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Hours in a Library 



By 

Leslie Stephen 



New Edition, with Additions 



In Four Volumes 
Volume IV. 

568128^ 
2.0.2.53 

G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

Gbe fsnicfterbocfcer prees 

1907 



PR 



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v.4 



Contents 



PAGB 



GRAY AND His SCHOOL . i 

STERNE 53 

COUNTRY BOOKS' . . . . 102 

GEORGE ELIOT .... .145 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY .... . 185 

CARLYLE'S ETHICS 232 

THE STATE TRIALS 281 

COLERIDGE . 3 2 7 



HOURS IN A LIBRARY 



Gray and His School 

A REMARK is every now and then made about 
Gray by somebody who has just been reading his 
charming letters. Gray, it is announced, was one 
of the first prophets of the true faith, or, as others 
call it, the modern superstition, of which mount- 
ains are the temples and Alpine clubs form the 
congregations. Their creed may be compressed 
into the single article that a love of mountains is 
the first of the cardinal virtues. To that doc- 
trine, with some slight reservations, I yield a very 
hearty assent and consent; and I am glad to 
reckon Gray amongst its sound adherents. A 
mountainous country alone, he says, can furnish 
truly picturesque scenery. His early enthu- 
siasm for the Chartreuse, his admiration in later 
years of the Vale of Keswick and the Pass of 
Killiecrankie, are symptoms of an orthodoxy cred- 
itable, because rarer, in his time than our own. 



VOL. IV. I. 



2 Hours in a Library 

But, though Gray shared the sentiment which was 
then growing up, it would be absurd to attribute 
to him any influence in its propagation. His de- 
scriptive letters are admirable, and show that he 
had a true eye for scenery; but they were not 
published till after his death, and certainly his 
Life and Writings, clipped and docked by the pre- 
cise Mason, was not the kind of book to generate 
a new enthusiasm. The real glory of revealing to 
mankind the new pleasure must be given so far 
as it can be given to any individual writers to 
men like Rousseau, whose passionate rhetoric 
made the love of nature a popular watchword, and 
Saussure, who first showed a thorough apprecia- 
tion of the glories of the Alps. But in England, 
and not in England alone, even Rousseau was, in 
this respect, eclipsed by Ossian. The general esti- 
mate of those singular poems, considered as de- 
scriptive of a mountainous region, coincides, I 
imagine, with that of Wordsworth. The mount- 
ains of Ossian are mere daubs, vague abstractions 
of mist and gloom, gigantesque unrealities which 
speak of anything but first-hand impressions of 
actual scenery. You may read through Ossian 
if you can read through it at all without gaining 
any more distinct impressions of Highland scenery 
than you would have received in the Highlands 
themselves any time since last November. But 



Gray and His School 3 

the extraordinary influence of Ossian upon the 
minds of MacPherson's contemporaries is a matter 
of history. When Goethe went to Switzerland, he 
evidently considered it the correct thing to have 
passages from Ossian at his fingers' ends for ap- 
plication to the Alps; it was the mountaineer's 
text-book, to be quoted in Switzerland as a later 
generation quoted Byron or the present the 
writings of Mr. Ruskin. Gray was one of the 
earliest enthusiasts, and, though he had a critical 
qualm or two, was apparently more moved by the 
new poems than by any literary event of his time. 
He is " extasie with their infinite beauty," makes 
"a thousand inquiries" about their authenticity, 
and in one letter declares himself to be ''cruelly 
disappointed" with the Nouvelle Heloise, and able 
to admire nothing but Fingal. He studies Croma 
(who now knows Croma even by name?), and 
picks out the finest phrase in it as though he were 
criticising a book of the Iliad. 

The Ossian fever was symptomatic of a widely 
spread sentiment or fashion, due to causes far 
more general than the influence of any individual. 
It would be easy enough to show that worship- 
pers of the picturesque had discovered the chief 
beauties of England before Gray wrote his letters. 
The tourist was already abroad. When Gray 
visited Gordale Scar, in Craven, he already found 



4 Hours in a Library 

landscape-painters settled at the neighbouring inn 
and preparing views for the engraver. The reader 
of that maddest of books, John Bunde, may remem- 
ber that the hero contrives at one place to emerge 
out of a mysterious cavern in the mountains of 
Westmoreland. He observes on the occasion 
that the Vale of Keswick is considered to offer the 
finest views in England, and that they were, in 
truth, finer than even the Rev. Dr. Dalton had 
been able to make them appear in his descriptive 
poem. Yet Buncle thinks that Keswick is sur- 
passed by the " shaded fells " in the neighbourhood 
(apparently) of Ambleside, and that the cascades 
there are superior to " dread Lodore." The " Rev. 
Dr. Dalton" appears to have published his poem 
a poem, I am sorry to say, unfamiliar to me 
in 1755, some years before Gray's visit. But it 
is needless to enlarge upon this point. It is clear 
enough, from many symptoms, that the love of 
picturesque scenery was becoming fashionable in 
the middle of the century, and that Gray, as a 
man of taste, was amongst the first to feel the 
impulse. 

The whole matter is, perhaps, of less importance 
than is sometimes attached to it. There is, after 
all, a good deal in Macaulay's common-sense ex- 
planation of the phenomenon that a love of 
mountain scenery means simply the formation of 



Gray and His School 5 

good roads and comfortable inns in mountain 
districts. But Gray's taste in this respect is at 
least significant as to Gray's own position. His 
contempt for Rousseau and his love of Ossian are 
inversions of the judgment of later times ; for no 
one would now deny the power of Rousseau, or 
find much pleasure unless possessed by some 
antiquarian or patriotic mania in the epics of the 
mythical bard. And yet we can see that Gray 
represents a vein of sentiment allied to some 
modern modes of thought, and generally regarded 
as antipathetic to the spirit of his own time. With 
all his popularity, he appears to be an isolated 
phenomenon. Everybody knows his poetry by 
heart. The Elegy has so worked itself into the 
popular imagination that it includes more familiar 
phrases than almost any poem of equal length in 
the language. The Bard and the lines upon Eton 
have become so hackneyed as perhaps to acquire 
a certain tinge of banality. If few English poets 
have written so little, none certainly has written 
so little that has fallen into oblivion. And yet, 
though Gray is in this sense the most popular poet 
of his day, though he is more read than Young, or 
Thomson, or Collins, or Goldsmith, or many others, 
we do not think of him as stamping his image upon 
the time. He stands apart. His poetry is taken 
to be like an oasis in the desert; it is a sudden 



6 Hours in a Library 

spring of perennial freshness gushing out in the 
midst of that dreary didactic, argumentative, mo- 
notonous current of versification poured forth by 
the imitators of Pope. He never used Pope's 
measure for serious purposes, except in one fine 
fragment the least read of his poems and is, as 
it were, an outsider in the literature of the time. 
And yet, again, it must be remembered that 
Wordsworth picked him out for special condemna- 
tion as the worst offender in the use of conven- 
tional language. He definitely accepted and has 
enlarged upon the theory which Wordsworth at- 
tempted to upset that poetry should use a lan- 
guage differing from that of common life. Indeed, 
he gets upon stilts as deliberately and consciously 
as any poet of the day, and is nervously sensitive 
to the risk of a lapse into the vernacular. 

It would be easy to give a paradoxical turn to 
these remarks, and to show how Gray was at once 
the opponent and the representative of the poet- 
ical creed of his day. The puzzle, such as it is, 
arises from our habit of absurdly exaggerating the 
difference between ourselves and our grandfathers, 
and speaking as if everybody was " artificial" in 
the reign of Pope and "natural" in the reign of 
Wordsworth. No two words in the language 
cover more confusion of thought than those 
famous phrases. It would be easy enough to 



Gray and His School 7 

twist them so as to prove that Wordsworth was 
more artificial than Pope, quite as clearly as the 
opposite is so often demonstrated; and, for my 
part, I am fully convinced that there was just as 
much human nature and as little affectation in 
the days of Queen Anne as in those of Victoria or 
in those of Elizabeth. The contrast usually 
drawn has, I doubt not, an important meaning; 
but it is so obscured by the vague talk about 
"nature" that I never see the word without in- 
stinctively putting myself on my guard against 
some bit of slipshod criticism or sham philosophy. 
I heartily wish that the word could be turned out 
of the language. Though that, alas ! is impossible, 
we may try to avoid the misleading associations 
which it continually introduces. Gray, at any 
rate, was a human being who liked looking at trees 
and hills as much as anybody does now; and he 
certainly succeeded in writing some verses which 
concentrate into a couple of pages a depth of 
genuine emotion such as would furnish whole 
volumes of modern verbiage. It is another ques- 
tion whether he ought to be called a natural or 
an artificial poet. 

In the first place, however, it may be observed 
that Gray was not so solitary a phenomenon as 
we might at first sight fancy. He never entered 
the circle of literary men who lived in London, 



8 Hours in a Library 

and who, in the later part of his career, acknow- 
ledged Johnson as their dictator. He shrank 
from the roughness of the "great bear," who, in 
his turn, seems to have despised Gray as a literary 
fop a finikin and affected spinner of verses, who 
tried to be grand and succeeded only in being 
pompous and obscure. Gray, in his quiet cloister, 
led the life of a recluse and followed his own fancies 
with little direct reference to the public opinion of 
accepted dispensers of literary reputation. But 
no man is really independent of his time, and 
Gray had his allies and his followers. Amongst 
them were men still worth remembering, though 
all of them, like Gray himself, stood more or less 
apart from the main current of literature. In 
one of his early letters he speaks of the Odes just 
published by two young authors, who "both de- 
serve to last some years, but will not." Collins, 
the first of these, has lasted, though destined to 
an early death, and scarcely more voluminous 
than Gray himself. Collins, like Gray, was sensi- 
tive and solitary, though in a still more morbid 
degree. It is recorded of him and I know of no 
similar case except that of Landor in regard to 
Pericles and Aspasia that he repaid his publisher 
for the loss incurred by his Odes. It is, perhaps, 
not irrelevant to add that his mind soon gave 
symptoms of approaching imbecility. The other 



Gray and His School 9 

young poet was Joseph Warton, still remembered 
for his essay on Pope, the elder brother of Thomas 
Warton, the historian of poetry; and the two 
brothers were the heads of what was once called 
the school of the Wartons. The ' ' school ' ' was not 
a very large one, and the poems of both the 
brothers though Thomas is held to be better than 
Joseph are not amongst the things that have 
lasted. The influence of the Wartons, however, 
was very conspicuous in reviving the study of the 
earlier models of our literature. Joseph tried to 
persuade the world unsuccessfully at the time 
that Pope was inferior to Spenser; and his 
brother's history is a considerable landmark in that 
revival of interest in poetical antiquities indicated 
by such works as Percy's Reliques, or by the for- 
geries of Chatterton and MacPherson. I might 
have quoted Joseph Warton's earliest poem (1740) 
to show that what is called the love of nature was 
by no means a novelty when Gray went to the 
lakes. It is enough to give the title The En- 
thusiast; or, The Lover of Nature and to observe 
that Warton wishes to seat himself on a " pinetopt 
precipice, abrupt and shaggy,*' and to listen to 
11 Boreas' blasts " and the sounds of " hollow winds 
and everbeating waves," in the most approved 
romantic fashion. Both brothers, too, have a 
taste for the "moss-grown spire and crumbling 



io Hours in a Library 

arch;" and Tom's best sonnet one much ad- 
mired by Lamb is written on a blank leaf of 
Dugdale's Monasticon, and expresses his delight 
in surveying the records of " cloister' d piety" 

Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding ways 
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers. 

In another he wishes to know whether his "pipe 
can aught essay to reach the ear" of that "divine 
bard" Mr. Gray, for whose Elegy and Bard he ex- 
presses the warmest admiration. 

The similarity of taste shown by the Wartons 
and Gray does not appear to have led to personal 
intercourse. They were divided by that broad, 
though to the outward world invisible, gulf which 
still separates Oxford from Cambridge. Gray's 
most enthusiastic disciple, Mason, had come under 
his influence at Cambridge, and his first perform- 
ance led to a passage of arms with Tom Warton. 
Mason attacked the Jacobitism of Oxford in a 
poem called Isis, stating, of course in a purely 
poetical sense, that Oxford men held "infernal 
orgies" to the foes of freedom. Warton replied 
in verses which Mason admitted to be better than 
his own. Modesty, however, was not Mason's 
strong point. Years afterwards, when riding into 
Oxford, he remarked that he was glad that it was 
already dark; otherwise, as he intimated, a mob 
would naturally have gathered to avenge his 



Gray and His School n 

insults to the University. Mason's odes and 
choruses are so obviously an echo of Gray's that 
one is rather surprised to find Gray praising them 
in language which implies that he was not aware 
of his responsibility. Mason himself was cordially 
proud of the relationship, though he took amazing 
liberties as an editor of his master's letters, and 
occasionally gave himself airs of equality, or even 
patronage, which strike one as a little absurd. A 
more distant, but perhaps still more enthusiastic 
admirer of Gray was Beattie, whose early odes 
(which he judiciously endeavoured to suppress) 
are feebler echoes than Mason's of the same model, 
and who reverently submitted his best poem, the 
Minstrel, to Gray's correction, and, more wonder- 
ful to relate, accepted one or two of his critic's 
emendations. And, finally, we must include in 
the school of Gray the man whose levity and 
coxcombry has blinded many readers to his very 
remarkable ability. Horace Walpole, who quar- 
relled with Gray as with many others of his friends, 
for a time, and who, unlike Gray, was thoroughly 
immersed in the central current of London society, 
was no poet, but was in thorough sympathy with 
Gray's antiquarian tastes, and by the Castle of 
Otranto and the sham Gothic of Strawberry Hill 
did more than profounder antiquarians to restore 
an interest in mediaeval art. 



12 Hours in a Library 

The names thus brought together, to which 
others might of course be added, give a sufficient 
indication of the general tendencies of what I have 
called the school of Gray. They did not form a 
clique, like most schools, for they lived in remote 
regions, and most of them showed the touchiness 
and even sensibility which is rubbed off by the 
friction of large societies. Tom Warton, who was 
certainly sociable enough in a fashion, was buried 
at Oxford for nearly fifty years. Gray was so 
secluded in his Cambridge cloister that the young 
men made a rush to see him in later years leav- 
ing their dinners, it is said; but that is scarcely 
credible when he appeared by some rare accident 
in the college walks. Beattie stuck with equal 
persistence to his college in Aberdeen, and could 
not be induced even to take a professorship in 
Edinburgh, being afraid, apparently, that his 
Essay on Truth would expose him to unpleasant- 
ness from the more metropolitan circle which ad- 
mired and respected his antagonist Hume. The 
alarm, indeed, was more reasonable than Mason's 
alarm about Oxford, for the essay was not only 
vehement in its abuse, but had succeeded in 
making a great stir in the world. Mason, again, 
fixed himself in his Yorkshire living and his 
canonry, emerging only at intervals to pay a 
few visits to his aristocratic friends. And even 



Gray and His School 13 

Walpole made a kind of sham cloister at Straw- 
berry Hill, and, though a man of the world, a gos- 
sip, and a politician, was as irritable and uneasy a 
companion as the most retired of hermits. The 
great movements of thought generally spread, it 
is supposed, from the metropolitan centres, where 
intellectual activity is stimulated by the constant 
collision of eager and excited minds. But a new 
taste may make its appearance in the corners to 
which sensitive men retire from the uncongenial 
atmosphere of the world, and cultivate at their 
ease what is first an individual crotchet and after- 
wards develops into a fashionable amusement. 

Gray, beyond all doubt, was the one man of 
genius of the school after the early death of Collins, 
for it would be strained to give a higher name 
than talent even to Horace Walpole' s remarkable 
intellectual vivacity. Tom Warton's biographer 
(it is impossible to speak of Thomas) has drawn an 
elaborate parallel, in the proper historical fashion, 
between his hero and Gray. They were both 
dons, professors, students of antiquities, lovers of 
nature and of the romantic, composers of odes, and 
so forth. The parallel contains a good deal of 
truth,but it is consistent with an amusing contrast. 
Tom Warton was the thoroughly jovial, undigni- 
fied don of the period. His poetry even if his 
Triumph of I sis the superior to Mason's I sis, and 



H Hours in a Library 

his sonnets deserve some praise in a century barren 
of sonnets is not generally refreshing; the poor 
man had to construct some of those fanciful pieces 
of verse which laureates in those days were bound 
to manufacture for the sovereign's birthday, and 
one cannot glance at them (nobody can read them) 
without profound sympathy. But his humorous 
verses have still a pleasant ring about them. 
There is a contagion in the enthusiasm with which 
he celebrates the virtues of Oxford ale. When he 
imagines himself discommuned for his indulgence, 
and unable even to get longer "tick" at the pot- 
house, he daringly compares himself to Adam 
exiled from Paradise. In another poem we have 
the characteristic triumph of the steady don, who 
has stuck to a bachelor life, over the misguided 
victim to matrimony and a college living. Thus 
will the poor fellow lament as butchers' bills and 
school fees become heavier year by year : 

Why did I sell my college life 
(He cries) for benefice and wife? 
Return, ye days when endless pleasure 
I found in reading or in leisure, 
When calm around the common room 
I puffed my daily pipe's perfume, 
Rode for a stomach, and inspected 
At annual bottlings corks selected, 
And din'd untaxed, untroubled, under 
The portrait of our pious founder ! 



Gray and His School 15 

These of course are youthful productions ; but, 
if all tales be true, the tastes described did not die 
out. Once, it is said, Warton's presence was re- 
quired on some grand public function. The pro- 
fessor was not to be found till an ingenious person 
suggested that a drum and fife should be sent 
through the streets performing a jovial and Jacob- 
ite tune ; and before long the sweet notes enticed 
Warton from a public -house, pipe in mouth and 
with rumpled bands, to be miserably deceived in 
his hopes of fun. More creditable, and apparently 
more authentic, anecdotes relate how he took part 
in the boyish pranks of his brother's pupils at 
Winchester, and once at least composed a copy of 
Latin verses for a youthful companion, and in- 
sisted upon taking the half-crown which had been 
offered as a reward for their excellence before the 
mild imposture was detected. 

Most men grow tired of pipes and ale and the 
jolly bachelor life of common rooms soon after 
they have put on their master's hood. In the old 
days, before commissions and reform, when the 
Universities were more frequently regarded as a 
permanent retreat for men who could find a pipe 
a sufficient substitute for a wife, such jolly fellows 
as Warton formed a larger part of the college so- 
ciety. Most of them, however, were duller dogs 
than Tom Warton, who, with all his enjoyment of 



16 Hours in a Library 

such heavy festivities, managed to write some 
laborious books. A proud, fastidious, and ex- 
quisitely sensitive man like Gray looked upon the 
whole scene with infinite contempt and scorn. It 
does not appear to be very clearly made out why 
he should have resided permanently at Cambridge, 
except for the sake of the libraries. Apparently 
he had resented some of Walpole's supercilious 
conduct, and possibly conduct which deserves a 
harsher name ; for it is said that Walpole opened 
a letter addressed to Gray in the expectation of 
finding some disrespectful notice of himself. Any- 
how, Gray erased Walpole from his list of friends, 
though he consented to resume acquaintanceship. 
He might previously have condescended to accept 
some of the appointments which Walpole could 
have easily procured during his father's ministry. 
But the father was turned out of office whilst the 
son was a discarded friend, and Gray, unwilling 
to enter the struggle of professional life, settled 
down at the University, though he always regarded 
it and its inhabitants with unqualified contempt. 
Gray as his letters prove had a very keen sense 
of humour, and when he chose could put a very 
sharp edge to his tongue. He let his fellow- 
residents know that he thought them fools an 
opinion which they were perverse enough to resent. 
The poem with which he greeted Cambridge on 



Gray and His School 17 

first returning from his travels, headed a Hymn to 
Ignorance, is a curious contrast to Warton's en- 
thusiastic Triumph of I sis. 

Hail, horrors, hail! ye ever gloomy bowers, 
Ye Gothic fanes and antiquated towers, 
Where rushy Camus' slowly winding flood 
Perpetual draws his humid train of mud 

is the opening of his uncomplimentary address to 
his alma mater. 

At the very time [says Parr, in that style of delic- 
ious pomposity which smells of his immortal wig], 
in which Mr. Gray spoke so contemptuously of Cam- 
bridge, that very University abounded in men of 
erudition and science, with whom the first scholars 
would not have disdained to converse ; and who shall 
convict me of exaggeration when I bring forward the 
names 

of the immortal so-and-so? The names include, 
it is true, some which have still a claim upon our 
respect Bentley, Waterland, and Conyers Middle- 
ton, for example but the most eminent were just 
dead or dying when Gray came into residence, and 
dignified heads of houses, like Bentley and Water- 
land, were in a seventh heaven of dignity, quite 
inaccessible to the youthful poet. It does not now 
appear that it can ever have been a great privilege 
to live in the same town with " Provost Snape," 
"Tunstall the public orator," or u Asheton of 



VOL. IV. 2. 



1 8 Hours in a Library 

Jesus." Gray knew something of Middleton (who 

> 

died in 1750, when Gray was 34), and speaks of 
his house as the only one in Cambridge where it 
was easy to converse; and he takes care to add 
that even Middleton was only an "old acquaint- 
ance," which is but an indifferent likeness of a 
friend. He made a few intimacies chiefly with 
younger men, like Mason, who soon ceased to be 
residents but the bulk of the University was in 
his eyes contemptible; and, on the whole, con- 
temporary evidence would lead to the conclusion 
that his opinion was not far wrong. Cambridge 
had possessed very eminent men in the days of 
Bentley, Newton, Waterland, Sherlock, and Mid- 
dleton, and it has had very eminent men at a 
later period, but Gray was himself almost the only 
man in the middle of the eighteenth century whom 
anybody need care to remember now. At any 
rate, there was a large proportion of that ale- 
drinking, tobacco-smoking element amongst the 
jolly fellows of the combination room, whose 
society Warton might relish, but whom Gray 
regarded with supreme contempt. The fellow- 
commoners appear by his account to have ex- 
ceeded in audacity the young gentlemen who 
lately exhibited their sense of playful humour by 
defacing certain statues at Oxford. The wits of 
an earlier day put poor Gray in fear of his life. 



Gray and His School 19 

He ordered a rope ladder, to be able to escape 
from his rooms in case they set the college on fire ; 
and, if I remember the tradition rightly, they set 
a " booby trap " for the poet, and, raising an alarm, 
induced him to descend his rope ladder into a 
water-butt. Anyhow, poor Gray was driven from 
Peterhouse to Pembroke, and there abstracted 
his mind from the academical noises by a course 
of study which, according to his admirers (but 
who shall answer for the admirers?), made him 
profoundly familiar with every branch of learning 
except mathematics. Meanwhile his appearance 
and manners were calculated to intensify the mu- 
tual dislike between himself and his rougher sur- 
roundings. His rooms were scrupulously neat, 
with mignonette in the windows and flowers ele- 
gantly planted in china vases; he spoke little in 
general society, and compiled biting epigrams or 
classical puns with a derisory application to his 
special associates. In short, in outward appear- 
ance he belonged to the class fop or petit-mattre, 
mincing, precise, affected, and as little in harmony 
with the rowdy fellow-commoners as Hotspur's 
courtier with the rough soldiers on the battle- 
field. 

The want of harmony between Gray and his 
surroundings goes far to explain his singular want 
of fertility. In fact, we may say without any 



20 Hours in a Library 

want of respect for a venerable institution that 
Gray could hardly have found a more uncongenial 
residence. Cambridge boasts of its poets; and a 
University may well be proud which has had, 
amongst many others, such inmates as Spenser, 
Milton, Dryden, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
Byron, and Tennyson. If a sceptic chooses to ask 
what share the University can claim in stimulating 
the genius of those illustrious men, the answer 
might be difficult. But, in any case, no poet ex- 
cept Gray loved his University well enough to 
become a resident. If it were not for Gray, I 
should be inclined to guess that a poet don was a 
contradiction in terms. The reason is very ob- 
vious to any one who has enjoyed the latter title. 
It is simply that no atmosphere can be conceived 
more calculated to stimulate that excessive fas- 
tidiousness which all but extinguished Gray's pro- 
ductive faculties. He might wrap himself in 
simple contempt for the ale-drinking vanity of the 
don. He could, in the old college slang, "sport 
his oak" and despise their railings, and even 
the shouts of "Fire!" of the worthy fellow- 
commoners. But a poet requires some sympathy, 
and, if possible, some worshippers . The inner circle 
of Gray's intimates was naturally composed of men 
fastidious like himself, and all of them more or less 
critics by profession. The reflection would be 



Gray and His School 21 

forced upon his mind, whenever he thought of 
publishing, What will be thought of my poems by 
Provost Snape, and Mr. Public-Orator Tunstall, 
and Asheton of Jesus, and those other luminaries 
whom Dr. Parr commemorates? And undoubt- 
edly their first thought would be to show their 
claim to literary excellence by picking holes in 
their friend's compositions. They would rejoice 
greatly when they could show that faculties 
sharpened by the detection of false quantities and 
slips of grammar in their pupils' Latin verses were 
equal to the discovery of solecisms and defective 
rhymes in the work of a living poet. Gray's ex- 
treme sensitiveness to all such quillets of criticism 
is marked in every poem he wrote. Had he been 
forced to fight his way in literature he would have 
learnt to swallow his scruples and take the chance 
in a free give-and-take struggle for fame. In a 
country living he might have forgotten his tor- 
mentors and have married a wife to secure at 
least one thoroughly appreciative and intelligent 
admirer. But to be shut up in a small scholastic 
clique, however little he might respect their indi- 
vidual merits, to have the chat of combination 
rooms ever in his ears, to be worried by bands of 
professional critics at every turn, was as though a 
singing bird should build over a wasp's nest. The 
Elegy and the Odes just struggled into existence, 



22 Hours in a Library 

though much of them was written before he settled 
down as a resident ; but Gray, like many another 
don of great abilities, finished but a minute 
fragment of the work of which he more or less 
contemplated the execution. The books contem- 
plated but never carried out by men in his position 
would make a melancholy and extensive catalogue. 
The effect of these influences upon his work is pal- 
pable to every reader of Gray. No English poet 
has ever given more decisive proof that he shared 
that secret of clothing even an obvious thought in 
majestic and resounding language, which we natu- 
rally call Miltonic. Though he modestly asserts 
that he inherits 

Nor the pride nor ample pinion 

That the Theban eagle bear, 
Sailing with supreme dominion 

Through the azure deep of air, 

yet we feel that none of his contemporaries per- 
haps none of his successors could have equalled, 
in dignity and richness of style, the noble passage 
in which that phrase occurs. And yet we must 
also feel that if his "car," as he says of Dryden's, 
is borne by " coursers of ethereal race/' they are 
constantly checked before they can get into full 
career. He takes flight as if the azure deep were 
the natural home in which he could sail suspended 



Gray and His School 23 

like the eagle without perceptible effort. But the 
wings droop before they are well unfurled, and the 
magnificent strain ceases without giving the pro- 
mised satisfaction. Even the Elegy flags a little 
towards the end; the " hoary-headed swain" be- 
comes rather flat in his remarks, and the conclud- 
ing epitaph has just a little too much twang of 
epigrammatic smartness. I sometimes agree, in- 
deed, with Wolfe that it was a far greater achieve- 
ment to write the Elegy than to storm the heights 
of Abram, and then hold (though I also incline to 
a different opinion) that only a soldier, or author, 
or civilian of ultra-military enthusiasm could 
suppose that such a comparison involved conde- 
scension on the side of the general. Gray and his 
personal admirers seem to have been annoyed at the 
preference given to this above his other writings. 
It proved, so he argued, that the stupid public 
cared for the subject instead of the art ; that they 
liked the Elegy as they liked Blair's Grave, and 
would have liked it as well if the same thoughts 
had been expressed in prose. Undoubtedly the 
public will always refuse to make that distinction 
between form and matter which seems so import- 
ant to the critical mind. It is not, however, that 
they are unaffected by the artistic skill, but that 
they are affected unconsciously. The medita- 
tions of Blair, of Young, and of Hervey, equally 



24 Hours in a Library 

popular in their day, have fallen into disrepute 
for want of the exquisite felicity of language which 
has preserved the Elegy. It is a commonplace 
thing to say that the power of giving freshness to 
commonplace is amongst the highest proofs of 
poetical genius. One reason is, apparently, that 
it is so difficult to extract the pure and ennobling 
element from the coarser materials in which any 
obvious truth comes to be imbedded. The diffi- 
culty of feeling rightly is as great as the difficulty 
of finding a worthy utterance of the feeling. 
Everybody may judge of the difficulty of Gray's 
task who will attend to what passes at a funeral. 
On such an occasion one is inclined to fancy, a 
priori, mourners will drop all affectation and speak 
poetically because they will speak from their 
hearts ; but, as a matter of fact, there is no occa- 
sion on which there is generally such a lavish ex- 
penditure of painful and jarring sentiment, of 
vulgarity, affectation, and insincerity; and thus 
Gray's meditations stand out from other treat- 
ments of a similar theme not merely by the tech- 
nical merits of the language, but by the admirable 
truth and purity of the underlying sentiment. 
The temptation to be too obtrusively moral and 
improving, to indulge in inappropriate epigram, 
in sham feeling, in idle sophistry, in strained and 
exaggerated gloominess, or even on occasion to 



Gray and His School 25 

heighten the effect by inappropriate humour, is 
so strong with most people that Gray's kindness 
and delicacy of feeling, qualities which were per- 
ceptible to the despised public, must be regarded 
as contributing quite as much to the success of 
the Elegy as the technical merits of form, which, 
moreover, can hardly be separated from the 
merits of substance. 

Indeed, when we come to the other odes which 
have similar qualities of mere style, we are at no 
loss to explain the difference of reception. The 
beautiful Ode upon Eton, for example, conies into 
conflict with one's common-sense. We know too 
well that an Eton boy is not always the happy and 
immaculate creature of Gray's fancy; and one 
feels that the reflections upon his probable de- 
gradation imply a fit of temporary ill-humour in 
the poet, supervening, no doubt, upon a deeper 
vein of melancholy. The sentiment is too splen- 
etic to be pleasing. The Bard, which has, I sup- 
pose, been recited by schoolboys as frequently as 
the Elegy, is a more curious indication of the 
peculiarities of Gray's method of composition. 
Mason gives an account of the remarkable trans- 
formation which it underwent. Gray's first 
intention, it appears, was that the bard should 
declare prophetically that poets should never be 
wanting "to celebrate true virtue and valour in 



26 Hours in a Library 

immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous 
pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and oppres- 
sion." Undoubtedly this gives a meaning to the 
ode worthy of the beginning. The victim could 
not make a more effective retort. But, unluckily, 
when the bard had got into full swing, it struck 
him that the facts were not what his theory re- 
quired. Shakespeare, says Mason, liked Falstaff 
in spite of his vices; Milton censured tyranny in 
prose; Dryden was a court parasite; Pope, a 
Tory ; and Addison, " though a Whig," was a poor 
poet. The poor bard was therefore in the miser- 
able position one of the most wretched known 
to humanity of a man who has begun a fine 
speech and does not see his way out of it. If Gray 
had taken a wider view of the poet's true function, 
he might still have found some embodiment for 
his thoughts; for English poetry, though it may 
not have been Whiggish, may certainly be re- 
garded as the fullest expression of the more liberal 
and humanising conceptions of the world which 
have to struggle against the pedantry and narrow- 
ness of prosaic professional theorisers. But the 
bard required sound Whig precedent to point his 
moral, and it was not forthcoming. Consequently 
he has to take refuge in the very scanty consola- 
tion afforded by the bare reflection that Spenser, 
Shakespeare, and Milton would begin to write 



Gray and His School 27 

some time after the descendants of a Welshman 
had ascended the throne. One would not grudge 
any satisfaction to an unfortunate gentleman just 
about to commit suicide; but one must admit 
that he was easily pleased. 

This want of any central idea converts the ode 
into a set of splendid fragments of verse, which 
scarcely hold together. Contemporary critics 
complained grievously of its "obscurity" a 
phrase which seems ill placed to us who know by 
experience what obscurity may really mean. An 
obscurity removable by a slight knowledge of Eng- 
lish history and a recollection of the fact that 
Richard II. is said to have been starved instead 
of stabbed, as in Shakespeare, by Exton, is not 
of a very grievous kind; but the absence of any 
intelligible motive in the bard's final rupture is 
more serious. A poet surely might have acted 
upon the tant pis pour les jaits theory, and pro- 
ceeded to make his general assertion without 
waiting for confirmatory evidence. A writer who, 
like Gray, secretes his poetry line by line and 
spreads the process over years, seems to fall into 
the same faults which are more frequently due to 
haste. He pores over his conceptions so long 
that he becomes blind to defects obvious to a fresh 
observer, and rather misses his point, as he intro- 
duces minute alterations without noticing their 



28 Hours in a Library 

effect on the context. One wonders how a man 
of Gray's exquisite perception could have intro- 
duced the lines 

And gorgeous dames, and statesmen old 
In bearded majesty appear 

without seeing that we are only saved by a comma, 
and a comma easily neglected, from assuming that 
a Julia Pastrana would have been a usual phe- 
nomenon at the court of Elizabeth. Correction 
continued after the freshness of the impression 
has died away is apt to lead to such oversight. 

The learned and fastidious don shows through 
the inspired "bard" by many equally unmistak- 
able indications. His editor, Mitford, collected a 
number of parallel passages which curiously in- 
dicate the degree in which his mind was saturated 
with recollections of poetical literature. It seems 
to be now considered as unjustifiable plagiarism 
for a poet to assimilate the phrases of his prede- 
cessors. We may, indeed, find abundant proofs 
of familiarity with Shakespeare in Shelley, and in 
more recent writers ; but they are generally of the 
unconscious kind, and would otherwise be avoided 
as sins against originality. The poets of the 
last century, such as Goldsmith, and especially 
Pope, had no scruples in the matter. Their 
work did not profess to be a sudden and sponta- 



Gray and His School 29 

neous inspiration. It was a slow elaboration, with 
which it was perfectly allowable to interweave 
any quantity of previously manufactured ma- 
terial so long as the juncture was not palpable. 
Gray's adaptations seem sometimes to make the 
whole tissue of his poetry. He owns to an un- 
conscious appropriation from Green (author of 
the Spleen) of the main thought of his Ode to the 
Spring, the comparison of men to ephemeral in- 
sects. But everywhere he is giving out phrases 
which he has previously assimilated. So in the 
very spirited translation from the Norse, " Uprose 
the king of men with speed," we have a verse 
from the Allegro " Right against the Eastern 
Gate" cropping up naturally in quite a fresh 
connection. A single phrase seems to combine 
several semi-conscious recollections. The words 
in the Bard, "dear as the ruddy drops that warm 
my heart" come from Shakespeare, and the pre- 
ceding "dear as the light that visits those sad 
eyes" are perhaps from Otway. But it is useless 
to accumulate instances of so palpable a process. 
It is only in character, again, that Gray should 
have clung to a peculiar dictum, as he would have 
insisted upon wearing his proper academical cos- 
tume in a performance in the senate-house. He 
would no more have dropped into Wordsworth's 
vernacular than he would have smoked a pipe in 



30 Hours in a Library 

one of Warton's pot-houses. Wordsworth con- 
sidered this dignity to be unnatural pomposity; 
and undoubtedly the language is frequently con- 
ventional and " unnatural," and a stumbling- 
block of offence to the generation which gave up 
wigs. Equally annoying was Gray's immense 
delight in semi-allegorical figures. We have whole 
catalogues of abstract qualities scarcely personi- 
fied. Ambition, bitter Scorn, grinning Infamy, 
Falsehood, hard Unkindness, keen Remorse, and 
moody Madness are all collected in one stanza not 
exceptional in style beings which to us are almost 
as offensive as the muse whom he has pretty well 
ceased to invoke, though he still appeals to his 
lyre. This fashion reached its culminating point 
in the celebrated invocation somewhere recorded 
by Coleridge, " Inoculation, heavenly maid!" The 
personified qualities are a kind of fading "sur- 
vival" ghosts of the old allegorical persons who 
put on a rather more solid clothing of flesh and 
blood with Spenser, and with Gray scarcely putting 
in a stronger claim to vitality than is implied in 
the use of capital letters. The "muses" were 
nearly extinct, and in Pope's time the gods and 
goddesses had come to be regarded as so much 
"machinery" invented by Homer to work his 
epic poetry. They were, in fact, passions and 
qualities in masquerade ; and they therefore found 



Gray and His School 3 1 

it very easy, in the next generation, to drop even 
this thin disguise, and fit themselves for poetic 
usage, not by taking the name of a pagan deity, 
but by a simple typographical device. 

What would Gray have done under more con- 
genial circumstances if he produced such inimita- 
ble fragments under such adverse conditions 
when his learning threatened to choke his fire> 
when his exquisite taste was pampered with ex- 
cessive fastidiousness, and his temper and position 
alienated him from the most vigorous intellectual 
movement of the day? Perhaps for the region 
of the might-have-been is boundless he would 
have produced a masterpiece of the " grand style," 
worthy of a place by Milton's finest work; or, as 
possibly, he would have done nothing. It is an 
amusing exercise of the imagination to place our 
favourite authors in different countries and cen- 
turies, and to trace their hypothetical develop- 
ment a century earlier. I fancy that Gray would 
have buried himself still more profoundly from 
the political convulsions which attracted Milton's 
sterner and more active spirit; he would have 
studied Plotinus and Maimonides, and found 
sympathetic companionship amongst the Cam- 
bridge Platonists; he would have written some 
fragment of semi-mystical reverie, showing stu- 
pendous learning and philosophic breadth of 



32 Hours in a Library 

thought, and possibly have composed some divine 
poems for the admiration of Henry More or John 
Norris. Warton, doubtless, would at any period 
have enjoyed Oxford ale, and joined in the jolly 
song, " Back and side go bare, go bare ; " he would 
have sometimes accompanied Burton on the ram- 
bles where he was thrown into fits of laughter by 
listening to the ribaldry of the bargees at the 
bridge end ; he would still have been an antiquar- 
ian, and his note-book might have contributed 
quaint scraps of learning to the Anatomy of 
Melancholy. Mason, anxious not to sink the man 
of the world in the country parson, would have 
racked his unfortunate brains for conceits worthy 
to be placed beside the most fashionable com- 
positions of Donne or Cowley. Horace Walpole 
would, of course, have been at any time the prince 
of gossips; he would have kept most judiciously 
on the safe side in the most dangerous revolutions, 
and have come just near enough to collect the 
most interesting scandals in the courts of the 
Stuarts; but probably his lively intellect would 
have led him to drop in occasionally at the meet- 
ings of the infant Royal Society, and to have been 
one of the early cultivators of a taste for ancient 
marbles or a judicious patron of Vandyke. It is, 
perhaps, harder to assign the precise place in our 
own days, when the separate niches are not so dis- 



Gray and His School 33 

tinctly marked off, and even the universities 
scarcely afford a satisfactory refuge for the would- 
be recluse ; but at least one may assume that each 
of them would have been aesthetic to his fingers' 
ends, and have been thoroughly on a level with 
the last new developments of taste, whether for 
mediaeval architecture or the art of the Renais- 
sance, or that style which is called after Queen 
Anne. The snapdragon which Cardinal Newman 
saw from his windows of Trinity, and took for the 
emblem of his perpetual residence in the Univer- 
sity, was probably flourishing when Warton's 
residence in the same college ceased ; and Warton, 
in spite of that love of ale which is perhaps more 
prominent than it should be in our impressions of 
his character, would beyond all doubt have been a 
member of that school of which his successor was 
the greatest ornament, and which has given a new 
meaning to the old phrase ' ' High Church. ' ' It was 
amongst the Wartons and their friends that the 
word " Gothic " used by earlier writers as a simple 
term of abuse, came to have a more appreciative 
meaning; they were the originators of the so- 
called romanticism made popular by Scott, and 
which counts for so much in the Anglo-Catholic 
development. 

The paradox, in short, with which I started 
comes simply to this : that Gray and his friends 

VOL. IV. 3 



34 Hours in a Library 

were eclectics. This taste for the " Gothic " was a 
kind of happy thought, a lucky discovery made 
by men feeling round rather vaguely for a new 
mode of literary and artistic enjoyment not 
quite content with the exceedingly comfortable 
and respectable century in which they lived, and 
yet not clearly seeing how to improve upon it. 
Horace Walpole, the shrewdest of all and the least 
of a recluse, was, on one side, a thorough man of 
his time ; he was a freethinker of the Voltaire type ; 
believed so far as he believed in anything in 
Pope's poetry and Locke's philosophy ; he sneered 
at enthusiasm and sentimentalism, and at any 
revolutionary movement calculated directly or in- 
directly to deprive Horace Walpoles of comfort- 
able sinecures. But he had a taste, and money 
to spend upon it ; so he made Gothic chapels and 
halls of lath and plaster, played with antiquarian 
researches, and wrote a romance which was made 
of literary lath and plaster to match the materials 
of Strawberry Hill. Gray's dilettanteism was far 
more serious and systematic, but it necessarily 
took the same direction. He did more than 
dabble in antiquarianism : he read with insatiable 
appetite; he became, I suppose, profound in 
Gothic architecture, so far as isolated efforts 
could make a man profound. But his attempts 
at putting his theory in practice were clearly of the 



Gray and His School 35 

Strawberry Hill kind. He instructs his friend to 
buy bits of plain coloured glass, and arrange the 
tops of his windows in a "mosaic of his own 
fancy," only observing that, to give them a 
"Gothic aspect," it will be enough to turn the 
fragments "corner-ways." Then he manages to 
procure "stucco paper" at threepence a yard, 
which is "rather pretty and nearly Gothic," and 
apparently represents Gothic arches and niches. 
It will produce an awkward effect, as he admits, 
where the pattern has to be turned the wrong way ; 
and, indeed, he is awake to the inadequacy of the 
crude revival. Painters, as he says, make objects 
which are more like goose pies than cathedrals. 
The new toy was still in a very imperfect and 
rickety state. 

One of the quaintest illustrations of the Gothic- 
ism of that time is in Mason's English Garden. It 
is a weary bit of didactic poetry, and a most 
amiable and lenient critic, Hartley Coleridge, pro- 
nounces it to be the dullest poem which he ever 
attempted to read. It is hard, says Coleridge, to 
suppose it "wholly destitute of beauties, espe- 
cially" (why especially?) "as it consists of 2,423 
lines of blank verse;" but he does not seem to 
have discovered any. Had the critic persevered 
to the end of the fourth book, he might at least 
have been rewarded by a smile at the author. 



36 Hours in a Library 

Mason tries to enliven his performance by a story 
about a pattern man of taste and virtue, named 
Alcander, whose tragical sorrows are soothed by 
religion and landscape gardening. It is enough 
to notice his performances in the last capacity. 
Alcander, as his name suggests, is an English 
country gentleman, possessed of an ancient man- 
sion, 

Coeval with those rich cathedral fanes 
(Gothic ill-named) whose harmony results 
From disunited parts. 

Alcander shows his taste by a restoration in the 
manner of the time. Let every structure, he 
proclaims, 

needful for a farm 

Arise in castle-semblance; the huge barn 
Shall with a mock portcullis awe the gate 
Where Ceres entering, o'er the flail-proof floor 
In golden triumph rides; some tower rotund 
Shall to the pigeons and their callow young 
Safe roost afford, and every buttress broad 
Whose proud projection seems a mass of stone 
Give space to stall the heifer and the steed. 
So shall each part, though turned to rural use, 
Deceive the eye with those bold feudal farms 
Which fancy loves to gaze on. 

He afterwards adopts a similar method 

To hide the structure rude where Winter pounds 
In conic pit his congelations hoar; 



Gray and His School 37 

concealing his ice-house and dairy behind a mod- 
ern ' ' time-struck abbey. ' ' Alcander thus displays 
those admirable qualities of head and heart which 
enable him to bear with resignation the melan- 
choly death of a beloved object. He finally con- 
soles himself by placing her monument in a sham 
hermitage. The Gothic revival of a century ago 
sounds absurd enough to our ears, and it must be 
confessed that our foolery is more systematic and 
scientific, as it is probably more destructive. 
Alcander, happily, did not " restore" his castle, 
though he surrounded it with those queer farm 
buildings and brand-new ruins. Pope, it seems, 
had set the fashion of landscape gardening on the 
little plot of ground which, as Horace Walpole 
tells us, he had "twisted and twirled, and rhymed 
and harmonised, till it appeared two or three 
sweet little lawns, opening and opening beyond 
one another, the whole surrounded with thick, im- 
penetrable woods." Mason, Spence, Shenstone, 
and other persons of literary note helped, accord- 
ing to their opportunities, to promote the revolt 
against the old-fashioned style in which, as Mason 
puts it, Folly combined with Wealth 

To plan that formal, dull, disjointed scene 
Which once was call'd a garden. 

He denounces the stiff canals, the clipped yews 



38 Hours in a Library 

and holly hedges, and the geometric patterns of 
"tonsile box" with the zeal of a reformer. The 
theory seems to be that a garden ought to look 
as if it were not a garden. The change of taste, 
however, was doubtless symptomatic of the grow- 
ing "love of nature," though I do not presume to 
discuss its merits. It was a development parallel 
to the literary change implied in the renewed taste 
for old ballads, for archaic poetry, or what passed 
for such under the names of Ossian and Rowley, 
and for Elizabethan literature. 

Such tastes, however significant of the advent 
of a literary revolution, did not imply any revolu- 
tionary purpose in their cultivators. If Gray 
loved Spenser, he was even more enthusiastic 
about Dryden, from whom he professed to have 
learnt the art of versification. Cowper tried to 
supersede Pope's Homer. Gray declared that 
nobody would ever translate Homer as well as 
Pope. Gray was as orthodox in his literary as 
in his philosophical profession of faith; and his 
most avowed disciple Mason was, on the whole, 
of the same persuasion. In Warton and Beattie 
there is clearly some anticipation of Scott's ro- 
manticism, but Mason's experiments were rather 
in the classical direction. His English Garden 
was his most ponderous and unsuccessful per- 
formance. In some other efforts he showed a 



Gray and His School 39 

keenness of style, a causticity of satire, which in- 
duced the late Mr. Dilke to suggest him (not quite 
seriously, I fancy) as a possible candidate for the 
questionable honour of being the real Junius. It 
would be difficult indeed to imagine that Junius 
could by any possibility have been a country 
clergyman, living for the greatest part of the year 
at a distance from the political gossip of the day, 
however much interested in the spread of sound 
Whig principles. It is amusing to read the cor- 
respondence between Mason and his two friends, 
Gray and Walpole, and to note how the respectful 
disciple, reverently receiving from his teachers 
little hints of criticism laudatory, it is true, for 
the most part, but also dashed with tolerably 
sharp sarcasm, gradually develops into the rather 
dandified clergyman, anxious to show that the 
man of the world is not altogether sunk in the rus- 
tic parson; that he is no pedant, but a man of 
taste, and capable of tagging his remarks with 
bits of fashionable French, and even of occasion- 
ally repaying in kind his correspondent's affluence 
of the latest scandals. Mason's clerical gown did 
not sit very well upon him, though he seems to 
have been conscientious and independent and not 
without some genuine kindliness of nature. But 
he always gives one the impression of being out 
of place in his cassock. It would not be easy to 



40 Hours in a Library 

find a more quaint expression of the unprofessional 
turn of mind in a clergyman than a defence of 
Christianity in one of his sermons. "If," he says, 
"the British Constitution will not enable a man 
to dispense with religion, we must admit that 
nothing can;" and he proceeds to establish a 
proposition which certainly would not be con- 
sidered as requiring defence in a modern pulpit 
that even the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights 
did not supersede the Gospels. His claims to be 
a conceivable Junius seem to depend chiefly upon 
the clever squib called Heroic Epistle, which is an 
amusing burlesque of the architectural crotchets 
of Sir W. Chambers and implies a want of rever- 
ence for George III. Mason took immense pains 
to conceal the authorship of this and some less 
successful sequels, and so far followed the steps of 
Junius; but it is impossible to fancy that the 
great pamphleteer would have made such a cack- 
ling over such a trifle, or have been so sensitive 
to the praises of his confidant Walpole. 

Gray speaks of Mason's "insatiable reforming 
mouth/' and remarks that he has no passions 
" except a little malice and revenge." There was 
a good deal of acidity in his nature, developed, 
perhaps, by his uncongenial position and by do- 
mestic trouble, if he had not the rancour and force 
vhich make a great satirist; but in earlier days 



Gray and His School 4 1 

Gray found in him a simple-minded and enthusi- 
astic disciple, who read little or nothing, but wrote 
abundance, ''and that with a design to make a 
fortune by it." His two poems Elfrida and Car- 
actacus were fruits of this early fluency. They 
have been criticised elaborately by Hartley Cole- 
ridge, but belong, I think, to that kind and class 
of literature upon which serious criticism would 
be rather wasted. It is not that they are bad; 
rather they suggest an uncomfortable reflection 
upon the quantity of real talent, as well as con- 
scientious effort, which may be thrown away in 
producing work unmistakably second-rate and 
void of genuine vitality. We can better estimate 
the extreme rarity and value of genius by measur- 
ing it against the achievements of remarkable 
cleverness. Hastily read, or read whilst still 
possessing the gloss of novelty, Mason's work 
might look like Gray's. Here, for example, is the 
first stanza of a chorus from Caractacus, which 
Gray not only praised to Mason, but cites in one 
of his notes as a proof that sublime odes could still 
be written in English : 

Hark! heard ye not yon footstep dread, 
That shook the earth with thund'ring tread? 

'T was Death. In haste 

The warrior past ; 
High towered his helmed head: 



42 Hours in a Library 

I mark'd his mail ; I mark'd his shield ; 
I 'spyed the sparkling of his spear ; 
I saw his giant arm the falchion wield; 
Wide wav'd the lickering blade, and fir'd the angry 
air. 1 

Longer quotation might be tiresome; but Mason 
continues to the end with all the manner of a 
genuine poet, and doubtless cheated himself as 
well as Gray into the impression that he had the 
real stuff in him. The effect is respectable at a 
little distance, though the work will not bear a 
moment's inspection. 

The general design of the plays, however, is 
more to my purpose than the merits of their exe- 
cution. At that time the worship of Shakespeare, 
though sometimes extravagant, had not become 
a mere slavish idolatry. It was still permitted 
to see spots in the sun, and not yet fashionable 
for poets to try to revive the Elizabethan style, 
though Mason made one feeble attempt at a play 
"on the English model/ ' Gray, with his catholic 
taste, admired Racine, and began a play in imita- 
tion of Britannicus ; and the faithful Mason de- 
cided that a "medium between the French and 
English taste would be preferable to -either." He 
had also a fancy that the ancient chorus might be 

1 The last line is an emendation for " Courage was in his 
van and Conquest in his rear," a line still more a la Gray, 
but removed in compliance with a criticism of Gray's. 



Gray and His School 43 

restored, so as at once to give greater opportunities 
for poetical descriptions and the graceful introduc- 
tion of "moral reflections/' Though Gray ridi- 
culed his arguments pretty sharply, he stuck to 
his plan as obstinately as Sam Weller when insist- 
ing, in defiance of paternal remonstrances, upon 
a poetical conclusion to his love-letter. Accord- 
ingly, in Elfrida and Caractacus, certain bands of 
British virgins and druids talk the twaddle and 
burst into the lyrical irrelevance which are the 
functions of a chorus. Mason had abundant self- 
complacency; and though his plays had only 
a moderate success, owing to the bad taste of the 
public, he felt that his ingenious eclecticisms 
combined the various merits of Sophocles, 
Racine, and Shakespeare. Unsuccessful authors 
may well invoke blessings on the man who in- 
vented conceit. But Mason, after all, writes like 
a cultivated scholar, with sensibility to poetic 
excellence, though without real poetic power ; and 
if we laugh at his taste, our grandchildren will 
probably laugh with equal self-satisfaction at 
ours. 

In truth, this fashion of writing plays not 
intended, or scarcely intended, for the stage, 
of which Mason was one of the first originators, 
is characteristic of the whole school. I will 
not argue a large question here, or deny that 



44 Hours in a Library 

something may be said for the practice; and yet 
it seems as though a play which is not to be acted 
has a more than superficial resemblance to the 
feudal castles which were not meant for defence, 
and the abbeys in which there were to be no 
monks. The form is dictated by conditions which 
are no longer present to the writer's mind, and 
are therefore apt to be a mere encumbrance. If 
you build a portcullis to let in cows, not to ex- 
clude marauders, it is apt to become rather 
ludicrously unreal. If you know that your play 
is to be read and not to be seen, the whole drama- 
tic arrangement is on the way to become a mere 
sham. It does not grow out of the poetical con- 
ception, but is fitted on to it in compliance with 
a fashion. Why bother yourself to make the 
actors tell a story, when it is simpler and easier 
to tell it yourself? 

In this sense literature grows more "artificial" 
as it is encumbered with more dead forms having 
no significance except as remnants of extinct 
conditions. There was a time we are told, when 
art was perfectly spontaneous, and the critic was 
happily not existent. People sang or recited by 
instinct, without asking how or why. That 
golden age if it ever existed since men were 
monkeys had long passed away even in the 
beginning of modern literature. Spenser and 



Gray and His School 45 

Shakespeare, for example, probably thought 
about the principles of their art almost as much 
as their modern critics, and were very consciously 
trying experiments and devising new forms of 
expression. But as the noxious animal called 
a critic becomes rampant, we have a different 
phase, which seems to be illustrated by the case 
of Gray and his fellows. The distinction seems 
to be that the critic, as he grows more conceited, 
not only lays down rules for the guidance of the 
imaginative impulse, but begins to think himself 
capable of producing any given effect at pleasure. 
He has got to the bottom of the whole affair, and 
can tell you what is the chemical composition of a 
"Hamlet," or an "Agamemnon," or an Iliad, and 
can therefore teach you what materials to select and 
how to combine them. He can give you a recipe 
for an epic poem, or for communicating the proper 
mediaeval or classical flavour to your performance. 
If he is as clever a man as Mason, he will perhaps 
go a little further, and show not only how to ex- 
tract the peculiar essence of a Racine or a Shake- 
speare, but how to mix the result so as to produce 
something better than either. In one respect he 
has clearly made an advance. He is beginning 
to appreciate the necessity of an historical study 
of different literary forms. In such quaint, old- 
fashioned criticism as Addison applied to Milton, 



4 6 Hours in a Library 

where Longinus, and Aristotle, and the learned 
M. Bossu are invoked as final authorities about 
the " fable" and the " machinery" and the char- 
acter of the hero, we perceive that the critic is 
still persuaded that there is one absolutely correct 
and infallible code of art, applicable in all times 
and places. Milton and Homer are regarded as 
belonging to the same class, and are to be judged 
by the same laws. The later critic, taking a wider 
survey and rummaging amongst the antiquarian 
stores to discover any pearls hidden under Dry- 
asdust's accumulations, began to see that there 
were many different types of art, each of which 
possessed its own charm and characteristic ex- 
cellence. He scarcely saw at first that each form 
was also the outgrowth of a particular set of 
conditions, and could not be produced independ- 
ently of them. It seemed easy to restore any- 
thing that struck him as picturesque or graceful. 
He could give the old ballad air by an arbitrary 
combination of bad spelling, or make his ruined 
abbey out of a scene-painter's materials. 

This early race of critics had no direct hostility 
to their own century or to its early classicalism. 
They were not iconoclasts, but only adding some 
new idols to the old pantheon. They aimed at be- 
ing men of finer and more catholic taste than their 
neighbours, but wished to extend the borders 



Gray and His School 47 

of orthodoxy, to repeal the anathema which had 
been pronounced upon the "Gothicism" and bar- 
barism of our old authors, not to anathematise 
the existing order in revenge. They were quiet, 
orthodox, and substantially conservative, even 
if nominally Whiggish, and feared or detested 
revolutionary impulses of any kind from the bot- 
tom of their hearts. Such men as Mason or the 
Wartons tried literary experiments which are 
now of no great value, because they represent at 
best the attempts of a superficial connoisseur of 
talent. They did something by attracting interest 
to researches which produced greater results when 
carried on by more thorough workers in the same 
mine. But it is also true that they were amongst 
the first to fall into the blunders, since repeated 
on a more gigantic scale by successors, who have 
tried more systematically to galvanise extinct 
forms into a semblance of vitality. 

Gray, the man of real poetic genius, was also, 
if his friends judged rightly, the most profound 
antiquarian and the most deeply read of the 
whole school. Many of his critics have lamented 
the time which he spent in making elaborate 
tables of chronology, in studying genealogy, and 
annotating Dugdale's Monasticon, or Grosier's 
History of the Chinese Dynasties, or the Botany of 
Linnaeus, when he might have been writing more 



48 Hours in a Library 

elegies. There is so much to regret in the world 
that one would not waste much lamentation upon 
might-have-beens. It is a thousand pities that 
Burns took to drink, that Byron quarrelled with 
his wife, that Shelley was drowned in a squall, and 
that Gray wasted intellect upon labours which 
were absolutely fruitless, but we cannot afford 
to sit down and cry over it all. We must take 
what we can get, and be thankful. But neither 
can one quite accept the optimist theory that 
Gray really did all that he could have done under 
different circumstances. The fire was all but 
choked by the fuel, and the cloisters of Pembroke 
acted as a tolerably effective extinguisher upon 
what was left. The peculiar merit of Gray is that 
he had force enough, though only at the cost of 
slow and laborious travail, to find an utterance 
for genuine emotion, which was enriched instead 
of being made unnatural by his varied culture. 
The critic in him never injured the quality, but 
only reduced the quantity, of his work. What 
little he left is so perfect in its kind, so far above 
any contemporary performances, because he never 
forgot, like some learned people, that the ultimate 
aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by 
showing his own, and not to exhibit his learning, 
or his fine taste, or his skill in mimicking the notes 
of his predecessors. He could rarely cast aside 



Gray and His School 49 

his reserve, or forget his academical dignity 
enough to speak at all; but when he does speak 
he always shows that the genuine depth of feeling 
underlies the crust of propriety. He cannot drop, 
nor does he desire to drop, the conventionality of 
style, but he makes us feel that he is a human be- 
ing before he is a critic or a don. He wears stately 
robes because it is an ingrained habit, but he does 
not suppose that the tailor can make the man. In 
his letters this is as clear as in his poetry. His 
habitual reserve restrains him from sentimental- 
ising, and he generally relieves himself by a pleas- 
ant vein of sub-acid humour. But now and then 
he speaks, as it were, shyly or half afraid to un- 
bosom himself, and yet with a pathetic tenderness 
which conquers our sympathy. Such is the beau- 
tiful little letter to Mason on the death of his wife, 
or still more the letter in which he confides to his 
friend Nichols how he had " discovered a thing 
very little known, which is that in one's whole life 
one can never have more than a single mother. " 
Sterne might have written a chapter of exquisite 
sentimentalising without approaching the pathetic 
charm of that single touch of the reserved and 
outwardly pedantic don. His utterance is wrung 
from him in spite of himself, and still half veiled 
by the quaintness of the phrase. 

Gray's love of nature shows itself in the same 

VOL. IV. 4. 



50 Hours in a Library 

way. He does not make poetical capital out of 
it, and indeed has an impression that it would be 
scarcely becoming. He would agree with Pope's 
contempt for "pure description." Fields and 
hills should only be admitted in the background 
of his dignified poetry, and just so far as they are 
obviously appropriate to the sentiment to be ex- 
pressed. But when he does speak it is always 
with the most genuine feeling in every word. 
There is a charming little description of the 
Southampton Water and of a sunrise he can 
" hardly believe" that anybody ever saw a sunrise 
before which are as perfect vignettes as can be 
put upon paper within equal limits, worth acres 
of more pretentious word-painting. He rather 
despised Mason's gardening tastes, it seems, on 
the ground that his sham wildernesses and water- 
falls could never come up to Skiddaw and Lodore. 
To spend a week at Keswick is for him to be "in 
Elysium." He kept notes, too, about natural 
history, which seem to show as keen an interest 
in the behaviour of birds or insects as that of 
White of Selborne himself. And yet his sensi- 
bility to such impressions has scarcely left a trace 
in his poetry, except in the moping owl and the 
droning flight of the beetle in the Elegy. The 
Spring has to appear in company with the "rosy- 
bosom'd hours," and the Muse and the insects 



Gray and His School 51 

have to preach a pathetic little sermon to justify 
the notice which is taken of them. Obviously 
this is not the kind of mountain worship which 
would satisfy Scott or Wordsworth. Gray was, 
perhaps, capable of feeling "the impulse from the 
vernal wood" as truly as Wordsworth, but he 
would have altogether rejected the doctrine that 
it could teach him more than all "the sages," and 
resisted the temptation to throw his books aside ex- 
cept for a brief constitutional. A turn in the backs 
of the colleges was enough for him, as a rule, and 
sometimes he* may thoroughly enjoy a brief holi- 
day by the side of Derwentwater as a delightful 
relief after the muddy oozings of the Cam. No- 
body could, in this sense, love nature with a more 
sincere and vivid affection; but such a love of 
nature is not symptomatic, as with Wordsworth, 
or Cowper, or Rousseau, of any preference of sav- 
age, or rustic, or simple life to the existing order 
of civilised society. It implied at most the de- 
velopment of a new taste, inadequately appre- 
ciated by the cockney men of letters of his own 
or the preceding generation, but not that passion- 
ate longing for relief from an effete set of conven- 
tions, poetical, political, and social, characteristic 
of the rising school. His head, when he travels, 
is evidently as full of Dugdale's Monasticon as of 
Ossian, and he reconstructs and repeoples Netley 



5 2 Hours in a Library 

Abbey in fancy to give a charm to the Solent. 
He places in it a monk, who glances at the white 
sail that shoots by over a stretch of blue glittering 
sea visible between the oak groves, and then en- 
ters and crosses himself to drive away the tempter 
who has thrown that distraction in his way. Gray 
himself pretty much shared the sentiments of 
his imagined monk, and only catches occasional 
glimpses of natural scenery from the loopholes 
of his retreat in an eighteenth-century cloister. 



Sterne 

"LovE me, love my book" is a version of a 
familiar proverb which one might be slow to ac- 
cept. There are, as one need hardly say, many 
admirable persons for whose sake one would gladly 
make any sacrifice of personal comfort short of 
that implied in a study of their works. But the 
converse of the statement is more nearly true. 
I confess that I at any rate love a book pretty 
much in proportion as it makes me love the au- 
thor. I do not of course speak of histories or 
metaphysical treatises which one reads for the 
sake of the information or of the logical teaching ; 
but of the imaginative books which appeal in the 
last resort to the sympathy between the writer 
and the reader. It matters not whether you are 
brought into contact with a man by seeing or 
hearing, by the printed or spoken word the 
ultimate source of pleasure is the personal affin- 
ity. To read a book in the true sense to read it, 
that is, not as the critic but in the spirit of enjoy- 
ment is to lay aside for the moment one's own 



54 Hours in a Library 

personality, and to become a part of the author. 
It is to enter the world in which he habitually lives 
for each of us lives in a separate world of his 
own to breathe his air, and therefore to receive 
pleasure and pain according as the atmosphere 
is or is not congenial. I may by an intellectual 
effort perceive the greatness of a writer whose 
character is essentially antagonistic to my own; 
but I cannot feel it as it must be felt for genuine 
enjoyment. The qualification must, of course, 
be understood that a great book really expresses 
the most refined essence of the writer's character. 
It gives the author transfigured, and does not 
represent all the stains and distortions which he 
may have received in his progress through the 
world. In real life we might have been repelled 
by Milton's stern Puritanism, or by some out- 
break of rather testy self-assertion. In reading 
Paradise Lost, we feel only the loftiness of char- 
acter, and are raised and inspirited by the senti- 
ments, without pausing to consider the particular 
application. 

If this be true in some degree of all imaginative 
writers, it is especially true of humourists. For 
humour is essentially the expression of a personal 
idiosyncrasy, and a man is a humourist just be- 
cause the tragic and the comic elements of life 
present themselves to his mind in new and unex- 



Sterne 55 

pected combinations. The objects of other men's 
reverence strike him from the ludicrous point of 
view, and he sees something attractive in the 
things which they affect to despise. It is his 
function to strip off the commonplaces by which 
we have tacitly agreed to cover over our doubts 
and misgivings, and to explode empty, pretences 
by the touch of a vigorous originality ; and there- 
fore it is that the great mass of mankind are 
apt to look upon humour of the stronger flavour 
with suspicion. They suspect the humourist 
not without reason of laughing at their beards. 
There is no saying where he may not explode 
next. They can enjoy the mere buffoonery which 
comes from high spirits combined with thought- 
lessness. And they can fairly appreciate the 
gentle humour of Addison, or Goldsmith, or 
Charles Lamb, where the kindliness of the inten- 
tion is so obvious that the irony is felt to be harm- 
less. It represents only the tinge of melancholy 
which every good man must feel at the sight of 
human folly, and is used rather to light up by its 
gentle irradiation the amiable aspects of weak- 
ness than to unmask solemn affectation and suc- 
cessful hypocrisy. As soon as the humourist 
begins to be more pungent, and the laughter to 
be edged with scorn and indignation, good quiet 
people who do not like to be shocked begin to 



56 Hours in a Library 

draw back. They are half ashamed when a Cer- 
vantes or a Montaigne, a Rabelais or a Swift, 
takes them into his confidence and proposes in 
the true humourist's spirit to but show them the 
ugly realities of the world or of his own mind. 
They shrink from the exposure which follows of the 
absurdity of heroes, the follies of the wise, the cru- 
elty and injustice of the virtuous. In their hearts 
they take this daring frankness for sheer cyn- 
icism, and reject his proffered intimacy. They 
would rather overlook the hollowness of estab- 
lished conventions than have them ruthlessly 
exposed by the sudden audacity of these daring 
rebels. To the man, on the contrary, who is 
predisposed to sympathy by some affinity of 
character, the sudden flash of genuine feeling is 
infinitely refreshing. He rejoices to see theories 
confronted with facts, solemn conventions turned 
inside out, and to have the air cleared by a sudden 
burst of laughter, though it may occasionally have 
something rather savage in it. He welcomes the 
discovery that another man has dared to laugh 
at the idols before which we are all supposed to 
bow in solemn reverence. We love the humour 
in short so far as we love the character from which 
it flows. Everybody can love the spirit which 
shows itself in the Essays of Elia; but you can 
hardly love the Tale of a Tub or Gulliver unless 



Sterne 57 

you have a sympathy with the genuine Swift 
which overpowers your occasional disgust at his 
misanthropy. But to this general rule there is 
one marked exception in our literature. It is im- 
possible for any one with the remotest taste for 
literary excellence to read Tristram Shandy or the 
Sentimental Journey without a sense of wondering 
admiration. One can hardly read the familiar 
passages without admitting that Sterne was per- 
haps the greatest artist in the language. No one 
at least shows more inimitable felicity in produc- 
ing a pungent effect by a few touches of exquisite 
precision. He gives the impression that the thing 
has been done once for all ; he has hit the bull's eye 
round which inspiring marksmen go on blundering 
indefinitely without any satisfying success. Two 
or three of the scenes in which Uncle Toby ex- 
presses his sentiments are as perfect in their way 
as the half-dozen lines in which Mrs. Quickly de- 
scribes the end of Falstaff, and convince us that 
three strokes from a man of genius may be worth 
more than the life's labour of the cleverest of 
skilled literary workmen. And it may further be 
said that Uncle Toby, like his kinsmen in the world 
of humour, is an incarnation of most lovable qual- 
ities. In going over the list a short list in any 
case of the immortal characters in fiction, there 
is hardly any one in our literature who would be 



58 Hours in a Library 

entitled to take precedence of him. To find a dis- 
tinctly superior type, we must go back to Cer- 
vantes, whom Sterne idolised and professed to 
take for his model. But to speak of a character 
as in some sort comparable to Don Quixote, though 
without any thought of placing him on the same 
level, is to admit that he is a triumph of art. In- 
deed, if we take the other creator of types, of whom 
it is only permitted to speak with bated breath, 
we must agree that it would be difficult to find a 
figure even in the Shakespearean gallery more ad- 
mirable in its way. Of course, the creation of a 
Hamlet, an lago, or a Falstaff implies an intellect- 
ual intensity and reach of imaginative sympathy 
altogether different from anything which his 
wannest admirers would attribute to Sterne. I 
only say that there is no single character in Shake- 
speare whom we see more vividly and love more 
heartily than Mr. Shandy's uncle. 

It should follow, according to the doctrine just 
set forth, that we ought to love Uncle Toby's 
creator. But here I fancy that everybody will be 
sensible of a considerable difficulty. The judg- 
ment pronounced upon Sterne by Thackeray seems 
to me to be substantially unimpeachable. The 
more I know of the man, for my part, the less I 
like him. It is impossible to write his biography 
(from the admiring point of view) without making 



Sterne 59 

it a continuous apology. His faults may be ex- 
tenuated by the customary devices ; but there is 
a terrible lack of any positive merits to set against 
them. He seems to have been fond of his daugh- 
ter and tolerant of his wife. The nearest ap- 
proach to a good action recorded of him is that 
when they preferred remaining in France to follow- 
ing him to England, he took care that they should 
have the income which he had promised. The 
liberality was nothing very wonderful. He knew 
that his wife was severely economical, as she had 
good reason to be; inasmuch as his own health 
was most precarious, and he was spending his in- 
come with a generous freedom which left her in 
destitution at his death. Still we are glad to give 
him all credit for not being a grudging paymaster. 
Some better men have been less good-natured. 
The rest of his panegyric consists of excuses for 
his shortcomings. We know the regular formu- 
lae. He had bad companions, it is said, in his 
youth. Men who show a want of principle in 
later life have a knack of picking up bad compan- 
ions at their outset. We are reminded as usual 
that the morals of the time were corrupt. It is 
a very difficult question how far this is true. We 
can only make a rough guess as to the morals of 
our own time; some people can see steady im- 
provement, where others see nothing but signs of 



60 Hours in a Library 

growing corruption; but when we come to speak 
of the morals of an age more or less removed, there 
are so many causes of illusion that our estimates 
have very small title to respect. It is no doubt 
true that the clergy of the Church of England in 
Sterne's day took a less exalted view than they 
now do of their own position and duties; that 
they were frequently pluralists and absentees ; that 
patrons had small sense of responsibility; and 
that, as a general rule, the spiritual teachers of 
the country took life easily, and left an ample 
field for the activity of Wesley and his followers. 
But, making every allowance for this, it would be 
grossly unfair to deny, what is plainly visible in 
all the memoirs of the time, that there were plenty 
of honest squires and persons in every part of the 
country leading wholesome domestic lives. 

But, in any case, such apologies rather explain 
how a man came to be bad, than prove that he 
was not bad. They would show at most that we 
were making an erroneous inference if we inferred 
badness of heart from conduct which was not con- 
demned by the standard of his own day. This 
argument, however, is really inapplicable. Sterne's 
faults were of a kind for which if anything there 
was less excuse then than now. The faults of 
his best-known contemporaries, of men like Field- 
ing, Smollett, or Churchill, were the faults of 



Sterne 61 

robust temperament with an excess of animal pas- 
sions. Their coarseness has left a stain upon 
their pages as it injured their lives. But, however 
much we may lament or condemn, we do not feel 
that such men were corrupt at heart. And that, 
unfortunately, is just what we are tempted to feel 
about Sterne. When the huge, brawny parson, 
Churchill, felt his unfitness for clerical life, he 
pitched his cassock to the dogs and blossomed 
out in purple and gold. He set the respectabil- 
ities at defiance, took up with Wilkes and the 
reprobates, and roared out full-mouthed abuse 
against bishops and ministers. He could still be 
faithful to his friends, observe his own code of 
honour, and do his best to make some atonement 
to the victims of his misconduct. Sterne, one 
feels, differs from Churchill not really as being 
more virtuous, but in not having the courage to 
be so openly vicious. Unlike Churchill, he could 
be a consummate sneak. He was quite as ready 
to flatter Wilkes or to be on intimate terms with 
atheists and libertines, with Holbach and Cre- 
billon, when his bishop and his parishioners could 
not see him. His most intimate friend from early 
days was John Hall Stevenson the country 
squire whose pride it was to ape in the provinces 
the orgies of the monks of Medmenham Abbey, 
and once notorious as the author of a grossly 



62 Hours in a Library 

indecent book. The dog-Latin letter in which 
Sterne informs this chosen companion that he is 
weary of his life contains other remarks sufficiently 
significant of the nature of their intimacy. The 
age was not very nice; but it was quite acute 
enough to see the objections to a close alliance be- 
tween a married ecclesiastic of forty-five x and the 
rustic Don Juan of the district. But his cynicism 
becomes doubly disgusting when we remember 
that Sterne was all the time as eager as any patron- 
age hunter to ingratiate himself into the good 
graces of bishops. Churchill, we remember, lam- 
pooned Warburton with savage ferocity. Sterne 
tried his best to conciliate the most conspicuous 
prelate of the day. He never put together a 
more elaborately skilful bit of writing than the 
letter which he wrote to Garrick, with the obvious 
intention that it should be shown to Warburton. 
He humbly says that he has no claim to an intro- 
duction, except " what arises from the honour and 
respect which, in the progress of my work, will be 
shown the world I owe so great a man.'* The 
statement was probably meant to encounter a 
suspicion which Warburton entertained that he 
was to be introduced in a ridiculous character in 
Tristram Shandy. The bishop was sufficiently 

1 Sterne says in the letter that Hall was over forty; and 
he was five years older than Hall. 



Sterne 63 

soothed to administer not only good advice but a 
certain purse of gold, which had an unpleasant 
resemblance to hush-money. It became evident, 
however, that the author of Tristram Shandy was 
not a possible object of episcopal patronage ; and, 
indeed, he was presently described by the bishop 
as an "irrevocable scoundrel." Sterne's " honour 
and respect" never found expression in his writ- 
ings; but he ingeniously managed to couple the 
Divine Legation the work which had justified 
Warburton's elevation to the bench with the 
Tale of a Tub, the audacious satire upon orthodox 
opinions which had been an insuperable bar to 
Swift's preferment. The insinuation had its sting, 
for there were plenty of critics in those days who 
maintained that Warburton's apology was really 
more damaging to the cause of orthodoxy than 
Swift's burlesque. We cannot resist the convic- 
tion that if Warburton had been more judicious 
in his distribution of patronage, he would have 
received a very different notice in return. The 
blow from Churchill's bludgeon was, on any right, 
given by an open enemy. This little stab came 
from one who had been a servile flatterer. 

No doubt Sterne is to be pitied for his uncon- 
genial position. The relations who kindly took 
him off the hands of his impecunious father could 
provide for him most easily in the Church ; and he 



64 Hours in a Library 

is not the only man who has been injured by being 
forced by such considerations into a career for 
which he was unfitted. In the same way we may 
pity him for having become tired of his wife whom 
he seems to have married under a generous im- 
pulse she was no doubt a very tiresome woman 
and try to forgive him for some of his flirtations. 
But it is not so easy to forgive the spirit in which 
he conducted them. One story, as related by an 
admiring biographer, will be an amply sufficient 
specimen. He fell in love with a Miss Fourman- 
telle, who was living at York when he was finishing 
the first volumes of Tristram Shandy at the ripe 
age of forty-six. He introduced her into that 
work as " dear, dear Jenny." He writes to her in 
his usual style of love-making. He swears that 
he loves her "to distraction," and will love her 
"to eternity." He declares that there is "only 
one obstacle to their happiness" obviously Mrs. 
Sterne and solemnly prays to God that she may 
so live and love him as one day to share in his 
great good fortune. Precisely similar aspirations 
we note in passing, were to be soon afterwards 
addressed to Mrs. Draper, on the hypothesis that 
two obstacles to their happiness might be removed 
namely, Mr. Draper and Mrs. Sterne. Few readers 
are likely to be edified by the sacred language used 
by a clergyman on such an occasion; though 



Sterne 65 

biographical zeal has been equal even to this 
emergency. But the sequel to the Fourmantelle 
story is the really significant part. Mr. Sterne 
goes to London to reap the social fruits of his 
amazing success with Tristram Shandy. The 
whole London world falls at his feet; he is over- 
whelmed with invitations, and deafened with 
flattery ; and poor literary drudges like Goldsmith 
are scandalised by so overpowering a triumph. 
Nobody had thought it worth while to make a 
fuss about the author of the Vicar of Wakefield. 
Sterne writes the accounts of his unprecedented 
success to Miss Fourmantelle: he snatches mo- 
ments in the midst of his crowded levees to tell 
her that he is hers for ever and ever, that he would 
1 'give a guinea for a squeeze of her hand;" and 
promises to use his influence in some affair in 
which she is interested. Hereupon Miss Four- 
mantelle follows him to London. She finds him 
so deeply engaged that he cannot see her from 
Sunday till Friday ; though he is still good enough 
to say that he would wish to be with her always, 
were it not for "fate." And, hereupon, Miss 
Fourmantelle vanishes out of history, and Mr. 
Sterne ceases to trouble his head about her. It 
needs only to be added that this is but one epi- 
sode in Sterne's career out of several of which the 
records have been accidently preserved. Mrs. 

VOL. IV. 5. 



66 Hours in a Library 

Draper seems to have been the most famous case ; 
but, according to his own statement, he had regu- 
larly on hand some affair of the sort, and is proud 
of the sensibility which they indicate. 

Upon such an occurrence only one comment is 
possible from the moralist's point of view, namely, 
that a brother of Miss Fourmantelle, had she 
possessed a brother would have been justified in 
administering a horse- whipping. I do not, how- 
ever, wish to preach a sermon upon Sterne's in- 
iquities, or to draw any edifying conclusions upon 
the present occasion. We have only to deal with 
the failings of the man so far as they are reflected 
in the author. Time enables us to abstract and 
distinguish. A man's hateful qualities may not 
be of the essence of his character, or they may be 
only hateful in certain specific relations which do 
not now affect us. Moreover, there is some kind 
of immorality spite and uncharitableness, for 
example which is not without its charm. Pope 
was in many ways a far worse man than Sterne; 
he was an incomparably more elaborate liar, and 
the amount of gall with which his constitution 
was saturated would have been enough to furnish 
a whole generation of Sternes. But we can ad- 
mire the brilliance of Pope's epigrams without 
bothering ourselves with the reflection that he 
told a whole series of falsehoods as to the date of 



Sterne 67 

their composition. We can enjoy the pungency 
of his indignant satire without asking whether 
it was directed against deserving objects. Atticus 
was perhaps a very cruel caricature of Addison; 
but the lines upon Atticus remain as an incom- 
parably keen dissection of a type which need not 
have been embodied in this particular representa- 
tive. Some people, indeed, may be too virtuous 
or tender-hearted to enjoy any exposure of human 
weakness. I make no pretensions to such amia- 
bility, and I can admire the keenness of the wasp's 
sting when it is no longer capable of touching me 
and my friends. Indeed, almost any genuine 
ebullition of human passion is interesting in its 
way, and it would be pedantic to be scandalised 
whenever it is rather more vehement than a 
moralist would approve, or happens to break out 
on the wrong occasion. The reader can apply 
s the correction for himself; he can read satire in 
his moments of virtuous indignation, and twist 
it in his own mind against some of those people 
they are generally to be found who really de- 
serve it. But the case is different when the senti- 
ment itself is offensive, and offensive by reason 
of insincerity. When the very thing by which 
we are supposed to be attracted is the goodness 
of a man's heart, a suspicion that he was a mere 
Tartufe cannot enter our minds without injuring 



68 Hours in a Library 

our enjoyment. We may continue to admire the 
writer's technical skill, but he cannot fascinate us 
unless he persuades us of his sincerity. One might, 
to take a parallel case, admire Reynolds for his 
skill of hand, and fine perception of form and col- 
our, if he had used them only to represent objects 
as repulsive as the most hideous scenes in Hogarth. 
One loves him, because of the exquisite tenderness 
of nature implied in the representations of infantile 
beauty. And if it were possible to feel that this 
tenderness was a mere sham, that his work was 
that of a dexterous artist skilfully flattering the 
fondness of parents, the charm would vanish. The 
children would breathe affectation instead of sim- 
plicity, and provoke only the sardonic sneer which 
is suggested by most of the infantile portraits col- 
lected in modern exhibitions. 

It is with something of this feeling that we read 
Sterne. Of the literary skill there cannot be a 
moment's question ; but if we for a moment yield 
to the enchantment, we feel ashamed, at the next 
moment, of our weakness. We have been moved 
on false pretences ; and we seem to see the sham 
Yorick with that unpleasant leer upon his too ex- 
pressive face, chuckling quietly at his successful 
imposition. It is no wonder if many of his readers 
have revolted, and even been provoked to an ex- 
cessive reaction of feeling. The criticism was too 



Sterne 69 

obvious to be missed. Horace Walpole indulged 
in a characteristic sneer at the genius who neg- 
lected a mother and snivelled over a dead donkey. 
(The neglect of a mother, we may note in passing, 
is certainly not proven.) Walpole was too much 
of a cynic, it may be said, to distinguish between 
sentimentalism and genuine sentiment, or rather 
so much of a cynic that one is surprised at his not 
liking the sentimentalism more. But Goldsmith 
at least was a man of real feeling, and as an artist 
in some respects superior even to Sterne. He was 
moved to his bitterest outburst of satire by Tris- 
tram Shandy. He despised the charlatan who 
eked out his defects of humour by the paltry me- 
chanical devices of blank pages, disordered chap- 
ters, and a profuse indulgence in dashes. He 
pointed out with undeniable truth the many griev- 
ous stains by which Sterne's pages are defaced. He 
spoke with disgust of the ladies who worshipped 
the author of a book which they should have been 
ashamed to read, and found the whole secret of 
Sterne's success in his pertness and indecency. 
Goldsmith may have been yielding unconsciously 
to a not unnatural jealousy, and his criticism 
certainly omits to take into account Sterne's 
legitimate claims to admiration. It is happily 
needless to insist at the present day upon the palp- 
able errors by which the delicate and pure-minded 



70 Hours in a Library 

Goldsmith was offended. It is enough to indulge 
in a passing word of regret that a man of Sterne's 
genius should have descended so often to mere 
buffoonery or to the most degrading methods of 
meeting his reader's interest. The Sentimental 
Journey is a book of simply marvellous cleverness, 
to which one can find no nearer parallel than 
Heine's Reisebilder. But one often closes it with 
a mixture of disgust and regret. The disgust needs 
no explanation ; the regret is caused by our feeling 
that something has been missed which ought to 
have been in the writer's power. He has so keen 
an eye for picturesque effects ; he is so sensitive to 
a thousand little incidents which your ordinary 
traveller passes with eyes riveted to his guide- 
book, or which "Smelfungus" Smollett disre- 
garded in his surly British pomposity; he is so 
quick at appreciating some delicate courtesy in 
humble life or some pathetic touch of common- 
place suffering, that one grows angry when he 
spoils a graceful scene by some prurient double 
meaning, and wastes whole pages in telling a story- 
fit only for John Hall Stevenson. One feels that 
one has been rambling with a discreditable par- 
son, who is so glad to be free from the restraints 
of his parish or of Mrs. Sterne's company that he 
is always peeping into forbidden corners, and 
anxious to prove to you that he is as knowing in 



Sterne 7 1 

the ways of a wicked world as a raffish undergrad- 
uate enjoying a stolen visit to London. Gold- 
smith's idyllic pictures of country life may be a 
little too rose-coloured, but at least they are har- 
monious. Sterne's sudden excursions into the 
nauseous are like the brutal practical jokes of a 
dirty boy who should put filth into a scent bottle. 
We feel that if he had entered the rustic paradise, 
of which Dr. and Mrs. Primrose were the Adam 
and Eve, half his sympathies would have been 
with the wicked Squire Thornhill ; he would have 
been quite as able to suit that gentleman's tastes 
as to wheedle the excellent Vicar ; and his homage 
to Miss Olivia would have partaken of the nature 
of an insult. A man of Sterne's admirable deli- 
cacy of genius, writing always with an eye to the 
canons of taste approved in Crazy Castle, must 
necessarily produce painful discords, and throw 
away admirable workmanship upon contemptible 
ribaldry. But the very feeling proves that there 
was really a finer element in him. Had he been 
thoroughly steeped in the noxious element, there 
would have been no discord. We might simply 
have set him down as a very clever reprobate. 
But, with some exceptions, we can generally 
recognise something so amiable and attractive as 
to excite our regret for the waste of genius even 
in his more questionable passages. 



72 Hours in a Library 

Coleridge points out, with his usual critical 
acuteness, that much of Tristram Shandy would 
produce simple disgust were it not for the presence 
of that wonderful group of characters who are an- 
tagonistic to the spurious wit based upon simple 
shocks to a sense of decency. That group re- 
deems the book, and we may say that it is the 
book. We must therefore admit that the creator 
of Uncle Toby and his family must not be unre- 
servedly condemned. To admit that one thor- 
oughly dislikes Sterne is not to assert that he was 
a thorough hypocrite of the downright Tartufe 
variety. His good feelings must be something 
more than a mere sham or empty formula; they 
are not a flimsy veil thrown over degrading selfish- 
ness or sensuality. When he is attacked upon 
this ground, his apologists may have an easy tri- 
umph. The true statement is rather that Sterne 
was a man who understood to perfection the art 
of enjoying his own good feelings as a luxury with- 
out humbling himself to translate them into prac- 
tice. This is the definition of sentimentalism 
when the word is used in a bad sense. Many ad- 
mirable teachers of mankind have held the doc- 
trine that all artistic indulgence is universally 
immoral, because it is all more or less obnoxious 
to this objection. So far as a man saves up his 
good feelings merely to use them as the raw mater- 



Sterne 73 

ial of poems, he is wasting a force which ought to 
be applied to the improvement of the world. What 
have we to do with singing and painting when 
there are so many of our fellow-creatures whose 
sufferings might be relieved and whose characters 
might be purified if we turned our songs into ser- 
mons, and, instead of staining canvas, tried to 
purify the dwellings of the poor? There is a good 
deal to be said for the thesis that all fiction is 
really a kind of lying, and that art in general is a 
luxurious indulgence, to which we have no right 
whilst crime and disease are rampant in the outer 
world. 

I think, indeed, that I could detect some flaws 
in the logic by which this conclusion is sup- 
ported, but I confess that it often seems to possess 
a considerable plausibility. The peculiar senti- 
mentalism of which Sterne was one of the first 
mouthpieces would supply many effective illustra- 
tions of the argument ; for it is a continuous mani- 
festation of extraordinary skill in providing "sweet 
poison for the age's tooth/' He was exactly the 
man for his time, though, indeed, so clever a man 
would probably have been equally able to flatter 
the prevailing impulse of any time in which his 
lot had been cast. M. Taine has lately described 
with great skill the sort of fashion of philanthropy 
which became popular among the upper classes 



74 Hours in a Library 

in France in the pre-revolutionary generation. 
The fine ladies and gentlemen who were so soon 
to be crushed as tyrannical oppressors of the peo- 
ple had really a strong impression that benevo- 
lence was a branch of social elegance which ought 
to be assiduously cultivated by persons of taste 
and refinement. A similar tendency, though less 
strongly marked, is observable amongst the cor- 
responding class in English society. From causes 
which may be analysed by historians, the upper 
social stratum was becoming penetrated with a 
vague discontent with the existing order and a 
desire to find new outlets for emotional activity. 
Between the reign of comfortable common-sense, 
represented by Pope and his school, and the fierce 
outbreak of passion which accompanied the crash 
of the revolution, there was an interregnum 
marked by a semi-conscious fore-feeling of some 
approaching catastrophe; a longing for fresh ex- 
citement, and tentative excursions into various 
regions of thought, which have since been ex- 
plored in a more systematic fashion. Senti- 
mentalism was the word which represented one 
phase of this inarticulate longing, and which ex- 
presses pretty accurately the need of having some 
keen sensations without very well knowing in 
what particular channels they were to be directed. 
The growth of the feminine influence in literature 



Sterne 75 

had no doubt some share in this development. 
Women were no longer content to be simply the 
pretty fools of the Spectator, unworthy to learn 
the Latin grammar or to be admitted to the circle 
of wits; though they seldom presumed to be in- 
dependent authors, they were of sufficient import- 
ance to have a literature composed for their benefit. 
The phrase "sentimentalism" became common 
towards the middle of the century, as I have re- 
marked in speaking of Richardson. Some time 
earlier Sterne was writing a love letter to his future 
wife, lamenting the ''quiet and sentimental re- 
pasts ' ' which they had had together, and weeping 
''like a child" (so he writes) at the sight of his 
single knife and fork and plate. We have known 
the same spirit in many incarnations in later 
days. Sterne, who made the word popular in 
literature, represents what may be considered as 
sentimentalism in its purest form; that which 
corresponds most closely to its definition as senti- 
ment running to waste ; for in Sterne there is no 
thought of any moral, or political, or philosophi- 
cal application. He is as entirely free as a man 
can be from any suspicion of ' ' purpose. ' ' He tells 
us as frankly as possible that he is simply putting 
on the cap and bells for our amusement. He 
must weep and laugh just as the fancy takes him ; 
his pen, he declares, is the master of him, not he 



76 Hours in a Library 

the master of his pen. This, being interpreted, 
means, of course, something rather different from 
its obvious sense. Nobody, it is abundantly 
clear, could be a more careful and deliberate art- 
ist, though he aims at giving a whimsical and 
arbitrary appearance to his most skilfully de- 
vised effects. The author Sterne has a thorough 
command of his pen; he only means that the 
parson Sterne is not allowed to interfere in the 
management. He has no doctrine which he is in 
the least ambitious of expounding. He does not 
even wish to tell us, like some of his successors, 
that the world is out of joint; that happiness is 
a delusion, and misery the only reality; nor, 
what often comes to just the same thing, is he 
anxious to be optimistic, and to declare, in the 
vein of some later humourists, that the world 
should be regarded through a rose-coloured mask, 
and that a little effusion of benevolence will sum- 
marily remove all its rough places. Undoubtedly 
it would be easy to argue were it worth the 
trouble that Sterne's peculiarities of tempera- 
ment would have rendered certain political and 
religious teachings more congenial to him than 
others. But he did not live in stirring times, 
when every man is forced to translate his tem- 
perament by a definite creed. He could be as 
thoroughgoing and consistent an Epicurean as 



Sterne 77 

he pleased. Nothing matters very much (that 
seems to be his main doctrine), so long as you 
possess a good temper, a soft heart, and have a 
flirtation or two with pretty women. Though 
both men may be called sentimentalists, Sterne 
must have regarded Rousseau's vehement social 
enthusiasm as so much insanity. The poor man 
took life in desperate earnest, and instead of keep- 
ing his sensibility to warm his own hearth, wanted 
to set the world on fire. When rambling through 
France, Sterne had an eye for every pretty vign- 
ette by the roadside, for peasants' dances, for 
begging monks, or smart Parisian grisettes; he 
received and repaid the flattery of the drawing- 
rooms, and was, one may suppose, as absolutely 
indifferent to omens of coming difficulties as any 
of the free-thinking or free-living abbes who were 
his most congenial company. Horace Walpole 
was no philosopher, but he shook his head in 
amazement over the audacious scepticism of 
French society. Sterne, so far as one can judge 
from his letters, saw and heard nothing in this 
direction; and one would as soon expect to find 
a reflection upon such matters in the Sentimental 
Journey as to come upon a serious discussion of 
theological controversy in Tristram Shandy. Now 
and then some such question just shows itself for 
an instant in the background, A negro wanted 



78 Hours in a Library 

him to write against slavery ; and the letter came 
just as Trim was telling a pathetic story to Uncle 
Toby, and suggesting doubtfully that a black 
might have a soul. "I am not much versed, 
Corporal," quoth my Uncle Toby, "in things of 
that kind; but I suppose God would not have 
made him without one any more than thee or 
me." Sterne was quite ready to aid the cause of 
emancipation by adding as many picturesque 
touches as he could devise to Uncle Toby, or senti- 
mentalising over jackdaws and prisoners in the 
Sentimental Journey; but more direct agitation 
would have been as little in his line as travelling 
through France in the spirit of Arthur Young to 
collect statistics about rent and wages. Sterne's 
sermons, to which one might possibly turn with a 
view to discovering some serious opinions, are not 
without an interest of their own. They show 
touches of the Shandy style and efforts to escape 
from the dead level. But Sterne could not be 
really at home in the pulpit, and all that can be 
called original is an occasional infusion of a more 
pungent criticism of life into the moral common- 
places of which sermons were then chiefly com- 
posed. The sermon in Tristram Shandy supplies 
a happy background to Uncle Toby's comments; 
but even Sterne could not manage to interweave 
them into the text. 



Sterne 79 

The very essence of the Shandy character im- 
plies this absolute disengagement from all actual 
contact with sublunary affairs. Neither Fielding 
nor Goldsmith can be accused of preaching in the 
objectionable sense ; they do not attempt to supply 
us with pamphlets in the shape of novels, but in 
so far as they draw from real life they inevitably 
suggest some practical conclusions. Reformers, 
for example, might point to the prison experiences 
of Dr. Primrose or of Captain Booth, as well as to 
the actual facts which they represent ; and Smol- 
lett's account of the British navy is a more valu- 
able historical document than any quantity of 
official reports. But in Uncle Toby's bowling- 
green we have fairly shut the door upon the real 
world. We are in a region as far removed from 
the prosaic fact as in Aladdin's wondrous sub- 
terranean garden. We mount the magical hobby- 
horse, and straightway are in an enchanted land, 
"as though of hemlock we had drunk," and if the 
region is not altogether so full of delicious per- 
fume as that haunted by Keats's nightingale, and 
even admits occasional puffs of rather unsavoury 
odours, it has a singular and characteristic influ- 
ence of its own. Uncle Toby, so far as his intellect 
is concerned, is a full-grown child ; he plays with 
his toys, and rejoices over the manufacture of can- 
non from a pair of jack-boots, precisely as if he were 



8o Hours in a Library 

still in petticoats; he lives in a continuous day- 
dream framed from the materials of adult ex- 
perience, but as unsubstantial as any childish 
fancies ; and when he speaks of realities it is with 
the voice of one half-awake, and in whose mind 
the melting vision still blends with the tangible 
realities. Mr. Shandy has a more direct and con- 
scious antipathy to reality. The actual world is 
commonplace; the events there have a trick of 
happening in obedience to the laws of nature ; and 
people not unfrequently feel what one might have 
expected beforehand that they would feel. One 
can express them in cut-and-dried formulae. Mr. 
Shandy detests this monotony. He differs from 
the ordinary pedant in so far as he values theories 
not in proportion to their dusty antiquity, but in 
proportion to their unreality, the pure whimsi- 
cality and irrationality of the heads which con- 
tained them. He is a sort of inverted philosopher, 
who loves the antithesis of the reasonable as pas- 
sionately as your commonplace philosopher pro- 
fesses to love the reasonable. He is ready to 
welcome a reductio ad absurdum for a demonstra- 
tion ; yet he values the society of men of the or- 
dinary turn of mind precisely because his love of 
oddities makes him relish a contradiction. He is 
enabled to enjoy the full flavour of his preposter- 
ous notions by the reaction of other men's aston- 



Sterne 81 

ished common-sense. The sensation of standing 
upon his head is intensified by the presence of 
others in the normal position. He delights in the 
society of the pragmatic and contradictious Dr. 
Slop, because Slop is like a fish always ready to 
rise at the bait of a palpable paradox, and quite 
unable to see with the prosaic humourist that 
paradoxes are the salt of philosophy. Poor Mrs. 
Shandy drives him to distraction by the detest- 
able acquiescence with which she receives his 
most extravagant theories, and the consequent 
impossibility of ever (in the vulgar phrase) getting 
a rise out of her. 

A man would be priggish indeed who could not 
enjoy this queer region where all the sober pro- 
prieties of ordinary logic are as much inverted as 
in Alice's Wonderland; where the only serious 
occupation of a good man's life is in playing an 
infantile game ; where the passion of love is only 
introduced as a passing distraction when the 
hobby-horse has accidentaly fallen out of gear; 
where the death of a son merely supplies an 
affectionate father with a favourable opportun- 
ity for airing his queer scraps of outworn morali- 
ties, and the misnaming of an infant casts him 
into a fit of profound melancholy; where every- 
thing, in short, is topsy-turvy, and we are invited 
to sit down, consuming a perpetual pipe in an 

VOL. IV. 6. 



82 Hours in a Library 

old-fashioned arbour, dreamily amusing ourselves 
with the grotesque shapes that seem to be pro- 
jected, in obedience to no perceptible law, upon 
the shifting wreaths of smoke. It would be as 
absurd to lecture the excellent brothers upon the 
absurdity of their mode of life as to preach moral- 
ity to the manager of a Punch show, or to demand 
sentiment in the writer of a mathematical treatise. 

I believe in my soul [says Sterne, rather auda- 
ciously] that the hand of the supreme Maker and 
Designer of all things never made or put a family to- 
gether, where the characters of it were cast and con- 
trasted with so dramatic a felicity as ours was, for 
this end ; or in which the capacities of affording such 
exquisite scenes, and the powers of shifting them per- 
petually from morning to night, were lodged and en- 
trusted with so unlimited a confidence as in the 
Shandy family. 

The grammar of the sentence is rather queer, but 
we can hardly find fault with the substance. The 
remark is made & propos of Mr. Shandy's attempt 
to indoctrinate his brother with the true theory 
of noses, which is prefaced by the profoundly 
humorous sentence which expresses the leading 
article of Mr. Shandy's creed: ''Learned men, 
brother Toby, .don't write dialogues upon long 
noses for nothing." And, in fact, one sees how 
admirably the simplicity of each brother plays 
into the eccentricity of the other. The elder 



Sterne 83 

Shandy could not have found in the universe a 
listener more admirably calculated to act as whet- 
stone for his strangely constructed wit, to dissent 
in precisely the right tone, not with a brutal in- 
trusion of common-sense, but with the gentle 
horror of innocent astonishment at the paradoxes, 
mixed with veneration for the portentous learn- 
ing of his senior. By looking at each brother 
alternately through the eyes of his relative, we 
are insensibly infected with the intense relish 
which each feels for the cognate excellence of the 
other. When the characters are once familiar to 
us, each new episode in the book is a delightful ex- 
periment upon the fresh contrasts which can be 
struck out by skilfully shifting their positions and 
exchanging the parts of clown and chief actor. 
The light is made to flash from a new point, as 
the gem is turned round by skilled hands. Sterne's 
wonderful dexterity appears in the admirable set- 
ting which is thus obtained for his most telling 
remarks. Many of the most famous sayings, such 
as Uncle Toby's remark about the fly, or the re- 
cording angel, are more or less adapted from other 
authors, but they come out so brilliantly that we 
feel that he has shown a full right to property 
which he can turn to such excellent account. 
Sayings quite as witty, or still wittier, may be 
found elsewhere. Some of Voltaire's incomparable 



84 Hours in a Library 

epigrams, for example, are keener than Sterne's, 
but they owe nothing to the Zadig or Candide who 
supplies the occasion for the remark. They are 
thrown out in passing, and shine by their intrinsic 
brilliancy. But when Sterne has a telling remark, 
he carefully prepares the dramatic situation in 
which it will have the whole force due to the con- 
centrated effect of all the attendant circumstances. 
"Our armies swore terribly in Flanders," cried 
my Uncle Toby, "but nothing to this." Voltaire 
could not have made a happier hit at the excess of 
the odium theologicum, but the saying comes to us 
armed with the authority of the whole Shandy 
conclave. We have a vision of the whole party 
sitting round, each charged with his own peculiar 
humour. There is Mr. Shandy, whose fancy has 
been amazingly tickled by the portentous oath of 
Ernulfus, as regards antiquarian curiosity, and 
has at once framed a quaint theory of the advan- 
tages of profane swearing in order to justify his 
delight in the tremendous formula. He regards 
his last odd discovery with the satisfaction of a 
connoisseur; " I defy a man to swear out of it!" 
It includes all oaths from that of William the 
Conqueror to that of the humblest scavenger, and 
is a perfect institute of swearing collected from all 
the most learned authorities. And there is the 
unlucky Dr. Slop, cleverly enticed into the pitfall 



Sterne 85 

by Mr. Shandy's simple cunning, and induced to 
exhibit himself as a monster of ecclesiastical feroc- 
ity by thundering forth the sounding anathema 
at the ludicrously disproportioned case of Oba- 
diah's clumsy knot-tying; and to bring out the 
full flavour of the grotesque scene, we see it as 
represented to the childlike intelligence of Uncle 
Toby, taking it all in sublime seriousness, whistling 
lilliburlero to soothe his nerves under this amazing 
performance, in sheer wonder at the sudden reve- 
lation of the potentialities of human malediction, 
and compressing his whole character in that ad- 
mirable cry of wonder, so phrased as to exhibit 
his innocent conviction that the habits of the 
armies in Flanders supplied a sort of standard by 
which the results of all human experience might 
be appropriately measured, and to even justify it 
in some degree by the queer felicity of the par- 
ticular application. A formal lecturer upon the 
evils of intolerance might argue in a set of treatises 
upon the light in which such an employment of 
sacred language would strike the unsophisticated 
common-sense of a benevolent mind. The imag- 
inative humourist sets before us a delicious picture 
of two or three concrete human beings, and is then 
able at one stroke to deliver a blow more telling 
than the keenest flashes of the dry light of logical 
understanding. The more one looks into the 



86 Hours in a Library 

scene and tries to analyse the numerous elements 
of dramatic effect to which his total impression 
is owing, the more one admires the astonishing 
skill which has put so much significance into a few 
simple words. The colouring is so brilliant and 
the touch so firm that one is afraid to put any 
other work beside it. Nobody before or since has 
had so clear an insight into the meaning which can 
be got out of a simple scene by a judicious selec- 
tion and skilful arrangement of the appropriate 
surroundings. Sterne's comment upon the mode 
in which Trim dropped his hat at the peroration 
of his speech upon Master Bobby's death, affect- 
ing even the "fat, foolish scullion," is significant. 

Had he flung it, or thrown it, or skimmed it, or 
squirted it, or let it slip or fall in any possible direc- 
tion under Heaven or in the best direction that 
could have been given to it had he dropped it like a 
goose, like a puppy, like an ass, or in doing it, or even 
after he had done it, had he looked like a fool, like a 
ninny, like a nincompoop, it had failed, and the 
effect upon the heart had been lost. 

Those who would play upon human passions 
and, those who are played upon, or, in Sterne's 
phrase those who drive, and those who are driven, 
like turkeys to market, with a stick and a red 
clout, are invited to meditate upon Trim's hat; 
and so may all who may wish to understand the 
secret of Sterne's art. 



Sterne 87 

It is true, unfortunately, that this singular skill 
the felicity with which Trim's cap, or his Mon- 
tero cap, or Uncle Toby's pipe is made to radi- 
ate eloquence, sometimes leads to a decided bathos. 
The climax so elaborately prepared too often 
turns out to be a faded bit of sentimentalism. 
We rather resent the art which is thrown away to 
prepare us for the assertion that ''When a few 
weeks will rescue misery out of her distress, I hate 
the man who can be a churl of them." So we 
hate the man who can lift his hand upon a woman 
save in the way of kindness, but we do not want a 
great writer to adorn that unimpeachable senti- 
ment with all the jewels of rhetoric. It is just in 
these very critical passages that Sterne's taste is 
defective, because his feeling is not sound. We 
are never sure that we can distinguish between the 
true gems and the counterfeit. When the moment 
comes at which he suddenly drops the tear of 
sensibility, he is almost as likely to provoke sneers 
as sympathy. There is, for example, the famous 
donkey, and it is curious to compare the donkey 
fed with macaroons in the Tristram Shandy with 
the dead donkey of the Sentimental Journey, 
whose weeping master lays a crust of bread on the 
now vacant bit of his bridle. It is obviously the 
same donkey, and Sterne has reflected that he can 
squeeze a little more pathos out of the animal by 



88 Hours in a Library 

actually killing him, and providing a sentimental 
master. It seems to me that, in trying to heighten 
the effect, he has just crossed the dangerous limit 
which divides sympathetic from derisive laughter ; 
and whereas the macaroon-fed animal is a possible, 
straight-forward beast, he becomes (as higher be- 
ings have done) a humbug in his palpably hypo- 
critical epitaph. Sterne tries his hand in the same 
way at improving Maria, who is certainly an effect- 
ive embodiment of the mad young woman who 
has tried to move us in many forms since the days 
of Ophelia. In her second appearance, she comes 
in to utter the famous sentiment about the wind 
and the shorn lamb. It has become proverbial, 
and been even credited in the popular mind with 
a scriptural origin; and considering such a suc- 
cess, one has hardly the right to say that it has 
gathered a certain sort of banality. Yet it is 
surely on the extreme verge at which the pathetic 
melts into the ludicrous. The reflection, however, 
occurs more irresistibly in regard to that other fa- 
mous passage about the recording angel. Sterne's 
admirers held it to be sublime at the time, and he 
obviously shared the opinion. And it is unde- 
niable that the story of Le Fevre, in which it is 
the most conspicuous gem, is a masterpiece in its 
way. No one can read it, or better still, hear it 
from the lips of a skilful reader, without admitting 



Sterne 89 

the marvellous felicity with which the whole scene 
is presented. Uncle Toby's oath is a triumph 
fully worthy of Shakespeare. But the recording 
angel, though he certainly comes in effectively, is 
a little suspicious to me. It would have been a 
sacrifice to which few writers could have been 
equal, to suppress or soften that brilliant climax ; 
and, yet, if the angel had been omitted, the pass- 
age would, I fancy, have been really stronger. 
We might have been left to make the implied 
comment for ourselves. For the angel seems to 
introduce an unpleasant air as of eighteenth- 
century politeness ; we fancy that he would have 
welcomed a Lord Chesterfield to the celestial 
mansions with a faultless bow and a dexterous 
compliment; and somehow he appears, to my 
imagination at least, apparelled in theatrical gauze 
and spangles rather than in the genuine angelic cos- 
tume. Some change passes over every famous 
passage ; the bloom of its first freshness is rubbed 
off as it is handed from one quoter to another ; but 
where the sentiment has no false ring at the begin- 
ning, the colours may grow faint without losing 
their harmony. In this angel, and some other of 
Sterne's best-known touches, we seem to feel that 
the baser metal is beginning to show itself through 
the superficial enamel. 

And this suggests the criticism which must still 



90 Hours in a Library 

be made in regard even to the admirable Uncle 
Toby. Sterne has been called the English Rabe- 
lais, and was apparently more ambitious himself 
of being considered as an English Cervantes. To 
a modern English reader he is certainly far more 
amusing than Rabelais, and he can be appreciated 
with less effort than Cervantes. But it is impos- 
sible to mention these great names without seeing 
the direction in which Sterne falls short of the high- 
est excellence . We know that, on clearing away 
the vast masses of buffoonery and ribaldry under 
which Rabelais was forced, or chose, to hide him- 
self we come to the profound thinker and power- 
ful satirist. Sterne represents a comparatively 
shallow vein of thought. He is the mouthpiece 
of a sentiment which had certainly its import- 
ance in so far as it was significant of a vague dis- 
content with things in general, and a desire for 
more exciting intellectual food. He was so far 
ready to fool the age to the top of its bent ; and in 
the course of his ramblings he strikes some hard 
blows at various types of hide-bound pedantry. 
But he is too systematic a trifler to be reckoned 
with any plausibility amongst the spiritual leaders 
of any intellectual movement. In that sense, 
Tristram Shandy is a curious symptom of the ex- 
isting currents of emotion, but cannot, like the 
Emile or the Nouvelle Helo'ise, be reckoned as one 



Sterne 91 

of the efficient causes. This complete and char- 
acteristic want of purpose may indeed be reckoned 
as a literary merit, so far as it prevented Tristram 
Shandy from degenerating into a mere tract. But 
the want of intellectual seriousness has another 
aspect, which comes out when we compare Tris- 
tram Shandy, for example, with Don Quixote. 
The resemblance, which has been often pointed 
out (as indeed Sterne is fond of hinting at it him- 
self) consists in this, that in both cases we see 
lovable characters through a veil of the ludicrous. 
As Don Quixote is a true hero, though he is under 
a constant hallucination, so Uncle Toby is full of 
the milk of human kindness, though his simplic- 
ity makes him ridiculous to the piercing eyes of 
common-sense. In both cases, it is inferred, the 
humourist is discharging this true function of 
showing the lovable qualities which may be as- 
sociated with a ludicrous outside. 

The Don and the Captain both have their hob- 
bies, which they ride with equal zeal, and there 
is a close analogy between them. Uncle Toby 
makes his own apology in the famous oration 
upon war. 

What is war [he asks] but the getting together of 
quiet and harmless people with swords in their hands, 
to keep the turbulent and ambitious within bounds ? 
And heaven is my witness, brother Shandy, that the 



9 2 Hours in a Library 

pleasure I have taken in these things, and that in- 
finite delight in particular which has attended my 
sieges in the bowling-green, has arisen within me, and 
I hope in the Corporal too, from the consciousness 
that in carrying them on we were answering the great 
ends of our creation 1 . 

Uncle Toby's military ardour undoubtedly makes 
a most piquant addition to his simple-minded 
benevolence. The fusion of the gentle Christian 
with the chivalrous devotee of honour is perfect; 
and the kindliest of human beings, who would not 
hurt a hair of the fly's head, most delicately 
blended with the gallant soldier who, as Trim 
avers, would march up to the mouth of a cannon 
though he saw the match at the very touchhole. 
Should any one doubt the merits of the perform- 
ance, he might reassure himself by comparing the 
scene in which Uncle Toby makes the speech, just 
quoted, with a parallel passage in The Caxtons, 
and realise the difference between extreme imita- 
tive dexterity and the force of real genius. 

It is only when we compare this exquisite pic- 
ture with the highest art that we are sensible of 
its comparative deficiency. The imaginative force 
of Cervantes is proved by the fact that Don Quix- 
ote and his followers have become the accepted 
symbols of the most profoundly tragic element 
in human life of the contrast between the lofty 
idealism of the mere enthusiast and the sturdy 



Sterne 93 

common-sense of ordinary human beings be- 
tween the utilitarian and the romantic types of 
character ; and as neither aspect of the truth can 
be said to be exhaustive, we are rightly left with 
our sympathies equally balanced. The book may 
be a sad one to those who prefer to be blind ; but 
in proportion as we can appreciate a penetrative 
insight into the genuine facts of life, we are im- 
pressed by this most powerful presentation of the 
never-ending problem. It is impossible to find 
in Tristram Shandy any central conception of this 
breadth and depth. If Trim had been as shrewd 
as Sancho, Uncle Toby would appear like a mere 
simpleton. Like a child, he requires a thoroughly 
sympathetic audience who will not bring his play- 
things to the brutal test of actual facts. The 
high and earnest enthusiasm of the Don can stand 
the contrast of common-sense, though at the price 
of passing into insanity. But Trim is forced to be 
Uncle Toby's accomplice, or his Commander would 
never be able to play at soldiers. If Don Quixote 
had simply amused himself at a mock tourna- 
ment, and had never been in danger of mistaking 
a puppet-show for a reality, he would certainly 
have been more credible, but in the same propor- 
tion he would have been commonplace. The 
whole tragic element which makes the humour 
impressive would have disappeared. Sterne sel- 



94 Hours in a Library 

dom ventures to the limit of the tragic. The 
bowling-green of Mr. Shandy's parlance is too 
exclusively a sleepy hollow. The air is never 
cleared by a strain of lofty sentiment. When 
Yorick and Eugenius form part of the company, 
we feel that they are rather too much at home 
with offensive suggestions. When Uncle Toby's 
innocence fails to perceive their coarse insinua- 
tions, we are credited with clearer perception, and 
expected to sympathise with the spurious wit 
which derives its chief zest from the presence of 
the pure-minded victim. And so Uncle Toby 
comes to represent that stingless virtue, which 
never gets beyond the ken or hurts the feelings 
of the easy-going epicurean. His perceptions are 
too slow and his temper too mild to resent an in- 
decency as his relative, Colonel Newcome, would 
have done. He would have been too complacent, 
even to the outrageous Costigan. He is admir- 
ably kind when a comrade falls ill at his door ; but 
his benevolence can exhale itself sufficiently in 
the intervals of hobby-riding, and his chivalrous 
temper in fighting over old battles with the Cor- 
poral. We feel that he must be growing fat ; that 
his pulse is flabby and his vegetative functions 
predominant. When he falls in love with the re- 
pulsive (for she is repulsive) widow Wadman, we 
pity him as we pity a poor soft zoophyte in the 



Sterne 95 

clutches of a rapacious crab; but we have no 
sense of a wasted life. Even his military ardour 
seems to present itself to our minds as due to the 
simple affection which makes his regiment part 
of his family rather than to any capacity for 
heroic sentiment. His brain might turn soft; it 
would never spontaneously generate the noble 
madness of a Quixote, though he might have fol- 
lowed that hero with a more canine fidelity than 
Sancho. 

Mr. Matthew Arnold says of Heine, as we all 
remember, that 

The spirit of the world, 
Beholding the absurdity of men 
Their vanities, their feats let a sardonic smile 
For one short moment wander o'er his lips 
That smile was Heine. 

There is a considerable analogy, as one may note 
in passing, between the two men; and if Sterne 
was not a poet, his prose could perhaps be even 
more vivid and picturesque than Heine's. But 
his humour is generally wanting in the quality 
suggested by Mr. Arnold's phrase. We cannot 
represent it by a sardonic smile, or indeed by any 
other expression which we can very well associate 
with the world -spirit. The imaginative humour- 
ist must in all cases be keenly alive to the " ab- 
surdity of man ; " he must have a sense of the irony 



96 Hours in a Library 

of fate, of the strange interlacing of good and evil 
in the world, and of the baser and nobler elements 
in human nature. He will be affected differently 
according to his temperament and his intellectual 
grasp. He may be most impressed by the affinity 
between madness and heroism; by the waste of 
noble qualities on trifling purposes ; and, if he be 
more amiable, by the goodness which may lurk 
under ugly forms. He may be bitter and melan- 
choly, or simply serious in contemplating the fan- 
tastic tricks played by mortals before high heaven. 
But, in any case, some real undercurrent of deeper 
feeling is essential to the humourist who impresses 
us powerfully, and who is equally far from mere 
buffoonery and sentimental foppery. His smile 
must be at least edged with melancholy, and his 
pathos too deep for mere "snivelling." 

Sterne is often close to this loftier region of the 
humorous ; sometimes he fairly crosses it ; but 
his step is uncertain as of one not feeling at home. 
The absurdity of man does not make him " sar- 
donic." He takes things too easily. He shows 
us the farce of life, and feels that there is a tragi- 
cal background to it all ; but somehow he is not 
usually much disposed to cry over it, and he is ob- 
viously proud of the tears which he manages to 
produce. The thought of human folly and suf- 
fering does not usually torment and perplex him. 






Sterne 97 

The highest humourist should be the laughing 
and weeping philosopher in one ; and in Sterne the 
weeping philosopher is always a bit of a humbug. 
The pedantry of the elder Shandy is a simple 
whim, not a misguided aspiration ; and Sterne is 
so amused with his oddities that he even allows 
him to be obtrusively heartless. Uncle Toby un- 
doubtedly comes much nearer to complete success ; 
but he wants just that touch of genuine pathos 
which he would have received from the hands of 
the greatest writers. But the performance is so 
admirable in the best passages, where Sterne can 
drop his buffoonery and his indecency, that even 
a criticism which sets him below the highest place 
seems almost unfair. 

And this may bring us back for a moment to 
the man himself. Sterne avowedly drew his own 
portrait in Yorick. That clerical jester, he says, 
was a mere child, full of whim and gaiety, but 
without an ounce of ballast. He had no more 
knowledge of the world at 26 than a "romping 
unsuspicious girl of 13." His high spirits and 
frankness were always getting him into trouble. 
When he heard of a spiteful or ungenerous action 
he would blurt out that the man was a dirty fellow. 
He would not stoop to set himself right, but let 
people think of him what they would. Thus his 
faults were all due to his extreme candour and 

VOL. IV. 7. 



98 Hours in a Library 

impulsiveness. It wants little experience of the 
world to recognise the familiar portrait of an im- 
pulsive and generous fellow. It represents the 
judicious device by which a man reconciles him- 
self to some very ugly actions. It provides by 
anticipation a complete excuse for thoughtlessness 
and meanness. If he is accused of being incon- 
stant, he points out the extreme goodness of his 
impulses; and if the impulses were bad, he argues 
that at least they did not last very long. He 
prides himself on his disregard to consequences, 
even when the consequences may be injurious to 
his friends. His feelings are so genuine for the 
moment that his conscience is satisfied without 
his will translating them into action. He is per- 
fectly candid in expressing the passing phrase of 
sentiment, and therefore does not trouble himself 
to ask whether what is true to-day will be true to- 
morrow. He can call an adversary a dirty fellow, 
and is very proud of his generous indiscretion. 
But he is also capable of gratifying the dirty 
fellow's vanity by high-flown compliments if he 
happens to be in the enthusiastic vein ; and some- 
how the providence which watches over the 
thoughtless is very apt to make his impulses fall 
in with the dictates of calculated selfishness. He 
cannot be an accomplished courtier, because he is 
apt to be found out ; but he can crawl and creep 



Sterne 99 

for the nonce with any one. In real life such a 
man is often as delightful for a short time as he 
becomes contemptible on a longer acquaintance. 
When we think of Sterne as a man, and try to 
frame a coherent picture of his character, we must 
give a due weight to the baser elements of his com- 
position. We cannot forget his shallowness of 
feeling and the utter want of self-respect which 
prompted him to condescend to be a mere mounte- 
bank, and to dabble in filth for the amusement of 
graceless patrons. Nor is it really possible en- 
tirely to throw aside this judgment even in reading 
his works ; for even after abstracting our attention 
from the rubbish and the indecency, we are 
haunted in the really admirable parts by our mis- 
givings as to their sincerity. But the problem is 
one to tax critical acumen. It is one aspect of a 
difficulty which meets us sometimes in real life. 
Every man flatters himself that he can detect the 
mere hypocrite. We seem to have a sufficient 
instinct to warn us against the downright pitfalls 
where an absolute void is covered by an artificial 
stratum of mere verbiage. Perhaps even this is 
not so easy as we sometimes fancy; but there is 
a more refined sort of hypocrisy which requires 
keener dissection. How are men to draw the 
narrow and yet all-important line which separates 
not the genuine from the feigned emotion but 



ioo Hours in a Library 

the emotion which is due to some real cause, and 
that which is a cause in itself? Some people we 
know fall in love with a woman, and others are 
really in love with the passion. Grief may be the 
sign of lacerated affection, or it may be a mere 
luxury indulged in for its own sake. The senti- 
mentalism which Sterne represented corresponded 
in the main to this last variety. People had dis- 
covered the art of extracting direct enjoyment 
from their own " sensibility," and Sterne expressly 
gives thanks for his own as the great consolation 
of his life. He has the heartiest possible relish 
for his tears and lamentations, and it is precisely 
his skill in marking this vein of interest which 
gives him his extraordinary popularity. So soon 
as we discover that a man is enjoying his sorrow 
our sympathy is killed within us, and for that 
reason Sterne is apt to be repulsive to humourists 
whose sense of the human tragi-comedy is deeper 
than his own. They agree with him that the 
vanity of human dreams may suggest a mingling 
of tears and laughter; but they grieve because 
they must, not because they find it a pleasant 
amusement. Yet it is perhaps unwise to poison 
our pleasure by reflections of this kind. They 
come with critical reflection, and may at least be 
temporarily suppressed when we are reading for 
enjoyment. We need not sin ourselves by looking 



Sterne 101 

a gift horse in the mouth. The sentiment is genu- 
ine at the time. Do not inquire how far it has 
been deliberately concocted and stimulated. The 
man is not only a wonderful artist, but he is right 
in asserting that his impulses are clear and genu- 
ine. Why should not that satisfy us? Are we to 
set up for so rigid a nature that we are never to 
consent to sit down with Uncle Toby and take 
him as he is made? We may wish, if we please, 
that Sterne had always been in his best, and that 
his tears flowed from a deeper source. But so 
long as he really speaks from his heart and he 
does so in all the finer parts of the Toby drama 
why should we remember that the heart was 
rather flighty, and regarded with too much 
conscious complacency by its proprietor? The 
Shandyism upon which he prided himself was not 
a very exalted form of mind, nor one which offered 
a very deep or lasting satisfaction. Happily we 
can dismiss an author when we please; give him 
a cold shoulder in our more virtuous moods, and 
have a quiet chat with him when we are graciously 
pleased to relax. In those times we may admit 
Sterne as the best of jesters, though it may remain 
an open question whether the jester is on the 
whole an estimable institution. 



Country Books 



. 



A LOVE of the country is taken, I know not why, 
to indicate the presence of all the cardinal virtues. 
It is one of those outlying qualities which are not 
exactly meritorious, but which, for that very rea- 
son, are the more provocative of a pleasing self- 
complacency. People pride themselves upon it 
as upon early rising, or upon answering letters by 
return of post. We recognise the virtuous hero 
of a novel as soon as we are told that the cat in- 
stinctively creeps to his knee, and that the little 
child clutches his hand to stay his tottering steps. 
To say that we love the country is to make an in- 
direct claim to a similar excellence. We assert a 
taste for sweet and innocent pleasures, and an in- 
difference to the feverish excitements of artificial 
society. I, too, love the country if such a state- 
ment can be received after such an exordium ; but 
I confess to be duly modest that I love it best 
in books. In real life I have remarked that it is 
frequently damp and rheumatic, and most hated 
by those who know it best. Not long ago, I 

102 



Country Books 103 

heard a worthy oratoi at a country school-treat 
declare to his small audience that honesty, sobri- 
ety, and industry, in their station in life, might pos- 
sibly enable them to become cabdrivers in London. 
The precise form of the reward was suggested, I 
fancy, by some edifying history of an ideal cab- 
man; but the speaker clearly knew the road to 
his hearers' hearts. Perhaps the realisation of 
this high destiny might dispel their illusions. Like 
poor Susan at the corner of Wood Street, they 
would see 

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, 
And a river flow on through the vale of Cheapside. 






The Swiss, who at home regards a mountain as 
an unmitigated nuisance, is (or once was) capable 
of developing sentimental yearnings for the Alps 
at the sound of a ranz des vaches. We all agree 
with Horace that Rome is most attractive at 
Tibur, and vice versd. It is the man who has been 
"long in populous cities pent" who, according to 
Milton, enjoys 

The smell of grain or tedded grass or kine, 
Or daisy, each rural sight, each rural sound ; 

and the phrase is employed to illustrate the senti- 
ments of a being whose enjoyment of paradise was 
certainly enhanced by a sufficiently contrasted 
experience. 



104 Hours in a Library 

I do not wish to pursue the good old moral saws 
expounded by so many preachers and poets. I 
am only suggesting a possible ground of apology 
for one who prefers the ideal mode of rustication ; 
who can share the worthy Johnson's love of 
Charing Cross, and sympathise with his pathetic 
remark when enticed into the Highlands by his 
bear-leader that it is easy "to sit at home and 
conceive rocks, heaths, and waterfalls." Some 
slight basis of experience must doubtless be pro- 
vided on which to rear any imaginary fabric ; and 
the mental opiate, which stimulates the sweetest 
reverie, is found in chewing the cud of past recol- 
lections, but with a good guide, one requires small 
external aid. Though a cockney in grain, I love 
to lean upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs. 
Poyser give a bit of her mind to the squire ; to be 
lulled into a placid doze by the humming of Dorle- 
cote Mill; to sit down in Dandie Dinmont's par- 
lour, and bestow crumbs from his groaning table 
upon three generations of Peppers and Mustards ; 
or to drop into the kitchen of a good old country 
inn, and to smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen 
to the simple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams. 
When I lift my eyes to realities, I can dimly descry 
across the street a vision of my neighbour behind 
his looking-glass adjusting the parting of his back 
hair, and achieving triumphs with his white tie 



Country Books 105 

calculated to excite the envy of a Brummel. It 
is pleasant to take down one of the magicians of 
the shelf, to annihilate my neighbour and his even- 
ing parties, and to wander off through quiet coun- 
try lanes into some sleepy hollow of the past. 

Who are the most potent weavers of that de- 
lightful magic? Clearly, in the first place, those 
who have been themselves in contact with rural 
sights and sounds. The echo of an echo loses all 
sharpness of definition ; our guide may save us the 
trouble of stumbling through farmyards and across 
ploughed fields, but he must have gone through 
it himself till his very voice has a twang of the 
true country accent. Milton, as Mr. Pattison has 
lately told us, "saw nature through books," and 
is therefore no trustworthy guide. We feel that 
he has got a Theocritus in his pocket; that he is 
using the country to refresh his memories of Spen- 
ser, or Chaucer, or Virgil ; and, instead of forget- 
ting the existence of books in his company, we 
shall be painfully abashed if we miss some obvi- 
ous allusion or fail to identify the passages upon 
which he has moulded his own descriptions. And, 
indeed, to put it broadly, the poets are hardly to 
be trusted in this matter, however fresh and spon- 
taneous may be their song. They don't want to 
offer us a formal sermon, unless "they" means 
Wordsworth ; but they have not the less got their 



io6 Hours in a Library 

little moral to insinuate. Shelley's skylark and 
Keats's nightingale are equally determined that 
we shall indulge in meditations about life and 
death and the mysterious meaning of the universe. 
That is just what, on these occasions, we want to 
forget ; we want the bird's song, not the emotions 
which it excites in our abnormally sensitive na- 
tures. I can never read without fresh admiration 
Mr. Arnold's Gipsy Scholar, but in this sense that 
delightful person is a typical offender. I put 
myself, at Mr. Arnold's request, in the corner of 
the high half -reaped field ; I see the poppies peep- 
ing through the green roots and yellowing stems 
of the corn; I lazily watch the scholar with " his 
hat of antique shape," roaming the countryside, 
and becoming the living centre of one bit of true 
old-fashioned rustic scenery after another; and 
I feel myself half persuaded to be a gipsy. But 
then, before I know how or why, I find that I am 
to be worrying myself about the strange disease 
of modern life; about "our brains o'ertaxed and 
palsied hearts," and so forth; and instead of being 
lulled into a delicious dream, I have somehow been 
entrapped into a meditation upon my incapacity 
for dreaming. And more or less, this is the fashion 
of all poets. You can never be sure that they will 
let you have your dream out quietly. They must 
always be bothering you about the state of their 



Country Books 107 

souls ; and, to say the truth, when they try to be 
simply descriptive, they are for the most part in- 
tolerably dull. 

Your poet, of course, is bound to be an inter- 
preter of nature; and nature, for the present pur- 
pose, must be regarded as simply a nuisance. 
The poet, by his own account, is condescending 
to find words for the inarticulate voices of sea, 
and sky, and mountain. In reality nature is 
nothing but the sounding-board which is to give 
effect to his own valuable observations. It is a 
general but safe rule that whenever you come 
across the phrase " laws of nature," in an article 
especially if it is by a profound philosopher you 
may expect a sophistry ; and it is still more cer- 
tain that when you come across nature in a poem 
you should prepare to receive a sermon. It does 
not in the least follow that it will be a bad one. It 
may be exquisite, graceful, edifying, and sublime ; 
but, as a sermon, the more effective the less favour- 
able to the reverie which one desires to cultivate. 
Nor, be it observed, does it matter whether the 
prophet be more or less openly and unblushingly 
didactic. A good many hard things have been 
said about poor Wordsworth for his delight in 
sermonising ; and though I love Wordsworth with 
all my heart, I certainly cannot deny that he is 
capable of becoming a portentous weariness to 



io8 Hours in a Library 

the flesh. But, for this purpose, Wordsworth is 
no better and no worse than Byron or Shelley, 
or Keats or Rousseau, or any of the dealers in 
praises of Weltschmerz, or mental dyspepsia. Mr. 
Ruskin has lately told us that in his opinion 
ninety-nine things out of a hundred are not what 
they should be, but the very opposite of what they 
should be. And therefore he sympathises less 
with Wordsworth than with Byron and Rousseau, 
and other distinguished representatives of the 
same agreeable creed. From the present point 
of view the question is irrelevant. I wish to be 
for the nonce a poet of nature, not a philosopher, 
either with a healthy or a disturbed liver, deliver- 
ing a judicial opinion about nature as a whole or 
declaring whether I regard it as representing a 
satisfactory or a thoroughly uncomfortable sys- 
tem. I condemn neither opinion ; I will not pro- 
nounce Wordsworth's complacency to be simply 
the glow thrown from his comfortable domestic 
hearth upon the outside darkness; or Byron's 
wrath against mankind to be simply the crying 
of a spoilt child with a digestion ruined by sweet- 
meats. I do not want to think about it. Preach- 
ing, good or bad, from the angelic or diabolical 
point of view, cunningly hidden away in delicate 
artistic forms, or dashed ostentatiously in one's 
face in a shower of moral platitudes, is equally 



Country Books 109 

out of place. And, therefore, for the time, I 
would choose for my guide to the Alps some gentle 
enthusiast in Peaks and Passes, who tells me in 
his admirably matter-of-fact spirit what he had 
for lunch and how many steps he had to cut in the 
mur de la cote, and catalogues the mountains which 
he could see as calmly as if he were repeating 
a schoolboy lesson in geography. I eschew the 
meditations of Obermann, and do not care in the 
least whether he got into a more or less maudlin 
frame of mind about things in general as contem- 
plated from the Col de Jaman. I shrink even 
from the admirable descriptions of Alpine scenery 
in the Modern Painters, lest I should be launched 
unawares into ethical or sesthetical speculation. 
" A plague of both your houses ! " I wish to court 
entire absence of thought not even to talk to a 
graceful gipsy scholar, troubled with aspirations 
for mysterious knowledge; but rather to the 
genuine article, such as the excellent Bamfylde 
Moore Carew, who took to be a gipsy in earnest, 
and was content to be a thorough loafer, not even 
a Bohemian in conscious revolt against society, 
but simply outside of the whole social framework, 
and accepting his position with as little reflection 
as some wild animal in a congenial country. 

Some kind philosopher professes to put my 
thoughts into correct phraseology by saying that 



1 10 Hours in a Library 

for such a purpose I require thoroughly "objec- 
tive" treatment. I must, however, reject his 
suggestions, not only because " objective" and 
"subjective" are vile phrases, used for the most 
part to cover indolence and ambiguity of thought, 
but also because, if I understand the word rightly, 
it describes what I do not desire. The only thor- 
oughly objective works with which I am ac- 
quainted are those of which Bradshaw's Railway 
Guide is an accepted type. There are occasions, 
I will admit, in which such literature is the best 
help to the imagination. When I read in prosaic 
black and white that by leaving Euston Square 
at 10 A.M. I shall reach Windermere at 5.45 P.M., 
it sometimes helps me to perform an imaginary 
journey to the lakes even better than a study of 
Wordsworth's poems. It seems to give a fixed 
point round which old fancies and memories can 
crystallise; to supply a useful guarantee that 
Grasmere and Rydal do in sober earnest belong 
to the world of realities, and are not mere parts of 
the decaying phantasmagoria of memory. And 
I was much pleased the other day to find a com- 
plimentary reference in a contemporary essayist 
to a lively work called, I believe, the Shepherd's 
Guide, which once beguiled a leisure hour in a 
lonely inn, and which simply records the distinct- 
ive marks put upon the sheep of the district. The 



Country Books in 

sheep, as it proved, was not a mere poetical fig- 
ment in an idyll, but a real tangible animal, with 
wool capable of being tarred and ruddled, and 
eating real grass in real fells and accessible moun- 
tain dales. In our childhood, when any old 
broomstick will serve as well as the wondrous 
horse of brass 

On which the Tartar king did ride, 

in the days when a cylinder with four pegs is as 
good a steed as the finest animal in the Elgin mar- 
bles, and when a puddle swarming with tadpoles 
or a streamlet haunted by water-rats is as full of 
romance as a jungle full of tigers, the barest cata- 
logue of facts is the most effective. A child is de- 
liciously excited by Robinson Crusoe because De 
Foe is content to give the naked scaffolding of 
direct narrative, and leaves his reader to supply 
the sentiment and romance at pleasure. Who 
does not fear, on returning to the books which 
delighted his childhood, that all the fairy-gold 
should have turned to dead leaves? I remember 
a story told in some forgotten book of travels, 
which haunted my dreams, and still strikes me as 
terribly impressive. I see a traveller benighted 
by some accident in a nullah where a tiger has 
already supped upon his companion, and listen- 
ing to mysterious sounds, as of fiendish laughter, 



ii2 Hours in a Library 

which he is afterwards cruel enough to explain 
away by some rationalising theory as to gases. 
How or why the traveller got into or emerged from 
the scrape, I know not ; but some vague associa- 
tion of ferocious wild beasts and wood-demons in 
ghastly and haunted solitudes has ever since been 
excited in me by the mention of a nullah. It is 
as redolent of awful mysteries as the chasm in Ku- 
bla Khan. And it is painful to reflect that a nullah 
may be a commonplace phenomenon in real life; 
and that the anecdote might possibly affect me no 
more, could I now read it for the first time, than 
one of the tremendous adventures recorded by 
Mr. Kingston or Captain Mayne Reid. 

As we become less capable of supplying the 
magic for ourselves, we require it from our author. 
He must have the art the less conscious the 
better of placing us at his own point of view. 
He should, if possible, be something of a "humour- 
ist," in the old-fashioned sense of the word; not 
the man who compounds oddities, but the man 
who is an oddity; the slave, not the master, of 
his own eccentricities ; one absolutely unconscious 
that the strange twist in his mental vision is not 
shared by mankind, and capable, therefore, of 
presenting the fancies dictated by his idiosyn- 
crasy as if they corresponded to obvious and gen- 
erally recognised realities; and of propounding 



Country Books 113 

some quaint and utterly preposterous theory, as 
though it were a plain deduction from undeni- 
able truths. The modern humourist is the old 
humourist plus a consciousness of his own eccen- 
tricity, and the old humourist is the modern 
humourist minus that consciousness. The order 
of his ideas should not (as philosophers would have 
it) be identical with the order of things, but be 
determined by odd arbitrary freaks of purely 
personal association. 

This is the kind of originality which we specially 
demand from an efficient guide to the country; 
for the country means a region where men have 
not been ground into the monotony by the fric- 
tion of our social mill. The secret of his charm 
lies in the clearness with which he brings before 
us some quaint, old-fashioned type of existence. 
He must know and care as little for what passes 
in the great world of cities and parliaments as the 
family of Tullivers and Dodsons. His horizon 
should be limited by the nearest country town, 
and his politics confined to the disputes between 
the parson and the Dissenting minister. He 
should have thoroughly absorbed the character- 
istic prejudices of the little society in which he 
lives, till he is unaware that it could ever enter 
into any one's head to doubt their absolute truth. 
He should have a share of the peculiarity which is 

VOL. IV. 8. 



ii4 Hours in a Library 

often so pathetic in children the unhesitating 
conviction that some little family arrangement is 
a part of the eternal and immutable system of 
things and be as much surprised at discovering 
an irreverent world outside as the child at the dis- 
covery that there are persons who do not consider 
his papa to be omniscient. That is the temper 
of mind which should characterise your genu- 
ine rustic. As a rule, of course, it condemns him 
to silence. He has no more reason for supposing 
that some quaint peculiarity of his little circle will 
be interesting to the outside world than a frog for 
imagining that a natural philosopher would be 
interested by the statement that he was once a 
tadpole. He takes it for granted that we have all 
been tadpoles. In the queer, outlying corners of 
the world where the father goes to bed and is 
nursed upon the birth of a child (a system which 
has its attractive side to some persons of that per- 
suasion), the singular custom is so much a matter 
of course that a village historian would not think 
of mentioning it. The man is only induced to 
exhibit his humour to the world when, by some 
happy piece of fortune, he has started a hobby not 
sufficiently appreciated by his neighbours. Then 
it may be that he becomes a prophet, and in his 
anxiety to recommend his own pet fancy, un- 
consciously illustrates also the interesting social 



Country Books 1 1 5 

stratum in which it sprang to life. The hobby, in- 
deed, is too often unattractive. When a self-taught 
philosopher airs some pet crotchet, and proves, 
for example, that the legitimate descendants of 
the lost tribes are to be found amongst the O jib- 
be ways, he doubtless throws a singular light upon 
the intellectual peculiarities of his district. But 
he illustrates chiefly the melancholy truth that 
a half-taught philosopher may be as dry and as 
barren as the one who has been smoke-dried ac- 
cording to all the rules of art in the most learned 
academy of Europe. 

There are a few familiar books in which a happy 
combination of circumstances has provided us with 
a true country idyll, fresh and racy from the soil, 
not consciously constructed by the most skilful 
artistic hand. Two of them have a kind of acknow- 
ledged pre-eminence in their own department. The 
man is not to be envied who has not in his 
boyhood fallen in love with Izaak Walton and 
White of Selborne. The boy, indeed, is happily 
untroubled as to the true source of the charm. 
He pores over the Compleat Angler with the im- 
pression that he will gain some hints for beguiling, 
if not the wily carp, who is accounted the water- 
fox, at least the innocent roach, who " is accounted 
the water-sheep for his simplicity or foolishness." 
His mouth waters as he reads the directions for 



i 16 Hours in a Library 

converting the pike that compound of mud and 
needles into "a dish of meat too good for any 
but anglers or very honest men ; " a transformation 
which, if authentic, is little less than miraculous. 
He does not ask what is the secret of the charm of 
the book even for those to whom fishing is an 
abomination a charm which induced even the 
arch-cockney Dr. Johnson, in spite of his famous 
definition of angling, to prompt the republication 
of this angler's bible. It is only as he grows older, 
and has plodded through other sporting literature, 
that he can at all explain why the old gentleman's 
gossip is so fascinating. Walton, undoubtedly, 
is everywhere charming for his pure simple Eng- 
lish, and the unostentatious vein of natural piety 
which everywhere lies just beneath the surface of 
his writing. Now and then, however, in reading 
the Lives, we cannot quite avoid a sense that this 
excellent tradesman has just a touch of the unctu- 
ous about him. He is given it is a fault from 
which hagiographers can scarcely be free to us- 
ing the rose-colour a little too freely. He holds 
towards his heroes the relation of a sentimental 
churchwarden to a revered parish parson. We 
fancy that the eyes of the preacher would turn 
instinctively to Walton's seat when he wished to 
catch an admiring glance from an upturned face, 
and to assure himself that he was touching the 



Country Books n; 

"sacred fount of sympathetic tears." We im- 
agine Walton lingering near the porch to submit 
a deferential compliment as to the "florid and 
seraphical ' ' discourse to which he has been listen- 
ing, and scarcely raising his glance above the 
clerical shoe-buckles. A portrait taken from this 
point of view is apt to be rather unsatisfactory. 
Yet, in describing the "sweet humility" of a 
George Herbert or of the saintly Mr. Fairer, the 
tone is at least in keeping, and is consistent even 
with an occasional gleam of humour, as in the ac- 
count of poor Hooker, tending sheep and rocking 
the cradle under stringent feminine supremacy. 
It is less satisfactory when we ask Walton to 
throw some light upon the curiously enigmatic 
character of Donne, with its strange element of 
morbid gloom, and masculine passion, and subtle 
and intense intellect. Donne married the woman 
he loved, in spite of her father and to the injury 
of his own fortunes. "His marriage," however, 
observes the biographer, "was the remarkable 
error of his life ; an error which, though he had a 
wit able and very apt to maintain paradoxes, 
yet he was very far from justifying it." From 
our point of view, the only error was in the desire 
to justify an action of which he should have been 
proud. We must make allowance for the differ- 
ence in Walton's views of domestic authority; 



n8 Hours in a Library 

but we feel that his prejudice disqualifies him 
from fairly estimating a character of great in- 
trinsic force. A portrait of Donne cannot be 
adequately brought within the lines accepted by 
the writer of orthodox and edifying tracts. 

In spite of this little failing, this rather excessive 
subservience to the respectabilities, the Lives form 
a delightful book ; but we get the genuine Walton 
at full length in his Angler. It was first published 
in dark days ; when the biographer might be glad 
that his pious heroes had been taken from the 
sight of the coming evil ; when the scattered sur- 
vivors of his favourite school of divines and poets 
were turned out of their well-beloved colleges and 
parsonages, hiding in dark corners or plotting with 
the melancholy band of exiles in France and Hol- 
land; when Walton, instead of listening to the 
sound and witty discourses of Donne, would find 
the pulpit of the parish church profaned by some 
fanatical Puritan, expounding the Westminster 
Confession in place of the Thirty-nine Articles. 
The good Walton found consolation in the almost 
religious pursuit of his hobby. He fortified him- 
self with the authority of such admirable and 
orthodox anglers as Sir Henry Wotton and Dr. 
Nowel, Dean of St. Paul's. Dr. Nowel had, "like 
an honest angler, made that good, plain, unper- 
plexed Catechism which is printed with our good 



Country Books 119 

old service-book;" for an angler, it seems, is most 
likely to know that the road to heaven is not 
through " hard questions." The dean died at the 
age of ninety-five, in perfect possession of his 
faculties ; and " 't is said that angling and temper- 
ance were great causes of those blessings." Evi- 
dently Walton had somehow taken for granted 
that there is an inherent harmony between angl- 
ing and true religion, which of course for him im- 
plies the Anglican religion. He does not trust 
himself in the evil times to grumble openly, or to 
indulge in more than an occasional oblique refer- 
ence to the dealers in hard questions and meta- 
physical dogmatism. He takes his rod, leaves 
the populous city behind him, and makes a day's 
march to the banks of the quiet Lea, where he can 
meet a likeminded friend or two ; sit in the sanded 
parlour of the country inn, and listen to the milk- 
maid singing that " smooth song made by Kit 
Marlow, now at least fifty years ago," before Eng- 
lish fields had been drenched with the blood of 
Roundheads and Cavaliers; or lie under a tree, 
watching his float till the shower had passed, and 
then calling to mind what " holy Mr. Herbert says 
of such days and flowers as these." Sweet day, so 
cool, so calm, so bright ! but everybody has learnt 
to share Walton's admiration, and the quota- 
tion would now be superfluous. It is nowhere 



i2o Hours in a Library 

so effective as with Walton's illustrations. We 
need not, indeed, remember the background of 
storm to enjoy the quiet sunshine and showers 
on the soft English landscape, which Walton 
painted so lovingly. The fact that he was living 
in the midst of a turmoil, in which the objects of 
his special idolatry had been so ruthlessly crushed 
and scattered, may help to explain the intense 
relish for the peaceful river-side life. His rod was 
the magic wand to interpose a soft idyllic mist be- 
tween his eyes and such scenes as were visible at 
times from the windows of Whitehall. He loved 
his paradise the better because it was an escape 
from a pandemonium. But whatever the cause 
of his enthusiasm, its sincerity arid intensity are 
the main cause of his attractiveness. Many poets 
of Walton's time loved the country as well as he, 
and showed it in some of the delicate lyrics which 
find an appropriate setting in his pages. But we 
have to infer their exquisite appreciation of coun- 
try sights and sounds from such brief utterances, 
or from passing allusions in dramatic scenes. No- 
body can doubt that Shakespeare loved daffodils, 
or a bank of wild thyme, or violets, as keenly as 
Wordsworth. When he happens to mention them, 
his voice trembles with fine emotion. But none 
of the poets of the time dared to make a passion 
for the country the main theme of their more pre- 



Country Books 121 

tentious song. They thought it necessary to 
idealise and transmute ; to substitute an indefinite 
Arcadia for plain English fields, and to populate 
it with piping swains and nymphs, Corydons and 
Amorets and Phyllises. Poor Hodge and Cis were 
only allowed to appear when they were minded 
to indulge in a little broad comedy. The coarse 
rustics had to be washed and combed before they 
could present themselves before an aristocratic 
audience ; and plain English hills and rivers to be 
provided with tutelary gods and goddesses, fitted 
for the gorgeous pageantry of a country masque. 
Far be it from me with the fear of aesthetic critics 
before my eyes to say that very beautiful poems 
might not be produced under these conditions. 
It is proper, as I am aware, to admire Browne's 
Britannia's Pastorals, and to speak reverently of 
Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, and Ben Jonson's 
Sad Shepherd. I only venture to suggest here 
that such work is caviare to the multitude; that 
it requires a fine literary sense, a happy superiority 
to dull realistic suggestion, and a power of accept- 
ing the conventional conditions which the artist 
has to accept for his guidance. Possibly I may 
go so far as to hint without offence that the neces- 
sity of using this artificial apparatus was not in 
itself an advantage. A great master of harmony, 
with a mind overflowing with majestic imagery, 



122 Hours in a Library 

might achieve such triumphs as Comus and Ly- 
cidas, in which even the Arcadian pipe is made 
to utter the true organ-tones. We forgive any in- 
congruities or artificialities when they are lost in 
such a blaze of poetry. The atmosphere of Ar- 
cadia was not as yet sickly enough to asphyxiate 
a Milton; but it was ceasing to be wholesome; 
and the weaker singers who imbibed it suffered 
under distinct attacks of drowsiness. 

Walton's good sense, or his humility, or perhaps 
the simple ardour of his devotion to his hobby, 
encouraged him to deal in realities. He gave 
the genuine sentiment which his contemporaries 
would only give indirectly, transfigured and be- 
dizened with due ornaments of classic or romantic 
pattern. There is just a faint touch of unreality 
a barely perceptible flavour of the sentimental 
about his personages ; but only enough to give 
a permissible touch of pastoral idealism. Walton 
is painting directly from the life. The "honest 
alehouse," where he finds "a cleanly room, laven- 
der in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck 
about the wall," was standing then on the banks 
of the lea, as in quiet country nooks, here and 
there, occasional representatives of the true an- 
gler's rest are still to be found, not entirely cor- 
rupted by the modern tourist. The good man is 
far too much in earnest to be aiming at literary 



Country Books 123 

ornament ; he is a genuine simple-minded enthu- 
siast revealing his kindly nature by a thousand 
unconscious touches. The common objection is a 
misunderstanding. Everybody quotes the phrase 
about using the frog "as though you loved 
him;" and it is the more piquant as following 
one of his characteristically pious remarks. The 
frog's mouth, he tells, grows up for six months, 
and he lives for six months without eating, " sus- 
tained, none but He whose name is Wonderful 
knows how." He reverently admires the care of 
the frog by Providence, without drawing any more 
inference for his own conduct than if he were 
a modern physiologist. It is just this absolute 
unconsciousness which makes his love of the sport 
attractive. He has never looked at it from the 
frog's point of view. Your modern angler has 
to excuse himself by some scientific hypothesis 
as to feeling in the lower animals, and thereby 
betrays certain qualms of conscience which had 
not yet come to light in Walton's day. He is no 
more cruel than a schoolboy, "ere he grows to 
pity." He is simply discharging his functions as 
a part of nature, like the pike or the frog; and 
convinced, at the very bottom of his heart, that 
the angler represents the most eminent type of en- 
joyment, and should be the humble inheritor of 
the virtues of the fishers of Galilee. The gentlest 



124 Hours in a Library 

and most pious thoughts come naturally into his 
mind whilst his worm is wriggling on his hook to 
entice the luckless trout. It is particularly pleas- 
ant to notice the quotations, which give a certain 
air of learning to his book. We see that the love 
of angling had become so ingrained in his mind as 
to direct his reading as well as to provide him with 
amusement. We fancy him poring on winter 
evenings over the pages of Aldrovandus and Ges- 
ner and Pliny and Topsell's histories of serpents 
and four-footed beasts, and humbly accepting the 
teaching of more learned men, who had recorded 
so many strange facts unobserved by the simple 
angler. He produces a couple of bishops, Dubra- 
vius and Thurso, as eye-witnesses, to testify to 
a marvellous anecdote of a frog jumping upon a 
pike's head and tearing out his eyes, after "ex- 
pressing malice or anger by swollen cheeks and 
staring eyes." Even Walton cannot forbear a 
quiet smile at this quaint narrative. But he is 
ready to believe, in all seriousness, that eels, "like 
some kinds of bees and wasps," are bred out of 
dew, and to confirm it by the parallel case of 
young goslings bred by the sun "from the rotten 
planks of an old ship and hatched up trees.** 
Science was not a dry museum of hard facts, but 
a quaint storehouse of semi-mythical curiosities; 
and therefore excellently fitted to fill spare hours, 



Country Books 125 

when he could not meditatively indulge in "the 
contemplative man's recreation." Walton found 
some queer text for his pious meditations, and 
his pursuit is not without its drawbacks. But 
his quaintness only adds a zest to our enjoyment 
of his book ; and we are content to fall in with his 
humour, and to believe for the nonce that the love 
of a sport which so fascinates this simple, kindly, 
reverent nature must be, as he takes for granted, 
the very crowning grace of a character moulded 
on the principles of sound Christian philosophy. 
Angling becomes synonymous with purity of mind 
and simplicity of character. 

Mr. Lowell, in one of the most charming essays 
ever written about a garden, takes his text from 
White of Selborne, and admirably explains the 
charm of that worthy representative of the Wal- 
tonian spirit. " It is good for us now and then/* 
says Mr. Lowell, "to converse in a world like 
Mr. White's, where man is the least important of 
animals;" to find one's whole world in a garden, 
beyond the reach of wars and rumours of wars. 
White does not give a thought to the little troubles 
which were disturbing the souls of Burke and 
George III. The "natural term of a hog's life 
has more interest for him than that of an empire;" 
he does not trouble his head about diplomatic 
complications whilst he is discovering that the odd 



i26 Hours in a Library 

tumbling of rooks in the air is caused by their 
turning over to scratch themselves with one claw. 
The great events of his life are his making ac- 
quaintance with a stilted plover, or his long for 
it was protracted over ten years and finally 
triumphant passion for "an old family tortoise." 
White of Selborne did not live in the rough old 
days when a country house had occasionally to be 
a fastness ; nor in our own, when he would have 
to consider whether his property ought not to be 
"nationalised." He was merely a good, kindly, 
domestic gentleman, on friendly terms with the 
parson and the gamekeeper, and ready for a chat 
with the rude forefathers of the hamlet. His 
horizon, natural and unnatural, is bounded by the 
soft round hills and the rich hangers of his beloved 
Hampshire country. There is something specially 
characteristic in his taste for scenery. Though 
" I have now travelled the Sussex Downs upwards 
of thirty years," he says, " I still investigate that 
chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration 
year by year;" and he calls " Mr. Ray" to witness 
that there is nothing finer in any part of Europe. 
"For my own part," he says, "I think there is 
somewhat peculiarly sweet and amusing in the 
shapely figured aspects of chalk hills in preference 
to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, ab- 
rupt, and shapeless." I, for my part, agree with 



Country Books 127 

Mr. White so long, at least, as I am reading his 
book. The Downs have a singular charm in the 
exquisite play of long, gracefully undulating lines 
which bound their gentle edges. If not a "majes- 
tic range of mountains," as judged by an Alpine 
standard, there is no want of true sublimity in 
their springing curves, especially when harmon- 
ised by the lights and shadows under cloud-masses 
driving before a broad south-westerly gale; and 
when you reach the edge of a great down, and 
suddenly look down into one of the little hollows 
where a village with a grey church tower and a 
grove of noble elms nestles amidst the fold of the 
hills, you fancy that in such places of refuge there 
must still be relics of the quiet domesticities en- 
joyed by Gilbert White. Here one fancies, it 
must be good to live; to discharge, at an easy 
rate, all the demands of a society which is but a 
large family, and find ample excitement in study- 
ing the rambles of a tortoise, forming intimacies 
with moles, crickets and fieldmice, and bats, and 
brown owls, and watching the swifts and the 
nightjars wheeling round the old church tower, 
or hunting flies at the edge of the wood in the 
quiet summer evening. 

In rambling through the lanes sacred to the 
memory of White, you may (in fancy, at least) 
meet another figure not at first sight quite in 



128 Hours in a Library 

harmony with the clerical Mr. White. He is a 
stalwart, broad-chested man in the farmer's dress, 
even ostentatiously representing the old British 
yeoman brought up on beer and beef, and with a 
certain touch of pugnacity suggestive of the re- 
tired prizefighter. He stops his horse to chat 
with a labourer breaking stones by the roadside, 
and informs the gaping rustic that wages are made 
bad and food dear by the diabolical machinations 
of the Tories, and the fundholders and the bor- 
oughmongers, who are draining away all the fat- 
ness of the land to nourish the portentous "wen" 
called London. He leaves the man to meditate 
on this suggestion, and jogs off to the nearest 
country town, where he will meet the farmers at 
their ordinary, and deliver a ranting radical ad- 
dress. The squire or the parson who recognises 
William Cobbett in this sturdy traveller will 
mutter a hearty objurgation, and wish that the dis- 
turber of rustic peace could make a closer acquaint- 
ance with the neighbouring horsepond. Possibly 
most readers who hear his name have vaguely set 
down Cobbett as one of the demagogues of the 
anti-reforming days, and remember little more 
than the fact that he dabbled in some rather 
questionable squabbles, and brought back Tom 
Paine's bones from America. But it is worth 
while to read Cobbett, and especially the Rural 



Country Books 129 

Rides, not only to enjoy his fine homespun Eng- 
lish, but to learn to know the man a little better. 
Whatever the deserts or demerits of Cobbett as a 
political agitator, the true man was fully as much 
allied to modern Young England and the later 
type of conservatism as to the modern radical. 
He hated the Scotch " feelosophers " as he calls 
them Parson Malthus, the political communists, 
the Manchester men, the men who would break 
up the old social system of the country, at the 
bottom of his heart ; and, whatever might be his 
superficial alliances, he loved the old quiet country 
life when Englishmen were burly, independent 
yeomen, each equal to three frog-eating French- 
men. He remembered the relics of the system 
in the days of his youth; he thought that it had 
begun to decay at the time of the Reformation, 
when grasping landlords and unprincipled states- 
men had stolen Church property on pretence of 
religion ; but ever since, the growth of manufac- 
tures, and corruption, and stockjobbing had been 
unpopulating the country to swell the towns, and 
broken up the old, wholesome, friendly English 
life. That is the text on which he is always dilat- 
ing with genuine enthusiasm, and the belief, true 
or false, gives a pleasant flavour to his intense 
relish for true country scenery. 

He looks at things, it is true, from the point of 

VOL. IV. Q. 



i 3 Hours in a Library 

view of a fanner, not of a landscape-painter or a 
lover of the picturesque. He raves against that 
"accursed hill" Hindhead; he swears that he 
will not go over it; and he tells us very amus- 
ingly how, in spite of himself, he found himself on 
the very "tip top" of it, in a pelting rain, owing 
to an incompetent guide. But he loves the wood- 
lands and the downs, and bursts into vivid en- 
thusiasm at fine points of view. He is specially 
ecstatic in White's country. 

On we trotted [he says] up this pretty green lane, 
and, indeed, we had been coming gently and gradu- 
ally up-hill for a good while. The lane was between 
high banks, and pretty high stuff growing on the 
banks, so that we could see no distance from us, and 
could receive not the smallest hint of what was so 
near at hand. The lane had a little turn towards 
the end, so that we came, all in a moment, at the very 
edge of the hanger ; and never in my life was I so sur- 
prised and delighted ! I pulled up my horse, and sat 
and looked. It was like looking from the top of a 
castle down into the sea, except that the valley was 
land and not water. I looked at my servant to see 
what effect this unexpected sight had upon him. His 
surprise was as great as mine, though he had been 
bred amongst the North Hampshire hills. Those who 
have so strenuously dwelt on the dirt and dangers of 
this road have said not a word about the beauties, 
the matchless beauties, of the scenery. 

And Cobbett goes on to describe the charms of the 
view over Selborne, and to fancy what it will be 



Country Books 131 

when trees, and hangers, and hedges are in leaf, the 
corn waving, the meadows bright, and the hops upon 
the poles, 

in language which is not after the modern style 
of word-painting, but excites a contagious en- 
thusiasm by its freshness and sincerity. He is 
equally enthusiastic soon afterwards at the sight 
of Avington Park and a lake swarming with wild 
fowl ; and complains of the folly of modern rapid 
travelling. 

In any sort of carriage you cannot get into the real 
country places. To travel in stage-coaches is to be 
hurried along by force in a box with an air-hole in it, 
and constantly exposed to broken limbs, the danger 
being much greater than that of ship-board, and the 
noise much more disagreeable, while the company is 
frequently not a great deal more to one's liking. 

What would Cobbett have said to a railway? 
And what has become of the old farmhouse on 
the banks of the Mole, once the home of "plain 
manners and plentiful living," with 

oak clotheschests, oak bedsteads, oak chests of 
drawers, and oak tables to eat on, long, strong, and 
well supplied with joint stools? 

Now, he sighs, there is a 

parlour! aye, and a carpet, and bell-pull too! and a 
mahogany table, and the fine chairs, and the fine 
glass, and all as barefaced upstart as any stockjobber 
in the kingdom can boast of! 



i3 2 Hours in a Library 

Probably the farmhouse has followed the furni- 
ture, and, meanwhile, what has become of the 
fine old British hospitality, when the farmer and 
his lads and lasses dined at one table, and a solid 
Englishman did not squeeze money out of his 
men's wages to surround himself with trumpery 
finery? 

To say the truth, Cobbett's fine flow of invec- 
tive is a little too exuberant, and overlays too 
deeply the picturesque touches of scenery and 
the occasional bits of autobiography which recall 
his boyish experience of the old country life. It 
would be idle to inquire how far his vision of the 
old English country had any foundation in fact, 
Our hills and fields may be as lovely as ever; 
and there is still ample room for the lovers of 
" nature" in Scotch moors and lochs, or even 
amongst the English fells, or among the storm- 
beaten cliffs of Devon and Cornwall. But nature, 
as I have said, is not the country. We are not in 
search of the scenery which appears now as it ap- 
peared in the remote days when painted savages 
managed to raise a granite block upon its supports 
for the amusement of future antiquaries. We 
want the country which bears the impress of some 
characteristic social growth; which has been 
moulded by its inhabitants as the inhabitants by 
it, till one is as much adapted to the other as the 



Country Books 133 

lichen to the rock on which it grows. How bleak 
and comfortless a really natural country may be is 
apparent to the readers of Thoreau. He had all 
the will to become a part of nature, and to shake 
himself free from the various trammels of civilised 
life, and he had no small share of the necessary 
qualifications; but one cannot read his account 
of his life by Walden pond without a shivering 
sense of discomfort . He is not really acclimatised ; 
so far from being a true child of nature, he is a 
man of theories, a product of the social state 
against which he tries to revolt. He does not so 
much relish the wilderness as to go out into the 
wilderness in order to rebuke his contemporaries. 
There is something harsh about him and his sur- 
roundings, and he affords an unconscious proof 
that something more is necessary for the civilised 
man who would become a true man of the woods 
than simply to strip off his clothes. He has got 
tolerably free from tailors; but he still lives in 
the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge debat- 
ing-rooms. 

To find a life really in harmony with a rustic 
environment, we must not go to raw settlements 
where man is still righting with the outside world, 
but to some region where a reconciliation has been 
worked out by an experience of centuries. And 
amidst all the restlessness of modern improvers 



134 Hours in a Library 

we may still find a few regions where the old 
genius has not been quite exorcised. Here and 
there, in country lanes, and on the edge of un- 
enclosed commons, we may still meet the gipsy 
the type of a race adapted to live in the inter- 
stices of civilisation, having something of the in- 
definable grace of all wild animals, and yet free 
from the absolute savagery of the genuine wilder- 
ness. To mention gipsies is to think of George 
Borrow; and I always wonder that the author 
of the Bible in Spain and Lavengro is not more 
popular. Certainly, I have found no more de- 
lightful guide to the charming nooks and corners 
of rural England. I would give a good deal to 
identify that remarkable dingle in which he met 
so singular a collection of characters. Does it 
really exist, I wonder, anywhere on this island? 
or did it ever exist? and, if so, has it become a 
railway-station, and what has become of Isopel 
Berners and "Blazing Bosville, the flaming Tin- 
man?" His very name is as good as a poem, and 
the battle in which Borrow floored the Tinman 
by that happy left-handed blow is, to my mind, 
more delightful than the fight in Tom Brown, or 
that in which Dobbin acted as the champion of 
Osborne. Borrow is a "humourist" of the first 
water. He lives in a world of his own a queer 
world with laws peculiar to itself, and yet one 



Country Books 135 

which has all manner of odd and unexpected points 
of contact with the prosaic world of daily experi- 
ence. Borrow's Bohemianism is no revolt against 
the established order. He does not invoke nature 
or fly to the hedges because society is corrupt or 
the world unsatisfying, or because he has some 
kind of new patent theory of life to work out. 
He cares nothing for such fancies. On the con- 
trary, he is a staunch conservative, full of good 
old-fashioned prejudices. He seems to be a case 
of the strange reappearance of an ancestral in- 
stinct under altered circumstances. Some of his 
forefathers must have been gipsies by tempera- 
ment if not by race ; and the impulses due to that 
strain have got themselves blended with the 
characteristics of the average Englishman. The 
result is a strange and yet, in a way, harmonious 
and original type which made the Bible in Spain 
a puzzle to the average reader. The name sug- 
gested a work of the edifying class. Here was a 
good respectable emissary of the Bible Society 
going to convert poor papists by a distribution 
of the Scriptures. He has returned to write a long 
tract setting forth the difficulties of his enter- 
prise, and the stiff-neckedness of the Spanish 
people. The luckless reader who took up the 
book on that understanding was destined to a 
strange disappointment. True, Borrow appeared 



Hours in a Library 

to take his enterprise quite seriously, indulges in 
the proper reflections, and gets into the regulation 
difficulty involving an appeal to the British min- 
ister. But it soon appears that his Protestant 
zeal is somehow mixed up with a passion for 
strange wanderings in the queerest of company. 
To him Spain is not the land of staunch Catholic- 
ism, or of Cervantes, or of Velasquez, and still less 
a country of historical or political interest. Its 
attraction is in the picturesque outcasts who find 
ample roaming-ground in its wilder regions. He 
regards them, it is true, as occasional subjects for 
a little proselytism. He tells us how he once de- 
livered a moving address to the gipsies in their 
own language. To this most promising congre- 
gation, when he had finished, he looked up and 
found himself the centre of all eyes, each pair 
contorted by a hideous squint, rivalling each other 
in frightfulness ; and the performance, which he 
seems to have thoroughly appreciated, pretty 
well expressed the gipsy view of his missionary 
enterprise. But they delighted to welcome him 
in his other character as one of themselves, and 
yet as dropping amongst them from the hostile 
world outside. And, certainly, no one not thor- 
oughly at home with gipsy ways, gipsy modes of 
thought, to whom it comes quite naturally to put 
up in a den of cut-throats, or to enter the field of 



Country Books 137 

his missionary enterprise in company with a pro- 
fessional brigand travelling on business, could have 
given us so singular a glimpse of the most pictur- 
esque elements of a strange country. Your re- 
spectable compiler of handbooks might travel for 
years in the same districts all unconscious that 
passing vagabonds were so fertile in romance. 
The freemasonry which exists amongst the class 
lying outside the pale of respectability enables 
Borrow to fall in with adventures full of mysteri- 
ous fascination. He passes through forests at 
night, and his horse suddenly stops and trembles, 
whilst he hears heavy footsteps and rustling 
branches, and some heavy body is apparently 
dragged across the road by panting but invisible 
bearers. He enters a shadowy pass, and is met 
by a man with a face streaming with blood, who 
implores him not to go forwards into the hands 
of a band of robbers; and Borrow is too sleepy 
and indifferent to stop, and jogs on in safety 
without meeting the knife which he half expected. 
" It was not so written," he says, with the genuine 
fatalism of your hand-to-mouth Bohemian. He 
crosses a wild moor with a half-witted guide, who 
suddenly deserts him at a little tavern. After a 
wild gallop on a pony, apparently half-witted 
also, he at last rejoins the guide resting by 
a fountain. This gentleman condescends to 



138 Hours in a Library 

explain that he is in the habit of bolting after a 
couple of glasses, and never stops till he comes to 
running water. The congenial pair lose them- 
selves at nightfall, and the guide observes that 
if they should meet the Estadea, which are spirits 
of the dead riding with candles in their hands, 
a phenomenon happily rare in this region, he 
shall "run and run till he drowns himself in the 
sea, somewhere near Muros." The Estadea do 
not appear, but Borrow and his guide come near 
being hanged as Don Carlos and a nephew, escap- 
ing only by the help of a sailor who knows the 
English words "knife" and "fork," and can there- 
fore testify to Borrow's nationality ; and is finally 
liberated by an official who is a devoted student 
of Jeremy Bentham. The queer stumbling upon 
a name redolent of everyday British life throws 
the surrounding oddity into quaint relief. But 
Borrow encounters more mysterious characters. 
There is the wondrous Abarbenell, whom he 
meets riding by night, and with whom he soon 
becomes hand and glove. Abarbenell is a huge 
figure in a broad-brimmed hat, who stares at him 
in the moonlight with deep, calm eyes, and still 
revisits him in dreams. He has two wives and 
a hidden treasure of old coins, and when the 
gates of his house are locked, and the big dogs 
loose in the court, he dines off ancient plate made 



Country Books 139 

before the discovery of America. There are many 
of his race amongst the priesthood, and even an 
Archbishop, who died in great renown for sanc- 
tity, had come by night to kiss his father's hand. 
Nor can any reader forget the singular history of 
Benedict Mol, the wandering Swiss, who turns up 
now and then in the course of his search for the 
hidden treasure at Compostella. Men who live in 
strange company learn the advantage of not ask- 
ing questions, or following out delicate inquiries; 
and these singular figures are the more attractive 
because they come and go, half revealing them- 
selves for a moment, and then vanishing into out- 
side mystery ; as the narrator himself sometimes 
merges into the regions of absolute commonplace, 
and then dives down below the surface into the 
remotest recesses of the social labyrinth. 

In Spain there may be room for such wild 
adventures. In the trim, orderly, English coun- 
try we might fancy they had gone out with the 
fairies. And yet Borrow meets a decayed pedlar 
in Spain who seems to echo his own sentiments; 
and tells him that even the most prosperous of 
his tribe who have made their fortunes in Amer- 
ica, return in their dreams to the green English 
lanes and farmyards. 

There they are with their boxes on the ground dis- 
playing their goods to the honest rustics and their 



i4 Hours in a Library 

dames and their daughters, and selling away and 
chaffering and laughing just as of old. And there 
they are again at nightfall in the hedge alehouses, 
eating their toasted cheese and their bread, and 
drinking the Suffolk ale, and listening to the roaring 
song and merry jests of the labourers. 



It is the old picturesque country life which fas- 
cinates Borrow, and he was fortunate enough to 
plunge into the heart of it before it had been 
frightened away by the railways. Lavengro is a 
strange medley, which is nevertheless charming 
by reason of the odd idiosyncrasy which fits the 
author to interpret this fast vanishing phase of 
life. It contains queer controversial irrelevance 
conversations or stories which may or may not 
be more or less founded on fact, tending to illus- 
trate the pernicious propagandism of Popery, the 
evil done by Sir Walter Scott's novels, and the 
melancholy results of the decline of pugilism. And 
then we have satire of a simple kind upon literary 
craftsmen, and excursions into philology which 
show at least an amusing dash of innocent vanity. 
But the oddity of these quaint utterances of a 
humourist who seeks to find the most congenial 
mental food in the Bible, the Newgate Calendar, 
and in old Welsh literature, is in thorough 
keeping with the situation. He is the genuine 
tramp whose experience is naturally made up of 



Country Books 14* 

miscellaneous waifs and strays; who drifts into 
contact with the most eccentric beings, and parts 
company with them at a moment's notice, or catch- 
ing hold of some stray bit of out-of-the-way know- 
ledge follows it up as long as it amuses him. He is 
equally at home compounding narratives of the 
lives of eminent criminals for London booksellers, 
or making acquaintance with thimble-riggers, or 
pugilists, or Armenian merchants, or becoming a 
hermit in his remote dingle, making his own 
shoes and discussing theology with a post-boy, a 
feminine tramp, and a Jesuit in disguise. The 
compound is too quaint for fiction, but is made in- 
teresting by the quaint vein of simplicity and the 
touch of genius which brings out the picturesque 
side of his roving existence, and yet leaves one in 
doubt how far the author appreciates his own 
singularity. One old gipsy lady in particular, 
who turns up at intervals, is as fascinating as Meg 
Merrilees, and at once made lifelike and more 
mysterious. " My name is Herne, and I comes of 
the hairy ones!" are the remarkable words by 
which she introduces herself. She bitterly re- 
grets the intrusion of a Gentile into the secrets of 
the Romanies, and relieves her feelings by admin- 
istering poison to the intruder, and then trying 
to poke out his eye as he is lying apparently in his 
last agonies. But she seems to be highly respected 



i4 2 Hours in a Library 

by her victim as well as by her own people and to 
be acting in accordance with the moral teaching 
of her tribe. Her design is frustrated by the 
appearance of a Welsh Methodist preacher, who, 
like every other strange being, is at once com- 
pelled to unbosom himself to his odd confessor. 
He fancies himself to have committed the un- 
pardonable sin at the age of six, and is at once 
comforted by Borrow's sensible observation that 
he should not care if he had done the same thing 
twenty times over at the same period. The grate- 
ful preacher induces his consoler to accompany 
him to the borders of Wales; but there Borrow 
suddenly stops, on the ground that he should pre- 
fer to enter Wales in a suit of superfine black, 
mounted on a powerful steed like that which bore 
Greduv to the fight of Catrath, and to be wel- 
comed at a dinner of the bards, as the translator 
of the odes of the great Ab Gwilym. And Mr. 
Petulengro opportunely turns up at the instant, 
and Borrow rides back with him, and hears that 
Mrs. Herne has hanged herself, and celebrates the 
meeting by a fight without gloves, but in pure 
friendliness, and then settles down to the life of a 
blacksmith in his secluded dingle. 

Certainly it is a queer topsy-turvy world to 
which we are introduced in Lavengro. It gives the 
reader the sensation of a strange dream in which 



Country Books 143 

all the miscellaneous population of caravans and 
wayside tents make their exits and entrances at 
random, mixed with such eccentrics as the distin- 
guished author, who has a mysterious propensity 
for touching odd objects as a charm against evil. 
All one's ideas are dislocated when the centre of 
interest is no longer in the thick of the crowd, but 
in that curious limbo whither drift all the odd 
personages who live in the interstices without be- 
ing caught by the meshes of the great network of 
ordinary convention. Perhaps the oddity repels 
many readers; but to me it always seems that 
Borrow's dingle represents a little oasis of genuine 
romance a kind of half-visionary fragment of 
fairy-land, which reveals itself like the enchanted 
castle in the vale of St. John, and then vanishes 
after tantalising and arousing one's curiosity. It 
will never be again discovered by any flesh-and- 
blood traveller; but, in my imaginary travels, I 
like to rusticate there for a time, and to feel as if 
the gipsy were the true possessor of the secret of 
life, and we who travel by rail and read news- 
papers and consider ourselves to be sensible men 
of business, were but vexatious intruders upon 
this sweet dream. There must, one supposes, 
be a history of England from the Petulengro 
point of view, in which the change of dynasties 
recognised by Hume and Mr. Freeman, or the 



144 Hours in a Library 

oscillations of power between Lord Beaconsfield and 
Mr. Gladstone, appear in relative insignificance 
as more or less affecting certain police regulations 
and the inclosure of commons. It is pleasant for 
a time to feel as though the little rivulet were the 
main stream, and the social outcast the true cen- 
tre of society. The pure flavour of the country 
life is only perceptible when one has annihilated 
all disturbing influences ; and in that little dingle 
with its solitary forge beneath the woods haunted 
by the hairy Hernes, that desirable result may be 
achieved for a time, even in a London library. 



George Eliot 



HAD we been asked a few weeks ago to name 
the greatest living writer of English fiction, the an- 
swer would have been unanimous. No one what- 
ever might be his special personal predilections 
would have refused that title to George Eliot. 
To ask the same question now would be to suggest 
some measure of our loss. In losing George Eliot, 
we have probably lost the greatest woman who 
ever won literary fame, and one of the very few 
writers of our day to whom the name "great" 
could be conceded with any plausibility. We are 
not at a sufficient distance from the object of our 
admiration to measure its true elevation. We 
are liable to a double illusion on the morrow of 
such events. In political life, we fancy that all 
heroism is extinct with the dead leader, whilst 
there are within the realm five hundred good as 
he. Yet the most daring optimist can hardly 
suppose that consolatory creed to be generally 
true in literature. If contemporaries sometimes 
exaggerate, they not unfrequently under-estimate 

VOL. IV. IO. 

145 



Hours in a Library 

their loss. When Shakespeare died, nobody im- 
agined we may suspect that the English drama 
had touched its highest point. When men are 
crossing the lines which divide one of the fruitful 
from one of the barren epochs in literature, they 
are often but faintly conscious of the change. It 
would require no paradoxical ingenuity to main- 
tain that we are even now going through such a 
transition. The works of George Eliot may here- 
after appear as marking the termination of the 
great period of English fiction which began with 
Scott. She may hereafter be regarded as the last 
great sovereign of a literary dynasty, who had to 
bequeath her sceptre to a comparatively petty line 
of successors : though for anything that we can 
say to the contrary it may also be true that the 
successor may appear to-morrow, or may even be 
now amongst us in the shape of some writer who is 
struggling against a general want of recognition. 
Ephemeral critics must not pretend to pro- 
nounce too confidently upon such questions. They 
can only try to say, in Mr. Browning's phrase, 
how it strikes a contemporary. And a contem- 
porary is prompted by the natural regret to stray 
into irrelevant reflections, and dwell needlessly 
in the regions of might-have-beens. Had George 
Eliot lived a little longer, or begun to write a little 
earlier, or been endowed with some additional 



George Eliot 147 

quality which she did not in fact possess, she 
might have done greater things still. It is very 
true, and true of others besides George Eliot. It 
often seems as if even the greatest works of the 
greatest writers were but fragmentary waifs and 
strays mere indications of more splendid achieve- 
ments which would have been within their grasp, 
had they not been forced, like weaker people, to 
feel out the way to success through comparative 
failure, or to bend their genius to unworthy tasks. 
So, of the great writers in her own special depart- 
ment, Fielding wasted his powers in writing third- 
rate plays till he was five-and-thirty, and died a 
broken-down man at forty-seven. Scott did not 
appear in the field of his greatest victories till he 
was forty-three, and all his really first-rate work 
was done within the next ten years. George 
Eliot's period of full activity, the time during 
which she was conscientiously doing her best un- 
der the stimulus of high reputation, lasted some 
twenty years ; and so long a space is fully up to 
the average of the time allowed to most great 
writers. If not a voluminous writer, according 
to the standard of recent novelists, she has left 
enough work, representative of her powers at their 
best, to give a full impress of her mind. 

So far, I think, we have little reason for regret. 
When once a writer has managed to express the 



148 Hours in a Library 

best that was in him to say, the question of abso- 
lute mass is trifling. Though some very great have 
also been very voluminous writers, the immortal 
part of their achievement bears a slight propor- 
tion to the whole. It is melancholy to look at 
the " complete works " of famous writers and com- 
pute the quantity of comparative rubbish that has 
been piled over the jewels. Hardly any great Eng- 
lish writer has left a greater quantity of work 
representing the highest level of the author's ca- 
pacity than is equivalent to the Scenes of Clerical 
Life, Adam Bede, the Mill on the Floss, Silas 
Marner, Romola, and Middlemarch. Certainly, 
she might have done more. She did not begin to 
write novels till a period at which many popular 
authors are already showing symptoms of ex- 
haustion, and indulging in the perilous practice of 
self -imitation. Why, it may be said, did not 
George Eliot write immortal works in her youth, 
instead of translating German authors of a hetero- 
dox tendency ? If we could arrange all such things 
to our taste and could foresee a writer's powers 
from the beginning, we might have ordered mat- 
ters differently. Yet one may observe that there 
is another side to the question . Imaginative minds 
often ripen quickly ; and much of the finest poetry 
in the language derives its charm from the fresh- 
ness of youth. But writers of the contemplative 



George Eliot 149 

order those whose best works represent the gen- 
eral experience of a rich and thoughtful nature 
may be expected to come later to their maturity. 
The phenomenon of early exhaustion is too com- 
mon in these days to allow us to regret an occa- 
sional exception. If during her youth George 
Eliot was storing the thoughts and emotions which 
afterwards shaped themselves into the Scenes of 
Clerical Life, we need not suppose that the time 
was wasted. Certainly, I do not think that any 
one who has had a little experience in such matters 
would regard it as otherwise than dangerous for 
a powerful mind to be precipitated into public 
utterance. The Pythagorean probation of silence 
may be protracted too long ; but it may afford a 
most useful discipline; and I think that there is 
nothing preposterous in the supposition that 
George Eliot's work was all the more powerful 
because it came from a novelist who had lain 
fallow through a longer period than ordinary. 

If it is rather idle to pursue such speculations, it 
is still more idle to indulge in that kind of criticism 
which virtually comes to saying that George Eliot 
ought to have been Walter Scott or Charlotte 
Bronte. You may think her inferior to those 
writers; you may dislike her philosophy or her 
character ; and you are fully justified in ex- 
pressing your dislike. But it is only fair to ask 



150 Hours in a Library 

whether the qualities which you disapprove were 
mere external and adventitious familiarities or the 
inseparable adjunct of those which you admire. 
It is important to remember this in considering 
some of the common criticisms. The poor woman 
was not content simply to write amusing stories. 
She is convicted upon conclusive evidence of hav- 
ing indulged in ideas; she ventured to speculate 
upon human life and its meaning, and still worse, 
she endeavoured to embody her convictions in 
imaginative shapes, and probably wished to in- 
fect her readers with them. This was, according 
to some people, highly unbecoming in a woman and 
very inartistic in a novelist. I confess that, for 
my part, I am rather glad to find ideas anywhere. 
They are not very common ; and there are a vast 
number of excellent fictions which these sensitive 
critics may study without the least danger of a 
shock to their artistic sensibilities by anything of 
the kind. But if you will permit a poor novelist 
to indulge in such awkward possessions, I cannot 
see why he or she should not be allowed occasion- 
ally to interweave them in her narrative, taking 
care of course to keep them in their proper place. 
Some of that mannerism which offends many 
critics represents in fact simply George Eliot's 
way of using this privilege. We are indeed told 
dogmatically that a novelist should never indulge 



George Eliot 151 

in little asides to the reader. Why not? One 
main advantage of a novel, as it seems to me, is 
precisely that it leaves room for a freedom in such 
matters which is incompatible with the require- 
ments, for example, of dramatic writing. I can 
enjoy Scott's downright story-telling, which never 
reminds you obtrusively of the presence of the 
author ; but with all respect for Scott, I do not see 
why his manner should be the sole type and model 
for all his successors. I like to read about Tom 
Jones or Colonel Newcome; but I am also very 
glad when Fielding or Thackeray puts his puppets 
aside for the moment and talks to me in his own 
person. A child, it is true, dislikes to have the 
illusion broken, and is angry if you try to per- 
suade him that Giant Despair was not a real per- 
sonage like his favourite Blunderbore. But the 
attempt to produce such illusions is really un- 
worthy of work intended for full-grown readers. 
The humourist in particular knows that you will 
not mistake his puppet-show for reality, nor does 
he wish you to do so. He is rather of opinion that 
the world itself is a greater puppet-show, not to 
be taken in too desperate earnest. It is congenial 
to his whole mode of thought to act occasionally 
as chorus, and dwell upon some incidental sug- 
gestion. The solemn critic may step forward, 
like the physician who attended Sancho Panza's 



i5 2 Hours in a Library 

meal, and waive aside the condiment which gives 
a peculiar relish to the feast. It is not prepared 
according to his recipe. But till he gives me 
some better reason for obedience than his ipse 
dixit, I shall refuse to respect what would destroy 
many charming passages and obliterate touches 
which clearly contribute to the general effect of 
George Eliot's work. 

Were it not indeed that some critics in authority 
have dwelt upon this supposed defect, I should be 
disposed simply to plead "not guilty, " for I think 
that any one who reads the earlier books with the 
criticism in his mind, and notes the passages 
which are really obnoxious upon this ground, will 
be surprised at the rarity of the passages to which 
it applies. One cannot help suspecting that what 
is really offensive is not so much the method itself 
as the substance of the reflections introduced, and 
occasionally the cumbrous style in which they are 
expressed. And upon these points there is more 
to be said. But it is more desirable, if one can 
do it, to say what George Eliot was than what she 
was not; and to try to catch the secret of her 
unique power rather than to dwell upon short- 
comings, some of which, to say the truth, are so 
obvious that it requires little critical acumen to 
discover them, and a decided tinge of antipathy 
to dwell upon them at length. 



George Eliot 153 

What is it, in fact, which makes us conscious 
that George Eliot had a position apart ; that, in a 
field where she had so many competitors of no 
mean capacity, she stands out as superior to all 
her rivals; or that, whilst we can easily imagine 
that many other reputations will fade with a 
change of fashion, there is something in George 
Eliot which we are confident will give delight 
to our grandchildren as it has to ourselves? To 
such questions there is one obvious answer at 
hand. There is one part of her writings upon 
which every competent reader has dwelt with de- 
light, and which seems fresher and more charm- 
ing whenever we come back to it. There is no 
danger of arousing any controversy in saying that 
the works of her first period, the Scenes of Clerical 
Life, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and the Mill on 
the Floss, have the unmistakable mark of high 
genius. They are something for which it is sim- 
ply out of the question to find any substitute. 
Strike them out of English literature, and we feel 
that there would be a gap not to be filled up; 
a distinct vein of thought and feeling unrepre- 
sented; a characteristic and delightful type of 
social development left without any adequate 
interpreter. A second-rate writer can be more 
or less replaced. When you have read Shake- 
speare, you can do very well without Beaumont 



i54 Hours in a Library 

and Fletcher, and a study of the satires of Pope 
makes it unnecessary to plod through the many 
volumes filled by his imitators. But we feel that, 
however much we may admire the other great 
English novelists, there is none who would make 
the study of George Eliot superfluous. The 
sphere which she has made specially her own is 
that quiet English country life which she knew 
in early youth. It has been described with more 
or less vivacity and sympathy by many observers. 
Nobody has approached George Eliot in the 
power of seizing its essential characteristics and 
exhibiting its real charm. She has done for it 
what Scott did for the Scotch peasantry, or Field- 
ing for the eighteenth-century Englishman, or 
Thackeray for the higher social stratum of his 
time. Its last traces are vanishing so rapidly 
amidst the changes of modern revolution that its 
picture could hardly be drawn again, even if there 
were an artist of equal skill and penetration. And 
thus, when the name of George Eliot is mentioned, 
it calls up, to me at least, and, I suspect, to most 
readers, not so much her later and more ambitious 
works, as the exquisite series of scenes so lovingly 
and vividly presented in the earlier stage : snuffy 
old Mr. Gilfil, drinking his gin-and-water in his 
lonely parlour and dreaming of the early romance 
of his life, with his faithful Ponto snoring on the 



George Eliot 155 

rug; and the inimitable Mrs. Poyser in her ex- 
quisite dairy, delivering her soul in a series of 
pithy aphorisms, bright as the little flames in Mr. 
Biglow's pastoral, that "danced about the chaney 
on the dresser;" and the party in the parlour 
of the "Rainbow" discussing the evidences for 
"ghos'es;" or the family conclaves in which the 
affairs of the Tulliver family were discussed from 
so many and such admirably contrasted points 
of view. Where shall we find a more delightful 
circle, or quainter manifestations of human char- 
acter, in beings grotesque, misshapen, and swathed 
in old prejudices, like the mossy trees in an old- 
fashioned orchard, which, for all their vagaries of 
growth, are yet full of sap and capable of bearing 
mellow and toothsome fruit? 

It was pleasant to Mr. Try an [as we are told in 
Janet's Repentance} to listen to the simple chat of the 
old man to walk in the shade of the incomparable 
orchard and hear the story of the crops yielded by the 
red-streaked apple-tree, and the quite embarrassing 
plentifulness of the summer pears to drink in the 
sweet evening breath of the garden as they sat in the 
alcove and so, for a short interval, to feel the strain 
of his pastoral task relaxed. 

Our enjoyment is analogous to Mr. Tryan's. We 
are soothed by the atmosphere of the-Old- World 
country life, where people, no doubt, had as many 
troubles as ours, but troubles which, because they 



156 Hours in a Library 

were different, seem more bearable to our imagina- 
tion. We half wish that we could go back to 
the old days of stage-coaches and waggons and 
shambling old curates in " Brutus wigs" preaching 
to slumbrous congregations enshrouded in high- 
backed pews, contemplating as little the advent 
of railways as of a race of clergymen capable of 
going to prison upon a question of ritual. 

So far, indeed, it can hardly be said that George 
Eliot is unique. She has been approached, if she 
has not been surpassed, by other writers in her 
idyllic effects. But there is something less easily 
paralleled in the peculiar vein of humour which is 
the essential complement of the more tender pass- 
ages. Mrs. Poyser is necessary to balance the 
solemnity of Dinah Morris. Silas Marner would 
lose half his impressiveness if he were not in con- 
trast with the inimitable party in the " Rainbow'* 
parlour. Omit the few pages in which their ad- 
mirable conversation is reported, and the whole 
harmony of the book would be altered. The 
change would be as fatal as to strike out a figure 
in some perfect composition, where the most 
trifling accessory may really be an essential part 
of the whole design. It might throw some light 
upon George Eliot's peculiar power if we could 
fairly analyse the charm of that little masterpiece. 
Psychologists are very fond of attempting to de- 



George Eliot 157 

fine the nature of wit and humour. Hitherto 
they have not been very successful, though of 
course their failure cannot be due to any want 
of personal appreciation of those qualities. But 
I should certainly despair of giving any account 
of the pleasure which one receives from that 
famous conflict of rustic wits. Why are we 
charmed by Ben Winthrop's retort to the parish 
clerk: " It 's your inside as is n't right made for 
music; it 's no better nor a hollow stalk;" and 
the statement that this "unflinching frankness 
was regarded by the company as the most piquant 
form of joke;" or by the landlord's ingenious re- 
marks upon the analogy between a power of smell- 
ing cheeses and perceiving the supernatural; or 
by that quaint stumble into something surprising 
to the speaker himself by its apparent resemblance 
to witty repartee, when the same person says to 
the farrier: "You 're a doctor, I reckon, though 
you 're only a cow-doctor ; for a fly 's a fly, though 
it may be a horse-fly "? One can understand at 
a proper distance how a clever man comes to say 
a brilliant thing, and it is still more easy to under- 
stand how he can say a thoroughly silly thing, 
and, therefore, how he can simulate stupidity. 
But there is something mysterious in the power 
possessed by a few great humourists of convert- 
ing themselves for the nonce into that peculiar 



158 Hours in a Library 

condition of muddle-headedness dashed with gro- 
tesque flashes of common-sense which is natural 
to a half -educated mind. It is less difficult to 
draw either a perfect circle or a purely arbitrary 
line than to see what will be the projection of the 
regular figure on some queer, lop-sided, and im- 
perfectly reflecting surface. And these quaint 
freaks of rustic intelligence seem to be rags and 
tatters of what would make wit and reason in a 
cultivated mind, but when put together in this 
grotesque kaleidoscopic confusion suggests, not 
simple nonsense, but a ludicrous parody of sense. 
To reproduce the effect, you have not simply to 
lower the activity of the reasoning machine, but 
to put it together on some essential plan, so as to 
bring out a new set of combinations distantly re- 
calling the correct order. We require not a new 
defect of logic, but a new logical structure. 

There is no answer to this as to any other such 
problems. It is enough to take note of the fact 
that George Eliot possessed a vein of humour, of 
which it is little to say that it is incomparably 
superior, in depth if not in delicacy, to that of any 
feminine writer. It is the humour of a calm con- 
templative mind, familiar with wide fields of 
knowledge and capable of observing the little 
dramas of rustic life from a higher standing-point. 
It is not in these earlier books at any rate that 



George Eliot 159 

she obtrudes her acquirements upon us; for if 
here and there we find some of those scientific 
illusions which afterwards became a kind of man- 
nerism, they are introduced without any appear- 
ance of forcing. It is simply that she is awake 
to those quaint aspects of the little world before 
her which only show their quaintness to the cul- 
tivated intellect. We feel that there must be a 
silent guest in the chimney-corner of the " Rain- 
bow," so thoroughly at home with the natives as 
to put no stress upon their behaviour, and yet one 
who has travelled out of sight of the village spire 
and known the thoughts and feelings which are 
stirring in the great world outside. The guest 
can at once sympathise and silently criticise; or 
rather, in the process of observation, carries on 
the two processes simultaneously by recognising 
at once the little oddities of the microcosm, and 
yet seeing them as merely one embodiment of the 
same thoughts and passions which present them- 
selves on a larger scale elsewhere. It is in this 
happy combination of two characteristics often 
disjoined that we have one secret of George Eliot's 
power. There is a breadth of touch, the large- 
minded equable spirit of loving contemplative 
thought, which is fully conscious of the narrow 
limitations of the actor's thoughts and habits, 
but does not cease on that account to sympathise 



160 Hours in a Library 

with his joys and sorrows. We are on a petty 
stage, but not in a stifling atmosphere, and we 
are not called upon to accept the prejudices of the 
actors or to be angry with them, but simply to 
understand and be tolerant. We have neither 
the country idyll of the sentimentalist which 
charms us in some of George Sand's stories of 
French life, but in which our enjoyment is checked 
by the inevitable sense of unreality, nor the cari- 
cature of the satirist who is anxious to proclaim 
the truth that base passions and grovelling in- 
stincts are as common in country towns as in 
court and city. Everything is quietly set before 
us with a fine sense of its wider relations, and yet 
with a loving touch, significant of a pathetic 
yearning for the past, which makes the whole 
picture artistically charming. We are reminded 
in Mr. Gilfil's love-story how, whilst poor little 
Tina was fretting over her wrongs, the "stream 
of human thought and deed was hurrying and 
broadening around." 

What were our little Tina and her trouble in this 
mighty torrent, rushing from one awful unknown to 
another ? Lighter than the smallest centre of quiver- 
ing life in the water drop hidden and uncared for as 
the pulse of anguish in the breast of the tiniest bird 
that has fluttered down to its nest with the long- 
sought food, and has found the nest torn and 
empty. 



George Eliot 161 

It is this constant reference, tacit or express, sug- 
gested by pathetic touches, and by humorous ex- 
hibition of the incongruities and contrasts of the 
little drama of village life to the outer world be- 
yond, and to the wider universe in which it too is 
an atom, that distinctly raises George Eliot above 
the level of many merely picturesque descriptions 
of similar scenes. We feel that the artist is on 
intellectual elevation high enough to be beyond 
the illusions of the city fashion ; but the singular 
charm springs out of the tender affection which 
reproduces the little world left so far behind and 
hallowed by the romance of early association. 

George Eliot's own view of the matter is given 
in more than one of these objectionable "asides" 
of which we have had to speak. She entreats us 
to try to see the poetry and the pathos, the 
tragedy and the comedy, to be found in the ex- 
perience of poor dingy Amos Barton. She rarely 
looks, she says, at " a bent old man or a wizened 
old woman " without seeing 

the past of which they are the shrunken remnant ; and 
the unfinished romance of rosy cheeks and bright 
eyes seems sometimes of feeble interest and signi- 
ficance compared with that drama of hope and love 
which has long ago reached its catastrophe, and left 
the poor soul, like a dim and dusty stage, with all its 
sweet garden scenes and fair perspectives overturned 
and thrust out of sight. 



VOL. IV. II. 



1 62 Hours in a Library 

To reflect that we ought to see wizened old men 
and women with such eyes is of course easy 
enough; to have such eyes really to see what 
we know that we ought to see is to possess true 
genius. George Eliot is not laying down a philo- 
sophical maxim to be proved and illustrated, but 
is attempting to express the animating principle 
of a labour of love. Mr. Gilfil, the person who 
suggests this remark, is the embodiment of the 
abstract principle, and makes us feel that it is 
no empty profession. Everybody has noticed 
how admirably George Eliot has portrayed certain 
phases of religious feeling with which, in one sense, 
she had long ceased to sympathise. Amongst 
subsidiary actors in her stories, none are more 
tenderly and lovingly touched than the old- 
fashioned parsons and Dissenting preachers 
Barton and Gilfil and Try an, and Irwin and Dinah 
Morris in Adam Bede, and Mr. Lyon in Felix Holt. 
I do not know that they or their successors would 
have much call to be grateful. For, in truth, it 
is plain enough that the interest is in the kindly 
old-fashioned parson, considered as a valuable 
factor in the social system, and that his creed is 
not taken to be the source of his strength ; whilst 
the few Methodists and the brethren in Lantern 
Yard are regarded as attaining a very imperfect 
and stammering version of truths capable of being 



George Eliot 163 

very completely dissevered from their dogmatic 
teaching. In any case, her breach with the creed 
of her youth involved no breach of the ties formed 
by early reverence for its representatives. The 
change involved none of the bitterness which is 
sometimes generated by a spiritual revolt. Dickens 
who is sometimes supposed to represent the 
version of modern Christianity could apparently 
see nothing in a Dissenting preacher but an unc- 
tuous and sensual hypocrite a vulgarised Tar- 
tufe such as Stiggins and Chadband. If George 
Eliot had been the mere didactic preacher of 
mere critics, she might have set before us mere 
portraits of spiritual pride or clerical charlatan- 
ism. But whatever her creed, she was too deep 
a humourist, too thoughtful and too tender, to 
fall into such an error. She never sinned against 
the "natural piety" which should bind our days 
together. The tender regard which she had re- 
tained for all the surroundings of her youth did 
not fail towards those whose teaching had once 
roused her reverence, and which could never be- 
come the objects of indiscriminate antipathy. 

In this, one may perhaps say George Eliot was 
a true woman. Women, indeed, can be fully as 
bitter in their resentment as the harsher sex ; but 
their bitterness seems to be generated in the at- 
tempt to outdo their masculine rivals, and to 



1 64 Hours in a Library 

imply perverted rather than deficient sensibility. 
They seldom exhibit pachydermatous indiffer- 
ence to their neighbour's emotions. The so-called 
masculine quality in George Eliot her wide and 
calm intelligence was certainly combined with 
a thoroughly feminine nature; and the more one 
reads her books and notes her real triumphs, the 
more strongly this comes out. The poetry and 
pathos which she seeks to reveal under common- 
place surroundings is found chiefly in feminine 
hearts. Each of the early books is the record of 
an ordeal endured by some suffering woman. In 
the Scenes of Clerical Life the interest really cen- 
tres in the women whose fate is bound up with 
the acts of the clerical heroes; it is Janet and 
Molly Barton in whom we are really interested; 
and if poor little Tina is too weak to be a heroine, 
her vigorous struggle against the destinies is the 
pivot of the story. That George Eliot succeeded 
remarkably in some male portraits, and notably 
in Tom Tulliver, is undeniable. Yet the men 
were often simply women in disguise. The 
piquancy, for example, of the famous character 
of Tito is greatly due to the fact that he is the 
voluptuous, selfish, but sensitive character, not 
unfamiliar in the fiction which deals with social 
intrigues, but generally presented to us in femin- 
ine costume. We are told of Daniel Deronda, 



George Eliot 165 

upon whose character an extraordinary amount 
of analysis is expended, that he combined a femin- 
ine affectionateness with masculine inflexibility. 
To our perceptions, the feminine vein becomes 
decidedly the most prominent ; and this is equally 
true of such characters as Philip Wakem and Mr. 
Lyon. Adam Bede, indeed, to mention no one 
else, is a thorough man. He represents, it would 
seem, that ideal of masculine strength which Miss 
Bronte tried with curious want of success to de- 
pict in Louis Moore the firm arm, the offer of 
which (as we are told & propos of Maggie Tulliver 
and the offensive Stephen Guest) has in it "some- 
thing strangely winning to most women." Yet 
if Adam Bede had shown less Christian forbear- 
ance to young Squire Donnithorne, we should have 
been more convinced that he was of masculine 
fibre throughout. 

Here we approach more disputable matters. 
George Eliot's early books owe their charm to the 
exquisite painting of the old country-life an 
achievement made possible by a tender imagina- 
tion brooding over a vanishing past but, if we 
may make the distinction, they owe their great- 
ness to the insight into passions not confined 
to one race or period. Janet Dempster would 
lose much of her charm if she were transplanted 
from Milby to London ; but she would still be 



1 66 Hours in a Library 

profoundly interesting as representing a marked 
type of feminine character. Balzac or somebody 
else said, or is said to have said, that there were 
only seven possible plots in fiction. Without 
pledging oneself to the particular number, one 
may admit that the number of radically different 
motives is remarkably small. It may be added 
that even great writers rarely show their highest 
capacity in more than one of these typical situa- 
tions. It is not hard to say which is George Eliot's 
favourite theme. We may call it speaking with 
proper reserve the woman in need of a confessor. 
We may have the comparatively shallow nature, 
the poor wilful little Tina, or Hetty or Tessa the 
mere plaything of fate, whom we pity because in 
her childish ignorance she is apt, like little Red 
Ridinghood, to mistake the wolf for a friend, 
though not exactly to take him for a grandmother. 
Or we have the woman with noble aspirations 
Janet, or Dinah, or Maggie, or Romola, or Doro- 
thea, or may we add? Daniel Deronda, who 
recognises more clearly her own need of guidance, 
and even in failure has the lofty air of martyrdom. 
It is in the setting such characters before us that 
George Eliot has achieved her highest triumphs, 
and made some of her most unmistakable failures. 
It is here that we meet the complaint that she is 
too analytic ; that she takes the point of view of 



George Eliot 167 

the confessor rather than the artist ; and is more 
anxious to probe the condition of her heroines' 
souls, to give us an accurate diagnosis of their 
spiritual complaints, and an account of their 
moral evolution, than to show us the character in 
action. If I must give my own view, I must ven- 
ture a distinction. To say that George Eliot's 
stories are interesting as studies of human nature, 
is really to say little more than that they deserve 
serious attention. There are stories and very 
excellent and amusing stories which have com- 
paratively little to do with character; histories 
of wondrous and moving events, where you are 
fascinated by the vivacity of the narrator without 
caring much for the passions of the actors such 
stories, in fact, as compose the Arabian Nights, 
or the voluminous works of the admirable Alex- 
andre Dumas. We do not care to understand 
Aladdin's sentiments, or to say how far he differed 
from Sinbad and Camaralzaman. The famous 
Musketeers have different parts to play, and so 
far different characters; but one does not care 
very much for their psychology. Still, every 
serious writer must derive his power from his 
insight into men and women. A Cervantes or 
Shakespeare, a Scott, a Fielding, a Richardson 
or Thackeray, commands our attention by forcible 
presentation of certain types of character; and, 



1 68 Hours in a Library 

so far, George Eliot's does not differ from her pre- 
decessors'. Nor, again, would any truly imagina- 
tive writer give us mere abstract analyses of 
character, instead of showing us the concrete per- 
son in action. If George Eliot has a tendency 
to this error, it does not appear in her early period. 
We can see any of her best characters as distinctly, 
we know them by direct vision as intimately, as we 
know any personage in real or fictitious his- 
tory. We are not put off with the formulae of 
their conduct, but persons are themselves revealed 
to us. Yet it is, I think, true that her stories are 
pre-eminently studies of character in this sense, 
that her main and conscious purpose is to set be- 
fore us the living beings in what may be called, 
with due apology, their statical relations to show 
them, that is, in their quiet and normal state, not 
under the stress of exceptional events. When we 
once know Adam Bede or Dinah Morris, we care 
comparatively little for the development of the 
plot. Compare, for example, Adam Bede with the 
Heart of Midlothian, the first half of which seems 
to me to be one of the very noblest of all fictions, 
though the latter part suffers from the conven- 
tional mad woman and the bit of commonplace 
intrigue which Scott fancied himself bound to 
introduce. Jeanie Deans is, to my mind, a more 
powerfully drawn and altogether a more substan- 



George Eliot 169 

tial and satisfactory young woman than Dinah 
Morris, who, with all her merits, seems to me, I 
will confess, to be a bit of a prig. The contrast, 
however, to which I refer is in the method rather 
than in the characters or the situation. Scott 
wishes to interest us in the magnificent trial scene, 
for which all the preceding narrative is a prepara- 
tion ; he is content to set the Deans family before 
us with a few amazingly vigorous touches, so that 
we may thoroughly enter into the spirit of the 
tremendous ordeal through which poor Jeanie 
Deans is to pass in the conflict between affection 
and duty. We first learn to know her thoroughly 
by her behaviour under that overpowering strain. 
But in Adam Bede we learn first to know the main 
actors by their conduct in a number of little scenes, 
most admirably devised and drawn, and serving 
to bring out, if not a more powerful, a more elabo- 
rate and minute manifestation of their inmost 
feelings. When we come to the critical parts in 
the story, and the final catastrophe, they are less 
interesting and vivid than the preliminary detail 
of apparently insignificant events. The trial and 
the arrival of the reprieve are probably the weak- 
est and most commonplace passages; and what 
we really remember and enjoy are the little scenes 
on the village green, in Mrs. Poyser's dairy, and 
Adam Bede's workshop. We have there learnt 



170 Hours in a Library 

to know the people themselves, and we scarcely 
care for what happens to them. The method is 
natural to a feminine observer who has learnt to 
interpret character by watching its manifestations 
in little everyday incidents, and feels compara- 
tively at a loss when having to deal with the more 
exciting struggles and calamities which make a 
noise in the world. And therefore, as I think, 
George Eliot is always more admirable in careful 
exposition in setting her personages before us 
than in dealing with her catastrophes, where, to 
say the truth, she sometimes seems to become 
weak just when we expect her full powers to be 
exerted. 

This is true, for example, of Silas Marner, where 
the inimitable opening is very superior to the se- 
quel. It is still more conspicuously true of the 
Mill on the Floss. The first part of that novel 
appears to me to mark the culmination of her 
genius. So far, it is one of the rare books which 
it is difficult to praise in adequate language. We 
may naturally suspect that part of the singular 
vividness is due to some admixture of an autobio- 
graphical element. The sonnets called Brother 
and Sister perhaps her most successful poetical 
effort suggest that the adventures of Tom and 
Maggie had some counterpart in personal experi- 
ence. In any case, the whole account of Maggie's 



George Eliot 171 

childhood, the admirable pathos of the childish 
yearnings, and the quaint chorus of uncles and 
aunts, the adventure with the gipsies, the wander- 
ings by the Floss, the visit to Tom in his school, 
have a freshness and brilliance of colouring, show- 
ing that the workmanship is as perfect as the senti- 
ment is tender. But when Maggie ceases to be 
the most fascinating child in fiction, and becomes 
the heroine of a novel, the falling off is grievous. 
The unlucky affair with Stephen Guest is simply 
indefensible. It may, indeed, be urged and 
urged with plausibility that it is true to nature ; 
it is true, that is, that women of genius and, in- 
deed, other women do not always show that 
taste in the selection of lovers which commends 
itself to the masculine mind. There is nothing 
contrary to experience in the supposition that the 
imagination of an impulsive girl may transfigure 
a very second-rate young tradesman into a lover 
worthy of her ; but this does not excuse the author 
for sharing the illusion. It is painfully true that 
some women, otherwise excellent, may be tempted 
like Janet Dempster, to take to stimulants. But 
we should not have been satisfied if her weakness 
had been represented as a creditable or venial 
peculiarity, or without a sense of the degradation. 
So it would, in any case, be hardly pleasant to make 
our charming Maggie the means of illustrating 



i7 2 Hours in a Library 

the doctrine that a woman of high qualities may 
throw herself away upon a low creature ; when 
she is made to act in this way, and the weakness 
is not duly emphasised, we are forced to sup- 
pose that George Eliot did not see what a poor 
creature she has really drawn. Perhaps this is 
characteristic of a certain feminine incapacity for 
drawing really masculine heroes, which is exem- 
plified, not quite so disagreeably, in the case of 
Dorothea and Ladislaw. But it is a misfortune, 
and all the more so because the error seems to be 
gratuitous. If it was necessary to introduce a 
new lover, he should have been endowed with 
some qualities likely to attract Maggie's higher 
nature, instead of betraying his second-rate dandy- 
ism in every feature. But the engagement to 
Philip Wakem, who is, at least, a lovable charac- 
ter, might surely have supplied enough tragical 
motive for a catastrophe which would not de- 
grade poor Maggie to common clay. As it is, 
what promises to be the most perfect story of its 
kind ends most pathetically indeed, but yet with 
a strain which jars most painfully upon the gen- 
eral harmony. 

The line so sharply drawn in the Mill on the 
Floss is also the boundary between two provinces 
of the whole region. With Maggie's visit to St. 
Ogg' s we take leave of that part of George Eliot's 



George Eliot 173 

work which can be praised without important 
qualification of work so admirable in its kind 
that we have a sense of complete achievement. 
In the later stories we come upon debatable 
ground; we have to recognise distinct failure in 
hitting the mark, and to strike a balance between 
the good and bad qualities, instead of simply 
recognising the thorough harmony of a finished 
whole. What is the nature of the change? The 
shortcomings are, as I have said, obvious enough. 
We have, for example, the growing tendency to 
substitute elaborate analysis for direct presenta- 
tion; there are such passages, as one to which I 
have referred, where we are told that it is neces- 
sary to understand Deronda's character at five- 
and-twenty in order to appreciate the effect of 
after-events; and where we have an elaborate 
discussion which would be perfectly admissible 
in the discussion of some historical character, but 
which, in a writer who has the privilege of creating 
history, strikes us as an evasion of a difficulty. 
When we are limited to certain facts, we are forced 
to theorise as to the qualities which they indicate. 
Real people do not always get into situations 
which speak for themselves. But when we can 
make such facts as will reveal character, we have 
no right to give the abstract theory for the con- 
crete embodiment. We perceive when this is 



174 Hours in a Library 

done that the reflective faculties have been grow- 
ing at the expense of the imagination, and that, 
instead of simply enriching and extending the 
field of interest, they are coming into the fore- 
ground and usurping functions for which they are 
unfitted. The fault is palpable in Romola. The 
remarkable power not only of many passages but 
of the general conception of the book is unable to 
blind us to the fact that, after all, it is a magnifi- 
cent piece of cram. The masses of information 
have not been fused by a glowing imagination. 
The fuel has put out the fire. If we fail to per- 
ceive this in the more serious passages, it is pain- 
fully evident in those which are meant to be 
humorous or playful. People often impose upon 
themselves when they are listening to some rhet- 
oric, perhaps because, when we have got into a 
reverential frame of mind, our critical instincts 
are in abeyance. But it is not so easy to simulate 
amusement. And if anybody, with the mimicry 
of Mrs. Poyser or Bob Jakin in his mind, can get 
through the chapter called "A Florentine Joke" 
without coming to the conclusion that the jokes 
of that period were oppressive and wearisome 
ghosts of the facetious, he must be one of those 
people who take in jokes by the same faculty as 
scientific theorems. If we are indulgent, it must 
be on the ground that the historical novel proper 



George Eliot 175 

is after all an elaborate blunder. It is really 
analogous to, and shows the weakness of, the 
various attempts at the revival of extinct phases 
of art with which we have been overpowered in 
these days. It almost inevitably falls into Scylla 
or Charybdis ; it is either a heavy mass of infor- 
mation striving to be lively, or it is really lively 
at the price of being thoroughly shallow, and giv- 
ing us the merely pretty and picturesque in place 
of the really impressive. If any one has succeeded 
in avoiding the horns of this dilemma, it is cer- 
tainly not George Eliot. She had certainly very 
imposing authorities on her side; but I imagine 
that Romola gives unqualified satisfaction only 
to people who hold that academical correctness 
of design can supply the place of vivid directness 
of intuitive vision. 

Yet the situation was not so much the cause as 
the symptom of a change. When George Eliot 
returned to her proper ground, she did not regain 
the old magic. Middlemarch is undoubtedly a 
powerful book, but to many readers it is a rather 
painful book, and it can hardly be called a charm- 
ing book to any one. The light of common day 
has most unmistakably superseded the indescrib- 
able glow which illuminated the earlier writings. 

The change, so far as we need consider it, is 
sufficiently indicated by one circumstance. The 



176 Hours in a Library 

"prelude" invites us to remember Saint Theresa. 
Her passionate nature, we are told, demanded a 
consecration of life to some object of unselfish de- 
votion. She found it in the reform of a religious 
order. But there are many modern Theresas who, 
with equally noble aspirations, can find no worthy 
object for their energies. They have found "no 
coherent social faith and order," no sufficient 
guidance for their ardent souls. And thus we 
have now and then a Saint Theresa, "foundress 
of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after 
an unattained goodness tremble off and are dis- 
persed among hindrances instead of centring in 
some long recognisable deed." This, then, is the 
keynote of Middlemarck. We are to have one 
more variation on the theme already treated in 
various forms; and Dorothea Brooke is to be 
the Saint Theresa with lofty aspirations to pass 
through a searching ordeal, and, if she fails in 
outward results, yet to win additional nobility 
from failure. And yet, if this be the design, it 
almost seems as if the book were intended for 
elaborate irony. Dorothea starts with some ad- 
mirable, though not very novel, aspirations of 
the social kind with a desire to improve drainage 
and provide better cottages for the poor. She 
meets a consummate pedant, who is piteously 
ridiculed for his petty and hidebound intellect, 



George Eliot i77 

and immediately takes him to be her hero and 
guide to lofty endeavour. She fancies, as we are 
told, that her spiritual difficulties will be solved 
by the help of a little Latin and Greek. "Per- 
haps even Hebrew might be necessary at least 
the alphabet and a few roots in order to arrive 
at the core of things and judge soundly on the 
social duties of the Christian." She marries Mr. 
Casaubon, and of course is speedily undeceived. 
But curiously enough, the process of enlighten- 
ment seems to be very partial. Her faith in her 
husband receives its death-blow as soon as she 
finds out not that he is a wretched pedant, but 
that he is a pedant of the wrong kind. Will 
Ladislaw points out to her that Mr. Casaubon is 
throwing away his labour because he does not 
know German, and is therefore only abreast of 
poor old Jacob Bryant in the last century, instead 
of being a worthy contemporary of Professor Max 
Muller. Surely Dorothea's error is almost as 
deep as ever. Casaubon is a wretched being be- 
cause he has neither heart nor brains not because 
his reading has been confined to the wrong set of 
books. Surely a man may be a prig and a pedant, 
though he is familiar with the very last researches 
of German professors. The latest theories about 
comparative mythology may be familiar to a man 
with a soul comparable only to a dry pea in a 



VOL. IV. 12. 



1 78 Hours in a Library 

bladder. If Casaubon had been all that Dorothea 
fancied, if his knowledge had been thoroughly up 
to the mark, we should still have pitied her for not 
knowing the difference between a man and a stick. 
Unluckily, she never seems to find out that in this 
stupendous blunder, and not in the pardonable 
ignorance as to the true value of his literary la- 
bours, is the real source of her misfortune. In 
fact, she hardly seems to grow wiser at the end; 
for when poor Casaubon is as dead as his writings, 
she takes up with a young gentleman who appears 
to have some good feeling, but is conspicuously 
unworthy of the affections of a Saint Theresa. 
Had Middlemarch been intended for a cutting 
satire upon the aspirations of young ladies who 
wish to learn Latin and Greek when they ought 
to be nursing babies and supporting hospitals, 
these developments of affairs would have been in 
perfect congruity with the design. As it is, we 
are left with the feeling that aspirations of this 
kind scarcely deserve a better fate than they meet, 
and that Dorothea was all the better for getting 
the romantic aspirations out of her head. Have 
not the commonplace people the best of the 
argument? 

It would be very untrue to say that the later 
books show any defect of general power. I do not 
think, for example, that there are many passages 



George Eliot 179 

in modern fiction so vigorous as the description 
of poor Lydgate, whose higher aspirations are 
dashed with a comparatively vulgar desire for 
worldly success, gradually engulfed by the selfish 
persistence of his wife, like a swimmer sucked 
down by an octopus. On the contrary, the pic- 
ture is so forcible and so lifelike that one reads 
it with a sense of -actual bitterness. And as in 
Daniel Deronda, though I am ready to confess that 
Mordecai and Daniel are to my mind intolerable 
bores, I hold the story of Grandecourt and Gwen- 
dolen to be, though not a pleasant, a singularly 
powerful study. And it may certainly be said 
both of Romola and of Middlemarch that they have 
some merits of so high an order that the defects 
upon which I have dwelt are felt as blemishes, not 
as fatal errors. If there is some misunderstanding 
of the limits of her own powers, or some miscon- 
ception of true artistic conditions, nobody can 
read them without the sense of having been in 
contact with a comprehensive and vigorous in- 
tellect, with high feeling and keen powers of ob- 
servation. Only one cannot help regretting the 
loss of that early charm. In reading Adam Bede, 
we feel first the magic, and afterwards we recog- 
nise the power which it implies. In Middlemarch, 
we feel the power, but we ask in vain for the charm. 
Some such change passes over any great mind 



i8o Hours in a Library 

which goes through a genuine process of devel- 
opment. It is not surprising that the reflective 
powers should become more predominant in later 
years ; that reasoning should to some extent take 
the place of intuitive perception; and that ex- 
perience of life should give a sterner and sadder 
tone to the implied criticism of human nature. 
We are prepared to find less spontaneity, less 
freshness of interest in the little incidents of life, 
and we are not surprised that a mind so reflective 
and richly stored should try to get beyond the 
charmed circle of its early successes and to give 
us a picture of wider and less picturesque aspects 
of human life. But this does not seem to account 
sufficiently for the presence of something jarring 
and depressing in the later work. 

Without going into the question fully, one thing 
may be said : the modern Theresa, whether she is 
called Dorothea, or Maggie, or Dinah, or Janet, is 
the central figure in the world of George Eliot's 
imagination. We are to be brought to sympa- 
thise with the noble aspirations of a loving and 
unselfish spirit, conscious that it cannot receive 
any full satisfaction within the commonplace con- 
ditions of this prosaic world. How women are to 
find a worthier sphere of action than the mere 
suckling of babes and chronicling of small beer 
is a question for the Social Science Associations, 



George Eliot 181 

Some people answer it by proposing to give women 
votes or degrees, and others would tell us that such 
problems can only be answered by reverting to 
Saint Theresa's method. The solution in terms 
of actual conduct lies beyond the proper province 
of the novelist. She has done all that she can 
do if she has revealed the intrinsic beauty of such 
a character, and its proper function in life. She 
should make us fall in love with Romola and 
Maggie, and convert us to the belief that they are 
the true salt of the earth. 

Up to a certain point her success is complete, 
and it is won by high moral feeling and quick 
sympathy with true nobility of character. We 
pay willing homage to these pure and lofty femin- 
ine types, and we may get some measure of the 
success by comparing them with other dissatisfied 
heroines whose aspirations are by no means so 
lofty or so compatible with delicate moral senti- 
ment. But the triumph has its limits. In the 
sweet Old- World country life, a Janet or a Dinah 
can find some sort of satisfaction from an evan- 
gelical preacher, or within the limits of the Metho- 
dist Church. If the thoughts and ways of her 
circle are narrow, it is in harmony with itself, and 
we may feel its beauty without asking awkward 
questions. But as soon as Maggie has left her 
quiet fields and reached even such a centre of 



1 82 Hours in a Library 

civilisation as St. Ogg's, there is a jar and a dis- 
cord. Romola is in presence of a great spiritual 
disturbance where the highest aspirations are 
doomed to the saddest failure; and when we get 
to Middlemarch, we feel that the charm has some- 
how vanished. Even in the early period, Mrs. 
Poyser's bright common-sense has some advan- 
tages over Dinah Morris's high-wrought sentiment. 
And in Middlemarch, we feel more decidedly that 
high aspirations are doubtful qualifications ; that 
the ambitious young devotee of science has to 
compound with the quarrelling world, and the 
brilliant young Dorothea to submit to a decided 
clipping of her wings. Is it worth while to have 
a lofty nature in such surroundings? The very 
bitterness with which the triumph of the lower 
characters is set forth seems to betray a kind of 
misgiving. And it is the presence of this feeling, 
as well as the absence of the old picturesque scen- 
ery, that gives a tone of melancholy to the later 
books. Some readers are disposed to sneer, and 
to look upon the heroes and heroines as male and 
female prigs, who are ridiculous if they persist 
and contemptible when they fail. Others are 
disposed to infer that the philosophy which they 
represent is radically unsatisfactory. And some 
may say that, after all, the picture is true, how- 
ever sad, and that, in all ages, people who try to 



George Eliot 183 

lift their heads above the crowd must lay their 
account with martyrdom and be content to be 
uncomfortable. The moral, accepted by George 
Eliot herself, is indicated at the end of Middle- 
march. A new Theresa, she tells us, will not have 
the old opportunity any more than a new An- 
tigone would "spend heroic piety in daring all for 
the sake of a brother's funeral; the medium in 
which these ardent deeds took shape is for ever 
gone." There will be many Dorotheas, and some 
of them doomed to worse sacrifices than the Doro- 
thea of Middlemarch, and we must be content to 
think that her influence spent itself through many 
invisible channels, but was not the less potent 
because unseen. 

Perhaps that is not a very satisfactory conclu- 
sion. I cannot here ask why it should not have 
been more satisfactory. We must admit that 
there is something rather depressing in the thought 
of these anonymous Dorotheas feeling about 
vaguely for some worthy outlet of their energies, 
taking up with a man of science and discovering 
him to be an effete pedant, wishing ardently to 
reform the world, but quite unable to specify the 
steps to be taken, and condescending to put up 
with a very commonplace life in a vague hope that 
somehow or other they will do some good. Un- 
doubtedly we must admit that, wherever the fault 



1 84 Hours in a Library 

lies, our Theresas have some difficulty in fully 
manifesting their excellence. But with all their 
faults, we feel that they embody the imperfect 
influence of a nature so lofty in its sentiment, so 
wide in its sympathies, and so keen in its percep- 
tions, that we may wait long before it will be ad- 
equately replaced. The imperfections belong in 
great measure to a time of vast revolutions in 
thought which produce artistic discords as well 
as philosophic anarchy. Lower minds escape 
the difficulty because they are lower; and even 
to be fully sensitive to the deepest searchings of 
heart of the time is to possess a high claim on our 
respect. At lowest, however we may differ from 
George Eliot's teaching on many points, we feel 
her to be one who, in the midst of great perplex- 
ities, has brought great intellectual powers to 
setting before us a lofty moral ideal, and, in spite 
of manifest shortcomings, has shown certain as- 
pects of a vanishing social phase with a power and 
delicacy unsurpassed in her own sphere. 



Autobiography 



NOBODY ever wrote a dull autobiography. If 
one may make such a bull, the very dulness would 
be interesting. The autobiographer has ex officio 
two qualifications of supreme importance in all 
literary work. He is writing about a topic in 
which he is keenly interested, and about a topic 
upon which he is the highest living authority. It 
may be reckoned, too, as a special felicity that an 
autobiography, alone of all books, may be more 
valuable in proportion to the amount of mis- 
representation which it contains. We do not 
wonder when a man gives a false character to his 
neighbour, but it is always curious to see how a 
man contrives to present a false testimonial to 
himself. It is pleasant to be admitted behind the 
scenes and trace the growth of that singular phan- 
tom which, like the Spectre of the Brocken, is the 
man's own shadow cast upon the coloured and 
distorting mists of memory. Autobiography for 
these reasons is so generally interesting, that I 
have frequently thought with the admirable 

185 



1 86 Hours in a Library 

Benvenuto Cellini that it should be considered as 
a duty by all eminent men ; and, indeed, by men 
not eminent. As every sensible man is exhorted 
to make his will, he should also be bound to leave 
to his descendants some account of his experience 
of life. The dullest would in spite of themselves 
say something profoundly interesting, if only 
by explaining how they came to be so dull 
a circumstance which is sometimes in great need 
of explanation. On reflection, however, we must 
admit that autobiography done under compulsion 
would be in danger of losing the essential charm 
of spontaneity. The true autobiography is written 
by one who feels an irresistible longing for con- 
fidential expansion; who is forced by his innate 
constitution to unbosom himself to the public of 
the kind of matter generally reserved for our clos- 
est intimacy. Confessions dictated by a sense of 
duty, like many records of religious experience, 
have rarely the peculiar attractiveness of those 
which are prompted by the simple longing for 
human sympathy. Nothing, indeed, in all litera- 
ture is more impressive than some of the writings 
in which great men have laid bare to us the 
working of their souls in the severest spiritual 
crisis. But the solemnity and the loftiness of 
purpose generally remove such work to a rather 
different category. Augustine's Confessions is an 



Autobiography 187 

impassioned meditation upon great religious and 
philosophical questions which only condescends 
at intervals to autobiographical detail. Few 
books, to descend a little in the scale, are more 
interesting, whether to the fellow-believer or to 
the psychological observer, than Bunyan's Grace 
Abounding. We follow this real pilgrim through a 
labyrinth of strange scruples invented by a quick 
brain placed for the time at the service of a self- 
torturing impulse, and peopled by the phantoms 
created by a poetical imagination under stress of 
profound excitement. Incidentally we learn to 
know and to love the writer, and certainly not the 
less because the spiritual fermentation reveals no 
morbid affectation. We give him credit for ex- 
posing the trial and the victory simply and solely 
for the reason which he alleges; that is to say, 
because he really thinks that his experience offers 
useful lessons to his fellow-creatures. He is no 
attitudiniser, proud at the bottom of his heart 
of the sensibility which he professes to lament, 
nor a sanctimonious sentimentalist stimulating a 
false emotion for purposes of ostentation. He is 
as simple, honest, and soundhearted as he is ten- 
der and impassioned. But these very merits 
deprive the book of some autobiographical inter- 
est. It never enters his head that anybody will 
care about John Bunyan the tinker, or the details 



1 88 Hours in a Library 

of his tinkering. He who painted the scenes in 
Vanity Fair could have drawn a vivid picture of 
Elstow and Bedford, of Puritanical preachers and 
Cromwellian soldiers, and the judges and gaolers 
under Charles II. Here and there, in scattered 
passages of his works, he gives us graphic anec- 
dotes in passing which set the scene before us 
vividly as a bit of Pepys's diaries. The incidents 
connected with his commitment to prison are de- 
scribed with a dramatic force capable of exciting 
the envy of a practised reporter. But we see only 
enough to tantalise us with the possibilities. He 
tells us so little of his early life that his biographers 
cannot make up their minds as to whether he was, 
as Southey calls him, a "blackguard," or a few 
degrees above or below that zero-point of the 
scale of merit. Lord Macaulay takes it for granted 
that he was in the Parliamentary, and Mr. Froude 
thinks it almost proved that he was in the Royal- 
ist army. He tells us nothing of the death of the 
first wife, whose love seems to have raised him 
from blackguardism; nor of his marriage to the 
second wife, who stood up for him so bravely be- 
fore the judges, and was his faithful companion 
to the end of his pilgrimage. The book is there- 
fore a profoundly interesting account of one phase 
in the development of the character of our great 
prose-poet; but hardly an autobiography. The 



Autobiography 1 89 

narrative was worth writing, because his own 
heart, like his allegorical Mansoul, had been the 
scene of one incident in the everlasting struggle 
between the powers of light and darkness, not 
because the scene had any independent interest 
of its own. 

In this, one may be disposed to say Bunyan 
judged rightly. The wisest man, it is said, is he 
who realises most clearly the narrow limits of 
human knowledge; the greatest should be pene- 
trated with the strongest conviction of his own 
insignificance. The higher we rise above the 
average mass of mankind, the more clearly we 
should see our own incapacity for acting the part 
of Providence. The village squire who does not 
really believe in anything invisible from his own 
steeple, may fancy that he is of real importance 
to the world, for the world for him means his vil- 
lage. " P.P. clerk of this parish" thought that all 
future generations would be interested in the fact 
that he had smoothed the dog's-ears in the great 
Bible. A genuine statesman who knows some- 
thing of the forces by which the world is governed 
should have seen through the humbug of history. 
He should have learnt the fable of the fly and the 
chariot wheel, and be aware that what are called 
his achievements are really the events upon which, 
through some accident of position, he has been 



190 Hours in a Library 

allowed to inscribe his name. One stage in a 
nation's life gets itself labelled Cromwell, and 
another William Pitt ; but perhaps Pitt and Crom- 
well were really of little more importance than 
some contemporary P.P. This doctrine, how- 
ever, is considered, I know not why, to be 
immoral, and to smack of fatalism, cynicism, 
jealousy of great men, and other objectionable 
tendencies. We are in a tacit conspiracy to flatter 
conspicuous men at the expense of their fellow- 
workers, and he is the most generous and appre- 
ciative who can heap the greatest number of 
superlatives upon growing reputations, and add 
a stone to the gigantic pile of eulogy under which 
the historical proportions of some great figures 
are pretty well buried. We must not complain, 
therefore, if we flatter the vanity which seems 
to be the most essential ingredient in the com- 
position of a model biographer. A man who ex- 
pects that future generations will be profoundly 
interested in the state of his interior seems to be 
drawing a heavy bill upon posterity. And yet it 
is generally honoured. We are flattered perhaps 
by this exhibition of confidence. We are touched 
by the demand for sympathy. There is some- 
thing pathetic in this belief that we shall be moved 
by the record of past sufferings and aspirations 
as there is in a child's confidence that you will 



Autobiography 191 

enter into its little fears and hopes. And per- 
haps vanity is so universal a weakness, and, in 
spite of good moralising, it so strongly resembles 
a virtue in some of its embodiments, that we can- 
not find it in our hearts to be angry with it. We 
can understand it too thoroughly. And then we 
make an ingenious compromise with our con- 
sciences. Our interest in Pepys's avowals of his 
own foibles, for example, is partly due to the fact 
that whilst we are secretly conscious of at least 
the germs of similar failings, the consciousness 
does not bring any sense of shame, because we 
set down the confession to the account of poor 
Pepys himself. The man who, like Goldsmith, is 
so running over with jealousy that he is forced to 
avow it openly, seems to be a sort of excuse to us 
for cherishing a less abundant stock of similar 
sentiment. This is one occult source of pleasure 
in reading autobiography. We have a delicate 
shade of conscious superiority in listening to the 
vicarious confession. " I am sometimes troubled," 
said Boswell, "by a disposition to stinginess." 
"So am I," replied Johnson, "but I do not tell 
it." That is our attitude in regard to the auto- 
biographer. After all, we say to ourselves, this 
distinguished person is such a one as we are; and 
even more so, for he cannot keep it to himself. 
The conclusion is not quite fair, it may be, when 



Hours in a Library 

applied to the case of a diarist like Pepys, who, 
poor man, meant only to confide his thoughts 
to his note-books. But it applies more or less 
to every genuine autobiographer to every man, 
that is, who has deliberately written down a his- 
tory of his own feelings and thoughts for the 
benefit of posterity. 

The prince of all autobiographers in this full 
sense of the word the man who represents the 
genuine type in its fullest realisation is un- 
doubtedly Rousseau. The Confessions may cer- 
tainly be regarded as not only one of the most 
remarkable, but as in parts one of the most re- 
pulsive, books ever written. Yet, one must add, 
it is also one of the most fascinating. Rousseau 
starts by declaring that he is undertaking a task 
which has had no precedent, and will have no 
imitators the task of showing a man in all the 
truth of nature, and that man himself. How far 
he is perfectly sincere in this, or in the declaration 
which immediately follows, that no one of his 
readers will be able to pronounce himself a better 
man than Jean Jacques Rousseau, is a question 
hardly to be answered. The avowal is at any 
rate characteristic of the true autobiographer. 
It reflects the subtle vanity which, taking now 
the guise of perfect sincerity, and now that of 
deep humility, encourages us to colour as highly 



Autobiography 193 

as possible both our vices and our virtues as 
equally entitling us to the sympathies of man- 
kind : that strange and Protean sensibility which 
we are puzzled to classify either as an excessive 
craving for admiration, or a mere morbid desire 
for self-abasement. Certainly in Rousseau it 
sometimes shows itself in a shamelessness which 
it is very hard to forgive unless we will admit the 
ambiguous and well-worn plea of partial insanity. 
The pleasure always, it must be granted, a very 
questionable one of recognising our own failings 
in our superiors, passes too often into sheer dis- 
gust or shuddering horror at the spectacle of 
genius grovelling in the mire. But Rousseau 
represents an abnormal development of all the 
qualities of his class ; and this, the ugliest amongst 
the autobiographic instincts, is hardly developed 
out of proportion to the rest. And, therefore, 
if we cannot quite forgive, we are not altogether 
alienated. We read, for example, one of those 
amazing confessions of contemptible meanness 
which makes us wonder that human fingers could 
commit them to paper: the story of his casting 
the blame of a petty theft upon an innocent girl, 
to her probable ruin ; of his desertion of his friend 
lying in a fit on the pavement of a strange town ; 
of the more grievous crime of his abandonment 
of his own children to the foundling hospital. 



VOL. IV. 13. 



194 Hours in a Library 

How can any interest survive in the narrator 
except that kind of interest which a physiologist 
takes in some ghastly disease? It would be a 
libel upon ourselves to suppose that we see the 
reflections of our own hearts in such narratives, 
or that we can in any degree take them as an in- 
direct flattery to our own superiority. Such an 
emotion may conceivably be present in some other 
passages. When, for example, we read how, on 
the death of a dear friend, Rousseau confesses to 
one who loved them both that he derived some 
pleasure from the reflection that he should inherit 
an excellent black coat, he may perhaps be giving 
to us the sort of satisfaction which we derive from 
a keen maxim of Rochefoucauld. We recognise 
the truth painful though it may be in itself 
that some strand of mean and selfish feeling may 
be interwoven with genuine regret; and we may 
reconcile ourselves by interpreting it as a proof 
that some of the sentiments for which we have 
blushed are not inconsistent with real kindness 
of heart. We may smile still more harmlessly at 
the quaint avowal of absurdity when Rousseau 
decides that he will test the probability of his 
future fate by throwing a stone at a tree trunk. 
A hit is to mean salvation, and a miss, damna- 
tion. He chooses a very big trunk very close to 
him, succeeds in hitting it, and sets his mind at 



Autobiography 195 

rest. We may congratulate ourselves without 
malice on this proof that men of genius may 
indulge in very grotesque follies. A student of 
human nature may be grateful for a frank avowal 
now and then of the " fears of the brave and follies 
of the wise.'* But how can we justify ourselves 
in point of taste to say nothing of morality 
at not shrinking back from the more hideous 
avowals of downright depravity contained in this 
strange record which is to convince us that none 
amongst the sons of men can claim superiority to 
Rousseau? 

The answer is not far to seek. One leading 
peculiarity of Rousseau, the great prophet of 
sentimentalism, is that exaltation of the imme- 
diate sensation at the expense of hard realities 
which is the mark of all sentimentalism. He can 
enjoy intensely, but cannot restrain a single im- 
pulse with a view to future enjoyment. He can 
sympathise keenly with immediate sufferings, but 
shrinks from admitting that indulgence may be 
the worst cruelty. His only rule of life is to give 
free play to his impulses. All discipline is tyranny. 
Education is to consist in stimulating the emo- 
tions at the expense of the reason. And, therefore, 
facts in general are on the whole objectionable 
and inconvenient things. Your practical man is 
merely a wheel in a gigantic machinery, for ever 



196 Hours in a Library 

grinding out barren results and never leaving him- 
self time for the pure happiness of feeling. He 
would abolish space and time to make one dreamer 
happy. Dreamland is the only true reality. There 
facts conform to feeling instead of crushing it out 
of existence. There we can be optimists; see 
virtue rewarded, simplicity honoured, genius ap- 
preciated, and the substance of happiness pur- 
sued instead of its idle shadows external show, 
and hard-won triumphs that pall in the fruition. 
Nothing is more characteristic of this tendency 
than the passage in which he describes the com- 
position of the Nouvelle Heloise. The impossi- 
bility, he says, of grasping realities cast him into 
the land of chimeras ; seeing nothing in existence 
which was worthy of his delirium, he nourished 
it in an ideal world which his creative imagination 
soon peopled with beings after his own heart. He 
was in love not with an external object, but 
with love itself; he formed out of his passionate 
longings those beautiful, unreal, highstrung be- 
ings, whose ecstasies and agonies kept fine ladies 
sitting up all night in forgetfulness of balls and 
assemblies, and which now, alas! have faded, as 
unreal things are apt to fade, and become rather 
wearisome and slightly absurd. Facts revenge 
themselves upon the man who denies their ex- 
istence; and poor Rousseau did not escape the 



Autobiography 1 9 7 

inevitable Nemesis. His follies and his crimes 
sprang from this fatal habit of sacrificing every- 
thing to the immediate impulse; his reveries 
seduced him into the region of downright illusions ; 
and his optimism by a curious, but not uncom- 
mon inversion became the strongest proof of 
his actual misery. He found realities so painful 
that he swore that they must be dreams; as 
dreams were so sweet, that they must be the true 
realities. "All men are born free," as he says in 
his famous sentence; "and men are everywhere 
in chains." That is the true Rousseau logic. 
Everything must be right in some transcendental 
sense, because in an actual sense everything is 
wrong. We say that men take a cheerful or a 
doleful view of the universe according to the state 
of their own livers; but sometimes the reverse 
seems to hold good. It requires, it would seem, 
unusual buoyancy of spirits to endure the thought 
that the world is a scene of misery ; and the belief 
in its happiness is sometimes the attempt of the 
miserable man to reconcile himself to his lot. 
Anyhow, Rousseau had learnt this dangerous 
lesson. He suffered from a morbid appetite for 
happiness; his intense longing for enjoyment 
stimulated an effeminate shrinking from the pos- 
sibility of the crumpled rose-leaf. He identified 
himself with the man who left his mistress in order 



i9 8 Hours in a Library 

to write letters to her. The absent in this sense 
have no blemishes. And this is true of the past 
as of the distant. Foresight, he says, always 
spoilt his enjoyment; the future is pure loss to 
him; for to look forward is always to anticipate 
possibilities of evil. He lives entirely, as he says 
elsewhere, in the present ; but in a present which 
includes the enjoyment of the past pleasures. 
"Not heaven itself upon the past has power," 
and we can nowhere be absolutely safe except in 
brooding over the moments of happiness which 
have survived by reason of their pleasantness. 

This is part of the charm of the Confessions. 
Finding no pure enjoyment in the present, he 
says, he returned by fits to the serene days of his 
youth. He chewed the cud of past delight, and 
lived again his life at the Charmettes. Hence 
sprang the Nouvelle Heloise, placed amongst the 
scenery of his early youth and constantly reviving 
real experiences. He apologises for giving us the 
details of his youth; but the apology is clearly 
needless. He gives what he delights in. His 
youthful memories grow brighter as the latter 
become effaced ; the least facts of that time please 
him, because they are of that time. He remem- 
bers the place, the people, the time; the servant 
moving in the room, the swallow entering the 
window, the fly settling on his hand whilst he 



Autobiography 199 

writes his lesson; he trembles with pleasure as 
he recalls the minutest details and we feel the 
reflection of his delight. Indeed, this is one secret 
of most autobiography. There is something 
touching in those introductory fragments which 
are so common in autobiographies. The old 
man, we see, has been enticed to write a book by 
the charm of the first chapter. He tells us with 
eager interest the story of his early days; he re- 
members the village school and his initiation into 
the alphabet, or calls up the sacred vision of the 
mother whose figure still stands out amidst the 
mists of memory; but as he reaches the point 
where the light of common day blends with the 
romantic colouring of childhood, his hand fails, 
and he sums up the remainder of his history, if 
he has the courage to continue, in a few barren 
facts and dates. The phenomenon recurs again 
and again and leaves us to infer, according to our 
tastes, that infancy is the time of real happiness, 
or that the appearance of happiness always be- 
longs to the distant. Rousseau tries to explain 
it in his own case. He long remained a child, he 
says; objects always made less impression upon 
him than their memories ; and as all his ideas were 
images, the first engraved were the deepest, and 
the later rather blended with them than effaced 
them. 

* 



200 Hours in a Library 

To explain Rousseau's power over his genera- 
tion, and even his strongest interest for us, we 
should require to add other considerations. Rous- 
seau's dreams, in fact, were not those of the mys- 
tic or of the poetical philosopher. If he cared, in 
one sense, very little for facts, it was because the 
past and the present overpowered the future. 
He could not cut himself apart from the world, 
as some meditative minds have done who live by 
choice in the region of abstract speculation. His 
temperament was too sensuous, his sympathies 
with those around him too keen, to permit him 
to find a permanent refuge in the gorgeous but 
unsubstantial world of poetic imagery. His senses 
bound him fast to realities as upon a rock on 
which he was always struggling impatiently and 
spasmodically. It is in the vicissitudes of this 
struggle that the interest of his personal story 
consists. For it leads him to find that solution 
which has been preached in one form or other by 
so many moralists in all ages, and which had a 
special meaning for the society of his day. An- 
cient philosophers said that the great secret of 
life is in placing your happiness in things which 
depend upon ourselves, and not in things which 
are at the mercy of circumstance. Happiness, 
says a modern prophet, is to be found by lessen- 
ing your denominator, not by increasing your 



Autobiography 201 

numerator; by restricting your wants, not by 
multiplying your enjoyments. The great illu- 
sion of life is the childish fancy that you can get 
the moon by crying for it, instead of learning 
that the moon is beyond your reach. You must 
learn the great secret of renunciation. Rousseau's 
version of this doctrine was given with an inten- 
sity of conviction which moved the hearts of his 
contemporaries; and the Confessions are a kind 
of continuous comment upon the text. Are we, it 
may be asked, to take the ascetic view to admit 
that happiness is impossible in this life, and to 
seek future blessedness by mortifying the affec- 
tions which seek for present gratification? No, 
Rousseau would say ; happiness is everything ; to 
get as much enjoyment out of life as we possibly 
can is the one conceivable end of a human being. 
Nobody could be a more thorough hedonist. 
Then, should we seek for happiness in active life 
devoted to some absorbing ambition, or rather 
in courting those lofty emotions or those intel- 
lectual tastes which are the fruit of a thorough 
cultivation of our faculties? No, again; for 
active life means weariness and disappointment, 
and exchange of substance for vain shadows ; and 
the more men are cultivated, the more sophisti- 
cated and unreal become their lives, and the less 
their real powers of enjoyment. Then, should we 



202 Hours in a Library 

be Epicureans of the vulgar type, and give our- 
selves up to the indulgence of animal appetites? 
That, again, though Rousseau sometimes falls in- 
to perilous approximation to that error in prac- 
tice, is as far as possible from his better mind. 
Nobody, in fact and it is the redeeming quality 
in his life could set a higher value upon the sim- 
ple affections. A life of calm domestic tranquil- 
lity the idyllic life of unsophisticated country 
villages, of regular labour, and innocent recrea- 
tion is the ideal which he set before his genera- 
tion with all the fervour of his eloquence. That 
he made a terrible mess of it himself is undeniable ; 
it is equally undeniable that the praises of domestic 
life come with a very bad grace from the man who 
sanctioned the worst practices of a corrupt society 
by abandoning his own children, though he tries 
to represent even that amazing delinquency as a 
corollary from his principles ; and it must also be 
admitted that his Arcadia has too often the taint 
of sentimental unreality. But the doctrine takes 
a worthier form, not only in those passages of his 
speculative writings which manifest his deep sym- 
pathy with the poor and simple crushed under an 
effete system of social tyranny, but in many pass- 
ages of the Confessions where he recalls his brief 
approximations to a realisation of his dreams. 
He might claim to have found " love in huts where 



Autobiography 203 

poor men lie;" and to have been qualified by 
experience for recognising the surpassing beauty 
of simple happiness. That is the secret charm of 
those eloquent passages to which the jaded fine 
ladies and gentlemen of his days turned again and 
again with an enthusiastic sympathy which it 
would be grossly unjust to set down as mere 
affectation. Such, for example, is his description 
of the delicious strolls by his beloved Lake of 
Geneva, where every scene was redolent of youth- 
ful associations; where he seemed to be almost 
within reach of that sweet tranquil life which was 
yet for him but a vanishing mirage; and where 
alone he declares that he might obtain perfect 
happiness, if he had but a faithful friend, a loving 
wife, a cow, and a little boat. He smiles sadly 
enough at the simplicity which has frequently 
led him to that region in search of this imaginary 
bliss, and at the contrast between the dream and 
the reality. Even in Paris he could grasp a like 
phantom. Here with his half-idiotic Theresa 
(who had, however, the heart of an angel), he 
found perfect happiness for a time. He pictures 
himself sitting at the open window, the sill form- 
ing his table, for a frugal supper; looking down 
upon the street from the fourth story, and enjoy- 
ing a crust of bread, a few cherries, a bit of cheese, 
and a bottle of wine. Who, he exclaims, can feel 



204 Hours in a Library 

the happiness of these feasts? Friendship, con- 
fidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul, how sweet 
is the seasoning you bring! And, of course, he 
soon passes to a confession proving that his para- 
dise had its snake. But the better sentiment, 
though clogged and degraded by ignoble passions, 
almost reconciles us to the man. Rousseau re- 
presents the strange combination of a kind of 
sensual appetite for pure and simple pleasures. 
On one side he reminds us of Keats, by his intense 
appreciation of sensuous beauty; and, on the 
other, of Cowper, by his love of such simple 
pleasures as our English poet enjoyed when sitting 
at Mrs. Unwin's tea-urn. It is a strange, almost 
a contradictory mixture; but Rousseau's life is 
a struggle between antagonisms; and until you 
admit that human nature is in some sense a con- 
tradictory compound, and can take delight in the 
queer results which grow out of them, you are 
hardly qualified to be a student of autobiography. 
Your proper biographer glides over these diffi- 
culties, or tries to find some reconciliation. The 
man who tells his own story reveals them because 
he is unconscious of their mixture. 

Rousseau, I said, was the type of all autobi- 
ographers; and for the obvious reason, that no 
man ever turned himself inside out for the in- 
spection of posterity so completely, and that even 



Autobiography 205 

when he was unconscious of the exposure. Even 
his affectations are instructive. But when we 
think of some other autobiographers, we may be 
inclined to retract. There are, when one comes 
to reflect, more ways of killing a cat than choking 
her with cream : and there are more ways of re- 
vealing your character than by this deliberate 
introspection, this brooding over past feelings, 
and laying bare every impulse of your nature. 
So, if Rousseau is to be called the typical auto- 
biographer, it is perhaps in virtue simply of those 
strange contradictions which give piquancy to 
his Confessions, and to those of many other men 
to whom the great problem of existence presented 
itself in different terms. So for example, it would 
be difficult to imagine a more complete antithesis 
to Rousseau than we find in Benvenuto Cellini, 
whose autobiography is almost equally interesting 
in a totally different way. He is a man in whose 
company the very conception of sentimentalism 
seems to be an absurdity; who is so incapable of 
reflective brooding that he is just as proud of his 
worst crimes as of his greatest artistic achieve- 
ments; who tells with equal glee how he struck 
his dagger into the nape of his enemy's neck, and 
made a gold button of unparalleled beauty for the 
Pope's cope ; who is so full of energy that his life 
seems to be one desperate struggle, and who is 



2o6 Hours in a Library 

most at home in the periods of most overpowering 
excitement, whether firing guns at the siege of 
Rome, or pitching all his plate into the furnace to 
help the fusing of the statue of Perseus ; so full of 
intense vitality that when we read his memoirs 
it becomes difficult to realise the fact that all 
these throbbing passions and ambitions are still 
for ever, and that we peaceable readers are alive ; 
at once a man of high artistic genius, and yet such 
a braggart and a liar as to surpass Bobadil or the 
proverbial Ferdinand Mendez Pinto; a standing 
refutation of that pleasant moral commonplace 
which tries to associate genius with modesty; a 
queer compound of reckless audacity and defiance 
of all constituted authority with abject super- 
stition; a man, in short, who makes us wonder, 
as we read, whether the world has advanced or 
gone back; whether we have gained or lost by 
substituting the douce, respectable jeweller, and 
the vulgar blackguard of modern London, for this 
magnificent goldsmith bravo of the Florence of 
the sixteenth century. The only writer in our 
own literature who, at a long interval, recalls 
this brilliant apparition, is Lord Herbert of Cher- 
bury. In him, too, we find the singular combina- 
tion of the fire-eating duellist with the man of high 
intellectual power. Horace Walpole, who pro- 
cured the publication of his autobiography, says 



Autobiography 207 

that the reader will be astonished to find that the 
"history of Don Quixote was the life of Plato." 
Herbert, it is true, was not quite a Plato nor a 
Quixote. His thirst for chivalrous adventures 
may indeed remind us of the Don or of Cellini ; yet 
somehow, though he wandered through Europe in 
true knight-errant spirit, always on the look out 
for occasions of proving that courage for which, 
so he declares, he had as high a reputation as any 
man of his time, and was as irritable, punctilious, 
and given to dare-devil deeds as the most precise 
of cavaliers could desire, he seems to have had 
singular ill-luck. Somehow, the authorities al- 
ways interpose to prevent his fighting. The van- 
ity of Lord Herbert is of a more reflective and 
priggish type than that of Cellini. Instead of 
taking himself for granted, with the superlative 
audacity of his predecessor, he contemplates his 
own perfections complacently, and draws his own 
portrait for the benefit of his descendants, as an 
embodiment of the perfect gentleman accom- 
plished in all knightly arts, and full to overflowing 
of the most becoming sentiments. He has, in 
fact, a rather obtrusive moral sense, whereas an 
entire absence of any incumbrance of that kind 
is one of Cellini's peculiarities; or, at least, the 
Italian assumes that whatever he does must be 
right, whereas the Englishman is simply convinced 



208 Hours in a Library 

that he does whatever is right. Herbert parades 
himself as a model with an amazing consciousness 
of his own perfection, and sets forth his various 
natural endowments such, for example, as the 
delicious odour which exudes from his body and 
perfumes even his clothes as a kind of provi- 
dential testimony to his merits. When a voice 
from heaven orders him to publish his great book 
De Veritate, we feel that no human imprimatur 
would be adequate to so important an occasion. 
And, in spite of his swelling self-satisfaction, we 
must admit that he has real claims upon our re- 
spect ; in fact, Herbert, though not so great a poet 
as his brother George, at least wrote one poem 
which has a curious interest as anticipating, not 
only the metre, but, in some degree, the senti- 
ment, of In Memoriam; and, though less con- 
spicuous as a philosopher than Bacon or Hobbes, 
wrote books in which it is possible to trace some 
remarkable analogies to the teaching of Kant. 
When Walpole and Gray first tried to read the life, 
they could not get on for "laughing and scream- 
ing," and Walpole was rather vexed when people 
took Herbert a little too seriously, and were in- 
clined to admire him as a worthy successor to Sir 
Philip Sidney. Yet Herbert is but one of many 
proofs (perhaps Walpole himself was another) 
that all coxcombs are not fools. 



Autobiography 209 

We have, it is plain, got a long way from Rous- 
seau. We are almost, it may be said, at the very 
opposite pole of character. If vanity be a deter- 
mining force in both cases, it is in the two cases 
controlled and directed by opposite passions. 
Combined with a morbid tendency to retrospec- 
tion, a weak self-pity, and effeminate shrinking 
from pain, it reveals itself as a perverse pleasure 
in baring to the public gaze those viler impulses 
which most men shrink from revealing to them- 
selves. In the masterful, overbearing, active 
character, it appears in the more natural shape 
of straightforward ostentation, though it some- 
times leads to the same end ; for it displays follies 
and vices, not because they are shameful, but for 
the opposite reason that it sees nothing in them 
to be ashamed of. Whether it should be called 
by the same name, as manifested in the one or in 
the other combination, is a question for the un- 
lucky psychologist who has already a sufficient 
burden of insoluble problems. And we might find 
new puzzles in abundance for the same person by 
tracing the manifold transformations of the same 
Protean quality. We might skip from the Quix- 
ote-Plato rather, one might say, the Bobadil- 
Kant to another biographer, like him in little 
but the power of amusing, the vivacious Colley 
Gibber. Gibber's vanity is of a simpler type. It 

VOL. IV. 14 



210 Hours in a Library 

seems to be an unaccountable freak of nature that 
Gibber should have been the descendant of a 
Schleswig-Holstein father and an English mother. 
We could have sworn that he was a born French- 
man. His vanity is that which we generally 
attribute to the race whom we used to call our 
"lively neighbours." In other words, instead of 
being priggish or sulky like the English, it is closely 
allied to good sense, good humour, and simplicity. 
It implies unfeigned self-complacency quite un- 
alloyed by self-deception. It supplied the ex- 
cellent Colley with an armour of proof which made 
him absolutely impervious even to the most vi- 
cious stings of Pope's poisonous satire. He took 
all ridicule with the most imperturbable good 
temper, because he fully recognised, and was per- 
fectly reconciled to the fact that he was ridiculous. 
He writes his life, as he tells us with admirable 
serenity, because he was vain, and liked to talk 
about himself. What can the critic say more? 
" Expose me? Why, dear sir, does not every man 
that writes expose himself? Can you make me 
more ridiculous than nature has made me?" To 
hurt such a man by correct portraiture was im- 
possible; and when Pope tried to injure him by 
giving him the absurdly incorrect name of Dunce, 
the satirist missed his mark too palpably to hurt 
anybody but himself. And so, though the laugh- 



Autobiography 211 

ing-stock of all the wits, assailed by Pope and 
Fielding, the lucky Gibber, lapped in his invul- 
nerable vanity, went gaily through his eighty-six 
years of life, as brisk and buoyant to the end as 
when he had only to go upon the stage with his 
natural manners to be the ideal representative of 
the Foppingtons and Easys of his own comedy. 
If the autobiography be slightly deficient on the 
side of sentiment, we may console ourselves by 
admitting that some of the descriptions of the 
actors of the time would not disgrace Charles 
Lamb. Would we find another variety of inno- 
cent and excessive vanity? Take up the memoirs 
unfortunately fragmentary of one whose long 
life ran side by side with Gibber's for some eighty- 
two years, though in oddly different surroundings, 
Swift's "wicked Will Whiston," so called be- 
cause so transparently guileless and well-meaning 
that even bigots could only smile at his absurd- 
ities. In reading him we fancy that we must be 
studying a new version of the Vicar of Wakefield. 
In truth, however, that good Dr. Primrose was 
one of Whiston's disciples, and got into trouble, 
as we may remember, by advocating a crotchet 
learnt from his predecessor a little too warmly. 
The master, however, suffered longer than the 
disciple, and shows just the same innocuous vanity 
in regard to his own supposed discoveries, and the 



212 Hours in a Library 

same simple-minded wonder that others should 
fail to be converted, or should refuse to sacrifice 
preferment to crotchets about the date of the 
Apostolic Constitutions. Whiston's self-compla- 
cency reappears with a difference in Baxter's pon- 
derous autobiography. The copious outpourings 
of the good man help us to understand the report, 
which he can happily deny, that his multitudinous 
publications had ruined his bookseller ; but it is 
full of interesting display of character, and no- 
where more than in the profound conviction that 
if he had been able to apply a few more sermons 
he would have converted Cromwell and his troop- 
ers from their rebellious purposes, and the inno- 
cent enthusiasm with which he hurls his elaborate 
syllogisms at the heads of Charles II. 's bishops, 
believing, poor man, in all good faith that the 
policy of the Restoration government was to be 
determined by scholastic argumentation. 

If we seek for an excellent contrast, we may go 
to those admirable representatives of the worldly 
bishop of the now extinct type, Newton or Watson. 
There is something quite touching in Watson's 
complaints of an unappreciative world. He had 
been made a professor of chemistry without hav- 
ing studied the very elements of the science, a 
professor of divinity without having studied 
theology before, or taking the trouble to study 



Autobiography 213 

it afterwards. He was appointed to a bishopric 
because he was a sound Whig, and passed his life 
in a delightful country town on the banks of 
Windermere without ever bothering himself to 
reside in his Welsh diocese. But the stoppage of 
his preferment at this point is for him a con- 
clusive proof that true Christian principles could 
not meet with their reward in this world. How 
else account for this scandalous neglect of one 
who, in addition to all his other merits, had taken 
great trouble to plant trees, and to make an 
honourable provision for his children as well as 
giving them a sound education? It is a natural 
corollary that the man whose memoirs are thus 
a continuous grumble over the absence of pre- 
ferment should specially pride himself on his 
thorough self-respect. He belongs, he says, to 
the oaks, not to the willows. Whenever he asks 
for a vacant bishopric, he explains that it is only 
in deference to the wishes of his friends. For 
himself he asks for nothing better than a life of 
retirement, though the king and his ministers 
will be eternally disgraced for having left him 
to enjoy that blessing. The finest satirist, 
Fielding or Thackeray, might have been proud 
of portraying this ingenious and yet transparent 
self-deception ; of unravelling the artifice by which 
worldliness and preferment hunting are so wrapped 



214 Hours in a Library 

in blustering self-assertion as to appear to the 
actor himself as dignified independence of spirit. 
Running over such varieties of character, we 
may ask whether it is fair to set down the auto- 
biographic impulse as in all cases a manifestation 
of vanity. Or if we call it vanity, must we not 
stretch the meaning of the word beyond all bear- 
ing? The old psychologists used to maintain 
that every passion was a special form of self-love ; 
and, if we may take such a license, we may call 
every man vain who takes an interest in his own 
affairs, and expects that others may be interested. 
He may hold that opinion even whilst sincerely 
believing that his success in the game of life was 
more due to the cards he held than to his in- 
trinsic skill. If that still imply the presence of 
some latent vanity, some bias to our judgment 
lying below the region of conscious reflection, it 
is certainly of a scarcely perceptible kind. Vanity 
in this sense is but the inverse side of a man's 
philosophy of life. It is the value which he sets 
upon certain qualities of mind and character, 
which is, no doubt, apt to be more or less con- 
nected with the trifling circumstance that he 
takes them to be his own. But in some cases 
this latter consideration has so little prominence 
that we almost overlook it. The autobiography 
takes so much the form of a philosophical sermon 



Autobiography 215 

on the true principles of conduct, that we quite 
forget that the preacher is his own text. He 
treats himself with apparent impartiality, as if 
he were merely a scientific specimen whose ex- 
cellent adaptation to the general scheme of things 
deserves the notice of an impartial inquirer. It 
happens to be the case nearest at hand, but is 
interesting only in the light of the general im- 
personal principle. 

It is curious to trace this in one of the most 
interesting of modern autobiographies. J. S. 
Mill begins his recollections by disavowing with 
obvious sincerity any egoistic motive. He 
wishes to show the effect of a particular mode of 
education, to trace the influence upon a receptive 
mind of various currents of modern thought; 
and, above all, to show how large a debt he 
owed to certain persons who, but for this avowal, 
would not receive their due meed of recognition. 
He is to give a lecture upon his own career as 
dispassionately as Professor Owen might lecture 
upon a creature which died in the palaeozoic era. 
In pursuing this end, Mill made more revela- 
tions as to his own character than he perhaps 
knew himself. The book is much else, but it is 
also an exposition of a definite theory of life. 
Some readers were astonished to find that, as 
Mill puts it, a Benthamite might be something 



216 Hours in a Library 

more than a mere " reasoning machine." That 
description, he admits, was applicable in some 
cases, and even to himself at one period of his 
life. But nothing could be clearer to readers 
of the autobiography as, indeed, it was clear 
enough to the observers of his later career 
that, so far from being a mere reasoning machine, 
Mill was a man of strong affections, and even 
feminine sensibility. And in this, as some critics 
have said, consists the peculiar pathos of the 
book. It was the story of a man of strong feel- 
ings, who had been put into a kind of moral and 
logical strait-waistcoat and kept there till it had 
become a part of himself. The diagnosis of the 
case showed it, upon this understanding, to be one 
of partial atrophy of the affections or rather 
for the affections clearly survived illustrated the 
effect of depriving them of their natural susten- 
ance. To Mill himself, it was rather a record of 
the means by which the strait-waistcoat had been 
forced to yield. Like Bunyan, he had been locked 
up by Giant Despair, and had escaped from the 
dungeons, though by a different method. The 
account of the crisis in his moral development, 
which corresponds to a conversion in the case of 
Bunyan, gives the real key to his story. He had 
been put into the strait-waistcoat by that tre- 
mendous old gentleman, James Mill, whose force 



Autobiography 2 1 7 

of mind produced less effect through his books 
than by his personal influence upon his immedi- 
ate surroundings. His doctrine repelled most 
readers till it had been made more sympathetic 
by passing through the more sensitive and emo- 
tional nature of his son. The ultimate effect was 
not to suppress J. S. Mill's affections, but to 
confine them to certain narrow channels. The 
primary effect, however, was to produce that 
11 reasoning machine" period in which the son 
was a simple logic-mill grinding out the materials 
supplied by the father and Bentham. Now old 
Mill was not simply a kind of personified "cate- 
gorical imperative" a rigid external conscience 
imposing a fixed rule upon his filial disciple, but 
his doctrine was certainly a trying one. He 
held that the sole end of morality was to pro- 
duce happiness, and at the same time he did 
not believe in happiness. "He thought human 
life a poor thing at best after the freshness of 
youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by." 
He and his disciples denounced all emotion as 
"sentimentality," and fully shared that English 
prejudice which, as J. S. Mill declares, regards 
feeling, especially if it has a touch of the romantic 
or exalted, to be something intrinsically disgrace- 
ful. Here then was the uncomfortable dilemma 
into which the younger Mill was driven, and 



2i8 Hours in a Library 

which made him miserable. A rigid sense of 
duty was the sole rule of life; duty meant the 
production of happiness; and happiness was a 
mere illusion and unsubstantial phantom. No 
wonder if a period followed during which the 
world seemed to him weary, stale, flat, and 
unprofitable. To feel that all that is left for one 
is to be a machine grinding out theorems in 
political economy is certainly not an exhilarating 
state of things. 

The escape from this condition, as Mill repre- 
sents, involved two discoveries, which, like all 
such discoveries, are old enough in the state of 
abstract theory, and new only in so far as they 
become actual possessions and active principles 
of conduct. Happiness, he discovered, was to be 
found by not aiming at happiness; by working 
for some external end and not meditating upon 
your own feelings. And, secondly, he discovered 
the importance of cultivating those sympathies 
and sentiments which he had previously been 
inclined to despise as mere incumbrances to his 
reasoning machinery. But do not the two 
doctrines clash? Is not an aesthetic cultivation 
of happiness a name for that introspective brood- 
ing of which Rousseau is the great example, 
implying precisely that thirst for happiness as 
an ultimate end and aim which his other principles 



Autobiography 2 1 9 

showed to be suicidal? Consciously to cultivate 
the emotions is to become a sentimentalist the 
very thing which he was anxious to renounce. 
The apparent paradox was solved for him by 
the help of Wordsworth, who taught him that 
the charm of tranquil contemplation might be 
heightened instead of dulled by a vivid interest 
in the common feelings and common destinies 
of human beings; and that aesthetic delight in 
nature was perfectly compatible with scientific 
interest in its laws. The famous ode proved to 
him that the first freshness of youthful enjoy- 
ment could be replaced by a wider interest in our 
fellows ; and that the thoughts which gather round 
the setting sun are not something distinct from, 
but really identical with, those suggested by a 
watch over man's mortality. This teaching, he 
says, dispersed for ever his youthful depression. 

The problem seems a simple one when thus 
stated. How to cultivate your feelings without 
becoming sentimental. Find your happiness in 
the happiness of others; and regard even the 
grinding of that logical mill as work done for the 
benefit of your kind. Problems, however, which 
have to be worked out by modifying your own 
character take a good deal more labour than is 
implied in putting together a couple of syllogisms. 
And it is in this modification of character that 



220 Hours in a Library 

the peculiar interest of the autobiography con- 
sists. The aversion of his mind from his own 
private interests, the intense devotion of his 
mental energies to what he regarded as the great 
needs of his fellow-men, the constant reference 
of his apparently most abstract speculation to 
practical reforms, are obvious and most honour- 
able characteristics of Mill as a thinker. One 
may doubt whether women will be as much im- 
proved by receiving votes as he anticipated; one 
cannot doubt the generosity with which he 
revolted against their supposed "subjection.'* 
But there is another sense in which this theory 
of the vast importance of "extra-regarding" 
habits brings out some curious results. We are 
all such adepts at self-deception that we need 
not wonder if the very resolution not to think 
of oneself sometimes tends to a more refined 
kind of self -consciousness. I have often fancied 
that nobody can be so dogmatic as your thor- 
oughly candid person. The fact that he has 
listened to all sides gives him a kind of right in 
his own opinion to speak with the authority of a 
judge. It has been said that a tendency to be 
" cock-sure" is a special characteristic of Mill's 
school; and perhaps we may recognise it in their 
master not the less because it is combined with a 
scrupulous desire to grant a hearing to all an- 



Autobiography 2 2 1 

tagonists. But another manifestation of char- 
acter is more interesting. No one could be more 
anxious than Mill to arrogate nothing to himself. 
Nobody could state more explicitly that his 
merit was less in original thought than in willing- 
ness to learn from others, and thus that his true 
function was to mediate between the public and 
the original thinkers. And therefore it is natural 
to find him insisting with passionate eagerness 
upon the superlative merits of the woman who 
was, according to him, the guide of his mature 
years, as his father had been of his infancy and 
youth. Here was the practical commentary on 
the text of cultivating the emotions. If he 
withdrew from society and many social enjoy- 
ments, it was because his whole emotional 
strength was concentrated upon a single object. 
We listen with some mixture of feeling to his 
rather strained and exalted eulogy. It may be 
true that Mrs. Mill was more of a poet than 
Carlyle, and more of a thinker than Mill himself; 
that she was like Shelley, but that Shelley was 
but a child to what she ultimately became ; that 
her wisdom was "all but unrivalled," and much 
more to the same purpose. It may, I say, be 
true, for one cannot prove a negative in regard 
to a person of whom the world knows so little. 
Yet it is a weakness, though an amiable weakness, 



222 Hours in a Library 

to attempt, by force of such language, to over- 
come the inevitable decree of circumstances, and 
to try to dictate to the world an opinion which 
it cannot receive upon any single authority. It 
may be profoundly melancholy that such exalted 
merit should vanish without leaving more tangi- 
ble traces; but it is useless to resent the fact, or 
to suppose that when such traces are non-existent, 
the defect can be supplied by the most positive 
assertions that they might have existed. And 
Mill would have seen in any other case what was 
the inevitable suggestion to his readers. He 
could not, he says, "detect any mixture of 
errors" in the truths which she struck out far in 
advance to him. What are the opinions in which 
a man detects no mixture of error? Plainly his 
own. But these were far in advance of him? 
That means that they were deductions from his 
own. Is it possible, to speak it plainly, to resist 
a strong impression that these extravagant ex- 
pressions of admiration may have been lavished 
upon a living echo an echo, it is true, skilful 
enough to anticipate as well as to repeat, but 
still essentially an echo? We know, for Mill has 
told us, what he did alone, and we know what 
he did in co-operation; and if the earlier work 
was not his best, it certainly contained the 
whole sum and substance of his later teaching. 



Autobiography 223 

That his wife must have been a remarkable 
woman may be a fair deduction from his admira- 
tion ; that she was all that he then thought her 
would be, to say the least of it, a very rash 
conjecture. 

Happiness, says Mill, is to be found by aiming 
at something different from happiness. And if 
we thus cheat ourselves into happiness, we may 
attain to the vanity of self-esteem by a similar 
expedient. By lavishing all our enthusiasm upon 
one who is but a second self, we may deprive our 
appreciation of our own merits of its apparent 
arrogance. This, indeed, is one of the many 
illusions which give a peculiar interest to the 
unconscious confessions of autobiographers. But 
neither is it to be roughly set down as an illusion, 
and still less as an unworthy sentiment. It in 
no sort diminishes our interest in discovering 
that this so-called reasoning machine was a man 
of the most delicate fibre and most tender affec- 
tions. It is easy to forgive the illusions against 
which a thick cuirass of tough selfishness is the 
only known safeguard of complete efficacy. 
Rather it helps to convince us that Mill should 
be classed in some respects with the unworldly 
enthusiasts of the Vicar of Wakefield type, whose 
very simplicity leads them to a harmless vanity 
which exaggerates their own infallibility and 



224 Hours in a Library 

importance to the world. He had the char- 
acter, though not the crotchets, of the lifelong 
recluse. Though his intellect was deeply inter- 
ested in the great problems of contemporary 
thought, and though he had been for many years 
in State affairs, there was a wall of separation 
between himself and his contemporary society. 
When he came into Parliament he came as re- 
entering the world from a remote hermitage. 
Hermits, whether they come from deserts or from 
the India Office, have a certain tendency to intol- 
erance and contempt for the social part of the 
species. They have lost some human feeling and 
preach crusades with a reckless indifference to 
consequences. I cannot determine how far Mill 
might be rightly accused of a want of practical 
sense. But in any case he had nothing of the 
bitterness or the harsh pedantry of the solitary 
theorist. Even his enemies could see that his 
sympathies were fresh and generous, and that his 
impulses were invariably generous. As a philan- 
thropist, his philanthropy was not of the merciless 
and inhuman variety. The discovery of the fact 
was a surprise at the time to those who believed 
in the traditional Benthamite and Malthusian. 
The autobiography, with its strange bursts of 
emotion, perhaps reveals the true secret. If he 
naturally exaggerated the merits of the partner 



Autobiography 225 

of his hermitage, he did not necessarily exaggerate 
her services to him. It is easily credible that her 
company saved him from ossifying into a mere 
grinder of formulae and syllogisms. We shrink 
a little from certain over-strung phrases, but they 
reveal to us the pathos of the man's life. Admit 
that his affection produced illusion, or that it 
covered and was combined with a sort of vicarious 
self-conceit, yet at bottom it represents the in- 
tense devotion which springs only out of sim- 
plicity and tenderness of nature. 

It would be tempting here to draw the obvious 
parallel between Mill and Carlyle, which must just 
now be in every one's mind ; for certainly whatever 
may be said of the Reminiscences just published, 
they contain one of the most remarkable self- 
revelations ever given to the world, and the re- 
lations of the two men to vigorous fathers and 
passionately adored wives have singular points 
of contrast and resemblance. But I must be con- 
tent to close this ramble through some famous 
autobiographies by touc ling upon one which often 
seems to me to be the m >st delightful of its class. 
I know, as everybody knows, what may be said 
against Gibbon: against his want of high en- 
thusiasm, his deficient sympathy with the great 
causes and their heroes, the provoking self-suf- 
ficiency and apparent cold-bloodedness of the fat, 

VOL. IV. 15. 



226 Hours in a Library 

composed little man. And yet, when reading his 
autobiography and contrasting it with some of 
those we have considered, I find myself constantly 
led to a conclusion not quite in accordance with 
the proper rules of morality. After all, one can- 
not help asking, did not Gibbon succeed in solving 
the problem of life more satisfactorily than almost 
anybody one knows? Other autobiographies are 
for the most part records of hard struggles with 
fate, plaintive lamentations over the inability to 
obtain any solid satisfaction out of life, appeals 
of disappointed vanity to the judgment of an 
indifferent posterity, vain-glorious braggings over 
successes which should rather have been the cause 
of shame, weak regrets for the vanishing pleasures 
of youth, and hopeless attempts to make the might- 
have-been pass muster with the actual achieve- 
ment. The more a man prides himself upon his 
successes, the more we feel how good a case a 
rival's advocate could make on the other side: 
and when he laments over his failures, the more 
we are inclined to say that after all it served him 
right. But when in imagination we take that 
famous turn with Gibbon upon that terrace at 
Lausanne beneath the covered walk of acacias, 
gaze upon the serene moon and the silent lake, and 
hear him soliloquise upon the conclusion of the 
Decline and Fall, we feel that we are in the presence 



Autobiography 227 

of a man who has a right to his complacency. He 
has not aimed, perhaps, at the highest mark, but 
he has hit the bull's-eye. Given his conception 
of life, he has done his task to perfection. With 
singular felicity, he has come at the exact moment 
and found the exact task to give full play to his 
powers. Nobody had yet laid the keystone in 
the great arch of history; and he laid it so well 
that his work can never be superseded. Some- 
body defines a life to be une pensee de jeunesse 
executte par Vdge mtir. It was Gibbon's singular 
good fortune to illustrate that saying as few men 
have done. Though his plan ripened slowly and 
with all deliberation, he acted as if he had fore- 
seen the end from the beginning. If he had been 
told in his boyhood, You shall live so long a life, 
with such and such means at your disposal, he 
could hardly have laid out his life differently. To 
mistake neither one's power nor one's opportun- 
ities is a felicity which happens to few; and Gib- 
bon had the additional good fortune that even his 
distractions seem to have been useful. The in- 
terruption to his Oxford education made him a 
cosmopolitan; his service with the volunteers 
helped him to be a military historian; and even 
his parliamentary career, which threatened to 
absorb him, only gave to the student the tone 
of a practical politician. It seems as though 



228 Hours in a Library 

everything had been expressly combined to make 
the best of him. 

What more could be desired by a man of Gib- 
bon's temperament? Undoubtedly to be a man 
of Gibbon's temperament is to have a moderate 
capacity for certain forms of happiness. In the 
lives of most great men, the history of a conversion 
is a record of heart-rending struggle, ending in 
hard -won peace. Gibbon merely changed his re- 
ligion as he changed his opinion upon some an- 
tiquarian controversy; it is a question as to the 
weight of historical evidence, like the question 
about the sixth JEneid, or a dispute about the 
genealogy of the House of Brunswick. Whatever 
pangs and raptures may require religious suscep- 
tibility were clearly not within his range of feeling. 
And in another great department of feeling we 
need not inquire into the character of the author 
of the inimitable sentence, " I sighed as a lover, I 
obeyed as a son." One is tempted to put it be- 
side a remark which he makes on another occasion, 
" I yielded to the authority of a parent, and com- 
plied, like a pious son, with the wish of my own 
heart." Perhaps the heart which sanctioned his 
filial obedience in the latter case was not so op- 
posed to it in the other as he would have us be- 
lieve. It is better worth noting, however, that, 
in spite of the very tepid disposition illustrated by 



Autobiography 229 

these familiar passages, Gibbon has affections as 
warm as are compatible with thorough comfort. 
He was not a passionate lover ; and we cannot say, 
for he was not tried, that his friendship was of an 
heroic strain; but he had a very good supply of 
such affections as are wanted for the ordinary 
wear and tear of life to provide a man with 
enough interests and sympathies to make society 
pleasant, and his family life agreeable. Nay, he 
seems to have been really generous and consider- 
ate beyond the ordinary pitch, and to have been 
a faithful friend, and excellent in some very deli- 
cate relationships. For a statesman, a religious 
teacher, or a poet, much stronger equipment in 
this direction might be desirable. But Gibbon 
had warmth enough to keep up a pleasant fire- 
side, if not enough to fire the hearts of a nation. 
He clearly had enough passion for his historical 
vocation. A more passionate and imaginative 
person would hardly have written it at all. It 
requires a certain moderation of character to be 
satisfied with a history instead of a wife, and Gib- 
bon was so great an historian because he could 
accept such a substitute. No one capable of be- 
ing a partisan could have preserved that stately 
march and equable development of the vast 
drama of human affairs which gives a monumental 
dignity to his great book. Even if you do not 



230 Hours in a Library 

want to write another Decline and Fall, is not such 
a disposition the most enviable of gifts? If such 
a life has less vivid passages, is there not some- 
thing fascinating about that calm, harmonious 
existence, disturbed by no spasmodic storms, 
and yet devoted to one achievement grand enough 
to extort admiration even from the least sympa- 
thetic ? Surely it is a happy mean ; enough genius 
to be in the front rank, if not in the highest class, 
and yet that kind of genius which has no affinity 
to madness or disease, and virtue enough to keep 
up to the respectable level which justifies a com- 
fortable self-complacency without suggesting any 
awkward deviations in the direction of martyr- 
dom. That is surely the kind of composition 
which a man might desire if he were to calculate 
what character would give him the best chance of 
extracting the greatest possible amount of en- 
joyment out of life. Luckily for the world, if not 
for its heroes, men's characters cannot be fixed 
by such calculations; and a certain number of 
perverse people are even glad to possess vehement 
emotions and restless intellects, however con- 
scious that the fiery soul will wear out the pigmy 
body. We try to persuade ourselves that they 
are not only choosing the noblest part, but acting 
most wisely for their own interests. It may be 
so ; for the problem is a complex one. But it has 



Autobiography 231 

not yet been proved that a man can always make 
the best of both worlds, and that the sacrifices 
imposed by virtue are always repaid in this life. 
Certainly it seems doubtful, when we have studied 
the self-written records of remarkable men, 
whether experience will confirm that pleasant 
theory; whether it is not more probable that for 
simple enjoyment it is best to have one's nature 
pitched in a key below the highest. Most of us 
would make a very fair compromise if we should 
abandon our loftier claims on condition of being 
no worse than Gibbon. 



Carlyle's Ethics 



I HAVE sometimes wondered of late what would 
have been the reception accorded to an auto- 
biographical sketch by St. John the Baptist. It 
would, one may suppose, have contained some 
remarks not very palatable to refined society. 
The scoffers indeed would have covered their de- 
light in an opportunity for lowering a great re- 
putation by a plausible veil of virtuous indignation. 
The Pharisees would have taken occasion to dwell 
upon the immoral contempt of the stern prophet 
for the maxims of humdrum respectability. The 
Sadducees would have aired their orthodoxy by 
lamenting his open denunciations of shams, which, 
in their opinion, were quite as serviceable as real 
beliefs. Both would have agreed that nothing 
but a mean personal motive could have prompted 
such an outrageous utterance of discontent. And 
the good, kindly, well-meaning people for, doubt- 
less, there were some such even at the court of 
Herod would have been sincerely shocked at 
the discovery that the vehement denunciations to 

232 



Carlyle's Ethics 233 

which they had listened were in good truth the 
utterance of a tortured and unhappy nature, which 
took in all sincerity a gloomy view of the prospects 
of their society and the intrinsic value of its idols, 
instead of merely getting up indignation for pur- 
poses of pulpit oratory. They complacent op- 
timists, as kindly people are apt to be have made 
up their minds that a genuine philosopher is al- 
ways a benevolent, white-haired old gentleman, 
overflowing with philanthropic sentiment, con- 
vinced that all is for the best, and that even the 
"miserable sinners" are excellent people at bot- 
tom ; and are grievously shocked at the discovery 
that anybody can still believe in the existence of 
the devil as a potent agent in human affairs. If 
we have any difficulty in imagining such critic- 
isms, we may easily realise them by reading cer- 
tain criticisms upon the Reminiscences of the last 
prophet for we may call him a prophet whatever 
we think of the sources of his inspiration who 
has passed from among us. The reflection which 
has most frequently occurred to me is one put 
with characteristic force by Carlyle himself in de- 
scribing the sight of Charles X. going to see the 
portrait of "the child of miracle. " 

How tragical are men once more; how merciless 
withal to one another ! I had not the least pity for 
Charles Dix's pious pilgriming to such an object ; the 



234 Hours in a Library 

poor mother of it, and her immense hopes and pains, 
I did not even think of them. 

And so, the average criticism of that most tragical 
and pathetic monologue in reality a soliloquy 
to which we have somehow been admitted that 
prolonged and painful moan of remorse and de- 
solation coming from a proud and intensely af- 
fectionate nature in its direst agony a record 
which will be read with keen sympathy and inter- 
est when ninety-nine of a hundred of the best 
contemporary books have been abandoned to 
the moths has been such as would have been 
appropriate for the flippant assault of some living 
penny-a-liner upon the celebrities of to-day. The 
critics have had an eye for nothing but the harsh- 
ness and the gloom, and have read without a tear, 
without even a touch of sympathy, a confession 
more moving, more vividly reflecting the struggles 
and the anguish of a great man, than almost any- 
thing in our literature. 

Enough of this : though in speaking of Carlyle 
at this time it is impossible to pass it over in com- 
plete silence. I intend only to say something of 
Carlyle's teaching, which seems to be as much 
misunderstood by some critics as his character. 
It should require little impartiality or insight at 
the present day to do something like justice to a 
teacher who belonged essentially to a past genera- 



Carlyle's Ethics 235 

tion. When Carlyle was still preaching upon 
questions of the day, my juvenile sympathies 
such as they were were always on the side of 
his opponents. But he and his opinions have 
passed into the domain of history, and we can, or 
at least we should, judge of them as calmly as we 
can of Burke and of Milton. In the year 1789, 
you might have sympathised with Mackintosh, 
or with Tom Paine, rather than with the great 
opponent of the Revolution; and you may even 
now hold that they were more in the right as to 
the immediate issues than Burke. But it would, 
indeed, be a narrow mind which could not now 
perceive that Burke, as a philosophic writer upon 
politics, towers like a giant amidst pigmies above 
the highest of his contemporaries; and that the 
value of his principles is scarcely affected by the 
particular application. Though Carlyle touched 
upon more recent events, we can already make 
the same distinction, and we must make it if we 
would judge fairly in his case. 

The most obvious of all remarks about Carlyle 
is one expressed (I think) by Sir Henry Taylor in 
the phrase that he was u a Calvinist who had lost 
his creed." Rather we should say he was a Cal- 
vinist who had dropped the dogmas out of his 
creed. It is no doubt a serious question what 
remains of a creed when thus eviscerated; or, 



236 Hours in a Library 

again, how long it is likely to survive such an 
operation. But for the present purpose it is 
enough to say that what remained for Carlyle was 
the characteristic temper of mind and the whole 
mode of regarding the universe. He often de- 
clared that the Hebrew Scriptures, though he did 
not adhere to the orthodox view of their author- 
ity, contained the most tenable theory of the 
world ever propounded to mankind. Without 
seeking to define what was the element which he 
had preserved, and what it was that he had aban- 
doned, or attempting the perilous task of drawing 
a line between the essence and accidents of a 
creed, it is in any case clear that Carlyle was as 
Scottish in faith as in character; that he would 
have taken and imposed the Covenant with the 
most thoroughgoing and exanimo assent and con- 
sent; and that the difference between him and 
his forefathers was one rather of particular be- 
liefs than of essential sentiment. He had changed 
rather the data upon which his convictions were 
based than the convictions themselves. He re- 
vered what his fathers revered, but he revered 
the same principle in other manifestations, and 
to them this would naturally appear as a profana- 
tion, whilst from his point of view it was but a 
legitimate extension of their fundamental beliefs. 
The more one reads Carlyle the further one 



Carlyle's Ethics 237 

traces the consequences of this belief. The Puri- 
tan creed, one may say, is not popular at the pres- 
ent day for reasons which'might easily be assigned ; 
and those who dislike it in any form are not con- 
ciliated by the omission of its external peculiar- 
ities. And, on the other hand, the omission 
naturally alienates many who would otherwise 
sympathise. When Carlyle speaks of "the Eter- 
nities" and "the Silences," he is really using a 
convenient periphrasis for thoughts more natur- 
ally expressed by most people in the language 
peculiar to Cromwell the translation is often 
given side by side with the original in the com- 
ments upon Cromwell's letters and speeches 
and his mode of speech is dictated by the feeling 
that the old dogmatic forms are too narrow and 
too much associated with scholastic pedantry to 
be appropriate in presence of such awful mys- 
teries. He is, as Teufelsdrockh would have said, 
dropping the old clothes of belief only that he 
may more fittingly express the living reality. 

To Carlyle, for example, the later developments 
of Irvingism, the speaking with tongues, and so 
forth, appeared as simply contemptible, or, when 
sanctioned by the friend whose memory he cher- 
ished so pathetically, as inexpressibly pitiable. 
It was a hopeless attempt to cling to the worn-out 
rags, a dropping of the substance to grasp the 



238 Hours in a Library 

shadow; ending, therefore, in a mere grotesque 
caricature of belief which made genuine belief all 
the more difficult of attainment. You are seeking 
for outward signs and wonders when you should 
be impressed by the profound and all-pervading 
mysteries of the universe; and therefore falling 
into the hands of mere charlatans, and taking 
the morbid hysterics of over-excited women for 
the revelation conveyed by all nature to those 
who have ears to hear. Has not the word "spir- 
itual," till now expressive of the highest emotions 
possible to human beings, got itself somehow 
stained and debased by association with the 
loathsome tricks practised by impostors aided 
by the prurient curiosity of their dupes? The 
perversion of the highest instincts which leads 
a man in his very anxiety to find a true prophet 
and spiritual leader to put up with some miser- 
able Cagliostro a quack working "miracles" by 
sleight of hand and phosphorus appeared to 
Carlyle, and surely appeared to him most rightly, 
as the saddest of all conceivable aberrations of 
human nature; saddest because some men with 
a higher strain of character are amenable to such 
influences. But when Carlyle came to specify 
what was and what was not quackery of this kind, 
and included much that was still sacred to others, 
he naturally had to part company with many 



Carlyle's Ethics 239 

who would otherwise have sympathised. Miss 
Martineau, he tells us, was described as not only 
stripping herself naked, but stripping to the bone. 
Carlyle seems to some people to be performing this 
last operation, though to himself it appeared in 
the opposite light. 

To Carlyle himself the liberation from the old 
clothes or external casing of belief constituted 
what he regarded as equivalent to the conversion 
of the "old Christian people." He emerged, he 
tells us, into a higher atmosphere, and gained a 
"constant inward happiness that was quite royal 
and supreme, in which all temporal evil was tran- 
sient and insignificant:" a happiness, he adds, 
which he never quite lost, though in later years it 
suffered more frequent eclipse. For this he held 
himself to be "endlessly indebted" to Goethe; 
for Goethe had in his own fashion trod the same 
path and achieved the same victory. Conver- 
sion, as meaning the conscious abandonment of 
beliefs which have once formed an integral and 
important part of a man's life, is a process which 
indeed must be very exceptional with all men of 
real force of character. Carlyle, it is plain, was 
so far from undergoing such a process, that he 
retained much which would have been little in 
harmony with the teaching of his master. For, 
whilst everybody can see that Goethe reached a 



240 Hours in a Library 

region of philosophic serenity, we must take Car- 
lyle's "royal and supreme happiness" a little on 
trust. If his earlier writings have some gleams 
of the happier mood, we are certainly much more 
frequently in the region of murky gloom, shrouded 
by the Tartarean and "fuliginous" vapours of 
the lower earth. If his studies of Goethe and 
German literature opened a door of escape from 
the narrow prejudices which made the air of Edin- 
burgh oppressive to him, they certainly did not 
help him to shake off the old Puritan sentiments 
which were bred in the bone, and no mere external 
trapping. 

Critics have spoken as though Carlyle had be- 
come a disciple of some school of German meta- 
physics. It is, doubtless, true enough that he 
valued the great German thinkers as representing 
to his mind a victorious reaction against the scep- 
ticism of Hume, or the materialism of Hume's 
French successors. But he sympathised with the 
general tendency without caring to bewilder him- 
self in any of the elaborate systems evolved by 
Kant or his followers. The reader, he says in the 
earlier essay on Novalis, 

would err widely who supposed that this transcend- 
ental system of metaphysics was a mere intellectual 
card-castle, or logical hocus-pocus . . . without 
any bearing on the practical interests of men. On 



Carlyle's Ethics 241 

the contrary . . . it is the most serious in its 
purport of all philosophies propounded in these latter 
ages; 

and he proceeds to indicate their purport, and to 
hint, as one writing for uncongenial readers, his 
respect for German "mysticism." He thought, 
that is, that these mystics, transcendentalists, 
and so forth, were vindicating faith against scep- 
ticism, idealism against materialism, a belief in 
the divine order against atheistic negations ; and, 
moreover, that their fundamental creed was in- 
expugnable, resting on a basis of solid reason 
instead of outworn dogma. As for the superstruc- 
ture, the systems of this or that wonderful pro- 
fessor to explain the universe in general, he 
probably held them to be "card-castles'* mere 
cobwebs of the brain at best arid, tentative grop- 
ings in the right direction. He had far too much 
of true Scotish shrewdness even in the higher 
regions of thought to trust body or soul to the 
truth of such flimsy materials. This comes out in 
his view of Coleridge, who so far sympathised with 
him as to have imbibed consolation from the same 
sources. No reader of the life of Sterling can for- 
get the chapter one of the most vivid portraits 
ever drawn even by Carlyle devoted to Coleridge 
as the oracle of the "innumerable brave souls" 
still engaged in the London turmoil a portrait 

VOL. IV. 1 6. 



242 Hours in a Library 

which suggests incidentally how much was left 
unspoken in the hastier touches of the Remin- 
iscences. We can see the oracle not answering 
your questions, nor decidedly setting out towards 
an answer, but accumulating 

formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, tran- 
scendental life-preservers, and other precautionary 
and vehiculatory gear for setting out; ending by 
losing himself in the morass and in the mazes of 
theosophic philosophy, 

where now and then "glorious islets" would rise 
out of the haze, only to be lost again in the sur- 
rounding gloom. In his talk, as in him, "a ray 
of heavenly inspiration struggled in a tragically 
ineffectual degree against the weakness of flesh 
and blood." He had "skirted the deserts of in- 
fidelity," but "had not had the courage, in de- 
fiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across 
such deserts to the new firm lands of faith be- 
yond." Many disciples have of course seen more 
in Coleridge ; but even his warmest admirers must 
admit the general truth of the picture, and con- 
fess that if Coleridge cast a leaven of much virtue 
into modern English speculation, he never suc- 
ceeded in working out a downright answer to the 
philosophical perplexities of his day, or in pro- 
mulgating a distinct rule of faith or life. To Car- 
lyle this was enough to condemn Coleridge as a 



Carlyle's Ethics 243 

teacher. Coleridge, in his view, failed because he 
adhered to the "old clothes;" tried desperately 
to breathe life into dead creeds ; and, encumbered 
with such burdens, could not make the effort 
necessary to cross the "desert." He lingered 
fatally round the starting-point, and succeeded 
only in starting "strange spectral Puseyisms, 
monstrous illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical 
chimeras which now roam the earth in a very 
lamentable manner." 

The judgment is in many ways characteristic 
of Carlyle. To the genuine Puritan a creed is 
nothing which does not immediately embody 
itself in a war-cry. It must have a direct forcible 
application to life. It must divide light from 
darkness, distinguish friends from enemies, both 
external and internal, nerve your arms for the 
battle, and plant your feet on solid standing- 
ground. It must be no flickering ray in the midst 
of gloom, but a steady, unquenchable light a 
permanent "star to every wandering bark." 
Coleridge would stimulate only to uncertain 
musings, instead of animating to strenuous en- 
deavour. The same sentiment utters itself in 
Carlyle's favourite exaltation of silence above 
speech a phrase paradoxical if literally taken, 
but in substance an emphatic assertion of the 
futility of the uncertain meanderings in the 



244 Hours in a Library 

regions of abstract speculation which hinder 
a man from girding himself at once to deadly 
wrestle with the powers of darkness. 

This is but a new version of the Puritan con- 
tempt for the vain speculations of human wisdom 
when he is himself conscious of an inner light 
guiding him infallibly through the labyrinths of 
the world. The Puritan contempt for aesthetic 
enjoyments springs from the same root, and is 
equally characteristic of Carlyle. He can never 
see much difference between fiction and lying. 

Fiction [he says] or idle falsity of any kind was 
never tolerable, except in a world which did itself 
abound in practical lies and solid shams. ... A 
serious soul, can it wish, even in hours of relaxation, 
that you should fiddle empty nonsense to it? A seri- 
ous soul would desire to be entertained either with 
silence or with what was truth, and had fruit in it, 
and was made by the Maker of us all, 

a doctrine which will clearly not commend itself 
to an aesthetic world. " Poetry, fiction in general, 
he [Carlyle the father] had universally seen treated 
as not only idle, but false and criminal," and the 
son adhered to the opinion except so far as he 
came to admit that fiction might in a sense be 
true. The ground-feeling is still that of some old 
Puritan, preaching, like Baxter, as "a dying man 
to dying men," and at most tolerant of anything 
not directly tending to edification. Carlyle, of 



Carlyle's Ethics 245 

course, belonged emphatically to the imaginative 
as distinguished from the speculative order of 
minds. He was a man of intuitions, not of dis- 
cursive thought : who felt before he reasoned : to 
whom it was a mental necessity that a principle 
should clothe itself in concrete flesh and blood, 
and if possible in some definite historical hero, 
before he could fully believe in it. He wanted 
vivid images in place of abstract formulas. His 
indifference to the metaphysical was not simply 
that of the practical man who regards all such 
inquiries as leading to hopeless and bottomless 
quagmires of doubt and a paralysis of all active 
will; as an attempt, doomed to failure from the 
beginning, to get off your own shadow, and to 
twist and twirl till your pigtail hangs before you ; 
though this, too, counts for much in his teaching ; 
but it was also the antipathy of the imaginative 
mind to the passionless analyser who "explains" 
the living organism by reducing it to a dead 
mechanism. It is, indeed, remarkable that Car- 
lyle had a certain comparative respect even for 
the materialist and utilitarian whom he so harshly 
denounced. Such a man was at least better than 
the ineffectual dilettante or dealer in small shams 
and phantasms. Anything thoroughgoing, even 
a thoroughgoing rejection of the highest elements 
of life, so far deserved respect as at least affording 



246 Hours in a Library 

some firm starting-point. But, for the most part, 
the scientific frame of mind, so far as it implies a 
tranquil dissecting of concrete phenomena into 
their dead elements, jarred upon every fibre of his 
nature. Political economy, which treats society as 
a complex piece of machinery, and the logic which 
resolves the universe itself into a mere heap of 
separable atoms, seemed to him hopelessly bar- 
ren, and uninteresting to the higher mind. Mill's 
talk and books which specially represented this 
mode of thought for him were "sawdustish;" 
for what is sawdust but the dead product of a 
living growth deprived of its organising principle 
and reduced to mere dry, indigestible powder? 
To the poetic as to the religious nature of Car- 
lyle, such a process was to make the whole world 
weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. Carlyle, there- 
fore, must be judged as a poet, and not as a dealer 
in philosophic systems; as a seer or a prophet, 
not as a theorist or a man of calculations. And, 
therefore, if I were attempting any criticism of 
his literary merits, I should dwell upon his sur- 
passing power in his peculiar province. Admit- 
ting that every line he wrote has the stamp of 
his idiosyncrasies, and consequently requires a 
certain congeniality of temperament in the reader, 
I should try to describe the strange spell which 
it exercises over the initiated. If you really hate 



Carlyle's Ethics 247 

the grotesque, the gloomy, the exaggerated, you 
are of course disqualified from enjoying Carlyle. 
You must take leave of what ordinarily passes 
even for common-sense, of all academical canons 
of taste, and of any weak regard for symmetry or 
simplicity, before you enter the charmed circle. 
But if you can get rid of your prejudices for the 
nonce, you will certainly be rewarded by seeing 
visions such as are evoked by no other magician. 
The common-sense reappears in the new shape 
of strange, vivid flashes of humour and insight 
casting undisputed gleams of light into many 
dark places; and dashing off graphic portraits 
with a single touch. And if you miss the serene 
atmosphere of calmer forms of art, it is something 
to feel at times, as no one but Carlyle can make 
you feel, that each instant is the "conflux of two 
eternities;'* that our little lives, in his favourite 
Shakespearean phrase, are "rounded with sleep;" 
that history is like the short space lighted up by 
a flickering taper in the midst of infinite glooms 
and mysteries, and its greatest events brief scenes 
in a vast drama of conflicting forces, where the 
actors are passing in rapid succession rising from 
and vanishing into the all-embracing darkness. 
And if there is something oppressive to the imag- 
ination when we stay long in this singular re- 
gion, over which the same inspiration seems to be 



248 Hours in a Library 

brooding which created the old Northern mytho- 
logy with its grim gigantesque, semi-humorous 
figures, we are rewarded by the vividness of the 
pictures standing out against the surrounding 
emptiness; some little groups of human figures, 
who lived and moved like us in the long-past 
days; or of vignettes of scenery, like the Alpine 
sunrise in the Sartor Resartus, or the sight of 
sleeping Haddington from the high moorland in 
the Reminiscences, as bright and vivid for us as 
our own memories, and revealing unsuspected 
sensibilities in the writer. Though he scorned 
the word-painters and description-mongers, no 
one was a better landscape painter. It is perhaps 
idle to dwell upon characteristics which one either 
feels or cannot be persuaded into feeling. Those 
to whom he is on the whole repugnant may admit 
him to be occasionally a master of the picturesque ; 
and sometimes endeavour to put him out of court 
on the strength of this formula. A mere dealer, 
many exclaim, in oddities and grotesques, who 
will sacrifice anything to produce a startling effect, 
whose portraits are caricatures, whose style is 
torn to pieces by excessive straining after em- 
phasis, and who systematically banishes all those 
half-tones which are necessary to faithful por- 
traiture in the search after incessant contrasts of 
light and shade. 



Carlyle's Ethics 249 

Let us first remark in regard to this that Carlyle 
himself peremptorily and emphatically denied 
that the distinction here assumed between the 
poet and the philosopher could be more than 
superficial. The philosopher only reaches his 
goal so far as his analysis leads to a synthesis, or 
as his abstract speculations can be embodied in 
definite concrete vision. And the poet is a mere 
idler, with no substantial or permanent value in 
him, unless he is uttering thoughts equally sus- 
ceptible of philosophical exposition. 

The hero [he says] can be poet, prophet, king, 
priest, or what you will, according to the kind of 
world he finds himself born into. I confess I have no 
notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts 
of men. The poet who could merely sit on a chair 
and compose stanzas could never make a stanza 
worth much. He could not sing the heroic warrior, 
unless he himself were an heroic warrior too. 

To this doctrine though with various logical 
distinctions and qualifications which seem in- 
congruous with Carlyle's vehement dogmatic 
utterances I, for one, would willingly subscribe ; 
and I hold further that in strenuously asserting 
and enforcing it Carlyle was really laying down 
the fundamental doctrine of all sound criticism, 
whether of art or literature or life. Any teaching, 
that is, which attempts to separate the poet from 



250 Hours in a Library 

the man as though his excellence were to be 
measured by a radically different set of tests is, 
to my mind, either erroneous or trifling and super- 
ficial. The point at which one is inclined to part 
company with this teaching is different. I do not 
condemn Carlyle for judging the poet as he judges 
the hero, for the substantial worth of the man 
whom it reveals to us ; but I admit that his ideal 
man has a certain stamp of Puritanical narrow- 
ness. So, for example, there is something char- 
acteristic in his judgments not only of Coleridge, 
but of Lamb or Scott. He judges Lamb as the 
spoilt child of Cockney circles, as the Baptist in his 
garment of camel's hair might have judged some 
favourite courtier cracking jokes for the amuse- 
ment of Herodias's daughter. And of Scott, 
though he strives to do justice to the pride of all 
Scotchmen, and admits Scott's merit in breathing 
life into the past, his real judgment is based upon 
the maxim that literature must have higher aims 
"than that of harmlessly amusing indolent languid 
men." Scott was not one who had gone through 
spiritual convulsions, who had " dwelt and wrestled 
amid dark pains and throes," but on the whole a 
prosperous easy-going gentleman, who found out 
the art of "writing impromptu novels to buy 
farms with;" and who can therefore by no means 
claim the entire devotion of the rigorous ascetic 



Carlyle's Ethics 251 

prophet to whom happiness is inconceivable ex- 
cept as the reward of victorious conflicts with the 
deadly enemies of the soul. To me it seems that 
the error in such judgments is one of omission; 
but the omission is certainly considerable. For 
Carlyle's tacit assumption seems to be that the 
conscience should be not only the supreme but 
the single faculty of the soul ; that morality is not 
only a necessary, but the sole, condition of all ex- 
cellence ; and, therefore, that an ethical judgment 
is not merely implied in every aesthetic judgment, 
but is the sole essence and meaning of it. Our 
minds, according to some of his Puritan teachers, 
should be so exclusively set upon working out our 
salvation that every kind of aim not consciously 
directed to this ultimate end is a trifling which is 
closely akin to actual sin. Carlyle, accepting or 
unconsciously imbibing the spirit of such teaching, 
reserves his whole reverence for rigid and lofty 
natures, deserving beyond all question of rever- 
ence, but wanting in elements essential to the full 
development of our natures, and therefore, in the 
long run, to a broad morality. 

This leads us to his most emphatically asserted 
doctrines. No one could assert more forcibly, 
emphatically, and frequently than Carlyle that 
morality or justice is the one indispensable thing ; 
that justice means the law of God; that the sole 



252 Hours in a Library 

test of the merits of any human law is its conform- 
ity to the divine law; and that, as he puts it, all 
history is an 

inarticulate Bible, and in a dim, intricate manner 
reveals the divine appearances in this lower world. 
For God did make this world, and does for ever govern 
it ; the loud roaring loom of time, with all its French 
revolutions, Jewish revelations, "weaves the vesture 
thou seest Him by." There is no biography of a man, 
much less any history or biography of a nation, but 
wraps in it a message out of heaven, addressed to the 
hearing ear and the not-hearing. 

It is needless to quote particular passages. This 
clearly is the special doctrine of Carlyle, em- 
bodied in all his works; preached in season and 
(often enough) out of season; which possesses 
him rather than is possessed by him; the sum 
and substance of the message which he had to 
deliver to the world, and spent his life and energy 
in delivering with emphasis. And yet we are 
constantly told that Carlyle was a cynic who be- 
lieved in nothing but brute force. If such a criti- 
cism came only from those who had been repelled 
by his style from reading his books, or again, 
only from the shallow and Pharisaical, who mis- 
take any attack upon the arrangements to which 
they owe their comfort for an attack upon the 
eternal laws of the universe, it might be dis- 



Carlyle's Ethics 253 

missed with contempt. And this is, indeed, all 
that much of the average talk about Carlyle de- 
serves. But there is a more solid ground in the 
objection, which brings us in face of Carlyle's most 
disputable teaching, and is worth considering. 

We have, in fact, to consider the principle so 
often ascribed to him that Might makes Right; 
and this may be interpreted into the immoral doc- 
trine that force is the one thing admirable, and 
success the sole test of merit. Cromwell was right 
because he cut off Charles's head, and Charles 
wrong because he lost his head. Frederick's 
political immorality is condoned because Freder- 
ick succeeding in making Prussia great ; Napoleon 
was right so long as he was victorious, and was 
condemned because he ended in St. Helena. 
That, as some critics suppose, was Carlyle's mean- 
ing, and they very naturally denounce it as an 
offensive and cynical theory. 

Now in one sense Carlyle's doctrine is the very 
reverse of this. His theory is the opposite one, 
that Right makes Might. He admires Cromwell, 
for example, and Cromwell is the hero after his 
own heart, expressly on the ground that Cromwell 
is the perfect embodiment of the Puritan prin- 
ciple, and that the essence of Puritanism was to 

see God's own law made good in this world. . . . 
Eternal justice; that God's will be done on earth as 



254 Hours in a Library 

it is in heaven ; corollaries enough will flow from that, 
if that be there: if that be not there, no corollary 
good for much will flow. 

How does a doctrine apparently, at least, implying 
an unqualified belief in the absolute supremacy 
of right, a conviction that nothing but the rule of 
right can give a satisfactory basis for any human 
arrangement, get itself transmuted into an ap- 
pearance of the opposite, of being a kind of Hobb- 
ism, deducing all morality from sheer force? Such 
transmutations, or apparent meetings of opposite 
extremes, are not uncommon, and the process 
might perhaps be most forcibly illustrated by a 
history of the old Puritans themselves. But it 
will be quite enough for my purpose to indicate, 
as briefly as may be, Carlyle's own method, which 
is of course guided as well by his temper as by his 
primary assumptions. He is predisposed in every 
way to take the sternest view of morality. He 
means by virtue, by no means an indiscriminate 
extension of all-comprehending benevolence, of 
goodwill to rogues and scoundrels, or amiable de- 
sire that everybody should have as pleasant a 
time of it as possible. Justice, according to him, 
and the most stringent and unflinching justice, is 
the essential basis of all morality Love, doubt- 
less, is the fulfilling of the law ; but along with that 
truth you must also recognise the awful and mys- 



Carlyle's Ethics 255 

terious truth, that hell itself is one product of the 
divine love. Love itself implies the destruction 
of evil and of the evil-doers. From this assump- 
tion it is not surprising if much modern philan- 
thropy appeared to him as mere sentimentalism, 
a weak sympathy even for the suffering which is 
the divinely appointed remedy for social diseases, 
the mere effeminate shrinking from the surgical 
knife. The cardinal virtue from which all others 
might be inferred is not benevolence, but veracity, 
respect for facts and hatred of shams. This was 
not with Carlyle, as with some of his teachers, an 
abstract theorem of metaphysics, but the ex- 
pression of his whole character, of that Puritanic 
fervour which tested all doctrine by its immediate 
practical influence upon the will, and which forced 
even his poetical imagination to spend itself not 
in creating images, but in realising as vividly as 
possible the actual facts of history. 

Carlyle's application of these principles brings 
out a remarkable result. 

Puritanism [he says] was a genuine thing, for Na- 
ture has adopted it, and it has grown and grows. I 
say sometimes, that everything goes by wager of 
battle in this world; that strength, well understood, 
is the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it 
can succeed it is a right thing. 

This is one form of Carlyle's essential principle, 



256 Hours in a Library 

and is it not also the essential principle of Mr. 
Darwin's famous theory? It is an explicit asser- 
tion of the doctrine of the struggle for existence, 
though applied here to Knox and the Puritans 
instead of to the origin of species. And yet, 
as we may note in passing, the evolutionists are, 
as a fact, the most ready to condemn Carlyle's 
immorality, whilst Carlyle could never find words 
adequate to express his contempt for them. In 
that thorough carrying out of this principle, Car- 
lyle is approaching that profound problem which 
in one shape or other haunts all philosophies: 
What kind of victory may we expect for right in 
this world? If Might and Right were strictly 
identical, it would seem here that we might start 
indifferently from either basis. "This succeeds; 
therefore it is right," would be as tenable an argu- 
ment as "This is right; therefore it will suc- 
ceed." Yet one doctrine has an edifying sound, 
and the other seems to be the very reverse of 
edifying. Moralists vie with each other in pro- 
claiming their belief in the ultimate success of 
good causes, and yet indignantly deny that the 
goodness of a cause should be inferred from its 
success. We agree to applaud the prophecy, 
cited with applause by Carlyle himself, that Na- 
poleon's empire would fail because founded upon 
injustice; but we are startled by an inference 



Carlyle's Ethics 257 

from the failure to the injustice. But why 
should there be so vast a difference in what seem 
to be equivalent modes of reasoning? Carlyle's 
answer would follow from the words just cited. 
You must, he says, " give a thing time." Nobody 
can deny the temporary prosperity of the wicked, 
and certainly Carlyle could not deny that injustice 
may flourish long before it produces the inevitable 
crash. "The mills of God grind slowly, though 
they grind exceeding small." And, therefore, it 
may make all the difference whether we make 
the success the premiss or the conclusion. For 
though, in the long run, the good causes may be 
trusted to succeed in time, and we may see in his- 
tory the proof that they have succeeded, yet at 
any moment the test of success may be precarious 
whilst that of justice is infallible. We may dis- 
tinguish the wheat from the tares before the reaper 
has cast one aside and preserved the other. At 
the moment the injustice of Napoleon's empire 
was manifest, though the cracks and fissures which 
were to cause its crumbling were still hidden from 
any observer. 

By what signs, then, other than the ultimate 
test of success, can we discern the just from the 
unjust? That, of course, is the vital point which 
must decide upon the character of Carlyle's moral- 
ity ; and it is one which, in my opinion, he cannot 

VOL. IV. 17. 



258 Hours in a Library 

be said to have answered distinctly. He gives, 
indeed, a test satisfactory to himself, and he en- 
forces and applies it with superabundant energy 
and variety of phrase. That is right, one may 
say briefly, which will "work." The sham is 
hollow, and must be crushed in the tug and wrestle 
of the warring world. The reality survives and 
gathers strength. Veracity in equivalent phrase 
is the condition of vitality. Truth endures; the 
He perishes. But in applying this or his vast 
vocabulary of similar phrases, we come to a diffi- 
culty. "The largest veracity ever done in Parlia- 
ment" was, he says, Sir Robert Peel's abolition 
of the Corn Laws. But how can you do veracity? 
What is a lie? a question, as he observes, worth 
asking by the "practical English mind;" and to 
which he accordingly proceeds to give an answer. 
He insists, that is, very eloquently and vehe- 
mently, upon the inevitable results of all lying, 
and of all legislative and other action which pro- 
ceeds upon the assumption of a falsity or an error 
which passes itself off for a truth. In all which 
I, for one, admit that there is not only truth, but 
truth nobly expressed and applied to the con- 
futation of some most pestilent errors; and yet, 
as one must also admit, there is still an ambiguity. 
May it not, in fact, cover that exaltation of mere 
success which is so often objected to in him ? Some 



Carlyle's Ethics 259 

tyrannical institution slavery, for example 
lives and flourishes through long ages. Is it 
thereby justified? Is it not a fact, and if fact 
and truth are the same things, is it not a truth 
sanctioned by the eternal veracities and so forth, 
and therefore entitled to our respect? This is 
one more form of that fundamental problem 
which really perplexes Carlyle's moral teaching, 
and which he has at least the merit of bringing 
into prominence, though not of answering. In 
fact, we may recognise in it an ancient philo- 
sophical controversy not yet set at rest; for, 
since the beginning of ethical theorising, thinkers 
of various schools have tried in one way or other 
to deduce virtue from truth, and to identify all 
vice with error. But the reference is enough to 
show the difference of Carlyle's method. He 
might respect the metaphysician who held a doc- 
trine so far analogous to his own ; but the meta- 
physical method appeared to him as a mere formal 
logic-chopping, where the essence of the teaching 
escaped amidst barren demonstrations of verbal 
identities. 

The real answer is here again a new version of 
the old Puritan answer. The Puritan fell back 
upon the will of God revealed through the Bible, 
whose authority was manifest by the inner light. 
If the wicked were allowed to triumph for a time, 



260 Hours in a Library 

there was no danger of being misled by their suc- 
cess, for they were condemned in advance by the 
plain fact of their renunciation of the inspired 
guide. For Carlyle, the "hero" takes the place 
of, or rather is put side by side with, the older 
organs of inspiration. Every hero conveys in 
fact a new revelation to mankind; he conveys 
a divine message, not, it is true, with infallible 
precision, or without an admixture of human 
error, but still the very kernel and essence of his 
teaching. He may come as prophet, king, poet, 
philosopher, and you may reject or accept his 
message at your peril. You may recognise it, 
as the Puritan recognised the authority of his 
Bible, by the spontaneous witness of your higher 
nature, and you will recognise it so long as you 
have not given yourself up to believe a lie. And 
if you demand some external proofs, you must be 
referred, not to some particular signs and wonders, 
but to what you may, if you please, call the " suc- 
cess" of the message; the fact, that is, that the 
hero has contributed some permanent element to 
the thoughts and lives of mankind, that he has 
revealed some enduring truth, created some per- 
manent symbol of our highest feelings, or wrought 
some organic change in the very structure of so- 
ciety. There is a danger undoubtedly of confound- 
ing some temporary crystal palace or dazzling 



Carlyle's Ethics 261 

edifice of mere glass with an edifice founded on 
the rock and solid as the pyramids. The hero 
may be confounded with the sham, as, unfortun- 
ately, shams and realities are most frequently con- 
founded in this world. But they differ for all 
that, and the true man recognises the difference 
as the religious man knows the hypocrite from 
the saint. The test is indifferently the truth or 
the soundness of the work; they must coincide; 
but the test can only be applied by one who really 
loves the truth. 

It is easy to point out the dangers of this posi- 
tion. It rests, after all you may say, upon the 
individual conviction, and lends itself too easily 
to that kind of dogmatism in which Carlyle in- 
dulged so freely, and which consists in asserting 
that any doctrine or system which he dislikes is 
an incarnate lie, and pronouncing that it is there- 
fore doomed to failure. And, on the other hand, 
it may be equally perverted in the opposite direc- 
tion by claiming a sacred character for every 
"lie" not yet exploded. Carlyle, beyond all 
question, was a man of intense prejudices, and 
the claim to inspiration, even to the inspiration 
of our teachers, very easily passes into a deifica- 
tion of our own prejudices. No one was more 
liable to that error; but it is better worth our 
while to look at some other aspect of his teaching. 



262 Hours in a Library 

For we may surely accept without hesitation 
one application of the doctrine which is of the 
first importance with Carlyle, and which he has 
taught so incessantly and impressively that to 
him more than to any other man may be at- 
tributed the general recognition of its truth. The 
success of any system of thought the permanent 
influence, that is, of any great man or of any 
great institution must be due to the truth which 
it contains, or to its real value to mankind. This 
doctrine has become so much of a commonplace, 
and harmonises so fully with all modern historical 
methods, that we are apt to overlook the service 
done by Carlyle in its explicit assertion and rigor- 
ous application to facts. When he was delivering 
his lectures upon hero-worship, intelligent people 
were still in the attitude of mind represented, for 
example, by Gibbon's famous explanation of the 
success of Christianity, as due, amongst other 
things, to the zeal of the early believers, as if the 
zeal required no explanation ; when, on the other 
side, it was thought proper to explain Mahomet- 
anism, not by the admixture of genuine truth 
which it contained, but as a simple imposture. 
Carlyle still speaks like a man advancing a dis- 
puted theory when he urges in this latter case 
that to explain the power of Mahomet's sword, 
you must explain the force which wielded . the 



Carlyle's Ethics 263 

sword; and that the ingenious hypothesis of a 
downright cheat will by no means serve the turn. 
This doctrine is now generally accepted, unless 
by a few clever people who still cherish the wire- 
pulling heresy which makes history a puppet- 
show manipulated by ingenious scoundrels, instead 
of a vast co-operation of organic forces. Carlyle, 
however, has done more than any writer to make 
such barren and degrading explanations impos- 
sible for all serious thinkers. His Cromwell has 
at least exploded once for all the simple-minded 
"hypocrisy" theory, as the essay upon Johnson 
destroyed the ingenious doctrine that a man could 
write a good book simply because he was a fool. 
Whether his portraits are accurate or not, they 
are at least set before us as conceivable and con- 
sistent human beings. The prosaic historian and 
biographer takes the average verdict of common- 
place observers : if he is a partisan, he is content 
with the contemporary caricatures of the party 
to which he belongs ; if he wishes to be impartial, 
he strikes a rough average between opposite er- 
rors; and if he wishes to be dazzling, he calmly 
combines incompatible judgments. Macaulay's 
works, with all their merits, are a perfect gallery 
of such portraits rhetorically excellent, but 
hopelessly flimsy in substance: of angelic Whigs 
and fiendish Tories, and of strange monsters like 



264 Hours in a Library 

his Bacon and his Boswell, made by quietly heap- 
ing together meanness and wisdom, sense and 
folly, and inviting you to accept a string of para- 
doxes as a sober statement of fact. The truly 
imaginative writer has to go deeper than this. 
He begins where the rhetorician ends. A great 
work, as he instinctively sees, implies a great 
force. A man can only leave his mark upon his- 
tory so far as he is animated, and therefore worthy 
to be animated, by a great idea. The secret of 
his nature is to be discovered by a sympathetic 
imagination acting by a kind of poetical induction. 
Gathering together all his recorded acts and utter- 
ances, the masses of recorded facts, preserved, 
often in hopeless confusion and misrepresentation, 
by his contemporaries, you must brood over them 
till at last you gain a clear vision of the under- 
lying unity of character which manifests itself 
in these various ways. Then, at last, you may 
recognise the true hero, and discover unsuspected 
unity of purpose and strength of conviction, 
where the hasty judgments passed by contem- 
poraries and those who set them upon isolated 
fragments of his career make a bewildering chaos 
of inconsistency. The process is admirably illus- 
trated in the study of Cromwell, and the result 
has the merit of being at least a possible, if not a 
correct, theory of a great man. 



Carlyle's Ethics 265 

This, again, is connected with another aspect of 
Carlyle's teaching as valuable, though perhaps 
its value is not even now as generally recognised. 
For the tendency of his mind is always to sub- 
stitute what is sometimes called the dynamical 
for the merely mechanical view of history. It 
is a necessity for his imagination to penetrate 
to the centre instead of remaining at the cir- 
cumference; to unveil the actual forces which 
govern the working of the superficial phenomena, 
instead of losing himself in the external phe- 
nomena themselves. The true condition for un- 
derstanding history is to gain a clear perception 
of the genuine beliefs, the wants, and passions 
which actually sway men's souls, instead of work- 
ing simply at the complicated wheels and pulleys 
of the political machinery, or accepting the masses 
of idle verbiage which conceal our true thoughts 
from ourselves and from each other. An implicit 
faith in the potency of the machinery, and an 
equal neglect of the real driving force, was, in his 
view, the original sin of political theory. The 
constitution-mongers of the Delolme or Sieyes 
type, the men who fancied that government (as 
one of them said) was like " a dance where every- 
thing depended on the disposition of the figures," 
and nothing, therefore, on the nature of the 
dancers, have pretty well passed away. Carlyle 



266 Hours in a Library 

saw the same vital fallacies in such nostrums as 
the ballot or the scheme so enthusiastically ad- 
vocated by Hare and Mill. 

If of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which 
is a common calculation, how in the name of wonder 
will you get a ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom 
from the votes of those ten men? Never by any 
conceivable ballot-box, nor by all the machinery in 
Bromwicham or out of it, will you attain such a 
result. 

Whether Carlyle was right or wrong in the par- 
ticular application I do not presume to say. Such 
a change as the ballot may perhaps imply more 
than a mere change of machinery. But I cer- 
tainly cannot doubt that he is right in the essence 
of his contention : that a perception of the differ- 
ence between the merely mechanical details and 
the vital forces of a society is essential to any 
sound political theorising; and that half our pet 
schemes of reform fail just from this cause, that 
they expect to change the essence by modifying 
the surface, and are therefore equivalent to plans 
for obtaining mechanical results without expend- 
ing energy. 

To kave asserted these principles so emphatic- 
ally is one of Carlyle's greatest merits ; and if he 
obtained emphasis at the cost of exaggeration, 
overstatement, grotesque straining of language 



Carlyle's Ethics 267 

and imagery, and much substantial error as to 
facts, I can only say that the service remains, and 
is inestimable. But there is a less pleasing qual- 
ification to be made. The objection to the ballot 
as a purely mechanical arrangement is combined, 
as we have just seen, with the objection founded 
upon the prevalence of fools. That stinging 
phrase, "mostly fools," has stuck in our throats. 
The prophet who tells us that we are wicked may 
be popular perhaps, because our consciences are 
on his side; but the prophet who calls us fools is 
likely to provoke our wrath. I, at least, never 
met a man who relished that imputation, even 
if he admitted it to contain a grain of truth. 
But, palatable or not, it is clearly fundamental 
with Carlyle. The world is formed of "dull 
millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and 
thither, whithersoever they are led;" the great 
men are the "guides of the dull host, who follow 
them as by an irrevocable decree." They are the 
heroes to whom alone are granted real powers of 
vision and command ; realities amongst shams, 
and knowers amongst vague feelers after know- 
ledge. We need not ask how this theory was 
reached ; whether it is the spontaneous sentiment 
of a proud and melancholy character, or really 
a fair estimate of the facts ; or, again, a deduction 
from the "hero" doctrine. With that doctrine, 



268 Hours in a Library 

at any rate, it naturally coincides. To exalt the 
stature of your hero, you must depress his fellows. 
If Gulliver is to be a giant, he must go to Lilliput. 
There is, however, a gap in the argument which 
is characteristically neglected by Carlyle. He 
would never have fairly accepted the doctrine 
whose was it ? that, though a man may be wiser 
than anybody there is something wiser than he 
namely, everybody. The omission is critical, 
and has many consequences. For one may fully 
admit Carlyle's estimate : one may hold the differ- 
ence between a Shakespeare and an average con- 
tributor to the poet's corner of a newspaper, or 
between a born leader of men, a Cromwell and a 
Chatham, and the enormous majority of his fol- 
lowers, as something hardly expressible in words : 
one may admit that the history of thought or 
society reveals the more clearly, the more closely 
it is studied, the height to which the chosen few 
tower above the average ; one may even diminish 
the percentage of the wise from a tenth to a hun- 
dredth or a thousandth* and yet one may hold 
to the superior wisdom of the mass. No ballot- 
box, it is true, will make the folly of the nine equal 
to the wisdom of the one. Or it can tend that 
way only if the foolish majority have some sense 
of the need of superior guidance. But the ignor- 
ance and folly of mankind, their incapacity for 



Carlyle's Ethics 269 

forming any trustworthy judgment on any given 
point, may also be consistent with a capacity for 
groping after truth, and they have the advantage 
of trying experiments on a large scale. The fact 
that a creed commends itself to the instincts of 
many men in many ages is a better proof Carlyle 
himself being the judge that it contains some 
truth than the isolated judgment of the most 
clearsighted philosopher. The fact that an in- 
stitution actually makes men happy and calls 
forth their loyalty is a more forcible argument in 
its favour than the opinion of the most experi- 
enced statesman. And, therefore, the fact that 
any society is chiefly made up of fools is quite 
consistent with the belief that it is collectively 
the organ through which truth gradually mani- 
fests itself and wins a wider recognition. Securus 
judicat orbis may be a true maxim if we interpret 
it to mean that the world decides not as the 
experimenter but as the experiment. Carlyle 
systematically overlooks this blind, semi-conscious 
process of co-operation upon which the "hero" 
is really as dependent as the dull flock which he 
leads. History, as he is fond of saying, is the 
essence of innumerable biographies. To find the 
essence of the biographies, again, he goes to the es- 
sential biographies; that is, to the biographies 
of the men who give the impulse, not of those who 



270 Hours in a Library 

passively submit to the impulse. This apotheosis 
of the individual is dictated by his imaginative 
idiosyncrasy, as much as by his theory of history. 
He must have the picturesque concrete fact ; the 
living hero to be the incarnation of the idea ; and, 
accordingly, history in his page is like a gigantic 
panorama in which the painter sacrifices every- 
thing to obtain the strongest contrasts, and makes 
his lights stand out against vast breadths of un- 
speakable gloom. The hero is thus made to sum 
up the whole effectual force, and all that is done 
by the Greeks is attributed to the arm of Achilles. 
Some awkward results follow. Frederick is a 
hero who has obvious moral defects, and readers 
are startled by Carlyle's worship of such an idol. 
Yet it follows from the assumptions. For Fred- 
erick, in Carlyle's theory, means the development 
of the German nation. That the growth of the 
German influence in Europe was a phenomenon 
which naturally and rightfully excited Carlyle's 
strongest enthusiasm requires no demonstration. 
If the credit of that, as of every other great 
achievement, must be given to some solitary hero, 
Frederick doubtless has the best claim to the 
honour. We may no doubt say that Frederick, in 
spite of this, was selfish and cynical, and may con- 
fine our praises to allowing his possession of perspi- 
cacity enough to see the capabilities of his position. 



Carlyle's Ethics 271 

A great man may do an involuntary service to 
mankind, because his genius inclines him to range 
himself on the side of the strongest forces, and 
therefore of what we vaguely call progress. But 
the hero-worshipper naturally regards him as not 
merely an instrument, but the conscious and 
efficient cause of the progress itself. 

Hence, too, the apparent immorality which 
some people discern in Carlyle's denunciations of 
"red tape" formulas, and the ordinary conven- 
tions of society. Undoubtedly, such fetters must 
snap like packthread when opposed to the deeper 
forces which govern the growth of nations. No 
set of engagements on paper will keep a nation on 
its legs if it is rotten at the core, or maintain a 
balance of power between forces which are daily 
growing unequal. It is idle to suppose that 
any contract can bind, or otherwise preserve, 
the vitality of effete institutions. And hence 
arise a good many puzzling questions for political 
casuistry. It is hard to say at what precise point 
it becomes necessary to snap the bonds, and when 
the necessity of change makes revolution, with all 
its mischiefs, preferable to stagnation. The hero- 
worshipper who regards his idol as the supreme 
moving force has to make him also the infallible 
judge in such matter. He stands above not 
the ultimate rules of morality, but the whole 



272 Hours in a Library 

system of regulations and compromises by which 
men must govern themselves in normal times 
and decides when they must be suspended in the 
name of the higher law. The only appeal from 
his decision is the appeal to facts. If the apparent 
hero be really self-seeking and vulgarly ambitious, 
he and his empire will be crushed like Napoleon's. 
If, on the whole, his decision be right, as inspired 
from above, he will lay the foundations of a new 
order on an unshakable basis. And, therefore, 
Carlyle is naturally attracted to the revolutionary 
periods, when the underlying forces come to the 
surface; when the foundations of the great deep 
are broken up, all conventions summarily swept 
aside, and the direct as well as the ultimate at- 
tention is to the great principles of its social life. 
Therefore he sympathises with Mirabeau, who 
had " swallowed all formulas," and still more with 
Cromwell, whose purpose, in his view, was to 
make the laws of England a direct application of 
the laws of God. Puritan and Jacobin are equally 
impatient for the instantaneous advent of the 
millennium, and so far attract equally the man 
who shares their hatred of compromise and tem- 
porising with the world. 

Here we come to the final problem. Crom- 
well's Parliament, he says, failed in their attempt 
to realise their "noble, and surely necessary, at- 



Carlyle's Ethics 273 

tempt. [Nay, they] could not but fail ; [they had] " 

the sluggishness, the slavish half-and-half ness, the 
greediness, the cowardice, and general fatuity and 
falsity of some ten million men against it alas! the 
whole world and what we call the Devil and all his 
angels against it! 

This is the true revolutionary doctrine. The fact 
that a reform would only succeed fully if men 
were angels is with the ordinary Conservative a 
reason for not reforming at all; and with your 
genuine fanatic a reason not for declining the im- 
practicable, but for denouncing the facts. We 
have, however, to ask how it fits in with any such 
theory of progress as was possible for Carlyle. For 
some such theory must be held by any one who 
makes the victory of truth and justice over shams 
and falsehoods a corner-stone of his system. It 
has been asked, in fact, whether there is not a 
gross inconsistency here. If Cromwell's success 
proved him to be a hero, did not the Restoration 
upset the proof? The answer, frequently and 
emphatically given by Carlyle, as in the lecture 
on the hero as king, is an obvious one. Crom- 
well represents an intermediate stage between 
Luther and the French Revolution. Luther told 
the Pope that he was a " chimera ; " and the French 
gave the same piece of information to other "chi- 
The whole process is a revolt against 

VOL. IV. 18. 



274 Hours in a Library 

certain gigantic shams, and the success very in- 
adequately measured by any special incident in 
the struggle. The French Revolution, with all 
its horrors, was a "return to truth," though, as 
it were, to a truth "clad in hellfire:" and its ad- 
vent should be hailed as "shipwrecked mariners 
might hail the sternest rock, in a world otherwise 
all of baseless seas and waves." And throughout 
this vast revolutionary process, our hope rests 
upon the "certainty of heroes being sent us;" 
and that certainty " shines like a polestar, through 
murk dustclouds, and all manner of down-rushing 
and conflagration." 

It is well that we have a " certainty" of the com- 
ing hero ; for the essay seems to show the weak- 
ness of all excessive reliance upon individuals. 
Cromwell's life, as he tells us emphatically, was 
the life of the Commonwealth, and Cromwell's 
life was at the mercy of a " stray bullet." Where 
then is a certainty of progress in a world thus de- 
pendent upon solitary heroes, in a wilderness of 
fools, liable to be snuffed out at a moment's no- 
tice? So far as certainty means a scientific con- 
viction resting on the observation of facts, we, 
of course, cannot have it. It is a certainty which 
follows from our belief in the overruling Power 
which will send heroes when there is work for 
heroes to do. And Carlyle can at times, especially 



Carlyle's Ethics 275 

in his earlier writings, declare his faith in such a 
progress with full conviction. 

The English Whig [says Herr Teufelsdrockh] has, 
in the second generation, become an English Radical, 
who, in the third, it is to be hoped, will become an 
English rebuilder. Find mankind where thou wilt, 
thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster 
or slower; the phoenix soars aloft, hovers with out- 
stretched wings, filling earth with her music; or, as 
now, she sinks, and with spheral swansong immolates 
herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and 
sing the clearer. 

And the phrase, as I think, gives the theory which 
in fact is more or less explicitly contained in all 
Carlyle's writings. 

It is plain, however, that progress, so under- 
stood, is a progress consistent with long periods 
of the reverse of progress. It implies an alter- 
nation of periods of reconstruction and vital 
energy with others of decay and degeneration. 
And in this I do not know that Carlyle differs 
from other philosophers. Few people are san- 
guine enough to hold that every generation im- 
proves upon the preceding. But the modern 
believer in progress undoubtedly believes that 
this actual generation is better than the last, and 
that the next will be better still ; and is very apt 
to impute bad motives to any one who differs 
from him. Here, of course, he must come into 



2 76 Hours in a Library 

flat opposition to Carlyle. For Carlyle, to put it 
briefly, regarded the present state of things as 
analogous to that of the Lower Empire; a time 
of dissolution of old bonds and of a general fer- 
ment which was destroying the very tissues of 
society. So far he agrees, of course, with many 
Conservatives; but he differs from them in re- 
garding the process as necessary, and even ulti- 
mately beneficial. The disease is one which must 
run its course; the best hope is that it may run 
it quickly ; the attempt to suppress the symptoms 
and to regain health by making time run back- 
wards is simply chimerical. Thus he was in the 
painful position of one who sees a destructive 
process going on of which he recognises the neces- 
sity whilst all the immediate results are bad. 

To the ardent believer in progress such a state 
of mind is, of course, repulsive. It implies mis- 
anthropy, cynicism, and disbelief in mankind. 
Nor can anybody deny that Carlyle's gloomy and 
dyspeptic constitution palpably biassed his view 
of his contemporaries as well as of their theories. 
The "mostly fools'* expresses a deeply rooted 
feeling, and we might add "mostly bores," and 
to a great extent humbugs. And this, of course, 
implies a very low estimate of the powers of 
unheroic mankind, and therefore of their rights. 
If most men are fools, their right to do as they 



Carlyle's Ethics 277 

please is a right to knock their heads against stone 
walls. Carlyle perhaps overlooked the fact that 
even that process may be useful training for fools. 
But even here he asserted a doctrine wrongly ap- 
plied rather than false in principle. It shocks 
one to find an open advocacy of slavery for black 
Quashee. But we must admit, and admit for 
the reasons given by Carlyle, that even slavery 
may be better than sheer anarchy and barbarism ; 
that, historically speaking, the system of slavery 
represents a necessary stage in civilisation; and 
therefore that the simple abolition of slavery a 
recognition of unconditional "right" without re- 
ference to the possession of the instincts necessary 
for higher kinds of society might be disguised 
cruelty. The error was in the hasty assumption 
that his Quashee was, in fact, in this degraded 
state; and the haste to accept this disheartening 
belief was but too characteristic. That liberty 
might mean barbarism was true ; that it actually 
did mean it in certain given cases was a rash as- 
sumption too much in harmony with his ordinary 
aversion to the theorists of his time. 

This applies to all Carlyle's preachings about 
contemporary politics; the weakest of his writ- 
ings are those in which his rash dogmatism, 
coloured by his gloomy temperament, was em- 
ployed upon unfamiliar topics. But the pith 



278 Hours in a Library 

and essence of them all is the intense conviction 
that the one critical point for modern statesmen 
is the creation of a healthy substratum to the 
social structure. That the lives of the great 
masses are squalid, miserable, and vicious, and 
must be elevated by the spread of honesty, justice, 
and the unflinching extirpation of corrupt ele- 
ments, the substitution of rigorous rulers for idle 
professors of official pedantry, busy about every- 
thing but the essential that is the sum and sub- 
stance of the teaching. That he attributes too 
much to the legislative power, and has too little 
belief in the capacities of the average man, may 
be true enough. But this one thing must be said 
in conclusion. The bitterness, the gloom, even 
the apparent brutality, is a proof of the strength 
of his sympathies. He is savage with the physi- 
cian because he is appalled at the virulence of the 
disease and the inadequacy of the remedy. He 
may shriek " quack" too hastily, and be too ready 
to give over the patient as desperate. And yet I 
am frequently struck by a contrast. I meet a 
good friend who holds up his hands at Carlyle's 
ferocity. We talk, and I find that he holds that 
in politics we are all going to sheer destruction 
or "shooting Niagara;" that the miserable Rad- 
icals are sapping all public spirit; that faith is 
being undermined by malcontents and atheists; 



Carlyle's Ethics 279 

that the merchant has become a gambler, and the 
tradesman a common cheat; that the " British 
workman " is a phrase which may be used with the 
certainty of provoking a sneer ; and, briefly, that 
there is not a class in the country which is not on 
the highroad to decay, or an institution beyond 
the reach of corruption. And yet my friend sits 
quietly down and enjoys his dinner as heartily as 
if he were expecting the millennium. What shall 
I say? That he does not believe what he says, or 
that his digestive apparatus is in most enviable 
order? I know not; but certainly Carlyle was 
not capable of this. He took things too terribly 
in earnest. When workmen scamped the altera- 
tions in his house, or the railway puffed its smoke 
into his face, he saw visible symbols of modern 
degeneracy, and thought painfully of the old 
honest, wholesome life in Annandale of steady, 
God-fearing farmers and self-respecting work- 
men. All that swept away by progress and 
" prosperity beyond example"! That was his 
reflection ; perhaps it was very weak, as certainly 
it was very unpleasant, to worry himself about 
what he could not help, and sprang, let us say, all 
from a defective digestion. And yet, though I 
cannot think without pity of the man of genius 
who felt so keenly and thought so gloomily of the 
evils around us, I feel infinitely more respect for 



280 Hours in a Library 

his frame of mind than for that of the man who, 
sharing, verbally at least, this opinion, can let it 
calmly lie in his mind without the least danger to 
his personal comfort. 



The State Trials 

IT sometimes strikes readers of books that 
literature is, on the whole, a snare and a delusion. 
Writers, of course, do not generally share that 
impression; and, on the contrary, have said a 
great many fine things about the charm of con- 
versing with the choice minds of all ages, with the 
innuendo, to use the legal phrase, that they them- 
selves modestly demand some place amongst the 
aforesaid choice minds. But at times we are 
disposed to retort upon our teachers. Are you 
not, we observe, exceedingly given to humbug? 
The youthful student takes the poet's ecstasies 
and agonies in solemn earnest. We who have 
grown a little wiser cannot forget with what com- 
placency the poet has often devised a new agony ; 
how he has set it to a pretty tune; how he has 
treasured up his sorrows and despairs to make his 
literary stock in trade, has taken them to market, 
and squabbled with publishers and writhed un- 
der petty critics, and purred and bridled under 

281 



282 Hours in a Library 

judicious flattery ; and we begin to resent his de- 
mand upon our sympathies. Are not poetry and art 
a terrible waste of energy in a world where so much 
energy is already being dissipated? The great 
musician, according to the well-worn anecdote, 
hears the people crying for bread in the street, 
and the wave of emotion passing through his mind 
comes out in the shape, not of active benevolence, 
but of some new and exquisite jangle of sounds. 
It is all very well. The musician, it is probable 
enough, could have done nothing better. But 
there are times when we feel that we would rather 
have the actual sounds, the downright utterance 
of an agonised human being, than the far-away 
echo of passion set up in the artistic brain. We 
prefer the roar of the tempest to the squeaking 
of the ^Eolian harp. We tire of the skilfully pre- 
pared sentiment, the pretty fancies, the unreal 
imaginations, and long for the harsh, crude, sub- 
stantial fact, the actual utterance of men strug- 
gling in the dire grasp of unmitigated realities. 
We want to see Nature itself, not to look at the 
distorted images presented in the magical mirror 
of a Shakespeare. The purpose of playing is, as 
that excellent authority is constantly made to 
repeat, to show the very age and body of the time 
his form and pressure. But, upon that hypo- 
thesis, why should we not see the age itself instead 



The State Trials 283 

of being bothered by impossible kings and queens 
and ghosts mixed up in supernatural catastrophes ? 
If this theory of art be sound, is not the most 
realistic historian the only artist? Nay, since 
every historian is more or less a sophisticator, 
should we not go back to the materials from 
which histories are made? 

I feel some touch of sympathy for those simple- 
minded readers who avowedly prefer the police 
reports to any other kind of literature. There, at 
least, they come into contact with solid facts; 
shocking, it may be, to well-regulated minds, but 
possessing all the charm of their brutal reality; 
not worked into the carefully doctored theories 
and rose-coloured pictures set forth by the judic- 
ious author, whose real aim is to pose as an amiable 
and interesting being. It is true that there are 
certain objections to such studies. They gener- 
ally imply a wrong state of mind in the student. 
He too often reads, it is to be feared, with that 
pleasure in loathsome details which seems to 
spring from a survival of the old cruel instincts 
capable of finding pleasure in the sight of torture 
and bloodshed. Certainly one would not, even 
in a passing phrase, suggest that the indulgence 
of such a temper can be anything but loathsome. 
But it is not necessary to assume this evil propen- 
sity in all cases ; or what must be our judgment 



284 Hours in a Library 

of the many excellent members of society who 
studied day by day the reports of the Tichborne 
case, for example, and felt that there was a 
real blank in their lives when the newspapers 
had to fill their columns with nothing better than 
discussions of international relations and social 
reforms? You might perhaps laugh at such a 
man if he asserted that he was conscientiously 
studying human nature. But you might give 
him credit if he replied that he was reading a 
novel which atoned for any defects of construction 
by the incomparable interest of reality. And the 
reply would be more plausible in defence of an- 
other kind of reading. When literature palls 
upon me, I sometimes turn for relief to the great 
collection of State Trials. They are nothing, you 
may say, but the police reports of the past. But 
it makes all the difference that they are of the 
past. I may be ashamed of myself when I read 
some hideous revelation of modern crime, not to 
stimulate my ardour as a patriot and a reformer, 
but to add a zest to my comfortable chair in the 
club window or at the bar of my favourite public- 
house. But I can read without such a pang of 
remorse about Charles I. and the regicides. I 
can do nothing for them. I cannot turn the tide 
of battle at Naseby, or rush into the streets with 
the enthusiastic Venner. They make no appeal 



The State Trials 285 

to me for help, and I have not to harden my heart 
by resisting, but only feel a sympathy which can- 
not be wasted because it could not be turned to 
account. I may indulge in it, for it strengthens 
the bond between me and my ancestors. My sense 
of relationship is stimulated and strengthened 
as I gaze at the forms sinking slowly beyond my 
grasp down into the abyss of the past, and try 
in imagination to raise them once more to the 
surface. I do all that I can for them in simply 
acknowledging that they form a part of the great 
process in which I am for the instant on the knife- 
edge of actual existence, and unreal only in the 
sense in which the last motion of my pen is unreal 
now. " I was once," says one of the earliest 
performers, " a looker-on of the pageant as others 
be here now, but now, woe is me! I am a player 
in that doleful tragedy." This "now" is become 
our "once," and we may leave it to the harm- 
less enthusiasts who play at metaphysics to ex- 
plain or to darken the meaning of the familiar 
phrase. Whatever time may be, a point, I be- 
lieve, not quite settled, there is always a singu- 
lar fascination in any study which makes us 
vividly conscious of its ceaseless lapse, and gives 
us the sense of rolling back the ever-closing scroll. 
Historians, especially of the graphic variety, try 
to do that service for us; but we can only get 



286 Hours in a Library 

the full enjoyment by studying at first hand 
direct contemporary reports of actual words and 
deeds. 

The charm of the State Trials is in the singular 
fulness and apparent authenticity of many of the 
reports of vivd voce examinations. There are not 
more links between us for example, and Sir Nicho- 
las Throgmorton whose words I have just quoted 
than between us and the last witness at a con- 
temporary trial. The very words are given fresh 
from the speaker's mouth. The volumes, of 
course, contain vast masses of the dismal materials 
which can be quarried only by the patience of a 
Dryasdust. If we open them at random, we may 
come upon reading which is anything but ex- 
hilarating. There are pages upon pages of con- 
stitutional eloquence in the Sacheverell case about 
the blessed revolution, and the social compact, 
and the theory of passive resistance, which are 
as hopelessly unreadable as the last parliamentary 
debate in the Times. If we chance upon the 
great case of Shipmoney, and the arguments for 
and against the immortal Hampden, we have to 
dig through strata of legal antiquarianism solid 
enough to daunt the most intrepid explorer. And, 
as trials expand in later times, and the efforts of 
the British barrister to establish certain import- 
ant rules of evidence become fully reported, we, 



The State Trials 287 

as innocent laymen, feel bound to withdraw from 
the sacred place. Indeed, one is forced to ask 
in passing whether any English lawyer, with one 
exception, ever made a speech in court which it 
was possible for any one not a lawyer to read in 
cold blood. Speeches, of course, have been made 
beyond number of admirable efficacy for the per- 
suasion of judges and juries; but so far as the 
State Trials inform us, one can only suppose that 
lawyers regarded eloquence as a deadly sin, per- 
haps because jurymen had a kind of dumb in- 
stinct which led them to associate eloquence with 
humbug. The one exception is Erskine, whose 
speeches are true works of art, and perfect models 
of lucid exposition. The strangely inarticulate 
utterance of his brethren reconciles us in a literary 
sense to the rule outrageous in a moral and 
political point of view which for centuries for- 
bade the assistance of counsel in the most serious 
cases. In the older trials, therefore, we assist at 
a series of tragedies which may shock our sense of 
justice, but which in their rough-and-ready fashion 
go at once to the point and show us all the passions 
of human beings fighting in deadly earnest over 
the issues of life and death. The unities of time 
and place are strictly observed. In the good old 
days the jury, when once empanelled, had to go 
on to the end. There was no dilatory adjourning 



288 Hours in a Library 

from day to day. 1 As wrestlers who have once 
taken hold must struggle till one touches earth, 
the prisoner had to finish his agony there and 
then. The case might go on by candlelight, and 
into the early hours of a second morning, till even 
the spectators, wedged together in the close court, 
with a pestilential atmosphere, loaded, if they 
had only known it, with the germs of gaol fever, 
were well-nigh exhausted ; till the judge confessed 
himself too faint to sum up, and even to recollect 
the evidence ; till the unfortunate prisoner, brow- 
beaten by the judge and the opposite counsel, 
bewildered by the legal subtleties, often sur- 
prised by unexpected evidence, and unable to pro- 
duce contradictory witnesses at the instant, over- 
whelmed with all the labour and impossibility 
of a task to which he was totally unaccustomed, 
could only stammer out a vague assertion of in- 
nocence. Here and there some sturdy prisoner 
a Throgmorton or a Lilburne thus brought to 
bay under every disadvantage, managed to fight 
his way through, and to persuade a jury to let 
him off even at their own peril. As time goes on, 
things get better, and the professions of fair play 
have more reality; but it is also true that the 

1 In the trial of Home Tooke in 1794, it was decided by 
the judges that an adjournment might take place in case of 
"physical necessity," but the only previous case of an ad- 
journment cited was that of Canning (in 1753). 



The State Trials 289 

performance becomes less exciting. In the de- 
generate eighteenth century it came to be settled 
that a minister might be turned out of office 
without losing his head; and it is perhaps only 
from an aesthetic point of view that the old prac- 
tice was better, which provided historians with 
so many moving stories of judicial tyranny. But 
in that point of view we may certainly prefer 
the old system, for the tragedies generally have a 
worthy ending ; and instead of those sudden in- 
terventions of a benevolent author, which are 
meant to save our feelings, at the end of a modern 
novel, we are generally thrilled by a scene on the 
scaffold, in which it is rare indeed for the actors 
to play their parts unworthily. 

The most interesting period of the State Trials 
is perhaps the last half of the seventeenth cent- 
ury, when the art of reporting seems to have 
been sufficiently developed to give a minute 
verbal record vivid as a photograph of the act- 
ual scene, and before the interest was diluted by 
floods of legal rhetoric. Pepys himself does not 
restore the past more vividly than do some of 
those anonymous reporters. The records indeed 
of the trials give the fullest picture of a social 
period which is too often treated from some 
limited point of view. The great political move- 
ments of the day leave their mark upon the trials ; 

VOL IV. 19. 



290 Hours in a Library 

the last struggle of parties was fought out by 
judges and juries with whatever partiality in open 
court. We may start, if we please, with the 
"memorable scene" in which Charles I. won his 
title to martyrdom; then comes the gloomy pro- 
cession of regicides; and presently we have the 
martyrs to the Popish Plot, and they are followed 
by the Whig martyr, Russell, and by the miserable 
victims who got the worst of Sedgemoor fight. 
The Church of England has its share of interest 
in the exciting case of the Seven Bishops; and 
Nonconformists are represented by Baxter's suf- 
ferings under Jeffreys, and by luckless frequenters 
of prohibited conventicles ; and beneath the more 
stirring events described in different histories, we 
have strange glimpses of the domestic histories 
which were being transacted at the time; there 
are murderers and forgers and housebreakers, 
who cared little for Whig or Tory. Superstition 
is represented by an occasional case of witchcraft. 
And we have some curious illustrations of the 
manners and customs of the fast young men of 
the period, the dissolute noblemen, the "sons of 
Belial flown with insolence and wine," who dis- 
turbed Milton's meditations, and got upon the 
stage to see Nell Gwynn and Mrs. Bracegirdle in 
the comedies of Dryden and Etherege. It is un- 
fair to take the reports of a police court as fully 



The State Trials 291 

representing the characteristics of the time; but 
there never was a time which left a fuller im- 
pression of its idiosyncrasies in such an unsavoury 
Record Office. Let us pick up a case or two 
pretty much at random. 

It is pleasantest, perhaps, to avoid the more 
familiar and pompous scenes. It is rather in the 
by-play in the little vignettes of real life which 
turn up amidst more serious events that we may 
find the characteristic charm of the narrative. 
The trials, for example, of the regicides have an 
interest. They died for the most part (Hugh 
Peters seems to have been an exception) as 
became the survivors of the terrible Ironsides, 
glorying, till drums beat under the scaffold to 
silence them, in their fidelity to the "good old 
cause," and showing a stern front to the jubilant 
royalists. But one must admit that they show 
something, too, of the peculiarities which made 
the race tiresome to their contemporaries as they 
probably would be to us. They cannot submit 
without a wrangle which they know to be futile 
over some legal point, where simple submission 
to the inevitable would have been more dignified ; 
and their dying prayers and orations are echoes 
of the long-winded sermons of the Blathergowls. 
They showed fully as much courage, but not so 
much taste, as the " royal actor" on the same 



292 Hours in a Library 

scene. But amidst the trials there occurs here 
and there a fragment of picturesque evidence. A 
waterman tells us how he was walking about 
Whitehall on the morning of the "fatal blow." 
" Down came a file of musketeers." They hurried 
the hangman into his boat, and said, " Waterman, 
away with him; begone quickly." 

So [says the waterman] out I launched, and having 
got a little way in the water, says I, "Who the devil 
have I got in my boat?" Says my fellow, says he, 
"Why?" I directed my speech to him, saying, "Are 
you the hangman that cut off the King's head?" 
"No, as I am a sinner to God," saith he, "not I." 
He shook, every joint of him. I knew not what to 
do. I rowed away a little farther, and fell to a new 
examination of him. "Tell me true," says I, "are 
you the hangman that hath cut off the King's head? 
I cannot carry you," said I. "No," saith he; 

and explains that his instruments had been used, 
but not himself; and though the waterman 
threatened to sink his boat, the supposed hang- 
man stuck to his story, and was presumably 
landed in safety. The evidence seems to be 
rather ambiguous as concerns the prisoner, who 
was accused of being the actual executioner ; but 
the vivacity with which Mr. Abraham Smith tells 
his story is admirable. Doubtless it had been 
his favourite anecdote to his fellows and his fares 
during the intervening years, and he felt, rightly 



The State Trials 293 

as it has turned out, that this accidental contact 
with one of the great events of history would be 
his sole title to a kind of obscure immortality. 

Another hero of that time, unfortunately a 
principal instead of a mere spectator in the re- 
corded tragedy, is so full of exuberant vitality 
that we can scarcely reconcile ourselves to the 
belief that the poor man was hanged two cent- 
uries ago. The gallant Colonel Turner had 
served in the royal army, and, if we may believe 
his dying words, was specially valued by his 
Majesty. The colonel, however, got into diffi- 
culties: he made acquaintance with a rich old 
merchant named Tryon, and tried to get a will 
forged in his favour by one of Tryon's clerks; 
failing in this, he decided upon speedier measures. 
He tied down poor old Tryon in his bed one night, 
and then carried off jewels to the value of 3000^. 
An energetic alderman suspected the colonel, 
clutched him a day or two afterwards, and forced 
him to disgorge. When put upon his defence, 
he could only tell one of those familiar fictions 
common to pickpockets; how he had accident- 
ally collared the thief, who had transferred the 
stolen goods to him, and how he was thus en- 
titled to gratitude instead of puishment. It is 
not surprising that the jury declined to believe 
him ; but we are almost surprised that any judge 



294 Hours in a Library 

had the courage to sentence him. For Colonel 
Turner is a splendid scoundrel. There is some- 
thing truly heroic in his magnificent self-com- 
placency ; the fine placid glow of conscious virtue 
diffused over his speeches. He is a link between 
Dugald Dalgetty, Captain Bobadil, and the au- 
dacious promoter of some modern financiering 
scheme. Had he lived in days when old mer- 
chants invested their savings in shares instead of 
diamonds, he would have been an invaluable 
director of a bubble company. There is a dash 
of the Pecksniff about him; but he has far too 
much pith and courage to be dashed like that 
miserable creature by a single exposure. Old 
Chuzzlewit would never have broken loose from 
his bonds. It is delightful to see, in days when 
most criminals prostrated themselves in abject 
humiliation, how this splendid colonel takes the 
Lord Chief Justice into his confidence, verbally 
buttonholes "my dear lord" with a pleasant 
assumption that, though for form's sake some 
inquiry might be necessary, every reasonable man 
must see the humour of an accusation directed 
against so innocent a patriot. The whole thing 
is manifestly absurd. And then the colonel 
gracefully slides in little compliments to his own 
domestic virtues. Part of his story had to be 
that he had sent his wife (who was accused as an 



The State Trials 295 

accomplice) on an embassy to recover the stolen 
goods. 

"I sent my poor wife away," he says, "and saving 
your lordship's presence, she did all bedirt herself 
a thing she did not use to do, poor soul. She found 
this Nagshead, she sat down, being somewhat fat and 
weary, poor heart ! I have had twenty-seven children 
by her, fifteen sons and twelve daughters." "Seven 
or eight times this fellow did round her." "Let me 
give that relation," interrupts the wife. "You can- 
not," replies the colonel, "it is as well. Prythee, sit 
down, dear Moll; sit thee down, good child, all will 
be well." 

And so the colonel proceeds with amazing volu- 
bility, and we sympathise with this admirable 
father of twenty-seven children under so cruel a 
hardship. But not to follow the trial the 
colonel culminated under the most trying cir- 
cumstances. His dying speech is superb. He 
is honourably confessing his sins, but his natural 
instinct asserts itself. He cannot but admit, in 
common honesty, that he is a model character, 
and speaks under his gallows as if he were the 
good apprentice just arrived at the mayoralty. 
He admits, indeed, that he occasionally gave way 
to swearing, though he " hated and loathed" the 
sin when he observed it ; but he was it was the 
source of all his troubles of a "hasty nature. " 
But he was brought up in an honest family in the 



296 Hours in a Library 

good old times, and laments the bad times that 
have since come in. He has been a devoted loyal- 
ist ; he has lived civilly and honestly at the upper 
end of Cheapside as became a freeman of the 
Company of Drapers ; he was never known to be 
" disguised in drink;'* a small cup of cider in the 
morning, and two little glasses of sack and one 
of claret at dinner, were enough for him; he was 
a constant church-goer, and of such delicate pro- 
priety of behaviour that he never " saw a man in 
church with his hat on but it troubled him very 
much" (a phrase which reminds us of Johnson's 
famous friend) ; " there must be," he is sure, when 
he thinks of all his virtues, " a thousand sorrowful 
souls and weeping eyes" for him this day. The 
attendant clergy are a little scandalised at this 
peculiar kind of penitence ; and he is good enough 
to declare that he "disclaims any desert of his 
own" a sentiment which we feel to be a graceful 
concession, but not to be too strictly interpreted. 
The hangman is obliged to put the rope round his 
neck. "Dost thou mean to choke me, fellow?" 
exclaims the indignant colonel. "What a simple 
fellow is this! how long have you been execu- 
tioner that you know not how to put the knot?" 
He then utters some pious ejaculations, and as 
he is assuming the fatal cap, sees a lady at a win- 
dow; he kisses his hand to her, and says, "Your 



The State Trials 297 

servant, Mistress;" and so pulling down the cap, 
the brave colonel vanishes, as the reporter tells 
us, with a very undaunted carriage to his last 
breath. 

Sir Thomas More with his flashes of playful- 
ness, and Charles with his solemn "Remember," 
could scarcely play their parts more gallantly than 
Colonel Turner, and they had the advantage of 
a belief in the goodness of their cause. Perhaps 
it is illogical to sympathise all the more with poor 
Colonel Turner, because we know that his courage 
had not the adventitious aid of a good conscience. 
But surely he was a very prince of burglars ! We 
turn a page and come to a very different question 
of casuistry. Law and morality are at a deadlock. 
Instead of the florid, swaggering cavalier, we have 
a pair of Quakers, Margaret Fell and the famous 
George Fox, arguing with the most irritating 
calmness and logic against the imposition of an 
oath. "Give me the book in my hand," says 
Fox; and they are all gazing in hopes that he is 
about to swear. Then he holds up the Bible and 
exclaims, " This book commands me not to swear." 
To which dramatic argument (the report, it is to 
be observed, comes from Fox's side) there is no 
possible reply but to " pluck the book forth of his 
hand again," and send him back to prison. The 
Quakers vanish in their invincible passiveness; 



298 Hours in a Library 

and in the next page we find ourselves at Bury 
St. Edmunds. The venerated Sir Matthew Hale 
is on the bench, and the learned and eloquent 
Sir Thomas Browne appears in the witness-box. 
They listen to a wretched story of two poor old 
women accused of bewitching children. The 
children swear that they have been tormented by 
imps, in the shape of flies, which flew into their 
mouths with crooked pins the said imps being 
presumably the diabolical emissaries of the witches. 
Then Sir Thomas Browne gravely delivers his 
opinion; he quotes a case of witchcraft in Den- 
mark, and decides, after due talk about "super- 
abundant humours" and judicious balancing of 
conflicting considerations, that the fits into which 
the children fell were strictly natural, but " height- 
ened to a great excess by the subtlety of the devil 
co-operating with the malice of the witches." 
An "ingenious person," however, suggests an 
experiment. The child who had sworn that the 
touch of the witch threw her into fits was blind- 
folded and touched by another person passed off 
as the witch. The young sinner fell into the 
same fits, and the "ingenious person" pronounced 
the whole affair to be an imposture. However, 
a more ingenious person gets up and proves by 
dexterous logic, curiously like that of a detected 
"medium" of to-day, that, on the contrary, it 



The State Trials 299 

confirms the evidence. 1 Whereupon the witches 
were found guilty, the judge and all the court 
being satisfied fully with the verdict, and were 
hanged accordingly, though absolutely refusing to 
confess. 

Our ancestors' justice strikes us as rather 
heavy-handed and dull-eyed on these occasions. 
In another class of trials we see the opposite phase 
the manifestation of that curious tenderness 
which has shown itself in so many forms since 
the days when highway robbery appeared to be 
a graceful accomplishment if practised by a wild 
Prince and Poins. Things were made delight- 
fully easy in the race which flourished after the 
Restoration. Every Peer, by the amazing privi- 
lege of the " benefit of clergy," had a right to 
commit one manslaughter. Like a schoolboy, he 
was allowed to plead "first fault;" and a good 
many Peers took advantage of the system 

Lord Morley, for example, has a quarrel " about 
half-a-crown." A Mr. Hastings, against whom 
he has some previous grudge, contemptuously 
throws down four half-crowns. Therefore Lord 
Morley and an attendant bully insult Hastings, 
assault him repeatedly, and at last fall upon him 

1 This case was in 1665. It is curious that in the case of 
Hathaway, in 1702, a precisely similar experiment convinced 
everybody that the accuser was an impostor ; and got him a 
whipping and a place in the pillory. 



300 Hours in a Library 

" just under the arch in Lincoln's Inn Fields," 
and there Lord Morley stabs him to death, " with 
a desperate imprecation." The Attorney-General 
argues that this shows malice, and urges that Mr. 
Hastings, too, was a man of good family. But 
the Peers only find their fellow guilty of man- 
slaughter. He claims his privilege, and is dis- 
missed with a benevolent admonition not to do. 
it again. Elsewhere, we have Lord Cornwallis 
and a friend coming out of Whitehall in the early 
morning, drunk and using the foulest language. 
After trying in vain to quarrel with a sentinel, 
they swear that they will kill somebody before 
going home. An unlucky youth comes home to his 
lodgings close by, and after some abuse from the 
Peer and his friend, the lad is somehow tumbled 
downstairs and killed on the spot. As it seems 
not to be clear whether Lord Cornwallis gave the 
fatal kick, he is honourably acquitted. Then we 
have a free fight at a tavern, where Lord Pem- 
broke is drinking with a lot of friends. One of 
them says that he is as good a gentleman as Lord 
Pembroke. The witnesses were all too drunk to 
remember how and why anything happened ; but 
after a time one of them is kicked out of the tavern ; 
another, a Mr. Cony, is knocked down and tram- 
pled, and swears that he has received what turned 
out some days later to be mortal injuries from the 



The State Trials 301 

boots of Lord Pembroke. The case is indeed 
doubtful; for the doctor who was called refused 
to make a post-mortem examination on the 
ground that it might lead him into "a trouble- 
some matter;" and another was disposed to at- 
tribute the death to poor Mr. Cony's inordinate 
love of " cold small beer." He drank three whole 
tankards the night before his death; and when 
actually dying, declined "white wine posset 
drink," suggested by the doctor, and " swore a 
great oath he would have small beer." And so 
he died, whether by boots or beer; and the Lord 
High Steward in due time had to inform Lord 
Pembroke that his lordship was guilty of man- 
slaughter, but, being entitled to his clergy, was to 
be discharged on paying his fees. The most sin- 
ister figure amongst these wild gallants is the 
Lord Mohun, who killed, and was killed by, the 
Duke of Hamilton, as all the readers of the Jour- 
nals of Swift or of "Colonel Esmond" remember. 
He appears twice in the collection. On December 
9, 1690, Mohun and his friend Colonel Hill came 
swaggering into the play-house, and got from the 
pit upon the stage. An attendant asks them to 
pay for their places; whereupon Lord Mohun 
nobly refuses, saying, "If you bring any of your 
masters I will slit their noses." The pair have a 
coach-and-six waiting in the street to carry off 



302 Hours in a Library 

Mrs. Bracegirdle, to whom Hill has been making 
love. As she is going home to supper, they try 
to force her into it with the help of half-a-dozen 
soldiers. The bystanders prevent this; but the 
pair insist upon seeing Mrs. Bracegirdle to her 
house, and mount guard outside with their swords 
drawn. Mrs. Bracegirdle and her friends stand 
listening at the door, and hear them vowing venge- 
ance against Mountford, of whom Hill was jealous. 
Presently the watch appears the constable and 
the beadle, and a man in front with a lantern. 
The constable asks why are the swords drawn. 
Mrs. Bracegirdle through the door hears Mohun 
reply, " I am a Peer of England, touch me if you 
dare." " God bless your honour," replies the con- 
stable, " I know not what you are, but I hope you 
are doing no harm." " No," said he. " You may 
knock me down, if you please," adds Colonel Hill. 
"'Nay,' said I [the lantern-bearer], 'we never 
use to knock gentlemen down unless there be 
occasion.'" And the judicious watch retire to a 
tavern in the next street, in order, as they say, 
"to examine what they [Mohun and Hill] were, 
and what they were doing." There was, as the 
constable explains, "a drawer there, who had 
formerly lived over against him," and might throw 
some light upon the proceedings of these polite 
gentlemen. But, alas! "in the meantime the 



The State Trials 303 

murder was done." For as another witness tells 
us, Mr. Mountford came up the street and was 
speaking coolly to Mohun, when Hill came up be- 
hind and gave him a box on the ear. " Saith Mr. 
Mountford, 'What 's that for?' And with that he 
[Hill] whipped out his sword and made a pass at 
him, and I turned about and cried ' Murder ! ' ' 
Mountford was instantly killed; but witnesses 
peeping through doors and looking out of win- 
dows, gave conflicting accounts of the scuffle in 
the dim street, and Lord Mohun, after much argu- 
ment as to the law, was acquitted. Five years 
later, he appears in the case reported by Esmond, 
with little more than a change in the names. An 
insensate tavern-brawl is followed by an adjourn- 
ment to Leicester Fields ; six noblemen and gen- 
tlemen in chairs; Mr. Coote, the chief actor in 
the quarrel, urging his chairman by threatening 
to goad him with his sword. The gentlemen 
get over the railings and vanish into the "dark 
wet" night, whilst the chairmen philosophically 
light their pipes. The pipes are scarcely alight, 
when there is a cry for help. Somehow a chair 
is hoisted over the rails, and poor Mr. Coote is 
found prostrate in a pool of blood. The chair- 
men strongly object to spoiling their chairs by 
putting a "bloody man" into them. They are 
pacified by a promise of ioo/. security; but the 



304 Hours in a Library 

chair is somehow broken, and the watch will not 
come to help, because it is out of their ward; 

and I staid half-an-hour [says the chief witness 
pathetically] with my chair broken, and afterwards 
I was laid hold upon, both I and my partner, and kept 
till next night at eleven o'clock; and that is all the 
satisfaction I have had for my chair and everything. 

This damage to the chair was clearly the chief 
point of interest for poor Robert Browne, the 
chairman, and it may be feared that his account 
is still unsettled. Mohun escaped upon this oc- 
casion, and, indeed, Esmond is unjust in giving 
to him a principal part in the tragedy. 

Such were the sights to be seen occasionally in 
London by the watchman's lantern or the candle 
glimmering across the narrow alley, or some oc- 
casional lamp swinging across the street; for it 
was by such a lamp that a girl looked into the 
hackney coach and saw the face of a man who 
had sent for Dr. Clench ostensibly to visit a pa- 
tient, but really in order to strangle the poor 
doctor on the way. These are strange illumina- 
tions on the margin of the pompous page of official 
history; and the incidental details give form and 
colour to the incidents in Pepys's Journals or 
Grammont's Memoirs. We have kept at a dis- 
tance from the more dignified records of the 
famous constitutional struggles which fill the 



The State Trials 305 

greatest number of pages. Yet those pages are 
not barren for the lover of the picturesque. And 
here I must put in a word for one much reviled 
character. If ever I were to try my hand at the 
historical amusement of whitewashing, I should 
be tempted to take for my hero the infamous 
Jeffreys. He was, I dare say, as bad as he is 
painted; so perhaps were Nero and Richard III., 
and other much abused persons; but no mis- 
creant of them all could be more amusing. Wher- 
ever the name of Jeffreys appears we may be 
certain of good sport. With all his inexpressible 
brutality, his buffoonery, his baseness, we can see 
that he was a man of remarkable talent. We 
think of him generally as he appeared when bul- 
lying Baxter; when "he snorted and squeaked, 
blew his nose and clenched his hands, and lifted 
up his eyes, mimicking their [the Nonconform- 
ists'] manner, and running on furiously, as he 
said they used to pray ; ' ' and we may regard him 
as his victims must have regarded him, as a kind 
of demoniacal baboon placed on the bench in 
robes and wig, in hideous caricature of justice. 
But the vigour and skill of the man when he has 
to worry the truth out of a stubborn witness is 
also amazing. When a knavish witness pro- 
duced a forged deed in support of the claim of a 
certain Lady Ity to a great part of Shadwell, 

VOL. IV. 20. 



306 Hours in a Library 

Jeffreys is in his element. He is perhaps a little 
too exuberant. 

Ask him what questions you will [he breaks out], 
but if he should swear as long as Sir John Falstaff 
fought [the Chief Justice can quote Shakespeare], I 
would never believe a word he says. 

His lordship may be too violent, but he is sub- 
stantially doing justice; and shows himself a 
dead hand at unmasking a cheat. The most 
striking proof of Jeffreys's power is in the dramatic 
trial of Lady Lisle. The poor lady was accused 
of harbouring one Hicks, a Dissenting preacher, 
after Sedgemoor. It was clear that a certain 
James Dunne had guided Hicks to Lady Lisle's 
house. The difficulty was to prove that Lady 
Lisle knew Hicks to be a traitor. Dunne had 
talked to her in presence of another witness, and 
it was suggested that he had given her the fatal 
information. But Dunne tried hard in telling 
his story to sink this vital fact. The effort of Jef- 
freys to twist it out of poor Dunne, and Dunne's 
futile and prolonged wriggling to escape the con- 
fession, are reported in full, and form one of the 
most striking passages in the " State Trials." 
Jeffreys shouts at him; dilates in most edifying 
terms upon the bottomless lake of fire and brim- 
stone which awaits all perjurers; snatches at 
any slip; pins the witness down; fastens incon- 



The State Trials 307 

sistencies upon him through page after page; but 
poor Dunne desperately clutches the secret in 
spite of the tremendous strain. He almost seems 
to have escaped, when the other witness estab- 
lishes the fact that some conversation took place. 
Armed with this new thumbscrew, Jeffreys leaps 
upon poor Dunne again. The storm of objur- 
gations, appeals, confutations, bursts forth with 
increased force ; poor Dunne slips into a fatal ad- 
mission ; he has admitted some talk, but cannot 
explain what it was. He tries dogged silence. 
The torture of Jeffreys 's tongue urges him to fresh 
blundering. A candle is held up to his nose that 
the court "may see his brazen face." At last he 
exclaims, the candle "still nearer to his nose," 
and feeling himself the very focus of all attention, 
" I am quite cluttered out of my senses ; I do not 
know what I say." The wretched creature is al- 
lowed to reflect for a time, and then at last de- 
clares that he will tell the truth. He tells enough 
in fact for the purpose, though he feebly tries to 
keep back the most damning words. Enough has 
been wrenched out of him to send poor Lady 
Lisle to the scaffold. The figure of the poor old 
lady falling asleep, as it is said, while Jeffreys's 
thunder and lightning was raging in this terrific 
fashion round the feeble defence of Dunne's reti- 
cence, is so pathetic, and her fate so piteous and 



38 Hours in a Library 

disgraceful, that we have little sense for anything 
but Jeffreys's brutality. But if the power of worm- 
ing the truth out of a grudging witness were the 
sole test of a judge's excellence, we must admit 
the amazing efficiency of Jeffreys's method. He 
is the ideal cross-examiner, and we may overlook 
the cruelty to victims who have so long ceased 
to suffer. 

In the post-revolutionary period the world be- 
comes more merciful and duller. Lawyers speak 
at greater length; and even the victims of '45, 
the strange Lord Lovat himself, give little sport 
at the respectable bar of the House of Lords. 
But the domestic trials become perhaps more 
interesting, if only by way of commentary 
upon Tom Jones or Roderick Random. Novelists 
indeed have occasionally sought to turn these 
records to account. The great Annesley case has 
been used by Mr. Charles Reade, and Scott took 
some hints from it in one of the very best of his 
performances, the inimitable Guy Mannering. 
Scott's adaptation should, indeed, be rather a 
warning than a precedent; for the surpassing 
merit of his great novel consists in the display of 
character, in Meg Merrilies and Dandie Dinmont 
and Counsellor Pleydell, and certainly not in the 
rather childish plot with the long-lost heir busi- 
ness. He falls into the common error of supposing 



The State Trials 309 

that the actual occurrence of events must be a 
sufficient guarantee for employing them in fiction. 
The Annesley case is almost the only one in the 
collection in which facts descend to the level of 
romance. The claimant's case was clearly es- 
tablished up to a certain point. There was no 
doubt that he had passed for Lord Annesley's son 
in his childhood ; that he had for that reason been 
spirited away by his uncle, and sold as a slave 
in America ; and, further, that, when he returned 
to make his claim and killed a man by accident 
(an incident used by Scott), his uncle did his 
best to have him convicted of murder. The 
more difficult point was to prove that he was the 
legitimate son of the deceased lord by his wife, 
who was also dead. A servant of the supposed 
mother gave evidence which, if true, conclusively 
disproved this assumption; and though young 
Annesley won his first trial, he afterwards failed 
to convict this witness of perjury. The case may 
therefore be still doubtful, though the weight of 
evidence seems decidedly against the claimant. 
The case the "longest ever known" at that time 
lasted fifteen days, and gives some queer illus- 
trations of the domestic life of a disreputable 
Irish nobleman of the period. Perhaps, how- 
ever, the most curious piece of evidence is given 
by the attorney who was employed to prosecute 



3*0 Hours in a Library 

the claimant for a murder of which he was clearly 
innocent. 

"What was the intention of the prosecution?" he 
is asked. "To put this man out of the way that he 
[Lord Anglesea, the uncle] might enjoy the estate 
easy and quiet." "You understood, then, that Lord 
Anglesea would give io,ooo/. to get the plaintiff 
hanged!" "I did." " Did you not apprehend that 
to be a most wicked crime?" " I did." "If so, 
how could you engage in that project, without mak- 
ing any objection to it?" "I may as well ask you," 
is the reply, " how you came to be engaged in this 



He is afterwards asked whether any honest man 
would do such an action. "Yes, I believe they 
would, or else I would not have carried it on." 
This is one of the prettiest instances on record of 
that ingenious adaptation of the conscience which 
allows a man to think himself thoroughly honest 
for committing a most wicked crime in his pro- 
fessional capacity. The novelist who wishes 
rather to display character than to amuse us with 
intricacies of plot will find more matter in less 
ambitious narratives. A most pathetic romance, 
which may remind us of more famous fictions, 
underlies the great murder case in which Cowper, 
the poet's grandfather, was defendant. Sarah 
Stout, the daughter of a Quaker at Hertford, fell 
desperately in love with Cowper, who was a bar- 



The State Trials 31 1 

rister, and sometimes lodged at her father's house 
when on circuit. She wrote passionate letters 
to him of the "Eloisa to Abelard" kind, which 
Cowper was ultimately forced to produce in evi- 
dence. He therefore had a final interview with 
her, explained to her the folly of her passion, there 
being already a Mrs. Cowper, and left her late in 
the evening to go to his lodgings elsewhere. Poor 
Sarah Stout rushed out in despair and threw her- 
self into the Priory river. There she was found 
dead next morning, when the miller came to pull 
up his sluices. All the gossips of Hertford came 
immediately to look at the body and make moral 
or judicial reflections upon the facts. Wiseacres 
suggested that Cowper was the last man seen in 
her company, and it came out that two or three 
other men attending the assizes had gossiped about 
her on the previous evening, and one of them had, 
strange to relate, left a cord close by his trunk. 
These facts, transfigured by the Hertford imagina- 
tion, became the nucleus of a theory, set forth in 
delicious legal verbosity, that the said Cowper, 
John Masson, and others 

a certain rope of no value about the neck of the said 
Sarah, then and there feloniously, voluntarily, and of 
malice aforethought did put, place, fix, and bind; and 
the neck and throat of the said Sarah, then and 
there with the hands of you, the said Cowper, Masson, 



312 Hours in a Library 

Stephens, and Rogers, feloniously, voluntarily, and 
of your malice aforethought, did hold, squeeze, and 
gripe. 

By the said squeezing and griping, to abbreviate 
a little, Sarah Stout was choked and strangled; 
and being choked and strangled instantly died, 
and was then secretly and maliciously put and 
cast into the river. The evidence, it is plain, re- 
quired a little straining, but then Cowper be- 
longed to the great Whig family of the town, and 
Sarah Stout was a Quaker. Tories thought it 
would be well to get a Cowper hanged, and Quakers 
wished to escape the imputation that one of their 
sect had committed suicide. The trial lasted so 
long that the poor judge became faint and con- 
fessed that he could not sum up properly. The 
whole strength of the case, however, such as it 
was, depended upon an ingenious theory set up 
by the prosecution, to the effect that the bodies 
of the drowned always sink, whereas Miss Stout 
was found floating, and must therefore have been 
dead before she was put in the river. The chief 
witness was a sailor, who swore that this doctrine 
as to sinking and swimming was universal in the 
navy. He had seen the shipwreck of the Corona- 
tion in 1691. 

"We saw the ship sink down," he says, "and they 
swam up and down like a shoal of fish one over an- 



The State Trials 313 

other, and I see them hover one upon another, and 
see them drop away by scores at a time;" some nine 
escaped, "but there were no more saved out of the 
ship's complement, which was between 500 and 600, 
and the rest I saw sinking downright, twenty at a 
time." 

He has a clinching argument, though a less graphic 
instance, to prove that men already dead do not 
sink. 

Otherwise, why should Government be at that 
vast charge to allow threescore or fourscore weight of 
iron to sink every man, but only that their swimming 
about should not be a discouragement to others? 

Cowper's scientific witnesses, some of the medical 
bigwigs of the day, had very little trouble in con- 
futing this evidence; but the letters which he at 
last produced, and the evidence that poor Miss 
Stout had been talking of suicide, should have 
made the whole story clear even to the bemuddled 
judges. The novelist would throw into the back- 
ground this crowd of gossiping and malicious 
quidnuncs of Hertford; but we must be content 
to catch glimpses of her previous history from 
these absurdly irrelevant twaddlings, as in actual 
life we catch sight of tragedies below the surface 
of social small-talk. Sarah Stout was clearly 
a Maggie Tulliver, a potential heroine, unable to 
be happy amidst the broad-brimmed, drab-coated 



3H Hours in a Library 

respectabilities of quiet little Hertford. Her re- 
bellion was rasher than Maggie's, but perhaps 
in a more characteristic fashion. The case sug- 
gests the wish that Mr. Stephen Guest might 
have been hanged on some such suspicion as was 
nearly fatal to Cowper. 

Half a century later our ancestors were in a 
state of intense excitement about another tragedy 
of a darker kind. Mary Blandy, the only daughter 
of a gentleman at Henley, made acquaintance with 
a Captain Cranstoun, who was recruiting in the 
town. The father objected to a marriage from 
a suspicion, apparently well founded, that Cran- 
stoun was already married in Scotland. There- 
upon Mary Blandy administered to her father 
certain powders sent to her by Cranstoun. Ac- 
cording to her own account, she intended them 
as a kind of charm to act upon her father's affec- 
tions. As they were, in fact, composed of arsenic, 
they soon put an end to her father altogether, and 
it is too clear that she really knew what she was 
doing. It was sworn that she used brutal and 
unfeeling language about the poor old man's suf- 
ferings, for the poison was given at intervals dur- 
ing some months. But the pathetic touch which 
moved the sympathies of contemporaries was the 
behaviour of the father. In the last day or two 
of his life, he was told that his daughter had been 



The State Trials 3*5 

the cause of his fatal illness. His comment was: 
"Poor love-sick girl! What will not a woman 
do for the man she loves!" When she came to 
his room, his only thought was apparently to 
comfort her. His most reproachful phrase was : 
" Thee should have considered better than to have 
attempted anything against thy father." The 
daughter went down on her knees and begged 
him not to curse her. 

"I curse thee!" he exclaimed. "My dear, how 
couldst thou think I should curse thee? No, I bless 
thee, and hope God will bless thee and amend thy 
life." And then he added, "Do, my dear, go out of 
the room and say no more, lest thou shouldst say any- 
thing to thy prejudice; go to thy uncle Stevens, take 
him for thy friend; poor man, I am sorry for him." 

The tragedy behind these homely words is almost 
too pathetic and painful for dramatic purposes; 
and it is not strange that our ancestors were af- 
fected. The sympathy, however, took the queer 
illogical twist which perhaps who can tell? it 
might do at the present day. Miss Blandy be- 
came a sort of quasi saint, the tenderness due to 
the murdered man extended itself to his murderer, 
and her penitence profoundly edified all observers, 
Crowds of people flocked to see her m chapel, and 
she accepted the homage gracefully. She was ex- 
tremely shocked, we are told, by one insinuation 



3*6 Hours in a Library 

tion made by uncharitable persons ; namely, that 
her intimacy with Cranstoun, who was supposed 
to be a freethinker, might justify doubts upon her 
orthodoxy. She declared that he had always 
talked to her "perfectly in the style of a Christ- 
ian," and she had read the works of some of our 
most celebrated divines. In spite of her moving 
conduct, however, the "prejudices she had to 
struggle with had taken too deep root in some 
men's minds" to allow of her getting a pardon. 
And so, five thousand people saw poor Miss Blandy 
mount the ladder in "a black bombazine, short 
sack and petticoat," on an April morning at Ox- 
ford, and many, "particularly several gentlemen 
of the University," were observed to shed tears. 
She left a declaration of innocence which, in spite 
of its solemnity, must have been a lie ; and which 
contained an allusion from which it appears that 
Miss Blandy, like other prisoners, was suspected 
of previous crimes. 

" It is shocking to think," says Horace Walpole, 
in noticing Miss Blandy 's case, "what a shambles 
this country has become. Seventeen were exe- 
cuted this morning, after having murdered the 
turnkey on Friday night, and almost forced open 
Newgate." Another woman was hanged in the 
same year for murdering her uncle at Waltham- 
stow ; and the public could talk about nothing but 



The State Trials 31 7 

the marriage of the Miss Gunnings and the hanging 
of two murderesses. Fielding, then approaching 
the end of his career, was moved by this and 
other atrocities to publish a queer collection of 
instances of the providential punishment of mur- 
derers. Another famous author of the day was 
commonly said to have turned a famous murder 
to account in a different fashion. Foote, it is 
said, was introduced at a club in the words, " This 
is the nephew of the gentleman who was lately 
hung in chains for murdering his brother;" and 
it is added that Foote 's first pamphlet was an 
account of this disagreeable domestic incident. 
A more serious author might have found in it ma- 
terials for a striking narrative. Captain Goodere 
commanded his Majesty's ship Ruby, lying in 
the King's Road off Bristol. He had a quarrel 
with his brother, Sir John Goodere, about a certain 
estate. The family solicitor arranged a meeting 
in his house, where the two brothers appeared to 
be reconciled. But Sir John had scarcely left the 
house, when he was seized in broad daylight by a 
set of sailors who had been drinking in a public- 
house, and carried down forcibly to the Captain's 
barge. The Captain himself followed and rowed, 
off with his brother to the ship. There Sir John 
was confined in a cabin, a suggestion being thrown 
out to the crew that he was a madman, A few 



318 Hours in a Library 

hours later, one Mahony, who played the part of 
11 hairy-faced Dick" to Hamilton Tighe, strangled 
the unfortunate man, with an accomplice called 
White. Attention had been aroused amongst the 
crew by ominous sounds, groans, and scufflings 
heard in the dead of the night, and next morning, 
the lieutenant, after a talk with the surgeon, re- 
solved to seize their captain for murder. A more 
outrageous and reckless proceeding, indeed, could 
scarcely have been imagined even in the days 
when a pressgang was a familiar sight, and the 
captain of a ship at sea was as absolute as an 
Eastern despot. Every detail seemed to be ar- 
ranged with an express view to publicity. One 
piece of evidence, however, was required to bring 
the matter home to the captain; and it is of 
ghastly picturesqueness. The ship's cooper and 
his wife were sleeping in the cabin next to the 
scene of the murder. The cooper had heard the 
poor man exclaim that he was going to be mur- 
dered, and praying that the murder might come 
to light. This, however, seemed to be the wan- 
dering of a madman, and the cooper went to 
sleep. Presently his wife called him up: "I be- 
lieve they are murdering the gentleman." He 
heard broken words and saw a light glimmering 
through a crevice in the partition. Peeping 
through he could distinguish the two ruffians, 



'The State Trials 3*9 

standing with a candle over the dead body and 
taking a watch from a pocket. And then, through 
the gloom, he made out a hand upon the throat 
of the victim. The owner of the hand was in- 
visible ; but it was whiter than that of a common 
sailor. " I have often seen Mahony's and White's 
hands," he added, "and I thought the hand was 
whiter than either of theirs." The trembling 
cooper wanted to leave the cabin, but his wife 
held him back, as, indeed, with three murderers in 
the dark passage outside, it required some cour- 
age to move. So they watched trembling, till he 
heard a sentinel outside, and thought himself 
safe at last: he roused the doctor, peeped at the 
dead body through a " scuttle" which opened intc 
the cabin, and then urged the lieutenant to seize 
the captain. The captain was deservedly hanged, 
bequeathing to us that ghastly Rembrandt-like 
picture of the white hand seen through the crev- 
ice by the trembling cooper on the throat of the 
murdered man. There is no touch which appeals 
so forcibly to the imagination in De Quincey's 
famous narrative of the Mar murders. 

I have made but a random selection from the 
long gallery of grim and grotesque portraiture of 
the less reputable of our ancestry. It must be 
confessed that a first impression tends to recon- 
cile us to the comfortable creed of progress. The 



320 Hours in a Library 

eighteenth century had little defects which have 
been frequently expounded ; but it can certainly 
afford to show courts of justice against its pre- 
decessor. The old judicial murder of the Popish 
Plot variety has become extinct; if the judges 
try to strain the law for libel, for example, the pris- 
oner has every chance of making a good fight ; for 
which the readers of Home Tooke's gallant de- 
fences, and of some of Erskine's speeches, may 
be duly grateful. The ancient brag of fair play 
has become something of a reality. And the 
character of the crimes has changed in a notice- 
able way. There are hideous crimes enough. 
A brutal murder by smugglers near the case of 
Mary Blandy surpasses in its barbarity the worst 
of modern agrarian outrages; though it is not 
clear that in number of horrors the present cent- 
ury is unable to match its predecessor. When 
the wild blood of the Byrons shows itself in the 
last of the old tavern brawls a la Mohun, we feel 
that it is a case (in modern slang) of a " survival." 
The poet's granduncle, the wicked Lord Byron, 
got into a quarrel with Mr. Cha worth about the 
game laws at a dinner of country gentlemen at 
the Star and Garter; whereupon, in an ambiguous 
affair, half scuffle and half duel, Byron sent his 
sword through Chaworth's body, and then politely 
requested Mr. Chaworth to admit that he (Byron) 



The State Trials 321 

was as brave a man as any in the Kingdom. But 
this little ebullition required Byronic impulsive- 
ness, and was not a recognised part of a gentle- 
man's conduct. Lord Ferrers, a short time 
before, was hanged, to the admiration of all men, 
like a common felon, for shooting his own steward ; 
whereas in our day, he would almost certainly 
have escaped on the plea of insanity. Other 
cases mark the advent of the meddlesome, but 
perhaps on the whole useful person, the social 
reformer. Momentary gleams of light, for exam- 
ple, are thrown upon the scandals which ruined 
the trade of the parsons of the Fleet. Poor Miss 
Pleasant Rawlins is arrested for an imaginary 
debt, carried to a sponging-house, and there per- 
suaded (she was only seventeen or thereabouts) 
that she could obtain her liberty by an immediate 
marriage to an adventurer who had scraped ac- 
quaintance with her and taken a liking to her 
fortune. The famous (he was once famous) Beau 
Fielding falls into a trap unworthy of an ex- 
perienced man of the world. He is persuaded 
that a lady of fortune has fallen in love with him 
on seeing him walking in her grounds at a dis- 
tance. A lady, by no means of fortune, comes 
to his lodgings, and passes herself off as this sus- 
ceptible person. Hereupon Fielding sends off 
for a priest of one of the foreign embassies, gets 



VOL. IV. 21. 



322 Hours in a Library 

himself married at his lodgings the same evening, 
and discovers a few days afterwards that he is 
married to the wrong person. It is exactly a 
comedy of the period performed by real flesh-and- 
blood actors. The catastrophe is painful. Mr. 
Fielding ventures to grant himself a divorce, and 
to marry the wretched old Duchess of Cleveland ; 
and in due time the Duchess finds it very con- 
venient to have him tried for bigamy. It did 
not take more than half a century or so of such 
scandals to get an improvement in the marriage 
law, which implies, on the whole, a creditable 
rate of progress. Another set of cases illustrates a 
grievance familiar to novel-readers . In A melia the 
atrocities of bailiffs, sponging-houses, and debtors' 
prisons are drawn with startling realism. We 
may easily convince ourselves that Fielding was 
not speaking without book. The bailiff who has 
arrested Captain Booth gives a " wipe or two with 
his hanger," as he pleasantly expresses it, to an 
unlucky wretch who gives trouble, and delivers 
an admirable discourse upon the ethics of killing 
in such cases. It might have come from the 
mouth of one Tranter, a bailiff who, a few years 
before, had stabbed poor Captain Luttrell, for 
objecting to leave his wife in a delicate state of 
health. Soon after, we find a society of philan- 
thropists, headed by Oglethorpe, of ' 'strong benevo- 



The State Trials 323 

lence of soul " endeavouring to expose the horrors 
of the Fleet and the Marshalsea. A series of 
trials, ordered by the House of Commons, had 
the ending too characteristic of all such move- 
ments. Witnesses swore to atrocities enough to 
make one's blood run cold of men guilty only of 
impecuniosity, half starved, thrust naked into 
loathsome and pestiferous dungeons, beaten and 
chained, and persecuted to death. But then 
arise another set of unimpeachable witnesses, 
who swear with equal vigour that the unfortunate 
debtors were treated with every consideration; 
that they were made as comfortable as their 
mutinous spirit would allow ; that they were dis- 
charged in good health and died months after- 
wards from entirely different causes; that the 
accused were not responsible authorities; that 
they had never interfered except from kindness, 
and that they were the humanest and best of 
mankind. Nothing remained but an acquittal; 
though the investigation did something towards 
letting daylight into abodes of horror which Mr. 
Pickwick found capable of improvement a cen- 
tury later. 

Other cases might show how in various ways 
the strange power called Public Opinion was be- 
ginning to increase its capricious and desultory 
influence. The strange case of Elizabeth Canning 



324 Hours in a Library 

(1753) is one of the most picturesque in the col- 
lection. Miss Canning was a maid-servant, who 
disappeared for a month, and coming home told 
how she had been kidnapped by a gipsy and finally 
escaped. Officious neighbours rushed in, and by 
judicious leading questions managed to help her 
to manufacture evidence against a poor old gipsy 
woman, preternaturally hideous, who sat smoking 
her pipe in blank wonder as the crowd of virtuous 
avengers of innocence rushed into her kitchen. 
Mary Squires, the gipsy, was sentenced to be 
hanged, and doubtless at an earlier period she 
would have been turned off without delay. But 
in that delicious calm in the middle of the last 
century, when wars, and rebellions, and consti- 
tutional agitations were quiet for the moment, 
and people had time to read their modest news- 
papers without spoiling their digestions and their 
nerves, the case aroused the popular interest. 
If the news did not flash through the country as 
rapidly as that of the Lefroy murder, it slowly 
dribbled along the post-roads and set people 
gossiping in ale-houses far away in quiet country 
villages. A whole host of witnesses appeared and 
proved an alibi by giving a diary of a gipsy's tour. 
We follow the party to village dances; we hear 
the venerable piece of scandal about the school- 
master who "got fuddled" with the gipsies; and 



The State Trials 325 

what the gipsies had for dinner on January i, 
1753, and how they paid their bill; we have a 
glimpse of the little flirtation carried on by the 
gipsy's daughter, and the poor trembling little 
letter is produced which she managed to write 
to her lover, and which cost her sevenpence; 
threepence being charged for it from Basingstoke 
to London, and fourpence from London to Dor- 
chester. After more than a week spent in over- 
hauling this and other evidence, proving amongst 
other things that the scene of the girl's supposed 
confinement was really tenanted the whole time by 
a man strangely and most inappropriately named 
Fortune Natus, the jury decided that the accuser 
was guilty of perjury, but boggled characteristic- 
ally as to its being "wilful and corrupt. " How- 
ever, Elizabeth Canning got her deserts and was 
transported to New England, still sticking to the 
truth of her story. Her guilt is plain enough, if 
anybody could care about it, but the little details 
of English country life a century ago are as fresh 
as the doings of the rustics in one of Mr. Hardy's 
novels. 

It all happened a long time ago, but we cannot 
hope, with the old lady who made that consolatory 
remark about other historical narratives, that "it 
ain't none of it true." On the contrary such vivid 
little pictures flash out upon us as we read that 



326 Hours in a Library 

we have a difficulty in supposing that they were 
not taken yesterday. Abundance of morals may 
be drawn by historians and others who deal in 
that kind of ware: it is enough here to have in- 
dicated, as well as we can, what pleasant reading 
may be found in the dusty old volumes which are 
too often left to repose undisturbed on the re- 
pulsive shelves of a lawyer's library. 



Coleridge 1 



IN the period which intervened between the 
Great War and the first Reform Bill, there were 
two centres of intellectual light in England. Jere- 
my Bentham, in his cheerful old age, reached 
his eightieth birthday in 1828, still, as he phrased 
it, codifying like any dragon, solving all problems 
by the application of his famous formula about 
the greatest happiness of the greatest number, 
and adding day by day to the vast piles of manu- 
script which were to embody the principles of all 
future legislation. To his hermitage in West- 
minster were admitted a little group of chosen 
disciples, the stern political economists, rigid 
utilitarians, and energetic reformers, some of 
whom were in the coming years to assume the 

i A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution of Great 
Britain, gth March, 1888. It seems desirable to say that 
some of the statements in the Lecture rest upon an examina- 
tion of original documents, many of which have not hitherto 
been accessible to biographers. I owe my acquaintance with 
them chiefly to Mr. Dykes Campbell, whose knowledge of the 
subject is most minute and exhaustive. A complete bio- 
graphy still remains to be written ; it may be expected from 
Mr. Ernest Coleridge, who is in possession of a great mass of 
his grandfather's papers. 

327 



328 Hours in a Library 

title of philosophical radicals. Another band of 
enthusiasts sought a different shrine. They lis- 
tened to an oracle which taught them that utili- 
tarianism was "moral anarchy," political economy 
a "solemn humbug," radicalism the direct road 
to ruin, and true wisdom only to be found in re- 
gions of contemplation which Bent ham could 
never enter for a reason analogous to that which 
forbids pachydermatous quadrupeds to soar into 
the empyrean. We know pretty well what was 
the manner of man at whose feet these disciples 
sat. The keenest of contemporary observers has 
left a picture which must be laid under contribu- 
tion for every description of Coleridge. Carlyle 
saw an old man though in point of actual years 
he was Bentham's junior by nearly a quarter of 
a century with the brow of a philosopher and 
the eye of a poet, but with the irresolute, flabby 
mouth of a sensuous dreamer of dreams, con- 
suming cups of tea, lukewarm but better than he 
deserved, or strolling, corkscrew fashion, along 
both sides of a garden path, unable to make up 
his mind to either. You put him a question ; he 
replied by accumulating "formidable apparatus, 
logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preserv- 
ers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory 
gear for setting out;" but rambled into the uni- 
verse at large, treated you "as a mere passive 



Coleridge 3 2 9 

bucket, to be pumped into" (fancy a Carlyle for 
a passive bucket!), and finally left you "swim- 
ming and fluttering in the mistiest wide unintel- 
ligible deluge of things, for the most part in a 
rather profitless, uncomfortable manner." Yet 
at times, we are told, " balmy, sunny islets, islets 
of the blest and intelligible," would rise out of 
the haze; and upon these islets the enthusiastic 
Sterling and others would try to cast anchor. 
Had they reached the solid foundation of creation, 
or had they, like Milton's pilot of the small night- 
foundered skiff, mistaken some metaphysical 
Kraken for the permanent framework of things? 
That question may be answered dogmatically 
by any one who pleases. Immovable limits of 
time and capacity forbid me from attempting to 
answer it now. My excuse for venturing to say 
something of Coleridge certainly one of the 
most fascinating and most perplexing figures in 
our literary history is simply this : I have been 
forced to investigate with some care the details 
of his career ; and I ought to be able not to answer 
the question, but to provide a little " vehiculatory 
gear" towards answering it. Coleridge's philo- 
sophy must of course be judged by considerations 
extraneous to his personal history. Yet I think, as 
a professional biographer is in duty bound to think, 
that philosophy is, more often than philosophers 



33 Hours in a Library 

admit, the outcome of personal experience; and 
Coleridge's singular history may throw some 
light upon his teaching. Here we meet the 
hagiologist and the iconoclast, the twin plagues 
of the humble biographer. The hagiologist burns 
incense before his idol till it is difficult to dis- 
tinguish any fixed outline through the clouds 
of gorgeously tinted vapour. Coleridge thought 
himself to have certain failings. His relations 
fully agreed with him. His worshippers regard 
these meek confessions as mere illustrations of 
the good man's humility, and even manage to 
endow the poet and philosopher with all the 
homely virtues of the respectable and the solvent. 
To put forward such claims is to challenge the 
iconoclast. He, a person endowed by nature 
with a fine stock of virtuous indignation, has very 
little trouble in picturing the poet-philosopher 
as a shambling, unreliable, indolent voluptuary, 
to whom an action became impossible so soon as 
it presented itself as a duty, and who, even as a 
man of genius, must be condemned as unfaithful 
to his high calling. And so we raise the usual 
edifying discussion as to the privileges of genius. 
Do they include superiority to the Ten Command- 
ments? Can you expect a poet to confine him- 
self to one wife? May a man neglect his children 
because he has written The Ancient Mariner and 



Coleridge 33 I 

Ckristdbelf points of casuistry, of which, with 
your leave, I will postpone the consideration to 
a future occasion. 

For my purpose it is enough to ascertain the 
facts. I have not to decide whether Coleridge 
should receive excommunication or canonisation; 
whether he deserved to go straight to heaven or 
to pass a period and, if so, how long a period 
in purgatory. It is difficult to settle such ques- 
tions satisfactorily. I desiderate an accurate 
diagnosis, not a judicial sentence. Coleridge 
sinned and repented. I take note of sin and of 
repentance as indications of character. I do not 
pretend to say whether in the eye of Heaven the 
repentance would be an adequate set-off for the 
sin. But I premise one apology for anything that 
may sound iconoclastic, and which I think is 
worth the consideration of the amiable persons 
who undertake to rehabilitate soiled reputations. 
A man's weakness can rarely be overlooked with- 
out underestimating his strength. If Coleridge's 
intellect were, as De Quincey said in his mag- 
niloquent way, "the greatest and most spacious, 
the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has 
yet existed among men" (what a philosopher one 
must be to pronounce such a judgment!) why 
were the results so small? Because the ethereal 
soul was chained to a fleshly carcase. To deny 



33 2 Hours in a Library 

this is to force us to assume that what he did was 
all that he could do. You must either exagger- 
ate his actual achievements beyond all possible 
limits, or save your belief in his potential achieve- 
ments by admitting that his intellect never had 
fair play. 

Let us consider the antecedents of the prophet 
of Highgate Hill. . Was there ever a young man 
fuller of intellectual promise or of personal charm 
than the youth of twenty-five, who, in 1797, 
rambled through the Quantocks discussing and 
composing poetry with Wordsworth? Circum- 
stances apparently unfavourable had only served 
to stimulate his intellectual growth. Separated 
from his family in infancy, to become one of the 
victims of our public-school system ill-fed, ill- 
nursed, and ill-taught at Christ's Hospital; urged 
upon the treadmill of a sound classical education 
by a rigid schoolmaster, he had assimilated with 
singular aptitude whatever intellectual food had 
drifted within his reach. He had caught glimpses 
of high metaphysical secrets ; he had peered into 
the mysteries of medical practice; he had bolted 
a miscellaneous library whole; he had been in- 
fected with poetical enthusiasm by the study of 
that minute day-star, W. L. Bowles ; and he had 
completed his training by falling desperately in 
love with the inevitable sister of a schoolfellow. 



Coleridge 333 

It is a comfort to reflect that the best regulated 
systems of education break down somewhere. 
Coleridge, it would have seemed, ran every risk 
of being driven sheep-like along the dull high-road 
of Latin grammar. Nature had prompted him 
to leap the fences, to expatiate in the wide fields 
of intellectual and imaginative pasture, and to de- 
rive a keener zest for his nourishment from the 
knowledge that the indulgence was illegitimate. 
Cambridge, the mother of poets, received him 
with the kindness she had so often shown to her 
children. We I speak as a Cambridge man 
we flogged (or nearly flogged) Milton into repub- 
licanism ; we disgusted Dryden into an anomalous 
and monstrous preference for Oxford ; we bored 
Gray till, half stifled with academic dulness, he 
sought more cheerful surroundings in a country 
churchyard; we left Byron to the congenial soci- 
ety of his bear; we did nothing for Wordsworth, ex- 
cept, indeed, that we took him to Milton's rooms, 
and there for once (it must really have done him 
some good) induced him to take a glass too much ; 
and we, as nearly as possible, converted Coleridge 
into a heavy dragoon. We ordered him to bow 
the knee to Euclid, and to Newton's Principia, the 
only idols whose merits were altogether beyond his 
powers of appreciation, and by such kindness in 
disguise induced him to plunge into a precocious 



334 Hours in a Library 

breach with the proprieties. A fellowship might 
have converted him into a solid Church-and- 
State don, an oracle of the Combination Room, 
and a sound judge of port wine. We sternly with- 
held the temptation. A reformer has to start 
in life as a rebel. Coleridge sympathised with 
the rebellious William Frend, who was being ban- 
ished from Cambridge for excessive liberalism. 
He offered his youthful incense to Priestley, the 
"patriot and saint and sage" so the young en- 
thusiast called him who was soon to be expelled 
by the exuberant loyalty of Birmingham from 
an ungrateful country. Though never a Jacobin, 
he became what, in some form or other, a young 
man ought to become an enthusiast for the 
newest lights, a partisan of the ideas struggling to 
remould the ancient order and raise the aspira- 
tions of mankind. The Master of the College 
shook his reverend head, kindly enough at times, 
at the lad's vagaries, and forgave him even for 
that preposterous attempt to become a trooper, 
which never enabled him, with all his subtlety of 
distinction, to form any clear conception of the 
difference between a horse's head and its tail. 
But he could not run in the regular track. He 
was thrown into the chaotic world to sink or swim 
by his unassisted abilities. No man had, in some 
ways, a better floating apparatus. The poetic 



Coleridge 335 

vein, soon to manifest itself in his best work, was 
indeed still turbid with the alloy of didactic 
twaddle. But already he had the versatility, 
the inherent vitality of intellect, the power of em- 
bodying philosophic thoughts in poetic imagery, 
which made him unrivalled in monologue. He 
talked better, I am apt to think, with his chum, 
Charles Lamb, at the "Cat and Salutation," than 
he ever talked to his worshippers at Highgate 
Hill. A man is at his best before he is recognised. 
Coleridge's early letters and essays show the ful- 
ness and intellectual vigour, without the too 
elaborate and slightly sanctimonious circumgyra- 
tions, of his later effusions . And his genius was 
such as implied a double portion of the power 
of making friends, which, with most of us, wanes 
so lamentably as the years go by. Lamb, his 
earliest and latest friend, was already devoted to 
this brilliant schoolfellow; and if Lamb was an 
easy conquest, men of less conspicuously tender 
nature were equally attracted. He had only to 
meet Southey at Oxford to swear at once an eter- 
nal friendship a friendship to be cemented by 
a regeneration of the world. 

Coleridge was to be the Plato of a new society 
to be founded in the wilds of America. There a 
short and healthy space of daily toil was to pro- 
vide all that was necessary for a band of poets 



33 6 Hours in a Library 

and philosophers, too benevolent to care for 
separate property, and worthy founders of an 
Arcadia of perfect simplicity, refinement, and 
equality. As for the Eves of the Paradise, were 
there not three Miss Prickers ? Coleridge repelled 
for a time the too obvious foreboding that Panti- 
socracy was but a province of dream-land. Dream- 
land was his reality. For the demands of butchers 
and bakers he had still a lordly indifference. He 
had the voice which could charm even a pub- 
lisher. The prim and priggish Cottle was at once 
annexed by Coleridge, and all the natural caution 
of a tradesman did not withhold him from pro- 
mising a guinea for every hundred lines to be pro- 
duced by a still untried new poet. What were 
one hundred lines to the genius which could turn 
off an act of a tragedy in a morning, and which 
soon afterwards could build the shadowy palace 
of Kubla Khan in a dream? Coleridge was justi- 
fied, in point of bare prudence, in marrying at 
once on the prospect. Somehow the poetry did 
not come so fast as the bills. But Coleridge had 
other strings to his bow. He set up as a lecturer 
and journalist. His marvellous eloquence conde- 
scended for the nonce to wile promises of sub- 
scription even from dealers in tallow; and the 
philosopher not without a humorous sense of 
his own absurdity became a successful com- 



Coleridge 337 

mercial traveller. The newspaper of course col- 
lapsed almost on the spot. All the arrangements 
were absurd, and Coleridge's eloquence proved to 
be somehow uncongenial to the tallow-dealing 
interest. But meanwhile, in the course of his 
journey, Coleridge had incidentally and, as it 
were, by the mere side glance of his eye, swept 
up Charles Lloyd, son of a rich banker, who, fas- 
cinated and enthralled, left the bank to become 
an inmate of his teacher's house, and, no doubt, 
a contributor to its expenses. Poole, a most 
public-spirited and intelligent man, offered him 
an asylum at Nether Stowey. The Unitarians, 
to whom he more or less belonged, were ready to 
open their pulpit to a preacher whose eloquence 
promised to rival even the most splendid tradi- 
tions of the age of Leighton and Jeremy Taylor. 

Hazlitt, not yet soured and savage, heard Cole- 
ridge preach in 1798; and tells us in true Haz- 
littian style how his voice rose like a storm of rich 
distilled perfumes ; how he launched into his sub- 
ject like an eagle dallying with the wind; how, 
in brief, poetry and philosophy had met together, 
truth and genius had embraced under the eye and 
with the sanction of reason. The Unitarian firma- 
ment was too cramped for this brilliant meteor; 
the philosophy expounded from the pulpits seemed 
to him meagre and rigid; and, while hesitating, 



VOL. IV, 22, 



Hours in a Library 

he received an offer from the generous Wedg- 
woods, anxious to spend some part of their wealth 
in the patronage of genius. 

Rumours had reached England by this time 
that a great intellectual light had arisen in Ger- 
many. The Wedgwoods gave Coleridge a mod- 
est annuity, unfettered (as I can now say) by any 
condition whatever, a fact which makes the sub- 
sequent withdrawal a harsher measure than has 
been supposed. Coleridge resolved to go to Ger- 
many, catch the sacred fire of the Kantian philo- 
sophy, and return to England to regenerate the 
mind of his countrymen. He started in Septem- 
ber, 1798, when he was just twenty-six, in com- 
pany with the friend who alone could be compared 
to him in intellectual power. Wordsworth had 
been attracted, as Lamb and Southey had been 
attracted before him. Coleridge and Words- 
worth had discussed the principles of their com- 
mon art ; and Coleridge had applied them in those 
wonderful poems, The Ancient Mariner and Chris- 
tabel (the first part), which were to be but the 
prologue to a fuller utterance; a wonderful pro- 
logue, for, though followed by nothing, it re- 
mained unique and inimitable. Coleridge was 
not yet deterrt, as Pope said of Johnson ; the or- 
dinary critics had only a passing smile or sneer 
for the little clique which published its obscure 



Coleridge 339 

utterances in a provincial town. Monthly and 
critical reviewers the arbiters of taste would 
have been astonished to hear that Coleridge and 
Wordsworth and Lamb and Southey would soon 
stand in the very front ranks of English literature ; 
and he must have a clearer conscience than I who 
would cast a stone at critics for not at once de- 
tecting the first germs of rising genius. But, as 
ex post facto prophets, we are able to see that Cole- 
ridge already had not only given proofs of aston- 
ishing power, but had won what was even more 
valuable, the true sympathy and cordial affection 
of young men who were the distinct leaders of the 
next generation. Even material support was not 
wanting from such men as Poole and Wedgwood, 
sufficient to ensure a fair start for the little band 
of prophets. We should have been justified in 
foretelling, with unusual confidence, a career of 
surpassing brilliancy for the youth, of whom it 
seemed only questionable whether he would 
choose to be a second Bacon or a second Milton. 

And if, at that time, any one could have shown 
us the same Coleridge at a distance of eighteen 
years, the worn, depressed, prematurely aged 
man who took up his abode with Gillman in 1816, 
we should have been shocked, and yet, perhaps, 
have been able to utter our complacent "I told 
you so." What so far had been the achievements 



34 Hours in a Library 

of the most brilliant genius of the generation: a 
man not only of surpassing ability, but of sur- 
passing facility of utterance ; a man whom to set 
going at any moment was to unlock a perpetually 
flowing fountain of abounding eloquence? A 
few newspaper articles and some courses of lec- 
tures, he said in 1817, constituted his whole pub- 
licity. It may be added that he had jotted down 
on the margins of books enough detached thoughts 
to have made some volumes of admirable reflec- 
tions. But he had achieved nothing to suggest 
concentrated thought or sustained labour. In a 
shorter period Scott poured out the whole of 
the Waverley Novels, besides discharging official 
duties, and writing a number of reviews and mis- 
cellaneous works. I say nothing as to the quality. 
I am simply thinking of the amount of work ; and 
Coleridge's work cost little labour, for his power 
of improvisation was among his most marvellous 
faculties. Why, then, was the work so limited 
in quantity? The internal facts are sufficiently 
significant. After his return from Germany in 
the autumn of 1799, he wrote some articles which 
certainly proved that his intellect was in full 
vigour, translated Wallenstein, and then, in 1800, 
retired with his family to Keswick. Here at once 
ominous symptoms begin to show themselves. 
A strange disquiet is betrayed in his letters ; there 



Coleridge 34 1 

are painful complaints of ill-health; his poetic 
inspiration breathes its last in the Ode to Dejection. 
He sought in vain to distract painful thought by 
metaphysical abstractions; he rambled off in 
1804 to spend two years and a half in Malta and 
Italy. Returning to England, he tried lecturing 
at the Royal Institution, and then settled at Gras- 
mere separated by fifteen miles of mountain 
roads from his wife and repeated his Watchman 
experiment by writing the Friend. The youthful 
buoyancy, even flippancy, has departed, though 
it shows far riper thought and richer intellectual 
stores. But weariness of spirit marks every page ; 
the long sentences somehow suggest a succession 
of stifled groans ; as the enterprise proceeds, it can 
only be kept up by introducing any irrelevant 
matter that may be on hand such as old letters 
from Germany which happened to be in his port- 
folio, and an extravagant panegyric upon his pa- 
tron at Malta, Sir Alexander Ball. 

The Friend soon falls dead, and Coleridge drifts 
back to London. There he makes efforts, pathetic 
in their impotence, to keep his head above water. 
He tries journalism again, but without the occa- 
sional triumphs which had formerly atoned for 
his irregularity. He lectures, and is heard with 
an interest which shows that, in spite of all im- 
pediments, his marvellous powers have at least 



34 2 Hours in a Library 

roused the curiosity of all who claim to have an 
intellectual taste. He has a gleam of success, 
too, from the production of his old tragedy, Re- 
morse, written in the days of early vigour. But 
some undertow seems to be sucking him back, so 
that he can never get his feet planted on dry land. 
He retires to Bristol, and thence to Calne, where 
he seems to be sinking into utter obscurity. He 
has almost passed out of the knowledge of his 
friends, when a last despairing effort lands him 
at Highgate, and there a rather singular trans- 
formation, it may seem at first sight, enables 
him to become the oracle of youthful aspiration, 
wisdom, and virtue. Painfully, and imperfectly 
with their aid, he gathers together some frag- 
ments of actual achievement enough to justify 
a great, but a most tantalising reputation. 

What was the secret of this painful history? 
Briefly, it was opium. Coleridge said so himself, 
and all his biographers have stated the facts. 
Without this statement the whole story would 
be unintelligible, and we could have done justice 
neither to Coleridge's intellectual powers nor 
even to some of his virtues. To tell the story of 
Coleridge without the opium is to tell the story 
of Hamlet without mentioning the Ghost. The 
tragedy of a life would become a mere string of 
incoherent accidents. Nor are the facts doubt- 



Coleridge 343 

ful. Coleridge, I fear, composed, or invented, 
for the benefit of Gillman, a certain picturesque 
"Kendal black drop" a treacherous nostrum, 
it is suggested, which gave him relief in his suffer- 
ings at Keswick, and overpowered his will before 
he had recognised its nature. The truth is, as 
can be abundantly proved by his letters at the 
time, that he was taking laudanum in large quan- 
tities in 1 796, that is when he was just twenty-four, 
under the pressure of illness, but certainly well 
knowing what he was taking. It was at Keswick, 
not that he first indulged, but that he first became 
aware of his almost hopeless enslavement. 

After reading many painfully conclusive proofs 
of this passion, I confess that I think it less re- 
markable that his demoralisation in this respect 
seemed to be complete about 1814, than that he 
succeeded, under Gillman's care, in so far breaking 
off the habit as to make a certain salvage from 
the wreck. I simply take note of these facts, and 
leave anybody who pleases to do the moralising; 
but I am forced to add a few words upon another 
topic, to which his apologists have resorted in or- 
der to extenuate the opium-eating. Briefly, it has 
been attempted to save his character by abusing 
his wife. Undoubtedly, as the recently pub- 
lished Coleorton papers prove, there was a com- 
plete want of sympathy. The same documents 



344 Hours in a Library 

show that it was not, as had been generally sup- 
posed, a case of gradual drifting apart. Proposals 
for a regular separation had been made by the 
time of Coleridge's return from Malta. Cole- 
ridge's apologists have said that Mrs. Coleridge 
was one of lago's women, born "to suckle fools 
and chronicle small beer," and quite unable to 
appreciate Kantian metaphysics, or even Chris- 
tabel. A very doubtful legend has been put about, 
that she once said, "Get oop, Coleridge" (a re- 
mark for which one can conceive a sufficient jus- 
tification), and no man can be expected to care 
for a woman who says "Get oop," or for her 
children. From letters of hers which I have seen, 
I am inclined to think that Mrs. Coleridge must 
really have been a very sensible woman, who 
worked hard to educate her own children and the 
children of her sister, Mrs. Southey, in French and 
Italian, and who could express herself in remark- 
ably good English. She was no doubt inappre- 
ciative of a genius which could not be set to 
bread-winning. And moreover, when a man has 
an ecstatic admiration for another woman, it is not 
likely to make his relations to his wife more pleas- 
ant. To speak of all this as a moral excuse for 
Coleridge is to my mind unmanly. If a man of 
genius condescends to marry a woman, and be 
the father of her children, he must incur responsi- 



Coleridge 345 

bilities. The fact that he leaves her, as Coleridge 
did, his small fixed income, the balance of her ex- 
penses to be made up by his brother-in-law and 
other connections, is so far to his credit, but does 
not excuse him for a neglect of those duties, not 
to be measured in pounds, shillings, and pence, 
which a husband and father owes to an innocent 
woman and three small children. Coleridge's 
position was no doubt difficult, but the mode in 
which he solved the difficulty is a proof that 
opium-eating is inconsistent with certain homely 
duties. 

An experienced person has said, " Do not marry 
a man of genius." I have no personal interest in 
that question, nor will I express any opinion upon 
it, but one is inclined to say, Don't be his brother- 
in-law, or his publisher, or his editor, or any- 
thing that is his if you care twopence it is prob- 
ably an excessive valuation for the opinion of 
post-humous critics. 

But, again, I would avoid moralising. I only 
ask, What is the true inference as to Coleridge's 
character? And that consideration may bring us 
back to less painful reflections. It is preposter- 
ous to maintain the thesis that Coleridge was the 
kind of person to be held up as a pattern to young 
men about to marry. Opium had ruined the 
power of will, never very strong, and any capacity 



346 Hours in a Library 

he may have had and his versatility was per- 
haps incompatible with any great capacity for 
concentration on a great task. The consequences 
of such indulgence had ruined his home life, and 
all but ruined his intellectual career. But there 
is also this to be said, that at his worst Coleridge 
was both loved and eminently lovable. His fail- 
ings excited far more compassion than indignation. 
The " pity of it " expresses the sentiment of all eye- 
witnesses. He was always full of kindly feelings, 
never soured into cynicism. The strange power of 
fascination which he had shown in his poetic youth 
never deserted him. As De Quincey has said : 

Beyond all men who ever perhaps have lived, he 
found means to engage a constant succession of most 
faithful friends. He received the services of sisters, 
brothers, daughters, sons, from the hands of strangers 
attracted to him by no possible impulses but those of 
reverence for his intellect and love for his gracious 
nature. Perpetual relays were laid along his path in 
life of zealous and judicious supporters. 

Whenever Coleridge was at his lowest, some one 
was ready to help him. Poole, and Lloyd, and 
Wedgwood, and De Quincey, had come forward 
in their turn. Through the dismal years of de- 
gradation which preceded his final refuge at Gill- 
man's, the faithful Morgans had made him a home, 
tried to break off his bad habits, and enabled him 
to carry on the almost hopeless struggle. When 



Coleridge 347 

Morgan himself became bankrupt, it is pleasant 
to know that Coleridge, among whose faults pecu- 
niary meanness had no place, gave what he could 
and far more than he could really spare to 
help his old friend. When he delivered his lec- 
tures or poured out an amazing monologue at 
Lamb's suppers, or in Godwin's shop, young men, 
at the age of hero-worship, were already prepared 
not only to wonder at the intellectual display, 
but to feel their hearts warmed by the real good- 
ness shining through the shattered and imperfectly 
transparent vessel. Coleridge's letters may re- 
veal some part of this charm, though some part, 
too, of the drawback. His long involved senten- 
ces, compared by himself to a Surinam toad with 
a brood of little toads escaping from his back, 
wind about in something between a spoken rev- 
erie and a sympathetic effusion of confidential con- 
fessions. When they touch the practical, e.g., 
publishers' accounts, they are apt to become hope- 
lessly unintelligible. When they expound a vast 
scheme for a magnum opus, or one of the various 
magna opera which at any time for thirty years 
were just ready to issue from the press, as soon as 
a few pages were transcribed, we perceive, after 
a moment, that they are not the fictions of the 
begging letter-writer, but a kind of secretion, 
spontaneously and unconsciously evolved to pacify 



348 Hours in a Library 

the stings of remorse. There are moments when 
he is querulous, but we must forgive them to the 
man who had been hopelessly distanced in popular 
fame by his inferiors ; whose attempts at public ut- 
terance had utterly collapsed ; whose Wallenstein 
still encumbered his publisher's shelves; whose 
poetical copyrights had been deliberately valued 
at nil; and whose name was only mentioned in 
the chief reviews as a superlative for wilful ec- 
centricity and absurdity. And then, at every 
turn, we come upon frequent gleams, not only of 
subtle thought and imaginative expression, but 
of shrewd common-sense, and even at times of a 
genuine humour, which seems to imply that Lamb 
was partly serious when he said that Coleridge 
had so much "f-f-fun" in him. After reading 
many of the letters, which still remain unpublished, 
I may say that it is my own conviction that a life 
of Coleridge may still be put together by some 
judicious writer, who should take Boswell rather 
than the Acta Sanctorum for his model, which 
would be as interesting as the great Confessions, 
which should by turns remind us of Augustine, of 
Montaigne, and of Rousseau, and sometimes, too, 
of the inimitable Pepys or Boswell himself ; which 
should show the blending of the many elements 
of a most complex character and a most versa- 
tile and opulent intellect ; which should often call 



Coleridge 349 

forth wonder, and smiles, and sighs, and indigna- 
tion smothered by pity, in one of those unique 
combinations which it would take a Shakespeare 
to portray and act, and defy the skill of a psycho- 
logist to define. 

Only a faint indication of this is to be found in 
Coleridge's Apologia, or, as he called it, his Bio- 
graphia Literaria, of which I must now say a word. 
It was written at his very nadir, and published 
just after he had reached his asylum at Highgate. 
In this sense it has a special biographical value 
though its statements, coloured by the illusions 
to which he was then specially subject, have 
passed muster too easily with his biographers. 
Its aim is chiefly to protest against the neglect 
of the public and the dispensers of patronage. 
Such complaints generally remind me of a rifle- 
man complaining that the target persists in keep- 
ing out of the line of fire. But if we must pardon 
something to a man so grievously tried for en- 
deavouring to shift a part of the responsibility 
upon other shoulders than his own, we must be 
upon our guard against accepting censures which 
involve injustice to others. Nothing but Cole- 
ridge's strange illusions could be an apology, for 
example, for his complaints that the Ministry 
had not rewarded a writer whose greatest suc- 
cesses had been scornful denunciations of their 



35 Hours in a Library 

great leader, Pitt. The book, of course, is put 
together with a pitchfork. It is without form 
or proportion, and is finally eked out with a batch 
of the old letters from Germany which he had 
already used in the Friend, and apparently kept 
as a last resource to stop the mouths of printers. 

Now it is remarkable that even at this time, 
when his demoralisation had gone furthest, he 
could still pour out many pages of criticism, quite 
irrelevant to the professed purpose of the book, 
and yet such as was beyond and above the range 
of any living contemporary. Coleridge at his 
worst lost the power of finishing and concentrat- 
ing of which he had never had very much but 
not the power of discursive reflection. He must be 
compared not to a tree which has lost its vital 
fibre, but to a vine deprived of its props, which, 
though most of its fruit is crushed and wasted, 
can yet produce grapes with the full bloom of 
what might have been a superlative vintage. 
But there is one fact of the Biographia for which 
the apology of illusion is more requisite even than 
for his misstatements of fact. Coleridge has often 
been accused of plagiarism. I do not believe that 
he stole his Shakespeare criticism from Schlegel, 
and, partly at least, for the reason which would 
induce me to acquit a supposed thief of having 
stolen a pair of breeches from a wild Highland- 



Coleridge 351 

man. But it is undeniable that Coleridge was 
guilty of a serious theft of metaphysical wares. 
The only excuse suggested is that the theft was 
too certain of exposure to be perpetrated. But 
as it certainly was perpetrated, this can only be 
an apology for the motive. The simple fact is 
that part of his scheme was to establish his claims 
to be a great metaphysician. But it takes much 
trouble and some thought to put together what 
looks like a chain of a priori demonstration of ab- 
stract principles. Coleridge, therefore, persuaded 
himself that he had really anticipated Schelling's 
thoughts and might justifiably appropriate Schel- 
ling's words. He threw out a few phrases about 
"genial coincidence" perhaps the happiest cir- 
cumlocution ever devised for what Pistol called 
" conveying" and adopted Sc helling in the lump. 
When he had come to an end of Schelling's guid- 
ance, he proceeded with an infantile simplicity 
which disarms indignation to write a solemn 
complimentary letter from himself to himself, 
pointing out that the public would have had 
enough of the discussion, and "Dear C." politely 
agreed to drop the subject, with proper compli- 
ments to his "affectionate, etc." 

And now I come to the very difficult task of 
indicating, as briefly as I can, the bearing of these 
remarks upon Coleridge's multifarious activity. 



35 2 Hours in a Library 

It is not possible to sum up in a few phrases the 
characteristics of a man who wrote upon meta- 
physics, theology, morals, politics, and literary 
criticism; who made a deep impression in all the 
departments of thought; whose utterances are 
scattered up and down in fragmentary treatises, 
in complex arguments which generally break off 
in the middle, and in miscellaneous jottings upon 
the margins of books; whose opinions have been 
differently interpreted by different disciples, and 
have in great part to be inferred from his com- 
ments upon other writers, and can only be in- 
telligible when we have settled what those writers 
meant, and what he took them to mean; who 
frequently changed his mind, and who certainly 
appears, to thinkers of a different order, to add 
obscurity even to subjects which are necessarily 
obscure. Nor is the difficulty diminished when, 
as in my case, the commentator belongs to what 
must be called the antagonistic school, and is even 
most properly to be described as a thorough Phil- 
istine who is dull enough to glory in his Philis- 
tinism. All that I shall attempt is to select a 
certain aspect of the Coleridgian impulse, and to 
say what impression it makes upon a radically 
prosaic mind. 

The brilliant Coleridge of Nether Stowey, the 
buoyant young poet-philosopher who had not 



Coleridge 353 

been to Germany, was still a curious compound 
of imperfectly fused elements. His Liberalism 
had led him to the Unitarianism of Priestley and 
the associative philosophy of Hartley. But he 
had also dipped into Plotinus and into some of the 
mystical writers who represent the very opposite 
pole of speculation. The first doctrine was im- 
posed upon him from without, the other was that 
which was really congenial to his temperament. 
For Coleridge was, above all, essentially and in- 
trinsically a poet. The first genuine manifesta- 
tions of his genius are the poems which he wrote 
before he was twenty-six. The germ of all Cole- 
ridge's utterances may be found by a little in- 
genuity in The Ancient Mariner. For what is 
the secret of the strange charm of that unique 
achievement? I do not speak of what may be 
called its purely literary merits the melody of 
versification, the command of language, the vivid- 
ness of the descriptive passages, and so forth I 
leave such points to critics of finer perception and 
a greater command of superlatives. But part, at 
least, of the secret is the ease with which Cole- 
ridge moves in a world of which the machinery 
(as the old critics called it) is supplied by the mys- 
tic philosopher. Milton, as Penseroso, implores 

The spirit of Plato to unfold, 

What worlds or what vast systems hold 



VOL. IV. 23. 



354 Hours in a Library 

The spirit of man that hath forsook 
Her mansion in this fleshy nook, 
And of those demons that are found 
In fire, air, flood, and underground, 
Whose^spowers have a true consent 
With planet and with element. 

If such a man fell asleep in his "high lonely 
tower," his dreams would present to him in sen- 
suous imagery the very world in which the strange 
history of The Ancient Mariner was transacted. 
It is a world in which both animated things, and 
stones, and brooks, and clouds, and plants are 
moved by spiritual agency ; in which, as he would 
put it, the veil of the senses is nothing but a sym- 
bolism everywhere telling of unseen and super- 
natural forces. What we call the solid and the 
substantial becomes a dream; and the dream is 
the true underlying reality. The difference be- 
tween such poetry and the poetry of Pope, or 
even of Gray, or Goldsmith, or Cowper poetry 
which is the direct utterance of a string of moral, 
political, or religious reflections implies a literary 
revolution. Coleridge, even more distinctly than 
Wordsworth, represented a deliberate rejection 
of the canons of the preceding school; for, if 
Wordsworth's philosophy differed from that of 
Pope, he still taught by direct exposition instead 
of the presentation of sensuous symbolism. The 
distinction might be illustrated by the ingenious 



Coleridge 355 

criticism of Mrs. Barbauld, who told Coleridge 
that The Ancient Mariner had two faults it was 
improbable and had no moral. Coleridge owned 
the improbability, but replied to the other strict- 
ure that it had too much moral, for that it ought 
to have had no more than a story in the Arabian 
Nights. Indeed, the moral, which would appar- 
ently be that people who sympathise with a man 
who shoots an albatross will die in prolonged 
torture of thirst, is open to obvious objections. 

Coleridge's poetic impulse died early; per- 
haps, as De Quincey said, it was killed by the 
opium; or, as Coleridge said himself, that his 
afflictions had suspended what nature gave him 
at his birth, 

His shaping spirit of imagination. 
So that his only plan was 

From his own nature all the natural man, 
By abstruse research to steal, 

and partly, too, I should guess, for the reason that 
this strange mystic world in which he was at home 
was so remote from all ordinary experience that 
it failed even to provide an efficient symbolism 
for his deepest thoughts, and could only be ac- 
cessible in the singular glow and fervour of youth- 
ful inspiration. The domestic anxieties, the pains 



35 6 Hours in a Library 

of ill-health, the depression produced by opium, 
were a heavy clog upon an imagination which 
should try to soar into vast aerial regions. But 
it may be doubtful whether this peculiar vein of 
imagination, opened in The Ancient Mariner and 
Christabel, could in any case have been worked 
much further. 

At any rate, Coleridge, as his imaginative im- 
pulse flagged, passed into the reflective stage; 
and, as was natural, his mind dwelt much upon 
those principles of art which he had already dis- 
cussed with Wordsworth in his creative period. 
In saying that Coleridge was primarily a poet, I 
did not mean to intimate that he was not also a 
subtle dialectician. There is no real incompati- 
bility between the two faculties. A poetic litera- 
ture which includes Shakespeare in the past and 
Browning in the present is of itself a sufficient 
proof that the keenest and most active logical 
faculty may be combined with the truest poetical 
imagination. Coleridge's peculiar service to Eng- 
lish criticism consisted, indeed, in a great measure, 
in a clear appreciation of the true relation between 
the faculties, a relation, I think, which he never 
quite managed to express clearly. Poetry, as he 
says, is properly opposed not to prose but to 
science. Its aim, he infers, is not to establish 
truth but to communicate pleasure. The poet 



Coleridge 357 

presents us with the concrete symbol; the man 
of science endeavours to analyse and abstract the 
laws embodied. Shakespeare was certainly not 
a psychologist in the sense in which Professor 
Bain is a psychologist. He does not state what 
are our ultimate faculties, or how they act and 
react, and determine our conduct ; but, so far as 
he creates typical characters, he gives concrete 
psychology, or presents the problems upon which 
psychology has to operate. Therefore, if poetry, 
as Coleridge says after Milton, should be simple, 
sensuous, passionate, instead of systematic, ab- 
stract, and emotionless, like speculative reason- 
ing, it is not to be inferred that the poet should 
be positively unphilosophical, nor is he the better, 
as some recent critics appear to have discovered, 
for merely appealing to the senses as being without 
thoughts, or, in simpler words, a mere animal. 
The loftiest poet and the loftiest philosopher deal 
with the same subject-matter, the great problems 
of the world and of human life, though one pre- 
sents the symbolism and the others unravels the 
logical connection of the abstract conceptions. 

Coleridge, having practised, proceeded to preach. 
That a poet should also be a good critic is no more 
surprising than that any man should speak well 
on the art of which he is master. Our best critics of 
poetry, at least from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, 



Hours in a Library 

have been (to invert a famous maxim) poets who 
have succeeded. Coleridge's specific merit was 
not, as I think, that he laid down any scientific 
theory. I don't believe that any such theory has 
as yet any existence except in embryo. He was 
something almost unique in this as in his poetry, 
first because his criticism (so far as it was really 
excellent) was the criticism of love, the criticism 
of a man who combined the first simple impulse 
of admiration with the power of explaining why 
he admired; and secondly, and as a result, be- 
cause he placed himself at the right point of view ; 
because, to put it briefly, he was the first great 
writer who criticised poetry as poetry, and not 
as science. The preceding generation had asked, 
as Mrs. Barbauld asked: "What is the moral?" 
Has Othello a moral catastrophe? What does 
Paradise Lost prove ? Are the principles of Pope's 
Essay on Man philosophical? or is Goldsmith's 
Deserted Village a sound piece of political econ- 
omy? The reply embodied in Coleridge's admir- 
able criticisms, especially of Shakespeare, was that 
this implied a total misconception of the relations 
of poetry to philosophy. The " moral" of a poem 
is not this or that proposition tagged to it or de- 
ducible from it, moral or otherwise ; but the total 
effect of the stimulus to the imagination and affec- 
tions, or what Coleridge would call its dynamic 



Coleridge 359 

effect. That will, no doubt, depend partly upon 
the philosophy assumed in it; but has no com- 
mon ground with the merits of a demonstration 
in Euclid or Spinoza. It is this adoption of a 
really new method which makes us feel, when we 
compare Coleridge, not only with the critics of a 
past generation, but even with very able and acute 
writers such as Jeffrey or Hazlitt, who were his 
contemporaries, that we are in a freer and larger 
atmosphere, and are in contact with deeper prin- 
ciples. It raises another question, for it leads to 
Coleridge's most conscious aim. Nothing is easier 
than to put the proper label on a poet to call 
him "romantic," or " classical, " and so forth; and 
then, if he has a predecessor of like principles, to 
explain him by the likeness, and if he represents 
a change of principles, to make the change explain 
itself by calling it a reaction. The method is de- 
lightfully simple, and I can use the words as easily 
as my neighbours. The only thing I find difficult 
is to look wise when I use them, or to fancy that 
I give an explanation because I have adopted a 
classification. Coleridge, both in poetry and philo- 
sophy, conceived himself to be one of the leaders 
of such a reaction. He proposed to abolish the 
wicked, mechanical, infidel, prosaic eighteenth 
century and go back to the seventeenth. I do 
not believe in the possibility or the desirability 



360 Hours in a Library 

of any such reaction. I prefer my own grand- 
fathers to their grandfathers, and myself in- 
cluding you and me to my grandfathers. I am 
quite sure that, if I did not, I could not make time 
run backwards. We are far enough off to be just 
to the maligned eighteenth century, and to keep 
all our uncharitableness for our contemporaries 
it may do them some good. I would never 
abuse the century which loved common-sense and 
freedom of speech, and hated humbug and mys- 
tery; the century in which first sprang to life 
most of the social and intellectual movements 
which are still the best hope of our own ; in which 
science and history and invention first took their 
modern shape; the century of David Hume, and 
Adam Smith, and Gibbon, and Burke, and John- 
son, and Fielding, and many old friends to whom 
I aver incalculable gratitude; but I admit that, 
like other centuries, it had its faults. It was, no 
doubt, unpoetical at its close almost as un- 
poetical as the latter half of the nineteenth ; and 
somehow it had fallen into that queer blunder of 
judging poetry by the canons of science. The old 
symbolism of an earlier generation had faded, and 
for pagan or Christian imagery we had frigid per- 
sonifications, such even as Coleridge quotes from 
some prize poem: " Inoculation, heavenly maid!" 
a deity who could be only adored in a rhymed 



Coleridge 361 

medical treatise. And Coleridge's charge against 
the philosophy of the time was really identical 
with his charge against the poetry. 

Poetry, without the mystic or spiritual element, 
meant Darwin's Botanic Garden an ice-palace, 
as he called it, a heap of fine phrases and sham 
personifications. Take the same element from 
theology, and you have Paley's Evidences; from 
morals, and the residuum is Bentham's utilitari- 
anism. Coleridge's nomenclature expressed this 
in a fashion. He was fond of saying that all men 
were born Aristotelians or Platonists : Platonists, 
if, in his favourite distinction, the reason and the 
imagination dominated in them, and Aristotelians, 
if they had only the understanding, the almost 
vulpine cunning, which was shared even by the 
lower animals, which meant prudence in morality, 
reliance upon mere external evidence in theology, 
and pure expediency in politics. How the Aris- 
totelians had come to rule the world ever since the 
opening of the eighteenth century is a question 
which, so far as I know, he never answered. But 
the effect of their dominion was equally to de- 
throne reason as to asphyxiate imagination. The 
two were allies, if not an incarnation of the same 
faculty. Inversely the Benthamites, till Mill was 
converted by Wordsworth, regarded poetry as 
equivalent to mere tintinnabulation and lying, 



362 Hours in a Library 

or, as Carlyle's friend put it, the " prodooction of a 
rude age." It was as much in his character of poet 
as of philosopher that Coleridge hated political 
economy, the favourite science of the Bentham- 
ites ; for, according to him, it was an illustration 
of their destructive method. The economist 
deals with mere barren abstractions, and then 
misapplies them to the concrete organism, the 
life of which, according to the common meta- 
phor, has been destroyed by his dissecting knife. 
Coleridge goes too far in speaking as if analysis 
were in itself a mischievous instead of an impor- 
tant process, much as Wordsworth thought that 
every man of science was ready to botanise on his 
mother's grave. But, on the other hand, the 
clear conviction that a society could only be ex- 
plained as an organic and continuous whole en- 
ables him to point out very distinctly the limits 
of the opposite school. One indication of this 
contrast may be found in Coleridge's theory of 
Church and State. It is curious that Mill, in his 
essay upon Coleridge, especially admires him for 
taking into account the historical element in which 
Bent ham was deficient. It is curious because it 
is remarkable that the leader of a school which 
boasted specially of resting upon experience, 
should admit that it was weak precisely in 
not appreciating the historical method on which 



Coleridge 3 6 3 

surely experience should be founded. It seems 
almost as if the antagonists had changed weapons 
like the duellists in Hamlet. The a priori thinker 
rests upon experience, and the empiricist upon a 
really a priori method. 

The ambiguity indicates Coleridge's peculiar 
position towards the opposite school. He regards 
society as an organism, a something which has 
grown through long centuries, and therefore to be 
studied in its vital principle, not to be analysed 
into a mere mechanism for distributing certain 
lumps of happiness. In doing so he was saying 
what had been said by Burke, whose wisdom he 
fully appreciated and whose real consistency he 
recognised. To my mind, indeed, Burke as a 
political philosopher was far greater than Cole- 
ridge. But Burke hated the metaphysics in 
which Coleridge delighted, and therefore with him 
we seem at best to come upon blank prejudice, or 
prescription, as the ultimate ground of political 
science. Coleridge feels the necessity of con- 
necting his organic principles with some genuine 
philosophical principle, and Mill admits that 
conservatism in his treatment was something very 
superior to the mere brute prejudice to which 
Eldon and Castlereagh appealed, and which was 
used as a bludgeon by the Quarterly Review. 
Unluckily it is here, too, that we find the weakness 



364 Hours in a Library 

of Coleridge's character. He tried to put together 
his views at a time when his mind had been hope- 
lessly enervated ; when he could guess and beat 
about a principle, but could never get it fairly 
stated or see its full bearings. He is struggling 
for utterance, still clinging to the belief that he 
can elaborate a system, but never getting beyond 
prolegomena and fruitful hints. He says that 
to study politics with benefit we must try to 
elaborate the "idea" of Church and State, and 
the "idea," as he explains, is identical with what 
scientific people call a law. But how the law or 
laws of an organism are to be determined by 
some transcendental principle overruling and in- 
dependent of experiences, is just the point which 
remains inexplicable. He seems to appreciate 
what we now call the historic method. He uses 
the sacred phrase "evolution," which is simply 
the general formula of which the historic method 
is a special application. But we find that by 
evolution he means some strange process sug- 
gestive of his old mystical employment, and even 
at times talks of heptads and pentads and the 
"adorable tetractys," which is the same with the 
Trinity; and connects chemical laws of oxygen 
and hydrogen gas with the logical formulae about 
prothesis, and antithesis, and mesothesis. To 
state the theory of evolution in verifiable and 



Coleridge 3 6 5 

scientific terms was reserved for Darwin; when 
we meet it in Coleridge we seem to be going back 
to Pythagoras; and yet it is the same thought 
which is struggling for an utterance in singular 
and bewildering terms, and moreover it was just 
the theory which Mill required. 

But, to come to a conclusion : though I cannot 
think that Coleridge ever worked with his mind 
clear, or was, indeed, capable of the necessary con- 
centration and steadiness of thought by which 
alone philosophical achievements are possible; 
though I hold, again, that if he had succeeded he 
would have found that he was not so much re- 
futing his opponents as supplying a necessary 
complement to their teaching, I can still believe 
that he saw more clearly than any of his contem- 
poraries what were the vital issues; that in his 
detached and desultory and inconsistent fashion 
he was stirring the thoughts which were to oc- 
cupy his successors; and that a detailed exam- 
ination would show in how many directions a 
certain Coleridgian leaven is working in later 
fermentations. 

Besides the able and zealous disciples who ac- 
knowledged his leadership, we may find many 
affinities in Carlyle's masculine if narrow teach- 
ing; or again, in a school which diverged in a 
very opposite direction, for the theory of Church 



366 Hours in a Library 

authority sanctioned by the Oxford disciples of 
Cardinal Newman is, in spite of its different re- 
sult, closely allied to Coleridge's ; while the modern 
Hegelians though they regard him as a super- 
ficial dabbler must admit that he rendered the 
service (of doubtful value, perhaps) of infecting 
English thought with the virus of German meta- 
physics, and will perhaps admit that, in principle, 
he anticipated some of their most cogent critic- 
isms of the common enemy. Coleridge never 
constructed a system. If a philosophy, or its cre- 
ator, is to be judged by the systematic characters, 
Coleridge must take a very low place. But when 
we think what philosophical systems have so far 
been; what flimsy and air-built bubbles in the 
eyes of the next generation ; how often we desire, 
even in the case of the greatest men, that the one 
vital idea (there is seldom so much as one !) could 
be preserved, and the pretentious structure in 
which it is involved permitted once for all to 
burst; we may think that another criterion is 
admissible ; that a man's work may be judged by 
the stimulus given to reflection, even if given in 
so intricate a muddle and such fragmentary utter- 
ances that its disciples themselves are hopelessly 
unable to present it in an orderly form. Upon 
that ground, Coleridge's rank will be a very high 
one, although, when all is said, the history, both 



Coleridge 367 

of the man and the thinker, will always be a sad 
one the saddest in some sense that we can read, 
for it is the history of early promise blighted and 
vast powers all but running hopelessly to waste. 

END OF VOLUME IV. 



PR Stephen, (Sir) Leslie 
99 Hours in a library 
S7 
1907 



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