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ASPECTS OF POETRY

JOHN CAMPBELL SHAIRP

Hontron

HENRY FROWDE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS "WAREHOUSE
7 PATERNOSTER ROW

ASPECTS OF POETRY

BEING

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JOHN CAMPBELL SHAIRP, LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF POETRY, OXFORD
PRINCIPAL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE, ST. ANDREWS

§daxh

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1881

[A// rights reserved 'X

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
The Province of Poetry .

PAGE

I

CHAPTER 11.
Criticism and Creation Zl

CHAPTER III.

The Spiritual Side of Poetry 66

CHAPTER IV.
The Poet a Revealer 94

CHAPTER V.
Poetic Style in Modern English Poetry . . .123

X CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VI.

PAOE

Virgil as a Religious Poet 159

CHAPTER VH.
Scottish Song, and Burns 192

CHAPTER Vni.
Shelley as a Lyric Poet 227

CHAPTER IX.
The Poetry of the Scottish Highlands.— Ossian . 256

CHAPTER X.
Modern Gaelic Bards.— Duncan MacIntyre . . 287

CHAPTER XI.
The Three Yarrows 316

CHAPTER XII.
The White Doe of Rylstone 345

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER XIII.

PAGE

The Homeric Spirit in Walter Scott . . .377

CHAPTER XIV.
Prose Poets.— Thomas Carlyle 407

CHAPTER XV.
Prose Poets.— Cardinal Newman 438

PREFACE.

The following pages contain twelve Lectures selected
from those which I have delivered from the Chair of
Poetry in Oxford during the last four years, some of
which have already been published separately. To these
have been added three Chapters (xi, xli, xiii), which
were not delivered as Lectures in Oxford, but which
are, by the kind permission of the Proprietor, reprinted
from Good Words.

Some might, perhaps, expect to find in this book a
systematic theory of poetry, and a consecutive course
of Lectures. But the conditions of the Professorship,
which require one Lecture to be delivered during each
Academic term, render it difficult, even if it were on
other grounds desirable, to preserve such continuity. The
audiences which listen to these Lectures change from
term to term ; so that a course, begun before one set of
hearers, would have to be continued before another, and
completed before a third. This renders it almost a
necessity that each Lecture should be, as far as possible,
complete in itself.

As to the mode of treatment pursued, I have tried to
adapt it, as well as I could, to the varied character of
my hearers. These consisted of Undergraduates, of

vi PREFACE.

Graduates, and of some who were of neither of these.
Among these last were not a few of those resident
Gentlewomen, who now form a new and not unpleasing
element in some Oxford Lecture-rooms. As my pre-
decessor in the Poetry Chair said in the Preface to his
published Lectures, I felt it to be my duty, having
found a large number of persons willing to listen, to do
what I could to retain them. This seemed most likely
to be done by treating the several subjects under review
in a broad way, and by presenting their larger outlines,
rather than by dwelling on refined subtleties or minute
details. On verbal criticism and scholastic erudition
sufficient attention is bestowed in the various Lecture-
rooms of the Colleges, and of the University. It would
seem to be a desirable variety, if, in one Lecture-room
filled by a general audience, a different treatment were
adopted.

For the rest, the Lectures, both as to the views they
advance, and the way in which these views are ex-
pressed, must speak for themselves. No formal canons
of criticism have been here laid down, but the principles
which underlie, and the sentiments which animate the
Lectures, are, I trust, sufficiently apparent.

When I have been aware that I have derived a
thought from another writer, I have tried to acknow-
ledge it in the text. But it is a pleasure to record
here, in a more explicit way, many obligations to the
kindness of personal friends.

For information on the difficult Ossianic question,
which I have tried to condense into a few plain para-

PREFACE. vii

graphs, I have to thank Mr. W. F. Skene, D.C.L.,
'author of Celtic Scotlajid, — that work of difficult and
original research, with which he has crowned the labour
of his life. To Dr. Clerk of Kilmallie also, author of the
new translation of Ossian, I am indebted for ever ready-
help on the same subject, as well as for kind aid
afforded, when I was translating the Gaelic of Duncan
Maclntyre's poems.

In the Lecture on Virgil I have to acknowledge
the free use I have made of the scholarly and sugges-
tive work on Virgil by Professor Sellar ; to whom too
I owe my introduction to M. Gaston Boissier's work
entitled La Religion Roniaine, from which I derived
valuable assistance.

The Lecture on Cardinal Newman is, in my thoughts,
specially associated with another college friend. Several
of the passages I have cited in the course of this
Lecture recall to me walks around Oxford, and evening
talks in college rooms, during which I first heard them
from the lips of the present Lord Coleridge From
him too I have quite recently received some sugges-
tions, which I have gladly embodied in the text.

Lastly, the late Dean Stanley, with his never-failing
friendliness, took lively interest in these Lectures, and
frequently talked with me over the subjects of them,
before they were composed.

One occasion^ the last on which I enjoyed his de-
lightful society, will long live in my remembrance.
I had paid a two days' visit to him in his hospitable
home in the Deanery, in the early days of last March.

viii PREFACE.

I was then meditating the Lecture on Carlyle ; and
on the second day of my visit we spoke a good deal
about the subject, which interested him and me alike.
He suggested several passages, in which Carlyle's poetic
power seemed to him conspicuous. On the last day
of my visit, Saturday the 5th of March, while I was
engaged in a hurried breakfast, before starting for the
Scotch Express, he opened a book, Mr. Justice Stephen's
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and, in the dim light
of the early morning, read aloud in his clear impressive
tones the passage I have quoted from Carlyle, which
thus ends : —

' through mystery to mystery, from God and to God.'

These words were hardly uttered,, when I had to rise
and go. It was our last parting.

J. C. SHAIRP.

HOUSTOUN,
September, 1881.

ASPECTS OF POETRY.

CHAPTER I.

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY.

Were I to begin my first Lecture from this Chair,
in which the kindness of the University has placed me,
by following an approved and time-honoured usage,
I might ask at the outset, What is Poetry? and try
to answer the question, either by falling back on some
one of the old definitions, or by proposing a new one,
or perhaps by even venturing on a theory of Poetry,
But, as you are all, no doubt, more or less acquainted
with the definitions and theories of the past, and
probably have not found much profit in them, you
will, I believe, readily absolve me from any attempt
to add one more to their number. For definitions do
not really help us better to understand or appreciate
subjects with which we have been long familiar,
especially when they are, as poetry is, all life and
spirit. As my friend the author of Rab and his

a THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

Friends has well expressed it, ' It is with Poetry as
with flowers and fruits. We would all rather have them
and taste them than talk about them. It is a good thing
to know about a lily, its scientific ins and outs, its botany,
its archaeology, even its anatomy and organic radicals,
but it is a better thing to look at the flowers themselves,
and to consider how they grow.' So one would rather
enjoy poetry, than criticise it and discuss its nature.
But, as there is a time for studying the botany of flowers,
as well as for enjoying their beauty, there is a time also
for dwelling on the nature and offices of poetry, and
that time seems to have come to-day.

I think I shall be able best to bring before you
what I wish to say at present, if, approaching the
subject in a concrete rather than in an abstract way,
I endeavour at the outset to note some of the more
prominent characteristics of the poetic nature, when
that nature appears in its largest and most healthful
manifestation.

In doing so I shall have to tread some well-worn
ways, and to say things which have often been said
before. But I shall willingly incur this risk. For
my aim is not so much to say things that are
new as things that are true. You will therefore bear
with me, I hope, if I try to recall to your thoughts
a few plain but primal truths regarding that which
is most essential in the poetic nature — truths which
are apt to be forgotten amid the fashions of the

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 3

hour, and to lie buried beneath heaps of superfine
criticism.

One of the first characteristics of the genuine and
healthy poetic nature is this — it is rooted rather in the
heart than in the head. Human-heartedness is the
soil from which all its other gifts originally grow, and
are continually fed. The true poet is not an eccentric
creature, not a mere artist living only for art, not a
dreamer or a dilettante, sipping the nectar of existence,
while he keeps aloof from its deeper interests. He is,
above all things, a man among his fellow-men, with a
heart that beats in sympathy with theirs, a heart not
different from theirs, only larger, more open, more sensi-
tive, more intense. It is the peculiar depth, intensity,
and fineness of his emotional nature, which kindles his
intellect and inspires it with energy. He does not feel
differently from other men, but he feels more. There is
a larger field of things over which his feelings range, and
in which he takes vivid interest. If, as we have been
often told, sympathy is the secret of all insight, this
holds especially true of poetic insight, which more than
any other derives its power of seeing from sympathy
with the object seen. There is a kinship between the
poetic eye and the thing it looks on, in virtue of
which it penetrates. As the German poet says —

' If the eye had not been sunny
How could it look upon the sun "i '

And herein lies one great distinction between the
B 2

4 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

poetic and the scientific treatment of things. The
scientific man must keep his feelings under stern con-
trol, lest they intrude into his researches and colour
the dry light, in which alone Science desires to see its
objects. The poet on the other hand — it is because
his feelings inform and kindle his intellect that he
sees into the life of things.

Some perhaps may recall the names of great poets,
though not the greatest, who have fled habitually from
human neighbourhood, and dwelt apart in proud isola-
tion. But this does not, I think, disprove the view that
human-heartedness is the great background of the poet's
strength, for to the poets I speak of, their solitariness
has been their misfortune, if not their fault. By some
untowardness in their lot, or some malady of their time,
they have been compelled to retire into themselves,
and to become lonely thinkers. If their isolation has
added some intensity to their thoughts, it has, at the
same time, narrowed the range of their vision, and
diminished the breadth and permanence of their influ-
ence.

But this vivid human sympathy, though an essential
condition or background of all great poetry, by no
means belongs exclusively to the poet. Taking other
forms, it is characteristic of all men who have deeply
moved or greatly benefited their kind, — of St, Augustine,
and Luther, Howard, Clarkson, and Wilberforce, not
less than of Homer, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott.

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 5

I must therefore pass on to points more distinctive
of the poet, and consider —

What is the object or material with which the poet
deals ;

What is the special power which he brings to bear on
that object ;

What is his true aim ; what the function which he
fulfils in human society.

The poet's peculiar domain has generally been said
to be Beauty ; and there is so much truth in this, that,
if the thing must be condensed into a single word,
probably none better could be found. For it is one
large part of the poet's vocation to be a witness for the
Beauty, which is in the world around him and in human
life. But this one word is too narrow to cover all the
domain over which the poetic spirit ranges. It fits well
that which attracts the poet in the face of nature, and is
applicable* to many forms of mental and moral ex-
cellence. But there are other things which rightly win
his regard, to which it cannot be applied without
stretching it till it becomes meaningless. Therefore I
should rather say that the whole range of existence, or
any part of it, when imaginatively apprehended, seized
on the side of its human interest, may be transfigured
into poetry. There is nothing that exists, except things
ignoble and mean, in which the true poet may not find
himself at home — in the open sights of nature, in the
occult secrets of science, in the 'quicquid agunt homines,'

6 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

in men's character and fortunes, in their actions and
sufferings, their joys and sorrows, their past history,
their present experience, their future destiny. All these
lie open to him who has power to enter in, and, by
might of imaginative insight, to possess them. And
such is the kinship between man and all that exists,
that, as I have elsewhere said, ' whenever the soul comes
vividly in contact with any fact, truth, or existence,
whenever it realises and takes them home to itself with
more than common intensity, out of that meeting of the
soul and its object there arises a thrill of joy, a glow of
emotion ; and the expression of that glotu, that thi'ill, is
poetry.' But as each age modifies in some measure
men's conceptions of existence, and brings to light new
aspects of life before undreamt of, so Poetry, which is
the expression of these aspects, is ever changing, in
sympathy with the changing consciousness of the race.
A growth old as thought, but ever young, it alters its
form, but renews its vitality, with each succeeding age.

As to the specific organ or mental gift through
which poets work, every one knows that it is Imagi-
nation. But if asked what Imagination is, who can
tell? If we turn to the psychologists — the men who
busy themselves with labelling and ticketing the mental
faculties, — they do not much help us. Scattered through
the poets here and there, and in some writers on aesthetic
subjects, notably in the works of Mr. Ruskin, we find
thoughts which are more suggestive. Perhaps it is a

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 7

thing to rejoice in that this marvellous faculty has
hitherto baffled the analysts. For it would seem that
when you have analysed any vital entity down to its
last elements, you have done your best to destroy it.

I may however observe in passing, that the following
seem to be some of the most prominent notes of the way
in which Imagination works : —

To a man's ordinary conceptions of things Imagina-
tion adds force, clearness, distinctness of outline, vividness
of colouring.

Again, it seems to be a power intermediate between
intellect and emotion, looking towards both, and par-
taking of the nature of both. In its highest form, it
would seem to be based on ' moral intensity.' The
emotional and the intellectual in it act and react on
each other, deep emotion kindling imagination, and
expressing itself in imaginative form, while imaginative
insight kindles and deepens emotion.

Closely connected with this is what some have called
the penetrative, others the interpretative, power of Ima-
gination. It is that subtle and mysterious gift, that
intense intuition which, piercing beneath all surface
appearance, goes straight to the core of an object, enters
where reasoning and peddling analysis are at fault, lays
hold of the inner heart, the essential life, of a scene, a
character, or a situation, and expresses it in a few im-
mortal words. What is the secret of this penetrative
glance, who shall say } It defies analysis. Neither the

8 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [r.

poet himself who puts it forth, nor the critic who
examines the result, can explain how it works, can lay
his finger on the vital source of it. A line, a word,
has flashed the scene upon us, has made the character
live before us ; how we know not, only the thing is
done. And others, when they see it, exclaim, How true
to nature this is ! so like what I have often felt myself,
only I could never express it ! But the poet has ex-
pressed it, and this is what makes him an interpreter to
men of their own unuttered experience. All great poets
are full of this power. It is that by which Shakespeare
read the inmost heart of man, Wordsworth of nature.

A further note of Imagination is that combining and
harmonising power, in virtue of which the poetic mind,
guided by the eternal forms of beauty which inhabit it,
out of a mass of incongruous materials, drops those which
are accidental and irrelevant, and selects those which suit
its purpose, — those which bring out a given scene or
character, — and combines them into a harmonious whole.

The last note I shall mention is what may be called
the shaping or embodying power of Imagination, — I
mean the power of clothing intellectual and spiritual
conceptions in appropriate forms. This is that which
Shakespeare speaks of —

' Imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown.'

And conversely there is in Imagination a power which
spiritualises what is visible and corporeal, and fills

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 9

it with a higher meaning than mere understanding
dreams of. These two processes are seen at work in all
great poets, the one or the other being stronger, accord-
ing to the bent of each poet's nature.

While Imagination, working in these and other ways,
is the poet's peculiar endowment, it is clear that for its
beneficent operation there must be present an ample
range, a large store of material on which to work. This
it cannot create for itself. From other regions it must
be gathered ; from a wealth of mind in the poet himself,
from large experience of life and intimate knowledge of
nature, from the exercise of his heart, his judgment, his
reflection, indeed of his whole being, on all he has seen
and felt. In fact, a great poet must be a man made
wise by large experience, much feeling, and deep re-
flection ; above all, he must have a hold of the great
central truth of things. When these many conditions
are present, then and then only can his imagination
work widely, benignly, and for all time ; then only can
the poet become a

' Serene creator of immortal things.'

Imagination is not, as has sometimes been conceived,
a faculty of falsehood or deception, calling up merely
fictitious and fantastic views. It is pre-eminently a
truthful and truth-seeing faculty, perceiving subtle
aspects of truth, hidden relations, far-reaching analogies,
which find no entrance to us by any other inlet. It is
the power which vitalises all knowledge, which makes

lo THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

the dead abstract and the dead concrete meet, and
by their meeting live, which suffers not truth to dwell
by itself in one compartment of the mind, but carries it
home through our whole being — understanding, affec-
tions, will.

This vivid insight, this quick, imaginative intuition,
is accompanied by a delight in the object or truth
beheld, — a glow of heart, 'a white heat of emotion,'
which is the proper condition of creation. The joy of
imagination in its own vision, the thrill of delight, is one
of the most exquisite moods man ever experiences.

Emotion, then, from first to last inseparably attends
the exercise of Imagination, pre-eminently in him who
creates, in a lesser degree in those who enjoy his
creations.

In this aspect of poetry, as in some sense the imme-
diate product of emotion, some have seen its necessary
weakness and its limitation. Emotion, they say, belongs
to youth, and must needs disappear before mature reason
and ripe reflection. Time must dull feelings, however
vivid, cool down passions, however fervid. How many
poets have reiterated Byron's lament, that

' The early glow of thought declines in feeling's dull decay ! '

How much of the poetry of all ages is filled with pas-
sionate regrets for objects

' Too early lost, too hopelessly deplored ! '

No wonder, therefore, that strong men who despise senti-

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. li

mentality, and will not spend their lives in bemoaning
the inevitable, are wont, as they grow older, to drop
poetry of this kind, along with other youthful illusions.
The truth of this cannot be gainsaid. The poetry of
regret may please youth, which has buoyancy enough in
itself to bear the weight of sadness not its own. But
those who have learnt by experience what real sorrow
is, have no strength to waste on imaginary sorrows.
And if all poetry were of this character, it would be true
enough that it contained no refreshment for toiling,
suffering men.

But, not to speak of purely objective poets, there is
in great meditative poets a higher wisdom, a serener
region, than that of imaginative regret. There are
poets who, after having experienced and depicted the
tumults of the soul, after having felt and sung the pain
of unsatisfied desires, or uttered their yearning regret

' That things depart which never may return,'
have been able to retire within themselves, thence to
contemplate the fever of excitement from a higherj more
permanent region, and to illuminate, as has been said,
transitory emotion 'with the light of a calm, infinite
world.' Such poets do not ignore the heartless things
that are done in the world, but they forgive them ; the
dark problems of existence they do not try to explain,
but they make you feel that there is light behind, if we
could but see it ;— the discords and dissonances of life
are still there, but over them all they seem to shed a

12 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

reconciling spirit. This serene wisdom, this large and
luminous contemplation, absorbs into itself all conflict,
passion, and regret, as the all-embracing blue of heaven
iiolds the storms and clouds that momentarily sweep
over it. It is seen in the ' august repose ' of Sophocles,
when he prepares the calm close for the troubled day of
the blind and exiled Theban king. It is seen in the
spirit that pervades the Tempest, one of Shakespeare's
latest dramas, in which, to use his own words, he ' takes
part with his nobler reason against his fury,' and rises
out of conflict and passion into a region of self-control
and serenity. It is seen in Milton, when, amid the deep
solitariness of his own blindness and forced inactivity, he
is enabled to console himself with the thought —
' They also serve who only stand and wait.'
It is seen in Wordsworth, him who, while feeling as few
have done, regret for a brightness gone which nothing
could restore, was able to let all these experiences melt
into his being, and enrich it, till his soul became human-
ised by distress, and by the thoughts that spring out of
human suffering. Poetry such as this stands the wear of
life, and breathes a benediction even over its decline.

As to the aim which the poet sets before him, the end
which poetry is meant to fulfil, what shall be said ?
Here the critics, ancient and modern, answer, almost
with one voice, that the end is to give pleasure. Aris-
totle tells us that ' it is the business of the tragic poet to
give that pleasure which arises from pity and terror,

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 13

through imitation/ Horace gives an alternative end

in his

'Aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare Poetae,'

and he awards the palm to those poems which combine
both ends, and at once elevate and please. To take one
sample from the moderns : Coleridge, in his definition of
poetry, tells us that ' a poem is a species of composition,
opposed to science as having intellectual pleasure for its
object or end,' and that its perfection is ' to communicate
the greatest immediate pleasure from the parts, com-
patible with the largest sum of pleasure on the whole,'

May I venture to differ from these great authorities,
and to say that they seem to have mistaken that which
is an inseparable accompaniment for that which is the
main aim, the proper end of poetry? The impulse to
poetic composition is, I believe, in the first instance,
spontaneous, almost unconscious ; and where the inspi-
ration, as we call it, is most strong and deep, there a
conscious purpose is least present. When a poet is
in the true creative mood, he is for the time possessed
with love of the object, the truth, the vision which he
sees, for its own sake, — is wholly absorbed in it ; the
desire fitly to express what he sees and feels is his one
sufficient motive, and to attain to this expression is itself
his end and his reward. While the inspiration is at its
strongest the thought of giving pleasure to others or of
winning praise for himself is weakest. The intrinsic
delight in his own vision, and in the act of expressing it,

14 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

keeps all extrinsic aims, for a time at least, aloof. This
might perhaps be a sufficient account of the poet's aim
in short lyrics and brief arrow-flights of song. But even
in the richest poetic natures the inspiring heat cannot
always or long be maintained at its height,

* And tasks in hours of insight willed,
In hours of gloom must be fulfilled.'

Effort long sustained implies the presence of conscious
purpose. Great poets cannot be conceived to have girded
themselves to their longest, most deliberate efforts, —
Shakespeare to Hamlet^ Milton to Paradise Lost, —
without reflecting what was to be the effect of their work
on their fellow-men. It would hardly have satisfied
them at such a time to have been told that their poems
would add to men's intellectual pleasures. They would
not have been content with any result short of this — the
assurance that their work would live to awaken those
high sympathies in men, in the exercise of which they
themselves found their best satisfaction, and which, they
well knew, ennoble every one who partakes of them.
To appeal to the higher side of human nature, and to
strengthen it, to come to its rescue, when it is overborne
by worldliness and material interests, to support it by
great truths, set forth in their most attractive form, — this
is the only worthy aim, the adequate end, of all poetic
endeavour. And this it does, by expressing in beautiful
form and melodious language the best thoughts and the
noblest feelings which the spectacle of life awakens in the

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 15

finest souls. This is the true office of poetry, which is
the bloom of high thought, the efflorescence of noble emo-
tion. No doubt these sympathies, once awakened, yield
a delight among the purest and noblest man can know ;
but to minister this pleasure is not the main end which
the poet sets before himself, but is at most a subordinate
object. The true end is to awaken men to the divine
side of things, to bear witness to the beauty that clothes
the outer world, the nobility that lies hid, often obscured,
in human souls, to call forth sympathy for neglected
truths, for noble but oppressed persons, for downtrodden
causes, and to make men feel that, through all outward
beauty and all pure inward affection, God Himself is
addressing them.

In this endeavour poetry makes common cause with
all high things, — with right reason and true philosophy,
with man's moral intuitions and his religious aspirations.
It combines its influence with all those benign tendencies
which are working in the world for the melioration of
man and the manifestation of the kingdom of God. It is
adding from age to age its own current to those great

' Tides that are flowing
Right onward to the eternal shore.'

But, if it has great allies, it has also powerful adver-
saries. The worship of wealth and of all it gives, a mate-
rialistic philosophy which disbelieves in all knowledge
unverifiable by the senses, luxury, empty display, world-
liness, and cynicism, with these true poetry cannot dwell.

1 6 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

In periods and in circles where these are paramount,
the poet is discredited, his function as a witness to high
truth is denied. If tolerated at all, he is degraded into
a merely ornamental personage, a sayer of pretty things,
a hanger-on of society and the great. Such is the only
function which degenerate ages allow to him, and this is
a function which only poets of baser metal will accept.
The truly great poets in every age have felt the nobility
of their calling, have perceived that their true function
is not to amuse, or merely to give delight, but to be
witnesses for the ideal and spiritual side of things, to
come to the help of the generous, the noble, and the
true, against the mighty.

And, though some exceptions there have been, yet
it is true that the great majority of poets in all times
have, according to their gifts, recognised this to be their
proper aim, and fulfilled it. Therefore we say once
more, in the words of one of the foremost of the brother-
hood—

' Blessings be on them and eternal praise !
Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares,
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth, and pure delight by heavenly lays.'

If these general views are true, there follow from them
some practical corollaries as to our poetic judgments,
which, while true for all times, are yet specially ap-
plicable to this time, perhaps to this place.

The first of these is the need we have to cultivate an

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 1 7

open and catholic judgment, ready to appreciate excel-
lence in poetry and in literature under whatever forms it
comes. It might seem that there was little need to urge
this here, for is not one main end of all academic teach-
ing to form in the mind right standards of judgment ?
Of course it is. But the process as carried on here is
not free from hindrances. We too readily, by the very
nature of our studies, become slaves to the past. Those
who have spent their days in studying the master minds
of former ages naturally take from their works canons of
criticism by which they try all new productions. Hence
it is that, when there appears some fresh and original
creation, which is unlike anything the past has recognised,
it is apt to fare ill before a learned tribunal. The learned
and the literary are so trained to judge by precedents,
that they often deal harder measure and narrower judg-
ment to young aspirants, than those do, who, having
no rules of criticism, judge merely by their own natural
instincts. Literary circles think to bind by their formal
codes young and vigorous genius, whose very nature it is
to defy the conventional, and to achieve the unexpected.
Many a time has this been seen in the history of poetry,
notably at the opening of the present century. Those
who then seated themselves on the high places of criti-
cism, and affected to dispense judgment, brought their
critical apparatus, derived from the age of Pope, to bear
on the vigorous race of young poets, who in this country
appeared after the French Revolution. Jeffrey and his

1 8 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

band of critics tried the new poetic brotherhood, one by
one, found them wanting, and consigned them to oblivion.
Hardly more generous were the critics of the Quarterly
Reviexv. There was not one of the great original spirits
of that time whom the then schools of critics did not
attempt to crush. The poets sang on, each in his own
way, heedless of the anathemas. The world has long
since recognised them, and crowned them with honour.
The critics, and the canons by which they condemned
them, — where is their authority now .''

Even more to be deprecated than critics, judging by
the past, are coteries which test all things by some domi-
nant sentiment or short-lived fashion of the hour. Those
who have lived some time have seen school after school of
this sort arise, air its little nostrums for a season, and
disappear. But such coteries, while they last, do their
best, by narrowness and intolerance, to vitiate literature,
and are unfair alike to past eminence and to rising genius.
I can myself remember a time, when the subjective school
of poetry was so dominant in Oxford, that some of its
ablest disciples voted Walter Scott to be no poet ; per-
haps there may be some who think so still.

To guard us against all such narrowness, it is well to
remember that the world of poetry is wide, as wide as
existence, that no experience of the past can lay down
rules for future originality, or limit the materials which
fresh minds may vivify, or predict the moulds in which
they may cast their creations. Let those who would pre-

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 19

serve catholicity of judgment, purge their minds of all
formulas and fashions, and look with open eye and
ingenuous heart, alike on the boundless range of past
excellence, and on the hardly less boundless field of
future possibility. If we must have canons of judgment,
it is well to have them few, simple, and elastic, founded
only on what is permanent in nature and in man.

Again, in a place like this, men's thoughts are turned,
and rightly, to the great world-poets of all time, — to
Homer, ^schylus, Sophocles, Virgil, perhaps to Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton. For the whole host of lesser,
though still genuine, poets, much more for the sources
whence all poetry comes, we are apt to have but scanty
regard. It is well perhaps that for a short time, as
students, we should so concentrate our gaze; for we thus
get a standard of what is noblest in thought and most
perfect in expression. But this exclusiveness should
continue but a little while, and for a special purpose.
If it be prolonged into life, if we continue only to admire
and enjoy a few poets of the greatest name, we become,
while fancying ourselves to be large-minded, narrow
and artificial. If our eyes were always fixed on the
highest mountain-peaks, what should we know of the
broad earth around us? What should we think of the
geographer who should acquaint himself with the rivers
only where they broaden seaward, and bear navies on
their bosom, and know nothing of the small affluents
and brooks that run among the hills and feed the rivers,
C 2

20 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

and of the mountain-wells that feed the brooks, and of
the clouds and vapours that supply the wells ? You
admire Homer, ^schylus, Shakespeare, perhaps Scott
and Wordsworth and Shelley, but where did these get
their inspiration and the materials which they wrought
into beauty? Not mainly by study of books, not by
placing before themselves literary models, but by going
straight to the true sources of all poetry, by knowing
and loving nature, by acquaintance with their own hearts,
and by knowledge of their fellow-men.

From the poetry of the people has been drawn most
of what is truest, most human-hearted, in the greatest
poems. Would the Iliad have been possible if there had
not existed before it a nameless crowd of rhapsodists,
who wrought out a poetic language, and shaped the
deeds of the heroes into rough popular songs ? Would
Shakespeare's work have been possible, if he had not
wrought on ground overstrewn with the wreck of medi-
eval mysteries, of moralities, tales, ballads, and of Eng-
land's chronicles and traditions, as well as enriched by the
regular plays of his predecessors ? When Shakespeare's
' study of imagination ' was filled with kings and heroes
and statesmen such as he had never met with, how was
it that he so painted them to the life ? Did not his in-
sight into their characters, his reading of their feelings,
spring from the power in him of imagination and memory,
working on scenes he had witnessed, and on impressions
he had gathered, first in the hamlets and the oak woods

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 21

about his own Stratford, and afterwards in the city and
in city Hfe ? It was his own experience, not of books,
but of men, idealised and projected into the strange and
distant, till that became alive and near.

No doubt, a day comes with advancing civilisation,
when the poets of the past must exercise more power
over younger poets than they did in earlier times. But
this at least remains true, that, if the poetry of any, even
the most advanced, age is to retain that eternal freshness,
which is its finest grace, it must draw both its materials
and its impulses more from sympathy with the people
than from past poets, more from the heart of man than
from books. If poetry is to portray true emotion, this
must come from poets who themselves have felt it, and
seen others feel.

Those who are familiar with the poor, know how much
of that feeling language, which is the essence of poetry,
may be heard at times under cottage roofs. At the fall
of autumn I have visited and said farewell to two old
Highland women, sisters, sitting in their smoky hut
beside their scanty peat-fire. With return of summer I
have revisited that hut, and found one sitting there
alone, and have heard that sole survivor, as she sat on
her stool, rocking her body to and fro, pour forth in
Gaelic speech the story, how her sister pined away, and
left her in the dead days of winter, all alone. And no
threnody or lament poet ever penned could match the
pathos of that simple narrative.

22 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

In cases like this, not the feeling only is poetic, the
words which utter it are so too. And the poet, instead
of adopting the approved diction of poets, or coining
tropes and images of his own, cannot do better than
adopt the language of genuine emotion, as it comes warm
from the lips of suffering men and women. And not
the language only, but the incidents of actual life are
worth more, as a storehouse of fresh poetry, than all
the written poems of all the literatures. Here, more
than elsewhere, the saying holds, that the literary lan-
guage is a stagnant pool. The words which men use
under pressure of real emotion, these are the running
stream, the living spring.

But it is not nature and human life only as they exist
now, but also as we know them to have been in the
past, that furnish ever fresh poetic materials. It has
often been a marvel to me that English poets, with their
own grand national history behind them, have made so
little use of it. Since Shakespeare wrote his historical
dramas, how few poetic blocks have been dug from
that quarry ! What I now say applies to England,
rather than to Scotland. Our picturesque historians of
recent years, while they have done the work of partisans
very effectually, have also been in some sort poets of the
past. But how seldom have our regular singers set foot
on that field ! The Laureate, no doubt, after having
done his work in England's mythic region, has, late in
his career, descended from those shadowy heights to the

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 23

more solid ground and more substantial figures of her
recorded history. Let us hail the omen, and hope that
the coming generation of poets may follow him, and enter
into the rich world of England's history and possess it.
Surely England, if any land, supplies rich poetic mate-
rial in her long, unbroken story, in her heroic names,
in her battlefields scattered all the island over, where
railways and factories have not obliterated them —
'in the halls in which is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old,' —

where hang, too, the portraits of her famous men, and
in the homes in which they were reared, either still
inhabited, or mouldering

' In all the imploring beauty of decay.'
These things remain to add life and colour to that
which chronicle and tradition and family histories have
preserved. How is it that our English poets have so
turned their back on all this ? I confess it has often
pained me to see fine poetic faculty expended on a poem,
long as Paradise Lost, upon some demigod or hero of
Greece, in whom the Teutonic mind can never find more
than a passing interest ; or in discussing hard problems
of psychology, better left to the philosophers ; or in
cutting the inner man to shreds in morbid self-analysis,
while the great fresh fields of our own history lie all
unvisited.

One word as to the relation which substance bears to
form, thought to expression, in poetry, ' Lively feeling

24 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

for a situation and power to express it constitute the
poet,' said Goethe. ' The power of clear and eloquent
expression is a talent distinct from poetr>% though often
mistaken for it,' says Dr. Newman. Into this large
question, whether he can be called a poet who lacks the
power of expressing the poetic thought that is in him, I
shall not enter. On the one hand you have Goethe and
Coleridge, maintaining that poetic conception and ex-
pression are inseparable, — powers born in one birth.
On the other hand, Wordsworth and Dr. Newman agree
in holding that

' many are the poets sown by nature.
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.'

As however the 'vision,' even if it exist, cannot reveal
itself to others without the ' accomplishment ' of expres-
sion, there is little practical need to discuss the question.
But while both of these powers are indispensable, they
seem to exist in various proportions in different poets.
One poet is strong in thought and substance, less ef-
fective in form and expression. In another the case is
exactly reversed. It is only in the greatest poets, and
in those, when in their happiest mood, that the two
powers seem to meet in perfect equipoise, — and that the
highest thoughts are found wedded to the most perfect
words. Among well-known poets, Cowper and Scott
have been noted, as stronger in substance than in form ;
Pope and Gray, as poets in whom finish of style exceeds
power of thought ; Moore, as hiding commonplace sen-

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 25

timent under elaborate ornament. On the whole, it
may be said that the early poets of any nation are for
the most part stronger in substance than in style ;
whereas, with advancing time, power of expression
grows, style gets cultivated for its own sake, so that
in later poets expression very often outruns thought.

As an illustration of the wide limits within which
two styles of expression, each perfect after its kind, may
range, take two poems, well known to every one ; Words-
worth^s Resolution and Independence^ and Mr. Tennyson's
Palace of Ar't. Each poem well represents the manner
of its author. In one thing only they agree, that
each contains a moral truth, though to teach this is
not probably the main object of either. In all other
respects, in their manner of conveying the truth, in
form, colouring, and style of diction, no two poems
could well be more unlike.

Wordsworth's poem sets forth that alternation of two
opposite moods to which imaginative natures are ex-
posed,— the highest exaltation, rejoicing in sympathy
with the joy of Nature, quickly succeeded by the deepest
despondency. After these two moods have been power-
fully depicted, admonition and restoration come from
the sight of a hard lot patiently, even cheerfully, borne,
by a poor leech-gatherer, who wanders about the moors
plying his trade. This sight acts as a tonic on the
poet's spirit, bracing him to fortitude and content.

The early poem of the Laureate begins by personify-

26 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

ing the Spirit of Art, who speaks forth her own aims
and desires, her one purpose to enjoy Beauty ahvays
and only by herself, for her own selfish enjo}/ment — the
artistic temptation to worship Beauty, apart from truth
and goodness. You will remember how she describes
the Palace, so royal, rich, and wide, with which she
surrounded herself, — the life she led there ; how, after a
time, smitten to the core with a sense of her own in-
ward poverty and misery, she loathes herself in despair.
Wordsworth's ' plain imagination and severe ' moves
rapidly from the most literal, everyday commonplace,
into the remotest distance of brooding phantasy, before
which the old man and the visible scene entirely dis-
appear, or are transfigured. And the diction moves
with the thought, passing from the barest prose to the
most elevated poetic style. Thus, if on the one hand
you have such lines as

' To me that morning did it happen so,'
and

'How is it that you hve ? and what is it you do?'
you have on the other —

* I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride ;
Of him who walked in glory and in joy.
Following his plough along the mountain side :
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.'

You have also the strong lines likening the sudden

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 27

apparition of the old man on the moor to a huge boulder-
stone,

' Couched on the bald top of an eminence ' ;
then to a sea-beast that has crawled forth on a sand-
bank or rock-ledge to sun itself. Then rising into —

' Upon the margin of that moorish flood,
Motionless as a cloud, the old man stood ;
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth all together, if it move at all.'

Many may object to the appearance of the plain lines
in the poem as blemishes. To me, while they give great
reality to the whole, they enhance, I know not how
much, the power of the grander lines. I would not, if I
could, have them otherwise.

Mr. Tennyson again, from end to end of his poem,
pitches the style at a high artistic level, from which he
never once descends. Image comes on image, picture
succeeds picture, each perfect, rich in colour, clear in
outline. When you first read the poem, every stanza
startles you with a new and brilliant surprise. There
is not a line which the most fastidious could wish away.

In another thing the two poems are strikingly con-
trasted. Wordsworth^s is almost colourless ; there is only
a word or two in it that can suggest colour. Mr. Tenny-
son's is inlaid throughout with the richest hues, yet so
deftly as not to satiate, but only to bring out more fully
the purpose of the poem. In reading the one you feel
as though you were in the midst of a plain bare moor,

28 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

out of which the precipiced crags and blue mountain-
peaks soar aloof, not inharmoniously, but all the more
impressively, from the dead level that surrounds them.
In the other you are, as it were, walking along some
high mountain level, which, without marked elevation
or depression anywhere, yields on either side wide
outlooks over land and sea.

I have alluded to these two poems, not by any means
to estimate their comparative excellence, but as in-
stances in which two great poets give expression to
high thoughts, each in his own characteristic style, and
that style perfect according to its kind and aim.

In these two instances the idea and the expression are
well balanced, in just equipoise.

But it is otherwise with much of the poetry, or at-
tempts at poetry, of the present time. A tincture of
letters is now so common, that the number of those who
can versify is greatly increased, and the power of expres-
sion often lamentably outruns the thought. There is
one marked exception to this, which will occur to every
one, in the case of one of the most prominent living
poets, in whom the power of lucid utterance halts, breath-
lessly and painfully, behind the jerks and jolts of his
subtle and eccentric thought. But this is not a common
fault. Rather, I should say, we are overdone with super-
abundant imagery and luscious melody. We are so
cloyed with the perfume of flowers, that we long for the
bare bracing heights, where only stern north winds blow.

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 29

Or to put it otherwise : in many modern poems you are
presented with a richly-chased casket ; you open it, and
find only a common pebble within. This is a malady
incident to periods of late civilisation and of much criti-
cism. Poetry gets narrowed into an art — an art which
many can practise, but which, when practised, is not worth
much. How many are there in the present day, of more
or less poetical faculty, who can express admirably
whatever they have to say, but that amounts to little or
nothing ! At best it is but a collection of poetic pretti-
nesses, sometimes of hysteric exaggerations and extra-
vagances. Had these men, with their fine faculty of
expression, only made themselves seriously at home in
any one field of thought, had they ever learned to love
any subject for its own sake, and not merely for its
artistic capabilities, had they ever laid a strong heart-
hold of any side of human interest, no one can say what
they might not have achieved ; but for want of this
grasp of substance the result is in so many cases what
we see. Not till some stirring of the stagnant waters
be vouchsafed, some new awakening to the higher
side of things, not till some mighty wind blows over
the souls of men, will another epoch of great and
creative poetry arise.

The views which I have set forth in this Lecture will,
if they are true, determine what value we ought to place
on that modern theory which maintains ' the moral in-
difference of true art.' The great poet, we are sometimes

30 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

told now-a-days, must be free from all moral preposses-
sions ; his one business is ' to see life steadily and see it
whole,' and to represent it faithfully as it is. The highest
office of the poet is ' to aim at a purely artistic effect.'
To him goodness and vice are alike — his work is to de-
lineate each impartiall}^, and let no shade of preference
intrude.

It is to Dramatic Poetry, I suppose, that this theory is
mainly intended to apply, and from the Drama it is sup-
posed to receive most confirmation. Be it so.

It is then the aim of the dramatist truly to delineate
character of every hue, the base equally with the noble,
to represent life, in all its variety, just as it is. But is
not life itself full of morality ? Is not the substance and
texture of it moral to the core } must not the contempla-
tion of human characters, as they are, awaken liking
or dislike, moral admiration or moral aversion, in every
healthy mind ? And must not the poetry which repre-
sents truly that substance be moral too? must not
the spectacle of the characters depicted stir natural
feelings of love or dislike, as well in the poet who draws,
as in the reader who contemplates them ? Did not
Sophocles have more delight in Antigone than in
Ismene ? Did not Shakespeare admire and love
Desdemona and Cordelia ; hate and despise lago and
Edmund ?

This theory of the moral indifference of Art originated,
I believe, in great measure, with Goethe, and has been

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 31

propagated chiefly by his too exclusive admirers. I
should be content to rest the whole question on a com-
parison of the moral spirit that pervades the dramas
of Goethe and those of Shakespeare. It has been as-
serted, I believe with truth, that it was the existence of
this very theory in Goethe, or rather of that element in
him whence this theory was projected, which shuts him
out from the highest place as a dramatist, and marks the
vast interval between him and Shakespeare. Goethe's
moral nature was, it has been said, of a somewhat limp
texture, with few strong ' natural admirations,' so that his
dramas are wanting in those moral lights and shadows,
which exist in the actual world, and give life and outline
to the most manly natures. His groups of characters
are most of them morally feeble and shadowy. Shake-
speare, on the other hand, being a whole, natural man,
'the moral, imaginative, and intellectual parts of him
do not lie separate,' but move at once and all together.
Being wholly unembarrassed with aesthetic theories, his
'poetical impulse and his moral feelings are one." He
does not conceal or explain away the great moral
elevations and depressions that you see in the world.
He paints men and women as they are, with great
moral differences, not withholding admiration from the
noble, contempt and aversion from the base. There-
fore, though we do not say that he is faultless, do
not deny that there are things in him we could wish
away, yet, taken as a whole, there breathes from his

32 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l.

works a natural, healthy, bracing, elevating spirit, not
to be found in the works of Goethe. Every side, every
phase of human nature is there faithfully set down, but
to the higher and better side is given its own natural
predominance. With the largest tolerance ever man had
for all human infirmity, the widest sympathy with all
men, seeing even the soul of good that may lie in things
evil, there is in him nothing of that neutral moral
tint, which is weakness in poetry as truly as in actual
life.

Neither do we find in this master-dramatist any trace
of another theory, born of morbid physiology, as the for-
mer of morbid aesthetics, by which character^ personality,
the soul are explained away, and all moral energy dis-
appears before such solvents as outward circumstances,
antecedent conditions,heredity,and accumulated instincts.
Shakespeare had looked that way too, as he had most
ways ; but he leaves the announcement of this modern
view, or one closely allied to it, to Edmund, one of his
basest characters, and even he scorns it.

If the divorce of poetry from morality will not hold in
the drama, in which alone it can show any semblance of
argument, far less can it be applied to poetry in its other
forms, epic, lyric, meditative. If it be not the function
of poetry in these forms to give beautiful expression to
the finer impulses, to the higher side of life, I see not
that it has any function at all. If poetry be not a river,
fed from the clear wells that spring on the highest

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. '>^'^

summits of humanity, but only a canal to drain off stag-
nant ditches from the flats, it may be a very useful sani-
tary contrivance, but has not, in Bacon's words, any
'participation of divineness.'

Poets who do not recognise the highest moral ideal
known to man, do, by that very act, cut themselves off
from the highest artistic effect. It is another exempli-
fication of that great law of ethics which compasses all
human action, 'whereby the abandonment of a lower
end in obedience to a higher aim is made the very condi-
tion of securing the lower one.' For just as the pleasure-
seeker is not the pleasure-finder, so he who aims only
at artistic effect, by that very act misses it. To reach
the highest art, we must forget art, and aim beyond it.
Other gifts being equal, the poet, who has been enabled
to apprehend the highest moral conception, has in that
gained for himself a great poetic vantage-ground.

To bring this to a point : The Christian standard we
take to be the highest known among men. Must then,
you may ask, all great poets, at least in modern times,
in order to reach the highest poetic excellence, be
Christians ? Goethe, you say, made little of Chris-
tianity ; Shelley abjured it : are we on that account
to deny, that they rank among the great poets of the
world ?

To this it may be replied, — First, that though they
did not consciously hold it, they could not escape
at least some unconscious influence from the religion
D

34 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. [l,

which surrounded them. Secondly, that had their pre-
judice against Christianity been removed, could they
have frankly owned its divinity, instead of being losers
they would have gained hardly less as poets than
as men. For lack of this it is that there lie hidden
in the human spirit tones, the truest, the most tender,
the most profound, which these poets have never
elicited.

Let it not be said that I have been advocating sect-
arian views — trying to bind poetry to the service of a
sect. It is true that poetry refuses to be made over as
the handmaid of any one philosophy or view of life or
system of belief. But it is equally true that it naturally
allies itself only with what is highest and best in human
nature ; and in whatever philosophy or belief this is en-
shrined, thence poetry will draw its finest impulses.

There are only two views with which it has nothing
in common. One is the view of life which they hold,
whose motto is ' Nil admirari! With this it can have
no fellowship, for it cuts off the springs of emotion at
their very sources. The other antipode is the philosophy
which denies us any access to truth except through the
senses ; which refuses to believe anything which scalpel
or crucible or microscope cannot verify ; which reduces
human nature to a heap of finely granulated, iridescent
dust, and empties man of a soul and the universe of
a God. Such a philosophy would leave to poetry
only one function, — to deck with tinsel the cofiin of

I.] THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. ^^

universal humanity. This is a function which she
decHnes to perform.

But we need have no fears that it will come to this.
Poetry will not succumb before materialism, or agnosti-
cism, or any other cobweb of the sophisticated brain. It
is an older, stronger birth than these, and will survive
them. It will throw itself out into fresh forms ; it will dig
for itself new channels ; under some form suited to each
age, it will continue through all time, for it is an undying
effluence of the soul of man.

That this effluence has on the whole been benign in
its tendency who can doubt } I have wished throughout
not to indulge in exaggeration, nor to claim for poetry
more than every one must concede to it. Imagination
may be turned to evil uses. It may minister, it has
sometimes ministered, to the baser side of human nature,
and thrown enchantment over things that are vile. But
this has been a perversion, which depraves the nature
of poetry, and robs it of its finest grace. Naturally it is
the ally of all things high and pure ; among these is its
home ; its nature is to lay hold of these, and to bring them,
with power and attractiveness, home to our hearts. It
is the prerogative of poetry to convey to us, as nothing
else can, the beauty that is in all nature, to interpret the
finer quality that is hidden in the hearts of men, and to
hint at a beauty which lies behind these, a light ' above
the light of setting suns,' which is incommunicable. In
doing this it will fulfil now, as of old, the office which
D 2

36 THE PROVINCE OF POETRY.

Bacon assigned to it, and will give some ' shadow of
satisfaction to the spirit of man, longing for a more ample
greatness, a more perfect goodness, and a more absolute
variety ' than here it is capable of.

CHAPTER II.

CRITICISM AND CREATION.

We are apt to fancy that the powers which poet and
philosopher put forth are of a quite different order from
those which we feel in ourselves, and that commonplace
people and everyday life have nothing in common with
their high functions. It is not so. The most unlettered
peasant performs the same kind of mental acts, as the
poet and the philosopher, only in these last the powers
work with a higher energy. Of all men it is true that
they feel and energise first, they reflect and judge after-
wards. First comes impulse, emotion, active outgoing ;
then reflection, analysing the impulse, and questioning
the motive.

Now these two moods of mind, which go on alter-
nately in every human heart, go on in the poet not less,
but more — the same powers are working in him, only in
fuller, intenser energy. First comes his creative mood.
He has given him a vision of some truth, some beautiful
aspect of things, which for a time fills his whole heart
and imagination ; he seizes it, moulds it into words, and
while he does so his soul is all aglow with emotion — so
strong emotion, that the intellectual power he is putting

38 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

forth is almost unconscious, almost lost sight of. Then,
when the inspiring heat has cooled down, the time of
judgment comes on : he contemplates the work of his
fervid hours, criticises it, as we say, sees its shortcomings,
weighs its value.

This, which goes on in the minds of individual men,
who have the creative gift, is seen reflected on a large
scale in the literary history of nations and of the race.
The world has had its great creative epochs, more fre-
quently it has had its great critical ones. The great
creative epochs are not those in which criticism most
flourishes, neither are the epochs which are most critical
those which have most creative force. In nations as in
men, the two moods seem to alternate, and, in some
degree, to exclude each other.

What happened in Greece we all know. Her creative
energy had spent itself, the roll of her great poets was
complete, before there appeared anything which can be
called criticism. When Aristotle came, and, in his
prosaic, methodical way, laid line and plummet to the
tragedians, took their dimensions, and drew from these
his definitions and canons for tragedy, the tragic, indeed
the whole poetic, impulse of Greece had exhausted
itself.

Then followed the Alexandrian era — the first epoch
of systematic criticism which the world had seen. Be-
hind it lay the whole land which Hellenic genius in its
prime had traversed, and had covered with artistic monu-

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION, 39

ments. Looking back on these, the Alexandrian men
began to take stock of them, to appraise, arrange, edit
them, to extract from them the forms of speech and rules
of grammar — and in fact to construct, as far as they could,
a whole critical apparatus. Learned editors, compilers,
grammarians, critics, these men were ; but poets, makers,
creators, that it was denied them to be. Useful and
laborious men, doing work which has passed into the
world's mental life, but not interesting, stimulative,
refreshing, as the true poets are.

A poet, no doubt, Alexandria had — the firstfruits of
its literature, the most finished specimen of its spirit.
In him we have a sample of what the most extensive
learning and finished taste, without genius, can do.
He wrote, we are told, 800 works, and poems innu-
merable. All that great talents, vast learning, un-
wearied industry, and great literary ambition could do,
he did. The result is not encouraging. We do not in
these latter days desire to see more Callimachi ; one
Callimachus is enough for the world.

I have alluded to Alexandria and Callimachus, because
some seem to think that we in England, as far as poetry
is concerned, have now reached our Alexandrian era,
that it is in vain we shut our eyes to the fact, that our
wisdom is to accept it, and to try to make the best
of it.

This is the subject I wish to consider to-day —
Whether, looking back on the course of our poetic

40 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

history, and considering our present mental condition,
there is good reason to believe that our creative, poetic
energy has worked itself out, that our Alexandrian era
has come.

This rather depressing view of our poetical situation,
as though it were the time of Alexandrian decadence,
may perhaps seem to receive some countenance from an
opinion put forth with much force by a living voice,
which most Oxford men have probably heard, and
which all are glad to hear — my friend and my fore-
runner in this chair, which he so greatly adorned. Mr.
Arnold is never so welcome as when he speaks of poetry
and literature. Even when we may not agree with all
he says, his words instruct and delight us ; for every
word he speaks on these subjects is living, based on
large knowledge, and on a high standard of excellence.

It must not therefore be supposed that I wish to
engage in controversy with my friend, but rather to
enter into a friendly conversation with him on subjects
interesting to both of us, if I first remind you of his
view, and then try to supplement what he has said by
some other considerations which, in his zeal for a larger,
more enlightened knowledge, he has perhaps left un-
expressed.

He holds that the one work to which we are at
present called, both in poetry and in all literature, is
the work of a better, higher, more world-wide criticism,
than any we have as yet known in England. And by

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 41

criticism is meant not the old insular British prejudice,
as it has been represented in the Edinburgh or the
Qiiarterly Rcviciv, but ' the disinterested endeavour to
learn and propagate the best that is known and thought
in the world.' Real criticism, he says, is essentially the
exercise of 'curiosity as to ideas on all subjects, for
their own sakes, apart from any practical interest they
may serve ; it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to
know the best that is known and thought in the world,
irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the
kind, and to value knowledge and thought, as they ap-
proach this best, without the intrusion of any other con-
siderations whatever.'

This is a view of criticism which, if it has a bearing
on poetry, has a still more obvious bearing on other
forms of literature, and hardly less on science. Criticism
in this sense is but one phase, perhaps I should rather
say another name, of that great historic method, which
in our time has entered into and transformed every
province of thought. Taking its stand on the high
eminence to which all the past has been leading up,
and casting a wide-sweeping eye backward on uni-
versal literature, criticism, we are told^ sees only two
great creative epochs of poetry, one the age of vEschylus
and Sophocles, the other the age of Shakespeare.

These two epochs were creative and fruitful, because
in both a new and fresh current of ideas was let in on
the world. There was a breaking-up of the old confining

42 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

limitations, an expansion all round of the mental horizon,
and this condition of things is the most stimulating and
exhilarating of mental influences. This bracing intel-
lectual atmosphere, this fresh movement of ideas, was
caused, in the case of Greece, by the national exalta-
tion of mind which followed the overthrow of the Persian,
and by the sense of triumph, security, and expanding
energy which every Athenian felt, while his country was
building up her maritime empire, and Pericles was
placing the copestone on the structure.

In Shakespeare's time like causes were at work, and
created a similar expansion of men's thoughts. The
Renaissance, after having done its work on the Con-
tinent, had at last reached the shores of England, and
created there the ' New Learning.' The Mediaeval
Church-fabric had been rent, and new light came in, as
the barriers fell down. A new world had arisen beyond
the Atlantic, on which the bravest of Englishmen were
not ashamed to descend as buccaneers, and to draw fresh
life from the wider ocean and larger earth opened to
their adventure.

In these two epochs, when great poets were born into
the world, the time was propitious, and the result was
the great poetic creations which we know. The ' men '
and ' the moment ' had met ; that is the account of it.
Two great creative epochs of poetry vouchsafed to the
world — only two — no third.

We had always fancied that the end of last and the

II.J CRITICISM AND CREA TION. 43

beginning of this century, the period embraced between
1790 and JH25, had been, in England at least, such a
creative period — that the outburst of native song which
then took place made it one of the world's great poetic
eras. But it seems that it is not so.

We had imagined that, though the brotherhood of
poets which then arose in England contained no Shake-
speare, yet, taken all together, they formed a band
so original, so energetic, so various, as to have made
their era for ever memorable while English literature
lasts. This is a common — I am inclined to think, a
not exaggerated — estimate of them.

But the high critical view to which I have been re-
ferring says, No. And the reason it gives is this. The
French Revolution, the prime moving force of Europe
during that time, took in France too practical a turn,
was bent too much on political results, and had ceased
to supply that fine atmosphere of universal thought —
' that current of ideas which animate and stimulate the
creative force — such a current as moved the times of
Pindar and of Sophocles in Greece, and of Shakespeare
in England.' In France the force of the Revolution was
expended in carrying out political theories. At the
same time in England the whole national life was spent
in finding means of resisting those theories, and of
curbing the madness of foreign ideas. Even the most
thoughtful Englishmen lent themselves to this effort.
Hence, in England, the first quarter of this century was

44 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

a period of concentration, of insularity, not of expansion,
of thought. This was not a benign atmosphere for
creative minds to work in. The men of original genius
were given us, but the outward conditions were not
given. Therefore we cannot, according to this view,
look back with complacency on the poetry which ushered
in this century in our own country. And if we cannot
so look back on the period before 1825, much less can
we do so on anything that has succeeded it. Therefore
we must stick to criticism. Criticism is the only func-
tion now allowed us. ' Criticism first — a time of true
creative activity hereafter, when criticism has done its
work.'

This is the view which has been advocated. Now
consider its results. Had such high critical views been
admitted in former times, how would it have thinned
the ranks of England's poets ! what gaps it would have
made in that noble line of singers,

' That, on the steady breeze of honour, sail
In long procession calm and beautiful'!

It is one of the most characteristic things about our
literature that the spirit of each time has passed into
our poetry. The political changes of each age, the
deeds men did, the thoughts they had, the change of
manners that was going on, all these acted directly on
the imagination of our countrymen, kindled their emo-
tions, and embodied themselves in the poetry of the
time.

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 45

It has been truly said that ' no one poet, however
ample his range, represents all the tendencies of his
time, but all the poets of any time taken together do.'
The same writer (Mr. Stopford Brooke) has expressed
so well the historical nature of English poetry, as reflect-
ing the life of each age, that I cannot but quote his
words : —

' If we want to get a clear idea of any period we must
know all the poets, small and great, who wrote in it, and
read them altogether. It would be really useful and
delightful to take a siagle time, and read every line of
fairly good poetry written in it, and then compare the
results of our study with the history of the time. Such
a piece of work would not only increase our pleasure in
all the higher poetry of the time we study, but would
give us grounds for philosophic study, and for greater
enjoyment of the poetry of any other time. Above all,
it would supply us with an historical element, which the
writers of history, even at the present day, have so
strangely neglected ; the history of the emotions and
passions which political changes worked, and which
themselves influenced political change ; the history of
the rise and fall of those ideas, which especially touch
the imaginative and emotional life of a people, and in
doing so modify their whole development.'

It would be easy to illustrate the truth of this, and to
show, by a survey of English poetry from Chaucer to
our own day, how entirely every change in it reflects

46 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

some change in national sentiment. I shall take but
two instances.

The long struggle between the Stewart kings and the
new order of things, from Charles I till the days of
Prince Charles Edward, how faithfully is it reflected in
the Jacobite songs and lyrics ! At first jaunty, trucu-
lent, haughtily anti-plebeian, they then change into a
pathetic wail of nameless singers for a lost cause and
a departing glory, till at last they lend to the songs of
Burns, of Lady Nairne, and of Walter Scott tender
tones of imaginative regret for a vanished time.

I suppose no lover of English poetry would willingly
part with what Burns and Cowper have contributed to
it. But what would have become of Burns, if, before
pouring forth his passion-prompted songs, he had taken
counsel with some learned critic, who told him that
ere he allowed himself to sing, he must first know the
best of what the world had felt and sung before him }
Indeed, after he had flung forth in his own vernacular
those matchless songs, which have made the whole world
his debtor, when he came to know the literati of his time,
and to read more widely in English literature, he ac-
knowledged that, had he known more, he would have
dared less, nor have ventured on such unfrequented by-
paths. Wider knowledge, that is, would have paralysed
his singing power.

Again : Cowper was a scholar, and in his youth had
seen something- of what London could show him. In

TI.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 47

his manhood, from his Huntingdon seclusion, how
much of England's homeliest scenery has he described ;
how much of England's best life and sentiment at the
close of last century has he preserved for us ! But had
some representative of high criticism come across him,
and bidden him, before he essayed his Task, know all the
best that the world had thought or said on the same
subjects, how would the pen have dropped from his
sensitive hand, and left the poetic world so much the
poorer for his silence !

Gray, on the other hand, had fully laid to heart and
acted on the counsels of a refined criticism. He knew
whatever of best the world had produced before him.
Behind his poetic outcome lay a great effort of thought
and criticism, and we have the benefit of it in his scanty
and fastidious contribution to English Poetry, I would
not willingly underrate the author of the Elegy and of the
Ode to Adversity \ but, if the alternative were forced upon
us, I do not think that we should be prepared to give up
either Burns or Cowper in order to preserve Gray.

It is natural that in a scholarly and academic atmo-
sphere, criticism, knowledge, and appreciation of the
best should be highly prized, for this is just that which
academic study can give, and which can hardly be got
without it. But that which schools and universities can-
not give is the afflatus, the native inspiration which
originally produced that best. These are powerless to
awake the voice of the divine Sibyl, which, 'uttering

48 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

things simple, unperfumed, and unadorned, reaches
through myriads of years.' If there is one truth which
all past experience and all present knowledge teach, it
is this : That the creative heat, the imaginative insight,
the inspiration, which is the soul of poetry — that all this
is something which learning and knowledge may stifle,
but cannot generate. That talk about the Muses, and
that invocation of their aid, which has long grown vapid
and wearisome to us, had in its origin a real meaning.
The \xr\viv aeibe, Bed, the earliest poets felt as a fact of
experience. Something was given them — whence and
how they knew not — only it was not their own invention,
but given them from without, or from above, in some
unnameable way, and utter it they must. Since the days
of Homer this feeling of an inspiration from within has
dwindled, and literary and artistic efforts have tried to
do its work, but in vain. Even till this hour, when
poetry is genuine, it originates in a high enthusiasm, a
noble passion overmastering the soul.

Though the muse has been 'shamed so oft by later
lyres on earth,' that poets now ' dare not call her from
her sacred hill,'' yet we see the sense of a veritable
inspiration reappear in Milton in a higher form, other,
yet the same. His ' Sing, Heavenly Muse,' and ' Descend
from Heaven, Urania,' 'The meaning, not the name,
I call ' — these are not empty words, as we know from
what he tells us in prose of the manner and the spirit in
which he prepared himself for song.

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 49

Philosophers, who, themselves gifted with imagination,
understand its ways of working, acknowledge that there
is about the origin of the poetic impulse something which
defies analysis — born, not taught — inexplicable, and mys-
terious. Plato's few words upon this in the Ion are worth
all Aristotle's methodical treatise on Poetry. To quote
from that translation which in our day has made Plato
an English classic, we have Socrates saying to Ion : —
'All good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their
beautiful poems, not as works of art, but because they
are inspired and possessed. . . . For the poet is a light
and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention
in him until he has been inspired, . . . When he has
not attained to this state he is powerless, and unable to
utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which
poets speak of the actions which they record, but they
do not speak of them by any rules of art ; they are
inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them,
and that only.'

Plato further recognises the truth that, though the
first and original inspiration is in the poet, yet all who
sympathise with and can rightly interpret him, must
be partakers of the same inspiration, though in a sub-
dued and ever-lessening measure. Thus it is that he
' compares the poets and their interpreters to a chain of
magnetic rings, suspended from one another and from
a magnet. The magnet is the muse, and the large ring
which comes next in order is the poet himself; then
E

^O CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

follow the rhapsodes and actors ' (the critics, we might
modernise it), ' who are rings of inferior power ; and the
last ring of all is the spectator' (or the reader of the
poems). In these few sentences, making allowance for
their antique form, there is more insight into the origin,
or first awakening of the poetic impulse, than in any-
thing contained in Aristotle's Poetics.

It is a long descent from Plato to Lord Macaulay : but
I take the latter as one of the most businesslike of modern
literary men, who could never be accused of being a
victim to transcendentalism. Hear what he says in the
introduction to his Essay on Dryden : — ' The man who
is best able to take a machine to pieces, and who most
clearly comprehends the manner of its working, will be
the man most competent to form another machine of
similar power. In all the branches of physical and moral
science which admit of perfect analysis, he who can re-
solve will be able to combine. But the analysis which
criticism can effect of poetry is necessarily imperfect.
One element must for ever elude its researches ; and
that is the very element by which poetry is poetry.'

It is the old story. The botanist can take the flower
to pieces, show you the stamens, pistil, calyx, corolla,
and all the rest of it, but can he put them together
again? Can he grasp, or recreate the mysterious thing,
which held them together and made the living flower?
No ; the life has escaped his grasp. Now this quick life,
this vivid impulse, this unnameable essence which makes

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 51

poetry to be poetry — these, learning, criticism, study,
reflection, may kill, as I have said, but cannot create.

By the flashes of uncritical genius the world has
gained its finest truths. When it is working at full
power, it leaves behind criticism and all her works. At
those moments when it is least conscious, it achieves
most. In such rapt moods the poet, carried far out of
the ken even of his own intelligence, goes 'voyaging
through strange seas of thought alone,' and overtakes
new views, descries far heights of beauty and sublimity,
which he in his sober moments can little account for.
These are the far fetches of genius, which lie so much
beyond its own forecast or deliberate aim, that it is only
long after, if ever, that it comes to understand what it
has done. This is that which is called truly inspiration.

When Milton flung forth these lines —

•' How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence through the empty vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled,'

do you suppose he could have quite explained his
imagery? If we could call up Shakespeare and place
before him the various theories about Hamlet, do you
think he would own any one of them as his own ? Would
he not rather tell you with a smile that those clever
fellows, the critics, knew far better than himself the thing
that he meant to do .-*

But if the spontaneous impulse to soar must be
E 2

52 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

delayed till the poet has looked round and ascertained
what soarings have been before attempted, and how
much they have achieved, he will wait till the impulse
is spent, the buoyancy gone. By all means let young
poets cultivate themselves and their powers of expres-
sion— take in as much knowledge as they can carry,
without being oppressed by it. All the learning they
can get, if it be really assimilated, if the native spring
of spirit be not overborne, will come in to enrich and
expand their imaginative range. But the knowledge,
before it can be otherwise than hurtful, must have passed
into their being, become entirely spontaneous, a part of
themselves. If it be laborious learning, culture always
conscious of what other poets have done, it may produce
poetry which may please critics, not passion or fervid
thought, which will reach the hearts of men. There is
no little danger at the present day lest the poetic side
of men's natures die of surfeit, be overlaid with a ple-
thora of past literature. In common with many others,
I am somewhat weary of criticism. We have heard the
best of what she has to say, and would now beg her to
stand aside for a season, and give spontaneity its turn.

Men of mature age, academic and literary persons,
will probably be found giving other counsel, advising
young genius to wait and learn. But these are not the
poet's best advisers. If he desires to reach the great
nia.ss even of intelligent men, he must remember that
they are not learned, and are not to be moved by poetry

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. ^7^

whose characteristic is its learning. Men who have
passed forty will, no doubt, counsel caution and criti-
cism ; but the far larger portion of the world are on the
other side of forty, and we elders must regretfully admit
that it is among these the poets find their best and most
sympathetic audience.

It was not by vast stores of book-knowledge, not by
great critical efforts, that the long line of England's
poets has been maintained — that unbroken succession
which has lasted so many centuries. To them the
actual life of men, the face of nature, their own hearts,
were their first and best teachers. To know these
intimately was their discipline — supplied their material.
Books and book-learning were to them a quite subordi-
nate affair. But the demand for a great critical effort as
the prerequisite of creation seems to put that first which
is not first, and to disallow that instinctive knowledge of
man and of nature which is the poet's breath of life.
This view of things probably originates in the concep-
tion of Goethe as the typical poet of the modern era.
Whatever worth it may have in itself, one thing is
certain, that, had it been believed by former generations,
English poetry would have been other, certainly not
better, than it is.

However various the phases of our poetry have been,
they have never been born of criticism, except perhaps
in the days of Pope. If we may judge from all the past
of poetry, criticism must be subordinate to passion,

54 CRITICISM AND CREA TION. [ll.

science to temperament, else the result will be frigid and
without vitality. It remains for ever true in the region
of poetry that 'immortal works are those which issue
from personal feeling, which the spirit of system has not
petrified.'

These last words are from a paper in a recent Quar-
terly Review, entitled 'A French Critic on Goethe.' I
had written nearly all the foregoing before I read that
paper, and when I read it I found in it remarkable con-
firmation of the views I had been trying to express. No
one could doubt the hand from which that paper came ;
and, since its first appearance, it has been acknowledged
as Mr. Arnold's. Both the French critic and his English
commentator agree in the opinion that of all Goethe's
works the First Part of Faust is his masterpiece. And
the reason they give is this ; that, ' while it has the
benefit of Goethe's matured powers of thought, of his
command over his materials, of his mastery in planning
and expressing, it possesses an intrinsic richness, colour,
and warmth. Having been early begun, Faust has pre-
served many a stroke and flash out of the days of its
author's fervid youth.'

Both the French critic and his commentator agree
that after this 'a gradual cooling down of the poetic
fire ' is visible, ' that in his later works the man of reflec-
tion has overmastered the man of inspiration.' The
conclusion to which the Quarterly Reviewer comes on
the whole is that Goethe's pre-eminence comes not from

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. ^t^

his being 'the greatest of modern poets,' but from his
being ' the clearest, largest, most helpful thinker of
modern times.' Exactly so. Nothing could more con-
firm what I have been urging throughout than this
estimate of Goethe endorsed by two so eminent autho-
rities. In him we see on a great scale exemplified the
tendency of the critic to mar the poet, of 'science to
overcome individuality, of reflection to chill poetic genius,
of philosophic thought to prevail over the poetry of
passion and of nature, of the spirit of system to crush or
petrify personal feelings.' And this is one of the mental
maladies from which the intellectual health of our times
has most to dread.

There are places where it might be unwise to hazard
thoughts like these, lest we should discourage the im-
portant duty of self-cultivation. But this is not one of
those places. Is there not truth in the charge that to
those who live here permanently there is something in
the atmosphere of the place, call it criticism or what you
will, which too much represses individuality ?

I know that Oxford has many aspects, — wears very ^
different looks, as seen from this side or from that. In
the early years of discipleship, or viewed from a distance
down long vistas of memory, or revisited after years of
absence, she appears, what she truly is, the nurse of all
high thoughts, the home of all pure and generous affec-
tions. To those who are quite young there is perhaps
no spot of English ground, which sinks so deeply into

56 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

the seats of emotion, or enters so intimately into all
their study of imagination.

But it is otherwise with older residents. For them
the golden exhalations of the dawn are soon turned into
the gray light of common day. For those on this side
of graduation, whose manhood is harnessed into the
duties of the place, what between the routine of work
and the necessity of taking a side in public questions,
and above all, the atmosphere of omnipresent criticism
in which life is lived here, original production becomes
almost an impossibility. Any one who may feel within
him the stirring of creative impulse, if he does not wish
to have it frozen at its source, must, before he can create,
leave the air of academic circles and the distracting talk
of literary sets, and retire with his own impulses and
thoughts into some solitude, where the din of these will
not reach him.

Will young poets excuse me if I make use of a very
homely image .? They say that among the pea-fowl, the
mother-bird, when she would rear her young, retires from
farm and thoroughfare, and seeks the most silent places
of the wood. There she sits, days and weeks, unseen
even by her mate. At length, when the brooding-time
is over, and her young are fully fledged, she walks forth
some summer morning, followed by her brood, and
displays them with pride before human homes. This, I
take it, truly represents the way that poetic genius in-
stinctively takes. Vital poems, whether short or long,

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 57

slight or serious, are born, not amid literary talk, but in
silence and solitude. Goethe, I believe, said that he
never could create anything, if he told his purpose to any
one before it was completed.

There may be some in this place to whom it will be
given to shape the poetry of a new time. If criticism be
needed, this generation has done that work to satiety.
It has edited and re-edited every great poet, found out
all that can be known about each, and a good deal
that cannot be known ; has counted and scheduled the
percentage of light endings and of weak endings, of
end-stopt and run-on verses in every play, has compared,
corrected, annotated with most praiseworthy, and some-
times with most wearisome exactness. It is surely time
that this work should cease. For the coming generation
we may hope some higher work remains to do — to enjoy
the old and to create the new — to use whatever valuable
result has been achieved by the laborious processes, and
to burn up the heaps of rubbish in a fresh flame of
creative impulse. The critic has had his day — it is time
the poet once more should have his. And if the national
heart continues to beat strong, if the nation is fired with
great, not with ignoble aims, then poets will arise to set
to music the people's aspirations, and will ' leave the
critics well behind them.'

If any young spirit feels touched from within by the
poetic breath, let him not be scared by the oft-heard
saying — that the day of poetry is past. Macaulay

58 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

indeed has maintained that as 'knowledge extends and
as the reason develops itself,' the imaginative arts decay.
It is the literary creed of Mr. Carlyle, several times
announced, that the poetic form nowadays is an ana-
chronism, that plain prose alone is welcome to him, that
he grudges to see men of genius employ themselves in
fiction and versifying, while reality stands in such need of
interpreters. ' Reality is, as I always say, God's unwritten
poem, which it needs precisely that a human genius
should write and make intelligible to his less-gifted bro-
thers.' To discuss these views fully would require several
lectures, not the end of one. I can now but throw out a
few suggestions.

So far is it from being true that reason has put out
imagination, that perhaps there never was a time when
reason so imperatively calls imagination to her aid, and
when imagination entered so largely into all literary and
even into scientific products. Imaginative thought,
which formerly expressed itself but rarely except in
verse, now enters into almost every form of prose except
the barely statistical. Indeed the boundary-lines be-
tween prose and poetry have become obliterated, as
those between prose and verse have become more than
ever rigid. Consider how wide is the range of thought
over which imagination now travels, how vast is the work
it is called upon to do.

Even in the most rigorous sciences it is present, when-
ever any discoverer would pass beyond the frontiers of

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 59

the known, and encroach on the unknown, by some wise
question, some penetrating guess, which he labours after-
wards by analysis to verify. This is what they call the
scientific imagination.

Again, what is it that enables the geologist, from the
contortions of strata, a few scratchings on rock-surfaces,
and embedded fossils here and there, to venture into ' the
dark backward and abysm of time,' and reconstruct and
repeople extinct continents ? What but a great fetch of
imaginative power?

Again, history, which a former age wrote or tried to
write with imagination rigorously suppressed, has of late
rediscovered what Herodotus and Tacitus knew, that
unless a true historic imagination is present to breathe
on the facts supplied by antiquary and chronicler, a dead
past cannot be made to live again. A dim and perilous
way doubtless it is, leading by many a side-path down
to error and illusion, but one which must be trod by the
genuine historian, who would make the pale shadows of
the past live.

It is the same with every form of modern criticism —
with the investigations into the origins of language, of
society, and of religion. These studies are impossible
without an ever-present power of imagination, both to
suggest hypotheses and to vivify the facts which re-
search has supplied.

It thus has come to pass that, in the growing sub-
division of mental labour, imagination is not only not

6o CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

discredited, but is more than ever in demand. So far
from imagination receding, like the Red Indian, before
the advance of criticism and civilisation, the truth is
that expanding knowledge opens ever new fields for its
operation. Just as we see the produce of our coal and
iron mines used nowadays for a hundred industries, to
which no one dreamt of applying them a century ago,
so imagination enters to-day into all our knowledge, in
ways undreamt of till now. More and more it is felt that,
till the fire of imagination has passed over our knowledge,
and brought it into contact with heart and spirit, it is
not really living knowledge, but only dead material.

You say perhaps, if imagination is now employed in
almost every field of knowledge, does any remain over
to express itself in poetry or metrical language ? is any
place left for what we used to know as poetry proper —
thought metrically expressed ? I grant that the old
limits between prose and poetry tend to disappear. If
poetry be the highest, most impassioned thoughts con-
veyed in the most perfect melody of words, we have
many prose writers who, when at their best, are truly
poets. Every one will recall passages of Jeremy Taylor's
writings, which are, in the truest sense, not oratory, but
poetry. Again, of how many in our time is this true ?
You can all lay your finger on splendid descriptions of
nature by Mr, Ruskin, which leave all sober prose behind,
and flood the soul with imagery and music like the
finest poetry.

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION, 6l

As the highest instance of all I would name some of
Dr. Newman's Oxford sermons. Many of these, instinct
as they are with high spiritual thought, quivering with
suppressed but piercing emotion, and clothed in words
so simple, so transparent, that the very soul shines
through them, suggest, as only great poems do, the
heart's deepest secrets, and in the perfect rhythm and
melody of their words, seem to evoke new powers from
our native language.

If, then, so much imagination is drained off to enrich
other fields of literature ; if, moreover, that peculiar com-
bination of thought and emotion which is the essence of
poetry, now often finds vent in the form of prose, what
place, you may ask, still remains for the use of metrical
language ? Is verse, as a vehicle of thought, any longer
genuine and natural ? Is it not an anachronism, a mere
imitation of a past mode? Have not the old channels
which poetry used to fill now gone dry ?

Perhaps we may say that it can hardly be denied that
some of the old channels are dry, some of the early forms
of poetry are not likely to be revivified. Old civilisations
do not naturally give birth to epics. Such as they do
produce are apt to be not of the genuine, but rather of
the imitative, sort. Again, of the drama, in its poetic
form, it may well be doubted whether it has not gone
into abeyance ; whether the world — at least this seon of
it — will see another revival of the drama as a living power.
Its place has been in a great measure usurped by the

6a CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

modern novel — (I wish they would condense their three
volumes into one) — the modern novel, which depicts
character, groups of men and women, their attitudes,
looks, gestures, conversations — all, in fact, which reveals
life — with a power that versified dialogue can hardly-
rival. All this may be conceded. And yet there remain
large and deep ranges of experience which, just because
they are so deep and tender, find no natural and adequate
outlet, but in some form of melodious and metrical
language. Whether this shall be done by original genius,
pouring new life and rhythm into the old and well-used
metres, or whether, by striking out novel and untried
forms of metre, which may better chime with new ca-
dences of thought, I shall not venture to say.

You ask for reality, not fiction and filigree-work.
Well, then, there are many of the most intense realities,
of which poetic and melodious words are the fittest,
I might say the only, vehicle. There is the poetry of
external nature ; not merely to paint its outward shows
to the eye, but to reproduce those feelings which its
beauty awakens. There are those aspects of history
in which great national events kindle our patriotism,
or striking individual adventures thrill us with a sense
of romance. There is the whole world of the affec-
tions, those elements of our being which earliest wake
and latest die. The deep home affections, the yearn-
ings for those whom no more we see, the unutterable
dawnings on the soul, as it looks towards the Eternal,

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 6^

— these which are the deepest, most permanent things
in man, though the least utterable in forms of the un-
derstanding, how are they to be even hinted at —
expressed they can never be — except in a form of
words the most rhythmical and musical man can attain
to? All this side of things, which more and more as
life advances becomes to us the most real one — to
this, poetry is the only form of human speech which
can do justice.

Again, there is the wide region of reflective or medita-
tive thought, when the poet, brooding over the great
realities of time and eternity — the same which engage the
philosopher and the theologian — muses till his heart is
hot within him, and the fire burns, and the burning at
last finds vent in song. Of the deepest poets it has been
truly said that they are

' Haunted for ever by the Eternal mind.'

To the poet in his brooding mood how often has there
been vouchsafed a quick, penetrating glance, a satisfying
insight into the heart of things, such as sage and theolo-
gian have never attained? For instance, how many
philosophies do we not find condensed into these simple,
sincere lines of a poet whom Balliol College reared, and
some still there know ? —

' And yet when all is thought and said,
The heart still overrules the head ;
Still what we hope we must believe,
And what is given us receive ;

64 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.

Must still believe, for still we hope
That in a world of larger scope,
What here is faithfully begun
Will be completed, not undone.'

Lastly, there is religious poetry, the poetry that gives
utterance to faith, to devotion, to aspiration. In these,
as poetry found its earliest, so, I believe, it will find its
latest springs of inspiration. Not only as the life of
individual men, but as the life of the race advances, the
deepest thoughts, the most earnest emotions, gather
round religion and the secrets of which it alone holds the
key. And the more we realise the inability of the logical
faculty to grasp the things of faith — how it cannot breathe
in the unseen world, and falls back paralysed when it
tries to enter it — the more we shall feel that some form
of song or musical language is the best possible adum-
bration of spiritual realities and the emotions they
awaken. An expansion of the field of religious poetry
this century has seen, since the time when Wordsworth
approached the world of nature with a sensitive love and
reverence till then unknown, feeling himself and making
others feel that the visible light that is in the heavens is
akin to the light that lighteth every man — both coming
from one centre. This unifying feeling, this more religious
attitude seen in men's regard towards the visible world,
may we not believe it to be the prelude of a wider unity
of feeling, which shall yet take in, not nature only, but
all truth and all existence ? And if some of our most

II.] CRITICISM AND CREATION. 6^

earnest poets since Wordsworth's day, feeling too sensi-
tively the unbridged gulf between things seen and things
unseen, have wasted themselves on intractable problems,
and sung too habitually ' in sad perplexed minors ;' yet
this shall not disturb our faith, that the blue heaven is
behind the clouds, and that that heaven is the poet's
rightful home. As growing time gives men more clearly
to discern the real harmony between thought and fact,
between the ideal and the actual world, the clouds will
pass off the poet's soul, and leave him to sing aloud a free
rejoicing worship.

In the hope of that day we live, and, though we may
not see it, yet we nothing doubt that come it will.

CHAPTER III.

THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY,

We have been lately told on good authority that it is
characteristic of the English poets, that they deal mainly
with ' that great and inexhaustible thing called Life, and
that the greatest of them deal with it most widely, most
powerfully, most profoundly.' Further, it is added that
in dealing with life they must deal with it morally ; for
human life is moral to the very core. Exactly so ! What
man is, what he does, what he should do, what he may
become, what he may enjoy, admire, venerate, love, what
he may hope, what is his ultimate destiny, — these things
are never absent from the thoughts of great poets, and that
not by accident, but from their very essence as poets.

What Horace said of Homer, holds even more em-
phatically of other great ones in the poetic brotherhood—

* Qui, quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,
Rectius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.'

As the late Professor Conington translates the lines —

' What 's good, what 's bad, what helps, what hurts, he shows,
Better in verse than Grantor does in prose.'

Not that they prove, moralise, or preach ; but we learn

THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 67

from being in their company, from the atmosphere
which they breathe, and to which they admit us, — learn
perhaps more readily, though indirectly, than from the
lessons of professed philosophers, moralists, and even
preachers.

This truth, that the moral is the essential aspect of
life, and that in it poetry has its true home, we are glad to
hear re-echoed from quarters whence we should hardly
have looked for it. To many it had seemed so obvious
that it scarcely needed to be stated — so mere a truism,
as to be almost a platitude. But of late the theory that
poetry and all art is morally indifferent ; that vice, if
only it be artistically treated ; that unmoral or even
immoral sides of life, if imaginatively rendered, are as
well fitted for poetry, as what we have been accustomed
to regard as the truest and highest views, — all this has
been so often reiterated, and sometimes with so much
ability, that one was almost tempted to fancy that this
might be the coming faith, and that to hold any other
was an old-world prejudice.

Let us then take courage, and accept for the time,
as settled, the old conviction that the moral substance
of human nature is the soil on which true poetry grows,
that the poetry of life must be moral, since life itself is
essentially moral. But what do we mean by the moral
substance of life? What is it that gives moral tone
and colour to the life of each individual man ? Is it not
the things he admires, loves, longs for.-* the sum, in short,
F a

68 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

of the desires, affections, hopes, aims, by which he Hves?
These make up the moral substance of each man's life ;
these create the spiritual air he breathes. But objects,
which are adequate to the finer affections, cannot be
found within the mere world of sense ; phenomena,
however rich and varied, are not enough for any living,
feeling man. Even persons, however loved, cannot
satisfy him, if these are thought of as only transitory.
Some foundation the heart needs to rest on, which
shall be permanent, secure, and stable. Where is this
element to be found ? Not in the maxims of moralists,
nor in the abstractions of the schools. ' I cannot cor-
dialise with a mere ens rationis,' said the late Alex-
ander Knox ; and so would say every man with a warm
heart throbbing within him. Leave moral abstractions,
and categorical imperatives, to the philosopher, who has
lived so long by mere intellect, that everything else is
dried out of him. But man, as man, needs something
more quick and vital, something at least as living as
his own beating heart, something akin to his own per-
sonality, to commune with. And if man, much more
the true poet, who has within him all the elements
that make man, only these carried to their highest
power.

The truth is that poetry has this in common with
religion, that it lives by that which eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard. Deny it this and it dies ; confine it to
mere appearances, whether phenomena of the outward

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 69

sense, or of the inner consciousness, and it is dried up
at its very source. Religion of course turns the eye
directly on the unseen, and the spiritual objects that
are there ; poetry, on the other hand, finds its materials
in the things seen ; but it cannot deal with these ima-
ginatively, cannot perform on them its finer function,
until it draws upon the unseen, and penetrates things
visible with a light from behind the veil. So far then
poetry and religion are akin, that both hold of the
unseen, the supersensible. But we must not press the
resemblance too far. Both, it is true, draw upon the
invisible, but they turn towards it different sides of our
nature, apprehend it by different faculties, use it for
different ends. Religion lays hold on the unseen world
mainly through conscience and the spiritual affections,
and seeks to bring all that it apprehends to bear on life,
conduct, and the soul's health. On this practical end
it insists, unless it is a merely sentimental religion.
On the other hand, poetry, as poetry, has nothing to
do with conduct and action. Contemplation is its
aim and end. It longs to see the vision of the
beautiful, the noble, and the true; and that spectacle,
when granted, suffices it. Beyond the contemplation of
beauty and goodness it does not seek to go. Herein
lie the weakness and the temptation not of actual poets
only, but of all artistic persons. They feel keen delight
in the sight of things noble, are emotionally thrilled by
them, strive to find adequate expression for them, and

70 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

are content to end there. A part of their being, their
imagination and emotions, touches the ideal, but their
will remains unaffected. Their ideals do not necessarily
rule their life. They are content to be sayers of fine
things, not doers of them. This, I suppose, is the moral
of that early poem of the Laureate's The Palace of
Art. Hence perhaps arises the unsatisfactoriness of the
lives of so many

'Mighty poets in their misery dead.'

The splendid vision they saw contrasts too sadly with
the actual lives they lived.

But without pursuing this train of thought, we may
observe, that, whenever a poet has attained to a really
high impassioned strain, it has not been in virtue of
what mere eye or ear discovered, but because, while
he saw things visible, and heard things audible, he
was haunted by the sense that there was in them
something more behind ; and just in proportion as he
felt and hinted this something more, the work he has
done has risen in true nobility. This will appear more
plainly, if we look at the two great fields in which
the poet works, the world of Nature, and the world
of man.

I. With regard to the first of these, it might seem that
any one who has to deal with the visible world should
confine himself to its visible features, and not meddle
with anything beyond. But a little reflection will show

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 71

that it is not so. For what is it in Nature that espe-
cially attracts the poet, that he is gifted beyond other
men to feel, to interpret, and express? Is it not the
beauty that is in the face of Nature? Now consider
what this beauty is, what it means, how it is apprehended.
It is a very wonderful thing, both about ourselves and
the world we live in, that, as in our own inward nature,
to the gift of life has been added the sense of pleasure,
so in the outward world, to the usefulnesss of it has been
added its beauty. The use and the beauty are two
aspects of Nature, distinct, yet inseparable. This thought,
though not new, has been brought out with such peculiar
power by the late Canon Mozley, that in some sort he
has made it his own. In that sermon of his on Nature,
well known, I doubt not, to many here, he says, ' The
beauty is just as much a part of Nature as the use ; they
are only different aspects of the selfsame facts.' The
same laws which make the usefulness make also the
beauty, ' It is not that the mechanism is painted over,
in order to disguise the deformity of machinery, but the
machinery itself is the painting ; the useful laws compose
the spectacle. . . . All that might seem the superfluities
of Nature are only her most necessary operations under
another view, her ornament is but another aspect of her
work ; and in the very act of labouring as a machine,
she also sleeps as a picture.' In the physical world,
the laws, their working, and their use, are the domain
of science. The beauty which accompanies their

72 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

working, — this is the special object of the poet, and of
the painter.

But consider what this beauty is. Of this that certainly
is true which Bishop Berkeley asserted of all outward
things — its ' esse ' is ' percipi.' Unless it is felt, perceived
by an intelligent soul, it does not exist. The forms,
the motions, the colours of Nature, taken alone, do
not constitute beauty. Not till these enter in and pass
through the medium of a feeling heart, can the beauty
be said to exist. You cannot find it "by any mere search
into the physical facts, however far back you press your
analysis of them. The height, the depth, the expanse,
the splendour, the gloom, — these do not in themselves
contain it, do not account for it, without the presence of
a soul to perceive and feel them, any more than the in-
strument accounts for the music, without the musician's
hand to touch it.

The feeling for the beauty, by which the visible world
is garmented, ranges through many gradations, from
a mere animal pleasure up to what may be called a
spiritual rapture.

The first and lowest is the mere exhilaration of the
animal spirits, stimulated by fresh air, fine weather, blue
sky, fine views of sea and land. This need not neces-
sarily be more than an animal enjoyment, an excite-
ment of the bodily nerves, unaccompanied by any fine
emotion, or any high thought.

The second stage is that enjoyment, which aesthetic

111.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. ']^

natures feel at the sight of gorgeous colouring, or deli-
cate tints, or symmetry of form and outline, the beautiful
curve of clouds, their silver lines or rich transparencies.
One is almost at a loss to say, whether in this delight,
exquisite as it often is, there is necessarily present any
spiritual element or not. Perhaps there is no poet in
whom pure sensuous delight in the colours and forms
of nature is more prominent than in Keats. Take his
Ode on Autwnn for instance. Here all the sights and
sounds of a Devonshire autumn are received into a
most responsive soul, and rendered back in most ex-
quisite artistic form. Or take a well-known passage
from the same poet's Eve of St. Agnes : —

'A casement high and triple-arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imageries,
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes.
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings ;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and
kings.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon.
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon ;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest.
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint :
She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,

74 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

Save wings, for heaven : Porphyro grew faint ;

She knelt so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.'

It is difficult to believe that any poet could enjoy,
as Keats did, the sensuous beauty which is in the face
of Nature, and in works of Art, and not be carried
farther, and led to ask, what does this visible beauty
mean, what hint does it give about that universe of
which it forms so essential a part ?

This leads to the third stage in the upward ascent
towards the higher perception of visible beauty. This
is what may be called the moral stage, when some scene
of the external world not so much imparts sensuous
delight, as awakens within us moral emotion. That it
is natural for the outward world to do this, is seen in the
fact that all languages employ moral or emotional terms
to describe, not only the impressions which a scene
creates, but the scene itself. Landscapes are universally
spoken of as cheerful or melancholy, peaceful or wild,
pensive, solemn, or awful. Terms, you will observe, all
taken, not from physical but from moral things. No
physical features, height, depth, expanse, contain these
qualities in themselves, but they awaken these feelings
in us, — why, we know not, but they do. These qualities
are not in outward things taken by themselves, nor are
they wholly in the soul ; but when the outward object
and the soul meet, then these emotions awake within
us. They are a joint result of the soul of man and
the objects fitted to produce them coming in contact.

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 75

Hence arises that mystical feeling about Nature which
forms so large an element in modern poetry ; and which,
when genuine and not exaggerated, adds to poetry a new
charm, because it reveals a real truth as to the relation
in which Nature and the human soul stand to each other.
Of this feeling Wordsworth's poetry is^ of course, the
great storehouse. As one sample, out of a thousand, of
the vivid way in which a scene may be described by the
feeling it awakens, rather than by its physical features,
take his poem Glen Almain or the Narrotv Glen.

In this upward gradation the last and highest stage
is, when not merely moral qualities are suggested, but
something more than these.

In many persons, and not in poets only, a beautiful
sunrise, or a gorgeous sunset, or the starry heavens on
a cloudless night, create moral impressions, and some-
thing more ; these sights suggest to them, if vaguely,
yet powerfully, the presence of Him from whom come
both Nature and the emotions it awakens. The tender
lights that fleet over sea and sky are to them

'signallings from some high land
Of One they feel, but dimly understand.'

As they gaze, they become aware that they are admitted
not only to catch a glimpse into the Divine order and
beauty, but to stand, for a time, in greater nearness to
Him Who makes that order and beauty.

The sublime rapture which it is given to some hearts
to feel in the presence of such sights^ is perhaps nowhere

76 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

more finely rendered, than in a passage of the First
Book of The Excursion, in which Wordsworth describes
the feeHngs of the Young Wanderer, in presence of a
sunrise among the mountains.

' For the growing youth
WTiat soul was his, when from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light ! He looked —
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love ! Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank
The spectacle : sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him ; they swallowed up
His animal being ; in them did he live.
And by them did he live ; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ;
Rapt into still communion which transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
That made him ; it was blessedness and love.'

In this fine passage, observe, there is Httle — hardly one
expression (only ' the solid frame of earth ' and ' ocean^s
liquid mass') — that appeals to the outward eye ; no shapes
of cloud nor gorgeous gildings ; only the feelings and
aspirations which these awaken in a pure, high-strung
soul. Yet these feelings, once set vibrating, call up more

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 77

vividly than the most elaborate physical description
could have done, the whole outward scene — its colours,
its shapes, its glory ; and how much more besides ?

This is, I believe, characteristic of Wordsworth's best
descriptions of Nature, — he touches first the soul, the
spirit, evokes at once the moods into which they are
thrown by Nature's looks, and through the spirit reaches
the eye and the senses more powerfully, after a more
ethereal fashion, than if these had been directly appealed
to. In this and many another such passage of the same
poet, is seen the truth of that oft-repeated saying of
Mr. Ruskin, that 'all great art is the expression of
mane's delight in the work of God.' This is true; it is
also true that the sight of natural beauty has no ten-
dency, of itself, to make men religious.

II. Poets there have been who have begun with Nature,
whose imagination has been first kindled by the sight
of her loveliness. But, if they are really powerful
as poets, they cannot be content with mere outward
Nature alone, but must pass from it inward to the soul
of man. Far more commonly, however, poets begin
directly with man, and the heart of man. It is there
they find the home of their thoughts, the main region
of their song. With man, his affections, his fortunes,
and his destiny, they deal directly, and at first hand.
Nature, if they touch it at all, is to them only as a back-
ground, against which the doings and the sufferings of
man, the great human story, are set off. This is seen

78 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE 01 POETRY. [ill.

especially in the great dramatists, ancient and modern,
from whose works were you to withdraw all the allusions
to Nature, though some of their charm would disappear,
yet the greater part of it would remain. When these
poets deal directly with human life and individual char-
acter, it holds in this region, not less but more than in
their dealing with Nature, that it is the continual
reference, tacit or expressed, to a higher unseen order
of things, which lends to all their thoughts about man
their profoundest interest and truest dignity.

* O Life ! O Death, O World, O Time !
O Grave where all things flow,
'Tis yours to make our lot sublime
With your great weight of woe.'

Two thoughts there are, which, if once admitted into
the mind, change our whole view of this life, — the belief
that this world is but the vestibule of an eternal state of
being ; and the thought of Him in Whom man lives here,
and shall live for ever. These, as they are the cardinal
assumptions of natural religion, so they are hardly less,
though more unconsciously, the groundtones which
underlie all the strains of the world's highest poetry.
It makes scarcely more difference in the colour of a
man's practical life, whether he really believes these
things to be true, than it does in the complexion of a
poet's work. Even those who can in no sense be called
exclusively religious poets, if they grasp Hfe with a
strong hand, are constrained to take in the sense of

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 79

something beyond this life. To say this would, a few
years ago, have sounded a truism. To-day it is necessary
once more to reassert it. For there have arisen among
us teachers of great power, who would have us believe,
that, for artistic purposes at least, human life, with its
hopes and fears, its affections and devotions, is a thing
complete in itself, — that it can maintain its interest and
its dignity, even if confined within this visible horizon,
concentrated entirely on this earthly existence. In lieu
of the old faith, both religious and poetic, which
reached beyond the confines of earth, a new illuminating
power has been sought, and is assumed to have been
found, in duty to our fellow men, and to them alone.
Duty is not allowed to have an unearthly origin, to
strike its root in any celestial soil. A piety without
God is now, it would seem, to be the sole light vouch-
safed to poor mortals yearning for light. It is to supply
to sensitive hearts all ' high endeavour, pure morality,
strong enthusiasm,' and whatever consolation may be
possible for them. In opposition to this teaching it is
maintained that no poet ever yet has made, or ever can
make, the most of human life, even poetically, who has
not regarded it as standing on the threshold of an
invisible world, as supported by divine foundations.
This is true not only of such devout singers as Dante,
Milton, Spenser and Wordsworth ; it holds hardly less
of other poets, who may at first sight seem to be more
absorbed in the merely human side of things.

8o THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

As one has lately said, 'Shakespeare may or may
not have been a religious man ; he may or may not
have been a Catholic or a Protestant. But whatever
his personal views and feelings may have been, the
light by which he viewed life was the light of Chris-
tianity. The shine, the shadow, and the colours of the
moral world he looked upon, were all caused or cast by
the Christian Sun of Righteousness.' There is hardly
a great character in his plays, no pitch of passion, no
depth of pathos, where the thought of the other world
is not present, to add intensity to what is done or
suffered in this.

Look at his finest representations of character, men
or women, and it will at once appear how true this is.
To take some of the best-known passages. When
Macbeth is on the verge of his dreadful act, the thought
of the future world intrudes —

' that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here, —
But here upon this bank and shoal of time, —
We'd jump the life to come.'

When Hamlet's thoughts turn towards suicide, what is
it ' gives him pause ' but

'the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country,'

where dreams may come to trouble him ? And in the
same play, how the sense of the upright judgment
hereafter disturbs the guilty King! —

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 8i

' In the corrupted currents of the world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice ;

but 'tis not so above :
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature ; and we ourselves compelled,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults.
To give in evidence.'

Again, Henry V, on the night before Agincourt, when
he tries to encourage himself with the thought of all
the good deeds he has done to make reparation for the
sins of himself and his house, is yet forced to feel that
there lies a judgment beyond, whose requirements these
things cannot meet :

'Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay.
Who twice a day their withered hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood ; and I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard's soul. More will I do ;
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.'

Even Othello in his deadliest mood has yet some
Christian forecastings about him. His words to Des-
demona are —

' If you bethink yourself of any crime,
Unreconciled as yet to heaven and grace,

SoHcit for it straight

I would not kill thy unprepared spirit ;

No ; heaven forfend ! I would not kill thy soul,

Think on thy sins.'

G

82 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

And all that dreadful scene is full of reverberations
from beyond the grave, down to those last words of

Othello—

' when we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it.'

All feel the beauty of Shakespeare's heroines, the
variety, the naturalness, the perfection of his portraiture
of women. They are in some sense the crowning grace
of his finest dramas. Shakespeare was no stainless
knight, as some of his sonnets too surely witness. But
whatever he may himself for a time have been, he never
lost his high ideal of what woman is, or may be. Differ-
ing, as his best female characters differ, from each
other, and beautiful as they all are, in this they agree,
that, when they are most deeply moved, their religious
feeling comes out most naturally and winningly. Every
one must have observed how in all his most attractive
heroines, Shakespeare has made prayer to be not a
mere formal office, but the language which, in their
deepest emotion, rises spontaneously to their lips. You
remember how Imogen, had she been allowed to meet
her lover for a parting interview, would

'have charged him
At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,
To encounter me with orisons, for then
I am in heaven for him.'

And they are not less warm in their devotion than
true in their theology. Justice and mercy are ever in

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 83

their thoughts, and while they plead for this, they do
not forget that. This is seen in the famous speech of
Portia, in which she discourses so eloquently to the Jew
of ' the quality of mercy,' ending thus —

' consider this,

That, in the course of justice, none of us

Should see salvation : we do pray for mercy ;

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy.'

With still greater emphasis Isabel, she whom Shake-
speare calls

*a thing
Ensky'd, and sainted, an immortal spirit,'

pleads for her brother :

' Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once ;
And He, that might the vantage best have took,
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are .? O, think on that ;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.'

Observe that Shakespeare refrains from analysing, as
is common now-a-days, those female characters whom
he loves best, and would have us love; he merely presents
them, true women, yet idealised — moving, speaking,
in the most natural and graceful way. As our great
modern poet has expressed it, he places each before us
in herself,

' A perfect woman, . . .
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light.'
G %

84 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

His analysis, as has been said, he keeps for inferior
characters — for Cressida and Cleopatra, But for the
favourites of his imagination, Portia, Perdita, Imogen,
Cordelia, he has too tender a reverence to treat them
so. And the thing to remark here is, that Shakespeare,
who knew the heart so well, when he would represent
in his heroines the truest, tenderest, most womanly-
love, cannot express it without stirring the depths of
their religious nature. It may be said that Shake-
speare merely represented feelings dramatically; we
must not take them for his own personal convictions.
Be it so: but it is something, if he, who of all men
knew human nature best, has shown us that those feel-
ings, which touch on the higher unseen world, are the
deepest and truest in the human bosom, and are uttered
then only, when men or women are most deeply moved.
Moreover, as Gervinus has said, the feelings and sen-
timents, which rise most frequently to the lips of his
purest characters, and are at every turn repeated, may
be fairly taken to be his own.

It is not however in his best characters only that this
is seen : to his worst and most abandoned he has given
very distinctly the sense of 'the Deity in their own
bosom ' — the forecast of a future judgment.

But we need not dwell longer on the sayings of
Shakespeare's best characters, or even on their always
implied, if not expressed, faith that the world is morally
governed. We have but to ask ourselves, Would the

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 85

characters of Desdemona or Cordelia have the same
meaning for us, if they were merely images painted on
a curtain, which concealed nothing behind it, — if the
sufferings and wrongs they endured did not stand out
against the light of a really existing and eternal right-
eousness? What would our feeling be about the whole
spectacle of life with all its enigmas, which Shakespeare
places before us, if, as we gazed on it, we felt that it
was wholly limited by time, and had no eternal issues ?
How would the purity, the patience, the self-forget-
fulness he represents affect us, if these qualities were
merely foam-flakes on the top of the wave —
' A moment white, then gone forever ' ?
Further : take even the ordinary moral ideas and affec-
tions, which are essential portions of human life, and
which govern it, — what would they be, what power would
they have, if they depended merely on this visible frame-
work of things ; if they were not allied to a higher world,
from which they come, to which they tend ? Conscience,
for instance, as honest hearts feel it, and as Shakespeare
described it, what has it to do with a merely material
system ? Or the emotion of awe, — what is there in the
merely physical world, which has any power or right to
evoke it? Or love, — even human love, when it is high,
pure, and intense, — can it stop within merely temporal
bounds ? is it not borne instinctively onward to seek for
its objects a higher, more stable existence, beyond the
reach of earthly vicissitudes ?

85 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [tII.

Again, while it is true that even the most common
moral ideas and affections, which all men acknowledge,
would be stunted and dwarfed, if cut off from a spiritual
background, there exists a whole order of moral ideas,
which without that background could not exist at all.
There is a whole range of ' delicate and fragile forms of
virtue ' which could not grow in the air of ordinary
society, yet in which modern poetry has found its finest
material. The sense of sinfulness, with all that it in-
volves, whence do men get it, but from the sense of
One higher and holier than we? Repentance, with its
family of gentle graces, compassion for the fallen, sym-
pathy with the wretched, sweet humility — what would
human life, what would modern poetry be, if these
tender yet unearthly graces were withdrawn from them ?
Aspiration, which gives wings to man's best feelings and
bears them heavenward, where would this be, if the
human heart were denied all access to an eternal world,
and Him who is the life of it ?

These graces, and many more, are plants which
have their root not in any earthly garden, but in that
celestial soil, under that serene sky which is warmed
by the sunshine of the Divine Spirit. Here we touch
the ground of the profoundest inspiration accessible to
man. If, as we are told, poetry is 'the suggestion of
noble grounds for the noble emotions,' what emotions
so noble, what grounds so elevated, as those to which
devout souls are admitted in communion with their

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 87

Maker? This is a subject merely to hint at, not to
dwell on here. When a man who has vitally felt these
moods adds to them the true poetic gift, we then have
the best that human poetry can do. Then only the
soul responds from its deepest depths, then only are
elicited in their fullest compass 'the whole mysterious
assemblage of thoughts and feelings' which the heart
has within it, and to which one object alone is adequate.
Such poetry is reached by Dante, by Milton, and by
Wordsworth, when at the height of their inspiration,
— those consecrated spirits among the poets,
' Haunted for ever by the eternal mind.'

And yet, truth to tell, one can imagine — indeed the
spirit craves — something that should transcend even the
highest strains which these have uttered, a poetry in
which deep and fervid devotion, winged with high ima-
gination, should relieve the soul's yearnings, in a way
which no human language, save the words of Scripture,
has yet attained to.

The philosophies which have been dominant for the
last thirty years, have not been favourable to poetry of
this kind. The system of thought which confines all
knowledge to mere appearances, and all belief to things
which can be verified by physical methods, leaves no
place for it. Such poetry cannot live, any more than
religion, on appearances divorced from substance ; it
knows not what to make of phenomena unattached ;
it imperatively demands that there shall be a substratum

88 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

of reality behind those fleeting images of beauty and of
goodness which it contemplates. How strangely this
philosophy works in the region of poetry, how it sets
head and heart, imagination and conviction, at war, in
those who are enslaved by it, is notably seen in the
experience of the late John Stuart Mill, as recorded in
his autobiography. There came, it will be remembered,
a crisis in his life, when the fabric of happiness, which
he had been rearing up for himself and the world,
fell in ruins about him, and he found himself sunk in
hopeless dejection. This result he ascribes to the all-
annihilating power of analysis, which alone of his mental
faculties he had cultivated. He asked himself, whether,
if all the social ends he had hitherto aimed at were
achieved, their success would really give him inward
satisfaction ; and he honestly answered, No ! He then
fell into a prolonged despondency, from which for a time
nothing could arouse him. Almost the first thing which
came to relieve this mental malady, was the study of
Wordsworth's Poems, especially the Lyrical Ballads. In
these he seemed to find the medicine that he needed.
Expressing, as they did, ' states of feeling, and of thought
coloured by feeling under the excitement of beauty,'
they seemed to open to him a perennial source ' of
inward joy, and of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure,
which could be shared by all human beings.'

But while Mr. Mill accepted and delighted in the
imaginative emotions which Wordsworth awakened, true

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 89

to the philosophy which he had imbibed from his
father, he would not accept the spiritual beliefs, which
in Wordsworth supported these emotions. But would
Wordsworth's poetry have been possible, if, as he looked
on the spectacle of the natural and moral universe, he
had not apprehended behind it

'the ever-during power,

And central peace subsisting at the heart

Of endless agitation ?'

To be a poet and teacher such as Wordsworth is,
implies not merely the possession of his great poetic
powers, but a firm hold of that moral material out of
which such poetry is wrought.

Sometimes, of late years, when our summers have
been unusually sunless and cold, we have been told
that the cause lay in the icebergs, which, detached
in spring from the polar ice, and floating southward
into the temperate seas, had chilled our atmosphere.
Some such chill has during the last thirty years fallen
on much of our poetry, from the influence of nega-
tive philosophies. There have been poets amongst
us, who, if they had not lived under this cold shadow,
possessed gifts which might have carried them to far
greater heights than they ever reached. As it is, their
poetry, whatever its merits may be, has in it no skylark
notes, no tones of natural gladness ; still less does
it attain to that serener joy, which they know, who,
having looked sorrow in the face, and gone through dark

90 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

experiences, have come out on the farther side. These
modern poets have nothing' to tell of the peace which

' settles where the intellect is meek.'
They know nothing of

' Melancholy fear subdued by faith,
Of blessed consolations in distress ;
Of joy in widest commonalty spread.'

These things they cannot know ; because the roots of
them lie only in spiritual convictions, from which the
philosophy they have embraced has wholly estranged
them.

The Experience Philosophy, so long in the air, has put
on many forms and taken many names. Whether it call
itself Phenomenalism, or Positivism, or Agnosticism, or
Secularism, in all its phases it is alike chilling to the
soul and to soul-like poetry. No doubt it offers to
imagination an ideal, but it is an ideal which has no
root in reality. With such an ideal, imagination, which
is an organ of the true, not of the false, which is in-
tended to vivify truth, not to create the fictitious, can
never be satisfied. Imagination, as has been said, is
an eagle, whose natural home is the celestial mountains.
Unless it knows these to be, not cloud shadows, but
veritable hills, whither it can repair and renew its strength,
the faculty pines and dies. If it could not believe that
the ideal on which it fixes its eyes, with which it strives
to interpenetrate the actual, is truth in its highest es-
sence, imagination would be paralysed, poetry extinct.

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 91

But we need not fear any such catastrophe. Negative
philosophies may for a time prevail ; but they cannot
ultimately suppress the soul, or stifle vivid intuitions
which flash up from its depth and witness to its celestial
origin. Those 'gentle ardours from above,' which in
better moments visit men, it is the privilege of poetry to
seize, and to clothe for ever in forms of perfect beauty.

To conclude. There are many ways of looking at
life, and each way has an ideal, and a poetry appropriate
to it.

There is the view which looks on the world as a place
for physical enjoyment, and its ideal is perfect health,
bodily vigour, and high animal spirits. And there is a
poetry answering to this view, though not a very exalted
poetry.

Again, there are views, which make intellectual truth,
or at least perfect aesthetic beauty, their aim ; and under
the power of these ideals^ poetry no doubt rises to a
much higher level. But as such views leave out the
deeper part of man, they do not adequately interpret
life, or permanently satisfy the heart.

Some there are who, having tried life, and not found
in it what they expected, have grown disappointed and
cynical, or even defiant and rebellious. And these moods
have found poetic utterance in every age, and in every
variety of tone. But the poets, who have lent their gift
to express these feelings only, have not much benefited
mankind.

92 THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. [ill.

Yet others there are who, having looked below the
surface, have early learned that, if the world is not
meant to give absolute enjoyment, if pain and sorrow are
indeed integral parts of it, it yet contains within it
gracious reliefs, remedies, alleviations ; and that for many
sensitive hearts one of the alleviations is poetry. ' We
live under a remedial system ; ' and poetry, rightly used,
not only helps to interpret this system, but itself com-
bines with the remedial tendencies.

Again, there are high-toned spirits which regard the
world as a scene made to give scope for moral heroism.
Devotion to some object out from self — to friendship,
to country, to humanity, — each of these is a field, in
which poetry finds full exercise, and on which it sheds
back its own consecration. But neither of these last
views, noble as they are, can by itself withstand the
shock of circumstance, unless it is secured on a spirit-
ual anchorage. The poet who has himself laid hold
of the spiritual world, and the objects that are there,
is especially fitted to help men to do this. While, in
virtue of that insight which great poets have, he reads
to men their own thoughts and aspirations, and ' com-
forts and strengthens them by the very reading,' he
lets down on them a light from above which trans-
figures them ; touches springs of immortality that lie
buried within, and sets them murmuring ; opens avenues
for the soul into endless existence. Before men, over-
borne by things seen, he sets an ideal, which is real

III.] THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY. 93

— an object not for intellect and imagination only, but
for the affections, the conscience, the spirit, for the whole
of man. When their hearts droop he bids them

' look abroad,
And see to what fair countries they are bound.'

His voice is a continual reminder that, whether we
think of it or not, the celestial mountains are before
us, and thither lies our true destiny. And he is the
highest poet, who keeps this vision most steadily before
himself, and, by the beauty of his singing, wakens others
to a sense of it.

CHAPTER IV

THE POET A REVEALER.

Hazlitt has somewhere said that 'genius is some
strong quality in the mind, aiming at and bringing out
some new and striking quahty in nature.' The same
thought seems to have possessed Coleridge, when, in
the third volume of The Friend, he labours to reconcile
Bacon's insistence on observation and experiment, as the
tests of truth, with Plato's equal insistence on the truth
of ideas, independent of experience. In the ' prudens
quaestio,' says Coleridge, which the discoverer puts to
nature, he is unconsciously feeling after and anticipating
some hidden law of nature ; and that he does so feel
after it till he finds it, is in virtue of some mysterious
kinship between the guess of the discoverer's mind, and
the operations of nature.

In the physical world, we observe that those guesses
of genius, which are the parents of discovery, arc born in
gifted minds, here or there, just when some new in-
vention or discovery is required to carry on the course
of human affairs. The mariner's compass, whoever may
have been its discoverer, was introduced into Europe

THE POET A REVEALER. 95

the century before Vasco da Gama and Columbus under-
took their voyages, and, as it would seem, to enable them
to do so. Newton wrought out his system of Fluxions,
and published his Pri'icipia, with its announcement
of the law of gravitation, at a time when physical inquiry
must have remained at a standstill, if these discoveries
had been withheld. In the last generation James
Watt's great invention, and, within living memory,
Robert Stephenson's, appeared just at a time when
society was ready to assume a new phase, but could not
have assumed it, till these discoveries were perfected.

But there are other social changes, more impalpable,
but not less real, more subtle, but piercing deeper, than
the physical ones. These last, wrought on the world's
surface, are visible and tangible, and all can appreciate
them. But the invisible changes wrought in men's
minds, the revolutions in sentiment which distinguish
one age from another, are so silent and so subtle, that
the mere practical man entirely ignores or despises them.
Mere sentiment, forsooth! who cares for sentiment?
But let the practical man know, those sentiments he
despises are in human affairs more potent than all the
physical inventions he so much venerates.

How these changes of feeling arise, from what hidden
springs they come, who shall say? But that they do
come forth, and make themselves widely felt, and in the
end change the whole face of society, none can doubt.
They come, as changes in the weather come, as the sky

96 THE POET A REVEALER. [iV.

turns from bright to dark, and from dark to bright, by
reason of causes which we cannot penetrate, but with
effects which all must feel.

' The thoughts they had were the parents of the deeds
they did ; their feelings were the parents of their
thoughts.' So it always has been, and shall be. In the
movements of man's being, the first and deepest thing
is the sentiment which possesses him, the emotional
and moral atmosphere which he breathes. The causes,
which ultimately determine what this atmosphere shall
be, are too hidden, too manifold and complex, for us
to grasp, but, among the human agents which produce
them, none are more powerful than great poets. Poets
are the rulers of men's spirits more than the philoso-
phers, whether mental or physical. For the reasoned
thought of the philosopher appeals only to the intellect,
and does not flood the spirit; the great poet touches
a deeper part of us than the mere philosopher ever
reaches, for he is a philosopher and something more —
a master of thought, but it is inspired thought, thought
filled and made alive with emotion. He makes his
appeal, not to intellect alone, but to all that part of
man's being, in which lie the springs of life.

If it be true that

'We live by admiration, hope, and love' —
that the objects which we admire, love, hope for,
determine our character, make us what we are — then
it is the poet, more than any other, who holds the

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. 97

key of our inmost being. For it is he who, by virtue
of inspired insight, places before us, in the truest, most
attractive hght, the highest things we can admire, hope
for, love. And this he does mainly by unveiling some
new truth to men, or, which is the same thing, by
so quickening and vivifying old and neglected truths,
that he makes them live anew. To do this last needs
as much prophetic insight, as to see new truths for the
first time.

This is the poet's highest office — either to be a re-
vealer of new truth, or an unveiler of truths forgotten or
hidden from common eyes. There is another function
which poets fulfil, — that of setting forth in appropriate
form the beauty which all see, and giving to thoughts
and sentiments in which all share beautiful and attrac-
tive expression. This last is the poet's artistic function,
and that which some would assign to him as his only
one.

These two aspects of the poet, the prophetic and the
artistic, coexist in different proportions in all great
poets ; in one the prophetic insight predominates, in
another the artistic utterance. In the case of any single
poet it may be an interesting question to determine, in
what proportions he possesses each of these two qualities.
But, without attempting this, it will be enough to show
by examples of some of the greatest poets, ancient and
modern, that to each has been granted some domain,
of which he is the supreme master; that to each has
H

98 THE POET A REVEALER. [iv.

been vouchsafed a special insight into some aspect of
truth, a knowledge and a love of some side of life or of
nature, not equally revealed to any other ; that he has
taken this home to his heart, and made it his own
peculiar possession, and then uttered it to the world,
in a more vivid and a more attractive way than had
ever been done before.

To begin with Homer. It was no merely artistic
power, but a true and deep insight into human nature,
which enabled him to be the first of his race, as far as
we know, who saw clearly, and drew with firm hand,
those great types of heroic character, which have lived
ever since in the world's imagination. Achilles, Ulysses,
Nestor, Ajax, Hector, Andromache, Priam — these, while
they are ideal portraits, are at the same time permanent,
outstanding, forms of what human nature is. The
Homeric vision of Olympus and its immortals, splendid
though it be, was still but transient. It had no root in
the deepest seats of human nature. For even in his
own land a time came when, in the interest of purer
morality, Plato wished to dethrone Homer's gods. But
his delineation of heroes and heroines remains true
to human feeling as it exists to-day. Even Shake-
speare, when, in his Troilus and Cressida, he took
up those world-old characters, and touched them
anew, was constrained to preserve the main outlines
as Homer had left them. It is this permanent truth-
fulness and consistency in the human characters of

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. 99

the Iliad, which makes one believe, in spite of all
the critics, that one master hand was at the centre
of the work, drawing those consistent portraits, real
yet ideal, which no agglomeration of bards could ever
have achieved.

Again, iEschylus and Sophocles were, each in his
day, revealers of new and deeper truth to their genera-
tion. The Greek world, as it became self-conscious and
reflective, had, no doubt, grown much in moral light
since the time of Homer, and that light, which their
age inherited, these two poets gathered up, and uttered
in the best form. But, besides this, they added to it
something of their own. In the religion of their poems,
though the mythologic and polytheistic conceptions of
their country are still present, you can perceive the
poet's own inner thought disengaging itself from these
entanglements, and rising to the purer and higher idea
of the Unity of Zeus, the one all-powerful and all-wise
Ruler of heaven and earth ; till in Sophocles he stands
forth as the ' centre and source ' of all truth and right-
eousness.

Then, as to the life of man, we see in ^Eschylus and
in Sophocles the Greek mind for the first time at work
upon those great moral problems, which at an earlier
date had engaged the Hebrew mind in the Book of Job.
The mystery of suffering, especially the suffering of
the guiltless, is ever present to them. Popular belief
held that such innocent suffering was the mere decree
H 3

JOO THE POET A REVEALER. [iv.

of a dark and unmoral destiny, -^schylus was not
content with this, but taught that, when the innocent
man or woman suffers, it is because there has been
wrongdoing somewhere. He sought to give a moral
meaning to the suffering, by tracing it back to sin, if
not in the sufferer himself, at least in some one of his
ancestors. The father has sinned, the son must suffer.
"T/Spis there has been in some progenitor, ar?j and ruin
fall on his descendants.

Sophocles looks on the same spectacle of innocent
suffering, but carries his interpretation of it a step
farther, and makes it more moral. Prosperity, he shows,
is not always real gain to the individual, but often
proves itself an evil by the effects it produces on his
character. Neither is adversity entirely an evil, for
sometimes, though not always, it acts as a refining fire,
purifying and elevating the nature of the sufferer. Its
effects, at least in noble natures, are self-control, pru-
dence, contentment, peace of soul. Philoctetes, after
being ennobled by the things he had suffered, has his
reward even here, in being made the means of destroying
Troy, and then returning home, healed and triumphant.
CEdipus, in his calm and holy death within the shrine
of the Eumenides, and in the honour reserved for his
memory, finds a recompense for his monstrous sufferings
and his noble endurance. Antigone, though she has no
earthly reward for her self-sacrifice, yet passes hence
with sure hope — the hope that in the life beyond she

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. lOl

will find love waiting her, with all the loved ones gone
before.

These few remarks may recall, to some who read
them, suggestive thoughts which fell from Professor J ebb
in his two concluding lectures on Sophocles, given last
summer in the hall of New College, Oxford. And all
who desire to follow out this subject I gladly refer
to the admirable essay on The Theology and Ethics
of Sophocles, which Mr. Abbott, of Balliol, has recently
contributed to the book entitled Hellenica.

We should not naturally turn to Roman literature to
find the prophetic element. Speculation and imagin-
ative dreaming, whence new thoughts are born, were
alien to the genius of that practical race. But there is
at least one of Rome's poets, who is filled with some-
thing like true prophetic fire. On the mind of Lucretius
there had dawned two truths, one learned from his own
experience, the other from Greek philosophy ; and both
of these inspired him with a deep fervour, quite unlike
anything else to be met with in his country's litera-
ture. One was the misery and hopelessness of human
life around him, as it still clung to the decaying phan-
toms of an outworn mythology, and groped its way
through darkness with no better guides than these.
The other, gained from the teaching of Democritus
and Epicurus, was the vision of the fixed order of
the Universe, the infinite sweep and the steadfastness
of its laws. As he contemplated the stately march of

loa THE POET A REVEALER. [iV.

these vast, all-embracing uniformities, he felt as though
he were a man inspired to utter to the world a new
revelation. And the words in which he does utter it
often rise to the earnestness and the glow of a prophet.
He was, as far as I know, the earliest and most earnest
expounder, in ancient times, of that truth, which has
taken so firm hold of the modern mind. In the full
recognition by men of the new truth which he preached,
he seemed to himself to see the sole remedy for all the
ills which make up human misery.

Again, Virgil, though with him the love of beauty, as
all know, and the artistic power of rendering it, are
paramount, yet laid hold of some new truths, which none
before him had felt so deeply. No one had till then
conceived so grandly of the growth of Rome's greatness,
and the high mission with which heaven had entrusted
her. And who else of the ancient poets has felt so
deeply, and expressed so tenderly, the pathos of human
life, or so gathered up and uttered the most humane
sentiment, towards which the world's whole history had
been tending — sentiment which was the best flower of the
travail of the old world, and which Christianity took up
and carried on into the new? In these two directions
Virgil made his own contribution to human progress.

If any poet deserves the name of prophet, it is he
whose voice was heard the earliest in the dawn of
modern poetry. In the Divine Comedy Dante gave
voice to all the thoughts and speculations, as well as to

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. 103

the action, of the stirring thirteenth century. I suppose
that no age has ever been summed up, so fully, and
so melodiously, by any singer. On Dante"s work, I can-
not do better than quote the words, in which one of the
most accomplished of its interpreters has expressed his
feeling regarding it. Dean Church, in his well-known
Essay on Dante, has said : —

' Those who have studied that wonderful poem know its austere
yet subduing beauty ; they know what force there is in its free
and earnest yet solemn verse, to strengthen, to tranquillise, to
console. It is a small thing that it has the secret of nature and
man ; that a few keen words have opened their eyes to new sights
in earth, and sea, and sky ; have taught them new mysteries of
sound ; have made them recognise, in distinct image and thought,
fugitive feelings, or their unheeded expression by look, or gesture,
or motion ; that it has enriched the public and collective memory
of society with new instances, never to be lost, of human feelings
and fortune; has charmed ear and mind by the music of its
stately march, and the variety and completeness of its plan. But,
besides this, they know how often its seriousness has put to shame
their trifling, its magnanimity their faintheartedness, its living
energy their indolence, its stern and sad grandeur rebuked low
thoughts, its thrilling tenderness overcome sullenness and assuaged
distress, its strong faith quelled despair and soothed perplexity,
its vast grasp imparted harmony to the view of clashing truths.'

To review the great poets of our own country, and
consider what new elements of thought and sentiment
each in his turn imported into the minds of his country-
men, would be an interesting study, but one not to be
overtaken in a single essay, if it could be in many. I
shall therefore pass at once to that great outburst of

104 THE POET A REVEALER. [iv.

song, which ushered in the dawn of the present century
in England ; and shall try to show, more in detail, some
of the original and creative impulses, which the poets
of that time let loose upon society. This I shall do by
taking the examples of two poets of that generation.
Other poets, their contemporaries, were not without
their share of the prophetic gift ; but the two I shall
name have exerted an influence, the one wider, the
other more deep, and both more distinctly healthful,
than any of their brethren.

It was nothing short of a new revelation, when Scott
turned back men's eyes on their own past history and
national life, and showed them there a field of human
interest and poetic creation, which long had lain neg-
lected. Since the days of Shakespeare a veil had been
upon it, and Scott removed the veil. Quinet has spoken
of the impassable gulf, which the age of Louis Ouatorze
has placed between mediaeval France and the modern
time. It has parted the literature of France, he says,
into two distinct periods, between which no communion is
possible. Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire,
owe nothing to the earlier thought of France, draw
nothing from it. Because of this separation, Quinet
thinks that all modern French literature, both prose
and poetry, is more real and more fitted to interpret
the modern spirit, than if it had grown continuously.
We may well doubt this ; we may ask whether it has
not been the death of French poetry — the cause why

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. 1 05

modern France possesses so little that to us looks like
poetry at all. It would seem as if at one time a like
calamity had threatened English literature. In the
earlier part of last century, under the influence of Pope
and Bolingbroke, a false cosmopolitanism seemed creep-
ing over it, which might have done for our literature
what the French wits of the Louis Quatorze age did
for theirs. But from this we were saved by that con-
tinuity of feeling and of purpose, which happily governs
our literary not less than our political life. All through
last century the ancient spirit was never wholly dead
in England, and it would have revived in some way or
other. That immense sentiment, that turning back of
affection upon the" past, was coming — no doubt it would
have come— even if Scott had never been born. But
he was the chosen vessel to gather up and concentrate
within himself the whole force of this retrospective
tendency, and to pour it in full flood upon the heart of
European society. More profoundly than any other
man or poet, he felt the significance of the past, brooded
over it, was haunted by it, and in his poems and ro-
mances expressed it so broadly, so felicitously, with such
genial human interest, that even in his own lifetime he
won the world to feel as he did.

One among many results of Scott's work was to turn
the tide against the Illumination, of which Voltaire,
Diderot, and the host of Encyclopaedists were the high
priests. Another result was, that he changed men's whole

lo6 THE POET A REVEALER. [iV.

view of history, and of the way in which it should be
written ; recalled it from pale abstractions to living per-
sonalities, and peopled the past no longer with mere
phantoms, or doctrinaire notions, but with men and
women, in whom the life-blood is warm. If you wish to
estimate the change he wrought in this way, compare
the historic characters of Hume and Robertson with the
life-like portraits of Carlyle and Macaulay. Though these
two last have said nasty things of Scott, it little became
them to do so ; for from him they learnt much of that
art which gives to their descriptions of men and scenes
and events so peculiar a charm. If we now look back
on many characters of past ages, with an intimate ac-
quaintance and a personal affection unknown to our
grandfathers, it was Scott who taught us this.

These may be said to be intellectual results of Scott^s
ascendancy ; but there are also great social changes
wrought by his influence, which are patent to every eye.
Look at modern architecture. The whole mediaeval
revival, whether we admire it or not, must be credited
to Scott. Likely enough Scott was not deeply versed
in the secrets of Gothic architecture and its inner pro-
prieties— as, I believe, his own attempts at Abbotsford,
as well as his descriptions of castles and churches, prove.
But it was he who turned men's eyes and thoughts that
way, and touched those inner springs of interest from
which, in due time, the whole movement came.

Another social result is, that he not only changed

IV.] THE POET A R EVE ALE R. 1 07

the whole sentiment with which Scotchmen regard
their country, but he awakened in other nations an
interest in it, which was till his time unknown. When
Scott was born, Scotland had not yet recovered from
the long decadence and despondency into which she
had fallen, after she had lost her Kings and her Par-
liament. Throughout last century a sense of something
like degradation lay on the hearts of those who, still
loving their country, could not be content with the cold
cosmopolitanism affected by the Edinburgh wits. Burns
felt this deeply, as his poems show, and he did some-
thing in his way to redress it. But still the prevailing
feeling entertained by Englishmen towards Scots and
Scotland was that which is so well represented in The
Fortunes of Nigel. Till the end of the last century,
the attitude of Dr. Johnson was shared by most of his
countrymen. If all this has entirely changed, — if Scots
are now proud of their country, instead of being ashamed
of it, — if other nations look on the land with feelings of
romance, and on the people themselves with respect, if
not with interest, this we owe to Scott, more than to
any other human agency. And not the past only, with
its heroic figures, but the lowly peasant life of his own
time, he first revealed to the world in its worth and
beauty. Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltree, Caleb Balder-
stone, Dandie Dinmont, — these and many more are
characters, which his eye first discerned in their quiet
obscurity, — read the inner movements of their hearts, —

Io8 THE POET A REV E ALE R. [iV.

and gave to the world, a possession for all time. And
this he did by his own wonderful humanheartedness
— so broad, so clear, so genial, so humorous. More
than any man since Shakespeare, he had in him that
touch of nature, which makes the whole world kin, and
he so imparted it to his own creations, that they won
men's sympathies to himself, not less than to his country
and his people. Wordsworth has well called Scott ' the
whole world's darling.' If strangers and foreigners now
look upon Scotland and its people with other eyes and
another heart, it is because they see them through the
personality of Scott, and through the creations with
which he peopled the land ; not through the prosaic
Radicalism, which since Scott's day has been busily
effacing from the character of his countrymen so much
that he loved.

I have spoken of how Scott has been a power of social
and beneficent influence by the flood of fresh sentiment
which he let in on men's minds. But I am aware that
to your ' practical ' man, romance is moonshine, and sen-
timent a delusion. Such an one may, perhaps, be led
to esteem them more highly, when he is made aware
how much sentiment and romance are worth in the
market. The tourists, who from all lands crowd to
Scotland every summer, and enrich the natives even in
remotest districts, — what was it brought them thither ?
What but the spell of Walter Scott > And, as the late
Sir William Stirling Maxwell well expressed it at the

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. 109

Scott Centenary, the fact that Scott has in any of his
creations named a farm, or a hill, or a stream, that is to
their possessor as good as a new title-deed, which will
probably double the marketable value of the spot. So
practical a power may poetry become in the affairs of
this working world.

I have been speaking of the power poetry has, by
bringing in on men's minds new tides of feeling, to
effect great and visible social changes.

I shall now turn to another poet, a contemporary and
a friend of Scott's, whose influence has affected a much
narrower area, but who within that area has probably
worked more deeply. Wordsworth is nothing, if he is
not a revealer of new truth. That this was the view he
himself took of his office may be gathered from many
words of his own. In The Prelude he speaks of —
* the animating faith.

That poets, even as prophets, . . .

Have each his own pecuHar faculty,

Heaven's gift, a sense that fits them to perceive

Objects unseen before.'

And then he goes on to express his conviction that to
him also had been vouchsafed

' An insight that in some sense he possesses
A privilege, whereby a work of his.
Proceeding from a source of untaught things,
Creative and enduring, may become
A power like one of Nature's.'

If Wordsworth was a revealer, what did he reveal ?

no THE POET A REVEALER. [iV.

The subjects of his own poetry, he tells us, are Man,
and Nature, and Human Life. What did he teach?
what new light did he shed on each of these ? He
was gifted with soul and eye for nature, which enabled
him in her presence to feel a vivid and sensitive delight,
which it has been given to few men to feel. The
outward world lay before him with the dew still fresh
upon it, the splendour of morning still undulled by
custom or routine. The earliest poets of every nation.
Homer and Chaucer, had, no doubt, delighted in rural
sights and sounds, in their own simple unconscious way.
It was Wordsworth's special merit that, coming late in
time, when the thick veil of custom, and centuries of
artificial civilisation, had come between us and this
natural delight, and made the familiar things of earth
seem trivial and commonplace, he saw nature anew,
with a freshness as of the morning, with a sensibility of
soul that was like a new inspiration ; and not only saw,
but so expressed it, as to remove the scales from the
eyes of others, and make them see something of the
fresh beauty which nature wore for himself — feel some
occasional touch of that rapture in her presence, with
which he himself was visited. This power especially
resides in his Lyrical Ballads, composed between 1798
and 1H08. Such heaps of comment have recently been
written about Wordsworth's way of dealing with na-
ture— and I have made my own contribution to that
heap — that I should be ashamed to increase it now ;

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. iii

the more, because in this, as in other good things, our
attempts to analyse the gift spoil our enjoyment of it.
Two remarks only I shall make, and pass on. First,
he did not attempt to describe rural objects, as they are
in themselves, but rather as they affect human hearts.
As it has been well expressed, he stood at the meeting-
point where inflowing nature and the soul of man touch
each other, showed how they fit in each to each, and
what exquisite joy comes from the contact. Secondly,
he did not hold with Coleridge that from nature we
' receive but what we give,' but rather that we receive
much which we do not give. He held that nature is a
' living presence,' which exerts on us active powers of her
own — a bodily image through which the Sovereign Mind
holds intercourse with man.

When face to face with nature Wordsworth would
sometimes seem too much of an optimist. At such
times it was, that he exclaimed —

' naught
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.'

Nature had done so much to restore himself from deep
mental dejection, that he sometimes spoke as if she
were able to do the same for all men. But, when he
so spoke, he forgot how many people there are, whom,
either from inward disposition, or from outward circum-
stances, nature never reaches.

112 THE POET A REVEALER. [iV.

But in the poems which deal with human hfe and
character there is no trace of this optimistic tendency.
It has been recently said that ' no poet of any day has
sunk a sounding-line deeper than Wordsworth into the
fathomless secret of suffering that is in no sense retribu-
tive.' His mind seemed fascinated by the thought of
the sorrow that is in this world, and brooded o'er it as
something infinite, unfathomable.

His deepest convictions on this are expressed in these

lines —

'Action is transitory — a step, a blow.
The motion of a muscle — this way or that —
'Tis done ; and in the after vacancy of thought
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed :
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark,
And hath the nature of infinity.
Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seems
And unremovable), gracious openings lie.
By which the soul — with patient steps of thought,
Now toiling, wafted now on wings of prayer —
May pass in hope, and though from mortal bonds
Yet undelivered, rise with sure ascent
Even to the fountain-head of peace divine.'

This is the keynote of his deepest human poetry. In
theory and practice alike he held that it is not in ex-
citing adventure, romantic incident, strange and unusual
mental experience, that the depth of human nature is
most seen, or its dignity. Along the common high road
of life, in the elemental feelings of men and women, in the
primary afifections, in the ordinary joys and sorrows, there

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. T13

lay for him the truest, most permanent, sources of
interest. His eye saw beneath the outward surface that
which common eyes do not see, but which he was
empowered to make them see. The secret pathos, the
real dignity, which lie hid, often under the most un-
promising exteriors, he has brought out, in many of those
narrative poems, in which he has described men and
women, and expressed his views about life in the con-
crete, more vividly than in his poems that are purely
reflective and philosophical. Take, for instance, Ruth,
The Female Vagrant, The Affliction of Margaret, the
Story of Margaret in The Excursion, the Story of
Ellen in The Churchyard among the Mountains, The
Brothers, Michael, — above all. The White Doe of
Rylstone. It is noticeable, how predominating in these
is the note of suffering, not of action ; and in most of
them, how it is women rather than men, who are
the sufferers. This, perhaps, is because endurance
seems to be, in a peculiar way, the lot of women, and
patience has among them its most perfect work. Human
affection sorely tried, love that has lost its earthly object,
yet lives on, with nothing to support it,

'solitary anguish.
Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight
To think of, for the glory that redounds
Therefrom to human kind, and what we are,' —

these are the themes over which his spirit broods, spell-
bound as by a strange fascination. This might be well
I

114 THE POET A REVEALER. [iv.

illustrated, could I have dwelt in detail on the story of
' Margaret ' in the first book of The Excursion. Those
who are interested in the subject should study that
affecting tale, as it is one in which is specially seen
Wordsworth's characteristic way of meditating upon,
while sympathising with, human suffering.

The reflection which closes the narrative is peculiarly
Wordsworthian. The ' Wanderer,' seeing the poet deeply
moved by the tale, says —

' My friend ! enough to sorrow you have given.
The purposes of wisdom ask no more ;
Be wise and cheerful ; and no longer read
The forms of things with an unworthy eye.
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.
I well remember that those very plumes.
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on the wall.
By mist and silent rain-drops silvered o'er.
As once I passed, did to my heart convey
So still an image of tranquillity.
So calm and still, and looked so beautiful,
Amid the uneasy thoughts that filled my mind,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief.
The passing shows of being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was. I turned away
And walked along my road in happiness.'

No poet but Wordsworth would have concluded such
a tale with such words. In this ' meditative rapture,'
which could so absorb into itself the most desolating

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. T15

sorrow, there is, it must be owned, something too
austere, too isolated, too remote from ordinary human
sympathy. Few minds are equal to such philosophic
hardihood. Even Wordsworth himself, as he grew older
and had experienced sorrows of his own, came down
from this solitary height, and changed the passage into
a humbler tone of Christian sentiment.

This one story may be taken as a sample of Words-
worth's general attitude towards life, and of the estimate
he formed of things. The trappings, the appendages,
the outward circumstances of men were nothing to him ;
the inner heart of the man was everything. What was a
man's ancestry, what his social position, what were even
his intellectual attainments, — to these things he was
almost as indifferent as the writers of the Holy Scrip-
tures are. There was quite a biblical severity and in-
wardness about his estimate of human affairs. It was
the personality, the man within the man, the permanent
affections, the will, the purpose of the life, on which alone
his eye rested. He looked solely on men as they are
men within themselves. He cared too, I gather, but
little for that culture, literary, aesthetic, and scientific, of
which so much is made nowadays, as though the pos-
session, or the want of it, made all possible difference
between man and man. This kind of culture, he lightly
esteemed, for he had found something worthier than
all class culture, often among the lowliest and most
despised. He tells us that he was —
I 3

Il6 THE POET A REVEALER. [iV.

' Convinced at heart,
How little those formalities, to which,
With overweening trust, alone we give
The name of education, have to do
With real feeling and just sense ; how vain
A correspondence with the talking world
Proves to the most.'

It has sometimes been said that Wordsworth's estimate
of men was essentially democratic. Inasmuch as it
looked only at intrinsic worthiness, and made nothing of
distinctions of rank, or of polished manners, or even of
intellectual or aesthetic culture, it may be said to have
been democratic. Inasmuch, however, as he valued only
that which is intrinsically and essentially the best in men,
he may be said to have upheld a moral and spiritual
aristocracy ; but it is an aristocracy which knows no ex-
clusiveness, and freely welcomes all who will to enter it.
No one, indeed, could be farther from flattering the aver-
age man by preaching to him equality, and telling him
that he is as good as any other man. Rather he taught
him that there are moral heights far above him, to which
some have attained, to which he too may attain ; but that
only by thinking lowlily of himself, and highly of those
better than himself, only by reverence and by upward
looking, may he rise higher.

One thing is noticeable. The ideas and sentiments
which fill Wordsworth's mind, and colour all his delinea-
tions of men and of nature, are not those which pass
current in society. You feel intuitively that they would

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. 1 17

sound strange, and out of place, there. They are too
unworldly to breathe in that atmosphere. Hence you
will never find the mere man of the world, who takes his
tone from society, really care for Wordsworth's poetry.
The aspect of things he has to reveal does not interest
such men.

Others, however, there are who are far from being
worldly-minded, whom nevertheless Wordsworth's poetry
fails to reach ; and this not from their fault, but from his
limitations. His sympathies were deep, rather than keen,
or broad. There is a large part of human life which lies
outside of his interest. He was, as all know, entirely
destitute of humour — a great want, but one which he
shared with Milton. This want, often seen in very
earnest natures, shut him out from much of the play and
movement that make up life. His plain and severe
imagination wanted nimbleness and versatihty. Again,
he was not at home in the stormy regions of the soul ;
he stands aloof alike from the Titanic passions, and
from the more thrilling and palpitating emotions. If he
contemplates these at all, whether in others, or as felt by
himself, it is from a distance, viewing the stormy spectacle
from a place of meditative calm. This agrees with his
saying that poetry arises from, emotion remembered in
tranquillity. If his heart was hot within him, it was not
then that he spake, but when it had had time to grow cool
by after reflection. To many sensitive and imaginative
natures this attitude is provoking and repellent. Those

Il8 THE POET A REVEALER. [iV.

things about Lucy, I have heard asked, are these all he
had to give to the tenderest afifection he ever knew?
And many turn from them impatiently away to such
poems as Byron's on Thyrza, or to his —

'When we two parted
In silence in tears,
Half broken-hearted,
To sever for years,'

or to the passion of Shakespeare, or to the proud pathos
of Mrs. Barrett Browning's sonnets — tingling through
every syllable with emotion. Compared with these,
Wordsworth's most feeling poems seem to them cold
and impassive, not to say, soporific. But this is hardly
the true account of them. Byron and such poets as he,
when they express emotion, are wholly absorbed in it,
lose themselves entirely in the feeling of the moment.
For the time, it is the whole world to them. Wordsworth,
and such as he, however deeply they sympathise with
any suffering, never wholly lose themselves in it, never
forget that the quick and throbbing emotions are but
' moments in the being of the eternal silence.' They
make you feel that you are, after all, encompassed by an
everlasting calm. The passionate kind of lyric is sure to
be the most universally popular. The meditative lyric
appeals to a profounder reflectiveness, which is feelingly
alive to the full pathos of life, and to all the mystery of
sorrow. Which of them is the higher style of poetry I
shall not seek to determine. In one mood of mind wc

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. 119

relish the one ; in another mood we turn to the other.
Let us keep our hearts open to both.

In a word, Wordsworth is the prophet of the spiritual
aspects of the external world, the prophet, too, of the
moral depths of the soul. The intrinsic and permanent
affections he contemplated till he saw

'joy that springs
Out of human sufferings,'

a light beyond the deepest darkness. In the clearness,
and the steadfastness, with which he was able to con-
template these things, there is something almost super-
human.

It is a large subject on which we have been dwelling,
and yet I seem to have only touched the surface of it.
Fully to illustrate what contributions of new thought and
sentiment Scott and Wordsworth made to their age,
would require at least a separate treatise for each. And,
besides these, there were poets among their contempo-
raries, who had something of the prophetic light in them,
though it was a more lurid light ; pre-eminently the two
poets of revolt, Byron and Shelley. It was with some-
thing of quite true prophetic fervour that each of these, in
his own way, tore off the mask from the social compromises
and hollownesses, and denounced the hypocrisies which
they believed they saw around them. Neither of them
perhaps had much positive truth, with which to replace the
things they would destroy. Byron did not pretend to have.
Yet in the far and fierce delight of his sympathy with

I20 THE POET A REVEALER. [iV.

the tempests and the austere grandeurs of nature, and in
the strength with which he portrayed the turbid and
Titanic movements of the soul, there was an element of
power hitherto unknown in English poetry.

Shelley, again, had a gift of his own altogether unique.
He caught and fixed for ever movements and hues,
both in nature and in the mind of man, which were too
subtle, too delicate, too evanescent for any eye but his.
He may be said to be the prophet of many shades of
emotion, which before him had no language ; the poet,
as he has been called, of unsatisfied desire, of insatiable
longing. A remedy for all human ills he fancied that
he had found in that universal love, which he preached
so unweariedly. But one may doubt if the love that he
dreamt of was substantial, or moral, or self-sacrificing
enough, to bring any healing.

I refrain from discussing poets who are still living.
Else one might have tried to show how the Laureate in
some of his works, specially in In Mcmoriavi, if he has
not exactly imported new truths into his age, has yet so
well expressed much of the highest thought that was
dawning on men's consciousness, that he has become,
in some sort, the first unveiler of it : also how great
inroads he has made into the domain of science,
bringing thence truths, hitherto unsung, and wedding
them to his own exquisite music.

One might have shown too, how Mr. Browning, disdain-
ing the great highway of the universal emotions, has,

IV.] THE POET A REVEALER. 121

from the most hidden nooks of consciousness, fetched
novel situations and hard problems of thought, and in
his own peculiar style uttered —

'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.'

In the younger poets of the day, as far as I know
them, I have not yet perceived the same original
prophetic power which has distinguished many of 'the
dead kings of melody.' If it exists, and I have failed
to discern it, no one will welcome it more gladly than
I. But what seems to me most characteristic in the
poetry of the time is, elaborately ornate diction and
luscious music, expended on themes not weighty in
themselves. Prophet souls, burning with great and new
truth, can afford to be severe, plain, even bare in diction.
Charged with the utterance of large and massive thoughts,
they can seldom give their strength to studied orna-
mentation. We wait for the day of more substance in
our poetry. Shall we have to wait, till the ploughshare
of revolution has been again driven through the field of
European society, and has brought to the surface some
subsoil of original and substantive truth, which lies as
yet undiscovered ?

CHAPTER V.

POETIC STYLE IN MODERN ENGLISH POETRY.

' Manner,' said Sir James Mackintosh, ' is the con-
stant transpiration of character.' What manner is to
character and conduct, style is to thought and sentiment,
when these are expressed in Hterature. We all know
what is meant by saying that a man has a good manner ;
and we know too, in some measure, how he has come
by it. It implies first that there exist in his nature
qualities which are admirable, dispositions which are
lovable, and next, that to these has been superadded
courtesy, or the gift of expressing naturally and felici-
tously the feelings that are within him. Where these
dispositions exist, what is needed is that a man during
his pliable youth should have lived in good society.
And by good society we mean not what the world often
calls such, but society where character is true and
genuine, where the moral tone is high, and the manners
are refined. It is of course possible, and we sometimes
see, that a man may have good outward manners,
which yet cover a soul inwardly unbeautiful. He may
have adopted the external economy of manners which

POETIC STYLE. 1 23

rightly belongs to genuine worth, and he may wear
these as a veneer over what is really a coarse and
ignoble nature. And if the polish has been skilfully
put on, it requires a practised eye to detect the de-
ception ; but in time it is detected.

All this may be transferred from character and social
life to literature and its works. A man reveals himself
— what he really is — in many ways ; by his countenance,
by his voice, by his gait, and not least by the style in
which he writes. This last, though a more conscious
and deliberate, is as genuine an expression of himself, as
anything else that he does.

All literature necessarily implies style, for style is
the reflection of the writer's personality, and literature
is before all things personal. In this indeed lies the
distinction between literature and science, as Dr. New-
man has pointed out. ' Science,' he says, ' has to do
with things, literature with thoughts ; science is uni-
versal, literature is personal ; science uses words merely
as symbols, and by employing symbols can often dis-
pense with words ; but literature uses language in its
full compass, as including phraseology, idiom, style,
composition, rhythm, eloquence, and whatever other
qualities are included in it/ In all literature which is
genuine, the substance or matter is not one thing, and
the style another ; they are inseparable. The style is
not something superadded from without, as we may
make a wooden house, and then paint it ; but it is

124 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

breathed from within, and is instinct with the person-
ality of the writer. Genuine Hterature expresses not
abstract conceptions, pure and colourless, but thoughts
and things, as these are seen by some individual mind,
coloured with all the views, associations, memories, and
emotions which belong to that mind.

When it is said that one of the chief merits of a style
is to be natural, some are apt to fancy that this means
that it should be wholly effortless and unconscious.
But a little thought will show that this cannot be.
Composition by its very nature implies set purpose,
endeavour, some measure of painstaking. A few sen-
tences, a few verses, may be struck off in the first heat
of impulse. But no continuous essay, no long poem of
any merit, can be composed by mere improvisation, or
without effort more or less sustained. There are indeed
thoughts so simple, that they can be communicated in
a style differing little from good conversation, in a few
short, transparent sentences. There are other subjects
so deep and complex, ideas so novel and abstruse, that
the most finished writer cannot express them without
much labour, without often retouching his phrases, often
recasting his whole mode of expression, ere he can place,
in a lucid and adequate way, before the mind of his
readers the vision that fills his own. And the result of
such elaboration may at last bear the charm of natural-
ness as much as the easiest, most spontaneous utterance.
To use effort, and yet to preserve truth and naturalness.

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 125

is the main difficulty in all composition. To be able
to be natural, yet artistic, it is this which distinguishes
true literary genius.

What has just been said is true of all literature, prose
as well as poetry. But it applies pre-eminently to
poetry, inasmuch as all poetry worthy of the name is
' more intense in meaning, and more concise in style,'
than prose. If in all real literature the writer's person-
ality makes itself felt, more especially is this true in
poetry. Not that the poet necessarily speaks of himself
or of his own feelings, but, even in epic narrative and
dramatic representation, the personal qualities that are
in him are sure to shine through. Some one has
defined religion as morality touched with emotion.
Much more truly might poetry be said to be thought
touched with imagination and emotion. It is the
presence of these two elements, imagination and emotion,
informing the poet's thought, — elements which are es-
sentially personal, — that gives to poetry its chief at-
traction, adds to it elevation, intensity, penetrating
power. If then personality is even more characteristic
of poetry than of prose, if poetry is thought and feeling
in their intensest, most condensed power, this implies that
style is more essential to poetry than to prose.

But what do we mean by style? Mr. Matthew Arnold,
who, when he speaks of these things, whether we agree
with him or not, is always interesting and attractive,
has told us very emphatically what he means by style.

126 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

' Style,' he says, ' in my sense of the word, is a pecuhar
recasting and heightening, under a certain spiritual ex-
citement, a certain pressure of emotion, of what a man
has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and
distinction to it.' Again he says, ' Power of style,
properly so called, as manifested in masters of style,
like Dante and Milton in poetry, Cicero, Bossuet, and
Bolingbroke in prose, has for its characteristic effect
this, to add dignity and distinction to it.' An admirable
definition of certain kinds of style, no doubt. Dignity
and distinction necessarily attend every good style, but
to attain these it would seem, to judge by many of the
examples which Mr. Arnold cites from Milton and
others, as though he demanded more recasting, reknead-
ing of expression, than is at all necessary. He dwells so
fondly on Milton's most elaborately wrought and artisti-
cally condensed lines, that one would almost be led to
suppose, what cannot be, that he denies the highest
praise to that most perfect style of all, which bears with
it 'the charm of an uncommunicable simplicity.' I
would therefore take leave to extend the meaning of
poetic style a little wider, and to say that, whenever a
man poetically gifted expresses his best thoughts in his
best words, there we have the style which is natural to
him, and which, if he be a true poet, is sure to be a good
style. It may, no doubt, be something very different
from the styles, which have won the world's admiration
in Virgil, in Dante, in Milton. Chaucer has none of

w] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 127

that ' peculiar kneading and recasting of expression '
which these poets have. Yet Chaucer has a style of his
own, in which all acknowledge a peculiar charm. Even
a poet like Walter Scott, who paid little heed to style,
and often worked carelessly, when he chooses to put
forth his full power, compensates for the absence of
many things by his winsome naturalness. In fact, every
great poet has his own individual style, which we recog-
nise at once when we meet with it.

To attempt to characterise the style that is proper to
each of the great masters is not my present purpose. But
there is one point of view, from which they all appear
divided into two great classes as regards style. Some never
appear except in their most finished style; they allow
nothing to escape them, which has not been touched in
their best manner, elaborated with their deftest hand. Of
this order are Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Milton, Gray.
These are never seen abroad except in court dress, with
ruffles and rapier. On the other hand, Homer, Shakespeare,
Cowper, Wordsworth, above all Scott, are often content to
work more slackly, and are not ashamed to appear in
public with shooting-jacket and hobnailed shoes. Only
when their genius is stirred by some great incident, some
high thought, some overmastering emotion, do they rise
to their full pitch of power and display their hidden
energy. Critics are apt to speak, as if this latter class,
who do not always walk on the highest levels of style,
but sometimes descend nearer to prose, were by that

128 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

very fact proved inferior to the great masters of style
and metre, whose bow is always at the full bend. For
my own part I take leave to doubt this canon. Rather
it would seem to be a sign of more spontaneous genius,
to be able sometimes to unstring its powers. In a long
poem especially, the intervention of barer ground and
more level tracts, far from impairing the total effect,
affords relief to the mind, and makes the surrounding
heights stand out more impressively. Such alternations
of style reflect the rising and falling, which is incident
to the human spirit, more truly than the high pressure
of uniformly sustained elevation.

There is one malady to which poetic expression is, by
its very nature, peculiarly exposed, and that is conven-
tionalism. Even in the commonest prose-writing there
are, it is well known, a whole set of stock words and
phrases which good taste instinctively avoids. It is not
that these were originally bad in themselves, but they
have become so worn and faded, that one never hears
them without a sense of commonness and fatigue.
A good writer keeps clear of such ruts, and finds some
simpler and fresher mode of expressing what he has to
say. But, if the danger of being entangled in outworn
commonplaces besets the prose-writer, much more does
it waylay the poet. And for this reason : high-pitched
imagination and vivid emotion tend, just because they are
so vivid and so personal, to groove for themselves channels
of language which are peculiar and unique. They shape

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 129

for themselves a whole economy of diction and rhythm,
which, from their very uncommonness, strike the ear
and rivet the attention. Such diction and rhythm,
admirable in the hands of the original poet who first
moulded them for himself, have this drawback, that they
lend themselves very easily to imitation. However racy
and instinct with meaning a style may at first have been,
when once it has got to be the common stock in trade
of later and lesser poets, nothing can be more vapid
and unreal than it becomes. It requires the shock of
some great revolution to sweep this conventional dic-
tion into the limbo ' of weeds and outworn faces,' before
the intellectual atmosphere can be left clear for a new
and more natural growth of language.

Not once only or twice, in the history of literature, has
this malady of conventionalism smitten it to the core.
The great Roman poet, perhaps the greatest artist of
language the world has seen, created for himself an
elaborate rhythm and a high-wrought diction, tessel-
ated with fragments from all former poets, yet worked
into an exquisite and harmonious whole, which was
simply inimitable. But in the hands of Silius Italicus,
Statius, and others, the Virgilian hexameter gives one
the sense of a faded imitation, from which the life has
gone. Milton, perhaps the next greatest artist of lan-
guage, moulded for himself a ' grand style ' of his own,
with a similar result. When his blank verse, with its
involved and inverted structure, became the heirloom
K

130 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

of English poets, it spoiled all our blank verse for nearly
two centuries. No meaner hand than that of the great
master himself could wield his gigantic instrument.
When its tones were recalled in the cumbrous descrip-
tions of Thomson, and in the sonorous platitudes of
Young, the result was weariness. Another tyrant, who
for several generations dominated English verse, was
Pope. What Milton did for blank verse. Pope did for the
heroic couplet — left it as a tradition from which no poet
of the last century could entirely escape. Goldsmith
indeed, in his Deserted Village, and Gray in his Elegy,
returned somewhat nearer to the language of natural
feeling. But it was not till Burns and Cowper appeared,
that poetry w^as able to throw off the fetters of diction,
in which Milton and Pope had bound it. Burns and
Cowper were the precursors of a revolt against the
tyrant tradition, rather than the leaders of it. The
return they began towards a freer, more natural diction,
came from an unconscious instinct for nature, rather
than from any formed theory, or from any announced
principles, on which they composed. In Burns it may
almost be said to have been a happy accident. He had
been reared where literary fashions were unknown. His
strong intellect naturally loved plain reality, and his
whole life was a rebellion against conventions and pro-
prieties, good and bad alike. When his inspiration came,
the language ho found ready to his hand was, not the
worn-out diction of Pope or Shenstone, but the racy

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 131

vernacular of his native country. It was well that he
knew so little of literary modes, when he began his
poetry. For late in life he confessed that, had he known
more of the English poets of his time, he would not
have ventured to use the homely 'Westlan' jingle' which
he has made classical. When he did attempt to write
pure English verse, the result was third-rate conven-
tional stuff. As for Cowper, it was only after a time,
and then but in part, that he emancipated himself from
the old trammels. In his first volume, published in 1782,
containing Table Talk, Progress of Error, and other
pieces, we see his fine wit and delicate feeling labouring
to express themselves through the forced antithesis and
monotonous rhythm of Pope. The blank verse of The
Task is freer, and more unembarrassed, and yet it con-
tains a strange intermingling of several distinct manners.
Almost in the same page you find the stately Miltonic
style, with its tortuous involutions employed for homely,
even for trivial, matters, and then, within a few lines,
such passages of playful humour or sweet pensive-
ness, as his address to his 'pet hare,' or his pathetic
allusion to his own spiritual history in the lines be-
ginning

'I was a stricken deer that left the herd
Long since.'

It is in such passages as these last that Cowper has

rendered his best service to English poetry, by showing,

with what felicitous grace the blank verse lends itself to

K 2

132 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

far other styles than the stately Miltonic movement.
And yet towards the end of his life, in his translation
of Homer, he returned to the Miltonic manner, and by
doing so spoiled his work.

Burns and Cowper then were, as I have said, the
forerunners of the revolt against stereotyped poetic
diction, not the conscious leaders of it. The end of the
old poetic regime came with the great outburst of new
and original poetry, which marked the last decade of the
former century, and the first two decades of the present.
It required some great catastrophe to remove the accu-
mulations of used-up verbiage, which had so long choked
the sources of inspiration, and to cut for the fresh
springs of poetic feeling new and appropriate channels.
It was as though some great frozen lake, which had
already been traversed here and there with strange
rents, were suddenly, in one night's thaw, broken up, and
the old ice of style, which had so long fettered men's
minds, were swept away for ever. In the great chorus
of song with which England greeted the dawn of this
century, individuality had full swing. The exuberance,
not to say the extravagance, of young genius was un-
checked. His own impulse was to each poet law.
Each uttered himself in his own way, in a style of his
own, or without style, as native passion prompted. In
their work there was much that was irregular, much
that was imperfect, but it was young imagination revel-
ling in new-found freedom and strength. Criticism that

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 133

had insight, — that could be helpful, — there was none ex-
tant. For Jeffrey with his Edinburgh Revieiv did his
little best to extinguish each rising genius as it appeared.
Among the host of British poets then born into the
world, six, at least, may be named of first-rate power.
Each of these shaped for himself a style which was his
own, individual, manly, and, with whatever faults, effec-
tive. These six were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott,
Byron, Shelley, Keats. Each of these had his own,
manner, and we know it. None of them, it is true,
always maintained his own highest level of form, rhythm
and diction, as Milton did, as Gray may be said to have
done. They were all of them, at times, hasty and even
slovenly in style ; but each of them, when he was at his
best, when he was grasping with his greatest strength,
had substance, — something of his own to say, which
he did say in his own manner. Of these six poets only
two have left criticism as well as poetry. In two of
them, Scott, I mean, and Byron, the absence of criticism
is conspicuous. For though Byron did maintain some
critical controversy in favour of Pope, yet it is a crude
sort of criticism, the offspring, rather of prejudice and
dislike to some contemporary poets, than of matured
judgment. The two younger poets, Keats and Shelley,
though they both studied diligently the old poets, an-
nounced few principles of criticism. Of all the poets
of his time, Scott was the one who set least store by
style. He worked always rapidly, often carelessly,

T34 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

writing whole pages, I might almost say, cantos, which
do not rise above ballad ding-dong. And yet when he
put forth his full strength, on a subject which really
kindled him, he could rise to a dignity and elevation,
truly impressive. Though the facility of the octosyllabic
couplet often betrayed him into carelessness, yet there
are many passages, in which he has made it the best
vehicle we possess for rapid and effective narrative —
perhaps also for natural description.

The early stanzas of The Lay, the opening lines of
Marmion, the description of Flodden battle — the most
perfect battle-piece which English poetry contains, —
these are samples of Scott's style at its best — a style
which he has made entirely his own, and in which he
has had no equal. Again, in the ballads of Rosabelle,
and of The Eve of St. John, and in some others, he has
lifted, as no other poet has done, the old ballad form
to a higher power. In all forms of the ballad, and in
romantic narrative, if in no other poetic style, Scott
stands alone.

Of the six poets above named two only, as I said,
were critics, Wordsworth and Coleridge. These both
announced the principles by which they estimated poetry,
and — what is noteworthy — their criticism, far from mar-
ring the originality of the poetry they composed, only
enhanced its excellence. In his own practice, Words-
worth not only rejected the whole of the poetic diction
that had been in vogue since the days of Dryden, not

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 135

only fashioned for himself a style of his ov/n, and forms
of expression, which his contemporaries derided, but which
he maintained to be the natural and genuine language
of true thought and feeling — he not only did this, but
he gave to the world his reasons for doing so. The two
prefaces appended to the Lyrical Ballads, in which he
attacked the then fashionable poetic diction, and de-
fended the principles on which he himself composed, are
so well known that one need only allude to them now.
The main positions which he maintained were, first,
that poetry should leave the stereotyped phraseology of
books, and revert to the language which common men,
even peasants, use, when their conversation is animated,
and touched by more than ordinary emotion ; secondly,
that the language of good poetry in no way differs from
that of good prose. Even if Wordsworth in some points
pressed his theory too far, yet no one who cares for such
matters, can read the reasoning of these prefaces without
instruction.

The two positions which Wordsworth maintained were
examined by his friend Coleridge in some chapters of
his Biograpliia Liter aria, which, as they are not perhaps
so well known as they deserve to be, I shall here attempt
to summarise.

While upholding most powerfully the genius of Words-
worth as a poet, Coleridge could not accept all the
principles which his friend advocated, as a critic. He
agreed with Wordsworth in condemning 'the gaudy

136 POETIC STYLE IN [V.

affectation of style which had long passed current for
poetic diction,' and asserted that, with some few illustrious
exceptions, the poetic language in use, ' from Pope's trans-
lation of Homer to Darwin's Temple of N attire, may claim
to be poetic, for no better reason than that it would be
intolerable in conversation or in prose.' He showed,
moreover, that the faults which disgusted Wordsworth
were as much violations of common-sense and logic, as of
poetic excellence. Yet while agreeing with Wordsworth
in the object of his attack, he did not approve all the
arguments with which Wordsworth had assailed it, or
assent to all the articles of the poetic creed which his
friend laid down.

In opposition to Wordsworth, Coleridge maintained
that the peasantry do not, as Wordsworth held, speak a
language better adapted to poetic purposes, than that
which educated men speak, and that peasants have
not the primary feelings and affections simpler, truer,
deeper than other men. If Wordsworth had found it
so among the Cumberland dalesmen, this arose from
exceptional circumstances — circumstances which have
now almost disappeared. The peasantry of the midland
or southern counties are in no way purer or nobler than
men in higher station. Coleridge further protests against
Wordsworth's advice to adopt into poetry the language
of rustics, only purifying it from provincialisms ; and he
maintains that the language of the most educated writers,
Hooker, Bacon, Burke, is as real as that of any peasant,

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 137

while it covers a far wider range of ideas, feelings, and
experiences. The language of these writers differs far
less from the usage of cultivated society, than the lan-
guage of Wordsworth's homeliest poems differs from the
talk of bullock-drivers.

Again, Coleridge will not hear of the doctrine that,
between the language of prose and that of metrical com-
position, there is no essential difference. For, since
poetry implies more passion and greater excitement of
all the faculties than prose, this excitement must make
itself felt in the language that expresses it. Of this
excited feeling metre is the natural vehicle — metre, which
has its origin in emotion, tempered and mastered by will ;
or, as Coleridge expresses, it, metre, which is the result
of the balance which the mind strikes by its voluntary
effort to check the working of passion. Hence, as the
use of metrical language implies a union of spontaneous
impulse and voluntary purpose, both of these elements
ought to reflect themselves in the poet's diction. The
presence of these two elements, both at a high pitch,
must necessarily colour the language of the poet, and
separate it from that of the prose-writer, which ex-
presses rather the calmer workings of the pure under-
standing. While thus dissenting from Wordsworth's
arguments in the unqualified extent to which he urged
them, Coleridge showed that what Wordsworth really
meant to enforce was his preference for the language
of nature and good sense before all forms of affected

138 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

ornamentation — for a style as remote as possible from
the false and gaudy splendour, which had so long
usurped the name of poetry. The thing Wordsworth
really desired to see was a neutral style, common to
prose and poetry alike, in which everything should
be expressed in as direct a way as one would wish to
talk, yet in which everything should be dignified and
attractive. Such a neutral style Coleridge showed that
English poetry already possessed, and he cited examples
of it from Chaucer, Spenser, and other poets. This, he
believes, is what Wordsworth in his theory was aiming
at. But is it not, exclaims Coleridge, surprising that
such a theory should have come from — that the estab-
lishment of a neutral style should have been advocated
by — a poet whose diction, next to that of Shakespeare
and of Milton, was the most individualised and charac-
teristic of all our poets ? For in all Wordsworth's most
elevated poems, whether in rhyme or in blank verse,
he rises, says Coleridge, into a diction peculiarly his
own — a style which every one at once recognises as
Wordsworth's. Evidently Coleridge would not have
assented to Mr. Arnold's saying that Wordsworth has
no style. The chapters of the Biographia Literaria
in which Coleridge questions Wordsworth's canons of
criticism, and goes on to vindicate the excellence of
his poetry, are well worthy of careful study by all
who care for such matters. Taken along with many
fragments scattered throughout the same author's

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 139

Literary Remains, they form perhaps the finest criti-
cism which our language possesses.

It would seem to show that criticism does not neces-
sarily suppress imagination, when we turn to the poetry
of these two poet-critics, and find how high an imagin-
ative quality belongs to both. No one whose judgment
is worth anything has ever questioned Wordsworth's
power of imagination, or denied that the substance
of his poetry is pre-eminently imaginative. But the
gift of style has been denied him, and that by no
less an authority than Mr. Arnold. In the fine and
suggestive preface with which Mr. Arnold has intro-
duced his recent admirable Selections from Wordsworth,
he has said that Wordsworth has no style ; he has fine
Miltonic lines, but he has no assured poetic style of his
own, like Milton. When he seeks to have a style of his
own, it seems, he falls into ponderosity and pomposity.
Probably Mr. Arnold here uses the word 'style' in some
restricted sense, meaning by it such artistic form as those
writers only display, who have fashioned their English
on the model of ancient classic poets. It is true that in
this sense Wordsworth has no study of poetic style, but
no more had Shakespeare. It may be true that when he
seeks to have a style he falls into pomposity. This is
just what one would expect — that when a poet seeks
to have a style, he should cease to be himself, and
should fall into some absurdity. But it is exactly
because Wordsworth so seldom sought to have a style,

140 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

because, when he is most sincere, most fully inspired,
he never thought of style, but only of the object before
him, because he was so entirely absorbed in the thing
he saw, and sought only how most directly to express
it — it is this sincerity and wholeness of inspiration that
enables him to express his thoughts with the most
perfect purity, the most transparent clearness, the most
simple and single-minded strength of which the English
language is capable. If by poetic style we mean the
expression of the best thoughts in the best and most
beautiful words, and with the most appropriate melody
of rhythm, in this sense Wordsworth, when at his best,
has a style of his own, which is perfect after its kind.
When at his best, I say; for it cannot be denied that,
in the large amount of poetry which he has left, there
is a good deal which falls below his highest level.

Take his lyrical pieces, those which are the product
of his best decade, between 1798 and 1808. They are
so well known that I need hardly allude to them. The
lines on The Cuckoo^ ' O blithe newcomer ! ' ' She was a
phantom of delight,' ' I heard a thousand blended notes ' ;
the poems about Liicy, The two April mornings, The
Fountain, The Solitary Reaper, The Poefs Epitaph, —
if these are not poems in a style at once unique and
perfect, our language has no such poems. Or turn to
the sonnets. Among so large a number of these as
Wordsworth composed, there is, of course, great variety
of excellence. But it is hardly possible to conceive

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 141

more lucid, nervous^ or dignified language, than that
in which the best of his sonnets are expressed. Take,
for instance^ the morning sonnet on Westminster Bridge,
and the evening one beginning

' It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.'
Can language render sentiment more perfectly than
these do? In these and a few others, Wordsworth
triumphs over the last difficulty which, from its very
structure, besets the sonnet. He rises above all sense
of effort — the thought runs off pure and free. The
series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets are far from his best.
They were made to order, rather than by spontaneous
impulse. Yet even these contain lines so dignified and
distinguished in style that, when once heard, they stamp
themseves on the memory for ever. It is in these we
hear of the shattered tower, which

'Could not even sustain

Some casual shout that broke the silent air,

Or the unimaginable touch of time.'
In these, that regretful aspiration breathed amid moul-
dering abbeys —

' Once ye were holy, ye are holy still ;

Your spirit freely let me drink, and live.'

In these, too, that fine ejaculation inside of King's
College chapel, Cambridge —

'They dreamt not of a perishable home.
Who thus could build.'

Again, spirited narrative was not much in Words-
worth's way, but description was. In The White Doe

142 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

of Rylstone the incidents are of little account, the sen-
timent is deep as the world. The first 170 lines of
that poem, for mellowed diction, for rhythm and melody-
appropriate to the meditative and pensive theme, are
a study in themselves. The octosyllabic metre has no-
where, that I know, lent itself to more finely modulated
music, as soothing as the murmur of Wharfe River, by
the green holm of Bolton.

Of Wordsworth's blank verse there is much, no doubt,
which may freely be made over to the scourge of the
critic. It is often cumbrous, prolix, altogether prosy.
The last Book of The Excursion, for instance, which
tells how the Wanderer and his friends

'Seated in a ring partook
The beverage drawn from China's fragrant herb,'

and discussed matters social and educational over their tea,
would have been better written as a pamphlet than as a
poem. Whole pages, too, of The Prelude there are, which
are little more than wordy prose cut into ten-syllable
lines. Yet let me whisper to the docile reader, if not to
the self-complacent critic, that, even in the least effective
of Wordsworth's blank verse, he will find in every page
some line, or phrase, or thought, weighty with individual
genius. Even admitting that Wordsworth does, like
Homer, sometimes nap, and oftener in blank verse than
elsewhere, yet even in his blank verse, when he is • really
possessed by his subject and kindles with it, he has
attained a majesty and a power which make it more

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 143

rememberable than any blank verse since Milton's. Of
this kind is the blank verse of Michael^ the Lines on
Tinte7'n Abbey, many a passage in The Prelude, such as
the description of a mountain-pass in the high Alps ;
of this kind, too, are some of the narrative parts of
TJie Exeursion — the story of Margaret in the First
Book, the story of Ellen, the village maiden, betrayed
and repentant^ in the Seventh Book :

' Meek saint ! by suffering glorified on earth !
In whom, as by her lonely hearth she sat,
The ghastly face of cold decay put on
A sun-like beauty, and appeared divine ! '

It would be easy to go on quoting passages or poems
without number, which bear out the assertion that
Wordsworth fashioned for himself a style, as unlike as
possible to the vapid poetic diction which he denounced,
but akin to whatever is manliest, noblest, and best in
the English poetry of all ages. Many causes were
doubtless at work to put out that outworn poetic lan-
guage. But no one agency did so much to discredit it,
as the protest which Wordsworth made against it in his
prefaces, and still more by the example of his poems.
These have set a standard of what a pure and sincere
diction in poetry should be, just as the sermons and
other writings of Dr. Newman have done in prose.
Both have alike evoked new power from the English
language, and shown what capabilities it possesses of
insinuating its tendrils into the deepest and most recon-

144 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

dite veins of thought, as well as into the tenderest sen-
timent by which any spirit of man is visited.

Coleridge we have seen as a critic. One word about
his poetry ; for he is perhaps the finest instance we have
in England of the critical and poetical power combined.
The editions of his poems usually published contain
much that is casual and second rate, especially among
his early poems and his Religious Musings. They
contain also something which no other poet could have
given. Of his best pieces it may be said in the words
of a living poet and critic with whom, in this instance,
I am glad to agree, ' The world has nothing like them,
nor can have ; they are of the highest kind, and of their
own.' These best pieces are Christabel^ The Ancient
Mariner., and Kubla Khan. Over this last fragment
Mr. Swinburne, who, when he does admire, knows no
stint in his admiration, goes into raptures, and ex-
hausts even his eulogistic vocabulary. ' The most won-
derful of all poems/ he calls it. ' In reading it,' he says,
' we are rapt into that paradise where " music and
colour and perfume are one ; " where you hear the hues,
and see the harmonies, of heaven. For absolute melody
and splendour it were hardly rash to call it the first
poem of the language.' Especially he dotes over these
lines in it :

* Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man.

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 145

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean ;
And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war.'

It is not wonderful that a poet, who himself revels in
melodious words, should go into ecstasies over a poem,
which his own favourite devices of alliteration, and as-
sonance, and rhythm have done their best to make a
miracle of music. For my part, I cannot compare
Kubla Khan with Christabcl. The magical beauty of
the latter has been so long canonised in the world's
estimate, that to praise it now would be unseemly. It
brought into English poetry an atmosphere of wonder
and mystery, of weird beauty and pity combined, which
was quite new at the time it appeared, and has never
since been approached. The movement of its subtle
cadences has a union of grace with power, which only
the finest lines of Shakespeare can parallel. As we
read Christabcl and a few other of Coleridge's pieces,
we recall his own words :

' In a half-sleep we dream.
And dreaming hear thee still, O singing lark !
That singest like an angel in the clouds.'

To leave those few poems, in which Coleridge has
touched the supernatural world with so matchless skill,
and to come nearer earth, take, as a fine specimen of
his style in human things, the opening and closing
stanzas of his Ode on France. What ' a musical sweep '
there is in those long-sustained paragraphs ! Coleridge,
L

145 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

from his temperament, was not often at the full pitch
of his powers ; but when he was, he possessed a style
which, for inner delicacy and grace, combined with in-
spired strength and free-sweeping movement, made him
one of the few masters of poetic diction, one who, we
may be quite sure, will in our language remain unsur-
passed. Too early he forsook the Muse, or the Muse
forsook him ; and the most subtle imagination of his
time was plunged in the Sirbonian bog of German
metaphysics. Yet in his old age the Muse for brief
moments revisited him, and he threw off a few short
jets of epigrammatic song, or such lines as those entitled
Youth and Age, in which we hear once more the old
witchery.

Wordsworth and Coleridge were critics and poets at
once, and it is because they were so that, in speaking
of style, I have dwelt at length on their critical prin-
ciples and their poetic performance. Byron, on the
other hand, was exclusively a poet, and no critic. Of
him Mr. Swinburne has truly said that his critical faculty
was zero, or even a frightful minus quantity. He had
never even attempted to master his art, or to take the
measure of himself, and to know the nature of the
materials he had to work with. In all that he did he
trusted simply to the fiery force that stirred him, and
took counsel only with his own fierce Titanic spirit. It is
by the vast strength and volume of his powers, rather
than by any one perfect work, that he is to be estimated.

I

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 147

He does not seem to have had any delicacy of ear for
the refinements of metre, or to have studied the intri-
cacies of it. But, when the impulse came, he poured
himself forth with wonderful rapidity, home-thrusting
directness, and burning eloquence — eloquence that car-
ries you over much that is faulty in structure, and
imperfect, or monotonous in metre. He himself did
not stay to consider the way he said things, so intent
was he on the things he had to say. Neither any more
does the reader. His cadences were few, but they were
strong and impressive, and carried with them, for the
time, every soul that heard them. If we look for what
is most characteristic, in Byron's poetic style, it is not
to his romantic narratives that we turn — to his Giaours
and his Laras. Neither is it to Childe Harold, much as
it contains of interest, for in the Spenserian stanza Byron
was never quite at ease. It was only after attempting
many styles, with more or less success, that at last he
hit upon a style entirely his own — entirely fitted to
express all the various and discordant tones of his way-
ward spirit. The note which he first struck in Bcppo,
he carried to its full compass in Doit Juaii. In the
' ottava rima ' — that light, fluent, plastic measure which
he made at once and for ever his own — he found a fit
vehicle for the comic vein that had long slumbered
within him, of which in his earlier poems he had given
no sign, as well as for the satire that he commanded,
a satire sometimes light and playful, oftener scornful
L %

148 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

and cynical, yet even in the midst of its wildest licence
and ribaldry, from time to time suspending itself, that
the poet may flash out into splendid description, or
melt into pathetic retrospect or brief but thrilling regret.
For good or for evil, it must be said that all the variety
of Byron's moods, and his most characteristic style, are
faithfully embodied in the peculiar texture and original
versification of Don Juan.

Byron, as all know, often affected gloom and played
with misanthropy, and his poems reflecting these moods
are all, more or less, in a falsetto tone. The sincerest,
as they are the most touching poems, expressive of his
personal feelings, are the Domestic Pieces, and those on
T/iyrza, and sincerity gives to these verses a beauty
which, once felt, can never be forgotten. Over blank
verse he had no great mastery ; and yet he has one
poem in this measure, in which he reverts to his early
love with a simple sincerity and a piercing pathos which
have never been surpassed. In the Drcaju, it is the
very artlessness that makes the charm. The lines thrill
with intense and passionate sincerity. On the whole, of
Byron's style it may be said that, if it has none of the
subtle and curious felicities in which some poets delight,
it is yet language in its first intention, not reflected over
or exquisitely distilled, but, in his strongest moments,
coming direct from himself, and going direct to the
heart. Placed under the critical microscope, his lan-
guage, no doubt, shows many flaws and faults, but, far

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 149

beyond any of his contemporaries, he has the manly
force, the directness, the eloquence which passion gives.
Passionate eloquence is the chief characteristic of his
style.

Among the poets who appeared in the first two de-
cades of this century, as among all poets, readers will
choose their favourites according to their sympathies.
But putting aside personal preferences, every one must
allow that none of the poets of that time was more
' radiant with genius,' and more rich in promise, than the
short-lived Keats. His genius showed itself in a won-
derful power of style, which, after striking many notes,
and reflecting many colours, caught from the old poets
he loved, was settling down into a noble style of his own,
when his brief life closed. His first poem, Endymion,
for all its crudeness and extravagance, undeniably re-
vealed the vitality of young genius, and reclaimed for
English poetry the original freedom of the ten-syllable
couplet, which had been lost since the days of Chaucer.
The influence of Spenser, who was the earliest idol of
Keats, is strong in his tales, The Eve of St. Agnes, and
Isabella. There is in them, too, some flavour of the
Italian poets, whom he studied much, while he was
composing his tales. The 'grand style' of Milton has
never been so marvellously reproduced as in Hyperion ;
but from this great fragment Keats himself turned with
some impatience, pressing on to utter himself in a style
more genuinely his own. This he attained in his odes

150 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

On a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, To a Nightmgale, and
in a few of his sonnets. In these he was leaving behind
him all traces of early mannerism, and attaining to that
large utterance, — combining simplicity with richness,
strength with freedom and grace of movement, — which
was worthy of himself. The odes especially, so finished,
so full of artistic beauty, flow forth into full sonorous
harmonies, which leave no sense of effort. In his
later poems, from behind the love of sensuous beauty,
which was the groundwork of his genius, there was
coming out a deeper thoughtfulness and humanity,
which make us the more regret his early fate. Perhaps
there is no other instance of so instinctive a yearning
towards the old Hellenic life, as is to be seen in Keats,
His thirst for artistic beauty could find no full satisfac-
tion in the productions of the cold north, and turned
intuitively to the fair creations of the elder world, as to
its native element. This is the more remarkable, as we
know that Keats was so slenderly equipped with what is
called scholarship, that he could reach the Greek poets
only through translations. His classical instinct shows
itself not only m his love of Greek subjects and Greek
mythology, but in his wonderful reproduction of Greek
form. As we read such lines as these :

' What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk this pious morn?'

or these on the nightingale's song :

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 151

'The same that found a path,
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home.
She stood in tears amid the ahen corn' —

we ask, What finished Greek scholar has ever so vividly
recalled the manner of the Greeks ?

To speak of the style of Shelley there is no space
here, and, as comments on his poetry have of late
been so rife, there is the less need. Suffice it to
say that unbiassed criticism generally admits that his
exuberant power of language often overmastered him,
and his delight in melodious words tempted him at
times to sacrifice sense to sound. Condensation and
self-repression would have improved much that he wrote.
On the other hand, all must feel that by his subtle
sense of beauty he caught many a vanishing hue of
earth and sky^ which no poet before him had noticed,
and expressed many a tone of longing and regret,
which no language but his has ever hinted.

Fifty years and more have passed since the voices of
all the great poets I have named became mute, and in
the interval between then and now England has had
no lack of poetry. Whether any of it has reached as
high a level as the best works of the masters of the
former generation, may be doubted. The world is not
likely soon again to see another flood of inspiration like
that which burst on England with the opening of this
century. In the poetry of the last fifty years many
notes have been struck, so many and so different, that

152 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

it would not be easy to characterise them all. On the
whole, it may perhaps be said, that two main branches
of poetic tendency are discernible — one which carries
on the impulse and the style derived from Keats and
Shelley, one which more or less is representative of
Wordsworth's influence. Of these two tones the former
would seem most to have won the world's ear, and its
chief voice is that of the Poet Laureate, Mr. Tennyson
is, as all know, before all things an artist; and as such he
has formed for himself a composite and richly-wrought
style, into the elaborate texture of which many elements,
fetched from many lands and from many things, have
entered. His selective mind has taken now something
from Milton, now something from Shakespeare, besides
pathetic cadences from the old ballads, stately wisdom
from Greek tragedians, epic tones from Homer. And
not only from the remote past, but from the present ;
the latest science and philosophy both lend themselves
to his thought, and add metaphor and variety to his lan-
guage. It is this elaboration of style, this ' subtle trail
of association, this play of shooting colours,' pervading
the texture of his poetry, which has made him be called
the English Virgil. But if it were asked, which of his
immediate predecessors most influenced his nascent
powers, it would seem that, while his early lyrics recall
the delicate grace of Coleridge, and some of his idyls
the plainness of Wordsworth, while the subtle music of
Shelley has fascinated his ear, yet, more than any other

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 153

poet, Keats, with his rich sensuous colouring, is the
master whose style he has caught and prolonged. In
part from Shelley, and still more from Keats, has pro-
ceeded that rich-melodied and highly coloured style
which has been regnant in English poetry for the last
half-century. Tennyson has been the chief artist in it,
but it has been carried on by a whole host of lesser
workmen.

Beside this, the dominant style, there has Hved
another, more direct, more plain, more severe, which,
without in any way imitating, has represented the in-
fluence of Wordsworth. However differing in other
respects, Keble, Sir Henry Taylor, Archbishop Trench,
and Arthur Clough, each in his own way, represent
this second tendency, which I may call the plain-
speaking, unornamented, and natural style. There is
a passage in Mr. Arnold's preface to his Selections
from Wordsworth, which all who have read must
remember, in which he speaks of Wordsworth's nobly
plain manner, ' when Nature herself seems to take the
pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own
bare, sheer, penetrating power.' But this characteristic,
which Mr. Arnold has noted as occasional, occurring in
a few poems, such as The Leech-gatherer and Michael,
may be extended to all of best that Wordsworth has
done. It brings out, in fact, the broad and radical dis-
tinction, enforced by the late Mr. Bagehot, between
pure art and ornate art.

154 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

Pure art is that which, whether it describes a scene,
a character, or a sentiment, lays hold of its inner
meaning, not its surface, the type which the thing em-
bodies, not the accidents, the core or heart of it, not
the accessories. As Mr. Bagehot expressed it, the per-
fection of pure art is 'to embody typical conceptions
in the choicest, the fewest accidents, to embody them
so that each of these accidents may produce its full
effect, and so to embody them without effort.' Descrip-
tions of this kind, while they convey typical conceptions,
yet retain perfect individuality. They are done by a
few strokes, in the fewest possible words ; but each
stroke tells, each word goes home. Of this kind is the
poetry of the Psalms and of the Hebrew prophets. It
is seen in the brief impressive way, in which Dante
presents the heroes or heroines of his nether world, as
compared with Virgil's more elaborate pictures. In all
of Wordsworth that has really impressed the world, this
will be found to be the chief characteristic. It is seen
especially in his finest lyrics, and in his most impressive
sonnets. Take only three poems which stand together
in his works, Glen Almain, Stepping Westzvard, The
Solitary Reaper. In each, you have a scene and its
sentiment, brought home with the minimum of words,
the maximum of power. It is distinctive of the pure
style that it relies not on side effects, but on the total
impression — that it produces a unity in which all the
parts are subordinated to one paramount aim. The

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 155

imagery is appropriate, never excessive. You are not
distracted by glaring single lines or too splendid images.
There is one tone, and that all-pei-vading — reducing all
the materials, however diverse, into harmony with
the one sentiment that dominates the whole. This
style in its perfection is not to be attained by any
rules of art. The secret of it lies farther in, than
rules of art can reach ; even in this : — that the writer
sees his object, and this only; feels the sentiment
of it, and this only ; is so absorbed in it, lost in it,
that he altogether forgets himself and his style, and
cares only, in fewest, and most vital words, to convey to
others the vision his own soul sees. This power of
intense sincerity, of total absorption in an object which
is not self, is not given to many men, not even to men
otherwise highly gifted. But without this, the pure
style in full perfection is not possible. It comes to this :
that in order to attain the truest and best style, a man
must, for the time at least, forget style and think only
of things. One instance more of that great law of
ethics, whereby the abandonment of some lower end,
in obedience to a higher aim, is made the very condition
of securing the lower one. To employ the pure style in
its full power requires the presence of a seer, a prophet-
soul ; and prophet-souls are few, even among poets.

The ornate style in poetry is altogether different from
this. When a scene, a sentiment, a character, has to
be described, it does not penetrate at once, as the pure

T56 POETIC STYLE IN [v.

style penetrates, to the idea which informs the scene,
the sentiment, the character ; it does not place the scene
before you, impressed by a few words on the mind for
ever. But it gathers round the scene or the character,
which it seeks to delineate, many of the most striking
accessories and associations which it suggests, and sets
it before you, clad in the richest and most splendid
drapery the subject will bear. It sees the informing
idea, and expresses it ; but by its adjuncts rather than
by its bare essence. The vision of the inner reality is
not intense enough to make it impatient of accessories
and ornamentation. It so delights in imagery, distant
allusion, classical retrospect, that the attention is apt to
be led off by these, and to neglect the central subject.
This ornate style, redundant with splendid imagery,
loaded with cloying music, is much in vogue with our
modern poets. Mr. Tennyson, who has employed various
styles, and sometimes the pure and severe style, has
done more of his work in the ornate. As one instance,
take his poem on Love and Duty. It is intense with
passion, the thought is noble and nobly rendered. But
after the agony of parting, it occurs to the lover that
perhaps the thought of him might still come back, and
the poem closes thus :

* If unforgotten ! should it cross thy dreams,
So might it come, like one that looks content,
With quiet eyes, unfaithful to the truth.
Or point thee forward to a distant light.

v.] MODERN ENGLISH POETRY. 157

Or seem to lift a burden from thy heart,
And leave thee freer, till thou wake refreshed,
Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown
Full quire, and morning driven her plow of pearl
Far-furrowing into light the mounded rack,
Between the fair green field and eastern sea.'

This description of morning is no doubt very pretty, but
one has always felt that it might well have been spared,
after the passionate parting scene immediately before it.

'A dressy literature, an exaggerated literature, seem
to be fated to us. These are our curses, as other times
had theirs.' With these words Mr. Bagehot closes his
essay to which I have alluded. No doubt the multitude
of uneducated and half-educated readers, which every
day increases, loves a highly ornamented, not to say
a meretricious, style, both in literature and in the arts ;
and if these demand it, writers and artists will be found
to furnish it. There remains, therefore, to the most
educated the task of counterworking this evil. With
them it lies to elevate the thought, and to purify the
taste, of less cultivated readers, and so to remedy one
of the evils incident to democracy. To high thinking
and noble living the pure style is natural. But these
things are severe, require moral bracing, minds which
are not luxurious, but can endure hardness. Softness,
luxuriousness, and moral limpness find their congenial
element in excess of highly coloured ornamentation.

On the whole, when once a man is master of himself,
and of his materials, the best rule that can be given him

158 POETIC STYLE IN MODERN POETRY,

is, to forget style altogether, and to think only of the
thing to be expressed. The more the mind is intent
on this, the simpler, truer, more telling the style will be.
The advice, which the great preacher gives for conduct,
holds not less for writing of all kinds : ' Aim at things,
and your words will be right without aiming. Guard
against love of display, love of singularity, love of
seeming original. Aim at meaning what you say, and
saying what you mean.' When a man who is full of
his subject, and has matured his powers of expression,
sets himself to speak thus simply and sincerely, what-
ever there is in him of strength or sweetness, of dignity
or grace, of humour or pathos, will find its way out
naturally into his language. That language will be true
to his thought, true to the man himself. Free from self-
consciousness, free from mannerism, it will still bear the
impress of whatever is best in his individuality.

And yet there is something better even than the best
individuality— a region of selfless humanity, of pure,
transparent ether, into which the best spirits sometimes
ascend. In that region there is no trace, no colour of
individuality any more. The greatest poets, uttering
their highest inspirations, there attain a style which
is colourless, and speak a common language. It is but
in rare moments that even they attain these heights, but
sometimes they do attain them.

IloXXai [kkv BiiTjToTs y\a)cr(rai, jxia S' ddavaToiai.
(' Mortals speak many tongues, the immortals one.')

CHAPTER VI.

VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET.

Those who have read will no doubt remember an
essay on Virgil by Mr. Frederick Myers, which appeared
in the FortnigJitly Rcviexv of February 1879. I speak, I
believe^ the experience of many, when I say that it is
long since I have read any piece of criticism with so
much interest, I might say, delight.

To some the spirit in which it is written may appear
too enthusiastic — the style perhaps may be a shade
too florid. But it possesses, I think, that one highest
merit of criticism — indeed the only thing which makes
any criticism worth reading — it is evidently the work
of one who has seen more clearly, and felt more vividly,
than others have done, the peculiar excellence of Virgil ;
and who longs to make others see and feel it.

Speaking of a certain essay on Shakespeare by a
Mrs. Montague, Dr. Johnson once said, ' No, Sir, there
is no real criticism in it ; none showing the beauty of
thought, as founded on the workings of the human
heart.' That word of the stern old critic well expresses,
what is the true function of his own craft, the only

l6o VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET, [vi.

thing that makes poetic criticism worth having — when
some competent person uses it to explain to the world
in general, who really do not see far in such matters,
those permanent truths of human feeling on which some
great poem is built. For, after all, the reputation which
attaches to even the greatest — Homer, Shakespeare,
and the like, depends on the verdict of a few. They
see into the core of the matter, tell the world what
it ought to see and feel, — the world receives their say-
ing and repeats it. Mr. Myers has seen anew the truth
about Virgil, and expressed it. And, strange to say, this
needed to be done, even at this late date, for our age.

This century, as we all know, has seen a great de-
cline in the world's estimate of Virgil. Niebuhr and the
Germans began it, and, as usual, England followed suit.
Perhaps the thing was inevitable. One reason was, that
Virgil could not but suffer from the comparison with
Homer, which advancing scholarship brought on.
Another reason was, that a civilisation, which, like our
own, has reached a late stage, turns with an instinc-
tive relish towards the poets of the early time, still
fresh with the dew of youth. To the heat and languor
of the afternoon, nothing is so grateful as the coolness
and freshness of the dawn. The poetry of an age in
many ways so akin to our own as Virgil's was, is apt
to pall on our taste, and to meet with scanty justice.
If from causes like these Virgil's reputation has for a
time suffered eclipse, we may hope that the glad de-

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. l6l

liverance has begun, and that he is now passing back
to that serener heaven which rightfully belongs to him.
One symptom of a return to a truer judgment of Virgil
is to be found in the admirable essay by Mr. Myers of
which I have spoken. Another is Professor Sellar's
work on Virgil, which has given, probably for the first
time in English scholarship, a just and well-balanced
estimate of the true nature and excellence of the
Virgilian poetry.

The truth is, to compare Virgil and Homer, except
to contrast them, is a mistake. Who does not at
once feel that of that in which Homer's chief strength
lay Virgil has but a meagre share ? Heroic portraiture
was not in his way. He has depicted no characters
which live in the world's imagination, as those of Achilles
and Hector, of Ulysses and Ajax, of Priam and An-
dromache live. To throw himself into the joy of the
onset was so alien to Virgil's whole turn of thought
that one could almost wish that it had been possible
for him to have constructed an Aeneid, in which battles
could have been dispensed with. The tenth book of the
Aeneid, though it has many vigorous touches, is pale
and ineffectual beside the Homeric battle-pieces. In
the words of a modern poet, Virgil might have said : —
' The moving accident is not my trade,
To freeze the blood I have no ready arts ;
'Tis my delight alone in summer shade
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.

In fact all that forms the charm of Homer's poetry
M

i62 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

was simply impossible, and would have been unnatural,
to one living in Virgil's day. The keen morning air,
the strong-beating pulses of youth, unreflecting delight
in all sights of nature, and in all actions of men, could
not belong to a poet living in a civilisation that was
old and smitten with decay. But if these things were
denied, other things were given, such as a late time could
give — the mellow, if somewhat sad, wisdom that comes
from a world's experience, the human-hearted sympathy
that, looking back over wide tracts of time on the toils
and sufferings of man, feels the full pathos of the human
story, and yet is not without some consoling hope.

It is well known in what special honour the early
Christian Fathers held Virgil. St. Augustine styled
him the finest and noblest of poets. St. Jerome, who
looked severely on all heathen writers, allows that to
read Virgil was a necessity for boys, but complains that
even priests in his day turned to him for pleasure.

In the middle age he was regarded by some as a
magician ; by others as a prophet or a saint. His form
was found sculptured on the stalls of a cathedral among
the Old Testament worthies ; in a picture of the Nativity,
where David and the prophets are singing round The
Child, Virgil is seen leading the concert. His verses
are found in the burial-places of the catacombs, asso-
ciated with the cross and the monogram of our Lord.
The power with which he has laid hold of the Christian
imagination is proved by nothing more than by the

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 163

place Dante assigns him in his Divina Comnicdia, as
his teacher and his guide to the nether world. You
remember the words with which Dante addresses him
on his first appearance :

'Art thou, then, that Virgil — that fountain which pours forth
abroad so rich a stream of speech } O glory and light of other
poets ! May the long zeal avail me, and the great love that
made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my
author ; thou alone art he from whom I took the good style
that hath done me honour \'

This general consent of the primitive and the middle
ages to adopt Virgil among the possible if not actual saints
of Christendom arose, no doubt, from the belief that in
his fourth Eclogue he had prophesied the advent of
Christ. Constantine in his discourse Ad Sanctos quoted
it as a prophecy. Lactantius agreed that it had a
Christian meaning. St. Augustine accepted it as a
genuine prophecy, and read in the thirteenth and four-
teenth verses of that Eclogue a distinct prediction
of the remission of sins.

This interpretation of the Eclogue, which would
seem to have lingered on till Pope's time, when he
imitated it in his Messiah, has for long been discre-
dited. The Child that was to be born, of which the
Eclogue speaks, whether the son of Pollio, or the daughter
of Augustus, was far enough from being a regenerator
of the world. While, however, we reject the grounds,

^ J. Carlyle's Translation of Dante's Inferno.
M a

1 64 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

which the early Fathers and the men of the middle
age would have given for their belief in Virgil's religious,
even Christian spirit, we need not reject the belief
itself. Though the reason they gave for it was false,
the conception may have been true. There is in Virgil
a vein of thought and sentiment more devout, more
humane, more akin to the Christian, than is to be found
in any other ancient poet, whether Greek or Roman.
The religious feeling which Virgil preserved in his
own heart is made the more conspicuous, when we
remember amidst what almost overpowering difficulties
it was that he preserved it. It was not only that, in
the words of Dante, ' he lived at Rome under the good
Augustus in the time of the false and lying gods,'
but he lived at a time when the traditional faith in
these gods was dead among almost all educated men.
As has been lately said, 'The old religions were dead
from the Pillars of Hercules to the Euphrates and
the Nile, and the principles on which human society
had been constructed were dead also. There remained
of spiritual conviction only the common and human
sense of justice and morality ; and out of this sense
some ordered system of government had to be con-
structed, under which men could live, and labour, and
eat the fruit of their industry. Under a rule of this
material kind there can be no enthusiasm, no chivalry,
no saintly aspirations, no patriotism of the heroic type.'
But such was the rule of the Csesars — ' a kingdom where

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 165

men could work, think, and speak as they pleased, and
travel freely among provinces for the most part ruled
by Gallios, who protected life and property,' and who
cared for nothing else. This was the world into which
Virgil was born, and it is his unique merit that he in
some way maintained within himself a sense of poetry,
faith, and devoutness in a time when, if these things
were slumbering in the heart of humanity, they were
nowhere else apparent.

A man of his spirit must have felt himself lonely
enough among the literary men and statesmen whom
he met at Rome. Many a secret longing of heart he
must have had, for which among them he could find
no sympathy. They had ceased to believe in any
thing divine, probably mocked and ridiculed it. But,
whatever else he might have done, a devout soul
like Virgil could never do this. A severe and peculiar
kind of trial it is for such a spirit to be born into an
age, when the old forms of religion, which have sustained
former generations, are waxing old and ready to perish.
We can imagine that Virgil himself must have felt
that those old beliefs had no longer the strength they
once had ; but his innate modesty and reverence, his
love for antiquity and for the scenes of his childhood, his
imaginative sympathy, would not suffer him to treat
them rudely, but would make him cling to them and
make the best of them. In fact, at such a time there
are always a few select spirits in whom the inner

J 66 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

religious life is sustained by its own strength, or, if fed
at all from without, it is fed from sources of which it is
unconscious. Instead of deriving nutriment from the old
beliefs, it imparts to them from within whatever vitality
they still retain. Such we can imagine Virgil to have
been. Men of his kind, who still believe that, whatever
some scoffers may say, there is ' a higher life than this
daily one, and a brighter world than that we see,' if
they fall among a set of acute dialecticians, are often
sore bestead to give a reason for the faith that is still
in them. If Virgil had been an interlocutor in Cicero's
dialogue De Natiira Deoj'um, he would probably have
cut but a sorry figure against the arguments of Cotta
and the sneers of Velleius, and certainly could not have
tabled any so clear-cut theory as Stoic Balbus did. But
it is just the very beauty of such spirits, that all the
irrefragable arguments and demonstrations of the acutest
logicians cannot drive them out of their essential faith
in the supernatural and the divine.

Mr. Sellar has truly said that Virgil has failed
to produce a consistent picture of spiritual life out of
the various elements, the popular, mystical, and philo-
sophical modes of thought, which he strove to combine
into a single representation. This may be at once
conceded. How could he or any one produce harmony
out of elements so discordant as those which his age
supplied ? But nevertheless, inconsistent, irreconcileable,
as these elements are, when they have passed through

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET, 167

Virgil's mind one spirit pervades them all. Everywhere
we see that the touch of his fine and reverent spirit
tends to extract from them a moral, if it cannot reduce
them into an intellectual, harmony.

What were the elements out of which the very com-
posite Virgilian theology was woven ? First, there was
his native love for the old rustic gods whom in his boy-
hood he had seen worshipped by the Mantuan husband-
men— Faunus and Picus, Janus and Pilumnus, and the
like—

' Ye gods and goddesses all ! whose care is to protect the fields.'

His first impressions were of the country and of
country people, and these Virgil was not worldly
enough to forget amid the life of the city, and the
friendship of the great. His imagination ever reverted
to Mincio's side, and his heart clung with peculiar
tenacity to the recollections of that early time. And
therefore we find that, both in the Georgics and in the
Aeneid, he dwells on the old rustic worships and the
local divinities with something more than a mere anti-
quarian attachment. To those primaeval traditions,
those old-world beliefs and practices, he adhered, as to
his earliest and surest ground of trust. He felt that to
eradicate these would be to tear up some of the deepest
roots of his spiritual hfe. Therefore he retained them
fondly, and did his best to reconcile them with the
beliefs which his later culture superinduced.

l68 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

The second element in Virgil's Pantheon was the
Olympian dynasty of gods, with which the influx of
Greek literature had saturated the whole educated
thought and imagination of Rome. Indeed, the litera-
ture of his day would not have allowed him to reject
this poetic theology. At first sight it might seem that
the Olympian gods had come to Virgil, pure and un-
alloyed from Homer. But, when we look more closely,
there is a deep change. Outwardly they may appear
the same, but inwardly the modern spirit has reached
and modified them. Virgil introduces his gods far more
sparingly than Homer ; they interfere far less with the
affairs of men. When they do interfere, it is in a gentler
and humaner spirit. It is with pity that they look
upon men slaughtering each other. When Trojans and
Rutulians are hewing each other down, and ' the gods
in Jove's palace look pityingly on the idle rage of the
warring hosts,' their feeling is —

' Alas that death-doomed men should suffer so terribly ! '
Again, Virgil's Jove is more just and impartial than
Homer's. When Turnus and Aeneas contend, he holds
the balance with perfect evenness :

'Jupiter himself holds aloft his scales, poised and level, and

lays therein
The destinies of the two, to see whom the struggle dooms,

and whose
The weight that death bears down.

When Virgil's gods meet in council, their deliberations

VL] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 169

are more dignified ; there is less of the debating
agora in their proceedings. Jupiter addresses them
with a quite Roman majesty — indeed, approaches more
nearly to a real king of the gods. Monotheism has
evidently coloured Virgil's conception of him. Venus
appears no longer as the voluptuous beguiler, but
rather as the mother trembling for her son.

If Virgil cannot altogether hide the follies and vices
of the gods which mythology had given to his hands,
he does his best to throw a veil over them. If Juno's
wrath must still burn implacably, Virgil has for it the
well-known cry of surprise —

' Can heavenly natures hate so fiercely ? '
Thus we see that if the Homeric forms and even some
of the strange doings of the old gods are still retained,
the best ideas and scruples of Virgil's own age enter in
to inform, to modify, and to moralise them.

But, beside the primaeval Italian traditions and the
Olympian gods, there were probably other extraneous
elements, which entered into Virgil's very composite
theology. Something, perhaps, he may have gathered
from the teaching of the Eleusinian or other mysteries ;
but of this we know too little to speak with any certainty.
Some tincture of Oriental worships, too, is indicated
by his mention of the Phrygian goddess Cybele.

Perhaps nowhere in Virgil is the strange medley of
faiths forced more disturbingly on our view than in the
invocation to the first Georgic. When we read that

170 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

opening passage, in which Liber and Ceres, Fauni and
Dryades, Neptune, producer of the horse ; Aristaeus,
feeder of kine ; Pan, keeper of sheep ; Minerva, discoverer
of the olive ; Triptolemus, the Attic inventor of the
plough ; Silvanus, planter of trees — are all jumbled to-
gether, we scarce know what to think of it. When finally
Caesar is invoked as a deity — Virgil doubts whether of
earth, sky, or sea ; surely not of Tartarus, for he would not
wish to reign there — we are sorely puzzled, whether we
are to regard the whole passage as fictitious and unreal,
or as representing a state of belief not impossible to an
imaginative mind in Virgil's day, though by us wholly
inconceivable. As Mr. Sellar has well said, 'it is im-
possible to find any principle of reconcilement ' for such
multifarious elements. ' Probably not even the poets
themselves, least of all Virgil, could have given an
explanation of their real state of mind ' in composing
such a passage. ' So far as we can attach any truthful
meaning to this invocation, we must look upon it as a
symbolical expression of divine agency and superin-
tendence in all the various fields of natural production.'
Just so. To a reverent mind like Virgil's, unwilling to
break with the past, yet accessible to all influences of
the present, it may well have been that these multi-
farious relics of a fading polytheism expressed only the
various functions, attributes, or agencies through which
worked that Supreme Will, that one Pronoia in which
his deeper mind really believed. Something of the

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 171

same kind is seen in mediaeval belief, when the practical
faith in elaborate and active angelic hierarchies may-
have interfered with, though it did not supersede, the
true faith in the Divine Unity.

If in the time of Augustus the majority of educated
men believed nothing, those religious minds, to whom,
as to Virgil, belief was a necessity, were more and more
driven towards a monotheistic faith, towards the belief
that the essential Being underlying the many forms of
religion was One. The whole progress of the world,
practical and social, as well as speculative, tended this
way. Of intellectual influences making in this direction,
the most powerful was Greek philosophy, whether in
the shape of Stoicism or of Platonism. Every great
poet takes in deeply the philosophy of his time, and
certainly Virgil was no exception. Of the three forms
of philosophy then current at Rome, the Stoic, the
Platonic, and the Epicurean, Virgil began with the last.
At Rome he studied under Siron, the Epicurean, and
had been profoundly impressed by the great poem of
his predecessor, Lucretius, which had expounded so
powerfully to the Roman world the Epicurean tenets.
For a time he was held charmed by this philosophy ;
but there were in Virgil's devout and affectionate nature
longings which it could not satisfy. When he wrote
his Eclogues he may have been a disciple of Epicurus ;
but in the Georgics we see that, if he still retained the
physical views of that sect, he had bidden good-bye to

1 7a VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

their moral and religious teaching. Every one re-
members the passage in the second Georgic in which
Virgil contrasts the task he had set before himself with
the large aim which Lucretius had in view. While
according no stinted admiration to the great attempt
of Lucretius to lay bare Nature's inner mysteries, he
says that he has chosen a humbler path. The import
of this passage may be, as the French critic interprets
it, to let us know that, after having sounded his own
nature, Virgil had found that he was not fitted to per-
severe in those violent speculations, which had at first
seduced his imagination^ and that he had decided to
abide by the majority, and to share their beliefs ; yet
not without casting a look of envy and regret at those
more daring spirits, who were able to dwell without
fear in the calm cold heights of science.

Perhaps another interpretation may be given to this
famous passage, which evidently describes a crisis in
Virgil's mental life, as well as in the direction of his
poetry. After having been fascinated for a time by the
seeming grandeur of the Lucretian view of things, he
came to a crucial question which meets all thoughtful
men in modern as well as in ancient times. He had to
ask himself. In what way am I to think of this world ;
how am I to interpret it? From which side shall I
approach it .^ Shall I think of its central force, its ruling
power, under the medium of nature or under that of
man } We cannot conceive it barely, absolutely, colour-

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 173

lessly : we must think it under some medium, and these
are the only two media possible to us. Between the
two we must make our choice. If we take nature for
our medium, we see through it vastness, machinery,
motion, order, growth, decay. And the contemplation
of these things may lead us to think of some great
central power, whence all these proceed. Centrality,
organisation, power, — these are the results which mere
nature yields. And if we cannot rest in mere abstrac-
tions, we may pass from these to the thought of a Being,
who is the spring of all this machinery, the central
power of these vast movements, the arranger of these
harmonies. Beyond this, by the aid of mere nature, we
cannot get. The central power we thus arrive at is
characterless, unmoral. Out of nature we can get no
morality. 'Nature is an unmoral medium.' And this
is very much all that Lucretius got to, and all that any
ever will get to, who start from his point of view and
adopt his method.

But take the other medium : start from man — from
what is highest and best in him, his moral nature, his
moral affections ; make man with these moral affections,
which are his proper humanity, our medium, and we are
led to a very different result. Interpreting the world
and its central power through this medium, we are led
not to a mere abstraction, but to think of that ruling
Power as a personal and moral Being. That which is
chief, highest, central in the universe, cannot possibly be

174 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

lower than that which is best in man. Using whatever
is deepest and best in ourselves as the window through
which we look out to what is highest in the universe, in
this way alone can we see somewhat into the Divine
character. This, it may be said, is anthropomorphism ;
and that is a big word which scares many. But there is
an anthropomorphism which is true, the only true theo-
logy— when we refer to God all those moral qualities, —
righteous love, righteous hatred, mercy, truth, — of which
there are some faint traces in ourselves. High humanity,
then, is our guide to God. There is no other medium
through which we can see Him as a moral being. Of
the two methods, the ' physical view,' as has been said,
' reduces God to a mechanical principle, the human and
moral view raises him into a person and a character.'
The day may come when these two may coalesce and
be seen in perfect harmony. But that day is not yet.
Till it comes we shall cling to that which is deepest,
most essential, and must always be paramount, and
regard man's moral nature as the truest key to the
interpretation of the universe — as our access to the divine
nature.

It is not, of course, meant that Virgil consciously went
through any such process of reasoning as this. But he
may have been led by half-conscious thoughts, akin to
these, to renounce the Lucretian philosophy, and to
attach himself to that humbler, more human mode of
thought, which breathes through all his poetry. Not

VL] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 175

but that he once and again reverts in his poems to philo-
sophic speculations. In the song of Silenus, in the
sixth Eclogue, he gives us a piece of the Lucretian
cosmogony. In the fourth Georgic, when speaking of
the wisdom of the bees, he alludes with evident sym-
pathy to the theory, whether learnt from Pythagoras,
or Plato, or the Stoics, that all creation, animate and
inanimate, is inspired by the breath of one universal
soul. To this theory he again returns in the sixth book
of the Aeneid, where Anchises in Elysium expounds it
still more earnestly. Yet it is characteristic of Virgil's
happy inconsistency, that his pantheism, if he really did
in some sense hold it, had not any of the results it fre-
quently has in more consecutive thinkers. It did not in
the least obliterate for him moral distinctions, or make
him at all less sensitive to the everlasting difference
between right and wrong. This is at once apparent in
the whole sentiment of the Georgics.

That greatest of didactic poems is Virgil's tribute to
his love of Italian scenery, and to his interest in Italian
rustics, among whom he had spent his childhood and
youth. I cannot now even glance at the many and
great beauties of the poem, and at the wonderful way in
which, as all travellers testify, it conveys the feeling of
the Italian landscape. A young poet, while lately visiting
the neighbourhood of Mantua, has well expressed this :

' O sweetest singer ! stateliest head,
And gentlest, ever crowned with bay,

176 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

It seemed that from the holy dead
Thy soul came near to mine to-day ;

And all fair places to my view

Seemed fairer ; — such delight I had,

To deem that these thy presence knew,
And at thy coming oft were glad.'

But it is not of this, but of the religious sentiment
which pervades the Georgics, that I have now to speak.
It is seen not only in that Virgil exhorts the husband-
inen to piety —

' First of all worship the gods ' —
and throws himself, as far as he can, into the rustic's
reverence for Ceres and other rural deities. This he
does. But his religious feeling shows itself in a more
genuine and unconventional way.

Virgil's whole view of the relation of man to nature is
in marked contrast to that of Lucretius. He felt, as
strongly as Lucretius did, that the country is no mere
Arcadian paradise ; that nature, if a nurse at all, is a rough
and wayward one — often seems to fight against man —
is traversed by what seem to us inherent defects and
imperfections. Looking on these, Lucretius had main-
tained that a work, which was so defective, could not
be divine :

* This universe has by no means been fashioned for us by
divine
Wisdom — with so deep a flaw it stands endowed.'

And among the defects he enumerates many features —
mountains, seas, the arctic and the torrid zones, and

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 177

other things, which we now know to be really bless-
ings. Virgil saw and recognised the seeming defects,
acknowledges them not less feelingly, but interprets
them in a different way. He saw that one end of
their existence was to discipline man, to draw out in
him the hardy and self-denying virtues, and that, if
man so accepted them, they turned to his good.

' The great sire himself would not have the path of tillage
To be a smooth one, and first disturbed the fields
By the husbandman's art, and whetted human wit by many

a care,
Nor suffered heavy sloth to waste his realm.'

He regards the husbandman's lot as one full of often
thankless toil, of suffering and disappointment. The
first days of life are the best :

'Poor mortals that we are, all the best days of life are the
first
To fly — come on apace diseases and the gloom of age, and

suffering
Sweeps us off, and the unrelenting cruelty of death.'

And again, in such words as

'All things are destined to hurry towards decay,'

there is a tone of deep sadness, bordering on despond-
ency ; but yet this does not engender in Virgil unbelief
or despair, much less anger or revolt. Rather, in view
of these acknowledged hardships and evils, he counsels
fortitude, patience, watchfulness, self-restraint, reverence.
In Virgil's sadness there is no bitterness, but rather a
N

178 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

sweet pensiveness, which looks to be comforted. His
advice to the husbandman sums itself up into the
mediaeval motto, ' Ora et labora.' For nature is not,
any more than man, independent. Both are under the
control of a heavenly power, a supreme will ; and this
will ordains that man should by patient toil subdue
reluctant nature, and in doing so should find not his
sustenance only, but his happiness and peace.

In fine, with regard to the religious sentiment of the
Georgics, Mr. Sellar thinks that Virgil's faith is purer
and happier than that of Hesiod, because it is ' trust
in a just and beneficent Father, rather than fear of a
jealous taskmaster.' But he thinks it less noble than
the faith of Aeschylus and Sophocles, because it is 'a
passive yielding to the longing of the human heart and
to aesthetic emotion, rather than that union of natural
piety with insight into the mystery of life' which
characterises the religion of the two great dramatists.
Without attempting now to discuss this contrast which
Mr. Sellar has drawn, I leave it to the reflections of my
readers.

As the Georgics are the poem of Italy, so the Aeneid
is the poem of Rome — the epic of the Empire. Patriot-
ism is its keynote, its inspiring motive : pride in the
past history of Rome, her present prosperity, her future
destiny — all these, strangely interwoven with the fortunes
of the Julian House. Yet along with this motive,
behind it, in harmony with it, there moves a great

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 179

background of religious sentiment, so powerful and
omnipresent that the Aeneid may be called a great
religious epic.

In Virgil, however it may have been with other
Romans, the sense of universal empire, and the belief
in the eternal existence of Rome, were not founded on
presumption. These things were guaranteed to her
by her divine origin, and by the continual presence of
an overruling destiny — a Fortuna urbis, Fatum, or
Fata, whose behests it was Rome's mission to fulfil.
This Fatum was something different from Jupiter. But
'Jupiter Capitohnus in ancient, the living emperor in
later times, were its visible vicegerents.' This mys-
terious power which ruled the destiny of Rome was
neither a personal nor a purely moral power. But in
Virgirs view it assumed a beneficent aspect, just as
with him the mission of Rome was not merely to
conquer the world and rule it, but to bring in law
and peace, and to put an end to war — 'pacisque impo-
nere morem.'

Another religious aspect of the Aeneid is seen, as the
French critic ^ has remarked, in the view taken of the
mission intrusted to Aeneas. It was not to conquer
Italy, but to find there a home and refuge for the
outcast deities and penates of Troy. This runs through
the poem from end to end. It is seen in the opening

^ G. Boissier, La Religioft Romaine.
N 3

l8o VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

lines of it. It is seen in the words which Hector's
ghost addresses to Aeneas :

' Troy intrusts to thee now her worship and her gods. Take

them
To share your destiny — seek for them a mighty city.'

It is seen at the close, in the words of Aeneas himself :

' I will ordain sacred rites and divinities ; let my father-in-law
Latinus hold to the rule of war.'

The Romans would never have tolerated to hear that
their ancestors, Latin and Sabine, of whom they were
so proud, were conquered by Phrygians, whom they
despised. But the East they looked on as the land
of mystery, the birthplace of religion, and they were
not unwilling to receive thence their first lessons in
things divine. It is as the bearer of the Trojan gods
to Italy that Aeneas appears, from first to last. This
is his main function ; and, this achieved, his mission is
ended, his work done. At the close of the poem, when
all difficulties are to be smoothed away, the last of
these, Juno^s vindictiveness, is appeased when she is
told by Jupiter that her favourite Italians were to be
unremoved, their place and name preserved, the Trojans
were only to hand on to them their worship and their
name, and then to disappear.

' The Ausonians shall keep their native tongue, their native
customs :
The name shall remain as it is. The Teucrians shall merge
in the nation they join —

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. i8i

That and no more ; their rites and worship shall be my gift ;
All shall be Latins and speak the Latin tongue.'

{Aeneid, xii. 834.)

This view of the mission of Aeneas as essentially
a religious one throws^ I think, some light on his
character as Virgil pourtrays it. That character, as
we all know, has generally been thought uninteresting,
not to say insipid. Every one has felt the contrast
between him and the hero of the Iliad, or even such
subordinate characters as Ulysses, Hector, Ajax, and
Nestor. These are living men, full of like passions with
ourselves, only of more heroic mould. The glow of
health is in their cheek, the strong throb is in their
pulses. Beside them, how pale, washed-out, is the
countenance of Aeneas ! He is no doubt, in some sort,
a composite conception — an attempt to embody some-
what diverse attributes, rather than a man moved by
one strong human impulse. On one side Aeneas repre-
sents that latest product of civilisation, the humane
man, in whom is embodied ' humanitas,^ as Cicero and
Virgil conceived it. On another side, some of his
traits are taken from Augustus and meant to recall
him. These two elements are both present. But
far more potent than either is the conception of him
as the man of destiny, whom the fates had called
to go forth, he knows not whither, and to seek in
some strange land, which the fates would show him,
a home for his country's gods and for himself ; a sad,

i82 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

contemplative man, to whom the present is nothing,
who ever feels that he has a mournful past behind him,
and a great destiny before him. He has no strong
impulses of his own ; natural interests have ceased
to move him ;

* In him the savage virtues of the race.
Revenge and all ferocious thoughts, are dead.'

As the French critic has well expressed it, 'He has
secured from heaven a mission which lies heavy on
him ; and he accepts it pensively. He toils and endures
hardness, to find a resting-place for his Penates, a king-
dom for his son, a glorious future for his race. Before
these great interests his own personality has effaced
itself. He obeys the behest of fate in spite of natural
reluctance, and sacrifices himself to the commands of
heaven.' Herein lies the ' pietas ' which Virgil has
made his fixed characteristic. The chief motive-power
within him is piety in its widest sense, including all
human affections — love to family, love to country,
fidelity to the dead ; above all, that dependence on a
higher power, and that obedience to it, which controls
and sanctifies all his actions. To meet these duties, to
fulfil the destiny he is called to, is his one absorbing
thought. He has no other.

Even that part of his conduct which to moderns seems
most unforgivable, his heartless desertion of Dido, is
explained by this principle, though it is not justified.
Aeneas deserts her not from heartlessness, but in obe-

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 183

dience to an overmastering call from heaven. Whatever
his attachment may have been, one word brought by-
Mercury from Jupiter suffices to startle him from his
dream. At the god's approach —

' Art thou not helping to build the walls of lofty Carthage,
And in the fondness of weak affection piling up a fair city ! '

he at once awakes and longs to be gone.

' He is on fire to fly, and leave the too-well-loved city,
Astounded at so unlooked-for a warning, and at the com-
mand of the gods.'

Hence we see why the character Qf Aeneas, as pour-
trayed in the first six books of the Aeneid, is so much
more consistent than it appears to be in the last six.
In the former he is entirely the absorbed devoted man
obeying the behests of heaven. In the latter he has
to do the fighting business, to play the part of Achilles
or Ajax. When we see him lopping off the heads
of the Rutulians, we feel that this is not in keeping
with the original conception of him. His bearing be-
comes unnatural, his words truculent, altogether unlike
those of the humane^ pensive, contemplative man of the
earlier books. But it could not be avoided : the plan
of the poem required that he should be the warrior as
well as the religious exile ; as the warrior, he had
bloody work to do, and in describing this, Virgil could
not be original, but must needs fall back on imitation
of the Iliad and of the Homeric heroes.

If we cannot get over an impression of baseness

1 84 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

in his conduct to the Carthaginian Queen, we should
remember that in Virgil's intention this but proves
the greatness of his self-sacrifice, and the depth of his
conviction, that Heaven had called him to another
destiny. Had his abandonment of Dido been his own
deed it would have been the basest treachery. As it
is, that action, though not admirable, is changed in
character, when we see it as done at the behest of
Heaven, as an act of religious obedience.

' Cease to inflame by your complaints both yourself and me :
It is not by my choice I am pursuing Italy.'

It makes him, no doubt, less interesting as a man,
but it proves more entirely that he is a religious hero
inspired by the sense of a divine mission. This was
the poet's fundamental conception of him ; it was thus
he wished to represent him. Unless we continually
remember this, we shall not only misinterpret Aeneas
in his conduct to Dido, but we shall miss the key
to his whole character, and to the main purpose of the
poem.

It has often been remarked how much more attractive
is the character of Turnus than that of Aeneas. Turnus
and his comrades represent the natural passions, the
spontaneous impulses, in a much freer, more human way,
than Aeneas and his Trojans. The individuality of
these last is, as it were, obliterated, by the weight
of destiny which they feel laid upon them. What is
this but to say that in poetry or romance it is much

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 185

easier to invest with interest an ordinary man, with
all the human feehngs and infirmities about him, than
to pourtray a religious hero in such wise that, while
he commands our reverence, he shall win our affection ?
If Virgil has failed to do so, and I grant that he
has failed, who is there of poets or novelists that in
this kind of portraiture has entirely succeeded ?

But more than in any other portion of his work, the
strength of Virgil's moral and religious feeling comes
out in the sixth book of the Aeneid. His whole con-
ception of the condition of the departed souls is a
thoroughly moral one — a projection into the unseen
future of the everlasting difference between good and
evil. That which lies at the bottom of all the elaborate
imagery of the book is the belief that judgment awaits
men there for what they have been, and what they have
done here ; that their works follow them into the un-
seen state ; that the pollution which men have con-
tracted here must be purged away before they can
attain to peace. To show in detail how these concep-
tions pervade that sixth book would require a whole
essay devoted to itself, and I cannot do more than
allude to it now.

It is not, however, the definite teaching either of the
sixth, or of any other book of the Aeneid, that most
clearly reveals the essential piety of Virgil's soul. It is
the incidental expressions, the half-uttered thoughts,
the sighs which escape him unawares, that show what

1 86 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [VI.

his habitual feeling about man's life and destiny was —
how solemn ! how tender ! how religious !

Consider the great purity of his mind as seen in his
poems. One or two passages only occur in all his
works from which the most perfect modesty would
shrink. And this in an age when many of the great
men of the day were steeped to the lips in impurity.
When we first become acquainted with Virgil in boy-
hood, we are not, of course, aware of this characteristic.
It requires larger acquaintance with literature and with
the world to make us feel, how great is the contrast, in
this respect, between Virgil and most of the ancient,
and indeed many of the modern, poets. Horace, who
lived much in society^ was conscious of the rare beauty
of Virgil's character, and speaks of him as one of the
whitest souls among the sons of men. Indeed, Horace
never alludes to Virgil, but his voice hushes itself into
a tone of tender reverence unusual with him.

Again, observe how, though Virgil is compelled to
speak of war and bloodshed, his soul evidently abhors
it. We see this in such lines as

* The fever of the steel, the guilty madness of battle
Rages within him.'

Again —

* By degrees crept in an age degenerate and of duller hue,
And the frenzy for war and the greed of gain.'

This sounds strange language from the lips of the great
poet of the conquerors of the world, but it was the true

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 187

language of Virgil's own heart, though not of his people's.
Keble has remarked how from the thick of battle and
slaughter he turns away to soothe himself with rustic
images, as in the description of the conflicts of Aeneas
in the tenth book of the Aeneid. Every death is de-
scribedj not with stern delight, but with a sigh, as of
one who felt for the miseries of men. As each warrior
falls, Virgil turns aside to recall his home, his family,
his peaceful pursuits, as in the well-known —

' And he dreams in death of his darling Argos.'

Note too Virgil's unworldliness of spirit. He had
evidently no relish for the material splendours that
fascinate lower natures. It would seem as if unworld-
liness were the very condition of all high poetry, and
as if a great poet's heart could not be given to those
things which the worldling admires. But no one of
ancient, and few of modern, poets have shown so de-
cidedly that riches, rank, splendour, have no charm for
them. Homer, himself probably a poor man, in his
simplicity, looks with evident satisfaction on the riches
of the great. Andromache is ' rich in gifts ' ; Homer's
Aeneas boasts that his ancestor was ' the wealthiest of
mortal men.' For Virgil

* the high mansion with proud portals.
Discharging from all the palace its huge tide of early visitants,'

has no attraction. From the palace of Augustus, and
from the home of Maecenas on the Esquiline, he turns

1 88 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

away instinctively to the woods and the fields, and to
the men who lived among them. The country house-
wife going about her work pleases him more than the
grandest of patrician matrons. Observe his picture, in
the eighth book of the Aeneid, of the thrifty housewife ;
how at the mid-hour of the night, ' compelled to sup-
port life by spinning, she wakes to light the fire that
slumbered in the embers, adding night to her day's
work, and keeps her handmaids labouring long by the
blaze, all that she may be able to preserve her wedded
life in purity, and bring up her infant sons.' Evidently
this was more to his mind than all the Tyrian purple
and fretted ceilings of Roman mansions.

Connected with this unworldHness is Virgil's continual
remembrance of the poor, and his feeling for the miser-
able. This he has expressed in one immortal line.

' Tears there are for human things,
And hearts are touched by mortal sufferings ' —

this is the spirit of all his poetry. If men forget or
despise the unfortunate, he is sure that Heaven does
not :

' If you defy the race of men, and the weapons that mortals
wield,
Yet look to have to do with the gods, who forget not right
and wrong.'

No poet ever less admired mere outward success, and
felt more sure that there is a tribunal somewhere, which

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 189

will test men and things by another standard, according

to which

' a noble aim
Faithfully kept is as a noble deed,
In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed.'

You remember his

' Learn, O boy ! from me what virtue means and genuine toil.
Let others teach you the meaning of success.'

While gentleness and natural piety are Virgil's char-
acteristic virtues, hardly less prized by him is another
virtue which might seem opposed to these ; I mean
patience, fortitude, manly endurance.

'Whate'er betide, every misfortune must be overcome by
enduring it' —

this is the undertone of all his morality.

Again, another side of his unworldliness appears in
this, that his heart refuses to find full satisfaction in any-
thing here. Not wealth, not honour, not future fame,
not the loveliness of nature, not the voice of friend, are
enough for him. For, even if for a time they pleased,
does he not keenly feel that

' Poor mortals that we are, our brightest days of life
Are ever the first to fly ' ?

This has been called pessimism in Virgil. It is, how-
ever, only his keen feeling of the transitory and un-
sufficing nature of all earthly things. He does not rail
at it, as some poets have done ; he upbraids neither the

I90 VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. [vi.

world nor the power that made it, but accepts it and
learns from it reverent patience. And this experience
would seem to have wakened within him a longing and
aspiration after something purer, higher, lovelier, than
anything which earth contains. His poetry has the
tone as of one, who, in his own words,

' Was stretching forth his hands with longing desire for the
farther shore.

Therefore, while we may not accept, as former ages did,
the fourth Eclogue as in any sense a prophecy of the
Messiah, we need not be blind to that which it does
contain — the hope of better things, the expectation that
some relief was at hand for the miseries of an outworn
and distracted world. This expectation was, we know,
widely spread in Virgil's day, and probably none felt
it more than he. Likely enough he expected that the
relief would come from the establishment and universal
sway of Roman Dominion; but the ideal empire,
as he conceived it, was something more humane and
beneficent than anything earth had yet seen — some-
thing such as Trajan may perhaps have dreamed of,
but which none ever saw realised. His conception of
the future work, which he imagined the Empire had to
do, contained elements which belonged to a kingdom
not of this world. Of his enthusiastic predictions re-
garding it, we may say, in Keble's words,

' Thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were
given.'

VI.] VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 191

Taking, then, all these qualities of Virgil together,
his purity, his unworldliness, his tenderness towards the
weak and down-trodden, his weariness of the state of
things he saw around him, his lofty ideal, his longing
for a higher life — in him it may be said that the
ancient civilisation reached its moral culmination. Here
was, at least, one spirit, 'who lived and died in faith,'
and kept himself unspotted from the world. It was
this feeling about Virgil, probably, which gave rise to
the legend, that St. Paul on his journey to Rome
turned aside to visit the poet's tomb near Naples, and
that, weeping over it, he exclaimed —

' What a man would I have made of thee,
Had I found thee alive,
O greatest of the poets ! '

In the words of the old Latin hymn —

' Ad Maronis Mausoleum
Ductus, fudit super eum

Piae rorem lacrymae ;
Ouem te, inquit, reddidissem.
Si te vivum invenissem,

Poetarum maxime ! '

CHAPTER VII.

SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS.

Lyrical poetry is poetry in its intensest and purest
form. Other kinds of poetry may be greater, more
intellectual, — may combine elements more numerous
and diverse, and demand more varied powers for their
production ; but no other kind contains within the same
compass so much of the true poetic ore, of that simple
and vivid essence which to all true poetry is the breath
of life.

For what is it that is the primal source, the earliest
impulse, out of which all true poetry in the past has
sprung, out of which alone it ever can spring ? Is it not
the descent upon the soul, or the flashing up from its
inmost depths, of some thought, sentiment, emotion,
which possesses, fills, kindles it — as we say, inspires it ?
It may be some new truth, which the poet has been
the first to discern. It may be some world-old truth,
borne in upon him so vividly, that he seems to have
been the first man who has ever seen it. New to him,
a new dawn, as it were, from within, the light of it makes
all it touches new. In remote times, before poetry had

SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 193

worn itself into conventional grooves, it was only some
impulse torrent-strong, some fountain of thought burst-
ing from the deepest and freshest places of the soul, that
could cleave for itself channels of utterance. In later
times, when a poetic language had been framed, poetic
forms stereotyped, and poetry had become an art, or
even a literary trade, a far feebler impulse might borrow
these forms, and express itself poetically. But originally
it was not so. In primitive times, as Ewald says, it
was only the marvellous over-mastering power, the irre-
sistible impulse of some new and creative thought,
which, descending upon a man, could become within
him the spirit and impelling force of poetry.

To our modern ears all this sounds unreal, — a thing
you read of in aesthetic books, but never meet with in
actual life. Our civilisation, with its stereotyped ways
and smooth conventionalities, has done so much to
repress strong feeling ; above all, English reserve so per-
emptorily forbids all exhibition of it, even when most
genuine, that, if any are visited by it, they must learn
to keep it to themselves, and be content to know 'the
lonely rapture of lonely minds.' And yet even in this
century of ours such things have been possible.

A modern poet, whose own experience and produc-
tions exemplified his words, has said, 'A man can-
not say, I will write poetry ; the greatest poet cannot
say it, for the mind in creation is as a fading coal,
which some irresistible influence, like an inconstant
O

194 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [VII.

wind, awakens to transitory brightness. This power
arises from within, Hke the colour of a flower which dims
and changes as it is developed, and the conscious por-
tions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach
or of its departure. It is, as it were, the interpenetration
of a diviner nature with our own ; but its footsteps are
like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm
erases, and whose traces remain only on the wrinkled
sand which paves it. Poetry is the record of the best
and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.'

Thisj if in a measure true of all poetry, is especially
descriptive of lyrical poetry. The thought, sentiment,
situation, which shall lay hold of the soul with such
intense force and rise to the highest elevation, must be
single, solitary. Other thoughts may attach themselves
to the ruling one, and contribute to body it forth, but
these are merely accessory and subordinate. One ruling
thought, one absorbing emotion there must be, if the
mind is to be kindled and concentrated into its warmest
glow. And what we call a lyric poem is the adequate
and consummate expression of some such supreme mo-
ment, of some one rapturous mood. Single we said
the inspiring mood must be, — whole, unmingled, all-
absorbing. When a mood of mind, a thought, a senti-
ment, or an emotion, or a situation, or an incident, pos-
sessing these characters, has filled and overmastered
the singer's soul, then the vehicle most fitted to express
it is the form of words which we call lyrical or musical.

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS, 195

When and how the adequate utterance of the Inward
visitation comes, is an interesting question, which how-
ever need not detain us now. There may have been
instances in which the poet, in the first flush of emotion,
projected it into language perfect and complete. This,
however, I should believe, is but rare, and only when
the faculty of poetic utterance has been trained to
the finest. Far more often, I should believe, a few
burning words, a line here and there, have sprung
to life in the first moment of excitement, and then
have remained in the mind as the keynotes, till after-
wards the propitious hour arrives which shall round
off the whole thought into perfect language. Other
instances there are in which the profound impressions
have come and gone, and found no words at the time,
but lain long dumb within, till, retouched in some happy
moment by memory and imagination, they have taken
to themselves wings, and bodied themselves for ever in
language that renews all their original brightness. This
it is of which Wordsworth speaks when he calls poetry
' emotion remembered in tranquillity.'' It is seen exem-
plified in his own best lyrics, many of which were no
doubt born in this way ; pre-eminently is it seen in his
master Ode On Intimations of Immortality. And if
those moments of past fervour, seen through the atmo-
sphere of memory, lose something of their first vivid-
ness, they win instead a pensive and spiritual light,
which forms I know not how much of their charm.
o a

196 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

But however, and whenever, the one inspiring impulse
finds words to embody it, one thing is certain^ — that
embodiment must be in language which has in it rhythm
and melody. The expression must be musical, and for
this reason. There is a strange kinship between inward
fervour of emotion and outward melody of voice. When
one overmastering impulse entirely fills the soul, there
is a heaving of emotion within, which is in its nature
rhythmical, — is indeed music, though unuttered music.
And, when this passes outward into expression, it of
necessity seeks to embody itself in some form of words
which shall be musical, the outward melody of language
answering to the already rhythmical and musical volume
of feeling that is billowing within. We see this in
the fact that, whenever any one is deeply moved,
the excitement, passing outward, changes the tones of
the voice, and makes them musical. Lyrical poetry
is but the concentrating into regular form, and the carry-
ing to higher power, of this natural tendency.

To make the perfect lyric two things must conspire :
an original emotion of more than usual depth, intensity,
and tenderness, and a corresponding mastery over lan-
guage to give it fitting utterance. The light that
flashes up in the first creative moment must be so vivid
and penetrating, as to fill and illumine every syllable
of the language, as the light of the setting sun
fills the cloud and transfigures it into its own bright-
ness. When this depth and tenderness of susceptibility

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 197

meets with perfect power of expression, we have the
great lyric poems of the world. Such creations con-
centrate the largest amount of the true poetic essence
into the smallest compass, and project it in the directest
form, and with the most thrilling power, of which human
language is capable.

Lyric poems are in a special way the creation of
youth and the delight of age. Longer poems, the epic,
the tragedy, demand more varied and maturer powers,
and have generally been composed by men who have
reached middle life. The intense glow, the tumult-
uous rush of feeling, which are the essence of the
song, belong pre-eminently to youth, and can seldom
in their first freshness be perpetuated even in those
who have carried the boy's heart furthest into manhood.
The wear and tear of life, and the continual sight of
mortality pressing home, cool down the most ardent
glow, and abate the strongest impulse. Hence it is
that most of the greatest lyrists have done their pipings
before forty ; many have ceased to sing even earlier.
The songs or lyric poems composed in mature life
are mainly such as those which Wordsworth speaks
of, — products of emotion remembered in tranquillity.
These no doubt have a charm of their own, in which
the fervour of early feeling is tempered and mellowed
by the ripeness of age.

In the sequel I shall try to illustrate one of the many
possible kinds of lyrics. There is an obvious division

198 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

of lyrics suggested by a passage which I recently read
in the Literary Studies of the late Mr. Walter Bagehot.
That very able man, who was long known chiefly
as an original writer on political economy^ seems to
have been even more at home in the deep problems of
metaphysics, and amid the fine shades of poetic feeling,
than when discussing the doctrine of rent or of the
currency. Speaking of lyric poetry, he says, ' That
species of art may be divided roughly into the human
and the abstract. The sphere of the former is of course
the actual life, passions, and actions of real men. In
early ages there is no subject for art but natural life
and primitive passion. At a later time, when, from
the deposit of the debris of a hundred philosophies,
a large number of half-personified abstractions are
part of the familiar thoughts and language of all
mankind, there are new objects to excite the feelings,
— we might even say there are new feelings to be
excited ; the rough substance of original passion is
sublimated and attenuated, till we hardly recognise
its identity.' Out of this last state of feeling comes
the abstract, or, as I may call it, the intellectual lyric.
I propose to dwell now on the former of these two kinds.
There is a very general impression, especially in
England, that Burns created Scottish song, and that
all that is valuable in it is his work. Instead of saying
that Burns created Scottish song, it would be more
true to say that Scottish song created Burns, and

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 199

that in him it culminated. He was born at a happy-
hour for a national singer, with a great background
of song, centuries old, behind him, and breathing from
his childhood a very atmosphere of melody. From
the earliest times the Scotch have been a song-loving
people, meaning by song both the tunes, or airs, and
the words. This is not the side which the Scotchman
turns to the world, when he goes abroad into it to push
his fortune. We all know the character that passes
current as that of the typical Scot, — sandy-haired,
hard-featured, clannish to his countrymen, unsympa-
thetic to strangers, cautious, shrewd, self-seeking, self-
reliant, persevering, difficult to drive a bargain with,
impossible to circumvent. The last thing a stranger
would credit him with would be the love of song.
Yet when that hard, calculating trader has retired from
the 'change or the market-place to his own fireside,
the thing, perhaps, he loves best, almost as much as
his dividends, will be those simple national melodies
he has known from his childhood. Till a very recent
time the whole air of Scotland, among the country
people, was redolent of song. You heard the milkmaid
singing some old chant, as she milked the cows in
field or byre ; the housewife went about her work,
or spun at her wheel, with a lilt upon her lips. You
might hear in the Highland glen some solitary reaper,
singing like her whom • Wordsworth has immortalised;
in the Lowland harvest field, now one, now another,

2C0 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

of the reapers taking up an old-world melody, till
the whole band break out into some well-known chorus.
The ploughman, too, in winter, as he turned over the
green lea, beguiled the time by humming or whistling
a tune ; even the weaver, as he clashed his shuttle
between the threads, mellowed the harsh sound with
a song. In former days song was the great amuse-
ment of the peasantry, as they of a winter night
met for a hamlet-gathering by each other's firesides.
This was the usage in Scotland for centuries. Is it
certain that the radical newspaper, which has super-
seded it, is an improvement?

In general, it may be said that the airs or melodies
are older than the words : almost all the tunes have had
at least two sets of words, an earlier and a later ; many
of them have outlived more. There is much rather vague
discussion as to the source from which the Scottish
national tunes came. Some writers would refer them to
the First James of Scotland, of whom we are told that
he 'invented a new, melancholy, and plaintive style of
music, different from all others.' Some would trace
them to the old Celtic music, which has infiltrated itself
unawares from the Highlands into the Scottish Low-
lands, and it cannot be doubted that to this source we
owe some of our finest melodies. Others would make
the Lowland music a Scandinavian rather than a Celtic
immigration. Others, with not a little probability, have
found a chief origin of it in the plain-song, Gregorian

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 20l

chants, or other sacred tunes of the medieval Church,
still clinging to the hearts and memories of the people,
after they had been banished from the churches. What-
ever may have been their origin, these old airs or melo-
dies, which have been sung by so many generations,
are full of character, and have a marked individuality
of their own. They are simple, yet strong ; wild, yet
sweet, answering wonderfully to the heart's primary
emotions, lending themselves alike to sadness or gaiety,
to humour, drollery, or pathos, to manly independence
and resolve, or to heart-broken lamentation. What
musical peculiarities distinguish them I cannot say,
knowing nothing of music but only the delight it gives.
If any one cares to know what the chief characteristics
of Scottish music are, I would refer him to a publication
called The Thistle, which is now being brought out by
Mr. Colin Brown, of Glasgow. In that miscellany of
Scottish song there is a disquisition on the nature of
the national music, which seems to me to make the
whole matter more plain and intelligible than any
other of the treatises I have met with. But whatever
may have been the origin, whatever may be the
characteristics, of the Scottish tunes or melodies, the
thing to be remembered is that, in general, the musical
airs are older than the words which we now have,
and were in a great measure the inspirers of these
words.

About the poetry of the oldest songs, since I cannot

202 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [VIT.

analyse or describe the music, let me say a word or two.
It is songs I speak of now, not ballads. For though
these two terms are often used indiscriminately, I should
wish to keep them distinct. A ballad is a poem which
narrates an event in a simple style, noticing the several
incidents of it successively as they occurred ; not in-
dulging in sentiment or reflection, but conveying what-
ever sentiment it has indirectly, by the way the facts
are told, rather than by direct expression. A song, on
the other hand, contains little or no narrative, tells no
facts, or gives, by allusion only, the thinnest possible
framework of fact, with a view to convey some one
prevaiUng sentiment, — one sentiment, one emotion,
simple, passionate, unalloyed with intellectualising or
analysis. That it should be of feeling all compact ; that
the words should be translucent with the light of the
one all-pervading emotion, this is the essence of the
true song. Mr. Carlyle well describes it when he says,
' The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested ;
not said or spouted in rhetorical completeness and
coherence, but sung in fitful gushes, in glowing hints,
in fantastic breaks, in warblings not of the voice only,
but of the whole mind.''

As to the history of these songs, it was only in the
last century that men began to think them worth col-
lecting; and only in this century that they have sought
to trace their age and history. There are few, if any,
entire songs of which we can be sure that they existed,

VIL] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 203

in the form in which we now have them, before the
Reformation. Snatches and fragments there are of
much older date, some as early as the war of indepen-
dence, when in the days of Robert Bruce the Scotch
sang in triumph —

' Maidens of England
Sore may ye moume
For your lemmans ye hae lost
At Bannockburn.'

James I, our poet king, is said, besides his graver
poems, to have composed songs in the vernacular which
were sung by the people ; but these have perished, or
are now unknown. James V celebrated his adventures
among the peasantry in the somewhat free ballad or
song, The Gaberlunzie Man.

With the dawn of the eighteenth century there came
in Scotland an awakening, some would say a revival, of
literature of various kinds. It was at this time that
the popular songs, which hitherto had been almost
entirely left to the peasantry, first began to be esteemed
by the polite, and regarded as a form of literature.
The first symptom of this was the publication in 1706
of Watson's collection of Scotch poems, which con-
tained a number of old songs. But that which marked
most decisively the turn of the tide in favour of the
old popular minstrelsy was the publication by Allan
Ramsay of his Tea Table Miscellany in 1724. Ramsay
was himself a poet and a song-writer, and, living in

204 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vii;

Edinburgh as a bookseller, undertook to supply the
upper ranks with the songs which he had heard in
his moorland birthplace. The Tea Table Miscellany
was intended, as its name suggests, to furnish the
more polished circles of Edinburgh, at their social
meetings, with the best specimens of their national
melodies. Through that collection the homely strains
which had been born in cottages, and which described
the manners and feelings of peasants, found their way
to the drawing-rooms of the rich and refined.

In this collection honest Allan did something to
preserve the genuine old ware of our songs, which but
for him might have perished. Many old strains he
recast after his own taste, substituting for the names
of Jock and Jennie, Damon and Phyllis, and for sun
and moon, Phoebus and Cynthia. A great deal was, no
doubt, done at this time to spoil the genuine old ware
by importations of a false classicism from Virgil's
Eclogues, or perhaps from Pope's imitations of these.
Much was thus irretrievably lost ; but we may be glad
that so much was allowed to escape the touch of the
spoilers.

Ramsay's collection, and other collections which were
made early in the eighteenth century, contained many
songs which belonged to the seventeenth century, if not
to a remoter date ; songs which are full of the fine
flavour of old vernacular humour and dialect — here
and there passing into deep pathos. Such songs are

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 205

— ' Get up and bar the door,' ' Tak your auld cloak
about ye,'

' O waly, waly up the bank,

And waly, waly down the brae.'

These and many more contain all the raciness and
melodious feeling of the best songs of Burns.

As a sample of the peculiar manner in which
drollery and sentiment are blended often in the same
song, take one composed by a Forfarshire laird in the
last century, Carnegie of Balnamoon, who, like many of
his name, was out with the Prince in the Forty-Five :

' My daddie is a cankert carle,
He '11 no twine wi' his gear ;
My minnie she 's a scaulding wife,
Hauds a' the house asteer.

But let them say, or let them dae,

It 's a' ane to me.
For he 's low doun, he 's in the brume,

That 's waitin' on me :
Waitin' on me, my love.

He 's waitin' on me :
For he's low doun, he's in the brume.
That 's waitin' on me.

My auntie Kate sits at her wheel.

And sair she lightlies me ;
But weel I ken it 's a' envy.

For ne'er a joe has she.
But let them say, or let them dae, &c.

2o6 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

Gleed Sandy he cam wast yestreen,

And speir'd when I saw Pate ;
And aye sinsyne the neebors round

They jeer me air and late.

But let them say, or let them dae, &;c.'

After Ramsay's time the love of Scottish song spread
through all ranks in Scotland, and many exquisite
melodies, both tune and words, were added to the
current stock by distinguished men of the time, and
especially by ladies of what Lockhart used to call ' the
fine old Scottish families.' Conspicuous among the lady
songstresses stands Lady Grisell Baillie. She was a girl
during the troublous times of Charles II and James II,
and died a widow in 1746. By her heroic conduct in
preserving the life of her father, the covenanting Earl
of Marchmont, she had won the admiration of her
countrymen, before she was known as a poetess. To
the heroic Christian character which she displayed
while still a girl she added the accomplishment of song.
One of her songs begins —

' There was ance a may, and she lo'ed na man,'
and it has for a chorus —

' And were na my heart licht I would die.'

The song, excellent in itself, was made more famous
by being quoted by Robert Burns on a well-known
occasion in his later days. Lady Grisell was a native
of the Borders, and a large proportion of our best songs,
as of our ballads, came from the Border land.

VII.J SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 207

Other Border ladies followed her in the path of song,
especially Miss Jane Elliot, of Minto, and Miss Ruther-
ford, of Fairnielee, afterwards Mrs. Cockburn, who lived
to be, in her old age, a friend of Scott's boyhood. Each
of these made herself famous by one immortal song.
Miss Elliot, taking up one old line —

' I've heard the lilting at our ewe milking,'

and a refrain that remained from the lament sung
for the Ettrick Forest men who had died at Flodden —

' ' The flowers o' the Forest are a wed awa,'

sang it anew in a strain which breathes the finest spirit
of antiquity. Miss Rutherford, born herself on the
edge of Ettrick Forest, took up the same refrain, and
adapted it to a more recent calamity which befell, in
her own time, many lairds of the Forest, who were
overwhelmed with ruin and swept away. The songs of
these three Border ladies, while they are true to the
old spirit and manner of our native minstrelsy, did
something toward refining it, by showing of how pure
and elevated sentiment it might be made the vehicle.

These ladies' songs were first made known to the
world by appearing in a collection of Scottish songs,
ancient and modern, published in 1769 by David Herd,
a zealous antiquary and collector. After Ramsay's Mis-
cellany, this publication of Herd's marks another epoch
in the history of Scottish song. Herd preserved many
precious relics of the past, which otherwise would have

2o8 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

disappeared. He was indefatigable in searching out
every scrap that was old and genuine, and his eye for
the genuinely antique was far truer than Ramsay's.
This, however, must be said : he was so faithful and
indiscriminate in his zeal for antiquity, that, along with
the pure ore, he retained much baser metal, which might
well have been left to perish. Not a few of the songs
in his collection are coarse and indecent. As has often
been said, if we wish to know what Burns did to purify
Scottish song, we have only to compare those which he
has left us with many which Herd incorporated in his
collection, and published not twenty years before Burns
appeared.

Scottish song is true pastoral poetry, — truer pastoral
poetry is nowhere to be found. That is, it expresses the
lives, thoughts, feelings, manners, incidents, of men and
women who were shepherds, peasants, crofters, and small
moorland farmers, in the very language and phrases
which they used at their firesides. As I have said else-
where, the productions, many of them, not of book-
learned men, but of country people, with country life,
cottage characters and incidents, for their subjects, they
utter the feelings which poor men have known, in the
very words and phrases which poor men have used. No
wonder the Scottish people love them ; for never was
the heart of any people more fully rendered in poetry
than Scotland's heart in these songs. Like the homely
hodden-gray, formerly the cotter's only wear, warp and

VIL] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 209

woof, they are entirely homespun. The stuff out of

which they are composed,

'The cardin o't, the spinnin o't,
The warpin o't, the winnin o't,'

is the heart-fibre of a stout and hardy peasantry.

Every way you take them, — in authorship, in senti-
mentj in tone, in language, — they are the creation and
property of the people. And if educated men and
high-born ladies, and even some of Scotland's kings, have
added to the store, it was only because they had lived
familiarly among the peasantry, felt as they felt, and
spoken their language, that they were enabled to sing
strains that their country's heart would not disown. For
the whole character of these melodies, various as they
are, is so peculiar and so pronounced, that the smallest
foreign element introduced, one word out of keeping,
grates on the ear and mars the music. Scottish song
has both a spirit and a framework of its own, within
which it rigorously keeps. Into that framework, these
moulds, it is wonderful how much strong and manly
thought, how much deep and tender human-heartedness,
can be poured. But so entirely unique is the inner
spirit, as well as the outward setting, that no one, not
even Burns, could stretch it beyond its compass, without
your being at once aware of a falsetto note.

It was the gloiy of Burns that, taking the old form of
Scottish song as his instrument, he was able to elicit
from it so much. That Burns was the creator of Scot-
P

210 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

tish song no one would have denied more vehemently
than himself. When he appeared, in 1786, as the
national poet of his country, the tide of popular taste
was running strongly in favour of Scottish song. He
took up that tide of feeling, or rather he was taken up
by it, and he carried it to its height. He was nurtured
in a home that was full of song. His mother's memory
was stored with old tunes or songs of her country, and
she sang them to her eldest boy from his cradle-time all
through his boyhood. Amid the multifarious reading
of his early years, the book he most prized was an
old song-book, which he carried with him wherever he
went, poring over it as he drove his cart or walked
afield, song by song, verse by verse, carefully distin-
guishing the true, tender, or sublime from affectation
and fustian. Thus he learned his song-craft, and his
critic-craft together. The earliest poem he composed
was in his seventeenth summer, a simple love-song in
praise of a girl who was his companion in the harvest
field. The last strain he breathed was from his death-
bed, in remembrance of some former affection.

Yet deep as were the love and power of song, the true
lyric throb of heart, within him, it was not as a lyrist or
song-writer that he first became famous. The Kilmar-
nock volume, which carried him at once to the height of
poetic fame, contained only three songs, and these,
though full of promise, are perhaps not his best. A
song which he addressed to an early love, while he was

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 21 1

still young and innocent, composed before almost any
of his other poems, has a tenderness and delicacy reached
in only a few of his later love-songs, and was the first
of his productions which revealed his lyric genius :

'Yestreen, when to the trembling string
The dance gaed through the lighted ha',
To thee my fancy took its wing,
I sat, but neither heard nor saw ;
Though this was fair, and that was braw,
And yon the toast of a' the town,
I sigh'd, and said among them a',
"Ye are na Mary Morison."

O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace,
Wha for thy sake wad gladly die ?
Or canst thou break that heart of his,
Whase only faut was loving thee ?
If love for love thou wilt na gie.
At least be pity to me shown !
A thought ungentle canna be
The thought o' Mary Morison.'

It was during the last eight years of his life that Burns
threw his whole genius into song. Many have been the
lamentations over this. Scott has expressed his regret
that in his later and more evil days Burns had no
fixed poetic purpose, — did not gird himself to some
great dramatic work, such as he once contemplated.
Carlyle has bewailed that ' our son of thunder should
have been constrained to pour all the lightning of his
genius through the narrow cranny of Scottish song, —
the narrowest cranny ever vouchsafed to any son of
P 2

212 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

thunder.' We may well regret that his later years were
so desultory ; we cannot but lament the evil habits to
which latterly he yielded ; we may allow that the sup-
plying two collections with weekly cargoes of song must
have ' degenerated into a slavish labour, which no genius
could support.' All this may well be granted, and yet
we cannot but feel that Burns was predestined, alike by
his own native instinct and by his outward circumstances,
to be the great song-maker of his country, — I might say,
of the world. Song was the form of literature which he
had drunk in from his cradle ; it was a realm with which
he was more familiar — into which he had keener insight
— than any one else. He had longed from boyhood to
shed upon the unknown streams of his native Ayrshire
some of the power which generations of minstrels had
shed upon Yarrow and Tweed. He tells us in his own
vernacular verse that from boyhood he had
' Ev'n then a wish (I mind its power),
A wish that to my latest hour
Shall strongly heave my breast.
That I for poor old Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or book could make.
Or sing a song at least.'
He had a compassionate sympathy for the old nameless
song-makers of his country, lying in their unknown
graves, all Scotland over. When he had leisure for a
few brief tours, he went to gaze on the places, the names
of which were embalmed in their old melodies ; he sought
out their birthplaces, and looked feelingly upon the

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 213

graves where they lie buried, as Wilson beautifully says,
in kirkyards that have ceased to exist, and returned to
the wilderness. The moulds which those old singers had
bequeathed him, the channels they had dug, Burns gladly
accepted, and into these he poured all the fervour of his
large and melodious heart. He perceived how great
capabilities lay in the old vernacular Lowland dialect,
and in the pastoral form and style of the old Scottish
songs, availed himself of these, expanded and enriched
them ; — this he did, but more than this : he entered with
his whole soul into the old airs and melodies with which
the earliest songs were associated, and these old melodies
became his inspirers. He tells us that he laid it down as
a rule, from his first attempts at song-writing, to sound
some old tune over and over, till he caught its inspira-
tion. He never composed a lyric without first crooning
a melody to himself, in order to kindle his emotion, and
regulate the rhythm of his words. Sometimes he got an
old woman to hum the tune to him ; sometimes the village
musician to scrape it on his fiddle, or a piper to drone
it on his bagpipe ; oftener his own wife sang it aloud
to him, with her wood-note wild. And so his songs are
not, like many modern ones, set to music ; they are
themselves music, conceived in an atmosphere of music,
rising out of it, and with music instinct to their last
syllable. But the essential melody that was in him
might have effected little, if he had not possessed a
large background of mind to draw upon ; a broad and

214 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

deep world of thought and feeling to turn to melody ;
a nature largely receptive of all beauty, of all influences
from man and the outward world ; most tender sen-
sibility ; vivid and many-sided sympathy with all that
breathes ; passionate, headlong impulse,— all these forces
acting from behind, and through an intellect, perhaps
the most powerful of his time, and driving it home with
penetrating insight to the very core of men and things.
Yet keen as was his intellect, no one knew so well as
Burns, that in song-writing intellect must be wholly
subordinate to feeling ; that it must be sheathed and
gently charmed ; that if for a moment it is allowed to
preponderate over feeling, the song is killed. It is the
equipoise and perfect intermingling of thought and
emotion, the strong sense latent through the prevailing
melody, that makes Burns's songs what they are, the
most perfect the world has seen. Happy as a singer
Burns was in this, that his own strong nature, his birth,
and all his circumstances, conspired to fix his interest
on the primary and permanent affections, the great fun-
damental relations of life, which men have always with
them, — not on the social conventions and ephemeral
modes, which are here to-day, forgotten in the next
generation. In this how much happier than Moore or
B^ranger, or other song-writers of society living in a
late civilisation ! Burns had his foot on the primary
granite, which is not likely to move, while anything on
earth remains steadfast.

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 215

Consider, too, the perfect naturalness, the entire spon-
taneity, of his singing. It gushes from him as easily,
as clearly, as sunnily, as the skylark's song does. In
this he surpasses all other song-composers. In truth,
when he is at his best, when his soul is really filled with
his subject, it is not composing at all ; the word is not
applicable to him. He sings because he cannot help
singing, — because his heart is full, and could not other-
wise relieve itself.

Consider, again, while his songs deal with the primary
emotions, the permanent relations and situations of
human nature, how great is the variety of those moods
and feelings^ how large the range of them, to which he
has given voice! One emotion with him, no doubt,
is paramount, — that of love. And it must be owned
that he allows the amatory muse too little respite.
As our eye ranges over his songs, we could wish that,
both for his own peace, and for our satisfaction, he had
touched this note more sparingly. As Sir Walter says,
' There is evidence enough, that even the genius of
Burns could not support him in the monotonous task of
writing love-verses on heaving bosoms and sparkling
eyes, and twisting them into such rhythmical form as
might suit Scotch reels, ports, and strathspeys.'

Yet, allowing all this, when he was really serious,
how many phases of this emotion has he rendered into
words which have long since become a part of the
mother tongue! What husband ever breathed to his

3l6 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [VII.

absent wife words more natural and beautiful than
those in

' Of a' the airts the winds can blaw ? '
When did blighted and broken-hearted love mingle
itself with the sights and sounds of nature more touch-
ingly than in

'Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon,
How can ye blume sae fair !
How can ye chant, ye Httle birds,
And I sae fu' o' care ? '

Where is the wooing-match that for pointed humour
and drollery can compare with that of Duncan Gray,
when ' Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig,' and Duncan ' spak
o' lowpin o'er a linn ! ' These are lines that for happy
humour none but Burns could have hit ofif. Many more
of his love-songs are equally felicitous, but there is a
limitation. It has been remarked, and I think truly,
of Bums's love- songs that their rapture is without
reverence. The distant awe, with which chivalry ap-
proaches the loved one it adores, is unknown to him ; it
was Scott's privilege above all poets to feel and express
this. Perhaps Burns made some slight approach toward
this more refined sentiment in his love-song after the
manner of the old minstrels : —

' My luve is like a red, red rose
That 's newly sprung in June :
My luve is like a melodic
That 's sweetly play'd in tune.'

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 217

And again in that early song of his to Mary Morison,
which has been already quoted.

Besides those effusions of young ardour in which
he generally indulges, how well has he conceived and
depicted the sober certainty of long-wedded love in
the calm and cheerful pathos of ' John Anderson, my
jo, John ! '

One emotion, no doubt, was paramount with Burns,
and yet how many other moods has he rendered !
What can be simpler, easier, one might think, to com-
pose than such a song as ' Should auld acquaintance be
forgot ' } Yet who else has done it ? There is about
this song almost a biblical severity, such as we find in
the words of Naomi, or of one of the old Hebrew patri-
archs. For, as has been said, the whole inevitable
essential conditions of human life, the whole of its plain,
natural joys and sorrows, are described, — often they are
only hinted at, — in the Old Testament as they are
nowhere else. In songs like 'Auld Lang Syne,' Burns
has approached nearer to this biblical character than
any other modern poet. Again, if wild revelry and
bacchanalian joy must find a voice in song, what utter-
ance have they found to compare with 'Willie brewed
a peck of maut ' ? Certainly not the ' Nunc est biben-
dum' of Horace. The heroic chord, too, Burns has
touched with a powerful hand in ' Scots, wha hae.' The
great Scotchman, lately departed, has said of it, ' As
long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchmen,

2l8 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

or of man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war
ode, the best, I believe, that was ever written by any
pen.' To this oracle I suppose every Scotchman must
say, Amen. And yet I have my own misgivings. I
think that it is to the charm of music and old asso-
ciations rather than to any surpassing excellence in the
words that the song owes its power. Another mood is
uttered, a strange wild fascination dwells, in the defiant
Farewell of Macpherson, the Highland Reever, who

' lived a life of sturt and strife,
And died df treachery ; '

to whose last words Burns has added this matchless
chorus : —

' Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,

Sae dauntingly gaed he ;
He play'd a spring and danc'd it round,
Below the gallows tree.'

Last of all, I shall name ' A man 's a man for a' that.^
which, though not without a touch of democratic bitter-
ness, contains lines that are for all time : —

' The rank is but the guinea's stamp ;
The man's the gowd for a' that.'

These are but a few samples of the many mental
moods which Burns has set to melody. He composed in
all nearly three hundred songs. Of these from thirty
to forty represent him at his best, at the highest flood-
mark of his singing power. They are perfect in sen-
timent, perfect in form. Amid all that was sad and

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 219

heart-depressing in his later years, the making of these
songs was his comfort and deh'ght. Besides the solace
he had in the exercise of his powers, he found satis-
faction in the thought that he was doing something
to atone for the waste of the great gifts with which he
had been entrusted. Of these three hundred songs some
were founded on old words which he took, retouched,
or recast ; sometimes an old verse or line served as the
hint, whence he struck off an original song, far better
than the lost one. For others he made new words from
beginning to end, keeping to some old tune, and pre-
serving the native pastoral style and vernacular dialect.

Every one of them contains some touch of tenderness
or humour^ or some delicate grace or stroke of power,
which could have come from no other but his master
hand. And to his great credit be it ever remembered
that in doing this he purified the ancient songs from
much coarseness, and made them fit to be heard in
decent society. The poems, and even some of the
songs, of Burns are not free from grossness, which he
himself regretted at the last. But in justice to his
memory it should ever be borne in mind how many
3ongs he purged of their coarser element, — how many
tunes he found associated with unseemly words, and
left married to verses, pure and beautiful, of his own
composing. Those old Scottish melodies, said Thomas
Aird, himself a poet, 'sweet and strong though they
were, strong and sweet, were all the more, for their

220 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from
the indecent words to which many of them had been
set. How was the plague to be stayed ? All the
preachers in the land could not divorce the grossness
from the music. The only way was to put something
better in its stead. That inestimable something, not to
be bought by all the mines of California, Burns gave
us. And in doing so, he accomplished a social reform
beyond the power of pulpit or parliament to effect.'

That which we have seen to be the native quality
of Scottish song Burns took up and carried to a higher
effect. The characteristics of the best old Scottish
songs, and pre-eminently of the best songs of Burns,
are : — (i) Absolute truthfulness ; truthfulness to the great
facts of life ; truthfulness also to the singer's own feel-
ings,— what we mean by sincerity. (2) Perfect natural-
ness : the feeling embodies itself in a form and language
as natural to the poet as its song is to the bird. This
is what Pitt noted when he said of Burns' poems that no
verse since Shakespeare's 'has so much the appearance
of coming sweetly from nature.' I should venture to
hint, that in this gift of perfect spontaneity Burns was
even beyond Shakespeare. (3) What is perhaps but
another form of the same thing, you have in Burns'
songs what, in the language of logicians, I would call the
' first intention ' of thought and feeling. You overhear
in them the first throb of the heart, not meditated over,
not subtiKsed or refined, but projected warm from the

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 221

first glow. (4) To this effect, his native Scottish ver-
nacular, which no one has ever used like Burns, contri-
buted I know not how much. That dialect, broadening
so many vowels and dropping so many consonants,
lends itself especially to humour and tenderness, and
brings out many shades of those feelings which in
English would entirely evaporate. Nothing, I think,
more shows the power of Burns than this, that a dialect,
which but for him would have perished ere now, he
has made classical, — an imperishable portion of the
English language. This is but one way of putting a
broader and very striking fact : that while everything
about Burns would seem to localise and limit his in-
fluence, the language he employed, the colouring, the
manner, the whole environment, — he has informed all
these with such strength and breadth of catholic humanity,
that of every emotion which he has sung, his has be-
come the permanent and accepted language wherever
the English tongue is spoken.

Scottish song, I have said, culminated in Burns. I
might have gone further, and said that he gave to
the song a power and a dignity before undreamt of.
What Wordsworth said of Milton's sonnets may equally
be said of Burns' songs — in his hand the thing became
a trumpet —

'whence he blew
Soul-animating strains.'

Is there any other form of poetry or of literature

222 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

which so lays hold of the heart, — which penetrates
so deep, and is remembered so long? Although no
singer equal to Burns has arisen in Scotland since
his day, or will again arise, yet, in the generation
which followed him, song in his country gained a new
impetus from what he had done for it. Tannahill,
the Ettrick Shepherd, Walter Scott, Lady Nairn, Hugh
Ainslie, and many more, each made their contribution
to swell the broad river of their country's song. Other
nameless men there are who will yet be remembered
in Scotland, each as the author of one unforgotten song.
Lady Nairn, I am apt to fancy, is almost our best song-
composer since Burns. She has given us four or five
songs, each in a different vein, which might be placed
next after, perhaps even beside, the best of Burns.

Whether the roll of Scottish song is not now closed,
is a thought which will often recur to the heart of those
who love their country better for its songs' sake. The
melodies, the form, the language, the feeling, of those
national lyrics belong to an early state of society. Can
the old moulds be stretched to admit modern feeling,
without breaking? Can the old root put forth fresh
shoots amid our modern civilisation? Are not school
boards and educational apparatus doing their best to
stamp out the grand old dialect, and to make the
country people ashamed of it ? Can the leisure and the
full-heartedness, in which song is born, any longer
survive, amid the hurry of life, the roar of railways,

VIL] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 223

the clash of machinery, the universal devotion to manu-
facture and money-making ? I should be loth to answer
No ; but I must own to a painful misgiving, when I
remember that during the present generation, that is,
during the last thirty years, Scotland has produced no
song which can be named along with our old favourites.

I said that Burns had given a voice to a wide range of
emotion, — to many moods ; I did not say to all moods, —
that would have been to exaggerate. There is the whole
range of sentiment which belongs to the learned and
the philosophic, that which is born of subtle, perhaps
over-refined intellect, which he has not touched. No
Scottish song has touched it. Into that region it could
not intrude without abrogating its nature and destroying
its intrinsic charm. That charm is that it makes us
breathe awhile the air of the mountains and the moors,
not that of the schools. But Scottish song is limited
on another side, which it is not so easy to account for.
There is little, almost no, allusion to religion in it. It is
almost as entirely destitute of the distinctively Christian
element, as if it had been composed by pagans. Cer-
tainly, if we wished to express any peculiarly Christian
feeling or aspiration, we should have to look elsewhere
than to these songs. Had this been confined to the
lyrics of Burns, it might have been explained by the
fact, that he, though not without a haunting sense of
religion, lived a life which shut him out from its serener
influences ; he never had the ' heart set free,' from

224 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. [vil.

which alone religious poetry can flow. But the same
want is apparent in almost all Scottish songs of every
age. The Scotch have passed hitherto for a religious
people, and, we may hope, not without reason. Yet
there is hardly one of their popular songs which breathes
any deep religious emotions, which expresses any of
those thoughts that wander towards eternity. This is
to be accounted for partly by the fact, that the early
Scottish songs were so mingled with coarseness and
indecency, that the teachers of religion and guardians
of purity could not do otheru'ise than set their face
against them. Song and all pertaining to it got to
be looked upon as irreligious. Moreover, the old stern
religion of Scotland was somewhat repressive of natural
feeling, and divided things sacred from things profane by
too rigid a partition ; and songs and song-singing were
reckoned among things profane. Yet the native melo-
dies were so beautiful, and the words, notwithstanding
their frequent coarseness, contained so much that was
healthful, so much that was intensely human, that they
could not be put down, but kept singing themselves
on in the hearts and homes of the people, in spite of all
denunciations. In the old time, it was often the same
people who read their Bibles most, whose memories
were most largely stored with these countless melodies.
As a modern poetess has said,

'They sang by turns
The psalms of David and the songs of Burns.'

VII.] SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS. 2^5

Lady Nairn, who was a religious person, and yet
loved her country's songs, and felt how much they
contain, which, if not directly religious, was yet 'not
far from the kingdom of heaven,' desired to remove
the barrier ; and she sang one strain, The Land d the
Leal, which, even were there none other such, would
remain to prove how little alien to Christianity is the
genuine sentiment of Scottish song, — how easily it can
rise from true human feeling into the pure air of spiritual
religion. If any Scottish religious teacher of modern
times possessed a high spiritual ideal, and could set
forth the stern side of righteousness, it was Edward
Irving ; yet in his devoutest moods he could still
remember the melodies and songs he had loved in
childhood. With a passage from his sermon on Religious
Meditation, I shall conclude : ' I have seen Sabbath
sights and joined in Sabbath worships which took
the heart with their simplicity and thrilled it with
sublime emotions. I have crossed the hills in the sober,
contemplative autumn to reach the retired, lonely church
betimes ; and as we descended towards the simple edifice,
whither every heart and every foot directed itself from
the country around on the Sabbath morn, we beheld
issuing from every glen its little train of worshippers
coming up to the congregation of the Lord's house,
round which the bones of their fathers reposed. In
so holy a place the people assembled under a roof,
where ye of the plentiful South would not have lodged
Q

226 SCOTTISH SONG, AND BURNS.

the porter of your gate ; but under that roof the people
sat and sang their Maker's praise, " tuning their hearts,
by far the noblest aim," and the pastor poured forth
to God the simple wants of the people, and poured into
their attentive ears the scope of Christian doctrine and
duty. The men were shepherds, and came up in their
shepherd's guise, and the very brute, the shepherd's
servant and companion, rejoiced to come at his feet.
It was a Sabbath, — a Sabbath of rest ! But were
the people stupid ? Yes, what an over-excited citizen
would call stupid ; that is, they cared not for Parlia-
ments, for plays, routs, or assemblies, but they cared
for their wives and their children, their laws, their reli-
gion, and their God ; and they sang their own native
songs in their own native vales, — songs which the men
I speak of can alone imagine and compose. And from
them we citizens have to be served with songs and
melodies, too, for we can make none ourselves.'

CHAPTER VIII.

SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET.

So many biographies, records, and criticisms, of
Shelley have lately appeared that one may take for
granted in all readers some genera,! acquaintance with
the facts of his life. Of the biographies, none perhaps
is more interesting than the short work by Mr. J. A.
Symonds, which has lately been published as one of
the series, edited by Mr. Morley, English Men of
Letters. That work has all the charm which intense
admiration of its subject, set forth in a glowing style
can lend it. Those who in the main hold with Mr.
Symonds, and are at one with him in his fundamental
estimate of things, will no doubt find his work highly
attractive. Those, on the other hand, who do not
altogether admire Shelley's character or the theories
that moulded it, will find Mr. Symonds's work a less
satisfactory guide than they could have wished. Of the
many comments and criticisms on Shelley's character
and poetry two of the most substantial and rational
are an essay by Mr. R. H. Hutton, and one by the
late Mr. Walter Bagehot. These two friends had to-
gether in their youth felt the charm of Shelleyj and

228 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [vill.

each in his riper years has given his estimate of the
man and of his poetry. We all admire that which we
agree with ; and nowhere have I found on this subject
thoughts which seem to me so adequate, and so helpful,
as those contained in these two essays — none which give
such insight into Shelley's abnormal character, and into
the secret springs of his inspiration. Of the benefit of
these thoughts I shall freely avail myself, whenever they
seem to throw light upon my subject.

The effort to enter into the meaning of Shelley's
poetry is not altogether a painless one. Some may
ask, Why should it be painful .'' Cannot you enjoy his
poems merely in an aesthetic way, take the marvel
of his subtle thoughts, and the magic of his melody,
without scrutinising too closely their meaning or moral
import } This, I suppose, most of my hearers could do
for themselves, without any comment of mine. Such a
mere surface, dilettante way of treating the subject might
be entertaining, but it would be altogether unworthy
of this place. All true literature, all genuine poetry, is
the direct outcome, the condensed essence, of actual
life and thought. Lyric poetry for the most part is —
Shelley's especially was — the vivid expression of per-
sonal experience. It is only as poetry is founded on
reality that it has any solid value ; otherwise it is worth-
less. Before, then, attempting to understand Shelley's
lyrics, I must ask what was the reality out of which they
came — that is, what manner of man Shelley was, what

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 229

were his ruling views of life, along what lines did his
thoughts move ?

Those who knew Shelley best speak of the sweetness
and refinement of his nature, of his lofty disinterested-
ness, his unworldliness. They speak too of something
like heroic self-forgetfulness. These things we can in a
measure believe, for there are in his writings many traits
that look like those qualities. And yet one receives
with some reserve the high eulogies of his friends ;
for we feel that these were not generally men whose
moral estimates we can entirely accept, and there were
incidents in his life which seem somewhat at variance
with the qualities they attribute to him. When Byron
speaks of his purity of mind, we cannot but doubt how
far Byron can be accepted as a good judge of purity.

One of his biographers has said that in no man was
the moral sense ever more completely developed than
in Shelley, in none was the perception of right and wrong
more acute. I rather think that the late Mr. Bagehot
was nearer the mark when he asserted that in Shelley
conscience, in the strict meaning of that word, never had
been revealed — that he was almost entirely without con-
science. Moral susceptibilities and impulses, keen and
refined, he had. He was inspired with an enthusiasm of
humanity after a kind ; hated to see pain in others, and
would willingly relieve it ; hated oppression, and stormed
against it ; but then all rule and authority he regarded as
oppression. He felt for the poor and the suffering, and

230 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [VIII.

tried to help them, and willingly would have shared
with all men the vision of good which he sought for
himself. But these passionate impulses are something
very different from conscience. Conscience first reveals
itself, when we become aware of the strife between a
lower and a higher nature within us — a law of the flesh
warring against the law of the mind. And it is out of
this experience that moral religion is born, the higher
law leading up to One whom that law represents. As
Canon Mozley has said, ' it is an introspection on which
all religion is built — man going into himself and seeing
the struggle within him ; and thence getting self-know-
ledge, and thence the knowledge of God." But Shelley
seems to have been conscious of no such strife, to have
known nothing of the inward struggle between flesh and
spirit. He was altogether a child of impulse — of impulse,
one, total, all-absorbing. And the impulse that came to
him he followed whithersoever it went, without question-
ing either himself or it. He was pre-eminently rols Ttadeaiv
aKoKovOrjTLKos, one who followed his passions unquestion-
ingly ; and Aristotle, we know, tells us that such an one is
no fit judge of moral truth. But this peculiarity, which
made him so little fitted to guide either his own life or
that of others, tended, on the other hand, to make him
pre-eminently a lyric poet. How it fitted him for this
we shall presently see. But abandonment to impulse,
however much it may contribute to lyrical inspiration,
is a poor guide to conduct ; and a poet's conduct in life,

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 231

of whatever kind it be, quickly reacts on his poetry.
It was so with Shelley.

It would be painful to revert to unhappy incidents,
and as needless as painful. But when one reads in Mr.
Symonds's book that Shelley's youth was 'strongly
moralised,' some incidents of his early years rise to
mind, which make ordinary persons ask with wonder,
what sort of morality it was wherewith he was ' moral-
ised.'

Partisans of Shelley will, I know, reply, ' You judge
Shelley by the conventional morality of the present day,
and, judging him by this standard, of course you at once
condemn him. Do you not know that it was against
these very conventions, which you call morality, that
Shelley's whole life was a protest .? He was the prophet of
something truer or better than this."" But was Shelley's
revolt only against the conventional morality of his own
time, and not rather against the fundamental morality
of all time? Had he merely cried out against the
stifling political atmosphere and the dry, dead ortho-
doxy of the Regency and the reign of George IV, and
longed for some ampler air, freer and more life-giving,
one could well have understood, even sympathised with,
him. His rebellion, however, was not against the limita-
tions and corruptions of his own day, but against the
moral verities which two thousand years have tested, and
which have been approved not only by eighteen Chris-
tian centuries, but no less by the wisdom of Virgil and

232 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [vill.

Cicero, of Aristotle and Sophocles. Shelley may be
the prophet of a new morality ; but it is one which never
can be realised till moral law has been obliterated from
the universe and conscience from the heart of man.

That he possessed many noble traits of character,
none can gainsay ; and yet it is impossible when reading
his life and his poetry not to feel that his nature must
have been traversed by some strange deep flaw, marred
by some radical inward defect. In some of his gifts and
impulses he was more, — in other things essential to
goodness, he was far less, — than other men ; a fully
developed man he certainly was not. I am inclined to
believe that, for all his noble impulses and aims, he was
in some way deficient in rational and moral sanity.
Many will remember HazHtt's somewhat cynical de-
scription of him ; yet, to judge by his writings, it looks
like truth. He has ' a fire in his eye, a fever in his
blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his
speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He
is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced.' This is
just the outward appearance we could fancy for his
inward temperament. What was that temperament ?

He was entirely a child of impulse, lived and longed
for high-strung and intense emotion — simple, all-absorb-
ing, all-penetrating emotion, going straight on in one
direction to its object, hating and resenting whatever
opposed its progress thitherward. The object which he
longed for was some abstract intellectualised spirit of

VIIL] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 233

beauty and loveliness, which should thrill his spirit, un-
ceasingly, with delicious shocks of emotion.

This yearning, panting desire is expressed by him in
a thousand forms and figures throughout his poetry.
Again and again this yearning recurs —

' I pant for the music which is Divine,

My heart in its thirst is a dying flower ;
Pour forth the sound like enchanted wine.

Loosen the notes in a silver shower ;
Like a herbless plain for the gentle rain
I gasp, I faint, till they wake again.

Let me drink the spirit of that sweet sound ;

More, O more ! I am thirsting yet ;
It loosens the serpent which care has bound

Upon my heart to stifle it ;
The dissolving strain, through every vein,
Passes into my heart and brain.'

It was not mere sensuous enjoyment that he sought,
but keen intellectual and emotional delight — the mental
thrill, the glow of soul, the ' tingling of the nerves,' that
accompany transcendental rapture. His hungry craving
was for intellectual beauty, and the delight it yields ;
if not that, then for horror ; anything to thrill the nerves,
though it should curdle the blood, and make the flesh
creep. Sometimes for a moment this perfect abstract
loveliness would seem to have embodied itself in some
creature of flesh and blood ; but only for a moment
would the sight soothe him — the sympathy would cease,
the glow of heart would die down — and he would pass

234 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [VIII.

on in hot insatiable pursuit of new rapture. ' There
is no rest for us,' says the great preacher, ' save in quiet-
ness, confidence, and affection.' This was not what
Shelley dreamed of, but something very different from
this.

The pursuit of abstract ideal beauty was one form
which his hungry, insatiable desire took. Another
passion that possessed him was the longing to pierce to
the very heart of the mystery of existence. It has been
said that before an insoluble mystery, clearly seen to be
insoluble, the soul bows down and is at rest, as before
an ascertained truth. Shelley knew nothing of this.
Before nothing would his soul bow down. Every veil,
however sacred, he would rend, pierce the inner shrine
of being, and force it to give up its secret. There is
in him a profane audacity, an utter awelessness. Intel-
lectual AiSws was to him unknown. Reverence was to
him another word for hated superstition. Nothing was
to him inviolate ; all the natural reserves he would
break down. Heavenward, he would pierce to the
heart of the universe and lay it bare ; manward, he
would lay bare the inner precincts of personality. Every
soul should be free to mingle with any other, as so many
raindrops do. In his own words,

' The fountains of our deepest life shall be
Confused in passion's golden purity.'
However fine the language in which such feelings may
clothe themselves, in truth they are wholly vile ; there

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 235

is no horror of shamelessness which they may not
generate. Yet this is what comes of the unbridled
desire for 'tingling pulses,' quivering, panting, fainting
sensibility, which Shelley everywhere makes the supreme
happiness. It issues in awelessness, irreverence, and
what some one has called ' moral nudity.'

These two impulses both combined with another
passion he had — the passion for reforming the world.
He had a real, benevolent desire to impart to all men
the peculiar good he sought for himself — a life of free,
unimpeded impulse, of passionate, unobstructed desire.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — these of course ; but
something far beyond these — absolute Perfection, as he
conceived it, he believed to be within every man's
reach. Attainable, if only all the growths of history
could be swept away, — all authority and government,
all religion, law, custom, nationality, everything that
limits and restrains — and if every man were left open
to the uncontrolled expansion of himself and his im-
pulses. The end of this process of making a clean sweep
of all that is, and beginning afresh, would be that family
ties, social distinctions, government, worship, would dis-
appear, and then man would be king over himself, and
wise, gentle, just, and good. Such was his temperament,
the original emotional basis of Shelley's nature ; such,
too, some of the chief beliefs and aims towards which
this temperament impelled him. And certainly these
aims do make one think of the ' maggot in the brain.'

236 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [VIII.

But a temperament of this kind, whatever aims it turned
to, was eminently and essentially lyrical. Those thrills
of soul, those tingling nerves, those rapturous glows of
feeling, are the very substance out of which high lyrics
are woven.

The insatiable craving to pierce the mystery, of
course drove Shelley to philosophy for instruments to
pierce it with. During his brief life he was a follower of
three distinct schools of thought. At first he began
with the philosophy of the senses, was a materialist,
adopting Lucretius as his master, and holding that
atoms are the only realities, with, perhaps, a pervading
life of nature to mould them — that from atoms all
things come, to atoms return. Yet even over this
dreary creeds without spirit, immortality, or God, he
shouted a jubilant ' Eureka,' as though he had found in
it some new glad tidings.

From this he passed into the school of Hume— got
rid of matter, the dull clods of earth, denied both
matter and mind, and held that these were nothing but
impressions, with no substance behind them. This was
a creed more akin to Shelley's cast of mind than ma-
terialism. Not only dull clods of matter, but personality,
the ' I ' and the ' thou,' were by this creed eliminated,
and that exactly suited Shelley's way of thought. It
gave him a phantom world.

From Hume he went on to Plato, and in him found
still more congenial nutriment. The solid, fixed entities

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 237

— matter and mind — he could still deny, while he was
led on to believe in eternal archetypes behind all phe-
nomena, as the only realities. These Platonic ideas
attracted his abstract intellect and imagination, and
are often alluded to in his later poems, as in Adonais.
Out of this philosophy it is probable that he got the
only object of worship which he ever acknowledged,
the Spirit of Beauty — Plato's idea of beauty changed
into a spirit, but without will, without morality ; in his
own words —

' That Light whose smile kindles the universe.
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.'

To the moral and religious truths which are the back-
bone of Plato's thought he never attained. Shelley's
thought never had any backbone. Each of these suc-
cessively adopted philosophies entered into and coloured
the successive stages of Shelley's poetry ; but through
them all his intellect and imagination remained un-
changed.

What was the nature of that intellect ? It was wholly
akin and adapted to the temperament I have described
as his. Impatient of solid substances, inaccessible to
many kinds of truth, inappreciative of solid, concrete

238 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [VIII.

facts, it was quick and subtle to seize the evanescent
hues of things, the delicate aromas which are too fine
for ordinary perceptions. His intellect waited on his
temperament, and, so to speak, did its will — caught up,
one by one, the warm emotions as they were thrown
off, and worked them up into the most exquisite ab-
stractions. The rush of throbbing pulsations supplied
the materials for his keen-edged thought to work on,
and these it did mould into the rarest, most beautiful
shapes. This his mind was busy doing all his life long.
The real world, existence as it is to other minds, he
recoiled from — shrank from the dull gross earth which
we see around us — nor less from the unseen world of
Righteous Law and Will which we apprehend above us.
The solid earth he did not care for. Heaven — a moral
heaven — there was that in him which would not tolerate.
So, as Mr. Hutton has said, his mind made for itself
a dwelling-place, midway between heaven and earth,
equally remote from both, some interstellar region, some
cold, clear place

' Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,'
which he peopled with ideal shapes and abstractions,
wonderful or weird, beautiful or fantastic, all woven out
of his own dreaming phantasy.

This was the world in which he was at home ; he was
not at home with any reality known to other men. Few
real human characters appear in his poetry ; his own
pulsations, desires, aspirations, supplied the place of

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 239

these. Hardly any actual human feeling is in them ;
only some phase of evanescent emotion, or the shadow
of it, is seized — not even the flower of human feeling,
but the bloom of the flower, or the dream of the bloom.
A real landscape he has seldom described, only he has
caught his own impression of it, or some momentary
gleam, some tender light, that has fleeted vanishingly
over earth and sea. Nature he used mainly to cull
from it some of its most delicate tints, some faint
hues of the dawn or of the sunset clouds, to weave in
and colour the web of his abstract dream. So entirely
at home is he in this abstract shadowy world of his own
making, that, when he would describe common visible
things, he does so by likening them to those phantoms
of the brain, as though with these last alone he was
familiar. Virgil likens the ghosts by the banks of Styx
to falling leaves —

' Ouam multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo
Lapsa cadunt folia.'

Shelley likens falling leaves to ghosts. Before the
wind the dead leaves, he says,

' Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.'
Others have compared thought to a breeze. With
Shelley the breeze is like thought; the pilot spirit of
the blast, he says,

'Wakens the leaves and waves, ere it hath past,
To such brief unison as on the brain
One tone which never can recur has cast
One accent, never to return again.'

240 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [vill.

We see thus that nature, as it actually exists, has little
place in Shelley's poetry. And man, as he really is,
may be said to have no place at all.

Neither is the world of moral or spiritual truth there
— not the living laws by which the world is governed —
no presence of a Sovereign Will, no all-wise Personality,
behind the fleeting shows of time. The abstract world,
in which his imagination dwelt, is a cold, weird, unearthly,
unhuman place, peopled with shapes which we may
wonder at^ but cannot love. When we first encounter
these, we are fain to exclaim. Earth we know, and
Heaven we know, but who and what are ye ? Ye belong
neither to things human nor to things divine. After a
very brief sojourn in Shelley's ideal world, with its pale
abstractions, most men are ready to say with another
poet, after a voyage among the stars —

' Then back to earth, the dear green earth ;
Whole ages though I here should roam.
The world for my remarks and me
Would not a whit the better be :

I've left my heart at home.'

In that dear green earth, and the men who have lived
or still live on it, in their human hopes and fears, in their
faiths and aspirations, lies the truest field for the highest
imagination to work in. That is, and ever will be, the
haunt and main region for the songs of the greatest
poets. The real is the true world for a great poet, but
it was not Shelley's world.

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET, 241

Yet Shelley, while the imaginative mood was on him,
felt this ideal world of his to be as real as most men feel
the solid earth, and through the pallid lips of its phantom
people and dim abstractions he pours as warm a flood
of emotion, as ever poet did through the rosiest lips and
brightest eyes of earth-born creatures. Not more real
to Burns were his Bonny Jean and his Highland Mary,
than to Shelley were the visions of Asia and Panthea,
and the Lady of the Sensitive Plant, while he gazed upon
them. And when his affections did light, not on these
abstractions, but on creatures of flesh and blood, yet so
penetrated was his thought with his own idealism, that
he lifted them up from earth into a rarefied atmosphere,
and described them in the same style of imagery and
language, as that with which he clothes the phantoms
of his mind. Thus, after all, Shelley's imagination had
but a narrow tract to range over, because it took little
or no note of reality, and because, boundless as was his
fertility and power of resource within his own chosen
circle, the widest realm of mere brain-creation must
be thin and small, compared with the realities, which
exist both in the seen and the unseen worlds.

This is the reason why most of Shelley's long
poems are such absolute failures, while his short lyrics
have so wonderful a charm. Mere thrills of soul were
weak as connecting bonds for long poems. Distilled
essences and personified qualities were poor material, out
of which to build up great works. These things could
R

242 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [vill.

give neither unity, nor motive power, nor human Interest
to long poems. Hence the incoherence which all but
a few devoted admirers find in Shelley's long poems,
despite their grand passages and their splendid imagery.
In fact, if the long poems were to be broken up and
thrown into a heap, and the lyric portions riddled out
of them and preserved, the world would lose nothing,
and would get rid of not a little superfluity. An ex-
ception to this judgment is generally made in favour
of the Cenci\ but that tragedy turns on an incident so
repulsive that, notwithstanding its acknowledged power,
it can hardly satisfy any healthy mind.

On the other hand, single thrills of rapture, which
are insufficient to make long poems out of, supply
the very inspiration for the true lyric. It is this pre-
dominance of emotion, so unhappy to himself, which
made Shelley the lyrist that he was. When he sings
his lyric strains, whatever is least pleasing in him is
softened down, if it does not wholly disappear. What-
ever is most unique and excellent in him comes out at
its best — his eye for abstract beauty, the subtlety of his
thought, the rush of his eager pursuing desire, the splen-
dour of his imagery, the delicate rhythm, the matchless
music. These lyrics are gales of melody blown from a
far-off region, that looks fair in the distance. To enjoy
them it may perhaps be as well not to inquire too
closely what is the nature of that land, or to know too
exactly the theories and views of life of which these

VIIL] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 243

songs are the effluence. If we come too near, we
may find that there is poison in the air. Many a
one has read those lyrics, and felt their fascination,
without thought of the unhappy experience out of which
they have come. They understood 'a beauty in the
words, but not the words.' I doubt whether any one
after very early youth, any one who has known the
realities of life, can continue to take Shelley's best
songs to heart, as he can those of Shakespeare or the
best of Burns. For, however we may continue to
wonder at the genius that is in them, no healthy mind
will find in them the expression of its truest and best
thoughts.

Other lyric poets, it has been said, sing of what
they feel. Shelley in his lyrics sings of what he wants
to feel. The thrills of desire, the gushes of emo-
tion, are all straining after something seen afar, but
unattained, something distant or future ; or they are
passionate despair, — utter despondency for something
hopelessly gone. Yet it must be owned, that those
bursts of passionate desire after ideal beauty set our
pulses a-throbbing with a strange vibration, even when
we do not really sympathise with them. Even his
desolate wails make those for a moment seem to share
his despair who do not really share it. Such is the
charm of his impassioned eloquence, and the witchery
of his music.

Let us turn now to look at some of his lyrics in detail
R 2

244 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [vill.

The earliest of them, those of 1814, were written
while Shelley was under the depressing weight of mate-
rialistic belief, and at the time when he was abandoning
poor Harriet Westbrook. For a time he lived under
the spell of that ghastly faith, hugging it, yet hating
it ; and its progeny are the lyrics of that time, such
as Death, Mutability, Lines in a Country CJmrchyard.
These have a cold, clammy feel. They are full of
'wormy horrors,' as though the poet were one,

'who had made his bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black Death
Keeps record of the trophies won from Life,'

as though, by dwelling amid these things, he had hoped
to force some lone ghost

'to render up the tale
Of what we are.'

And what does it all come to? What is the lesson he
reads there?

'Lift not the painted veil which those who live

Call life. . . . Behind lurk Fear
And Hope, twin destinies, who ever weave

Their shadows o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.'

That is all that the belief in mere matter taught Shelley,
or ever will teach any one.

As he passed on, the clayey, clammy sensation is less
present. Even Hume's impressions are better than mere
dust, and the Platonic ideas are better than Hume's
impressions. When he came under the influence of

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 245

Plato his doctrine of ideas, as eternal existences and
the only realities, exercised over Shelley the charm it
always has had for imaginative minds ; and it furnished
him with a form under which he figured to himself his
favourite belief in the Spirit of Love and Beauty, as
the animating spirit of the universe — that for which
the human soul pants. It is the passion for this ideal
which leads Alastor through his long wanderings to die
at last in the Caucasian wilderness, without attaining it.
It is this which he apostrophises in the Hymn to Intel-
lectual Beauty, as the power which consecrates all it
shines on, as the awful loveliness to which he looks to
free this world from its dark slavery. It is this vision
which reappears in its highest form in Prometheus Un-
bound, the greatest and most attractive of all Shelley's
longer poems. That drama is from beginning to end
a great lyrical poem, or I should rather say a congeries
of lyrics, in which perhaps more than anywhere else
Shelley's lyrical power has highest soared. The whole
poem is exalted by a grand pervading idea, one which
in its truest and deepest form is the grandest we can
conceive — the idea of the ultimate renovation of man
and of the world. And although the powers, and pro-
cesses, and personified abstractions, which Shelley in-
voked to effect this end, are ludicrously inadequate, as
irrational as it would be to try to build a solid house
out of shadows and moonbeams, yet the high ideal
imparts to the poem something of its own elevation.

24^ SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [VIII.

Prometheus, the representative of suffering and strug-
gling humanity, is to be redeemed and perfected by
union with Asia, who is the ideal of beauty, the light
of life, the spirit of love. To this spirit Shelley looked
to rid the world of all that is evil, and to bring in the
diviner day. The lyric poetry, which is exquisite
throughout, perhaps culminates in the song in which
Panthea, one of the nymphs, hails her sister Asia, as

' Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle

With their love the breath between them ;

And thy smiles, before they dwindle.

Make the cold air fire ; then screen them

In those looks, where whoso gazes

Faints, entangled in their mazes.

Child of Light ! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them ;

As the radiant lines of morning

Through the clouds, ere they divide them ;

And this atmosphere divinest

Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest.

Lamp of Earth ! where'er thou movest,
The dim shapes are clad with brightness.

And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,

Till they fail, as I am failing,

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.'

The reply of Asia to this song is hardly less exquisite.
Every one will remember it : —

'My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 247

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing ;

And thine doth like an angel sit

Beside the helm, conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing ;

It seems to float ever, for ever,

Upon the many-winding river,

Between mountains, woods, abysses,

A paradise of wildernesses !
Till, like one in slumber bound.
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around
Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound.

Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions

In music's most serene dominions,
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.

And we sail on, away, afar

Without a course, without a star.
But, by the instinct of sweet music driven j

Till through Elysian garden islets

By thee, most beautiful of pilots,

Where never mortal pinnace glided,

The boat of my desire is guided :
Realms where the air we breathe is love,
Which in the winds on the waves doth move,
Harmonising this earth with what we feel above.'

In these two lyrics you have Shelley at his highest
perfection. Exquisitely beautiful as they are, they are,
however, beautiful as the mirage is beautiful, and as
unsubstantial. There is nothing in the reality of things
answering to Asia. She is not human, she is not divine.
There is nothing moral in her — no will, no power to
subdue evil ; only an exquisite essence, a melting love-
liness. There is in her no law, no righteousness ; some-

348 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [VIII.

thing which may enervate, nothing which can brace
the soul.

Perfect as is the workmanship of those lyrics in Prome-
theus and of many another, their excellence is lessened by
the material out of which they are woven being fantastic,
not substantial, truth. Few of them lay hold of real
sentiments which are catholic to humanity. They do
not deal with permanent emotions which belong to all
men and are for all time, but appeal rather to minds in a
particular stage of culture, and that not a healthy stage.
They are not of such stuff as life is made of. They will
not interest all healthy and truthful minds in all stages
of culture, and in all ages. To do this, however, is, I
believe, a note of the highest order of lyric poem.

Another thing to be observed is, that while the imagery
of Shelley's lyrics is so splendid and the music of their
language so magical, both of these are at that point of
over-bloom which is on the verge of decay. The imagery,
for all its splendour, is too ornate, too redundant, too
much overlays the thought, which has not strength
enough to uphold such a weight of ornament. Then, as
to the music of the words, wonderful as it is, all but
exclusive admirers of Shelley must have felt at times, as
if the sound runs away with the sense. In some of the
Promethms lyrics the poet, according to Mr. Symonds,
seems to have ' realised the miracle of making words,
detached from meaning, the substance of a new ethereal
music' This is, to say the least, a dangerous miracle to

VIII.J SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 249

practise. Even Shelley, overborne by the power of
melodious words, would at times seem to approach
perilously near the borders of the unintelligible, not to
say the nonsensical. What it comes to, when adopted as
a style, has been seen plainly enough in some of Shelley's
chief followers in our own day. Cloyed with overloaded
imagery, and satiated almost to sickening with alliterative
music, we turn for reinvigoration to poetry that is severe,
even to baldness.

The Prometheus Unbound was written in Italy, and
during his four Italian years Shelley's lyric stream flowed
on unremittingly, and enriched England's poetry with
many lyrics unrivalled in their kind, and added to its
language a new power. These lyrics are on the whole
his best poetic work. To go over them in detail would
be impossible, besides being needless. Perhaps his year
most prolific in lyrics was 1820, just two years before
his death. Among the products of this year were The
Sensitive Plant, The Cloud, The Skylark, Love's Philo-
sophy, Arethusa, Hymns of Pan, and of Apollo, all in
his best manner, with many besides these. About the
lyrics of this time two things are noticeable : more of
them are about things of nature than heretofore, and
several of them revert to themes of Greece.

Of all modern attempts to renovate Greek subjects,
there are, perhaps, none equal to these, unless it be
one or two of the Laureate's happiest efforts. They
take the Greek forms and mythologies, and fill them

250 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [vill.

with modern thought and spirit. And perhaps this is
the only way to make Greek subjects real and inter-
esting to us. If we want the very Greek spirit we
had better go to the originals, not to any reproductions.
It is thus he makes Pan sing —

'From the forests and highlands

We come, we come ;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb,
Listening to my sweet pipings.

Liquid Peneus was flowing.

And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing

The light of the dying day.

Speeded with my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,

And the nymphs of the woods and waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,

And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend or follow.
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.

I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven, and the giant wars.

And Love, and Death, and Birth,
And then I changed my pipings —
Singing how down the vale of Menalus

I pursued a maiden and clasped a weed :
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus !

It breaks in our bosom, and then we bleed :

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 251

All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.'

Of the lyrics on natural objects the two supreme ones
are the Ode on the West Wind and The Skylark. Of
this last nothing need be said. Artistically and poeti-
cally it is unique, has a place of its own in poetry ;
yet may I be allowed to express a misgiving, which
I have long felt, and others too may feel? For all its
beauty, perhaps one would rather not recall it, when
hearing the skylark's song in the fields on a bright
spring morning. The poem is not in tune with the
bird's song and the feelings it does, and ought to, awaken.
The rapture with which the strain springs up at first
dies down before the close into Shelley's ever-haunting
melancholy. Who wishes, when hearing the real skylark,
to be told that

' We look before and after,
And pine for what is not :
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught ' ?

If personal feeling must be inwrought into the living
powers of nature, let it be such feeling as is in keeping
with the object, appropriate to the time and place.
In this spirit is the invocation with which Shelley closes
his grand Ode to the West Wind, written the previous
year, 1819—

' Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is :
What if my leaves are fallen like its own !
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

252 SHELLEY AS A LYRLC POET. [VIII.

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit ! be thou me, impetuous one !

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth ;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy ! O Wind,

If W' inter comes, can Spring be far behind?'

This ode ends with some vigour, some hope ; but
that is not usual with Shelley. Every one must have
noticed how almost habitually his intensest lyrics —
those which have started with the fullest swing of
rapture — die down, before they close, into a wail of
despair. It is as though, when the strong gush of
emotion had spent itself, there was no more behind,
nothing to fall back upon, but blank emptiness and
desolation. It is this that makes Shelley's poetry so
unspeakably sad — sad with a hopeless sorrow that is
like none other. You feel as though he were a wan-
derer who has lost his way hopelessly In the wilderness
of a blank universe. True is Carlyle's well-known
saying, ' his cry is like the infinite inarticulate wailing of
forsaken infants.' In the wail of his desolation there are
many tones — some wild and weird, some defiant, some
full of desponding pathos.

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRLC POET. 253

The Lines zvritten in Dejection, on the Bay of Naples,
in 181 8, are perhaps the most touching of all his wails :
the words are so sweet, they seem, by their very sweet-
ness; to lighten the load of heart-loneliness :

' I see the Deep's untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown ;
I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown :
I sit upon the sands alone ;

The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet ! did any heart now share in my emotion.

Alas ! I have nor hope, nor health,

Nor peace within, nor calm around,
Nor that content, surpassing wealth,

The sage in meditation found.

Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are ;
I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away this life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,

Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.'

Who that reads these sighing lines but must feel for
the heart that breathed them ! Yet how can we be
surprised that he should have felt so desolate } Every
heart needs some stay. And a heart so keen, a spirit

254 SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. [vill.

so finely touched, as Shelley's,, needed, far more than
narrow and unsympathetic natures, a refuge amid the
storms of life. But he knew of none. His universe
was a homeless one ; it had no centre of repose. His
universal essence of love, diffused throughout it, con-
tained nothing substantial — no will that could control
and support his own. While a soul owns no law, is
without awe, lives wholly by impulse, what rest, what
central peace, is possible for it ? When the ardours of
emotion have died down, what remains for it, but
weakness, exhaustion, despair? The feeling of his
weakness awoke in Shelley no brokenness of spirit,
no self-abasement, no reverence. Nature was to him
really the whole, and he saw in it nothing but 'a
revelation of death, a sepulchral picture, generation
after generation disappearing, and being heard of and
seen no more.' He rejected utterly that other 'con-
solatory revelation which tells us that we are spiri-
tual beings, and have a spiritual source of life ' and
strength, above and beyond the material system. Such
a belief, or rather no belief, as his, can engender only
infinite sadness, infinite despair. And this is the deep
undertone of all Shelley's poetry.

I have dwelt on his lyrics because they contain little
of the questionable elements which here and there
obtrude themselves in the longer poems. And one
may speak of these lyrics without agitating too deeply
questions which at present I would rather avoid. Yet

VIII.] SHELLEY AS A LYRIC POET. 255

even the lyrics bear some impress of the source whence
they come. Beautiful though they be, they are like
those fine pearls which, we are told, are the products
of disease in the parent shell. All Shelley's poetry is,
as it were, a gale blown from a richly dowered but not
healthy land ; and the taint, though not so perceptible
in the lyrics, still hangs more or less over many of the
finest. Besides this defect, they are very limited in
their range of influence. They cannot reach the hearts
of all men. They fascinate only some of the educated,
and that probably only while they are young. The
time comes when these pass out of that peculiar sphere
of thought, and find little interest in such poetry.
Probably the rare exquisiteness of their workmanship
will always preserve Shelley^s lyrics, even after the
world has lost, as we may hope it will lose, sympathy
with their substance. But better, stronger, more vital
far are those lyrics which lay hold on the permanent,
unchanging emotions of man — those emotions which
all healthy natures have felt, and always will feel, and
which no new deposit of thought or of civilisation can
ever bury out of sight.

CHAPTER IX.

THE POETRY OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. — OSSIAN.

It was towards the end of August when I bethought
me of my Oxford audience, and of what I should say-
when next I met them. Around me was the flush of
the heather on all the braes ; before me the autumn
lights and shadows were trailing over the higher Bens.
With the power of the hills thus upon him, who could
turn to books? It seemed impossible for me to fix on
any subject which was not in keeping with the sights
on which my eyes were resting the while.

And then I thought of the countless throng of
strangers from England and from all lands, who at
that moment were crowding all the tourist thorough-
fares of the Highlands, visiting the usual lochs and
glens, and climbing, perhaps, some of the more famous
mountains. And I could not but feel how rarely any one
of these penetrates beyond the mere shell of what he sees,
or gets a glimpse into the heart of that mountain vision
which passes before him. It cannot be that they should.
They hurry for a week or ten days, which are all thej'
have leisure for, along the beaten tracks ; they catch

POETRY OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 257

from the deck of a crowded steamer or the top of a stage
coach, rapid views of mountains, moors, and sea-lochs,
which may for a moment please the eye and refresh
the spirits. But it is not thus that the mountain soH-
tudes render up their secret, and melt into the heart.
A momentary glance at the pine woods of Rothie-
murchus, and the granite cliffs of the Cairngorm,
snatched from a flying railway-train is better than
Cheapside ; that is all. Even those more fortunate
ones who can pass a month at a shooting lodge in some
Highland glen, or by some blue sea-loch, are for the
most part so absorbed in grouse-killing or deer-stalking,
that they have seldom eye or ear for anything beside.

Those only have a chance of knowing what the real
Highlands are, who go with hearts at leisure to see and
to feel, and who ' go all alone the while ' : some adven-
turous wanderer, who has had the gentle hardihood to
leave the crowded tourist-paths, with their steamers and
hotels, and setting his face, unattended, to the wilder-
ness, has been content to shelter for nights together be-
neath some huge boulder-stone, or in a cave, or under the
roof of crofter, keeper, or shepherd ; or some deer-stalker
who has lain for hours in the balloch or hill-pass, waiting
till the antlered stag came by; or the grouse-shooter,
who, when wearied with a whole day's walking, has sat
down towards evening on some western hill-side, and
watched the sun going down to the Atlantic Isles. At
such seasons the traveller and the sportsman, while his
S

258 THE POETRY OF THE [ix.

eye went dreaming over the dusky waste, and ear and
heart were awake to receive the lonely sounds of the
desert, and to let these, and the great silence that
encompasses them, melt into his being ; at such seasons
it was, that he perhaps became aware how vast a world
of unuttered poetry lies all dumb in those great wilder-
nesses— poetry of which the best words of the best
poets, who have essayed to give voice to it, are but a
poor, inadequate echo.

Some features of that country's scenery, and some
human feelings and habits which it has fostered, have
expressed themselves in songs of the native Gaelic-
speaking bards, which for force and vividness no foreign
language can equal. To succeed, however imperfectly,
in conveying even a faint notion of this Gaelic poetry,
might be serviceable in several ways.

As modern civilisation has, whether for good or evil,
willed that all the Scottish Highlands shall be a vast
playground or hunting-field for the rich Southron, it
might, perhaps, be well that the Southron should know
something more of the land and of the people amid
which he takes his summer pastime. The character
of the land appeals to every eye ; less apparent, but
not less marked and interesting, is the character of
the people, whose forefathers, ages ago, gave names
to its mountains and glens, which they still retain.
To know something about their native poetry might
help strangers to understand better, and appreciate

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 259

more highly, the noble qualities that lie hidden in these
Scottish Gael. There are facts in their history, and
traits in their character, which might benefit even
the most self-complacent stranger, if he could learn
to know and sympathise with them. Besides, to us
here accustomed to read the great standard poets, and
to measure all poetry by their model, it may be some
advantage to turn aside and look at a poetry, wholly
unlike that of England, Rome, or Greece ; a poetry
which is as spontaneous as the singing of the birds
and the beating of men's hearts ; a poetry which is, in
a great measure, independent of books and manu-
scripts ; a poetry which, if narrower in compass and
less careful in finish, is as intense in feeling, and as true
to nature and to man, as anything which the classical
literatures contain.

It is strange to think how long, and up to how late
a date, the whole world of the Scottish Gael lay out-
side of the political and the intellectual life not only of
England, but even of their neighbours, the Scottish
Lowlanders. From the time, A.D. 141 1, when on the
field of Harlaw it was finally decided that Saxon, not
Celt, should rule in Scotland, down to the time of
Montrose and Claverhouse, that is for two centuries and
a half, the Highlanders lay little heeded within their
own mountains, except when they descended in some
marauding raid upon the Lowland plains ; or when one
or another of the Royal Jameses plunged into the
S 2

26o THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

mountains to hang some rebellious chief, and quell his
turbulent clan. The first appearance of the clans in
modern history took place when they rose in defence
of the dethroned Stuarts, and enabled Montrose to
triumph at Inverlochy, and Viscount Dundee at Killie-
crankie. When they rose again, for the same cause, in
the Fifteen and the Forty-five, especially in the latter,
they so alarmed the minds of English politicians, that
in the rebound after the victory of Culloden these
exacted from the helpless Gael a bloody vengeance,
which is one of the darkest pages in England's history.
During the century when the Gael were throwing them-
selves with all their native ardour into the political
struggle, they were making no impression on England's
literature. This was first done nearly twenty years
after the Forty-five, when James MacPherson published
his translation of the so-called Epics of Ossian.

Of the great storm of controversy which MacPherson's
Ossian awakened, I shall say nothing at present. But
whether we regard the Ossianic Poems as genuine
productions of the ancient Gael, or fabrications of
MacPherson, there cannot be a doubt that in that
publication the Gael for the first time put in their
claim to be recognised on the field, not only of Eng-
land's, but of Europe's literature. Henceforth Highland
scenery and Celtic feeling entered as a conscious ele-
ment into the poetry of England and of other nations,
and touched them with something of its peculiar scnti-

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 261

ment. How real and penetrating this influence was,
hear in the eloquent words of Mr, Arnold in his sug-
gestive lectures on Celtic Literature. 'The Celts are the
prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion,
of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, MacPher-
son's Ossian, carried in the last century this vein like
a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to
criticise MacPherson's Ossian here. Make the part of
what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book,
as large as you please ; strip Scotland, if you like, of
every feather of borrowed plumes which, on the strength
of MacPherson's Ossian, she may have stolen from that
veins et major Scotia — Ireland ; I make no objection.
But there will still be left in the book a residue with the
very soul of the Celtic genius in it ; and which has the
proud distinction of having brought this soul of the
Celtic genius into contact with the nations of modern
Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody
Morven, and echoing Lora, and Selma with its silent
halls ! We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when
we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget
us ! Choose any one of the better passages in MacPher-
son's Ossian, and you can see, even at this time of day,
what an apparition of newness and of power such a strain
must have been in the eighteenth century.'

In his work on The Study of Celtic Literature^ from
which I have just quoted, Mr. Arnold lays his finger
with his peculiar felicity on the Celtic element which

252 THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

exists in the English nature, and shows how it is the
dash of Celtic blood in English veins, which has given
to it some of its finest, if least recognised, quality; how
the commingling of Celtic sentiment and sensibility with
Saxon steadiness and method has leavened our litera-
ture. I know nothing finer in criticism than the subtle
and admirable tact with which he traces the way in
which the presence of a Celtic sentiment has heightened
and spiritualised the genius of our best poets, has added
to the imagination of Shakespeare a magic charm, not
to be found even in the finest words of Goethe. This
line of thought, true and interesting as it is, has refer-
ence to the unconscious influence of the Celtic spirit on
Englishmen, who never once, perhaps, thought or cared
for anything Celtic. It would be a humbler and more
obvious task to trace, how the direct and conscious infil-
tration of the Celtic genius, from the time of MacPher-
son's Ossian, has told on our modern poets. But from
this I must refrain to-day ; and in what remains confine
myself strictly to the Gael of the Scottish Highlands
and their poetry.

I shall not venture to speak of the Celts in general,
much less of that very abstract thing called ' Celtism.'
For Celt is a wide word, which covers several very
distinct and different peoples. What is true of the
poetry of Wales is not true of the poetry of Ireland.
What is true of the poetry of Ireland cannot be said
of the poetry of the Scottish Gael. In all our talk

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 263

about Celts, let us never forget that there are two
main branches of the great Celtic race — the Cymri
and the Gael. Each of the two great branches had
its own distinct cycle of legends — or myths, if you
choose — on which were founded their earliest heroic
songs or ballads. The story of Arthur and his knights
sprang from the Cymri, and had its root probably
in some vicissitudes of their early history, when the
Saxons invaded their country and drove them to the
western shores of Britain. Latin chroniclers and French
minstrels, at a later day, took up the story of their
doings, and handed it on, transformed in character,
and invested with all the hues of mediaeval chivalry. It
is, in fact, an old Cymric legend, seen by us through
the haze which centuries of chivalric sentiment have
interposed. But, however transfigured, vestiges of the
Arthurian story linger to this day in all lands where de-
scendants of the Cymri still dwell — in Brittany, in Corn-
wall, in Wales, in the old Cymric kingdom of Strath-
Clyde. Merlin lies buried at Drummelzier-on-Tweed ;
Guenevre at Meigle, close to the foot of the so-called
Grampians; Arthur's most northern battle was fought,
according to Mr. Skene, near the foot of Loch Lomond.
But there all traces of Arthur cease ; beyond the High-
land line he never penetrated.

That Highland line, namely the mountain barrier
which stretches from Ben Lomond in a north-eastern
direction to the Cairngorms and the Deeside Mountains,

264 THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

encloses a whole world of legend as native to the Gael
of Scotland and Ireland, as the Arthurian legend is to
the lands of the Cymri. Where Arthui-'s story ends,
that of Fion and his Feinne begins.

Within that mountain barrier, all the Highlands of
Perthshire, Inverness-shire, and Argyll are fragrant with
memories of an old heroic race, called the Feinne, or
Fianntainean. Not a glen, hardly a mountain, but
contains some rock, or knoll, or cairn, or cave, named
from the Fenian warriors, whose memories people those
mountains like a family of ghosts. The language of the
native Gael abounds with allusions to them ; their names
are familiar in proverbs used at this hour.

Who were these Feinne ? To what age do they
belong ? Mr. Skene, our highest authority on all Celtic
matters, replies that they were one of those races which
came from Lochlan, and preceded the Milesian Scots,
both in Erin and in Alban. Lochlan is the most ancient
name of that part of North Germany which lies between
the mouths of the Rhine and the Elbe, before the name
was transferred to Scandinavia. From that North
German sea-board came the earliest race that peopled
Ireland, and Alban or the Scottish Highlands. During
their occupation, Ireland and the north of Scotland
were regarded as one territory, and the population
passed freely from one island to the other at a time
'when race, not territory, was the great bond of asso-
ciation.' Hence it came that the deeds and memories

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 265

of this one warrior race belong equally to both countries.
Each has its songs about the Fenian heroes ; each has
its local names taken from these, its ' Fenian topography.'
The question, therefore, often agitated, whether the
Fenian poetry belongs by right to Ireland or to Scot-
land, is a futile one. It belongs equally to both, for it
sprang from the doings and achievements of one warrior
race, which occupied both lands indifferently. I leave
Ireland to speak for itself, as it does very effectually
through the lectures of the late Professor O' Curry, and
other native writers. In the Western Highlands, to
quote the words of Mr. Skene, ' The mountains, streams,
and lakes, are everywhere redolent of names connected
with the heroes and actions of the Feinne, and show
that a body of popular legends, whether in poetry or
prose, arising out of these, and preserved by oral recita-
tion, must have existed in the country, where this
topography sprang up.' But, whether the events asso-
ciated with particular local names originally happened
in Scotland or in Ireland, must be left undetermined.

That songs about the Feinne, which had never been
committed to writing, had been preserved from time out
of mind by oral recitation among the native Gael, no
candid man who has examined the question can doubt.
The great Dr. Johnson would not believe this on any
evidence. But as one among innumerable witnesses
tells us, ' It was the constant amusement or occupation
of the Highlanders in the winter time to go by turns

266 THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

to each others' houses in every village, either to recite,
or hear recited or sung, the poems of Ossian, and other
songs and poems.' Almost all the native Gael could
recite some parts of these, but there were professed
Seannachies, or persons of unusual power of memory,
who could go on repeating Fenian poems for two or
three whole nights continuously. I have myself known
men who have often heard five hundred lines of con-
tinuous Fenian poetry recited at one time.

A little after the middle of the last century, when
James MacPherson began his wanderings in search of
these songs, the Highlands were full of such Ossianic
poetry, and of men who could recite it. I am not going
to retail the oft-told history of MacPherson's marvellous
proceedings, much less to plunge into the interminable
jungle of the Ossianic controversy. Those who may
desire to see the facts clearly stated will find this done
in Mr. Skene's Introduction to the book of the Dean of
Lismore, published in 1862, also in the very clear and
candid Dissertation prefixed by Dr. Clerk to his new
and literal translation of the Gaelic Ossian, published
in 1870. A condensed view of the present state of the
question will be found in a paper published inMacmillans
Magazine, for June 1871. Since this last date, new con-
tributions have been made to the subject, especially
by the publication of Mr. J. F. Campbell's Book of the
Feinne, in which he advocates a view entirely opposed to
that taken in the three publications already named.

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 267

Without at all entering into the controversy, I shall just
note the crucial point round which the whole question
turns. MacPherson published in 1762 an English trans-
lation of Fingal, an epic which he attributed to Ossian.
The next year, 1763, he published Temora, another
Ossianic epic. The genuineness of the two epics was
immediately challenged. MacPherson never published
the Gaelic originals while he lived, but he left them in
manuscripts, which after many vicissitudes were pub-
lished by the Highland Society in 1807. Of the Gaelic
Ossian, published by the Highland Society, a new trans-
lation, much more literal and exact than MacPherson's,
was made by Dr. Clerk of Kilmallie, in 1870. There
they now He side by side, the Gaelic Ossian, and the two
English versions, that of MacPherson, and that by
Dr. Clerk ; and the question now is, which is the original,
the Gaelic or the English ? Mr. Skene and Dr. Clerk
strongly maintain that the Gaelic shows undoubted
signs of being the original, and the English of being a
translation. These two are among the most eminent
Gaelic scholars now alive. On the other hand, Mr. J. F.
Campbell, an ardent collector of Gaelic tales and antique
things, if not so critical a Gaelic scholar as the two former,
contends as strongly for the English being the original,
from which he says the Gaelic has evidently been trans-
lated. Again, supposing, with Mr. Skene and Dr. Clerk,
that the Gaelic is the original, who composed the Gaelic ?
Among those who agree in holding the Gaelic to be the

268 THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

original, there are two divergent opinions as to the
composers of it. Some hold that the Gaelic was mainly
the composition of MacPherson and some of his friends,
who incorporated into it here and there certain ancient
fragments, but composed the larger portion of it them-
selves. It is further alleged that when the Gaelic had
been thus composed, MacPherson rendered it into the
stately, if sometimes tawdry, English, which we know as
Ossian. Others maintain that by far the larger portion
of the Gaelic is ancient, and that MacPherson supplied
only a few passages here and there to link together
his ancient originals. Hardly any one, however, is
prepared to argue that the long epics of Fingal and
Temora came down from a remote antiquity in the
exact form in which MacPherson published them. The
piecing together of fragments, often ill-adjusted and
incongruous, is too evident to allow of such a sup-
position.

The English and the Gaelic Ossian, as I said, lie
before us. Is it too much to hope that criticism may
yet decide the question? that some Gaelic Porson or
Bentley may yet arise, who shall apply to the documents
the best critical acumen, and pronounce a verdict which
shall be final, as to which of the two is the original,
which the translation ? If some one were to assert that
he had discovered a lost book of Homer, and were to
publish it with an English translation, the resources of
Greek scholarship are quite competent to settle whether

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 269

the Greek were authentic or a forgery. Why should not
Gaelic scholarship achieve as much ?

But even if we were to cancel all that has passed
through MacPherson's hands, whether Gaelic or English,
enough still is left of Ossianic poetry, both in the Dean
of Lismore's book, that dates from early in the sixteenth
century, and also in the gleanings of other collectors,
whose honesty has never been questioned, to prove that
the whole Highlands were formerly saturated with
heroic songs about the Feinne, and to enable us to know
what were the characteristics of this Fenian poetry. I
believe that the last reciters of Ossianic songs have
scarcely yet died out in the remoter Hebrides.

Who was this Ossian, and when did he live } His
exact date, even his century, no one can determine ; but
fragments, which are undoubtedly genuine, refer to a very
dim foretime, even to the centuries when Christianity
was yet young, and was struggling for existence against
old Paganism, in Erin and in Alba.

The conception of Ossian, not only in MacPherson,
but in the oldest fragments and in universal Highland
tradition, is one and uniform. He is the proto-bard, the
first and greatest of all the bards. Himself the son of
the great Fenian king Fionn, or Finn, and a warrior in
his youth, he survived all his kindred, and was left alone,
blind and forlorn, with nothing, but the memories of the
men he loved, to solace him. There he sits in his empty
hall, with the dusky wilderness around him, listening to

270 THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

the winds that sigh through the grey cairns, and to the
streams that roar down the mountains. No longer can
he see the morning spread upon the hilltops, nor the
mists as they come down upon their flanks. But in
these mists he believes that the spirits of his fathers and
his lost comrades dwell, and often they revisit him waking
or in dreams. One only comfort is left him, Malvina, the
betrothed of his hero son, Oscar, who had early fallen in
battle ; and the best consolation she can minister is to
raise her voice in the joy of song. As the sightless old
man sits in the last warmth of the setting sun, the days
of other years come back to him, and he is fain to sing
a tale of the times of old. And his song is of his father
Fion, the king of the Fenians, and of his deeds of
prowess, when he led his peers to battle against the
invading hosts of Lochlan. Those peers were the ' great
Cuchullin with his war chariot, the brown-haired and
beautiful Diarmid, slayer of the boar by which himself
was slain, the strong and valiant Gaul, son of Morni,
the rash Conan — a Celtic Thersites — the hardy Ryno,
the swift and gallant Cailta.' These all stand out before
the imagination of the Gael, as individual in their deeds
and their characters, as did the Homeric heroes before
the minds of the Greeks. All of them died before
Ossian, and, most pathetic of all, Oscar, his own son,
the pride and hope of the Feinne, died, treacherously
slain in the first bloom of his youth and valour.

As a sample of the average Ossianic style, let me give

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 271

a few lines of one of those fragments which MacPherson
published in 1760. These he put forth before he
knew they would have any literary value, and before
he brought out his epics ; so that, as Mr. Skene says,
there is little reason to doubt that they are genuine
ancient fragments. The one I am about to give he
afterwards incorporated as an episode in the first book
of Fingal, but this version is the literal unadorned ren-
dering of Dr. Clerk.

A warrior, called Du-chomar, meets a maiden, called
Morna, alone on the hill, and thus addresses her : —

' " Morna, most lovely among women,
Graceful daughter of Cormac,
Why by thyself in the circle of stones,
In hollow of the rock, on the hill alone ?
Streams are sounding around thee ;
The aged tree is moaning in the wind ;
Trouble is on yonder loch ;
Clouds darken round the mountain tops ;
Thyself art hke snow on the hill —
Thy waving hair like mist of Cromla,
Curling upwards on the Ben,
'Neath gleaming of the sun from the west ;
Thy soft bosom like the white rock
On bank of Brano of foaming streams."

" Then said the maid of loveliest locks,
Whence art thou, grimmest among men?
Gloomy always was thy brow ;
Red is now thine eye, and boding ill.
Sawest thou Swaran on the ocean?
What hast thou heard about the foe ? "

273 THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

He replies that he has seen or heard nothing, and then
goes on : —

" Cormac's daughter of fairest mien,
As my soul is my love to thee."

" Du-chomar," said the gentle maiden,

"No spark of love have I for thee ;

Dark is thy brow, darker thy spirit ;

But unto thee, son of Armin, my love.

Brave Cabad, Morna cleaves to thee.

Like gleaming of the sun are thy locks.

When rises the mist of the mountain.

Has Cabad, the prince, been seen by thee,

Young gallant, travelling the hills ?

The daughter of Cormac, O hero brave.

Waits the return of her love from the chase."

" Long shalt thou wait, O Morna,"

Said Du-chomar, dark and stem —

" Long shalt thou wait, O Morna,

For the fiery son of Armin.

Look at this blade of cleanest sweep —

To its very hilt sprang Cabad's blood.

"Hie strong hero has fallen by my hand ;

Long shalt thou wait, O Morna.

I will raise a stone o'er thy beloved.

Daughter of Cormac of blue shields.

Bend on Du-chomar thine eye ;

His hand is as thunder of the mountains."

" Has the son of Armin fallen in death?"

Exclaimed the maiden with voice of love.

" Has he fallen on the mountain high.

The brave one, fairest of the people ?

Leader of the strong ones in the chase.

Foe, with cleaving blows for ocean strangers .^

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 2^^

Dark is Du-chomar in his wrath ;

Bloody to me is thy hand ;

Mine enemy thou art, but reach me the sword —

Dear to me is Cabad and his blood." '

He gives her the sword, she plunges it in his breast.
Falling, he entreats her to draw the sword from his
wound. As she approaches he slays her.

One of the standing arguments used by Dr. Johnson
and others to prove that MacPherson's Ossimi was a
shameless imposture, was the generosity of heart, the
nobility of nature, and the refined and delicate senti-
ment, attributed in these poems to Fingal and his com-
rades ; if they lived when they were said to have lived,
they must, it was alleged, have been ferocious savages.
This, no doubt, was a natural objection. But one
fact is worth a world of such hypotheses. Here is
the description of Finn, as it is found in one of the
fragments of Ossianic song, about which no doubt can
be raised, for it has been preserved in the book of the
Dean of Lismore, and that was written about A.D. 1520.
The fragment when thus written down by the Dean was
attributed to Ossian, who then was reckoned a poet of
unknown antiquity. The following is the bare literal
translation of it :

' Both poet and chief,
Braver than kings,
Firm chief of the Feinne,
Lord of all lands.
Foremost always,
T

274 THE POETRY OF THE [ix.

Generous, just,
Despising a lie.
Of vigorous deeds
First in song,
A righteous judge,
Polished in mien.
Who knew but victory.
All men's trust.
Of noble mind,
Of ready deeds.
To women mild.
Three hundred battles
He bravely fought.
With miser's mind
Withheld from none.
Anything false
His lips never spake.
He never grudged.
No, never, Finn,
The sun ne'er saw king
Who him excelled.
Good man was Finn,
Good man was he ;
No gifts were given
Like his so free.'

This may not be very fine poetry, but it is an image
of noble manhood.

As a sample of an Ossianic battle-picture, take the
well-known description of the chariot of Cuchullin. The
passage has by MacPherson been incorporated into his
first book of Fingal, but later authorities refer it to a
different era and cycle of events. However this may
be, there is no doubt that the passage is very ancient,

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 275

for it has been recovered from old Highlanders, who
never read a word of MacPherson's Ossiaii, nor heard
of it. I give the translation not of MacPherson, but the
much more literal one lately done by Dr. Clerk.

Swaran, King of Lochlan (Scandinavia), has invaded
Erin, and sent forward a scout to reconnoitre, and bring
him word of the movements of the Irish host. This is
the description, with which the scout returns, of the
chariot and the appearance of Cuchullin, leader of the
warriors of Ulster : —

' Rise, thou ruler of the waves,
True leader of dark-brown shields,
I see the sons of Erin and their chief,
A chariot — the greatest chariot of war —
Moving over the plain with death,
The shapely swift car of Cuchullin.
Behind, it curves downward like a wave.
Or mist enfolding a sharp-cragged hill ;
The light of precious stones is about it.
Like the sea in the wake of a boat at night.
Of shining yew is the pole of it ;
Of well-smoothed bone the seat.
It is the dwelling-place of spears,
Of shields, of swords, and of heroes.

On the right side of the great chariot
Is seen a horse, high-mettled, snorting,
Lofty-crested, broad-chested, dark.
High-bounding, strong-bodied son of the mountain,
Springy, and sounding his hoof;
The spread of his forelock on high
Is like mist on the dwelling of deer ;
T 3

276 THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

Shining his coat, and swift
His pace — Si-fadda his name.

On the other side of the car
Is an arch-necked snorting horse :
Thin-maned, free-striding, deep-hoofed.
Swift-footed, wide-nostrelled son of the mountain,
Du-sron-gel the name of the gallant steed.
Full a thousand slender thongs
Fasten the chariot on high ;
The hard bright bit of the bridle
In their jaws is covered white with foam.
Shining stones of power
Wave aloft with the horses' manes-
Horses like mist on the mountain side.
Which onward bear the chief to his fame.
Keener their temper than the deer,
Strong as the eagle their strength,
Their noise is like winter fierce
On Gormal smothered in snow.

In the chariot is seen the chief,

True, brave son of the keen-cutting brand,

Cuchullin of blue-dappled shields.

Son of Semo, renowned in song.

His cheek like the polished yew ;

Clear, far-ranging his eye.

Under arched, dark, and slender brow ;

His yellow hair, down-streaming from his head,

Falls round the glorious face of the man,

As he draws his spear from his back.'

Then addressing Swaran, the scout exclaims —

' Flee thou great ruler of ships,
Flee from the hero who comes right on,
As a storm from the glen of torrents.'

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 277

If any one were carefully to compare Dr. Clerk's
version just given with that of MacPherson, he could
not fail to observe that, whenever they differ, the
former is more exact and graphic, preserving all the
edges, whereas the latter is vague, less definite^ more
declamatory. And this, as far as I have observed, is
characteristic of MacPherson's translations throughout.
He attains rhythmical flow, stateliness, sometimes sub-
limity, of language ; but for these he sacrifices the
realistic force, the sharpness of outline, and the vivid
exactness which belong to the Gaelic, and are faithfully
preserved in Dr. Clerk's rendering. If this is true, it
has a very close bearing on the question whether Mac-
Pherson's English, or his Gaelic Ossian is the original.

Perhaps I ought to refrain from quoting, or even from
alluding to, a passage so familiar to all readers of
Ossian, as the address or hymn to the Sun. But it is
so remarkable in itself, and is of such undoubted anti-
quity, having been recovered from many other sources
besides MacPherson, that I shall venture to presume on
the ignorance of at least some of my readers, and once
more to quote it.

Dr. Clerk's literal, word for word translation of it runs
thus —

' O thou that travellest on high,

Round as the warrior's hard full shield,

Whence thy brightness without gloom,

Thy light that is lasting, O sun !

Thou comest forth strong in thy beauty.

27^ THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

And the stars conceal their path;
The moon, all pale, forsakes the sky,
To hide herself in the western wave ;
Thou, in thy journey, art alone ;
Who will dare draw nigh to thee ?
The oak falls from the lofty crag ;
The rock falls in crumbling decay ;
Ebbs and flows the ocean ;
The moon is lost aloft in the heaven ;
Thou alone dost triumph evermore.
In gladness of light all thine own.

When tempest blackens round the world,

In fierce thunder and dreadful lightning,

Thou, in thy beauty, lookest forth on the storm.

Laughing mid the uproar of the skies.

To me thy light is vain.

Never more shall I see thy face.

Spreading thy waving golden-yellow hair,

In the east on the face of the clouds.

Nor when thou tremblest in the west,

At thy dusky doors, on the ocean.

And perchance thou art even as I,

At seasons strong, at seasons without strength,

Our years, descending from the sky.

Together hasting to their close.

Joy be upon thee then, O sun !

Since, in thy youth, thou art strong, O chief.'

This hymn to the Sun marks the highest pitch reached
by the Ossianic poetry ; if I may venture to say so, only
a httle below the description of the sun in the 19th
Psalm.

That sensitiveness to the powers of nature said to be

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 279

characteristic of the Celtic race, appears very impressively
stamped on the Ossianic remains. One might go on
quoting by the hour passages, in which the old poet, or
poets, have rendered the changing aspects of the moun-
tains, the ocean, and the sky. But, instead of this, I
shall give a specimen from a poem which belongs to an
older legend even than any of the Fenian cycle.

The subject of it is this. There was in Ulster a certain
Deirdre, the most beautiful woman of her time — a Celtic
Helen, only as faithful as Helen of Troy was faithless.
Conor, King of Ulster, loved her, but she preferred Naisi,
one of his chiefs ; and Naisi married Deirdre, and fled
with his two brothers and many of his clan to the coast
of Argyll. A long time they lived there in happiness,
these three sons of Uisnach, with their people, and Naisi
and Deirdre were supreme among them. At length Conor
summoned them back to Erin, and they, by some spell,
felt constrained to return. The King, finding that Deir-
dre was as beautiful as ever, treacherously slew her hus-
band and his brothers, but Deirdre would not yield, and
died, it is said, on the grave of the sons of Uisnach.

The following poem is her lament, as she sailed away
to Erin, and looked back on the lovely shores of Argyll,
which she felt she had left for ever :

' Beloved land, that Eastern land.

Alba with its wonders,

O that I might not depart from it,

But that I go with Naisi.

28o THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

Glen Massan, O Glen Massan !
High its herbs, fair its boughs,
Solitary was the place of our repose
On grassy Invermassan.

Glen Etive ! O Glen Etive !
There was raised my earliest home.
Beautiful its woods at sunrise,
When the sun struck on Glen Etive.

Glen Urchay! O Glen Urchay!
The straight glen of smooth ridges.
No man of his age was more joyful
Than Naisi in Glen Urchay.

Glendaruadh ! O Glendaruadh !

Each man who dwells there I love.

Sweet the voice of the cuckoo on bending bough.

On the hill above Glendaruadh.

Beloved is Draighen and its sounding shore.
Beloved the water over the clear pure sands.
O that I might not depart from the east,
Unless I go with my beloved.'

All the places here mentioned are well-known scenes
in Argyll, beloved to this day by the natives — pleasant
memories to m.any a stranger. This is the earliest poem
which celebrates the beauty of those West Highland
shores, and it is said to be one of the oldest poems in the
Gaelic tongue. It is found in a manuscript of the year
1238, and who can say how long before that it had
travelled down, living only on the lips of men ?

I wish I could go on to give more specimens of this
ancient poetry, for there are many more to give. This

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 281

only must be said : — that the people who in a rude age
could create poetry like that, and could so love it, as
to preserve it from generation to generation in their
memories, merit surely some better fate, than the con-
tempt and ill-treatment they have too often received
from their prosaic Saxon neighbours.

I have throughout indicated that I regard the body of
Ossianic poetry, which belongs to the Scottish Highlands,
and partly also to Ireland, as a genuine ancient growth.
Even were we to set down all that MacPherson pub-
lished as fabricated by himself, we should still have
in the fragments preserved in the Dean of Lismore's
book, in those collected by the Highland Society, and in
pieces gathered by other collectors of undoubted veracity,
enough to prove that it belonged to a remote antiquity.
How remote I do not venture to say, only I am inclined
to believe that it belonged to a time far back beyond the
mediaeval age. Neither have I said a word as to the
existence of one Ossian.

Mr. Skene has distinguished three separate and suc-
cessive stages in the creation of this poetry. At each
stage it assumed a different form. In its oldest form
there are pure poems of a heroic character, each poem
complete in itself, and formed on a metrical system of
alliteration and of rhyme, or correspondence of vowels.
For the other two forms I must refer to Mr. Skene's
Introduction. The poems of the oldest form are attri-
buted to one mythic poet ; but, whether one or many.

282 THE POETRY OF THE [iX.

it is natural to suppose that there must originally have
been one master-spirit, who struck the key-note of a
poetry, containing so much that was original, exalted,
and unique.

What the characteristic faults of the Gael are, we
have been well told by Dr. Arnold, and many other
writers. It is more to our purpose now, to note their
characteristic excellences, as these appear in their native
poetry.

The exquisite, penetrating sensibility which has been
so often noted as the basis of Celtic character, is fully
reflected in these Ossianic poems. Quickness to see,
quickness to feel, lively perceptions, deep, overpowering,
all-absorbing emotions, these, the exact opposite of the
Saxon temperament, tough, heavy, phlegmatic, are no-
where more conspicuous than in the Scottish Gael, and
in that early poetry which rose out of their deepest
nature, and has since powerfully reacted on it. This
liveliness of eye, and sensitiveness of heart, have been
noted as main elements of genius, and no doubt they
are.

One side of their sensibility is great openness to joy —
a sprightly, vivacious nature, loving dance and song.
The other side is equal openness to melancholy, to de-
spondency. Gleams intensely bright, glooms profoundly
dark, exaltations, depressions — these are the staple of
the Gael's existence, and of his poetry.

Turned on human life, this high-toned sensibility

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 283

makes the Gael, in poetry as well as in practice, venerate
heroes, cling to the heroic through all vicissitudes ;
though the heroes fall, die, and disappear, still he
remains faithful to their memories, loves these, and
only these. This fervid devotion to the memory of all
the Fenian warriors whom he had known, is a character-
istic note in Ossian, but it becomes quite a passionate
tenderness towards 'the household hearts that were
his own,' towards his father Fion, his brother Fillan,
his son Oscar. The laments he pours over this
latter exceed in their piercing tenderness anything
in Greek or Roman poetry, and recall some Hebrew
strains.

These feelings of devotion to their chiefs, and tenacity
of affection to their kindred, which we find in their
most ancient poetry, reappear in the Gael throughout
all their history, down to the present hour.

Again, this same sensibility made a lofty ideal of
life quite natural to the Gael, even before Christianity
had reached him ; made his heart open to admire the
generous and the noble, and imparted a peculiar delicacy
to his sentiments, and courtesy to his manners, — qualities
which, even after all he has undergone, have not yet
forsaken him. These qualities enter largely into the
Ossianic ideal. It is wonderful how free from all gross-
ness these poems are, how great purity pervades them.
There is, of course, the dark side to this picture : ferocity
of vengeance when enraged, recklessness of human life.

284 THE POETRY OF THE [ix.

As the counterpart of his devotion to the high and the
heroic, is the Gael's aversion to the commonplace routine
of life ; his contempt for the mechanical trades and arts.
To this day the native Gael in his own glens thinks
all occupations but that of the soldier, the hunter, and,
perhaps, the shepherd, unworthy of him. He carries
down to the present hour something of the Ossianic
conception, which recognises only the warrior and the
hunter.

Turned upon nature, their open sensibility is quick
to seize the outward aspect of things, but does not rest
there, cannot be satisfied with a homely realism ; is not
even content with the picturesque appearances, but
penetrates easily, rapidly, to the secret of the object,
finds its affinity to the soul ; in fact, spiritualises it.
This is that power of natural magic, which Mr. Arnold
makes so much of in his book on Celtic literature. The
impressionable Gael was, from the earliest time, greatly
under the power of the ever-changing aspects of earth
and sky. The bright side is in his poetry ; the sunrise
on the mountains, the sunset on the ocean, the softness
of moonlight, all are there touched with exceeding
delicacy. But more frequently still in Ossian, as be-
fitted his country and his circumstances, the melancholy
side of nature predominates. His poetry is full of
natural images taken straight from the wilderness ; the
brown heath, the thistle-down on the autumn air, the
dark mountain cairns, the sighing winds, the movements

IX.] SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. 385

of mist and clouds, silence and solitude — these are for
ever recurring in impressive monotone. Even to this
day, when one is alone in the loneliest places of the
Highlands, in the wilderness where no man is, on the
desolate moor of Rannoch, or among the grey boulders
of Badenoch, — when

' the loneliness
Loadeth the heart, the desert tires the eye ' —

at such a time, if one wished a language to express the
feeling that weighs upon the heart, where would one
turn to find it ? Not to Scott ; not even to Words-
worth— though the power of hills was upon him, if upon
any modern. Not in these, but in the voice of Cona
alone would the heart find a language that would relieve
it. It is this fact, that there is something which is of
the very essence of the Highland glens and mountains,
something unexpressed by any modern poet, but which
the old Ossianic poetry alone expresses ; this, if nothing
else, would convince me that the poetry, which conveys
this feeling, is no modern fabrication, but is native to the
hills, connatural, I had almost said, with the granite
mountains, among which it has survived.

Lastly, this sadness of tone in describing nature is
still more deeply apparent, when the Gaelic poet touches
on the destiny of his race. That race, high-spirited,
impetuous, war-loving, proud, once covered a great
portion of Europe. As one has said, it shook all em-
pires, but founded none. For ages it has been pushed

286 POETRY OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS.

westward before a younger advancing race, till for
many ages the Gael has retained only the westernmost
promontories and islands. To these they still cling,
as limpets cling to their rocks ; and they feel, as
they gaze wistfully on the Atlantic ocean, that be-
yond it the majority of their race has already gone,
and that they, the remnant, are doomed soon to follow,
or to disappear.

' Cha till, cha till, cha till mi tuille.'
' I return, I return, I return no more.'

This is the feeling deepest in the heart of the modern
Gael ; this is the mournful, ever-recurring undertone of
the Ossianic poetry. It is the sentiment of a despairing
and disappearing race, a sentiment of deeper sadness,
than any the prosperous Saxon can know.

Two facts are enough to convince me of the genuine-
ness of the ancient Gaelic poetry. The truthfulness with
which it reflects the melancholy aspects of Highland
scenery, the equal truthfulness with which it expresses
the prevailing sentiment of the Gael, and his sad sense
of his people's destiny. I need no other proofs, that
the Ossianic poetry is a native formation, and comes
from the primaeval heart of the Gaelic race.

CHAPTER X.

MODERN GAELIC BARDS AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE.

To those who feel that poetry is a thing older than
all manuscripts and books, and that in its essence it is
independent of these, it is I know not how refreshing
to turn from the poetry that is confined to books to
the song-lore of the Gael. They find there a poetry
which, both in its ancient and in its modern forms,
was the creation of men who were taught in no school
but that of nature ; who could neither read nor write
their native Gaelic ; who, many of them, never saw a
book or a manuscript ; who had no other model than
the old primaeval Ossianic strains which they had heard
from childhood ; and who, when inborn passion prompted,
sang songs of natural and genuine inspiration. What
they composed they never thought of committing to
writing, for writing was to them an art unknown. The
great body of Highland poetry, both in old and in
modern times, has come down to us preserved mainly by
oral tradition. This is a fact which can be proved, let
learned criticism say what it will. I have already spoken
of that great primitive background of heroic songs and

288 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [X.

ballads, known as the Ossianic poetry, which had lived
for centuries only on the lips of men, before it was com-
mitted to writing. That was the nurse and school by
which all after Gaelic poets were formed. To-day let us
turn to the post-Ossianic, or modern poetry of the Gael,
which reaches from the Middle Age almost down to our
own time.

' In a land of song like the Highlands,' says one who
knew well what he spoke of, ' every strath, glen, and
hamlet had its bard. In the morning of my days,' he
goes on to say, writing in 1841, ' it was my happy lot to
inhale the mountain air of a sequestered spot, whose
inhabitants may be designated children of song, in a
state of society whose manners were little removed from
that of primitive simplicity. I had many opportunities
of witnessing the influence of poetry over the mind, and
I found that cheerfulness and song, music and morality,
walked almost always hand in hand.' Making allowance
for the warmth of feeling with which a man looks back
on a childhood spent among the mountains, these words
are, I believe, true. One may be forgiven if one doubts,
whether School Boards and the Code with its six
Standards, which have superseded this state of things,
and are doing their best to stamp out the small remains
of Gaelic poetry, are wholly a gain.

The writer from whom I have quoted, Mr. John Mac-
kenzie, was a native of the west coast of Ross, to whom
those who still cherish Gaelic poetry owe a great debt ;

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 289

for in 1 841 he published his Beauties of Gaelic Poetry,
which is a collection of the best pieces of the best
modern Gaelic bards. They are but a sample of what
might have been dug from a vast quarry, but they are a
good sample. In many cases he had to gather the poems
of some of the best bards, not from any edition of their
works, or even from manuscripts, but from the recitation
of old people, who preserved them in memory. Mac-
kenzie's book contains more than thirty thousand lines
of poetry on all kinds of subjects, from the long heroic
chant about

' Old unhappy far off things,
And battles long ago ! '

down to the

' More humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day.'

To this book and its contents I shall confine myself,
while speaking of the modern poetry of the Gael.

The book is divided into three parts. First, a few
poems of the mediaeval time, which form a sort of link
between the Ossianic and the modern poetry. The
second, and by far the largest part, consists of the poems
of well-known bards from the Reformation down to the
present century. The names of these are given with
their works, and with some account of their lives. The
third portion consists of short popular songs well known
among the people, but without the name of the authors
attached to them.

U

290 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

Of the early or pre-Reformation poems given by-
Mackenzie, two only seem to be of undoubted antiquity,
one a poem called The Owl, and another The Aged Bard's
Wish. In the former, an old hunter, who is illtreated
by his young wife, and is turned by her out of doors at
night, tells all his grievances to an owl. The most in-
teresting thing about it is the mention he makes of all the
mountain places, where he used in happier days to hunt
the wolf or the deer. Singing four hundred years ago, he
mentions the mountains that cluster round Ben Nevis,
and the waterfalls by Loch Treig, by the same names
which they bear to-day. The other ancient poem, called
The Aged Bard's Wish, is of unknown date, but certainly
belongs to the pre-Reformation period. It is beautiful
in its composition, melodious in its language, and per-
vaded not at all by the spirit of the warrior, and only in
a slight degree by that of the hunter, but rather by the
pastoral sentiment. This is a distinct advance on the
poems of the Ossianic era. Here are some stanzas from
Mackenzie's literal prose translation, and these will show
its tone : —

' Oh, lay me near the brooks, which slowly move with gentle
steps ; under the shade of the budding branches lay my head, and
be thou, O sun, in kindness with me

I see Ben-Aid of beautiful curve, chief of a thousand hills ;
the dreams of stags are in his locks, his head in the bed of
clouds.

I see Scorn-eilt on the brow of the glen, where the cuckoo first
raises her tuneful voice ; and the beautiful green hill of the thou-
sand pines, of herds, of roes, and of elks.

X.] AND DUNCAN MACJNTYRE. 291

Let joyous ducklings swim swiftly on the pool of tall pines. A
strath of green firs is at its head, bending the red rowans over its
banks.

Let the swan of the snowy bosom glide on the top of the
waves. When she soars on high among the clouds she will be
unencumbered.

She travels oft over the sea to the cold region of foaming
billows ; where never shall sail be spread out to a mast, nor an
oaken prow divide the wave

Farewell, lovely company of youth ! and you, O beautiful
maiden, farewell. I cannot see you. Yours is the joy of summer ;
my winter is everlasting.

Oh, place me within hearing of the great waterfall, where it
descends from the rock ; let a harp and a shell be by my side, and
the shield that defended my forefathers in battle.

Come friendlily over the sea, O soft breeze, that movest slowly,
bear my shade on the wind of thy swiftness, and travel quickly to
the Isle of Heroes,

Where those who went of old are in deep slumber, deaf to the
sound of music. Open the hall where dwell Ossian and Daol.
The night shall come, and the Bard shall not be found.'

Several things about this poem are noteworthy. Here
you have a vein of fine and delicate sentiment in a
Gaelic poem composed centuries before MacPherson
appeared. Then observe that, though pastoral life
has come in, Christianity is yet unknown, or, at least,
unbelieved by this dweller beside Loch Treig. His
desire is that his harp, a shell full of wine, and his
ancestral shield should be laid by his side ; and then
that his soul, which he believed to be of the nature of
wind, should be borne by its kindred winds, not to
heaven, but to Flath-Innis, the Isle of the Brave, the

U 2

292 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

Celtic Paradise, where Ossian and Daol are. Lastly,
note the peculiar love of nature, and that magical charm
with which it is touched.

Of those thirty bards, whose poems Mackenzie has
preserved, I might give the names and a few facts about
the lives and compositions of each ; but this, which is all
I could do within my prescribed space, would not greatly
edify any one. I might tell you of Mary MacLeod, the
nurse of five chiefs of MacLeod, and the poetess of her
clan ; of Ian Lom MacDonald, the first Jacobite bard,
who led Montrose and his army to Inverlochy, pointed
out the camping ground of the Campbells, then mounted
the ramparts, watched the battle, and sang a fiery paean
for the victory ; of Alastair MacDonald, the second
great Jacobite bard, who joined Prince Charlie's army,
shared his disaster, and preserved the memory of that
time in songs of fervid Jacobite devotion.

But I should do little good by giving you merely
bare lists of names, facts, and a few notions, about Rob
Donn, or Mackay, the poet of the Reay Country, a
bitter and powerful satirist ; about Dougal Buchanan, the
earnest and solemn religious poet of Rannoch ; and
William Ross, the sweet lyrist of Gairloch in Ross, and
many more.

If any one desires to know further about these
bards of the Gael, let me refer him to the brief bio-
graphics given of each of them, in the book I have
already spoken of, Mackenzie's Beauties of Gaelic Poetry,

X,] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 293

and also to the very animated commentary on the con-
tents of that book, contained in Professor Blackie's
interesting work on The Language and Literature of
the Scottish Highlands.

One characteristic of these Gaelic bards must be
mentioned. They were most of them satirists as well
as lyrists and eulogists. It was a true instinct, which
made the Chief of MacLeod forbid his poetic nurse to
sing praises of himself and his family, for he said, the
bard who is free to praise is also free to blame. Enthu-
siastic admiration and love have as their other side
equal vehemence of hatred. And this bitter side of
the poetic nature found full vent in the poetry of
many Highland bards. Biting wit, invectives often
exceeding all bounds — these, but not humour, char-
acterise the Gael. Humour, which is a quieter, more
kindly quality, generally comes from men fatter, better
fed, in easier circumstances than most of the High-
land poets were. Satire abounds in both the Mac-
Donalds, above all in Rob Donn, who carries it often
to coarseness. It is not wanting in the kindlier nature
of the poet of whom I shall now speak ; for I think I
cannot do better than take as a sample of the whole
Bardic brotherhood one whom I have most studied, and
who is, I believe, recognised as among the very foremost,
if not quite the foremost, of the Highland minstrels.

Any one who of late years has travelled by the banks
of Loch Awe must have remarked by the wayside, a

294 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

short distance above Dalmally, a monument of rude
unhewn stones cemented together. It stands very near
the spot where, as his sister tells, Wordsworth, in his
famous tour, first caught sight across the loch of the
ruined Castle of Kilchurn, and shouted out impromptu
the first three lines of his Address to tJie Castle—

' Child of loud-throated war, the mountain stream
Roars in thy hearing, but thine hour of rest
Is come, and thou art silent in thine age.'

That monument has been raised to the memory of the
Bard of Glenorchy, Duncan Maclntyre, or ' Donacha
Ban nan Oran,' Fair Duncan of the Songs, as he is
familiarly called by his Highland countrymen. If ever
poet was a pure son of nature, this man was. Born in
a lonely place, called Druimliaghart (pronounced Drum-
liarst), on the skirts of the Monadh Dhu, or the Forest of
the Black Mount, of poor parents, he never went to
school, never learnt to read or write, could not speak
English, knew but one language — his own native Gaelic.
His only school was the deer forest, in which he spent
his boyhood. His lessons were catching trout and
salmon with his fishing-rod, shooting grouse, and stalk-
ing deer with his gun. His mental food was the songs
of the mountains, especially the great oral literature of
the Ossianic minstrelsy. He tells us that he got 'a
part of his nursing' at the shealings; and I remember
onccj in a walk through the mountains of the Black
Forest, beside a grass-covered road that leads down to

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 295

Loch Etive, having the ruins of a sheaHng both pointed
out to me in which Duncan Ban used to spend his
early summers. Those shealing times, when the people
from the glens drove their black cattle and a few small
sheep to pasture for the summer months on the higher
Bens, are still looked back to by the Highlanders as
their great season of happiness, romance, and song.
With the shealings for his summer, Drumliarst for his
winter, home, Duncan had just reached manhood, when
the rising of the clans and the Forty-five broke out.
Like all true Highlanders, his heart was with the
Stuarts, but, as he lived on the lands of the Earl of
Breadalbane, he was obliged to serve on the Hano-
verian side^ as a substitute for a neighbouring Tacksman.
This man supplied Duncan with a sword, which, in
the rout of Falkirk, Duncan treated as Horace did
his shield, and either lost or flung away. His earliest
poem was composed on this battle, and in it he de-
scribes with evident relish the disgraceful retreat, hinting
that, had he been on the Princess side, he would have
fought with more manhood. The man for whom Dun-
can served as a substitute, refused to pay the sum
promised, because the sword had been lost ; so the bard
took his revenge by writing a satiric poem on the
sword and its owner. Fletcher, for that was the
man's name, fell upon the poet and thrashed him
with his walking-stick, telling him to go and make a
song upon that. But Duncan had a friend in the

296 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

Breadalbane of the day, who came to his aid, and forced
Fletcher to pay down the money to the man who had
risked his Hfe on his account. This first poem soon be-
came known, and made Duncan famous, and Fletcher
despised.

Early in life the bard married a young girl of some-
what higher station and richer parents than himself.
There is nothing more pleasing in the loves of any of
the poets than this courtship. In a beautiful lyric called
Mairi Bhan-og, or ' Fair Young Mary,' he tells how he
wooed and won her. Her home was within less than
a mile from his own, but their conditions in life were so
different, that for long he despaired. Her father was
baron bailiff, or under factor, and a freeholder, and she
had some cows and calves of her own for a dowry. He
was the son of poor people, and had no patrimony. He
tells how he used from his own door to watch her, as
she went about her household work, and how, when at
last he ventured to address her, the kindness of her
demeanour gave him confidence. After praising her
beauty, he says, the thing that most took him was
her firmness in good, and her manners, that were ever
so womanly. And he concludes with a fine delicacy,
wishing to take her away and hide her in some place,
where decay or change might never reach her. This
song, we are told, is regarded, 'on account of its com-
bined purity and passion, its grace, delicacy, and tender-
ness,' as the finest love song in the Gaelic language.

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 297

After his return from soldiering, his patron, Lord Bread-
albane, made Duncan his forester, first in Coire Chea-
thaich (pronounced Hyaich), or the Misty Corrie, in the
forest of Maam-lorn, at the head of Glen Lochy; then
on Ben Doran, a beautifully-shaped hill at the head of
Glenorchy, looking down that long glen towards Loch
Awe. For a time, too, he served the Duke of Argyll, as
his deer forester on the Buachaill Etie or the Shepherds
of Etive, gnarled peaks facing towards both Glen Etive
and Glencoe.

Duncan has made famous Coire Cheathaich and Ben
Doran by two of his best poems. The poem on Coire
Cheathaich has been translated by a living poet, Mr.
Robert Buchanan, in his book called The Land of Lome.
His version gives a very good notion of it, with its
minute realistic description : —

' My beauteous corrie ! where cattle wander
My misty corrie ! my darling dell !
Mighty, verdant, and covered over
With tender wild flowers of sweetest smell ;
Dark is the green of thy grassy clothing.
Soft swell thy hillocks, most green and deep.
The cannach flowing, the darnel growing.
While the deer troop past to the misty steep.'
But of all Duncan Ban's poems the most original,
the most elaborate, and the most famous is that on Ben
Doran. It consists of five hundred and fifty-five lines,
and is unique in its plan and construction. It is adapted
to a pipe tune, and follows with wonderful skill all the
turns, and twirls, and wild cadences of the pibroch.

298 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

It falls into eight parts^ alternating with a sort of
strophe and antistrophe, one slow, called urlar, in stately
trochees ; another swift, called siubhal, in a kind of
galloping anapaests.

In Ben Doran, as in Coire Cheathaich, the bard dwells
with the most loving minuteness on all the varied
features, and the ever-changing aspects, of the moun-
tain, which he loved as if it were a living creature and
a friend. But besides this, in no poem on record have
the looks, the haunts, the habits, and the manners of the
deer, both red and roe, been pictured so accurately and
so fondly, by one who had been born and reared among
them, and who loved them as his chosen playmates.

Professor Blackie has made a very spirited rendering
into English of this most difficult poem, to which I
would advise any one to turn who cares for poetry fresh
from nature. I venture at present to give some pas-
sages from a translation I made years ago, to beguile
hours of lonely wandering among the Highland hills.
Be it remembered, however, how different a thing is
a wild Celtic chaunt, adapted to the roar and thunder
of the bagpipe, from a literary performance meant only
to be read by critical eyes in unexcited leisure. Here
is the opening stave : —

' Honour o'er all Bens
On Bendoran be!
Of all hills the sun kens,
Beautifullest he ;

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE, 299

Mountain long and sweeping,
Nooks the red deer keeping,
Light on braesides sleeping ;

There I've watched delightedly.
Branchy copses cool,
Woods of sweet grass full.
Deer herds beautiful,

There are dwelling aye.
Oh ! blithe to hunting go.

Where white-hipped stag and hind,
Upward in long row.

Snuff the mountain wind ;
Jaunty follows sprightly,

With bright burnished hide,
Dressed in fashion sightly.
Yet all free from pride.'
The poem is, as I have said, made for a pibroch tune,
and is, Hke the pibroch, full of repetitions. It returns
again and again upon the same theme, but each time
with variations and additions. Thus the grasses and
plants and bushes that grow on Ben Doran are more
than once described, as if the poet never tired of think-
ing of them. The red-deer, stag and hind, with their
ways ; the roe-deer, buck and doe, with their ways ;
each is several times dwelt on at length.

I shall now give a specimen of the description of each
kind of deer. Here is a picture of the red-deer hind,
and of the stag, her mate : —

' Hark that quick darting snort !
'Tis the light-headed hind.
With sharp-pointed nostril
Keen searching the wind ;

300 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

Conceited, slim-limbed,

The high summits she keeps,
Nor, for fear of the gun-fire,

Descends from the steeps.
Though she gallop at speed

Her breath will not fail,
For she comes of a breed

Were strong-winded and hale.

When she lifteth her voice,

What joy 'tis to hear
The ghost of her breath.

As it echoeth clear.
For she calleth aloud.

From the cliff of the crag.
Her silver-hipped lover,

The proud antlered stag.
Well-antlered, high-headed.

Loud-voiced doth he come.
From the haunts he well knows

Of Bendoran, his home.

Ah ! mighty Bendoran !

How hard 'twere to tell,
How many proud stags

In thy fastnesses dwell.
How many thy slim hinds.

Their wee calves attending,
And, with white-twinkling tails.

Up the Balloch ascending,
To where Corrie-Chreetar

Its bield is extending.

But when the mood takes her

To gallop with speed,
With her slender hoof-tips

Hardly touching the mead.

X.] AND DUNCAN M AC I NT Y RE. 301

As she stretcheth away

In her fleet-flying might,
What man in the kingdom

Could follow her flight ?
Full of gambol and gladness,

Blithe wanderers free,
No shadow of sadness

Ever comes o'er their glee.
But fitful and tricksy,

Slim and agile of limb.
Age will not burden them,

Sorrow not dim.

'How gay through the glens

Of the sweet mountain grass.
Loud sounding, all free

From complaining, they pass.
Though the snow come, they'll ask

For no roof-tree to bield them ;
The deep Corrie Altrum,

His rampart will shield them.
There the rifts, and the clefts,

And deep hollows they'll be in,
With their well-sheltered beds

Down in lone Aisan-teean.'

Again, in an urlar, or slow trochaic strophe, he returns
to the same theme —

' O ! sweet to me at rising

In early dawn to see.
All about the mountains.

Where they've right to be.
Twice a hundred there
Of the people without care,

302 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

Starting from their lair,

Hale and full of glee ;
Clear-sounding, smooth, and low,

From their mouths the murmurs flow,
And beautiful they go.

As they sing their morning song.

Sweeter to me far,

When they begin their croon.
Than all melodies that are

In Erin — song or tune ;
Than pipe or viol clear,
More I love to hear
The breath of the son of the deer
Bellowing on the face
Of Bendoran.'

Our last sample shall be the description of the roe : —

' Mid budding sprays the doe

Ever restless moves —
Edge of banks and braes.

Haunts that most she loves.
Young leaves, fresh and sheen,
Tips of heather green —
Dainties fine and clean,

Are her choice.
Pert, coquettish, gay.
Thoughtless, full of play.
Creature, made alway

To rejoice.
Maiden-Hke in mien
Mostly she is seen
In the birk-glens green

Where lush grasses be.

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE.

But sometimes Crag-y-vhor,

Gives her refuge meet,
Sunday and Monday there

In a still retreat.
There bushes thick and deep
Cluster round her sleep,
Her all safe to keep

From rude north-winds blowing
In bield of Doire-chro.
Lying down below
The Sron's lofty brow.

Where fresh shoots are growing :
There well-springs clear and fine,

With draughts more benign,
Than ale or any wine.

Always are flowing.
These, as they pour.

Their streams unfailing.
Keep her evermore

Fresh and free from ailing.

Yellow hues and red,
Delicately spread.
On her figure shed

Loveliness complete.
Hardy 'gainst the cold.
Virtues manifold,
More than can be told,

In her nature meet.

At the hunter's sound
Sudden whirling round,
How lightly doth she bound,
O'er rough mountain ground,
Far and free.

y^-i

304 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

Quicker ear to hear
Danger drawing near,
Fleeter flight from fear,
In Europe cannot be.'

This long hunting pibroch, of which I have given a
few samples, is a prime favourite with all Gaelic-speaking
men, and is to them what such songs as Gala Water or
the Holms of Yarrow are to the ear of the Lowlander.
Duncan Ban will ever be remembered among his coun-
trymen as the chief minstrel of the deer, the chase, and
the forest. As a deer-stalker he had lived much in

solitude, —

'had been alone
Amid the heart of many thousand mists.'

When he was forester on Ben Doran, in Coire Cheathaich,
and on Buachail Etie, the inspiration found him. But
solitude left no shade of sadness on his spirit ; there is in
his .song nothing of the Ossianic melancholy. He was a
blithe, hearty companion, fond of good fellowship, and
several of his songs are in praise of it. But, though he
enjoyed such things, he never lost himself in them.
When his foresting days were over, he joined a volunteer
regiment called the Breadalbane Fencibles, in which he
served for six years, till it was disbanded in 1 799.

After his discharge from the Fencibles he migrated
from his hills to Edinburgh, where he served for some
time in the City Guard, which Walter Scott has de-
scribed in one of his novels. The third edition of

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 305

his poems was published in 1804, and in 1806 he was
able to retire from the City Guard, and to live for the
remainder of his days in comparative comfort, on the
return which this third edition brought him. He died
in 1 81 a in Edinburgh, in his eighty-ninth year, and lies
buried in Old Gray Friars' churchyard.

Born at Druimliaghart, on the skirts of the Black
Mount, at the head of Glenorchy ; laid to rest in
Gray Friars' churchyard, Edinburgh ; beloved in life ;
honoured after death by his countrymen, who have
reared a monument to perpetuate his memory on Loch
Awe side ; of him it may be said, as truly as of most
sons of song, ' he sleeps well.'

Once or twice he wandered through the Highlands,
to obtain subscriptions for a new edition of his poems.
I knew a Highland lady who remembered to have seen
him in her childhood on one of these occasions, when
he visited her father's house in Mull. He was wandering
about with the wife of his youth, fair young Mary, still
fair, though no longer young. He then wore, if I re-
member aright, a tartan kilt, and on his head a cap
made of a fox's skin. He was fair of hair and face, with
a pleasant countenance, and a happy, attractive manner.
An amiable, sweet-blooded man, who never, it is said,
attacked any one, unprovoked ; but, when he was as-
sailed, he could repay smartly in that satire, which came
naturally to most Highland bards.

After he had settled in Edinburgh he paid one last
X

3o6 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

visit to his native Glenorchy in 1802, where he found
that those changes had already set in, which have since
desolated so many glens, and changed the whole charac-
ter of social life in the Highlands. What he then felt he
has recorded in one of his last and most touching poems
entitled

Last Leave-taking of the Mountains.

'Yestreen I was on Ben Doran,

Which I had good right to know,
I saw all the glens beneath me,

And the Bens loved long ago.
Bright vision it used to be,

Walking on that mountain ground,
When the sun was in gladness rising,

And the deer were bellowing round.

Joyous the frolicsome herd.

As they moved in their jaunty pride,
While the hinds were at the cold hill-wells.

With their dappled fawns by their side ;
The little doe and the roe buck,

The black cock and red grouse-bird,
Their voices were filling the morning air —

Sweeter melody never was heard.

There I passed the time of my nursing.

At the shealings well known to me.
With the kind-hearted maidens mingling there

In games, and dafFmg, and glee.
Twas not in the course of nature.

That should last till now the same ;
But sad it was to be forced to go,

When the time for the parting came.

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 307

But now that old age has smote me,

I have got a hurt that will last ;
On my teeth it hath wrought decay,

On my eyesight blindness cast.

But though now my head is grey,

And my locks but thinly spread,
I have slipt the deerhound many a day

On the lads with high antlered head.
Though I love them dearly as ever,

Were a herd on the hillside in sight,
I could not go to seek them,

For my breath has failed me quite.

Yestreen as I walked the mountain,

O the thoughts that arose in me ;
For the people I loved that used to be there

In the desert, no more could I see.
Ah ! little I dreamed that Ben

Such change would undergo.
That I should see it covered with sheep.

And the world would deceive me so !

When I looked round on every side.

How could I feel but drear !
For the woods and the heather all were gone.

And the men were no longer here.
There was not a deer for the hunting,

Not a bird, nor a single roe ;
Of these the few that were not dead

Hence have vanished long ago.

My farewell then to the forests.

And the marvellous mountains there.
Where the green cresses grow, and the clear wells flow,

Draughts gentle, and kingly, and fair.
X 2

3o8 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

Ye pastures beyond all price !

Wildernesses, wide and free,
On you, since I go to return no more,

My blessing for ever be ! '

In the close of this pathetic farewell Duncan Ban has
touched on what has since become a great social ques-
tion— I mean the clearing of the glens, the depopulation
of the Highlands. This great change — revolution I
might call it — began early in this century, and our bard
saw the first fruits of the new system. The old native
Gael who used to live grouped in hamlets in the glens,
each with so many small sheep and goats, and a little
herd of black cattle, which they pastured in common on
the mountains, these were dispossessed of the holdings
they had held for immemorial time, to make way for
Lowland farmers with large capital, who covered hill
and glen with large flocks of bigger sheep. These
flocks a few shepherds, often Lowlanders, tended on the
mountains from which the old race had been swept,
till the land indeed became a wilderness. One question
only was asked — What shall most speedily return large
rents to the lairds ? what shall grow the largest amount
of mutton for the Glasgow and Liverpool markets?
Tried by this purely commercial standard, the ancient
Gael were found wanting, and being dispossessed, went
to America and elsewhere. Great Britain thus lost
thousands of the finest of its people irrecoverably.

Since Culloden, the Highlands have received from the

X.] AND DUNCAN M AC I NT Y RE. 309

British Government only one piece of wise and kindly-
legislation. That was, when the elder Pitt gave the
chiefs or their sons commissions to raise regiments from
among their clansmen. The result was the Highland
regiments, who bore themselves, all know how, in the
Peninsula and at Waterloo. Their name and the re-
membrance of their achievements remain to this day a
tower of strength to the British army, although in some
of the so-called Highland regiments there is now scarcely
one genuine Gael. In the glens which formerly sent
forth whole regiments, you could not now get a single
man to wear her Majesty's uniform.

But to return from these matters, economical and
political, to our bard. It is a noteworthy fact that, as
he could neither read nor write, he had to carry the
whole of his poetry, which amounts to about six thou-
sand lines, in his memory, which was also stored with a
large equipment of Ossianic and other current lays.
After he had preserved his poems for years, a young
minister committed them to writing from Duncan's
recital, and in time they were published. Facts like
these, and they could easily be multiplied, tend to show
how short-sighted is the view of critics, who refuse to
believe in the preserving power of oral tradition. They
also show how far culture can go, wholly unaided by
books. All who read with open heart the poetry of our
bard, must acknowledge that here we have a man more
truly replenished with all that is best in culture, than

3IO MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

most of the men who are the products of our modern
School Board system.

Maclntyre has sometimes been called the Burns of
the Highlands. Burns and he lived at the same time,
but Maclntyre's life overlapped that of Burns at both
ends. He was older than Burns by thirty-five years,
and outlived him by sixteen. It is strange, and shows
the great separation there then was between the High-
lands and the rest of the world, that there is no evidence
that either poet knew of the existence of the other. Yet
Maclntyre must have heard of Burns when he passed
his old age in Edinburgh. Though they have been
compared to each other, there is little likeness between
them, except in this : — both were natural, spontaneous
singers ; both sang of human life, as they saw it with
their own eyes ; each is the darling poet of his own
people. Here the likeness ends.

Maclntyre had not the experience of men and society,
the varied range, of Burns. The problem of the rich
and poor^ and many another problem which vexed
Burns, never troubled the bard of Glenorchy. He
accepted his condition, and was content ; had no
jealousy of those above him in rank or wealth. He
was happier than Burns in his own inner man, and
had no quarrel with the worlds and the way it was
ordered, till they expelled the deer, and brought in the
big long-wooled sheep. But if Maclntyre knew less
of man than Burns, he knew more of nature in its grand

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 31 1

and solitary moods. He took it more to heart ; at every
turn it more enters into his song and forms its texture.

Maclntyre's poetry eminently disproves — as indeed
all Gaelic poetry does — that modern doctrine, that love
of nature is necessarily a late growth, the product of
refined cultivation. It may be so with the phlegmatic
Teuton, not so with the susceptible and impassioned
Gael. Their poets, Maclntyre above all, were never
inside a schoolroom, never read a book ; yet they love
their mountains as passionately as Wordsworth loved
his, though with a simpler, more primitive love.

Mr. Arnold concluded his lectures delivered on Celtic
Literature by pleading for the foundation in Oxford of
a Celtic chair. He thought that this might perhaps
atone for the errors of Saxon Philistines, and send
through the gentle ministrations of science a message
of peace to Ireland. Oxford since then has got a Celtic
chair, but has not thereby propitiated Ireland.

Another Celtic chair is just about to be founded in
Edinburgh University. But the foundation of Celtic
chairs will be of small avail, unless the younger gen-
eration takes advantage of them. To these let me say
that, if they will but master the language of the Gael,
and dig in the great quarry of their native song, they
will find there, to repay their efforts, much that is
weird and wild, as well as sweet and pathetic, thrilling
with a piercing tenderness wholly unlike anything in
the Saxon tongue. There they may not only delight

312 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

and reinvigorate their imagination, but they may fetch
thence new tones of inspiration for English poetry.

And more than this, they will find there sources of
deep human interest. The knowledge of the Gaelic
language will be a key to open to them the hearts of
a noble people, as nothing else can. England, and Low-
land Scotland, alike owe a real debt to the Scottish
Gael, if not so urgent a debt as they owe to Ireland,
a debt for the wrongs done last century after Culloden
battle — a debt still unrepaid, perhaps now unrepay-
able. A debt, too, for the world of pleasure which so
many strangers annually reap in the Scottish High-
lands. The native Gael are capable of something more
than merely to be gillies and keepers to aristocratic or
plutocratic sportsmen. Within those dim smoky sheal-
ings of the west, beat hearts warm with feelings which
the pushing and prosperous Saxon little dreams of.

That race, last century, sheltered their outlawed
Prince at the peril of their own lives. While they them-
selves and their families were starving, they refused
the bribe of thirty thousand pounds which was offered
for his head, and chose to be shot down by troopers
on their own mountains, rather than betray him. Can
any nation on earth point to a record of finer loyalty
and purer self-devotion ? Yet, for the race that was
capable of these things no better fate has been found,
than to be driven, unwilling exiles, from the land that
reared them.

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 313

Perhaps I may fitly close this brief sketch with some
lines conveying the feeling with which Duncan Ban's
romantic but now desolate birthplace was visited a few
years ago.

The homes long are gone, but enchantment still lingers
The green knolls around, where thy young life began,

Sweetest and last of the old Celtic singers,
Bard of the Monadh-dhu, bhthe Donach Ban !

Never mid scenes of earth fairer or grander

Poet first lifted his eyelids on light.
Free through these glens, o'er these mountains to wander,

And make them his own by the true minstrel right.

Around thee the meeting and green interlacing
Of clear-flowing waters and far-winding glens,

Lovely inlaid in the mighty embracing
Of sombre pine forests and storm-riven Bens :

Behind thee, the crowding Peaks, region of mystery,
Fed thy young spirit with broodings sublime,

Grey cairn and green hillock, each breathing some history
Of the weird under-world or the wild battle-time.

Thine were Ben Starrav, Stop-gyre, Meal-na ruadh.
Mantled in storm-gloom, or bathed in sunshine.

Streams from Cor-oran, Glashgower, and Glen-fuadh,
Made music for thee, where their waters combine.

But more than all others, thy darling Ben Doran
Held thee entranced with his beautiful form,

With looks ever changing thy young fancy storing,
Gladness of sunshine, and terror of storm, —

3T4 MODERN GAELIC BARDS [x.

Opened to thee his most secret recesses.

Taught thee the lore of the red-deer and roe,

Showed thee them feed on the green mountain cresses,
Drink the cold wells above lone Doirc-chro.

There thine eye watched them go up the hill-passes,
At sunrise rejoicing, a proud jaunty throng.

Learnt the herbs that they love, the small flowers and hill
grasses.
To make these for ever bloom green in thy song.

Yet, child of the wilderness ! nursling of nature !

Would the hills e'er have taught thee the true minstrel art.
Had not one visage, more lovely of feature,

The fountain unsealed of thy tenderer heart ?

The maiden that dwelt on the side of Mam-haarie —
Seen from thy home-door — a vision of joy —

Morning and even, the young fair-haired Mary
Moving about at her household employ.

High on Bendoa, and stately Benchallader,

Leaving the dun deer in safety to hide.
Fondly thy doating eye dwelt on her, followed her,

Tenderly wooed her, and won her thy bride.

O ! well for the maiden who found such a lover !

And well for the Poet ; to whom Mary gave
Her fulness of heart, until, life's journey over.

She lay down beside him to rest in the grave.

From the bards of to-day, and their sad thoughts that darken
The sunshine with doubt, wring the bosom with pain.

How gladly we fly to the shealings, and hearken
The clear mountain gladness that sounds through thy strain !

X.] AND DUNCAN MACINTYRE. 315

In the uplands with thee is no doubt or misgiving,
But strength, joy, and freedom Atlantic winds blow,

And kind thoughts are there, and the pure simple living
Of the warm-hearted Gael in the glens long ago.

The Muse of old Maro hath pathos and splendour,
The long lines of Homer in majesty roll ;

But to me Donach Ban breathes a feeling more tender,
More akin to the child-heart that sleeps in my soul.

CHAPTER XL

THE THREE YARROWS.

The ideal creations of poets generally have their root,
whether we can trace it or not, in some personal ex-
perience. However remote from actual life the perfected
creation may appear, whether it be a Midsummer Nighfs
Dream or a presentation of Hamlet, we may well believe
that all its finer features were the birth of some chance
bright moments, when certain aspects of nature, or ex-
pressions of human countenance, or incidents of life, or
subtle traits of character, struck on the poet's soulj and
impressed themselves indelibly there. But though we
may be quite sure of this, yet so subtilely works the
transmuting power of imagination, so reticent have poets
generally been about their own creations, so little have
they been given to analyse themselves, that the cases
are few in which we can lay our finger on this and that
actual fact, and say, these are the elements out of which
the bright creation came. There are, however, some
instances among modern poets in which we are allowed
to trace the first footprints of their thought. And when
we can do so, this, instead of diminishing our admiration

THE THREE YARROWS. 317

of the perfected results, gives them, I believe, an added
interest. Lockhart has recorded his belief that there is
hardly a scene, incident, or character in all Scott's poems
or romances, of which the first suggestion may not be
traced to some old verse in the Border Minstrelsy, or
to some incident or character which he fell in with
during those raids, in which he gleaned the materials
of that wonderful book from the sequestered places
of the green Border hills. It may not be without
interest if we turn to a contemporary and friend of
Scott's, and trace the actual facts out of which arose
three of Wordsworth's most exquisite lyrics, Yarrotv
Unvisited, Yarrow Visited, and Yarro7v Revisited.

It was in August, 1803, that Wordsworth, though
he had been born and reared in sight of Scotland's
hills, for the first time set his foot on Scottish ground.
He and his sister Dorothy, with Coleridge for their
companion, left Keswick, to make a tour through Scot-
land, mainly on foot. The poet's means, which were
then but scanty, his income being not more than ;^ioo
a year, would not allow any more costly way of travel-
ling ; and well for us that it was so. Out of that ' plain
living,' which circumstances enforced, how much of
the ' high thinking ' came ! And certainly, as walking
is the least expensive, so it is the best way in which
a poet can see a country. Walking alone, or with one
congenial friend, he can stop, and gaze, and listen,
and saunter, and meditate, at his will, and let all sights

31 8 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

and sounds of nature melt into him, as in no other
way they can. On foot the three travelled up Nithsdale,
by Falls of Clyde, on to Loch Lomond, where Cole-
ridge, with whom the morbid period of his life had set
in, having accompanied them thus far, fell foot-sore,
got into the dumps, and left them. The other poet,
with his hardly less poetic sister, went on alone, and
traversed on foot the finest highlands of Argyll and
Perthshire. It is needless to trace their route in prose ;
for the poet has left his imperishable footprints at
Inversnaid in the 'Sweet Highland Girl'; on Loch
Awe side and Kilchurn in his address to the ' Child
of loud-throated War ' ; at the Small glen, or head
of Glen Almond, in the poem on Ossiati's Grave ; on
Loch Katrine side in ' What ? you are stepping west-
ward' ; in Rob Roys Grave, which^ however, Wordsworth
took to be at Glengyle, not, where it really is, in Bal-
quhidder kirkyard ; and at Strathire, in The Solitary
Reaper. As they two moved quietly along, the poet's
imagination fell here on some well-known spot, there
on some familiar human incident, and touched them
with a light which will consecrate them for ever. It was,
as I have seen on some grey autumnal day among
the mountains, the slanting silver light moving over the
dusky wilderness, and touching into sudden brightness
now a deep-shadowed corrie, now a slip of greensward
by a burn, or flushing a heathery brae, or suddenly
bringing out from the gloom some tremendous precipice.

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. 319

or striking into momentary glory some far-off mountain
peak. Only that glory was momentary, seen but by
a single eye, and then gone. The light, which the poet
shed on those favoured spots^ remains a joy for all
generations, if they have but the heart to feel it.

Hardly less beautiful than her brother's poems —
indeed, sometimes quite equal to them, though far less
known — are the entries which his sister made in her
journal during that memorable tour. Native poets have
done much for Scotland, but nature has done far more,
and all that they have sung is but a poor instalment
of the grandeur and the glory, which lies still unuttered.
When Wordsworth, with his fresh eye and strong imagin-
ation, set foot across the border, he saw further and
clearer into the heart of things that met him, than any
of the native poets had done, and added a new and
deeper tone to their minstrelsy.

In this first tour, when the poet and his sister had
descended from the Highlands, they went to Rosslyn,
and then it was, as Lockhart tells us, that Scott first
saw Wordsworth. 'Their mutual acquaintance, Stod-
dart, had so often talked of them to each other, that
they met as if they had not been strangers, and they
parted friends.' The 17th of September was the day
they first met. Wordsworth and his sister walked in the
early morning from Rosslyn down the valley to Lass-
wade, where Scott was then living, and they arrived
before Mr. and Mrs. Scott had risen. ' We were received,'

320 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

Wordsworth says, ' with that frank cordiality which, under
whatever circumstances I afterwards met Scott, always
marked his manners .... The same lively, entertaining
conversation, full of anecdote, and averse from disquisi-
tion; the same unaffected modesty about himself; the
same cheerful and benevolent and hopeful view of man
and the world.' They heard something that day of The
Lay of the Last Minstrel, of which they were to hear
more at Jedburgh. At the close of this day Scott walked
with his two friends to Rosslyn, and on parting promised
to meet them in two days at Melrose. The tourists
passed by Peebles to the Vale of Tweed. There, after
looking for a moment at Neidpath Castle, ' beggared
and outraged ' by the loss of its trees, he turned from
these

' Wrongs, which Nature scarcely seems to heed :
For sheltered places, bosoms, nooks, and bays,
And the pure mountains, and the gentle Tweed,
And the green silent pastures, yet remain.'

From Peebles, travelling down the Tweed by Traquair,
Elibank, Ashestiel, through that vale, where as yet
railway was undreamt of, they found it

* More pensive in sunshine
Than others in moonshine.'

At Clovenford they had reached the spot whence, if
at all, they should have turned aside to Yarrow. A
short walk to the ridge of the hill behind Yare, and the
whole of Yarrow Vale would have lain at their feet.

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. 321

They debated about it, and determined to reserve the
pleasure for a future day. Thence they passed to Mel-
rose, where Walter Scott met them, and became their
guide to the ' fair ' Abbey. Being then ' Shirra,' and on
his official rounds, he took them with him to Jedburgh,
where the Assize was being held. The inns there were
so filled with the judges' retinue and the lawyers, that the
poet and his sister had difficulty in finding quarters. As
they passed the evening in their lodging, under the roof
of that kind hostess, whom Wordsworth celebrated
in The Matron of Jedburgh, Scott left his brethren
of the bar at their port, and stole away to spend an
hour or two with the water-drinking poet and his sister.
He then repeated to them a part of The Lay of the Last
Minstrel, in which Wordsworth at once hailed the
coming poet, and which he regarded to the last as
the finest of all Scott's poems. Next day, while Scott
was engaged in court, he left the poet and his sister to
go to Ferneyhurst and the old Jed Forest, with William
Laidlaw for their guide. Miss Wordsworth in her
journal describes him as 'a young man from the braes
of Yarrow, an acquaintance of Mr. Scott's,' who, having
been much delighted with some of William's poems,
which he had chanced to see in a newspaper, had wished
to be introduced to him. He ' lives at the most retired
part of the Dale of Yarrow, where he has a farm. He
is fond of reading, and well informed, but at first
meeting as shy as any of our Grasmere lads, and not
Y

322 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

less rustic in his appearance.' This was the author of
Lticfs Flitting, Laidlaw's one ballad or song, which,
for pure natural pathos, is unsurpassed, if indeed it is
equalled, by any lyric that either of the two great poets
ever wrote.

Next day Scott accompanied Wordsworth and his
sister for two miles up a bare hill above Hawick.
Thence they looked wide 'over the moors of Liddes-
dale, and saw the Cheviot hills. We wished we could
have gone with Mr. Scott into some of the remote dales
of this country, where in almost every house he can find
a home.' But the friends were obliged to part, the
Wordsworths to take the road by Mosspaul and Ewes-
dale to Langholm, Scott to return to the duties of his
sherififry. It would have been a curious sight to see
how Wordsworth would have comported himself, if he
had been ushered into a company of Scott's friends,
the Hill Farmers of the Dandy Dinmont stamp, with
their big punch-bowls and deep draughts.

When Wordsworth returned to his Grasmere home,
he finished the poem Yarroiv Unvisited, which had
been suggested by the incident I have mentioned at
Clovenford.

Eleven years passed before Wordsworth again visited
Scotland. The visit this time was less memorable. It
was not lighted up by that wonderful journal of his
sister's, and it called forth from the poet himself only
four memorials in verse. Of these Yarrow Visited is

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. 323

the only one in the poet's happiest manner. The road,
by which Wordsworth and his travelhng companions
approached Yarrow, was that leading across the hill from
Innerleithen. The night before they passed in the se-
questered hamlet of Traquair, perhaps it may have been
in Traquair Manse. Next morning the Ettrick Shep-
herd met the party at Traquair, and became their guide
to his own home-land. One can imagine the simple-
hearted garrulous vanity with which Hogg would per-
form the office of guide, and how Wordsworth, who
believed himself to be so much the greater of the two,
would receive the patronising attentions.

From Traquair they walked, and so had a full view
of Yarrow vale from the descending road. In Yarrow,
they visited in his cottage the father of the Ettrick
Shepherd, himself a shepherd, a fine old man, more than
eighty years of age. This may have been at one or
other of Hogg's two homes on Yarrow, Benger Mount
or Altrive Lake. How Wordsworth was solemnised
and elevated by this his first look on Yarrow, we shall
see when we come to consider the poem Yarroiv Visited.
Their route that day lay up the stream to St. Mary's
Lochj which has left its impress on the poem. And
from thence they seem to have traversed the whole
course of Yarrow, till its union with the Ettrick.

Seventeen more years passed before Wordsworth again
crossed the Scottish Border. This time it was on a sad
errand, to visit Sir Walter Scott once again before ' his
Y 2

324 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

last going from Tweedside,' in hope of recruiting his
shattered health in Italy. ' How sadly changed did I
find him from the man I had seen so healthy, gay, and
hopeful a few years before, when he said at the inn at
Patterdale, in my presence, " I mean to live till I am
eighty, and shall write as long as I live ! " ' Wordsworth
and his daughter spent the first evening with the family
party at Abbotsford, and among them was William
Laidlaw, now a very old friend of Sir Walter's, who had
for several years been his amanuensis. Next day — it
was a Tuesday — they drove to Newark Castle, accom-
panied by most of the home party ; and the two poets,
both now stricken with years, wandered about the wood-
land walks overhanging that Yarrow, of which each in
his prime had sung so well. They did not, however,
penetrate, beyond the wooded banks near the lower part
of the river, into the upper and more pastoral region.
It was this day which Wordsworth commemorated in
his Yarrow Revisited. On their return home they
came down the north bank of Tweed, and crossed the
river at the ford immediately under Abbotsford. As
the wheels of their carriage grated upon the pebbles
in the bed of the stream, Wordsworth looked up and
saw at that moment a rich but sad light, purple rather
than golden, spread over Eildon Hills. Thinking that
this was, probably, the very last time that Sir Walter
would ever cross the stream, he was not a little moved,
and gave vent to some of his feelings in the sonnet —

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. yx^

*A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain,
Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light
Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height.'

Farther on, fain to comfort himself and others, he breaks
out —

* Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners ! for the might
Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes ;
Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue
Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows,
Follow this wondrous Potentate. Be true,
Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea,
Wafting your Charge to soft Parthenope ! '

He appeals to the elements and to the universal heart
of man to come to the help of him, whom elsewhere he
calls ' the whole world's darling ' ; but it will not do.

There were other affecting incidents connected with
that visit. It was on the morning of the Thursday, just
before Wordsworth left at noon, that Sir Walter wrote
in the album of Wordsworth's daughter some im-
perfectly finished stanzas. As he stood by his desk,
and put the book into her hand, he said to her in her
father's presence, ' I should not have done anything of
this kind, but for your father's sake ; they are probably
the last verses I shall ever write.' And they were the
last.

One stanza clings to memory. Alluding to the fact
that Wordsworth had listened to The Lay of the Last
Minstrel before it was given to the world, and had
hailed it as a true work of genius. Sir Walter says, —

326 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

'And meet it is that he who saw
The first faint rays of genius burn,
Should mark their latest light with awe,
Low glimmering from their funeral urn.'

At parting, Wordsworth expressed to Sir Walter
his hope that the mild climate of Italy would restore
his health, and the classic remembrances interest him,
to which Sir Walter replied in words from Yarrow
Unvisited, which Wordsworth in his musings in Aqua-
pendente, six years afterwards, thus recalls : —

' Still, in more than ear-deep seats,
Survives for me, and cannot but survive.
The tone of voice which wedded borrowed words
To sadness not their own, when, with faint smile,
Forced by intent to take from speech its edge,
He said, "When I am there, although 'tis fair,
'Twill be another Yarrow." Prophecy
More than fulfilled, as gay Campania's shores
Soon witnessed, and the city of seven hills,
Her sparkling fountains and her mouldering tombs ;
And more than all, that Eminence which showed
Her splendours, seen, not felt, the while he stood,
A few short steps (painful they were) apart
From Tasso's Convent-haven and retired grave.'

These three visits of Wordsworth to Scotland, and
the incidents connected with them, called forth his
Three Yarrows. The first visit and the last are asso-
ciated with Sir Walter, the second with the Ettrick
Shepherd. And each of the three poets has shed on
Yarrow the light of his peculiar genius.

It would be an interesting subject to turn aside and

XL] THE THREE YARROWS. 327

note what a different aspect Yarrow wore, what different
feelings it called up in each poet, as seen by his own
individual eye. But there is an anterior question which
may very naturally occur to any one to ask — What is
there peculiar about Yarrow, of all the thousand streams
of Scotland, to rivet the affection, and call forth the
finest minstrelsy of these three poets ? A chance comer
passing down its green braes and holms, if told that this
dale was consecrated to song, might well exclaim, —

'What's Yarrow but a river bare
That glides the dark hills under?
There are a thousand such elsewhere
As worthy of your wonder.'

To a casual and hurried glance it might well seem so ;
but there, too, as elsewhere, it is not to the first rapid
look that the truth reveals itself.

What is it then that has so consecrated Yarrow to
song and poetry, made it dear to the hearts of so many
poets, dear too to every heart, in which there dwells any
tone of melody? The very name is itself a poem,
sounding wildly sweet, sad, and musical. And when
you see it, the place answers with a strange fitness
to the name. It is, as it were, the inner sanctuary of
the whole Scottish Border, of that mountain tract which
sweeps from sea to sea, from St. Abb's Head and the
Lammermuir westward to the hills of Galloway. It
concentrates in itself all that is most characteristic of
that scenery. The soft green rounded hills with their

328 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

flowing outlines, overlapping and melting into each other,
— the clear streams winding down between them from
side to side, margined with green slips of holm,— the
steep brae-sides with the splendour of mountain grass,
interlaced here and there with darker ferns, or purple
heather, — the hundred side-burns that feed the main
Dale-river, coming from hidden Hopes where the grey
Peel-tower still moulders, — the pensive aspect of the
whole region so solitary and desolate. Then Yarrow is
the centre of the once famous but now vanished Forest
of Ettrick, with its memories of proud huntings and
chivalry, of glamourie and the land of Faery. Again, it
is the home of some 'old unhappy far-off thing,' some
immemorial romantic sorrow, so remote that tradition
has forgotten its incidents, yet cannot forget the impres-
sion of its sadness. Ballad after ballad comes down
loaded with a dirge-like wail for some sad event, made
still sadder for that it befell in Yarrow. The oldest
ballad that survives. The Dowie Dens o Yarrow, tells of
a knight, one probably of the clan Scott, treacherously
slain in combat by a kinsman : —

'She's kiss'd his cheek, she's kaim'd his hair,

As oft she 'd done before, O ;
She's beked him wi' his noble brand,
And he's awa' to Yarrow.'

To Yarrow too belongs that most pathetic Lament of
the Border Widow, sung by his wife Marjory over the

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. 329

grave of the outlaw Piers Cockburn, when she had
buried him by his tower of Henderland : —

' I sew'd his sheet, making my maen ;
I watch'd the corpse, myself alane ;
I watch'd his body, night and day,
No living creature cam' that way.

I took his body on my back,

And whiles I gaed, and whiles I sate,

I digg'd a grave, and laid him in,

And happ'd him with the sod sae green.

But think na ye my heart was sair.
When I laid the mool on his yellow hair ;
O think na ye my heart was wae,
When I turn'd about, away to gae?'

Below Henderland, a mile down Yarrow, moulders
Dryhope Tower, the birthplace in Queen Mary's time of
the famous Mary Scott, the first Flower of Yarrow,
renowned for her beauty, wooed by all the Chieftains
of the Border, and won to be his wife by the famous
Wat of Harden. Another mile down, comes into Yar-
row River the Douglas Burn, which, after it flowed past
the now ruined Blackhouse Tower, home of Lady Mar-
garet and scene of The Douglas Tragedy, had its waters
dyed with the blood of the stricken Lord William.

'O they rade on, and on they rade,
And a' by the light of the moon,
Until they came to yon wan water,
And there they lighted doun.

330 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

They lighted doun to tak a drink

Of the springs that ran sae clear ;
And down the stream ran his gude heart's blood,

And sair she 'gan to fear.'

And all the way down, not a ' Hope ' or a burn joins
Yarrow from either side, but had its Peel-tower, the
scene of some tragic or romantic incident, many of
them remembered, more forgotten.

Last century the old popular wail was taken up by two
ladies, each of an ancient Border name, and each the
authoress of a beautiful song, set to the old tune of the
Flowers of the Forest. But their strains were but the
echoes of a far older refrain, coaeval probably with Flodden,
which Scott sought to recover, but found two lines only : —
' I ride single in my saddle,
For the Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away.'

Last century, too, Hamilton of Bangour carried on the
strain, but in a lighter mood, in his well-known ballad —

' Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride.'
And soon after Logan recurred to the older and more
plaintive form of the melody, adding to it another note
of sadness : —

' They sought him east, they sought him west.
They sought him all the forest thorough,
They nothing saw but the coming night,
They nothing heard but the roar of Yarrow.

No longer from thy window look,
Thou hast no son, thou tender mother.
No longer walk, thou weeping maid,
Alas ! thou hast no more a brother.'

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. 331

Such was the great background of pathetic feeling
out of which Yarrow came forth to meet the poets of
this century. In the earliest years of it Scott, by
gathering together and concentrating all that was oldest
and finest in the ancient songs of ' The Forest/ had
conferred a new and deeper consecration on Yarrow.
When Wordsworth passed down Tweed-dale with his
sister from that first interview at Lasswade, Scott had
already published his Minstrelsy of the Scottish. Border,
but had not yet made the last minstrel

' Pass where Newark's ruined tower
Looks forth from Yarrow's birchen bower,'

much less dreamed of Marmion, with those so inter-
esting introductions, in one of which he sings of St.
Mary's silent lake : —

' There 's nothing left to Fancy's guess,
You see that all is loneliness :
Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude.
So stilly is the solitude.'

Then Wordsworth came, and as he travelled down the
bank of Tweed, and felt that on the other side of the
hill, within an hour's walk, lay Yarrow, the very sanc-
tuary of old border song, doubtless the poetic heart
was stirred within him, and he longed to look on the
romantic river. But he was constrained — probably
enough from some quite prosaic reason — to pass on,
and the thoughts and feelings came to him which took
shape in Yarrow Unvisited. Turn to the poem. It

332 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

opens in a lighter, more frolicsome vein than was usual
with Wordsworth — frolicsome, we may call it, not hu-
morous, for to humour Wordsworth never attained. His
sister evidently desires to

' turn aside,
And see the braes of Yarrow.'

To her wish — it may have been importunity — the poet
replies, We have seen so many famous rivers all Scot-
land over ; so many famous streams lie before us yet
to see — Galla Water, Leader Haughs, Dryburgh by
the ' chiming Tweed ' —

' There 's pleasant Teviotdale, a land

Made blithe with plough and harrow :
Why throw away a needful day
To go in search of Yarrow } '

And then he breaks out, —

' What 's Yarrow but a river bare
That glides the dark hills under?
There are a thousand such elsewhere
As worthy of your wonder.'

His sister looks up in his face surprised and pained to
hear her brother speak in what seemed scorn of the
old romantic river. To her look the poet replies in a
somewhat more serious strain, admits that there must
be something worth their seeing in Yarrow — the green
holms, the fair flowing river — but these for the present
they must pass by, and must allow

' The swan on still Saint Mary's Lake,
Float double, swan and shadow.'

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. ^'i^'^

And then the deep undertone of feeHng which lay
beneath all the lighter chafif and seeming disparage-
ment, breaks out in these two immortal stanzas : —

' Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown ;
It must, or we shall rue it :
We have a vision of our own ;
Ah ! why should we undo it ?

The treasured dreams of times long past
We'll keep them, winsome Marrow !

For, when we're there, although 'tis fair,
'Twill be another Yarrow ! '

After this ideal gleam has for a moment broken over
it, the light of common day again closes in, and the
poem ends with the comforting thought that

' Should life be dull, and spirits low,

'Twill soothe us in our sorrow
That earth has something yet to show.
The bonny holms of Yarrow ! '

The whole poem, if it contains only two stanzas pitched
in Wordsworth's highest strain, is throughout in his
most felicitous diction. The manner is that of the
old ballad, with an infusion of modern reflection, which
yet does not spoil its naturalness. The metre is that
in which most of the old Yarrow ballads, from The
Dowie Dens onward, are cast, with the second and the
fourth lines in each stanza ending in double rhymes,
to let the refrain fall full on the fine melodious name
of Yarrow. It plays with the subject, rises and falls —
now light-hearted, now serious, then back to homeliness,

334 THE THREE YARROWS. [XT.

with a most graceful movement. It has in it something
of that ethereahty of thought and manner which be-
longed to Wordsworth's earlier lyrics — those composed
during the last years of the preceding and the first few
years of this century. This peculiar ethereality — which
is a thing to feel rather than to describe — left him after
about 1805, and though replaced in the best of his later
poems by increased depth and mellowness of reflection,
yet could no more be compensated than the fresh gleam
of new-fledged leaves in spring can be made up for by
their autumnal glory.

Years pass, and Wordsworth at length, guided by the
Ettrick Shepherd, looks on the actual Yarrow, and
takes up the strain, where he had left it eleven years
before. Then the feeling was —

' We have a vision of our own ;
Ah ! why should we undo it ! '

Now it is —

' And is this — Yarrow ?— This the stream,
Of which my fancy cherish'd,
So faithfully, a waking dream,
An image that hath perish'd ? '

This famous exclamation, which has long since passed
into the mind of the world, had scarcely found vent,
when there falls a strange sadness on the poet's heart,
and he would that some minstrel were near, to dispel
it with glad music. Yet why should he be sad ? The
stream wanders on its way clear and silvery- —

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. ^'^^

' Nor have these eyes by greener hills
Been soothed, in all my wanderings ;

And, through her depths, Saint Mary's Lake

Is visibly delighted ;
For not a feature of those hills

Is in the mirror slighted.'

And ' a blue sky bends o'er Yarrow Vale,' save where it
is flecked by ' pearly whiteness ' of a fair September
morning. Everything that meets his eye is beautiful
and soothing. But the braes, though beautiful, look
so solitary and desolate, and the solitariness of the
present answers too well to the sadness of the past.
Summing up all the sorrows of innumerable songs in
one question, he exclaims, —

' Where was it that the famous Flower
Of Yarrow Vale lay bleeding ? '

And here, if we might pause on details of fact, we might
say that Wordsworth fell into an inaccuracy ; for Mary
Scott of Dryhope, the real 'Flower of Yarrow,' never
did lie bleeding on Yarrow, but became the wife of Wat
of Harden, and the mother of a wide-branching race.
Yet Wordsworth speaks oihis bed, evidently confounding
the lady ' Flower of Yarrow ' with that ' slaughtered
youth' for whom so many ballads had sung lament.
This slight divergence from fact, however, no way mars
the truth of feeling, which makes the poet long to pierce
into the dumb past, and know something of the pathetic
histories that have immortalised these braes. But,

^^6 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

though he cannot recall the buried histories of the past,
he does not fail to read to the life the present senti-
ment that pervades Yarrow : —

' Meek loveliness is round thee spread,
A softness still and holy ;
The grace of forest charms decayed,
And pastoral melancholy.'

No words in the language penetrate more truly and
deeply into the very heart of nature. It was one of
Wordsworth's great gifts to be able to concentrate the
whole feeling of a wide scene into a few words, simple,
strong, penetrating to the very core. Many a time,
and for many a varied scene, he has done this, but
perhaps he has never put forth this power more happily,
than in the four lines in which he has summed up for all
time the true quality of Yarrow. You look on Yarrow,
you repeat those four lines over to yourself, and you feel
that the finer, more subtle, essence of nature has never
been more perfectly uttered in human words. There it
stands complete. No poet coming after Wordsworth
need try to do it again, for it has been done once,
perfectly and for ever.

The verses which follow relapse from that high altitude
into a more ordinary level of description. Having
traversed the stream from St. Mary's Loch to Newark
and Bowhill, he leaves it with the impression that sight
has not destroyed imagination — the actual not effaced
the ideal : —

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. ^^J

' . . . . Not by sight alone,

Lov'd Yarrow, have I won thee ;
A ray of fancy still survives —

Her sunshine plays upon thee !

.... I know where'er I go,

Thy genuine image, Yarrow !
Will dwell with me, to heighten joy

And cheer my mind in sorrow.'

Compared with Varrozv Unvisited, Yarrotv Visited
does not go with such a swing from end to end. The
second poem has in it more of contemplative pause than
the first. There is more irregularity in the quality of
its stanzas — some of them rising to an excellence which
Wordsworth has not surpassed, and which has impressed
them on the poetic memory as possessions for ever,
others sinking down to the level of ordinary poetic
workmanship' But even in a lyric of a dozen stanzas,
if a note is struck here and there of the highest pitch,
to maintain the strain at the same level throughout
seems hardly given to man. It will be found, I think,
on examination, that the lyric stanzas which have taken
an undying hold on mankind, are almost always em-
bedded among other stanzas not so perfect. Even the
most gifted poets cannot keep on expressing their best
thoughts in the best words throughout all the stanzas
of a long lyric.

Seventeen more years, and then came the farewell
visit to Abbotsford, and that last day on Yarrow, when
z

338 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

' Once more, by Newark's Castle-gate,
Long left without a warder,
I stood, looked, listened, and with me,
Great minstrel of the Border !

And through the silent portal arch
Of mouldering Newark enter'd ;

And clomb the winding stair that once

Too timidly was mounted
By the ' last Minstrel ' (not the last !)

Ere he his Tale recounted.'

It was a day late in September, and, judging by the
natural features touched in Yarrow Revisited, the party
from Abbotsford did not go to the upper course of
Yarrow, where the braes are green and treeless, but
lingered among the woods of Bowhill, and about the
ruin of Newark. The leaves on these woods were sere,
but made redder or more golden as the breezes played,
or the autumnal sunshine shot through them.

As they wandered through the wooded banks that
overhang Yarrow, they

* Made a day of happy hours,

Their happy days recalling :
And if, as Yarrow, through the woods

And down the meadow ranging,
Did meet us with unaltered face.

Though we were changed and changing ;

If then, some natural shadows spread

Our inward prospect over.
The soul's deep valley was not slow

Its brightness to recover.'

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. 339

No wonder that some shadows overspread their mental
prospect that day, for, as regarded Scott,

' . . . . Sickness lingering yet

Has o'er his pillow brooded ;
And Care waylays his steps, — a Sprite
Not easily eluded.'

Against these forebodings of decay Wordsworth, through-
out the poem, contends with wonderful buoyancy. But
the pressure of fact was too heavy to be put by. It
required something more than the soothing influences
of nature, or even the faith which Wordsworth so
cherished,

' Naught shall prevail against us, or disturb
The cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of goodness,'

to have enabled Scott or his friends to bear his then
condition. From the sight of that inevitable decay
Wordsworth turned, and tried to soothe himself and
his friends with the hope that, though he was compelled
to leave his Tweed and Teviot, ' Sorento's breezy waves '
would give him gracious welcome, and Tiber before his
eyes ' with unimagined beauty shine.'

' For Thou, upon a hundred streams,
By tales of love and sorrow,
Of faithful love, undaunted truth,
Hast shed the power of Yarrow ;
Z 1

340 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

And streams unknown, hills yet unseen,

Wherever they invite Thee,
At parent Nature's grateful call,

With gladness must requite thee.'

Alas! how different was the reality! In Lockhart's
Life of him may be read, with how dull and unstirred
a heart he gazed on all that Italy contains of art or
nature, how the only things, which for a moment reani-
mated him, were the Tombs of the Stuarts in St. Peter's,
and the sight of the heather on the Apennines, remind-
ing him of his native land.

After the expression of the hope of what Italy may
do to restore Scott, Wordsworth passes on, in four more
stanzas, to reflect on the power of ' localised Romance,'
to elevate and beautify existence, how

' The visions of the past
Sustain the heart in feeling
Life as she is, — our changeful Life.'

And then the poem, longer than either of the two
preceding ones, closes with this farewell benediction
on the stream, whose immemorial charm his own three
poems have so greatly enhanced : —

' YXovi on for ever, Yarrow Stream !

Fulfil thy pensive duty.
Well pleased that future Bards should chant

For simple hearts thy beauty ;
To dream-light dear while yet unseen.

Dear to the common sunshine,
And dearer still, as now I feel.

To memory's shadowy moonshine.'

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. 341

This poem, along with the touching sonnet which
condenses much of the same sentiment, and tells Scott

that

' the might
Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes,'

was sent to him soon afterwards, and reached him
before he left London for Italy. No record remains
as to how he took these poems, or what pleasure they
gave him. Probably the pall of gloom was by this time
settling down on his mind too heavily, to be lifted off
by any song that mortal poet could sing.

Compared with the two former poems, Yarrow Re-
visited falls short of the ideal tone to which they were
set. In the former, the poet's mind was free to follow
its natural impulse, and, unencumbered with present
fact, to see Yarrow Vale in the visionary light which
romance and foregone humanities had combined to
shed upon it.

In the last poem the sense of Scott's recent mis-
fortunes and declining health was too painfully present
to admit of such treatment. Wordsworth was himself
conscious of this, and in the retrospect he made this
remark : — * There is too much pressure of fact for these
verses to harmonise, as much as I could wish, with the
two preceding poems.' This is true. And yet if it
wants the idealising touch, it has qualities of its own,
which well compensate for that want. It is one of the
latest of Wordsworth's poems, in which his natural power

342 THE THREE YARROWS. [xi.

is seen still unabated ; and if it falls below the best
things he did in his best days, it is only second to these,
and displays his later or autumnal manner in its best
form. Several of the stanzas above quoted are only a
little below the finest verses in the best of the Lyrical
Ballads, written in his poetic prime. But if some may
estimate the artistic merit of Yarrow Revisited lower
than I am inclined to do, they cannot deny its human
and historic interest. It is an enduring record of the
friendship of two poets, the greatest of their time, and
of the last scene in that friendship. Commencing with
that first meeting at Lasswade, before either was much
known to fame, their friendship lasted, unabated till
death parted them.

The two poets had lived apart, and met only by
occasional visits, when Wordsworth crossed the Scottish
border, or Scott visited the Lakes. On one of these
latter occasions they had together ascended Helvellyn,
and some have supposed, but, I believe, without reason,
that Wordsworth commemorated that ascent in the lines
beginning —

' Inmate of a mountain dwelling.'

But there is no doubt that in one of his latest poems,
' Musings in Aquapendentc,' he reverted to that day on

'Old Helvellyn's brow,
Where once together, in his day of strength.
We stood rejoicing, as if earth were free
From sorrow, hke the sky above our heads.'

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. 343

The characters of Wordsworth and Scott were not
less different than were the views and methods on which
their poetry was constructed. But they each esteemed
and honoured the other, throughout their days of active
creation, and now they had met for what they well knew,
though they did not say it, must be their final interview.
It was an affecting and solemn interview, according to
the prose account of it which Wordsworth and Lockhart
have each given ; not less affecting than this, its poetic
record. ^

Then, again, the poem is a memorial of the very last
visit Scott ever paid, not to Yarrow only, but to any
scene in that land which he had so loved and glorified.
A memorial of that day, struck off on the spot, even by
an inferior hand, would have been precious. But when
no less a poet than Wordsworth was there to com-
memorate this, Scott's last day by his native streams, and
when into that record he poured so much of the mellow
music of his autumnal genius, the whole poem reaches
to a quite tragic pathos. As you croon over its solemn
cadences, and think of the circumstances out of which it
arose, and the sequel that was so soon to follow, you
seem to overhear in every line

' The still sad music of humanity.'

Wordsworth never revisited those scenes. But once
again, on hearing of the death of James Hogg, in
November, 1835, in thought he returned to Yarrow, and

344 THE THREE YARROWS.

poured out this Extempore Effusion, probably the very-
last outburst in which his genius flashed forth with
its old poetic fervour : —

'When first, descending from the moorlands,

I saw the Stream of Yarrow gHde
Along a bare and open valley,
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.

When last along its banks I wandered,
Through groves which had begun to shed

Their golden leaves upon the pathways,
My steps the Border-minstrel led.

The mighty minstrel breathes no longer,

'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies ;
And death upon the braes of Yarrow,

Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes.

Like clouds that rake the mountain summits,

Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,

From sunshine to the sunless land !

Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber

Were earlier raised, remain to hear
A timid voice, that asks in whispers,

"Who next will drop and disappear.'""

These lines are a fitting epilogue to the three poems,
■ by which,' as Lockhart has said, ' Wordsworth has
connected his name to all time with the most romantic
of Scottish streams,' and, he might have added, with the
greatest of Scottish poets.

CHAPTER XII.

'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.'

What induced Wordsworth for once to stray into
the field of romance, and to choose for his theme this
last effort of decaying chivalry — Wordsworth whose
genius we generally associate with incidents which are
homely, and subjects which are reflective ? His other
poems all turn upon modern persons and experiences.
But The White Doe of Rylstone goes back to the feudal
period of England's history, just before its close. In
choosing such a theme, does not Wordsworth seem to
have forsaken his proper region, and to have trespassed
for once upon the domain of Scott? For is not the
story of the 'Fall of the Nortons'just such an one as
might have inspired one of Scott's metrical romances ?
So at first sight it might seem. And yet a closer study
of this poem will, perhaps, show more than anything
else could, how wide is the contrast between the genius
of the two poets. The whole way in which Wordsworth
handles the subject, and the peculiar effect which he
brings out of it, are so unlike Scott's manner of treat-
ment, are so entirely true to Wordsworth's special vein

346 ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xiI.

of thought and sentiment, that this contrast, even if
there were nothing else, would make the poem worthy
of close regard.

The incidents on which the White Doe is founded
belong to the year 1569, the twelfth of Queen Elizabeth.

It is well known that as soon as Queen Mary of
Scotland was imprisoned in England, she became the
centre around which gathered all the intrigues which
were then on foot, not only in England, but throughout
Catholic Europe, to dethrone the Protestant Queen
Elizabeth. Abroad, the Catholic world was collecting
all its strength, to crush the heretical island. The bigot
Pope Pius v., with the dark intriguer Philip II. of Spain,
and the savage Duke of Alva, were ready to pour their
forces on the shores of England.

At home, a secret negotiation for a marriage between
Queen Mary and the Duke of Norfolk had received
the approval of many of the chief English nobles. The
Queen discovered the plot, threw Norfolk and some
of his friends into the Tower, and summoned Percy.
Earl of Northumberland, and Neville, Earl of West-
moreland, immediately to appear at court. These two
earls were known to be holding secret communica-
tion with Mary, and longing to see the old faith
restored.

On receiving the summons, Northumberland at once
withdrew to Brancepeth Castle, a stronghold of the
Earl of Westmoreland. Straightway all their vassals

XII.] ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 347

rose and gathered round the two great earls. The
whole of the North was in arms. A proclamation went
forth that they intended to restore the ancient religion,
to settle the succession to the crown, and to prevent
the destruction of the old nobility. As they marched
forward they were joined by all the strength of the
Yorkshire dales, and, among others, by a gentleman
of ancient name, Richard Norton, accompanied by
eight brave sons. He came bearing the common
banner, called the Banner of the Five Wounds, because
on it was displayed the Cross with the five wounds of
our Lord. The insurgents entered Durham, tore the
Bible, caused mass to be said in the cathedral, and
then set forward as for York. Changing their purpose
on the way, they turned aside to lay siege to Barnard
Castle, which was held by Sir George Bowes for the
Queen. While they lingered there for eleven days,
Sussex marched against them from York, and the
earls, losing heart, retired towards the Border, and dis-
banded their forces, which were left to the vengeance
of the enemy, while they themselves sought refuge
in Scotland. Northumberland, after a confinement of
several years in Loch Leven Castle, was betrayed by
the Scots to the English, and put to death. West-
moreland died an exile in Flanders, the last of the
ancient house of the Nevilles, earls of Westmoreland.
Norton, with his eight sons, fell into the hands of
Sussex, and all suffered death at York. It is the fate

34^ 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xiI.

of this ancient family on which Wordsworth's poem is
founded.

Wordsworth was not the first poet who had touched
the theme. Some nameless North England minstrel
had before composed a not unspirited ballad upon it,
which appears in Percy's Reliques, under the title of
The Rising in the NortJi.

Although these incidents might perhaps have con-
tained too little of martial prowess, battle, and ad-
venture to satisfy Scott, yet we can all imagine what
he would have made of them ; how he would have
revelled in the description of the mustering vassals ;
the hot haste in which they flew from their homes to
the standard of the earls ; the varieties of armour ; the
emblazonment of the shields, the caparisoned steeds on
which the earls rode ; the scene when the army entered
Durham and filled the cathedral ; the siege of Barnard
Castle by the Tees ; the countermarch of Sussex ; the
dismay spreading from the earls among their followers ;
the retreat and the final catastrophe. What vigorous
portraits we should have had of Northumberland and
of Westmoreland ; nor less of Bowes and Sussex, each
standing out distinct, in his own individual guise and
personality !

Of all this pomp and pageantry of war Wordsworth
gives little or nothing. In fact, he hardly attempts to
' conduct the action,' or to bring out the main incidents
at all, or to portray the chief personages. So entirely,

XII.] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 349

in the poet's thought, is the action subordinated to the
one pervading sentiment he desires to convey, that
the narrative portion of the poem seems broken, feeble,
and ill-adjusted. For not on the main action at all, but
on quite a side incident — not on the obvious, but on a
more hidden aspect of the story, has Wordsworth fixed
his eye.

Not that the epic faculty was wholly wanting in him.
In the song of Brotigham Castle he had struck a true
epic strain : —

' Armour rusting in his halls
On the blood of Clifford calls ;—
" Quell the Scot," exclaims the lance—
" Bear me to the heart of France,"
Is the longing of the shield.'

This, if no other of his poems, proves that he was not
insensible to the thought that —

* In our halls is hung
Armour of the invincible knights of old.'

But his delights were not with these. Nowhere does
this appear more clearly than in The White Doe of
Rylstone, where, with such temptation to dwell on one
of the latest outbursts of the feudal spirit in England,
he turned so persistently aside to contemplate quite
another aspect of things.

What that aspect is — what were the incidents in
that rising in the North, which arrested Wordsworth's

350 ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xil.

imagination and drew forth from him this poem, we shall
see by-and-by.

It is well, in studying any poet, to note at what
period of his hfe each particular poem was written.
It is, I think, of especial importance to do so in the
study of Wordsworth. For, as has been often noted, he
had at least two distinct periods — each of them marked
by its own style, both of sentiment and of diction.

The period of his first and finest inspiration reached
from about the year 1795 to 1805, or perhaps 1807.
This decade is the period of his restoration to mental
health and hopefulness, after the depression and despond-
ency into which the failure of the French Revolution
had plunged him. His mind had just come back from
chaos to order, and yet retained the full swing of the
impulse it had received, by having passed through that
great world-agony. To these ten years belong most of
the poems to which men now turn with most delight, as
containing the essence of that new inspiration which
Wordsworth let in upon the world. There is in them
the freshness, the ethereality, ' the innocent brightness '
as 'of the new-born day.' Or, they are like the re-
awakening that comes upon the moors and mountains,
when the first breath of spring is blowing over them.
The best poems of his later era have a quality of their
own — a deepened thoughtfulness, a pensive solemnity,
like the afternoon of an autumnal day.

Now The White Doe of Rylstone was composed in

XII.] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 351

1807, just at the close of his first period, though not
pubHshed till 18 15. It was during the summer of 1807.
the poet tells us, that he visited, for the first time, the
beautiful scenery that surrounds Bolton Priory ; and the
poem of The White Doe, founded on a tradition connected
with the place, was composed at the close of the same
year. That tradition, as preserved by Dr. Whitaker, in
his History of Craven, runs thus : — Not long after the
Dissolution of the Monasteries, ' a white doe, say the aged
people of the neighbourhood, long continued to make
a weekly pilgrimage from Rylstone over the fells of
Bolton, and was constantly found in the Abbey church-
yard during the divine service ; after the close of which
she returned home as regularly as the rest of the con-
gregation.' This is the story which laid hold of Words-
worth's imagination, and to which we owe the poem.
The earlier half, he tells us, was composed, at the close
of the year 1807, while on a visit to his wife's relatives
at Stockton-upon-Tees, and the poem was finished on
his return to Grasmere. That year had just seen the
publication of the two volumes of Lyrical Ballads, which
contain perhaps his highest inspirations and, as it were,
wind up the productions of his first great creative
period.

TJie White Doe, therefore, marks the beginning of
the transition to his second period, the period of The
Excursion. But in the finest parts of The White Doe
we still feel the presence of the same ethereal spirit,

352 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.' [xil.

which animated his earlier day. The introduction to
the poem, which bears the date of 1815, is altogether
in his later vein.

Without, however, saying more of the circumstances
under which the poem was composed, let me now turn
to itself, and note its contents canto by canto.

The First Canto opens with a Sunday forenoon, and
the gathering of the people from the moorlands and
hills around the Wharf to the church-service in Bolton
Abbey. This beautiful ruin of the middle age stands
on a level green holm down by the side of the Wharf,
surrounded by wooded banks and moorland hills. From
these, on the Sunday morn, the people come trooping
eagerly, for they are in the first zeal of the Reformation
era. The place where they meet for worship is the nave
of the old Abbey Church, which at the Dissolution had
been preserved, when everything else belonging to the
monastic house had gone down before the fury of the
spoiler. The throng of country people has passed
within the church, the singing of the prelusive hymn
has been heard outside. Then silence ensues, for the
priest has begun to recite the liturgy, when suddenly
a white doe is seen pacing into the churchyard ground.

'A moment ends the fervent din,
And all is hushed, without and within ;
For though the priest, more tranquilly,
Recites the holy liturgy,
The only voice which you can hear

XII.] ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.'

Is the river murmuring near.
—When soft !— the dusky trees between,
And down the path through the open green,
Where is no living thing to be seen ;
And through yon gateway where is found,
Beneath the arch with ivy bound,
Free entrance to the churchyard ground.
And right across the verdant sod
Towards the very house of God ;
—Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
Comes gliding in, serene and slow.
Soft and silent as a dream,

A solitary doe !
White she is as lily of June,
And beauteous as the silver moon,
When out of sight the clouds are driven.
And she is left alone in heaven ;
Or like a ship some gentle day
In sunshine sailing far away,
A glittering ship, that hath the plain
Of ocean for her own domain.
Lie silent in your graves, ye dead !
Lie quiet in your churchyard bed !
Ye living, tend your holy cares ;
Ye multitude, pursue your prayers ;
And blame not me if my heart and sight
Are occupied with one delight !
Tis a work for Sabbath hours

If I with this bright creature go :
Whether she be of forest bowers.

From the bowers of earth below ;
Or a spirit, for one day given,
A gift of grace from purest heaven.
What harmonious pensive changes
Wait upon her as she ranges

?,5?,

A a

354 ^THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xii.

Round and round this pile of state,
Overthrown and desolate !
Now a step or two her way
Is through space of open day,
Where the enamoured sunny light
Brightens her that was so bright ;
Now doth a dehcate shadow fall,

Falls upon her like a breath,
From some lofty arch or wall,

As she passes underneath :
Now some gloomy nook partakes
Of the glory that she makes, —
High-ribbed vault of stone, or cell
With perfect cunning framed as well
Of stone, and ivy, and the spread
Of the elder's bushy head ;
Some jealous and forbidding cell.
That doth the living stars repel,
And where no flower hath leave to dwell.'

I know not any lines in the octosyllabic metre more
perfect in their rhythm, and with melody more attuned
to the meaning and sentiment tliey are intended to
convey. They might be placed next after the most
exquisite parts of CJiristabel. If metre has its origin,
as Coleridge suggests, in the balance produced by
the power of the will striving to hold in check the
working of emotion — if it is the union and interpene-
tration of will and emotion, of impulse and purpose,
I know not where this balance can be seen more
beautifully adjusted. As for the description of the
ruined Bolton Abbey, seen in the light of a Sabbath

XII.] ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 355

noon, it may well be compared with Scott's description
of Melrose, seen while still in its prime, under the light
of the moon.

Presently, service over, the congregation pass out,
and then begin many questionings and surmises as
to what mean these visits of the doe, renewed every
Sunday, to the Abbey churchyard and that solitary
grave. First a mother points her out to her boy, but
he shrinks back in a kind of superstitious awe —

' " But is she truly what she seems ? "
He asks, with insecure delight,
Asks of himself^and doubts — and still
The doubt returns against his will.'

Then an old man comes, a soldier returned from the
wars, and he has his explanation. It is the spirit of
the lady who, in grief for her son drowned in the Wharf
many centuries ago, founded Bolton Priory, and now
returns in the shape of this beautiful creature, to grieve
over her holy place outraged and overthrown.

Then a dame of haughty air, followed by a page to
carry her book, opines that the doe comes with no good
intent, for often she is seen to gaze down into a vault,
' where the bodies are buried upright.'

' There, face by face, and hand by hand,
The Claphams and Mauleverers stand.'

There too is buried the savage John de Clapham, who,
in the Wars of the Roses,

A a 2

^^6 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xii.

' Dragged Earl Pembroke from Banbury Church,
And smote off his head on the stones of the porch.'

This high dame has the blood of the Pembrokes in her
veins, and believes the doe has something to do with
the Earl's murderer.

' The scholar pale
From Oxford come to his native vale,'

he has a conceit of his own ; he believes the doe to be
none other than the gracious fairy or ministrant spirit,
who in old time waited on the Shepherd-Lord Clifford,
when in the neighbouring tower of Barden he gave
himself to the study of the stars, and alchemy, and
other such glamourie, with the monks of Bolton for
companions of his researches.

At last, after the people have gazed and questioned
to their hearts' content, they disperse, and the doe also
disappears.

Left alone, the poet turns to give the true version,
and to chant —

' A tale of tears, a mortal story.'

In Canto II he passes at once from the doe to
her, whose companion, years before, she had been, the
only daughter of the House of Norton. He glances
back to the days just before the rising in the North,
when there stood in the hall of Rylstone that banner,
embroidered with the cross and the five wounds, which

XII.] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 357

Emily had wrought with her own hands, but against
her will, in obedience to her father.

' That banner, waiting for the call,
Stood quietly in Rylstone Hall.'

At length the call came, and at the summons Norton
and his sons go forth to join the two Earls, who were
in arms for the Catholic cause. With eight sons he
went ; but one, Francis, the eldest, would not go. He,
and his only sister, who had received the Reformed
faith long ago from their mother ere she died, now look
with sorrow and foreboding on the rash enterprise, in
which their father and brothers are going forth. Francis
makes one effort to avert their fate ; he throws him-
self at his father's feet, and though he knew he would
be scorned as a recreant, entreats him to hold his
hand, and not to join the rising, urging many reasons,
— most of all, would he thus forsake his only daughter ?
In vain — the old man goes forth from the hall, and
is received with shouts by the assembled tenantry, and
all together, squire and vassals, march off to Brance-
peth Castle, the trysting-place.

Here was a passage of which Scott would have made
much ; the gathering around the old hall of the yeomen
of Rylstone, their marching forth, and their reception
by their confederates at Brancepeth. Of this there is
scarce a hint in Wordsworth. He turns aside, wholly
occupied with the brother and sister left behind.

358 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE! [xit.

When these two are left alone, Francis tells his
sister of his last interview with their father, and of
seeing him and his eight brothers march forth. For
himself, though he cannot be one with them, he is
determined to follow them, and be at hand to render
what service he may, when misfortune comes, as come
it must. For he does not try to hide or extenuate the
certainty of the doom that was overtaking their house.
He himself was going to share it, and his sister must
brace her heart to bear what was impending. Possessed,
as by a spirit of mournful divination, he tells her —

' Farewell all wishes, all debate,
All prayers for this cause, or for that !
Weep, if that aid thee ; but depend
Upon no help of outward friend.
Espouse thy doom at once, and cleave
To Fortitude without reprieve.
For we must fall, both we and ours, —
This mansion, and these pleasant bowers.
The blast will sweep us all away,
One desolation, one decay ! '

Then, pointing to the White Doe which was feeding by,
he continued —

' Even she will to her peaceful woods

Return, and to her murmuring floods,

And be in heart and soul the same

She was, before she hither came.

Ere she had learned to love us all,

Herself beloved in Rylstone Hall.'

He bids his sister prepare for the doom that awaits

XII.] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE' 359

them, to look for no consolation from earthly sources,
but to seek it in that purer faith which they had
learned together. These are his words to her :

' But thou, my sister, doomed to be
The last leaf which by heaven's decree
Must hang upon a blasted tree ;
If not in vain we breathed the breath
Together of a purer faith —
If on one thought our minds have fed,
And we have in one meaning read —
If we like combatants have fared,
And for this issue been prepared —
If thou art beautiful, and youth
And thought endue thee with all truth —
Be strong ; — be worthy of the grace
Of God, and fill thy destined place :
A soul by force of sorrows high.
Uplifted to the purest sky
Of undisturbed humanity.'

When he had by this solemn adjuration, as it were,
consecrated his sister to fulfil her destiny, and to
become a soul beatified by sorrow, they part, and he
follows his armed kinsmen. This consecration, and the
sanctifying effect of sorrow on the heroine, is, as Words-
worth himself has said, ' the point on which henceforth
the whole moral interest of the poem hinges.'

The Third Canto describes the mustering of the host
at Brancepeth Castle, which was the Earl of Westmore-
land's stronghold on the Were, the meeting of Norton
and his eight sons with the two Earls, and his high-
spirited address to these —

360 ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xiI.

' Brave earls, to whose heroic veins
Our noblest blood is given in trust,'

urging them to rise for their outraged faith and the old
and holy Church.

Then follows the unfurling of the banner which Nor-
ton's child had wrought, to be the standard of the whole
army, the march to Durham^ where, after they

' In Saint Cuthbert's ancient see
Sang mass — and tore the Book of Prayer —
And trod the Bible beneath their feet,'

the whole host musters on Clifford Moor,

' Full sixteen thousand fair to see.'

Among them all the finest figure is the aged Squire
of Rylstone :

' No shape of man in all the array
So graced the sunshine of the day ;
The monumental pomp of age
Was with this goodly Personage ;
A stature, undepressed in size.
Unbent, which rather seemed to rise
In open victory o'er the weight
Of seventy years, to higher height ;
Magnific limbs of withered state, —
A face to fear and venerate, —
Eyes dark and strong, and on his head
Bright locks of silver hair, thick spread,
Which a bright morion half concealed.
Light as a hunter's of the field.'

The stirring incidents of this Canto afford much

XII.] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 361

scope for pictorial painting ; but this is perhaps the
one passage in which Wordsworth has attempted it.
There are several speeches, which, though not without
a certain quaint homely expressiveness, have nothing of
the poetic oratory which Scott would have imparted
to them.

The intention was to march direct on London ; but
news reaches them on the way that Dudley had set out
against them, and was nearing York with a large and
well-appointed force. Westmoreland's heart fails him ;
a retreat is ordered, Norton remonstrates in vain, A
disorderly march is begun backward toward the Tees,
there to wait till Dacre from Naworth, and Howard,
Duke of Norfolk, come to reinforce them. Francis
Norton, who had followed unarmed, and

* Had watched the banner from afar.
As shepherds watch a lonely star,'

once more throws himself in the way of his father, and
beseeches him to retire from these craven-hearted leaders,
who by their incompetence and cowardliness were lead-
ing so many brave men to sure destruction. He had
done his part by them, and was now by their mis-
conduct freed from farther obligation. The old man
spurns aside his son, who retires to wait another oppor-
tunity. In this narrative part of the poem, though there
are many lines of quaint and rugged strength, there is
none of the clear, direct, forward-flowing march of Scott's
best narrative poetry. Wordsworth is encumbered, as

-z^S^ 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.' [XTI.

it were, by reflectiveness of manner ; the thought, instead
of a rapid onward flow, keeps ever eddying round itself.
Canto IV. A clear full moon looks down upon the
insurgents beleaguering Barnard Castle on the river
Tees. The same moon shines on Rylstone Hall, with
its terraces, parterres, and the wild chase around it, all
untenanted, save by Emily and her White Doe. Here
is the description of it : —

' And southward far, with moors between,
Hill-tops, and floods, and forests green,
The bright moon sees that valley small,
Where Rylstone's old sequestered Hall
A venerable image yields
Of quiet to the neighbouring fields ;
While from one pillared chimney breathes
The smoke, and mounts in silver wreaths,
— The courts are hushed ; — for timely sleep
The grey-hounds to their kennel creep ;
The peacock in the broad ash-tree
Aloft is roosted for the night.
He who in proud prosperity
Of colours manifold and bright
Walked round, affronting the daylight ;
And higher still, above the bower
Where he is perched, from yon lone tower
The Hall-clock in the clear moonshine
With glittering finger points at nine.'

The gleam of natural loveliness here let in wonder-
fully relieves the pressure of the human sadness. Indeed,
the whole passage from which these lines come, gives
so truthfully, yet ideally, the image of an old family

XII.] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.'' 363

mansion seen at such an hour, that I cannot recall any
moonlight picture which equals it.

Wandering in the moonlight around her old home,
Emily enters by chance a woodbined bower, where in
her childhood she had often sat with her mother. The
woodbine fragrance recalls, as scents only can, those
long-vanished hours, and —

'An image faint,

And yet not faint — a presence bright

Returns to her, — 'tis that blest saint,

Who with mild looks and language mild

Instructed here her darhng child.

While yet a prattler on the knee,

To worship in simplicity

The Invisible God, and take for guide

The faith reformed and purified.'

By that vision she is soothed, and strengthened to check
her strong longing to follow her father and her brothers,
and to disobey the injunction to passive endurance laid
on her by Francis.

That same moon, as it shines on the Tees, sees another
sight — the insurgent host, wildly assaulting Barnard
Castle, Norton and his eight sons, as they dash reck-
lessly into a breach in the wall, made prisoners, and the
whole rash levy scattered to the winds.

In Canto V, an old retainer, whom Emily Norton
had sent to gain tidings of her father, returning, finds
her by a watch-tower or summer-house, that stood high
among the wastes of Rylstone Fell, and tells her the
tragic end of her father and brothers. They had been

364 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xiI.

led in chains to York, and were condemned to die.
Francis had followed them, got access to their prison,
and received the last commands of his father with his
blessing.

The banner was, by the cruel order of Sussex, to be
carried before them in mockery to the place of execu-
tion. But Francis, claiming it as his own by right,
takes it from the hands of the soldier to whom it was
entrusted, and bears it off through the unresisting crowd.
Richard Norton and his eight sons go forth, and calmly
and reverently meet their doom.

Emily returns to Rylstone Hall to await the coming
of her now only brother. But he comes not. As he
was leaving York, there fell on his ear the sound of
the minster bell, tolling the knell of his father and his
brothers. Bearing the banner, though not without mis-
givings as to his own consistency in doing so, he held
west over the great plain of York, up Wharfdale, and on
the second day reaches a summit whence he can descry
the far-off towers of Bolton. On that spot he is over-
taken by a band of horsemen sent by Sussex, under
command of Sir George Bowes, is accused of being a
coward and traitor, who had held aloof from the rising,
only to save his father's land, and is overpowered and
slain. Two days his body lay unheeded ; on the third
it was found in that lonely place by one of the Norton
tenantry, who, along with other yeomen, bears it to
Bolton Priory, and there, with the aid of the priest,

XII. J 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: '3<Se^

they lay it in a grave apart from the other graves,
because this was not the family burial-place. While
they are so engaged, his sister, who was wandering
towards Bolton, overhears the dirge they are singing,
'And, darting like a wounded bird,

She reached the grave, and with her breast

Upon the ground received the rest,

The consummation, the whole ruth

And sorrow of this final truth.'

But it is in the Seventh and last Canto, when all inci-
dent and action are over, and suffering, and the beauty
rising out of suffering, alone remain, that the full power
of the poet comes out. Just as in the First Canto the
calm contemplation of the ruined abbey, the sabbath
quiet, and the apparition of the doe, had prompted his
finest tones, so here, the sight of the only sister, sole
survivor of her ruined house, left alone with her sorrow,
awakens a strain of calm, deep melody, which is a meet
close for such a beginning.

Now that Emily Norton knows to the full her family's
doom, the poet turns and asks, —

' Whither has she fled ?

What mighty forest in its gloom

Enfolds her? Is a rifted tomb

Within the wilderness her seat ?

Some island which the wild waves beat,

Is that the sufferer's last retreat ?

Or some aspiring rock, that shrouds

Its perilous front in mists and clouds ?

High climbing rock — low sunless dale —

Sea — desert — what do these avail ?

2^6 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xII.

Oh, take her anguish and her fears
Into a deep recess of years !'

And years do pass ere we see her again. Neglect and
desolation have swept over Rylstone, and in their an-
cient home the name of Norton is unknown. Many
a weary foot she has wandered, far from her home,
which from the day of Francis' burial she has not looked
upon. At length, after many years, she returns to the
neighbourhood, and is seen on a bank once covered with
oaks, but now bare, seated under one sole surviving
mouldering tree.

' Behold her, like a virgin queen,
Neglecting in imperial state
These outward images of fate,
And carrying inward a serene
And perfect sway, through many a thought
Of chance and change, that hath been brought
To the subjection of a holy,
Though stern and rigorous, melancholy !
The like authority, with grace
Of awfulness, is in her face —
There hath she fixed it ; yet it seems
To overshadow, by no native right,
That face, which cannot lose the gleams,
Lose utterly the tender gleams,
Of gentleness and meek delight,
And loving-kindness ever bright :
Such is her sovereign mien : — her dress
(A vest, with woollen cincture tied ;
A hood of mountain-wool undyed)
Is homely — fashioned to express
A wandering Pilgrim's humbleness.'

XII.] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 367

That is the nearest approach the poem contains to
a visible picture of this daughter of the house of Norton.
Yet how little of a picture it is ! — her features, her
hair, her eyes, not one of these is mentioned. She is
painted almost entirely from within. Yet so powerfully
is the soul portrayed, that no adequate painter would
find any difficulty in adding the form and face, which
would be the outward image of such a character.

There, while she sits, a herd of deer sweeps by. But
one out of the herd pauses and draws near. It is her
own White Doe, which had run wild again for years.
Now it comes to her feet, lays its head upon her knee,
looks up into her face,

'A look of pure benignity.
And fond unclouded memory.'

Her mistress melted into tears,

*A flood of tears that flowed apace
Upon the happy creature's face.'

The doe restored came like a spirit of healing and
consolation to Emily Norton. Thenceforth, go where
she will, the creature is by her side. First to one
cottage in the neighbourhood, then to another, where
old tenants of the family lived, she went and sojourned,
and the White Doe with her. At length she finds cour-
age to revisit her old haunts about Rylstone — Norton
Tov/er, — that summer-house, where the messenger of
the sad tidings had found her — near which, years before.

368 ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xiI.

her youngest brother had found the doe, when a fawn,
and carried it in his arms home to Rylstone Hall. The
prophecy of Francis, she thinks, has been fulfilled almost
to the letter — in one detail only had it been falsified —
all else was taken, but the White Doe remained to her,
her last living friend. With this companion, she dared
to visit Bolton Abbey and the single grave there.

So, through all the overthrow and the suff"ering, there
had come at last healing and calm, and with it
*A reascent in sanctity

From fair to fairer ; day by day

A more divine and loftier way !

Even such this blessed Pilgrim trod,

By sorrow lifted toward her God ;

Uplifted to the purest sky

Of undisturbed mortality.'
At length, after she had returned and sojourned
among the Wharfdale peasants, and joined in their
Sabbath worships, she died, and was laid in Rylstone
church by her mother's side.

The White Doe long survived her, and continued to
haunt the spots which her mistress had loved to visit.
But the close, which rounds off the whole with perfect
beauty, must be given in the poet's own words : —
' Most glorious sunset ! and a ray

Survives — the twilight of this day —

In that fair creature whom the fields

Support, and whom the forest shields ;

Who, having filled a holy place,

Partakes, in her degree. Heaven's grace ;

XII.] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 369

And bears a memory and a^ mind

Raised far above the law of kind ;

Haunting the spots with lonely cheer

Which her dear mistress once held dear:

Loves most what Emily loved most —

The enclosure of this churchyard ground ;

Here wanders like a gliding ghost,

And every sabbath here is found ;

Comes with the people when the bells

Are heard among the moorland dells,

Finds entrance through yon arch, where way

Lies open on the sabbath-day ;

Here walks amid the mournful waste

Of prostrate altars, shrines defaced.

And floors encumbered with rich show

Of fret-work imagery laid low ;

Paces slowly or makes halt
By fractured cell, or tomb, or vault,
By plate of monumental brass
Dim-gleaming among weeds and grass,
And sculptured forms of warriors brave ;
But chiefly by that single grave,
That one sequestered hillock green.
The pensive visitant is seen.
Thus doth the gentle creature lie
With these adversities unmoved ;
Calm spectacle, by earth and sky
In their benignity approved !
And aye, methinks, this hoary pile,
Subdued by outrage and decay,
Looks down upon her with a smile,
A gracious smile that seems to say,
" Thou, thou art not a child of time,
But daughter of the Eternal Prime." '

Bb

370 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE! [xiI.

The main aim of the \vhole poem is to set forth the
purification and elevation of the heroine's character by
the baptism of sorrow through which she was doomed
to pass. Let us hear Wordsworth's own account of it.
In one of those reminiscences which he dictated in his
later years, after noting that the White Doe had been
compared with Scott's poems, because, like them, the
scene was laid in feudal times, —

' The comparison,' he says, ' is inconsiderate. Sir Walter pur-
sued the customary and very natural course of conducting an
action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding
point, as a termination or catastrophe. The course I attempted
to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attempted by
the chief personages in the White Doe fails, so far as its object
is external and substantial ; so far as it is moral and spiritual it
succeeds. The heroine knows that her duty is not to interfere
with the current of events, either to forward or delay them ; but
"To abide

The shock, and finally secure

O'er pain and grief a triumph pure."

The anticipated beatification, if I may say so, of her mind, and
the apotheosis of the companion of her solitude, are the points at
which the poem aims, and constitute its legitimate catastrophe —
far too spiritual a one for instant and wide-spread sympathy, but
not therefore the less fitted to make a deep and permanent im-
pression upon those minds who think and feel more indepen-
dently, than the many do, of the surfaces of things, and of interests
transitory, because belonging more to the outward and social
forms of life than to its internal spirit.'

Such is Wordsworth's account of his aim, given
late in life, to the friend who wrote down his remini-
scences of his own poems.

XIL] 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 371

Writing to a friend at the time of its publication, he
says : —

' The White Doe will be acceptable to the intelligent, for whom
alone it is written. It starts from a high point of imagination,
and comes round, through various wanderings of that faculty, to
a still higher — nothing less than the apotheosis of the animal who
gives the title to the poem. And as the poem begins and ends
with fine and lofty imagination, every motive and impetus that
actuates the persons introduced is from the same source ; a kin-
dred spirit pervades and is intended to harmonise the whole.
Throughout, objects (the banner, for instance) derive their influ-
ence, not from properties inherent in them, not from what they
actually are in themselves, but from such qualities as are bestowed
on them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected
by those objects. Thus the poetry, if there be any in the work,
proceeds, as it ought to do, from the soul of man, communicating
its creative energies to the images of the external world.'

Such accounts in sober prose of what he aimed at in
poetry, are valuable as coming from the poet himself ;
especially so in the case of Wordsworth, who, though
he composed, as all poets must do, under the power of
emotion and creative impulse, was yet able afterwards
to reflect on the emotion that possessed him, and lay
his finger on the aim that actuated him, as few poets
have been able to do. Some have adduced this as a
proof that it was not the highest kind of inspiration by
which Wordsworth was impelled, for such, they say, is
unconscious, and can give little or no account of itself.
Without going into this question, there is no doubt that
Wordsworth had reflected on the workings of imagi-
nation more, and could describe them better, than
E b 2

'^'T2, 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xII.

most poets. To the later editions of the poem he has
furtlier prefixed some Hnes in blank verse, which are his
own comment on the supreme aim of the poem — namely,
the total subordination in it of action to endurance : —

' Action is transitory — a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle — this way or that —
'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy of thought
We wonder at ourselves as men betrayed.
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
Yet through that darkness, infinite though it seem
And irremovable, gracious openings lie,
By which the soul — with patient steps of thought,
Now toiling, wafted now on wings of prayer —
May pass in hope, and, though from mortal bonds
Yet undelivered, rise with sure ascent
Even to the fountain-head of peace divine.'

It is an obvious remark that the purifying and hal-
lowing effect of suffering, which is here so prominently
brought out, does not belong to suffering merely in
itself. There are many cases where suffering only
hardens and degrades. If it elevates, it does so, not
by its own inherent nature, but by virtue of the primal
moral bias — the faith which receives and transmutes it.
Though Wordsworth does not dwell on this, he every-
where implies it. And yet here, as elsewhere in his
works, notably in the book of the Excursion, entitled
Despondency Corrected, Wordsworth is, perhaps, disposed
to attribute a greater sanative power to the influences
of outward nature, and to the recuperative forces inherent

XIL] ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: 373

in the individual soul, than experience warrants, not to
speak of revelation. It is not that he anywhere denies
the need of direct assistance from above — indeed, he
often implies it. But the error, if error there be, lies in
not observing the due proportions of things — in giving
to nature, and the soul's inherent resources, too great a
prominence in the work of restoration ; and in mark-
ing, with too faint emphasis^ the need of a help which
is immediately divine. Late in life, when this character-
istic of his writings was alluded to, Wordsworth said that
he had been slow to deal directly with Christian truths,
partly from feeling their sacredness, partly from a sense
of his inability to do justice to them, and to interweave
them with sufficient ease, and with becoming reverence,
into his poetic structures. And in one or two passages
of his poems, where the defect above noticed was most
apparent, he afterwards altered the passages, and, while
he increased their Christian sentiment, did not, perhaps,
improve their poetic beauty.

But to return to the poem. What is it that gives
to it its chief power and charm ? Is it not the imagina-
tive use which the poet has made of the White Doe?
With her appearance the poem opens, with her re-
appearance it closes. And the passages in which she
is introduced are radiant with the purest light of poetry.
A mere floating tradition she was, which the historian
of Craven had preserved. How much does the poet
bring out of how little ! It was a high stroke of genius

374 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [XII.

to seize on this slight traditionary incident, and make
it the organ of so much. What were the objects
which he had to describe and blend into one harmo-
nious whole ? They were these :

1. The last expiring gleam of feudal chivalry, ending
in the ruin of an ancient race, and the desolation of an
ancestral home.

2. The sole survivor, purified and exalted by the
sufferings she had to undergo.

3. The pathos of the decaying sanctities of Bolton,
after wrong and outrage, abandoned to the healing of
nature and time.

4. Lastly, the beautiful scenery of pastoral Wharfdale,
and of the fells around Bolton^ which blends so well with
these affecting memories.

All these were before him — they had melted into his
imagination, and waited to be woven into one harmo-
nious creation. He takes the White Doe, and makes
her the exponent, the symbol, the embodiment of them
all. The one central aim — to represent the beatifica-
tion of the heroine — how was this to be attained ?
Had it been a drama, the poet would have made
the heroine give forth in speeches her hidden mind
and character. But this was a romantic narrative.
Was the poet to make her soliloquise, analyse her own
feelings, lay bare her heart in metaphysical monologue ?
This might have been done by some modern poets, but
it was not Wordsworth's way of exhibiting character,

XII.] ' THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE.' 375

reflective though he was. When he analyses feelings
they are generally his own, not those of his characters.
To shadow forth that which is invisible, the sanctity
of Emily's chastened soul, he lays hold of this sensible
image — a creature, the purest, most innocent, most beau-
tiful in the whole realm of nature — and makes her the
vehicle in which he embodies the saintliness, which is
a thing invisible. It is the hardest of all tasks to make
spiritual things sensuous, without degrading them. I
know not where this difficulty has been more happily
met ; for we are made to feel that, before the poem closes,
the doe has ceased to be a mere animal, or a physical
creature at all, but in the light of the poet's imagination
has been transfigured into a heavenly apparition — a
type of all that is pure, and affecting, and saintly. And
not only the chastened soul of her mistress, but the
beautiful Priory of Bolton, the whole vale of Wharf,
and all the surrounding scenery, are illumined by the
glory which she makes ; her presence irradiates them
all with a beauty and an interest more than the eye
discovers. Seen through her as an imaginative trans-
parency, they become spiritualised ; in fact, she and
they alike become the symbols and expression of the
sentiment which pervades the poem — a sentiment broad
and deep as the world. And yet, any one who visits
these scenes in a mellow autumnal day, will feel that
she is no alien or adventitious image, imported by the
caprice of the poet, but one altogether native to the

376 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xiI.

place, one which gathers up and concentrates all the
undefined spirit and sentiment which lie spread around
it. She both glorifies the scenery by her presence, and
herself seems to be a natural growth of the scenery, so
that it finds in her its most appropriate utterance. This
power of imagination to divine and project the very
corporeal image, which suits and expresses the spirit of
a scene, Wordsworth has many times shown. Notably,
for instance, do those ghostly shapes, which might meet
at noontide under the dark dome of the fraternal yews
of Borrowdale, embody the feeling awakened when one
stands there. But never perhaps has he shown this
embodying power of imagination more felicitously, than
when he made the White Doe the ideal exponent of
the scenery, the memories, and the sympathies which
cluster around Bolton Priory.

One more thing I would notice. While change, de-
struction, and death overtake everything else in the poem,
they do not touch this sylvan creature. So entirely has
the poet's imagination transfigured her, that she is no
longer a mere thing of flesh, but has become an image of
the mind, and taken to herself the permanence of an ideal
existence. This is expressed in the concluding lines.

And so the poem has no definite end, but passes off,
as it were, into the illimitable. It rises out of the per-
turbations of time and transitory things, and, passing
- upward itself, takes our thoughts with it, to calm places
and eternal sunshine.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE HOMERIC SPIRIT IN WALTER SCOTT,

The poetry of Scott is so familiar to all men from
their childhood, the drift of it is so obvious, the mean-
ing seems to lie so entirely on the surface, that it may
appear as if nothing more could be said about it,
nothing which every one did not already know. In the
memory of most men it almost blends with their
nursery rhymes ; their childhood listened to it, their
boyhood revelled in it ; but when they came to man-
hood they desired, perhaps, to put aside such simple
things, and to pass on to something more subtle and
reflective. Yet if we consider the time at which this
poetry appeared, the conditions of the age which pro-
duced it, the great background of history out of which
it grew, and to which it gave new meaning and interest
— if we further compare it with poetry of a like nature
belonging to other nations and ages, and see its likeness
to, and its difference from, their minstrelsies, we shall
perhaps perceive that it has another import and a higher
value than we suspected. As sometimes happens with
persons who have been born and have always lived

$7S THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

amid beautiful scenery, that they know not how beau-
tiful their native district is till they have travelled
abroad, and found few other regions that may compare
with it ; so I think it is with the poetry of Scott.
We have been so long familiar with it, that we hardly
know how unique it is, how truly great.

A wide knowledge of the poetry of all ages and
nations, so far from depreciating the value of Scott's
minstrelsy, will only enhance it in our eyes. When
we come to know that many nations which possess an
abundant literature have nothing answering to the
poetry of Scott, that all the national literatures, ancient
and modern, which the world has produced, can only
show a very few specimens of poetry of this order,
and these separated from each other by intervals of
centuries, we shall then perhaps learn to prize, more
truly and intelligently, the great national inheritance,
which Scott has bequeathed . to us in his poetic ro-
mances.

It might be too great a shock to the nerves of
critics, to assert that Scott is distinctively and
peculiarly a great epic poet. But even the strictest
criticism must allow that, whatever other elements of
interest his poems possess, they contain more of the
Homeric or epic element than any other poems in the
English language. If, to a reader who could read no
other language than his own, I wished to convey an im-
pression of what Homer was like, I should say let him

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 379

read the more heroic parts of Scott's poems, and from
these he would gather some insight into the Homeric
spirit ; inadequate, no doubt, meagre, some might perhaps
say, yet true it would be, as far as it goes.

First, then, let us ask what is meant by an epic
poem ? Aristotle has answered this question in the
Poetics, and the definition he there gives holds good
to this day. Its substance has been thus condensed
by Mr. Thomas Arnold in his interesting Manual of
English Literature: 'The subject of the epic poem
must be some one, great, complex action. The prin-
cipal personages must belong to the high places of the
world, and must be grand and elevated in their ideas
and in their bearing. The measure must be of a
sonorous dignity, befitting the subject. The action is
carried on by a mixture of narrative, dialogue, and
soliloquy. Briefly to express its main requisites, the
epic poem treats of one great, complex action, in a
grand style and with fulness of detail.'

Few European nations possess more than one real
epic — some great nations possess none. The Iliad,
the Aeneid, the Niebelimgen Lied, the Jerusalem De-
livered, and Paradise Lost, these are the recognised
great epics of the world. It was the fashion in the
last century to institute elaborate comparisons between
some of them, as though they were all poems of
exactly the same order. So much was this the case
that Addison in the Spectator wrote a series of papers,

380 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [XIII.

in which he compares the Iliad, the Aeneid, and Para-
dise Lost, first, with respect to the choice of subject,
secondly, to the mode of treatment ; and in both
respects he gives the palm to Milton. And so little
was the essential difference between Homer and Milton
perceived up to the very end of last century, that so
genuine a poet as Cowper, when he set himself to
translate Homer, chose as his vehicle the blank verse
of Milton. Grand, impressive, but elaborate, involved, full
of ' inversion and pregnant conciseness/ as Milton's verse
is, nothing in the world could be a more unfit medium
for conveying to the English reader the general effect
produced by the direct, rapid, easy-flowing yet dignified
narrative of Homer. As Mr. Matthew Arnold has said,
' Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in style,
plain in language, natural in thought ; he is also, and
above all, noble.' Between the popular epic and the
literary epic there is a deep and essential difference, a
difference which, though Addison and Cowper failed to
discern it, we cannot too much lay to heart, if we would
really understand and appreciate the spirit of epic poetry.
The first critic, as far as I know, who pointed out this
distinction was the famous German scholar Wolf, who in
his Prolegomena or introductory essays to Homer, pub-
lished in 1795, insisted on it with much earnestness.
He says, * That view of things has not yet been entirely
exploded, which makes men read in the same spirit
Homer and Callimachus and Virgil and Milton, and

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 38 1

take no pains to weigh and observe how different are
the productions to which the age of each of these gives
birth.' This distinction, first noted by Wolf, Professor
Blackie, in his Homeric Dissertations prefixed to his
translation of the Iliad, has enforced and illustrated
in his own lively way. The following, he shows, are
the chief notes of the popular epic : —

1. It is the product of an early and primitive age,
before a written literature has come into existence, while
the songs or ballads of the people were still preserved
in memory — repeated orally, and not yet committed to
writing.

2. It is founded on some great national event which
has impressed itself deeply on the national imagination,
and it portrays, celebrates, glorifies some great national
hero.

3. The popular epic tells its story in a plain, easy-
flowing, direct, and ample style. There is no daintiness
either as to the things the poet describes, or the lan-
guage in which he describes them ; no object is too
homely to be noticed, or too simple to furnish an apt
simile.

4. Closely connected with this is the naturalness, the
simplicity; the naivcti of the whole. Many things are
told and mentioned in the most unconscious way, which
a later, more conscious age could not notice, without
either coarseness or studied imitation.

Finally, the minstrel himself lives amidst the natural

382 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

healthy Hfe which he describes, he is himself a part
of it.

These characteristics of the popular epic are, I need
hardly say, generalised from the Homeric poems. For
these afford the highest, most perfect specimen the
world has seen, or ever will see, of the popular epic
— of a nation's minstrelsy. Without going here into
the vexed question of their authorship, whether there
was one Homer or more, I may say that the fact of
such poems presupposes a whole world of ballad poetry
or minstrelsy previously existing, from which the great
minstrel king, when he arises, takes his traditions, his
materials, his manner — perhaps many of his verses.
Such a poem as the Iliad could not rise up, full-fledged
and perfect, without many shorter and lesser poems
going before it. A whole atmosphere of antecedent
song is the very condition of a great popular epic
being born. But, while saying that Homer's poetry
grew out of a ballad literature, we must not forget how
different it is in style from the ballads as we conceive
of them. To the naturalness, the ease, the rapid flow
of the ballad, the Homeric genius, using as its vehicle
the majestic hexameter measure, has added a nobleness,
a grandeur, which even the best of our ballads have
never reached.

Homer probably lived on the latest verge of the
heroic age, while its traditions and feelings were still
fresh in memory, but were ready to vanish away before

XIIL] in WALTER SCOTT. 383

a new age of manners and society. There is in his
poems a tone of admiring regret, as he looks back on
the great champions whom he celebrates. He feel-
ingly complains that there are no such men as those
nowadays.

In the Iliad the popular epic is seen in its highest,
most perfect form. And though the world can show
but one Iliad, yet the primitive ages of other countries
can show poems which, though vastly inferior to the
Iliad, are yet in their character and spirit of the same
order of poetry. The Teutonic race had its Niebebingen
Lied; the Celtic its Fingalian battle-songs; the Middle
Age its poems of the Arthurian cycle ; Spain the heroic
ballads that cluster round the Cid ; and England, though
it does not possess a national epic, according to the
form, yet has inherited the substance of it in the grand
succession of Shakespeare's historical plays, especially
in Richard II, in Henry V, and in Richard III.

From these specimens of the popular epic, turn to
the literary epics, the Aeneid, the Jerusalem Delivered,
the Paradise Lost, and see how entirely different they
are in origin, in character, in style, and in the spirit
which animates them. These last are elaborate works
of art, produced in a later age, by literary men, working
consciously according to recognised rules, and imitating,
more or less, ancient models of the primitive time, not
singing unconsciously and spontaneously as native pas-
sion dictated. The first lesson the critic has to learn

384 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

is to feel the entire difference of the Iliad and the
Aeneid, — to see how wide a world of thought and feeling
separates the popular or national from the learned or
literary epic. For, however they may seem to agree
somewhat in form — and even in form they are distinct
— in the age which creates each, in the sentiment which
animates them, and in the impression they leave on the
reader, they stand almost as wide apart as any two
kinds of poetry can do.

This somewhat long digression into the nature of
Epic Poetry will not be in vain, if it enables us to see,
how nearly the poetry of Scott approaches the province
of the popular epic, how true it is that he, more than
any poet in the English language, — I might say than
any poet of modern Europe, — has revived the Homeric
inspiration, and exhibited, even in this late day, some-
thing of the primitive spirit of Homer.

How can this be? perhaps you say. Scott, born in
literary Edinburgh, within the last thirty years of the
eighteenth century, where Hume had expounded his
sceptical philosophy a generation before, where Robert-
son and Hugh Blair were shedding their literary light
during his childhood, and Dugald Stewart expounded
his polished metaphysics over his unregarding boyhood
— how could it be that he should be in any other than
an imitative sense, a real rhapsodist, a genuine minstrel
of the olden stamp ? It is a natural question, but one
to which a little thought will supply an answer. It is

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 385

characteristic of modern Europe, as compared with
ancient Greece or Rome, that its society is much more
complex, contains more numerous and diverse elements,
existing side by side, that its cable is composed of many
different strands twisted into one. Yet even in Greece
did not Herodotus, with his childlike simplicity, live on
into the age of the sophists? was he not contemporary
with the reflective Thucydides, father of philosophic
history ? Still more, in modern nations we find stages
of society the most diverse, and apparently the most
opposed, the most primitive simplicity and the most ar-
tificial culture, co-existing in the same age, side by side.
So it was with the Scotland into which Scott was born.
His native town had, in the sixty years that followed
the Union, made a wonderful start in elegant literature.
It contained a coterie of literary men, which rivalled
Paris for polish and scepticism, London for shrewdness
and criticism. Yet in Edinburgh, such men were but
a handful — one cannot be sure that they are to be taken
as samples of the mental condition even of educated
Scots of the day. But if we turn to the country places,
especially to the remoter districts, we find a wholly
different condition of society. Over large tracts of
Scotland, both south and north, though men were
plying busily their farming or pastoral industries, the
traditions of former times still prevailed, and formed
the intellectual atmosphere which they breathed. In
some places where the Covenant had struck deep root,
C c

386 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

and on which Claverhouse had come down most heavily,
tales of slaughtered sons of the Covenant, and of the
cruel persecution, still fed the flame of religious fervour.
In other places, where the Covenant and its spirit had
less penetrated, traditions of English invasion and of
Border feuds and battles were still rife, though a cen-
tury and a half had passed since the reality had ceased.
And through all the wilder Highlands, and in a great
part of the Lowlands, the romantic adventures of the
Fifteen and the Forty-five, with the stern sufferings
which followed, were still preserved by the people in
affectionate though mournful remembrance.

It was in an atmosphere filled with these elements
that Scott first began to breathe. He himself tells
us that it was at Sandyknowe, in the home of his
paternal grandfather, that he had the first conscious-
ness of existence. Edinburgh was his physical, but
Sandyknowe his mental birthplace — Sandyknowe, the
old farm-house on the southern slope of Smailholme
Crags, crowned with the grim old peel-tower, command-
ing so brave an outlook over all the storied Border-land.
Every one will remember Lockhart's description of
the scene, and yet so graphic it is, it cannot be here
omitted : —

' On the summit of the crags which overhang the farm-house
stands the ruined tower of Smailholme, the scene of The Eve of
St. John ; and the view from thence takes in a wide expanse of the
district in which, as has been truly said, every field has its battle,
and every rivulet its song.

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. ' 387

"The lady looked in mournful mood,

Looked, over hill and vale,
O'er Mertoun's wood, and Tweed's fair flood,

And all down Teviotdale."
Mertoun, the principal seat of the Harden family, with its noble
groves ; nearly in front of it, across the Tweed, Lessudden, the
comparatively small but still venerable and stately abode of the
Lairds of Raeburn ; and the hoary Abbey of Dryburgh, surrounded
with yew-trees ancient as itself, seem to lie almost below the feet
of the spectator. Opposite him rise the purple peaks of Eildon,
the traditional scene of Thomas the Rhymer's interview with the
Queen of Faerie ; behind are the blasted peel which the seer of
Erceldoun himself inhabited, "the Broom of the Cowdenknowes,"
the pastoral valley of the Leader, and the bleak wilderness of
Lammermoor. To the eastward the desolate grandeur of Hume
Castle breaks the horizon as the eye travels towards the range of
the Cheviot. A few miles westward Melrose, "like some tall rock
with lichens grey," appears clasped amidst the windings of the
Tweed ; and the distance presents the serrated mountains of the
Gala, the Ettrick, and the Yarrow, all famous in song. Such were
the objects that had painted the earliest images on the eye of the
last and greatest of the Border minstrels.'

To this beautiful description there is but one draw-
back. ' Serrated ' is the last epithet which should have
been chosen to describe the rounded, soft and flowing
outlines of the hills that cradle Ettrick and Yarrow.

His human teachers were his grandmother by her
parlour fire, with her old gudeman seated on the
arm-chair opposite, while she told to the grave three-
years^ child at her feet many a tale of Watt of Harden,
Wight Willie of Aikwood, Jamie Telfer of the fair
Dodhead, and other heroes, whose wild Border forays
C c a

388 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

were still fresh in memory ; his aunt, Miss Janet Scott,
who taught him old ballads before he could read —
among others, that of Hardiknute, ' the first poem I ever
learnt, the last I shall ever forget ' ; ' Auld Sandy
Ormistoun,' the shepherd, or ' cow-bailie,' who used
to carry him on his shoulder up the Smailholme Crags,
and leave him on the grass all day long to play with
the sheep and lambs, till the child and they became
friends. Could there be more fitting nursery for a poet-
child ? The infant on the green ledges of Smailholme
Crags, rolling among the lambs, while his eye wandered
lovingly over that delightful land ! Or forgotten among
the knolls, when the thunder-storm came on, and found
by his affrighted aunt lying on his back, clapping his
hands at the lightning, and crying out, ' Bonny, Bonny ! '
at every flash, brave child that he was ! The old shep-
herd poured into his ear his own wealth of stories and
legends, and no doubt pointed, as he spoke, to many
a spot where the scenes were transacted, lying at their
feet ; and when summer was past, and the child could
no longer roll on the grass out of doors, the long winter
nights by the fireside were beguiled by the telling of the
same tales, the recitation of the same or of still fresh store
of ballads. Thus eye and ear alike were steeped in the
most warlike traditions of the Border and of Scotland, —
the human teachers pouring them daily into the ear
of the child, while the far sweep of storied Tweeddale
and Teviotdale appealed no less powerfully to his eye.

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 389

Add to this, that never was child born more susceptible
of such impressions — that between these and the soul
of Scott there was a pre-established harmony. And
have we not, even in the midst of the eighteenth century,
the very materials out of which is fashioned a true epic
minstrel ?

Then, when he passed from childhood to boyhood,
and read at random every book he could lay hands on,
there was one book which struck deeper than all the
rest, and kindled to new life those treasures of legend
and ballad which had lain embedded in his mind since
infancy. Every one will remember his own description
— how he lay through the long summer afternoon beneath
a huge plantanus-tree in the garden, overhanging the
Tweed, and read for the first time Percy's Reliques of
Ancient Poetry : and with him, when anything arrested
his imagination, to read and to remember were one.

The publication of Percy's Reliqncs marked the first
turning of the tide of literary taste back to a land
whence it had long receded. It was, as has been
said, the earliest symptom in England of ' a fonder,
more earnest looking back to the past, which began
about that time to manifest itself in all nations.' Percy
and others, who then began those backward looks,
had to gaze at the old time across an interval of
perhaps two centuries. In the case of Scott, the past
had come down to him in an unbroken succession of
traditions and personages. First were the inmates of

39© THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [XIII.

Sandyknowe, among whom he spent his childhood.
Then came his intercourse with Stewart of Inverna-
hyle, when as a boy he first penetrated the Highlands
to share the hospitality of that laird, who had himself
fought a broadsword duel with Rob Roy, and had served
in the Fifteen under Mar, and in the Forty-five under
Prince Charles Edward. Lastly, in early manhood he
traversed Ettrick Forest, and made those raids, during
seven successive years, into Liddesdale and many an-
other Border dale, whence he returned laden with that
spoil of the old riding ballads, which now live secured
to all time in his Border Minsti^elsy. In those and in
other ways Scott came face to face with the feudal
and heroic past — a past which was then on the eve
of disappearing, and which, had he been born thirty
years later, might have disappeared for ever, and no
one to record it. With that past, before it was wholly
past, he came in contact, as did countless others of
his generation ; but the contact would have been as
little to him as it was to his contemporaries, had he
not been gifted with the eye to see, and the soul to
feel it. Scott had born in him the heroic soul, the
epic inspiration ; and the circumstances in which his
childhood and youth were cast supplied the fuel to
feed the flame. The fuel and the flame were long
pent up together, long smouldered within, before they
blazed out to the world. Scott was past thirty when
he published the Minstrelsy, and at the close of the

XIII,] IN WALTER SCOTT. 391

work he gave original ballads of his own, which were
the first notes of the fuller song that was to follow.
Eminent among these ballads is The Eve of St. John,
in which Scott repeoples the tower of Smailholme, and
consecrates for ever the haunt of his infancy. In this
he gave a sample of the genius that was in him, and,
as an expression of old Border heroism daunted before
conscience and the unseen world, he himself has never
surpassed, and none other has equalled it. But it is
not only the original ballads which he contributed to
the Minstrelsy, excellent as these are, which show
what was the deepest bias of his poetic nature. At
the time when the book first appeared, one of its
critics prophetically said that it contained 'the ele-
ments of a hundred historical romances ' ; and Lock-
hart has noted that no one who has not gone over
the Minstrelsy for the purpose of comparing its con-
tents with his subsequent works can conceive to what
an extent it has been the quarry out of which he has
dug the materials of all his after creations. Of many
of the incidents and images which are elaborated in
these latter works, the first hints may be found either
in those old primitive ballads, or in the historical and
legendary notices which accompany them.

We thus have in Walter Scott a spirit in itself naturally
of the heroic or epic order, waking up to its first con-
sciousness in a secluded district, which was still redolent
of traditions of the old feudal and fighting times —

392 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

meeting in his boyhood with the first turn of that tide
which, setting towards the neglected past, he himself
was destined to carry to full flood ;— spending all the
leisure of his youth and early manhood in gathering
from the Southern dales every ballad, Border song, or
romantic legend that was still lingering there; — now
and then trying with some stave of his own to match
those wild native chaunts that had charmed his ear
and imagination ; and living and finding his delight
in this enchanted world till past the mature age of
thirty. Is there not here, if anywhere for the last
three hundred years, the nurture and training of the
genuine rhapsodist? When, after such long and loving
abode in that dreamland, his mind addressed itself
to original creation, it was not with any mere literary
or simulated fei-vour, but out of the fulness of an over-
flowing heart, that he poured forth his first immortal
Lay. In that poem the treasured dreams of years first
found a voice, the stream that had been so long pent
up at last flowed full and free. Arnold used to say — and
the late Dean Stanley, in the inimitable outburst with
which he thrilled his hearers at the Scott Centenary,
repeated the saying — that the world has seen nothing
so truly Homeric, since the days of Homer, as those
opening lines of the Lay, in which Scott describes
the custom of Branksome Hall,

' Nine-and-twenty knights of fame.'
If anywhere the ballad metre has risen to the true epic

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 393

pitch, it is in the concentrated fire and measured tread
of those noble stanzas. Nor less in the true heroic style
is the description of Deloraine's nightly ride from Brank-
some to Melrose. In those lines, especially, as indeed
throughout all that poem, Scott at last found a fit poetic
setting for all those dear localities, over which his eye
had dreamed, as he lay an infant on Smailholme crags,
which he had traversed on foot and horseback in his
boyish wanderings, or in those raids of early manhood,
in which he bore back from Liddesdale and Eskdale
his booty of ancient ballads, with as much zest as ever
moss-trooper drove a prey from the English border.
In his descriptions of the feudal and battle time, the
usages of chivalry and the rites of the mediaeval
Church are everywhere introduced ; for these are the
true modern representatives of the Homeric rites and
priests, and blazing hecatombs. Not otherwise except
in this their native garb could the heroic times of
modern Europe be truly rendered into poetry. Chivalry,
romance, and mediaeval beliefs were the real accom-
paniments of our heroic times, and if these were
discarded for what are thought to be more classical
garniture, you might have a modern imitation of the
ancient Homeric poem ; but no genuine heroic poetry,
standing to our age in something of the same relation
as Homer's poetry stood to later Grecian life.

If Scott had been asked, when he was writing his
poems, to what class or style of poetry his belonged,

394 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

likely enough he would have smiled, and said that he
never troubled himself with such questions, but sang
as he listed, and let the form take care of itself.
In fact, in the advertisement to Marmion he actually
disavows any attempt on his part to write an epic
poem. But it is the very spontaneity, the absence of
all artistic consciousness, which forms one of his greatest
poetic charms, compensating for much that might, on
merely artistic and literary grounds, be lightly esteemed.
And it is this spontaneity, this naturalness of treatment,
this absence of effort, which marks out Scott's poetry
as belonging essentially to the popular, and having
little in common with the literary epic. This welling
forth of an overflowing heart characterises the Lay
more than any of his subsequent poems, and imparts
to it a charm all its own. Hence it is that lovers of
Scott revert, I think, to the Lay with a greater fond-
ness than to any of his other productions, though in
some of these they acknowledge that there are merits
which the Lay has not. Of course, little as Scott may
have troubled himself about it, his poetry had a very
decided form of its own, as all poetry must have. It was
formed, as his mind had been, on the old Border ballad,
with some intermixture of the mediseval romance ; and
the earlier cantos of the Lay were touched by some re-
membrance of Chrisiabel, which, however, died away
before the end of the poem, and did not reappear in
any subsequent one.

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 395

But though the Lay here and there rises into a truly
epic strain, it is in Marmiou that whatever was epic in
Scott found fullest vent. In that, his second poetic
work, he had chosen a national and truly heroic action,
as the centre or climax of the whole poem — the battle
of Flodden — an event second only to that still greater
battle which he essayed to sing at a later day, and in a
feebler tone. Flodden had been the most grievous
blow that Scotland ever received. It had cost her the
lives of her chivalrous king, and of the flower of all
the Scottish nobility, gentry, and men-at-arms. It
had pierced the national heart with an overpowering
sorrow so pervading and so deep that no other event,
not even Culloden, ever equalled it. It had lived on in
remembrance down to Scott's boyhood as a source of
the most pathetic refrains that ever blended with the
people's songs. When, therefore, he addressed himself
to it he had a subject which, though old, was still fresh
in remembrance, and full of all that epic and tragic
interest which a great poem requires. He was aware
of the greatness of the theme, and he tells us that he
set to it, resolved to bestow on it more labour than
he had yet done on his productions, and that par-
ticular passages of the poem were elaborated with a
good deal of care by one by whom much care was
seldom bestowed. Throughout, the poem has more
of epic stateliness, if it wants some other graces of the
Lay. From beginning to end, it rises now into the

396 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [XIII.

epic pitch, then recedes from it into the romantic,
sometimes falls into the prosaic, then rises into the
epic again, up to the grand close. The passages in
which the heroic gleams out most clearly are such as
these : — the well-known opening stanzas describing Mar-
mion's approach to Norham at sunset ; the muster of
the Scottish army on the Borough muir before march-
ing to Flodden ; and, above all, the whole last canto,
in which the battle itself is depicted. It is on this last
that Scott put out all his strength, and by this canto,
if by anything in his poetry, it is that his claim to the
epic laurel should be judged. Before reaching this last
culmination, the poem had wound on, now high, now
low, spirited or tame, in stately or in homely strain.
But from the moment that the poet gets in sight of
Flodden, and sees the English army defiling through
the deep ravine of Till, while the Scots from the ridge
above gaze idly on— from that moment to the close,
he soars steadily on the full pinion of epic poetry.

It was a fine thought to describe the great battle,
not from the thick of the inelcc, but as seen by Clara
and the two pages from a vantage-ground apart. This
does not diminish one whit the animation of the scene,
yet greatly enhances the totality and perfection of the
picture. It is needless to quote lines which every one
who cares for such things knows by heart. But the
passage beginning with —

'At length the freshening western blast
Aside the shroud of battle cast';

I

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 397

and the one following, which thus opens : —

' Far on the left, unseen the while,
Stanley broke Lennox and Argyle';

ending with that so powerful incident —

'When, fast as shaft can fly.
Bloodshot his eyes, his nostrils spread,
The loose rein dangling from his head,
Housing and saddle bloody red,
Lord Marmion's steed rushed by' ;

and last of all, the picture of the desperate ring that
fought and died, but did not yield, around their gallant
king. To find any battle scenes that can match with
these we must go back to those of the Iliad. As far as
I know, the poetry of no land, in the interval between
Homer and Scott, can show anything that can be placed
by their side.

Perhaps we may find the best counterpart to these
passages of Scott in the sixteenth book of the Iliad,
where Patroclus does on the armour of Achilles and
comes to the rescue of the Achaian host.

Take that passage where Hector and Patroclus close
in mortal conflict over the dead body of Cebriones,
charioteer of Hector : —

'Upon Cebriones Patroclus sprang,
Down from his car too Hector leaped to earth,
So over Cebriones opposed they stood ;
As on the mountain, o'er a slaughtered stag,
Both hunger-pinched, two lions fiercely fight,
So o'er Cebriones two mighty chiefs,

398 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

Menoetius' son and noble Hector, strove,
Each in the other bent to plunge his spear.
The head, with grasp unyielding, Hector held ;
Patroclus seized the foot ; and, crowding round,
Trojans and Greeks in stubborn conflict closed.
As when encountering in some mountain glen,
Eurus and Notus shake the forest deep.
Of oak, or ash, or slender cornel-tree,
Whose tapering branches are together thrown
With fearful din and crash of broken boughs ;
So, mixed confusedly, Greeks and Trojans fought,
No thought of flight by either entertained.
Thick o'er Cebriones the javelins flew.
And feathered arrows bounding from the string.
And ponderous stones that on the bucklers rang.
As round the dead they fought ; amid the dust
That eddying rose, his art forgotten all,
A mighty warrior, mightily he lay.'

Those only who have read the original know how
much it loses both in vividness of edge and in swinging
power, when dulled down into the blank verse of the
translation. To the English reader, Lord Derby's verse
sounds flat and tame compared with the rapid and ring-
ing octosyllabics of Scott, when he is at his best, as in
his description of Flodden. And yet Scott's best eight-
syllable lines may not compare with

'The long resounding march and energy divine'

of the Homeric hexameters.

It will be said, I am aware, that in Scott's
romantic poems, though heroic subjects are handled,
yet 'neither the subject nor the form rises to the true

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 399

dignity of the epic' That they are regular epics, as
these are defined by the canons of the critics, no one
would contend. But that they abound in the epic
element, as no other English poems abound, cannot be
gainsaid. In subject, neither Marmion nor The Lord
of the Isles falls below the epic pitch, unless it be that
the whole history of Scotland is inadequate to furnish
material for an epic. And as to form, if the large ad-
mixture of romantic incident and treatment be held
to mar the epic dignity, this does not hinder that these
poems rise to the true epic height, in such passages
as the battle of Flodden, and the priest's benediction
of the Bruce.

It would be a pleasant task to go through the other
poems of Scott, laying one's finger on the scenes and
passages in which the epic fire most clearly breaks out ;
and showing how epically conceived many of his heroes
are, with what entire sympathy he threw himself into
the heroic character. But this task cannot be attempted
now. Suffice it that in The Lady of the Lake, though its
tone is throughout more romantic than epic, yet there
are true gleams of heroic fire, as in the Gathering ; still
stronger in the combat between Roderick and Fitz-james,
and again in that battle-stave which the bard sings to
the dying Roderick, in which occur these two lines,
breathing the very spirit of Homer himself : —

"Twere worth ten years of peaceful life.
One glance at their array ! '

400 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

In his last long poem Scott essayed a subject more
fitted for a national epic than any other which the
history of either Scotland or England supplies — the
wanderings of Bruce and his ultimate victory at Ban-
nockburn. Delightful as The Lord of the Isles in many
of its parts is, I cannot agree with Lockhart's estimate
of it, when he says, that 'the Battle of Bannockburn,
now that we can compare these works from something
like the same point of view, does not appear to me in
the slightest particular inferior to the Flodden of Mar-
mion' This will hardly be the verdict of posterity. It
was not to be expected that the same poet should
describe in full two such battles with equal vigour and
effect. There is a fire and a swing about the former —
a heroic spirit in the short octosyllabics describing Flod-
den, which we look for in vain in the careful and almost
too historic accuracy of the earlier battle. Flodden, the
less likely of the two themes to kindle a Scottish poet's
enthusiasm, in order of poetic composition, came first.
Scott was then in the prime of his poetic ardour. When
he touched Bruce and Bannockburn that noon was past,
he was tired of the trammels of metre, and was hastening
on to his period of prose creation. Had he, on the
contrary, begun with Bruce, and given him the full force
of his earlier inspiration, he would no doubt have made
out of the adventures of the great national hero the
great epic poem of Scotland, which The Lord of the Isles
can hardly claim to be. There is no subject in all

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 401

history more fitted for epic treatment ; it requires no
fiction to adorn it. The character of Bruce, the events
of his wanderings, as described by Barbour, in the moun-
tain wilds, through which the outlawed king passed,
where tradition still preserves the track of his footsteps
— these in themselves are enough. They need no added
fiction, but only the true singer to come in the prime of
inspiration, and render them as they deserve. What-
ever similarity may exist between Homer and Scott
must have come from intrinsic likeness of genius, not
from conscious imitation. For Scott is said to have
been so innocent of any knowledge of Greek, that the
light of Homer could only have reached him, dimly
reflected, from the horn lanterns of Pope's or Cowper's
translations. The similarity is not confined only to the
spirit by which the two poets are animated. It comes
out not less strikingly in small details of manner — in
the constant epithets, for instance, by which Scott de-
scribes his heroes, ' the doughty Douglas,' ' the bold
Buccleuch,' ' William of Deloraine, good at need.' It
is seen too in the plain yet picturesque epithets, with
which Scott hits off the distinctive character of places.
Who that has sailed among the Hebrides but must
at once feel the graphic force of such expressions as
' lonely Colonsay,' ' the sandy Coll,' ' Renin's mountains
dark ' ?

Space has not allowed me to touch, much less ex-
haust, the many phases of Scott's poems, in which the
Dd

402 THE HOMERIC SPUUT [XIII.

heroic element appears. The Homeric spirit which
breathes through his novels I have not even alluded to.
But I would suggest it as a pleasant and instructive
task to any one who cares for such things, to read
once again the Waverley novels, noting, as he passes,
the places where the Homeric vein most distinctly
crops out. In such a survey we should take the
Homeric vein in its widest range, as it appears in the
romantic adventures and beautiful home-pictures of the
Odyssey, not less than in the battle scenes of the Iliad.

Scott's earliest novel supplies much that recalls
Odyssey and Iliad alike. In the Charge of Preston-
pans, ' " Down with your plaids," cries Fergus Maclvor,
throwing his own, " We'll win silks for our tartans, before
the sun is above the sea." . . . The vapours rose like
a curtain, and showed the two armies in the act of
closing.' Again, in a story so near our own day as that
of The Antiquary, with what grand relief comes in the
old background of the heroic time, behind the more
modern characters and incidents, when the aged croon
Elspeth is overheard in her cottage chaunting her old-
world snatches about the Earl of Glenallan and the red
Harlaw, where Celt and Saxon fought out their con-
troversy, from morn till evening, a whole summer's day !

' Now haud your tongue, baith wife and carle.
And listen, great and sma'.
And I will sing of Glenallan's Earl,
That fought on the red Harlaw.

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 403

The coronach 's cried on Bennachie,

And doun the Don and a',
And Hieland and Lawland may mornfu' be

For the sair field of Harlaw ! '

Or I might point to another of the more modern
novels, to Redgauntlet, and Wandering Willie's Tale.
Every one should remember — yet perhaps some forget
— auld Steenie's visit to the nether world, and the
sight he got of that set of ghastly revellers sitting
round the table there. ' My gude sire kend mony that
had long before gane to their place, for often had he
piped to the most part in the hall of Redgauntlet.
There was. . . . And there was Claverhouse, as beau-
tiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks,
streaming down over his laced buff-coat, and his left
hand always on his right spule-blade, to hide the wound
that the silver bullet had made. He sat apart from
them all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty
countenance ; while the rest hallooed, and sung, and
laughed, that the room rang.' Turn to the novel, and
read the whole scene. There is nothing in the Odyssean
Tartarus to equal it. If Scott is not Homeric here, he is
something more. There is in that weird ghastly vision
a touch of sublime horror, to match which we must go
beyond Homer, to Dante, or to Shakespeare.

Moralists before now have asked. What has Siott
done by all this singing about battles, and knights,
and chivalry, but merely amuse his fellow-men? Has
D d 2

404 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT [xill.

he in any way really elevated and improved them? It
might be enough to answer this question by saying, that
of all writers in verse or prose, he has done most to
make us understand history, to let in light and sym-
pathy upon a wide range of ages, which had become
dumb and meaningless to men, and which but for him
might have continued so still.

But I shall not answer it only in this indirect way.
It has been too pertinaciously and pointedly asked to
be put thus aside.

Wordsworth is reported to have said in conversation
that, as a poet, Scott cannot live, for he has never writ-
ten anything addressed to the immortal part of man.
This he said of his poetry, while speaking more highly
of his prose writings. Carlyle, on the other hand, has
included both Scott's prose and his poetry under the same
condemnation. He has said that our highest literary
man had no message whatever to deliver to the world ;
wished not the world to elevate itself, to amend itself,
to do this or that, except simply to give him, for the
books he kept writing, payment, which he might button
into his breeches pocket. All this moralising bears
somewhat hard upon Scott. Is it true ? Is it the whole
truth ? Is there nothing to be set over against it ? On
Scott's side, may it not be said, that it is no small thing to
have been the writer who, above all others, has delighted
childhood and boyhood, delighted them and affected
them in a way, that the self-conscious moralising school

XIII.] IN WALTER SCOTT. 405

of writers never could do? There must be something
high or noble in that, which can so take unsophisticated
hearts. In his later days Scott is reported to have
asked Laidlaw, what he thought the moral influence of
his writings had been? Laidlaw well replied that his
works were the delight of the young, and that to have
so reached their hearts was surely a good work to have
done. Scott was affected, almost to tears, as well he
might be. Again, not the young only, but of the old,
those who have kept themselves most childlike, who have
carried the boy's heart with them farthest into life, they
have loved Scott's poetry, even to the end. Something of
this no doubt may be attributed to the pleasure of revert-
ing in age to the things that have delighted our boyhood.
But would the best and purest men have cared to do this,
if the things which delighted their boyhood had not
been worthy? It is the great virtue of Scott's poetry
and of his novels also, that, quite forgetting self, they
describe man and outward nature, broadly, truly, genially,
as they are. All contemporary poetry, indeed all con-
temporary literature, goes to work in the exactly op-
posite direction, shaping men and things after patterns
self-originated from within, describing and probing
human feelings and motives with an analysis so search-
ing, that all manly impulse withers before it, and single-
hearted straightforwardness becomes a thing impossible.
Against this whole tendency of modern poetry and
fiction, so weakening, so morbidly self-conscious, so

4o6 THE HOMERIC SPIRIT IN WALTER SCOTT.

unhealthily introspective, what more effective antidote,
than the bracing atmosphere of Homer, and Shake-
speare, and Scott?

Lastly, it may be said, the feelings to which Scott's
poetry appeals, the ideals which it sets before the ima-
gination, if not themselves the highest types of character,
are those out of which the highest characters are
formed. Cardinal Newman has said, ' What is Chris-
tian high-mindedness, generous self-denial, contempt of
wealth, endurance of suffering, and earnest striving after
perfection, but an improvement and transformation,
under the influence of the Holy Spirit, of that natural
character of mind which we call romantic ? ' To have
awakened and kept alive in an artificial, and too
money-loving age, 'that character of mind which we
call romantic,' which, by transformation, can become
something so much beyond itself, is, even from the
severest moral point of view, no mean merit. To higher
than this few poets can lay claim. But let the critics
praise him, or let them blame. It matters not. His
reputation will not wane, but will grow with time.
Therefore we do well to make much of Walter Scott.
He is the only Homer who has been vouchsafed to
Scotland — I might almost say to modern Europe. He
came at the latest hour, when it was possible for a great
epic minstrel to be born. And the altered conditions of
the world will not admit of another.

CHAPTER XIV.

PROSE POETS. THOMAS CARLYLE.

Prose, Coleridge used to say, is the opposite, not of
poetry, but of verse or metre — a doctrine which, how-
ever contrary to common parlance, commends itself at
once to all who think about it.

If, as I have been accustomed in these lectures to say^
' Poetry is the expression, in beautiful form and melo-
dious language, of the best thoughts and the noblest
emotions, which the spectacle of life awakens in the
finest souls,' it is clear that this may be effected by
prose as truly as by verse, if only the language be
rhythmical and beautiful.

I was pleased to find the same view taken by my
friend Mr. Shadworth Hodgson, in an essay which he
has lately published on English Verse, an essay which,
for its suggestiveness and subtlety of thought, may
be commended to all who are curious in these matters.
In that essay he says, ' Metre is not necessary to
poetry, while poetry is necessary to metre.' Again,
' prose, when it rises into poetry, becomes as nearly

408 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

musical as language without metre can be ; it becomes
rhythmical.'

But I need not enlarge on this view, or quote autho-
rities in favour of it. Every one must remember sen-
tences in his favourite prose-writers, which, for their
beauty, dwell upon the memory, like the immortal lines
of the great poets, or passages of the finest music.

Who does not recall words of Plato, such as the
description of the scenery in the opening of the PJiae-
drus, or in the same dialogue the vision of the pro-
cession of the Twelve Immortals, or the closing scene
in the Phaedo, or a passage here and there in the
Republic, or in the Theactetus, which haunt him with
the same feeling of melody as that with which famous
lines in Homer or in Shakespeare haunt us ?

Again, Tacitus is generally set down as a rhetorician,
and no doubt he had caught much of his manner from
the schools of the rhetoricians. But there is in him
something more, something peculiarly his own, which
is of the true essence of poetry — his few condensed
clauses, hinting all the sadness and hopelessness of his
time, or the vivid scenes he paints so full of human
pathos. Such is the description of Vitcllius as he
walked forth from his palace to meet his doom. The
' nee quisquam adeo rerum humanarum immemor, quern
non commoveret ilia facies ' lingers in the mind in the
same way as Virgil's

' Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.'

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 409

In French literature you find a truer poetry both of
thought and language in some of the best prose-writers,
than in any of the so-called French poets. Such pas-
sages, so beautiful in thought, so sweet in expression,
occur in Pascal of the elder writers, in Maurice de
Guerin of the moderns.

Among our own elder prose-writers, two may be
named, who break out, every here and there, into as
real poetry, both in substance, and in form, as any of the
metrical poets of their time ; Bishop Jeremy Taylor,
and Sir Thomas Browne, author of the Religio Medici.

There is a passage in the late Mr. Keble's Praelcc-
tiones Academicae, in which he compares one of those
poetical prose passages from Jeremy Taylor's writings,
with a well-known passage from Burke's Reflections
on the French Revolution, describing Marie Antoinette
as she appeared for the first time in Paris, and for the
last. The purpose with which Keble compares the two
passages, is to show the difference between a thought
which is only eloquently expressed, and one which is
truly poetical.

What is the distinction between the highest eloquence
and true poetry is an interesting question, but not one
to detain us now. Perhaps, in passing, one may say
that in eloquence, whatever imagination is allowed to
enter, is kept consciously and carefully subordinate
to an ulterior object, either to convince the hearers of
some truth, or to persuade them to some course of

41 0 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

action. On the other hand, when in prose composition
the whole or any part of it is felt to be poetical, the
thoughts which are poetical appear to be dwelt upon
for the pure imaginative delight they yield, for their
inherent truth, or beauty, or interest, without reference
to anything beyond. If the writer is more intent on
the effect he wishes to produce, than on the imaginative
delight of the thought he utters, it then ceases to be
true poetry.

It is characteristic of our modern literature that at
no former period have so many men, richly endowed
with the poetic gift, expressed themselves through
the medium of prose. Why it should be so, may well
be asked ; but the answer to the question given by
Carlyle, that the metrical form is an anachronism, —
that verse as the vehicle of true thought and feeling
is a thing of the past,-— cannot, I think, be accepted.
It is one of the many strong, one-sided statements, in
which Carlyle was wont to indulge, from judging all
things by his own idiosyncrasy. He himself was but
a poor performer in verse, as may be seen from his
few attempts at metrical rendering of German lyrics.
But this defect in him cannot change the fact, that there
are shades of thought, and tones of feeling, for which
metre will always continue to be the most natural
vehicle, to those at least who have the gift of using it.

Great poets who have expressed themselves in verse
are, as we have often seen, possessed by some great

XIV ] THOMAS CARLYLE. 411

truth, inspired, as we say, by some master-vision,
which fills their whole soul. To see such a vision is the
poet's nature, to utter it is his office. If this be the case
with metrical poets, it is not less, but rather more true
of those whom we call prose poets. Some aspect of
things they have been permitted to see, some truths
have come home to them with peculiar power, till their
hearts are all aglow, and they long to utter them. In
truth, the prose poet must be more fully possessed,
more intensely inspired by the truth which he sees,
than the metrical poet need be, in order to fuse and
mould his more intractable material of prose language
into that rhythmical, melodious cadence, which we feel
to be poetry. It will be our duty in the sequel to
note some of those great primal truths by which prose
poets have been possessed, in order that we may see
how essentially poetical has been the way in which they
expressed them.

In dwelling upon Carlyle as such a prose poet, those
of us who are old enough, cannot but look back —
so strange it seems — to the time when his light first
dawned on the literary world, a wonder and a be-
wilderment. Not that his first appearance was hailed
with any noise or loud acclaim. Unobserved, almost
silent, his first reception was, recognised only by one
or two here and there, who had some special means of
knowing about him. I can remember his FrencJi Revo-
lution being, for the first time, put into my hands

4T2 PROSE POETS. [xiV.

when a boy, in a country house, by one who knew
something of him. ' Here is a strange book, written
by a strange man, who is a friend of some of our family.'
I opened it, and read some chapter styled ' Symbolic/
which, if at the time wholly unintelligible, still left
behind it a sting of curiosity.

Again, the young Glasgow Professor of Greek, newly
come from the first place in the Cambridge Classical
Tripos, and fresh from the society of the Cambridge
Apostles, told how he had lately heard Carlyle lecture
upon Heroes, more like a man inspired than any one
he had ever listened to. Then early in the 1840 s,
when the Miscellanies appeared, and became known to
undergraduates here in Oxford, I remember how they
reached the more active-minded, one by one, and thrilled
them as no printed book ever before had thrilled them.
The very spot one can recall, where certain passages
first flashed upon the mind, and stamped themselves
indelibly on the memory. Indeed it used to be said,
and I believe with truth, that, with but few exceptions,
none of the abler young men of that date escaped being,
for a time at least, Carlyle-bitten. What exactly he
taught us, what new doctrine he brought, or whether he
brought any new doctrine at all, we perhaps did not
care to ask. Only this we knew, that he had a way
of looking at things which was altogether new, that his
words penetrated and stirred us, as no other words did.
What there was of true or false, of one-sided or exag-

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 413

gerated, in his teaching, what of good or of evil, we
could not measure then — perhaps it would not be easy
to measure now. But to him we owed exaltations of
spirit more high, depressions more profound, than we
had ever known before, — wild gleams of unearthly light,
alternating with baleful glooms. ' He has given most
of us a bad half-hour,' one has lately said ; — more than
half-hours he gave to many. In what directions he
affected young minds, how his burning thoughts mingled
with the tenor of their thoughts, it were hard to say ;
only somehow they did ; and these men held on their
way, most of them modified, but not revolutionised,
not wholly driven from their path, by having passed
through the tempestuous fire-atmosphere, in which
Carlyle had for a time enveloped them.

One or two there were, the noblest of their generation,
who took Carlyle not only for a prophet, as others did,
but for the prophet, the only prophet then alive. To
them he seemed the man of all men living who had truly
read the secret of the world, who had spoken the deepest
word about human life, and the universe which encom-
passes it. Feeling intensely the truth and the power
of his teaching in certain directions in which he was well
at home, they took him to be equally wise, because
his words were equally strong, in other directions in
which he was not at all at home, in which, to say truth,
he had little insight. And giving over to his guidance
their noble and too confiding natures, they broke with

4T4 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

all traditions and beliefs of the past, burst away from
their natural surroundings, and followed him out into
the wilderness, to find there no haven of rest, but only
the vagueness of his so-called ' immensities,' and ' eter-
nities,' and abysses fathomless.

It is hard to think of these things, and not to feel
some indignation, that such noble spirits should have
trusted him so unreservedly. They would not have
done so, had they lived longer, and been permitted
to see the whole man, as his self-revelations have lately
forced us to see him. Comments more than enough
have been made, and will yet be made on these, and
I refrain from adding to them. But as we have from
his other works long known his strength, in these last
we see his weakness ; if we have hitherto owned his
unique powers, these bring home his no less marked
limitations. They make us feel that a prophet universal
he could not be, that he could not see life and the
world steadily and see them whole, who, from his peculiar
constitution and temperament, looked at them through
such a dismal and distorting atmosphere, whose ha-
bitual element was so deep a gloom. Some imagined
that he had come to be the revealer of a new morality,
higher and nobler than Christianity. It is now plain,
that, as to his theory, the best truths he taught so power-
fully are essential parts of Christianity, lie at the base of
it, and of all spiritual religion ; while in actual practice,
so far from having exhausted its teaching, and passed

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 415

beyond it, he, like most of his neighbours, fell far enough
short of the full Christian stature. We now see plainly-
enough that Carlyle's teaching, so far from discrediting,
serves only to exalt the Christian ideal by the contrast
which it suggests.

But though it is true that Carlyle's whole view of
things no reasonable man can adopt ; though his one-
sided idiosyncrasy shut him out from all possibility
of being accepted as a universal teacher, it did not
hinder, rather it helped, his seeing the truths and things
which he did see, with an intense insight which few men
possess, and uttering them with a force which still
fewer are capable of. As he looked out from his own
solitary soul upon the universe, it seemed to him all
one great black element encompassing him, lit only,
here and there, with central spots of exceeding bright-
ness. On these he fixed his gaze, and these he made
other men see and feel, with something of that vividness
with which they shone for himself. As a sample of his
power to render poetically a human countenance, take
this description of Dante —

'To me it is a most touching face ; perhaps of all faces that
I know, the most so. Blank there, painted on vacancy, with the
simple laurel wound round it ; the deathless sorrow and pain,
the known victory which is also deathless ; significant of the
whole history of Dante ! I think it is the mournfullest face that
ever was painted from reality ; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting
face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness,
gentle affection as of a child ; but all this is as if congealed into

4l6 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless
pain. A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-
trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice ! Withal it
is a silent pain too, a silent scornful one : the lip is curled in a
kind of godlike disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart, —
as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it
had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face
of one wholly in protest, and life-long unsurrendering battle,
against the world, affection all converted into indignation : an
implacable indignation ; slow, equable, implacable, silent, like
that of a god ! The eye too, it looks out as in a kind of surprise,
a kind of inquiry. Why the world was of such a sort ? This is
Dante : so he looks, this "voice often silent centuries," and sings
us " his mystic unfathomable song." '

But the critics, I observe, have been repeating, one
after another, that Carlyle was not great as a thinker, but
only as a word-painter. If by a thinker they mean one
who can table a well-adjusted theory of the universe, in
which he can locate every given fact or phenomenon,
such a formula as Mr. Herbert Spencer has favoured
the world with, Carlyle was not such a thinker ; no
one would have more scornfully rejected the claim to
be so. But if he is a thinker, who has seen some great
truths more penetratingly, and has felt them more pro-
foundly, than other men have done, then in this sense
a thinker Carlyle certainly was. Isolated truths these
may have been, but isolated truths were all he cared
or hoped to see : he felt too keenly the mystery of
things ever to fancy that he or any other man could
see them all in well-rounded harmony. It was just

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 417

because he saw and felt some truths so keenly, that he
was enabled to paint them in words so vividly. It was
the insight that was in him which made him a word-
painter ; without that insight, word-painting becomes a
mere trick of words.

The presence of personality, we are told, is that which
distinguishes literature from science, which is wholly
impersonal. It is this which gives to the finest lite-
rature its chief charm, that it is illuminated by the
presence of an elevated personality, — personality observe,
not egotism, which is a wholly different and inferior
thing. Great literature, we may say, is the emanation
of a noble, or at least of an interesting, personality.

In Carlyle this element of a marked, altogether pecu-
liar personality, was eminently present, and shot itself
through every word he wrote.

An Annandale peasant, sprung from a robust and
rugged peasant stock, reared in a home in which the
Bible, especially the Old Testament, was the only book ;
taught in the parish school, and in such lore as it
afforded ; passing thence to Edinburgh University,
gathering such learning as was current then and there,
but holding his Professors in but little honour, — 'hide-
bound pedants/ he somewhere calls them ; an om-
nivorous devourer of books, almost exhausting the
college library ; bursting afterwards into the then
almost unknown sea of German literature and philo-
sophy, and coming back thence to be, after Coleridge,
E e

41 8 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

its next interpreter to his countrymen ; — such was the
intellectual outfit with which he had to face the world.
To a Scottish rustic, with brains, but no funds, who had
received a college training, there were at that time only
two outlets possible — the Church or teaching. From
the former partly Carlyle's own questioning and not
too docile nature, partly his newly-acquired German
lights, wholly excluded him. The latter, or the gerund-
grinding business, as he called it, he tried but hated,
and spurned from him as contemptuously as if he had
been the haughtiest of born aristocrats.

Then followed some years of idleness, ill-health, and
apparent aimlessness ; during which, however, he was
waging grim conflict with manifold doubts, with dark-
ness as of the nether pit. The final issue of the long
and desperate struggle is recorded symbolically in Sartor
Resartus; and the climax or ultimate turning-point of
the whole is that strange incident in the Rue St. Thomas
de I'Enfer, which happened to himself, he tells us, quite
literally in Leith Walk. That he then and there
wrestled down once and for all 'the Everlasting No,'
he verily believed. Yet 'the Everlasting Yea,' which
he thought he found on the farther side, whatever it
may have been, never seems to have brought assured
peace to his spirit, never to have fully convinced him
that he was in a world ruled by One who has 'good
will towards men.' Peace indeed was not one of those
things which he deemed attainable, or even much to be
desired, except by craven spirits.

XIV ] THOMAS CARLYLE. 419

But meanwhile, whatever else remained unsettled, that
which Coleridge calls the Bread and Butter question
could not be put by, but imperiously demanded an
answer. The only way of solving it that now remained
open to him, was literature. But even here the path for
him was hemmed in by high and narrow walls. To
write supply for demand, to say the thing that would
please the multitude and command sale, to batter his
brains into bannocks, — against this his whole nature
rebelled. Something, he felt, was burning down at the
bottom of his heart, and this was the only thing he
cared to utter. How to utter it he was long in finding,
and whether, when uttered, it would be listened to, was
all uncertain. At last, after years of solitary struggle,
hag-ridden, as he says, by dyspepsia, which made his
waking thoughts one long nightmare, 'without hope,'
as he tells, or at best with a desperate ' hope, shrouded
in continual gloom and grimness,' he did get himself
uttered, and his Sartor Resartus, his Miscellaneous
Essays, and his French Revolution are the outcome.
Thus, by slow degrees, he won the world's ear, and by
1840 or thereabouts, it began to be recognised that in
Carlyle a new light had arisen in England's literature.

No doubt the narrow though bracing atmosphere of
his youth, the grinding poverty, the depressing ill-health,
the fierce struggle, the want of all appreciation, which
beset his early years, working on his naturally proud
and violent temper, made him the rugged, stern, un-
E e a

420 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

genial man he seemed to be. But had he missed this
stern disciphne, and been reared in soft and pleasant
places, how different would he, how different would his
teaching, have been ! Would it have burnt itself into
the world's heart, as his best words have done?

However this may be, the strong, isolated, self-reliant
man, when he settled at Chelsea, and began to meet
face to face London celebrities, literary, social, and
political, it is strange to see with what a haughty self-
assertion he eyed and measured them. Full of genius
as he was, strong in imagination, keen in sympathy for
great historic characters, yet on the men he met in
society he looked with a proud peasant's narrowness
and bigotry of contempt. Whatever was strange to
him, or uncongenial, he would seem to have regarded
with an unsympathising eye, and judged by narrow
standards. Something of the same kind of too conscious
self-assertion there was in him which we see in Burns.
Determined not to cringe to men socially their superiors,
whom they thought to be intellectually their inferiors,
neither of them escaped some rudeness in their manners,
some harshness in their judgments. Unlike as they
were in temperament — Burns the jovial Epicurean,
Carlyle the abstinent Stoic — in this they were alike, that
neither moved at ease through the new social circum-
stances to which their genius introduced them. But
who can wonder if both failed to solve quite success-
fully that hardest of social problems, — when a man

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 42 1

rises in society by force of his ability, to bear himself
with becoming self-respect and dignity, and at the same
time to show due consideration for others, — at once to
be true to his own past, and in no way turn his back
upon it, and at the same time genially and gracefully
to adapt himself to new situations ?

Whether it was owing to continual ill-health, or to
the dire struggle he had to wage with poverty and un-
toward circumstances, it cannot be said that Carlyle
looked genially on the world of his fellow men. Dowered
with a deep capacity for love, nor less with strong power
of scorn — the love he reserved for a few chosen ones,
of his own family and his immediate circle ; the scorn
he dealt out lavishly and promiscuously on the outer
world, whether of chance acquaintances, or of celebrities
of the hour. Yet from behind all this scorn — or seem-
ing scorn — there would break out strange gleams of
reverence and tenderness, where you would least look
for it ; and the reverence and the tenderness, we fain
believe, lay deeper than the scorn.

What then were some of those truths which Carlyle
laid to heart, and preached with that emphatic power,
which formed his poetic inspiration ? He was a prophet
of the soul in man. Deeply sensible, as he himself
expressed it, that ' the clay that is about man is always
sufficiently ready to assert itself; that the danger is
always the other way, that the spiritual part of man
will become overlaid with his bodily part,' he asserted

422 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

with all the strength that was in him, and in every
variety of form, the reality of man's spiritual nature
in opposition to all the materialisms that threatened
to crush it. More alive than most men to the
mysteriousness of our present being, often weighed
down under a sad sense of the surrounding darkness,
having done long battle with all the doubts that issue
out of it, he yet planted his foot firmly on deep in-
eradicable convictions as to the soul's divine origin
and destiny, which he found at the roots of his
being. These primal instincts were to him ' the foun-
tain light of all his seeing'; and on these, not on any
nostrums of so-called analytical philosophies, taking his
stand, he set his face towards this world and the next.
Against the mud-philosophies, which, with their proto-
plasms, their natural selections, their heredities, would
have robbed him of these cherished convictions, all his
works are one long indignant protest — a protest con-
ducted not by argument mainly, but by vehement asser-
tion of what he found in his own personal consciousness
— assertion illuminated with high lights of imagination,
grotesque with droll humour, and grim with scornful
raillery.

In this he was akin to all the prophets, one of their
brotherhood, — that he maintained the spiritual and dy-
namic forces in man as against the mechanical. While
so many, listening to the host of materialising teachers,
are always succumbing to the visible, and selling their

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 423

birthright for the mess of pottage which this world offers,
Carlyle's voice appealed from these to a higher tribunal,
and found a response in those deeper recesses which
He beyond the reach of argument and analysis. This
he did with all his powers, and by doing so rendered
a great service to his generation, whether they have
listened to him or not.

This sense, that the spirit in man is the substance,
the I the reality, and that the bodily senses are the
tools we use for a little time, then lay aside ; that
we are ' spirits in a prison, able only to make signals
to each other, but with a world of things to think and
say which our signals cannot describe at all,' has been
expressed many times by Carlyle, but never more
powerfully than in words which Mr. Justice Stephen
has called ' perhaps the most memorable utterance of
our greatest poet'

' It is mysterious, it is awful to consider, that we not only carry
each a future ghost within him, but are in very deed ghosts.
These limbs, whence had we them ? this stormy force, this life-
blood with its burning passion ? They are dust and shadow ;
a shadow-system gathered round our Me, wherein through some
moment or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the
flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through
his eyes, force dwells in his arms and heart ; but warrior and war-
horse are a vision, a revealed force, nothing more. Stately they
tread the earth, as if it were a firm substance. Fools ! the earth
is but a film ; it cracks in twain, and warrior and warhorse sink
beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's .'' Fantasy herself will
not follow them. A little while ago they were not ; a little while
and they are not, their very ashes are not.

424 PROSE POETS. [xiv.

So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end.
Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a body ;
and forth issuing from Cimmerian night on heaven's mission
appears. What force and fire is in each, he expends. One grinding
in the mill of industry, one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine
heights of science, one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of
strife in war with his fellows, and then the heaven-sent is recalled,
his earthly vesture falls away, and soon even to sense becomes
a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild flaming, wild thunder-
ing train of Heaven's artillery, does this mysterious mankind
thunder and flame in long-drawn quick-succeeding grandeur
through the unknown deep. Thus, like a god-created, fire-
breathing spirit-host, we emerge from the inane, haste stormfully
across the astonished earth, then plunge again into the inane.
Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up in our
passage. Can the earth, which is dead, and a vision, resist
spirits which have reality and are alive .? On the hardest adamant
some footprint of us is stamped in. The last rear of the host will
read traces of the earliest van. But whence ? Oh, Heaven !
whither? Sense knows not, faith knows not, only that it is
through mystery to mystery, from God and to God.

" We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."'

Closely connected with the thought thus powerfully
expressed was his sense of the mysteriousness of Time
as the vestibule of Eternity, and of our life here as a
narrow isthmus between two eternities. This deep con-
viction, instilled into him by his early Biblical training,
and confirmed, though changed in form, by German
transcendentalism, is ever present to his imagination.
* Remember/ he says to the young man entering on

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 425

life, ' Remember now and always that life is no idle
dream, but a solemn reality, based upon Eternity and
encompassed by Eternity.' Again, he speaks of the
priceless 'gift of life, which a man can have but once,
for he waited a whole eternity to be born, and now has
a whole eternity waiting to see what he will do when
born.'

This is a very old truth — a primaeval truth, one may
say. But into Carlyle it had sunk so profoundly, and
he has uttered it so impressively, that it comes from
his lips as if heard for the first time. It is the under-
tone of many of his truest and most poetic utterances,
this thought of Time, with its birth and its decay, its
tumult and unceasing change, hiding the Eternity that
lies close behind it. The wonder with which this spec-
tacle filled him, as he stood on the shore of Time, and
looked out on the Infinite beyond, he has in many ways
expressed. Here is one of his most touching and
melodious expressions of it —

' He has witnessed overhead the infinite Deep, with greater and
lesser Hghts, bright-rolling, silent-beaming, hurled forth by the
hand of God ; around him, and under his feet, the wonderfullest
Earth, with her winter snow-storms and her summer spice-airs,
and (unaccountablest of all) himself standing there. He stood
in the lapse of Time ; he saw Eternity behind him, and before
him. The all-encircling mysterious tide of Force, thousandfold
(for from force of thought to force of gravitation what an interval !)
billowed shoreless on ; bore him along, — he too was part of it.
From its bosom rose and vanished in perpetual change the
lordliest Real-Phantasmagory (which was Being) ; and ever anew

426 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

rose and vanished ; and ever that lordliest many-coloured scene
was full, another yet the same. Oak-trees fell, young acorns
sprang : men too, new-sent from the Unknown, he met, of tiniest
size, who waxed into stature, into strength of sinew, passionate
fire and light : in other men the light was growing dim, the sinews
all feeble ; they sank, motionless, into ashes, into invisibihty ;
returned back to the Unknown, beckoning him their mute farewell.
He wanders still by the parting-spot ; cannot hear them ; they
are far, how far ! It was sight for angels and archangels ; for,
indeed, God Himself had made it wholly.'

With all this deep sense of the Eternal brooding
over him, yet if one were asked how he conceived of
the nature of this Eternal, with what powers he peopled
it, the answer would not be easy ; for of this he has
nowhere spoken plainly, often spoken contradictorily.
He had, no one can doubt, a real belief in ' the Ever-
lasting Mind behind nature and history.' But what
was the character of this Mind, what its attitude towards
men, this was a question he would probably have put
aside with some impatience. To formulate it, either
in speech or in thought, he would have held to be an
impertinence. To him it was the Unnameable, the
Inconceivable ; man's only becoming attitude towards
it was not speech, nor conception, nor sentiment, — but
silence, absolute silence. When he did allow himself
any definite thought about this unnameable centre of
Things, he conceived that it was Power, Force, that
there lay the fountain of law and order, and that to
this law and order belonged a kind of stern unbend-

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 437

ing justice, which had power, and would use it to vin-
dicate itself and execute its inexorable decrees. To
these man has to bow, not to question or investigate
them. As to attributing mercy, forgiveness in any
sense, not to speak of love, to this inexorable power,
this peremptory fate, that, as he thought, could only be
done by weakness or self-deception.

Sir Henry Taylor is reported to have said of Carlyle
that he was 'a Puritan who had lost his creed.' But
though the superstructure of Puritanism had disap-
peared, the original substratum remained — the stern
stoical Calvinism of his nature was the foundation on
which all his views were built. Nor is this to be won-
dered at. The religion in which he had been reared was
of a rigid, unelastic kind. Like cast-iron it would break
under pressure, but would not bend. Either the whole
of the Westminster Confession or none of it ; of that
larger, more expansive Christianity, which can assimilate
and absorb the best elements of modern culture, he
knew nothing, and would have rejected it as a delusion.
His religious faith, if we may venture to trace it, would
seem to be the result of three things, his own strong
stern nature, his early Calvinistic training, and these
two transformed by the after influx of German tran-
scendentalism tempered by Goethism.

That such an idealist should have become a historian
and achieved so much on the field of history may seem
surprising. Yet this idealism, which might have gone

438 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

to dreaminess, was counterbalanced and held in check by
inherent tendencies that went in the opposite direction,
and kept him close to actual reality. He had strong
love of concrete facts, keen insight into the picturesque
and expressive traits of human character, indefatigable
industry in getting at the facts that interested him, and
a wonderful eye to read their inner meaning. His
glowing imagination not only bodied forth the past,
but made its characters live before us down to the
minutest detail, — their looks, the peculiarity of their
gait, their very dress. He throws himself into the part
of his heroes, and represents it, as an actor would. No
historian before him, it has been well said, was ever such
a dramatist. As you read him, you see his hero not
only in action, and outward appearance, but you hear
him utter, in side hints, in soliloquy, or otherwise, the
inner secrets of his heart. This made him a quite un-
rivalled interpreter of characters and epochs for which
he had sympathy, lighting up with wonderful power
some of the foremost men and some of the most thrill-
ing crises in the world's history. He did this because
of his intense sympathy with those men and those
crises. But where his sympathy failed, his insight also
failed. A glowing poet, a vivid painter, as few have
ever been, or can be, he was ; but a historian, impartial,
calm-judging, judicial-minded, this it was not in him
to be. To a large portion of what makes up history,
the growth of institutions, the checks and counterchecks

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 429

of constitutional government (indeed constitutionalism
was always a bugbear to him), the necessity of com-
promise, the power of traditional usage, the value of
habit and routine,— to all these things he was utterly
blind ; or if for a moment made aware of their existence,
he dismissed them scornfully as red-tapeism, effete
formulas. But great men, and great crises, when per-
sonal emotion and popular passions are at the white
heat, when iron will struggles with popular fury and
overmasters it, — these were the subjects that exactly
suited his peculiar temperament and turn of imagin-
ation. This it was which made the French Revolution
so fascinating a theme for him. All history, ancient
or modern, did not furnish such another for one who
had power to grapple with it : in De Quincey's words,
' Not Nineveh nor Babylon with the enemy in all their
gates, not Memphis nor Jerusalem in their latest agonies.'
Carlyle's book on the French Revolution has been
called the great modern epic, and so it is — an epic as
true and germane to this age, as Homer's was to his.
Chaos come again, and overwhelming all extant order,
— the wild volcano of mad democracy bursting and
consuming the accumulated rubbish and corruption of
centuries, — all the paradoxes of human nature face to
face, blind popular passion and starving multitudes con-
fronting court imbecility, conventionality, nostrums of
political doctrinaires and effete diplomacy, — panic and
trembling uncertainty controlled by clear-seeing deter-

430 PROSE POETS. [xiV.

mined will, and all these by great inscrutable forces
together driven on to their doom. In the midst of all
the tumults and confusion, some Mirabeau appearing as
the cloud-compeller — the one man who, had he lived,
might have guided the tremendous forces to some
certain end. ' Honour to the strong man in these ages
who has shaken himself loose of shams, and is some-
thing. There lay verily in him sincerity, a great free
earnestness ; nay, call it Honesty.' This is a word we
have heard almost to weariness. This, though said of
Mirabeau is the refrain in all his works — the admiration
of clear-seeing penetrating intelligence, backed by ada-
mantine will. So these be present, we shall not much
enquire what may be their moral purpose, or whether
they have a moral purpose at all. The strong intellect
and the strong will are an emanation from the central
force of the universe, and as such have a right to rule.

The two elements we have noted in Carlyle's way
of thinking, the fundamental idealism, and the strong
grasp of realism, his firm hold on actual facts, combined
with his deep sense of the mysteriousness of life, — these
two tendencies, seemingly contradictory, yet each en-
hancing the other, are everywhere visible in his treat-
ment of history. In all affairs of men, no one was so
aware of the little known^ the vast unknown. You see
it equally in his portraits of men, and in his accounts
of great movements. A recent writer in the Spectator
has well pointed out how much of Carlyle's power is due

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 431

to the way he has apprehended and brought out these
two elements. These conflicting tendencies, so power-
fully operating in all great tumults, Carlyle takes full
account of, interweaves the one with the other, and by
doing so wonderfully heightens not only the truthful-
ness, but also the effectiveness of his pictures. In this
how unlike Macaulay, and other historians of his kind !
with whom the most complex characters are explained
down to the ground, the greatest and most confused
movements and revolutions accounted for by definite,
causes, tabulated one, two, three. With such writers
when they have said their say, there remains no more
behind — they think they can lay their finger on the
most secret springs of Providence. Their very definite-
ness and too great knowingness is their condemnation.

Here is the description of Marie Antoinette, taken
from one of Carlyle's Essays, which seems a sort of
prelude to his French Revolution : —

' Beautiful Highborn, that wert so foully hurled low ! For, if
thy Being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties, came it
not also (like my own) out of Heaven ? . . . . Oh, is there a man's
heart that thinks, without pity, of those long months and years
of slow-wasting ignominy ; — of thy Birth, soft cradled in imperial
Schonbrunn, the winds of heaven not to visit thy face too roughly,
thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour ; and then of
thy Death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine and
Fouquier-Tinville's judgment - bar was but the merciful end ?
Look there, O man born of woman ! The bloom of that fair face
is wasted, the hair is gray with care ; the brightness of those eyes
is quenched, their lids hang drooping ; the face is stony, pale, as

432 PROSE POETS. [xiV.

of one living in death. Mean weeds (which her own hand has
mended) attire the Queen of the World. The death hurdle, where
thou sittest, pale, motionless, which only curses environ, must
stop : a people, drunk with vengeance, will drink it again in full
draught : far as eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads;
the air deaf with their triumph-yell ! The Living-dead must shud-
der with yet one other pang : her startled blood yet again suffuses
with the hue of agony that pale face, which she hides with her
hands. There is, then, no heart to say, God pity thee } '

Open his French Revohition itself almost anywhere,
and you will find examples of the unique power I have
spoken of. Here is one from the second volume of the
book : —

' As for the King, he as usual will go wavering chameleon-like ;
changing colour and purpose with the colour of his environment ;
— good for no kingly use. On one royal person, on the Queen
only, can Mirabeau perhaps place dependence. It is possible,
the greatness of this man, not unskilled too in blandishments,
courtiership, and graceful adroitness, might, with most legitimate
sorcery, fascinate the volatile Queen, and fix her to him. She
has courage for all noble daring ; an eye and a heart, the soul

of Theresa's daughter " She is the only man," as Mirabeau

observes, " whom his Majesty has about him." Of one other man
Mirabeau is still surer — of himself. .... Din of battles, wars
more than civil, confusion from above and from below : in such
environment the eye of prophecy sees Comte de Mirabeau, like
some Cardinal de Retz, stormfully maintain himself ; with head
all-devising, heart all-daring, if not victorious, yet still unvan-
quished, while life is left him. The speciaHties and issues of it,
no eye of prophecy can guess at : it is clouds, we repeat, and
tempestuous night ; and in the middle of it, now visible, far-
darting, now labouring in eclipse, is Mirabeau indomitably strug-
gling to be cloud-compeller I One can say that, had Mirabeau

XIV.] • THOMAS CARLYLE. 433

lived, the history of France and of the world had been different.
.... Had Mirabeau lived another year ! . . . . But Mirabeau
could not live another year, any more than he could live another

thousand years

The fierce wear and tear of such an existence has wasted out
the giant oaken strength of Mirabeau. A fret and fever that

keeps heart and brain on fire On Saturday, the second

day of April, Mirabeau feels that the last of the days has risen for
him ; that on this day he has to depart and be no more. His
death is Titanic, as his life has been ! Lit up, for the last time,
in the glare of coming dissolution, the mind of the man is all
glowing and burning ; utters itself in sayings, such as men long
remember. He longs to live, yet acquiesces in death, argues not
with the inexorable. His speech is wild and wondrous ; unearthly
phantasms dancing now their torch-dance round his soul ; the
soul looking out, fire-radiant, motionless, girt together for that
great hour ! At times comes a beam of light from him on the
world he is quitting. " I carry in my heart the death-dirge of the
French monarchy ; the dead remains of it will now be the spoil

of the factions." While some friend is supporting him :

" Yes, support that head ; would I could bequeath it thee ! " For
the man dies as he has lived ; self-conscious, conscious of a world
looking on. He gazes forth on the young Spring, which for him
will never be Summer. The sun has risen ; he says, " Si ce n'est

pas le Dieu, c'est du moins son cousin germain." So dies

a gigantic Heathen and Titan, stumbHng blindly, undismayed,
down to his rest. At half-past eight in the morning. Doctor Petit,
standing at the foot of the bed, says, " II ne souffre plus." His
suffering and his working are now ended.'

Of all Carlyle's works, his French Revolution is, no

doubt, the greatest, that by which he will, probably, be

longest remembered. It is a thoroughly artistic book,

artistically conceived, and artistically executed. On it

Ff

434 PROSE POETS. [xiv.

he expended his full strength, and he himself felt that
he had done so.

His Cromwell and his Frederick, with all their power,
are comparatively amorphous productions, as he would
have called them. There is in them far less of the
shaping power that he put forth on the French Revolution.
For Carlyle, rugged and gnarled though he was, none
the less was a great artist, not of the mellifluous, but of
the strong and vehement order, delighting in the Titanic,
yet intermingling it, ever and anon, with soft bursts of
pathos ; as you see some rough granite mountain,
with here and there well-springs of clearest water, and
streaks of greenest verdure. Had time served I
could have cited from the two latter histories passages
in which his pictorial and poetic power shine forth
conspicuously. Such are the description of the battle
of Dunbar in Cromwell. In this passage his graphic
power of rendering a landscape is seen — the same power
that appears in another way in the description he gives
of the Border hills and dales in the Reminiscences of
Edward Irving.

I have said that Carlyle was essentially a great artist,
both in the way in which he conceived things, and in
the way in which he expressed his conception of them.
An artist, not of the Raphael or Leonardo order,
but of the Rembrandt, or even of the Michael Angelo
type, — forceful, rugged, gnarled, lurid. Titanic.

Being an artist, he wrought out for himself a style

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 435

of his own, highly artificial, no doubt intensely self-
conscious, but yet one which reflected with wonderful
power and exactness his whole mental attitude, — the
way in which he habitually looked out from his dark
soul on men and things. He was weary of glib words,
and fluent periods, which impose on reader and writer
alike, which film over the chasms of their ignorance, and
make them think they know what they do not know. As
to style, he himself gives this rule in his Reminiscences :
' Learn, so far as possible, to be intelligible and trans-
parent— no notice taken of your style, but solely of what
you express by it : this is your clear rule, and if you
have anything which is not quite trivial to express to
your contemporaries, you will find such rule a great
deal more difficult to follow than many people think.'

Excellent precept ; but, alas for performance ! none
ever broke the rule more habitually than Carlyle himself.
The idiom which he ultimately forged for himself was
a new and strange form of English — rugged, disjointed,
often uncouth ; in his own phrase, ' vast, fitful, decidedly
fuliginous,' but yet bringing out with marvellous vivid-
ness the thoughts that possessed him, the few truths
which he saw clearly, and was sure of — while it
suggested not less powerfully the dark background of
ignorance against which those truths shone out. In
all this he was a great and original artist, using words,
his tools, to bring out forcibly the effects most present
to his own mind, and to convey them to the minds of
F f 2

436 PROSE POETS. [XIV.

Others. To achieve this, he cared not how much he
violated all the decorums, and shocked the proprieties of
literature. He set at naught, what are usually called,
the models of English composition — he laid under con-
tribution the most diverse and outlandish sources of
speech, borrowing now something from his native An-
nandale idiom and vocabulary, largely from German
sources (Jean Paul Richter is especially named), im-
porting not only words and phrases, but whole turns
of language, hitherto unheard in English, while, to ex-
press the droll humours and grim fancies that possessed
him, he dashed in grotesque side-lights, copious nick-
names, that seem to have been native to him, or a
trick inherited from his shrewd, caustic old father.

Read page after page, such a style soon wearies.
One gets to feel as if driven over a rough stony road,
in a cart without springs. But in short descriptions
and pictures, it is stimulative and impressive, as few
other styles are. What effect, if any, it has had on our
language, may be a question. One thing only is certain.
Carlyle must be left alone with his own style. When
taken up by imitators, it becomes simply unendurable.

I shall close with a few words from the lament he
breathed over Edward Irving, written as long ago
as 1H35. They give a glimpse of the nobleness that
was in Carlyle's heart beneath all his morosencss, as
well of the height of poetry to which, on fitting occasions,
he could rise.

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 437

' Edward Irving's warfare has closed ; if not in victory, yet in
invincibility, and faithful endurance to the end. . . . The voice
of our " son of thunder," with its deep tone of wisdom, has gone
silent so soon. . . . The large heart, with its large bounty,
where wretchedness found solacement, and they that were wander-
ing in darkness, the light as of a home, has paused. The strong
man can no more : beaten on from without, undermined from
within, he must sink overwearied, as at nightfall, when it was
yet but the mid-season of the day. Scotland sent him forth a
Herculean man ; our mad Babylon wore him and wasted him,
with all her engines ; and it took her twelve years. He sleeps
with his fathers, in that loved birth-land : Babylon with its deafen-
ing inanity rages on ; to him henceforth innocuous, unheeded —
for ever.

One who knew him well, and may with good cause love him,
has said : " But for Irving, I had never known what the com-
munion of man with man means. His was the freest, brotherliest,
bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with : I call him,
on the whole, the best man I have ever (after trial enough) found
in this world, or now hope to find."

The first time I saw Irving was six and twenty years ago,
in his native town, Annan. He was fresh from Edinburgh, with
college prizes, high character, and promise. . . . We heard of
famed professors of high matters classical, mathematical, a whole
Wonderland of knowledge : nothing but joy, health, hopefulness
without end, looked out from the blooming young man.

The last time I saw him was three months ago, in London.
Friendliness still beamed from his eyes, but now from amid
unquiet fire ; his face was flaccid, wasted, unsound ; hoary as
with extreme age : he was trembling on the brink of the grave.
Adieu, thou first Friend ; adieu, while this confused twilight of
existence lasts ! Might we meet where Twilight has become
Day !'

CHAPTER XV.

PROSE POETS. CARDINAL NEWMAN.

During the first fifty years of this century, there
were living in England three men, three teachers of
men, each of whom appealed to what is highest in
man, to the moral and spiritual side of human nature,
and by that appeal told most powerfully on his gener-
ation. These men were William Wordsworth, Thomas
Carlyle, and John Henry Newman. Each gathered
round himself in time, whether consciously or not,
a group of disciples, whom he influenced, and who
became conductors of his influence to the minds of his
countrymen. All three were idealists, believers in the
mental and spiritual forces, as higher than the material,
and as ruling them — but idealists each after his own
fashion. The strength of each lay in a large measure
in his imagination, and in the power with which he
stirred his fellow-men, by bearing home to their imagin-
ations his own views of truth. But here any likeness
between them begins and ends.

No three men of power, living in the same epoch,
lived more aloof from each other, borrowed less from

CARDINAL NEWMAN. 439

each other, were more independent of each other's
influence, were less appreciative of each other's gift.

What Carlyle thought of Wordsworth we know too
well, from the brief notice in the Reinmiscences, in which
Carlyle speaks out his ' intelligent contempt ' for the
great poet — a contempt which does not prove his own
superiority. And Wordsworth, if he did not return the
contempt, was, we have reason to believe, in no way
an admirer of Carlyle, or of any of his works ; and, when
they met, turned but a cold side towards him.

There is no reason to think that Carlyle and Cardinal
Newman knew much or anything of each other's works ;
certainly they never met. For High Church doctrine
Carlyle expresses nothing but scorn, whenever he alludes
to it, and cannot preserve either equanimity or good
manners in presence of anything that looked like sacer-
dotalism.

Had they ever met, we can well imagine the refined
Cardinal Newman turning toward the rough Scot that
reticence and reserve which none knew better how to
maintain, in presence of the uncongenial. Then, as to
Wordsworth and Cardinal Newman, while the old poet
knew and appreciated The Christian Year, and used to
comment on it, there is nowhere any evidence that
Cardinal Newman's works had ever reached, or any
way affected him. And as for the younger of these
two, it was only this time last year that he told one in
Oxford, that he was quite innocent of any familiarity

440 PROSE POETS. [XV.

with Wordsworth. ' No ! I was never soaked in Words-
worth, as some of my contemporaries were.'

Strange, is it not ? that three such teachers, who
have each at different times influenced so powerfully men
younger than themselves, should have lived so apart, as
little appreciating each other, as if they had been inhabit-
ants of different countries, or even of different planets.

Of these three teachers, the two elder are no longer
here. The third still remains among us, in beautiful and
revered old age. It is of him that I have now to speak.

We saw how that which lay at the centre of Carlyle's
great literary power, was the force of a vigorous per-
sonality, a unique character, an indomitable will. Not
less marked and strong is the personality of Cardinal
Newman, but the two personalities passed through
very different experiences. In the one the rough ore
was presented to the world, just as it had come direct
from mother earth, with all the clay and mud about it.
The other underwent in youth the most searching pro-
cesses, intellectual and social ; met, in rivalry or in friend-
ship, many men of the highest order, his own equals, and
came forth from the ordeal seven times refined. But this
training no way impaired his native strength or damped
his ardour. Only it taught him to know what is due
to the feelings and convictions of others, as well as
what became his own self-respect. He did not con-
sider it any part of veracity to speak out, at all hazards,
every impulse and prejudice, every like and dislike

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 441

which he felt. That a thing is true was, in his view,
'no reason why it should be said, but why it should
be done, acted on, made our own inwardly.' And as
the firm fibre of his nature remained the same, all the
training and refining it went through made it only
more sure in aim, and more effective in operation.
The difference of the two men is that between the
furious strength of Roderick Dhu, and the trained
power and graceful skill of James Fitz-James.

There are many sides from which the literary work
of Cardinal Newman might be viewed ; but there is
only one aspect in which, speaking in this place, it
would be pertinent to regard it. To dwell on his work
as a theologian, or as a controversialist, or even as
he is a preacher or a religious teacher, would be un-
becoming here. It is mainly as he is a poet that I feel
warranted to advert to his writings now.

When I speak of him as one of the great prose poets
of our time, this is not because, as in the case of Carlyle,
he had not the gift of expressing himself in verse, or
did not at times practise it. That he could do so
effectively, readers of the Lyr'a Apostolica do not need
to be informed. They remember his few impressive
lines on The Call of David, rendering in a brief page
of verse the whole outline of that wonderful life ; his
lines too on David and Jonathan, and those on The
Greek Fathers, and those entitled Separation, upon a
friend lately lost.

442 PROSE POETS. [XV.

Here are some lines entitled Rest of Saints Departed.

' They are at rest :
We may not stir the heaven of their repose
By rude invoking voice, or prayer addrest

In waywardness, to those
Who in the mountain grots of Eden lie,
And hear the fourfold river as it murmurs by.

They hear it sweep
In distance down the dark and savage vale ;
But they at rocky bed, or current deep,
Shall never more grow pale ;
They hear, and meekly muse, as fain to know,
How long untired, unspent, that giant stream shall flow.'

Or the next poem of the book, called Knowledge,
which means the knowledge which saints departed have
of what goes on on earth,

'A sea before
The Throne is spread ; its pure, still glass
Pictures all earth-scenes as they pass.

We, on its shore.
Share, in the bosom of our rest,
God's knowledge, and are blest.'

Just one more, the condensed severity of the lines
entitled Deeds not Words.

' Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control,
That o'er thee swell and throng ;
They will condense within thy soul,
And change to purpose strong.

But he, who lets his feelings run
In soft luxurious flow.

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 443

Shrinks when hard service must be done,

And faints at every woe.
Faith's meanest deed more favour bears,

Where hearts and wills are weighed,
Than brightest transports, choicest prayers,

Which bloom their hour and fade.'

Such short poems as these showed, long before The
Dream of Gerontiiis appeared, that Cardinal Newman
possessed the true poet's gift, and could speak the poet's
language, had he cared to cultivate it. But he was
called to another duty, and passed on. To an age which
was set, as this age is, on material prosperity, easy
living, and all that gratifies the flesh, he felt called to
speak a language long unheard ; to insist on the reality
of the things of faith, and the necessity of obedience ;
to urge on men the necessity to crush self, and obey ;
to press home a severer, more girt-up way of living ; to
throw himself into strenuous conflict with the darling
prejudices of his countrymen. It was in his Parochial
Sermons, beyond all his other works, that he spoke
out the truths which were within him — spoke them
with all the fei-vour of a prophet and the severe
beauty of a poet. Modern English literature has no-
where any language to compare with the style of these
Sermons, so simple and transparent, yet so subtle withal ;
so strong yet so tender ; the grasp of a strong man's
hand, combined with the trembling tenderness of a
woman's heart, expressing in a few monosyllables truths
which would have cost other men a page of philosophic

444 PROSE POETS. [XV.

verbiage, laying the most gentle yet penetrating finger
on the very core of things, reading to men their own
most secret thoughts better than they knew them
themselves.

Carlyle's style is like the full untutored swing of the
giant's arm ; Cardinal Newman's is the assured self-
possession, the quiet gracefulness of the finished athlete.
The one, when he means to be effective, seizes the most
vehement feelings and the strongest words within his
reach, and hurls them impetuously at the object. The
other, with disciplined moderation, and delicate self-
restraint, shrinks instinctively from overstatement, but
penetrates more directly to the core by words of sober
truth and ' vivid exactness.'

One often hears a lament that the mellow cadence and
perfect rhythm of the Collects and the Liturgy are a
lost art — a grace that is gone from the English lan-
guage. It is not so. There are hundreds of passages in
Cardinal Newman's writings which, for graceful rhythm
and perfect melody, may be placed side by side with the
most soothing harmonies of the Prayer Book.

In his mode of thought the first characteristic I would
notice is his Innate and intense idealism. Somewhere
in his Apologia he says that there had been times in his
life when the whole material world seemed to him
unreal, unsubstantial as a dream. And all through life
it would seem that the sense of his own soul, of his
spiritual nature, and of the existence of God, was more

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 445

present to him than the material worid which sur-
rounded him.

It is a thought of his, always deeply felt, and many
times repeated, that this visible world is but the outward
shell of an invisible kingdom, a screen which hides from
our view things far greater and more wonderful than any
which we see, and that the unseen world is close to us,
and ever ready as it were to break through the shell,
and manifest itself.

' To those who hve by faith,' he says, ' everything they see
speaks of that future world ; the very glories of nature, the sun,
moon, and stars, and the richness and the beauty of the earth,
are as types and figures, witnessing and teaching the invisible
things of God. All that we see is destined one day to burst forth
into a heavenly bloom, and to be transfigured into immortal glory.
Heaven at present is out of sight, but in due time, as snow melts
and discovers what it lay upon, so will this visible creation fade
away before those greater splendours which are behind it, and on
which at present it depends. In that day shadows will retire, and
the substance show itself. The sun will grow pale and be lost
in the sky, but it will be before the radiance of Him, whom it

does but image, the Sun of Righteousness Our own

mortal bodies will then be found in like manner to contain within
them an inner man, which will then receive its due proportions,
as the soul's harmonious organ, instead of the gross mass of flesh
and blood which sight and touch are sensible of.'

In this, and in many another place, he expresses the
feeling that here he is walking about ' in a world of
shadows,' and that there is behind it ' that kingdom
where all is real.' To his eye the very movements of
nature, and the appearances of the sky, suggest the

44^ PROSE POETS. [XV.

presence of spiritual beings in them. In his Sermon,
on the Feast of St. Michael and all Angels, this thought
occurs : —

'Whenever we look abroad, we are reminded of those most
gracious and holy Beings, the servants of the Holiest, who deign
to minister to the heirs of salvation. Every breath of air and
ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the
skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those, whose
faces see God in heaven.'

In the same strain, he says : —

' Bright as is the sun, and the sky, and the clouds ; green as
are the leaves and the fields ; sweet as is the singing of the birds ;
we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part
for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness,
which is God Himself; but they are not His fulness ; they speak
of heaven, but they are not heaven ; they are but as stray beams
and dim reflections of His Image ; they are but crumbs from the
table. We are looking for the day of God, when all this outward

world, fair though it be, shall perish We can bear the

loss, for we know it will be but the removing of a veil. We
know that to remove the world which is seen, will be the mani-
festation of the world which is not seen. We know that what
we see is as a screen hiding from us God and Christ ; and His
Saints and Angels. And we earnestly desire and pray for the
dissolution of all we see, from our longing after that which we
do not see.'

This is, no doubt, not a common state of mind, but
it is one which is in some way shared by all great
spiritual teachers. We saw how, taking the form of
transcendentalism, it lay at the base of Carlyle's whole
way of looking at things. But the passage I have just

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 447

read, if compared with a like passage which I quoted
from Carlyle, shows how very differently the two writers
apprehended the same truth. To Carlyle the eternal
world, which he felt to be so near and so all-absorbing,
appeared in a stern, often in a lurid light. To Cardinal
Newman it appears in its calmness and its majesty,
invested with a light which, if pensive — even awful— is
still calm and serene. The eternity which Carlyle con-
ceived was filled only with that which his own grim
imagination pictured, stern, over-ruling Force at the
centre, whence proceeded adamantine law. To Cardinal
Newman it is peopled with all the soul-subduing yet
soothing objects which Christianity reveals.

Again, there is another powerful conviction which we
noted in Carlyle, which also, though in a very different
way, is ever present to Cardinal Newman. It is the
sense of the mysteriousness of our present being — that
we even now belong to two worlds ; and that the in-
visible world, and that part of ourselves which we cannot
see, are far more important than the part which we
do see.

'All this being so, and the vastness and mystery of the world
being borne in upon us, we begin to think that there is nothing
here below, but, for what we know, has a connexion with every-
thing else ; the most distant events may yet be united, and
meanest and highest may be parts of one ; and God may be
teaching us, and offering knowledge of His ways if we will but
open our eyes, in all the ordinary matters of the day,'

One way in which he shows this sense of mystery

448 PROSE POETS. [xv.

is the feeling of wonder with which he looks upon the
brute creation : —

' Can anything,' he asks, ' be more marvellous or startling, unless
we were used to it, than that we should have a race of beings
about us whom we do but see, and as little know their state, or
can describe their interests, or their destiny, as we can tell of the
inhabitants of the sun and moon. It is indeed a very overpower-
ing thought, when we get to fix our minds on it, that we familiarly
use, I may say hold intercourse with, creatures who are as much
strangers to us, as mysterious, as if they were fabulous, unearthly
beings, more powerful than man, and yet his slaves, which Eastern
superstitions have invented. They have apparently passions,
habits, and a certain accountableness, but all is mystery about
them. We do not know whether they can sin or not, whether
they are under punishment, whether they are to live after this

life Is it not plain to our senses that there is a world

inferior to us in the scale of beings, with which we are connected
without understanding what it is? and is it difficult to faith to
admit the word of Scripture concerning our connexion with a
world superior to nsV

And to thoughtful minds that world of brute animals
is as mysterious still, nor is the veil of mystery removed
by talk about evolution, and the impudent knowingness
it often engenders.

Again, Cardinal Newman's mind dwelt much in the
remote past; but the objects it there held converse
with were of a different order from those which attracted
the gaze of Carlyle. Not the rise and fall of mighty
kingdoms and dynasties ; not

'The giant forms of empires on their way
To ruin';

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 449

not heroes, and conquerors, the ' massive iron hammers '
of the whole earth ; not the great men and the famous
in the world's affairs. With these he could deal, as his
Lectures on the Turks prove. But the one object which
attracted his eye in all the past was the stone hewn
out of the side of the mountain, which should crush to
pieces all the kingdoms of the earth. The kingdom of
Christ ' coming to us from the very time of the apo-
stles, spreading out into all lands, triumphing over a
thousand revolutions, exhibiting an awful unity, glorying
in a mysterious vitality, so majestic, so imperturbable,
so bold, so saintly, so sublime, so beautiful.' This was
the one object which filled his heart and imagination.
This was the vision which he had ever in his eye, and
these are the feelings with which it inspired him : —

' What shall keep us calm and peaceful within ? What but

the vision of all Saints of all ages, whose steps we follow

The early times of purity and truth have not passed away ! they
are present still ! We are not solitary, though we seem so. Few
now alive may understand or sanction us ; but those multitudes
in the primitive time, who believed, and taught, and worshipped,
as we do, still live unto God, and in their past deeds and present
voices, cry from the Altar. They animate us by their example ;
they cheer us by their company ; they are on our right hand and
our left. Martyrs, Confessors, and the like, high and low, who
used the same creeds, and celebrated the same mysteries, and
preached the same gospel as we do. And to them were joined,
as ages went on, even in fallen times, nay, even now in times of
division, fresh and fresh witnesses from the Church below. In

the world of spirits there is no difference of parties The

truth is at length simply discerned by the spirits of the just ;

450 PROSE POETS. [XV.

human additions, human institutions, human enactments, enter
not with them into the unseen state. They are put off with the
flesh. Greece and Rome, England and France, give no colour
to those souls which have been cleansed in the One Baptism,
nourished by the One Body, and moulded upon the One Faith.
Adversaries agree together directly they are dead, if they have
lived and walked in the Holy Ghost. The harmonies combine
and fill the temple, while discords and imperfections die away.'

This was to him no sentimental dream, cherished
in the closet, but unfit to face the world. It was a
reality which moulded his own character and his destiny,
and determined the work he set himself to do on earth.
He saw, as he believed, a religion prevalent all around,
which was secular and mundane, soft, and self-indulgent,
taking in that part of the gospel which pleases the flesh,
but shrinking from its sterner discipline and higher
aspirations. He made it the aim of his life to introduce
some iron into its blood, to import into the religion
of his day something of the zeal, and devotion, and
self-denying sanctity, which were the notes of the early
Faith. The vision which he beheld in the primitive ages
he laboured to bring home and make practical in these
modern times. It will be said, I know, that Cardinal
Newman is an Ascetic, and teaches Asceticism. And
there are many who think that, when they have once
labelled any view with this name, they have as good as
disproved it. Do such persons deny that Asceticism, in
some sense, is an essential part of Christianity, that to
deny self, to endure hardness, is one of its most charac-

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 451

teristic precepts? Those who most fully acknowledge
this precept know that it is one thing to acknowledge,
quite another to obey it. But the world is so set on the
genial, not to say the jovial, it so loves the padding of
material civilisation in which it enwraps itself, that it
resents any crossing of the natural man, and will always
listen greedily to those teachers — and they are many —
who persuade it that the flesh ought to have its own
way. A teacher so to its mind the world has not found
in Cardinal Newman.

It is not however our part here to estimate the need
or the value of the work he has done. But it is easy
to see how well his rare and peculiar genius fitted him
for doing it. If, on the one side, he had the imaginative
devotion which clung to a past ideal, he had, on the
other side, that penetrating insight into human nature,
which made him well understand his own age, and
its tendencies. He was intimately acquainted with
his own heart, and he so read the hearts of his fel-
low men, that he seemed to know their inmost secrets.
In his own words he could tell them what they
knew about themselves, and what they did not know,
till they were startled by the truth of his revelations.
His knowledge of human nature, underived from books
and philosophy, was intuitive, first-hand, practical. In
this region he belonged to the pre-scientific era. He
took what he found within him, as the first of all know-
ledge, as the thing he was most absolutely certain
Gg3

452 PROSE POETS. [xv.

of. The feelings, desires, aspirations, needs, which he
felt in his own heart, the intimations of conscience, sense
of sin, longing for deliverance, these were his closest
knowledge, to accept, not to explain away, or to analyse
into nothing. They were his original outfit, they fixed
his standard of judgment ; they furnished the key by
which he was to read the riddle of life, and to interpret
the world ; they were the ' something within him, which
was to harmonise and adjust' all that was obscure and
discordant without him. The nostrums by which these
primal truths are attempted to be explained away
now-a-days, heredity, antecedent conditions, these had
not come much into vogue in his youth. But we know
well enough how he would have dealt with them. What
I feel and know intimately at first hand, that I must
accept and use as the condition of all other knowledge ;
I am not to explain this away by uncertain theories or
doubtful analyses ; I cannot unclothe myself of myself,
at the bidding of any philosophical theory, however
plausible. This is what he would have said.

The sermons are full of such heart-knowledge, such
reading to men of their own hidden half-realised
selves.

But it is not my purpose here to go into this, but
to exhibit those places in Dr. Newman's teaching, which
break, almost involuntarily, into poetry, and become
poetical, not in feeling and conception only, but in
expression also. Who has so truly and beautifully

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 453

touched those more subtle and evanescent experiences,
by which tender and imaginative natures are visited ?

This is the way he describes our feelings in looking
back on much of our life that is past.

'When enjoyment is past, reflection comes in. Such is the
sweetness and softness with which days long past fall upon the
memory, and strike us. The most ordinary years, when we
seemed to be living for nothing, these shine forth to us in their
very regularity and orderly course. What was sameness at the
time, is now stability ; what was dulness, is now a soothing calm ;
what seemed unprofitable, has now its treasure in itself; what
was but monotony, is now harmony ; all is pleasing and com-
fortable, and we regard it all with aifection. Nay, even sor-
rowful times (which at first sight is wonderful) are thus softened
and illuminated afterwards.'

Thus too he describes the remembrance of our child-
hood : —

' Such are the feelings with which men look back on their
childhood, when any accident brings it vividly before them.
Some reHc or token of that early time, some spot, or some
book, or a word, or a scent, or a sound, brings them back in
memory to the first years of their discipleship, and they then
see, what they could not know at the time, that God's presence
went up with them and gave them rest. Nay, even now perhaps,
they are unable to discern fully what it was which made them so
bright and glorious. They are full of tender, affectionate thoughts
towards those first years, but they do not know why. They
think it is those very years which they yearn after, whereas it
is the presence of God which, as they now see, was then over
them, which attracts them. They think that they regret the
past, when they are but longing after the future. It is not that
they would be children again, but that they would be Angels
and would see God ; they would be immortal beings, crowned

454 PROSE POETS. [XV.

with amaranth, and with pahns in their hands, before His
Throne.'

There is one thing which makes a difficulty in quoting
the passages in Dr. Newman's writings which are most
touching and most truly poetical. They do not come
in at all as ' purpurei panni ' — as pieces of ornamental
patchwork in the midst of his religious teaching, intro-
duced for rhetorical effect. They are interwoven with
his religious thought, are indeed essential parts of
it, so that you cannot isolate without destroying them.
And to quote here for the purpose of literary illustration,
what were meant for a more earnest purpose, would
seem to be out of place, if not irreverent. But there
are touching passages of another kind, which are cha-
racteristic of Dr. Newman's writings and give them
a peculiar charm. They are those which yield mo-
mentary glimpses of a very tender heart that has a
burden of its own, unrevealed to man. Nothing could
be more alien to Dr. Newman's whole nature, than
to withdraw the veil, and indulge in those public ex-
hibitions of himself, which are now-a-days so common,
and so offensive. It is but a mere indirect hint he gives
— a few indirect words, dropped as it were unawares,
which many might read without notice, but which
rightly understood, seem breathed from some very in-
ward experience. It is, as I have heard it described,
as though he suddenly opened a book, and gave you a
glimpse for a moment of wonderful secrets, and then

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 455

as quickly closed it. But the glance you have had, the
words you have caught, haunt you ever after with an
interest in him who uttered them, which is indescrib-
able. The words, though in prose, become, what all high
poetry is said to be, at once a revelation and a veil.

Such a glimpse into hidden things seems given in
a passage in the sermon on ' a Particular Providence.'

* How gracious is the revelation of God's particular providence
.... to those who have discovered that this world is but vanity,
and who are solitary and isolated in themselves, whatever shadows
of power and happiness surround them. The multitude, indeed,
go on without these thoughts, either from insensibility, as not
understanding their own wants, or changing from one idol to
another, as each successively fails. But men of keener hearts
would be overpowered by despondency, and would even loathe
existence, did they suppose themselves under the mere operation
of fixed laws, powerless to excite the pity or the attention of Him
who has appointed them. What should they do especially, who
are cast among persons unable to enter into their feelings, and
thus strangers to them, though by long custom ever so much
friends ! or have perplexities of mind they cannot explain to them-
selves, much less remove them, and no one to help them, — or
have affections and aspirations pent up within them, because they
have not met with objects to which to devote them, — or are
misunderstood by those around them, and find they have no
words to set themselves right with them, or no principles in
common by way of appeal, — or seem to themselves to be without
place or purpose in the world, or to be in the way of others, — or
have to follow their own sense of duty without advisers or sup-
porters, nay, to resist the wishes and solicitations of superiors
or relatives, — or have the burden of some painful secret, or of
some incommunicable solitary grief ! '

And then follows a passage showing with wonderful

456 PROSE POETS. [XV.

tenderness what this particular providence really is to
each individual soul, how close, how sympathising, how
consoling ! but it is almost too sacred to quote here.

I have heard a very thoughtful man say that he knew
many passages of these sermons ofT by heart, and that
he found himself repeating them to himself, for comfort
and strengthening, more often than any poetry he knew.
Just such a passage is the sequel to that which I have
last quoted.

I am, as I have said, unwilling to intrude here upon
what is distinctly religious in Dr. Newman's teaching.
But I feel it necessary to do so, in some measure, to
show the intimacy of his heart-knowledge, the inwardness,
which is the special character of his thought. Unless
this is seen, we do not understand him. Therefore
I venture to give these words of his : —

' We do not know, perhaps, what or where our pain is ; we
are so used to it that we do not call it pain. Still, so it is ; we
need a relief to our hearts, that they may be dark and sullen no
longer, or that they may not go on feeding upon themselves ; we
need to escape from ourselves to something beyond ; and much
as we may wish it otherwise, and may try to make idols to our-
selves, nothing short of God's presence is our true refuge. Every-
thing else is either a mockery, or but an expedient useful for its

season and in its measure Created natures cannot open

us, or elicit the ten thousand mental senses which belong to us,

and through which we really live The contemplation of

God, and nothing but it, is able fully to open and relieve the

mind, to unlock, occupy, and fix our affections Life passes,

riches fly away, popularity is fickle, the senses decay, the world
changes, friends die. One alone is constant : One alone is true

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 457

to us ; One alone can be true ; One alone can be all things to
us ; One alone can supply our needs ; One alone can train us up
to our full perfection ; One alone can give a meaning to our com-
plex and intricate nature ; One alone can give us tune and har-
mony ; One alone can form and possess us. Are we allowed to
put ourselves under His guidance? this surely is the only question.'

Let me quote but one passage more of a like nature
to the foregoing one. It is from the sermon ' Warfare
the condition of Victory.' The writer has been showing
that, in some way or other, trial, suffering, is the path
to peace ; that this has been the experience common to
all Christians, and that the law remains unaltered.

' The whole Church,' he says, ' all elect souls, each in its turn
is called to this necessary work. Once it was the turn of others,
and now it is our turn. Once it was the Apostles' turn. It was

St. Paul's turn once And after him, the excellent of the

earth, the white-robed army of Martyrs, and the cheerful company
of Confessors, each in his turn, each in his day, likewise played
the man. And so down to our time, when faith has wellnigh
failed, first one and then another have been called out to exhibit
before the great King. It is as though all of us were allowed to
stand around His Throne at once, and He called on first this man,
and then that, to take up the chant by himself, each in his turn
having to repeat the melody which his brethren have before gone
through. Or as if we held a solemn dance to His honour in the
courts of heaven, and each had by himself to perform some one
and the same solemn and graceful movement, at a signal given.
Or as if it were some trial of strength, or of agility, and, while the
ring of bystanders beheld, and applauded, we in succession, one
by one, were actors in the pageant. Such is our state ; — Angels
are looking on, Christ has gone before, — Christ has given us an
example, that we may follow His steps. Now it is our turn ; and
all ministering spirits keep silence and look on. O let not your

458 PROSE POETS. [XV.

foot slip, or your eye be false, or your ear dull, or your attention
flagging ! Be not dispirited ; be not afraid ; keep a good heart ;
be bold ; draw not back ; — you will be carried through.'

Observe here one very rare gift which Cardinal New-
man has ; he can in the midst of his most solemn and
sacred thoughts introduce the homeliest illustrations, the
most familiar images, and they produce no jar — you
feel that all is in keeping. Who but he, speaking of
man's earthly trial, could, without offence, have described
it as a solemn dance held in the courts of heaven, in
which each has in his turn to perform some difficult and
graceful movement at a signal given ? But here it is
done with so delicate a touch, that you feel it to be
quite appropriate.

In the same way, when speaking of St. John as having
outlived all his friends, and having had to ' experience
the dreariness of being solitary,' he says : —

*He had to live in his own thoughts, without familiar friend,
with those only about him who belonged to a younger generation.
Of him were demanded by his gracious Lord, as pledge of his
faith, all his eye loved and his heart held converse with. He was
as a man moving his goods into a far country, who at intervals
and by portions sends them before him, till his present abode is
wellnigh unfurnished.'

He compares St. John in his old age to a man who is
' flitting ' from his house, and has sent his furniture by in-
stalments before him. Imagine how such a comparison
would have fared in the hands of any ordinary writer — of
any one, in short, not possessed of most consummate taste

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 459

I might go on for a day quoting from the Parochial
Sermons alone passages in which the poet as well as
the preacher speaks. I shall however give but one
more. It is where he speaks of what is to be the
Christian life's ultimate issue.

'All God's providences, all God's dealings with us, all His
judgments, mercies, warnings, deliverances, tend to peace and
repose as their ultimate issue. All our troubles and pleasures
here, all our anxieties, fears, doubts, difficulties, hopes, encourage-
ments, afflictions, losses, attainments, tend this one way. After
Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, comes Trinity Sunday and
the weeks that follow ; and in like manner, after our soul's anxious
travail ; after the birth of the Spirit ; after trial and temptation ;
after sorrow and pain ; after daily dyings to the world ; after daily
risings unto holiness ; at length comes that "rest which remaineth
unto the people of God." After the fever of life ; after wearinesses
and sicknesses ; fightings and despondings ; languor and fretful-
ness ; struggling and failing, struggling and succeeding ; after all
the changes and chances of this troubled and unhealthy state, at
length comes death, at length the White Throne of God, at length
the Beatific Vision. After restlessness comes rest, peace, joy ;
our eternal portion, if we be worthy.'

I know not how this and other passages I have quoted
may strike those to whom they have not been long
familiar. To me it seems, they have a sweetness, an
inner melody, which few other words have. They fall
upon the heart like dew, and soothe it, as only the most
exquisite music can. It may be that to the few who
can still recall the tones of the voice which first uttered
them, remembrance lends them a charm, which those
cannot feel who only read them. These sermons were

460 PROSE POETS. [XV.

the first utterance of new thoughts in a new language,
which have long since passed into the deeper heart of
England. The presence and personality of the speaker,
and the clear pathetic tones of his voice, can only live
in the memory of those who heard him in St. Mary's,
forty years ago. But the thoughts, and the style in
which they are conveyed, are so perfect that they pre-
serve for future generations more of the man who spoke
them than most discourses can. It is hardly too much
to say that they have elevated the thought and purified
the style of every able Oxford man who has written
since, even of those who had least sympathy with the
sentiments they express. But they, whose good fortune
it was to hear them when they were first delivered,
know that nothing they have heard in the long interval
can compare with the pensive grace, the thrilling pathos
of the sounds, as they then fell fresh from the lips of
the great teacher.

I have on purpose confined myself to the Parochial
Sermons, though from many other parts of Cardinal
Newman's works I might have adduced samples of the
poetry that lies embedded in his prose. And the reason
is this : — these sermons seem more than any of his other
writings to be full of his individuality, and to utter his
inner feelings in the best language.

From his more recent discourses, preached to mixed
congregations, one might have taken many samples,
in which he paints with a broader brush, and lets himself

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 461

loose in more sweeping periods, than he generally used
in Oxford. But these, though high eloquence, do not
seem to contain such true poetry as the earlier sermons.
Yet therer'is one passage in the University Sermons well
known (probably tO many here, which I cannot close
with^tit referring/ to. He is speaking of music as an
outward and earthly economy, under which great wonders
unknown are typified. ■>

* There are seven notes in the scale,' he says ; ' make them
fourteen ; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise !
What science brings so much out of so little ? Out of what poor
elements does some great Master in it create his new world !
Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day,
without reality, without meaning ? We may do so ; and then,
perhaps, we shall account the science of theology to be a matter
of words ; yet, as there is a divinity in the theology of the Church,
which those who feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the
wonderful creation of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking.
To many men the very names which the science employs are
utterly incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems
to be fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views it opens upon us to
be childish extravagance ; yet is it possible that that inexhaustible
evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intri-
cate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere
sound, which is gone and perishes ? Can it be that those myste-
rious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings
after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not
whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and
comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself.'' It is not so, it
cannot be. No ; they have escaped from some higher sphere ;
they are the outpouring of eternal harmony in the medium of
created sound ; they are echoes from our Home, they are the voice

46il PROSE POETS. [xv.

of angels, or the Magnificat of saints, or the living laws of Divine
Governance, or the Divine Attributes ; something are they besides
themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter ; —
though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished
above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them.'

These extracts may, perhaps, be fittingly closed with
that passionate yet tender lament in which, in the
autumn of 1843, he bade farewell to Oxford and to the
Church of England.

' O mother of saints ! O school of the wise ! O nurse of the
heroic ! of whom went forth, in whom have dwelt, memorable
names of old, to spread the truth abroad, or to cherish and illus-
trate it at home! O thou, from whom surrounding nations lit
their lamps ! O virgin of Israel ! wherefore dost thou now sit
on the ground and keep silence, like one of the foolish women,
who were without oil on the coming of the Bridegroom ? . . . How
is it, O once holy place, that " the land mourneth, for the corn is
wasted, the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth, because joy
is withered away from the sons of men " ? . . . O my mother, whence
is this unto thee, that thou hast good things poured upon thee and
canst not keep them, and bearest children, yet darest not own
them? why hast thou not the skill to use their services, nor the
heart to rejoice in their love ? how is it that whatever is generous
in purpose, and tender or deep in devotion, thy flower and thy
promise, falls from thy bosom and finds no home within thine
arms ? Who hath put this note upon thee, to have " a miscarrying
womb and dry breasts," to be strange to thine own flesh, and thine
eye cruel towards thy little ones ? Thine own offspring, the fruit
of thy womb, who love thee and would fain toil for thee, thou dost
gaze upon with fear, as though a portent, or thou dost loath as
an offence ; — at best thou dost but endure, as if they had no
claim but on thy patience, self-possession, and vigilance, to be
rid of them as easily as thou mayest. Thou makest them
" stand all the day idle," as the very condition of thy bearing with

XV.] CARDINAL NEWMAN. 463

them ; or thou biddest them to be gone, where they will be more
welcome ; or thou sellest them for nought to the stranger that
passes by. And what wilt thou do in the end thereof ? '

One thing must have struck most persons, — always the
pensiveness, often the sadness of tone which pervades
these extracts ; and this impression would not be lessened
by a perusal of the sermons in full. It is so. The view
of life taken by Dr. Newman is more than grave, it is
a sad, sometimes almost a heartbroken one.

Canon Liddon has somewhere asked, ' How is a man
likely to look upon his existence ? Is existence a happi-
ness or a misery, a blessing or a curse ? ' And he replies,
' This question will, probably, be answered in accordance
with deep-rooted tendencies of individual temperament ;
but these tendencies, when prolonged and emphasised,
become systems of doctrine — as we call them, philo-
sophies. And so it is that there are two main ways of
looking at human life and its surrounding liabilities,
which are called optimism and pessimism.' There is
a whole order of minds, and these sometimes the most
thoughtful and deep, on whom the sad side of things,
the dark enigmas of existence, weigh so heavily, that the
brighter side seems as though it were not. Those
especially who enter on life with a high ideal, whether
a merely aesthetic, or a moral and spiritual ideal, get it
sorely tried by their intercourse with the world. All
they see and meet with in actual experience so contra-
dicts the high vision they once had. And with the

464 PROSE POETS. [XV.

increase of their experience, they are often tempted to
despair. One thing only can save them from this tempt-
ation— the entrance into their hearts of the consoling
light that comes from above. In Carlyle this tendency
to despair of the world was strongly present from the
first, and being in his case unrelieved by the light of
Christianity, his view of life darkened more and more
as years went on. The view which Dr. Newman takes
of the natural condition and destiny of man, though
modified by his gentler disposition, is hardly at all more
hopeful. Those who remember the words in which he
gives his impression of this world and the children of
it, towards the close of his Apologia, will acknowledge
this. Nothing can exceed the hopelessness of the
picture he there draws. One cannot but hope that it
is too dark and desponding a picture. But between
the two men there is this great difference : — however
dark and despondent may be Dr. Newman's view of
man when left to himself, he is supported and cheered
by the faith that he has not been left to himself, that
there has entered into human nature a new and divine
power, to counterwork its downward tendency, and
reinvigorate its decayed energies. Amid the deepest de-
spair of nature, he is still animated by this heavenward
hope. Beneath all the discords and distractions of this
perplexing world, he overhears a divine undertone, and,
hearing it^ he can wait and be at peace.

THE END.