Leslie Stephen : Studies of a Bibliographer, vol. 4
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	STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

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	_All rights reserved_

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	STUDIES OF
	A BIOGRAPHER

	_By_ LESLIE STEPHEN

	[[ Floral device: DESORMAIS ]]

	(SECOND SERIES)

	VOL. IV



	LONDON
	_DUCKWORTH and CO._
	3 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.
	1902

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	Edinburgh : Printed by T. and A. Constable

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	CONTENTS

        SHAKESPEARE AS A MAN                    <? p1>
        SOUTHEY’S LETTERS                       <? p45>
        NEW LIGHTS ON MILTON                    <? p86>
        EMERSON                                 <? p130>
        ANTHONY TROLLOPE                        <? p168>
        ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON                  <? p206>
        THE COSMOPOLITAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE   <? p247>

<text>

	STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

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	SHAKESPEARE AS A MAN<! p1>

I am reluctant to break the rule—or what ought
to be the rule—that no one should write about
Shakespeare without a special licence. Heaven-
born critics or thorough antiquaries alone should
add to the pile under which his ‘honoured bones’
are but too effectually hidden. I make no pretence
of having discovered a new philosophical
meaning in _Hamlet,_ or of having any light to
throw upon the initials ‘W.H.’ I confess, too,
that though I have read Shakespeare with much
pleasure, I cannot say as much for most of his
commentators. I have not studied them eagerly.
I spent, however, some hours of a recent vacation
in reading a few Shakespeare books, including Mr.
Lee’s already standard _Life_ and Professor Brandes’
interesting _Critical Study._ The contrast between
the two raised an old question. Mr. Lee, like
many critics of the highest authority, maintains
that we can know nothing of the man. He shows
that we know more than the average reader
supposes of the external history of the Stratford
townsman. But then he maintains the self-denying
proposition that such knowledge teaches us nothing
about the author of _Hamlet._ Professor Brandes,
on the contrary, tries to show how a certain
spiritual history indicated by the works may be
more or less distinctly correlated with certain
passages in the personal history. The process, of
course, involves a good deal of conjecture. It
rests upon the assumption that the works, when
properly interpreted, reveal character; for the
facts taken by themselves are a manifestly insufficient
ground for more than a few negative inferences.
If, with Mr. Lee, we regard the first
step as impossible, the whole theory must collapse.
Upon his showing we learn little from the works
except that Shakespeare, whatever he may have
been as a man, had a marvellous power of wearing
different masks. There is no reason to suppose
that his mirth or melancholy, his patriotism or
his misanthropy, reveal his own sentiments. He
could inspire his puppets with the eloquence which
would bring down the house and direct money to
the till of the Globe. He could drop his mask
and become a commonplace man of business when
he applied for a coat of arms or requested his
debtors to settle their little accounts.

  This raises the previous question of the possibility
of the general inference from the book to
the man. Now I confess that to me one main
interest in reading is always the communion with
the author. _Paradise Lost_ gives me the sense of
intercourse with Milton, and the Waverley Novels
bring me a greeting from Scott. Every author,
I fancy, is unconsciously his own Boswell, and,
however ‘objective’ or dramatic he professes to
be, really betrays his own secrets. Browning is
one of the authorities against me. If Shakespeare,
he says, really unlocked his heart in the sonnets,
why ‘the less Shakespeare he.’ Browning declines
for his part to follow the example, and fancies
that he has preserved his privacy. Yet we must,
I think, agree with a critic who emphatically
declares that a main characteristic of Browning’s
own poetry is that it brings us into contact with
the real ‘self of the author.’ Self-revelation is
not the less clear because involuntary or quite
incidental to the main purpose of a book. I may
read Gibbon simply to learn facts; but I enjoy
his literary merits because I recognise my friend
of the autobiography who ‘sighed as a lover and
obeyed as a son.’ I may study Darwin’s _Origin
of Species_ to clear my views upon natural selection;
but as a book it interests me even through the
defects of style by the occult personal charm of
the candid, sagacious, patient seeker for truth.
In pure literature the case is, of course, plainer,
and I will not count up instances because, in truth,
I can hardly think of a clear exception. Whenever
we know a man adequately we perceive that,
though different aspects of his character may be
made prominent in his life and his works, the
same qualities are revealed in both, and we cannot
describe the literary without indicating the personal
charm.

  Is Shakespeare the sole exception? There are
obvious difficulties in the way of a satisfactory
answer. Shakespearean criticism means too often
reckless competition in hyperboles. So long as
critics think it necessary to show their appreciative
power by falling into hysterics, all distinctive
characteristics are obliterated. When the poet is
lost in such a blaze of light, we can make no
inference to the man. Sometimes out of reverence
for his genius he is treated like a prophet
whose inspiration is proved by his commonplace
character in other moments. The more impossible
an explanation, the greater will be the
wonder. Some commentators, again, have displayed
their affection by dwelling upon his proverbial
‘gentleness,’ till he seems to be a kind of
milksop with no more of the devil in him than
there was in the poet of _The Christian Year._
Others have been so impressed by the vigour of his
fine frenzies, and the ‘irregularities’ of which our
forefathers complained, that they describe him as
always on the border of insanity. Such discords
do not prove necessarily that the man was unknowable,
but certainly suggest that to know him
a critic must keep his head and be less anxious to
exhibit his own enthusiasm and geniality than to
form a tolerably sane judgment. The application
of sound methods happily seems to be spreading,
and may lead to more solid results.

  Some objections, indeed, if they could be sustained,
would make the investigation impossible
from the first. Shakespeare, we are reminded
with undeniable truth, was a dramatist. We
cannot assume that he is responsible for the
opinions which he formulates. It is Orsino, not
his creator, who holds that wives should be
younger than their husbands, and Shakespeare
may not have been thinking of Anne Hathaway.
Some of us have personal reasons for hoping that
when his characters express a dislike for the lean
or for the unmusical, their words do not give his
deliberate judgment. If this were a fatal difficulty
it would follow that no competent dramatist
reveals himself in his works. Yet, as a matter of
fact, I suppose that dramatists are generally quite
as knowable as other authors. We learn to know
Ben Jonson from his plays alone, almost as well
as we know his namesake the great Samuel.
That surely is the rule. A dramatist lets us
know, and cannot help letting us know, what is
his general view of his fellow-creatures and of the
world in which they live. It is his very function
to do so, and though the indication may be indirect,
it is not the less significant of the observer’s
own peculiarities. But, we are told, Shakespeare
does not identify himself with any of his characters.
He is not himself either Falstaff or
Hamlet. This too applies to most dramatists,
but it certainly suggests a difficulty.

  The most demonstrable, though it may not be
the highest, merit of Shakespeare’s plays is, I
suppose, the extraordinary variety of vivid and
original types of character. The mind which
could create a Hamlet and a Falstaff, and an Iago
and a Mercutio and a Caliban, a Cleopatra and a
Lady Macbeth and a Perdita, must undoubtedly
have been capable of an astonishing variety of
moods and sympathies. That certainly gives a
presumption that the creator must have been
himself too complex to be easily described. The
difficulty, again, is increased by the other most
familiar commonplace about Shakespeare, the
entire absence of deliberate didacticism. Profound
critics, it is true, have discovered certain
moral lessons and philosophical theories concealed
in his plays. If so, they are bound to admit,
though their modesty may restrain their utterance,
that he concealed them so cleverly that he has had
to wait for a great philosopher to perceive them.
If he really meant to enforce them upon the
vulgar, his attempt must be regarded as a signal
failure. Anyhow, we are without one clue which
is given by the didactic writer. To read Dante is
to know whom he hated and why he hated them,
and what, in his opinion, would be their proper
place hereafter. To Shakespeare good men and
bad are alike parts of the order of Nature, to be
understood and interpreted with perfect impartiality.
He gives a diagnosis of the case, not
a judgment sentencing them to heaven or hell.
His characters prosper or suffer, not in proportion
to their merits, but as good and bad fortune
decides or as may be most dramatically effective.
It does not, indeed, follow that Shakespeare was
without moral sympathies or ideals. It would be
as erroneous as to infer that a physician who
describes a disease accurately is indifferent to the
value of health. Shakespeare no doubt held that
Iago was a hateful person, and meant him to excite
the aversion of his hearers. Only he did not infer,
as inferior writers are apt to do, that Iago ought
to be misrepresented. The devil ought to be
painted just as black as he is and not a shade
blacker. A perfectly impartial analysis of character
is, surely, the true method of showing what
is lovable in the virtuous and hateful in the vicious,
and the man who gets angry with his own creatures,
and denounces instead of explaining, is really
perverting the true moral. When Cervantes
makes us love Don Quixote in spite of the crack
in his intellect and the absurdity of his career, he
is really setting forth in the most effective way the
beauty of the chivalrous character. That, I take
it, is the true artistic method. It simply displays
the facts and leaves the reader to be attracted or
repelled according to his power of appreciating
moral beauty or deformity. But, undoubtedly, so
far as this method is characteristic of Shakespeare’s
work, it increases our difficulty. These are the
facts, he says: make what you can of them; I
do not draw the moral for you, or even deny
that many very different morals may commend
themselves to different people. No great poet
can be without some implicit morality, though the
morality may be sometimes very bad. He is
great because he has a rich emotional nature, and
great powers of observation and insight. He
must have his own views of what are the really
valuable elements in life, of what constitutes true
happiness, and what part the deepest instincts play
in the general course of affairs. He must therefore
have his answer to the great problems of
ethics. But we have to translate his implicit
convictions into an abstract theory in order to discover
his moral system. To do that in the case
of Shakespeare would no doubt be a specially difficult
and delicate task. He refuses to give us any
direct help towards divining his sympathies. Scott,
in his most Shakespearean moods, has something
of the same impartiality. When he describes an
interesting person, Louis =xi.= in _Quentin Durward,_
or James =i.= in _The Fortunes of Nigel,_ he shows a
power of insight, of making wicked and weak
men intelligible and human, which reminds us of
Shakespeare’s methods. He hated Covenanters
like a good Jacobite, and yet he can describe them
kindly and sympathetically. But then he has
sympathies which he cannot conceal. His love of
the manly, healthy type represented in the Dandie
Dinmonts and their like reveals the man, and,
without reading Lockhart, we can see that, unlike
Shakespeare, he is clearly identifying himself with
some of his characters.

  My inference then would be, not that Shakespeare
cannot be known, but that a knowledge
of Shakespeare must be attained through a less
obvious process. His character, we must suppose,
was highly complex, and we are without the direct
and unequivocal clues which enable us to feel
ourselves personally acquainted with such men as
Dante or Milton, to say nothing of Wordsworth
or Byron. A distinction, however, must be made.
There is such a thing as knowing a man thoroughly
and yet being unable to put our knowledge
into definite formulæ. I may know a man’s
face and the sound of his voice well enough to
swear to him among a thousand others, and yet I
may be totally unable to describe him in such a
way as to enable a detective to pick him out of a
crowd. I can say that he is six feet high and has
a red beard, but I cannot give the finer marks
which distinguish tall red-bearded men from each
other. So I can often divine instinctively what
my friend will say and do and think on a given
occasion; and yet be quite unable to give the
reasons for my expectation. If I am not a trained
psychologist, I shall not have the proper terms, or
shall confuse different terms; and if I am a trained
psychologist, I may too probably be misled by my
own theories, and I shall certainly find that all
the common phrases by which we describe character
are too vague and shifting to reflect the vast
variety of delicate shades of emotional temperament
which we can yet recognise in observation.
Does not every critic of poetry claim such a
knowledge—vivid and yet difficult to grasp and
analyse? He professes to recognise Shakespeare’s
style; he can tell you confidently which plays are
Shakespeare’s own, and which he produced in
collaboration with others; he can point out the
scene and even the particular speech at which
Shakespeare dropped the pen and Fletcher took it
up. Part of this knowledge is derived, it is true,
from ‘objective’ signs. One scene has a larger
percentage than others of verses with eleven
syllables. That observation requires no critical
insight. Yet I do not suppose that any critic
would admit that he was unable to discriminate
qualities too delicate to be inferred from counting
on the fingers. The point of which I am speaking
corresponds to the distinction made by Newman
in the _Grammar of Assent_ between the ‘Illative
Instinct’ and such formal reasoning as can be put
into syllogisms. He illustrates it by Falstaff’s
‘babbling of green fields.’ Some readers, he says,
are certain that this was Shakespeare’s phrase,
while others hold that they do not recognise the
true Shakespearean ring. The certitude of either
side is therefore not conclusive for the other.
Yet the conviction implies that each reader has so
vivid a conception of certain characteristics that
the verdict ‘this is’ or ‘this is not Shakespearean’
arises spontaneously at a particular phrase. ‘Shakespearean,’
then, must have a definite though not
definable meaning. Something in the turn of
thought, in the play of humour, fits in or does not
exactly fit in with our image, and we must therefore
have such an image—whether like or unlike
to the reality.

  Two difficulties, in fact, are often confounded:
the difficulty of knowing and the difficulty of
analysing and formulating our knowledge. Language
is too rough and equivocal an instrument
to enable us to communicate to others the finer
shades of difference which we can clearly recognise.
Critics, I fancy, were it not for their characteristic
modesty, might be induced by a skilful cross-examination
to confess that their knowledge of
Shakespeare is much more precise and distinct
than they venture to claim. If I had the skill
required for the most difficult form of literary art,
I should try to surmount their diffidence by a
Socratic dialogue. I should not endeavour to
reveal new truths to them, but endeavour, like
Socrates, to deliver them of the truths with which
their judgments are already pregnant. Much as
critics of the poetry differ, they show a tendency to
converge; there are certain commonplaces, and at
least as many negations, in which they would agree.
As I do not profess to be an expert, I must limit
myself to such generalities. What I would try
to show is that what is accepted about the poetry
really implies certain conclusions about the man.
I must leave it to those who unite more thorough
knowledge with more poetical insight to fill up
the rough outlines which are all that I can attempt
to indicate.

  One remark will be granted. A dramatist is
no more able than anybody else to bestow upon
his characters talents which he does not himself
possess. If—as critics are agreed—Shakespeare’s
creatures show humour, Shakespeare must have had
a sense of humour himself. When Mercutio indulges
in the wonderful tirade upon Queen Mab,
or Jaques moralises in the forest, we learn that
their creator had certain powers of mind just as
clearly as if we were reading a report of one of the
wit combats at the ‘Mermaid.’ It is harder to
define those qualities precisely than to say what
is implied by Johnson’s talk at the ‘Mitre,’ but
the idiosyncrasy is at least as strongly impressed
upon such characteristic mental displays. If we
were to ask any critic whether such passages could
be attributed to Marlowe or Ben Jonson, he
would inquire whether we took him for a fool.
If, indeed, we were considering a bit of scientific
exposition, the inference to character would not
exist. A mathematician, I suppose, could tell me
that the demonstration of some astronomical
theorem was in Newton’s manner, and the remark
would not show whether Newton was amiable or
spiteful, jealous or generous. But a man’s humour
and fancy are functions of his character as well as
of his reason. To appreciate them clearly is to
know how he feels as well as how he argues; what
are the aspects of life which especially impress him,
and what morals are most congenial. I do not
see how the critic can claim an instinctive perception
of the Shakespearean mode of thought
without a perception of some sides of his
character. You distinguish Shakespeare’s work
from his rivals’ as confidently as any expert judging
of handwriting. You admit, too, that you
can give a very fair account of the characteristics
of the other writers. Then surely you can tell me
—or at least you know ‘implicitly’—what is the
quality in which they are defective and Shakespeare
pre-eminent.

  Half my knowledge of a friend’s character is
derived from his talk, and not the less if it is
playful, ironical, and dramatic. When we agree
that Shakespeare’s mind was vivid and subtle, that
he shows a unique power of blending the tragic
and the comic, we already have some indications
of character; and incidentally we catch revelations
of more specific peculiarities. Part of my
late reading was a charming book in which Mr.
Justice Madden sets forth Shakespeare’s accurate
knowledge of field sports. It seems to prove
conclusively a proposition against which there can
certainly be no presumption. We may be quite
confident that he could thoroughly enjoy a day’s
coursing on the Cotswold Hills, and we know
by the most undeniable proof that his sense of
humour was tickled by the oddities of his fellow-
sportsmen, the Shallows and Slenders. It is at
least equally clear that he had the keenest enjoyment
of the charms of the surrounding scenery.
He could not have written _Midsummer Night’s
Dream_ or _As You Like It_ if the poetry of the English
greenwood had not entered into his soul. The
single phrase about the daffodils—so often quoted
for its magical power—is proof enough, if there
were no other, of a nature exquisitely sensitive to
the beauties of flowers and of springtime. It
wants, again, no such confirmation as Fuller’s
familiar anecdote to convince us that Shakespeare
could enjoy convivial meetings at taverns, that he
could listen to, and probably join in, a catch by
Sir Toby Belch, or make Lord Southampton
laugh as heartily as Prince Hal laughed at the
jests of Falstaff. Shakespeare, again, as this
suggests, was certainly not a Puritan. That may
be inferred by judicious critics from particular
phrases or from the relations of Puritans to players
in general. But without such reasoning we may
go further and say that the very conception of
a Puritan Shakespeare involves a contradiction in
terms. He represents, of course, in the fullest
degree, the type which is just the antithesis of
Puritanism; the large and tolerant acceptance of
human nature which was intolerable to the rigid
and strait-laced fanatics, whom, nevertheless,
we may forgive in consideration of their stern
morality. People, indeed, have argued, very
fruitlessly I fancy, as to Shakespeare’s religious
beliefs. Critics tell us, and I have no doubt
truly, that it would be impossible to show conclusively
from his works whether he considered
himself to be an Anglican or a Catholic. But a
man’s religion is not to be defined by the formula
which he accepts, or inferred even from the church
to which he belongs. That is chiefly a matter of
accident and circumstance, not of character. The
same essential religious sentiments may be clothed
in the most various and even logically contradictory
creeds. We may, I think, be pretty certain
that Shakespeare’s religion, whatever may have
been its external form, included a profound sense
of the mystery of the world and of the pettiness
of the little lives that are rounded by a sleep; a
conviction that we are such stuff as dreams are
made of, and a constant sense, such as is impressed
in the most powerful sonnets, that our
best life is an infinitesimal moment in the vast
‘abysm’ of eternity. Shakespeare, we know, read
Montaigne; and if, like Montaigne, he accepted
the creed in which he was brought up, he would
have sympathised in Montaigne’s sceptical and
humorous view of theological controversialists
playing their fantastic tricks of logic before high
Heaven. Undoubtedly, he despised a pedant,
and the pedantry which displayed itself in the
wranglings of Protestant and Papist divines would
clearly not have escaped his contempt. Critics,
again, have disputed as to Shakespeare’s politics;
and the problem is complicated by the desire to
show that his politics were as good as his poetry.
Sound Liberals are unwilling to admit that he had
aristocratic tendencies, because they hold that all
aristocrats are wicked and narrow-minded. It is,
of course, an anachronism to transplant our problems
to those days, and we cannot say what
Shakespeare would have thought of modern applications
of the principles which he accepted. But
I do not see how any man could have been more
clearly what may be called an intellectual aristocrat.
His contempt for the mob may be good-
humoured enough, but is surely unequivocal:
from the portrait of Jack Cade promising, like a
good Socialist, that the three-hooped pot shall
have ten hoops, to the first, second, and third
citizens who give a display of their inanity and
instability in _Coriolanus_ or _Julius Cæsar._ Shakespeare
may be speaking dramatically through
Ulysses in _Troilus and Cressida_; but at least he
must have fully appreciated the argument for
order, and understood by order that the cultivated
and intelligent should rule and the common herd
have as little direct voice in state affairs as Elizabeth
and James could have desired.

  When we have got so far, we have already, as
it seems to me, admitted certain attributes, which
are as much personal as literary. If you admit
that Shakespeare was a humorist, intensely sensitive
to natural beauty, a scorner of the pedantry,
whether of scholars or theologians, endowed with
an amazingly wide and tolerant view of human
nature, radically opposed to Puritanism or any
kind of fanaticism, capable of hearty sympathy with
the popular instincts and yet with a strong persuasion
of the depth of popular folly, you thereby
know at least some negative propositions about
the man himself. You can say with confidence
what are the characteristics which were thoroughly
antipathetic to him, even though it may be difficult
to describe accurately the characteristics which he
positively embodied.

  Another point is, it would seem, too plain to
need much emphasis. The author of _Romeo and
Juliet_ was, I suppose, capable of Romeo’s passion.
We may ‘doubt that the sun is fire,’ but can
hardly doubt that Shakespeare could love. In
this case, it seems to me, the power of intuition
is identical with the emotional power. A man
would surely have been unable to find the most
memorable utterance in literature of passions of
which he was not himself abnormally susceptible.
It may be right to describe a poet’s power as
marvellous, but why should we hold it to be
miraculous? I agree with Pope’s common-sense
remark about Heloisa’s ‘well-sung woes’; ‘he
best can paint ’em who can feel ’em most.’ Surely
that is the obvious explanation, and I am unable
to see why there should be any difficulty in receiving
it. When the blind poet, Blacklock, described
scenery which he had never seen, wise critics
puzzled over the phenomenon. It was explained
by the obvious remark, that he was simply appropriating
the conventional phrases of other poets.
But when a poet gives originality to the most
commonplace of all themes, I infer that he has
had the eyesight or felt the emotions required for
the feat. We must, no doubt, be careful as to
further differences. If I had read the poems of
Burns or Byron without any knowledge of their
lives, I should be justified, I think, in modestly
inferring that they were men of strong passions.
I could not suppose that they were merely vamping
up old material. No inference from conduct
could be made more conclusive than the inference
from the fire and force of their poetry. But it is,
of course, doubtful what effect might be produced
on their lives. Byron, brought up under judicious
and firm management, might conceivably have
become an affectionate husband and a respectable
nobleman. Some men have greater powers of
self-command than others, or may be prevented
by other qualities of character from obeying in.
practice the impulses which govern their imaginations.
It has been said that Moore, who in early
days shocked his contemporaries by immoral
poetry, lived the most domestic and well-regulated
of lives; whereas Rogers was the most respectable
of poets and a striking contrast to Moore in conduct.
The fact, if it be a fact, may warn us
against hasty conclusions. A man may have very
good reasons for keeping some of his feelings out
of his books; or may, out of mere levity, affect
vices which he does not put in practice. We can
be sure that he has certain propensities; but, of
course, we cannot tell how far circumstance and
other propensities may not hold them in check.
Much smaller men than Shakespeare are still very
complex organisms. We may judge from this and
that symptom that they react, as a chemist may
say, in certain ways to a given stimulus; but to
put all the indications together, to say which are
the dominant instincts and how different impulses
will modify each other in active life; to decide
whether a feeling which shapes the ideal world will
have a corresponding force when it comes into
contact with realities, is a delicate investigation.
When an adequate biography is obtainable the
answer is virtually given. The facts of Shakespeare’s
life are as far as possible from adequate;
but we may ask how far what is known can check
or confirm inferences from the works.

  This brings us to the biographical problem.
Minute students of Shakespeare have done one
great service at least. They have established
approximately the order of his works. The plays,
when placed in a chronological series, show probably
the most remarkable intellectual development
on record. There is, I suppose, no great
writer who shows so distinctly the growth and
varying direction of his poetical faculty. We
watch Shakespeare from the start; beginning as a
cobbler and adapter of other men’s works; making
a fresh start as a follower of Marlowe, and then
improving upon his model in the great historical
dramas. We can compare the gaiety and the
ridicule of affectations in the early comedies with
the more serious and penetrative portraits of life
in the later works; or trace the development of
his full powers in the great tragedies, and the
mellower tone of the later romantic dramas. If
some knowledge of Shakespeare is implied in a
comparison between him and his contemporaries,
there is still more significance in the comparison
with himself. A century ago a critic put the _Two
Gentlemen of Verona_ at the end and the _Winter’s
Tale_ at the beginning of his career. Such an
inversion, we now perceive, would make the
whole history of his mental development chaotic
and contradictory. That Shakespeare, whom we
know to have been a marvellously keen observer
of life and character, and who lived, as literary
historians so elaborately demonstrate, under the
most stimulating intellectual and social conditions,
must have had his reflections and learnt some
lessons about human life is self-evident. To show
how, for example, _Richard II.,_ in which he
followed Marlowe, differed from the _Henry IV.,_
in which he has found his own characteristic
breadth and strength, is to show what some of
those lessons were, and therefore to throw light
upon the man who learnt them so quickly. We
see how certain veins of reflection become more
prominent, how, for example, humour checks the
bombastic tendency, and the broader and deeper
view of life ‘begets a temperance’ which restrains
the ‘whirlwind’ of ungovernable passions. The
critic who can exhibit the growth of a man’s power
implicitly exhibits also the character which is developed;
and, in fact, I think that by taking such
considerations into account a clearer perception of
the man has been gradually worked out. The
task, no doubt, would be easier if we could
strengthen our case by some definite biographical
data; and the misfortune is that we are tempted
to construct the required data by the help of
audacious conjectures. The natural failure of
such enterprises has unduly discredited the value
of mere modest inferences.

  The hope of unveiling the man has in particular
led to the controversy over the sonnets. They
are supposed to show that Shakespeare went
through a spiritual crisis, which is indicated by
the bitterness of some of the plays written at the
time; and certain inferences would be applicable if
we could safely identify the dark lady with Mistress
Fitton and ‘W. H.’ with the Earl of Pembroke.
I humbly accept Mr. Lee’s chief conclusions. He
has insisted upon the fact that Shakespeare was
falling in with a temporary fashion, or infected by
a curious mania which led poets just at that period
to pour out sonnets by the hundred. The inference
that the sonnets necessarily imply some
personal catastrophe is thus deprived of its force.
If half the early Victorian poets had been writing
‘In Memoriams,’ we might believe that Tennyson
had no special friendship for Arthur Hallam, and
had merely made a pretext of a commonplace
attachment. It is possible, or rather it is highly
probable, that Shakespeare took some real bit of
personal history for a text, though many of the
sonnets are simply variations upon established
poetical themes. But we cannot say that his
emotion must have been caused by some thrilling
events when it is at least equally likely that he
merely took a trifling event as a pretext for expressing
his emotions. Shakespeare was certainly
dramatist enough to discover a motive for poetry
in a commonplace experience. The attempted
identifications do little more than illustrate a
common fallacy. The impossibility of proving a
negative is confounded with the conclusive proof
of the positive. ‘It is just possible’ becomes ‘it
is certainly true.’ The whole Pembroke-Fitton
hypothesis rests (as Mr. Lee seems to show) upon
the interpretation of the famous initials. The fact
that a nobleman had an intrigue with a lady about
the time when the sonnets, or some of them, may
have been written, cannot prove that they refer
to the intrigue. Shakespeare could hardly have
managed to write at a period when some intrigue
was not going on. If, then, ‘W. H.’ did not
mean William Herbert, the peg on which the
whole argument hangs is struck out. Now ‘Mr.
W. H.’ could not possibly suggest the Earl to any
contemporary, and, in fact, did not suggest him to
any one for more than two centuries. That, Professor
Brandes seems to think, strengthens the
case, because the dedication would naturally be
reticent. The argument recalls the old retort—

<verse>
My wound is great, because it is so small:
Then it were greater were it none at all!
</>

If there had been no dedication, the proof apparently
would have been conclusive, because the
reticence would have been absolute. The true
argument is surely simple. If there were otherwise
very strong reasons for believing in the Pembroke
theory, it might be a plausible conjecture
that the initials were suggested by association,
though it would still be odd that reticence pushed
so far did not go a step further. In the absence
of such reasons, the obscurity cannot of itself be
any ground for conviction. People forget how
frequent are much closer and yet purely accidental
coincidences; but when there is a chance of the
glory of a discovery of such a bit of personal
history, ‘trifles light as air’ become demonstrative
to enthusiastic worshippers.

  There is a more fundamental objection to the
whole theory. Were it proved that the sonnets
refer to the conjectured history, the fact would
be interesting, but would hardly throw much light
upon our problem. It is supposed to suggest a
cause for Shakespeare’s supposed pessimistic mood.
To take a parallel case: we may find an explanation
of Swift’s misanthropy in his long ordeal of disappointed
ambition. There is no doubt whatever
that Swift’s writings express a misanthropy as
savage as that of Timon or Thersites; and on the
other side, there is no doubt that his career was
calculated to sour his nature. Putting the history
of the man and his works together, both become
the more intelligible. The fierce indignation
shown by the author is explained and palliated by
the life of the man. If Shakespeare had suddenly
retired from the stage and taken to writing pamphlets
like the _Drapier’s Letters_ or the _Martin
Marprelate Tracts,_ we might admit the probability
of some events which embittered his life. But
then the conspicuous fact is that his life ran on, as
far as we can tell, with perfect smoothness. Nobody
can prove that he did not love Mistress
Fitton; but it is quite clear that, if he did, it did
not prevent him from making money, buying New
Place, setting up as a gentleman, and continuing a
thoroughly prosperous career. The passion clearly
did not dislocate his career. Even if the alleged
fact be true, it had no permanent bearing on his
life. On the other side, there is no proof of anything
in the works to require explanation. Critics
have indeed shown that at one period pessimistic
sentiments (to speak roughly) become more prominent
than before or afterwards. But we must,
in the first place, make the proper allowance for
the dramatic condition. He may have continued
the ‘Thersites’ or ‘Timon’ vein because it was
popular or because it suited the acting of one of
his ‘fellows.’ And in the next place the whole
argument that a man must be gloomy because he
writes of horrors or indulges in misanthropical
tirades is questionable. Sometimes the opposite
theory is more plausible. When we are young
and our nerves strong, we can bear excitement
which becomes painful as our spirits fail; and in
old age we like happy conclusions and soothing
imagery, precisely because we are less cheerful.
In any case, the works admittedly lose the pessimistic
tone in the later years; and the presumption
is that if Shakespeare suffered from any moral
convulsion, he was fortunate enough to be thoroughly
cured. The conjectured story, if so, is
required, if at all, by the sonnets alone. When
we make proper allowance for the degree in which
they were suggested by the contemporary fashion
and were imitations of other poets or simple variations
of commonplace themes, the necessity for
believing in any romance at all vanishes. Thus
there are not two histories, literary and personal,
which explain each other, but two histories, both
of which rest upon conjecture. Even if the conjecture
be accepted in either case, the one thing
that is clear is that the results were transitory.
I can therefore accept Mr. Lee’s opinion that the
story may be put out of account altogether when
we are trying to understand the man in his works.

  The more modest inference, however, remains.
If we can infer from his poetry that Shakespeare
could be in love, we can surely infer with equal
confidence that he could feel the emotions which
embody themselves in pessimism. He had, one
cannot doubt, satisfied the familiar condition of
acquaintance with the heavenly powers. He knew
what it was to eat his bread with sorrow and pass
his nights in weeping. No one, I suppose, ever
read the famous catalogue of the evils which made
him pine for restful death, or the reference to the
degrading influences of his profession, without
feeling that a real man is speaking to us from his
own experience. The poetical ‘intuition,’ as I
must again hold, does not supersede the necessity
for assuming the intense sensibility of which it is
surely a product. When Thackeray, in the little
poem ‘Vanitas Vanitatum,’ almost repeats Shakespeare’s
catalogue as a comment upon the saying
of the ‘Weary King Ecclesiast,’ I know from his
biography that he had gone through corresponding
trials. I infer that Shakespeare had felt the
emotions which he infused with unequalled intensity.
When we recall the main facts of his
career, the society in which he had lived, the
events of which he had been a close spectator,
and admit, to put it gently, that he was a man of
more than average powers of mind and feeling,
the _a priori_ probability that he had gone through
trying experiences is pretty strong; and though
we know none of the details we can hardly suppose
that he got through life without abundant opportunities
for putting Hamlet’s question as to the
value of life. This, indeed, suggests that the
argument may be inverted. The life, so far from
explaining the genius, makes it, as some people
have thought, a puzzle. ‘I cannot,’ says Emerson,
‘marry this fact’ (the fact that Shakespeare was a
jovial actor and manager) ‘to his verse.’ The
best of the world’s poets led an ‘obscure and profane
life, using his genius for the public amusement.’
‘Obscure’ and ‘profane’ are perhaps
rather harsh epithets; but they suggest the
problem: Is there any real incompatibility between
Shakespeare’s conduct and the theory of
life implied by his writings?

  I leave a full answer to the accomplished critic
whom I desiderate but do not try to anticipate.
Yet, keeping to the region of tolerably safe
commonplaces, I fancy that this supposed antithesis
really admits of, or rather suggests, a
natural mode of conciliation. Emerson laments,
what we all admit, that Shakespeare was not a
preacher with a mission. He had no definite
ethical system to inculcate; and, moreover, so far
as we can define his morality, it was not such as
would satisfy the ideal saint. If he clearly did
not agree with John Knox, we may doubt whether
he would have appreciated St. Francis. Martyrs
and ascetics would have been out of place in his
world. The exalted idealist despises fact: he is
impressive precisely because his doctrine is impracticable:
the ideal may stimulate what is best
in us, but it is too refined and exalted to be
accepted by the mass. But Shakespeare does not
idealise in the sense of neglecting the actual. He
is intensely interested in the world as it is, moved
by the great forces of love, hate, jealousy, ambition,
pride and patriotism. He ‘idealises’ so far
as he has a keener insight than any one into the
corresponding types of character, but he does not
care, so far as we can see, for the religious enthusiast
who retires to a hermitage or scornfully
renounces the world, the flesh, and the devil.
The men in whom he takes an interest have forgotten
that they ever renounced these powers;
they are soldiers, courtiers, and statesmen, who
give us the secret of the actual Raleighs and
Essexes and Burleighs of his own day. The
virtues of purity or self-devotion are left chiefly
to the women who are the more charming by
contrast with the world of force and passion in
which they move; though now and then, a Cleopatra
or a Lady Macbeth shows that a woman, as
Mary Stuart had sufficiently shown, can be interesting
by force of human passion. This, of
course, is to say that Shakespeare is able to interpret
in the most vivid way the characteristics of
a period of extraordinary intellectual and social
convulsion. But his interpretation shows also
individual peculiarities which distinguish him from
others who experience a similar external influence.
There is, I think, one distinct moral doctrine even
in Shakespeare, and one which is a corollary from
this position. Hamlet states it in explaining his
regard for Horatio, the man

<verse>
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please: Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.
</verse>

  In a world so full of passion and violence, the
essential condition of happiness is the power of
keeping your head. They, as he says in a remarkable
sonnet, ‘who moving others are themselves
as stone,’ are the right inheritors of
‘Heaven’s graces.’ The one character who, as
commentators agree, represents a personal enthusiasm
is Henry =v.,= and Henry =v.=’s special peculiarity
is his superlative self-command. It is
emphasised even at some cost of dramatic propriety.
Critics at least have complained of the
soliloquy—

<verse>
I know you all, and will a while uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness,
</>

in which the prince expresses a deliberate intention
of throwing off his wild companions. He is
talking to the audience, it is suggested, and should
not have so clear a theory of motives which he
would scarcely avow to himself. I fancy indeed
that many young gentlemen have indulged in
similar excuses for the process of sowing their
wild oats, and the main peculiarity of Henry =v.= is
that he really means them and keeps to his resolution.
Shakespeare obviously expects us to approve
the exile of Falstaff, and rather scandalises readers
who have fallen in love with that disreputable
person. A similar moral is implied in others of
the most characteristic plays. Shakespeare, for
example, sympathises most heartily and unmistakably
with the pride of Coriolanus and the
passionate energy of Mark Antony. They are
admirable and attractive because they have such
hot blood in their veins; but come to grief because
the blood is not ‘commingled’ with judgment.
The really enviable thing, he seems to say,
would be to unite the two characteristics; to be
full of energy which shall yet be always well in
hand; to have unbounded strength of passion
and yet never to be the slave of passion.

  If this be a characteristic impression, it is
an obvious suggestion that it is illustrated by
Shakespeare’s life. The young lad from the
country had the same temptations as Robert
Greene and Christopher Marlowe. He did not
escape them by any coldness of temperament or
inability to appreciate the pleasures of the town.
He may, as two or three stories suggest, have
given way to weaknesses, which would account for
some of the expressions of remorse in the sonnets.
Anyhow, he had retained enough prudence and
self-command to avoid the fate of a Pistol or a
Falstaff. He became a highly respectable man as
well as a world-poet. If he caught some stains
from bad company, they were, as I may leave the
critics to demonstrate, superficial. The appreciation
of pure and lofty qualities develops instead
of declines as years go on. It surely cannot be
said that an eye for the main chance is inconsistent
with the poetical character. The conventional
poet, of course, lives in dreamland, and is
an incapable man of business. But then it is the
speciality of Shakespeare, that if he could dream,
he must have been most keenly awake to a living
world of men. Interest in and insight into our
fellow-creatures is surely a good qualification for
business. Voltaire was a superlative man of
business. Goethe knew the value of a good social
position. Pope was a keen and successful money-
maker. Dickens showed a similar capacity. Such
cases may show that men can reconcile literary
genius with business aptitudes. In one respect
they may fall short of the case. They do not
imply the actual preference of ‘gain’ to ‘glory’
attributed to Shakespeare. The closer parallel is,
of course, Scott. If Scott’s enjoyment of Abbotsford
led to his ruin, while Shakespeare’s more
modest ambition was satisfied by New Place, the
difference may have been that in the earlier period
the arts of manufacturing paper credit were not
so well understood. Still, Scott’s estimate of the
really valuable element of life naturally suggests
Shakespeare. He held that the man of action was
superior to the man of letters. He wondered that
the Duke of Wellington should condescend to an
interest in the author of a few ‘bits of novels.’
He meant frankly to make money by providing
harmless amusement; but he did not fancy that
the achievements of a novelist were comparable to
the winning of battles or the making of laws.
Shakespeare, we may guess, would have agreed.
Like Scott, he held aloof from literary squabbles,
whether from good-nature or from worldly
wisdom, or from a sense of the pettiness of such
contentions. He had his literary vanity, but it was
to be satisfied by the poems and by the circulation
of the sonnets in manuscript. The plays were in
the first instance pot-boilers. He could not help
putting his power into them when the situation
laid hold of his imagination; but the haste, the
frequent flagging of interest, the curious readiness
with which he sometimes forgives a character or
accepts an unsatisfactory catastrophe, tends to
show a singular indifference. In the greatest
plays the inspiration lasts throughout; but in most
he does not take the trouble to keep up to the
highest level.

  I need not ask whether the opinions attributed
to Scott and Shakespeare are defensible. Some
people, I know, consider that ‘devotion to art’
is the cardinal virtue, and that it is better to turn
out a good poem and starve than to write down
to the public and pay your bills. That is an old
controversy; but, at any rate, Shakespeare’s view
is in character. He was never blind to the
humorist’s point of view, and humour has its
questionable ethical quality. It helps some people
to see the charm of the ‘simple faith miscalled
simplicity,’ and Shakespeare’s cordial appreciation
of a fool shows one side of an amiable disposition.
But a saint can hardly be a humorist. It is his
nature to take things seriously, and to believe
(bold as it appears) in the power of sermons. The
humorist sees with painful distinctness the folly
of the wise and the weakness of the hero and the
general perversity of fortune. He may be capable
of enthusiasm, or, at least, sympathy with the
enthusiastic; but he feels that there is always a
lurking irony in the general order of things. He
is specially conscious of the vanity of his own
ambition, and aware that his highest success makes
a very small ripple on the great ocean of existence.
Shakespeare had the good (though not rare) fortune
of living before his commentators. His head,
therefore, was not turned, and he held, we may
suppose, that to defeat the Armada was a more
important bit of work than to amuse the audience
at the Globe. He could feel, indeed, the irony
with which fate treats the great men of action.
Masterful ambitions lead to catastrophes, and in
the political world, where order and subordination
are the essentials, even the ideal hero who can be
calm in the storm, and hold his own amidst the
struggling elements, is not much the better for it
personally. Henry =v.= is still but a man made to
bear the blame of all mishap, and ‘subject to the
breath of every fool.’ He has nothing to show
for it, ‘save ceremony,’ and cannot sleep so
soundly as the vacant-minded slave. So the
Spanish minister is said to have told the king:
‘Your Majesty is but a ceremony,’ an essential
part, indeed, of the framework of the State, but
not superior in personal happiness to the ordinary
human being.

  That, it seems to me, points to the most obvious
solution of the supposed contrast between the man
and the author. Nobody was more keenly alive
to every variety of enjoyment, or more capable of
sympathising with the passions and ambitions of
all the amazingly vigorous life that was going on
around him. He can be poet and lover and
sportsman, a boon companion, and watch the
great game that is played in the court or in the
wars. He can act as they come every part in
Jaques’ famous speech, always with an eye to the
end of the strange, eventful history; take everything
as it comes, and yet ask, ‘What is it worth?’
Never forget, he seems to have replied, that life
is very short, and man very small, and the
pleasure of each stage in it always has drawbacks,
and will disappear altogether as the powers decline.
And by the time you are fifty it will be
well to have a comfortable little place of your own
in the quiet country town endeared by youthful
memories.

  If everything that I have said should be granted,
there would be great gaps in our knowledge of
Shakespeare. We could only fill them by the
help of data no longer ascertainable. We do not
know what scrapes he may have got into; only
that he must have got out of them: nor how
much he cared for his wife and children, or how
he behaved in business transactions, or whether he
was too obsequious to his patrons. If such questions
could be answered we might know a great
deal more of him. Yet I think also that some very
distinct personal qualities are sufficiently implied.
Shakespeare’s life suggests a problem. We have,
on the one hand, a man abnormally sensitive to
all manner of emotions, and having an unrivalled
power of sympathy with every passion of human
nature. On the other hand, though exposed to
all the temptations of a most exciting ‘environment,’
he accomplishes a prosperous and outwardly
commonplace career. He could emerge from the
grosser element, no doubt, because his powers ot
intellect and imagination raised him above the
level of the sensualist whose tastes he sometimes
condescended to gratify. But he could not be a
Puritan, because their stern morality was radically
opposed to the æsthetic enjoyment to which he
was most sensitive. He cared little for the
æstheticism of a different and more sentimental
type, which condemns as worldly the great passions
and emotions which are the really moving forces
of the world. He sympathises far too heartily
with human loves and hatreds and political ambitions.
But then he cannot, like Marlowe or
Chapman, sympathise unequivocally with the
heroic when it becomes excessive and over-strained.
The power of humour keeps him from the bombastic
and the affected, and he sees the facts of
life too clearly not to be aware of the vanity of
human wishes, the disappointments of successful
ambition and the emptiness of its supposed rewards.
He is profoundly conscious of the pettiness of
human life and of the irony of fate—of which,
indeed, he had plenty of instances before him.
This, I fancy, implies personal characteristics
which fall in very well, so far as they can be
grasped, with what we know of the life. Be a
Romeo while you can; love is delightful when
you are young; only, think twice before you buy
your dram of poison. As you grow older be a
soldier, a hero, or a statesman, or, if you can be
nothing better, be a playwright, so long as the
inspiration comes with spontaneous and overpowering
force. But always remember to keep
your passions in check, and don’t forget that the
prize, even if you win it, may turn to ashes in
your mouth. Fate is always playing ugly tricks,
punishing the reckless, and exposing illusions.
The struggle is fascinating while it lasts because
it rouses the energies; but when the energies
decay the position which it has won loses its
charm. Literary glory, though one may talk
about it in sonnets, is a trifle. Your rivals are
many of them very good fellows, and make excellent
society; it is both pleasant and prudent to be
on good terms with them, and nothing is so contemptible
as the rivalry of authors. But, after
all, success only means a position among jealous
dependants of great men, who themselves are very
apt to get into the Tower and even to the scaffold.
When youthful passions have grown feeble, and
the delight of being applauded by the mob has
rather palled upon one, the best thing will be to
break one’s magical wand and sit down with, we
will hope, ‘good Mistress Hall’ for a satisfactory
Miranda, at Stratford-upon-Avon. Though we
can no longer write ballads to our mistress’ eye-
brow, we can heartily appreciate gentle, pure and
obedient womanhood, and may hope that some
specimens may be found, while we still enjoy a
chat and a convivial meeting with an old theatrical
friend. This view of life suggests, I think, a very
real person, and does not go beyond what is substantially
admitted by literary critics.

<chapter>

	SOUTHEY’S LETTERS<! p45>

I read somewhere the other day a contemptuous
reference to Southey’s letters. It gave me a shock,
and yet, upon reflection, I had to admit that from
a purely literary point of view it had some justification.
In spite of this, I can always turn with
pleasure to the ten volumes of correspondence.
I might justify myself by the often quoted passage
in which Thackeray contrasts Southey as the
true gentleman with the spurious article called
George =iv.= ‘Southey’s politics,’ said Thackeray,
‘are obsolete, and his poetry dead; but his private
letters are worth piles of epics, and are sure to last
among us as long as kind hearts like to sympathise
with goodness and purity and love and upright
life.’ Professor Dowden’s charming account of
Southey (in the ‘Men of Letters’ Series) is a prolonged
commentary upon the same theme. I
should be glad if I could set down my own liking
for the letters to sheer sympathy with goodness
and purity. I am aware, indeed, that it is the
fashion to drop all moral prejudices before putting
on one’s critical robes; but I have a sneaking
regard for the qualities mentioned by Thackeray
when they are not smothered under too heavy a
burthen of intellectual feebleness. Southey’s
virtues are not obscured by that defect. His
letters are the self-portraiture of a man whose
good qualities are seconded by superabundant
vivacity. I am afraid, however, that this does
not quite sum up the impression which they make.
Southey was not exactly the typical saint—the man
whose talents serve only to give lustre to the
beauty of holiness. The eulogy which I have
quoted would be equally applicable to Lamb’s
favourite Quaker, John Woolman, a touching
incarnation of simplicity and goodwill to man.
Now, Southey was no Quaker, but a man of war
from his youth up—a hard hitter and a good
hater; and such qualities, though they may be
excellent, are not simple applications of the Sermon
on the Mount. Thackeray would, of course,
have given some touches of this kind if he had
been drawing a full-length portrait, and not
simply seeking for an antithesis to his pet aversion.
Professor Dowden, I think, went a little too far
in toning down the qualities which do not exactly
fit the ideal candidate for canonisation. I am
content for my part to say that Southey reached
such moral excellence as is possible for his position.
He is good enough (if I may speak as a
member of the craft) to serve as the patron saint
of men of letters by profession, though we must
humbly confess that he would be a little out of
place in a more exalted sanctuary. A man who
lives by his pen must renounce some pretensions
to lofty morality; he cannot expect to be on a
pedestal beside the great philanthropists and prophets
and statesmen. He confesses himself to
belong to a lower class of humanity; but he may
be a good specimen of his class, as a cab-horse
may be a good cab-horse though he does not
expect to win the Derby. If he pays his bills and
is kind to his family, and does not sell his pen to
the enemy, he deserves respect in his life, and
may at least claim the usual complimentary epitaph.
Southey is interesting to me because he
represents the high-water mark in that direction
during his own generation. He is the most complete
type of the man fitted by nature for this
peculiar function, which one must sorrowfully
admit not to be the highest.

  The problem which presents itself to the professional
man of letters might be illustrated by
that most pathetic autobiography of Mrs. Oliphant
which has, I think, been rather harshly judged.
Mrs. Oliphant thought (and, as I believe, with
some justice) that, if freed from pecuniary pressure,
she could have rivalled some more successful
authors, and possibly have written a novel fit to
stand on the same shelf with _Adam Bede._ She
resigned her chance of such fame because she
wished to send her sons to Eton. It is, of course,
clear enough that, if she had sent them to some
humbler school, she might have come nearer to
combining the two aims, and have kept her family
without sacrificing her talents to over-production.
But, granting the force of the dilemma, I confess
that I honour rather than blame the choice. I
take it to be better for a parent to do his (or her)
parental duty than to sacrifice the duty to art or
the demands of posterity. Perhaps that is because
I have a low opinion of the intrinsic value of artistic
masterpieces. But I refer to Mrs. Oliphant merely
to emphasise Southey’s peculiarity. To him there
scarcely appeared to be any dilemma at all. He
says in an early letter that he has sacrificed prospects
of wealth and rank to ‘one overwhelming
propensity’; but that propensity, he adds, ‘has
made me happy and will make me immortal.’ He
gave up his chances of a seat on the woolsack for
the certainty of a place beside Milton or Spenser.
He never doubted the possibility of combining
the professional author with the inspired prophet.
Undoubtedly the feat has been performed.
Masterpieces have been written by Shakespeare
and others, who turned them out in the way of
business. But, in such cases, though the business
motive unlocks the fountain, the spring is already
full. The mind, that is, is charged with imagery
and reflection: with thoughts, as Browning puts
it, ‘self-gathered for an outbreak’ and ‘chafing in
the censer.’ Southey seems to have imagined that
preliminary accumulation was scarcely needed.
He did not need any apprenticeship before setting
up as a fully equipped teacher of mankind. ‘It is
the very nose on the face of my intellect,’ he says
quaintly, ‘that my mind is useless without its
tools.’ He can never think regularly ‘unless the
pen be in his hand.’ Then his thoughts flow as
fast as the water from ‘the rock of Horeb.’ But
without the ‘wand’—the pen, that is, to strike the
rock—the rock remains dry. If thinking and
uttering are identical, meditation and reflection are
superfluous. That partly explains Southey’s amazing
habits of business-like composition. He
divides his time with the absolute punctuality of a
city clerk between his various employments:
writing _Kehama_ before breakfast to earn ‘immortality,’
and dividing the rest of the day between
reviews, histories, and the exposition of sound
moral and political philosophy. His friend,
Landor, to whom, by his own account, poetical
composition meant nights broken by tears and
days of absorption, wondered at Southey’s facility,
and, we must suppose, contrived to avoid the
reflection that the wonder would be diminished
when the value of the results was taken into
account. People like Dante and Milton supposed
that a whole life must be devoted to a great poem;
Wordsworth felt at least that it would require an
abundant allowance of ‘wise passiveness.’ Southey
had the pleasant illusion that the only relaxation
needed was a change of labour, and that the
fertility of the mind could be preserved, not by
lying fallow, but by a rotation of crops, poetical,
political, historical, to say nothing of the multitudinous
varieties of hackwork which filled up the
interstices. It is odd, though characteristic, that
so devoted a student of literature should never
have asked himself, or fully considered, the
question, What really goes to the making of a
masterpiece?

  I find, indeed, that critics of authority speak of
Southey’s poems with respect, and weigh in their
judicial balances the relative merits of _Joan of Arc,_
and _Thalaba,_ and _Madoc,_ and _Roderick,_ and the
rest, though they do not seem to agree as to
which is the best. I venture no opinion. I once
had a friend—and a very intelligent friend—who
had _Madoc_ at his fingers’ ends. Scott read it four
times with ‘increasing admiration.’ Fox read it
aloud at night, and with the surprising result of
keeping his hearers awake for an hour beyond the
usual time. Perhaps their sleep was afterwards
the sounder. Dean Stanley was an ardent admirer
—and who am I, to say that I cannot bring my
mind even to remember the family relationships of
Madoc and Goervyl and Cadwallon, or to take
the smallest interest in the conversations of Tezozomoc
and Yuhidthiton, or to understand why
Erillyab cursed the hour in which she gave birth
to Amalahta? The most remarkable eulogy upon
Southey that I know is by Cardinal Newman. To
show how literary language can be improved he
contrasts one of Milton’s craggy choruses in
_Samson Agonistes_ with Southey’s opening verses in
_Thalaba_—‘How beautiful is night’—and decides
that Southey shows to advantage. Southey’s
verses are, of course, smoother: whether they
show a greater mastery of versification is a question
in which I fear to contradict so exquisite a
judge. Yet Newman would surely have agreed
that if Southey’s versification in general could be
compared to Milton’s as fair specimens of the two
periods, the obvious moral would be, not the improvement
but the possible degradation of poetic
dialect. A secret would seem to have been lost,
and mere facility of handling to have taken the
place of the marvellous instinct which created
Milton’s majestic harmonies. Perhaps, indeed,
Newman only intended to say what may be more
easily accepted. Southey, no doubt, writes like a
thoroughly practised craftsman; he has all the
technical skill that implies a trained sensibility
without high genius, and avoids the occasional
blunders, if he cannot approach the felicities, of
Milton’s splendid audacity.

  Apart from such technical matters, Southey’s
poetry has attracted many readers on the moral
side. Carlyle says that he recognised the ‘piety,
the gentle deep affection, the reverence for God
and man which reigned in these pieces’ (_Thalaba,
Joan of Arc,_ and so forth), ‘full of soft pity, like
the wailings of a mother, and yet with a clang of
chivalrous valour finely audible, too.’ So Professor
Dowden tells us that Southey’s heroes
embody his native stoicism; he had been an
enthusiastic reader of Epictetus in early youth,
and his great characters are models of fortitude
and self-devotion under overpowering difficulties.
I do not doubt that this ought to be felt; only it
must be confessed that it has to struggle with
certain difficulties. Boys (I can answer for one
case) used to read _Thalaba_ and _The Curse of
Kehama,_ as they read the _Arabian Nights,_ which
does not embody stoical morality. The pleasure
came from the curious stories of eccentric mythology
which Southey had extracted from his
multifarious reading. The first motive of these
poems was not the setting forth of moral ideals,
but the illustration of ancient mythologies. After
the days of childish simplicity all this ‘machinery’
is apt to reveal its comic side. Kehama, as it may
now be necessary to mention, is a wonderful
Hindoo prince, who has become an ‘almighty
man’ by performing certain rites of mysterious
efficacy. He uses his power to curse his enemy,
Ladurlad, and, with the singular shortsightedness
common in fairy stories, tries to prolong his
victim’s sufferings by endowing him with immortality
and invulnerability. The result is that
Ladurlad is always turning up in the most impossible
times and places, and, being invulnerable, can
frustrate all Kehama’s tyrannical schemes by such
singular feats as choking a supernatural sea-
monster after a week of wrestling. It becomes
quite impossible, as his eulogist admits, to ‘drop
a tear’ over Ladurlad and his amiable daughter.
They may be very virtuous, but their position is
too grotesque; and when the terrible Kehama
appears at the eight gates of Hell all at once, and
tackles the excellent god of that district, one
foresees too well the coming transformation scene.
The lofty stoicism only adds a touch of the comic
to this topsy-turvy world of the totally irrational.
Fairyland is a very pleasant region in its way, and
so is the philosophical world of ethical ideals, but
somehow they do not blend very easily. There are
certain poems of Southey’s which we can all read
with pleasure. _The Old Woman of Berkeley,_ for
example, and others in which he appears as poet-
laureate to the Devil—the genuine ‘Old Nick,’
with horns and hoofs, who found his master in
St. Antidius and sat for his portrait to the Spanish
painter, and enlivened medieval chronicles with
the quaint legends which Southey delighted to
unearth. The ballads are better, I think, than
the _Ingoldsby Legends,_ because they are less vulgar
and less elaborately funny. Southey tells us how
he first read the legend of the ‘old woman of
Berkeley’ in a chronicle chained to the upper
shelf of the neglected library in a Spanish convent,
having to stand on a chair to reach his treasure,
and how he set about his verses ‘that very evening.’
We have the genuine man of letters looking
up in playful mood, delighted by the nugget of
quaint absurdity which has enlivened his labours,
and pouring out his ballad with spontaneous and
infectious delight.

  This, however, suggests to ordinary criticism
that in the ‘epics’ the literary gentleman does not
get sufficiently out of sight. After the excellent
Joan of Arc has astonished the priests of her day
by versifying a bit of Rousseau, we have to listen
to a series of extracts from chronicles, and to
consult authorities as to the medieval methods of
warfare, which tend to damp one’s ardour, and
I humbly confess that my efforts to read later
poems have generally been frustrated by the
temptation of plunging into the notes in which
the epic poet gives his authorities. Southey’s
reading had made him familiar with much that is
now called ‘Folk-lore,’ and I turn from an affecting
incident in the _Tale of Paraguay_ to follow his
remarks upon the curious custom of the ‘couvade,’
or from a tremendous fight of Madoc with a
sacred serpent, to read an account of ‘the wonderful
docility of the snake.’ The reader of an
epic poem is clearly not in the right mood when
he is accessible to such temptations; and he infers,
rightly perhaps, that the writer must have been
equally below the imaginative tension necessary
for success. In fact, an ‘epic poem’ was already
an anachronism; though Southey tells us that all
clever young men in his day hoped to produce epic
poems. I do not know what they want to produce
now—something, perhaps, which will seem
as absurd a century hence. Anyhow, we are
content to pass Southey’s poems with the admission
that they are not so unreadable as Glover’s
_Leonidas,_ or Wilkie’s _Epigoniad._ The characteristic
point is Southey’s complacent and indomitable
faith in his own performances. There
is something sublime in his self-confidence. He
commends the judicious critic who had said that
_Madoc_ was the best English poem since _Paradise
Lost._ ‘This is not exaggerated praise, for unfortunately
there is no competition.’ _Madoc_ must,
indeed, be compared with the _Odyssey,_ not with
the _Iliad,_ but it is a good poem, and must live.
He objects to being called the ‘sublimest poet of
the age,’ for on that point Wordsworth and
Landor are ‘at least his equals.’ But this statement
is not to be suspected of ‘mock-modesty,’
as he sufficiently proves by adding that he ‘will
have done greater things than either,’ though not
because he possesses ‘greater powers.’ In fact,
there are different classes of excellence. His
mind, he admits, is wholly unlike Milton’s, whose
proper analogue is Wordsworth. For himself, he
may be fairly compared with Tasso, Virgil, or
Homer. Every generation, he observes elsewhere,
will afford some half-dozen admirers of
_Kehama,_ ‘and the everlasting column of Dante’s
fame does not stand upon a wider base.’ Meanwhile,
he points out that contemporary popularity
can only be won by compliance with the faults of
the time—a consoling doctrine which he shared
with Wordsworth and Landor. Unfortunately,
there are other roads to unpopularity besides
simple excellence. Southey, however, was able
to preserve the pleasant belief that he was
one of the few fixed stars of his time, though
differing from other stars in glory, and that
his light would be recognised through the ages
to come.

  This failing, if it be rightly called a failing, is
clearly an essential characteristic. If a man is to
be condemned because he has a calm conviction
of his own undeniable merits, no case can be made
out for Southey. His self-confidence is written in
the very character of his face. He fancies that
his friend Bedford may attribute one of his
humours to the ‘cut of his nose.’ Certainly, it
is impossible to look at Southey’s portrait without
admitting that a man with such a nose was predestined
to a dogmatic self-complacency. He
was strikingly handsome, and Byron, we know,
said that he would almost have written Southey’s
_Sapphics_ to have such a head upon his shoulders;
and, though it is easy to guess what reply Byron
was really courting, the remark certainly implies
that his rival had strikingly good looks. Hazlitt
speaks of his ‘falcon glance,’ and Carlyle of his
sharp, eager, ‘militant’ expression. Another
describer speaks of his brilliant eyes, under black
brows and snow-white hair, but adds the inevitable
‘beak.’ The elder Shandy would have taken him
for an illustration of his famous study upon noses.
A man with the beak of a falcon has to go through
the world defiant, conscious that he is of a higher
than the ordinary strain; ready to pounce upon
the barn-door fowl, and sometimes, perhaps, mistaking
an eagle for a mere overgrown carrion
crow. Marmion had a falcon for his crest, with
the motto, ‘Who checks at me to death is dight!’
Southey’s might have borne the same motto.
When he meets an opponent he foresees the result
—the wretch is crushed, and will be remembered
by posterity solely as a victim to Southey’s
righteous indignation. We call the quality vanity
when we dislike it, and fail to observe how essential
a service it renders to its possessor. Would
any great thinker or great poet succeed without it?
Does it not show portentous self-confidence when
a Bacon or a Descartes proposes to reconstruct
philosophy, or when a Dante or a Milton undertakes
to give utterance to the profoundest religious
thought of his age? We judge by the event; and
if the man’s opinion of himself turns out to be
tolerably correct, we speak of his noble consciousness
of genius and his fidelity to his powers. If
the poor man has made a mistake, we make merry
over his conceit. Wordsworth’s estimate of his
own merits was confirmed in the main by the next
generation, and Southey’s became the object of
ridicule. Was not the same moral quality implied
in both cases? and why should Southey be blamed
for taking his ardent love of literature for a proof
of supreme literary genius? Ten people must try
if one is to succeed. Great, at any rate, must be
the comfort of such a possession. Vanity, like
sleep, ‘wraps a man round like a cloak ’; it is the
natural armour which fits the man of letters for
the struggle of existence. Some authors may be
simply ‘pachydermatous,’ though that is a quality
which scarcely fits the true literary temperament.
Southey, highly strung, sensitive, and ardent, was
gifted with that falcon nose and that superlative
self-esteem to comfort and support him through
failure and obloquy, and the protracted struggle
to make both ends meet. Nothing less could
have kept up his spirits through his hard-fought
career. ‘My natural spirits,’ he says in 1819, ‘are
buoyant beyond those of any person, man, woman,
or child, whom I ever saw or heard of.’ This
‘vanity,’ self-esteem, or whatever we please to
call it, is simply one aspect of the indomitable
buoyancy which enabled him to do some really
admirable work, if it led him into rash attempts
to soar beyond his powers.

  Undoubtedly such a conviction shows a weakness.
A man could hardly take himself so
seriously who had any very strong sense of
humour. But a sense of humour is hard to
reconcile with some cardinal virtues. The true
humorist sees that the world is a tragi-comedy, a
Vanity Fair, in which enthusiasm is out of place.
Southey, with a sense of humour, would have
been alive to his own smallness in the general
system of things; he would have perceived that
even a Quarterly Reviewer cannot make the great
current flow backwards, and that a drudging journalist
had no right to drape himself in the robes
of a prophet. Hopes of ‘literary immortality,’
and a place among the dead with Virgil and
Homer and Dante, are apt to strike the humorist
as illusions—mere gaseous exhalations of vanity to
be dispersed by an injection of chilling mockery.
It was happy for Southey that he had hardly more
humour than Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley
or Miss Brontë. In spite of his defect, or his
immunity, shall we say, from this morbid propensity,
Southey was certainly no prig. He could
enjoy nonsense and was proud of it, though his
nonsense, it must be confessed, is poor enough in
quality. It is amusing to read his correspondence
with Grosvenor Bedford upon his _Doctor._ Bedford
feared that Southey’s jokes might fall a little
flat in print. The success of _Tristram Shandy_
would not, he said, justify a second assumption of
the cap and bells. Southey replies by a rapturous
account of his precious manuscript: the stores of
reading which it is to display—the ‘satire and
speculation,’ the mixture of truths which require
the cap and bells with others which might beseem
the bench and the pulpit, and withal a narrative,
continuous, and yet varying from grave to gay,
‘taking as wild and natural a course as one of our
mountain streams.’ He is so delighted with his
performance that he confides his hopes to his
readers and tells them that the whole world is to
be racked by curiosity as to the authorship. He
makes cunning little plots to throw readers upon
a false scent; he imagines the ‘stir and buzz and
bustle’ at tea-tables and booksellers’ shops, and in
Holland House. It cannot be Byron’s or Moore’s,
it will be said, because it is too moral; or Wordsworth’s,
because an elephant does not cut capers
on the slack wire; or Coleridge’s, because it is
intelligible throughout; or Hazlitt’s, because it
is free from egotism and abuse of Southey and
Coleridge. Nobody is capable of such a unique
combination unless Southey be suggested; and he
is ‘buried under his own historical quartos.’ The
worthy author that is, is chuckling to himself because
he is able to interpose this marvellous production
between his stupendous labours. The
_Doctor_ was not all that Southey fancied, and yet
one is grateful for the illusions which cheered
him. Certainly, he did not make a rival to
_Tristram Shandy._ He had not the humour; nor
could even Sterne have accomplished _Tristram
Shandy_ if he had worked under Southey’s conditions.
It is easy enough to be odd, but to make
mere oddity the vehicle for true humour requires
an artistic elaboration which cannot be produced
without the leisurely thought which can wait for
the felicitous combination. Southey, in attempting
the ‘Shandy’ vein, achieves oddity and incoherence
without genuine humour; he imitates, in
Burke’s phrase, the contortions without the inspiration
of the Sibyl. But, in spite of that, the
_Doctor_ is a very delightful book; a book ‘for the
bedside,’ which is always entertaining without endangering
sleep. Like Burton’s _Anatomy,_ it is, of
course, a commonplace book in disguise. But,
besides its collection of ‘curiosities of literature,’
it has really charming interludes when Southey is
not tempted into too deliberate facetiousness. A
great author would not like, I imagine, to rest his
fame upon a perfect nursery story, and yet, if
‘literary immortality’ be desirable, the immortal
story of the _Three Bears_ is more likely to secure
that result than _Madoc_ or _Roderick._ To add a
new legend fit to take place amidst the old
legendary stories is surely a remarkable feat.
This is the gem of the _Doctor_; but it is one
outcome of a playful and tender sentiment which,
amidst some obvious defects, often shows the real
charm of Southey’s domestic atmosphere. The
frontispiece—a view of Southey’s back as he sits
in his library—is characteristic. You can see the
man in spite of the concealment almost as clearly
as if he showed his falcon beak; the neat alert
figure, not lolling, but sitting bolt upright before
the beautiful rows of well-bound books which he
managed to collect in spite of his poverty, and
which he still affectionately fondled when the
power of reading them had gone. The correlation
of organism and environment (Southey
would have shuddered at such neologisms!) is
perfect. He is as much in his place as a Dryad
in an oak; and it is not for those who have
haunted the same regions to complain if he is a
trifle too ‘bookish.’ Southey, I must confess,
went a bit too far when he took his walks with a
book in his hands. I abhor such a practice. It
is as bad as smoking a pipe in church; it savours
of profanity to the real lovers of walks, and
suggests that Southey really liked even mountains
better on paper than in reality. One must, however,
forgive something to a thoroughbred monomaniac;
and if Southey’s talk, as De Quincey
reports, ran too much upon literature and too
little upon life, it meant no indifference or blindness
to actual events, only an acquired necessity
of looking at them through his accustomed spectacles.
To read the _Doctor_ is to spend an hour
with Southey in his library; and, if here and
there to be a little overdosed with an author’s
pedantry, yet to be made aware of his domestic
charm. There was a nursery in his house as well
as a library; and the _Three Bears_ must have been
told to the precocious boy whose early death
almost broke his father’s heart. Daniel Dove, his
hero, is not an Uncle Toby, but he sufficiently
reflects the generous and chivalrous characteristics
of his creator.

  The _Doctor,_ indeed, shows the limitations of
Southey’s intellect, which have led critics to condemn
him as a mere fossil in politics and his
enemies to denounce him as a renegade and a
timeserver. Few men were more bitterly abused
than the ‘ultra-servile, sack-guzzling laureate’
(to quote one flower of speech). Southey, of
course, took this as a compliment. ‘There is no
man,’ he says in 1816, ‘whom the Whigs and
Anarchists hate more inveterately, because there
is none whom they fear so much.’ That is the
secret. They tremble at his logic and his eloquence
and writhe under his satire. When Mr.
William Smith—a very excellent Unitarian and a
conspicuous supporter of Wilberforce and Clarkson—
called Southey a renegade, Southey retorted
‘by branding him on the forehead with the name
of slanderer.’ ‘Salve the mark as you will, sir,
it is ineffaceable! You must bear it with you to
your grave, and the remembrance will outlast
your epitaph.’ The pamphlet in which this
occurs was considered by Southey and his friends
as a triumphant and dignified vindication of his
fame; and ends by a ‘scathing’ passage in which
Southey sees by anticipation his own life in a
biographical dictionary, and ‘a certain Mr.
William Smith’ just dragged in at the tail of the
article as the retailer of a preposterous calumny.
Both of them have, in fact, obtained admission
to such a work; but the allusion to their conflict
does not quite confirm Southey’s prophetic view.
The characteristic thing is the way in which
Southey unconsciously evades the point. The
occasion of the controversy was the republication,
by an enemy, of _Wat Tyler,_ a performance of the
early days in which he had sympathised with the
French Revolution. Southey maintains—what no
one will now dispute—that a man of over forty
may have honestly changed opinions held at
twenty. What he fails to see is that a convert
should be charitably disposed to the unconverted.
A Protestant may become a Catholic without
reproach, but he is hardly the proper person to
propose that all Protestants should be sent to the
stake. That gave the real edge to Smith’s indignation.
Radicals were reviving the doctrines of
Wat Tyler; they were met by the suspension of
the ‘Habeas Corpus,’ the ‘Six Acts,’ and all the old
machinery of suppression. The loudest advocate
for applying the scourge was precisely the author
of _Wat Tyler._ His letters are full of the wrath
roused by Cobbett and ‘orator Hunt’ and the
Radical Press. ‘I would have the Anarchists
under weigh for Botany Bay or in prison within
a month after the meeting of Parliament,’ he
says; and in the _Quarterly Review_ he did his
utmost to stimulate the fears of the Tory rulers.
He urged the amiable Wilberforce to take the
side of severity. In his own opinion he is quite
consistent, because the persons who now advocate
his old principles are diabolical miscreants, seeking
to ruin society and initiating the most dangerous
conspiracies. When he was a revolutionist, revolutionists
were all good men. Things have altered
now. The alteration was not so obvious to Mr.
William Smith. He and his friends failed to see
that they were scoundrels who ought not to be
allowed even to open their mouths. On such
matters, however, Southey knew himself to be
infallible. He was just as certain that he could
blast the fame of Byron as that he could indelibly
brand the forehead of Mr. William Smith. Byron
and his crew were the ‘Satanic School’—as he
took occasion to point out incidentally, by way
of preface to his _Vision of Judgment._ Few people,
probably, read Southey’s ‘Vision,’ unless in illustration
of Byron’s most cutting satire; but it is
worth a glance in illustration of Southey’s own
character. Byron, in certain collateral attacks on
Southey, no doubt showed his own meaner side;
but it is curious to note that his ‘Vision’ has
an amazing superiority not only in wit—which
goes without saying—but in reverence. Southey
gives one of the quaintest of all illustrations of
the occasional transition of intense respectability
into something very like blasphemy. A devout
Christian might be expected to reflect that on the
Day of Judgment the political squabbles of the day
would lose some of their importance. Southey
might even have taken a hint from Swift’s famous
vision. ‘Jove’s’ startling declaration, ‘I damn
such fools!’ is not, I suppose, exactly orthodox,
and it is certainly misanthropical. But at least it
implies that the Deity should not be made a Tory
partisan, and that Byron’s view that on that day
George =iii.= would appear as a stupid, obstinate,
well-meaning human being is less shocking than
Southey’s calm assumption that the old king is
still to wear his crown in heaven, and Wilkes
and ‘Junius’ be sent straight to hell. A loyal
dedication to George =iv.,= as the providentially
appointed inheritor of the merits of his race, adds
a specially grotesque touch when we remember
that just at this moment that monarch’s domestic
life was becoming public property. Such blunders
are common enough. It is a very good thing to
be always on the side of virtue; but it may sometimes
lead to the error that you think you have a
kind of patent for uttering moral sentiment.

  Southey had not the philosopher’s elevation nor
the poet’s insight to see things in their true proportions.
To judge him by such standards is
simply inappropriate. When Hazlitt reproached
him as a turncoat, he had a very fair retort.
Hazlitt and he had both taken the French Revolution
to be the dawn of liberty. Hazlitt was now
worshipping Napoleon, the military despot and
the oppressor of Spain and Germany, and still
bragging of his ‘consistency.’ As Southey put it,
‘You are still looking for the sun in the east when
he has got round to the west. It is I who am
still faithful to my aspirations, but have been wise
enough to learn by experience that I was mistaken
in my facts.’ To ask which was right would be
not only superfluous but irrelevant. Southey’s
revolutionary sentiment belonged to his schoolboy
days. He was still at Westminster when the
Bastille was taken, and at Oxford during the
early part of the war. He had found out that
‘pantisocracy’ was an illusion by the time he was
of age, and was already reconciled enough to be
looking forward to an ordinary professional career.
Nobody could blame a man seriously for altering
the doctrines which had attracted him at college.
But Southey did not really change his opinions;
he only changed what he had erroneously supposed
to be his opinons. The change of his early
teacher, Coleridge, involved an intellectual elaboration:
the abandonment of the philosophy which
had satisfied his early youth, and the steeping of
his mind in the mystical doctrines discovered in
Germany. Wordsworth, when he rejected the
revolutionary teachers, went through a prolonged
spiritual crisis, and had to struggle long and grievously
before he could get his feet upon a satisfactory
rock. When Southey changed, it did not
even occur to him that he was changing at all.
He did not alter his philosophical creed, because
he had no philosophical creed to alter. He got
on very well, as most of us do, without one. He
does not know much about metaphysics, as he
admits, at twenty-one, but he has quite enough to
confute Godwin. He takes up the first handy
argument that is lying about. It will do to rap
his antagonist’s knuckles, and he does not inquire
to what else it may commit him. His son tells
us how he started as a Stoic, and then became a
Unitarian, and finally a devoted Anglican, by
imperceptible degrees. At each stage, moreover,
he was equally confident that he had possession of
the whole truth, and that his complete satisfaction
with the creed of the moment should be a conclusive
proof of its validity to everybody else. He
was content with any general principle which
would serve for a war-cry. He was not a man,
as he says, for half-measures. He was too
vehement by nature not to like good round sweeping
assertions, but he looked at the concrete
embodiment of principles, not at the abstract justification.
In his generous and impetuous youth
he worshipped Rousseau, and was carried off his
feet by the brilliant Coleridge. He did not ask
how the cosmopolitan philanthropy was to be
combined with the patriotic zeal which was equally
ingrained in the youthful Briton. They simply
lay side by side in his mind. When the Revolution
led to the Terror in France, and to suppression
of free speech in England, he inferred that
Robespierre on one side and Pitt on the other
were very bad men, and did not bother about
more general causes. He indulged for the time
in a little misanthropy in the humour of Swift;
professed to hate mankind in a mass, though he
loved individuals; and, in short, held that everybody,
except Southey, had gone mad. The
‘misanthropy’ was shallow enough, and did not for
a moment diminish his buoyancy, his interest in
life and in books, or his delight in his friends and
family. It only meant that, for the time, there
was no party to which he could swear unreserved
allegiance, and for one who is by nature a partisan
that is an intolerable position. His dislike of
‘that wretched Pitt,’ that ‘coxcombry, insolent,
empty-headed, long-winded braggadocio’ (phrases
used on occasion of Pitt’s death, but representing
his permanent view), gradually developed into
hatred, not of the tyrant but of the incompetent
War Minister. The patriotism becomes more
permanent than the republicanism. When the
Peninsular War began he had at last a cause to
swear by. Jeffrey had criticised _Thalaba,_ and
tried to crush Wordsworth (‘as well try to crush
Skiddaw,’ said Southey), and now Jeffrey and his
clique were preaching that England must be beaten
by Napoleon. This cowardice (so they thought
it) roused Southey as it roused Scott. _The Quarterly
Review,_ afterwards Southey’s mainstay, was
started to give expression to the new sentiment.
Even Wordsworth was roused to write a political
pamphlet. The war was no longer a crusade
against Jacobinism, but a war in defence of
oppressed nations. To Southey the appeal came
with especial force, because he had lived in Portugal
and was thoroughly versed in Spanish and
Portuguese literature. He looked forward, as he
declared, not merely to a resurrection of the
Spanish people, but to the creation of a federal
republic. His old and his new principles pointed
in the same direction. He dropped his ‘misanthropy’
now that he had at last a plain cause to
be supported by tooth and nail. His indomitable
buoyancy made him superlatively confident, and
having backed the winning side, he was ever afterwards
convinced that he was an infallible prophet.
He could criticise Moore or Wellington by the
light of nature; and, if things went wrong for a
time, it was always from neglect of the advice
which he would have given. The most valuable
result for us of Southey’s enthusiasm was the
famous _Life of Nelson._ Nothing could be more
characteristic. Southey’s ignorance of nautical
matters was absolute. He was, as he says, a
‘thorough landlubber,’ who just knew the binnacle
from the mainmast, and had to walk among sea-
terms as ‘a cat does in a china-pantry.’ He, of
course, had not read Captain Mahan. The
motives of Nelson’s strategy are left in judicious
obscurity, and we have to take it on faith that he
was right on any given occasion in hauling his
wind or brailing up his mainsail. Apocryphal
stories are accepted without an attempt at criticism.
But the book, in spite of an excessive ‘jingoism’
and very unworthy abuse of the French, is a classic,
because no biographer was ever more in sympathy
with his hero, or wrote more simply and directly.
Nelson’s three great commandments—obey orders,
honour the King, and hate the French as you hate
the devil—apply to warfare the principles which
Southey applied to literature. Absolute simple-minded
devotion to the immediate purpose in
hand is characteristic of both. Nelson in sight of
a French fleet and Southey opposed to a Radical
orator strike home with the same inexorable and
uncompromising zeal. Even Nelson’s vanity and
thirst for ‘glory’ recall Southey’s literary aspirations,
and, if Southey could not be a real naval
critic, he could give to perfection the essential
charm of the historic character.

  Southey’s patriotic enthusiasm imperceptibly
carried him into the Tory camp. The author of
_Wat Tyler_ would have been shocked by the
Quarterly Reviewer. Yet the change should
surely be intelligible now that we can adopt the
historical point of view. To abuse Southey as a
renegade was quite natural so long as the old
party lines were taken to mark the distinction
between right and wrong. But that theory seems
to be a little obsolete. I have lived long enough
to see a change on a larger scale which may help
to account for Southey’s supposed tergiversation.
We are told by Liberals that they adhere unflinchingly
to the immortal principles of their
creed. Still, one who was a Liberal fifty years
ago must admit that those principles have come to
support theories, especially about Government
interference, which they were once used to demolish.
Southey’s conversion was simply a crude
anticipation of the same change. It is curious to
read Macaulay’s review of Southey’s _Colloquies._
Macaulay, as usual, talks a great deal of very
sound common-sense, and makes mincemeat of
some of Southey’s amazing expositions of political
economy. Macaulay is a prophet in the school
of Adam Smith. He rejoices in a Pisgah-sight of
the blessed period when cultivation will be carried
to the top of Helvellyn, and there will be no
travelling but by steam. The one secret for
reaching the land of promise is that rulers should
leave men to manage their own affairs, and abandon
the folly of ‘paternal government’ Southey, indeed,
talked a great deal of downright nonsense.
He admits his ignorance of political economy,
which he regards as a conclusive proof that political
economy was not worth knowing. He falls
into fallacies too absurd for argument. The
distress which followed the peace was simply due
to the loss of a customer (that is, the Government)
to the amount of fifty millions a year; and
the remedy was not retrenchment but maintenance
of the war expenditure, even (as he suggests) by
building enormous ‘pyramids’ to Nelson and
Wellington. He talked, says Macaulay, as if the
taxes dropped out of heaven like the ‘quails and
manna sent to the Israelites.’ That such fallacies
could be seriously propounded is some excuse for
the arrogance of the contemporary economists.
They represent simply the illogical way in which
Southey clutched at extravagant theories as the
readiest mode of contradicting their opposites.
If, however, the _Colloquies_ abound in such absurdities,
a reader of to-day will be still more
struck by the anticipation of modern tendencies.
Southey can hardly mention Malthus without
foaming at the mouth. That was because
‘Malthus’ meant for him the doctrine that vice,
and disease were necessary checks to population;
and that the only way to suppress poverty was to
leave the poor man to starve. He denounced the
‘manufacturing system’ even in his early writings,
as the great source of evil, because it meant the
breaking up of the old social bonds, the growth of
a vast ‘proletariat,’ and the conditions under which
the rich become richer and the poor poorer, or, as
he puts it, the capitalists, like pike in a fish-pond,
eat up the smaller fish. He attacks Pitt (absurdly
enough) as responsible for the cruelties inflicted
upon children in factories, and Lord Shaftesbury,
when he took up the factory legislation, wrote to
Southey, as a disciple to one of his chief teachers.
Macaulay supposes that Southey thinks well of
Owen, simply because Owen was ‘more unreasonably
and hopelessly in the wrong than any speculator
of our time.’ Southey’s sympathy meant
really (as many of his letters show) that he held
that Owen, in spite of some shocking opinions and
chimerical hopes, was at least attacking the great
social evil—the spreading cancer of pauperism.
Now that we have ‘all become Socialists,’ we can
at least admit that Southey saw something which
was hidden from Macaulay. Southey, of course,
rushed to extremes. He is as vehement and one-
sided as Carlyle, whose _French Revolution_ he
admired and whose _Chartism_ would have been
quite to his taste. He held (as many observers
held then) that the country was oscillating between
a servile war and a military despotism. His
remedy was that Government should do its duty
and suppress discontent by improving the condition
of the poor. He rivalled the most bigoted
Tories of the day in supporting despotic measures;
but he also protested most vehemently against the
neglect of corresponding duties. He demanded
a national system of education as vigorously as he
supported the attacks upon the Press. His
theories had another side which struck Macaulay
as specially absurd. He held with Burke that
‘religion is the basis of civil society.’ Southey,
in his vehement way, takes for granted as a self-
evident ‘postulate’ that religion means the Anglican
religion, and comes painfully near to approving
that no others should be tolerated. He admits,
indeed, that the Church requires reforms. The
_Life of Wesley,_ in other ways a very charming and
characteristic book, is really designed in support
of one of his favourite schemes—the enlistment of
the Methodists as ‘Cossacks’ or irregular troops
auxiliary to the Church. His desire to found
Protestant sisterhoods to take up some of the old
functions of monastic institutions represents an
earlier phase of the movement which has since
transformed the Church of England. Southey’s
belief that the Golden Age was somehow due to
the Reformation, and that the Reformation was
also the cause of pauperism and half the social
evils of the day, is an odd instance of the way in
which he was governed by the prejudices of his
position. He hated Popery as heartily as he
hated Malthus, and yet a generation later he
would probably have followed Cardinal Manning,
who had some similar qualities of character. The
odd collection of vehement and uncompromising
prejudices which Southey took for principles
meant a hasty assimilation of doctrines which, for
good or evil, were to gain strength in the next
generation. When we can look at him simply as
a historical phenomenon, we can see how he represents
a rising force even more than a mere obstruction.
To Whigs of the Macaulay stamp he
seemed to be simply a ‘reactionary’ partisan and
a servile follower of Sidmouth or Eldon. It is
easy now to see that they would have done better
to take a hint from the enemy. He recognised
social evils, and proposed quack remedies. They
met him by denying that any remedy was wanted.
That may sufficiently explain why even in Southey’s
rash dogmatism there is something less antiquated
than in Macaulay’s optimistic confidence in the
policy of doing nothing.

  Some of his old prejudice hangs about Southey
still, and obscures some merits of the letters.
We are repelled by some of his outrageous utterances
instead of simply taking them as indications
of character. Instead of being amused, we are
tempted to the absurdity of contradicting or even
arguing. Then his directness and simplicity produce
one bad result. Southey constantly insisted
upon the doctrine, consoling for some authors,
that the secret of good writing is to be concise,
clear, and pointed, and not to think about your
style at all. ‘Style’ must come unconsciously.
You must aim at the mark without thinking about
your attitude. The method is excellent when you
are writing a plain statement of fact or argument,
and is so far applicable in letter-writing that self-
consciousness or deliberate attempts at literary
elegance is the worst of all faults. Yet really
first-rate letters should imply a certain detachment.
The writer should be able to play a little
with his subject: to tell a bit of news so as
to give the picturesque aspects; to insinuate a
humorous or melancholy reflection without falling
into sermonising; and, in short, to put into
a few lines the effect of a whole evening of spontaneous
and discursive chat. Southey, having to
squeeze in a letter between an epic and a quarterly
review, is too eager and impetuous. He goes to
the point at once like a good man of business, and
cannot give the effect of leisurely and amused
reflection. The reader has to supply a good deal
from independent knowledge, or to gather it from
the general result of the correspondence. Then
we gradually become aware of those admirable
moral qualities of which Thackeray speaks. He
takes up one burthen after another as all in the
day’s work so simply that we may fail to notice
the energy implied in his forty years of unremitting
labour. It is quite natural, when one comes
to think of it, that his brain should have given
way at last: but at any given moment he seems
to be working as smoothly and unconsciously as a
well-oiled steam-engine. There are no creaks and
groans and whinings, and one can forget that there
was any strain. So he makes few protestations;
but the old friendships go on from schoolboy days
to the end without a cloud. Though irritable
and sensitive, he seems never to have had one of
those personal quarrels which, it is to be feared,
give a zest to many literary biographies, and his
self-restraint leads us to ignore the temptations
overcome. The friendship with Coleridge alone
seems to have cooled very decidedly; but it must
be admitted that it was hard for the most methodical
of authors to preserve his affection for the
amiable poet and philosopher, who could be
systematic in nothing but in neglecting his duties
and leaving them to be discharged by his brother-in-law.
We smile at Southey’s vanity, and forget
to notice his freedom from self-conscious egotism
which provokes jealousy of rivals. Nobody could
be more generous than Southey in appreciating
eminent contemporaries, or giving a helping hand
to young men of promise. He is, it is true, rather
apt to discover ‘satanic’ propensities in his antagonists;
but he was at least a perfectly straightforward
and sincere enemy. Of all the charges
made by his enemies, the most absurd was that of
servility. He always says what he thinks, and
though he had never a year’s income in advance,
never condescended to unworthy flattery of patrons
or the public. If he estimates his work too
highly, he takes it as a mere matter of course that
he should be independent and plain-spoken. The
letters after the death of the son who was to have
inherited his genius, are almost the only ones in
which Southey allows himself to utter the strong
domestic affections in which we see, on reflection,
that he found his real happiness. Even in the
midst of this grief he is, perhaps, a little over-
anxious to insist upon his power of preserving a
stoical calm; but for once he cannot conceal the
emotions which he generally keeps in the background.
Poor Mrs. Southey, one suspects, had
a rather bad time of it with the anxieties which he
met so gallantly. She must have grudged the
purchase of that _Acta Sanctorum_ over which he
rejoices without a thought of weekly bills. When,
however, one tries to form a picture of Southey’s
life and to supply the side which he leaves in
obscurity, one begins to hope that even a journalist
may save his soul. That the letters do not
give up that secret at the first glance is, perhaps,
the reason why they are not more generally valued;
but to those who have been immersed in the same
element, it should not be difficult to supply the
gaps. He gets rather hard measure. Some
modern readers seem to like in an author precisely
the qualities which they would despise in the man.
Southey, as a gentleman to the core, was incapable
of the wayward egotism and bitter personality
which Hazlitt cherished and even turned to account
in his works. Posterity is too apt to prefer
the man who will unveil his feelings, even when
they are in themselves ignoble; and Southey’s
‘stoicism,’ honourable as it was, has perhaps
alienated rather than attracted sympathy.

<chapter>

	NEW LIGHTS ON MILTON<! p86><*>

<footnote>
1. _Milton._ By Walter Raleigh. London: Edward Arnold,
1900.

2. _Poetical Works of John Milton._ Edited after the original texts
by the Rev. H. C. Beeching. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1900.

3. _Milton’s Prosody._ By Robert Bridges. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1893.

4. _Milton’s Poems._ Edited by A. Wilson Verity in ‘Pitt Press
Series.’ Cambridge University Press, 1897, etc.

5. _Facsimile of the Manuscript of Milton’s Minor Poems preserved
in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge._ Cambridge
University Press, 1899.
</>

Political economists in former days puzzled
themselves over the attempt to find a constant
standard of value. Literary critics may congratulate
themselves upon possessing such a standard
for their own purposes in Milton’s poetry.
Many reputations have risen and set, and sometimes
risen again, while he has been shining as a
fixed star. Dryden recognised his genius in the
days of Charles =ii.=; Addison paid him homage on
behalf of the wits of Anne’s reign; Johnson’s
prejudices against the republican only emphasise
his testimony to the enduring fame of the epic
poet; and Wordsworth, while renouncing the style
sanctioned by Milton’s authority, was among the
most reverential worshippers of Milton himself.
The unsurpassed industry of Professor Masson is
a sufficient indication of Milton’s power in later
years; and we have before us ample proofs of the
loving zeal with which he is still studied. Mr.
Bridges has examined his prosody; Mr. Beeching
has edited the poetry, reproducing for the first
time the spelling and punctuation of the early
poems; a facsimile of the invaluable manuscripts
in the library of Trinity has been published under
the superintendence of Dr. Aldis Wright; and
the University Press of Cambridge has issued a
series of poetical works elaborately annotated by
Mr. A. W. Verity. The student who desires to
investigate the minutest secrets of Milton’s art
will be at no loss for an appropriate critical
apparatus. Such services perhaps deserve more
gratitude than they will get. Mr. Beeching has
made himself so well known as an appreciative
critic that we may doubt at first sight whether his
talents are employed to the best account in regulating
commas and deciding in which cases ‘wee’
is a misprint and in which a deliberate correction
of ‘we.’ Still, everything helps. The microscope
has been so useful in natural science that we are
encouraged to apply it to literature; and the
genuine lover of a great poet shrinks from no
labour which can bring out a particle of new
meaning.

  Milton has had obvious attractions for commentators
ever since Bentley’s days. His peculiarities
of spelling and grammar, his obligations to
previous literature, his geographical, astronomical,
and theological theories all call for elucidation.
Those who have come under his spell will be
grateful for help in innumerable directions. The
mass of subsidiary information supposed to be
necessary may to others suggest a certain misgiving.
The series of poems excellently edited by
Mr. Verity is intended for educational purposes,
and the notes answer exhaustively all the questions
which may reasonably occur to students. They
remind us, however, that ingenuous youth in these
days has an eye to the ubiquitous examiner. He
reads the invocation to Sabrina, and is told—most
undeniably—that it is ‘golden.’ He takes that for
granted. The examiner will not ask him for
rhetoric, but inquire, Who was the ‘Carpathian
wizard?’ What is the _locus classicus_ describing
the wizard’s wiles? Who had previously told the
story of Sabrina? The attendant spirit, he will
notice, has learnt from ‘Melibœus’ the right mode
of invoking her; and Professor Masson thinks
that this is ‘a somewhat sarcastic allusion’ to
Geoffrey of Monmouth (the ‘sarcasm,’ it must
be admitted, is carefully hidden). This suggests
the desirability of reading Geoffrey’s narrative,
and then of remarking how it was modified
by Milton in his history of England. Some
young gentlemen will wish by this time that
Sabrina had been left at the bottom of the Severn.
It is presumed that one who understands the allusions
will be so far better qualified for enjoying
the melody. We could wish to be more sure that
he will begin by his enjoyment, and not regard
the poem as a mass of pegs on which to hang
questions. We are told that English youths
ought to study English literature. That is undeniable;
but there is a way of compelling them to
study it which will make them loathe the subject
for the rest of their days. ‘Does anybody,’ we
once heard a young gentleman ask, after cramming
_Hamlet_ for such purposes, ‘does anybody
ever read Shakespeare for pleasure?’

  This, of course, is not intended to decry such
books as Mr. Verity’s. I only point out that
there is a wrong as well as a right way of using
them; and it is not for him, but for teachers, to
do their best to discourage the wrong method.
They cannot do better than by accepting the
method of Professor Raleigh. Professor Raleigh
admits that the task of literary criticism is at best
one of ‘disheartening difficulty.’ To appreciate
a great author, he says, requires knowledge and
industry, and in the end ‘it is the critic, and not
the author, who is judged by it.’ That is clearly
true if ‘appreciation’ means a reasoned estimate
of the author’s qualities. ‘An appreciation of
Milton,’ said Pattison, ‘is the last reward of consummated
scholarship’; and yet it is probable
that the unlearned John Bright ‘appreciated’
Milton in another sense as well as Pattison, and
incomparably better than Bentley. The first and
essential step is the spontaneous love of the poet
where that exists, learning and critical knowledge
may reveal new beauties and deepen the sense of
the old; to explain and justify the fully-developed
sentiment requires the knowledge and industry of
which Professor Raleigh speaks, as well as his
conspicuous impartiality and power of analysis.
Writers of all schools have felt Milton’s power.
What has changed has been, not their admiration,
but the grounds upon which they proposed to
justify it. Successive critics have tried to prove,
with more or less plausibility, that Milton’s poetry
conformed to the canons which they accepted as
orthodox. Their reasons often strike us as obsolete
—even when we accept their conclusions.
We judge not only the critic, but the code of
criticism. Professor Raleigh can hardly say anything
absolutely new in the way of eulogy upon
Milton, but he can give tenable grounds for the
faith that is in him. He can extricate the real
causes of his predecessors’ enthusiasm from the
sham reasons intended to justify it. Moreover,
though he has enlightened his judgment by studying
previous critics, he is a thoroughly independent
thinker, and accepts no dictum without
careful scrutiny. Perhaps here and there he takes
the slightly supercilious tone of the æsthetic expert
anxious to rebuff the Philistine. But he can flout
the ‘New Criticism’—whatever that may be—and,
unlike most Miltonians, he speaks with emphatic
respect of Johnson’s opinions. Professor Raleigh,
that is, values the masculine common-sense which
to many more squeamish critics has appeared to
be the embodiment of brutal iconoclasm. The
critic who can be subtle and delicate without
losing touch of Johnsonian common-sense would
represent the ideal eclecticism. Professor Raleigh
approximates at least to that desirable combination;
and he has also the merits of an admirable
style, and most commendable conciseness of
exposition.

  Professor Raleigh begins by speaking of Milton
himself. The singular simplicity and dignity of
Milton’s character could never have been quite
missed by any reader. His superb egoism is
unrivalled in literature; and Pattison gives the
obvious answer to his own rather superfluous
question, why such egoism is not offensive. It is
because Milton’s egoism is identical with consciousness
of a lofty vocation and a great responsibility.
From his earliest years his powers
were dedicated to a great cause, and his life was
governed by the desire to be worthy of his calling.
A smaller man, indeed, who claimed such a position,
might strike us as presumptuous, perhaps as
simply ridiculous. As Professor Raleigh puts it,
Milton virtually anticipated Dryden’s saying:
‘This man cuts us all out and the Ancients too.’
Milton had announced his intention of cutting
them out in one of his first pamphlets, and requested
his readers to let him ‘go on trust’ with
them for a few years. ‘His most enthusiastic
eulogists are compelled merely to echo the remarks
of his earliest and greatest critic, himself.’
They can only say, that is, that the pledge was
not disproportionate to his power, and that he
redeemed it amply. Though Milton’s mood
changed under hard experiences, the essential
Milton remains identical from boyhood to age;
and, to exhibit the man fully is also to characterise
his work. The old critics assume that epic poetry
is to be judged by certain rules equally applicable
to the _Paradise Lost_ and the _Iliad,_ and make no
more reference to Milton’s personality than to
Homer’s. Biography had not formed an alliance
with criticism. Though Johnson’s admirable
_Lives_ marked the growing importance of biographical
data, he still keeps the two subjects
apart. A poem must, of course, stand upon its
own basis. If we knew as little of Milton as we
know of Shakespeare, we might find the same
pleasure in _Paradise Lost_; and the _Comus_ would
be equally exquisite if it were anonymous. Yet
even in _Comus,_ that excellent elder brother, who
has unkindly been called a prig, speaks more
clearly when his voice becomes that of the young
poet taking up his function as the laureate of
virtue.

  In any case, biography enables us to divine
better the secret of the charm already felt. Johnson,
as even Professor Raleigh has to admit, was
a little hard upon _Lycidas._ ‘In this poem, there
is no nature, for there is no truth. . . . Nothing
can less display knowledge, or less exercise invention,
than to tell how a shepherd has lost his
companion, and must now feed his flocks alone,
without any judge of his skill in piping; and how
one god asks another god what has become of
Lycidas, and how neither god can tell. He who
thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who
thus praises will confer no honour.’ Perhaps a
young reader would really learn more from such
remarks than from the critic who simply shrieks
at them. They are so undeniable in a sense that
he may be driven to justify his pleasure by detecting
their inconclusiveness. We cannot quite
agree with Professor Raleigh’s view that the
musical lamentation may, in spite of Johnson, be
considered ‘as the effusion of real passion.’
_Lycidas_ does not convince us that Milton’s breakfast
was spoilt when he heard that King was
drowned. It is more to the purpose that Milton
was ‘thinking as much of himself as of his dead
companion.’ Lycidas was Edward King, but he
also personified the Cambridge culture struggling
against the dry scholastic stupidity of the college
authorities. The poetry in this sense represents
a genuine emotion. Milton is still steeping
his mind in literary studies, reading alternately
classical tragedy and the comedy of learned
Jonson and ‘sweetest Shakespeare,’ losing himself
in old romances, calling up

<verse>
        him that left half-told
The story of Cambuscan bold,
</>

out-watching the Bear with thrice-great Hermes;
and holding that our ‘sage and serious Spenser
. . . is a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.’
The college dons, certainly Mr. William Chappell,
represented spiritual slavery equally in literature
and theology. They embodied the obscurantism
against which he felt himself to be already set
apart as a champion of liberty. St. Peter therefore
introduces himself quite naturally in company
with Father Camus and the ‘herald of the
sea.’ Laud is the common enemy of both;
and Milton is already preparing himself, as he
puts it, to ‘blow a dolorous and jarring blast’ at
the divine command. _Lycidas_ becomes intelligible
as Milton’s utterance when ‘looking to his
equipment’ (as Professor Raleigh says) ‘if perchance
he may live to do that in poetry and
politics which King had died leaving unaccomplished.’
In his mind, the cause of Puritanism
is identical with the cause of liberal culture in
general. Mr. Verity makes the remark, natural
to a Cambridge man, that it might have been
better had Milton been sent to the great Puritan
college, Emmanuel. Its Puritanism, he thinks,
would have made Cambridge life more congenial.
At Emmanuel, I may add, he would have been
brought into relations with the remarkable set of
men known afterwards as the Cambridge Platonists.
Whichcote was nearly his contemporary,
and Cudworth, Culverwell, and John Smith a
little his juniors. With them, perhaps, he might
have ‘unsphered the spirit of Plato’ to better
purpose; and found out that there was a more
philosophical method of escaping from the ecclesiastical
tyranny of Laud than the acceptance of the
harshest Puritanic dogmatism. Milton, however,
was as little as possible of a philosophic reasoner;
and for the present his vocation meant an uncompromising
hostility to the prelates by whom
he was ‘church-outed,’ and unconditional adherence
to their most determined opponents.

  This suggests the problem discussed by previous
critics—the diversion of Milton’s energies from
poetry to politics. Pattison gave the uncompromising
view of the pure scholar. Milton’s
pamphlets, he says, now serve only as ‘a record
of the prostitution of genius to political party.
They never did any good to the cause.’ The
man who was meditating the erection of an
enduring monument was unfortunately distracted
into ‘the most ephemeral of all hackwork.’ He
was writing, in his own phrase, ‘to catch the
worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational,
and image-doting rabble.’ This sweeping condemnation
is pleasantly characteristic of the critic;
and, moreover, expresses what most readers feel.
If we were able to exchange all the prose pamphlets
for another _Comus_ or a ‘Christmas Hymn,’ the
modern world would certainly be the gainer.
Professor Raleigh answers the complaint as Dr.
Garnett has done. No ‘dainty shy poet-scholar,’
he urges, could have given us anything half as
good as _Paradise Lost._ Milton’s purpose even in
poetry was essentially patriotic. He would not, he
said, make ‘verbal curiosity’ his end, but would
be ‘an interpreter of the best and sagest things
among his own citizens throughout this island in
the mother dialect.’ To keep Milton out of
politics, that is, we should have had to emasculate
him; and the emasculation would certainly have
been fatal to the great poems. The modern
‘stylist’ is generally an ‘interesting invalid,’ with
a voice too weak to be heard in the market-place.
We may quite agree that we would not exchange
Milton for a dozen invalids, interesting or otherwise.
But is this really the dilemma? Must we
choose between the ‘invalid’ and the savage
pamphleteer? Was Milton, because a patriot,
bound to be scurrilous? It is easy to recall the
fierceness of the time: we may possibly admit
with Professor Raleigh that the use of Latin is an
apology for abuse, and that the English tracts,
equally abusive, were written for people accustomed
to controversy in Latin. But the argument
from the ‘standard of the time,’ and the proof
that at any given period that standard was exceptionally
low, has become a trifle commonplace.
Milton’s abusiveness scandalised even his contemporaries,
and their reproofs extorted from him a
sufficiently lame apology. Some people could
carry on controversies decently even in those days;
and we might have hoped that a man distinguished
above all men for lofty self-respect would have set
a good example instead of sanctioning a bad practice.
Milton might have taken a lesson from
Hooker, who wrote in the spirit of his famous
saying: ‘Your next argument consists of railing
and of reasons; to your railing I say nothing; to
your reasons I say what follows.’ Milton never
perceives the immense advantage which railing
gives to the man who can reply by ignoring it.
Therefore he allows a controversy about the rights
of Englishmen to degenerate into a squabble about
Morus’s behaviour to a cookmaid. He is, as
Pattison says, like a blind Ajax castigating sheep
instead of the Achæans. It is quite true that we
still see the Ajax, though his blows might be better
directed. Milton invariably convinces us of his
absolute fidelity to his lofty vocation, and his
noblest utterances of scorn for base motives are
wrung from him by his passionate indignation.
Still his irascibility perverts his reasoning, though
it does not degrade his character.

  In Milton the personal element is always present.
It disfigures his first controversy upon
Church government. He writes upon divorce
because he has quarrelled with his wife; and upon
the freedom of the press because his writings on
divorce are censured. He cannot abstract his
cause from himself. Since he represents virtue,
his adversaries must be embodiments of vice. He
not only assumes that his enemies are in the
wrong, but he often seems to expect that they
will grant so obvious an assumption. He complains,
for example, that the ‘table of communion’
is fortified ‘with bulwark and barricado to keep
off the profane touch of the laics whilst the obscene
and surfeited priest scruples not to paw and
mammock the sacramental bread as familiarly as
his tavern biscuit.’ Why must the priest be
‘obscene and surfeited’? Simply because he is a
priest. That may be true; but the priest can
hardly be expected to admit the fact. Controversy
which starts from such assumptions must
degenerate into personal abuse. The divorce
pamphlets give the other side of the method.
Milton, arguing from his own case, thinks only off
the hardship upon the good man linked to an unworthy
partner. He complains quaintly in one
passage that on account of his chastity he has not
had that practical experience of transitory connections
which often enables a loose liver to make a
happy choice in marriage. The good man ought
to have the same opportunity for making experiments,
and it does not occur to him that the
practice might be demoralising.

  This example illustrates what, for want of a
better name, must be called Milton’s method of
reasoning. He generalises from a single case, and
that case his own. ‘Logical Milton always was,’
says Professor Raleigh; ‘he learnt little or nothing
from the political events of his time.’ The
‘logic’ which rejects experience has a strong
resemblance to the simpler process of dispensing
with logic. Milton, no doubt, was, as Professor
Raleigh calls him, ‘an idealist, pure and simple,’
and expected to realise the dream of setting up in
England a republic on the old classical model.
He may be so far compared to theorists of the
Rousseau type, who went upon _a priori_ principles
and were equally scornful of appeals to experience.
But the ‘rights of man’ doctrine admitted at least
of being set forth as a coherent system of
reasoning. Its first principles might be erroneous,
but they led by logical process to its conclusion.
Milton does not reason to his conclusions; he
simply jumps at them. He feels intensely, and
judges by his instincts. He does not formulate
theories clearly enough to make them consistent
or to distinguish between the accidental and the
universal element. The most serious disenchantment
awaited him in his political doctrine. His
strongest political passion was a really noble love
of liberty; and by liberty he understood at once
the removal of all obstacles to the full moral and
intellectual development of a Milton, and the
voluntary subordination of the nation to its
Miltons and Cromwells. The time came when
the two ideals became inconsistent. Set the
nation free, and it would restore Charles =ii.=
Milton had accordingly to propose, in the name
of liberty, that it should be permanently ruled by
an irresponsible oligarchy. He was, of course,
untouched by democratic ideas of modern growth;
but it would be hard, even on his own terms, to
construct any coherent theory out of his instinctive
aversions and enthusiasms.

  The _Areopagitica_ survives alone among Milton’s
prose works; partly because he is endeavouring
to conciliate instead of to brow-beat, and can therefore
keep his temper, and partly because Milton’s
own case happened to be the typical case. His
arguments have become commonplace, but they
are still to the point. Professor Raleigh denies
the assertion that the other pamphlets are neglected
because their subjects are obsolete. The proposal
for freedom of divorce, as he remarks, is so far
from obsolete that it is only too prominent at the
present day. Milton’s argument, however, is
obsolete enough. As Bagehot remarks, he is
frankly and honestly anxious not for the rights of
women, but for the rights of the man. He may
be dealing with modern questions, but from a
point of view so dependent upon his own prejudices
and the accidents of the day that it has ceased to
appeal to us. We may go further. ‘Neither in
politics, theology, nor social ethics,’ says Lowell,
‘did Milton leave any distinguishable trace upon
the thought of his time or in the history of opinion.’
His speculations on such topics are forgotten, because
they were never really effectual. The
theories of Hobbes may be as obsolete in some
senses as Milton’s; but no one could write the
history of political thought without acknowledging
their remarkable influence. Even Harrington—
insignificant as his actual value has become—
probably made a greater mark than Milton upon
the speculations of the day. Political theories
have an unpleasant way of falling into oblivion;
but some of them have at least counted as
affecting contemporary thinkers; and it is difficult
to say that even that is true of Milton’s
performances.

  When, therefore, Professor Raleigh says that
Milton’s prose works ‘raise every question they
touch’ even if they do not ‘advance it,’ we must
make a reservation. He approaches his problems
from a lofty point of view, and desires that politics
should be the incarnation of morality. The
tone is as rare in political writings as it is admirable.
No one can wish that Milton should be one
whit less high-minded and patriotic or less anxious
to see his ideals applied to practice. It may be as
unseemly for politicians to grumble ‘as for the
herdsmen of Admetus to complain of the presence
among them of a god.’ Still we may regret that
the god so lost his temper as to join in a mere
‘rough and tumble’; and, moreover, that he
devoted so much energy to a fray in which, as he
admits, he was fighting with his ‘left hand.’ No
one ever saw more clearly what a long and
arduous training was desirable for a great poet;
but to be a great publicist, he assumed, it was
enough to be in a towering passion. Professor
Raleigh, indeed, argues ingeniously that it was
good for Milton occasionally to give ‘a loose to
his pen and his thought.’ ‘Irresponsible paradox
and nonsense’ may be ‘a useful and pleasant recreation-ground.’
I will not argue the point.
To me it seems that fierce indignation might have
been turned to better purposes. His good genius
might have persuaded him to remain upon the level
of his ‘Areopagitica,’ and to keep clear of the personalities
which only injured his cause. But a man’s
good genius rarely secures the attention which he
deserves. Without arguing ‘might-have-beens,’
we can admit that Milton was going through an
ordeal which was not thrown away when it bore
fruit in _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson Agonistes._ The
prose works are not easy reading; but it is worth
while to study them in order to understand more
clearly the sources of the unapproachable majesty
of Milton at his best. The heroic attitude of his
last days shows the essentially noble elements of
the old passion, and is in turn made intelligible by
the previous emotion.

  When Milton at last turned to his true function,
and spoke to a backsliding generation as a
prophet of high thinking, he had to fulfil two
conditions. He was to announce a theodicy, or
in his own words ‘to justify the ways of God to
man’; and he had decided that his teaching was
to be in the form of an epic poem. He therefore
gives both a creed, as Professor Raleigh says, ‘and
a cosmical scheme of imagination.’ The creed
may not bear examination; but the scheme appears
all the more wonderful as a work of art. ‘By the
most delicate skill of architecture this gigantic filamented
structure has been raised into the air. . . .
That it should stand at all is the marvel, seeing
that it is spanned on frail arches over the abyss of
the impossible, the unnatural, and the grotesque.’
Milton’s creed, of course, is the creed of contemporary
theologians. He accepts unhesitatingly
the speculative position represented by the Westminster
divines. He holds, indeed, that most of
them were wrong in their conclusions, but he has
not the least doubt that truth is attainable by their
methods. A complete theodicy may be reached
by hitting off the right mean between Calvin and
Arminius. He is indeed so little of a philosopher
that he is hardly aware of the difficulties. When
Pope complains that ‘God the Father turns a
school-divine’ and asserts the compatibility of
prescience and freewill, he does injustice, says
Professor Raleigh, ‘to the scholastic philosophers.
There was never one of them who could have
walked into a metaphysical bramble-bush with the
blind recklessness that Milton displays.’ This is
perhaps an overstatement, for Milton is here simply
repeating a familiar dogma of scholastic and contemporary
divinity. But Pope, at any rate, is
fully justified. To introduce the Creator as a
moderator, if not as a disputant, in such discussions
is certainly offensive, and shows the characteristic
weakness of Milton’s position. He not
only accepts the dogmatism of the time at a period
when it was already losing its hold upon the
philosophic thinkers, but identifies it with the
essence of religion. He holds, as Professor
Raleigh puts it, that ‘everything is as plain as a
pikestaff’; he is convinced that there are no
mysteries in the government of the universe which
cannot be solved by our dialectical skill. The
weakness is connected with the most obvious limitations
of Milton’s intellect. In theology as in
politics he can be a thorough partisan, and supposes
with the ordinary man that the whole truth
can be packed into a dogma. That is partly due
to his characteristic want of the sympathy which
enables a man to see the world from other points
of view. He is the exact antithesis to Shakespeare,
who could throw himself into every character.
He is equally incapable of the mysticism of some
contemporaries. Professor Raleigh draws a striking
contrast between the ‘solid materialism’ of
Milton’s heroics and the spiritual vision of
Vaughan the ‘Silurist.’ The interminable controversies
of the day had led some keen intellects
to scepticism and others to the mystical view
which sees in all human dogmas and systems the
‘broken lights’ of absolute truth. Milton
remained an uncompromising and unhesitating
dogmatist. The ‘scheme of salvation’ could be
expounded as clearly and definitively as a body
of human law, though nobody but himself had
perhaps hit upon precisely the right set of
formulæ.

  Milton’s ‘theodicy,’ therefore, was already
becoming obsolete; and even his first readers
seem to have paid no attention to his merits or
defects as a justifier of Providence. Indeed, the
justification is obviously preposterous. The relations
between man and his Creator are expressed,
according to him, by a definite legal code. The
defect of Paradise Lost, says Bagehot, is that it is
‘founded on a political transaction.’ It treats of
a rebellion against an absolute, and moreover
an arbitrary, sovereign. The offence committed
by Adam and Eve is an offence against a ‘positive’
law, not against the essential principles
of morality. As Professor Raleigh puts it,
the ruler of the universe becomes a ‘whimsical
tyrant,’ issuing commands from time to time,
often utterly incapable of being carried out, and
given merely to test the submissiveness of his
subjects. The corruption of human nature is a
Christian doctrine, the plausibility of which was
admitted, as we have been lately reminded, by
such a freethinker as Huxley. With Milton it
seems to be a superficial phenomenon. His
morality usually rests upon a lofty sense of the
dignity of human nature. ‘A pious and just
honouring of ourselves,’ he says ‘is the radical
moisture and fountain-head whence every laudable
and worthy enterprise issues forth.’ He claims
for himself an ‘honest haughtiness and self-esteem,’
‘which let envy call pride.’ In _Paradise Lost,_
Satan’s pride has so strong an affinity to this
honest haughtiness that we feel his error to have
been rather of the head than of the heart. He
has miscalculated his position, and applied a noble
quality to a mistaken end. Milton, therefore,
has more real sympathy with the Stoic than with
the Christian ethics. He tells us how, during his
study of ‘Greek and Roman exploits,’ he had
‘found many things both worthily done and nobly
spoken,’ but that when he turned to the history
of the Church under a Christian emperor, he was
amazed to find it all ‘quite contrary’—nothing
but ambition, corruption, contention, combustion.
The Catholic version of Christianity, at least, is
altogether repugnant to him; and Newman
couples Milton with Gibbon (not a very similar
pair in other respects), ‘each breathing hatred to
the Catholic Church in his own way; each a
proud and rebellious creature of God; each gifted
with incomparable gifts.’ Dislike to Milton was
for that reason one of the ‘notes’ of the literary
representatives of the Oxford ‘movement.’

  If Milton took for pure Christianity a system
into which it is hard to fit the doctrines of corruption
or of humility, his heterodoxy was combined
with the most absolute faith in the historical revelation.
As his theodicy is also to be an epic, he
has to make his ‘fable’ out of the events entwined
into the whole system of Protestant theology.
The first chapter of Genesis, taken as literally and
absolutely true, gives the catastrophe to the
accomplishment of which the action of all the
characters concerned is exclusively directed. If,
therefore, we are to accept the book as a serious
theodicy, our interest must depend upon our
belief in the facts. Milton’s poem, says M.
Scherer, is intended to support a thesis. We
cannot separate the form from the contents in a
didactic work. If the thesis collapses, the poem
will cease to interest, except, of course, in its
parentheses. Pattison argues that the change in
our conceptions has already sapped our interest in
the poetry, and that, if the process continues, the
‘possibility of epic illusion’ will be lost. But
why, one asks, should the decay in our belief be
fatal to the poetry? We need not be pagans to
enjoy the _Iliad,_ and we may give up Dante’s
material hell without much loss of interest in
the _Divina Commedia._ One possible answer is
suggested in a striking passage of Ruskin.
Milton’s history, he declares, ‘is evidently unbelievable
to himself.’ The war in heaven is adapted
from Hesiod, and throughout the rest of the
poem every artifice ‘of invention is visibly and
consciously employed.’ Milton, of course, knew
when he was inventing the allegory of Sin and
Death that he was not writing history. The
visions which he created could only be a projection
upon his imagination of realities essentially
beyond human perception. But we cannot doubt
that he believed that the visions reflected realities,
and especially that the biblical story of the Fall
was true. He held his beliefs so strongly that the
tortures of the Inquisition would not have extorted
a recantation.

  The question, however, from a poetical point of
view is not whether he could believe, but whether,
in modern phrase, he could ‘visualise’ the objects
of his belief; and in this respect, the contrast with
Dante is significant. Dante can hardly have
believed that his elaborate plan of the Inferno was
precisely accurate. When a man is deliberately
contriving an imaginary world, he cannot, unless
he is actually insane, suppose that he is mapping a
real world. He must know that he is creating,
not surveying. But Dante’s vision could, at any
rate, be as distinct and definite as reality. The
circles of hell are as visible to Dante, and therefore
to us, as the streets of Florence, while
Milton’s scheme is so vague that he does not even
know clearly whether the Ptolemaic or the Copernican
system is correct. And the reason is
obvious. Dante was a profounder student of
theology and philosophy than Milton; but he
does not mix his philosophy with his statement of
facts. Throughout his journey, he is still in presence
of matters of fact, which, however startling,
are continuous with the realities of actual experience.
The problems about freewill and fore-
knowledge are not supposed to be solved by
stating the facts. He may be ‘justifying Providence’
in the sense that his personages obviously
(to him at least) deserve what they get; but he
does not profess to explain why there should be a
hell and a purgatory and a heaven. They are
there, and we must behave accordingly. Milton,
on the contrary, has to be at one and the same
time a philosopher and a historian. He tells a
story as the embodiment of a dogmatic system.
The supernatural characters must be anthropomorphic
for the purposes of poetry, but they are
also principles of a philosophy. Milton, we are
told, believed sincerely that the pagan gods were
the fallen angels. Still, the devils have almost
become personified abstractions of pride, greed,
and lust. In his early drafts of a drama, Milton
has a number of such actors as Death, Hatred,
Conscience, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Though
they become angels and devils in the actual poem,
Satan is still abstract enough to hold conversation
with Sin and Death. The devils are utterly unlike
the concrete and grotesque devils of mediæval
superstition. They not only discuss metaphysical
puzzles, but are themselves metaphysical entities.
The difficulty reaches its height when it compels
him to introduce the Creator as an actor in the
story, and leads to those strange incongruities
upon which it is needless to dwell. If we do not
accuse him of profanity, it is because he is plainly
abashed by his own daring. Most people—in
spite of enthusiastic critics—agree with Johnson
that no one ever wished _Paradise Lost_ longer.
Readers are generally bored when a poet is bored
himself; and Milton, if not bored, is clearly
writing under constraint, which has much the
same effect. His imagination, if not quenched, is
paralysed. He has to cling closely to the text,
or moves cautiously, and diverges into a commonplace
historical summary. The contrast between
the incomparable majesty of the opening, and the
flagging which begins when he ventures into
heaven, makes itself felt in spite of the continued
dignity of style.

  The criticism represented by Addison did not
trouble itself with this problem. The theodicy
dropped out of sight. Addison, indeed, though
he declines to admit with Le Bossu that every epic
poet ‘pitches upon a certain moral’ as a starting-
point, agrees that from every ‘just heroic poem’
some one great moral may be deduced. _Paradise
Lost_ teaches us the unexceptionable but simple
moral that obedience to the will of God makes
men happy. But the metaphysical problem which
Milton took himself to be solving was handed
over to the directly didactic poets. Addison
takes occasion to puff the good Whig Blackmore,
whose poem on the ‘Creation’ confuted Lucretius
and supplied the reasoning omitted in the
seventh book of _Paradise Lost._ Pope was to take
up the task of ‘vindicating’ the ‘ways of God to
man.’ He ‘vindicates’ instead of ‘justifies,’ as
Warburton explains, because he ‘has to deal with
unbelievers.’ The controversies of his day had
made it impossible to fuse the theodicy with the
epic. The epic poem therefore came to be treated,
in spite of Le Bossu’s moral, as simply a work of
art, to which the justification of Providence is
really irrelevant. Homer, Virgil, and Milton, it is
assumed, devised the ‘fables’ and the ‘machinery’
of their poems by an equally deliberate and artificial
process, though in the two first cases the
Pagan mythology, and in the last the book of
Genesis, supplied the necessary materials. The
epic poem, no doubt, was becoming slightly absurd,
as is shown by the famous recipe in Martinus
Scriblerus. Still it was accepted as the highest
form of poetry; and when Wilkie in 1757 published
the _Epigoniad,_ he was hailed by the patriotic
Hume as a ‘Scottish Homer.’ That poetry was
quite independent of the vitality of the conceptions
which it embodied, was taken to be too obvious
for demonstration. _Paradise Lost_ was accepted
on these terms simply as the noblest English
specimen of the class; and if Johnson shows a
certain sense that Milton had been too daring in
venturing into the highest regions, the audacity
was pardonable in the absence of any irreverent
intention. Ordinary readers could shut their eyes
to incongruities and refuse to see profanity where
so clearly none was intended. The critic could
take _Paradise Lost_ simply as an epic; and the
ordinary reader accepted it as a kind of gorgeous
paraphrase of the book of Genesis.

  In more modern times the difficulties presented
by the combination have obviously increased. Are
we to admit with Pattison that our interest in the
poetry will inevitably be sapped; or can we throw
ourselves back into his intellectual position sufficiently
to revive the classic for the time? We may,
it is suggested, arrive at ‘that willing suspension
of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic
faith.’ That is a difficult attitude of mind to
preserve. The truth, I think, is indicated by Professor
Raleigh in a striking remark. The more
we study _Paradise Lost_ the more we see the hand
of the author. ‘The epic poem, which in its
natural form is a kind of cathedral for the ideas
of a nation, is by him transformed into a chapel-of-ease
for his own mind, a monument to his own
genius and to his own habits of thought.’ As
the tombs of the Medici suggest—not Lorenzo
or Giovanni, but—Michel Angelo, _Paradise Lost_
suggests Milton; and ‘the same dull convention
that calls _Paradise Lost_ a religious poem might
call them Christian statues.’ The denial that
_Paradise Lost_ is a religious poem would have
startled Milton and many modern disciples. It
should perhaps be qualified by saying that it represents
Milton’s religion, and is one product of very
genuine convictions of the day which had varying
outcomes in the faiths of Cromwell and Baxter
and George Fox, and again in that of the more
narrow and bigoted Puritans. To define its
essential nature would be a very difficult and very
interesting problem. The inference, however,
remains. To read _Paradise Lost_ without a shock,
we must not only ‘suspend disbelief’ but get rid
of our positive beliefs. We must forget as far as
possible that the supernatural actors are really the
personages suggested by the names. So long as
we are in hell, that is easy. We are in presence
of gigantic figures, with heroic impulses and intelligible
motives—if only we do not ask too
closely what was the warfare in which they were
engaged. When we venture to the highest regions,
the discord is harder to resolve; and we are painfully
aware that Milton is writing ‘in fetters.’

  This, in fact, is implied in the opinion which
Professor Raleigh shares with the best critics since
Dryden’s day, that Satan is the hero of the poem.
If _Paradise Lost_ be really a religious poem, that
would seem to imply a stupendous blunder somewhere;
and yet it is inevitable. Johnson quaintly
praises Milton because ‘there is in Satan’s speeches
little that can give pain to a pious ear.’ That is
perhaps the last compliment that we could have
expected the genuine devil to deserve. In fact, it
is impossible not to feel a strong admiration for
so heroic a being, and to be even glad that he has
found so sympathetic, we might say so loving, a
portrait-painter. The first book of _Paradise Lost_
holds the very first place in English, if not in all
existing, poetry; and the marvellous passage in
which the ‘Dread Commander’ presents himself
to his comrades enthrals the imagination and casts
into utter oblivion the irrelevant question as to
the accidental goodness or badness of his cause.
He is not only himself the embodiment of heroic
endurance, but obviously deserves the absolute
confidence of his followers. He preserves his
grandeur even when he is detected in stratagems,
and rises to meet overpowering enemies

<verse>
Like Teneriff or Atlas unremov’d.
</>

We have, in short, to put aside our theological
and philosophical prepossessions; to be content
without forcing Milton’s imagery into too close a
contact with fact or asking too curiously who are
the personages and what their motives. We must
accept the transcendent grandeur of the actors,
and admit in general that the grandeur is somehow
the outcome of Milton’s own character.
His poetry is like the ‘spectre of the Brocken’—
a gigantic shape which is really a reflection of
himself.

  Yet Milton’s conviction that he is in some
sense writing true history has important results,
admirably explained by Professor Raleigh. Milton’s
method is at the opposite pole to Shakespeare’s.
He gives the general type, where
Shakespeare gives the concrete individual. He
describes the emotion excited, where Shakespeare
gives the specific details which excite the emotion.
The danger of the Shakespearean method is that
it may suggest grotesque and trivial associations
and injure the unity and symmetry of the whole.
Milton’s method involves the danger of becoming
vague and insipid. The general is apt to
be commonplace. Milton, as Professor Raleigh
points out with great clearness, is saved from this
weakness by his ‘concrete epic realities.’ Keats’s
_Hyperion,_ he says, fails by want of Milton’s ‘exact
physical system.’ The world in which the history
takes place is so shadowy and indefinite that
there is ‘nothing for the poem to hang on by.’
Milton is anthropomorphic and materialistic, and
in his posthumous treatise explicitly defends the
corresponding principles. Even in heaven events
happen in the time and place of human chronology
and geography—though at vast distances.
The angels and devils, therefore, though vast and
shadowy, have still tangible clothing of flesh and
blood. They do not become properly abstractions,
however nearly they approach that consummation.
They are but highly generalised types. Milton
has ‘no deep sense of mystery.’ His figures are
of superhuman proportions, but vagueness and
dim visions of remote perspectives take the place
of the properly mystic. There is always a firm
and definite outline behind the shadowy figure;
Death has a head and a crown, though they are
such as become a phantom. Milton’s weakness
in metaphysics, and his undoubting acceptance of
rigid dogmas, naturally go with the conviction
that he is dealing with history and fact; and, so
to speak, prevent the poetry from evaporating in
the thin air of philosophical concepts. Hence we
have one aspect of the extraordinary power in
which Milton is unrivalled. ‘His natural port,’
as Johnson puts it, ‘is gigantic loftiness’; and
every critic has to say the same and illustrate it
by the same famous passages. The famous ‘Far
off his coming shone’ is enough to recall his
special power of concentrating the most majestic
effects in a single image. It would be idle to
insist upon this specially Miltonic magic, which,
besides informing particular passages, animates
the whole poem and gives a fainter glory even
where we cannot deny the flagging power.

  How, precisely, is this effect produced? Critics
would fain get beyond generalities, and seek to
detect the finer secret of Milton’s power in the
style which reflects his idiosyncrasy. Sometimes
they investigate the mechanism of the versification
and hope to learn something from minute examination
of Milton’s stresses and ‘assonances’ and
alliterations. Professor Raleigh remarks that the
passage describing the heavenward procession, in
the seventh book, would ‘justify an entire treatise.’
A treatise would be amply justified if it could
really reveal the secret of the music. Professor
Raleigh appears, however, to admit that the prospect
is a bad one; the ‘laws of music in verse
are very subtle . . . and, it must be added, very
imperfectly ascertained.’ Are they ascertained at
all? Or, if ascertained, would they help us?
There can, of course, be no doubt that a poet
must have the musical power. Milton could not
have produced his organ-tones on a ‘scrannel
pipe’; and a character of equal grandeur might
have been combined with as little power of expression
as was possessed by Cromwell. But a consideration
of the instrument abstractedly, apart
from the performer, can tell us little. It could
only reveal that part of the charm of the poem
which depends upon the sound, and which would
be equally enjoyable in ‘nonsense verses’ or to a
foreigner ignorant of the meaning. That is a
very small part of the charm of _Paradise Lost._
The musical power is an essential condition of
uttering the thought effectually, hard as it may be
to explain the connection. But the ultimate secret
must always lie in the grandeur of the thought,
without which the best verses would be mere
jingle; and no skill in arranging sibilants and
aspirates and labials can be a substitute for the
poetic inspiration.

  When a man is moved by the ‘serious and
hearty love of truth, his words, like so many
nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command,
and in well-ordered files, as he would wish,
fall aptly into their own places.’ Milton is speaking
of his prose, and, of course, laboured his poetic
style most carefully. Only, the words followed
the thought. Professor Raleigh describes admirably
the characteristic results. He points out
how every word is of value: ‘In Milton’s versification
there is no mortar between the stones; each
is held in place by the weight ot the others, and
helps to uphold the building.’ Milton himself
says that one secret lies partly in the ‘sense
variously drawn out from one verse into another.’
‘He varies the verse,’ says Professor Raleigh,
‘till he has hardly a rule left, save the iambic
pattern, which he treats merely as a point of
departure and reference, a background or framework
to carry the variations imposed upon it by
the luxuriance of perfectly composed art.’ The
metre is like the canvas which shows through the
pictures woven in tapestry. In some early blank
verse the sentence is forced to conform to the
music; while the later Elizabethans had taken
such licences that the verse became indistinguishable
from prose. When Milton, for the first time,
applied blank verse to a great narrative poem, he
entirely reformed this laxity and reached the perfect
balance, in which the sentences and the line reciprocally
strengthen each other. No one has ever
equalled him in this. The ‘secret is lost’—as
Professor Raleigh puts it—or, rather, no later poet
has possessed the delicate instinct which arranged
Milton’s words in their ‘well-ordered files.’ The
‘secret’ was never expressible in a formula. It
means simply that Milton had a marvellous ear;
but even if we could assign certain ‘laws of verse’
which he unconsciously obeyed, we should still be
as far as ever from the power of applying them.

  Milton is a master of the ‘grand style’ because
the exquisite ear was also at the service of a
character of unique dignity, moved by intense
convictions, contemptuous of all that was mean
and trivial; hard, dogmatic, and unsympathetic,
but constantly under the stress of intense and
massive emotion, which finds its natural clothing
in his unequalled diction. The impossibility of
adopting the diction when the thought is feeble is
curiously illustrated by Milton’s influence on the
eighteenth century. Professor Raleigh declares
that ‘English verse went Milton-mad’ during the
reign of Pope, and exemplifies the remark abundantly
from such men as Thomson, Young, and
Akenside. Milton is partly responsible for the
mannerism which excited Wordsworth’s revolt.
Addison already gives the theory. A poet, he says,
who seeks for ‘perspicuity’ alone is in danger
of becoming vulgar. He must avoid that fault
by ‘guarding himself against idiomatic ways of
speaking’; and for that purpose, among other
expedients, he may use the idioms of other
languages; as Milton indulges in Latinisms, and
in grammatical inversions. To the school of
Pope ‘perspicuity’ became the cardinal virtue, as
suited to an age in which the imagination was
kept in strict bondage by the reason; and Pope’s
language was simply that of the most cultivated
society of the day. It was quite adequate for
purposes of satire or argument in verse: when,
that is, the metre was used only to give point and
smartness to the substance of prose. But when
the writer was ambitious of some more distinctively
poetic effect, he had to ‘raise his language’
by some judicious artifice. Pascal had shown how
this is done. As men do not know, he says, in
what poetic beauty consists, they invent ‘certains
termes bizarres, “siècle d’or, merveille de nos
jours, fatal laurier, bel astre,” etc., et on appelle
ce jargon beauté poëtique.’ So shepherds in
English become ‘conscious swains,’ and their
sheep are the ‘flocks that graze the verdant
mead.’ _Paradise Lost_ for such purposes was an
invaluable treasure-house, and applicable almost in
proportion to the prosaic nature of the subject.
The excellent Dr. Grainger undertook to write a
didactic poem about the sugar-cane. He had
written, so Boswell tells us, ‘Now muse, let’s
sing of mice’; and substituted ‘rats’ for ‘mice’
as more dignified. But he made a more promising
attempt when he echoed Milton—

<verse>
Spirit of Inspiration, that didst lead
Th’ Ascrean poet to the sacred mount, etc.
</>

  Thomson, says Professor Raleigh, is like a man
trying to win a wager by describing the country
without giving the plain name to a single object.
Birds, for example, become ‘the feathered nations.’
Pope, as afterwards Gray, often laid hands upon
Milton, though both were well enough read in
poetry to convey spoils from many other authors.
Gray’s excessive use of personification—the practice
which culminated in Coleridge’s favourite
‘Inoculation, heavenly maid’—illustrates the process
in another way. When Voltaire set up as an
epic poet, he had to use for his ‘machinery’ such
personages as ‘La Discorde,’ ‘La Politique,’ and
‘Le Fanatisme,’ instead of Satan and Beelzebub.
Milton’s famous precept, that poetry should be
‘simple, sensuous, and passionate,’ became impossible
when passion had to be made logical and
the abstract concept took the place of the ‘sensuous’
imagery. The peculiar jargon of Ossian
which especially irritated Wordsworth might
suggest other illustrations of the difficulty of
‘raising the language.’ The tendency of poetry
to fall into the dead flat of rhymed prose was so
strong that men who, like Thomson, had true
poetic feeling, had to catch at some distinguishing
mark, and used an artifice which could be adopted
by men like Grainger, with no poetic feeling at
all. Milton’s turn of phrase could be imitated,
and became a mere trick when divorced from the
thought. Milton, says Professor Raleigh,

<quote>
invented a system of preternaturally majestic diction, perfectly
fitted for the utterance of his own conceptions, but,
when divorced from those conceptions, so monstrously artificial
in effect that his imitators and followers, hoisting themselves
on the Miltonic stilts, brought the very name of ‘poetic
diction’ into a contempt that lasted for more than a century
and is not yet wholly extinct.
</>

We should qualify this judgment by adding that
they had to find some stilts; and that, if their
gait was awkward on the inappropriate elevation,
Milton’s magnificent power helped to preserve an
ideal of poetic excellence through a period in
which the highest sources of inspiration were
almost closed by the general attitude of thought.
I return, in short, to the point from which I
started. When we criticise Milton as a religious
poet, as the expounder of a theodicy or the creator
of an epic, we are forced to justify admiration at
the cost of condoning palpable absurdities. It
becomes evident that we must rather seek to
justify ourselves by showing what a surpassing
power was manifested in spite of innumerable
trammels imposed by the task and by the conditions
of thought which made his conception of it
inevitable. The diction is admirable because it
gives the man himself, but, for that reason, could
be effectively used by no one but himself. The
gigantic figure stands out more clearly by the help
of his last interpreter; though Professor Raleigh
would be the first to admit that to see Milton
clearly is not to explain him. The full analysis
of a personality is beyond the reach of any psychologist.
I can only say that Professor Raleigh’s
portrait is among the most lifelike in existence;
and that he has discussed many interesting topics
at which I have not been able even to glance.

<chapter>

	EMERSON.<! p130>

Many years ago I had the chance of laying up
an interesting reminiscence. Lowell took me to
visit Emerson in his house at Concord, and, as it
happened, had to leave me to perform the function
of an interviewer by myself. But instead of
recording an impression, I have to make a confession.
I was young enough at that time to
believe in great authors, and to desire to offer
acceptable incense. Unluckily, I had not read a
word of Emerson, and on the way I had innocently
confided to Lowell that I took him to be a
kind of Carlyle. I did not know that Lowell
had drawn an inimitably witty contrast between
the two, beginning—

<verse>
There are persons mole-blind to the soul’s make and style,
Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him and Carlyle.
</>

Though he did not accuse me of ‘mole-blindness,’
Lowell managed to intimate courteously that I
was somehow in the dark. The sense of my
ignorance struck me dumb. The brilliant remark
which was to show at once that I appreciated
Emerson and that my appreciation was worth
having, refused to present itself. What Emerson
thought of the intruder I know not, but our
conversation fell hopelessly flat; and I was a
happy man when Lowell relieved guard. I came
away, indeed, with a certain impression of my
host’s personal simplicity and dignity. If I had
not offered homage he had not shown the least
wish that I should fall upon my knees, and had
received me as at least a human being—a claim
upon his courtesy which he admitted like a true
democrat. Still, I was left with a problem unsolved.
Emerson’s ablest countrymen, I found,
were never tired of expressing their gratitude to
him. He had pronounced their ‘literary Declaration
of Independence.’ His first lectures had
made an epoch. He had removed the scales
from their eyes, revealed the barrenness of the
intellectual wilderness in which they had been
wandering, and given them a Pisgah-sight of a
new land ‘flowing with freedom’s honey and
milk.’ The question remained: What was the
secret of his power? Then and since I have tried
to answer it, partly by the obvious expedient of
reading his books, and partly by reading various
criticisms. I hope that I have learnt something,
in spite of grave disqualifications. I was not
impressed at the impressible age, and do not in
any case belong to the class which takes most
freely the impression of the Emersonian stamp.
Yet it may be of some interest to more congenial
disciples to know how their prophet affects one
of the profane vulgar. If some rays from the
luminary can pierce the opaque medium of my
Philistinism it will show their intrinsic brilliance.

  Matthew Arnold characteristically explained to
an American audience that Emerson was not a
great poet, nor a great philosopher, nor even a
great man of letters. For all that, he was the
friend and aider ‘of those who would live in
the spirit.’ Perhaps the phrase is a little vague,
though it, no doubt, indicates the truth. Emerson
was the founder and leader of the American
‘Transcendentalists,’ and Transcendentalists, I
suppose, were people who professed to ‘live in the
spirit.’ The name is alarming, but it represents
a very harmless and a very commendable phenomenon.
In Emerson’s youth his countrymen
were in need of a sharp intellectual shock. Their
understanding, in Coleridgean phrase—the faculty
which is useful in clearing forests and accumulating
dollars—was thoroughly wide-awake; but
their reason—the faculty which cultivates poetry
and ‘divine philosophy’—had somehow sunk into
slumber. A vague craving for better things had
been roused, though by no leader with authoritative
credentials. There were no trained professors
profoundly learned in the past history of thought
to come forward and propound new solutions of
the enigma of the universe. Active but superficially
educated youths were ready to take for a
beacon any light, ancient or modern, of which
they happened to catch a glimpse. Some enthusiasts
had vague impressions that there was such
a thing as German philosophy, and had heard of
Schelling through Cousin or Coleridge. One
swore by Pythagoras; and others took up Plotinus,
or found what they wanted in Swedenborg or in
Jacob Behmen, or set up some mystic doctrine of
their own. ‘Transcendentalism’ took its name
from Kant, but implied no familiarity with Kant’s
special metaphysical system. It meant a ‘wave
of sentiment’—a vague desire for some kind of
intellectual flying machine—some impulse that
would lift you above the prosaic commonplace
world into the charmed regions of philosophy
and poetry. Emerson had no more academical
training than his followers, and, in one sense, was
certainly not a ‘great philosopher.’ If ‘philosophy’
means such a logical system as was worked
out by Kant or Hegel, he was not a philosopher
at all. He positively disliked such philosophies.
‘Who,’ he asked, ‘has not looked into a metaphysical
book? And what sensible man ever
looked twice?’ You may collate and distil all
the systems, he declared, and you will get nothing
by it. We have as yet nothing but ‘tendency
and indication.’ Systems are merely the outside
husk, worthless except as a temporary embodiment
of the essential truth. Emerson, that is, is a
denizen of the region where philosophy is not
differentiated from poetry. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘in
all my theory, ethics, and politics, a poet’; and he
ridicules the impression that his ‘transcendentalism’
was, as some people fancied, ‘a known
and fixed element, like salt or meal’—a rigid and
definite creed. All the argument and all the
wisdom, he declares, is not in the treatise on
metaphysics, ‘but in the sonnet or the play.’
Transcendentalism, indeed, had its philosophical
affinities: it represented idealism as against
materialism; or, as Emerson occasionally puts it,
takes the side of Plato against Locke. Lockism
is the influx of ‘decomposition and prose,’ while
Platonism means growth. The Platonic is the
poetic tendency; the ‘so-called scientific’ is the
negative and poisonous. Spenser, Burns, Byron,
and Wordsworth will be Platonists; and ‘the
dull men will be Lockists.’

  The average American had fallen into such
‘Lockism,’ and Emerson, when he came to
England, found the fully-blown type flourishing
and triumphant. The ‘brilliant Macaulay,’ he
said, represented the spirit of the governing classes,
and Macaulay had explicitly declared (in his essay
on Bacon) that ‘good’ meant simply solid, sensual
benefits—good food and good clothes and material
comfort. Emerson does not argue with men in
whom the faculty of vision is non-existent or
clouded by want of use. He is content simply to
see. One result is indicated in the charming
correspondence with Carlyle. Each most cordially
appreciated the merits of the other, and Carlyle,
like Emerson, called himself a ‘mystic,’ and soared
above ‘Lockism.’ But the visions of the two took
a very different colouring. Emerson praises
_Sartor Resartus_ with a characteristic qualification.
Carlyle’s grim humour and daring flights of
superabundant imagination cover a ‘simple air,’
he complains, with a ‘volley of variations.’ You
are, he says, dispensing ‘that which is rarest, the
simplest truths, truths which lie next to consciousness,
which only the Platos and the Goethes
perceive,’ and he hopes for the hour ‘when the
word will be as simple and so as resistless as the
thought’; for the hour, that is, when a Carlyle
will be an Emerson. To find effective utterance
for these ‘simplest truths’ is, in fact,
Emerson’s special function. The difficulty of the
task is proverbial. A simple truth is a very
charming thing; but it has an uncomfortable
trick of sinking into a truism. If you try to
make it something more it is apt to collide with
other simple truths. The function of the system-
maker is to persuade the various truths to keep
the peace by assigning to each its proper limits
and stating it with due reserves and qualifications.
But that is precisely what Emerson altogether
declines to do. The most obvious peculiarity of
his style corresponds. His lectures are a ‘mosaic’
of separate sentences; each, as he put it himself, an
‘infinitely repellent particle.’ Carlyle, praising the
beauty and simplicity of his sentences, complains
that the paragraph is not ‘a beaten ingot,’ but ‘a
beautiful square bag of duckshot held together by
canvas.’ Proverbs, says Emerson, are statements
of an absolute truth, and thus the sanctuary of the
intuitions. They are, indeed, absolute statements
of truth; and for that reason, as Sancho Panza
might have pointed out, you can always quote a
proverb on each side of every alternative. Solomon
tells us to answer and also not to answer a
fool according to his folly. ‘More haste, worse
speed’ is true; but it is equally true that ‘the
early bird catches the worm.’ Emerson is a master
of the gnomic utterances which are to the cultivated
what proverbs are to the vulgar. He is well aware
that they are not always reconcilable; but it is
not his function to reconcile them. He cares
nothing for consistency. He wishes to say what
he feels to-day with ‘the proviso that to-morrow,
perhaps, I shall contradict it all.’ ‘A foolish
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . . .
With consistency a great soul has nothing whatever
to do. . . . Speak what you think now in
hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict
everything you said to-day.’ The peculiarity
seems to have annoyed his friends with a turn for
logic. Argument was for him an absurdity. He
approved as a rule for a debating society (what often
enough corresponds to the practice) that no one
should reply to a previous speaker. You thought
that you had contradicted him; he placidly
accepted both your statements and his own. He
is simply playing a different tune, not denying
that yours may be harmonious. The region of
simple truths would seem to be altogether above
the sphere in which controversy is possible. You
should never conform to a church or sect, or to
public opinion or to your own past utterances.
Leave the truths to assimilate by spontaneous
affinity.

  One charm of Emerson is due to this affable
reception of all opinions. On his first appearance
in a pulpit he is described as ‘the most gracious of
mortals, with a face all benignity,’ and preached
with an indefinite air of simplicity and wisdom.
His lectures radiate benignity and simplicity. He
has no dogmas to proclaim or heretics to denounce.
He is simply uttering an inspiration
which has come to him. He is not a mystagogue,
affecting supernatural wisdom, and in
possession of the only clue to the secret. If you
sympathise, well and good; if you cannot, you
may translate his truth into your own. The
ascent into this serene region, above all the noise
of controversy, has its disadvantages. Carlyle
complains gently that his friend is in danger of
parting from fact and soaring into perilous altitudes.
He is ‘soliloquising on the mountain
tops.’ It is easy to ‘screw oneself up into high
and ever higher altitudes of transcendentalism,’ to
see nothing beneath one but ‘the everlasting snows
of the Himalaya, the earth shrinking to a planet,
and the indigo firmament sowing itself with stars.’
Come back to the earth, he exclaims; and readers
of Emerson must occasionally echo the exhortation.
And yet, in his own way, Emerson was
closer to the everyday world than Carlyle himself;
and it is the curious union of the two generally
inconsistent qualities which gives a peculiar flavour
to Emersonian teaching. Lowell puts it admirably
in his comparison of Emerson and Carlyle:—

<verse>
C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues,
And rims common-sense things with mystical hues;
E. sits in a mystery calm and intense,
And looks coolly round him with calm common-sense;
C. shows you how everyday matters unite,
With the dim trans-diurnal recesses of night;
While E., in a plain preternatural way,
Makes mysteries matters of mere every day.
</>

  Emerson’s curious position of equilibrium between
the two worlds of mystery and broad daylight
comes out in his literary tastes. His reading
was wide but desultory. He was entirely free
from the superstition which besets the ordinary
scholar, and makes him unhappy till he has read a
book through and got it up as a student gets up
a book for an examination. Emerson looks for
inspiration, not for information. He puts a book
down as soon as it bores him, and does not care a
straw for its authenticity or for the place assigned
to it in the orthodox literary tribunals. He is
content if it ‘makes his top spin’—as he says—if,
that is, it stimulates thought or fires the imagination.
‘What is best in literature,’ he says, ‘is the
affirming, prophesying, spermatic words of men-
making poets.’ Shakespeare is to be valued not
because he is so much greater than yourself, but
because, by your receptivity of him, you become
aware of the power of your own soul. To
Emerson the value of a book is measured by its
dynamic effect upon himself. For some great
names he cared little. The list of uninteresting
writers included Shelley, Aristophanes, Cervantes,
Miss Austen, and Dickens. He thought Dante a
prodigy, but fitter for a museum than for a welcome
to your own study. In compensation he is
sometimes strangely enthusiastic about very obscure
people. In speaking of literature in England,
his appreciation of his friend Carlyle is checked by
his dislike of the Carlylian pessimism; but he
finds one consolation. There is a writer whose
mind has ‘a long Atlantic roll not known except
in the deepest water’; and who is elsewhere
declared to have a ‘vigour of understanding and
imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon’s.’
This cheering exception to British stupidity turns
out, to our surprise, to be a Mr. Wilkinson. I
confess that I am not acquainted with his works,
which, according to Emerson, ‘had thrown all
contemporary philosophy in England into the
shade.’ Wilkinson (a man of real ability, as a
biographical dictionary informs me) had impressed
Emerson by his exposition of Swedenborg. When
Emerson made Swedenborg himself one of his
representative men, Carlyle had to exclaim:
‘_Missed_ the consummate flower and divine ultimate
elixir of philosophy, say you? By heaven,
in clutching at it and almost getting it he has
tumbled into Bedlam!’ Emerson would apparently
reply not by denying the truth of the
remark, but by declaring it to be irrelevant.
Swedenborg, like other prophets, fell into absurdities
when he became a system-monger, and
Emerson could condemn some of the results
sharply enough. He was not the less grateful for
the inspiration, because associated with absurdities,
which might qualify the prophet for Bedlam.
Swedenborg’s leading thought, he says, is given in
Milton’s lines:—

<verse>
                       What if earth
Be but the shadow of Heaven and things therein
Each to the other more like than on earth is thought?
</>

  Swedenborg, he thinks, was the first to give a
scientific statement of the poetical doctrine of
‘symbolism.’ He had inverted the point of view
of the ‘poisonous’ kind of science. The ideal
world is the reality, and the material world should
be regarded as merely a kind of ‘picture language.’
Emerson wonders that when this fruitful seed of
thought was once sown men did not put by all
other science to work out the results. Yet people
continue to take more interest in examining every
spider, or fossil, or fungus, than in trying to
discover ‘the meaning and upshot of the frame of
things.’ It may be, he thinks, that centuries will
be required to elaborate so profound a conception.

  The impression made upon Emerson by this
doctrine appears both in his own teaching and in
numerous references to Swedenborg as one of the
greatest leaders of thought, to be classed with the
Platos and Shakespeares; and yet Emerson is
equally attracted by men to whom mysticism
would be another name for nonsense. From his
boyhood he had studied Montaigne, another of
his ‘representative men,’ of whom he speaks with
a kind of personal affection. Montaigne appears
in the _Representative Men_ as the typical ‘sceptic’;
and scepticism goes rather awkwardly with mysticism
and the imperative claims of direct intuition
of simple truths. Yet Emerson finds scepticism
congenial so far as it implies toleration. It represents
contempt for the formalism and exaggeration
of ‘bigots and blockheads’; and every superior
mind must pass through this ‘domain of equilibration.’
He delights, therefore, in Montaigne’s
hospitable reception of every conceivable variety
of opinion. Montaigne, it is true, not only begins,
but ends with doubt. ‘_Que sçais-je!_’ is his last
word. But then, it is his superlative merit to
admit frankly that there are doubts, instead of
trying to smother them. The difference seems
to be that while Montaigne remains balanced
between opposite opinions, Emerson seems to
hold that, though opposed, they may both be
true. If we can rise to a higher sphere we shall
see that they are complementary instead of contradictory.
But Montaigne has evidently another
charm for Emerson. His amazing frankness, his
delight in laying bare all his own weaknesses,
makes his _Essays_ an incomparable text-book for
the student of human nature. Montaigne has no
literary affectation; he talks rather than writes.
‘Cut his words and they would bleed; they are
vascular and alive.’ Montaigne plays no antics;
he is ‘stout and solid; tastes every moment of
the day; likes pain because it makes him feel
himself and realise things, as we pinch ourselves
to know that we are awake.’ If Emerson could
soar into mystic regions, he is equally delighted
with the broad daylight, in which you can see the
actual everyday play of human nature, stripped
bare of every sort of conventional disguise. The
man of genius, he says, must draw strength from
pure reason, and his aim from common-sense.
The two poles are equally necessary, if he is not
to be either too mean or too vague. That, again,
is one of the merits which he sees in Plato. Plato
is the ‘balanced soul.’ He combines the mystical
and the practical element. He can be transcendental,
and yet is at home in common life. He
can illustrate his philosophy from the world which
philosophers despise: ‘from mares and puppies,
from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks and
criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors,
butchers, and fishmongers.’ It is this synthesis
or equal poise between two opposite poles of
thought which stamps his genius as unique. Yet
Emerson can be equally impressed by men who
represent only one side of the antithesis. He
makes, perhaps, more references to Napoleon than
to any one except Swedenborg. Napoleon is
‘the man of the world’; ‘the idol of common
men, because he had the common qualities in a
transcendent degree. He hated sentiment and
despised ‘ideologists’; he had no moral scruples
and no magnanimity. But his supreme practical
ability, his ‘enormous self-trust,’ his power of
seeing to the heart of things, his readiness to
meet every emergency and ‘two o’clock in the
morning courage’ command our respect. ‘I find
it easy,’ says Emerson, ‘to translate all his technics
into all of mine.’ There is more philosophy in
his despatches than in the sermons of the Academy.
‘We like everything to do its office, whether it be
a milch-cow or a rattlesnake’; and Napoleon at
least represents a stupendous natural force.
Emerson was fond of reading books upon Napoleon.
They were at any rate instructive documents
in the study of character. The list of
authors recommended in his lecture upon ‘books’
is characteristic. You must, of course, read the
great poets. But his special favourites are, on
one side, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists; and on
the other, the books which give an insight into
character. Plutarch, both the _Lives_ and the
_Morals_ should be in the smallest library; Confessions
and autobiographies, Augustine, Benvenuto
Cellini, and Rousseau; the table-talks of
Luther, or Selden, or Coleridge; and books of
anecdotes are invaluable. Anybody, meanwhile,
will do for history: Hume and Goldsmith as
well as Gibbon. History represents merely the
background in which the great lives are set; and
what you should really want is to be brought into
contact with inspiring minds, not to get up dates
and external facts. Emerson is weak in criticism,
if the critic is to give a judicial estimate of a
man’s proper position in the development of
poetry or philosophy; but he can say most clearly
and forcibly what is the message which any great
writer has delivered to him personally.

  This, I think, shows how one may approach
one secret of reading Emerson himself. He combines
Yankee shrewdness in singular fashion with
the exaltation of the mystic. The mysticism is
bewildering, if not simply nonsensical, to the poor
‘Lockist’ or the average common-sense mortal.
If asked to accept it as a systematic creed, he will
declare that it is mere theosophical moonshine:
too vague to have any meaning, or meaning
something which is palpably absurd. But, then,
one may also read Emerson as Emerson read his
predecessors: for stimulus or inspiration, not as
a propounder of solid, substantial truths. We
are not to take his philosophy for a system of
truths, but for a series of vivid intuitions. His
Declaration of Independence proclaims a truth
which maybe stated in many dialects. Like its
political parallel, it asserts that every man has
indisputable rights, to be abrogated by no human
authority. But it is not aggressive or dogmatic.
It does not remind us of Fourth of July celebrations,
which treated George =iii.= like a grotesque
Guy Faux. The emancipation is to be effected,
not by iconoclasm, but by rousing the slumbering
faculties. It implies a duty to yourself, as well as
a right against your rulers. The enemy to be
overcome is the torpor which accepts traditions
and conventions as ultimate. They benumb the
soul, and make it a part of a dead mechanism,
when it should be a part of the living force which
moulds the world. You should be an active
instead of a passive agent in that process; you
must be, in his phrase, ‘self-reliant’; you must
develop your own powers and obey your instincts,
without submitting to any external rule. You
then become a ‘ripple of the stream of tendency.’
‘Beware,’ he says, ‘when the great God lets loose
a thinker on this planet.’ The new thought
represents a ‘new influx of divinity into the mind.’
The doctrine is sometimes expressed in language
learnt from the mystics. The beautiful state of
the soul is measured by its capacity for ‘ecstasy.’
Every man is capable of divine illumination, and
can be elevated by intercourse with the spiritual
world. The ‘ecstasy’ corresponds to the ‘inner
light’ of the Quakers. It recalls, as he says, ‘the
trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen,
Fox, Bunyan, Pascal, Guion, and Swedenborg.’
The ‘rapt saint,’ he declares, is the only logician;
not exhortation, not argument, becomes our lips,
but ‘pæans of joy and praise.’ He speaks of the
ecstatic state with a kind of awe in the essay on
Self-reliance as something which cannot be fully
uttered. ‘The soul raised over passion beholds
identity and Eternal causation, perceives the self-
existence of truth and right, and calms itself with
knowing that all things go well.’

  Certainly Emerson is on the threshold of mysticism.
His peculiarity is that he stops there. He
does not lose his balance. He respects common-sense,
and dreads to disturb his vague aspirations
by translating them into a definite system. He
does not wish us to swallow mystic formulas as
necessary or sufficient keys to the puzzle. He
is only saying with benevolent unction what
corresponds to Carlyle’s fierce denunciations of
cants and shams; and may even be translated
into the phraseology of the humble ‘Lockist.’
The Lockist, too, is aware of the evil of dead
‘survivals,’ and the importance of encouraging
new intellectual variations. The difference
between his prose and Emerson’s poetry is great
enough; but he may sympathise with the spirit,
at least, of the rapture with which Emerson
sets forth the blessings of intellectual independence,
and the need that an individual be
true to himself. Emerson’s version was congenial
to his audience at the time. One can
understand the nature of the stimulus, even if
we don’t quite appreciate the merits of the
‘ecstatic state.’

  In one of its aspects Emerson’s philosophy or
poetry, whichever be its proper name, has scandalised
his critics. His optimism, they think, is
irritating. The most hopeless of all consolations
is the denial that there is any need for consolation.
The latter-day philosopher prefers thorough-going
pessimism, and scornfully rejects Emerson’s futile
attempts to ignore the dark side of the world.
Undoubtedly Emerson was an unequivocal optimist.
‘My whole philosophy, which is very real,’
he said to Carlyle, ‘teaches acquiescence and
optimism.’ He laments his ‘stammering tongue
and fumbling fingers,’ but he is not going to
commit or recommend suicide. When men
degrade each other, and desponding doctrines
are spread, the ‘scholar,’ he said, in one of the
early epoch-making lectures, ‘must be a bringer
of hope, and must reinforce man against himself.’
‘Power,’ he says elsewhere, ‘dwells with cheerfulness.
. . . A man should make life and nature
happier to us or he had better have never been
born.’ All the talent in the world, he declares,
cannot save a Schopenhauer from being
odious. I confess that I do not altogether dislike
this old-fashioned creed. It suited, no doubt, the
time and place. America, it has been said, is the
land of hope; and in Emerson’s youth some
symptoms which alarm modern observers were
hardly perceptible. When he came to England
in 1847 he was shocked by the ‘tragic spectacles’
of misery and degradation in the streets of the
great towns; and thanked God that his children
were being brought up in a land where such
things were unknown. The external circumstances
help to explain the difference between him and
Carlyle, upon whom the English pauperism and
squalor had impressed the opposite lesson. But,
apart from the surroundings, optimism is clearly
of the essence of Emerson’s temperament and
philosophy. It is the teaching of the ‘ecstatic
state.’ Wordsworth’s nature-worship lifted him
to the ‘blessed mood’ in which the

<verse>
           Burthen of the mystery
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened,
</>

and enabled him to ‘see into the life of things ’
and the harmony of the universe. With Emerson
the ‘blessed mood’ becomes normal. The greatest
teachers have seen that ‘all nature is the rapid
efflux of goodness executing and organising itself.’
He frequently, it has been said, speaks as an
evolutionist before Darwin. But for him evolution
is rather emanation, and it does not mean a
blind struggle for existence, but the regular unrolling
of a divine and benevolent drama, implying
steady progress to perfection. Evil, he can
declare, is only privation. It has no real existence,
and vanishes when you can see the whole
instead of dwelling upon isolated facts. Many
philosophers have used similar words, and their
opponents reply that such sayings are words and
nothing more. To declare that this is the best or
the worst of all possible worlds, as the impartial
cynic is accustomed to suggest against both sides,
is in reality to declare the state of your own liver.
Your universe is the other side of yourself, and to
give a theory which shall be valid for every one
is to claim omniscience. Emerson, at any rate,
does not profess to argue; he simply asserts, and
the assertion comes to this, that it is possible to
take a cheerful view of things in general. That,
at least, defines the point of view from which his
writings may act as an inspiring source if not as
revelations of fact. The essays in which he
develops these doctrines most explicitly, the
‘Oversoul,’ ‘Compensation,’ ‘Circles,’ and the
like, may be futile considered as philosophical
dogmas; and there is not even a pretence of
proving their truth. They may still be regarded
as studies of the spirit in which a man may
serenely front the trials of life and find comfort
from forebodings. Emerson has been often compared
to the great stoic moralists, and like them,
he indulges in the hyperbolic and paradoxical.
Macaulay in the essay upon Bacon, in which
Emerson found the typical Lockist, suggests an
‘amusing fiction’ illustrative of the contrast.
Two travellers find a village full of small-pox.
The Baconian traveller vaccinates the sufferers.
The Stoic assures the villagers that to the wise
man disease and the loss of friends is no evil. A
merchant has lost his ship. The Baconian makes
a diving-bell and fishes up the cargo; while the
Stoic exhorts him not to seek happiness in things
outside himself. That is the difference, says
Macaulay, between the ‘philosophy of words’ and
the ‘philosophy of works.’ When Baconians
have suppressed disease and disaster, the Stoic will
doubtless have less call for his consolations.
While such things remain with us some sort of
moral discipline will have its uses; and if the Stoic
paradoxes when taken literally are hard of acceptance
by anybody who has had the toothache, they
were exaggerations of principles which have
formed noble characters and even had their utility
in the world. The exhortations of Epictetus and
Marcus Aurelius have really encouraged men who
had not yet been provided with diving-bells and
vaccination. The wise man of the Stoics is to
become independent of chance and change by
identifying himself with reason; and Emerson’s
disciple is to perceive that in all evils there is
compensation when we look upon the world as the
evolution of divine ideas. He may remind us
of another philosopher whom he resembled in
frugality, dignity, and cheerful acceptance of life.
They coincide in one significant saying. ‘A free
man,’ says Spinoza, in what has been called ‘one
of the most weighty sayings ever uttered,’ ‘thinks
of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a
meditation not of death but of life.’ So Emerson
tells us that ‘a wise man in our time caused to be
written on his tomb, “think on living.”’ We
are not to waste life in doubts and fears; and one
great mark of progress is that the old system
of meditating upon death and surrounding the
thought with terrors has gone out of fashion.
That is Emerson’s answer by anticipation to the
charge that he has not spoken sufficiently of the
terror of death.

  That you should train yourself to take evil
bravely and cheerfully is a maxim more likely to be
condemned as commonplace than as paradoxical.
The statement becomes paradoxical when we deny
the existence of evil, and immoral if it be understood
as advice to ignore instead of facing the
inevitable. Emerson certainly accepts some rather
startling positions. The first lesson of history, he
says, is ‘the good of evil’: ‘Good is a good
doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better!’ and he
illustrates the point by some remarkable cases.
The contrast of good and evil is expressed in art,
and explains its powers. ‘What would painter
do, or what would poet or saint do but for the
crucifixions and hells?’ But for death, as Mr.
Weller remarked, what would become of the
undertakers? Emerson admires great men of all
classes—‘scourges of God and failings of the
human race.’ They are all parts of the general
system:—

<verse>
If plague or earthquake break not Heaven’s design,
Why, then, a Borgia or a Catiline?
</>

  The knaves, he calmly observes, win in every
political struggle and a change of government
means delivering society from the hands of one
to the hands of another set of criminals, and the
march of civilisation is ‘a train of felonies.’ Yet
a ‘beneficent tendency’ streams irresistibly through
the centuries, even through evil agents. Once he
knew a ‘burly Boniface’ in a rural capital. This
gentleman ‘introduced all the fiends into the
town, and united in his own person the functions
of bully, incendiary, bankrupt, and burglar, and
yet he was the most public-spirited citizen. The
‘Boss,’ as he would be called in modern language,
was, at the same time, ‘a Man of Ross.’ The
moral is that his energy was good, and only
wanted to be directed to the better objects. Such
illustrations of the ‘good of evil’ are certainly
rather startling, and may explain why Emerson
has even been described as without a conscience.
Emerson, like his mystic guides, has a tendency
to what theologians call ‘antinomianism.’ The
inner world is the whole real world, and a morality
which takes outer consequences for a criterion
becomes merely prudential. Moral goodness for
him implies the harmony of the individual soul.
The man approaches perfection so far as the eyes
of his spirit are always open to the inner light,
and his whole nature acts spontaneously in conformity
with the divine will. Obedience to the
moral law is equivocal or worthless so far as it
depends upon any extrinsic motive. If imposed
from without, it so far rather savours of evil.
Virtue, to be genuine, must be the absolutely
spontaneous efflux of the character, not a mere
disguise for hopes of reward and fear of punishment.
Emerson insists upon this aspect of the
truth, till even spontaneous wickedness seems to
be better than compulsory goodness. Each man,
he says, should ‘plant himself indomitably upon
his instincts.’ A ‘valued adviser’ warned him
against trusting his instincts against venerable
traditions. Your impulses, he said, may be from
below, not from above. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘if I
am the devil’s child, I will live, then, from the
devil.’ No law, he adds, can be sacred to me but
that of my nature. That is right which is according
to my constitution, and that wrong which is
against it. Emerson therefore accepts a thorough
individualism. All associations impress limitation
by others. Each man is ‘cramped and diminished’
by his associates. He distrusted even the movements
encouraged by transcendentalism. ‘Professed
philanthropists, it is strange and horrible
to say, are an altogether odious set of people,
whom one would shun as the worst of liars and
canters.’ Temperance and anti-slavery, and so
forth, are poor things when prosecuted for themselves
as an end, though appealing to generous
motives. The reason is that all associations must
be a product of, not dependent upon, a bond.
The ‘union is only perfect when all the unities are
isolated.’ When each man sees the truth for
himself, all will come together. Reform, therefore,
even in the case of slavery, should proceed
by the gradual elevation of the human spirit, not
by direct legislation and outward agitation. When
you trust to external means instead of acting upon
the soul you become mechanical and take narrow
and distorted views of the evil. The transcendentalists,
so far as they accepted this view, were
regarded as mere apostles of ‘culture.’ They
were inclined to stand aside from active life, and
leave things to be gradually improved by the slow
infiltration of higher ideals. Emerson, says
Lowell, was a truer follower of Goethe than
Carlyle; his teaching tended to self-culture and
the development of the individual man, till it
seemed ‘almost Pythagorean in its voluntary
seclusion from commonwealth affairs.’ Emerson,
in his lecture upon the transcendentalists, accepts
and apologises for this tendency. They can afford
to stand aside from the world where even good
causes are spoilt by compromise and associated
with vulgar motives. There is, he admits, a difficulty
in keeping upon the higher levels of thought,
in retaining the faith which reveals itself in intuition
and ecstasy. Yet the world may find
room for ‘some few persons of purer fire’ to
serve as ‘collectors of the heavenly spark, with
power to convey the electricity to others.’ The
thought which the hermit ‘strove to proclaim by
silence’ will spread till it has reorganised society.
If Emerson were to be treated as a system-
maker, we might suggest that he is only accentuating
one aspect of a single truth. Virtue
certainly is not obedience to an outward law, but
the spontaneous outcome of the man’s nature.
It implies not the less the nature which fits a man
for social life. ‘Self-culture’ does not imply retreat
to a hermitage, for the most efficient culture is in
the active discharge of duties. The simple truth
requires to be limited by its correlatives. In any
case, nothing could be really less chargeable
against Emerson than an approach to ethical insensibility.
It is precisely the keenness and
delicacy of his moral sense which attracts us and
gives point to his best sentences. He is not the
man to retire to a palace of art or find in æsthetic
indulgence an anodyne to dull his sympathies with
human sorrow. He can indeed admire the
teachers who, like Shakespeare and Montaigne,
look upon morality with a certain impartiality.
Shakespeare, he rather quaintly asserts, ‘is our
city of refuge if we tire of the saints.’ But the
critic ought to show the relation between Shakespeare
and Swedenborg. Now Swedenborg’s great
merit is the ‘immolation of genius and fame at
the shrine of conscience.’ The ‘atmosphere of
moral sentiment opens to every wretch that has
reason the doors of the universe,’ and ‘all men
are commanded by the saint.’ If Emerson’s
optimism leads him to dwell upon the ‘good of
evil,’ and to see the use of ‘scourges of God’
and vulgar political scoundrels, it is because they
are for him the instruments of an essentially moral
force. He can condemn a vulgar exaltation over
mechanical continuous railways and telegraphs;
but, instead of simply denouncing them, like
Ruskin, he sees their good side, and believes that
in time they will become instruments of the world
spirit. His ‘pantheism’ is not belief in a power
superior to or indifferent to morality, but one to
which the true, the good, and the beautiful are
identical. We want something beyond Shakespeare
and Goethe. ‘We, too, must write Bibles
to unite again the heavenly and the earthly
worlds.’ The teacher who is to come will see
into the ultimate laws; ‘see to identity of the
law of gravitation with purity of heart,’ and show
that ‘duty is one thing with science, with beauty,
and with joy.’

  This, no doubt, verges upon the poetical; it is
hard of acceptance for the poor ‘Lockist,’ and can
be fully appreciated only by those who have access
to the ‘ecstatic state.’ Others must be content to
take a lower point of view. The title of one of
Emerson’s books—_The Conduct of Life_—defines
one less inaccessible aspect of his teaching. If he
has not penetrated the secret of the universe, he
can show by example what attitude and disposition
of mind can make the universe tolerable. It may
be suggested to the pessimist that as he cannot
understand the general system of things, and certainly
cannot alter it, he may as well learn how to
make the best of it. Emerson may supply useful
hints for such an enterprise. ‘The true preacher,’
he says, can ‘be known by this, that he deals out to
the people his life.’ The phrase may explain his
own secret. He had, for one thing, to depend
upon popular lecturing, a trade which, it must be
granted, has its drawbacks. He had, he complained,
to go about ‘peddling with his literary
pack of notions,’ dropping pearls before superficial
hearers, who would turn them into twaddle and
extravagance. Still, he took his mission simply
and seriously, gave what he had, and tried to
indicate ‘the ideal and holy life,’ . . . to ‘celebrate
the spiritual powers,’ in contrast to the
mechanical philosophy of the time, and ‘appeal to
the great optimism self-affirmed in all bosoms.’
His simplicity and sincerity moved congenial
hearers to aspire to regions of thought higher than
those of the counting-house or the market, and
impressed upon them at least the beauty and
dignity of Emerson’s own character. His
aphorism—it has, I fear, a twang of the popular
lecturer about it—‘hitch your waggon to a star’
sums up the moral, and the power depends as
much upon the sweetness of disposition as upon the
mystical doctrine. The charm appears in his best
poetry, in spite of its admitted shortcomings. His
characteristic want of continuity made him as incapable
of evolving a central idea as of expounding
an argument. As in prose, he often coins
exquisite phrases, but he is abrupt and fragmentary
and apt to break down both in grammar and
rhythm. A true inspiration comes as it came to
Blake in the midst of much incoherence and stammering
utterance. Few poems are more touching
than the ‘Dirge’ and the ‘Threnody,’ in which he
commemorates his brothers and the son who died
in infancy. The ‘Threnody’ recalls Wordsworth
in the simplicity and in the concluding meditation
where he finds soothing, if not fully consoling
thought. What orthodox critics may say of it
I know not, but, at any rate, few poems bring one
into so close a contact with a perfectly sweet nature,
or could show how a great sorrow should be met
by a man equally brave and tender. In the essay
upon ‘Experience’—on which, it must be confessed,
it is not easy to put any clear interpretation—he
refers again to the loss of his son. ‘Grief,’ he
says, ‘makes us idealists. The world becomes a
dream. Life is a train of moods;’ the moods
‘are many-coloured lenses which paint the world
their own hue.’ And yet the dream is somehow
the reality. The facts, as he has learnt from
Swedenborg, are only symbols. Life wears ‘a
visionary face.’ It is hard, he admits, to keep
ourselves at this mystical point of view. The poet
who is to show us the truth under the outside
world has not yet come. The prosaic person will
refuse a consolation which proposes, according to
him, to drop substantial facts for dreams and
shadows. Yet he may allow that the emotion is
in itself beautiful. If he cannot accept the optimist
view of the world, he can, perhaps, learn
from the optimist how to take the inevitable
cheerfully. Emerson admits in one essay that
Fate is a reality and has a very ugly side to it.
Yet he ends by exhorting us to ‘build altars to
the beautiful necessity’; and, without bothering
ourselves with metaphysical puzzles, to find comfort
in the thought that ‘all is made of one piece,’ and
that the Law which we dread is really ‘Intelligence,’
which vivifies nature, and somehow makes
Fate identical with Freedom. This is not remarkable
for lucidity, and to the prosaic reasoner
may seem to amount to the statement that a man
of fine moral nature may protect himself against
harsh truth by cultivating pleasant illusions. Yet
it shows how, without yielding to illusions, such a
man can make his life beautiful. The secret is
indicated in the beautiful essays upon ‘Love’ and
‘Friendship.’ In speaking of ‘Friendship,’ Emerson
becomes a little too high-flown, because he is
suspicious of even cementing friendship by actual
services. The Stoics held that friendship was only
possible for the wise man; and Emerson thinks
that it requires such ‘rare and costly’ natures that
it can seldom be realised. It is the product of
the spontaneous affinity of the soul, which must
be independent of all external circumstance or
reciprocity of kind actions. In the essay, where
he manages to give a new charm even to the
ancient topic of Love, he puts a more acceptable
theory. He speaks in a prose-poem, which
reminds us of Mr. Meredith’s ‘Love in a Valley,’
of the recollection ‘of the days when happiness
was not happy enough, but must be drugged with
the rubbish of pain and fear; for he touched the
secret of the writer who said of love—

<verse>
All other pleasures are not worth its pains;
</>

and when the day was not enough, but the night,
too, must be consumed in keen recollections; when
the head boiled all night on the pillow with the
generous deed it resolved on; when the moon-
light was a pleasing fever, and the stars were
letters and the flowers ciphers, and the air was
carved into song; when all business seemed an
impertinence, and all the men and women running
to and fro in the streets mere pictures.’ Love
may generate illusions; but it makes the strong
gentle and gives the coward heart. The lover
becomes a ‘new man, with new perceptions, new
and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of
character and aims.’ And thus love, which is
‘the deification of persons, becomes more impersonal
every day’; and the passion of Romeo
for Juliet ‘puts us in training for a love which
knows not sex nor person nor partiality, but which
seeks virtue and wisdom to the end of increasing
virtue and wisdom.’

  I do Emerson injustice in taking a few sentences
out of his fine rapture; and it would be out of
place to consider the cold-blooded criticism that a
Romeo sometimes fails to develop in this desirable
fashion. I only refer to it to indicate the
process by which, as I think, the prosaic person
may get some profit even from Emerson’s mysticism.
It may be unintelligible or false if taken
as a solid philosophy. It reveals, at any rate, the
man himself, the pure, simple-minded, high-
feeling man, made of the finest clay of human
nature; the one man who to Carlyle uttered a
genuine human voice, and soothed the profound
glooms of dyspeptic misanthropy; a little too
apt, no doubt, to fall into the illusion of taking
the world to be as comfortably constituted as
himself; and apt also to withdraw from the ugly
drama, in which the graver passions are inextricably
mixed up with the heroic and the rational,
to the remote mountain-tops of mystical reflection.
Yet nobody could be more fitted to communicate
the ‘electric shock’ to his disciples, because of his
keen perception of the noble elements of life, in
superiority to all the vulgar motives and modes of
thought, which were not the less attractive because
he could not see his way to any harmonious or
consistent system of thought.

<chapter>

	ANTHONY TROLLOPE<! p168>

Long ago, when Trollope was becoming known
as the historian of Barsetshire, I was one of his
devoted readers. Some time later I happened to
find myself alone at an inn where the literature
consisted of waifs and strays from the Tauchnitz
reprints. Among them was one of Trollope’s
novels, and I rejoiced at the prospect of a pleasant
evening. To my grievous disappointment I
suddenly broke down. My old favourite had lost
all charms. The book was as insipid as yesterday’s
newspaper. Of course I explained the
phenomenon by my own improvement in good
taste, and for a long time I held complacently that
Trollope should be left to the vulgar herd. Lately
I have begun to doubt this plausible explanation.
An excellent critic of Victorian novelists (Mr.
Herbert Paul) told us, it is true, the other day
that Trollope was not only dead, but dead beyond
all hopes of resurrection. There are symptoms,
however, which may point rather to a case of
suspended vitality. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a
very appreciative article upon Trollope, regards
his temporary obscurity as illustrating an ordinary
phenomenon. As literary fashions change, the
rising generation throws aside too contemptuously
the books which pleased its immediate predecessors,
and which will again interest its successors.
Trollope, he thinks, may have for our children
the interest at least of a singularly faithful portrait
of the society of fifty years ago. Such of our
unfortunate descendants as have a historical turn
will be overwhelmed by the masses of material
provided for them; and no doubt it will be a
relief to them when weary of official despatches
and blue-books, and solemn historical dissertations,
to clothe the statistical skeleton in the concrete
flesh and blood of realistic fiction. They may
learn what the British squire or archdeacon of the
period looked like, besides ascertaining the amount
of his income and his constitutional position. In
course of such reading, they may discover that
such personages, if taken in the right spirit, are
really attractive. Nobody can claim for Trollope
any of the first-rate qualities which strain the
powers of subtle and philosophical criticism; but
perhaps it would be well if readers would sometimes
make a little effort to blunt their critical
faculty. May not an author beg to be judged by
his peers? ‘I know that I am stupid and commonplace,’
I am often disposed to say; ‘but if you
would condescend to be a little less clever for once,
you might still find something in me.’ Nobody
will listen to such an appeal; and yet if we could
learn the art of enjoying dull books, it is startling
to think what vast fields of innocent enjoyment
would be thrown open to us. Macaulay, we are
told, found pleasure in reading and re-reading the
most vapid and rubbishy novels. Trollope’s
novels are far above that level; and though the
rising generation is so brilliant that it can hardly
enjoy them without a certain condescension, the
condescension might be repaid.

  If any one is disposed to cultivate the frame of
mind appropriate for Trollope he should begin by
reading the _Autobiography._ That will put his
mind in the proper key. Trollope indeed gives
fair notice that he does not mean to give us a
‘record of his inner life.’ He is not about to turn
himself inside out in the manner of Rousseau. He
must, no doubt, like all of us, have had an ‘inner
life,’ though one can hardly suppose that it presented
any of the strange phenomena which delight
the student of morbid psychology. He professes
to tell us only such facts as might have been seen
by an outside observer. He tells us, however,
enough to suggest matter for speculation to
persons interested in education. Nobody ever
met the adult Trollope in the flesh without
receiving one impression. Henry =viii.,= we are
told—and it is one of the few statements which
make that monarch attractive—‘loved a man.’
If so, he would clearly have loved Trollope. In
person, Trollope resembled the ideal beefeater;
square and sturdy, and as downright as a box on
the ear. The simple, masculine character revealed
itself in every lineament and gesture. His talk
was as hearty and boisterous as a gust of a north-easter—
a Kingsley north-easter, that is; not
blighting, but bracing and genial. The first time
I met him was in a low room, where he was talking
with a friend almost as square and sturdy as
himself. It seemed as if the roof was in danger
of being blown off by the vigour of the conversational
blasts. And yet, if I remember rightly,
they were not disputing, but simply competing in
the utterance of a perfectly harmless sentiment in
which they cordially agreed. A talker of feeble
lungs might be unable to get his fair share in the
discussion; but not because Trollope was intentionally
overbearing, or even rough. His kindliness
and cordiality were as unmistakable as his
sincerity; and if he happened to impinge upon
his hearers’ sore points, it was from clumsiness,
not malignity. He was incapable of shyness or
diffidence, and would go at any subject as gallantly
as he rode at a stiff fence in the hunting-field. His
audacity sprang not from conceit, but from a
little over-confidence in the power of downright
common-sense.

  Here is the problem to which I referred. If
we inquired how such a character had been developed,
the last hypothesis which we should make
would be that it was due to such surroundings as
are described in the _Autobiography._ If one wished
to bring up a lad to be a sneak, a cynic, and a
humbug, one would deal with him as Trollope
was dealt with in his childhood. Many distinguished
men have preserved painful impressions of
their school-days. Thackeray has sufficiently indicated
what he thought of the morality of a
public school in his day. Dickens felt bitterly to
the end of his life the neglect from which he
suffered during part of his childhood. Trollope
had a more painful and prolonged experience than
either. His father was a man of such oddity and
perversity that it must have required all the son’s
filial duty in later years not to introduce him in a
novel. He would have been more interesting
as a model than the gentleman who stood for
Micawber, though certainly without Micawber’s
peculiar claims to be attractive. He was a man
of ability and learning, who had ruined good prospects
at the bar by a singular facility for quarrelling
with his bread and butter. By way of
retrieving his position, he had taken to farming,
of which he was absolutely ignorant; and when he
got into the inevitable difficulties, he set about
compiling a gigantic _Encyclopædia Ecclesiastica,_ for
which he was equally incompetent, and which
would have ruined a publisher had any such
person been forthcoming. He was most anxious,
his son assures us, to do his duty to his family,
but equally misguided in his plans for their
welfare. Anthony’s chief recollections at least
were of standing in a convenient position while his
amiable parent was shaving, so that his hair might
be pulled at any slip in Latin grammar, and of
being knocked down for stupidity by a folio Bible.
It was all meant in kindness, but only produced
obstinate idleness. The child was sent as a day
boy to Harrow, where the headmaster could only
express his horror that so dirty a little wretch
should belong to the school; and his comrades
unanimously excluded him from their society.
Then he was sent to a private school, where the
master treated him as a degraded being for faults
committed by others, and had not the manliness
to confess when he discovered his mistake. His
next experience was at Winchester, where his elder
brother thrashed him daily with a thick stick.
Being big, awkward, ugly, ill-dressed, and dirty,
he was generally despised and ‘suffered horribly.’
Then he returned to Harrow, and was at the same
time employed occasionally as a labourer on his
father’s farm. He was universally despised,
excluded from all games, and, though he ‘gravitated
upwards’ to near the top of the school, by
force of seniority, represented at the age of nineteen
the densest ignorance of his lessons attainable
even by a boy at an English public school. The
one pleasant thing that he could remember was
that he once turned against an oppressor. The
bully was so well thrashed that he had to be sent
home for repairs.

  The spirit in which Trollope took this cruelty
is characteristic. Less painful experience of the
life at a public school helped to convince Cowper
that human nature was radically corrupt, and
Shelley that the existence of a merciful Providence
was doubtful, and Thackeray that there was something
radically wrong in the social order. Trollope,
who hated tyranny as earnestly as any one, seems
only to have drawn the modest inference that the
discipline at Winchester and Harrow was imperfect;
and, for the time, he did not even go so far.
He was always, as he says, ‘craving for love,’ even
for the love of the young bullies who made his life
a burthen. He was miserable in his school-days,
because he ‘envied the popularity of popular boys.’
They lived in a social paradise from which he was
excluded. But he apparently did not think that
his exclusion was wrong. It was simply natural—
part of the inevitable and providential order of
nature. He accepted the code under which he
suffered as if it had been the obvious embodiment
of right reason. It was quite proper that poverty
and clumsiness should be despised and bullied;
that was implied in the essential idea of a public
school, and his comrades naturally treated him as
a herd of wild animals may trample upon an intruder
of an inferior species. It ‘was their nature
to,’ and there was no more to be said about it. It
is pathetic to observe the average child accepting
its misery as part of a sacred tradition; but in
Trollope’s case it had one advantage: he bore no
malice to anybody. The brother who had thrashed
him every day became, as he testifies, the best of
brothers, and Trollope cherished no resentment
against individuals or to the system. The toughness
looked like stupidity, but, at any rate, was
an admirable preservative against the temptations,
to which a more sensitive and reflective nature
would have been liable, of revolting against morality
in general or meeting tyranny by hypocrisy and
trickery.

  His start in life was equally unpromising. As
he knew no languages, ancient or modern, he
became classical usher at a school in Brussels,
with the promise of a commission in the Austrian
army. Then he was suddenly transferred to a
clerkship in the London Post Office. He was
disqualified for the new position by general ignorance
and special incapacity for the simplest
arithmetic. A vague threat that he must pass an
examination was forgotten before it was put in
execution, and Trollope characteristically takes
occasion to denounce the system of competitive
examination by which he would have been excluded.
Meanwhile he was turned loose in
London, and attempted to live like a gentleman
on £90 a year. The results are indicated by a
couple of anecdotes. A money-lender once
advanced him £4, for which, first and last, he
paid £200. This person, he says, became so
much attached to him as to pay a daily visit at
his office and exhort him to be punctual. ‘These
visits were very terrible, and can hardly have been
of service to me in the office.’ This mild remark
applies also to the visits from the mother of a
young woman in the country who had fallen in
love with him, and to whom he ‘lacked the pluck
to give a decided negative.’ The mother used to
appear with a basket on her arm and an immense
bonnet upon her head, and inquire in a loud voice,
before all his companions, ‘Anthony Trollope,
when are you going to marry my daughter?’ No
wonder that he was miserable; he was hopelessly
in debt, and often unable to pay for a dinner; he
hated his work, he says, and he hated his idleness;
he quarrelled with his superiors, who thought him
hopelessly incapable, and felt that he was sinking
‘to the lowest pits.’ At last he heard of a place
in the Irish Post Office, which everybody despised,
and was successful on applying for it, because his
masters were so glad to get rid of him. At the
same time they informed his new superior that
he would probably have to be dismissed on the
first opportunity.

  If the _Autobiography_ had been a novel, instead
of a true story, the continuation must have been
pronounced utterly improbable. No sooner does
Trollope get to Ireland than the story changes;
he sets his hand to the plough and wins the
respect of his superiors; he at once begins hunting,
and though very heavy and very blind and
‘not a good horseman,’ rides straight and boldly
and steadily for the next thirty years, letting
neither official nor literary duties interfere; he
makes a happy marriage at an early period; he
rides up and down over Ireland and England
setting things straight; and is sent on missions to
Egypt and the West Indies and the United States
and Australia; and turns out his daily tale of
copy at home or abroad, travelling or resting;
and rises in his office, and withstands Sir Rowland
Hill, and has ‘delicious feuds’ with his colleagues;
and retires with a sense that he has both done his
duty and thoroughly enjoyed his life. Of all this,
which may be read in the _Autobiography_ nothing
more need be said, or it needs only to be said that
so prosperous a consummation was never tacked
to so dismal a beginning. It seems to suggest
the immoral inference that we need take no
thought for our sons’ education. The innate
good qualities will come out and the superficial
stupidity is only a safeguard against over-
sensibility; the wasted and unhappy youth and
boyhood may be the stepping-stone to a thoroughly
honourable and prosperous career. I am here
only concerned with the light which the story
may throw upon the novel-writing. Trollope
himself dwells chiefly upon that subject and sets
forth his views with the most engaging candour
and simplicity. He propounds some theories
which may scandalise the author who takes a lofty
view of his vocation; but they are worth notice,
if only because they are more frequently adopted
than avowed by his rivals.

  It seems, in the first place, that in one respect
his early life had been propitious in spite of all
probability. His mother had supplied the one
bright influence. One of his father’s most preposterous
schemes had turned out well by sheer
accident. He had sent his wife, Heaven knows
why, to open a bazaar in Cincinnati. She was to
make a fortune by selling pin-cushions and
pepper-boxes to the natives of that remote region,
whom he must apparently have supposed to be in
the state of savages ready to barter valuables for
beads. The Yankee was not quite so innocent.
She, of course, lost all her money, but came
home to describe the ‘domestic manners’ of her
customers with a sharpness which for a time
set England and America by the ears. She discovered
that she had a pure vein of rather vulgar
satire, and worked it to such effect that, though
she was over fifty when she began to write, she
published one hundred and fourteen volumes
before her death. She managed to keep her
family afloat, and Trollope, in his darkest days,
saw that one possible road to success lay in following
her footsteps. He perceived that he had not
genius to be a poet, nor the erudition necessary
for a historian. But he had a certain taste for
reading. He had, even in his boyhood, indulged
during the intervals of bullying in occasional
rambles through such literature as came in his
way, and had decided that _Pride and Prejudice_ was
the best novel in the language. At the Post
Office he had learnt French and brushed up his
Latin sufficiently to enjoy Horace. Then he had
been given to what he calls the ‘dangerous mental
practice’ of castle-building. He solaced his loneliness
by carrying on imaginary stories, of which he
was himself the hero, and which he characteristically
kept within the limits of possibility. He
could not fancy himself handsome, or a philosopher
by any stretch of mind, but he could
imagine himself to be clever and chivalrous enough
to be attractive to beautiful young women. This
suggested that in his mind, as in his mother’s,
there was a mine of literary material, and he
resolved that novel-writing was the one career
open to him. Accordingly he set to work in a
thoroughly business-like spirit, and slowly and
doggedly forced himself upon publishers.

  ‘Nobody but a fool,’ says the great Johnson,
‘ever wrote except for money.’ Trollope holds
at least that the love of money is a perfectly
honourable and sufficient reason for writing. ‘We
know,’ he says, ‘that the more a man earns the
more useful he is to his fellowmen’—a fine
sweeping maxim, which certainly has its convenience.
It is true, he declares, of lawyers and
doctors, and would be true of clergymen if (which
is a rather large assumption) the best men were
always made bishops. It is equally true of authors.
Shakespeare wrote for money, and Byron, Scott,
Tennyson, Dickens, Macaulay, and Carlyle were
not above being paid. ‘Take away from English
authors their copyrights, and you would very
soon take away from England her authors.’ He
wrote, therefore, as he avows, for the very same
reasons which prompt the barrister to go to the
bar, or the baker to set up his oven. I have
certain qualms about the theory of copyright—
though I don’t mention them to my publishers.
It is not that I would deprive authors of their
reward. In the ideal state of things, I fancy, the
promising author will be infallibly recognised by
the scientific critic; a parental government will
pay him a handsome salary and trust to his
honour to do his best and take his time; and his
works, if any, will then be circulated gratis. That
scheme would avoid the objection which occurs to
Trollope’s theory. We can hardly assume that
the author’s usefulness to his fellow-creatures is
precisely proportioned to his earnings. On the
contrary, the great evil of to-day is that an author
has constantly to choose whether he will do the
best, or whether he will do the most profitable
work in his power. Tennyson and Carlyle, to
take Trollope’s examples, would never have
reached their excellence had they not dared to
be poor till middle age. Had they accepted
Trollope’s maxim, we should have had masses of
newspaper articles and keepsake rhyming instead
of _Sartor Resartus_ and _In Memoriam._

  The temptation of the present system to sacrifice
quality to quantity, and to work exhausted
brains instead of accumulating thought, is too
obvious to be insisted upon. When we look at
Trollope’s turnout, we are tempted to take him
for an example of the consequences. George
Eliot, as Mr. Harrison tells us—and we can well
believe it—was horror-struck when she heard of
Trollope’s methods. When he began a new book,
he allowed a fixed time for its completion, and
day by day entered in a diary the number of pages
written. A page meant two hundred and fifty
words. He had every word counted, and never
failed to deliver his tale of words at the time prefixed.
‘Such appliances,’ people told him, ‘were
beneath the notice of a man of genius.’ He never
fancied himself, he replied, to be a man of genius,
but ‘had I been so, I think I might well have
subjected myself to these trammels.’ He could
hardly ‘repress his scorn’ when he was told that
an imaginative writer should wait for ‘inspiration.’
The tallow candle, he declares, might as well wait
‘for the divine moment of melting.’ Nay, he
recommends youthful aspirants to ‘avoid enthusiastic
rushes with their pen.’ They should sit
down at their desks like lawyers’ clerks and work
till their tasks are done. Then they may rival
Trollope, at any rate in quantity. During a
period of twelve years (1859 to 1871) he did his
official duties so as to leave no pretext for fault-
finding; he hunted twice a week, he played whist
daily, went freely into society, took his holidays,
and yet turned out more work, including articles
of all kinds in periodicals, than any contemporary
author. He was up every morning at 5.30; spent
half an hour in reading the previous day’s work;
and then wrote two hundred and fifty words every
quarter of an hour for two hours and a half. He
wrote when he was travelling on a railway, or on
shipboard, and in the course of his career turned
out some fifty novels, besides other work, including
a _Life of Cicero,_ which showed at least his
daring. He lamented, I remember, at one time
that Mrs. Gore (who wrote seventy novels and
two hundred volumes) was still ahead of him; but
perhaps, counting all his writing, he had equalled
her before his death.

  It would be absurd to argue gravely against
Trollope’s simple-minded views; to appeal to the
demigods of literature who have thought, like
George Eliot, that there was a difference between
‘tallow chandling’ and bookwriting; and that,
if inspiration be a daring word, some time must
at least be allowed for ideas to ripen and harmonise,
and that it may be well to await some
overmastering mood that will not come regularly
when an old groom calls you at 5.30 a.m. It is
more to the purpose to admit frankly that some
great writers have been almost equally productive.
Scott took almost as businesslike a view as
Trollope. Lockhart tells us how an idle youth
was irritated by the shadow of a hand behind a
window-blind; and by noting the provoking
pertinacity with which it added sheet to sheet
with the regularity of a copying machine, and
how it afterwards appeared that the sheets were
those of _Waverley._ Scott, it may be replied, was
only pouring out the stores of imagery which
had been accumulating for many years, when as
yet he had no thought of bringing them to market.
Moreover, in some twelve years of excessive
production even Scott’s vein was pretty nearly
exhausted. What stores, one may ask, had
Trollope to draw upon? The answer suggests
that Trollope was not quite so black as he painted
himself. When he comes to lay down rules for
the art—or trade—he shows that three hours a
day did not include the whole of his labours. A
novelist, he declares, must write ‘because he has
a story to tell, not because he has to tell a story.’
To do so, he must ‘live with his characters.’
They must be with him when he wakes and when
he lies down to sleep. He must know them as
he knows his best friends. Trollope says that he
knew the actors in his own stories—‘the tone of
the voice, the colour of the hair, every flame of
the eye, and the very clothes they wear.’ He
knew precisely what each of them would say on
any given occasion. He declares, in answer to
the complaint of over-rapidity, that he wrote best
when he wrote quickest. That was, he says, when
he was away from hunting and whist, in ‘some quiet
spot among the mountains’ where he could be
absorbed among his characters. ‘I have wandered
about among the rocks and woods, crying at their
grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly
enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with
my own creations till it has been my only excitement
to sit with my pen in my hand and drive
them before me at as quick a pace as I could
make them travel.’

  This surely is sound doctrine: but Trollope is
justifying one set of critics in order to answer
another. He wrote best, he admits, when his
mind was fullest, and freest from distraction;
that is, when he had the ‘inspiration’ or ‘rush of
enthusiasm,’ against which he warns his disciples.
No doubt a man may write quickly at such
moments. The great Goethe—if one may introduce
such an august example—tells us that he
was at times so eager to get his thoughts upon
paper that he could not even wait to put the sheet
straight, and dashed down his verses diagonally.
George Eliot—to come a bit nearer to Trollope—
wrote her finest part of _Adam Bede_ without a
pause or a correction. That you should write
quickly when you are ‘inspired’ is natural; but
that does not prove that all previous inspiration
is superfluous. These unconscious admissions
must qualify the statement about the two hundred
and fifty words every quarter of an hour.
Trollope’s genuine gift showed itself in that
practice of ‘castle building’ which, as he tells us,
he always kept up. His ideal architecture, it is
true, was of a humble and prosaic kind. He did
not venture into regions of old romance; nor
discover ideal excellence in Utopias of the future;
or even observe that the most commonplace
houses may be the background for great passions
or tragedies. He always kept, as he says, to the
probable. His imaginary world was conterminous
with that in which he lived. As he tramped
along the high road he saw wayside cottages or
vicarages, or perhaps convenient hunting-boxes,
and provided them with a charming girl to flirt
with, and one or two good fellows for after-dinner
talk; and made himself an ideal home such as
might be provided by the most ordinary course of
events. This meant such day-dreaming as just
repeats the events of the day—only supplying the
touch of simple sentimentalism. A good many
men of business, I fancy, are sentimentalists in
secret, and after a day of stockbroking or law
conveyancing enjoy in strict privacy a little whimpering
over a novel. Trollope had abundant
tenderness of nature and his sentimentalism is
perfectly genuine, though he did find it convenient
to bring it to market. That was a main source
of his popularity. There were—as the public
held—such nice girls in his stories. Once, he
tells us, he tried to write a novel without love.
He took for his heroine an unattractive old maid
in money difficulties; but he had to wind up by
allowing her to make a romantic marriage. It is
this quaint contrast between the burly, vigorous
man of the world and the author’s young ladies,
who provide him with such sentiment as he can
appreciate, that somehow attracts us even by force
of commonplace.

  Trollope claims another merit—not to the
modern taste. ‘I have ever thought of myself,’
he says, ‘as a preacher of sermons, and my pulpit
as one which I could make both salutary and
agreeable to my audience.’ Young people, he
thinks, receive a large part of their education
from novels, and a good novelist should inculcate
sound morality. Beatrix Esmond, for example,
with her beauty and heartlessness, might seem to
be a dangerous example to set before girls. But
as she is so treated that every girl will pray to be
unlike her, and every youth to avoid the wiles of
which she was a mistress, a sermon is preached
which no clergyman could rival. Let us hope so
—though I must confess to a weakness both for
Beatrix and Becky Sharp which may imply some
injury to my morals. One point, at least, may
be granted. ‘I do believe,’ says Trollope, ‘that
no girl has risen from the reading of my pages
less modest than she was before, and that some
may have learnt from them that modesty is a
charm worth possessing.’ The phrase reminds
me of my favourite critic, who declared that there
was not a word in Dr. Watts’s sermons ‘which
could call a blush to the cheek of modesty.’
Trollope certainly deserves that negative but by
no means worthless praise. When a novelist
courts popularity by appealing to a perverted
taste for the morally repulsive, I consider him
to be a blackguard—even though he may be an
‘artist’; and, at the day of judgment, he will
hardly, I suppose, be divided into two.

  Trollope’s moral purpose, however, led him
into difficulty. The ‘regions of absolute evil,’ he
says, ‘are foul and odious’; but there is a
‘border-land,’ where flowers are mixed with weeds
and where the novelist is tempted to enter. The
‘border-land,’ one would rather say, is conterminous
with the world; and the novelist who will
not speak of it will have to, abandon any dealings
with human nature. Trollope was confined within
narrow limits. One of his novels was refused by
a religious periodical because it spoke of dancing
without reprobation. A dignitary of the Church
of England remonstrated with him because one of
his heroines was tempted to leave her husband for
a lover. Trollope replied forcibly enough by
asking him whether he ever denounced adultery
from his pulpit. If so, why should not the same
denunciation be uttered from the pulpit of the
novelist? The dignitary judiciously invited him
to spend a week in the country and talk over the
subject. The visit never came off, and, if that
dignitary be now alive, he probably looks back
with some regret to the Trollope standard. In
one novel Trollope ventured upon a bolder step,
and described the career of a female outcast, but
the difficulty imposed a good many limitations.
If a novelist is to be a preacher, he cannot simply
overlook what he ought to denounce. Trollope
was, in principle, a thorough ‘realist,’ but he
had to write in popular magazines and submit
to their conventions. It may be a difficult
question whether a ‘realistic’ description of vice
makes vice more disgusting or stimulates a
morbid interest. Trollope, at any rate, was in
the awkward position of a realist bound to
ignore realities. He had to leave gaps in his
pictures of life, and gaps—according to some
tastes—in the only really interesting places.

  We can see plainly enough what we must renounce
in order to enjoy Trollope. We must cease
to bother ourselves about art. We must not
ask for exquisite polish of style. We must
be content with good homespun phrases which
give up all their meaning on the first reading.
We must not desire brilliant epigrams suggesting
familiarity with æsthetic doctrines or theories of
the universe. A brilliant modern novelist is not
only clever, but writes for clever readers. He
expects us to understand oblique references to
esoteric theories, and to grasp a situation from a
delicate hint. We are not to be bothered with
matter-of-fact details, but to have facts sufficiently
adumbrated to enable us to accept the æsthetic
impression. Trollope writes like a thorough man
of business or a lawyer stating a case. We must
know exactly the birth, parentage, and circumstances
of all the people concerned, and have a
precise statement of what afterwards happens to
everybody mentioned in the course of the story.
We must not care for artistic unity. Trollope
admits that he could never construct an intricate
plot to be gradually unravelled. That, in fact,
takes time and thought. He got hold of some
leading incident, set his characters to work, and
followed out any series of events which happened
to be involved. In one of his stories, if I remember
rightly, the love affairs of four different
couples get mixed up, and each of them has to be
followed out to a conclusion. He simply looks
on, and only takes care to make his report consistent
and intelligible. To accept such writing in
the corresponding spirit implies, no doubt, the
confession that you are a bit of a Philistine, able
to put up with the plainest of bread and butter
and dispense with all the finer literary essences.
I think, however, that at times one’s state is the
more gracious for accepting the position. There
is something so friendly and simple and shrewd
about one’s temporary guide that one is the better
for taking a stroll with him and listening to
gossiping family stories, even though they be
rather rambling and never scandalous. One
difficulty is suggested, indeed, by Trollope’s
sacrifice of all other aims to the duty of fidelity.
We begin to ask whether it can be worth while to
read a novel which is a mere reflection of the
commonplace. Would it not be better to read
genuine biographies and narratives of real events?
One answer might be suggested by Walpole’s
famous remark about history, which, as he said,
must be false. When we read the lives of people
we have known and observe the singular transformations
which take place, we are sometimes
tempted to think that biography is an organised
attempt to misrepresent the past. Trollope is at
least conscientiously labouring to avoid that error
with a zeal which few Boswells can rival. His
fiction is in that respect even truer than history.
Hawthorne said at an early period that Trollope’s
novels precisely suited his taste. They are ‘solid,
substantial, written on the strength of beef and
through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as
if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the
earth and put it under a glass case, with all its
inhabitants going about their daily business, and
not suspecting that they were being made a show
of.’ Trollope was delighted, as he well might be,
with such praise from so different a writer, and
declares that this passage defined the aim of his
novels ‘with wonderful accuracy.’ They represent,
that is, the average English society of the
time more faithfully even than memoirs of real
persons, because there is no motive for colouring
the motives of an imaginary person.

  Is this really the case? Willl our descendants
get an accurate conception of England in the
middle of the nineteenth century? Or if some
‘medium’ could call us up for cross-examination,
should we have to warn posterity not to trust too
implicitly to the portraiture? Trollope’s best
achievement, I take it, was the series of Barsetshire
novels. They certainly passed at the time
for a marvel of fidelity. Trollope tells us that he
was often asked when he had lived in a cathedral
close and become intimate with archdeacons; and
had been able to answer that he had never lived
in a close and had never spoken to an archdeacon.
He had evolved the character, he declares, ‘out
of his moral consciousness,’ and is pleasantly complacent
over his creation. Though one would
not like to disparage the merits of the performance,
the wonder seems to be pretty simple.
Trollope had been to Harrow and Winchester;
the headmaster of one had become a dean, and
the headmaster of the other a bishop. He afterwards
spent two years riding through English
country, and a visit, during this period, to
Salisbury close, had suggested the first Barchester
novel. It is not wonderful that, after such experience,
he should have been equal to the costume of
archdeacons; and, apart from their costumes,
archdeacons are not essentially different, I fancy,
from bishops or headmasters, or from the average
adult male of the upper classes. Archdeacon
Grantly is certainly an excellent and lifelike
person: an honourable, narrow-minded English
gentleman with just the necessary tinge of ecclesiastical
dignity. Still, if our hypothetical descendants
asked us, Were English archdeacons like
that? we should be a little puzzled. If Miss
Yonge could be called as a witness to character,
she would certainly remonstrate. Archdeacons,
she would say, in her time, high-church archdeacons
at least, were generally saints. They
could be spiritual guides; they had listened to
Newman or been misled by _Essays and Reviews_;
but they had, at least, been interested in the religious
movements of the day. Trollope’s archdeacon is
as indifferent to all such matters as were the
much-reviled dignitaries of an older generation.
He is supposed to do his official duties, and he
carefully says, ‘Good Heavens!’ where a layman
would use another phrase; but he never gives the
slightest indication of having any religious views
whatever beyond a dislike to dissenters. He has
a landed estate, and is as zealous as any squire to
keep up the breed of foxes, and he threatens
to disinherit his son for making an unworldly
marriage as if he were the great Barchester
magnate—the Duke of Omnium himself.

  I do not presume to inquire how far such a
man represents the prevalent type more accurately
than the more ethereal divine of pious lady
novelists. The Trollope theory of the archdeacons
might be held to confirm Matthew
Arnold’s description of the Church as an ‘appendage
of the barbarian’; and the philosophical
historian might infer that in the nineteenth century
the normal country parson was a very slightly
modified squire. Perhaps Trollope’s view may be
a useful corrective to the study of the ordinary
lives in which the saintliness of respectable clergymen
tends to be a little over-emphasised; still, it
omits or attenuates one element—the religious,
namely—which must have had some importance
in the character of contemporary divines. And
what can we say for the young women who
charmed his readers so thoroughly? Vulgar
satire in those days was denouncing the ‘girl of
the period’—the young lady who was chafing
against established conventions of all kinds. The
young women of Barchester seem to have been
entirely innocent of such extravagance. Trollope’s
heroines are as domestic as Clarissa Harlowe.
They haven’t a thought beyond housekeeping or
making a respectable marriage. We could hardly
expect such delineations of the fair feminine
qualities as could be given by feminine novelists
alone. We could not ask him for a Jane Eyre or
still less for a Maggie Tulliver. But were the
average girls of forty years back made of such
very solid flesh and blood with so small an allowance
of the romantic? His are so good-natured,
sensible, and commonplace that he has the greatest
difficulty in preventing them from at once marrying
their lovers. He has to make them excessively
punctilious on some point of their little
code of propriety. One is loved by a lord, whose
mother objects to a _mésalliance_; another is of
doubtful legitimacy, and a third is the daughter
of an excellent man whose character is for a
moment under a cloud. They have to hold out
till their lovers and their lovers’ families have got
over such scruples, or the cause has been removed.
The most popular of all was Miss Lily Dale,
whom Trollope himself unkindly describes as
somewhat of a feminine prig. She will not
marry the man whom she loves because she has
been cruelly jilted by a thorough snob, and makes
it a point of honour not to accept consolation or
admit that she can love twice. Readers, it seems,
fell in love with her, and used to write to Trollope
entreating him to reconcile her to making her
lover happy. Posterity, I think, will make a
mistake if it infers that English girls were generally
of this type; but it must admit, though with
a certain wonder, that the type commended itself
to a sturdy, sensible Briton of the period, as the
very ideal of Womanhood, and delighted a large
circle of readers.

  The prosaic person, it must remember, has a
faculty for ignoring all the elements of life and
character which are not prosaic, and if Trollope’s
picture is accurate it is not exhaustive. The weakness
comes from misapplying a good principle.
Trollope made it a first principle to keep rigorously
to the realities of life. He inferred that nothing
strange or improbable should ever be admitted.
That is not the way to be lifelike. Life, as we
all find out, is full of the strange and improbable.
Every character has its idiosyncrasies: its points
of divergence from the ordinary. If the average
man whose qualities are just at the mean between
the extremes, who is half-way between genius and
idiot, villain and saint, must be allowed to exist,
it may be doubted whether he is not, on the
whole, more exceptional than the so-called exceptions.
Trollope inclines to make everybody an
average specimen, and in his desire to avoid
exaggeration inevitably exaggerates the commonplaceness
of life. He is afraid of admitting any
one into his world who will startle us by exhibiting
any strength of character. His lovers, for
example, have to win the heroine by showing
superiority to the worldly scruples of their relations.
The archdeacon’s son proposes to marry a
beautiful and specially virtuous and clever girl,
although her father had been accused of stealing.
He thus endangers his prospects of inheriting an
estate, though he had, in any case, enough to live
upon. Surely some men would be up to such
heroism, even though the girl herself hesitates to
accept the sacrifice. But, to make things probable,
we are carefully told that the hero has great
difficulty in rising to the occasion; he has to be
screwed up to the effort by the advice of a sensible
lady; and even her encouragement would scarcely
carry the point, had not the father’s guilt been disproved.
In this, and other cases, the heroes have
all the vigour taken out of them that they may
not shock us by diverging from the most commonplace
standard. When a hero does something
energetic, gives a thrashing, for example, to the
man who has jilted a girl, we are carefully informed
that he does it in a blundering and
unsatisfactory way.

  By the excision of all that is energetic, or
eccentric, or impulsive, or romantic, you do not
really become more lifelike; you only limit yourself
to the common and uninteresting. That misconception
injures Trollope’s work, and accounts,
I suspect, for the decline of our interest. An
artist who systematically excludes all lurid colours
or strong lights, shows a dingy, whitey-brown
universe, and is not therefore more true to nature.
Barsetshire surely had its heroes and its villains,
its tragedy and its farce, as well as its archdeacons
and young ladies bound hand and foot by the
narrowest rules of contemporary propriety. Yet,
after all, Trollope’s desire to be faithful had its
good result in spite of this misconception. There
are, in the first place, a good many commonplace
people in the world; and, moreover, there were
certain types into which he could throw himself
with real vigour. He can appreciate energy when
it does not take a strain of too obvious romance.
His best novel, he thinks, and his readers must
agree with him, was the _Last Chronicle of Barset._
The poor parson, Mr. Crawley, is at once the
most lifelike and (in his sense) the most improbable
of his characters. He is the embodiment of
Trollope’s own ‘doggedness.’ One fancies that
Trollope’s memory of his sufferings under the
‘three hundred tyrants’ of his school-days, and of
his father’s flounderings in money matters, entered
into sympathy with his hero. Anyhow, the man
with his strange wrong-headed conscientiousness,
his honourable independence, blended with bitter
resentment against the more successful, and the
strong domestic affections, which yet make him a
despot in his family, is a real triumph of which
more ambitious novelists might be proud. Such
men, he might have observed, though exceptional,
are far more real than the average persons with
whom he is generally content. Another triumph,
of which he speaks with justifiable complacency, is
the famous Mrs. Proudie. He knew, he declares,
‘all the little shades of her character.’ She was
bigoted, bullying, and vulgar, but really conscientious,
no hypocrite, and at last dies in bitter regret
for the consequences of her misrule. He killed
her because he heard two clergymen in the
Athenæum complaining of her too frequent reappearances.
But he thoroughly enjoyed her, and
continued, as he declares, to ‘live much in company
with her ghost.’ I should guess, though I
cannot speak from a wide personal observation of
the class, that no British bishop was ever so
thoroughly henpecked as Dr. Proudie. The case
was at any rate exceptional, and yet, or therefore,
is thoroughly lifelike. Mrs. Proudie, that is, is
one genuine type, albeit a very rare one, of the
Englishwoman of the period, and Trollope draws
her vigorously, because her qualities are only an
excessive development of very commonplace failings.
In such cases Trollope can deal with his
characters vigorously and freely, and we do not
feel that their vitality has been lowered from a
mistaken desire to avoid a strain upon our powers
of belief. He can really understand people on a
certain plane of intelligence. His pompous officials
at public offices, and dull members of Parliament,
and here and there such disreputable persons as he
ventures to sketch, as, for example, the shrewd
contractor in _Dr. Thorne,_ who is ruined by his
love of gin, are solid and undeniable realities.
We see the world as it was, only in a dark mirror
which is incapable of reflecting the fairer shades of
thought and custom.

  Hawthorne’s appreciation of Trollope’s strain
was perhaps due in part to his conviction that
John Bull was a huge mass of solid flesh incapable
of entering the more ethereal regions of subtle
fancy of which he was himself a native. Trollope
was to him a John Bull convicting himself out of
his own mouth, and yet a good fellow in his place.
When our posterity sits in judgment, it will discover,
I hope, that the conventional John Bull is
only an embodiment of one set of the national
qualities, and by no means an exhaustive portrait
of the original. But taking Trollope to represent
the point of view from which there is a certain
truthfulness in the picture—and no novelist can
really do more than give one set of impressions—
posterity may after all consider his novels as a
very instructive document. Perhaps, though it
would be idle to prophesy confidently, one remark
will be suggested. The middle of the nineteenth
century—our descendants may possibly say—was
really a time in which a great intellectual, political,
and social revolution was beginning to make itself
perceptible. The vast changes now (that is, in
the twenty-first century) so familiar to everybody
could then have been foretold by any intelligent
observer. And yet in this ancient novelist we see
the society of the time, the squires and parsons
and officials, and the women whom they courted,
entirely unconscious of any approaching convulsions;
imagining that their little social arrangements
were to endure for ever; that their social
conventions were the only ones conceivable; and,
on the whole, mainly occupied in carrying on
business in a humdrum way and sweetening life by
flirtation with healthy and pretty young women
without two ideas in their heads. Then they will
look back to the early days of Queen Victoria as
a delightful time, when it was possible to take
things quietly, and a good, sound, sensible optimism
was the prevalent state of mind. How far
the estimate would be true is another question;
but Trollope, as representing such an epoch, will
supply a soothing if rather mild stimulant for the
imagination, and it will be admitted that if he was
not among the highest intellects of his benighted
time, he was as sturdy, wholesome, and kindly a
human being as could be desired.

<chapter>

	ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON<! p206>

Nearly thirty years have passed since Stevenson
began to attract a circle of appreciative readers.
From the first it was clear that the literary appreciation
coincided with a personal attraction. As
his fame extended, the admiration of readers
remotest in the flesh had a tinge of friendship,
while the inner circle could not distinguish between
their enthusiastic affection for the man and
their cordial enjoyment of his genius. So far as
the biographer is concerned, the identity of the
two sentiments is a clear gain. Affection, though
not a sufficient, is an almost necessary qualification
for a good biography. It may be doubted, however,
whether a man’s friends are his best critics.
The keen eye of the candid outsider has detected
a tacit conspiracy in this case. The circle of
friends looks unpleasantly like a clique, trying to
gain a reflex glory from the fame of its hero, or
to make a boast of its superior insight. The
connection, it is true, has other dangers. The tie
may be broken, and the rupture, it appears, cancels
all obligations to reticence. No one can then lay
on the lash like the old friend who knows the
weak places and has, or fancies that he has,
an injury to resent. But even fidelity to old
ties is not necessarily blinding. No one can read
Mr. Colvin’s notes upon his friend’s letters
without admitting that his friendship has sharpened
his insight. To him belongs the credit of having
been the first, outside the home circle, to recognise
Stevenson’s genius and to give encouragement
when encouragement was most needed. The
keen interest enabled him to interpret both the
personal and the artistic characteristics of his friend
with a clearness which satisfies us of the essential
fidelity of the portrait. If we differ from the
valuation which he puts upon certain qualities, he
gives essential help to perceiving them. We often
learn more from the partisan than from the candid
historian; and in criticism, as well as in history,
candour may be an alias for insensibility.

  It was to Mr. Colvin that I owe what is perhaps
my chief claim to such respect as readers of
a periodical may concede to an editor. Through
his good offices, Stevenson became one of my
contributors, and I may be allowed to boast that,
in his case at least, I did not nip rising genius in
the bud—the feat which, according to some young
authors, represents the main desire of the editorial
mind. Fate, however, withheld from me the
privilege of forming such an intimacy as could
materially bias my opinions; and so far I have a
negative qualification for answering the question
which so many people are eager to put: what,
namely, will posterity think about Stevenson? I
am content to leave the point to posterity; but
in trying to sum up my own impressions, corrected
by the judgment of his closer friends and critics,
I may contribute to the discussion of the previous
question: what is the species, not what is the
degree, of praise which he will receive? Friendly
criticism is apt to fail in this direction. Enthusiasts
fancy that to define a man’s proper sphere is
to limit his merits; they assume that other sects
are necessarily hostile, and that they must remove
another bust from Poets’ Corner in order to make
room for doing honour to their favourite. Such
controversies lead to impossible problems and
attempts to find a common measure for disparate
qualities. We may surely by this time agree that
Tennyson and Browning excelled in different lines
without asking which line was absolutely best.
That will always be a matter of individual taste.

  Whatever Stevenson was, he was, I think, a
man of genius. I do not mean to bring him
under any strict definition. My own conception
of genius has been formed by an induction from
the very few cases which I have been fortunate
enough to observe. I may try to describe one
characteristic by perverting the language of one
of those instances. The late W. K. Clifford,
who had the most unmistakable stamp of genius,
held that the universe was composed of ‘mindstuff.’
I don’t know how that may be, but a
man has genius, I should say, when he seems to
be made of nothing but ‘mindstuff.’ We of
coarser make have a certain infusion of mind;
but it is terribly cramped and held down by
matter. What we call ‘thinking’ is often a
mechanical process carried on by dead formulæ.
We work out results as a phonograph repeats the
sound when you insert the diaphragm already
impressed with the pattern. The mental processes
in the man of genius are still vital instead
of being automatic. He has, as Carlyle is fond
of repeating about Mirabeau, ‘swallowed all
formulas,’ or rather, he is not the slave but the
master of those useful intellectual tools. It is
this pervading vitality which has marked such
geniuses as I have known, though it assumes very
various forms. A proposition of Euclid, such as
‘coaches’ hammer into the head of a dunce to be
reproduced by rote, developed instantly, when
inserted into Clifford’s brain, into whole systems
of geometry. Genius of a different type was
shown by the historian J. R. Green. You pointed
out a bit of old wall, or a slope of down, and it
immediately opened to him a vista of past ages,
illustrating bygone social states and the growth
of nations. So Stevenson heard an anecdote and
it became at once the nucleus of a story, and he
was on the spot a hero of romance plunging into
a whole series of thrilling adventures. Connected
with this, I suppose, is the invincible boyishness
so often noticed as a characteristic of genius.
The mind which retains its freshness can sympathise
with the child to whom the world is still a
novelty. Both Clifford and Green were conspicuous
for this possession of the prerogative of
genius, and showed it both in being boyish themselves
and in their intense sympathy with children.
Clifford was never happier than in a child’s party,
and Green sought relief from the dreariness of a
clergyman’s life at the East-end by associating
with the children of the district. Stevenson’s
boyishness was not only conspicuous, but was the
very mainspring of his best work. That quality
cannot be shown in a mathematical dissertation
or an historical narrative, but it is invaluable for a
writer of romances. The singular vivacity of
Stevenson’s early memories is shown by Mr.
Balfour’s account of his infancy as it was sufficiently
revealed in the delightful _Child’s Garden._
It is amusing to note that Stevenson could not
even imagine that other men should be without
this experience. You are indulging in ‘wilful
paradox,’ he replied to Mr. Henry James. ‘If a
man have never been’ (Mr. James alleged that
he had not been) ‘on a quest for hidden treasure,
it can be demonstrated that he has never been a
child.’ His scheme of life, as he puts it in a
charming letter to Mr. Monkhouse, was to be
alternately a pirate and a leader of irregular
cavalry ‘devastating whole valleys.’ Some of us,
I fear, have never been pirates; and if we were
anything, were perhaps already preaching infantile
sermons. In any case, the castle-building propensity
is often so weak as not even to leave
a trace in memory. Stevenson’s most obvious
peculiarity was that it only strengthened with life,
and, which is rarer, always retained some of the
childish colouring.

  A common test—for it is surely not the essence
—of genius is the proverbial capacity for taking
pains. Stevenson again illustrates the meaning of
the remark. Nothing is easier, says a recent
German philosopher, than to give a receipt for
making yourself a good novelist. Write a hundred
drafts, none of them above two pages long:
let each be so expressed that every word is necessary:
practise putting anecdotes into the most
pregnant and effective shapes; and after ten years
devoted to these and various subsidiary studies,
you will have completed your apprenticeship.
Few novelists, I suppose, carry out this scheme
to the letter; but Stevenson might have approved
the spirit of the advice. Nobody would adopt it
unless he had the passion for the art, which is a
presumption of genius, and, without genius, the
labour would be wasted. That, indeed, raises one
of those points which are so delightful to discuss
because they admit of no precise solution. When
people ask whether ‘form’ or ‘content,’ style or
matter, be the most important, it is like asking
whether order or progress should be the aim of a
statesman, or whether strength or activity be most
needed for an athlete. Both are essential, and
neither excellence will supersede necessity for the
other. If you have nothing to say, there is no
manner of saying it well; and if not well said,
your something is as good as nothing. For
Stevenson, the question of style was the most
pressing. His mind was already, as it continued
to be, swarming with any number of projects; he
was always acting ‘some fragment from his dream
of human life’; the storehouse of his imagination
was full to overflowing, and the question was not
what to say but how to say it. Moreover, a singular
delicacy of organisation gave him a love of
words for their own sake; the mere sound of
‘Jehovah Tsidkenu’ gave him a thrill (it does not
thrill me!); he was sensitive from childhood to
assonance and alliteration, and in his later essay
upon the ‘technical elements of style’ shows how
a sentence in the _Areopagitica_ involves a cunning
use of the letters P V F. Language, in short,
had to him a music independently of its meaning.
That, no doubt, is one element of literary effect,
though without a fine ear it would be hopeless to
decide what pleases; and the finest ear cannot
really explain what are the conditions of pleasing.
This precocious sensitiveness developed into a
clear appreciation of various qualities of style.
Like other young men, he began by imitating;
taking for models such curiously different writers
as Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe, Hawthorne,
Montaigne, Baudelaire, and Ruskin. In the
ordinary cases imitation implies that the model
is taken as a master. Milton probably meant,
in youth, to be a second Spenser. But the variety
of Stevenson’s models implies an absence of strict
discipleship. He was trying to discover the secret
which gave distinction to any particular style; and
without adopting the manner would know how to
apply it on occasion for any desired effect. How
impressionable he was is curiously shown by his
statement towards the end of his life, that he
would not read Livy for fear of the effect upon
his style. He had long before acquired a style of
his own so distinctive that such a danger would
strike no one else. I will not dwell upon its
merits. They have been set forth, far better
than I could hope to do, in Professor Raleigh’s
admirable study. He is a critic who shares the
perceptiveness of his author. I will only note one
point. A ‘stylist’ sometimes becomes a mannerist;
he acquires tricks of speech which intrude
themselves inappropriately. Stevenson’s general
freedom from this fault implies that hatred to the
commonplace formula of which I have spoken.
His words are always alive. He came to insist
chiefly upon the importance of condensation.
‘There is but one art,’ he says, ‘the art to omit’;
or, as Pope puts it, perhaps more accurately, ‘the
last and greatest art’ is ‘the art to blot.’ That is
a corollary from the theory of the right word.
A writer is an ‘amateur,’ says Stevenson, ‘who
says in two sentences what can be said in one.’
The artist puts his whole meaning into one perfectly
accurate line, while a feebler hand tries to
correct one error by superposing another, and
ends by making a blur of the whole.

  Stevenson, by whatever means, acquired not
only a delicate style, but a style of his own. If it
sometimes reminds one of models, it does not
suggest that he is speaking in a feigned voice. I
think, indeed, that this precocious preoccupation
with style suggests the excess of self-consciousness
which was his most obvious weakness; a daintiness
which does not allow us to forget the presence
of the artist. But Stevenson did not yield
to other temptations which beset the lover of exquisite
form. He was no ‘æsthete’ in the sense
which conveys a reproach. He did not sympathise
with the doctrine that an artist should wrap
up himself in luxurious hedonism and cultivate
indifference to active life. He was too much of
a boy. A true boy cannot be ‘æsthetic.’ He
had ‘day-dreams,’ but they were of piracy; tacit
aspirations towards stirring adventure and active
heroism. His dreams were of a future waking.
Stevenson’s energies had to take the form of
writing; and though he talks about his ‘art’ a
little more solemnly than one would wish, he
betrays a certain hesitation as to its claims. In a
late essay, he suggests that a man who has failed
in literature should take to some ‘more manly
way of life.’ To ‘live by pleasure,’ he declares,
‘is not a high calling’; and he illustrates the
proposition by speaking of such a life (not quite
seriously) as a kind of intellectual prostitution.
He laments his disqualification for active duties.
‘I think _David Balfour_ a nice little book,’ he
says, ‘and very artistic and just the thing to
occupy the leisure of a busy life; but for the top
flower of a man’s life it seems to be inadequate.
. . . I could have wished to be otherwise busy
in this world. I ought to have been able to build
lighthouses and write _David Balfours_ too.’ This
may be considered as the legitimate outcome of
the boyish mood. It might have indicated a
budding Nelson instead of a budding writer of
romance. One result was the curious misunderstanding
set forth in the interesting letters to Mr.
William Archer. Mr. Archer had pleased him
by an early appreciation; but had—as Stevenson
complains—taken him for a ‘rosy-gilled æsthetico-æsthete’;
whereas he was really at this time ‘a
rickety and cloistered spectre.’ To Mr. Archer,
Stevenson’s optimism had seemed to indicate
superabundant health, and a want of familiarity
with sorrow and sickness. A rheumatic fever, it
was suggested, would try his philosophy. Mr.
Archer’s hypothesis (if fairly reported) was of
course the reverse of the fact. Stevenson’s whole
career was a heroic struggle against disease, and
it is needless to add that his sympathy with other
sufferers was such as became an exquisitely sensitive
nature. Neither would he admit that he
overlooked the enormous mass of evil in the
world. His view is characteristic. His own
position as an invalid, with ‘the circle of impotence
closing very slowly but quite steadily
round him,’ makes him indignant with the affectation
of the rich and strong ‘bleating about their
sorrows and the burthen of life.’ In a world so
full of evil ‘one dank and dispirited word’ is
harmful, and it is the business of art to present
gay and bright pictures which may send the reader
on his way rejoicing. Then, ingeniously turning
the tables, he argues that Mr. Archer’s acceptance
of pessimism shows him to be a happy man,
‘raging at the misery of others.’ Had his critic
tried for himself ‘what unhappiness was like,’ he
would have found how much compensation it
contains. He admits the correctness of one of
Mr. Archer’s remarks, that he has ‘a voluntary
aversion from the painful sides of life.’ On the
voyage to the leper settlement at Molokai he
speaks of the Zola view of the human animal;
and upon reaching the place sees ‘sights that
cannot be told and hears stories that cannot be
repeated.’ M. Zola would have managed perhaps
to tell and repeat. Stevenson is sickened by the
spectacle but ‘touched to the heart by the sight
of lovely and effective virtues in the helpless.’
The background of the loathsome is there; but
he would rather dwell upon the moral beauty
relieved against it.

  Stevenson might certainly claim that his optimism
did not imply want of experience or want
of sympathy. And, indeed, one is inclined to ask
why the question should be raised at all. A man
must be a very determined pessimist if he thinks
it wrong for an artist to express moods of cheerfulness
or the simple joy of eventful living. We
may surely be allowed to be sometimes in high
spirits. It would require some courage to infer
from _Treasure Island_ that the author held any
philosophy. Stevenson, of course, was not a
philosopher in such a sense as would have entitled
him to succeed to the chair of Sir William
Hamilton at Edinburgh. Yet it is true that he
had some very strong and very characteristic convictions
upon the questions in which philosophy
touches the conduct of life. The early difficulties,
the abandonment of the regular professional
careers, the revolt against the yoke of the lesser
catechism, the sentence to a life of invalidism
enforced much reflection, some results of which
are embodied in various essays. A curious indication
of the progress of thought is given in his
account of the ‘books which influenced him.’ It
is a strangely miscellaneous list. He begins with
Shakespeare, Dumas, and Bunyan; then comes
Montaigne, always a favourite; next, ‘in order of
time,’ the Gospel according to St. Matthew; and
then Walt Whitman. By an odd transition (as
he observes elsewhere) Walt Whitman’s influence
blends with that of Mr. Herbert Spencer. ‘I
should be much of a hound,’ he says, ‘if I lost
my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.’ Next comes
Lewes’s _Life of Goethe_—though there is no one
whom he ‘less admires than Goethe.’ Martial,
Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, and Mr. George
Meredith’s _Egoist_ follow, and he notes that an
essay of Hazlitt ‘on the spirit of obligation’
formed a ‘turning-point in his life.’ One would
have been glad of a comment upon the last, for
the essay is one in which Hazlitt shows his most
cynical side, and explains how frequently envy and
selfishness are concealed under a pretence of conferring
obligations. Stevenson, perhaps, took it
as he took Mr. Meredith’s novel, for an ethical
lecture, revealing the Protean forms of egoism
more or less common to us all.

  Stevenson clearly was not one of the young
gentlemen who get up a subject systematically.
He read as chance and curiosity dictated. A new
author did not help him to fill up gaps in a
theory, but became a personal friend, throwing
out pregnant hints and suggesting rapid glances
from various points of view into different aspects
of life. Each writer in turn carried on a lively
and suggestive conversation with him; but he
cares little for putting their remarks into the
framework of an abstract theory. He does not
profess to form any judgment of Mr. Spencer’s
system; he is content to find him ‘bracing,
manly, and honest.’ He feels the ethical stimulant.
He is attracted by all writers whose words
have the ring of genuine first-hand conviction;
who reveal their own souls—with a good many
defects, it may be, but at least bring one into
contact with a bit of real unsophisticated human
nature. He can forgive Walt Whitman’s want
of form, and rejoice in the ‘barbaric yawp’ which
utterly rejects and denounces effete conventionalism.
What he hates above all is the Pharisee.
‘Respectability,’ he says in _Lay Morals,_ is ‘the
deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on
man.’ He is, that is to say, a Bohemian; but
he is a Bohemian who is tempered for good, or
(as some critics would say) for bad, by morality
and the lesser catechism. He sympathises with
Whitman’s combination of egoism and altruism.
‘Morality has been ceremoniously extruded at the
door (by Whitman) only to be brought in again
by the window.’ So Stevenson’s Bohemianism
only modifies without obliterating his moral prejudices.
Scotsman as he was to the verge of
fanaticism, he refused to shut his eyes to the
coarser elements in the national idol. The _Lay
Morals_ is specially concerned with the danger of
debasing the moral currency. In spirit the
Christian principles are absolutely right; but as
soon as they are converted into an outward law,
the spirit tends to be superseded by the letter,
and the hypocrite finds a convenient shelter under
the formula which has parted company from the
true purpose. An interesting bit of autobiography
is made to illustrate the point. ‘Thou shalt not
steal,’ he says, is a good rule; but what is stealing?
Something is to be said for the communist
theory that property is theft. While his father
was supporting him at the University, where he
was surrounded by fellow students whose lives
were cramped by poverty, he considered that his
allowance could be excusable only when regarded
as a loan advanced by mankind. He lived as
sparingly as he could, grudged himself all but
necessaries, and hoped that in time he might
repay the debt by his services.

  No very definite conclusion was to emerge
from such speculation. Stevenson was to become
a novelist, not a writer of systematic treatises
upon ethics or sociology. The impulses, however,
survived in various forms. They are shown, for
example, in the striking essay called _Pulvis et
Umbra._ It is his answer to the pessimistic view
of men considered as merely multiplying and
struggling units. Everywhere we find that man
has yet aspirations and imperfect virtues. ‘Of all
earth’s meteors,’ he says, ‘here, at least, is the
most strange and consoling; that this ennobled
lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this
inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet
deny himself his rare delights and add to his
frequent pains and live for an ideal, however
misconceived.’ This view implies his sympathy
with the publican as against the Pharisee. We
should cherish whatever aspirations may exist,
even in the pot-house or the brothel, instead of
simply enforcing conformity to the law. We
should like the outcast because he is, after all,
the really virtuous person. To teach a man
blindly to obey public opinion is to ‘discredit in
his eyes the one authoritative voice of his own
soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never
be a man.’ The sanctity of the individual in this
sense explains, perhaps, what was the teaching in
which Walt Whitman and Mr. Herbert Spencer
seemed to him to coincide.

  The ‘philosophy’ is the man. It is the development
of the old boyish sentiment. Disease
and trouble might do their worst; the career of
the ‘pirate,’ or even more creditable forms of the
adventurous, might be impracticable; but at least
he could meet life gallantly, find inexhaustible
interest even in trifling occupations when thrown
upon his back by ill-health, and cheer himself
against temptations to pessimistic melancholy by
sympathy with every human being who showed
a touch of the heroic spirit. His essay upon the
old _Admirals_ is characteristic. His heart goes out
to Nelson, with his ‘peerage or Westminster
Abbey,’ and even more to the four marines of the
_Wager,_ abandoned of necessity to a certain death,
but who yet, as they watched their comrades
pulling away, gave three cheers and cried, ‘God
bless the King!’ In _Æs triplex_ he gives the
same moral with a closer application to himself:

<quote>
  It is best [he says] to begin your folio; even if the doctor
does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month,
make one brave push, see what can be finished in a week.
. . . All who have meant good work with their whole heart
have done good work, although they may die before they have
the time to sign it. . . . Life goes down with a better grace
foaming in full tide over a precipice, than miserably struggling
to an end in sandy deltas.
</>

That, he explains, is the true meaning of the
saying about those whom the gods love. At
whatever age death may come, the man who dies
so dies young.

  This gallant spirit, combined with extraordinarily
quick and vivid sympathy, gives, I think, a
main secret of the charm which endeared Stevenson
both to friends and readers. His writings showed
anything but the insensibility to human sorrows
of the jovial, full-blooded athlete. It must be
admitted, however, that if he did not ignore the
darker side of things, he disliked dwelling upon it
or admitting the necessity of surrender to melancholy,
or even to incorporating sad thoughts in
your general view of life. In some of his early
work, especially in _Ordered South,_ his first published
essay, and in _Will o’ the Mill,_ a different
note of sentiment is sounded. The invalid ordered
south is inclined to console himself by reflecting
that he is ‘one too many in the world.’ This,
says Stevenson in a later note, is a ‘very youthful
view.’ As prolonged life brings more interests,
the thought that we cannot play out our part
becomes more, not less, painful. To some of us,
I fear, every year that we live only emphasises our
insignificance. To Stevenson such resignation
savoured of cowardice. _Will o’ the Mill_ is
certainly one of his most finished and exquisite
pieces of work. He told Mr. Balfour that it was
written as an ‘experiment.’ His own favourite
doctrine was that ‘acts may be forgiven, but not
even God can forgive the hanger back.’ _Will o’
the Mill_ was written ‘to see what could be said in
support of the opposite theory.’ The essay
suggests the influence of Hawthorne and shows
a similar skill in symbolising a certain mood. It
implies, no doubt, a capacity for so far assuming
the mood as to make it harmonious or self-
consistent; but I cannot perceive that it makes it
attractive. Translated into vulgar realism, Will
would be a stout innkeeper, who will not risk
solid comfort by marrying the girl whom he likes.
He hardly loves her. He prefers to help his
guests to empty his cellar. Will lives in so vague
a region that we do not detest him as we should in
real life; but, after all, the story affects me less as
an apology than as a satire. If that be really all
that can be said for the prudential view of life, it
is surely as contemptible as Stevenson thought the
corresponding practice. He has a little grudge
against Matthew Arnold, whose general merits he
acknowledges, for having introduced him to Obermann,
for in Obermann he finds only ‘inhumanity.’
The contrast is shown, as Professor
Raleigh points out, by Arnold’s poem on the
_Grande Chartreuse_ and Stevenson’s _Our Lady of
the Snows._ Arnold is tempted for the time to
seek peace among the recluses, though he cannot
share their belief. Stevenson treats them to a
sharp remonstrance. He prefers to be ‘up and
doing.’ He warns them that the Lord takes
delight in deeds, and approves those who—

<verse>
Still with laughter, song and shout,
Spin the great wheel of earth about.
</>

‘Perhaps,’ he concludes,

<verse>
Our cheerful general on high
With careless look may pass you by.
</>

  If I had to accept either estimate as complete,
I should agree with Stevenson. Yet Stevenson’s
attitude shows his limitations. The sentiment
which makes men ascetic monks; the conviction
of the corruption of mankind; of the futility of
all worldly pleasures; the renunciation of the
active duties of life; and the resolute trampling
upon the flesh as the deadly enemy of the spirit,
may strike us as cowardly and immoral, or at best
representing Milton’s ‘fugitive and cloistered
virtue.’ Still it is a mood which has been so conspicuous
in many periods that it is clearly desirable
to recognise whatever appeal it contained to the
deeper instincts of humanity. Matthew Arnold
recurred fondly but provisionally to the peacefulness
and harmony of the old order of conception,
though he was as convinced as any one that it
rested on a decayed foundation. The enlightenment
of the species is, of course, desirable, and
may lead ultimately to a more satisfactory solution;
but for the moment its destructive and
materialising tendencies justify a tender treatment
of the survival of the old ideal. Stevenson was
no bigot, and could most cordially admire the
Catholic spirit as embodied in the heroism of a
Father Damien. But when it took this form of
simple renunciation it did not appeal to him. In
fact, it corresponds to the kind of pessimism
which was radically uncongenial. Life, for him,
is, or can be made, essentially bright and full of
interest. He agrees with Mr. Herbert Spencer
that it is a duty to be happy; and to be happy
not by crushing your instincts but by finding
employment for them. Confined to his bed and
sentenced to silence, he could still preserve his old
boyishness; even his childish amusements. ‘We
grown people,’ he says in an essay, ‘can tell ourselves
a story, give and take strokes till the
bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and
die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or
lying prone in bed’—whereas a child must have a
toy sword or fight with a bit of furniture. Indeed,
he was not above toys in later days. He
spent a large part of one winter, as Mr. Balfour
tells us, building with toy bricks; and, beginning
to join in a schoolboy’s amusement of tin soldiers,
developed an elaborate ‘war game’ which occupied
many hours at Davos. We can understand
why Symonds called him ‘sprite.’ The amazing
vitality which kept him going under the most
depressing influences was combined with the
‘sprite’s’ capricious, and, to most adults, unintelligible
modes of spending superfluous energy.
Whatever he took up, serious or trifling, novel
writing, childish toys, or even, for a time, political
agitation, he threw his whole soul into it as if it
were the sole object of existence. He impressed
one at first sight as a man whose nerves were
always in a state of over-tension. Baxter says
that Cromwell was a man ‘of such a vivacity,
hilarity, and alacrity as another man hath when he
hath drunken a cup too much.’<*> Stevenson—not

<footnote>
  A similar remark was made about Ninon de l’Enclos. They
make a queer trio.
</>

very like Cromwell in other respects—seemed to
find excitement a necessity of existence. He
speaks to a correspondent of the timidity of
youth. ‘I was,’ he says, ‘a particularly brave
boy’—ready to plunge into rash adventures, but
‘in fear of that strange blind machinery in which
I stood. I fear life still,’ he adds, and ‘that terror
for an adventurer like myself is one of the chief
joys of living.’ Terror keeps one wide awake
and highly strung. Inextinguishable playfulness,
with extraordinary quickness of sympathy; an
impulsiveness which means accessibility to every
generous and heroic nature; and a brave heart in
a feeble body, ought to be, as they are, most
fascinating qualities. But it is true that they
imply a limitation. So versatile a nature, glancing
off at every contact, absorbed for the moment by
every impulse, has not much time for listening to
the’ Cherub Contemplation.’ Stevenson turns from
‘the painful aspects of life,’ not from the cowardice
which refuses to look evils in the face, but from
the courage which manages to treat them as a
counter-irritant. His ‘view of life,’ he says, ‘is
essentially the comic and the romantically comic’
He loves, as he explains, the comedy ‘which keeps
the beauty and touches the terrors of life’; which
tells its story ‘not with the one eye of pity but
with the two of pity and mirth.’ We should
arrange our little drama so that, without ignoring
the tragic element, the net outcome may be a state
of mind in which the terror becomes, as danger
became to Nelson, a source of joyous excitement.

  What I have so far said has more direct application
to the essayist than to the novelist; and to
most readers, I suppose, the novelist is the more
interesting of the two. As an essayist, however,
Stevenson becomes an unconscious critic of the
stories. The essays define the point of view
adopted by the story-teller. One quality is
common to all his writings. The irrepressible
youthfulness must be remembered, to do justice to
the essays. We must not ask for deep thought
employed upon long experience; or expect to be
impressed, as we are impressed in reading Bacon,
by aphorisms in which the wisdom of a lifetime
seems to be concentrated. We admire the quick
feeling, the dexterity and nimbleness of intellect.
The thought of ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’ is
obvious enough, but the performance reminds us
of Robin Oig in _Kidnapped._ Robin repeated the
air played by Alan Breck, but ‘with such ingenuity
and sentiment, with so odd a fancy and so quick a
knack in the grace-notes that I was amazed to hear
him.’ Stevenson’s ‘grace-notes’ give fresh charm
to the old theme. The critical essays, again, may
not imply a very wide knowledge of literature or
familiarity with orthodox standards of judgment.
They more than atone for any such defects by the
freshness and the genuine ring of youthful enthusiasm.
I am hopelessly unable, for example, to
appreciate Walt Whitman. Stevenson himself
only regretted that he had qualified his enthusiasm
by noticing too pointedly some of his author’s
shortcomings. The shortcomings still stick in my
throat; but if I cannot catch the enthusiasm, my
dulness is so far enlightened that I can partly
understand why Whitman fascinated Stevenson
and other good judges. That, at least, is so much
clear gain. To read Stevenson’s criticisms is like
revisiting a familiar country with a young traveller
who sees it for the first time. He probably makes
some remarks that we have heard before; but he
is capable of such a thrill of surprise as Keats
received from Chapman’s _Homer._

  The ‘love of youth,’ says Mr. Henry James in
an admirable essay, ‘is the beginning and end of
Stevenson’s message.’ Mr. James was writing
before Stevenson’s last publications, and was thinking
specially, perhaps, of _Treasure Island._ Now
to me, I confess, for I fear that it is a confession,
_Treasure Island_ is the one story which I can
admire without the least qualification or reserve.
The aim may not be the highest, but it is attained
with the most thorough success. It may be
described as a ‘message’ in the sense that it
appeals to the boyish element. Stevenson has
described the fit of inspiration in which he wrote
it. He had a schoolboy for audience; his father
became a schoolboy to collaborate; and when
published it made schoolboys of Gladstone and of
the editor of the ‘cynical’ _Saturday Review._ We
believe in it as we believe in _Robinson Crusoe._
My only trouble is that I have always thought
that, had I been in command of the _Hispaniola,_ I
should have adopted a different line of defence
against the conspirators. My plan would have
spoilt the story, but I regret the error as I regret
certain real blunders which were supposed to have
changed the course of history. I have always
wondered that, after such a proof of his powers of
fascination, Stevenson should only have achieved
full recognition by _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde._
That book, we are told, was also written in a fit
of inspiration, suggested by dreaming a ‘fine
bogey tale.’ The public liked it because it became
an allegory—a circumstance, I fear, which
does not attract me. But considered as a ‘bogey
tale,’ able to revive the old thrill of delicious
horror in one who does not care for psychical
research, it has the same power of carrying one
away by its imaginative intensity. These masterpieces
in their own way suggest one remark. Mr.
Balfour points out that Stevenson did an enormous
quantity of work, considering not only his
ill-health, but the fact that he often worked very
slowly, that he destroyed many sketches, and that
he rewrote some articles as often as seven or eight
times. Thanks to his ‘dire industry,’ as he said
himself, he had ‘done more with smaller gifts’
(one must excuse the modest formula), ‘than
almost any man of letters in the world.’ This
restless energy, however, did not mean persistent
labour upon one task; but a constant alternation
of tasks. When inspiration failed him for one
book, he took up another, and waited for the fit
to return. One result is that there is often a want
of continuity, when his stories do not, as in
_Treasure Island,_ represent a single uninterrupted
effort. _Kidnapped,_ for example, is made up of
two different stories, and _The Wrecker_ is a curious
example of piecing together heterogeneous fragments.
Moreover, a good deal of the work is the
product of a feebler exercise of the fancy intercalated
between the general fits of inspiration.
The undeniably successful books, where he has
thrown himself thoroughly into the spirit of the
story, stand out among a good deal of very
inferior merit. I will confine myself to speaking
of the four Scottish novels which appear to be
accepted as his best achievements, and to endeavouring
to point out what was the proper
sphere of his genius.

  They represent a development of the _Treasure
Island_ method. He began _Kidnapped_ as another
book for boys, and the later stories may be classed
for some purposes with the Waverley series.
Stevenson was fond of discussing the classification
of novels. He contrasts the ‘novel of adventure,’
the novel of character, and the dramatic novel.
Properly speaking, this is not a classification of
radically different species, but an indication of the
different sources of interest upon which a novelist
may draw. ‘Adventure’ need not exclude
‘character.’ A perfect novel might accept, with
a change of name, Mr. Meredith’s title _The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel._ The facts are interesting,
because they show character in the crucible;
and the character displays itself most forcibly by
the resulting action. A complete fusion, however,
is no doubt rare, and requires consummate
art. _Treasure Island,_ of course, is a pure novel
of adventure. It satisfies what he somewhere
describes as the criterion of a good ‘romance.’
The writer and his readers throw themselves into
the events, enjoy the thrilling excitement, and do
not bother themselves with questions of psychology.
_Treasure Island,_ indeed, contains Silver,
who, to my mind, is his most successful hero.
But Silver incarnates the spirit in which the book
is to be read; the state of mind in which we
accept genial good humour as a complete apology
for cold-blooded murder. Piracy is for the time
to be merely one side of the game; and in a
serious picture of human life, which of course is
out of that sphere, we should have required a
further attempt to reconcile us to the psychological
monstrosity. In the later stories we assume
that the adventurers are to be themselves interesting
as well as the adventure. Still, the story
is to hold the front place. We may come to be
attracted to the problems of character presented
by the author, but the development of the story
must never for a moment be sacrificed to expositions
of the sentiments. We must not expect
from Stevenson such reflections as Thackeray indulges
upon the ‘Vanity of Vanities’ or a revelation,
such as George Eliot gives in _The Mill on
the Floss,_ of the inner life of the heroine. Either
method may be right for its own purpose; and
I mean so far only to define, not to criticise,
Stevenson’s purpose. Not only is it possible to
tell a story in Stevenson’s manner, ‘cutting off the
flesh off the bones’ of his stories, as he says, and
yet to reveal the characters; but critics who object
to all intrusions of the author as commentator
hold this to be the most legitimate and effective
method of revelation. Here, however, the limitation
means something more than a difference of
method. I do not think, to speak frankly, that
any novelist of power comparable to his has
created so few living and attractive characters.
Mr. Sidney Colvin confesses to having been for a
time blinded to the imaginative force of _The Ebb
Tide_ by his dislike to the three wretched heroes.
One is deservedly shot, and the two others,
credited with some redeeming points, lose whatever
interest they possessed when they accept
conversion to avoid death from a missionary’s
revolver. However vivid the scenery, I cannot
follow the fate of such wretches with a pretence
of sympathy. There is a similar drawback about
_The Master of Ballantrae._ The younger brother,
who is blackmailed by the utterly reprobate
Master, ought surely to be interesting instead of
being simply sullen and dogged. In the later
adventures, we are invited to forgive him on the
ground that his brain has been affected; but the
impression upon me is that he is sacrificed
throughout to the interests of the story. He is
cramped in character because a man of any real
strength would have broken the meshes upon
which the adventure depends. The curious exclusion
of women is natural in the purely boyish
stories, since to a boy woman is simply an incumbrance
upon reasonable modes of life. When in
_Catriona_ Stevenson introduces a love-story, it is
still unsatisfactory because David Balfour is so
much of the undeveloped animal, that his passion
is clumsy, and his charm for the girl unintelligible.
I cannot feel, to say the truth, that in any of these
stories I am really living among human beings
with whom, apart from their adventures, I can
feel any very lively affection or antipathy. Mr.
Balfour praises Stevenson for his sparing use of
the pathetic. That is to apologise for a weakness
on the ground that it is not the opposite weakness.
It is quite true that an excessive use of
pathos is offensive, but it is equally true that a
power of appealing to our sympathies by genuine
pathos is a mark of the highest power in fiction.
The novelist has to make us feel that it is a necessity,
not a mere luxury; that he is forced to weep,
not weeping to exhibit his sensibility; but to omit
it altogether is to abnegate one of his chief functions.
That Stevenson’s feelings, far from being
cold, were abnormally keen, can be doubted by
no one; but his view of fiction keeps him out of
the regions in which pathos is appropriate. Any
way, I feel that there is a whole range of sentiment
familiar to other writers which Stevenson
rarely enters or even touches.

  The character to which I am generally referred
as a masterpiece is that of Alan Breck. Mr.
Henry James speaks of that excellent Highlander
as a psychological triumph, and regards him as a
study of the passion for glory. Mr. James
speaks with authority; and I will admit that he
is a very skilful combination of the hero and the
braggart—qualities which are sometimes combined,
as they were to some degree in Nelson and
Wolfe. Somehow, perhaps because I am not a
Gael, I can never feel that he is fully alive. He
suggests to me the artist’s study, not the man
who appeals to us because his creator has really
thrown himself unreservedly into the part.
When I compare him, for example, with Dugald
Dalgetty (I must venture a comparison for once)
he seems to illustrate the difference between skilful
construction and genial intuition. He may
suggest one other point. Scott was for Stevenson
the ‘King of the Romanticists.’ Romance, as
understood by Scott, meant among other things
the attempt to revive a picture of old social
conditions. He was interested, in his own
phraseology, in the contrast between ancient and
modern manners, and his favourite periods are
those in which the feudal ideals came into conflict
with the more modern commercial state. This
interest often interferes with his art as a story-
teller. The hero of Waverley, for example, is a
mere walking letter of introduction to Fergus
MacIvor, the type of a chief of a clan modified
by modern civilisation. The story halts in order
to give us a full portrait of the state of things
in which a semi-barbarous order was confronted
with the opposing forces. Scott, in fact, began
from a profound interest in the social phenomena
(to use a big word) around him. He was full of
the legends, the relics of the old customs and
ways of thought, but was also a lawyer and a keen
politician. His story-telling often represents a
subordinate aim. Stevenson just reverses the
process. He started as an ‘artist,’ abnormally
sensitive to the qualities of style and literary
effect to which Scott was audaciously indifferent.
His first interest is in any scene or story which
will fit in with his artistic purposes. Life swarmed
with themes for romance, as rivers are made to
supply canals. The attitude is illustrated by his
incursions into politics. He was stirred to wrath
by Mr. Gladstone’s desertion (as he thought it)
of Gordon, and could not afterwards write a letter
to the guilty statesman because he would have had
to sign himself ‘Your fellow-criminal in the sight
of God.’ He was roused by the boycotting of
the Curtin family to such a degree that he could
scarcely be withheld from settling on their farm
to share their dangers and stir his countrymen to
a sense of shame. His righteous indignation in
the case of Father Damien, and the zeal with
which he threw himself into the Samoan troubles,
are equally in character. The small scale of the
Samoan business made it a personal question.
He came to the conclusion, however, that politics
meant ‘the darkest, most foolish, and most random
of human employments,’ and, though he had an
aversion to Gladstone, had no definite political
creed. Political strife, that is, only touched him
when some individual case appealed to the chivalrous
sentiment. In the same way the story of
the clans interests him by its artistic capabilities.
The flight of Alan Breck gave an opportunity,
seized with admirable skill, for a narrative of
exciting adventure; and he takes full advantage
of picturesque figures in the history of his time.
But one peculiarity is significant. The adventure
turns upon a murder which, according to him,
was not committed, though certainly not disapproved,
by Alan Breck. Now, complicity in
murder, or, let us say, homicide, is a circumstance
of some importance. Before landlord-shooting is
regarded as a venial or a commendable practice,
we ought to be placed at the right point of view
to appreciate it. We cannot take it as easily as Mr.
Silver took piracy. We should see enough of the
evictions or of the social state of the clansmen to
direct our sympathies. No doubt if Stevenson had
insisted upon such things, he would have written
a different book. He would have had to digress
from the adventures and to introduce characters
irrelevant in that sense, who might have been
types of the classes of a semi-civilised society.
Perhaps the pure story of adventure is a better
thing. I only say that it involves the omission of
a great many aspects of life which have been the
main preoccupation of novelists of a different
class. Stevenson once told Mr. Balfour that a
novelist might devise a plot and find characters
to suit, or he might reverse the process; or finally,
he might take a certain atmosphere and get ‘both
persons and actions to express it.’ He wrote _The
Merry Men_ as embodying the sentiment caused
by a sight of a Scottish island. That, indeed, is
an explanation of some of his most skilful pieces
of work, and the South Seas as well as his beloved
country gave materials for such ‘impressionist’
pictures. But besides the atmosphere of scenery,
there is what may be called the social atmosphere.
To reproduce the social atmosphere of a past
epoch is the aim—generally missed—of the historical
novelist; but it is the prerogative of the
more thoughtful novelist to set before you, in
concrete types, not only personal character but
the moral and intellectual idiosyncrasies of the.
epoch, whether remote or contemporary. The
novelist is not to lecture; but the great novels
give the very age and body of the time ‘its form
and feature.’ I will give no instances because
they would be superfluous and also because they
would suggest a comparison which I would rather
exclude as misleading. That is the element
which is absent from Stevenson’s work.

  The affection which Stevenson inspires needs no
justification. The man’s extraordinary gallantry,
his tender-heartedness, the chivalrous interest so
easily roused by any touch of heroism, the generosity
shown in his hearty appreciation of possible
rivals, are beyond praise. His rapid glances at
many aspects of life show real insight and singular
delicacy, a sensibility of moral instinct, and the
thought is expressed or gently indicated with the
most admirable literary tact. The praise of versatility
again is justified by the variety of themes
which he has touched, always with vivacity and
often with a masterly handling within certain
limits. When panegyrics, dwelling upon these
topics, have been most unreservedly accepted, it is
a mistake to claim incompatible merits. The
‘Bohemian’—taking Stevenson’s version of the
character—the man who looks from the outside
upon the ordinary humdrum citizen, may be a
very fascinating personage; but he really lacks
something. Delighted with the exceptional and
the picturesque, he has less insight into the more
ordinary and, after all, most important springs of
action. The excitable temperament, trying to stir
every moment of life with some thrill of vivid
feeling, and dreaming adventures to fill up every
interstice of active occupation, is hardly compatible
with much reflection. The writer, whose writing
is the outcome of long experience, who has
brooded long and patiently over the problems of
life, who has tried to understand the character of
his fellows and to form tenable ideals for himself,
may not have accepted any systematic philosophy;
but he represents the impression made by life
upon a thoughtful mind, and has formed some
sort of coherent and often professedly interesting
judgment upon its merits. He is sometimes a
bore, it is true; but sometimes, too, we have
experience which is ripe without being mouldy.
The rapid, vivid ‘Sprite,’ the natural Bohemian
impinging upon society at a dozen different parts,
turning from the painful aspects of life, and from
the first considering life as intended to suggest
romance rather than romance as reflecting life,
could not possibly secrete that kind of wisdom.
He had a charm of his own, and I do not inquire
whether it was better or worse; I only think
that we do him injustice when we claim merits
belonging to a different order. His admirers
hold that _Weir of Hermiston_ would have shown
profounder insight founded upon longer experience.
I will not argue the point. That it contains
one very powerful scene is undeniable. That it
shows power of rivalling on their own ground the
great novelists who have moved in a higher sphere
is not plain to me. At any rate, the claim seems
to be a tacit admission of the absence of certain
qualities from the previous work. ‘He might
have,’ implies ‘he did not.’ But I have said
enough to indicate what I take to be the right
method of appreciating Stevenson without making
untenable claims.

<chapter>

	THE COSMOPOLITAN SPIRIT<! p247>
	IN LITERATURE

M. Joseph Texte, Professor of ‘Comparative
Literature’ at Lyon, has recently published an
interesting book upon Rousseau and the ‘Cosmopolitan
Spirit in Literature.’<*> This ‘Cosmopolitan

<footnote>
  A translation by Mr. J. W. Mathews has recently appeared.
</>

Spirit,’ for good or for bad, is spreading through
the civilised world, and Rousseau marks one
essential stage in the process. The spirit was
born ‘of the fruitful union’ between ‘the English
genius and that of Jean-Jacques.’ So says M.
Texte at starting, and he concludes by prophesying
that in two or three centuries Rousseau will
be regarded as the Dante of modern times, the
writer who has opened before us (the French
people) the portals of the ‘Northern and Germanic
section of Europe.’ Prophecies to be fulfilled at so
distant a date are daring; but M. Texte, it is only
right to say, qualifies his opinions with proper diffidence,
and is not quite sure that even the assumed
contrast between the Latin and the Germanic
races, as if they were two distinct and definite
units, can be justified. That, in a general way, the
cosmopolitan spirit has spread and is spreading
may be taken for granted. M. Texte himself
illustrates one of its excellent results. He is one
of many French writers who have added German
thoroughness to their own admirable characteristics
of clearness and vivacity. The home-bred British
critic may well feel nervous when he sees how
thoroughly his own field is being explored by such
writers as M. Beljame, M. Jusserand, and M.
Legouis. M. Texte’s account of Richardson, for
example, is probably better than anything in our
own language. But I propose only to speak
briefly of the thesis which I have already quoted.
I have dabbled in criticism long enough to be
something of a traitor. I am inclined to be suspicious
of critical doctrines—including, I hope,
my own, but certainly including all other people’s.
This doctrine about the mutual influence of the
two races, if indeed they are properly two races
and not each a mixture of a great variety of races,
rouses a certain scepticism. One may ask whether
the influence was really so great as is suggested;
whether Rousseau had really so important a part
in bringing the two into relation; and what, after
all, is precisely meant by the ‘cosmopolitan spirit.’
The facts, which M. Texte has collected with
great industry, may be quite correctly stated; I
at least have no errors to point out; but when
one gets beyond the facts, so many doubts spring
up that no two people can be expected altogether
to agree on the explanation. I will only say
enough to suggest the nature of my chief
difficulty.

  First of all, M. Texte represents one general
tendency of which I entirely approve. Critics,
like other people nowadays, are anxious to be
scientific. They wish to improve upon the old
simple-minded criticism which expressed a mere
individual liking or disliking. The personal
element, indeed, is essential to all good criticism;
to the only criticism which can really open our
eyes to unrecognised genius; to such criticism,
for instance, as that by which Coleridge and
Lamb revived an interest in our older authors.
But the individual taste now requires to be
guided by a wide knowledge of the taste of other
ages and countries. The critic should not accept
the dogmatic utterances of academical professors
who lay down an absolute code, or mistake the
war-cry of some rising party for a complete and
exhaustive statement of the truth. He should,
therefore, so far adopt the scientific spirit as to
begin by studying the facts as impartially as he
can. Shakespeare was admired in one place, and
Racine preferred in another. He should not set
down one admiration as a mark of sheer folly and
the other as a proof of sound taste, but try to
understand the causes of preference and so to learn
what were the real merits of each school. That is
a very simple and sound principle, but rather difficult
of application. If, seeking to be purely
scientific, you keep to bare indisputable facts, you
resign yourself to be a mere annalist or bibliographer.
Theories, moreover, are things which
have an awkward facility for intruding even when
you are most on your guard against them. They
slip in imperceptibly and colour your view of facts.
You begin, of course, by clearing your mind of
prejudices. You are to consider yourself simply
as an observer, not as a judge. Therefore, you
first resolve to discard mere local prejudices and
show how the literature of any race or nation
corresponds to its peculiar characteristics, and so
candidly admit that what was good in Paris might
be bad in London. Taine carried out that principle
in his history of English literature; and since
Taine, says M. Texte, ‘the history of literature
has been above all an ethnological problem.’ In
fact, all great English writers, as Taine showed
us, were incarnations of the great John Bull;
and Bull’s peculiarities are to be explained, if we
must explain further, by his race and his fogs.
But this at once seems to involve whole systems
of theory. We do not know accurately what is
the composition of John Bull himself; how much
of him, for example, is Celtic and how much
Teuton; and few things are more difficult than to
describe accurately the characteristics by which one
race differs from another. A Frenchman and an
Englishman represent different types. We all
perceive the difference, but to say precisely in
what it consists we should require nothing less
than a complete psychology. We may take for
granted, however, that we can fairly assume that
a national character exists, and that it is very
distinctly manifested in the corresponding literature.
Then we can make at least some provisional
inferences, to be verified or disproved when somebody
will tell us what, after all, is the real
distinction.

  Assuming this, there is no doubt of one
conspicuous fact. Buckle remarked in his famous
book that the ‘union of the French with the
English intellect was by far the most important
fact in the history of the eighteenth century.’
He shows that nearly all the famous French authors
of the century had learned English, and that many
had visited England. In the preceding century
English was a ‘barbarous jargon,’ classed by Corneille,
as M. Texte observes, with ‘Turkish and
Sclavonian.’ M. Texte traces some of the steps
by which the change took place. When Louis
=xiv.= tried to trample out French Protestantism
by revoking the Edict of Nantes, he was really
scattering the sparks for a new conflagration.
Thousands of refugees settled in England, Holland,
and elsewhere. Industrious and educated men
supported themselves in the humbler walks of
literature. In London they naturally drifted into
Grub Street, and kept up a correspondence with
their countrymen in Holland, which had come to be
a great intellectual, as well as commercial, centre of
exchange. Such names as Motteux, Boyer, Coste,
Desmaiseaux, meet us constantly in the earlier
annals of English journalism. They habitually
gathered at the ‘Rainbow’ in Marylebone, and
formed a kind of literary agency. They sat at
the feet of Locke and Newton. They compiled,
edited, translated and contributed to the long
series of journals published in Holland. Bayle
had already paid some attention to English writings
in his _Nouvelles de la République des Lettres_; Le
Clerc took up the task more thoroughly, and a
whole series of journals dealing with English
publications were afterward published in Holland.
Knowledge of English philosophy and science, and,
by degrees, of English literature, spread from the
Hague and Amsterdam to the literary circles of
France. Then a Frenchman or two drifted to
England, and translated Addison and Swift. A
Swiss traveller, Muralt, published some letters
upon England about 1724, and drew a genuine
portrait of John Bull, who had really good points
in the eyes of a Protestant. Muralt admits that
the animal can be fierce and misanthropic, and
that his ‘houmour’ turns all things topsy-turvy;
but he sympathises heartily with the serious,
thoughtful, and vigorous character whose eccentricity
is but one side of the independence which
had won political liberty. Next came the Abbé
Prévost, who passed some years in England, and
worked up his experience into various novels,
translated many English works, and published
some twenty volumes of a magazine which, with
much greater vivacity, carried on the work of the
Dutch journalists. These writers were eclipsed
by Voltaire, whose epoch-making visit to England
lasted from 1726 to 1729. Voltaire, as Mr.
Morley says, ‘left France a poet and returned to
it a sage.’ The _Lettres Anglaises_ appeared in 1733,
and Voltaire was the ambassador who definitely
proclaimed the new alliance between the French
and English mind.

  The full story, as told by M. Texte, is very
interesting, and obviously suggests one comment.
The man who was told that so many tons of
water fell over Niagara, very naturally asked, Why
shouldn’t they? That France and England
should come into intellectual contact was surely
inevitable. The difficulty would have been to
keep them apart. Historians of politics or commerce
would have no difficulty in showing why
the England of George =i.= should be much more
interesting in France than the England of
Charles =ii.= The French refugees, no doubt,
stimulated, but they could also presuppose, an
interest in the nation which had taken so important
a position in Europe. Many subsidiary
symptoms might be mentioned which lie outside
M. Texte’s plan. The English influence upon
France was partly a result of the French influence
upon England. English writers since the Restoration
had been assimilating French methods,
and Addison and Pope came near enough to
Racine and Boileau to be regarded as civilised
human beings by Voltaire. Familiarity with their
work suggested that there were some merits in
the older English literature which they had refined,
and that it might be worth while to look
even at Shakespeare or other literary ancestors.
The English nobleman, conversely, all through
the century regarded France as the school of good
manners. Bolingbroke and Chesterfield and
Horace Walpole felt themselves at home in a
society pleasantly contrasted with the clownish
and brutal Squire Westerns who were their
neighbours at home and elbowed them in the
House of Commons. The ‘grand tour’ enabled
the young noble and his bear-leader to get some
French polish. He was easily made an honorary
member of the highest circles; and men like
Hume and Adam Smith were introduced through
his patronage to society in which their intellectual
eminence was more frankly recognised than in
England. There arose a tacit freemasonry between
the higher classes. M. Texte points out
that the French appreciation of English literature
was at its strongest during the wars. The
eighteenth-century wars did not imply the profound
antipathy of the religious wars of the
past or the revolutionary wars to come. The
‘patriotic idea,’ says M. Texte, had become
feeble. A person of quality often thought himself
a gentleman first and a Frenchman or an
Englishman afterwards. War to the enlightened
aristocrat meant not an internecine struggle, but a
game to be played in a sportsmanlike spirit.
The English officers did not say at Fontenoy,
‘Gentlemen of the French Guard, fire first,’ but
that was the spirit in which they might, or ought
to, have acted. The ‘cosmopolitan spirit,’ in
short, was the product of the innumerable causes
which were bringing nations into closer intercourse
at their higher levels; and the literary go-betweens
were useful ‘masters of the ceremonies’ to bring
together people anxious for an introduction.
What, then, was Rousseau’s special share in the
process? Had not Voltaire already opened his
countrymen’s eyes? This gives the important
distinction. Voltaire’s special achievement was
to make Frenchmen familiar with Locke and
Newton—that is, with English philosophy and
science. But, though an Englishman may make
mathematical discoveries, mathematics cannot be
especially English. Two and two make four in
Paris as well as in London: and the reasoning
of Newton’s _Principia_ was as valid in French as
in English or Latin. Art, as M. Texte says, ‘is
infinitely various’; philosophy is (or ought to be)
‘one.’ Though art, therefore, may be national,
philosophy must be cosmopolitan. The glory of
discovering some new principle may be assigned to
this or that country; but once discovered it loses
all trace of its origin. How far, in point of fact,
Voltaire learnt his doctrine from Locke or from
Bayle or elsewhere is disputable. In any case, the
doctrine, once reached, had to live or die mainly by
its logic. The philosophy, indeed, had attracted
Voltaire to other characteristics. It was one
product of the English character. Britons, he
thought, were philosophers because they were free
men, resolved to think as they pleased and to say
what they thought. To the earlier generation it
only occurred that a race which could kill its king
must be more savage than its own mastiffs. Now
its fierceness, its rough energy and sturdy independence,
appeared to have its merits. It had made
kings know that they ‘had a lith in their necks’;
it could reduce priests into bondage to the State;
and a man of letters would not be sent to the
Bastille or thrashed with impunity by a great man’s
valet. The coarseness and eccentricity were but
accidental defects of a strong vitality. Such qualities,
incorporated in John Bull, attracted Voltaire
and his fellows in their contest with the established
order in France, and naturally suggested some
interest in a literature which showed the same
qualities. Voltaire, however, stopped at a certain
point: he remained substantially faithful to the
old literary ideal of his race; he renounced the
Shakespeare whom he had once patronised, and
the literary revolution was left to Rousseau.

  This marks Rousseau’s special function. He
not only admired the English character, but introduced
English canons of art. He joined the
barbarians, whose incursion was still dreaded by
Voltaire. The _Nouvelle Héloïse_ was admittedly
an imitation of Richardson’s _Clarissa Harlowe._
Rousseau imitated even its defects. The awkwardness,
for example, of telling a story by letters leads
to comic results in both. The heroes and heroines
of both have to sit down at the most exciting
moments and pour out reams of correspondence
for the benefit of the general public. The likeness
of form corresponds to a more important
likeness in substance. Richardson and Rousseau
are both preachers, and both preachers of a
‘bourgeois’ morality, adapted to the British
tradesman or the citizen of a little Swiss town.
Both, too, are ‘realists’ in the sense of producing
their effects by the minute descriptions of commonplace
and ugly facts, the mention of which
would be incompatible with the old literary conventions.
Thus, though Rousseau has an exquisite
style and Richardson no style at all, both
represent ‘a plebeian type of art.’ This, no
doubt, is the truth, and points to an important
observation. In fact, Richardson, and another ot
Rousseau’s favourites, Defoe, had stumbled upon
a great discovery. Defoe, a thoroughly trained
journalist, had found out the secret of successful
journalism; the charm of a straightforward
circumstantial narrative. He could save trouble
by inventing his facts, but to all appearance they
must be still simply facts. Defoe had no literary
dignity to prevent him from supplying what his
audience really wanted. Richardson, again, began
by publishing a series of edifying letters. He
afterwards discovered how to make letters interesting
by stringing them upon a story. They
became a prolonged religious tract, which also
happened to be a great romance. Both Defoe and
Richardson being men of genius, they founded a
new literary genus. But the cause of their
immediate success was that they were frankly
suiting the taste of a new class of readers.
Addison and Pope thought first of gentlemen and
scholars, and could not condescend to lower their
dignity for readers who cared nothing for the
high court of criticism. Voltaire, as M. Texte
observes, did not see Defoe in England. Voltaire’s
friends, that is, were in the upper circle, to
which Defoe was utterly inadmissible, and who
partly shared Congreve’s wish to be regarded as
gentlemen, not as authors. To Swift, Defoe was
the fellow who stood in the pillory—‘I forget his
name’; and Pope pleasantly calls him ‘earless’ and
‘unabashed.’ To see him, it would have been
necessary to descend into the slums. Richardson
was eminently respectable, but bishops and deans
still write to ‘good Mr. Richardson,’ with the
condescension of great dons recognising merit in
a humble, self-taught scribbler. His work was
suited for the inhabitants of Salisbury Court, not
for St. James’s. The novelty was that as the habit
of reading spread to a lower social stratum, literature
had to adopt new ideals, and to leave off
some of the fine lace and full-bottomed wigs which
it still had to wear in the elegant world. Rousseau,
brought up in a similar atmosphere, took the hint,
and no doubt himself shared the taste of his class.
He was the first French writer, so far, to exemplify
one symptom of the great social changes
which were to bring about the Revolution. Literature
in England was already taking the middle
class instead of the aristocracy for its patrons.
Rousseau naturally sympathised with the ‘plebeian’
tendency, and was ready to take advantage of
Richardson’s innovation.

  The enthusiasm which greeted the _Nouvelle
Héloïse_ was due, of course, to the sentiment which
found easier expression in the new form. Here,
again, Richardson was followed by Rousseau.
The generation which wept over the wrongs of
Clarissa was succeeded by the generation which
wept over the death of Julie. We, though we
have a sentimentalism of our own, find it rather
difficult to shed tears upon either tomb. We can
see that both writers were men of genius, though
we cry ‘with difficulty’ over the pathos. But did
Rousseau learn his sentimentalism from Richardson?
Would he not have been as sentimental if
Richardson had never existed? And was the
‘sentimentalism’ a specially Northern product
transplanted from the Germanic to the Latin
races, or a product of conditions common to
both? It was in some respects even opposed to
the English character. The true founder of the
English novel was not Richardson so much as
Fielding. To most modern readers, to me certainly,
Fielding is incomparably the more readable
of the two. I can put myself by an effort into
the proper attitude about Clarissa; but I can
adopt it spontaneously for Amelia. Fielding,
however, achieved no such popularity abroad as
Richardson. One obvious reason is precisely that
he was too thorough a John Bull. The great
coarse vigorous animal, the ‘good buffalo,’ as
Taine calls him, disgusted our more refined
neighbours. He began by a hearty guffaw
at Richardson’s ‘sentimentalism,’ and embodies
the really British view of that product. It is, he
held, substantially an unmanly, mawkish affectation,
fit only for tea-drinking, effeminate,
molly-coddling tradesmen and Frenchified dandies.
So far from being specially English, it was everything
that was rightfully despised by your lusty
Englishman, who held, with ‘old Mr. Meynell,’
that ‘foreigners were fools.’ No doubt John
Bull was already notorious for his melancholy.
He was a victim to the ‘spleen’ and given to
committing suicide during his November fogs.
Jaques had already learnt to suck melancholy out
of a song as a weasel sucks eggs, and classified and
compounded the various brands of melancholy.
Great English poets had invoked ‘divinest
melancholy.’ We had an ‘anatomy’ of melancholy;
and one of the greatest writers of the
time had combined melancholy with misanthropy
and died ‘like a poisoned rat in a hole.’ Swift
was melancholy in the true British fashion,
but hardly sentimental. Probably enough our
national character, or our fogs, predisposed us to
a certain gloom, which might take the form of
grim humour or tinge imaginative work with
sadness. But, then, surely a Frenchman can be
melancholy too, though he may wear his melancholy
with a difference. A characteristic example
often noticed is the simultaneous appearance of
_Candide_ and _Rasselas,_ both of them powerful
protests against optimism, but couched by the
Frenchman in brilliant wit and by the Englishman
in ponderous moralising. The true sentiment is
the same in both. Pessimism, misanthropy, and
melancholy are not the property of any particular
race—for reasons only too obvious. Now
Rousseau—it requires no proof—was, if ever
such a thing existed, a born sentimentalist. He
needed no teacher to explain the luxury of grief
or the charm of sad and solitary musing; nor, in
fact, would he have found his precise shade of
sentimentalism in Richardson. I will not try to
define precisely what was the sentimentalism which
undoubtedly charmed readers both at home and
abroad. But the British product, as it seems
to me, was appreciated abroad just in so far as
it was not specifically British. The thoroughly
national article could not be exported. Richardson’s
sentimentalism inclined to twaddle; and
there is nothing, I fancy, so cosmopolitan as
downright twaddle. Obvious little moral commonplaces
are current in every market. Twaddle
pure and simple, indeed, may be a drug. Richardson’s
genius, his command of the pathetic and the
realistic, was undoubtedly the secret of his success;
but it could be assimilated by foreigners, because
it was diluted with the obvious morality
which is just as good at Geneva as at London.
Fielding’s work supposed some familiarity with his
powerfully-drawn British types, and with the
downright brutal common-sense which came like
a slap in the face to your pure sentimentalist.
Richardson’s characters and sentiments have less
idiosyncrasy, and can, therefore, be more easily
transported. The quality which now makes them
tedious was then one cause of their success. They
suited the middle class all over the world just
because they had not too strong a flavour of
their native soil. This suggests another point.
M. Texte insists in a very interesting way upon
the bond of sympathy due to the common Protestantism
of Richardson and Rousseau. The
English sentimentalism had obviously a distinct
religious colouring. Richardson in literature was
a parallel to Wesley in theology. Both men
represent the dissatisfaction of the middle classes
with the codes which were respected in the upper
circles. The ‘enthusiasm’ of Methodists was
the antithesis of the ‘cold morality’ of such men as
Clarke and Hoadly. In literature, ‘enthusiasm’
became sentimentalism. Pope’s _Essay on Man,_
more or less dictated by Bolingbroke, represented
the eighteenth century rationalism. Young’s
_Night Thoughts,_ as he boasted, was meant to supply
the desirable corrective. He meditated among
the tombs, as a great many Englishmen had done
before him, but professed to find consolation in
the revealed truths which were ignored in Pope’s
philosophy. Hervey took up the strain in the
prose Meditations, which, I fancy, have still a
kind of faded vitality. The _Night Thoughts_
gained extraordinary popularity in France at a
later period, and chiefly, as M. Texte thinks,
because readers saturated with Rousseauism were
prepared to accept any kindred sentimentalism.
The relationship, anyhow, implies also a curious
difference. Rousseau and Rousseau’s followers
held forms of religious belief which would have
set Richardson’s hair on end. Probably he would
have agreed with his friend Johnson that the
proper way of dealing with Rousseau was by a
sentence of transportation. Richardson’s discontent
with the dominant ideals might be compared
to that of Dickens, whose sentimentalism delighted
the same class, and was met by the heartless sneers
(so he thought them) of cold-blooded people in clubs
and drawing-rooms. But, in English conditions,
this did not imply any revolutionary outbreak,
political or theological. The enthusiasm could
still run in the old channels, and Richardson could
still be a sound Tory and Churchman. Rousseau,
on the other hand, was to become the mouthpiece
of the most ardent revolutionists. Instead of
promoting a religious revival in the British manner,
he was to convert the revolutionary movement
itself into a kind of new religion. Rationalism
was not to be his enemy, but to be converted into
a creed to be preached with all the fervour of a
fresh gospel.

  The difference corresponds to another contrast,
of which M. Texte has something to say. If
Shakespeare appeared to be half a lunatic to the
admirers of French tragedy, it was partly because
he is so deeply impressed by the greatest riddles
of human life—by the silences and the eternities,
as Carlyle would say. The French drama, says
M. Texte, held aloof from such thoughts; ‘where,
in the plays of Racine and Corneille, are we to
look for their philosophy?’ They have nothing
to say of the ‘problems which bring anguish to
lofty souls.’ This, he thinks, is because in France
there was a divorce between secular and religious
literature. The conventions of the French stage
confined the drama to a sphere of emotion from
which the profoundest poetical sentiments were
excluded. It was certainly not that Frenchmen
were insensible to such thoughts; but that they
left them aside as belonging to the domain of the
Church. Bossuet could preach upon the emptiness
of worldly glory; and Pascal could be profoundly,
even morbidly, sensible of the impotence
of human reason and the worthlessness of human
happiness. In the French pulpit, if not in the English,
it was admittedly becoming that hell should
be mentioned to ‘ears polite’; but the dramatist
felt that in his surroundings the topic would be
really inappropriate and savour of profanity. The
remark is very suggestive, and, I think, may help
to explain what it was that Rousseau really owed
to Richardson. Rousseau clearly was a sentimentalist
in his own right; not because he had
been infected by Richardson. His philosophy,
again, wherever he learnt it, was certainly not due
to the worthy old printer. It had to express
passions and emotions which were not allowed to
find free utterance under the academic _régime._
So far, Richardson might give him a lead by his
‘plebeian’ indifference to accepted canons of
art. They had, so to speak, a common enemy.
Richardson’s revolt was comparatively easy,
because the dominion against which he protested
had never been very solidly founded. The
English authors, whom we call after Queen Anne,
represented our nearest, but still a temporary and
half-hearted, approximation to the French conception.
Swift tried to persuade his Tory friends to
found an academy. The town wits who gathered
in London coffee-houses made for the time such
a circle as was required, and were fully prepared
to accept an absolute code of literary orthodoxy,
and, but for certain patriotic prejudices, to condemn
as Gothic and barbarous everything that
would have displeased a French critic. But this
corresponded to a temporary phase; it was ‘un-
English.’ We could never live up to an academy,
and had no intolerable critical yoke to throw off.
The literary, like the political, movement could
therefore take place by gentle compromise instead
of violent revolution. In France the classical rule
had been stronger, and the explosion was proportionately
forcible. It had forbidden men to
speak upon the deepest subjects and provided no
utterance for the passions which were beginning
to demand open expression. The English precedent
encouraged an advance, which soon went
far beyond English limits. In the same way the
political Anglomaniacs in France saw that in some
things England was ahead of them, and aspired to
transplant the British Constitution bodily. In literature,
Rousseau was attracted by a style which was
breaking with the old conventions, and was admired
for its frank utterance of common sentiments
and freedom in dealing with common objects
and simple human emotions. He loved the ‘individualism’
which meant an expression of a man’s
natural feelings without deference to pretentious
authority. But in politics, Anglomania turned
out to be an impossible compromise; and, in
literature, the new spirit introduced by Rousseau
came into alliance with a radical revolt against the
old order. Cowper in England impressed his
sentimentalism in terms of Evangelical religion;
but Rousseau made a religion out of the rights
of man.

  If this be true, as, at least, it is tolerably
commonplace, we must surely modify the statement
of Rousseau’s influence. Clearly he learnt
something from England, but what he learnt was
mainly encouragement to express more directly
sentiments which he had learnt from nobody outside
of himself. We might rather say that he
assimilated just what was cosmopolitan in the
English movement, and rejected whatever was
really national. A curious illustration of the same
process might be found in the singular popularity
of Ossian. The Ossianic enthusiasm is one of the
most remarkable of literary phenomena. Goethe
admired Ossian; Chateaubriand translated him;
Napoleon revelled in Ossian; Madame de Staël,
equally enthusiastic, considers Ossian as a typical
example of the influence of the Northern spirit.
I will not say that Ossian—or so much of him as
appeared in Macpherson—was a mere humbug.
But I may say, without incurring much risk of
critical wrath, that I cannot read him. Nobody
can read him. Wordsworth, as we know, was
disgusted with his unreal mountains; and his
scenery strikes one, so far as it strikes one at all,
like so much ‘carpenter’s Gothic.’ It is a mere
sham, and, in fact, it never produced any very
assignable effect upon English literature. Yet the
impression which it made upon people of the
highest intelligence is a fact, and ought to be
explained. It seems to show, as some other cases
show, that popularity abroad may be unaffected
by, if not exactly due to, faults which are fatal at
home. The reader of a translation is not shocked
by defects of style apparent to the native, and gets
general impressions in the lump. Wordsworth
was offended because Ossian’s mountains were not
the real thing; only what a Cockney might see
through a Scottish mist. But Chateaubriand was
content with a ‘mountain’ in the abstract, and
supplied details for himself. Ossian’s mountains
might be mere scene-painting. When Scott or
Wordsworth gave genuine likenesses Ossian’s
were seen to be intolerable blurs. That made no
difference to people who simply wanted what Mr.
Ruskin described as the ‘mountain gloom.’ A
vague daub answered the purpose as well as
Turner’s most powerful drawing of the reality.
May we not say the same of the sentiment itself?
Was it really specifically Northern, or simply
eighteenth century, characteristic of the period,
and common to the Germanic and the Latin races?
This, indeed, suggests another question. Matthew
Arnold argues that the effect of Ossian was due to
the specially Celtic sentiment, which survived even
through Macpherson’s manipulation. Madame
de Staël and most contemporaries were indifferent
to such niceties. For them the Northern races
were a unit; Celt and Scandinavian both lived in
the North, and represent bogs and moors and
wind-swept seas in general. Gray complained of
Mason for mixing Scandinavian scalds with Celtic
bards, but the distinction was scarcely recognised
by less learned scholars. M. Texte, of course, is
well aware that the English are not a single race.
He would feel it more keenly, perhaps, if he were
a poor Anglo-Saxon whose thick-headed incapacity
for wit, humour, fancy, or imagination is
being daily impressed upon him by his Irish
friends. This, however, becomes a real difficulty
in ‘ethnological’ theories of literature. If Ossian
represents the Celt as distinguished from, and not
as merely one of, the Northern races, will not
theories as to the influence of Germanic and Latin
races require modification? If Matthew Arnold’s
view be accepted, it would apparently follow that
race differences are so indelible that centuries
of close contact cannot obliterate them. If all
Northern races are alike in so far as they are
all ‘children of the mist,’ can these qualities be
really transmitted till London fogs have occupied
Paris?

  I do not presume to treat such questions. I
confine myself to a simpler point. The ‘cosmopolitan’
movement, in one sense, needs no exposition.
That Europe is becoming a unit for
scientific purposes, or that the great changes,
which we generally sum up as democratic, affect
all civilised countries, is too obvious to be insisted
upon. But does this imply a corresponding unity
of art and literature; a fusion of different types,
and an influence of Northern, for example, upon
Southern races? That is where I hesitate. Critics
trace the growth of ‘sentimentalism,’ ‘romanticism,’
‘love of nature,’ and so forth; they show
their acuteness by recognising early symptoms of
each type; and then speak as though its first
representative had made a discovery of a new
product as a chemist discovers a gas which nobody
had ever before perceived. Rousseau, or somebody
else, has then the credit of all the subsequent
developments, as Watt gets the credit of the
steam-engine. Each new critic pushes the origin
a little further back, because in reality there is no
origin but only a gradual change of form. The
real process seems to me to be very different.
‘Sentimentalism’ was due, I should guess, to the
truly ‘cosmopolitan’ movement: to the social,
political, and philosophical changes which were
common to all Europe. The emotions, of course,
are as old as human nature; they only required a
new form of utterance. Rousseau, as abnormally
sensitive to the great impulses of the time, was
bound to find some appropriate form, and in the
_Nouvelle Héloïse_ he imitated Richardson, the man
who under English conditions had already made
a step in the same direction. But then, he did
not appropriate what was English in Richardson,
but only what was cosmopolitan; or, rather, the
specifically English element was soon thrown off,
and the genuine French characteristics speedily
reappeared. The Anglomania in literature and in
society corresponds, that is, to a fashion essentially
superficial and transitory. Anglomania, we are
told, was rampant in France before the Revolution;
it made ‘appalling progress’; it tended to
replace the ‘social spirit’ by ‘individualism.’
Frenchmen read Shakespeare; drank tea; dressed
like jockeys; imported race-horses; set up
English clubs and had _assemblées à l’anglaise_
destructive of the old French _salon._ As Fox
observed, the imitation was equally ridiculous on
both sides of the Channel. It was ridiculous,
because superficial. We know perfectly well
that to land at Calais was then—as it is even now
to some degree—to find oneself in a new world,
with radically different manners, religion, politics,
institutions, and ways of thinking. A Frenchman
might put on top-boots and keep a bull-dog
without being really one bit the more a genuine
John Bull. He was only masquerading—a mere
stage caricature, whose likeness to the original
was skin-deep. The whole phenomenon represented
a passing enthusiasm, resting, to a great
degree, on a total misunderstanding, and without
any real roots in the soil. So British aristocrats
sympathised at first with the French Revolution,
and French reformers admired the British Constitution,
precisely on account of the utter ignorance
on both sides of the real significance of the
foreign state of things. Was it not really the
same in literature? Richardson and Young and
Ossian could be admired, although they were
English; and admiration for them and others
suggested a fashion of imitation which implied no
real appreciation of the peculiarly English qualities.
Regarded in this way, it seems to me that a moral
might be drawn which would be different from
M. Texte’s. Rousseau shows how one nation
may take a hint from another; but shows also
how the different national characteristics act as a
non-conducting medium. They allow the ‘cosmopolitan’
or congenial element to pass freely, as
the Röntgen rays pass through an opaque body;
but to the really national element they are obstinately
non-transparent. He shows not so much
the blending of two types as the persistence of
each, even when brought into close external
contact.

  If there be any truth in this it applies to M.
Texte’s final moral. He observes that there is a
danger of literature becoming too cosmopolitan.
The distinctive qualities in which French literature
has been super-eminent may disappear: and if
something is gained for science, much may be lost
for art. At present, indeed, we do not seem
to be rapidly approaching the period at which
patriotism will be lost in universal philanthropy.
When the ‘parliament of man’ has been elected
by the ‘federation of the world’ it will be time
enough to make up our minds as to the gain and
loss. The real danger is, to my mind, a little
different. It is quite true that the modern author
does his best to be in one way cosmopolitan. He
goes about the world searching for new sensations.
If an original writer arises in France or Germany,
Russia or Norway, he is translated and imitated,
and has his sect of fervent admirers in every other
civilised country. That, no doubt, represents a
very different state of things from the old order,
under which each vernacular literature grew up
utterly unconscious of the existence of others, or
even from the order in which a small body of
critics could lay down a code of absolute laws and
keep to the elaboration of a single type. In spite
of that, it may be that the national taste will still
assert itself. We plant, it is true, all manner of
exotics, but only a few take root, and those in
virtue of their suitability to our soil. But if the
vision of our political Jeremiahs is to be fulfilled;
if the inevitable growth of democracy means a
growing uniformity and growing vulgarisation of
the human being everywhere; if it implies, too,
an indefinite multiplication of masses, in which the
individual is insignificant, occupied by the same
petty round of interests, and incapable of appreciating
refinement or high intellectual powers,
there can be no doubt that literature also will
become commonplace and vulgar, and so far alike
throughout the world. There may be reasons for
thinking that, in point of fact, there is a strong
temptation for men of genius to write down to a
low level and produce literary shoddy instead of
thorough works of art. It may be, on the other
hand, that democratic literature may represent
wider sympathies and more genuine enthusiasms.
But this opens problems far wider than any mere
literary criticism can approach; as, indeed, the
scientific critic, if such a person is to come into
existence, would be the first to admit that it is
impossible to explain literary changes if the literary
movement be taken by itself as an isolated
phenomenon.

</text>


Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. Constable
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

  This electronic transcription of Leslie Stephen's `Studies of a
Biographer', vol. 4 was transcribed from the edition published by
Duckworth and Co., London, 1902.

  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:

  Page divisions have been removed.

  Line divisions remain, with the exception that end-of-line
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.

  Small caps used in the first word or two of each chapter has been
changed to lower case letters.

  Displayed matter, such as chapter titles, has been intended by a
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 have been corrected:

214.6:	Montaigne, Baudelaire, and Ruskin. In the	(was: Beaudelaire)


  The following oddities remain

51.17:	---and who am I, to say that I cannot bring my

	extraneous , ?

52.21:	blunders, if he cannot approach the felicities, of

	extraneous , after 'felicities' ?

143.20:	but ends with doubt. ‘_Que sçais-je!_’ is his last

	Odd spelling -- '_Que sais-je!_' ?

145.12:	  `the man of the world'; `the idol of common

  The quotation started here does not end.


  businesslike? business-like?

	  Both forms appears.


* The following markup has been added:

  Paragraphs that in the original begin with an indentation have been
indicated by two spaces indentation after an empty line.

_ _	surrounds texts in italics
= =	surrounds text where lowercase letters were set in small caps. 
—	indicates an em dash. Longer sequences represent
	correspondingly longer dashes

<verse>
	Poetry has been marked up by <verse> ... </>, using spaces to
	give the approximate appearance of the text on the printed page.
	Occasionally, the last line contains a source reference. This
	has not been specially marked up.
	
<*>     footnote

	Footnotes in the text were placed at the foot of the page; in
	this edition they have been placed immediately after the line
	in which they are referenced. The footnote callout is always
	an asterisk,<*> and the text of the footnote has been placed,
	within <footnote> ... </> immediately after the line with the
	callout. Footnotes follow the same markup as the rest of the
	text.

	  If the footnote comes at the end of a paragraph, the first
	line of the following paragraph is indented two spaces, as usual.

<? xxx> indicates a page reference to the page where the corresponding
        anchor (named xxx) is placed.

<! xxx> page anchor, named xxx

<bastard title>
<bastard title, verso>
<title page>
<title page, verso>
<page>
<table of contents>
<text>
<chapter>
</text>

	Further markup


* Revision history:

  2006-10-24	First release

  2009-01-12	Corrected mistranscriptions:

		74.3: against Jacobinism, but a war in defence of	(was: defence or)
		94.21: their inconclusiveness. We cannot quite		(was: quite;)
		113.20:	and lust. In his early drafts of a drama, Milton  (was: lust In)
		149.5: Certainly Emerson is on the threshold of mysticism. (was: mysti-||cism.)
		201.16: and young ladies bound hand and foot by the	(was: ladie’s)
		271.15:	like so much ‘carpenter’s Gothic.’ It is a mere	(was: missing '.')
		248.22: This doctrine about the mutual influence of the	(was: the,)

		



  The transcription and proof-reading was done by Anders Thulin,
e-mail: anders (at) thulin (dot) name .

  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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