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• • •T> • 9 • •
MATTHEW ARNOLD
From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery
(By permission of Mr. Frederick Hollyer)
OXFORD EDITION
« ESSAYS' BY f)U
MATTHEW ARNOLD
INCLUDING
ESSAYS IN CRITICISM, 1865
ON TRANSLATING HOMER
(WITH F. W. NEWMAN'S REPLY)
AND FIVE OTHER ESSAYS
NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME COLLECTED
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW
NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY
1914
H<^''>
f";^
OXFORD : HORACE HART
PRLNTEIi TO THE UKiVERSlTr
• ••»,•#; :
V ! •• • • «
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CONTENTS /^//
ESSAYS IN CRITICISM, 1865 P^furJ
{Here reprinted from the Secoiid Edition of 1869)
PAGE
Preface .......... 3
The Function of Criticism: at the Present Time . , 9 ~ —
The Literary Influence of Academies . . . .37 —
^Maurice de GuiRm ....... 64
Eugenie de Gu^rin ....... 92
•^EiNRiCH Heine 116
Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment . . .143
JOUBBRT .......... 163
Spinoza and the Bible . . . . . . . 192
v^Iarcus Aurelius . . . . . . . .217
ON TRANSLATING HOMER, 1861-2
Lecture I ........ . 245
Lecture II 264
Lecture III 287
Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice. A Reply
TO Matthew Arnold by Francis W. Newman, 1861 . 313
Last Words. A Lecture given at Oxford by IVIatthew
Arnold, 1862 -377
FIVE ESSAYS HITHERTO UNCOLLECTED
Dr. Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church . . 427
Dante and Beatrice 445
On the Modern Element in Literature .... 454- .
Obermann 473 ^v^.
Sainte-Beuve 482
ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
1865
[Reprinted from Second Edition, 1869]
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
(1869)
Several of the Essays which are here collected and
reprinted had the good or the bad fortune to be much
criticised at the time of their first appearance. I am not
now going to inflict upon the reader a reply to those
criticisms ; for one or two explanations which are desir-
able, I shall elsewhere, perhaps, be able some day to find
an opportunity ; but, indeed, it is not in my nature, — some
of my critics would rather say, not in my power, — to dispute
on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately.
To try and approach truth on one, side after another;
not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on
any one side, with violence and self-will, — it is only thus,
it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision
of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except
in outline, but only thus even in outline. He who will do
nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own^
one, favourite, particular hne, is inevitably destined to
run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she
is wrapped.
So it is not to reply to my critics that I write this preface,
but to prevent a misunderstanding, of which certain
phrases that some of them use make me apprehensive.
Mr. Wright, one of the many translators of Homer, has
published a Letter to the Dean of Canterbury, complaining
of some remarks of mine, uttered now a long while ago,
on his version of the Iliad. One cannot be always studying
one's own works, and I was really under the impression,
B 2
4 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
till I saw Mr. Wright's complaint, that I had spoken of him
with all respect. The reader may judge of my astonish-
ment, therefore, at finding, from Mr. Wright's pamphlet,
that I had * declared with much solemnity that there is not
any proper reason for his existing.' That I never said ;
but, on looking back at my Lectures on translating Homer,
I find that I did say, not that Mr. Wright^ but that
Mr. Wright's version of the Iliad, repeating in the main the
merits and defects of Cowper's version, as Mr. Sotheby's
repeated those of Pope's version, had, if I might be par-
doned for saying so, no proper reason for existing. Else-
where I expressly spoke of the merit of his version ; but
I confess that the phrase, qualified as I have shown, about
its want of a proper reason for existing, I used. Well, the
phrase had, perhaps, too much vivacity ; we have all of
us a right to exist, we and our works ; an unpopular
author should be the last person to call in question this
right. So I gladly withdraw the offending phrase, and
I am sorry for having used it ; Mr. Wright, however,
would perhaps be more indulgent to my vivacity, if he
considered that we are none of us likely to be lively much
r^onger. My vivacity is but the last sparkle of flame before
/ we are all in the dark, the last glimpse of colour before we
\ all go into drab, — the drab of the earnest, prosaic, practical,
\^^§^sterely literal future. Yes, the world will soon be the
Philistines' ! and then, with every voice, not of thunder,
silenced, and the whole earth filled and ennobled every
morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of
the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another's
faces with the dismallest, the mast unimpeachable gravity.
But I return to my design in writing this Preface.
That design was, after apologising to Mr. Wright for my
vivacity of five years ago, to beg him and others to let
me bear my own burdens, without saddling the great and
PREFACE 5
famous University, to which 1 have the honour to belong,
with any portion of them. What I mean to deprecate
is such phrases as, ' his professorial assault,' ' his assertions
issued tx cathedra,' ' the sanction of his name as the repre-
sentative of poetry,' and so on. Proud as I am of my
connection with the University of Oxford,^ I can truly say,
that knowing how unpopular a task one is undertaking
when one tries to pull out a few more stops in that powerful
but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modem
Englishman, I have always sought to stand by myself,
and to compromise others as Uttle as possible. Besides
this, my native modesty is such, that I have always been
shy of assuming the honourable style of Professor, because
this is a title I share with so many distinguished men, —
Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel,
and others, — who adorn it, I feel, much more than I do. '
However, it is not merely out of modesty that I prefer
to stand alone, and to concentrate on myself, as a plain
citizen of the repubUc of letters, and not as an office-
bearer in a hierarchy, the whole responsibility for all
I write ; it is much more out of genuine devotion to the
University of Oxford, for which I feel, and always must
feci, the fondest, the most reverential attachment. In an
epoch of dissolution and transformation, such as that on
which we are now entered, habits, ties, and associations
are inevitably broken up, the action of individuals becomes
more distinct, the shortcomings, errors, heats, disputes,
which necessarily attend individual action, are brought
into greater prominence. Who would not gladly keep
clear, from all these passing clouds, an august institution
which was there before they arose, and which will be there
when they have blown over ?
^ When the above was written the author still had the Chair of
Poetry at Oxford, which he has since vacated.
6 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
It is true, the Saturday Review maintains that our epoch
of transformation is finished ; that we have found our
philosophy ; that the British nation has searched all
C anchorages for the spirit, and has finally anchored itself,
in the fulness of perfected knowledge, on Benthamism.
This idea at first made a great impression on me ; not only
because it is so consoling in itself, but also because it
explained a phenomenon which in the summer of last
year had, I confess, a good deal troubled me. At that
time my avocations led me to travel almost daily on one
of the Great Eastern Lines, — the Woodford Branch.
Every one knows that the murderer, Miiller, perpetrated
his detestable act on the North London Railway, close
by. The English middle class, of which I am myself
a feeble unit, travel on the Woodford Branch in large
numbers. Well, the demoralisation of our class, — the
class which (the newspapers are constantly saying it, so
I may repeat it without vanity) has done all the great
things which have ever been done in England, — the
demoralisation, I say, of our class, caused by the Bow
tragedy, was something bewildering. Myself a transcen-
dentalist (as the Saturday Review knows), I escaped the
infection ; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated
fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my
transcendentalism would naturally suggest to me. I re-
minded them how Caesar refused to take precautions
against assassination, because life was not worth having
at the price of an ignoble solicitude for it. I reminded
them what insignificant atoms we all are in the Hfe of the
world. ' Suppose the worst to happen,' I said, addressing
a portly jeweller from Cheapside ; ' suppose even yourself
to be the victim ; il n'y a pas d'homme nicessaire. We
should miss you for a day or two upon the Woodford
Branch ; but the great mundane movement would still go
PREFACE 7
on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled,
dividends would still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would
still run, there would still be the old crush at the comer of
Fenchurch Street.' All was of no avail. Nothing could
moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class,
their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging
to life. At the moment I thought this over-concern a little
imworthy ; but the Saturday Review suggests a touching
explanation of it. What I took for the ignoble cUnging
to life of a comfortable worldling, was, perhaps, only the
ardent longing of a faithful Benthamite, traversing an age
still dimmed by the last mists of transcendentahsm, to be
spared long enough to see his religion in the full and final
blaze of its triumph. This respectable man, whom I
imagined to be going up to London to serve his shop,
or to buy shares, or to attend an Exeter Hall meeting,
or to assist at the deliberations of the Marylebone Vestry,
was, perhaps, in real truth, on a pious pilgrimage, to
obtain from Mr. Bentham's executors a sacred bone of his
great, dissected master.
And yet, after all, I cannot but think that the Saturday
Review has here, for once, fallen a victim to an idea, — •
a beautiful but deluding idea, — and that the British nation
has not yet, so entirely as the reviewer seems to imagine,
found the last word of its philosophy. No, we are all
seekers still ! seekers often make mistakes, and I wish
mine to redound to my own discredit only, and not to
touch Oxford. Beautiful city ! so venerable, so lovely,
BO unravaged by the fierce intellectual Ufe of our century
so serene !
* There are our young barbarians all at play I *
And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her
gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers
8 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny
that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us
nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to per-
fection,— to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen
from another side ? — ^nearer, perhaps, than all the science
of Tiibingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been
so romantic ! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given
thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to
the PhiUstines 1 home of lost causes, and forsaken beUefs,
and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties ! what
example could ever so inspire us to keep down the PhiUstine
in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that
bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which
Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller,
makes it his friend's highest praise (and nobly did Schiller
deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind
him ; — the bondage of ' loas uns alle bdndigt, i^as gemeine!^
She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn
upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son ; for
she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all,
hers. Apparitions of a day, what is om* puny warfare
against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which
this queen of romance has been waging against them for
centuries, and will wage after we are gono 1
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT
THE PRESENT TIME
Many objections have been made to a proposition which,
in some remarks of mine on translating Homer, I ventm:ed
to put forth ; a proposition about criticism, and its impor-
tance at the present day. I said : ' Of the Uterature of
France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in
general, the main effort, for now many years, has been
a critical effort t the endeavour, in all branches of know- \
ledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to_see tV
the object as m itself it really isj, I added, that owing /
io to the operation in English literature of certain causes,
' almost the last thing for which one would come to English
literature is just that very thing which now Europe most
desires, — criticism ; ' and that the power and value of
Enghsh literature was thereby impaired. More than one
rejomder declared that the importance I here assigned to
criticism was excessive, and asserted the inherent superiority
of the creative effort of the human spirit over its critical
effort. And the other day, having been led by an
excellent notice of Wordsworth ^ pubhshed in the North
20 British Review, to turn again to his biography, I found,
in the words of this great man, whom I, for one, must
always listen to with the profoundest respect, a sentence
passed on the critic's business, which seems to justify
^ I cannot help thinking that a practice, common in England during
the last century, and still followed in France, of printing a notice of this
kind, — a notice by a competent critic, — to serve aa an introduction to
an eminent author's works, might be revived among us with advantage.
To introduce all succeeding editions of Wordsworth, Mr. Shairp's notice
(it is permitted, I hope, to mention his name) might, it seems to me,
excellently serve ; it is written from the point of view of an admirer,
nay, of a disciple, and that is right ; but then the disciple must be also,
as in this case he is, a critic, a man of letters, not, as too Often happens,
some relation or friend with no qualification for his task except affection
for his author.
10 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
every possible disparagement of it. Wordsworth says in
one of his letters : —
' The writers in these publications ' (the Reviews),
' while they prosecute their inglorious employment, can
not be supposed to be in a state of mind very favourable
for being affected by the finer influences of a thing so pure
as genuine poetry.'
And a trustworthy reporter of his conversation quotes
a more elaborate judgment to the same effect : —
1/^ ' Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely i
lower than the inventive ; and he said to-day that if the
quantity of time consumed in writing critiques on the
works of others were given to original composition, of
whatever kind it might be, it would be much better em-
ployed ; it would make a man find out sooner his own
level, and it would do infinitely less mischief. A false or
fmaUcious criticism may do much injury to the minds of
others ; a stupid invention, either in prose or verse, is
' quite harmless.'
It is almost too much to expect of poor human nature, 2
that a man capable of producing some effect in one line of
literature, should, for the greater good of society, volun-
tarily doom himself to impotence and obscurity in another.
Still less is this to be expected from men addicted to the
composition of the ' false or mahcious criticism,' of which
Wordsworth speaks. However, everybody would admit
that a false or mahcious criticism had better never have
been written. Evcrybodj^ too, would be willing to admit,
I as a general proposition, that the critical faculty is lower
than the inventive. But is it true that criticism is really, a
in itself, a baneful and injurious employment ; is it true
that all time given to writing critiques on the works of
others would be much better employed if it were given to
original composition, of whatever kind this may be ? Is
it true that Johnson had better have gone on producing
more Irenes mstead of writing his Lives of the Poets ; nay,
is it certain that Wordsworth himself was better employed
in making his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, than when he made
his celebrated Preface, so full of criticism, and criticism
of the works of others ? Wordsworth was himself a great 4
critic, and it is to be sincerely regretted that he has not
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 11
left us more criticism ; Groethe was one of the greatest of
critics, and we may sincerely congratulate ourselves that
he has left us so much criticism. Without wasting time
over the exaggeration which Wordsworth's judgment on
criticism clearly contains, or over an attempt to trace
the causes, — not difficult I think to be traced, — which may
have led Wordsworth to this exaggeration, a critic may
with advantage seize an occasion for trying his own con-
science, and for asking himself of what real service, at any
10 given moment, the practice of criticism either is, or may
be made, to his own mind and spirit, and to the minds and
spirits of others.
The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. '
True ; but in assenting to this proposition, one or two
things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable that the
exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, •
is the true fimction of man ; it is proved to be so by man's
finding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable,
also, that men may have the sense of exercising this free ^
20 creative activity in other ways than in producing great '
works of literature or art ; if it were not so, all but a very
few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all »
men ; they may have it in well-doing, they may have I
it in learning, they may have it even in criticising. This
is one thing to be kept in mind. Another is, that the
exercise of the creative power in the production of great
works of Uterature or art, however high this exercise of it,^
may rank, is not at all epochs and under all conditions^
possible ; and that therefore labour may be vainly spent
30 in attempting it, which might with more fruit be used
preparing for it, in rendering it possible. This creative
power works with elements, with materials ; what if it
has not those materials, those elements, ready for its use ?
In that case it must surely wait till they are ready. Now
in hterature, — I will Umit myself to literature, for it is
about Hterature that the question arises, — the elements with
which the creative power works are jdeas ; the best ideas,
on every matter which Hterature touches, current at the
time ; at any rate we may lay it down as certain that in
40 modem Hterature no manifestation of the creative power
not working with these can be very important or fruitful.
12 • ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
And I say current at the time, not merely accessible at
the time ; for creative literary genius does not principally
show itself in discovering new ideas ; that is rather the
business of the philosopher : ftEe grand work of literary v
genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis
and discovery > its gift lies in the faculty of being happily
inspired "By a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere,
by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them ;
of deahng divinely with these ideas, presenting them in
the most effective and attractive combinations, — making lo
beautiful works with them, in short. But it must have
the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of
ideas, in order to work freely ; and these it is not so easy
to command. This is why great creative epochs in litera-
ture are so rare; this is why there is so much that is
unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of real
genius ; because for the creation of a master-work of
literature two powers must concur, the power of the man
and the power of the moment, and the maiTisTiot enough
without the moment ; T5e^ creative power has, for its 20
happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements
are not in its own control.
Nay, they are more within the control of the critical
power. It is the business of the critical power, as I said
in the words already quoted, ' in all branches of know-
ledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see
the object as in itself it really is.'yC Thus it tends, at last,
to make an intellectual situation of which the creative
power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an
order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by com- 30
parison with that which it displaces ; to make the best
ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society,
the touch of truth is the touch of fife, and there is a stir
and growth everywhere ; out of this stir and growth come
the creative epochs of literature.
Or, to narrow our range, and quit these considerations of
the general march of genius and of society, considerations
which are apt to become too abstract and impalpable,—
every one can see that a p^et, for instance, ought to know [
life and the world before dealing with them^ in poetry ; fo
and fife and the world being, in modern times, very com- i
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 13
plex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth
much, implies a great critical effort behind it ; else it
must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short-Uved
affair. This is why Byron's poetry had so little endurance
in it, and Goethe's so much ; both Byron and Goethe
had a great productive power, but Goethe's was nourished -^
by a great critical effort providing the true materials for
it, and Byron's was not ; Goethe knew life and the world,
the poet's necessary subjects, much more comprehen-
10 sively and thoroughly than Byron. He knew a great
deal more of them, and he knew them much more as they
really are.
It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative
activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this
century, had about it, in fact, something premature ; and \
that from this cause its productions are doomed, most of \
them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied
and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting
than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And
20 this prematureness comes from its having proceeded with-
out having its proper data, without sufficient materials to
work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first
quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of
creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron
so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth
even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness
and variety. Wordsworth cared little for books, and
disparaged Goethe. I admire Wordsworth, as he is, so
much that I cannot wish him different ; and it is vain,
30 no doubt, to imagine such a man different from what he
is, to suppose that he could have been different ; but
surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even
greater poet than he is, — his thought richer, and his in-
fluence of wider application, — was that he should have read
more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe
whom he disparaged without reading him.
But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to
a misunderstanding here. It was not really books and
reading that lacked to our poetry, at this epoch ; Shelley
40 had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense reading.
Pindar and Sophocles — as we all say so glibly, and often
14 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
with so little discernment of the real import of what we
are saying — had not many books ; Shakspeare was no
y deep reader. True ; but in the Greece of Pindar and
. 'y^l Sophocles, in the England of Shakspeare, the poet lived
• ^ ^ in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and
jT A /nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the
' %L<^ fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelUgent
i^ y r ^nd alive ; and this state of things is the true basis for
^ I the creative power's exercise, — in this it finds its data, its
i materials, truly ready for its hand ; all the books and lo
j reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps
to this. Even when this does not actually exist, books
and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of
semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge
and intelligence in which he may live and work : this is
by no means an equivalent, to the artist, for the nationally
diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or
Shakspeare, but, besides that it may be a means of pre-
paration for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many
share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of 20
great value. Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning
and the long and widely-combined critical effort of Germany
formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked. There was
-I no national glow of life and thought there, as in the Athens
of *Pericles, or the England of EHzabeth. That was the
poet's weakness. But there was a sort of equivalent for
it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large
body of Germans. That was his strength, j In the England
of the first quarter of this century, there was neither
a national glow of life and thought, such as we had in the 3o
age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a force of learning
and criticism, such as were to be found in Germany./
Therefore the creative power of poetry wanted, for success
in the highest sense, materials and a basis ; a thorough
y interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it.
' At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense ^
stir of the French Revolution and its age should not have
come a crop of works of genius equal to that which came
out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or
out of that of the Renaissance, with its powerful episode 4o
the Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 15
French Revolution took a character which essentially
distinguished it from such movements as these. These
were, in the main, disinterestedly intellectual and spiritual
movements ; movements in which the human spirit looked
for its satisfaction in itself and in the increased play of its
own activity : the French Revolution took a political, 7^
practical character. The movement which went on inv
France under the old regime, from 1700 to 1789, was far
more really akin than that of the Revolution itself to the
10 movement of the Renaissance ; the France of Voltaire
and Rousseau told far more powerfully upon the mind of
Europe than the France of the Revolution. Goethe
reproached this last expressly with having ' thrown quiet,
culture back.' Nay, and the true key to how much in our/
Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this ! — ^that they had
their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great
movement of mind. The French Revolution, howe^^r, —
that object of so much blind love a^d so much blind
hatred, — found undoubtedly its motive-power in the
20 mtelligence of men and not in their practical sense ; — this
is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of
-Charles the First's time ; this is what makes it a more
spiritual event than our Revolution, an event of much more
powerful and world-wide interest, though practically less
successful ; — it appeals to an order of ideas which are
universal, certain, permanent. 178i9 asked of a thing, Is it
rational ? 1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal ? or, when it
went furthest, Is it according to conscience ? This is the
English fashion ; a fashion to be treated, within its own
30 sphere, with the highest respect ; for its success, within its
own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in one
• place, is not law in another ; what is law here to-day,
is not law even here to-morrow ; and as for conscience,
what is binding on one man's conscience is not binding
on another's ; the old woman who threw her stool at the
head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's Church at
Edinburgh obeyed an impulse to which millions of the_
human race may be permitted to remain strangers. But )
the prescriptions of reason are absolute, unchanging, of /
40 universal validity ; to count by tens is the easiest way of j
counting, — that is a proposition of which every one, from--
16 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
here to the Antipodes, feels the force ; at least, I should
say so, if we did not live in a country where it is not im-
possible that any morning we may find a letter in the
Times declaring that a decimal coinage is an absurdity.
That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an
enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for
making its prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable
thing, when we consider how little of mind, or anjrthing so
worthy and quickening as mind, comes into the motives
which alone, in general, impel great masses of men. In n
spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm,
in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself,
the French Revolution derives from the force, truth, and
universaUty of the ideas which it took for its law, and
from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude
for these ideas, a unique and still living power ; it is — it
will probably long remain — the greatest, the most animating
event in history. And, as no sincere passion for the things
of the mind, even though it turn out in many respects an
unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite 2
barren of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit, the
natural and legitimate fruit, though not precisely the grand
fruit she expected ; she is the country in Europe where
the people is most aUve.
But the mania for giving an immediate political and
practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason
was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element : on this
theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the
habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal of truth,
^^deas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, 3(
cannot be too much lived with ; but to transport them
abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently
to revolutionise this world to their bidding, — that is quite
another thing. There is the world of ideas and there is
Klie world of practice ; the French are often for suppressing
the one and the English the other ; but neither is to be
suppressed. A member of the House of Commons said to
me the other day : ' That a thing is an anomaly, I consider
to be no objection to it whatever.' I venture to think he
was wrong ; that a thing is an anomaly is an objection i\
to it, but absolutely and in the sphere of ideas : it is not
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 17
necessarily, under such and such circumstances, or at such
and such a moment, an objection to it in the sphere of
pohtics and practice. Joubert has said beautifully :
' C'est la force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans le
monde ; la force en attendant le droit.' (Force and right
are the governors of this world ; force till right is ready.) ^^
Force till right is ready ; and till right is ready, force, the /^
existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler.
But right is something moral, and implies inward recogni-
10 tion, free assent of the will ; we are not ready for right, —
right, so far as we are concerned, ia not ready, — until we have /^
attained this sense of seeing it and wilHng it. The way
in which for us it may change and transform force, the
existing order of things, and become, in its turn, the
legitimate ruler of the world, will depend on the way in
which, when our time comes, we see it and will it. There-
fore for other people enamoured of their own newly dis-
cerned right, to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and
violently to substitute their right for our force, is an act
20 of tyranny, and to be resisted. It sets at nought the * —
second great half of our maxim, force till right is ready.
This was the grand error of the French Revolution ; and
its movement of ideas, by quitting the intellectual sphere ^
and rushing furiously into the pohtical sphere, ran, indeed,
a prodigious and memorable course, but produced no such
intellectual fruit as the movement of ideas of the Renais-
sance, and created, in opposition to itself, what I may call
an epoch of concentration. The great force of that epoch ^^
of concentration was England ; and the great voice of that
30 epoch of concentration was Burks. It is the fashion to
treat Burke's writings on the l^rench Revolution as super-
annuated and conquered by the event ; as the eloquent
but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and prejudice.
I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the
violence and passion of the moment, and that in some
directions Burke's view was bounded, and his observation
therefore at fault ; but on the whole, and for those who can
make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these
writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical
40 truth ; they contain the true philosophy of an epoch of
concentration, dissipate the heavy atmosphere which its
ABNOU> n
18 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
own nature is apt to engender round it, and make its
resistance rational instead of mechanical.
But Burke is so great because, almost alone in England,
H^ he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates
politics with thought ; it is his accident that his ideas
were at the service of an epoch of concentration, not of
an epoch of expansion ; it is his characteristic that he so
lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up
within him, that he could float even an epoch of con-
centration and English Tory politics with them. It does i
not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were enraged
with him ; it does not even hurt him that George the Third
and the Tories v/ere enchanted with him. His greatness
is that he lived in a world which neither EngHsh Liberalism
nor English Tor3dsm is apt to enter ; — the world of ideas,
not the world of catchwords and party habits. So far is
it from being really true of him that he ' to party gave up
what was meant for mankind,' that at the very end of his
fierce struggle with the French Revolution, after all his
invectives against its false pretensions, hoUowness, and 2
madness, with his sincere conviction of its mischievousness,
he can close a memorandum on the best means of combat-
ing it, some of the last pages he ever wrote, — the Thoughts
on French Affairs, in December 1791, — with these striking
words : —
' The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The
remedy must be where power, wisdom, and information,
I hope, are more united with good intentions than they
can be with me. I have done with this subject, I believe,
for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for 3
the last two. years. // a great change is to be made in
human affairs, the minds of men will he fitted to it ; the
general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every
fear, every hope will forward it ; and then they who persist
in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear
rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere
designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but
perverse and obstinate.'
That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed
to me one of the finest things in English literature, or 4
indeed in any Hterature. That is what I call Uving by
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 19
ideas ; when oue side of a question has long had your
earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when
you hear all round you no language but one, when your
party talks this language like a steam-engine and can
imagine no other, — still to be able to think, still to be
irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought
to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to
be unable to speak anything but ivhat the Lord has put in
your mouth. I know nothing more striking, and I must
10 add that I know nothing more un-EngUsh.
For the Englishman in general is like my friend the
Member of ParUament, and believes, point-blank, that^
for a thmg to be an anomaly is absolutely no objection ^^-^^^^
to it whatever. He is like the Lord Auckland of Burkes
day, who, in a memorandum on the French Revolution,
talks of 'certain miscreants, assuming the name of philo-
sophers, who have presumed themselves capable of estab-
lishing a new system of society.' The Englishman has
been called a poUtical animal, and he values what is
20 political and practical so much that ideas easily become
objects of dislike in his eyes, and thinkers ' miscreants,*
because ideas and thinkers have rashly meddled with
politics and practice. This would be all very well if the
disUke and neglect confined themselves to ideas trans-
ported out of their own sphere, and meddUng rashly
with practice ; but they are inevitably extended to ideas
as such, and to the whole life of intelligence ; practice is
everything, a free play of the mind is nothing. The
notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being
80 a pleasure in itself, bemg an object of desire, being an
essential provider of elements without which a nation's
spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them,
must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into
an Enghshman's thoughts. It is noticeable that the word
curiosity, which in other languages is used m a good sense,
to mean, as a high and fine quality of man's nature, just
this disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all
subjects, for its own sake, — it is noticeable, I say, thaty
this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no ^
40 sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, /
real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quahty ; j^
0 2 ^
20 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
\it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best
(that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of
J practice, poUtics, and everything of the kind ; and to, value
•^ knowledge and thought asJhe^Mapproach this best, without
the intrusion of any other considerations whatever. This
is an instinct for which there is, I think, little original
sympathy in the practical English nature, and what there
was of it has undergone a long benumbing period of blight
and suppression in the epoch of concentration which
followed the French Revolution. ic
But epochs of concentration cannot well endure for ever ;
>- epochs of expansion, in the due course of things, follow
them. Such an epoch of expansion seems to be opening
in this country. In the first place all danger of a hostile
forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long
disappeared ; like the traveller in the fable, therefore, we
begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with
a long peace, the ideas of Europe steal gradually and
amicably in, and mingle, though in infinitesimally small
r quantities at a time, with our own notions. Then, too, 2c
in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutal-
ising influence of our passionate material progress, it seems
to me indisputable that this progress is likely, though not
certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual
life ; and that man, after he has made himself perfectly
comfortable and has now to determine what to do with
himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind,
^nd that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure,
grant it is mainly the privilege of faith, at present, to
discern this end to our railways, our business, and our so
fortune -making ; but we shall see if, here as elsewhere,
faith is not in the end the true prophet. Our ease, our
travelling, and our unbounded liberty to hold just as hard
and securely as we please to the practice to which our
notions have given birth, all tend to beget an incUnation
to deal a little more freely with these notions themselves,
to canvass them a little, to penetrate a little into their
real nature. Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign sense
\ of the word, appear amongst us, and it is in these that
^r criticism must look to find its account. Criticism first ; 40
a time of true creative activity, perhaps, — which, as I have
Vai
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 21
said, must inevitably be preceded amongst us by a time of
criticism, — hereafter, when criticism has done its work.
It is of the last importance that English criticism should
clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail
itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for ,
the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed upx/ j
in one word, — disinterestedness. And how is criticism toJy \
show disinterestedness f^y keeping aloof from practice; / /
by resolutely following the law of Its" own nature, which is'~ .
10 to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it
touches ; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those
ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas which
plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which
perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this
country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite
sufficiently, but which criticism has really nothing to do
with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the
best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its
turn .making this known, to create a current of true and
20 fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty,
with due ability ; but its business is to do no more, and to
leave alone all questions of practical consequences and
applications, questions which will never fail to have due
prominence given to them. Else criticism, besides being
really false to its own nature, merely continues in the old
rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and will
certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what is at
present the bane of criticism in this country ? It is that
practical considerations cling to it and stifle it ; it subserves
30 interests not its own ; our organs of criticism are organs of
men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with
them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of
mind the second ; so much play of mind as is compatible
with the prosecution of those practical ends is all that is
wanted. An organ like the Revue des Deux Mondes, having
for its main function ^ojmderstand and utter the best that |
is known and thought in the world^xisting, it may be said, \
as just an organ for a free play of the mind, we have not ;
but we have the Edinburgh Review, existing as an organ of
40 the old Whigs, and for as much play of mind as may suit
its being that ; we have the Quarterly Review ^ existing as an
22 ESSAYS IN ORITIOTSM
organ of the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may
suit its being that ; we have the British Quarterly Beview,
existing as an organ of the poHtical Dissenters, and for as
much play of mind as may suit its being that ; we have the
Times, existing as an organ of the common, satisfied, well-
to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as may
suit its being that. And so on through all the various
/ fractions, political and religious, of our society ; every
fraction has, as such, its organ of criticism, but the notion
of combining all fractions in the common pleasure of a free lo
disinterested play of mind meets with no favour. Directly
this play of mind wants to have more scope, and to forget
the pressure of practical considerations a little, it is checked,
it is made to feel the chain ; we saw this the other day in
the extinction, so much to be regretted, of the Home a7id
Foreign Review ; perhaps in no organ of criticism in this
country was there so much knowledge, so much play of
mind ; but these could not save it : the Dublin Review
subordinates play of mind to the practical business of
English and Irish Cathohcism, and lives. It must needs 20
be that men should act in sects and parties, that each of
these sects and parties should have its organ, and should
make this organ subserve the interests of its action ; but
it would be well, too, that there should be a criticism, not
the minister of these interests, not their enemy, but abso-
lutely and entirely independent of them. No other criticism
will ever attain any real authority or make any real way
towards its end, — the creating a current of true and fresh
ideas.
It is because Q^tjcism has so little kept in the pure intel- so
lectual sphere, has^ little detached itself from practice,
has been so directly polemical and controversial, that it has
yso ill accomplished, in this country, its best spiritual work ;
^ which is to keep man from a self-satis'facTTon~'^IiIc!rii§
retardiijg'and" vulgarising ,~to lead him towards perfection ,
Ty making liis~mind dwell upon what-is excellent In itself,
and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. A polemical
practical criticism makes men blind evehto the ideal imper-
fection of their practice, makes them willingly assert its
ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it against 40
attack ; and clearly this is narrowing and baneful for them.
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 23
If they were reassured on the practical side, speculative
considerations of ideal perfection they might be brought to
entertain, and their spiritual horizon would thus gradually
widen. Mr. Adderley says to the Warwickshire farmers : —
' Talk of the improvement of breed ! Why, the race we
ourselves represent, the men and women, the old Anglo-
Saxon race, are the best breed in the whole world. . . . The
absence of a too enervating climate, too unclouded skies, and
a too luxurious nature, has produced so vigorous a race of
10 people, and has rendered us so superior to all the world.'
Mr. Roebuck says to the Sheffield cutlers : —
' I look around me and ask what is the state of England ?
Is not property safe ? Is not every man able to say what he
likes ? Can you not walk from one end of England to the
other in perfect security ? I ask you whether, the world
over or in past history, there is anything like it ? Nothing.
I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last.'
Now obviously there is a peril for poor human nature in
words and thoughts of such exuberant self-satisfaction,
20 until we find ourselves safe in the streets of the Celestial
City.
' Das wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blicke
Der vorwarts sieht, wie viel noch iibrig bleibt — '
says Goethe ; the little that is done seems nothing when we
look forward and see how much we have yet to do. Clearly
this is a better line of reflection for weak humanity, so long
as it remains on this earthly field of labour and trial. But
neither Mr. Adderley nor Mr. Roebuck is by nature inac-
cessible to considerations of this sort. They only lose sight
30 of them owing to the controversial life we all lead, and the
practical form which all speculation takes with us. They
have in view opponents whose aim is not ideal, but practical ;
and in their zeal to uphold their own practice against these
innovators, they go so far as even to attribute to this
practice an ideal perfection. Somebody has been wanting
to introduce a six-pound franchise, or to aboUsh church-
rates, or to collect agricultural statistics by force, or to
diminish local self-government. How natural, in reply to
such proposals, very likely improper or ill-timed, to go a
40 little beyond the mark, and to say stoutly, ' Such a race
24 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
of people as we stand, so superior to all the world ! The
old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world !
I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last ! I ask you
whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything
like it ! ' And so long as criticism answers this dithyramb
by insisting that the old Anglo-Saxon race would be still
more superior to all others if it had no church-rates, or that
our unrivalled happiness would last yet longer with a six-
pound franchise, so long will the strain, ' The best breed in
the whole world ! ' swell louder and louder, everything ideal lo
and refining will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed
and their critics will remain in a sphere, to say the truth,
perfectly un vital, a sphere in which spiritual progression is
impossible. But let criticism leave church-rates and the
franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit, without a
single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with
our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a
newspaper soon after reading Mr. Roebuck : —
' A shocking child murder has just been committed at
Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there 20
on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child.
The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly
Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.'
Nothing but that ; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute
eulogies of Mr. Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent,
how suggestive are those few lines ! * Our old Anglo-Saxon
breed, the best in the whole world ! ' — how much that is
harsh and ill-favoured there is in this best ! Wragg ! If we
are to talk of ideal perfection, of ' the best in the whole
world,' has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in 30
our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate
spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth
amongst us of such hideous names, — Higginbottom,
Stiggins, Bugg ! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in
this respect than ' the best race in the world ; ' by the
Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing ! And * our
unrivalled happiness ; ' — ^what an element of grimness,
bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it ; the
workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills, — how dismal those
who have seen them will remember ; — the gloom, the smoke, 40
the cold, the strangled illegitimate child ! ' I ask you
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 25
whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything
like it ? ' Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer ; but at
any rate, in that case, the world is very much to be pitied.
And the final touch, — short, bleak, and inhuman : Wragg
is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled
"happiness ; or (shall I say ?) the superfluous Christian name
lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-
Saxon breed ! There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts
as this ; criticism serves the cause of perfection by estab-
10 lishing them. By eluding sterile conflict, by refusing to af,
remain in the sphere where alone narrow and relative con- 7
ceptions have any worth and validity, criticism may diminish
its momentary importance, but only in this way has it
a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and more*
perfect conceptions to which all its duty is really owed/
Mr. Roebuck will have a poor opinion of an adversary who
replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring
under his breath, Wragg is in custody ; but in no other way
will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to moder-
:o ate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive and
offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key.
It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action
which I am thus prescribing for criticism, and that by em-
bracing in this manner the Indian virtue of detachment
and aLbandoning the sphere of practicaLlife^ it condemns ^ ^
itself to^Tslow and obscur"ework. Slow and obscure it may p ys
be, but ilua-the_Qnly proper work of^criticjsm. The mass ' ^
of mankind will^ever nave any ardent zeal for seeing things
as they are ; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them.
50 On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the
general practice of the worldJy^tTiat is as much as saying
that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find
himself one of a very small circle ; but it is only by this
small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate
ideas will ever get current at all. The rush and roar of
practical life will always have a dizzying and attracting
effect upon the most collected spectator, and tend to draw
him into its vortex ; most of all will this be the case where
that life is so powerful as it is in England. But it is only by
10 remaining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the i^/
point of view of the practical man, that the critic can do the ^
26 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
practical man any service ; and it is only by the greatest
sincerity in pursuing his own course, and by at last con-
vincing even the practical man of his sincerity, that he can
escape misunderstandings which perpetually threaten him.
For the practical man is not apt for fine distinctions, and
yet in these distinctions truth and the highest culture
greatly find their account. But it is not easy to lead a
practical man — unless you reassure him as to your practical
intentions, you have no chance of leading him — to see that
a thing which he has always been used to look at from one i(
side only, which he greatly values, and which, looked at
from that side, more than deserves, perhaps, all the prizing
and admiring which he bestows upon it, — that this thing,
looked at from another side, may appear much less bene-
ficent and beautiful, and yet retain all its claims to our
practical allegiance. Where shall we find language inno-
cent enough, how shall we make the spotless purity of our
intentions evident enough, to enable us to say to the
political EngHshman _that" the British Constitution itself,
which, seen from the practical side, looks such a magnificent 2(
organ of progress and virtue, seen from the speculative side,
— with its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of
theory, its studied avoidance of clear thoughts, — that, seen
from this side, our august Constitution sometimes looks,
— forgive me, shade of Lord Somers ! — a colossal machine
for the manufacture of ^ilistines ? How is Cobbett to say
this and not be misunderstoo37l5lackened as he is with the
smoke of a lifelong conflict in the field of political practice ?
how is Mr. Carlyle to say it and not be misunderstood, after
his furious raid into this field with his Latter-day Pamphlets ? sc
how is Mr. Ruskin, after his pugnacious political economy ?
I say, the critic must keep out of the region of immediate
practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere, if he
wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative
treatment of things, which may perhaps one day make its
benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence
irresistible manner.
Do what he will, however, the critic will still remain
exposed to frequent misunderstandings, and nowhere so
much as in this country. For here people are particularly 40
indisposed even to comprehend that without this fre^
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 27
disinterested treatment of things, truth and the highest
culture are out of the question. So immersed are they in
practical life, so accustomed to take all their notions from
this life and its processes, that they are apt to think that
truth and culture themselves can be reached by the pro-
cesses of this life, and that it is an impertinent singularity
to think of reaching them in any other. ' We are all terrae
filii,* cries their eloquent advocate ; ' all PhiUstines to-
gether. Away with the notion of proceeding by any other
0 course than the course dear to the Philistines ; let us have
a social movement, let us organize and combine a party to
pursue truth and new thought, let us call it the liberal party,
and let us all stick to each other, and back each other up.
Let us have no nonsense about independent criticism, and l"
intellectual delicacy, and the few and the many ; don't let
us trouble ourselves about foreign thought ; we shall
invent the whole thing for ourselves as we go along : if one
of us speaks well, applaud him ; if one of us speaks ill,
applaud him too ; we are all in the same movement, we are
0 all liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth.' In this way the
pursuit of truth becomes really a social, practical, pleasur-
able affair, almost requiring a chairman, a secretary, and
advertisements ; with the excitement of an occasional
scandal, with a little resistance to give the happy sense of
difficulty overcome ; but, in general, plenty of bustle and
very Uttle thought. To act is so easy, as Goethe says ; to
think is so hard ! It is true that the critic has many temp-J
tations to go with the stream, to make one of the party on
movement, one of these terrae, jilii ; it seems ungracious to/
0 refuse to be a terrae filius, when so many excellent people)
are ; but the critic's duty is to refuse, or, if resistance is
vain, at least to cry with Obermann : Perissons en resistant.
How serious a matter it is to try and resist, I had ample
opportunity of experiencing when I ventured some time
ago to criticise the celebrated first volume of Bishop
Colenso.^ The echoes of the storm which was then raised
* So sincere is my dislike to all personal attack and controversy,
that I abstain from reprinting, at this distance of time from the occasion
which called them forth, the essays in which I criticised Dr. Colenso's
book ; I feel bound, however, after all that has passed, to make here
a final declaration of my sincere impenitence for having published them.
-I
28 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
I still, from time to time, hear grumbling round me. That
storm arose out of a misunderstanding almost inevitable.
It is a result of no little culture to attain to a clear perception
that science and religion are two wholly different things ;
the multitude will for ever confuse them, but happily that
is of no great real importance, for while the multitude
imagines itself to live by its false science, it does really live
by its true religion. Dr. Colenso, however, in his first
volume did all he could to strengthen the confusion,^ and to
make it dangerous. He did this with the best intentions, i
I freely admit, and with the most candid ignorance that this
was the natural effect of what he was doing ; but, says
Joubert, ' Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates
the crime, is itself, in intellectual matters, a crime of the
first order.' I criticised Bishop Colenso' s speci^lative
confusion. Immediately there was a cry raised : ' What
is this ? here is a liberal attacking a liberal. Do not you
belong to the movement ? are not you a friend of truth ?
Is not Bishop Colenso in pursuit of truth ? then speak with
proper respect of his book. Dr. Stanley is another friend 2
of truth, and you speak with proper respect of his book ;
why make these invidious differences ? both books are
excellent, admirable, liberal ; Bishop Colenso' s perhaps the
most so, because it is the boldest, and will have the best
practical consequences for the liberal cause. Do you want
to encourage to the attack of a brother liberal his, and your,
and our implacable enemies, the Church and State Review or
the Record, — the High Church rhinoceros and the Evangeli-
cal hyaena ? Be silent, therefore ; or rather speak, speak
as loud as ever you can, and go into ecstasies over the eighty 3
and odd pigeons.'
But criticism cannot follow this coarse and indiscriminate
method. It is unfortunately possible for a man in pursuit
Nay, I cannot forbear repeating yet once more, for his benefit and that
of his readers, this sentence from my original remarks upon him : There
is truth of science and truth of religion ; truth of science does not become
truth of religion till it is made religious. And I wUl add : Let us have all
the science there is from the men of science ; from the men of religion
let us have religion.
^ It has been said I make it ' a crime against literary criticism and tho
higher culture to attempt to inform the ignorant.' Need I point out that
the ignorant are not informed by being confirmed in a confusion ?
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 29
of truth to write a book which reposes upon a false con-
ception. Even the practical consequences of a book are to
genuine criticism no recommendation of it, if the book is,
in the highest sense, blundering. I see that a lady who
herself, too, is in pursuit of truth, and who writes with great
abihty, but a httle too much, perhaps, under the influence
of the practical spirit of the English Uberal movement,
classes Bishop Colenso's book and M. Kenan's together, in
her survey of the religious state of Europe, as facts of the
) same order, works, both of them, of ' great importance ; '
' great abihty, power, and skill ; ' Bishop Colenso's, perhaps,
the most powerful ; at least. Miss Cobbe gives special
expression to her gratitude that to Bishop Colenso ' has been
given the strength to grasp, and the courage to teach, truths
of such deep import.' In the same way, more than one
popular writer has compared him to Luther. Now it is just j/
this kind of false estimate which the critical spirit is, it
seems to me, bound to resist. It is really the strongest
possible proof of the low ebb at which, in England, the
) critical spirit is, that while the critical hit in the reUgious
hterature of Germany is Dr. Strauss' s book, in that of
France M. Kenan's book, the book of Bishop Colenso is the
critical hit in the reUgious hterature of England. Bishop
Colenso's book reposes on a total misconception of the
essential elements of the religious problem, as that problem
is now presented for solution. To criticism, therefore,
which seeks to have the best that is known and thought on
this problem, it is, however well meant, of no importance
whatever. M. Kenan's book attempts a new synthesis of
) the elements furnished to us by the Four Gospels. It
attempts, in my opinion, a synthesis, perhaps premature,
perhaps impossible, certainly not successful. Up to the
present time, at any rate, we must acquiesce in Fleury's
sentence on such recastings of the Gospel-story : Quiconque
8' imagine la pouvoir mieux icrire, ne Ventend pa^. M. Kenan ■
had himself passed by anticipation a hke sentence on his
own work, when he said : ' If a new presentation of the
character of Jesus were ofEered to me, I would not have it ;
its very clearness would be, in my opinion, the best proof
) of its insufficiency.' His friends may with perfect justice
rejoin that at the sight of the Holy Land, and of the actual
30 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
scene of the Gospel-story, all the current of M. Kenan's
thoughts may have naturally changed, and a new casting
of that story irresistibly suggested itself to him ; and that
this is just a case for applying Cicero's maxim : Change of
mind is not inconsistency — nemo doctus unquam mutationem
consilii inconstantiam dixit esse. Nevertheless, for criticism,
M. Kenan's first thought must still be the truer one, as long
as his new casting so fails more fully to commend itself, more
fully (to use Coleridge's happy phrase about the Bible) to
find us. Still M. Kenan's attempt is, for criticism, of the i
most real interest and importance, since, with all its diffi-
culty, a fresh synthesis of the New Testament data, — not
a making war on them, in Voltaire's fashion, not a leaving
them out of mind, in the world's fashion, but the putting
a new construction upon them, the taking them from under
the old, adoptive, traditional, unspiritual point of view and
placing them under a new one, — is the very essence of the
religious problem, as now presented ; and only by efforts in
this direction can it receive a solution.
Again, in the same spirit in v/hich she judges Bishop 2
Colenso, Miss Cobbe, like so many earnest liberals of our
practical race, both here and in America, herself sets vigor-
ously about a positive reconstruction of reUgion, about
malnng a religion of the future out of hand, or at least
setting about making it ; we must not rest, she and they
are always thinking and saying, in negative criticism, we
must be creative and constructive ; hence we have such
works as her recent Religious Duty, and works still more
considerable, perhaps, by others, which will be in every
one's mind. These works often have much ability ; they a
often spring out of sincere convictions, and a sincere wish
to do good ; and they sometimes, perhaps, do good. Their
fault is (if I may be permitted to say so) one which they
have in common with the British College of Health, in the
New Koad. Every one Imows the British College of
Health ; it is that building with the hon and the statue of
the Goddess Hygeia before it ; at least, I am sure about the
lion, though I am not absolutely certain about the Goddess
Hygeia. This building does credit, perhaps, to the resources
of Dr. Morrison and his disciples ; but it falls a good deal 4
short of one's idea oi what a British College of Health ought
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 31
to be. Ill England, where we hate pubUc interference and
love mdividual enterprise, we have a whole crop of places
like the British College of Health ; the grand name without
the grand thing. Unluckily, creditable to individual enter-
prise as they are, they tend to impair our taste by making
us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character
properly belongs to a public institution. The same may be
said of the religions of the future of Mss Cobbe and others.
Creditabla^ike the British College of Health, to the \>^
0 resourccli^fl 'llieir authors, they yet tend to make us forget H
what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly
belongs to religious constructions. The historic religions,
with all theii:^ faults, have had this ; it certainly belongs to
the religious sentiment, when it truly flowers, to have this ;
and we impoverish our spirit if we allow a rehgion of the
future without it. What then is the duty of criticism here ?
To take the practical point of view, to applaud the liberal
movement and all its works, — its New Road religions of the
future into the bargain, — for their general utility's sake ^ J/
0 By no means ; but to be perpetually dissatisfied with these I '^^ /^
works, while they perpetually fall short of a high and^
perfect ideal.
For criticism, these are elementary laws ; but they never .
can be popular, and in this country they have been very ^
little followed, and one meets with immense obstacles in
following them. That is a reason for asserting them again
and again. Criticism must maintain [ts independence of 1
the practical spirit and its aims. 1 E ven witli.,well-m£ajit/ .
efforts of the practical ijpirit it m usp express dissa»tisf action \ ^
0 if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and
limiting./ It must not hm-ry on to the goal because of its
prScti^ importance. It must be patient, and know how
to wait ; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to
things and how to withdraw from them. It must be apt to
study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual
perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power
which in the practical sphere may be maleficent. It must
be apt to di^ern the spiritual shortcomings or illusions of
powers that in the practical sphere may be beneficent. And
0 this without any notion of favouring or injuring, in the prac-
tical sphere, one power or the other ; v/ithout any notion of
32 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
playing off, in this sphere, one power against the other.
When one looks, for instance, at the English Divorce Court,
— an institution which perhaps has its practical conveni-
ences, but which in the ideal sphere is so hideous ; an
institution which neither makes divorce impossible nor
makes it decent, which allows a man to get rid of his wife,
or a wife of her husband, but makes them drag one another
first, for the public edification, through a mire of unutter-
able infamy, — when one looks at this charming institution,
I say, with its crowded benches, its newspaper-reports, and ic
its money-compensations, this institution in which the gross
unregenerate British Philistine has indeed stamped an
image of himself, — one may be permitted to find the mar-
riage-theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating. Or
when Protestantism, in virtue of its supposed rational and
intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism too magis-
terially, criticism may and must remind it that its preten-
sions, in this respect, are illusive and do it harm ; that the
Reformation was a moral rather than an intellectual event ;
that Luther's theory of grace no more exactly reflects the 2C
mind of the spirit than Bossuet's philosophy of history
reflects it ; and that there is no more antecedent probability
of the Bishop of Durham's stock of ideas being agreeable to
perfect reason than of Pope Pius the Ninth's. But criticism
will not on that account forget the achievements of Pro-
testantism in the practical and moral sphere ; nor that,
even in the intellectual sphere. Protestantism, though in
a blind and stumbling mariner, carried forward the Re-
naissance, while Catholicisna threw itself violently across
its path. 3C
I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the
want of ardour and movement which he now found amongst
young men in this country with what he remembered
in his own youth, twenty years ago. 'What reformers
we were then ! ' he exclaimed ; ' what a zeal we had !
how we canvassed every institution in Church and State,
and were prepared to remodel them all on first principles I '
He was inclined to regret, as a spiritual flagging, the lull
which he saw. I am disposed rather to regard it as a pause
in which the turn to a new mode of spiritual progress is 4c
being accomplished. Everything was long seen, by the
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 33
young and ardent amongst us, in inseparable connection
with politics and practical life ; we have pretty well ex-
hausted the benefits of seeing things in this connection, we
have got all that can be got by so seeing them. Let us try
a more disinterested mode of seeing them ; let us betake
ourselves more to the serener life of the mind and spirit.
This life, too, may have its excesses and dangers ; but they
are not for us at present. Let us think of quietly enlarging^
our stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we getV*
0 an idea or half an idea, be running out with it mto thej
street, and tr^dng to make it rule there. Our ideas will, in
the end, shape the world all the better for maturing a little, y^
Perhaps in fifty years' time it will in the English House of
Commons be an objection to an institution that it is an
anomaly, and my friend the Member of Parliament will
shudder in his grave. But let us in the meanwhile rather
endeavour that in twenty years' time it may, in English
literature, be an objection to a proposition that it is absurd.
That will be a change so vast, that the imagination almost
0 fails to grasp it. Ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism
must take where politics and religion are concerned, it is^
because, where these burning matters are in question, it isA
most Ukely to go astray. I have wished, above all, to insist
on the attitude which criticism should adopt towards
everything ; on its right tone and temper of mind. Then
comes the^estion as to the subject-jgMter which^criti^^
should mostseegr Mere, in gen'eral, its course is determined
TorTt^Fy the idea which is the law of its being ; the idea oSi/
a a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the bestf
that is known and thought in the world, and thus to estab-7
lish a current of fresh and true ideas. By the very nature df
things, as England is not all the world, much of the best I
that is known and thought in the world cannot be of Eng-
lish growth, must be foreign ; by the nature of things,
again, it is just this that we are least likely to know, while
EngHsh thought is streaming in upon us from all sides and
takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its
existence ; the EngUsh critic, therefore, must dwell muclu-/
10 on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part
of it, which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any
K
34 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
reason specially likely to escape him. Again, judging is often
spoken of as the critic's one business ; and so in some sense
it is ; but the judgment which almost insensibly forms
itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge,
is the valuable one ; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh
laiowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself ;
and it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting
his own judgment pass along with it, — but insensibly, and
in the second place not the first, as a sort of companion and
clue, not as an abstract lawgiver, — that he will generally do i<
most good to his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the
sake of establishing an author's place in literature, and his
relation to a central standard (and if this is not done, how
are we to get at our best in the world ?), criticism may have to
deal with a subject-matter so familiar that fresh knowledge
is out of the question, and then it must be all judgment ; an
enunciation and detailed application of principles. Here
the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract,
always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the
truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, 21
to be sure that something is wrong. Still, under all circum-
stances, this mere judgment and application of principles
is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic ;
like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us,
like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity.
But stop, some one will say ; all this talk is of no practical
use to us whatever ; this criticism of yours is not what we
have in our minds when we speak of criticism ; when we
speak of critios and criticism, we mean critics and criticism
of the current English literature of the day ; when you offer 3C
to tell criticism its function, it is to this criticism that we
expect you to address yourself. I am sorry for it, for I am
afraid I must disappoint these expectations. I am bound \
by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour \
to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in ■
the world. How much of current English literature comes
into this ' best that is known and thought in the world ' ?
Not very much, I fear ; certainly less, at this moment, than
of the current literature of France or Germany. Well, then,
am I to alter my definition of criticism, in order to meet the 40
requirements of a number of practising English critics, who,
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 35
after all, are free in their choice of a business ? That would
be making criticism lend itself just to one of those alien
practical considerations, which, 1 have said, are so fatal to
it. One may say, indeed, to those who have to deal with
the mass — so much better disregarded — of current English
Hterature, that they may at all events endeavour, in dealing
with this, to try it, so far as they can, by the standard of the
best that is known and thought in the world ; one may say,
that to get anywhere near this standard, every critic should
10 try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his
own ; and the more unlike his own, the better. But, aftei
all, the criticism I am really concerned with, — the criticism
which alone can much help us for the future, the criticism
which, throughout Europe, is at the present day meant,
when so much stress is laid on the importance of criticism
and the critical spirit, — is a criticism which regards Europe
as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great
confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a
common result ; and whose members have, for their proper^
!0 outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity
and of one another. Special, local, and temporary advan-
tages being put out of account, that modern nation will in
the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress,
which most thoroughly carries out this programme. And
what is that but saying that we too, all of us, as individuals,
the more thoroughly we carry it out, shall make the more
progress ?
There is so much inviting us ! — what are we to take ?
what will nourish us in growth towards perfection ? That
10 is the question which, with the immense field of life and of
literature lying before him, the critic has to answer; for
himself first, and afterwards for others. In this idea of the
critic's business the essays brought together in the following
pages have had their origin ; in this idea, widely different
as are their subjects, they have, perhaps, their unity.
I conclude with what I said at the beginning : to have /
the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and
the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism
to have it ; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, V
.0 flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may
have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative
D 2
36 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
activity ; a sense which a man of insight and conscience
will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved,
fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs
f no other creation is possible.
Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity
belongs only to genuine creation ; in literature we must
never forget that. But what true man of letters ever can
forget it ? It is no such common matter for a gifted nature
to come into possession of a current of true and living ideas,
and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are ic
likely to underrate it. The epochs of Aeschylus and Shak-
speare make us feel their pre-eminence. In an epoch like
those is, no doubt, the true life of a literature ; there is the
promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon.
That promised land it wiU not be ours to enter, and we shall
die in the wilderness : but to have desired to enter it, to
have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best
distinction among contemporaries ; it will certainly be the
best title to esteem with posterity.
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OP
ACADEMIES
It is impossible to put down a book like the history of
the French Academy, by Pellisson and D' Olivet, which
M. Charles Livet has lately re-edited, without being led to
reflect upon the absence, in our own country, of any institu-
J^ion hke the T^rencK' Academy ~upon the probable causes of
this absence,~airdlipoh its results. A thousand voices will
be ready to tell us that this absence is a signal mark of our
national superiority ; that it is in great part owing to this
absence that the exhilarating words of Lord Macaulay,
10 lately given to the world by his very clever nephew, Mr.
Trevelyan, are so profoundly true : ' It may safely be said
that the literature now extant in the English language is of
far greater value than all the literature which three hundred
years ago was extant in all the languages of the world to-
gether.' I daresay this is so ; only, remembering Spinoza's
maxim that the two great banes of humanity are self-
conceit and the laziness coming from self-conceit, I think it
may do us good, instead of resting in our pre-eminence with
perfect security, to look a little more closely why this is so,
10 and whether it is so without any Hmitations.
But first of all I must give a very few words to the out- 1
ward history of the French Academy. About the year
1629, seven or eight persons in Paris, fon(i of literature,
formed themselves into a sort of Uttle club to meet at one
another's houses and discuss literary matters. Their meet-
ings got talked of, and Cardinal Richelieu, then minister and
all powerful, heard of them. He himself had a noble
passion for letters, and for all fine culture ; he was interested
If, by what he heard of the nascent society. Himself a nianin
- Jthe grand style, if ever man jwas, he had~lfte^nsrght to
b perceive what a potent mstrument of the grand style was
ilefe]to"1iis hand . It was the beginning of a great century
38 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
for France, the seventeenth ; men's minds were working,
the French language was forming. RicheHeu sent to ask
the members of the new society whether they would be
willing to become a body with a public character, holding
regular meetings. Not without a little hesitation, — for
apparently they found themselves very well as they were,
and these seven or eight gentlemen of a social and literary
turn were not perfectly at their ease as to what the great
and terrible minister could want with them, — they con-
sented. The favours of a man like Richelieu are not easily lo
refused, whether they are honestly meant or no ; but this
favour of Richelieu's was meant quite honestly. The
Parliament, however, had its doubts of this. The Parlia-
ment had none of Richelieu's enthusiasm about letters and
culture ; it was jealous of the apparition of a new public
body in the State ; above all, of a body called into existence
by Richelieu. The King's letters patent, establishing and
authorizing the new society, were granted early in 1635 ;
but, by the old constitution of France, these letters patent
required the verification of the Parliament. It was two 20
years and a half, — towards the autumn of 1637, — before the
Parliament would give it ; and it then gave it only after
pressing solicitations, and earnest assurances of the innocent
intentions of the young Academy. Jocose people said that
this society, with its mission to purify and embellish the
language, filled with terror a body of lawyers like the French
Parliament, the stronghold of barbarous jargon and of
chicane.
This improvement of the language was in truth the
declared grand aim for the operations of the Academy. Its so
^tatutes of foundation, approved by Richelieu before the
royal edict establishing it was issued, say expressly : ' The
Academy's principal function shall be to work with all the
care and all the diligence possible at giving sure rules tx) our
language, and rendering it pure^ "eloquent, and capable i_
*~oi treatmg the3?1^I^tn3"^ien^ces This zeal for making
^"liatlotfs great instrument "of thought, — its language, —
correct and worthy, is undoubtedly a sign full of promise,
a \, eighty earnest of future power. It is said that Richelieu
had it in his mind that French should succeed Latin in its 40
general ascendency, as Latin had succeeded Greek ; if it
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 39
was so, even this wish has to some extent been fulfilled.
But, at any rate, the ethical influences of style in language,
— its close relations, so of ten pointed ouE7 with character,
-^are^mostlinportant: Richelieu, a man of high culture,
an37at the^samefTme, of great character, felt them pro-
ffHiiulIy ; and^'that he" should have sough t~ to regularise,
strengthen, and perpetuate them by an institution for per-
fecting language, is alone a striking proof of his governing
spirit and of his genius.
0 This was not all he had in his mind, however. The new
Academy, now enlarged to a body of forty members, and
meant to contain ail the chief literary men of France, was
to be a literary tribu7ial. The works of its members were to
be brought before it previous to publication, were to be
criticised by it, and finally, if it saw fit, to be published with
its declared approbation. The works of other writers, not
members of the Academy, might also, at the request of
these writers themselves, be passed under the Academy's
review. Besides this, in essays and discussions the Aca-
0 demy examined and judged works already published,
whether by Uving or dead authors, and literary matters in
general. The celebrated opinion on Corneille's Cid, de-
livered in 1637 by the Academy at Richelieu's urgent
request, when this poem, which strongly occupied public
attention, had been attacked by M. de Scudery, shows how
fully Richelieu designed his new creation to do duty as
^asupreme court of literatu^Cj^ and how early it in fact began
to exerciSCtKTs'funetion. One ^ who had known Richelieu
declared, after the Cardinal's death, that he had projected
;o a yet greater institution than the Academy, a sort of grand
European college of art, science, and literature, a Pry-
taneum, where the chief authors of all Europe should
be gathered together in one central home, there to live
in security, leisure, and honour ; — that was a dream
which will not bear to be pulled about too roughly. But
the project of forming a high court of letters for France
was no dream ; Richelieu in great measure fulfilled it.
This is what the Academy, by its idea, really is ; this is
what it has always tended to become ; this is what it
10 has, from time to time, really been ; by being, or tending
^ La Mesnardiere.
40 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
to be this, far more than even by what it has done for
the language, it is of such importance in France. To
give the law, the tone to literature, and that tone a high
one, is its business. * Richelieu meant it,' says M. Sainte-
Beuve, * to be a haut jury,' — a jury the most choice
and authoritative that could be found on all important
literary matters in question before the public ; to be, as
it in fact became in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, ' a ^sovereign organ of opinion.' 'The duty
of the AcaHemy is7~says M. Renan, ' maintenir la deli- u
catesse de V esprit frangais ' — to keep the fine quality of_
the JFrench spmt_ unimpaired ; it represents a kind of
^maitrise en fait de hon ton '—the authority of a recognized
master in matters of tone. and taste. 'All ages, says
l?!TrKenan again, ' have had their inferior literature ; but
the great danger of our time is that this inferior literature
tends more and more to get the upper place. No one
has the same advantage as the Academy for fighting against
this mischief ; ' the Academy, which, as he says elsewhere,
has even special facilities for ' creating a form of intellectual 2(
culture which shall impose itself on all around.' M. Sainte-
Beuve and M. Renan are, both of them, very keen-sighted
critics ; and they show it signally by seizing and putting
so prominently forward this character of the French
Academy.
Such an eSort to set up a recognised authority, imposing
on us a high standard in matters of intellect and taste,
has many enemies in human nature. We all of us like
to^o our own way, arid not to be forced out of the atmo-
sphere of commonplace habitual to most of^ us ; — ' was uns 3c
alle bdndigtj' says Goethe, * das Gemeine.' We like to be
suffered to lie comfortably in the old straw of our habits,
especially of our intellectual habits, even though this
straw may not be very clean and fine. But if the effort to
limit this freedom of our lower nature finds, as it does
and must find, enemies in human nature, it finds also
auxiliaries in it. Out of the four great parts, says Cicero,
of the honestum, or good, which forms the matter on which
officium, or human duty, finds employment, one is the fixing
of a modus and an ordo, a measure and an order, to fashion 40
and wholesomely constrain our action, in order to lift it
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 41
above the level it keeps if left to itself, and to bring it
nearer to perfection. Man alone of living creatures, he
saysj^qes feehn^_aiteT^''quid sit ordo, quid sit quod deceat,
in factis €[iciisque qui modus ' — the discovery of an order y a
\^wot_gogd_taste, a mecwMrc for^'His^words and actions, i
Dthercreatures^ubmTssivelylfollow the law of their nature ; /
man alone has an impulse leading him to set up some otherj
law to cbntrorthelBeiit jof his nature.
ThisTholds "good , of course, as to moral matters, as well
.0 as intellectual matters : and it is of moral matters that
we are generally thinking when we affirm it. But it holds
good as to intellectual matters too. Now, probably,
M. Sainte-Beuve had not these words of Cicero in his
mind when he made, about the French nation, the assertion
I am going to quote ; but, for all that, the assertion leans
for support, one may say, upon the truth conveyed in those
words of Cicero, and wonderfully illustrates and confirms
them. ' jn France/ says M. Sainte-Beuve, * the first
considera^on for iis is nut whether we are amused and
;o pfeased^by a work of art or mind, nor is it whether we are
toucfiediSy it. What we seek above all to learn is, whetherf|
we were right in being amused with it, and in applauding it,\
and in being moved by it.* Those are very remarkable y
words, and they are, I believe, in the main quite true. A
Frenchman has, to a considerable degree, what one may call
a conscience in intellectual mattersj he has an active
^ehef t^at there is a rigEt and a~ wrong in them, that he
is bound to honour and obey tEe"rigKt7'that he is disgraced
by cleaving to the wrong. All the world has, or professes
w to have, this conscience in moral matters. The word
conscience has become almost confined, in popular use,
to the moral sphere, because this hvely susceptibiUty of
feelmg is, in the moral sphere, so far more common than
in the intellectual sphere ; the Hvelier, in the moral sphere,
this susceptibiUty is, the greater becomes a man's readiness
to admit a high standard of action, an ideal authoritatively
correcting his everyday moral habits ; here, such willing
admission of authority is due to sensitiveness of conscience.
And a hke deference to a standard hi^er than one's own
10 habitual standard in infellectual matters, a like respectful
recognition oflTsupenor ideal7 is caused, in the intellectual
42 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
sphere, by sensitiveness of intelligence. Those whose in-
telligence is quickest, openest, most sensitive, are readiest
with this deference ; those whose intelligence is less delicate
and sensitive are less disposed to it. Well, now we are on
the road to see why the French have their Academy and
we have nothing of the kind.
What are the essential characteristics of the spirit of
our nation ? Not, certainly, an open and clear mind,
not a quick and flexible intelligence. Our greatest admirers
would not claim for us that we have these in a pre-eminent lo
degree ; they might say that we had more of them than our
detractors gave us credit for ; but they would not assert
them to be our essential characteristics. They would rather
allege, as our chief spiritual characteristics, energy. .^nd
honesty ; and, if we are judged favourably and positively,
not invidiously and negatively, our chief characteristics
are, no doubt, these; — energy and KonestyTnbt an open andr~7
clear mind, not a quick and flexible intelligence. Open-
ness of mind and flexibility of intelligence were very signal
characteristics of the Athenian people in ancient times ; 20
everybody will feel that. Openness of mind and flexibility
of intelligence are remarkable characteristics of the French
people in modern times ; at any rate, they strikingly
characterise them as compared with us ; I think every-
body, or almost everybody, will feel that. I will not now
ask what more the Athenian or the French spirit has than
this, nor what shortcomings either of them may have as
a set-off against this ; all I want now to point out is that
they have this, and that we have it in a much lesser degree.
Let me remark, however, that not only in the moral 30
sphere, but also in the intellectual and spiritual sphere,
energy and honesty are most important and fruitful^
qualities ; that, for instance, of what we call genius,
energy is the most essential part. So, by assigning to
a nation energy and honesty as its chief spiritual charac-
teristics,— by refusing to it, as at all eminent character-
istics, openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence, — •
we do not by any means, as some people might at first
suppose, relegate its importance and its power of manifesting
itself with effect from the intellectual to the moral sphere. 40
We only indicate its probable special line of successful
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 43
activity in the intellectual sphere, and, it is true, certain
imperfections and failings to which, in this sphere, it will
always be subject. Genius is mainly an affair of energy,
and poetry is mainly an'affair of genius ; therefore, a nation
whose spirit is charactemed by energy may well be eminent
m~poetry ; — and~we haveShakspeare. Again, the hrghest
reacEr~df~^ience is, orie may say, an inventive power,
a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised
in poetry ; therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterised
0 by energy may well be eminent in science ; — and we have
Newton. Shakspeare and Newton : in the intellectual
sphere there can be no higher names . 4sJLyhat that energy,
which is the life of genius, above everything demands and"
insists upon, is freedom ; entire independence of all author-
ity, prescription, and routine, — the fullest room to expand
as it wilU Therefore, a nation whose chief spiritual charac-
teristic is energy, will not be very apt to set up, in intel-
lectual matters, a fixed standard, an authority, like an
academy. By this it certainly escapes certain real incon-
0 veniences and dangers, and it can, at the same time, as
we have seen, reach undeniably splendid heights in poetry
and science. On the other hand, some of the requisites of
intellectual work are special!}^ the affair of quickness of
'^mndj.nd flexibiHty^ of intelligence .The form, the methods
'oT'ev^lutiorL^ItEe'precision, the" proportions, the relations
of the parts to the wHplejJn an intellectual worKT^depend
mainly "trp'diOBjBni. And these are the elements of an
'"trrfcettectual work which are really most communicable
from it, which can most be learned and adopted from it,
;o which have, therefore, the greatest effect upon the intel-
lectual performance of others. Even in poetry, these
requisites are very important ; and the poetry of a nation,
not eminent for the gifts on which they depend, will,
more or less, suffer by this shortcoming. In poetry,
however, the}" are, after all, secondary, and energy is the
first iliiii- ; but in prose they are of lirst-rate importance^
1n^its"prose literature, therefore, and in the routine of
intellectual work generally, a nation with no particular
gifts for these will not be so successful. These are what, asL
0 I^ave said, can to a certain degree be learned'and appro-
priated, while the free activity of genius cannot. Academies
4
44 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
consecrate and maintain them, and, therefore, a nation
with an eminent turn for them naturally estabhshea
academies. So far as routine and authority tend to embar-
rass energy and inventive genius, academies may be~saidr~
ToH^e obstructive to energy and inventive genius, and, ToT
this extent, to the human spirit's general advance. But
then this evil is so much compensated by the propaga-
tion, on a large scale, of the mental aptitudes and demands
which an open mind and a flexible intelligence naturally
engender, genius itself, in the long run, so greatly finds lo
its account in this propagation, and bodies like the French
Academy have such power for promoting it, that the general
advance of the human spirit is perhaps, on the whole,
rather furthered than impeded by their existence.
JHqw„ much greater is our nation in poetry than prose !
how much better, in generar, do the productions of its
spirit show in the qualities of genius than in the quahties
of intelligence ! One may constantly remark this in the
work of individuals ; how much more striking, in general,
does any Englishman,— of some vigour of mind, but Joy 23
no means a poet,— seem in his verse than in his prosej"
No doubt his verse suffers from the same defects which
impair his prose, and he cannot express himself with
real success in it ; but how much more powerful a per-
sonage does he appear in it, by dint of feeling, and of
originality and movement of ideas, than when he is writing
prose ! With a Frenchman of like stamp, it is just the
reverse : set him to write poetry, he is limited, artificial,
and impotent ; set him to write prose, he is free, natural,
and effective. The power of French literature is in its so
prose-writers, the power of English literature is in its poets.
Nay, many of the celebrated French poets depend wholly
for their fame upon the qualities of intelligence which they
exhibit, — qualities which are the distinctive support of
prose ; many of the celebrated English prose-writers depend
wholly for their fame upon the qualities of genius and
imagination which they exhibit, — qualities which are the
distinctive support of poetry. jBut, as I have said, the
qualities of genius are less transferable than the qualities
of intelligence ; less can be immediately learned ana 40
appropriated from their product ; they are less direct and
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 45
stringent intellectual agencies, though they may be more
T3eaunnr^T3ivinel"~ShalSpeare and our great'Elizabethan
group were ceflamly more gifted writers than Corneille
and his group ; but what was the sequel to this great
literature, this literature of genius, as we may call it,
stretching from Marlow to Milton ? What did it lead up
to in English literature ? To our provincial and second-
rate Hterature of the eighteenth century. What, on the
other hand, was the sequel to the literature of the French
10 ' great century,' to this Uterature of intelUgence, as, by
comparison with our EUzabethan literature, we may call
it ; what did it lead up to ? To the French literature of
the eighteenth century, one of the most powerful and
pervasive intellectual agencies that have ever existed, the
greatest European force of the eighteenth century. In
science, again, we had Newton, a genius of the very highest
order, a type of genius in science, if ever there was one. On
the continent, as a sort of counterpart to Newton, there
was Leibnitz ; a man, it seems to me (though on these
20 matters I speak under correction), of much less creative
energy of genius, much less power of divination than
Newton, but rather a man of admirable intelUgence, a
type of intelligence in science, if ever there was one.
Well, and what did they each directly lead up to in science ?
What was the intellectual generation that sprang from
each of them ? I only repeat what the men of science
have themselves pointed out. The man of genius was
continued by the English analysts of the eighteenth
century, comparatively powerless and obscure followers
80 of the renowned master ; the man of intelligence was
continued by successors like Bernouilli, Euler, Lagrange,
and Laplace, the greatest names in modem mathematics.
What I want the reader to see is, that the question as
to the utiUty of academies to the intellectual life of a
nation is not settled when we say, for instance : ' Oh, we
have never had an academy, and yet we have, confessedly,
a very great literature.' It stUl remains to be asked :
* What sort of a great literature ? a literature great in the
special quaUties of genius, or great in the special quaUties
40 of intelligence ? ' If in the former, it is by no means
sure that either our literature, or the general intellectual
46 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
life of our nation, has got already, without academies, all
that academies can give. Both the one and the other
may very well be somewhat wanting in those qualities of
intelligence, out of a lively sense for which a body like
the French Academy, as I have said, springs, and which
such a body does a great deal to spread and confirm.
Our literature, in spite of the genius manifested i.n_,rt,
may fall short in form, method, precision, proportions,
arrangement, — all of them, I have said, things where
intelligence proper comes in. It may be comparatively lo
weak in prose, that branch of literature where intelligence
proper is, so to speak, all in all. In this branch it may show
many grave faults to which the want of a quick, flexible
intelligence, and of the strict standard which such an
intelligence tends to impose, makes it liable ; it may be
full of hap-hazard, crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity,
violence, blundering. It may be a less stringent and effective
intellectual agency, both upon our own nation and upon
the world at large, than other literatures which show less
genius, perhaps, but more intelligence. 20
The right conclusion certainly is that we should try^
so far as we cM, to hiake up our shortcomings ; and that
to this end, instead of always fixing our thoughts upon
the points in which our literature, and our intellectual
life generally, are strong, we should, from time to time,
fix them upon those in which they are weak, and so learn
to perceive clearly what we have to a^nend. What is our
second great spiritual characteristic, — our honesty, — good
for, if it is not good for this ? But it will, — I am sure it
will,— more and more, as time goes on, be found good for 30
this.
Well, then, an institution like the French Academy, —
an institution owing its existence to a national bent to-
wards the things of the mind, towards culture, towards
clearness, correctness, and propriety in thinking and
speaking, and, in its turn, promoting this benty — sets
standards in a number of directions, and creates, in all
these directions, a force of educated opinion, checking
and rebuking those who f aU below these standards, or who
set them at nought. Educated opinion exists here as in 4o
France ; but in France the Academy serves as a sort of
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 47
centre and rallying-point to it, and gives it a force which
it has not got here. Why is all the journeyman-work of
literature, as I may call it, so much worse done here than
it is in France ? I do not wish to hurt any one's feelings ;
but surely this is so. Think of the difference between
our books of reference and those of the French, between
our biographical dictionaries (to take a striking instance)
and theirs ; think of the difference between the translations
of the classics turned out for Mr. Bohn's library and those
10 turned out for M. Nisard's collection ! As a general rule,
hardly any one amongst us, who knows French and German
well, would use an English book of reference when he
could get a French or German one ; or would look at an
English prose translation of an ancient author when he
could get a French or German one. It is not that there
do not exist in England, as in France, a number of people
perfectl}^ well able to discern what is good, in these things,
from what is bad, and preferring what is good ; but they
are isolated, they form no powerful body of opinion, they
20 are not strong enough to set a standard, up to which even
the journeyman-work of literature must be brought, if it
is to be vendible. Ignorance and charlatanism in work
of this kind are always trying to pass off their wares as
excellent, and to cry down criticism as the voice of an
insignificant, over-fastidious minority ; they easily persuade
the multitude that this is so when the minority is scattered
about as it is here ; not so easily when it is banded together
as in the French Academy. So, again, with freaks in dealing
with language ; certainly all such freaks tend to impair
80 the power and beauty of language ; and how far more
common they are with us than with the French ! To
take a very famihar instance. Every one has noticed
the way in which the Times chooses to spell the word
' diocese ; ' it always spells it diocess,^ deriving it, I suppose,
from Zeus and census. The Journal des Debats might
just as well ^vrite ' diocess ' instead of ' diocese,' but
imagine the Journal des Debats doing so ! Imagine an
educated Frenchman indulging himself in an ortho-
graphical antic of this sort, in face of the grave respect
^ The Times has now (1868) abandoned this spelling and adopted
the ordinary one.
48 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
with which the Academy and its dictionary invest the
French language ! Some people will say these are little
things ; they are not ; they are of bad example. They
tend to spread the baneful notion that there is no such
thing as a high, "cSlTeTfr's^andard in intellectual matters ;
that every one may as well take his own way ; they are
at variance with the severe discipline necessary for all
real culture ; they confirm us in habits of wilfulness and
eccentricity, which hurt our minds, and damage our
credit with serious people. The late Mr. Donaldson was lo
certainly a man of great ability, and I, who am not an
Orientalist, do not pretend to judge his Jashar ; but
let the reader observe the form which a foreign Orientalist's
judgment of it naturally takes. M. Renan calls it a tentative
malheureuse, a failure, in short ; this it may be, or it may
not be ; I am no judge. But he goes on : 'It is astonishing
that a recent article ' (in a French periodical, he means)
' should have brought forward as the last word of German
exegesis a work like this, composed by a doctor of the
University of Cambridge, and universally condemned by 20
German critics.' You see what he means to imply : an
extravagance of this sort could never have come from
Germany, where there is a great force of critical opinion^
controlling a learned man's vagaries^ 8.nd keeping him
'Jtraight ; it comes from the native home of intellectual
eccentricity of all kinds, ^ — from England, from a doctor
of the University of Cambridge ; — and I daresay he would
not expect much better things from a doctor of the
University of Oxford. Again, after speaking of what
Germany and France have done for the history of Mahomet : 3o
* America and England,' M. Renan goes on, ' have also
occupied themselves with Mahomet.' He mentions
Washington Irving's Life of Mahomet, which does not,
he says, evince much of an historical sense, a sentiment
historique fort ileve ; * but,' he proceeds, ' this book shows
a real progress,' when one thinks that in 1829 Mr. Charles
Forster published two thick volumes, which enchanted
* A critic declares I am wrong in sajdng that M. Renan's language
implies this. I still think that there is a shade, a nuance of expression,
in M. Renan's language, which does imply this ; but, I confess, the only
person who can really settle such a question is M. Renan himself.
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 49
the English reverends, to make out that Mahomet was
the little horn of the he-goat that figures in the eighth
chapter of Daniel, and that the Pope was the great horn.
Mr. Forster founded on this ingenious parallel a whole
philosophy of history, according to which the Pope repre-
sented the Western corruption of Christianity, and Mahomet
the Eastern ; thence the striking resemblances between
Mahometanism and Popery.' And in a note M. Renan
adds : ' This is the same Mr. Charles Forster who is the
.0 author of a mystification about the Sinaitic inscriptions,
in which he declares he finds the primitive language.' As
much as to say : ' It is an Englishman, be surprised at no
extravagance.' If these innuendoes had no ground, and
were made in hatred and malice, they would not be worth
a moment's attention ; but they coniB from a grave
OrientaUst, on his own subject, and they point to a real
fact ; — the absence, in this country, of any force of educated
literary and scientific o]3iniou, making abeirations like
those of the author of The One Primeval Language out of the
!0 question. Not only the author of such aberrations, often
a very clever man, suffers by the w^ant of check, by the
not being kept straight, and spends force in vain on a
false road, which, under better discipUne, he might have
used with profit on a true one ; but all his adherents,
both ' reverends ' and others, suffer too, and the general
rate of information and judgment is in this way kept low.
In a production which we have all been reading lately,
a production stamped throughout with a literary quality
very rare in this country, and of which I shall have a
JO word to say presently, — urbanity ; in this production, the
work of a man never to be named by any son of Oxford
without sympathy, a man who alone in Oxford of his
generation, alone of many generations, conveyed to us
in his genius that same charm, that same ineffable senti-
ment, which this exquisite place itself conveys, — I mean
Dr. Newman, — an expression is frequently used which is
more common in theological than in literary language,
but which seems to me fitted to be of general service ;
the 7iote of so and so, the note of catholicity, the not© of
40 antiquity, the note of sanctity, and so on. Adopting this
expressive word, I say that in the bulk of the intellectual
ABNOLO 2}
60 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
work of ^ natum which hasno centre, no intellectual
metropolis Tike an " academy, "^Tike M. Sainte-Beuve's
""^sovereign organ of opinion,' Hke M. Kenan's ' recognised
authority in matters of tone and taste,' — there is observable
'si'note of frovinciality. Now to get rid of provinciahty is
aT certain stage of culture ; a stage the positive result of
which we must not make of too much importance, but which
is, nevertheless, indispensable ; for it brings us on to the
platform where alone the best and highest intellectual work
can be said fairly to begin. Work done after men have^io
reached this platform is classical ; and that is the only wor]^"
which, in the long run, can stand. All the scoriae in the"
work of men of great genius who have not lived on this
platform, are due to their not having lived on it. Genius
raises them to it by moments, and the portions of their
work which are immortal are done at these moments ;
but more of it would have been immortal if they had not
reached this platform at moments only, if they had had
the culture which makes men live there.
The less a literature has felt the influence of a supposed 20
centre of correct information, correct judgment, correct
taste, the more we shall find in it this note of provinciality.
I have shown the note of provinciality asj;aused by remotej:
ness from a centre of cogi^Jllnfofinatiqii. Of course, the
note of provinciality Irom the want of a centre of correct
taste is still more visible, and it is also still more common.
For here great — even the greatest — powers of mmd most
fail a man. Great powers of mind will make him inform
himself thoroughly, great powers of mind will make him
think profoundly, even with ignorance and platitude all 30
round him ; but not even great powers of mind will keep
his taste and style perfectly sound and sure, if he is left too^
much to himself, with no sovereign organ of opinion,'
in these matters, near him. Even men Uke^ Jeremy Taylor
and Burke suffer here. Tafe this passage from Taylor's
fimeral sermon onTLady Carbery : —
' So have I seen a river, deep and smooth, passmg
with a still foot and a sober face, and paying to the fiscus,
the great exchequer of the sea, a tribute large and full ;
and hard by it, a Uttle brook, skipping and making a 40
noise upon its unequal and neighbour bottom ; and after
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OP ACADEMIES 51
all its talking and bragged motion, it paid to its common
audit no more than the revenues of a little cloud or a
contemptible vessel : so have I sometimes compared the
issues of her rehgion to the solemnities and famed out-
sides of another's piety.'
That passage has been much admired, and, indeed, the
genius in it is undeniable. I should say, for my part,
that genius, the ruling divinity of poetry, had been too
busy in it, and intelligence, the ruling divmity of prose,
10 not busy enough I But can any un?57with"nie' 'Best 'models
of style in his head, help feeling the note of provinciality
there, the want of simplicity, the want of measure7 ffie
want of 2ust the qualities^That Inake prose classical ? If
lie""does not feel what T mean, let him place beside the
passage of Taylor this passage from the Panegyric of
St. Paul, by Taylor's contemporary, Bossuet : —
' II ira, cet ignorant dans I'art de bien dire, avec cette
locution rude, avec cette phrase qui sent I'etranger, il ira
en cette Grece pohe, la mere des philosophes et des
20 orateurs ; et malgre la resistance du monde, il y etablira
plus d'Eghses que Platon n'y a gagne de disciples par
cette eloquence qu'on a crue divine.'
There we have prose without the note of provinciality,
— cTassic^pTogJprose^of the centre.
Or take Burke, our greatest English prose-writer, as I
think ; take expressions like this : —
' Blindfold themselves, Uke bulls that shut their eyes
when they push, they drive, by the point of their bayonets,
their slaves, blindfolded, indeed, no worse than their
JO lords, to take their fictions for currencies, and to swallow
down paper pills by thirty-four millions sterling at a
dose.'
Or this :—
' They used it ' (the royal name) ' as a sort of navel-
string, to nourish their unnatural offspring from the bowels
of royalty itself. Now that the monster can purvey for
its own subsistence, it will only carry the mark about it,
as a token of its having torn the womb it came from.'
Or this :—
10 ' Without one natural pang, he ' (Rousseau) ' casts
away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his
£ 2
/
52 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital
of foundlings.'
Or this :—
* I confess, I never liked this continual talk of resistance
and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme
medicine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders
the habit of society dangerously valetudinary ; it is taking
periodical doses of mercury sublimate and swallowing
down repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love of
liberty.' k
I say that is extravagant prose ; prose too much suffered
to ihduTge its caprices ; prose at too great a distance from
the centre of good taste ; prose, in short, with the note^
of provinciality. People may reply, it is rich and imagina-
tive ; yes, that is j'ust it^ it is Asiatic prose, as the ancieiit
critics would have said ; prose somewhat barbarously
rich and overloaded. But the true prose is Attic prose.
Well, but Addison's prose is Attic prose. Where, then,
it may be asked, is the note of provinciality in Addison ?
I answer, in the commohplace of his ideas.* This is a^(
matter worth remarking. Addison claims to take leading
rank as a moralist. To do that, you must have ideas of
the first order on your subject, — the best ideas, at_any
rate, attainable in your time, — as well as be able to express
them in a perfectly sound and sure style. Else you show
your distance from the centre of ideas by your matter ;
you are provincial by your matter, though you may not
be provincial by your style. It is comparatively a small
matter to express oneself well, if one will be content with
^ A critic says this is paradoxical, and urges that many second-rate
French academicians have uttered the most commonplace ideas possible.
I agree that many second-rate French academicians have uttered the
most commonplace ideas possible ; but Addison is not a second-rate
man. He is a man of the order, I will not say of Pascal, but at any rate
of La Bruyere and Vauvenargues ; why does he not equal them ?
I say, because of the medium in which he finds himself, the atmosphere
in which he lives and works ; an atmosphere which teUs unfavourably,
or rather tends to teU unfavourably (for that is the truer way of putting
it) either upon style or else upon ideas ; tends to make even a man of
great ability either a Mr. Carlyle or else a Lord Macaulay.
It is to be observed, however, that Lord Macaulay's style has in
its turn suffered by his failure in ideas, and this cannot be said of
Addison's.
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 53
not expressing much, with expressing only trite ideas ; the
prnhlem is to express new and profound ideas in a^erfectly
sound and classical style. He is the^true classiCj injsyery
age, who does that. Now Addison has not, on his subject
oi morals, the fOTce of ideas of the moralists of the first
class, — the classical moralists ; he has not the best ideas
attainable in or about his time, and which were, so to speak,
in the air then, to be seized by the finest spirits ; he is not
^cTBe compared for power, searchingness, or delicacy of
10 thought, to Pascal, or La Bruyere, or Vauvenargues ; he
is rather on a level, in this respect, with a man like Har-
mon tel ; therefore, I say, _hehas the note of provinciality
as a nioraUst ; he is provmcialTy his matter, though not
'By liis^tyle.
To illustrate what I mean by an example. Addison,
writing as a moralist on fixedness in reUgious faith, says : —
' Those who delight in reading books of controversy
do very seldom arrive at a fixed and settled habit of
faith. The doubt which was laid revives again, and
20 shows itself in new difficulties ; and that generally for
this reason, — because the mind, which is perpetually tossed
in controversies and disputes, is apt to forget the reasons
which had once set it at rest, and to be disquieted with
any former perplexity when it appears in a new shape, or
is started by a different hand.'
It may be said, that is classical English, perfect in lucidity,
measure, and propriety. I make no objection ; but, in
my turn, I say that the idea expressed is perfectly trite
and barren, and that it is a note of provinciality in Addison,
80 in a man whom a nation puts forward as one of its great
morahsts, to have no profounder and more striking idea
to produce on this great subject. Compare, on the same
subject, these words of a moralist really of the first order,
really at the centre bv his ideas, — Joubert : —
TTexpSnence de beaucoup d'opinfons donne a 1' esprit
beaucoup de flexibilite et Taffermit dans celles qu'il croit
lesmeilleures.'
With what a flash of light that touches the subject I
how it sets us thinking ! what a genuine contribution to
40 moral science it is !
In short, where there is no centre like an academy, if
64 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
you have genius and powerful ideas, you are apt not to
have the best style going ; if you have precision of style
and not genius, you are apt not to have the best ideas
going-
The provincial spirit, again, exaggerates the value of
its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which
to try them. Or rather, for want of such a standard, it
gives one idea too much "prominence at the expense of
others ; it orders its ideas amiss ; it is hurried away by
fancies ; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too ex- lo
clusively. Its admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its
disapprobation foams at the mouth. So we get thGerujptive_
and the aggressive manner in literature ; the former
prevails most in our criticism, the latter in our^ news-
papers. For, not having the lucidity of a large and
centrally placed intelligence, the provincial spirit has n~St —
its graciousness ; it does not persuade, it makes war ;
it hasjaot urbanity, the tone of the city, of the^centre7
t-he tone which always aims at a spiritual' and intellectual
effect, and not excluding the use of banter, never disjoins 20
banter itself from politeness, from felicity. But the
provincial tone is more violent, and seems to aim rather
at an effect upon the blood and senses than upon the
spirit and intellect ; it loves hard-hitting rather than
persuading. The newspaper, with its party spirit, its
thorough-goingness, its resolute avoidance of shades and
distinctions, its short, highly-charged, heavy-shotted,
articles, its style so unlike that style lenis minimeque per-
tinax — easy and not too violently insisting, — which the
ancients so much admired, is its true literature ; the 30
provincial spirit Ukes in the newspaper just what makes
the newspaper such bad food for it, — just what made
Goethe say, when he was pressed hard about the im-
morality of Byron's poems, that, after all, they were not
so immoral as the newspapers. The French talk of the
brutalite des journaux anglais. What strikes them comes
from the necessary inherent tendencies of newspaper-
writing not being checked in England by any centre of
intelligent and urbane spirit, but rather stimulated by
coming in contact with a provincial spirit. Even a news- 40
paper like the Saturday Eeview, that old friend of all of us,
THE LITERA^IY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 55
a newspaper expressly aiming at an immunity from the
common newspaper-spirit, aiming at being a sort of organ
of reason, — and, by thus aiming, it merits great gratitude
and has done great good, — even the Saturday Review,
replying to some foreign criticism on our precautions
against invasion, falls into a strain of this kind : —
' To do this ' (to take these precautions) ' seems to
us eminently worthy of a great nation, and to talk of it
as unworthy of a great nation, seems to us eminently
10 worthy of a great fool.'
There is what the French mean when they talk of the
brutaliU des journaux anglais ; there is a style certainly as
far removed from urbanity as possible, — a style with
what I call the note of provinciality. And the same
note may not unfrequently be observed even in the ideas
of this newspaper, full as it is of thought and cleverness :
certain ideas allojgLed to iecome fixed ideas, to prevail
Too abBolulelyn will not speak of the immediate present,
l^ut, to go a little while back, it had the critic who so
20 disliked the Emperor of the French ; it had the critic
who so disliked the subject of my present remarks —
academies ; it had the critic who was so fond of the German
element in our nation, and, indeed, everywhere ; who
ground his t-eeth if one said Charlemagne^ instead of Charles
the Great, and, in short, saw all things in Teutonism, as
Malebranche saw all things in God. Certainly any one may
fairly find faults in the Emperor Napoleon or in academies,
and merit in the German element ; but it is a note of the
provincial spirit not to hold ideas of this kind a little more
30 easily, to be so devoured by them, to suffer them to become
crotchets.
In England there needs a miracle of genius hke Shak-
speare's to produce balance of mind, and a miracle of
intellectual delicacy like Dr. Newman's to produce urbanity
of style. How_prevalent all round us is the want of balance
of mind anHTurbanity of style ! How much, doubtless, it
is to belound in ourselves, — in each of us ! but, as human
nature is constituted, every one can see it clearest in his
contemporaries. There, above all, we should consider it,
CO because they and we are exposed to the same influences ;
and it is in the best of one's contemporaries that it is
56 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
most worth considering, because one then most feels the
harm it does, when one sees what they would be without it.
Think of the difference between Mr. Ruskin exercising his
genius, and Mr. Ruskin exercising his intelligence ; consider
the truth and beauty of this : —
' Go out, in the spring-time, among the meadows that
slope from the shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of
their lower mountains. There, mingled with the taller
gentians and the white narcissus, the grass grows deep and
free ; and as you follow the winding mountain paths, iQ
beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom,
— paths that for ever droop and rise over the green banks
and mounds sweeping down in scented undulation, steep
to the blue water, studded here and there with new-mown
heaps, filling all the air with fainter sweetness, — ^look up
towards the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting
green roll silently into their long inlets among the shadows
of the pines. . . .'
There is what the genius, the feeling, the temperament
in Mr. Ruskin, the original and incommunicable part, 2C
has to do with ; and how exquisite it is ! All the critic
could possibly suggest, in the way of objection, would be,
perhaps, that Mr. Ruskin is there trying to make prose
do more than it can perfectly do -"fcliat what he is there
attempting he will never, except in poetry, be able To
accomplish to his own entire satisfaction : but he accom-
plishes so much that the critic may well hesitate to suggest
even this. Place beside this charming passage another, —
a passage about Shakspeare's names, where the inteUigence
and judgment of Mr. Ruskin, the acquired, trained, com- 3C
municable part in him, are brought into play, — and see
the difference : —
' Of Shakspeare's names I will afterwards speak at
more length ; they are curiously — often barbarously —
mixed out of various traditions and languages. Three
of the clearest in meaning have been already noticed.
Desdemona — " 8vo-8at/Aovia ", miserable fortune — is also
plain enough. Othello is, I believe, " the careful ; " all
the calamity of the tragedy arising from the single flaw
and error in his magnificently collected strength. Ophelia, 40
** l^erviceableness," the true^ lost wife of Hamlet, is marked
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 57
as having a Greek name by that of her brother, Laertes ;
and its signification is once exquisitely alluded to in that
brother's last word of her, where her gentle preciousness
is opposed to the uselessness of the churlish clergy : —
" A ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest
howling." Hamlet is, I believe, connected in some way
with " homely," the entire event of the tragedy turning on
betrayal of home duty. Hermione (cp/xa), *' pillar-like "
(7 €1809 €;^€ Xpv(Trj<s * A(f>poStTij<s) ; Titania (rirr/vry), " the
0 queen " ; Benedict and Beatrice, " blessed and blessing " ;
Valentine and Proteus, " enduring or strong " {valens),
and " changeful." lago and lachimo have evidently the
same root — probably the Spanish lago, Jacob, " the
supplant er." '
Now, really, what a piece of extravagance all that is !
I will not say that the meaning of Shakspeare's names
(I put aside the question as to the correctness of Mr.
Ruskin's etymologies) has no effect at all, may be entirely
lost sight of ; but to give it that degree of prominence is
0 to throw the reins to one's whim, to forget all moderation
and proportion, to lose the balance of one's mind altogether.
It is to show in one's criticism, to the highest excess, the
note of provinciality.
Again, there is Mr. Palgrave, certainly endowed with a
very fine critical tact ; his Golden Treasury abundantly
proves it. The plan of arrangement which he devised
for that work, the mode in which he followed his plan
out, nay, one might even say, merely the juxtaposition,
in pursuance of it, of two such pieces as those of Words-
0 worth and Shelley which form the 285th and 286th in
his collection, show a delicacy of feeling in these matters
which is quite indisputable and very rare. And his notes
are full of remarks which show it too. All the more
striking, conjoined with so much justness of perception,
are certain freaks and violences in Mr. Palgrave's criticism,
mainly imputable, I think, to the critic's isolated position
in this country, to his feeling himself too much left to
take his own way, too much without any central authority
representing high culture and sound judgment, by which
ohe may be, on the one hand, confirmed as against the
ignorant, on the other, held in respect when he himself
68 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
is inclined to take liberties. I mean such things as this
note on Milton's line, —
' The great Emathian conqueror bade spare ' . . .
* When Thebes was destroyed, Alexander ordered the
house of Pindar to be spared. He ivas as incapable of
appreciating the poet as Louis XI V of appreciating Racine;
hut even the narrow and barbarian mind of Alexander
could understand the advantage of a showy act of homage
to poetry.' A note like that I call a freak or a violence ;
if this disparaging view of Alexander and Louis XIV, soi
unlike the current view, is wrong, — if the current view
is, after all, the truer one of them, — the note is a freak.
But, even if its disparaging view is right, the note is a
violence ; for, abandoning the true mode of intellectual
action — persuasion, the instilment of conviction, — it simply
astounds and irritates the hearer by contradicting without
a word of proof or preparation, his fixed and familiar
notions ; and this is mere violence. In either case, the
fitness, the measure, the centrality, which is the soul of
all good criticism, is lost, and the note of provinciality 2
shows itself.
Thus in the famous Handbook, marks of a fine power of
perception are everywhere discernible, but so, too, are
marks of the want of sure balance, of the check and support
afforded by knowing one speaks before good and severe
judges. When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing, he feels no
pressure constraining him either to try his dislike closely
or to express it moderately ; he does not mince matters,
he gives his dislike all its own way ; both his judgment
and his style would gain if he were under more restraint. 2
' The style which has filled London with the dead monotony
of Gower or Harley Streets, or the pale commonplace of
Belgravia, Tyburnia and Kensington ; which has pierced
Paris and Madrid with the feeble frivolities of the Rue
Rivoli and the Strada de Toledo.' He dislikes the archi-
tecture of the Rue Rivoli, and he puts it on a level with the
architecture of Belgravia and Gower Street ; he lumps
them all together in one condemnation, he loses sight of the
shade, the distinction, which is everything here ; the
distinction, namely, that the architecture of the Rue Rivoli i
THE LITERARY INFT.UENCE OF ACADEmES 59
expresses show, splendour, pleasure, — unworthy things,
perhaps, to express alone and for their own sakes, but it
expresses them ; whereas the architecture of Gower Street
and Belgravia merely expresses the impotence of the
architect to express anything. Then, as to style : ' sculp-
ture which stands in a contrast with Woolner hardly more
shameful than diverting,' . . . ' passing from Davy or
Faraday to the art of the mountebank or the science of
the spirit-rapper,' . . . ' it is the old, old story with Maro-
chetti, the frog trying to blow himself out to bull dimensions.
He may puff and be puffed, but he will never do it.' We
all remember that shower of amenities on poor M. Maro-
chetti. Now, here Mr. Palgrave himself enables us to form
a contrast which lets us see just what the presence of
an academy does for style ; for he quotes a criticism
by M. Gustave Planche on this very M. Marochetti.
M. Gustave Planche was a critic of the very first order,
a man of strong opinions, which he expressed with severity ;
he, too, condemns M. Marochetti's work, and Mr. Palgrave
calls him as a witness to back what he has himself said ;
certainly Mr. Palgrave's translation will not exaggerate
M. Planche's urbanity in dealing with M. Marochetti, but,
even in this translation, see the difference in sobriety, in
measure, between the critic writing in Paris and the critic
writing in London : —
' These conditions are so elementary, that I am at a
perfect loss to comprehend how M. Marochetti has neglected
them. There are soldiers here like the leaden playthings
of the nursery : it is almost impossible to guess whether
there is a body beneath the dress. We have here no
question of style, not even of grammar ; it is nothing
beyond mere matter of the alphabet of art. To break
these conditions is the same as to be ignorant of spelhng.'
That is really more formidable criticism than Mr.
Palgrave's, and yet in how perfectly temperate a style !
M. Planche's advantage is, that he feels himself to be
speaking before competent judges, that there is a force of
cultivated opinion for him to appeal to. Therefore, he
must not be extravagant, and he need not storm ; he
must satisfy the reason and taste, — that is his business.
Mr. Palgrave, on the other hand, feels himself to be
60 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
speaking before a promiscuous multitude, with the few
good judges so scattered through it as to be powerless ;
therefore, he has no calm confidence and no self-control ;
he reUes on the strength of his lungs ; he knows that big
words impose on the mob, and that, even if he is outrageous,
most of his audience are apt to be a great deal more so>
Again, the first two volumes of Mr. Kinglake's Invasion
of the Crimea were certainly among the most successful
and reno^vned English books of our time. Their style was
one of the most renowned things about them, and yet how
conspicuous a fault in Mr. Kinglake's style is this over-
charge of which I have been speaking ! Mr. James Gordon
Bennett, of the New York Herald, says, I believe, that the
highest achievement of the human intellect is what he calls
' a good editorial.' This is not quite so ; but, if it were
so, on what a height would these two volumes by Mr. King-
lake stand ! I have already spoken of the Attic and the
Asiatic styles ; besides these, there is the Corinthian stvle.
That is the style for ' a good editorial,' and Mr. Kinglake
has really reached perfection in it. It lia^jQijt_the_warm
glow, blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life, as the
Attic style has ; IFTias not the over-heavy richness and
encumbered gait of the Asiatic style ; it has glitter witholit
warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness without
charm. Its characteristic is, that it has no soul ; all it exists
for, is to get its ends, to make its points, to damage its
adversaries, to be admired,' to triumph. A style so bent on
effect at the expense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy;
a style so little studious of the charm of the great models ;
so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be said to
have the note of provinciality. Yet Mr. Kinglake's talent
is a really eminent one, and so in harmony with our intel-
lectual habits and tendencies, that, to the great bulk of
English people, the faults of his style seem its merits ;
all the more needful that criticism should not be dazzled
by them, but should try closely this, the form of his work.
The matter of the work is a separate thing ; and, indeed,
this has been, I believe, withdrawn from discussion,
^ When I wrote this I had before me the first edition of Mr. Palgrave's
Handbook. I am bound to say that in the second edition much strong
language has been expunged, and what remains, softened.
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 61
Mr. Kinglake declaring that this must and shall stay as it is,
and that he is resolved, like Pontius Pilate, to stand by what
he has written. And here, I must say, he seems to me to
be quite right. On the breast of the huge Mississippi of
falsehood called history, a foam-bell more or less is of no
consequence. But he may, at any rate, ease and soften
his style.
We must not compare a man of Mr. Kinglake's literary
talent with French writers like M. de Bazancourt. We
must compare him with M. Thiers. And what a superiority
in style has M. Thiers from being formed in a good school,
with severe traditions, wholesome restraining influences !
Even in this age of IVIr. James Gordon Bennett, his style
has nothing Corinthian about it, its lightness and brightness
make it almost Attic. It is not quite Attic, however ;
it has not the infallible sureness of Attic taste. Sometimes
his head gets a little hot with the fumes of patriotism, and
then he crosses the Hne, he loses perfect measure, he declaims,
he raises a momentary smile. France condemned ' a etre
I'effroi du monde dont elle pourrait etre Vamour,' — Caesar,
whose exquisite simplicity M. Thiers so much admires,
would not have written like that. There is, if I may be
allowed to say so, the slightest possible touch of fatuity
in such language, — of that failure in good sense which comes
from too warm a self-satisfaction. But compare this
language with Mr. Kinglake's Marshal St. Arnaud — ' dis-
missed from the presence ' of Lord Raglan or Lord Stratford,
* cowed and pressed down ' under their ' stern reproofs,'
or under ' the majesty of the great Elchi's Canning brow and
tight, merciless lips ! ' The failure in good sense and good
taste there reaches far beyond what the French mean
by fatuity ; they would call it by another word, a word
expressing blank defect of inteUigence, a word for which
we have no exact equivalent in English ,-^^^e. It js the.
difference between a venial, momentary, good-tempered
exce5S^,~Tn'"a''man of the world, of an amiable and social
wealmess, — ^vanity ; and a serious, settled, fierce, narrow,
provincial -misconception of the whole relative value of
one's own things and the things of others. So baneful to
the style of even the cleverest man may be the total want of
checks.
62 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
In all I have said, I do not pretend that the examples
given prove my rule as to the influence of academies ;
they only illustrate it. Examples in plenty might very
likely be found to set against them ; the truth of the rule
depends, no doubt, on whether the balance of all the
examples is in its favour or not ; but actually to strike
this balance is always out of the question. Here, as every-
where else, the rule, the idea, if true, commends itself to
the judicious, and then the examples make it clearer still
to them. This is the real use of examples, and this alone i
is the purpose which I have meant mine to serve. There is
also another side to the whole question, — as to the limiting
and prejudicial operation which academies may have ; but
this side of the question it rather behoves the French, not
us, to study.
The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about
the establishment of an Academy in this country, and
perhaps I shall hardly give him the one he expects. But
nations have their own modes of acting, and these modes
are not easily changed ; they are even consecrated, when 2
great things have been done in them. When a literature
has produced Shakspeare and Milton, when it has even
produced Barrow and Burke, it cannot well abandon its
traditions ; it can hardly begin, at this late time of day,
with an institution like the French Academy. I think
academies with a limited, special, scientific scope, in the
various lines of intellectual work, — academies like that of
Berlin, for instance, — we with time may, and probably
shall, establish. And no doubt they will do good ; no
doubt the presence of such influential centres of correct 3
information will tend to raise the standard amongst us
for what I have called the journeyman-work of literature,
and to free us from the scandal of such biographical
dictionaries as Chalmers's, or such translations as a recent
one of Spinoza, or perhaps, such philological freaks as
Mr. Forster's about the one primeval language. But an
academy quite hke the French Academy, a sovereign
organ of the highest literary opinion, a recognised authority
in matters of intellectual tone and taste, we shall hardly
have, and perhaps we ought not to wish to have it. But k
then every one amongst us with any turn for literature
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 63
will do well to remember to what shortcomings and
excesses, which such an academy tends to correct, we are
liable ; and the more liable, of course, for not having it.
He will do well constantly to try himself in respect of these,
steadily to widen his culture, severely to check in himself
the provincial spirit ; and he will do this the better the more
he keeps in mind that all mere glorification by ourselves
of ourselves or our literature, in the strain of what, at the
beginning of these remarks, I quoted from Lord Macaulay,
is both vulgar, and, besides being vulgar, retarding.
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN
I WILL not presume to say that I now know the French
language well ; but at a time when I knew it even less
well than at present, — some fifteen years ago, — I remember
pestering those about me with this sentence, the rhythm oi
which had lodged itself in my head, and which, with the
strangest pronunciation possible, I kept perpetually de-
claiming : ' Les dieux jaloux ont enfoui quelque part la
temoignages de la descendance des choses ; mais au bord
de quel Ocean ont-ils roule lapierre qui les couvre, 6 Macaree!'
These words come from a short composition called
the Centaur, of which the author, Georges-Maurice de
Guerin, died in the year 1839, at the age of twenty-eight,
without having published anything. In 1840, Madame
Sand brought out the Centaur in the Revue des Deta
Mondes, with a short notice of its author, and a few extracts
from his letters. A year or two afterwards she reprinted
these at the end of a volume of her novels ; and there i1
was that I fell in with them. I was so much struck witt
the Centaur that I waited anxiously to hear something
more of its author, and of what he had left ; but it was nol
till the other day — twenty years after the first publicatioi:
of the Centaur in the Revue des Deux Mondes, that mj
anxiety was satisfied. At the end of 1860 appeared two
volumes with the title, Maurice de Guerin, Reliquiae
containing the Centaur, several poems of Guerin, his journals
and a number of his letters, collected and edited by a
devoted friend, M. Trebutien, and preceded by a notice
of Guerin by the first of living critics, M. Sainte-Beuve.
The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power
by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in blact
and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe
but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken ir
us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them
and of our relations with them. When this sense is awak-
MAURICE DE GUI5rIN 05
enecl in us, as to objects without us, we feel ourselves
to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects,
to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but
to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them ;
and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can.
Poetry, indeed, interprets in another way besides this ;
but one of its two ways of interpreting, of exercising its
highest power, is by awakening this sense in us. I will
not now inquire whether this sense is illusive, whether it
) can be proved not to be illusive, whether it does absolutely
make us possess the real nature of things ; all I say is,
that poetry can awaken it in us, and that to awaken it
is one of the highest powers of poetry. The interpretations
of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects
as the interpretations of poetry give it ; they appeal to
a Umited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not
Linnaeus, or Cavendish, or Cuvier who gives us the true
sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their
secret for us, who makes us participate in their life ; it is
) Shakspeare, with his
' daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty ; '
it is Wordsworth, with his
' voice . . . heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides ; '
it is Keats, wnth his
> * moving waters at their priestlike task
Of cold ablution round Earth's human shores ; '
it is Chateaubriand, with his ' cime indeterminee des forets ;
it is Senancour, with his mountain birch-tree : ' Cette
ecorce blanche, lisse et crevassee ; cette tige agreste ; ces
branches qui s'inclinent vers la terre ; la mobilite des feuilles,
et tout cet abandon, simjplicite de la nature, attitude des deserts.^
Eminent manifestations of this magical power of poetry
are very rare and very precious : the compositions of
Guerin manifest it, I think, in singular eminence. Not
)his poems, strictly so called, — his verse, — so much as his
ARNOLD ■£
66 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
prose ; his poems in general take for their vehicle that
favourite metre of French poetry, the Alexandrine ; and,
in my judgment, I confess they have thus, as compared
with his prose, a great disadvantage to start with. In
prose, the character of the vehicle for the composer's
thoughts is not determined beforehand ; every composer
has to make his own vehicle ; and who has ever done this
more admirably than the great prose -writers of France, —
Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Voltaire ? But in verse the
composer has (with comparatively narrow liberty of i
modification) to accept his vehicle ready-made ; it is
therefore of vital importance to him that he should find
at his disposal a vehicle adequate to convey the highest
matters of poetry. We may even get a decisive test of
the poetical power of a language and nation by ascertaining
how far the principal poetical vehicle which they have
employed, how far (in plainer words) the established
national metre for high poetry, is adequate or inadequate.
It seems to me that the established metre of this kind
in France, — the Alexandrine, — is inadequate ; that as 2
a vehicle for high poetry it is greatly inferior to the hexa-
meter or to the iambics of Greece (for example), or to the
blank verse of England. Therefore the man of genius who
uses it is at a disadvantage as compared with the man of
genius who has for conveying his thoughts a more adequate
vehicle, metrical or not. Racine is at a disadvantage as
compared with Sophocles or Shakspeare, and he is likewise
at a disadvantage as compared with Bossuet. The same
may be said of our own poets of the eighteenth century,
a century which gave them as the main vehicle for their 31
high poetry a metre inadequate (as much as the French
Alexandrine, and nearly in the same way) for this poetry, —
the ten-syllable couplet. It is worth remarking, that the
English poet of the eighteenth century whose compositions
wear best and give one the most entire satisfaction, — Gray,
— hardly uses that couplet at all : this abstinence, however,
limits Gray's productions to a few short compositions,
and (exquisite as these are) he is a poetical nature repressed
and without free issue. For English poetical production
on a great scale, for an English poet deploying all the forces 4
of his genius, the ten-syllable couplet was, in the eighteenth
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 67
century, the established, one may almost say the inevitable,
channel. Now this couplet, admirable (as Chaucer uses
it) for story -telling not of the epic pitch, and often admirable
for a few lines even in poetry of a very high pitch, is for
continuous use in poetry of this latter kind inadequate.
Pope, in his Essay on Man, is thus at a disadvantage
compared with Lucretius in his poem on Nature : Lucretius
has an adequate vehicle, Pope has not. Nay, though
Pope's genius for didactic poetry was not less than that of
[0 Horace, while his satirical power was certainly greater,
still one's taste receives, I cannot but think, a certain
satisfaction when one reads the Epistles and Satires of
Horace, which it fails to receive when one reads the Satires
and Epistles of Pope. Of such avail is the superior adequacy
of the vehicle used to compensate even an inferiority of
genius in the user ! In the same way Pope is at a disad-
vantage as compared with Addison. The best of Addison's
composition (the ' Coverley Papers ' in the Spectator, for
instance) wears better than the best of Pope's, because
10 Addison has in his prose an intrinsically better vehicle
for his genius than Pope in his couplet. But Bacon has no
such advantage over Shakspeare ; nor has Milton, writing
prose (for no contemporary English prose-writer must be
matched with Milton except Milton himself), any such
advantage over Milton writing verse : indeed, the advantage
here is all the other way.
It is in the prose remains of Guerin, — his journals, his
letters, and the striking composition which I have already
mentioned, the Centaur, — ^that his extraordinary gift
10 manifests itself. He has a truly interpretative faculty ;
the most profound and delicate sense of the life of Nature,
and the most exquisite felicity in finding expressions
to render that sense. To all who love poetry, Guerin
deserves to be something more than a name ; and I shall
try, in spite of the impossibility of doing justice to such
a master of expression by translations, to make my English
readers see for themselves how gifted an organisation his
was, and how few artists have received from Nature a more
magical faculty of interpreting her.
10 In the winter of the year 1832 there was collected
F2
68 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
in Brittany, around the well-known Abbe Lamennais,
a singular gathering. At a lonely place, La Chenaie, he
had founded a religious retreat, to which disciples, attracted
by his powers or by his reputation, repaired. Some came
with the intention of preparing themselves for the ecclesi-
astical profession ; others merely to profit by the society
and discourse of so distinguished a master. Among the
inmates were men whose names have since become known
to all Europe, — Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert ;
there were others, who have acquired a reputation, not i
European, indeed, but considerable, — the Abbe Gerbet,
the Abbe Rohrbacher ; others, who have never quitted the
shade of private life. The winter of 1832 was a period
of crisis in the religious world of France : Lamennais 's
rupture with Rome, the condemnation of his opinions by
the Pope, and his revolt against that condemnation, were
imminent. Some of his followers, like Lacordaire, had
already resolved not to cross the Rubicon with their leader,
not to go into rebellion against Rome ; they were preparing
to separate from him. The society of La Chenaie was soon 2
to dissolve ; but, such as it is shown to us for a moment,
with its voluntary character, its simple and severe life in
common, its mixture of lay and clerical members, the genius
of its chiefs, the sincerity of its disciples, — above all, its
paramount fervent interest in matters of spiritual and reli-
gious concernment, — it offers a most instructive spectacle.
It is not the spectacle we most of us think to find in France,
the France we have imagined from common English notions,
from the streets of Paris, from novels ; it shows us how,
wherever there is greatness like that of France, there are, 3
as its foundation, treasures of fervour, pure-mindedness,
and spirituality somewhere, whether we know of them or
not ; — a store of that which Goethe calls Halt ; — since
greatness can never be founded upon frivolity and cor-
ruption.
On the evening of the 18th of December in this year
1832, M. de Lamennais was talking to those assembled
in the sitting-room of La Chenaie of his recent journey
to Italy. He talked with all his usual animation ; ' but,'
writes one of his hearers, a Breton gentleman, M. de^
Marzan, ' I soon became inattentive and absent, being
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 09
struck with the reserved attitude of a young stranger some
twenty-two years old, pale in face, his black hair already
thin over his temples, with a southern eye, in which
brightness and melancholy were mingled. He kept himself
somewhat aloof, seeming to avoid notice rather than to
court it. All the old faces of friends which I found about
me at this my re-entry into the circle of La Chenaie failed
to occupy me so much as the sight of this stranger, looking
on, listening, observing, and saying nothing.'
0 The miknown was Maurice de Guerin. Of a noble
but poor family, having lost his mother at six years old,
he had been brought up by his father, a man saddened
by his wife's death, and austerely religious, at the chateau
of Le Cayla, in Languedoc. His childhood was not gay ;
he had not the society of other boys ; and solitude, the
sight of his father's gloom, and the habit of accompanjdng
the cure of the parish on his rounds among the sick and
djdng, made him prematurely grave and famiUar with
sorrow. He went to school first at Toulouse, then at the
;o College Stanislas at Paris, with a temperament almost as
unfit as Shelley's for common school life. His youth was
ardent, sensitive, agitated, and unhappy. In 1832 he
procured admission to La Chenaie to brace his spirit by
the teaching of Lamemiais, and to decide whether his
rehgious feelings would determine themselves into a dis-
tinct rehgious vocation. Strong and deep rehgious feelings
he had, implanted in him by nature, developed in him by
the circumstances of his childhood ; but he had also (and
here is the key to his character) that temperament which
10 opposes itself to the fixedness of a religious vocation, or of
any vocation of which fixedness is an essential attribute ;
a temperament mobile, inconstant, eager, thirsting for new
impressions, abhorrmg rules, aspiring to a ' renovation
without end ; ' a temperament common enough among
artists, but with which few artists, who have it to the same
degree as Guerin, unite a seriousness and a sad intensity
Hke his. After leaving school, and before going to La
Chenaie, he had been at home at Le Cayla with his sister
Eugenie (a wonderfully gifted person, whose genius • so
10 competent a judge as M. Sainte-Beuve is inclined to pro-
nounce even superior to her brother's) and his sister
70 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Eugenie's friends. With one of these friends he had fallen
in love, — a slight and transient fancy, but which had
already called his poetical powers into exercise ; and his
poems and fragments, in a certain green note-book {le
Cahier Vert) which he long continued to make the deposi-
tory of his thoughts, and which became famous among his
friends, he brought with him to La Chenaie. There he
found among the younger members of the Society several
who, like himself, had a secret passion for poetry and
literature ; with these he became intimate, and in his i
letters and journal we find him occupied, now with a literary
commerce established with these friends, now with the
fortunes, fast coming to a crisis, of the Society, and now
with that for the sake of which he came to La Chenaie, —
his religious progress and the state of his soul.
On Christmas-day, 1832, having been then three weeks
at La Chenaie, he writes thus of it to a friend of his family,
M. de Bayne : —
' La Chenaie is a sort of oasis in the midst of the steppes
of Brittany. In front of the chateau stretches a very 2
large garden, cut in two by a terrace with a lime avenue,
at the end of which is a tiny chapel. I am extremely fond
of this little oratory, where one breathes a twofold peace, —
the peace of solitude and the peace of the Lord. When
spring comes we shall walk to prayers between two borders
of flowers. On the east side, and only a few yards from
the chateau, sleeps a small mere between two woods,
where the birds in warm weather sing all day long ; and
then, — right, left, on all sides, — woods, woods, everywhere
woods. It looks desolate just now that all is bare and the 3
woods are rust-colour, and under this Brittany sky, which
is always clouded and so low that it seems as if it were
going to fall on your head ; but as soon as spring comes
the sky raises itself up, the woods come to life again, and
everything will be full of charm.'
Of what La Chenaie will be when spring comes he has
a foretaste on the 3rd of March.
* To-day ' (he writes in his journal) ' has enchanted me.
For the first time for a long while the sun has shown
himself in all his beauty. He has made the buds of the 41
leaves and flowers swell, and he has waked up in me a
MAURICE DE GUfiRiN 71
thousand happy thoughts. The clouds assume more and
more their Hght and graceful shapes, and are sketching,
over the blue sky, the most charming fancies. The woods
have not yet got their leaves, but they are taking an
indescribable air of life and gaiety, which gives them
quite a new physiognomy. Everything is getting ready
for the great festival of Nature.'
Storm and snow adjourn this festival a little longer.
On the 11th of March he writes : —
10 ' It has snowed all night. I have been to look at our
primroses ; each of them had its small load of snow, and
was bowing its head under its burden. These pretty
flowers, with their rich yellow colour, had a charming
effect under their white hoods. I saw whole tufts of
them roofed over by a single block of snow ; all these
laughing flowers thus shrouded and leaning one upon
another, made one think of a group of young girls surprised
by a shower, and sheltering under a white apron.'
The burst of spring comes at last, though late. On the
20 5th of April we find Guerin ' sitting in the sun to penetrate
himself to the very marrow with the divine spring.' On
the 3rd of May, ' one can actually see the progress of the
green ; it has made a start from the garden to the shrub-
beries, it is getting the upper hand all along the mere ;
it leaps, one may say, from tree to tree, from thicket to
thicket, in the fields and on the hill-sides ; and I can see
it already arrived at the forest edge and beginning to
spread itself over the broad back of the forest. Soon it
will have overrun everything as far as the eye can reach,
30 and all those wide spaces between here and the horizon
will be moving and sounding like one vast sea, a sea of
emerald.'
Finally, on the 16th of May, he writes to M. de Bayne
that ' the gloomy and bad days — bad because they bring
temptation by tlieir gloom, — are, thanks to God and the
spring, over ; and I see approaching a long file of shining
and happy days, to do me all the good in the world. This
Brittany of ours,' he continues, ' gives one the idea of the
greyest and most wrinkled old woman possible suddenly
40 changed back by the touch of a fairy's wand into a girl
of twenty, and one of the loveUest in the world ; the fine
72 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
weather has so decked and beautified the dear old country. '
He felt, however, the cloudiness and cold of the ' dear old
country ' with all the sensitiveness of a child of the South.
' What a difference,' he cries, ' between the sky of Brittany,
even on the finest day, and the sky of our South ! Here
the summer has, even on its highdays and holidays, some-
thing mournful, overcast, and stinted about it. It is like
a miser who is making a show ; there is a niggardliness in
his magnificence. Give me our Languedoc sky, so bountiful
of light, so blue, so largely vaulted ! ' And somewhat :
later, complaining of the short and dim sunhght of a
February day in Paris, ' What a sunshine,' he exclaims,
' to gladden eyes accustomed to all the wealth of light of
the South ! — aux larges et liberales effusions de lumiere du
del du Midi.'
In the long winter of La Chenaie his great resource
was literature. One has often heard that an educated
Frenchman's reading seldom goes much beyond French
and Latin, and that he makes the authors in these two
languages his sole literary standard. This may or may '
not be true of Frenchmen in general, but there can be no
question as to the width of the reading of Guerin and his
friends, and as to the range of their literary sympathies.
One of the circle, Hippol3rte la Morvonnais; — a poet who
published a volume of verse, and died in the prime of
life, — had a passionate admiration for Wordsworth, and
had even, it is said, made a pilgrimage to Rydal Mount
to visit him ; and in Guerin's own reading I find, besides
the French names of Bernardin de St. Pierre, Chateau-
briand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, the names of Homer, '<
Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and Goethe ; and he quotes
both from Greek and from English authors in the original.
His literary tact is beautifully fine and true. ' Every
poet,' he writes to his sister, ' has his own art of poetry
written on the ground of his own soul ; there is no other.
Be constantly observing Nature in her smallest details,
and then write as the current of your thoughts guides
you ; — that is all.' But with all this freedom from the
bondage of forms and rules, Guerin marks with perfect
precision the faults of the free French literature of his 4
time, — the litterature facile , — and judges the romantic
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 73
school and its prospects like a master : * that youthful
literature which has put forth all its blossom prematurely,
and has left itself a helpless prey to the returning frost,
stimulated as it has been by the burning smi of our century,
by this atmosphere charged with a perilous heat, which
has over-hastened every sort of development, and will
most likely reduce to a handful of grains the harvest
of our age.' And the popular authors, — those ' whose
name appears once and disappears for ever, whose books,
Q unwelcome to all serious people, welcome to the rest of
the world, to novelty-hunters and novel-readers, fill with
vanity these vain souls, and then, falling from hands
heavy with the languor of satiety, drop for ever into the
gulf of obHvion ; ' and those, more noteworthy, * the
\vTiters of books celebrated, and, as works of art, deserv-
ing celebrity, but which have in them not one grain of
that hidden manna, not one of those sweet and whole-
some thoughts which nourish the human soul and refresh
it when it is weary,' — these he treats with such severity
)that he may in some sense be described, as he describes
himself, as ' invoking with his whole heart a classical
restoration.' He is best described, however, not- as a
partisan of any school, but as an ardent seeker for that
mode of expression which is the most natural, happy,
and true. He writes to his sister Eugenie : —
' I want you to reform your system of composition ; it
is too loose, too vague, too Lamartinian. Your verse is
too sing-song ; it does not talk enough. Form for your-
self a style of your own, which shall be your real expression.
) Study the French language by attentive reading, making
it your care to remark constructions, turns of expression,
delicacies of style, but without ever adopting the manner
of any master. In the works of these masters we must
learn our language, but we must use it each in our own
fashion.' ^
It was not, however, to perfect his literary judgment
that Guerin come to La Chenaie. The rehgious feeling,
which was as much a part of his essence as the passion
* Part of these extracts date from a time a little after Guerin's
residence at La Chenaie ; but already, amidst the readings and con-
versations of La Chenaie, his literary judgment was perfectly formed.
74 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
for Nature and the literary instinct, shows itself at moments
jealous of these its rivals, and alarmed at their predomin-
ance. Like all powerful feelings, it wants to exclude every
other feeling and to be absolute. One Friday in April,
after he has been delighting himself with the shapes of the
clouds and the progress of the spring, he suddenly bethinks
himself that the day is Good Friday, and exclaims in his
diary : —
' My God, what is my soul about that it can thus go
running after such fugitive delights on Good Friday, on
this day all filled with thy death and our redemption ?
There is in me I know not what damnable spirit, that
awakens in me strong discontents, and is for ever prompt-
ing me to rebel against the holy exercises and the devout
collectedness of soul which are the meet preparation for
these great solemnities of our faith. Oh how well can
I trace here the old leaven, from which I have not yet
perfectly cleared my soul ! '
And again, in a letter to M. de Marzan : ' Of what, my
God, are we made,' he cries, ' that a little verdure and
a few trees should be enough to rob us of our tranquillity
and to distract us from thy love ? ' And writing, three
days after Easter Sunday, in his journal, he records the
reception at La Chenaie of a fervent neophyte, in words
which seem to convey a covert blame of his own want of
fervency : —
' Three days have passed over our heads since the great
festival. One anniversary the less for us yet to spend
of the death and resurrection of our Saviour ! Every
year thus bears away with it its solemn festivals ; when
will the everlasting festival be here ? I have been witness
of a most touching sight ; Fran9ois has brought us one
of his friends whom he has gained to the faith. This
neophyte joined us in our exercises during the Holy week,
and on Easter-day he received the communion with us.
Fran9ois was in raptures. It is a truly good work which
he has thus done. Frangois is quite young, hardly twenty
years old ; M. de la M. is thirty, and is married. There is
something most touching and beautifully simple in M. de
la M. letting himself thus be brought to God by quite
a young man ; and to see friendship, on Fran9ois's side,
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 76
thus doing the work of an Apostle, is not less beautiful
and touching.'
Admiration for Lamennais worked in the same direction
with this feeling. Lamennais never appreciated Guerin ;
his combative, rigid, despotic nature, of which the charac-
teristic was energy, had no affinity with Guerin' s elusive,
undulating, impalpable nature, of which the characteristic
was delicacy. He set little store by his new disciple, and
could hardly bring himself to understand what others
found so remarkable in him, his own genuine feeling
towards him being one of indulgent compassion. But the
intuition of Guerin, more discerning than the logic of his
master, instinctively felt what there was commanding and
tragic in Lamennais 's character, different as this was from
his own ; and some of his notes are among the most
interesting records of Lamennais which remain.
' " Do you know what it is," M. Feli ^ said to us on
the evening of the day before yesterday, " which makes
man the most suffering of all creatures ? It is that he
has one foot in the finite and the other in the infinite,
and that he is torn asunder, not by four horses, as in the
horrible old times, but between two worlds." Again he
said to us as we heard the clock strike : "If that clock
knew that it was to be destroyed the next instant, it
would still keep striking its hour until that instant arrived.
My children, be as the clock ; whatever may be going
to happen to you, strike always your hour." '
Another time Guerin writes,
' To-day M. Feli startled us. He was sitting behind
the chapel, under the two Scotch firs ; he took his stick
and marked out a grave on the turf, and said to Elie,
*' It is there I wish to be buried, but no tombstone ! only
a simple hillock of grass. Oh, how well I shall be there ! "
Elie thought he had a presentiment that his end was near.
This is not the first time he has been visited by such
a presentiment ; when he was setting out for Rome, he
said to those here : " I do not expect ever to come back
to you ; you must do the good which I have failed to do."
He is impatient for death.'
^ The familiar name given to M. de Lamennais by his followers at
La Chenaie.
76 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Overpowered by the ascendency of Lamennais, Gueruij
in spite of his hesitations, in spite of his confession to
himself that ' after a three weeks' close scrutiny of his
soul, in the hope of finding the pearl of a rehgious vocation
hidden in some corner of it,' he had failed to find what
he sought, took, at the end of August, 1833, a decisive
step. He joined the religious order which Lamennais
had founded. But at this very moment the deepening
displeasure of Rome with Lamennais determined the
Bishop of Rennes to break up, in so far as it was a religious
congregation, the Society of La Chenaie, to transfer the
novices to Ploermel, and to place them under other super-
intendence. In September, Lamennais, ' Avho had not
yet ceased,' writes M. de Marzan, a fervent Cathohc, ' to
be a Christian and a priest, took leave of his beloved
colony of La Chenaie, with the anguish of a general who
disbands his army down to the last recruit, and withdraws
annihilated from the field of battle.' Guerin went to
Ploermel. But here, in the seclusion of a real rehgious
house, he instantly perceived how ahen to a spirit like
his, — a spirit which, as he himself says somewhere, ' had
need of the open air, wanted to see the sun and the flowers,'
— ^was the constraint and monotony of a monastic life,
when Lamennais' s genius was no longer present to enliven
this hfe for him. On the 7th of October he renounced
the novitiate, believing himself a partisan of Lamennais
in his quarrel with Rome, reproaching the life he had left
with demanding passive obedience instead of trpng ' to
put in practice the admirable alliance of order with liberty,
and of variety with unity,' and declaring that, for his
part, he preferred taking the chances of a life of adventure
to submitting himself to be ' garrotte jmr un reglement, — tied
hand and foot by a set of rules.' In real truth, a life of
adventure, or rather a life free to wander at its own will,
was that to which his nature irresistibly impelled him.
For a career of adventure, the inevitable field was Paris.
But before this career began, there came a stage, the
smoothest, perhaps, and the most happy in the short
life of Guerin. M. la Morvonnais, one of his La Chenaie
friends, — some years older than Guerin, and married to
a wife of singular s^^'cetness and charm, — had a house by
MAURTCE DE GUfiRTN 77
the seaside at the mouth of one of the beautiful rivers of
Brittany, the Arguenon. He asked Guerin, when he left
Ploermel, to come and stay with him at this place, called
Le Val de l' Arguenon, and Guerin spent the winter of
1833-4 there. I grudge every word about Le Val and
its inmates which is not Guerin's own, so charming is
the picture he draws of them, so truly does his talent
find itself in its best vein as he draws it.
' How full of goodness ' (he writes in his journal of
the 7th of December) ' is Providence to me ! For fear
the sudden passage from the mild and temperate air of
a religious life to the torrid clime of the world should be
too trying for my soul, it has conducted me, after I have
left my sacred shelter, to a house planted on the frontier
between the two regions, where, without being in solitude,
one is not yet in the world ; a house whose windows look
on the one side towards the plain where the tumult of
men is rocking, on the other towards the wilderness where
the servants of God are chanting. I intend to write down
the record of my sojourn here, for the days here spent are
full of happiness, and I know that in the time to come
I shall often turn back to the story of these past feUcities.
A man, pious, and a poet ; a woman, whose spirit is in
such perfect sympathy with his that you would say they
had but one being between them ; a child, called Marie
like her mother, and who sends, like a star, the first rays
of her love and thought through the white cloud of infancy ;
a simple life in an old-fashioned house ; the ocean, which
comes morning and evening to bring us its harmonies ;
and lastly, a wanderer who descends from Carmel and is
going on to Babylon, and who has laid down at this thres-
hold his staff and his sandals, to take his seat at the
hospitable table ; — here is matter to make a biblical poem
of, if I could only describe things as I can feel them ! '
Every line written by Guerin during this stay at Le Val
is worth quoting, but I have only room for one extract
more : —
' Never ' (he writes, a fortnight later, on the 20th of
December), ' never have I tasted so inwardly and deeply
the happiness of home-life. All the little details of this
life which in their succession make up the day, are to me
78 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
so many stages of a continuous charm carried from one
end of the day to the other. The morning greeting, which
in some sort renews the pleasure of the first arrival, for
the words with which one meets are almost the same, and
the separation at night, through the hours of darkness
and uncertainty, does not ill represent longer separations ;
then breakfast, during which you have the fresh enjoyment
of having met together again ; the stroll afterwards, when
we go out and bid Nature good-morning ; the return and
setting to work in an old panelled chamber looking out on
the sea, inaccessible to all the stir of the house, a perfect
sanctuary of labour ; dinner, to which we are called, not
by a bell, which reminds one too much of school or a great
house, but by a pleasant voice ; the gaiety, the merriment,
the talk flitting from one subject to another and never
dropping so long as the meal lasts ; the crackling fire of
dry branches to which we draw our chairs directly after-
wards, the kind words that are spoken round the warm
flame which sings while we talk ; and then, if it is fine,
the walk by the seaside, when the sea has for its visitors
a mother with her child in her arms, this child's father
and a stranger, each of these two last with a stick in his
hand ; the rosy lips of the little girl, which keep talking
at the same time with the waves, — now and then tears
shed by her and cries of childish fright at the edge of the
sea ; our thoughts, the father's and mine, as we stand
and look at the mother and child smiling at one another,
or at the child in tears and the mother trying to comfort
it by her caresses and exhortations ; the Ocean, going on
all the while rolling up his waves and noises ; the dead
boughs which we go and cut, here and there, out of the
copse- wood, to make a quick and bright fire when we get
home, — this little taste of .the woodman's calling which
brings us closer to Nature and makes us think of M. Feli's
eager fondness for the same work ; the hours of study and
poetical flow which carry us to supper-time ; this meal,
which summons us by the same gentle voice as its pre-
decessor, and which is passed amid the same joys, only
less loud, because evening sobers everything, tones every-
thing down ; then our evening, ushered in by the blaze
of a cheerful fire, and which with its alternations of reading
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 79
and talking brings us at last to bed-time : — to all the
charms of a day so spent add the dreams which follow it,
and your imagination will still fall far short of these home-
joys in their delightful reality.'
I said the foregoing should be my last extract, but who
could resist this picture of a January evening on the coast
of Brittany ? —
* All the sky is covered over with grey clouds just silvered
at the edges. The sun, who departed a few minutes ago,
has left behind him enough light to temper for awhile the
black shadows, and to soften down, as it were, the approach
of night. The winds are hushed, and the tranquil ocean
sends up to me, when I go out on the doorstep to listen,
only a melodious murmur, which dies away in the soul like
a beautiful wave on the beach. The birds, the first to obey
the nocturnal influence, make their way towards the woods,
and you hear the rustle of their wings in the clouds. The
copses which cover the whole hill-side of Le Val, which
all the day-time are alive with the chirp of the wren, the
laughing whistle of the woodpecker, ^ and the different notes
of a multitude of birds, have no longer any sound in their
paths and thickets, unless it be the prolonged high call
of the blackbirds at play with one another and chasing
one another, after all the other birds have their heads safe
under their wings. The noise of man, always the last to
be silent, dies gradually out over the face of the fields.
The general murmur fades away, and one hears hardly
a sound except what comes from the villages and hamlets,
in which, up till far into the night, there are cries of
children and barking of dogs. Silence wraps me round ;
everything seeks repose except this pen of mine, which
perhaps disturbs the rest of some living atom asleep in
a crease of my note-book, for it makes its light scratching
as it puts down these idle thoughts. Let it stop, then !
for all I write, have written, or shall write, will never be
worth setting against the sleep of an atom.'
On the 1st of February we find him in a lodging at
Paris. ' I enter the world ' (such are the last words written
in his journal at Le Val) ' with a secret horror.' His
^ ' The woodpecker laughs,'' says White of Selborne ; and here is
Guerin, in Brittany, confirming his testimony.
80 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
outward history for the next five years is soon told. H(
found himself in Paris, poor, fastidious, and with healtl
which already, no doubt, felt the obscure presence of th(
malady of which he died, — consumption. One of his Brit
tany acquaintances introduced him to editors, tried tc
engage him in the periodical literature of Paris ; and sc
unmistakeable was Guerin's talent, that even his first essays
were immediately accepted. But Guerin's genius was oi
a kind which unfitted him to get his bread in this manner
At first he was pleased with the notion of living by his
pen ; ' je n'ai qu'd ecrire,' he says to his sister, — ' I havt
only got to write.' But to a nature like his, endued wit!
the passion for perfection, the necessity to produce, tc
produce constantly, to produce whether in the vein or oul
of the vein, to produce something good or bad or middling
as it may happen, but at all events something, — is the most
intolerable of tortures. To escape from it he betook him-
self to that common but most perfidious refuge of men oi
letters, that refuge to which Goldsmith and poor Hartley
Coleridge had betaken themselves before him, — the pro-
fession of teaching. In September, 1834, he procured an
engagement at the College Stanislas, where he had himself
been educated. It was vacation-time, and all he had to
do was to teach a small class composed of boys who did
not go home for the holidays, — in his own words, ' scholars
left like sick sheep in the fold, while the rest of the flock
are frisking in the fields.' After the vacation he was kept
on at the College as a supernumerary. ' The master of
the fifth class has asked for a month's leave of absence ;
I am taking his place, and by this work I get one hundred
francs (4Z.). I have been looking about for pupils to give
private lessons to, and I have found three or four. School-
work and private lessons together fill my day from half-
past seven in the morning till half -past nine at night.
The college dinner serves me for breakfast, and I go and
dine in the evening at twenty-four sous, as a young man
beginning life should.' To better his position in the hier-
archy of public teachers it was necessary that he should
take the degree of agrege es-lettres, corresponding to our
degree of Master of Arts ; and to his heavy work in teach-
ing, there was thus added that of preparing for a severe
MAURICE DE GUfiRlN 81
examination. The drudgery of this Hie was very irksome
to him, although less insupportable than the drudgery of
the profession of letters ; inasmuch as to a sensitive man,
like Guerin, to silence his genius is more tolerable than to
hackney it. Still the yoke wore him deeply, and he had
moments of bitter revolt : he continued, however, to bear
it with resolution, and on the whole with patience, for
four years. On the 15th of November, 1838, he married
a young Creole lady of some fortune, Mademoiselle Caroline
de Gervain, * whom,' to use his own words, ' Destiny, who
loves these surprises, has wafted from the farthest Indies
into my arms.' The marriage was happy, and it ensured
to Guerin liberty and leisure ; but now ' the blind Fury
with the abhorred shears ' was hard at hand. Consumption
declared itself in him : ' I pass my life,' he writes, with his
old playfulness and calm, to his sister, on the 8th of April,
1839, * within my bed curtains, and wait patiently enough,
thanks to Caro's ^ goodness, books, and dreams, for the
recovery which the sunshine is to bring with it.' In search
of this sunshine he was taken to his native country, Lan-
guedoc, but in vain. He died at Le Cay la on the 19th of
July, 1839.
The vicissitudes of his inward life during these five
years were more considerable. His opinions and tastes
underwent great, or what seem to be great, changes. He
came to Paris the ardent partisan of Lamennais : even in
April, 1834, after Rome had finally condemned Lamennais,
— ' To-night there will go forth from Paris,' he writes,
' with his face set to the west, a man whose every step
I would fain follow, and who returns to the desert for
which I sigh. M. Feli departs this evening for La Chenaie.'
But in October, 1835, — ' I assure you,' he writes to his
sister, ' I am at last weaned from M. de Lamennais ; one
does not remain a babe and suckling for ever ; I am
perfectly freed from his influence.' There was a greater
change than this. In 1834 the main cause of Guerin's
aversion to the literature of the French romantic school,
was that this literature, having had a religious origin had
ceased to be religious : ' it has forgotten,' he says, ' the
house and the admonitions of its Father.' But his friend,
^ His wife.
ABNOLD Q
82 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
M, de Marzan, tells us of a ' deplorable revolution ' which,
by 1836, had taken place in him. Guerin had become
intimate with the chiefs of this very literature ; he no
longer went to church ; ' the bond of a common faith,
in which our friendship had its birth, existed between us
no longer.' Then, again, ' this interregnum was not
destined to last.' Reconverted to his old faith by suffering
and by the pious efforts of his sister Eugenie, Guerin died
a Catholic. His feelings about society underwent a like
change. After ' entering the world with a secret horror,'
after congratulating himself when he had been some months
at Paris on being ' disengaged from the social tumult, out
of the reach of those blows which, when I live in the thick
of the world, bruise me, irritate me, or utterly crush me,'
M. Sainte-Beuve tells us of him, two years afterwards,
appearing in society ' a man of the world, elegant, even
fashionable ; a talker who could hold his own against the
most brilliant talkers of Paris.'
In few natures, however, is there really such essential
consistency as in Guerin's. He says of himself, in the
very beginning of his journal : ' I owe everything to
poetry, for there is no other name to give to the sum
total of my thoughts ; I owe to it whatever I now have
pure, lofty, and solid in my soul ; I owe to it all my con-
solations in the past ; I snail probably owe to it my
future.' Poetry, the poetical instinct, was indeed the
basis of his nature ; but to say so thus absolutely is not
quite enough. One aspect of poetry fascinated Guerin's
imagination and held it prisoner. Poetry is the inter-
pretress of the natural world, and she is the interpretress
of the moral world ; it was as the interpretress of the
natural world that she had Guerin for her mouthpiece. To
make magically near and real the life of Nature, and
man's life only so far as it is a part of that Nature, was
his faculty ; a faculty of naturalistic, not of moral inter-
pretation. This faculty always has for its basis a peculiar
temperament, an extraordinary delicacy of organisation
and susceptibility to impressions ; in exercising it the
poet is in a great degree passive (Wordsworth thus speaks
of a wise passiveness) ; he aspires to be a sort of human
Aeolian-harp, catching and rendering every rustle of
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 83
Nature. To assist at the evolution of the whole life of the
world is his craving, and intimately to feel it all :
. . . ' the glow, the thrill of life,
Where, where do these abound ? '
is what he asks : he resists being riveted and held stationary
by any single impression, but would be borne on for ever
down an enchanted stream. He goes into religion and out
of religion, into society and out of society, not from the
motives which impel men in general, but to feel what it
is all like ; he is thus hardly a moral agent, and, like the
passive and ineffectual Uranus of Keats's poem, he may say :
. . . ' I am but a voice ;
My life is but the life of winds and tides ;
No more than winds and tides can I avail.'
He hovers over the tumult of life, but does not really put
his hand to it.
No one has expressed the aspirations of this tempera-
ment better than Guerin himself. In the last year of his
life he writes : —
' I return, as you see, to my old brooding over the world
of Nature, that line which my thoughts irresistibly take ;
a sort of passion which gives me enthusiasm, tears, bursts
of joy, and an eternal food for musing ; and yet I am
neither philosopher, nor naturalist, nor anything learned
whatsoever. There is one word which is the God of my
imagination, the tyrant, I ought rather to say, that fasci-
nates it, lures it onward, gives it work to do without
ceasing, and will finally carry it I know not where ; the
word life.'
And in one place in his journal he says : —
* My imagination welcomes every dream, every im-
pression, without attaching itself to any, and goes on for
ever seeking something new.'
And again, in another : —
' The longer I live, and the clearer 1 discern between
true and false in society, the more does the inclination
to live, not as a savage or a misanthrope, but as a solitary
man on the frontiers of society, on the outskirts of the
world, gain strength and grow in me. The birds come
and go and make nests around our habitations, they are
G 2
84 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
fellow-citizens of our farms and hamlets with us ; but
they take their flight in a heaven which is boundless, but
the hand of God alone gives and measures to them their
daily food, but they build their nests in the heart of the
thick bushes, or hang them in the height of the trees. So
would I, too, live, hovering round society, and having
always at my back a field of liberty vast as the sky.'
In the same spirit he longed for travel. ' When one
is a wanderer,' he writes to his sister, ' one feels that one
fulfils the true condition of humanity.' And the last entry
in his journal is — ' The stream of travel is full of delight.
Oh, who will set me adrift on this Nile ! '
Assuredly it is not in this temperament that the active
virtues have their rise. On the contrary, this temperament,
considered in itself alone, indisposes for the discharge of
them. Something morbid and excessive, as manifested
in Guerin, it undoubtedly has. In him, as in Keats, and
as in another youth of genius, whose name, but the other
day unheard of, " Lord Houghton has so gracefully
written in the history of English poetry, — David Gray, —
the temperament, the talent itself, is deeply influenced
by their mysterious malady ; the temperament is devouring ;
it uses vital power too hard and too fast, paying the
penalty in long hours of unutterable exhaustion and in
premature death. The intensity of Guerin's depression is
described to us by Guerin himself with the same incompar-
able touch with which he describes happier feelings ; far
oftener than any pleasurable sense of his gift he has ' the
sense profound, near, immense, of my misery, of my
inward poverty.' And again : ' My inward misery gains
upon me ; I no longer dare look within.' And on another
day of gloom he does look within, and here is the terrible
analysis : —
' Craving, unquiet, seeing only by glimpses, my spirit
is stricken by all those ills which are the sure fruit of
a youth doomed never to ripen into manhood. I grow old
and wear myself out in the most futile mental strainings,
and make no progress. My head seems dying, and when
the wind blows I fancy I feel it, as if I were a tree, blowing
through a number of withered branches in my top. Study
is intolerable to me, or rather it is quite out of my power.
MAURICE DE GUfiRTN 85
Mental work brings on, not drowsiness, but an irritable
and nervous disgust which drives me out, I know not where,
into the streets and public places. The Spring, whose
delights used to come every year stealthily and mysteriously
to charm me in my retreat, crushes me this year under
a weight of sudden hotness. I should be glad of any
event which delivered me from the situation in which
I am. If I were free I would embark for some distant
country where I could begin life anew.'
) Such is this temperament in the frequent hours when
the sense of its own weakness and isolation crushes it to
the ground. Certainly it was not for Guerin's happiness,
or for Keats's, as men count happiness, to be as they were.
Still the very excess and predominance of their tempera-
ment has given to the fruits of their genius a unique
brilliancy and flavour. I have said that poetry interprets
in two ways ; it interprets by expressing with magical
felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward
world, and it interprets by expressing, with inspired
D conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's
moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is
interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by
having moral profundity. In both ways it illuminates
man ; it gives him a satisfying sense of reality ; it reconciles
him with himself and the universe. Thus Aeschylus 's
^ SpdaavTt TraOeLV* and his ' (Iviy/ot^/xov yeXaa-fua^ are alike
interpretative. Shakspeare interprets both when he says,
*rull many a glorious morning have I seen,
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovran eye ; '
0 and when he says,
'There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Kough-hew them as we will.'
These great poets unite in themselves the faculty of both
kinds of interpretation, the naturalistic and the moral.
But it is observable that in the poets who unite both kinds,
the latter (the moral) usually ends by making itself the
master. In Shakspeare the two kinds seem wonderfully
to balance one another ; but even in him the balance
leans ; his expression tends to become too little sensuous
io and simple, too much intellectualis^d. The same thing
86 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
may be yet more strongly affirmed of Lucretius and of
Wordsworth. In Shelley there is not a balance of the two
gifts, nor even a co-existence of them, but there is a passion-
ate straining after them both, and this is what makes
Shelley, as a man, so interesting : I will not now inquire
how much Shelley achieves as a poet, but whatever he
achieves, he in general fails to achieve natural magic
in his expression ; in Mr. Palgrave's charming Treasury
may be seen a gallery of his failures.^ But in Keats and
Guerin, in whom the faculty of naturalistic interpretation
is overpoweringly predommant, the natural magic is perfect;
when they speak of the world they speak like Adam naming
by divine inspiration the creatures ; their expression corre-
sponds with the thing's essential reality. Even between
Keats and Guerin, however, there is a distinction to be
drawn. Keats has, above all, a sense of what is pleasureable
and open in the life of Nature ; for him she is the Alma
Parens : his expression has, therefore, more than Guerin's,
something genial, outward, and sensuous. Guerin has
above all a sense of what there is adorable and secret in
the life of Nature ; for him she is the Magna Parens ;
his expression has, therefore, more than Keats's, something
mystic, inward, and profound.
So he lived like a man possessed ; with his eye not on
his own career, not on the public, not on fame, but on the
Isis whose veil he had uplifted. He published nothing :
' There is more power and beauty,' he writes, ' in the well-
kept secret of one'sself and one's thoughts, than in the
display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one.'
* My spirit,' he answers the friends who urge him to wiite,
* is of the home-keeping order, and has no fancy for adven-
ture ; literary adventure is above all distasteful to it ; for
this, indeed (let me say so without the least self-sufficiency),
^ Compare, for example, his ' Lines Written in the Euganean Hills,'
with Keats's ' Ode to Autumn ' {Golden Treasury, pp. 256, 284). The
latter piece renders Nature ; the former tries to render her. I will not
deny, however, that Shelley has natural magic in his rhythm ; what
I deny is, that he has it in his language. It always seems to me that
the right sphere for Shelley's genius was the sphere of music, not of
poetry ; the medium of sounds he can master, but to master the more
difficult medium of words he has neither intellectual force enough nor
sanity enough.
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 87
it has a contempt. The literary career seems to me unreal,
both in its own essence and in the rewards which one seeks
from it, and therefore fatally marred by a secret absurdity.'
His acquaintances, and among them distinguished men of
letters, full of admiration for the originality and delicacy
of his talent, laughed at his self -depreciation, warmly
assured him of his powers. He received their assurances
with a mournful incredulity, which contrasts curiously
with the self-assertion of poor David Gray, whom I just
now mentioned. ' It seems to me intolerable,' he writes,
' to appear to men other than one appears to God. My
worst torture at this moment is the over-estimate which
generous friends form of me. We are told that at the"^last
judgment the secret of all consciences will be laid bare to
the universe ; would that mine were so this day, and that
every passer-by could see me as I am ! ' ' High above
my head,' he says at another time, ' far, far away, I seem
to hear the murmur of that world of thought and feeling
to which I aspire so often, but where I can never attain. I
think of those of my own age who have wings strong enough
to reach it, but I think of them without jealousy, and as
men on earth contemplate the elect and their felicity.' And,
criticising his own composition, ' When I begin a subject,
my self-conceit ' (says this exquisite artist) ' imagines
I am doing wonders ; and when I have finished, I see
nothing but a wretched made-up imitation, composed of
odds and ends of colour stolen from other i)eople's palettes,
and tastelessly mixed together on mine.' Such was his
passion for perfection, his disdain for all poetical work not
perfectly adequate and felicitous . The magic of expression to
which by the force of this passion he won his way, will make
the name of Maurice de Guerin remembered in literature.
I have already mentioned the Centaur, a sort of prose
poem by Guerin, which Madame Sand published after
his death. The idea of this composition came to him,
M. Sainte-Beuve says, in the course of some visits which
he made with his friend, M. Trebutien, a learned antiquarian,
to the Museum of Antiquities in the Louvre. The free and
wild life which the Greeks expressed by such creations as
the Centaur had, as we might well expect, a strong charm
for him ; under the same inspiration he composed a
88 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Bacchante, which was meant by him to form part of a prose
poem on the adventures of Bacchus in India. Real as was
the affinity which Guerin's nature had for these subjects,
I doubt whether, in treating them, he would have found
the full and final employment of his talent. But the beauty
of his Centaur is extraordinary ; in its whole conception
and expression this piece has in a wonderful degree that
natural magic of which I have said so much, and the
rhythm has a charm which bewitches even a foreigner.
An old Centaur on his mountain is supposed to relate
to Melampus, a human questioner, the life of his youth.
Untranslateable as the piece is, I shall conclude with some
extracts from it : —
*The Centaur.
* I had my birth in the caves of these mountains. Like
the stream of this valley, whose first drops trickle from
some weeping rock in a deep cavern, the first moment of
my life fell in the darkness of a remote abode, and without
breaking the silence. When our mothers draw near to the
time of their delivery, they withdraw to the caverns, and
in the depth of the loneliest of them, in the thickest of its
gloom, bring forth, without uttering a plaint, a fruit silent
as themselves. Their puissant milk makes us surmount,
without weakness or dubious struggle, the first difficulties
of life ; and yet we leave our caverns later than you your
cradles. The reason is that we have a doctrine that the
early days of existence should be kept apart and enshrouded,
as days filled with the presence of the gods. Nearly the
whole term of my growth was passed in the darkness
where I was born. The recesses of my dwelling ran so far
under the mountain, that I should not have known on which
side was the exit, had not the winds, when they sometimes
made their way through the opening, sent fresh airs in,
and a sudden trouble. Sometimes, too, my mother came
back to me, having about her the odours of the valleys,
or streaming from the waters which were her haunt. Her
returning thus, without a word said of the valleys or the
rivers, but with the emanations from them hanging about
her, troubled my spirit, and I moved up and down restlessly
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 89
in my darkness. " What is it," I cried, ** this outside
world whither my mother is borne, and what reigns there
in it so potent as to attract her so often ? " At these
moments my own force began to make me unquiet. I felt
in it a power which could not remain idle ; and betaking
myself either to toss my arms or to gallop backwards and
forwards in the spacious darkness of the cavern, I tried to
make out from the blows which I dealt in the empty space,
or from the transport of my course through it, in what
direction my arms were meant to reach, or my feet to bear
me. Since that day, I have wound my arms round the bust
of Centaurs, and round the body of heroes, and round
the trunk of oaks ; my hands have assayed the rocks,
the waters, plants without number, and the subtlest impres-
sions of the air, — for I uplift them in the dark and still
nights to catch the breaths of wind, and to draw signs
whereby I may augur my road ; my feet, — look, 0 Melam-
pus, how w^orn they are ! And yet, all benumbed as I am
in this extremity of age, there are days when, in broad
sunlight, on the mountain-tops, I renew these gallopings
of my youth in the cavern, and with the same object,
brandishing my arms and employing all the fleetness which
yet is left to me.
' O Melampus, thou who wouldst know the life of the
Centaurs, wherefore have the gods willed that thy steps
should lead thee to me, the oldest and most forlorn of
them all ? It is long since I have ceased to practise any
part of their life. I quit no more this mountain summit,
to which age has confined me. The point of my arrows now
serves me only to uproot some tough-fibred plant ; the
tranquil lakes know me still, but the rivers have forgotten
me. I will tell thee a little of my youth ; but these recollec-
tions, issuing from a worn memory, come like the drops of
a niggardly libation poured from a damaged urn.
'* The course of my youth was rapid and full of agitation.
Movement was my life, and my steps knew no bound.
One day when I was following the course of a valley
seldom entered by the Centaurs, I discovered a man
making his way up the stream -side on the opposite bank.
He was the first whom my eyes had lighted on : I despised
90 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
him. *' Behold," I cried, " at the utmost but the half of
what I am ! How short are his steps ! and his movement how
full of labour ! Doubtless he is a Centaur overthrown by
the gods, and reduced by them to drag himself along thus."
* Wandering along at my own will like the rivers, feeling
wherever I went the presence of Cybele, whether in the bed
of the valleys, or on the height of the mountains, I bounded
whither I would, like a blind and chainless life. But when
Night, filled with the charm of the gods, overtook me on
the slopes of the mountain, she guided me to the mouth oi
the caverns, and there tranquillised me as she tranquilliser
the billows of the sea. Stretched across the threshold oi
my retreat, my flanks hidden within the cave, and my head
under the open sky, I watched the spectacle of the dark.
The sea-gods, it is said, quit during the hours of darkness
their palaces under the deep ; they seat themselves on the
promontories, and their eyes wander over the expanse of
the waves. Even so I kept watch, having at my feet an
expanse of life like the hushed sea. My regards had free
range, and travelled to the most distant points. Like
sea-beaches which never lose their wetness, the line of
mountains to the west retained the imprint of gleam* not
perfectly wiped out by the shadows. In that quarter still
survived, in pale clearness, mountain-summits naked and
pure. There I beheld at one time the god Pan descend,
ever soUtary ; at another, the choir of the mystic divinities ;
or I saw pass some mountain-nymph charm-struck by the
night. Sometimes the eagles of Mount Olympus traversed
the upper sky, and were lost to view among the far-ofl
constellations, or in the shade of the dreaming forests.
' Thou pursuest after wisdom, 0 Melampus, which is
the science of the will of the gods ; and thou roamest
from people to people like a mortal driven by the destinies.
In the times when I kept my night-watches before the
caverns, I have sometimes beUeved that I was about to
surprise the thought of the sleeping Cybele, and that the
mother of the gods, betrayed by her dreams, would let faU
some of her secrets ; but I have never made out more than
sounds which faded away in the murmur of night, or words
inarticulate as the bubbling of the rivers.
MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 91
' " 0 Macareus," one day said the great Chiron to me,
whose old age I tended ; "we are, both of us, Centaurs
of the mountain ; but how different are our lives ! Of
my days all the study is (thou seest it) the search for
plants ; thou, thou art like those mortals who have picked
up on the waters or in the woods, and carried to their
lips, some pieces of the reed-pipe thrown away by the
god Pan. From that hour these mortals, having caught
from their relics of the god a passion for wild life, or perhaps
smitten with some secret madness, enter into the wilderness,
plunge among the forests, follow the course of the streams,
bury themselves in the heart of the mountains, restless,
and haunted by an unknown purpose. The mares beloved
of the winds in the farthest Scythia are not wilder than thou,
nor more cast down at nightfall, when the North Wind has
departed. Seekest thou to know the gods, 0 Macareus,
and from what source men, animals, and the elements of
the universal fire have their origin ? But the aged Ocean,
the father of all things, keeps locked within his own breast
these secrets ; and the nymphs, who stand around, sing as
they weave their eternal dance before him, to cover any
Bound which might escape from his lips half-opened by
slumber. The mortals, dear to the gods for their virtue,
have received from their hands lyres to give delight to man,
or the seeds of new plants to make him rich ; but from their
inexorable lips, nothing ! "
' Such were the lessons which the old Chiron gave
me. Waned to the very extremity of life, the Centaur
yet nourished in his spirit the most lofty discourse.
' For me, O Melampus, I decline into my last days,
calm as the setting of the constellations. I still retain
enterprise enough to climb to the top of the rocks, and
there I linger late, either gazing on the wild and restless
clouds, or to see come up from the horizon the rainy Hyades,
the Pleiades, or the great Orion ; but I feel myself perishing
and passing quickly away, like a snow-wreath floating on
the stream ; and soon I shall bo mingled with the waters
which flow in the vast bosom of Earth.*
EUGENIE DE GUIilRIN
Who that had spoken of Maurice de Guerin could refrain
from speaking of his sister Eugenie, the most devoted of
sisters, one of the rarest and most beautiful of souls "i
' There is nothing fixed, no duration, no vitality in the
sentiments of women towards one another ; their attach-
ments are mere pretty bows of ribbon, and no more.
In all the friendships of women I observe this slightness
of the tie. I know no instance to the contrary, even in
history. Orestes and Pylades have no sisters.' So she
herself speaks of the friendships of her own sex. But
Electra can attach herself to Orestes, if not to Chryso-
themis. And to her brother Maurice, Eugenie de Guerin
was Pylades and Electra in one.
The name of Maurice de Guerin, — ^that young man so
gifted, so attractive, so careless of fame, and so early
snatched away ; who died at twenty -nine ; who, says his
sister, ' let what he did be lost with a carelessness so
unjust to himself, set no value on any of his own pro-
ductions, and departed hence without reaping the rich
harvest which seemed his due ; ' who, in spite of his
immaturity, in spite of his fragility, exercised such a charm.
' furnished to others so much of that which all live by,'
that some years after his death his sister found in a country-
house where he used to stay, in the journal of a young girl
who had not known him, but who heard her family speak
of him, his name, the date of his death, and these words j
' il etait leur vie ' (he was their life) ; whose talent, exquisite
as that of Keats, with less of sunlight, abundance, and
facility in it than that of Keats, but with more of distinc-
tion and power, had ' that winning, delicate, and beautifully
happy turn of expression ' which is the stamp of the master,
— is beginning to be well known to all lovers of literature,
This establishment of Maurice's name was an object for
which his sister Eugenie passionately laboured. While he
EUGfiNIE DE GUERIN 93
was alive, she placed her whole joy in the flowering of this
gifted nature ; when he was dead, she had no other thought
than to make the world know him as she knew him. She
outlived him nine years, and her cherished task for those
years was to rescue the fragments of her brother's composi-
tion, to collect them, to get them published. In pursuing
this task she had at first cheering hopes of success ; she
had at last baffling and bitter disappointment. Her
earthly business was at an end ; she died. Ten years
afterwards, it was permitted to the love of a friend,
M. Trebutien, to effect for Maurice's memory what the love
of a sister had failed to accomplish. But those who read,
with delight and admiration, the journal and letters of
Maurice de Guerin, could not but be attracted and touched
by this sister Eugenie, who met them at every page. She
seemed hardly less gifted, hardly less interesting, than
Maurice himself. And presently M. Trebutien did for the
sister what he had done for the brother. He published the
journal of Mdlle. Eugenie de Guerin, and a few (too few,
alas !) of her letters.^ The book has made a profound
impression in France ; and the fame which she sought only
for her brother now crowns the sister also.
Parts of Mdlle. de Guerin's journal were several years
ago printed for private circulation, and a writer in the
National Review had the good fortune to fall in with
them. The bees of our English criticism do not often
roam so far afield for their honey, and this critic deserves
thanks for having flitted in his quest of blossom to foreign
parts, and for having settled upon a beautiful flower found
there. He had the discernment to see that Mdlle. de Guerin
was well worth speaking of, and he spoke of her with feehng
and appreciation. But that, as I have said, was several
years ago ; even a true and feeling homage needs to be
from time to time renewed, if the memory of its object
is to endure ; and criticism must not lose the occasion
offered by Mdlle. de Guerin's journal being for the first
time published to the world, of directing notice once more
to this religious and beautiful character.
Eugenie de Guerin was bom in 1805, at the chateau
^ A volume of these, also, has just been brought out by M. Trebutien.
One good book, at least, in the literature of the year 1865 !
94 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
of Le Cayla, in Languedoc. Her family, though reduced
in circumstances, was noble ; and even when one is a saint
one cannot quite forget that one comes of the stock of the
Guarini of Italy, or that one counts among one's ancestors
a Bishop of Senlis, who had the marshalling of the French
order of battle on the day of Bou vines. Le Cayla was a
solitary place, with its terrace looking down upon a stream-
bed and valley ; ' one may pass days there without seeing
any living thing but the sheep, without hearing any living
thing but the birds.' M. de Guerin, Eugenie's father,
lost his wife when Eugenie was thirteen years old, and
Maurice seven ; he was left with four children, — Eugenie,
Marie, Erembert, and Maurice, — of whom Eugenie was the
eldest, and Maurice was the youngest. This youngest
child, whose beauty and delicacy had made him the object
of his mother's most anxious fondness, was commended
by her in dying to the care of his sister Eugenie. Maurice
at eleven years old went to school at Toulouse ; then he went
to the College Stanislas at Paris ; then he became a member
of the religious society which M. de Lamennais had formed
at La Chenaie in Brittany ; afterwards he lived chiefly at
Paris, returning to Le Cayla, at the age of twenty-nine,
to die. Distance, in those days, was a great obstacle to
frequent meetings of the separated members of a French
family of narrow means. Maurice de Guerin was seldom
at Le Cayla after he had once quitted it, though his few
visits to his home were long ones ; but he passed five
years, — ^the period of his sojourn in Brittany, and of his
first settlement in Paris, — ^without coming home at all.
In spite of the check from these absences, in spite of the
more serious check from a temporary alteration in Maurice's
religious feelings, the union between the brother and
sister was wonderfully close and firm. For they were knit
together, not only by the tie of blood and early attachment,
but also by the tie of a common genius. ' We were,' says
Eugenie, ' two eyes looking out of one head.' She, on her
part, brought to her love for her brother the devotedness
of a woman, the intensity of a recluse, almost the solicitude
of a mother. Her home duties prevented her from following
the wish, which often arose in her, to join a religious
sisterhood. There is a trace, — just a trace, — of an early
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 95
attachment to a cousin ; but he died when she was twenty-
four. After that, she lived for Maurice. It was for Maurice
that, in addition to her constant correspondence with him
by letter, she began in 1834 her journal, which was sent to
him by portions as it was finished. After his death she
tried to continue it, addressing it ' to Maurice in Heaven.'
But the effort was beyond her strength ; gradually the
entries become rarer and rarer ; and on the last day of
December, 1840, the pen dropped from her hand : the
journal ends.
Other sisters have loved their brothers, and it is not
her affection for Maurice, admirable as this was, which
alone could have made Eugenie de Guerin celebrated.
I have said that both brother and sister had genius :
M. Sainte-Beuve goes so far as to say that the sister's
genius was equal, if not superior, to her brother's. No
one has a more profound respect for M. Sainte-Beuve 's
critical judgments than I have ; but it seems to me that
this particular judgment needs to be a little explained
and guarded. In Maurice's special talent, which was a?
talent for interpreting nature, for finding words which
incomparably render the subtlest impressions which
nature makes upon us, which bring the intimate life of
nature wonderfully near to us, it seems to me that hi^
sister was by no means his equal. She never, indeed,
expresses herself without grace and intelligence ; but
her words, when she speaks of the life and appearances
of nature, are in general but intellectual signs ; they are
not like her brother's — symbols equivalent with the thing
symbolised. They bring the notion of the thing described
to the mind, they do not bring the feeling of it to the
imagination. Writing from the Nivemais, that region of
vast woodlands in the centre of France : ' It does one good,'
says Eugenie, ' to be going about in the midst of this en-
chanting nature, with flowers, birds, and verdure all round
one, mider this large and blue sky of the Nivemais. How
I love the gracious form of it, and those little white clouds
here and there, like cushions of cotton, hung aloft to rest
the eye in this immensity ! ' It is pretty and graceful,
but how different from the grave and pregnant strokes of
Maurice's pencil ! * I have been along the Loire, and seen
96 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
on its banks the plains where nature is puissant and gay ;
I have seen royal and antique dwellings, all marked by
memories which have their place in the mournful legend
of humanity, — Chambord, Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux ;
then the towns on the two banks of the river, — Orleans,
Tours, Saumur, Nantes ; and, at the end of it all, the
Ocean rumbling. From these I passed back into the interior
of the country, as far as Bourges and Nevers, a region
of vast woodlands, in which murmurs of an immense range
and fulness ' {ce beau torrent de rumeurs, as, with an expres-
sion worthy of Wordsworth, he elsewhere calls them)
' prevail and never cease.' Words whose charm is like
that of the sounds of the murmuring forest itself, and
whose reverberations, like theirs, die away in the infinite
distance of the soul.
Maurice's life was in the life of nature, and the passion
for it consumed him ; it would have been strange if his
accent had not caught more of the soul of nature than
Eugenie's accent, whose life was elsewhere. ' You will
find in him,' Maurice says to his sister of a friend whom
he was recommending to her, ' you will find in him that
which you love, and which suits you better than anything
else, — Vonction, Veffusion, la mysticiti.' Unction, the
pouring out of the soul, the rapture of the mystic, were
dear to Maurice also ; but in him the bent of his genius
gave even to those a special direction of its own. In
Eugenie they took the direction most native and familiar
to them ; their object was the religious life.
And yet, if one analyses this beautiful and most interesting
character quite to the bottom, it is not exactly as a saint:
that Eugenie de Guerin is remarkable. The ideal saint
is a nature like Saint Fran9ois de Sales or Fenelon ; a nature
of ineffable sweetness and serenity, a nature in which
struggle and revolt is over, and the whole man (so far as
is possible to human infirmity) swallowed up in love.
Saint Theresa (it is Mdlle. de Guerin herself who reminds
us of it) endured twenty years of unacceptance and of
repulse in her prayers ; yes, but the Saint Theresa whom
Christendom knows is Saint Theresa repulsed no longer !
it is Saint Theresa accepted, rejoicing in love, radiants
with ecstasy. Mdlle. de Guerin is not one of these saints
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 97
arrived at perfect sweetness and calm, steeped in ecstasy ;
there is something primitive, indomitable in her, which
she governs, indeed, but which chafes, which revolts ;
somewhere in the depths of that strong nature there is
a struggle, an impatience, an inquietude, an ennui, which
endures to the end, and which leaves one, when one finally
closes her journal, with an impression of profound melan-
choly. ' There are days,' she writes to her brother, * when
one's nature rolls itself up, and becomes a hedgehog. If
I had you here at this moment, here close by me, how I
should prick you ! how sharp and hard ! ' ' Poor soul,
poor soul,' she cries out to herself another day, ' what
is the matter, what would you have ? Where is that which
will do you good ? Everything is green, everjd^hing is
in bloom, all the air has a breath of flowers. How beautiful
it is ! well, I will go out. No, I should be alone, and all
this beauty, when one is alone, is worth nothing. What
shall I do then ? Read, write, pray, take a basket of sand
on my head like that hermit-saint, and walk with it ? Yes,
work, work ! keep busy the body which does mischief to
the soul ! I have been too little occupied to-day, and that
is bad for one, and it gives a certain ennui which I have in
me time to ferment.'
A certain ennui which I have in me : her wound is there.
In vain she follows the counsel of Fenelon : ' If God tires
you, tell him that he tires you.' No doubt she obtained great
and frequent solace and restoration from prayer : ' This
morning I was suffering ; well, at present I am calm, and
this I owe to faith, simply to faith, to an act of faith. I
can think of death and eternity without trouble, without
alarm. Over a deep of sorrow there floats a divine calm,
a suavity which is the work of God only. In vain have I
tried other things at a time like this : nothing human
comforts the soul, nothing human upholds it : —
"A I'enfant il faut sa mere,
A mon ame il faut mon Dieu." '
Still the ennui reappears, bringing with it hours of un-
utterable forlomness, and making her cling to her one
great earthly happiness, — her affection for her brother, —
with an intenseness, an anxiety, a desperation in which
ABNOLD J£
98 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
there is something morbid, and by which she is occasionally
carried into an irritability, a jealousy, which she herself
is the first, indeed, to censure, which she severely represses,
but which nevertheless leaves a sense of pain.
Mdlle. de Guerin's admirers have compared her to
Pascal, and in some respects the comparison is just. But
she cannot exactly be classed with Pascal, any more
than with Saint FranQois de Sales. Pascal is a man, and
the inexhaustible power and activity of his mind leave
him no leisure for ennui. He has not the sweetness and
serenity of the perfect saint ; he is, perhaps, ' der strenge,
kranke Pascal — the severe, morbid Pascal,' — as Goethe (and,
strange to say, Goethe at twenty-three, an age which
usually feels Pascal's charm most profoundly) calls him ;
but the stress and movement of the lifelong conflict
waged in him between his soul and his reason keep him
full of fire, full of agitation, and keep his reader, who
witnesses this conflict, animated and excited ; the sense
of forlornness and dejected weariness which clings to
Eugenie de Guerin does not belong to Pascal. Eugenie
de Guerin is a woman, and longs for a state of firm happi-
ness, for an affection in which she may repose ; the inward
bliss of Saint Theresa or Fenelon would have satisfied her ;
denied this, she cannot rest satisfied with the triumphs of
self-abasement, with the sombre joy of trampling the pride
of life and of reason underfoot, of reducing all human hope
and joy to insignificance ; she repeats the magnificent
words of Bossuet, words which both Catholicism and
Protestantism have uttered with indefatigable iteration :
* On trouve au fond de tout le vide et le neant — at the bottom
of everything one finds emptiness and nothingness' — but she
feels, as every one but the true mystic must ever feel, their
incurable sterility.
She resembles Pascal, however, by the clearness and
firmness of her intelligence, going straight and instinctively
to the bottom of any matter she is dealing with, and express-
ing hsrself about it with incomparable precision ; never
fumbling with what she has to say, never imperfectly
seizing or imperfectly presenting her thought. And to
this admirable precision she joins a lightness of touch,
a feminine ease and grace, a flowing facility which are her
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 99
own. * I do not say,' writes her brother Maurice, an
excellent judge, ' that I find in myself a dearth of expression ;
but I have not this abundance of yours, this productiveness
of soul which streams forth, which courses along without
ever failing, and always with an infinite charm/ And writing
to her of some composition of hers, produced after her
religious scruples had for a long time kept her from the
exercise of her talent : ' You see, my dear Tortoise,' he
writes, * that your talent is no illusion, since after a period,
1 1 know not how long, of poetical inaction, — a trial to which
any half -talent would have succumbed, — it rears its head
again more vigorous than ever. It is really heart-breaking
to see you repress and bind down, with I know not what
scruples, your spirit, which tends with all the force of its
nature to develop itself in this direction. Others have
made it a case of conscience for you to resist this impulse,
and I make it one for you to follow it.' And she says
of herself, on one of her freer days : ' It is the instinct
of my life to write, as it is the instinct of the fountain to
I flow.' The charm of her expression is not a sensuous
and imaginative charm like that of Maurice, but rather
an intellectual charm ; it comes from the texture of the
style rather than from its elements ; it is not so much in
the words as in the turn of the phrase, in the happy cast
and flow of the sentence. Recluse as she was, she had
a great correspondence : every one wished to have letters
from her ; and no wonder.
To this strength of intelligence and talent of expression
she joined a great force of cha-racter. Religion had early
I possessed itself of this force of character, and reinforced
it : in the shadow of the Ceveimes, in the sharp and tonic
nature of this region of southern France, which has seen
the Albigensians, which has seen the Camisards, Catholicism
too is fervent and intense. Eugenie de Guerin was brought
up amidst strong religious influences, and they found in
her a nature on which they could lay firm hold. I have said
that she was not a saint of the order of Saint FranQois
de Sales or Fenelon ; perhaps she had too keen an intelli-
gence to suffer her to be this, too forcible and impetuous
> a character. But I did not mean to imply the least doubt
of the reality, the profoundness, of her religious life. She
n 2
100 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
was penetrated by the power of religion ; religion was the
master-influence of her life ; she derived immense consola-
tions from religion, she earnestly strove to conform her
whole nature to it ; if there was an element in her which
religion could not perfectly reach, perfectly transmute,
she groaned over this element in her, she chid it, she
made it bow. Almost every thought in her was brought
into harmony with religion ; and what few thoughts were
not thus brought into harmony were brought into sub-
jection.
Then she had her affection for her brother ; and this,
too, though perhaps there might be in it something a little
over-eager, a little too absolute, a little too susceptible,
was a pure, a devoted affection. It was not only passionate,
it was tender. It was tender, pliant, and self-sacrificing
to a degree that not in one nature out of a thousand, — of
natures with a mind and will like hers, — is found attainable.
She thus united extraordinary power of intelligence, extra-
ordinary force of character, and extraordinary strength of
affection ; and all these under the control of a deep religious
feeling.
This is what makes her so remarkable, so interesting.
I shall try and make her speak for herself, that she may
show us the characteristic sides of her rare nature with
her own inimitable touch.
It must be remembered that her journal is written for
Maurice only ; in her lifetime no eye but his ever saw it.
' Ceci rCest pas pour le public,' she writes ; ' c'est de Vintime,
c'est de Vdme, c'est pour un.' ' This is not for the public ;
it contains my inmost thoughts, my very soul ; it is for
one.' And Maurice, this one, was a kind of second self to
her. ' We see things with the same eyes ; what you find
beautiful, I find beautiful ; God has made our souls of one
piece.' And this genuine confidence in her brother's sym-
pathy gives to the entries in her journal a naturalness and
simple freedom rare in such compositions. She felt that
he would understand her, and be interested in all that she
wrote.
One of the first pages of her journal relates an incident
of the home-life of Le Cayla, the smallest detail of which
Maurice liked to hear ; and in relating it she brings this
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 101
simple life before us. She is writing in November, 1834 : —
' I am furious with the grey cat. The mischievous
beast has made away with a little half-frozen pigeon,
which I was trying to thaw by the side of the fire. The
poor little thing was just beginning to come round ; I
meant to tame him ; he would have grown fond of me ;
and there is my whole scheme eaten up by a cat ! This
event, and all the rest of to-day's history, has passed in
the kitchen. Here I take up my abode all the morning
I and a part of the evening, ever since I am without Mimi.^
I have to superintend the cook ; sometimes papa comes
down, and I read to him by the oven, or by the fireside,
some bits out of the Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church,
This book struck Pierril^ with astonishment. ''Que de
mouts aqui dedins ! What a lot of words there are inside
it ! " This boy is a real original. One evening he asked
me if the soul was immortal ; then afterwards, what
a philosopher was ? We had got upon great questions.,
as you see. When I told him that a philosopher was a
) person who was wise and learned : " Then, mademoiselle,
you are a philosopher." This was said with an air of sim-
plicity and sincerity which might have made even Socrates
take it as a compliment ; but it made me laugh so much
that my gravity as catechist was gone for that evening.
A day or two ago Pierril left us, to his great sorrow : his
time with us was up on Saint Brice's day. Now he goes
about with his little dog, truffle -hunting. If he comes this
way I shall go and ask him if he still thinks I look like a
philosopher.'
0 Her good sense and spirit made her discharge with
alacrity her household tasks in this patriarchal life of Le
Cayla, and treat them as the most natural thing in the
world. She sometimes complains, to be sure, of burning
her fingers at the kitchen-fire. But when a literary friend
of her brother expresses enthusiasm about her and her
poetical nature : ' The poetess,' she says, * whom this
gentleman believes me to be, is an ideal being, infinitely
removed from the life which is actually mine — a life of
occupations, a life of household-business, which takes up
^ The familiar name of her sister Marie.
■ A servant-boy at Le Cayla.
102 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
all my time. How could I make it otherwise ? I am
sure I do not know ; and, besides, my duty is in this sort
of life, and I have no wish to escape from it.'
Among these occupations of the patriarchal life of
the chatelaine of Le Cayla intercourse with the poor fills
a prominent place : —
* To-day,' she writes on the 9th of December, 1834,
' I have been warming myself at every fireside in the
village. It is a round which Mimi and I often make, and in
which I take pleasure. To-day we have been seeing sick
people, and holding forth on doses and sick-room drinks.
" Take this, do that ; " and they attend to us just as if
we were the doctor. We prescribed shoes for a little thing
who was amiss from having gone barefoot ; to the brother,
who, with a bad headache, was lying quite flat, we prescribed
a pillow ; the pillow did him good, but I am afraid it will
hardly cure him. He is at the beginning of a bad feverish
cold : and these poor people live in the filth of their hovels
like animals in their stable ; the bad air poisons them.
When I come home to Le Cayla I seem to be in a palace.'
She had books, too ; not in abundance, not for the
fancying them ; the list of her library is small, and it is
enlarged slowly and with difficulty. The Letters of Saint
Theresa, which she had long wished to get, she sees in
the hands of a poor servant-girl, before she can procure
them for herself. ' What then ? ' is her comment : * very
likely she makes a better use of them than I could.' But
she has the Imitation, the Spiritual Works of Bossuet and
Fenelon, the Lives of the Saints, Corneille, Racine, Andre
Chenier, and Lamartine ; Madame de Stael's book on
Germany, and French translations of Shakspeare's plays,
Ossian, the Vicar of Wakefield, Scott's Old Mortality and
Redgauntlet, and the Promessi Sposi of Manzoni. Above
all, she has her own mind ; her meditations in the lonely
fields, on the oak-^rown hill-side of ' The Seven Springs ; '
her meditations and writing in her own room, her chambrette,
her dilicieux chez moi, where every night, before she goes
to bed, she opens the window to look out upon the sky, —
the balmy moonlit sky of Languedoc. This life of reading,
thinking, and writing was the life she liked best, the life
that most truly suited her. * I find writing has become
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRlN 103
almost a necessity to me. Whence does it arise, this im-
pulse to give utterance to the voice of one's spirit, to pour
out my thoughts before God and one human being ? I say
one human being, because I alwaj^s imagine that you are
present, that you see what I write. In the stillness of a
life like this my spirit is happy, and, as it were, dead to
all that goes on upstairs or downstairs, in the house or
out of the house. But this does not last long. " Come,
my poor spirit," I then say to myself, *' we must go back
0 to the things of this world." And I take my spinning, or
a book, or a saucepan, or I play with Wolf or Trilby.
Such a life as this I call heaven upon earth.'
Tastes like these, joined with a talent like Mdlle. de
Guerin's, naturally inspire thoughts of literary composition.
Such thoughts she had, and perhaps she would have been
happier if she had followed them ; but she never could
satisfy herself that to follow them was quite consistent with
the religious life, and her projects of composition were
gradually relinquished : —
0 * Would to God that my thoughts, my spirit, had never
taken their flight beyond the narrow round in which it
is my lot to live ! In spite of all that people say to the
contrary, I feel that I cannot go beyond my needlework and
my spinning without going too far : I feel it, I believe it :
well, then, I will keep in my proper sphere ; however much
I am tempted, my spirit shall not be allowed to occupy
itself with great matters mitil it occupies itself with them
in Heaven.'
And again : —
0 * My journal has been untouched for a long while. Do
you want to know why ? It is because the time seems to
me misspent which I spend in wiiting it. We owe God
an account of every minute ; and is it not a wrong use of
our minutes to employ them in writing a history of our
transitory days ? '
She overcomes her scruples, and goes on writing the
journal ; but again and again they return to her. Her
brother tells her of the pleasure and comfort something
she has written gives to a friend of his in affliction. She
0 answers : —
' It is from the Cross that those thoughts come, which
104 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
your friend finds so soothing, so unspeakably tender.
None of them come from me. I feel my own aridity ;
but I feel, too, that God, when he will, can make an ocean
flow upon this bed of sand. It is the same with so many
simple souls, from which proceed the most admirable things ;
because they are in direct relation with God, without false
science and without pride. And thus I am gradually losing
my taste for books ; I say to myself : " What can they
teach me which I shall not one day know in Heaven ? let
God be my master and my study here ! " I try to make ]
him so, and I find myself the better for it. I read little ;
I go out little ; I plunge myself in the inward life. How
infinite are the sayings, doings, feelings, events of that life !
Oh, if you could but see them ! But what avails it to make
them known ? God alone should be admitted to the sanc-
tuary of the soul.'
Beautifully as she says all this, one cannot, I think,
read it without a sense of disquietude, without a presenti-
ment that this ardent spirit is forcing itself from its
natural bent, that the beatitude of the true mystic will s
never be its earthly portion. And yet how simple and
charming is her picture of the life of religion which she
chose as her ark of refuge, and in which she desired to
place all her happiness : —
' Cloaks, clogs, umbrellas, all the apparatus of winter,
went with us this morning to Andillac, where we have
passed the whole day ; some of it at the cure's house,
the rest in church. How I like this life of a country
Sunday, with its activity, its journeys to church, its live-
liness ! You find all your neighbours on the road ; you i
have a curtsey from every woman you meet, and then,
as you go along, such a talk about the poultry, the sheep
and cows, the good man and the children ! My great
delight is to give a kiss to these children, and see them
run away and hide their blushing faces in their mother's
gown. They are alarmed at las doumaiselos,^ as at a being
of another world. One of these little things said the other
day to its grandmother, who was talking of coming to see
us : *' Minino, you mustn't go to that castle ; there is
a black hole there." What is the reason that in aU ages i
^ The young lady.
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 106
the noble*s chateau has been an object of terror ? 1& it
because of the horrors that were committed there in old
times ? I suppose so.'
This vague horror of the chateau, still lingering in the
mind of the French peasant fifty years after he has stormed
it, is indeed curious, and is one of the thousand indications
how unlike aristocracy on the Continent has been to
aristocracy in England. But this is one of the great matters
with which Mdlle. de Guerin would not have us occupied ;
D let us pass to the subject of Christmas in Languedoc : —
* Christmas is come ; the beautiful festival, the one I
love most, and which gives me the same joy as it gave
the shepherds of Bethlehem. In real truth, one's whole
soul sings with joy at this beautiful coming of God upon
earth, — a coming which here is announced on all sides of
us by music and by our charming nadalet} Nothing at
Paris can give you a notion of what Christmas is with us.
You have not even the midnight -mass. We all of us
went to it, papa at our head, on the most perfect night
0 possible. Never was there a finer sky than ours was that
midnight ; — so fine that papa kept perpetually throwing
back the hood of his cloak, that he might look up at the
sky. The ground was white with hoar-frost, but we
were not cold ; besides, the air, as we met it, was warmed
by the bundles of blazing torchwood which our servants
carried in front of us to light us on our way. It was
delightful, I do assure j'-ou ; and I should like you to
have seen us there on our road to church, in those lanes
with the bushes along their banks as white as if they were
to in flower. The hoar-frost makes the most lovely flowers.
We saw a long spray so beautiful that we wanted to take
it with us as a garland for the communion-table, but it
melted in our hands : all flowers fade so soon ! I was
very sorry about my garland ; it was mournful to see it
drip away, and get smaller and smaller every minute.'
The religious life is at bottom everywhere alike ; but
it is curious to note the variousness of its setting and out-
ward circumstance. Catholicism has these so different
from Protestantism ! and in Catholicism these accessories
^ A peculiar peal rung at Christmas-time by the church bells of
Languedoc.
106 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
»
have, it cannot be denied, a nobleness and amplitude
which in Protestantism is often wanting to them. In
Catholicism they have, from the antiquity of this form of
religion, from its pretensions to imiversality, from its really
wide-spread prevalence, from its sensuousness, something
European, august, and imaginative : in Protestantism they
often have, from its inferiority in all these respects, some-
thing provincial, mean, and prosaic. In revenge. Protes-
tantism has a future before it, a prospect of growth in
alliance with the vital movement of modern society ;
while Catholicism appears to be bent on widening the
breach between itself and the modem spirit, to be fatally
losing itself in the multiplication of dogmas, Mariolatry,
and miracle-mongering. But the style and circumstance
of actual Catholicism is grander than its present tendency,
and the style and circumstance of Protestantism is meaner
than its tendency. While I was reading the journal of
Mdlle. de Guerin, there came into my hands the memoir
and poems of a young Englishwoman, Miss Emma Tatham ;
and one could not but be struck with the singular contrast
which the two lives, — in their setting rather than in their
inherent quality, — present. Miss Tatham had not, certainly,
Mdlle. de Guerin's talent, but she had a sincere vein of
poetic feeling, a genuine aptitude for composition. Both
were fervent Christians, and, so far, the two lives have
a real resemblance ; but, in the setting of them, what
a difference ! The Frenchwoman is a Catholic in Langue-
doc ; the Englishwoman is a Protestant at Margate ;
Margate, that brick-and-mortar image of English Protes-
tantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeli-
ness, — ^let me add, all its salubrity. Between the external
form and fashion of these two lives, between the Catholic
Mdlle. de Guerin's nadalet at the Languedoc Christmas,
her chapel of moss at Easter-time, her daily reading of the
life of a saint, carrying her to the most diverse times,
places, and peoples, — her quoting, when she wants to fix
her mind upon the stanchness which the religious aspirant
needs, the words of Saint Macedonius to a hunter whom he
met in the moimtains, ' I pursue after God, as you pursue
after game,' — her quoting, when she wants to break
a village girl of disobedience to her mother, the story of
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 107
the ten disobedient children whom at Hippo Saint Augustine
saw palsied ; — between all this and the bare, blank, narrowly
English setting of Miss Tatham's Protestantism, her
' imion in church-fellowship with the worshippers at
Hawley-Square Chapel, Margate ; ' her * singing with
soft, sweet voice, the animating lines —
" My Jesus to know, and feel his blood flow,
'Tis life everlasting, 'tis heaven below ; " '
her * young female teachers belonging to the Sunday-
D school,' and her * Mr. Thomas Rowe, a venerable class-
leader,' — what a dissimilarity ! In the ground of the two
lives, a likeness ; in all their circumstance, what rmlike-
ness ! An unlikeness, it will be said, in that which is non-
essential and indifferent. Non-essential, — yes ; indifferent,
— no. The signal want of grace and charm in English
Protestantism's setting of its religious life is not an indiffer-
ent matter ; it is a real weakness. This ought ye to have
done, and not to have left the other undone.
I have said that the present tendency of Catholicism,
D — ^the Catholicism of the main body of the Catholic clergy
and laity, — seems likely to exaggerate rather than to remove
all that in this form of religion is most repugnant to reason ;
but this Catholicism was not that of Mdlle. de Guerin.
The insufficiency of her Catholicism comes from a doctrine
which Protestantism, too, has adopted, although Protes-
tantism, from its inherent element of freedom, may find
it easier to escape from it ; a doctrine with a certain
attraction for all noble natures, but, in the modern world
at any rate, incurably sterile, — the doctrine of the emptiness
oand nothingness of human life, of the superiority of re-
nouncement to activity, of quietism to energy ; the doctrine
which makes effort for things on this side of the grave
a folly, and joy in things on this side of the grave a sin.
But her Catholicism is remarkably free from the faults
which Protestants commonly think inseparable from
Catholicism ; the relation to the priest, the practice of
confession, assume, when she speaks of them, an aspect
which is not that under which Exeter Hall knows them,
but which, — unless one is of the number of those who
0 prefer regarding that by which men and nations die to
108 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
regarding that by which they live, — one is glad to study.
' La confession,\sh.e says twice in her journal, ' n'est qu'une
expansion du repentir dans Vamour ; ' and her weekly
journey to the confessional in the little church of Cahuzac
is her ' cher pelerinage ; ' the little church is the place where
she has ' laisse tant de miser es.'
' This morning,' she writes, one 28th of November, ' I
was up before daylight, dressed quickly, said my prayers,
and started with Marie for Cahuzac. When we got there,
the chapel was occupied, which I was not sorry for. I like :
not to be hurried, and to have time, before I go in, to lay
bare my soul before God. This often takes me a long time,
because my thoughts are apt to be flying about like these
autumn leaves. At ten o'clock I was on my knees, listening
to words the most salutary that were ever spoken ; and
I went away, feeling myself a better being. Every burden
thrown off leaves us with a sense of brightness ; and when
the soul has laid down the load of its sins at God's feet,
it feels as if it had wings. What an admirable thing is
confession ! What comfort, what light, what strength is :
given me every time after I have said, / have sinned.'
This blessing of confession is the greater, she says, ' the
more the heart of the priest to whom we confide our repen-
tance is like that divine heart which "has so loved us."
This is what attaches me to M. Bories.' M. Bories was
the cure of her parish, a man no longer young, and of whose
loss, when he was about to leave them, she thus speaks : —
' What a grief for me ! how much I lose in losing this
faithful guide of my conscience, heart, and mind, of my
whole self, which God has appointed to be in his charge, i
and which let itself be in his charge so gladly ! He knew
the resolves which God had put in my heart, and I had need
of his help to follow them. Our new cure cannot supply his
place : he is so young ! and then he seems so inexperienced,
so undecided ! It needs firmness to pluck a soul out of
the midst of the world, and to uphold it against the assaults
of flesh and blood. It is Saturday, my day for going to
Cahuzac ; I am just going there, perhaps I shall come back
more tranquil. God has always given me some good thing
there, in that chapel where I have left behind me so many i
miseries.'
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 109
Such is confession for her when the priest is worthy ;
and, when he is not worthy, she knows how to separate
the man from the office : —
' To-day I am going to do something which I dislike ;
but I will do it, with God's help. Do not think I am on
my way to the stake ; it is only that I am going to confess
to a priest in whom I have not confidence, but who is the
only one here. In this act of religion the man must always
be separated from the priest, and sometimes the man
must be annihilated.'
The same clear sense, the same freedom from super-
stition, shows itself in all her religious life. She tells us,
to be sure, how once, when she was a little girl, she stained
a new frock, and on praying, in her alarm, to an image of
the Virgin which hung in her room, saw the stains vanish :
even the austerest Protestant will not judge such Mario-
latry as this very harshly. But, in general, the Virgin
Mary fills, in the religious parts of her journal, no pro-
minent place ; it is Jesus, not Mary. * Oh, how well has
Jesus said : " Come unto me, all ye that labour and are
heavy laden." It is only there, only in the bosom of God,
that we can rightly weep, rightly rid ourselves of our
burden.' And again : ' The mj^stery of suffering makes
one grasp the belief of something to be expiated, some-
thing to be won. I see it in Jesus Christ, the Man of
Sorrow. It was necessary that the Son of Man should
suffer. That is all we know in the troubles and calamities
of life.'
And who has ever spoken of justification more impres-
sively and piously than Mdlle. de Guerin speaks of it, when,
after reckoning the number of minutes she has lived, she
exclaims : —
* My God, what have we done with all these minutes
of ours, which thou, too, wilt one day reckon ? Will there
be any of them to count for eternal life ? will there be
many of them ? will there be one of them ? "If thou,
0 Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss,
0 Lord, who may abide it ? " This close scrutiny of our
time may well make us tremble, all of us who have advanced
more than a few steps in life ; for God will judge us other-
wise than as he judges the lilies of the field. I have never
110 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
been able to understand the security of those who place
their whole reliance, in presenting themselves before God,
upon a good conduct in the ordinary relations of human
life. As if all our duties were confined within the narrow
sphere of this world ! To be a good parent, a good child,
a good citizen, a good brother or sister, is not enough to
procure entrance into the kingdom of heaven. God
demands other things besides these kindly social virtues,
of him whom he means to crown with an eternity of glory.'
And, with this zeal for the spirit and power of religion,
what prudence in her counsels of religious practice ; what
discernment, what measure ! She has been speaking of
the charm of the Lives of the Saints, and she goes on : —
' Notwithstanding this, the Lives of the Saints seem to
me, for a great many people, dangerous reading. I would
not recommend them to a young girl, or even to some
women who are no longer young. What one reads has
such power over one's feelings ; and these, even in seek-
ing God, sometimes go astray. Alas, we have seen it in
poor C.'s case. What care one ought to take with a young
person ; with what she reads, what she writes, her society,
her prayers, — all of them matters which demand a mother's
tender watchfulness ! I remember many things I did at
fourteen, which my mother, had she lived, would not
have let me do. I would have done anything for God's
sake ; I would have cast myself into an oven, and assuredly
things like that are not God's will ; he is not pleased by
the hurt one does to one's health through that ardent but
ill-regulated piety which, while it impairs the body, often
leaves many a fault flourishing. And, therefore, Saint
Fran9ois de Sales used to say to the nuns who asked his
leave to go barefoot : " Change your brains and keep your
shoes.'"
Meanwhile Maurice, in a five years' absence, and amid
the distractions of Paris, lost, or seemed to his sister to
lose, something of his fondness for his home and its in-
mates ; he certainly lost his early religious habits and
feelings. It is on this latter loss that Mdlle. de Guerin's
journal oftenest touches, — with infinite delicacy, but with
infinite anguish : —
* Oh, the agony of being in fear for a soul's salvation.
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 111
who can describe it ! That which caused our Saviour the
keenest suffering, in the agony of his Passion, was not so
much the thought of the torments he was to endure, as
the thought that these torments would be of no avail for
a multitude of sinners ; for all those who set themselves
against their redemption, or who do not care for it. The
mere anticipation of this obstinacy and this heedlessness
had power to make sorrowful, even unto death, the divine
Son of Man. And this feeling all Christian souls, accord-
ing to the measure of faith and love granted them, more
or less share.'
Maurice returned to Le Cayla in the summer of 1837,
and passed six months there. This meeting entirely
restored the union between him and his family. ' These
six months with us,' writes his sister, ' he ill, and finding
himself so loved by us all, had entirely reattached him to
us. Five years without seeing us, had perhaps made him
a little lose sight of our affection for him ; having found
it again, he met it with all the strength of his own. He
had so firmly renewed, before he left us, all family-ties,
that nothing but death could have broken them.' The
separation in religious matters between the brother and
sister gradually diminished, and before Maurice died it had
ceased. I have elsewhere spoken of Maurice's religious
feeling and its character. It is probable that his diver-
gence from his sister in this sphere of religion was never
so wide as she feared, and that his reunion with her was
never so complete as she hoped. * His errors were passed,*
she says, ' his illusions were cleared away ; by the call of
his nature, by original disposition, he had come back to
sentiments of order. I knew all, I followed each of his
steps ; out of the fiery sphere of the passions (which held
him but a little moment) I saw him pass into the sphere
of the Christian life. It was a beautiful soul, the soul of
Maurice.' But the illness which had caused his return to
Le Cayla reappeared after he got back to Paris in the
winter of 1837-8. Again he seemed to recover ; and his
marriage with a young Creole lady, Mdlle. Caroline de
Gervain, took place in the autumn of 1838. At the end
of September in that year Mdlle. de Guerin had joined her
brother in Paris ; she was present at his marriage, and
112 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
stayed with him and his wife for some months afterwards.
Her journal recommences in April 1839 ; zealously as
she had promoted her brother's marriage, cordial as were
her relations with her sister-in-law, it is evident that
a sense of loss, of loneliness, invades her, and sometimes
weighs her down. She writes in her journal on the 4th of
May :—
' God knows when we shall see one another again !
My own Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart, to find
that this marriage, which I had so much share in bringing
about, which I hoped would keep us so much together,
leaves us more asunder than ever ? For the present and
for the future, this troubles me more than I can say.
My sympathies, my inclinations, carry me more towards
you than towards any other member of our family. I have
the misfortune to be fonder of you than of anything else
in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you
its happiness. Youth gone and life declining, I looked
forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time
of life a great affection is a great happiness ; the spirit
comes to take refuge in it entirely. O delight and joy
which will never be your sister's portion ! Only in the
direction of God shall I find an issue for my heart to love
as it has the notion of loving, as it has the power of loving.'
From such complainings, in which there is undoubtedly
something morbid, — complainings which she herself blamed.
to which she seldom gave way, but which, in presenting
her character, it is not just to put wholly out of sight, —
she was called by the news of an alarming return of hei
brother's illness. For some days the entries in the journa]
show her agony of apprehension. ' He coughs, he coughs
still ! Those words keep echoing for ever in my ears, and
pursue me wherever I go ; I cannot look at the leaves on
the trees without thinking that the winter will come, and
then the consumptive die.' Then she went to him and
brought him back by slow stages to Le Cayla, dying. He
died on the 19th of July, 1839.
Thenceforward the energy of life ebbed in her ; but the
main chords of her being, the chord of affection, the chord
of religious longing, the chord of intelligence, the chord of
sorrow, gave, so long as they answered to the touch at all,
EUGENIE DE GUJfiRiN ll3
a -deeper and finer sound than ever. Always she saw before
her, * that beloved pale face ; ' ' that beautiful head, with
all its different expressions, smiling, speaking, suffering,
dying,' regarded her always : —
' I have seen his coffin in the same room, in the same
spot where I remember seeing, when I was a very Uttle
girl, his cradle, when I was brought home from Gaillac,
where I was then staying, for his christening. This christen-
ing was a grand one, full of rejoicing, more than that of
any of the rest of us ; specially marked. I enjoyed myself
greatly, and went back to Gaillac next day, charmed with
my new little brother. Two years afterwards I came home,
and brought with me for him a frock of my own making.
I dressed him in the frock, and took him out with me
along by the warren at the north of the house, and there
he walked a few steps alone, — his first walking alone, —
and I ran with delight to tell my mother the news :
" Maurice, Mam-ice has begun to walk by himself ! " —
Recollections which, coming back to day, break one's
heart ! '
The shortness and suffering of her brother's life filled
her with an agony of pity. ' Poor beloved soul, you have
had hardly any happiness here below ; your life has been
so short, your repose so rare. 0 God, uphold me, stablish
my heart in thy faith ! Alas, I have too little of this
supporting me ! How we have gazed at him and loved
him, and kissed him, — his wife, and we, his sisters ; he
lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he
were asleep 1 Then we followed him to the churchyard,
to the grave, to his last resting-place, and prayed over him,
and wept over him ; and we are here again, and I am
writing to him again, as if he were staying away from
home, as if he were in Paris. My beloved one, can it be,
shall we never see one another again on earth ? '
But in heaven ? — and here, though love and hope finally
prevailed, the very passion of the sister's longing some-
times inspired torturing inquietudes : —
' I am broken down with misery. I want to see him.
Every moment I pray to God to grant me this grace.
Heaven, the world of spirits, is it so far from us ? 0 depth,
O mystery of the other life which separates us I I, who
Aim OLD X
114 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
was so eagerly anxious about him, who wanted so to know
all that happened to him, — wherever he may be now, it
is over ! I follow him into the three abodes : I stop
wistfully before the place of bliss ; I pass on to the place
of suffering ; — to the gulf of fire. My God, my God, no !
Not there let my brother be ! not there ! And he is not :
his soul, the soul of Maurice, among the lost . . . horrible
fear, no ! But in purgatory, where the soul is cleansed
by suffering, where the failings of the heart are expiated,
the doubtings of the spirit, the half-yieldings to evil ''
Perhaps my brother is there and suffers, and calls to us
amidst his anguish of repentance, as he used to call to us
amidst his bodity suffering : " Help me, you who love
me." Yes, beloved one, by prayer. I will go and pray ;
prayer has been such a power to me, and I will pray tc
the end. Prayer ! Oh ! and prayer for the dead ; it is
the dew of purgatory.'
Often, alas, the gracious dew would not fall ; the aii
of her soul was parched ; the arid wind, which was some-
where in the depths of her being, blew. She marks in hei
journal the first of May, ' this return of the loveliest month
in the year,' only to keep up the old habit ; even the
month of May can no longer give her any pleasure : ' Tout
est change — all is changed.' She is crushed by ' the miser}'
which has nothing good in it, the tearless, dry misery,
which bruises the heart like a hammer.'
' I am dying to everything. I am dying of a slow moral
agony, a condition of unutterable suffering. Lie there, my
poor journal ! be forgotten with all this world which is
fading away from me. I will write here no more until
I come to life again, until God re-awakens me out of this
tomb in which my soul lies buried. Maurice, my beloved !
it was not thus with me when I had you ! The thought
of Maurice could revive me from the most profound depres-
sion : to have him in the world was enough for me. With
Maurice, to be buried alive would have not seemed dull
to me.'
And, as a burden to this funereal strain, the old vide et
neant of Bossuet, profound, solemn, sterile : —
* So beautiful in the morning, and in the evening, that !
how the thought disenchants one, and turns one from the
EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 116
world ! I can understand that Spanish grandee who, after
lifting up the winding-sheet of a beautiful queen, threw
himself into a cloister and became a great saint. I would
bave all my friends at La Trappe, in the interest of their
eternal welfare. Not that in the world one cannot be
saved, not that there are not in the world duties to be
discharged as sacred and as beautiful as there are in the
cloister, but . . .'
And there she stops, and a day or two afterwards her
journal comes to an end. A few fragments, a few letters
carry us on a little later, but after the 22nd of August, 1845,
there is nothing. To make known her brother's genius to
the world was the one task she set herself after his death ;
in 1840 came Madame Sand's noble tribute to him in the
Eenue des Deux Mondes ; then followed projects of raising
a, yet more enduring monument to his fame, by collecting
md publishing his scattered compositions ; these projects
[ have already said, were baffled ; — Mdlle. de Guerin's
[etter of the 22nd of August, 1845, relates to this dis-
appointment. In silence, during nearly three years more,
3he faded away at Le Cayla. She died on the 31st of May,
1848.
M. Trebutien has accompUshed the pious task in which
MdUe. de Guerin was baffled, and has established Maurice's
Fame ; by publishing this journal he has established
Eugenie's also. She was very different from her brother ;
but she too, Kke him, had that in her which preserves
St reputation. Her soul had the same characteristic quality
j-s his talent, — distinction. Of this quality the world is
impatient ; it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates
it : it ends by receiving its influence, and by undergoing
its law. This quality at last inexorably corrects the world's
blunders, and fixes the world's ideals. It procures that
the popular poet shall not finally pass for a Pindar, nor
bhe popular historian for a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher
lOr a Bossuet. To the circle of spirits marked by this rare
luaHty, Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin belong ; they will
bake their place in the sky which these inhabit, and shine
3lose to one another, lucida sidera.
19,
HEINRICH HEINE
' I KNOW not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should
one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have
loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything.
I have never attached any great value to poetical fame ;
and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my
verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a sword ; foi
I was a brave soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.'
Heine had his full share of love of fame, and cared quite
as much as his brethren of the genus irritabile whethei
people praised his verses or blamed them. And he was
very little of a hero. Posterity will certainly decorate his
tomb with the emblem of the laurel rather than with the
emblem of the sword. Still, for his contemporaries, for us
for the Europe of the present century, he is signfficani
chiefly for the reason which he himself in the words jusi
quoted assigns. He is significant because he was, if noi
pre-eminently a brave, yet a brilliant, a most effective
soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.
To ascertain the master-current in the literature of ar
epoch, and to distinguish this from all minor currents, is
one of the critic's highest functions ; in discharging it he
shows how far he possesses the most indispensable quality
of his office, — justness of spirit. The living writer who
has done most to make England acquainted with Germar
authors, a man of genius, but to whom precisely this one
quality of justness of spirit is perhaps wanting, — I mear
Mr. Carlyle, — seems to me in the result of his labours or
German Uterature to afford a proof how very necessary tc
the critic this quality is. Mr. Cartyle has spoken admirably
of Goethe ; but then Goethe stands before all men's eyes,
the manifest centre of German literature ; and from this
central source many rivers flow. Which of these rivers is
the main stream ? which of the courses of spirit which we
see active in Goethe is the course which will most influence
the future, and attract and be continued by the most
HEINRICH HEINE 117
powerful of Goethe's successors ? — that is the question.
Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too much impor-
tance to the romantic school of Germany, — Tieck, Novalis,
Jean Paul Richter, — and gives to these writers, really
gifted as two, at any rate, of them are, an undue prom-
inence. These writers, and others with aims and a general
tendency the same as theirs, are not the real inheritors
and continuators of Goethe's power ; the current of their
activity is not the main current of German literature after
Goethe. Far more in Heine's works flows this main
current ; Heine, far more than Tieck or Jean Paul Richter,
is the continuator of that which, in Goethe's varied activity,
is the most powerful and vital ; on Heine, of all German
authors who survived Goethe, incomparably the largest
portion of Goethe's mantle fell. I do not forget that when
^Ir. Carlyle was dealing with German Uterature, Heine,
though he was clearly risen above the horizon, had not
shone forth with all his strength ; I do not forget, too,
that after ten or twenty years many things may come out
plain before the critic which before were hard to be dis-
cerned by him ; and assuredly no one would dream of
imputing it as a fault to Mr. Carlyle that twenty years
ago he mistook the central current in German Uterature,
overlooked the rising Heine, and attached undue impor-
tance to that romantic school which Heine was to destroy ;
one may rather note it as a misfortune, sent perhaps as
a deUcate chastisement to a critic, who, — man of genius .^
as he is, and no one recognises his genius more admiringly
than I do, — has, for the functions of the critic, a little too
much of the self-will and eccentricity of a genuine son of
Great Britain.
Heine is noteworthy, because he is the most importan^>N k-
German successor and continuator of Goethe in Goethe's
most important line of activity. And which of Goethe's
lines of activity is this ? — His line of activity as ' a soldier
in the war of liberation of humanity.'
Heine himself would hardly have admitted this affilia-
tion, though he was far too powerful-minded a man to
decry, with some of the vulgar German liberals, Goethe's
genius. * The wind of the Paris Revolution,' he writes
after the three days of 1830, ' blew about the candles
118 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
a little in the dark night of Germany, so that the red
curtains of a German throne or two caught fire ; but the
old watchmen, who do the police of the German kingdoms,
are already bringing out the fire-engines, and will keep the
candles closer snuffed for the future. Poor, fast-bound
German people, lose not all heart in thy bonds I The
fashionable coating of ice melts off from my heart, my soul
quivers and my eyes burn, and that is a disadvantageous
state of things for a writer, who should control his subject-
matter and keep himself beautifully objective, as the
artistic school would have us, and as Goethe has done ;
he has come to be eighty years old doing this, and minister,
and in good condition ; — poor German people ! that is thy
greatest man ! '
But hear Goethe himself : ' If I were to say what I had
really been to the Germans in general, and to the young
German poets in particular, I should say I had been their
liberator'
Modern times find themselves with an immense system
of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, cus-
toms, rules, which have come to them from times not
modern. In this system their life has to be carried for-
ward ; yet they have a sense that this system is not of
their own creation, that it by no means corresponds exactly
with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is
customary, not rational. The awakening of this sense is
the awakening of the modern spirit. The modern spirit is
now awake almost everywhere ; the sense of want of
correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and
its spirit, between the new wine of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and the old bottles of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, or even of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth, almost every one now perceives ; it is no longer
dangerous to affirm that this want of correspondence
exists ; people are even beginning to be shy of denying
it. To remove this want of correspondence is beginning
to be the settled endeavour of most persons of good sense.
Dissolvents of the old European system of dominant ideas
and facts we must all be, all of us who have any power of
working ; what we have to study is that we may not be
acrid dissolvents of it.
HEINRICH HEINE 119
And how did Goethe, that grand dissolvent in an age
when tliere were fewer of them than at present, proceed
in his task of dissolution, of liberation of the modern
European from the old routine ? He shall tell us himself.
' Through me the German poets have become aware that,
as man must live from within outwards, so the artist must
work from within outwards, seeing that, make what con-
tortions he will, he can only bring to light his own individu-
ality. I can clearly mark where this influence of mine has
made itself felt ; there arises out of it a kind of poetry of
nature, and only in this way is it possible to be original.'
My voice shall never be joined to those which decry
Goethe, and if it is said that the foregoing is a lame and
impotent conclusion to Goethe's declaration that he had
been the liberator of the Germans in general, and of the
young German poets in particular, I say it is not. Goethe's
profound, imperturbable naturalism is absolutely fatal to
all routine thinking; he puts the standard, once for all,-,
inside every man instead of outside him ; when he is told, \
such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and \
custom in favour of its being so, it has been held to be so
for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian polite-
ness, ' But is it so ? is it so to me ? ' Nothing could be
more really subversive of the foundations on which the
old European order rested ; and it may be remarked that
no persons are so radically detached from this order, no
persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt
Goethe's influence most deeply. If it is said that Goethe
professes to have in this way deeply influenced but a few
' persons, and those persons poets, one may answer that he
could have taken no better way to secure, in the end, the
ear of the world ; for poetry is simply the most beautiful,
impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things,
and hence its importance. Nevertheless the process of
liberation, as Goethe worksd it, though sure, is undoubtedly
slow ; he came, as Heine says, to be eighty years old in
thus working it, and at the end of that time the old Middle-
Age machine was still creaking on, the thirty German
courts and their chamberlains subsisted in all their glory ;
) Goethe himself was a minister, and the visible triumph of
the modern spirit over prescription and routine seemed as
120 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
far off as ever. It was the year 1830 ; the German sovereigns
had passed the preceding fifteen years in breaking the
promises of freedom they had made to their subjects when
they wanted their help in the final struggle with Napoleon.
Great events were happening in France ; the revolution,
defeated in 1815, had arisen from its defeat, and was
wresting from its adversaries the power. Heinrich Heine,
a young man of genius, born at Hamburg, and with all the
culture of Germany, but by race a Jew ; with warm
sympathies for France, whose revolution had given to its
race the rights of citizenship, and whose rule had been, as
is well known, popular in the Rhine provinces, where he
passed his youth ; with a passionate admiration for the
great French Emperor, with a passionate contempt for the
sovereigns who had overthrown him, for their agents, and
for their policy, — Heinrich Heine was in 1830 in no humour
for any such gradual process of liberation from the old
order of things as that which Goethe had followed. His
counsel was for open war. With that terrible modern
weapon, the pen, in his hand, he passed the remainder of
his life in one fierce battle. What was that battle ? the
reader will ask. It was a life and death battle with Philis-
tinism.
Philistinism ! — we have not the expression in English.
Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much
of the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of
solecisms ; and here, at the very head-quarters of Gohath,
nobody talks of PhiHstinism. The French have adopted
the term epicier (grocer), to designate the sort of being
whom the Germans designatelby the term Philistine ; but
the French term, — besides that it casts a slur upon a re-
spectable class, composed of living and susceptible members,
while the original Philistines are dead and buried long ago,
— is really, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive
than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain
in English some term equivalent to Philister or epicier ;
Mr. Carlyle has made several such efforts : ' respectability
with its thousand gigs,' he says ; — well, the occupant of
every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine.
However, the word respectable is far too valuable a word^
tp be thus perverted from its proper meaning ; if th^
HEINRICH HEINE 121
English are ever to have a word for the thing we are speak-
ing of, — and so prodigious are the changes which the
modern spirit is introducing, that even we English shall
perhaps one day come to want such a word, — I think we
had much better take the term Philistine itself.
Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of
those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, un-^
enlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children) U'
of the light. The party of change, the would-bfe remodellers
) of the old traditional European order, the invokers of reason
against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in
every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves,
with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers as
a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded
their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine,
enemies to light ; stupid and oppressive, but at the same
time very strong. This explains the love which Heine,
that Paladin of the modern spirit, has for France ; it
explains the preference which he gives to France over
> Germany : ' the French,' he says, ' are the chosen people
of the new religion, its first gospels and dogmas have been
drawn up in their language ; Paris is the new Jerusalem,
and the Rhine is the Jordan which divides the consecrated
land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.' He
means that the French, as a people, have shown more
accessibility to ideas than any other people ; that prescrip-
tion and routine have had less hold upon them than upon
any other people ; that they have shown most readiness
to move and to alter at the bidding (real or supposed) of
) reason. This explains, too, the detestation which Heine
had for the English : ' I might settle in England,' he says,
in his exile, ' if it were not that I should find there two
things, coal-smoke and Englishmen ; I cannot abide
either.' What he hated in the English was the ' acht-
brittische Beschranktheit,' as he calls it, — the genuine
British narrowness. In truth, the English, profoundly'^as ^
they have modified the old Middle-Age order, great as is
the liberty which they have secured for themselves, have
in all their changes proceeded, to use a familiar expression,
) by the rule of thumb ; what was intolerably inconvenient
to them they have suppressed, and as they have suppressed
122 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
it, not because it was irrational, but because it was prac-
tically inconvenient, they have seldom in suppressing it
appealed to reason, but always, if possible, to some pre-
cedent, or form, or letter, which served as a convenient
instrument for their purpose, and which saved them from
the necessity of recurring to general principles. They have
thus become, in a certain sense, of all people the most
inaccessible to ideas and the most impatient of them ;
inaccessible to them, because of their want of familiarity
with them ; and impatient of them because they have got
on so well without them, that they despise those who, not
having got on as well as themselves, still make a fuss for
^what they themselves have done so well without. But
tKere has certainly followed from hence, in this country,
somewhat of a general depression of pure intelligence :
Philistia has come to be thought by us the true Land of
Promise, and it is anything but that ; the born lover of
ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this
country, that the sky over his head is of brass and iron.
The enthusiast for the idea, for reason, values reason, the
idea, in and for themselves ; he values them, irrespectively
of the practical conveniences which their triumph may
obtain for him ; and the man who regards the possession
of these practical conveniences as something sufficient in
itself, something which compensates for the absence or
surrender of the idea, of reason, is, in his eyes, a Philistine.
This is why Heine so often and so mercilessly attacks the
liberals ; much as he hates conservatism he hates Philistinism
even more, and whoever attacks conservatism itself ignobly,
not as a child of light, not in the name of the idea, is
a Philistine. Our Cobbett is thus for him, much as he dis-
liked our clergy and. aristocracy whom Cobbett attacked,
a Philistine with six fingers on every hand and on every foot
six toes, f our-and-twenty in number : a Philistine, the staff
of whose spear is like a weaver's beam. Thus he speaks
of him : —
' While I translate Cobbett' s words, the man himself
comes bodily before my mind's eye, as I saw him at
that uproarious dinner at the Crown and Anchor Tavern,
with his scolding red face and his radical laugh, in which
venomous hate mingles with a mocking exultation at his
HEINRICH HEINE 123
enemies' surely approaching downfall. He is a chained
cur, who falls with equal fury on every one whom he does
not know, often bites the best friend of the house in his
calves, barks incessantly, and just because of this in-
cessantness of his barking cannot get listened to, even when
he barks at a real thief. Therefore, the distinguished
thieves who plunder England do not think it necessary to
throw the growling Cobbett a bone to stop his mouth.
This makes the dog furiously savage, and he shows all his
0 hungry teeth. Poor old Cobbett ! England's dog ! I have
no love for thee, for every vulgar nature my soul abhors ;
but thou touchest me to the inmost soul with pity, as I see
how thou strainest in vain to break loose and to get at
those thieves, who make off with their booty before thy
very eyes, and mock at thy fruitless springs and thine
impotent howling.'
There is balm in Philistia as well as in Gilead. A chosen
circle of children of the modern spirit, perfectly emanci-
pated from prejudice and commonplace, regarding the
) ideal side of things in all its efforts for change, passionately
despising half-measures and condescension to human folly
and obstinacy, — with a bewildered, timid, torpid multitude
behind, — conducts a country to the ministry of Herr von
Bismarck. A nation regarding the practical side of things
in its efforts for change, attacking not what is irrational,
but what is pressingly inconvenient, and attacking this as
one body, ' moving altogether if it move at all,' and treat-
ing children of light like the very harshest of step-mothers,
comes to the prosperity and liberty of modern England.
) For all that, however, Philistia (let me say it again) is not
the true promised land, as we English commonly imagine
it to be ; and our excessive neglect of the idea, and con-
sequent inaptitude for it, threatens us, at a moment when
the idea is beginning to exercise a real power in human
society, with serious future inconvenience, and, in the
meanwhile, cuts us off from the sympathy of other nations,
which feel its power more than we do.
But, in 1830, Heine very soon found that the fire-engines
of the German governments were too much for his direct
3 efforts at incendiarism. ' What demon drove me,' he cries,
' to write my Reisehilder, to edit a newspaper, to plague
124 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
myself with our time and its interests, to try and shake
the poor German Hodge out of his thousand years' sleep
in his hole ? What good did I get by it ? Hodge opened
his eyes, only to shut them again immediately ; he yawned,
only to begin snoring again the next minute louder than
ever ; he stretched his stiff ungainly limbs, only to sink
down again directly afterwards, and lie like a dead man
in the old bed of his accustomed habits. I must have rest ;
but where am I to find a resting-place ? In Germany I can
no longer stay.' k
This is Heine's jesting account of his own efforts to
rouse Germany : now for his pathetic account of them ;
it is because he unites so much wit with so much pathos
that he is so effective a writer : —
' The Emperor Charles the Fifth sate in sore straits, in
the T3T0I, encompassed by his enemies. All his knights
and courtiers had forsaken him ; not one came to his help.
I know not if he had at that time the cheese face with
which Holbein has painted him for us. But I am sure
that under-lip of his, with its contempt for mankind, stuck 21
out even more than it does in his portraits. How could he
but contemn the tribe which in the sunshine of his prosperity
had fawned on him so devotedly, and now, in his dark
distress, left him all alone ? Then suddenly his door
opened, and there came in a man in disguise, and, as he
threw back his cloak, the Kaiser recognised in him his
faithful Conrad von der Rosen, the court jester. This
man brought him comfort and counsel, and he was the
court jester !
' 0 German fatherland ! dear German people ! I am si
thy Conrad von der Rosen. The man whose proper busi-
ness was to amuse thee, and who in good times should
have catered only for thy mirth, makes his way into thy
prison in time of need ; here, under my cloak, I bring thee
thy sceptre and crown ; dost thou not recognise me, my
Kaiser ? If I cannot free thee, I will at least comfort
thee, and thou shalt at least have one with thee who will
prattle with thee about thy sorest affliction, and whisper
courage to thee, and love thee, and whose best joke and
best blood shall be at thy service. For thou, my people, 4(
art the true Kaiser, the true lord of the land ; thy will is
HBINRICH HEINE 125
sovereign, and more legitimate far than that purple Tel
est notre flaisir, which invokes a divine right with no
better warrant than the anointings of shaven and shorn
i ugglers ; thy will, my people, is the sole rightful source
of power. Though now thou hest down in thy bonds, yet
in the end will thy rightful cause prevail ; the day of
deliverance is at hand, a new time is beginning. My
Kaiser, the night is over, and out there glows the ruddy
dawn.
0 * '• Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, thou art mistaken ;
perhaps thou takest a headsman's gleaming axe for the
sun, and the red of dawn is only blood."
' '' No, my Kaiser, it is the sun, though it is rising in the
west ; these six thousand years it has always risen in
the east ; it is high time there should come a change."
* " Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, thou hast lost the
bells out of thy red cap, and it has now such an odd look,
that red caj) of thine ! "
' " Ah, my Kaiser, thy distress has made me shake my
JO head so hard and fierce, that the fool's bells have dropped
off my cap ; the cap is none the worse for that."
' " Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, what is that noise
of breaking and cracking outside there ? "
* " Hush ! that is the saw and the carpenter's axe, and
soon the doors of thy prison w^ill be burst open, and thou
wilt be free, my Kaiser ! "
' " Am I then really Kaiser ? Ah, I forgot, it is the fool
who tells me so 1 "
' " Oh, sigh not, my dear master, the air of thy prison
30 makes thee so desponding ! when once thou hast got thy
rights again, thou wilt feel once more the bold imperial
blood in thy veins, and thou wilt be proud like a Kaiser,
and violent, and gracious, and unjust, and smiling, and
ungrateful, as princes are." .
' " Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, when I am free, what
wilt thou do then ? "
' " I will then sew new bells on to my cap."
' " And how shall I recompense thy fidelity ? "
* *' Ah, dear master, by not leaving me to die in a ditch ! " '
40 I wish to mark Heine's place in modem European
literature, the scojie of his activity, and his value. I cannot
126 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
attempt to give here a detailed account of his life, or
a description of his separate works. In May, 1831, he
went over his Jordan, the Rhine, and fixed himself in his
new Jerusalem, Paris. There, henceforward, he lived,
going in general to some French watering-place in the
summer, but making only one or two short visits to Ger-
many during the rest of his life. His works, in verse and
prose, succeeded each other without stopping ; a collected
edition of them, filling seven closely-printed octavo volumes,
has been published in America ; ^ in the collected editions i
of few people's works is there so little to skip. Those who
wish for a single good specimen of him should read his
first important work, the work which made his reputation,
the Reisebilder, or ' Travelling Sketches : ' prose and
verse, wit and seriousness, are mingled in it, and the
mingling of these is characteristic of Heine, and is nowhere
to be seen practised more naturally and happily than in
his Reisebilder. In 1847 his health, which till then had
always been perfectly good, gave way. He had a kind of
paralytic stroke. His malady proved to be a softening 2
of the spinal marrow : it was incurable ; it made rapid
progress. In May, 1848, not a year after his first attack,
he went out of doors for the last time ; but his disease
took more than eight years to kill him. For nearly eight
years he lay helpless on a couch, with the use of his limbs
gone, wasted almost to the proportions of a child, wasted
so that a woman could carry him about ; the sight of one
eye lost, that of the other greatly dimmed, and requiring,
that it might be exercised, to have the palsied eyelid lifted
and held up by the finger ; all this, and suffering, besides »
this, at short intervals, paroxysms of nervous agony.
I have said he was not pre-eminently brave ; but in the
astonishing force of spirit with which he retained his
activity of mind, even his gaiety, amid all his suffering,
and went on composing with undiminished fire to the last,
he was truly brave. Nothing could clog that aerial light-
ness. ' Pouvez-vous siffier ? ' his doctor asked him one
day, when he was almost at his last gasp ; — ' siffler,' as
every one knows, has the double meaning of to whistle
^ A complete edition has at last appeared in Germany.
HEINRICH HEINE 127
and to hiss : — * Helas ! non,' was his whispered answer ;
' pas meme une comedie de M. Scribe ! ' M. Scribe is, or
was, the favourite dramatist of the French PhiUstine.
' My nerves,' he said to some one who asked him about
them in 1855, the year of the Great Exhibition in Paris,
* my nerves are of that quite singularly remarkable miser-
ableness of nature, that I am convinced they would get
at the Exhibition the grand medal for pain and misery.'
He read all the medical books which treated of his com-
plaint. ' But,' said he to some one who found him thus
engaged, ' what good this reading is to do me I don't
know, except that it will qualify me to give lectures in
heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases
of the spinal marrow.' What a matter of grim seriousness
are our own ailments to most of us ! yet with this gaiety
Heine treated his to the end. That end, so long in coming,
came at last. Heine died on the 17th of February, 1856,
at the age of fifty-eight. By his mil he forbade that his
remains should be transported to Germany. He lies
buried in the cemetery of Montmartre, at Paris.
His direct political action was null, and this is neither
to be wondered at nor regretted ; direct political action^
is not the true function of literature, and Heine was a born I
man of letters. Even in his favourite France the turn taken
by public affairs was not at all what he wished, though
he read French politics by no means as we in England,
most of us, read them. He thought things were tending
there to the triumph of communism ; and to a champion
of the idea like Heine, what there is gross and narrow in
I communism was very repulsive. ' It is all of no use,' he
cried on his death-bed, ' the future belongs to our enemies,
the Communists, and Louis Napoleon is their John the
Baptist.' ' And yet,' — ^he added with all his old love for
that remarkable entity, so full of attraction for him, so
profoundly unknown in England, the French people, — ' do
not beUeve that God lets all this go forward merely as
a grand comedy. Even though the Communists deny him
to-day, he knows better than they do, that a time will
come when they will learn to believe in him.' After 1831
) his hopes of soon upsetting the German Governments had
died away, and his propagandism took another, a more
128 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
truly literary, character. It took the character of an
intrepid application of the modern spirit to Hterature. To
the ideas with which the burning questions of modern
life filled him, he made all his subject-matter minister.
He touched all the great points in the career of the human
race, and here he but followed the tendency of the wide
culture of Germany ; but he touched them with a wand
which brought them all under a light where the modern
eye cares most to see them, and here he gave a lesson to
the culture of Germany, — so wide, so impartial, that it is
apt to become slack and powerless, and to lose itself in
its materials for want of a strong central idea round which
to group all its other ideas. So the mystic and romantic
school of Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was
overpowered by their influence, came to ruin by its vain
dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder
sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle
Age than Goerres, or Brentano, or Arnim, Heine the chief
romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than
a romantic poet ; he is a great modern poet, he is not
conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which
he can feel, — along with but above the power of the
fascinating Middle Age itself, — ^the power of modern
ideas.
A French critic of Heine thinks he has said enough
in saying that Heine proclaimed in German countries,
with beat of drum, the ideas of 1789, and that at the
cheerful noise of his drum the ghosts of the IMiddle Age
took to flight. But this is rather too French an account
of the matter. Germany, that vast mine of ideas, had
no need to import ideas, as such, from any foreign country ;
and if Heine had carried ideas, as such, from France into
Germany, he would but have been carrjdng coals to New-
castle. But that for which France, far less meditative than
Germany, is eminent, is the prompt, ardent, and practical
application of an idea, when she seizes it, in all departments
of human activity which admit it. Amd that in which
Germany most fails, and by failing in which she appears
so helpless and impotent, is just the practical apphcation
of her innumerable ideas. ' When Candide,' says Heine
himself, * came to Eldorado, he saw in the streets a number
HEINRICH HEINE 129
of boys who were plajdng with gold-nuggets instead of
marbles. This degree of luxury made him imagine that
they must be the king's children, and he was not a little
astonished when he found that in Eldorado gold -nuggets
are of no more value than marbles are with us, and that
the schoolboys play with them. A similar thing happened
to a friend of mine, a foreigner, when he came to Germany
and first read German books. He was perfectly astounded
at the wealth of ideas which he found in them ; but he soon
0 remarked that ideas in Germany are as plentiful as gold-
nuggets in Eldorado, and that those writers whom he had
taken for intellectual princes, were in reality only common
school-boys.' Heine was, as he calls himself, a ' Child of
the French Revolution,' an 'Initiator,' because he vigorously
assured the Germans that ideas were not counters or marbles,
to be played with for their own sake ; because he exhibited
in Hterature modem ideas applied with the utmost freedom,
clearness, and originality. And therefore he declared
that the great task of his life had been the endeavour to
D establish a cordial relation between France and Germany.
It is because he thus operates a junction between the"^
French spirit, and German ideas and German culture, ;
that he founds something new, opens a fresh period, and /
deserves the attention of criticism far more than the
German poets his contemporaries, who merely continue /
an old period till it expires. It may be predicted that in I
the literature of other countries, too, the French spirit \
is destined to make its influence felt, — as an element, in 1
alliance with the native spirit, of novelty and movement, — I
0 as it has made its influence felt in German literature ; J
fifty years hence a critic will be demonstrating to ouir^
grandchildren how this phenomenon has come to pass^^
We in England, in our great burst of literature during
the first thirty years of the present century, had no mani-
festation of the modem spirit, as this spirit manifests
itself in Goethe's works or Heine's. And the reason is
not far to seek. We had neither the German wealth of ; /
ideas, nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. '
There reigned in the mass of the nation that inveterate"
D inaccessibility to ideas, that Philistinism, — to use the
German nickname, — which reacts even on the individual
130 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
genius that is exempt from it. In our greatest literary
epoch, that of the Elizabethan age, English society at
large was accessible to ideas, was permeated by them,
was vivified by them, to a degree which has never been
reached in England since. Hence the unique greatness
in English literature of Shakspeare and his contempo-
raries ; they were powerfully upheld by the intellectual
life of their nation ; they applied freely in literature the
then modern ideas, — the ideas of the Renaissance and the
Reformation. A few years afterwards the great English i
middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose
intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakspeare, entered
the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned on
its spirit there for two hundred years. He enlargeth
nation, says Job, and straiteneth it again. In the literary
movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century
the signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was
made in England by two members of the aristocratic
class, Byron and Shelley. Aristocracies are, as such,
naturally impenetrable by ideas ; but their individual 5
members have a high courage and a turn for breaking
boimds ; and a man of genius, who is the born child of
the idea, happening to be born in the aristocratic ranks,
chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from freely
developing it. But Byron and Shelley did not succeed
in their attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English
literature ; they could not succeed in it ; the resistance to
baffle them, the want of intelligent sympathy to guide and
uphold them, were too great. Their literary creation,
compared with the literary creation of Shakspeare and:
Spenser, compared with the literary creation of Goethe
and Heine, is a failure. The best literary creation of that
time in England proceeded from men who did not make
the same bold attempt as Byron and Shelley. What, in
fact, was the career of the chief English men of letters,
their contemporaries ? The greatest of them, Wordsworth,
retired (in Middle-Age phrase) into a monastery. I mean,
he plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntarily cut
himself off from the modern spirit. Coleridge took to opium.
Scott became the historiographer royal of feudalism. 4
Keats passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius,
HEINRTCH HEINE 131
to hi 3 faculty for interpreting nature ; and he died of
consumption at twenty-five, Wordsworth, Scott, and
Keats have left admirable works ; far more solid and com-
plete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left.
But their works have this defect ; — they do not belong to
that which is the main current of the literature of modern
epochs, they do not apply modern ideas to life ; they
constitute, therefore, minor currents, and all other literary
work of our day, however popular, which has the same
0 defect, also constitutes but a minor current. Byron and
Shelley will be long remembered, long after the inadequacy
of their actual work is clearly recognised, for their passionate,
their Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern
literature ; their names will be greater than their writings ;
■Stat magni nominis umbra.
Heine's literary good fortune was superior to that
of Bjrron and Shelley. His theatre of operations wa»^
Germany, whose Philistinism does not consist in her \
want of ideas, or in her inaccessibiHty to ideas, for she I
0 teems with them and loves them, but, as I have said, in /
her feeble and hesitating application of modern ideas to-V
life. )jleine's intense modernism, his absolute freedom,
his utter rejection of stock classicism and stock romanti-
cism, his bringing all things under the point of view of the
nineteenth century, were understood and laid to heart
by Germany, through virtue of her immense, tolerant
intellectualism, much as there was in all Heine said to affront
and wound Germany. The wit and ardent modem spirit^
of France Heine joined to the culture, the sentiment, the /
0 thought of Germany. This is what makes him so remark- [
able ; his wonderful clearness, lightness, and freedom, united
with such power of feeling and width of range. Is there
anywhere keener wit than in his story of the French
abbe who was his tutor, and who wanted to get from him
that la religion is French for der Glauhe : ' Six times did
he ask me the question : " Henry, what is der Glaube in
French ? " and six times, and each time with a greater
burst of tears, did I answer him — " It is le credit." And at
the seventh time, his face purple with rage, the infuriated
D (juestioner screamed out : ** It is la religion ; '* and a rain
of cuffs descended upon me, and all the other boys burst
K2
132 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
out laughing. Since that day I have never been able to
hear la religion mentioned, without feeling a tremor run
through my back, and my cheeks grow red with shame.'
Or in that comment on the fate of Professor Saalfeld, who
had been addicted to writing furious pamphlets against
Napoleon, and who was a professor at Gottingen, a great
seat, according to Heine, of pedantry and Philistinism :
* It is curious,' says Heine, ' the three greatest adversaries
of Napoleon have all of them ended miserably. Castlereagh
cut his own throat ; Louis the Eighteenth rotted upon i
his throne ; and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at
Gottingen.' It is impossible to go beyond thag
What wit, again, in that saying which every one has
heard : * The Englishman loves liberty like his lawful
wife, the Frenchman loves her like his mistress, the
German loves her like his old grandmother.' But the
turn Heine gives to this incomparable saying is not so
well known ; and it is by that turn he shows himself the
born poet he is, — full of delicacy and tenderness, of inex-
haustible resource, infinitely new and striking : — 2
' And yet, after all, no one can ever tell how things
may turn out. The grumpy Englishman, in an ill-temper
with his wife, is capable of some day putting a rope round
her neck, and taking her to be sold at Smithfield. The
inconstant Frenchman may become unfaithful to his
adored mistress, and be seen fluttering about the Palais
Royal after another. But the German will never quite
abandon his old grandmother ; he will always keep for her
a nook by the chimney-comer, where she can tell her
fairy stories to the listening children.' 3
Is it possible to touch more delicately and happily both
the weakness and the strength of Germany ; — pedantic,
simple, enslaved, free, ridiculous, admirable Germany ?
And Heine's verse, — his Lieder ? Oh, the comfort,
after dealing with French people of genius, irresistibly
impelled to try and express themselves in verse, launching
out into a deep which destiny has sown with so many
rocks for them, — ^the comfort of coming to a man of
genius, who finds in verse his freest and most perfect
expression, whose voyage over the deep of poetry destiny 4
makes smooth ! After the rhythm, to us, at any rat-e^^with
HEINRICH HEINE 133
the German paste in our composition, so deeply unsatis-
fying, of—
' Ah ! quo me dites-vous, et que vous dit mon ame ?
Que dit le ciel a I'aube et la flamme a la flamme ? '
what a blessing to arrive at rhythms like —
*Take, oh, take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn — *
or-
Siehst sehr sterbeblasslich aus,
Doch getrost ! du bist zu Haus-
in which one's soul can take pleasure ! The magic of
Heine's poetical form is incomparable ; he chiefly uses
a form of old German popular poetry, a ballad-form which
has more rapidity and grace than any ballad-form of ours ;
he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness
and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn
fulness, pathos, and old-world charm of all true forms of
popular poetry. Thus in Heine's poetry, too, one pei
petually blends the impression of French modernism and
20 clearness, with that of German sentiment and fulness ;
and to give this blended impression is, as I have said,-
Heine's great characteristic. To feel it, one must read
him ; ho gives it in his form as well as in his contents,
and by translation I can only reproduce it so far as his
contents give it. But even the contents of many of his
poems are capable of giving a certain sense of it. Here,
for instance, is a poem in which he makes his profession
of faith to an innocent beautiful soul, a sort of Gretchen,
the child of some simple mining people having their hut
80 among the pines at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, who
reproaches him with not holding the old articles of the
Christian creed : —
' Ah, my child, while I was yet a little boy, while I yet
sate upon my mother's knee, I believed in God the Father,
who rules up there in Heaven, good and great ;
* Who created the beautiful earth, and the beautiful
men and women thereon ; who ordained for sun, moon,
and stars their courses.
* When I got bigger, my child, I comprehended yet a
134 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
great deal more than this, and comprehended, and grew
intelligent ; and I believe on the Son also ;
' On the beloved Son, who loved us, and revealed
love to us ; and for his reward, as always happens, was
crucified by the people.
' Now, when I am grown up, have read much, have
travelled much, my heart swells within me, and with my
whole heart I believe on the Holy Ghost.
' The greatest miracles were of his working, and still
greater miracles doth he even now work ; he burst in i
sunder the oppressor's stronghold, and he burst in sunder
the bondsman's yoke.
' He heals old death-wounds, and renews the old right ;
all mankind are one race of noble equals before him.
' He chases away the evil clouds and the dark cobwebs
of the brain, which have spoilt love and joy for us, which
day and night have loured on us.
* A thousand knights, well harnessed, has the Holy
Ghost chosen out to fulfil his will, and he has put courage
into their souls. 2
' Their good swords flash, their bright banners wave ;
what, thou wouldst give much, my child, to look upon
such gallant knights ?
' Well, on me, my child, look ! kiss me, and look boldly
upon me ! one of those knights of the Holy Ghost am I.'
One has only to turn over the pages of his Romancero,
• — a collection of poems written in the first years of his
illness, with his whole power and charm still in them, and
not, like his latest poems of all, painfully touched by the
^ air of his Matrazzen-gruft, his ' mattress-grave,' — ^to see 3
Heine's width of range ; the most varied figures succeed
one another, — Rhampsinitus, Edith with the Swan Neck,
Charles the First, Marie Antoinette, King David, a heroine
of Mabille, Melisanda of Tripoli, Richard Cceur de Lion,
Pedro the Cruel, Firdusi, Cortes, Dr. Dollinger ; — but
^y^neveT does Heine attempt to be hiibsch objectiv, ' beautifully
\ objective,' to become in spirit an old Egyptian, or an
old Hebrew, or a Middle-Age knight, or a Spanish adven-
turer, or an English royalist ; he always remains Heinrich
\Heine, a son of the nineteenth century. To give a notion 4
of his tone I will quote a few stanzas at the end of the
HEINRICH HEINE 135
Spanish Atridae, in which ho describes, in the character of
a visitor at the court of Henry of Transtamare at Segovia,
Henry's treatment of the children of his brother, Pedro
the Cruel. Don Diego Albuquerque, his neighbour, strolls
after dinner through the castle with him : —
' In the cloister-passage, which leads to the kennels
where are kept the king's hounds, that with their growling
and yelping let you know a long way o& where they are,
' There I saw, built into the wall, and with a strong
LOiron grating for its outer face, a cell like a cage.
' Two human figures sate therein, two young boys ;
chained by the leg, they crouched in the dirty straw.
* Hardly twelve years old seemed the one, the other
not much older ; their faces fair and noble, but pale and
wan with sickness.
* They were all in rags, almost naked ; and their lean
bodies showed wounds, the marks of ill-usage ; both of
them shivered with fever..
' They looked up at me out of the depth of their misery ;
10 " Who," I cried in horror to Don Diegcr, '* are these pictures
of wretchedness ? "
* Don Diego seemed embarrassed ; he looked round to
see that no one was listening ; then he gave a deep sigh ;
and at last, putting on the easy tone of a man of the world,
he said :
' " These are a pair of king's sons, who were early left
orphans ; the name of their father was King Pedro, the
name of their mother, Maria de Padilla.
* " After the great battle of Navarette, when Henry of
JO Transtamare had relieved his brother, King Pedro, of
the troublesome burden of the crown,
* " And likewise of that still more troublesome burden,
which is called life, then Don Henry's victorious magna-
nimity had to deal with his brother's children.
' " He has adopted them, as an uncle should ; and he
has given them free quarters in his own castle.
' " The room which he has assigned to them is certainly
rather small, but then it is cool in summer, and not intoler-
ably cold in winter.
tt) ' " Their fare is rye-bread, which tastes as sweet as if the
goddess Ceres had baked it express for her beloved Proserpine.
136 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
' " Not unfrequently, too, he sends a scullion to them
with garbanzos, and then the young gentlemen know that
it is Sunday in Spain.
* " But it is not Sunday every day, and garbanzos do
not come every day ; and the master of the hounds gives
them the treat of his whip.
* " For the master of the hounds, who has imder his
superintendence the kennels and the pack, and the nephews'
cage also,
' " Is the unfortunate husband of that lemon-faced
woman with the white ruff, whom we remarked to-day at
dinner.
* " And she scolds so sharp, that often her husband
snatches his whip, and rushes down here, and gives it to
the dogs and to the poor little boys.
* " But his majesty has expressed his disapproval of
such proceedings, and has given orders that for the future
his nephews are to be treated differently from the dogs.
' *' He has determined no longer to entrust the disci-
plining of his nephews to a mercenary stranger, but to :
carry it out with his own hands."
' Don Diego stopped abruptly ; for the seneschal of
the castle joined us, and politely expressed his hope
that we had dined to our satisfaction.'
Observe how the irony of the whole of that, finishing
with the grim innuendo of the last stanza but one, is at
once truly masterly and truly modern.
No account of Heine is complete which does not notice
the Jewish element in him. His race he treated with
the same freedom with which he treated everything else, ;
but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew
this better than he himself. He has excellently pointed
out how in the sixteenth century there was a double
renaissance, — a Hellenic renaissance and a Hebrew renais-
sance,— and how both have been great powers ever since.
He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the
spirit of Judaea ; both these spirits reach the infinite,
which is the true goal of all poetry and all art, — the
Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity.
By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness, 4
by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek ; by his intensity,
HEINRICH HEINE 137
by his uiitamableness, by his ' longing which cannot be
uttered,' he is Hebrew. Yet what Hebrew ever treated
the things of the Hebrews like this ? —
* There lives at Hamburg, in a one-roomed lodging in
the Baker's Broad Walk, a man whose name is Moses
Lump ; all the week he goes about in wind and rain,
with his pack on his back, to earn his few shillings ; but
when on Friday evening he comes home, he finds the
candlestick with seven candles lighted, and the table
0 covered with a fair white cloth, and he puts away from
him his pack and his cares, and he sits down to table
with his squinting wife and yet more squinting daughter,
and eats fish with them, fish which has been dressed in
beautiful white garlic sauce, sings therewith the grandest
psalms of King David, rejoices with his whole heart over
the deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt,
rejoices, too, that all the wicked ones who have done
the children of Israel hurt, have ended by taking them-
selves off ; that King Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman,
0 Antiochus, Titus, and all such people, are well dead, while
he, Moses Lump, is yet alive, and eating fish with wife and
daughter ; and I can tell you. Doctor, the fish is delicate
and the man is happy, he has no call to torment himself
about culture, he sits contented in his religion and in his
green bed-gown, like Diogenes in his tub, he contemplates
with satisfaction his candles, which he on no account will
snuff for himself ; and I can tell you, if the candles bum
a little dim, and the snuffers-woman, whose business it is
to snuff them, is not at hand, and Rothschild the Great
0 were at that moment to come in, with all his brokers, bill
discounters, agents, and chief clerks, with whom he conquers
the world, and Rothschild were to say : " Moses Lump,
ask of me what favour you will, and it shall be granted
you ; " — Doctor, I am convinced, Moses Lump would
quietly answer : " Snuff me those candles ! " and Roth-
schild the Great would exclaim with admiration : " If I
were not Rothschild, I would be Moses Lump." '
There Heine shows us his own people by its comic
Bide ; in the poem of the Princess Sabbath he shows it to
ous by a more serious side. The Princess Sabbath, * the
tranquil Princess, pearl and flower of all beauty, fair as
138 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
the Queen of Sheba, Solomon's bosom friend, that blue
stocking from Ethiopia who wanted to shine by her esprit,
and with her wise riddles made herself in the long run a
bore ' (with Heine the sarcastic turn is never far off),
this princess has for her betrothed a prince whom sorcery
has transformed into an animal of lower race, the Prince
Israel.
* A dog with the desires of a dog, he wallows all the
week long in the filth and refuse of hfe, amidst the jeers
of the boys in the street.
' But every Friday evening, at the twilight hour, sud-
denly the magic passes off, and the dog becomes once
more a human being.
' A man with the feelings of a man, with head and
heart raised aloft, in festal garb, in almost clean garb, he
enters the halls of his Father.
* Hail, beloved halls of my royal Father ! Ye tents of
Jacob, I kiss with my lips your holy door-posts ! '
Still more he shows us this serious side in his beautiful
poem on Jehuda ben Halevy, a poet belonging to ' the
great golden age of the Arabian, Old-Spanish, Jewish
school of poets,' a contemporary of the troubadours : —
' He, too, — the hero whom we sing, — Jehuda ben Halevy,
too, had his lady-love ; but she was of a special sort.
' She was no Laura, whose eyes, mortal stars, in the
cathedral on Good Friday kindled that world-renowned
flame.
' She was no chatelaine, who in the blooming glory of
her youth presided at tourneys, and awarded the victor's
crown.
' No casuistess in the Gay Science was she, no lady
doctrinaire, who delivered her oracles in the judgment-
chamber of a Court of Love.
* She, whom the Rabbi loved, was a woe-begone poor
darling, a mourning picture of desolation . . . and her
name was Jerusalem.'
Jehuda ben Halevy, like the Crusaders, makes his
pilgrimage to Jerusalem ; and there, amid the ruins, sings
a song of Sion which has become famous among his
people : —
* That lay of pearled tears is the wide -famed Lament,
HEINRICH HEINE 139
which is sung in all the scattered tents of Jacob throughout
the world,
' On the ninth day of the month which is called Ab,
on the anniversary of Jerusalem's destruction by Titus
Vespasianus.
' Yes, that is the song of Sion, which Jehuda ben Halevy
sang with his dying breath amid the holy ruins of Jeru-
salem.
' Barefoot, and in penitential weeds, ho sate there upon
) the fragment of a fallen column ; down to his breast
fell,
' Like a grey forest, his hair ; and cast a weird shadow
on the face which looked out through it, — his troubled
pale face, with the spiritual eyes.
' So he sate and sang, like unto a seer out of the fore-
time to look upon ; Jeremiah, the Ancient, seemed to
have risen out of his grave.
* But a bold Saracen came riding that way, aloft on
his barb, lolling in his saddle, and brandishing a naked
) javelin ;
' Into the breast of the poor singer he plunged his
deadly shaft, and shot away like a winged shadow.
' Quietly flowed the Rabbi's life-blood, quietly he
nang his song to an end ; and his last dying sigh was
Jerusalem ! '
But, most of all, Heine shows us this side in a strange
poem describing a public dispute, before King Pedro and
his court, between a Jewish and a Christian champion, on
the merits of their respective faiths. In the strain of the
)Jew all the fierceness of the old Hebrew genius, all its
rigid defiant Monotheism, appear : —
' Our God has not died like a poor innocent lamb for
mankind ; he is no gushing philanthropist, no declaimer.
' Our God is not love ; caressing is not his line ; but
he is a God of thunder, and he is a God of revenge.
' The lightnings of his wrath strike inexorably every
sinner, and the sins of the fathers are often visited upon
their remote posterity.
' Our Grod, he is alive, and in his hall of heaven he
0 goes on existing away, throughout all the eternities.
*Our God, too, is a God in robust health, no myth.
k
140 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
pale and thin as sacrificial wafers, or as shadows hy
Cocytus.
' Our God is strong. In his hand he upholds sun, moon,
and stars ; thrones break, nations reel to and fro, when
he knits his forehead.
' Our God loves music, the voice of the harp and the
song of feasting ; but the sound of church-bells he hateSj
as he hates the grunting of pigs.'
Nor must Heine's sweetest note be unheard, — hig
plaintive note, his note of melancholy. Here is a strain
which came from him as he lay, in the winter night, on
his ' mattress -grave ' at Paris, and let his thoughts wandei
home to Germany, ' the great child, entertaining herseH
with her Christmas -tree.' ' Thou tookest,' — ^he cries tc
the German exile, —
* Thou tookest thy flight towards sunshine and happi-
ness ; naked and poor returnest thou back. German
truth, German shirts, — one gets them worn to tatters in
foreign parts.
* Deadly pale are thy looks, but take comfort, thou
art at home ; one lies warm in German earth, warm ag
by the old pleasant fireside.
' Many a one, alas ! became crippled, and could get
home no more : longingly he stretches out his arms ;
God have mercy upon him ! '
God have mercy upon him ! for what remain of the days
of the years of his life are few and evil. ' Can it be that
I still actually exist ? My body is so shrunk that there is
hardly anything of me left but my voice, and my bed makes
me think of the melodious grave of the enchanter Merlin,
which is in the forest of Broceliand in Brittany, under high
oaks whose tops shine like green flames to heaven. Ah,
I envy thee those trees, brother Merlin, and their fresh
waving ! for over my mattress-grave here in Paris no green
leaves rustle ; and early and late I hear nothing but the
rattle of carriages, hammering, scolding, and the jingle
of the piano. A grave without rest, death without the
privileges of the departed, who have no longer any need to
spend money, or to write letters, or to compose books.
What a melancholy situation ! '
He died, and has left a blemished name ; with his
HEINRTCH HEINE 141
crying faults, — his intemperate susceptibility, his unscru-
pulousness in passion, his inconceivable attacks on his
enemies, his still more inconceivable attacks on his friends,
his want of generosity, his sensuality, his incessant mocking,
• — how could it be otherwise ? Not only was he not one of
Mr. Carlyle's ' respectable ' people, he was profoundly
disrespectable ; and not even the merit of not being
a Philistine can make up for a man's being that. To his
intellectual deliverance there was an addition of some-
I thing else wanting, and that something else was something
immense ; the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needfuL.,^^
moral deliverance. Goethe says that he was deficient ]
in love ; to me his weakness seems to be not so much /
a deficiency in love as a deficiency in self-respect, in J
true dignity of character. But on this negative side or
one's criticism of a man of great genius, I for my part,
when I have once clearly marked that this negative side
is and must be there, have no pleasure in dwelling. I
prefer to say of Heine something positive. He is not an
I adequate interpreter of the modem world. He is only
a brilliant soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.
But, such as he is, he is (and posterity too, I am quite sure,
will say this), in the European poetry of that quarter of
a century which follows the death of Goethe, incomparably
the most important figure.
What a spendthrift, one is tempted to cry, is Nature !
With what prodigality, in the march of generations, she
employs human power, content to gather almost always
little result from it, sometimes none ! Look at Byron,
I that Bjrron whom the present generation of Englishmen
are forgetting; Byron, the greatest natural force, the ~ ]
greatest elementary power, I cannot but think, which has /
appeared in our literature since Shakspeare. And what J
became of this wonderful production of nature ? He
shattered himself, he inevitably shattered himself to
pieces, against the huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable
precipice of British Philistinism. But Byron, it may be
said, was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn-
force and fire ; he had not the intellectual equipment of
)a supreme modem poet ; except for his genius he was an
ordinary nineteenth -century English gentleman, with little
142 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
culture and with no ideas. Well, then, look at Heine. Heine
had all the culture of Germany ; in his head fermented all
the ideas of modern Europe. And what have we got from
"^ Heine ? A half -result, for want of moral balance, and of
nobleness of soul and character. That is what I say ;
there is so much power, so many seem able to run well, so
many give promise of running well ; so few reach the goal,
\ so few are chosen. Many are called, few chosen.
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL RELIGIOUS
SENTIMENT
I READ the other day in the Dublin Review : — * We
Catholics are apt to be cowed and scared by the lordly
oppression of public opinion, and not to bear ourselves
as men in the face of the anti -Catholic society of England.
It is good to have an habitual consciousness that the public
opinion of Catholic Europe looks upon Protestant England
with a mixture of impatience and compassion, which more
than balances the arrogance of the English people towards
the Catholic Church in these countries.'
• The Holy Catholic Church, Apostolic and Roman, can
take very good care of herself, and I am not going to
defend her against the scorns of Exeter Hall. Catholicism
is not a great visible force in this country, and the mass
of mankind will always treat lightly even things the most
venerable, if they do not present themselves as visible
forces before its eyes. In Catholic countries, as the
Dublin Review itself says with triumph, they make very
little account of the greatness of Exeter Hall. The
majority has eyes only for the things of the majority, and
> in England the immense majority is Protestant. And yet,
in spite of all the shocks which the feeling of a good Catholic,
like the writer in the Dublin Review, has in this Protestant
country inevitably to undergo, in spite of the contemptuous
insensibility to the grandeur of Rome which he finds so
general and so hard to bear, how much has he to console
him, how many acts of homage to the greatness of his
religion may he see if he has his eyes open ! I will tell him
of one of them. Let him go in London to that delightful
spot, that Happy Island in Bloomsbury, the reading-room
)of the British Museum. Let him visit its sacred quarter,
the region where its theological books are placed. I am
almost afraid to say what he will find there, for fear Mr.
Spurgeon, like a second Caliph Omar, should give the library
144 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
to the flames. He will find an immense Catholic work,
the collection of the Abbe Migne, lording it over that
whole region, reducing to insignificance the feeble Pro-
testant forces which hang upon its skirts. Protestantism
is duly represented, indeed : the librarian knows hia
business too well to suffer it to be otherwise ; all the
varieties of Protestantism are there ; there is the Library
of Anglo -CathoHc Theology, learned, decorous, exemplary,
but a little uninteresting ; there are the works of Calvin,
rigid, militant, menacing ; there are the works of Dr.
Chalmers, the Scotch thistle valiantly doing duty as the
rose of Sharon, but keeping something very Scotch about it
all the time ; there are the works of Dr. Channing, the last
word of religious philosophy in a land where every one
has some culture and where superiorities are discounte-
nanced,— ^the flower of moral and intelligent mediocrity.
But how are all these divided against one another, and
how, though they were all united, are they dwarfed by the
Catholic Leviathan, their neighbour ! Majestic in its blue
and gold unity, this fills shelf after shelf and compartment
after compartment, its right mounting up into heaven
among the white folios of the Acta Sanctorum, its left
plunging down into hell among the yellow octavos of the
Law Digest. Everything is there, in that iimnensePatrologiae
Cursus Completus, in that Encyclojpedie Theologique, that
Nouvelle Encyclopedie Theologique, that Troisieme Encyclo-
pedie Theologique ; religion, philosophy, history, biography,
arts, sciences, bibliography, gossip. The work embraces
the whole range of human interests ; like one of the great
Middle -Age Cathedrals, it is in itself a study for a life. Like
the net in Scripture, it drags everything to land, bad and
good, lay and ecclesiastical, sacred and profane, so that
it be but matter of human concern. Wide -embracing as
the power whose product it is ! a power, for history at
any rate, eminently the Church ; not, perhaps, the Church
of the future, but indisputably the Church of the past,
and, in the past, the Church of the multitude.
This is why the man of imagination — nay, and the
philosopher too, in spite of her propensity to burn him —
will always have a weakness for the Catholic Church ;
because of the rich treasures of human life which have
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTII\IENT 146
been slored within her pale. The mention of other religious
bodies, or of their leaders, at once calls up in our mind the
thought of men of a definite type as their adherents ; the
mention of Catholicism suggests no such special following.
Anglicanism suggests the English episcopate ; Calvin's
name suggests Dr. Candlish ; Chalmers's, the Duke of
Argyll ; Channing's, Boston society ; but Catholicism"?
suggests, — what shall I say ? — all the pell-mell of the men J
and women of Shakspeare's plays. This abundance the^-^
) Abbe Migne's collection faithfully reflects. People talk of 1
this or that work which they would choose, if they were /
to pass their life with only one ; for my part I think I /
would choose the Abbe Migne's collection. Quicquid agunt {
homines, — everything, as I have said, is there. Do not
seek in it splendour of form, perfection of editing ; its
paper is common, its type ugly, its editing indifferent, its
printing careless. The greatest and most baffling crowd
of misprints I ever met with in my life occurs in a very
important page of the introduction to the Dictionnaire des
) Apocryphes. But this is just what you have in the world, —
quantity rather than quality. Do not seek in it impartiality,
the critical spirit ; in reading it you must do the criticism
for yourself ; it loves criticism as little as the world loves
it. Like the world, it chooses to have things all its own
way, to abuse its adversary, to back its own notion through
thick and thin, to put forward all the pros for its own notion,
to suppress all the contras ; it does just all that the world
does, and all that the critical shrinks from. Open the
Dictionnaire des Erreurs Sociales : * The religious persecu-
)tions of Henry the Eighth's and Edward the Sixth's
time abated a little in the reign of Mary, to break out
again with new fury in the reign of Elizabeth.' There is
a summary of the history of religious persecution under
the Tudors ! But how unreasonable to reproach the
Abbe Migne's work with wanting a criticism, which, by
the very nature of things, it cannot have, and not rather
to be grateful to it for its abundance, its variety, its infinite
suggestiveness, its happy adoption, in many a delicate
circumstance, of the urbane tone and temper of the man
3 of the world, instead of the acrid tone and temper of the
fanatic !
AUKOLD J^
i46 ifiSSAYS IN CRITICISM
Still, in spite of their fascinations, the contents of this
collection sometimes rouse the critical spirit within one.
It happened that lately, after I had been thinking much
of Marcus Aurelius and his times, I took down the Dic-
tionnaire des Origines du Ghristianisme, to see what it
had to say about paganism and pagans. I found much
what I expected. I read the article, Revelation Svangelique,
sa Necessiti. There I found what a sink of iniquity was
the whole pagan world ; how one Roman fed his oysters
on his slaves, how another put a slave to death that
a curious friend might see what dying was like ; how
Galen's mother tore and bit her waiting-women when she
was in a passion with them. I found this account of the
religion of paganism : ' Paganism invented a mob of
divinities with the most hateful character, and attributed
to them the most monstrous and abominable crimes. It
personified in them drunkenness, incest, kidnapping,
adultery, sensuality, knavery, cruelty, and rage.* And
I found that from this religion there followed such practice
as was to be expected : * What must naturally have been
the state of morals under the influence of such a religion,
which penetrated with its own spirit the public life, the
family life, and the individual life of antiquity ? '
The colours in this picture are laid on very thick, and
I for my part cannot believe that any human societies,
with a religion and practice such as those just described,
could ever have endured as the societies of Greece and
Rome endured, still less have done what the societies
of Greece and Rome did. We are not brought far by
descriptions of the vices of great cities, or even of indi-
viduals driven mad by imbounded means of self-indulgence.
Feudal and aristocratic hfe in Christendom has produced
horrors of selfishness and cruelty not surpassed by the
grandee of pagan Rome ; and then, again, in antiquity
there is Marcus Aurehus's mother to set against Galen's.
Eminent examples of vice and virtue in individuals prove
little as to the state of societies. What, under the first
emperors, was the condition of the Roman poor upon the
Aventine compared with that of our poor in Spitalfields
and Bethnal Green ? What, in comfort, morals, and happi- -
ness, were the rural population of the Sabine country
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 147
under Augustus's rule, compared with the rural population
of Hertfordshire and Buclmighamshire under the rule of^
Queen Victoria ? U->^
But these great questions are not now for me. Without I
trying to answer them, I ask myself, when I read such /
declamation as the foregoing, if I can find anything that /
will give me a near, distinct sense of the real difference in /
spirit and sentiment between paganism and Christianity,
and of the natural effect of this difference upon people-^
I in general. I take a representative rehgious poem of
paganism, — of the paganism which all the world has in
its mind when it speaks of paganism. To be a representa-
tive poem, it must be one for popular use, one that the
multitude Ustens to. Such a rehgious poem may be found
at the end of one of the best and happiest of Theocritus's
idylls, the fifteenth. In order that the reader may the
bettor go along with me in the line of thought I am following,
I will translate it ; and, that he may see the medium in
which religious poetry of this sort is found existing, the
) society out of which it grows, the people who form it and
are formed by it, I will translate the whole, or nearly the
whole, of the idyll (it is not long) in which the poem occurs.
The idyll is dramatic. Somewhere about two hundred
and eighty years before the Christian era, a couple of
Syracusan women, staying at Alexandria, agreed on the
occasion of a great religious solemnity, — the feast of
Adonis, — to go together to the palace of King Ptolemy
Philadelphus, to see the image of Adonis, which the
queen Arsinoe, Ptolemy's wife, had had decorated with
3 peculiar magnificence. A hymn, by a celebrated performer,'
was to be recited over the image. The names of the two
women are Gorgo and Praxinoe ; their maids, who are
mentioned in the poem, are called Eunoe and Eutychis.
Gorgo comes by appointment to Praxinoe's house to fetch
her, and there the dialogue begins : —
Gorgo. — Is Praxinoe at home ?
Praxinoe. — My dear Gorgo, at last! Yes, here I am.
Eunoe, find a chair, — get a cushion for it.
Oorgo. — It will do beautifully as it is.
Praxinoe. — Do sit down.
Gorgo. — Oh, this gad-about spirit ! I could hardly
L 2
148 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
get to you, Praxinoe, through all the crowd and all the
carriages. Nothing but heavy boots, nothing but men in
uniform. And what a journey it is ! My dear child, you
really Uve too far off.
Praxinoe. — It is all that insane husband of mine. He
has chosen to come out here to the end of the world,
and take a hole of a place, — for a house it is not, — on
purpose that you and I might not be neighbours. He
is always just the same ; — anything to quarrel with one !
anything for spite !
Gorgo. — My dear, don't talk so of your husband before
the little fellow. Just see how astonished he looks at you.
Never mind, Zopyrio, my pet, she is not talking about papa,
Praxinoe. — Good heavens ! the child does really under-
stand.
Gorgo. — Pretty papa !
Praxinoe. — That pretty papa of his the other dsiy
(though I told him beforehand to mind what he was
about), when I sent him to a shop to buy soap and rouge
brought me home salt instead ; — stupid, great, big, inter-
minable animal !
Gorgo. — Mine is just the fellow to him. . . . But nevei
mind now, get on your things and let us be off to the palace
to see the Adonis. I hear the queen's decorations are
something splendid.
Praxinoe. — In grand people's houses everji^hing is
grand. What things you have seen in Alexandria ! Whal
a deal you will have to tell to anj^body who has neve]
been here !
Gorgo. — Come, we ought to be going.
Praxinoe. — Every day is holiday to people who have
nothing to do. Eunoe, pick up your work ; and take care
lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again ; the cats
find it just the bed they like. Come, stir yourself, fetcl
me some water, quick ! I wanted the water first, and the
girl brings me the soap. Never mind ; give it me. Nol
all that, extravagant ! Now pour out the water ; — stupid
why don't you take care of my dress ? That will do
I have got my hands washed as it pleased God. Where
is the key of the large wardrobe ? Bring it here ;—
quick !
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 149
Gorgo. — Praxinoe, you can't think how well that dress,
made full, as you've got it, suits you. Tell me, how much
did it cost ? — the dress by itself, I mean.
Praxinoe. — Don't talk of it, Gorgo : more than eight
guineas of good hard money. And about the work on it
I have almost worn my life out.
Gorgo. — Well, you couldn't have done better.
Praxinoe. — Thank you. Bring me my shawl, and put
my hat properly on my head ; — properly. No, child {to
5 her little boy), I am not going to take you ; there 's a bogy
on horseback, who bites. Cry as much as you like ; I'm
not going to have you lamed for life. Now we'll start.
Nurse, take the little one and amuse him ; call the dog in,
and shut the street-door. (They go out.) Good heavens !
what a crowd of people ! How on earth are we ever to get
through all this ? They are like ants : you can't count
them. My dearest Gorgo, what will become of us ? here
are the royal Horse Guards. My good man, don't ride
over me ! Look at that bay horse rearing bolt upright ;
0 \^ hat a vicious one ! Eunoe, you mad girl, do take care ! —
that horse will certainly be the death of the man on his
back. How glad I am now, that I left the child safe at home !
Gorgo. — All right, Praxinoe, we are safe behind them ;
and they have gone on to where they are stationed.
Praxinoe. — Well, yes, I begin to revive again. From
the time I was a little girl I have had more horror of
horses and snakes than of anything in the world. Let
us get on ; here 's a great crowd coming this way upon us.
Gorgo (to an old woman). — Mother, are you from the
to palace ?
Old Woman. — \es, my dears.
Gorgo. — Has one a tolerable chance of getting there ?
Old Woman. — My pretty young lady, the Greeks got
to Troy by dint of trying hard ; trying will do anything
in this world.
Gorgo. — The old creature has delivered herself of an
oracle and departed.
Praxinoe. — Women can tell you everything about
everything, Jupiter's marriage with Juno not excepted.
10 Gorgo. — Look, Praxinoe, what a squeeze at the palace
gates I
150 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Praxinoe. — Tremendous ! Take hold of me, Gorge ;
and you, Eunoe, take hold of Eutychis ! — ^tight hold, or
you'll be lost. Here we go in all together. Hold tight
to us, Eunoe ! Oh, dear ! oh, dear ! Gorge, there 's my
scarf tern right in two. For heaven's sake, my good man,
as you hope to be saved, take care of my dress !
Stranger. — I'll do what I can, but it doesn't depend
upon me.
Praxinoe. — What heaps of people ! They push like a
drove of pigs.
Stranger. — Den't be frightened, ma'am, we are all
right.
Praxinoe. — May you be all right, my dear sir, to the
last day you live, for the care you have taken of us !
What a kind, considerate man ! There is Eunoe jammed
in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push ! Capital ! We
are all of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom
said when he had locked himself in with the bride.
Gorgo. — Praxinoe, come this way. Do but look at that
work, hew delicate it is ! — how exquisite ! Why, they
might wear it in heaven.
Praxinoe. — Heavenly patroness of needlewomen, what
hands were hired to do that work ? Who designed those
beautiful patterns ? They seem to stand up and move
about, as if they were real ; — as if they were living things,
and not needlework. Well, man is a wonderful creature !
And look, look, how charming he lies there on his silver
couch, with just a soft down en his cheeks, that beloved
Adonis, — Adonis, whom one loves, even though he is
dead !
Another Stranger. — You wretched women, do stop your
incessant chatter ! Like turtles, you go on for ever. They
are enough to kill one with their bread lingo, — nothing
but a, a, a.
Gorgo. — Lord, where dees the man come from ? What
is it to you if we are chatterboxes ? Order about your
own servants ! Do you give orders to Syracusan women ?
If you want to know, we came originally from Copinth, as
Beilerophon did ; we speak Pelepennesian. I suppose
Dorian women may be allowed to have a Dorian accent.
Praxinoe. — Oh, honey-sweet Proserpine, let us have no
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 151
more masters than the one we've got ! We don't the least
care for you ; pray don't trouble yourself for nothing.
Gorgo. — Be quiet, Praxinoe ! That first-rate singer, the
Argive woman's daughter, is going to sing the Adonis
hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge
last year. We are sure to have something first-rate from
Jier. She is going through her airs and graces ready to
begin. —
So far the dialogue ; and, as it stands in the original, ~^\
0 it can hardly be praised too highly. It is a page torn )
fresh out of the book of human life. What freedom I /
What animation ! What gaiety ! What naturalness ! It /
is said that Theocritus, in composing this poem, borrowed 1
from a work of Sophron, a poet of an earlier and bettei>-^
time ; but, even if this is so, the form is still Theocritus's
own, and how excellent is that form, how masterly ! And
this in a Greek poem of the decadence ; for Theocritus's
poetry, after all, is poetry of the decadence. When such
is Greek poetry of the decadence, what must be Greek
« poetry of the prime ?
Then the singer begins her hymn : —
' Mistress, who lovest the haunts of Golgi, and Idalium,
and high-peaked Eryx, Aphrodite that play est with gold !
how have the delicate-footed Hours, after twelve months,
brought thy Adonis back to thee from the ever-flowing
Acheron ! Tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours,
but all mankind wait their approach with longing, for they
ever bring something with them. 0 Cypris, Dione's child !
thou didst change — so is the story among men — Berenice
» from mortal to immortal, by dropping ambrosia into her
fair bosom ; and in gratitude to thee for this, 0 thou of
many names and many temples ! Berenice's daughter,
Arsinoe, lovely Helen's living counterpart, makes much
of Adonis with all manner of braveries.
*A11 fruits that the tree bears are laid before him, all
treasures of the garden in silver baskets, and alabaster
boxes, gold-inlaid, of Syrian ointment ; and all confec-
tionery that cunning women make on their kneading-tray,
kneading up every sort of flowers with white meal, and
10 all that they make of sweet honey and delicate oil, and
all winged and creeping things are here set before him.
152 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
And there are built for him green bowers with wealth of
tender anise, and little boy-loves flutter about over them,
like young nightingales trying their new wings on the tree,
from bough to bough. Oh, the ebony, the gold, the eagle
of white ivory that bears aloft his cup-bearer to Kronos-
born Zeus ! And up there, see ! a second couch strewn
for lovely Adonis, scarlet coverlets softer than sleep itself
(so Miletus and the Samian wool-grower will say) ; Cjrpris
has hers, and the rosy-armed Adonis has his, that eighteen
or nineteen -year- old bridegroom. His kisses will not
wound, the hair on his lip is yet light.
' Now, Cypris, good-night, we leave thee with thy bride-
groom ; but to-morrow morning, with the earliest dew,
we will one and all bear him forth to where the waves
splash upon the sea-strand, and letting loose our locks,
and letting fall our robes, with bosoms bare, we will set
up this, our melodious strain :
' " Beloved Adonis, alone of the demigods (so men say)
thou art permitted to visit both us and Acheron ! This
lot had neither Agamemnon, nor the mighty moonstruck
hero Ajax, nor Hector the first-born of Hecuba's twenty
children, nor Patroclus, nor Pyrrhus who came home from
Troy, nor those yet earlier Lapithae and the sons of Deu-
calion, nor the Pelasgians, the root of Argos and of Pelops'
isle. Be gracious to us now, loved Adonis, and be favour-
able to us for the year to come ! Dear to us hast thou
been at this coming, dear to us shalt thou be when thou
comest again." '
The poem concludes with a characteristic speech from
Gorgo : — ;
' Praxinoe, certainly women are wonderful things. That
lucky woman to know all that ! and luckier still to have
such a splendid voice ! And now we must see about
getting home. My husband has not had his dinner. That
man is all vinegar, and nothing else ; and if you keep him
waiting for his dinner, he 's dangerous to go near. Adieu,
precious Adonis, and may you find us all well when you
come next year ! '
So, with the hymn still in her ears, says the incorrigible
Gorgo. i
But what a hymn that is ! Of religious emotion, in our
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTBTENT 153
acceptation of the words, and of the comfort springing|
from rehgious emotion, not a particle. And yet many,
elements of reHgious emotion are contained in the beautifuf
story of Adonis. Symbolically treated, as the thoughtful
man might treat it, as the Greek mysteries undoubtedly
treated it, this story was capable of a noble and touching
apphcation, and could lead the soul to elevating and con-
soling thoughts. Adonis was the sun in his summer and
in his winter course, in his time of triumph and his time of
D defeat ; but in his time of triumph still moving towards his
defeat, in his time of defeat still returning towards his
triumph. Thus he became an emblem of the power of life
and the bloom of beauty, the power of human life and the
bloom of human beauty, hastening inevitably to diminution
and decay, yet in that very decay finding
' Hope, and a renovation without end.'
But nothing of this appears in the story as prepared for
popular religious use, as presented to the multitude in
a popular religious ceremony. Its treatment is not devoid
D of a certain grace and beauty, but it has nothing whatever
that is elevating, nothing that is consoling, nothing that
is in our sense of the word religious. The religious cere-
monies of Christendom, even on occasion of the most
joyful and mundane matters, present the multitude with
strains of profoundly religious character, such as the
Kyrie eleison and the Te Deum. But this Greek hymn to
Adonis adapts itself exactly to the tone and temper of
a gay and pleasure-loving multitude, — of light-hearted
people, like Gorgo and Praxinoe, whose moral nature is
0 much of the same calibre as that of Phillina in Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister, people who seem never made to be
serious, never made to be sick or sorry. And, if they
happen to be sick or sorry, what will they do then ? But
that we have no right to ask. Phillina, within the enchanted
bounds of Goethe's novel, Gorgo and Praxinoe, within the
enchanted bounds of Theocritus' s poem, never will be sick
and sorry, never can be sick and sorry. The ideal, cheerful,
sensuous, pagan Ufe is not sick or sorry. No ; yet its
natural end is in the sort of life which Pompeii and Her-
0 culaneum bring so vividly before us, — a life which by no
154 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
means in itself suggests the thought of horror and misery,
which even, in many ways, gratifies the senses and the
understanding ; but by the very intensity and unremitting-
ness of its appeal to the senses and the understanding, by
its stimulating a single side of us too absolutely, ends by
fatiguing and revolting us ; ends by leaving us with
a sense of confinement, of oppression, — with a desire for
an utter change, for clouds, storms, effusion and relief.
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the
clouds and storms had come, when the gay sensuous
pagan life was gone, when men were not living by the
senses and understanding, when they were looking for the
speedy coming of Antichrist, there appeared in Italy, to
the north of Rome, in the beautiful Umbrian country at
the foot of the Apennines, a figure of the most magical
power and charm, St. Francis. His century is, I think,
the most interesting in the history of Christianity after
its primitive age, more interesting than even the century
of the Reformation ; and one of the chief figures, perhaps
the very chief, to which this interest attaches itself, is
St. Francis. And why ? Because of the profound popular
instinct which enabled him, more than any man since the
primitive age, to fit religion for popular use. He brought
religion to the people. He founded the most popular body
of ministers of religion that has ever existed in the Church.
He transformed monachism by uprooting the stationary
monk, delivering him from the bondage of property, and
sending him, as a mendicant friar, to be a stranger and
sojourner, not in the wilderness, but in the most crowded
haunts of men, to console them and to do them good.
This popular instinct of his is at the bottom of his famous
marriage with poverty. Poverty and suffering are the con-
dition of the people, the multitude, the immense majority
of mankind ; and it was towards this people that his soul
yearned. * He listens,' it was said of him, ' to those to
whom God himself will not listen.'
So in return, as no other man he was listened to. When
an Umbrian town or village heard of his approach, the
whole population went out in joyful procession to meet
him, with green boughs, flags, music, and songs of glad-
ness. The master, who began with two disciples, could in
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 155
his own lifetime (and he died at forty-four) collect to keep
Whitsuntide with him, in presence of an immense multitude,
five thousand of his Minorites. And thus he found fulfil-
ment to his prophetic cry : * I hear in my ears the sound
of the tongues of all the nations who shall come unto us ;
Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, EngUshmen. The Lord
will make of us a great people, even unto the ends of the
earth.'
Prose could not satisfy this ardent soul, and he made
) poetry. Latin was too learned for this simple, popular
nature, and he composed in his mother tongue, in Itahan.
The beginnings of the mundane poetry of the Italians are
in Sicily, at the court of kings ; the beginnings of their
reUgious poetry are in Umbria, with St. Francis. His are
the humble upper waters of a mighty stream : at the
beginning of the thirteenth century it is St. Francis, at
the end, Dante. Now it happens that St. Francis, too,
like the Alexandrian songstress, has his hymn for the sun,
for Adonis ; Canticle of the Sun, Canticle of the Creatures , —
) the poem goes by both names. Like the Alexandrian hymn,
it is designed for popular use, but not for use by King
Ptolemy's people ; artless in language, irregular in rhythm,
it matches with the childUke genius that produced it, and
the simple natures that loved and repeated it : —
' 0 most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong
praise, glory, honour, and all blessing !
' Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures ; and
specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day, and
who brings us the light ; fair is he, and shining with a very
0 great splendour : O Lord, he signifies to us thee !
' Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for
the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven.
' Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for
air and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which thou
upholdest in life all creatures.
' Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very
serviceable unto us, and humble, and precious, and clean.
' Praised *be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom
thou givest us light in the darkness ; and he is bright,
0 and pleasant, and very mighty, and strong.
* Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the
15G ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth
divers fruits, and flowers of many colours, and grass.
' Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one
another for his love's sake, and who endure weakness and
tribulation ; blessed are they who peaceably shall endure,
for thou, O most Highest, shalt give them a crown !
* Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the
body, from whom no man escapeth. Woe to him who
dieth in mortal sin ! Blessed are they who are found
walking by thy most holy will, for the second death shall
have no power to do them harm.
* Praise ye, and bless ye the Lord, and give thanks unto
him, and serve him with great humility.'
It is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses.
But it is natural, also, that he should take refuge in his
heart and imagination from his misery. And when one
thinks what human life is for the vast majority of man-
kind, how little of a feast for their senses it can possibly
be, one understands the charm for them of a refuge offered
in the heart and imagination. Above all, when one thinks
what human life was in the Middle Ages, one understands
the charm of such a refuge.
Now, the poetry of Theocritus' s hymn is poetry treating
the world according to the demand of the senses ; the
poetry of St. Francis's hymn is poetry treating the world
according to the demand of the heart and imagination.
The first takes the world by its outward, sensible side ;
the second by its inward, symbolical side. The first admits
as much of the world as is pleasure-giving ; the second
admits the whole world, rough and smooth, painful and
pleasure-giving, all alike, but all transfigured by the power
of a spiritual emotion, all brought under a law of super-
sensual love, having its seat in the soul. It can thus
even say : ' Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death
of the body.'
But these very words are, perhaps, an indication that
we are touching upon an extreme. When we see Pompeii,
we can put our finger upon the pagan sentiment in its
extreme. And when we read of Monte Alverno and the
stigmata ; when we read of the repulsive, because seH-
caused, sufferings of the end of St. Francis's life ; when we
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 157
find even him saying, ' I have sinned against my brother
the ass,' meaning by these words that he had been too
hard upon his own body ; when we find him assailed, even
himself, by the doubt ' whether he who had destroyed
himself by the severity of his penances could find mercy
in eternity,' we can put our finger on the mediaeval
Christian sentiment in its extreme. Human nature is
neither all senses and understanding, nor all heart and
imagination. Pompeii was a sign that for humanity at
^ large the measure of sensualism had been over-passed;
St. Francis's doubt was a sign that for humanity at large the
measure of spiritualism had been over-passed. Humanity,
in its violent rebound from one extreme, had swung from
Pompeii to Monte Alverno ; but it was sure not to stay
there.
The Renaissance is, in part, a return towards the pagan
spirit, in the special sense in which I have been using the
word pagan ; a return towards the life of the senses and
the understanding. The Reformation, on the other hand,
so is the very opposite to this ; in Luther there is nothing
Greek or pagan ; vehemently as he attacked the adoration
of St. Francis, Luther had himself something of St. Francis
in him ; he was a thousand times more akin to St. Francis
than to Theocritus or to Voltaire. The Reformation — I do
not mean the inferior piece given luider that name, by
Henry the Eighth and a second-rate company, in this
island, but the real Reformation, the German Reformation,-
Luther's Reformation — ^was a reaction of the moral and
spiritual sense against the carnal and pagan sense ; it was
»a religious revival like St. Francis's, but this time against
the Church of Rome, not within her ; for the carnal and
pagan sense had now, in the government of the Church
of Rome herself, its prime representative. But the grand
reaction against the rule of the heart and imagination, the
strong return towards the rule of the senses and understand-
ing, is in the eighteenth century. And this reaction has
had no more brilliant champion than a man of the nine-
teenth, of whom I have already spoken ; a man who could
feel not only the pleasurableness but the poetry of the
40 life of the senses (and the life of the senses has its deep
poetry) ; a man who, in his very last poem, divided the
158 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
whole world into * barbarians and Greeks,' — Heinrich
Heine. No man has reproached the Monte Alverno extreme
in sentiment, the Christian extreme, the heart and imagina-
tion subjugating the senses and understanding, more bitterly
than Heine ; no man has extolled the Pompeii extreme, the
pagan extreme, more rapturously.
* All through the Middle Age these sufferings, this fever,
this over-tension lasted ; and we modems still feel in all
our limbs the pain and weakness from them. Even those
of us who are cured have still to live with a hospital -
atmosphere all around us, and find ourselves as wretched
in it as a strong man among the sick. Some day or other,
when humanity shall have got quite well again, when the
body and soul shall have made their peace together, the
factitious quarrel which Christianity has cooked up between
them will appear something hardly comprehensible. The
fairer and happier generations, offspring of unfettered
unions, that will rise up and bloom in the atmosphere of
a religion of pleasure, will smile sadly when they think of
their poor ancestors, whose life was passed in melancholy
abstinence from the joys of this beautiful earth, and who
faded away into spectres, from the mortal compression
which they put upon the warm and glowing emotions of
sense. Yes, with assurance I say it, our descendants will
be fairer and happier than we are ; for I am a believer in
progress, and I hold God to be a kind being who has
intended man to be happy.'
That is Heine's sentiment, in the prime of life, in the
glow of activity, amid the brilHant whirl of Paris. I will
no more blame it than I blamed the sentiment of the
Greek hymn to Adonis. I wish to decide nothing as of my
own authority ; the great art of criticism is to get oneself
out of the way and to let humanity decide. Well, the
sentiment of the ' religion of pleasure ' has much that is
natural in it ; humanity will gladly accept it if it can live
by it ; to live by it one must never be sick or sorry, and
the old, ideal, Umited, pagan world never, I have said, was
sick or sorry, never at least shows itself to us sick or sorry: —
' What pipes and timbrels ! what wild ecstasy ! '
For our imagination, Gorgo and Praxinoe cross the human
TAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIIMENT 159
etago chattering in their blithe Doric, — like turtles, as the
cross stranger said, — and keep gaily chattering on till they
disappear. But in the new, real, immense, post-pagan
world, — ^in the barbarian world, — ^the shock of accident is
unceasing, the serenity of existence is perpetually troubled,
not even a Greek like Heine can get across the mortal
stage without bitter calamity. How does the sentiment
of the ' religion of pleasure ' serve then ? does it help,
does it console ? Can a man live by it ? Heine again shall
) answer; Heine just twenty years older, stricken with
incurable disease, waiting for death : —
' The great pot stands smoking before me, but I have
no spoon to help myself. What does it profit me that
my health is drunk at banquets out of gold cups and in
the most exquisite wines, if I myself, while these ovations
are going on, lonely and cut off from the pleasures of the
world, can only just wet my lips with barley-water ?
What good does it do me that all the roses of Shiraz open
their leaves and bum for me with passionate tenderness ?
) Alas ! Shiraz is some two thousand leagues from the Rue
d' Amsterdam, where in the solitude of my sick chamber
all the perfume I smell is that of hot towels. Alas ! the
mockery of God is heavy upon me I The great author of
the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, has determined
to make the petty earthly author, the so-called Aristophanes
of Germany, feel to his heart's core what pitiful needle-
pricks his cleverest sarcasms have been, compared with
the thunderbolts which his divine humour can launch
against feeble mortals ! . . .
9 ' In the year 1340, says the Chronicle of Limburg, all
over Germany everybody was strumming and humming
certain songs more lovely and delightful than any which
had ever yet been known in German countries ; and all
people, old and young, the women particularly, were
perfectly mad about them, so that from morning till night
you heard nothing else. Only, the Chronicle adds, the
author of these songs happened to be a young clerk afflicted
with leprosy, and living apart from all the world in a
desolate place. The excellent reader does not require to
0 be told how horrible a complaint was leprosy in the Middle
Ages, and how the poor wretches who had this incuiable
160 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
plague were banished from society, and had to keep at
a distance from every human being. Like living corpses,
in a grey gown reaching down to the feet, and with the
hood brought over their face, they went about, carrying
in their hands an enormous rattle, called Saint Lazarus 'g
rattle. With this rattle they gave notice of their approach,
that every one might have time to get out of their way,
This poor clerk, then, whose poetical gift the Limburg
Chronicle extols, was a leper, and he sate moping in the
dismal deserts of his misery, whilst all Germany, gay and
tuneful, was praising his songs.
' Sometimes, in my sombre visions of the night, I imagine
that I see before me the poor leprosy-stricken clerk of the
Limburg Chronicle, and then from under his grey hood his
distressed eyes look out upon me in a fixed and strange
fashion ; but the next instant he disappears, and I hear
dying away in the distance, like the echo of a dream, the
dull creak of Saint Lazarus's rattle.'
We have come a long way from Theocritus there ! the
expression of that has nothing of the clear, positive, happy,
pagan character ; it has much more the character of one
of the indeterminate grotesques of the suffering Middle
Age. Profoundness and power it has, though at the same
time it is not truly poetical ; it is not natural enough for
that, there is too much waywardness in it, too much
bravado. But as a condition of sentiment to be popular, —
to be a comfort for the mass of mankind, under the pressure
of calamity, to live by, — what a manifest failure is this
last word of the religion of pleasure ! One man in many
millions, a Heine, may console himself, and keep himself
erect in suffering, by a colossal irony of this sort, by cover-
ing himself and the universe with the red fire of this sinister
mockery ; but the many millions cannot, — cannot if they
would. That is where the sentiment of a religion of sorrow
has such a vast advantage over the sentiment of a religion
of pleasure ; in its power to be a general, popular, religious
sentiment, a stay for the mass of mankind, whose lives
are full of hardship. It really succeeds in conveying far
more joy, far more of what the mass of mankind are so
much without, than its rival. I do not mean joy in pros-
pect only, but joy in possession, actual enjoyment of the
PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 161
world. Mediaeval Christianity is reproached with its
gloom and austerities ; it assigns the material world, says
Heine, to the devil. But yet what a fulness of delight
does St. Francis manage to draw from this material world
itself, and from its commonest and most universally
enjoyed elements, — sun, air, earth, water, plants ! His
hymn expresses a far more cordial sense of happiness, even
in the material world, than the hymn of Theocritus. It
is this which made the fortune of Christianity, — its glad-
I ness, not its sorrow ; not its assigning the spiritual world
to Christ and the material w^orld to the devil, but its
draAving from the spiritual world a source of joy so abun-
dant that it ran over upon the material world and trans-
figured it.
I have said a great deal of harm of paganism ; and,
taking paganism to mean a state of things which it is
commonly taken to mean, and which did really exist, no
more harm than it well deserved. Yet I must not end
without reminding the reader, that before this state of
'things appeared, there was an epoch in Greek life — in
pagan life — of the highest possible beauty and value ; an
epoch which alone goes far tow^ards making Greece the
Greece we mean when we speak of Greece, — a country
hardly less important to mankind than Judaea. The poetry
of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding ;
the poetry of mediaeval Christianity lived by the heart
and imagination. But the main element of the modern
spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor
the heart and imagination ; it is the imaginative reason.
• And there is a century in Greek life, — ^the century preceding
the Peloponnesian war, from about the year 530 b. c. to
about the year 430, — in which poetry made, it seems to
me, the noblest, the most successful effort she has ever
made as the priestess of the imaginative reason, of the
element by which the modem spirit, if it would live right,
has chiefly to live. Of this effort, of which the four great
names are Simqnides, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, I must
not now attempt more than the bare mention ; but it is
right, it is necessary, after all I have said, to indicate it.
► No doubt that effort was imperfect. Perhaps everything,
take it at what point in its existence you will, carries
ARNOLD ]yj
162 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
within itself the fatal law of its own ulterior development.
Perhaps, even of the life of Pindar's time, Pompeii was the
inevitable bourne. Perhaps the life of their beautiful
Greece could not afford to its poets all that fulness of varied
experience, all that power of emotion, which
* . . . the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world '
affords to the poet of after-times. Perhaps in Sophocles
the thinking-power a little overbalances the religious sense,
as in Dante the religious sense overbalances the thinking-
power. The present has to make its own poetry, and not
even Sophocles and his compeers, any more than Dante
and Shakspeare, are enough for it. That I will not dis-
pute ; nor will I set up the Greek poets, from Pindar to
Sophocles, as objects of blind worship. But no other
poets so well show to the poetry of the present the way
it must take ; no other poets have lived so much by the
imaginative reason ; no other poets have made their work
so well balanced ; no other poets, who have so well satisfied
the thinking-power, have so well satisfied the religious
sense : —
' Oh ! that my lot may lead me in the path of holy
innocence of word and deed, the path which august laws
ordain, laws that in the highest empyrean had their birth,
of which Heaven is the father alone, neither did the race
of mortal men beget them, nor shall oblivion ever put
them to sleep. The power of God is mighty in them, and
groweth not old.'
Let St. Francis — ^nay, or Luther either — beat that 1
JOUBERT
Why should we ever treat of any dead authors but the
famous ones ? Mainly for this reason : because, from these
famous personages, home or foreign, whom we all know so
well, and of whom so much has been said, the amount of
sti^jilus which they contain for us has been m li~great
measure disengaged ; people have formed their opinion
aboiirtliem, and do not readily change it. One may write
of them afresh, combat received opinions about them,
even interest one's readers in so doing ; but the interest
) one's readers receive has to do, in general, rather with the
treatment than with the subject ; they are susceptible of
a lively impression rather of the course of the discussion
itself, — its turns, vivacity, and novelty, — than of the
genius of the author who is the occasion of it. And yet
what is really precious and inspiring, in all that we get
from literature, except this sense of an immediate contact
with genius itself, and the stimulus towards what is true
and excellent which we derive from it ? Now in literature,
besides the eminent men of genius who have had their
) deserts in the way of fame, besides the eminent men* of
ability who have often had far more than their deserts in
the way of fame, there are a certain numberj)f personages
who have been real men of genius,-^^y which I mean,
thaT they have had a genuine gift for what is true and
^^cellentr and are jtherefore capal)Te of Emitting a life -
giving stimuhis^ — but who, loir s6me"reason or other, in
"most cases forvery valid reasons, have remained obscure,
nay, beyond a narrow circle in their own country^ unlaiown.
It is salutary from time to time to come across a genius of
Dthis kind, and to extract his honey. Often he has more of
it for us, as I have already said, than greater men ; for,
though it is by no means true that from what is new to us
there is most to be learnt, it is yet indisputably true that
from what is new to us we in general learn most.
M 2
164 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Of a genius of this kind, Joseph Joubert, I am now
going to speak. His name is, I believe, almost unknown
in England ; and even in France, his native country, it
is not famous. M. Sainte-Beuve has given of him one of
his incomparable portraits ; but, — besides that even
M. Sainte-Beuve 's writings are far less known amongst
us than they deserve to be, — every country has its own
point of view from which a remarkable author may most
profitably be seen and studied.
Joseph Joubert was born (and his date should be re- ]
marked) in 1754, at Montignac, a little town in Perigord.
His father was a doctor with small means ahd a large
family ; and Joseph, the eldest, had his own way to make
in the world. He was for eight years, as pupil ^rst, and
afterwards as an assistant-master, in the public school of
Toulouse, then managed by the Jesuits, who seemito have
left in him a most favourable opinion, not only of their
tact and address, but of their really good qualities as
teachers and directors. Compelled by the weakness of
his health to give up, at twenty-two, the profession of i
teaching, he passed two important years of his life ijn hard
study, at home at Montignac ; and came in 1778 Ito try
his fortune in the literary world of Paris, then perhaips the
most tempting field which has ever yet presented itielf to
a young man of letters. He knew Diderot, D'Alembert,
Marmontel, Laharpe ; he became intimate with one of the
celebrities of the next literary generation, then, like himself,
a young man, — Chateaubriand's friend, the future Grand
Master of the University, Fontanes. But, even th^n, it
began to be remarked of him, that M. Joubert s'inquUtait :
de perfection bien plus que de gloire — ' cared far more albout
perfecting himself than about making himself a rej^uta-
tion.' His severity of morals may perhaps have been
rendered easier to him by the delicacy of his health ; | but
the delicacy of his health will not by itself account foif his
changeless preference of being to seeming, knowing to
showing, studying to publishing ; for what terrible public
performers have some invalids been ! This preference he
retained all through his life, and it is by this that he is
characterised. ' He has chosen,' Chateaubriand (adopting -
Epicurus's famous words) said of him, * to hide hisllife.'
JOUBERT Ifij
Of a life which its owner was bent on hiding there can be
but little to tell. Yet the only two public incidents of
Joubert's life, slight as they are, do all concerned in them
so much credit that they deserve mention. In 1790 the
Constituent Assembly made the office of justice of the
peace elective throughout France. The people of Montignac
retained such an impression of the character of their young
townsman, — one of Plutarch's men of virtue, as he had
lived amongst them, simple, studious, severe, — that,
10 though he had left them for years, they elected him m
his absence without his knowing anything about it. The
appointment little suited Joubert's wishes or tastes ; but
at such a moment he thought it wrong to decline it. He
held it for two years, the legal term, discharging its duties
with a firmness and integrity which were long remembered ;
and then, when he went out of office, his fellow-townsmen
re-elected him. But Joubert thought that he had now
accomplished his duty towards them, and he went back
to the retirement which he loved. That seems to us
to a little episode of the great French Revolution worth
remembering. The sage who w^as asked by the king, why
sages were seen at the doors of kings, but not kings at the
doors of sages, replied, that it was because sages knew
what was good for them, and kings did not. But at Mon-
tignac the king — for in 1790 the people in France was king
with a vengeance — knew what was good for him, and came
to the door of the sage.
The other incident was this. When Napoleon, in 1809,
reorganised the public instruction of France, founded the
JO University, and made M. de Fontanes its Grand Master,
Fontanes had to submit to the Emperor a list of persons
to form the council or governing body of the new University.
Third on his list, after two distinguished names, Fontanes
placed the unknown name of Joubert. ' This name,' he
said in his accompanying memorandum to the Emperor,
' is not known as the two first are ; and yet this is the
nomination to which I attach most importance. I have
known M. Joubert all my life. His character and intelli-
gence are of the very highest order. I shall rejoice if your
10 Majesty will accept my guarantee for him.' Napoleon
trusted his Grand Master, and Joubert became a councillor
1C3 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
of the University. It is something that a man, elevated
to the highest posts of State, should not forget his obscure
friends ; or that, if he remembers and places them, he
should regard in placing them their merit rather than their
obscurity. It is more, in the eyes of those whom the
necessities, real or supposed, of a political system have
long familiarised with such cynical disregard of fitness in
the distribution of office, to see a minister and his master
alike zealous, in giving away places, t^ give them to the
best men to be found. \
Between 1792 and 1809 Joubert had mai^ried. His life
was passed between Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, w^ere his wife's
family lived, — a pretty little Burgundian town, by which
the Lyons railroad now passes, — and Paris. Here, in
a house in the Rue St.-Honore, in a room very high up,
and admitting plenty of the light which he so loved, —
a room from which he saw, in his own words, * a great
deal of sky and very little earth,' — among the treasures
of a library collected with infinite pains, tasta, and skill,
from which every book he thought ill of was tigidly ex-
cluded,— he never would possess either a complete Voltaire
or a complete Rousseau, — ^the happiest hours of his life
were passed. In the circle of one of those wAmen who
leave a sort of perfume in literary history, and who have
the gift of inspiring successive generations of readers with
an indescribable regret not to have known them,4-Pauline
de Montmorin, Madame de Beaumont, — he had become
intimate with nearly all which at that time, in tjhe Paris
world of letters or of society, was most attractive and
promising. Amongst his acquaintances one only misses
the names of Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant ;
neither of them was to his taste, and with Madame de
Stael he always refused to become acquainted ; he ^thought
she had more vehemence than truth, and more heat than
light. Years went on, and his friends became conspicuous
authors or statesmen ; but Joubert remained in th^ shade.
His constitution was of such fragility that how l^e lived
so long, or accomplished so much as he did, is a wonder ;
his soul had, for its basis of operations, hardly aiiy body
at all : both from his stomach and from his chest hie seems
to have had constant suffering, though he lived by rule,
JOUBERT 167
and was as abstemious as a Hindoo. Often, after over-
work in thinking, reading, or talking, he remained for days
together in a state of utter prostration, — condemned to
absolute silence and inaction ; too happy if the agitation
of his mind would become quiet also, and let him have the
repose of which he stood in so much need. With this
weakness of health, these repeated suspensions of energy,
he was incapable of the prolonged contention of spirit
necessary for the creation of great works ; but he read
0 and thought immensely ; he was an unwearied note -taker,
a charming letter-writer ; above all, an excellent and
delightful talker. The gaiety and amenity of his natural
disposition were inexhaustible ; and his spirit, too, was of
astonishing elasticity ; he seemed to hold on to life by
a single thread only, but that single thread was very
tenacious. More and more, as his soul and knowledge
ripened more and more, his friends pressed to his room in
the Rue St.-Honore ; often he received them in bed, for
he seldom rose before three o'clock in the afternoon ; and
Oat his bedroom-door, on his bad days, Madame Joubert
stood sentry, trying, not always with success, to keep back
the thirsty comers from the fountain which was forbidden
to flow, Fontanes did nothing in the University without
consulting him, and Joubert 's ideas and pen were always
at his friend's service. When he was in the country, at
Villeneuve, the young priests of his neighbourhood used
to resort to him, in order to profit by his library and by
his conversation. He, like our Coleridge, was particularly
qualified to attract men of this kind and to benefit them ;
0 retaining perfect independence of mind, he was religious ;
he was a religious philosopher. As age came on, his in-
firmities became more and more overwhelming ; some of
his friends, too, died ; others became so immersed in
politics, that Joubert, who hated politics, saw them
seldomer than of old ; but the moroseness of age and
infirmity never touched him, and he never quarrelled with
a friend or lost one. From these miseries he was preserved
by that quality in him of which I have already spoken ;
a quality which is best expressed by a word, not of common
louse in English, — alas, we have too little in our national
character of the quality which this word expresses, — his
168
ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
inborn, his constant amenity. He lived till the year 1824.
On the 4th of May in that year he died, at the age of
seventy. A day or two after his death, M. de Chateau-
briand inserted in the Journal des Debats a short notice
of him, perfect for its feeling, grace, and propriety. On
ne vit dans la memoire du monde, he says and says truly,
que par des travaux pour le monde — ' a man can live in the
world's memory only by what he has done for the world.'
But Chateaubriand used the privilege \#iich his great name
gave him to assert, delicately but firiiily, Joubert's real
and rare merits, and to tell the world w^iat manner of man
had just left it.
Joubert's papers were accumulated in boxes and drawers.
He had not meant them for publication ; it was very
difficult to sort them and to prepare them for it. Madame
Joubert, his widow, had a scruple about giving them
a publicity which her husband, she felt, w6uld never have
permitted. But, as her own end approached, the natural
desire to leave of so remarkable a spirit some enduring
memorial, some memorial to outlast the admiring recollec-
tion of the living who were so fast passing away, made her
yield to the entreaties of his friends, and allo"W[ the printing,
but for private circulation only, of a volum^ of his frag-
ments. Chateaubriand edited it ; it appeared in 1838,
fourteen years after Joubert's death. The volutne attracted
the attention of those who were best fitted to appreciate it,
and profoundly impressed them. M. Sainte-feeuve gave
of it, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the admirable notice
of which I have already spoken ; and so muqh curiosity
was excited about Joubert, that the collection bf his frag-
ments, enlarged by many additions, was at last published
for the benefit of the world in general. It has since been
twice reprinted. The first or preliminary chapter has some
fancifulness and affectation in it ; the reader should begin
with the second.
I have likened Joubert to Coleridge ; and indeed the
points of resemblance between the two men are numerous.
Both of them great and celebrated talkers, Joubert attract-
ing pilgrims to his upper chamber in the Rue Sfc. -Honor e,
as Coleridge attracted pilgrims to Mr. Gilman'^ at High-
gate ; both of them desultory and incomplete
writers, —
JOUBERT 169
here they had an outward likeness with one another. Both
of them passionately devoted to reading in a class of
books, and to thinking on a class of subjects, out of the
beaten line of the reading and thought of their day ; both
of them ardent students and critics of old literature, poetry,
and the metaphysics of religion ; both of them curious
explorers of words, and of the latent significance hidden
under the popular use of them ; both of them, in a certain
sense, conservative in religion and politics, by antipathy to
10 the narrow and shallow foolishness of vulgar modem liberal-
ism ; — here they had their inward and real likeness. But that
in which the essence of their likeness consisted is this, —
that they both had from nature an ardent impulse for
seeking the genuine truth on all matters they thought
about, and a gift for finding it and recognising it when it
was found. To have the impulse for seeking this truth is
much rarer than most people think ; to have the gift for
finding it is, I need not say, very rare indeed. By this
they have a spiritual relationship of the closest kind with
20 one another, and they become, each of them, a source of
stimulus and progress for all of us.
Coleridge had less delicacy and penetration than Joubert,
but more richness and power ; his production, though far
inferior to what his nature at first seemed to promise, was
abundant and varied. Yet in all his production how much
is there to dissatisfy us ! How many reserves must be
made in praising either his poetry, or his criticism, or his
philosophy ! How little either of his poetry, or of his
criticism, or of his philosophy, can we expect permanently
80 to stand ! But that which will stand of Coleridge is this :
the stimulus of his continual effort, — not a moral effort, for
he had no morals, — but of his continual instinctive effort,
crowned often with rich success, to get at and to lay bare
the real truth of his matter in hand, whether that matter
were literary, or philosophical, or political, or religious ;
and this in a country where at that moment such an effort
was almost unknown ; where the most powerful minds
threw themselves upon poetry, which cbnveys truth,
indeed, but conveys it indirectly ; and where ordinary
40 minds were so habituated to do without thinking altogether,
to regard considerations of estabhshed routine and practical
170 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
convenience as paramount, that any attempt to introduce
within the domain of these the disturbing element of
thought, they were prompt to resent as an outrage.
Coleridge's great action lay in his supplying in England,
for many years and under critical circumstances, by the
spectacle of this effort of his, a stimulus to all minds, in
the generation which grew up round him, capable of
profiting by it. His action will still be felt as long as the
need for it continues ; when, with the cessation of the need,
the action too has ceased, Coleridge's n^emory, in spite of ]
the disesteem — nay, repugnance — which \his character may
and must inspire, will yet for ever remain invested with
that interest and gratitude which invest^s the memory of
founders. \
M. de Remusat, indeed, reproaches Coleridge with his
jugements saugrenus ; the criticism of a gifted truth-
finder ought not to be saugrenu ; so on this reproach we
must pause for a moment. Saugrenu is a rather vulgar
French word, but, like many other vulgai; words, very
expressive ; used as an epithet for a judgmtent, it means 2
something like impudently absurd. The literary judg-
ments of one nation about another are very apt to be
saugrenus ; it is certainly true, as M. Sainte-BeUve remarks
in answer to Goethe's complaint against the French that
they have undervalued Du Bartas, that as to the estimate
of its own authors every nation is the best judge ; the
positive estimate of them, be it understood, not, of course,
the estimate of them in comparison with the authors of
other nations. Therefore a foreigner's judgmekits about
the intrinsic merit of a nation's authors will generally, J
when at complete variance with that nation's own, be
wrong ; but there is a permissible wrongness in these
matters, and to that permissible wrongness there isla limit.
When that limit is exceeded, the wrong judgment becomes
more than wrong, it becomes saugrenu, or impjudently
absurd. For instance, the high estimate which the French
have of Racine is probably in great measure deserved ; or,
to take a yet stronger case, even the high estimate which
Joubert had of the Abbe Delille is probably in great
measure deserved ; but the common disparaging judg- 4
ment passed on Racine by English readers is not saugrenu,
/
JOUBERT 171
still less is that passed by them on the Abbe Delille sau-
grenu, because the beauty of Racine, and of Delille too, so
far as Delille 's beauty goes, is eminently in their language,
and this is a beauty which a foreigner cannot perfectly
seize ; — this beauty of diction, apicibus verborum ligata, as
M. Sainte-Beuve, quoting Quintilian, says of Chateau-
briand's. As to Chateaubriand himself, again, the common
English judgment, which stamps him as a mere shallow
rhetorician, all froth and vanity, is certainly wrong ; one
to may even wonder that we English should judge Chateau-
briand so wrongly, for his power goes far beyond beauty of
diction ; it is a power, as well, of passion and sentiment,
and this sort of power the English can perfectly well
appreciate. One production of Chateaubriand's, Rene, is
akin to the most popular productions of Byron, — to the
Childe Harold or Manfred, — in spirit, equal to them in
power, superior to them in form. But this work, I hardly
know why, is almost unread in England. And only con-
sider this criticism of Chateaubriand's on the true pathetic !
no ' It is a dangerous mistake, sanctioned, like so many other
dangerous mistakes, by Voltaire, to suppose that the best
works of imagination are those which draw most tears.
One could name this or that melodrama, which no one
would like to own having written, and which yet harrows
the feelings far more than the Aeneid. The true tears are
those which are called forth by the beauty of poetry ;
there must be as much admiration in them as sorrow.
They are the tears which come to our eyes when Priam
says to Achilles, erXrjv S\ of ovttw . . . — ** And I have
30 endured, — the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath
yet endured, — to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew
my child ; " or when Joseph cries out : *' I am Joseph
your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt." ' Who does not
feel that the man who wrote that was no shallow rhetorician,
but a born man of genius, with the true instinct of genius
for what is really admirable ? Nay, take these words of
Chateaubriand, an old man of eighty, dying amidst the
noise and bustle of the ignoble revolution of February
1848 : ' Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, quand done, quand done
loserai-je delivre de tout ce monde, ce bruit ; quand done,
quand done cela finira-t-il ? ' Who, with any ear, does not
172 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
feel that those are not the accents of a trumpery rhetorician,
but of a rich and puissant nature, — ^the cry of the dying
lion ? I repeat it, Chateaubriand is most ignorantly
underrated in England ; and we English are capable of
rating him far more correctly if we knew him better.
Still, Chateaubriand has such real and great faults, he
falls so decidedly beneath the rank of the truly greatest
authors, that the depreciatory judgment passed on him
in England, though ignorant and wrong, can hardly be
said to transgress the limits of permissible ignorance ; it :
is not a jugement saugrenu. But when a critic denies
genius to a literature which has produced Bossuet and
Moliere, he passes the bounds ; and Coleridge's judgments
on French literature and the French genius are undoubtedly,
06 M. de Remusat calls them, saugrenus.
And yet, such is the impetuosity of our poor human
nature, such its proneness to rush to a decision with
imperfect knowledge, that his having delivered a saugrenu
judgment or two in his life by no means proves a man
not to have had, in comparison with his fellow men in :
general, a remarkable gift for truth, or disqualifies him for
being, by virtue of that gift, a source of vital stimulus for
us. Joubert had far less smoke and turbid vehemence in
him than Coleridge ; he had also a far keener sense of
what was absurd. But Joubert can write to M. Mole (the
M. Mole who was afterwards Louis Philippe's well-known
minister) : ' As to your Milton, whom the merit of the
Abbe Delille ' (the Abbe Delille translated Paradise Lost)
* makes me admire, and with whom I have nevertheless
still plenty of fault to find, why, I should like to know, i
are you scandalised that I have not enabled myself to
read him ? I don't understand the language in which he
writes, and I don't much care to. If he is a poet one
cannot put up with, even in the prose of the younger
Racine, am I to blame for that ? If by force you mean
beauty manifesting itself with power, I maintain that the
Abbe Delille has more force than Milton.' That, to be sure,
is a petulant outburst in a private letter ; it is not, like
Coleridge's, a deliberate proposition in a printed philo-
sophical essay. But is it possible to imagine a more^
perfect specimen of a saugrenu judgment ? It is even
JOUBERT 173
worse than Coleridge's, because it is saugrenu with reasons.
That, however, does not prevent Joubert from having
been really a man of extraordinary ardour in the search
for truth, and of extraordinary fineness in the perception
of it ; and so was Ck)leridge.
Joubert had around him in France an atmosphere of
literary, philosophical, and religious opinion as alien to
him as that in England was to Coleridge. This is what
makes Joubert, too, so remarkable, and it is on this account
Lo that I begged the reader to remark his date. He was born
in 1754 ; he died in 1824. He was thus in the fulness of
his powers at the beginning of the present century, at the
epoch of Napoleon's consulate. The French criticism of
that day — ^the criticism of Laharpe's successors, of Geoffroy
and his colleagues in the Journal des Debats — had a dry-
ness very unlike the telling vivacity of the early Edinburgh
reviewers, their contemporaries, but a fundamental narrow-
ness, a want of genuine insight, much on a par with theirs.
Joubert, like Coleridge, has no respect for the dominant
>o oracle ; he treats his Geoffroy with about as little deference
as Coleridge treats his Jeffrey. * Geoffroy,' he says of an
article in the Journal des Debats criticising Chateaubriand's
Genie du Christianisme — ' Geoffroy in this article begins
by holding out his paw prettily enough ; but he ends by
a volley of kicks, which lets the whole world see but too
clearly the four iron shoes of the four-footed animal.'
There is, however, in France a sympathy with intellectual
activity for its own sake, and for the sake of its inherent
pleasureableness and beauty, keener than any which exists
BO in England ; and Joubert had more effect in Paris, —
though his conversation was his only weapon, and Coleridge
wielded besides his conversation lus pen, — than Coleridge
had or could have in London. I mean, a more immediate,
appreciable effect ; an effect not only upon the young and
enthusiastic, to whom the future belongs, but upon formed
and important personages to whom the present belongs,
and who are actually moving society. He owed this partly
to his real advantages over Coleridge. If he had, as I have
already said, less power and richness than his English
40 parallel, he had more tact and penetration. He was more
possible than Coleridge ; his doctrine was more intelligible
174 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
than Coleridge's, more receivable. And yet withjoubert,
the striving after a consummate and attractive clearness
of expression came from no mere frivolous dislike of labour
and inability for going deep, but was a part of his native
love of truth and perfection. The delight of his life he
found in truth, and in the satisfaction which the enjoying
of truth gives to the spirit ; and he thought the truth was
never really and worthily said, so long as the least cloud,
clumsiness, and repulsiveness hung about the expression
of it. 1
Some of his best passages are those in which he upholds
this doctrine. Even metaphysics he would not allow to
remain difficult and abstract ; so long as they spoke
a professional jargon, the language of the schools, he
maintained, — and who shall gainsay him ?- — ^that meta-
physics were imperfect ; or, at any rate, had not yet
reached their ideal perfection.
* The true science of metaphysics,' he says, ' consists
not in rendering abstract that which is sensible, but in
rendering sensible that which is abstract ; apparent that J
which is hidden ; imaginable, if so it may be, that which
is only intelligible ; and intelligible, finally, that which
an ordinary attention fails to seize.'
And therefore : —
* Distrust, in books on metaphysics, words^which have
not been able to get currency in the world," and are only
calculated to form a special language.'
Nor would he suffer common words to be employed in
a special sense by the schools : —
* Which is the best, if one wants to be useful and to be a
really understood, to get one's words in the world, or to
get them in the schools ? I maintain that the good plan is
to employ words in their popular sense rather than in
their philosophical sense ; and the better plan still, to
employ them in their natural sense rather than in their
popular sense. By their natural sense, I mean the popular
and universal acceptation of them brought to that which
in this is essential and invariable. To prove a thing by
definition proves nothing, if the definition is purely philo-
sophical; for such definitions only bind him who makes 4
them. To prove a thing by definition, when the definition
JOUBERT 175
expresses the necessary, inevitable, and clear idea which
tHe^'orld at large attaches to the object, is, on the contrary,
jiIT in all ; because then what one does is simply to show
people what they do really think, in spite of themselves
and without knowing it. The rule that one is free to give
"to words what sense one will, and that the only thing
needful is to be agreed upon the sense one gives them, is
very well for the mere purposes of argumentation, and may
be allowed in the schools where this sort of fencing is to be
10 practised ; but in the sphere of the true-born and noble
science of metaphysics, and in the genuine world of
literature, it is good for nothing. One must never quit
Bight of realities, and one must employ one's expressions
^mpl^^s media, — as glasses, through which one's thoughts
can be best made evident. I know, by my own experience,
'how hard this rule is to follow ; but I judge of its importance
^y the failure of every system of metaphysics. Not one
of them has succeeded ; for the simple reason, that in every
one ciphers have been constantly used instead of values,
20 artificial ideas instead of native ideas, jargon instead of
l^om/
T"^ not know whether the metaphysician will ever
adopt Joubert's rules ; but I am sure that the man of
letters, whenever he has to speak of metaphysics, will do
well to adopt them. He, at any rate, must remember : —
' It is by means of familiar words that style takes hold
of the reader and gets possession of liim*.^ ft is Jby means
"of these tliat great thoughts get currency and pass for
^rue metal, like gold and silver which have had a recognised
30 stamp put upon them. They beget confidence in the man
who, in order to make his thoughts more clearly perceived,
uses them ; for people feel that such an employment of
the language of common human life betokens a man who
knows that life and its concerns, and who keeps himself in
-contact with them. Besides, these words m_ake a style
frank ^nd easy. They show that an author has long made
The tTiougM or the feeling expressed his mental food ; that
he has so assimilated them and familiarised them, that the"
most common expressions suffice hiih in order to express
4oiHeas which have become everyday ideas to him by the
length of time they have been in his mind. And lastly,
176 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
what one says in such words looks more true ; for, of all
the words in use, none are so clear as those wffich w'ecall
common words ; and clearness is so eminently one of the
characteristics of truth, that often it even passes for truth
itself.'
These are not, in Joubert, mere counsels of rhetoric ;
they come from his accurate sense of perfection, from his
having clearly seized the fine and just idea that beauty
and light are properties of truth, and that truth is incom-
pletely exhibited if it is exhibited without beauty and i
light :—
* Be profound with clear terms and not with obscure
terms. What is difficult will at last become easy ; but as
one goes deep into things, one must still keep a charm,
and one must carry into these dark depths of thought,
into which speculation has only recently penetrated, the
pure and antique clearness of centuries less learned than
ours, but with more light in them.'
And elsewhere he speaks of those ' spirits, lovers of
light, who, when they have an idea to put forth, brood :
long over it first, and wait patiently till it shines, as Buffon
enjoined, when he defined genius to be the aptitude for
patience ; spirits who know by experience that the driest
matter and the dullest words hide within them the germ
and spark of some brightness, like those fairy nuts in
which were found diamonds if one broke the shell and
was the right person ; spirits who maintain that, to see
and exhibit things in beauty, is to see and show things
as in their essence they really are, and not as they exist
for the eye of the careless, who do not look beyond the ;
outside ; spirits hard to satisfy, because of a keen-sighted-
ness in them, which makes them discern but too clearly
both the models to be followed and those to be shunned ;
spirits active though meditative, who cannot rest except
in solid truths, and whom only beauty can make happy ;.
spirits far less concerned for glory than for perfection,
who, because their art is long and life is short, often die
without leaving a monument, having had their own inward
sense of life and fruitfulness for their best reward.'
No doubt there is something a little too ethereal in all <
this, something which reminds one of Joubert 's physical
JOUBERT 177
want of body and substance ; no doubt, i f^ a man wishes
to be a great author, it is * to consider too curiously, to
consider ' as Joubert did ; it is a mistake to spend so much
qT one's time in setting up one's ideal standard of perfec-
^n, and in contemplating it. Joubert himself knew this
very well : ' I cannot build a house for my ideas,' said he ;
* I have tried to do without words, and words take their
revenge on me by their difficulty.' * If there is a man upon
earth tormented by the cursed desire to get a whole book
,0 into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and this phrase
into one word, — that man is myself,' * I can sow, but I
cannot build.' Joubert, however, makes no claim to be
a great auth_ar ;^by renbuncmg all ambition to be this,
Tvy not trying to fit his ideas into a house, by making no
compromise with words in spite of their difficulty, ^_bX^
_being^ C[uite single-minded in his pursuit of perfection,
perhaps he is enabled to get closer to the truth of the objects
ofhisj^tudy,ji.nd.to be of more service to us by setting ideals,
than if Jie had composed a celebrated work. I doubt
0 whether^in an elaborate work on the philosophy of religion,
he would have got his ideas about religion to shine, to
use his own expression, as they shine when he utters them
in perfect freedom. Penetration in these matters is value-
less without soul, and soul is valueless without penetration ;
both of these are delicate qualities, and, even in those who
have them, easily lost ; the charm of Joubert is, that he
has and keeps both : —
' One should be fearful of being wrong in poetry when
one thinks differently from the poets, and in religion when
0 one thinks differently from the saints.
' There is a great difference between taking for idols
Mahomet and Luther, and bowing down before Rousseau
and Voltaire. People at any rate imagined they were
obeying God when they followed Mahomet, and the
Scriptures when they hearkened to Luther. And perhaps
one ought not too much to disparage that inclination
which leads mankind to put into the hands of those
whom it thinks the friends of God the direction and
government of its heart and mind. It is the subjection
(/lO irreligious spirits which alone is fatal, and, in the fullest
sense of the word, depraving. •
ABKOLD jj
178 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
* May I say it ? It is not hard to know God, provided
one will not force oneself to define him.
' Do not bring into the domain of reasoning that which
belongs to our innermost feeling. State truths of senti-
ment, and do not try to prove them. There is a danger
in such proofs ; for in arguing it is necessary to treat that
which is in question as something problematic : now that
which we accustom ourselves to treat as problematic ends
by appearing to us as really doubtful. In things that
are visible and palpable, never prove what is believed
already ; in things that are certain and mysterious, —
mysterious by their greatness and by their nature, — make
people believe them, and do not prove them ; in things
that are matters of practice and duty, command, and do
not explain. " Fear God," has made many men pious ;
the proofs of the existence of God have made many men
atheists. From the defence springs the attack ; the
advocate begets in his hearer a wish to pick holes ; and
men are almost always led on, from the desire to con-
tradict the doctor, to the desire to contradict the doctrine.
Make truth lovely, and do not try to arm her ; mankind
will then be far less inclined to contend with her.
' Why is even a bad preacher almost always heard by
the pious with pleasure ? Because he talks to them about
what they love. But you who have to expound religion
to the children of this world, you who have to speak to
them of that which they once loved perhaps, or which
they would be glad to love, — remember that they do not
love it yet, and, to make them love it, take heed to speak
with power.
' You may do what you like, mankind will believe no
one but God ; and he only can persuade mankind who
believes that God has spoken to him. No one can give
faith unless he has faith ; the persuaded persuade, as the
indulgent disarm.
' The only happy people in the world are the good
man, the sage, and the saint ; but the saint is happier
than either of the others, so much is man by his nature
formed for sanctity.'
The same delicacy and penetration which he here shows
in speaking of the inward essence of religion, Joubert
JOUBERT 179
shows also in speaking of its outward form, and of its
manifestation in the world : —
* Piety is not a religion, though it is the soul of all
religions. A man has not a religion simply by having
pious inclinations, any more than he has a country simply
by having philanthropy. A man has not a country until
he is a citizen in a state, until he undertakes to follow
and uphold certain laws, to obey certain magistrates, and
to adopt certain ways of living and acting.
I ' Religion is neither a theology nor a theosophy ; it is
more than all this ; it is a discipline, a law, a yoke, an
indissoluble engagement.'
Who, again, has ever shown with more truth and beauty
the good and imposing side of the wealth and splendour
of the Catholic Church, than Joubert in the following
passage : —
* The pomps and magnificence with which the Church
is reproached are in truth the result and the proof of
her incomparable excellence. From whence, let me ask,
> have come this power of hers and these excessive riches,
except from the enchantment into which she threw all
the world ? Ravished with her beauty, millions of men
from age to age kept loading her with gifts, bequests,
cessions. She had the talent of making herself loved,
and the talent of making men happy. It is that which
wrought prodigies for her ; it is from thence that she
drew her power.'
' She had the talent of making herself feared,' — one
should add that too, in order to be perfectly just ; but
) Joubert, because he is a true child of light, can see that
the wonderful success of the Catholic Church must have
been due really to her good rather than to her bad qualities ;
to her making herself loved rather than to her making
herself feared.
How striking and suggestive, again, is this remark on
the Old and New Testaments : —
' The Old Testament teaches the knowledge of good
and evil ; the Gospel, on the other hand, seems written
for the predestinated ; it is the book of innocence. The
)one is made for earth, the other seems made for heaven.
According as the one or the other of these books takes
N2
180 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
hold of a nation, what may be called the religious humours
of nations differ.'
So the British and North American Puritans are the
children of the Old Testament, as Joachim of Flora and
St. Francis are the children of the New. And does not
the following maxim exactly fit the Church of England,
of which Joubert certainly never thought when he was
writing it ? ' The austere sects excite the most enthusiasm
at first ; but the temperate sects have always been the
most durable.'
And these remarks on the Jansenists and Jesuits,
interesting in themselves, are still more interesting because
they touch matters we cannot well know at first hand,
and which Joubert, an impartial observer, had had the
means of studying closely. We are apt to think of the
Jansenists as having failed by reason of their merits ;
Joubert shows us how far their failure was due to theii
defects : —
' We ought to lay stress upon what is clear in Scripture,
and to pass quickly over what is obscure ; to light up what
in Scripture is troubled, by what is serene in it ; what
puzzles and checks the reason, by what satisfies the reason.
The Jansenists have done just the reverse. They lay stress
upon what is uncertain, obscure, afflicting, and they pass
lightly over all the rest ; they eclipse the luminous and
consoling truths of Scripture, by putting between us and
them its opaque and dismal truths. For example, " Many
are called ; " there is a clear truth : " Few are chosen ; "
there is an obscure truth. " We are children of wrath ; "
there is a sombre, cloudy, terrifying truth : " We are alj
the children of God ; " "I came not to call the righteous,
but sinners to repentance ; " there are truths which are
full of clearness, mildness, serenity, light. The Jansenists
trouble our cheerfulness, and shed no cheering ray on oui
trouble. They are not, however, to be condemned foi
what they say, because what they say is true ; but they are
to be condemned for what they fail to say, for that is true
too, — truer, even, than the other ; that is, its truth h
easier for us to seize, fuller, rounder, and more complete
Theology, as the Jansenists exhibit her, has but the hali
of her disk.'
JOUBERT 181
Again : —
' The Jansenists erect " grace " into a kind of fourth
person of the Trinity. They are, without thinking or
intending it, QuatemitariaUvS. St. Paul and St. Augustine,
too exclusively studied, have done all the mischief. Instead
of " grace ", say help, succour, a divine influence, a dew of
heaven ; then one can come to a right understanding.
The word " grace " is a sort of talisman, all the baneful
spell of which can be broken by translating it. The trick of
personifying words is a fatal source of mischief in theology.'
Once more : —
' The Jansenists tell men to love God ; the Jesuits
make men love him. The doctrine of these last is full
of loosenesses, or, if you will, of errors ; still, — singular
as it may seem, it is undeniable, — they are the better
directors of souls.
' The Jansenists have carried into religion more thought
than the Jesuits, and they go deeper ; they are faster bound
with its sacred bonds. They have in their way of thinking
an austerity which incessantly constrains the will to keep
the path of duty ; all the habits of their understanding,
in short, are more Christian. But they seem to love God
without affection, and solely from reason, from duty, from
justice. The Jesuits, on the other hand, seem to love
him from pure inclination ; out of admiration, gratitude,
tenderness ; for the pleasure of loving him, in short. In
their books of devotion you find joy, because with the
Jesuits nature and religion go hand in hand. In the books
of the Jansenists there is a sadness and a moral constraint,
because with the Jansenists religion is for ever trying to
put nature in bonds.'
The Jesuits have suffered, and deservedly suffered,
plenty of discredit from what Joubert gently calls their
* loosenesses ' ; let them have the merit of their amiability.
The most characteristic thoughts one can quote from
any writer are always his thoughts on matters like these ;
but the maxims of Joubert on purely literary subjects
also, have the same purged and subtle delicacy ; they show
the same sedulousness in him to preserve perfectly true
the balance of his soul. Let me begin with this, which
contains a truth too many people fail to perceive : —
182 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
* Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates
the crime, is itself, in matters of literature, a crime of
the first order.'
And here is another sentence, worthy of Goethe, to
clear the air at one's entrance into the region of litera-
ture : —
' With the fever of the senses, the delirium of the
passions, the weakness of the spirit ; with the storms of
the passing time and with the great scourges of human
life, — hunger, thirst, dishonour, diseases, and death, —
authors may as long as they like go on making novels
which shall harrow our hearts ; but the soul says all the
while, " You hurt me." '
And again : —
' Fiction has no business to exist unless it is more
beautiful than reality. Certainly the monstrosities of
fiction may be found in the booksellers' shops ; you buy
them there for a certain number of francs, and you talk
of them for a certain number of days ; but they have no
place in literature, because in literature the one aim of
art is the beautiful. Once lose sight of that, and you have
the mere frightful reality.'
That is just the right criticism to pass on these ' mon-
strosities ' ; they have no place in literature, and those
who produce them are not really men of letters. One
would think that this was enough to deter from such
production any man of genuine ambition. But most of
us, alas ! are what we must be, not what we ought to be,
— not even what we know we ought to be.
The following, of which the first part reminds one of
Wordsworth's sonnet, * If thou indeed derive thy light
from heaven,' excellently defines the true salutary function
of literature, and the limits of this function : —
* Whether one is an eagle or an ant, in the intellectual
world, seems to me not to matter much ; the essential
thing is to have one's place marked there, one's station
assigned, and to belong decidedly to a regular and whole-
some order. A small talent, if it keeps within its limits
and rightly fulfils its task, may reach the goal just as well
as a greater one. To accustom mankind to pleasures
which depend neither upon the bodily appetites nor upon
JOUBERT 183
money, by giving them a taste for the things of the mind,
seems to me, in fact, the one proper fruit which nature
has meant our literary productions to have. When they
have other fruits, it is by accident, and, in general, not for
good. Books which absorb our attention to such a degreo
that they rob us of all fancy for other books, are absolutely
pernicious. In this way they only bring fresh crotchets
and sects into the world ; they multiply the great variety
of weights, rules, and measures already existing ; they aro
[» morally and politically a nuisance.'
Who can read these words and not think of the limiting
effect exercised by certain works in certain spheres and
for certain periods ; exercised even by the works of men
of genius or virtue, — by the works of Rousseau, the works
of Wesley, tho works of Swedenborg ? And what is it
which makes the Bible so admirable a book, to be the one
book of those who can have onlj^ one, but the miscellaneous
character of the contents of the Bible ?
Jouberb was all his life a passionate lover of Plato ; I
a hope other lovers of Plato will forgive me for sajring that
their adored ol)ject has never been more truly described
than he is here : —
' Plato shows us nothing, but he brings brightness with
him ; he puts light into our eyes, and fills us with a clear-
ness by which all objects afterwards become illuminated.
He teaches us nothing ; but he prepares us, fashions us,
and makes us ready to know all. Somehow or other,
the habit of reading him augments in us the capacity
for discerning and entertaining whatever fine truths may
0 afterwards present themselves. Like mountain-air, it
sharpens our organs, and gives us an appetite for whole-
some food.'
' Plato loses himself in the void ' (he says again) ; ' but
one sees the play of his wings, one hears their rustle.' And
the conclusion is : 'It is good to breathe his air, but not to
live upon him.'
As a pendant to the criticism on Plato, this on the French
moralist Nicole is excellent : —
1 ' Nicole is a Pascal without style. It is not what he
!0 says which is sublime, but what he thinks ; he rises, not by
I the natural elevation of his own spirit, but by that of
184 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
his doctrines. One must not look to the form in him,
but to the matter, which is exquisite. He ought to be
read with a direct view of practice.'
English people have hardly ears to hear the praises of
Bossuet, and the Bossu^et of Joubert is Bossuet at his
very best ; but this is a far truer Bossuet than the * de-
claimer ' Bossuet of Lord Macaulay, himself a born
rhetorician, if ever there was one : —
' Bossuet employs all our idioms, as Homer employed
all the dialects. The 'language of kings," of "statesmen, i
and of warriors ; the language of the people and of the
student, of the country and of the schools, of the sanctuary
and of the courts of law ; the old and the new, the trivial
and the stately, the quiet and the resounding, — he turns
all to his use ; and out of all this he makes a style, simple,
grave, majestic. His ideas are, like his words, varied, —
common and sublime together. Times and doctrines in
all their multitude were ever before his spirit, as things
and words in all their multitude were ever before it. He
is not so much a man as a human nature, with the temper- s
anoe of a saint, the justice of a bishop, the prudence of a
doctor, and the might of a great spirit.'
"After this on Bossuet, I must quote a criticism on
Racine, to show that Joubert did not inciiscriminately
worship all the French gods of the grand century : —
* Those who find Racine enough for them are poor
souls and poor wits ; they are souls and wits which have
never got beyond the callov/ and boarding-school stage.
Admirable, as no doubt he is, for his skill in having made
poetical the most humdrum sentiments and the most a
middling sort of passions, he can yet stand us in stead
of nobody but himself. He is a superior writer ; and, in
literature, that at once puts a man on a pinnacle. But he
is not an inimitable writer.'
And again : ' The talent of Racine is in his works,
but Racine himself is not there. That is why he himself
became disgusted with them.' ' Of Racine, as of his
ancients, the genius lay in taste. His elegance is perfect,
but it is not supreme, like that of Virgil.' And, indeed,
there is something supreme in an elegance which exercises 4
such a fascination as Virgil's does ; which makes one
JOUBERT 185
return to his poems again and again, long after one thinks
one has done with them ; which makes them one of those
books that, to use Joubert's words, ' lure the reader back
to them, as the proverb says good wine lures back the wine-
bibber.' And the highest praise Joubert can at last find
for Racine is this, that he is the Virgil of the ignorant ; —
* Racine est le Virgile des ignorants.'
Of Boileau, too, Joubert says : ' Boileau is a powerful
poet, but only in the world of half poetry.' How true
10 is that of Pope also ! And he adds : ' Neither Boileau 's
poetry nor Racine's flows from the fountain-head.' No
Englishman, controverting the exaggerated French estimate
of these poets, could desire to use fitter words.
I will end with some remarks on Voltaire and Rousseau,
remarks in which Joubert eminently shows his prime
merit as a critic, — the soundness and completeness of
his judgments. I mean that he has the faculty of judging
with all the powers of his mind and soul at work together
in due combination ; and how rare is this faculty ! how
20 seldom is it exercised towards writers who so powerfully
as Voltaire and Rousseau stimulate and call into activity
a single side in us !
' Voltaire's wits came to their maturity twenty years
sooner than the wits of other men, and remained in full
vigour thirty years longer. The charm which our style
in general gets from our ideas, his ideas get from his
style. Voltaire is sometimes afflicted, sometimes strongly
moved ; but serious he never is. His very graces have
an effrontery about them. He had correctness of judgment,
BO liveliness of imagination, nimble wits, quick taste, and
a moral sense in ruins. He is the most debauched of spirits,
and the worst of him is that one gets debauched along with
him. If he had been a wise man, and had had the self-
discipline of wisdom, beyond a doubt half his wit would
have been gone ; it needed an atmosphere of licence in
order to play freely. Those people who read him every
day, create for themselves, by an invincible law, the
necessity of liking him. But those people who, having
given up reading him, gaze steadily down upon the influ-
40 ences which his spirit has shed abroad, find themselves in
simple justice and duty compelled to detest him. It is
186 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
impossible to be satisfied with him, and impossible not to
be fascinated by him.'
The literary sense in us is apt to rebel against so severe
a judgment on such a charmer of the literary sense as
Voltaire, and perhaps we English are not very liable to
catch Voltaire's vices, while of some of his merits we have
signal need ; still, as the real definitive judgment on
Voltaire, Joubert's is undoubtedly the true one. It is
nearly identical with that of Goethe. Joubert's sentence
on Rousseau is in some respects more favourable : —
' That weight in the speaker [auctoritas) which the
ancients talk of, is to be found in Bossuet more than in
any other French author ; Pascal, too, has it, and La
Bruyere ; even Rousseau has something of it, but Voltaire
not a particle. I can understand how a Rousseau — I
mean a Rousseau cured of his faults — might at the present
day do much good, and may even come to be greatly
wanted ; but under no circumstances can a Voltaire bo
of any use.'
The peculiar power of Rousseau's style has never been
better hit off than in the following passage : —
* Rousseau imparted, if I may so speak, bowels of
feeling to the words he used (donna des entrailles d tous
les mots), and poured into them such a charm, sweetness
so penetrating, energy so puissant, that his writings have
an effect upon the soul something like that of those illicit
pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate
our reason.'
The final judgment, however, is severe, and justly severe : —
' Life without actions ; life entirely resolved into
affections and half -sensual thoughts ; do-nothingness
setting up for a virtue ; cowardliness with voluptuousness ;
fierce pride with nullity underneath it ; the strutting phrase
of the most sensual of vagabonds, who has made his
system of philosophy and can give it eloquently forth :
there is Rousseau ! A piety in which there is no religion ;
a severity which brings corruption with it ; a dogmatism
which serves to ruin all authority : there is Rousseau's
philosophy ! To all tender, ardent, and elevated natures,
I say : Only Rousseau can detach you from religion, and
only true religion can cure you of Rousseau.'
JOUBERT 187
I must yet find room, before I end, for one at least of
Joubert's sayings on political matters ; here, too, the whole
man shows himself ; and here, too, the affinity with
Coleridge is very remarkable. How true, how true in
France especially, is this remark on the contrasting direction
taken by the aspirations of the community in ancient and
in modem states : —
' The ancients were attached to their country by three
things, — their temples, their tombs, and their forefathers.
10 The two great bonds which united them to their govern-
ment were the bonds of habit and antiquity. With the
moderns, hope and the love of novelty have produced
a total change. The ancients said our forefathers, we say
posterity ; we do not, like them, love our patria, that is to
say, the country and the laws of our fathers, rather we
love the laws and the country of our children ; the charm
we are most sensible to is the charm of the future, and
not the charm of the past.'
And how keen and true is this criticism on the changed
20 sense of the word * liberty ' : —
' A great many words have changed their meaning.
The word liberty, for example, had at bottom among the
ancients the same meaning as the word dominion. I would
be free meant, in the mouth of the ancient, / would take
part in governing or administering the State ; in the mouth
of a modern it means, / would be independent. The word
liberty has with us a moral sense ; with them its sense was
purely political.'
Joubert had lived through the French Revolution, and
80 to the modern cry for liberty he was prone to answer : —
* Let your cry be for free souls rather even than for
free men. Moral liberty is the one vitally important
liberty, the one liberty which is indispensable ; the other
liberty is good and salutary only so far as it favours this.
Subordination is in itself a better thing than independence.
The one implies order and arrangement ; the other implies
only self-sufficiency with isolation. The one means harmony,
the other a single tone ; the one is the whole, the other is
but the part.'
40 ' Liberty ! liberty ! ' he cries again ; ' in all things let
us have justice, and then we shall have enough liberty.'
188 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Let us have justice, and then we shall have enough liberty.
The wise man will never refuse to echo those words ; but
then, such is the imperfection of human governments,
that almost always, in order to get justice, one has first
to secure liberty.
I do not hold up Joubert as a very astonishing and
powerful genius, but rather as a delightful and edifying
genius. I have not cared to exhibit him as a sayer of
brilliant epigrammatic things, such things as, ' Notre vie
est du vent tissu . . . les dettes abregent la vie . . . celui ic
qui a de I'imagination sans erudition a des ailes et n'a
pas de pieds ' {Our life is woven wind , . . debts take from
life . . . the man of imagination without learning has wings
and no feet), though for such sayings he is famous. In the
first place, the French language is in itself so favourable
a vehicle for such sayings, that the making them in it has
the less merit ; at least half the merit ought to go, not to
the maker of the saying, but to the French language. In
the second place, the peculiar beauty of Joubert is not
there ; it is not in what is exclusively intellectual, — it is 2(
in the union of soul with intellect, and in the delightful,
satisfying result which this union produces. ' Vivre, c'est
penser et sentir son ame . . . le bonheur est de sentir son
ame bonne . . . toute verite nue et crue n'a pas assez passe
par I'ame ... les hommes ne sont justes qu'envers ceux
qu'ils aiment ' {The essence of life lies in thinking and being
conscious of one's soul . . . happiness is the sense of one's
soul being good ...ifa truth is nude and crude, that is a proof
it has not been steeped long enough in the soul ; . . . man
cannot even be just to his neighbour, unless he loves him) ; 3(
it is much rather in sayings like these that Joubert 's best
and innermost nature manifests itself. He is the most
prepossessing and convincing of witnesses to the good of
loving light. Because he sincerely loved light, and did not
prefer to it any little private darkness of his own, he found
light ; his eye was single, and therefore his whole body was
full of light. And because he was full of light, he was also"
full of happiness. In spite of his infirmities, in spite of his
sufferings, in spite of his obscurity, he was the happiest
man alive ; his life was as charming as his thoughts. For 40
certainly it is natural that the love of light, which is already.
JOUBERT 189
in some measure, the possession of light, should irradiate
and beatify the whole life of him who has it. There is
something unnatural and shocking where, as in the case of
Coleridge, it does not. Joubert pains us by no such contra-
diction ; ' the same penetration of spirit which made him
such delightful company to his friends, served also to make
him perfect in his own personal life, by enabling him always
to perceive and do what was right ; ' he loved and sought
light till he became so habituated to it, so accustomed
10 to the joyiul testimony of a good conscience, that, to use
his own words, ' he could no longer exist without this,
and was obliged to live without reproach if he would live
without misery.'
Joubert was not famous while he lived, and he will not
be famous now that he is dead. But, before we pity him
for this, let us be sure what we mean, in literature, by
famous. There are the famous men of genius in literature,
— the Homers, Pantes, Shakspeares : of them we need not
speak"; their praise is for ever and ever. Then there are
20 tW^amous men of ability in literature: their praise is
in^heirown generation. And what makes this difference ?
TL'hewofkl)f tne'two orders of men is at the bottom the same,
-^^oTcriticism^oJITiJe, The end and aim of all liter ature^
if one'coiisiders it attentively, is, in truth, nothing but that J
But the criticism which the men of genius pass upon human
lifeTff permanently acceptable to mankind ; the criticism^
which the men of ability pass upon human life is transitorily
acceptable. Between Shakspeare's criticism of human
iTfe'and Scribe's the difference is there ; — ^the one is per-
80 manently acceptable, the other transitorily. Whence
then, I repeat, this difference ? It is that the acceptable-
neflfi_£if_Shaksp_eare's criticism depends upon its inherent
_5ruthj_the acceptableness of Scribe's upon its suiting
"jtselfTHby its subject-matter, ideas, mode of treatment,
loathe taste of the generation that hears it. But the taste
and ideas of one generation are not those of the next. This
next generation in its turn arrives ;— first its sharpshooters,
its quick-witted, audacious light troops ; then the elephan-
tine main body. The imposing array of its predecessor it con-
40 fidently assails, riddles it with bullets, passes over its body.
It goes hard then with many once popular reputations,
190 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
with many authorities once oracular. Pnly two kinds of
authors are safe in the general havoc. The first Mnd are
the great abounding fountains of truth, whose criticism
of life is a source of illumination and joy to the whole
human race for ever, — ^the Homers, the ShakspearesT
These are the sacred personages, whom all civilised warfare
respects. The second are those whom the out -skirmishers
of the new generation, its forerunners, — quick-witted
soldiers, as I have said, the select of the army, — recognise,
though the bulk of their comrades behind might not, as ^
of the same family and character with the sacred personages,
exercising like them an immortal function, and like them
inspiring a permanent interest. They snatch them up,
and set them in a place of shelter, where the on-coming
multitude may not overwhelm them. These are the
Jbuberts. They will never, like the Shakspeares, command
the homage of the multitude; but they are safe; the
multitude will not trample them down. Except these
two kinds, no author is safe. Let us consider, for example,
Joubert's famous contemporary. Lord Jeffrey. All his 2
vivacity and accomplishment avail him nothing ; of the
true critic he had in an eminent degree no quality, except
one, — curiosity. Curiosity he had, but he had no gift for
truth ; he cannot illuminate and rejoice us ; no intelligent
out -skirmisher of the new generation cares about him,
cares to put him in safety ; at this moment we are all
passing over his body. Let us consider a greater than
Jeffrey, a critic whose reputation still stands firm, — ^will
stand, many people think, for ever, — ^the great apostle
of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay. Lord Macaulay was, a
as I have already said, a born rhetorician ; a splendid
rhetorician doubtless, and, beyond that, an English
rhetorician also, an honest rhetorician ; still, beyond the
apparent rhetorical truth of things he never could penetrate ;
for their vital truth, for what the French call the vraie
verite, he had absolutely no organ ; therefore his reputation,
brilliant as it is, is not secure. Rhetoric so good as his
excites and gives pleasure ; but by pleasure alone you
cannot permanently bind men's spirits to you. Truth
illuminates and gives joy, and it is- by the bond of joy, 4
not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.
JOUBERT 191
As Lord Macaulay's own generation dies out, as a new
generation arrives, without those ideas and tendencies of
its predecessor which Lord Macaulay so deeply shared and
60 happily satisfied, will he give the same pleasure ? and,
if he ceases to give this, has he enough of light in him to
make him safe ? Pleasure the new generation will get
from its own novel ideas and tendencies ; but light is another
and a'rafef thing, and must be treasured wherever it can
.^^guiid. Will Macaulay be saved, in the sweep and pres-
iosure~^ time, for his light's sake, as Johnson has already
been saved by two generations, Joubert by one ? I think
it very doubtful. But for a spirit of any delicacy and
dignity, what a fate, if he could foresee it ! to be an oracle
for one generation, and then of little or no account for ever.
52^fM-i§tt^r^o piass with scant notice through one's
Qwn generation, but to T)e singled out and preserved by
tfe^^Tery^coiiocIasts of the next, then in their turn by
ttese'T5f the next, and so, like the lamp of life itself, to be
EandJed. j5n from. x)ne generation to another in safety !
io This is Joubert 's lot, and it is a very enviable one. The
new men of the new generations, while they let the dust
deepen on a thousand Laharpes, will say of him : * He lived
in the Philistine's day, in a place and time when almost
every idea current in literature had the mark of Dagon upon
it, and not the mark of the children of light. Nay, the chil-
dren of light were as yet hardly so much as heard of : the
Canaanite was then in the land. Still, there were even then
a few, who, nourished on some secret tradition, or illumined,
perhaps, by a divine inspiration, kept aloof from the
30 reigning superstitions, never bowed the knee to the gods
of Canaan : and one of these few was called Joubert.^
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE.
* By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the
saints, we anathematise, cut off, curse, and execrate
Baruch Spinoza, in the presence of these sacred books
with the six hundred and thirteen precepts which are
written therein, with the anathema wherewith Joshua
anathematised Jericho ; with the cursing wherewith Elisha
cursed the children ; and with all the cursings which are
written in the Book of the Law : cursed be he by day,
and cursed by night ; cursed when he lieth down, and
cursed when he riseth up ; cursed when he goeth out, and
cursed when he cometh in ; the Lord pardon him never ;
the wrath and fury of the Lord burn upon this man, and
bring upon him all the curses which are written in the
Book of the Law. The Lord blot out his name under
heaven. The Lord set him apart for destruction from all
the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament
which are written in the Book of this Law. . . . There
shall no man speak to him, no man write to him, no man
show him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof
with him, no man come nigh him.'
With these amenities, the current compliments of
theological parting, the Jews of the Portuguese s3Tiagogue
at Amsterdam took in 1656 (and not in 1660 as has till
now been commonly supposed) their leave of their erring
brother, Baruch or Benedict Spinoza. They remained
children of Israel, and he became a child of modern
Europe.
That was in 1656, and Spinoza died in 1677, at the early
age of forty-four. Glory had not found him out. His
short life — a life of unbroken diligence, kindliness, and
purity — ^was passed in seclusion. But in spite of that
seclusion, in spite of the shortness of his career, in spite
of the hostility of the dispensers of renown in the eighteenth
century, — of Voltaire's disparagement and Bayle's detrac-
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 193
tion, — in spite of the repellent form which he has given
to his principal work, in spite of the exterior semblance
of a rigid dogmatism alien to the most essential tendencies
of modem philosophy, in spite, finally, of the immense
weight of disfavour cast upon him by the long-repeated
charge of atheism, Spinoza's name has silently risen in
importance, the man and his work have attracted a steadily
increasing notice, and bid fair to become soon what they
deserve to become, — ^in the history of modern philosophy,
1-0 the central point of interest. An avowed translation of
one of his works, — his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, — has
at last made its appearance in English. It is the principal
work which Spinoza published in his lifetime ; his book
on ethics, the work on which his fame rests, is posthumous.
The English translator has not done his task well. Of
the character of his version there can, I am afraid, be no
doubt ; one such passage as the following is decisive : —
' I confess that, while with them (the theologians) /
have never been able sufficiently to admire the unfathomed
20 mysteries of Scripture, I have still found them giving utterance
to nothing but Aristotelian and Platonic speculations, artfully
dressed up and cunningly accommodated to Holy Writ,
lest the speakers should show themselves too plainly to
belong to the sect of the Grecian heathens. Nor was it
enough for these men to discourse with the Greeks ; they have
further taken to raving with the Hebrew prophets.'
This professes to be a translation of these words of
Spinoza : ' Fateor, eos nunquam satis mirari potuisse
Scripturae profundissima mysteria ; attamen praeter
JO Aristotelicorum vel Platonicorum speculationes nihil
docuisse video, atque his, ne gentiles sectari viderentur,
Scripturam accommodaverunt. Non satis his fuit cum
Graecis insanire, sed prophetas cum iisdem deliravisse
voluerunt.' After one such specimen of a translator's
force, the experienced reader has a sort of instinct that he
may as well close the book at once, with a smile or a sigh,
according as he happens to be a follower of the weeping
or of the laughing philosopher. If, in spite of this instinct,
he persists in going on with the English version of the
10 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he will find many more
such specimens. It is not, however, my intention to
ARNOLD O
194 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
fill my space with these, or with strictures upon their
author. I prefer to remark, that he renders a service to
literary history by pointing out, in his preface, how ' to
Bayle may be traced the disfavour in which the name of
Spinoza was so long held ; ' that, in his observations on
the system of the Church of England, he shows a laudable
freedom from the prejudices of ordinary English Liberals
of that advanced school to which he clearly belongs ;
and lastly, that, though he manifests little familiarity with
Latin, he seems to have considerable familiarity with
philosophy, and to be well able to follow and comprehend
speculative reasoning. Let me advise him to unite his
forces with those of some one who has that accurate
knowledge of Latin which he himself has not, and then,
perhaps, of that union a really good translation of Spinoza
will be the result. And, having given him this advice, let
me again turn, for a little, to the Tractatus Theologico-
Politicus itself.
This work, as I have already said, is a work on the
interpretation of Scripture, — ^it treats of the Bible. What
was it exactly which Spinoza thought about the Bible and
its inspiration ? That will be, at the present moment,
the central point of interest for the English readers of his
Treatise. Now, it is to be observed, that just on this
very point the Treatise, interesting and remarkable as it
is, will fail to satisfy the reader. It is important to seize
this notion quite firmly, and not to quit hold of it while
one is reading Spinoza's work. The scope of that work
is this. Spinoza sees that the life and practice of Christian
nations professing the religion of the Bible, are not the
due fruits of the religion of the Bible ; he sees only hatred,
bitterness, and strife, where he might have expected to
see love, joy, and peace in believing ; and he asks himself
the reason of this. The reason is, he says, that these people
misunderstand their Bible. Well, then, in his conclusion,
I will write a Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. I will show
these people, that, taking the Bible for granted, taking it
to be all which it asserts itself to be, taking it to have all
the authority which it claims, it is not what they imagine
it to be, it does not say what they imagine it to say. I will
show them what it really does say, and I will show them
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 195
that they will do well to accept this real teaching of tho
Bible, instead of the phantom with which they have so
long been cheated. I will show their governments that they
will do well to remodel the national churches, to make of
them institutions informed with the spirit of the • true
Bible, instead of institutions informed with the spirit of
this false phantom.
The comments of men, Spinoza said, had been foisted
into the Christian religion ; the pure teaching of God
0 had been lost sight of. He determined, therefore, to
go again to the Bible, to read it over and over with a
perfectly unprejudiced mind, and to accept nothing as
its teaching which it did not clearly teach. He began
by constructing a method, or set of conditions indispensable
for the adequate interpretation of Scripture. These con-
ditions are such, he points out, that a perfectly adequate
interpretation of Scripture is now impossible . For example,
to understand any prophet thoroughly, we ought to know
the life, character, and pursuits of that prophet, under
10 what circumstances his book was composed, and in what
state and through what hands it has come down to us ;
and, in general, most of this we cannot now know. Still,
the main sense of the Books of Scripture may be clearly
seized by us. Himself a Jew with all the learning of his
nation, and a man of the highest natural powers, Spinoza
had in the difficult task of seizing this sense every aid
which special knowledge or pre-eminent faculties could
supply.
In what then, he asks, does Scripture, interpreted by
so its own aid, and not by the aid of Rabbinical traditions
or Greek philosophy, allege its own divinity to consist ?
In a revelation given by God to the prophets. Now all
knowledge is a divine revelation ; but prophecy, as repre-
sented in Scripture, is one of which the laws of human
nature, coi"Lsidered in themselves alone, cannot be the
cause. Therefore nothing must be asserted about it,
except what is clearly declared by the prophets themselves ;
for they are our only source of knowledge on a matter
which does not fall within the scope of our ordinary know-
ioing faculties. But ignorant people, not knowing the
, Hebrew genius and phraseology, and not attending to the
1 02
196 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
circumstances of the speaker, often imagine the prophets to
assert things which they do not.
The prophets clearly declare themselves to have received
the revelation of God through the means of words and
images ; — not, as Christ, through immediate communication
of the mind with the mind of God. Therefore the prophets
excelled other men by the power and vividness of theii
representing and imagining faculty, not by the perfection
of their mind. This is why they perceived almost every-
thing through figures, and express themselves so variously,
and so improperly, concerning the nature of God. Moses
imagined that God could be seen, and attributed to him
the passions of anger and jealousy ; Micaiah imagined him
sitting on a throne, with the host of heaven on his right and
left hand ; Daniel as an old man, with a white garment
and white hair ; Ezekiel as a fire ; the disciples of Christ
thought they saw the Spirit of God in the form of a dove ;
the apostles in the form of fiery tongues.
Whence, then, could the prophets be certain of the
truth of a revelation which they received through the
imagination, and not by a mental process ? — ^for only an
idea can carry the sense of its own certainty along with it,
not an imagination. To make them certain of the truth
of what was revealed to them, a reasoning process came in ;
they had to rely on the testimony of a sign ; and (above
all) on the testimony of their own conscience, that they were
good men, and spoke for God's sake. Either testimony
was incomplete without the other. Even the good prophet
needed for his message the confirmation of a sign ; but the
bad prophet, the utterer of an immoral doctrine, had no
certainty for his doctrine, no truth in it, even though
he confirmed it by a sign. The testimony of a good conscience
was, therefore, the prophet's grand source of certitude.
Even this, however, was only a moral certitude, not
a mathematical ; for no man can be perfectly sure of his
own goodness.
The power of imagining, the power of feeling what good-
ness is, and the habit of practising goodness, were therefore
the sole essential qualifications of a true prophet. But
for the purpose of the message, the revelation, which God
designed him to convey, these qualifications were enough.
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 197
The sum and substance of this revelation was simply ;
Believe in God', and lead a good life. To be the organ of this
revelation, did not make a man more learned ; it left his
scientific knowledge as it found it. This explains the
contradictory and speculatively false opinions about God,
and the laws of nature, which the patriarchs, the prophets,
the apostles entertained. Abraham and the patriarchs
knew God only as El Sadai, the power which gives to every
man that which suffices him ; Moses knew him as Jehovah,
I) a self-existent being, but imagined him with the passions
of a man. Samuel imagined that God could not repent of
his sentences ; Jeremiah, that he could. Joshua, on a day
of great victory, the ground being white with hail, seeing
the daylight last longer than usual, and imaginatively
seizing this as a special sign of the help divinely promised
to him, declared that the sun was standing still. To be
obeyers of God themselves, and inspired leaders of others
to obedience and good life, did not make Abraham and
Moses metaphysicians, or Joshua a natural philosopher.
0 His revelation no more changed the speculative opinions
of each prophet, than it changed his temperament or
style. The wrathful Elisha required the natural sedative of
music, before he could be the messenger of good fortune to
Jehoram. The high-bred Isaiah and Nahum have the style
proper to their condition, and the rustic Ezekiel and Amos
the style proper to theirs. We are not therefore bound to
pay heed to the speculative opinions of this or that prophet,
for in uttering these he spoke as a mere man : only in ex-
horting his hearers to obey God and lead a good life was
0 he the organ of a divine revelation.
To know and love God is the highest blessedness of
man, and of all men ahke ; to this all mankind are called,
and not any one nation in particular. The divine law,
properly so named, is the method of life for attaining
this height of human blessedness : this law is universal,
written in the heart, and one for all mankind. Human
law is the method of life for attaining and preserving
temporal security and prosperity : this law is dictated by
a lawgiver, and every nation has its own. In the case
io of the Jews, this law was dictated, by revelation, through
the prophets ; its fundamental precept was to obey God
198 ESSAYS IN ORITIOISM
and to keep his commandments, and it is therefore, in
a secondary sense, called divine ; but it was, nevertheless,
framed in respect of temporal things only. Even the truly
moral and divine precept of this law, to practise for God's
sake justice and mercy towards one's neighbour, meant
for the Hebrew of the Old Testament his Hebrew neighbour
only, and had respect to the concord and stabiUty of the
Hebrew commonwealth. The Jews were to obey God and
to keep his commandments, that they might continue
long in the land given to them, and that it might be well
with them there. Their election was a temporal one, and
lasted only so long as their State. It is now over ; and the
only election the Jews now have is that of the pious, the
remnant, which takes place, and has always taken place,
in every other nation also. Scripture itself teaches that
there is a universal divine law, that this is common to all
nations aUke, and is the law which truly confers eternal
blessedness. Solomon, the wisest of the Jews, knew this
law, as the few wisest men in all nations have ever known
it ; but for the mass of the Jews, as for the mass of man-
kind everywhere, this law was hidden, and they had no
notion of its moral action, its vera vita which conducts to
eternal blessedness, except so far as this action was enjoined
upon them by the prescriptions of their temporal law.
When the ruin of their State brought with it the ruin of
their temporal law, they would have lost altogether their
only clue to eternal blessedness.
Christ came when that fabric of the Jewish State, for
the sake of which the Jewish law existed, was about to
fall ; and he proclaimed the universal divine law. A certain
moral action is prescribed by this law, as a certain moral
action was prescribed by the Jewish law : but he who
truly conceives the universal divine law conceives God's
decrees adequately as eternal truths, and for him moral
action has liberty and self-knowledge ; while the prophets
of the Jewish law inadequately conceived God's decrees
as mere rules and commands, and for them moral action
had no liberty and no self-knowledge. Christ who beheld
the decrees of God as God himself beholds them, — as
eternal truths, — ^proclaimed the love of God and the love
of our neighbour as commands, only because of the ignorance
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 199
of the multitude : to those to whom it was ' given to know
the mysteries of the kingdom of God,' he announced them,
as he himself perceived them, as eternal truths. And the
apostles, like Christ, spoke to many of their hearers ' as
unto carnal not spiritual ; ' presented to them, that is,
the love of God and their neighbour as a divine command
authenticated by the life and death of Christ, not as an
eternal idea of reason carrying its own warrant along with
it. The presentation of it as this latter their hearers
10 ' were not able to bear.' The apostles, moreover, though
they preached and confirmed their doctrine by signs as
ptophets, wrote their Epistles, not as prophets, but as
doctors and reasoners. The essentials of their doctrine,
indeed, they took not from reason, but, like the prophets,
from fact and revelation ; they preached behef in God
and goodness of Ufe as a catholic religion existing by virtue
of the passion of Christ, as the prophets had preached
behef in God and goodness of life as a national religion
existing by virtue of the Mosaic covenant : but while
20 the prophets announced their message in a form purely
dogmatical, the apostles developed theirs with the forms
of reasoning and argumentation, according to each apostle's
ability and way of thinking, and as they might best commend
their message to their hearers ; and for their reasonings they
themselves claim no divine authority, submitting them to
the judgment of their hearers. Thus each apostle built
essential reUgion on a non-essential foundation of his own,
and, as St. Paul says, avoided building on the foundations
of another apostle, which might be quite different from his
80 own. Hence the discrepancies between the doctrine of
one apostle and another, — between that of St. Paul, for
example, and that of St. James ; but these discrepancies
are in the non-essentials not given to them by revelation,
and not in essentials. Human churches, seizing these
I discrepant non-essentials as essentials, one maintaining
one of them, another another, have filled the world with
improfitable disputes, have ' turned the Church into
I an academy, and rehgion into a science, or rather a
I wrangUng,' and have fallen into endless schism.
10 What, then, are the essentials of rehgion according
both to the Old and to the New Testament ? Very few
200 ESSAYS IN nRITICISM
and very simple. The precept to love God and our neigh-
bour. The precepts of the first chapter of Isaiah : ' Wash
you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your doings
from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do
well ; seek judgment ; relieve the oppressed ; judge the
fatherless ; plead for the widow.' The precepts of the
Sermon on the Mount, which add to the foregoing the
injunction that we should cease to do evil and learn to do
well, not to our brethren and fellow-citizens only, but to
all mankind. It is by following these precepts that belief :
in God is to be shown : if we beheve in him, we shall keep
his commandment ; and this is his commandment, that we
love one another. It is because it contains these precepts
that the Bible is properly called the Word of God, in spite
of its containing much that is mere history, and, hke all
history, sometimes true, sometimes false ; in spite of its
containing much that is mere reasoning, and, like all
reasoning, sometimes sound, sometimes hollow. These
precepts are also the precepts of the universal divine law
written in our hearts ; and it is only by this that the '>
divmity of Scripture is established ; — by its containing,
namely, precepts identical with those of this inly-written
and self -proving law. This law was in the world, as St. John
says, before the doctrine of Moses or the doctrine of Christ.
And what need was there, then, for these doctrines ? Be-
cause the world at large ' knew not ' this original divine
law, in which precepts are ideas, and the belief in God the
knowledge and contemplation of him. Reason gives us
this law, reason tells us that it leads to eternal blessedness,
and that those who follow it have no need of any other, s
But reason could not have told us that the moral action of
the universal divine law, — followed not from a sense of
its intrinsic goodness, truth, and necessity, but simply in
proof of obedience (for both the Old and New Testament
are but one long discipline of obedience), simply because
it is so commanded by Moses in virtue of the covenant,
simply because it is so commanded by Christ in virtue of
his life and passion, — can lead to eternal blessedness, which
means, for reason, eternal knowledge. Reason could not
have told us this, and this is what the Bible tells us. This 4
is that ' thing which had been kept secret since the fomida-
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 201
tion of the world.' It is thus that by means of the foolish-
ness of the world God confounds the wise, and with things
that are not brings to nought things that are. Of the truth
of the promise thus made to obedience without knowledge,
we can have no mathematical certainty ; for we can have
a mathematical certainty only of things deduced by
reason from elements which she in herself possesses.
But we can have a moral certainty of it ; a certainty such
as the prophets had themselves, arising out of the goodness
10 and pureness of those to whom this revelation has been
made, and rendered possible for us by its contradicting
no principles of reason. It is a great comfort to believe it ;
because ' as it is only the very small minority who can
pursue a virtuous life by the sole guidance of reason, we
should, unless we had this testimony of Scripture, be in
doubt respecting the salvation of nearly the whole human
race.'
It follows from this that philosophy has her own inde-
pendent sphere, and theology hers, and that neither
10 has the right to invade and try to subdue the other.
Theology demands perfect obedience, philosophy perfect
knowledge : the obedience demanded by theology and
the knowledge demanded by philosophy are aUke saving.
As speculative opinions about God, theology requires only
such as are indispensable to the reahty of this obedience ;
the belief that God is, that he is a rewarder of them that
seek him, and that the proof of seeking him is a good Ufe.
These are the fundamentals of faith, and they are so clear
and simple that none of the inaccuracies provable in the
w Bible narrative the least affect them, and they have
indubitably come to us uncorrupted. He who holds them
may make, as the patriarchs and prophets did, other specula-
tions about God most erroneous, and yet their faith is
complete and saving. Nay, beyond these fundamentals,
speculative opinions are pious or impious, not as they are
true or false, but as they confirm or shake the believer in
the practice of obedience. The truest speculative opinion
about the nature of God is impious if it makes its
holder rebellious ; the falsest speculative opinion is pious
loif it makes him obedient. Governments should never
render themselves the tools of ecclesiastical ambition by
202 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
promulgating as fundamentals of the national Church's
faith more than these, and should concede the fullest
liberty of speculation.
But the multitude, which respects only what astonishes,
terrifies, and overwhelms it, by no means takes this simple
view of its own religion. To the multitude, religion seems
imposing only when it is subversive of reason, confirmed
iby miracles, conveyed in documents materially sacred
and infallible, and dooming to damnation all without its
pale. But this religion of the multitude is not the rehgion
which a true interpretation of Scripture finds in Scripture.
Reason tells us that a miracle, — understanding by a miracle
a breach of the laws of nature, — ^is impossible, and that to
think it possible is to dishonour God ; for the laws of nature
are the laws of God, and to say that God violates the laws
of nature is to say that he violates his own nature. Reason
sees, too, that miracles can never attain their professed
object, — that of bringing us to a higher knowledge of
God ; since our knowledge of God is raised only by perfect-
ing and clearing our conceptions, and the alleged design
of miracles is to baffie them. But neither does Scripture
anywhere assert, as a general truth, that miracles are
possible. Indeed, it asserts the contrary ; for Jeremiah
declares that Nature follows an invariable order. Scrip-
ture, however, like Nature herself, does not lay down
speculative propositions {Scriptura definitiones non tradit,
ut nee etiam natura). It relates matters in such an order
and with such phraseology as a speaker (often not perfectly
instructed himself) who wanted to impress his hearers
with a Uvely sense of God's greatness and goodness would
naturally employ ; as Moses, for instance, relates to the
IsraeHtes the passage of the Red Sea without any mention
of the east wind which attended it, and which is brought
accidentally to our knowledge in another place. So that to
know exactly what Scripture means in the relation of each
seeming miracle, we ought to know (besides the tropes and
phrases of the Hebrew language) the circumstances, and
also, — since every one is swayed in his maimer of presenting
facts by his own preconceived opinions, and we have seen
what those of the prophets were, — the preconceived
opinions of each speaker. But this mode of interpreting
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 203
Scripture is fatal to th^ vulgar notion of its verbal inspira-
tion, of a sanctity and absolute truth in all the words and
sentences of which it is composed. This vulgar notion is,
indeed, a palpable error. It is demonstrable from the
internal testimony of the Scriptures themselves, that the
books from the first of the Pentateuch to the last of Bangs
were put together, after the first destruction of Jerusalem,
by a compiler (probably Ezra) who designed to relate the
history of the Jewish people from its origin to that destruc-
10 tion ; it is demonstrable, moreover, that the compiler did
not put his last hand to the work, but left it with its extracts
from various and conflicting sources sometimes unreconciled,
left it with errors of text and unsettled readings. The
prophetic books are mere fragments of the prophets,
collected by the Rabbins where they could find them, and
inserted in the Canon according to their discretion. They,
at first, proposed to admit neither the Book of Proverbs
nor the Book of Ecclesiastes into the Canon, and only ad-
mitted them because there were found in them passages
20 which commended the law of Moses. Ezekiel also they had
determined to exclude ; but one of their number remodelled
him, so as to procure his admission. The Books of Ezra,
Nehemiah, Esther, and Daniel are the work of a single
author, and were not written till after Judas Maccabeus
had restored the worship of the Temple. The Book of
Psalms was collected and arranged at the same time.
, Before this time, there was no Canon of the sacred writings,
and the great synagogue, by which the Canon was fixed,
was first convened after the Macedonian conquest of Asia.
30 Of that synagogue none of the prophets were members ;
the learned men who composed it were guided by their
own faUible judgment. In Uke manner the iminspired
' judgment of human councils determined the Canon of the
New Testament.
Such, reduced to the briefest and plainest terms possible,
stripped of the developments and proofs with which he
deUvers it, and divested of the metaphysical language
in which much of it is clothed by him, is the doctrine of
Spinoza's treatise on the interpretation of Scripture. By
40 the whole scope and drift of its argument, by the spirit
204 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
in which the subject is throughout treated, his work
undeniably is most interesting and stimulating to the
general culture of Europe. There are alleged contradictions
in Scripture ; and the question which the general culture
of Europe, informed of this, asks with real interest is :
What then ? Spinoza addresses himself to this question.
All secondary points of criticism he touches with the utmost
possible brevity. He points out that^ Moses could never
have written : ' And the Canaanite was then in the land,'
because the Canaanite was in the land still at the death of ]
Moses. He points out that Moses could never have written :
' There arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses.'
He points out how such a passage as, ' These are the kings
that reigned in Edom before there reigned any king over the
children of Israel,' clearly indicates an author writing not
before the times of the Kings. He points out how the
account of Og's iron bedstead : * Only Og the king of
Bashan remained of the remnant of giants ; behold, his
bedstead was a bedstead of iron ; is it not in Rabbath of
the children of Ammon ? ' — ^probably indicates an author i
writing after David had taken Rabbath, and found there
* abundance of spoil,' amongst it this iron bedstead, the
gigantic relic of another age. He points out how the language
of this passage, and of such a passage as that in the Book
of Samuel : ' Beforetime in Israel, when a man went to
inquire of God, thus he spake : Come and let us go to the
seer ; for he that is now called prophet was aforetime called
seer ' — is certainly the language of a writer describing the
events of a long-past age, and not the language of a con-
temporary. But he devotes to all this no more space than 2
is absolutely necessary. He apologises for delaying over
such matters so long : non est cur circa haec diu detinear — -
nolo taediosd lectione lector em detinere. For him the interest-
ing question is, not whether the fanatical devotee of the
letter is to continue, for a longer or for a shorter time, to
beUeve that Moses sate in the land of Moab writing tho
description of his own death, but what he is to believe when
he does not believe this. Is he to take for the guidance of
his life a great gloss put upon the Bible by theologians,
who, ' not content with going mad themselves with Plato 4
and Aristotle, want to make Christ and the prophets go
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 205
mad with them too,' — or the Bible itself ? Is he to be
presented by his national church with metaphysical
formularies for his creed, or with the real fundamentals
of Christianity ? If with the former, religion will never
produce its due fruits. A few elect will still be saved ;
but the vast majority of mankind will remain without
grace and without good works, hateful and hating one
another. Therefore he calls urgently upon governments
to make the national church what it should be. ^TMs— ,
10 is the conclusion of the whole matter for him ; arfervent
appeal to the State, to save us from the untoward generation
of metaphysical Article-makers. And therefore, anticipating
Mr. Gladstone, he called his book ' The Church in its
Relations with the State.'
Such is really the scope of Spinoza's work. He pursues
a great object, and pursues it with signal ability ; but it is
important to observe that he does not give us his own
opinion about the Bible's fundamental character. He
takes the Bible as it stands, as he might take the phenomena
io of nature, and he discusses it as he finds it. Revelation 7
differs from natural knowledge, he says, not by being more /
divine or more certain than natural knowledge, but by /
being conveyed in a different way ; it differs from it
because it is a knowledge ' of which the laws of human—'
nature considered in themselves alone cannot be the
cause.' What is really its cause, he says, we need not
here inquire {verum nee nobis jam opus est propheticae
cognitionis causam scire), for we take Scripture, which
contains this revelation, as it stands, and do not ask how
80 it arose {documentorum causas nihil curamus).
Proceeding on this principle, Spinoza leaves the attentive
reader somewhat baffled and disappointed, clear as is his
way of treating his subject, and remarkable as are the
conclusions with which he presents us. He starts, we feel,
from what is to him a hypothesis, and we want to know
what he really thinks about this hypothesis. His greatest
novelties are all within limits fixed for him by this hypo-
thesis. He says that the voice which called Samuel was an
imaginary voice ; he says that the waters of the Red Sea
40 retreated before a strong wind ; he says that the Shunam-
mites son was revived by the natural heat of EUsha's
206 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
body ; he says that the rainbow which was made a sign
to Noah appeared in the ordinary course of nature. Scrip-
ture itself, rightly interpreted, says, he affirms, all this.
But he asserts that the voice which uttered the command-
ments on Mount Sinai was a real voice, a vera vox. He says,
indeed, that this voice could not really give to the Israelites
that proof which they imagined it gave to them of the
existence of God, and that God on Sinai was dealing with
the Israelites only according to their imperfect knowledge.
Still he asserts the voice to have been a real one ; and for i
this reason, that we do violence to Scripture if we do not
admit it to have been a real one {nisi Scripturae vim inferre
velimus, omnino concedendum est, Israelitas veram vocem
audivisse). The attentive reader wants to know what
Spinoza himself thought about this vera vox and its
possibility ; he is much more interested in knowing this,
than in knowing what Spinoza considered Scripture to
\_ affirm about the matter.
The feeling of perplexity thus caused is not diminished
by the language of the chapter on miracles. In this chapter 2
Spinoza broadly affirms a miracle to be an impossibility.
But he himself contrasts the method of demonstration
a priori, by which he claims to have established this
proposition, with the method which he has pursued in
treating of prophetic revelation. ' This revelation,' he
says, ' is a matter out of human reach, and therefore I was
bound to take it as I found it.' Monere volo, me alid
prorsus methodo circa miracula processisse, quam circa
prophetiam . . . quod etiam consulto feci, quia de prophetid,
quandoquidem ipsa captum humanum superat et quaestio si
mere theologica est, nihil affirmare, neque etiam scire poteram
in quo ipsa potissimum constiterit, nisi ex fundamentis
revelatis. The reader feels that Spinoza, proceeding on
a hypothesis, has presented him with the assertion of
a miracle, and afterwards, proceeding d priori, has presented
him with the assertion that a miracle is impossible. He
feels that Spinoza does not adequately reconcile these two
assertions by declaring that any event really miraculous, if
found recorded in Scripture, must be * a spurious addition
made to Scripture by sacrilegious men.' Is, then, he asks, 4C
the vera vox of Mount Sinai in Spinoza's opinion a spurious
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 207
addition made to Scripture by sacrilegious men ; or, if
not, how is it not miraculous ?
Spinoza, in his own mind, regarded the Bible as a vast
collection of miscellaneous documents, many of them
quite disparate and not at all to be harmonised with others ;
documents of unequal value and of varying applicability,
some of them conveying ideas salutary for one time, others
for another. But in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
he by no means always deals in this free spirit with the
Lo Bible. Sometimes he chooses to deal with it in the spirit of
the veriest worshipper of the letter ; sometimes he chooses
to treat the Bible as if all its parts were (so to speak)
equipollent ; to snatch an isolated text which suits his
purpose, without caring whether it is annulled by the con-
text, by the general drift of Scripture, or by other passages
of more weight and authority. The great critic thus becomes ^
voluntarily as uncritical as Exeter Hall. The epicurean J
Solomon, whose Ecclesiastes the Hebrew doctors, even after
they had received it into the canon, forbade the young and
so weak-minded among their community to read, Spinoza
quotes as of the same authority with the severe Moses ; he
uses promiscuously, as documents of identical force, without
discriminating between their essentially different character,
the softened cosmopolitan teaching of the prophets of the
captivity and the rigid national teaching of the instructors
of Israel's youth. He is capable of extracting, from — ^
a chance expression of Jeremiah, the assertion of a specula- '
tive idea which Jeremiah certainly never entertained,
and from which he would have recoiled in dismay,— the
M) idea, namely, that miracles are impossible ; just as the
ordinary Englishman can extract from God's words to
Noah, Be fruitful and multiply, an exhortation to himself
to have a large family. Spinoza, I repeat, knew perfectly
well what this verbal mode of dealing with the Bible was
worth : but he sometimes uses it because of the hypothesis
from which he set out ; because of his having agreed * to
take Scripture as it stands, and not to ask how it arose.'
No doubt the sagacity of Spinoza's rules for Biblical
interpretation, the power of his analysis of the contents of
40 the Bible, the interest of his reflections on Jewish history,
are, in spite of this, very great, and have an absolute
208 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
worth of their own, independent of the silence or ambiguity
of their author upon a point of cardinal importance. Few
candid people will read his rules of interpretation without
exclaiming that they are the very dictates of good sense,
that they have always believed in them ; and without
adding, after a moment's reflection, that they have passed
their lives in violating them. And what can be more
interesting than to find that perhaps the main cause
of the decay of the Jewish polity was one of which from
our English Bible, which entirely mistranslates the 26th
verse of the 20th chapter of Ezekiel, we hear nothing, —
the perpetual reproach of impurity and rejection cast
upon the mass of the Hebrew nation by the exclusive
priesthood of the tribe of Levi ? What can be more
suggestive, after Mr. Mill and Dr. Stanley have been
telling us how great an element of strength to the Hebrew
nation was the institution of prophets, than to hear from
the ablest of Hebrews how this institution seems to him
to have been to his nation one of her main elements of
weakness ? No intelligent man can read the Tractatus :
Theologico-Politicus without being profoundlj^ instructed
Jby it : but neither can he read it without feeling that, as
^speculative work, it is, to use a French military expression,
in the air ; that, in a certain sense, it is in want of a base
and in want of supports ; that this base and these supports
are, at any rate, not to be found in the work itself, and, if
\ they exist, must be sought for in other works of the
I author.
L The genuine speculative opinions of Spinoza, which
the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus but imperfectly reveals. ?
Cmay in his Ethics and in his Letters be found set forth
clearly. It is, however, the business of criticism to deal
with every independent work as with an independent
whole, and, instead of establishing between the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus and the Ethics of Spinoza a relation
which Spinoza himself has not established, — ^to seize, in
dealing with the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the impor-
tant fact that this work has its source, not in the axioms
and definitions of the Ethics, but in a hypothesis. The
Ethics are not yet translated into English, and I have not 4
here to speak of them. Then will be the right time for
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 209
criticism to try and seize the special character and tendencies
of that remarkable work, when it is dealing with it directly.
The criticism of the Ethics is far too serious a task to be
midertaken incidentally, and merely as a supplement to
the criticism of the Tractatus Theologico-Politictcs. Never-
theless, on certain governing ideas of Spinoza, which receive
their systematic expression, indeed, in the Ethics, and on
which the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is not formally
based, but which are yet never absent from Spinoza's
D mind in the composition of any work, which breathe through
all his works, and fill them with a peculiar effect and power,
I have a word or two to say.
A philosopher's real power over mankind resides not
in his metaphysical formulas, but in the spirit and ten-
dencies which have led him to adopt those formulas,
Spinoza's critic, therefore, has rather to bring to light
that spirit and those tendencies of his author, than to
exhibit his metaphysical formulas. Propositions about
substance pass by mankind at large like the idle wind,
9 which mankind at large regards not ; it will not even
listen to a word about these propositions, unless it first
learns what their author was driving at with them, and
finds that this object of his is one with which it sympathises,
one, at any rate, which commands its attention. And
mankind is so far right that this object of the author
is really, as has been said, that which is most important,
that which sets all his work in motion, that which is the
secret of his attraction for other minds, which, by different
ways, pursue the same object.
D Mr. Maurice, seeking for the cause of Goethe's great
admiration for Spinoza, thinks that he finds it in Spinoza's
Hebrew genius. ' He spoke of God,' says Mr. Maurice,
* as an actual being, to those who had fancied him a name
in a book. The child of the circumcision had a message
for Lessing and Goethe which the pagan schools of philo-
sophy could not bring.' This seems to me, I confess,
fanciful. An intensity and impress! veness, which came to
him from his Hebrew nature, Spinoza no doubt has ; but
the two tilings which are most remarkable about him, and
0 by which, as I think, be chiefly impressed Goethe, seem
to nie not to come to him from his Hebrew nature at all.
21() ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
^— I mean his denial of final causes, and his stoicism,
a stoicism not passive, but active. For a mind like Goethe's,
— a mind profoundly impartial and passionately aspiring
after the science, not of men only, but of universal nature, —
the popular philosophy which explains all things by refer-
ence to man, and regards universal nature as existing for
the sake of man, and even of certain classes of men, was
utterly repulsive. Unchecked, this philosophy would
gladly maintain that the donkey exists in order that the
invalid Christian may have donkey's milk before break-
fast ; and such views of nature as this were exactly what
Goethe's whole soul abhorred. Creation, he thought,
should be made of sterner stuff ; he desired to rest the
donkey's existence on larger grounds. More than any
philosopher who has ever lived, Spinoza satisfied him here.
The full exposition ©f the counter-doctrine to the popular
doctrine of final causes is to be found in the Ethics ; but
this denial of final causes was so essential an element of
all Spinoza's thinking that we shall, as has been said
already, find it in the work with which we are here con-
cerned, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and, indeed,
permeating that work and all his works. From the Trac-
tatus Theologico-Politicus one may take as good a general
statement of this denial as any which is to be found in
the Ethics : —
' Deus naturam dirigit, prout ejus leges universales, non
autem prout humanae naturae particulares leges exigunt,
adeoque Deus non solius humani generis, sed to tins naturae
rationem habet.' {God directs nature, according as the
universal laws of nature, but not according as the particular
laws of human nature require ; and so God has regard, not
of the human race only, hut of entire nature.)
And, as a pendant to this denial by Spinoza of final
causes, comes his stoicism : —
' Non studemus, ut natura nobis, sed contra ut nos
naturae pareamus.' (Our desire is not that nature may
obey us, but, on the contrary, that we may obey nature.)
Here is the second source of his attractiveness for
Goethe ; and Goethe is but the eminent representative
of a whole order of minds whose admiration has made
Spinoza's fame. Spinoza first impresses Goethe and any
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 211
man like Goethe, and then he composes him ; first he fills
and satisfies his imagination by the width and grandeur
of his view of nature, and then he fortifies and stills his
mobile, straining, passionate, poetic temperament by the
moral lesson he draws from his view of nature. And
a moral lesson not of mere resigned acquiescence, not of
Melancholy quietism, but of joyful activity within the
limits of man's true sphere : —
' Ipsa hominis essentia est conatus quo unusquisque
10 suum esse conservare conatur. . . . Virtus hominis est
ipsa hominis essentia, quatenus a solo conatu suum esse
conservandi definitur. . . . Felicitas in eo consistit quod
homo suum esse conservare potest. . . . Laetitia est hominis
transitio ad majorem perfectionem. . . . Tristitia est hominis
transitio ad minorem perfectionem.' (Man's very essence
is the effort wherewith each man strives to maintain his own
being. . . . Man's virtue is this very essence, so far as it is
defined by this single effort to maintain his own being. . . .
Happiness consists in a man's being able to maintain his
20 own bein^. . . . Joy is man's passage to a greater perfection.
, . . Sorrow is inan's passage to a lesser perfection.)
It seems to me that by neither of these, his grand charac-
teristic doctrines, is Spinoza truly Hebrew or truly Christian.
His denial of final causes is essentially alien to the spirit
of the Old Testament, and his cheerful and seK-sufficing
stoicism is essentially alien to the spirit of the New. The
doctrine that ' God directs nature, not according as the
particular laws of human nature, but according as the
universal laws of nature require,' is at utter variance with
to that Hebrew mode of representing God's dealings, which
makes the locusts visit Egypt to punish Pharaoh's hard-
ness of heart, and the falling dew avert itself from the
fleece of Gideon. The doctrine that * all sorrow is a passage
to a lesser perfection ' is at utter variance with the Christian
recognition of the blessedness of sorrow, working ' repent-
ance to salvation not to be repented of ; ' of sorrow, which,
in Dante's words, ' remarries us to God.'
Spinoza's repeated and earnest assertions that the love
of God is man's summum bonum do not remove the funda-
Q mental diversity between his doctrine and the Hebrew and
Christian doctrines. By the love of God he does not mean
P2
212 ' ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
the same thing which the Hebrew and Christian religions
mean by the love of God. He makes the love of God to
consist in the knowledge of God ; and, as we know God
only through his manifestation of himself in the laws of
all nature, it is by knowing these laws that we love God,
and the more we know them the more we love him. This
may be true, but this is not what the Christian means li^r
the love of God. Spinoza's ideal is the intellectual life ;
the Christian's ideal is the religious life. Between the two
conditions there is all the difference which there is between i
the being in love, and the following, with delighted com-
prehension, a reasoning of Plato. For Spinoza, undoubtedly,
the crown of the intellectual life is a transport, as for the
saint the crown of the religious life is a transport ; but the
two transports are not the same.
This is true ; yet it is true, also, that by thus crowning
the intellectual life with a sacred transport, by thus retain-
ing in philosophy, amid the discontented murmurs of all
the army of atheism, the name of God, Spinoza maintains
a profound affinity with that which is truest in religion, 2
and inspires an indestructible interest. One of his admirers,
M. Van Vloten, has recently published at Amsterdam
a supplementary volume to Spinoza's works, containing
the interesting document of Spinoza's sentence of excom-
munication, from which I have already quoted, and con-
taining, besides, several lately found works alleged to be
Spinoza's, which seem to me to be of doubtful authenticity,
and, even if authentic, of no great importance. M. Van
Vloten (who, let me be permitted to say in passing, writes
a Latin which would make one think that the art of writing 31
Latin must be now a lost art in the country of Lipsius) is
very anxious that Spinoza's unscientific retention of the
name of God should not afflict his readers with any doubts
as to his perfect scientific orthodoxy : —
* It is a great mistake,' he cries, ' to disparage Spinoza
as merely one of the dogmatists before Kant. By keeping
the name of God, while he did away with his person and
character, he has done himseK an injustice. Those who
look to the bottom of things will see, that, long ago as
he lived, he had even then reached the point to which the 4i
post-Hegelian philosophy and the study of natural science
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 213
has only just brought our own times. Leibnitz expressed
his apprehension lest those who did away with final causes
should do away with God at the same time. But it is in
his having done away with final causes, and with God
along with them, that Spinoza's true merit consists.'
Now it must be remarked that to use Spinoza's denial
of final causes in order to identify him with the Corjrphaei
of atheism, is to make a false use of Spinoza's denial of
final causes, just as to use his assertion of the all-impor-
Lo tance of loving God to identify him with the saints would
be to make a false use of his assertion of the alHmportance
of loving God. He is no more to be identified with the
post-Hegelian philosophers than he is to be identified with
St. Augustine. Unction, indeed, Spinoza's writings have
not ; that name does not precisely fit any quality which
they exhibit. And yet, so all-important in the sphere of
religious thought is the power of edification, that in this
sphere a great fame like Spinoza !s can never be founded
without it. A court of literature can never be very severe
:o to Voltaire : with that inimitable wit and clear sense of
his, he cannot write a page in which the fullest head may
not find something suggestive : still, because, with all his
wit and clear sense, he handles religious ideas wholly
without the power of edification, his fame as a great
man is equivocal. Strauss has treated the question of
Scripture miracles with an acuteness and fulness which
even to the most informed minds is instructive ; but
because he treats it wholly without the power of edifica-
tion, his fame as a serious thinker is equivocal. But in
JO Spinoza there is not a trace either of Voltaire's passion for
mockery or of Strauss's passion for demolition. His whole
soul was filled with desire of the love and knowledge of
God, and of that only. Philosophy always proclaims her-
self on the way to the summum honum ; but too often on
the road she seems to forget her destination, and suffers
her hearers to forget it also. Spinoza never forgets his
destination : * The love of God is man's highest happiness
and blessedness, and the final end and aim of all human
actions ; — The supreme reward for keeping God's Word is
10 that Word itself — namely, to know him and with free will
and pure and constant heart love him : ' these sentences
214 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
are the keynote to all he produced, and Avere the inspira-
tion of all his labours. This is why he turns so sternly upon
the worshippers of the letter, — ^the editors of the Masora,
the editor of the Record, — because their doctrine imperils
our love and knowledge of God. * What ! ' he cries, * our
knowledge of God to depend upon these perishable things,
which Moses can dash to the ground and break to pieces
like the first tables of stone, or of which the originals can
be lost like the original book of the Covenant, like the
original book of the Law of God, like the book of the i
Wars of God ! . . . which can come to us confused, imper-
fect, miswritten by copyists, tampered with by doctors !
And you accuse others of impiety ! It is you who are
impious, to believe that God would commit the treasure
of the true record of himself to any substance less enduring
than the heart ! '
And Spinoza's life was not unworthy of this elevated
strain. A philosopher who professed that knowledge was
its own reward, a devotee who professed that the love of
God was its own reward, this philosopher and this devotee 2
believed in what he said. Spinoza led a life the most
spotless, perhaps, to be found among the lives of philo-
sophers ; he lived simple, studious, even-tempered, kind ;
declining honours, declining riches, declining notoriety.
He was poor, and his admirer Simon de Vries sent him two
thousand florins ; — he refused them. The same friend left
him his fortune ; — he returned it to the heir. He was
asked to dedicate one of his works to the magnificent
patron of letters in his century, Louis the Fourteenth ; —
he declined. His great work, his Ethics, published after 31
his death, he gave injunctions to his friends to publish
anonymously, for fear he should give his name to a school.
Truth, he thought, should bear no man's nc^me. And
finally, — ' Unless,' he said, * I had known that my writings
would in the end advance the cause of true religion, I would
have suppressed them, — tacuissem.' It was in this spirit
that he lived ; and this spirit gives to all he writes not
exactly unction, — I have already said so, — but a kind of
sacred solemnity. Not of the same order as the saints, he
yet follows the same service : Doubtless thou art our Father, 4C
though A braham he ignorant oj us, and Israel acknowledge us not.
SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 215
Therefore he has been, in a certain sphere, edifying, and
has inspired in many powerful minds an interest and an
admiration such as no other philosopher has inspired since
Plato. The lonely precursor of Grerman philosophy, he still
shines when the light of his successors is fading away ;
they had celebrity, Spinoza has fame. Not because h{3 )
peculiar system of philosophy has had more adherents /
than theirs ; on the contrary, it has had fewer. But schools [
of philosophy arise and fall ; their bands of adherents I
) inevitably dwindle ; no master can long persuade a largo ]
body of disciples that they give to themselves just the
same account of the world as he does ; it is only the very
young and the very enthusiastic who can think themselves
sure that they possess the whole mind of Plato, or Spinoza,
or Hegel, at all. The very mature and the very sober can
even hardly believe that these philosophers possessed it
themselves enough to put it all into their works, and to let
us know entirely how the world seemed to them. What
a remarkable philosopher really does for human thought,
0 is to throw into circulation a certain number of new and
striking ideas and expressions, and to stimulate with them
the thought and imagination of his century or of after-
times. So Spinoza has made his distinction between
adequate and inadequate ideas a current notion for educated
Europe. So Hegel seized a single pregnant sentence of
Heracleitus, and cast it, with a thousand striking applica-
tions, into the world of modern thought. But to do this is
only enough to make a philosopher noteworthy ; it is not
enough to make him great. To be great, he must have
0 something in him which can influence character, which is
edifying ; he must, in short, have a noble and lofty character
himself,' a character, — to recur to that much-criticised
expression of mine, — in the grand style. This is what
Spinoza had ; and because he had it, he stands out from
the multitude of philosophers, and has been able to inspire
in powerful minds a feeling which the most remarkable
philosophers, without this grandiose character, could not
inspire. ' There is no possible view of life but Spinoza's,'
said Lessing. Goethe has told us how he was calmed and
10 edified by him in his youth, and how he again went to him
for support in his maturity. Heine, the man (in spite of
216 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
his faults) of truest genius that Germany has produced
since Goethe, — a man with faults, as I have said, immense
faults, the greatest of them being that he could reverence
so little, — ^reverenced Spinoza. Hegel's influence ran off
him like water : ' I have seen Hegel,' he cries, * seated
with his doleful air of a hatching hen upon his unhappy
eggs, and I have heard his dismal clucking. — How easily
one can cheat oneself into thinking that one understands
everything, when one has learnt only how to construct
dialectical formulas ! ' But of Spinoza, Heine said : * His
life was a copy of the life of his divine kinsman, Jesus
Christ.'
And therefore, when M. Van \loten violently presses
the parallel with the post-Hegelians, one feels that the
parallel with St. Augustine is the far truer one. Compared
with the soldier of irreligion M. Van Vloten would have
him to be, Spinoza is religious. * It is true,' one may say
to the wise and devout Christian, ' Spinoza's conception
of beatitude is not yours, and cannot satisfy you ; but
whose conception of beatitude would you accept as satis- :
fying ? Not even that of the devoutest of your fellow-
Christians. Fra Angelico, the sweetest and most inspired
of devout souls, has given us, in his great picture of the
Last Judgment, his conception of beatitude. The elect
are going round in a ring on long grass under laden fruit-
trees ; two of them, more restless than the others, are
flying up a battlemented street, — a street blank with all
the ennui of the Middle Ages. Across a gulf is visible, for
the delectation of the saints, a blazing caldron in which
Beelzebub is sousing the damned. This is hardly more :
your conception of beatitude than Spinoza's is. But ** in
my Father's house are many mansions ; " only, to reach
any one of these mansions, there are needed the wings of
a genuine sacred transport, of an " immortal longing." '
These wings Spinoza had ; and, because he had them, his
own language about himself, about his aspirations and his
course, are true : his foot is in the vera vita, his eye on
the beatific vision.
MARCUS AURELIUS
— )
Mr. Mill says, in his book on Liberty, that ' Christian
morality is in great part merely a protest against paganism ;
its ideal is negative rather than positive, passive, rather
than active.' He says, that, in certain most important
respects, * it falls far below the best morality of the
ancients.' Now, the object of systems of morality is to
take possession of human life, to save it from being aban-
doned to passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it
happiness by establishing it in the practice of virtue ; and •
othis object they seek to attain by prescribing to human j
life fixed principles of action, fixed rules of conduct. InJ
its uninspired as well as in its inspired moments, in its
days of languor and gloom as well as in its days of sun-
shine and energy, human life has thus always a clue to
follow, and may always be making way towards its goal.
Christian morality has not failed to supply to human life
aids of this sort. It has supplied them far more abundantly
than many of its critics imagine. The most exquisite
document, after those of the New Testament, of all the
:o documents the Christian spirit has ever inspired, — ^the
Imitation, — by no means contains the whole of Christian
morality ; nay, the disparagers of this morality would
think themselves sure of triumphing if one agreed to look
for it in the Imitation only. But even the Imitation is
full of passages like these : ' Vita sine proposito languida
et vaga est ; ' — * Omni die renovare debemus propositum
nostrum, dicentes : nunc hodie perfecte incipiamus, quia
nihil est quod hactenus fecimus ; ' — * Secundum propositum
nostrum est cursus profectus nostri ; ' — * Raro etiam unum
\o vitium perfecte vincimus, et ad quotidianum profectum non
accendimur ; ' — * Semper aliquid certi proponendum est ; '
— * Tibi ipsi violentiam frequenter fac : ' {A life without
a purpose is a languid^ drifting thing ; — Every day we ought
to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves :: This day let us
218 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is
nought ; — Our improvement is in proportion to our pur-
pose ; — We hardly ever manage to get completely rid even of
one fault, and do not set our hearts on daily improvement ; —
Always place a definite purpose before thee ; — Get the habit
of mastering thine inclination.) These are moral precepts,
and moral precepts of the best kind. As rules to hold
possession of our conduct, and to keep us in the right
course through outward troubles and inward perplexity,
they are equal to the best ever furnished by the great i
^_ masters of morals, — Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius.
(^ But moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then
^ rigorously followed as laws, are, and must be, for the sage
/ only. The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect
/ enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of
( • character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The
— mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of
hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the
thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the
tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is impossible s
to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without
a sense of restraint and melancholy, without feeling that
the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he
can bear. Honour to the sages who have felt this, and
yet have borne it ! Yet, even for the sage, this sense of
labour and sorrow in his march towards the goal constitutes
a relative inferiority ; the noblest souls of whatever creed,
the pagan Empedocles as well as the Christian Paul, have
insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a joyful emotion,
to make moral action perfect ; an obscure indication of J
this necessity is the one drop of truth in the ocean of
verbiage with v/hich the controversy on justification by
^^^^--faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary man,
\ this sense of labour and sorrow constitutes an absolute
] disqualification ; it paralyses him ; under the weight of
/ it, he cannot make way towards the goal at all. The
/ paramount virtue of religion is, that it has lighted up
'^^^.Tnorality ; that it has supplied the emotion and inspiration
needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly,
for carrying the ordinary man along it at all. Even the 4
religions with most dross in tKemH&ave had something of
MARCUS AURELIUS . 219
this virtue ; but the Christian religion manifests it with
unexampled splenCtotrr. — ' Lead me, "Zeus and Destiny ! *
6ays"th"epfayef of Epfctetus, 'whithersoever I am appointed
to go ; I will follow without wavering ; even though I turn
coward and shrink, I shall have to follow all the same.'
The fortitude of that is for the strong, for the few ; even
for them the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds
them is bleak and grey. But, * Let thy loving spirit lead
me forth into the land of righteousness ; ' — * The Lord
shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy
glory ; ' — ' Unto you that fear my name shall the sun of
righteousness arise with heaUng in his wings,' says the Old
Testament ; * Born, not of blood, nor of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God ; ' — ' Except
a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God ; '
— ' Whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world,'
says the New. The ray of sunshine is there, the glow of
a divine warmth ; — the austerity of the sage melts away
under it, the paralysis of the weak is healed : he who is
vivified by it renews his strength ; ' all things are possible
to him ; ' ' he is a new creature.'
Epictetus says : ' Every matter has two handles, one
of which will bear taking hold of, the other not. If thy
brother sin against thee, lay not hold of the matter by
this, that he sins against thee ; for by this handle the
matter will not bear taking hold of. But rather lay hold
of it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate ; and
thou wilt take hold of it by what will bear handling.'
Jesus, asked whether a man is bound to forgive his brother
as often as seven times, answers : ' I say not unto thee,
until seven times, l)ut until seventy times seven.' Epic-
tetus here suggests to the reason grounds for forgiveness
of injuries which Jesus does not ; but it is vain to say
that Epictetus is on that account a better moraUst than
Jesus, if the warmth, the emotion, of Jesus's answer fires
his hearer to the practice of forgiveness of injuries, while
the thought in Epictetus's leaves him cold. So with^ I
Christian morality in general : its distinction is not that I
it propounds the maxim, ' Thou shalt lovo God and thy
neighbour,' with more development, closer reasoning, truer
sincerity, than other moral systems ; it is that it propounds
220 . ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
this maxim with an inspiration which wonderfully catches
the hearer and makes him act upon it. It is because
Mr. Mill has attained to the perception of truths of this
nature, that he is, — ^instead of being, like the school from
vvhich he proceeds, doomed to sterility, — a writer of dis-
tinguished mark and influence, a writer deserving all
attention and respect ; it is (I must be pardoned for
saying) because he is not sufficiently leavened with them,
that he falls just short of being a great writer.
That which gives to the moral writings of the Emperor
Maj-cus "^ur^us^h^r'pecTiliar cliaracter and charm, is
their being suffused and sottened by something of this
very sentiment whence Christian morality draws its best
power. Mr. Long has recently published in a convenient
form a translation of these writings, and has thus enabled
English readers to judge Marcus AureUus for themselves ;
he has rendered his countrymen a real service by so doing.
Mr. Long's reputation as a scholar is a sufficient guarantee
of the general fidelity and accuracy of his translation ;
on these matters, besides, I am hardly entitled to speak,
and my praise is of no value. But that for which I and the
rest of the unlearned may venture to praise Mr. Long is
this : that he treats Marcus Aurelius's writings, as he treats
all the other remains of Greek and Roman antiquity wliich
he touches, not as a dead and dry matter of learning, but
as documents with a side of modern applicability and
living interest, and valuable mainly so far as this side in
them can be made clear ; that as in his notes on Plutarch's
Roman Lives he deals with the modern epoch of Caesar
and Cicero, not as food for schoolboys, but as food for men,
and men engaged in the current of contemporary Ufe and
action, so in his remarks and essays on Marcus Aurelius
he treats this truly modern striver and thinker not as
a Classical Dictionary hero, but as a present source from
which to draw * example of life, and instruction of manners.*
Why may not a son of Dr. Arnold say, what might naturally
here be said by any other critic, that in this Hvely and
fruitful way of considering the men and affairs of ancient
Greece and Rome, Mr. Long resembles Dr. Arnold ?
One or two little complaints, however, I have against
Mr. Long, and I will get them off my mind at once. In
MARCUS AURELIUS 221
the first place, why could he not have found gentler and
juster terms to describe the translation of his best-known
predecessor, Jeremy Collier, — the redoubtable enemy of
stage plaj-j, — than these : ' a most coarse and vulgar copy
of the original ' ? As a matter of taste, a translator should
deal leniently with his predecessor ; but putting that out
of the question, Mr. Long's language is a great deal too
hard. Most Enghsh people who knew Marcus AureHus
before ]\Ir. Long appeared as his introducer, knew him
through Jeremy CoUier. And the acquaintance of a man
like Marcus Aurehus is such an imperishable benefit, that
one can never lose a pecuUar sense of obhgation towards
the man who confers it. Apart from this claim upon one's
tenderness, however, Jeremy Collier's version deserves
respect for its genuine spirit and vigour, the spirit and
vigour of the age of Dryden. Jeremy ColHer too, Hke
Mr. Long, regarded in Marcus Aurehus the living morahst,
and not the dead classic ; and his warmth of feeling gave
to his style an impetuosity and rhythm which from Mr.
Long's style (I do not blame it on that account) are absent.
Let us place the two side by side. The impressive opening
of Marcus Aurehus's fifth book, Mr. Long translates thus : —
' In the morning when thou risest unwiUingly, let this
thought be present : I am rising to the work of a human
being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do
the things for which I exist and for which I was brought
into the world ? Or h'ave I been made for this, to he in
the bed-clothes and keep nlyself warm ? — But this is more
pleasant. — Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and
I not at ah for action or exertion ? *
Jeremy CoUier has : —
* When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the
morning, make this short speech to yourself : "I am
getting up now to do the business of a man ; and am
I out of humour for going about that which I was made
for, and for the sake of which I was sent into the world ?
Was I then designed for nothing but to doze and batten
beneath the counterpane ? I thought action had been
the end of your being." '
) Jn another striking passage, again, Mr. Long has : —
' No longer wander at hazard ; for neither wilt thou
222 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
read thy own memoirs, nor the acts of the ancient Romana
and Hellenes, and the selections from books which thou
wast reserving for thy old age. Hasten then to the end
which thou hast before thee, and, throwing away idle
hopes, come to thine own aid, if thou carest at all for
thyself, while it is in thy power.'
Here his despised predecessor has : —
' Don't go too far in your books and overgrasp yourself.
Alas, you have no time left to peruse your diary, to read
over the Greek and Roman history : come, don't flatter
and deceive yourself ; look to the main chance, to the
end and design of reading, and mind life more than notion :
I say, if you have a kindness for your person, drive at the
practice and help yourself, for that is in your own power.'
It seems to me that here for style and force Jeremy
Collier can (to say the least) perfectly stand comparison
with Mr. Long. Jeremy Collier's real defect as a translator
is not his coarseness and vulgarity, but his imperfect
acquaintance with Greek ; this is a serious defect, a fatal
one ; it renders a translation like Mr. Long's necessary.
Jeremy CoUier's work will now be forgotten, and Mr. Long
stands master of the field ; but he may be content, at any
rate, to leave his predecessor's grave unharmed, even if
he will not throw upon it, in passing, a handful of kindly
earth.
Another complaint I have against Mr. Long is, that he
is not quite idiomatic and simple* enough. It is a little
formal, at least, if Tit>t pedantic, H:;o~say-:S7^/t*c and Dialectic,
instead of Ethics and Dialectics, and to say, 'Hellenes and
Romans ' instead of ' Greeks and Romans.' And why, too,
— the name of Antoninus being preoccupied by Antoninus
Pius, — will Mr. Long call his author Marcus Antoninus
instead of Marcus Aurelius ? Small as these matters
appear, they are important when one has to deal with the
general public, and not with a small circle of scholars ;
and it is the general public that the translator of a short
masterpiece on morals, such as is the book of MafGuf"
Aurelius", "should have in view ; his aim should be to make
Marcus Aurelius' s work as popular as the Imitqtignj and
Marcus Aurelius's name as famiUar as Socrates's. In
rendering or naming him, therefore, punctilious accuracy
MARCUS AURELIUS 223
of phrase is not so much to be sought as accessibility and
currency ; everything which may best enable the Emperor
and his precepts volitare per ora viriXm. It is essential to
render him in language perfectly plain and unprofessional,
and to call him by the name by which he is best and most
distinctly known. The translators of the Bible talk of
pence and not denarii, and the admirers of Voltaire do not
celebrate him under the name of Arouet.
But, after these trifling complaints are made, one must
0 end, as one began, in unfeigned gratitude to Mr. Long for
his excellent and substantial reproduction in English of an
invaluable work. In general the substantiahty, soundness,
and precision of Mr. Long's rendering are (I will venture,
after all, to give my opinion about them) as conspicuous
as the_^living spirit with which he tr^-^ta antiquity ; and
these quaUties are particularly desirable in the translator
of a work like Marcus Aurelius's, of which the language is
often corrupt, almost always hard and obscure. Any one
who wants to appreciate Mr. Long's merits as a translator
0 may read, in the original and in Mr. Long's translation,
the seventh chapter of the tenth book ; he will see how,
through all the dubiousness and involved manner of the
Greek, Mr. Long has firmly seized upon the clear thought'
which is certainly at the bottom of that troubled wording,
and, in distinctly rendering this thought, has at the same
time thrown round its expression a characteristic shade of
painfulness and difficulty which just suits it. And Marcus
AureUus's book is one which, when it is rendered so accur-
ately as Mr. Long renders it, even those who know Greek
0 tolerably well may choose to read rather in the translation
than in the original. For not only are the contents here
incomparably more valuable than the external form, but
this form, the Greek of a Roman, is not exactly one of
those styles which havti a physiognomy, which are an
essential part of their author, which stamp an indelible
impression of him on the reader's mind. An old Lyons
commentator finds, indeed, in Marcus Aurelius's Greek,
something characteristic, something specially firm and
imperial ; but I think an ordinary mortal will hardly find
0 this : he will find crabbed Greek, without any great charm
of distinct physiognomy. The Greek of Thucydides and
224 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Plato has this charm, and he who reads them in a transla-
tion, however accurate, loses it, and loses much in losing
it ; but the Greek of Marcus Aurelius, like the Greek of
the New Testament, and even more than the Greek of the
New Testament, is wanting in it. If one could be assured
that the English Testament were made perfectly accurate,
one might be almost content never to open a Greek Testa-
ment again ; and, Mr. Long's version of Marcus Aurelius
being what it is, an Enghshman who reads to live, and
does not live to read, may henceforth let the Greek original ;
repose upon its shelf.
CThe man whose thoughts Mr. Long has thus faithfully
reproduced, is perhaps the most beautiful figufeTn history .
He is one of those consoling and hopB^inspirilig marks,
which stand for ever to remind our weak and easily dis-
couraged race how high human goodness and perseverance
have once been carried, and may be carried again. The
interest of mankind is peculiarly attracted by examples
of signal goodness in high places ; for that testimony to
\ the worth of goodness is the most striking which is borne i
\ by those to whom all the means of pleasure and self-
-indulgence lay open, by those who had at their command
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Marcus
Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of empires ; and he
was one of the best of men. Besides him, history presents
one or two other sovereigns eminent for their goodness,
such as Saint Louis or Alfred. But Marcus Aurelius has,
for us moderns, this great superiority m interest over
Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted m a state
of society modern by its essential chafact5ristics7 in an 3
epoch akin "to our own, in a brilhant centre of civilisation.
Trajan talks of ' our enlightened age * just as glibly as the
Times talks of it. Marcus Aurelius thus becomes for us
a man Uke ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are.
Saint Louis inhabits an atmosphere of mediaeval Catho-
licism, which the man of the nineteenth century may
admire, indeed, may even passiona^ly msh to inhabit, but
which, strive as he will, he cannot really inhabit : Alfred
belongs to a state of society (I say it with all deference to
the Saturday Review critic who keeps such jealous watch 4
over the honour of our Saxon ancestors) half barbarous.
MARCUS AURELIUS 226
Neither Alfred nor Saint Louis can be morally and intel-
lectually as near to us as Marcus Aurelius.
The record of the outward life of this admirable man
has in it little of striking incident. He was born at Rome
on the 26th of April, in the year 121 of the Christian era.
Ho was nephew and son-in-law to his predecessor on the
throne, Antoninus Pius. When Antoninus died, he was
forty years old, but from the time of his earliest manhood
he had assisted in administering public affairs. Then, after
I his uncle's death in 161, for nineteen years he reigned as
emperor. The barbarians were pressing on the Roman
frontier, and a great part of Marcus Aurelius's nineteen
years of reign was passed in campaigning. His absences
from Rome were numerous and long : we hear of him in
Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Greece ; but, above all, in the
countries on the Danube, where the war with the barbarians
was going on, — in Austria, Moravia, Hungary. In these
countries much of his Journal seems to have been written ;
parts of it are dated from them ; and there, a few v/eeks
I before his fifty-ninth birthday, he fell sick and died.^ The
record of him on which his fame chiefly rests is the record
of his inward life, — his Journal, or Commentaries, or Medita-
tions, or Thoiights, for by all these names has the work
been called. Perhaps the most interesting of the records
of his outward life is that which the first book of this w ork
supplies, where he gives an account of his education, recites
the names of those to whom he is indebted for it, and
enumerates his obligations to each of them. It is a refresh-
ing and consoling picture, a priceless treasure for those,
) who, sick of the ' wild and dreamlike trade of blood and
guile,' which seems to be nearly the whole of what history
has to offer to our view, seek eagerly for that substratum
of right thinking and well-doing which inlimigeslnust
>iii ely have somewhere existed, for without it the continued
life of humanity would have been impossible. ' From my
mother I learnt piety and beneficence, and abstinence not
only from evil deeds but even from evil thoughts ; and
further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from
the habits of the rich.' Let us remember that, the next
^ He died on the 17th of March, a.d. 180.
ARNOLD Q
226 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
time we are reading the sixth satire of Juvenal. ' From my
tutor I learnt ' (hear it, ye tutors of princes !) ' endurance
of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands,
and not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not to
be ready to listen to slander.' The vices and foibles of the
Greek sophist or rhetorician — the Graeculus esuriens — are
in everybody's mind ; but he who reads Marcus Aurelius's
account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand
how it is that, in spite of the vices and foibles of individual
Graeculi, the education of the human race owes to Greece
a debt which can never be overrated. The vague and
colourless praise of history leaves on the mind hardly
any impression of Antoninus Pius : it is only from the
private memoranda of his nephew that we learn what
a disciplined, hard-working, gentle, wise, virtuous man he
was ; a man who, perhaps, interests mankind less than
his immortal nephew only because he has left in writing
no record of his inner life, — caret quia vate sacro.
Of the outward life and circumstances of Marcus Aurelius,
beyond these notices which he has himself supplied, there
are few of much interest and importance. There is the
fine anecdote of his speech when he heard of the assassina-
tion of the revolted Avidius Cassius, against whom he was
marching ; he was sorry, he said, to be deprived of the
pleasure of pardoning him. And there are one or two more
anecdotes of him which show the same spirit. But the
great record for the outward life of a man who has left
such a record of his lofty inward aspirations as that which
Marcus Aurelius has left, is the clear consenting voice of
all his contemporaries, — high and low, friend and enemy,
pagan and Christian, — in praise of his sincerity, justice,
and goodness. The world's charity does not err on the side
of excess, and here was a man occupying the most con-
spicuous station in the world, and professing the highest
possible standard of conduct ; — yet the world was obliged
to declare that he walked worthily of his profession. Long
after his death, his bust was to be seen in the houses of
private men through the wide Roman empire : it may be
the vufgar part of human nature which busies itself with
the semblance and doings of living sovereigns, it is its nobler
part which busies itself with those of the dead ; these busts
MARCUS AURELIUS 227
of Marcu3 Aurelius, in the homes of Gaul, Britain, and
Italy, bore witness, not to the inmates' frivolous curiosity
about princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory
of the passage of a great man upon the earth.
Two things, however, before one turns from the out-
ward to the inward life of Marcus Aurelius, force them-
selves upon one's notice, and demand a word of comment ;
he persecuted the Christians, and he had for his son
the vicious and brutal Commodus. The persecution at
5 Lyons, in which Attains and Pothinus suffered, the
persecution at Smyrna, in which Polycarp suffered, took
place in his reign. Of his humanity, of his tolerance, of
his horror of cruelty and violence, of his wish to refrain
from severe measures against the Christians, of his anxiety
to temper the severity of these measures when they
appeared to him indispensable, there is no doubt : but,
on the one hand, it is certain that the letter, attributed to
him, directing that no Christian should be punished for
being a Christian, is spurious ; it is almost certain that his
) alleged answer to the authorities of Lyons, in which he
directs that Christians persisting in their profession shall
be dealt with according to law, is genuine. Mr. Long
seems inclined to try and throw doubt over the persecution
at Lyons, by pointing out that the letter of the Lyons
Christians relating it, alleges it to have been attended by
miraculous and incredible incidents. ' A man,' he says,
' can only act consistently by accepting all this letter or
rejecting it all, and we cannot blame him for either.' But^
it is contrary to all experience to say that because a fact )
jis related with incorrect additions and embellishments, j
therefore it probably never happened at all ; or that it is /
not, in general, easy for an impartial mind to distinguish 7
between the fact and the embellishments. I cannot doubt
that the Lyons persecution took place, and that the punish-
ment of Christians for being Christians was sanctioned by
Marcus Aurelius. But then I must add that nine modern
readers out of ten, when they read this, will, I believe,
have a perfectly false notion of what the moral action of
Marcus Aurelius, in sanctioning that punishment, really
3 was. They imagine Trajan, or Antoninus Pius, or Marcus
Aurelius, fresh from the perusal of the Gospel, fully aware
Q2
228 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
of the spirit and holiness of the Christian saints, ordering
/their extermination because he loved darkness rather than
I light. Far from this, the Christianity which these emperors
I aimed at repressing was, in their conception of it, some-
thing philosophically contemptible, politically subversive,
and morally abominable. As men, they sincerely regarded
it much as well-conditioned people, with us, regard Mor-
monism ; as rulers, they regarded it much as Liberal states-
men, with us, regard the Jesuits. A kind of Mormonism,
constituted as a vast secret society, with obscure aims of ]
political and social subversion, was what Antoninus Pius and
Marcus Aurelius believed themselves to be repressing when
they punished Christians. The early Christian apologists
again and again declare to us under what odious imputations
the Christians lay, how general was the belief that these
imputations were well-grounded, how sincere was the horror
which the belief inspired. The multitude, convinced that
the Christians were atheists who ate human flesh and
thought incest no crime, displayed against them a fury
so passionate as to embarrass and alarm their rulers. The J
severe expressions of Tacitus, exitiabilis superstitio — odio
humani generis convicti, show how deeply the prejudices
of the multitude imbued the educated class also. One
asks oneself with astonishment how a doctrine so benign
as that of Christ can have incurred misrepresentation so
monstrous. The inner and moving cause of the misrepre-
sentation lay, no doubt, in this, — that Christianity was
a new spirit in the Roman world, destined to act in that
world as its dissolvent ; and it was inevitable that Chris-
tianity in the Roman world, like democracy in the modern 3
world, like every new spirit with a similar mission assigned
to it, should at its first appearance occasion an instinctive
shrinking and repugnance in the world which it was to
dissolve. The outer and palpable causes of the mis-
representation were, for the Roman public at large, the
confounding of the Christians with the Jews, that isolated,
fierce, and stubborn race, whose stubbornness, fierce-
ness, and isolation, real as they were, the fancy of a
civilised Roman yet further exaggerated ; the atmosphere
of mystery and novelty which surrounded the Christian 4
rites ; the very simplicity of Christian theism ; — ^for the
MARCUS AURELIUS 229
Roman statesman, the character of secret assemblages
which the meetings of the Christian community wore,
under a State-system as jealous of unauthorised associa-
tions as the State-system of modern France.
A Roman of Marcus Aurelius's time and position could
not well see the Christians except through the mist of
these prejudices. Seen through such a mist, the Christians
appeared with a thousand faults not their own : but it
has not been sufficiently remarked that faults, really their
0 own, many of them assuredly appeared with besides, faults
especially likely to strike such an observer as Marcus
Aurelius, and to confirm him in the prejudices of his race,
station, and rearing. We look back upon Christianity after
it has proved what a future it bore within it, and for us the
sole representatives of its early struggles are the pure and
devoted spirits through whom it proved this ; Marcus
Aurelius saw it with its future yet unshown, and with the
tares among its professed progeny not less conspicuous than
the wheat . Who can doubt that among the professing Chris-
0 tians of the second century, as among the professing Chris-
tians of the nineteenth, there was plenty of folly, plenty of
rabid nonsense, plenty of gross fanaticism ? who will even
venture to affirm that, separated in great measure from the
intellect and civilisation of the world for one or two
centuries, Christianity, wonderful as have been its fruits,
had the development perfectly worthy of its inestimable
germ ? Who will venture to affirm that, by the alliance
of Christianity with the virtue and intelligence of men
like the Antonines, — of the best product of Greek and
0 Roman civilisation, while Greek and Roman civilisation
had yet life and power, — Christianity and the world, as
well as the Antonines themselves, would not have been
gainers ? That alliance was not to be ; — the Antonines
lived and died with an utter misconception of Christianity ;
Christianity grew up in the Catacombs, not on the Palatine.
Marcus Aurelius incurs no moral reproach by having
authorised the punishment of the Christians ; he does
not thereby become in the least what we mean by a
persecutor. One may concede that it was impossible for-
10 him to see Christianity as it really was ; — as impossible
as for even the moderate and sensible Fleury to see the
230 ESSAYS IN OTIITICISM
Antonines as they really were ; — one may concede that
the point of view from which Christianity appeared some-
thing anti-civil and anti-social, which the State had the
faculty to judge and the duty to suppress, was inevitably
his. Still, however, it remains true, that this sage, who
made perfection his aim and reason his law, did Christianity
an immense injustice, and rested in an idea of State-
attributes which was illusive. And this is, in truth,
characteristic of Marcus Aurelius, that he is blameless,
yet, in a certain sense, unfortunate ; in his character, i
beautiful as it is, there is something melancholy, circum-
scribed, and ineffectual.
For of his having such a son as Commodus, too, one
must say that he is not to be blamed on that account,
but that he is unfortunate. Disposition and temperament
are inexplicable things ; there are natures on which the
best education and example are thrown away ; excellent
fathers may have, without any fault of theirs, incurably
vicious sons. It is to be remembered, also, that Commodus
Avas left, at the perilous age of nineteen, master of the world ; 2
while his father, at that age, was but beginning a twenty
years' apprenticeship to wisdom, labour, and self-command,
under the sheltering teachership of his uncle Antoninus.
Commodus was a prince apt to be led by favourites ; and
if the story is true which says that he left, aU through his
reign, the Christians untroubled, and ascribes this lenity
to the influence of his mistress Marcia, it shows that he
could be led to good as well as to evil ; — for such a nature
to be left at a critical age with absolute power, and wholly
without good counsel and direction, was the more fatal. 31
Still one cannot help wishing that the example of Marcus
Aurelius could have availed more with his own only son ;
one cannot but think that with such virtue as his there
should go, too, the ardour which removes mountains,
and that the ardour which removes mountains might have
even won Commodus : the word ineffectual again rises
to one's mind ; Marcus Aurelius saved his own soul by
his righteousness, and he could do no more. Happy
they, who can do this ! but still happier, who can do more !
\ Yet, when one passes from his outward to his inward 4C
life, when one turns over the pages of his Meditations, —
MARCUS AURELIUS 281
entries jotted down from day to day, amid the business
of the city or the fatigues of the camp, for his own guidance
and support, meant for no eye but his own, without the
slightest attempt at style, with no care, even, for correct
writing, not to be surpassed for naturalness and sincerity, —
all disposition to carp and cavil dies away, and one is
overpowered by the charm of a character of such purity,
delicacy, and virtue. He fails neither in small things
nor in great ; he keeps watch over himself both that the
I great springs of action may be right in him, and that the
minute details of action may be right also. How admirable
in a hard-tasked ruler, and a ruler, too, with a passion for
thinking and reading, is such a memorandum as the
following : —
' Not frequently nor without necessity to say to any
one, or to write in a letter, that I have no leisure ; nor
continually to excuse the neglect of duties required by
our relation to those with whom we live, by alleging
urgent occupation.'
) And, when that ruler is a Roman emperor, what an
' idea ' is this to be written down and meditated by him : —
' The idea of a polity in which there is the same law
for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights
and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly
government which respects most of all the freedom of the
governed.'
And, for all men who * drive at practice,' what practical
rules may not one accumulate out of these Meditations : —
' The greatest part of what we say or do being unneces-
0 sar}^ if a man takes this away, he will have more leisure
and less uneasiness. Accordingly, on every occasion a man
should ask himself : "Is this one of the unnecessary
things ? " Now a man should take away not only unneces-
sary acts, but also unnecessary thoughts, for thus super-
fluous acts will not follow after.'
And again : —
* We ought to check in the series of our thoughts every-
thing that is without a purpose and useless, but most of
all the over-curious feeling and the malignant ; and a man
10 should use himself to think of those things only about which
if one should suddenly ask, " What hast thou now in thy
23^ ESSAYS IN ORITICISM
thoughts ? " with perfect openness thou mightest im-
mediately answer, " This or That ; " so that from thy words
it should be plain that everything in thee is simple and
benevolent, and such as befits a social animal, and one that
cares not for thoughts about sensual enjoyments, or any
rivalry or envy and suspicion, or anything else for which
thou wouldst blush if thou shouldst say thou hadst it in
\^thy mind.'
So, with a stringent practicalness worthy of Franklin,
he discourses on his favourite text. Let nothing he done]
without a purpose. But it is when he enters the region
^,,_ where Franklin cannot follow him, when he utters his
'^ thoughts on the ground-motives of human action, that
he is most interesting ; — that he becomes the unique, the
\^ incomparable Marcus Aurelius. C^hristianity uses language
very liable to be misunderstood when it seems to tell men
to do good, not, certainly, from the vulgar motives of
worldly interest, or vanity, or love of human praise, but
that ' their Father which seeth in secret may reward them
openly.' The motives of reward and punishment have i
come, from the misconception of language of this kind,
to be strangely overpressed by many Christian moralists,
to the deterioration and disfigurement of Christianity.
Marcus Aurelius says, truly and nobly : —
I * One man, when he has done a service to another, is
/ ready to set it down to his account as a favour conferred.
/ Another is not ready to do this, but still in his own mind
} he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he knows what he
has done. A third in a manner does not even know what
he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, s
and seeks for nothing more after it has once produced its
proper fruit. As a horse when he has run, a dog when he
has caught the game, a bee when it has made its honey,
so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out
for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act,
as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season.
Must a man, then, be one of these, who in a manner acts
thus without observing it ? Yes.'
And again : —
* What more dost thou want when thou hast done a man 4
a service ? Art thou not content that thou hast done
MARCUS AURELIUS 233
something conformable to thy nature, and dost thou seek
to be paid for it, just as if the eye demanded a recompense
for seeing y or the feet for walking ? *
Christianity, in order to match morahty of this strain,
has to correct its apparent offers of external reward, and
to say : The kingdom of God is within you. ^
I have said that it is by its accent of emotion that the )
morality of Marcus Aurelius acquires a special character,
and reminds one of Christian morality. The sentences of-^
10 Seneca are stimulating to the intellect ; the sentences ^
of Eprctetus~are fortifying to the character ; the sentences j
of Marcus Aurehus find their way to the sOul. T have /
said that religious emotion has the power to light up^
Ttrorality : the emotion of Marcus Aurelius does not quite^
Iiglit~iTp his morality, but it suffuses it ; it has not power^
*tn— melt the clouds of effort and austerity quite away,
T)ut it shines through them and glorifies them ; it is a spirit,^
liot so much of gladness and elation, as of gentleness and
sweetness ; a delicate and tender sentiment, which is less
20 than joy and more than resignation. He says that in his
yOrrbh-he-fearned from Maximus, one of his teachers, ' cheer ^
fulness in all circumstances as well as in illness ;. and a just
admixture in the moral character of sweetness and dignity : '
and it is this very admixture of sweetness with his dignity
which makes him so beautiful a moralist. It enables him
to carry even into his observation of nature a delicate
penetration, a sympathetic tenderness, worthy of Words-
worth ; the spirit of such a remark as the following has
hardly a parallel, so far as my knowledge goes, in the whole
M) range of Greek and Roman literature : —
' Figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open ; and in the ^
ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to
rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit. And J
the ears of corn bending down, and the lion's eyebrows,^
and the foam which flows from the mouth of wild boars,
and many other things, — though they are far from being
beautiful, in a certain sense, — still, because they come
in the course of nature, have a beauty in them, and they
please the mind ; so that if a man should have a feeling
40 and a deeper insight with respect to the things which are
produced in the universe, there is hardly anything which
234 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
comee in the course of nature which will not seem to him to
be in a manner disposed so as to give pleasure.'
But it is when his strain passes to directly moral subjects
that his delicacy and sweetness lend to it the greatest charm.
Let those who can feel the beauty of spiritual refinement
read this, the reflection of an emperor who prized mental
superiority highly : —
' Thou sayest, " Men cannot admire the sharpness of
thy wits." Be it so ; but there are many other things of
which thou canst not say, " I am not formed for them by ]
nature." Show those qualities, then, which are altogether
in thy power, — sincerity, gravity, endurance of labour,
aversion to pleasure, contentment with thy portion and
with few things, benevolence, frankness, no love of super-
fluity, freedom from trifling, magnanimity. Dost thou
not see how many qualities thou art at once able to exhibit,
as to which there is no excuse of natural incapacity and
unfitness, and yet thou still remainest voluntarily below
the mark ? Or art thou compelled, through being defectively
furnished by nature, to murmur, and to be mean, and to 2
flatter, and to find fault with thy poor body, and to try
to please men, and to make great display, and to be so
restless in thy mind ? No, indeed ; but thou mightest have
been delivered from these things long ago. Only, if in
truth thou canst be charged with being rather slow and dull
of comprehension, thou must exert thyself about this also,
not neglecting nor yet taking pleasure in thy dulness.'
The same sweetness enables him to fix his mind, when
he sees the isolation and moral death caused by sin, not
on the cheerless thought of the misery of this condition, a
but on the inspiriting thought that man is blest with the
power to escape from it : —
' Suppose that thou hast detached thyself from the
natural unity, — for thou wast made by nature a part, but
now thou hast cut thyself off, — yet here is this beautiful
provision, that it is in thy power again to unite thyself.
God has allowed this to no other part, — after it has been
separated and cut asunder, to come together again. But
consider the goodness with which he has privileged man ;
for he has put it in his power, when he has been separated, 4
to return and to be united and to resume his place.*
MARCUS AURELIUS 235
It enables him to control even the passion for retreat
and sohtude, so strong in a soul like his, to which the
■world could offer no abiding city : —
' Men seek retreat for themselves, houses in the country,
sea-shores, and mountains ; and thou, too, art wont to
desire such things very much. But this is altogether
a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power
whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For
nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from
» trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly
when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into
them he is immediately in perfect tranquillity. Constantly,
then, give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself ; and
let thy principles be brief and fundamental, which, as soon
as thou shalt recur to them, will be sufficient to cleanse
the soul completely, and to send thee back free from all
discontent with the things to which thou returnest.'
Against this feeling of discontent and weariness, so
natural to the great for whom there seems nothing left
> to desire or to strive after, but so enfeebling to them, so
deteriorating, Marcus Aurelius never ceased to struggle.
With resolute thankfulness he kept in remembrance the
blessings of his lot ; the true blessings of it, not the false : —
' I have to thank Heaven that I was subjected to a ruler
and a father (Antoninus Pius) who was able to take away
all pride from me, and to bring me to the knowledge that
it is possible for a man to live in a palace without either
guards, or embroidered dresses, or any show of this kind ;
but that it is in such a man's power to bring himself very
I near to the fashion of a private person, without being for
this reason either meaner in thought or more remiss in
action with respect to the things which must be done for
public interest. ... I have to be thankful that my children
have not been stupid nor deformed in body ; that I did
not make more proficiency in rhetoric, poetry, and the other
studies, by which I should perhaps have been completely
engrossed, if I had seen that I was making great progress
in them ; . . . that I knew Apollonius, Rusticus, Maximus ;
. . . that I received clear and frequent impressions about
) living according to nature, and what kind of a life that
is, so that, so far as depended on Heaven, and its gifts,
236 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
help, and inspiration, nothing hindered me from forthwith
living according to nature, though I still fall short of
it through my own fault, and through not observing the
admonitions of Heaven, and, I may almost say, its direct
instructions ; that my body has held out so long in such
a kind of life as mine ; that though it was my mother's
lot to die young, she spent the last years of her life with
me ; that whenever I wished to help any man in his need,
I was never told that I had not the means of doing it ;
that, when I had an inclination to philosophy, I did noti
fall into the hands of a sophist.'
* And, as he dwelt with gratitude on these helps and
blessings vouchsafed to him, his mind (so, at least, it
seems to me) would sometimes revert with awe to the
perils and temptations of the lonely height where he
stood, to the lives of Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian,
in their hideous blackness and ruin ; and then he wrote
down for himself- such a warning entry as this, significant
and terrible in its abruptness : —
* A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn 2
character, bestial, childish, animal, stupid, counterfeit,
scurrilous, fraudulent, tyrannical ! '
Or this :—
' About what am I now emplojdng my soul ? On every
occasion I must ask myself this question, and ^enquire.
What have I now in this part of me which they call the
ruling principle, and whose soul have I now ? — that of
a child, or of a young man, or of a weak woman, or of
a tyrant, or of one of the lower animals in the service of
man, or of a wild beast ? ' 31
The character he wished to attain he knew well, and
beautifully he has marked it, and marked, too, his. sense
of shortcoming : —
' When thou hast assumed these names, — good, modest,
true, rational, equal-minded, magnanimous, — take care
that thou dost not change these names ; and, if thou
shouldst lose them, quickly return to them. If thou
maintainest thyself in possession of these names without
desiring that others should call thee by them, thou wilt
be another being, and wilt enter on another life. For to 41
continue to be such as thou hast hitherto been, and to bo
MARCUS AURELTUS 237
torn in pieces and detiled in such a life, is the character
of a very stupid man, and one overfond of liis life, and
like those half-devoured fighters with wild beasts, who
though covered with wounds and gore still entreat to be kept
to the following day, though they will be exposed in the same
state to the same claws and bites. Therefore fix thyself in the
possession of these few names : and if thou art able to abide
in them, abide as if thou wast removed to the Happy Islands.'
For all his sweetness and serenity, however, man's
10 point of life ' between two infinities ' (of that expression
Marcus Aurelius is the real owner) was to him anything
but a Happy Island, and the performances on it he saw
through no veils of illusion. Nothing is in general more
gloomy and monotonous than declamations on the hoUow-
ness and transitoriness of human life and grandeur : but
here, too, the great charm of Marcus Aurelius, his emotion,
comes in to relieve the monotony and to break through
the gloom ; and even on this eternally used topic he is
imaginative, fresh, and striking : —
0 ' Consider, for example, the times of Vespasian. Thou
wilt see all these things, people marrying, bringing up
children, sick, dying, warring, feasting, trafficking, cultivat-
ing the ground, flattering, obstinately arrogant, suspecting,
plotting, wishing for somebody to die, grumbling about the
present, loving, heaping up treasure, desiring to be consuls
or kings. Well then, that life of these people no longer
exists at all. Again, go to the times of Trajan. All is again
the same. Their life too is gone. But chiefly thou shouldst
think of those whom thou hast thyself known distracting
0 themselves about idle things, neglecting to do what was in
accordance with their proper constitution, and to hold
firmly to this and to be content with it.'
Again : —
' The things which are much valued in life are empty,
and rotten, and trifling ; ait& people are like little dogs
biting one another, and little children quarrelling, cr3dng,
and then straightway laughing. But fidelity, and modesty,
and justice, and truth, are fled
Up to Olympus from the wide-spread earth.
0 What then is there which still detains thee here ? *
238 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
And once more : —
' Look down from above on the countless herds of
men, and their countless solemnities, and the infinitely
varied voyagings in storms and calms, and the differences
among those who are born, who live together, and die.
And consider too the life lived by others in olden time,
and the life now lived among barbarous nations, and
how many know not even thy name, and how many will
soon forget it, and how they who perhaps now are praising
thee will very soon blame thee, and that neither a posthu- :
mous name is of any value, nor reputation, nor anything
else.*
He recognised, indeed, that (to use his own words)
* the prime principle in man's constitution is the social ; *
and he laboured sincerely to make not only his acts towards
his fellow-men, but his thoughts also, suitable to this
conviction : —
' When thou wishest to delight thyself, think of the
virtues of those who live with thee ; for instance, the
activity of one, and the modesty of another, and the s
liberality of a third, and some other good quality of a
fourth.'
Still, it is hard for a pure and thoughtful man to Hve
in a state of rapture at the spectacle afforded to him by
his fellow-creatures ; above all it is hard, when such a man
is placed as Marcus Aurelius was placed, and has had the
meanness and perversity of his fellow- creatures thrust,
in no common measure, upon his notice, — has had, time
after time, to experience how ' within ten days thou wilt
seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an 3
ape.' His true strain of thought as to his relations with
his fellow-men is rather the following. He has been enume-
rating the higher consolations which may support a man
at the approach of death, and he goes on : —
' But if thou requirest also a vulgar kind of comfort
which shall reach thy heart, thou wilt be made best
reconciled to death by observing the objects from which
thou art going to be removed, and the morals of those
with whom thy soul will no longer be mingled. For it is
no way right to be offended with men, but it is thy duty k
to care for them and to bear with them gently ; and yet
MARCUS AURELTUS 239
to remember that thy departure will not be from men
who have the same principles as thyself. For this is
the only thing, if there be any, which could draw us the
contrary way and attach us to life, to be permitted to live
with those who have the same principles as ourselves.
But now thou seest how great is the distress caused by
the difference of those who live together, so that thou
mayest say : " Come quick, 0 death, lest perchance I too
should forget myself." '
0 0 faithless and perverse generation ! how long shall I
he with you ? how long shall I suffer you ? Sometimes
this strain rises even to passion : —
* Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live
as on a mountain. Let men see, let them know, a real
man, who lives as he was meant to live. If they cannot
endure him, let them kill him. For that is better than to
live as men do.'
It is remarkable how little of a merely local and tem-
porary character, how little of those scoriae which a reader
0 has to clear away before he gets to the precious ore, how
little that even admits of doubt or question, the morality
of Marcus Aurelius exhibits. Perhaps as to one point we "
must make an exception. Marcus Aurelius is fond of urging
as a motive for man's cheerful acquiescence in whatever
befalls him, that ' whatever happens to every man is for
the interest of the universal ; ' that the whole contains
nothing which is not for its advantage ; that everything
which happens to a man is to be accepted, ' even if it seems
disagreeable, because it leads to the health of the universe'
0 And the whole course of the universe, he adds, has a provi-
dential reference to man's welfare : ' all other things have_
been made for the sake of rational beings.' Religion has in A
all ages freely used this language, and it is not religion which -^
will object to Marcus Aurelius's use of it ; but science can |
hardly accept as severely accurate this employment of I
the terms interest and advantage. Even to a sound nature j
and a clear reason the proposition that things happen ' for J
the interest of the universal,' as men conceive of interest,^*
may seem to have no meaning at all, and the proposition
,0 that * all things have been made for the sake of rational
beings ' may seem to be false. Yet even to this language,
240 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
not irresistibly cogent when it is thus absolutely used,
Marcus Aurelius gives a turn which makes it true and
useful, when he says : ' The ruling part of man can
make a material for itself out of that which opposes it,
as fire lays hold of what falls into it, and rises higher by
means of this very material ; ' — when he says : ' What
else are all things except exercises for the reason ? Per-
I severe then until thou shalt have made all things thme
) own, as the stomach which is strengthened makes all
j things its own, as the blazing fire makes flame and bright- 1
'■ ness out of everything that is thrown into it ; ' — when he
says : ' Thou wilt not cease to be miserable till thy mind
is in such a condition, that, what luxury is to those who
enjoy pleasure, such shall be to thee, in every matter
which presents itself, the doing of the things which are
conformable to man's constitution ; for a man ought to
consider as an enjoyment everything which it is in his
power to do according to his own nature, — and it is in
his power everywhere.' In this sense it is, indeed, most
true that ' all things have been made for the sake of 2
rational beings ; ' that ' all things work together for
good.'
— In general, however, the action Marcus Aurelius pre-
scribes is action which every sound nature must recognise
as right, and the motives he assigns are motives which
N every clear reason must recognise as valid. And so he
remains the especial friend and comforter of all clear-headed
and scrupulous, yet pure-hearted and upward-striving
men, in those ages most especially that walk by sight, not
by faith, and yet have no open vision : he cannot give 3
such souls, perhaps, all they yearn for, but he gives them
niuch ; and what he gives them, they can receive.
\^ Yet no, it is not for what he thus gives them that such
j souls love him most ! it is rather because of the emotion
/ which lends to his voice so touching an accent, it is because
^^___Jie too yearns as they do for something unattained by him.
What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor of
the Christians ! the effusion of Christianity, its relieving
tears, its happy self-sacrifice, were the very element, one
feels, for which his soul longed : they were near him, they 4i
brushed him; iie'Touched them, he passed them by. One
MARCUS AURELIUS 241
feels, too, that the Marcus Aurelius one reads must still
have remained, even had Christianity been fully known
to him, in a great measure himself ; he would have been
no Justin : but how would Christianity have affected him ?
in what measure would it have changed him ? Granted
that he might have found, like the Alogi in ancient and
modern times, in the most beautiful of the Gospels, the
Gospel which has leavened Christendom most powerfully,
the Gospel of St. John, too much Greek metaphysics, too
.0 much gnosis ; granted that this Gospel might have looked
too Uke what he knew already to be a total surprise to him :
what, then, would he have said to the Sermon on the Mount,
to the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew ? what would
have become of his notions of the exitiabilis superstitio,
of the ' obstinacy of the Christians ' ? Vain question !
yet the greatest charm of Marcus Aurelius is that he makes
us ask it. We see him wise, just, self -governed, tender,
thankful, blameTess f^yet, with all this, agitated, stretching
out liis arms for something beyond, — tendentemque manna
'^ ripae ultulorlsamore.
ON TRANSLATING HOMER
THREE LECTURES GIVEN AT OXFORD, 1861
R i
Nunquamne leponam V
It has more than once been suggested to me that I should
translate Homer. That is a task for which I have neither
the time nor the courage ; but the suggestion led me to
regard yet more closely a poet whom I had already long
studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer were
seldom out of my hands. The study of classical literature
is probably on the decline ; but, whatever may be the fate
of this study in general, it is certain that as instruction
spreads and the number of readers increases, attention will
be more and more^^irected to the poetry of Homer, not
indeed as part of a classical course, but as the most im-
portant poetical monument existing. Even within the last
ten years two fresh translations of the Iliad have appeared
in England : one by a man of great ability and genuine
learning. Professor Newman ; the other by Mr. Wright, the
conscientious and painstaking translator of Dante. It may
safely be asserted that neither of these works will take rank
as the standard translation of Homer ; that the task of
rendering him will still be attempted by other translators.
It may perhaps be possible to render to these some service,
to save them some loss of labour, by pointing out rocks on
which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on
which a translator of Homer should fix his attention.
It is disputed, what aim a translator should propose to
himself in dealing with his original. Even this preliminary
is not yet settled. On one side it is said, that the transla-
tion ought to be such ' that the reader should, if possible,
forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the
illusion that he is reading an original work ; something
original,' (if the translation be in English), ' from an English
hand.' The real original is in this case, it is said, ' taken
as a basis on which, to rear a poem that shall affect our
countrymen as the original may be conceived to have
affected its natural hearers/ On the otherhand, Mr. Newman.
246 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
who states the foregoing doctrine only to condemn it, de-
clares that he ' aims at precisely the opposite : to retain
every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with
the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be ; ' so
that it may ' never be forgotten that he is imitating, and
imitating in a different material.' The translator's ' first
duty,' says Mr. Newman, ' is a historical one ; to hQ faithful*
, Probably both sides would agree that the translator's ' first
duty is to be faithful ; ' but the question at issue between
them is, in what faithfulness consists.
My one object is to give practical advice to a translator ;
and I shall not the least concern myself with theories of
translation as such. But I advise the translator not to try
' to rear on the basis of the Iliad, a poem that shall affect
our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have
affected its natural hearers ; ' and for this simple reason,
that we cannot possibly tell how the Iliad ' affected its
natural hearers.' It is probably meant merely that he
should try to affect Englishmen powerfully, as Homer
affected Greeks powerfully; but this direction is not enough,
and can give no real guidance. For all great poete affect
their hearers powerfully,^but the effect of one poet is one
thing, that of another poet another thing : it is our
translator's business to reproduce the effect of Homer,
and the most powerful emotion of the unlearned English
reader can' never assure him whether he has reproduced
this, or whether he has produced something else. So, again,
he may follow Mr. Newman's directions, he may try to be
' faithful,' he may ' retain every peculiarity of his original ; '
but who is to assure him, who is to assure Mr. Newman
himself, that, when he has done this, he has done that for
which Mr. Newman enjoins this to be done, ' adhered
closely to Homer's manner and habit of thought ' ? Evi-
dently the translator needs some more practical directions
than these. No one can tell him how Homer affected the
Greeks ; but there are those who can tell him how Homer
affects them. These are scholars ; who possess, at the same
time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and
feeling. No translation will seem to them of much worth
compared with the original ; but they alone can say,
whether the translation produces more or less the same
LECTURE I 247
effect upon them as the original. They are the only
competent tribmial in this matter : the Greeks are dead ; q
the unlearned 'Englishman has not the data for judging ; /"^
and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment '^
of his own work. Let not the translator, then, trust to his C5
notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of n^
him ; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trusty
to what the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he^''
will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust
10 to his own judgment of his own work ; he may be misled ^'^^/<.
by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects
those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry ;
whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor
Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowetthere in Oxford,
at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them,
I consider that when Bentley said of Pope's translation,
' it was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer,' the
work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged .
'ih av 6 (f>p6vLixo^ opLcreuv — ' as the judicious would deter -
w mine ' — that is a test to which every one professes himself
willing to submit his works. Unhappily, in most cases, no
two persons agree as to who ' the judicious ' are. In the
present case, the ambiguity is removed : I suppose the
translator at one with me as to the tribunal to which alone
he should look for judgment; and he has thus obtained
a practical test by which to estimate the real success of hiy
work. How is he to proceed, in order that his work, tried
by this test, may be found most successful ? ^ .
First of all, there are certain negative counsels which I ^^l^
so will give him. Homer has occupied men's minds so much, ^
such a literature has arisen about him, that every one who Z)^
approaches him should resolve strictly to limit himself to
that which may directly serve the object for which he
approaches him. I advise the translator to have nothing
to do with the questions, whether Homer ever existed ;
whether the poet of the Iliad be one or many ; whether the
Iliad be one poem or an Achilleis and an Iliad stuck
together ; whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement
is shadowed forth in the Homeric mythology ; whether the
40 Goddess Latona in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary, and
so on. These are questions which have been discussed
248 ON TBANSLATING HOMER
with learning, with ingenuity, nay, with genius ; but they
have two inconveniences ; one general for all who approach
them, one particular for the translator. The general
inconvenience is, that there really exist no data for deter-
mining them. The particular inconvenience is, that their
solution by the translator, even were it possible, could bo
of no benefit to his translation.
I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with construct-
ing a special vocabulary for his use in translation ; with
excluding a certain class of English words, and with ii
confining himself to another class, in obedience to any
theory about the peculiar qualities of Homer's style.
Mr. Newman says that ' the entire dialect of Homer being
essentially archaic, that of a translator ought to be as much
Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to
the elements thrown into our language by classical learning.'
Mr. Newman is unfortunate in the observance of his own
theory ; for I continually find in his translation words of
Latin origin, which seem to me quite alien to the simplicity
of Honier : ' responsive,' for instance, which is a favourite 2(
word of Mr. Newman, to represent the Homeric dyu-ci^o/Aei/os :
Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her responsive.
But thus responsively to him spake god-like Alexander.
And the word ' celestial,' again, in the grand address of
Zeus to the horses of Achilles,
You, who are born celestial, from Eld and Death exempted !
seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feeling as
too bookish. But, apart from the question of Mr. Newman's
fidelity to his own theory, such a theory seems to me both
dangerous for a translator and false in itself. Dangerous 3C
for a translator ; because, wherever one finds such a theory
announced, (and one finds it pretty often,) it is generally
'followed by an explosion of pedantry ; and pedantry is of
all things in the world the most un-Homeric. False in
itself ; because, in fact, we owe to the Latin element in our
language most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness
by which it is contradistinguished from the German, and in
fij^mpathy with the languages of Greece and Rome : so that
to limit an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon
LECTURE I 219
origin is to deprive him of one of his special advantages for
translating Homer. In Voss's well-known translation of
Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his German language
itself, something heavy and trailing both in the structure of
its sentences and in the words of which it is composed,
which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters,
in spite of the fidelity, from creating in us the impression
created by the Greek. Mr. Newman's prescription, if
followed, would just strip the English translator of the
0 advantage which he has over Voss.
The ^r^irip nf mind in which we approach an author
influences our correctness of appreciation of him ; and
Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest
frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment tries to make
the ancient not less than the modern world its own ; but
against modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the
translator, if he would feel Homer truly — and unless he
feels him truly, how can he render him truly ? — cannot be
too much on his guard. For example : the writer of an
D interesting article on English translations of Homer, in the
last number of the National Review^ quotes, I see, with
admiration, a criticism of Mr. Ruskin on the use of the
epithet c^ro-i^oo?, ' life-giving,' in that beautiful passage,
in the third book of the Iliad, which follows Helen's
mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux as aUve, though
thej^ were in truth dead :
u)9 <paTo' Tovs 5* i]Sr] Kdrexfv tpvoi^oos aia
(V AaKedai/jiovi avdi, (piXri ev irarpiti '^ai-g}
' The poet,' says Mr. Ruskin, ' has to speak of the earth
0 in sadness ; but he will not let that sadness affect or change
his thought of it. No ; though Castor and Pollux be deadj
yet the earth is our mother still, — fruitful, life-giving.' This
is just a specimen of that sort of application of moderi '
sentiment to the ancients, against which a student, wh(
wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot too resolutel;
defend himself. It reminds one, as, alas ! so much oi
Mr. Ruskin's writing reminds one, of those words of the mosf^
delicate of living critics : ' Comme tout genre de composi-
tion a son ecueil particulier, celui du genre romanesque,
» Iliad, iii. 243.
250 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
c'est le faux,"* The reader may feel moved as he reads it ;
but it is not the less an example of ' le faux ' in criticism ;
it is false. It is not true, as to that particular passage, that
Homer called the earth (fiva-iCoos because, ' though he had
to speak of the earth in sadness, he would not let that sadness
change or affect his thought of it,' but consoled himself by
considering that ' the earth is our mother still, — fruitful,
life-giving.' It is not true, as a matter of general criticism,
that this kind of sentimentality, eminently modern, inspires
']- Homer at all. ' From Homer and Polygnotus I every day
< learn more clearly,' says Goethe, ' that in our life here
( above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell ^ : '
— if the student must absolutely have a key-note to the
Q Iliad, let him take this of Goethe, and see what he can do
with it ; it will not, at any rate, like the tender pantheism
of Mr. Ruskin, falsify for him the whole strain of
Homer.
. — These are negative counsels ; I come to the positive.
I When I say, the translator of Homer should above all be
penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author : — that
\'^he is eminently rapid ;J-^that he is eminently plain and
direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the
expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words ;
^that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of
his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas ; and, finally
vV that he is eminently noble ; — I probably seem to be saying
what is too general to be of much service to anybody.
Yet it is strictly true that, for want of duly penetrating
themselves with the first-named quality of Homer, his
rapidity, Cowper and Mr. Wright have failed in rendering
him ; that, for want of duly appreciating the second-named
quality, his plainness and directness of style and diction,
Pope and Mr. Sotheby have failed in rendering him ; that
for want of appreciating the third, his plainness and
directness of ideas. Chapman has failed in rendering him ;
while for want of appreciating the fourth, his nobleness,
Mr. Newman, who has clearly seen some of the faults of
his predecessors, has yet failed more conspicuously than
any of them.
Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the
* Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, vi, 230.
LECTURE I 251
union of the human soul with the divine essence, that this
takes place,
Whene'er the mist, which stands 'twixt God and thee,
Def aecates to a pure transparency ;
and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator
with his original, which alone can produce a good transla-
tion, that it takes place when the mist which stands betweeiiJ
them — the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, ancf
feeling on the translator's part — ' defaecates to a pur*
10 transparency,' and disappears. But between Cowper and
Homer — (Mr. Wright repeats in the main Cowper's manner,
as Mr. Sotheby repeats Pope's manner, and neither Mr.
Wright's translation nor Mr. Sotheby's has, I must be for-
given for saying, any proper reason for existing) — between
Cowper and Homer there is interposed the mist of Cowper's
elaborate Miltonic manner, entirely alien to the flowing
rapidity of Homer ; between Pope and Homer there is inter-
posed the mist of Pqpels-iitfirary artificial manner, entirely
alien to the plain naturalness of Homer's manner^ between
20 Chapman and^onTeTTEefe^is" Interposed the mist of the
fancifulness of the EHzabethan age, entirely aUen to the
plain" (iirectness of Homer's thought and feeling ; while
between Mr. Newman and Homer is interposed a cloud
of more than ^Egyptian thickness — namelj^, a manner, in
Mr. Newman's version, eminently ignoble, while Homer's
manner is eminently noble.
I do not despair of making all these propositions clear to
a student who approaches Homer with a free mind. First,
Homer is eminentlj^ rapid, and to this rapidity the elaborate
30 movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien. The reputation
of Cowper, that most interesting man and excellent poet,
does not depend on his translation of Homer ; and in his
preface to the second edition, he himself tells us that he
felt — he had too much poetical taste not to feel — on
returning to his own version after six or seven years,
' more dissatisfied with it himself than the most difficult to
be pleased of all his judges.' And he was dissatisfied with
it for the right reason — that ' it seemed to him deficient in
the grace of ease.' Yet he seqms to have originally miscon-
40 ceived the manner of Homer so much, that it is no wonder
252 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
he rendered him amiss. * The simiUtude of Milton's manner
to that of Homer is such,' he says, ' that no person famiUar
with both can read either without being reminded of
the other ; and it is in those breaks and pauses to which
the numbers of the EngHsh poet are so much indebted
both for their dignity and variety, that he chiefly copies the
Grecian.' It would be more true to say : ' The unlikeness
of Milton's manner to that of Homer is such, that no person
familiar with both can read either without being struck with
his difference from the other ; and it is in his breaks and lo
pauses that the English poet is most unlike the Grecian.'
The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or
Dante are, doubtless, most impressive qualities of style ;
but they are the very opposites of the directness and flow-
ingness of Homer, which he keeps alike in passages of the
simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest emotion.
Not only, for example, are these lines of Cowper un-
Homeric :
So numerous seem'd those fires the banks between
Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece 22
In prospect all of Troy ;
where the positi6n of the word ' blazing ' gives an entirely
un-Homeric movement to this simple passage, describing
the fires of the Trojan camp outside of Troy ; but the
following lines, in that very highly -wrought passage where
the horse of Achilles answers his master's reproaches for
having left Patroclus on the field of battle, are equally
un-Homeric :
For not through sloth or tardiness on us
Aught chargeable, have Ilium's sons thine arms 80
fStript from Patroclus' shoulders ; but a God
Matchless in battle, offspring of bright-hair'd
Latona, him contending in the van
Slew, for the glory of the chief of Troy.
Here even the first inversion, * have Ilium's sons thine
arms Stript from Patroclus' shoulders,' gives the reader
a sense of a movement not Homeric ; and the second
inversion, ' a God him contending in the van Slew,' gives
this sense ten times stronger. Instead of moving on without
check, as in reading the original, the reader twice finds 40
himself, in reading the translation, brought up and checked.
LECTURE I 253
Homer moves with the same simplicity and rapidity in tha ^^
highly-wrought as in the simple passage.
It is in vain that Cowper insists on his fideUty : ' my
chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original : ' —
' the matter found in me, whether the reader like it or not,
is fomid also in Homer ; and the matter not foimd in me,
how much soever the reader may admire it, is found onb
in Mr. Pope.' To suppose that it ia fidelity to an original to
give its matter, unless you at the same time give its manner ;
10 or, rather, to suppose that you can really give its matter at^
all, unless you can give its manner, is just the mistake
our pre-RaphaeUte school of painters, who do not under-
stand that the pecuHar effect of nature resides in the whole
and not in the parts. So the pecuhar effect of a poet
resides in his manner and movement, not in his words
taken separately. It is well known how conscientiously
literal is Cowper in his translation of Homer. It is well
known how extravagantly free is Pope :
So let it be !
20 Portents and prodigies are lost on me :
that is Pope's rendering of the words,
Boytfc, Tt /ioi Odvaroy fxavTevcat ; ovSe ri at XP^' ^
Xanthus, why prophesiest thou my death to me ? thou needest not at all :
yet, on the whole, Pope's translation of the Iliad is more
Homeric than Cowper's, for it is more rapid.
Pope's movement, however, though rapid, is not of the
same kind as Homer's ; and here I come to the real objec-
tion to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is commonly
said that rhyme is to be abandoned in a translation of
80 Homer, because ' the exigences of rhyme,' to quote Mr.
Newman, ' positively forbid faithfulness ; * because ' a just
translation of any ancient poet in rhyme,' to quote Cowper,
* is impossible.' This, however, is merely an accidental
objection to rhyme. If this were all, it might be supposed
that if rhymes were more abundant. Homer could be
adequately translated in rhyme. But this is not so ; there
is a deeper, a substantial objection to rhyme in a translation
of Homer. /It is, that rhyme inevitably tends to pair Hnes ^
' ' Iliad, xix, 420.
/
254 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
which in the original are independent, and thus the move-
ment of the poem is changed. In these Hnes of Chapman,
for instance, from Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus, in the
twelfth book of the Iliad :
0 friend, if keeping back
Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack
In this life's human sea at all, but that deferring now
We shunn'd death ever, — nor would I half this vain valour show.
Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance ;
But since we must go, though not here, and that besides the chance ic
Propos'd now, there are infinite fates, &c.
Here the necessity of making the line.
Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance ;
rhyme with the Une which follows it, entirely changes and
spoils the movement of the passage.
ovT€ Kiv avTos kvl vpojTOiai imxoifiTji'
ovT€ «€ ae <7TtAAoi/it naxijv « KvSidveipav^
Neither would I myself go forth to fight with the foremost,
Nor would I urge thee on to enter the glorious battle :
E^js Homer ; there he stops, and begins an opposed move- 2fl
ment :
vvu S' — efiiTT]S yap lajpts kcptaraaiv Bavaroio —
But — ^for a thousands fates of death stand close to us always — ■
this line, in which Homer wishes to go away with the most
marked rapidity from the line before, Chapman is forced,
by the necessity of rhyming, intimately to connect with the
line before.
But since we must go, though not here, and that besides the chance —
the moment the word chance strikes our ear, we are irre-
sistibly carried back to advance and to the whole previous 30
line, which, according to Homer's own feehng, we ought to
have left behind us entirely, and to be moving farther and
farther away from.
Rhyme certainly, by intensifying antithesis, can intensify
separation, and this is precisely what Pope does ; but this
balanced rhetorical antithesis, though very effective, is
^ lliadt xii, 321.
LECTURE I 265
entirely un-Homeric. Aiid this is what I mean by saying
that Pope fails to render Homer, because he does not
render his plainness and directness of style and diction.
Where Homer marks separation by moving away, Pope
marks it by antithesis. No passage could show this better
than the passage I have just quoted, on which I will pause
for a moment.
Robert Wood, wliose Essay on the Genius of Homer is
mentioned by Goethe as one of the books which fell into
0 his hands when his powers were first developing themselves,
and strongly interested him, relates of this passage a striking
story. He says that in 1762, at the end of the Seven
Years' War, being then Under-Secretary of State, he was
directed to wait upon the President of the Council, Lord
Granville, a few days before he died, with the preliminary
articles of the Treaty of Paris. ' I found him,' he con-
tinues, ' so languid, that I proposed postponing my business
for another time ; but he insisted that I should stay, saying,
it could not prolong his life to neglect his duty ; and
0 repeating the following passage out of Sarpedon's speech,
he dwelled with particular emphasis on the third line, which
recalled to his mind the distinguishing part he had taken
in public affairs :
S} neiTov, €1 fi€V yap TroXtfiov ntpl TouSe (pvyovre,
aifl 877 fxiWoifiev dyrjpoj t' iOavdroi re
eaaeaO', ovrt k€v avrbs kvl ir puTOici /xaxot/x^i',*
ovre K€ (J 6 (XTeXKoifxi ixdxqv Is Kvhidvupav
vvv 5* — efiirrfs yap Kijpes ((peardaiv Oavdroio
fivpiai, hs ovK (<jti <pvyeTv fiporhv ov5' vwaKv^ai —
0 lofifv. . . .
His Lordship repeated the last word several times with
a calm and determinate resignation ; and after a serious
pause of some minutes, he desired to hear the Treaty read,
to which he listened with great attention, and recovered
spirits enough to declare the approbation of a dying states-
man (I use his own words) ' on the most glorious war, and
most honourable peace, this nation ever saw." ' ^
I quote this story, first, because it is interesting as
^ These are the words on which Lord Granville ' dwelled with particular
emphasis '.
' Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Qenius and Writings 0/ Homer,
London, 1775 ; p. vii.
256 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
exhibiting the English aristocracy at its very height of
culture, lofty spirit, and greatness, towards the middle of
the last century. I quote it, secondly, because it seems to
me to illustrate Goethe's saying which I mentioned, that
our life, in Homer's view of it, represents a conflict and
a hell ; and it brings out, too, what there is tonic and
fortifying in this doctrine. I quote it, lastly, because it
shows that the passage is just one of those in translating
which Pope will be at his best, a passage of strong emotion
and oratorical movement, not of simple narrative or,
description.
Pope translates the passage thus :
Could all our care lelude the gloomy grave
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave.
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war :
But since, alas ! ignoble age must come.
Disease, and death's inexorable doom ;
The life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe. 1
Nothing could better exhibit Pope's prodigious talent ; and
nothing, too, could be better in its own way. But, as
Bentley said, ' You must not call it Homer.' One feels
that Homer's thought has passed through a Hterary and
^ rhetorical crucible, and come out highly intellectualised ;
come out in a form which strongly impresses us, indeed,
but which no longer impresses us in the same way as
when it was uttered by Homer. The antithesis of the last
two lines :
The life which others pay, let us bestow, c
And give to fame what we to nature owe :
is excellent, and is just suited to Pope's heroic couplet ; but
neither the antithesis itself, nor the couplet which conveys
it, is suited to the feeling or to the movement of the
Homeric to/xcv.
A Hterary and intellectuahsed language is, however, in its
own way well suited to grand matters ; and Pope, with
■/ a language of this kind and his own admirable talent,
comes off well enough as long as he has passion, or oratory,
^ or a great crisis, to deal with. Even here, as I have been i
pointing out, he does not render Homer ; but ho and his
LECTURE I 257
style are in themselves strong. It is when he comes to
level passages, passages of narrative or description, that
he and his style are sorely tried, and prove themselves
weak. A perfectly plain direct style can of course convey
the simplest matter as naturally as the grandest ; indeed, it s
must be harder for it, one would say, to convey a grand
matter worthily and nobly, than to convey a common
matter, as alone such a matter should be conveyed, plainly
and simply. But the style of Rasselas is incomparably
0 better fitted to describe a sage philosophising than a soldier
lighting his camp-fire. The style of Pope is not the style
of Rasselas ; but it is equally a hterary style, equally
unfitted to describe a simple matter with the plain natural-
ness of Homer.
Every one knows the passage at the end of the eighth
book of the Iliad, where the fires of the Trojan encamp-
ment are likened to the stars. It is very far from my wish
to hold Pope up to ridicule, so I shall not quote the com-
mencement of the passage, which in the original is of great
0 and celebrated beauty, and in translating which Pope has
been singularly and notoriously fortunate. But the latter
part of the passage, where Homer leaves the stars, and
comes to the Trojan fires, treats of the plainest, most
matter-of-fact subject possible, and deals with this, as
Homer always deals with every .subject, in the plainest ^
and most straightforward style . ^ "" So m'any' m number,
between the ships and the streams of Xanthus, shone forth
in front of Troy the fires kindled by the Trojans. There were
kindled a thousand fires in the plain ; and by each one
D there sat fifty men in the light of the blazing fire. And
the horses, munching white barley and rye, and standing
by the chariots, waited for the bright-throned Morning.' ^
In Pope's translation, this plain story becomes the
following :
So many flames before proud Hion blaze,
And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays :
The long reflections of the distant fires
Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires.
A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild,
) And shoot a shady lustre o'er the field.
* Iliad, viii, 560.
ARNOLD S
268 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend,
Whose umbered arms, by fits, thick flashes send ;
Loud neigh the coursers o'er their heaps of corn.
And ardent warriors wait the rising mom.
It IS for passages of this sort, which, after all, form the bulk
of a narrative poem, that Pope's style is so bad. In elevated
passages he is powerful, as Homer is powerful, though not
in the same way ; but in plain narrative, where Homer ia
stiU powerful and delightful, Pope, by the inherent fault of
his style, is ineffective and out of taste. Wordsworth says
somewhere, that wherever Virgil seems to have composed
Vv with his eye on the object,' Dry den fails to render him.
Homer invariably composes ' with his eye on the object,'
I — whether the object be a moral or a material one : Pope
composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates
I his object, whatever it is. That, therefore, which Homer
^conveys to us immediately, Pope conveys to us through
a medium. He aims at turning Homer's sentiments
pointedly and rhetorically ; at investing Homer's descrip-
tion with ornament and dignity. A sentiment may be i
changed by being put into a pointed and oratorical form,
yet may still be very effective in that form ; but a descrip-
tion, the moment it takes its eyes off that which it is to
describe, and begins to think of ornamenting itself, is
worthless.
Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should pene-
trate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness
of Homer's style ; of the simplicity with which Homer's
thought is evolved and expressed. He has Pope's fate
before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created i
even between the most gifted translator and Homer by an
artificial evolution of thought and a literary cast of style.
Chapman's style is not artificial and literary like Pope's,
nor his movement elaborate and self -retarding like the
Miltonio movement of Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh,
vigorous, and to a certain degree, rapid ; and all these are
Homeric quaUties. I cannot say that I think the movement
of his fourteen-syllable Une, which has been so much
commended, Homeric ; but on this point I shall have more
to say by and by, when I come to speak of Mr. Newman's 4
metrical exploits. But it is not distinctly anti-Homeric,
LECTURE I 259
like the movement of Milton's blank verse ; and it has
a rapidity of its own. Chapman's diction, too, is generally
good, that is, appropriate to Homer ; above all, the
syntactical character of his style is appropriate. With these
merits, what prevents his translation from being a satis-
factory version of Homer ? Is it merely the want of literal ^
faithfulness to his original, imposed upon him, it is said,
by the exigences of rhyme ? Has this celebrated version ,
which has so many advantages, no other and deeper defect
0 than that ? Its author is a poet, and a poet, too, of the ^^
Elizabethan age ; the golden age of English literature as it
is called, and on the whole truly called ; for, whatever be .
the defects of Elizabethan literature, (and they are great,)
we have no development of our Uterature to compare with
it for vigour and richness. This age, too, showed what it
could do in translating, by producing a masterpiece, its
version of the Bible.
Chapman's translationhas often been praised as eminently
Homeric. Keats's fine sonnet in its honour every one
0 knows ; but Keats could not read the original, and there-
fore could not really judge the translation. Coleridge, in
praising Chapman's version, says at the same time, ' it
will give you small idea of Homer.' But the grave authority
of Mr. Hallam pronounces this translation to be ' often
exceedingly Homeric ; ' and its latest editor boldly declares,
that by what, with a deplorable style, he calls ' his own
innative Homeric genius,' Chapman * has thoroughly
identified himself with Homer ; ' and that ' we pardon him
even for his digressions, for they are such as we feel Homer
0 himself would have written.'
I confess that I can never read twenty fines of Chapman's
version without recurring to Bentley's cry, ' This is not
Homer ! ' and that from a deeper cause than any unfaith-
fulness occasioned by the fetters of rhyme.
I said that there were four things which eminently
distinguished Homer, and with a sense of which Homer's
translator should penetrate himself as fully as possible.
One of these four things was, the plainness and directness
of Homer's ideas. I have just been speaking of the plain-
D ness and directness of his style ; but the plainness and
directness of the contents of his style, of his ideas them-
92
260 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
selves, is not less remarkable. But as eminently as Homer
is plain, so eminently is the Elizabethan literature in
, general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful. Steeped in
humours and fantasticality up to its very hps, the EHza-
bethan age, newly arrived at the free use of the human
_ faculties after their long term of bondage and delighting
to exercise them freely, suffers from its own extravagance
in this first exercise of them, can hardly bring itself to see
an object quietly or to describe it temperately. Happily,
in the translation of the Bible, the sacred character of their i
original inspired the translators with such respect, that
they did not dare to give the rein to their own fancies in
dealing with it. But, in dealing with works of profane
literature, in dealing with poetical works above all, which
highly stimulated them, one may say that the minds of
the Elizabethan translators were too active ; that they could
not forbear importing so much of their own, and this of
a most peculiar and Elizabethan character, into their
original, that they effaced the character of the original
itself. 2
Take merely the opening pages to Chapman's translation,
the introductory verses, and the dedications. You will
find:
An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince,
My most gracious and sacred Maecenas,
Henry Prince of Wales,
Our Sunn, Heyr, Peace, Life,
Henry, son of James the First, to whom the work is
dedicated. Then comes an address,
To the sacred Fountain of Princes, 3
Sole Empress of Beauty and Virtue, Anne Queen
Of England, &c.
All the Middle Age, with its grotesqueness, its conceits,
its irrationality, is still in these opening pages ; they by
themselves are sufficient to indicate to us what a gulf
divides Chapman from the ' clearest-soul'd ' of poets, from
Homer ; almost as great a gulf as that which divides him
from Voltaire. Pope has been sneered at for saying that
Chapman writes ' somewhat as one might imagine Homer
himself to have written before he arrived at years oii
Y^discretion/ But the remark is excellent : Homer expresses
LECTURE I 261
himself like a man of adult reason, Chapman like a man X
whoso reason has not yet cleared itself. For instance, if
Homer had had to Ifay of a poet, that he hoped his merit
was now about to be fully established in the opinion of
good judges, he was as incapable of saying this as Chapman
says it — ' Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so
deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora, and Ganges, few
eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so
discover and confirm that the date being out of her darkness
.0 in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his temples
with the sun ' — I say. Homer was as incapable of saying
this in that manner, as Voltaire himself would have been.
^ Homer, indeed, has actually an affinity with Voltaire in
the unrivalled clearness and straightforwardness of his
thinking ; in the way in which he keeps to one thought at
a time, and puts that thought forth in its complete natural
plainness, instead of being led away from it by some fancy
striking him in connexion with it, and being beguiled to
wander off with this fancy till his original thought, in its
so natural reaUty, knows him no more. What could better
show us how gifted a race was this Greek race ? The same
member of it has not only the power of profoundly touching
that natural heart of humanity which it is Voltaire's
weakness that he cannot reach, but can also address the
understanding with all Voltaire's admirable simplicity and
rationaUty.
My limits will not allow me to do more than shortly
illustrate, from Chapman's version of the Iliad, what I mean
when I speak of this vital difference between Homer and
JO an EUzabethan poet in the quality of their thought ; be-
tween the plain simplicity of the thought of the one, and
the curious complexity of the thought of the other. As in
Pope's case, I carefully abstain from choosing passages for
the express purpose of making Chapman appear ridiculous ;
Chapman, Uke Pope, merits in himself all respect, though
he too, like Pope, fails to render Homer.
In that tonic speech of Sarpedon, of which I have said
so much. Homer, you may remember, has :
(I fxiv ydp, ir6\efj.ov irtpl rovSe (pvySi re,
10 aid 8^ /x^KKoifKv dyqpai t' ddav&TOj t«
262 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
if, indeed, but once this battle avoided,
We were for ever to live without growing old and immortal —
Chapman cannot be satisfied with this, but must add a fancy
to it :
if keeping baok
Would keep back age from us, and death, and thai we might not wrack
In this lifers human sea at all ;
and so on. Again ; in another passage which I have before
quoted, where Zeus says to the horses of Peleus :
Ovqr^ ; vnHs S' kdrbv &yijpaj r aOavaro} t«'^
Why gave we you to royal Peleus, to a mortal ? but ye aro without
old age, and immortal ;
Chapman sophisticates this into :
Why gave we you t' a mortal king, when immortality
And incapacity of age so dignifies your states ?
Again ; in the speech of Achilles to his horses, where
Achilles, according to Homer, says simply, * Take heed that
ye bring your master safe back to the host of the Danaans,
in some other sort than the last time, when the battle is 21
ended,' Chapman sophisticates this into :
Wheyi with blood, for this day^s fast observed, revenge ehaU yield
Our heart satiety, bring us off.
In Hector's famous speech, again, at his parting from
Andromache, Homer makes him say : ' Nor does my own
heart so bid me,' (to keep safe behind the walls,) ' since I
have learned to be staunch always, and to fight among the
foremost of the Trojans, busy on behalf of my father's great
glory, and my own.' ^ In Chapman's hands this becomes :
The spirit I first did breathe 3
Did never teach me that ; much less, since the contempt of death
Was settled in me, and my mind knew what a worthy was, <
Whose office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass
Without improvement. In this fire must Hector^ a trial shine :
Here must his country, father, friends, he in him made divine.
You see how ingeniously Homer's plain thought is tormented,
as the French would say, here. Homer goes on : * For
* Iliad, xvii, 443. « Iliad, vi, 444.
LECTURE I 263
well I know this in my mind and in my heart, the day will
bo, when sacred Troy shall perish : '
taaiTox ^fjiap, or av ttot' bXwKrj "IKios Ipff,
Chapman makes this :
And such a stormy day shall come, in mind rvnd soul I know,
When sacred Troy shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow.
I might go on for ever, but I could not give you a better
illustration than this last, of what I mean by saying that the
^EUzabethan poet fails to render Homer because he cannot
0 forbear to interpose a play of thought between his object
i and its expression. Chapman translates his object into
EUzabethan, as Pope translates it into the Augustan of
Queen Anne ; both convey it to us through a medium, j
■^ Homer, on the other hand, sees his object and conveys^
^it to us immediately.
And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness
of Homer's style, in spite of this perfect plainness and
directness of his ideas, he is eminently noble ; he works as
entirely in the grand style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, *
10 or Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what makes his
translators despair. ' To give relief,' says Cowper, * to
prosaic subjects,' (such as dressing, eating, drinking, harness-
ing, travelling, going to bed), that is to treat such subjects
nobly, in the grand style, ' without seeming unreasonably
tumid, is extremely difficult.' It is difficult, but Homer
has done it ; Homer is precisely the incomparable poet he
is, because he has done it. His translator must not be
tumid, must not be artfficial, must not be Uterary ; true :
but then also he must not be commonplace, must not be
JO ignoble. I have shown you how translators of Homer fail '
by wanting rapidity, by wanting simpHcity of style, by
wanting plainness of thought : in a second lecture I will
• show you how a translator fails by wanting nobility.
n
I MUST repeat what I said in beginning, that the translator ~
of Homer ought steadily to keep in mind where lies the
real test of the success of his translation, what judges he
is to try to satisfy. He is to try to satisfy scholars, because
scholars alone have the means of really judging him. A
scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his judgment
will be worthless ; but a scholar may also have poetical
feeling, and then he can judge him truly ; whereas all the
poetical feeling in the world will not enable a man who is
not a scholar to judge him truly. For the translator is to k
reproduce Homer, and the scholar alone has the means of
knowing that Homer who is to be reproduced. He knows
him but imperfectly, for he is separated from him by time,
race, and language ; but he alone knows him at all. Yet
people speak as if there were two real tribunals in this
matter — the scholar's tribunal, and that of the general
public. They speak as if the scholar's judgment was one
thing, and the general public's judgment another ; both
with their shortcomings, both with their liability to error ;
but both to be regarded by the translator. The translator 20
who makes verbal literalness his chief care ' will,' says a
writer in the National Review whom I have already quoted,
* be appreciated by the scholar accustomed to test a trans-
lation rigidly by comparison with the original, to look
perhaps with excessive care to finish in detail rather than
boldness and general effect, and find pardon even for a
version that seems bare and bald, so it be scholastic and
faithful.' But, if the scholar in judging a translation looks
to detail rather than to general effect, he judges it pedanti-
cally and ill. The appeal, however, Hes not from the 30
pedantic scholar to the general public, which can only like
or dishke Chapman's version, or Pope's, or Mr. Newman's,
but cannot judge them ; it lies from the pedantic scholar to
the scholar who is not pedantic, who knows that Homer is
Homer by his general effect, and not by his single~words]^
attd who demands but one thing in a translatioiP-that it
LECTURE II 265
shall, as nearly^ as possible, reproduce for him the general
^"TecroTHomer. This, then, remains the one proper aim
'oi the tran'slalor : to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, \
as nearly as possible, the general effect of Holder. Except /
so far as he reproduces this, he loses his labour, even though/^
he may make a spirited Iliad of his own, like Pope, or
translate Homer's Iliad word for word, like Mr. Newman.
If his proper aim were to stimulate in any manner possible
the general public, he might be right in following Pope's
LO example ; if his proper aim were to help schoolboys to
construe Homer, he might be right in following Mr, New-
man's. But it is not : his proper aim is, I repeat it yet>^
once more, to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as
nearly as he can, the general effect of Homer.
When, therefore, Cowper says, ' My chief boast is that
I have adhered closely to my original ; ' when Mr. Newman
says, ' My aim is to retain every peculiarity of the original,
to be faithful, exactly as is the case with the draughtsman
of the Elgin marbles ; ' their real judge only replies : ' It may
10 be so : reproduce then upon us, reproduce the effect of Homer,
as a good copy reproduces the effect of the Elgin marbles.'
When, again, Mr. Newman tells us that ' by an exhaustive
process of argument and experiment ' he has found a metre
which is at once the metre of ' the modern Greek epic,' and
a metre ' like in moral genius ' to Homer's metre, his judge ■
has still but the same answer for him : * It may be so ;
reproduce then on our ear something of the effect produced
by the movement of Homer.'
But what is the general effect which Homer produces on
to Mr. Newman himself ? because, when we know this, we
shall know whether he and his judges are agreed at the
outset, whether we may expect him, if he can reproduce
the effect he feels, if his hand does not befray him in the
execution, to satisfy his judges and to succeed. If, however,
Mr. Newman's impression from Homer is something quite
different from that of his judges, then it can hardly be
expected that any amount of labour or talent will enable
him to reproduce for them their Homer.
Mr. Newman does not leave us in doubt as to the general
w effect which Homer makes upon him. As I have told you
what is the general effect which Homer makes upon me^
266 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
- that of a most rapidly moving poet, that of a poet most
plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most plain and
direct in his ideas, that of a poet eminently noble — so
Mr. Newman tells us his general impression of Homer.
•* Homer's style,' he says, 'is direct, popular, forcible,
' quaint, flowing, garrulous.' Again ; ' Homer rises and
sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low
when it is mean.'
I lay my finger on four words in these two sentences of
Mr. Newman, and I say that the man who could apply those i
words to Homer can never render Homer truly. The four
words are these ; quaint^ garrulous, prosaic, low. Search
the EngUsh language for a word which does not apply to
Homer, and you could not fix on a better than quaint,
unless perhaps you fixed on one of the other three.
Again ; ' to translate Homer suitably,' says Mr. Newman,
* we need a diction sufficiently antiquated to obtain pardon
of the reader for its frequent homeliness.' ' I am con-
cerned,' he says again, ' with the artistic problem of
obtaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while 2
remaining easily inteUigible.' And, again, he speaks of
' the more antiquated style suited to this subject.' Quaint !
antiquated ! — but to whom ? Sir Thomas Browne is
quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated : ^does
Mr. Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to
^pphpcles7wEeii lio feadTEm, as~Bir Thomas Bfowne^seems-
quaint to us, when we read him ? or that Homer's diction
seemed antiquated to Sophocles, as Chaucer's diction seems
antiquated to us ? But we cannot really know, I confess,
how Homer seemed to Sophocles : well then, to those who 3
can tell us how he seems to them, to the living scholar, to
our only present witness on this matter — does Homer
make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the
impression of a poet quaint and antiquated ? does he make
this impression on Professor Thompson, or Professor Jowett ?
When Shakspeare says, ' The princes orgulous,'' meaning
' the proud princes,' we say, ' This is antiquated ; ' when
he says of the Trojan gates, that they,
With massy staples
And corresponsive and fulfilling bolta
Sj^err up the sons of Troy —
LEOTURE n 267
we say, * This is both quaint and antiquated.' But does
Homer ever compose in a language which produces on the
scholar at all the same impression as this language which
I have quoted from Shakspeare ? Never once. Shakspeare
is quaint and antiquated in the Unes which I have just
quoted ; but Shakspeare, need I say it ? can compose,
when he Ukes, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly
simple, perfectly intelligible ; in a language which, in spite
of the two centuries and a half which part its author from
ous, stops us or surprises us as Uttle as the language of
a contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare's varia-
tions : Homer always composes as Shakspeare composes
at his best ; Homer is always simple and intelligible, as
Shakspeare is often ; Homer is never quaint and anti-
^juated^as Shakspeare is sometimes.
vVhen Mr. Newman says that Homer is garrulous, he
seems, perhaps, to depart less widely from the common
opinion than when he calls him quaint ; for is there not
Horace's authority for asserting that ' the good Homer
0 sometimes nods,' bonus dormitat Homerus ? and a great
many people have come, from the currency of this well-
known criticism, to represent Homer to themselves as
a diffuse old man, with the full-stocked mind, but also with
the occasional slips and weaknesses, of old age. Horace has
said better things than his ' bonus dormitat Homerus ; ' but
he never meant by this, as I need not remind any one who
knows the passage, that Homer was garrulous, or anything
of the kind. Instead, however, of either discussing what
Horace meant, or discussing Homer's garruUty as a general
0 question, I prefer to bring to my mind some style which is
garrulous, and to ask myself, to ask you, whether anything
at all of the impression made by that style, is ever made by
the style of Homer. The mediaeval romancers, for instance,
are garrulous ; the following, to take out of a thousand in-
stances the first which comes to hand, is in a garrulous
manner. It is from the romance of Richard Cceur de Lion :
Of my tale be not a-wondered !
The French says he slew an hundred
(Whereof is made this English saw) /
>0 Or he rested him any thraw. /
Him followed many an English knight
That eagerly holp him for to fight —
r
268 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
and so on. Now the manner of that composition I call
garrulous ; every one will feel it to be garrulous ; every
one will imderstand what is meant when it is called
garrulous. Then I ask the scholar — does Homer's manner
ever make upon you, I do not say, the same impression of
its garrulity as that passage, but does it make, ever for one
moment, an impression in the sUghtest way resembUng, in
the remotest degree akin to, the impression made by that
passage of the mediaeval poet ? I have no fear of the answer.
I follow the same method with Mr. Newman's two other ]
epithets, prosaic, and low. ' Homer rises and sinks with his
subject,' says Mr. Newman ; ' is prosaic when it is tame,
is low when it is mean.* ]First I say, HomeiLis_never, in
any sense, to be with truth called prosaic ; he is never to
be called low. He does not rise and sink with his subject ;
on the contrary, his manner invests his subject, whatever
his subject be, with nobleness. Then I look for an author
of whom it may with truth be said, that he ' rises and
sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low
when it is mean.' Defoe is eminently such an author ; of 5
Defoe's manner it may with perfect precision be said, that
it follows his matter ; his lifelike composition takes its
character from the facts which it conveys, not from the
nobleness of the composer. In Moll Flanders and Colonel
Jack, Defoe is undoubtedly prosaic when his subject is
tame, low when his subject is mean. Does Homer's manner
in the Iliad, I ask the scholar, ever make upon him an impres-
sion at all like the impression made by Defoe's manner in
Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack ? Does it not, on the con-
trary, leave him with an impression of nobleness, even when j
it deals with Thersites or with Irus ?
Well then. Homer is neither quaint, nor garrulous, nor
prosaic, nor mean ; and Mr. Newman, in seeing him so,
sees him dijfferently from those who are to judge Mr. New-
man's rendering of him. By pointing out how a wrong
conception of Homer affects Mr. Newman's translation,
I hope to place in still clearer Ught those four cardinal
truths which I pronounce essential for him who would have
a right conception of Homer ; that Homer is rapid, that he
is plain and direct in word and style, that he is plain and 4
direct in his ideas, and that he is noble.
LECTURE ir 269
Mr. Newman says that in fixing on a style for suitably
rendering Homer, as he conceives him, he ' alights on the
deUcate line which separates the quaint from the grotesque.'
' I ought to be quaint,' he says, ' I ought not to be grotesque/
This is a most -oinfortunate sentence. Mr. Newman is
grotesque, which he himself says he ought not to be ; and
he ought not to be quaint, which he himself says he ought
to be.
* No two persons will agree,' says Mr. Newman, ' as to
0 where the quaint ends and the grotesque begins ; ' and
perhaps this is true. But, in order to avoid all ambiguity
in the use of the two words /It is enough to say, that most
persons would call an expression which produced on them
a very strong sense of its incongruity, and which violently
surprised them, grotesque ; and an expression, which pro-
duced on them a slighter sense of its incongruity, and which
more gently surprised them, quaint. Using the two words
in this manner, I say, that when Mr. Newman translates
Helen's words to Hector in the sixth book,
" Adfp ifiHo, Kvvbs KaHOfxtjxavov, oKpvoeaffijs,^
O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,
A numbing horror —
he is grotesque ; that is, he expresses himself in a manner
which produces on us a very strong sense of its incongruity,
and which violently surprises us. I say, again, that when
Mr. Newman translates the common line,
T^v 8' ^^ft/Sfx' (veira fiiyas KopvdaioKos "EicToop —
Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her responsive —
or the common expression ivKvrjfxL8c<: *Axaioi, ' dapper-
to greav'd Achaians '—he is quaint ; that is, he expresses him-
self in a manner which produces on us a slighter sense of
incongruity, and which more gently surprises us. But
violent and gentle surprise are alike far from the scholar's
spirit when he reads in Homer kvv6<s KaKOfxrjxdvov, or,
KopvOaioXo^ "Ekto)/), or, evKVTy/xtScs 'A;(aioi. These expressions
nojaom_fieem. odd to him than the sirhplesf'expres-
Bions in English. He is not more checked by any feehng
* Iliad, vi, 344.
270 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
of strangeness, strong or weak, when he reads them, than
when he reads in an English book ' the painted savage,'
or, * the phlegmatic Dutchman.* Mr. Newman's renderings
of them must, therefore, be wrong expressions in a transla-
tion of Homer ; because they excite in the scholar, their
only competent judge, a feeling quite alien to that excited
in him by what they profess to render.
Mr. Newman, by expressions of this kind, is false to his
original in two ways. He is false to him inasm^uch as he
is ignoble ; for a noble air, and a grotesque air, the air of
the address,
Ad(p eiJieio, Kwbs KaKOfirfx&voVy oHpvoiffarjS—
and the air of the address,
O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief- working vixen,
A numbing horror —
are just contrary the one to the other : and he is false to
him inasmuch as he is odd ; for an odd diction like Mr.
Newman's, and a perfectlyjplain natural djctionlike Homer's
— * dapper-greav d AchaiaSs~^and" cv/a^rj/AiSts 'Axaioi, — are
also just contrary the one to the other. Where, indeed,
Mr. Newman got his diction, with whom he can have lived,
what can be his test of antiquity and rarity for words, are
questions which I ask myself with bewilderment. He has
prefixed to his translation a list of what he calls * the more
antiquated or rarer words ' which he has used. In this list
appear, on the one hand, such words as doughty, grisly,
lusty, noisome, ravin, which are familiar, one would think,
to all the world ; on the other hand, such words as bragly,
meaning, Mr. Newman tells us, * proudly fine ' ; hullcin, ' a
calf ' ; plump, a ' mass ' ; and so on. * I am concerned,'
says Mr. Newman, ' with the artistic problem of attaining
a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining
easily intelligible.' But it seems to me that lusty is not
antiquated ; and that bragly is not a word readily under-
stood. That this word, indeed, and bulkin, may have * a
plausible aspect of moderate antiquity,' I admit ; but that
they are * easily intelligible,' I deny.
Mr. Newman's syntax has, I say it with pleasure, a much
-mote Hcmieric cast than his vocabulary ; his syntax, the
LECTURE II 271
mode in which his thought is evolved, although not the
actual words in which it is expressed, seems to me right in
its general character, and the best feature of his version.
It is not artificial or rhetorical like Cowper's syntax or
Pope's : it is shnple^^irect^andjiatural, and so far it is like
Homer's. liTailsnEiowever, just where, from the inherent
fault of Mr. Newman's conception of Homer, one might i
expect it to fail — it fails in nobleness. It presents thel
th£ughtjn_jk_waj^hicli is something more~lEan uncon- '
0 stFained^— o veFfa^naTT~some'£hing more than easy— free
"anjjeasy^^ In thiTrespecFlt is like the movement of Mr.
"T^wman's" version, like his rhythm ; for this, too, fails, in
spite of some good qualities, by not being noble enough ;
this, while it avoids the faults of being slow and elaborate,
jEod^^ HomeFpresents his thought naturally ; but when
falls into^j^_fault in the ' opposite direction^ and is slip-
_Jhod^ HomeFpresents his tHT "^
MF~Sewman has, \/
A thousand fires along the plain, / «ay, that night were burning —
he presents his thought familiarly ; in a style which may
0 be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but which is not
the style of Homer. Homer moves freely ; but when Mr.
JJewman has.
Infatuate ! Oh that thou wert lord to some other army — *
he gives himself too much freedom ; he leaves us too much
"todblor^s rhythm ourselves, instead of giving to us a
rhythm like Homer's, easy indeed, but mastering our ear
with a fulness of power which is irresistible.
I said that a certain style might be the genuine style of
ballad-poetry, but yet not the style of Homer. The analogy
0 of the ballad is ever present to Mr. Newman's thoughts in
considering Homer ; and perhaps nothing has more caused
his faults than this analogy — ^this popular, but, it is time to
* From the reproachful answer of Ulysses to Agamemnon, who had
proposed an abandonment of their expedition. This is one of the
tonic ' passages of the Iliad, so I quote it :
Ah, unworthy king, some other inglorious army
Should' st thou command, not rule over us, whose portion for ever
Zeus hath made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding
Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish.
Iliad,, xiv, 84.
272 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
' say, this erroneous analogy. ' The moral qualities of
Homer's style,' says Mr. Newman, ' being like to those of
the English ballad, we need a metre of the same genius.
Only those metres, which by the very possession of these
qualities are liable to degenerate into doggerel, are suitable
to reproduce the ancient epic.' * The style of Homer,' he
says in a passage which I have before quoted, ' is direct,
popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous : in all these
respects it is similar to the old English ballad.' Mr. New-
man, I need not say, is by no means alone in this opinion.
* The most really and truly Homeric of all the creations
of the English muse is,' says Mr. Newman's critic in the
National Review^ ' the ballad-poetry of ancient times ;
and the association between metre and subject is one that
it would be true wisdom to preserve.' ' It is confessed,*
says Chapman's last editor, Mr. Hooper, * that the fourteen-
syllable verse,' (that is, a ballad- verse,) ' is peculiarly fitting
for Homeric translation.' And the editor of Dr. Maginn's
clever and popular Homeric Ballads assumes it as one of
his author's greatest and most indisputable merits, that he :
was ' the first who consciously realised to himself the truth
that Greek ballads can be really represented in English only
by a similar measure.'
This proposition that Homer's poetry is ballad-poeiry,
analogous to the well-known ballad-poetry of the English
and other nations, has a certain small portion of truth in it,
and at one time probably served a useful purpose, whenjt_
was employed to discredit the artificial and literary manner
in which Pope and his school rendered Homer. But it has
'been so extravagantly over-used, (he mistake which it was i
useful in combating has so entirely lost the public favour,
that it is now much more important to insist on the largo
part of error contained in it, than to extol its small part of
truth. It is time to say plainly that, whatever the admirers
of our old ballads may think, the supreme form of epio
poetry, the genuine Homeric mould, is not the form of the
Ballad of Lord Bateman. I have myself shown the Jbroad
difEefence between Milton's' manner and Homer's ; but,
after a couTse of Mr. Newman and Dr. Maginn, I turn round
in desperation upon them and upon the balladists who have 4
misled them, and I exclaim : * Compared with you,^^ltoii_
LECTURE II 273
is Homer*8 double : there is, whatever you may think, ten
thousand times more of the real strain of Homer in,
than in,
or in,
Blind Thamyris, and blind Mseonidcs,
And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old —
Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter,
Now Christ thee save and see — ^
While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine."
\r JPoT Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in -
style, plain in language, "natural inlhought ; lie is also, and
aBove all^ noftfer Thave advised the translator not to go
mto the vexed question of Homer's identity. Yet I will
just remind him, that the grand argument — or rather, not
argument, for the matter affords no data for arguing, but
the grand source from which conviction, as we read the
Iliad, keeps pressing in upon us, that there is one poet of ^
the /ZicK^,oneJIoiner— is precisely tEis nobleness of the
po"et, this _^and manner.; we feel that the analogy drawn
from other joint compositions does not hold good here,
because those works do not bear, like the Iliad, the magic
stamp of a master ; and the moment you have anything less
than a masterwork, the co-operation or consolidation of i
several poets becomes possible, for talent is not uncommon ; /
the moment you have rmtch less than a masterwork, they /
become easy, for mediocrity is everywhere. I can imagine
fifty Bradies joined with as many Tates to make the New
Version of the Psalms. I can imagine several poets having -
contributed to any one of the old English ballads in Percy's
collection. I can imagine several poets, possessing, like
Chapman, the Elizabethan vigour and the Elizabethan
mannerism , united with Chapman to produce his version of
the Iliad. I can imagine several poets, with the literary
knack of the twelfth century, united to produce the Nibe--
lun^en Lay in the form in which we have it — a work which j
the Germans, in their joy at discovering a national epic of
' From the ballad of Kirig Estmere, in Percy's Beliques oj Ancient
English Poetry ; i, 69 ; (edit, of 1767).
• Reliqv.es : i, 241.
i.SKOU> ij*
S74 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
H
their own, have rated vastly higher than it deserves. And
astly, though Mr. Newman's translation of Homer bears
the strong mark of his own idiosyncrasy, yet I can imagine
Mr. Newman and a school of adepts trained by him in his
art of poetry, jointly producing that work, so that Aristar-
chus himself should have difficulty in pronouncing which
line was the master's, and which a pupil's. But I cannot
imagine several poets, or one poet, joined with Dante in
■ the composition of his Inferno, though many poets have
) taken for their subject a descent into Hell. Many artists,
] again, have represented Moses ; but there is only one Moses
( -of Michael Angelo. So the^^ insurmountable obstacle to
^^ believing the Iliad a consolidated work of several poets is
this— that the work of great masters is unique ; and the
-Iliad has a great master's genuine stamp, and that stamp
is the grand style.
Poets who cannot work in the grand style, instinctively
seek a style in which their comparative inferiority may feel
itself at ease, a manner which may be, so to speak, indul-
gent to their inequalities. The ballad-style offers to an epic
poet, quite unable to fill the canvas of Homer, or Dante, or
Milton, a canvas which he is capable of filling. The ballad-
measure is quite able to give due effect to the vigour and
spirit which its employer, when at his very best, may be able
to exhibit ; and, when he is not at his best, when he is a
little trivial, or a little dull, it will not betray him, it will not
bring out his weaknesses into broad relief. This is a con-
venience ; but it is a convenience which the ballad-style
purchases by resigning all pretensions to the highest, to the
/ grand manner. It is true of its movement, as it is not true
I of Homer's, that it is ' liable to degenerate into doggerel.'
It is true of its ' moral qualities,* as it is not true of Homer's,
' that * quaintness ' and ' garrulity ' are among them. It is
true of its employers, as it is not true of Homer, that they
* rise and sink with their subject, are prosaic when it is
/ tame, are low when it is mean.' For this reason the ballad-
\ style and the ballad-measure are eminently inappropriate to
< render Homer. Homer's manner and movement are
I always both noble and powerful : the ballad-manner and
movement are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble ;
or jog-trot and humdrum, so not powerful.
LECTURE II 275
Tho Nibelungen Lay affords a good illustration of the
qualities of the ballad-manner. Based on grand traditions,
which had found expression in a grand lyric poetry, the
German epic poem of the Nibelungen Lay, though it is
interesting, and though it has good passages, is itself any-
thing rather than a grand poem. It is a poem of which the
composer is, to speak the truth, a very ordinary mortal, and
often, therefore, like other ordinary mortals, very prosy. It
is in a measure which eminently adapts itself to this
Lo commonplace personality of its composer, which has much
the movement of the well-known measures of Tate and
Brady, and can jog on, for hundreds of lines at a time, with
a level ease which reminds one of Sheridan's saying that'
easy writing may be often such hard reading. But, instead
of occupying myself with the Nibelungen Lay, I prefer to
look at the ballad-style as directly applied to Homer, in
Chapman's version and Mr. Newman's, and in the Homeric
Ballads of Dr. Maginn.
First I take Chapman. I have already shown that Chap-
;o mans conceits are un-Homeric, and that his rhyme is un-
Homeric ; I will now show how his manner and movement
are un-Homeric. Chapman's diction, I have said, is
generally good ; but it must be called good with this reserve,
that, though it has Homer's plainness and directness, it
often offends him who knows Homer by wanting Homer's
nobleness. In a passage which I have already quoted, the
address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, where Homer has,
a 5u\w, ri a<pu)'£ do/ifv IlrjXij'i ayaxTi
dvrjT^ ; u^tfs 5* karov dyrjpoj t' adavaro) t«*
0 rj tVa SvaTTivoiai fier' avbpdaiv dkyc exV'^^t^
Chapman has,
' Poor wretched beasts,* said he,
' Why gave we you to a mortal king, when immortality
And incapacity of age so dignifies your states ?
Was it to haste ' the miseries pour'd out on human fates ? *
There are many faults in this rendering of Chapman's, but
what I particularly wish to notice in it is the expression
* Iliad, xvii, 443.
* All the editions which I have seen have ' haste,' but the right
reading must certainly be ' taste.'
276 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
* Poor wretched beasts/ for a SctXw. This expression just
'"Illustrates the difference between the ballad-manner and
Homer's. The ballad-manner — Chapman's manner — ^is,
I say, pitched sensibly lower than Homer's. The ballad-
manner requires that an expression shall be plain and
natural, and then it asks no more. Homer's manner
requires that an expression shall be plain and natural,
but it also requires that it shall be noble. 'A SaXw is
as plain, as simple as * Poor wretched beasts ; ' but it is
also noble, which * Poor wretched beasts ' is not. * Poor i
wretched beasts ' is, in truth, a little over-familiar : but this
is no objection to it for the ballad-manner ; it is good
enough for the old English ballad, good enough for the
Nibelungen Lay, good enough for Chapman's Iliad, good
enough for Mr. Newman's Iliad, good enough for Dr.
Maginn's Homeric Ballads ; but it is not good enough for
Homer.
To feel that Chapman's measure, though natural, is not
" Homeric ; that, though tolerably rapid, it has not Homer's
rapidity ; that it has a jogging rapidity rather than a flow- s
ing rapidity ; and a movement familiar rather than nobly
easy, one has only, I think, to read half a dozen lines in any
part of his version. I prefer to keep as much as possible to
passages which I have already noticed, so I will quote the
conclusion of the nineteenth book, where Achilles answers
his horse Xanthus, who has prophesied his death to him.^
Achilles, far in rage,
Thus answered him : — It fits not thee thus proudly to presage
My overthrow. I know myself it is my fate to fall
Thus far from Phthia ; yet that fate shall fail to vent her gaU i
Till mine vent thousands. — ^These words said, he fell to horrid deeds.
Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoof' d steeds.
For what regards the manner of this passage, the words
' Achilles Thus answered him,' and ' I know myself it is
my fate to fall Thus far from Phthia,' are in Homer's
manner, and all the rest is out of it. But for what regards
its movement: who, after being jolted by Chapmai
through such verse as this :
I "^ These words said, he fell to horrid deeds,
Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofd steeds — i
^ Iliad, xix, 419.
"i
LECTURE II 277
who does not feel the vital difference of the movement of
Homer — -^
^ pa, KoX kv TTpwTois Idxo^v ex^ ftuvuxas tnirov^ ?
To pass from CJhapraan to Dr. Maginn. His Homeric
Ballads are vigorous and genuine poems in their own way ;
they are not one continual falsetto, like the pinchbeck
Roman Ballads of Lord Macaulay ; but just because they
afe^allaHs in their manner and movement, just because,
to use the words of his applauding editor, Dr. Maginn has
0 ' consciously reaHsed to himself the truth that Greek
ballads can be really represented in English only by
a similar manner ' — ^just for this very reason they are not
at all Homeric, they have not the least in the world the
manner of Homer. There is a celebrated incident in the
nineteenth book of the Odyssey y the recognition by the old
nurse Eurycleia of a scar on the leg of her master Ulysses,
who has entered his own hall as an unknown wanderer,
and whose feet she has been set to wash. ' Then she came
near,' says Homer, ' and began to wash her master ; and
D straightway she recognised a scar which he had got in
former days from the white tusk of a wild boar, when he
went to Parnassus unto Autolycus and the sons of Auto-
lycus, his mother's father and brethren.' ^ This, ' really
represented ' by Dr. Maginn, in ' a measure similar ' to
Homer's, becomes :
And scarcely had she begun to wash
Ere she was aware of the grisly gash
Above his knee that lay.
It was a wound from a wild boar's tooth,
0 All on Parnassus' slope,
Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth
With his mother's sire —
and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can
deny ; ' all on Parnassus' slope ' is, I was going to say, the
true ballad-slang ; but never again shall I be able to read,
vi^i 8* dp iaaov lovaa avax^' ^ov avriKa 5' t'^vo)
' ovkrjv
without having the detestable dance of Dr. Maginn's,
And scarcely had she begun to wash
10 Ere she was aware of the grisly gash —
^ Odyasey, xix, 392.
278 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
jigging in my eats, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to
torture me. To apply that manner and that rhythm to
Homer's incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty
him.
Lastly I come to Mr. Newman. His rhythm, hke Chap-
man's and Dr. Maginn's, is a ballad-rhythm, but with
a modification of his own. * Holding it,' he tells us, ' as
an axiom, that rhyme must be abandoned,' he found, on
abandoning it, ' an unpleasant void until he gave a double
ending to the verse.' In short, instead of saying i
Good people all with one accord
Give ear unto my tale,
Mr. Newman would say,
Good people all with one accord
Give ear unto my story.
A recent American writer ^ gravely observes that for his
countrymen this rhythm has a disadvantage in being like
the rhythm of the American national air ' Yankee Doodle,'
and thus provoking ludicrous associations. * Yankee
Doodle ' is not our national air : for us Mr. Newman's s
rhythm has not this disadvantage. He himself gives us
several plausible reasons why this rhythm of his really
ought to be successful : let us examine how far it is successful.
Mr. Newman joins to a bad rhythm so bad a diction,
that it is difi&cult to distinguish exactly whether in any
given passage it is his words or his measure which produces
a total impression of such an unpleasant kind. But
with a little attention we may analyse our total impression,
and find the share which each element has in producing it.
To take the passage which I have so often mentioned, a
Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus. Mr. Newman translates
this as follows :
O gentle friend ! if thou and I, from this encounter 'scaping,
Hereafter might for ever be from Eld and Death exempted
As heav'nly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost,
Nor Kefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle.
Now, — sith ten thousand shapes of Death do any-gait pursue us
Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and nimble ;—
Onward ! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to some one. —
^ Mr. Marsh, in his Lectures on tfia English Language, New York,
1860 ; p. 620.
LECTURE II 279
Could all our care elude the gloomy grave
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave — •
I am not going to quote Pope's version over again, but
I must remark in passing, how much more, with all Pope's
radical difference of manner from Homer, it gives us of
the real effect of,
el n^v yap, ir6\€fiov rrepl rovSe <pvy6vT( —
than Mr. Newman's lines. And now, why are Mr. New-
man's lines faulty ? They are faulty, first, because as
Lo a matter of diction, the expressions * O gentle friend,'
' eld,' ' in sooth,' ' Hefly,' ' advance,' ' man-ennobling,'
* sith,' * any-gait,' and ' sly of foot,' are all bad ; some
of them worse than others, but all bad : that is, they all
of them as here used excite in the scholar, their sole judge
— excite, I will boldly affirm, in Professor Thompson or
Professor Jowett — a feeling totally different from that
excited in them by the words of Homer which these expres-
sions profess to render. The lines are faulty, secondly,
because, as a matter of rhythm, any and every line among
50 thom has to the ear of the same judges, (I affirm it with
equal boldness,) a movement as unlike Homer's move-
ment in the corresponding line as the single words are
unhke Homer's words. Ovtc k€ <ri o-rcAAot/xt fjiaxw ^^ KvStar
veipav — ' Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling
battle ' — for whose ears do those two rhythms produce
impressions of, to use Mr. Newman's own words, ' similar
moral genius ' ?
I will by no means make search in Mr. Newman's version
for passages likely to raise a laugh ; that search, alas !
80 would be far too easy. I will quote but one other passage
from him, and that a passage where the diction is com-
paratively inoffensive, in order that disapproval of the
words may not unfairly heighten disapproval of the
rhythm. The end of the nineteenth book, the answer of
Achilles to his horse Xanthus, Mr. Newman gives thus :
* Chestnut ! why bodest death to me ? from thee this was not needed.
Myself right surely know also, that 'tis my doom to perish,
From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy ; but never
Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted.'
40 He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofed horses.
280 ON TRANSLATING HOJIdER
Here Mr. Newman calls Xanthus Chestnut ^ indeed, as he
calls Balius Spotted, and Podarga Spry -foot ; which is as
if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Madlle.
Bossignol, or Mr. Bright M. Glair. And several other
expressions, too — ' yelling,' ' held afront,' ' single-hoofed '
— cleave, to say the very least, much to be desired. Still,
for Mr. Newman, the diction of this passage is pure. All
the more clearly appears the profound vice of a rhythm,
which, with comparatively few faults of words, can leave
a sense of such incurable aUenation from Homer's manner i
as, * Myself right surely know also that 'tis my doom to
perish,' compared with the, ev vv tol oTSa koI avro?, o fxoc
/Ao/jos evOdS' oXea-Oai — of Homer.
But so deeply-seated is the difference between the ballad-
manner and Homer's, that even a man of the highest
powers, even a man of the greatest vigour of spirit and of
; true genius — ^the Coryphaeus of balladists. Sir Walter Scott
/ — fails with a manner of this kind to produce an effect at
' all like the effect of Homer. ' I am not so rash,' declares
Mr. Newman, * as to say that if freedom, be given to rhyme 2
as in Walter Scott's poetry ' — Walter Scott, ' by far the
most Homeric of our poets,' as in another place he calls
him — ' a genius may not arise who will translate Homer
into the melodies of Marmion.^ ' The truly classical and
truly romantic,' says Dr. Maginn, ' are one ; the moss-
trooping Nestor reappears in the moss-trooping heroes of
Percy's Reliques ; ' and a description by Scott, which he
, quotes, he calls ' graphic and therefore Homeric' He
\ forgets our fourth axiom — that Homer is not only graphic ;
he is also noble, and has the grand style. Human nature 3
under like circumstances is probably in all ages much the
same ; and so far it may be said that ' the truly classical
and the truly romantic are one ; * but it is of little use to
tell us this, because we know the human nature of other
ages only through the representations of them which have
come down to us, and the classical and the romantic
modes of representation are so far from being ' one,' that
they remain eternally distinct, and have created for us
. a separation between the two worlds which they respectively
V. represent. Therefore to call Nestor the * moss-trooping 4<
Nestor ' is absurd, because, though Nestor may possibly
LECTURE II 281
have been much the same sort of man as many a moss-
trooper, he has yet come to us through a mode of representa-
tion so unlike that of Percy's Rdiques, that, instead of
' reappearing in the moss-trooping heroes * of these poems,
he eidsts in our imagination as something utterly unlike
them, and as belonging to another world. So the Greeks
in Shakspeare's Troilus and Cressida are no longer the
Greeks whom we have known in Homer, because they
come to us through a mode of representation of the romantic
A world. But I must not forget Scott.
I suppose that when Scott is in what may be called full
ballad swing, no one will hesitate to pronounce his manner
neither Homeric, nor the grand manner. When he says,
for instance,
I do not rhyme to that duU elf
Who cannot image to himself ' —
and so on, any scholar will feel that this is not Homer's
manner. But let us take Scott's poetry at its best ; and
when it is at its best, it is undoubtedly very good indeed :
0 Tunstall lies dead upon the field,
His life-blood stains the spotless shield :
Edmund is down — ^my life is reft —
The Admiral alone is left.
Let Stanley charge with spur of fire^—
With Chester charge, and Lancashire,
Full upon Scotland's central host,
Or victory and England's lost.*
That is, no doubt, as vigorous as possible, as spirited as^
possible ; it is exceedingly fine poetry. And still I say, it (
0 is not in the grand manner, and therefore it is not
Homer's poetry. Now, how shall I make him who doul
this feel that I say true ; that these Hnes of Scott are
essentially neither in Homer's style, nor in the
style ? I may point out to him that the movement oi^
Scott's hnes, while it is rapid, is also at the same time what ]
the French call saccade, its rapidity is 'jerky; ' whereas/
Homer's rapidity is a flowing rapidity. But this is some-l
thing external and material ; it is but the outward and \
visible sign of an inward and spiritual diversity. Ima^ ]
,0 discuss what, in the abstract, constitutes the grand^^^p^
* Murmion, canto vi, 38. ' Marmion, canto vi, 29,
282 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
but thatjsort of general discussion never much helps our
judgment of particular instances. I may say that^the
presence or absence of the grand style can onlyBe spiritu-
ally discerned ; and this is true, but to plead this looks
like evading the difficulty. My best way is to take eminent
specimens of the grand style, and to put them side by side
with this of Scott. For example, when Homer says :
dAAa, ipiXos, 6dv€ Kal av' ri-q 6\v(})vpeai ovtojs ;
KarSave Kal ndrpoKKos, owep do iroWdv dfxdvojv^ —
that is in the grand style. When Virgil says :
Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem ;
Fortunam ex aliis^ —
that is in the grand style. When Dante says :
Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi
Promessi a me per lo verace Duca ;
Ma fino al centro pria convien eh' io tomi' —
that is in the grand style. When Milton says ;
His form had not yet lost
^ All her original brightness, nor appear' d
""^ Less than archangel ruin'd, and the excess
Of glory obscured* —
•
that, finally, is in the grand style. Now let any one, after
repeating to himself these four passages, repeat again the
passage of Scott, and he will perceive that there is some-
'Hhing in style which the four first have in common, and
which the last is without ; and this something is precisely
the grand manner. It is no disrespect to Scott to say that
fie'does not attain to this manner in his poetry ; to say so,
is merely to say that he is not among the five or six supreme
poets of the world. Among these he is not ; but, being
^ * Be content, good friend, die also thou ! why lamentest thou thy-
self on this wise ? Patroclus, too, died, who was a far better than
thou.' — Iliad, xxi, 106.
/ ^ ' From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true effort ;
learn success from others.' — Aeneid, xii, 435.
* ' I leave the gall of bitterness, and I go for the apples of sweetness
promised unto me by my faithful Guide ; but far as the centre it behoves
me first to fall.' — Hellf xvi, 61.
* Paradise Lost, i, 591.
LECTURE II 283
a man of far greater powers than the ballad-poets, he has ^
tried to give to their instrument a compass and an elevation
which it does not naturally possess, in order to enable him
to come nearer to the effect of the instrument used by the
great epic poets — an instrument which he felt he could not
truly use — and in this attempt he has but imperfectly
succeeded. The poetic style of Scott is — (it becomes
necessary to say so when it is proposed to ' translate
Homer into the melodies of Marmion ') — ^it is, tried by
) the highest standards, a bastard epic style ; and that is ^
why, out of his own powerful hands, it has had so little
success. It is a less natural, and therefore a less good
style, than the original baUad-style ; while it shares with
the ballad-style the inherent incapacity of rising into the
grand style, of adequately rendering Homer. Scott is
certainly at his best in his battles. Of Homer you could
not say this ; he is not better in his battles than elsewhere ;
but even between the battle-pieces of the two there exists
all the difference which there is between an able work
) and a masterpiece.
Tunstall lies dead upon the field,
His life-blood stains the spotless shield ;
Edmund is down — my life is reft —
The Admiral alono is left. —
— ' For not in the hands of Diomede the son of Tydeus
rages the spear, to ward off destruction from the Danaans ;
neither as yet have I heard the voice of the son of Atreus,
shouting out of his hated mouth ; but the voice of Hector
^ the slayer of men bursts round me, as he cheers on the
) Trojans ; and they with their yellings fill all the plain, over-
coming the Achaians in the battle.' — I protest that, to my
feeling, Homer's performance, even through that pale and
far-off shadow of a prose translation, still has a hundred
times more of the grand manner about it, than the original
l^oetry of Scott.
Welljjthen, the ballad-manner and the ballad-measure,
whetherTn the hands of the old ballad poets, or arranged by
CEapnian, or arranged Ly Mr. Newman, or, even, arranged
by Sir Walter Scott, cannot worthily render Homer. And
dIS: one reason ; Homer is plain, so are they ; Homer is
284 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
natural,_sp are they ; Homer is £^pirited, so are they ; but
Homer is sustainedly noble, and they are not. Homer and
they are both of them natural, and therefore touching and
stirring ; but the grand style, which is Homer 'a, Is something
more than touching and stirring ; it can form the character,
it is edifying. The old English balladist may stir Sir Philip
Sidney's heart like a trumpet, and this is much: but
Homer, but the few artists in the grand style^ can do more ;
they can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute
him. So it is not without cause that I say, aM say again,
to the translator of Homer : * Never for a moment suffer
yourself to forget our fourth fundamental proposition.
Homer is iwble.' Tor it is seen how large a share this
nobleness has in producing that general effect of his, which
it is the main business of a translator to reproduce.
I shall have to try your patience yet once more upon this
subject, and then my task will be completed. I have shown
what the four axioms respecting Homer which I have laid
down, exclude, what they bid a translator not to do ; I have
still to show what they supply, what positive help they can
give to the translator in his work. I v/ill even, with their
aid, myself try my fortune with some bf those passages of
Homer which I have already noticed ; not indeed with any
confidence that I more than others can succeed in ade-
quately rendering Homer, but in the hope of satisfying
competent judges, in the hope of making it clear to the
future translator, that I at any rate follow a right method,
and that, in coming short, I come short from weakness of
execution, not from original vice of design. This is why I
have so long occupied myself with Mr. Newman's version ;
that, apart from all faults of execution, his original design
was wrong, and that he has done us the good service of
declaring that design in its naked wrongness. To bad
practice he has prefixed the bad theory which made the
practice bad ; he has given us a false theory in his preface,
and he has exemplified the bad effects of that false theory
in his translation. It is because his starting-point is so bad
that he runs so badly ; and to save others from taking so
false a starting-point, may be to save them from running so
futile a course.
Mr. Newman, indeed, says in his preface, that if any one
LECTURE II 285
dislikes his translation, * he has his easy remedy ; to keep
aloof from it.' But Mr. Newman is a writer of considerable
and deserved reputation ; he is also a Professor of the
University of London, an institution which by its position
and by its merits acquires every year greater importance.
It woiild be a very grave thing if the authority of so eminent
a Professor led his students to miscrnceive entirely the
chief work of the Greek world ; that work which, whatever
the other works of classical antiquity have to give us, gives
10 it more abundantly than they all. The eccentricity, too,
the arbitrariness, of which Mr. Newman's conception of
Homer offers so signal an example, are not a peculiar failing
of Mr. Newman's own ; in varying degrees, they are the
great defect of English intellect, the great blemish of
English literature . Our literature of the eighteenth century ,
the literature of the school of Dryden, Addison, Pope, -^
Johnson, is a long reaction agai^t this ifccent^city, this *
arbitrariness : that reaction perished by its own faults,
and its enemies are left once more masters of the field. It
so is much more likely that any new English version of Horner"^. ,
will have Mr. Newman's faults than Pope's. Our present '^
literature, which is very far, certainly, from having the
spirit and power of Elizabethan genius, yet has in its own
way these faults, eccentricity and arbitrariness, quite as
much as the Elizabethan literature ever had. They are
the cause that, while upon none, perhaps, of the modem
literatures has so great a sum of force been expended as
upon the English literature, at the present hour this
literature, regarded not as an object of mere literary interest
w but as a living intellectual instrument, ranks only third in
European effect and importance among the literatures of
Europe ; it ranks after the literatures of France and
Germany. Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of
Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has
been a critical effort ; the endeavour, in all branches of
knowledge — ^theology, philosophy, history, art, science —
to see the object as in itseK it really is. But, owing to the
presence in English literature of this eccentric and arbitrary
spirit, owing to the strong tendency of English writers to
10 bring to the consideration of their object some individual
fancy, almost the last thing for which one would come
286 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
to English literature is just that very thing which now
Europe most desires — criticism. It is useful to notice any
signal manifestation of those faults, which thus limit and
impair the action of our literature. And therefore I have
pointed out, how widely, in translating Homer, a man
even of real ability and learning may go astray, unless
he brings to the st'^iy of this clearest of poets one q[uality
in which our English authors, with all their great gifts,
are apt to be somewhat wanting — simple lucidity of niind.
Ill
Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his
words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is
noble in his manner. Ck)wper renders him ill because he
is slow in his movement, and elaborate in his style ; Pope
renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and
in his words ; Chapman renders him ill because he is
fantastic in his ideas ; Mr. Newman renders him ill because
he is odd in his words and ignoble in his manner. All four
translators diverge from their original at other points besides
10 those named ; but it is at the points thus named that their
divergence is greatest. For instance, Cowper's diction is
not as Homer's diction, nor his nobleness as Homer's
nobleness ; but it is in movement and grammatical style
that he is most imlike Homer. Pope's rapidity is not of
the same sort as Homer's rapidity, nor are his plainness of
ideas and his nobleness as Homer's plainness of ideas, and
nobleness : but it is in the artificial character of his style
and diction that he is most unlike Homer. Chapman's
movement, words, style, and manner, are often far enough
20 from resembling Homer's movement, words, style, and
manner ; but it is the fantasticality of his ideas which puts
him farthest from resembling Homer. Mr. Newman's
movement, grammatical style, and ideas, are a thousand
times in strong contrast with Homer's ; still it is by the
oddness of his diction and the ignobleness of his manner
that he contrasts with Homer the most violently.
Therefore the translator must not say to himself :
' Cowper is noble, Pope is rapid, Chapman has a good
diction, Mr. Newman has a good cast of sentence ; I will
80 avoid Cowper's slowness, Pope's artificiahty, Chapman's
conceits, Mr. Newman's oddity ; I will take Cowper's
dignified manner. Pope's impetuous movement. Chapman's,
vocabulary, Mr. Newman's syntax, and so make a perfect
translation of Homer.' Undoubtedly in certain points the
versions of Chapman, Cowper, Pope, and Mr. Newman, all
288 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
of them have merit ; some of them very high merit, others
a lower merit ; but even in these points they have none of
them precisely the same kind of merit as Homer, and
therefore the new translator, even if he can imitate thera
in their good points, will still not satisfy his judge the
scholar, who asks him for Homer and Homer's kind of merit,
or, at least, for as much of them as it is possible to give.
So the translator really has no good model before him for
any part of his work, and has to invent everything for him-
self. He is to be rapid in movement, plain in speech,
simple in thought, and noble ; and how he is to be either
rapid, or plain, or simple, or noble, no one yet has shown
him. I shall try to-day to establish some practical sugges-
tions which may help the translator of Homer's poetry to
comply with the four grand requirements which we make of
him.
His version is to be rapid ; and of course, to make a
man's poetry rapid, as to make it noble, nothing can serve
him so much as to have, in his own nature, rapidity and
nobleness. JLt is the sj^irit that quickeneth; and ho one will
so well render Homer's swift-flowing mbvemeiit ' as he
who has himself something of the swift-moving spirit of
Homer. Yet even this is not quite enough. Pope certainly
had a quick and darting spirit, as he had, also, real noble-
ness ; yet Pope does not render the movement of Homer.
To render this the translator must have, besides his natural
qualifications, an appropriate metre.
I have sufficiently shown why I think all forms of our
ballad-metre unsuited to Homer. It seems to me to be
beyond question that, for epic poetry, only threemetre^
can seriously claim to be accounted capable of tEe grand
style. Two of these will at once occur to every one— ;^the
ten-syllable, di: so-called heroic, couplet, and blank verse.
T'dX) hot add to these the Spenserian "stanza, although
Dr. Maginn, whose metrical eccentricities I have already
criticised, pronounces this stanza the one right measure for
a translation of Homer. It is enough to observe, that if
Pope's couplet, with the simple system of correspondences
that its rhymes introduce, changes the movement of Homer,
in which no such correspondences are found, and is therefore
a bad measure for a translator of Homer to employ, Spenser's
LECTURE III 289
stanza, with its far more intricate system of correspon-
dences, must change Homer's movement far more profoundly
and must therefore be for the translator a far worse measure
than the couplet of Pope. Yet I will say, at the same time,
that the verse of Spenser is more flyid, slips more easily
and quickly along, than the verse of almost any other
EngHsh poet.
By this the northern wagoner had set
His seven-fold team beliind the steadfast star
) That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firm is fixt, and sondeth light from far
To all that in the wide deep wandering are ; ^
one cannot but feel that English verse has not often moved
with 'the fluidity and sweet ease of these lines. It is possible
that it may have been this quality of Spenser's poetry which
made Dr. Maginn think that the stanza of The Faery Queen
must be a good measure for rendering Homer. This it
is not : Spenser's verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but
there are more ways thaiTone oTbelhg fluid and rapid, and
} H(QXQfi£jMf uid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser.
Spenser's manner is no more Homeric than is the manner
'M'tHe^ohe modern inheritor of Spenser's beautiful gift ;
. ■Fhe~pbiBt, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and
easy-sUpping movement, and who has exquisitely employed
it ; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endow-
ment richer probably than even Spenser ; that light which
shines so unexpected and without fellow in our century, an
Elizabethan born too late, the early lost and admirably
gifted Keats.
[) I say theiTlhat there are really but three metres — the ten-
syllable couplet, blank verse, and a third metre which I will
not yet name, but which is neither the Spenserian stanza'
nor any form of ballad-verse — between which, as vehicles
for Homer's poetry, the translator has to make his choice.
Every one will at once remember a thousand passages in
which both the ten-syllable couplet and blank verse prove
themselves to have nobleness. Undoubtedly the movement
and manner of this ;
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
) But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice —
^ The Faery Queen, Canto ii, Stanza 1.
ARNOLD JJ
290 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
are noble. Undoubtedly, the movement and manner o:
this ;
High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind —
are noble also. But the first is in a rhymed metre ; and th(
unfitness of a rhymed metre lor rendering Homer I hav(
already shown. I will observe, too, that the fine couple
which I have quoted comes out of a satire, a didactic poem
and that it is in didactic poetry that the ten-syllable couple
has most successfully essayed the grand style. In narrativ(
poetry this metre has succeeded best when it essayec
a sensibly lower style, the style of Chaucer, for instance
whose narrative manner, though a very good and sounc
manner, is certainly neither the grand manner nor th(
manner of Homer.
The rhymed ten-sjdlable couplet being thus.. ^luded
blaiiE~yerse offers itself for the translator's use. Th'^rfirs
kind~'bf blank verse which naturally occurs to us is th(
blank verse of Milton, which has been employed, with mor(
or less modification, by Mr. Gary in translating Dante, b^
Cowper, and by Mr. Wright in translating Homer. Ho^
noble this metre is in Milton's hands, how completely i
shows itself capable of the grand, nay of the grandest, style
I need not say. To this metre, as use^ in tTie^Parafc
Lost, our country owes the glory of having produced one o
the only two poetical works in the grand style which are t<
be found in the modern languages ; the Divine Comedy o
Dante is the other. England and Italy here stand alone
Spain, France, and Germany, have produced great poets
but neither Calderon, nor Corneille, nor Schiller, nor evei
Goethe, has produced a body of poetry in the true granc
style, in the sense in which the style of the body of Homer'i
poetry, or Pindar's, or Sophocles's, is grand. But Dant(
has, and so has Milton ; and in this respect Milton pos
sesses a distinction which even Shakspeare, undoubtedly
the supreme poetical power in our literature, does not shar^
with him. Not a tragedy of Shakspeare but contain
passages in the worst of all styles, the affected style ; am
the grand style, although it may be harsh, or obscure, o:
cumbrous, or over-laboured, is never affected. In spite
LECTURE III 291
therefore, of objections which may justly be urged against
the plan and treatment of the Paradise Lost, in spite of its
possessing, certainly, a far less enthralling force of interest
to attract and to carry forward the reader than the Iliad or
the Divine Comedy, it fully deserves, it can never lose, its
immense reputation ; for, like the Iliad and the Divine
Comedy, nay in some "respects fo a higher degree than
either of them, it is in the grand style,
"^ut the grandeur of Milton is one thing, and the grandeur,
oofTIomer is another. Homer^s movement, I have said)
again and again, is a flowing, a rapid movement ; Milton's,
onThe other hand, is a laboured, a self -retarding movement.
IiTeach case, the movement, the metrical cast, corresponds
, with the mode of evolution of the thought, with the syn-
tactical cast, and is indeed determined by it. Milton;;
charges hin^elf so full with thought, imagination, know-^
ledge, thaOIs^style^will hardly contain them. He is tooi
fatl-stofed^ show us in much detail one conception, one^
_piece of knowledge ; he just shows it to us in a pregnant -^
» allusive way, and then he presses on to another ; and all -
this fulness, this pressure, this condensation, this self- j
constraint, enters into his movement, and makes it what \
it is — noble, but difficult and austere. Homer is quite
differenTyhe says a thing, and says it to the^'end, and then
"begins'another, while Milton is trying to press a thousand
things Into ^e. So that whereas, in reading Milton, you i
never lose the sense of laborious and condensed fullness, in )
reading Homer you never lose the sense of flowing and
abounding ease. With Milton line runs into line, and all is
w straitly^bound together : with Homer line runs off from line,
jtnd all hurries away onward. Homer begins, Myviv aeiSe,
0€a — at the second^ word announcing tlie'proposed action :
Milton_begins :
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till ono greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.
Sing, heavenly muse —
to so chary of a sentence is he, so resolute not to let it escape
Irim-till he has crowded into it all he can, that it is not till
U 2
292 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
the thirty-ninth word in the sentence that he will give us the
key to it, the word of action, the verb. Milton says : »
O for that warning voice, which he, who saw
The Apocalypse, heard cry in heaven aloud —
he is not satisfied, unless he can tell us, all in one sentence,
and without permitting himself to actually mention the
name, that the man who had the warning voice was the
same man who saw the Apocalypse.* Homer would have
said, ' 0 for that warning voice, which John heard ' — and if
it had suited him to say that John also saw the Apocalypse,
he would have given us that in another sentence. The
effect of this allusive and compressed manner of Milton is,
I need not say, often very powerful ; and it is an effect
which other great poets have often sought to obtain much
in the same way : Dante is full of it, Horace is full of it ;
but wherever it exists, it is always an un-Homeric effect.
* The losses of the heavens,' says Horace, ' fresh moons
speedily repair ; we, when we have gone down where the
pious iEneas, where the rich TuUus, and Ancus are — ^pulvis
et umbra sumus.' ^ He never actually says where we go to ;
he only indicates it by saying that it is that place where
iEneas, Tullus, and Ancus, are. But Homer, when he has
to speak of going down to the grave, says definitely, k,
'HAtj o-tov TreStov — aOavaroi Trifuf/ovcrLV ^ — 'The immortals shalJ
send theo. to the Elysian 'plain ; ' and it is not till
after he has definitely said this, that he adds, that it is
there that the abode of departed worthies is placed : oOi
$av06s 'FaSdfiai'6v<s — ' Where the yellow-hair'd Rhadaman-
thus is.' Again ; Horace, having to say that punishment
sooner or later overtakes crime, says it thus :
Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede Poena claudo.'
The thought itself of these lines is familiar enough to
Homer and Hesiod ; but neither Homer nor Hesiod,
in expressing it, could possibly have so comphcated its
expression as Horace complicates it, and purposely com-
plicates it, by his use of the word deseruit. I say that this
complicated evolution of .the thought necessarily com-
plicates the movement and rhythm of a poet ; and that
1 Odes, IV, vii, 13. * Odyssey, iv, 563. « Odes, III, ii, 31.
LECTURE III 293
the Miltonic blank verse, of course the first model of blank
verse which suggests itself to an English translator of
Homer, bears the strongest marks of such complication,
and is therefore entirely unfit to render Homer.
If blank verse is used in translating Homer, it must be
a blank verse of which English poetry, naturally swayed
much by Milton's treatment of this metre, offers at present
hardly any examples. It must not be Cowper's blank verse,
who has studied Milton's pregnant manner with such effect,
Lo that, having to say of Mr. Throckmorton that he spares his
avenue, although it is the fashion with other people to cut
down theirs, he says that Benevolus ' reprieves The obsolete
prolixity of shade.' It must not be Mr. Tennyson's blank
verse.
For all experience ia an arch, wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose distance fades
Por ever and for ever, as we gaze —
it is no blame to the thought of those lines, which belongs
to another order of ideas than Homer's, but it is true, that
20 Homer would certainly have said of them, ' It is to con-
sider too curiously to consider so.' It is no blame to their
rhythm, which belongs to another order of movement than
Homer's, but it is true, that these three lines by themselves^
take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad. I
No ; the blank verse used in rendering Homer must be a_J
blaiik vefse~of which perhaps the best specimens are to be
found in some of the most rapid passages of Shakspeare's
plays — a blank verse which does not dovetail its lines into
one another, and which habitually ends its lines with mono-
83jyjlablga- Such a blank verse might no doubt be very
rapid in its movement, and might perfectly adapt itselTto
"^ thoughT plainly arid directly evolved ; and it would be
interesting to see it well applied to Homer. But the trans-
lator who determines to use it, must not conceal from
himself that in order to pour Homer into the mould of
this metre, he will have entirely to break him up and melt
him down, with the hope of then successfully composing
him afresh ; and this is a process which is full of risks. It
may, no doubt, be the real Homer that issues new from it ;
40 it is not certain beforehand that it cannot be the real
Homer, as it is certain that from the mould of Pope's
294 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
couplet or Cowper's Miltonic verse it cannot be the real
Homer that will issue ; still, the chances of disappointment
are great. The result of such an attempt to renovate the
old poet may be an Mson ; but it may also, and more
probably will, be a Pelias.
When I say this, I point to the metre which seems to
me to give the translator the best chance of pfeserving^the"^
general effect of Homer— that third metre which I have
not yet expressly named, the hexameter. I know all that
is said against the use of hexametefs^in English poetry ; i
but it comes only to this, that, among us, they have not
yet been used on any considerable scale with success.
Solvitur ambulando : this is an^ objection which can best
be met by producing good English hexameters^ And there
is no reason in the nature of the English language why it
should not adapt itself to hexameters as well as the German
language does ; nay, the English language, from its greater
rapidity, is in itself better suited than the German for them.
The hexameter, whether alone or with the pentameter,
possesses a movement, an expression, which no metre 2
hitherto in common use amongst us possesses, and which
I am convinced English poetry, as our mental wants
multiply, will not always be content to forgo. Applied to
Homer, this metre affords to the translator the immense
support of keeping him more nearly than any other metre
to Homer's movement ; and, since a poet's movement
makes so large a part of his general effect, and to repro-
duce this general effect is at once the translator's indis-
pensable business and so difficult for him, it is a great
thing to have this part of your model's general effect 3
already given you in your metre, instead of having to get
it entirely for yourself.
These are general considerations ; but there are also one
or two particular considerations which confirm me in the
opinion that for translating Homer into English verse the
hexameter should be used. The most successful attempt
hitherto made at rendering Homer into English, the
attempt in which Homer's general effect has been best
retained, is an attempt made in the hexameter measure.
It is a version of the famous lines in the third book of 4<
the Iliad, which end with that mention of Castor and
LECTURE ni 295
Pollux from which Mr. Ruskin extracts the sentimental
consolation already noticed by me. The author is the
accomplished Provost of Eton, Dr. Hawtrey ; and this
performance of his must be my excuse for having taken the
hberty to single him out for mention, as one of the natural
judges of a translation of Homer, along with Professor
Thompson and Professor Jowett, whose connection with
Greek Uterature is official. The passage is short ^ ; and
Dr. Hawtrey's version of it is suffused with a pensive
0 grace which is, perhaps, rather more Virgilian than Homeric;
still it is the one version of any part of the Iliad which in
^ So short, that I quote it entire :
Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-ey'd sons of Achaia ;
Known to me well are the faces of all ; their names I remember ;
Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders.
Castor fleet in the car, — Polydeukes brave with the cestus —
Own dear brethren of mine — one parent lov'd us as infants.
Are they not here in the host, from the shores of lov'd Lacedaemon,
Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound thro' the waters.
Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awaken'd 2
So said she ; — they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing,
There, in their own dear land, their Father-land, Lacedaemon.
English Hexameter Translations, London, 1847 ; p. 242.
I have changed Dr. Hawtrey's * Kastor,' * Lakedaimon,' back to
the familiar ' Castor,' ' Lacedemon,' in obedience to my own rule
that everything odd is to be avoided in rendering Homer, the most
natural and least odd of poets. I see Mr. Newman's critic in the
National Review urges our generation to bear with the unnatural effect
of these rewritten Greek names, in the hope that by this means the
effect of them may have to the next generation become natural. For
my part, I feel no disposition to pass all my own life in the wilderness
pi pedantry, in order that a posterity which I shall never see may one
day enter an orthographical Canaan ; and, after aU, the real question is
this — whether our living apprehension of the Greek world is more
checked by meeting in an English book about the Greeks, names not
spelt letter for letter as in the original Greek, or by meeting names
which make us rub our eyes and call out, ' How exceedingly odd I '
The Latin names of the Greek deities raise in most cases the idea of
quite distinct personages from the personages whose idea is raised by
the Greek names. Hera and Juno are actually, to every scholar's
imagination, two different peo]jle. So in all these cases the Latin
names must, at any inconvenience, be abandoned when we are dealing
with the Greek world. But I think it can be in the sensitive imagina-
tion of Mr. Grote only, that ' Thucydides ' raises the idea of a different
man from eovitvSlBiis.
296 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
some degree reproduces for me the original effecj; of Homer :
it is the best, and it is in hexameters. ^
This is one of the particular considerations that incline
me to prefer the hexameter, for translating Homer, to our
established metres. There is another. Most of you, prob-
ably, have some knowledge of a poem by Mr. Clough,
The, Bothie of Toper -na-fuosich, a long- vacation pastoral,
in hexameters. The general merits of that poem I am not
going to discuss : it is a serio-comic poem, and, therefore,
of essentially different nature from the Iliad. Still in two :
things it is, more than any other English poem which I can
call to mind, like the Iliad ; in the rapidity of its move-
ment, and the plainness and directness of its style. The
thought in this poem is often curious and subtle, and that
is not Homeric ; the diction is often grotesque, and that
is not Homeric. Still, by its rapidity of movement, and
plain and direct manner of presenting the thought however
curious in itself, this poem, which being as I say a serio-
comic poem has a right to be grotesque, is grotesque truly,
not, like Mr. Newman's version of the Iliad, falsely. Mr. i
Clough's odd epithets, ' The grave man nick-named Adam,'
' The hairy Aldrich,' and so on, grow vitally and appear
naturally in their place ; while Mr. Newman's ' dapper-
greav'd Achaians,' and ' motley-helmed Hector,' have all
the air of being mechanically elaborated and artificially
stuck in. Mr. Clough's hexameters are excessively, need-
lessly rough : still, owing to the native rapidity of this
measure, and to the directness of style which so well allies
itself with it, his composition produces a sense in the
reader which Homer's composition also produces, andj
which Homer's translator ought to reproduce — the sense
of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of
human life presented to him, instead of a small portion.
Mr. Clough's hexameters are, as I have just said, too
rough and irregular ; and indeed a good model, on any
considerable scale, of this metre, the English translator
will nowhere find. He must not follow the model offered
by Mr. Longfellow in his pleasing and popular poem of
Evangeline ; for the merit of the manner and movement
of Evangeline, when they are at their best, is to be tenderly j
elegant ; and their fault, when they are at their worst,
}
LECTURE m 297
is to be lumbering ; but Homer's defect is not lumbering-
ness, neither is tender elegance his excellence. The lumber-
ing effect of most English hexameters is caused by their
"being much too dactylic ; ^ the translator must learn to
use spondees freely. Mr. Clough has done this, but he has
noTsufficiently observed another rule which the translator
cannot follow too strictly ; and that is, to have no lines
which will not, as it is familiarly said,^^<i themselves,
T£Is~is of the last importance for rhythms with which the
.0 ear of the English pubUc is not thoroughly acquainted.
Lord Redesdale, in two papers on the subject of Greek
and Roman metres, has some good remarks on the out-
rageous disregard of q^uantity in which English verse,
trusting ^"^ its force of accent, is apt to indulge itself. The
pfedoniinance of accent in our language is so great, that it
would be pedantic not to avail oneself of it ; and Lord
Redesdale suggests rules which might easily be pushed too
far. Still, it is undeniable that in English hexameters we
generally force the quantity f ar^to^o mucli ; we rely on
0 justlflcatToh'^y accent with a security which is excessive.
But not only do we abuse accent by shortening long
syllables and lengthening short ones ; we perpetually
commit a far worse fault, by requiring the removal of the
accent from its natural place to an unnatural one, in order
^o^TTRCke^ our line scan. This is a fault, even when our
"Metre Ts one' which every English reader knows, and when
we can see what we want and can correct the rhythm
according to our wish ; although it is a fault which a great
master may sometimes commit knowingly to produce
0 a desired effect, as Milton changes the natural accent on
the word Tiresias in the line :
And Tiresias and Pliineus, prophets old ;
and then it ceases to be a fault, and becomes a beauty.
But it is a real fault, when Chapman has :
By him the golden-thron'd Queen slept, the Queen of Deities ;
^ For instance ; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr. Lockhart) of
Homer's description of the parting of Hector and Andromache, there
occurs, in the first five lines, but one spondee besrides the necessary
spondees in the sixth place : in the corresponding five lines of Homer
there occur ten. See English Hexameter Translations, 244.
298 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
for in this line, to make it scan, you have to take away the
accent from the word Queen, on which it naturally falls,
and to place it on thron'd, which would naturally be un-
accented ; and yet, after all, you get no peculiar effect or
beauty of cadence to reward you. It is a real fault, when
Mr. Newman has :
Infatuate ! oh that thou wert lord to some other army —
for here again the reader is required, not for any special
advantage to himself, but simply to save Mr. Newman
trouble, to place the accent on the insignificant word i(
wert, where it has no business whatever. But it is a still
greater fault, when Spenser has, (to take a striking in-
stance,)
Wot ye why his mother with a veil hath covered his face ?
for a hexameter ; because here not only is the reader
causelessly required to make havoc with the natural
accentuation of the line in order to get it to run as a hexa-
meter ; but also he, in nine cases out of ten, will be utterly
at a loss how to perform the process required, and the line
will remain a mere monster for him. I repeat, it is ad vis- 21
able to construct all verses so that by reading them natur-
ally— that is, according to the sense sf^d legitimate accent
"=^the reader gets the right rhythm ; but, for English
hexameters, that they be so constructed is indispensable.
If the hexameter best helps the translator to the Homeric
rapidity, what style may best help him to the Homeric
plainness and directness ? It is the merit of a metre
appropriate to your subject, that it in some degree suggests
and carries with itself a style appropriate to the subject ;
the elaborate and self -retarding style, which comes so a
naturally when your metre is the Miltonic blank verse,
does not come naturally with the hexameter ; is, indeed,
alien to it. On the other hand, the hexameter has a natural
dignity which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot
style, to both of which the ballad-measure so easily lends
itself. These are great advantages ; and perhaps it is
nearly enough to say to the translator who uses the hexa-
meter that he cannot too religiously follow, in style, the
inspiration of his metre. He will find that a loose and
LECTURE III 299
Jdiomatic grammar — a grammar which follows the essential
rather than the^orinal logic of the thought — allies itself
excellently with the hexameter ; and that, while this sort
of grammar ensures plainness and naturalness, it by no
Tneans^comes short in nobleness. It is difficult to pro-
"nounce certainly what is idiomatic in the ancient hterature
of a language which, though still spoken, has long since
entirely adopted, as modern Greek has adopted, modem
idioms. Still one may, I think, clearly perceive that
) Homer's grammatical style is idiomatic — that it may even
Be calleo, not improperly, a loose grammatical style.^
Examples, however, of what I mean by a loose grammatical
style, will be of more use to the translator if taken from
English poetry than if taken from Homer. I call it, then,
a loose and idiomatic grammar which Shakspeare uses in
the last line of the following three :
He 's here in double trust :
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed —
) or in this :
Wit, whither wilt ?
What Shakspeare mog/US is perfectly clear, clearer, prob-
ably, than if he had said it in a more formal and regular
maimer ; but his grammar is loose and idiomatic, because
he leaves out the subject of the verb ' wilt ' in the second
passage quoted, and because, in the first, a prodigious
addition to the sentence has to be, as we used to say in
our old Latin grammar days, understood^ before the word
' both ' can be properly parsed. So, again, Chapman's
D grammar is loose and idiomatic where he says : —
Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and he to field doth go —
because he leaves out, in the second clause, the relative
which in formal Avriting would be required. But Chapman
^ See for instance, in the Iliad, the loose contruction of oarf, xvii,
658 ; that of ihoiro, xvii, 681 ; that of oiVe, xviii, 209 ; and the
elliptical construction at xix, 42, 43 ; also the idiomatic construction of
«7a;y oSf ifopaax^iv, xix, 140. These instances are all taken within a
range of a thousand lines : any one may easily multiply them for
himself.
300 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
here does not lose dignity by this idiomatic way of ex-
pressing himself, any more than Shakspeare loses it by
neglecting to confer on ' both ' the blessings of a regular
government : neither loses dignity, but each gives that
impression of a plain, direct, and natural mode of speaking,
which Homer, too, gives, and which it is so important, as
I say, that Homer's translator should succeed in giving.
Cowper calls blank verse ' a style farther removed than
rhyme from the vernacular idiom, both in the language
itself and in the arrangement of it ; ' and just in propor-
tion as blank verse is removed from the vernacular idiom,
from that idiomatic style which is of all styles the plainest
and most natural, blank verse is unsuited to render Homer.
Shakspeare is not only idiomatic in his grammar or
style, he is also idiomatic in his words or diction ; and
here, too, his example is valuable for the translator of
Homer. The translator must not, indeed, allow himself
all the liberty that Shakspeare allows himself ; for
/^ Shakspeare sometimes uses expressions which pass per-
( fectly well as he uses them, because Shakspeare thinks
< so fast and so powerfully, that in reading him we are
borne over single words as by a mighty current ; but, if
our mind were less excited — and who may rely on exciting
our mind like Shakspeare ? — they would check us. 'To
grunt and sweat under a weary load ; ' — that does perfectly
well where it comes in Shakspeare ; but if the translator
of Homer, who will hardly have wound our minds up to
the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were
to employ, when he has to speak of one of Homer's heroes
under the load of calamity, this figure of ' grunting ' and
' sweating ' we should say. He, Newmanises, and his diction
would offend us. For he is to be noble ; and no plea of
wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from
being this : only, as he is to be also, like Homer, perfectly
simple and free from artificiahty, and as the use of idio-
matic expressions undoubtedly gives this effect,^ he should
* Our knowledge of Homer's Greek is hardly such as to enable us to
pronounce quite confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and what
is not, any more than in his grammar ; but I seem to myseli clearly to
recognise an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as roKvirivuv iro\€ycys,
xiv, 86 ; (pdos kv vqeaaiv Orjus, xvi, 94 ; nv* oioj dairaalus ovtcDk yOvo
L
LECTURE III 301
be as idiomatic as he can be without ceasing to be noble.
Therefore the Idiomatic language of Shakspeare — such
language as, ' prate of his whereabout ; ' ' jump the Ufe
to come ; ' ' the damnation of his taking-off ; ' * his quietus
make with a bare bodkin ' — should be carefully observed
by the translator of Homer, although in every case he will
have to decide for himself whether the use, by him, of
Shakspeare's liberty, will or will not clash with his in-
dispensable duty of nobleness. He will find one English
LO book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect
plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness ; and
that book is the Bible. No one could see this more clearly
than Pope saw it : ' This pure and noble simplicity,' he
says, ' is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture
and Homer ' : yet even with Pope a woman is a ' fair,'
a father is a ' sire,' and an old man a ' reverend sage,' and
so on through all the phrases of that pseudo-Augustan,
and most unbiblical, vocabulary. The Bible, however, is
undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator
10 of Homer ; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly
between what will suit him and what will not, the Bible
may afford him also invaluable lessons of style.
I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and
diction, was plarn^n the quahty of his thought. It is
possible that a thought may be expressed with idiomatic
plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain thought. For
example, in Mr. Clough's poem, already mentioned, the
style and diction is almost always idiomatic and plain, but
the thought itself is often of a quality which is not plain ;
» it is curious. But the grand instance of the union of
idiomatic expression with curious or difficult thought is
in Shakspeare's poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and
power of Shakspeare's idiomatic expression, that it gives
an effect of clearness and vividness even to a thought
which is imperfect and incoherent ; for instance, when
Hamlet says,
To take arms against a sea of troubles —
Kafxipeiv, xix, 71 ; K\oroir(veiv, xix, 149 ; and many others. The first-
quoted expression, roXvirevdv dpyaKtovs voKf/iovs, seems to me to have
just about the same degree of freedom as the * jump the life to come,'
or the ' shuffle off this mortal coil,' of Shakspeare.
302 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no
means runs on four legs ; but the thing is said so freely
and idiomatically, that it passes. This, however, is not
a point to which I now want to call your attention ; I want
you to remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that which
we may directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in
Shakspeare the thought is often, while most idiomatically
uttered, nay, while good and sound in itself, yet of a quality
which is curious and difficult ; and that this quality of
thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For example,
when Lady Macbeth says,
Memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only —
this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt ;
Mr. Knight even calls it a ' happy ' figure ; but it is a
difficult figure : Homer would not have used it. Again,
when Lady Macbeth says,
When you durst do it, then you were a man ;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man —
the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you
seize it, a perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought ; but
it is a curious thought : Homer would not have used it.
These are favourable instances of the union of plain style
and words with a thought not plain in quality ; but take
stronger instances of this union — let the thought be not
only not plain in quality, but highly fanciful ; and you
have the EHzabethan conceits ; you have, in spite of
idiomatic style and idiomatic diction, everything which is
most un-Homeric ; you have such atrocities as this of
Chapman :
Fate shall fail to vent her gall
Till mine vent thousands.
I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such
a conceit as that, must purify themselves seven times in
the fire before they can hope to render Homer. They
must expel their nature with a fork, and keep crjdng to
one another night and day : ' Homer not only moves
LECTURE III 303
rapidly, not only speaks idiomatically; he is^ also ^ free
Jrom fancifulness . '
So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness
and natm-alness of thought, that to the preservation of
this in his own version the translator must without scruple
sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original,
rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an
odd and unnatural effect. The double epithets so con-
stantly occurring in Homer must be dealt with according
loTo this rula : these epithets come quite naturally in Homer's
^poetry j^ in English poetry they, in nine cases out of ten,
cdme7 when literally rendered, quite unnaturally. I will
rKJtnr6w discuss why this is so, I assume it as an indis-
putable fact that it is so ; that Homer's fxepoTroiv dvOpM-n-wv
comes to the reader as something perfectly natural, while
l^Ir. Newman's ' voice-dividing mortals ' comes to him as
something perfectly unnatural. Well then, as it is Homer's
general effect which we are to reproduce, it is to be false
to Homer to be so verbally faithful to him as that we lose
20 this effect : and by the English translator Homer's double
epithets must be, in many places, renounced altogether ;
in all places where they are rendered, rendered by equiva-
lents which come naturally. Instead of rendering ©eVt
Tain;7r€7rX€ by Mr. Newman's ' Thetis trailing-rob'd,' which
brings to one's mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty
pavement, the translator must render the Greek by English
words which come as naturally to us as Milton's words
when he says, ' Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall
come sweeping by.' Instead of rendering /tcowxa? ittttov?
80 by Chapman's ' one-hoof 'd steeds,' or Mr. Newman's
' single-hoofed horses,' he must speak of horses in a way
which surprises us as little as Shakspeare surprises us
when he says, ' Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds.'
Listead of rendering /xcXir^Sca Ovfiov by ' life as honey
pleasant,' he must characterise Ufe with the simple pathos
of Gray's ' Warm precincts of the cheerful day/ Instead
of converting ttoiov a-e iTro<5 ffivycv €pKo<; oSovtwv; into the
portentous remonstrance, 'Betwixt the outwork of thy
teeth what word hath slipt ? * he must remonstrate in
40 English as straightforward as this of St. Peter, * Be it
far from thee, Lord, this shall not be unto thee ; * or as
304 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
this of the disciples, ' What is this that he saith, a Httie
while ? we cannot tell what he saith/ Homer's Greek,
in each of the places quoted, reads as naturally as any of
those English passages : the expression no more calls
away the attention from the sense in the Greek than in
the English. But when, in order to render literally in
/^English one of Homer's double epithets, a strange un-
\ familiar adjective is invented — such as ' voice-dividing^*
for fxipoif/^ — an improper share of the reader's attention
is necessarily diverted to this ancillary word, to this word i
which Homer never intended should receive so much
notice ; and a total effect quite different from Homer's is
- thus produced. Therefore Mr. Newman, though he does
not purposely import, Uke Chapman, conceits of his own
into the Iliad, does actually import them ; for the result of
his singular diction is to raise ideas, and odd ideas, not
raised by the corresponding diction in Homer ; and Chap-
man himself does no more. Cowper says, ' I have cautiously
avoided all terms of new invention, with an abundance of
which persons of more ingenuity than judgment have 2
not enriched our language but encumbered it ; ' and this
criticism so exactly hits the diction of Mr. Newman, that
one is irresistibly led to imagine his present appearance in
the flesh to be at least his second.
A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style,
diction, and quality of thought, without at the same time
having what is the result of these in Homer — nobleness.
Therefore I do not attempt to lay down any rules for
obtaining this effect of nobleness — the effect, too, of all
others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, 3
\ and which most depends on the individual personality of
the artist. So I proceed at once to give you, in conclusion,
one or two passages in which I have tried to follow those
principles of Homeric translation which 1 have laid down.
I give them, it must be remembered, not as specimens of
perfect translation, but as specimens of an attempt to
translate Homer on certain principles ; specimens which
may very aptly illustrate those principles by falling short,
as well as by succeeding.
I take first a passage of which I have already spoken, 4(
the comparison of the Trojan fires to the stars. The first
LECTURE m 305
part of that passage is, I have said, of splendid beauty ;
and to begin with a lame version of that, would be the
height of imprudence in me. It is the last and more level
part with which I shall concern myself. I have already
quoted Cowper's version of this part in order to show you
how unlike his stiff and Miltonic manner of telling a plain
story is to Homer's easy and rapid manner :
So numerous seem'd those fires the bank between
Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece,
In prospect all of Troy —
I need not continue to the end. I have also quoted Pope's
version of it, to show you how unlike his ornate and arti-
ficial manner is to Homer's plain and natural manner ;
So many flames before proud Hion blaze,
And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays ;
The long reflections of the distant fires
Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires —
and much more of the same kind. I want to show you
that it is possible, in a plain passage of this sort, to keep
Homer's simplicity without being heavy and dull ; and to
keep his dignity without bringing in pomp and ornament.
* As numerous as are the stars on a clear night,* says
Homer,
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus,
Between that and the ships, the Trojans' numerous fires.
In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires : by each one
There sate fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire :
By their chariots stood the steeds, and champ'd the white barley
While their masters sate by the fire, and waited for Morning. —
Here, in order to keep Homer's effect of perfect plainness
and directness, I repeat the word ' fires ' as he repeats Trvpa,
without scruple ; although in a more elaborate and literary
style of poetry this recurrence of the same word would be
a fault to be avoided. I omit the epithet of Morning, and,
whereas Homer says that the steeds ' waited for Morning,*
I prefer to attribute this expectation of Morning to the
master and not to the horse. Very likely in this particulai-,
as in any other single particular, I may be wrong : what
I wish you to remark is my endeavour after absolute
plainness of speech, my care to avoid anything which may
ABKOLO 2
306 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
the least check or surprise the reader, whom Homer does
not check or surprise. Homer's Hvely personal familiarity
with war, and with the war-horse as his master's com-
panion, is such that, as it seems to me, his attributing to
the one the other's feelings comes to us quite naturally ;
but, from a poet without this famiUarity, the attribution
strikes as a little unnatural ; and therefore, as everything
the least unnatural is un-Homeric, I avoid it.
Again ; in the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles,
Cowper has :
Jove saw their grief with pity, and his brows
Shaking, within himself thus, pensive, said.
' Ah hapless pair ! wherefore by gift divine
Were ye to Peleus given, a mortal king,
Yourselves immortal and from age exempt ? '
There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of
Chapman and Mr. Newman, which I have already quoted ;
but the v/hole effect is much too slow. Take Pope :
Nor Jove disdained to cast a pitying look
While thus relenting to the steeds he spoke.
' Unhappy coursers of immortal strain !
Exempt from age and deathless now in vain :
Did we your race on mortal man bestow
Only, alas ! to share in mortal woe ? '
Here there is no want either of dignity or rapidity, but all
is too artificial. ' Nor Jove disdained,' for instance, is
a very artificial and literary way of rendering Homer's
words, and so is, ' coursers of immortal strain.'
Mvpofiivo) S' dpa 70/ ye idwv^ kXirjai Kpoviojy —
And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing.
And he shook his head, and thus address' d his own bosom :
* Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you,
To a mortal ? but ye are without old age and immortal.
Was it that ye, with man, might have your thousands of sorrows ?
For than man, indeed, there breathes no wretcheder creature,
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving.'
Here I will observe that the use of * own,' in the second
line, for the last syllable of a dactyl, and the use of ' To a,*
in the fourth, for a complete spondee, though they do not,
I think, actually spoil the run of the hexameter, are yet
imdoubtedly instances of that over-rehance on accent, and
LECTURE III 307
too free disregard of quantity, which Lord Redesdale visits
with just reprehension.^
I now take two longer passages in order to try my
method more fully ; but I still keep to passages which
have already come under our notice. I quoted Chapman's
version of some passages in the speech of Hector at his
parting with Andromache. One astounding conceit will
probably still be in your remembrance :
When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of overthrow —
10 as a translation of 6t av iror 6\u>\y "IXios Iprj. I will quote
a few lines which may give you, also, the key-note to the
Anglo-Augustan manner of rendering this passage, and to
the Miltonic manner of rendering it. What Mr. Newman's
manner of rendering it would be, you can by this time
sufficiently imagine for yourselves. Mr. Wright — ^to quote
for once from his meritorious version instead of Cowper's,
whose strong and weak points are those of Mr. Wright also
— Mr. Wright begins his version of this passage thus :
All these thy anxious cares are also mine,
>0 Partner belov'd ; but how could I endure
The scorn of Trojans and their long-rob'd wives,
Should they behold their Hector shrink from war.
And act the coward's part 1 Nor doth my soul
Prompt the base thought.
^ It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard quantity too
much in constructing English hexameters, we also disregard accent too
much in reading Greek hexameters. We read every Greek dactyl so
as to make a pure dactyl of it ; but, to a Greek, the accent must have
hindered many dactyls from sounding as pure dactyls. When we read
at 6a OS i'n-Tros, for instance, or aiyiuxoio, the dactyl in each of these
cases is made by us as pure a dactyl as ' Tityre,' or ' dignity ' ; but
to a Greek it was not so. To him aldKos must have been nearly as im-
pure a dactyl as ' death-destined ' is to us ; and alyiux nearly as impure
as the ' dress' d his own ' of my text. Nor, I think, does this right
mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil the run of the Une as
a hexameter. The effect of atoXAos 'innos, (or something like that),
though not our effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the other hand,
Kopv6aiu\os as a paroxjrtonon, although it has the respectable authority
of Liddell and Scott's Lexicon, (following Heyne,) is certainly wrong ;
for then the word cannot be pronounced without throwing an accent on
the first syllable as well as the third, and fieyas KoppvOaioWos "Ektojp
would have been to a Greek as intolerable an ending for an hexameter
line, as 'accurst orphanhood-destined houses' would be to us. The
best authorities, accordingly, accent KopvBaioXos as a proparoxytonon.
X2
308 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
Ex pede Herculem : you see just what the manner is.
Mr. Sotheby, on the other hand, (to take a disciple of
Pope instead of Pope himself,) begins thus :
' What moves thee, moves my mind,' brave Hector said,
' Yet Troy's upbraiding scorn I deeply dread.
If, like a slave, where chiefs with chiefs engage,
The warrior Hector fears the war to wage.
Not thus my heart inclines.'
From that specimen, too, you can easily divine what, with
such a manner, will become of the whole passage. But ii
Homer has neither :
What moves thee, moves my mind —
nor has ho :
All these thy anxious cares are also mine.
*H KOI kfJiol rdSe wdvTa fie'Aet, yvvai' dKXoL fxdk' atVcDs —
that is what Homer has, that is his style and movement, if
one could but catch it. Andromache, as you know, has
been entreating Hector to defend Troy from within the
walls, instead of exposing his life, and, with his own life,
the safety of all those dearest to him, by fighting in the 21
open plain. Hector replies :
Woman, I too take thought for this ; but then I bethink me
What the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur,
If like a coward I skulk' d behind, apart from the battle.
Nor would my own heart let me ; my heart, which has bid me be valiant
Always, and always fighting among the first of the Trojans,
Busy for Priam's fame and my own, in spite of the future.
For that day will come, my soul is assur'd of its coming,
It will come, when sacred Troy shall go to destruction,
Troy, and warlike Priam too, and the people of Priam. 31
And yet not that grief, which then will be, of the Trojans,
Moves me so much — not Hecuba's grief, nor Priam my father's.
Nor my brethren's, many and brave, who then will be lying
In the bloody dust, beneath the feet of their foemen —
As thy grief, when, in tears, some brazen-coated Achaian
Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended.
Then, perhaps, thou shalt work at the loom of another, in Argos,
Or bear pails to the well of Messeis, or Hypereia,
Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity's order.
And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling : 4(
See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain
Of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city.
LECTURE III 309
So some man will say ; and then thy grief will redouble
At thy want of a man like me; to save thee from bondage.
But let me be dead, and the earth be mounded above me,
Ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity told of.
The main question, whether or no this version repro-
duces for him the movement and general effect of Homer
better than other versions ^ of the same passage, I leave
for the judgment of the scholar. But the particular
points, in which the operation of my own rules is mani-
10 fested, are as follows. In the second line I leave out the
epithet of the Trojan women cAKco-tTreVAovs, altogether. In
the sixth Une I put in five words 'in spite of the future,'
which are in the original by implication only, and are not
there actually expressed. This I do, because Homer, as
I have before said, is so remote from one who reads him
in English, that the English translator must be even
plainer, if possible, and more unambiguous than Homer
himself ; the connexion of meaning must be even more
distinctly marked in the translation than in the original.
20 For in the Greek language itself there is something which
brings one nearer to Homer, which gives one a clue to his
thought, which makes a hint enough ; but in the English
language this sense of nearness, this clue, is gone ; hints
are insufficient, everything must be stated with full dis-
tinctness. In the ninth line Homer's epithet for Priam is
cv/A/AcAtw, — ' armed with good ashen spear,' say the dic-
tionaries ; ' ashen-speared,' translates Mr. Newman, follow-
ing his own rule to ' retain every pecuUarity of his original *
— I say, on the other hand, that ivfi/xeXtto has not the
80 effect of a ' peculiarity ' in the original, while ' ashen-
speared ' has the effect of a ' peculiarity ' in English ; and
' warUke ' is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for
cv/xyaeXto), for fear of disturbing the balance of expres-
sion in Homer's sentence. In the fourteenth line, again,
I translate x^'^'^'^X^'^^^^^*' ^Y ' brazen-coated : ' Mr.
Newman, meaning to be perfectly literal, translates it by
' brazen-cloak'd,' an expression which comes to the reader
oddly and unnaturally, while Homer's word comes to him
quite naturally ; but I venture to go as near to a literal
^ Dr. Hawtrey also has translated this passage ; but here, he haa not,
I think, been so successful as in his ' Helen on the walls of Troy.'
310 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
rendering as * brazen-coated/ because a ' coat of brass ' is
familiar to us all from the Bible, and familiar, too, as
distinctly specified in connexion with the wearer. Finally,
let me farther illustrate from the twentieth line the value
which I attach, in a question of diction, to the authority
of the Bible. The word ' pre-eminent ' occurs in that line ;
I was a little in doubt whether that was not too bookish
an expression to be used in rendering Homer, as I can
imagine Mr. Newman to have been a little in doubt whether
his ' responsively accosted,' for d/xci^o/xcvos irpoa-icfir}, was i
not too bookish an expression. Let us both, I say, consult
our Bibles : Mr. Newman will nowhere find it in his Bible
that David, for instance, ' responsively accosted Goliath ; '
but I do find in mine that ' the right hand of the Lord
hath the pre-eminence ; ' and forthwith I use ' pre-eminent '
without scruple. My Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive ;
and no doubt a true poetic feeling is the Homeric trans-
lator's best guide in the use of words ; but where this
feeling does not exist, or is at fault, I think he cannot do
better than take for a mechanical guide Cruden's Con- i
cordance. To be sure, here as elsewhere, the consulter
must know how to consult — must know how very slight
a variation of word or circumstance makes the difference
between an authority in his favour, and an authority
which gives him no countenance at all ; for instance, the
' Great simpleton ! ' (for fxiya vrj-n-Lo^) of Mr. Newman,
and the ' Thou fool ! ' of the Bible, are something ahke ;
but * Thou fool ! ' is very grand, and ' Great simpleton ! '
is an atrocity. So, too, Chapman's ' Poor wretched beasts *
is pitched many degrees too low ; but Shakspeare's ' Poor a
venomous fool. Be angry and despatch ! ' is in the grand style.
One more piece of translation, and I have done. I will
take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr. Newman
have already so much excited our astonishment, the
passage at. the end of the nineteenth book of the Iliady
the dialogue between Achilles and his horse Xanthus, after
the death of Patroclus. Achilles begins :
* Xanthus and Balius both, ye far-fam'd seed of Podarga !
See that ye bring your master home to the host of the Argives
In some other sort than your last, when the battle is ended ; 4i
And not leave him behind, a corpse on the plain, like Patroclus.'
LECTURE III 311
Then, from beneath the yoke, the fleet horse Xanthus address'd him :
Sudden he bow'd his head, and all his mane, as he bow'd it,
Stream'd to the ground by the yoke, escaping from under the collar ;
And he was given a voice by the white -arm' d Goddess Hera.
' Truly, yet tliis time will we save thee, mighty Achilles !
But thy day of death is at hand ; nor shall we be the reason —
No, but the will of Heaven, and Fate's invincible power.
For by no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours
Did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms from Patroclus ;
) But that prince among Gods, the son of the lovely-hair'd Leto,
Slew him fighting in front of the fray, and glorified Hector.
But, for us, we vie in speed with the breath of the West-Wind,
Which, men say, is the fleetest of winds ; 'tis thou who art fated
To lie low in death, by the hand of a God and a Mortal.'
Thus far he ; and here his voice was stopped by the Furies.
Then, with a troubled heart, the swift Achilles address'd him :
' Why dost thou prophesy so my death to me, Xanthus ? It needs
not.
I of myself know well, that here I am destin'd to perish,
9 Far from my father and mother dear : for all that, I will not
Stay this hand from fight, till the Trojans are utterly routed.'
So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle.
Here the only particular remark which I will make is,
that in the fourth and eighth line the grammar is what I call
a loose and idiomatic grammar ; in writing a regular and
hterary style, one would in the fourth line have to repeat,
before ' leave ', the words ' that ye ' from the second line,
and to insert the word ' do ' ; and in the eighth line one
would not use such an expression as ' he was given a voice.'
0 But I will make one general remark on the character of my
own translations, as I have made so many on that of
the translations of others. It is, that over the graver
passages there is shed an air somewhat too strenuous and
severe, by comparison with that lovely ease and sweetness
which Homer, for all his noble and masculine way of
thinking, never loses.
Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that
,the task of translating Homer into EngUsh verse both will
be re-attempted, and may be re-attempted successfully.
« There are great works composed of parts so disparate, that
one translator is not likely to have the requisite gifts for
poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works
of Shakspeare, and Goethe's Faust ; and these it is best to
attempt to render in prose only. People praise Tieck and
312 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
Schlegel's version of Shakspeare : I, for my part, would
sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation,
and that is saying a great deal ; but in the German poets'
hands Shakspeare so often gets, especially where he is
humorous, an air of what the French call niaiserie ! and
can anything be more un-Shakspearian than that ? Again ;
Mr. Hayward's prose translation of the first part of Faust —
so good that it makes one regret Mr. Hay ward should have
abandoned the line of translation for a kind of Uterature
which is, to say the least, somewhat slight — is not Hkely
to be surpassed by any translation in verse. But poems
like the Iliad, which, in the main, are in one manner, may
hope to find a poetical translator so gifted and so trained as
to be able to learn that one manner, and to reproduce it.
Only, the poet who would reproduce this must cultivate in
himself a Greek virtue by no means common among the
modems in general, and the English in particular — modera-
tion. For Homer has not only the English vigour, he has
the Greek grace ; and when one observes the boisterous,
rollicking way in which his English admirers — even men
of genius, like the late Professor Wilson — love to talk of
Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feehng that there
is no very deep communitj^ of nature between them and
the object of their enthusiasm. ' It is very well, my good
friends,' I always imagine Homer saying to them, 2 he
could hear them : ' you do me a great deal of honour, but
somehow or other you praise me too like barbarians.' For
Homer's grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur
of the great poets of the north, of the authors "of Othello
and Faust ; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly
his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of
our ruder climates ; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an
Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.
HOMERIC TRANSLATION IN
THEORY AND PRACTICE
A REPLY TO MATTHEW ARNOLD, ESQ.
PROFESSOR OF POETRY, OXFORD
BY FRANCIS W. NEWMAN
A TRANSLATOR OF THE ILIAD
HOMERIC TRANSLATION IN THEORY
AND PRACTICE
It is so difficult, amid the press of literature, for a mere
versifier and translator to gain notice at all, that an assailant
may even do one a service, if he so conduct his assault as to
enable the reader to sit in intelligent judgment on the
merits of the book assailed. But when the critic deals out
to the readers only so much knowledge as may propagate
his own contempt of the book, he has undoubtedly immense
power to dissuade them from wishing to open it. Mr.
Arnold writes as openly aiming at this end. He begins by
) complimenting me, as ' a man of great ability and genuine
learning ; ' but on questions of learning, as well as of taste,
he puts me down as bluntly, as if he had meant, ' a man
totally void both of learning and of sagacity.' He again and
again takes for granted that he has ' the scholar ' on his
side, ' the Uving scholar,* the man who has learning and
taste without pedantry. He bids me please ' the scholars,'
and go to ' the scholars' tribunal ; ' and does not know
that I did this, to the extent of my opportunity, before
committing myself to a laborious, expensive and perhaps
Q thankless task. Of course he cannot guess, what is the fact,
that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judgment
which I think far more mascuHne than Mr. Arnold's, have
passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of
my translation. I at this moment count eight such names,
though of course I must not here adduce them : nor will
I further allude to it, than to say, that I have no such sense
either of pride or of despondency, as those are Hable to,
who are consciously isolated in their taste.
Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the
D educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge ;
and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars collectively have
no right, and much less have single scholars, to pronounce
a final sentence on questions of taste in their court. Where
316 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
I differ in Taste from Mr. Arnold, it is very difficult to find
* the scholars' tribunal,' even if I acknowledged its absolute
jurisdiction : but as regards Erudition, this difficulty does
not occur, and I shall fully reply to the numerous dog-
matisms by which he settles the case against me.
But I must first avow to the reader my own moderate
pretensions. Mr. Arnold begins by instilling two errors
which he does not commit himself to assert. He says that
my work will not take rank as the standard translation of
Homer, but other translations will be made : — as if I thought
otherwise ! If I have set the example of the right direction
in which translators ought to aim, of course those who
follow me will improve upon me and supersede me. A man
would be rash indeed to withhold his version of a poem of
fifteen thousand lines, until he had, to his best ability,
imparted to them all their final perfection. He might spend
the leisure of his life upon it. He would possibly be in his
grave before it could see the light. If it then were pubHshed,
and it was founded on any new principle, there would be no
one to defend it from the attacks of ignorance and prejudice.
In the nature of the case, his wisdom is to elaborate in the
first instance all the high and noble parts carefully, and get
through the inferior parts somehow ; leaving of necessity
very much to be done in successive editions, if possibly it
please general taste sufficiently to reach them. A generous
and intelligent critic will test such a work mainly or solely
by the most noble parts, and as to the rest, will consider
whether the metre and style adapts itself naturally to them
also.
Next, Mr. Arnold asks, ' Who is to assure Mr. Newman,
that when he has tried to retain every peculiarity of his
original, he has done that for which Mr. Newman enjoins
this to be done, — adhered closely to Homer's manner and
habit of thought ? Evidently the translator needs more
practical directions than these.' The tendency of this is,
to suggest to the reader that I am not aware of the difficulty
of rightly applying good principles ; whereas I have in this
very connexion said expressly, that even when a translator
has got right principles, he is liable to go wrong in the detail
of their application. This is as true of all the principles .
which Mr. iirnold can possibly give, as of those which I have
HOW TO CRITICIZE IT 317
given ; nor do I for a moment assume, that in ^'riting
fifteen thousand lines of verse I have not made hundreds
of blots.
At the same time Mr. Arnold has overlooked the point of
my remark. Nearly every translator before me has know-
«"l7?y» purposely, habitually shrunk from Homer's thoughts
and Homer's manner. The reader will afterwards see
whether Mr. Arnold does not justify them in their course.
It is not for those who are purposely unfaithful to taunt me
) with the difficulty of being truly faithful.
I have alleged, and, against Mr. Arnold's flat denial,
I deliberately repeat, that Homer rises and sinks with his
subject, and is often homely or prosaic. I have professed
as my principle, to follow my original in this matter. It is
unfair to expect of me grandeur in trivial passages. If in
any place where Homer is confessedly grand and noble,
I have marred and ruined his greatness, let me be reproved.
But I shall have occasion to protest, that Stateliness is not
Grandeur, Picturesqueness is not Stately, Wild Beauty is
) not to be confounded with Elegance : a Forest has its
swamps and brushwood, as well as its tall trees.
The duty of one who pMishes his censures on me is, to
select noble, greatly admired passages, and confront me both
with a prose translation of the original (for the public cannot
go to the Greek) and also with that which he judges to be
a more successful version than mine. Translation being
matter of compromise, and being certain to fall below the
original, when this is of the highest type of grandeur ; the
question is not. What translator is perfect ? but, Who is
) least imperfect ? Hence the only fair test is by comparison,
when comparison is possible. But Mr. Arnold has not put
me to this test. He has quoted two very short passages,
and various single Hues, half lines and single words, from
me ; and chooses to tell his readers that I ruin Homer's
\ nobleness, when (if his censure is just) he might make
I them feel it by quoting me upon the most admired pieces.
Now with the warmest sincerity I say, — If any English
reader, after perusing my version of four or five eminently
noble passages of sufficient length, side by side with those
0 of other translators, and (better still) with a prose version
also, finds in them high qualities which I have destroyed ;
318 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
I am foremost to advise him to shut my book, or to consult
it only (as Mr. Arnold suggests) as a schoolboy's ' help to
construe,' if such it can be. My sole object is, to bring
Homer before the unlearned public : I seek no self-
glorification : the sooner I am superseded by a really
better translation, the greater will be my pleasure.
It was not until I more closely read Mr. Arnold's own
versions, that I understood how necessary is his repugnance
to mine. I am unwilling to speak of his metrical efforts.
I shall not say more than my argument strictly demands. ]
It here suffices to state the simple fact, that for awhile
I seriously doubted whether he meant his first specimen for
metre at all. He seems distinctly to say, he is going to
give us English Hexameters ; but it was long before I could
believe that he had written the following for that metre : —
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus,
Between that and the ships, the Trojans' numerous fires.
In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires : by each one
There sate fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire.
By their chariots stood the steeds, and champ'd the white barley, i
While their masters sate by the fire, and waited for Morning.
I sincerely thought, this was meant for prose ; at length
the two last lines opened my eyes. He does mean them for
Hexameters ! Tire ' (=feuer) with him is a spondee or
trochee. The first line, I now see, begins with three
(quantitative) spondees, and is meant to be spondaic in the
fifth foot. ' Bed of. Between, In the,' — are meant for
spondees ! So are ' There sate,' ' By their ' ; though ' Troy,
by the ' was a dactyl. ' Champ'd the white ' is a dactyl.
— My ' metrical exploits ' amaze Mr. Arnold (p. 258) ; but i
my courage is timidity itself compared to his.
His second specimen stands thus : —
And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing.
And he shook his head, and thus address' d his own bosom :
Ah, unhappy pair ! to Peleus why did we give you,
To a mortal ? but ye are without old age and immortal.
Was it that ye with man, might have your thousands of sorrows ?
For than man indeed there breathes no wretcheder creature,
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving.
Upon this he apologizes for 'To a,' intended as a spondee 4
in the fourth line, and ' -dress'd his own ' for a dactyl in the
MR. ARNOLD'S HEXAMETERS 319
second ; liberties which, he admits, go rather far, but ' do
not actually spoil the run of the hexameter.' In a note, he
attempts to palliate his deeds by recriminating on Homer,
though he will not allow to me the same excuse. The
accent (it seems) on the second syllable of atdAos makes
it as impure a dactyl to a Greek as ' death-destin'd ' is to
us ! Mr. Arnold's erudition in Greek metres is very curious,
if he can establish that they take any cognizance at all of
the prose accent, or that atoAos is quantitatively more or
LO less of a dactyl, according as the prose accent is on one or
other syllable. His ear also must be of a very unusual
kind, if it makes out that ' death-destin'd ' is anything but
a downright Molossus. Write it dethdestind, as it is pro-
nounced, and the eye, equally with the ear, decides it to be
of the same type as the word persistunt.
In the Knes just quoted, most readers will be slow to
believe, that they have to place an impetus of the voice (an
ictus metricus at least) on Between, In' the. There sate, By'
their, A'nd with, A'nd he. To a. For than, O'f all. Here,
20 in the course of thirteen lines, composed as a specimen of
style, is found the same o£fence nine times repeated, to say
nothing here of other deformities. Now contrast Mr.
Arnold's severity against me,^ p. 298 : ' It is a real fault
when Mr. Newman has :
Infiituate ! oh that thou wert | lord to some other army —
for here the reader is required, not for any special advantage
to himself, but simply to save Mr. Nevmian trouble, to place
the accent on the insignificant word wert, where it has no
business whatever.' Thus to the flaw which Mr. Arnold
80 admits nine times in thirteen pattern Unes, he shows no
mercy in me, who have toiled through fifteen thousand.
Besides, on wert we are free at pleasure to place or not to
place the accent ; but in Mr. Arnold's Between^ To a, etc.,
it is impossible or offensive.
To avoid a needlessly personal argument, I enlarge on
the general question of hexameters. Others, scholars of
repute, have given example and authority to EngUsh hexa-
^ He attacks the same line also in p. 271 ; but I do not claim this as
a mark, how free I am from the fault.
320 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
meters. A3 matter of curiosity, as erudite sport, such
experiments may have their value. I do not mean to express
indiscriminate disapproval, much less contempt. I have
myself privately tried the same in Alcaics ; and find the
chief objection to be, not that the task is impossible, but
that to execute it well is too diihcult for a language like ours,
overladen with consonants, and abounding with syllables
neither distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every
intermediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to
keep even Greek or Roman poetry to true time ; to the 1
English language it is of tenfold necessity. But if time is
abandoned, (as in fact it always is,) and the prose accent has
to do duty for the ictus metricus, the moral genius of the
metre is fundamentally subverted. What previously was
steady duplicate time (' march-time,' as Professor Blackie
calls it) vacillates between duplicate and triplica^te. With
Homer, a dactyl had nothing in it more tripping than a
spondee : a crotchet followed by two quavers belongs to as
grave an anthem as two crotchets. But Mr. Arnold himself
(p. 277) calls the introduction of anapaests by Dr. Maginn 2
into our ballad measure, ' a detestable dance : ' as in ;
And scarcely had she bugiin to wash,
Ere she was aware of the grisly gash.
I will not assert that this is everjrvvhere improper in the
Odyssey ; but no part of the Iliad occurs to me in which
it is proper, and I have totally excluded it in my own
practice. I notice it but once in Mr. Gladstone's specimens,
and it certainly offends my taste as out of harmony with
the gravity of the rest, viz.
My ships shall bound in the morning's light. 3
In Shakspeare we have i'th' and o'th' for monosyllables, but
(so scrupulous am I in the midst of my ' atrocities ') I
never dream of such a liberty myself, much less of avowed
' anapaests.' So far do I go in the opposite direction, as to
prefer to make such words as Danai, victory three syllables,
which even Mr. Gladstone and Pope accept as dissyllabic.
Some reviewers have called my metre lege solutum ; which
is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning
Pindar. That, in passing. But surely Mr. Arnold's severe
THE JIG OF HEXAMETERS 321
blow at Dr. Maginn rebounds with double force upon him-
self.
To P^leus why' did w^ give you ? —
Hecuba's gri6f nor Prfam my father's —
Thousands of sorrows —
cannot be a less detestable jig than that of Dr. Maginn.
And this objection holds against every accentual hexameter,
even to those of Longfellow or Lockhart, if applied to grand
poetry. For bombast, in a wild whimsical poem, Mr.
I Clough has proved it to be highly appropriate ; and I
think, the more ' rollicking ' is ^Ir. Clough (if only I under-
stand the word), the more successful his metre. Mr. Arnold
himself feels what I say against ' dactyls,' for on this very
ground he advises largely superseding them by spondees ;
and since what he calls a spondee is any pair of syllables of
which the former is accentuable, his precept amounts to
this, that the hexameter be converted into a line of six
accentual trochees, with free liberty left of diversifying it, in
any foot except the last, by Dr. Maginn's ' detestable
\ dance.' What more severe condemnation of the metre is
imaginable than this mere description gives ? ' Six trochees '
seems to me the worst possible foundation for an English
metre. I cannot imagine that Mr. Arnold will give the
slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me ; but I do
advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba,
Kehama, and Shelley's works, for the phenomenon.
I have elsewhere insisted, but I -here repeat, that for
a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is most un-
natural and vexatious in English, because so large a number
\ of our sentences begin with unaccented syllables, and the
vigour of a trochaic line eminently depends on the purity of
its initial trochee. Mr. Arnold's feeble trochees already
quoted (from Between to To a) are all the fatal result of
defying the tendencies of our language.
If by happy combination any scholar could compose fifty
such English hexameters, as would convey a living likeness
of the Virgilian metre, I should applaud it as valuable for
initiating schoolboys into that metre : but there its utility
would end. The method could not be profitably used for
) translating Homer or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible
to say for whose service such a translation would be executed.
322 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
Those who can read the original will never care to read
through any translation ; and the unlearned look on all,
even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart,
or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr. Arnold
deprecates appeal to popular taste : well he may ! yet if the
unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them.
I myself, before venturing to print, sought to ascertain
how unlearned women and children would accept my verses.
I could boast how children and half-educated women have
extolled them ; how greedily a working man has inquired
for them, without knowing who was the translator ; but
I well know that this is quite insufficient to establish the
merits of a translation. It is nevertheless one point.
' Homer is popular,' is one of the very few matters of fact
in this controversy on which Mr. Arnold and I are agreed.
* English hexameters are not popular,' is a truth so obvious,
that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore,
' Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer.'
Q. E. D.
I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars who
pertinaciously adhere to the notion that English hexa-
meters have something ' epical ' in them, have no vivid
feeling of the difference between Accent and Quantity :
and this is the less wonderful, since so very few persons
have ever actually heard quantitative verse. I have ; by
listening to Hungarian poems, read to me by my friend
Mr. Francis Pulszky, a native Magyar. He had not finished
a single page, before I complained gravely of the monotony.
He replied : ' So do we complain of it : ' and then showed
me, by turning the pages, that the poet cut the knot which he
could not untie, by frequent changes of his metre. Whether
it was a change of mere length, as from Iambic senarian to
Iambic dimeter ; or implied a fundamental change of time,
as in music from common to minuet time ; — I cannot say.
But, to my ear, nothing but a tune can ever save a quantita-
tive metre from hideous monotony. It is like strumming
a piece of very simple music on a single note. Nor only so ;
but the most beautiful of anthems, after it has been re-
peated a hundred times on a hundred successive verses,
begins to pall on the ear. How much more would an entire
book of Homer, if chanted at one sitting ! I have the con-
THE HOMERIC ACCENT 323
viction, though I will not undertake to impart it to another,
that if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they
would at first move in us the same pleasing interest as an
elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold
Coast ; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should
complain of meagreness, sameness, and loss of moral ex-
pression ; and should judge the style to be as inferior to
our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our
third-rate modern music. But if the poet, at our request,
10 instead of singing the verses, read or spoke them, then
from the loss of well marked time and the ascendency re-
assumed by the prose-accent, we should be as helplessly
unable to hear any metre in them, as are the modern Greeks.
I expect that Mr. Arnold will reply to this, that he reads
and does not sing Homer, and yet he finds his verses to be
melodious and not monotonous. To this, I retort, that he
begins by wilfully pronouncing Greek falsely, according to
the laws of Latin accent, and artificially assimilating the
Homeric to the Virgilian line. Virgil has compromised
'0 between the ictus metricus and the prose accent, by exacting
that the two coincide in the two last feet and generally for-
bidding it in the second and third foot. What is called the
* feminine caesura ' gives (in the Latin language) coincidence
on the third foot. Our extreme familiarity with these laws
of compromise enables us to anticipate recurring sounds
and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose accent, by reason
of oxytons and paroxytons, and accent on the antepenultima
in spite of a long penultima, totally resists all such com-
promise ; and proves that particular form of melody, which
10 our scholars enjoy in Homer, to be an unhistoric imitation
of Virgil.
I am aware, there is a bold theory, whispered if not pub-
lished, that, — so out-and-out ^olian was Homer, — his laws
of accent must have been almost Latin. According to this,
Erasmus, following the track of Virgil blindly, has taught us
to pronounce Euripides and Plato ridiculously ill, but
Homer with an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus
to shame. This is no place for discussing so difficult a
question. Suffice it to say, firsts that Mr. Arnold cannot
0 take refuge in such a theory, since he does not admit that
Homer was antiquated to Euripides ; next, that admitting
Y2
324 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
the theory to him, still the loss of the Digamma destroys to
him the true rhythm of Homer. I shall recur to both
questions below. I here add, that our English pronuncia-
tion even of Virgil often so ruins Virgil's own quantities, that
there is something either of delusion or of pedantry in our
scholars' self-complacency in the rhythm which they elicit.
I think it fortunate for Mr. Arnold, that he had not
* courage to translate Homer ; ' for he must have failed
to make it acceptable to the unlearned. But if the public
ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr. Arnold assumes) ' the i
scholar ' is with him in this whole controversy. Nevertheless
it gradually comes out that neither is this the case, but he
himself is in the minority. P. 312, he writes : ' When one
observes the boisterous rollicking way in which Homer's
Ei^Hsh admirers — even men of genius, like the late Pro-
fessor Wilson — love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one
cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community
of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm.'
It does not occur to Mr. Arnold that the defect of perception
lies with himself, and that Homer has more sides than he has 2
discovered. He deplores that Dr. Maginn, and others whom
he names, err with me, in believing that our baUad-style is
the nearest approximation to that of Homer; and avows
that ' it is time to say plainly ' (p. 272) that Homer is not of
the ballad-type. So in p. 271, ' — this popular, but, it is time
to say, this erroneous analogy ' between the ballad and
Homer. Since it is reserved for Mr. Arnold to turn the tide
of opinion ; since it is a task not yet achieved, but remains
to be a(ihieved by his authoritative enunciation ; he con-
fesses that hitherto I have with me the suffrage of scholars. 3(
With this confession, a little more diffidence would be
becoming, if diffidence were possible to the fanaticism with
which he idolizes hexameters. P. 298, he says : ' The
hexameter has a natural dignity, which repels both the
jaunty style and the jog-trot style, &c. . . . The translator
who uses it cannot too religiously follow the inspiration of
HIS METRE,' &c. Inspiration from a metre which has no
recognised type ? from a metre which the heart and soul
of the nation ignores ? I believe, if the metre can inspire
anjrthing, it is to frolic and gambol with Mr. Clougli. 4(
Mr. Arnold's English hexameter cannot be a higher in-
EPIC AND BALLAD 325
spiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek :
yet that metre inspired strains of totally different essential
genius and merit.
But I claim Mr. Arnold himself as confessing that our
ballad metre is epical, when he says that Scott is ' hasiard-
epic' I do not admit that his quotations from Scott are at
all Scott's best, nor anything like it ; but if they were, it
would only prove something against Scott's genius or talent,
■ nothing about his metre. The Kx'Trpia t-rr-q or 'lAtou Trcpo-ts were
Lo probably very inferior to the Iliad ; but no one would on
that account call them or the Frogs and Mice bastard-epic.
No one would call a bad tale of Dryden or of Crabbe bastard-
epic. The application of the word to Scott virtually con-
cedes what I assert. Mr. Arnold also calls Macaulay's
ballads ' pinchbeck ; ' but a man needs to produce some-
thing very noble himself, before he can afford thus to sneer
at Macaulay's ' Lars Porsena.'
Before I enter on my own ' metrical exploits,' I must get
JO rid of a disagreeable topic. Mr. Arnold's repugnance to them
has led him into forms of attack, which I do not know hov/
to characterize. I shall state my complaints as concisely as
I can, and so leave them.
1. I do not seek for any similarity of sound in an English
accentual metre to that of a Greek quantitative metre ;
besides that Homer writes in a highly vocalized tongue,
while ours is overfilled with consonants. I have disowned
this notion of similar rhythm in the strongest terms (p. xvii
of my Preface), expressly because some critics had imputed
this aim to me in the case of Horace. I summed up : 'It
80 is not audible sameness of metre, but a likeness of moral
frcnius which is to be aimed at.' I contrast the audible to
the moral. Mr. Arnold suppresses this contrast, and writes
as follows, p. 265. ' Mr. Newman tells us that he has found
a metre like in moral genius to Homer's. His judge has still
the same answer : *' reproduce then on our ear something
of the effect produced Jby the movement of Homer." ' He
recurs to the same fallacy in p. 279. ' For whose ear do
those two rhythms produce impressions of {to use Mr. New-
man's own words) "similar moral genius " ? ' His reader
10 will naturally suppose that ' like in moral genius ' is with
me an eccentric phrase for * like in musical cadence/ The
323 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
only likeness to the ear which I have admitted, is, that the
one and the other are primitively made for ynusic. That,
Mr. Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad be
well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold the rhythm
of our metre to be necessarily inferior to Homer's and to his
own ; but when I fully explained in my preface what were
my tests of * like moral genius,' I cannot understand his
suppressing them, and perverting the sense of my words.
2. In p. 275, Mr. Arnold quotes Chapman's translation
of tt SeiXoj, ' Poor wretched beasts ' (of Achilles' horses), on k
which he comments severely. He does not quote me.
Yet in p. 306, after exhibiting Cowper's translation of the
same passage, he adds : ' There is no want of dignity here,
as in the versions of Chapman and of Mr. Newman, which
I have already quoted.' Thus he leads the reader to believe
that I have the same phrase as Chapman ! In fact, my
translation is :
Ha ! why on Peleus, mortal prince.
Bestowed we you, unhappy !
If he had done me the justice of quoting, it is possible that 2<
some readers would not have thought my rendering intrin-
sically ' wanting in dignity,' or less noble than Mr. Arnold's
own, which is :
Ah ! unhappy pair ! to Pelous ^ why did we give you,
To a mortal ?
In p. 276, he with very gratuitous insult remarks, that
*' Poor wretched beasts " is a little overfamiliar ; but this is
no objection to it for the ballad-manner : ^ it is good enough
. . . for Mr. Newman's Iliad, . . . &c.' Yet I myself have
not thought it good enough for my Ihad. ^'
3. In p. 310, Mr. Arnold gives his own translation of the
discourse between Achilles and his horse ; and prefaces it
with the words, ' I will take the passage in which both
Chapman and Mr. Newman have already so much excited our
^ If I had used such a double dative, as ' to Peleus to a mortal,' what
would he have said of my syntax ?
^ Ballad-wawner ./ The prevalent ballad-mefre is the Common Metre
of our Psalm tunes : and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metro
must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our existing
old ballads are ' poor and mean,' and are not my pattern.
DELUSIVE QUOTATION 327
astonisliment.'' But he did not quote my translation of the
noble part of the passage, consisting of 19 lines ; he has
merely quoted ^ the tail of it, 5 lines ; which are altogether
inferior. Of this a sufficient indication is, that Mr. Gladstone
has translated the 19 and omitted the 5. I shall below give
my translation parallel to JVIr. Gladstone's. The curious
reader may compare it with Mr. Arnold's, if he choose.
4. In p. 307, Mr. Arnold quotes from Chapman as a trans-
lation of OTttV TTOT 6X(i)X.r} "lAlOS ip77,
I When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of overthrow ;
and adds : ' What Mr. Newman's manner of rendering
would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for
yourselves.' Would be! Why does he set his readers to
* imagine,' when in fewer words he could tell them what
my version is ? It stands thus :
A day, when sacred Ilium | for overthrow is destin'd, —
which may have faults unperceived by me, but is in my
opinion far better than Mr. Arnold's, and certainly did not
deserve to be censured side by side with Chapman's
I absurdity. I must say plainly ; a critic has no right to hide
what I have written, and stimulate his readers to despise
me by these indirect methods.
I proceed to my own metre. It is exhibited in this
stanza of Campbell :
By this the storm grew loud apace :
The waterwraith was shrieking.
And in the scowl of heav'n each face
Grew dark as they were speaking.
Whether I use this metre well or ill, I maintain that it is
) essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great
capacity. It is essentially the national ballad metre, for the
double rhyme is an accident. Of course it can be applied to
low, as well as to high subjects ; else it would not be popular :
it would not be ' of a like moral genius ' to the Homeric
metre, which was available equally for the comic poem
Margites, for the precepts of Pythagoras, for the pious
prosaic hymn of Cleanthes, for the driest prose of a naval
*■ He has also overlooked the misprint Trojans, where I wrote Tro'iana
(in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five.
328 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
catalogue^, — in short, for all early thought. Mr. Arnold
appears to forget, though he cannot be ignorant, that prose-
composition is later than Homer, and that in the epical
days every initial effort at prose history was carried on in
Homeric doggerel by the Cyclic poets, who traced the history
of Troy ab ovo in consecutive chronology. I say, he is
merely inadvertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the
Homeric metre, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought
with the utmost facility ; but I hold it to be, not inadver-
tence, but blindness, when he does not see that Homer's
Tov 8' a7raixei^6fji€vos is a line of as thoroughly unaffected
oratio pedestris as any verse of Pythagoras or Horace's
Satires. But on diction I defer to speak, till I have finished
the topic of metre.
I do not say that any measure is faultless. Every
measure has its foible : mine has that fault which every
uniform line must have, — ^it is liable to monotony. This is
evaded of course as in the hexameter or rather as in
Milton's line, — first, by varying the Caesura, — secondly, by
varjdng certain feet, within narrow and well understood
limits, — ^thirdly, by irregularity in the strength of accents ;
fourthly, by varjdng the weight of the unaccented syllables
also. Ail these things are needed, for the mere sake of
breaking uniformity. I will not here assert that Homer's
many marvellous freedoms, such as Urj^oXov 'AttoAA-wj/os,
were dictated by this aim, like those in the Paradise Lost ;
but I do say, that it is most unjust, most unintelligent, in
critics, to produce single Unes from me, and criticize them
^ As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned reviewer
concerning this metre of Campbell. ' It is a metre fit for introducing
anything or translating anything ; a metre that nothing can elevate, or
degrade, or improve, or spoil ; in which all subjects will sound alike.
A theorem of Euclid, a leading article from the Times, a dialogue from
the last new novel, could all be reduced to it with the slightest possible
verbal alteration.' [Quite true of Greek hexameter or Shakspeare's
line. It is a virtue in the metres.] ' To such a mill all would be grist
that came near it, and in no grain that had once passed through it would
human ingenuity ever detect again a characteristic quality.^ This writer
is a stout maintainer that English ballad metre is the right one for
translating Homer : only, somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that
Campbell's is ballad metre ! — Sad to say, extravagant and absurd
assertions, like these, though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning,
do much damage to the sale of a book in verse.
MANAGEMENT OF CAESURA 329
as rough or weak, instead of examining them and present-
ing them as part of a mass. How would Shakspeare stand
this sort of test ? nay, or Milton ? The metrical laws of
a long poem cafmot be the same as of a sonnet : single
verses are organic elements of a great whole. A crag must
not be cut like a gem. Mr. Arnold should remember
Aristotle's maxim, that popular eloquence (and such is
Homer's) should be broad, rough and highly coloured, Uke
scene painting, not polished into delicacy like miniature.
0 But I speak now of metre, not j^et of diction. In any
long and popular poem it is a mistake to wish every Hne
to conform severely to a few types ; but to claim this of
a translator of Homer is a doubly unintelligent exaction,
when Homer's own liberties transgress all bounds ; many
of them being feebly disguised by later double spellings, as
€1(09, ctos, invented for his special accommodation.
The Homeric verse has a rhythmical advantage over
mine in less rigidity of caesura. Though the Hexameter
was made out of two Doric lines, yet no division of sense,
0 no pause of the voice or thought, is exacted between them.
The chasm between two English verses is deeper. Perhaps,
on the side of sjnitax, a four -\-three English metre drives
harder towards monotony than Homer's own verse. For
other reasons, it Ues imder a Uke disadvantage, compared
with Milton's metre. The secondary caesuras possible in
the four feet are of course less numerous than those in the
five feet, and the three-foot verse has still less variety.
To my taste, it is far more pleasing that the short Hne
recur less regularly ; just as the paroemiac of Greek
0 anapaests is less pleasant in the Aristophanic tetrameter,
than when it comes frequent but not expected. This is
a main reason why I prefer Scott's free metre to my own ;
yet, without rhyme, I have not found how to use his
freedom. Mr. Arnold wrongly supposes me to have over-
looked his main and just objections to rhyming Homer ;
viz. that so many Homeric lines are intrinsically made for
isolation. In p. ix of my Preface I called it a fatal embar-
rassment. But the objection appUes in its full strength
only against Pope's rhymes, not against Walter Scott's.
0 Mr. Gladstone has now laid before the public his own
specimens of Homeric translation. Their dates range from
330 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
1836 to 1859. It is possible that he has as strong a dis-
taste as Mr. Arnold for my version ; for he totally ignores
the archaic, the rugged, the boisterous element in Homer.
But as to metre, he gives me his full suffrage. He has
lines with four accents, with three, and a few with two ;
not one with five. On the whole, his metre, his cadences,
his varying rhymes, are those of Scott. He has more
trochaic lines than I approve. He is truthful to Homer
on many sides ; and (such is the delicate grace and variety
admitted by the rhyme) his verses are more pleasing than ic
mine. I do not hesitate to say, that if all Homer could
be put before the public in the same style equally well
with his best pieces, a translation executed on my principles
could not live in the market at its side ; and certainly
I should spare my labour. I add, that I myself prefer the
former piece which I quote to my own, even while I see
his defects : for I hold that his graces, at which I cannot
afford to aim, more than make up for his losses. After
this confession, I frankly contrast his rendering of the two
noblest passages with mine, that the reader may see, what 2(
Mr. Arnold does not show, my weak and strong sides
Gladstone, Iliad iv, 422
As when the billow gathers fast
With slow and sullen roar
Beneath the keen northwestern blast
Against the sounding shore :
First far at sea it rears its crest.
Then bursts upon the beach.
Or ^ with proud arch and swelling breast.
Where headlands ^ outward reach, 8C
It smites their strength, and bellowing flings
Its silver foam afar ;
So, stern and thick, the Danaan kings
And soldiers marched to war.
Each leader gave his men the word ;
Each warrior deep in silence heard.
So mute they march' d, thou couldst not ken
• They were a mass of speaking men :
And as they strode in martial might,
Their flickering arms shot back the light. 4C
^ I think he has mistaken the summit of the wave for a headland, and
has made a single description into two, by the word Or : but I now
confine my regard to the metre and general efi!ect of the style.
MR. GLADSTONE'S SPECIMENS 331
But as at even the folded sheep
Of some rich master stand,
Ten thousand thick their place they keep.
And bide the milkman's hand.
And more and more they bleat, the more
They hear their lamblings cry ;
So, from the Trojan host, uproar
And din rose loud and high.
They were a many- voiced throng :
5 Discordant accents there.
That sound from many a differing tongue.
Their differing race declare.
These, Mars had kindled for the fight ;
Those, starry-ey'd Athene's might.
And savage Terror and Affright,
And Strife, insatiate of wars.
The sister and the mate of Mars :
Strife, that, a pigmy at her birth.
By gathering rumour fed,
► Soon plants her feet upon the earth.
And in the heav'n her head.
I add my own rendering of the same ; somewhat cor-
rected, but only in the direction of my own principles and
against Mr. Arnold's.
As when the surges of the deep, by Western blore uphoven.
Against the ever- booming strand dash up in roll successive ;
A head of waters swelleth first aloof ; then under harried
By the rough bottom, roars aloud ; till, hollow at the summit.
Sputtering the briny foam abroad, the huge crest tumbleth over ;
) So then the lines of Danai, successive and unceasing.
In battle's close array mov'd on. To his own troops each leader
Gave order : dumbly went the rest, (nor mightest thou discover,
So vast a train of people held a voice within their bosom,)
In silence their commanders fearing : all the ranks wellmarshall'd
Were clad in crafty panoply, which glitter' d on their bodies.
Meantime, as sheep within the yard of some great cattle-master.
While the white milk is drain'd from them, stand round in number
countless,
And, grieved by their lambs' complaint, respond with bleat incessant ;
) So then along their ample host arose the Troian hurly.
For neither common words spake they, nor kindred accent utter'd ;
But mingled was the tongue of men from divers places summon' d.
By Ares these were urged on, those by grey-ey'd Athene,
By Fear, by Panic, and by Strife immeasurably eager.
The sister and companion ^ of hero-slaying Ares,
Who truly doth at first her crest but humble rear ; thereafter.
Planting upon the ground her feet, her head in heaven fixeth.
* Corrfpanion, in four syllables, is in Shakspeare's style ; with whom
habitually the termination -lion is two.
332 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
Gladstone, Iliad xix, 403.
Hanging low his auburn head,
Sweeping with his mane the ground,
From beneath his collar shed,
Xanthus, hark ! a voice hath found,
Xanthus of the flashing feet :
Whitearm'd Here gave the sound.
' Lord Achilles, strong and fleet !
Trust us, we will bear thee home ;
Yet Cometh nigh thy day of doom -.
No doom of ours, but doom that stands
By God and mighty Fate's commands.
'Twas not that we were slow or slack
Patroclus lay a corpse, his back
All stript of arms by Trojan hands.
The prince of gods, whom Leto bare,
Leto with the flowing hair,
He forward fighting did the deed.
And gave to Hector glory's meed.
In toil for thee, we will not shun
Against e'en Zephyr's breath to run.
Swiftest of winds : but all in vain :
By god and man shalt thou be slain.'
He spake : and here, his words among,
Erinnys bound his faltering tongue.
Beginning with Achilles's speech, I render the passage
parallel to Gladstone thus.
' Chesnut and Spotted ! noble pair ! farfamous brood of Spry-foot !
In other guise now ponder ye your charioteer to rescue
Back to the troop of Danai, when we have done with battle :
Nor leave him dead upon the field, as late ye left Patroclus.'
But him the dapplefooted steed under the yoke accosted ;
(And droop'd his auburn head aside straightway ; and thro' the collar,
His full mane, streaming to the ground, over the yoke was scatter'd :
Him Juno, whitearm'd goddess, then with voice of man endowed :)
' Now and again we verily will save and more than save thee.
Dreadful Achilles ! yet for thee the deadly day approacheth.
Not ours the guilt ; but mighty God and stubborn Fate are guilty.
Not by the slowness of our feet or dulness of our spirit
The Troians did thy armour strip from shoulders of Patroclus ;
But the exalted god, for whom brighthair'd Latona travail' d,
Slew him amid the foremost ranks and glory gave to Hector.
Now we, in coursing, pace would keep even with breeze of Zephjo:,
Which speediest they say to be : but for thyself 'tis fated
By hand of hero and of god in mighty strife to perish.'
So much he spake : thereat his voice the Furies stopp'd for ever.
Now if any fool ask, Why does not Mr. Gladstone trans-
late all Homer ? any fool can reply with me, Because he is
MR. ARNOLD'S DICTA 333
Chancellor of the Exchequer. A man who has talents and
acquirements adequate to translate Homer well into rhyme,
is almost certain to have other far more urgent calls for
the exercise of such talents.
So much of metre. At length I come to the topic of
Diction, where Mr. Arnold and I are at variance not only
as to taste, but as to the main facts of Greek literature.
I had called Homer's stjde quaint and garrulous ; and
said that he rises and falls with his subject, being prosaic
• when it is tame, and low when it is mean. I added no
proof ; for I did not dream that it was needed. Mr. Arnold
not only absolutely denies all this, and denies it without
proof ; but adds, that these assertions prove my incom-
petence, and account for my total and conspicuous failure.
His whole attack upon my diction is grounded on a passage
which I must quote at length ; for it is so confused in
logic, that I may otherwise be thought to garble it, pp.
266, 267.
' Mr. Newman speaks of the more antiquated style
I suited to this subject. Quaint ! Antiquated ! but to
whom ? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the diction
of Chaucer is antiquated : does Mr. Newman suppose that
Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, as Chaucer's diction
seems antiquated to us ? ' But we cannot really know,
I confess (! !), how Homer seemed to Sophocles. Well then,
to those who can tell us how he seems to them, to the
living scholar, to our only present witness on this matter
— does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads
him, the impression of a poet quaint and antiquated ?
I does he make this impression on Professor Thompson or
Professor Jowett ? When Shakspeare says, " The princes
orgulous," meaning " the proud princes," we say, " This
is antiquated." When he says of the Trojan gates, that
they,
With massy staples
And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts
Sperr up the sons of Troy, —
we say, " This is both quaint and antiquated." But does
Homer ever compose in a language, which produces on
I the scholar at all the same impression as this language
which I have quoted from Shakspeare ? Never once.
334 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines which
I have just quoted ; but Shakspeare, need I say it ? can
compose, when he Hkes, when he is at his best, in a language
perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible ; in a language,
which, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part
its author from us, stops or surprises us as little as the
language of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shak-
speare's variations. Homer always composes, as Shak-
speare composes at his best. Homer is always simple and
intelligible, as Shakspeare is often ; Homer is never quaint
and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes.'
If Mr. Arnold were to lay before none but Oxford
students assertions concerning Greek literature so start-
lingly erroneous as are here contained, it would not con-
cern me to refute or protest against them. The young men
who read Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides, — ^nay,
the boys who read Homer and Xenophon, — ^would know
his statements to be against the most notorious and
elementary fact : and the Professors, whom he quotes,
would only lose credit, if they sanctioned the use he makes
of their names. But when he publishes the book for the
unlearned in Greek, among whom I must include a great
number of editors of magazines, I find Mr. Arnold to do
a public wrong to literature, and a private wrong to my
book. If I am silent, such editors may easily believe that
I have made an enormous blunder in treating the dialect
of Homer as antiquated. If those who are ostensibly
scholars, thus assail my version, and the great majority of
magazines and reviews ignore it, its existence can never
become known to the public ; or it will exist not to be ;
read, but to be despised without being opened ; and it
must perish as many meritorious books perish. I but lately
picked up — ^new, and for a fraction of its price — at a second-
hand stall, a translation of the Iliad by T. S. Brandreth, Esq.
(Pickering, London), into Cowper's metre, which is, as
I judge, immensely superior to Cowper. Its date is 1846 :
I had never heard of it. It seems to have -perished un-
criticized, unreproved, unwept, unknown. I do not wish
my progeny to die of neglect, though I am willing that it
should be slain in battle. — However, just because I address /
myself to the public unlearned in Greek, and because
HOMER'S DICTION 335
Mr. Arnold lays before them a new, paradoxical, mon-
strously erroneous representation of facts, with the avowed
object of staying the plague of my Homer ; I am forced
to reply to him.
Knowingly or unknowingly, he leads his readers to con-
fuse four different questions : — 1. whether Homer is
thoroughly intelligible to modem scholars ; 2. whether
Homer was antiquated tt) the Athenians of Themistocles
and Pericles ; 3. whether he was thoroughly understood
10 by them ; 4. whether he is, absolutely, an antique poet.
I feel it rather odd, that Mr. Arnold begins by com-
plimenting me with ' genuine learning,' and proceeds to
appeal from me to the ' living scholar.' (AVhat if I were
bluntly to reply : ' Well ! I am the living scholar ' ?)
After starting the question, how Homer's style appeared
to Sophocles, he suddenly enters a plea, under form of
a concession [' I confess ' !], — as a pretence for carrying
the cause into a new court, — that of the Provost of Eton
and two Professors, — into which court I have no admission ;
20 and then, of his own will, pronounces a sentence in the
name of these learned men. Whether they are pleased
with this parading of their name in behalf of paradoxical
error, I may well doubt : and until they indorse it them-
selves, I shall treat Mr. Arnold's process as a piece of forgery.
But, be this as it may, I cannot allow him to ' confess '
for me against me : let him confess for himself that he
does not know, and not for me, who know perfectly well,
whether Homer seemed quaint or antiquated to Sophocles.
Of course he did, as every beginner must know. Why, if
30 1 were to write mon for man, lojidis for lands, nestles for
nests, libbard for leo^oard, muchel for much, nap for snap,
green-wood shatv for green-ivood shade, Mr. Arnold would
call me antiquated, although every word would be intelli-
gible. Can he possibly be ignorant, that this exhibits but
the smallest part of the chasm which separates the Homeric
dialect not merely from the Attic prose, but from i^schylus
when he borrows most from Homer ? Every sentence of
Homer was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who
could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and
40 antiquated character of the poetry, than an Englishman
can help feeling the same in reading Burns's poems. Would
336 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
mon, londis, libbard, withouten, muchel be antiquated or
foreign, and are HrjXrj'idSao for UtjXclSov, oa-a-aTLos for oo-os,
yvT€ for o)?, (TTT^y] for orTrj, t€K€.€(T(ti for rc/cj'ot?, TOiaSea-o-L for roicrSe,
TToAces for TToXXoL, ix€(r(Trjyvs for fxcra^v, ala for y^, €t/?w for Xei/Sw,
and five hundred others, — less antiquated or less foreign ?
Homer has archaisms in every variety ; some rather recent
to the Athenians, and carrying their minds back only to
Solon, as /Jao-tX-^os for f^aa-tXem ; others harsher, yet varying
as dialect still, as ^cti/os for $evos, tU for Irlixa, dv^e/xo€is for
ayOr]p6<i, k€kXv6l for kXv€ or aKovaov, Oafxv^ for Oafitvos or (JV)(v6<i, ^
vaL€TdovT€<s for vatoi/res or oIkovvt€<s ; others varying in the
root, like a new language, as a<jf>cvos for ttXovtos, loTrj? for
/SovXrjfxa, rrj for U^ai, under which head are heaps of strange
words, as dK-qv, ;(wo/xa6, ^t09, KXjXa, fxefx^XiOKe, yeVro, ttcttov,
etc. etc. Finally comes a goodly lot of words which to this
day are most uncertain in sense. My learned colleague
Mr. Maiden has printed a paper on Homeric words, mis-
understood by the later poets. Buttmann has written an
octavo volume — (I have the English translation, — contain-
ing 548 pages) — to discuss 106 illexplained Homeric words. 2
Some of these Sophocles may have understood, though we
do not ; but even if so, they were not the less antiquated to
him. If there had been any perfect traditional understand-
ing of Homer, we should not need to deal with so many
words by elaborate argument. On the face of the Iliad alone
every learner must know how many difficult adjectives
occur : I write dov/n on the spur of the moment and without
reference, Kpr/yvov, dpyos, dSivo?, dr)TO<Si airjTO^, vu>poi{/, -^voif/f
ciAtVoSe?, '^Xl$, eAtKcoTTcs, IAAottcs, /xepoTrc?, rjXt/^aTO?, rjXeKTwp,
alyiXLij/, crtyaA.0€t9, l6fjnopo<;, iy)(eatp,iopo^, TreTrove?, r}Ouo<;. If 3
Mr. Arnold thought himself wiser than all the world of
Greek scholars, he would not appeal to them, but would
surely enlighten us all : he would tell me, for instance,
what eXXores means, which Liddell and Scott do not
pretend to understand ; or r]da.o<;, of which they give
three different explanations. But he does not write as
claiming an independent opinion, when he flatly opposes
me and sets me down ; he does but use surreptitiously the
name of the ' living scholar ' against me.
But I have only begun to describe the marked chasm 4
often separating Homer's dialect from everything Attic.
HOMER'S GRAMMATICAL FORMS 337
It has a wide diversity of grammatical inflections, far beyond
such vowel changes of dialect as answer to our provincial
pronunciations. This begins with new case-endings to the
nouns ; in -^i, -6?cv, -Se, -cf>i, — proceeds to very peculiar pro-
nominal forms, — and then to strange or irregular verbal
inflections, infinitives in -/xcv, -/xcvai, imperfects in -ctr/ce,
presents in -aOw, and an immensity of strange adverbs and
conjunctions. In Thiersch's Greek Grammar, after the
Accidence of common Greek is added as supplement an
Homeric Grammar : and in it the Homeric Noun and
Verb occupy (in the English Translation) 206 octavo pages.
Who ever heard of a Spenserian Grammar ? How many
pages could be needed to explain Chaucer's grammatical
deviations from modern English ? The bare fact of
Thiersch having written so copious a grammar will enable
even the unlearned to understand the monstrous mis-
representation of Homer's dialect, on which Mr. Arnold
has based his condemnation of my Homeric diction. Not
wishing to face the plain and undeniable facts which I have
here recounted, Mr. Arnold makes a ' confession ' that we
know nothing about them ! and then appeals to three
learned men whether Homer is antiquated to them, — and
expounds this to mean, intelligible to them ! Well : if they
have learned modern Greek, of course they may understand
it ; but Attic Greek alone will not teach it to them. Neither
will it teach them Homer's Greek. — The difference of the
two is in some directions so vast, that they may deserve to
be called two languages as much as Portuguese and
Spanish.
Much as I have written, a large side of the argument
remains still untouched. The orthography of Homer was
revolutionized in adapting it to Hellenic use, and in the
process not only were the grammatical forms tampered
with, but at least on6 consonant was suppressed. I am
sure Mr. Arnold has heard of the Digamma, though he does
not see it in the current Homeric text. By the re-establish-
ment of this letter, no small addition would be made to the
*' oddity ' of the sound to the ears of Sophocles. That the
unlearned in Greek may understand this, I add, that what
with us is written eoika, oikon, oinos, hekas, eorga, eeipe, eleli-
xOrj, were with the poet wewoika, wikon, winos, wekas (or
§38 HOMERIC TRANSLATION^
swekas ?), weworga, eweipe, ewelixOr] ; ^ and so with very
many other words, in which either the metre or the gram-
matical formation helps us to detect a lost consonant, and
the analogy of other dialects or languages assures us that it
is w which has been lost. Nor is this all ; but in certain
words sw seems to have vanished. What in our text is hoi,
heos, hekuros, were probably woi and swoi, weos and sweos,
swekuros. Moreover the received spelling of many other
words is corrupt : for instance, deos, deidoika, eddeisen,
periddeisas, addees. The true root must have had the form
dwe or dre or dhe. That the consonant lost was really w,
is asserted by Benfey from the Sanscrit dvish. Hence the
true forms are dweos, dedvx)ika, edweisen, etc. . . . Next, the
initial I of Homer had in some words a stronger pronuncia-
tion, whether XX or x^> ^^ ^^ XXirat, XXca-aofMai, XXwtos,
XXiravevo). I have met with the opinion that the consonant
lost in anax is not w but k ; and that Homer's kanax is
connected with English king. The relations of wergon,
weworga, wrexai, to English work and wrought must strike
every one ; but I do not here press the phenomena of the
Homeric r, (although it became br in strong ^Eolism.,)
because they do not differ from those in Attic. The Attic
forms elXyjcfia, etXeyfxai for X€Xr](fia, etc., point to a time
when the initial X of the roots was a double letter. A
root XXafS would explain Homer's eXXa^e. If XX ^ approached
to its Welsh sound, that is, to x^j it is not wonderful that
such a pronunciation as o<f)pa XXapoifxev was possible : but
it is singular that the vSan X'^tap^ of Attic is written Xiapw
in our Homeric text, though the metre needs a double
consonant. Such phenomena as x^'-^P^^ ^^^ Xiapos, ctf^a)
and Xei^o), La and fxia, ct/xap/nai and efxfxope, ata and yata, yevro
for eXero, icokt) and iw^is with Slwko), need to be reconsidered
in connection. The ek aAa aXro of our Homer was perhaps
c'g aXa adXXro : when XX was changed into A., they compen-
^ By corrupting the past tenses of welisso into a false similarity to the
past tenses of elelizo, the old editors superimposed a new and false sense
on the latter verb ; which still holds its place in our dictionaries, as it
deceived the Greeks themselves.
' That AX in Attic was sounded like French I mouillee, is judged prob-
able by the learned writer of the article L (Penny Cyclop.), who urges
that fxaWov is for fidXtov, and compares (pvWo with folio, a\\o with cliOf
oAX with sali.
THE DIGAMMA 339
sated by circumflexing the vowel. I might add the query,
Is it so certain that his Oeduyv was Oedwon, and not Oearon,
analogous to Latin dearum ? But dropping here everything
that has the slightest uncertainty, the mere restoration of
the w where it is most necessary, makes a startling addi-
tion to the antiquated sound of the Homeric text. The
reciters of Homer in Athens must have dropped the w, since
it is never written. Nor indeed would Sophocles have intro-
duced in his Trachinice, d 8c ol (f>i\a Safxap . . . leaving a
hiatus most offensive to the Attics, in mere imitation of
Homer, if he had been accustomed to hear from the reciters,
de woi or de swoi. In other words also, as in ovAo/xevo? for
oXo/xcvo?, later poets have slavishly followed Homer into
irregularities suggested by his peculiar metre. Whether
Homer's aOdvaTo<i, aixfxopo<; . . . rose out of avOdvaTo<s, avixopoq
._ . .is wholly unimportant when we remember his
AttoAAwi/o?.
But this leads to remark on the acuteness of Mr. Arnold's
ear. I need not ask whether he recites the A differently in
'Ap69, "Apc^, and in 'AttoAAwi/, 'AttoAAwvo?. He will not
allow anything antiquated in Homer ; and therefore it is
certain that he recites —
CUSOIOS T€ fXOl (ffffl, (pl\( tKVpf, bdVOS Tf
and — ovhe iOLK€ —
as they are printed, and admires the rhythm. When he
endures with exemplary patience such hiatuses, — such
dactyls as cckv, ovScc, such a spondee as pe Set, 1 can hardly
wonder at his complacency in his own spondees ' Between,'
' To a.' He finds nothing wrong in Kai TreSta Awrewra or
TToAAa XLo-a-ofxevrj. But Homer sang,
<pi\e swftcvpe Stoeivos t( — ov5( wdvoim —
Hat nedia WojTevvra . . . iroWa Wiaffofifurj.
Mr. Arnold is not satisfied with destroying Quantit}^ alone.
After theoretically substituting Accent for it in his hexa-
meters, he robs us of Accent also ; and presents to us the
syllables 'to a,' both short and both necessarily unaccented,
for a Spondee, in a pattern piece seven lines long, and with
an express and gratuitous remark, that in using ' to a ' for
a Spondee, he has perhaps reHed too much on accent. I hold
340 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
up these phenomena in Mr. Arnold as a warning to all
scholars, of the pit of delusion into which th-ey will fall, if
they allow themselves to talk fine about the ' Homeric
ihythm ' as now heard, and the duty of a translator to
reproduce something of it.
It is not merely the sound and the metre of Homer, which
are impaired by the loss of his radical w ; in extreme cases
the sense also is confused. Thus if a scholar be asked,
what is the meaning of Uia-aro in the Iliad ? he will have
to reply : If it stands for eweisato, it means, ' he was hke,'
and is related to the Enghsh root wis and wit, Germ, wiss,
Lat. vid ; but it may also mean ' he went,' — a very eccentric
Homerism, — ^in which case we should perhaps write it
eyeisato, as in old Enghsh we have he yode or yede instead of
he goed, gaed, since too the current root in Greek and Latin
i (go) may be accepted as ye, answering to German geh,
English go. — ^Thus two words, eweisato, ' he was like,'
eyeisato, ' he went,' are confounded in our text. I will add,
that in the Homeric
— ^vT€ wiOvea (y^dai — {II. 2, 87)
— 8ia TTpo S€ (y]€iaaTo kuI t^s (//. 4, 138)
my ear misses the consonant, though Mr. Arnold's (it seems)
does not. If we were ordered to read dat ting in Chaucer
for that thing, it would at first ' surprise ' us as ' grotesque ; '
but after this objection had vanished, we should still feel it
' antiquated.' The confusion of thick and tick, thread and
tread, may illustrate the possible effect of dropping the w in
Homer. I observe that Benfey's Greek Root Lexicon has
a list of 454 digammated Avords, most of which are Homeric.
But it is quite needless to press the argument to its fuU.
If as much learning had been spent on the double X and
on the y and h of Homer, as on the digamma, it might
perhaps now be conceded that we have lost, not one, but
three or four consonants from his text. That X in Xvio or
Xouw was ever a complex sound in Greek, 1 see nothing to
indicate ; hence that X, and the X of Atrat, Xtapo?, seem to
have been different consonants in Homer, as I and II in
Welsh. As to h and y I assert nothing, except that critics
appear too hastily to infer, that if a consonant has disap-
peared, it must needs he w. It is credible that the Greek
HOMERIC RHYTmi 341
h was once strong enough to stop hiatus or elision, as the
EngUsh, and much more the Asiatic h. The later Greeks,
after turning the character H into a vowel, seem to have
had no idea of a consonant h in the middle of a word, nor
any means of writing the consonant y. Since G passes
through gh into the sounds h, w, y, f, (as in English and
German is obvious,) it is easy to confound them all under
the compendious word ' digamma.' I should be glad to
know that Homer's forms were as well understood by
) modern scholars as Mr. Arnold lays down.
On his quotation from Shakspeare, I remark, 1. ' Or-
gulous,' from French ' orgueilleux,' is intelligible to all
who know French, and is comparable to Sicilian words in
iEschylus. 2. It is contrary to fact to say, that Homer has
not words, and words in great plenty, as unintelligible to
later Greeks, as ' orgulous ' to us. 3. Sperr, for Bar, as
Splash for Plash, is much less than the diversity which
separates Homer from the spoken Attic. What is crfxiKp6<s for
fiLKpoi to compare with rj/Sacos for fMLKpos ? 4. Mr. Arnold
) (as I understand him) blames Shakspeare for being some-
times antiquated : I do not blame him, nor yet Homer for
the same ; but neither can I admit the contrast which he
asserts. He says : ' Shakspeare can compose, when he ie
at his best, in a language perfectly intelligible, in spite of
the two centuries and a half which part him from us.
Homer has not Shakspeare' s variations : he is never anti-
quated, as Shakspeare is sometimes.' I certainly find the
very same variations in Homer, as Mr. Arnold finds in
Shakspeare. My reader unlearned in Greek might hastily
) infer from the facts just laid before him, that Homer is
always equally strange to a purely Attic ear : but it is not so.
The dialects of Greece did indeed differ strongly, as broad
Scotch from English ; yet as ^ve know. Burns is sometimes
perfectly intelligible to an Englishman, sometimes quite
unintelligible. In spite of Homer's occasional wide receding
from Attic speech, he as often comes close to it. For
instance, in the first piece quoted above from Gladstoius,
the simile occupying five (Homeric) lines would almost go
down in Sophocles, if the Tragedian had chosen to use the
) metre. There is but one out-and-out Homeric word in it
(e7rao-(rvT€/)os) : and even that is used once in an iEsehylean
342 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
chorus. There are no strange inflections, and not a single
digamma is sensibly lost. Its peculiarities are only -el for
-€t, iov for 6v and 8e re for 8e, which could not embarrass the
hearer as to the sense. I myself reproduce much the same
result. Thus in my translation of these five lines I have
the antiquated words blore for blast, harry for harass (harrow,
worry), and the antiquated participle hoven from heave, as
cloven, woven from cleave, weave. The whole has thus just
a tinge of antiquity, as had the Homeric passage to the
Attics, without any need of aid from a Glossary. But at
other times the aid is occasionally convenient, just as in
Homer or Shakspeare.
Mr. Arnold plays fallaciously on the words familiar and
unfamiliar. Homer's words may have been familiar to the
Athenians (i.e. often heard), even when they were not
understood, but, at most, were guessed at ; or when, being
understood, they were still felt and known to be utterly
foreign. Of course, when thus ' familiar,' they could not
' surprise ' the Athenians, as Mr. Arnold complains that my
renderings surprise the English. Let mine be heard as
Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be
' surprised.'
Antiquated words are understood well by some, ill by
others, not at all by a third class ; hence it is difficult to
decide the limits of a glossary. Mr. Arnold speaks scorn-
fully of me, (he wonders with whom Mr. Newman can have
lived,) that I use the words which I use, and explain those
which I explain. He censures my little Glossary, for con-
taining three words which he did not know, and some
others, which, he says, are ' familiar to all the world.' It is
clear, he will never want a stone to throw at me. I suppose
I am often guilty of keeping low company. I have found
ladies — ^whom no one would guess to be so ill-educated, —
who yet do not distinctly know what lusty means ; but have
an uncomfortable feeling that it is very near to lustful ; and
understand grisly only in the sense of grizzled, grey. Great
numbers mistake the sense of Buxom, Imp, Dapper, deplor-
ably. I no more wrote my Glossary than my translation
for persons so highly educated as Mr. Arnold.
But I must proceed to remark : Homer might have been '
as unintelligible to Pericles, as was the court poet of king
HOMER ABSOLUTELY ANTIQUE 343
Croesus, and yet it might be highly improper to translate
him into an old English dialect ; namely, if he had been the
typical poet of a logical and refined age. Here is the real
question; — is he absolutely antique, or only antiquated
relatively, as Euripides is now antiquated ? A modern
Greek statesman, accomplished for every purpose of
modern business, might find himself quite perplexed by the
infinitives, the numerous participles, the optatives, the
datives, — by the particle av, — and by the whole syntax of
.0 Euripides, as also by many special words ; but this would
never justify us in translating Euripides into any but a most
refined style. Was Homer of this class ? I say, that he not
only was antiquated, relatively to Pericles, but is also
absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age.
Antiquity in poets is not (as Horace stupidly imagines in
the argument of the horse's tail) a question of years, but of
intrinsic qualities. Homer sang to a wholly unfastidious
audience, very susceptible to the marvellous, very unalive
to the ridiculous, capable of swallowing with reverence the
!0 most grotesque conceptions. Hence nothing is easier than
to turn Homer to ridicule. The fun which Lucian made of
his mythology, a rhetorical critic like Mr. Arnold could make
of his diction, if he understood it as he understands mine.
He takes credit to himself for not ridiculing me ; and is not
aware, that I could not be like Homer without being easy
to ridicule. An intelligent child is the second-best reader of
Homer. The best of all is a scholar of highly masculine
taste ; the worst of all is a fastidious and refined man, to
whom ever)rthing quaint seems ignoble and contemptible.
10 I might have supposed that Mr. Arnold thinks Homer
to be a poHshed drawing-room poet, like Pope, when I read
in him this astonishing sentence, p. 266, ' Search the English
language for a word which does not apply to Homer,
and you could not fix on a better word than quaint.' But
I am taken aback at finding him praise the diction of
Chapman's translation in contrast to mine. Now I never
open Chapman, without being offended at his pushing
Homer's quaintness most unnecessarily into the grotesque.
Thus in Mr. Gladstone's first passage above, where Homer
10 says that the sea ' sputters out the foam,' Chapman makes
it, ' all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam,*
344 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
obtruding what may remind one of a cat or stoat. I hold
sputter to be epical,^ because it is strong ; but spit is feeble
and mean. In passing, I observe that the universal praise
given to Chapman as ' Homeric ' (a praise which I have
too absolutely repeated, perhaps through false shame of
depreciating my only rival) is a testimony to me that I
rightly appreciate Homeric style ; for my style is Chapman's
softened, purged of conceits and made far more melodious.
Mr. Arnold leaves me to wonder, how, with his disgust
at me, he can avoid feeling tenfold disgust at Chapman ;
and to wonder also what he means, by so blankly con-
tradicting my statement that Homer is quaint ; and why he
so vehemently resents it. He does not vouchsafe to me
or to his readers one particle of disproof or of explanation.
I regard it as quaint in Homer to call Juno white-arm' d
goddess and large-ey'd. (I have not rendered /^ow-n-is ox-ey'd,
because in a case of doubt I shrank to obtrude anything so
grotesque to us.) It is quaint to say, ' the lord of bright-
haired Juno lightens ' for ' it lightens ' ; or ' my heart in
my shaggy bosom is divided,' for ' I doubt ' : quaint
to call waves wet, milk white, blood dusky, horses single-
hoofed, a hero's hand broad, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot
(KvXXoTToStW), a maiden fair-ankled, the Greeks wellgreav'd,
a spear longshadowy, battle and council man- ennobling ,
one's knees dear, and many other epithets. Mr. Arnold
most gratuitously asserts that the sense of these had
evaporated to the Athenians. If that were true, it would
not signify to this argument. Aai/xovios (possessed l>y an
elf or daemon) so lost its sense in Attic talk, that although
i^schylus has it in its true meaning, some college tutors
(I am told) render w Sat/xoVtc in Plato, ' my very good sir ! '
This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the word in
Homer. If Mr. Arnold could prove (what he certainly
cannot) that Sophocles had forgotten the derivation of
iiJKvr] fuse's and Ivfjiixikir}^, and understood by the former
nothing but ' full armed ' and by the latter (as he says)
nothing but ' warlike,' this would not justify his blame of
* Men who can bear ' belch ' in poetry, nowadays pretend that
* sputter ' is indelicate. They find Homer's airoTTTvu to be ' elegant,'
but sputter — ^not ! ' No one would guess from Mr. Newman's coarse
phrases how elegant is Homer ' ! !
QUAINTNESS OF HOMER 345
me for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek
nation by long familiarity had become inobservant of
Homer's 'oddities', (conceding this for the moment,) that
also would be no fault of mine. That Homer is extremely
peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the
sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering.
It is very quaint to say, ' the outwork (or rampart)
of the teeth ' instead of ' the lips.' If Mr. Arnold will
call it ' portentous ' in my English, let him produce some
.0 shadow of reason for denying it to be portentous in Greek.
Many phrases are so quaint as to be almost untranslatable,
as fiTjo-TiDp <j>6poLo (deviser of fear ?) fxTJa-Tcop avrrj<s (deviser
of outcry ?) : others are quaint to the verge of being
comical, as to call a man an equipoise (draAavros) to a
god, and to praise eyes for having a curl in them.^ It is
quaint to make Juno call Jupiter aivdrare (grimmest ?
direst ?), whether she is in good or bad humour with him,
and to call a Vision ghastly, when it is sent with a pleasant
message. It is astonishingly quaint to tell how many oxen
0 every fringe of Athene's aegis was worth. — It is quaint to
call Patroclus ' a great simpleton,' for not foreseeing that
he would lose his life in rushing to the rescue of his country-
men. (I cannot receive Mr. Arnold's suggested Biblical
correction ' Thou fool ! ' which he thinks grander : first,
because grave moral rebuke is utterly out of place ; secondly,
because the Greek cannot mean this ; — it means infantine
simplicity, and has precisely the colour of the word which
I have used.) — It is quaint to say : ' Patroclus kindled
a great fire, godlike man! ' or, ' Aiitomedon held up the
» meat, divine Achilles slic'd it : ' quaint to address a young
friend as * Oh ^ pippin ! ' or ' Oh sof theart ! ' or ' Oh
pet ! ' whichever is the true translation. It is quaint to
^ In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than one critic) I
have explained curl-ey'd, carefully, but not very accurately perhaps ; as
I had not before me the picture of the Hindoo lady to which I referred.
The whole upper eyelid, when open, may be called the curl ; for it is
shaped like a buffalo's horns. This accounts for kkiKo^Ki<papos, ' having
a curly eyelid.'
* I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering it ' 0 gentle
friend I ' Mr. Arnold rebukes me for this, without telling me what
I ought to say, or what is my fault. One thing is certain, that the Greek
is most odd and peculiar.
346 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, Ulysses
to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two Knes to three gods, and in
the third line to a bull ; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles
to a grampus chasing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf
which kills a dog and runs away, Menelaus striding over
Patroclus's body to a heifer defending her firstborn. It is
quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking
fly, that Agamemnon's sobs came thick as flashes of
lightning ; and that the Trojan mares, while running,
groaned like overflowing rivers. All such similes come i
from a mind quick to discern similarities, but very dull to
feel incongruities ; unaware therefore that it is on a verge
where the sublime easily turns into the ludicrous ; — a mind
and heart inevitably quaint to the very core. What is it in
Vulcan, — ^when he would comfort his mother under Jupiter's
threat, — to make jokes about the severe mauling which he
himself formerly received, and his terror lest she should be
now beaten ? Still more quaint (if rollicking is not the
word), is the address by which Jupiter tries to ingratiate
himself with Juno : viz. he recounts to her all his unlawful s
amours, declaring that in none of them was he so smitten
as now. I have not enough of the yewatos evTJ^cta, the
barbarian simpleheartedness, needed by a reader of Homer,
to get through this speech with gravity. — ^What shall I call
it, — certainly much worse than quaint, — that the poet
adds : Jupiter was more enamoured than at his stolen
embrace in their first bed ' secretly from their dear parents ' ?
But to develop Homer's inexhaustible quaintnesses, of
which Mr. Arnold denies the existence, seems to me to need
a long treatise. It is not to be expected, that one who is j
blind to superficial facts so very prominent as those which
I have recounted, should retain any delicate perception of
the highly coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of
Homer, even if he has ever understood it, which he forces
me to doubt. He sees nothing ' odd ' in kwos KaKoix-qx^^vov,
or in Kwo/Avta, ' thou dogfly ' ! He replaces to his imagina-
tion the flesh and blood of the noble barbarian by a dim
feeble spiritless outline.
I have not adduced, in proof of Homer's quaintness, the
monstrous simile given to us in Iliad 13, 754 ; viz. Hector 4
* darted forward screaming like a snowy mountain, and
HOMER PICTURESQUE 347
flew through the Trojans and allies : ' for I cannot believe
that the poet wrote anything so absurd. Rather than
admit this, I have suggested that the text is corrupt, and
that for opet vt^oevTt we should read Spviw Ovovtl, — ' darted
forth screaming like a raging bird' Yet, as far as I know,
I am the first man that has here impugned the text.
Mr. Brandreth is faithful in his rendering, except that he
says shouting for screaming :
' He said ; and, like a snowy mountain, rush'd
10 Shouting ; and flew through Trojans and allies.'
Chapman, Cowper, and Pope strain and twist the words to
an impossible sense, putting in something about white plume,
which they fancy suggested a snowy mountain ; but they
evidently accept the Greek as it stands, unhesitatingly.
I claim this phenomenon in proof that to all commentators
and interpreters hitherto Homer's quaintness has been such
an axiom, that they have even acquiesced unsuspiciously in
an extravagance which goes far beyond oddity. Moreover
the reader may augur by my opposite treatment of the
20 passage, with what discernment Mr. Arnold condemns me
of obtruding upon Homer gratuitous oddities which equal
the conceits of Chapman.
But, while thus vindicating Quaintness as an essential
quality of Homer, do I regard it as a weakness to be
apologized for ? Certainly not ; for it is a condition of his
cardinal excellencies. He could not otherwise be Pictur-
esque as he is. So volatile is his mind, that what would be
Metaphor in a more logical and cultivated age, with him
riots in Simile which overflows its banks. His similes not
30 merely go beyond ^ the mark of likeness ; in extreme cases
they even turn into contrariety. If he were not so carried
away by his illustration, as to forget what he is illustrating
(which belongs to a quaint mind), he would never paint for
us such full and splendid pictures. Where a logical later
poet would have said that Menelaus
With eagle- eye survey'd the field,
^ In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 330 above, only the
two first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr. Gladstone, seduced
by rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only
a microscopic reader will sec it.
348 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
the mere metaphor contenting him ; Homer says :
Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,
Which, of all heaven's fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest :
Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth.
Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush : but straight at it he souseth,
Unerring ; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.
I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the logical
balance, such as belcmgs to the lively eye of the savage,
whose observation is intense, his concentration of reasoning
powers feeble. Without this, we should never have got
anything so picturesque.
Homer never sees things in the same prcyportions as wo
see them. To omit his digressions, and what I may call
his ' impertinencies,' in order to give to his argument that
which Mr. Arnold is pleased to call the proper ' balance,'
is to value our own logical minds, more than his picturesque ^
but illogical mind.
Mr. Arnold says I am not quaint, but grotesque, in my
rendering of Kvvb<; KaKOfxrjxdvov. I do not hold the phrase
to be quaint : to me it is excessively coarse. When
Jupiter calls Juno ' a bitch,' of course he means a snarling
cur; hence my rendering, 'vixen' (or she-fox), is there
perfect, since we say vixen of an irascible woman. But
Helen had no such evil tempers, and beyond a doubt she
meant to ascribe impurity to herself. I have twice com-
mitted a pious fraud by making her call herself ' a vixen,'
where ' bitch ' is the only faithful rendering ; and Mr.
Arnold, instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil
over Homer's deformity, assails me for my phrase as
intolerably grotesque.
He further forbids me to invent new compound adjectives,
as fair-thron'd, rill-bestream'd ; because they strike us as
new, though Homer's epithets (he says) did not so strike
the Greeks : hence they derange attention from the main
^ It is very singular that Mr. Gladstone should imagine such a poet to
have no eye for colour. I totally protest against his turning Homer's
paintings into leadpencil drawings. I believe that yXavKos is grey
(silvergreen), x^P^^ hhie ; and that TrpdaivoSf ' leek-colour,' was too
mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for ' green ; ' therefore
X>^ojp6s does duty for it. Kvfia iropcpvpeov is surely ' the purple wave,'
and loeiSia hovtov ' the violet sea.'
NOVELTY OF EXPRESSION 349
question. I hold this doctrine of his (conceding his fact
for a moment) to be destructive of all translation whatever,
into prose or poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles's
horses were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by
' the horses grazed,' and does not say on what. Using Mr.
Arnold's principles, he might defend himself by arguing :
' The Greeks, being familiar with such horsefood, were not
struck by it as new, as my reader would be. I was afraid
of telling him what the horses were eating, lest it should
LO derange the balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him
from the main idea of the sentence.' But, I find, readers
are indignant on learning Pope's suppression : they feel that
he has defrauded them of a piece of interesting information.
— In short, how can an Englishman read any Greek com-
position and be affected by it as Greeks were ? In a piece
of Euripides my imagination is caught by many things,
which he never intended or calculated for the prominence
which they actually get in my mind. This or that absurdity
in mythology, which passed with him as matter of course,
so may monopolize my main attention. Our minds are not
passive recipients of this or that poet's influence ; but the
poet is the material on which our minds actively work. If
an unlearned reader thinks it very ' odd ' of Homer (the
first time he hears it) to call Aurora ' fair-thron'd,' so does
a boy learning Greek think it odd to call her evOpovo^.
Mr. Arnold ought to blot every odd Homeric epithet out
of his Greek Homer (or never lend the copy to a youthful
learner) if he desire me to expunge ' fair-thron'd ' from the
translation. Nay, I think he should conceal that the Morn-
jo ing was esteemed as a goddess, though she had no altars
or sacrifice. It is all odd. But that is just why people
want to read an English Homer, — to know all his oddities,
exactly as learned men do. He is the phenomenon to be
studied. His peculiarities, pleasant or unpleasant, are to
be made known, precisely because of his great eminence and
his substantial deeply seated worth. Mr. Arnold writes
like a timid biographer, fearful to let too much of his friend
come out. So much as to the substance. As to mere words,
here also I hold the very reverse of Mr. Arnold's doctrine.
10 I do not feel free to translate ovpavofirJKrjs by ' heaven-
kissing,' precisely because Shakspeare has used the last
350 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
word. It is his property, as evVny/AtSc?, ivfi/neXLrjs, KySiaveipa,
&c., are Homer's property. I could not use it without
being felt to quote Shakspeare, which would be highly
inappropriate in a Homeric translation. But if nobody
had ever yet used the phrase ' heaven-kissing ' (or if it
were current without any proprietor) then I should be quite
free to use it as a rendering of ovpavo/j.-rjKrj^. 1 cannot assent
to a critic killing the vital powers of our tongue. If Shak-
speare might invent the compound ' heaven-kissing,' or
' man-eimobling,' so might William Wordsworth or Matthew i
Arnold ; and so might I. Inspiration is not dead, nor yet
is the English language.
Mr. Arnold is slow to understand what I think very
obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were to scold
a missionary for rendering in Feejee the phrase ' kingdom
of heaven ' and ' Lamb of God ' accurately ; also ' saints '
and other words characteristic of the New Testament ? 1
might urge against him : ' This and that sounds very odd
to the Feejees : that cannot be right, for it did not seem odd
to the Nicene bishops. The latter had forgotten that2i
/Saa-LXeca meant ' kingdom ' ; they took the phrase ' king-
dom of God ' collectively to mean ' the Church.' The
phrase did not surprise them. As to ' Lambs,' the Feejees
are not accustomed to sacrifice, and cannot be expected to
know of themselves what ' Lamb of God ' means, as
Hebrews did. The courtiers of Constantine thought it
very natural to be called aytoi for they were accustomed to
think every baptised person ayios ; but to the baptised
courtiers of Feejee it really seems very odd to be called
saints. You disturb the balance of their judgment.' 3(
The missionary might reply : ' You seem to be ashamed
of the oddities of the Gospel. I am jiot. They grow out
of its excellences and cannot be separated. By avoiding
a few eccentric phrases you will do little to remove the
deep-seated eccentricity of its very essence. Odd and
eccentric it will remain, unless you despoil it of its heart,
and reduce it to a fashionable philosophy.' And just so do
I reply to Mr. Arnold. The Homeric style (whether it be
that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, is ' odd,' if
IVIr. Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its eccentri- 4C
cities in epithet are mere efflorescences of its essential
* ODDITIEvS ' OF HOMER 351
eccentricity. If Homer could cry out to us, I doubt not he
would say, as Oliver Cromwell to the painter, ' Paint me
just as I am, wart and all : ' but if the true Homer could
reappear, I am sure Mr. Arnold would start from him just
as a bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a trans-
lator of the Bible honours the book by his close rendering
of its characteristics, however ' odd,' so do I honour
Homer by the same. Those characteristics, the moment
I produce them, Mr. Arnold calls ignoble. Well : be it so ;
0 but I am not to blame for them. They exist, whether
Mr. Arnold likes them or not.
I wjil here observe that he bids me paraphrase ravvireTrXo^
(t railing-robed) into something like, * Let gorgeous Tragedy
AVith sceptred pall come sweeping by.' I deliberately
j udge, that to paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst
thing that can be done : to omit it entirely would be better.
I object even to Mr. Gladstone's
. . . whom Leto bare,
Leto with the flowing hair.
0 For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the epithet
Still more extravagant is Mr. Arnold in wishing me to turn
* single-hoofed horses ' into ' something which cw little
surjjrises us as " Gallop apace, you fiery -footed steeds " ' ;
p. 303. To reproduce Shakspeare would be in any case
a ' surprising ' mode of translating Homer : but the
principle which changes ' single-hoofed ' into a different
epithet which the translator thinks better, is precisely that
which for more than two centuries has made nearly all
English translation worthless. To throw the poet into your
0 crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful
process. I had thought, the manly taste of this day had
outgrown the idea that a translator's business is to melt
up the old coin and stamp it with a modern image. I am
wondering that I should have to write against such notions :
I would not take the trouble, only that they come against
me from an Oxford Professor of Poetry.
At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes far
beyond compound epithets. Whether I say ' motley-
helmed Hector ' or ' Hector of the motley helm,' * silver-
0 footed Thetis ' or * Thetis of the silver foot/ ' man-
352 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
ennobling combat ' or ' combat which ennobles man,' the
novelty is so nearly on a par, that he cannot condemn one
and justify the other on this score. Even Pope falls far
short of the false taste which would plane down every
Homeric prominence : for he prizes an elegant epithet like
' silver-footed,' however new and odd.
From such a Homer as Mr. Arnold's specimens and
principles would give us, no one could learn anything ;
no one could have any motive for reading the translation.
He smooths down the stamp of Homer's coin, till nothing i
is left even for microscopic examination. When he forbids
me (p. 303) to let my reader know that Homer calls horses
* single-hoofed,' of course he would suppress also the
epithets ' white milk,' ' dusky blood,' ' dear knees,' ' dear
life,' &c. His process obliterates everything characteristic,
great or small.
Mr. Arnold condemns my translating certain names of
horses. He says (p. 280) : 'Mr. Newman calls Xanthua
Chesnut ; as he calls Balius Spotted and Podarga Spry foot :
which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale 2
Mdlle. Rossignol, or Mr. Bright M. Clair.' He is very
wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector into
Possessor or Agamemnon into Highmind, his censure would
be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown
may be a blonde : we utter the proper names of men and
women without any remembrance of their intrinsic mean-
ing. But it is different with many names of domestic
animals. We never call a dog Spot, unless he is spotted ;
nor without consciousness that the name expresses his
peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name 3
Chesnut ; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the
name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the
name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse
xanthos and a spotted horse balios ; therefore, until
Mr. Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never
read the names of Achilles's two horses without a sense of
their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated ;
while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reason-
ing applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly under-
stand dpyo5. I have taken it to mean sprightly. 41
Mr. Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never ' garru-
GARRULITY OF HOMER 353
loiis.' Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attri-
butes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence in
Horace ! I admire Horace as an ode-writer, but I do not
revere him as a critic, any more than as a moral philosopher.
I say that Homer is garrulous, because I see and feel it. —
Mr. Arnold puts me into a most unwelcome position.
I have a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer.
In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and taste,
I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for two years
and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling unremittingly in
my vacations and in my walks, and going to large expenses
of money, in order to put the book before the unlearned ;
and this, though I am not a Professor of Poetry nor even
of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as Homer's
disparager and accuser ! But if Homer were always a poet,
he could not be, what he is, so many other things beside
poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of
art, not because they are beautiful or grand, but from
a mere love of imitating ; so Homer narrates perpetually
from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egjrptian
a way does he tell the process of cutting up an ox and
making kebab ; the process of bringing a boat to anchor and
carefully putting by the tackle ; the process of taking out
a shawl from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom !
With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods ;
and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular
of trifling actions comes out with him, as, the opening of
a door or box with a key. — He tells who made Juno's
earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax — the history of Aga-
memnon's breastplate — and in what detail a hero puts on
his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of
Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, ^neas, in the midst of battle ;
I might press his description of wounds. Indeed I have
said enough, and more than enough, against Mr. Arnold's
novel, unsupported, paradoxical assertion. — But this is
connected with another subject. I called Homer's manner
' direct ' : Mr. Arnold (if I understand) would supersede
this by his own epithet ' rapid.' But I cannot admit the
exchange : Homer is often the opposite of rapid. Amplifica-
tion is his characteristic, as it must be of every impro-
visatore, every popular orator : condensation, indeed, is
ARNOLD A a
354 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
improper for anything but written style, — written to be
read privately. But I regard as Homer's worst defect, his
lingering over scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds.
He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another and
how deep. They arm : they approach : they encounter :
we have to listen to stereotype details again and again.
Such a style is anything but ' rapid.' Homer's garrulity
often leads him into it ; yet he can do far better, as in
a part of the fight over Patroclus's body, and other
splendid passages.
Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr. Arnold
selects for animadversion this line of mine (p. 271), —
A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were gleaming.'
He says : ' This may be the genuine style of ballad poetry,
but it is not the style of Homer.' I reply ; my use of
expletives is moderate indeed compared to Homer's.
Mr. Arnold writes, as if quite una^ware that such words
as the intensely prosaic apa, and its abbreviations ap, pa,
with Tot, re, 8>J, /^aA-a, rj, rj pa, vv, Trep, Overflow in epic style;
and that a pupil who has mastered the very copious stock ;
of Attic particles, is taken quite aback by the extravagant
number in Homer. Our expletives are generally more
offensive, because longer. My principle is, to admit only
such expletives as add energy, and savour of antiquity. To
the feeble expletives of mean ditties I am not prone. I
once heard from an eminent counsellor the first lesson of
young lawyers, in the following doggerel :
He who holds his lands in fee,
Need neither quake nor quiver :
For I humbly conceive, look ye, do ye see ? J
He holds his lands for ever.
The * humbly conceiving ' certainly outdoes Homer. Yet
if the poet had chosen (as he might have chosen) to make
Polydamas or Glaucus say :
"OcTTis kirerpaipOT) rifxevos iriffTfi ^aaiXrjos,
<pr}jxi Toi, ovTOS dvTip ovt' Sip rpifxei ovt( (po^eirai'
t-fj fi&Xa yap pa Ids Kparioi Kiv iaauv dpovpa^ :
I rather think the following would be a fair prose rendering :
* Whoso hath been entrusted with a demesne under pledge
HOMER'S EXPLETIVES 355
with the king ; (I tell you,) this man neither trembleth (you
see) nor feareth : for (look ye !) he (verily) may hold (you
see) his lands for ever.'
Since Mr. Arnold momentarily appeals to me on the
chasm beween Attic and Homeric Greek, I turn the last
piece into a style far less widely separated from modem
English than Homer from Thucydides,
Dat mon, quhich hauldeth Kyngis-af
Londis yn fco, niver
(I tell 'e) feereth aught ; sith heo
Doth hauld hys londis yver.
I certainly do not recommend this style to a translator, yet
it would have its advantage. Even with a smaller change
of dialect it would aid us over Helen's self piercing denun-
ciation,— * approaching to Christian penitence,' as some
have judged it.
Quoth she, I am a gramsome bitch,
If woman bitch may bee.
But in behalf of the poet I must avow : when one con-
) siders how dramatic he is, it is marvellous how little in him
can offend. For this very reason he is above needing
tender treatment from a translator, but can bear faithful
rendering, not only better than Shakspeare but better than
Pindar or Sophocles.
When Mr. Arnold denies that Homer is ever prosaic or
homely, his own specimens of translation put me into
despair of convincing him ; for they seem to me a very
anthology of prosaic flatness. Phrases, which are not in
themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the
) syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become
in him prose out-and-out. ' To Peleus why did we give
you, to a mortal ? ' 'In the plain there were kindled a
thousand fires ; by each one there sate fifty men.' [At least
he might have left out the expletive.] ' By their chariots
stood the steeds, and champed the white barley ; while
their masters sate by the fire and waited for morning.'
* Us, whose portion for ever Zeus has made it, from youth
right up to age, to be winding skeins of grievous wars, till
every soul of us perish.' The words which I here italicize,
0 seem to me below noble ballad. What shaU I say of
A a 2
356 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
* I bethink me what the Trojan men and Trojan women
might murmur.' ' Sacred Troy shall go to destruction.' ' Or
bear pails to the well of Messeis.' ' See, the wife of Hector,
that great pre-eminent captain of the horsemen of Troy,
in the day they fought for their city : ' for, ' who was captain
in the day on which .' ' Let me be dead and the earth
be mounded (?) above me, ere I hear thy cries, and thy
captivity ^ told of.' ' By no slow pace or want of swiftness
of ours 2 did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms of Patroclus.'
* Here I am destined to perish, far from my father and i
mother dear ; for all that, I will not,' &c. ' Dare they not
enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes, all for fear
of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened ? ' One
who regards all this to be high poetry, — emphatically
* noble,' — may well think tov 8' d7ra/>iet/3o/A€vo9 or ' with
him there came forty black galleys,' or the broiling of the
beef coUops, to be such. When Mr. Arnold regards ' no
want of swiftness of ours ; ' 'for all that,' in the sense of
nevertheless ; ' all for fear,' i.e. because of the fear ; — not
to be prosaic : — my readers, however ignorant of Greek, will 2
dispense with further argument from me. Mr. Arnold's
inability to discern prose in Greek is not to be trusted.
But I see something more in this phenomenon. Mr. Arnold
is an original poet ; and, as such, certainly uses a diction
far more elevated than he here puts forward to represent
Homer. He calls his Homeric diction plain and simple.
Interpreting these words from the contrast of Mr. Arnold's
own poems, I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer
is often in a style much lower than what the moderns
esteem to be poetical. But I protest, that he carries it 31
very much too far, and levels the noblest down to the most
negligent style of Homer. The poet is not always so
* ignoble,' as the unlearned might infer from my critic's
^ He pares down kKitrjdnoTo (the dragging away of a woman by the
hair) into ' captivity ' ! Better surely is my ' ignoble ' version : ' Ere-
that I see thee dragged away, and hear thy shriek of anguish.'
* He means ours for two syllables. ' Swiftness of ours ' is surely
ungrammatical. ' A galley of my own ' = one of my own galleys ;
but ' a father of mine,' is absurd, since each has but one father. I
confess I have myself been seduced into writing * those two eyes of
his,' to avoid * those his two eyes ' : but I have since condemned and
altered it.
HOMER'S LOWER STYLE 357
specimens. He never drops so low as Shakspeare ; yet if
he were as sustained as Virgil or Milton, he would with it
lose his vast superiority over these, his rich variety. That
the whole first book of the Iliad is pitched lower than the
rest, though it has vigorous descriptions, is denoted by the
total absence of simile in it : for Homer's kindhng is always
indicated by simile. The second book rises on the first,
until the catalogue of ships, which (as if to atone for its flat-
ness) is ushered in by five consecutive similes. In the third
^ and fourth books the poet continues to rise, and almost
culminates in the fifth ; but then seems to restrain himself,
lest nothing grander be left for Achilles. Although I do
not beheve in a unity of authorship between the Odyssey
and the Iliad, yet in the Iliad itself I see such unity, that
I cannot doubt its negligences to be from art. (The
monstrous speech of Nestor in the 11th book is a case by
itself. About 100 Unes have perhaps been added later, for
reasons other than Hterary.) I observe that just before the
poet is about to bring out Achilles in his utmost splendour,
50 he has three-quarters of a book comparatively tame, with
a ridiculous legend told by Agamemnon in order to cast his
own sins upon Fate. If Shakspeare introduces coarse
wrangling, buffoonery, or mean superstition, no one claims
or wishes this to be in a high diction or tragic rhythm ; and
why should any one wish such a thing from Homer or
Homer's translator ? I find nothing here in the poet to
apologize for ; but much cause for indignation, when the
unlearned public is misled by translators or by critics to
expect delicacy and elegance out of place. But I beg the
JO unlearned to judge for himself whether Homer can have
intended such lines as the following for poetry, and whether
I am bomid to make them any better than I do.
Then visiting he urged each man with words,
Mesthles and Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus
And Asteropaeus and Deisenor and Hippothoiia
And Phorkya and Chromius and Ennomus the augur.
He has lines in plenty as little elevated. If they came often
in masses, it would be best to translate them into avowed
prose : but since gleams of poetry break out amid what is
40 flattest, I have no choice but to imitate Homer in retaining
358 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
a uniform, but easy and unpretending metre. Mr. Arnold
calls my metre ' slipshod ' : if it can rise into grandeur
when needful, the epithet is a praise.
Of course I hold the Iliad to be generally noble and
grand. Very many of the poet's conceptions were grand to
him, mean to us : especially is he mean and absurd in
scenes of conflict between the gods. Besides, he is dis-
gusting and horrible occasionally in word and thought ; as
when Hecuba wishes to ' cling on Achilles and eat up his
liver ' ; when (as Jupiter says) Juno would gladly eat :
Priam's children raw ; when Jupiter hanged Juno up and
fastened a pair of anvils to her feet ; also in the description
of dreadful wounds, and the treatment which (Priam says)
dogs give to an old man's corpse. The descriptions of
Vulcan and Thersites are ignoble ; so is the mode of mourn-
ing for Hector adopted by Priam ; so is the treatment of
the populace by Ulysses, which does but reflect the manners
of the day. I am not now blaming Homer for these things ;
but I say no treatment can elevate the subject ; the trans-
lator must not be expected to make noble what is not so J
intrinsically.
If any one think that I am disparaging Homer, let me
remind him of the horrid grossnesses of Shakspeare, which
yet are not allowed to lessen our admiration of Shakspeare's
grandeur. The Homer of the Iliad is morally pure and
often very tender ; but to expect refinement and universal
delicacy of expression in that stage of civilization is quite
anachronistic and unreasonable. As in earlier England, so
in Homeric Greece, even high poetry partook of the coarse-
ness of society. This was probably inevitable, precisely :
because Greek epic poetry was so natural.
Mr. Arnold says that I make Homer's nobleness emi-
nently ignoble. This suggests to me to quote a passage,
not because I think myself particularly successful in it, but
because the poet is evidently aiming to be grand, when his
mightiest hero puts forth mighty boastings, offensive to
some of the gods. It is the speech of Achilles over the
dead body of Asteropaeus {Iliad xxi, 184) . Whether I make
it ignoble, by my diction or my metre, the reader must judge.
Lie as thou art. 'Tis hard for thee to strive against the children ^
Of overmatching Saturn's son, tho' offspring of a River.
HOMER'S DIFFUSENESS 369
Thou boastest, that thy origin is from a Stream broad-flowing ;
I boast, from mighty Jupiter to trace my first beginning.
A man who o'er the Myrmidons holdeth wide rule, begat me.
Peleus ; whose father- Aeacus by Jupiter was gotten.
Rivers, that trickle to the sea, than Jupiter are weaker ;
So, than the progeny of Jove, weaker a River's offspring.
Yea, if he aught avail'd to help, behold ! a mighty River
Beside thee here : but none can fight with Jove, the child of Satunit
Not royal AcheloTus with him may play the equal.
0 Nor e'en the amplebosom'd strength of deeply-flowing Ocean :
Tho' from his fulness every Sea and every River welleth,
And all the ever-bubbling springs and eke their vasty sources.
Yet at the lightning-bolt of Jove doth even Ocean shudder,
And at the direful thunder-clap, when from the sky it crasheth.
Mr. Arnold has in some respects attacked me discreetly ;
I mean, where he has said that which damages me with his
readers, and yet leaves me no possible reply. What is
easier than for one to call another ignoble ? what more
damaging ? what harder to refute ? Then when he speaks
0 of my ' metrical exploits ' how can I be offended ? to
what have I to reply ? His words are expressive either of
compUment or of contempt ; but in either case are un-
tangible. Again : when he would show how tender he
has been of my honour, and how unwilling to expose my
enormities, he says : p. 279 : ' I will by no means search in
Mr. Newman's version for passages likely to raise a laugh :
that search, alas ! would be far too easy ; ' I find the pity
which the word alas ! expresses, to be very clever, and very
effective against me. But, I think, he was not discreet, but
to very unwise, in making dogmatic statements on the ground
of erudition, many of which I have exposed ; and about
which much more remains to be said than space will
allow me.
In his denial that Homer is ' garrulous,' he complains
that so many think him to be ' diffuse.' Mr. Arnold, it
seems, is unaware of that very prominent peculiarity ;
which suits ill even to Mr. Gladstone's style. Thus, where
Homer said (and I said) in a passage quoted above, ' people
that have a voice in their bosom,' Mr. Gladstone has only
U) ' speaking men.' I have noticed the epithet shaggy as quaint,
in ' His heart in his shaggy bosom was divided ; ' where, in
a moral thought, a physical epithet is obtruded. But even
if ' shaggy ' be dropped, it remains diffuse (and charac-
360 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
teristically so) to say ' my heart in my bosom is divided/
for * I doubt.' So — ' I will speak what my heart in my
bosom bids me.' So, Homer makes men think Kara <^peVa
Kttt Kara Bvfxov, ' in their heart and mind ; ' and deprives
them of ' mind and soul.' Also : ' this appeared to him
in his mind to be the best counsel.' Mr. Arnold assumes
tones of great superiority ; but every schoolboy knows that
diffuseness is a distinguishing characteristic of Homer.
Again, the poet's epithets are often selected by their conve-
nience for his metre ; sometimes perhaps even appropriated
for no other cause. No one has ever given any better
reason why Diomedes and Menelaus are almost exclusively
called ySo^v dya^o?, except that it suits the metre. This
belongs to the improvisatore, the negligent, the ballad style.
The word cv/x/acXit;?, which I with others render ' ashen-
speared,' is said of Priam, of Panthus, and of sons of
Panthus. Mr. Arnold rebukes me, p. 309, for violating my
own principles. ' I say, on the other hand, that evfifxeXco)
has not the effect ^ of a peculiarity in the original, while
" ashen-speared " has the effect of a pecuHarity in the
EngUsh : and " warlike " is as marking an equivalent as
I dare give for €i;>/xeA.ta), for fear of disturbing the balance of
expression in Homer's sentence.' Mr. Arnold cannot write
a sentence on Greek, without showing an ignorance hard
to excuse in one who thus comes forward as a vituperating
censor. Warlike is a word current in the lips and books of
all Englishmen : €v>/x.eAt7?s is a word never used, never, I
believe, in all Greek literature, by any one but Homer. If
he does but turn to Liddell and Scott, he will see their
statement, that the Attic form c^/xeXtas is only to be found :
in grammars. He is here, as always, wrong in his facts.
The word is most singular in Greek ; more singular by far
than ' ashen-spear'd ' in English, because it is more obscure,
as is its special application to one or two persons : and in
truth I have doubted whether we any better understand
Eumelian Priam than Gerenian Nestor. — ^Mr. Arnold
presently imputes to me the opinion that x^^wv means
* a cloak,' which he does not dispute : but if I had thought it
^ Of course no peculiarity of phrase has the effect of peculiarity on a
man who has imperfect acquaintance with the delicacies of a language j
who, for instance, thinks that €A.,v/;^/xos means dovXiia,
PECULIAR EPITHETS 361
necessary to be literal, I must have rendered x'^^'^^xLTiove^
brazen-shirted. He suggests to me the rendering * brazen-
coated,' which I have used in //. 4, 285 and elsewhere.
I have also used * brazen-clad,' and I now prefer ' brazen-
niail'd.' I here wish only to press that Mr. Arnold's criti-
cism proceeds on a false fact. Homer's epithet was not
a famiUar word at Athens (in any other sense than as
Burns or Virgil may be familiar to Mr. Arnold), but was
strange, unknown even to their poets ; hence his demand
0 that I shall use a word already familiar in English poetry
is doubly baseless. The later poets of Greece have plenty
of words beginning with xa^^^o- '» but this one word is
exclusively Homer's. — Everything that I have now said,
may be repeated still more pointedly concerning ivKvrjfuSe^,
inasmuch as directing attention to leg- armour is peculiarly
quaint. No one in all Greek literature (as far as I know)
names the word but Homer ; and yet Mr. Arnold turns on
me with his ever reiterated, ever unsupported, assertions
and censures, of course assuming that ' the scholar ' is with
D him. (I have no theory at hand, to explain why he regards
his own word to suffice without attempt at proof.) The
epithet is intensely peculiar ; and I observe that Mr. Arnold
has not dared to suggest a translation. It is clear to me
that he is ashamed of my poet's oddities ; and has no mode
of escaping from them but by bluntly denying facts.
Equally peculiar to Homer are the words /cuStavetpa, TavvTre-n-kos
and twenty others, — equally unknown to Attic the peculiar
compound /acXo/St?? (adopted from Homer by Pindar), —
about all which he carps at me on false grounds. But
0 I pass these, and speak a little more at length about /AcpoTrc?.
Will the reader allow me to vary these tedious details, by
imagining a conversation between the Aristophanic Socrates
and his clownish pupil Strepsiades. I suppose the philo-
sopher to be instructing him in the higher Greek, Homer
being the text.
Soc. Now Streppy, tell me what /AcpoTrcs avOpoyn-oi means ?
Strep. Let me see : fxipo-n-e^ ? that must mean ' half -faced/
Soc. Nonsense, silly fellow : think again.
Strep. Well then : /Aepo7r€9, half -eyed, squinting.
.0 Soc. No ; you are playing the fool : it is not our ott Lq
6i{/Ls, oxj/ofiai,, KaTOTTTpov, but another sort of ott.
362 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
Strep. Why, you yesterday told me that oivoTra was
* wine-faced,' and aWoira ' blazing-faced,' something like
our aWiOil/.
Soc. Ah ! well : it is not so wonderful that you go wrong.
It is true, there is also vwpoi}/, a-Tipoij/, r^vo^. Those might
mislead you ; />tc/ooi/^ is rather peculiar. Now cannot you
think of any characteristic of mankind, which /xepoires will
express. How do men differ from other animals ?
Strep. I have it ! I heard it from your young friend
Euclid. Mepoif/ €(ttIv dv6poiTro<;, * man is a cooking animal.'
Soc. You stupid lout ! what are you at ? what do you
mean ?
Strep. Why, fjicpoxf/, from /Aeipw, I distribute, oif/ov, sauce.
Soc. No, no : oij/ov has the 6\j/, with radical immovable
s in it ; but here ott is the root, and s is movable.
Strep. Now I have got it ; /^etpw, I distribute, ottoi/, juice,
rennet.
Soc. Wretched man ! you must forget your larder and
your dairy, if ever you are to learn grammar. — Come,
Streppy : leave rustic words, and think of the language of
the gods. Did you ever hear of the brilliant goddess Circe
and of her oTra KaXi^v ?
Strep. Oh yes ; Circe and her beautiful face.
Soc. I told you, no ! you forgetful fellow. It is another
OTT. Now I Will ask you in a different way. Do you know
why we call fishes eXXo-rres ?
Strep. I suppose, because they are cased in scales.
Soc. That is not it. — (And yet I am not sure. Perhaps
the fellow is right, after all.) — Well, we will not speak any
more of cAAoTrts. But did you never hear in Euripides, ovk
€xw yey(i)V€Lv oira ? What does that mean ?
Strep. ' I am not able to shout out, w ttottol.'
Soc. No, no, Streppy : but Euripides often uses oira. He
takes it from Homer, and it is akin to eV, not to our ott
and much less to ttoVoi. What does tirr] mean ?
Strep. It means such lines as the diviners sing.
Soc. So it does in Attic, but Homer uses it for pT^/xara,
words ; indeed we also sometimes.
Strep. Yes, yes, I do know it. AU is right.
Soc. I think you do : well, and oij/ means a voice, tfim'rj.
Strep. How you learned men like to puzzle us 1 I often
MEPOHES 363
have heard otti, orra in the Tragedies, but never quite under-
stood it. What a pity they do not say (^(ovtj when they
mean (fuDv/j.
Soc. We have at last made one step. Now what is fiipoij/ ?
IX€p07r€<s avOpoiiroi.
Strep, Metpw, I divide, otto, ^oiv-qvy voice ; ' voice-divid-
ing ' : what can that mean ?
Soc. You have heard a wild dog howl, and a tame dog
bark : tell me how they differ.
) Strep. The wild dog gives a long long oo-oo, which
changes like a trumpet ii you push your hand up and down
it ; and the tame dog says how, wow, wow, like two or three
panpipes blown one after another.
Soc. Exactly ; you see the tame dog is humanized : he
divides his voice into syllables, as men do. ' Voice-dividing '
means ' speaking in syllables.'
Strep. Oh, how clever you are !
Soc. Well then, you understand ; ' Voice-dividing *
means articulating.
) Mr. Arnold will see in the Scholiast on Iliad i, 250,
precisely this order of analysis for fxipo-n-es. It seems to me
to give not a traditional but a grammatical explanation.
Be that as it may, it indicates that a Greek had to pass
through exactly the same process in order to expound fxcpo-n-es,
as an Englishman to get sense out of ' voice-dividing.' The
word is twice used by Aeschylus, who affects Homeric words,
and one by Euripides (Iph. T.) in the connection TroXeViv
fiipoTToyv, where the very unusual lonism iroXia-Lv shows in
how Homeric a region is the poet's fancy. No other word
) ending in of except fxipoif/ can be confidently assigned to the
root oij/, a voice. *Hvoi/^ in Homer (itself of most uncertain
sense and derivation) is generally referred to the other oif/.
The sense of cXAoi/^ again ^ is very uncertain. Every way
therefore piipoxj/ is ' odd ' and obscure. The phrase
' articulating ' is utterly prosaic and inadmissible. Vocal
is rather too Latinized for my style, and besides, is apt to
mean melodious. The phrase ' voice-dividing ' is indeed
easier to us than /xcpoTrcs can have been to the Athenians,
^ 'EAA(5s needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for
iv(6s, as a\Xos, alius, for Sanscrit anya. Ho with me refers i\\o\p to
A«7r». Cf. equamigeri in Lucretius*
364 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
because we all know what voice means, but they had to be
taught scholastically what o-n-a meant ; nor would easily
guess that 6x}/ in fiipoif/ had a sense, differing from 6if/ in
{oi)a-T€poi}/ olvoxj/, aWoij/, aWio^, vStpox^/ (yvoij/), yapoxl/. Finally, since
fiepoTres is only found in the plural, it remains an open
question, whether it does not mean ' speaking various
languages.' Mr. Arnold will find that Stephanus and Scapula
treat it as doubtful, though Liddell and Scott do not
name the second interpretation. I desired to leave in the
English all the uncertainty of the Greek : but my critic
is unencumbered with such cares.
Hitherto I have been unwillingly thrown into nothing
but antagonism to Mr. Arnold, who thereby at least adds
tenfold value to his praise, and makes me proud when he
declares that the structure of my sentences is good and
Homeric. For this I give the credit to my metre, which
alone confers on me this cardinal advantage. But in turn
I will compliment Mr. Arnold at the expense of some other
critics. He does know, and they do not, the difference of
flowing and smooth. A mountain torrent is flowing, but
often very rough ; such is Homer. The * staircases of
Neptune ' on the canal of Languedoc are smooth, but do
not flow : you have to descend abruptly from each level
to the next. It would be unjust to say absolutely, that such
is Pope's smoothness ; yet often, I feel, this censure would
not be too severe. The rhyme forces him to so frequent
a change of the nominative, that he becomes painfully
discontinuous, where Homer is what Aristotle calls ' long-
linked.' At the same time, in our language, in order to
impart a flowing style, good structure does not suffice.
A principle is needed, unknown to the Greeks ; viz. the
natural divisions of the sentence oratorically, must coincide
with the divisions of the verse musically. To attain this
always in a long poem, is very difficult to a translator who
is scrupulous as to tampering with the sense. I have not
always been successful in this. But before any critic passes
on me the general sentence that I am ' deficient in flow,'
let him count up the proportion of instances in which he
can justly make the complaint, and mark whether they
occur in elevated passages.
I shall now speak of the peculiarities of my diction, under
ANTIQUE ENGLISH 365
three lieads : 1 . old or antiquated words ; 2. coarse words
expressive of outward actions, but having no moral colour ;
3. words of which the sense has degenerated in modern days.
1. Mr. Arnold appears to regard what is antiquated as
ignoble. I think him, as usual, in fundamental error. In
general the nobler words come from ancient style, and
in no case can it be said that old words (as such) are ignoble.
To introduce such terms as whereat, therefrom, quoth, be-
holden, steed, erst, anon, anent, into the midst of style which
in all other respects is modern and prosaic, would be like to
that which we often hear from half -educated people. The
want of harmony makes us regard it as low-minded and
uncouth. From this cause (as I suspect) has stolen into
Mr. Arnold's mind the fallacy, that the words themselves
are uncouth.^ But the words are excellent, if only they are
in proper keeping with the general style. — Now it is very
possible, that in some passages, few or many, I am open to
the charge of having mixed old and new style unskiLfully ;
but I cannot admit that the old words (as such) are ignoble.
Xo one so speaks of Spenser's dialect, nay, nor of Thomson's ;
although with Thomson it was assumed, exactly as by me,
but to a far greater extent, and without any such necessity
as urges me. As I have stated in my preface, a broad
tinge of antiquity in the style is essential, to make Homer's
barbaric puerilities and eccentricities less offensive. (Even
Mr. Arnold would admit this, if he admitted my facts : but
he denies that there is anything eccentric, antique, quaint,
barbaric in Homer : that is his only way of resisting my
conclusion.) If Mr. Gladstone were able to give his valuable
time to work out an entire Iliad in his refined modem style,
I feel confident that he would find it impossible to deal
^ I do not see that Mr. Arnold has any right to reproach me, because
Tie does not know Spenser's word ' bragly ' (which I may have used
twice in the Iliad), or Dryden's word ' plump,' for a mass. The former
is so near in sound to brag and braw, that an Englishman who is once
told that it means ' proudly fine,' ought thenceforward to find it very
intelligible : the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar lump. That
he can carp as he does against these words and against bulkin (= young
bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how little I have imposed of
difficulty on my readers. Those who know lambkin cannot find bulkin
very hard. Since writing the above, I see a learned writer in the Philo-
logical Museum illustrates XKrj by the old English phrase ' a plump
of spears.'
366 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
faithfully with the eccentric phraseology and with the
negligent parts of the poem. I have the testimony of an
•unfriendly reviewer, that I am the first and only translator
that has dared to give Homer's constant epithets and not
conceal his forms of thought : of course I could not have
done this in modern style. The lisping of a child is well
enough from a child, but is disgusting in a full-grown man.
Cowper and Pope systematically cut out from Homer what-
ever they cannot make stately, and harmonize with modern
style : even Mr. Brandreth often shrinks, though he is brave
enough to say ox-eyed Juno. Who then can doubt the ex-
treme unfitness of their metre and of their modern diction ?
My opposers never fairly meet the argument. Mr. Arnold,
when most gratuitously censuring my mild rendering of
Kwo? KaKOfirjxdvov oKpvoeo-o-rj^y does not dare to suggest any
English for it himself. Even Mr. Brandreth skips it. It is
not merely offensive words ; but the purest and simplest
phrases, as a man's ' dear life,' ' dear knees,' or his ' tightly-
built house,' are a stumbling-block to translators. No
stronger proof is necessary, or perhaps is possible, than ;
these phenomena give, that to shed an antique hue over
Homer is of first necessity to a translator : without it, in-
justice is done both to the reader and to the poet. Whether
I have managed the style well, is a separate question, and
is matter of detail. I may have sometimes done well,
sometimes ill ; but I claim that my critics shall judge me
from a broader ground, and shall not pertinaciously go on
comparing my version with modern style, and condemning
me as (what they are pleased to call) inelegant, because
it is not like refined modern poetry, when it specially j
avoids to be such. They never deal thus with Thomson
or Chatterton, any more than with Shakspeare or Spenser.
There is no sharp distinction possible between the foreign
and the antiquated in language. What is obsolete with us,
may still live somewhere : as, what in Greek is called Poetic
or Homeric, may at the same time be living Aeolic. So,
whether I take a word from Spenser or from Scotland, is
generally unimportant. I do not remember more than four
Scotch words, which I have occasionally adopted for con-
venience ; viz. Gallant, young man ; Canny, right-minded ; 4
Bonny, handsome ; to Skirl, to cry shrilly. A trochaic
ANTIQUE ENGLISH 367
word, which I cannot get in English, is sometimes urgently
needed. It is astonishing to me that those who ought to
know both what a large mass of antique and foreign-sound-
ing words an Athenian found in Homer, and how many-
Doric or Sicilian forms as well as Homeric words the Greek
tragedians on principle brought into thdir songs, should
make the outcry that they do against my very limited use
of that which has an antique or Scotch sound. Classical
scholars ought to set their faces against the double heresy,
I of trying to enforce, that foreign poetry, however various,
shall be all rendered into one English dialect, and that
this shall, in order of words and in diction, closely approxi-
mate to pohshed prose. From an Oxford Professor I should
have expected the very opposite spirit to that which
Mr. Arnold shows. He ought to know and feel that one
glory of Greek poetry is its great internal variety. He
admits the principle that old words are a source of ennoble-
ment for diction, when he extols the Bible as his standard :
for surely he claims no rhetorical inspiration for the
) translators. Words which have come to us in a sacred
connection, no doubt, gain a sacred hue, but they must not
be allowed to desecrate other old and excellent words.
Mr. Arnold informs his Oxford hearers that ' his Bibliolatry
is perhaps excessive.' So the public will judge, if he say
that wench, whore, pate, pot, gin, damn, busybody, audience^
principality, generation, are epical noble words because they
are in the Bible, and that lief, ken, in sooth, grim, stalwart,
gait, guise, eld, hie, erst, are bad, because they are not
there. Nine times out of ten, what are called ' poetical '
) words, are nothing but antique words, and are made
ignoble by Mr. Arnold's doctrine. His very arbitrary con-
demnation of eld, lief, in sooth, gait, gentle friend in one
passage of mine as ' bad words,' is probably due to his
monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint and nothing
antique in Homer. Excellent and noble as are these words
which he rebukes, excellent even for ^schylus, I should
doubt the propriety of using them in the dialogue of
Euripides ; on the level of which he seems to think Homer
to be.
[) 2. Our language, especially the Saxon part of it, abounds
with vigorous monosyllabic verbs, and dissyllabic frequenta-
368 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
tives derived from them, indicative of strong physical action.
For these words (which, I make no doubt, Mr. Arnold
regards as ignoble plebeians), I claim Quiritarian rights :
but I do not wish them to displace patricians from high
service. Such verbs as sweat, haul, plump, maul, yell, hang^
splash, smash, thump, tug, scud, sprawl, spank, &c., I hold
(in their purely physical sense) to be eminently epical : for
the epic revels in descriptions of violent action to which
they are suited. Intense muscular exertion in every form,
intense physical action of the surrounding elements, with :
intense ascription or description of size or colour ; —
together make up an immense fraction of the poem. To
cut out these words is to emasculate the epic. Even Pope
admits such words. My eye in turning his pages was just
now caught by : ' They tug, they sweat.' Who will say
that ' tug,' * sweat ' are admissible, but ' bang,' ' smash,'
* sputter ' are inadmissible ? Mr. Arnold resents my saying
that Homer is often homely. He is homely expressly
because he is natural. The epical diction admits both the
gigantesque and the homely : it inexorably refuses the con- 2
ventional, under which is comprised a vast mass of what
some wrongly call elegant. But while I justify the use of
homely words in a primary physical, I deprecate them in
a secondary moral sense. Mr. Arnold clearly is dull to this
distinction, or he would not utter against me the follo^ng
taunt, p. 300 : -^
' To grunt and sweat under a weary load does perfeOtly
well where it comes in Shakspeare : but if the translator of
Homer, who will hardly have wound up our minds to the
pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to 3
employ, when he has to speak of Homer's heroes under the
load of calamity, this figure of ' grunting ' and ' sweating,'
we should say, He Newmanizes.^
Mr. Arnold here not only makes a mistake, he propagates
a slander ; as if I had ever used such words as grunt and
sweat morally. If Homer in the Iliad spoke of grunting
swine, as he does of sweating steeds, so should I. As the
coarse metaphors here quoted from Shakspeare are utterly
opposed to Homer's style, to obtrude them on him would
be a gross offence. Mr. Arnold sends his readers away with n
the belief that this is my practice, though he has not dared
COARSE METAPHOR S69
to assert it. T hear such coarseness in Shakspeare, not
because I am ' wound up to a high pitch ' by him, ' borne
away by a mighty current ' — (which Mr. Arnold, with
ingenious unfairness to me, assumes to be certain in a
reader of Shakspeare and all but impossible in a reader of
Homer), — but because I know, that in Shakspeare's time all
literature was coarse, as was the speech of courtiers and of
the queen herself. Mr. Arnold imputes to me Shakspeare's
coarseness, from which I instinctively shrink ; and when
> his logic leads to the conclusion, ' he Shakspearizes,' he
with gratuitous rancour turns it into ' he Newmanizes.'
Some words which with the Biblical translators seem to
have been noble, I should not now dare to use in the
primitive sense. For instance, ' His iniquity shall fall
upon his own 'pate.^ Yet I think pate a good metaphorical
word and have used it of the sea-waves, in a bold passage,
//. xiii, 795:'
Then on rush'd they, with weight and mass like to a troublous whirl-
wind,
) Which from the thundercloud of Jove down on the champaign plumpeth.
And doth the briny flood bestir with an unearthly uproar :
Then in the ever brawling sea full many a billow splasheth,
Hollow, and bald with hoary -pate, one racing after other.
Is there really no ' mighty current ' here, to sweep
off petty criticism ?
I have a remark on the strong physical word ' plumpeth '
here used. It is fundamentally Milton's ' plumb down he
drops ten thousand fathom deep ; ' plumb and plmnp in
this sense are clearly the same root. I confess I have not
) been able to find the verb in an old writer, though it is so
common now. Old writers do not say ' to plumb down,'
but ' to drop plumb down.' Perhaps in a second edition
(if I reach to it), I may alter the words to ' plumb . . ,
droppeth ' on this ground ; but I do turn sick at the mawk-
ishness of critics, one of whom, who ought to know better,
tells me that the word plump reminds him ' of the crinolined
hoyden of a boarding-school ' ! ! If he had said, ' It is too
like the phrase of a sailor, — of a peasant, — of a schoolbo}^
this objection would be at least intelligible. However :
[) the word is intended to express the violent impact of a body
descending from aloft ^ — and it does express it.
ABMOLO ;q \^
370 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
Mr. Arnold censures me for representing Achilles as yelling.
He is depicted by the poet as in the most violent physical
rage, boiling over with passion and wholly uncontrouled.
He smacks his two thighs at once ; he rolls on the ground,
fiiya? fieyaXoio-TL ; he defiles his hair with dust ; he rends it ;
he grinds his teeth ; fire flashes from his eyes ; but — he may
not ' yell,' that would not be comme ilfaut ! We shall agree,
that in peace nothing so becomes a hero as modest still-
ness ; but that * Peleus' son, insatiate of combat,' fuU of the
fiercest pent-up passion, should vent a little of it in a yell,
seems to me quite in place. That the Greek la^wv is not
necessarily to be so rendered, I am aware ; but it is a very
vigorous word, like peal and shriek ; neither of which would
here suit. I sometimes render it skirl : but ' battle-yell '
is a received rightful phrase. Achilles is not a stately
Virgilian pius Aeneas, but is a far wilder barbarian.
After Mr. Arnold has laid upon me the sins of Shakspeare,
he amazes me by adding, p. 301 : ' The idiomatic language
of Shakspeare, — such language as "prate of hi^ivhereahout,''
''jump the life to come," — "the damnation of his taking-
off,'' — " quietus make with a bare bodkin," should be care-
fully observed by the translator of Homer ; although in
every case he will have to decide for himself, whether the
use, by him, of Shakspeare's liberty, will or will not clash
with his indispensable duty of nobleness.'
Of the Shakspearianisms here italicized by Mr. Arnold,
there is not one which I could endure to adopt. * His
whereabout,' I regard as the flattest prose. (The word
prate is a plebeian which I admit in its own low places ; but
how Mr. Arnold can approve of it, consistently with his
attacks on me, I do not understand.) Damnation and
Taking-off (for Guilt and Murder), and Jump, I absolutely
reject ; and * quietus make ' would be nothing but an
utterly inadmissible quotation from Shakspeare. Jump as
an active verb is to me monstrous, but Jump is just the
sort of modern prose word which is not noble . Leap , Bound,
for great action. Skip, Frisk, Gambol, for smaller, are all good.
I have shown against Mr. Arnold, (1) that Homer was
out-and-out antiquated to the Athenians, even when
perfectly understood by them ; (2) that his conceptions,
similes, phraseology and epithets are habitually quaint,
COABSE PHYSICAL WORDS 371
strange, unparalleled in Greek literature ; and pardonable
only to semibarbarism ; (3) that they are intimately related
to his noblest excellencies ; (4) that many words are so
peculiar as to be still doubtful to us ; (5) I have indicated
that some of his descriptions and conceptions are horrible
to us, though they were not so to his barbaric auditors ;
(6) that considerable portions of the poem are not poetry,
but rhjrthmical prose like Horace's Satires, and are interest-
ing to us not as poetry but as portraying the manners or
[) sentiments of the day. I now add (7) what is inevitable in
all high and barbaric poetry, — perhaps in all high poetry, —
— many of his energetic descriptions are expressed in coarse
physical words. I do not here attempt proof, for it might
need a treatise : but I give one illustration ; II, xiii, 136,
T/30JC9 TrpovTvij/av doAAc€9. Cowper, misled by the ignis
fatuus of ' stateliness,' renders it absurdly
The pow'rs of Ilium gave the first assault,
Embattled close ;
but it is strictly, * The Trojans knocked-forward (or, thumped,
D hutted, forward) in close pack.' The verb is too coarse for
later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong
(packed together). I believe, that ' Forward in pack the
Troians pitch'd/ would not be really unfaithful to the
Homeric colour ; and I maintain that ' Forward in mass
the Troians pitch'd,' would be an irreprovable rendering.
Dryden in this respect is in entire harmony with Homeric
style. No critic deals fairly with me in isolating any of
these strong words, and then appealing to his readers
whether I am not ignoble. Hereby he deprives me of the
D aycov, the ' mighty current ' of Mr. Arnold, and he misstates
the problem ; which is, whether the word is suitable, then and
there, for the work required of it, as the coalman at the pit,
the clown in the furrow, the huntsman in the open field.
3. There is a small number of words, not natural plebeians,
but patricians on which a most unjust bill of attainder has
been passed, which I seek to reverse. On the first which
I name, Mr. Arnold will side with me, because it is a BibUcal
word, — wench. In Lancashire I believe that at the age
of about sixteen a ' girl ' turns into ' a wench,' or as we say
D * a young woman.' In Homer, * girl ' and * young woman '
are alike inadmissible ; ' maid ' or * maiden ' will not
B b2
372 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
always suit, and ' wench ' is the natural word. I do not
know that I have used it three times, but I claim a right of
using it, and protest against allowing the heroes of slang to
deprive us of excellent words by their perverse misuse. If
the imaginations of some men are always in satire and in
low slang, so much the worse for them : but the more we
yield to such demands, the more will be exacted. I expect,
before long, to be told that brick is an ignoble word, meaning
a jolly fellow, and that sell, cut are out of place in Homer.
My metre, it seems, is inadmissible with some, because it is
the metre of Yankee Doodle ! as if Homer's metre were
not that of the Margites. Every noble poem is liable to be
travestied, as the Iliad and Aeschylus and Shakspeare have
been. Every burlesque writer uses the noble metre, and
caricatures the noble style. Mr. Arnold says, I must not
render ravvrr^TrXo^ ' trailing-rob'd,' because it reminds him
of ' long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement.' What a
confession as to the state of his imagination ! Why not, of
' a queen's robe trailing on a marble pavement * ? Did lie
never read
TTirr\ov fikv Karix^^^^ kavdv narpos kit' oi/Set ?
I have digressed : I return to words which have been
misunderstood. A second word is of more importance,
Imjp ; which properly means a Graft. The best translation
of w A7J8a9 lpvo<s to my mind, is, ' 0 imp of Leda ! ' for
neither ' bud of Leda,' nor ' scion of Leda ' satisfy me ;
much less ' sprig ' or ' shoot of Leda ' . The theological
writers so often used the phrase ' imp of Satan ' for ' child
of the devil,' that (since Bunyan ?) the vulgar no longer
understand that imp means scion, child, and suppose it to
mean ' little devil.' A Reviewer has omitted to give his
unlearned readers any explanation of the word (though I
carefully explained it) and calls down their indignation upon
me by his censures, which I hope proceeded from careless-
ness and ignorance
Even in Spenser's Fairy Queen the word retains its right-
ful and noble sense :
Well worthy imp ! then said the lady, &c.,
and in North's Plutarch,
• He took upon him to protect him from them all, and
MISUSED WORDS 373
not to suffer so goodly an imp [Alcibiades] to lone the good
fruit of his youth.'
Dryden uses the verb, To imp ; to graft, insert.
I was quite aware that I claimed of my readers a certain
strength of mind, when I bid them to forget the defilements
which vulgarity has shed over the noble word Imp, and
carry their imaginations back two or three centuries : but I
did not calculate that any critic would call Dainty grotesque.
This word is equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice,
► but has precisely the epical character in which both those
words are deficient. For instance, I say, that after the
death of Patroclus, the coursers ' stood motionless,'
Drooping tSward the ground their heads, and down their plaintive
eyelids
Did warm tears trickle to the ground, their charioteer bewailing.
Defiled were their dainty manes, over the yoke-strap dropping.
A critic who objects to this, has to learn English from my
translation. Does he imagine that Dainty can mean
nothing but ' over-particular as to food ' ?
\ In the compound Dainty-cheek'd, Homer shows his own
epic peculiarity. It is imitated in the similar word evTrapao?
applied to the Gorgon Medusa by Pindar : but not in the
Attics. I have somewhere read, that the rudest conception
of female beauty is that of a brilliant red plump cheek ; —
such as an English clown admires ( — was this what Pindar
meant ?) ; the second stage looks to the delicacy of tint
in the cheek ; (this is Homer's KaX\i7rdpr]o<s :) the third looks
to shape (this is the €v/>top(^o9 of the Attics, the formosus of
the Latins, and is seen in the Greek sculpture) ; the fourth
) and highest looks to moral expression : this is the idea of
Christian Europe. That Homer rests exclusively in the
second or semibarbaric stage, it is not for me to say, but, as
far as I am able, to give to the readers of my translation
materials for their own judgment. From the vague word
cT^o?, species, appearance, it cannot be positively inferred
whether the poet had an eye for Shape. The epithets curl-
eyed and fine-ankled decidedly suggest that he had ; except
that his application of the former to the entire nation of the
Greeks makes it seem to be of foreign tradition, and as
) unreal as brazen-mat7ed.
374 HOMERIC TIIANSLATI0:N
Another word which has been ill-understood and ill-used,
is dapjper. Of the epithet dappergreav'd for ivKvr)ixL<s I
certainly am not enamoured, but I have not yet found a
better rendering. It is easier to carp at my phrase, than to
suggest a better. The word dapper in Dutch = German
tapfer ; and like the Scotch braw or brave means with us
fine, gallant, elegant. I have read the line of an old poet.
The dapper words which lovers use,
for elegant, I suppose ; and so ' the dapper does ' and
' dapper elves ' of Milton must refer to elegance or refined
beauty. What is there ^ ignoble in such a word ? * Elegant '
and ' pretty ' are inadmissible in epic poetry : * dapper '
is logically equivalent, and has the epic colour. Neither
* fair ' nor ' comely ' here suit. As to the school trans-
lation * wellgreav'd,' every common Englishman on hear-
ing the sound receives it as ' wellgrieved/ and to me it is
very unpleasing. A part of the mischief, a large part of
it, is in the word greave ; for dapper-girdled is on the whole
well-received. But what else can we say for greave ?
leggings ? gambados ?
Much perhaps remains to be learnt concerning Homer's
perpetual epithets. My very learned colleague Goldstiicker,
Professor of Sanscrit, is convinced that the epithet cow-eyed
of the Homeric Juno is an echo of the notion of Hindoo
poets, that (if I remember his statement) ' the sunbeams are
the cows of heaven.' The sacred qualities of the Hindoo
cow are perhaps not to be forgotten. I have myself been
struck by the phrase SdVereos Trora/xoio as akin to the idea
that the Ganges falls from Mount Meru, the Hindoo Olympus.
Also the meaning of two other epithets has been revealed ;
to me from the pictures of Hindoo ladies. First, curl-eyed,
to which I have referred above ; secondly, rosy-fingered
Aurora. For Aurora is an ' Eastern lady ' ; and, as such,
has the tips of her fingers dyed rosy-red, whether by henna
or by some more brilliant drug. Who shall say that the
kings and warriors of Homer do not derive from the East
their epithet ' Jove-nurtured ' ? or that this or that goddess
is not called ' golden-throned ' or ' fair-throned ' in allusion
^ I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton's dapper elf by /.adivd,
* softly moving.'
PERPETUAL EPITHETS 375
to Assyrian sculpture or painting, as Rivers probably drew
their later poetical attribute ' bull-headed ' from the sculp-
ture of fountains ? It is a familiar remark, that Homer's
poetry presupposes a vast pre-existing art and material.
Much in him was traditional. Many of his wild legends
came from Asia. He is to us much beside a poet ; and that
a translator should assume to cut him down to the standard
of modern taste, is a thought which all the higher minds of
this age have outgrown. How much better is that reve-
a rential Docility, which with simple and innocent wonder,
receives the oddest notions of antiquity as material of
instruction yet to be revealed, than the self-complacent
Criticism, which pronouncing everything against modern
taste to be grotesque ^ and contemptible, squares the facts
to its own ' Axioms ' ! Homer is noble : but this or that
epithet is not noble : therefore we must explode it from Homer I
I value, I maintain, I struggle for the * high a priori road '
in its own place ; but certainly not in historical literature.
To read Homer's own thoughts, is to wander in a world
3 abounding with freshness : but if we insist on treading
round and round in our own footsteps, we shall never ascend
those heights whence the strange region is to be seen.
Surely an intelligent learned critic ought to inculcate on the
unlearned, that if they would get instruction from Homer,
they must not expect to have their ears tickled by a musical
sound as of a namby-pamby poetaster ; but must look on
a metre as doing its duty, when it ' strings the mind up to
the necessary pitch ' in elevated passages ; and that instead
of demanding of a translator everywhere a rhythmical
) perfection which perhaps can only be attained by a great
sacrifice of higher quaUties, they should be willing to sub-
mit to a small part of that ruggedness, which Mr. Arnold
cheerfully bears in Homer himself through the loss of the
Digamma. And now, for a final protest. To be stately is
^ Mr. Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine : ' I ought to
be quaint ; I ought not to be grotesque.' I am disposed to think him
right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have
' unfortunately ' given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me
unjustly. I should rather have said: *We ought to be quaint, and
not to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call
grotesque in English, when he is too blunted by habit or too poor a*
scholar to discern it in the Greek,'
376 HOMERIC TRANSLATION
not to be grand. Nicolas of Russia may have been stately
like Cowper, Garibaldi is grand like the true Homer. A
diplomatic address is stately ; it is not grand, nor often
noble'. To expect a translation of Homer to be pervadingly
elegant, is absurd ; Homer is not such, any more than is the
side of an Alpine mountain. The elegant and the pic-
turesque are seldom identical, however much of delicate
beauty may be interstudded in the picturesque : but this
has always got plenty of what is shaggy and uncouth,
without which contrast the full delight of beauty would not i<
be attained. I think Moore in his characteristic way tells
of a beauty
Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender.
Till love falls asleep in the sameness of splendour.
Such certainly is not Homer's. His beauty, when at its
height, is tvild beauty : it smells of the mountain and the
sea. If he be compared to a noble animal, it is not to such
a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer as our smooth
translators would pretend, but to a wild horse of the Don
Cossacks : and if I, instead of this, present to the reader 2(
nothing but a Dandie Dinmont's pony, this, as a first
approximation, is a valuable step towards the true solution.
Before the best translation of the Iliad of which our lan-
guage is capable, can be produced, the English pubUc has
to unlearn the false notion of Homer which his deliberately
faithless versifiers have infused. Chapman's conceits unfit
his translation for instructing the public, even if his rhj^thm
' jolted ' less, if his structure were simpler, and his dialect
more intelligible. My version, if allowed to be read, will
prepare the public to receive a version better than mine. I 3
regard it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a
translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic
landis, houndis, hartis, «&c.,' instead of our modern un-
melodious lands, hounds, harts ; whether the ye or y before
the past participle may not be restored ; the want of which
confounds that participle with the past tense. Even the
final -en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.)
still subsists in Lancashire. It deserves consideration
whether by a few such slight grammatical retrogressions
into antiquity a translator of Homer might not add much 4
melody to his poem and do good service to the language.
ON TRANSLATING HOMER
LAST WORD&
A LECTURE GIVEN AT OXFORD
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
* Multi, qui jperseq_uuntur me, et tribiilant me : a testimoniis non
declinavi.*
ON TRANSLATING HOMER
LAST WORDS
BuFFON, the great French naturahst, imposed on himself
the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks
made upon him. ' Je n'ai jamais repondu a aucune
critique,' he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion
of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his
behalf ; ' je n'ai jamais repondu a aucune critique, et je
garderai le meme silence sur celle-ci.' On another occasion,
when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to
answer, ' II vaut mieux,' he said, ' laisser ces mauvaises
I gens dans I'incertitude.* Even when reply to an attack
was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted
that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more
sensitive to criticism than Buff on, had answered, and
successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work,
the Esprit des Lois, by the Gazetier Janseniste. This
Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times, —
a periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally
seen, — very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the
point to be seized was at all a delicate one, very apt to
I miss it. ' Notwithstanding this example,' said BufEon, —
who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the
Jansenist Gazetteer, — ' notwithstanding this example, I
think I may promise my course will be different. I shall
not answer a single word.'
And to any one who has noticed the baneful effects of
controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and
hatreds, on men of letters or men of science ; to any one
who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their
dignity and repose, but their productive force, their
) genuine activity ; how it always checks the free play of
the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether ; it
can hardly seem doubtful, that the rule thus imposed on
380 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
himself by Buff on was a wise one. His own career, indeed,
admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as
glorious as it was serene ; but it owed to its serenity no
small part of its glory. The regularity and completeness
with which he gradually built up the great work which he
had designed, the air of equable majesty which he shed
over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his con-
temporaries, and surrounded Buff on' s fame with a pecuUar
respect and dignity. ' He is,' said Frederick the Great of
him, ' the man who has best deserved the great celebrity i
which he has acquired.' And this regularity of produc-
tion, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his
resolute disdain of personal controversy.
Buff on' s example seems to me worthy of all imitation,
and in my humble way I mean always to follow it. I never
have replied, I never will reply, to any literary assailant ;
in such encounters tempers are lost, the world laughs, and
truth is not served. Least of all should I think of using
this Chair as a place from which to carry on such a con-
flict. But when a learned and estimable man thinks he 2
has reason to complain of language used by me in this
Chair, — ^when he attributes to me intentions and feelings
towards him which are far from my heart, I owe him some
explanation, — and I am bound, too, to make the explana-
tion as public as the words which gave offence. This is
the reason why I revert once more to the subject of trans-
lating Homer. But being thus brought back to that subject,
and not wishing to occupy you solely with an explanation
which, after all, is Mr. Newman's affair and mine, not the
public's, I shall take the opportunity, — not certainly to 3
enter into any conflict with any one, — but to try to establish
our old friend, the coming translator of Homer, yet a little
firmer in the positions which I hope we have now secured
for him ; to protect him against the danger of relaxing,
in the confusion of dispute, his attention to those matters
which alone I consider important for him ; to save him
from losing sight, in the dust of the attacks delivered over
it, of the real body of Patroclus. He will, probably, when
he arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, and be in haste
to disown his benefactor : but my interest in him is so 4
sincere that I can disregard his probable ingratitude.
LAST WORDS 381
First, however, for the explanation. Mr. Newman has
published a reply to the remarks which I made on his
translation of the Iliad. He seems to think that the
respect which at the outset of those remarks I professed
for him must have been professed ironically ; he says that
I use ' forms of attack against him which he does not
know how to characterize ; ' that I ' speak scornfully ' of
him, treat him with 'gratuitous insult, gratuitous rancour ; '
that I ' propagate slanders ' against him, that I wish to
Lo ' damage him with my readers,' to ' stimulate my readers
to despise ' him. He is entirely mistaken. I respect
Mr. Newman sincerely ; I respect him as one of the few
learned men we have, one of the few who love learning
for its own sake ; this respect for him I had before I read
his translation of the Iliad, I retained it while I was com-
menting on that translation, I have not lost it after read-
ing his reply. Any vivacities of expression which may
have given him pain I sincerely regret, and can only
assure him that I used them without a thought of insult
!0 or rancour. When I took the hberty of creating the verb
to Neivmanise, my intentions were no more rancorous
than if I had said to Miltonise ; when I exclaimed, in my
astonishment at his vocabulary, — ' With whom can Mr.
Newman have lived ? ' — I meant merely to convey, in
a familiar form of speech, the sense of bewilderment one
has at finding a person to whom words one thought all
the world knew seem strange, and words one thought
entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple expression
of my bewilderment Mr. Newman construes into an accusa-
ju tion that he is ' often guilty of keeping low company,'
and says that I shall ' never want a stone to throw at
him.' And what is stranger still, one of his friends gravely
tells me that Mr. Newman ' lived with the fellows of
Balliol.' As if that made Mr. Newman's glossary less
inexplicable to me ! As if he could have got his glossary
from the fellows of Balliol ! As if I could believe, that the
members of that distinguished society, — of whose dis-
course, not so many years afterwards, I myself was an
unworthy hearer, — were in Mr. Newman's time so far
40 removed from the Attic purity of speech which we all of
us admired, that when one of them called a calf a bulkin,
382 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
the rest ' easily understood ' him ; or, when he wanted
to say that a newspaper-article was ' proudly fine,' it
mattered little whether he said it was that or hragly !
No ; his having lived with the fellows of Balliol does not
explain Mr. Newman's glossary to me. I will no longer
ask ' with whom he can have lived,' since that gives him
offence ; but I must still declare that where he got his
test of rarity or intelligibility for words is a mystery to me.
That, however, does not prevent me from entertaining
a very sincere respect for Mr. Newman, and since he 3
doubts it, I am glad to reiterate my expression of it. But
the truth of the matter is this : I unfeignedly admire
Mr. Newman's ability and learning ; but I think in his
translation of Homer he has employed that ability and
/"learning quite amiss. I think he has chosen quite the
wrong field for turning his ability and learning to account.
I think that in England, partly from the want of an
J Academy, partly from a national habit of intellect to
\ which that want of an Academy is itself due, there exists
too little of what I may call a public force of correct literary 2
I opinion, possessing within certain limits a clear sense of
Vwhat is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and sharply
recalling men of ability and learning from any flagrant
misdirection of these their advantages. I think, even, that
in our country a powerful misdirection of this kind is
often more likely to subjugate and pervert opinion, than
to be checked and corrected by it.^ Hence a chaos of
false tendencies, wasted efforts, impotent conclusions,
works which ought never to have been undertaken. Any
one who can introduce a little order into this chaos b3^g
establishing in any quarter a single sound rule of criticism,
a single rule which clearly marks what is right as right,
and what is wrong as wrong, does a good deed ; and his
^ ' It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judg-
ment which I think far more masculine than Mr. Arnold's, have passed
a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my transLation. I at
present count eight such names.' — ' Before venturing to print, I sought
to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my
verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have
extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them,
without knowing who was the translator.' — Mr. Newman's Reply,
pp. 315, 322.
LAST WORDS 383
deed is so much the better the greater force he counter-
acts of learning and ability applied to thicken the chaos.
Of course no one can be sure that he has fixed any such
• rules ; he can only do his best to fix them ; but some-
where or other, in the literary opinion of Europe, if not
in the literary opinion of one nation, in fifty years, if not
in five, there is a final judgment on these matters, and
the critic's work will at last stand or fall by its true merits.
Meanwhile, the charge of having in one instance mis-
0 appUed his powers, of having once followed a false ten-
dency, is no such grievous charge to bring against a man ;
it does not exclude a great respect for himself personally,
or for his powers in the happiest manifestations of them.
False tendency is, I have said, an evil to which the artist
or the man of letters in England is pecuHarly prone ; but
everjrwhere in our time he is liable to it, — the greatest as
well as the humblest. * The first beginnings of my Wilhelm^
MeisterJ says Goethe, ' arose out of an obscure sense of
the great truth that man will often attempt something for
0 which nature has denied him the proper powers, will
undertake and practise something in which he cannot
become skilled. An inward feeling warns him to desist '
(yes, but there are, unhappily, cases of absolute judicial
blindness !), ' nevertheless he cannot get clear in himself
about it, and is driven along a false road to a false goal,
without knowing how it is with him. To this we may refer
everything which goes by the name of false tendency,
dilettantism, and so on. A great many men waste in this
way the fairest portion of their lives, and fall at last into
o wonderful delusion.' Yet after all, — Goethe adds, — it
sometimes happens that even on this false road a man
finds, not indeed that which he sought, but something
which is good and useful for him ; * like Saul, the son of
I\ish, who went forth to look for his father's asses, and
found a kingdom.' And thus false tendency as well as
true, vain effort as well as fruitful, go together to produce
that great movement of life, to present that immense
and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from boy-
hood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagina-
0 tion, and which would be his terror, if it were not at the
same time his deliorht.
384 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
So Mr. Newman may see how wide-spread a danger it
is, to which he has, as I think, in setting himself to tran-
slate Homer, fallen a prey. He may be well satisfied if
he can escape from it by paying it the tribute of a single
work only. He may judge how unlikely it is that I should
* despise ' him for once falling a prey to it. I know far
too well how exposed to it we all are ; how exposed to it
I myself am. At this very moment, for example, I am
fresh from reading Mr, Newman's reply to my lectures,
a reply full of that erudition in which (as I am so often
and so good-naturedly reminded, but indeed I know it
without being reminded) Mr. Newman is immeasurably my
superior. Well, the demon that pushes us all to our ruin
is even now prompting me to follow Mr. Newman into
a discussion about the digamma, and I know not what
providence holds me back. And some day, I have no
doubt, I shall lecture on the language of the Berbers, and
give him his entire revenge.
But Mr. Newman does not confine himself to com-
plaints on his own behalf, he complains on Homer's behalf
too. He says that my ' statements about Greek literature
are against the most notorious and elementary fact ; '
that I ' do a public wrong to literature by publishing
them ; ' and that the Professors to whom I appealed in
my three Lectures, ' would only lose credit if they sanc-
tioned the use I make of their names.' He does these
eminent men the kindness of adding, however, that
' whether they are pleased with this parading of their
names in behalf of paradoxical error, he may well doubt,'
and that ' until they endorse it themselves, he shall treat
my process as a piece of forgery.' He proceeds to discuss
my statements at great length, and with an erudition and
ingenuity which nobody can admire more than I do. And
he ends by saying that my ignorance is great.
Alas ! that is very true. Much as Mr. Newman was
mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is entirely
right when he talks of my ignorance. And yet, perverse
as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing,
when deahng with these matters of poetical criticism, that
my ignorance were even greater than it is. To handle
these matters properly there is needed a poise so perfect.
LAST WORDS S85
that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy
the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it,
even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of
the thing itself with which one is dealing, not to go off on
some collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter
in the world. The * thing itself * with which one is here
dealing, — the critical perception of poetic truth, — is of all
things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent ; by even
pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing
it. The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the
nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic
spirit imaginable ; he should be indeed the * ondoyant et
divers,' the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne.
The less he can deal with his object simply and freely,
the more things he has to take into account in dealing
with it, — the more, in short, he has to encumber himself, —
so much the greater force of spirit he needs to retain his
elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this greater force
by wishing for it ; so, for the force of spirit one has, the
load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear.
The late Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that
* it was a great pity his education had been so far too
much for his abilities.' In like manner, one often sees
erudition out of all proportion to its owner's critical faculty.
Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in
dealing with poetry, lest even that little should prove ' too
much for my abilities.'
With this consciousness of my own lack of learning, —
nay, with this sort of acquiescence in it, with this belief
that for the labourer in the field of poetical criticism
learning has its disadvantages, — I am not likely to dispute
with Mr. Newman about matters of erudition. All that he
says on these matters in his Reply I read with great
interest : in general I agree with him ; but only, I am sorry
to say, up to a certain point. Like all learned men, accus-
tomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too
absolutely ; he wants to include too much under his rules ;
he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the
shade, the fine distinction, is everything ; and that, when
he has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but.
beating the air. For instance : because I think Homer
ARNOLD 0 0
386 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
noble, he imagines I must think him elegant ; and in fact
he says in plain words that I do think him so, — that to
me Homer seems ' pervadingly elegant.' But he does not.
Virgil is elegant, — ' pervadingly elegant,' — even in passages
of the highest emotion :
0, ubi campi,
Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis
Taygeta ! ^
Even there Virgil, though of a divine elegance, is still
elegant : but Homer is not elegant ; the word is quite
a wrong one to apply to him, and Mr. Newman is quite
right in blaming any one he finds so applying it. Again ;
arguing against my assertion that Homer is not quaint, he
says : ' It is quaint to call waves wet, milk white, blood
dusky, horses single-hoofed, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot
{KvXXottoBlwv), a spear longshadowy,' and so on. I find
I know not how many distinctions to draw here. I do
not think it quaint to call waves wet, or milk white, or
words winged ; but I do think it quaint to call horses
single-hoofed, or Vulcan Lobfoot, or a spear longshadowy.
As to calling blood dusky, I do not feel quite sure ; I will
tell Mr. Newman my opinion when I see the passage in
which he calls it so. But then, again, because it is quaint
to call Vulcan Lobfoot, I cannot admit that it was quaint
to call him KvXXoTroStwi/ ; nor that, because it is quaint to
call a spear longshadowy, it was quaint to call it SoAtxo-
a-KLov. Here Mr. Newman's erudition misleads him : he
knows the literal value of the Greek so well, that he thinks
his literal rendering identical with the Greek, and that the
Greek must stand or fall along with his rendering. But
the real question is, not whether he has given us, so to
speak, full change for the Greek, but how he gives us our
change : we want it in gold, and he gives it us in copper.
Again : ' It is quaint,' says Mr. Newman, ' to address
a young friend as " 0 Pippin ! " — it is quaint to compare
Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring.' Here, too,
"Ml. Newman goes much too fast, and his category of
quaintness is too comprehensive. To address a young
^ ' 0 f or the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios ! Oh
for the hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, the h^l]a of
Taygetus I ' — Georgics, ii, 486.
LAST WORDS 387
friend as ' 0 Pippin ! * is, I cordially agree with him, very
quaint ; although I do not think it was quaint in Sarpedon
to address Glaucus as w ttcttov : but in comparing, whether
in Greek or in English, Ajax to an ass whom boys are
belabouring, I do not see that there is of necessity any-
thing quaint at all. Again ; because I said that eld, lief,
i7i sooth, and other words, are, as Mr. Newman uses them
in certain places, bad words, he imagines that I must
mean to stamp these words with an absolute reprobation ;
) and because I said that ' my Bibliolatry is excessive,' he
imagines that I brand all words as ignoble which are not
in the Bible. Nothing of the kind : there are no such
absolute rules to be laid down in these matters. The Bible
vocabulary is to be used as an assistance, not as an authority.
Of the words which, placed where Mr. Newman places them,
I have called bad words, every one may be excellent in
some other place. Take eld, for instance : when Shak-
speare, reproaching man with the dependence in which
his youth is passed, says :
> all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld, . . .
it seems to me that eld comes in excellently there, in
a passage of curious meditation ; but when Mr. Newman
renders ayrjpiM t d^avarw tc by ' from Eld and Death
exempted,' it seems to me he infuses a tinge of quaint-
ness into the transparent simpUcity of Homer's expression,
and so I call eld a bad word in that place.
Once more. Mr. Newman lays it down as a general rule
) that * many of Homer's energetic descriptions are ex-
pressed in coarse physical words.' He goes on : 'I give
one illustration — Tpwes Trpovrvif/av aoXAccs. Cowper, misled
by the ignis fatuus of " stateliness " renders it absurdly :
The powers of Ilium gave the first assault
Embattled close ;
but it is, strictly, " The Trojans knocked forward (or,
thumped, butted forward) in close pack.*' The verb is too
coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is
very strong {packed together). I believe, that *' forward in
I pack the Trojans pitch'd," would not be really unfaithful
0 02
388 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
to the Homeric colour; and I maintain, that "forward
in mass the Trojans pitch'd," would be an irreprovable
rendering/ He actually gives us all that as if it were
a piece of scientific deduction ; and as if, at the end, he
had arrived at an incontrovertible conclusion. But, in
truth, one cannot settle these matters quite in this way.
Mr. Newman's general rule may be true or false (I dislike
to meddle with general rules), but every part in what
follows must stand or fall by itself, and its soundness or
unsoundness has nothing at all to do with the truth or
falsehood of Mr. Newman's general rule. He first gives,
as a strict rendering of the Greek, ' The Trojans knocked
forward (or, thumped, butted forward), in close pack.'
I need not say that, as a ' strict rendering of the Greek '
this is good, — all Mr. Newman's ' strict renderings of the
Greek ' are sure to be, as such, good ; but ' in close pack,'
for doXXics, seems to me to be what Mr. Newman's
renderings are not always, — an excellent poetical render-
ing of the Greek ; a thousand times better, certainly,
than Cowper's ' embattled close.' Well, but Mr. Newman
goes on : 'I believe, that " forward in pack the Trojans
pitch'd," would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric
colour.' Here, I say, the Homeric colour is half washed
out of Mr. Newman's happy rendering of aoXXccs ; while
in ' pitch'd ' for irpovroxpav, the literal fidelity of the
first rendering is gone, while certainly no Homeric colour
has come in its place. Finally, Mr. Newman concludes :
* I maintain that " forward in mass the Trojans pitch'd,'
would be an irreprovable rendering.' Here, in what
Mr. Newman fancies his final moment of triumph, Homeric
colour and literal fidelity have alike abandoned him
altogether ; the last stage of his translation is much
worse than the second, and immeasurably worse than the
first.
All this to show that a looser, easier method than Mr.
Newman's must be taken, if we are to arrive at any good
result in these questions. I now go on to follow Mr. New-
man a little further, not at all as wishing to dispute with
him, but as seeking (and this is the true fruit we may
gather from criticisms upon us) to gain hints from him for
the establishment of some useful truth about our subject,
LAST WORDS 889
even when I think him wrong. I still retain, I confess,
my conviction that Homer's characteristic qualities are
rapidity of movement, plainness of words and style,
simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all, noble-
ness, the grand manner. Whenever Mr. Newman drops
a word, awakens a train of thought, which leads me to see
any of these characteristics more clearly, I am grateful to
him ; and one or two suggestions of this kind which he
affords, are all that now, — having expressed my sorrow
► that he should have misconceived my feelings towards
him, and pointed out what I think the vice of his method
of criticism, — I have to notice in his Reply.
Such a suggestion I find in Mr. Newman's remarks on
my assertion that the translator of Homer must not adopt
a quaint and antiquated style in rendering him, because
the impression which Homer makes upon the living scholar
is not that of a poet quaint and antiquated, but that of
a poet perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible. I added
that we cannot, I confess, really know how Homer seemed
) to Sophocles, but that it is impossible to me to believe
that he seemed to him quaint and antiquated. Mr. New-
man asserts, on the other hand, that I am absurdly wrong
here ; that Homer seemed ' out and out ' quaint and
antiquated to the Athenians ; that ' every sentence of
him was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could
no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and
antiquated character of the poetry, than an Englishman
can help feeling the same in reading Bums' s poems.' And
not only does Mr. Newman say this, but he has managed
} thoroughly to convince some of his readers of it. ' Homer's
Greek,' says one of them, ' certainly seemed antiquated to
the historical times of Greece. Mr. Newman, taking a far
broader historical and philological view than Mr. Arnold,
stoutly maintains that it did seem so.' And another says :
* Doubtless Homer's dialect and diction were as hard and
obscure to a later Attic Greek, as Chaucer to an Englishman
of our day.'
. / Mr. Newman goes on to say, that not only was Homer
yantiquated relatively to Pericles, but he is antiquated to
olthe living scholar ; and, indeed, is in himself * absolutely
'jantique, being the poet of a barbarian age.' He tells us
390 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
\i' of his * inexhaustible quaintnesses,' of his ' very eccentric
A diction ; ' and he infers, of course, that he is perfectly
/ right in rendering him in a quaint and antiquated style.
f Now this question, — ^whether or no Homer seemed
quaint and antiquated to Sophocles, — I call a delightful
question to raise. It is not a barren verbal dispute ; it is
a question ' drenched in matter,' to use an expression of
Bacon ; a question full of flesh and blood, and of which
the scrutiny, though I still think we cannot settle it
absolutely, may yet give us a directly useful result. To
scrutinise it may lead us to see more clearly what sort of
a style a modern translator of Homer ought to adopt.
Homer's verses were some of the first words which
a young Athenian heard. He heard them from his mother
or his nurse before he went to school ; and at school,
when he went there, he was constantly occupied with
them. So much did he hear of them that Socrates pro-
poses, in the interests of morality, to have selections from
Homer made, and placed in the hands of mothers and
nurses, in his model republic ; in order that, of an author
with whom they were sure to be so perpetually conversant,
the young might learn only those parts which might do
them good. His language was as familiar to Sophocles,
we may be quite sure, as the language of the Bible is
to us.
Nay, more. Homer's language was not, of course, in the
time of Sophocles, the spoken or written language of
ordinary life, any more than the language of the Bible,
any more than the language of poetry, is with us ; but
for one great species of composition, — epic poetry, — ^it was
still the current language ; it was the language in which
' every one who made that sort of poetry composed. Every
one at Athens who dabbled in epic poetry, not only under-
stood Homer's language, — he possessed it. He possessed
it as every one who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses
what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished
/from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern
I prose : I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps,
spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charmed for
charmed, and thousands of others. '.
I might go to Burns and Chaucer, and, taking words
LAST WORDS 391
and passages from them, ask if they afforded any parallel
to a language so familiar and so possessed. But this I will
not do, for Mr. Newman himself supplies me with what
he thinks a fair parallel, in its effect upon us, to the
language of Homer in its effect upon Sophocles. He says
that such words as mon, londis, libbard, withouteUy muchel,
give us a tolerable but incomplete notion of this parallel ;
and he finally exhibits the parallel in aJl its clearness, by
this poetical specimen :
0 Dat mon, quhich hauldeth Kyngis-af
Londis yn f^o, niver
(I tell 'e) feereth aught ; sith hee
Doth hauld hys londis yver.
Now, does Mr. Newman really think that Sophocles could,
as he says, ' no more help feeUng at every instant the
foreign and antiquated character of Homer, than an
EngUshman can help feeling the same in hearing ' these
lines ? Is he quite sure of it ? He says he is ; he will
not allow of any doubt or hesitation in the matter. I had
0 confessed we could not really know how Homer seemed to
Sophocles ; — ' Let Mr. Arnold confess for himself,' cries
Mr. Newman, ' and not for me, who know perfectly well.*
And this is what he knows !
Mr. Newman says, however, that I ' play fallaciously
on the words familiar and unfamiliar ; ' that * Homer's
words may have been familiar to the Athenians (i.e. often
heard) even when they were either not understood by
them, or else, being understood, were yet felt and known
to be utterly foreign. Let my renderings,' he continues, ' be
to heard, as Pope or even Cowper has. been heard, and no
one will be " surprised." '
But the whole question is here. The translator must
not assume that to have taken place which has not taken
place, although, perhaps, he may wish it to have taken
place, — namely, that his diction is become an established
possession of the minds of men, and therefore is, in its
proper place, familiar to them, will not ' surprise ' them.
If Homer's language was familiar, — that is, often heard, —
then to this language words like londis and libbard, which
U) are not familiar, offer, for the translator's purpose, no
parallel. For some purpose of the philologer they may
892 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
offer a parallel to it ; for the translator's purpose they
offer none. The question is not, whether a diction is
antiquated for current speech, but whether it is antiquated
for that particular purpose for which it is employed.
A diction that is antiquated for common speech and com-
mon prose, may very well not be antiquated for poetry or
certain special kinds of prose. ' Perad venture there shall
be ten found there,' is not antiquated for Biblical prose,
though for conversation or for a newspaper it is antiquated.
' The trumpet spake not to the armed throng,' is not ]
antiquated for poetry, although we should not write in
a letter, ' he spake to me,' or say, ' the British soldier
is armid with the Enfield rifle.' But when language is
antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is
employed, — as numbers of Chaucer's words, for instance,
are antiquated for poetry, — such language is a bad repre-
sentative of language which, like Homer's, was never
antiquated for that particular purpose for which it was
employed. I imagine that UrjKrj'idSco) for ILyjX^lSov, in
Homer, no more sounded antiquated to Sophocles, than s
armid for arm'd, in Milton, sounds antiquated to us ; but
Mr. Newman's tvithouten and muchel do sound to us anti-
quated, even for poetry, and therefore they do not corre-
al spond in their effect upon us with Homer's words in their
Veffect upon Sophocles. When Chaucer, who uses such
words, is to pass current amongst us, to be familiar to us,
as Homer was familiar to the Athenians, he has to be
modernised, as Wordsworth and others set to work to
modernise him ; but an Athenian no more needed to have
I Homer modernised, than we need to have the Bible a
Vmodernised, or Wordsworth himself.
Therefore, when Mr. Newman's words bragly, bulkin, and
the rest, are an established possession of our minds, as
Homer's words were an established possession of an
Athenian's mind, he may use them ; but not till then.
Chaucer's words, the words of Burns, great poets as these
were, are yet not thus an established possession of an
Englishman's mind, and therefore they must not be used
in rendering Homer into English.
Mr. Newman has been misled just by doing that which 4i
<■ his admirer praises him for doing, by taking a * far broader
)
LAST WORDS 393
historical and philological view than ' mine. Precisely
because he has done this, and has appUed the * philo-
logical view ' where it was not apphcable, but where the
* poetical view ' alone was rightly apphcable, he has fallen
into error.
It is the same with him in his remarks on the difficulty
and obscurity of Homer. Homer, I say, is perfectly plain
in^peech, simple, and intelligible. And I infer from this
that his translator, too, ought to be perfectly plain in
0 speech, simple, and intelligible ; ought not to say, for
instance, in rendering
OvT€ Ki ae oreWoi/xi n&xn^ ^^ KvSidveipav . . .
* Nor Hefly thee would I advance to man-ennobHng battle,*
— and things of that kind. Mr. Newman hands me a list
of some twenty hard words, invokes Buttmann, Mr.
Maiden, and M. Benfey, and asks me if I think myself
wiser than all the world of Greek scholars, and if I am
ready to supply the deficiencies of Liddell and Scott's
Lexicon ! But here, again, Mr. Newman errs by not
0 perceiving that the question is one not of scholarship, but
of a poetical translation of Homer. This, I say, should
be perfectly simple and intelligible. He replies by
telluig me that dSiro?, eiAiVoScs, and onyaAoets are hard
words. Well, but what does he infer from that ? That
the poetical translator, in his rendering of them, is to
give us a sense of the difficulties of the scholar, and so is
to make his translation obscure ? If he does not mean
that, how, by bringing forward these hard words, does he
touch the question whether an EngUsh version of Homer
0 should be plain or not plain ? If Homer's poetry, as
poetry, is in its general effect on the poetical reader per-
fectly simple and intelHgible, the uncertainty of the
scholar about the true meaning of certain words can never
change this general effect. Rather will the poetry of
Homer make us forget his philology, than his philology
make us forget his poetry. It may even be affirmed that
every one who reads Homer perpetually for the sake of
enjojdng his poetry (and no one who does not so read him
will ever translate him well), comes at last to form a per-
ofectly clear sense in his own mind for every important
394 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
word in Homer, such as aBivos, or ^XtT^aros, whatever
the scholar's doubts about the word may be. And this
sense is present to his mind with perfect clearness and
fulness, whenever the word recurs, although as a scholar
he may know that he cannot be sure whether this sense
is the right one or not. But poetically he feels clearly
about the word, although philologically he may not. The
scholar in him may hesitate, like the father in Sheridan's
play ; but the reader of poetry in him is, like the governor,
fixed. The same thing happens to us with our own Ian- k
guage. How many words occur in the Bible, for instance,
to which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach
the precise real meaning ; but they make out a meaning
for them out of what materials they have at hand ; and
the words, heard over and over again, come to convey this
meaning with a certainty which poetically is adequate,
though not philologically. How many have attached
a clear and poetically adequate sense to 'the beam' and
' the mote,' though not precisely the right one ! How
clearly, again, have readers got a sense from Milton's 21
words, ' grate on their scrannel pipes,' who yet might have
been puzzled to write a commentary on the word scrannel
for the dictionary ! So we get a clear sense from dStvos
as an epithet for grief, after often meeting with it and
finding out all we can about it, even though that all be
philologically insufficient : so we get a clear sense from
etAtTToSes as an epithet for cows. And this his clear poetical
sense about the words, not his philological uncertainties
about them, is what the translator has to convey. Words
like hragly and bulkin offer no parallel to these words ; 31
because the reader, from his entire want of familiarity
with the words hragly and bulkin, has no clear sense of
them poetically.
Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological aspect of
Homer's language, encumbered by his own learning, Mr.
Newman, I say, misses the poetical aspect, misses that
with which alone we are here concerned. ' Homer is odd,'
he persists, fixing his eyes on his own philological anatysis
of ixiavv^, and fxepoxj/, and KdA-AottoSicuv, and not on these
words in their synthetic character; — just as Professor 41
Max Miiller, going a little farther back, and fixing his
LAST WORDS 395
attention on the elementary value of the word ^vydrrjp,
might say Homer was ' odd * for using that word ; — * if
the whole Greek nation, by long famiHarity, had become
inobservant of Homer's oddities,' — of the oddities of this
* noble barbarian,' as Mr. Newman elsewhere calls him,
this ' noble barbarian ' with the ' lively eye of the savage,*
— * that would be no fault of mine. That would not
justify Mr. Arnold's blame of me for rendering the words
correctly.' Correctly, — ah, but what is correctness in this ?
0 case ? This correctness of his is the very rock on which ^
Mr. Newman has split. He is so correct that at last he
finds pecuUarity everywhere. The true knowledge of
Homer becomes at last, in his eyes, a knowledge of Homer's
' peculiarities, pleasant and unpleasant.' Learned men
know these * pecuUarities,' and Homer is to be translated
because the unlearned are impatient to know them too.
' That,' he exclaims, * is just why people want to read an
EngUsh Homer, — to know all his oddities, just as learned
men do.' Here I am obliged to shake my head, and to
10 declare that, in spite of all my respect for Mr. Newman,
I cannot go these lengths with him. He talks of my"^
* monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint or antique >
in Homer.' Terrible learning, — I cannot help in my turn \
exclaiming, — terrible learning, which discovers so much !
Here, then, I take my leave of Mr. Newman, retaining
my opinion that his version of Homer is spoiled by his
making Homer odd and ignoble ; but having, I hope,
sufficient love for literature to be able to canvass works
without thinking of persons, and to hold this or that
10 production cheap, while retaining a sincere respect, on
other grounds, for its author.
In fulfilment of my promise to take this opportunity for
giving the translator of Homer a little further advice, I pro-
ceed to notice one or two other criticisms which I find, in
like manner, suggestive ; which give us an opportunity, that
is, of seeing more clearly, as we look into them, the true
principles on which translation of Homer should rest. This
is all I seek in criticisms ; and, perhaps (as I have already
said) it is only as one seeks a positive result of this kind,
10 that one can get any fruit from them. Seeking a negative
result from them, — personal altercation and wrangling, —
896 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
one gets no fruit ; seeking a positive result, — the elucidation
and establishment of one's ideas, — one may get much.
Even bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and
fruitful. I declared, in a former lecture on this subject, my
conviction that criticism is not the strong point of our
national literature. Well, even the bad criticisms on our
present topic which I meet with, serve to illustrate this con-
viction for me. And thus one is enabled, even in reading
remarks which for Homeric criticism, for their immediate
subject, have no value, — ^which are far too personal in spirit, i
far too immoderate in temper, and far too heavy-handed in
style, for the delicate matter they have to treat, — still to
gain light and confirmation for a serious idea, and to follow
the Baconian injunction, semper aliquid addiscere, always to
be adding to one's stock of observation and knowledge.
, Yes, even when we have to do with writers who, — to quote
' the words of an exquisite critic, the master of us all in
I criticism, M. Sainte-Beuve, — ^remind us, when they handle
'-such subjects as our present, of ' Romans of the fourth or
fifth century, coming to hold forth, all at random, in African 2
style, on papers found in the desk of Augustus, Maecenas, or
Pollio,' — even then we may instruct ourselves if we may
regard ideas and not persons ; even then we may enable
ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the effect
made upon him by D'Argenson's Memoirs : ' My taste is
revolted, but I learn something ; — Je suis choqui, mais je
suis instruit'
But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive directly
and not thus indirectly only ; criticisms by examining
which we may be brought nearer to what immediately z
interests us, — the right way of translating Homer.
I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his subject,
was never to be called prosaic and low. This gives surprise
to many persons, who object that parts of the Iliad are
certainly pitched lower than others, and who remind me of
a number of absolutely level passages in Homer. But I
never denied that a subject must rise and sink, that it must
have its elevated and its level regions ; aU I deny is, that a
poet can be said to rise and sink when all that he, as a poet,
can do, is perfectly well done ; when he is perfectly sound ^
and good, that is, perfect as a poet, in the level regions of
LAST WORDS 397
his subject as well as in its elevated regions. Indeed, what '~\
"SiSfinguishes the greatest masters of poetry from all others
is, that they are perfectly sound and poetical in these level
regions of their subject ; in these regions which are the
great difficulty of all poets but the very greatest, which they [
never quite know what to do with. A poet may sink in J
these regions by being falsely grand as well as by being low ; )
he sinks, in short, whenever he does not treat his matter,
whatever it is, in a perfectly good and poetic way. But,
LO so long as he treats it in this way, he cannot be said to sink,
whatever his matter may do. A passage of the simplest
narrative is quoted to me from Homer : ^
wrpvviv 5i iKaarov Irroix^fxevos kneecraiv,
MiadXrjv Tf, T\avK6v re, Midovrd t€, Q€pa[\ox6v re . . ,
and I am asked, whether Homer does not sink there ;
whether he * can have intended such lines as those for
poetry ? ' My answer is : Those lines are very good poetry
indeed, poetry of the best^class, in that place. But when
WgrHsworth^ having to narrate a very plain matter, tries
20 ?iQ^ to^sink in narrating it, tries, in short, to be what is falsely
called poetical, he does sink, although he sinks by being
pompous, not by being low.
Onward we drove beneath the Castle ; caught,
While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam,
And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn.
That last line shows excellently how a poet may sink with
his subject by resolving not to sink with it. A page or two
further on, the subject rises to grandeur, and then Words-
worth is nobly worthy of it :
20 The antechapel, where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
But the supreme poet is he who is thoroughly sound and 1
poetical, alike when his subject is grand, and when it is V
plain : with him the subject may ^k, but never _the_pQfijb. J
But a Dutch painter does not rise and^ sink with his sub-
ject,— Defoe, in Moll Flanders, does not rise and sink with
1 Iliad, xvii, 216.
398 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
his subject, — in so far as an artist cannot be said to sink who
is sound in his treatment of his subject, however plain it is :
yet Defoe, yet a Dutch painter, may in one sense be said to
sink with their subject, because though sound in their treat-
ment of it, they are not poetical, — poetical in the true, not
\ the false sense of the word ; because, in fact, they are not
vjil the grand style. Homer can in no sense be said to sink
. with his subject, because his soundness has something more
than Uteral naturalness about it ; because his soundness is
the soundness of Homer, of a great epic poet ; because, in i
fact, he is in the grand style. So he sheds over the simplest
matter he touches the charm of his grand manner ; he
makes everything noble. Nothing has raised more ques-
tioning among my critics than these words, — noble, the
grand style. People complain that I do not define these
words sufficiently, that I do not tell them enough about
them. ' The grand style, — but what is the grand style ? '
— they cry ; some with an inclination to believe in it, but
puzzled ; others mockingly and with incredulity. Alas !
the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal 2
defihitioii to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is
said of faith : * One must feel it in order to know what it is.'
But, as of faith, so too one may say of nobleness, of the
grand style : ' Woe to those who know it not ! ' Yet this
expression, though indefinable, has a charm ; one is the
better for considering it ; honum est, nos hie esse ; nay, one
loves to try to explain it, though one knows that one must
speak imperfectly. For those, then, who ask the question,
— ^What is the grand style ? — with sincerity, I will try to
make some answer, inadequate as it must be. For those 3
who ask it mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to
them, with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words :
Moriemini in peccatis vestris, — Ye shall die in your sins.
But let me, at any rate, have the pleasure of again giving,
before I begin to try and define the grand style, a specimen
of what it is.' ^ ..
Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days.
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues. ... 4(
There is the grand style in perfection ; and any one who has
LAST WORDS 399
a sense for it, will feel it a thousand times better from re- v
peating those lines than from hearing anything I can say
about it.
Let us try, however, what can be said, controlling what^^
we say by examples. I think it will be found that the ' •
OTa^ld/style. arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically!^ X >
^^ifiedyitxats^with simplicUy or with severity a serious subject, -/f^
I think thisTd^efinitiofi will be found to cover all instances of
the grand style in poetry which present themselves. I think
10 it will be found to exclude all poetry which is not in the
grand style. And I think it contains no terms which are
obscure, which themselves need defining. Even those who
do not understand what is meant by calling poetry noble,
will understand, I imagine, what is meant by speaking of
a noble nature in a man. But the noble or powerful nature
— the bedeutendes individu^tcm'J3t~(^6efhe,^— Is iioi enough.
For instance, IVIr. Newman has zeal for learmngT^al for -^ j
zeanof'liberty, and all these things are noble, they V/
ennoble a'man ; but he has not the poetical gift : there
20 m^st^tie^fchepoetical gift, the ' divine faculty,' also. And,
"beslSesTalTtms, thesubjectinfmst be a serious one (for it is \
only by a kind of licence that we can speak of the grand '
style in comedy) ; and it must be treated with simplicity or
severity. Here is the great diiBrculty: "Hie poets of the
worI3~^ave been many ; there has been wanting neitherV
abundance of poetical gift nor a bundance^ of noble natures ;
But a poetical gift so happy, in a noble nature so circum-
stance"d~and trained, that the result is a continuous style,
perfect' in simplicity or perfect in severity, has been ex-
80 tremely rare. One poet has had the gifts of nature and
lacuTty in unequalled fulness, mthout the circumstances
and training which make this sustained jJerfection of style
possible. Of other poets, some have caught this perfect
strain now and then, in short pieces or single lines, but
have not been able to maintain it through considerable
works ; others have composed all their productions in a
style which, by comparison with the best, one must call
secondary.
The best model of the grand style simple i^JIomer ; V
40 perhaps the best model of the grand style severe is fflton. ^
feiit Dante is remarkable for affording admirable examples
I
400 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
of feoth^jt;^les ; he has the grand style which arises from
"K^nplicity, and he has the grand style which arises from
r^4\ severity ; and from him I mil illustrate them both. In a
/ former lecture I pointed out what that severity of poetical
style is, which comes from sa5dng a thing with a kind of
^ • intense compression, or in an illusive, brief, almost haughty
' way, as if the poet's mind were charged with so many and
such grave matters, that he would not deign to treat any one
of them explicitly. Of this severity the last line of the
following stanza of the Purgatory is a good example. Dante i
has been telling Forese that Virgil had guided him through
Hell, and he goes on : ^
Indi m' han tratto su gli suoi conforti,
Salendo e rigirando la Montagna
Che drizza voi che il mondo fece iorti.
* Thence hath his comforting aid led me up, climbing and
circling the Mountain, which straightens you whom the world
made crooked' These last words, ' la Montagna che drizza
voi che il mondo fece torti' — ' the Mountain which straightens
you whom the world made crooked,' — for the Mountain of 2
Purgatory, I call an excellent specimen of the grand style in
severity, where the poet's mind is too full charged to suffer
him to speak more expUcitly. But the very next stanza is a
beautiful specimen of the grand style in simplicity, where
a noble nature and a poetical gift unite to utter a thing with
the most limpid plainness and clearness : ^
Tanto dice di farmi sua compagna
Ch' io sarb la dove fia Beatrice ;
Quivi convien che senza lui rimagna.
* So long,' Dante continues, ' so long he (Virgil) saith he a
will bear me company, until I shall be there where Beatrice
is ; there it behoves that without him I remain.' But the
noble simplicity of that in the Italian no words of mine can
render.
Both these styles, the simple and the severe, are truly
y grand; th^severe seem^^perhapS;, the
/ we attend" most to the great personality, to the noble nature,
in the poet its author ; the simple seems the grandest when
* Purgatory, xxiii, 124. ' Ibid., xxiii, 127.
LAST WORDS 401
we attend most to the exquisite faculty^ to the poetical^t.
But the Sim pi ft 15=^ no doubt to be preferred7~"Tt is the more
^^^f^flLTin the other there is something ihteIlectual,"some-
Thing''whicE~gIv^~scope for a play of thought which may
exist where^ the poetical gift is either wanting or present in
only inferior degree : the severe is much more imitable, and >
this a little spoils its charm. A kind of semblance of this
style keeps Young going, one may say, through all the nine
parts of that most indifferent ipToduction,thG NightThoughts. ^
0 But the grand style in simpUcity is inimitable :
aiwv d(T<pa\^s
ovK ifivr' out' AiaKiSq irapci UtjKu,
ovT€ ■nap' dvTiOecp KadfiO)' xiyovrai fiav fiporS/u
6K0OV virepTUTov oi ox^iv, oi T€ /tal xpvoaix-nvKtuv
fie\nofi€vdv iv opu Motadv, koI kv k-nranvKois
diov (drjfiais . , .^
There is a limpidness in that, a want of saHent points to
seize and transfer, which makes imitation impossible, except
by a genius akin to the genius which produced it.
[) Greek simpUcity and Greek grace are inimitable ; but it
is said that the Iliad msiy still be ballad-poetry while in-
finitely superior to all other ballads, and that, in my speci-
mens of EngUsh ballad-poetry, I have been unfair. Well,
no doubt there are better things in English ballad-poetry
than
Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter. . . .
but the real strength of a chain, they say, is the strength of
its weakest link ; and what I was trying to show you was,
xhai} the English ballad-style is not an instrument of enough
0 compass and force to correspond to the Greek hexameter ;
that, owing to an inherent weakness in it as an epic style, it
easily runs into one of two faults, — either it is prosaic and
humdrum, or, trying to avoid that fault, and to make itself
lively {se faire vif), it becomes pert and jaunty. To show
that, the passage about King Adland's porter serves very
well. But these degradations are not proj^er to a true epic
instrument, such as the Greek hexameter.
^ ' A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of ^Eacus,
nor of the god-like Cadmus ; howbeit these are said to have had, of all
mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Musea
sing, one of them on the mountain (Pelion), the other in seven-gated
Thebes.'
AENOLD D (X
402 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
You may say, if you like, when you find Homer's verse,
even in describing the plainest matter, neither humdrum nor
jaunty, that this is because he is so incomparably better a
poet than other balladists, because he is Homer. But take
the whole range of Greek epic poetry, — take the later poets,
the poets of the last ages of this poetry, many of them most
indifferent, — Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Quintus of Smyrna,
Nonnus. Never will you find in this instrument of the
hexameter, even in their hands, the vices of the ballad-style
in the weak moments of this last : everjrwhere the hexa- 1
meter, — a noble, a truly epical instrument, — ^rather resists
the weakness of its employer than lends itself to it. Quintus
of Smjnrna is a poet of merit, but certainly not a poet of a
high order : with him, too, epic poetry, whether in the
character of its prosody or in that of its diction, is no longer
the epic poetry of earlier and better times, nor epic poetry
as again restored by Nonnus : but even in Quintus of
Smyrna, I say, the hexameter is still the hexameter ; it is
a style which the ballad-style, even in the hands of better
poets, cannot rival. And in the hands of inferior poets, the 2
ballad-style sinks to vices of which the hexameter, even in
the hands of a Trjrphiodorus, never can become guilty.
But a critic, whom it is impossible to read without plea-
sure, and the disguise of whose initials I am sure I may be
allowed to penetrate, — ^Mr. Spedding, — says that he * denies
altogether that the metrical movement of the English hexa-
meter has any resemblance to that of the Greek.' Of course,
in that case, if the two metres in no respect correspond,
praise accorded to the Greek hexameter as an epical instru-
ment will not extend to the English. Mr. Spedding seeks 3
to estabhsh his proposition by pointing out that the system
of accentuation differs in the EngHsh and in the Virgihan
hexameter ; that in the first, the accent and the long
syllable (or what has to do duty as such) coincide, in the
second they do not. He says that we caimot be so sure of
the accent with which Greek verse should be read as of that
with which Latin should ; but that the lines of Homer in
which the accent and the long syllable coincide as in the
EngHsh hexameter, are certainly very rare. He suggests a
type of EngHsh hexameter in agreement with the Virgihan 4(
model, and formed on the supposition that ' quantity is as
LAST WORDS 403
distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear
that will attend to it.' Of the truth of this supposition he
entertains no doubt. The new hexameter will, Mr. Sped-
ding thinks, at least have the merit of resembling, in its
metrical movement, the classical hexameter, which merit
the ordinary English hexameter has not. But even with
this improved hexameter he is not satisfied ; and he goes
on, first to suggest other metres for rendering Homer, and
finally to suggest that rendering Homer is impossible.
LO A scholar to whom all who admire Lucretius owe a large
debt of gratitude, — ^Mr.Munro, — hasreplied to Mr.Spedding.
Mr. Munro declares that ' the accent of the old Greeks and
Romans resembled our accent only in name, in reality was
essentially different ; ' that ' our English reading of Homer
and Virgil has in itself no meaning ; ' and that ' accent has
nothing to do with the Virgilian hexameter.' If this be so,
of course the merit which Mr. Spedding attributes to his
own hexameter, of really corresponding with the Virgilian
hexameter, has no existence. Again ; in contradiction to
10 Mr. Spedding's assertion that lines in which (in our reading
of them) the accent and the long syllable coincide,^ as in
the ordinary English hexameter, are ' rare even in Homer,'
Mr. Munro declares that such lines, ' instead of being rare,
are among the very commonest types of Homeric rhythm.'
Mr. Spedding asserts that ' quantity is as distinguishable in
English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that will attend to
it ; ' but Mr. Munro replies, that in English ' neither his
ear nor his reason recognises any real distinction of quantity
except that which is produced by accentuated and unac-
80 centuated syllables.' He therefore arrives at the conclusion,
that in constructing EngUsh hexameters, ' quantity must
be utterly discarded ; and longer or shorter unaccentuated
syllables can have no meaning, except so far as they may bo
made to produce sweeter or harsher sounds in the hands of
a master.'
It is not for me to interpose between two such com-
batants ; and indeed my way lies, not up the high-road
where they are contending, but along a by-path. With the
^ liines such as the first of the Odyssey :
'Aydpa fxoi iyvfvff Movcra, noXvTponoVj ts yuaXa voWd • • •
D d2
404 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
absolute truth of their general propositions respecting
accent and quantity, I have nothing to do ; it is most
interesting and instructive to me to hear such propositions
discussed, when it is Mr. Munro or Mr. Spedding who dis-
cusses them ; but I have strictly limited myself in these
lectures to the humble function of giving practical advice
to the translator of Homer. He, I still think, must not
follow so confidently, as makers of English hexameters
have hitherto followed, Mr. Munro's maxim, — quantity may
he utterly discarded. He must not, like Mr. Longfellow, lo
make seventeen a dactyl in spite of all the length of its last
syllable, even though he can plead that in counting we lay
the accent on the first syllable of this word. He may be
far from attaining Mr. Spedding's nicety of ear ; — may be
unable to feel that ' while quantity is a dactyl, quiddity is a
tribrach,' and that ' rapidly is a word to which we find no
parallel in Latin ; ' — but I think he must bring himself to
distinguish, with Mr. Spedding, between ' f^'o'erwearied
eyehd,' and ' the wearied eyelid,' as being, the one a correct
ending for a hexameter, the other an ending with a false 2(
quantity in it ; instead of finding, with Mr. Munro, that
this distinction ' conveys to his mind no intelligible idea.'
He must temper his belief in Mr. Munro's dictum, — quantity
must he utterly discarded, — by mixing with it a belief in this
other dictum of the same author, — two or more consonants
take longer time in enunciating than one}
^ Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr. Munro
and Mr. Spedding, I agree with Mr. Munro. By the italicised words in
the following sentence, ' The rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter de-
pends entirely on caesura, pause, and a due arrangement of words,' he
has touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this hexameter, the
central point, which Mr. Spedding misses. The accent, or heightened
tone, of Virgil in reading his own hexameters, was probably far from
being the same thing as the accent or stress with which we read them.
The general effect of each line, in Virgil's mouth, was probably there-
fore something widely different from what Mr. Spedding assumes it to
have been : an ancient's accentual reading was something which
allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be far more perceptible
than our accentual reading allows it to be.
On the question as to the real rhythm of the ancient hexameter, Mr.
Newman has in his Eeply a page quite admirable for force and precision.
Here he is in his element, and his ability and acuteness have their
proper scope. But it is true that the modern reading of the ancient
hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitatei and that the
LAST WORDS 403
Criticism is so apt in general to be vague and impalpable,
that when it gives us a solid and definite possession, such as
is Mr. Spedding's parallel of the Virgilian and the English
hexameter with their difference of accentuation distinctly
marked, we cannot be too grateful to it. It is in the way in
which Mr. Spedding proceeds to press his conclusions from
the parallel which he has drawn out, that his criticism seem3
to me to come a little short. Here even he, I think, shows
(if he will allow me to say so) a little of that want of pliancy ~)
10 and suppleness so common among critics, but so dangerous •(
to their criticism ; he is a little too absolute in imposing his /
metrical laws, he too much forgets the excellent maxim of \
Menander, so appUcable to literary criticism : \
KaXuv oi v6fj.oi acpoSp' flaiv 6 5* opwv tovs voiiovs
\iav cLKpi^wi, cvKocpdvTTjs ipaiverai'
' laws are admirable things ; but he who keeps his eye
too closely fixed upon them, runs the risk of becoming ' — ,-
let us say, a purist. Mr. Spedding is probably mistaken)
in supposing that Virgil pronounced his hexameters as
20 Mr. Spedding pronounces them. He is almost certainly
mistaken in supposing that Homer pronounced his hexa-
meters as Mr. Spedding pronounces Virgil's. But this, as
I have said, is not a question for us to treat ; all we are
here concerned with is the imitation, by the English
hexameter, of the ancient hexameter in its effect upon us
moderns. Suppose we concede to Mr. Spedding that his
parallel proves our accentuation of the English and of the
Virgilian hexameter to be different : what are we to con-
clude from that ; how will a criticism, — not a formal, but
30 a substantial criticism, — deal with such a fact as that ?
Will it infer, as Mr. Spedding infers, that the English
hexameter, therefore, must not pretend to reproduce
better than other rhythms the movement of Homer's
hexameter for us ; that there can be no correspondence at
all between the movement of these two hexameters ;
that, if we want to have such a correspondence, we must
abandon the current English hexameter altogether, and
English reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr. Spedding describes
it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the English hexameter,
I have tried to point out in the text.
408 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
adopt in its place a new hexameter of Mr. Spedding's
Anglo-Latin type ; substitute for lines like the
Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia . , ,
of Dr. Hawtrey, lines like the
Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent.
After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order . . .
of Mr. Spedding ? To infer this, is to go, as I have com-
plained of Mr. Newman for sometimes going, a great deal
too fast. I think prudent criticism must certainly recognise,
in the current English hexameter, a fact which cannot so i(
lightly be set aside ; it must acknowledge that by this
hexameter the English ear, the genius of the EngUsh
language, have, in their own way, adopted, have translated
for themselves the Homeric hexameter ; and that a rhythm
which has thus grown up, which is thus, in a manner, the
production of nature, has in its general type something
necessary and inevitable, something which admits change
only within narrow limits, which precludes change that is
sweeping and essential. I think, therefore, the prudent
critic will regard Mr. Spedding' s proposed revolution as 2(
simply impracticable. He will feel that in English poetry
the hexameter, if used at all, must be, in the main, the
English hexameter now current. He will perceive that its
having come into existence as the representative of the
Homeric hexameter, proves it to have, for the English
ear, a certain correspondence with the Homeric hexa-
meter, although this correspondence may be, from the
difference of the Greek and EngHsh languages, necessarily
incomplete. This incompleteness he wUl endeavour, ^ as
^ Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally shifting, in
the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the
second. In the current English hexameter, it is on the first. Mr.
Spedding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this
hexameter, seems not to understand that any one can propose to modify
it partially ; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not
reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say, ' be-
tween that and the ships,' or * There sat fifty men ; ' or how I can
reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that ' hexa-
meters must read themselves.* Presently he says that he cannot believo
1 do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out the accent
in the first foot altogether, and thua get an hexameter with only five
LAST WORDS 407
he may find or fancy himself able, gradually somewhat
to lessen through minor changes, suggested by the ancient
hexameter, but respecting the general constitution of the
modem : the notion of making it disappear altogether by
the critic's inventing in his closet a new constitution of
his own for the English hexameter, he will judge to be
a chimerical dream.
When, therefore, IVIr. Spedding objects to the English
hexameter, that it imperfectly represents the movement
10 of the ancient hexameter, I answer : We must work with
the tools we have. The received English type, in its
general outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type
of this metre ; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its
pattern, not by rendering the accentual beat of it, that
the English language has adapted the Greek hexameter.
To render the metrical beat of its pattern is something ;
by effecting so much as this the English hexameter puts
itself in closer relations with its original, it comes nearer
to its movement, than any other metre which does not
29 even effect so much as this ; but Mr. Spedding is dis-
satisfied with it for not effecting more still, for not render-
ing the accentual beat too. If he asks me why the English
hexameter has not tried to render this too, why it has
confined itself to rendering the metrical beat, why^ in
accents. He will pardon me : I pronounce, as I suppose he himself
does, if he reads the words naturally, ' 'Between that and the ships,'
and ' There sate fifty men.' Mr. Spedding is familiar enough with this
accent on the second syllable in Virgil's hexameters ; in ' et ti montosae,'
or ' VeZoces jaculo.' Such a change is an attempt to relieve the monotony
of the current English hexameter by occasionally altering the position
of one of its accents ; it is not an attempt to make a wholly new English
hexameter by habitually altering the position of four of them. Very
likely it is an unsuccessful attempt ; but at any rate it does not violate
what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters, — that
they be such as to read themselves without necessitating, on the reader's
part, any non-natural putting-on or taking-ofi of accent. Hexameters
like these of Mr. Longfellow,
In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware's waters . . .
and,
As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they molested . . .
violate this rule ; and they are very common. I think the blemish of
Mr. Dart's recent meritorious version of the Iliad is that it contains too
many of them.
408 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
short, it is itself, and not Mr. Spedding's new hexameter, —
that is a question which I, whose only business is to give
practical advice to a translator, am not bound to answer ;
but I will not decline to answer it nevertheless. I will
suggest to Mr. Spedding that, as I have already said, the
modern hexameter is merely an attempt to imitate the
effect of the ancient hexameter, as read by us moderns ;
that the great object of its imitation has been the hexa-
meter of Homer ; that of this hexameter such lines as
those which Mr. Spedding declares to be so rare, even in i^
Homer, but which are in truth so common, — alines in which
the quantity and the reader's accent coincide, — are, for
the English reader, just from that simplicity (for him) of
rhythm which they owe to this very coincidence, the
master-type ; that so much is this the case, that one may
again and again notice an English reader of Homer, in
reading lines where his Virgilian accent would not coincide
with the quantity, abandoning this accent, and reading
the lines (as we say) by quantity, reading them as if he
were scanning them ; while foreigners neglect our Virgilian 2
accent even in reading Virgil, read even Virgil by quantity,
making the accents coincide with the long syllables. And
no doubt the hexameter of a kindred language, the German,
based on this mode of reading the ancient hexameter, has
had a powerful influence upon the type of its English
fellow. But all this shows how extremely powerful accent
is for us moderns, since we find not even Greek and Latin
quantity perceptible enough without it. Yet in these
languages, where we have been accustomed always to
look for it, it is far more perceptible to us Englishmen than 31
in our own language, where we have not been accustomed
to look for it. And here is the true reason why Mr. Sped-
ding's hexameter is not and cannot be the current English
hexameter, even though it is based on the accentuation
which Englishmen give to all Virgil's lines, and to many
of Homer's, — ^that the quantity which in Greek or Latin
words we feel, or imagine we feel, even though it be un-
supported by accent, we do not feel or imagine we feel in
English words, when it is thus unsupported. For example,
in repeating the Latin line, 4(
Ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores . . ,
LAST WORDS 409
an Englishman feels the length of the second syllable of
fundent, although he lays the accent on the first ; but in
repeating Mr. Spedding's line,
Softly Cometh slumber closing th'o'erwearied eyelid,
the English ear, full of the accent on the first syllable of
closing, has really no sense at all of any length in its second.
The metrical beat of the line is thus quite destroyed.
So when Mr. Spedding proposes a new Anglo -Virgilian
hexameter he proposes an impossibility ; when he ' denies
0 altogether that the metrical movement of the English
hexameter has any resemblance to that of the Greek,' 'he
denies too much ; when he declares that, ' were every
other metre impossible, an attempt to translate Homer
into English hexameters might be permitted, but that such
an attempt he himself would never read,' he exhibits, it
seems to me, a little of that obduracy and over- vehemence
in liking and disliking, — a remnant, I suppose, of our
insular ferocity, — to which EngUsh criticism is so prone.
He ought to be enchanted to meet with a good attempt
oin any metre, even though he would never have advised
it, even though its success be contrary to all his expecta-
tions ; for it is the critic's first duty, — prior even to his /
duty of stigmatising what is bad — to welcome everything
that is good. In welcoming this, he must at all times be
ready, like the Christian convert, even to burn what he
used to worship, and to worship what he used to burn.
Nay, but he need not be thus inconsistent in welcoming it ;
he may retain all his principles : principles endure, cir-
cumstances change ; absolute success is one thing, relative
0 success another. Relative success may take place under
the most diverse conditions ; and it is in appreciating the
good in even relative success, it is in taking into account
the change of circumstances, that the critic's judgment
is tested, that his versatility must display itself. He is to
keep his idea of the best, of perfection, and at the same
time to be willingly accessible to every second best which
offers itself. So I enjoy the ease and beauty of Mr. Sped-
ding's stanza.
Therewith to all the gods in order due . . .
0 I welcome it, in the absence of equally good poetry in
410 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
another metre,^ although I still think the stanza unfit to
render Homer thoroughly well, although I still think other
metres fit to render him better. So I concede to Mr.
Spedding that every form of translation, prose or verse,
must more or less break up Homer in order to reproduce
him ; but then I urge that that form which needs to break
him up least is to be preferred. So I concede to him that
the test proposed by me for the translator, — a competent
scholar's judgment whether the translation more or less
reproduces for him the effect of the original, — is not per-
feqtly satisfactory ; but I adopt it as the best we can get,
as the only test capable of being really applied ; for Mr.
Spedding's proposed substitute, — the translation's making
the same effect, more or less, upon the unlearned which
the original makes upon the scholar, — is a test which can
never really be applied at all. These two impressions, —
that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned reader, —
can, practically, never be accurately compared ; they are,
and must remain, like those lines we read of in Euclid,
which, though produced ever so far, can never meet. So,
again, I concede that a good verse-translation of Homer,
^ As I welcome another more recent attempt in stanza, — Mr. Worsley's
version of the Odyssey in Spenser's measure. Mr. Worsley does me
the honour to notice some remarks of mine on this measure : I had
said that its greater intricacy made it a worse measure than even the
ten-syllable couplet to employ for rendering Homer. He points out,
in answer, that ' the more complicated the correspondences in a poetical
measure, the less obtrusive and absolute are the rhymes.' This is
true, and subtly remarked ; but I never denied that the single shocks
of rhyme in the couplet were more strongly felt than those in the stanza ;
I said that the more frequent recurrence of the same rhyme, in the
stanza, necessarily made this measure more intricate. The stanza
repacks Homer's matter yet more arbitrarily, and therefore changes his
movement yet more radically, than the couplet. Accordingly, I imagine
a nearer approach to a perfect translation of Homer is possible in
the couplet, well managed, than in the stanza, however well managed.
But meanwhile Mr. Worsley, — applying the Spenserian stanza, that
beautiful romantic measure, to the most romantic poem of the ancient
world ; making this stanza yield him, too (what it never yielded to
Bjrron), its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease ; above all, bringing to
his task a truly poetical sense and skill, — has produced a version of
the Odyssey much the most pleasing of those hitherto produced, and
which is delightful to read.
For the public this may well be enough, nay, more than enough ; but
for the critic even this is not yet quite enough.
LAST WORDS 411
or, indeed, of any poet, is very difficult, and that a good
prose-translation is much easier ; but then I urge that
a verse-translation, while giving the pleasure which Pope's
has given, might at the same time render Homer more
faithfully than Pope's ; and that this being possible, we
ought not to cease wishing for a source of pleasure which
no prose-translation can ever hope to rival.
Wishing for such a verse -translation of Homer, beUeving
that rhythms have natural tendencies which, within certain
0 limits, inevitably govern them ; having little faith, there-
fore, that rhythms which have manifested tendencies
utterly un-Homeric can so change themselves as to become
well adapted for rendering Homer, — I have looked about
for the rhythm which seems to depart least from the
tendencies of Homer's rhythm. Such a rhythm I think
may be found in the English hexameter, somewhat modified.
I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting
and emplojdng this rhythm ; but my belief in the immediate
success of such attempts is far less confident than has been
0 supposed. Between the recognition of this rhythm as
ideally the best, and the recommendation of it to the
translator for instant practical use, there must come all
that consideration of circumstances, all that pliancy in
forgoing, under the pressure of certain difficulties, the
absolute best, which J. have said is so indispensable to the
critic. The hexameter is, comparatively, still unfamiliar
in England ; many people have a great dislike to it.
A certain degree of unfamiliarity, a certain degree of
dislike, are obstacles with which it is not wise to contend.
0 It is difficult to say at present whether the dislike to this
rhythm is so strong and so wide-spread that it will prevent
its ever becoming thoroughly familiar. I think not, but
it is too soon to decide. I am inclined to think that the
dislike of it is rather among the professional critics than
among the general public ; I think the reception which
Mr. Longfellow's Evangeline has met with indicates this.
I think that even now, if a version of the Iliad in English
hexameters were made by a poet who, like Mr. Longfellow,
has that indefinable quality which renders him popular, —
0 something attractive in his talent, which communicates
itself to his verses, — it would have a great success among
412 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
the general public. Yet a version of Homer in hexameters
of the Evangeline type would not satisfy the judicious, nor
is the definite establishment of this type to be desired ;
and one would regret that Mr. Longfellow should, even to
popularise the hexameter, give the immense labour required
for a translation of Homer, when one could not wish his
work to stand. Rather it is to be wished, that by the
efforts of poets like Mr. Longfellow in original poetry,
and the efforts of less distinguished poets in the task of
translation, the hexameter may gradually be made familiar
to the ear of the English public ; at the same time that
there gradually arises, out of all these efforts, an improved
type of this rhythm ; a type which some man of genius
may sign with the final stamp, and employ in rendering
Homer ; an hexameter which may be as superior to Vosse's
as Shakspeare's blank verse is superior to Schiller's.
I am inclined to believe that all this travail will actually
take place, because I believe that modern poetry is actually
in want of such an instrument as the hexameter.
In the meantime, whether this rhythm be destined to
success or not, let us steadily keep in mind what originally
made us turn to it. We turned to it because we required
certain Homeric characteristics in a translation of Homer,
and because all other rhythms seemed to find, from different
causes, great difficulties in satisfying this our requirement.
If the hexameter is impossible, if one of these other rhythms
must be used, let us keep this rhythm always in mind of
our requirements and of its own faults, let us compel it to
get rid of these latter as much as possible. It may be
necessary to have recourse to blank verse ; but then blank
verse must de-Cowperise itself, must get rid of the habits
of stiff self -retardation which make it say ' Not fewer
shone,' for ' So many shone.' Homer moves swiftly :
blank verse can move swiftly if it likes, but it must remember
that the movement of such lines as
A thousand fires were burning, and by each . . .
is just the slow movement which makes us despair of it.
Homer moves with noble ease : blank verse must not be
suffered to forget that the movement of
Came they not over from sweet Laeedaemon . . »
LAST WORDS 418
is ungainly. Homer's expression of his thought is simple
as light : we know how blank verse affects such locutions as
While the steeds mouthed their corn aloof . . .
and such modes of expressing one's thought are sophisti-
cated and artificial.
One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the
English translator's attention to the essential characteristics
of Homer's poetry, when so accompUshed a person as Mr.
Spedding, recognising these characteristics as indeed
I Homer's, admitting them to be essential, is led by the
ingrained habits and tendencies of EngUsh blank verse
thus repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even
a few lines. One sees this yet more clearly, when Mr.
Spedding, taking me to task for saying that the blank
verse used for rendering Homer ' must not be Mr. Tenny-
son's blank verse,' declares that in most of Mr. Tennyson's
blank verse all Homer's essential characteristics, — ' rapidity
of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and
directness of ideasf and, above all, nobleness of manner, are
) as conspicuous as in Homer himself.' This shows, it seems
to me, how hard it is for English readers of poetry, even the
most accomplished, to feel deeply and permanently what
Greek plainness of thought and Greek simpHcity of expres-
sion really are : they admit the importance of these
quahties in a general way, but they have no ever-present
sense of them ; and they easily attribute them to any
poetry which has other excellent quahties, and which they
very much admire. No doubt there are plainer things in
Mr. Tennyson's poetry than the three lines I quoted ; in
0 choosing them, as in choosing a specimen of ballad-poetry,
I wished to bring out clearly, by a strong instance, the
quahties of thought and style to which I was calling atten-
tion ; but when Mr. Spedding talks of a plainness of
thought like Homer's, of a plainness of speech like Homer's,
and says that he finds these constantly in Mr. Tennyson's
poetry, I answer that these I do not find there at all,
Mr. Tennyson is a most distinguished and charming poet ;
but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, it seems
to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of
0 thought, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness
V
414 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
of expression. In the best and most characteristic pro-
ductions of his genius, these characteristics are most
prominent. They are marked characteristics, as we have
seen, of the Elizabethan poets ; they are marked, though
not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself.
Under the influences of the nineteenth, century, under
wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they mani-
fest themselves in Mr. Tennyson's poetry in a wholly
new way. But they are still there. The essential bent of
his poetry is towards such expressions as ]
Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars . . .
or
O'er the sun's bright eye
Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud . . .
When the cairn'd mountain was a shadow, sunn'd
The world to peace again . . .
The fresh young captains flash'd their glittering teeth.
The huge bush-bearded barons heaved and blew ... '
He bared the knotted column of his throat,
The massive square of his heroic breast.
And arms on which the standing muscle sloped
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone.
Running too vehemently to break upon it . . .
And this way of speaking is the least plain, the most
unHomeriCj which can possibly be conceived. Homer
presents his thought to you just as it wells from the source
of his mind : ]\ir. Tennyson carefully distils his thought 2
before he will part with it. Hence comes, in, the expres-
sion of the thought, a heightened and elaborate air. In
Homer's poetry it is all natural thoughts in natural words ;
in Mr. Tennyson's poetry it is all distilled thoughts in
distilled words. Exactly this heightening and elaboration
may be observed in Mr. Spedding's
While the steeds mouth'd their corn aloof . . .
(an expression which might have been Mr. Tennyson's),
on which I have already commented ; and to one who is
penetrated with a sense of the real simplicity of Homer, 4
or
or
or
LAST WORDS 415
this subtle sophistication of the thought is, I think, very
perceptible even in such lines as these,
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
. Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy . .
which I have seen quoted as perfectly Homeric. Perfect
simplicity can be obtained only by a genius of which
perfect jimpHcity is an essential characteristic.
^6 true is this, that when a genius essentially subtle,
or a genius which, from whatever cause, is in its essence
D not truly and broadly simple, determines to be perfectly
plain, determines not to admit a shade of subtlety or
curiosity into its expression, it cannot even then attain
real simphcity ; it can only attain a semblance of sim-
plicity.^ French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than
ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this sem-
blance (often very beautiful and valuable) from the real
quaUty. The real quality it calls simplicite, the semblance
simplesse. The one is natural simplicity, the other is
artificial simphcity. What is called simphcity in the pro-
0 ductions of a genius essentially not simple, is in truth
simplesse. The two are distinguishable from one another
the moment they appear in company. For instance,
let us take the opening of the narrative in Wordsworth's
Michael :
Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a shepherd, IVIichael was his name ;
An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength ; his mind was keen,
0 Intense, and frugal, apt for all a^airs ;
And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr. Tenny-
son's Dora :
With Farmer Allan at the farm abode
William and Dora. William was his son,
^ I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative or
dramatic poetry, — poetry in which the poet has to go out of himself and
to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal feeling,
the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure of passion,
express itself simply. Even here, however, the native tendency will
generally be discernible.
416 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
And she his niece. He often looked at them.
And often thought, '.I'll make them man and wife.'
The simplicity of the first of these passages is simplicite ;
that of the second, simjplesse. Let us take the end of the
same two poems ; first, of Michael : —
The cottage which was named the Evening Star
Is gone — the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood ; great changes have been wrought
In all the neighbourhood : yet the oak is left
That grew beside their door : and the remains 1
Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen
Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Ghyll.
And now, of Dora :
So those four abode
Within one house together; and as years
Went forward, Mary took another mate :
But Dora lived unmarried till her death.
A heedless critic may call both of these passages simple
if he will. Simple, in a certain sense, they both are ; but
between the simplicity of the two there is all the difference 2\
that there is between the simplicity of Homer and the
simplicity of Moschus.
But, — whether the hexameter establish itself or not,
whether a truly simple and rapid blank verse be obtained
or not, as the vehicle for a standard English translation
of Homer, — I feel sure that this vehicle will not be furnished
by the ballad-form. On this question about the ballad-
character of Homer's poetry, I see that Professor Blackie
proposes a compromise : he suggests that those who say
Homer's poetry is pure ballad-poetry, and those who deny 3(
that it is ballad-poetry at all, should split the difference
between them ; that it should be agreed that Homer's
poems are baUads a little, but not so much as some have
said. I am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in
which Mr. Blackie invites me to this compromise ; but
I cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it ; I cannot allow
that Homer's poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of
capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in
the ballad-form, when employed for epic poetry. The more
we examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, «
will it become to us. Let us but observe how a great
LAST WORDS 417
poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and
serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from
a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form
too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which
has more amplitude and impress! veness. Every one knows
the Lucy Gray and the Ruth of Wordsworth. Both poems
are excellent ; but the subject-matter of the narrative of
Ruth is much more weighty and impressive to the poet's
own feeling than that of the narrative of Jjwcy Gray^ for
which latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad-
form is quite adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he com-
posed Ruth, — his great time, his annus mirahilis, about
1800, — strove to be simple ; it was his mission to be
simple ; he loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because
it was simple. Even in Ruth he tried, one may say, to use
it ; he would have used it if he could : but the gravity of
his matter is too much for this somewhat slight form ; he
is obliged to give to his form more amplitude, more august-
ness, to shake out its folds.
The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide ;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.
That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to
the subject-matter. But take this, on the other hand :
I, too, have passed her on the hills,
Setting her little water-mills
By spouts and fountains wild ;
Such small inachinery as she tum'd.
Ere she had wept, ere she had moum'd,
A young' and happy child.
Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight
of his matter has here compelled the true and feeling poet
to adopt a form of more volume than the simple ballad-
form ?
It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking ; the ques-
tion is about the use of the ballad -form for this. I say
that for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer's
is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate ; and that
Homer's translator must not adopt it, because it even
ARNOLD E e
418 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
leads him, by its own weakness, away from the grand
style rather than towards it. We must remember that the
matter of narrative poetry stands'T^h a different relation
to the vehicle which conveys it,^ — is not so independent of
this vehicle, so absorbing and powerful in itself, — as the
matter of purely emotional poetry. When there comes in
poetry what I may call the lyrical cry, this transfigures
everything, makes everything grand ; the simplest form
may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the
emotion glows through and through it more easily. To i
go again for an illustration to Wordsworth ; — our great
poet, since Milton, by his performance, as Keats, I think,
is our great poet by his gift and promise ; — in one of his
stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have :
And I can listen to thee yet ;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple ballad-form,
is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler s
form, as grand as the
An innocent life, yet far astray ! . . .
of Ruth ; as the
There is a comfort in the strength of love ...
of Michael. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical
cry, the ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, though
not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the
grand style.
O lang, lang may their ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand, j
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence
Come sailing to the land.
0 lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi' their gold combs in their hair.
Waiting for their ain dear lords.
For they'll see them nae mair.
But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its
subject-matter fills it over and over again, — is indeed, in
itself, all in all, — one must not infer its effectiveness when
LAST WORDS 419
its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great
body of a narrative.
But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the
balladistav because he has taken in the hexameter a better
instrument ; he took this instrument because he was
eTdlfferent poet from them : so different, — not only so
itruch better, but so essentially different, — that he is not
to be classed with them at all. Poets receive their dis-~
tinctive character, not from their siibject, but from their
3 application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the
Excursion)
On God, on Nature, and on human life . . .
v/hichjhey_haxe.il^guired _f^^^ In the ballad-
p5(5tsTn general, as in men of a rude and early stage of
the world, in whom fKeiFliumanity is not yet variously
and~~fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty,
an^Tthe ideas themselves not very effective or profound.
FriSnTEhem the narrative itself is the great matter, not the
sgmt and significance which underlies the narrative. Even
) inlater times of richly developed life and thought, poets
api^ear who have what may be called a balladisfs mind ;
in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the outward
spectacle of the world is much more strong than their
sense of the inward significance of that spectacle. When
they apply ideas to their narrative of human events, you
feel that they are, so to speak, travelling out of their own
X)rovince : in the best of them you feel this perceptibly,
but in those of a lower order you feel it very strongly.
Even Sir Walter Scott's efforts of this kind, — even, for
) instance, the
Breathes there the man with soul so dead . .
or the
Oh woman ! in our hours of ease . . .
even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be
desired ; far more than the same poet's descriptions of
a hunt or a battle. But Lord Macaulay's
Then out spake brave Horatias,
The captain of the gate :
* To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.' . . .
E e 2
/
420 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
(and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing
Lord Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome^ let me frankly say
that, to my mind, a man's power to detect the ring of false
metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give
an opinion about poetical matters at all) — I say, Lord
Macaulay's
To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late,
it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Hqiner
it is very different. This ' noble barbarian,' this ' savage i
witir the lively eye,' — ^whose verse Mr. Newman thinks,
would affect us, if we could hear the living Homer, ' like
an elegant and simple melody from an African of the
/"Gold Coast,'— is never more at home, never more nobly
himself, than in applying profound ideas to his narrative.
As a poet he belongs, — narrative as is his poetry, and
early as is his date, — ^to an incomparably more developed
spiritual and intellectual order than the balladists, or than
Scott and Macaulay ; he is here as much to be distinguished
, from them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be dis- •:
/ tinguished from them. He is, indeed^ rather to be classed
I with Milton than with the balladists and Scott ; for what
V he has in common with Milton, — the noble and profound
"application of ideas to life, is the most essential part of
} poetic greatness. The most essentially grand and charac-
teristic things of Homer are such things as
6T\r]v S', oV ovvQ} Tis (TTixOovios /9/)0Toj dWos,
dvSpbs iraiZo(p6voio ttoti aroixa x^'V opiyeaOai . . .*
or as
Kal (t4, yepov, to irplv (i^v aKovofxev 6\0iov uvai ..." <
or as
&s yoLp irtiK\waavTo 6(ol SeiKoiai ^poroimv,
^weiv dxwp^vovs' avrol be t' dtfT^Scf? elaiv . . .'
^ ' And I have endured, — the like whereof no soul upon the earth
hath yet endured, — to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my
child.' — Iliad, xxiv, 505.
^ * Nay and thou too, old man, in times past wert, as we hear,
happy.' — Iliad, xxiv, 543. In the original this line, for mingled pathos
and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in Homer.
* ' For so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals, —
that we should live in sorrow ; but they themselves are without trouble.'
'—Iliad, xxiv, 525.
LAST WORDS 421
and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything
of the balladists, by such things as the
lo no piangeva : si dontro impietrai :
Piangevan elli ... *
of Dante ; or the
FaU'n Cherub ! to be weak is miserable . . •
of Milton.
I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two
about my own hexameters ; and yet truly, on such a topic,
10 I am almost ashamed to trouble you. From those perish-
able objects I feel, I can truly say, a most Oriental detach-
ment. You yourselves are witnesses how little importance,
when I offered them to you, I claimed for them, — ^how
humble a function I designed them to fill. I offered them,
not as specimens of a competing translation of Homer,
but as illustrations of certain canons which I had been
trying to estabUsh for Homer's poetry. I said that these
canons they might very well illustrate by failing as well
as by succeeding : if they illustrate them in any manner,
20 I am satisfied. I was thinking of the future translator of
Homer, and trying to let him see as clearly as possible
what I meant by the combination of characteristics which
I assigned to Homer's poetry, — by saying that this poetry
was at once rapid in movement, plain in words and style,
simple and direct in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do
not suppose that my own hexameters are rapid in move-
ment, plain in words and style, simple and direct in their
ideas, and noble in manner ; but I am in hopes that
a translator, reading them with a genuine interest in his
DO subject, and without the slightest grain of personal feeling,
may see more clearly, as he reads them, what I meant by
saying that Homer's poetry is all these. I am in hopes
that he may be able to seize more distinctly, when he has
before him my
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus . . .
or my
Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you . . .
* ' / wept not : so of stone grew I within : — they wept.' — Hellf
49 (Carlyle's Translation, slightly altered).
422 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
or my
So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle . . •
the exact points which I wish to him avoid in Cowper's
So numerous seemed those fires the banks between . . »
or in Pope's
Unhappy coursers of immortal strain , . ,
or in Mr. Newman's
He spake, and yelling, held a-front his single-hoofed horses.
At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine
which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own i
compositions no composer can be admitted the judge.
But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still
hope my hexameters may prove ; and he it is, above all,
whom one has to regard. The general public carries away
little from discussions of this kind, except some vague
notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one
has attacked Mr, Newman. On the mind of an adversary
one never makes the faintest impression. Mr, Newman
reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on
the subject is, that he ' regards it as a question about to 21
open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not
to adopt the old dissyllabic landis, houndis, hartis ' (for
lands, hounds, harts), and also * the final en of the plural
of verbs (we dancen, they singen, &c.) ', which ' still sub-
sists in Lancashire.' A certain critic reads all one can say
about style, and at the end of it arrives at the inference
that, * after all, there is some style grander than the grand
style itself, since Shakspeare has not the grand manner,
and yet has the supremacy over Milton ; ' another critic
reads all one can say about rhythm, and the result is, that 3{
he thinks Scott's rhythm, in the description of the death
of Marmion, all the better for being saccade, because the
dying ejaculations of Marmion were likely to be ' jerky.'
How vain to rise up early, and to take rest late, from any
zeal for proving to Mr. Newman that he must not, in trans-
lating Homer, say houndis and dancen ; or to the first of
the two critics above-quoted, that one poet may be a greater
poetical force than another, and yet have a more unequal
LAST WORDS 423
style ; or to the second, that the best art, having to repre-
sent the death of a hero, does not set about imitatmg his
dying noises ! Such critics, however, provide for an
opponent's vivacity the charming excuse offered by
Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with giving
offence by it : ' Ah ! ' he exclaimed, ' no one considers
how much pain every man of taste has had to suffer,
before he ever inflicts any.'
It is for the future translator that one must work. The
10 successful translator of Homer will have (or he cannot
succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that dis-
interested love of it, which are, both of them, so rare in
literature, and so precious ; he will not be led off by any
false scent ; he will have an eye for the real matter, and,
where he thinks he may find any indication of this, no
hint will be too slight for him, no shade will be too fine,
no imperfections will turn him aside, — he will go before his
adviser's thought, and help it out with his own. This is
the sort of student that a critic of Homer should always
20 have in his thoughts ; but students of this sort are indeed
rare.
And how, then, can I help being reminded what a student
of this sort we have just lost in Mx. Clough, whose name
I have already mentioned in these lectures ? He, too,
was busy with Homer ; but it is not on that account that
I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order to
call attention to his qualities and powers in general,
admirable as these are. I mention him because, in so
eminent a degree, he possessed these two invaluable
30 literary qualities, — a true sense for his object of study,
and a single-hearted care for it. He had both ; but he
had the second even more eminently than the first. He
> greatly developed the first through means of the second.
In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most
undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself,
ithe greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything
7 accidental or personal. His interest was in literature
' itself ; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his
character, which kept him so free from all taint of little-
40 ness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of
which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded
424 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled.
He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his
enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised
what he despised. Those who knew him well had the
conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would
never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has
some admirable Homeric qualities ; — out-of-doors fresh-
ness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the
expressions in that poem, — 'Dangerous Gorrievreckan . . .
Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish,' — come back i(
now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in
him of which I think oftenest, is the Homeric simplicity
of his literary life.
V
FIVE ESSAYS HITHERTO
UNCOLLECTED
DR. STANLEY'S LECTURES ON THE
JEWISH CHURCH
[Macmillan's Magazine, February 1863.]
Here is a book on religious matters, which, meant for all
the world to read, fulfils the indispensable duty of edifying
at the same time that it informs. Here is a clergyman,
who, looking at the Bible, sees its contents in their right
proportion, and gives to each matter its due prominence.
Here is an inquirer, who, treating Scripture history with
a perfectly free spirit, — ^falsifying nothing, sophisticating
nothing — treats it so that his freedom leaves the sacred
power of that history inviolate. Who that had been
0 reproached with denying to an honest clergyman freedom
to speak the truth, who that had been misrepresented as
wishing to make religious truth the property of an aristo-
cratic few, while to the multitude is thrown the sop of any
convenient fiction, could desire a better opportunity than
Dr. Stanley's book affords for showing what, in rehgious
matters, is the true freedom of a religious speaker, and
what the true demand and true right of his hearers ?
His hearers are the many ; those who prosecute the
religious life, or those who need to prosecute it. All these
0 come to him with certain demands in virtue of certain
needs. There remain a few of mankind who do not come
to him with these demands, or acknowledge these needs.
Mr. Maurice (whom I name with gratitude and respect)
says, in a remarkable letter, that I thus assert them to be
without these needs. By no means : that is a matter
which literary criticism does not try. But it sees that
a very few of mankind aspire after a life which is not the
life after which the vast majority aspire, and to help them
to which the vast majority seek the aid of religion. It
0 sees that the ideal life — the summum honum for a born
thinker, for a philosopher like Parmenides, or Spinoza, or
428 THE JEWISH CHURCH
Hegel — is an eternal series of intellectual acts. It sees that
this life treats all things, r^^ligion included, with entire
freedom as subject-matter for thought, as elements in
a vast movement of speculation. The few who live this
life stand apart, and have an existence separate from that
of the mass of mankind ; they address an imaginary
audience of their mates ; the region which they inhabit
is the laboratory wherein are fashioned the new intellectual
ideas which, from time to time, take their place in the
Avorld. Are these few justified, in the sight of God, in so i<
living ? That is a question which Uterary criticism must
not attempt to answer. But such is the worth of intellect,
such the benefit which it procures for man, that criticism,
itself the creation of intellect, cannot but recognise this
purely intellectual life, when really followed, as justified
8o far as the jurisdiction of criticism extends, and even
admirable. Those they regard as really following it, who
show the power of mind to animate and carry forward the
intellectual movement in which it consists. No doubt,
many boast of living this life, of inhabiting this purety 2(
intellectual region, who cannot really breathe its air : they
vainly profess themselves able to live by thought alone,
and to dispense with religion : the life of the many, and
not the life of the few, would have been the right one for
them. They follow the life of the few at their own peril.
No doubt the rich and the great, unsoftened by suffering,
hardened by enjoyment, craving after novelty, imagining
that they see a distinction in the freedom of mind with
which the born thinker treats all things, and believing that
all distinctions naturally belong to them, have in every 3t
age been prone to treat reUgion as something which the
multitude wanted, but they themselves did not — to affect
freethinking as a kind of aristocratic privilege ; while, in
fact, for any real mental or moral life at all, their frivolity
entirely disquahfied them. They, too, profess the life of
the few at their own peril. But the few do really remain,
whose life, whose ideal, whose demand, is thought, and
thought only : to the communications (however bold) of
these few with one another through the ages, criticism
assigns the right of passing freely. 4c
But the world of the few — the world of speculative life —
THE JEWISH CHURCH 429
is not the world of the many, the world of religious life ;
the thoughts of the former cannot properly be transferred
to the latter, cannot be called true in the latter, except
on certain conditions. It is not for Uterary criticism to
set forth adequately the religious life ; yet what, even as
criticism, it sees of this life, it may say. Religious life
resides not in an incessant movement of ideas, but in
a feeling which attaches itself to certain fixed objects.
The religious life of Christendom has thus attached itself
10 to the acts, and words, and death of Christ, as recorded
in the Gospels and expounded in the Epistles of the New
Testament ; and to the main histories, the prophecies and
the hymns of the Old Testament. In relation to these
objects, it has adopted certain intellectual ideas ; such are,
ideas respecting the being of God, the laws of nature, the
freedom of human will, the character of prophecy, the
character of inspiration. But its essence, the essence of
Christian life, consists in the ardour, the love, the self-
renouncement, the ineffable aspiration with which it throws
20 itself upon the objects of its attachment themselves, not
in the intellectual ideas which it holds in relation to
them. These ideas belong to another sphere, the sphere
of speculative life, of intellect, of pure thought ; trans-
planted into the sphere of religious life, they have no
meaning in them, no vitality, no truth, unless they adjust
themselves to the conditions of that life, unless they allow
it to pursue its course freely. The moment this is forgotten,
the moment in the sphere of the religious life undue
prominence is given to the intellectual ideas which are
30 here but accessories, the moment the first place is not given
to the emotion which is here the principle, that moment
the essence of the religious life is violated : confusion and
falsehood are introduced into its sphere. And, if not only
is undue prominence in this sphere given to intellectual
ideas, but these ideas are so presented as in themselves
violently to jar with the religious feeling, then the con-
fusion is a thousand times worse confounded, the falsehood
a thousand times more glaring.
' The earth moves,' said Galileo, speaking as a philosopher
40 in the sphere of pure thought, in which ideas have an
absolute value ; and he said the truth ; he was a great
430 THE JEWISH CHURCH
thinker because he perceived this truth ; he was a great
man because he asserted it in spite of persecution. It was
the theologians, insisting upon transplanting his idea into
the world of theology, and placing it in a false connexion
there, who were guilty of folly. But if Galileo himself,
quitting the sphere of mathematics, coming into the sphere
of religion, had placed this thesis of his in juxtaposition
with the Book of Joshua, had applied it so as to impair
the value of the Book of Joshua for the religious life of
Christendom, to make that book regarded as a tissue of i<
fictions, for which no blame indeed attached to Joshua,
because he never meant it for anything else, — then Galileo
would have himself placed his idea in a false connexion,
and would have deserved censure : his ' the earth moves ',
in spite of its absolute truth, would have become a false-
hood. Spinoza, again, speaking as a pure thinker to pure
thinkers, not concerning himself whether what he said
impaired or confirmed the power and virtue of the Bible
for the actual religious life of Christendom, but pursuing
a speculative demonstration, said : ' The Bible contains 21
much that is mere history, and, like all history, sometimes
true, sometimes false.' But we must bear in mind that
Spinoza did not promulgate this thesis in immediate con-
nexion with the religious life of his times, but as a specula-
tive idea : he uttered it not as a religious teacher, but as
an independent philosopher ; and he left it, as Galileo left
his, to filter down gradually (if true) into the common
thought of mankind, and to adjust itself, through other
agency than his, to their religious life. The Bishop of
Natal does not speak as an independent philosopher, as 3(
a pure thinker ; if he did, and if he spoke with power in
this capacity, literary criticism would, I have already said,
have no right to condemn him. But he speaks actually
and avowedly, as by virtue of his office he was almost
inevitably constrained to speak, as a religious teacher to
the religious world. Well, then, any intellectual idea which,
speaking in this capacity, he promulgates, he is bound to
place in its right connexion with the religious life, he is
bound to make harmonise with that Hfe, he is bound
not to magnify to the detriment of that life : else, 4(
in the sphere of that life, it is false. He takes an in-
THE JEWISH CHURCH 431
tellectual idea, we will say, which is true ; the idea
that Mr. Burgon's proposition, ' Every letter of the Bible
is the direct utterance of the Most High,' is false. And
how does he apply this idea in connexion with the religious
life ? He gives to it the most excessive, the most exag-
gerated prominence ; so much so, that hardly in one page
out of twenty does he suffer his reader to recollect that
the religious life exists out of connexion with this idea,
that it is, in truth, wholly independent of it. And by
10 way of adjusting this idea to the feeUng of the religious
reader of the Bible, he puts it thus : — ' In writing the story
of the Exodus from the ancient legends of his people, the
Scripture writer may have had no more consciousness of
doing wrong, or of practising historical deception, than
Homer had, or any of the early Roman annalists.' Theo-
logical criticism censures this language as unorthodox,
irreverent : literary criticism censures it as false. Its
employer precisely does what I have imagined Galileo
doing : he misemploys a true idea so as to deprive it of
20 all truth. It is a thousand times truer to say that the
Book of Exodus is a sacred book, an inspired history, than
to say that it is fiction, not culpable because no deception
was intended, because its author worked in the same free
poetic spirit as the creator of the Isle of Calypso and the
• Garden of Alcinous.
It is one of the hardest tasks in the world to make new
intellectual ideas harmonise truly with the religious life,
to place them in their right light for that life. The moments
in which such a change is accomplished are epochs in
30 religious history ; the men through whose instrumentahty
it is accomplished are great religious reformers. The great-
ness of these men does not consist in their having these
new ideas, in their originating them. The ideas are in the
world ; they come originally from the sphere of pure
thought ; they are put into circulation by the spirit of
the time. The greatness of a religious reformer consists
in his reconciling them with the religious life, in his starting
this life upon a fresh period in company with them. No
such religious reformer for the present age has yet shown
40 himself. Till he appears, the true religious teacher is he
who, not yet reconciling all things, at least esteems things
432 THE JEWISH CHURCH
still in their due order, and makes his hearers so esteem
them ; who, shutting his mind against no ideas brought
by the spirit of his time, sets these ideas, in the sphere
of the religious life, in their right prominence, and still
puts that first which is first ; who, under the pressure of
new' thoughts, keeps the centre of the religious life where
it should be. The best distinction of Dr. Stanley's lectures
is that in them he shows himself such a teacher. Others
will praise them, and deservedly praise them, for their
eloquence, their varied information ; for enabling us to n
give such form and substance to our impressions from Bible
history. To me they seem admirable, chiefly by the clear
perception which they exhibit of a religious teacher's true
business in dealing with the Bible. Dr. Stanley speaks
of the Bible to the religious world, and he speaks of it
so as to maintain the sense of the divine virtue of the
Bible unimpaired, so as to bring out this sense more fully.
He speaks of the deliverance of the Israelites out of the
land of Egypt. He does not dilate upon the difficulty of
understanding how the Israelites should have departed 2(
' harnessed ' ; but he points out how they are ' the only
nation in ancient or modern times, which, throwing off
the yoke of slavery, claims no merit, no victory of its own :
There is no Marathon, no Regillus, no Tours, no Morgarten.
All is from above, nothing from themselves.' He mentions
the difficulty of ' conceiving the migration of a whole nation
under such circumstances ' as those of the Israelites, the
proposal ' to reduce the numbers of the text from 600,000
to 600 armed men ; ' he mentions the difficulty of deter-
mining the exact place of the passage of the Red Sea ; 3c
but he quickly ' dismisses these considerations to fix the
mind on the essential features of this great deliverance ' —
on the Almighty, ' through the dark and terrible night,
with the enemy pressing close behind and the driving seas
on either side, leading his people like sheep by the hands
of Moses and Aaron ; ' his people, carrying with them from
that night ' the abiding impression that this deliverance —
the first and greatest in their history — was effected not by
their own power, but by the power of God.' He tells
the reader how, ' with regard to all the topographical 4(
details of the Israelite journey, we are still in the condition
THE JEWISH CHURCH 433
of discoverers ; ' but, instead of impressing upon him as
an inference from this that the Bible narrative is a creation
such as the Iliad and Odyssey, he reminds him, with truth,
how ' suspense as to the exact details of form and locality
is the most fitting approach for the consideration of the
presence of Him who has made darkness His secret place,
his pavilion round about Him with dark water, and thick
clouds to cover them.' Everywhere Dr. Stanley thus seeks
to give its due prominence to that for which the religious
3 life really values the Bible. If ' the Jewish religion is
characterized in an eminent degree by the dimness of its
conception of a future life,' Dr. Stanley does not find
here, like Warburton, matter for a baffling contrast between
Jewish and pagan religion, but he finds fresh proof of the
grand edifying fact of Jewish history, * the consciousness of
the living, actual presence of God Himself — a truth, in the
limited conceptions of this youthful nation, too vast to
admit of any rival truth, however precious.' He speaks
of the call of Samuel. What he finds to dwell on in this call
) is not the exact nature of the voice that called Samuel, on
which Spinoza speculates so curiously ; it is the image of
* childlike, devoted, continuous goodness,' which Samuel's
childhood brings before us ; the type which Samuel offers
' of holiness, of growth, of a new creation without con-
version.' He speaks of the Prophets, and he avows that
' the Bible recognizes " revelation " and " inspiration "
outside the circle of the chosen people ; ' but he makes
it his business not to reduce, in virtue of this avowal, the
greatness and significance of Hebrew prophecy, but to set
3 that greatness and significance in clearer light than ever. To
the greatness and significance of what he calls ' the negative
side ' of that prophecy — its attacks on the falsehoods and
superstitions which endeavoured to take the place of God —
he does due justice ; but he reserves the chief prominence
for its ' positive side — the assertion of the spirituality, the
morality of God, His justice, His goodness. His love.'
Everywhere he keeps in mind the purpose for which
the religious fife seeks the Bible — to be enlarged and
strengthened, not to be straitened and perplexed. He
D seizes a truth of criticism when he says that the Bible
narrative, whatever inaccuracies of numbers the Oriental
ARNOLD -^ f
434 TPIE JEWISH CHURCH
tendency to amplification may have introduced into it,
remains a ' substantially historical ' work — not a work like
Homer's poems ; but to this proposition, which, merely
so stated, is a truth of criticism and nothing more, he
assigns no undue prominence : he knows that a mere truth
of criticism is not, as such, a truth for the religious life.
Dr. Stanley thus gives a lesson not only to the Bishop
of Natal, but to the Bishop of Natal's adversaries. Many
of these adversaries themselves exactly repeat the Bishop's
error in this, that they give a wholly undue prominence, i
in connexion with the religious life, to certain intellectual
propositions, on which the essence and vitality of the
religious life in no way depends. The Bishop devotes
a volume to the exhibition of such propositions, and he
is censurable because, addressing the rehgious world, he
exhibits his propositions so as to confuse the religious life
by them, not to strengthen it. He seems to have so con-
fused it in many of his hearers that they, like himself,
have forgotten in what it really consists. Puzzled by the
Bishop's sums, terrified at the conclusion he draws from 2
them, they, in their bewilderment, seek for safety in
attacking the sums themselves, instead of putting them
on one side as irrelevant, and rejecting the conclusion
deduced from them as untrue. ' Here is a Bishop,' many
of Dr. Stanley's brethren are now crying in all parts of
England — ' here is a Bishop who has learnt among the
Zulus that only a certain number of people can stand in
a doorway at once, and that no man can eat eighty-eight
pigeons a day, and who tells us, as a consequence, that
the Pentateuch is all fiction, which, however, the authors
may very likely have composed without meaning to do
wrong, and as a work of poetry, like Homer's.' ' Well,*
one can imagine Dr. Stanley answering them, ' you cannot
think that ! ' ' No,' they reply ; * and yet the Bishop's
sums puzzle us, and we want them disproved. And power-
ful answers, we know, are preparing. An adversary worthy
of the Bishop will soon appear, —
Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor !
He, when he comes, will make mince-meat of the Bishop's
calculations. Those great truths, so necessary to our salva- 4(
tion, which the Bishop assails, will at his hands receive
THE JEWISH CHURCH 435
all the strengthening they deserve. He will prove to
demonstration that any number of persons can stand in
the same doorway at once, and that one man can eat
eighty-eight pigeons a day with ease.' ' Compose your-
selves,' says Dr. Stanley : ' he cannot prove this.' ' What,'
cry his terrified interlocutors, ' he cannot ! In that case
we may as well shut up our Bibles, and read Homer and
the first books of Livy ! ' ' Compose yourselves,' says
Dr. Stanley again : ' it is not so. Even if the Bishop's
3 sums are right, they do not prove that the Bible narrative
is to be classed with the Iliad and the Legends of Rome.
Even if you prove them wrong, your success does not bring
you a step nearer to that which you go to the Bible to seek.
Carry your achievements of this kind to the Statistical
Society, to the Geographical Society, to the Ethnological
Society. They have no vital interest for the religious
reader of the Bible. The heart of the Bible is not there.'
Just because Dr. Stanley has comprehended this, and,
in a book addressed to the reUgious world, makes us feel
) that he has comprehended it, his book is excellent and
salutary. I praise it for the very reason for which some
critics find fault with it — for not giving prominence, in
speaking of the Bible, to matters with which the real virtue
of the Bible is not bound up. * The book,' a critic com-
plains, ' contains no solution of the difficulties which the
history of the period traversed presents in the Bible. The
oracle is dumb in the very places where many would wish
it to speak. This must lessen Dr. Stanley's influence in
the cause of Biblical science. The present time needs bold
) men, prepared to give utterance to their deepest thoughts.'
And which are a man's deepest thoughts I should like to
know : his thoughts whether it was 215 years, or 430, or
1,000 that the Israelites sojourned in Egypt, — which
question the critic complains of Dr. Stanley for saying
that it is needless to discuss in detail, — or his thoughts on
the moral lesson to be drawn from the story of the
Israelites' deUverance ? And which is the true science of
the Bible — that which helps men to follow the cardinal
injunction of the Bible, to be * transformed by the renewing
) of their mind, that they may prove what is that good,
and acceptable, and perfect will of God ' — or that which
Ff 2
436 THE JEWISH CHURCH
helps them to * settle the vexed question of the precise
time when the Book of Deuteronomy assumed its present
form ' ? — that which elaborates an octavo volume on the
arithmetical difficulties of the Bible, with the conclusion
that the Bible is as unhistorical as Homer's poetry, or that
which makes us feel that ' these difficulties melt away
before the simple pathos and lofty spirit of the Bible
itself ' ? Such critics as this critic of Dr. Stanley are those
who commend the Bishop of Natal for ' speaking the
truth,' who say that ' liberals of every shade of 'opinion ' ic
are indignant with me for rebuking him. Ah ! these
liberals ! — the power for good they have had, and lost :
the power for good they will yet again have, and yet again
lose ! Eternal bondsmen of phrases and catchwords, will
they never arrive at the heart of any matter, but always
keep muttering round it their silly shibboleths like an
incantation ? There is truth of science and truth of
religion : truth of science does not become truth of religion
until it is made to harmonize with it. Applied as the laws
of nature are applied in the Essays and Reviews, applied 2C
as arithmetical calculations are applied in the Bishop of
Natal's work, truths of science, even supposing them to
be such, lose their truth, and the utterer of them is not
a ' fearless speaker of truth,' but, at best, a blunderer.
' Allowing two feet in width for each full-grown man, nine
men could just have stood in front of the Tabernacle.'
* A priest could not have eaten, daily, eighty-eight pigeons
for his own portion, " in the most holy place." ' And as
a conclusion from all this : ' In writing the story of the
Exodus from the ancient legends of his people, the Scripture- 3o
writer may have had no more consciousness of doing wrong,
or of practising historical deception, than Homer had, or
any of the early Roman annalists.' Heaven and earth,
what a gospel ! Is it this which a ' fearless speaker of
truth ' must ' burst ' if he cannot utter ? Is this a message
which it is woe to him if he does not preach ? — this a testi-
mony which he is straitened tiU he can deliver ?
I am told that the Bishop of Natal explains to those
who do not know it, that the Pentateuch is not to be
read as an authentic history, but as a narrative full of 40
divine instruction in morals and religion : I wish to lay
THE JEWISH CHURCH 437
aside all ridicule, into which literary criticism too readily
falls, while I express my unfeigned conviction that in his
own heart the Bishop of Natal honestly believes this, and
that he originally meant to convey this to his readers.
But I censure his book because it entirely fails to convey
this. I censure it, because while it impresses strongly on
the reader that ' the Pentateuch is not to be read as an
authentic narrative,' it so entirely fails to make him feel
that it is ' a narrative full of divine instruction in morals
10 and religion.' I censure it, because, addressed to the
religious world, it puts the non-essential part of the Bible
so prominent, and the essential so much in the background,
and, having established this false proportion, holds such
language about the Bible in consequence of it, that, instead
of serving the religious life, it confuses it, I do not blame
the Bishop of Natal' s doctrine for its novelty or heterodoxy
— literary criticism takes no account of a doctrine's novelty
or heterodoxy ; I said expressly that Mr. Jowett's Essay
was, for literary criticism, justified by its unction ; I said
20 that the Bishop of Natal's book was censurable, because,
proclaiming what it did, it proclaimed no more ; because,
not taking rank as a book of pure speculation, inevitably
taking rank as a religious book for the religious world,
for the great majority of mankind, it treated its subject
unedifyingly. Address what doctrine you like to the
religious world, be as unorthodox as you will, literary
criticism has no authority to blame you : only, if your
doctrine is evidently not adapted to the needs of the
religious life, — if, as you present it, it tends to confound
30 that life rather than to strengthen it, literary criticism has
the right to check you ; for it at once perceives that your
doctrine, as you present it, is false. Was it, nevertheless,
your duty to put forth that doctrine, since you believed
it to be true ? The honoured authority of the Archbishop
of Dublin is invoked to decide that it was. Which duty
comes first for a man — the duty of proclaiming an in-
adequate idea, or the duty of making an inadequate idea
adequate ? But this difficult question we need not resolve :
it is enough that, if it is a man's duty to announce even
40 his inadequate ideas, it is the duty of criticism to tell him
that they are inadequate.
438 THE JEWISH CHURCH
But, again, it is said that the Bishop of Natal's book
will, in the end, have a good effect, by loosening the super-
stitious attachment with which the mass of the English
religious world clings to the letter of the Bible, and that it
deserves from criticism indulgence on this ground. I can-
not tell what may, in the end, be the effect of the Bishop
of Natal's book upon the religious life of this country. Its
natural immediate effect may be seen by any one who will
take the trouble of looking at a newspaper called Public
Opinion, in which the Bishop's book is the theme of a great n
continuous correspondence. There, week after week, the
critical genius of our nation discovers itself in captivating
nudity ; and there, in the letters of a terrible athlete of
Reason, who signs himself ' Eagle-Eye,' the natural imme-
diate effect of the Bishop's book may be observed. Its
natural iiltimate effect would be, I think, to continue, in
another form, the excessive care of the English religious
world for that which is not of the real essence of the Bible :
as this world has for years been prone to say, ' We are
the salt of the earth, because we believe that every syllable 21
and letter of the Bible is the direct utterance of the Most
High,' so it would naturally, after imbibing the Bishop
of Natal's influence, be inclined to say, ' We are the salt
of the earth, because we believe that the Pentateuch is
unhistorical.' Whether they believe the one or the other,
what they should learn to say is : ' We are unprofitable
servants ; the religious life is beyond.* But, at all events,
literary criticism, which is the guardian of literary truth,
must judge books according to their intrinsic merit and
proximate natural effect, not according to their possible 3(
utility and remote contingent effect. If the Bishop of
Natal's demonstrations ever produce a salutary effect upon
the religious life of England, it will be after some one else,
or he himself, has supplied the now missing power of
edification : for literary criticism his book, as it at present
stands, must always remain a censurable production.
The situation of a clergjonan, active-minded as well aa
pious, is, I freely admit, at the present moment one of
great difficulty. Intellectual ideas are not the essence of
the religious life ; still the religious life connects itself, as 4C
I have said, with certain intellectual ideas, and all Intel-
THE JEWISH CHURCH 439
lectual ideas follow a development independent of the
religious life. Goethe remarks somewhere how the Zeit-
Geist, as he calls it, the Time-Spirit, irresistibly changes
the ideas current in the world. When he was young, ho
says, the Time-Spirit had made every one disbelieve in
the existence of a single Homer : when he was old, it was
bearing every one to a belief in it. Intellectual ideas,
which the majority of men take from the age in which they
live, are the dominion of this Time-Spirit ; not moral and
10 spiritual life, which is original in each individual. In the
Articles of the Church of England are exhibited the intel-
lectual ideas with which the religious life of that Church,
at the time of the Reformation, and almost to the present
day, connected itself. They are the intellectual ideas of
the English Reformers and of their time ; they are liable
to development and change. Insensibly the Time -Spirit
brings to men's minds a consciousness that certain of these
ideas have undergone such development, such change. For
the laity, to whom the religious life of their National
20 Church is the great matter, and who owe to that Church
only the general adhesion of citizens to the Government
under which they are born, this consciousness is not irk-
some as it is for the clergy, who, as ministers of the Church,
undertake to become organs of the intellectual ideas of its
formularies. As this consciousness becomes more and more
distinct, it becomes more and more irksome. One can
almost fix the last period in which a clergyman, very
speculative by the habit of his mind, or very sensible to
the whispers of the Time-Spirit, can sincerely feel himself
30 free and at ease in his position of a minister of the Church
of England. The moment inevitably arrives when such
a man feels himself in a false position. It is natural that
he should try to defend his position, that he should long
prefer defending his position to confessing it untenable,
and demanding to have it changed. Still, in his own heart,
he cannot but be dissatisfied with it. It is not good for
him, not good for his usefulness, to be left in it. The
sermons of Tauler and Wesley were not preached by men
hampered by the consciousness of an unsound position.
40 Even when a clergyman, charged full with modern ideas,
manages by a miracle of address to go over the very gromid
440 THE JEWISH CHURCH
most dangerous to him without professional ruin, and even
to exhibit unction as he goes along, there is no reason to
exult at the feat : he would probably have exhibited more
unction still if he had not had to exhibit it upon the tight-
rope. The time at last comes for the State, the collective
nation, to intervene. Some reconstruction of the EngUsh
Church, a reconstruction hardly less important than that
which took place at the Reformation, is fast becoming
inevitable. It will be a delicate, a most difficult task ;
and the reconstruction of the Protestant Churches of i(
Germany offers an example of what is to be avoided rather
than of what is to be followed.
Still, so divine, so indestructible is the power of
Christianity — so immense the power of transformation
afforded to it by its sublime maxim, ' The letter killeth,
but the spirit giveth life,' that it will assuredly ever be
able to adapt itself to new conditions, and, in connexion
with intellectual ideas changed or developed, to enter upon
successive stages of progress. It will even survive the
handling of ' liberals of every shade of opinion.' But it 2(
will not do this by losing its essence, by becoming such
a Christianity as these liberals imagine, the ' Christianity
not Mysterious ' of Toland ; a Christianity consisting of
half a dozen intellectual propositions, and half a dozen
moral rules deduced from them. It will do it by retaining
the religious life in all its depth and fulness in connexion
with new intellectual ideas ; and the latter will never have
meaning for it until they have been harmonized with the
former, and the religious teacher who presents the latter
to it, without harmonizing them with the former, will 30
never have fulfilled his mission. The religious life existed
in the Church of the Middle Ages, as it exists in the
Churches of Protestantism ; nay, what monument of that
life have the Protestant Churches produced, which for its
most essential qualities, its tenderness, its spirituality, its
ineffable yearning, is comparable to the Imitation. The
critical ideas of the sixteenth century broke up the Church
of the Middle Ages, resting on the basis of a priesthood
with supernatural power of interpreting the Bible. But
Luther was a great religious reformer, not because he made 40
himself the organ of these ideas, themselves negative, not
THE JEWISH CHURCH 411
because he shattered the idol of a mediatory priesthood,
but because he reconciled these ideas with the rehgious
life, because he made the religious life feel that a positive
and fruitful conclusion was to be drawn from them, — the
conclusion that each man must ' work out his own salva-
tion with fear and trembling.' Protestantism has formed
the notion that every syllable and letter of the Bible is
the direct utterance of the Most High. The critical ideas
of our century are forcing Protestantism away from this
10 proposition, untrue like the proposition that the Pope is
infallible : but the religious reformer is not he who rivets
our minds upon the untruth of this proposition, who
bewilders the religious life by insisting on the intellectual
blunder of which it has been guilty in entertaining it ; he
is the man who makes us feel the future which undoubtedly
exists for the religious life in the absence of it.
Makes us all feel, not the multitude only. I am reproached
with wishing to make free-thinking an aristocratic privilege,
while a false religion is thrown to the multitude to keep
20 it quiet ; and in this country — where the multitude is, in
the first place, particularly averse to being called the multi-
tude, and in the second, by its natural spirit of honesty,
particularly averse to all underhand, selfish scheming —
such an imputation is readily snatched up, and carries
much odium with it. I will not seek to remove that odium
by any flattery, by saying that I think we are all one
enlightened public together. No, there is a multitude,
a multitude made up out of all ranks : probably in no
country — so much has our national life been carried on by
30 means of parties, and so inevitably does party-spirit, in
regarding all things, put the consideration of their intrinsic
reason and truth second, and not first — is the multitude
more unintelligent, more narrow-minded, and more pas-
sionate than in this. Perhaps in no country in the world
is so much nonsense so firmly believed. But those on
whose behalf I demand from a religious speaker edification
are more than this multitude ; and their cause and that
of the multitude are one. They are all those who acknow-
ledge the need of the religious life. The few whom literary
40 criticism regards as exempt from all concern with edifica-
tion, are far fewer than is commonly supposed. Those
442 THE JEWISH CHURCH
whose life is all in thought, and to whom, therefore, literary
criticism concedes the right of treating religion with absolute
freedom, as pure matter for thought, are not a great class,
but a few individuals. Let them think in peace, these
sublime solitaries ; they have a right to their liberty :
Churches will never concede it to them ; literary criticism
will never deny it to them. From his austere isolation
a born thinker like Spinoza cries with warning solemnity
to the would-be thinker, what, from his austere isolation
a bom artist like Michael Angelo, cries to the would-be lo
artist — ' Canst thou drink of the cup that I drink of ? '
Those who persist in the thinker's life, are far fewer even
than those who persist in the artist's. Of the educated
minority, far the greatest number retain their demand
upon the religious life. They share, indeed, the culture
of their time, they are curious to know the new ideas of
their time ; their own culture is advanced, in so far as
those ideas are novel, striking, and just. This course they
follow, whether they feel or not (what is certainly true),
that this satisfaction of their curiosity, this culture of 20
theirs, is not without its dangers to the religious life. Thus
they go on being informed, gathering intellectual ideas at
their own peril, minding, as Marcus Aurelius reproached
himself with too long minting, ' life less than notion.'
But the moment they enter the sphere of religion, they
too ask and need to be edified, not informed only. They
inevitably, such is the law of the religious life, take the
same attitude as the least-instructed. The rehgious voice
that speaks to them must have the tone of the spiritual
world : the intellectual ideas presented to them must be 30
made to blend with the religious life.
The world may not see this, but cannot a clergyman
see it ? Cannot he see that, speaking to the religious life,
he may honestly be silent about matters which he cannot
yet use to edification, and of which, therefore, the religions
life does not want to hear ? Does he not see that he is
even bound to take account of the circumstances of his
hearers, and that information which is only fruitless to
the rehgious life of some of his hearers, may be worse than
fruitless, confounding, to the religious life of others of 40
them ? Certainly, Christianity has not two doctrines, one
THE JEWISH CHURCH 443
for the few, another for the many ; but as certainly, Christ
adapted His teaching to the different stages of growth in
His hearers, and for all of them adapted it to the needs
of the religious life. He came to preach moral and spiritual
truths ; and for His purpose moral genius was of moro
avail than intellectual genius, St. Peter than Solomon.
But the speculative few who stood outside of His teaching
were not the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees
were the narrow-minded, cruel-hearted reUgious professors
10 of that day ; the Sadducees were the ' liberals of every
shade of opinion.' And who, then, were the thinking few
of that time ? — a student or two at Athens or Alexandria.
That was the hour of the reHgious sense of the East : but
the hour of the thought of the West, of Greek thought,
was also to come. The religious sense had to ally itself
with this, to make certain conditions with it, to be in
certain ways inevitably modified by it. Now is the hour
of the thought of the West. This thought has its apostles
on every side, and we hear far more of its conquests than
20 of the conquests of the religious sense. Still the religious
life maintains its indefeasible claims, and in its own sphere
inexorably refuses to be satisfied with the new thought,
to admit it to be of any truth and significance, until it has
harmonized it with itself, imtil it has imparted to it its
own divine power of refreshing souls. Some day the
religious life will have harmonized all the new thought
with itself, will be able to use it freely : but it cannot
use it yet. And who has not rejoiced to be able, between
the old idea, tenable no longer, which once connected itself
30 with certain reHgious words, and the new idea, which has
not yet connected itself with them, to rest for awhile in
the healing virtue and beauty of the words themselves ?
The old popular notion of perpetual special interventions
of Providence in the concerns of man is weak and erroneous ;
yet who has yet found, to define Providence for the religious
life, words so adequate as the words of Isaiah — * In all
their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence
saved them ; and he bare them and carried them all the
days of old ' ? The old popular notion of an incensed God
40 appeased in His wrath against the helpless race of mankind
by a bloody sacrifice, is barbarous and false ; but what
444 THE JEWISH CHURCH
intellectual definition of the death of Christ has yet suc-
ceeded in placing it, for the religious life, in so true an
aspect as the sublime ejaculation of the Litany : ' 0 Lamb
of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy
upon us ! '
And you are masters in Israel, and know not these
things ; and you require a voice from the world of literature
to tell them to you ! Those who ask nothing better than
to remain silent on such topics, who have to quit their
own sphere to speak of them, who cannot touch them ic
without being reminded that they survive those who
touched them with far different power, you compel, in the
mere interest of letters, of intelligence, of general culture,
to proclaim truths which it was your function to have
made familiar. And, when you have thus forced the very
stones to cry out, and the dumb to speak, you call them
singular because they know these truths, and arrogant
because they declare them !
DANTE AND BEATRICE
[Fraser's Magazine, May 1863.]
Those critics who allegorize the Divine Comedy, who
exaggerate, or, rather, who mistake the supersensual
element in Dante's work, who reduce to nothing the
sensible and human element, are hardly worth refuting.
They know nothing of the necessary laws under which
poetic genius works, of the inevitable conditions under
which the creations of poetry are produced. But, in their
turn, those other critics err hardly less widely, who exag-
gerate, or, rather, who mistake the human and real element
Lo in Dante's poem ; who see, in such a passion as that of
Dante for Beatrice, an affection belonging to the sphere of
actual domestic life, fitted to sustain the wear and tear
of our ordinary daily existence. Into the error of these
second critics an accomplished recent translator of Dante,
IMr. Theodore Martin, seems to me to have fallen. He has
ever present to his mind, when he speaks of the Beatrice
whom Dante adored, Wordsworth's picture of —
The perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command ;
20 And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light.
He is ever quoting these lines in connexion with Dante's
Beatrice ; ever assimilating to this picture Beatrice as
Dante conceived her ; ever attributing to Dante's passion
a character identical with that of the affection which
Wordsworth, in the poem from which these lines are taken,
meant to portray. The affection here portrayed by Words-
worth is, I grant, a substantial human affection, inhabiting
the domain of real life, at the same time that it is poetical
30 and beautiful. But in order to give this flesh-and-blood
character to Dante's passion for Beatrice, what a task has
Mr. Martin to perform ! how much is he obliged to imagine 1
/ how much to shut his eyes to, or to disbeheve ! Not per-
V
446 DANTE AND BEATRICE
ceiving that the vital impulse of Dante's soul is towards
reverie and spiritual vision ; that the task Dante sets himself
is not the task of reconciling poetry and reality, of giving to
each its due part, of supplementing the one by the other ;
but the task of sacrificing the world to the spirit, of making
the spirit all in all, of effacing the world in presence of the
spirit — ^Mr. Martin seeks to find a Dante admirable and
complete in the life of the world as well as in the life of the
spirit ; and when he cannot find him, he invents him. Dante
saw the world, and used in his poetry what he had seen ; lo
for he was a born artist. But he was essentially aloof
from the world, and not complete in the life of the world ;
for he was a born spiritualist and solitary. Keeping in
our minds this, his double character, we may seize the
exact truth as to his relations with Beatrice, and steer
a right course between the error of those who dehteralize
them too much, on the one hand, and that of those who
literalize them too much, on the other.
The Divine Comedy, I have already said, is no alle-
gory, and Beatrice no mere personification of theologj^ 20
Mr. Martin is quite right in saying that Beatrice is the
Beatrice whom men turned round to gaze at in the streets
of Florence ; that she is no ' allegorical phantom,' no
' fiction purely ideal.' He is quite right in saying that
Dante ' worships no phantoms,' that his passion for
Beatrice was a real passion, and that his love-poetry does
not deal ' in the attributes of celestial charms.' He was
an artist — one of the greatest artists ; and art abhors what
7 is vague, hollow, and impalpable.
' Enough to make this fully manifest we have in the Vita 30
Nuova. Dante there records how, a boy of ten; he first
saw Beatrice, a girl of nine, dressed in crimson ; how,
a second time," he saw her, nine years later, passing along
the street, dressed in white, between two ladies older than
herself, and how she saluted him.^ He rec>ords how after-
{ wards she once denied him her salutation ;-he records the
f profound impression which, at her father's death, the grief
and beauty of Beatrice made on all those who visited her ;
he -records his meeting with her at a party after her
marriage, his emotion, and how some ladies present, 40
observing his emotion, ' made a mock of him to that most
IDANTE AND BEATRICE 447
gentle being ; ' he records her death, and how, a year
afterwards, some gentlemen found him, on the anniversary
of her death, ' sketching an angel on his tablets.' 4le
tells us how, a little later, he had a vision of the dead
Beatrice ' arrayed in the same crimson robe in which she
had originally appeared in my eyes, and she seemed as
youthful as on the day I saw her first.' He mentions
how, one day, the sight of some pilgrims passing along
a particular street in Florence brought to his mind the
10 thought that perhaps these pilgrims, coming from a far
country, had never even heard the name of her who filled
his thoughts so entirely. And even in the Divine Comedy ^
composed many years afterwards, and treating of the J
glorified Beatrice only, one distinct trait of the earthly y
Beatrice is still preserved — her smile ; the santo riso of
the Purgatory, the dolce riso of the Paradise.
Yes, undoubtedly there was a real Beatrice, whom Dante \ ^
had seen living and moving before him, and for whom he \
had felt a passion. This basis of fact and reality he took
20 from the life of the outward world : this basis was indis-
? pensable to him, for he was an artist.
But this basis was enough for him as an artist : to have
seen Beatrice two or three times, to have spoken to her two
or three times, to have felt her beauty, her charm ; to have
had the emotion of her marriage, her death — this was enough.
[Art requires a basis of fact, but it also desires to treat this
basis of fact with the utmost freedom ; and this desire for
the freest handling of its object is even thwarted when its
object is too near, and too real.J To have had his relations
30 with Beatrice more positive, intimate, and prolonged, to have
had an affection for her into which there entered more of
the life of this world, would have even somewhat impeded,
one may say, Dante's free use of these relations for the
purpose of art. And the artist nature in him was in Httle
danger of being thus impeded ; for he was a bom solitary. '
Thus the conditions of art do not make it necessary
that Dante's relations with Beatrice should have been
more close and real than the Vita Nuova represents them ;
and the conditions of Dante's own nature do not make it
40 probable. Not the less do such admirers of the poet as
Mr. Martin — misconceiving the essential characteristic of
448 DANTE AND BEATRICE
chivalrous passion in general, and of Dante's divinization
of Beatrice in particular, misled by imagining this ' worship
for woman,' as they call it, to be something which it was
not, something involving modern relations in social life
between the two sexes — insist upon making out of Dante's
adoration of Beatrice a substantial modem love-story, and
of arranging Dante's real life so as to turn it into the
proper sort of real life for a ' worshipper of woman ' to
lead. The few real incidents of Dante's passion, enumerated
in the Vita Nuova, sufficient to give to his great poem the lo
basis which it required, are far too scanty to give to such
a love-story as this the basis which it requires ; therefore
they must be developed and amplified. Beatrice was
a living woman, and Dante had seen her ; but she must
become
The creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food,
of Wordsworth's poem : she must become ' pure flesh and
blood — ^beautiful, yet substantial,' and ' moulded of that
noble humanity wherewith Heaven blesses, not unfre- 20
quently, our common earth.' Dante had saluted Beatrice,
had spoken to her ; but this is not enough : he has surely
omitted to ' record particulars : ' it is ' scarcely credible
that he should not have found an opportunity of directly
declaring his attachment ; ' for ' in position, education,
and appearance he was a man worth any woman,' and his
face ' at that time of his life must have been eminently
engaging.' Therefore ' it seems strange that his love should
not have found its issue in marriage ; ' for ' he loved
Beatrice as a man loves, and with the passion that naturally 30
perseveres to the possession of its mistress.'
However, his love did not find its issue in marriage.
Beatrice married Messer Simone dei Bardi, to whom, says
Mr. Martin, ' her hand had been, perhaps lightly or to
please her parents, pledged, in ignorance of the deep and
noble passion which she had inspired in the young poet's
heart.' But she certainly could not ' have been insensible
to his profound tenderness and passion ; ' although whether
' she knew of it before her marriage,' and whether ' she,
either then or afterwards, gave it her countenance and 40
DANTE AKD BEATRICE 449
approval, and returned it in any way, and in what degree '
— questions which, Mr. Martin saj^s, ' naturally suggest
themselves ' — are, he confesses, questions for solving which
* the materials are most scanty and unsatisfactory.' ' Un-
questionably,' he adds, ' it startles and grieves us to find
Beatrice taking part with her friends ** in laughing at Dante
when he was overcome at first meeting her after her
marriage." But there may,' he thinks, ' have been causes
for this — causes for which, in justice to her, allowance must
LO be made, even as we see that Dante made it.' Then, again,
as to Messer Simone dei Bardi's feelings about this attach-
ment of Dante to his wife. ' It is true,' says Mr. Martin,
' that we have no direct information on this point ; ' but
' the love of Dante was of an order too pure and noble
to occasion distrust, even if the purity of Beatrice had not
placed her above suspicion ; ' but Dante ' did what only
a great and manly nature could have done — he triumphed
over his pain ; he uttered no complaint ; his regrets were
buried within his own heart.' * At the same time ', Mr. Martin
!o thinks, ' it is contrary to human nature that a love unfed
by any tokens of favour should retain all its original force ;
and without wrong either to Beatrice or Dante we may
conclude that an understanding was come to between them,
which in some measure soothed his heart, if it did not
satisfy it.' And ' sooner or later, before Beatrice died, we
cannot doubt that there came a day when words passed
between them which helped to reconcile Dante to the doom
that severed her from his side during her all too brief
sojourn on earth, when the pent-up heart of the poet
10 swept down the barriers within which it had so long
struggled, and he
Caught up the whole of love, and utter'd it,
Then bade adieu for ever,
if not to her, yet to all those words which it was no longer
meet should be spoken to another's wife.'
But Dante married, as well as Beatrice ; and so Dante's
married life has to be arranged also. ' It is,' says Mr. Martin,
* only those who have observed little of human nature, or
of their own hearts, who will think that Dante's marriage
\o with Gemma Donati argues against the depth of sincerity
AENOLD Q «
450 DANTE AND BEATRICE
of his first love. Why should he not have sought the
solace and the support of a generous woman's nature, who,
knowing all the truth, was yet content with such affection
as he was able to bring to a second love ? Nor was that
necessarily small. Ardent and affectionate as his nature
was, the sympathies of such a woman must have elicited
from him a satisfactory response ; while, at the same time,
without prejudice to the wife's claim on his regard, he
might entertain his heavenward dream of the departed
Beatrice.' The tradition is, however, that Dante did not i
live happily with his wife ; and some have thought that
he means to cast a disparaging reflection on his marriage
in a passage of the Purgatory. I need not say that this
sort of thing would never do for Mr. Martin's hero — ^that
hero who can do nothing ' inconsistent with the purest
respect to her who had been the wedded wife of another,
on the one hand, or with his regard for the mother of his
children, on the other.' 'Accordingly, ' are we to assume,'
Mr. Martin cries, ' that the woman who gave herself to
him in the full knowledge that she was not the bride of 2
his imagination, was not regarded by him with the esteem
which her devotion v/as calculated to inspire ? ' It is quite
impossible. 'Dante was a true-hearted gentleman, and
could never have spoken slightingly of her on whose breast
he had found comfort amid many a sorrow, and who had
borne to him a numerous progeny — the last a Beatrice.'
Donna Gemma was a ' generous and devoted woman,' and
she and Dante ' thoroughly understood each other.'
All this has, as applied to real personages, the grave
defect of being entirely of Mr. Martin's own imagining. 3
But it has a still graver defect, I think, as appHed to
^Dante, in being so singularly inappropriate to its object.
The grand, impracticable Solitary, with keen senses and
ardent passions — for nature had made him an artist, and
art must be, as Milton says, ' sensuous and impassioned ' —
but with an irresistible bent to the inward life, the life of
imagination, vision, and ecstasy ; with an inherent im-
patience of the outward life, the life of distraction, jostling,
mutual concession ; this man ' of a humour which made
him hard to get on with,' says Petrarch ; * melancholy and 4
pensive,' says Boccaccio; ' by nature abstracted and taci-
DANTE AND BEATRICE 451
turn, seldom spCcaking unless he was questioned, and often
so absorbed in his own reflections that he did not hear tho
questions which were put to him ; ' who could not live
with the Florentines, who could not live with Gemma
Donati, who could not live with Can Grande della Scala ; .
this lover of Beatrice, but of Beatrice a vision of his youth^ \
hardly at all in contact with him Tn actual Iff e, vanished \
from him soon, with whom his imagination could deal
freely, whom_he could divinize into a fit object for the,
0 spirituar . lojigmg^^hich _fiUed him — this Dante is trans-
formed, in Mr. Martin's hands, into the hero of a senti-
mental, but strictly virtuous, novel ! To make out Dante
to have been eminent for a wise, complete conduct of his
outward life, seems to me as unimportant as it is impossible. ,
I can quite believe the tradition which represents him as'
not having lived happily with his wife, and attributes her
not having joined him in his exile to this cause. I can
even believe, without difficulty, an assertion of Boccaccio
which excites Mr. Martin's indignation, that Dante's con-
0 duct, even in mature life, was at times exceedingly irregular.
We know how the followers of the spiritual life tend to
be antinomian in what belongs to the outward life : they
do not attach much importance to such irregularity them-
selves ; it is their fault, as complete men, that they do
not ; it is the fault of the spiritual life, as a complete life,
that it allows this tendency : by dint of despising the
outward life, it loses the control of this life, and of itself
when in contact with it. My present business, however,
is not to praise or blame Dante's practical conduct of his
Q Ufe, but to make clear his peculiar mental and spiritual
constitution. This, I say, disposed him to absorb himself
in the inner life, wholly to humble and efface before this
the outward life. We may see this in the passage of the
Purgatory where he makes Beatrice reprove him for his
backslidings after she, his visible symbol of spiritual per-
fection, had vanished from his eyes.
' For a while ' — she says of him to the ' pious substances,*
the angels — ' for a while with my countenance I upheld
him ; showing to him my youthful eyes, with me I led
a him, turned towards the right way.
* Soon as I came on the threshold of my second age,
Gg2
452 DANTE AND BEATRICE
and changed my life, this man took himself from me and
gave himself to others.
' When that I had mounted from flesh to spirit, and
beauty and spirit were increased unto me, I was to him
less dear and less acceptable.
* He turned his steps to go in a way not true, pursuing
after false images of good, which fulfil nothing of the
promises which they give.
' Neither availed it me that I obtained inspirations to
be granted me, whereby, both in dream and otherwise, k
I called him back ; so little heed paid he to them.
' So deep he fell, that, for his salvation all means came
short, except to show him the people of perdition.
' The high decree of God would be broken, could Lethe
be passed, and that so fair aliment tasted, without some
scot paid of repentance, which pours forth tears.'
Here, indeed, and in a somewhat similar passage of the
next canto, Mr. Martin thinks that the ' obvious allusion '
is to certain moral shortcomings, occasional slips, of which
(though he treats Boccaccio's imputation as monstrous and 2
incredible) ' Dante, with his strong and ardent passions,
having, like meaner men, to fight the perennial conflict
between flesh and spirit,' had sometimes, he supposes, been
guilty. An Italian commentator gives at least as true an
interpretation of these passages when he says that ' in
them Dante makes Beatrice, as the representative of
theology, lament that he should have left the study of
divinity — in which, by the grace of Heaven, he might have
attained admirable proficiency — to immerse himself in civil
affairs with the parties of Florence.' But the real truth a
is, that all the life of the world, its pleasures, its business,
its parties, its politics, all is alike hollow and miserable to
Dante in comparison with the inward life, the ecstasy of
the divine vision ; every-waywhich does not lead straight
towards this is for him a via non vera ; every good thing
but this is for him a false image of good, fulfilling none
of the promises which it gives ; for the excellency of the
knowledge of this he counts all things but loss. Beatrice
leads him to this ; herself symbolizes for him the ineffable -
I beauty and purity for which he longs. Even to Dante at 4
' twenty-one, when he yet sees the living Beatrice with his
DANTE AND BEATRICE 453
eyes, she already symbolizes this for him, she is already
not the ' creature not too bright and good ' of Wordsworth,
but a spirit far more than a woman ; to Dante at twenty-
five composing the Vita Nuova she is still more a spirit ;
to Dante at fifty, when his character has taken its bent,
when his genius is come to his perfection, when he is
composing his immortal poem, she is a spirit altogether.
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN
LITERATURE
[Macmillan's Magazine, February 1869]
[What follows was delivered as an inaugural lecture in the Poetry
Chair at Oxford. It was never printed, but there appeared at the time
several comments on it, from critics who had either heard it, or heard
reports about it. It was meant to be followed and completed by a course
of lectures developing the subject entirely, and some of these were
given. But the course was broken off because I found my knowledge
insufficient for treating in a solid way many portions of the subject
chosen. The inaugural lecture, however, treating a portion of the
subject where my knowledge was perhaps less insufficient, and where
besides my hearers were better able to help themselves out from their
own knowledge, is here printed. No one feels the imperfection of this
sketchy and generalizing mode of treatment more than I do ; arid noF'
only is this mode of treatment less to my taste now than it was eleven
years ago, but the style too, which is that of the doctor rather than
the explorer, is a style which I have long since learnt to abandon.
Nevertheless, having written much of late about Hellenism and Hebraism,
and Hellenism being to many people almost an empty name compared
with Hebraism, I print this lecture with the hope that it may serve,
in the absence of other and fuller illustrations, to give some notion of
the Hellenic spirit and its works, and of their significance in the history
of the evolution of the human spirit in general.
M. A.]
It is related in one of those legends which illustrate the
history of Buddhism, that a certain disciple once presented
himself before his master, Buddha, with the desire to bo
permitted to undertake a mission of peculiar difficulty.
The compassionate teacher represented to him the obstacles
to be surmounted and the risks to be run. Pourna — so
the disciple was called — ^insisted, and replied, with equal
humility and adroitness, to the successive objections of
his adviser. Satisfied at last by his answers of the fitness
of his disciple, Buddha accorded to him the desired per- lo
mission ; and dismissed him to his task with these remark-
able words, nearly identical with those in which he himself
is said to have been admonished by a divinity at the
outset of his own career : — ' Go then, O Pouma,' are his
words ; ' having been delivered, deliver ; having been
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 455
consoled, console ; being arrived thyself at the farther
bank, eaiable others to arrive there also.'
It was a moral deliverance, eminently, of which the great
Oriental reformer spoke ; it was a"deliveraiice from the ^
pride, the sloth, the anger, the selfishness, which impair ..
tfae^morstticctivity^of man — a deliverance which is demanded
of all individuals and in all ages. But there is another
deUverance for the human race, hardly less important,
indeed, than the first — for in the enjoyment of both
10 united consists man's true freedom — but demanded far
less universally, and even more rarely and imperfectly
obtamed ; a deliverance neglected, apparently hardly con-
ceived, in some ages, while it has been pursued with earnest-
ness in others, which derive from that very pursuit their
.peculiar character. This deliverance is an intellectual ,^
/y deliverance.
An intellectual deliverance is the peculiar demand of
those ages which are called modern ; and those nations '^
are said to be imbued with the modern spirit most eminently
20 in which the demand for such a deliverance has been made
with most zeal, and satisfied with most completeness.
Such a deHverance is emphatically, whether we will or no,
the demand of the age in which we ourselves live. All
intellectual pursuits our age judges according to their
power of helping to satisfy this demand ; of all studies it
asks, above all, the question, how far they can contribute
to this deliverance.
I propose, on this my first occasion of speaking here, to
attempt such a general survey of ancient classical literature
30 and history as may afford us the conviction — in presence
of the doubts so often expressed of the profitableness, in
the present day, of our study of this literature — that,
even admitting to their fullest extent the legitimate!
demands of our age, the literature of ancient Greece is, . /
even for modern times, a mighty agent of intellectual v
deliverance ; even for modem times, therefore, an object
of indestructible interest. -^.
But first let us ask ourselves why the demand for an
intellectual deliverance arises in such an age as the present,
40 and in what the deliverance itself consists ? The demand
arises, because our present age has around it a copious
456 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
and complex present, and behind it a copious and complex
past ; it arises, because the present age exhibits to the
individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of
\y a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his com-
prehension. . The deliverance consists in man's comprehen-
sion of this present and past. It begins when our mind
begins to enter into possession of the general ideas which
are the law of this vast multitude of facts. It is perfect
when we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of
mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle lo
V that is intelligible to us ; when we have lost that impatient
irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense,
moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually
excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehen-
sion.
' This, then, is what distinguishes certain epochs in the
history of the human race, and our own amongst the
number ; — on the one hand, the presence of a significant
spectacle to contemplate ; on the other hand, the desire
to find the true point of view from which to contemplate 20
this spectacle. He who has found that point of view, he
who adequately comprehends this spectacle, has risen to
the comprehension of his age : he who communicates that
point of view to his age, he who interprets to it that
spectacle, is one of his age's intellectual deliverers.
The spectacle, the facts, presented for the comprehen-
sion of the present age, are indeed immense. The facts
consist of the events, the institutions, the sciences, the
arts, the literatures, in which human life has ma.nifested
itself up to the present time : the spectacle is the collective 30
life of humanity. And everywhere there is connexion,
everywhere there is illustration : no single event, no
single literature, is adequately comprehended except in
^^its relation to other events, to other literatures. The
literature of ancient Greece, the literature of the Christian
Middle Age, so long as they are regarded as two isolated
literatures, two isolated growths of the human spirit, are
not adequately comprehended ; and it is adequate com-
prehension which is the demand of the present age. ' We
must compare,' — the illustrious Chancellor of Cambridge ^ 40
^ The late Prince Consort.
j^
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 457
said the other day to his hearers at Manchester, — ' we must
compare the works of other ages with those of our own
age and country ; that, while we feel proud of the immense
development of knowledge and power of production which
we possess, we may learn humility in contemplating the
refinement of feeling and intensity of thought manifested
in the works of the older schools.' To know how others
stand, that we may know how we ourselves stand ; and
to know how we ourselves stand, that we may correct
Lo our mistakes and achieve our deliverance — that is our
problem.
But all facts, all the elements of the spectacle before
us, have not an equal value — do not merit a like attention :
and it is well that they do not, for no man would be
adequate to the task of thoroughly mastering them all.
Some have more significance for us, others have less ;
some merit our utmost attention in all their details, others
it is sufficient to comprehend in their general character,
and then they may be dismissed.
:o What facts, then, let us ask ourselves, what elements of
the spectacle before us, will naturally be most interesting 5 o.'^v^
to a highly developed age like our own, to an age making
the demand which we have described for an intellectual
deliverance by means of the complete intelligence of its ,.
own situation ? Evidently, the other ages similarl}'
developed, and making the same demand. And what past
literature will naturally be most interesting to such an
age as our own ? Evidently, the literatures which have
most successfully solved for their ages the problem which
JO occupies ours : the literatures Avhich in their day and for
their own nation have adequately comprehended, have
adequately represented, the spectacle before them. A signi-
ficant, a highly -developed, a culminating epoch, on the
one hand, — a comprehensive, a commensurate, an adequate
literature, on the other, — these will naturally be the objects
of deepest interest to our modern age. Such an epoch
and such a literature are, in fact, modern, in the same
sense in which our own age and literature are modem ;
they are founded upon a rich past and upon an instructive
10 fulness of experience.
It may, however, happen that a great epoch is without
458 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
a perfectly adequate literature ; it may happen that
a great age, a great nation, has attained a remarkable
fulness of political and social development, without in-
tellectually taking the complete measure of itself, without
adequately representing that development in its literature.
In this case, the epoch, the nation itself, will still be an
object of the greatest interest to us ; but the literature
will be an object of less interest to us: the facts, the
material spectacle, are there ; but the contemporary view
of the facts, the intellectual interpretation, are inferior and ifl
inadequate.
It may happen, on the other hand, that great authors,
that a powerful literature, are found in an age and nation
less great and powerful than themselves ; it may happen
that a literature, that a man of genius, may arise adequate
to the representation of a greater, a more highly-developed
age than that in which they appear ; it may happen that
a literature completely interprets its epoch, and yet has
something over ; that it has a force, a richness, a geniality,
a power of view which the materials at its disposition are 2C
insufficient adequately to employ. In such a case, the
literature will be more interesting to us than the epoch.
The interpreting power, the illuminating and revealing
intellect, are there ; but the spectacle on which they
throw their light is not fully worthy of them.
And I shall not, I hope, be thought to magnify too
, much my office if I add, that it is to the poetical literature
, of an age that we must, in general, look for the most
^perfect, the most adequate interpretation of that age, —
for the performance of a work which demands the most so
^ energetic and harmonious activity of all the powers of the
^ human mind. Because that activity of the whole mind,
V that genius, as Johnson nobly describes it, * without which
V judgment is cold and knowledge is inert ; that energy
I which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates,' is in
poetry at its highest stretch and in its most energetic
exertion.
What we seek, therefore, what will most enlighten us,
most contribute to our intellectual deliverance, is the
union of two things ; it is the co-existence, the simul- 40
taneous appearance, of a great epoch and a great literature.
ON THE MODERN ELEIVIENT IN LITERATURE 459
Now the cuLminating age in the life of ancient Greece
I call, beyond question, a great epoch ; the life of Athens
in the fifth century before our era I call one of the highly-
developed, one of the marking, one of the modern periods
in the Hfe of the whole human race. It has been said that
the ' Athens of Pericles was a vigorous man, at the summit
of his bodily strength and mental energy.' There was the
utmost energy of life there, pubUc and private ; the most
entire freedom, the most unprejudiced and inteUigent
10 observation of human affairs. Let us rapidly examine
some of the characteristics which distinguish modern
epochs ; let us see how far the culminating century of
ancient Greece exhibits them ; let us compare it, in respect
of them, with a much later, a celebrated century ; let us
compare it with the age of Elizabeth in our own country.
To begin with what is exterior. One of the most charac-
teristic outward features of a modern age, of an age of
advanced civilization, is the banishment of the ensigns
of war and bloodshed from the intercourse of civil life. ^
JO Crime still exists, and wars are still carried on ; but
within the limits of civil life a circle has been formed
within which man can move securely, and develop the
arts of peace uninterruptedly. The private man does not
go forth to his daily occupation prepared to assail the life
of his neighbour or to have to defend his own. With the
disappearance of the constant means of offence the occasions
of offence diminish ; society at last acquires repose, con-
fidence, and free activity. An important inward charac- ^
teristic, again, is the growth of a tolerant spirit ; that
JO spirit which is the offspring of an enlarged knowledge ;
a spirit patient of the diversities of habits and opinions.
Other characteristics are the multiplication of the con-
veniences of life, the formation of taste, the capacity for
refined pursuits. And this leads us to the supreme charac-
teristic of all : the intellectual maturity of man himself ; \
the tendency to observe facts with a critical spirit ; to
search for their law, not to wander among them at random ;
to judge by the rule of reason, not by the impulse of ly
prejudice or caprice.
10 Well, now, with respect to the presence of all these
characteristics in the age of Pericles, we possess the explicit
460 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
testimony of an immortal work, — of the history of Thucy-
dides. ' The Athenians first,' he says — speaking of the
gradual development of Grecian society up to the period
when the Peloponnesian war commenced — ' the Athenians
first left off the habit of wearing arms : ' that is, this
mark of superior civilization had, in the age of Pericles,
become general in Greece, had long been visible at Athens.
In the time of Elizabeth, on the other hand, the wearing
of arms was universal in England and throughout Europe.
Again, the conveniences, the ornaments, the luxuries of lo
life, had become common at Athens at the time of which
we are speaking. But there had been an advance even
beyond this ; there had been an advance to that perfec-
tion, that propriety of taste which prescribes the excess
of ornament, the extravagance of luxury. The Athenians
had given up, Thucydides says, had given up, although
not very long before, an extravagance of dress and an
excess of personal ornament which, in the first flush of
newly discovered luxury, had been adopted by some of
the richer classes. The height of civilization in this respect 20
seems to have been attained ; there was general elegance
and refinement of life, and there was simplicity. What
was the case in this respect in the Elizabethan age ? The
scholar Casaubon, who settled in England in the reign of
James I, bears evidence to the want here, even at that
time, of conveniences of life which were already to be
met with on the continent of Europe. On the other hand,
the taste for fantastic, for excessive personal adornment,
to which the portraits of the time bear testimony, is
admirably set forth in the work of a great novelist, whoso
was also a very truthful antiquarian — in the Kenilworth
of Sir Walter Scott. We all remember the description,
in the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of the second
volume of Kenilworth, of the barbarous magnificence, the
* fierce vanities,' of the dress of the period.
Pericles praises the Athenians that they had discovered
sources of recreation for the spirit to counterbalance the
labours of the body : compare these, compare the pleasures
which charmed the whole body of the Athenian people
through the yearly round of their festivals with the popular lo
shows and pastimes in Kenilworth, ' We have freedom,'
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 461
says Pericles, ' for individual diversities of opinion and
character ; we do not take offence at the tastes and habits
of our neighbour if they differ from our own.' Yes, in
Greece, in the Athens of Pericles, there is toleration ;
but in England, in the England of the sixteenth century ?
— the Puritans are then in full growth. So that with
regard to these characteristics of civilization of a modern
spirit which we have hitherto enumerated, the superiority,
it will be admitted, rests with the age of Pericles.
10 Let us pass to what we said was the supreme charac-
teristic of a highly developed, a modern age — the manifesta-
tion of a critical spirit, the endeavour after a rational
arrangement and appreciation of facts. Let us consider
oiie or two of the passages in the masterly introduction
which Thucydides, the contemporary of Pericles, has
prefixed to his history. What was his motive in choosing
the Peloponnesian War for his subject ? Because it was,
in his opinion, the most important, the most instructive
event which had, up to that time, happened in the history
20 of mankind. What is his effort in the first twenty-three
chapters of his history ? To place in their correct point of
view all the facts which had brought Grecian society to
the point at which that dominant event found it ; to strip
these facts of their exaggeration, to examine them critically.
The enterprises undertaken in the early times of Greece
were on a much smaller scale than had been commonly
supposed. The Greek chiefs were induced to combine in
the expedition against Troy, not by their respect for an
oath taken by them all when suitors to Helen, but by
30 their respect for the preponderating influence of Aga-
memnon ; the siege of Troy had been protracted not so
much by the valour of the besieged as by the inadequate
mode of warfare necessitated by the want of funds of the
besiegers. No doubt Thucydides' criticism of the Trojan
war is not perfect ; but observe how in these and many
other points he labours to correct popular errors, to assign
their true character to facts, complaining, as he does so,
of men's habit of uncritical reception of current stories.
* So little a matter of care to most men,' he says, ' is the
40 search after truth, and so inclined are they to take up any
story which is ready to their hand.' ' He himself,' he
462 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
continues, ' has endeavoured to give a true picture, and
believes that in the main he has done so. For some readers
his history may want the charm of the uncritical, half-
fabulous narratives of earlier writers ; but for such as
desire to gain a clear knowledge of the past, and thereby
of the future also, which will surely, after the course of
human things, represent again hereafter, if not the very
image, yet the near resemblance of the past — if such shall
judge my work to be profitable, I shall be well content.'
What language shall we properly call this ? It is lo
modern language ; it is the language of a thoughtful
philosophic man of our own days ; it is the language of
Burke or Niebuhr assigning the true aim of history. And
yet Thucydides is no mere literary man ; no isolated
thinker, speaking far over the heads of his hearers to
a future age — no : he was a man of action, a man of the
world, a man of his time. He represents, at its best indeed,
but he represents, the general intelligence of his age and
nation ; of a nation the meanest citizens of which could
follow with comprehension the profoundly thoughtful 20
speeches of Pericles.
Let us now turn for a contrast to a historian of the
Elizabethan age, also a man of great mark and ability,
also a man of action, also a man of the world. Sir Walter
Ralegh. Sir Walter Ralegh writes the History of the World,
as Thucydides has written the History of the Peloponnesian
War ; let us hear his language ; let us mark his point of
view ; let us see what problems occur to him for solution.
* Seeing,' he says, ' that we digress in all the ways of our
lives — yea, seeing the life of man is nothing else but digres- 30
sion — I may be the better excused in writing their lives and
actions.' What are the preliminary facts which he dis-
cusses, as Thucydides discusses the Trojan War and the
early naval power of Crete, and which are to lead up to
his main inquiry ? Open the tSible of contents of his first
volume. You will find : — ' Of the firmament, and of the
waters above the firmament, and whether there be any
crystalline Heaven, or any primum mobile.' You will
then find : — ' Of Fate, and that the stars have great
influence, and that their operations may diversely be 40
prevented or furthered.' Then you come to two entire
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 463
chapters on the place of Paradise, and on the two chief
trees in the garden of Paradise. And in what style, with
what power of criticism, does Ralegh treat the subjects
so selected ? I turn to the seventh section of the third
chapter of his first book, which treats ' Of their opinion
which make Paradise as high as the moon, and of others
which make it higher than the middle region of the air.'
Thus he begins the discussion of this opinion : — ' Whereas
Beda saith, and as the schoolmen affirm Paradise to be
10 a place altogether removed from the knowledge of men
(" locus a cognitione hominum remotissimus "), and Bar-
cephas conceived that Paradise was far in the east, but
mounted above the ocean and all the earth, and near the
orb of the moon (which opinion, though the schoolmen
charge Beda withal, yet Pererius lays it off from Beda
and his master Rabanus) ; and whereas Rupertus in his
geography of Paradise doth not much differ from the
rest, but finds it seated next or nearest Heaven ' So he
states the error, and now for his own criticism of it. * First,
20 such a place cannot be commodious to live in, for being
so near the moon it had been too near the sun and other
heavenly bodies. Secondly, it must have been too joint
a neighbour to the element of fire. Thirdly, the air in
that region is so violently moved and carried about with
such swiftness as nothing in that place can consist or have
abiding. Fourthly,' — but what has been quoted is surely
enough, and there is no use in continuing. /
Which is the ancient here, and which is the moder;i r
Which uses the language of an intelligent man of our own
so days ? which a language wholly obsolete and unfamiliar
to us ? A^Tiich has the rational appreciation and control
of his facts ? which wanders among them helplessly and
without a clue ? Is it our own countryman, or is it the
Greek ? And the language of Ralegh affords a fair sample
of the critical power, of the point of view, possessed by
the majority of intelligent men of his day ; as the language
of Thucydides affords us a fair sample of the critical power
of the majority of intelligent men in the age of Pericles.
Well, then, in the age of Pericles we have, in spite of
40 its antiquity, a highly-developed, a modem, a deeply
interesting epoch. Next comes the question : Is this
464 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
epoch adequately interpreted by its highest literature ?
Now, the peculiar characteristic of the highest literature
— the poetry — of the fifth century in Greece before the
Christian era, is its adequacy ; the peculiar characteristic
of the poetry of Sophocles is its consummate, its unrivalled
adequacy ; that it represents the highly developed human
nature of that age — human nature developed in a number
of directions, politically, socially, religiously, morally
developed — in its completest and most harmonious develop-
ment in all these directions ; while there is shed over this lo
poetry the charm of that noble serenity which always
accompanies true insight, / If in the body of Athenians of
that time there was, as we have said, the utmost energy
of mature manhood, public and private ; the most entire
freedom, the most unprejudiced and intelligent observa-
tion of human affairs — in Sophocles there is the same
energy, the same maturity, the same freedom, the same
intelligent observation ; but all these idealized and glorified
by the grace and light shed over them from the noblest
poetical feeling. And therefore I have ventured to say of 20
Sophocles, that he ' saw life steadily, and saw it Avhole.'j
Well may we understand how Pericles — how the great
statesman whose aim was, it has been said, ' to realize in
Athens the idea which he had conceived of human great-
ness,' and who partly succeeded in his aim — should have
been drawn to the great poet whose works are the noblest
reflection of his success.
I assert, therefore, though the detailed proof of the
assertion must be reserved for other opportunities, that,
if the fifth century in Greece before our era is a significant 30
and modern epoch, the poetry of that epoch — the poetry
of Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles — is an adequate
representation and interpretation of it.
The poetry of Aristophanes is an adequate representa-
tion of it also. True, this poetry regards humanity from
the comic side ; but there is a comic side from which to
regard humanity as well as a tragic one ; and the dis-
tinction of Aristophanes is to have regarded it from the
true point of view on the comic side. He too, like Sophocles,
regards the human nature of his time in its fullest develop- 4o
ment ; the boldest creations of a riotous imagination are
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 466
in Aristophanes, as has been justly said, based always
upon the foundation of a serious thought : politics, educa-
tion, social life, literature — all the great modes in which
the human life of his day manifested itself — are the sub-
jects of his thoughts, and of his penetrating comment.
There is shed, therefore, over his poetry the charm, the
vital freshness, which is felt when man and his relations
are from any side adequately, and therefore genially, re- /
garded. Here is the true difference between Aristophanes^
0 and Menander. There has been preserved an epitome of
a comparison by Plutarch between Aristophanes and
Menander, in which the grossness of the former, the
exquisite truth to life and felicity of observation of the
latter, are strongly insisted upon ; and the preference of
the refined, the learned, the intelligent men of a later
period for Menander loudly proclaimed. ' What should
take a man of refinement to the theatre,' asks Plutarch,
' except to see one of Menander' s plays ? When do you
see the theatre filled with cultivated persons, except when
0 Menander is acted ? and he is the favourite refreshment,'
he continues, ' to the overstrained mind of the laborious
philosopher.' And every one knows the famous line of
tribute to this poet by an enthusiastic admirer in antiquity :
— ' 0 Life and Menander, which of you painted the other ? '
We remember, too, how a great English statesman is said
to have declared that there was no lost work of antiquity
which he so ardently desired to recover as a play of Menander,
Yet Menander has perished, and Aristophanes has survived.
And to what is this to be attributed ? To the instinct of
0 self-preservation in humanity. The human race has the
strongest, the most invincible tendency to live, to develop
itself. It retains, it clings to what fosters its life, what
favours its development, to the literature which exhibits
it in its vigour ; it rejects, it abandons what does not
foster its development, the literature which exhibits it
arrested and decayed. Now, between the times of Sophocles
and Menander a great check had befallen the development
of Greece ; — the failure of the Athenian expedition to
Syracuse, and the consequent termmation of the Pelo-
ioponnesian War in a result unfavourable to Athens. The
free expansion of her growth was checked ; one of the
ABXOLD H h
466 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
noblest channels of Athenian life, that of political activity,
had begun to narrow and to dry up. Tliat was the true
catastrophe of the ancient world ; it was then that the
oracles of the ancient world should have become silent,
and that its gods should have forsaken their temples ;
for from that date the intellectual and spiritual life of
Greece was left without an adequate material basis of
political and practical life ; and both began inevitably to
decay. The opportunity of the ancient world was then
lost, never to return ; for neither the Macedonian nor the ic
Roman world, which possessed an adequate material basis,
possessed, like the Athens of earlier times, an adequate
intellect and soul to inform and inspire them ; and there
was left of the ancient world, when Christianity arrived,
of Greece only a head without a body, and of Rome only
a body without a soul.
It is Athens after this check, after this diminution of
vitality, — it is man with part of his life shorn away, refined
and intelligent indeed, but sceptical, frivolous, and dis-
solute,— which the poetry of Menander represented. The 2(
cultivated, the accomplished might applaud the dexterity,
the perfection of the representation — might prefer it to
the free genial delineation of a more living time with
which they were no longer in sympathy. But the instinct
of humanity taught it, that in the one poetry there was
the seed of life, in the other poetry the seed of death ;
and it has rescued Aristophanes, while it has left Menander
to his fate.
In the flowering period of the life of Greece, therefore,
we have a culminating age, one of the flowering periods sc
of the life of the human race : in the poetry of that age
we have a literature commensurate with its epoch. It is
most perfectly commensurate in the poetry of Pindar,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes ; these, therefore, will
be the supremely interesting objects in this literature ;
but the stages in literature which led up to this point of
perfection, the stages in literature which led downward
from it, will be deeply interesting also. A distinguished
person,^ who has lately been occupying himself with
Homer, has remarked that an undue preference is given, 4C
^ Mr. Gladstone.
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 407
in the studies of Oxford, to these poets over Homer. The
justification of such a preference, even if we put aside all
philological considerations, lies, perhaps, in what I have
said. Homer himself is eternally interesting ; he is a
greater poetical power than even Sophocles or Aeschylus ; ^
but his age is less interesting than himself. Aeschylus and
Sophocles represent an age as interesting as themselves ;
the names, indeed, in their dramas are the names of the
old heroic world, from which they were far separated ;
10 but these names are taken, because the use of them permits
to the poet that free and ideal treatment of his characters
which the highest tragedy demands ; and into these figures >
of the old world is poured all the fulness of life and ofV
thought which the new world had accumulated. This new
world in its maturity of reason resembles our own ; and
the advantage over Homer in their greater significance for
us, which Aeschylus and Sophocles gain by belonging to
this new world, more than compensates for their poetical
inferioritj'- to him. l
20 Let us now pass to the Roman world. There is no
necessity to accumulate proofs that the culminating period
of Roman history is to be classed among the leading, the
significant, the modern periods of the world. There is
universally current, I think, a pretty correct appreciation
of the high development of the Rome of Cicero and Augustus ;
no one doubts that material civilization and the refine-
ments of life were largely diffused in it ; no one doubts
that cultivation of mind and intelligence were widely
diffused in it. Therefore, I \vill not occupy time by show-
so ing that Cicero corresponded with his friends in the style
of the most accomplished, the most easy letter- writers of
modern times ; ^at Caesar did not write history like
Sir Walter Ralegh. The great period of Rome is, perhaps,
on the whole, the greatest, the fullest, the most significant
period on record ; it is certainly a greater, a fuller period
than the age of Pericles. It is an infinitely larger school
for the men reared in it ; the relations of life are immeasur-
ably multiplied, the events which happen are on an
immeasurably grander scale. The facts, the spectacle of
40 this Roman world, then, are immense : let us see how far the
Uterature, the interpretation of the facts, has been adequate.
n h 2
468 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
Let us begin with a great poet, a great philosopher,
Lucretius. In the case of Thucydides I called attention
to the fact that his habit of mind, his mode of dealing
with questions, were modern ; that they were those of an
enlightened, reflecting man among ourselves. Let^me call
attention to the exhibition in Lucretius of a modern feeling
, not less remarkable than the modern thought in Thucydides.
The predominance of thought, of reflection, in modern
epochs is not without its penalties ; in the unsound, in
the over-tasked, in the over-sensitive, it has produced the lo
most painful, the most lamentable results ; it has produced
a state of feeling unknown to less enlightened but perhaps
healthier epochs — the feeling of depression, the feeling of
ennui. Depression and ennui ; these are the characteristics
stamped on how many of the representative works of
modern times ! they are also the characteristics stamped
on the poem of Lucretius. One of the most powerful, the
most solemn passages of the work of Lucretius, one of the
most powerful, the most solemn passages in the literature
of the whole world, is the well-known conclusion of the 20
third book. With masterly touches he exhibits the lassi-
tude, the incurable tedium which pursue men in their
amusements ; with indignant irony he upbraids them for
the cowardice with which they cling to a life which for
most is miserable ; to a life which contains, for the most
fortunate, nothing but the old dull round of the same
unsatisfying objects for ever presented. ' A man rushes
abroad,' he says, ' because he is sick of being at home ;
and suddenly comes home again because he finds himself
no whit easier abroad. He posts as fast as his horses can 30
take him to his country-seat : when he has got there he
hesitates what to do ; or he throws himself down moodily
to sleep, and seeks forgetfulness in that ; or he makes the
best of his way back to town again with the same speed
as he fled from it. Thus every one flies from himself.'
V What a picture of ennui I of the disease of the most modern
societies, the most advanced civilizations ! ' 0 man,' he
exclaims again, ' the lights of the world, Scipio, Homer,
Epicurus, are dead ; wilt thou hesitate and fret at djdng,
whose life is wellnigh dead whilst thou art yet alive ; who 40
consumest in sleep the greater part of thy span, and when
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 469
awake dronest and ceasest not to dream ; and earnest
about a mind troubled with baseless fear, and canst not
find what it is that aileth thee when thou staggerest like
a drunken wretch in the press of thy cares, and welterest
hither and thither in the unsteady wandering of thy
spirit ! ' And again : ' I have seen nothing more than
you have already seen,' he makes Nature say to man, ' to
invent for your amusement ; eadem sunt omnia semper —
all things continue the same for ever.'
10 Yes, Lucretius is modem ; but is he adequate ? And
how can a man adequately interpret the activity of his
age when he is not in sympathy with it ? Think of the
varied, the abundant, the wide spectacle of the Roman
life of his day ; think of its fulness of occupation, its
energy of effort. From these Lucretius withdraws him-
self, and bids his disciples to withdraw themselves ; he
bids them to leave the business of the world, and to apply
themselves ' naturam cognoscere rerum — to learn the nature
of things ; ' but there is no peace, no cheerfulness for him
JO either in the world from which he comes, or in the solitude
to which he goes. With stern effort, with gloomy despair,
he seems to rivet his eyes on the elementary reality, the
naked framework of the world, because the world in its
fulness and movement is too exciting a spectacle for his
discomposed brain. He seems to feel the spectacle of it
at once terrifying and alluring ; and to deliver himself
from it he has to keep perpetually repeating his formula
of disenchantment and annihilation. In reading him, you
understand the tradition which represents him as having
30 been driven mad by a poison administered as a love-
charm by his mistress, and as having composed his great
work in the intervals of his madness. Lucretius is, there-
fore, overstrained, gloom-weighted, morbid ; and he who
is morbid is no adequate interpreter of his age.
I pass to Virgil : to the poetical name which of all
poetical names has perhaps had the most prodigious
fortune ; the name which for Dante, for the Middle Age,
represented the perfection of classical antiquity. The
perfection of classical antiquity Virgil does not represent ;
40 but far be it from me to add my voice to those which have
decried his genius ; nothing that I shalt say is, or can
470 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
ever be, inconsistent with a profound, an almost affec-
tionate veneration for him. But with respect to him, as
with respect to Lucretius, I shall freely ask the question,
Is Tie adequate ? Does he represent the epoch in which he
lived, the mighty Roman world of his time, as the great
poets of the great epoch of Greek life represented theirs,
in all its fulness, in all its significance ?
From the very form itself of his great poem, the Aeneid,
one would be led to augur that this was impossible. The
epic form, as a form for representing contemporary or lo
nearly contemporary events, has attained, in the poems
of Homer, an unmatched, an immortal success ; • the epic
form as employed by learned poets for the reproduction
of the events of a past age has attained a very considerable
success, i But for this purpose, for the poetic treatment of
the events of a past age, the epic form is a less vital form
than the dramatic form. The great poets of the modern
period of Greece are accordingly, as we have seen, the
dramatic poets. The chief of these — ^Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, Aristophanes — have survived : the distinguished 20
epic poets of the same period — Panyasis, Choerilus, Anti-
machus — though praised by the Alexandrian critics, have
Perished in a common destruction with the undistinguished.
' And what is the reason of this ? ~ It is, that the dramatic
form exhibits, above all, the actions of man as strictly
determined by his thoughts and feelings ; it exhibits, there-
fore, what may be always accessible, always intelligible,
\/always interesting. But the epic form takes a wider range ;
It represents not only the thought and passion of man,
that which is universal and eternal, but also the forms of 3o
outward life, the fashion of manners, the aspects of nature,
V'that which is local or transient. To exhibit adequately
what is local and transient, only a witness, a contem-
V porary, can suffice. In the reconstruction, by learning and
antiquarian ingenuity, of the local and transient features
of a past age, in their representation by one who is not
a witness or contemporary, it is impossible to feel the
^' livehest kind of interest. What, for instance, is the most
interesting portion of the Aeneid, — the portion where
Virgil seems to be moving most freely, and therefore to 40
be most animated, most forcible ? Precisely that portion
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 471
which has most a dramatic character ; the episode of Dido ;
that portion where locality and manners are nothing —
where persons and characters are everything. We might
presume beforehand, therefore, that if Virgil, at a time
when contemporary epic poetry was no longer possible,
had been inspired to represent human life in its fullest
significance, he would not have selected the epic form.
Accordingly, what is, in fact, the character of the poem, /
the frame of mind of the poet ? Has the poem depth, the /
10 completeness of the poems of Aeschylus or Sophocles, of
those adequate and consummate representations of human V
life ? Has the poet the serious cheerfulness of Sophocles, '
of a man who has mastered the problem of human life,
who knows its gravity, and is therefore serious, but who
knows that he comprehends it, and is therefore cheerful ? ^
Over the whole of the great poem of Virgil, over the whole
Aeneid, there rests an ineffable melancholy : not a rigid,
a moody gloom, like the melancholy of Lucretius ; no,
a sweet, a touching sadness, but still a sadness ; a melan-
20 choly which is at once a source of charm in the poem,
and a testimony to its incompleteness. Virgil, as Niebuhr
has well said, expressed no affected self-disparagement,
but the haunting, the irresistible self -dissatisfaction of his
heart, when he desired on his deathbed that his poem /
might be destroyed. A man of the most delicate genius, ^
the most rich learning, but of weak health, of the most
sensitive nature, in a great and overwhelming world ;
conscious, at heart, of his inadequacy for the thorough
spiritual mastery of that world and its interpretation in
30 a work of art ; , conscious of this inadequacy — the one
inadequacy, the one weak place in the mighty Roman
nature 1 This suffering, this graceful-minded, this finely-
gifted man is the most beautiful, the most attractive
figure in literary history ; but he is not the adequate ,
interpreter of the great period of Home. ^
We come to Horace : and if Lucretius, if Virgil want y
cheerfulness, Horace wants seriousness. I go back to
what I said of Menander : as with Menander so it is with
Horace : the men of taste, the men of cultivation, the men
40 of the world are enchanted with him ; he has not a pre-
judice, not an illusion, not a blunder. True ! yet the best
472 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
men in the best ages have never been thoroughly satisfied
with Horace. C If human life were complete without faith,
without enthusiasm, without energy, Horace, like Menan-
der ; would be the perfect interpreter of human life : but it
is not ; to the best, to the most living sense of humanity,
it is not ; and because it is not, Horace is inadequate J
Pedants are tiresome, men of reflection and enthusiasm
are unhappy and morbid ; therefore Horace is a sceptical
/ man of the world. Men of action are without ideas, men
of the world are frivolous and sceptical ; therefore Lucretius lo
is plunged in gloom and in stem sorrow. So hard, nay,
so impossible for most men is it to develop themselves in
their entireness ; to rejoice in the variety, the movement
of human life with the children of the world ; to be serious
over the depth, the significance of human life with the
wise ! Horace warms himself before the transient fire of
I human animation and human pleasure while he can, and
is only serious when he reflects that the fire must soon
go out : —
' Damna tamen celeres reparant coelestia lunae : 20
Nos, ubi decidimus — '
* For nature there is renovation, but for man there is
none ! ' — it is exquisite, but it is not interpretative and
W fortifying.
In the Roman world, then, we have found a highly
modern, a deeply significant, an interesting period —
a period more significant and more interesting, because
fuller, than the great period of Greece ; but we have not
a commensurate literature. In Greece we have seen
a highly modern, a most significant and interesting period, 30
although on a scale of less magnitude and importance
than the great period of Rome ; but then, co-existing
with the great epoch of Greece there is what is wanting to
that of Rome, a commensurate, an interesting literature.
The intellectual history of our race cannot be clearly
understood without applying to other ages, nations, and
literatures the same method of inquiry which we have
been here imperfectly applying to what is called classical
antiquity. But enough has at least been said, perhaps, to
establish the absolute, the enduring interest of Greek 40
literature, and, above all, of Greek poetry.
OBERMANN
[The Academy, October 9, 1869.]
The most recent edition of Obermann lies before me, the
date on its title-page being 1863. It is, I believe, the
fourth edition which has been published ; the book made
its first appearance in 1804 ; three editions, and not large
editions, have sufi&ced for the demand of sixty years. Yet
the book has lived, though with but this obscure life,
and is not likely to die. Madame George Sand and Monsieur
Sainte-Beuve have spoken in prose much and excellently
of the book and its author. It may be in the recollection
10 of some who read this that I have spoken of Obermann in
verse, if not well, at least abundantly. It is to be wished,
however, that Obermann should also speak to English
readers for himself ; and my present design is to take
those two or three points where he is most significant and
interesting, and to present some of his deliverances on
those points in his own words.
It may be convenient, however, that first I should
repeat here the short sketch which I have already given
elsewhere of the uneventful life of the personage whom
£0 we call Obermann. His real name is Senancour. In the
book which occupies us, — a volume of letters of which the
writer, calling himself Obermann, and writing chiefly from
Switzerland, delivers his thoughts about God, nature, and
the human soul, — it is Senancour himself who speaks
under Obermann's name, l^tienne Pivert de Senancour,
a Frenchman, although having in his nature much that
we are accustomed to consider as by no means French,
was bom in 1770, was trained for the priesthood, and
passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice, broke
30 away from his training and country to Uve some years in
Switzerland, where he married, came back to France in
middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of
a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success.
474 OBERMANN
His marriage was not a happy one. He died an old man
in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these
words only: ^ Eternite, deviens mon asUe.'
Of the letters of Obermann, the writer's profound inward-
ness, his austere and sad sincerity, and his delicate feeling
for nature, are, as I have elsewhere remarked, the dis-
tinguishing characteristics. His constant inwardness, his
unremitting occupation with that question which haunted
St. Bernard — Bernarde, ad quid venisti ? — dis>tinguish him
from Goethe and Wordsworth, whose study of this question lo
is relieved by the thousand distractions of a poetic interest
in nature and in man. His severe sincerity distinguishes
him from Rousseau, Chateaubriand, or Byron, who in
their dealing with this question are so often attitudinising
and thinking of the effect of what they say on the public.
His exquisite feeling for nature, though alwaj^s dominated
by his inward self-converse and by his melancholy, yet
distinguishes him from the men simply absorbed in philo-
sophical or religious concerns, and places him in the rank
of men of poetry and imagination. Let me try to show 20
these three main characteristics of Senancour from his
own words.
A Frenchman, coming immediately after the eighteenth
century and the French Revolution, too clear-headed and
austere for any such sentimental Catholic reaction as that
with which Chateaubriand cheated himself, and yet, from
the very profoundness and meditativeness of his nature,
religious, Senancour felt to the uttermost the bare and
bleak spiritual atmosphere into which he was born. Neither
to a German nor to an Englishman, perhaps, would such so
a sense of absolute religious denudation have then been
possible, or such a plainness and even crudity, therefore,
in their way of speaking of it. Only to a Frenchman were
these possible ; but amid wars, bustle, and the glory of
the grande nation few Frenchmen had meditativeness and
seriousness enough for them. Senancour was of a character
to feel his spiritual position, to feel it without dream or
illusion, and to feel, also, that in the absence of any real
inward basis life was weariness and vanity, and the ordinary
considerations so confidently urged to induce a man to 40
master himself and to be busy in it, quite hollow.
OBERMANN 476
' People keep talking,' says he, ' of doing with energy
that which ought to be done ; but, amidst all this parade
of firmness, tdl me, then, what it is that oiight to be done.
For my part I do not know ; and I venture to suspect
that a good many others are in the same state of ignor-
ance.'
He was bom with a passion for order and harmony, and
a belief in them ; his being so utterly divested of all con-
ventional beliefs, makes this single elementary belief of
10 his the more weighty and impressive.
' May we not say that the tendency to order forms an
essential part of our propensities, our instinct, just like
the tendency to self-preservation, or to the reproduction
of the species ? Is it nothing, to live with the calm and
the security of the just ? '
And therefore, he concludes, ' inasmuch as man had
this feeling of order planted in him, inasmuch as it was
in his nature, the right course would have been to try and
make every individual man sensible of it and obedient to
20 it.' But what has been done ? Since the beginning of the
world, instead of having recourse to this innate feeling,
the guides of mankind have uniformly sought to control
human conduct by means of supernatural hopes, super-
natural terrors, thus misleading man's intelligence, and
debasing his soul. ' Depuis trente siecles, les resultats sont
dignes de la sag esse des moyens.' What are called the
virtues, ' are laws of nature as necessary to man as the
laws of his bodily senses.' Instead of teaching men to feel
this, instead of developing in them that sentiment of order
30 and that consciousness of the divine which are the native
possession of our race. Paganism and Christianity aUke
have tampered with man's mind and heart, and wrought
confusion in them.
' Conquerors, slaves, poets, pagan priests, and nurses,
succeeded in disfiguring the traditions of primitive wisdom
by dint of mixing races, destroying memorials, explaining
allegories and making nonsense of them, abandoning the
profound and true meaning in order to discover in them
absurd ideas which might inspire wonder and awe, and
40 personifying abstract beings in order to have plenty of
objects of worship. The principle of life — that which was
476 OBERMANN
intelligence, light, the eternal — became nothing more than
the husband of Juno ; harmony, fruitfulness, the bond of
all living things, became nothing more than the mistress of
Adonis ; imperishable wisdom came to be distinguished
only through her owl ; the great ideas of immortality and
retribution consisted in the fear of turning a wheel, and
the hope of strolling in a green wood. The indivisible
divinity was parcelled into a hierarchical' multitude torn
by miserable passions ; the fruit of the genius of primitive
mankind, the emblems of the laws of the universe, had lo
degenerated into superstitious usages which the children
in great cities turned into ridicule.'
Paul at Athens might have set forth, in words not unlike
these, the degradation of the Unknown God ; now for the
religion of which Paul was a minister : —
' A moral belief was wanted, because pure morality was
gone out of men's knowledge ; dogmas were wanted,
which should be profound and perhaps unfathomable, but
not by any means dogmas which should be absurd, because
intelligence was spreading more and more. All religions 20
being sunk into degradation, there was needed a religion
of majesty, and answering to man's effort to elevate his
soul by the idea of a God of all things. There were needed
religious rites which should be imposing, not too common,
objects of desire, mysterious yet simple ; rites which
seemed to belong to a higher world, and which yet a man's
reason should accept as naturally as his heart. There was
needed, in short, what only a great genius could institute,
and what I can only catch glimpses of.
* But you have fabricated, patched, experimented, 30
altered ; renewed I know not what incoherent multitude
of trivial ceremonies and dogmas, more fitted to scandalize
the weak than to edify them. This dubious mixture you
have joined to a morality sometimes false, often exceed-
ingly noble, and almost always austere ; the one single
point in which you have shown sagacity. You pass some
hundreds of years in arranging all this by inspiration ;
and your slowly built work, industriously repaired, but
with a radical fault in plan, is so made as to last
hardly longer than the time during which you have been 4o
accomplishing it.'
OBERMANN 477
There is a passage to be meditated by the new Oecu-
menical Council ! Not that Senancour has a trace of the
Voltairian bitterness against Christianity, or against
Catholicism which to him represented Christianity : —
* So far am I from having any prejudice against Chris-
tianity, that I deplore, I may say, what the majority of
its zealous adherents never themselves think of deploring.
I could willingly join them in lamenting the loss of Chris-
tianity ; but there is this difference between us, that they
10 regret it in the form into which it settled, nay, in the
form, even, which it wore a century ago ; whereas I cannot
consider such a Christianity as that was to be. much worthy
of regret.*
He owns that religion has done much ; but, ' si la
religion a fait des grandes choses, c'est avec des moyens
immenses.' Disposing of such means, it ought to have
done much more. Remark, he says, that for the educated
class religion is one of the weakest of the motive-powers
they live by ; and then ask yourself whether it is not
20 absurd that there should be only a tenth part of our race
educated. That religion should be of use as some restraint
to the ignorant and brutal mass of mankind, shows, he
thinks, not so much the beneficence of religion as the
state of utter confusion and misery into which mankind
has, in spite of religion, drifted : —
* I admit that the laws of civil society prove to be not
restraint enough for this multitude to which we give no
training, about which we never trouble our heads, which
we bring into the world and then leave to the chance of
30 ignorant passions and of habits of low debauchery. This
only proves that there is mere wretchedness and confusion
under the apparent calm of vast states ; that the science
of politics, in the true sense of the term, is a stranger to
our world, where diplomacy and financial administration
produce prosperity to be sung in poems, and win victories
to figure in gazettes.'
This concern for the state and prospects of what are
called the masses is perpetually recurring with Senancour ;
it came to him from his singular lucidity and plain-deahng,
40 for it was no commonplace with his time and contemporaries,
as it is with ours. * There are men,' he says, and he was
478 OBERMANN
one of them, * who cannot be happy except among men
who are contented ; who feel in their own persons all the
enjoyment and suffering they witness, and who cannot be
satisfied with themselves except they contribute to the
order of the world and to man's welfare.' ' Arrange one's
life how one will,' he says in another place, ' who can
answer for its being any happier, so long as it is and must
be sans accord avec les choses, et passee au milieu des peuples
souffrans ? ' This feeling returns again and again : —
' Inequality is in the nature of things ; but you have lo
increased it out of all measure, when you ought, on the
contrary, to have studied to reduce it. The prodigies of
your industry must, surely be a baneful work of superfluity,
if you have neither time nor faculties for doing so many
things which are indispensable. The mass of mankind is
brutal, foolish, given over to its passions ; all your ills
come from this cause. Either do not bring men into exis-
tence, or, if you do, give them, an existence which is
human.'
But as deep as his sense that the time was out of joint, 20
was the feeling of this Hamlet that he had no power to
set it right. Vos douleurs ont fletri mon dme, he says : —
' Your miseries have worn out my soul ; they are
intolerable, because they are objectless. Your pleasures
are illusory, fugitive ; a day suffices for knowing them
and abandoning them. I inquired of myseK for happiness,
but with my eyes open ; I saw that it was not made for
the man who was isolated ; I proposed it to those who
stood round me ; they had not leisure to concern them-
selves with it. I asked the multitude in its wear and tear 30
of misery, and the great of earth under their load of ennui ;
they answered me : We are wretched to-day, but we shall
enjoy ourselves to-morrow. For my part, I know that
the day which is coming will only tread in the footsteps
of the day which is gone before.'
But a root of failure, powerlessness, and ennui, there
certainly was in the constitution of Senancour's own
nature ; so that, unfavourable as may have been his
time, we should err in attributing to any outward circum-
stances the whole of the discouragement by which he is 40
pervaded. He himself knew this well, and he never seeks
OBERMANN 479
to hide it from us. * II y a dans moi un derangement/
says he ; ' c'est le desordre des ennuis.^
' I was born to be not happy. You know those dark
days, bordering on the frosts of winter, when mists hang
heavily about the very dawn, and day begins only by
threatening lines of a lurid light upon the masses of cloud.
That glooming veil, those stormy squalls, those uncertain
gleams, that whistling of the mnd through trees which
bend and shiver, those prolonged throes like funeral
10 groans — you see in them the morning of life ; at noon,
cooler storms and more steadily persistent ; at evening,
thicker darkness still, and the day of man is brought to
an end.'
No representation of Senancour can, however, be com-
plete without some of the gleams which relieved this
discouragement. Besides the inwardness, besides the
sincerity, besides the renouncement, there was the poetic
emotion and the deep feeling for nature.
' And I, too, I have my moments of forgetfulness, of
20 strength, of grandeur ; I have desires and yearnings that
know no limit. But I behold the monuments of effaced
generations ; I see the flint wTought by the hand of man,
and which will subsist a hundred centuries after him.
I renounce the care for that which passes away, and the
thought of a present which is already gone. I stand still,
and marvel ; I listen to what subsists yet. I would fain
hear what will go on subsisting ; in the movement of the
forest, in the murmur of the pines, I seek to catch some
of the accents of the eternal tongue.'
30 Nature, and the emotion caused by nature, inspire so
many beautiful passages in Obermann's letters that one
is embarrassed to make a choice among them. The follow-
ing, with which we Avill end our extracts, is a morning and
nightpiece from the north end of the Lake of Neufchatel,
where the river Thiele enters the lake from Bienne, between
Saint -Blaise and Morat : —
' My window had remained open all night, as is my habit.
Towards four o'clock in the morning I was wakened by
the dawn, and by the scent of the hay which they had
40 been cutting in the cool early hours by the light of the
moon. I expected an ordinary view ; but I had a moment
480 OBERMANN
of perfect astonishment. The midsummer rains had kept
up the waters which the melting snow in the Jura had
previously swollen. The space between the lake and the
Thiele was almost entirely flooded ; the highest spots
formed islands of pasture amidst the expanse of waters
rufiied with the fresh breeze of morning. The waves of
the lake could be made out in the distance, driven by the
wind against the half-flooded bank. Some goats and
cows, with their herdsman, who made a rustic music with
a horn, were passing at the moment over a tongue of lo
land left dry between the flooded plain and the Thiele.
Stones set in the parts where it was worst going sup-
ported this natural causeway or filled up gaps in it ; the
pasture to which the docile animals were proceeding was
not in sight, and to see their slow and irresolute advance,
one would have said they were about to get out into the
lake and be lost there. The heights of Anet and the thick
woods of Julemont rose out of the waters like a desert
island without an inhabitant. The hilly chain of Vuilly
edged the lake on the horizon. To the south, this chain 20
stretched away behind the slopes of Montmirail ; and
farther on than all these objects, sixty leagues of eternal
snows stamped the whole country with the inimitable
majesty of those bold lines of nature which give to places
sublimity.'
He dines at the toll-house by the river-bank, and after
passing the afternoon there, goes out again late in the
evening : —
* The moon had not yet risen ; my path lay beside the
green waters of the Thiele. I had taken the key of my 30
lodging that I might come in when I liked without being
tied to a particular hour. But feeling inclined to muse,
and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship
in being all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint
Blaise. I left it at a little village called Marin, which has
the lake to the south of it. I descended a steep bank,
and got upon the shore of the lake where its ripple came
up and expired. The air was calm ; not a sail was to be
seen on the lake. Every one was at rest ; some in the
forgetfulness of their toils, others in the forgetfulness of 40
their sorrows. The moon rose ; I remained there hours.
OBERMANN 481
Towards morning, the moon shed over earth and waters
the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems
unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a long reverie, one
hears the washing of the waves upon a solitary strand,
in the calm of a night still enkindled and luminous with
the setting moon.
* Sensibility which no words can express, charm and
torment of our vain years ! vast consciousness of a nature
everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere impene-
10 trable ! all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, delicious
self-abandonment, — everything that a mortal heart can
contain of life-weariness and yearning, I felt it all, I ex-
perienced it all, in this memorable night. I have made an
ominous step towards the age of decline ; I have swallowed
up ten years of life at once. Happy the simple, whose
heart is always young ! '
There, in one of the hours which were at once the
inspiration and the enervation of Senancour's life, we
leave him. It is possible that an age, breaking with the
20 past, and inclined to tell it the most naked truths, may
take more pleasure than its predecessors in Obermann's
bleak frankness, and may even give him a kind of celebrity.
Nevertheless it may be predicted with certainty that his
very celebrity, if he gets it, will have, like his life, some-
thing maimed, incomplete, and unsuccessful about it ;
and that his intimate friends will still be but a few, as
they have hitherto been. These few will never fail him.
II
8AINTE-BEUVE
[The Academy, November 13, 1869.]
This is neither the time nor the place to attempt any
complete account of the remarkable man whose pen, busy
to the end, and to the end charming and instructing us,
has within the last few weeks dropped from his hand for
ever. A few words are all that the occasion allows, and it
is hard not to make them words of mere regret and eulogy.
Most of what is at this moment written about him is in
this strain, and very naturally ; the world has some arrears
to make up to him, and now, if ever, it feels this. Late,
and as it were by accident, he came to his due estimation ic
in France ; here in England it is only within the last ten
years that he can be said to have been publicly known at
all. We who write these lines knew him long and owed
him much ; something of that debt we will endeavour to
pay, not, as we ourselves might be most inclined, by
following the impulse of the hour and simply praising him,
but, as he himself would have preferred, by recalling what
in sum he chiefly was, and what is the essential scope of
his effort and working.
Shortly before Sainte-Beuve's death appeared a new 2(
edition of his Portraits Contemporains, one of his earlier
works, of which the contents date from 1832 and 1833,
before his method and manner of criticism were finally
formed. But the new edition is enriched with notes and
retouches added as the volumes were going through the
press, and which bring our communications with him down
to these very latest months of his life. Among them is
a comment on a letter of Madame George Sand, in which
she had spoken of the admiration excited by one of his
articles. ' I leave this as it stands,' says he, ' because the 3(
sense and the connection of the passage require it ; but,
per Sonne ne salt mieux que moi a quoi s'en tenir sur le
merite absolu de ces articles qui sont tout au plus, et meme
SAINTE-BEUVE 483
lorsqu'ils reussissent le mieux, des choses sensees dans un
genre mediocre. Ce quHls ont eu d'alerte et d'd-propos
a leur moment suffit a peine a expliquer ces exagerations de
Vamitie. Reservons V admiration pour les ceuvres de poesie
et d'art, pour les compositions elevees ; la plus grande gloire
du critique est dans Vapprohation et dans Vestime des bans
esprits.'
This comment, which extends to his whole work as
a critic, has all the good breeding and delicacy by which
10 Sainte-Beuve's writing was distinguished, and it expresses,
too, what was to a great extent, no doubt, his sincere
conviction. Like so many who have tried their hands at
osuvres de poesie et d'art, his preference, his dream, his
ideal, was there ; the rest was comparatively journeyman-
work, to be done well and estimably rather than ill and
discreditably, and with precious rewards of its own, besides,
in exercising the faculties and in keeping off ennui ; but
still work of an inferior order. Yet when one looks at the
names on the title-page of the Portraits Contemporains :
20 Chateaubriand, Beranger, Lamennais, Lamartine, Victor
Hugo, George Sand, — names representing, in our judg-
ment, very different degrees of eminence, but none of
which we have the least inclination to disparage, — is it
certain that the works of poetry and art to which these
names are attached eclipse the work done by Sainte-
Beuve ? Could Sainte-Beuve have had what was no doubt
his will, and in the line of the Consolations and Volupte
have produced works with the power and vogue of Lamar-
tine's works, or Chateaubriand's, or Hugo's, would he have
30 been more interesting to us to-day, — would he have stood
permanently higher ? We venture to doubt it. Works
of poetry and art like Moliere's and Milton's eclipse no
doubt all productions of the order of the Causeries du
Lundi, and the highest language of admiration may very
properly be reserved for such works alone. Inferior works
in the same kind have their moment of vogue when their
admirers apply to them this language ; there is a moment
when a drama of Hugo's finds a public to speak of it as
if it were Moliere's, and a poem of Lamartine's finds
40 a public to speak of it as if it were Milton's. At no moment
will a public be found to speak of work like Sainte-Beuve's
484 SAINTE-BEUVE
Causer ies in such fashion ; and if this alone were regarded,
one might allow oneself to leave to his work the humbler
. ' rank which he assigns to it. But the esteem inspired by
' his work remains and grows, while the vogue of all works
< of poetry and art but the best, and the high-pitched
admiration which goes with vogue, diminish and disappear ;
and this redresses the balance. , Five-and-twenty years
ago it would have seemed absurd, in France, to place
Sainte-Beuve, as a French author, on a level with Lamartine.
Lamartine had at that time still his vogue, and though lo
assuredly no Moliere or Milton, had for the time of his
vogue the halo which surrounds properly none but great
poets like these. To this Sainte-Beuve cannot pretend,
but what does Lamartine retain of it now ? It would still
be absurd to place Sainte-Beuve on a level with MoUere
or Milton ; is it any longer absurd to place him on a level
with Lamartine, or even above him ? In other words,
excellent work in a lower kind counts in the long run
above work which is short of excellence in a higher ; first-
rate criticism has a permanent value greater than that of 20
any but first-rate works of poetry and art^
And Sainte-Beuve' s criticism may be called first-rate.
His curiosity was unbounded, and he was born a naturalist,
carrying into letters, so often the mere domain of rhetoric
and futile amusement, the ideas and methods of scientific
^ natural inquiry. And this he did while keeping in perfec-
L tion the ease of movement and charm of touch which belong
( to letters properly so called, and which give them their
■ unique power of universal penetration and of propagandism.
Man, as he is, and as his history and the productions of his 30
spirit show him, was the object of his study and interest ;
he strove to find the real data with which, in dealing with
man and his affairs, we have to do. Beyond this study
he did not go, — to find the real data. But he was deter-
mined they should be the real data, and not fictitious and
conventional data, if he could help it. This is what, in
our judgment, distinguishes him, and makes his work of
singular use and instructiveness. Most of us think that we
already possess the data required > and have only to pro-
ceed to deal with human affairs in the light of them. 40
This is, as is well known, a thoroughly English persuasion.
SATNTE-BEUVE 485
It is what makes us such keen politicians ; it is an honour
to an Englishman, we say, to take part in political strife.
Solomon says, on the other hand, ' It is an honour to a man
to cease from strife, but every fool will be meddling ; '
and Sainte-Beuve held with Solomon. Many of us, again,
have principles and connections which are all in all to us,
and we arrange data to suit them ; — a book, a character,
a period of history, we see from a point of view given by
our principles and connections, and to the requirements
10 of this point of view we make the book, the character, the
period, adjust themselves. Sainte-Beuve never did so,
and criticised with unfailing acuteness those who did.
' Tocquemlle arrivait avec son moule tout pret ; la realite
n.y repond pas, et les choses ne se pretent pas d y entrer.'
M. de Tocqueville commands much more sympathy in
England than his critic, and the very mention of him will
awaken impressions unfavourable to Sainte-Beuve ; for
the French Liberals honour Tocqueville and at heart
dislike Sainte-Beuve ; and people in England always take
20 their cue from the French Liberals. For that very reason
have we boldly selected for quotation this criticism on
him, because the course criticised in Tocqueville is pre-
cisely the course with which an Englishman would sym-
pathise, and which he would be apt to take himself ; while
Sainte-Beuve, in criticising him, shows just the tendency
which is his characteristic, and by which he is of use to
us. Tocqueville, as is well known, finds in the ancient
regime all the germs of the centralisation which the French
Revolution developed and established. This centralisa-
30 tion is his bugbear, as it is the bugbear of English Liberal-
ism ; and directly he finds it, the system where it appears
is judged. Disliking, therefore, the French Revolution for
its centralisation, and then finding centralisation in the
ancient regime also, he at once sees in this discovery,
' mille motifs nouveaux de hair Vancien regime.' How
entirely does every Englishman abound here, as the French
say, in Tocqueville's sense ; how faithfully have all English-
men repeated and re-echoed Tocqueville's book on the
ancient regime ever since it was published ; how incapable
40 are they of supplying, or of imagining the need of supplying,
any corrective to it ! But hear Sainte-Beuve : — •
486 SAINTE-BEUVE
* Dans son effroi de la centralisation, I'auteur en vient
a meconnaitre de grands bienfaits d'equite dus a Richelieu
et a Louis XIV. Homme du peuple ou bourgeois, sous
Louis XIII, ne valait-il pas mieux avoir affaire a un
intendant, a I'homme du roi, qu'a un gouverneur de
province, a quelque due d'Epernon ? Ne maudissons pas
ceux a qui nous devons les commencements de Fegalite
devant la loi, la premiere ebauche de I'ordre moderne qui
nous a affranchis, nous et nos^peres, et le tiers-etat tout
entier, de cette quantite de petits tyrans qui couvraient lo
le sol, grands seigneurs ou hobereaux.'
The point of view of Sainte-Beuve is as little that of
a glowing Revolutionist as it is that of a chagrined Liberal ;
it is that of a man who seeks the truth about the ancient
regime and its institutions, and who instinctively seeks to
correct anything strained and arranged in the representa-
tion of them. ' Voyons les choses de Vhistoire telles qu'elles
se sont 'passees.'
At the risk of offending the prejudices of English readers
we have thus gone for an example of Sainte-Beuve' s 20
essential method to a sphere where his application of it
makes a keen impression, and created for him, in his
lifetime, warm enemies and detractors. In that sphere it
is not easily permitted to a man to be a naturalist^ but
a naturaUst Sainte-Beuve could not help being always.
Accidentally, at the end of his life, he gave delight to the
Liberal opinion of his own country and ours by his famous
speech in the Senate on behalf of free thought. He did
but follow his instinct, however, of opposing, in whatever
medium he was, the current of that medium when it 30
seemed excessive and tyrannous. The extraordinary social
power of French CathoUcism makes itself specially felt in
an assembly like the Senate. An elderly Frenchman of
the upper class is apt to be, not unfrequently, a man of
pleasure, reformed or exhausted, and the deference of
such a personage to repression and Cardinals is generally
excessive. This was enough to rouse Sainte-Beuve' s oppo-
sition ; but he would have had the same tendency to oppose
the heady current of a medium where mere Liberalism
reigned, where it was Professor Fawcett, and not the 40
Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the bit in his teeth.
SAINTE-BEUVE 487
That Saint c-Beuve stopped short at curiosity, at the
desire tpnEnow things 1^ ^tiey really are, and did not
press on with faith and ardour to the various and immense
applications of tLis knowledge which suggest themselves,
and of which the accomplishment is reserved for the
future, was due in part to his character, but more to his
date, his period, his circumstances. Let it be enough for
a man to have served well one need of his age ; and among
politicians and rhetoricians to have been a naturalist, at
10 a time when for any good and lasting work in government
and literature our old conventional draught of the nature
of things wanted in a thousand directions re- verifying ard
correcting.
THE END
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