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Title: Companionable Books

Author: Henry van Dyke

Release Date: February 8, 2020 [EBook #61345]

Language: English

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BY HENRY VAN DYKE


    Companionable Books
    The Valley of Vision
    Camp-Fires and Guide-Posts
    Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land
    Little Rivers
    Fisherman’s Luck

    Days Off
    The Unknown Quantity
    The Ruling Passion
    The Blue Flower

    Poems, Collection in one volume
    Songs Out of Doors

    Golden Stars
    The Red Flower
    The Grand Canyon, and Other Poems
    The White Bees, and Other Poems
    The Builders, and Other Poems
    Music, and Other Poems
    The Toiling of Felix, and Other Poems
    The House of Rimmon

    Studies in Tennyson
    Poems of Tennyson
    Fighting for Peace

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS




COMPANIONABLE BOOKS




[Illustration: JOHN KEATS.

Painted by Joseph Severn.

_From a photograph, copyright by Hollyer, London._]




                              COMPANIONABLE
                                  BOOKS

                                   BY
                             HENRY VAN DYKE

      _“What is this reading, which I must learn,” asked Adam, “and
      what is it like?”_

      _“It is something beyond gardening,” answered Raphael, “and at
      times you will find it a heavy task. But at its best it will
      be like listening through your eyes; and you shall hear the
      flowers laugh, the trees talk, and the stars sing.”_

      SOLOMON SINGLEWITZ—_The Life of Adam_

                                NEW YORK
                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                  1922

                           COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                   COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HARPER BROTHERS

                 Printed in the United States of America

                         Published October, 1922

[Illustration]




    To

    MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT

    AUTHOR AND RANCHMAN
    ONCE MY SCHOLAR
    ALWAYS MY FRIEND




PREFACE


Many books are dry and dusty, there is no juice in them; and many are
soon exhausted, you would no more go back to them than to a squeezed
orange; but some have in them an unfailing sap, both from the tree of
knowledge and from the tree of life.

By companionable books I mean those that are worth taking with you on a
journey, where the weight of luggage counts, or keeping beside your bed,
near the night-lamp; books that will bear reading often, and the more
slowly you read them the better you enjoy them; books that not only tell
you how things look and how people behave, but also interpret nature and
life to you, in language of beauty and power touched with the personality
of the author, so that they have a real voice audible to your spirit in
the silence.

Here I have written about a few of these books which have borne me good
company, in one way or another,—and about their authors, who have put
the best of themselves into their work. Such criticism as the volume
contains is therefore mainly in the form of appreciation with reasons for
it. The other kind of criticism you will find chiefly in the omissions.

So (changing the figure to suit this cabin by the sea) I send forth my
new ship, hoping only that it may carry something desirable from each of
the ports where it has taken on cargo, and that it may not be sunk by the
enemy before it touches at a few friendly harbours.

                                                          HENRY VAN DYKE.

SYLVANORA, _Seal Harbour, Me., August 19, 1922_.




CONTENTS


       _I._ _The Book of Books_                                          1

       _II._ _Poetry in the Psalms_                                     33

     _III._ _The Good Enchantment of Dickens_                           63

      _IV._ _Thackeray and Real Men_                                   103

       _V._ _George Eliot and Real Women_                              131

      _VI._ _The Poet of Immortal Youth (Keats)_                       165

     _VII._ _The Recovery of Joy (Wordsworth)_                         189

    _VIII._ _“The Glory of the Imperfect” (Browning)_                  233

      _IX._ _A Quaint Comrade by Quiet Streams (Walton)_               289

       _X._ _A Sturdy Believer (Samuel Johnson)_                       307

      _XI._ _A Puritan Plus Poetry (Emerson)_                          333

     _XII._ _An Adventurer in a Velvet Jacket (Stevenson)_             357




ILLUSTRATIONS


    _John Keats_                                              Frontispiece

                                                               Facing page

    _Charles Dickens as Captain Bobadil in “Every Man in His Humour”_   82

    _William Makepeace Thackeray_                                      120

    _William Wordsworth_                                               200

    _Robert Browning_                                                  246

    _Samuel Johnson_                                                   314

    _Ralph Waldo Emerson_                                              340

    _Robert Louis Stevenson_                                           360

_In the cover design by Margaret Armstrong the books and authors are
represented by the following symbolic flowers: Bible—grapes; Psalms—wheat;
Dickens—English holly; Thackeray—English rose; George Eliot—ivy;
Keats—bleeding-heart; Wordsworth—daffodil; Browning—pomegranate; Izaak
Walton—strawberry; Johnson—oak; Stevenson—Scottish bluebell._




THE BOOK OF BOOKS

_An Apologue_


There was once an Eastern prince who was much enamoured of the art of
gardening. He wished that all flowers delightful to the eye, and all
fruits pleasant to the taste and good for food, should grow in his
dominion, and that in growing the flowers should become more fair, the
fruits more savoury and nourishing. With this thought in his mind and
this desire in his heart, he found his way to the Ancient One, the Worker
of Wonders who dwells in a secret place, and made known his request.

“For the care of your gardens and your orchards,” said the Ancient One,
“I can do nothing, since that charge has been given to you and to your
people. Nor will I send blossoming plants and fruiting trees of every
kind to make your kingdom rich and beautiful as by magic, lest the honour
of labour should be diminished, and the slow reward of patience despised,
and even the living gifts bestowed upon you without toil should wither
and die away. But this will I do: a single tree shall be brought to you
from a far country by the hands of my servants, and you shall plant it in
the midst of your land. In the body of that tree is the sap of life that
was from the beginning; the leaves of it are full of healing; its flowers
never fail, and its fruitage is the joy of every season. The roots of
the tree shall go down to the springs of deep waters; and wherever its
pollen is drifted by the wind or borne by the bees, the gardens shall put
on new beauty; and wherever its seed is carried by the fowls of the air,
the orchards shall yield a richer harvest. But the tree itself you shall
guard and cherish and keep as I give it you, neither cutting anything
away from it, nor grafting anything upon it; for the life of the tree is
in all the branches, and the other trees shall be glad because of it.”

As the Ancient One had spoken, so it came to pass. The land of that
prince had great renown of fine flowers and delicious fruits, ever
unfolding in new colours and sweeter flavours the life that was shed
among them by the tree of trees.


I

Something like the marvel of this tale may be read in the history of
the Bible. No other book in the world has had such a strange vitality,
such an outgoing power of influence and inspiration. Not only has it
brought to the countries in whose heart it has been set new ideals of
civilization, new models of character, new conceptions of virtue and
hopes of happiness; but it has also given new impulse and form to the
shaping imagination of man, and begotten beauty in literature and the
other arts.

Suppose, for example, that it were possible to dissolve away all the
works of art which clearly owe their being to thoughts, emotions, or
visions derived from the Bible,—all sculpture like Donatello’s “David”
and Michelangelo’s “Moses”; all painting like Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna”
and Murillo’s “Holy Family”; all music like Bach’s “Passion” and Handel’s
“Messiah”; all poetry like Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Milton’s “Paradise
Lost,”—how it would impoverish the world!

The literary influence of the Bible appears the more wonderful when we
consider that it is the work of a race not otherwise potent or famous in
literature. We do not know, of course, what other books may have come
from the Jewish nation and vanished with whatever of power or beauty they
possessed; but in those that remain there is little of exceptional force
or charm for readers outside of the Hebrew race. They have no broad human
appeal, no universal significance, not even any signal excellence of form
and imagery. Josephus is a fairly good historian, sometimes entertaining,
but not comparable to Herodotus or Thucydides or Tacitus or Gibbon. The
Talmuds are vast storehouses of things new and old, where a careful
searcher may now and then find a legendary gem or a quaint fragment of
moral tapestry. In histories of mediæval literature, Ibn Ezra of Toledo
and Rashi of Lunel are spoken of with respect. In modern letters, works
as far apart as the philosophical treatises of Spinoza and the lyrics of
Heinrich Heine have distinction in their kind. No one thinks that the
Hebrews are lacking in great and varied talents; but how is it that in
world-literature their only contribution that counts is the Bible? And
how is it that it counts so immensely?

It is possible to answer by saying that in the Old Testament we have a
happily made collection of the best things in the ancient literature
of the Jews, and in the New Testament we have another anthology of the
finest of the narratives and letters which were produced by certain
writers of the same race under a new and exceedingly powerful spiritual
impulse. The Bible is excellent because it contains the cream of Hebrew
thought. But this answer explains nothing. It only restates the facts in
another form. How did the cream rise? How did such a collection come to
be made? What gives it unity and coherence underneath all its diversity?
How is it that, as a clear critic has well said, “These sixty books, with
all their varieties of age, authorship, literary form, are, when properly
arranged, felt to draw together with a unity like the connectedness of a
dramatic plot?”

There is an answer, which if it be accepted, carries with it a solution
of the problem.

Suppose a race chosen by some process of selection (which need not
now be discussed or defined) to develop in its strongest and most
absolute form that one of man’s faculties which is called the religious
sense, to receive most clearly and deeply the impression of the unity,
spirituality, and righteousness of a Supreme Being present in the world.
Imagine that race moving through a long and varied experience under this
powerful impression, now loyal to it, now rebelling against it, now
misinterpreting it, now led by the voice of some prophet to understand
it more fully and feel it more profoundly, but never wholly losing it
for a single generation. Imagine the history of that race, its poetry,
the biography of its famous men and women, the messages of its moral
reformers, conceived and written in constant relation to that strongest
factor of conscious life, the sense of the presence and power of the
Eternal.

Suppose, now, in a time of darkness and humiliation, that there rises
within that race a prophet who declares that a new era of spiritual light
has come, preaches a new revelation of the Eternal, and claims in his own
person to fulfil the ancient hopes and promises of a divine deliverer
and redeemer. Imagine his followers, few in number, accepting his
message slowly and dimly at first, guided by companionship with him into
a clearer understanding and a stronger belief, until at last they are
convinced that his claims are true, and that he is the saviour not only
of the chosen people, but also of the whole world, the revealer of the
Eternal to mankind. Imagine these disciples setting out with incredible
courage to carry this message to all nations, so deeply impressed with
its truth that they are supremely happy to suffer and die for it, so
filled with the passion of its meaning that they dare attempt to remodel
the life of the world with it. Suppose a human story like this underneath
the writing of the books which are gathered in the Bible, and you have
an explanation—it seems to me the only reasonable explanation—of their
surpassing quality and their strange unity.

This story is not a mere supposition: its general outline, stated in
these terms, belongs to the realm of facts which cannot reasonably be
questioned. What more is needed to account for the story itself, what
potent and irresistible reality is involved in this record of experience,
I do not now ask. This is not an estimate of the religious authority of
the Bible, nor of its inspiration in the theological sense of that word,
but only of something less important, though no less real—its literary
influence.


II

The fountain-head of the power of the Bible in literature lies in its
nearness to the very springs and sources of human life—life taken
seriously, earnestly, intensely; life in its broadest meaning, including
the inward as well as the outward; life interpreted in its relation
to universal laws and eternal values. It is this vital quality in the
narratives, the poems, the allegories, the meditations, the discourses,
the letters, gathered in this book, that gives it first place among the
books of the world not only for currency, but also for greatness.

For the currency of literature depends in the long run upon the breadth
and vividness of its human appeal. And the greatness of literature
depends upon the intensive significance of those portions of life which
it depicts and interprets. Now, there is no other book which reflects so
many sides and aspects of human experience as the Bible, and this fact
alone would suffice to give it a world-wide interest and make it popular.
But it mirrors them all, whether they belong to the chronicles of kings
and conquerors, or to the obscure records of the lowliest of labourers
and sufferers, in the light of a conviction that they are all related
to the will and purpose of the Eternal. This illuminates every figure
with a divine distinction, and raises every event to the _n_th power of
meaning. It is this fact that gives the Bible its extraordinary force as
literature and makes it great.

_Born in the East and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible
walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet and enters land after
land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds
of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the
monarch that he is a servant of the Most High, and into the cottage
to assure the peasant that he is a son of God. Children listen to its
stories with wonder and delight, and wise men ponder them as parables
of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, a word of comfort
for the day of calamity, a word of light for the hour of darkness. Its
oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels
whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wicked and the proud tremble
at its warning, but to the wounded and the penitent it has a mother’s
voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it,
and the fire on the hearth has lit the reading of its well-worn page. It
has woven itself into our deepest affections and coloured our dearest
dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and
hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of
frankincense and myrrh._

_Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us
uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the
beauty of them lingers on our ear long after the sermons which they
adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like
doves flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like
springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-trodden
path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart._

_No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the
landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the Valley named
of the Shadow, he is not afraid to enter: he takes the rod and staff of
Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, “Good-by; we shall
meet again”; and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely
pass as one who walks through darkness into light._

It would be strange indeed if a book which has played such a part in
human life had not exercised an extraordinary influence upon literature.
As a matter of fact, the Bible has called into existence tens of
thousands of other books devoted to the exposition of its meaning,
the defense and illustration of its doctrine, the application of its
teaching, or the record of its history. The learned Fabricius, in the
early part of the eighteenth century, published a _catalogue raisonné_
of such books, filling seven hundred quarto pages.[1] Since that time
the length of the list has probably more than trebled. In addition, we
must reckon the many books of hostile criticism and contrary argument
which the Bible has evoked, and which are an evidence of revolt against
the might of its influence. All this tangle of Biblical literature has
grown up around it like a vast wood full of all manner of trees, great
and small, useful and worthless, fruit-trees, timber-trees, berry-bushes,
briers, and poison-vines. But all of them, even the most beautiful and
tall, look like undergrowth, when we compare them with the mighty oak of
Scripture, towering in perennial grandeur, the father of the forest.

Among the patristic writers there were some of great genius like Origen
and Chrysostom and Augustine. The mediæval schools of theology produced
men of philosophic power, like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas; of spiritual
insight, like the author of the _Imitatio Christi_. The eloquence of
France reached its height in the discourses of Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and
Massillon. German became one of the potent tongues of literature when
Martin Luther used it in his tracts and sermons, and Herder’s _Geist der
hebräischen Poesie_ is one of the great books in criticism. In English,
to mention such names as Hooker and Fuller and Jeremy Taylor is to recall
the dignity, force, and splendour of prose at its best. Yet none of
these authors has produced anything to rival the book from which they
drew their common inspiration.

In the other camp, though there have been many brilliant assailants, not
one has surpassed, or even equalled, in the estimation of the world, the
literary excellence of the book which they attacked. The mordant wit
of Voltaire, the lucid and melancholy charm of Renan, have not availed
to drive or draw the world away from the Bible; and the effect of all
assaults has been to leave it more widely read, better understood, and
more intelligently admired than ever before.

Now it must be admitted that the same thing is true, at least in some
degree, of other books which are held to be sacred or quasi-sacred:
they are superior to the distinctively theological literature which has
grown up about them. I suppose nothing of the Mussulmans is as great as
the “Koran,” nothing of the Hindus as great as the “Vedas”; and though
the effect of the Confucian classics, from the literary point of view,
may not have been altogether good, their supremacy in the religious
library of the Chinese is unquestioned. But the singular and noteworthy
thing about the influence of the Bible is the extent to which it has
permeated general literature, the mark which it has made in all forms of
belles-lettres. To treat this subject adequately one would need to write
volumes. In this chapter I can touch but briefly on a few points of the
outline as they come out in English literature.


III

In the Old-English period, the predominant influence of the Scriptures
may be seen in the frequency with which the men of letters turned to
them for subjects, and in the Biblical colouring and texture of thought
and style. Cædmon’s famous “Hymn” and the other poems like “Genesis,”
“Exodus,” “Daniel,” and “Judith,” which were once ascribed to him;
Cynewulf’s “Crist,” “The Fates of the Apostles,” “The Dream of the
Rood”; Ælfric’s “Homilies” and his paraphrases of certain books of
Scripture—these early fruits of our literature are all the offspring of
the Bible.

In the Middle-English period, that anonymous masterpiece “Pearl” is
full of the spirit of Christian mysticism, and the two poems called
“Cleanness” and “Patience,” probably written by the same hand, are free
and spirited versions of stories from the Bible. “The Vision of Piers the
Plowman,” formerly ascribed to William Langland, but now supposed by some
scholars to be the work of four or five different authors, was the most
popular poem of the latter half of the fourteenth century. It is a vivid
picture of the wrongs and sufferings of the labouring man, a passionate
satire on the corruptions of the age in church and state, an eloquent
appeal for a return to truth and simplicity. The feeling and the imagery
of Scripture pervade it with a strange power and charm; in its reverence
for poverty and toil it leans closely and confidently upon the example of
Jesus; and at the end it makes its ploughman hero appear in some mystic
way as a type, first of the crucified Saviour, and then of the church
which is the body of Christ.

It was about this time, the end of the fourteenth century, that John
Wyclif and his disciples, feeling the need of the support of the Bible in
their work as reformers, took up and completed the task of translating
it entirely into the English tongue of the common people. This rude but
vigourous version was revised and improved by John Purvey. It rested
mainly upon the Latin version of St. Jerome. At the beginning of the
sixteenth century William Tindale made an independent translation of
the New Testament from the original Greek, a virile and enduring piece
of work, marked by strength and simplicity, and setting a standard for
subsequent English translations. Coverdale’s version of the Scriptures
was published in 1535, and was announced as made “out of Douche and
Latyn”; that is to say, it was based upon the German of Luther and the
Zurich Bible, and upon the Vulgate of St. Jerome; but it owed much to
Tindale, to whose manly force it added a certain music of diction and
grace of phrase which may still be noted in the Psalms as they are
rendered in the Anglican Prayer-Book. Another translation, marked by
accurate scholarship, was made by English Puritans at Geneva, and still
another, characterized by a richer Latinized style, was made by English
Catholics living in exile at Rheims, and was known as “the Douai
Version,” from the fact that it was first published in its complete form
in that city in 1609-1610.

Meantime, in 1604, a company of scholars had been appointed by King James
I in England to make a new translation “out of the original tongues, and
with the former translations diligently compared and revised.” These
forty-seven men had the advantage of all the work of their predecessors,
the benefit of all the discussion over doubtful words and phrases, and
the “unearned increment” of riches which had come into the English
language since the days of Wyclif. The result of their labours, published
in 1611, was the so-called “Authorized Version,” a monument of English
prose in its prime: clear, strong, direct, yet full of subtle rhythms
and strange colours; now moving as simply as a shepherd’s song, in the
Twenty-third Psalm; now marching with majestic harmonies, in the book
of Job; now reflecting the lowliest forms of human life, in the Gospel
stories; and now flashing with celestial splendours in the visions of
the Apocalypse; vivid without effort; picturesque without exaggeration;
sinewy without strain; capable alike of the deepest tenderness and the
most sublime majesty; using a vocabulary of only six thousand words to
build a book which, as Macaulay said, “if everything else in our language
should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty
and power.”

The literary excellence of this version, no doubt, did much to increase
the influence of the Bible in literature and confirm its place as the
central book in the life of those who speak and write the English tongue.
Consider a few of the ways in which this influence may be traced.


IV

First of all, it has had a general effect upon English writing, helping
to preserve it from the opposite faults of vulgarity and affectation.
Coleridge long ago remarked upon the tendency of a close study of the
Bible to elevate a writer’s style. There is a certain naturalness,
inevitableness, propriety of form to substance, in the language of
Scripture which communicates to its readers a feeling for the fitness
of words; and this in itself is the first requisite of good writing.
Sincerity is the best part of dignity.

The English of our Bible is singularly free from the vice of preciosity:
it is not far-sought, overnice, elaborate. Its plainness is a rebuking
contrast to all forms of euphuism. It does not encourage a direct
imitation of itself; for the comparison between the original and the copy
makes the latter look pale and dull. Even in the age which produced the
authorized version, its style was distinct and remarkable. As Hallam has
observed, it was “not the English of Daniel, of Raleigh, or Bacon.” It
was something larger, at once more ancient and more modern, and therefore
well fitted to become not an invariable model, but an enduring standard.
Its words come to it from all sources; they are not chosen according
to the foolish theory that a word of Anglo-Saxon origin is always
stronger and simpler than a Latin derivative. Take the beginning of the
Forty-sixth Psalm:

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the
mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof
roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling
thereof.”

Or take this passage from the Epistle to the Romans:

“Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour
preferring one another; not slothful in business; fervent in spirit;
serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing
instant in prayer; distributing to the necessity of saints; given to
hospitality.”

Here is a style that adapts itself by instinct to its subject, and
whether it uses Saxon words like “strength” and “help” and “love” and
“hope,” or Latin words like “refuge” and “trouble” and “present” and
“fervent” and “patient” and “prayer” and “hospitality,” weaves them into
a garment worthy of the thought.

The literary influence of a great, popular book written in such a style
is both inspiring and conservative. It survives the passing modes of
prose in each generation, and keeps the present in touch with the past.
It preserves a sense of balance and proportion in a language whose perils
lie in its liberties and in the indiscriminate use of its growing wealth.
And finally it keeps a medium of communication open between the learned
and the simple; for the two places where the effect of the Bible upon the
English language may be most clearly felt are in the natural speech of
the plain people and in the finest passages of great authors.


V

Following this line of the influence of the Bible upon language as the
medium of literature, we find, in the next place, that it has contributed
to our common speech a great number of phrases which are current
everywhere. Sometimes these phrases are used in a merely conventional
way. They serve as counters in a long extemporaneous prayer, or as
padding to a page of dull and pious prose. But at other times they
illuminate the sentence with a new radiance; they clarify its meaning
with a true symbol; they enhance its value with rich associations; they
are “sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.”

Take for example such phrases as these: “a good old age,” “the wife
of thy bosom,” “the apple of his eye,” “gathered to his fathers,” “a
mother in Israel,” “a land flowing with milk and honey,” “the windows
of heaven,” “the fountains of the great deep,” “living fountains of
waters,” “the valley of decision,” “cometh up as a flower,” “a garden
enclosed,” “one little ewe lamb,” “thou art the man,” “a still, small
voice,” “as the sparks fly upward,” “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,”
“miserable comforters,” “the strife of tongues,” “the tents of Kedar,”
“the cry of the humble,” “the lofty looks of man,” “the pride of life,”
“from strength to strength,” “as a dream when one awaketh,” “the wings
of the morning,” “stolen waters,” “a dinner of herbs,” “apples of gold
in pictures of silver,” “better than rubies,” “a lion in the way,”
“vanity of vanities,” “no discharge in that war,” “the little foxes that
spoil the vines,” “terrible as an army with banners,” “precept upon
precept, line upon line,” “as a drop of a bucket,” “whose merchants are
princes,” “trodden the wine-press alone,” “the rose of Sharon and the
lily of the valley,” “the highways and hedges,” “the salt of the earth,”
“the burden and heat of the day,” “the signs of the times,” “a pearl of
great price,” “what God hath joined together,” “the children of light,”
“the powers that be,” “if the trumpet give an uncertain sound,” “the
fashion of this world,” “decently and in order,” “a thorn in the flesh,”
“labour of love,” “a cloud of witnesses,” “to entertain angels unawares,”
“faithful unto death,” “a crown of life.” Consider also those expressions
which carry with them distinctly the memory of some ancient story: “the
fleshpots of Egypt,” “manna in the wilderness,” “a mess of pottage,”
“Joseph’s coat,” “the driving of Jehu,” “the mantle of Elijah,” “the
widow’s mite,” “the elder brother,” “the kiss of Judas,” “the house of
Martha,” “a friend of publicans and sinners,” “many mansions,” “bearing
the cross.” Into such phrases as these, which are familiar to us all, the
Bible has poured a wealth of meaning far beyond the measure of the bare
words. They call up visions and reveal mysteries.


VI

Direct, but not always accurate, quotations from Scripture and allusions
to Biblical characters and events are very numerous in English
literature. They are found in all sorts of books. Professor Albert T.
Cook has recently counted sixty-three in a volume of descriptive sketches
of Italy, twelve in a book on wild animals, and eighteen in a novel by
Thomas Hardy. A special study of the Biblical references in Tennyson has
been made,[2] and more than five hundred of them have been found.

Bishop Charles Wordsworth has written a book on _Shakespeare’s Knowledge
and Use of the Bible_,[3] and shown “how fully and how accurately the
general tenor of the facts recorded in the sacred narrative was present
to his mind,” and “how Scriptural are the conceptions which Shakespeare
had of the being and attributes of God, of His general and particular
Providence, of His revelation to man, of our duty toward Him and toward
each other, of human life and of human death, of time and of eternity.”
It is possible that the bishop benevolently credits the dramatist with a
more invariable and complete orthodoxy than he possessed. But certainly
Shakespeare knew the Bible well, and felt the dramatic value of allusions
and illustrations which were sure to be instantly understood by the plain
people. It is his Antonio, in _The Merchant of Venice_, who remarks that
“the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” evidently referring to
the Gospel story of the evil one who tried to tempt Jesus with a verse
from the Psalms.

The references to the Bible in the poetry of Robert Browning have been
very carefully examined by Mrs. Machen in an admirable little book.[4]
It is not too much to say that his work is crowded with Scriptural
quotations, allusions, and imagery. He follows Antonio’s maxim, and makes
his bad characters, like Bishop Blougram and Sludge the Medium, cite
from Holy Writ to cloak their hypocrisy or excuse their villainy. In his
longest poem, _The Ring and the Book_, there are said to be more than
five hundred Biblical references.

But more remarkable even than the extent to which this material drawn
from the Scriptures has been used by English writers, is the striking
effect which it produces when it is well used. With what pathos does Sir
Walter Scott, in _The Heart of Midlothian_, make old Davie Deans bow his
head when he sees his daughter Effie on trial for her life, and mutter to
himself, “Ichabod! my glory is departed!” How magnificently does Ruskin
enrich his _Sesame and Lilies_ with that passage from Isaiah in which the
fallen kings of Hades start from their thrones to greet the newly fallen
with the cry, “Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like
unto us?” How grandly do the images and thoughts of the last chapters of
Deuteronomy roll through Kipling’s _Recessional_, with its Scriptural
refrain, “Lest we forget!”

There are some works of literature in English since the sixteenth century
which are altogether Biblical in subject and colouring. Chief among these
in prose is _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ of John Bunyan, and in verse, the
_Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_ of John
Milton. These are already classics. Some day a place near them will be
given to Browning’s _Saul_ and _A Death in the Desert_; but for that we
must wait until their form has stood the test of time.

In general it may be observed—and the remark holds good of the works
just mentioned—that a Scriptural story or poem is most likely to succeed
when it takes its theme, directly or by suggestion, from the Bible, and
carries it into a region of imagination, a border-realm, where the author
is free to work without paraphrase or comparison with the sacred writers.
It is for this reason that both _Samson Agonistes_ and _Paradise Lost_
are superior to _Paradise Regained_.


VII

The largest and most important influence of the Bible in literature lies
beyond all these visible effects upon language and style and imagery
and form. It comes from the strange power of the book to nourish and
inspire, to mould and guide, the inner life of man. “_It finds me_,”
said Coleridge; and the word of the philosopher is one that the plain man
can understand and repeat.

The hunger for happiness which lies in every human heart can never be
satisfied without righteousness; and the reason why the Bible reaches
down so deep into the breast of man is because it brings news of a
kingdom which _is_ righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. It
brings this news not in the form of a dogma, a definition, a scientific
statement, but in the form of literature, a living picture of experience,
a perfect ideal embodied in a Character and a Life. And because it does
this, it has inspiration for those who write in the service of truth and
humanity.

The Bible has been the favourite book of those who were troubled and
downtrodden, and of those who bore the great burden of a great task. New
light has broken forth from it to lead the upward struggle of mankind
from age to age. Men have come back to it because they could not do
without it. Nor will its influence wane, its radiance be darkened, unless
literature ceases to express the noblest of human longings, the highest
of human hopes, and mankind forgets all that is now incarnate in the
central figure of the Bible,—the Divine Deliverer.




POETRY IN THE PSALMS


There are three ways in which we may read the Bible.

We may come to it as the divinely inspired rule of faith and conduct.
This is the point of view from which it appears most precious to
religion. It gives us the word of God to teach us what to believe and how
to live.

We may consider it as a collection of historical books, written under
certain conditions, and reflecting, in their contents and in their
language, the circumstances in which they were produced. This is the
aspect in which criticism regards the Bible; and its intellectual
interest, as well as its religious value, is greatly enhanced by a clear
vision of the truth about it from this point of view.

We may study it also as literature. We may see in it a noble and
impassioned interpretation of nature and life, uttered in language
of beauty and sublimity, touched with the vivid colours of human
personality, and embodied in forms of enduring literary art.

None of these three ways of studying the Bible is hostile to the others.
On the contrary, they are helpful to one another, because each of them
gives us knowledge of a real factor in the marvellous influence of the
Bible in the world.

The true lover of the Bible has an interest in all the elements of
its life as an immortal book. He wishes to discern, and rightly to
appreciate, the method of its history, the spirit of its philosophy, the
significance of its fiction, the power of its eloquence, and the charm of
its poetry. He wishes this all the more because he finds in it something
which is not in any other book: a vision of God, a hope for man, and an
inspiration to righteousness which seem to him divine. As the worshipper
in the Temple would observe the art and structure of the carven beams of
cedar and the lily-work on the tops of the pillars the more attentively
because they beautified the house of his God, so the man who has a
religious faith in the Bible will study more eagerly and carefully the
literary forms of the book in which the Holy Spirit speaks forever.

It is in this spirit that I wish to consider the poetical element in the
Psalms. The comfort, help, and guidance that they bring to our spiritual
life will not be diminished, but increased, by a perception of their
exquisite form and finish. If a king sent a golden cup full of cheering
cordial to a weary man, he might well admire the two-fold bounty of the
royal gift. The beauty of the vessel would make the draught more grateful
and refreshing. And if the cup were inexhaustible, if it filled itself
anew as often as it touched the lips, then the very shape and adornment
of it would become significant and precious. It would be an inestimable
possession, a singing goblet, a treasure of life.

John Milton, whose faith in religion was as exalted as his mastery of
the art of poetry was perfect, has expressed in a single sentence the
spirit in which I would approach the poetic study of the Book of Psalms:
“Not in their divine arguments alone, but in the very critical art of
composition, the Psalms may be easily made to appear over all kinds of
lyric poetry incomparable.”


I

Let us remember at the outset that a considerable part of the value of
the Psalms as poetry will lie beyond our reach. We cannot precisely
measure it, nor give it full appreciation, simply because we are dealing
with the Psalms only as we have them in our English Bible. This is a real
drawback; and it is well to understand clearly the two things that we
lose in reading the Psalms in this way.

First, we lose the beauty and the charm of verse. This is a serious loss.
Poetry and verse are not the same thing, but they are so intimately
related that it is difficult to divide them. Indeed, according to certain
definitions of poetry, it would seem almost impossible.

Yet who will deny that the Psalms as we have them in the English Bible
are really and truly poetical?

The only way out of this difficulty that I can see is to distinguish
between verse as the formal element and imaginative emotion as the
essential element in poetry. In the original production of a poem, it
seems to me, it is just to say that the embodiment in metrical language
is a law of art which must be observed. But in the translation of a poem
(which is a kind of reflection of it in a mirror) the verse may be lost
without altogether losing the spirit of the poem.

Take an illustration from another art. A statue has the symmetry of solid
form. You can look at it from all sides, and from every side you can see
the balance and rhythm of the parts. In a photograph this solidity of
form disappears. You see only a flat surface. But you still recognize it
as the reflection of a statue.

The Psalms were undoubtedly written, in the original Hebrew, according to
a system of versification, and perhaps to some extent with forms of rhyme.

The older scholars, like Lowth and Herder, held that such a system
existed, but could not be recovered. Later scholars, like Ewald, evolved
a system of their own. Modern scholarship, represented by such authors
as Professors Cheyne and Briggs, is reconstructing and explaining more
accurately the Hebrew versification. But, for the present at least, the
only thing that is clear is that this system must remain obscure to us.
It cannot be reproduced in English. The metrical versions of the Psalms
are the least satisfactory. The poet Cowley said of them, “They are so
far from doing justice to David that methinks they revile him worse
than Shimei.”[5] We must learn to appreciate the poetry in the Psalms
without the aid of those symmetries of form and sound in which they first
appeared. This is a serious loss. Poetry without verse is like a bride
without a bridal garment.

The second thing that we lose in reading the Psalms in English is
something even more important. It is the heavy tax on the wealth of its
meaning, which all poetry must pay when it is imported from one country
to another, through the medium of translation.

The most subtle charm of poetry is its suggestiveness; and much of
this comes from the magical power which words acquire over memory and
imagination, from their associations. This intimate and personal charm
must be left behind when a poem passes from one language to another. The
accompaniment, the harmony of things remembered and beloved, which the
very words of the song once awakened, is silent now. Nothing remains but
the naked melody of thought. If this is pure and strong, it will gather
new associations; as, indeed, the Psalms have already done in English,
so that their familiar expressions have become charged with musical
potency. And yet I suppose such phrases as “a tree planted by the rivers
of water,” “a fruitful vine in the innermost parts of the house,” “the
mountains round about Jerusalem,” can never bring to us the full sense of
beauty, the enlargement of heart, that they gave to the ancient Hebrews.
But, in spite of this double loss, in the passage from verse to prose and
from Hebrew to English, the poetry in the Psalms is so real and vital and
imperishable that every reader feels its beauty and power.

It retains one valuable element of poetic form. This is that balancing
of the parts of a sentence, one against another, to which Bishop Lowth
first gave the familiar name of “parallelism.”[6] The effect of this
simple artifice, learned from Nature herself, is singularly pleasant
and powerful. It is the rise and fall of the fountain, the ebb and flow
of the tide, the tone and overtone of the chiming bell. The two-fold
utterance seems to bear the thought onward like the wings of a bird. A
German writer compares it very exquisitely to “the heaving and sinking of
the troubled heart.”

It is this “parallelism” which gives such a familiar charm to the
language of the Psalms. Unconsciously, and without recognizing the nature
of the attraction, we grow used to the double cadence, the sound and the
echo, and learn to look for its recurrence with delight.

    O come let us sing unto the Lord;
  Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation,
  Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving;
  And make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.

If we should want a plain English name for this method of composition we
might call it _thought-rhyme_. It is easy to find varied illustrations of
its beauty and of its power to emphasize large and simple ideas.

Take for instance that very perfect psalm with which the book begins—a
poem so complete, so compact, so delicately wrought that it seems like a
sonnet. The subject is _The Two Paths_.

The first part describes the way of the good man. It has three divisions.

The first verse gives a description of his conduct by negatives—telling
us what he does not do. There is a triple thought-rhyme here.

  Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
  Nor standeth in the way of sinners,
  Nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

The second verse describes his character positively, with a double
thought-rhyme.

  But his delight is in the law of the Lord;
  And in his law doth he meditate day and night.

The third verse tells us the result of this character and conduct, in a
fourfold thought-rhyme.

  He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water:
  That bringeth forth his fruit in his season:
  His leaf also shall not wither:
  And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

The second part of the psalm describes the way of the evil man. In the
fourth verse there is a double thought-rhyme.

  The ungodly are not so:
  But are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

In the fifth verse the consequences of this worthless, fruitless,
unrooted life are shown, again with a double cadence of thought, the
first referring to the judgment of God, the second to the judgment of men.

  Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment:
  Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

The third part of the psalm is a terse, powerful couplet, giving the
reason for the different ending of the two paths.

  For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous:
  But the way of the ungodly shall perish.

The thought-rhyme here is one of contrast.

A poem of very different character from this brief, serious, impersonal
sonnet is found in the Forty-sixth Psalm, which might be called a
National Anthem. Here again the poem is divided into three parts.

The first part (verses first to third) expresses a sense of joyful
confidence in the Eternal, amid the tempests and confusions of earth.
The thought-rhymes are in couplets; and the second phrase, in each case,
emphasizes and enlarges the idea of the first phrase.

  God is our refuge and strength:
  A very present help in trouble.

The second part (verses fourth to seventh) describes the peace and
security of the city of God, surrounded by furious enemies, but rejoicing
in the Eternal Presence. The parallel phrases here follow the same rule
as in the first part. The concluding phrase is the stronger, the more
emphatic. The seventh verse gives the refrain or chorus of the anthem.

  The Lord of hosts is with us:
  The God of Jacob is our refuge.

The last part (verses eighth to tenth) describes in a very vivid and
concrete way the deliverance of the people that have trusted in the
Eternal. It begins with a couplet, like those which have gone before.
Then follow two stanzas of triple thought-rhymes, in which the thought is
stated and intensified with each repetition.

  He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth:
  He breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder:
  He burneth the chariot in the fire.

  Be still, and know that I am God:
  I will be exalted among the heathen:
  I will be exalted in the earth.

The anthem ends with a repetition of the refrain.

A careful study of the Psalms, even in English, will enable the
thoughtful reader to derive new pleasure from them, by tracing the many
modes and manners in which this poetic form of thought-rhyme is used to
bind the composition together, and to give balance and harmony to the
poem.

Another element of poetic form can be discerned in the Psalms, not
directly, in the English version, but by its effects. I mean the curious
artifice of alphabetic arrangement. It was a favourite practice among
Hebrew poets to begin their verses with the successive letters of the
alphabet, or sometimes to vary the device by making every verse in a
strophe begin with one letter, and every verse in the next strophe with
the following letter, and so on to the end. The Twenty-fifth and the
Thirty-seventh Psalms were written by the first of these rules; the One
Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm follows the second plan.

Of course the alphabetic artifice disappears entirely in the English
translation. But its effects remain. The Psalms written in this manner
usually have but a single theme, which is repeated over and over again,
in different words and with new illustrations. They are kaleidoscopic.
The material does not change, but it is turned this way and that way, and
shows itself in new shapes and arrangements. These alphabetic psalms are
characterized by poverty of action and richness of expression.


II

Milton has already reminded us that the Psalms belong to the second
of the three orders into which the Greeks, with clear discernment,
divided all poetry: the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic. The Psalms
are rightly called lyrics because they are chiefly concerned with the
immediate and imaginative expression of real feeling. It is the personal
and emotional note that predominates. They are inward, confessional,
intense; outpourings of the quickened spirit; self-revelations of the
heart. It is for this reason that we should never separate them in our
thought from the actual human life out of which they sprung. We must
feel the warm pulse of humanity in them in order to comprehend their
meaning and immortal worth. So far as we can connect them with the actual
experience of men, this will help us to appreciate their reality and
power. The effort to do this will make plain to us some other things
which it is important to remember.

We shall see at once that the book does not come from a single writer,
but from many authors and ages. It represents the heart of man in
communion with God through a thousand years of history, from Moses to
Nehemiah, perhaps even to the time of the Maccabean revival. It is,
therefore, something very much larger and better than an individual book.

It is the golden treasury of lyrics gathered from the life of the Hebrew
people, the hymn-book of the Jews. And this gives to it a singular and
precious quality of brotherhood. The fault, or at least the danger, of
modern lyrical poetry is that it is too solitary and separate in its
tone. It tends towards exclusiveness, over-refinement, morbid sentiment.
Many Christian hymns suffer from this defect. But the Psalms breathe a
spirit of human fellowship even when they are most intensely personal.
The poet rejoices or mourns in solitude, it may be, but he is not alone
in spirit. He is one of the people. He is conscious always of the ties
that bind him to his brother men. Compare the intense selfishness of the
modern hymn:

  I can but perish if I go;
    I am resolved to try;
  For if I stay away, I know
    I shall forever die;

with the generous penitence of the Fifty-first Psalm:

  Then will I teach transgressors thy way;
  And sinners shall be converted unto thee.

It is important to observe that there are several different kinds of
lyrics among the Psalms. Some of them are simple and natural outpourings
of a single feeling, like _A Shepherd’s Song about His Shepherd_, the
incomparable Twenty-third Psalm.

This little poem is a perfect melody. It would be impossible to express
a pure, unmixed emotion—the feeling of joy in the Divine Goodness—more
simply, with a more penetrating lyrical charm. The “valley of the
death-shadow,” the “enemies” in whose presence the table is spread, are
but dimly suggested in the background. The atmosphere of the psalm is
clear and bright. The singing shepherd walks in light. The whole world is
the House of the Lord, and life is altogether gladness.

How different is the tone, the quality, of the One Hundred and Nineteenth
Psalm! This is not a melody, but a harmony; not a song, but an ode. The
ode has been defined as “a strain of exalted and enthusiastic lyrical
verse, directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one
dignified theme.”[7] This definition precisely fits the One Hundred and
Nineteenth Psalm.

Its theme is _The Eternal Word_. Every verse in the poem, except one,
contains some name or description of the law, commandments, testimonies,
precepts, statutes, or judgments of Jehovah. Its enthusiasm for the
Divine Righteousness never fails from beginning to end. Its fixed purpose
is to kindle in other hearts the flame of devotion to the one Holy Law.
It closes with a touch of magnificent pathos—a confession of personal
failure and an assertion of spiritual loyalty:

  I have gone astray like a lost sheep:
  Seek thy servant:
  For I do not forget thy commandments.

The Fifteenth Psalm I should call a short didactic lyric. Its title is
_The Good Citizen_. It begins with a question:

  Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle?
  Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?

This question is answered by the description of a man whose character
corresponds to the law of God. First there is a positive sketch in three
broad lines:

  He that walketh uprightly,
  And worketh righteousness,
  And speaketh truth in his heart.

Then comes a negative characterization in a finely touched triplet:

  He that backbiteth not with his tongue,
  Nor doeth evil to his neighbor,
  Nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor.

This is followed by a couplet containing a strong contrast:

  In whose eyes a vile person is contemned:
  But he honoureth them that fear the Lord.

Then the description goes back to the negative style again and three more
touches are added to the picture:

  He that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not,
  He that putteth not out his money to usury,
  Nor taketh reward against the innocent.

The poem closes with a single vigourous line, summing up the character of
the good citizen and answering the question of the first verse with a new
emphasis of security and permanence:

  He that doeth these things shall never be moved.

The Seventy-eighth, One Hundred and Fifth, and One Hundred and Sixth
Psalms are lyrical ballads. They tell the story of Israel in Egypt, and
in the Wilderness, and in Canaan, with swift, stirring phrases, and with
splendid flashes of imagery. Take this passage from the Seventy-eighth
Psalm as an example:

  He clave the rocks in the wilderness,
  _And gave them drink out of the great depths_.

  He brought streams also out of the rock,
  _And caused waters to run down like rivers_.

  And they sinned yet more against him,
  Provoking the Most High in the wilderness.

  _They tempted God in their hearts_,
  Asking meat for their lust.

  Yea, they spake against God:
  They said, _Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?_

  Behold, he smote the rock that the waters gushed out,
  And the streams overflowed;

  Can he give bread also?
  Can he provide flesh for his people?

  Therefore the Lord heard and was wroth:
  _So a fire was kindled against Jacob,_
  _And anger also came up against Israel:_
  Because they believed not in God,
  And trusted not in his salvation:

  Though he had commanded the clouds from above,
  And opened the doors of heaven,
  And had rained down manna upon them to eat,
  _And had given them of the corn of heaven,_
  _Man did eat angel’s food:_

  He sent them meat to the full.
  He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven,
  And by his power he brought in the south wind.
  _He rained flesh also upon them as dust,_
  _And feathered fowls like as the sand of the sea._

  And he let it fall in the midst of their camp,
  Round about their habitations;
  So they did eat and were filled,
  _For he gave them their own desire_.

  They were not estranged from their lust:
  _But while the meat was yet in their mouths,_
  _The wrath of God came upon them, and slew the fattest of them_,
  And smote down the chosen men of Israel.

The Forty-fifth Psalm is a Marriage Ode: the Hebrew title calls it a
Love Song. It bears all the marks of having been composed for some royal
wedding-feast in Jerusalem.

There are many nature lyrics among the Psalms. The Twenty-ninth is
notable for its rugged realism. It is a Song of Thunder.

  The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars:
  Yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon:
  He maketh them also to skip like a calf:
  Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn.

The One Hundred and Fourth, on the contrary, is full of calm sublimity
and meditative grandeur.

  O, Lord, my God, thou art very great:
  Thou art clothed with honour and majesty:

  Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment;
  Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.

The Nineteenth is famous for its splendid comparison between “the starry
heavens and the moral law.”

I think that we may find also some dramatic lyrics among the Psalms—poems
composed to express the feelings of an historic person, like David or
Solomon, in certain well-known and striking experiences of his life. That
a later writer should thus embody and express the truth dramatically
through the personality of some great hero of the past, involves no
falsehood. It is a mode of utterance which has been common to the
literature of all lands and of all ages. Such a method of composition
would certainly be no hindrance to the spirit of inspiration. The
Thirty-first Psalm, for instance, is ascribed by the title to David. But
there is strong reason, in the phraseology and in the spirit of the poem,
to believe that it was written by the Prophet Jeremiah.


III

It is not to be supposed that our reverence for the Psalms in their
moral and religious aspects will make us put them all on the same level
poetically. There is a difference among the books of the New Testament
in regard to the purity and dignity of the Greek in which they are
written. There is a difference among St. Paul’s Epistles in regard to
the clearness and force of their style. There is a difference even among
the chapters of the same epistle in regard to the beauty of thought and
language. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the thirteenth chapter
is poetic, and the fourteenth is prosaic. Why should there not be a
difference in poetic quality among the Psalms?

There is a difference. The honest reader will recognize it. It will be no
harm to him if he should have his favourites among the poems which have
been gathered from many centuries into this great collection.

There are some, like the Twenty-seventh, the Forty-second, the
Forty-sixth, the Fifty-first, the Sixty-third, the Ninety-first, the
Ninety-sixth, the One Hundred and Third, the One Hundred and Seventh,
the One Hundred and Thirty-ninth, which rank with the noblest poetic
literature of the world. Others move on a lower level, and show the
traces of effort and constraint. There are also manifest alterations
and interpolations, which are not always improvements. Dr. Perowne,
who is one of the wisest and most conservative of modern commentators,
says, “Many of the Psalms have not come down to us in their original
form,”[8] and refers to the alterations which the Seventieth makes in
the Fortieth, and the Fifty-third in the Fourteenth. The last two verses
of the Fifty-first were evidently added by a later hand. The whole book,
in its present form, shows the marks of its compilation and use as the
Hymn-Book of the Jewish people. Not only in the titles, but also in the
text, we can discern the work of the compiler, critic, and adapter,
sometimes wise, but occasionally otherwise.


IV

The most essential thing in the appreciation of the poetry in the
Psalms is the recognition of the three great spiritual qualities which
distinguish them.

The first of these is the deep and genuine love of nature. The psalmists
delight in the vision of the world, and their joy quickens their senses
to read both the larger hieroglyphs of glory written in the stars and
the delicate tracings of transient beauty on leaf and flower; to hear
both the mighty roaring of the sea and the soft sweet laughter of the
rustling corn-fields. But in all these they see the handwriting and
hear the voice of God. It is His presence that makes the world sublime
and beautiful. The direct, piercing, elevating sense of this presence
simplifies, enlarges, and enables their style, and makes it different
from other nature-poetry. They never lose themselves, as Theocritus and
Wordsworth and Shelley and Tennyson sometimes do, in the contemplation
and description of natural beauty. They see it, but they always see
beyond it. Compare, for example, a modern versified translation with the
psalm itself:

  The spacious firmament on high,
  With all the blue ethereal sky
  And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
  Their Great Original proclaim.[9]

Addison’s descriptive epithets betray a conscious effort to make a
splendid picture. But the psalmist felt no need of this; a larger impulse
lifted him at once into “the grand style:”

  The heavens declare the glory of God;
  And the firmament showeth his handiwork.

The second quality of the poetry in the Psalms is their passionate sense
of the beauty of holiness. Keats was undoubtedly right in his suggestion
that the poet must always see truth in the form of beauty. Otherwise he
may be a philosopher, or a critic, or a moralist, but he is not a true
poet. But we must go on from this standpoint to the Platonic doctrine
that the highest form of beauty is spiritual and ethical. The poet must
also see beauty in the light of truth. It is the harmony of the soul with
the eternal music of the Good. And the highest poets are those who, like
the psalmists, are most ardently enamoured of righteousness. This fills
their songs with sweetness and fire incomparable and immortal:

  The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever:
  The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
  More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold:
  Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

The third quality of the poetry of the Psalms is their intense joy in
God. No lover ever poured out the longings of his heart toward his
mistress more eagerly than the Psalmist voices his desire and thirst for
God. No conqueror ever sang of victory more exultantly than the Psalmist
rejoices in the Lord, who is his light and his salvation, the strength of
his life and his portion forever.

After all, the true mission of poetry is to increase joy. It must,
indeed, be sensitive to sorrow and acquainted with grief. But it has
wings given to it in order that it may bear us up into the air of
gladness.

There is no perfect joy without love. Therefore love-poetry is the best.
But the highest of all love-poetry is that which celebrates, with the
Psalms,

        that Love which is and was
  My Father and my Brother and my God.




THE GOOD ENCHANTMENT OF CHARLES DICKENS


I

There are four kinds of novels.

First, those that are easy to read and hard to remember: the well-told
tales of no consequence, the cream-puffs of perishable fiction.

Second, those that are hard to read and hard to remember: the
purpose-novels which are tedious sermons in disguise, and the love-tales
in which there is no one with whom it is possible to fall in love.

Third, those that are hard to read and easy to remember: the books with a
crust of perverse style or faulty construction through which the reader
must break in order to get at the rich and vital meaning.

Fourth, those that are easy to read and easy to remember: the novels in
which stories worth telling are well-told, and characters worth observing
are vividly painted, and life is interpreted to the imagination in
enduring forms of literary art. These are the best-sellers which do not
go out of print—everybody’s books.

In this fourth class healthy-minded people and unprejudiced critics
put the novels of Charles Dickens. For millions of readers they have
fulfilled what Dr. Johnson called the purpose of good books, to teach us
to enjoy life or help us to endure it. They have awakened laughter and
tears. They have enlarged and enriched existence by revealing the hidden
veins of humour and pathos beneath the surface of the every-day world,
and by giving “the freedom of the city” to those poor prisoners who had
thought of it only as the dwelling-place of so many hundred thousand
inhabitants and no real persons.

What a city it was that Dickens opened to us! London, of course, in
outward form and semblance,—the London of the early Victorian epoch, with
its reeking Seven Dials close to its perfumed Piccadilly, with its grimy
river-front and its musty Inns of Court and its mildly rural suburbs,
with its rollicking taverns and its deadly solemn residential squares and
its gloomy debtors’ prisons and its gaily insanitary markets, with all
its consecrated conventions and unsuspected hilarities,—vast, portentous,
formal, merry, childish, inexplicable, a wilderness of human homes and
haunts, ever thrilling with sincerest passion, mirth, and pain,—London it
was, as the eye saw it in those days, and as the curious traveller may
still retrace some of its vanishing landmarks and fading features.

But it was more than London, after Dickens touched it. It was an
enchanted city, where the streets seemed to murmur of joy or fear,
where the dark faces of the dens of crime scowled or leered at you, and
the decrepit houses doddered in senility, and the new mansions stared
you down with stolid pride. Everything spoke or made a sign to you.
From red-curtained windows jollity beckoned. From prison-doors lean
hands stretched toward you. Under bridges and among slimy piers the
river gurgled, and chuckled, and muttered unholy secrets. Across trim
front-yards little cottages smiled and almost nodded their good-will.
There were no dead spots, no deaf and dumb regions. All was alive and
significant. Even the real estate became personal. One felt that it
needed but a word, a wave of the wand, to bring the buildings leaping,
roistering, creeping, tottering, stalking from their places.

It was an enchanted city, and the folk who filled it and almost,
but never quite, crowded it to suffocation, were so intensely and
supernaturally human, so blackly bad, so brightly good, so touchingly
pathetic, so supremely funny, that they also were creatures of
enchantment and seemed to come from fairy-land.

For what is fairy-land, after all? It is not an invisible region, an
impossible place. It is only the realm of the hitherto unobserved, the
not yet realized, where the things we have seen but never noticed, and
the persons we have met but never known, are suddenly “translated,” like
Bottom the Weaver, and sent forth upon strange adventures.

That is what happens to the Dickens people. Good or bad they surpass
themselves when they get into his books. That rotund Brownie,
Mr. Pickwick, with his amazing troupe; that gentle compound of
Hop-o’-my-Thumb and a Babe in the Wood, Oliver Twist, surrounded by
wicked uncles, and hungry ogres, and good fairies in bottle-green coats;
that tender and lovely Red Riding-Hood, Little Nell; that impetuous
Hans-in-Luck, Nicholas Nickleby; that intimate Cinderella, Little Dorrit;
that simple-minded Aladdin, Pip; all these, and a thousand more like
them, go rambling through Dickensopolis and behaving naturally in a most
extraordinary manner.

Things that have seldom or never happened, occur inevitably. The
preposterous becomes the necessary, the wildly improbable is the one
thing that must come to pass. Mr. Dombey is converted, Mr. Krook is
removed by spontaneous combustion, Mr. Micawber performs amazing feats
as an amateur detective, Sam Weller gets married, the immortally absurd
epitaphs of Young John Chivery and Mrs. Sapsea are engraved upon
monuments more lasting than brass.

The fact is, Dickens himself was bewitched by the spell of his own
imagination. His people carried him away, did what they liked with him.
He wrote of Little Nell: “You can’t imagine how exhausted I am to-day
with yesterday’s labours. I went to bed last night utterly dispirited and
done up. All night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I
am unrefreshed and miserable. I don’t know what to do with myself.... I
think the close of the story will be great.” Again he says: “As to the
way in which these characters have opened out [in _Martin Chuzzlewit_],
that is to me one of the most surprising processes of the mind in this
sort of invention. Given what one knows, what one does not know springs
up; and I am _as absolutely certain of its being true, as I am of the law
of gravitation_—if such a thing is possible, more so.”

Precisely such a thing (as Dickens very well understood) is not only
possible, but unavoidable. For what certainty have we of the law of
gravitation? Only by hearsay, by the submissive reception of a process
of reasoning conducted for us by Sir Isaac Newton and other vaguely
conceived men of science. The fall of an apple is an intense reality
(especially if it falls upon your head); but the law which regulates its
speed is for you an intellectual abstraction as remote as the idea of a
“combination in restraint of trade,” or the definition of “art for art’s
sake.” Whereas the irrepressible vivacity of Sam Weller, and the unctuous
hypocrisy of Pecksniff, and the moist humility of Uriah Heep, and the
sublime conviviality of Dick Swiveller, and the triumphant make-believe
of the Marchioness are facts of experience. They have touched you, and
you cannot doubt them. The question whether they are actual or imaginary
is purely academic.

Another fairy-land feature of Dickens’s world is the way in which minor
personages of the drama suddenly take the centre of the stage and hold
the attention of the audience. It is always so in fairy-land.

In _The Tempest_, what are Prospero and Miranda, compared with Caliban
and Ariel? In _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, who thinks as much of Oberon
and Titania, as of Puck, and Bottom the Weaver? Even in an historical
drama like Henry IV, we feel that Falstaff is the most historic character.

Dickens’s first lady and first gentleman are often less memorable than
his active supernumeraries. A hobgoblin like Quilp, a good old nurse
like Peggotty, a bad old nurse like Sairey Gamp, a volatile elf like Miss
Mowcher, a shrewd elf and a blunder-headed elf like Susan Nipper and Mr.
Toots, a good-natured disreputable sprite like Charley Bates, a malicious
gnome like Noah Claypole, a wicked ogre like Wackford Squeers, a pair
of fairy-godmothers like the Cheeryble Brothers, a dandy ouphe like Mr.
Mantalini, and a mischievous, wooden-legged kobold like Silas Wegg, take
stronger hold upon us than the Harry Maylies and Rose Flemings, the John
Harmons and Bella Wilfers, for whose ultimate matrimonial felicity the
business of the plot is conducted. Even the more notable heroes often
pale a little by comparison with their attendants. Who remembers Martin
Chuzzlewit as clearly as his servant Mark Tapley? Is Pip, with his Great
Expectations, half as delightful as his clumsy dry-nurse Joe Gargery? Has
even the great Pickwick a charm to compare with the unique, immortal Sam
Weller?

Do not imagine that Dickens was unconscious of this disarrangement of
rôles, or that it was an evidence of failure on his part. He knew
perfectly well what he was doing. Great authors always do. They cannot
help it, and they do not care. Homer makes Agamemnon and Priam the kings
of his tale, and Paris the first walking gentleman and Helen the leading
lady. But Achilles and Ajax and Hector are the bully boys, and Ulysses is
the wise jester, and Thersites the tragic clown. As for Helen,—

  The face that launched a thousand ships,
  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium—

her reputed pulchritude means less to us than the splendid womanhood of
Andromache, or the wit and worth of the adorable matron Penelope.

Now this unconventionality of art, which disregards ranks and titles,
even those of its own making, and finds the beautiful and the absurd, the
grotesque and the picturesque, the noble and the base, not according to
the programme but according to the fact, is precisely the essence of good
enchantment.

Good enchantment goes about discovering the ass in the lion’s skin and
the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the princess in the goose-girl and the
wise man under the fool’s cap, the pretender in the purple robe and the
rightful heir in rags, the devil in the belfry and the Redeemer among
the publicans and sinners. It is the spirit of revelation, the spirit of
divine sympathy and laughter, the spirit of admiration, hope, and love—or
better still, it is simply the spirit of life.

When I call this the essence of good enchantment I do not mean that it is
unreal. I mean only that it is _unrealistic_, which is just the opposite
of unreal. It is not in bondage to the beggarly elements of form and
ceremony. It is not captive to names and appearances, though it revels
in their delightful absurdity. It knows that an idol is nothing, and
finds all the more laughter in its pompous pretence of being something.
It can afford to be merry because it is in earnest; it is happy because
it has not forgotten how to weep; it is content because it is still
unsatisfied; it is humble in the sense of unfathomed faults and exalted
in the consciousness of inexhaustible power; it calls nothing common or
unclean; it values life for its mystery, its surprisingness, and its
divine reversals of human prejudice,—just like Beauty and the Beast and
the story of the Ugly Duckling.

This, I say, is the essence of good enchantment; and it is also the
essence of true religion. “For God hath chosen the foolish things of the
world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound
the mighty, and base things of the world and things which are despised,
yea, and _things which are not, to bring to naught things which are._”

This is also the essence of real democracy, which is not a theory of
government but a state of mind.

No one has ever expressed it better than Charles Dickens did in a speech
which he made at Hartford, Connecticut, seventy years ago. “I have
faith,” said he, “and I wish to diffuse faith in the existence—yes,
of beautiful things, even in those conditions of society which are so
degenerate, so degraded and forlorn, that at first sight it would seem as
though it could only be described by a strange and terrible reversal of
the words of Scripture—God said let there be light, and there was none.
I take it that we are born, and that we hold our sympathies, hopes, and
energies in trust for the Many and not the Few. That we cannot hold in
too strong a light of disgust and contempt, before our own view and that
of others, all meanness, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression of every
grade and kind. Above all, that nothing is high because it is in a high
place; and that nothing is low because it is in a low place. This is the
lesson taught us in the great book of Nature. This is the lesson which
may be read alike in the bright track of the stars, and in the dusty
course of the poorest thing that drags its tiny length upon the ground.”

This was the creed of Dickens; and like every man’s creed, conscious or
unconscious, confessed or concealed, it made him what he was.

It has been said that he had no deep philosophy, no calmly reasoned
and clearly stated theory of the universe. Perhaps that is true. Yet I
believe he hardly missed it. He was too much interested in living to be
anxious about a complete theory of life. Perhaps it would have helped
him when trouble came, when domestic infelicity broke up his home, if he
could have climbed into some philosopher’s ivory tower. Perhaps not. I
have observed that even the most learned and philosophic mortals, under
these afflictions, sometimes fail to appreciate the consolations of
philosophy to any noticeable extent. From their ivory towers they cry
aloud, being in pain, even as other men.

But it was certainly not true (even though his biographer wrote it, and
it has been quoted a thousand times), that just because Dickens cried
aloud, “there was for him no ‘city of the mind’ against outward ills, for
inner consolation and shelter.” He was not cast out and left comfortless.
Faith, hope, and charity—these three abode with him. His human sympathy,
his indomitable imagination, his immense and varied interest in the
strange adventures of men and women, his unfaltering intuition of the
truer light of God that burns

  In this vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
  Heart, or whatever else——

these were the celestial powers and bright serviceable angels that built
and guarded for him a true “city of refuge,” secure, inviolate, ever open
to the fugitive in the day of his calamity. Thither he could flee to
find safety. There he could ungird his heart and indulge

  Love and the thoughts that breathe for humankind;

there he could laugh and sing and weep with the children, the
dream-children, which God had given him; there he could enter into his
work-shop and shut the door and lose himself in joyous labour which
should make the world richer by the gift of good books. And so he did,
even until the end came and the pen fell from his fingers, he sitting
safe in his city of refuge, learning and unfolding _The Mystery of Edwin
Drood_.

O enchanted city, great asylum in the mind of man, where ideals are
embodied, and visions take form and substance to parley with us!
Imagination rears thy towers and Fancy populates thy streets; yet art
thou a city that hath foundations, a dwelling eternal though unseen.
Ever building, changing, never falling, thy walls are open-gated day
and night. The fountain of youth is in thy gardens, the treasure of the
humble in thy storehouses. Hope is thy doorkeeper, and Faith thy warden,
and Love thy Lord. In thee the wanderer may take shelter and find
himself by forgetting himself. In thee rest and refreshment are waiting
for the weary, and new courage for the despondent, and new strength for
the faint. From thy magic casements we have looked upon unknown horizons,
and we return from thy gates to our task, our toil, our pilgrimage,
with better and braver hearts, knowing more surely that the things
which are seen were not made of things which do appear, and that the
imperishable jewels of the universe are in the souls of men. O city of
good enchantment, for my brethren and companions’ sakes I will now say:
Peace be within thee!


II

Of the outward appearance, or, as _Sartor Resartus_ would have called it,
the Time-Vesture and Flesh-Garment of that flaming light-particle which
was cast hither from Heaven in the person of Charles Dickens, and of his
ways and manners while he hasted jubilantly and stormfully across the
astonished Earth, something must be said here.

Charles Dickens was born at Portsea, in 1812, an offspring of what the
accurate English call the “lower middle class.” Inheriting something
from a father who was decidedly Micawberish, and a mother who resembled
Mrs. Nickleby, Charles was not likely to be a humdrum child. But the
remarkable thing about him was the intense, aspiring, and gaily sensible
spirit with which he entered into the business of developing whatever
gifts he had received from his vague and amiable parents.

The fat streak of comfort in his childish years, when his proud father
used to stand the tiny lad on a table to sing comic songs for an
applauding audience of relatives, could not spoil him. The lean streak
of misery, when the improvident family sprawled in poverty, with its
head in a debtors’ prison, while the bright, delicate, hungry boy roamed
the streets, or drudged in a dirty blacking-factory, could not starve
him. The two dry years of school at Wellington House Academy could not
fossilize him. The years from fifteen to nineteen, when he was earning
his bread as office-boy, lawyers’ clerk, shorthand reporter, could
not commercialize him. Through it all he burned his way painfully and
joyously.

He was not to be detailed as a perpetual comic songster in upholstered
parlors; nor as a prosperous frock-coated citizen with fatty degeneration
of the mind; nor as a newspaper politician, a power beneath the
footstool. None of these alluring prospects delayed him. He passed them
by, observing everything as he went, now hurrying, now sauntering, for
all the world like a boy who has been sent somewhere. Where it was, he
found out in his twenty-fifth year, when the extraordinary results of his
self-education bloomed in the _Pickwick Papers_ and _Oliver Twist._

Never was a good thing coming out of Nazareth more promptly welcomed.
The simple-minded critics of that day had not yet discovered the damning
nature of popularity, and they hailed the new genius in spite of the fact
that hundreds of thousands of people were reading his books. His success
was exhilarating, overwhelming, and at times intoxicating.

  It was roses, roses all the way.—

Some of them had thorns, which hurt his thin skin horribly, but they
never made him despair or doubt the goodness of the universe. Being
vexed, he let it off in anger instead of distilling it into pessimism to
poison himself. Life was too everlastingly interesting for him to be long
unhappy. A draught of his own triumph would restore him, a slice of his
own work would reinvigorate him, and he would go on with his industrious
dreaming.

No one enjoyed the reading of his books more than he the making of them,
though he sometimes suffered keenly in the process. That was a proof of
his faith that happiness does not consist in the absence of suffering,
but in the presence of joy. Dulness, insincerity, stupid humbug—_voilà
l’ennemi!_ So he lived and wrote with a high hand and an outstretched
arm. He made men see what he saw, and hate what he hated, and love what
he loved. This was his great reward,—more than money, fame, or hosts of
friends,—that he saw the children of his brain enter into the common life
of the world.

[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS AS CAPTAIN BOBADIL IN “EVERY MAN IN HIS
HUMOUR.”

Painted by C. R. Leslie.]

But he was not exempt from the ordinary laws of nature. The conditions of
his youth left their marks for good and evil on his maturity. The petting
of his babyhood gave him the habit of showing off. We often see him as
a grown man, standing on the table and reciting his little piece, or
singing his little song, to please an admiring audience. He delighted in
playing to the galleries.

His early experience of poverty made him at once tremendously sympathetic
and invincibly optimistic—both of which virtues belong to the poor
more than to the rich. Dickens understood this and never forgot it.
The chief moralities of his poor people are mutual helpfulness and
unquenchable hopefulness. From them, also, he caught the tone of material
comfort which characterizes his visions of the reward of virtue. Having
known cold and hunger, he simply could not resist the desire to make
his favourite characters—if they stayed on earth till the end of the
book—warm and “comfy,” and to give them plenty to eat and drink. This may
not have been artistic, but it was intensely human.

The same personal quality may be noted in his ardour as a reformer. No
writer of fiction has ever done more to better the world than Charles
Dickens. But he did not do it by setting forth programmes of legislation
and theories of government. As a matter of fact, he professed an
amusing “contempt for the House of Commons,” having been a Parliamentary
reporter; and of Sir Robert Peel, who emancipated the Catholics,
enfranchised the Jews, and repealed the Corn Laws, he thought so little
that he caricatured him as Mr. Pecksniff.

Dickens felt the evils of the social order at the precise point where
the shoe pinched; he did not go back to the place where the leather was
tanned or the last designed. It was some practical abuse in poorhouses
or police-courts or prisons; it was some hidden shame in the conduct of
schools, or the renting of tenements; it was some monumental absurdity
in the Circumlocution Office, some pompous and cruel delay in the course
of justice, that made him hot with indignation. These were the things
that he assailed with Rabelaisian laughter, or over which he wept with a
deeper and more sincere pity than that of Tristram Shandy. His idea was
that if he could get people to see that a thing was both ridiculous and
cruel, they would want to stop it. What would come after that, he did not
clearly know, nor had he any particularly valuable suggestions to make,
except the general proposition that men should do justly, and love mercy,
and walk humbly with their God.

He took no stock in the doleful predictions of the politicians that
England was in an awful state merely because Lord Coodle was going out of
office, and Sir Thomas Doodle would not come in, and each of these was
the only man to save the country. The trouble seemed to him deeper and
more real. It was a certain fat-witted selfishness, a certain callous,
complacent blindness in the people who were likely to read his books. He
conceived that his duty as a novelist was done when he had shown up the
absurd and hateful things, and made people laugh at their ugliness, weep
over their inhumanity, and long to sweep them away.

In this attitude, I think, Dickens was not only natural, and true to his
bringing-up, but also wise as a great artist in literature. For I have
observed that brilliant writers, while often profitable as satirists to
expose abuses, are seldom judicious as legislators to plan reforms.

Before we leave this subject of the effects of Dickens’s early poverty
and sudden popularity, we must consider his alleged lack of refinement.
Some say that he was vulgar, others that he was ungrateful and
inconsiderate of the feelings of his friends and relations, others that
he had little or no taste. I should rather say, in the words of the old
epigram, that he had a great deal of taste, and that some of it was very
bad.

Take the matter of his caricaturing real people in his books. No one
could object to his use of the grotesque insolence of a well-known London
magistrate as the foundation of his portrait of Mr. Fang in _Oliver
Twist._ That was public property. But the amiable eccentricities of his
own father and mother, the airy irresponsible ways of his good friend
Leigh Hunt, were private property. Yet even here Dickens could not
reasonably be blamed for observing them, for being amused by them, or for
letting them enrich his general sense of the immense, incalculable, and
fantastic humour of the world. Taste, which is simply another name for
the gusto of life, has a comic side; and a man who is keenly sensitive
to everything cannot be expected to be blind to the funny things that
happen among his family and friends. But when Dickens used these private
delights for the public amusement, and in such a form that the partial
portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Nickleby, and Harold Skimpole
were easily identified, all that we can say is that his taste was still
there, but it had gone bad. What could you expect? Where, in his early
years, was he likely to have learned the old-fashioned habit of reserve
in regard to private affairs, which you may call either a mark of good
manners, or a sign of silly pride, according to your own education?

Or take his behavior during his first visit to America in 1842, and
immediately after his return to England. His reception was enough to turn
anybody’s head. “There never was a king or emperor,” wrote Dickens to a
friend, “so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained at splendid
balls and dinners, and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds.” This
was at the beginning. At the end he was criticized by all, condemned
by many, and abused by some of the newspapers. Why? Chiefly because
he used the dinners given in his honour as occasions to convict the
Americans of their gross national sin of literary piracy, and because
when he got home he wrote a book of _American Notes_, containing some
very severe strictures upon the country which had just entertained him so
magnificently.

Mr. Chesterton defends Dickens for his attack upon the American practice
of book-stealing which grew out of the absence of an International
Copyright Law. He says that it was only the new, raw sensibility of the
Americans that was hurt by these speeches. “Dickens was not in the least
desirous of being thought too ‘high-souled’ to want his wages.... He
asked for his money in a valiant and ringing voice, like a man asking for
his honour.” And this, Mr. Chesterton leaves us to infer, is what any
bold Englishman, as distinguished from a timidly refined American, would
do.

Precisely. But if the bold Englishman had been gently-bred would he have
accepted an invitation to dinner in order that he might publicly say
to his host, in a valiant and ringing voice, “You owe me a thousand
pounds”? Such procedure at the dinner-table is contrary not only to good
manners but also to good digestion. This is what Mr. Chesterton’s bold
British constitution apparently prevents him from seeing. What Dickens
said about international copyright was right. But he was wretchedly wrong
in his choice of the time and place for saying it. The natural irritation
which his bad taste produced was one of the causes which delayed for
fifty years the success of the efforts of American authors to secure
copyright for foreign authors.

The same criticism applies to the _American Notes_. Read them again and
you will see that they are not bad notes. With much that he says about
Yankee boastfulness and superficiality, and the evils of slavery, and the
dangers of yellow journalism, every sane American will agree to-day. But
the occasion which Dickens took for making these remarks was not happily
chosen. It was as if a man who had just been entertained at your house
should write to thank you for the pleasure of the visit, and improve the
opportunity to point out the shocking defects of your domestic service
and the exceedingly bad tone which pervaded your establishment. Such a
“bread-and-butter letter” might be full of good morals, but their effect
would be diminished by its bad manners. Of this Dickens was probably
quite unconscious. He acted spontaneously, irrepressibly, vivaciously,
in accordance with his own taste; and it surprised and irritated him
immensely that people were offended by it.

It was precisely so in regard to his personal appearance. When the time
suddenly arrived that he could indulge his taste in dress without fear of
financial consequences, he did so hilariously and to the fullest extent.
Here is a description of him as he appeared to an American girl at an
evening party in Cincinnati eighty years ago. “He is young and handsome,
has a mellow beautiful eye, fine brow and abundant hair.... His manner
is easy and negligent, but not elegant. His dress was foppish.... He had
a dark coat with lighter pantaloons; a black waistcoat embroidered with
coloured flowers; and about his neck, covering his white shirt-front,
was a black neck-cloth also embroidered with colours, on which were two
large diamond pins connected by a chain; a gold watch-chain and a large
red rose in his buttonhole completed his toilet.”

The young lady does not seem to have been delighted with this costume.
But Dickens did not dress to please her, he dressed to please himself.
His taste was so exuberant that it naturally effervesced in this kind
of raiment. There was certainly nothing immoral about it. He had paid
for it and he had a right to wear it, for to him it seemed beautiful. He
would have been amazed to know that any young lady did not like it; and
her opinion would probably have had little effect upon him, for he wrote
of the occasion on which this candid girl met him, as follows: “In the
evening we went to a party at Judge Walker’s and were introduced to at
least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, separately and singly.”

But what does it all amount to, this lack of discretion in manners, this
want of reserve in speech, this oriental luxuriance in attire? It simply
goes to show that _Dickens himself was a Dickens character_.

He was vivid, florid, inexhaustible, and untamed. There was material
in the little man for a hundred of his own immortal caricatures. The
self-portrait that he has drawn in _David Copperfield_ is too smooth,
like a retouched photograph. That is why David is less interesting than
half-a-dozen other people in the book. If Dickens could have seen his
own humourous aspects in the magic mirror of his fancy, it would have
been among the richest of his observations, and if he could have let
his enchantment loose upon the subject, not even the figures of Dick
Swiveller and Harold Skimpole would have been more memorable than the
burlesque of “Boz” by the hand of C. D.

But the humourous, the extravagant, the wildly picturesque,—would these
have given a true and complete portrait of the man? Does it make any
great difference what kind of clothes he wore, or how many blunders
of taste and tact he made, even tragic blunders like his inability to
refrain from telling the world all about his domestic unhappiness,—does
all this count for much when we look back upon the wonders which his
imagination wrought in fiction, and upon the generous fruits which his
heart brought forth in life?

It is easy to endure small weaknesses when you can feel beneath them the
presence of great and vital power. Faults are forgiven readily in one
who has the genius of loving much. Better many blunders than the supreme
mistake of a life that is

  Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.

Charles Dickens never made, nor indeed was tempted to make, that mistake.
He carried with him the defects of his qualities, the marks of his early
life, the penalties of his bewildering success. But, look you, _he
carried them_—they did not crush him nor turn him from his true course.
Forward he marched, cheering and beguiling the way for his comrades
with mirthful stories and tales of pity, lightening many a burden and
consoling many a dark and lonely hour, until he came at last to the
goal of honour and the haven of happy rest. Those who knew him best saw
him most clearly as Carlyle did: “The good, the gentle, high-gifted,
ever-friendly, noble Dickens,—every inch of him an Honest Man.”


III

As an artist in fiction Dickens was great; but not because he had a
correct theory of the technique of the novel, not because he always
followed good rules and models in writing, nor because he was one

  Who saw life steadily and saw it whole.

On the contrary, his vision of life, though vivid, was almost always
partial. He was capable of doing a great deal of bad work, which he
himself liked. The plots of his novels, on which he toiled tremendously,
are negligible; indeed it is often difficult to follow and impossible to
remember them. The one of his books that is notably fine in structure and
approximately faultless in technique—_A Tale of Two Cities_—is so unlike
his other novels that it stands in a class by itself, as an example of
what he could have done if he had chosen to follow that line. In a way it
is his most perfect piece of work. But it is not his most characteristic
piece of work, and therefore I think it has less value for us than some
of his other books in which his peculiar, distinctive, unrivalled powers
are more fully shown.

After all, art must not only interpret the world but also reveal the
artist. The lasting interest of his vision, its distinction, its charm,
depend, at least in some real degree, upon the personal touch. Being
himself a part of the things that are seen, he must “paint the thing _as
he sees it_” if he wishes to win the approval of “the God of things as
they are.”

Now the artistic value of Dickens’s way of seeing things lay in its
fitness to the purpose which he had in mind and heart,—a really great
purpose, namely, to enhance the interest of life by good enchantment,
to save people from the plague of dulness and the curse of indifference
by showing them that the world is full of the stuff for hearty laughter
and deep sympathy. This way of seeing things, with constant reference
to their humourous and sentimental potency, was essential to the genius
of Dickens. His method of making other people see it was strongly
influenced, if not absolutely determined, by two facts which seemed to
lie outside of his career as an author: first, his training as a reporter
for the press; second, his favourite avocation as an amateur actor,
stage-manager, and dramatic reader.

The style of Dickens at its best is that of an inspired reporter. It
is rapid, graphic, pictorial, aiming always at a certain heightening
of effect, making the shadows darker and the lights brighter for the
purpose of intensifying sensation. He did not get it in the study but
in the street. Take his description in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ of Todgers’s
Boarding House with its complicated smells and its mottled shades of
dinginess; or take his picture in _Little Dorrit_ of Marseilles burning
in the August sunlight with its broad, white, universal stare. Here is
the art of journalism,—the trick of intensification by omission,—carried
to the limit. He aims distinctly at a certain effect, and he makes sure
of getting it.

He takes long walks in the heart of London, attends police courts, goes
behind the scenes of theatres, rides in omnibuses, visits prisons and
workhouses. You think he is seeking realism. Quite wrong. He is seeking a
sense of reality which shall make realism look cheap. He is not trying to
put up canned goods which shall seem more or less like fresh vegetables.
He is trying to extract the essential flavour of places and people so
that you can taste it in a drop.

We find in his style an accumulation of details all bearing on a certain
point; nothing that serves his purpose is overlooked; everything that is
likely to distract the attention or obscure his aim is disregarded. The
head-lines are in the text. When the brute, Bill Sykes, says to Nancy:
“Get up,” you know what is coming. When Mrs. Todgers gives a party to Mr.
Pecksniff you know what is coming. But the point is that when it comes,
tragedy or comedy, it is as pure and unadulterated as the most brilliant
of reporters could make it.

Naturally, Dickens puts more emphasis upon the contrast between
his characters than upon the contrast within them. The internal
inconsistencies and struggles, the slow processes of growth and change
which are the delight of the psychological novelist do not especially
interest him. He sees things black or white, not gray. The objects that
attract him most, and on which he lavishes his art, do not belong to
the average, but to the extraordinary. Dickens is not a commonplace
merchant. He is a dealer in oddities and rarities, in fact the keeper
of an “Old Curiosity Shop,” and he knows how to set forth his goods with
incomparable skill.

His drawing of character is sharp rather than deep. He makes the figure
stand out, always recognizable, but not always thoroughly understood.
Many of his people are simply admirable incarnations of their particular
trades or professions: Mould the undertaker, old Weller the coachman,
Tulkinghorn the lawyer, Elijah Program the political demagogue, Blimber
the school-master, Stiggins the religious ranter, Betsey Prig the
day-nurse, Cap’n Cuttle the retired skipper. They are all as easy
to identify as the wooden image in front of a tobacconist’s shop.
Others are embodiments of a single passion or quality: Pecksniff of
unctuous hypocrisy, Micawber of joyous improvidence, Mr. Toots of dumb
sentimentalism, Little Dorrit of the motherly instinct in a girl, Joe
Gargery of the motherly instinct in a man, Mark Tapley of resolute and
strenuous optimism. If these persons do anything out of harmony with
their head-lines, Dickens does not tell of it. He does not care for the
incongruities, the modifications, the fine shadings which soften and
complicate the philosophic and reflective view of life. He wants to write
his “story” sharply, picturesquely, with “snap” and plenty of local
colour; and he does it, in his happiest hours, with all the _verve_ and
skill of a star reporter for the _Morning Journal_ of the Enchanted City.

In this graphic and emphatic quality the art of Dickens in fiction
resembles the art of Hogarth in painting. But Dickens, like Hogarth, was
much more than a reporter. He was a dramatist, and therefore he was also,
by necessity, a moralist.

I do not mean that Dickens had a dramatic genius in the Greek sense that
he habitually dealt with the eternal conflict between human passion and
inscrutable destiny. I mean only this: that his lifelong love for the
theatre often led him, consciously or unconsciously, to construct the
_scenario_ of a story with a view to dramatic effect, and to work up the
details of a crisis precisely as if he saw it in his mind’s eye on the
stage.

Notice how the _dramatis personæ_ are clearly marked as comic, or tragic,
or sentimental. The moment they come upon the scene you can tell whether
they are meant to appeal to your risibilities or to your sensibilities.
You are in no danger of laughing at the heroine, or weeping over the
funny man. Dickens knows too much to leave his audience in perplexity.
He even gives to some of his personages set phrases, like the musical
_motifs_ of the various characters in the operas of Wagner, by which you
may easily identify them. Mr. Micawber is forever “waiting for something
to turn up.” Mr. Toots always reminds us that “it’s of no consequence.”
Sairey Gamp never appears without her imaginary friend Mrs. Harris. Mrs.
General has “prunes and prism” perpetually on her lips.

Observe, also, how carefully the scene is set, and how wonderfully the
preparation is made for a dramatic climax in the story. If it is a comic
climax, like the trial of Mr. Pickwick for breach of promise, nothing is
forgotten, from the hysterics of the obese Mrs. Bardell to the feigned
indignation of Sergeant Buzfuz over the incriminating phrase “chops and
tomato sauce!”

If it is a tragic climax, like the death of Bill Sykes, a score of dark
premonitions lead up to it, the dingiest slum of London is chosen for
it, the grimy streets are filled with a furious crowd to witness it, and
just as the murderer is about to escape, the ghostly eyes of his victim
glare upon him, and he plunges from the roof, tangled in his rope, to be
hanged by the hand of the Eternal Judge as surely as if he stood upon the
gallows.

Or suppose the climax is not one of shame and terror, but of pure pity
and tenderness, like the death of Little Nell. Then the quiet room is
prepared for it, and the white bed is decked with winter berries and
green leaves that the child loved because they loved the light; and
gentle friends are there to read and talk to her, and she sleeps herself
away in loving dreams, and the poor old grandfather, whom she has guided
by the hand and comforted, kneels at her bedside, wondering why his dear
Nell lies so still, and the very words which tell us of her peace and his
grief, move rhythmically and plaintively, like soft music with a dying
fall.

Close the book. The curtain descends. The drama is finished. The master
has had his way with us; he has made us laugh; he has made us cry. We
have been at the play.

But was it not as real to us while it lasted as many of the scenes in
which we actors daily take our parts? And did it not mellow our spirits
with mirth, and soften our hearts with tears? And now that it is over are
we not likely to be a little better, a little kinder, a little happier
for what we have laughed at or wept over?

Ah, master of the good enchantment, you have given us hours of ease
and joy, and we thank you for them. But there is a greater gift than
that. You have made us more willing to go cheerfully and companionably
along the strange, crowded, winding way of human life, because you have
deepened our faith that there is something of the divine on earth, and
something of the human in heaven.




THACKERAY AND REAL MEN


In that fragrant bunch of _Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children_
which has just brightened and sweetened our too sadly strenuous times
there are some passages on novel-reading which are full of spirited good
sense. He says that he can read _Pendennis_, and _The Newcomes_, and
_Vanity Fair_ over and over again; he agrees with his boy in preferring
Thackeray to Dickens, and then he gives the reason—or at least _a_
reason—for this preference:

“Of course one fundamental difference ... is that Thackeray was a
gentleman and Dickens was not.”

The damnatory clause in this sentence seems to me too absolute, though
Roosevelt softens it by adding, “but a man might do some mighty good work
without being in any sense a gentleman.” That is certainly true, and
beyond a doubt Dickens did it—a wonderful plenty of it. It is also true
that in several perfectly good senses he was a brave and kind gentleman,
despite his faults in manners and dress.

But it is the laudatory clause in Roosevelt’s judgment that interests me.
Thackeray’s work is pervaded with his personality to an unusual degree.
It is a saturated solution of the man. We can taste him in every page.
And it is because we like the taste, because we find something strong
and true, bracing and stimulant in it, that we love to read him. ’Tis
like being with a gentleman in any enterprise or adventure; it gives us
pleasure and does us unconscious good.

Well, then, what do we mean by “a gentleman?” Tennyson calls it

    The grand old name of gentleman
    Defamed by every charlatan,
  And soil’d with all ignoble use.

In the big New Oxford Dictionary there is more than a pageful of
definitions of the word, and almost every English essayist has tried a
shot at it. One thing is sure, its old hereditary use as a title of rank
or property is going out, or already gone. “John Jones, Gent.,” is a
vanishing form of address. More and more the word is coming to connote
something in character and conduct. Inheritance may enter into it, and
the sense of honour has a great part in it, and its outward and visible
sign is an unassuming fitness of behaviour in the various circumstances
of life. But its indispensable essence is reality; its native speech,
sincerity; and its controlling spirit, good-will.

Let us content ourselves with a description instead of a definition.
A gentleman is a real man who deals honestly, bravely, frankly, and
considerately with all sorts and conditions of other real men.

This is Thackeray’s very mark and quality. We can feel it all through his
life and works. Everything real in the world he recognized and accepted,
even though he might not always like it. But the unreal people and
things—the pretenders, the hypocrites, the shams, and the frauds (whether
pious or impious)—he detested and scoffed away. Reality was his quest
and his passion. He followed it with unfailing interest, penetration,
and good temper. He found it, at least in humankind, always mixed and
complicated, never altogether good nor altogether bad, no hero without a
fault, and no villain without a germ of virtue. Life is really made that
way. The true realist is not the materialist, the five-sense naturalist,
but the man who takes into account the human soul and God as ultimate
realities.

Thackeray’s personal life had nothing that was remarkable and much that
was admirable. It was simply the background of his genius. He was a
child of the upper-middle class in England—if you know just what that
means. He went to the Charterhouse School in London (which he afterward
immortalized as Greyfriars in _The Newcomes_), and illustrated his
passion for reality by getting his nose broken in a fight, which gave
his face a permanent Socratic cast. At Cambridge University he seems to
have written much and studied little, but that little to good purpose. He
inherited a modest fortune, which he spent, not in riotous living, but in
travel, art study in Paris, and in the most risky of all extravagances,
the starting of new periodicals. When this failed and his money was gone,
he lived in London as a hack-writer.

His young wife was taken from him by that saddest of all
bereavements—the loss of her mind. It became necessary to place her in a
private sanitarium, where she outlived her husband by thirty years. To
her, and to the two little daughters whom she left him, Thackeray was
faithful and devoted. He never complained, never flinched into an easy
way of escape from his burden. He bent his back to it, and, in spite of
natural indolence, he worked hard and was cheerful.

He made a host of friends and kept them, as Stevenson puts it, “without
capitulation.” Of course, this grim condition implies some frictions and
some dislikes, and from these Thackeray was not exempt. The satire which
was his first mode in writing was too direct and pungent to be relished
by those who had any streak of self-humbug in their make-up. But, so far
as I know, he had only one serious literary quarrel—that unhappy dispute
with Mr. Edmund Yates, in which Dickens, with the best intentions in the
world, became, unfortunately, somewhat involved. Thackeray might perhaps
have been more generous and forgiving—he could have afforded that luxury.
But he could not have been more honest and frank, more real, than he
was. Being very angry, and for a just cause, he said so in plain words.
Presently the tempest passed away. When Thackeray died in 1863, Dickens
wrote:

“No one can be surer than I of the greatness and goodness of his heart.”

The first period of his life as a man of letters was given almost
entirely to satirical and fragmentary writing, under various _noms de
guerre_. Hence, he remained for a long time in comparative poverty and
obscurity, from which he stepped into fame and prosperity with the
publication of his first large novel, _Vanity Fair_, in 1847-48. It was
like turning the corner of Grub Street and coming into Glory Avenue.

Henceforth the way was open, though not easy. The succession of his
big, welcome novels was slow, steady, unbroken. Each one brought him
thousands of new readers, and the old ones were _semper fideles_, even
when they professed a preference for the earlier over the later volumes.
His lecture tours in Great Britain and the United States were eminently
successful—more so, I think, than those of Charles Dickens. They may have
brought in less money, but more of what old William Caxton, the prince
of printers, called “good fame and renommee.” The last of his completed
books, and one of his most delightful, was _Roundabout Papers_—a volume
of essays that has no superior in English for a light, firm, friendly
touch upon the realities of life. His last story begun was _Denis Duval_,
and on this he was working when he laid down his pen on Christmas Eve,
1863, and fell asleep for the last time.

It was Edmund Yates who wrote of him then:

“Thackeray was dead; and the purest English prose writer of the
nineteenth century and the novelist with a greater knowledge of the human
heart, as it really is, than any other—with the exception perhaps of
Shakespeare and Balzac—was suddenly struck down in the midst of us.”

_The human heart as it really is_—there’s the point! That is what
Thackeray sought to know, to understand, to reveal, and—no! not to
explain, nor to judge and sentence—for that, as he well knew, was far
beyond him or any of us—but his desire was to _show_ the real heart
of man, in its various complexities and perplexities, working its
way through the divers realities and unrealities in which we are all
entangled.

The acute French critic, Edmond Scherer, distinguished and divided
between George Eliot as “a novelist of character,” and Thackeray as “a
novelist of manners.” The epithet will pass only if we take the word in
the sense of William of Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth man.”

For, as surely as there is something in the outward demeanour which
unveils and discloses the person within, even so surely is there
something in behaviour, the habitual mode of speech and conduct, which
moulds the man using it. A false behaviour weaves a texture of lies into
the warp of his nature. A true behaviour weakens the hold of his own
self-delusions, and so helps him to know what he really is—which is good
for him and for others.

It was in this sense that Thackeray was interested in manners, and
depicted them in his books. Go with him to a ball, and you arrive at the
hour of unmasking; to a club, and you are aware of the thoughts under
the conversation; to a play, and you pass behind the footlights and the
paint; to a death-bed, and—well, do you remember the death of Helen in
_Pendennis_? and of the Colonel in _The Newcomes_? Foolish critics speak
of these last two passages as “scenes.” Scenes! By Heaven! no, they are
realities. We can feel those pure souls passing.

Let us follow this clew of the passion for reality through the three
phases of Thackeray’s work.


I

At first he is the indefatigable satirist, rejoicing in the assault.
Youth is almost always inclined that way—far more swift and sweeping in
judgment, more severe in condemnation, than maturity or age. Thackeray
writes much that is merely amusing, full of high spirits and pure fun, in
his first period. But his main business is to expose false pretensions,
false methods, false principles in literature and life; to show up the
fakers, to ridicule the humbugs, to convict the crooks of every rank and
degree.

Here, for example, is a popular fashion of books with criminals and
burglars for heroes and heroines, portrayed in the glamour of romance.
Very well, our satirist, assuming the name of “Ikey Solomons, Esq.,”
will take a real criminal, a murderess, and show us the manner of life
she leads with her associates. So we have _Catherine_. Here is another
fashion of weaving a fiction about a _chevalier d’industrie_, a bold,
adventurous, conscienceless fellow who pursues his own pleasure with a
swagger, and makes a brave show hide a mean and selfish heart. Very well,
a fellow of this kidney shall tell his own story and show himself in his
habit as he lives, and as he dies in prison. So we have _The Memoirs of
Barry Lyndon, Esq._ Here are innumerable fashions of folly and falsehood
current not only in high society, but also in the region of respectable
mediocrity, and in the “world below-stairs.” Very well, our satirist,
under the name of “Jeames Yellowplush,” or “M. Angelo Titmarsh,” or
“Fitz-Boodle,” will show them up for us. So we have various bundles of
short stories, and skits, and sketches of travel, some of them bubbling
over with fun, some of them, like _Dennis Haggarty’s Wife_, touched with
quiet pathos.

The culmination of this satiric period is _The Book of Snobs_, which
appeared serially in the London _Punch_, 1845-46. In order to understand
the quality and meaning of Thackeray’s satire—an element which stayed
with him all through his writing, though it was later subdued to its
proper place—we must take the necessary pains to know just what he meant
by a “snob.”

A snob is an unreal person who tries to pass himself off for a real
person; a pretender who meanly admires and imitates mean things; an
ape of gentility. He is a specific variety of the great genus “Sham.”
Carlyle, the other notable English satirist of the nineteenth century,
attacked the whole genus with heavy artillery. Thackeray, with his light
cavalry of ridicule, assailed the species.

All snobs are shams, but not all shams are snobs. The specific qualities
of the snob are developed only in countries where there are social
classes and distinctions, but no insuperable barriers between them. Thus
in native India with its immutable caste, or in Central Africa with its
general barbarism, I fancy it must be difficult to discover snobbism.
(Yet I have seen traces of it even among dogs and cats.) But in a country
like England or the United States of America, where society is arranged
in different stories, with staircases between, snobbism is frequent and
flourishing.

_The snob is the man who tries to sneak up-stairs. He is the
surreptitious climber, the person who is ashamed to pass for what he is._

Has he been at an expensive college? He goes home and snubs his old
friends with allusions to the distinguished society he has been keeping.
Is he entertaining fashionable strangers? He gives them elaborate and
costly fare at the most aurivorous hotel, but at home his wife and
daughters may starve. He talks about books that he has never read, and
pretends to like music that sends him to sleep. At his worst, he says his
prayers on the street-corners and reviles his neighbour for sins which he
himself cherishes in secret.

That is the snob: the particular species of sham whom Thackeray pursues
and satirizes through all his disguises and metamorphoses. He does it
unsparingly, yet never—or at least hardly ever—savagely. There is always
a strain of good humour in it, and often a touch of fellow-feeling for
the man himself, camouflaged under his affectations. It may not be worth
while—this kind of work. All satire is perishable. It has no more of the
immortal in it than the unreality which it aims to destroy. But some
shams die hard. And while they live and propagate, the arrows which hit
them fairly are not out of date.

Stevenson makes a curious misjudgment of this part of Thackeray’s work,
when he says in his essay on “Some Gentlemen in Fiction”:

“Personally [Thackeray] scarce appeals to us as the ideal gentleman;
if there were nothing else, perpetual nosing after snobbery at least
suggests the snob.”

Most true, beloved R. L. S., but did you forget that this is precisely
what Thackeray himself says? He tells us not to be too quick or absolute
in our judgments; to acknowledge that we have some faults and failings
of our own; to remember that other people have sometimes hinted at a
vein, a trace, a vestige of snobbery in ourselves. Search for truth and
speak it; but, above all, no arrogance—_faut pas monter sur ses grands
chevaux_. Have you ever read the end of the lecture on “Charity and
Humour”?

“The author ... has been described by _The London Times_ newspaper as a
writer of considerable parts, but a dreary misanthrope, who sees no good
anywhere, who sees the sky above him green, I think, instead of blue, and
only miserable sinners around him. _So we are, as is every writer and
reader I have heard of; so was every being who ever trod this earth, save
One._ I cannot help telling the truth as I view it, and describing what
I see. To describe it otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood
in that calling in which it has pleased Heaven to place me; treason to
that conscience which says that men are weak; that truth must be told;
that faults must be owned; that pardon must be prayed for; and that Love
reigns supreme over all.”


II

With _Vanity Fair_ begins what some one has called the _quadrilateral_
on which Thackeray’s larger fame rests. The three other pillars are,
_Henry Esmond_, _Pendennis_, and _The Newcomes_. Which is the greatest of
these four novels? On this question there is dispute among critics, and
difference of opinion, even among avowed Thackerayans, who confess that
they “like everything he wrote.” Why try to settle the question? Why not
let the interesting, illuminating _causerie_ run on? In these furious
days when the hysteria of world-problems vexes us, it is good to have
some subjects on which we can dispute without ranting or raving.

For my part, I find _Vanity Fair_ the strongest, _Pendennis_ the most
intimate, _The Newcomes_ the richest and in parts the most lovable, and
_Henry Esmond_ the most admirable and satisfying, among Thackeray’s
novels. But they all have this in common: they represent a reaction from
certain false fashions in fiction which prevailed at that time. From the
spurious romanticism of G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth, from
the philosophic affectation of Bulwer, from the gilding and rococo-work
of the super-snob Disraeli—all of them popular writers of their
day—Thackeray turned away, not now as in his earlier period to satirize
and ridicule and parody them, but to create something in a different
_genre_, closer to the facts of life, more true to the reality of human
nature.

We may read in the preface to _Pendennis_ just what he had in mind and
purpose:

“Many ladies have remonstrated and subscribers left me, because, in the
course of the story, I described a young man resisting and affected by
temptation. My object was to say, that he had the passions to feel, and
the manliness and generosity to overcome them. You will not hear—it is
best to know it—what moves in the real world, what passes in society, in
the clubs, colleges, mess-rooms—what is the life and talk of your sons.
A little more frankness than is customary has been attempted in this
story; with no bad desire on the author’s part, it is hoped, and with no
ill consequence to any reader. If truth is not always pleasant, at any
rate truth is best, from whatever chair—from those whence graver writers
or thinkers argue, as from that at which the story-teller sits as he
concludes his labour, and bids his kind reader farewell.”

[Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.

_Reproduced from the Kensington Edition of Thackeray’s Works._]

It is amusing, in this age of art undressed, to read this modest
defense of frankness in fiction. Its meaning is very different
from the interpretation of it which is given by disciples of the
“show-everything-without-a-fig-leaf” school.

Thackeray did not confuse reality with indecency. He did not think it
needful to make his hero cut his toe-nails or take a bath in public
in order to show him as a real man. The ordinary and common physical
details of life may be taken for granted; to obtrude them is to
exaggerate their importance. It is with the frailties and passions,
the faults and virtues, the defeats and victories of his men and women
that Thackeray deals. He describes Pendennis tempted without making
the description a new temptation. He brings us acquainted with Becky
Sharp, _enchanteresse_, without adding to her enchantment. We feel that
she is capable of anything; but we do not know all that she actually
did,—indeed Thackeray himself frankly confessed that even he did not
know, nor much care.

The excellence of his character-drawing is that his men and women are not
mere pegs to hang a doctrine or a theory on. They have a life of their
own, independent of, and yet closely touching his. This is what he says
of them in his essay “_De Finibus_”:

“They have been boarding and lodging with me for twenty months.... I know
the people utterly,—I know the sound of their voices.”

Fault has been found with him (and that by such high authority as Mr.
Howells) for coming into his own pages so often with personal comment
or, “a word to the reader.” It is said that this disturbs the narrative,
breaks the illusion, makes the novel less convincing as a work of art.
Frankly, it does not strike me that way. On the contrary, it adds to the
verisimilitude. These men and women are so real to him that he cannot
help talking to us about them as we go along together. Is it not just
so in actual life, when you go with a friend to watch the passing show?
Do you think that what Thackeray says to you about Colonel Newcome,
or Captain Costigan, or Helen Pendennis, or Laura, or Ethel, or George
Warrington, makes them fade away?

Yes, I know the paragraphs at the beginning and end of _Vanity Fair_
about the showman and the puppets and the box. But don’t you see what the
parable means? It is only what Shakespeare said long ago:

  All the world’s a stage,
  And all the men and women merely players.

Nor would Thackeray have let this metaphor pass without adding to it
Pope’s fine line:

  Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

Of course, there is another type of fiction in which running personal
comment by the author would be out of place. It is illustrated in Dickens
by _A Tale of Two Cities_, and in Thackeray by _Henry Esmond_. The
latter seems to me the most perfect example of a historical novel in all
literature. More than that,—it is, so far as I know, the best portrayal
of the character of a gentleman.

The book presents itself as a memoir of Henry Esmond, Esq., a colonel in
the service of her Majesty, Queen Anne, written by himself. Here, then,
we have an autobiographical novel, the most difficult and perilous of all
modes of fiction. If the supposed author puts himself in the foreground,
he becomes egotistical and insufferable; if he puts himself in the
background, he becomes insignificant, a mere Chinese “property-man” in
the drama. This dilemma Thackeray avoids by letting Esmond tell his own
story in the third person—that is to say, with a certain detachment of
view, such as a sensible person would feel in looking back on his own
life.

Rarely is this historic method of narration broken. I recall one
instance, in the last chapter, where Beatrix, after that tremendous scene
in the house of Castlewood with the Prince, reveals her true nature and
quits the room in a rage. The supposed author writes:

“Her keen words gave no wound to Mr. Esmond; his heart was too hard. As
he looked at her, he wondered that he could ever have loved her....
The Prince blushed and bowed low, as she gazed at him and quitted the
chamber. _I have never seen her from that day._”

Thackeray made this slip on purpose. He wanted us to feel the reality of
the man who is trying to tell his own story in the third person.

This, after all, is the real value of the book. It is not only a
wonderful picture of the Age of Queen Anne, its ways and customs, its
manner of speech and life, its principal personages—the red-faced queen,
and peremptory Marlborough, and smooth Atterbury, and rakish Mohun, and
urbane Addison, and soldier-scholar Richard Steele—appearing in the
background of the political plot. It is also, and far more significantly,
a story of the honour of a gentleman—namely, Henry Esmond—carried through
a life of difficulty, and crowned with the love of a true woman, after a
false one had failed him.

Some readers profess themselves disappointed with the dénouement of the
love-story. They find it unnatural and disconcerting that the hero should
win the mother and not the daughter as the guerdon of his devotion. Not
I. Read the story more closely.

When it opens, in the house of Castlewood, Esmond is a grave, lonely
boy of twelve; Lady Castlewood, fair and golden-haired, is in the first
bloom of gracious beauty, twenty years old; Beatrix is a dark little minx
of four years. Naturally, Henry falls in love with the mother rather
than with the daughter, grows up as her champion and knight, defends
her against the rakishness of Lord Mohun, resolves for her sake to give
up his claim to the title and the estate. Then comes the episode of his
infatuation by the wonderful physical beauty of Beatrix, the vixen. That
madness ends with the self-betrayal of her letter of assignation with the
Prince, and her subsequent conduct. Esmond returns to his first love, his
young love, his true love, Lady Castlewood. Of its fruition let us read
his own estimate:

“That happiness which hath subsequently crowned it, cannot be written in
words; it is of its nature sacred and secret, and not to be spoken of,
though the heart be ever so full of thankfulness, save to Heaven and the
One Ear alone—to one fond being, the truest and tenderest and purest wife
ever man was blessed with.”


III

I have left myself scant space to speak of Thackeray’s third phase in
writing—his work as a moralist. But perhaps this is well, for, as he
himself said, (and as I have always tried to practise), the preacher must
be brief if he wishes to be heard. Five words that go home are worth more
than a thousand that wander about the subject.

Thackeray’s direct moralizings are to be found chiefly in his lectures
on “The Four Georges,” “The English Humourists,” and in the “Roundabout
Papers.” He was like Lowell: as a scholastic critic he was far from
infallible, but as a vital interpreter he seldom missed the mark.

After all, the essential thing in life for us as real men is to have a
knowledge of facts to correct our follies, an ideal to guide our efforts,
and a gospel to sustain our hopes.

That was Thackeray’s message as moralist. It is expressed in the last
paragraph of his essay “_Nil Nisi Bonum_,” written just after the death
of Macaulay and Washington Irving:

“If any young man of letters reads this little sermon—and to him, indeed,
it is addressed—I would say to him, ‘Bear Scott’s words in your mind, and
_be good, my dear_.’ Here are two literary men gone to their account,
and, _laus Deo_, as far as we know, it is fair, and open, and clean.
Here is no need of apologies for shortcomings, or explanations of vices
which would have been virtues but for unavoidable, etc. Here are two
examples of men most differently gifted—each pursuing his calling; each
speaking his truth as God bade him; each honest in his life; just and
irreproachable in his dealings; dear to his friends; honoured by his
country; beloved at his fireside. It has been the fortunate lot of both
to give incalculable happiness and delight to the world, which thanks
them in return with an immense kindliness, respect, affection. It may
not be our chance, brother scribe, to be endowed with such merit, or
rewarded with such fame. But the rewards of these men are rewards paid to
_our service_. We may not win the bâton or epaulettes; but God give us
strength to guard the honour of the flag!”

With this supplication for myself and for others, I leave this essay on
Thackeray, the greatest of English novelists, to the consideration of
real men.




GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN


George Eliot was a woman who wrote full-grown novels for men.

Other women have done and are doing notable work in prose fiction—Jane
Austen, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Stowe, Margaret Deland,
Edith Wharton, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Mrs. Humphry Ward—the list
might easily be extended, but it would delay us from the purpose of
this chapter. Let me rather make a general salute to all the sisterhood
who have risen above the indignity of being called “authoresses,” and,
without pursuing perilous comparisons, go directly to the subject in hand.

What was it that enabled George Eliot to enter the field of the English
novel at a time when Dickens and Thackeray were at the height of their
fame, and win a place in the same class with them?

It was certainly not the hide-and-seek of the sex of the new writer
under a pseudonym. You remember, opinions were divided on this
question. Carlyle and Thackeray thought that the author of _Scenes of
Clerical Life_ was a man. Dickens was sure that it was a woman. But a
mystification of this kind has no interest apart from the primary value
of the works of the unidentified writer in question. Nor does it last
long as an advertisement, unless the following books excel the first;
and, in that case, the secret is sure to be soon discovered.

George Eliot’s success and distinction as a novelist were due to three
things: first, the preliminary and rather obvious advantage of having
genius; second, a method of thinking and writing which is commonly
(though perhaps arrogantly) called masculine; third, a quickness of
insight into certain things, a warmth of sympathy for suffering, and
an instinct of sacrifice which we still regard (we hope rightly) as
feminine. A man for logic, a woman for feeling, a genius for creative
power—that was a great alliance. But the womanhood kept the priority
without which it would not only have died out, but also have endangered,
in dying, the other qualities. Dickens was right when he said of certain
touches in the work of this pseudonymous writer: “If they originated with
no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself
mentally so like a woman since the world began.”

George Eliot’s profile resembled Savonarola’s. He was one of her heroes.
But she was not his brother. She was his sister in the spirit.

Her essential femininity was the reason why the drawing of her women
surpassed the drawing of her men. It was more intimate, more revealing,
more convincing. She knew women better. She painted them of many types
and classes—from the peasant maid to the well-born lady, from the selfish
white cat to the generous white swan-sister; from the narrow-minded
Rosamund to the deep-hearted, broad-minded Romola; all types, I think,
but one—the lewdly carnal Circe. In all her books, with perhaps a single
exception, it is a woman who stands out most clearly from the carefully
studied and often complex background as the figure of interest. And even
in that one it is the slight form of Eppie, the golden-hearted girl who
was sent to save old Silas Marner from melancholy madness, that shines
brightest in the picture.

The finest of her women—finest not in the sense of being faultless, but
of having in them most of that wonderful sacrificial quality which Goethe
called _das ewig Weibliche_—were those upon whose spiritual portraits
George Eliot spent her most loving care and her most graphic skill.

She shows them almost always in the revealing light of love. But she
does not dwell meticulously on the symptoms or the course of the merely
physical attraction. She knows that it is there; she confesses that
it is potent. But it seems to her, (as indeed it really is,) far more
uniform and less interesting than the meaning of love in the _soul_ of a
woman as daughter, sister, sweetheart, wife. Were it not for that inward
significance there would be little to differentiate the physical act from
the mating of the lower animals—an affair so common and casual that it
merits less attention than some writers give it. But in the inner life of
thought and emotion, in a woman’s intellectual and moral nature,—there
love has its mystery and its power, there it brings deepest joy or
sharpest sorrow, there it strengthens or maims.

It is because George Eliot knows this and reveals it with extraordinary
clearness that her books have an especial value. Other qualities they
have, of course, and very high qualities. But this is their proper and
peculiar excellence, and the source, if I mistake not, of their strongest
appeal to sanely thinking men.

_The Man Who Understood Woman_ is the title of a recent clever
trivial story. But of course such a man is a myth, an impostor, or a
self-deluder. He makes a preposterous claim.

Thackeray and Dickens, for example, made no such pretension. Some
of their women are admirably drawn; they are very lovable, or very
despicable, as the case may be; but they are not completely convincing.
Thackeray comes nearer than Dickens, and George Meredith, I think, much
nearer than either of the others. But in George Eliot we feel that we
are listening to one who does understand. Her women, in their different
types, reveal something of that thinking, willing, feeling other-half of
humanity with whom man makes the journey of life. They do not cover all
the possibilities of variation in the feminine, for these are infinite,
but they are real women, and so they have an interest for real men.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us take it for granted that we know enough of the details of George
Eliot’s life to enable us to understand and appreciate certain things
in her novels. Such biographical knowledge is illuminating in the study
of the works of any writer. The author of a book is not an algebraic
quantity nor a strange monster, but a human being with certain features
and a certain life-history.

But, after all, the promotion of literary analysis is not the object of
these chapters. Plain reading, and the pleasure of it, is what I have in
mind. For that cause I love most of George Eliot’s novels, and am ready
to maintain that they are worthy to be loved. And so, even if my “taken
for granted” a few lines above should not be altogether accurate in these
days of ignorant contempt of all that is “Victorian,” I may still go
ahead to speak of her books as they are in themselves: strong, fine,
rewarding pieces of English fiction: that is what they would remain, no
matter who had written them.

It must be admitted at once that they are not adapted to readers who
like to be spared the trouble of thinking while they read. They do not
belong to the class of massage-fiction, Turkish-bath novels. They require
a certain amount of intellectual exercise; and for this they return, it
seems to me, an adequate recompense in the pleasurable sense of quickened
mental activity and vigour.

But this admission must not be taken to imply that they are obscure,
intricate, enigmatical, “tough reading,” like the later books of George
Meredith and Henry James, in which a minimum of meaning is hidden in a
maximum of obfuscated verbiage, and the reader is invited to a tedious
game of hunt-the-slipper. On the contrary, George Eliot at her best is a
very clear writer—decidedly not shallow, nor superficial, nor hasty,—like
the running comment which is supposed to illuminate the scenes in a
moving-picture show,—but intentionally lucid and perspicuous. Having
a story to tell, she takes pains to tell it so that you can follow it,
not only in its outward, but also in its inward movement. Having certain
characters to depict (and almost always mixed characters of good and evil
mingled and conflicting as in real life), she is careful to draw them so
that you shall feel their reality and take an interest in their strifes
and adventures.

They are distinctly persons, capable of making their own choice
between the worse and the better reason, and thereafter influenced by
the consequences of that choice, which, if repeated, becomes a habit
of moral victory or defeat. They are not puppets in, the hands of an
inscrutable Fate, like most of the figures in the books of the modern
Russian novelists and their imitators. What do I care for the ever-so
realistically painted marionettes in the fiction of Messrs. Gawky,
Popoff, Dropoff, and Slumpoff? What interest have I in the minute
articulations of the dingy automatons of Mijnheer Couperus, or the
dismal, despicable figures who are pulled through the pages of Mr. Samuel
Butler’s _The Way of All Flesh_? A claim on compassion they might
have if they were alive. But being, by the avowal of their creators,
nothing more than imaginary bundles of sensation, helpless playthings of
irresistible hereditary impulse and entangling destiny, their story and
their fate leave me cold. What does it matter what becomes of them? They
can neither be saved nor damned. They can only be drifted. There is no
more human interest in them than there is in the predestined saints and
foredoomed sinners of a certain type of Calvinistic theology.

But this is not George Eliot’s view of life. It is not to her “a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Within
the fixed circle of its stern natural and moral laws there is a hidden
field of conflict where the soul is free to discern and choose its own
cause, and to fight for it or betray it. However small that field may
be, while it exists life has a meaning, and personalities are real,
and the results of their striving or surrendering, though rarely seen
complete or final, are worth following and thinking about. Thus George
Eliot’s people—at least the majority of them—have the human touch which
justifies narrative and comment. We follow the fortunes of Dinah Morris
and of Maggie Tulliver, of Romola, and of Dorothea Brooke—yes, and of
Hetty Sorrel and Rosamund Vincy—precisely because we feel that they are
real women and that the turning of their ways will reveal the secret of
their hearts.

It is a mistake to think (as a recent admirable essay of Professor
W. L. Cross seems to imply) that the books of George Eliot are
characteristically novels of argument or propaganda. Once only, or
perhaps twice, she yielded to that temptation and spoiled her story. But
for the rest she kept clear of the snare of _Tendenz_.

Purpose-novels, like advertisements, belong in the temporary department.
As certain goods and wares go out of date, and the often eloquent
announcements that commended them suddenly disappear; even so the
“burning questions” of the hour and age burn out, and the solutions
of them presented in the form of fiction fall down with the other
ashes. They have served their purpose, well or ill, and their transient
importance is ended. What endures, if anything, is the human story
vividly told, the human characters graphically depicted. These have a
permanent value. These belong to literature. Here I would place _Adam
Bede_ and _Silas Marner_ and _The Mill on the Floss_ and _Middlemarch_,
because they deal with problems which never grow old; but not _Robert
Elsmere_, because it deals chiefly with a defunct controversy in Biblical
criticism.

George Eliot was thirty-eight years old when she made the amazing
discovery that she was by nature, not what she had thought herself, a
philosophical essayist and a translator of arid German treatises against
revealed religion, but something very different—a novelist of human
souls, and especially of the souls of women. It was the noteworthy
success of her three long short stories, _Amos Barton_, _Mr. Gilfil’s
Love Story_, and _Janet’s Repentance_, printed in _Blackwood’s Magazine_
in 1857, that revealed her to herself and to the world.

“Depend upon it, [she says to her imaginary reader in the first of these
stories,] you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see
something of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying
in the experience of the human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes
and speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”

It was the interior drama of human life that attracted her interest and
moved her heart with pity and fear, laughter and love. She found it for
the most part in what we should call mediocre surroundings and on rather
a humble and obscure stage. But what she found was not mediocre. It was
the same discovery that Wordsworth made:

  “A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”

By this I do not mean to say that a close study of the humanness of human
nature, a searching contemplation of character, an acute and penetrating
psychological analysis is all that there is in her novels. This is
her predominant interest, beyond a doubt. She belongs to the school
of Hawthorne, Henry James, Thomas Hardy—realists or romancers of the
interior life. But she has other interests; and there are other things to
reward us in the reading of her books.

There is, first of all, an admirable skill in the setting of her
stories. No other novelist has described English midland landscape,
towns, and hamlets, better than she. No other writer has given the rich,
history-saturated scenery of Florence as well.

She is careful also not to exclude from her stage that messenger of
relief and contrast whom George Meredith calls “the comic spirit.”
Shakespeare’s clowns, wonderful as some of them are, seem at times like
supernumeraries. They come in to make a “diversion.” But George Eliot’s
rustic wits and conscious or unconscious humourists belong to the story.
Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey, Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Tulliver and Bob
Jakin, could not be spared.

And then, her stories are really stories. They have action. They move;
though sometimes, it must be confessed, they move slowly. Not only do the
characters develop, one way or the other, but the plot also develops.
Sometimes it is very simple, as in _Silas Marner_; sometimes it is
extremely complicated, as in _Middlemarch_, where three love-stories are
braided together. One thing it never is—theatrical. Yet at times it
moves into an intense scene, like the trial of Hetty Sorrel or the death
of Tito Melema, in which the very essence of tragedy is concentrated.

From the success of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ George Eliot went on
steadily with her work in fiction, never turning aside, never pausing
even, except when her health compelled, or when she needed time to fill
her mind and heart with a new subject. She did not write rapidly, nor are
her books easy to read in a hurry.

It was an extraordinary series: _Adam Bede_ in 1859, _The Mill on the
Floss_ in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in 1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt,
the Radical_ in 1866, _Middlemarch_ in 1871, _Daniel Deronda_ in 1876; no
padding, no “seconds,” each book apparently more successful, certainly
more famous, than its predecessor. How could one woman produce so much
closely wrought, finely finished work? Of what sturdy mental race were
the serious readers who welcomed it and found delight in it?

Mr. Oscar Browning of Cambridge said that _Daniel Deronda_ was the
climax, “the sun and glory of George Eliot’s art.” From that academic
judgment I venture to dissent. It is a great book, no doubt, the work
of a powerful intellect. But to me it was at the first reading, and
is still, a tiresome book. Tediousness, which is a totally different
thing from seriousness, is the unpardonable defect in a novel. It may
be my own fault, but Deronda seems to me something of a prig. Now a man
may be a prig without sin, but he ought not to take up too much room.
Deronda takes up too much room. And Gwendolen Harleth, who dressed by
preference in sea-green, seems to me to have a soul of the same colour—a
psychological mermaid. She is unconvincing. I cannot love her. The vivid
little Jewess, Mirah, is the only character with charm in the book.

_Middlemarch_ is noteworthy for its extraordinary richness of human
observation and the unexcelled truthfulness of some of its portraits.
Mr. Isaac Casaubon is the living image of the gray-minded scholar and
gentleman,—as delicately drawn as one of Miss Cecelia Beaux’ portraits of
aged, learned, wrinkled men. Rosamund Vincy is the typical “daughter of
the horse-leech” in respectable clothes and surroundings. Dorothea Brooke
is one of George Eliot’s finest sacrificial heroines:

  “A perfect woman, nobly plann’d.”

The book, as a whole, seems to me to have the defect of superabundance.
There is too much of it. It is like one of the late William Frith’s large
canvases, “The Derby Day,” or “The Railway Station.” It is constructed
with skill, and full of rich material, but it does not compose. You
cannot see the people for the crowd. Yet there is hardly a corner of the
story in which you will not find something worth while.

_Felix Holt, the Radical_ is marred, at least for me, by a fault of
another kind. It is a novel of problem, of purpose. I do not care for
problem-novels, unless the problem is alive, and even then I do not care
very much for political economy in that form. It is too easy for the
author to prove any proposition by attaching it to a noble character,
or to disprove any theory by giving it an unworthy advocate. English
radicalism of 1832 has quite passed away, or gone into the Coalition
Cabinet. All that saves _Felix Holt_ now (as it seems to me, who read
novels primarily for pleasure) is the lovely figure of Esther Lyon, and
her old father, a preacher who really was good.

Following the path still backward, we come to something altogether
different. _Romola_ is a historical romance on the grand scale. In the
central background is the heroic figure of Savonarola, saintly but
not impeccable; in the middle distance, a crowd of Renaissance people
immersed in the rich and bloody turmoil of that age; in the foreground,
the sharp contrast of two epic personalities—Tito Melema, the incarnation
of smooth, easy-going selfishness which never refuses a pleasure nor
accepts a duty; and Romola, the splendid embodiment of pure love in
self-surrendering womanhood. The shameful end of Tito, swept away by the
flooded river Arno and finally choked to death by the father whom he had
disowned and wronged, has in it the sombre tone of Fate. But the end of
the book is not defeat; it is triumph. Romola, victor through selfless
courage and patience, saves and protects the deserted mistress and
children of her faithless husband. In the epilogue we see her like _Notre
Dame de Secours_, throned in mercy and crowned with compassion.

Listen to her as she talks to Tito’s son in the loggia looking over
Florence to the heights beyond Fiesole.

“‘What is it, Lillo?’ said Romola, pulling his hair back from his brow.
Lillo was a handsome lad, but his features were turning out to be more
massive and less regular than his father’s. The blood of the Tuscan
peasant was in his veins.

“‘Mamma Romola, what am I to be?’ he said, well contented that there was
a prospect of talking till it would be too late to con _Spirto gentil_
any longer.

“‘What should you like to be, Lillo? You might be a scholar. My father
was a scholar, you know, and taught me a great deal. That is the reason
why I can teach you.’

“‘Yes,’ said Lillo, rather hesitatingly. ‘But he is old and blind in the
picture. Did he get a great deal of glory?’

“‘Not much, Lillo. The world was not always very kind to him, and he
saw meaner men than himself put into higher places, because they could
flatter and say what was false. And then his dear son thought it right to
leave him and become a monk; and after that, my father, being blind and
lonely, felt unable to do the things that would have made his learning of
greater use to men, so that he might still have lived in his works after
he was in his grave.’

“‘I should not like that sort of life,’ said Lillo. ‘I should like
to be something that would make me a great man, and very happy
besides—something that would not hinder me from having a good deal of
pleasure.’

“‘That is not easy, my Lillo. It is only a poor sort of happiness that
could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We
can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a
great man, by having wide thoughts, and feeling for the rest of the world
as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much
pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we
would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.
There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world, that no man
can be great—he can hardly keep himself from wickedness—unless he gives
up thinking much about pleasure or rewards, and gets strength to endure
what is hard and painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to
integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. And
there was Fra Girolamo—you know why I keep to-morrow sacred: _he_ had the
greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful
wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable
of. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the
best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your
mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And
remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of
your life to seek your own pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable,
calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a
base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and
that may well make a man say, “It would have been better for me if I had
never been born.” I will tell you something, Lillo.’

“Romola paused for a moment. She had taken Lillo’s cheeks between her
hands, and his young eyes were meeting hers.

“‘There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I could see a great
deal of his life, who made almost every one fond of him, for he was
young, and clever, and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and
kind. I believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of anything
cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was
unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came
at last to commit some of the basest deeds—such as make men infamous. He
denied his father, and left him to misery; he betrayed every trust that
was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and
prosperous. Yet calamity overtook him.’

“Again Romola paused. Her voice was unsteady, and Lillo was looking up at
her with awed wonder.

“‘Another time, my Lillo—I will tell you another time. See, there are
our old Piero di Cosimo and Nello coming up the Borgo Pinti, bringing us
their flowers. Let us go and wave our hands to them, that they may know
we see them.’”

Hardly one of George Eliot’s stories has a conventional “happy
ending.” Yet they leave us not depressed, but strengthened to endure
and invigorated to endeavour. In this they differ absolutely from the
pessimistic novels of the present hour, which not only leave a bad taste
in the mouth, but also a sense of futility in the heart.

Let me turn now to her first two novels, which still seem to me her best.
Bear in mind, I am not formulating academic theories, nor pronouncing _ex
cathedrâ_ judgments, but simply recording for the consideration of other
readers certain personal observations and reactions.

_Adam Bede_ is a novel of rustic tragedy in which some of the characters
are drawn directly from memory. Adam is a partial portrait of George
Eliot’s father, and Dinah Morris a sketch of her aunt, a Methodist
woman preacher. There is plenty of comic relief in the story, admirably
done. Take the tongue duel between Bartle Massey, the sharp-spoken,
kind-hearted bachelor school-master, and Mrs. Poyser, the humorous,
pungent, motherly wife of the old farmer.

“‘What!’ said Bartle, with an air of disgust. ‘Was there a woman
concerned? Then I give you up, Adam.’

“‘But it’s a woman you’n spoke well on, Bartle,’ said Mr. Poyser. ‘Come,
now, you canna draw back; you said once as women wouldna ha’ been a bad
invention if they’d all been like Dinah.’

“‘I meant her voice, man—I meant her voice, that was all,’ said Bartle.
‘I can bear to hear her speak without wanting to put wool in my ears. As
for other things, I dare say she’s like the rest o’ the women—thinks two
and two ’ull come to make five, if she cries and bothers enough about it.’

“‘Ay, ay!’ said Mrs. Poyser; ‘one ’ud think, an’ hear some folks talk, as
the men war ’cute enough to count the corns in a bag o’ wheat wi’ only
smelling at it. They can see through a barn door, _they_ can. Perhaps
that’s the reason they can see so little o’ this side on’t.’

“‘Ah!’ said Bartle, sneeringly, ‘the women are quick enough—they’re
quick enough. They know the rights of a story before they hear it, and
can tell a man what his thoughts are before he knows ’em himself.’

“‘Like enough,’ said Mrs. Poyser; ‘for the men are mostly so slow, their
thoughts overrun ’em, an’ they can only catch ’em by the tail. I can
count a stocking-top while a man’s getting’s tongue ready; an’ when he
outs wi’ his speech at last, there’s little broth to be made on’t. It’s
your dead chicks take the longest hatchin’. Howiver, I’m not denyin’ the
women are foolish: God Almighty made ’em to match the men.’

“‘Match!’ said Bartle; ‘ay, as vinegar matches one’s teeth. If a man says
a word, his wife’ll match it with a contradiction; if he’s a mind for hot
meat, his wife’ll match it with cold bacon; if he laughs, she’ll match
him with whimpering. She’s such a match as the horsefly is to th’ horse:
she’s got the right venom to sting him with—the right venom to sting him
with.’

“‘What dost say to that?’ said Mr. Poyser, throwing himself back and
looking merrily at his wife.

“‘Say!’ answered Mrs. Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye;
‘why, _I say as some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on
strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat
wrong i’ their own inside_.’ ...”

The plot, as in Scott’s _Heart of Midlothian_, turns on a case of
seduction and child murder, and the contrast between Effie and Jeannie
Deans has its parallel in the stronger contrast between Hetty Sorrel and
Dinah Morris. Hetty looked as if she were “made of roses”; but she was,
in Mrs. Poyser’s phrase, “no better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside
it.” Dinah’s human beauty of face and voice was the true reflection of
her inward life which

      “cast a beam on the outward shape,
  The unpolluted temple of the mind,
  And turned it by degrees to the soul’s essence.”

The crisis of the book comes in the prison, where Dinah wrestles for the
soul of Hetty—a scene as passionate and moving as any in fiction. Dinah
triumphs, not by her own might, but by the sheer power and beauty of the
Christian faith and love which she embodies.

In George Eliot’s novels you will find some passages of stinging
and well-merited satire on the semi-pagan, conventional religion of
middle-class orthodoxy in England of the nineteenth century—“proud
respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without
side-dishes”—read the chapter on “A Variation of Protestantism Unknown
to Bossuet,” in _The Mill on the Floss_. But you will not find a single
page or paragraph that would draw or drive the reader away from real
Christianity. On the contrary, she has expressed the very secret of its
appeal to the human heart through the words and conduct of some of her
best characters. They do not argue; they utter and show the meaning
of religion. On me the effect of her books is a deepened sense of the
inevitable need of Christ and his gospel to sustain and nourish the high
morality of courage and compassion, patience, and hope, which she so
faithfully teaches.

The truth is, George Eliot lived in the afterglow of Christian faith.
Rare souls are capable of doing that. But mankind at large needs the
sunrise.

_The Mill on the Floss_ is partly an autobiographic romance. Maggie
Tulliver’s character resembles George Eliot in her youth. The contrast
between the practical and the ideal, the conflict between love and duty
in the heart of a girl, belong to those _problematische Naturen_, as
Goethe called them, which may taste keen joys but cannot escape sharp
sorrows. The centre of the story lies in Maggie’s strong devotion to
her father and to her brother Tom—a person not altogether unlike the
“elder brother” in the parable—in strife with her love for Philip, the
son of the family enemy. Tom ruthlessly commands his sister to choose
between breaking with him and giving up her lover. Maggie, after a bitter
struggle, chooses her brother. Would a real woman do that? Yes, I have
known some very real women who have done it, in one case with a tragic
result.

The original title of this book (and the right one) was _Sister Maggie_.
Yet we can see why George Eliot chose the other name. The little river
Floss, so tranquil in its regular tidal flow, yet capable of such fierce
and sudden outbreaks, runs through the book from beginning to end. It is
a mysterious type of the ineluctable power of Nature in man’s mortal
drama.

In the last chapter, when the flood comes, and the erring sister who
loved her brother so tenderly, rescues him who loved her so cruelly from
the ruined mill, the frail skiff which carries them clasped heart to
heart, reconciled in that revealing moment, goes down in the senseless
irresistible rush of waters.

It is not a “bad ending.” The sister’s love triumphs. Such a close was
inevitable for such a story. But it is not a conclusion. It cries out for
immortality.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the art of George Eliot judgments have differed. Mr. Oscar Browning,
a respectable authority, thinks highly of it. Mr. W. C. Brownell, a far
better critic, indeed one of the very best, thinks less favourably of
it, says that it is too intellectual; that the development and conduct
of her characters are too logical and consistent; that the element of
surprize, which is always present in life, is lacking in her people.
“Our attention,” he writes, “is so concentrated on what they think that
we hardly know how they feel, or whether ... they feel at all.” This
criticism does not seem to me altogether just. Certainly there is no lack
of surprize in Maggie Tulliver’s temporary infatuation with the handsome,
light-minded Stephen Guest, or in Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to that
heady young butterfly, Will Ladislaw. These things certainly were not
arrived at by logical consistency. Nor can one lay his hand on his heart
and say that there is no feeling in the chapter where the fugitive Romola
comes as Madonna to the mountain village, stricken by pestilence, or in
the passage where Dinah Morris strives for Hetty’s soul in prison.

George Eliot herself tells us the purpose of her art—it is _verity_.

“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in
many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise.... All honour
and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the
utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our homes.
But let us love that other beauty, too, which lies in no secret of
proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.”

It is Rembrandt, then, rather than Titian, who is her chosen painter.
But she does not often attain his marvellous _chiaroscuro_.

Her style is clear and almost always firm in drawing, though deficient
in colour. It is full of meaning, almost over-scrupulous in defining
precisely what she wishes to express. Here and there it flashes into
a wise saying, a sparkling epigram. At other times, especially in her
later books, it spreads out and becomes too diffuse, too slow, like Sir
Walter Scott’s. But it never repels by vulgar smartness, nor perplexes
by vagueness and artificial obscurity. It serves her purpose well—to
convey the results of her scrutiny of the inner life and her loving
observation of the outer life in its humblest forms. In these respects it
is admirable and satisfying. And it is her own—she does not imitate, nor
write according to a theory.

Her general view of human nature is not essentially different from that
expressed in a passage which I quoted from Thackeray in the previous
chapter. We are none of us “irreproachable characters.” We are “mixed
human beings.” Therefore she wishes to tell her stories “in such a way
as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy.”

       *       *       *       *       *

As I began so let me end this chapter—with a word on women. For myself,
I think it wise and prudent to maintain with Plutarch that _virtue_ in
man and woman is one and the same. Yet there is a difference between the
feminine and the masculine virtues. This opinion Plutarch sets forth and
illustrates in his brief histories, and George Eliot in her novels. But
of the virtues of women she gives more and finer examples.




THE POET OF IMMORTAL YOUTH


One of the things that surprized and bewildered old Colonel Newcome
when he gathered his boy’s friends around the mahogany tree in the
dull, respectable dining-room at 12 Fitzroy Square, was to hear George
Warrington declare, between huge puffs of tobacco smoke, “that young
Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael.”
At this Charles Honeyman sagely nodded his ambrosial head, while Clive
Newcome assented with sparkling eyes. But to the Colonel, sitting kindly
grave and silent at the head of the table, and recalling (somewhat
dimly) the bewigged and powdered poetry of the age of Queen Anne, such a
critical sentiment seemed radical and revolutionary, almost ungentlemanly.

How astonished he would have been sixty years later if he had taken up
Mr. Sidney Colvin’s _Life of Keats_, in the “English Men of Letters
Series,” and read in the concluding chapter the deliberate and
remarkable judgment that “by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he
was the most Shakespearean spirit that has lived since Shakespeare”!

In truth, from the beginning the poetry of Keats has been visited too
much by thunder-storms of praise. It was the indiscriminate enthusiasm
of his friends that drew out the equally indiscriminate ridicule of his
enemies. It was the premature salutation offered to him as a supreme
master of the most difficult of all arts that gave point and sting to
the criticism of evident defects in his work. _The Examiner_ hailed
him, before his first volume had been printed, as one who was destined
to revive the early vigour of English poetry. _Blackwood’s Magazine_
retorted by quoting his feeblest lines and calling him “Johnny Keats.”
The suspicion of log-rolling led to its usual result in a volley of
stone-throwing.

Happily, the ultimate fame and influence of a true poet are not
determined by the partizan conflicts which are waged about his name.
He may suffer some personal loss by having to breathe, at times, a
perturbed atmosphere of mingled flattery and abuse instead of the still
air of delightful studies. He may be robbed of some days of a life
already far too short, by the pestilent noise and confusion arising from
that scramble for notoriety which is often unduly honoured with the
name of “literary activity.” And there are some men whose days of real
inspiration are so few, and whose poetic gift is so slender, that this
loss proves fatal to them. They are completely carried away and absorbed
by the speculations and strifes of the market-place. They spend their
time in the intrigues of rival poetic enterprises, and learn to regard
current quotations in the trade journals as the only standard of value.
Minor poets at the outset, they are tempted to risk their little all on
the stock exchange of literature, and, losing their last title to the
noun, retire to bankruptcy on the adjective.

But Keats did not belong to this frail and foolish race. His lot was cast
in a world of petty conflict and ungenerous rivalry, but he was not of
that world. It hurt him a little, but it did not ruin him. His spiritual
capital was too large, and he regarded it as too sacred to be imperilled
by vain speculations. He had in Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and
Chapman, Milton and Petrarch, older and wiser friends than Leigh Hunt.
For him

                            “The blue
  Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
  Of summer nights collected still to make
  The morning precious: beauty was awake!”

He perceived, by that light which comes only to high-souled and
noble-hearted poets,

              “The great end
  Of poesy, that it should be a friend
  To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man.”

To that end he gave the best that he had to give, freely, generously,
joyously pouring himself into the ministry of his art. He did not dream
for a moment that the gift was perfect. Flattery could not blind him
to the limitations and defects of his early work. He was his own best
and clearest critic. But he knew that so far as it went his poetic
inspiration was true. He had faithfully followed the light of a pure
and elevating joy in the opulent, manifold beauty of nature and in the
eloquent significance of old-world legends, and he believed that it
had already led him to a place among the poets whose verse would bring
delight, in far-off years, to the sons and daughters of mankind. He
believed also that if he kept alive his faith in the truth of beauty and
the beauty of truth it would lead him on yet further, into a nobler life
and closer to those immortal bards whose

              “Souls still speak
  To mortals of their little week;
  Of their sorrows and delights;
  Of their passions and their spites;
  Of their glory and their shame;
  What doth strengthen and what maim.”

He expressed this faith very clearly in the early and uneven poem called
“Sleep and Poetry,” in a passage which begins

  “Oh, for ten years, that I may overwhelm
  Myself in poesy! so I may do the deed
  That my own soul has to itself decreed.”

And then, ere four years had followed that brave wish, his voice fell
silent under a wasting agony of pain and love, and the daisies were
growing upon his Roman grave.

The pathos of his frustrated hope, his early death, has sometimes
blinded men a little, it seems to me, to the real significance of his
work and the true quality of his influence in poetry. He has been
lamented in the golden verse of Shelley’s “Adonaïs,” and in the prose
of a hundred writers who have shared Shelley’s error without partaking
of his genius, as the loveliest innocent ever martyred by the cruelty
of hostile critics. But, in fact, the vituperations of Gifford and his
crew were no more responsible for the death of Keats, than the stings
of insects are for the death of a man who has perished of hunger on the
coast of Labrador. They added to his sufferings, no doubt, but they did
not take away his life. Keats had far too much virtue in the old Roman
sense—far too much courage, to be killed by a criticism. He died of
consumption, as he clearly and sadly knew that he was fated to do when he
first saw the drop of arterial blood upon his pillow.

Nor is it just, although it may seem generous, to estimate his fame
chiefly by the anticipation of what he might have accomplished if he
had lived longer; to praise him for his promise at the expense of his
performance; and to rest his claim to a place among the English poets
upon an uncertain prophecy of rivalry with Shakespeare. I find a far
sounder note in Lowell’s manly essay, when he says: “No doubt there is
something tropical and of strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but
it _was_ maturity nevertheless.” I hear the accent of a wiser and saner
criticism in the sonnet of one of our American poets:

  “Touch not with dark regret his perfect fame,
      Sighing, ‘Had he but lived he had done so’;
      Or, ‘Were his heart not eaten out with woe
  John Keats had won a prouder, mightier name!’
  Take him for what he was and did—nor blame
      Blind fate for all he suffered. Thou shouldst know
      Souls such as his escape no mortal blow—
  No agony of joy, or sorrow, or shame.”

“Take him for what he was and did”—that should be the key-note of our
thought of Keats as a poet. The exquisite harmony of his actual work
with his actual character; the truth of what he wrote to what his young
heart saw and felt and enjoyed; the simplicity of his very exuberance of
ornament, and the naturalness of his artifice; the sincerity of his love
of beauty and the beauty of his sincerity—these are the qualities which
give an individual and lasting charm to his poetry, and make his gift to
the world complete in itself and very precious, although,—or perhaps we
should even say because,—it was unfinished.

Youth itself is imperfect: it is impulsive, visionary, and unrestrained;
full of tremulous delight in its sensations, but not yet thoroughly awake
to the deeper meanings of the world; avid of novelty and mystery, but not
yet fully capable of hearing or interpreting the still, small voice of
divine significance which breathes from the simple and familiar elements
of life.

Yet youth has its own completeness as a season of man’s existence. It is
justified and indispensable. Alfred de Musset’s

  “We old men born yesterday”

are simply monstrous. The poetry which expresses and represents youth,
the poetry of sensation and sentiment, has its own place in the
literature of the world. This is the order to which the poetry of Keats
belongs.

He is not a feminine poet, as Mr. Coventry Patmore calls him, any more
than Theocritus or Tennyson is feminine; for the quality of extreme
sensitiveness to outward beauty is not a mark of femininity. It is found
in men more often and more clearly than in women. But it is always most
keen and joyous and overmastering in the morning of the soul.

Keats is not a virile poet, like Dante or Shakespeare or Milton; that he
would have become one if he had lived is a happy and loving guess. He is
certainly not a member of the senile school of poetry, which celebrates
the impotent and morbid passions of decay, with a _café chantant_ for its
temple, and the smoke of cigarettes for incense, and cups of absinthe for
its libations, and for its goddess not the immortal Venus rising from the
sea, but the weary, painted, and decrepit Venus sinking into the gutter.

He is in the highest and best sense of the word a juvenile poet—“mature,”
as Lowell says, but mature, as genius always is, within the boundaries
and in the spirit of his own season of life. The very sadness of his
lovely odes, “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “To
Psyche,” is the pleasant melancholy of the springtime of the heart. “The
Eve of St. Agnes,” pure and passionate, surprizing us by its fine excess
of colour and melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the slightest
taint of sensuality, is unforgettable and unsurpassable as the dream
of first love. The poetry of Keats, small in bulk and slight in body
as it seems at first sight to be, endures, and will endure, in English
literature, because it is the embodiment of _the spirit of immortal
youth_.

Here, I think, we touch its secret as an influence upon other poets. For
that it has been an influence,—in the older sense of the word, which
carries with it a reference to the guiding and controlling force supposed
to flow from the stars to the earth,—is beyond all doubt. The _History
of English Literature_, with which Taine amused us some fifty years ago,
nowhere displays its narrowness of vision more egregiously than in its
failure to take account of Gray, Collins, and Keats as fashioners of
English poetry. It does not mention Gray and Collins at all; the name
of Keats occurs only once, with a reference to “sickly or overflowing
imagination,” but to Byron nearly fifty pages are devoted. The American
critic, Stedman, showed a far broader and more intelligent understanding
of the subject when he said that “Wordsworth begot the mind, and Keats
the body, of the idyllic Victorian School.”

We can trace the influence of Keats not merely in the conscious or
unconscious imitations of his manner, like those which are so evident in
the early poems of Tennyson and Procter, in Hood’s _Plea of the Midsummer
Fairies_ and _Lycus the Centaur_, in Rossetti’s _Ballads and Sonnets_,
and William Morris’s _Earthly Paradise_, but also in the youthful spirit
of delight in the retelling of old tales of mythology and chivalry;
in the quickened sense of pleasure in the luxuriance and abundance of
natural beauty; in the freedom of overflowing cadences transmuting
ancient forms of verse into new and more flexible measures; in the large
liberty of imaginative diction, making all nature sympathize with
the joy and sorrow of man,—in brief, in many of the finest marks of a
renascence, a renewed youth, which characterize the poetry of the early
Victorian era.

I do not mean to say that Keats alone, or chiefly, was responsible for
this renascence. He never set up to lead a movement or to found a school.
His genius is not to be compared to that of a commanding artist like
Giotto or Leonardo or Michelangelo, but rather to that of a painter like
Botticelli, whose personal and expressive charm makes itself felt in the
work of many painters, who learned secrets of grace and beauty from him,
though they were not his professed disciples or followers.

Take for example Matthew Arnold. He called himself, and no doubt rightly,
a Wordsworthian. But it was not from Wordsworth that he caught the
strange and searching melody of “The Forsaken Merman,” or learned to
embroider the laments for “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gypsy” with such
opulence of varied bloom as makes death itself seem lovely. It was from
John Keats. Or read the description of the tapestry on the castle walls
in “Tristram and Iseult.” How perfectly that repeats the spirit of
Keats’s descriptions in “The Eve of St. Agnes”! It is the poetry of the
picturesque.

Indeed, we shall fail to do justice to the influence of Keats unless
we recognize also that it has produced direct and distinct effects
in the art of painting. The English pre-Raphaelites owed much to his
inspiration. Holman Hunt found two of his earliest subjects for pictures
in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Pot of Basil.” Millais painted
“Lorenzo and Isabella,” and Rossetti “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” There
is an evident sympathy between the art of these painters, which insisted
that every detail in a picture is precious and should be painted with
truthful care for its beauty, and the poetry of Keats, which is filled,
and even overfilled, with minute and loving touches of exquisite
elaboration.

But it must be remembered that in poetry, as well as in painting, the
spirit of picturesqueness has its dangers. The details may be multiplied
until the original design is lost. The harmony and lucidity of a poem
may be destroyed by innumerable digressions and descriptions. In some of
his poems—in “Endymion” and in “Lamia”—Keats fell very deep into this
fault, and no one knew it better than himself. But when he was at his
best he had the power of adding a hundred delicate details to his central
vision, and making every touch heighten and enhance the general effect.
How wonderful in its unity is the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”! How completely
magical are the opening lines of “Hyperion”:

  “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
  Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
  Far from the fiery Noon, and eve’s one star,
  Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
  Still as the silence round about his lair;
  Forest on forest hung about his head
  Like cloud on cloud.”

How large and splendid is the imagery of the sonnet “On First Looking
into Chapman’s Homer”! And who that has any sense of poetry does not
recognize the voice of a young master in the two superb lines of the last
poem that Keats wrote?—the sonnet in which he speaks of the bright star

        “watching, with eternal lids apart,
  Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
  The moving waters at their priestlike task
    Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”

The poets of America have not been slow to recognize the charm and power
of Keats. Holmes and Longfellow and Lowell paid homage to him in their
verse. Lanier inscribed to his memory a poem called “Clover.” Gilder
wrote two sonnets which celebrate his “perfect fame.” Robert Underwood
Johnson has a lovely lyric on “The Name Writ in Water.”

But I find an even deeper and larger tribute to his influence in the
features of resemblance to his manner and spirit which flash out here
and there, unexpectedly and unconsciously, in the poetry of our New
World. Emerson was so unlike Keats in his intellectual constitution as
to make all contact between them appear improbable, if not impossible.
Yet no one can read Emerson’s “May-Day,” and Keats’ exquisitely truthful
and imaginative lines on “Fancy,” one after the other, without feeling
that the two poems are very near of kin. Lowell’s “Legend of Brittany”
has caught, not only the measure, but also the tone and the diction of
“Isabella.” The famous introduction to “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” with
its often quoted line,

  “What is so rare as a day in June?”

finds a parallel in the opening verses of “Sleep and Poetry”—

  “What is more gentle than a wind in summer?”

Lowell’s “Endymion,” which he calls “a mystical comment on Titian’s
‘Sacred and Profane Love,’” is full of echoes from Keats, like this:

  “My day began not till the twilight fell
  And lo! in ether from heaven’s sweetest well
  The new moon swam, divinely isolate
  In maiden silence, she that makes my fate
  Haply not knowing it, or only so
  As I the secrets of my sheep may know.”

In Lanier’s rich and melodious “Hymns of the Marshes” there are
innumerable touches in the style of Keats; for example, his apostrophe to
the

  “Reverend marsh, low-couched along the sea,
  Old chemist, wrapped in alchemy,
  Distilling silence,——”

or his praise of the

  “Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,
  Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
  Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves.”

One of the finest pieces of elegiac verse that have yet been produced in
America, George E. Woodberry’s poem called “The North Shore Watch,” has
many passages that recall the young poet who wrote

  “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

Indeed, we hear the very spirit of Endymion speaking in Woodberry’s lines:

  “Beauty abides, nor suffers mortal change,
  Eternal refuge of the orphaned mind.”

Father John B. Tabb, who had the exquisite art of the Greek epigram at
his command, in one of his delicately finished little poems, imagined
Sappho listening to the “Ode to a Nightingale”:

  “Methinks when first the nightingale
  Was mated to thy deathless song,
  That Sappho with emotion pale
    Amid the Olympian throng,
  Again, as in the Lesbian grove,
  Stood listening with lips apart,
  To hear in thy melodious love
    The pantings of her heart.”

Yes; the memory and influence of Keats endure, and will endure, because
his poetry expresses something in the heart that will not die so long
as there are young men and maidens to see and feel the beauty of the
world and the thrill of love. His poetry is complete, it is true, it is
justified, because it is the fitting utterance of one of those periods of
mental life which Keats himself has called “the human seasons.”

But its completeness and its truth depend upon its relation, in itself
and in the poet’s mind, to the larger world of poetry, the fuller life,
the rounded year of man. Nor was this forward look, this anticipation of
something better and greater yet to come, lacking in the youth of Keats.
It flashes out, again and again, from his letters, those outpourings
of his heart and mind, so full of boyish exuberance and manly vigour,
so rich in revelations of what this marvellous, beautiful, sensitive,
courageous little creature really was,—a great soul in the body of a lad.
It shows itself clearly and calmly in the remarkable preface in which he
criticizes his own “Endymion,” calling it “a feverish attempt, rather
than a deed accomplished.” “It is just,” he writes, “that this youngster
should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while
it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit
to live.” The same fine hope of a sane and manly youth is expressed in
his early verses entitled “Sleep and Poetry.” He has been speaking of
the first joys of his fancy, in the realm of Flora and old Pan: the
merry games and dances with white-handed nymphs: the ardent pursuit of
love, and the satisfied repose in the bosom of a leafy world. Then his
imagination goes on to something better.

  “And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
  Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
  Where I may find the agonies, the strife
  Of human hearts: for lo! I see afar,
  O’ersailing the blue cragginess, a car
  And steeds with streamy manes—the charioteer
  Looks out upon the winds with glorious fear:
  And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly
  Along a huge cloud’s ridge: and now with sprightly
  Wheel downward come they into fresher skies,
  Tipt round with silver from the sun’s bright eyes.
                      ... And there soon appear
  Shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,
  Passing along before a dusky space
  Made by some mighty oaks: as they would chase
  Some ever-fleeting music, on they sweep.
  Lo! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and weep:
  Some with upholden hand and mouth severe;
  Some with their faces muffled to the ear
  Between their arms; some, clear in youthful bloom,
  Go glad and smilingly across the gloom;
  Some looking back, and some with upward gaze;
  Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways
  Flit onward—now a lovely wreath of girls
  Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls;
  And now broad wings. Most awfully intent
  The driver of those steeds is forward bent,
  And seems to listen: O that I might know
  All that he writes with such a hurrying glow.

  The visions all are fled—the car is fled
  Into the light of heaven, and in their stead
  A sense of real things comes doubly strong,
  And, like a muddy stream, would bear along
  My soul to nothingness: but I will strive
  Against all doubtings, and will keep alive
  The thought of that same chariot, and the strange
  Journey it went.”

How young-hearted is this vision, how full of thronging fancies and
half-apprehended mystic meanings! Yet how unmistakably it has the long,
high, forward look toward manhood, without which youth itself is not
rounded and complete!

After all, that look, that brave expectation, is vital in our picture of
Keats. It is one of the reasons why we love him. It is one of the things
which make his slender volume of poetry so companionable, even as an
ardent, dreamy man is doubly a good comrade when we feel in him the hope
of a strong man. We cannot truly understand the wonderful performance of
Keats without considering his promise; we cannot appreciate what he did
without remembering that it was only part of what he hoped to do.

He was not one of those who believe that the ultimate aim of poetry is
sensuous loveliness, and that there is no higher law above the law of
“art for art’s sake.” The poets of arrested development, the artificers
of mere melody and form, who say that art must always play and never
teach, the musicians who are content to remain forever

  “The idle singers of an empty day,”

are not his true followers.

He held that “beauty is truth.” But he held also another article that has
been too often left out in the repetition of his poetic creed: he held
“truth, beauty,” and he hoped one day to give a clear, full utterance to
that higher, holier vision. Perhaps he has, but not to mortal ears.




THE RECOVERY OF JOY

WORDSWORTH’S POETRY


When this essay was written, a good many years ago, there was no
available biography of Wordsworth except the two-volume _Memoir_ by
Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, the poet’s nephew. It is a solid work of
family piety, admiring and admirable; but it must be admitted that it is
dull. It is full of matters of no particular consequence, and it leaves
out events in the poet’s life and traits in his character which are not
only interesting in themselves but also of real importance to a vital
understanding of his work.

Even while reading the _Memoir_, I felt sure that he was not always the
tranquil, patient, wise, serenely happy sage that he appeared in his
later years,—sure that a joy in peace as deep and strong as his was,
could only have been won through sharp conflict,—sure that the smooth
portrait drawn by the reverent hand of the bishop did not fully and
frankly depict the real man who wrote the deep and moving poetry of
Wordsworth.

It was about this time that the valuable studies of Wordsworth’s early
life which had been made by Professor Emile Legouis, (then of the
University of Lyons, now of the Sorbonne,) were published in English.
This volume threw a new light upon the poet’s nature, revealing its
intense, romantic strain, and making clear at least some of the causes
which led to the shipwreck of his first hopes and to the period of
profound gloom which followed his return from residence in France in
December 1792.

Shortly after reading Professor Legouis’ book, I met by chance a
gentleman in Baltimore and was convinced by what he told me, (in a
conversation which I do not feel at liberty to repeat in detail,) that
Wordsworth had a grand “affair of the heart” while he lived in France,
with a young French lady of excellent family and character. But they were
parted. A daughter was born, (whom he legitimated according to French
law,) and descendants of that daughter were living.

There was therefore solid ground for my feeling that the poet was not
a man who had been always and easily decorous. He had passed through a
time of storm and stress. He had lost not only his political dreams and
his hopes of a career, but also his first love and his joy. The knowledge
of this gave his poetry a new meaning for me, brought it nearer, made it
seem more deeply human. It was under the influence of this feeling that
this essay was written in a farmhouse in Tyringham Valley, where I was
staying in the winter of 1897, with Richard Watson Gilder and his wife.

Since then Professor George McLean Harper has completed and published,
(1916,) his classic book on _William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and
Influence_. This is undoubtedly the very best biography of the poet,
and it contains much new material, particularly with reference to his
life and connections in France. But there is nothing in it to shake,
and on the contrary there is much to confirm, the opinion which was
first put forth in this essay: namely, that the central theme, the great
significance, of Wordsworth’s poetry is _the recovery of joy_.


I

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the town of Cockermouth in
Cumberland; educated in the village school of Hawkshead among the
mountains, and at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A dreamy, moody youth;
always ambitious, but not always industrious; passionate in disposition,
with high spirits, simple tastes, and independent virtues; he did not
win, and seems not to have desired, university honours. His principal
property when he came of age consisted of two manuscript poems,—_An
Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_,—composed in the manner of
Cowper’s _Task_. With these in his pocket he wandered over to France;
partly to study the language; partly to indulge his inborn love of travel
by a second journey on the Continent; and partly to look on at the vivid
scenes of the French Revolution. But the vast dæmonic movement of which
he proposed to be a spectator caught his mind in its current and swept
him out of his former self.

Wordsworth was not originally a revolutionist, like Coleridge and
Southey. He was not even a native radical, except as all simplicity
and austerity of character tend towards radicalism. When he passed
through Paris, in November of 1791, and picked up a bit of stone from
the ruins of the Bastile as a souvenir, it was only a sign of youthful
sentimentality. But when he came back to Paris in October of 1792, after
a winter at Orleans and a summer at Blois, in close intercourse with that
ardent and noble republican, Michael Beaupuy, he had been converted into
an eager partisan of the Republic. He even dreamed of throwing himself
into the conflict, reflecting on “the power of one pure and energetic
will to accomplish great things.”

His conversion was not, it seems to me, primarily a matter of
intellectual conviction. It was an affair of emotional sympathy. His
knowledge of the political and social theories of the Revolution was but
superficial. He was never a doctrinaire. The influence of Rousseau and
Condorcet did not penetrate far beneath the skin of his mind. It was
the primal joy of the Revolutionary movement that fascinated him,—the
confused glimmering of new hopes and aspirations for mankind. He was
like a man who has journeyed, half asleep, from the frost-bound dulness
of a wintry clime, and finds himself, fully awake, in a new country,
where the time for the singing of birds has come, and the multitudinous
blossoming of spring bursts forth. He is possessed by the spirit of
joy, and reason follows where feeling leads the way. Wordsworth himself
has confessed, half unconsciously, the secret of his conversion in his
lines on _The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its
Commencement_.

  “Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
  For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
  Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
  But to be young was very heaven!”

There was another “bliss,” keener even than the dreams of political
enthusiasm, that thrilled him in this momentous year,—the rapture of
romantic love. Into this he threw himself with ardour and tasted all its
joy. We do not know exactly what it was that broke the vision and dashed
the cup of gladness from his lips. Perhaps it was some difficulty with
the girl’s family, who were royalists. Perhaps it was simply the poet’s
poverty. Whatever the cause was, love’s young dream was shattered, and
there was nothing left but the painful memory of an error, to be atoned
for in later years as best he could.

His political hopes and ideals were darkened by the actual horrors
which filled Paris during the fall of 1792. His impulse to become a
revolutionist was shaken, if not altogether broken. Returning to England
at the end of the same year, he tried to sustain his sinking spirits by
setting in order the reasons and grounds of his new-born enthusiasm,
already waning. His letter to Bishop Watson, written in 1793, is the
fullest statement of republican sympathies that he ever made. In it he
even seems to justify the execution of Louis XVI, and makes light of “the
idle cry of modish lamentation which has resounded from the court to the
cottage” over the royal martyr’s fate. He defends the right of the people
to overthrow all who oppress them, to choose their own rulers, to direct
their own destiny by universal suffrage, and to sweep all obstacles out
of their way. The reasoning is so absolute, so relentless, the scorn
for all who oppose it is so lofty, that already we begin to suspect a
wavering conviction intrenching itself for safety.

The course of events in France was ill fitted to nourish the joy of a
pure-minded enthusiast. The tumultuous terrors of the Revolution trod its
ideals in the dust. Its light was obscured in its own sulphurous smoke.
Robespierre ran his bloody course to the end; and when his head fell
under the guillotine, Wordsworth could not but exult. War was declared
between France and England, and his heart was divided; but the deeper
and stronger ties were those that bound him to his own country. He was
English in his very flesh and bones. The framework of his mind was of
Cumberland. So he stood rooted in his native allegiance, while the leaves
and blossoms of joy fell from him, like a tree stripped bare by the first
great gale of autumn.

The years from 1793 to 1795 were the period of his deepest poverty,
spiritual and material. His youthful poems, published in 1793, met with
no more success than they deserved. His plans for entering into active
life were feeble and futile. His mind was darkened and confused, his
faith shaken to the foundation, and his feelings clouded with despair.
In this crisis of disaster two gifts of fortune came to him. His sister
Dorothy took her place at his side, to lead him back by her wise, tender,
cheerful love from the far country of despair. His friend Raisley Calvert
bequeathed to him a legacy of nine hundred pounds; a small inheritance,
but enough to protect him from the wolf of poverty, while he devoted his
life to the muse. From the autumn of 1795, when he and his sister set
up housekeeping together in a farmhouse at Racedown, until his death in
1850 in the cottage at Rydal Mount, where he had lived for thirty-seven
years with his wife and children, there was never any doubt about the
disposition of his life. It was wholly dedicated to poetry.


II

But what kind of poetry? What was to be its motive power? What its
animating spirit? Here the experience of life acting upon his natural
character became the deciding factor.

Wordsworth was born a lover of joy, not sensual, but spiritual. The
first thing that happened to him, when he went out into the world, was
that he went bankrupt of joy. The enthusiasm of his youth was dashed, the
high hope of his spirit was quenched. At the touch of reality his dreams
dissolved. It seemed as though he were altogether beaten, a broken man.
But with the gentle courage of his sister to sustain him, his indomitable
spirit rose again, to renew the adventure of life. He did not evade the
issue, by turning aside to seek for fame or wealth. His problem from
first to last was the problem of joy,—inward, sincere, imperishable
joy. How to recover it after life’s disappointments, how to deepen it
amid life’s illusions, how to secure it through life’s trials, how to
spread it among life’s confusions,—this was the problem that he faced.
This was the wealth that he desired to possess, and to increase, and to
diffuse,—the wealth

  “Of joy in widest commonalty spread.”

None of the poets has been as clear as Wordsworth in the avowal that the
immediate end of poetry is pleasure. “We have no sympathy,” said he, “but
what is propagated by pleasure, ... wherever we sympathise with pain,
it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle
combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is no general
principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what
has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone.” And
again: “The end of Poetry is to produce excitement, in co-existence with
an over-balance of pleasure.”

[Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Painted by W. Boxall.

_After an engraving by J. Bromley._]

But it may be clearly read in his poetry that what he means by “pleasure”
is really an inward, spiritual joy. It is such a joy, in its various
forms, that charms him most as he sees it in the world. His gallery of
human portraits contains many figures, but every one of them is presented
in the light of joy,—the rising light of dawn, or the waning light of
sunset. _Lucy Gray_ and the little maid in _We are Seven_ are childish
shapes of joy. The _Highland Girl_ is an embodiment of virginal gladness,
and the poet cries

  “Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace
  Hath led me to this lovely place.
  _Joy have I had_; and going hence
  I bear away my recompence.”

Wordsworth regards joy as an actual potency of vision:

  “With an eye made quiet by the power
  Of harmony, and _the deep power of joy_,
  We see into the heart of things.”

Joy is indeed the master-word of his poetry. The dancing daffodils enrich
his heart with joy.

  “They flash upon that inward eye
  Which is the bliss of solitude;
  And then my heart with pleasure fills,
  And dances with the daffodils.”

The kitten playing with the fallen leaves charms him with pure merriment.
The skylark’s song lifts him up into the clouds.

  “There is madness about thee, and _joy divine_
  In that song of thine.”

He turns from the nightingale, that creature of a “fiery heart,” to the
Stock-dove:

  “He sang of love, with quiet blending,
  Slow to begin and never ending;
  Of serious faith, _and inward glee_;
  That was the song—the song for me.”

He thinks of love which grows to use

  “_Joy as her holiest language._”

He speaks of life’s disenchantments and wearinesses as

  “_All that is at enmity with joy._”

When autumn closes around him, and the season makes him conscious that
his leaf is sere and yellow on the bough, he exclaims

  “_Yet will I temperately rejoice_;
  Wide is the range and free the choice
  Of undiscordant themes;
  Which haply kindred souls may prize
  Not less than vernal ecstacies,
  And passion’s feverish dreams.”

_Temperate rejoicing_,—that is the clearest note of Wordsworth’s poetry.
Not an unrestrained gladness, for he can never escape from that deep,
strange experience of his youth. Often, in thought, he

  “Must hear Humanity in fields and groves
  Pipe solitary anguish; or must hang
  Brooding above the fierce confederate storm
  Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore
  Within the walls of cities.”

But even while he hears these sounds he will not be “downcast or
forlorn.” He will find a deeper music to conquer these clashing
discords. He will learn, and teach, a hidden joy, strong to survive amid
the sorrows of a world like this. He will not look for it in some far-off
unrealized Utopia,

  “But in the very world which is the world
  Of all of us,—_the place where in the end_
  _We find our happiness, or not at all_!”

To this quest of joy, to this proclamation of joy, he dedicates his life.

                                “By words
  Which speak of nothing more than what we are
  Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
  Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
  _To noble raptures_.”

And herein he becomes a prophet to his age,—a prophet of the secret of
joy, simple, universal, enduring,—the open secret.

The burden of Wordsworth’s prophecy of joy, as found in his poetry,
is threefold. First, he declares with exultation that he has seen in
Nature the evidence of a living spirit in vital correspondence with
the spirit of man. Second, he expresses the deepest, tenderest feeling
of the inestimable value of the humblest human life,—a feeling which
through all its steadiness is yet strangely illumined by sudden gushes of
penetration and pathos. Third, he proclaims a lofty ideal of the liberty
and greatness of man, consisting in obedience to law and fidelity to duty.

I am careful in choosing words to describe the manner of this threefold
prophesying, because I am anxious to distinguish it from didacticism.
Not that Wordsworth is never didactic; for he is very often entirely and
dreadfully so. But at such times he is not at his best; and it is in
these long uninspired intervals that we must bear, as Walter Pater has
said, “With patience the presence of an alien element in Wordsworth’s
work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor
underwent his peculiar power.” Wordsworth’s genius as a poet did not
always illuminate his industry as a writer. In the intervals he prosed
terribly. There is a good deal of what Lowell calls “Dr. Wattsiness,” in
some of his poems.

But the character of his best poems was strangely inspirational. They
came to him like gifts, and he read them aloud as if wondering at their
beauty. Through the protracted description of an excursion, or the
careful explanation of a state of mind, he slowly plods on foot; but when
he comes to the mount of vision, he mounts up with wings as an eagle. In
the analysis of a character, in the narration of a simple story, he often
drones, and sometimes stammers; but when the flash of insight arrives, he
sings. This is the difference between the pedagogue and the prophet: the
pedagogue repeats a lesson learned by rote, the prophet chants a truth
revealed by vision.


III

Let me speak first of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature. The peculiar and
precious quality of his best work is that it is done with his eye on the
object and his imagination beyond it.

Nothing could be more accurate, more true to the facts than Wordsworth’s
observation of the external world. There was an underlying steadiness,
a fundamental placidity, a kind of patient, heroic obstinacy in his
character, which blended with his delicate, almost tremulous sensibility,
to make him rarely fitted for this work. He could look and listen long.
When the magical moment of disclosure arrived, he was there and ready.

Some of his senses were not particularly acute. Odours seem not to
have affected him. There are few phrases descriptive of the fragrance
of nature in his poetry, and so far as I can remember none of them are
vivid. He could never have written Tennyson’s line about

  “The smell of violets hidden in the green.”

Nor was he especially sensitive to colour. Most of his descriptions in
this region are vague and luminous, rather than precise and brilliant.
Colour-words are comparatively rare in his poems. Yellow, I think, was
his favourite, if we may judge by the flowers that he mentioned most
frequently. Yet more than any colour he loved clearness, transparency,
the diaphanous current of a pure stream, the light of sunset

                            “that imbues
  Whate’er it strikes with gem-like hues.”

But in two things his power of observation was unsurpassed, I think we
may almost say, unrivalled: in sound, and in movement. For these he had
what he describes in his sailor-brother,

                            “a watchful heart
  Still couchant, an inevitable ear,
  And an eye practiced like a blind man’s touch.”

In one of his juvenile poems, a sonnet describing the stillness of the
world at twilight, he says:

  “Calm is all nature as a resting wheel;
  The kine are couched upon the dewy grass,
  The horse alone seen dimly as I pass,
  _Is cropping audibly his evening meal_.”

At nightfall, while he is listening to the hooting of the owls and
mocking them, there comes an interval of silence, and then

           “a gentle shock of mild surprise
  _Has carried far into his heart the voice_
  _Of mountain torrents_.”

At midnight, on the summit of Snowdon, from a rift in the cloud-ocean at
his feet, he hears

        “the roar of waters, torrents, streams
  Innumerable, roaring with one voice.”

Under the shadows of the great yew-trees of Borrowdalek he loves

  “To lie and listen to the mountain flood
  _Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves_.”

What could be more perfect than the little lyric which begins

  “Yes, it was the mountain echo
  Solitary, clear, profound,
  Answering to the shouting cuckoo
  Giving to her sound for sound.”

How poignant is the touch with which he describes the notes of the
fiery-hearted Nightingale, singing in the dusk:

              “they pierce and pierce;
  Tumultuous harmony and fierce!”

But at sunrise other choristers make different melodies:

  “The birds are singing in the distant woods;
  Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
  The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
  And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.”

Wandering into a lovely glen among the hills, he hears all the voices of
nature blending together:

  “The Stream, so ardent in its course before,
  Sent forth such sallies of glad sound that all
  Which I till then had heard, appeared the voice
  Of common pleasure: beast and bird, the lamb,
  The shepherd’s dog, the linnet and the thrush
  Vied with this waterfall, and made a song,
  Which while I listened, seemed like the wild growth
  _Or like some natural produce of the air_
  _That could not cease to be_.”

Wordsworth, more than any other English poet, interprets and glorifies
the mystery of sound. He is the poet who sits oftenest by the Ear-Gate
listening to the whispers and murmurs of the invisible guests who throng
that portal into “the city of Man-Soul.” Indeed the whole spiritual
meaning of nature seems to come to him in the form of sound.

                                “Wonder not
  If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
  Communing in this sort through earth and heaven
  With every form of creature, as it looked
  Towards the Uncreated with a countenance
  Of adoration, with an eye of love.
  One song they sang, and it was audible,
  Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear,
  O’ercome by humblest prelude of that strain,
  Forgot her functions and slept undisturbed.”

No less wonderful is his sense of the delicate motions of nature, the
visible transition of form and outline. How exquisite is the description
of a high-poising summer-cloud,

  “That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
  And moveth all together, if it move at all.”

He sees the hazy ridges of the mountains like a golden ladder,

  “Climbing suffused with sunny air
  To stop—no record hath told where!”

He sees the gentle mists

  “Curling with unconfirmed intent
  On that green mountain’s side.”

He watches the swan swimming on Lake Lucarno,—

  “Behold!—as with a gushing impulse heaves
  That downy prow, and softly cleaves
  The mirror of the crystal flood,
  Vanish inverted hill and shadowy wood.”

He catches sight of the fluttering green linnet among the hazel-trees:

  “My dazzled sight he oft deceives,
  A Brother of the dancing leaves.”

He looks on the meadows sleeping in the spring sunshine:

  “The cattle are grazing,
  Their heads never raising,
  There are forty feeding like one!”

He beholds the far-off torrent pouring down Ben Cruachan:

  “Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice;
  Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye,
  Frozen by distance.”

Now in such an observation of Nature as this, so keen, so patient, so
loving, so delicate, there is an immediate comfort for the troubled mind,
a direct refuge and repose for the heart. To see and hear such things is
peace and joy. It is a consolation and an education. Wordsworth himself
has said this very distinctly.

  “One impulse from a vernal wood
  May teach you more of man
  Of moral evil and of good
  Than all the sages can.”

But the most perfect expression of his faith in the educating power of
Nature is given in one of the little group of lyrics which are bound
together by the name of Lucy,—love-songs so pure and simple that they
seem almost mysterious in their ethereal passion.

  “Three years she grew in sun and shower,
  Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
      On earth was never sown;
  This Child I to myself will take;
  She shall be mine, and I will make
      A Lady of my own.

  Myself will to my darling be
  Both law and impulse; and with me
      The Girl, in rock and plain,
  In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
  Shall feel an overseeing power
      To kindle or restrain.

  ...

  The stars of midnight shall be dear
  To her; and she shall lean her ear
      In many a secret place
  Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
  _And beauty born of murmuring sound_
      _Shall pass into her face_.’”

The personification of Nature in this poem is at the farthest removed
from the traditional poetic fiction which peopled the world with Dryads
and Nymphs and Oreads. Nor has it any touch of the “pathetic fallacy”
which imposes the thoughts and feelings of man upon natural objects. It
presents unconsciously, very simply, and yet prophetically, Wordsworth’s
vision of Nature,—a vision whose distinctive marks are vitality and
unity.

It is his faith that “every flower enjoys the air it breathes.” It is
also his faith that underlying and animating all this joy there is the
life of one mighty Spirit. This faith rises to its most magnificent
expression in the famous _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey_:

                      “And I have felt
  A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thought; a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
  And rolls through all things.”

The union of this animating Spirit of Nature, with the beholding,
contemplating, rejoicing spirit of man is like a pure and noble marriage,
in which man attains peace and the spousal consummation of his being.
This is the first remedy which Wordsworth finds for the malady of
despair, the first and simplest burden of his prophecy of joy. And he
utters it with confidence,

  “Knowing that Nature never did betray
  The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
  Through all the years of this our life, to lead
  From joy to joy: for she can so inform
  The mind that is within us, so impress
  With quietness and beauty, and so feed
  With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
  Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
  Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
  The dreary intercourse of daily life,
  Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
  Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
  Is full of blessings.”


IV

Side by side with this revelation of Nature, and interwoven with it so
closely as to be inseparable, Wordsworth was receiving a revelation of
humanity, no less marvellous, no less significant for his recovery of
joy. Indeed he himself seems to have thought it the more important of the
two, for he speaks of the mind of man as

  “My haunt and the main region of my song”;

And again he says that he will set out, like an adventurer,

  “And through the human heart explore the way;
  And look and listen—gathering whence I may,
  Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.”

The discovery of humble life, of peasant character, of lowly, trivial
scenes and incidents, as a field for poetry, was not original with
Wordsworth. But he was the first English poet to explore this field
thoroughly, sympathetically, with steady and deepening joy. Burns had
been there before him; but the song of Burns though clear and passionate,
was fitful. Cowper had been there before him; but Cowper was like a
visitor from the polite world, never an inhabitant, never quite able to
pierce gently, powerfully down to the realities of lowly life and abide
in them. Crabbe had been there before him; but Crabbe was something of
a pessimist; he felt the rough shell of the nut, but did not taste the
sweet kernel.

Wordsworth, if I may draw a comparison from another art, was the Millet
of English poetry. In his verse we find the same quality of perfect
comprehension, of tender pathos, of absolute truth interfused with
delicate beauty that makes Millet’s _Angelus_, and _The Gleaners_ and
_The Sower_ and _The Sheepfold_, immortal visions of the lowly life.
Place beside these pictures, if you will, Wordsworth’s _Solitary Reaper_,
_The Old Cumberland Beggar_, _Margaret_ waiting in her ruined cottage
for the husband who would never return, _Michael_, the old shepherd who
stood, many and many a day, beside the unfinished sheepfold which he had
begun to build with his lost boy,

  “And never lifted up a single stone,”—

place these beside Millet’s pictures, and the poems will bear the
comparison.

Coleridge called Wordsworth “a miner of the human heart.” But there is a
striking peculiarity in his mining: he searched the most familiar places,
by the most simple methods, to bring out the rarest and least suspected
treasures. His discovery was that there is an element of poetry, like
some metal of great value, diffused through the common clay of every-day
life.

It is true that he did not always succeed in separating the precious
metal from the surrounding dross. There were certain limitations in his
mind which prevented him from distinguishing that which was familiar and
precious, from that which was merely familiar.

One of these limitations was his lack of a sense of humour. At a
dinner-party he announced that he was never witty but once in his life.
When asked to narrate the instance, after some hesitation he said: “Well,
I will tell you. I was standing some time ago at the entrance of my
cottage at Rydal Mount. A man accosted me with the question, ‘Pray, sir,
have you seen my wife pass by?’ Whereupon I said, ‘Why, my good friend,
I didn’t know till this moment that you had a wife!’” The humour of this
story is unintentional and lies otherwhere than Wordsworth thought. The
fact that he was capable of telling it as a merry jest accounts for the
presence of many queer things in his poetry. For example; the lines in
_Simon Lee_,

  “Few months of life has he in store
    As he to you will tell,
  For still the more he works, the more
    Do his weak ankles swell:”

the stanza in _Peter Bell_, which Shelley was accused of having
maliciously invented, but which was actually printed in the first edition
of the poem,

  “Is it a party in a parlour
  Cramming just as they on earth were crammed,
  Some sipping punch—some sipping tea
  But, as you by their faces see,
  All silent and all—damned?”

the couplet in the original version of _The Blind Highland Boy_ which
describes him as embarking on his voyage in

  “A household tub, like one of those
  Which women use to wash their clothes.”

It is quite certain, I think, that Wordsworth’s insensibility to
the humourous side of things made him incapable of perceiving one
considerable source of comfort and solace in lowly life. Plain and poor
people get a great deal of consolation, in their hard journey, out of the
rude but keen fun that they take by the way. The sense of humour is a
means of grace.

I doubt whether Wordsworth’s peasant-poetry has ever been widely popular
among peasants themselves. There was an old farmer in the Lake Country
who had often seen the poet and talked with him, and who remembered him
well. Canon Rawnsley has made an interesting record of some of the old
man’s reminiscences. When he was asked whether he had ever read any of
Wordsworth’s poetry, or seen any of his books about in the farmhouses,
he answered:

“Ay, ay, time or two. But ya’re weel aware there’s potry and potry.
There’s potry wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can
laugh at or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery
to make out what’s said, and a deal of Wordsworth’s was this sort, ye
kna. You could tell fra the man’s faace his potry would niver have no
laugh in it.”

But when we have admitted these limitations, it remains true that no
other English poet has penetrated so deeply into the springs of poetry
which rise by every cottage door, or sung so nobly of the treasures which
are hidden in the humblest human heart, as Wordsworth has. This is his
merit, his incomparable merit, that he has done so much, amid the hard
conditions, the broken dreams, and the cruel necessities of life, to
remind us how rich we are in being simply human.

Like Clifford, in the _Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_,

  “Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,”

and thenceforth his chosen task was to explore the beauty and to show the
power of that common love.

  “There is a comfort in the strength of love;
  ’Twill make a thing endurable, which else
  Would overset the brain or break the heart.”

He found the best portion of a good man’s life in

  “His little, nameless, unremembered acts
  Of kindness and of love.”

In _The Old Cumberland Beggar_ he declared

                      “’Tis Nature’s law
  That none, the meanest of created things,
  Of forms created the most vile and brute,
  The dullest or most noxious, should exist
  Divorced from good—a spirit and pulse of good,
  A life and soul, to every mode of being
  Inseparably linked.”

And then he went on to trace, not always with full poetic inspiration,
but still with many touches of beautiful insight, the good that the old
beggar did and received in the world, by wakening among the peasants
to whose doors he came from year to year, the memory of past deeds of
charity, by giving them a sense of kinship with the world of want and
sorrow, and by bestowing on them in their poverty the opportunity of
showing mercy to one whose needs were even greater than their own;
for,—the poet adds—with one of those penetrating flashes which are the
surest mark of his genius,—

  “Man is dear to man; the poorest poor
  Long for some moments in a weary life
  When they can know and feel that they have been,
  Themselves, the fathers and the dealers out
  Of some small blessings; have been kind to such
  As needed kindness, for this single cause
  That we have all of us one human heart.”

Nor did Wordsworth forget, in his estimate of the value of the simplest
life, those pleasures which are shared by all men.

  “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
  And hermits are contented with their cells;
  And students with their pensive citadels;
  Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
  Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom
  High as the highest Peak of Furniss-fells,
  Will murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells;
  In truth the prison, unto which we doom
  Ourselves, no prison is.”

He sees a Miller dancing with two girls on the platform of a boat moored
in the river Thames, and breaks out into a song on the “stray pleasures”
that are spread through the earth to be claimed by whoever shall find
them. A little crowd of poor people gather around a wandering musician in
a city street, and the poet cries,

  “Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream;
  Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream;
  They are deaf to your murmurs—they care not for you,
  Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!”

He describes Coleridge and himself as lying together on the greensward in
the orchard by the cottage at Grasmere, and says

  “If but a bird, to keep them company,
  Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween,
  As pleased as if the same had been a maiden Queen.”

It was of such simple and unchartered blessings that he loved to sing. He
did not think that the vain or the worldly would care to listen to his
voice. Indeed he said in a memorable passage of gentle scorn that he did
not expect his poetry to be fashionable. “It is an awful truth,” wrote he
to Lady Beaumont, “that there neither is nor can be any genuine enjoyment
of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who either live
or wish to live in the broad light of the world,—among those who either
are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in
society. This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of
a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of
human nature and reverence for God.” He did not expect that his poetry
would be popular in that world where men and women devote themselves to
the business of pleasure, and where they care only for the things that
minister to vanity or selfishness,—and it never was.

But there was another world where he expected to be welcome and of
service. He wished his poetry to cheer the solitary, to uplift the
downcast, to bid the despairing hope again, to teach the impoverished
how much treasure was left to them. In short, he intended by the quiet
ministry of his art to be one of those

  “Poets who keep the world in heart,”

—and so he was.

It is impossible to exaggerate the value of such a service. Measured by
any true and vital standard Wordsworth’s contribution to the welfare of
mankind was greater, more enduring than that of the amazing Corsican,
Bonaparte, who was born but a few months before him and blazed his way to
glory. Wordsworth’s service was to life at its fountain-head. His remedy
for the despair and paralysis of the soul was not the prescription of a
definite philosophy as an antidote. It was a hygienic method, a simple,
healthful, loving life in fellowship with man and nature, by which
the native tranquillity and vigour of the soul would be restored. The
tendency of his poetry is to enhance our interest in humanity, to promote
the cultivation of the small but useful virtues, to brighten our joy in
common things, and to deepen our trust in a wise, kind, over-ruling God.
Wordsworth gives us not so much a new scheme of life as a new sense of
its interior and inalienable wealth. His calm, noble, lofty poetry is
needed to-day to counteract the belittling and distracting influence
of great cities; to save us from that most modern form of insanity,
publicomania, which sacrifices all the sanctities of life to the craze
for advertising; and to make a little quiet space in the heart, where
those who are still capable of thought, in this age of clattering
machinery, shall be able to hear themselves think.


V

But there is one still deeper element in Wordsworth’s poetry. He tells
us very clearly that the true liberty and grandeur of _mankind_ are
to be found along the line of obedience to law and fidelity to duty.
This is the truth which was revealed to him, slowly and serenely, as a
consolation for the loss of his brief revolutionary dream. He learned
to rejoice in it more and more deeply, and to proclaim it more and more
clearly, as his manhood settled into firmness and strength.

Fixing his attention at first upon the humblest examples of the power of
the human heart to resist unfriendly circumstances, as in _Resolution
and Independence_, and to endure sufferings and trials, as in _Margaret_
and _Michael_, he grew into a new conception of the right nobility. He
saw that it was not necessary to make a great overturning of society
before the individual man could begin to fulfil his destiny. “What then
remains?” he cries—

                                “To seek
  Those helps for his occasion ever near
  Who lacks not will to use them; vows, renewed
  On the first motion of a holy thought;
  Vigils of contemplation; praise; and prayer—
  A stream, which, from the fountain of the heart,
  Issuing however feebly, nowhere flows
  Without access of unexpected strength.
  But, above all, the victory is sure
  For him, who seeking faith by virtue, strives
  To yield entire submission to the law
  Of conscience—conscience reverenced and obeyed,
  As God’s most intimate presence in the soul,
  And his most perfect image in the world.”

If we would hear this message breathed in tones of lyric sweetness, as
to the notes of a silver harp, we may turn to Wordsworth’s poems on the
Skylark,—

  “Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
  True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.”

If we would hear it proclaimed with grandeur, as by a solemn organ;
or with martial ardour, as by a ringing trumpet, we may read the _Ode
to Duty_ or _The Character of the Happy Warrior_, two of the noblest
and most weighty poems that Wordsworth ever wrote. There is a certain
distinction and elevation about his moral feelings which makes them in
themselves poetic. In his poetry beauty is goodness and goodness is
beauty.

But I think it is in the Sonnets that this element of Wordsworth’s poetry
finds the broadest and most perfect expression. For here he sweeps upward
from the thought of the freedom and greatness of the individual man to
the vision of nations and races emancipated and ennobled by loyalty to
the right. How pregnant and powerful are his phrases! “Plain living and
high thinking.” “The homely beauty of the good old cause.” “A few strong
instincts and a few plain rules.” “Man’s unconquerable mind.” “By the
soul only, the Nations shall be great and free.” The whole series of
_Sonnets addressed to Liberty_, published in 1807, is full of poetic and
prophetic fire. But none among them burns with a clearer light, none
is more characteristic of him at his best, than that which is entitled
_London, 1802_.

  “Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour;
  England hath need of thee; she is a fen
  Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
  Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
  Have forfeited their ancient English dower
  Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
  Oh! raise us up; return to us again;
  And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
  Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
  Thou had’st a voice whose sound was like the sea:
  Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
  So didst thou travel on life’s common way
  In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
  The lowliest duties on herself did lay.”

This sonnet embraces within its “scanty plot of ground” the roots of
Wordsworth’s strength. Here is his view of nature in the kinship between
the lonely star and the solitary soul. Here is his recognition of life’s
common way as the path of honour, and of the lowliest duties as the
highest. Here is his message that manners and virtue must go before
freedom and power. And here is the deep spring and motive of all his
work, in the thought that _joy_, _inward happiness_, is the dower that
has been lost and must be regained.

Here then I conclude this chapter on Wordsworth. There are other things
that might well be said about him, indeed that would need to be said if
this were intended for a complete estimate of his influence. I should
wish to speak of the deep effect which his poetry has had upon the style
of other poets, breaking the bondage of “poetic diction” and leading the
way to a simpler and more natural utterance. I should need to touch upon
his alleged betrayal of his early revolutionary principles in politics,
and to show, (if a paradox may be pardoned), that he never had them and
that he always kept them. He never forsook liberty; he only changed his
conception of it. He saw that the reconstruction of society must be
preceded by reconstruction of the individual. Browning’s stirring lyric,
_The Lost Leader_,—

  “Just for a handful of silver he left us,
        Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat,”—

may have been written with Wordsworth in mind, but it was a singularly
infelicitous suggestion of a remarkably good poem.

All of these additions would be necessary if this estimate were intended
to be complete. But it is not, and so let it stand.

If we were to choose a motto for Wordsworth’s poetry it might be this:
“Rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice.” And if we looked farther
for a watchword, we might take it from that other great poet, Isaiah,
standing between the fierce radicals and sullen conservatives of Israel,
and saying,

  “In quietness and confidence shall be your strength,
  In rest and in returning ye shall be saved.”




“THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT”

ROBERT BROWNING’S POETRY


There is a striking contrast between the poetry of Browning and the
poetry of Wordsworth; and this comes naturally from the difference
between the two men in genius, temperament and life. I want to trace
carefully and perhaps more clearly some of the lines of that difference.
I do not propose to ask which of them ranks higher as poet. That seems
to me a futile question. The contrast in kind interests me more than the
comparison of degree. And this contrast, I think, can best be felt and
understood through a closer knowledge of the central theme of each of the
two poets.

Wordsworth is a poet of recovered joy. He brings consolation and
refreshment to the heart,—consolation which is passive strength,
refreshment which is peaceful energy. His poetry is addressed not to
crowds, but to men standing alone, and feeling their loneliness most
deeply when the crowd presses most tumultuously about them. He speaks
to us one by one, distracted by the very excess of life, separated from
humanity by the multitude of men, dazzled by the shifting variety of hues
into which the eternal light is broken by the prism of the world,—one
by one he accosts us, and leads us gently back, if we will follow him,
into a more tranquil region and a serener air. There we find the repose
of “a heart at leisure from itself.” There we feel the unity of man and
nature, and of both in God. There we catch sight of those eternal stars
of truth whose shining, though sometimes hidden, is never dimmed by the
cloud-confusions of morality. Such is the mission of Wordsworth to the
age. Matthew Arnold has described it with profound beauty.

  “He found us when the age had bound
  Our souls in its benumbing round,
  He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
  He laid us as we lay at birth
  On the cool flowery lap of earth,
  Smiles broke from us and we had ease,
  The hills were round us, and the breeze
  Went o’er the sun-lit fields again:
  Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
  Our youth returned; for there was shed
  On spirits that had long been dead,
  Spirits dried up and closely furled,
  The freshness of the early world.”

But precious as such a service is and ever must be, it does not fill
the whole need of man’s heart. There are times and moods in which it
seems pale and ineffectual. The very contrast between its serenity, its
assurance, its disembodied passion, its radiant asceticism, and the
mixed lights, the broken music, the fluctuating faith, the confused
conflict of actual life, seems like a discouragement. It calls us to
go into a retreat, that we may find ourselves and renew our power to
live. But there are natures which do not easily adapt themselves to a
retreat,—natures which crave stimulus more than consolation, and look
for a solution of life’s problem that can be worked out while they are
in motion. They do not wish, perhaps they are not able, to withdraw
themselves from active life even for the sake of seeing it more clearly.

Wordsworth’s world seems to them too bare, too still, too monotonous.
The rugged and unpopulous mountains, the lonely lakes, the secluded
vales, do not attract them as much as the fertile plain with its
luxuriant vegetation, the whirling city, the crowded highways of trade
and pleasure. Simplicity is strange to them; complexity is their native
element. They want music, but they want it to go with them in the
march, the parade, the festal procession. The poet for them must be
in the world, though he need not be altogether of it. He must speak
of the rich and varied life of man as one who knows its artificial as
well as its natural elements,—palaces as well as cottages, courts as
well as sheep-folds. Art and politics and literature and science and
churchmanship and society,—all must be familiar to him, material to his
art, significant to his interpretation. His message must be modern and
militant. He must not disregard doubt and rebellion and discord, but take
them into his poetry and transform them. He must front

  “The cloud of mortal destiny,”

and make the most of the light that breaks through it. Such a poet is
Robert Browning; and his poetry is the direct answer to at least one
side of the modern _Zeitgeist_, restless, curious, self-conscious,
energetic, the active, questioning spirit.


I

Browning’s poetic work-time covered a period of about fifty-six years,
(1833-1889,) and during this time he published over thirty volumes of
verse, containing more than two hundred and thirty poems, the longest,
_The Ring and the Book_, extending to nearly twenty-one thousand lines.
It was an immense output, greater I think, in mass, than that of almost
any other English poet except Shakespeare. The mere fact of such
productiveness is worth noting, because it is a proof of the activity of
the poet’s mind, and also because it may throw some light upon certain
peculiarities in the quality of his work.

Browning not only wrote much himself, he was also the cause of much
writing in others. Commentaries, guide-books, handbooks, and expositions
have grown up around his poetry so fast that the vines almost hide the
trellis. The Browning Literature now demands not merely a shelf, but a
whole case to itself in the library. It has come to such a pass that one
must choose between reading the books that Browning wrote and the books
that other people have written about Browning. Life is too short for both.

A reason, if not a justification, for this growth of a locksmith
literature about his work is undoubtedly to be found in what Mr.
Augustine Birrell calls “The Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning’s Poetry.”
The adjective in this happy title indicates one of the points in the
voluminous discussion. Does the difficulty in understanding Browning lie
in him, or in his readers? Is it an accidental defect of his style, or
a valuable element of his art, or an inherent profundity of his subject
that makes him hard to read? Or does the trouble reside altogether in
the imagination of certain readers, or perhaps in their lack of it? This
question was debated so seriously as to become at times almost personal
and threaten the unity of households if not the peace of nations.
Browning himself was accustomed to tell the story of a young man who
could not read his poetry, falling deeply in love with a young woman who
would hardly read anything else. She made it a condition of her favour
that her lover should learn to love her poet, and therefore set the
marriage day at a point beyond the time when the bridegroom could present
himself before her with convincing evidence that he had perused the works
of Browning down to the last line. Such was the strength of love that
the condition was triumphantly fulfilled. The poet used to tell with
humourous satisfaction that he assisted in person at the wedding of these
two lovers whose happiness he had unconsciously delayed and accomplished.

But an incident like this does not contribute much to the settlement of
the controversy which it illustrates. Love is a notorious miracle-worker.
The question of Browning’s obscurity is still debatable; and whatever may
be said on one side or the other, one fact must be recognized: it is not
yet quite clear whether his poetry is clear or not.

To this fact I would trace the rise and flourishing of Browning Societies
in considerable abundance, during the late Victorian Era, especially near
Boston. The enterprise of reading and understanding Browning presented
itself as an affair too large and difficult for the intellectual capital
of any private person. Corporations were formed, stock companies of
intelligence were promoted, for the purpose of working the field of his
poetry. The task which daunted the solitary individual was courageously
undertaken by phalanxes and cheerfully pursued in fellowship. Thus the
obscurity, alleged or actual, of the poet’s writing, having been at
first a hindrance, afterward became an advertisement to his fame. The
charm of the enigma, the fascination of solving riddles, the pleasure
of understanding something which other people at least professed to
be unable to understand, entered distinctly into the growth of his
popularity. A Browning cult, a Browning propaganda, came into being and
toiled tremendously.

One result of the work of these clubs and societies is already evident:
they have done much to remove the cause which called them into being. It
is generally recognized that a considerable part of Browning’s poetry is
not really so difficult after all. It can be read and enjoyed by any one
whose mind is in working order. Those innocent and stupid Victorians
were wrong about it. We alert and sagacious George-the-Fifthians need
some tougher poetry to try our mettle. So I suppose the Browning
Societies, having fulfilled their function, will gradually fade away,—or
perhaps transfer their attention to some of those later writers who
have put obscurity on a scientific basis and raised impenetrability to
a fine art. Meantime I question whether all the claims which were made
on behalf of Browning in the period of propaganda will be allowed at
their face value. For example, that _The Ring and the Book_ is “the
greatest work of creative imagination that has appeared since the time of
Shakespeare,”[10] and that _A Grammarian’s Funeral_ is “the most powerful
ode in English, the mightiest tribute ever paid to a man,”[11] and that
Browning’s “style as it stands is God-made, not Browning-made,”[12]
appear even now like drafts on glory which must be discounted before
they are paid. Nor does it seem probable that the general proposition
which was sometimes advanced by extreme Browningites, (and others,)
to the effect that all great poetry _ought_ to be hard to read, and
that a poem which is easy cannot be great, will stand the test of time.
Milton’s _Comus_, Gray’s _Elegy_, Wordsworth’s _Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality_, Shelley’s _Skylark_, Keats’ _Grecian Urn_, and Tennyson’s
_Guinevere_ cannot be reduced to the rank of minor verse by such a
formula.

And yet it must be said that the very extravagance of the claims which
were made for Browning, the audacity of enthusiasm which he inspired
in his expositors, is a proof of the reality and the potency of his
influence. Men are not kindled where there is no fire. Men do not keep
on guessing riddles unless the answers have some interest and value. A
stock company cannot create a prophet out of straw. Browning must have
had something important to say to the age, and he must have succeeded in
saying it in a way which was suitable, in spite of its defects, to convey
his message, else we may be sure his age never would have listened to
him, even by select companies, nor discussed him, even in a partisan
temper, nor felt his influence, even at second-hand.

What was it, then, that he had to say, and how did he say it? What was
the theme of his poetry, what the method by which he found it, what
the manner in which he treated it, and what the central element of
his disposition by which the development of his genius was impelled
and guided? These are the questions,—questions of fact rather than of
theory,—that particularly interest me in regard to Browning. And I hope
it may be possible to consider them from a somewhat fresh point of view,
and without entering into disturbing and unprofitable comparisons of rank
with Shakespeare and the other poets.

But there is no reason why the answers to these questions should be
concealed until the end of the chapter. It may be better to state them
now, in order that we may be able to test them as we go on, and judge
whether they are justified and how far they need to be qualified. There
is a particular reason for taking this course, in the fact that Browning
changed very little in the process of growth. There were alterations
in his style, but there was no real alteration in the man, nor in his
poetry. His first theme was his last theme. His early manner of treatment
was his latest manner of treatment. What he said at the beginning he
said again at the end. With the greatest possible variety of titles he
had but one main topic; with the widest imaginable range of subjects, he
used chiefly one method and reached but one conclusion; with a nature
of almost unlimited breadth he was always under control of one central
impulse and loyal to one central quality. Let me try, then, to condense
the general impression into a paragraph and take up the particulars
afterwards, point by point.

The clew to Browning’s mind, it seems to me, is vivid and inexhaustible
curiosity, dominated by a strangely steady optimism. His topic is not
the soul, in the abstract, but souls in the concrete. His chosen method
is that of spiritual drama, and for the most part, monodrama. His manner
is the intense, subtle, passionate style of psychological realism. His
message, uttered through the lips of a hundred imaginary characters, but
always with his own accent,—his message is “the Glory of the Imperfect.”

[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING.

Painted by G. F. Watts.

_From a photograph, copyright by Hollyer, London._]


II

The best criticisms of the poets have usually come from other poets, and
often in the form of verse. Landor wrote of Browning,

              “Since Chaucer was alive and hale
  No man hath walked along our roads with step
  So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
  So varied in discourse.”

This is a thumb-nail sketch of Browning’s personality,—not complete,
but very lifelike. And when we add to it Landor’s prose saying that
“his is the surest foot since Chaucer’s, that has waked the echoes from
_the difficult places_ of poetry and of life” we have a sufficiently
plain clew to the unfolding of Browning’s genius. Unwearying activity,
intense curiosity, variety of expression, and a predominant interest
in the difficult places of poetry and of life,—these were the striking
characteristics of his mind. In his heart a native optimism, an
unconquerable hopefulness, was the ruling factor. But of that I shall
not speak until later, when we come to consider his message. For
the present we are looking simply for the mainspring of his immense
intellectual energy.

When I say that the clew to Browning’s mind is to be found in his
curiosity, I do not mean inquisitiveness, but a very much larger and
nobler quality, for which we have no good word in English,—something
which corresponds with the German _Wissbegier_, as distinguished from
_Neugier_: an ardent desire to know things as they are, to penetrate as
many as possible of the secrets of actual life. This, it seems to me, is
the key to Browning’s intellectual disposition. He puts it into words in
his first poem _Pauline_, where he makes the nameless hero speak of his
life as linked to

    “a principle of restlessness
  Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all—
  This is myself; and I should thus have been
  Though gifted lower than the meanest soul.”

_Paracelsus_ is only an expansion of this theme in the biography of a
soul. In _Fra Lippo Lippi_ the painter says:

  “God made it all!
  For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
  For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,
  The mountain round it and the sky above,
  Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
  These are the frame to? What’s it all about?
  To be passed over, despised? Or dwelt upon,
  Wondered at? oh, this last of course!—you say.
  But why not do as well as say, paint these
  Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
  God’s works—paint any one and count it crime
  To let a truth slip.
              ... This world’s no blot for us,
  Nor blank; it means intensely and means good:
  To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”

No poet was ever more interested in life than Browning, and whatever
else may be said of his poetry it must be admitted that it is very
interesting. He touches all sides of human activity and peers into the
secret places of knowledge. He enters into the life of musicians in
_Abt Vogler_, _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_, _A Toccata of Galuppi’s_,
and _Charles Avison_; into the life of painters in _Andrea del Sarto_,
_Pictor Ignotus_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, _Old Pictures in Florence_,
_Gerard de Lairesse_, _Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper_,
and _Francis Furini_; into the life of scholars in _A Grammarian’s
Funeral_ and _Fust and his Friends_; into the life of politicians in
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ and _George Bubb Dodington_; into the life
of ecclesiastics in the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_, _Bishop
Blougram’s Apology_, _The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s
Church_, and _The Ring and the Book_; and he makes excursions into all
kinds of byways and crooked corners of life in such poems as _Mr. Sludge,
the Medium_, _Porphyria’s Lover_, _Mesmerism_, _Johannes Agricola in
Meditation_, _Pietro of Abano_, _Ned Bratts_, _Jochanan Hakkadosh_, and
so forth.

Merely to read a list of such titles is to have evidence of Browning’s
insatiable curiosity. It is evident also that he has a fondness for
out-of-the-way places. He wants to know, even more than he wants to
enjoy. If Wordsworth is the poet of the common life, Browning is the poet
of the uncommon life. Extraordinary situations and eccentric characters
attract him. Even when he is looking at some familiar scene, at some
commonplace character, his effort is to discover something that shall
prove that it is not familiar, not commonplace,—a singular detail, a
striking feature, a mark of individuality. This gives him more pleasure
than any distant vision of an abstraction or a general law.

  “All that I know
    Of a certain star
  Is, it can throw
    (Like the angled spar)
  Now a dart of red,
    Now a dart of blue;
  Till my friends have said
  They would fain see, too,
    My star that dartles the red and the blue!
  Then it stops like a bird; like a flower hangs furled;
    They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
  What matter to me if their star is a world?
    Mine has opened its soul to me, therefore I love it.”

One consequence of this penetrating, personal quality of mind is that
Browning’s pages teem with portraits of men and women, which are like
sculptures and paintings of the Renaissance. They are more individual
than they are typical. There is a peculiarity about each one of them
which almost makes us forget to ask whether they have any general
relation and value. The presentations are so sharp and vivid that their
representative quality is lost.

If Wordsworth is the Millet of poetry, Browning is the Holbein or the
Denner. He never misses the mole, the wrinkle, the twist of the eyebrow,
which makes the face stand out alone, the sudden touch of self-revelation
which individualizes the character. Thus we find in Browning’s poetry few
types of humanity, but plenty of men.

Yet he seldom, if ever, allows us to forget the background of society.
His figures are far more individual than Wordsworth’s, but far less
solitary. Behind each of them we feel the world out of which they
have come and to which they belong. There is a sense of crowded life
surging through his poetry. The city, with all that it means, is not
often completely out of view. “Shelley’s characters,” says a thoughtful
essayist, “are creatures of wave and sky; Wordsworth’s of green English
fields; Browning’s move in the house, the palace, the street.”[13] In
many of them, even when they are soliloquizing, there is a curious
consciousness of opposition, of conflict. They seem to be defending
themselves against unseen adversaries, justifying their course against
the judgment of absent critics. Thus Bishop Blougram while he talks over
the walnuts and the wine to Mr. Gigadibs, the sceptical hack-writer, has
a worldful of religious conservatives and radicals in his eye and makes
his half-cynical, wholly militant, apology for agnostic orthodoxy to
them. The old huntsman, in _The Flight of the Duchess_, is maintaining
the honour of his fugitive mistress against the dried-up, stiff,
conventional society from which she has eloped with the Gypsies. Andrea
del Sarto, looking at the soulless fatal beauty of his Lucrezia, and
meditating on the splendid failure of his art, cries out to Rafael and
Michelangelo and all his compeers to understand and judge him.

Even when Browning writes of romantic love, (one of his two favourite
subjects), he almost always heightens its effect by putting it in relief
against the ignorance, the indifference, the busyness, or the hostility
of the great world. In _Cristina_ and _Evelyn Hope_ half the charm of the
passion lies in the feeling that it means everything to the lover though
no one else in the world may know of its existence. _Porphyria’s Lover_,
in a fit of madness, kills his mistress to keep her from going back to
the world which would divide them. The sweet searching melody of _In a
Gondola_ plays itself athwart a sullen distant accompaniment of Venetian
tyranny and ends with a swift stroke of vengeance from the secret Three.

Take, for an example of Browning’s way of enhancing love by contrast,
that most exquisite and subtle lyric called _Love Among the Ruins_.

  “Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles
              Miles and miles
  On the solitary pastures where our sheep
              Half asleep
  Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stay or stop
              As they crop—
  Was the site once of a city great and gay
              (So they say)
  Of our country’s very capital, its prince
              Ages since
  Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
              Peace or war.

  And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
              Smiles to leave
  To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
              In such peace,
  And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray
              Melt away—
  That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
              Waits me there
  In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
              For the goal,
  When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
              Till I come.

  ...

  In one year they sent a million fighters forth
              South and North,
  And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
              As the sky,
  Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—
              Gold of course.
  Oh heart! Oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
              Earth’s returns
  For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
              Shut them in,
  With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
              Love is best.”


III

“Love is best!” That is one of the cardinal points of Browning’s
creed. He repeats it in a hundred ways: tragically in _A Blot in
the ’Scutcheon_; sentimentally in _A Lover’s Quarrel_, _Two in the
Campagna_, _The Last Ride Together_; heroically in _Colombe’s Birthday_;
in the form of a paradox in _The Statue and the Bust_; as a personal
experience in _By the Fireside_, _One Word More_, and at the end of the
prelude to _The Ring and the Book_.

  “For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
  And hope and fear, ...
  Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love.”

But it must be confessed that he does not often say it as clearly, as
quietly, as beautifully as in _Love Among the Ruins_. For his chosen
method is dramatic and his natural manner is psychological. So ardently
does he follow this method, so entirely does he give himself up to this
manner that his style

                      “is subdued
  To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”

In the dedicatory note to _Sordello_, written in 1863, he says “My stress
lay in the incidents in the development of a _soul_; little else is worth
study.” He felt intensely

  “How the world is made for each of us!
    How all we perceive and know in it
  Tends to some moment’s product thus,
    When a soul declares itself—to wit,
  By its fruit, the thing it does!”

In _One Word More_ he describes his own poetry with keen insight:

  “Love, you saw me gather men and women,
  Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,
  Enter each and all and use their service,
  Speak from every mouth,—the speech a poem.”

It is a mistake to say that Browning is a metaphysical poet: he is a
psychological poet. His interest does not lie in the abstract problems of
time and space, mind and matter, divinity and humanity. It lies in the
concrete problems of opportunity and crisis, flesh and spirit, man the
individual and God the person. He is an anatomist of souls.

  “Take the least man of all mankind, as I;
  Look at his head and heart, find how and why
  He differs from his fellows utterly.”[14]

But his way of finding out this personal equation is not by observation
and reflection. It is by throwing himself into the character and making
it reveal itself by intricate self-analysis or by impulsive action.
What his poetry lacks is the temperate zone. He has the arctic circle
of intellect and the tropics of passion. But he seldom enters the
intermediate region of sentiment, reflection, sympathy, equable and
prolonged feeling. Therefore it is that few of his poems have the power
of “sinking inward from thought to thought” as Wordsworth’s do. They
surprise us, rouse us, stimulate us, more than they rest us. He does
not penetrate with a mild and steady light through the portals of the
human heart, making them transparent. He flings them wide open suddenly,
and often the gates creak on their hinges. He is forever tying Gordian
knots in the skein of human life and cutting them with the sword of
swift action or intense passion. His psychological curiosity creates the
difficulties, his intuitive optimism solves them.


IV

The results of this preoccupation with such subjects and of this manner
of dealing with them may be recognized very easily in Browning’s work.

First of all they turned him aside from becoming a great Nature-poet,
though he was well fitted to be one. It is not that he loves Nature’s
slow and solemn pageant less, but that he loves man’s quick and varied
drama more. His landscapes are like scenery for the stage. They
accompany the unfolding of the plot and change with it, but they do not
influence it. His observation is as keen, as accurate as Wordsworth’s or
Tennyson’s, but it is less steady, less patient, less familiar. It is the
observation of one who passes through the country but does not stay to
grow intimate with it. The forms of nature do not print themselves on his
mind; they flash vividly before him, and come and go. Usually it is some
intense human feeling that makes the details of the landscape stand out
so sharply. In _Pippa Passes_, it is in the ecstasy of love that Ottima
and Sebald notice

  “The garden’s silence: even the single bee
  Persisting in his toil, suddenly stopped,
  And where he hid you only could surmise
  By some campanula chalice set a-swing.”

It is the sense of guilty passion that makes the lightning-flashes,
burning through the pine-forest, seem like dagger-strokes,—

  “As if God’s messenger through the closed wood screen
  Plunged and re-plunged his weapon at a venture,
  Feeling for guilty thee and me.”

In _Home Thoughts from Abroad_, it is the exile’s deep homesickness that
brings the quick, delicate vision before his eyes:

  “Oh, to be in England
  Now that April’s there,
  And whoever wakes in England
  Sees, some morning, unaware,
  That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
  Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
  While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
  In England—now!”

But Browning’s touches of nature are not always as happy as this. Often
he crowds the details too closely, and fails to blend them with the
ground of the picture, so that the tonality is destroyed and the effect
is distracting. The foreground is too vivid: the aerial perspective
vanishes. There is an impressionism that obscures the reality. As Amiel
says: “Under pretense that we want to study it more in detail, we
pulverize the statue.”

Browning is at his best as a Nature-poet in sky-scapes, like the
description of daybreak in _Pippa Passes_, the lunar rainbow in
_Christmas Eve_, and the Northern Lights in _Easter Day_; and also in
a kind of work which might be called symbolic landscape, where the
imaginative vision of nature is made to represent a human experience.
A striking example of this work is the scenery of _Childe Roland_,
reflecting as in a glass the grotesque horrors of spiritual desolation.
There is a passage in _Sordello_ which makes a fertile landscape,
sketched in a few swift lines, the symbol of Sordello’s luxuriant
nature; and another in Norbert’s speech, in _In a Balcony_, which uses
the calm self-abandonment of the world in the tranquil evening light as
the type of the sincerity of the heart giving itself up to love. But
perhaps as good an illustration as we can find of Browning’s quality as a
Nature-poet, is a little bit of mystery called _Meeting at Night_.

  “The gray sea and the long black land;
  And the yellow half-moon, large and low;
  And the startled little waves that leap
  In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
  As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
  And quench its speed in the slushy sand.
  Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
  Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
  A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
  And the blue spirt of a lighted match,
  And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
  Than the two hearts beating each to each!”

This is the landscape of the drama.

A second result of Browning’s preoccupation with dramatic psychology is
the close concentration and “alleged obscurity” of his style. Here again
I evade the critical question whether the obscurity is real, or whether
it is only a natural and admirable profundity to which an indolent
reviewer has given a bad name. That is a question which Posterity must
answer. But for us the fact remains that some of his poetry is hard to
read; it demands close attention and strenuous effort; and when we find
a piece of it that goes very easily, like _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_,
_How They brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_, _Hervé Riel_, or
the stirring _Cavalier Tunes_, we are conscious of missing the sense of
strain which we have learned to associate with the reading of Browning.

One reason for this is the predominance of curiosity over harmony in
his disposition. He tries to express the inexpressible, to write the
unwritable. As Dr. Johnson said of Cowley, he has the habit “of pursuing
his thoughts to the last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of
generality.” Another reason is the fluency, the fertility, the haste of
his genius, and his reluctance, or inability, to put the brakes on his
own productiveness.

It seems probable that if Browning had been able to write more slowly
and carefully he might have written with more lucidity. There was a time
when he made a point of turning off a poem a day. It is doubtful whether
the story of _The Ring and the Book_ gains in clearness by being told by
eleven different persons, all of them inclined to volubility.

Yet Browning’s poetry is not verbose. It is singularly condensed in the
matter of language. He seems to have made his most arduous effort in
this direction. After _Paracelsus_ had been published and pronounced
“unintelligible,” he was inclined to think that there might be some fault
of too great terseness in the style. But a letter from Miss Caroline
Fox was shown to him, in which that lady, (then very young,) took the
opposite view and asked “doth he know that Wordsworth will devote a
fortnight or more to the discovery of the single word that is the one
fit for his sonnet.” Browning appears to have been impressed by this
criticism; but he set himself to work upon it, not so much by way of
selecting words as by way of compressing them. He put _Sordello_ into a
world where many of the parts of speech are lacking and all are crowded.
He learned to pack the largest, possible amount of meaning into the
smallest possible space, as a hasty traveller packs his portmanteau. Many
small articles are crushed and crumpled out of shape. He adopted a system
of elisions for the sake of brevity, and loved, as C. S. Calverley said,

              “to dock the smaller parts of speech
  As we curtail th’ already curtailed cur.”

At the same time he seldom could resist the temptation to put in another
thought, another simile, another illustration, although the poem might be
already quite full. He called out, like the conductor of a street-car,
“Move up in front: room for one more!” He had little tautology of
expression, but much of conception. A good critic says “Browning
condenses by the phrase, elaborates by the volume.”[15]

One consequence of this system of writing is that a great deal of
Browning’s poetry lends itself admirably to translation,—into English.
The number of prose paraphrases of his poems is great, and so constantly
increasing that it seems as if there must be a real demand for them.
But Coleridge, speaking of the qualities of a true poetic style,
remarked: “Whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same
language without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or
in association, or in any other feeling, are so far vicious in their
diction.”

Another very notable thing in Browning’s poetry is his fertility
and fluency of rhyme. He is probably the most rapid, ingenious, and
unwearying rhymer among the English poets. There is a story that once,
in company with Tennyson, he was challenged to produce a rhyme for
“rhinoceros,” and almost instantly accomplished the task with a verse in
which the unwieldy quadruped kept time and tune with the phrase “he can
toss Eros.”[16] There are other _tours de force_ almost as extraordinary
in his serious poems. Who but Browning would have thought of rhyming
“syntax” with “tin-tacks,” or “spare-rib” with “Carib,” (_Flight of
Duchess_) or “Fra Angelico’s” with “bellicose,” or “Ghirlandajo” with
“heigh-ho,” (_Old Pictures in Florence_) or “expansive explosive” with “O
Danaides, O Sieve!” (_Master Hugues_). Rhyme, with most poets, acts as a
restraint, a brake upon speech. But with Browning it is the other way.
His rhymes are like wild, frolicsome horses, leaping over the fences and
carrying him into the widest digressions. Many a couplet, many a stanza
would not have been written but for the impulse of a daring, suggestive
rhyme.

Join to this love of somewhat reckless rhyming, his deep and powerful
sense of humour, and you have the secret of his fondness for the
grotesque. His poetry abounds in strange contrasts, sudden changes of
mood, incongruous comparisons, and odd presentations of well-known
subjects. Sometimes the whole poem is written in this manner. The
_Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister_, _Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis_, and
_Caliban upon Setebos_, are poetic gargoyles. Sometimes he begins
seriously enough, as in the poem on Keats, and closes with a bit of
fantastic irony:

  “Hobbs hints blue,—straight he turtle eats:
    Nobbs prints blue,—claret crowns his cup:
  Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats—
    Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?
  What porridge had John Keats?”

Sometimes the poem opens grotesquely, like _Christmas Eve_, and rises
swiftly to a wonderful height of pure beauty and solemnity, dropping
back into a grotesque at the end. But all this play of fancy must
not be confused with the spirit of mockery or of levity. It is often
characteristic of the most serious and earnest natures; it arises in
fact from the restlessness of mind in the contemplation of evil, or from
the perception of life’s difficulties and perplexities. Shakespeare
was profoundly right in introducing the element of the grotesque into
_Hamlet_, his most thoughtful tragedy. Browning is never really anything
else but a serious thinker, passionately curious to solve the riddle of
existence. Like his own _Sordello_ he

  “Gave to familiar things a face grotesque,
  Only, pursuing through the mad burlesque,
  A grave regard.”

We may sum up, then, what we have to say of Browning’s method and manner
by recognizing that they belong together and have a mutual fitness and
inevitableness. We may wish that he had attained to more lucidity and
harmony of expression, but we should probably have had some difficulty
in telling him precisely how to do it, and he would have been likely to
reply with good humour as he did to Tennyson, “The people must take me
as they find me.” If he had been less ardent in looking for subjects
for his poetry, he might have given more care to the form of his poems.
If he had cut fewer blocks, he might have finished more statues. The
immortality of much of his work may be discounted by its want of perfect
art,—the only true preservative of man’s handiwork. But the immortality
of his genius is secure. He may not be ranked finally among the great
masters of the art of poetry. But he certainly will endure as a mine for
poets. They may stamp the coins more clearly and fashion the ornaments
more delicately. But the gold is his. He was the prospector,—the first
dramatic psychologist of modern life. The very imperfections of his work,
in all its splendid richness and bewildering complexity, bear witness to
his favourite doctrine that life itself is more interesting than art, and
more glorious, because it is not yet perfect.


V

“The Glory of the Imperfect,”—that is a phrase which I read in a pamphlet
by that fine old Grecian and noble Christian philosopher, George Herbert
Palmer, many years ago. It seems to me to express the central meaning of
Browning’s poetry.

He is the poet of aspiration and endeavour; the prophet of a divine
discontent. All things are precious to him, not in themselves, but as
their defects are realized, as man uses them, and presses through them,
towards something higher and better. Hope is man’s power: and the things
hoped for must be as yet unseen. Struggle is man’s life; and the purpose
of life is not merely education, but a kind of progressive creation of
the soul.

  “Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.”

The world presents itself to him, as the Germans say, _Im Werden_. It is
a world of potencies, working itself out. Existence is not the mere fact
of being, but the vital process of becoming. The glory of man lies in
his power to realize this process in his mind and to fling himself into
it with all his will. If he tries to satisfy himself with things as they
are, like the world-wedded soul in _Easter Eve_, he fails. If he tries to
crowd the infinite into the finite, like Paracelsus, he fails. He must
make his dissatisfaction his strength. He must accept the limitations of
his life, not in the sense of submitting to them, but as Jacob wrestled
with the angel, in order to win, through conflict, a new power, a larger
blessing. His ardent desires and longings and aspirations, yes, even his
defeats and disappointments and failures, are the stuff out of which his
immortal destiny is weaving itself. The one thing that life requires of
him is to act with ardour, to go forward resolutely, to “burn his way
through the world”; and the great lesson which it teaches him is this:

  “But thou shalt painfully attain to joy
  While hope and love and fear shall keep thee man.”

Browning was very much needed in the Nineteenth Century as the antidote,
or perhaps it would be more just to say, as the complement to Carlyle.
For Carlyle’s prophecy, with all its moral earnestness, its virility,
its indomitable courage, had in it a ground-tone of despair. It was the
battle-cry of a forlorn hope. Man must hate shams intensely, must seek
reality passionately, must do his duty desperately; but he can never tell
why. The reason of things is inscrutable: the eternal Power that rules
things is unknowable. Carlyle, said Mazzini, “has a constant disposition
to crush the human by comparing him with God.” But Browning has an
unconquerable disposition to elevate the human by joining him to God. The
power that animates and governs the world is Divine; man cannot escape
from it nor overcome it. But the love that stirs in man’s heart is also
Divine; and if man will follow it, it shall lead him to that height
where he shall see that Power is Love.

  “I have faith such end shall be:
    From the first Power was—I knew.
  Life has made clear to me
    That, strive but for closer view,
  Love were as plain to see.

  When see? When there dawns a day
    If not on the homely earth,
  Then yonder, worlds away,
    Where the strange and new have birth
  And Power comes full in play.”[17]

Browning’s optimism is fundamental. Originally a matter of temperament,
perhaps, as it is expressed in _At the Mermaid_,—

  “I find earth not gray, but rosy,
    Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
  Do I stoop? I pluck a posy,
    Do I stand and stare? All’s blue——”

primarily the spontaneous tone of a healthy, happy nature, it became the
chosen key-note of all his music, and he works it out through a hundred
harmonies and discords. He is “sure of goodness as of life.” He does
not ask “How came good into the world?” For that, after all, is the
pessimistic question; it assumes that the ground of things is evil and
the good is the breaking of the rule. He asks instead “How came evil into
the world?” That is the optimistic question; as long as a man puts it in
that form he is an optimist at heart; he takes it for granted that good
is the native element and evil is the intruder; there must be a solution
of the problem whether he can find it or not; the rule must be superior
to, and triumphant over, the exception; the meaning and purpose of evil
must somehow, some time, be proved subordinate to good.

That is Browning’s position:

    “My own hope is, a sun will pierce
  The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
    That, after Last, returns the First,
  Though a wide compass round be fetched;
    That what began best, can’t end worst,
  Nor what God blessed once prove accurst.”

The way in which he justifies this position is characteristic of the man.
His optimism is far less defensive than it is militant. He never wavers
from his intuitive conviction that “the world means good.” He follows
this instinct as a soldier follows his banner, into whatever difficulties
and conflicts it may lead him, and fights his way out, now with the
weapons of philosophy, now with the bare sword of faith.


VI

It might seem at first as if it were unfair to attempt any estimate of
the philosophic and religious teaching of a poet like Browning, whose
method we have already recognized as dramatic. Can we ascribe to the poet
himself the opinions which he puts into the mouths of his characters? Can
we hold him responsible for the sentiments which are expressed by the
actors on his stage?

Certainly this objection must be admitted as a restraint in the
interpretation of his poetry. We are not to take all that his characters
say, literally and directly, as his own belief, any more than we are to
read the speeches of Satan, and Eliphaz, and Bildad, and Zophar, in the
Book of Job, as utterances of the spirit of inspiration. But just as
that great dramatic Scripture, dealing with the problems of evil and
suffering and sovereignty, does contain a doctrine and convey a lesson,
so the poetry of Browning, taken as a whole, utters a distinct and
positive prophetic message.

In the first place, many of the poems are evidently subjective, written
without disguise in the first person. Among these we may consider _My
Star_; _By the Fireside_; _One Word More_; the Epilogues to _Dramatis
Personæ_ and _Pachiarrotto_ and _Ferishtah’s Fancies_; the introduction
and the close of _The Ring and the Book_; _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter
Day_; the ending of the poem called _Gold Hair_, and of _A Death in the
Desert_, and of _Bishop Blougram’s Apology_; _Prospice_ and _Reverie_.
In the second place we must remember Goethe’s dictum: “Every author in
some degree, pourtrays himself in his works, even be it against his
will.” Even when Browning is writing dramatically, he cannot conceal
his sympathy. The masks are thin. His eyes shine through. “His own
personality,” says Mr. Stedman, “is manifest in the speech and movement
of almost every character of each piece. His spirit is infused as if by
metempsychosis, within them all, and forces each to assume a strange
Pentecostal tone, which we discover to be that of the poet himself.” Thus
it is not impossible, nor even difficult, to reach a fair estimate of his
ethical and religious teaching and discover its principal elements.

1. First among these I would put a great confidence in God. Browning is
the most theological of modern poets. The epithet which was applied to
Spinoza might well be transferred to him. He is a “God-intoxicated” man.
But in a very different sense, for whereas the philosopher felt God as an
idea, the poet feels Him intensely as a person. The song which he puts
into the lips of the unconscious heroine in _Pippa Passes_,—

  “God’s in his heaven
  All’s right with the world,——”

is the recurrent theme of his poetry. He cries with Paracelsus,

  “God thou art Love, I build my faith on that.”

Even when his music is broken and interrupted by discords, when it
seems to dissolve and fade away as all human work, in its outward form,
dissolves and fades, he turns, as Abt Vogler turns from his silent
organ, to God;

  “Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
    Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!
  What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?
    Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?”

In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ he takes up the ancient figure of the potter and the
clay and uses it to express his boundless trust in God.

The characteristic mark of Browning’s view of God is that it is always
taken from the side of humanity. The Perfect Glory is the correlative of
the glory of the imperfect. The Divine Love is the answer to the human
longing. God is, because man needs Him. From this point of view it almost
seems, as a brilliant essayist has said, as if “In Browning, God is
adjective to man.”[18]

But it may be said in answer, that, at least for man, this is the only
point of view that is accessible. We can never leave our own needs
behind us, however high we may try to climb. Certainly if we succeed in
forgetting them for a moment, in that very moment we have passed out of
the region of poetry, which is the impassioned interpretation of man’s
heart.

2. The second element of power in Browning’s poetry is that he sees in
the personal Christ the very revelation of God that man’s heart most
needs and welcomes. Nowhere else in all the range of modern poetry has
this vision been expressed with such spiritual ardour, with such poignant
joy. We must turn back to the pages of Isaiah to find anything to equal
the Messianic rapture of the minstrel in _Saul_.

  “He who did most shall bear most: the strongest shall stand the most
    weak.
  ’Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek
  In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be,
  A Face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me,
  Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand
  Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! see the Christ stand!”

We must look into the Christ-filled letters of St. Paul to find the
attractions of the Crucified One uttered as powerfully as they are in the
_Epistle of Karshish_.

  “The very God! think Abib; dost thou think?
  So, the All-great, were the All-Loving too—
  So, through the thunder comes a human voice
  Saying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here!
  Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
  Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine,
  But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
  And thou must love me who have died for thee!’”

It is idle to assert that these are only dramatic presentations of the
Christian faith. No poet could have imagined such utterances without
feeling their significance; and the piercing splendour of their
expression discloses his sympathy. He reveals it yet more unmistakably
in _Christmas Eve_, (strophe XVII) and in _Easter Day_, (strophe XXX.)
In the Epilogue to _Dramatis Personæ_ it flashes out clearly. The second
speaker, as Renan, has bewailed the vanishing of the face of Christ from
the sorrowful vision of the race. The third speaker, the poet himself,
answers:

  “That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
  Or decomposes but to recompose
  Become my universe that feels and knows!”

“That face,” said Browning to a friend, “that face is the face of Christ:
that is how I feel Him.”

Surely this is the religious message that the world most needs to-day.
More and more everything in Christianity hangs upon the truth of the
Incarnation. The alternative declares itself. Either no God whom we can
know and love at all, or God personally manifest in Christ!

3. The third religious element in Browning’s poetry is his faith that
this life is a probation, a discipline for the future. He says, again and
again,

              “I count life just a stuff
  To try the soul’s strength on, educe the man.”

The glory of the imperfect lies in the power of progress, “man’s
distinctive mark.” And progress comes by conflict; conflict with
falsehood and ignorance,—

  “Living here means nescience simply; ’tis next life that helps to learn—”

and conflict with evil,—

  “Why comes temptation but for man to meet,
  And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
  And so be pedestalled in triumph?”

The poet is always calling us to be glad we are engaged in such a noble
strife.

              “Rejoice we are allied
              To that which doth provide
  And not partake, effect and not receive!
              A spark disturbs our clod;
              Nearer we hold of God
  Who gives, than of his tribes that take, I must believe.

              Then welcome each rebuff
              That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
  Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
              Be our joys three-parts pain!
              Strive and hold cheap the strain;
  Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”

Now this is fine doctrine, lofty, strenuous, stimulating. It appeals
to the will, which is man’s central power. It proclaims the truth that
virtue must be active in its essence though it may also be passive in its
education, positive in its spirit and negative only by contrast.

But it is in the working out of this doctrine into an ethical system
that Browning enters upon dangerous ground, and arrives at results which
seem to obscure the clearness, and to threaten the stability of the moral
order, by which alone, if the world’s greatest teachers have been right,
the ultimate good of humanity can be attained. Here, it seems to me,
his teaching, especially in its latter utterances, is often confused,
turbulent, misleading. His light is mixed with darkness. He seems almost
to say that it matters little which way we go, provided only we go.

He overlooks the deep truth that there is an activity of the soul in
self-restraint as well as in self-assertion. It takes as much courage
to dare not to do evil as it does to dare to do good. The hero is
sometimes the man who stands still. Virtue is noblest when it is joined
to virility. But virility alone is not virtue nor does it always lead
to moral victory. Sometimes it leads straight towards moral paralysis,
death, extinction. Browning fails to see this, because his method is
dramatic and because he dramatizes through himself. He puts himself
into this or the other character, and works himself out through it,
preserving still in himself, though all unconsciously, the soul of
something good. Thus he does not touch that peculiar deadening of
spiritual power which is one result of the unrestrained following of
impulse and passion. It is this defect in his vision of life that leads
to the dubious and interrogatory moral of such a poem as _The Statue and
the Bust_.

Browning values the individual so much that he lays all his emphasis upon
the development of stronger passions and aspirations, the unfolding of a
more vivid and intense personality, and has comparatively little stress
to lay upon the larger thought of the progress of mankind in harmony
and order. Indeed he poetizes so vigorously against the conventional
judgments of society that he often seems to set himself against the
moral sentiments on which those conventional judgments, however warped,
ultimately rest. “Over and over again in Browning’s poetry,” says a
penetrating critic, “we meet with this insistence on the value of moments
of high excitement, of intense living, of full experience of pleasure,
even though such moments be of the essence of evil and fruitful in all
dark consequences.”

Take for example his treatment of love. He is right in saying “Love is
best.” But is he right in admitting, even by inference, that love has a
right to take its own way of realizing itself? Can love be at its best
unless it is obedient to law? Does it not make its truest music when
it keeps its place in the harmony of purity and peace and good living?
Surely the wild and reckless view of love as its own law which seems to
glimmer through the unconsumed smoke of Browning’s later poems, such as
_Fifine at the Fair_, _The Inn Album_, and _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_,
needs correction by a true flash of insight like that which we find in
two lines of _One Word More_:

  “_Dante, who loved well because he hated,_
  _Hated wickedness that hinders loving._”

Browning was at times misled by a perilous philosophy into a position
where the vital distinction between good and evil dissolved away in a
cloud of unreality. In _Ferishtah’s Fancies_ and _Parleyings with Certain
People of Importance_, any one who has the patience to read them will
find himself in a nebulous moral world. The supposed necessity of showing
that evil is always a means to good tempts to the assertion that it has
no other reality. Perhaps it is altogether an illusion, needed to sting
us into conflict, but really non-existent. Perhaps it is only the shadow
cast by the good,—or “the silence implying sound.” Perhaps it is good
in disguise, not yet developed from the crawling worm into the creature
with wings. After this fashion the whimsical dervish Ferishtah strews his
beans upon the table.

              “This bean was white, this—black,
  Set by itself,—but see if good and bad
  Each following other in companionship,
  Black have not grown less black and white less white,
  Till blackish seems but dun, and whitish,—gray,
  And the whole line turns—well, or black to thee
  Or white alike to me—no matter which.”

Certainly if this were the essence of Browning’s poetry the best
safeguard against its falsehood would be its own weakness. Such a
message, if this were all, could never attract many hearers, nor inspire
those whom it attracted. Effort, struggle, noble conflict would be
impossible in a world where there were no moral certainties or realities,
but all men felt that they were playing at a stupid game like the Caucus
race in _Alice in Wonderland_, where everything went round in a circle
and every runner received a prize.

But in fact these elements of weakness in Browning’s work, as it seems to
me, do not belong to his true poetry. They are expressed, generally, in
his most obfuscated style, and at a prohibitory length. They are embodied
in poems which no one is likely to read for fun, and few are capable of
learning by heart.

But when we go back to his best work we find another spirit, we hear
another message. Clear, resonant, trumpet-like his voice calls to us
proclaiming the glorious possibilities of this imperfect life. Only do
not despair; only do not sink down into conventionality, indifference,
mockery, cynicism; only rise and hope and go forward out of the house of
bondage into the land of liberty. True, the prophecy is not complete. But
it is inspiring. He does not teach us how to live. But he does tell us
to live,—with courage, with love to man, with trust in God,—and he bids
us find life glorious, because it is still imperfect and therefore full
of promise.




A QUAINT COMRADE BY QUIET STREAMS


In April, 1653, Oliver Cromwell, after much bloodshed and amid great
confusion, violently dissolved the “Rump Parliament.” In May of the same
year, Izaak Walton published _The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative
Man’s Recreation_. ’Twas a strange contrast between the tranquil book
and the tempestuous time. But that the contrast was not displeasing may
be inferred from the fact that five editions were issued during the
author’s life, which ended in 1683, at the house of his son-in-law in the
cathedral close at Winchester, Walton being then in his ninety-first year
and at peace with God and man.

Doubtless one of the reasons why those early editions, especially the
first, the second, and the fifth, (in which Walton’s friend Charles
Cotton added his “Instructions How to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a
Clear Stream,”) are now become so rare and costly, is because they were
carried about by honest anglers of the 17th Century in their coat-pockets
or in their wallets, a practice whereby the body of a book is soon worn
out, though its soul be immortal.

That this last is true of Walton’s _Angler_ seems proven by its continual
reappearance. The Hundredth Edition (called after the rivers Lea and
Dove, which Walton loved) was brought out in 1888, by the genial
fisherman and bibliophile, R. B. Marston of the London _Fishing Gazette_.
Among the other English editions I like John Major’s second (1824); and
Sir John Hawkins’, reissued by Bagster (1808); and Pickering’s richly
illustrated two volumes edited by Sir Harris Nicolas (1836). There is
a 32mo reprint by the same publisher, (and a “diamond” from the Oxford
University Press,) small enough to go comfortably in a vest-pocket with
your watch or your pipe. I must speak also of the admirable introductions
to the _Angler_ written in these latter years by James Russell Lowell,
Andrew Lang, and Richard Le Gallienne; and of the great American edition
made by the Reverend Doctor George W. Bethune in 1847, a work in which
the learning, wit, and sympathy of the editor illuminate the pages. This
edition is already hard to find, but no collector of angling books would
willingly go without it.

The gentle reader has a wide choice, then, of the form in which he will
take his Walton,—something rare and richly adorned for the library,
or something small and plain for the pocket or the creel. But in what
shape soever he may choose to read the book, if he be not “a severe,
sour-complexioned man” he will find it good company. There is a most
propitiating paragraph in the “Address” at the beginning of the first
edition. Explaining why he has introduced “some innocent harmless mirth”
into his work, Walton writes:

“I am the willinger to justify this innocent mirth because the whole
discourse is a kind of picture of my own disposition, at least of my
disposition in such days and times as I allow myself, when honest _Nat._
and _R.R._ and I go a-fishing together.”

This indeed is one of the great attractions of the book, that it so
naturally and simply shows the author. I know of no other in which this
quality of self-revelation without pretense or apology is as modest and
engaging,—unless it be the _Essays_ of Charles Lamb, or those of M. de
Montaigne. We feel well acquainted with Walton when we have read the
_Angler_, and perhaps have added to our reading his only other volume,—a
series of brief _Lives_ of certain excellent and beloved men of his time,
wherein he not only portrays their characters but further discloses his
own. They were men of note in their day: Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador
to Venice; Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s; Richard Hooker, famous
theologian; George Herbert, sacred poet; Bishop Sanderson, eminent
churchman. With most of these, and with other men of like standing,
Walton was in friendship. The company he kept indicates his quality.
Whatever his occupation or his means, he was certainly a gentleman and a
scholar, as well as a good judge of fishing.

Of the actual events of his life, despite diligent research, little is
known, and all to his credit. Perhaps there were no events of public
importance or interest. He came as near as possible to the fortunate
estate of the nation which has a good repute but no history.

He was born in the town of Stafford, August 9th, 1593. Of his schooling
he speaks with becoming modesty; and it must have been brief, for at the
age of sixteen or seventeen he was an apprentice in London. Whether he
was a linendraper or an ironmonger is a matter of dispute. Perhaps he
was first one and then the other. His first shop, in the Royal Burse,
Cornhill, was about seven and a half feet long by five wide. But he must
have done a good business in those narrow quarters; for in 1624 he had a
better place on Fleet Street, and from 1628 to 1644 he was a resident of
the parish of St. Dunstan’s, having a comfortable dwelling (and probably
his shop) in Chancery Lane, “about the seventh house on the left hand
side.” He served twice on the grand jury, and was elected a vestryman of
St. Dunstan’s twice.

It was during his residence here that he lost his first wife, Rachel
Floud, and the seven children whom she had borne to him. In 1644, finding
the city “dangerous for honest men” on account of the civil strife
and disorder, he retired from London, and probably from business, and
lived in the country, “sometimes at Stafford,” (according to Anthony
Wood, the antiquary,) “but mostly in the families of the eminent
clergymen of England, of whom he was much beloved.” This life gave him
large opportunity for his favourite avocation of fishing, and widened
the circle of his friendships, for wherever he came as a guest he was
cherished as a friend. I make no doubt that the love of angling, to which
innocent recreation he was attached by a temperate and enduring passion,
was either the occasion or the promoter of many of these intimacies.
For it has often been observed that this sport inclines those that
practise it to friendliness; and there are no closer or more lasting
companionships than such as are formed beside flowing streams by men who
study to be quiet and go a-fishing.

After his second marriage, about 1646, to Anne Ken, half-sister of Bishop
Thomas Ken, (author of the well-known hymns, “Awake, my soul, and with
the sun,” and “All praise to Thee, my God, this night,”) Walton went to
live for some years at Clerkenwell. While he was there, the book for
which he had been long preparing, _The Compleat Angler_, was published,
and gave him his sure place in English literature and in the heart of an
innumerable company of readers.

Never was there a better illustration of “fisherman’s luck” than the
success of Walton’s book. He set out to make a little “discourse of
fish and fishing,” a “pleasant curiositie” he calls it, full of useful
information concerning the history and practice of the gentle art, and,
as the author modestly claims on his title-page, “not unworthy the
perusal of most anglers.” Instead of this he produced an imperishable
classic, which has been read with delight by thousands who have never wet
a line. It was as if a man went forth to angle for smelts and caught a
lordly salmon.

As a manual of practical instruction the book is long since out of
date. The kind of rod which Walton describes is too cumbrous for the
modern angler, who catches his trout with a split bamboo weighing no
more than four or five ounces, and a thin waterproofed line of silk
beside which Father Izaak’s favourite line twisted of seven horse-hairs
would look like a bed-cord. Most of his recipes for captivating baits
and lures, and his hints about “oyl,” or “camphire” with which they may
be made infallibly attractive to reluctant fish, are now more curious
than valuable. They seem like ancient superstitions,—although this very
summer I have had recommended to me a secret magic ointment one drop
of which upon a salmon-fly would (supposedly) render it irresistible.
(Yes, reader, I did try it; but its actual effect, owing to various
incalculable circumstances, could not be verified. The salmon took the
anointed fly sometimes, but at other times they took the unanointed, and
so I could not make affidavit that it was the oil that allured them.
It may have been some tickling in the brain, some dim memory of the
time when they were little parr, living in fresh water for their first
eighteen months and feeding mainly on floating insects, that made them
wish to rise again.)

But to return to my subject. The angler of to-day who wishes to
understand the technics of modern fishing-gear will go to such books
as H. B. Wells’ _Fly Rods and Fly Tackle_, or to Dr. George Holden’s
_The Idyl of the Split Bamboo_. This very year two volumes have been
published, each of which in its way goes far beyond Walton: Mr.
William Radcliffe’s _Fishing from the Earliest Times_, which will
undoubtedly take its place as the standard history of the ancient craft
of fish-catching; and Mr. Edward R. Hewitt’s _Secrets of the Salmon_,
a brilliant and suggestive piece of work, full of acute scientific
observation and successful experiment. These belong to what De Quincey
called “the literature of knowledge.” But the _Angler_ belongs to “the
literature of power,”—that which has a quickening and inspiring influence
upon the spirit,—and here it is unsurpassed, I may even say unrivalled,
by any book ever written about any sport. Charles Lamb wrote to Coleridge
commending it to his perusal: “It might sweeten a man’s temper at any
time to read _The Compleat Angler_.”

The unfailing charm of the book lives in its delicately clear
descriptions of the country and of rural life; in its quaint pastoral
scenes, like the interview with the milkmaid and her mother, and the
convocation of gipsies under the hedge; and in its sincerely happy
incitements to patience, cheerfulness, a contented spirit, and a tranquil
mind.

In its first form the book opened with a dialogue between Piscator and
Viator; but later this was revised to a three-sided conversation in which
Venator, a hunter, and Auceps, a falconer, take the place of Viator and
try valiantly to uphold the merits of their respective sports as superior
to angling. Of course Piscator easily gets the best of them, (authors
always have this power to reserve victory for their favourites,) and
Auceps goes off stage, vanquished, while Venator remains as a convert
and willing disciple, to follow his “Master” by quiet streams and drink
in his pleasant and profitable discourse. As a dialogue it is not very
convincing, it lacks salt and pepper; Venator is too easy a convert;
he makes two or three rather neat repartees, but in general, he seems
to have no mind of his own. But as a monologue it is very agreeable,
being written in a sincere, colloquial, unaffected yet not undignified
manner, with a plenty of digressions. And these, like the by-paths on a
journey, are the pleasantest parts of all. Piscator’s talk appears easy,
unconstrained, rambling, yet always sure-footed, like the walk of one who
has wandered by the little rivers so long that he can move forward safely
without watching every step, finding his footing by a kind of instinct
while his eyes follow the water and the rising fish.

But we must not imagine that such a style as this, fluent as it seems and
easy to read as it is for any one with an ear for music, either comes
by nature or is attained without effort. Walton speaks somewhere of his
“artless pencil”; but this is true only in the sense that he makes us
forget the processes of his art in the simplicity of its results. He was
in fact very nice in his selection and ordering of words. He wrote and
rewrote his simplest sentences and revised his work in each of the five
earlier editions, except possibly the fourth.

Take, for example, the bit which I have already quoted from the
“address to the reader” in the first edition, and compare it with the
corresponding passage in the fifth edition:

“I am the willinger to justify _the pleasant part of it_, because,
_though it is known I can be serious at reasonable times_, yet the
whole discourse is, _or rather was_, a picture of my own disposition,
_especially_ in such days and times as I _have laid aside business, and
gone a-fishing with_ honest Nat. and R. Roe; _but they are gone, and with
them most of my pleasant hours, even as a shadow that passeth away and
returns not_.”

All the phrases in italics are either altered or added.

He cites Montaigne’s opinion of cats,—a familiar judgment expressed with
lightness,—and in the first edition Winds up his quotation with the
sentence, “To this purpose speaks Montaigne concerning cats.” In the
fifth edition this is humourously improved to, “Thus _freely_ speaks
Montaigne concerning cats,”—as if it were something noteworthy to take a
liberty with this petted animal.

The beautiful description of the song of the nightingale, and of the
lark, and the fine passage beginning, “Every misery that I miss is a new
mercy,” are jewels that Walton added in revision.

In the first edition he gravely tells how the salmon “will force
themselves over the tops of weirs and hedges or stops in the water, _by
taking their tails into their mouths and leaping over those places_,
even to a height beyond common belief.” But upon reflection this
fish-story seems to him dubious; and so in the later edition you find the
mouth-and-tail legend in a poetical quotation, to which Walton cautiously
adds, “_This Michael Drayton tells you_ of this leap or summer-salt of
the salmon.”

It would be easy to continue these illustrations of Walton’s care in
revising his work through successive editions; indeed a long article, or
even a little book might be made upon this subject, and if I had the time
I should like to do it.

Another theme would well repay study, and that is the influence of
the King James Version of the Bible upon his style and thought. That
wonderful example of pure, strong, and stately English prose, was first
printed and published when Walton was eighteen years old, about the
time he came to London as an apprentice. Yet to such good purpose did
he read and study it that his two books, the _Angler_ and the _Lives_,
are full of apt quotations from it, and almost every page shows the
exemplary effect of its admirable diction. Indeed it has often seemed to
me that his fine description of the style of the Prophet Amos, (in the
first chapter of the _Angler_,) reveals something of the manner in which
Walton himself desired to write; and in this desire he was not altogether
unsuccessful.

How clearly the man shines through his book! An honest, kindly man, not
ashamed of his trade, nor of his amusements, nor of his inmost faith.
A man contented with his modest place in the world, and never doubting
that it was a good world or that God made it. A firm man, not without
his settled convictions and strong aversions, yet “content that every
reader should enjoy his own opinion.” A liberal-mannered man, enjoying
the music of birds and of merry songs and glees, grateful for good food,
and “barly-wine, the good liquor that our honest Fore-fathers did use
to drink of,” and a fragrant pipe afterwards; sitting down to meat not
only with “the eminent clergymen of England,” but also, (as his Master
did,) with publicans and sinners; and counting among his friends such
dignitaries as Dr. John Hales, Bishop King, and Sir Henry Wotton, and
such lively and vagarious persons as Ben Jonson, Carey, and Charles
Cotton. A loyal, steadfast man, not given to change, anxiety of mind, or
vain complaining, but holding to the day’s duty and the day’s reward of
joy as God sent them to him, and bearing the day’s grief with fortitude.
Thus he worked and read and angled quietly through the stormy years of
the Civil War and the Commonwealth, wishing that men would beat their
swords into fish-hooks, and cast their leaden bullets into sinkers, and
study peace and the Divine will.




A STURDY BELIEVER


When James Boswell, Esq., wrote _The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D._, he
not only achieved his purpose of giving the world “a rich intellectual
treasure,” but also succeeded in making himself a subject of permanent
literary interest.

Among the good things which the year 1922 has brought to us I count the
_Boswell redivivus_ from the industrious and skilful hand of Professor
Chauncey Brewster Tinker of Yale. He calls his excellent book, which is
largely enriched with new material in the way of hitherto unpublished
letters, _Young Boswell_. This does not mean that he deals only with the
early years, amatory episodes, and first literary ventures of Johnson’s
inimitable biographer, but that he sees in the man a certain persistent
youngness which accounts for the exuberance of his faults and follies as
well as for the enthusiasm of his hero-worship.

Mr. Tinker does not attempt to camouflage the incorrigible absurdities
of Boswell’s disposition, nor the excesses of his conduct, but finds
an explanation if not an excuse for them in the fact that he had a
juvenile temperament which inclined him all through life to self-esteem
and self-indulgence, and kept him “very much a boy” until he died of
it. Whether this is quite consistent with his being “in fullest truth a
genius,” as Mr. Tinker claims, may be doubted; for genius in the high
sense is something that ripens if time be given it. But what is certain
beyond a question is that this vain and vagarious little Scotch laird
had in him a gift of observation, a talent of narration, and above all
a power of generous admiration, which enabled him to become, by dint of
hard work, what Macaulay entitled him, “the first of biographers.”

Ever since it appeared in 1791, Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ has been a
most companionable book. Reprinted again and again, it finds a perennial
welcome. To see it in a new edition is no more remarkable nowadays than
it once was to see Dr. Oliver Goldsmith in a new and vivid waistcoat.
For my own part I prefer it handsomely drest, with large type, liberal
margins, and a-plenty of illustrations. For it is not a book in which
economy of bulk is needful; it is less suitable for company on a journey
or a fishing-trip, than for a meditative hour in the library after
dinner, or a pleasant wakeful hour in bed, when the reading-lamp glows
clear and steady, and all the rest of the family are asleep or similarly
engaged in recumbent reading.

There are some books with which we can never become intimate. However
long we may know them they keep us on the cold threshold of acquaintance.
Others boisterously grasp our hand and drag us in, only to bore us and
make us regret the day of our introduction. But if there ever was a
book which invited genially to friendship and delight it is this of
Boswell’s. The man who does not know it is ignorant of some of the best
cheer that can enliven a solitary fireside. The man who does not enjoy
it is insensible alike to the attractions of a noble character vividly
depicted, and to the amusement afforded by the sight of a great genius
in company with an adoring follower capable, at times, of acting like an
engaging ass.

Yet after all, I have always had my doubts about the supposed
“asininity” of Boswell. As his Great Friend said, “A man who talks
nonsense so well must know that he is talking nonsense.” It is only
fair to accept his own explanation and allow that when he said or did
ridiculous things it was, partly at least, in order to draw out his
Tremendous Companion. Thus we may think with pleasure of Boswell taking
a rise out of Johnson. But we do not need to imagine Johnson taking a
rise out of Boswell; it was not necessary; he rose of his own accord.
He made a candid record of these diverting incidents because, though
self-complacent, he was not touchy, and he had sense enough to see that
the sure way to be entirely entertaining is to be quite frank.

Boswell threw a stone at one bird and brought down two. His triumphant
effort to write the life of his Immense Hero just as it was, with all its
surroundings, appurtenances, and eccentricities, has won for himself a
singular honour: his proper name has become a common noun. It is hardly
necessary to use a capital letter when we allude to a boswell. His pious
boast that he had “Johnsonized the land,” is no more correct than it
would be to say, (and if he were alive he would certainly say it,) that
he had boswellized biography.

The success of the book appears the more remarkable when we remember
that of the seventy-five years of Samuel Johnson’s life not more than
two years and two months were passed in the society of James Boswell.
Yet one would almost think that they had been rocked in the same cradle,
or, (if this figure of speech seem irreverent,) that the Laird of
Auchinleck had slept in a little trundle-bed beside the couch of the
Mighty Lexicographer. I do not mean by this that the record is trivial
and cubicular, but simply that Boswell has put into his book as much of
Johnson as it will hold.

Let no one imagine, however, that a like success can be secured by
following the same recipe with any chance subject. The exact portraiture
of an insignificant person confers information where there is no
curiosity, and becomes tedious in proportion as it is precise.[19] The
first thing needful is to catch a giant for your hero; and in this
little world it is seldom that one like Johnson comes to the net.

What a man he was,—this “old struggler,” as he called himself,—how
uncouth and noble and genuine and profound,—“a labouring, working mind;
an indolent, reposing body”! What a heart of fortitude in the bosom of
his melancholy, what a kernel of human kindness within the shell of his
rough manner! He was proud but not vain, sometimes rude but never cruel.
His prejudices were insular, but his intellect was continental. There was
enough of contradiction in his character to give it variety, and enough
of sturdy faith to give it unity. It was not easy for him to be good, but
it was impossible for him to be false; and he fought the battle of life
through along his chosen line even to the last skirmish of mortality.

[Illustration: SAMUEL JOHNSON.

Painted by Reynolds.

_From a photograph, copyright by Hollyer, London._]

I suppose we Americans might harbour a grudge against him on the score
of his opinion of our forefathers. It is on record that he said of
them, during their little controversy with King George III, that they
were “a race of convicts.” (How exciting it would have been to hear him
say a thing like that to the face of George Washington or Benjamin
Franklin! He was quite capable of it.) But we can afford to laugh at
such an _obiter dictum_ now. And upon my honesty it offends me less at
the present time than Lionel Lispingly Nutt’s condescending advice on
poetry and politics, or Stutterworth Bummell’s patronizing half-praise.
Let a man smite us fairly on one cheek, and we can manage to turn the
other,—out of his reach. But if he deals superciliously with us as “poor
relations,” we can hardly help looking for a convenient and not too
dangerous flight of stairs for his speedy descent.

Johnson may be rightly claimed as a Tory-Democrat on the strength of his
serious saying that “the interest of millions must ever prevail over that
of thousands,” and the temper of his pungent letter to Lord Chesterfield.
And when we consider also his side remark in defense of card-playing
on the ground that it “generates kindness and consolidates society,”
we may differ from him in our estimate of the game, but we cannot deny
that in small things as well as in great he spoke as a liberal friend of
humanity.

His literary taste was not infallible; in some instances, (for example
his extreme laudation of Sir John Denham’s poem _Cooper’s Hill_, and his
adverse criticism of Milton’s verse,) it was very bad. In general you may
say that it was based upon theories and rules which are not really of
universal application, though he conceived them to be so. But his style
was much more the product of his own personality and genius. Ponderous it
often was, but seldom clumsy. He had the art of saying what he meant in a
deliberate, clear, forceful way. Words arrayed themselves at his command
and moved forward in serried phalanx. He had the praiseworthy habit of
completing his sentences and building his paragraphs firmly. It will not
do us any good to belittle his merit as a writer, particularly in this
age of slipper-shod and dressing-gowned English.

His diction was much more varied than people usually suppose. He could
suit his manner to almost any kind of subject, except possibly the very
lightest. He had a keen sense of the shading of synonyms and rarely
picked the wrong word. Of antithesis and the balanced sentence he was
over-fond; and this device, intended originally to give a sharpened
emphasis, being used too often, lends an air of monotony to his writing.
Yet it has its merits too, as may be seen in these extracts from the
fiftieth number of _The Rambler_,—extracts which, by the way, have some
relation to a controversy still raging:

“Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of
the petulance and insolence of the rising generation. He recounts the
decency and regularity of former times, and celebrates the discipline and
sobriety of the age in which his youth was passed; a happy age, which is
now no more to be expected, since confusion has broken in upon the world
and thrown down all the boundaries of civility and reverence.... It may,
therefore, very reasonably be suspected that the old draw upon themselves
the greatest part of those insults which they so much lament, and that
age is rarely despised but when it is contemptible.... He that would
pass the latter part of his life with honour and decency, must, when he
is young, consider that he shall one day be old; and remember, when he
is old, that he has once been young. In youth, he must lay up knowledge
for his support, when his powers of action shall forsake him; and in age
forbear to animadvert with rigour on faults which experience only can
correct.”

In meaning this is very much the same as Sir James Barrie’s recent
admirable discourse on “Courage” at the University of St. Andrew’s; but
in manner there is quite a difference.

It is commonly supposed that Dr. Johnson did a great deal to overload
and oppress the English language by introducing new and awkward words of
monstrous length. His opportunities in that way were large, but he always
claimed that he had used them with moderation and had not coined above
four or five words. When we note that “peregrinity” was one of them,
we are grateful that he refrained so much; but when we remember that
“clubbable” was another, we are glad that he did not refrain altogether.
For there is no quality more easy to recognize and difficult to define
than that which makes a man acceptable in a club; and of this Dr. Johnson
has given us a fine example in his life and an appropriate name in his
word.

I think one reason why he got on so well with people who differed from
him, and why most of the sensible ones so readily put up with his
downright and often brusque way of expressing his sentiments, was because
they came so evidently from his sincere and unshakeable conviction
that certain things are true, that they can not be changed, and that
they should not be forgotten. Not only in politics, but also and more
significantly in religion, Samuel Johnson stands out as a sturdy believer.

This seems the more noteworthy when we consider the conditions of his
life. There is hardly one among the great men of history who can be
called so distinctively “a man of letters,” undoubtedly none who has
won as high a position and as large a contemporary influence by sheer
strength of pen. Now the literary life is not generally considered to
be especially favourable to the cultivation of religion; and Johnson’s
peculiar circumstances were not of a kind to make it more favourable in
his case than usual. He was poor and neglected, struggling during a great
part of his career against the heaviest odds. His natural disposition was
by no means such as to predispose him to faith. He was afflicted from
childhood with a hypochondriac and irritable humour; a high, domineering
spirit, housed in an unwieldy and disordered body; plagued by inordinate
physical appetites; inclined naturally to rely with over-confidence
upon the strength and accuracy of his reasoning powers; driven by his
impetuous temper into violent assertion and controversy; deeply depressed
by his long years of obscurity and highly elated by his final success,—he
was certainly not one whom we would select as likely to be a remarkably
religious man. Carlyle had less to embitter him. Goethe had no more to
excuse self-idolatry. And yet, beyond a doubt, Johnson was a sincere,
humble, and, in the main, a consistent Christian.

Of course, we cannot help seeing that his peculiarities and faults
affected his religion. He was intolerant in his expression of theological
views to a degree which seems almost ludicrous. We may, perhaps, keep a
straight face and a respectful attitude when we see him turning his back
on the Abbé Raynal, and refusing to “shake hands with an infidel.” But
when he exclaims in regard to a young lady who had left the Church of
England to become a Quaker, “I hate the wench and shall ever hate her; I
hate all impudence of a chit; apostasy I nauseate”; and when he answers
the gently expressed hope of a friend that he and the girl would meet,
after all, in a blessed eternity, by saying, “Madam, I am not fond of
_meeting fools anywhere_,” we cannot help joining in the general laughter
of the company to whom he speaks; and as the Doctor himself finally
laughs and becomes cheerful and entertaining, we feel that it was only
the bear in him that growled,—an honest beast, but sometimes very surly.

As for his remarkable strictures upon Presbyterianism, his declaration
that he preferred the Roman Catholic Church, his expressed hope that John
Knox was buried in the highway, and his wish that a dangerous steeple in
Edinburgh might not be taken down because if it were let alone it might
fall on some of the posterity of John Knox, which, he said, would be
“no great matter,”—if when we read these things we remember that he was
talking to his Scotch friend Boswell, we get a new idea of the audacity
of the great man’s humour. I believe he even stirred up his natural
high-churchism to rise rampant and roar vigourously, for the pleasure of
seeing Boswell’s eyes stand out, and his neat little pigtail vibrate in
dismay.

There are many other sayings of Johnson’s which disclose a deeper vein of
tolerance; such as that remark about the essential agreement and trivial
differences of all Christians, and his warm commendation, on his dying
bed, of the sermons of Dr. Samuel Clarke, a Dissenting minister.

But even suppose we are forced to admit that Dr. Johnson was lacking in
that polished liberality, that willingness to admit that every other
man’s opinions are as good as his own, which we have come nowadays to
regard as the chief of the theological virtues; even suppose we must call
him “narrow,” we must admit at the same time that he was “deep”; he had
a profundity of conviction, a sincerity of utterance which made of his
religion something, as the Germans say, “to take hold of with your hands.”

He had need of a sturdy belief. With that tempestuous, unruly
disposition of his boiling all the time within him, living in the age
of Chesterfield and Bolingbroke, fighting his way through the world amid
a thousand difficulties and temptations, he had great need to get a firm
grip upon some realities of religion and hold fast to them as things that
were settled. His first conviction of the truth of Christianity came to
him while he was at Oxford, through a casual reading of Law’s _Call to
the Unconverted_. There were some years after that, he tells us, when he
was totally regardless of religion. But sickness and trouble brought it
back, “and I hope,” says he, “that I have never lost it since.”

He was not unwilling to converse with friends at fitting opportunities
in regard to religious subjects, and no one who heard him could have
remained long in doubt as to the nature of his views. There was one
conversation in particular, on the subject of the sacrifice of Christ, at
the close of which he solemnly dictated to his friend a brief statement
of his belief, saying finally, “The peculiar doctrine of Christianity
is that of an universal sacrifice and a perpetual propitiation. Other
prophets only proclaimed the will and the threatenings of God. Christ
satisfied his justice.” Again, one calm, bright Sunday afternoon, when he
was in a boat with some friends upon the sea (I think it was during his
journey to the Hebrides,) he fell into discourse with Boswell about the
fear of death, which was often very terrible to his mind. He would not
admit that the close of life ought to be regarded with cheerfulness or
indifference, or that a rational man should be as willing to leave the
world as to go out of a show-room after he has seen it. “No, sir,” said
he, “there is no rational principle by which a man can die contented, but
a trust in the mercy of God through the merits of Jesus Christ.” He was
not ashamed to say that he was afraid to die. He assumed no braggadocio
before the grave. He was honest with himself, and he felt that he needed
all the fortitude of a religious faith to meet the hour of dissolution
and the prospect of divine judgment without flinching. He could never
have understood the attitude of men who saunter as unconcernedly and
airily towards the day of judgment as if they were going to the play.

But Johnson was by no means given to unseasonable or unreasonable
religious discourse. He had a holy horror of cant, and of unprofitable
controversy. He once said of a friend who was more loquacious than
discreet, “Why, yes, sir; he will introduce religious discourse without
seeing whether it will end in instruction and improvement, or produce
some profane jest. He would introduce it in the company of Wilkes, and
twenty more _such_.”

It was Dr. Johnson’s custom to keep a book of _Prayers and Meditations_
for his own private use. These were printed after his death, and they
reveal to us the sincerity of his inner life as nothing else could do.
Think of the old man kneeling down in his room before he began the
painful labours of a studious day, and repeating this prayer:—

“_Against inquisitive and perplexing thoughts_: O Lord, my Maker and
Protector, who hast graciously sent me into this world to work out my
salvation, enable me to drive from me all such unquiet and perplexing
thoughts as may mislead or hinder me in the practice of those duties
which Thou hast required. When I behold the works of thy hands, and
consider the course of thy providence, give me grace always to remember
that thy thoughts are not my thoughts, nor thy ways my ways. And while
it shall please Thee to continue me in this world, where much is to be
done and little to be known, teach me by thy Holy Spirit to withdraw my
mind from unprofitable and dangerous inquiries, from difficulties vainly
curious, and doubts impossible to be solved. Let me rejoice in the light
which Thou hast imparted; let me serve Thee with active zeal and humble
confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the
soul Thou receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge. Grant this, O
Lord, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.”

These are honest and sensible petitions. And the more a man knows, the
more devoted he is to serious and difficult studies, the more he ought to
feel the need of just such a divine defense and guidance. It is good to
be kept on the track. It is wise to mistrust your own doubts. It is happy
to be delivered from them.

The fundamental quality of Dr. Johnson’s religion was the sense of
reverence. He was never “known to utter the name of God but on proper
occasions and with due respect.” He approached the consideration of
divine things with genuine solemnity, and could not tolerate sacred
trifling or pious profanity. He was not ashamed to kneel where men could
see him, although he never courted their notice; or to pray where men
could hear him, although he did not desire their approbation any more
than he feared their ridicule.

There were grave faults and errors in his conduct. But no one had so
keen a sense of their unworthiness as the man himself, who was bravely
fighting against them, and sincerely lamenting their recurrence. They
often tripped him and humiliated him, but they never got him completely
down. He righted himself and went lumbering on. He never sold his heart
to a lie, never confused the evil and the good. When he sinned he knew
it and repented. It gives us confidence in his sincerity when we see him
denying himself the use of wine because he was naturally prone to excess,
and yet allowing it to his friends who were able to use it temperately.
He was no puritan; and, on the other hand, he was no slipshod condoner of
vice or suave preacher of moral indifference. He was a big, honest soul,
trying hard to live straight along the line of duty and to do good as he
found opportunity.

The kindness and generosity of his heart were known to few save his
intimate friends, and not always appreciated even by those who had most
cause to be grateful to him. The poor broken-down pensioners with whom
he filled his house in later years, and to whom he alluded playfully
as his _seraglio_, were a constant source of annoyance. They grumbled
perpetually and fought like so many cats. But he would not cast them off
any more than he would turn out his favourite mouser, Hodge, for whom he
used to “go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble
should take a dislike to the poor creature.” He gave away a large part
of his income in charity; and, what was still more generous, he devoted
a considerable portion of his time to counseling young and unsuccessful
authors and, (note this,) _reading their manuscripts_.

I suppose if one had been a poverty-stricken beginner at literature, in
London of the eighteenth century, the best thing one could have done
would have been to find the way to Dr. Johnson’s house and tell him
how the case stood. If he himself had no money to lend, he would have
borrowed it from some of his friends. And if he could not say anything
encouraging about the manuscripts, he would have been honest and kind
enough to advise the unhappy aspirant to fame to prefer the life of a
competent shoemaker to that of an incompetent scribbler.

Much of what was best in the character of Johnson came out in his
friendships. He was as good a lover as he was a hater. He was loyal to a
fault, and sincere, though never extravagant, in his admirations.

The picture of the old man in his last illness, surrounded by the friends
whom he had cherished so faithfully, and who now delighted to testify
their respect and affection for him, and brighten his lingering days with
every attention, has little of the customary horror of a death-bed. It
is strange indeed that he who had always been subject to such a dread of
dying should have found it possible to meet the hour of dissolution with
such composure. His old friend Sir Joshua Reynolds comes in to bid him
farewell, and Johnson makes three requests of him,—to forgive him thirty
pounds which he had borrowed from him, to read the Bible, and never to
use his pencil on a Sunday. Good petitions, which Sir Joshua readily
granted, although we cannot help fearing that he occasionally forgot the
last.

“Tell me,” says the sick man to his physician, “can I possibly recover?
Give me a direct answer.” Being hard pressed, Dr. Brocklesby confesses
that in his opinion recovery is out of the question. “Then,” says
Johnson, “I will take no more physick, not even my opiates: for I have
prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.”

And so with kind and thoughtful words to his servant, and a “God bless
you, my dear” to the young daughter of a friend who stood lingering at
the door of his room, this sturdy old believer went out to meet the God
whom he had tried so honestly to serve. His life was an amazing victory
over poverty, sickness, and sin. Greatness alone could not have insured,
nor could perseverance alone have commanded, three of his good fortunes
in this world: that Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait; that
Boswell wrote his biography; and that HIS WIFE said of him that “he was
the most sensible man she had ever met.”




A PURITAN PLUS POETRY


I

A friend of mine, one of the Elder Bookmen of Harvard, told me some
twenty years ago that he had only once seen Ralph Waldo Emerson vexed out
of his transcendental tranquillity and almost Olympian calm. It was a
Sunday afternoon in Concord, and the philosopher had been drawn from his
study by an unwonted noise in the house. On the back porch he found his
own offspring and some children of the neighbours engaged in a romping,
boisterous game. With visible anger he stopped it, saying, “Even if you
have no reverence for the day, you ought to have enough sense and manners
to respect the traditions of your forefathers.”

Emerson’s puritanism was in the blood. Seven of his ancestors were
ministers of New England churches of the early type. Among them was
Peter Bulkley, who left his comfortable parish in Bedfordshire, England,
to become the pastor of “the church in the wilderness” at Concord,
Massachusetts; Father Samuel Moody of Agamenticus, Maine, who was such a
zealous reformer that he pursued wayward sinners even into the alehouse
to reprove them; Joseph Emerson of Malden, a “heroic scholar,” who prayed
every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich; and William
Emerson, the patriot preacher, who died while serving in the army of the
Revolution. These were verily “soldiers of the Lord,” and from them and
women of like stamina and mettle, Emerson inherited the best of puritan
qualities: independence, sobriety, fearless loyalty to conscience,
strenuous and militant virtue.

But he had also a super-gift which was not theirs. That which made him
different from them, gave him a larger and more beautiful vision of the
world, led him into ways of thinking and speaking which to them would
have seemed strange and perilous, (though in conduct he followed the
strait and narrow path,)—in short, that which made him what he was in
himself and to countless other men, a seer, an inspirer, a singer of
new light and courage and joy, was the gift of poetic imagination and
interpretation. He was a puritan _plus_ poetry.

Graduating from Harvard he began life as a teacher in a Boston school
and afterwards the minister of a Boston church. But there was something
in his temperament which unfitted him for the service of institutions.
He was a servant of ideas. To do his best work he needed to feel himself
entirely independent of everything except allegiance to the truth as
God gave him to see it from day to day. The scholastic routine of a
Female Academy irked him. The social distinctions and rivalries of
city life appeared to him both insincere and tiresome. Even the mild
formulas and regulations of a Unitarian church seemed to hamper him. He
was a come-outer; he wished to think for himself, to proclaim his own
visions, to act and speak only from the inward impulse, though always
with an eye to the good of others. So he left his parish in Boston and
became a preacher at large to “these United States.” His pulpit was the
lecture-platform; his little books of prose and verse carried his words
to a still larger audience; no man in America during his life had a more
extended or a deeper influence; he became famous both as an orator and as
a writer; but in fact he was always preaching. As Lamb said to Coleridge,
“I never heard you do anything else.”

The central word of all his discourse is Self-reliance,—be yourself,
trust yourself, and fear not! But in order to interpret this rightly one
must have at least an inkling of his philosophy, which was profoundly
religious and essentially poetical. He was a mystic, an intuitional
thinker. He believed that the whole universe of visible things is only
a kind of garment which covers the real world of invisible ideas and
laws and principles. He believed also that each man, having a share
in the Divine Reason which is the source of all things, may have a
direct knowledge of truth through his own innate ideas and intuitive
perceptions. Emerson wrote in his diary, “The highest revelation is that
God is in every man.”

This way of thinking is called transcendentalism, because it overleaps
logic and scientific reasoning. It is easy to see how such a philosophy
might lead unbalanced persons into wild and queer and absurd views and
practices. And so it did when it struck the neighbourhood of Boston in
the second quarter of the 19th Century, and began to spread from that
sacred centre.

But with these vagaries Emerson had little sympathy. His mysticism
was strongly tinctured with common sense, (which also is of divine
origin,) and his orderly nature recoiled from eccentric and irregular
ways. Although for a time he belonged to the “Transcendental Club,” he
frequently said that he would not be called a transcendentalist, and
at times he made fun, in a mild and friendly spirit, of the extreme
followers of that doctrine. He held as strongly as any one that the
Divine light of reason in each man is the guide to truth; but he held it
with the important reservation that when this inner light really shines,
free from passion and prejudice, it will never lead a man away from
good judgment and the moral law. All through his life he navigated the
transcendental sea safely, piloted by a puritan conscience, warned off
the rocks by a keen sense of humour, and kept from capsizing by a solid
ballast of New England prudence.

He was in effect one of the most respected, sagacious, prosperous and
virtuous villagers of Concord. Some slight departures from common custom
he tranquilly tested and as tranquilly abandoned. He tried vegetarianism
for a while, but gave it up when he found that it did him no good. He
attempted to introduce domestic democracy by having the servants sit
at table with the rest of the household, but was readily induced to
abandon the experiment by the protest of his two sensible hired girls
against such an inconvenient arrangement. He began to practise a theory
that manual labour should form part of the scholar’s life, but was
checked by the personal discovery that hard work in the garden meant
poor work in the study. “The writer shall not dig,” was his conclusion.
Intellectual freedom was what he chiefly desired; and this he found could
best be attained in an inconspicuous manner of living and dressing,
not noticeably different from that of the average college professor or
country minister.

[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

_From a photograph by Black, Boston._]

Here you see the man “in his habit as he lived,” (and as thousands
of lecture-audiences saw him,) pictured in the old photograph which
illustrates this chapter. Here is the familiar _décor_ of the
photographer’s studio: the curtain draped with a cord and tassel,
the muslin screen background, and probably that hidden instrument of
torture, the “head-rest,” behind the tall, posed figure. Here are the
solemn “swallow-tail coat,” the conventional cravat, and the black satin
waistcoat. Yet even this antique “carte de visite,” it seems to me,
suggests something more and greater,—the imperturbable, kindly presence,
the noble face, the angelic look, the serene manner, the penetrating
and revealing quality of the man who set out to be “a friend to all who
wished to live in the spirit.”

Whatever the titles of his lectures,—_Man the Reformer_, _The Method
of Nature_, _The Conduct of Life_, _Fate_, _Compensation_, _Prudence_,
_The Present Age_, _Society and Solitude_,—his main theme is always the
same, “namely the infinitude of the private man.” But this private man
of Emerson’s, mark you, is linked by invisible ties to all Nature and
carries in his breast a spark of the undying fire which is of God. Hence
he is at his best when he feels not only his personal _unity_ but also
his universal _community_, when he relies on himself and at the same time
cries

  “I yield myself to the perfect whole.”

This kind of independence is the truest form of obedience.

The charm of Emerson’s way of presenting his thought comes from the
spirit of poetry in the man. He does not argue, nor threaten, nor often
exhort; he reveals what he has seen or heard, for you to make what you
will of it. He relies less on syllogisms than on imagery, symbols,
metaphors. His utterance is as inspirational as the ancient oracle of
Delphi, but he shuns the contortions of the priestess at that shrine.

The clearness and symmetry of his sentences, the modulations of his
thrilling voice, the radiance of his fine features and his understanding
smile, even his slight hesitations and pauses over his manuscript as
he read, lent a singular attraction to his speech. Those who were
mistrustful of his views on theology and the church, listened to him
with delight when he poetized on art, politics, literature, human
society and the natural world. To the finest men and women of America
in the mid-Victorian epoch he was the lecturer _par excellence_, the
intellectual awakener and liberator, the messenger calling them to break
away from dull, thoughtless, formal ways of doing things, and live freely
in harmony with the laws of God and their own spirit. They heard him
gladly.

I wonder how he would fare to-day, when lecturers, male or female, have
to make a loud noise to get a hearing.


II

Emerson’s books, prose and verse, remain with us and still live,—“the
precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on
purpose to a life beyond life.” That they are companionable is proved by
the way all sorts of companionable people love them. I know a Pullman car
conductor who swears by Emerson. A young French Canadian woodsman, (who
is going to work his way through college,) told me the other day that
he liked Emerson’s essays better than any other English book that he had
read. Restive girls and boys of the “new generation” find something in
him which appeals to them; reading farmers of New England and the West
prefer him to Plato; even academic professors and politicians qualifying
for statesmen feel his stimulating and liberating influence, although
(or perhaps because) he sometimes says such hard things about them. I
guess that nothing yet written in America is likely to live longer than
Emerson’s best work.

His prose is better known and more admired than his verse, for several
reasons: first, because he took more pains to make the form of it as
perfect as he could; second, because it has a wider range and an easier
utterance; third, because it has more touches of wit and of familiarity
with the daily doings of men; and finally, because the majority of
readers probably prefer prose for silent reading, since the full charm of
good verse is revealed only in reading aloud.

But for all that, with Emerson, (as with a writer so different as
Matthew Arnold,) I find something in the poems which is not in the
essays,—a more pure and subtle essence of what is deepest in the man.
Poetry has a power of compression which is beyond prose. It says less and
suggests more.

Emerson wrote to the girl whom he afterwards married: “I am born a
poet,—of a low class without doubt, but a poet.... My singing, to be
sure, is very husky and is for the most part in prose. Still I am a poet
in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are
in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondence between
them.” This is penetrating self-criticism. That he was “of a low class”
as poet is more than doubtful,—an error of modesty. But that his singing
was often “husky” cannot be denied. He never troubled himself to learn
the art of song. The music of verse, in which Longfellow gained such
mastery, and Lowell and Whittier had such native gifts, is not often
found in Emerson’s poetry. His measures rarely flow with freedom and
harmony. They are alternately stiff and spasmodic, and the rhymes are
sometimes threadbare, sometimes eccentric. Many of his poems are so
condensed, so tight-packed with thought and information that they seem to
labour along like an overladen boat in a choppy sea. For example, this:

  “The journeying atoms,
    Primordial wholes,
  Firmly draw, firmly drive,
    By their animate poles.”

Or this:

  “Puny man and scentless rose
  Tormenting Pan to double the dose.”

But for these defects of form Emerson as poet makes ample amends by the
richness and accuracy of his observation of nature, by the vigorous
flight of his imagination, by the depth and at times the passionate
controlled intensity of his feeling. Of love-poetry he has none, except
the philosophical. Of narrative poetry he has practically none, unless
you count such brief, vivid touches as,—

  “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
    Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
    And fired the shot heard round the world.”

But his descriptive pieces are of a rare beauty and charm, truthful in
broad outline and delicate detail, every flower and every bird in its
right colour and place. Walking with him you see and breathe New England
in the light of early morn, with the dew sparkling on the grass and all
the cosmic forces working underneath it. His reflective and symbolic
poems, like _Each and All_, _The Problem_, _Forerunners_, _Days_, _The
Sphinx_, are full of a searching and daring imaginative power. He has
also the genius of the perfect phrase.

  “The frolic architecture of the snow.”

  “Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
  As the best gem upon her zone”

  “The silent organ loudest chants
    The Master’s requiem.”

  “Music pours on mortals
    Its beautiful disdain.”

  “Over the winter glaciers,
  I see the summer glow,
  And through the wild-piled snowdrift
  The warm rose-buds below.”

  “I thenceforward and long after,
  Listen for their harp-like laughter,
  And carry in my heart, for days,
  Peace that hallows rudest ways.”

His _Threnody_, written after the early death of his first-born son, has
always seemed to me one of the most moving elegies in the English tongue.
His patriotic poems, especially the _Concord Ode_, are unsurpassed as
brief, lyrical utterances of the spirit of America. In certain moods,
when the mind is in vigour and the windows of far vision open at a touch,
Emerson’s small volume of _Poems_ is a most companionable book.

       *       *       *       *       *

As his prose sometimes intrudes into his verse and checks its flow, so
his poetry often runs over into his prose and illuminates it. What could
be more poetic in conception than this sentence from his first book,
_Nature_? “If the stars should appear but one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the
remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”

Emerson’s _Essays_ are a distillation of his lectures. His way of making
these was singular and all his own. It was his habit to keep note-books
in which he jotted down bits of observation about nature, stray thoughts
and comparisons, reflections on his reading, and striking phrases which
came to him in meditation or talk. Choosing a subject he planted it in
his mind and waited for ideas and illustrations to come to it, as birds
or insects to a flower. When a thought appeared he followed it, “as a
boy might hunt a butterfly,” and when it was captured he pinned it in
his “thought-book.” No doubt there were mental laws at work all the
time, giving guidance and direction to the process of composition which
seemed so irregular and haphazard. There is no lack of vital unity in
one of Emerson’s lectures or essays. It deals with a single subject and
never gets really out of sight of the proposition with which it begins.
Yet it seldom gives a complete, all-round view of it. It is more like a
series of swift and vivid glimpses of the same object seen from different
stand-points, a collection of snap-shot pictures taken in the course of a
walk around some great mountain.

From the pages of his note-books he gathered the material for one of
his lectures, selecting and arranging it under some such title as Fate,
Genius, Beauty, Manners, Duty, The Anglo-Saxon, The Young American,
and giving it such form and order as he thought would be most effective
in delivery. If the lecture was often repeated, (as it usually was,)
the material was frequently rearranged, the pages were shifted, the
illustrations changed. Then, after it had served its purpose, the
material was again rearranged and published in a volume of _Essays_.

It is easy to trace in the essays the effects of this method of writing.
The material is drawn from a wide range of reading and observation.
Emerson is especially fond of poetry, philosophy and books of anecdote
and biography. He quotes from Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, George Herbert,
Wordsworth, Plutarch, Grimm, St. Simon, Swedenborg, Behmen the mystic,
Plato, and the religious books of the East. His illustrations come from
far and near. Now they are strange and remote, now homely and familiar.
The Zodiac of Denderah; the Savoyards who carved their pine-forests into
toys; the _lustrum_ of silence which Pythagoras made his disciples keep;
Napoleon on the _Bellerophon_ watching the drill of the English soldiers;
the Egyptian legend that every man has two pair of eyes; Empedocles
and his shoe; the flat strata of the earth; a soft mushroom pushing up
through the hard ground;—all these allusions and a hundred more are found
in the same volume. On his pages, close beside the Parthenon, St. Paul’s,
the Sphinx, Ætna and Vesuvius, you will read of the White Mountains,
Monadnock, Katahdin, the pickerel-weed in bloom, the wild geese honking
across the sky, the chickadee singing in the face of winter, the Boston
State-house, Wall Street, cotton-mills, railroads, Quincy granite, and
so forth. Nothing is too far away to seem real to him, nothing too near
to seem interesting and valuable. There is an abundance, sometimes a
superabundance, of material in his essays, not always well-assorted, but
all vivid and suggestive.

The structure of the essay, the way of putting the material together,
does not follow any fixed rule or system. Yet in most cases it has a
well-considered and suitable form; it stands up; it is architecturally
built, though the art is concealed. I once amused myself trying to
analyze some of the essays, and found that many of the best ones have a
definite theme, like a text, and follow a regular plan of development,
with introduction, discussion, and conclusion. In some cases Emerson does
not disdain the “heads and horns” of the old-fashioned preacher, and
numbers his points “first,” “second,” “third,”—perhaps even “fourth.” But
this is rare. For the most part the essays do not seem to be constructed
but to grow. They are like conversations with the stupid things left out.
They turn aside from dull points, and omit connecting links, and follow
an attractive idea wherever it may lead. They seldom exhaust a subject,
but they usually illuminate it.

“The style is the man,” and in this case it is well suited to his
material and his method. It is brilliant, sparkling, gem-like. He has
great freedom in the choice of words, using them sometimes in odd ways
and not always correctly. Generally his diction is made up of terse,
pungent Anglo-Saxon phrases, but now and then he likes to bring in a
stately word of Greek or Latin origin, with a telling effect of contrast.
Most of his sentences are short and clear; it is only in the paragraph
that he is sometimes cloudy. Every essay is rich in epigrams. If one
reads too much of a style like this, the effect becomes fatiguing. You
miss the long, full, steady flow of sentences with varied cadence and
changing music.

Emerson’s river is almost all rapids. The flash and sparkle of phrase
after phrase tire me after a while. But for a short voyage nothing could
be more animated and stimulating. I read one essay at a time and rise
refreshed.

But the secret of Emerson’s power, (to change the figure,) is in the
wine which he offers, not the cup into which he pours it. His great
word,—“self-reliance,”—runs through all his writing and pervades all that
he says. At times it is put in an extreme form, and might lead, if rashly
followed, to intellectual conceit and folly. But it is balanced by other
words, no less potent,—self-criticism, modesty, consideration, prudence,
and reverence. He is an aspiring, hopeful teacher of youth; correcting
follies with a sharp wit; encouraging noble ambitions; making the face
of nature luminous with the glow of poetic imagination; and elevating
life with an ideal patriotism and a broad humanity. In all his writing
one feels the serene, lofty influence of a sane and chastened optimism,
the faith which holds, amid many appearances which are dark, mysterious
and terrifying, that Good is stronger than Evil and will triumph at last
everywhere.

Read what he says in the essay called _Compensation_: “There is no
penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of
being. In a virtuous action I properly _am_; in a virtuous act I add to
the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and
see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no
excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes
are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always
affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.”

This is the note that brings a brave joy to the ear of youth. Old age
gladly listens to the same note in the deeper, quieter music of Emerson’s
poem, _Terminus_.

  “As the bird trims her to the gale,
  I trim myself to the storm of time,
  I man the rudder, reef the sail,
  Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
  ‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,
  Right onward drive unharmed;
  The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
  And every wave is charmed.’”




AN ADVENTURER IN A VELVET JACKET


Thus gallantly he appears in my mind’s eye when I pause in rereading
one of his books and summon up a fantasm of the author,—Robert Louis
Stevenson, gentleman adventurer in life and letters, his brown eyes
shining in a swarthy face, his lean, long-enduring body adorned with a
black-velvet jacket.

This garment is no disguise but a symbol. It is short, so as not to
impede him with entangling tails. It is unconventional, as a protest
against the tyranny of fashion. But it is of velvet, mark you, to
match a certain niceness of choice and preference of beauty,—yes, and
probably a touch of bravura,—in all its wearer’s vagaries. ’Tis like the
silver spurs, broad sombrero and gay handkerchief of the thoroughbred
cowboy,—not an element of the dandiacal, but a tribute to romance.
Strange that the most genuine of men usually have a bit of this in their
composition; your only incurable _poseur_ being the fellow who affects
never to pose and betrays himself by his attitude of scorn.

Of course, Stevenson did not always wear this symbolic garment. In fact
the only time I met him in the flesh his clothes had a discouraging
resemblance to those of the rest of us at the Authors Club in New York.
And a few months ago, when I traced his “footprints on the sands of
time” at Waikiki beach, near Honolulu, the picture drawn for me by those
who knew him when he passed that way, was that of a lank, bare-footed,
bright-eyed, sun-browned man who daundered along the shore in white-duck
trousers and a shirt wide open at the neck. But the velvet jacket was in
his wardrobe, you may be sure, ready for fitting weather and occasion. He
wore it, very likely, when he went to beard the Honolulu colourman who
was trying to “do” his stepson-in-law in the matter of a bill for paints.
He put it on when he banqueted with his amiable but bibulous friend, King
Kalakaua. You can follow it through many, if not most, of the photographs
which he had taken from his twentieth to his forty-fourth, and last,
year. And in his style you can almost always feel it,—the touch of
distinction, the ease of a native elegance, the assurance of a well-born
wanderer,—in short, the velvet jacket.

[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

_From a photograph, negative of which is owned by Charles Scribner’s
Sons._]

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson began the adventure of life in a decent
little house in Howard Place, Edinburgh, on November 13, 1850. He
completed it on the Samoan island of Upolu in the South Seas, December 3,
1894,—completed it, I think, for though he left his work unfinished he
had arrived at the port of honour and the haven of happy rest.

His father, and his father’s father, were engineers connected with the
Board of Northern Lights. This sounds like being related to the Aurora
Borealis; and indeed there was something of mystery and magic about
Stevenson, as if an influence from that strange midnight dawn had entered
his blood. But as a matter of fact the family occupation was nothing more
uncanny than that of building and maintaining lighthouses and beacons
along the Scottish coast, a profession in which they won considerable
renown and to which the lad himself was originally assigned. He made a
fair try at it, and even won a silver medal for an essay on improvements
in lighthouses. But the calling did not suit him, and he said afterward
that he gained little from it except “properties for some possible
romance, or words to add to my vocabulary.”

This lanky, queer, delicate, headstrong boy was a dreamer of dreams, and
from youth desperately fond of writing. He felt himself a predestinated
author, and like a true Scot toiled diligently to make his calling and
election sure.

But there was one thing for which he cared more than for writing,
and that was living. He plunged into it eagerly, with more zest than
wisdom, trying all the games that cities offer, and learning some rather
disenchanting lessons at a high price. For in truth neither his physical,
nor (as he later discovered) his moral, nature was suited to the sowing
of wild oats. His constitution was one of the frailest ever exposed to
the biting winds and soaking mists of the North British Boston. Early
death seemed to be written in his horoscope. But an indomitable spirit
laughs at dismal predictions. Robert Louis Stevenson, (as he now called
himself, velvet-jacketing his own name,) was not the man to be easily
snuffed out by weak lungs or wild weather. Mocking at “bloody Jack” he
held fast to life with grim, cheerful, grotesque courage; his mother, his
wife, his trusty friends, heartened him for the combat; and he succeeded
in having a wider experience and doing more work than falls to the lot of
many men in rudely exuberant health. To do this calls for a singular kind
of bravery, not inferior to, nor unlike, that of the good soldier who
walks with Death undismayed.

Undoubtedly Stevenson was born with a _Wanderlust_.

  “My mistress was the open road
  And the bright eyes of danger.”

Ill health gave occasion and direction to many voyages and experiments,
some of which bettered him, while others made him worse. As a bachelor
he roamed mountains afoot and travelled rivers in his own boat, explored
the purlieus and sublittorals of Paris, London, and Edinburgh, lodged “on
the seacoast of Bohemia,” crossed the ocean as an emigrant, and made
himself vagrantly at home in California where he married the wife “the
great Artificer made for him.” They passed their honeymoon in a deserted
miner’s cabin, and then lived around, in Scotland, the Engadine, Southern
France, Bournemouth, the Adirondacks, and on a schooner among the South
Sea Islands, bringing up at last in the pleasant haven of Vailima. On
all these distant roads Death pursued him, and, till the last ten years,
Poverty was his companion. Yet he looked with keen and joyful eyes
upon the changing face of the world and into its shadowy heart without
trembling. He kept his spirit unbroken, his faith unquenched even when
the lights burned low. He counted life

                                “just a stuff
  To try the soul’s strength on and educe the man.”

He may have stumbled and sometimes fallen, things may have looked black
to him; but he never gave up, and in spite of frailties and burdens, he
travelled a long way,—upward. Through all his travels and tribulations he
kept on writing, writing, writing,—the very type of a migratory author.
He made his first appearance in a canoe. The log of this journey,
_An Inland Voyage on French Rivers_, published in 1878, was a modest,
whimsical, charming début in literature. In 1879 he appeared again,
and this time with a quaint companion. _Travels with a Donkey in the
Cevennes_ is one of the most delightful, uninstructive descriptions of a
journey ever written in English. It contains no practical information but
plenty of pleasure and profit. I do not envy the reader who can finish
it without loving that obstinate little mouse-coloured Modestine, and
feeling that she is one of the best-drawn female characters, of her race,
in fiction.

From this good, quiet beginning his books followed rapidly, and (after
_Treasure Island_, that incomparable boys’ book for men,) with growing
popularity among the judicious, the “gentle readers,” who choose
books not because they are recommended by professors or advertised in
department stores, but because they are really well written and worth
reading.

It is difficult to classify Stevenson’s books, perhaps just because they
are migrants, borderers. Yet I think a rough grouping, at least of his
significant works, may be made. There are five volumes of travels; six
or seven volumes of short stories; nine longer novels or romances; three
books of verse; three books of essays; one biography; and one study of
South Sea politics. This long list lights up two vital points in the man:
his industry and his versatility.

“A virtue and a vice,” say you? Well, that may be as you choose to
take it, reader. But if you say it in a sour or a puritanical spirit,
Stevenson will gaily contradict you, making light of what you praise and
vaunting what you blame.

Industry? Nonsense! Did he not write _An Apology for Idlers_? Yet
unquestionably he was a toiler; his record proves it. Fleeing from one
land to another to shake off his implacable enemy; camping briefly in
strange places; often laid on his back by sickness and sometimes told
to “move on” by Policeman Penury; collecting his books by post and
correcting his proofs in bed; he made out to produce twenty-nine volumes
in sixteen years,—say 8,000 pages of 300 words, each,—a thing manifestly
impossible without a mort of work. But of this he thought less than of
the fact that he did it, as a rule, cheerfully and with a high heart.
Herein he came near to his own ideal of success: “To be honest, to be
kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the
whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be
necessary and not to be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these
without capitulation,—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep
friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude
and delicacy.” Of his work I think he would have said that he stuck to
it, first, because he needed the money that it brought in, and second,
because he enjoyed it exceedingly. With this he would have smiled away
the puritan who wished to pat him on the back for industry.

That he was versatile, turned from one subject to another, tried many
forms of his art, and succeeded in some better than in others, he would
have admitted boldly—even before those critics who speak slightingly
of versatility as if it marked some inferiority in a writer, whereas
they dislike it chiefly because it gives them extra trouble in putting
him into his precise pigeonhole of classification. Stevenson would
have referred these gentlemen to his masters Scott and Thackeray for a
justification. His versatility was not that of a weathercock whirled
about by every wind of literary fashion, but that of a well-mounted gun
which can be turned towards any mark. He did not think that because he
had struck a rich vein of prose story-telling he must follow that lead
until he had worked it or himself out. He was a prospector as well as a
miner. He wished to roam around, to explore things, books, and men, to
see life vividly as it is, and then to write what he thought of it in any
form that seemed to him fit,—essay, or story, or verse. And this he did,
thank God, without misgiving, and on the whole greatly to our benefit and
enjoyment.

I am writing now of the things which make his books companionable. That
is why I have begun with a thumb-nail sketch of the man in the velvet
jacket who lives in them and in his four volumes of letters,—the best
English letters, it seems to me, since Lamb and Thackeray. That also is
why I have not cared to interrupt this simple essay by telling which of
his works strike me as comparative failures, and giving more or less
convincing reasons why certain volumes in my “collective edition” are
less worn than others.

’Tis of these others that I wish to speak,—the volumes whose bindings
are like a comfortable suit of old clothes and on whose pages there are
pencil-marks like lovers’ initials cut upon the bark of friendly trees.
What charm keeps them alive and fresh, in an age when most books five
years old are considered out of date and everything from the unspacious
times of Queen Victoria is cordially damned? What manner of virility is
in them to evoke, and to survive, such a flood of “Stevensoniana”? What
qualities make them still welcome to so wide a range of readers, young
and old, simple and learned,—yes, even among that fair and capricious
sex whose claim to be courted his earlier writings seem so lightly (or
prudently) to neglect?


I

Over and above the attraction of his pervading personality, I think
the most obvious charm of Stevenson’s books lies in the clear, vivid,
accurate and strong English in which they are written. Reading them is
like watching a good golfer drive or putt the ball with clean strokes
in which energy is never wanting and never wasted. He does not foozle,
or lose his temper in a hazard, or brandish his brassy like a war-club.
There is a grace of freedom in his play which comes from practice and
self-control.

Stevenson describes (as far as such a thing is possible) the way in which
he got his style. “All through my boyhood and youth,” says he, “I was
known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler, and yet I was always
busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write.” He traces
with gusto, and doubtless with as much accuracy as can be expected in a
map drawn from memory, the trails of early admiration which he followed
towards this goal. His list of “authors whom I have imitated” is most
entertaining: Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe,
Hawthorne, Montaigne, Baudelaire, Obermann. In another essay, on “Books
Which Have Influenced Me,” he names _The Bible_, _Hamlet_, _As You Like
It_, _King Lear_, _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_, _The Pilgrim’s Progress_,
_Leaves of Grass_, Herbert Spencer’s books, Lewes’s _Life of Goethe_,
the _Meditations_ of Marcus Aurelius, the poems of Wordsworth, George
Meredith’s _The Egoist_, the essays of Thoreau and Hazlitt, Mitford’s
_Tales of Old Japan_,—a strange catalogue, but not incoherent if you
remember that he is speaking now more of their effect upon his way of
thinking than of their guidance in his manner of writing,—though in this
also I reckon he learned something from them, especially from the English
Bible.

Besides the books which he read, he carried about with him little
blank-books in which he jotted down the noteworthy in what he saw, heard,
or imagined. He learned also from penless authors, composers without a
manuscript, masters of the _viva-voce_ style, like Robert, the Scotch
gardener, and John Todd, the shepherd. When he saw a beggar on horseback,
he cared not where the horse came from, he watched the rascal ride.
If an expression struck him “for some conspicuous force, some happy
distinction,” he promptly annexed it;—because he understood it, it was
his.

In two separate essays, each of which he calls “A Gossip,” he pays
tribute to “the bracing influence of old Dumas,” and to the sweeping
power and broad charm of Walter Scott, “a great romantic—an idle child,”
the type of easy writers. But Stevenson is of a totally different type,
though of a kindred spirit. He is the best example in modern English of
a careful writer. He modelled and remodelled, touched and retouched his
work, toiled tremendously. The chapter on Honolulu in _The Wrecker_, was
rewritten ten times. His essays for _Scribner’s Magazine_ passed through
half a dozen revisions.

His end in view was to bring his language closer to life, not to use
the common language of life. That, he maintained, was too diffuse, too
indiscriminate. He wished to condense, to distil, to bring out the real
vitality of language. He was like _Sentimental Tommy_ in Barrie’s book,
willing to cogitate three hours to find the solitary word which would
make the thing he had in mind stand out distinct and unmistakable.
What matter if his delay to finish his paper lost him the prize in the
competition? Tommy’s prize was the word; when he had that his work was
crowned.

A willingness to be content with the wrong colour, to put up with the
word which does not fit, is the mark of inferior work. For example, the
author of _Trilby_, wishing to describe a certain quick, retentive look,
speaks of the painter’s “_prehensile_ eye.” The adjective startles, but
does not illuminate. The prehensile quality belongs to tails rather than
to eyes.

There is a modern school of writers fondly given to the cross-breeding of
adjectives and nouns. Their idea of a vivid style is satisfied by taking
a subject which belongs to one region of life and describing it in terms
drawn from another. Thus if they write of music, they use the language of
painting; if of painting, they employ the terminology of music. They give
us pink songs of love, purple roars of anger, and gray dirges of despair.
Or they describe the andante passages of a landscape, and the minor key
of a heroine’s face.

This is the extravagance of a would-be pointed style which mistakes the
incongruous for the brilliant. Stevenson may have had something to do
with the effort to escape from the polished commonplace of an English
which admitted no master earlier than Addison or later than Macaulay.
He may have been a leader in the hunting of the unexpected, striking,
pungent word. But for the excesses and absurdities of this school of
writing in its decadence, he had no liking. He knew that if you are going
to use striking words you must be all the more careful to make them hit
the mark.

He sets forth his theory of style in the essay called _A Humble
Remonstrance_. It amounts to this: First, you shall have an idea, a
controlling thought; then you shall set your words and sentences marching
after it as soldiers follow their captain; and if any turns back, looks
the other way, fails to keep step, you shall put him out of the ranks as
a malingerer, a deserter at heart. “The proper method of literature,”
says he, “is by selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration.”
But the positive exaggeration,—the forced epithet, the violent phrase,
the hysterical paragraph,—he does not allow. Hence we feel at once a
restraint and an intensity, a poignancy and a delicacy in his style,
which make it vivid without ever becoming insane even when he describes
insanity, as he does in _The Merry Men_, _Olalla_, and _Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde_. His words are focussed on the object as with a burning-glass.
They light it up; they kindle it; but they do not distort it.

Now a style like this may have its occasional fatigues: it may convey a
sense of over-carefulness, of a choice somewhat too meticulous,—to use
a word which in itself illustrates my meaning. But after all it has a
certain charm, especially in these days of slipshod, straddling English.
You like to see a man put his foot down in the right place, neither
stumbling nor swaggering. The assurance with which he treads may be the
result of forethought and concentration, but to you, reading, it gives
a feeling of ease and confidence. You follow him with pleasure because
he knows where he is going and has taken pains to study the best way of
getting there.

Take a couple of illustrations from the early sketches which Stevenson
wrote to accompany a book of etchings of Edinburgh,—hack work, you may
call them; but even hack work can be done with a nice conscience.

Here is the Edinburgh climate: “The weather is raw and boisterous in
winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological
purgatory in spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor among
bleak winds and plumping rains, have been sometimes tempted to envy them
their fate.”

Here is the Scottish love of home: (One of the tall “lands,” inhabited
by a hundred families, has crumbled and gone down.) “How many people all
over the world, in London, Canada, New Zealand, could say with truth,
‘The house I was born in fell last night’!”

Now turn to a volume of short stories. Here is a Hebridean night, in _The
Merry Men_: “Outside was a wonderful clear night of stars, with here and
there a cloud still hanging, last stragglers of the tempest. It was near
the top of the flood, and the Merry Men were roaring in the windless
quiet.”

Here is a sirocco in Spain: “It came out of malarious lowlands, and over
several snowy sierras. The nerves of those on whom it blew were strung
and jangled; their eyes smarted with the dust; their legs ached under
the burden of their body; and the touch of one hand upon another grew to
be odious.”

Now take an illustration from one of his very early essays, _Notes on the
Movements of Young Children_, printed in 1874. Here are two very little
girls learning to dance: “In these two, particularly, the rhythm was
sometimes broken by an excess of energy, _as though the pleasure of the
music in their light bodies could endure no longer the restraint of the
regulated dance_.”

These examples are purposely chosen from tranquil pages; there is nothing
far-fetched or extraordinary about them; yet I shall be sorry for you,
reader, if you do not feel something rare and precious in a style like
this, in which the object, however simple, is made alive with a touch,
and stands before you as if you saw it for the first time.


II

Tusitala,—“Teller of Tales,”—was the name which the South Sea Islanders
gave to Stevenson; and he liked it well. Beginning as an essayist, he
turned more and more, as his life went on, to the art of prose fiction
as that in which he most desired to excel. It was in this field, indeed,
that he made his greatest advance. His later essays do not surpass his
earlier ones as much as his later stories excel his first attempts.

Here I conceive my reader objecting: Did not _Treasure Island_ strike
twelve early in the day? Is it not the best book of its kind in English?

Yes, my fellow Stevensonian, it is all that you say, and more,—of its
kind it has no superior, so far as I know, in any language. But the man
who wrote it wrote also books of a better kind,—deeper, broader, more
significant, and in writing these he showed, in spite of some relapses,
a steadily growing power which promised to place him in the very highest
rank of English novelists.

_The Master of Ballantrae_, maugre its defects of construction, has the
inevitable atmosphere of fate, and the unforgettable figures of the
two brothers, born rivals. The second part of _David Balfour_ is not
only a better romance, but also a better piece of character drawing,
than the first part. _St. Ives_, which was left unfinished, may have
been little more than a regular “sword-and-cloak” story, more choicely
written, perhaps, than is usual among the followers of “old Dumas.” But
Stevenson’s other unfinished book, _Weir of Hermiston_, is the torso of
a mighty and memorable work of art. It has the lines and the texture of
something great.

Why, then, was it not finished? Ask Death.

_Lorna Doone_ was written at forty-four years: _The Scarlet Letter_ at
forty-six: _The Egoist_ at fifty-one: _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ at
fifty-one. Stevenson died at forty-four. But considerations of what he
might have done, (and disputes about the insoluble question,) should not
hinder us from appraising his actual work as a teller of tales which do
not lose their interest nor their charm.

He had a theory of the art of narration which he stated from time to time
with considerable definiteness and inconsiderable variations. It is not
obligatory to believe that his stories were written on this theory. It is
more likely that he did the work first as he wanted to do it, and then,
like a true Scot, reasoned out an explanation of why he had done it in
just that way. But even so, his theory remains good as a comment on the
things that he liked best in his own stories. Let us take it briefly.

His first point is that fiction does not, and can not, compete with
real life. Life has a vastly more varied interest because it is more
complex. Fiction must not try to reproduce this complexity literally,
for that is manifestly impossible. What the novelist has to do is to
turn deliberately the other way, and seek to hold you by simplifying
and clarifying the material Which life presents. He wins not by trying
to tell you everything, but by telling you that which means most in the
revelation of character and in the unfolding of the story. Of necessity
he can deal only with a part of life, and that chiefly on the dramatic
side, the dream side; for a life in which the ordinary, indispensable
details of mere existence are omitted is, after all, more or less
dream-like. Therefore, the story-teller must renounce the notion of
making his story a literal transcript of even a single day of actual
life, and concentrate his attention upon those things which seem to him
the most real in life,—the things that count.

Now a man who takes this view of fiction, if he excels at all, will
be sure to do so in the short story, a form in which the art of
omission is at a high premium. Here, it seems to me, Stevenson is a
master unsurpassed. _Will o’ the Mill_ is a perfect idyl; _Markheim_,
a psychological tale in Hawthorne’s manner; _Olalla_, a love-story of
tragic beauty; and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, in spite of its obvious
moving-picture artifice, a parable of intense power.

Stevenson said to Graham Balfour: “There are three ways of writing a
story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a
character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly
you may take a certain atmosphere and get actions and persons to express
and realize it. I’ll give you an example—_The Merry Men_. There I began
with the feeling of one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland,
and I gradually developed the feeling with which that coast affected
me.” This, probably, is somewhat the way in which Hawthorne wrote _The
House of the Seven Gables_; yet I do not think that is one of his best
romances, any more than I think _The Merry Men_ one of Stevenson’s
best short stories. It is not memorable as a tale. Only the bits of
description live. _The Treasure of Franchard_, light and airy as it is,
has more of that kind of reality which Stevenson sought. Therefore it
seems as if his third “way of writing a story” were not the best suited
to his genius.

The second way,—that in which the plot links and unfolds the
characters,—is the path on which he shows at his best. Here the gentleman
adventurer was at ease from the moment he set forth on it. In _Treasure
Island_ he raised the dime novel to the level of a classic.

It has been charged against Stevenson’s stories that there are no women
in them. To this charge one might enter what the lawyers call a plea of
“confession and avoidance.” Even were it true, it would not necessarily
be fatal. It may well be doubted whether that primitive factor which
psychologists call “sex-interest” plays quite such a predominant,
perpetual, and all-absorbing part in real life as that which neurotic
writers assign to it in their books. But such a technical, (and it must
be confessed, somewhat perilous,) defense is not needed. There are plenty
of women in Stevenson’s books,—quite as many, and quite as delightful
and important as you will find in the ordinary run of life. Marjory in
_Will o’ the Mill_ is more lovable than Will himself. Olalla is the true
heroine of the story which bears her name. Catriona and Miss Grant, in
the second part of _David Balfour_, are girls of whom it would be an
honour to be enamoured; and I make no doubt that David, (like Stevenson)
was hard put to it to choose between them. Uma, in _The Beach of Falesa_,
is a lovely insulated Eve. The two Kirsties, in _Weir of Hermiston_,
are creatures of intense and vivid womanhood. It would have been quite
impossible for a writer who had such a mother as Stevenson’s, such a
friend of youth as Mrs. Sitwell, such a wife as Margaret Vandegrift, to
ignore or slight the part which woman plays in human life. If he touches
it with a certain respect and _pudor_, that also is in keeping with his
character,—the velvet jacket again.

The second point in his theory of fiction is that in a well-told tale
the threads of narrative should converge, now and then, in a scene which
expresses, visibly and unforgettably, the very soul of the story. He
instances Robinson Crusoe finding the footprint on the beach, and the
Pilgrim running from the City of Destruction with his fingers in his ears.

There are many of these flash-of-lightning scenes in Stevenson’s stories.
The duel in _The Master of Ballantrae_ where the brothers face each other
in the breathless winter midnight by the light of unwavering candles,
and Mr. Henry cries to his tormentor, “I will give you every advantage,
for I think you are about to die.” The flight across the heather, in
_Kidnapped_, when Davie lies down, forspent, and Alan Breck says, “Very
well then, I’ll carry ye”; whereupon Davie looks at the little man and
springs up ashamed, crying “Lead on, I’ll follow!” The moment in _Olalla_
when the Englishman comes to the beautiful Spanish mistress of the house
with his bleeding hand to be bound up, and she, catching it swiftly to
her lips, bites it to the bone. The dead form of Israel Hands lying
huddled together on the clean, bright sand at the bottom of the lagoon of
_Treasure Island_. Such pictures imprint themselves on memory like seals.

The third point in Stevenson’s theory is, that details should be
reduced to a minimum in number and raised to a maximum in significance.
He wrote to Henry James, (and the address of the letter is amusing,)
“How to escape from the besotting _particularity_ of fiction? ‘Roland
approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was
a scraper on the upper step.’ To hell with Roland and the scraper!” Many
a pious reader would say “thank you” for this accurate expression of his
sentiments.

But when Stevenson sets a detail in a story you see at once that it
cannot be spared. Will o’ the Mill, throwing back his head and shouting
aloud to the stars, seems to see “a momentary shock among them, and a
diffusion of frosty light pass from one to another along the sky.” When
Markheim has killed the antiquarian and stands in the old curiosity
shop, musing on the eternity of a moment’s deed,—“first one and then
another, with every variety of pace and voice,—one deep as the bell from
a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a
waltz,—the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.”
Turning over the bit of paper on which “the black spot,” the death-notice
of the pirates, has been scrawled with charcoal, Jim Hawkins finds it has
been cut from the last page of a Bible, and on the other side he reads
part of a verse from the last chapter of the Revelation: _Without are
dogs and murderers_.

There is no “besotting particularity” in such details as these. On the
contrary they illustrate the classic conception of a work of art, in
which every particular must be vitally connected with the general, and
the perfection of the smallest part depends upon its relation to the
perfect whole. Now this is precisely the quality, and the charm, of
Stevenson’s stories, short or long. He omits the non-essential, but his
eye never misses the significant. He does not waste your time and his
own in describing the coloured lights in the window of a chemist’s shop
where nothing is to happen, or the quaint costume of a disagreeable
woman who has no real part in the story. That kind of realism, of local
colour, does not interest him. But he is careful to let you know that
Alan Breck wore a sword that was much too long for him; that Mr. Hyde
was pale and dwarfish, gave an impression of deformity without any
nameable malformation, and bore himself “with a sort of murderous mixture
of timidity and boldness”; that John Silver could use his wooden leg as
a terrible weapon; that the kitchen of the cottage on Aros was crammed
with rare incongruous treasures from far away; and that on a certain
cold sunny morning “the blackbirds sung exceeding sweet and loud about
the House of Durisdeer, and there was a noise of the sea in all the
chambers.” Why these _trivia_? Why such an exact touch on these details?
Because they count.

Yet Stevenson’s tales and romances do not give—at least to me—the effect
of over-elaboration, of strain, of conscious effort; there is nothing
affected and therefore nothing tedious in them. They move; they carry you
along with them; they are easy to read; one does not wish to lay them
down and take a rest. There is artifice in them, of course, but it is
a thoroughly natural artifice,—as natural as a clean voice and a clear
enunciation are to a well-bred gentleman. He does not think about them;
he uses them in his habit as he lives. Tusitala enjoys his work as a
teller of tales; he is at home in it. His manner is his own; it suits
him; he wears it without fear or misgiving,—the velvet jacket again.


III

Of Stevenson as a moralist I hesitate to write because whatever is said
on this point is almost certain to be misunderstood. On one side are
the puritans who frown at a preacher in a velvet jacket; on the other
side the pagans who scoff at an artist who cares for morals. Yet surely
there is a way between the two extremes where an artist-man may follow
his conscience with joy to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with his God. And having caught sight of that path, though he may
trace it but dimly and follow it stumbling, surely such a man may say
to his fellows, “This is the good way; let us walk in it.” Not one of
the great writers who have used the English language, so far as I know,
has finished his career without wishing to moralize, to teach something
worth learning, to stand in the pulpit of experience and give an honest
message to the world. Stevenson was no exception to this rule. He avowed
the impulse frankly when he said to William Archer, “I would rise from
the dead to preach.”

In his stories we look in vain for “morals” in the narrow sense,—proverbs
printed in italics and tagged on to the tale like imitation oranges tied
to a Christmas tree. The teaching of his fiction is like that of life,
diffused through the course of events and embodied in the development
of characters. But as the story unfolds we are never in doubt as to the
feelings of the narrator,—his pity for the unfortunate; his scorn for
the mean, the selfish, the hypocritical; his admiration for the brave,
the kind, the loyal and cheerful servants of duty. Never at his lightest
and gayest does he make us think of life as a silly farce; nor at his
sternest and saddest does he leave us disheartened, “having no hope and
without God in the world.” Behind the play there is a meaning, and beyond
the conflict there is a victory, and underneath the uncertainties of
doubt there is a foothold for faith.

I like what Stevenson wrote to an old preacher, his father’s friend.
“Yes, my father was a ‘distinctly religious man,’ but not a pious....
His sentiments were tragic; he was a tragic thinker. Now granted that
life is tragic to the marrow, it seems the proper service of religion
to make us accept and serve in that tragedy, as officers in that other
and comparable one of war. Service is the word, active service in the
military sense; and the religious man—I beg pardon, the pious man—is he
who has a military joy in duty,—not he who weeps over the wounded.”

This is the point of view from which Stevenson writes as a novelist;
you can feel it even in a romance as romantic as _Prince Otto_; and in
his essays, where he speaks directly and in the first person, this way
of taking life as an adventure for the valourous and faithful comes out
yet more distinctly. The grace and vigour of his diction, the pointed
quality of his style, the wit of his comment on men and books, add to the
persuasiveness of his teaching. I can see no reason why morality should
be drab and dull. It was not so in Stevenson’s character, nor is it so
in his books. That is one reason why they are companionable.

“There is nothing in it [the world],” wrote he to a friend, “but the
moral side—but the great battle and the breathing times with their
refreshments. I see no more and no less. And if you look again, it is not
ugly, and it is filled with promise.”




FOOTNOTES


[1] _Syllabus Scriptorum Veterum Recentiumque qui Veritatem Religionis
Christianæ Asseruerunt_: Hamburg, 1725.

[2] _The Poetry of Tennyson._ Scribner’s: New York, 1889-1920.

[3] Smith, Elder & Co.: London, 1880.

[4] _The Bible in Browning._ Macmillan: New York, 1903.

[5] “The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley.” London, 1710. Preface to
_Pindarique Odes_, volume I, page 184.

[6] Lowth, _De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum Praelectiones_. Oxon., 1753.

[7] _English Odes_, selected by Edmund Gosse. Preface, page xiii.

[8] _The Book of Psalms._ 2 volumes, London, 1883. Volume I, page 82.

[9] Joseph Addison, 1712.

[10] Reverend A. H. Strong, _The Great Poets and their Theology_, p. 384.

[11] John Jay Chapman, _Emerson and Other Essays_, p. 195.

[12] J. H. Nettleship, _Robert Browning, Essays and Thoughts_, p. 292.

[13] Miss Vida D. Scudder, _The Life of the Spirit in Modern English
Poets_.

[14] Epilogue to _Dramatis Personæ_.

[15] Cheney, _The Golden Guess_, p. 143.

[16] _Memoir of Alfred Lord Tennyson_, vol. II, p. 230.

[17] _Asolando_, “Reverie.”

[18] J. J. Chapman, _Emerson, and Other Essays_.

[19] I am haunted by the notion that Johnson himself said this, but I
cannot find the passage for quotation.





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