{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_4037/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_4037","id":"gutenberg_4037","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4037","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","English literature -- History and criticism","Style, Literary"],"text":"Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAPPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE\n\nBy WALTER HORATIO PATER\n\n\n\n\nE-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date\n10-12-01\n\n\nNOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:\n\nReliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you\nread is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard\nedition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise scholarly\ncaution in using it.  It is not intended as a substitute for the\nprinted original but rather as a searchable supplement. My e-texts may\nprove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where\nboth instructor and students accept the possibility of some\nimperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article,\ndissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions\nof any works you cite.\n\nPagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I\nhave transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed numeral\nsuch as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the\nnumber marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I have preserved\nparagraph structure except for first-line indentation.\n\nHyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text\ndoes not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.\n\nGreek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated\nPater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,\nit can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a\nVictorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater\nand many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\nStyle: 5-38\n\nWordsworth: 39-64\n\nColeridge: 65-104\n\nCharles Lamb: 105-123\n\nSir Thomas Browne: 124-160\n\n\"Love's Labours Lost\": 161-169\n\n\"Measure for Measure\": 170-184\n\nShakespeare's English Kings: 185-204\n\nDante Gabriel Rossetti: 205-218\n\nFeuillet's \"La Morte\": 219-240\n\nPostscript: 241-261\n\n\n\n\nAPPRECIATIONS\n\n\nSTYLE\n\n[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in\ndifferentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object\ninto its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to\nconfuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of\nachieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for\ninstance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and\ncharacteristic excellences of verse and prose composition.  On the\nother hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction\nbetween prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been\ntempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this\nagain is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation\nof a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs\nmake the most of things.  Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by\nanticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with\nwhich this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or\nthe prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language of men, are always\nliable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production; and while\nprose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesque\nwith Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical and\nintimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or\nflorid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless to\nprotest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and\nnarrowly confined to mainly practical ends--a kind of  \"good\nround-hand;\" as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch\nprosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as with\nBrowning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson.  In\nsubordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in\nall literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so\nthe beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to\nestimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look\nfor those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too\nhas, or needs.  To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions,\nthe mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the\nlogical structure:--how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify in\nprose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating it\nas out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an\nestimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there.\n\n[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to\nemphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against\ntheir confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effect\nfrom one whose poetry was so prosaic.  In truth, his sense of prosaic\nexcellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not only\nfervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all\nunconsciously, by many a scanning line.  Setting up correctness, that\nhumble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really\na less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery\nof the relative pronoun.  It might have been foreseen that, in the\nrotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its\nassertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual\nneeds, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary\nform, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively\nenlarged by Wordsworth.  The true distinction between prose and poetry\nhe regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or\npresence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him\nthe opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as\nthe essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and\nunimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between\n\"the literature of power and the literature of knowledge,\" in the\nformer of which the composer gives us [8] not fact, but his peculiar\nsense of fact, whether past or present.\n\nDismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition\nof poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of\nthe last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one\nonly beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain\nqualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the\nliterature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the\nimaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and\nprose, so far as either is really imaginative--certain conditions of\ntrue art in both alike, which conditions may also contain in them the\nsecret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar\nexcellences of either.\n\nThe line between fact and something quite different from external fact\nis, indeed, hard to draw.  In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive\nwriters generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time\nto time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must\nconsist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading--a theorem no\nlonger, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's\nspirit, to think with him, if one can or will--an expression no longer\nof fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world,\nprospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present,\nin either case changed somewhat from the actual [9] world.  In science,\non the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule,\nwe have a literary domain where the imagination may be thought to be\nalways an intruder.  And as, in all science, the functions of\nliterature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so\nall the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible\nto various kinds of pains-taking; this good quality being involved in\nall \"skilled work\" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament,\nas in sewing.  Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history\nespecially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the\nborders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various\ndegrees.  Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful\nintention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs\nselect, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something\nthat comes not of the world without but of a vision within.  So Gibbon\nmoulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view.  Livy, Tacitus,\nMichelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the\npast, each, after his own sense, modifies--who can tell where and to\nwhat degree?--and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as\nhe thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper.  For just in\nproportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to\nbe the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his\nsense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art\n(as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of his\npresentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions of\nliterature also, truth--truth to bare fact, there--is the essence of\nsuch artistic quality as they may have.  Truth! there can be no merit,\nno craft at all, without that.  And further, all beauty is in the long\nrun only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer\naccommodation of speech to that vision within.\n\n--The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being\npreferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself.  In\nliterature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding\nof a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts\nitself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above\nits primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of\ncourse, in the first instance) there, \"fine\" as opposed to merely\nserviceable art, exists.  Literary art, that is, like all art which is\nin any way imitative or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or\nincident--is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of\na specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.\n\nSuch is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature--this\ntranscript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as\nmodified by human preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms.\nIt will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or\nrich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its\nrepresentation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being only\none department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may be\nthought, being the special art of the modern world.  That imaginative\nprose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world\nresults from two important facts about the latter: first, the chaotic\nvariety and complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue,\nthe really master currents of the present time incalculable--a\ncondition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verse\nform, so that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century\nhas been lawless verse; and secondly, an all-pervading naturalism, a\ncuriosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a\ncertain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the\nless ambitious form of literature.  And prose thus asserting itself as\nthe special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will\nbe, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its\nexcellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest\nexperience--an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant,\ndescriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid.  Its beauties will\nbe not exclusively \"pedestrian\": it will exert, in due measure, all the\nvaried charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12]\nor Michelet, or Newman, at their best, gives its musical value to every\nsyllable.*\n\nThe literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he .\nproposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the\nscholarly conscience--the male conscience in this matter, as we must\nthink it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent\nlimits real scholarship to men.  In his self-criticism, he supposes\nalways that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily,\nconsiderately, though without consideration for him, over the ground\nwhich the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the\nmaterial in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the\nsculptor's marble.  Product of a myriad various minds and contending\ntongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its\nown abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary\nrecognition of which scholarship consists.  A writer, full of a matter\nhe is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws,\nthe limitations of vocabulary, structure, and the like, as a\nrestriction, but if a [13] real artist will find in them an\nopportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties of his\nmedium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of sensibility,\nof refined usage.  Exclusiones debitae--the exclusions, or rejections,\nwhich nature demands--we know how large a part these play, according to\nBacon, in the science of nature.  In a somewhat changed sense, we might\nsay that the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of those\nrejections demanded by the nature of his medium, the material he must\nuse.  Alive to the value of an atmosphere in which every term finds its\nutmost degree of expression, and with all the jealousy of a lover of\nwords, he will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majority\nof those who use them to efface the distinctions of language, the\nfacility of writers often reinforcing in this respect the work of the\nvulgar.  He will feel the obligation not of the laws only, but of those\naffinities, avoidances, those mere preferences, of his language, which\nthrough the associations of literary history have become a part of its\nnature, prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license,\nmany a gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive.\nHis appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in\nliterature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed\nillustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned.\nHence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and renunciation,\nhaving for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minute\nconsideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail,\nbeing a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive too,\nthat the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and\ntherefore, indirectly, with the reader himself also, that he has the\nscience of the instrument he plays on, perhaps, after all, with a\nfreedom which in such case will be the freedom of a master.\n\nFor meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really\nvindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system\nof composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of\nthe manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art.\nPedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English\nequivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the\nrules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which\nlike the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will still\nfurther illustrate good taste.--The right vocabulary!  Translators have\nnot invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of\ntranslation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction;\nwhereas, if the original be first-rate, one's first care should be with\nits elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible\nby an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after\nword, as [15] the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only\neach word or syllable be not of false colour, to change my illustration\na little.\n\nWell! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed\nand searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would\nselect in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of the\nwords he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and\ndoing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search\nof an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a\nvocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the\nstrictest sense original.  That living authority which language needs\nlies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognising always that every\nlanguage possesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own,\nexpand at once and purify its very elements, which must needs change\nalong with the changing thoughts of living people.  Ninety years ago,\nfor instance, great mental force, certainly, was needed by Wordsworth,\nto break through the consecrated poetic associations of a century, and\nspeak the language that was his, that was to become in a measure the\nlanguage of the next generation.  But he did it with the tact of a\nscholar also.  English, for a quarter of a century past, has been\nassimilating the phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the\nphraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years\nago; in part also the [16] language of mystical theology: and none but\npedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources.  For\nmany years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of\nthe vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive\nscholarship--in a liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too,\nfor after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full,\nrich, complex matter to grapple with.  The literary artist, therefore,\nwill be well aware of physical science; science also attaining, in its\nturn, its true literary ideal.  And then, as the scholar is nothing\nwithout the historic sense, he will be apt to restore not really\nobsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer edge of words still in\nuse: ascertain, communicate, discover--words like these it has been\npart of our \"business\" to misuse.  And still, as language was made for\nman, he will be no authority for correctnesses which, limiting freedom\nof utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as if one vowed\nnot to say \"its,\" which ought to have been in Shakespeare; \"his\"\n\"hers,\" for inanimate objects, being but a barbarous and really\ninexpressive survival.  Yet we have known many things like this.  Racy\nSaxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix\nreadily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in \"second\nintention.\"  In this late day certainly, no critical process can be\nconducted reasonably without eclecticism.  Of [17] such eclecticism we\nhave a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time.  How\nillustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the\nphraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the\nwritings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship\nthroughout!\n\nA scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave something\nto the willing intelligence of his reader.  \"To go preach to the first\npasser-by,\" says Montaigne, \"to become tutor to the ignorance of the\nfirst I meet, is a thing I abhor;\" a thing, in fact, naturally\ndistressing to the scholar, who will therefore ever be shy of offering\nuncomplimentary assistance to the reader's wit.  To really strenuous\nminds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous\neffort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp\nof the author's sense.  Self-restraint, a skilful economy of means,\nascesis, that too has a beauty of its own; and for the reader supposed\nthere will be an aesthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness of\nstyle which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from every\nsentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to\nthought, in the logically filled space connected always with the\ndelightful sense of difficulty overcome.\n\nDifferent classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very\nvarious demands upon literature.  Still, scholars, I suppose, and not\n[18] only scholars, but all disinterested lovers of books, will always\nlook to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral\nrefuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world.  A perfect poem\nlike Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a\ntheory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of\nthe uses of a religious \"retreat.\"  Here, then, with a view to the\ncentral need of a select few, those \"men of a finer thread\" who have\nformed and maintain the literary ideal, everything, every component\nelement, will have undergone exact trial, and, above all, there will be\nno uncharacteristic or tarnished or vulgar decoration, permissible\nornament being for the most part structural, or necessary.  As the\npainter in his picture, so the artist in his book, aims at the\nproduction by honourable artifice of a peculiar atmosphere.  \"The\nartist,\" says Schiller, \"may be known rather by what he omits\"; and in\nliterature, too, the true artist may be best recognised by his tact of\nomission.  For to the grave reader words too are grave; and the\nornamental word, the figure, the accessory form or colour or reference,\nis rarely content to die to thought precisely at the right moment, but\nwill inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long \"brain-wave\" behind it\nof perhaps quite alien associations.\n\nJust there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of\nscholarly attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending.  But the true\nartist allows for it.  He will remember that, as the very word ornament\nindicates what is in itself non-essential, so the \"one beauty\" of all\nliterary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose and\nverse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its\nfullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or in\nStendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned,\nwith hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things.  Parallel,\nallusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:--he\nknows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to\nwhich any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder,\nbecause one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject.\nJealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does\nnot hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never\ndepart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a\nponderable something thereby.  Even assured of its congruity, he will\nstill question its serviceableness.  Is it worth while, can we afford,\nto attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, just\nthen?--Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles.\nFor in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage,\nfrom the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle\nof invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of [20] the finished\nwork to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's fancy, in the\nrough-hewn block of stone.\n\nAnd what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other\naccidental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of\nspecific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery which\nlanguage as such carries in it.  A lover of words for their own sake,\nto whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant\nobserver of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not only for\nobviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixed\nin all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of it.\nCurrently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elements\nor particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the first\nthat occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the\nresources of expression.  The elementary particles of language will be\nrealised as colour and light and shade through his scholarly living in\nthe full sense of them.  Still opposing the constant degradation of\nlanguage by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat coloured\nglass as if it were clear; and while half the world is using figure\nunconsciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latent\nfigurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formed\npersonification--a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, [21]\nbecause it has no really rhetorical motive--which plays so large a part\nthere, and, as in the case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously\nexact of it, from syllable to syllable, its precise value.\n\nSo far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art\narising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the\nessential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent\nornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good\ntaste respectively.  They are both subservient to a more intimate\nquality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist\nhimself.  The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent\nto the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all\nother art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed,\neverywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees the\nend in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is\nconscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with\nundiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition of\nliterary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of the\nartist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity of\nmind in style.\n\nAn acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whose\nworks illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and\nwith obvious repression or economy of a fine [22] rhetorical gift)\nwrote a book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, to\nshow that all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing, in\neach and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity with\nitself, of the apprehending mind.  All the laws of good writing aim at\na similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which\nthe word is associated to its import.  The term is right, and has its\nessential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as\nwith the names of simple sensations.  To give the phrase, the sentence,\nthe structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a\nsimilar unity with its subject and with itself:--style is in the right\nway when it tends towards that.  All depends upon the original unity,\nthe vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or\nview.  So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always its\nlogic, its comprehensive reason--insight, foresight, retrospect, in\nsimultaneous action--true, most of all, of the literary art, as being\nof all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence.\nSuch logical coherency may be evidenced not merely in the lines of\ncomposition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by\nno means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the\nbuilding of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative,\ndescriptive, discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the\nentire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's\nexpression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending,\nvictoriously intricate sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity\nof a single word, relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you look\nclosely, you can see much contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a\nhighly qualified matter into compass at one view.  For the literary\narchitecture, if it is to be rich and expressive, involves not only\nforesight of the end in the beginning, but also development or growth\nof design, in the process of execution, with many irregularities,\nsurprises, and afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessary\nbeing subsumed under the unity of the whole.  As truly, to the lack of\nsuch architectural design, of a single, almost visual, image,\nvigorously informing an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition,\nwhich shall be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true from\nfirst to last to that vision within, may be attributed those weaknesses\nof conscious or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, motive, or\nmember of the whole matter, indicating, as Flaubert was aware, an\noriginal structure in thought not organically complete.  With such\nforesight, the actual conclusion will most often get itself written out\nof hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished. With\nsome strong and leading sense of the world, the [24] tight hold of\nwhich secures true composition and not mere loose accretion, the\nliterary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, setting joint to\njoint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardour, retracing\nthe negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he\nmay give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress, readjusting\nmere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or at least not\ninterrupt him on his way; and then, somewhere before the end comes, is\nburdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes delivered of it,\nleaving off, not in weariness and because he finds himself at an end,\nbut in all the freshness of volition.  His work now structurally\ncomplete, with all the accumulating effect of secondary shades of\nmeaning, he finishes the whole up to the just proportion of that\nante-penultimate conclusion, and all becomes expressive.  The house he\nhas built is rather a body he has informed. And so it happens, to its\ngreater credit, that the better interest even of a narrative to be\nrecounted, a story to be told, will often be in its second reading.\nAnd though there are instances of great writers who have been no\nartists, an unconscious tact sometimes directing work in which we may\ndetect, very pleasurably, many of the effects of conscious art, yet one\nof the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in the\ncritical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure, and the\npervading sense of it [25] as we read.  Yet of poetic literature too;\nfor, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed is\none of the forms of the imagination.\n\nThat is the special function of mind, in style.  Mind and soul:--hard\nto ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough\npractically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, with\neach other.  Blake, in the last century, is an instance of\npreponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of\npreponderating mind.  As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a\nfact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing language, of\nattracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety\nwhich makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration.\nBy mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective\nindications of design in his work, legible to all.  By soul, he reaches\nus, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant\nsympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose but\napprove where we recognise it; soul may repel us, not because we\nmisunderstand it.  The way in which theological interests sometimes\navail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of the\nforce I mean to indicate generally in literature, by the word soul.\nArdent religious persuasion may exist, may make its way, without\nfinding any equivalent heat in language: or, again, it may enkindle\n[26] words to various degrees, and when it really takes hold of them\ndoubles its force.  Religious history presents many remarkable\ninstances in which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious\nliterary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway\nfrom one to another.  \"The altar-fire,\" people say, \"has touched those\nlips!\" The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-Book, the\nwritings of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times:--there, we have\ninstances of widely different and largely diffused phases of religious\nfeeling in operation as soul in style.  But something of the same kind\nacts with similar power in certain writers of quite other than\ntheological literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar\nsense of theirs.  Most easily illustrated by theological literature,\nthis quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence.\nAt their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, \"prophets\";\nsuch character depending on the effect not merely of their matter, but\nof their matter as allied to, in \"electric affinity\" with, peculiar\nform, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic contact, on\nwhich account it is that it may be called soul, as opposed to mind, in\nstyle.  And this too is a faculty of choosing and rejecting what is\ncongruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity--unity of atmosphere\nhere, as there of design--soul securing colour (or perfume, might [27]\nwe say?) as mind secures form, the latter being essentially finite, the\nformer vague or infinite, as the influence of a living person is\npractically infinite.  There are some to whom nothing has any real\ninterest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person; and\nit is they who best appreciate the quality of soul in literary art.\nThey seem to know a person, in a book, and make way by intuition: yet,\nalthough they thus enjoy the completeness of a personal information, it\nis still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it\ndoes but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being different\nfrom, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containing\nthat plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in\nwhat is there expressed.\n\nIf all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps\nrank as the martyr of literary style.  In his printed correspondence, a\ncurious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year, records\nwhat seems to have been his one other passion--a series of letters\nwhich, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed anguish, its\ntone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in which the\nwhole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes supposed, one\nof his own fictions.  Writing to Madame X. certainly he does display,\nby \"taking thought\" mainly, by constant and delicate pondering, as in\nhis love for literature, a heart really moved, but [28] still more, and\nas the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his work.  Madame X., too,\nis a literary artist, and the best gifts he can send her are precepts\nof perfection in art, counsels for the effectual pursuit of that better\nlove.  In his love-letters it is the pains and pleasures of art he\ninsists on, its solaces: he communicates secrets, reproves, encourages,\nwith a view to that. Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such\ndivided or indirect service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees\nthat, on Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of\nwhat was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitary\nand exclusive one.\n\nI must scold you (he writes) for one thing, which shocks, scandalises\nme, the small concern, namely, you show for art just now.  As regards\nglory be it so: there, I approve.  But for art!--the one thing in life\nthat is good and real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--prefer\nthe adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty?\nWell! I tell you the truth.  That is the one thing good in me: the one\nthing I have, to me estimable.  For yourself, you blend with the\nbeautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable, what not?--\n\nThe only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count\neverything else as nothing.  Pride takes the place of all beside when\nit is established on a large basis.  Work!  God wills it.  That, it\nseems to me, is clear.--+\n\nI am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I repeat to\nmyself to satiety.  There are phrases there which stay in one's head,\nby which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are for\never returning, and cause you pain, you love them so much.  I observe\nthat I no longer laugh much, and am no longer depressed.  I am ripe.\nYou talk of my serenity, and envy me.  It may well surprise you.  Sick,\n[29] irritated, the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I\ncontinue my labour like a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned\nup, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling\nhimself whether it rains or blows, for hail or thunder.  I was not like\nthat formerly.  The change has taken place naturally, though my will\nhas counted for something in the matter.--\n\nThose who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect of\nideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were\nsomething else than healing, of the painter than painting-as if the end\nof art were not, before all else, the beautiful.\n\nWhat, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued\nwith so much fervour, with so much self-command?  Let us hear a\nsympathetic commentator:--\n\nPossessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of\nexpressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify,\none verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman labour for the\ndiscovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet.  In\nthis way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, and\nwhen a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seeking\nanother, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold\nof the unique word....  A thousand preoccupations would beset him at\nthe same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his\nspirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of\nexpression, there is but one--one form, one mode--to express what I\nwant to say.\n\nThe one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of\nwords, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!--the\nunique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely\nproper to the single mental presentation or vision within.\n\n[30] In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and\nremovable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which\nit can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing\nitself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point,\nfrom single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific,\nindispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility\nof which constitutes it a fine art.\n\nOne seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there, the idea\nof a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a\nrelative, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative,\nsomewhere in the world of language--both alike, rather, somewhere in\nthe mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, inventive--meeting\neach other with the readiness of \"soul and body reunited,\" in Blake's\nrapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theory\nphilosophical expression.--\n\nThere are no beautiful thoughts (he would say) without beautiful forms,\nand conversely.  As it is impossible to extract from a physical body\nthe qualities which really constitute it--colour, extension, and the\nlike--without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without\ndestroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the\nidea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form.\n\nAll, the recognised flowers, the removable ornaments of literature\n(including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully considered\n[31] by him) counted, certainly; for these too are part of the actual\nvalue of what one says.  But still, after all, with Flaubert, the\nsearch, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth, or winsome, or\nforcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but quite simply and\nhonestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. The first condition\nof this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained your\nown sense exactly.  Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to the\nreader,--I want you to see precisely what I see.  Into the mind\nsensitive to \"form,\" a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, is\never penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympathetic\nselection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visible\nvesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within,\nnay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined,\nenlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at\nthose doubtful points that the function of style, as tact or taste,\nintervenes.  The unique term will come more quickly to one than\nanother, at one time than another, according also to the kind of matter\nin question.  Quickness and slowness, ease and closeness alike, have\nnothing to do with the artistic character of the true word found at\nlast.  As there is a charm of ease, so there is also a special charm in\nthe signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards a due end, as\nso often with Flaubert himself--in the style which has [32] been\npliant, as only obstinate, durable metal can be, to the inherent\nperplexities and recusancy of a certain difficult thought.\n\nIf Flaubert had not told us, perhaps we should never have guessed how\ntardy and painful his own procedure really was, and after reading his\nconfession may think that his almost endless hesitation had much to do\nwith diseased nerves.  Often, perhaps, the felicity supposed will be\nthe product of a happier, a more exuberant nature than Flaubert's.\nAggravated, certainly, by a morbid physical condition, that anxiety in\n\"seeking the phrase,\" which gathered all the other small ennuis of a\nreally quiet existence into a kind of battle, was connected with his\nlifelong contention against facile poetry, facile art--art, facile and\nflimsy; and what constitutes the true artist is not the slowness or\nquickness of the process, but the absolute success of the result.  As\nwith those labourers in the parable, the prize is independent of the\nmere length of the actual day's work.  \"You talk,\" he writes, odd,\ntrying lover, to Madame X.--\n\n\"You talk of the exclusiveness of my literary tastes.  That might have\nenabled you to divine what kind of a person I am in the matter of love.\nI grow so hard to please as a literary artist, that I am driven to\ndespair.  I shall end by not writing another line.\"\n\n\"Happy,\" he cries, in a moment of discouragement at that patient\nlabour, which for him, certainly, was the condition of a great\nsuccess--[33]\n\nHappy those who have no doubts of themselves! who lengthen out, as the\npen runs on, all that flows forth from their brains.  As for me, I\nhesitate, I disappoint myself, turn round upon myself in despite: my\ntaste is augmented in proportion as my natural vigour decreases, and I\nafflict my soul over some dubious word out of all proportion to the\npleasure I get from a whole page of good writing.  One would have to\nlive two centuries to attain a true idea of any matter whatever.  What\nBuffon said is a big blasphemy: genius is not long-continued patience.\nStill, there is some truth in the statement, and more than people\nthink, especially as regards our own day.  Art! art! art! bitter\ndeception! phantom that glows with light, only to lead one on to\ndestruction...\n\nAgain--\n\nI am growing so peevish about my writing.  I am like a man whose ear is\ntrue but who plays falsely on the violin: his fingers refuse to\nreproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the inward sense.\nThen the tears come rolling down from the poor scraper's eyes and the\nbow falls from his hand.\n\nComing slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much labour\nof mind, but also with so much lustre, to Gustave Flaubert, this\ndiscovery of the word will be, like all artistic success and felicity,\nincapable of strict analysis: effect of an intuitive condition of mind,\nit must be recognised by like intuition on the part of the reader, and\na sort of immediate sense.  In every one of those masterly sentences of\nFlaubert there was, below all mere contrivance, shaping and\nafterthought, by some happy instantaneous concourse of the various\nfaculties of the mind with each other, the exact apprehension of what\nwas needed to carry the meaning.  And that it fits with absolute\njustice will be a judgment of [34] immediate sense in the appreciative\nreader.  We all feel this in what may be called inspired translation.\nWell! all language involves translation from inward to outward.  In\nliterature, as in all forms of art, there are the absolute and the\nmerely relative or accessory beauties; and precisely in that exact\nproportion of the term to its purpose is the absolute beauty of style,\nprose or verse.  All the good qualities, the beauties, of verse also,\nare such, only as precise expression.\n\nIn the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one\nindispensable beauty is, after all, truth:--truth to bare fact in the\nlatter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from men's\nordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truth\nhere as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, the\nvraie verite. And what an eclectic principle this really is! employing\nfor its one sole purpose--that absolute accordance of expression to\nidea--all other literary beauties and excellences whatever: how many\nkinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same time\nsafeguards!  Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evocation of\n\"the phrase,\" are equally good art.  Say what you have to say, what you\nhave a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner\npossible, with no surplusage:--there, is the justification of the\nsentence so fortunately born, \"entire, smooth, and round,\" that it\nneeds no punctuation, and also [35] (that is the point!) of the most\nelaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration.  Here is the\noffice of ornament: here also the purpose of restraint in ornament.  As\nthe exponent of truth, that austerity (the beauty, the function, of\nwhich in literature Flaubert understood so well) becomes not the\ncorrectness or purism of the mere scholar, but a security against the\notiose, a jealous exclusion of what does not really tell towards the\npursuit of relief, of life and vigour in the portraiture of one's\nsense.  License again, the making free with rule, if it be indeed, as\npeople fancy, a habit of genius, flinging aside or transforming all\nthat opposes the liberty of beautiful production, will be but faith to\none's own meaning.  The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is\nnothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Miserables is nothing in\nitself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence,\nonly redoubled beauty--the phrase so large and so precise at the same\ntime, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation of\nwords to their matter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of\nprofit only so far as they too really serve to bring out the original,\ninitiative, generative, sense in them.\n\nIn this way, according to the well-known saying, \"The style is the\nman,\" complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of\nwhat he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions\nregarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to the\nmedium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things,\nthe purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is\nto be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that.\nStyle in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant,\nmusical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic\nor expressive, finds thus its justification, the sumptuous good taste\nof Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified,\nyet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been his\nportrait by Raffaelle, in full consular splendour, on his ivory chair.\n\nA relegation, you may say perhaps--a relegation of style to the\nsubjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon\ntransform it into mannerism.  Not so! since there is, under the\nconditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every lineament\nof the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word,\nrecognisable by the sensitive, by others \"who have intelligence\" in the\nmatter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in the evanescent and\ndelicate region of human language.  The style, the manner, would be the\nman, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices,\ninvoluntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of what\nis most real to him.  But let us hear our French guide again.--\n\nStyles (says Flaubert's commentator), Styles, as so many [37] peculiar\nmoulds, each of which bears the mark of a particular writer, who is to\npour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of his\ntheory.  What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certain\nabsolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in all its intensity\nand colour.  For him the form was the work itself.  As in living\ncreatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour\nand external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a\nwork of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the\nmeasure, the rhythm--the form in all its characteristics.\n\nIf the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable\napprehension, it will be in a real sense \"impersonal.\"\n\nI said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, that prose\nliterature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as\nothers, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned\nthat place to music.  Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the\nopposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to the\nimagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free\nand various as those which music presents to it through sense.  And\ncertainly the tendency of what has been here said is to bring\nliterature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music\ntakes rank as the typically perfect art.  If music be the ideal of all\nart whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to\ndistinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the\nexpression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the\nabsolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be [38] but\nfulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere,\nof all good art.\n\nGood art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great\nart and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all\nevents, not on its form, but on the matter.  Thackeray's Esmond,\nsurely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its\ninterests.  It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls,\nits compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of\nthe note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness\nof literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les\nMiserables, The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions I\nhave tried to explain as constituting good art;--then, if it be devoted\nfurther to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the\noppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to\nsuch presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation\nto the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or\nimmediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great\nart; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and\nsoul--that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it\nhas something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its\narchitectural place, in the great structure of human life.\n\n1888.\n\nNOTES\n\n12. *Mr. Saintsbury, in his Specimens of English Prose, from Malory to\nMacaulay, has succeeded in tracing, through successive English\nprose-writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in them, of which\nthis admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover.\nEnglish Prose, from Mandeville to Thackeray, more recently \"chosen and\nedited\" by a younger scholar, Mr. Arthur Galton, of New College,\nOxford, a lover of our literature at once enthusiastic and discreet,\naims at a more various illustration of the eloquent powers of English\nprose, and is a delightful companion.\n\n28. +In the original, the quoted material is not indented but instead\nappears in a smaller typeface; I have chosen to indent the material\nhalf an inch to make it easier to read.\n\n\n\nWORDSWORTH\n\n[39] SOME English critics at the beginning of the present century had a\ngreat deal to say concerning a distinction, of much importance, as they\nthought, in the true estimate of poetry, between the Fancy, and another\nmore powerful faculty--the Imagination.  This metaphysical distinction,\nborrowed originally from the writings of German philosophers, and\nperhaps not always clearly apprehended by those who talked of it,\ninvolved a far deeper and more vital distinction, with which indeed all\ntrue criticism more or less directly has to do, the distinction,\nnamely, between higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's\nperception of his subject, and in his concentration of himself upon his\nwork.  Of those who dwelt upon the metaphysical distinction between the\nFancy and the Imagination, it was Wordsworth who made the most of it,\nassuming it as the basis for the final classification of his poetical\nwritings; and it is in these writings that the deeper and more vital\ndistinction, which, as I have said, underlies the metaphysical [40]\ndistinction, is most needed, and may best be illustrated.\n\nFor nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own\npoetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work of\nalmost no character at all.  He has much conventional sentiment, and\nsome of that insincere poetic diction, against which his most serious\ncritical efforts were directed: the reaction in his political ideas,\nconsequent on the excesses of 1795, makes him, at times, a mere\ndeclaimer on moral and social topics; and he seems, sometimes, to force\nan unwilling pen, and write by rule.  By making the most of these\nblemishes it is possible to obscure the true aesthetic value of his\nwork, just as his life also, a life of much quiet delicacy and\nindependence, might easily be placed in a false focus, and made to\nappear a somewhat tame theme in illustration of the more obvious\nparochial virtues.  And those who wish to understand his influence, and\nexperience his peculiar savour, must bear with patience the presence of\nan alien element in Wordsworth's work, which never coalesced with what\nis really delightful in it, nor underwent his special power.  Who that\nvalues his writings most has not felt the intrusion there, from time to\ntime, of something tedious and prosaic? Of all poets equally great, he\nwould gain most by a skilfully made anthology.  Such a selection would\nshow, in truth, not so much what he was, or to himself or others [41]\nseemed to be, as what, by the more energetic and fertile quality in his\nwritings, he was ever tending to become.  And the mixture in his work,\nas it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the\nleast promising composition even, lest some precious morsel should be\nlying hidden within--the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word\nperhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost\nthe whole of which may be tame enough.  He who thought that in all\ncreative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient\nmind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a measure\nwas sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; and\nhe has permitted the impress of these too to remain in his work.  And\nthis duality there--the fitfulness with which the higher qualities\nmanifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his poetry of a power\nnot altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes when\nit will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in itself; so that that old\nfancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine\npossession, seems almost literally true of him.\n\nThis constant suggestion of an absolute duality between higher and\nlower moods, and the work done in them, stimulating one always to look\nbelow the surface, makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent sort of\ntraining towards the things of art and poetry.  It begets in those,\n[42] who, coming across him in youth, can bear him at all, a habit of\nreading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and\ncollectedness of mind in the right appreciation of poetry, an\nexpectation of things, in this order, coming to one by means of a right\ndiscipline of the temper as well as of the intellect.  He meets us with\nthe promise that he has much, and something very peculiar, to give us,\nif we will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to have the secret\nof a special and privileged state of mind.  And those who have\nundergone his influence, and followed this difficult way, are like\npeople who have passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by\nsubmitting to which they become able constantly to distinguish in art,\nspeech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive,\nfrom that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive.\n\nBut although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for\noneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar\ninfluence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of\nit, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent, had\nthe writer himself purged away that alien element.  How perfect would\nhave been the little treasury, shut between the covers of how thin a\nbook!  Let us suppose the desired separation made, the electric thread\nuntwined, the golden pieces, [43] great and small, lying apart\ntogether.*  What are the peculiarities of this residue? What special\nsense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does he satisfy?\nWhat are the subjects and the motives which in him excite the\nimaginative faculty?  What are the qualities in things and persons\nwhich he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to\nothers, in an extraordinary way?\n\nAn intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which\nweighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by,\nis a large element in the complexion of modern poetry.  It has been\nremarked as a fact in mental history again and again.  It reveals\nitself in many forms; but is strongest and most attractive in what is\nstrongest and most attractive in modern literature.  It is exemplified,\nalmost equally, by writers as unlike each other as Senancour and\nTheophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the history of the human\nmind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, from\nChateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it has doubtless some latent connexion\nwith those pantheistic theories which locate an intelligent soul in\nmaterial things, and have largely exercised men's minds in some modern\nsystems of philosophy: it is traceable even in [44] the graver writings\nof historians: it makes as much difference between ancient and modern\nlandscape art, as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic\nand a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough.  Of this new sense, the\nwritings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression: he is\nmore simply and entirely occupied with it than any other poet, though\nthere are fine expressions of precisely the same thing in so different\na poet as Shelley.  There was in his own character a certain\ncontentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united\nwith a sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet,\nhabitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence.\nHis life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt\nincidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into\nbroad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces.  What it most\nresembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish\npainters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions,\npassed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet,\nsystematic industry.  This placid life matured a quite unusual\nsensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the\nnatural world--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and\nits echo.  The poem of Resolution and Independence is a storehouse of\nsuch records: for its fulness of imagery it may be compared to Keats's\nSaint Agnes' Eve.  To [45] read one of his longer pastoral poems for\nthe first time, is like a day spent in a new country: the memory is\ncrowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents--\n\n  The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze\n  On some grey rock;--\n\n  The single sheep and the one blasted tree\n  And the bleak music from that old stone wall;--\n\n  In the meadows and the lower ground\n  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;--\n\n  And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears.\n\nClear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visible\nimagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous, in\nthe noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble sound as even\nmoulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something\nactually \"profaned\" by colour, by visible form, or image.\n\nHe has a power likewise of realising, and conveying to the\nconsciousness of the reader, abstract and elementary\nimpressions--silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, the\nwhole complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression\nof desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular\nfolding of the hills.  In the airy building of the brain, a special day\nor hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, a\nspirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional [46]\ninsight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one's\nhistory, and acts there, as a separate power or accomplishment; and he\nhas celebrated in many of his poems the \"efficacious spirit,\" which, as\nhe says, resides in these \"particular spots\" of time.\n\nIt is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation thereon,\nthat we see him retiring in his but lately published poem of The\nRecluse--taking leave, without much count of costs, of the world of\nbusiness, of action and ambition; as also of all that for the majority\nof mankind counts as sensuous enjoyment.*\n\nAnd so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects,\nwhich in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth\nthe assertion of what for him is almost literal fact.  To him every\nnatural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual\nlife, to be [47] capable of a companionship with man, full of\nexpression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse.\nAn emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves\nor water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly,\nby some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the passing\nspace of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even,\nfor a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.  It was\nlike a \"survival,\" in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of\nletters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive\ncondition, which some philosophers have traced in the general history\nof human culture, wherein all outward objects [48] alike, including\neven the works of men's hands, were believed to be endowed with\nanimation, and the world was \"full of souls\"--that mood in which the\nold Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strange\naftergrowths.\n\nIn the early ages, this belief, delightful as its effects on poetry\noften are, was but the result of a crude intelligence.  But, in\nWordsworth, such power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, in\ninanimate things, came of an exceptional susceptibility to the\nimpressions of eye and ear, and was, in its essence, a kind of\nsensuousness.  At least, it is only in a temperament exceptionally\nsusceptible on the sensuous side, that this sense of the expressiveness\nof outward things comes to be so large a part of life. That he awakened\n\"a sort of thought in sense,\" is Shelley's just estimate of this\nelement in Wordsworth's poetry.\n\nAnd it was through nature, thus ennobled by a semblance of passion and\nthought, that he approached the spectacle of human life.  Human life,\nindeed, is for him, at first, only an additional, accidental grace on\nan expressive landscape.  When he thought of man, it was of man as in\nthe presence and under the influence of these effective natural\nobjects, and linked to them by many associations.  The close connexion\nof man with natural objects, the habitual association of his thoughts\nand feelings with a particular spot of earth, has sometimes seemed to\n[49] degrade those who are subject to its influence, as if it did but\nreinforce that physical connexion of our nature with the actual lime\nand clay of the soil, which is always drawing us nearer to our end.\nBut for Wordsworth, these influences tended to the dignity of human\nnature, because they tended to tranquillise it.  By raising nature to\nthe level of human thought he gives it power and expression: he subdues\nman to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and\ncoolness and solemnity. The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman\n\"stepping westward,\" are for him natural objects, almost in the same\nsense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath.  In this\nsense the leader of the \"Lake School,\" in spite of an earnest\npreoccupation with man, his thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of\nnature.  And of nature, after all, in its modesty.  The English lake\ncountry has, of course, its grandeurs.  But the peculiar function of\nWordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of\napparently little or familiar things, would have found its true test\nhad he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.\nThe glories of Italy and Switzerland, though he did write a little\nabout them, had too potent a material life of their own to serve\ngreatly his poetic purpose.\n\nReligious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural regrets of\nthe human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for the [50]\nperishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has\nalways had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach\nthemselves to actual scenes and places.  Now what is true of it\neverywhere, is truest of it in those secluded valleys where one\ngeneration after another maintains the same abiding-place; and it was\non this side, that Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.\nConsisting, as it did so much, in the recognition of local sanctities,\nin the habit of connecting the stones and trees of a particular spot of\nearth with the great events of life, till the low walls, the green\nmounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full of voices, and a sort\nof natural oracles, the very religion of these people of the dales\nappeared but as another link between them and the earth, and was\nliterally a religion of nature.  It tranquillised them by bringing them\nunder the placid rule of traditional and narrowly localised\nobservances.  \"Grave livers,\" they seemed to him, under this aspect,\nwith stately speech, and something of that natural dignity of manners,\nwhich underlies the highest courtesy.\n\nAnd, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnised in\nproportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into\ncompanionship with permanent natural objects, his very religion forming\nnew links for him with the narrow limits of the valley, the low vaults\nof his church, the rough stones of his [51] home, made intense for him\nnow with profound sentiment, Wordsworth was able to appreciate passion\nin the lowly.  He chooses to depict people from humble life, because,\nbeing nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more\nimpassioned, certainly more direct in their expression of passion, than\nother men: it is for this direct expression of passion, that he values\ntheir humble words. In much that he said in exaltation of rural life,\nhe was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that perfect\nfidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise features of\nthe picture within, without which any profound poetry is impossible.\nIt was not for their tameness, but for this passionate sincerity, that\nhe chose incidents and situations from common life, \"related in a\nselection of language really used by men.\"  He constantly endeavours to\nbring his language near to the real language of men: to the real\nlanguage of men, however, not on the dead level of their ordinary\nintercourse, but in select moments of vivid sensation, when this\nlanguage is winnowed and ennobled by excitement.  There are poets who\nhave chosen rural life as their subject, for the sake of its\npassionless repose, and times when Wordsworth himself extols the mere\ncalm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of poetical\nculture.  But it was not for such passionless calm that he preferred\nthe scenes of pastoral life; and the meditative poet, sheltering [52]\nhimself, as it might seem, from the agitations of the outward world, is\nin reality only clearing the scene for the great exhibitions of\nemotion, and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of\nelementary feelings.\n\nAnd so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated\npresentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their\nsusceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle\nof it.  Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their\ndaily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great\nelementary feelings, lifting and solemnising their language and giving\nit a natural music.  The great, distinguishing passion came to Michael\nby the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble children\nof the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls. In this\nrespect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George Sand, in those\nof her novels which depict country life.  With a penetrative pathos,\nwhich puts him in the same rank with the masters of the sentiment of\npity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor Hugo, he collects all the\ntraces of vivid excitement which were to be found in that pastoral\nworld--the girl who rung her father's knell; the unborn infant feeling\nabout its mother's heart; the instinctive touches of children; the\nsorrows of the wild creatures, even--their home-sickness, their strange\nyearnings; the tales of passionate regret that hang [53] by a ruined\nfarm-building, a heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false,\nadventurous, outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder\nand deflower these quiet homes; not \"passionate sorrow\" only, for the\noverthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for\npersonal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged--their pathetic\nwanness; the sailor \"who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the\nstormy seas\"; the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her\nbetrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of\nthe young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;--all the\npathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, their\nwonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of\nchildren, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their\nyearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at their\nearly toil.  A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over this\nstrange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised the\nimage, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction has\ncaught from him.\n\nHe pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and reading deeply\nin the history of his own mind, seems at times to have passed the\nborders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent enough, had he\ncared to note such inconsistencies, with those traditional beliefs,\nwhich [54] were otherwise the object of his devout acceptance.\nThinking of the high value he set upon customariness, upon all that is\nhabitual, local, rooted in the ground, in matters of religious\nsentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one tethered down to a\nworld, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad outlook, a world\nprotected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence of received ideas.\nBut he is at times also something very different from this, and\nsomething much bolder.  A chance expression is overheard and placed in\na new connexion, the sudden memory of a thing long past occurs to him,\na distant object is relieved for a while by a random gleam of\nlight--accidents turning up for a moment what lies below the surface of\nour immediate experience--and he passes from the humble graves and\nlowly arches of \"the little rock-like pile\" of a Westmoreland church,\non bold trains of speculative thought, and comes, from point to point,\ninto strange contact with thoughts which have visited, from time to\ntime, far more venturesome, perhaps errant, spirits.\n\nHe had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminiscences\nand forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind\nus, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines of\nconnexion.  Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on these\nendless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a pledge\nto him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back also to\nthat mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence--the fancy of\nthe Platonists--the old heresy of Origen.  It was in this mood that he\nconceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, when\nthe relics of Paradise still clung about the soul--a childhood, as it\nseemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in\nthe passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over\nagain, in the passing away of actual youth.  It is this ideal childhood\nwhich he celebrates in his famous Ode on the Recollections of\nChildhood, and some other poems which may be grouped around it, such as\nthe lines on Tintern Abbey, and something like what he describes was\nactually truer of himself than he seems to have understood; for his own\nmost delightful poems were really the instinctive productions of\nearlier life, and most surely for him, \"the first diviner influence of\nthis world\" passed away, more and more completely, in his contact with\nexperience.\n\nSometimes as he dwelt upon those moments of profound, imaginative\npower, in which the outward object appears to take colour and\nexpression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observant\nmind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself,\nflake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when he\nwould the destroyer, of the world in which he lived--that old isolating\nthought of many a brain-sick mystic of ancient and modern times.\n\n[56] At other times, again, in those periods of intense susceptibility,\nin which he appeared to himself as but the passive recipient of\nexternal influences, he was attracted by the thought of a spirit of\nlife in outward things, a single, all-pervading mind in them, of which\nman, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but moments--that old\ndream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things and their grave, in\nwhich some had desired to lose themselves, and others had become\nindifferent to the distinctions of good and evil. It would come,\nsometimes, like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust in his cell: the\nnetwork of man and nature was seen to be pervaded by a common,\nuniversal life: a new, bold thought lifted him above the furrow, above\nthe green turf of the Westmoreland churchyard, to a world altogether\ndifferent in its vagueness and vastness, and the narrow glen was full\nof the brooding power of one universal spirit.\n\nAnd so he has something, also, for those who feel the fascination of\nbold speculative ideas, who are really capable of rising upon them to\nconditions of poetical thought.  He uses them, indeed, always with a\nvery fine apprehension of the limits within which alone philosophical\nimaginings have any place in true poetry; and using them only for\npoetical purposes, is not too careful even to make them consistent with\neach other.  To him, theories which for other men [57] bring a world of\ntechnical diction, brought perfect form and expression, as in those two\nlofty books of The Prelude, which describe the decay and the\nrestoration of Imagination and Taste.  Skirting the borders of this\nworld of bewildering heights and depths, he got but the first exciting\ninfluence of it, that joyful enthusiasm which great imaginative\ntheories prompt, when the mind first comes to have an understanding of\nthem; and it is not under the influence of these thoughts that his\npoetry becomes tedious or loses its blitheness.  He keeps them, too,\nalways within certain ethical bounds, so that no word of his could\noffend the simplest of those simple souls which are always the largest\nportion of mankind.  But it is, nevertheless, the contact of these\nthoughts, the speculative boldness in them, which constitutes, at least\nfor some minds, the secret attraction of much of his best poetry--the\nsudden passage from lowly thoughts and places to the majestic forms of\nphilosophical imagination, the play of these forms over a world so\ndifferent, enlarging so strangely the bounds of its humble churchyards,\nand breaking such a wild light on the graves of christened children.\n\nAnd these moods always brought with them faultless expression.  In\nregard to expression, as with feeling and thought, the duality of the\nhigher and lower moods was absolute.  It belonged to the higher, the\nimaginative mood, and was the pledge of its reality, to bring the [58]\nappropriate language with it.  In him, when the really poetical motive\nworked at all, it united, with absolute justice, the word and the idea;\neach, in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one with the\nother, by that fusion of matter and form, which is the characteristic\nof the highest poetical expression.  His words are themselves thought\nand feeling; not eloquent, or musical words merely, but that sort of\ncreative language which carries the reality of what it depicts,\ndirectly, to the consciousness.\n\nThe music of mere metre performs but a limited, yet a very peculiar and\nsubtly ascertained function, in Wordsworth's poetry.  With him, metre\nis but an additional grace, accessory to that deeper music of words and\nsounds, that moving power, which they exercise in the nobler prose no\nless than in formal poetry.  It is a sedative to that excitement, an\nexcitement sometimes almost painful, under which the language, alike of\npoetry and prose, attains a rhythmical power, independent of metrical\ncombination, and dependent rather on some subtle adjustment of the\nelementary sounds of words themselves to the image or feeling they\nconvey.  Yet some of his pieces, pieces prompted by a sort of\nhalf-playful mysticism, like the Daffodils and The Two April Mornings,\nare distinguished by a certain quaint gaiety of metre, and rival by\ntheir perfect execution, in this respect, similar pieces among our own\nElizabethan, or contemporary French poetry.\n\n[59] And those who take up these poems after an interval of months, or\nyears perhaps, may be surprised at finding how well old favourites\nwear, how their strange, inventive turns of diction or thought still\nsend through them the old feeling of surprise.  Those who lived about\nWordsworth were all great lovers of the older English literature, and\noftentimes there came out in him a noticeable likeness to our earlier\npoets.  He quotes unconsciously, but with new power of meaning, a\nclause from one of Shakespeare's sonnets; and, as with some other men's\nmost famous work, the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood had its\nanticipator.*  He drew something too from the unconscious mysticism of\nthe old English language itself, drawing out the inward significance of\nits racy idiom, and the not wholly unconscious poetry of the language\nused by the simplest people under strong excitement--language,\ntherefore, at its origin.\n\nThe office of the poet is not that of the moralist, and the first aim\nof Wordsworth's poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of\npleasure.  But through his poetry, and through this pleasure in it, he\ndoes actually convey to the reader an extraordinary wisdom in the\nthings of practice.  One lesson, if men must have lessons, he conveys\nmore clearly than all, the supreme importance of contemplation in the\nconduct of life.\n\n[60] Contemplation--impassioned contemplation--that, is with Wordsworth\nthe end-in-itself, the perfect end.  We see the majority of mankind\ngoing most often to definite ends, lower or higher ends, as their own\ninstincts may determine; but the end may never be attained, and the\nmeans not be quite the right means, great ends and little ones alike\nbeing, for the most part, distant, and the ways to them, in this dim\nworld, somewhat vague.  Meantime, to higher or lower ends, they move\ntoo often with something of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble\ngait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety\nto bear grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even\ngreat ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and\ntemper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world, at its\nvery sources.  We understand this when it is a question of mean, or of\nintensely selfish ends--of Grandet, or Javert.  We think it bad\nmorality to say that the end justifies the means, and we know how false\nto all higher conceptions of the religious life is the type of one who\nis ready to do evil that good may come.  We contrast with such dark,\nmistaken eagerness, a type like that of Saint Catherine of Siena, who\nmade the means to her ends so attractive, that she has won for herself\nan undying place in the House Beautiful, not by her rectitude of soul\nonly, but by its \"fairness\"--by those quite different qualities [61]\nwhich commend themselves to the poet and the artist.\n\nYet, for most of us, the conception of means and ends covers the whole\nof life, and is the exclusive type or figure under which we represent\nour lives to ourselves.  Such a figure, reducing all things to\nmachinery, though it has on its side the authority of that old Greek\nmoralist who has fixed for succeeding generations the outline of the\ntheory of right living, is too like a mere picture or description of\nmen's lives as we actually find them, to be the basis of the higher\nethics.  It covers the meanness of men's daily lives, and much of the\ndexterity with which they pursue what may seem to them the good of\nthemselves or of others; but not the intangible perfection of those\nwhose ideal is rather in being than in doing--not those manners which\nare, in the deepest as in the simplest sense, morals, and without which\none cannot so much as offer a cup of water to a poor man without\noffence--not the part of  \"antique Rachel,\" sitting in the company of\nBeatrice; and even the moralist might well endeavour rather to withdraw\nmen from the too exclusive consideration of means and ends, in life.\n\nAgainst this predominance of machinery in our existence, Wordsworth's\npoetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest. Justify\nrather the end by the means, it seems to say: whatever may become of\nthe fruit, make sure of [62] the flowers and the leaves. It was justly\nsaid, therefore, by one who had meditated very profoundly on the true\nrelation of means to ends in life, and on the distinction between what\nis desirable in itself and what is desirable only as machinery, that\nwhen the battle which he and his friends were waging had been won, the\nworld would need more than ever those qualities which Wordsworth was\nkeeping alive and nourishing.*\n\nThat the end of life is not action but contemplation--being as distinct\nfrom doing--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or\nother, the principle of all the higher morality.  In poetry, in art, if\nyou enter into their true spirit at all; you touch this principle, in a\nmeasure: these, by their very sterility, are a type of beholding for\nthe mere joy of beholding.  To treat life in the spirit of art, is to\nmake life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage\nsuch treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry.\nWordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient or more\nrecent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of impassioned\ncontemplation.  Their work is, not to teach lessons, or enforce rules,\nor even to stimulate us to noble ends; but to withdraw the thoughts for\na little while from the mere machinery of life, to fix [63] them, with\nappropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man's\nexistence which no machinery affects, \"on the great and universal\npassions of men, the most general and interesting of their occupations,\nand the entire world of nature,\"--on \"the operations of the elements\nand the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and sunshine, on\nthe revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss of friends\nand kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude and hope, on\nfear and sorrow.\"  To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotions\nis the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like\nWordsworth's is a great nourisher and stimulant.  He sees nature full\nof sentiment and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature,\npassionate, excited, in strange grouping and connexion with the\ngrandeur and beauty of the natural world:--images, in his own words,\n\"of man suffering, amid awful forms and powers.\"\n\nSuch is the figure of the more powerful and original poet, hidden away,\nin part, under those weaker elements in Wordsworth's poetry, which for\nsome minds determine their entire character; a poet somewhat bolder and\nmore passionate than might at first sight be supposed, but not too bold\nfor true poetical taste; an unimpassioned writer, you might sometimes\nfancy, yet thinking the chief aim, in life and art alike, to be a\ncertain deep emotion; seeking most often the great [64] elementary\npassions in lowly places; having at least this condition of all\nimpassioned work, that he aims always at an absolute sincerity of\nfeeling and diction, so that he is the true forerunner of the deepest\nand most passionate poetry of our own day; yet going back also, with\nsomething of a protest against the conventional fervour of much of the\npoetry popular in his own time, to those older English poets, whose\nunconscious likeness often comes out in him.\n\n1874.\n\nNOTES\n\n43. *Since this essay was written, such selections have been made, with\nexcellent taste, by Matthew Arnold and Professor Knight.\n\n46-47. *In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of\nThe Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was\nintended to be introductory to The Recluse; and that The Recluse, if\ncompleted, would have consisted of three parts.  The second part is The\nExcursion.  The third part was only planned; but the first book of the\nfirst part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in manuscript,\nit is said, in no great condition of forwardness for the printers.\nThis book, now for the first time printed  in extenso (a very noble\npassage from it found place in that prose advertisement to The\nExcursion), is included in the latest edition of Wordsworth by Mr. John\nMorley.  It was well worth adding to the poet's great bequest to\nEnglish literature.  A true student of his work, who has formulated for\nhimself what he supposes to be the leading characteristics of\nWordsworth's genius, will feel, we think, lively interest in testing\nthem by the various fine passages in what is here presented for the\nfirst time.  Let the following serve for a sample:--\n\n  Thickets full of songsters, and the voice\n  Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound\n  Heard now and then from morn to latest eve,\n  Admonishing the man who walks below\n  Of solitude and silence in the sky:--\n  These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth\n  Have also these, but nowhere else is found,\n  Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found\n  The one sensation that is here; 'tis here,\n  Here as it found its way into my heart\n  In childhood, here as it abides by day,\n  By night, here only; or in chosen minds\n  That take it with them hence, where'er they go.\n  --'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense\n  Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,\n  A blended holiness of earth and sky,\n  Something that makes this individual spot,\n  This small abiding-place of many men,\n  A termination, and a last retreat,\n  A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,\n  A whole without dependence or defect,\n  Made for itself, and happy in itself,\n  Perfect contentment, Unity entire.\n\n\n59. *Henry Vaughan, in The Retreat.\n\n62. *See an interesting paper, by Mr. John Morley, on \"The Death of Mr.\nMill,\" Fortnightly Review, June 1873.\n\n\n\nCOLERIDGE*\n\n[65] FORMS of intellectual and spiritual culture sometimes exercise\ntheir subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from\nthem. Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit\non its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper\nthat what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once,\neven from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of\ndevelopment evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life, and\nrepresses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier\ngrowth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the\nwhole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the\nspectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined by\nthe antagonism of the new.  That current of new life chastens them\nwhile they contend against it. Weaker minds fail to perceive the\nchange: the clearest minds abandon themselves to it.  To [66] feel the\nchange everywhere, yet not abandon oneself to it, is a situation of\ndifficulty and contention.  Communicating, in this way, to the passing\nstage of culture, the charm of what is chastened, high-strung,\nathletic, they yet detach the highest minds from the past, by pressing\nhome its difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such has been\nthe charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion.\nIt is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those older\nmethods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy of\nour day has triumphed.\n\nModern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the\n\"relative\" spirit in place of the \"absolute.\"  Ancient philosophy\nsought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in\na necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a classification by\n\"kinds,\" or genera.  To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly\nknown, except relatively and under conditions.  The philosophical\nconception of the relative has been developed in modern times through\nthe influence of the sciences of observation.  Those sciences reveal\ntypes of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refinements\nof change.  Things pass into their opposites by accumulation of\nundefinable quantities.  The growth of those sciences consists in a\ncontinual analysis of facts of rough and general observation into\ngroups of facts more precise and minute.\n\n[67] The faculty for truth is recognised as a power of distinguishing\nand fixing delicate and fugitive detail.  The moral world is ever in\ncontact with the physical, and the relative spirit has invaded moral\nphilosophy from the ground of the inductive sciences.  There it has\nstarted a new analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and\nevil, freedom and necessity.  Hard and abstract moralities are yielding\nto a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life.\nAlways, as an organism increases in perfection, the conditions of its\nlife become more complex.  Man is the most complex of the products of\nnature.  Character merges into temperament: the nervous system refines\nitself into intellect.  Man's physical organism is played upon not only\nby the physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance,\nthe vibration of long-past acts reaching him in the midst of the new\norder of things in which he lives.  When we have estimated these\nconditions he is still not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the\nrace, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the\nmedium of language and current ideas.  It seems as if the most opposite\nstatements about him were alike true: he is so receptive, all the\ninfluences of nature and of society ceaselessly playing upon him, so\nthat every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a stray\nword, or glance, or touch.  It is the truth of these relations that\nexperience [68] gives us, not the truth of eternal outlines ascertained\nonce for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked\nconditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change--and bids us,\nby a constant clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of\nanalysis, to make what we can of these.  To the intellect, the critical\nspirit, just these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything\nelse. What is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of\nexpression.  It is no vague scholastic abstraction that will satisfy\nthe speculative instinct in our modern minds.  Who would change the\ncolour or curve of a rose-leaf for that ousia akhromatos,\naskhematistos, anaphes+--that colourless, formless, intangible,\nbeing--Plato put so high?  For the true illustration of the speculative\ntemper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense, understanding,\nindividuality, but one such as Goethe, to whom every moment of life\nbrought its contribution of experimental, individual knowledge; by whom\nno touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.\n\nNow the literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against\nthe relative spirit. With a strong native bent towards the tracking of\nall questions, critical or practical, to first principles, he is ever\nrestlessly scheming to \"apprehend the absolute,\" to affirm it\neffectively, to get it acknowledged.  It was an effort, surely, an\neffort of sickly thought, that saddened his [69] mind, and limited the\noperation of his unique poetic gift.\n\nSo what the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's\nprose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet, in\nthose grey volumes, we have the larger part of the production of one\nwho made way ever by a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of\nlanguage, above all by the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous\nideas.  Perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of\nseriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but\nfrom a misconception of the perfect manner.  There is a certain shade\nof unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may\nbe thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract\nquestions.  The humanist, the possessor of that complete culture, does\nnot \"weep\" over the failure of \"a theory of the quantification of the\npredicate,\" nor \"shriek\" over the fall of a philosophical formula.  A\nkind of humour is, in truth, one of the conditions of the just mental\nattitude, in the criticism of by-past stages of thought.  Humanity\ncannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than a man of good\nsense can afford to be too serious in looking back upon his own\nchildhood.  Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first of his spiritual\nancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true humanist, holds his\ntheories lightly, glances with a somewhat blithe and naive\ninconsequence from [70] one view to another, not anticipating the\nburden of importance \"views\" will one day have for men.  In reading him\none feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to say\nthat external prosperity was not necessarily happiness.  But on\nColeridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection that has since\ncome into the world, with which for us the air is full, which the\n\"children in the market-place\" repeat to each other.  His very language\nis forced and broken lest some saving formula should be\nlost--distinctities, enucleation, pentad of operative Christianity; he\nhas a whole armoury of these terms, and expects to turn the tide of\nhuman thought by fixing the sense of such expressions as \"reason,\"\n\"understanding,\" \"idea.\"  Again, he lacks the jealousy of a true artist\nin excluding all associations that have no colour, or charm, or\ngladness in them; and everywhere allows the impress of a somewhat\ninferior theological literature.\n\n\"I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation:\" so\nColeridge sums up his childhood, with its delicacy, its sensitiveness,\nand passion.  But at twenty-five he was exercising a wonderful charm,\nand had already defined for himself his peculiar line of intellectual\nactivity.  He had an odd, attractive gift of conversation, or rather of\nmonologue, as Madame de Stael observed of him, full of bizarreries,\nwith the rapid alternations of a dream, and here or there an unexpected\nsummons into a world [71] strange to the hearer, abounding in images\ndrawn from a sort of divided imperfect life, the consciousness of the\nopium-eater, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in\npart, and, blent with all this, passages of deep obscurity, precious,\nif at all, only for their musical cadence, echoes in Coleridge of the\neloquence of those older English writers of whom he was so ardent a\nlover.  And all through this brilliant early manhood we may discern the\npower of the \"Asiatic\" temperament, of that voluptuousness, which is\nconnected perhaps with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost\nmystical communion of touch, between nature and man.  \"I am much\nbetter,\" he writes, \"and my new and tender health is all over me like a\nvoluptuous feeling.\"  And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring\ngift he has had as a speculative thinker, is the vibration of the\ninterest he excited then, the propulsion into years which clouded his\nearly promise of that first buoyant, irresistible, self-assertion. So\ngreat is even the indirect power of a sincere effort towards the ideal\nlife, of even a temporary escape of the spirit from routine.\n\nIn 1798 he visited Germany, then, the only half-known, \"promised land,\"\nof the metaphysical, the \"absolute,\" philosophy.  A beautiful fragment\nof this period remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken.\nHis excitement still vibrates in it.  Love, all joyful states [72] of\nmind, are self-expressive: they loosen the tongue, they fill the\nthoughts with sensuous images, they harmonise one with the world of\nsight.  We hear of the \"rich graciousness and courtesy\" of Coleridge's\nmanner, of the white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the\nfull, almost animal lips--that whole physiognomy of the dreamer,\nalready touched with narcotism.  One says, of the beginning of one of\nhis Unitarian sermons: \"His voice rose like a stream of rich, distilled\nperfumes;\" another, \"He talks like an angel, and does--nothing!\"\n\nThe Aids to Reflection, The Friend, The Biographia Literaria: those\nbooks came from one whose vocation was in the world of the imagination,\nthe theory and practice of poetry.  And yet, perhaps, of all books that\nhave been influential in modern times, they are furthest from artistic\nform--bundles of notes; the original matter inseparably mixed up with\nthat borrowed from others; the whole, just that mere preparation for an\nartistic effect which the finished literary artist would be careful one\nday to destroy.  Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic\nof Coleridge.  He sometimes attempts to reduce a phase of thought,\nsubtle and exquisite, to conditions too rough for it.  He uses a purely\nspeculative gift for direct moral edification.  Scientific truth is a\nthing fugitive, relative, full of fine gradations: he tries to fix it\nin absolute formulas.  The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, are [73]\nefforts to propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less\nethereal fabric of a written book; and it is only here or there that\nthe poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.\n\nDe Quincey said of him that \"he wanted better bread than can be made\nwith wheat:\" Lamb, that from childhood he had \"hungered for eternity.\"\nYet the faintness, the continuous dissolution, whatever its cause,\nwhich soon supplanted the buoyancy of his first wonderful years, had\nits own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to the \"Beautiful\nSoul\" in Wilhelm Meister, a faint religious ecstasy--that \"singing in\nthe sails\" which is not of the breeze.  Here again is one of his\noccasional notes:--\n\n\"In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder\nmoon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem rather to be\nseeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within\nme, that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new.\nEven when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure\nfeeling, as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten\nor hidden truth of my inner nature.  While I was preparing the pen to\nmake this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it.\"\n\nWhat a distemper of the eye of the mind!  What an almost bodily\ndistemper there is in that!\n\nColeridge's intellectual sorrows were many; [74] but he had one\nsingular intellectual happiness.  With an inborn taste for\ntranscendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when that\nphilosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with\nan impressive literary movement.  He had the good luck to light upon it\nin its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen.  What an\nopportunity for one reared on the colourless analytic English\nphilosophies of the last century, but who feels an irresistible\nattraction towards bold metaphysical synthesis!  How rare are such\noccasions of intellectual contentment!  This transcendental philosophy,\nchiefly as systematised by the mystic Schelling, Coleridge applied with\nan eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology, and poetic\nor artistic criticism.  It is in his theory of poetry, of art, that he\ncomes nearest to principles of permanent truth and importance: that is\nthe least fugitive part of his prose work.  What, then, is the essence\nof his philosophy of art--of imaginative production?\n\nGenerally, it may be described as an attempt to reclaim the world of\nart as a world of fixed laws, to show that the creative activity of\ngenius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lower\nproducts of the laws of a universal logic.  Criticism, feeling its own\ninadequacy in dealing with the greater works of art, is sometimes\ntempted to make too much of those dark and capricious suggestions of\ngenius, which even [75] the intellect possessed by them is unable to\nexplain or recall.  It has seemed due to the half-sacred character of\nthose works to ignore all analogy between the productive process by\nwhich they had their birth, and the simpler processes of mind.\nColeridge, on the other hand, assumes that the highest phases of\nthought must be more, not less, than the lower, subject to law.\n\nWith this interest, in the Biographia Literaria, he refines Schelling's\n\"Philosophy of Nature\" into a theory of art.  \"There can be no\nplagiarism in philosophy,\" says Heine:--Es giebt kein Plagiat in der\nPhilosophie, in reference to the charge brought against Schelling of\nunacknowledged borrowing from Bruno; and certainly that which is common\nto Coleridge and Schelling and Bruno alike is of far earlier origin\nthan any of them.  Schellingism, the \"Philosophy of Nature,\" is indeed\na constant tradition in the history of thought: it embodies a permanent\ntype of the speculative temper.  That mode of conceiving nature as a\nmirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced up to the\nfirst beginnings of Greek speculation.  There are two ways of\nenvisaging those aspects of nature which seem to bear the impress of\nreason or intelligence.  There is the deist's way, which regards them\nmerely as marks of design, which separates the informing mind from its\nresult in nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the\npantheistic way, which identifies the two, which [76] regards nature\nitself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as\nthough vaster in scope than the human.  Partly through the influence of\nmythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception of\nnature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man.  This\nunfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified\ninto an idea, is the force which gives unity of aim to Greek\nphilosophy.  Little by little, it works out the substance of the\nHegelian formula: \"Whatever is, is according to reason: whatever is\naccording to reason, that is.\"  Experience, which has gradually\nsaddened the earth's colours for us, stiffened its motions, withdrawn\nfrom it some blithe and debonair presence, has quite changed the\ncharacter of the science of nature, as we understand it.  The\n\"positive\" method, in truth, makes very little account of marks of\nintelligence in nature: in its wider view of phenomena, it sees that\nthose instances are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences: it\nabsorbs them in the larger conception of universal mechanical law.  But\nthe suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for release, and\nintercourse with the intellect of man through true ideas, has never\nceased to haunt a certain class of minds.  Started again and again in\nsuccessive periods by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case\nthe thought may have seemed paler and more fantastic amid the growing\n[77] consistency and sharpness of outline of other and more positive\nforms of knowledge.  Still, wherever the speculative instinct has been\nunited with a certain poetic inwardness of temperament, as in Bruno, in\nSchelling, there that old Greek conception, like some seed floating in\nthe air, has taken root and sprung up anew.  Coleridge, thrust inward\nupon himself, driven from \"life in thought and sensation\" to life in\nthought only, feels already, in his dark London school, a thread of the\nGreek mind on this matter vibrating strongly in him.  At fifteen he is\ndiscoursing on Plotinus, as in later years he reflects from Schelling\nthat flitting intellectual tradition. He supposes a subtle, sympathetic\nco-ordination between the ideas of the human reason and the laws of the\nnatural world.  Science, the real knowledge of that natural world, is\nto be attained, not by observation, experiment, analysis, patient\ngeneralisation, but by the evolution or recovery of those ideas\ndirectly from within, by a sort of Platonic \"recollection\"; every group\nof observed facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate idea is\nstruck upon them from the mind of a Newton, or a Cuvier, the genius in\nwhom sympathy with the universal reason becomes entire.  In the next\nplace, he conceives that this reason or intelligence in nature becomes\nreflective, or self-conscious.  He fancies he can trace, through all\nthe simpler forms of life, fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the\n[78] human mind.  The whole of nature he regards as a development of\nhigher forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematic\nchange.  The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axis of crystal\nform, the trance-like life of plants, the animal troubled by strange\nirritabilities, are stages which anticipate consciousness.  All through\nthe ever-increasing movement of life that was shaping itself; every\nsuccessive phase of life, in its unsatisfied susceptibilities, seeming\nto be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of\nlife on its confines, the \"shadow of approaching humanity\" gradually\ndeepening, the latent intelligence winning a way to the surface.  And\nat this point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice:\nrather it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to\nthe very highest acts of the conscious intelligence, there is another\nseries of refining shades.  Gradually the mind concentrates itself,\nfrees itself from the limitations of the particular, the individual,\nattains a strange power of modifying and centralising what it receives\nfrom without, according to the pattern of an inward ideal.  At last, in\nimaginative genius, ideas become effective: the intelligence of nature,\nall its discursive elements now connected and justified, is clearly\nreflected; the interpretation of its latent purposes being embodied in\nthe great central products of creative art.  The secret of creative\n[79] genius would be an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature, with\nthe reasonable soul antecedent there.  Those associative conceptions of\nthe imagination, those eternally fixed types of action and passion,\nwould come, not so much from the conscious invention of the artist, as\nfrom his self-surrender to the suggestions of an abstract reason or\nideality in things: they would be evolved by the stir of nature itself,\nrealising the highest reach of its dormant reason: they would have a\nkind of prevenient necessity to rise at some time to the surface of the\nhuman mind.\n\nIt is natural that Shakespeare should be the favourite illustration of\nsuch criticism, whether in England or Germany.  The first suggestion in\nShakespeare is that of capricious detail, of a waywardness that plays\nwith the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes\nis the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of\nHamlet or Macbeth.  His hand moving freely is curved round as if by\nsome law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity\nmakes itself visible amid an abounding variety.  This unity or identity\nColeridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural\norganism, and the associative act which effected it into something\nclosely akin to the primitive power of nature itself.  \"In the\nShakespearian drama,\" he says, \"there is a vitality which grows and\nevolves itself from within.\"\n\n[80] Again--\n\nHe, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ from\nwithin, by the imaginative power, according to the idea. For as the\npower of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature.\nThey are correlatives which suppose each other.\n\nAgain--\n\nThe organic form is innate: it shapes, as it develops, itself from\nwithin, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the\nperfection of its outward form.  Such as the life is, such is the form.\nNature, the prime, genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is\nequally inexhaustible in forms: each exterior is the physiognomy of the\nbeing within, and even such is the appropriate excellence of\nShakespeare, himself a nature humanised, a genial understanding,\ndirecting self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even\nthan our consciousness.+\n\nIn this late age we are become so familiarised with the greater works\nof art as to be little sensitive of the act of creation in them: they\ndo not impress us as a new presence in the world.  Only sometimes, in\nproductions which realise immediately a profound influence and enforce\na change in taste, we are actual witnesses of the moulding of an\nunforeseen type by some new principle of association; and to that\nphenomenon Coleridge wisely recalls our attention.  What makes his view\na one-sided one is, that in it the artist has become almost a\nmechanical agent: instead of the most luminous and self-possessed phase\nof consciousness, the associative act in art or poetry is made to look\nlike some blindly organic process of assimilation.  The work of art is\nlikened to a living organism.  That expresses [81] truly the sense of a\nself-delighting, independent life which the finished work of art gives\nus: it hardly figures the process by which such work was produced.\nHere there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements towards the\nrealisation of a type.  By exquisite analysis the artist attains\nclearness of idea; then, through many stages of refining, clearness of\nexpression.  He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest\ntone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting hand or fancy\nmove at large, gradually enforcing flaccid spaces to the higher degree\nof expressiveness.  The philosophic critic, at least, will value, even\nin works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the\nunderstanding in them, their logical process of construction, the\nspectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.\n\nColeridge's prose writings on philosophy, politics, religion, and\ncriticism, were, in truth, but one element in a whole lifetime of\nendeavours to present the then recent metaphysics of Germany to English\nreaders, as a legitimate expansion of the older, classical and native\nmasters of what has been variously called the a priori, or absolute, or\nspiritual, or Platonic, view of things.  His criticism, his challenge\nfor recognition in the concrete, visible, finite work of art, of the\ndim, unseen, comparatively infinite, soul or power of the artist, may\nwell be [82] remembered as part of the long pleading of German culture\nfor the things \"behind the veil.\"  To introduce that spiritual\nphilosophy, as represented by the more transcendental parts of Kant,\nand by Schelling, into all subjects, as a system of reason in them, one\nand ever identical with itself, however various the matter through\nwhich it was diffused, became with him the motive of an unflagging\nenthusiasm, which seems to have been the one thread of continuity in a\nlife otherwise singularly wanting in unity of purpose, and in which he\nwas certainly far from uniformly at his best.  Fragmentary and obscure,\nbut often eloquent, and always at once earnest and ingenious, those\nwritings, supplementing his remarkable gift of conversation, were\ndirectly and indirectly influential, even on some the furthest removed\nfrom Coleridge's own masters; on John Stuart Mill, for instance, and\nsome of the earlier writers of the \"high-church\" school.  Like his\nverse, they display him also in two other characters--as a student of\nwords, and as a psychologist, that is, as a more minute observer or\nstudent than other men of the phenomena of mind.  To note the recondite\nassociations of words, old or new; to expound the logic, the reasonable\nsoul, of their various uses; to recover the interest of older writers\nwho had had a phraseology of their own--this was a vein of inquiry\nallied to his undoubted gift of tracking out and analysing curious\nmodes of thought.  A [83] quaint fragment of verse on Human Life might\nserve to illustrate his study of the earlier English philosophical\npoetry.  The latter gift, that power of the \"subtle-souled\npsychologist,\" as Shelley calls him, seems to have been connected with\nsome tendency to disease in the physical temperament, something of a\nmorbid want of balance in those parts where the physical and\nintellectual elements mix most closely together, with a kind of languid\nvisionariness, deep-seated in the very constitution of the \"narcotist,\"\nwho had quite a gift for \"plucking the poisons of self-harm,\" and which\nthe actual habit of taking opium, accidentally acquired, did but\nreinforce.  This morbid languor of nature, connected both with his\nfitfulness of purpose and his rich delicate dreaminess, qualifies\nColeridge's poetic composition even more than his prose; his verse,\nwith the exception of his avowedly political poems, being, unlike that\nof the \"Lake School,\" to which in some respects he belongs, singularly\nunaffected by any moral, or professional, or personal effort or\nambition,--\"written,\" as he says, \"after the more violent emotions of\nsorrow, to give him pleasure, when perhaps nothing else could;\" but\ncoming thus, indeed, very close to his own most intimately personal\ncharacteristics, and having a certain languidly soothing grace or\ncadence, for its most fixed quality, from first to last.  After some\nPlatonic soliloquy on a flower opening on a fine day in February, he\ngoes on-- [84]\n\n  Dim similitudes\n  Weaving in mortal strains, I've stolen one hour\n  From anxious self, life's cruel taskmaster!\n  And the warm wooings of this sunny day\n  Tremble along my frame and harmonise\n  The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts\n  Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes\n  Played deftly on a sweet-toned instrument.\n\nThe expression of two opposed, yet allied, elements of sensibility in\nthese lines, is very true to Coleridge:--the grievous agitation, the\ngrievous listlessness, almost never entirely relieved, together with a\ncertain physical voluptuousness.  He has spoken several times of the\nscent of the bean-field in the air:--the tropical touches in a chilly\nclimate; his is a nature that will make the most of these, which finds\na sort of caress in such things.  Kubla Khan, the fragment of a poem\nactually composed in some certainly not quite healthy sleep, is perhaps\nchiefly of interest as showing, by the mode of its composition, how\nphysical, how much of a diseased or valetudinarian temperament, in its\nmoments of relief, Coleridge's happiest gift really was; and side by\nside with Kubla Khan should be read, as Coleridge placed it, the Pains\nof Sleep, to illustrate that retarding physical burden in his\ntemperament, that \"unimpassioned grief,\" the source of which lay so\nnear the source of those pleasures.  Connected also with this, and\nagain in contrast with Wordsworth, is the limited quantity of his\npoetical performance, as he himself [85] regrets so eloquently in the\nlines addressed to Wordsworth after his recitation of The Prelude.  It\nis like some exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little in the\nsomewhat un-english air of Coleridge's own south-western birthplace,\nbut never quite well there.\n\nIn 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of\npoems--the Lyrical Ballads.  What Wordsworth then wrote already\nvibrates with that blithe impulse which carried him to final happiness\nand self-possession.  In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and\nobscure dejection which clung like some contagious damp to all his\nwork.  Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and penetrative\nconviction of the existence of certain latent affinities between nature\nand the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and nature with a\nkind of \"heavenly alchemy.\"\n\n  My voice proclaims\n  How exquisitely the individual mind\n  (And the progressive powers, perhaps, no less\n  Of the whole species) to the external world\n  Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too,\n  The external world is fitted to the mind;\n  And the creation, by no lower name\n  Can it be called, which they with blended might\n  Accomplish.\n\nIn Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the\naspects and transitions of nature--a reflective, though altogether\nunformulated, analysis of them.\n\n[86] There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as\ndeep as Wordsworth's.  But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself\nto the dream, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the first\ncondition of such abandonment must be an unvexed quietness of heart.\nNo one can read the Lines composed above Tintern without feeling how\npotent the physical element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's\ngenius--\"felt in the blood and felt along the heart.\"\n\n  My whole life I have lived in quiet thought!\n\nThe stimulus which most artists require of nature he can renounce. He\nleaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains that he may reflect\nglory on a mouldering leaf.  He loves best to watch the floating\nthistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the air.\nColeridge's temperament, aei en sphodra orexei,+ with its faintness,\nits grieved dejection, could never have been like that.\n\n  My genial spirits fail;\n  And what can these avail\n  To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?\n  It were a vain endeavour,\n  Though I should gaze for ever\n  On that green light that lingers in the west\n  I may not hope from outward forms to win\n  The passion and the life whose fountains are within.\n\nWordsworth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of\nmind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, [87] a\nlittle cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary)\ngood fortune, kept his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature\nwithin the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to those\ndelicate and subdued shades of expression which alone perfect art\nallows.  In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of\ngenius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a\nphilosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much as\npossible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of the\ntranscendental schools of Germany.\n\nThe period of Coleridge's residence at Nether Stowey, 1797-1798, was\nfor him the annus mirabilis.  Nearly all the chief works by which his\npoetic fame will live were then composed or planned.  What shapes\nitself for criticism as the main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic life,\nis not, as with most true poets, the gradual development of a poetic\ngift, determined, enriched, retarded, by the actual circumstances of\nthe poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through one short season,\nof such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafter\ndeteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age.\nConnecting this phenomenon with the leading motive of his prose\nwritings, we might note it as the deterioration of a productive or\ncreative power into one merely metaphysical or discursive.  In his\nunambitious conception of his function as a poet, and in the very\nlimited quantity of his [88] poetical performance, as I have said, he\nwas a contrast to his friend Wordsworth.  That friendship with\nWordsworth, the chief \"developing\" circumstance of his poetic life,\ncomprehended a very close intellectual sympathy; and in such\nassociation chiefly, lies whatever truth there may be in the popular\nclassification of Coleridge as a member of what is called the \"Lake\nSchool.\"  Coleridge's philosophical speculations do really turn on the\nideas which underlay Wordsworth's poetical practice.  His prose works\nare one long explanation of all that is involved in that famous\ndistinction between the Fancy and the Imagination.  Of what is\nunderstood by both writers as the imaginative quality in the use of\npoetic figures, we may take some words of Shakespeare as an example.--\n\n  My cousin Suffolk,\n  My soul shall thine keep company to heaven\n  Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast.\n\nThe complete infusion here of the figure into the thought, so vividly\nrealised, that, though birds are not actually mentioned, yet the sense\nof their flight, conveyed to us by the single word \"abreast,\" comes to\nbe more than half of the thought itself:--this, as the expression of\nexalted feeling, is an instance of what Coleridge meant by Imagination.\nAnd this sort of identification of the poet's thought, of himself, with\nthe image or figure which serves him, is the secret, sometimes, [89] of\na singularly entire realisation of that image, such as makes these\nlines of Coleridge, for instance, \"imaginative\"--\n\n  Amid the howl of more than wintry storms,\n  The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours\n  Already on the wing.\n\nThere are many such figures both in Coleridge's verse and prose.  He\nhas, too, his passages of that sort of impassioned contemplation on the\npermanent and elementary conditions of nature and humanity, which\nWordsworth held to be the essence of a poet; as it would be his proper\nfunction to awaken such contemplation in other men--those \"moments,\" as\nColeridge says, addressing him--\n\n  Moments awful,\n  Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,\n  When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received\n  The light reflected, as a light bestowed.\n\nThe entire poem from which these lines are taken, \"composed on the\nnight after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an\nindividual mind,\" is, in its high-pitched strain of meditation, and in\nthe combined justice and elevation of its philosophical expression--\n\n  high and passionate thoughts\n  To their own music chanted;\n\nwholly sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of which\nthe subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the \"Lake\npoetry.\" [90] The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophically\nimaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's most\nsustained effort of this kind.\n\nIt is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external\nnature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the\nmain tendencies of the \"Lake School\"; a tendency instinctive, and no\nmere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth.  That record of the\n\n  green light\n  Which lingers in the west,\n\nand again, of\n\n  the western sky,\n  And its peculiar tint of yellow green,\n\nwhich Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no\ndefence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the\nminute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he wrote--a\ncloseness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do\nwith that idealistic philosophy which sees in the external world no\nmere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed\nand made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling\nintelligence.  It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelley\ntoo is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape which\nfollowed him.  \"I had found,\" Coleridge tells us,\n\n[91]\n\n  That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive\n  Their finer influence from the world within;\n  Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye\n  Traces no spot, in which the heart may read\n  History and prophecy:...\n\nand this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form and\nprocess, but such minute realism as this--\n\n  The thin grey cloud is spread on high,\n  It covers but not hides the sky.\n  The moon is behind and at the full;\n  And yet she looks both small and dull;\n\nor this, which has a touch of \"romantic\" weirdness--\n\n  Nought was green upon the oak\n  But moss and rarest misletoe\n\nor this--\n\n  There is not wind enough to twirl\n  The one red leaf, the last of its clan,\n  That dances as often as dance it can,\n  Hanging so light, and hanging so high,\n  On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky\n\nor this, with a weirdness, again, like that of some wild French etcher--\n\n  Lo! the new-moon winter-bright!\n  And overspread with phantom light\n  (With swimming phantom light o'erspread,\n  But rimmed and circled with a silver thread)\n  I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling\n  The coming on of rain and squally blast.\n\nHe has a like imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseen\nprocesses of nature, its \"ministries\" [92] of dew and frost, for\ninstance; as when he writes, in April--\n\n  A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,\n  Yet let us think upon the vernal showers\n  That gladden the green earth, and we shall find\n  A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.\n\nOf such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instance\nthan the description of The Dell, in Fears in Solitude--\n\n  A green and silent spot amid the hills,\n  A small and silent dell!  O'er stiller place\n  No singing skylark ever poised himself--\n  But the dell,\n  Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate\n  As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax\n  When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve,\n  The level sunshine glimmers with green light:--\n\n  The gust that roared and died away\n  To the distant tree--\n\n  heard and only heard\n  In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.\n\nThis curious insistence of the mind on one particular spot, till it\nseems to attain actual expression and a sort of soul in it--a mood so\ncharacteristic of the \"Lake School\"--occurs in an earnest political\npoem, \"written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion\"; and\nthat silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fears\nof the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of the place,\nmaintained all through them, gives a true poetic unity to the piece.\nGood political poetry--[93] political poetry that shall be permanently\nmoving--can, perhaps, only be written on motives which, for those they\nconcern, have ceased to be open questions, and are really beyond\nargument; while Coleridge's political poems are for the most part on\nopen questions.  For although it was a great part of his intellectual\nambition to subject political questions to the action of the\nfundamental ideas of his philosophy, he was nevertheless an ardent\npartisan, first on one side, then on the other, of the actual politics\nproper to the end of the last and the beginning of the present century,\nwhere there is still room for much difference of opinion.  Yet The\nDestiny of Nations, though formless as a whole, and unfinished,\npresents many traces of his most elevated manner of speculation, cast\ninto that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, in\neffect, the language itself is inseparable from, or essentially a part\nof, the thought.  France, an Ode, begins with a famous apostrophe to\nLiberty--\n\n  Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause,\n  Whose pathless march no mortal may control!\n  Ye Ocean-waves! that wheresoe'er ye roll,\n  Yield homage only to eternal laws!\n  Ye Woods! that listen to the night-bird's singing,\n  Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,\n  Save when your own imperious branches swinging,\n  Have made a solemn music of the wind!\n  Where like a man beloved of God,\n  Through glooms which never woodman trod,\n  How oft, pursuing fancies holy,\n\n[94]\n\n  My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound,\n  Inspired, beyond the guess of folly,\n  By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound!\n  O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high!\n  And O ye Clouds that far above me soar'd!\n\n  Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!\n  Yea, everything that is and will be free!\n  Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be,\n  With what deep worship I have still adored\n  The spirit of divinest liberty.\n\nAnd the whole ode, though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to\nthat exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in\nindignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French\nRepublic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines,\nreally justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect\nwhich the ode requires.  Liberty, after all his hopes of young France,\nis only to be found in nature:--\n\n  Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,\n  The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!\n\nIn his changes of political sentiment, Coleridge was associated with\nthe \"Lake School\"; and there is yet one other very different sort of\nsentiment in which he is one with that school, yet all himself, his\nsympathy, namely, with the animal world.  That was a sentiment\nconnected at once with the love of outward nature in himself and in the\n\"Lake School,\" and its assertion of the natural affections in their\nsimplicity; with the homeliness and pity, consequent upon [95] that\nassertion.  The Lines to a Young Ass, tethered--\n\n  Where the close-eaten grass is scarcely seen,\n  While sweet around her waves the tempting green,\n\nwhich had seemed merely whimsical in their day, indicate a vein of\ninterest constant in Coleridge's poems, and at its height in his\ngreatest poems--in Christabel, where it has its effect, as it were\nantipathetically, in the vivid realisation of the serpentine element in\nGeraldine's nature; and in The Ancient Mariner, whose fate is\ninterwoven with that of the wonderful bird, at whose blessing of the\nwater-snakes the curse for the death of the albatross passes away, and\nwhere the moral of the love of all creatures, as a sort of religious\nduty, is definitely expressed.\n\nChristabel, though not printed till 1816, was written mainly in the\nyear 1797: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was printed as a\ncontribution to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798; and these two poems belong\nto the great year of Coleridge's poetic production, his twenty-fifth\nyear.  In poetic quality, above all in that most poetic of all\nqualities, a keen sense of, and delight in beauty, the infection of\nwhich lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of proportion to\nall his other compositions.  The form in both is that of the ballad,\nwith some of its terminology, and some also of its quaint conceits.\nThey connect themselves with that revival of ballad literature, of\nwhich Percy's Relics, and, in another [96] way, Macpherson's Ossian are\nmonuments, and which afterwards so powerfully affected Scott--\n\n  Young-eyed poesy\n  All deftly masked as hoar antiquity.\n\nThe Ancient Mariner, as also, in its measure, Christabel, is a\n\"romantic\" poem, impressing us by bold invention, and appealing to that\ntaste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a shudder, to\nwhich the \"romantic\" school in Germany, and its derivations in England\nand France, directly ministered.  In Coleridge, personally, this taste\nhad been encouraged by his odd and out-of-the-way reading in the\nold-fashioned literature of the marvellous--books like Purchas's\nPilgrims, early voyages like Hakluyt's, old naturalists and visionary\nmoralists, like Thomas Burnet, from whom he quotes the motto of \"The\nAncient Mariner, Facile credo, plures esse naturas invisibiles quam\nvisibiles in rerum universitate, etc.\"  Fancies of the strange things\nwhich may very well happen, even in broad daylight, to men shut up\nalone in ships far off on the sea, seem to have occurred to the human\nmind in all ages with a peculiar readiness, and often have about them,\nfrom the story of the stealing of Dionysus downwards, the fascination\nof a certain dreamy grace, which distinguishes them from other kinds of\nmarvellous inventions.  This sort of fascination The Ancient Mariner\nbrings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the dreamy [97]\ngrace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge's\nwork so remarkable.  The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world\nin almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a\nkind of crudity or coarseness.  Coleridge's power is in the very\nfineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings home\nto our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are--the skeleton\nship, the polar spirit, the inspiriting of the dead corpses of the\nship's crew.  The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner has the plausibility,\nthe perfect adaptation to reason and the general aspect of life, which\nbelongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a\ncredible experience in our dreams.  Doubtless, the mere experience of\nthe opium-eater, the habit he must almost necessarily fall into of\nnoting the more elusive phenomena of dreams, had something to do with\nthat: in its essence, however, it is connected with a more purely\nintellectual circumstance in the development of Coleridge's poetic\ngift.  Some one once asked William Blake, to whom Coleridge has many\nresemblances, when either is at his best (that whole episode of the\nre-inspiriting of the ship's crew in The Ancient Mariner being\ncomparable to Blake's well-known design of the \"Morning Stars singing\ntogether\") whether he had ever seen a ghost, and was surprised when the\nfamous seer, who ought, one might think, to have seen so many, answered\nfrankly, \"Only [98] once!\"  His \"spirits,\" at once more delicate, and\nso much more real, than any ghost--the burden, as they were the\nprivilege, of his temperament--like it, were an integral element in his\neveryday life.  And the difference of mood expressed in that question\nand its answer, is indicative of a change of temper in regard to the\nsupernatural which has passed over the whole modern mind, and of which\nthe true measure is the influence of the writings of Swedenborg.  What\nthat change is we may see if we compare the vision by which Swedenborg\nwas \"called,\" as he thought, to his work, with the ghost which called\nHamlet, or the spells of Marlowe's Faust with those of Goethe's.  The\nmodern mind, so minutely self-scrutinising, if it is to be affected at\nall by a sense of the supernatural, needs to be more finely touched\nthan was possible in the older, romantic presentment of it.  The\nspectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as\n\n  The blot upon the brain,\n  That will show itself without;\n\nand is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which,\naccording to the scepticism, latent at least, in so much of our modern\nphilosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after\nall.\n\nIt is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, fruit of\nhis more delicate [99] psychology, that Coleridge infuses into romantic\nadventure, itself also then a new or revived thing in English\nliterature; and with a fineness of weird effect in The Ancient Mariner,\nunknown in those older, more simple, romantic legends and ballads.  It\nis a flower of medieval or later German romance, growing up in the\npeculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation,\nand putting forth in it wholly new qualities.  The quaint prose\ncommentary, which runs side by side with the verse of The Ancient\nMariner, illustrates this--a composition of quite a different shade of\nbeauty and merit from that of the verse which it accompanies,\nconnecting this, the chief poem of Coleridge, with his philosophy, and\nemphasising therein that psychological interest of which I have spoken,\nits curious soul-lore.\n\nCompleteness, the perfectly rounded wholeness and unity of the\nimpression it leaves on the mind of a reader who fairly gives himself\nto it--that, too, is one of the characteristics of a really excellent\nwork, in the poetic as in every other kind of art; and by this\ncompleteness, The Ancient Mariner certainly gains upon Christabel--a\ncompleteness, entire as that of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, or Keats's\nSaint Agnes' Eve, each typical in its way of such wholeness or entirety\nof effect on a careful reader.  It is Coleridge's one great complete\nwork, the one really finished thing, in a life of many beginnings.\nChristabel remained a fragment.  In The Ancient Mariner [100] this\nunity is secured in part by the skill with which the incidents of the\nmarriage-feast are made to break in dreamily from time to time upon the\nmain story.  And then, how pleasantly, how reassuringly, the whole\nnightmare story itself is made to end, among the clear fresh sounds and\nlights of the bay, where it began, with\n\n  The moon-light steeped in silentness,\n  The steady weather-cock.\n\nSo different from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in regard to this\ncompleteness of effect, Christabel illustrates the same complexion of\nmotives, a like intellectual situation.  Here, too, the work is of a\nkind peculiar to one who touches the characteristic motives of the old\nromantic ballad, with a spirit made subtle and fine by modern\nreflection; as we feel, I think, in such passages as--\n\n  But though my slumber had gone by,\n  This dream it would not pass away--\n  It seems to live upon mine eye;\n\nand--\n\n  For she, belike, hath drunken deep\n  Of all the blessedness of sleep;\n\nand again--\n\n  With such perplexity of mind\n  As dreams too lively leave behind.\n\nAnd that gift of handling the finer passages of human feeling, at once\nwith power and delicacy, which was another result of his finer\npsychology, [101] of his exquisitely refined habit of self-reflection,\nis illustrated by a passage on Friendship in the Second Part--\n\n  Alas! they had been friends in youth;\n  But whispering tongues can poison truth;\n  And constancy lives in realms above;\n  And life is thorny; and youth is vain;\n  And to be wroth with one we love,\n  Doth work like madness in the brain.\n  And thus it chanced, as I divine,\n  With Roland and Sir Leoline.\n  Each spake words of high disdain\n  And insult to his heart's best brother\n  They parted--ne'er to meet again!\n  But never either found another\n  To free the hollow heart from paining--\n  They stood aloof the scars remaining,\n  Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;\n  A dreary sea now flows between;\n  But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,\n  Shall wholly do away, I ween,\n  The marks of that which once hath been.\n\nI suppose these lines leave almost every reader with a quickened sense\nof the beauty and compass of human feeling; and it is the sense of such\nrichness and beauty which, in spite of his \"dejection,\" in spite of\nthat burden of his morbid lassitude, accompanies Coleridge himself\nthrough life.  A warm poetic joy in everything beautiful, whether it be\na moral sentiment, like the friendship of Roland and Leoline, or only\nthe flakes of falling light from the water-snakes--this joy, visiting\nhim, now and again, after sickly dreams, in sleep or waking, as a\nrelief not to be forgotten, [102] and with such a power of felicitous\nexpression that the infection of it passes irresistibly to the\nreader--such is the predominant element in the matter of his poetry, as\ncadence is the predominant quality of its form.  \"We bless thee for our\ncreation!\" he might have said, in his later period of definite\nreligious assent, \"because the world is so beautiful: the world of\nideas--living spirits, detached from the divine nature itself, to\ninform and lift the heavy mass of material things; the world of man,\nabove all in his melodious and intelligible speech; the world of living\ncreatures and natural scenery; the world of dreams.\"  What he really\ndid say, by way of A Tombless Epitaph, is true enough of himself--\n\n  Sickness, 'tis true,\n  Whole years of weary days, besieged him close,\n  Even to the gates and inlets of his life!\n  But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm,\n  And with a natural gladness, he maintained\n  The citadel unconquered, and in joy\n  Was strong to follow the delightful Muse.\n  For not a hidden path, that to the shades\n  Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads,\n  Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill\n  There issues from the fount of Hippocrene,\n  But he had traced it upward to its source,\n  Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell,\n  Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled\n  Its med'cinable herbs.  Yea, oft alone,\n  Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,\n  The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,\n  He bade with lifted torch its starry walls\n  Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame\n\n[103]\n\n  Of odorous lamps tended by saint and sage.\n  O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts!\n  O studious Poet, eloquent for truth!\n  Philosopher! contemning wealth and death,\n  Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love.\n\nThe student of empirical science asks, Are absolute principles\nattainable?  What are the limits of knowledge?  The answer he receives\nfrom science itself is not ambiguous.  What the moralist asks is, Shall\nwe gain or lose by surrendering human life to the relative spirit?\nExperience answers that the dominant tendency of life is to turn\nascertained truth into a dead letter, to make us all the phlegmatic\nservants of routine.  The relative spirit, by its constant dwelling on\nthe more fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking\nthrough a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and giving\nelasticity to inflexible principles, begets an intellectual finesse of\nwhich the ethical result is a delicate and tender justice in the\ncriticism of human life.  Who would gain more than Coleridge by\ncriticism in such a spirit?  We know how his life has appeared when\njudged by absolute standards.  We see him trying to apprehend the\n\"absolute,\" to stereotype forms of faith and philosophy, to attain, as\nhe says, \"fixed principles\" in politics, morals, and religion, to fix\none mode of life as the essence of life, refusing to see the parts as\nparts only; and all the time his own pathetic history pleads for a more\n[104] elastic moral philosophy than his, and cries out against every\nformula less living and flexible than life itself.\n\n\"From his childhood he hungered for eternity.\"  There, after all, is\nthe incontestable claim of Coleridge.  The perfect flower of any\nelementary type of life must always be precious to humanity, and\nColeridge is a true flower of the ennuye, of the type of Rene.  More\nthan Childe Harold, more than Werther, more than Rene himself,\nColeridge, by what he did, what he was, and what he failed to do,\nrepresents that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness,\nthat endless regret, the chords of which ring all through our modern\nliterature.  It is to the romantic element in literature that those\nqualities belong.  One day, perhaps, we may come to forget the distant\nhorizon, with full knowledge of the situation, to be content with \"what\nis here and now\"; and herein is the essence of classical feeling.  But\nby us of the present moment, certainly--by us for whom the Greek\nspirit, with its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair,\ntryphes, habrotetos, khlides, khariton, himerou, pothou pater+, is\nitself the Sangrail of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his\npassion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his\nfaintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still be\nranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of our\nlife.\n\n1865, 1880.\n\nNOTES\n\n65. *The latter part of this paper, like that on Dante Gabriel\nRossetti, was contributed to Mr. T. H. Ward's English Poets.\n\n68. +Transliteration: ousia akhromatos, askhematistos, anaphes.\nTranslation:  \"the colorless, utterly formless, intangible essence.\"\nPhaedrus 247C.\n\n80. +The two passages are not indented in the original; they are in\nsmaller typeface that makes for difficult reading.\n\n86. +Transliteration: aei en sphodra orexei.  Translation: \"always\ngreatly yearning.\"\n\n104. +Transliteration: tryphes, habrotetos, khlides, khariton, himerou,\npothou pater.  Translation: \"Of daintiness, delicacy, luxury, graces,\nfather of desire.\"\n\n\n\nCHARLES LAMB\n\n[105] THOSE English critics who at the beginning of the present century\nintroduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thought\ntransplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between the\nFancy and the Imagination, made much also of the cognate distinction\nbetween Wit and Humour, between that unreal and transitory mirth, which\nis as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter which\nblends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and\nwhich, in its most exquisite motives, is one with pity--the laughter of\nthe comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less expressive than his moods of\nseriousness or solemnity, of that deeply stirred soul of sympathy in\nhim, as flowing from which both tears and laughter are alike genuine\nand contagious.\n\nThis distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindred\ncritics applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of our\nolder English writers.  And as the distinction between imagination and\nfancy, made popular by Wordsworth, [106] found its best justification\nin certain essential differences of stuff in Wordsworth's own writings,\nso this other critical distinction, between wit and humour, finds a\nsort of visible interpretation and instance in the character and\nwritings of Charles Lamb;--one who lived more consistently than most\nwriters among subtle literary theories, and whose remains are still\nfull of curious interest for the student of literature as a fine art.\n\nThe author of the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, coming\nto the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is true\npreeminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepened\nby the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself,\nwhich is characteristic of the temper of the later generation; and\ntherewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which with pity humour\nproceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for example, freer and more\nboisterous.\n\nTo this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our literature,\nthe writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the last quarter of\nthe eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, are a\ntransition; and such union of grave, of terrible even, with gay, we may\nnote in the circumstances of his life, as reflected thence into his\nwork.  We catch the aroma of a singular, homely sweetness about his\nfirst years, spent on Thames' side, amid the red [107] bricks and\nterraced gardens, with their rich historical memories of old-fashioned\nlegal London.  Just above the poorer class, deprived, as he says, of\nthe \"sweet food of academic institution,\" he is fortunate enough to be\nreared in the classical languages at an ancient school, where he\nbecomes the companion of Coleridge, as at a later period he was his\nenthusiastic disciple.  So far, the years go by with less than the\nusual share of boyish difficulties; protected, one fancies, seeing what\nhe was afterwards, by some attraction of temper in the quaint child,\nsmall and delicate, with a certain Jewish expression in his clear,\nbrown complexion, eyes not precisely of the same colour, and a slow\nwalk adding to the staidness of his figure; and whose infirmity of\nspeech, increased by agitation, is partly engaging.\n\nAnd the cheerfulness of all this, of the mere aspect of Lamb's quiet\nsubsequent life also, might make the more superficial reader think of\nhim as in himself something slight, and of his mirth as cheaply bought.\nYet we know that beneath this blithe surface there was something of the\nfateful domestic horror, of the beautiful heroism and devotedness too,\nof old Greek tragedy.  His sister Mary, ten years his senior, in a\nsudden paroxysm of madness, caused the death of her mother, and was\nbrought to trial for what an overstrained justice might have construed\nas the greatest of crimes.  She was [108] released on the brother's\npledging himself to watch over her; and to this sister, from the age of\ntwenty-one, Charles Lamb sacrificed himself, \"seeking thenceforth,\"\nsays his earliest biographer, \"no connexion which could interfere with\nher supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and\ncomfort her.\" The \"feverish, romantic tie of love,\" he cast away in\nexchange for the \"charities of home.\"  Only, from time to time, the\nmadness returned, affecting him too, once; and we see the brother and\nsister voluntarily yielding to restraint.  In estimating the humour of\nElia, we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great\nmisfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story. So\nhe becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a\ndramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.\nRosamund Grey, written in his twenty-third year, a story with something\nbitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible\nin it, strikes clearly this note in his work.\n\nFor himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift,\nof his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonous\nlabour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very important thing;\navailing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them a little,\nchiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned with the\nturning of the tides of the great world.  And yet this very modesty,\nthis unambitious [109] way of conceiving his work, has impressed upon\nit a certain exceptional enduringness.  For of the remarkable English\nwriters contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied with\nideas of practice--religious, moral, political--ideas which have since,\nin some sense or other, entered permanently into the general\nconsciousness; and, these having no longer any stimulus for a\ngeneration provided with a different stock of ideas, the writings of\nthose who spent so much of themselves in their propagation have lost,\nwith posterity, something of what they gained by them in immediate\ninfluence.  Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley even--sharing so largely in\nthe unrest of their own age, and made personally more interesting\nthereby, yet, of their actual work, surrender more to the mere course\nof time than some of those who may have seemed to exercise themselves\nhardly at all in great matters, to have been little serious, or a\nlittle indifferent, regarding them.\n\nOf this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller in\nEngland than in France, Charles Lamb is one.  In the making of prose he\nrealises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats\nin the making of verse.  And, working ever close to the concrete, to\nthe details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with\nno part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere\nabstract theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect [110] also,\nin a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem, with\ngreat matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially\nin its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of\nthe whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with\na perfect understanding of it.  What sudden, unexpected touches of\npathos in him!--bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the\nWeltschmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with\nhim: but what a gift also for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties,\nof enjoyment actually refined by the need of some thoughtful economies\nand making the most of things!  Little arts of happiness he is ready to\nteach to others. The quaint remarks of children which another would\nscarcely have heard, he preserves--little flies in the priceless amber\nof his Attic wit--and has his \"Praise of chimney-sweepers\" (as William\nBlake has written, with so much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's\nSong) valuing carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white\nsheets in stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story,\nanticipating something of the mood of our deep humourists of the last\ngeneration.  His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident,\nor unkindness of nature, blindness for instance, or fateful disease of\nmind like his sister's, has something primitive in its largeness; and\non behalf of ill-used animals he is early in composing a Pity's Gift.\n\n[111] And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead do care at\nall for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare and\nWebster have been stirred, after so long converse with things that\nstopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his exquisite\nappreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth too; for,\nwhat has not been observed so generally as the excellence of his\nliterary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of painting also.  It\nwas as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare's self\nfirst, for instance, and then for Shakespeare's readers, that that too\nwas done: he has the true scholar's way of forgetting himself in his\nsubject.  For though \"defrauded,\" as we saw, in his young years, \"of\nthe sweet food of academic institution,\" he is yet essentially a\nscholar, and all his work mainly retrospective, as I said; his own\nsorrows, affections, perceptions, being alone real to him of the\npresent.  \"I cannot make these present times,\" he says once, \"present\nto me.\"\n\nAbove all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable,\nbut for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. \"The\nbook is such as I am glad there should be,\" he modestly says of the\nSpecimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of\nShakespeare; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very\nquintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of\nElizabethan poetry being [112] sorted, and stored here, with a sort of\ndelicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winning\nfor these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another\nof enthusiastic students.  Could he but have known how fresh a source\nof culture he was evoking there for other generations, through all\nthose years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the\nlimitation of his time by business, and sigh for a better fortune in\nregard to literary opportunities!\n\nTo feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary\ncharm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle;\nand then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--he seeming to\nhimself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of\nwhich for them he is really the creator--this is the way of his\ncriticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or\nlightest essay or conversation.  It is in such a letter, for instance,\nthat we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the genius and\nwritings of Defoe.\n\nTracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of their\nproduction to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, he\nseems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth or\nShakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities which have swayed\ntheir actual work; or \"puts up,\" and takes, the one morsel of good\nstuff in an old, forgotten writer.  Even [113] in what he says casually\nthere comes an aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in chance turn\nand phrase, of the great masters of style, the old masters.  Godwin,\nseeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil, takes it for a choice\nfragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding\nthe author.  His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reaches\nthe length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on\nPopular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir\nThomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by\ndisinterested study, of those elements of the man which were the real\nsource of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, ready\nto say what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continually\noverawes one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar.  For\nit is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations\nof expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of\nvocabulary--things, alas! dying out in the English literature of the\npresent, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of\nthe past--that his literary mission is chiefly concerned.  And yet,\ndelicate, refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes\nof giants, such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray\nnote, you catch the sense of veneration with which those great names in\npast literature and art brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished\n[114] impressibility by the great effects in them.  Reading, commenting\non Shakespeare, he is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormy\nsky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might\nseem to be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he\nanalyses it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he too\nknows the secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.\n\nThere are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress,\nsurviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so\nvividly into The Rake's Progress, or Marriage a la Mode, concerning\nwhich we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless\nin themselves, they have come to please us at last as things\npicturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different\nage.  Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture--types of\ncast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to\npreserve--we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them\nthe veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its\nmore solemn and self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of\nindividuality which we find quite tolerable in persons, because they\nconvey to us the secret of lifelike expression, and with regard to\nwhich we are all to some extent humourists.  But it is part of the\nprivilege of the genuine humourist to anticipate this pensive mood with\nregard to the ways and things [115] of his own day; to look upon the\ntricks in manner of the life about him with that same refined, purged\nsort of vision, which will come naturally to those of a later\ngeneration, in observing whatever may have survived by chance of its\nmere external habit.  Seeing things always by the light of an\nunderstanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the\nwhole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outward\nmode or fashion, always in strict connexion with the spiritual\ncondition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb\nanticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of\nplaces, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and\nin advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemn\nas mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the tradition\nof such fashion or accent.  \"The praise of beggars,\" \"the cries of\nLondon,\" the traits of actors just grown \"old,\" the spots in \"town\"\nwhere the country, its fresh green and fresh water, still lingered on,\none after another, amidst the bustle; the quaint, dimmed, just\nplayed-out farces, he had relished so much, coming partly through them\nto understand the earlier English theatre as a thing once really alive;\nthose fountains and sun-dials of old gardens, of which he entertains\nsuch dainty discourse:--he feels the poetry of these things, as the\npoetry of things old indeed, but surviving [116] as an actual part of\nthe life of the present; and as something quite different from the\npoetry of things flatly gone from us and antique, which come back to\nus, if at all, as entire strangers, like Scott's old Scotch-border\npersonages, their oaths and armour.  Such gift of appreciation depends,\nas I said, on the habitual apprehension of men's life as a whole--its\norganic wholeness, as extending even to the least things in it--of its\noutward manner in connexion with its inward temper; and it involves a\nfine perception of the congruities, the musical accordance between\nhumanity and its environment of custom, society, personal intercourse;\nas if all this, with its meetings, partings, ceremonies, gesture, tones\nof speech, were some delicate instrument on which an expert performer\nis playing.\n\nThese are some of the characteristics of Elia, one essentially an\nessayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, \"never judging,\" as he\nsays, \"system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars;\" saying all\nthings as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of pastime, yet\nsucceeding thus, \"glimpse-wise,\" in catching and recording more\nfrequently than others \"the gayest, happiest attitude of things;\" a\ncasual writer for dreamy readers, yet always giving the reader so much\nmore than he seemed to propose.  There is something of the follower of\nGeorge Fox about him, and the Quaker's belief in the inward light\ncoming to one passive, [117] to the mere wayfarer, who will be sure at\nall events to lose no light which falls by the way--glimpses,\nsuggestions, delightful half-apprehensions, profound thoughts of old\nphilosophers, hints of the innermost reason in things, the full\nknowledge of which is held in reserve; all the varied stuff, that is,\nof which genuine essays are made.\n\nAnd with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is,\nbelow all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at\nall--a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that modern\nsubjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in\nliterature.  What he designs is to give you himself, to acquaint you\nwith his likeness; but must do this, if at all, indirectly, being\nindeed always more or less reserved, for himself and his friends;\nfriendship counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous of\nanything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of\ninsincerity, to which he assigns its quaint \"praise\"; this lover of\nstage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality\nof play to sweeten the intercourse of actual life.\n\nAnd, in effect, a very delicate and expressive portrait of him does put\nitself together for the duly meditative reader.  In indirect touches of\nhis own work, scraps of faded old letters, what others remembered of\nhis talk, the man's likeness emerges; what he laughed and wept at,\n[118] his sudden elevations, and longings after absent friends, his\nfine casuistries of affection and devices to jog sometimes, as he says,\nthe lazy happiness of perfect love, his solemn moments of higher\ndiscourse with the young, as they came across him on occasion, and went\nalong a little way with him, the sudden, surprised apprehension of\nbeauties in old literature, revealing anew the deep soul of poetry in\nthings, and withal the pure spirit of fun, having its way again;\nlaughter, that most short-lived of all things (some of Shakespeare's\neven being grown hollow) wearing well with him.  Much of all this comes\nout through his letters, which may be regarded as a department of his\nessays.  He is an old-fashioned letter-writer, the essence of the old\nfashion of letter-writing lying, as with true essay-writing, in the\ndexterous availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in the\nprosecution of deeper lines of observation; although, just as with the\nrecord of his conversation, one loses something, in losing the actual\ntones of the stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he halted\nalso in composition, composing slowly and by fits, \"like a Flemish\npainter,\" as he tells us, so \"it is to be regretted,\" says the editor\nof his letters, \"that in the printed letters the reader will lose the\ncurious varieties of writing with which the originals abound, and which\nare scrupulously adapted to the subject.\"\n\nAlso, he was a true \"collector,\" delighting [119] in the personal\nfinding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by\nthe little accidents which attest previous ownership.  Wither's\nEmblems, \"that old book and quaint,\" long-desired, when he finds it at\nlast, he values none the less because a child had coloured the plates\nwith his paints.  A lover of household warmth everywhere, of that\ntempered atmosphere which our various habitations get by men's living\nwithin them, he \"sticks to his favourite books as he did to his\nfriends,\" and loved the \"town,\" with a jealous eye for all its\ncharacteristics, \"old houses\" coming to have souls for him.  The\nyearning for mere warmth against him in another, makes him content, all\nthrough life, with pure brotherliness, \"the most kindly and natural\nspecies of love,\" as he says, in place of the passion of love.  Brother\nand sister, sitting thus side by side, have, of course, their\nanticipations how one of them must sit at last in the faint sun alone,\nand set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely what amount of\nmelancholy really accompanied for him the approach of old age, so\nsteadily foreseen; make us note also, with pleasure, his successive\nwakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious musing over what\nis gone and what remains, of life.  In his subtle capacity for enjoying\nthe more refined points of earth, of human relationship, he could throw\nthe gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or threadbare; has\na care for the [120] sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of\nvery weak people, down to their little pathetic \"gentilities,\" even;\nwhile, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost like\nShakespeare.\n\nAnd that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what is\naccustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging to\nhome and the earth, was congruous also with that love for the\naccustomed in religion, which we may notice in him.  He is one of the\nlast votaries of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings of\nhope and awe, which may be described as the religion of men of letters\n(as Sir Thomas Browne has his Religion of the Physician) religion as\nunderstood by the soberer men of letters in the last century, Addison,\nGray, and Johnson; by Jane Austen and Thackeray, later.  A high way of\nfeeling developed largely by constant intercourse with the great things\nof literature, and extended in its turn to those matters greater still,\nthis religion lives, in the main retrospectively, in a system of\nreceived sentiments and beliefs; received, like those great things of\nliterature and art, in the first instance, on the authority of a long\ntradition, in the course of which they have linked themselves in a\nthousand complex ways to the conditions of human life, and no more\nquestioned now than the feeling one keeps by one of the greatness--say!\nof Shakespeare.  For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes [121]\nthe solemn background on which the nearer and more exciting objects of\nhis immediate experience relieve themselves, borrowing from it an\nexpression of calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a profound\nquiet, that quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy,\nworking, we might say, on the principle of the opus operatum, almost\nwithout any co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of the\nhigher self. And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attuned\ntemperament mere physical stillness has its full value; such natures\nseeming to long for it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, with\na sort of mystical sensuality.\n\nThe writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value\nof reserve in literature.  Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour,\nand what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental\ncharacter of his work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in his\nlife, a genuinely tragic element.  The gloom, reflected at its darkest\nin those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, is always there, though not\nalways realised either for himself or his readers, and restrained\nalways in utterance.  It gives to those lighter matters on the surface\nof life and literature among which he for the most part moved, a\nwonderful force of expression, as if at any moment these slight words\nand fancies might pierce very far into the deeper soul of things.  In\nhis writing, as in his [122] life, that quiet is not the low-flying of\none from the first drowsy by choice, and needing the prick of some\nstrong passion or worldly ambition, to stimulate him into all the\nenergy of which he is capable; but rather the reaction of nature, after\nan escape from fate, dark and insane as in old Greek tragedy, following\nupon which the sense of mere relief becomes a kind of passion, as with\none who, having narrowly escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing\nfor grateful tears in just sitting quiet at home, under the wall, till\nthe end of days.\n\nHe felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the\nplaces he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell--London,\nsixty-five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and the\nTemple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to\nnorth and south the fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, \"with their\nliving trees,\" the thoughts wander \"from the hard wood of the\ndesk\"--fields fresher, and coming nearer to town then, but in one of\nwhich the present writer remembers, on a brooding early summer's day,\nto have heard the cuckoo for the first time.  Here, the surface of\nthings is certainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where\nthe child goes a-maying, tame enough.  But nowhere are things more apt\nto respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference\nbetween rain and sunshine, nowhere do the [123] clouds roll together\nmore grandly; those quaint suburban pastorals gathering a certain\nquality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with its\nweighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and\nbleached stone steeples.\n\n1878.\n\n\n\nSIR THOMAS BROWNE\n\n[124] ENGLISH prose literature towards the end of the seventeenth\ncentury, in the hands of Dryden and Locke, was becoming, as that of\nFrance had become at an earlier date, a matter of design and skilled\npractice, highly conscious of itself as an art, and, above all,\ncorrect.  Up to that time it had been, on the whole, singularly\ninformal and unprofessional, and by no means the literature of the \"man\nof letters,\" as we understand him.  Certain great instances there had\nbeen of literary structure or architecture--The Ecclesiastical Polity,\nThe Leviathan--but for the most part that earlier prose literature is\neminently occasional, closely determined by the eager practical aims of\ncontemporary politics and theology, or else due to a man's own native\ninstinct to speak because he cannot help speaking.  Hardly aware of the\nhabit, he likes talking to himself; and when he writes (still in\nundress) he does but take the \"friendly reader\" into his confidence.\nThe type of this literature, obviously, is not Locke or Gibbon, but,\nabove all others, Sir Thomas [125] Browne; as Jean Paul is a good\ninstance of it in German literature, always in its developments so much\nlater than the English; and as the best instance of it in French\nliterature, in the century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whom\nindeed, in a great measure, all those tentative writers, or essayists,\nderive.\n\nIt was a result, perhaps, of the individualism and liberty of personal\ndevelopment, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the\nReformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the \"subjective,\"\nas people say, of the singularities of personal character.  Browne,\ntoo, bookish as he really is claims to give his readers a matter, \"not\npicked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and\ntares\" of his own brain.  The faults of such literature are what we all\nrecognise in it: unevenness, alike in thought and style; lack of\ndesign; and caprice--the lack of authority; after the full play of\nwhich, there is so much to refresh one in the reasonable transparency\nof Hooker, representing thus early the tradition of a classical\nclearness in English literature, anticipated by Latimer and More, and\nto be fulfilled afterwards in Butler and Hume.  But then, in recompense\nfor that looseness and whim, in Sir Thomas Browne for instance, we have\nin those \"quaint\" writers, as they themselves understood the term\n(coint, adorned, but adorned with all the curious ornaments of their\nown predilection, provincial [126] or archaic, certainly unfamiliar,\nand selected without reference to the taste or usages of other people)\nthe charm of an absolute sincerity, with all the ingenuous and racy\neffect of what is circumstantial and peculiar in their growth.\n\nThe whole creation is a mystery and particularly that of man. At the\nblast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare\nword they started out of nothing.  But in the frame of man He played\nthe sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create as to make him.\nWhen He had separated the materials of other creatures, there\nconsequently resulted a form and soul: but having raised the walls of\nman, He was driven to a second and harder creation--of a substance like\nHimself, an incorruptible and immortal soul.\n\nThere, we have the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, in exact expression of\nhis mind!--minute and curious in its thinking; but with an effect, on\nthe sudden, of a real sublimity or depth.  His style is certainly an\nunequal one.  It has the monumental aim which charmed, and perhaps\ninfluenced, Johnson--a dignity that can be attained only in such mental\ncalm as follows long and learned pondering on the high subjects Browne\nloves to deal with.  It has its garrulity, its various levels of\npainstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together\nwith much, to us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazy\nsummer afternoon down at Norwich.  And all is so oddly mixed, showing,\nin its entire ignorance of self, how much he, and the sort of\nliterature he represents, really stood in need of technique, [127] of a\nformed taste in literature, of a literary architecture.\n\nAnd yet perhaps we could hardly wish the result different, in him, any\nmore than in the books of Burton and Fuller, or some other similar\nwriters of that age--mental abodes, we might liken, after their own\nmanner, to the little old private houses of some historic town grouped\nabout its grand public structures, which, when they have survived at\nall, posterity is loth to part with.  For, in their absolute sincerity,\nnot only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves (\"the unique\npeculiarity of the writer's mind,\" being, as Johnson says of Browne,\n\"faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his work\") but, even\nmore than mere professionally instructed writers, they belong to, and\nreflect, the age they lived in.  In essentials, of course, even Browne\nis by no means so unique among his contemporaries, and so singular, as\nhe looks.  And then, as the very condition of their work, there is an\nentire absence of personal restraint in dealing with the public, whose\nhumours they come at last in a great measure to reproduce.  To speak\nmore properly, they have no sense of a \"public\" to deal with, at\nall--only a full confidence in the \"friendly reader,\" as they love to\ncall him.  Hence their amazing pleasantry, their indulgence in their\nown conceits; but hence also those unpremeditated wildflowers of speech\nwe should [128] never have the good luck to find in any more formal\nkind of literature.\n\nIt is, in truth, to the literary purpose of the humourist, in the\nold-fashioned sense of the term, that this method of writing naturally\nallies itself--of the humourist to whom all the world is but a\nspectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly\na sense of the distinction between great and little among things that\nare at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called out\nespecially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in\nthe things or the people around him.  Certainly, in an age stirred by\ngreat causes, like the age of Browne in England, of Montaigne in\nFrance, that is not a type to which one would wish to reduce all men of\nletters.  Still, in an age apt also to become severe, or even cruel\n(its eager interest in those great causes turning sour on occasion) the\ncharacter of the humourist may well find its proper influence, through\nthat serene power, and the leisure it has for conceiving second\nthoughts, on the tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the fierce\nwills around it.  Something of such a humourist was Browne--not callous\nto men and their fortunes; certainly not without opinions of his own\nabout them; and yet, undisturbed by the civil war, by the fall, and\nthen the restoration, of the monarchy, through that long quiet life\n(ending at last on the day [129] himself had predicted, as if at the\nmoment he had willed) in which \"all existence,\" as he says, \"had been\nbut food for contemplation.\"\n\nJohnson, in beginning his Life of Browne, remarks that Browne \"seems to\nhave had the fortune, common among men of letters, of raising little\ncuriosity after their private life.\"  Whether or not, with the example\nof Johnson himself before us, we can think just that, it is certain\nthat Browne's works are of a kind to directly stimulate curiosity about\nhimself--about himself, as being manifestly so large a part of those\nworks; and as a matter of fact we know a great deal about his life,\nuneventful as in truth it was.  To himself, indeed, his life at\nNorwich, as he gives us to understand, seemed wonderful enough.  \"Of\nthese wonders,\" says Johnson, \"the view that can now be taken of his\nlife offers no appearance.\"  But \"we carry with us,\" as Browne writes,\n\"the wonders we seek without us,\" and we may note on the other hand, a\ncircumstance which his daughter, Mrs. Lyttleton, tells us of his\nchildhood: \"His father used to open his breast when he was asleep, and\nkiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that the\nHoly Ghost would take possession there.\" It was perhaps because the son\ninherited an aptitude for a like profound kindling of sentiment in the\ntaking of his life, that, uneventful as it was, [130] commonplace as it\nseemed to Johnson, to Browne himself it was so full of wonders, and so\nstimulates the curiosity of his more careful reader of to-day.  \"What\ninfluence,\" says Johnson again, \"learning has had on its possessors may\nbe doubtful.\"  Well! the influence of his great learning, of his\nconstant research on Browne, was its imaginative influence--that it\ncompleted his outfit as a poetic visionary, stirring all the strange\n\"conceit\" of his nature to its depths.\n\nBrowne himself dwells, in connexion with the first publication\n(extorted by circumstance) of the Religio Medici, on the natural\n\"inactivity of his disposition\"; and he does, as I have said, pass very\nquietly through an exciting time.  Born in the year of the Gunpowder\nPlot, he was not, in truth, one of those clear and clarifying souls\nwhich, in an age alike of practical and mental confusion, can\nanticipate and lay down the bases of reconstruction, like Bacon or\nHooker.  His mind has much of the perplexity which was part of the\natmosphere of the time.  Not that he is without his own definite\nopinions on events.  For him, Cromwell is a usurper, the death of\nCharles an abominable murder.  In spite of what is but an affectation,\nperhaps, of the sceptical mood, he is a Churchman too; one of those who\nentered fully into the Anglican position, so full of sympathy with\nthose ceremonies and observances [131] which \"misguided zeal terms\nsuperstition,\" that there were some Roman Catholics who thought that\nnothing but custom and education kept him from their communion.  At the\nRestoration he rejoices to see the return of the comely Anglican order\nin old episcopal Norwich, with its ancient churches; the antiquity, in\nparticular, of the English Church being, characteristically, one of the\nthings he most valued in it, vindicating it, when occasion came,\nagainst the \"unjust scandal\" of those who made that Church a creation\nof Henry the Eighth.  As to Romanists--he makes no scruple to \"enter\ntheir churches in defect of ours.\"  He cannot laugh at, but rather\npities, \"the fruitless journeys of pilgrims--for there is something in\nit of devotion.\"  He could never \"hear the Ave Mary! bell without an\noraison.\"  At a solemn procession he has \"wept abundantly.\"  How\nEnglish, in truth, all this really is!  It reminds one how some of the\nmost popular of English writers, in many a half-conscious expression,\nhave witnessed to a susceptibility in the English mind itself, in spite\nof the Reformation, to what is affecting in religious ceremony.  Only,\nin religion as in politics, Browne had no turn for disputes; was\nsuspicious of them, indeed; knowing, as he says with true acumen, that\n\"a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be\nforced to surrender,\" even in controversies not [132] necessarily\nmaladroit--an image in which we may trace a little contemporary\ncolouring.\n\nThe Enquiries into Vulgar Errors appeared in the year 1646; a year\nwhich found him very hard on \"the vulgar.\"  His suspicion, in the\nabstract, of what Bacon calls Idola Fori, the Idols of the\nMarket-place, takes a special emphasis from the course of events about\nhim: \"being erroneous in their single numbers, once huddled together,\nthey will be error itself.\"  And yet, congruously with a dreamy\nsweetness of character we may find expressed in his very features, he\nseems not greatly concerned at the temporary suppression of the\ninstitutions he values so much.  He seems to possess some inward\nPlatonic reality of them--church or monarchy--to hold by in idea, quite\nbeyond the reach of Roundhead or unworthy Cavalier.  In the power of\nwhat is inward and inviolable in his religion, he can still take note:\n\"In my solitary and retired imagination (neque enim cum porticus aut me\nlectulus accepit, desum mihi) I remember I am not alone, and therefore\nforget not to contemplate Him and His attributes who is ever with me.\"\n\nHis father, a merchant of London, with some claims to ancient descent,\nleft him early in possession of ample means.  Educated at Winchester\nand Oxford, he visited Ireland, France, and Italy; and in the year\n1633, at the age of twenty-eight, became Doctor of Medicine at Leyden.\nThree years later he established himself as a physician [133] at\nNorwich for the remainder of his life, having married a lady, described\nas beautiful and attractive, and affectionate also, as we may judge\nfrom her letters and postscripts to those of her husband, in an\northography of a homeliness amazing even for that age. Dorothy Browne\nbore him ten children, six of whom he survived.\n\nTheir house at Norwich, even then an old one it would seem, must have\ngrown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet of\nantiquities--antiquities properly so called; his old Roman, or\nRomanised British urns, from Walsingham or Brampton, for instance, and\nthose natural objects which he studied somewhat in the temper of a\ncuriosity-hunter or antiquary.  In one of the old churchyards of\nNorwich he makes the first discovery of adipocere, of which grim\nsubstance \"a portion still remains with him.\"  For his multifarious\nexperiments he must have had his laboratory.  The old window-stanchions\nhad become magnetic, proving, as he thinks, that iron \"acquires\nverticity\" from long lying in one position.  Once we find him re-tiling\nthe place.  It was then, perhaps, that he made the observation that\nbricks and tiles also acquire \"magnetic alliciency\"--one's whole house,\none might fancy; as indeed, he holds the earth itself to be a vast\nlodestone.\n\nThe very faults of his literary work, its desultoriness, the time it\ncosts his readers, that [134] slow Latinity which Johnson imitated from\nhim, those lengthy leisurely terminations which busy posterity will\nabbreviate, all breathe of the long quiet of the place.  Yet he is by\nno means indolent.  Besides wide book-learning, experimental research\nat home, and indefatigable observation in the open air, he prosecutes\nthe ordinary duties of a physician; contrasting himself indeed with\nother students, \"whose quiet and unmolested doors afford no such\ndistractions.\"  To most persons of mind sensitive as his, his chosen\nstudies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as they\ndid, upon death and decay.  It is well, perhaps, that life should be\nsomething of a \"meditation upon death\": but to many, certainly,\nBrowne's would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one's own\nfuneral.  A museum is seldom a cheerful place--oftenest induces the\nfeeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne the\nwhole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a\nsomewhat mortified kind.  Only, for him (poetic dream, or philosophic\napprehension, it was this which never failed to evoke his wonderful\ngenius for exquisitely impassioned speech) over all those ugly\nanatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics,\nthere was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, one\nday to reassert itself--stranger far than any fancied odylic\ngravelights!\n\n[135] When Browne settled at Norwich, being then about thirty-six years\nold, he had already completed the Religio Medici; a desultory\ncollection of observations designed for himself only and a few friends,\nat all events with no purpose of immediate publication.  It had been\nlying by him for seven years, circulating privately in his own\nextraordinarily perplexed manuscript, or in manuscript copies, when, in\n1642, an incorrect printed version from one of those copies, \"much\ncorrupted by transcription at various hands,\" appeared anonymously.\nBrowne, decided royalist as he was in spite of seeming indifference,\nconnects this circumstance with the unscrupulous use of the press for\npolitical purposes, and especially against the king, at that time.\nJust here a romantic figure comes on the scene.  Son of the unfortunate\nyoung Everard Digby who perished on the scaffold for some half-hearted\nparticipation in the Gunpowder Plot, Kenelm Digby, brought up in the\nreformed religion, had returned in manhood to the religion of his\nfather.  In his intellectual composition he had, in common with Browne,\na scientific interest, oddly tinged with both poetry and scepticism: he\nhad also a strong sympathy with religious reaction, and a more than\nsentimental love for a seemingly vanishing age of faith, which he, for\none, would not think of as vanishing.  A copy of that surreptitious\nedition of the Religio Medici found him a prisoner on suspicion of a\ntoo active [136] royalism, and with much time on his hands.\n\nThe Roman Catholic, although, secure in his definite orthodoxy, he\nfinds himself indifferent on many points (on the reality of witchcraft,\nfor instance) concerning which Browne's more timid, personally grounded\nfaith might indulge no scepticism, forced himself, nevertheless, to\ndetect a vein of rationalism in a book which on the whole much\nattracted him, and hastily put forth his \"animadversions\" upon it.\nBrowne, with all his distaste for controversy, thus found himself\ncommitted to a dispute, and his reply came with the correct edition of\nthe Religio Medici published at last with his name.  There have been\nmany efforts to formulate the \"religion of the layman,\" which might be\nrightly understood, perhaps, as something more than what is called\n\"natural,\" yet less than ecclesiastical, or \"professional\" religion.\nThough its habitual mode of conceiving experience is on a different\nplane, yet it would recognise the legitimacy of the traditional\nreligious interpretation of that experience, generally and by\nimplication; only, with a marked reserve as to religious particulars,\nboth of thought and language, out of a real reverence or awe, as proper\nonly for a special place. Such is the lay religion, as we may find it\nin Addison, in Gray, in Thackeray; and there is something of a\nconcession--a concession, on second thoughts--about it.  Browne's\nReligio Medici is designed as the expression of a mind [137] more\ndifficult of belief than that of the mere \"layman,\" as above described;\nit is meant for the religion of the man of science.  Actually, it is\nsomething less to the point, in any balancing of the religious against\nthe worldly view of things, than the religion of the layman, as just\nnow defined.  For Browne, in spite of his profession of boisterous\ndoubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing\nof the character of a concession.  He holds that there has never\nexisted an atheist. Not that he is credulous; but that his religion is\nonly the correlative of himself, his peculiar character and education,\na religion of manifold association.  For him, the wonders of religion,\nits supernatural events or agencies, are almost natural facts or\nprocesses.  \"Even in this material fabric, the spirits walk as freely\nexempt from the affection of time, place and motion, as beyond the\nextremest circumference.\"  Had not Divine interference designed to\nraise the dead, nature herself is in act to do it--to lead out the\n\"incinerated soul\" from the retreats of her dark laboratory. Certainly\nBrowne has not, like Pascal, made the \"great resolution,\" by the\napprehension that it is just in the contrast of the moral world to the\nworld with which science deals that religion finds its proper basis.\nIt is from the homelessness of the world which science analyses so\nvictoriously, its dark unspirituality, wherein the soul he is conscious\nof seems such a [138] stranger, that Pascal \"turns again to his rest,\"\nin the conception of a world of wholly reasonable and moral agencies.\nFor Browne, on the contrary, the light is full, design everywhere\nobvious, its conclusion easy to draw, all small and great things marked\nclearly with the signature of the \"Word.\"  The adhesion, the difficult\nadhesion, of men such as Pascal, is an immense contribution to\nreligious controversy; the concession, again, of a man like Addison, of\ngreat significance there.  But in the adhesion of Browne, in spite of\nhis crusade against \"vulgar errors,\" there is no real significance.\nThe Religio Medici is a contribution, not to faith, but to piety; a\nrefinement and correction, such as piety often stands in need of; a\nhelp, not so much to religious belief in a world of doubt, as to the\nmaintenance of the religious mood amid the interests of a secular\ncalling.\n\nFrom about this time Browne's letters afford a pretty clear view of his\nlife as it passed in the house at Norwich.  Many of these letters\nrepresent him in correspondence with the singular men who shared his\nown half poetic, half scientific turn of mind, with that impressibility\ntowards what one might call the thaumaturgic elements in nature which\nhas often made men dupes, and which is certainly an element in the\nsomewhat atrabiliar mental complexion of that age in England.  He\ncorresponds seriously with William Lily, the astrologer; is acquainted\n[139] with Dr.  Dee, who had some connexion with Norwich, and has\n\"often heard him affirm, sometimes with oaths, that he had seen\ntransmutation of pewter dishes and flagons into silver (at least) which\nthe goldsmiths at Prague bought of him.\"  Browne is certainly an honest\ninvestigator; but it is still with a faint hope of something like that\nupon fitting occasion, and on the alert always for surprises in nature\n(as if nature had a rhetoric, at times, to deliver to us, like those\nsudden and surprising flowers of his own poetic style) that he listens\nto her everyday talk so attentively. Of strange animals, strange cures,\nand the like, his correspondence is full.  The very errors he combats\nare, of course, the curiosities of error--those fascinating,\nirresistible, popular, errors, which various kinds of people have\ninsisted on gliding into because they like them.  Even his heresies\nwere old ones--the very fossils of capricious opinion.\n\nIt is as an industrious local naturalist that Browne comes before us\nfirst, full of the fantastic minute life in the fens and \"Broads\"\naround Norwich, its various sea and marsh birds.  He is something of a\nvivisectionist also, and we may not be surprised at it, perhaps, in an\nage which, for the propagation of truth, was ready to cut off men's\nears.  He finds one day \"a Scarabaus capricornus odoratus,\" which he\ntakes \"to be mentioned by Monfetus, folio 150.  He saith, 'Nucem\nmoschatam et cinnamomum vere spirat'--[140] but to me it smelt like\nroses, santalum, and ambergris.\"  \"Musca tuliparum moschata,\" again,\n\"is a small bee-like fly of an excellent fragrant odour, which I have\noften found at the bottom of the flowers of tulips.\"  Is this within\nthe experience of modern entomologists?\n\nThe Garden of Cyrus, though it ends indeed with a passage of wonderful\nfelicity, certainly emphasises (to say the least) the defects of\nBrowne's literary good qualities.  His chimeric fancy carries him here\ninto a kind of frivolousness, as if he felt almost too safe with his\npublic, and were himself not quite serious, or dealing fairly with it;\nand in a writer such as Browne levity must of necessity be a little\nponderous.  Still, like one of those stiff gardens, half-way between\nthe medieval garden and the true \"English\" garden of Temple or Walpole,\nactually to be seen in the background of some of the conventional\nportraits of that day, the fantasies of this indescribable exposition\nof the mysteries of the quincunx form part of the complete portrait of\nBrowne himself; and it is in connexion with it that, once or twice, the\nquaintly delightful pen of Evelyn comes into the correspondence--in\nconnexion with the \"hortulane pleasure.\"  \"Norwich,\" he writes to\nBrowne, \"is a place, I understand, much addicted to the flowery part.\"\nProfessing himself a believer in the operation \"of the air and genius\nof gardens upon human spirits, towards virtue and sanctity,\" he is all\nfor [141] natural gardens as against \"those which appear like gardens\nof paste-board and march-pane, and smell more of paint than of flowers\nand verdure.\"  Browne is in communication also with Ashmole and\nDugdale, the famous antiquaries; to the latter of whom, who had written\na work on the history of the embanking of fens, he communicates the\ndiscovery of certain coins, on a piece of ground \"in the nature of an\nisland in the fens.\"\n\nFar more interesting certainly than those curious scientific letters is\nBrowne's \"domestic correspondence.\"  Dobson, Charles the First's\n\"English Tintoret,\" would seem to have painted a life-sized picture of\nSir Thomas Browne and his family, after the manner of those big,\nurbane, family groups, then coming into fashion with the Dutch Masters.\nOf such a portrait nothing is now known.  But in these old-fashioned,\naffectionate letters, transmitted often, in those troublous times, with\nso much difficulty, we have what is almost as graphic--a numerous\ngroup, in which, although so many of Browne's children died young, he\nwas happy; with Dorothy Browne, occasionally adding her charming,\nill-spelt postscripts to her husband's letters; the religious daughter\nwho goes to daily prayers after the Restoration, which brought Browne\nthe honour of knighthood; and, above all, two Toms, son and grandson of\nSir Thomas, the latter being the son of Dr. Edward Browne, [142] now\nbecome distinguished as a physician in London (he attended John, Earl\nof Rochester, in his last illness at Woodstock) and his childish\nexistence as he lives away from his proper home in London, in the old\nhouse at Norwich, two hundred years ago, we see like a thing of to-day.\n\nAt first the two brothers, Edward and Thomas (the elder) are together\nin everything.  Then Edward goes abroad for his studies, and Thomas,\nquite early, into the navy, where he certainly develops into a\nwonderfully gallant figure; passing away, however, from the\ncorrespondence, it is uncertain how, before he was of full age.  From\nthe first he is understood to be a lad of parts.  \"If you practise to\nwrite, you will have a good pen and style:\" and a delightful, boyish\njournal of his remains, describing a tour the two brothers made in\nSeptember 1662 among the Derbyshire hills.  \"I received your two last\nletters,\" he writes to his father from aboard the Marie Rose, \"and give\nyou many thanks for the discourse you sent me out of Vossius: De motu\nmarium et ventorum.  It seemed very hard to me at first; but I have now\nbeaten it, and I wish I had the book.\"  His father is pleased to think\nthat he is \"like to proceed not only a good navigator, but a good\nscholar\": and he finds the much exacting, old classical prescription\nfor the character of the brave man fulfilled in him.  On 16th July 1666\nthe young man writes--still from the Marie Rose--\n\n[143] If it were possible to get an opportunity to send as often as I\nam desirous to write, you should hear more often from me, being now so\nnear the grand action, from which I would by no means be absent.  I\nextremely long for that thundering day: wherein I hope you shall hear\nwe have behaved ourselves like men, and to the honour of our country.\nI thank you for your directions for my ears against the noise of the\nguns, but I have found that I could endure it; nor is it so intolerable\nas most conceive; especially when men are earnest, and intent upon\ntheir business, unto whom muskets sound but like pop-guns.  It is\nimpossible to express unto another how a smart sea-fight elevates the\nspirits of a man, and makes him despise all dangers.  In and after all\nsea-fights, I have been very thirsty.\n\nHe died, as I said, early in life.  We only hear of him later in\nconnexion with a trait of character observed in Tom the grandson, whose\nwinning ways, and tricks of bodily and mental growth, are duly recorded\nin these letters: the reader will, I hope, pardon the following\nextracts from them:--\n\nLittle Tom is lively....  Frank is fayne sometimes to play him asleep\nwith a fiddle.  When we send away our letters he scribbles a paper and\nwill have it sent to his sister, and saith she doth not know how many\nfine things there are in Norwich....  He delights his grandfather when\nhe comes home.\n\nTom gives you many thanks for his clothes (from London).  He has\nappeared very fine this King's day with them.\n\nTom presents his duty.  A gentleman at our election asked Tom who hee\nwas for? and he answered, \"For all four.\"  The gentleman replied that\nhe answered like a physician's son.\n\nTom would have his grandmother, his aunt Betty, and Frank, valentines:\nbut hee conditioned with them that they should give him nothing of any\nkind that hee had ever had or seen before.\n\n[144] \"Tom is just now gone to see two bears which are to be shown.\"\n\"Tom, his duty.  He is begging books and reading of them.\"  \"The\nplayers are at the Red Lion hard by; and Tom goes sometimes to see a\nplay.\"\n\nAnd then one day he stirs old memories--\n\nThe fairings were welcome to Tom.  He finds about the house divers\nthings that were your brother's (the late Edward's), and Betty\nsometimes tells him stories about him, so that he was importunate with\nher to write his life in a quarter of a sheet of paper, and read it\nunto him, and will have still more added.\n\nJust as I am writing (learnedly about a comet, 7th January 1680-81) Tom\ncomes and tells me the blazing star is in the yard, and calls me to see\nit.  It was but dim, and the sky not clear....  I am very sensible of\nthis sharp weather.+\n\nHe seems to have come to no good end, riding forth one stormy night.\nRequiescat in pace!\n\nOf this long, leisurely existence the chief events were Browne's rare\nliterary publications; some of his writings indeed having been left\nunprinted till after his death; while in the circumstances of the issue\nof every one of them there is something accidental, as if the world\nmight have missed it altogether.  Even the Discourse of Vulgar Errors,\nthe longest and most elaborate of his works, is entirely discursive and\noccasional, coming to an end with no natural conclusion, but only\nbecause the writer chose to leave off just there; and few probably have\nbeen the readers of the book as a consecutive whole. At times indeed we\nseem to have in it observations only, or notes, preliminary to some\nmore orderly composition.  Dip into it: read, for [145] instance, the\nchapter \"Of the Ring-finger,\" or the chapters \"Of the Long Life of the\nDeer,\" and on the \"Pictures of Mermaids, Unicorns, and some Others,\"\nand the part will certainly seem more than the whole.  Try to read it\nthrough, and you will soon feel cloyed;--miss very likely, its real\nworth to the fancy, the literary fancy (which finds its pleasure in\ninventive word and phrase) and become dull to the really vivid beauties\nof a book so lengthy, but with no real evolution.  Though there are\nwords, phrases, constructions innumerable, which remind one how much\nthe work initiated in France by Madame de Rambouillet--work, done for\nEngland, we may think perhaps imperfectly, in the next century by\nJohnson and others--was really needed; yet the capacities of Browne's\nmanner of writing, coming as it did so directly from the man, are felt\neven in his treatment of matters of science.  As with Buffon, his full,\nardent, sympathetic vocabulary, the poetry of his language, a poetry\ninherent in its elementary particles--the word, the epithet--helps to\nkeep his eye, and the eye of the reader, on the object before it, and\nconduces directly to the purpose of the naturalist, the observer.  But,\nonly one half observation, its other half consisting of very\nout-of-the-way book-lore, this work displays Browne still in the\ncharacter of the antiquary, as that age understood him.  He is a kind\nof Elias Ashmole, but dealing with natural objects; which are for him,\nin the first [146] place, and apart from the remote religious hints and\nintimations they carry with them, curiosities.  He seems to have no\ntrue sense of natural law, as Bacon understood it; nor even of that\nimmanent reason in the natural world, which the Platonic tradition\nsupposes.  \"Things are really true,\" he says, \"as they correspond unto\nGod's conception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity\nunto that intellect, in whose idea they had their first\ndeterminations.\"  But, actually, what he is busy in the record of, are\nmatters more or less of the nature of caprices; as if things, after\nall, were significant of their higher verity only at random, and in a\nsort of surprises, like music in old instruments suddenly touched into\nsound by a wandering finger, among the lumber of people's houses.\nNature, \"the art of God,\" as he says, varying a little a phrase used\nalso by Hobbes, in a work printed later--Nature, he seems to protest,\nis only a little less magical, its processes only a little less in the\nway of alchemy, than you had supposed.  We feel that, as with that\ndisturbed age in England generally (and it is here that he, with it, is\nso interesting, curious, old-world, and unlike ourselves) his supposed\nexperience might at any moment be broken in upon by a hundred forms of\na natural magic, only not quite so marvellous as that older sort of\nmagic, or alchemy, he is at so much pains to expose; and the large\npromises of which, its large words too, he still regretfully enjoys.\n\n[147] And yet the Discourse of Vulgar Errors, seeming, as it often\ndoes, to be a serious refutation of fairy tales--arguing, for instance,\nagainst the literal truth of the poetic statement that \"The pigeon hath\nno gall,\" and such questions as \"Whether men weigh heavier dead than\nalive?\" being characteristic questions--is designed, with much\nambition, under its pedantic Greek title Pseudodoxia Epidemica, as a\ncriticism, a cathartic, an instrument for the clarifying of the\nintellect.  He begins from \"that first error in Paradise,\" wondering\nmuch at \"man's deceivability in his perfection,\"--\"at such gross\ndeceit.\"  He enters in this connexion, with a kind of poetry of\nscholasticism which may interest the student of Paradise Lost, into\nwhat we may call the intellectual and moral by-play of the situation of\nthe first man and woman in Paradise, with strange queries about it.\nDid Adam, for instance, already know of the fall of the Angels?  Did he\nreally believe in death, till Abel died?  It is from Julius Scaliger\nthat he takes his motto, to the effect that the true knowledge of\nthings must be had from things themselves, not from books; and he seems\nas seriously concerned as Bacon to dissipate the crude impressions of a\nfalse \"common sense,\" of false science, and a fictitious authority.\nInverting, oddly, Plato's theory that all learning is but reminiscence,\nhe reflects with a sigh how much of oblivion must needs be involved in\nthe getting of any true knowledge.  \"Men that [148] adore times past,\nconsider not that those times were once present (that is, as our own\nare) and ourselves unto those to come, as they unto us at present.\"\nThat, surely, coming from one both by temperament and habit so great an\nantiquary, has the touch of something like an influence in the\natmosphere of the time.  That there was any actual connexion between\nBrowne's work and Bacon's is but a surmise.  Yet we almost seem to hear\nBacon when Browne discourses on the \"use of doubts, and the advantages\nwhich might be derived from drawing up a calendar of doubts,\nfalsehoods, and popular errors;\" and, as from Bacon, one gets the\nimpression that men really have been very much the prisoners of their\nown crude or pedantic terms, notions, associations; that they have been\nvery indolent in testing very simple matters--with a wonderful kind of\n\"supinity,\" as he calls it.  In Browne's chapter on the \"Sources of\nError,\" again, we may trace much resemblance to Bacon's striking\ndoctrine of the Idola, the \"shams\" men fall down and worship.  Taking\nsource respectively, from the \"common infirmity of human nature,\" from\nthe \"erroneous disposition of the people,\" from \"confident adherence to\nauthority,\" the errors which Browne chooses to deal with may be\nregistered as identical with Bacon's Idola Tribus, Fori, Theatri; the\nidols of our common human nature; of the vulgar, when they get\ntogether; and of the learned, when they get together.\n\n[149] But of the fourth species of error noted by Bacon, the Idola\nSpecus, the Idols of the Cave, that whole tribe of illusions, which are\n\"bred amongst the weeds and tares of one's own brain,\" Browne tells us\nnothing by way of criticism; was himself, rather, a lively example of\ntheir operation.  Throw those illusions, those \"idols,\" into concrete\nor personal form, suppose them introduced among the other forces of an\nactive intellect, and you have Sir Thomas Browne himself.  The\nsceptical inquirer who rises from his cathartic, his purging of error,\na believer in the supernatural character of pagan oracles, and a cruel\njudge of supposed witches, must still need as much as ever that\nelementary conception of the right method and the just limitations of\nknowledge, by power of which he should not just strain out a single\nerror here or there, but make a final precipitate of fallacy.\n\nAnd yet if the temperament had been deducted from Browne's work--that\ninherent and strongly marked way of deciding things, which has guided\nwith so surprising effect the musings of the Letter to a Friend, and\nthe Urn-Burial--we should probably have remembered him little.  Pity!\nsome may think, for himself at least, that he had not lived earlier,\nand still believed in the mandrake, for instance; its fondness for\nplaces of execution, and its human cries \"on eradication, with hazard\nof life to them that pull it up.\"  \"In philosophy,\" he observes,\nmeaning to contrast [150] his free-thinking in that department with his\northodoxy in religion--in philosophy, \"where truth seems double-faced,\nthere is no man more paradoxical than myself:\" which is true, we may\nthink, in a further sense than he meant, and that it was the\n\"paradoxical\" that he actually preferred.  Happy, at all events, he\nstill remained--undisturbed and happy--in a hundred native\nprepossessions, some certainly valueless, some of them perhaps\ninvaluable.  And while one feels that no real logic of fallacies has\nbeen achieved by him, one feels still more how little the construction\nof that branch of logical inquiry really helps men's minds; fallacy,\nlike truth itself, being a matter so dependent on innate gift of\napprehension, so extra-logical and personal; the original perception\ncounting for almost everything, the mere inference for so little!  Yes!\n\"A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be\nforced to surrender,\" even in controversies not necessarily maladroit.\n\nThe really stirring poetry of science is not in guesses, or facile\ndivinations about it, but in its larger ascertained truths--the order\nof infinite space, the slow method and vast results of infinite time.\nFor Browne, however, the sense of poetry which so overmasters his\nscientific procedure, depends chiefly on its vaguer possibilities; the\nempirical philosophy, even after Bacon, being still dominated by a\ntemper, resultant from the general unsettlement of men's [151] minds at\nthe Reformation, which may be summed up in the famous question of\nMontaigne--Que scais-je?  The cold-blooded method of observation and\nexperiment was creeping but slowly over the domain of science; and such\nunreclaimed portions of it as the phenomena of magnetism had an immense\nfascination for men like Browne and Digby. Here, in those parts of\nnatural philosophy \"but yet in discovery,\" \"the America and untravelled\nparts of truth,\" lay for them the true prospect of science, like the\nnew world itself to a geographical discoverer such as Raleigh.  And\nwelcome as one of the minute hints of that country far ahead of them,\nthe strange bird, or floating fragment of unfamiliar vegetation, which\nmet those early navigators, there was a certain fantastic experiment,\nin which, as was alleged, Paracelsus had been lucky.  For Browne and\nothers it became the crucial type of the kind of agency in nature\nwhich, as they conceived, it was the proper function of science to\nreveal in larger operation.  \"The subject of my last letter,\" says Dr.\nHenry Power, then a student, writing to Browne in 1648, the last year\nof Charles the First, \"being so high and noble a piece of chemistry,\ninvites me once more to request an experimental eviction of it from\nyourself; and I hope you will not chide my importunity in this\npetition, or be angry at my so frequent knockings at your door to\nobtain a grant of so great and admirable a [152] mystery.\"  What the\nenthusiastic young student expected from Browne, so high and noble a\npiece of chemistry, was the \"re-individualling of an incinerated\nplant\"--a violet, turning to freshness, and smelling sweet again, out\nof its ashes, under some genially fitted conditions of the chemic art.\n\nPalingenesis, resurrection, effected by orderly prescription--the\n\"re-individualling\" of an \"incinerated organism\"--is a subject which\naffords us a natural transition to the little book of the Hydriotaphia,\nor Treatise of Urn-Burial--about fifty or sixty pages--which, together\nwith a very singular letter not printed till after Browne's death, is\nperhaps, after all, the best justification of Browne's literary\nreputation, as it were his own curiously figured urn, and\ntreasure-place of immortal memory.\n\nIn its first presentation to the public this letter was connected with\nBrowne's Christian Morals; but its proper and sympathetic collocation\nwould be rather with the Urn-Burial, of which it is a kind of prelude,\nor strikes the keynote.  He is writing in a very complex situation--to\na friend, upon occasion of the death of a common friend.  The deceased\napparently had been little known to Browne himself till his recent\nvisits, while the intimate friend to whom he is writing had been absent\nat the time; and the leading motive of Browne's letter is the deep\nimpression he has received during those visits, of a sort of [153]\nphysical beauty in the coming of death, with which he still surprises\nand moves his reader.  There had been, in this case, a tardiness and\nreluctancy in the circumstances of dissolution, which had permitted\nhim, in the character of a physician, as it were to assist at the\nspiritualising of the bodily frame by natural process; a wonderful new\ntype of a kind of mortified grace being evolved by the way.  The\nspiritual body had anticipated the formal moment of death; the alert\nsoul, in that tardy decay, changing its vesture gradually, and as if\npiece by piece.  The infinite future had invaded this life perceptibly\nto the senses, like the ocean felt far inland up a tidal river.\nNowhere, perhaps, is the attitude of questioning awe on the threshold\nof another life displayed with the expressiveness of this unique morsel\nof literature; though there is something of the same kind, in another\nthan the literary medium, in the delicate monumental sculpture of the\nearly Tuscan School, as also in many of the designs of William Blake,\noften, though unconsciously, much in sympathy with those\nunsophisticated Italian workmen.  With him, as with them, and with the\nwriter of the Letter to a Friend upon the occasion of the death of his\nintimate Friend,--so strangely! the visible function of death is but to\nrefine, to detach from aught that is vulgar.  And this elfin letter,\nreally an impromptu epistle to a friend, affords the best possible\nlight on the general temper of the man [154] who could be moved by the\naccidental discovery of those old urns at Walsingham--funeral relics of\n\"Romans, or Britons Romanised which had learned Roman customs\"--to the\ncomposition of that wonderful book the Hydriotaphia.  He had drawn up a\nshort account of the circumstance at the moment; but it was after ten\nyears' brooding that he put forth the finished treatise, dedicated to\nan eminent collector of ancient coins and other rarities, with\ncongratulations that he \"can daily command the view of so many imperial\nfaces,\" and (by way of frontispiece) with one of the urns, \"drawn with\na coal taken out of it and found among the burnt bones.\"  The discovery\nhad resuscitated for him a whole world of latent observation, from\nlife, from out-of-the-way reading, from the natural world, and fused\ninto a composition, which with all its quaintness we may well pronounce\nclassical, all the heterogeneous elements of that singular mind.  The\ndesire to \"record these risen ashes and not to let them be buried twice\namong us,\" had set free, in his manner of conceiving things, something\nnot wholly analysable, something that may be properly called genius,\nwhich shapes his use of common words to stronger and deeper senses, in\na way unusual in prose writing.  Let the reader, for instance, trace\nhis peculiarly sensitive use of the epithets thin and dark, both here\nand in the Letter to a Friend.\n\nUpon what a grand note he can begin and end [155] chapter or paragraph!\n\"When the funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over:\"  \"And a\nlarge part of the earth is still in the urn unto us.\" Dealing with a\nvery vague range of feelings, it is his skill to associate them to very\ndefinite objects.  Like the Soul, in Blake's design, \"exploring the\nrecesses of the tomb,\" he carries a light, the light of the poetic\nfaith which he cannot put off him, into those dark places, \"the abode\nof worms and pismires,\" peering round with a boundless curiosity and no\nfear; noting the various casuistical considerations of men's last form\nof self-love; all those whims of humanity as a \"student of perpetuity,\"\nthe mortuary customs of all nations, which, from their very closeness\nto our human nature, arouse in most minds only a strong feeling of\ndistaste.  There is something congruous with the impassive piety of the\nman in his waiting on accident from without to take start for the work,\nwhich, of all his work, is most truly touched by the \"divine spark.\"\nDelightsome as its eloquence is actually found to be, that eloquence is\nattained out of a certain difficulty and halting crabbedness of\nexpression; the wretched punctuation of the piece being not the only\ncause of its impressing the reader with the notion that he is but\ndealing with a collection of notes for a more finished composition, and\nof a different kind; perhaps a purely erudite treatise on its subject,\nwith detachment of all personal colour now adhering [156] to it.  Out\nof an atmosphere of all-pervading oddity and quaintness--the quaintness\nof mind which reflects that this disclosing of the urns of the ancients\nhath \"left unto our view some parts which they never beheld\nthemselves\"--arises a work really ample and grand, nay! classical, as I\nsaid, by virtue of the effectiveness with which it fixes a type in\nliterature; as, indeed, at its best, romantic literature (and Browne is\ngenuinely romantic) in every period attains classical quality, giving\ntrue measure of the very limited value of those well-worn critical\ndistinctions.  And though the Urn-Burial certainly has much of the\ncharacter of a poem, yet one is never allowed to forget that it was\ndesigned, candidly, as a scientific treatise on one department of\nancient \"culture\" (as much so as Guichard's curious old French book on\nDivers Manners of Burial) and was the fruit of much labour, in the way\nespecially of industrious selection from remote and difficult writers;\nthere being then few or no handbooks, or anything like our modern\nshortcuts to varied knowledge.  Quite unaffectedly, a curious learning\nsaturates, with a kind of grey and aged colour most apt and congruous\nwith the subject-matter, all the thoughts that arise in him.  His great\nstore of reading, so freely displayed, he uses almost as poetically as\nMilton; like him, profiting often by the mere sonorous effect of some\nheroic or ancient name, which he can adapt to that same sort of learned\nsweetness of [157] cadence with which so many of his single sentences\nare made to fall upon the ear.\n\nPope Gregory, that great religious poet, requested by certain eminent\npersons to send them some of those relics he sought for so devoutly in\nall the lurking-places of old Rome, took up, it is said, a portion of\ncommon earth, and delivered it to the messengers; and, on their\nexpressing surprise at such a gift, pressed the earth together in his\nhand, whereupon the sacred blood of the Martyrs was beheld flowing out\nbetween his fingers.  The veneration of relics became a part of\nChristian (as some may think it a part of natural) religion.  All over\nRome we may count how much devotion in fine art is owing to it; and,\nthrough all ugliness or superstition, its intention still speaks\nclearly to serious minds.  The poor dead bones, ghastly and\nforbidding:--we know what Shakespeare would have felt about\nthem.--\"Beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a\nman!\" And it is with something of a similar feeling that Browne is\nfull, on the common and general ground of humanity; an awe-stricken\nsympathy with those, whose bones \"lie at the mercies of the living,\"\nstrong enough to unite all his various chords of feeling into a single\nstrain of impressive and genuine poetry.  His real interest is in what\nmay be called the curiosities of our common humanity.  As another might\nbe moved at the sight of Alexander's bones, or Saint Edmund's, or Saint\nCecilia's, [158] so he is full of a fine poetical excitement at such\nlowly relics as the earth hides almost everywhere beneath our feet.\nBut it is hardly fair to take our leave amid these grievous images of\nso happy a writer as Sir Thomas Browne; so great a lover of the open\nair, under which much of his life was passed.  His work, late one\nnight, draws to a natural close:--\"To keep our eyes open longer,\" he\nbethinks himself suddenly, \"were but to act our Antipodes.  The\nhuntsmen are up in America!\"\n\nWhat a fund of open-air cheerfulness, there! in turning to sleep.\nStill, even when we are dealing with a writer in whom mere style counts\nfor so much as with Browne, it is impossible to ignore his matter; and\nit is with religion he is really occupied from first to last, hardly\nless than Richard Hooker.  And his religion, too, after all, was a\nreligion of cheerfulness: he has no great consciousness of evil in\nthings, and is no fighter.  His religion, if one may say so, was all\nprofit to him; among other ways, in securing an absolute staidness and\nplacidity of temper, for the intellectual work which was the proper\nbusiness of his life.  His contributions to \"evidence,\" in the Religio\nMedici, for instance, hardly tell, because he writes out of view of a\nreally philosophical criticism.  What does tell in him, in this\ndirection, is the witness he brings to men's instinct of survival--the\n\"intimations of immortality,\" as Wordsworth terms them, which  [159]\nwere natural with him in surprising force. As was said of Jean Paul,\nhis special subject was the immortality of the soul; with an assurance\nas personal, as fresh and original, as it was, on the one hand, in\nthose old half-civilised people who had deposited the urns; on the\nother hand, in the cynical French poet of the nineteenth century, who\ndid not think, but knew, that his soul was imperishable.  He lived in\nan age in which that philosophy made a great stride which ends with\nHume; and his lesson, if we may be pardoned for taking away a \"lesson\"\nfrom so ethical a writer, is the force of men's temperaments in the\nmanagement of opinion, their own or that of others;--that it is not\nmerely different degrees of bare intellectual power which cause men to\napproach in different degrees to this or that intellectual programme.\nCould he have foreseen the mature result of that mechanical analysis\nwhich Bacon had applied to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, there\nis no reason to think that he would have surrendered his own chosen\nhypothesis concerning them.  He represents, in an age, the intellectual\npowers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, that class of minds to\nwhich the supernatural view of things is still credible.  The\nnon-mechanical theory of nature has had its grave adherents since: to\nthe non-mechanical theory of man--that he is in contact with a moral\norder on a different plane from the [160] mechanical order--thousands,\nof the most various types and degrees of intellectual power, always\nadhere; a fact worth the consideration of all ingenuous thinkers, if\n(as is certainly the case with colour, music, number, for instance)\nthere may be whole regions of fact, the recognition of which belongs to\none and not to another, which people may possess in various degrees;\nfor the knowledge of which, therefore, one person is dependent upon\nanother; and in relation to which the appropriate means of cognition\nmust lie among the elements of what we call individual temperament, so\nthat what looks like a pre-judgment may be really a legitimate\napprehension.  \"Men are what they are,\" and are not wholly at the mercy\nof formal conclusions from their formally limited premises. Browne\npasses his whole life in observation and inquiry: he is a genuine\ninvestigator, with every opportunity: the mind of the age all around\nhim seems passively yielding to an almost foregone intellectual result,\nto a philosophy of disillusion.  But he thinks all that a prejudice;\nand not from any want of intellectual power certainly, but from some\ninward consideration, some afterthought, from the antecedent\ngravitation of his own general character--or, will you say? from that\nunprecipitated infusion of fallacy in him--he fails to draw, unlike\nalmost all the rest of the world, the conclusion ready to hand.\n\n1886.\n\nNOTES\n\n144. +In the original, this quotation, like several above it, is not\nindented; it is in smaller type.  Return.\n\n\n\n\"LOVE'S LABOURS LOST\"\n\n[161] Love's Labours Lost is one of the earliest of Shakespeare's\ndramas, and has many of the peculiarities of his poems, which are also\nthe work of his earlier life.  The opening speech of the king on the\nimmortality of fame--on the triumph of fame over death--and the nobler\nparts of Biron, display something of the monumental style of\nShakespeare's Sonnets, and are not without their concerts of thought\nand expression.  This connexion of Love's Labours Lost with\nShakespeare's poems is further enforced by the actual insertion in it\nof three sonnets and a faultless song; which, in accordance with his\npractice in other plays, are inwoven into the argument of the piece\nand, like the golden ornaments of a fair woman, give it a peculiar air\nof distinction.  There is merriment in it also, with choice\nillustrations of both wit and humour; a laughter, often exquisite,\nringing, if faintly, yet as genuine laughter still, though sometimes\nsinking into mere burlesque, which has not lasted quite so well.  And\nShakespeare [162] brings a serious effect out of the trifling of his\ncharacters.  A dainty love-making is interchanged with the more\ncumbrous play: below the many artifices of Biron's amorous speeches we\nmay trace sometimes the \"unutterable longing;\" and the lines in which\nKatherine describes the blighting through love of her younger sister\nare one of the most touching things in older literature.* Again, how\nmany echoes seem awakened by those strange words, actually said in\njest!  \"The sweet war-man (Hector of Troy) is dead and rotten; sweet\nchucks, beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a\nman!\"--words which may remind us of Shakespeare's own epitaph.  In the\nlast scene, an ingenious turn is given to the action, so that the piece\ndoes not conclude after the manner of other comedies.--\n\n  Our wooing doth not end like an old play;\n  Jack hath not Jill:\n\nand Shakespeare strikes a passionate note across it at last, in the\nentrance of the messenger, who announces to the princess that the king\nher father is suddenly dead.\n\nThe merely dramatic interest of the piece is slight enough; only just\nsufficient, indeed, to form the vehicle of its wit and poetry.  The\nscene--a park of the King of Navarre--is unaltered throughout; and the\nunity of the [163] play is not so much the unity of a drama as that of\na series of pictorial groups, in which the same figures reappear, in\ndifferent combinations but on the same background.  It is as if\nShakespeare had intended to bind together, by some inventive conceit,\nthe devices of an ancient tapestry, and give voices to its figures.  On\none side, a fair palace; on the other, the tents of the Princess of\nFrance, who has come on an embassy from her father to the King of\nNavarre; in the midst, a wide space of smooth grass.\n\nThe same personages are combined over and over again into a series of\ngallant scenes--the princess, the three masked ladies, the quaint,\npedantic king; one of those amiable kings men have never loved enough,\nwhose serious occupation with the things of the mind seems, by contrast\nwith the more usual forms of kingship, like frivolity or play.  Some of\nthe figures are grotesque merely, and all the male ones at least, a\nlittle fantastic.  Certain objects reappearing from scene to\nscene--love-letters crammed with verses to the margin, and lovers'\ntoys--hint obscurely at some story of intrigue.  Between these groups,\non a smaller scale, come the slighter and more homely episodes, with\nSir Nathaniel the curate, the country-maid Jaquenetta, Moth or Mote the\nelfin-page, with Hiems and Ver, who recite \"the dialogue that the two\nlearned men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo.\"  The\nladies are [164] lodged in tents, because the king, like the princess\nof the modern poet's fancy, has taken a vow\n\n  to make his court a little Academe,\n\nand for three years' space no woman may come within a mile of it; and\nthe play shows how this artificial attempt was broken through.  For the\nking and his three fellow-scholars are of course soon forsworn, and\nturn to writing sonnets, each to his chosen lady.  These\nfellow-scholars of the king--\"quaint votaries of science\" at first,\nafterwards \"affection's men-at-arms\"--three youthful knights, gallant,\namorous, chivalrous, but also a little affected, sporting always a\ncurious foppery of language, are, throughout, the leading figures in\nthe foreground; one of them, in particular, being more carefully\ndepicted than the others, and in himself very noticeable--a portrait\nwith somewhat puzzling manner and expression, which at once catches the\neye irresistibly and keeps it fixed.\n\nPlay is often that about which people are most serious; and the\nhumourist may observe how, under all love of playthings, there is\nalmost always hidden an appreciation of something really engaging and\ndelightful.  This is true always of the toys of children: it is often\ntrue of the playthings of grown-up people, their vanities, their\nfopperies even, their lighter loves; the cynic would add their pursuit\nof fame.  Certainly, this is true without exception [165] of the\nplaythings of a past age, which to those who succeed it are always full\nof a pensive interest--old manners, old dresses, old houses. For what\nis called fashion in these matters occupies, in each age, much of the\ncare of many of the most discerning people, furnishing them with a kind\nof mirror of their real inward refinements, and their capacity for\nselection.  Such modes or fashions are, at their best, an example of\nthe artistic predominance of form over matter; of the manner of the\ndoing of it over the thing done; and have a beauty of their own.  It is\nso with that old euphuism of the Elizabethan age--that pride of dainty\nlanguage and curious expression, which it is very easy to ridicule,\nwhich often made itself ridiculous, but which had below it a real sense\nof fitness and nicety; and which, as we see in this very play, and\nstill more clearly in the Sonnets, had some fascination for the young\nShakespeare himself.  It is this foppery of delicate language, this\nfashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupied\nin Love's Labours Lost.  He shows us the manner in all its stages;\npassing from the grotesque and vulgar pedantry of Holofernes, through\nthe extravagant but polished caricature of Armado, to become the\npeculiar characteristic of a real though still quaint poetry in Biron\nhimself, who is still chargeable even at his best with just a little\naffectation.  As Shakespeare laughs broadly at it in Holofernes or\nArmado, so he [166] is the analyst of its curious charm in Biron; and\nthis analysis involves a delicate raillery by Shakespeare himself at\nhis own chosen manner.\n\nThis \"foppery\" of Shakespeare's day had, then, its really delightful\nside, a quality in no sense \"affected,\" by which it satisfies a real\ninstinct in our minds--the fancy so many of us have for an exquisite\nand curious skill in the use of words.  Biron is the perfect flower of\nthis manner:\n\n  A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight:\n\n--as he describes Armado, in terms which are really applicable to\nhimself.  In him this manner blends with a true gallantry of nature,\nand an affectionate complaisance and grace.  He has at times some of\nits extravagance or caricature also, but the shades of expression by\nwhich he passes from this to the \"golden cadence\" of Shakespeare's own\nmost characteristic verse, are so fine, that it is sometimes difficult\nto trace them.  What is a vulgarity in Holofernes, and a caricature in\nArmado, refines itself with him into the expression of a nature truly\nand inwardly bent upon a form of delicate perfection, and is\naccompanied by a real insight into the laws which determine what is\nexquisite in language, and their root in the nature of things.  He can\nappreciate quite the opposite style--\n\n  In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes;\n\nhe knows the first law of pathos, that\n\n  Honest plain words best suit the ear of grief.\n\n[167] He delights in his own rapidity of intuition; and, in harmony\nwith the half-sensuous philosophy of the Sonnets, exalts, a little\nscornfully, in many memorable expressions, the judgment of the senses,\nabove all slower, more toilsome means of knowledge, scorning some who\nfail to see things only because they are so clear:\n\n  So here you find where light in darkness lies,\n  Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes:--\n\nas with some German commentators on Shakespeare.  Appealing always to\nactual sensation from men's affected theories, he might seem to despise\nlearning; as, indeed, he has taken up his deep studies partly in sport,\nand demands always the profit of learning in renewed enjoyment.  Yet he\nsurprises us from time to time by intuitions which could come only from\na deep experience and power of observation; and men listen to him, old\nand young, in spite of themselves.  He is quickly impressible to the\nslightest clouding of the spirits in social intercourse, and has his\nmoments of extreme seriousness: his trial-task may well be, as Rosaline\nputs it--\n\n  To enforce the pained impotent to smile.\n\nBut still, through all, he is true to his chosen manner: that gloss of\ndainty language is a second nature with him: even at his best he is not\nwithout a certain artifice: the trick of playing on words never deserts\nhim; and [168] Shakespeare, in whose own genius there is an element of\nthis very quality, shows us in this graceful, and, as it seems,\nstudied, portrait, his enjoyment of it.\n\nAs happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most part\nhidden behind the persons of his creation.  Yet there are certain of\nhis characters in which we feel that there is something of\nself-portraiture.  And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle\nand ingenious creations that we feel this--in Hamlet and King Lear--as\nin those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while\nfar from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar\nhappiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which\npossess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no man\nbut would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of art\nwhich, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wrought\nof the choicest material.  Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, belongs to\nthis group of Shakespeare's characters--versatile, mercurial people,\nsuch as make good actors, and in whom the\n\n  nimble spirits of the arteries,\n\nthe finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate. A\ncareful delineation of minor, yet expressive traits seems to mark them\nout as the characters of his predilection; [169] and it is hard not to\nidentify him with these more than with others.  Biron, in Love's\nLabours Lost, is perhaps the most striking member of this group.  In\nthis character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect\nlevel of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see,\nperhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become able\nto stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry.\n\n1878.\n\nNOTES\n\n162. *Act V. Scene II.  Return.\n\n\n\n\"MEASURE FOR MEASURE\"\n\n[170] IN Measure for Measure, as in some other of his plays,\nShakespeare has remodelled an earlier and somewhat rough composition to\n\"finer issues,\" suffering much to remain as it had come from the less\nskilful hand, and not raising the whole of his work to an equal degree\nof intensity.  Hence perhaps some of that depth and weightiness which\nmake this play so impressive, as with the true seal of experience, like\na fragment of life itself, rough and disjointed indeed, but forced to\nyield in places its profounder meaning.  In Measure for Measure, in\ncontrast with the flawless execution of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare\nhas spent his art in just enough modification of the scheme of the\nolder play to make it exponent of this purpose, adapting its terrible\nessential incidents, so that Coleridge found it the only painful work\namong Shakespeare's dramas, and leaving for the reader of to-day more\nthan the usual number of difficult expressions; but infusing a lavish\ncolour and a profound significance into it, so that under his [171]\ntouch certain select portions of it rise far above the level of all but\nhis own best poetry, and working out of it a morality so characteristic\nthat the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral\njudgments.  It remains a comedy, as indeed is congruous with the bland,\nhalf-humorous equity which informs the whole composition, sinking from\nthe heights of sorrow and terror into the rough scheme of the earlier\npiece; yet it is hardly less full of what is really tragic in man's\nexistence than if Claudio had indeed \"stooped to death.\"  Even the\nhumorous concluding scenes have traits of special grace, retaining in\nless emphatic passages a stray lire or word of power, as it seems, so\nthat we watch to the end for the traces where the nobler hand has\nglanced along, leaving its vestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully,\nin the rising of the style.\n\nThe interest of Measure for Measure, therefore, is partly that of an\nold story told over again.  We measure with curiosity that variety of\nresources which has enabled Shakespeare to refashion the original\nmaterial with a higher motive; adding to the intricacy of the piece,\nyet so modifying its structure as to give the whole almost the unity of\na single scene; lending, by the light of a philosophy which dwells much\non what is complex and subtle in our nature, a true human propriety to\nits strange and unexpected turns of feeling and character, to incidents\nso [172] difficult as the fall of Angelo, and the subsequent\nreconciliation of Isabella, so that she pleads successfully for his\nlife.  It was from Whetstone, a contemporary English writer, that\nShakespeare derived the outline of Cinthio's \"rare history\" of Promos\nand Cassandra, one of that numerous class of Italian stories, like\nBoccaccio's Tancred of Salerno, in which the mere energy of southern\npassion has everything its own way, and which, though they may repel\nmany a northern reader by a certain crudity in their colouring, seem to\nhave been full of fascination for the Elizabethan age.  This story, as\nit appears in Whetstone's endless comedy, is almost as rough as the\nroughest episode of actual criminal life.  But the play seems never to\nhave been acted, and some time after its publication Whetstone himself\nturned the thing into a tale, included in his Heptameron of Civil\nDiscourses, where it still figures as a genuine piece, with touches of\nundesigned poetry, a quaint field-flower here and there of diction or\nsentiment, the whole strung up to an effective brevity, and with the\nfragrance of that admirable age of literature all about it.  Here,\nthen, there is something of the original Italian colour: in this\nnarrative Shakespeare may well have caught the first glimpse of a\ncomposition with nobler proportions; and some artless sketch from his\nown hand, perhaps, putting together his first impressions, insinuated\nitself between Whetstone's work and the play as we actually read it.\nOut [173] of these insignificant sources Shakespeare's play rises, full\nof solemn expression, and with a profoundly designed beauty, the new\nbody of a higher, though sometimes remote and difficult poetry,\nescaping from the imperfect relics of the old story, yet not wholly\ntransformed, and even as it stands but the preparation only, we might\nthink, of a still more imposing design.  For once we have in it a real\nexample of that sort of writing which is sometimes described as\nsuggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hints\nonly, brings into distinct shape the reader's own half-developed\nimaginings.  Often the quality is attributed to writing merely vague\nand unrealised, but in Measure for Measure, quite certainly,\nShakespeare has directed the attention of sympathetic readers along\ncertain channels of meditation beyond the immediate scope of his work.\n\nMeasure for Measure, therefore, by the quality of these higher designs,\nwoven by his strange magic on a texture of poorer quality, is hardly\nless indicative than Hamlet even, of Shakespeare's reason, of his power\nof moral interpretation.  It deals, not like Hamlet with the problems\nwhich beset one of exceptional temperament, but with mere human nature.\nIt brings before us a group of persons, attractive, full of desire,\nvessels of the genial, seed-bearing powers of nature, a gaudy existence\nflowering out over the old court and city of Vienna, a spectacle of the\nfulness and [174] pride of life which to some may seem to touch the\nverge of wantonness.  Behind this group of people, behind their various\naction, Shakespeare inspires in us the sense of a strong tyranny of\nnature and circumstance.  Then what shall there be on this side of\nit--on our side, the spectators' side, of this painted screen, with its\npuppets who are really glad or sorry all the time? what philosophy of\nlife, what sort of equity?\n\nStimulated to read more carefully by Shakespeare's own profounder\ntouches, the reader will note the vivid reality, the subtle interchange\nof light and shade, the strongly contrasted characters of this group of\npersons, passing across the stage so quickly.  The slightest of them is\nat least not ill-natured: the meanest of them can put forth a plea for\nexistence--Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live!--they are\nnever sure of themselves, even in the strong tower of a cold\nunimpressible nature: they are capable of many friendships and of a\ntrue dignity in danger, giving each other a sympathetic, if transitory,\nregret--one sorry that another \"should be foolishly lost at a game of\ntick-tack.\"  Words which seem to exhaust man's deepest sentiment\nconcerning death and life are put on the lips of a gilded, witless\nyouth; and the saintly Isabella feels fire creep along her, kindling\nher tongue to eloquence at the suggestion of shame.  In places the\nshadow deepens: death intrudes itself on the scene, as among other\n[175] things \"a great disguiser,\" blanching the features of youth and\nspoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with its\ndisgraceful associations.  As in Orcagna's fresco at Pisa, it comes\ncapriciously, giving many and long reprieves to Barnardine, who has\nbeen waiting for it nine years in prison, taking another thence by\nfever, another by mistake of judgment, embracing others in the midst of\ntheir music and song.  The little mirror of existence, which reflects\nto each for a moment the stage on which he plays, is broken at last by\na capricious accident; while all alike, in their yearning for untasted\nenjoyment, are really discounting their days, grasping so hastily and\naccepting so inexactly the precious pieces.  The Duke's quaint but\nexcellent moralising at the beginning of the third act does but\nexpress, like the chorus of a Greek play, the spirit of the passing\nincidents.  To him in Shakespeare's play, to a few here and there in\nthe actual world, this strange practical paradox of our life, so unwise\nin its eager haste, reveals itself in all its clearness.\n\nThe Duke disguised as a friar, with his curious moralising on life and\ndeath, and Isabella in her first mood of renunciation, a thing \"ensky'd\nand sainted,\" come with the quiet of the cloister as a relief to this\nlust and pride of life: like some grey monastic picture hung on the\nwall of a gaudy room, their presence cools the heated air of the piece.\nFor a moment we [176] are within the placid conventual walls, whither\nthey fancy at first that the Duke has come as a man crossed in love,\nwith Friar Thomas and Friar Peter, calling each other by their homely,\nEnglish names, or at the nunnery among the novices, with their little\nlimited privileges, where\n\n  If you speak you must not show your face,\n  Or if you show your face you must not speak.\n\nNot less precious for this relief in the general structure of the\npiece, than for its own peculiar graces is the episode of Mariana, a\ncreature wholly of Shakespeare's invention, told, by way of interlude,\nin subdued prose.  The moated grange, with its dejected mistress, its\nlong, listless, discontented days, where we hear only the voice of a\nboy broken off suddenly in the midst of one of the loveliest songs of\nShakespeare, or of Shakespeare's school,* is the pleasantest of many\nglimpses we get here of pleasant places--the field without the town,\nAngelo's garden-house, the consecrated fountain.  Indirectly it has\nsuggested two of the most perfect compositions among the poetry of our\nown generation.  Again it is a picture within a picture, but with\nfainter lines and a greyer atmosphere: we have here the same passions,\nthe same wrongs, the same continuance of affection, the same crying out\nupon death, as in the nearer and larger piece, though softened, and\nreduced to the mood of a more dreamy scene.\n\n[177] Of Angelo we may feel at first sight inclined to say only guarda\ne passa! or to ask whether he is indeed psychologically possible.  In\nthe old story, he figures as an embodiment of pure and unmodified evil,\nlike \"Hyliogabalus of Rome or Denis of Sicyll.\"  But the embodiment of\npure evil is no proper subject of art, and Shakespeare, in the spirit\nof a philosophy which dwells much on the complications of outward\ncircumstance with men's inclinations, turns into a subtle study in\ncasuistry this incident of the austere judge fallen suddenly into\nutmost corruption by a momentary contact with supreme purity.  But the\nmain interest in Measure for Measure is not, as in Promos and\nCassandra, in the relation of Isabella and Angelo, but rather in the\nrelation of Claudio and Isabella.\n\nGreek tragedy in some of its noblest products has taken for its theme\nthe love of a sister, a sentiment unimpassioned indeed, purifying by\nthe very spectacle of its passionlessness, but capable of a fierce and\nalmost animal strength if informed for a moment by pity and regret.  At\nfirst Isabella comes upon the scene as a tranquillising influence in\nit.  But Shakespeare, in the development of the action, brings quite\ndifferent and unexpected qualities out of her.  It is his\ncharacteristic poetry to expose this cold, chastened personality,\nrespected even by the worldly Lucio as \"something ensky'd and sainted,\nand almost an immortal spirit,\" to two [178] sharp, shameful trials,\nand wring out of her a fiery, revealing eloquence.  Thrown into the\nterrible dilemma of the piece, called upon to sacrifice that cloistral\nwhiteness to sisterly affection, become in a moment the ground of\nstrong, contending passions, she develops a new character and shows\nherself suddenly of kindred with those strangely conceived women, like\nWebster's Vittoria, who unite to a seductive sweetness something of a\ndangerous and tigerlike changefulness of feeling.  The swift,\nvindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this white spirit,\nand, stripped in a moment of all convention, she stands before us\nclear, detached, columnar, among the tender frailties of the piece.\nCassandra, the original of Isabella in Whetstone's tale, with the\npurpose of the Roman Lucretia in her mind, yields gracefully enough to\nthe conditions of her brother's safety; and to the lighter reader of\nShakespeare there may seem something harshly conceived, or\npsychologically impossible even, in the suddenness of the change\nwrought in her, as Claudio welcomes for a moment the chance of life\nthrough her compliance with Angelo's will, and he may have a sense here\nof flagging skill, as in words less finely handled than in the\npreceding scene.  The play, though still not without traces of nobler\nhandiwork, sinks down, as we know, at last into almost homely comedy,\nand it might be supposed that just here the grander manner [179]\ndeserted it.  But the skill with which Isabella plays upon Claudio's\nwell-recognised sense of honour, and endeavours by means of that to\ninsure him beforehand from the acceptance of life on baser terms,\nindicates no coming laxity of hand just in this place.  It was rather\nthat there rose in Shakespeare's conception, as there may for the\nreader, as there certainly would in any good acting of the part,\nsomething of that terror, the seeking for which is one of the notes of\nromanticism in Shakespeare and his circle.  The stream of ardent\nnatural affection, poured as sudden hatred  upon the youth condemned to\ndie, adds an additional note of expression to the horror of the prison\nwhere so much of the scene takes place.  It is not here only that\nShakespeare has conceived of such extreme anger and pity as putting a\nsort of genius into simple women, so that their \"lips drop eloquence,\"\nand their intuitions interpret that which is often too hard or fine for\nmanlier reason; and it is Isabella with her grand imaginative diction,\nand that poetry laid upon the \"prone and speechless dialect\" there is\nin mere youth itself, who gives utterance to the equity, the finer\njudgments of the piece on men and things.\n\nFrom behind this group with its subtle lights and shades, its poetry,\nits impressive contrasts, Shakespeare, as I said, conveys to us a\nstrong sense of the tyranny of nature and [180] circumstance over human\naction.  The most powerful expressions of this side of experience might\nbe found here.  The bloodless, impassible temperament does but wait for\nits opportunity, for the almost accidental coherence of time with\nplace, and place with wishing, to annul its long and patient\ndiscipline, and become in a moment the very opposite of that which\nunder ordinary conditions it seemed to be, even to itself.  The mere\nresolute self-assertion of the blood brings to others special\ntemptations, temptations which, as defects or over-growths, lie in the\nvery qualities which make them otherwise imposing or attractive; the\nvery advantage of men's gifts of intellect or sentiment being dependent\non a balance in their use so delicate that men hardly maintain it\nalways.  Something also must be conceded to influences merely physical,\nto the complexion of the heavens, the skyey influences, shifting as the\nstars shift; as something also to the mere caprice of men exercised\nover each other in the dispensations of social or political order, to\nthe chance which makes the life or death of Claudio dependent on\nAngelo's will.\n\nThe many veins of thought which render the poetry of this play so\nweighty and impressive unite in the image of Claudio, a flowerlike\nyoung man, whom, prompted by a few hints from Shakespeare, the\nimagination easily clothes with all the bravery of youth, as he crosses\nthe stage before us on his way to death, coming so [181] hastily to the\nend of his pilgrimage.  Set in the horrible blackness of the prison,\nwith its various forms of unsightly death, this flower seems the\nbraver.  Fallen by \"prompture of the blood,\" the victim of a suddenly\nrevived law against the common fault of youth like his, he finds his\nlife forfeited as if by the chance of a lottery.  With that instinctive\nclinging to life, which breaks through the subtlest casuistries of monk\nor sage apologising for an early death, he welcomes for a moment the\nchance of life through his sister's shame, though he revolts hardly\nless from the notion of perpetual imprisonment so repulsive to the\nbuoyant energy of youth. Familiarised, by the words alike of friends\nand the indifferent, to the thought of death, he becomes gentle and\nsubdued indeed, yet more perhaps through pride than real resignation,\nand would go down to darkness at last hard and unblinded.  Called upon\nsuddenly to encounter his fate, looking with keen and resolute profile\nstraight before him, he gives utterance to some of the central truths\nof human feeling, the sincere, concentrated expression of the recoiling\nflesh. Thoughts as profound and poetical as Hamlet's arise in him; and\nbut for the accidental arrest of sentence he would descend into the\ndust, a mere gilded, idle flower of youth indeed, but with what are\nperhaps the most eloquent of all Shakespeare's words upon his lips.\n\nAs Shakespeare in Measure for Measure has [182] refashioned, after a\nnobler pattern, materials already at hand, so that the relics of other\nmen's poetry are incorporated into his perfect work, so traces of the\nold \"morality,\" that early form of dramatic composition which had for\nits function the inculcating of some moral theme, survive in it also,\nand give it a peculiar ethical interest.  This ethical interest, though\nit can escape no attentive reader, yet, in accordance with that\nartistic law which demands the predominance of form everywhere over the\nmere matter or subject handled, is not to be wholly separated from the\nspecial circumstances, necessities, embarrassments, of these particular\ndramatic persons.  The old \"moralities\" exemplified most often some\nrough-and-ready lesson. Here the very intricacy and subtlety of the\nmoral world itself, the difficulty of seizing the true relations of so\ncomplex a material, the difficulty of just judgment, of judgment that\nshall not be unjust, are the lessons conveyed.  Even in Whetstone's old\nstory this peculiar vein of moralising comes to the surface: even\nthere, we notice the tendency to dwell on mixed motives, the contending\nissues of action, the presence of virtues and vices alike in unexpected\nplaces, on \"the hard choice of two evils,\" on the \"imprisoning\" of\nmen's \"real intents.\"  Measure for Measure is full of expressions drawn\nfrom a profound experience of these casuistries, and that ethical\ninterest becomes predominant in it: it is no longer Promos and [183]\nCassandra, but Measure for Measure, its new name expressly suggesting\nthe subject of poetical justice.  The action of the play, like the\naction of life itself for the keener observer, develops in us the\nconception of this poetical justice, and the yearning to realise it,\nthe true justice of which Angelo knows nothing, because it lies for the\nmost part beyond the limits of any acknowledged law. The idea of\njustice involves the idea of rights.  But at bottom rights are\nequivalent to that which really is, to facts; and the recognition of\nhis rights therefore, the justice he requires of our hands, or our\nthoughts, is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmost\nnature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really\nis in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a\nfiner knowledge through love.\n\n  'Tis very pregnant:\n  The jewel that we find we stoop and take it,\n  Because we see it; but what we do not see\n  We tread upon, and never think of it.\n\nIt is for this finer justice, a justice based on a more delicate\nappreciation of the true conditions of men and things, a true respect\nof persons in our estimate of actions, that the people in Measure for\nMeasure cry out as they pass before us; and as the poetry of this play\nis full of the peculiarities of Shakespeare's poetry, so in its ethics\nit is an epitome of Shakespeare's moral judgments.  They are the moral\njudgments of [184] an observer, of one who sits as a spectator, and\nknows how the threads in the design before him hold together under the\nsurface: they are the judgments of the humourist also, who follows with\na half-amused but always pitiful sympathy, the various ways of human\ndisposition, and sees less distance than ordinary men between what are\ncalled respectively great and little things.  It is not always that\npoetry can be the exponent of morality; but it is this aspect of morals\nwhich it represents most naturally, for this true justice is dependent\non just those finer appreciations which poetry cultivates in us the\npower of making, those peculiar valuations of action and its effect\nwhich poetry actually requires.\n\n1874.\n\nNOTES\n\n176.  *Fletcher, in the Bloody Brother, gives the rest of it. Return.\n\n\n\nSHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS\n\n[185]\n\n  A brittle glory shineth in this face:\n  As brittle as the glory is the face.\n\nTHE English plays of Shakespeare needed but the completion of one\nunimportant interval to possess the unity of a popular chronicle from\nRichard the Second to Henry the Eighth, and possess, as they actually\nstand, the unity of a common motive in the handling of the various\nevents and persons which they bring before us.  Certain of his historic\ndramas, not English, display Shakespeare's mastery in the development\nof the heroic nature amid heroic circumstances; and had he chosen, from\nEnglish history, to deal with Coeur-de-Lion or Edward the First, the\ninnate quality of his subject would doubtless have called into play\nsomething of that profound and sombre power which in Julius Caesar and\nMacbeth has sounded the depths of mighty character. True, on the whole,\nto fact, it is another side of kingship which he has made prominent in\nhis English histories.  The irony [186] of kingship--average human\nnature, flung with a wonderfully pathetic effect into the vortex of\ngreat events; tragedy of everyday quality heightened in degree only by\nthe conspicuous scene which does but make those who play their parts\nthere conspicuously unfortunate; the utterance of common humanity\nstraight from the heart, but refined like other common things for\nkingly uses by Shakespeare's unfailing eloquence: such, unconsciously\nfor the most part, though palpably enough to the careful reader, is the\nconception under which Shakespeare has arranged the lights and shadows\nof the story of the English kings, emphasising merely the light and\nshadow inherent in it, and keeping very close to the original\nauthorities, not simply in the general outline of these dramatic\nhistories but sometimes in their very expression.  Certainly the\nhistory itself, as he found it in Hall, Holinshed, and Stowe, those\nsomewhat picturesque old chroniclers who had themselves an eye for the\ndramatic \"effects\" of human life, has much of this sentiment already\nabout it.  What he did not find there was the natural prerogative--such\njustification, in kingly, that is to say, in exceptional, qualities, of\nthe exceptional position, as makes it practicable in the result.  It is\nno Henriade he writes, and no history of the English people, but the\nsad fortunes of some English kings as conspicuous examples of the\nordinary human condition.  As in a children's [187] story, all princes\nare in extremes.  Delightful in the sunshine above the wall into which\nchance lifts the flower for a season, they can but plead somewhat more\ntouchingly than others their everyday weakness in the storm. Such is\nthe motive that gives unity to these unequal and intermittent\ncontributions toward a slowly evolved dramatic chronicle, which it\nwould have taken many days to rehearse; a not distant story from real\nlife still well remembered in its general course, to which people might\nlisten now and again, as long as they cared, finding human nature at\nleast wherever their attention struck ground in it.\n\nHe begins with John, and allows indeed to the first of these English\nkings a kind of greatness, making the development of the play centre in\nthe counteraction of his natural gifts--that something of heroic force\nabout him--by a madness which takes the shape of reckless impiety,\nforced especially on men's attention by the terrible circumstances of\nhis end, in the delineation of which Shakespeare triumphs, setting,\nwith true poetic tact, this incident of the king's death, in all the\nhorror of a violent one, amid a scene delicately suggestive of what is\nperennially peaceful and genial in the outward world.  Like the sensual\nhumours of Falstaff in another play, the presence of the bastard\nFaulconbridge, with his physical energy and his unmistakable family\nlikeness--\"those limbs [188] which Sir Robert never holp to make\"*\ncontributes to an almost coarse assertion of the force of nature, of\nthe somewhat ironic preponderance of nature and circumstance over men's\nartificial arrangements, to, the recognition of a certain potent\nnatural aristocracy, which is far from being always identical with that\nmore formal, heraldic one.  And what is a coarse fact in the case of\nFaulconbridge becomes a motive of pathetic appeal in the wan and\nbabyish Arthur.  The magic with which nature models tiny and delicate\nchildren to the likeness of their rough fathers is nowhere more justly\nexpressed than in the words of King Philip.--\n\n  Look here upon thy brother Geoffrey's face\n  These eyes, these brows were moulded out of his:\n  This little abstract doth contain that large\n  Which died in Geoffrey; and the hand of time\n  Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.\n\nIt was perhaps something of a boyish memory of the shocking end of his\nfather that had distorted the piety of Henry the Third into\nsuperstitious terror.  A frightened soul, himself touched with the\ncontrary sort of religious madness, doting on all that was alien from\nhis father's huge ferocity, on the genialities, the soft gilding, of\nlife, on the genuine interests of art and poetry, to be credited more\nthan any other person with the deep religious expression of [189]\nWestminster Abbey, Henry the Third, picturesque though useless, but\ncertainly touching, might have furnished Shakespeare, had he filled up\nthis interval in his series, with precisely the kind of effect he tends\ntowards in his English plays.  But he found it completer still in the\nperson and story of Richard the Second, a figure--\"that sweet lovely\nrose\"--which haunts Shakespeare's mind, as it seems long to have\nhaunted the minds of the English people, as the most touching of all\nexamples of the irony of kingship.\n\nHenry the Fourth--to look for a moment beyond our immediate subject, in\npursuit of Shakespeare's thought--is presented, of course, in general\noutline, as an impersonation of \"surviving force:\" he has a certain\namount of kingcraft also, a real fitness for great opportunity.  But\nstill true to his leading motive, Shakespeare, in King Henry the\nFourth, has left the high-water mark of his poetry in the soliloquy\nwhich represents royalty longing vainly for the toiler's sleep; while\nthe popularity, the showy heroism, of Henry the Fifth, is used to give\nemphatic point to the old earthy commonplace about \"wild oats.\"  The\nwealth of homely humour in these plays, the fun coming straight home to\nall the world, of Fluellen especially in his unconscious interview with\nthe king, the boisterous earthiness of Falstaff and his companions,\ncontribute to the same effect.  The keynote of [190] Shakespeare's\ntreatment is indeed expressed by Henry the Fifth himself, the greatest\nof Shakespeare's kings.--\"Though I speak it to you,\" he says incognito,\nunder cover of night, to a common soldier on the field, \"I think the\nking is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me:\nall his senses have but human conditions; and though his affections be\nhigher mounted than ours yet when they stoop they stoop with like\nwing.\"  And, in truth, the really kingly speeches which Shakespeare\nassigns to him, as to other kings weak enough in all but speech, are\nbut a kind of flowers, worn for, and effective only as personal\nembellishment.  They combine to one result with the merely outward and\nceremonial ornaments of royalty, its pageantries, flaunting so naively,\nso credulously, in Shakespeare, as in that old medieval time.  And\nthen, the force of Hotspur is but transient youth, the common heat of\nyouth, in him. The character of Henry the Sixth again, roi faineant,\nwith La Pucelle* for his counterfoil, lay in the direct course of\nShakespeare's design: he has done much to fix the sentiment of the\n\"holy Henry.\"  Richard the Third, touched, like John, with an effect of\nreal heroism, is spoiled like him by something of criminal madness, and\nreaches his highest level of tragic expression [191] when circumstances\nreduce him to terms of mere human nature.--\n\n  A horse!  A horse!  My kingdom for a horse!\n\nThe Princes in the Tower recall to mind the lot of young Arthur:--\n\n  I'll go with thee,\n  And find the inheritance of this poor child,\n  His little kingdom of a forced grave.\n\nAnd when Shakespeare comes to Henry the Eighth, it is not the\nsuperficial though very English splendour of the king himself, but the\nreally potent and ascendant nature of the butcher's son on the one\nhand, and Katharine's subdued reproduction of the sad fortunes of\nRichard the Second on the other, that define his central interest.*\n\nWith a prescience of the Wars of the Roses, of which his errors were\nthe original cause, it is Richard who best exposes Shakespeare's own\nconstant sentiment concerning war, and especially that sort of civil\nwar which was then recent in English memories.  The soul of\nShakespeare, certainly, was not wanting in a sense of the magnanimity\nof warriors.  The grandiose aspects of war, its magnificent\napparelling, he records [192] monumentally enough--the \"dressing of the\nlists,\" the lion's heart, its unfaltering haste thither in all the\nfreshness of youth and morning.--\n\n  Not sick although I have to do with death--\n  The sun doth gild our armour: Up, my Lords!--\n  I saw young Harry with his beaver on,\n  His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,\n  Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury.\n\nOnly, with Shakespeare, the afterthought is immediate:--\n\n  They come like sacrifices in their trim.\n\n--Will it never be to-day?  I will trot to-morrow a mile, and my way\nshall be paved with English faces.\n\nThis sentiment Richard reiterates very plaintively, in association with\nthe delicate sweetness of the English fields, still sweet and fresh,\nlike London and her other fair towns in that England of Chaucer, for\nwhose soil the exiled Bolingbroke is made to long so dangerously, while\nRichard on his return from Ireland salutes it--\n\n  That pale, that white-fac'd shore,--\n  As a long-parted mother with her child.--\n  So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth!\n  And do thee favour with my royal hands.--\n\nThen (of Bolingbroke)\n\n  Ere the crown he looks for live in peace,\n  Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons\n  Shall ill become the flower of England's face;\n  Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace\n  To scarlet indignation, and bedew\n  My pastures' grass with faithful English blood.--\n\n[193]\n\n  Why have they dared to march?--\n\nasks York,\n\n  So many miles upon her peaceful bosom,\n  Frighting her pale-fac'd visages with war?--\n\nwaking, according to Richard,\n\n  Our peace, which in our country's cradle,\n  Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep:--\n\nbedrenching \"with crimson tempest\"\n\n  The fresh green lap of fair king Richard's land:--\n\nfrighting \"fair peace\" from \"our quiet confines,\" laying\n\n  The summer's dust with showers of blood,\n  Rained from the wounds of slaughter'd Englishmen:\n\nbruising\n\n  Her flowerets with the armed hoofs\n  Of hostile paces.\n\nPerhaps it is not too fanciful to note in this play a peculiar recoil\nfrom the mere instruments of warfare, the contact of the \"rude ribs,\"\nthe \"flint bosom,\" of Barkloughly Castle or Pomfret or\n\n  Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower:\n\nthe\n\n  Boisterous untun'd drums\n  With harsh-resounding trumpets' dreadful bray\n  And grating shock of wrathful iron arms.\n\nIt is as if the lax, soft beauty of the king took effect, at least by\ncontrast, on everything beside.  One gracious prerogative, certainly,\nShakespeare's [194]  English kings possess: they are a very eloquent\ncompany, and Richard is the most sweet-tongued of them all.  In no\nother play perhaps is there such a flush of those gay, fresh,\nvariegated flowers of speech--colour and figure, not lightly attached\nto, but fused into, the very phrase itself--which Shakespeare cannot\nhelp dispensing to his characters, as in this \"play of the Deposing of\nKing Richard the Second,\" an exquisite poet if he is nothing else, from\nfirst to last, in light and gloom alike, able to see all things\npoetically, to give a poetic turn to his conduct of them, and\nrefreshing with his golden language the tritest aspects of that ironic\ncontrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual necessities\nof his destiny.  What a garden of words!  With him, blank verse,\ninfinitely graceful, deliberate, musical in inflexion, becomes indeed a\ntrue \"verse royal,\" that rhyming lapse, which to the Shakespearian ear,\nat least in youth, came as the last touch of refinement on it, being\nhere doubly appropriate.  His eloquence blends with that fatal beauty,\nof which he was so frankly aware, so amiable to his friends, to his\nwife, of the effects of which on the people his enemies were so much\nafraid, on which Shakespeare himself dwells so attentively as the\n\"royal blood\" comes and goes in the face with his rapid changes of\ntemper.  As happens with sensitive natures, it attunes him to a\ncongruous suavity of manners, by which anger itself became flattering:\n[195] it blends with his merely youthful hopefulness and high spirits,\nhis sympathetic love for gay people, things, apparel--\"his cote of gold\nand stone, valued at thirty thousand marks,\" the novel Italian fashions\nhe preferred, as also with those real amiabilities that made people\nforget the darker touches of his character, but never tire of the\npathetic rehearsal of his fall, the meekness of which would have seemed\nmerely abject in a less graceful performer.\n\nYet it is only fair to say that in the painstaking \"revival\" of King\nRichard the Second, by the late Charles Kean, those who were very young\nthirty years ago were afforded much more than Shakespeare's play could\never have been before--the very person of the king based on the stately\nold portrait in Westminster Abbey, \"the earliest extant contemporary\nlikeness of any English sovereign,\" the grace, the winning pathos, the\nsympathetic voice of the player, the tasteful archaeology confronting\nvulgar modern London with a scenic reproduction, for once really\nagreeable, of the London of Chaucer. In the hands of Kean the play\nbecame like an exquisite performance on the violin.\n\nThe long agony of one so gaily painted by nature's self, from his\n\"tragic abdication\" till the hour in which he\n\n  Sluiced out his innocent soul thro' streams of blood,\n\nwas for playwrights a subject ready to hand, and [196] became early the\ntheme of a popular drama, of which some have fancied surviving\nfavourite fragments in the rhymed parts of Shakespeare's work.\n\n  The king Richard of Yngland\n  Was in his flowris then regnand:\n  But his flowris efter sone\n  Fadyt, and ware all undone:--\n\nsays the old chronicle.  Strangely enough, Shakespeare supposes him an\nover-confident believer in that divine right of kings, of which people\nin Shakespeare's time were coming to hear so much; a general right,\nsealed to him (so Richard is made to think) as an ineradicable personal\ngift by the touch--stream rather, over head and breast and\nshoulders--of the \"holy oil\" of his consecration at Westminster; not,\nhowever, through some oversight, the genuine balm used at the\ncoronation of his successor, given, according to legend, by the Blessed\nVirgin to Saint Thomas of Canterbury.  Richard himself found that, it\nwas said, among other forgotten treasures, at the crisis of his\nchanging fortunes, and vainly sought reconsecration\ntherewith--understood, wistfully, that it was reserved for his happier\nrival. And yet his coronation, by the pageantry, the amplitude, the\nlearned care, of its order, so lengthy that the king, then only eleven\nyears of age, and fasting, as a communicant at the ceremony, was\ncarried away in a faint, fixed the type under which it has ever [197]\nsince continued.  And nowhere is there so emphatic a reiteration as in\nRichard the Second of the sentiment which those singular rites were\ncalculated to produce.\n\n  Not all the water in the rough rude sea\n  Can wash the balm from an anointed king,--\n\nas supplementing another, almost supernatural, right.--\"Edward's seven\nsons,\" of whom Richard's father was one,\n\n  Were as seven phials of his sacred blood.\n\nBut this, too, in the hands of Shakespeare, becomes for him, like any\nother of those fantastic, ineffectual, easily discredited, personal\ngraces, as capricious in its operation on men's wills as merely\nphysical beauty, kindling himself to eloquence indeed, but only giving\ndouble pathos to insults which \"barbarism itself\" might have\npitied--the dust in his face, as he returns, through the streets of\nLondon, a prisoner in the train of his victorious enemy.\n\n  How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face!\n\nhe cries, in that most poetic invention of the mirror scene, which does\nbut reinforce again that physical charm which all confessed. The sense\nof \"divine right\" in kings is found to act not so much as a secret of\npower over others, as of infatuation to themselves.  And of all those\npersonal gifts the one which alone never altogether fails him is just\nthat royal utterance, his [198] appreciation of the poetry of his own\nhapless lot, an eloquent self-pity, infecting others in spite of\nthemselves, till they too become irresistibly eloquent about him.\n\nIn the Roman Pontifical, of which the order of Coronation is really a\npart, there is no form for the inverse process, no rite of\n\"degradation,\" such as that by which an offending priest or bishop may\nbe deprived, if not of the essential quality of \"orders,\" yet, one by\none, of its outward dignities.  It is as if Shakespeare had had in mind\nsome such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical or military\nones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the last touch of\nunkindness to the execution of its sentences, in the scene where\nRichard \"deposes\" himself, as in some long, agonising ceremony,\nreflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement of\nintelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicity of\npoetic invention, which puts these pages into a very select class, with\nthe finest \"vermeil and ivory\" work of Chatterton or Keats.\n\n  Fetch hither Richard that in common view\n  He may surrender!--\n\nAnd Richard more than concurs: he throws himself into the part,\nrealises a type, falls gracefully as on the world's stage.--Why is he\nsent for?\n\n  To do that office of thine own good will\n  Which tired majesty did make thee offer.--\n\n  Now mark me! how I will undo myself.\n\n[199] \"Hath Bolingbroke deposed thine intellect?\" the Queen asks him,\non his way to the Tower:--\n\n  Hath Bolingbroke\n  Deposed thine intellect? hath he been in thy heart?\n\nAnd in truth, but for that adventitious poetic gold, it would be only\n\"plume-plucked Richard.\"--\n\n  I find myself a traitor with the rest,\n  For I have given here my soul's consent\n  To undeck the pompous body of a king.\n\nHe is duly reminded, indeed, how\n\n  That which in mean men we entitle patience\n  Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.\n\nYet at least within the poetic bounds of Shakespeare's play, through\nShakespeare's bountiful gifts, his desire seems fulfilled.--\n\n  O! that I were as great\n  As is my grief.\n\nAnd his grief becomes nothing less than a central expression of all\nthat in the revolutions of Fortune's wheel goes down in the world.\n\nNo!  Shakespeare's kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men:\nrather, little or quite ordinary humanity, thrust upon greatness, with\nthose pathetic results, the natural self-pity of the weak heightened in\nthem into irresistible appeal to others as the net result of their\nroyal prerogative.  One after another, they seem to lie composed in\nShakespeare's embalming pages, with just that touch of nature about\nthem, [200] making the whole world akin, which has infused into their\ntombs at Westminster a rare poetic grace.  It is that irony of\nkingship, the sense that it is in its happiness child's play, in its\nsorrows, after all, but children's grief, which gives its finer accent\nto all the changeful feeling of these wonderful speeches:--the great\nmeekness of the graceful, wild creature, tamed at last.--\n\n  Give Richard leave to live till Richard die!\n\nhis somewhat abject fear of death, turning to acquiescence at moments\nof extreme weariness:--\n\n  My large kingdom for a little grave!\n  A little little grave, an obscure grave!--\n\nhis religious appeal in the last reserve, with its bold reference to\nthe judgment of Pilate, as he thinks once more of his \"anointing.\"\n\nAnd as happens with children he attains contentment finally in the\nmerely passive recognition of superior strength, in the naturalness of\nthe result of the great battle as a matter of course, and experiences\nsomething of the royal prerogative of poetry to obscure, or at least to\nattune and soften men's griefs.  As in some sweet anthem of Handel, the\nsufferer, who put finger to the organ under the utmost pressure of\nmental conflict, extracts a kind of peace at last from the mere skill\nwith which he sets his distress to music.--\n\n  Beshrew thee, Cousin, that didst lead me forth\n  Of that sweet way I was in to despair!\n\n[201] \"With Cain go wander through the shades of night!\" cries the new\nking to the gaoler Exton, dissimulating his share in the murder he is\nthought to have suggested; and in truth there is something of the\nmurdered Abel about Shakespeare's Richard.  The fact seems to be that\nhe died of \"waste and a broken heart:\" it was by way of proof that his\nend had been a natural one that, stifling a real fear of the face, the\nface of Richard, on men's minds, with the added pleading now of all\ndead faces, Henry exposed the corpse to general view; and Shakespeare,\nin bringing it on the stage, in the last scene of his play, does but\nfollow out the motive with which he has emphasised Richard's physical\nbeauty all through it--that \"most beauteous inn,\" as the Queen says\nquaintly, meeting him on the way to death--residence, then soon to be\ndeserted, of that wayward, frenzied, but withal so affectionate soul.\nThough the body did not go to Westminster immediately, his tomb,\n\n  That small model of the barren earth\n  Which serves as paste and cover to our bones,*\n\nthe effigy clasping the hand of his youthful consort, was already\nprepared there, with \"rich [202] gilding and ornaments,\" monument of\npoetic regret, for Queen Anne of Bohemia, not of course the \"Queen\" of\nShakespeare, who however seems to have transferred to this second wife\nsomething of Richard's wildly proclaimed affection for the first.  In\nthis way, through the connecting link of that sacred spot, our thoughts\nonce more associate Richard's two fallacious prerogatives, his personal\nbeauty and his \"anointing.\"\n\nAccording to Johnson, Richard the Second is one of those plays which\nShakespeare has \"apparently revised;\" and how doubly delightful\nShakespeare is where he seems to have revised!  \"Would that he had\nblotted a thousand\"--a thousand hasty phrases, we may venture once more\nto say with his earlier critic, now that the tiresome German\nsuperstition has passed away which challenged us to a dogmatic faith in\nthe plenary verbal inspiration of every one of Shakespeare's clowns.\nLike some melodiously contending anthem of Handle's, I said, of\nRichard's meek \"undoing\" of himself in the mirror-scene; and, in fact,\nthe play of Richard the Second does, like a musical composition,\npossess a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple continuity,\nan evenness in execution, which are rare in the great dramatist.  With\nRomeo and Juliet, that perfect symphony (symphony of three independent\npoetic forms set in a grander one* which it is the merit of German\n[203] criticism to have detected) it belongs to a small group of plays,\nwhere, by happy birth and consistent evolution, dramatic form\napproaches to something like the unity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, a\nsong, a single strain of music. Which sort of poetry we are to account\nthe highest, is perhaps a barren question.  Yet if, in art generally,\nunity of impression is a note of what is perfect, then lyric poetry,\nwhich in spite of complex structure often preserves the unity of a\nsingle passionate ejaculation, would rank higher than dramatic poetry,\nwhere, especially to the reader, as distinguished from the spectator\nassisting at a theatrical performance, there must always be a sense of\nthe effort necessary to keep the various parts from flying asunder, a\nsense of imperfect continuity, such as the older criticism vainly\nsought to obviate by the rule of the dramatic \"unities.\"  It follows\nthat a play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as it\napproaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad were\nstill lying at the root of it, all the various expression of the\nconflict of character and circumstance falling at last into the compass\nof a single melody, or musical theme.  As, historically, the earliest\nclassic drama arose out of the chorus, from which this or that person,\nthis or that episode, detached itself, so, into the unity of a choric\nsong the perfect drama ever tends to return, its intellectual scope\ndeepened, complicated, enlarged, but still with an unmistakable [204]\nsingleness, or identity, in its impression on the mind.  Just there, in\nthat vivid single impression left on the mind when all is over, not in\nany mechanical limitation of time and place, is the secret of the\n\"unities\"--the true imaginative unity--of the drama.\n\n1889.\n\nNOTES\n\n188. *Elinor.  Do you not read some tokens of my son (Coeur-de-Lion)\n     In the large composition of this man?\n\n190. *Perhaps the one person of genius in these English plays.\n\n  The spirit of deep prophecy she hath,\n  Exceeding the nine Sibyls of old Rome:\n  What's past and what's to come she can descry.\n\n191. *Proposing in this paper to trace the leading sentiment in\nShakespeare's English Plays as a sort of popular dramatic chronicle, I\nhave left untouched the question how much (or, in the case of Henry the\nSixth and Henry the Eighth, how little) of them may be really his: how\nfar inferior hands have contributed to a result, true on the whole to\nthe greater, that is to say, the Shakespearian elements in them.\n\n201. *Perhaps a double entendre:--of any ordinary grave, as comprising,\nin effect, the whole small earth now left to its occupant or, of such a\ntomb as Richard's in particular, with its actual model, or effigy, of\nthe clay of him.  Both senses are so characteristic that it would be a\npity to lose either.\n\n202. *The Sonnet: the Aubade: the Epithalamium.\n\n\n\nDANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI\n\n[205] IT was characteristic of a poet who had ever something about him\nof mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with a name\nit may seem now established in English literature, to a special and\nlimited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind of exquisite\nfame before they were in the full sense published.  The Blessed\nDamozel, although actually printed twice before the year 1870, was\neagerly circulated in manuscript; and the volume which it now opens\ncame at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the poet, whose\npictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind of\ninterest.  For those poems were the work of a painter, understood to\nbelong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school then rising\ninto note; and the reader of to-day may observe already, in The Blessed\nDamozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chief\ncharacteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, in\nproportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics\nwhich are most markedly personal and his own. Common [206] to that\nschool and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was the\nquality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of that\nearliest poem--a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use\nof the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance of\na poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry\nwas called upon to be.  At a time when poetic originality in England\nmight seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one new poet\nmore, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent,\nunmistakably novel, yet felt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted\nwith a view to forcing attention--an accent which might rather count as\nthe very seal of reality on one man's own proper speech; as that speech\nitself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he\nreally felt and saw.  Here was one, who had a matter to present to his\nreaders, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so\nreal and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression\nin his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within.\nThat he had this gift of transparency in language--the control of a\nstyle which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental\nmotion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the\noutline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a\nvolume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but\ndifficult [207] \"early Italian poets:\" such transparency being indeed\nthe secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong\nto one man and not to another.  His own meaning was always personal and\neven recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes\ncomplex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see,\ndeliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of\nthat peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew\nit.\n\nOne of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of\nsensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was\nstrange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary.  The gold bar\nof heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are\nbut examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the\npictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has shown\na similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there,\ntoo, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision.  Such definition of\noutline is indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles the\ngreat Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by family\ncircumstances, he was ever a lover--a \"servant and singer,\" faithful as\nDante, \"of Florence and of Beatrice\"--with some close inward\nconformities of genius also, independent of any mere circumstances of\neducation.  It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely\nthough agreeably to the practice of his time, [208] that poetry\nrejoices in abstractions.  For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question\non his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and\npresenting things is particularisation. \"Tell me now,\" he writes, for\nVillon's\n\n  Dictes-moy ou, n'en quel pays,\n  Est Flora, la belle Romaine--\n\n  Tell me now, in what hidden way is\n  Lady Flora the lovely Roman:\n\n--\"way,\" in which one might actually chance to meet her; the\nunmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on\nthe definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the\nsearch after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else would\nhave written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent\nto place or region.\n\nAnd this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of his\nconformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of his\npersonifications--his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him,\nwith the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from\nhim.  Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit of\nLove, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole \"populace\" of\nspecial hours and places, \"the hour\" even \"which might have been, yet\nmight not be,\" are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate\nvoices.\n\n[209]\n\n  Stands it not by the door--\n  Love's Hour--till she and I shall meet;\n  With bodiless form and unapparent feet\n  That cast no shadow yet before,\n  Though round its head the dawn begins to pour\n  The breath that makes day sweet?--\n\n  Nay, why\n  Name the dead hours?  I mind them well:\n  Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell\n  With desolate eyes to know them by.\n\nPoetry as a mania--one of Plato's two higher forms of \"divine\"\nmania--has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the\n\"defect of its quality,\" into which it may lapse in its moment of\nweakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic\nanthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in\nhis work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of\nabstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the\nscholastic realism of the Middle Age.\n\nIn Love's Nocturn and The Stream's Secret, congruously perhaps with a\ncertain feverishness of soul in the moods they present, there is at\ntimes a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism--\n\n  Pity and love shall burn\n  In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands;\n  And from the living spirit of love that stands\n  Between her lips to soothe and yearn,\n  Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn\n  And loose my spirit's bands.\n\n[210] But even if we concede this; even if we allow, in the very plan\nof those two compositions, something of the literary conceit--what\nexquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, as\nthey stand!  In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty of\nwater, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, how\nsubtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of sleep\nand dreams!  In both of them, with much the same attitude and tone,\nLove--sick and doubtful Love--would fain inquire of what lies below the\nsurface of sleep, and below the water; stream or dream being forced to\nspeak by Love's powerful \"control\"; and the poet would have it foretell\nthe fortune, issue, and event of his wasting passion.  Such artifices,\nindeed, were not unknown in the old Provencal poetry of which Dante had\nlearned something.  Only, in Rossetti at least, they are redeemed by a\nserious purpose, by that sincerity of his, which allies itself readily\nto a serious beauty, a sort of grandeur of literary workmanship, to a\ngreat style.  One seems to hear there a really new kind of poetic\nutterance, with effects which have nothing else like them; as there is\nnothing else, for instance, like the narrative of Jacob's Dream in\nGenesis, or Blake's design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, or\nAddison's Nineteenth Psalm.\n\nWith him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common\nthings--dawn, [211] noon, night--are full of human or personal\nexpression, full of sentiment.  The lovely little sceneries scattered\nup and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad\nopen-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the\npicturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time--the\n\"hollow brimmed with mist,\" or the \"ruined weir,\" as he sees it from\none of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his \"house of\nlife\" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic beryl)\nattest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial or\ndescriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which is\ncertainly also one half of the charm, in that other, more remote and\nmystic, use of it.  For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature,\nafter all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does but\nincorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion.  Every one\nunderstands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what a\nweirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into \"the\nwhite-flower'd elder-thicket,\" when Godiva saw it \"gleam through the\nGothic archways in the wall,\" at the end of her terrible ride. To\nRossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at every\nmoment.  A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions\nof man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a\nsingular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite\n[212] to him.  But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love--of\nlove based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material\nbeauty--which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers;\nYouth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory,\nOblivion, and the like.  Rossetti is one of those who, in the words of\nMerimee, se passionnent pour la passion, one of Love's lovers.\n\nAnd yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty as\nmaterial, is partly misleading.  Spirit and matter, indeed, have been\nfor the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism by\nschoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are. In\nour actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which the\nwords matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably\ninto each other.  Practically, the church of the Middle Age by its\naesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the\nresurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean\nopposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men's way of taking\nlife; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its spirit.\nTo him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the\nmaterial and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual\nattains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material loses\nits earthiness and impurity.  And here again, by force of instinct,\nRossetti [213] is one with him.  His chosen type of beauty is one,\n\n  Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,\n  Nor Love her body from her soul.\n\nLike Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuous\nalso, or material.  The shadowy world, which he realises so powerfully,\nhas still the ways and houses, the land and water, the light and\ndarkness, the fire and flowers, that had so much to do in the moulding\nof those bodily powers and aspects which counted for so large a part of\nthe soul, here.\n\nFor Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other,\nswayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius,\nmainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great\nundeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a world\nwhere all beside might be but shadow.  The fortunes of those\naffections--of the great love so determined; its casuistries, its\nlanguor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or unfortunate\ncollisions with those other great matters; how it looks, as the long\nday of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them: all this,\nconceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic,\nreflectiveness, is the matter of his verse, and especially of what he\ndesigned as his chief poetic work, \"a work to be called The House of\nLife,\" towards which the majority of his sonnets and songs were\ncontributions.\n\n[214] The dwelling-place in which one finds oneself by chance or\ndestiny, yet can partly fashion for oneself; never properly one's own\nat all, if it be changed too lightly; in which every object has its\nassociations--the dim mirrors, the portraits, the lamps, the books, the\nhair-tresses of the dead and visionary magic crystals in the secret\ndrawers, the names and words scratched on the windows, windows open\nupon prospects the saddest or the sweetest; the house one must quit,\nyet taking perhaps, how much of its quietly active light and colour\nalong with us!--grown now to be a kind of raiment to one's body, as the\nbody, according to Swedenborg, is but the raiment of the soul--under\nthat image, the whole of Rossetti's work might count as a House of\nLife, of which he is but the \"Interpreter.\"  And it is a \"haunted\"\nhouse.  A sense of power in love, defying distance, and those barriers\nwhich are so much more than physical distance, of unutterable desire\npenetrating into the world of sleep, however \"lead-bound,\" was one of\nthose anticipative notes obscurely struck in The Blessed Damozel, and,\nin his later work, makes him speak sometimes almost like a believer in\nmesmerism.  Dream-land, as we said, with its \"phantoms of the body,\"\ndeftly coming and going on love's service, is to him, in no mere fancy\nor figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion of, or\naddition to, our waking life; and he did well perhaps to wait carefully\nupon sleep, for the lack [215] of it became mortal disease with him.\nOne may even recognise a sort of morbid and over-hasty making-ready for\ndeath itself, which increases on him; thoughts concerning it, its\nimageries, coming with a frequency and importunity, in excess, one\nmight think, of even the very saddest, quite wholesome wisdom.\n\nAnd indeed the publication of his second volume of Ballads and Sonnets\npreceded his death by scarcely a twelvemonth.  That volume bears\nwitness to the reverse of any failure of power, or falling-off from his\nearly standard of literary perfection, in every one of his then\naccustomed forms of poetry--the song, the sonnet, and the ballad.  The\nnewly printed sonnets, now completing The House of Life, certainly\nadvanced beyond those earlier ones, in clearness; his dramatic power in\nthe ballad, was here at its height; while one monumental, gnomic piece,\nSoothsay, testifies, more clearly even than the Nineveh of his first\nvolume, to the reflective force, the dry reason, always at work behind\nhis imaginative creations, which at no time dispensed with a genuine\nintellectual structure.  For in matters of pure reflection also,\nRossetti maintained the painter's sensuous clearness of conception; and\nthis has something to do with the capacity, largely illustrated by his\nballads, of telling some red-hearted story of impassioned action with\neffect.\n\nHave there, in very deed, been ages, in which [216] the external\nconditions of poetry such as Rossetti's were of more spontaneous growth\nthan in our own?  The archaic side of Rossetti's work, his preferences\nin regard to earlier poetry, connect him with those who have certainly\nthought so, who fancied they could have breathed more largely in the\nage of Chaucer, or of Ronsard, in one of those ages, in the words of\nStendhal--ces siecles de passions ou les ames pouvaient se livrer\nfranchement a la plus haute exaltation, quand les passions qui font la\npossibilite We may think, perhaps, that such old time as that has never\nreally existed except in the fancy of poets; but it was to find it,\nthat Rossetti turned so often from modern life to the chronicle of the\npast.  Old Scotch history, perhaps beyond any other, is strong in the\nmatter of heroic and vehement hatreds and love, the tragic Mary herself\nbeing but the perfect blossom of them; and it is from that history that\nRossetti has taken the subjects of the two longer ballads of his second\nvolume: of the three admirable ballads in it, The King's Tragedy (in\nwhich Rossetti has dexterously interwoven some relics of James's own\nexquisite early verse) reaching the highest level of dramatic success,\nand marking perfection, perhaps, in this kind of poetry; which, in the\nearlier volume, gave us, among other pieces, Troy Town, Sister Helen,\nand Eden Bower.\n\nLike those earlier pieces, the ballads of the [217] second volume bring\nwith them the question of the poetic value of the \"refrain\"--\n\n  Eden bower's in flower:\n  And O the bower and the hour!\n\n--and the like.  Two of those ballads--Troy Town and Eden Bower, are\nterrible in theme; and the refrain serves, perhaps, to relieve their\nbold aim at the sentiment of terror.  In Sister Helen again, the\nrefrain has a real, and sustained purpose (being here duly varied also)\nand performs the part of a chorus, as the story proceeds.  Yet even in\nthese cases, whatever its effect may be in actual recitation, it may\nfairly be questioned, whether, to the mere reader their actual effect\nis not that of a positive interruption and drawback, at least in pieces\nso lengthy; and Rossetti himself, it would seem, came to think so, for\nin the shortest of his later ballads, The White Ship--that old true\nhistory of the generosity with which a youth, worthless in life, flung\nhimself upon death--he was contented with a single utterance of the\nrefrain, \"given out\" like the keynote or tune of a chant.\n\nIn The King's Tragedy, Rossetti has worked upon motive, broadly human\n(to adopt the phrase of popular criticism) such as one and all may\nrealise.  Rossetti, indeed, with all his self-concentration upon his\nown peculiar aim, by no means ignored those general interests which are\nexternal to poetry as he conceived it; as he has [218] shown here and\nthere, in this poetic, as also in pictorial, work.  It was but that, in\na life to be shorter even than the average, he found enough to occupy\nhim in the fulfilment of a task, plainly \"given him to do.\"  Perhaps,\nif one had to name a single composition of his to readers desiring to\nmake acquaintance with him for the first time, one would select: The\nKing's Tragedy--that poem so moving, so popularly dramatic, and\nlifelike.  Notwithstanding this, his work, it must be conceded,\ncertainly through no narrowness or egotism, but in the faithfulness of\na true workman to a vocation so emphatic, was mainly of the esoteric\norder.  But poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it\nmay reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common\nthings, after Gray's way (though Gray too, it is well to remember,\nseemed in his own day, seemed even to Johnson, obscure) or it may\nactually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in\nthemselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from\ntheir very birth.  Rossetti did something, something excellent, of the\nformer kind; but his characteristic, his really revealing work, lay in\nthe adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order of\nphenomena, in the creation of a new ideal.\n\n1883.\n\n\n\nFEUILLET'S \"LA MORTE\"\n\n[219] IN his latest novel M. Octave Feuillet adds two charming people\nto that chosen group of personages in which he loves to trace the\ndevelopment of the more serious elements of character amid the\nrefinements and artifices of modern society, and which make such good\ncompany.  The proper function of fictitious literature in affording us\na refuge into a world slightly better--better conceived, or better\nfinished--than the real one, is effected in most instances less through\nthe imaginary events at which a novelist causes us to assist, than by\nthe imaginary persons to whom he introduces us.  The situations of M.\nFeuillet's novels are indeed of a real and intrinsic\nimportance:--tragic crises, inherent in the general conditions of human\nnature itself, or which arise necessarily out of the special conditions\nof modern society.  Still, with him, in the actual result, they become\nsubordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life, to the\ncharacters they help to form.  Often, his most attentive reader will\nhave forgotten the actual details of his plot; while [220] the soul,\ntried, enlarged, shaped by it, remains as a well-fixed type in the\nmemory.  He may return a second or third time to Sibylle, or Le Journal\nd'une Femme, or Les Amours de Philippe, and watch, surprised afresh,\nthe clean, dainty, word-sparing literary operation (word-sparing, yet\nwith no loss of real grace or ease) which, sometimes in a few pages,\nwith the perfect logic of a problem of Euclid, complicates and then\nunravels some moral embarrassment, really worthy of a trained dramatic\nexpert.  But the characters themselves, the agents in those difficult,\nrevealing situations, such a reader will recognise as old acquaintances\nafter the first reading, feeling for them as for some gifted and\nattractive persons he has known in the actual world--Raoul de Chalys,\nHenri de Lerne, Madame de Tecle, Jeanne de la Roche-Ermel, Maurice de\nFremeuse, many others; to whom must now be added Bernard and Aliette de\nVaudricourt.\n\n\"How I love those people!\" cries Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, of Madame\nde Sevigne and some other of her literary favourites in the days of the\nGrand Monarch.  \"What good company!  What pleasure they took in high\nthings!  How much more worthy they were than the people who live\nnow!\"--What good company!  That is precisely what the admirer of M.\nFeuillet's books feels as one by one he places them on his book-shelf,\nto be sought again.  What is proposed here is not to tell his last\nstory, [221] but to give the English reader specimens of his most\nrecent effort at characterisation.\n\nIt is with the journal of Bernard himself that the story opens,\nSeptember 187-.  Bernard-Maurice Hugon de Montauret, Vicomte de\nVaudricourt, is on a visit to his uncle, the head of his family, at La\nSaviniere, a country-house somewhere between Normandy and Brittany.\nThis uncle, an artificial old Parisian in manner, but honest in\npurpose, a good talker, and full of real affection for his heir\nBernard, is one of M. Feuillet's good minor characters--one of the\nquietly humorous figures with which he relieves his more serious\ncompany.  Bernard, with whom the refinements of a man of fashion in the\nParisian world by no means disguise a powerful intelligence cultivated\nby wide reading, has had thoughts during his tedious stay at La\nSaviniere of writing a history of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth,\nthe library of a neighbouring chateau being rich in memoirs of that\nperiod.  Finally, he prefers to write his own story, a story so much\nmore interesting to himself; to write it at a peculiar crisis in his\nlife, the moment when his uncle, unmarried, but anxious to perpetuate\nhis race, is bent on providing him with a wife, and indeed has one in\nview.\n\nThe accomplished Bernard, with many graces of person, by his own\nconfession, takes nothing seriously.  As to that matter of religious\nbeliefs, \"the breeze of the age, and of science, has blown [222] over\nhim, as it has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty space\nthere.\"  Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departing from\nhim, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from all intelligent male\nParisians, he wept.  Since that moment, however, a gaiety, serene and\nimperturbable, has been the mainstay of his happily constituted\ncharacter.  The girl to whom his uncle desires to see him united--odd,\nquixotic, intelligent, with a sort of pathetic and delicate grace, and\nherself very religious--belongs to an old-fashioned, devout family,.\nresident at Varaville, near by.  M. Feuillet, with half a dozen fine\ntouches of his admirable pencil makes us see the place.  And the\nenterprise has at least sufficient interest to keep Bernard in the\ncountry, which the young Parisian detests.  \"This piquant episode of my\nlife,\" he writes, \"seems to me to be really deserving of study; to be\nworth etching off, day by day, by an observer well informed on the\nsubject.\"\n\nRecognising in himself, though as his one real fault, that he can take\nnothing seriously in heaven or earth, Bernard de Vaudricourt, like all\nM. Feuillet's favourite young men, so often erring or corrupt, is a man\nof scrupulous \"honour.\"  He has already shown disinterestedness in\nwishing his rich uncle to marry again.  His friends at Varaville think\nso well-mannered a young man more of a Christian than he really is;\nand, at all events, he will never owe his happiness to a falsehood.  If\nhe has great faults, [223] hypocrisy at least is no part of them.  In\noblique paths he finds himself ill at ease.  Decidedly, as he thinks,\nhe was born for straight ways, for loyalty in all his enterprises; and\nhe congratulates himself upon the fact.\n\nIn truth, Bernard has merits which he ignores, at least in this first\npart of his journal: merits which are necessary to explain the\ninfluence he is able to exercise from the first over such a character\nas Mademoiselle de Courteheuse.  His charm, in fact, is in the union of\nthat gay and apparently wanton nature with a genuine power of\nappreciating devotion in others, which becomes devotion in himself.\nWith all the much-cherished elegance and worldly glitter of his\npersonality, he is capable of apprehending, of understanding and being\ntouched by the presence of great matters.  In spite of that happy\nlightness of heart, so jealously fenced about, he is to be wholly\ncaught at last, as he is worthy to be, by the serious, the generous\ninfluence of things.  In proportion to his immense worldly strength is\nhis capacity for the immense pity which breaks his heart.\n\nIn a few life-like touches M. Feuillet brings out, as if it were indeed\na thing of ordinary existence, the simple yet delicate life of a French\ncountry-house, the ideal life in an ideal France.  Bernard is paying a\nmorning visit at the old turreted home of the \"prehistoric\" Courteheuse\nfamily.  Mademoiselle Aliette de Courteheuse, a studious girl, though a\nbold and excellent rider [224] --Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, \"with her\nhair of that strange colour of fine ashes\"--has conducted her visitor\nto see the library:\n\nOne day she took me to see the library, rich in works of the\nseventeenth century and in memoirs relating to that time.  I remarked\nthere also a curious collection of engravings of the same period.\n\"Your father,\" I observed, \"had a strong predilection for the age of\nLouis the Fourteenth.\"\n\n\"My father lived in that age,\" she answered gravely.  And as I looked\nat her with surprise, and a little embarrassed, she added, \"He made me\nlive there too, in his company.\"\n\nAnd then the eyes of this singular girl filled with tears. She turned\naway, took a few steps to suppress her emotion, and returning, pointed\nme to a chair.  Then seating herself on the step of the book-case, she\nsaid, \"I must explain my father to you.\"\n\nShe was half a minute collecting her thoughts: then, speaking with an\nexpansion of manner not habitual with her, hesitating, and blushing\ndeeply, whenever she was about to utter a word that might seem a shade\ntoo serious for lips so youthful:--\"My father,\" she proceeded, \"died of\nthe consequences of a wound he had received at Patay.  That may show\nyou that he loved his country, but he was no lover of his own age.  He\npossessed in the highest degree the love of order; and order was a\nthing nowhere to be seen.  He had a horror of disorder; and he saw it\neverywhere.  In those last years, especially, his reverence, his\nbeliefs, his tastes, all alike were ruffled to the point of actual\nsuffering, by whatever was done and said and written around him.\nDeeply saddened by the conditions of the present time, he habituated\nhimself to find a refuge in the past, and the seventeenth century more\nparticularly offered him the kind of society in which he would have\nwished to live--a society, well-ordered, polished, lettered, believing.\nMore and more he loved to shut himself up in it.  More and more also he\nloved to make the moral discipline and the literary tastes of that\nfavourite age prevail in his own household.  You may even have remarked\nthat he carried his predilection into minute matters of arrangement and\ndecoration.  You can see from this window the straight paths, the box\nin [225] patterns, the yew trees and clipped alleys of our garden.  You\nmay notice that in our garden-beds we have none but flowers of the\nperiod--lilies, rose-mallows, immortelles, rose-pinks, in short what\npeople call parsonage flowers--des fleurs de cure.  Our old silvan\ntapestries, similarly, are of that age.  You see too that all our\nfurniture, from presses and sideboards, down to our little tables and\nour arm-chairs, is in the severest style of Louis the Fourteenth. My\nfather did not appreciate the dainty research of our modern luxury.  He\nmaintained that our excessive care for the comforts of life weakened\nmind as well as body.  That,\" added the girl with a laugh,--\"that is\nwhy you find your chair so hard when you come to see us.\"\n\nThen, with resumed gravity--\"It was thus that my father endeavoured, by\nthe very aspect and arrangement of outward things, to promote in\nhimself the imaginary presence of the epoch in which his thoughts\ndelighted.  As for myself--need I tell you that I was the confidant of\nthat father, so well-beloved: a confidant touched by his sorrows, full\nof indignation at his disappointments, charmed by his consolations.\nHere, precisely--surrounded by those books which we read together, and\nwhich he taught me to love--it is here that I have passed the\npleasantest hours of my youth.  In common we indulged our enthusiasm\nfor those days of faith; of the quiet life; its blissful hours of\nleisure well-secured; for the French language in its beauty and purity;\nthe delicate, the noble urbanity, which was then the honour and the\nspecial mark of our country, but has ceased to be so.\"\n\nShe paused, with a little confusion, as I thought, at the warmth of her\nlast words.\n\nAnd then, just to break the silence, \"You have explained,\" I said, \"an\nimpression which I have experienced again and again in my visits here,\nand which has sometimes reached the intensity of an actual illusion,\nthough a very agreeable one.  The look of your house, its style, its\ntone and keeping, carried me two centuries back so completely that I\nshould hardly have been surprised to hear Monsieur le Prince, Madame de\nla Fayette, or Madame de Sevigne herself, announced at your\ndrawing-room door.\"\n\n\"Would it might be!\" said Mademoiselle de Courteheuse.  [226] \"Ah!\nMonsieur, how I love those people!  What good company! What pleasure\nthey took in high things!  How much more worthy they were than the\npeople who live now!\"  I tried to calm a little this retrospective\nenthusiasm, so much to the prejudice of my contemporaries and of\nmyself.  \"Most truly, Mademoiselle,\" I said, \"the age which you regret\nhad its rare merits--merits which I appreciate as you do.  But then,\nneed one say that that society, so regular, so choice in appearance,\nhad, like our own, below the surface, its troubles, its disorders?  I\nsee here many of the memoirs of that time. I can't tell exactly which\nof them you may or may not have read, and so I feel a certain\ndifficulty in speaking.\"\n\nShe interrupted me: \"Ah!\" she said, with entire simplicity, \"I\nunderstand you.  I have not read all you see here.  But I have read\nenough of it to know that my friends in that past age had, like those\nwho live now, their passions, their weaknesses, their mistakes.  But,\nas my father used to say to me, all that did but pass over a ground of\nwhat was solid and serious, which always discovered itself again anew.\nThere were great faults then; but there were also great repentances.\nThere was a certain higher region to which everything conducted--even\nwhat as evil.\"  She blushed deeply: then rising a little suddenly, \"A\nlong speech!\" she said: \"Forgive me!  I am not usually so very\ntalkative.  It is because my father was in question; and I should wish\nhis memory to be as dear and as venerable to all the rest of the world\nas it is to me.\"\n\nWe pass over the many little dramatic intrigues and misunderstandings,\nwith the more or less adroit interferences of the uncle, which raise\nand lower alternately Bernard's hopes.  M. Feuillet has more than once\ntried his hand with striking success in the portraiture of French\necclesiastics.  He has drawn none better than the Bishop of Saint-Meen,\nuncle of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, to whose interests he is devoted.\nBernard feels that to gain the influence of this prelate [227] would be\nto gain his cause; and the opportunity for an interview comes.\n\nMonseigneur de Courteheuse would seem to be little over fifty years of\nage: he is rather tall, and very thin: the eyes, black and full of\nlife, are encircled by a ring of deep brown.  His speech and gesture\nare animated, and, at times, as if carried away.  He adopts frequently\na sort of furious manner which on a sudden melts into the smile of an\nhonest man.  He has beautiful silvery hair, flying in vagrant locks\nover his forehead, and beautiful bishop's hands.  As he becomes calm he\nhas an imposing way of gently resettling himself in his sacerdotal\ndignity.  To sum up: his is a physiognomy full of passion, consumed\nwith zeal, yet still frank and sincere.\n\nI was hardly seated, when with a motion of the hand he invited me to\nspeak.\n\n\"Monseigneur!\" I said, \"I come to you (you understand me?) as to my\nlast resource.  What I am now doing is almost an act of despair; for it\nmight seem at first sight that no member of the family of Mademoiselle\nde Courteheuse must show himself more pitiless than yourself towards\nthe faults with which I am reproached.  I am an unbeliever: you are an\napostle!  And yet, Monseigneur, it is often at the hands of saintly\npriests, such as yourself, that the guilty find most indulgence.  And\nthen, I am not indeed guilty: I have but wandered.  I am refused the\nhand of your niece because I do not share her faith--your own faith.\nBut, Monseigneur, unbelief is not a crime, it is a misfortune.  I know\npeople often say, a man denies God when by his own conduct he has\nbrought himself into a condition in which he may well desire that God\ndoes not exist.  In this way he is made guilty, or, in a sense,\nresponsible for his incredulity.  For myself, Monseigneur, I have\nconsulted my conscience with an entire sincerity; and although my youth\nhas been amiss, I am certain that my atheism proceeds from no sentiment\nof personal interest.  On the contrary, I may tell you with truth that\nthe day on which I perceived my faith come to nought, the day on which\nI lost hope in God, I shed the bitterest tears of my life.  In spite of\nappearances, I am not so light a spirit as people think.  I am not one\nof those for whom God, when He disappears, [228] leaves no sense of a\nvoid place. Believe me!--a man may love sport, his club, his worldly\nhabits, and yet have his hours of thought, of self-recollection.  Do\nyou suppose that in those hours one does not feel the frightful\ndiscomfort of an existence with no moral basis, without principles,\nwith no outlook beyond this world?  And yet, what can one do?  You\nwould tell me forthwith, in the goodness, the compassion, which I read\nin your eyes; Confide to me your objections to religion, and I will try\nto solve them.  Monseigneur, I should hardly know how to answer you.\nMy objections are 'Legion!'  They are without number, like the stars in\nthe sky: they come to us on all sides, from every quarter of the\nhorizon, as if on the wings of the wind; and they leave in us, as they\npass, ruins only, and darkness. Such has been my experience, and that\nof many others; and it has been as involuntary as it is irreparable.\"\n\n\"And I--Monsieur!\" said the bishop, suddenly, casting on me one of his\naugust looks, \"Do you suppose that I am but a play-actor in my\ncathedral church?\"\n\n\"Monseigneur!\"\n\n\"Yes!  Listening to you, one would suppose that we were come to a\nperiod of the world in which one must needs be either an atheist or a\nhypocrite!  Personally, I claim to be neither one nor the other.\"\n\n\"Need I defend myself on that point, Monseigneur?  Need I say that I\ndid not come here to give you offence?\"\n\n\"Doubtless! doubtless!  Well, Monsieur, I admit; not without great\nreserves, mind! for one is always more or less responsible for the\natmosphere in which he lives, the influences to which he is subject,\nfor the habitual turn he gives to his thoughts; still, I admit that you\nare the victim of the incredulity of the age, that you are altogether\nguiltless in your scepticism, your atheism! since you have no fear of\nhard words.  Is it therefore any the less certain that the union of a\nfervent believer, such as my niece, with a man like yourself would be a\nmoral disorder of which the consequences might be disastrous?  Do you\nthink it could be my duty, as a relative of Mademoiselle de\nCourteheuse, her spiritual father, as a prelate of the Church, to lend\nmy hands to such disorder, to preside over the shocking union of two\nsouls separated by the whole width of heaven?\"\n\n[229] The bishop, in proposing that question, kept his eyes fixed\nardently on mine.\n\n\"Monseigneur,\" I answered, after a moment's embarrassment, \"you know as\nwell as, and better than I, the condition of the world, and of our\ncountry, at this time.  You know that unhappily I am not an exception:\nthat men of faith are rare in it.  And permit me to tell you my whole\nmind.  If I must needs suffer the inconsolable misfortune of renouncing\nthe happiness I had hoped for, are you quite sure that the man to whom\none of these days you will give your niece may not be something more\nthan a sceptic, or even an atheist?\"\n\n\"What, Monsieur?\"\n\n\"A hypocrite, Monseigneur!  Mademoiselle de Courteheuse is beautiful\nenough, rich enough, to excite the ambition of those who may be less\nscrupulous than I.  As for me, if you now know that I am a sceptic, you\nknow also that I am a man of honour: and there is something in that!\"\n\n\"A man of honour!\" the bishop muttered to himself, with a little\npetulance and hesitation.  \"A man of honour!  Yes, I believe it!\"\nThen, after an interval, \"Come, Monsieur,\" he said gently, \"your case\nis not as desperate as you suppose. My Aliette is one of those young\nenthusiasts through whom Heaven sometimes works miracles.\"  And Bernard\nrefusing any encouragement of that hope (the \"very roots of faith are\ndead\" in him for ever) \"since you think that,\" the bishop answers, \"it\nis honest to say so.  But God has His ways!\"\n\nSoon after, the journal comes to an end with that peculiar crisis in\nBernard's life which had suggested the writing of it.  Aliette, with\nthe approval of her family, has given him her hand.  Bernard accepts it\nwith the full purpose of doing all he can to make his wife as happy as\nshe is charming and beloved.  The virginal first period of their\nmarried life in their dainty house in Paris--the pure and beautiful\npicture of the mother, the father, and at last the child, a little\n[230] girl, Jeanne--is presented with M. Feuillet's usual grace.\nCertain embarrassments succeed; the development of what was ill-matched\nin their union; but still with mutual loyalty.  A far-reaching\nacquaintance with, and reflection upon, the world and its ways,\nespecially the Parisian world, has gone into the apparently slight\ntexture of these pages.  The accomplished playwright may be recognised\nin the skilful touches with which M. Feuillet, unrivalled, as his\nregular readers know, in his power of breathing higher notes into the\nfrivolous prattle of fashionable French life, develops the tragic germ\nin the elegant, youthful household.  Amid the distractions of a\nsociety, frivolous, perhaps vulgar, Aliette's mind is still set on\ngreater things; and, in spite of a thousand rude discouragements, she\nmaintains her generous hope for Bernard's restoration to faith.  One\nday, a little roughly, he bids her relinquish that dream finally.  She\nlooks at him with the moist, suppliant eyes of some weak animal at bay.\nThen his native goodness returns.  In a softened tone he owns himself\nwrong.\n\n\"As to conversions;--no one must be despaired of.  Do you remember M.\nde Rance?  He lived in your favourite age;--M. de Rance.  Well! before\nhe became the reformer of La Trappe he had been a worldling like me,\nand a great sceptic--what people called a libertine.  Still he became a\nsaint!  It is true he had a terrible reason for it.  Do you know what\nit was converted him?\"\n\nAliette gave a sign that she did not know.\n\n\"Well! he returned to Paris after a few days' absence.  He [231] ran\nstraight to the lady he loved; Madame Montbazon, I think: he went up a\nlittle staircase of which he had the key, and the first thing he saw on\nthe table in the middle of the room was the head of his mistress, of\nwhich the doctors were about to make a post-mortem examination.\"\n\n\"If I were sure,\" said Aliette, \"that my head could have such power, I\nwould love to die.\"\n\nShe said it in a low voice, but with such an accent of loving sincerity\nthat her husband had a sensation of a sort of painful disquiet.  He\nsmiled, however, and tapping her cheek softly, \"Folly!\" he said.  \"A\nhead, charming as yours, has no need to be dead that it may work\nmiracles!\"\n\nCertainly M. Feuillet has some weighty charges to bring against the\nParisian society of our day.  When Aliette revolts from a world of\ngossip, which reduces all minds alike to the same level of vulgar\nmediocrity, Bernard, on his side, can perceive there a deterioration of\nmoral tone which shocks his sense of honour.  As a man of honour, he\ncan hardly trust his wife to the gaieties of a society which welcomes\nall the world \"to amuse itself in undress.\"\n\nIt happened that at this perplexed period in the youthful household,\none and the same person became the recipient both of the tearful\nconfidences of Madame de Vaudricourt and those of her husband.  It was\nthe Duchess of Castel-Moret [she is another of M. Feuillet's admirable\nminor sketches] an old friend of the Vaudricourt family, and the only\nwoman with whom Aliette since her arrival in Paris had formed a kind of\nintimacy.  The Duchess was far from sharing, on points of morality, and\nabove all of religion, the severe and impassioned orthodoxy of her\nyoung friend.  She had lived, it is true, an irreproachable life, but\nless in consequence of defined principles than by instinct and natural\ntaste. She admitted to herself that she was an honest woman as a result\nof her birth, and had no further merit in the matter. She was old, very\ncareful of [232] herself, and a pleasant aroma floated about her, below\nher silvery hair.  People loved her for her grace--the grace of another\ntime than ours--for her wit, and her worldly wisdom, which she placed\nfreely at the disposal of the public.  Now and then she made a match:\nbut her special gift lay rather in the way in which she came to the\nrescue when a marriage turned out ill.  And she had no sinecure: the\nresult was that she passed the best part of her time in repairing\nfamily rents.  That might \"last its time,\" she would say.  \"And then we\nknow that what has been well mended sometimes lasts better than what is\nnew.\"\n\nA little later, Bernard, in the interest of Aliette, has chivalrously\ndetermined to quit Paris.  At Valmoutiers, a fine old place in the\nneighbourhood of Fontainebleau, they established themselves for a\ncountry life.  Here Aliette tastes the happiest days since her\nmarriage.  Bernard, of course, after a little time is greatly bored.\nBut so far they have never seriously doubted of their great love for\neach other.  It is here that M. Feuillet brings on the scene a kind of\ncharacter new in his books; perhaps hardly worthy of the other company\nthere; a sort of female Monsieur de Camors, but without his grace and\ntenderness, and who actually commits a crime.  How would the morbid\ncharms of M. de Camors have vanished, if, as his wife once suspected of\nhim, he had ever contemplated crime!  And surely, the showy insolent\ncharms of Sabine de Tallevaut, beautiful, intellectually gifted,\nsupremely Amazonian, yet withal not drawn with M. Feuillet's usual\nfineness, scarcely hold out for the reader, any more than for [233]\nBernard himself, in the long run, against the vulgarising touch of her\ncold wickedness.  Living in the neighbourhood of Valmoutiers, in a\nsomewhat melancholy abode (the mystery of which in the eyes of Bernard\nadds to her poetic charm) with her guardian, an old, rich, freethinking\ndoctor, devoted to research, she comes to Valmoutiers one night in his\ncompany on the occasion of the alarming illness of the only child.\nThey arrive escorted by Bernard himself.  The little Jeanne, wrapped in\nher coverlet, was placed upon the table of her play-room, which was\nilluminated as if for a party.  The illness, the operation (skilfully\nperformed by the old doctor) which restores her to life, are described\nwith that seemingly simple pathos in which M. Feuillet's consummate art\nhides itself.  Sabine remains to watch the child's recovery, and\nbecomes an intimate.  In vain Bernard struggles against the first real\npassion of his life;--does everything but send its object out of his\nsight.  Aliette has divined their secret.  In the fatal illness which\nfollows soon after, Bernard watches over her with tender solicitude;\nhoping against hope that the disease may take a favourable turn.\n\n\"My child,\" he said to her one day, taking the hand which she abandoned\nto him, \"I have just been scolding old Victoire. She is losing her\nhead.  In spite of the repeated assurances of the doctors, she is\nalarmed at seeing you a little worse than usual to-day, and has had the\nCure sent for.  Do you wish to see him?\"\n\n\"Pray let me see him!\"\n\n[234] She sighed heavily, and fixed upon her husband her large blue\neyes, full of anguish--an anguish so sharp and so singular that he felt\nfrozen to the marrow.\n\nHe could not help saying with deep emotion, \"Do you love me no longer,\nAliette?\"\n\n\"For ever!\" murmured the poor child.\n\nHe leaned over her with a long kiss upon the forehead.  She saw tears\nstealing from the eyes of her husband, and seemed as if surprised.\n\nSoon afterwards Aliette is dead, to the profound sorrow of Bernard.\nLess than two years later he has become the husband of Mademoiselle\nTallevaut.  It was about two years after his marriage with Sabine that\nBernard resumed the journal with which we began.  In the pages which he\nnow adds he seems at first unchanged.  How then as to that story of M.\nde Rance, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head of his dead\nmistress; an incident which the reader of La Morte will surely have\ntaken as a \"presentiment\"?  Aliette had so taken it.  \"A head so\ncharming as yours,\" Bernard had assured her tenderly, \"does not need to\nbe dead that it may work miracles!\"--How, in the few pages that remain,\nwill M. Feuillet justify that, and certain other delicate touches of\npresentiment, and at the same time justify the title of his book?\n\nThe journal is recommenced in February.  On the twentieth of April\nBernard writes, at Valmoutiers:\n\nUnder pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come to pass a\nweek at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air.  By my orders they have\nkept Aliette's room under lock and key since [235] the day when she\nleft it in her coffin.  To-day I re-entered it for the first time.\nThere was a vague odour of her favourite perfumes.  My poor Aliette!\nwhy was I unable, as you so ardently desired, to share your gentle\ncreed, and associate myself to the life of your dreams, the life of\nhonesty and peace? Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems to\nme like paradise.  What a terrible scene it was, here in this room!\nWhat a memory!  I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a look\nalmost of terror! and how quickly she died!  I have taken the room for\nmy own.  But I shall not remain here long.  I intend to go for a few\ndays to Varaville.  I want to see my little girl: her dear angel's face.\n\nVALMOUTIERS, April 22.--What a change there has been in the world since\nmy childhood: since my youth even! what a surprising change in so short\na period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing! Then we were, as it\nwere, impregnated with the thought of God--a just God, but benevolent\nand fatherlike.  We really lived under His eyes, as under the eyes of a\nparent, with respect and fear, but with confidence.  We felt sustained\nby His invisible but undoubted presence.  We spoke to Him, and it\nseemed that He answered.  And now we feel ourselves alone--as it were\nabandoned in the immensity of the universe.  We live in a world, hard,\nsavage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle for\nexistence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements, let\nloose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, with\nno appeal beyond, no hope of final justice.  And above us, in place of\nthe good God of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse than\nnothing--a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares nothing at all\nabout us.\n\nThe aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter, is\nlately dead.  Bernard proposes to take the child away with him to\nParis.  The child's old nurse objects.  On April the twenty-seventh,\nBernard writes:\n\nFor a moment--for a few moments--in that room where I have been\nshutting myself up with the shadow of my poor [236] dead one, a\nhorrible thought had come to me.  I had driven it away as an insane\nfancy.  But now, yes! it is becoming a reality.  Shall I write this?\nYes!  I will write it.  It is my duty to do so; for from this moment\nthe journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart, is but my last will and\ntestament.  If I should disappear from the world, the secret must not\ndie with me.  It must be bequeathed to the natural protectors of my\nchild.  Her interests, if not her life, are concerned therein.\n\nHere, then, is what passed: I had not arrived in time to render my last\nduty to Madame de Courteheuse.  The family was already dispersed.  I\nfound here only Aliette's brother.  To him I communicated my plan\nconcerning the child, and he could but approve.  My intention was to\nbring away with Jeanne her nurse Victoire, who had brought her up, as\nshe brought up her mother. But she is old, and in feeble health, and I\nfeared some difficulties on her part; the more as her attitude towards\nmyself since the death of my first wife has been marked by an ill grace\napproaching to hostility.  I took her aside while Jeanne was playing in\nthe garden.\n\n\"My good Victoire,\" I said, \"while Madame de Courteheuse was living, I\nconsidered it a duty to leave her granddaughter in her keeping.\nBesides, no one was better fitted to watch over her education.  At\npresent my duty is to watch over it myself. I propose therefore to take\nJeanne with me to Paris; and I hope that you may be willing to\naccompany her, and remain in her service.\" When she understood my\nintention, the old woman, in whose hands I had noticed a faint\ntrembling, became suddenly very pale.  She fixed her firm, grey eyes\nupon me: \"Monsieur le Comte will not do that!\"\n\n\"Pardon me, my good Victoire, that I shall do.  I appreciate your good\nqualities of fidelity and devotion.  I shall be very grateful if you\nwill continue to take care of my daughter, as you have done so\nexcellently.  But for the rest, I intend to be the only master in my\nown house, and the only master of my child.\"  She laid a hand upon my\narm: \"I implore you, Monsieur, don't do this!\"  Her fixed look did not\nleave my face, and seemed to be questioning me to the very bottom of my\nsoul. \"I have never believed it,\" she murmured, \"No!  I [237] never\ncould believe it.  But if you take the child away I shall.\"\n\n\"Believe what, wretched woman? believe what?\"\n\nHer voice sank lower still.  \"Believe that you knew how her mother came\nby her death; and that you mean the daughter to die as she did.\"\n\n\"Die as her mother did?\"\n\n\"Yes! by the same hand!\"\n\nThe sweat came on my forehead.  I felt as it were a breathing of death\nupon me.  But still I thrust away from me that terrible light on things.\n\n\"Victoire!\" I said, \"take care!  You are no fool: you are something\nworse.  Your hatred of the woman who has taken the place of my first\nwife--your blind hatred--has suggested to you odious, nay! criminal\nwords.\"\n\n\"Ah!  Ah!  Monsieur\", she cried with wild energy.  \"After what I have\njust told you, take your daughter to live with that woman if you dare.\"\n\nI walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses. Then,\nreturning to the old woman, \"Yet how can I believe you?\" I asked.  \"If\nyou had had the shadow of a proof of what you give me to understand,\nhow could you have kept silence so long? How could you have allowed me\nto contract that hateful marriage?\"\n\nShe seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler.  \"Monsieur, it\nis because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oath on the\ncrucifix to keep that secret for ever.\"\n\n\"Yet not with me, in fact,--not with me!\"  And I, in turn, questioned\nher; my eyes upon hers.  She  hesitated: then stammered out, \"True! not\nwith you! because she believed, poor little soul! that...\"\n\n\"What did she believe?  That I knew it?  That I was an accomplice? Tell\nme!\"  Her eyes fell, and she made no answer.  \"Is it possible, my God,\nis it possible?  But come, sit by me here, and tell me all you know,\nall you saw.  At what time was it you noticed anything--the precise\nmoment?\"  For in truth she had been suffering for a long time past.\n\nVictoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's [238] crime--we must\npardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary world\nM. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of fully\nknowing Bernard and Aliette.  The old nurse had surprised her in the\nvery act, and did not credit her explanation.  \"When I surprised her,\"\nshe goes on:\n\n\"It may already have been too late--be sure it was not the first time\nshe had been guilty--my first thought was to give you information.  But\nI had not the courage.  Then I told Madame. I thought I saw plainly\nthat I had nothing to tell she was not already aware of.  Nevertheless\nshe chided me almost harshly. 'You know very well,' she said, 'that my\nhusband is always there when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines.  So\nthat he too would be guilty.  Rather than believe that, I would accept\ndeath at his hands a hundred times over!'  And I remember, Monsieur,\nhow at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from the\nlittle boudoir, and brought her a glass of valerian.  She cast on me a\nterrible look and drank.  A few minutes afterwards she was so ill that\nshe thought the end was come.  She begged me to give her her crucifix,\nand made me swear never to utter a word concerning our suspicions.  It\nwas then I sent for the priest.  I have told you, Monsieur, what I\nknow; what I have seen with my own eyes.  I swear that I have said\nnothing but what is absolutely true.\"  She paused.  I could not answer\nher. I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them to\nmy forehead, and wept like a child.\n\nMay 10.--She died believing me guilty!  The thought is terrible to me.\nI know not what to do.  A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet.\n\"Yes!\" she said to herself, \"my husband is a murderer; what he is\ngiving me is poison, and he knows it.\"  She died with that thought in\nher mind--her last thought. And she will never, never know that it was\nnot so; that I am innocent; that the thought is torment to me: that I\nam the most unhappy of men.  Ah!  God, all-powerful! if you indeed\nexist, you see what I suffer.  Have pity on me!\n\nAh! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between [239] her\nand me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew the truth.  But I\nfind it impossible! impossible!\n\nJune.--That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she will never\nbe undeceived.\n\nAll seems so completely ended when one dies.  All returns to its first\nelements.  How credit that miracle of a personal resurrection? and yet\nin truth all is mystery,--miracle, around us, about us, within\nourselves.  The entire universe is but a continuous miracle.  Man's new\nbirth from the womb of death--is it a mystery less comprehensible than\nhis birth from the womb of his mother?\n\nThose lines are the last written by Bernard de Vaudricourt. His health,\nfor some time past disturbed by grief, was powerless against the\nemotions of the last terrible trial imposed on him.  A malady, the\nexact nature of which was not determined, in a few days assumed a\nmortal character. Perceiving that his end was come, he caused\nMonseigneur de Courteheuse to be summoned--he desired to die in the\nreligion of Aliette.  Living, the poor child had been defeated: she\nprevailed in her death.\n\nTwo distinguished souls! deux etres d'elite--M. Feuillet thinks--whose\nfine qualities properly brought them together.  When Mademoiselle de\nCourteheuse said of the heroes of her favourite age, that their\npassions, their errors, did but pass over a ground of what was solid\nand serious, and which always discovered itself afresh, she was\nunconsciously describing Bernard.  Singular young brother of Monsieur\nde Camors--after all, certainly, more fortunate than he--he belongs to\nthe age, which, if it had great faults, had also great repentances.  In\nappearance, frivolous; with all the light charm of the world, yet with\nthat impressibility to great things, according to the law which makes\nthe best of M. Feuillet's [240] characters so interesting; above all,\nwith that capacity for pity which almost everything around him tended\nto suppress; in real life, if he exists there, and certainly in M.\nFeuillet's pages, it is a refreshment to meet him.\n\n1886.\n\n\n\nPOSTSCRIPT\n\nainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnon neoteron+\n\n[241] THE words, classical and romantic, although, like many other\ncritical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood\nthem too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in\nthe history of art and literature.  Used in an exaggerated sense, to\nexpress a greater opposition between those tendencies than really\nexists, they have at times tended to divide people of taste into\nopposite camps.  But in that House Beautiful, which the creative minds\nof all generations--the artists and those who have treated life in the\nspirit of art--are always building together, for the refreshment of the\nhuman spirit, these oppositions cease; and the Interpreter of the House\nBeautiful, the true aesthetic critic, uses these divisions, only so far\nas they enable him to enter into the peculiarities of the objects with\nwhich he has to do.  The term classical, fixed, as it is, to a\nwell-defined literature, and a well-defined group in art, is clear,\nindeed; but then it has often been used in a hard, and merely\nscholastic [242] sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed,\nat the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have\ndiscovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old,\nwho value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and\nchiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about\nit--people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus\nfresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and\nRome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and\ntame.\n\nAnd as the term, classical, has been used in a too absolute, and\ntherefore in a misleading sense, so the term, romantic, has been used\nmuch too vaguely, in various accidental senses.  The sense in which\nScott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this; that, in opposition\nto the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange\nadventure, and sought it in the Middle Age.  Much later, in a Yorkshire\nvillage, the spirit of romanticism bore a more really characteristic\nfruit in the work of a young girl, Emily Bronte, the romance of\nWuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of Catherine\nLinton, and of Heathcliffe--tearing open Catherine's grave, removing\none side of her coffin, that he may really lie beside her in\ndeath--figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicately\nbeautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit. In\nGermany, again, [243] that spirit is shown less in Tieck, its\nprofessional representative, than in Meinhold, the author of Sidonia\nthe Sorceress and the Amber-Witch.  In Germany and France, within the\nlast hundred years, the term has been used to describe a particular\nschool of writers; and, consequently, when Heine criticises the\nRomantic School in Germany--that movement which culminated in Goethe's\nGoetz von Berlichingen; or when Theophile Gautier criticises the\nromantic movement in France, where, indeed, it bore its most\ncharacteristic fruits, and its play is hardly yet over where, by a\ncertain audacity, or bizarrerie of motive, united with faultless\nliterary execution, it still shows itself in imaginative literature,\nthey use the word, with an exact sense of special artistic qualities,\nindeed; but use it, nevertheless, with a limited application to the\nmanifestation of those qualities at a particular period.  But the\nromantic spirit is, in reality, an ever-present, an enduring principle,\nin the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought and style\nwhich that, and other similar uses of the word romantic really\nindicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widely\nworking influence.\n\nThough the words classical and romantic, then, have acquired an almost\ntechnical meaning, in application to certain developments of German and\nFrench taste, yet this is but one variation of an old opposition, which\nmay be traced from the [244] very beginning of the formation of\nEuropean art and literature.  From the first formation of anything like\na standard of taste in these things, the restless curiosity of their\nmore eager lovers necessarily made itself felt, in the craving for new\nmotives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of style.  Hence,\nthe opposition between the classicists and the romanticists--between\nthe adherents, in the culture of beauty, of the principles of liberty,\nand authority, respectively--of strength, and order or what the Greeks\ncalled kosmiotes.+\n\nSainte-Beuve, in the third volume of the Causeries du Lundi, has\ndiscussed the question, What is meant by a classic?  It was a question\nhe was well fitted to answer, having himself lived through many phases\nof taste, and having been in earlier life an enthusiastic member of the\nromantic school: he was also a great master of that sort of \"philosophy\nof literature,\" which delights in tracing traditions in it, and the way\nin which various phases of thought and sentiment maintain themselves,\nthrough successive modifications, from epoch to epoch.  His aim, then,\nis to give the word classic a wider and, as he says, a more generous\nsense than it commonly bears, to make it expressly grandiose et\nflottant; and, in doing this, he develops, in a masterly manner, those\nqualities of measure, purity, temperance, of which it is the especial\nfunction of classical art [245] and literature, whatever meaning,\nnarrower or wider, we attach to the term, to take care.\n\nThe charm, therefore, of what is classical, in art or literature, is\nthat of the well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen over\nand over again, because it is told so well.  To the absolute beauty of\nits artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil, charm of\nfamiliarity.  There are times, indeed, at which these charms fail to\nwork on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us.\n\"Romanticism,\" says Stendhal, \"is the art of presenting to people the\nliterary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs,\nare capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism,\non the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest\npossible pleasure to their grandfathers.\"  But then, beneath all\nchanges of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere abstract\nproportion--of music--which what is classical in literature possesses,\nstill maintains itself in the best of us, and what pleased our\ngrandparents may at least tranquillise us.  The \"classic\" comes to us\nout of the cool and quiet of other times; as the measure of what a long\nexperience has shown will at least never displease us. And in the\nclassical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last\ncentury, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in\nbeauty, which they possess, indeed, [246] in a pre-eminent degree, and\nwhich impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else in them.\n\nIt is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the\nromantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed\nelement in every artistic organisation, it is the addition of curiosity\nto this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic temper.\nCuriosity and the desire of beauty, have each their place in art, as in\nall true criticism.  When one's curiosity is deficient, when one is not\neager enough for new impressions, and new pleasures, one is liable to\nvalue mere academical proprieties too highly, to be satisfied with\nworn-out or conventional types, with the insipid ornament of Racine, or\nthe prettiness of that later Greek sculpture, which passed so long for\ntrue Hellenic work; to miss those places where the handiwork of nature,\nor of the artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating\nproducts of art a mere irritation.  And when one's curiosity is in\nexcess, when it overbalances the desire of beauty, then one is liable\nto value in works of art what is inartistic in them; to be satisfied\nwith what is exaggerated in art, with productions like some of those of\nthe romantic school in Germany; not to distinguish, jealously enough,\nbetween what is admirably done, and what is done not quite so well, in\nthe writings, for instance, of Jean Paul.  And if I had to give [247]\ninstances of these defects, then I should say, that Pope, in common\nwith the age of literature to which he belonged, had too little\ncuriosity, so that there is always a certain insipidity in the effect\nof his work, exquisite as it is; and, coming down to our own time, that\nBalzac had an excess of curiosity--curiosity not duly tempered with the\ndesire of beauty.\n\nBut, however falsely those two tendencies may be opposed by critics, or\nexaggerated by artists themselves, they are tendencies really at work\nat all times in art, moulding it, with the balance sometimes a little\non one side, sometimes a little on the other, generating, respectively,\nas the balance inclines on this side or that, two principles, two\ntraditions, in art, and in literature so far as it partakes of the\nspirit of art.  If there is a great overbalance of curiosity, then, we\nhave the grotesque in art: if the union of strangeness and beauty,\nunder very difficult and complex conditions, be a successful one, if\nthe union be entire, then the resultant beauty is very exquisite, very\nattractive.  With a passionate care for beauty, the romantic spirit\nrefuses to have it, unless the condition of strangeness be first\nfulfilled.  Its desire is for a beauty born of unlikely elements, by a\nprofound alchemy, by a difficult initiation, by the charm which wrings\nit even out of terrible things; and a trace of distortion, of the\ngrotesque, may perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression,\nabout its [248] ultimate grace.  Its eager, excited spirit will have\nstrength, the grotesque, first of all--the trees shrieking as you tear\noff the leaves; for Jean Valjean, the long years of convict life; for\nRedgauntlet, the quicksands of Solway Moss; then, incorporate with this\nstrangeness, and intensified by restraint, as much sweetness, as much\nbeauty, as is compatible with that.  Energique, frais, et\ndispos--these, according to Sainte-Beuve, are the characteristics of a\ngenuine classic--les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques parce\nqu'ils sont vieux, mais parce qu'ils sont energiques, frais, et dispos.\nEnergy, freshness, intelligent and masterly disposition:--these are\ncharacteristics of Victor Hugo when his alchemy is complete, in certain\nfigures, like Marius and Cosette, in certain scenes, like that in the\nopening of Les Travailleurs de la Mer, where Deruchette writes the name\nof Gilliatt in the snow, on Christmas morning; but always there is a\ncertain note of strangeness discernible there, as well.\n\nThe essential elements, then, of the romantic spirit are curiosity and\nthe love of beauty; and it is only as an illustration of these\nqualities, that it seeks the Middle Age, because, in the over-charged\natmosphere of the Middle Age, there are unworked sources of romantic\neffect, of a strange beauty, to be won, by strong imagination, out of\nthings unlikely or remote.\n\nFew, probably, now read Madame de Stael's [249] De l'Allemagne, though\nit has its interest, the interest which never quite fades out of work\nreally touched with the enthusiasm of the spiritual adventurer, the\npioneer in culture.  It was published in 1810, to introduce to French\nreaders a new school of writers--the romantic school, from beyond the\nRhine; and it was followed, twenty-three years later, by Heine's\nRomantische Schule, as at once a supplement and a correction.  Both\nthese books, then, connect romanticism with Germany, with the names\nespecially of Goethe and Tieck; and, to many English readers, the idea\nof romanticism is still inseparably connected with Germany--that\nGermany which, in its quaint old towns, under the spire of Strasburg or\nthe towers of Heidelberg, was always listening in rapt inaction to the\nmelodious, fascinating voices of the Middle Age, and which, now that it\nhas got Strasburg back again, has, I suppose, almost ceased to exist.\nBut neither Germany, with its Goethe and Tieck, nor England, with its\nByron and Scott, is nearly so representative of the romantic temper as\nFrance, with Murger, and Gautier, and Victor Hugo.  It is in French\nliterature that its most characteristic expression is to be found; and\nthat, as most closely derivative, historically, from such peculiar\nconditions, as ever reinforce it to the utmost.\n\nFor, although temperament has much to do with the generation of the\nromantic spirit, and [250] although this spirit, with its curiosity,\nits thirst for a curious beauty, may be always traceable in excellent\nart (traceable even in Sophocles) yet still, in a limited sense, it may\nbe said to be a product of special epochs.  Outbreaks of this spirit,\nthat is, come naturally with particular periods--times, when, in men's\napproaches towards art and poetry, curiosity may be noticed to take the\nlead, when men come to art and poetry, with a deep thirst for\nintellectual excitement, after a long ennui, or in reaction against the\nstrain of outward, practical things: in the later Middle Age, for\ninstance; so that medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed\nto Greek and Roman poetry, as romantic poetry to the classical.  What\nthe romanticism of Dante is, may be estimated, if we compare the lines\nin which Virgil describes the hazel-wood, from whose broken twigs flows\nthe blood of Polydorus, not without the expression of a real shudder at\nthe ghastly incident, with the whole canto of the Inferno, into which\nDante has expanded them, beautifying and softening it, meanwhile, by a\nsentiment of profound pity.  And it is especially in that period of\nintellectual disturbance, immediately preceding Dante, amid which the\nromance languages define themselves at last, that this temper is\nmanifested.  Here, in the literature of Provence, the very name of\nromanticism is stamped with its true signification: here we have indeed\na romantic world, grotesque [251] even, in the strength of its\npassions, almost insane in its curious expression of them, drawing all\nthings into its sphere, making the birds, nay! lifeless things, its\nvoices and messengers, yet so penetrated with the desire for beauty and\nsweetness, that it begets a wholly new species of poetry, in which the\nRenaissance may be said to begin.  The last century was pre-eminently a\nclassical age, an age in which, for art and literature, the element of\na comely order was in the ascendant; which, passing away, left a hard\nbattle to be fought between the classical and the romantic schools.\nYet, it is in the heart of this century, of Goldsmith and Stothard, of\nWatteau and the Siecle de Louis XIV.--in one of its central, if not\nmost characteristic figures, in Rousseau--that the modern or French\nromanticism really originates.  But, what in the eighteenth century is\nbut an exceptional phenomenon, breaking through its fair reserve and\ndiscretion only at rare intervals, is the habitual guise of the\nnineteenth, breaking through it perpetually, with a feverishness, an\nincomprehensible straining and excitement, which all experience to some\ndegree, but yearning also, in the genuine children of the romantic\nschool, to be energique, frais, et dispos--for those qualities of\nenergy, freshness, comely order; and often, in Murger, in Gautier, in\nVictor Hugo, for instance, with singular felicity attaining them.\n\nIt is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in [252] fact, that French\nromanticism, with much else, begins: reading his Confessions we seem\nactually to assist at the birth of this new, strong spirit in the\nFrench mind.  The wildness which has shocked so many, and the\nfascination which has influenced almost every one, in the squalid, yet\neloquent figure, we see and hear so clearly in that book, wandering\nunder the apple-blossoms and among the vines of Neuchatel or Vevey\nactually give it the quality of a very successful romantic invention.\nHis strangeness or distortion, his profound subjectivity, his\npassionateness--the cor laceratum--Rousseau makes all men in love with\nthese.  Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai sus.  Mais si je\nne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre.  \"I am not made like any one\nelse I have ever known: yet, if I am not better, at least I am\ndifferent.\"  These words, from the first page of the Confessions,\nanticipate all the Werthers, Renes, Obermanns, of the last hundred\nyears.  For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the spirit of the\nwhole world; and thirty years afterwards, what in him was a\npeculiarity, became part of the general consciousness.  A storm was\ncoming: Rousseau, with others, felt it in the air, and they helped to\nbring it down: they introduced a disturbing element into French\nliterature, then so trim and formal, like our own literature of the age\nof Queen Anne.\n\nIn 1815 the storm had come and gone, but had left, in the spirit of\n\"young France,\" the [253] ennui of an immense disillusion.  In the last\nchapter of Edgar Quinet's Revolution Francaise, a work itself full of\nirony, of disillusion, he distinguishes two books, Senancour's Obermann\nand Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme, as characteristic of the\nfirst decade of the present century.  In those two books we detect\nalready the disease and the cure--in Obermann the irony, refined into a\nplaintive philosophy of \"indifference\"--in Chateaubriand's Genie du\nChristianisme, the refuge from a tarnished actual present, a present of\ndisillusion, into a world of strength and beauty in the Middle Age, as\nat an earlier period--in Rene and Atala--into the free play of them in\nsavage life.  It is to minds in this spiritual situation, weary of the\npresent, but yearning for the spectacle of beauty and strength, that\nthe works of French romanticism appeal.  They set a positive value on\nthe intense, the exceptional; and a certain distortion is sometimes\nnoticeable in them, as in conceptions like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, or\nGwynplaine, something of a terrible grotesque, of the macabre, as the\nFrench themselves call it; though always combined with perfect literary\nexecution, as in Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse, or the scene of the\n\"maimed\" burial-rites of the player, dead of the frost, in his\nCapitaine Fracasse--true \"flowers of the yew.\"  It becomes grim humour\nin Victor Hugo's combat of Gilliatt with the devil-fish, or the\nincident, with all its ghastly comedy drawn [254] out at length, of the\ngreat gun detached from its fastenings on shipboard, in\nQuatre-Vingt-Trieze (perhaps the most terrible of all the accidents\nthat can happen by sea) and in the entire episode, in that book, of the\nConvention.  Not less surely does it reach a genuine pathos; for the\nhabit of noting and distinguishing one's own most intimate passages of\nsentiment makes one sympathetic, begetting, as it must, the power of\nentering, by all sorts of finer ways, into the intimate recesses of\nother minds; so that pity is another quality of romanticism, both\nVictor Hugo and Gautier being great lovers of animals, and charming\nwriters about them, and Murger being unrivalled in the pathos of his\nScenes de la Vie de Jeunesse.  Penetrating so finely into all\nsituations which appeal to pity, above all, into the special or\nexceptional phases of such feeling, the romantic humour is not afraid\nof the quaintness or singularity of its circumstances or expression,\npity, indeed, being of the essence of humour; so that Victor Hugo does\nbut turn his romanticism into practice, in his hunger and thirst after\npractical Justice!--a justice which shall no longer wrong children, or\nanimals, for instance, by ignoring in a stupid, mere breadth of view,\nminute facts about them.  Yet the romanticists are antinomian, too,\nsometimes, because the love of energy and beauty, of distinction in\npassion, tended naturally to become a little bizarre, plunging into the\n[255] Middle Age, into the secrets of old Italian story.  Are we in the\nInferno?--we are tempted to ask, wondering at something malign in so\nmuch beauty.  For over all a care for the refreshment of the human\nspirit by fine art manifests itself, a predominant sense of literary\ncharm, so that, in their search for the secret of exquisite expression,\nthe romantic school went back to the forgotten world of early French\npoetry, and literature itself became the most delicate of the\narts--like \"goldsmith's work,\" says Sainte-Beuve, of Bertrand's Gaspard\nde la Nuit--and that peculiarly French gift, the gift of exquisite\nspeech, argute loqui, attained in them a perfection which it had never\nseen before.\n\nStendhal, a writer whom I have already quoted, and of whom English\nreaders might well know much more than they do, stands between the\nearlier and later growths of the romantic spirit.  His novels are rich\nin romantic quality; and his other writings--partly criticism, partly\npersonal reminiscences--are a very curious and interesting illustration\nof the needs out of which romanticism arose.  In his book on Racine and\nShakespeare, Stendhal argues that all good art was romantic in its day;\nand this is perhaps true in Stendhal's sense. That little treatise,\nfull of \"dry light\" and fertile ideas, was published in the year 1823,\nand its object is to defend an entire independence and liberty in the\nchoice and treatment of subject, both in [256] art and literature,\nagainst those who upheld the exclusive authority of precedent.  In\npleading the cause of romanticism, therefore, it is the novelty, both\nof form and of motive, in writings like the Hernani of Victor Hugo\n(which soon followed it, raising a storm of criticism) that he is\nchiefly concerned to justify.  To be interesting and really\nstimulating, to keep us from yawning even, art and literature must\nfollow the subtle movements of that nimbly-shifting Time-Spirit, or\nZeit-Geist, understood by French not less than by German criticism,\nwhich is always modifying men's taste, as it modifies their manners and\ntheir pleasures.  This, he contends, is what all great workmen had\nalways understood.  Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere, had exercised an\nabsolute independence in their choice of subject and treatment.  To\nturn always with that ever-changing spirit, yet to retain the flavour\nof what was admirably done in past generations, in the classics, as we\nsay--is the problem of true romanticism.  \"Dante,\" he observes, \"was\npre-eminently the romantic poet.  He adored Virgil, yet he wrote the\nDivine Comedy, with the episode of Ugolino, which is as unlike the\nAeneid as can possibly be. And those who thus obey the fundamental\nprinciple of romanticism, one by one become classical, and are joined\nto that ever-increasing common league, formed by men of all countries,\nto approach nearer and nearer to perfection.\"\n\nRomanticism, then, although it has its epochs, [257] is in its\nessential characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all\ntimes, in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and\nthe amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one by one,\nthan the peculiarity of a time or a school.  Depending on the varying\nproportion of curiosity and the desire of beauty, natural tendencies of\nthe artistic spirit at all times, it must always be partly a matter of\nindividual temperament.  The eighteenth century in England has been\nregarded as almost exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, a\ntype of so much which breaks through what are conventionally thought\nthe influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in it,\nand the reaction in favour of naturalism in poetry begins in that\ncentury, early.  There are, thus, the born romanticists and the born\nclassicists.  There are the born classicists who start with form, to\nwhose minds the comeliness of the old, immemorial, well-recognised\ntypes in art and literature, have revealed themselves impressively; who\nwill entertain no matter which will not go easily and flexibly into\nthem; whose work aspires only to be a variation upon, or study from,\nthe older masters.  \"'Tis art's decline, my son!\" they are always\nsaying, to the progressive element in their own generation; to those\nwho care for that which in fifty years' time every one will be caring\nfor.  On the other hand, there are the born romanticists, who start\nwith an original, [258] untried matter, still in fusion; who conceive\nthis vividly, and hold by it as the essence of their work; who, by the\nvery vividness and heat of their conception, purge away, sooner or\nlater, all that is not organically appropriate to it, till the whole\neffect adjusts itself in clear, orderly, proportionate form; which\nform, after a very little time, becomes classical in its turn.\n\nThe romantic or classical character of a picture, a poem, a literary\nwork, depends, then, on the balance of certain qualities in it; and in\nthis sense, a very real distinction may be drawn between good classical\nand good romantic work.  But all critical terms are relative; and there\nis at least a valuable suggestion in that theory of Stendhal's, that\nall good art was romantic in its day.  In the beauties of Homer and\nPheidias, quiet as they now seem, there must have been, for those who\nconfronted them for the first time, excitement and surprise, the\nsudden, unforeseen satisfaction of the desire of beauty.  Yet the\nOdyssey, with its marvellous adventure, is more romantic than the\nIliad, which nevertheless contains, among many other romantic episodes,\nthat of the immortal horses of Achilles, who weep at the death of\nPatroclus.  Aeschylus is more romantic than Sophocles, whose\nPhiloctetes, were it written now, might figure, for the strangeness of\nits motive and the perfectness of its execution, as typically romantic;\nwhile, of Euripides, it may be said, that his method in [259] writing\nhis plays is to sacrifice readily almost everything else, so that he\nmay attain the fulness of a single romantic effect.  These two\ntendencies, indeed, might be applied as a measure or standard, all\nthrough Greek and Roman art and poetry, with very illuminating results;\nand for an analyst of the romantic principle in art, no exercise would\nbe more profitable, than to walk through the collection of classical\nantiquities at the Louvre, or the British Museum, or to examine some\nrepresentative collection of Greek coins, and note how the element of\ncuriosity, of the love of strangeness, insinuates itself into classical\ndesign, and record the effects of the romantic spirit there, the traces\nof struggle, of the grotesque even, though over-balanced here by\nsweetness; as in the sculpture of Chartres and Rheims, the real\nsweetness of mind in the sculptor is often overbalanced by the\ngrotesque, by the rudeness of his strength.\n\nClassicism, then, means for Stendhal, for that younger enthusiastic\nband of French writers whose unconscious method he formulated into\nprinciples, the reign of what is pedantic, conventional, and narrowly\nacademical in art; for him, all good art is romantic.  To Sainte-Beuve,\nwho understands the term in a more liberal sense, it is the\ncharacteristic of certain epochs, of certain spirits in every epoch,\nnot given to the exercise of original imagination, but rather to the\nworking out of refinements of manner on some [260] authorised matter;\nand who bring to their perfection, in this way, the elements of sanity,\nof order and beauty in manner.  In general criticism, again, it means\nthe spirit of Greece and Rome, of some phases in literature and art\nthat may seem of equal authority with Greece and Rome, the age of Louis\nthe Fourteenth, the age of Johnson; though this is at best an\nuncritical use of the term, because in Greek and Roman work there are\ntypical examples of the romantic spirit.  But explain the terms as we\nmay, in application to particular epochs, there are these two elements\nalways recognisable; united in perfect art--in Sophocles, in Dante, in\nthe highest work of Goethe, though not always absolutely balanced\nthere; and these two elements may be not inappropriately termed the\nclassical and romantic tendencies.\n\nMaterial for the artist, motives of inspiration, are not yet exhausted:\nour curious, complex, aspiring age still abounds in subjects for\naesthetic manipulation by the literary as well as by other forms of\nart.  For the literary art, at all events, the problem just now is, to\ninduce order upon the contorted, proportionless accumulation of our\nknowledge and experience, our science and history, our hopes and\ndisillusion, and, in effecting this, to do consciously what has been\ndone hitherto for the most part too unconsciously, to write our English\nlanguage as the Latins wrote theirs, as the [261] French write, as\nscholars should write. Appealing, as he may, to precedent in this\nmatter, the scholar will still remember that if \"the style is the man\"\nit is also the age: that the nineteenth century too will be found to\nhave had its style, justified by necessity--a style very different,\nalike from the baldness of an impossible \"Queen Anne\" revival, and an\nincorrect, incondite exuberance, after the mode of Elizabeth: that we\ncan only return to either at the price of an impoverishment of form or\nmatter, or both, although, an intellectually rich age such as ours\nbeing necessarily an eclectic one, we may well cultivate some of the\nexcellences of literary types so different as those: that in literature\nas in other matters it is well to unite as many diverse elements as may\nbe: that the individual writer or artist, certainly, is to be estimated\nby the number of graces he combines, and his power of interpenetrating\nthem in a given work.  To discriminate schools, of art, of literature,\nis, of course, part of the obvious business of literary criticism: but,\nin the work of literary production, it is easy to be overmuch occupied\nconcerning them.  For, in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of\none age or school of literary art against another, but of all\nsuccessive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the\nsubstance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.\n\n\nNOTES\n\n\n241. +Transliteration: ainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnon\nneoteron.  Translation: \"Praise wine for its age, but the song in first\nbloom.  Pindar, Odes, Book O, Poem 9, Line 47.\n\n244. +Transliteration: kosmiotes.  Liddell and Scott definition:\n\"propriety, decorum, orderly behavior.\"","title":"Appreciations, with an Essay on Style","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":62903}