, and lower man’s nature to the level
of the beasts. Montaigne, indeed, had erred
because he had stopped at this point: he had
exposed the misery but not the greatness of man.
How, indeed, could Montaigne go further? He
is emphatically the man of this world. He has to
deal with human passions as he finds them. He
watches the drama as impartially as Shakespeare.
He quietly puts aside conversion as impossible.
He does not, as he puts it, hold with the Pythagoreans
that men assume a new soul when they
visit the realm of the gods. He is far more at
home with Plutarch, or with his favourite Lucretius,
than with Christian dogmas and traditions; and
is smiling in his sleeve at the passionate eagerness
of theological as well as philosophical partakers
in the turmoil. To Pascal, therefore, he exactly
represents the natural man: the man fallen from
his high estate, but—what is strange—not even
conscious that he has fallen. One thing, says
Pascal in his opening _Thoughts,_ is unintelligible
to me: that is, man’s indifference. It irritates
me, he declares, rather than excites my pity.
What! shall a man say I know not whence I
come or whither I go—whether at death I shall
be annihilated or fall into the hands of an angry
God; and therefore I will live without even trying
to find out? The man who will risk his life and
soul for some trifling point of honour will remain
careless on this inconceivably important point!
It must be an incomprehensible enchantment,
a supernatural benumbing of the faculties, which
can explain such a state of mind. And yet this
indifference is the meaning of Montaigne’s _que
sais-je?_ If he thought of the angry God as a
possibility, he probably comforted himself, in the
words of the poet:

<verse>
He’s a good fellow and ’twill all be well.

</>

Pascal wasn’t so sure of that.

  Where, then, is Pascal’s escape? In humiliating
the intellect, has he not put out the only light,
faint and flickering as it may be, that can guide
us through the labyrinth? No, he says, the heart
has its reasons that reason does not know. Many
men have said so before and since; and it is
mainly the vigour with which Pascal puts his view
—the unflinching audacity with which he accepts
conclusions from which others shrink—that makes
his version stand out as the fullest utterance of his
view. Man is, he tells us, a chimera, a monster,
a contradiction. He judges all things and is a
mere worm; a depository of the truth and a sink
of error; at once the glory and the shame of the
universe. Nature confounds the Pyrrhonists,
and reason confounds the dogmatists. You must
belong to one sect or the other, and yet you can
remain in neither. Powerless reason, be humiliated!
Imbecile nature, be silent! Hear God.
To hear God is to feel the divine power. All
that is good in us comes from grace. Our knowledge
of God is therefore, if I may so say, a product
of the reaction of the heart moved by divine
grace. It is the response of the passive spirit to
the one all-powerful stimulus. That, in fact, is
the true theory of every mystic, though it leads of
necessity to very divergent conclusions. Pascal’s
conclusion is still marked by the sceptical element.
He will believe, and yet Montaigne cannot be
quite expelled. Montaigne, says Sainte-Beuve, is
to Pascal like the fox which gnawed the vitals of the
Spartan boy—a torment, yet almost a part of himself.
Though a mystic, he is a mathematician,
clear-headed, precise, impatient of mere vague
reverie. He must have a sharp, clear-cut answer.
And the result is noteworthy. The conflict expresses
itself in the famous argument which may
be called Pascal’s wager. You declare that you
know nothing, he says: let us then argue the
question upon that ground. God is or is not; it
is a question of heads or tails. On which side
will you bet? The right thing, you will reply, in
cases of absolute ignorance is not to bet at all.
Yes, but _il faut parier_: you must bet. You are
engaged in the game willy-nilly, and cannot be a
mere looker-on. Now, the stakes are infinite. If
you bet on God’s existence and win your bet, you
gain infinitely; even if you lose your bet, you lose
nothing. On the other side, if you bet against
His existence, the stake lost may be infinite and
the stake gained nothing. Can you, then, hesitate?
One feels grateful to Pascal for putting so forcibly
an argument which more timid theologians
insinuate without daring explicitly to enfold. I
must point out, however, that a curious assumption
is involved. To say that eternal happiness depends
on the existence of God is intelligible; but that is
not the same as to say that it must depend on my
belief in the existence of God. There is a chance
that certain conduct may have disastrous consequences.
It is just possible, however improbable,
that this bit of bread may be poisoned: that is a
conclusive reason for not eating it, however infinitesimal
the chance may be, if I have another bit of
bread which is altogether beyond suspicion. In
such cases—and they are illustrated everywhere in
life, since we must everywhere be guided by probability
—a small chance may be as unequivocal a
reason for conduct as a complete certainty. Needlessly
to encounter even the smallest risk of a
terrible catastrophe is of course unreasonable. But
though this is a sufficient ground for conduct, it is
no ground at all for belief. Because there is just a
chance of the catastrophe, I must avoid the chance:
well and good; but must I therefore believe the
chance to be a certainty? That is clearly contradictory,
and, indeed, the proper inference is the
very reverse. To act as if a thing existed is often
necessary, though its existence be highly improbable.
To act, again, _as if_ it existed is too
commonly to persuade myself against reason that
it does exist certainly. There are few errors
which are more seductive and against which I am
more bound to be on my guard. We might,
therefore, reply to Pascal: If there be a slight
chance of my being damned eternally for certain
conduct, that is a conclusive reason for avoiding
the conduct; but it is also a conclusive reason,
for not saying that I am certain to be damned. If
the mere possibility be as decisive a guide for conduct
as the calamity, that is so far a reason for not
confusing chance with certainty. According to
you the slightest belief is a sufficient reason. Then
why try to hold an absolute belief? After all, if
there be such a God as you suppose, He may
choose—it is not a very wild hypothesis—to damn
me for lying or deliberate self-deception. If, as
we are supposing, He has not supplied me with
evidence of a fact, He may be angry with me for
deliberately manufacturing beliefs without evidence
—for believing absolutely what I can only know
to be probable; He may do so—if we may venture
to attribute to Him a certain magnanimity—
even if the fact considered be the fact of His own
existence. You contemplate a Deity who wishes
to be believed to all hazards, even if He has not
given reasons for belief, even therefore if the
demand imply the grossest injustice. What is the
chance that God, if there be a God, acts on this
principle, and not on the opposite principle?

  Pascal, logical as he is, seems to overlook this,
and for a simple reason. The commands which
God is supposed to give us on penalty of damnation,
are not simple commands of morality, but
commands of religion: we are commanded to
worship Him, love Him, and promote His glory,
and we cannot do so without believing in Him.
The belief, then, is not so much directly ordered
as indirectly implied in the practices ordered.
Thus the distinction therefore, which I have suggested
between conduct and belief, does not show
itself. The heart is to obey the divine grace, and
the obedience implies recognition of the source of
grace. The mathematical view passes, therefore,
into the mystical; and hence follows another
famous conclusion. The Montaigne element
makes a last rally. I am, it exclaims, a mere
passive being; I am ordered to believe, but I am
not free. I am so made that I cannot believe.
What am I to do? Give me proofs and I may be
persuaded. No, says Pascal, I cannot give you
logical proofs. He has, indeed, sufficiently broken
with all mathematical demonstration. Epictetus,
as he remarks, falls into the opposite error to
Montaigne, for Epictetus imagined that we could
rise by reason to a knowledge of God. Pascal
had to some degree accepted Descartes’s metaphysics
in scientific matters. But, as he told his
sister, he could not forgive Descartes as a philosopher.
Descartes had tried to do without God
as far as he could, and was only forced to retain a
God in order to give a fillip to set the machinery
of the world in motion. Grave metaphysicians
have been scandalised at this criticism, and pointed
out that Descartes actually invented or refurbished
an argument to demonstrate the existence of God.
Pascal, of course, did not explicitly deny its force.
He only said that such languid arguments did not
move men’s hearts. It would, I fancy, be truer to
say that, if conclusive, they prove the existence of
a Being radically different from Pascal’s. They
go to prove the existence of a first cause and of
the unity of the universe, and of a Being identical
with the universe; but if anything they disprove
the angry Deity, hating sin and punishing sinners,
into whose hands Pascal feared to fall. His
answer is therefore different. We are, said Pascal,
automata, as Descartes had said, though we are
also spirits; as automata we believe by custom
and instinct, and all that we can do is to accustom
ourselves to submit to the right impulses. How,
then, will you believe? Learn from those who
have preceded you, and observe them cured of the
disease from which you suffer. How is that? By
acting as if they believed, he replies; by taking
holy water, causing masses to be said, and so
forth. ‘Naturellement cela vous fera croire et
vous abêtira.’ That will make you believe, and
will stupefy you. Pascal’s commentators have
again shrunk from this daring phrase, and tried to
explain it away as a mere note to be more
delicately put.<*> The crudity of the words perhaps

<footnote>
  I guess that Pascal was thinking of Montaigne, who, in the
essay upon Raymond de Sebonde, says, speaking of the evil of excessive
sensibility, ‘II nous faut abestir pour nous assagir.’
</>

lets out the secret. Some people seem to think
that it gives the truth. Now that the danger of
appealing to reason has become more marked,
Pascal’s remedy has become more popular; and I
need hardly say that there are plenty of establishments
in this neighbourhood where you may try
the efficacy of the Holy Water cure.

  Was Pascal then a sceptic or a sincere believer?
The answer is surely obvious. He was a sincere,
a humble, and even an abject believer precisely
because he was a thorough-going sceptic. One
point must be touched, however, though it cannot
be elaborated. The obvious objection to an
appeal to the heart is that the answer is necessarily
what is called subjective: is satisfactory to the
believer, but to the believer alone: the ‘will to
believe’—as Professor W. James calls it in a
recent essay, where he modifies and in some sense
rehabilitates Pascal’s bet—implies that you believe
what you will. I choose to believe this, and you
choose to disbelieve it. There is no reconciliation.
The Hindu fakir can persuade himself of the
enmity of Vishnu as the Christian monk of the
divinity of the Saviour. Holy water was used by
Pagans as well as by Catholics. Pascal was partly
blinded to this by the smallness of the world in
his time. He saw as a mathematician that man
was between two infinites. Geometry makes us
sensible of the fact. But ‘history’ still meant a
mere six thousand years. The Catholic Church
could still represent itself to the historian as the
central phenomenon of all human history, not as
an institution which dates but from a geological
yesterday, and peculiar to a special group of
nations which forms but a minute minority of the
race. Faith in God could therefore be identified
with faith in the Church, and a little factor in a
vast evolution as equivalent to the whole. The
historical argument to which he proceeds is therefore
only remarkable for naïveté. ‘Those,’ he
says, ‘who saw Lamech, who saw Adam, also saw
Jacob, who saw those who saw Moses. Therefore
the deluge and the creation are true.’ Who will
answer for them? To prove anything, that is,
you have only to invent evidence as well as to
invent facts. That is not Pascal’s strong point,
and is worthy only of a man who could believe
in the Holy Thorn.

  The great Pascal, however, remains. This
much I will venture to say. The root of all
Pascal’s creed, if I have judged rightly, is that
primary doctrine: Man is corrupt, and all good is
due to the inspiration of God. I think, therefore
I am, says Descartes: I tremble, therefore God is,
adds Pascal. His creed is made of feeling as well
as of logic. That gives scepticism on one side
and faith on the other. I can believe nothing
of myself because I am naturally imbecile. I can
accept any belief unhesitatingly, because I am
conscious of the power which moves my heart.
The belief may be intellectually absurd. The
doctrine of inherited guilt is monstrous, says
Pascal: can a child be damned for an action
committed six thousand years before its birth?
Nothing, he admits, so shocking; and yet, he adds,
it is essential to understanding man. It is simply
one aspect of that profound antinomy from which
we start. Is there, then, any such antinomy? Is
human nature absolutely corrupt? Divines calmly
tell us that it is a fact. Doubtless it is a fact, if
you mean that men have bad impulses, and if you
further assume that all good influences come from
a supernatural source. But why should I? Why
interpret man and the world as the meeting-place
of these tremendous contradictions? Why divide
a single though exceeding complex process into
a battle-ground between two wholly opposed
forces? I confess that I should correct Montaigne,
so far as he needs correction, by allowing more
liberally for the nobler impulses of human nature
—not by stripping man of all virtue and handing
over the good to an inconceivable and inscrutable
force. If you once begin by introducing an
omnipotent struggling with a finite being, this
may be the logical result; but I do not see my
way to the first step. Meanwhile, I do see some
painful results. I see that Pascal’s morality becomes
distorted; that in the division between
grace and nature some innocent and some admirable
qualities have got to the wrong side; that
Pascal becomes a morbid ascetic, torturing himself
to death, hating innocent diversion because it has
the great merit of distracting the mind from
melancholy brooding, looking upon natural passions
as simply bad, and inculcating demeanour which
would turn us all into celibate monks; pushing
delicacy to the point at which it becomes confounded
with pruriency; distrusting even the
highest of blessings, love of sisters and friends,
because they take us away from the service of the
Being who, after all, does not require our services;
consecrating poverty instead of trying to suppress
it; and finally, renouncing the intellectual pursuits
for which he had the most astonishing fitness,
because geometry had no bearing on dogmatic
theology. The devotion of a man to an ideal
which, however imperfect, is neither base, sensual,
nor anti-social, which implies a passionate devotion
to some of the higher impulses of our nature, has
so great a claim upon our reverence that we can
forgive, and even love, Pascal. We cannot follow
him without treason to our highest interests.

  The point of view from which Pascal repels us
is indicated in the common-sense comments upon
the _Pensées_ by Voltaire and Condorcet. We
decline to stupefy ourselves. Drug yourself with
holy water and masses, or be a brute beast. We
reply, as the old Duchess of Marlborough replied
to her doctor’s statement that she must be blistered
or die, ‘I won’t be blistered, and I won’t die!’
We won’t be drugged and we won’t be brute
beasts. And to Pascal’s appeal from the reason
to the heart, we answer that it implies a fundamental
error. The ‘heart’ is not another kind of
reason—a co-ordinate faculty for discerning truth
—but a name for emotions which are not reason
at all. Least of all can it claim to pronounce
that certain elements in our life are supernatural
or intrusions from without. And yet the heart,
if we are to use the word, implies something that
we must take into account. It represents implicit
judgments, for it determines the relative values of
different passions and aims, and therefore does, in
fact, supply principles which regulate our lives.
Pascal’s heart, for example, meant a conviction
founded upon his own direct experience of the
infinite superiority of the spiritual, as he would
have said, to the temporal and sensual. Such
implicit judgments, and the morality in which
they are embodied, are modified more or less
directly by the adoption of new philosophical or
scientific beliefs. We do not fear for a moment
that in seeking for truth and applying the most
rigid logical tests, we are endangering whatever
is really sound in the judgments or valuable in
the morality. A coherent and reliable philosophy
would, we are fully assured, incorporate whatever
may be sound in the beliefs and feelings which are
instinctive rather than reasoned. But the possibility,
or rather the certainty, of such a conflict imposes
a responsibility upon his opponents. For, in the
first place, it explains why persuasion does not go
with conviction or exposure of fallacy lead to
adoption of the truth. The clearest exposition of
the logical error may only lead, as it led Pascal,
to a revolt against reason; and the blind instinct
will somehow assert itself as a matter of fact, and
be an irreconcilable element until a satisfaction
be provided for it in a more comprehensive and
rational construction. Nor is the instinct, blind
though it be, without its light. Its very existence
affords a presumption, not that it is true, but that
it is an imperfect effort to impress a truth. And
this is, in fact, the reason which is impressed upon
us most forcibly by such a man as Pascal. He is
himself, as he declared man to be in general, a
kind of incarnate antinomy. As he brings the
heart into hopeless conflict with reason; as he
manages at once to exaggerate the baseness and
the grandeur of human nature; as he urges alternately
with extraordinary keenness two aspects of
truth, and is forced to make them contradictory
instead of complementary; as his moral position
is on one side pure, elevating, and a standing
rebuke to all the meaner tendencies of his generation,
and yet, on the other, becomes morbid,
perverse, and impracticable, because he has
separated life into its incommensurable elements,
—he leaves to us not a final solution but a problem:
How to form a system which shall throughout
be reasonable and founded upon fact, and
yet find due place and judicious guidance for the
higher elements, which he has really perverted
in the effort to exaggerate their importance?

</text>

	Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
	at the Edinburgh University Press

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

  This electronic transcription of Leslie Stephen's `Studies of a
Biographer', vol. 2 was transcribed from the edition published by
Duckworth and Co., London, 1898.

  The main purpose has been to produce a transcription that could
be used to produce a new printed edition. In general, typographical
accidentals in the original have not been retained in this 
transcription.

  The following changes have been made to the text:

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hyphenation have been removed, and the de-hyphenated words placed at
the end of the first line.  In non-obvious case, the guide for whether
to keep or remove the hyphen has been the text itself.

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changed to lower case letters.

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horizontal tab. In this type of text, typographical variations
(italics, small caps, etc.) have not been retained, unless they
performed an obvious function.

  The following misprints etc. have been corrected:

p. 49, l. -7...: ... _Budget of Para-||doxes,_	(was: Para-||aoxes,)

p. 66, l. -1: ... Staël ... (was: no accent ... spelled correctly elsewhere)

p. 105, l. -10: frequently. And yet their preaching is not the	(was: ís)

p. 108, l. -1: would have been attracted by State Socialism.	(was: no .)

p. 118, l. 4: certainly reach an intelligible position. It is moreover	(was: intelligíble)

p. 120, l.-2: yet remembers gratefully the service they have	(was: vet)

p. 189, l. -1: perhaps, because he never grew to manhood.	(was: manhood,)

p. 193, l. 1-8: verses restored to single-line form

p.242, l. 4: political, and literary movements of a profoundly	(was: profonndly)

p. 258, l. 3: says that, by similar devices, it was shown that a	(was: similiar)

p. 277, l. 6: have preceded you, and observe them cured of the	(was: aud)


The following oddities remain:

p. 38, l. -2: neueren Deutschen Literatur en England._ Von Georg. Herzfeld.

  According to several library catalogues, 'en' should be 'in'. 

p. 54, l. -5: of _Death's Textbook,_ had taught himself German, and is

  probably: _Death's Jestbook,_

p. 123, l. -1: College,_ Oxford. By Robert and Lewis Campbell. London, 1897.

  This book is by E. Abbott and Lewis Campbell. 

  These errors (and others) suggest that the text shows certain lapses in
original proofreading.

  Freewill? free-will?

	  Both forms appear more than once each.

  commonsense? common-sense?

	  Both forms appears once each.


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= =	surrounds text where lowercase letters were set in small caps. 
—	indicates an em dash. Longer sequences represent
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<verse>
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<*>     footnote

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<! xxx> page anchor, named xxx

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	Further markup


* Revision history:

  2006-05-14	First release

  2009-01-03	9:9: of Dryden, and was fallowing it by the edition	('following')
		18:15  you all that he spent upon turnpikes for, the last
									(removed ,)

		51:25  Germany thirty years before. Stewart — as	(removed spaces around dash)
		202:9  should be to ’ give the intense, masterful, and	(corrected quote to ‘, and removed space after)
		258:11 were too feeble to do real injury to their adver-|saries
									(corrected line break)



  The transcription and proof-reading was done by Anders Thulin,
e-mail: ath (at) algonet.se .

  As far as I am concerned, this electronical edition is free, and may
be used in any way for any purpose whatever.

  I'd be glad to hear of any errors or omissions you might find,
though.

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