Shelburne Essays
By
Paul Elmer More
Fourth Series
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G. P. Putnam s Sons
New York and London
Imic&erbocfcer press
1907
GENERAL
COPYRIGHT, 1906
BY
PAUL ELMER MORE
Published, December, 1906
Reprinted, January, 1907
Ube Knickerbocker prcee, flew
ADVERTISEMENT
The first of these essays was written for the Inter
national Quarterly. Those on Franklin and Paradise
Lost appeared in the Independent. All the others are
taken from the literary pages of the New York Evening
Post. In several cases a good deal of new matter has been
added for the present publication.
175629
f
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW . . . . i
FANNY BURNEY 35
A NOTE ON " DADDY" CRISP 61
GEORGE HERBERT > 66
JOHN KEATS 99
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 129
CHARGES LAMB AGAIN 156
WALT WHITMAN 180
WILLIAM BLAKE 212
THE THEME OF " PARADISE LOST" . . . 239
THE LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE . . .254
OF
l /
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
FOURTH SERIES
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW
Some thirty years ago, in 1875 to be exact,
that unstable compound, trie Knglish Church,
was shocked by the news that a Cornish cler
gyman, dying away from home, had received
the sacraments from the hands of a Roman
priest. Over the head of his young wife, who
had summoned the . ministrant to his bedside,
there was poured a bitter stream of controversy,
as was the wont of the Establishment in those
days ; and the storm was not allayed by the pub
lication a few months later of a somewhat irre
sponsible biography of the apostate by the Rev. S.
Baring-Gould. It was then seen that this death
bed conversion was only the last act of a life
crammed with eccentricities, and from that day to
this the Vicar of Morwenstow has enjoyed a kind
of pre-eminence in curiosity. At last his son-in
law, Mr. C. E. Byles, has collected his scattered
prose and verse in two attractive volumes, and
has added to these a full and accurate record of
i
;2\ SHELBURNE ESSAYS
his Hfe. 1 There is no doubt as to the value of the
result. Hawker cannot by any stretch of cour
tesy be called quite a great writer, but I do not
hesitate to say that the works and biography to
gether bring us acquainted with one of the most
original and most interesting personalities of the
past century. He is likely to be remembered
longer than some who have achieved more as
artists.
And if he cannot be ranked among the great,
at least his writings, long before Mr. Baring-
Gould made him a subject of romance, had at
tained an anomalous celebrity. One of his curi
ous methods of reaching the public was to print
off a poem in the form of leaflets, which he then
inclosed, like advertisements, 5n business and
friendly letters. In this way and through other
obscure channels of publication, some of his
poems attained a kind of life apart from their
author. They even received the dubious praise
of being imitated and stolen, and his best work
had a humourous trick of gaining currency as
anonymous and ancient folklore. His Sir Beville
1 Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall. By
R. S. Hawker. New York: John Lane, 1903.
Cornish Ballads and Other Poems. By R. S. Hawker.
John Lane, 1904.
The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker (Sometime
Vicar of Morwenstow). By his Son-in-law, C. E. Byles.
John Lane, 1905.
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 3
was included in Major Egerton Leigh s Ballads
and Leg ends of Cheshire, published in 1867, where
it was described as "A Royalist song found
amongst the family papers in an old oak chest, at
Brdeswick Hall, one of the seats of the Minshull
family." Nor was this a solitary instance. Most
notable of all was the fortune of his Song of the
Western Men, which, as the ballad that has raised
the loudest discussion, may here be quoted entire:
A good sword and a trusty hand !
A merry heart and true !
King James s men shall understand
What Cornish lads can do !
And have they fixed the where and when ?
And shall Trelawny die ?
Here s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why !
Out spake their Captain brave and bold :
A merry wight was he :
" If London Tower were Michael s hold,
We d set Trelawny free !
" We 11 cross the Tamar, land to land :
The Severn is no stay :
With one and all, and hand in hand ;
And who shall bid us nay ?
" And when we come to London Wall,
A pleasant sight to view,
Come forth ! come forth ! ye cowards all :
Here s men as good as you."
4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Trelawny he s in keep and hold :
Trelawny he may die :
But here s twenty thousand Cornish bold
Will know the reason why !
The stanzas were first published by Hawker
anonymously in a provincial newspaper, when he
was twenty-three. With the exception of the
italicised refrain, which is traditional and was
supposed by Hawker to allude to Sir Jonathan
Trelawny, one of the seven Bishops imprisoned by
James II., the poem is entirely original. Yet so
well had it caught the popular vein that it soon
passed for an ancient ballad. Mr. Davies Gilbert,
President of the Royal Society of London, had it
printed as such on a broadside ; Sir Walter Scott,
in a note to his own poems, wrote of it as "a
curious and spirited specimen" of the popular
ballad; and Macaulay, in his History of England y
used it as an indication of the feeling in Cornwall
during the trial of the bishops. It has since been
discovered that Hawker himself was partly mis
taken, and that the refrain alludes to an earlier
Trelawny than the persecuted Churchman; but
that is small matter. No wonder that the author
contemplated his ravished honours with some jeal
ousy. "All these years," he exclaimed bitterly,
"the Song has been bought and sold, set to music
and applauded, while I have lived on among these
far-away rocks unprofited, unpraised, and un
known. This is an epitome of my whole life.
Others have drawn profit from my brain, while
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 5
I have been coolly relinquished to obscurity and
unrequital and neglect."
And as with his works, so with the man. For
years before his death people who had scarcely
heard the name of Robert Stephen Hawker knew
vaguely of the strange Vicar of Morwenstow, and
associated his oddities with the wonders of the
West Country. Visitors to Devonshire and the
Duchy of Cornwall turned aside, as did Tennyson
on a memorable occasion, from the haunts of
King Arthur and the relics of a thousand super
stitions to break bread with the lonely parson
whose life was absorbed in the spirit of the land.
And what a land! Beauty and terror there divide
the scene between them, and the recollections of
saint and human fiend jostle each other for pos
session. There is Kynance Cove, on the Lizard,
which Swinburne, in his exaggerated way, thinks
the most incomparably lovely spot in the world.
Here one may follow up some river valley of
many-changing charms till suddenly he comes
out on the wide, rocky moors, whose vastness
seems more lonely than the sea, and whose mys
teries have wrought an indescribable fear in the
minds of men. Barely a score of miles west of
Morwenstow, on the north coast, rises the stern
headland of Tintagel (or Dundagel; it is spelt in
many ways), which fame has made the birthplace
of Arthur, and hallowed and saddened with the
loves of Tristram and Iseult and King Mark.
It may almost be called the Bethlehem of Ro-
6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
mance. One approaches it to-day through a dark
ravine that drops precipitously to the sea ; and
standing on the shore, one looks up and sees that
the great cliff on the left has been rent asunder,
how long ago cannot be told, leaving a chasm
between the two ruined castles, in one of which
Ygerne shut herself up against the guilty passion
of Uther Pendragon, but in vain. Through that
riven gate the wet wind rises and the sound of
waves that are said never to be still ; and one
thinks of Hawker s noble image :
There stood Dundagel, throned : and the great sea
Lay, a strong vassal at his master s gate,
And, like a drunken giant, sobb d in sleep !
Or, if the mood of the waters is more boisterous,
it may be that Swinburne s swinging lines break
on the memory, as he describes the carrying
of Iseult, with the fire of the magic potion already
in her veins, up the steep path, while King Mark
and his knights cluster before the walls and look
down on the climbing procession:
So with loud joy and storm of festival
They brought the bride in up the towery way
That rose against the rising front of day,
Stair based on stair, between the rocks unhewn,
To those strange halls wherethrough the tidal tune
Rang loud or lower from soft or strengthening sea,
Tower shouldering tower, to windward and to lee,
With change of floors and stories, flight on flight,
That clomb and curled up to the crowning height
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 7
Whence men might see wide east and west in one
And on one sea waned moon and mounting sun.
And severed from the sea-rock s base, where stand
Some worn walls yet, they saw the broken strand,
The beachless cliff that in the sheer sea dips,
The sleepless shore inexorable to ships,
And the straight causeway s bare gaunt spine between
The sea-spanned walls and naked mainland s green.
Inland from Tintagel, over the Camel River,
stands Slaughter Bridge, where, according to
tradition, Arthur was defeated in that great battle
of the West, and where he got his death wound.
Further on lies Dozmar6 Pool, in the desolate
moorland. Here it was that the King, wander
ing with Merlin, beheld an arm clothed in white
samite rise out of the water, and in the hand the
mystical sword Kxcalibur. And down to this
same lake came Sir Bedivere from his stricken
lord and cast the blade from him; and afterward
appeared the barge bearing the three Queens, and
wafted the dying man to his rest. It is not hard
for a lover of poetry who stands on that shore
when the homeless breeze is astir, to hear in im
agination the cry that issued from the boat,
breaking into
an agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come, since the making of the world.
But to the unlettered moormen the wailing of the
storm is more likely to sound like the anguish of
8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
-P
a certain John Tregeagle of infamous memory,
whose ghost, for an ancient, cruel sin, is com
pelled forever to bale the water of Dozmare with
? pierced limpet shell; while Satan himself lurks
among the reeds and leaps, roaring, upon him if
for a moment he slackens in his task. The
country is haunted with these weary revenants
who keep alive the memory of old wrongs, and
not a few of Hawker s poems are a retelling of
the local legends of this sort.
It is natural that those who travelled thither
to gather up the traditions of the land should
have included the little hamlet of Morwen-
stow in their pilgrimage. Tennyson, as I have
said, did so in 1848, when he was working
at his Idyls of the King, and he has left in his
journal this brief record of the visit : "June 2nd
Took a gig to Rev. S. Hawker at Morwen-
stow, passing Comb valley; fine view over
sea; coldest manner of Vicar until I told my
name, then all heartiness. Walk on cliff with
him; told of shipwreck." The note is brief and
dry, as befits a great man writing of a lesser
lesser, although to some there is a note in Haw
ker s poem on the Sangraal which almost compen
sates for Tennyson s art and his finer graces of the
spirit. But the solitary parson made more of the
occasion and wrote out in his notebook one of
the most graphic accounts of the Laureate that
we possess. The passage is too long to repeat in
full, but part of it may serve as an example of
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 9
g|
the talent lavished by Hawker on letters and
memoranda that have reached the public only by
accident :
I found my guest at his entrance a tall swarthy
Spanish-looking man, with an eye like a sword. He
sate down and we conversed. I at once found myself
with no common mind. All poetry in particular he
seemed to use like household words, and as chance led
to the mention of Homer s picture of night he gave at
once a rendering simple and fine. " When the Sky is
broken up and the myriad Stars roll down, and the
Shepherd s heart is glad." It struck me that the trite
translation was about the reverse motion of this. We then
talked about Cornwall and King Arthur, my themes,
and I quoted Tennyson s fine acct. of the restoration of
Excalibur to the Lake. . . . [Follows the dialogue
through which the poet s name was revealed to the host,
and then] We went on our way to the rocks, and if the
converse could all be written down it would make, I
think, as nice a little book as Charlotte Elizabeth [Mrs.
Hawker] could herself have composed. All verses
all lands the secret history of many of his poems,
which I may not reveal but that which I can lawfully
relate I will. We talked of the sea, which he and I
equally adore. But as he told me strange to say Words
worth cannot bear its face. My solution was, that nursed
among the still waters with a mind as calm and equable
as his lakes the Scenery of the rough Places might be
too boisterous for the meek man s Soul. He agreed.
We discussed TIOVTIGOV rs Kvfj,a.TGav, etc., and I was
glad to find that he half agreed with a thought I have
long cherished, that these words relate to the Ear and
not to the Eye. [De Quincey, apparently unknown to
Hawker, had expressed the same fancy, and elsewhere
Hawker finds confirmation of it in a line of Catullus.]
IO SHELBURNE ESSAYS
He did not disdain aversion of mine made long
ago:
" Hark how old Ocean laughs with all his Waves."
Then, seated on the brow of the Cliff, with Dundagel
full in sight, he revealed to me the purpose of his jour
ney to the West. . . .
I lent him Books and MSS. about King Arthur, which
he carried off, and which I perhaps shall never see again.
Then evening fell. He arose to go ; and I agreed to
drive him on his way. He demanded a pipe, and pro
duced a package of very common shag. By great good
luck my Sexton had about him his own short black dud-
heen, which accordingly the minstrel filled and fired.
Wild language occupied the way, until we shook farewell
at Combe. This, said Tennyson, has indeed been a
day to be remembered, at least it is one which I shall never
again forget. The Bard is a handsome well-formed
man and tall, more like a Spaniard than an Englishman
black, long elflocks all round his face, mid which his
eyes not only shine but glare. His garments loose and
full, such as Bard beseems, and over all a large dark
Spanish Cloak. He speaks the languages both old and
new, and has manifestly a most bibliothec memory.
His voice is very deep, tuneful and slow an organ, not
a breath. His temper, which I tried, seemed very calm
His spirits very low. When I quoted " My May of
Life" [?] and again, " O never more on me," etc., he
said they too were his haunting words.
All which may seem to concern Tennyson
rather than the subject of this sketch, but there
is a fascination in these meetings of the poets
which always tempts one to linger; some breath
of larger life blows from them to us, and for the
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW I I
time makes us of their company. It is easy to
imagine ourselves visiting the same reliques of
the romantic past, and turning aside with Tenny
son to Morwenstow. Hedges line the road on
either side, and it has been observed that every
bush is bent away from the sea, so steady and ruth
less are the landward winds. There are no groves
save a plantation at the chapel, and here every
tree crouches imploringly from the same gales.
We may, perhaps, find the Vicar in his glebe,
which, as he himself has described it, occupies a
position of wild and singular beauty; its western
boundary is the sea, skirted by tall and tremen
dous cliffs, and near this brink, with the exquis
ite taste of ecclesiastical antiquity, is placed the
church. Chapel and glebe and parsonage, after
the ancient Celtic tradition, lie alone and separ
ated from the hamlet they serve. Despite the
" coldest manner " noted by Tennyson, the Vicar,
when his suspicions were not aroused, had usually
a hearty welcome for strangers, even an awkward
eagerness such as grows on one who is much
isolated. He stands erect in the field overseeing
the care of his garden or flocks, a tall, sturdy fig
ure in striking garb. He is blond with weather-
beaten cheeks, and long, light hair, which, in
later life, turns white. The head is intellectual,
but the eyes, to judge from the portraits, lack con
centration, and there is a kind of pudginess about
the mouth and chin, the result, it may be, of his
habit of taking opium. At a d stance he might
12 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
be thought a venerable old lady. He wears over
all, perhaps, a yellow vestment made of a poncho,
and beneath it a reddish-brown cassock ; " a
blushing brown, * he once said, " was the hue of
Our L,ady s hair, as typified in the stem of the
maiden-hair fern." Or, possibly, the cassock
has been supplanted by a long purple coat. Un
der this is a fisherman s blue jersey, as befits a
fisher of men ; and a small red cross marks the
spot where the spear entered the Saviour s side.
A carpenter s pencil, betokening the life at Naza
reth, dangles from his button-hole, and besides
this he is adorned with a medal of gold struck in
honour of the promulgation, in 1854, of the
Immaculate Conception. His trousers are of
some odd colour, navy blue or red brown ; black
he utterly eschews, and has stipulated that even
in death he shall be covered with a purple pall.
Crimson gloves cover his hands (he kept them on
even in church), and loose Hessian boots rise
from his feet. His hat is the fez of a Greek priest
or, by way of alternation, a broad-brimmed felt
of the favourite reddish-brown. The " pastoral
staff" is cross-handled to complete the symbolism
of his habiliments.
The costume is unusual, to say the least, but
let a man beware how he shows surprise and,
above all, let him avoid comment ; for our mild-
looking parson has a nimble wit and a cutting
tongue. More than one patronising stranger has
departed from this provincial nook utterly non-
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 13
plussed and chop-fallen. If you are yourself clad
in dignified black, and especially if you are a
dissenting clergyman, it may be as well to gaze
and pass on without salutation. One innocent
guest was regaled by Hawker with the story of a
preceding visitor who for his unlucky garb had
been pinned to the earth by the Vicar s pet stag
Robin. "This Evangelical," said Hawker,
" had a tail-coat ; he was dressed like an under
taker, sir. Once upon a time there was one like
him travelling in Kgypt, with a similar coat and a
tall hat ; and the Arabs pursued him, calling
him the father of saucepans, with a slit-tail. "
The guest to whom the story was told wore a
like garment, and found the situation somewhat
embarrassing.
The tame stag, with its proper hatred of Evan
gelicals, was not the only odd pet that made
favour in the Vicar s eyes. At one time he was
attended everywhere by an intelligent black pig,
and it is as like as not we shall meet him in his
glebe surrounded by a dog and nine or ten cats.
Both dog and cats are so indulged that they
accompany him to church and circle about him
while he performs the divine office. There is
altogether something uncanny in the familiarity
between this man and the wild beasts of earth
and air. " Beans and peas," he once wrote, " are
interdicted by the Jackdaws. We have sown
twice, and twice they have devoured them all.
And a Scarecrow put up by my old Man, was so
14 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
made up in my hat and broken Cassock that they
took it for me, and came around it, looking up to
be fed." All that we learn about him confirms
this impression of his almost mythical attachment
to the soil, and if we talk with him we shall dis
cover his mind to be a veritable storehouse of
Cornish history and legend.
Yet, as a matter of fact, he was not native to
the Duchy, but was born, in 1803, at Plymouth,
in the neighbouring county of Devon. Even as a
boy he made himself notorious for his droll
pranks and practical jokes. For several years he
attended the Cheltenham Grammar School at the
expense of an aunt, and while there published his
first book of poems, Tendrils, by Reuben. L,ater
in life he could not even recall the name of this
early venture. At the age of nineteen he was
matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, and
took his B.A. degree five years later. As a
scholar he seems not to have risen much above
the average, though he won the Newdigate with
a poem on Pompeii. The most notorious esca
pade of his college career was his marriage,
which, even without the embellishments added
by Mr. Baring-Gould, was singular enough. His
father had been a physician, but had abandoned
the profession for holy orders and was incumbent
of the living at Stratton, not far from Morwen-
stow. Robert had become acquainted with the
family of Colonel Wrey I ans, who dwelt in the
neighbourhood of this place, and in 1823 he mar-
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 15
ried one of the daughters, Charlotte. The bride,
whom he carried back with him to Oxford, was
forty-one, while he was still under twenty; but
the union turned out to be unusually happy. He
was until her death, in 1863 at the age of eighty,
a kind and devoted husband. During her last
illness he gave much of his time to reading aloud
to her, and it is said that after going through a
three-volume novel so great was his abstraction
that he knew no more of the book than if he had
never seen it. Her loss left him in a state of
pathetic loneliness and depression, but he soon
found consolation. In something less than two
years he took to himself a new wife, a Miss
Pauline Kuczynski, the daughter of a Polish exile
and an Englishwoman. As if to balance the dis
parity of the first marriage, the groom was now
sixty-one and the bride only twenty ; yet again
the venture proved in every way fortunate.
But this is to anticipate. On leaving Oxford
Hawker was appointed to the curacy of North
Tamerton, and after a brief period was removed
to Morwenstow, where he resided for forty years,
seldom crossing the boundary of his parish during
all that time. He became, as it were, the genius
loci^ in whom the spirit of the valley and sea
found expression. The very towns of Cornwall
near by seemed to him remote and set in some
unvisited province of the world. "No one can
even imagine the horror it is to me," he once
wrote to a friend, after a residence of twenty-eight
1 6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
years, " to look forward to the journey from
hence to Stratton to attend the Confirmation.
The streets, the strange faces, the unusual crowd
the Salutations in the market-place are to me, a
shy, nervous man, an actual trial and a burthen
to bear. When I had to attend at the Archdea
con s Visitation at L,aunceston, twenty-five miles
off, every year, I could not sleep for long nights
before, and the faint and sickening sensation I
felt at the aspect of the Town was humiliating
and depressing indeed." It was one of the
whims of a more eccentric power than himself
that he should after all have died away from
home. Morwenstow had not hitherto enjoyed a
resident vicar for a century, and Hawker found
the church dilapidated, and the people, rude and
ignorant peasants and seamen for the most part,
unattached. He set himself diligently to right
these conditions, and by persistence and a kind
of rough wisdom succeeded. To restore the
church, whose legendary history appealed to his
fancy, he drew heavily on the small fortune of
his wife, laying up for himself endless debts and
difficulties in the future. He also built a vicar
age, in which he did not fail to embody some of
his own original notions. " The kitchen chim
ney," he explained, "perplexed me very much,
till I bethought me of my mother s tomb ; and
there it is, in its exact shape and dimensions."
His yearly revenue was ^365, as he announced
in an inscription placed over the front door:
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW Ij
A House, a Glebe, a Pound a Day ;
A Pleasant Place to Watch and Pray.
Be true to Church Be kind to Poor,
O Minister ! forevermore.
In the solitude of this haunted land his mind
brooded on its own fancies until the actual and
the visionary lost their sharp distinction for him.
Probably the habit of opium-taking strengthened
the reality of this dream-world. As a conse
quence, in dealing with him it is always difficult
to know what should be attributed to religion
and what belongs to superstition and pure char
latanry. When he wrote of Joseph of Arima-
thea s Syrian home those two perfect lines,
Young men, that no one knew, went in and out,
With a far look in their eternal eyes,
he was merely repeating what he held to be his
own experience. So real would he have these
angelic visitants to be that he impressed on
children s minds the fact that they were wrongly
depicted with wings. It is easy, in dealing with
such a character, to write down the word dupe
or hypocrite, but who shall presume to draw the
boundary between these morbid states and the
profounder conviction of celestial communion ?
And has not the least religious of poets said it, Et
sunt commercia cali f l
1 In the year 1895 Lionel Johnson wrote this sonnet
on Hawker of Morwenstow^ alluding to his death-bed
conversion and to his visionary life :
2
1 8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
In other matters his supernaturalism assumed
a grosser form. He had charms for the evil eye
and for inflictions of the body. He recognised a
witch by the five black spots placed diagonally
under her tongue, like those made in the feet of
the swine by the entrance of the devils at Gad-
ara. Elemental demons and emissaries of Satan
beset his path, and it is not unusual to come
upon such a note as this in his letters: " As I
entered the Gulph between the Vallies to-day, a
Storm leaped from the Sea and rushed at me
roaring I recognised a Demon and put Carrow
into a gallop and so escaped. But it was perilous
work. There once I saw a Brownie; and Thence
at Night the Northern Glances Gleam." He
had a philosophy for these apparitions and con
ceived a medium midway between matter and
"Strong Shepherd of thy sheep, pasturers of the sea ;
Far on the Western marge, thy passionate Cornish land !
Oh, that from out thy Paradise thou could st thine hand
Reach forth to mine, and I might tell my love to thee !
For one the faith, and one the joy, of thee and me,
Catholic faith and Celtic joy : I understand
Somewhat, I too, the Messengers from Sion strand ;
The voices and the visions of the Mystery.
Ah, not the Chaunt alone was thine : thine too the Quest !
And at the last the Sangraal of the Paschal Christ
Flashed down its fair red Glory to those dying eyes :
They closed in death, and opened on the Victim s Breast.
Now, while they look for ever on the Sacrificed,
Remember, how thine ancient race in twilight lies I"
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 19
Spirit for which he coined the outlandish name
of " Numyne." This was nothing less than
the " sacramental element of the Shechinah," the
" Mater et Filia Dei " of the Rabbins, the " at
mosphere of the angels," a blend of God and
man, and a dozen other quaint conceptions jum
bled together from the luminiferous ether of
science and the aura anim<z of the mediaeval
schoolmen. Yet if he could be solemn over his
beliefs one moment, he could treat them as a jest
the next. He is known to have pointed out with
apparent seriousness the haunt of mermaids to a
stranger, but Mr. Baring- Gould also tells how,
when a young man, he decked himself in sea
weeds and an oilskin wrap and, so disguised, sat
on a rock in the moonlight and sang, to the great
wonderment of the neighbourhood. Undoubtedly
there was not a little of this deliberate attempt at
mystification in the minor eccentricities of the
reverend gentleman, and Superstition entwined
herself cunningly with Charlatanry, as is the
custom with those foster sisters.
It is not to be supposed that any great and
accomplished work should proceed from such a
life and character. He was, indeed, not without
natural ambition, and in his youth had made a
brave effort to imitate Byron and other reigning
favourites of the day. But as time slipped by and
he became more and more involved in the cares
and solitudes of his parish, he realised with some
bitterness that the race of fame was not for him.
2O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
His letters contain pathetic allusions to the in
numerable memorandum books into which he
had poured his scattered thoughts and which he
hoped might one day be read and printed as
the Fragments of a broken mind. " The
phrase evidently flattered his vanity, and came
up for use more than once ; it had occurred in a
lyric written as early as 1840 :
All, all is gone no longer roll
Vision and dream around my soul :
But, in their stead, float down the wind
These fragments of a broken mind.
And in the noblest of his poems he put into the
mouth of King Arthur the expression of his own
futile doom, mingled with laments for an erring
land. Had he always, or often, written as mag
nificently as this, there would be no need to make
allowance for his shortcomings :
Ha ! Sirs ye seek a noble crest to-day,
To win and wear the starry Sangraal,
The link that binds to God a lonely land.
Would that my arm went with you, like my heart !
But the true shepherd must not shun the fold :
For in this flock are crouching grievous wolves,
And chief among them all, my own false kin.
Therefore I tarry by the cruel sea,
To hear at eve the treacherous mermaid s song,
And watch the wallowing monsters of the wave,
Mid all things fierce, and wild, and strange, alone !
Ah ! native Cornwall ! throned upon the hills,
Thy moorland pathways worn by Angel feet,
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 21
Thy streams that march in music to the sea
Mid Ocean s merry noise, his billowy laugh !
Ah me ! a gloom falls heavy on my soul
The birds that sung to me in youth are dead ;
I think, in dreamy vigils of the night,
It may be God is angry with my land,
Too much athirst for fame, too fond of blood ;
And all for earth, for shadows, and the dream
To glean an echo from the winds of song !
It is the cry of a mau who feels his powers
caught in some spell of impotence, who knows
there are great things to do and great labourers
starting for the field, while he lingers behind in
a lesser duty and a lonelier dream. But his
worst fear was baseless :
I would not be forgotten in this land.
No ; as that strange West Country is trodden
into conformity with the routine of civilisation,
he is likely to become better and more distinctly
known as the personification of a semi-mythical
past. No other writer can supplant him. For
we must recognise that there are two kinds of\^X
poetical genius, the essential and the contingent,
and that their claims on our memory are as
diverse as their faculties. Nor is this division
quite coterminous with that into major and minor
poets. Keats and Wordsworth both belong to
the major group, yet one is essentially, whereas
the other is in large measure contingently, poetic.
We judge the work of Keats in itself, and its
value rises or sinks purely in proportion to its
own intrinsic interest ; it would be almost the
22 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
same to us if we had never heard the writer s
name. On the contrary, no small portion of
Wordsworth s verse, and that not always the
least cherished, derives its weight and signifi
cance from what we know of the poet s own
character and of his philosophy. It is the voice
of the High Priest of Nature to which we are lis
tening, and behind his words is the authority of a
grave teacher. Take away the memory of that
systematic life with its associations, forget the
hallowed beauty of the Lake Country, and how
much of Wordsworth s celebrity would be an
nulled! Now it is just these contingent qualities
that render even the minor verse of our Cornish
Vicar precious. You may read his book of
poems alone with comparative coldness ; but first
go through Mr. Byles s admirable but rather
bulky memoir, read Hawker s own prose
sketches, steep your mind in the history and
topography of Cornwall, and then turn once more
to the poetry. The difference of its effect will be
startling.
A specific example will make clear what is
meant by the contingent interest of Hawker s
work. One of his shorter ballads is founded on
the story told him of the death of a noted
wrecker, Mawgan of Melhuach :
T was a fierce night when old Mawgan died,
Men shuddered to hear the rolling tide:
The wreckers fled fast from the awful shore,
They had heard strange voices amid the roar.
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 23
"Out with tlie boat there," some one cried,
" Will he never come ? We shall lose the tide:
His berth is trim and his cabin stored,
He s a weary long time coming on board."
The old man struggled upon the bed:
He knew the words that the voices said;
Wildly he shriek d as his eyes grew dim,
"He was dead ! he was dead ! when I buried him."
Hark yet again to the devilish roar !
" He was nimble once with a ship on shore;
Come ! come ! old man, tis a vain delay,
We must make the offing by break of day."
Hard was the struggle, but at the last,
With a stormy pang old Mawgan pass d,
And away, away, beneath their sight,
Gleam d the red sail at pitch of night.
The workmanship of the piece is sufficiently
good, and if read without preparation it might
pass as a fair specimen of the school which pro
duced Southey s Old Woman of Berkeley and a
host of similar ballads of the time. lyike South
ey s work, it cannot be classed with such a poem
as Keats s La Belle Dame Sans Merti, which
depends for its effect on emotions that lurk in
every human breast and hence requires no
realism behind its supernatural imagery ; but,
when properly considered, it also differs as radi
cally from the spurious school which it seems to
resemble. Southey s lines are clever and catch
the fancy, and nothing more ; they have no back
ground of real terror. On the contrary, the full
24 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
effect of Hawker s ballad is to be got by reading
it repeatedly and lingeringly, and by allowing
the memories of the poet s own experiences to
blend with the impression of the verse. Gradu
ally, as at the sound of a spell, the memories of
the sea about those pitiless coasts arise in the
mind. We recall the legends of great storms and
terrible wrecks from the days of the Spanish
Armada to the present, and the wild life of the
Western men, which had not wholly ceased in
Hawker s own time. So constant is the peril
of the ocean that even to-day a child in these
towns is rebuked if he brings to the table a loaf
of bread resting on its cut side it looks too much
like a vessel floating bottom upwards. But if
the waves take away, they also restore, and the
history of that coast is a long record of heroic
fighting with England s enemies and of no less
ruthless smuggling and wrecking. In one of the
chapters of his Footprints in Far Cornwall, Haw
ker relates with extraordinary vividness his own
labours in taming the habits of these wreckers,
who did not scruple to allure vessels on the rocks
with false lights. It was reckoned an omen of
ill-luck to restore life to the bodies washed ashore,
as he once learned emphatically from his own
servant ; and horrible tales were abroad of occa
sions when the murderous waves were not swift
enough in their work for these ghouls of the sea.
To be awakened at midnight when the wind was
screeching like a lost soul, to clamber down the
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 25
precipitous cliff some three hundred feet with the
spray lashing about him, to labour in the surf for
the rescue of a forlorn ship, was an adventure
that tried the nerves and troubled the imagina
tion. Too often only the lifeless bodies came to
his hands, but these at least he saved from dese
cration and buried with decent ceremony.
There had been more than one Mawgan in his
parish. Just before Hawker s time a stranger,
whose origin and end were wrapped in obscurity,
gained the sobriquet of Cruel Coppinger for his
lawless practices. His life and mysterious disap
pearance furnished Hawker with one of his best
prose sketches, and the same character figures in
Mr. Baring- Gould s In the Roar of the Sea. Still
more like the fate of Mawgan was the story sent
to the Times by a resident of the district during
Hawker s incumbency. The storms had been
unusually severe, and one night a cloud filled
with a fiery glow was seen by many of the sailors
gliding up the valley to the house of a notorious
merchant and wrecker, and passing inland along
the glen until it reached a church where his
family lay buried. Hawker himself half, or
wholly, believed the tale, and it evidently im
pressed him deeply. His own knowledge of the
event he writes in a letter :
On Sunday evening this day week went out on
the cliffs, and was seen watching the sea, it is supposed
for Wreck. He returned quite well and went to bed.
At 5 in the morning his Servants heard him walk about
26 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
his room. Then his footsteps ceased. He had returned
to bed. At Six O Clock a vast roll of the tide came up
the Harbour, and one of his Vessels broke loose. The
Servants went up to tell him knocked no answer
again silence frightened, they went in, and there he
lay quite dead, His head upon his hand. Ever since that
day it is certain the storms have been continual again
and again with violence, and while I now write my Table
trembles with the wind. All this is awful. The Bnemy
of Man, j-ou know, is called the Prince of the Powers of
the Air.
But it was something more than superstition
that supported the Vicar in his long years of trib
ulation. Above all these wandering fires glowed
the steady light of faith, and he is one of that
succession of clergymen, beginning with the
saintly George Herbert, who from the heart of
their isolated parishes have enriched English
poetry with a body of pure and high meditation.
I do not know how it may be with others, but
with me the knowledge of Hawker s faithful
service, and of the ancient traditions of Celtic and
Saxon saints amidst which he lived, lends a
peculiar charm to stanzas that might otherwise
appear almost commonplace. I discover this
charm in such lines as these :
Come, then, sad river, let our footsteps blend
Onward, by silent bank, and nameless stone :
Our years began alike, so let them end,
We live with many men, we die alone ;
and I find something quite different from the
familiar cant of piety in his poem to Monvcnna
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 1 J
Statio, that is, as he interprets with quaint ped
antry," The Stow, or the Place, of St. Morwenna ;
hence the Breviate, hodie^ Morwenstow :
My Saxon shrine ! the only ground
Wherein this weary heart hath rest :
What years the birds of God have found
Along thy walls their sacred nest !
The storm the blast the tempest shock
Have beat upon those walls in vain ;
She stands a daughter of the rock
The changeless God s eternal fane.
Huge, mighty, massive, hard, and strong,
Were the choice stones they lifted then :
The vision of their hope was long,
They knew their God, those faithful men.
They pitch d no tent for change or death,
No home to last man s shadowy day ;
There ! there ! the everlasting breath,
Would breathe whole centuries away.
See now, along that pillar d aisle,
The graven arches, firm and fair :
They bend their shoulders to the toil,
And lift the hollow roof in air.
A sign ! beneath the ship we stand,
The inverted vessel s arching side ;
Forsaken when the fisher-band
Went forth to sweep a mightier tide.
Pace we the ground ! our footsteps tread
A cross the builder s holiest form :
That awful couch, where once was shed
The blood, with man s forgiveness warm.
28 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
And here, just where His mighty breast
Throbb d the last agony away,
They bade the voice of worship rest,
And white-robed Levites pause and pray.
How all things glow with life and thought,
Where er our faithful fathers trod !
The very ground with speech is fraught,
The air is eloquent of God.
In vain would doubt or mockery hide
The buried echoes of the past ;
A voice of strength, a voice of pride,
Here dwells amid the storm and blast.
To understand Hawker s solemn reverence for
the temple and saint which he served, one must
go back to the days of the early Celtic domina
tion. It was the custom then for a holy man to
choose some bit of land, or llan, and there fast
and pray for forty days as a sign of possession.
After that the sacred precinct was his forever ;
he did not pass away, but abode as the guardian
and owner of the edifice which might be erected
to his name. To a man of Hawker s imaginative
temperament, the patron of his church was a liv
ing presence, listening to the words and following
with spirit eyes the acts of his worship. But his
attempt to bind the present and the past together
in a kind of reverent imitation did not end with
his ministrations at the altar. " Cornwall," as
it has been said, " was the Thebaid of the
Welsh," and the relics of the rude stone cells still
exist where these anchorites of the moors dwelt
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 29
in solitary contemplation. As a young man,
before he had come to Morwenstow, Hawker had,
after the manner of these exiled hermits, built
himself a perch on the cliff near Whitstone,
where he might be alone with his thoughts, and,
as he would say solemnly, " with God." And
later, again, at Morwenstow, out of the timbers
cast up by wrecks, he constructed a hut, from
which, looking out over the sea far below, like
another Odysseus on his wave-beaten island, he
beheld visions of a longed-for home beyond the
sunset. One may see a picture of this cell in Mr.
Byles s Life a little chamber half-buried in the
side of the steep heathery hill, with a mound of
earth over the roof. There is no window or
other outlet besides the door which opens seaward
a mere covering from the inclement weather.
Here, during the period of his widowhood, Haw
ker composed that fragment of the work which
he had long contemplated, The Quest of the San-
graal; and here a friend tells of visiting him one
wild evening when the sun had gone down like a
ball of red-hot iron into the deep, and of hearing
him recite from memory the completed canto.
It is a poem whose power grows upon you with
acquaintance, and upon it Hawker s fame as an
artist must ultimately hang. So much of his
own life is in it that I have already quoted a
number of the lines to illustrate the various
phases of his character, the vision of the young
men with a far look in their eternal eyes, the
3O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
image of the sea sobbing like a drunken giant
below Tintagel on its throne, the lament of
Arthur abiding at home while his knights went
out on the sacred Quest. At the very opening of
the poem there is a reminiscence of the old Celtic
hermits, not without allusion to the spot where,
in imitation of their withdrawal from the world,
the poet himself retired for prayer and composi
tion :
They had their lodges in the wilderness,
Or built them cells beside the shadowy sea,
And there they dwelt with angels, like a dream :
So they unroll d the volume of the Book,
And fill d the fields of the Evangelist
With antique thoughts, that breath d of Paradise.
And the subject of the lay the sending out of
the four chief knights to the Bast and West and
North and South in search of the vanished cup
is nothing less than the regeneration which was
to come to England when men should once more
reverence as in old days the mystic chalice of
the Communion. Hawker s work was, in this
respect, a part of that awakening of the religious
imagination which followed the Tractarian
Movement. It belongs to the same sacramenta-
rian impulse which produced John Inglesant,
although, like Shorthouse, he never identified
himself with the armies of High or Low Church,
while, unlike Shorthouse, he was, through his
reverence of the priestly function, brought at the
end into the Roman fold.
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 3!
But the more inevitable comparison, or con
trast, is with that Idyl of the King which deals
with the same Quest. We have seen Tennyson
and Hawker looking out together toward Tin-
tagel and talking over the deeds of the King who
issued from that fortress. It is worth while to
read in succession the results of their conversa
tion, if only to learn how the poetic pleasure may
vary in kind as well as in degree ; the two poems
are a notable illustration of that distinction be
tween the essential and the contingent. So far,
indeed, is Tennyson s rhapsody of The Holy
Grail removed from the accessories of time and
place and individual experience that to some it
may seem to rise perilously near to the inane.
Instead of Hawker s account of the knights set
ting forth from the actual Tintagel, " where gate
and bulwark darken o er the sea," Tennyson
carries us to the fantastic hall that Merlin raised
at Camelot, with its " four great zones of sculp
ture, set betwixt With many a mystic symbol."
The landscape, from the first description of the
" April morn That puffd the swaying branches
into smoke," is in a region that no eye has beheld
and no human foot has ever trod. And the sea
it is not on the Severn shores that Lancelot
encountered that darkening storm :
So loud a blast along the shore and sea,
Ye could not hear the waters for the blast,
Tho heapt in mounds and ridges all the sea
32 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Drove like a cataract, and all the sand
Swept like a river, and the clouded heavens
Were shaken with the motion and the sound.
And as the time and place, so is the action.
The popular tradition, or legend, has evaporated
into a vision of the poet s own brain which no
man ever believed or could believe to be historic.
There is not the slightest illusion in the reader s
mind that these are real knights who are seeking
a vessel supposed somewhere still to be hidden
in the earth ; it is characteristic of Tennyson s
Arthur that he laments the Quest as a kind
of ruinous madness sent among his followers,
whereas in Hawker s poem he only regrets that
he himself is restrained from the holy adventure.
Hawker wrote as a Churchman, having his eye
on an actual state of England in the past and
seeing in prophecy a corresponding regeneration.
Place by the side of those farewell lines which I
have already quoted from Hawker,
Ha ! Sirs ye seek a noble crest to-day,
these words in which the Arthur of the Idyls ex
plains his home-staying and his blindness to the
vision. He, too, is a King who cannot leave his
allotted field until his work be done,
but, being done,
Let visions of the night or of the day
Come, as they will ; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 33
This air that smites his forehead is not air
But vision yea, his very hand and foot
In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One
Who rose again : ye have seen what ye have seen.
Is it not plain that we are here rapt from this
earth into the land of the spirit? It is even safe,
I think, to say that this song of The Holy Grail
is the most purely spiritual poem in the language.
I would not tarnish its beauty with a clumsy
paraphrase of its sense, for, indeed, the value of
this mystical music lies entirely in the spontan
eous echo stirred in the reader s breast. But
clearly it is, in a general way, an expression of
that hungering after the ideal which exists in
every human being, obscured for the most part
by the necessities of the day, and to those even
who hearken to its summons speaking so vaguely
that all but one or two go out to " follow wander
ing fires, lost in the quagmire."
There is nothing of this universal meaning in
Hawker s lines, and they are little concerned
with that inner truth which is essential to the
human spirit, although by most of us so dimly
perceived. But they have their great compensa
tion. It is not necessary to explain once more
how vividly the scenes of that poem reproduce in
imagination the particular land in which the poet
dwelt, and how perfectly its theme blends to
gether the legendary exploits of King Arthur s
3
34 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
knights with the poet s own religious experience
and with the traditions of the church which he
served. It is, indeed, not unlikely that many
readers will feel more at home in these passing
but very tangible moods of religion than in the
ethereal vision of Tennyson, whose truth corre
sponds to no realities of outer life. And if
Hawker s language lacks the pure and essential
beauty of Tennyson s, there is nevertheless a
certain fine sonorousness in his measure, and
here and there a verse rings almost with the
gravity of Lycidas, where Milton in like measure
bewails the degeneracy of the land. These may
be contingent qualities and may demand for their
full enjoyment a special knowledge of the poet s
life, but they are genuine and have their precious
reward. I have quite failed in this essay if my
aim has not been evident to spare the impatient
reader as much as possible of this preliminary
labour and to shorten the way to his journey s
end.
FANNY BURNEY
better to begin with this English
maiden name, with its pleasant familiarity, than
to adopt the stately Madame D Arblay which
stands at the head of Mr. Austin Dobson s superb
edition of the Diary and Letters* For however
much the form of this minute self- revelation may
remind us of the famous French diaries, in sub
stance it is singularly English, and on that qual
ity not a little of its interest depends, as well as
its very grave defects. There is, too, something
incongruous in the very sound of a name which
did not belong to the writer until she was forty-
one. By a kind of unconscious selection the
memory of our great friends and mentors of the
1 Diary and Letters of Madame D Arblay (1778-1840).
As edited by her niece, Charlotte Barrett. With Preface
and Notes by Austin Dobson. In six volumes. New
York : The Macmillan Co., 1904-05. This is properly a
continuation of The Early Diary of Frances Burney
(1768-78], with a Selection from her Correspondence, and
from the Journals of her Sisters, Susan and Charlotte
Burney. Edited by Annie Raine Ellis. Two volumes.
London, 1889. The eight volumes together thus extend
over a period of seventy-three years.
35
36 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
past fixes itself at a certain age, and it is only
with an effort that we can picture them to ourselves
as younger or older than this arbitrary image.
Of Miss Burney s contemporaries, Johnson we
always see as grave and wearing the years of
authority; can any one honestly say the legend
of the young poet and hack writer strolling
through Grub Street with a hungry friend has any
meaning to him? Walpole remains in the middle
years of life with the cynicism on his face that
comes when youth has passed and the powers of
manhood still remain. But Fanny is a girl to
the end. At the close of her Journal we read of
her as an old woman, alone in her London house,
bending over the mass of papers left by her father
and sorting them out with tired fingers, but the
story leaves us incredulous. The stiffness of lan
guage which has gradually benumbed her style,
we take as the pedantry of untried youth, and
the face of the writer persists in wearing the mo
bile features so familiar in the portrait made by
her artist cousin. 1 The brow keeps its breadth
and smoothness; the eyes still look out with the
same mixture of large, quizzical humour and
near-sighted abstraction they were " greenish-
grey," she says, like those of a dove ; and the
bow of the mouth is not unstrung, but arched as
This portrait, known so well from engravings, may
not be of Miss Burney after all. Though painted in 1782,
when she was thirty years old, it has a marked appear
ance of youth.
FANNY BURNEY 37
if holding back the sly, swift satire. She was a
small, frail body, we know, and not handsome;
yet men felt a singular attraction in her, and
women did not withhold their love, and we who
read her life cannot think of her as anything but
winsome and unhandseled by time.
It was, perhaps, under this impression of her
inherent youth that Mr. Dobson has prefixed to
his volumes the quaint preface which Fanny
wrote down at the age of fifteen, when she had
made a solemn holocaust of her childish attempts
at literature, and was beginning, instead, the
record of her own life :
To have some account of my thoughts, manners, ac
quaintance, and actions, when the hour arrives at which
time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which
induces me to keep a Journal a Journal in which, I
must confess, my every thought must open my whole
heart.
But a thing of the kind ought to be addressed to some
body I must imagine myself to be talking talking to
the most intimate of friends to one in whom I should
take delight in confiding, and feel remorse in conceal
ment ; but who must this friend be? To make choice of
one in whom I can but halfrz\y, would be to frustrate
entirely the intention of my plan. The only one I could
wholly, totally confide in, lives in the same house with
me, and not only never has, but never will^ leave me
one secret to tell her. [Her "heart s beloved sister,
Susanna," we may suppose.] To whom then mus* 1 dedi
cate my wonderful, surprising, and interesting adven
tures? to whom dare I reveal my private opinion of
my nearest relations ? my secret thoughts of my dearest
38 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
friends? my own hopes, fears, reflections, and dislikes?
Nobody.
To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal ! since to
Nobody can I be wholly unreserved, to Nobody can I
reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with
the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting
sincerity, to the end of my life ! . . .
And to this genial confidant the early entries
were very properly directed. But with the part
of the Diary re-edited by Mr. Dobson, that begin
ning with the publication of Evelina in 1778
and extending to her death, comes a change
which makes this preface no longer appropriate,
except as indicating those girlish traits that we
choose to associate with her name. Most of the
record is now addressed to Susan or to her friend,
Mr. Crisp, and gradually we become aware that
she has in mind the larger public who some day
may be curious about her surprising and inter
esting adventures. She was a true prophet in
looking forward to the days when time should
be more nimble than memory, for in old age she
read over the record with great care, blotting out
what might give offence if printed, adding here
and there explanatory comments, and leaving a
mass of correspondence for her executors to
weave into the narrative. Her Nobody develops
first into a chosen circle of listeners, and then
into a public as gigantic as Polyphemus himself.
There are thus three distinct elements in the
Diary whose intermingling may add not a little
FANNY BURNEY 39
to its irregular charm. Yet it is a pity, on the
whole, that the thought of this final audience
ever entered her brain, for it led to a circum
spection and to erasures which have probably
rendered the limitations of her mind unneces
sarily obvious.
But of these it will be sufficient to speak later
on. Just now I should like, if possible, to convey
to the reader something of the exhilaration which
I have myself brought from this renewed ac
quaintance with so full and sprightly a book.
I understand, of course, the difficulty of that task.
To those who do not already know the Diary
what notion can be given in a brief essay of that
overflowing story of sixty- two years, and to
those who have read it how dry and inadequate
any summary will seem ! Yet, with the latter
class, at least, there is a ground of assurance. It
is good to recall in solitude the speech and acts
of a dear friend ; it is good also to sit with one
who has known him, and to talk over his gener
ous ways. In that interchange of memories the
striking events of his life come out more promin
ently, and his clever words tickle the ears again
as if newly spoken : we pass from one point to
another of his character as if, in journeying over
a fair country, we were carried by some seven-
league boots from hilltop to hilltop, with no
care for the humbler valleys where the prospect
is concealed. Such a dialogue, indeed, I should
wish these essays to be a dialogue in which the
40 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
reader plays an equal part with the writer in
cherishing the memory of the great moments and
persons of our literature.
And it is on one of these eminences of her
career that we meet with the subject of this essay
at the opening of the present Diary. "This
year," it begins, " was ushered in by a grand
and most important event ! At the latter end of
January the literary world was favoured with the
first publication of the ingenious, learned, and
most profound Fanny Burney ! I doubt not but
this memorable affair will, in future times, mark
the period whence chronologers will date the
zenith of the polite arts in this island! This
admirable authoress has named her most elabo
rate performance, Evelina: or, a Young Lady s En
trance into the World. Fanny was at this time
in her twenty-sixth year, and had already made
her own entrance into the world in a guarded
fashion. She was born at King s Lynn, in
1752, the second daughter and third child of a
family of eight, nearly all of whom in one way
and another showed marked talent. The father,
Dr. Charles Burney, was a busy and noted musi
cian, who was engaged in giving lessons among
the fashionable world from nine in the morning
until nine at night, and who still found time to
write, with Fanny s help as amanuensis, an
elaborate History of Music, and other minor
works. After various migrations, he had settled
down in Condon at No. i St. Martin s Street,
FANNY BURNEY 41
attracted thither, it seems, by the fact that the
house had once been the residence of Isaac New
ton, and still showed on the roof a small, wooden
tower, with leaden roof and diminutive fireplace,
which was supposed to have served the great
astronomer as observatory. Dr. Burney himself
never used the closet for star-gazing, although
he was a devoted student of that science, and
even wrote a learned poem thereupon. It seems
to have been left by common consent to Fanny
for a retreat, where, like a very amiable and very
feminine Teufelsdrockh, she might lift herself
above the world, and indulge unmolested in the
incorrigible family propensity for scribbling.
And it is well for us that such a place of retire
ment was allowed her, for in the hubbub below
stairs she would have found it as hard to conduct
her journals as Clarissa or any other badgered
heroine of the age. Besides the troop of brothers
and sisters, there was a stream of company pass
ing through the lower rooms. Hither came
Garrick, the irrepressible, turning the stairs and
chambers of the house into a Drury L,ane with
his droll mimicry; famous singers, the wonderful
Agujari and others, sang here before titled and
untitled guests, before gay fops and grave gentle
men ; Count Orloff blazed here in all the splendour
of his jewels, and kindly displayed to the inquisi
tive ladies the portrait of the imperial mistress
whom he was reputed to have served too well ;
Bruce, the Abyssinian King, threatened the ceil-
42 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
ings with his gigantic stature; Omai, the South
Sea Islander, here made his "remarkable good
bows," clad, unfortunately, in merely English
velvet, but, fortunately, not in his Otaheite gar
ments, which would have been, says the diarist
naively, "in every respect improper for Eng
land"; and by his side Hawkesworth might be
heard uttering solemn platitudes in book lan
guage, amid the chattering platitudes of less
pretentious talkers altogether a motley society
that gathered about the celebrated musician and
his clever daughters. As for Fanny, the least
promising of the flock, she sat demurely and
watched it all, saying little, but launching now
and then just the right word, and seeing little
with her near-sighted eyes (indeed, all her writ
ing is singularly lacking in visual description),
but somehow fixing in her mind the peculiarity
and whimsical trait of every guest. That, with
the more bourgeois connections of which less is
said, gave sufficient preparation for writing a
novel which was to keep Burke from his bed all
night, was to captivate Dr. Johnson, and take
London society by storm.
In some ways the first chapters of the Diary,
in which the subject of Evelina predominates,
are the most entertaining of all. The author s
transitions from modesty to innocent vanity, her
freshness and vivacity, make the record read
like the scenes of a fine comedy. Though the
book was dedicated to her father, he was one of
FANNY BURNEY 43
the last to discover its authorship, and from his
lips the knowledge passed to " Daddy" Crisp,
her mentor and friend of Chessington, than
whom no more tantalising figure exists in Eng
lish letters:
Sunday evening as I was going into my father s room,
I heard him say: "The variety of the characters the
variety of the scenes and the language why, she has
had very little education, but what she has given herself,
less than any of the others ! " and Mr. Crisp exclaimed,
" Wonderful it s wonderful ! "
I now found what was going forward, and therefore
deemed it most fitting to decamp.
About an hour after, as I was passing through the hall,
I met my daddy (Crisp). His face was all animation and
archness ; he doubled his fist at me, and would have
stopped me, but I ran past him into the parlour.
Before supper, however, I again met him, and he
would not suffer me to escape ; he caught both my hands,
and looked as if he would have looked me through, and
then exclaimed, "Why, you little hussy, you young
devil! An t you ashamed to look me in the face, you
Evelina, you ! Why, what a dance you have led me,
about it ! Young friend, indeed ! Oh, you little hussy,
what tricks have you served me ! "
And then comes the visit to Streatham, the
residence of Mr. Thrale, the brewer, and his wife,
where Dr. Johnson made himself so thoroughly
at home that nearly a century later the ink spots
might be seen which he had dabbled over the
floor and walls of his two rooms. The burly,
melancholy, tender-hearted dictator forms, so to
speak, the chorus of all these early chapters. No
44 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
wonder that his approbation almost crazed Fanny
with agreeable surprise, so she says, and gave
her such a flight of spirits that she danced a jig
to Mr. Crisp, without any preparation, music, or
explanation to that good man s no small amaze
ment and diversion. Forty-eight years afterward
she still remembered the escapade and told Sir
Walter Scott that the scene of it was a mulberry
tree in the garden at Chessington happy Sir
Walter, twice happy Mr. Crisp ! She no sooner
reaches Streatham than Mrs. Thrale takes her
into the library and tells her how they had dis
cussed the book at supper the day before, and
how Dr. Johnson had declared * Mr. Smith his
favourite character, and had acted him all even
ing, had even repeated whole scenes by heart.
At dinner she sees the great man himself, and
speaks of his cruel infirmities with reverence.
He sits by her, and in the middle of the dinner
asks Mrs. Thrale what is in some little pies near
him :
" Mutton," answered she, "sol don t ask you to eat
any, because I know you despise it."
"No, madam, no," cried he ; "I despise nothing that
is good of its sort ; but I am too proud now to eat of it.
Sitting by Miss Burney makes me very proud to-day ! "
"Miss Burney," said Mrs. Thrale, laughing, "you
must take great care of your heart if Dr. Johnson attacks
it ; for I assure you he is not often successless."
Dr. Johnson s manner of flirting was a little
heavy, perhaps, but it was certainly flattering.
FANNY BURNEY 45
He mixed the real world and the world of Eve
lina up in a way that must have turned the
author s head, and few of the many passing
guests escaped without suffering some humorous
comparison with the Branghtons, or Mme. Duval,
or M. Dubois.
One of the benefits derived from this acquaint
ance with the Thrales was the opportunity it
gave Fanny to travel and pick up odd characters
for enlarging the scope of her satire. Brighton
was particularly rich in these eccentricities, and
not the least of them was a certain General
B y, with his egregious vanity, his absurd
set speeches, his violent antipathy to physicians
( " those Gallipot fellows ! " ) and his quickly
spent pedantry. For neatness in genre painting
not many scenes in the Diary can surpass this ;
it reads like a page of Crabbe set in prose :
Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Selwyn, Mr. Tidy, and Mr. Thrale
seated themselves to whist ; the rest looked on : but the
General, as he always does, took up the newspaper, and,
with various comments, made aloud, as he went on read
ing to himself, diverted the whole company. Now he
would cry, " Strange ! strange that ! " presently, "What
stuff! I don t believe a word of it ! "a little after, " Oh,
Mr. Bate, I wish your ears were cropped ! " then, "Ha !
ha ! ha ! funnibus ! funnibus ! indeed ! " and, at last, in
a great rage, he exclaimed, "What a fellow is this, to
presume to arraign the conduct of persons of quality ! "
Having diverted himself and us in this manner, till he
had read every column methodically through, he began
all over again, and presently called out, " Ha ! ha ! here s
46 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
a pretty thing ! " and then, in a plaintive voice, lan
guished out some wretched verses. .
A few minutes after he began puffing and blowing,
with rising indignation, and, at last, cried out, " What a
fellow is this ! I should not be at all surprised if General
Burgoyne cut off both his ears !
"You have great variety there," cried Mr. Hamilton
drily; "but I think, Mr. B y, you have read us
nothing to-day about the analeptic pills ! "
Though we all smiled at this, the General, unconscious
of any joke, gravely answered,
"No, sir! I have not seen them yet, but I dare say I
shall find them by and by ! "
And, by the time the next game was finished, he called
out, "No! I see nothing of the analeptic pills to-day ;
but here s some Samaritan drops ! "
Naturally, with her growing fame and her
intimacy at Streatham, other friends of the great
world were added to Miss Burney s circle. Sir
Joshua Reynolds welcomed her to his studio, and
Edmund Burke paid deference to her genius. The
proud, the awful Mrs. Montagu invited her to
that monstrous house-warming at Portman
Square. " Down with her, Burney ! " cried the
Doctor, and we bless him for his brusquery ;
" down with her ! spare her not ! attack her,
fight her, and down with her at once! You are
a rising wit, and she is at the top ; and when I
was beginning the world, and was nothing and
nobody, the joy of my life was to fire at all the
established wits ! and then everybody loved to
halloo me on."
Yet with the increase of friends came a loss.
FANNY BURNEY 47
Mr. Crisp passes away at Chessington. " God
bless and restore you, my most dear daddy ! "
she had written to him in his illness ; but it is
the old lesson dis aliter visum. She flew to his
bedside and was there to nurse him through his
agony ; and then comes a pathetic break in the
Diary, and her busy pen for awhile is silent.
There is nothing in the years that follow which
quite takes the place of this genial, quizzical,
grumbling, lonely figure, nothing quite like it
elsewhere in our literary annals. Macaulay, in
his essay on Madame D Arblay, has used his
name to point a moral and to distort, if not adorn,
a tale. He had once written a tragedy, a dull
tragedy, which had failed, or only partially suc
ceeded, on the stage, and chiefly for pecuniary
reasons, he had thereupon gone to dwell in a
country boarding-house. To Macaulay he was
accordingly " a cynic and a hater of mankind,"
who had retired to an old hall in one of the most
desolate tracts of Surrey, to hide himself " like a
wild beast in a den." The picture is grotesquely
exaggerated and does wrong to a disappointed
but most loving spirit.
There is a lapse of two months in the Diary, as
I said, and the succeeding entry is ominous :
II We heard to-day that Dr. Johnson had been
taken ill, in a way that gave a dreadful shock
to himself, and a most anxious alarm to his
friends." That was in June of 1783; he died
at the close of 1784. Boswell s story of those
48 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
melancholy days of decay is well known, but I
think there is nothing in Boswell so beautiful as
this account in Fanny s Diary of the visit of her
father and herself to Bolt Court :
" I hope," he said, "Fanny did not take U amiss that
I did not see her ? I was very bad ! "
Amiss ! what a word ! Oh that I had been present
to have answered it ! My father stayed, I suppose, half
an hour, and then was coming away. He again took his
hand, and encouraged him to come again to him ; and
when he was taking leave, said " Tell Fanny to pray for
me!"
Ah ! dear Dr. Johnson ! might I but have your prayers!
After which, still grasping his hand, he made a prayer
for himself, the most fervent, pious, humble, eloquent,
and touching, my father says, that ever was composed.
. . . And again, when my father was leaving him, he
brightened up, something of his arch look returned,
and he said " I think I shall throw the ball at Fanny
yet!"
There is a word yet to be written about the
prayers and meditations of that great soul, about
his humility before God and his pride before
men ; and he who writes of the matter cannot
well fail to bear in mind that childlike appeal,
" Tell Fanny to pray for me."
But half our time is already gone and we have
not yet reached that great episode in Miss Bur-
ney s life, her appointment to be Keeper of the
Robes to Queen Charlotte, under the command
of Madame Schwellenberg. I confess myself in
accord with Macaulay rather than with later
FANNY BURNEY 49
writers in regard to this period, and only his
trenchant rhetoric can well describe the servitude
and vulgarity of existence in George the Third s
court Macaulay s rhetoric or Rochefoucauld s
wit: Les grands noms abaissent au lieu d* elever
ceux qui ne les savent pas soutenir. Fanny took
up the r61e against her better judgment and only
to serve her father s interests. If to you alone,
she writes, " I show myself in these dark colours,
can you blame the plan that I have intentionally
been forming namely, to wean myself from my
self to lessen all my affections to curb all my
wishes to deaden all my sensations ? This de
sign, my dear Susan, I formed so long ago as
the first day my dear father accepted my offered
appointment." She was herself in many respects
singularly unfitted for the place ; her near-sight
edness kept her in constant dread of not recog
nising some royalty, her bashfulness and lack of
orderliness made her constantly uneasy while
serving the Queen, and her health suffered miser
ably from hours of standing and from running
through draughty halls. It is to her credit that
she won the affection of the Queen and the
abounding love (such a word would be shocking
if applied to her Majesty) of the Princesses.
There are minds so shallow that a few creeping
virtues exhaust the soil and leave no nourish
ment for the flowers of fancy or the weeds of vice.
Charlotte was of that type, and to find any par
allel for her court, with its petty formalism,
4
5O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
narrowness of view, and rigid conceit, one must
go to the German principalities of the time, from
which, indeed, her manners sprung. A breath
of scandal, a suspicion of some real human pas
sion, would be welcomed as a relief in her
waiting- woman s annals. We wish that the
wicked Wales might have wreaked his corrup
tion at Windsor or Kew, instead of in his own
haunts, and we are only shocked with pleasure
when Fanny describes the reckless young Clar
ence making the gentlemen in waiting tipsy
under the very glare of Mme. Schwellenberg s
eyes.
Luckily, the Queen had a kindly, even a senti
mental, heart, but no such weakness seasoned the
coarse manners and scolding temper of Fanny s
immediate superior. At least it was retained for
her pet frogs whose " recreative and dulcet croak
ing threw her into ecstasies of delight. Fanny
seems to have loathed those cold creatures with a
rancorous hatred, and alludes to them more than
once :
What a stare was drawn from our new equerry the fol
lowing evening, by Major Price s gravely asking Mrs^
Schwellenberg after the health of her Frogs ! She an
swered they were very well, and the Major said, "You
must know, Colonel Gwynn, Mrs. Schwellenberg keeps a
pair of Frogs."
"Of Frogs ? pray what do they feed upon ? "
" Flies, sir," she answered.
" And pray, ma am, what food have they in winter?"
" Nothing other."
FANNY BURNEY 51
The stare was now still wider.
" But I can make them croak when I will," she added ;
"when I only go so to my snuff-box, knock, knock,
knock, they croak all what I please."
"Very pretty, indeed!" exclaimed Colonel Golds-
worthy.
" I thought to have some spawn," she continued ; "but
Lady Maria Carlton, what you call Lady Don caster, came
and frightened them ; I was never so angry ! "
" I am sorry for that," cried the Major, very seriously,
"for else I should have begged a pair."
"So you meant, ma am, to have had a breed of them,"
cried Colonel Goldsworthy ; "a breed of young frogs?
Vastly clever indeed ! "
Then followed a formal enumeration of their virtues
and endearing little qualities, which made all laugh
except the new equerry, who sat in perfect amaze.
The life of a sensitive woman under the despi
cable tyranny of a creature like this could have
been nothing less than a continuous torment.
Of course, there were alleviations. Some of the
gentlemen and ladies of the palace amused and
others pleased her, and of all she has left a series
of vignettes drawn with extraordinary precision
and not without a touch of relieving malice.
There was the Rev. C. de Guiffardiere, French
reader to the Queen and Princesses, whom she
always calls " Mr. Turbulent," and whose bois
terous, if innocent, love-making kept her in a
state of alarm which at least precluded ennui.
As an offset there was Col. Digby (the " Mr.
Fairly" of the Diary), as polite and melting as
the other was exasperating, who talked with her
52 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of his melancholy and read to her from the poets.
He could even suck sentiment from Falconer s
Shipwreck as Fanny romantically records :
4 One line he came to, that he read with an emo
tion extremely affecting. Tis a sweet line
He felt the chastity of silent woe.
He stopped upon it, and sighed so deeply that his
sadness quite infected me." Mr. Fairly was a
widower, and for awhile it looks as if Fanny
would be asked to console his chaste woe, but he
basely and clandestinely married another woman.
Nor were adventures of a larger sort lacking.
The journey of the court to Oxford is filled with
interesting details, and the experience of the
maids of honour at Nuneham, Lord Harcourt s
place near by, their wandering through empty
halls and questionable chambers, can only be
paralleled by the story of Wilhelm Meister s
troupe at the castle of the duke. More absorbing
still, not without an undertone of genuine awe,
is the recital of the King s illness. She touches
lightly on the raving of her royal master, and on
the brutal treatment he underwent, as was the
custom in those days with the insane. It was
her duty each morning to transmit the pages re
port of the night to the afflicted Queen, and once
to report those horrors was enough. The dark
event goes on behind closed doors, but it only
gains in power, as in the Greek tragedy, from
such a repression :
FANNY BURNEY 53
If this beginning of the night was affecting, she writes,
what did it not grow afterwards ! Two long hours
I waited alone, in silence, in ignorance, in dread ! I
thought they would never be over ; at twelve o clock I
seemed to have spent two whole days in waiting. I then
opened my door, to listen, in the passage, if anything
seemed stirring. Not a sound could I hear. My apart
ment seemed wholly separated from life and motion.
Whoever was in the house kept at the other end, and not
even a servant crossed the stairs or passage by my rooms.
I would fain have crept on myself, anywhere in the
world, for some inquiry, or to see but a face, and hear a
voice, but I did not dare risk losing a sudden summons.
I re-entered my room and there passed another endless
hour, in conjectures too horrible to relate.
A little after one, I heard a step my door opened
and a page said I must come to the Queen.
I could hardly get along hardly force myself into the
room ; dizzy I felt, almost to falling. . . .
My poor Royal Mistress ! never can I forget her coun
tenancepale, ghastly pale she looked ; she was seated
to be undressed, and attended by Lady Elizabeth Walde-
grave and Miss Goldsworthy ; her whole frame was dis
ordered, yet she was still and quiet.
Strange abode of royalty, which only the en
trance of madness can strip of its deluded self-
complaisance and raise to dignity. One compares
the fatuous dulness of Windsor and Kew with
the keen and passionate life that throbbed
through Versailles and is reflected in a hundred
French memoirs. " I think it owing to the good
sense of the English that they have not painted
better," said Hogarth once to Horace Walpole,
54 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
and sometimes one is led to question whether
good sense is not held after all at too high a price.
It would be a pretty piece of analysis to compare
it with the bon sens so extolled by Boileau.
It is but fair to add that the limitations of Miss
Burney s own mind throw the narrowness of the
court into undue prominence. Of the political
activities which centred around George III. and
which were the only real life of the court, as,
indeed, they were of England at that time, she
has not a word to say. There is just a glimpse
of the intrigues to set the Prince of Wales as
regent over the poor mad King, but not even a
hint of the larger movements that were converting
England from a kingdom to an empire, and
changing its government from an oligarchy to a
democracy. Those last years of the eighteenth
century were big with importance from that side,
and sometimes the blindness of Miss Burney to all
but the small personalities of the palace is more
than annoying. Even at the trial of Warren
Hastings, which she heard from the most advan
tageous position, she displays the same obtuseness
of mind. Her account of that scene as a piece of
large pictorial writing is extraordinary, but her
sympathy and her understanding are confined
solely to the persons involved. No suspicion
seems to have entered her mind that this gorgeous
drama represents a change in the conduct of an
empire; she is merely incensed against Burke
because he is in opposition to her beloved master;
FANNY BURNEY 55
her judgment does not extend beyond pity for an
accused friend. Yet in a way she occasionally
exhibits unusual shrewdness. Her comments to
Mr. Windham on the failure of Burke s eloquence
is a notable piece of literary criticism the only
criticism in the whole Diary, I believe, which is
not a mere repetition of the faded platitudes of
the day.
Failing health at last forced her to surrender
her place ; she took with her the blessing of the
Queen and a pension of 100, for both of which
she was overpowered with gratitude. For a
while she was unsettled, but a visit to her sister
Susan, now Mrs. Phillips, at Mickleham, Surrey,
brought a new influence into her life. Within
walking distance of the place was Juniper Hall,
an old ale-house which had been remodelled and
let to a colony of French emigres. The company
was certainly distinguished, including the Mar
quise de la Chatre, the Comte de Narbonne, the
Due de Montmorency, and the Due de Liancourt.
Talleyrand, too, was there for a time, and Ma
dame de Stael, and, most fatal of all for Fanny,
a certain M. Alexandre D Arblay, a former
marshal de camp and adjutant-general to La
Fayette, * a true militaire franc et loyal, as Mrs.
Phillips described him. There is nothing extraor
dinary in Fanny s marriage to this gentleman,
and the surprise that used to be expressed over it
was merely the outcome of insular prejudice.
The fact is that Fanny was immediately and very
56 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
naturally attracted by the simple manners, the
absence of snobbery, and the gay philosophy of
these exiles. It must be remembered that her
day fell in the dregs of English social life, in
what might be called a kind of interregnum be
tween two different worlds. Literature was dead
and only a stale echo of it remained among the
bluestocking coteries. Wit was fast degenerat
ing into sentimentality. The peculiar virility and
large insolence of the early eighteenth century
had passed away, while the new society was
yet to be born. The men of the age just gone
had been originals, with plenty of sins and crud
ities to answer for; but their originality (I
use the word in its old sense) had been one
of character, whereas the younger generation
were original only in manners. The difference
is felt strongly if one turns from the satire of
Tom Jones and Roderick Random to that of
Evelina and Cecilia, and it is shown equally
in the transcripts of real life. The coarse
humours of the men in Walpole s letters seem
to be the ebullience of some unused and un
tamed inner strength ; in comparison with
them the eccentricities of Miss Burney s circle
have the appearance of mere whim and sentiment,
or of callous insensibility. We catch this note of
the day in a thousand places. Miss Monckton at
her grand assembly rushes about to disarrange
the chairs and break up a circle ; in the middle
of the evening Lady Galway trots from her
FANNY BURNEY 57
corner, leans her hands on the back of two chairs,
thrusts her little round head through two fine
high-dressed ladies to peep at Fanny, and trots
back to her corner. The Duke of Devonshire
lolls back so as to throw down a lustre. " I
wonder how I did that," says he coolly ; walks
to another side of the room, pulls down a second
lustre, and strolls away with a " This is singular
enough ! " These are but little things, but they
show the kind of society in which Fanny lived,
and they explain why she was so readily capti
vated by the quiet refinement of Juniper Hall.
The marriage with M. D Arblay was not long
deferred, and for a while we have a pretty idyl of
domestic life in a little cottage built on the pro
ceeds from a third novel, and supported by
Fanny s scanty pension. From this there is an
abrupt transition to the intrigues of Napoleon s
court, the excitement of the Restoration, the
confusion of the Hundred Days, the suspense at
Brussels during the battle of Waterloo, from
which Thackeray drew his famous scene in
Vanity Fair^ and the second Restoration. The
interest never flags in these chapters, and it
would not be easy to find elsewhere a more vivid
description of the perturbations and blind cur
rents of fear that lay hold of the individual dur
ing these great national catastrophes. One feels
the general paralysis of lesser life, while some
where in the background dark and stupendous
powers are wrestling for the mastery.
58 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
In England, again, the interest gradually
wanes to the close of the writer s life. Yet there
are passages of this later record which display,
perhaps, more literary skill of the conscious sort
than any of the earlier parts. The adventure at
Ilfracombe, for example, is told with an art at
once realistic and imaginative, and the tale of her
husband s death has over it a quiet and ineffable
pathos. Macaulay has written harshly of the
petrified style adopted by Mme. D Arblay in her
declining years. The censure is deserved, no
doubt ; and yet for sheer beauty of words she
never wrote anything comparable to this expres
sion of her feelings when she heard that the
long-delayed end had fallen : " How I bore this
is still marvellous to me ! I had always believed
such a sentence would at once have killed me.
But his sight the sight of his stillness, kept me
from distraction ! Sacred he appeared, and his
stillness I thought should be mine, and be inviol
able." There were twenty-one years of memory
yet before her, and her own release did not come
until the extreme age of eighty-eight.
A "little character-monger" Johnson had
called her in her youth, and no phrase can better
describe the trait which lends interest to this long
Diary. Nowhere else in English will you find
anything just like this series of portraits, in
which the eccentricities and mannerisms, of the
age are caught up with so unerring a fidelity and
so gentle a malice. In this respect, the two of
FANNY BURNEY 59
her novels which still live, Evelina and Cecilia,
are properly mere excursions in the more
realistic transcript of life. Occasionally, to be
sure, there is a passage of capital narration, but
it is always of a purely personal sort. What we
miss in the Diary and the novels alike is any
note of passion and any immediate reflection on
life, and only this limitation prevents her work
from ranking with the great French autobio
graphies, with which a comparison most naturally
occurs. Fanny was a prude, we are told, and
she was also, I fear, something of a snob, but the
fault did not lie entirely in her own character.
Not a little of it must be charged to the state
of English society. The fact is, she was a victim
of that peculiarly British worship of the social
order which from the days of Hobbes had been
slowly permeating the national consciousness.
That worship was not incompatible with sound
statesmanship, or with profound political philo
sophy as in the case of Burke ; it did not lessen
the manly independence of a Johnson, and it
could serve to whet the barbed arrows of a Wai-
pole. But on a yielding, feminine character such
as Miss Buruey s its influence was almost omni
potent, so that her prudishness and her snobbery
became not so much individual as national ; and
they are, one must admit, none the less easy to
stomach for that reason. There was an actual
dead line for her mind. Custom lay like a crust
between what was proper and what was unspeak-
60 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
able. Above were the family, the State, the
Church, the social order ; below were gathered
all the ruinous emotions of the untamed heart, not
the immoral or indecent things, merely, for these,
as a matter of fact, might be harmless among
gentlemen, but the passionate, rebellious things
that create their own law. Richardson had been
able to show the working of that seething under
world without shocking society, but only by
throwing the burden of responsibility on poor
Clarissa s shoulders as the result of filial dis
obedience. With our Fanny that crust never for a
moment really breaks, and" her satire skates over
the surface of life with unfaltering dexterity.
If this were all, we might call her modest
rather than prudish ; but into that same forbidden
limbo is relegated every immediate and penetrat
ing reflection ; it is as if the reverend Constitution
of the land had been builded on the law, Thou
shalt not think the thing that has not been
thought. English literature as a body has alas !
served that law only too well, and we turn else
whither for quick and logical thought ; but in
this long diary the lack is unusually apparent. I
cannot recall in all the eight volumes of this
record kept for seventy-three years a single sen
tence that shows any immediate reaction of the
writer s mind on the troublesome problems of
existence. She seems to have passed through
the world without experience and without ques
tioning ; and at the end we still think of her as
CRISP 6 1
the girl, very English and very innocent, scrib
bling her satire in the protection of the great Sir
Isaac s observatory. Perhaps we cover up her
defects by remembering that Newton himself,
despite his mightiness in science, was but a child
when he came to reflect on human life ; and cer
tainly there are few more entertaining books and
few names fairer and dearer to us than hers.
NOTE ON "DADDY" CRISP
If any evidence, further than Fanny Burney s Diary,
is necessary to show the entire distortion of Macaulay s
picture of Samuel Crisp as a wild beast in his lair, it is
abundantly forthcoming in a collection of letters written
by Crisp from Chessington to his sister, Mrs. Sophia Crisp
Gast, at Burford, and now edited by Mr. W. H. Hutton.
Crisp was a disappointed man, no doubt, and weariness
of the world, as much as the need of economising money
and health, led him to make his home at Chesington (as
it was then spelled), where there was only one "safe route
across the wild common," to which he gave the clew to
his friends as a secret. But there was nothing morose in
his character, nothing peevish in his retirement. There
is a greater measure of truth in the epitaph which Dr.
Burney wrote for his friend, and which may still be read
in the village church :
" Reader, this cold and humble spot contains
The much lamented, much revered remains
Of one whose wisdom, learning, taste and sense
Good humour d art and wide benevolence
Cheer d and enlighten d all this hamlet round
Wherever genius, worth, or want was found.
62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
To few it is that bounteous Heav n imparts
Such depth of knowledge, and such taste in arts,
Such penetration and enchanting powers
Of brightening social and convivial hours.
Had he through life been blest by Nature kind
With health robust of body as of mind,
With skill to serve and charm mankind so great
In Arts, in Science, Letters, Church or State,
His name the Nation s annals had enroll d,
And virtues to remotest ages told."
Ivike most letters of the age, these of "Daddy" Crisp
have a good deal to say about his own health and his
correspondent s. "I stand in the first place," he writes,
"totally self-condemned for my own notorious indolence
and disuse of exercise through the whole winter, besides
a most senseless disregard to a proper diet of regimen, for
the sake of indulging appetite for the present moment."
No wonder that he feels "that hollow inside," and cries
out " That old Adam is a powerful obstinate antagonist ! "
(with an emphasis of capitals which I forego). Clearly,
Fanny s friend was not made for the battle of life, either
with theatre-managers or with his own unruly members.
It is clear, too, that he was tender of himself, fearing
exposure, and loving the chimney corner. So he writes
to his sister, "Dear Sop," that he will be glad if certain
people do not visit him and put him out with their comings
and goings. "Besides," he adds, "this cold weather, I
want to creep into the fire myself, in my own great chair,
and not be obliged to do the honours &c.; whereas, I
make Jem [Capt. James Burney] and Fanny make room
for me, and never mind them, nor put myself the least
out of my way for them." It is the very perfection of the
grumbling, frileux^ habit-ridden, but warm-hearted old
bachelor. When he is invited by the Thrales to Streat-
ham, where Fanny and the great Samuel are staying, this
"DADDY" "CRISP 63
lesser Samuel cannot sleep out of his own bed and is deter
mined to return the same night, though that means two
hours of driving in the dark. He goes, and reports a vast
deal of company at the dinner "two courses of 21 Dishes
each, besides Removes; and after that a dessert of a piece
with the Dinner Pines and Fruits of all sorts; Ices,
Creams, &c., &c., &c., without end everything in plate,
of which such a profusion and such a Side Board: I never
saw such at any Nobleman s." Here his grammar ap
parently gives way under the magnificence, but that was a
matter easily dispensed with by the best of these eighteenth-
century writers, and if we owed gratitude to Dr. Johnson
for nothing else, we should still be in his debt for teaching
us the difference between written and spoken language.
But grammar returns with his calmer mood. "I got
away," he adds, and reach d home by 9 o clock, and glad
I was to creep again into my own Nest."
If Crisp worried a good deal about his various ailments,
he was even more anxious about his sister, and he had an
eye, too, for Fanny s health, as we know. He had reason
enough to dread sickness. The wonder is that nature
ever resisted the furious assaults of the doctors in those
days. Their treatment of disease is notorious, but it would
not be easy to recall a better instance than that given in
one of Crisp s letters. Dr. Jebb visits at Streatham, where
he finds the ladies at tea and Mr. Thrale in his chair by
the fire. The rest, though rather long, may be given in
Crisp s own words :
"When he came up to Mr. T. and ask d him how he was;
he made no answer; he observ d his Eyes rowling in his
head he felt his pulse and cried out, Hey day ! why, what
are you all about? Why this man s very ill! Up they
all started in a fright; the Dr. then shook him and at last
made him get out of his Chair; he then cried out he was
very cold, and had a shivering Fit. The Company all
thought of nothing but a return of the same Fits he had
64 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
had before, and if Dr. Jebb had not been there they would
have instantly had him blooded, like an ox, as he was
before. Providentially his presence prevented this discip
line and certainly sav d his L,ife he ordered him instantly
to bed, to be plied with hot white wine whey stay d with
him 3 hours watching his Pulse; declar d some Crisis was
coming on; ordered the whey to be made quite strong,
and ply him all night with it. Next morning early
return d; ordered him to drink large quantities of Port,
above a bottle a Day, and a large proportion of brandy
mix d with the Port likewise to give him the highest
things to eat, and as plentifully as he could take them
port with brandy without all Stint. The bystanders were
frighted, but the Dr. persisted, and at last by this hot
work produced a violent Boil in the Nape of his neck,
which indeed proved a Carbuncle; he still went on heating
him and feeding him up in this manner, which he con
tinues to this hour, and by his bold and judicious pro
ceeding has obtain d what he wanted. His Carbuncle
has been open d before ripe, by orders, vast quantities of
crude undigested blood squeezed out by violence with
most excruciating Pain and nowthisenvenom d Carbuncle
is become mild, cool, digests great Quantities of laudable
matter; the patient is easy, comfortable in Spirits, and
Sharp, the famous Surgeon, and the Dr. both declare him
a restor d Man, and in all probability the secret, and
dreadful cause of his several late dangerous attacks, is
radically and effectually remov d; there s a Cure for
you! "
Alas, Mr. Thrale died in a few months, despite the
physician and his cure. Fanny also was ill at the time
from overwork on Cecilia, and Dr. Jebb did his best to
deprive us of that vessel of delight.
There is not so much in these Letters about Fanny as
we should like, but occasional glimpses confirm the best
we had already known of her. "She is courted, and
" DADDY " CRISP 65
almost adored by the wits," "she is followed and addressed
as if she was Pope," but her native simplicity and
modesty remain unchanged; she still clings to her old
friends and sends a man with a note at ten o clock at
night to inquire after Daddy * Crisp s health.
GEORGE HERBERT
No other of our lesser poets has received the
same long and detailed study which Prof. George
Herbert Palmer has lavished on the Rector of
Bemerton. As he lay in his cradle, he says, a
devotee of Herbert gave him the old poet s name,
dedicating his life by that act to the service of
so venerable a godfather. And the fruit of this
devotion of fifty years is now before us in an
elaborate edition of Herbert, that is learned with
out being pedantic, and full without being
replete the kind of work of which our universi
ties might well be more prodigal 1 . In establish
ing the text he has, I presume, left nothing for
the future to correct. He has discriminated, as
no one before him had thought of doing, between
the earlier and the later poems. And he has
gone further than that ; by separating the
poems into homogeneous groups, he has thrown
the development and inner changes of the writer
into sharp relief ; a caviller might even say that
the relief is here too high, and that a certain
1 The English Works of George Herbert. Newly ar
ranged and annotated and considered in relation to his
life, by George Herbert Palmer. Three volumes. Bos
ton : Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1905.
66
GEORGE HERBERT 67
injustice results from raising the wavering moods
of a man into contradictions of character. To all
this he has added a series of essays on the life
and writings of Herbert which form a proper
introduction to the editorial part of the volumes.
In particular the chapter on The Type of Reli
gious Poetry displays exemplary knowledge of a
great and complicated movement.
It might seem as if little were left for the
gleaner in this field, as if, indeed, any further
writing on this subject would be superfluous or
presumptuous ; and yet I trust this is not entirely
the case. It is even possible that the minute
analysis of Professor Palmer s method has hin
dered him in seeing the real significance of his
theme as a whole ; otherwise it is hard to under
stand how he could wave aside so cavalierly the
character which Herbert bore to his contempo
raries, and has since borne to all the world. * My
brother George," wrote the baron of Cherbury,
" was so excellent a scholar, that he was made
the public orator of the University in Cambridge,
some of whose English works are extant, which,
though they be rare in their kind, yet are far
short of expressing those perfections he had in
the Greek and Latin tongue, and all divine and
human literature ; his life was holy and exemplary \
in so much that about Salisbury, where he lived
beneficed for many years, he was little less than
sainted: he was not exempt from passion and
choler, being infirmities to which all our race is
68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
subject, but that excepted, without reproach in
his actions." Holy and little less than sainted
Herbert appeared not only to his brother, but to
all who walked beside him ; nevertheless in his
latest editor s mind than holy " a more mislead
ing epithet could not have been devised." It
requires a certain temerity thus to run counter to
the verdict of tradition, and the scholar who so
ventures needs to be well fortified. The fact is,
Professor Palmer, despite the long absorption in
his theme, brings to it still some alienation of
mind. Now lack of sympathy, I know, is a
dubious phrase in criticism ; it is a bludgeon too
often raised by the indiscriminating against any
who condemn the lower and false delights of
literature in favour of what is high and true.
But in the present case it would seem to be con
nected with a more serious failure of the historic
sense. That sense has a double function ; it
points out the differences that creep in from age
to age, the changes of manners and forms that
come with time and make the generations of
men like foreigners to one another. And here
the training of the day will keep any scholar
from error. But we are also justified in demand
ing that clearer faculty of vision which pierces
beneath those transient modes and discovers
what each age has attained of essential and
permanent truth . This is a high faculty of scholar
ship which is growing daily rarer among us
since we have become enslaved by the philosophy
GEORGE HERBERT 69
of progress, and one may suspect that Professor
Palmer has not altogether avoided bowing the
knee to the Idol of the Present. But for this, I
do not see why there should be in his essays so
continued a note of apology, as if Herbert s
religious emotion were something outworn and
outgrown, something comprehensible to the man
of to-day only by deliberately narrowing his
larger spiritual interests to a lesser sphere. At
least there is room to doubt whether the religious
instinct has deepened with the broadening of our
sympathies, and I should like, with all deference
to Professor Palmer s authority, and with a frank
use of the material his volumes afford, to look at
Herbert again for a little while as he appeared to
his own age.
And I feel a certain confidence in attempting
this, because that great lover of fish and men,
Izaak Walton, has left a life of Herbert which is
as clear in purpose as it is beautiful in execution.
The Herberts were even then an ancient and
distinguished clan. In the middle of the fifteenth
century the family had divided, the elder branch
becoming the Earls of Pembroke, and the younger
branch settling at Montgomery, a castle on the
eastern marches of Wales. The father of the
poet was by direct descent fifth cousin of the two
brothers William and Philip, who held the earl
dom during George Herbert s time. The father
of these earls had married the sister Mary for
whose sake Sir Philip Sidney wrote his Arcadia,
70 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
and at Wilton, the home of the Pembrokes,
where the greater part of that pastoral was prob
ably composed, George Herbert was an intimate
guest and came into contact with the finest liter
ary tradition of the Elizabethan age. It is nec
essary to remember these things in estimating
what may seem a touch of intellectual or spiritual
pride in the younger poet.
George Herbert was born at Montgomery,
April 3, 1593, being the fifth son in a family of
seven boys and three girls. The oldest brother
was Edward, the Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
whose Autobiography reads like one of Defoe s
novels with a man of strange and fantastic chivalry
instead of a ragamuffin for a hero. Another
brother, Henry, was made gentleman of the
privy chamber and master of the revels to King
James. The father, Sir Richard, died when
George was only four years old, and henceforth
the care of the family fell upon the mother, Lady
Magdalen. Hers was a full and bounteous
nature, and one feels about her presence that kind
of serene munificence which we attach to the
great women of that age as to those of none
other. She was the friend and patron of John
Donne, who celebrated her autumnal beauty in
more than one poem during her life, and at
her funeral preached a stately sermon. " Her
house," he said, and how the words carry us
back to more spacious times (l her house was a
court in the conversation of the best, and an
GEORGE HERBERT 7 1
almshouse in feeding the poor. God gave her
such a comeliness as though she were not proud
of it, yet she was so content with it as not to go
about to mend it by any art. And for her attire,
it was never sumptuous, never sordid, but always
agreeable to her quality and agreeable to her
company." She had met Donne at Oxford,
whither she had gone after her husband s death
to enter her oldest boy, Edward, at Queen s
College. There are not many passages finer in
their kind than that in which Izaak Walton tells
of her wise care for a son whose erratic fancy she
no doubt saw and trembled for :
She continued there with him, and still kept him in a
moderate awe of her self, and so much under her own
eye, as to see and converse with him daily : but she man
aged this power over him without any such rigid sour
ness as might make her company a torment to her Child ;
but with such a sweetness and complyance with the
recreations and pleasures of youth, as did incline him
willingly to spend much of his time in the company of
his dear and careful Mother ; which was to her great
content : for she would often say, That as our bodies
take a nourishment sutable to the meat on which we
feed ; so our souls do as insensibly take in vice by the
example or Conversation with wicked Company : and
would therefore as often say, That ignorance of Vice was
the best preservation of Vertue ; and that the very know
ledge of wickedness was as tinder to inflame and kindle
sin and keep it burning. For these reasons she indeared
him to her own Company, and continued with him in
Oxford four years ; in which time her great and harmless
wit, her chearful gravity, and her obliging behaviour,
72 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
gain d her an acquaintance and friendship with most of
any eminent worth or learning, that were at that time in
or near that University.
There is no need of apologising for the length
of this quotation, for it would be wanting in gal
lantry to pass by so brave and magnanimous a
figure with only a word of recognition. But more
than that, the two strongest influences in Her
bert s life were his mother and that poet- friend
for whom, as Walton says, she had " an amity
made up of a chain of suitable inclinations and
virtues." George was with his mother during
these Oxford years, and already, we may believe,
he was * eminent and lovely in his innocent age,
as he is said to have been a little later at West
minster School. A boy s mind developed early
in those days, and it is not forcing matters to
suppose that he was impressed by the handsome
Italian-looking poet, and wondered at some of his
strange poems, for Donne was then a young man
under thirty, a writer of passionate, haunting
verse, and not yet the grave dean of St. Paul s.
George did not, however, make Oxford his
university, but from Westminster went to Trinity
College, Cambridge, winning a scholarship in
1609, and taking his bachelor s degree three
years later. Already he was preluding to his life
work. In the first of his college years he sent
his mother a New Year s gift of verse with a
letter, of which Walton has preserved this signi
ficant fragment :
GEORGE HERBERT 73
But I fear the heat of my late Ague hath dried up those
springs, by which Scholars say the Muses used to take
up their habitations. However, I need not their help
to reprove the vanity of those many Love-poems, that
are daily writ, and consecrated to Venus ; nor to bewail
that so few are writ, that look towards God and Heaven.
For my own part, my meaning (dear Mother) is, in these
Sonnets, to declare my resolution to be, that my poor
Abilities in Poetry, shall be all and ever consecrated to
Gods glory: and I beg you to receive this as one
testimony.
My God, where is that antient heat towards thee,
Wherewith whole showls of Martyrs once did burn,
Besides their other flames ? Doth Poetry
Wear Venus Livery ? only serve her turn ?
Why are not Sonnets made of thee, and layes
Upon thine Altar burnt ? Cannot thy love
Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise
As well as any she ? Cannot thy Dove
Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight ?
Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same,
Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name ?
Why doth that fire, which by thy power and might
Bach breast does feel, no braver fewel choose
Than that, which one day, Worms may chance refuse ?
The sonnet (with its sequel, which I omit) may
not rank high as poetry, and indeed Herbert
himself was afterwards to discard it from his
approved verse, but, all things considered, it is
remarkable as the profession of a young man of
seventeen. It marks in a curious way the cross
ing of the two main influences on his mind.
From his childhood, apparently, his mother had
74 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
destined him for the Church, being persuaded to
this, it may be, by his feeble health, or by a
precocious vein of piety in the lad. It cannot be
asserted too strongly that Herbert s was a pliable
nature, not without gusty flaws of temper and
conscious always of the proud generations that
lay behind him, but at bottom docile and subject
to outer influences. Other more original forces,
such as that of Nicholas Ferrar, were to affect
his religious convictions, but, above all, it was
the strong spirit of his mother that moulded his
to the forms of piety. His letter, written on the
eve of manhood, may be read as an avowal to
dedicate himself, if not as a priest at least as a
poet, to the life she designed for him.
And it shows, to an equal degree, the influence
of his mother s friend, John Donne. There is
nothing of the eagle in Herbert, nothing of the
soaring quality which lifted Donne out of the
common sphere, into his own supreme dominion,
nothing of that originality which makes of Donne
one of the few real turning-points in our litera
ture. Herbert was content to look up at that
dizzy flight and follow with humbler wing.
How much his poems took their style and man
ner from Donne s might be shown by a hundred
points. Donne, apparently, had found the great
conventions of the Elizabethan school tiresome
and unreal, and he had broken through them as
resolutely as Wordsworth was to rebel against
those of the eighteenth century. He swept away
GEORGE HERBERT 75
not only the frigid platitudes of the sonnet, but also
the flowing ease of the lyric and the larger liberty
of the drama. With him the language must be
fresh and immediate ; sharp, unusual words must
cut through the crust of convention ; the mind
must be surprised out of its equilibrium by novel
juxtapositions ; the soul must be stirred in its
most secret recess by the sudden shock of unex
pected emotions. Like Socrates, he would rouse
men from their apathy by the jingling of pots
and pans and all common things. It is not the
highest form of poetry, for that, like manners,
must rest on a noble convention and avoid the
whim and license of the impertinent individual ;
but it was new and stimulating, exquisite at
times and again merely grotesque. In all these
things Herbert followed his master, only soften
ing the cruder asperities and exercising a gentle
manly taste which his model never possessed.
With the other poets of the Jacobean and Caro
line age he adopted Donne s use of " conceits " ;
he even directly imitated what is perhaps the
most curious extravagance in that Museum of
Wit. Donne had thought proper to introduce an
Epithalamium with a startling description of the
morning that ushers in the happy day and he
succeeds. All the chirping choristers greet
the dawn in his verse, and then
The husband cock looks out, and straight is sped,
And meets his wife, which brings her feather-bed.
Herbert kept the metaphor, but applied it to a
76 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
different kind of creature, with no decrease of
absurdity in this case, it must be confessed :
God gave thy soul brave wings ; put not those feathers
Into a bed, to sleep out all ill weathers.
But the influence of Donne goes deeper than
style and manner. It is probable that Herbert s
very desire to temper religion with poetry was
sustained, if not created, by the example of his
friend, and certainly, I think, his ambition to be
the lyric poet of divine love is derived from that
source. Donne s life had suffered a division such
as was regular enough in those days, however
suspicious it may appear to us. In youth and
early manhood he had given himself up to wan
ton intrigues and had written a series of poems
which betray only too frankly his irregular
passions. Afterwards he turned to religion,
disavowed his earlier pursuits, and sought to
make poetry the handmaid of his new faith. It
was a course quite familiar to his contemporaries,
corresponding to the sharp cleavage in their
minds between secular and sacred things. So
Joseph Hall indited scurrilous satires before tak
ing orders and devoting his pen to Christian
meditations ; and a little later Vaughan, to name
no others, was to repent his youthful servitude to
the profane Muse. Now Herbert began his poet
ical preludings just about the time when Donne
was passing from his first to his second career.
We have a letter, dated exactly July n, 1607,
GEORGE HERBERT 77
which Donne sent to L,ady Magdalen with a
copy of Holy Hymns and Sonnets, and a sonnet
addressed personally to the recipient. They
were no doubt read by I,ady Magdalen s son,
who was then fourteen ; and if there was any
wavering in his mind between profane and
religious verse, these lines may have weighed in
his decision :
O ! might those sighs and tears return again
Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent,
That I might in this holy discontent
Mourn with some fruit, as I have mourned in vain.
Again, three years later, Donne, writing to Sir
Henry Goodyere, promises a copy of his stanzas
called A Litany which he compares with the
poems canonised by Pope Nicholas and com
manded for public service in the churches ; but
mine, he adds, * is for the lesser chapels, which
are my friends." It is a pleasant fancy to think
that Herbert, then at Cambridge, was one of
these lesser chapels, and may have received the
Litany from Donne ; if so, he would have paused
at the twenty-seventh stanza:
That learning, Thine ambassador,
From Thine allegiance we never tempt ;
That beauty, paradise s flower
For physic made, from poison be exempt ;
That wit born apt high good to do
By dwelling lazily
On nature s nothing be not nothing too ;
That our affections kill us not, nor die ;
Hear us, weak echoes, O, Thou Ear and Eye.
78 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
It is dangerously easy, I know, to dwell on these
possible coincidences, but at any rate Donne s
stanza expresses the kind of influence that was at
work upon Herbert when he wrote those two
sonnets to his mother. For him there should be
no such division as that which made two differ
ent poets of Donne ; he would clothe his verse in
the * Venus livery of the early Donne and the
other Elizabethans, but it should be the Venus
Urania ; he would be the love-poet of religion.
As others had written out their sighs and groans
to a deaf mistress, so would he lament when his
prayers to Heaven fell back unheard ; so would
he exult when grace descended into his heart
from above. But, and the point needs emphasis,
there is nothing to be rebuked in Herbert s mar
riage of sacred and profane ideas, nothing of the
<, sensuousness that clings to the ardours of Cra-
i shaw ; above all, no taint of decay such as repels
a clean mind in Verlaine s sickly fusion of the
flesh and the spirit. It is more in Herbert the
close personal relation of the human soul to God
and the soul s fluctuations of joy and despondency
than any dubious use of amorous metaphor that
gives him his position.
For a number of years Herbert remained at
Cambridge, carrying out in leisurely fashion this
ideal of the Christian poet. In the few letters of
his that have been preserved we catch glimpses
of his life, of his unstable health, and of his stu
dent needs. Best and homeliest of all is a long
GEORGE HERBERT 79
epistle to Sir John Danvers, the generous but
somewhat erratic gentleman whom his mother
had married after a widowhood of twelve years.
"I will open my case unto you," he writes,
" which I think deserves the reading at the least :
and it is this, I want books extremely. You
know, Sir, how I am now setting foot into di
vinity, to lay the platform of my future life ; and
shall I then be fain always to borrow books, and
build on another s foundation? What tradesman
is there who will set up without his tools ? Par
don my boldness, Sir ; it is a most serious case,
nor can I write coldly in that wherein consisteth
the making good of my former education, of
obeying that spirit which hath guided me hither
to, and of achieving my (I dare say) holy ends.
. . . I protest and vow, I even study thrift,
and yet I am scarce able with much ado to make
one half-year s allowance shake hands with the
other. And yet if a book of four or five shillings
come in my way, I buy it, though I fast for it ;
yea, sometimes of ten shillings. But, alas Sir,
what is that to those infinite volumes of divinity,
which yet every day swell and grow bigger ?
That was in 1617, when he had been in residence
for eight years. In 1619, his scholarship, joined,
as Walton says, " with a high fancy, a civil and
sharp wit, and with a natural elegance," brought
its proper reward and he was appointed to be
Orator for the University. He describes the
duties of his office pleasantly in a letter to his
8o SHELBURNE ESSAYS
stepfather as the finest, though not the gainfull-
est, to be had : * For the orator writes all the uni
versity letters, makes all the orations, be it to the
King, prince, or whatever comes to the univer
sity ; to requite these pains, he takes place next
the doctors, is at all their assemblies and meet
ings, and sits above proctors ; is regent or
non-regent, at his pleasure ; and such like gay-
nesses, which will please a young man well."
The honour and the high society which now
opened to him were in full accord with Herbert s
temperament. He became a favourite with King
James, and made a point of attending the court
when it moved within reach of Cambridge, even
going so far as to leave the routine of the office
to his secretary for this purpose. He grew inti
mate with Bacon, whom he addressed, on the
publication of his Instauratio Magna, as " Mun-
dique et animarum Sacerdos unicus," and who
in turn consulted Herbert s opinion before he
would expose any of his books to be printed, and
in 1625 dedicated to Herbert his Translation of
Certain Psalms into English Verse. He was
undoubtedly fluttered by these worldly approba
tions, and lured to seek higher honours and to
travel abroad, but now as always he was
anchored by the steady trust of his mother and
kept from perilous flights :
Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the town,
GEORGE HERBERT 8 1
Thou didst betray me to a lingring book
And wrap me in a gown.
I was entangled in the world of strife
Before 1 had the power to change my life.
But all this may not mean that Herbert either
in act or thought betrayed the purpose to which
he had dedicated himself. The fair and innocent
formalities of life were a part of his nature ; they
even fitted in with his poetic aspirations. Later,
when the shadow of death was upon him, he
might fall into the common dualism of his age
and speak with repentance of the content he had
11 taken in beauty, in wit, in music, and pleasant
conversation," but no such doubts tyrannised
over him now ; his biographer Oley could even
despair of describing " that person of his, which
afforded so unusual a contesseration of elegancies
and singularities to the beholder." Clothes
might be a matter of significance to him, as in
our day they were to Mr. Shorthouse ; these
things, which other less devout souls have so
despised, formed then a part of his sacramenta-
rian view of religion as they did to John Ingle-
sant, who, in many but not all ways, is the
modern counterpart of that seventeenth -century
faith.
Let thy minde s sweetness have his operation
Upon thy body, clothes, and habitation,
Herbert had written in his Cambridge period.
He might have called virtue, as did St, Augus-
6
82 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
tine, a vera ordo in amore^ and dignified the order
liness of a man s outer habit as the reflection of
an inner consonance with God s law. He was
afterwards to find the desired harmony of life in
the humbler practices of. a priest ; now his native
instinct led his feet rather to the King s court.
We whose training is so different must remember
that to many in those days kingship was a divine
institution, just as was the Church. It gathered
up and symbolised the requirements of orderly
beauty in things secular, as the Church did in
things spiritual, and the two at times might seem
to a mind steeped in symbolism almost to flow
together. " Think the king sees thee still,"
Herbert wrote for his own guidance; "for his
King does." Nor were his vows forgotten;
through all these distractions he added steadily
to his little store of poetry which should be, as it
were, his courtly Book of Common Prayer :
To write a verse or two is all the praise
That I can raise.
Mend my estate in any wayes,
Thou shalt have more.
O raise me then ! Poore bees, that work all day,
Sting my delay ;
Who have a work as well as they,
And much, much more.
Let us not, however, fall into the other extreme
and exaggerate the harmony of Herbert s career.
He was no mere sentimentalist, but a man of
GEORGE HERBERT 83
subtle understanding. He had occasional mo
ments of depression, as his poems show, and
sometimes felt that he was still pausing below
the full consecration to which his mother had
destined him, and that he still wanted the high
est grace, which comes with sacrifice. In 1626
he was appointed prebendary of the parish of
Leighton, having already received the order of
deaconship, and took upon himself to rebuild the
church which was crumbling away into ruin.
Five miles from Leighton was Little Gidding,
where Nicholas Ferrar resided. He called on his
friend for assistance in this work, and from that
time the two men were sealed in intimacy. Many
letters passed between them, but these unfortu
nately have not come down to us. In 1627 Lady
Magdalen died. Other recent deaths had
loosened his hold on the world, but the loss of
his mother cast him completely adrift. Was it
at this time he wrote that strange poem of Mor
tification^ in which he described the five ages of
man as five deaths prefiguring the final transition
to the grave ? It begins with the cradled infant :
How soon doth man decay !
When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets
To swaddle infants, whose young breath
Scarce knows the way,
Those clouts are little winding sheets
Which do consigne and send them unto death :
and ends with the lesson :
84 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Man ere he is aware
Hath put together a solenmitie,
And drest his herse while he has breath
As yet to spare.
Yet Lord, instruct us so to die
That all these dyings may be life in death.
Herbert, we have seen, was much influenced by
Donne ; it is curious to note that in the last ser
mon he ever preached the Dean of St. Paul s
seems to have remembered this poem of his pupil
and to have imitated it. " That which we call
life," he said, " is but Hebdomada mortium, a
week of death. . . . Thus birth dies in in
fancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth
and the rest die in age, and age also dies and
determines all."
Immediately after his supreme loss, Herbert
gave up the oratorship and left the university.
For three years he led a wandering life, unsettled
in body and mind. There was, in fact, some
thing of Hamlet in his mental disposition, and
the subtleties of the imagination overbalanced the
will to act. It was his nature to hesitate and
dally until some impulse from without stimulated
him, and then his movement was curiously ab
rupt. So it was that, in 1629, he suddenly mar
ried Jane Danvers, a relative of the Earl of
Danby with whom he had become acquainted
through his mother s second husband. Tradition
would have it that this event occurred only three
days after his first interview with the lady, and
GEORGE HERBERT 85
such haste would suit well enough with his
temper. The next year he accepted the rector
ship of Fuggleston-cum-Bemerton. Fuggleston
church stood at the gate of Wilton, the estate of
the Pembrokes, where Herbert was always wel
come, lying three miles from Salisbury. The
ministry of this place he left to bis curate, and
took upon himself the care of Bemerton, " a piti
ful little chapel of ease," forty-six feet long
by eighteen wide, with a ruinous rectory across
the way. Both church and house he repaired
and adorned at his own expense. How solemnly
he entered upon his sacred charge may be read
in the happy words of Izaak Walton :
When at his Induction he was shut into Bemerton
Church, being left there alone to Toll the Bell, (as the
Law requires him,) he staid so much longer than an
ordinary time, before he return d to those Friends that
staid expecting him at the Church-door, that his Friend
Mr. Woodnot look d in at the Church-window, and saw
him lie prostrate on the ground before the Altar ; at
which time and place (as he after told Mr. Woodnot) he
set some Rules to himself, for the future manage of his
life ; and then and there made a vow to labour to keep
them. And the same night that he had his Induction, he
said to Mr. Woodnot, I now look back upon my aspiring
thoughts, and think myself more happy than if I had
attain d what then I so ambitiously thirsted for. And I
can now behold the Court with an impartial Eye, and see
plainly that it is made up of Fraud and Titles, and Flat
tery, and many other such empty, imaginary painted
Pleasures ; Pleasures, that are so empty, as not to satisfy-
when they are enjoy d. But in God and his service, is a
86 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
fulness of all joy and pleasure, and no satiety. And I
will now use all my endeavours to bring my Relations
and Dependants to a love and relyance on Him, who
never fails those that trust him. But above all, I will be
sure to live well, because the vertuous life of a Clergy
man is the most powerful eloquence to perswade all that
see it to reverence and love, and at least to desire to live
like him.
It does not seem to me that such words as
these should lead us to emphasise the contrast
between Herbert s courtly and his priestly life,
nor can I persuade myself that Professor Palmer
is not a little carried away with his analytical
method when he dwells on the fact that only
three years out of thirty-nine were given to
the Church. There was no convulsion in Her
bert s inner experience, no wrenching conversion
from the world, but rather a growth in assurance,
passing through seasons of doubt. His latest
verse is merely a development and deepening of
what he had set himself to sing at the age of
seventeen. In all lives there is a certain period
which stamps itself on the popular memory as
expressive of the man s essential nature ; it is not
measured by duration, but by significance. The
consummation of this inner tendency had been
delayed in Herbert by other modes of fulfilling
his ideal, by a hesitancy of will, by the feeling of
his friends that the calling of a minister was not
worthy of his high birth and talents, by worldly
allurements, if you please ; but it came as surely
GEORGE HERBERT 87
as the tropic vine struggles up to freedom, and
in the sunlight spreads its blossoms. After all,
he had just turned thirty-seven when he accepted
his charge, and should it be weighed against him
that he did not live to complete his fortieth year ?
Of those three years of priesthood we have a
picture of singular beauty and winsomeness. To
the humblest duties of his office he gave himself
with unreserved devotion, and in his prose trea
tise of The Country Parson he has left a manual
of conduct whose sincerity of aim and fine sim
plicity make it still attractive to-day to the lay
reader. About the ordinances of worship, which
he carried out with extreme regularity, his fancy
played with a kind of cherishing wit, as when he
wrote of the communion cup :
O what sweetness from the bowl
Fills my soul,
Such as is and makes divin !
Is some starre (fled from the sphere)
Melted there,
As we sugar melt in wine?
His chief diversion now, as it had always been,
was music. " He was a most excellent master,"
says Walton, " and he did himself compose many
divine hymns and anthems, which he set and
sung to his lute or viol. And, though he was a
lover of retiredness, yet his love to music was
such, that he went usually twice every week, on
certain appointed days, to the cathedral church
88 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
in Salisbury ; and at his return would say that
his time spent in prayer and cathedral music
elevated his soul, and was his heaven upon earth.
But before his return thence to Bemerton he
would usually sing and play his part at an ap
pointed private music- meeting ; and, to justify
this practice, he would often say, Religion does
not banish mirth, but only moderates and sets
rules to it." It was but a walk of a mile across
pleasant meadows from Bemerton to Salisbury,
whose spire is visible from the rectory windows.
Many times he made this brief journey the occa
sion of good works, and once he appeared before
his hosts well spattered with mud from assisting
a poor stalled carter. When he was twitted by his
friends for disparaging himself with so dirty an
employment, his answer was " that the thought
of what he had done would prove music to him at
midnight" ; and added, " I would not willingly
pass one day of my life without comforting a sad
soul or showing mercy."
There were indeed times of depression, almost of
agony ; seasons when he regretted the sacrifice of
courtly amenities. Often he found grief * a cun
ning guest ; often his high pretensions to faith
appeared to him a mockery, and to many readers
the poems in which he expresses these fluctuations
of joy and sorrow will seem the richest in human
experience of the collection. But I cannot see
that for this reason he should be denied the
epithet of holy which those who knew him best
GEORGE HERBERT 89
were quickest to ascribe to him. His was not
the spirit of the triumphant hero, perhaps not
even that of the martyr, and it is easy to under
stand why he was rejected by the fighting cohort
of Oxford in the last century. " The worthies of
the Church of England," said one of these bel
ligerents, " even when sharing the tender piety of
George Herbert or Bishop Ken, fell short of the
heroic aims, the martial sanctity, gained by war
fare unceasing against world, flesh, and devil,
which they found exhibited in Roman hagi-
ology." That may be true, but do we refuse
to call Bunyan holy because he wrestled with
despair, or Fenelon because he hankered after
Versailles, or St. Paul because he could not pluck
out the thorn from his flesh, or the Master of St.
Paul for the agony at Gethsemane ?
And withal the dominant tone in Herbert is
one of quiet joy and peace. From the very
doubts and hesitations that beset him he wrung
a submissive victory, as may be read in that most
characteristic of his poems, The Pulley :
When God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by,
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can.
Let the world s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.
So strength first made a way,
Then beautie flow d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottome lay.
90 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
For if I should (said he)
Bestow this Jewell also on my creature,
He should adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature.
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessnesse.
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.
Will you pardon me a fancy ? As often as I
read these stanzas the picture rises before me of
the Salisbury fields. It is an afternoon of the
early autumn, when the grey sunlight shimmers
in the air and scarcely touches the earth, brood
ing over all things with a kind of transient peace.
A country parson, after a day of music in the
cathedral and at the house of a friend, is walking
homeward. In his heart is the quiet afterglow
of rapture, not unlike the subdued light upon the
meadows, and he knows that both are but for a
little while. Memory is awake as she is apt to
be in the trail of exaltation, and he recalls the
earlier scenes of his life the peculiar consecra
tion of his youth, the half-hearted ambitions of
the scholar and courtier, the invisible guidance
that had brought him at last to the sheltered
haven whereto he was even now returning. Pro
vidence and the world had dealt kindly with him
as with few others, yet one thing was still lacking
he had not found rest. He was aware, keenly
GEORGE HERBERT 9!
aware, that this moment of perfect calm lay be
tween an hour of enthusiasm and an hour of
dejection. He was not like some he knew who
laid violent hands on the kingdom of peace; he
must suffer his moods. And then came the
recollection of the Greek Hesiod whom he had
studied at Cambridge, and of the story of Pandora.
The quaint contrast of that myth with the cer
tainty of his own faith teased him into reflection.
Hope, indeed, the new dispensation had released
from the box and had poured out blessings
instead of ills ; but one thing still remained shut
up rest in the bottom lay. And straightway he
began to remould the Greek fable to his own
experience.
All this is consonant with the tone which in
the beginning he adopted as the lyric poet of
divine love, and which remained with him in his
Bemerton study :
Why do I languish thus, drooping and dull,
As if I were all earth ?
O give me quickuesse, that I may with mirth
Praise thee brim-full !
The wanton lover in a curious strain
Can praise his fairest fair,
And with quaint metaphors her curled hair
Curl o re again.
Thou art my lovelinesse, my life, my light,
Beautie alone to me.
Thy bloudy death and undeserv d makes thee
Pure red and white.
92 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Where are my lines then ? My approaches ? Views?
Where are my window-songs?
Lovers are still pretending, and ev n wrongs
Sharpen their Muse.
1/ord, cleare thy gift, that with a constant wit
I may but look towards thee.
Look onely ; for to love thee, who can be,
What angel fit ?
To some this peculiarly individual note in
religion, this anxiety over his personal beatitude,
will be a stumbling-block. "For the most part,"
says Professor Palmer in disdain, "he is con
cerned with the small needs of his own soul."
It is like a taunt thrown ungraciously at the
ideals of a great and serious age. My dear sir,
even to-day in the face of our magnified concerns,
are the needs of a man s soul so small that we
dare speak of them with contempt? I am not
holding a brief from the human soul. L,et it be,
if you choose, a mere name for certain hopes and
fears which separate from the world and project
themselves into eternity ; but let us recognise the
fact that those hopes and fears have been of tre
mendous force in the past, and are still worthy of
reverence. It is one of the glories of Herbert s
age that it introduced into poetry that quick and
tremulous sense of the individual soul. Reli
gion came to those men with the shock of a sud
den and strange reality, and we who read the
report of their experience are ourselves stirred,
GEORGE HERBERT 93
willingly or rebelliously, to unused emotions.
Do you know, in fact, what most of all is lack
ing in the devotional poetry of recent times ? It
is just this direct personal appeal. Take, for
example, the better stanzas of Keble s
Whitsunday :
So, when the Spirit of our God
Came down His flock to find,
A voice from Heaven was heard abroad,
A rushing, mighty wind.
Nor doth the outward ear alone
At that high warning start ;
Conscience gives back the appalling tone ;
Tis echoed in the heart.
It fills the Church of God ; it fills
The sinful world around ;
Only in stubborn hearts and wills
No place for it is found.
That is Keble s version of the coming of the
Holy Ghost at Pentecost ; set it beside a single
stanza of Herbert s poem of the same name :
Ivisten, sweet Dove, unto my song
And spread thy golden wings in me ;
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing and flie away with thee.
Is the advantage all in favour of the modern faith ?
Or rather, is not the response to the descending
spirit in Keble dulled by the intrusion of foreign
interests, by the sense that he is writing for the
Church and imparting a moral lesson, whereas
94 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
in Herbert you feel the ecstatic uplift that
springs from the immediate contact of the poet s
imagination with its object? Religion has
changed from the soul s intimate discovery of
beatitude to the dull convention of sermons.
" He speaks of God like a man that really
believeth in God," said Baxter of Herbert; is
this altogether a small matter ?
Nor is it quite true that his personal concern
with religion is a selfish withdrawal from men or
that ( any notion of dedicating himself to their
welfare is foreign to him." Such a statement
would have been unintelligible to Herbert s con
temporaries ; it forgets the sacramental nature of
the priesthood as it was then conceived. His days,
indeed, were given to the humblest duties and
charities, yet to his friends it would have seemed
that the example of so saintly a life was a still
more perfect beneficence than any ministrations
of the body. Such, too, was the more difficult
ideal that Herbert set before himself :
Holinesse on the head,
Light aud perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest ;
Thus are true Aarons drest.
And, beyond the mere force of example, it was
supposed that worship in itself was an excellent
thing, and that some grace was poured out upon
GEORGE HERBERT 95
the people through the daily intercessions of their
priest :
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of thy praise.
Beasts fain would sing ; birds dittie to their notes ;
Trees would be tuning on their native lute
To thy renown ; but all their hands and throats
Are brought to Man, while they are lame and mute.
Man is the world s high Priest. He doth present
The sacrifice for all ; while they below
Unto the service mutter an assent,
Such as springs use that fall and windes that blow.
Wherefore, most sacred Spirit, I here present
For me and all my fellows praise to thee.
And just it is that I should pay the rent,
Because the benefit accrues to me.
And it was in this sense that elsewhere he likened
the priest to a window in the temple wall, " a
brittle crazy glass," through which, nevertheless,
the light fell upon the people stained with holy
images. His poems he called window-songs.
Certainly to Walton the concern with the small
needs of his own soul " did not appear to be an
abuse of precious talents. Says the Life : " And
there, by that inward devotion which he testified
constantly by an humble behaviour and visible
adoration, he, like Joshua, brought not only his
own household thus to serve the lyord, but
96 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
brought most of his parishioners, and many gen
tlemen in the neighbourhood, constantly to make
a part of his congregation twice a day. And some
of the meaner sort of his parish did so love and
reverence Mr. Herbert that they would let their
plough rest when Mr. Herbert s saints- bell rung to
prayers, that they might also offer their devotions
to God with him; and would then return back to
their plough. And his most holy life was such
that it begot such reverence to God, and to him,
that they thought themselves the happier when
they carried Mr. Herbert s blessing back with
them to their labour."
A part of the intense individualism of Herbert s
religion during these last years was no doubt due
to the increasing burden of ill health. Occasion
ally a note of pure bodily pain breaks through his
song, and the thought of the inevitable end grew
daily more insistent. Death is a thing of which
we have become ashamed. We huddle it up and
speak of it with averted glance. But it was not
always so ; men of Herbert s day looked upon it
as the solemn consummation of life and prepared
for it as for a public ceremony. Read Sir Thomas
Browne s Letter to a Friend, and see how he
dwells on the " deliberate and creeping progress
into the grave. " Or go not so far ; stop in the
eighteenth century and read the letters in which
Cowper relates the passing of his brother. You
will find nothing comparable to this in the liter
ature of to-day ; the very word is almost banished
GEORGE HERBERT 97
from our books. It may be that we have gained
in power by putting away from us the thought of
this paralysing necessity, yet sometimes I wonder
if we have not suffered an equal loss. For with
Herbert, at least, the fairest of his poems were
inspired by this ever-present thought. A very
thrill of joy leaps through such lines as these :
What wonders shall we feel when we shall see
Thy full-ey d love !
When thou shalt look us out of pain.
Is the rapture of Dante, lifted from sphere to
sphere at the sight of Beatrice s eyes, finer than
this When thou shalt look us out of pain? And
death is the theme of that sweetest song, which
no one who writes of Herbert can afford to omit :
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie ;
The dew shall weep thy fall to night,
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye ;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie ;
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives ;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
98 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Just before the end Herbert gave to a friend
who was visiting him a manuscript book, bid
ding him deliver it to Nicholas Ferrar to
be made public or burned as that gentleman
thought good. It was, as he described it, a pic
ture of the many spiritual conflicts that had
passed betwixt God and his soul, being the small
volume of verse which was the labour and the
fruit of his life. There is much to censure critic
ally in the work, much that is frigid and fantas
tic ; but at its best the note is rare and penetrating,
with the tinkling purity of a silver sacring bell.
Many have loved the book as a companion of the
closet, and many still cherish it for its human
comfort ; all of us may profit from its pages if we
can learn from them to wind ourselves out of the
vicious fallacy of the present, and to make our
own some part of Herbert s intimacy with divine
things.
KEATS
IN its pleasures and its toils the case of the
critic, I often think, is not unlike that of the ad
venturous traveller. Kvery author into whose
life in turn he diverts his own is to him a new
voyage of exploration. He comes back laden
with memories, whether the land he has tra
versed be one in the highways of commerce and
already trodden by many feet, or an island almost
forgotten in far-off seas. Cities of men he visits,
and walks in crowded streets, or sits by sheltered
hearths. Again, it is a country of unpeopled soli
tudes, where things of loveliness waylay him, or
monstrous forms startle and affright. There are
recollections of homely comfort to reward his toil ;
and of high adventures, as when, like Balboa, he
stands and looks out, the first of men, over the
infinite unknown Pacific ; and there are ways of
terror where he wanders alone on desolate frozen
coasts and, far as the eye can reach, sees only
ruinous death. All these visions and remembered
emotions he carries to his desk, counting himself
blessed if some happy chance of language or some
unusual quickening of the blood shall enable him
to convey to others though it be but a small part
99
IOO SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of his experience. That good fortune, he feels,
with all noble conquests, is reserved for the
poets :
Much have I travell d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow d Homer ruled as his demesne ;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold :
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken ;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific and all his men
Ivook d at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
It is the sonnet that to most people probably
comes first to mind when Keats is named and his
destiny remembered. There is about it the golden
flush and wonder of youth it was written in his
twentieth year and one catches in it also, or
seems to catch, a certain quickness of breath
which forebodes the rapture so soon quenched.
The inspiration of unsoiled nature and of Eng
land s clear- voiced early singers is here mingled
as in no other of our poets. And especially this
inheritance of the Elizabethan age rediscov
ered in a later century will have a new signifi
cance to any one who has just gone through the
KEATS IOI
poems in the volume edited by Mr. ^,d
court. 1
There is a good deal to commend in this schol
arly edition of Keats ; the text has been prepared
with extreme accuracy, and the notes, properly
placed at the end of the book, are thorough and
apposite. Mr. de Selincourt s interest has lain
more particularly in the study of sources, and
Keats, among the most derivative and at the
same time original of English poets, offered him
here a rich field. For one thing, he has exploded
the silly myth of the Lempriere. To that diction
ary (still a serviceable book, be it said, in its own
way) Keats no doubt owed his acquaintance with
many details of antiquity, but most of his infor
mation and all the colour and movement that made
of those legends a living inspiration he got from
the translations of Chapman and Sandys and from
the innumerable allusions in Spenser and the
other great Elizabethans. One might have sur
mised as much from his sonnet to Chapman s
Homer without waiting for the present editor s
erudition. To call him a Greek, as Shelley did
explicitly and as Matthew Arnold once did by
implication, is to miss the mark. "Keats was no
scholar," says Mr. de Selincourt aptly, " and of
the literature in which the Greek spirit found true
expression he could know nothing. But just as
1 The Poems of John Keats. Edited with an Introduc
tion and Notes by B. de Selincourt. New York: Dodd,
Mead, & Co., 1905.
102 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
it was through his devotion to Spenser that he
became a poet, so was it through his kinship,
both in spirit and taste, with the Elizabethans,
that he became the poet of ancient Greece."
I am inclined to think that the essential kinship
of Keats to The fervid choir that lifted up a
noise of harmony," as he called them, rests upon
something even deeper than similarity of language
and poetic method or than natural magic, that it
goes down to that faculty of vision in his mind
which, like theirs, beheld the marriage of the
ideas of beauty and death. As an editor con
cerned with the minutiae of the poet s manner,
Mr. de Selincourt may well be pardoned for over
looking this more essential relationship ; his ser
vices are sufficiently great after every deduction.
It is not a small thing, for instance, to find in the
Glossary a careful tabulation of the sources from
which Keats drew his extraordinary vocabulary,
and from the first word, "a-cold," to see how
constantly he borrowed from Shakespeare and
Milton and the writers that lie between, and how
deliberately he sought to echo "that large utter
ance of the early Gods." The curious thing is
that in the end all this borrowing should produce
the impression of a fine spontaneity. Just as we
are discovering more and more in the spacious
ness of the Elizabethans a literary inspiration
from foreign lands, so the freedom of diction in
Keats was in large measure the influence of a
remote age which may be taken as another
KEATS IO3
lesson in the nature of originality. The effect is
as if the language were undergoing a kind of
rejuvenation and no dulness of long custom lay
between words and objects. Wordsworth s en
deavour to introduce the speech of daily use is in
comparison the mere adopting of another artifice.
It is scarcely necessary to add that this sponta
neity in a mind so untrained as Keats s often fell
into license and barbarism. From the days of
the first reviewers his ill-formed compound terms
and his other solecisms have, and quite rightly,
been ridiculed and repudiated. Sometimes, in
deed, his super-grammatical creations have a
strange quality of genius that rebukes criticism
to modesty. Thus in the familiar lines :
As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave
it is not easy to justify " branch-charmed " by
any common linguistic process ; and yet who does
not feel that the spell of the passage, the very
mystery of its utter beauty, is concentrated in
that one lawless word ? It is the keystone of a
perfect arch. By a stroke of rarer insight Keats,
when he came to rewrite the scene for the later
Hyperion, left that phrase untouched, though he
IO4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
changed, and in changing marred, nearly all the
rest. But if occasionally these unlicensed expres
sions add to the magic of his style, more often
they are merely annoying blemishes. There is
no beauty in such a phrase as unslumbrous
night," to take the first words that occur, no
force in " most drowningly doth sing," and his
elision (which occurs more than once) of perhaps
iniQ p rhaps is of a sort to make even a hardened
reader wince.
The fact is, Keats might learn from the Eliza
bethans almost every element of stjde except taste,
and here where he most needed guidance they
seemed rather to sanction his lawlessness. But
there was a difference between their circumstances
and his. When a language is young and ex
panding, the absence of restraining taste is not so
much felt, and liberty is a principle of growth ;
whereas at a later stage the same freedom leads
often to mere eccentricity and vulgarisms. So it is
that in Keats s language we are often obliged to
distinguish between a true Elizabethan sponta
neity and a spurious imitation that smacks too
much of his London surroundings. We resent
justly the review of Endymion in Blackwood* s in
which the author was labelled as belonging to
" the Cockney School of Poetry "; we take almost
as a personal affront the reviewer s coarse de
rision : So back to the shop, Mr. John, stick to
plasters, pills, ointment boxes "; yet there is a
hideous particle of truth in the insult which will
KEATS IO5
forever cling to Keats s name. Great poets have
come out of London, but only Keats among the
immortals can be pointed at as " cockney."
There is, in fact, something disconcerting in
the circumstances of the poet s early life. He
was born in L,ondon in 1795. His father, a west-
countryman, probably with Celtic blood in his
veins, was employed in a livery stable, of which
he afterwards became manager, marrying the
owner s daughter. He died when John was nine
years old. The mother soon married a Mr. Wil
liam Rawlings, also stable-keeper, who apparently
had succeeded her first husband in the Moorgate
business. She lived but a few years, and the
family of children, of which John was the eldest,
were left orphans. There was some money, and
though towards the end pecuniary troubles came
upon him, Keats was in this respect more fortu
nate than many others ; he never had to waste
his powers by writing for bread. Between the
years of 1806 and 1810 he attended a fairly good
school kept by the Rev. John Clarke at Knfield.
After this he was apprenticed for five years to a
surgeon at Edmonton, and then went, as the
phrase is, to walk the London hospitals. Mean
while he had been studying other things besides
the human anatomy. Charles Cowden Clarke,
the son of his schoolmaster, one day memorable
in the annals of literature, had read Spenser s
Epithalamium to him, and lent him The Faerie
Queen to take home. It was letting the wind in
IO6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
upon a sleeping fire. Said a friend in after days:
Though born to be a poet, he was ignorant
of his birthright until he had completed his
eighteenth year. It was The Faerie Queen
that awakened his genius. In Spenser s fairy
land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world,
and became another being ; till enamoured of the
stanza, he attempted to imitate it, and succeeded.
This account of the sudden development of his
poetic powers I first received from his brothers
and afterwards from himself. This, his earliest
attempt, the Imitation of Spenser, is in his first
volume of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting
to those acquainted with his history."
There was no more walking of hospitals for
Keats. His first volume of Poems was published
in 1817, with the significant motto from Spenser :
What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty.
It contains the first project of Endymion, the
Epistles, in which Keats unfurls the flag of rebel
lion against poetic " rules," and a group of son
nets, including that on Chapman s Homer. The
next year appeared the true Endymion, which
won him the abuse of the reviewers and the
admiration of Shelley. Only two years later, in
1820, when he was not yet twenty-five, there
followed that wonderful book which has assured
to him the passionate desire of his life, a place
KEATS IO7
"among the English Poets." No poet of Eng
land at that age, barely four or five at any age,
had published such works as these, Lamia, Isa
bella, The Eve of St, Agnes, Hyperion, and the
great Odes. What else he wrote was only to be
printed posthumously, including, among other
poems, the revised Fall of Hyperion, the exquisite
fragment on The Eve of Saint Mark, the haunting
ballad of La Belle Dame sans Merri, and the
Dramas. Over some of this later work there
seems to be a flush of hectic impatience, the
creeping on of that dread which he had expressed
in a sonnet, written indeed as early as 1818, but
not published until after his death :
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact ry,
Hold like full garners the full-ripen d grain ;
When I behold, upon the night s starr d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance ;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour !
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love ! then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
It expresses the ever-present fear of his brief life,
but it contains also, at the close, the nearest
approach in Keats to that profounder vision of
disillusion which separates the Elizabethans from
IO8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
him ; it calls to mind what are, I think, the
greatest lines of Keats s Italian contemporary,
Leopardi :
Io quello
Infinite silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando : e mi sovvien 1 eterno,
B le tnorte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Cosl tra questa
Immensitti s annega ilpensier mio;
E il naufragariri* dolce in questo mare.
(I anon
That infinite silence with this voice compare:
And I remember the eternal one,
The seasons of the dead, and this of care
About us and its sound. So as I wonder,
My thought in this immensity sinks under;
And shipwreck in that sea is sweet to bear.}
But Keats owed to Cowden Clarke something
more than his intellectual awakening ; it was
through the same friend he was introduced to the
circle of literary and artistic men in London who
supported and stimulated him in his work. Chief
among these in his early impressionable years
were Leigh Hunt and the half-mad painter, B. R.
Haydon, and unfortunately both of these advisers
reinforced the natural qualities of his mind with
what may be called a kind of bastard, or cockney,
Klizabethanism. It is painful to follow that influ
ence, as so much in Keats s life is painful. In
his maturity he could see the weakness of these
friends and speak of them dispassionately enough.
Of Leigh Hunt he wrote to his brother George,
KEATS ICQ
then in America: "Hunt does one harm by mak
ing fine things petty and beautiful things hateful.
Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care
not for white Busts and many a glorious thing
when associated with him becomes a nothing."
So much Keats could see, but never, even in his
greatest works, could he quite free himself from
that malign influence ; for it had laid hold of a
corresponding tendency in his own nature. He
was never quite able to distinguish between the
large liberties of the strong and the jaunty flip
pancy of the underbred ; his passion for beauty
could never entirely save him from mawkish pret-
tinesses, and his idea of love was too often a mere
sickly sweetness. Never after the days of En-
dymion^ perhaps, did he write anything quite in
the character of " Those lips, O slippery blisses ";
but even in the volume of 1820 he could not be
sure of himself. There are too many passages
there like these lines in Lamia :
He, sick to lose
The amorous promise of her lone complain,
Swoon d, murmuring of love, and pale with pain.
Not a little of this uncertainty of taste was due to
Leigh Hunt.
And in the same way Haydon confirmed Keats
on another side of his cockney Elizabethanism.
Haydon himself was a man of vast and undisci
plined, almost insane, enthusiasms, and he
undoubtedly did much to keep the ambitious
IIO SHELBURNE ESSAYS
longings of Keats in a state of morbid fermenta
tion, It would be a curious study to trace the
friendship and humorous rupture of these two
men in Keats s letters and in those journals of
Haydon where so many of the geniuses of the day
are presented in startling undress. At first all is
smoothness. Keats tells Haydon in a letter "that
there are three things to rejoice at in this Age
The Excursion, Your Pictures, and Hazlitt s
depth of Taste " poor Hazlitt being supplanted
in a sonnet on the same theme by Hunt,
He of the rose, the violet, the spring,
The social smile, the chain for Freedom s sake.
On his part the painter describes his friend as the
ideal poet; "Keats was the only man I ever
met," he wrote, " who seemed and looked con
scious of a high calling, except Wordsworth."
Then it is a letter from Haydon :
I love you like my own brother. Beware, for God s
sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are
ripping up the talents and morality of our friend ! [A
kindly allusion to Hunt] ... Do not despair. Collect
incident, study character, read Shakespeare, and trust in
Providence, and you will do, you must.
Which brings from Keats this exalted reply :
I know no one but you who can be fully sensible of the
turmoil and anxiety, the sacrifice of all what \_sic] is called
comfort, the readiness to measure time by what is done
and to die in six hours could plans be brought to con
clusions the looking upon the Sun, the Moon, the Stars,
KEATS III
the Earth and its contents, as materials to form greater
things that is to say, ethereal things but here I am
talking like a Madman greater things than our Creator
hirnselt made! 1
Later a coolness sets in, occasioned by a common
habit of asking for money Haydon, indeed, was
thought by some to have sat to Charles L,amb as
a model for Ralph Bigod, Esq., captain of the
mighty " men who borrow" and at the last a
mutual estrangement. On hearing of Keats s
death Haydon summed up his character thus:
A genius more purely poetical never existed. In
fireside conversation he was weak and inconsequent, but
he was in his glory in the fields. . . . He was the
most unselfish of human creatures; unadapted to the
world, he cared not for himself, and put himself to
any inconvenience for the sake of his friends. He was
haughty, and had a fierce hatred of rank; but he had a
kind heart, and would have shared his fortune with any
one who wanted it. [Keats, by the way, had quarrelled
with Haydon over the repayment of a loan.] He had an
exquisite sense of humour, and too refined a notion of
female purity to bear the little sweet arts of love with
patience. ... He began life full of hopes, fury,
impetuous, and ungovernable, expecting the world to fall
at once beneath his powers. Unable to bear the sneers of
ignorance nor the attacks of envy, he began to despond,
and flew to dissipation as a relief. For six weeks he was
scarcely sober, and to show what a man does to gratify
his appetites when they get the better of him once
covered his tongue and throat as far as he could with
cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the "delicious
coldness of claret in all its glory " his own expression.
112 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
I should like to be as sure as are some others, of
Keats s own time and of the present, that this is
a distorted view of the man s failings ; they may
well be somewhat exaggerated, yet Haydon had
for the most part a wicked penetration into char
acter, and his words here ring remarkably true.
Nor is it the only place in which he asserts that
Keats was beaten down by the cruelty of the
reviewers, leading us to think that Byron s cyni
cal rhyme on the * fiery particle " * snuffed out
by an article " may have contained just a grain of
truth. And as for the cayenne pepper, is it much
more than a childish illustration of the thought
repeated in many a verse to " burst Joy s grape
against his palate fine"? After all this is but
the frailer, and, so to speak, ephemeral, side of
Keats ; unfortunately, his associations were not
of a kind to help him to overcome the initial lack
of training, by correcting his flaws of taste and
egotistic enthusiasm, and by purging what I
have called his Elizabethan spontaneity of its
cockney dross. As Wordsworth wrote in his
patronising way: "How is Keats? He is a
youth of promise, too great for the sorry com
pany he keeps."
The wonder of it is that he grew so rapidly,
and that so large a part of the volume of 1820
should have attained the true and lofty liberties
of the spirit. In many aspects he stands curi
ously apart from his age. One feels this in his
attitude toward nature, which in his verse is still
KEATS 113
unsubjected to the destinies of mankind. With
Wordsworth and Shelley, even with Byron, some
thought of man s sufferings and aspirations rises
between the poet s eye and the vision of Nature,
but with Keats she is still a great primeval force,
inhuman and self-centred, beautiful, and sublime,
and cruel, by turns. One catches this note at
times in the earlier poems, as in the largeness and
aloofness of such a picture as this:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence.
It speaks with greater clearness in the later
poems in the elfin call of the nightingale s song,
The same that hath
Charm d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn ;
and in the imagery, calling us back to times
before man s feebler creation, of that " sad place "
where
Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks, that seemed
Ever as if just rising from a sleep,
Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns.
One has the feeling that the poet s mind is in
immediate contact with the object described, and
the imagination of the reader is shocked from self-
complacency by a kind of sympathetic surprise.
It is at bottom a mark of that unperverted and
nntheorised sincerity whose presence condones so
many faults in the Elizabethan writers, and whose
8
I 14 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
absence mars so many brilliant qualities in the
contemporaries of Keats.
But more particularly I see this backward-
reaching kinship of Keats in his constant associ
ation of the ideas of beauty (or love) and death.
In the dramatists that association attained its cli
max in the broken cry of Webster, which rings
and sobs like a paroxysm of jealous rage against
the all-embracing power :
Cover her face ; mine eyes dazzle : she died young,
but everywhere in them it is present or implied.
Of their thirst for beauty there is no need to give
separate examples ; nor yet of their constant
brooding on the law of mutability. They cannot
get away from the remembrance of life s brevity:
On pain of death, let no man name death to me :
It is a word infinitely terrible.
But for the tedium of repetition one might go
through Keats s volume of 1820, and show how
completely the pattern of that book is wrought
on the same background of ideas. Perhaps the
most striking illustration may be found in those
two stanzas which relate how Isabella in the
lonely forest unearths the body of her buried
lover :
She gazed into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
One glance did fully all its secrets tell ;
Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well ;
Upon the murderous spot she seem d to grow,
KEATS 115
Like to a native lily of the dell:
Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
To dig more fervently than misers can.
Soon she turn d up a soiled glove, whereon
Her silk had play d in purple phantasies,
She kiss d it with a lip more chill than stone,
And put it in her bosoin, where it dries
And freezes utterly unto the bone
Those dainties made to still an infant s cries :
Than gan she work again; nor stay d her care,
But to throw back at times her veiling hair.
Every age has its peculiar adaptation of this
universal theme, and chants in its own way the
everlasting hymeneal of beauty and death ; but
in these stanzas there is something that calls the
mind back to the poetry of Webster and Ford.
This poignant meeting of the shapes of loveliness
and decay is the inheritance of the middle ages,
which in England more especially was carried
over into the new birth and made gorgeous with
all the cunning splendours of the Renaissance.
Keats did not learn his art from the real antiquity.
The Greeks, too, had their version of the theme,
and in the story of Persephone and Dis gave it its
most perfect mythological form. But its interest
with them lay primarily in its ethical associa
tions, and the Powers of beauty and death were
minor agents only in the great moral drama
moved by the supreme unwritten laws. No Greek
could have so gloated over the purely physical
contrast of ideas "A skull upon a mat of roses
Il6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
lying" or put into it the same hungering emo
tion, as did Keats in these stanzas that follow the
forest scene in Isabella:
In anxious secrecy they took it home,
And then the prize was all for Isabel :
She calm d its wild hair with a golden comb,
And all around each eye s sepulchral cell
Pointed each fringed lash ; the smeared loam
With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
She drench d away : and still she comb d, and kept
Sighing all day and still she kiss d, and wept.
Then in a silken scarf, sweet with the dews
Of precious flowers pluck d in Araby,
And divine liquids cotne with odorous ooze
Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,
She wrapp d it up ; and for its tomb did choose
A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
And cover d it with mould, and o er it set
Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze ;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten d it with tears unto the core.
To see how far Keats is from the spirit of Greece,
we need only turn from this last stanza to the scene
of Antigone, in the play of Sophocles, treading
the last road for the love of one dead, and look
ing for the last time on the light of the sun and
KEATS 117
never again any more. She, too, bids farewell to
the bright things of the world, the springs of
Dirce and the grove of Thebes, but it is not in the
language of Isabella.
The same music wrung from the transience of
lovely things runs like a monotone through the
other poems of Keats s great volume, but in a
different key. The incongruity (as it appears, yet
it lies at the bottom of human thought) intrudes
even into The Eve of St. Agnes, with the opening
image of the benumbed beadsman among the
sculptured dead and with the closing return to
the same contrast. In the Odes it is subdued to
a musing regret heard pensively in the Ode to a
Nightingale:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath ;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy !
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain
To thy high requiem become a sod ;
speaking with a still more chastened beauty in the
Ode on a Grecian Urn :
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter ; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on ;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone :
Il8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare ;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
uttered with greater poignancy in the Ode on
Melancholy:
She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must die ;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.
It is the secret, for those who can read that
mystery, of what is to many his most perfect
work, the ballad of La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
From these ideal poems one turns naturally to
the letters in which the fever and unrest, the
glimpses of philosophy, and the broken hopes
of Keats s actual life are expressed with such
pathetic earnestness. The picture that results is
of a strong man fighting against what he calls,
with some self-depreciation, "a horrid Morbidity
of Temperament." There is much to lament in
this revelation never meant for the public ; but in
the end the sense of the man s greatness, the feel
ing of his reliance on the divine call, outweighs the
impression of his painful susceptibility, and of his
struggles to free himself from "the mire of a bad
reputation." He may write on one day: ic My
name with the literary fashionables is vulgar, I am
a weaver-boy to them, a tragedy would lift me out
KEATS 119
of this mess"; but the truer Keats is to be found
in his moments of proud independence: "I value
more the privilege of seeing great things in lone
liness than the fame of a Prophet." Great things
in loneliness! These were to him, as almost
every page of the letters would prove, the mighty
abstract Idea of Beauty and the ever-present con
sciousness of death. The pity of it is that these
relentless powers should have passed for him from
the realm of reflection to the coarse realities of life,
and that the experience of his few years (they were
only twenty-five) should have been torn by them
as by a warring destiny. It was inevitable that
this contention should take the form of love; nay,
from the beginning, in his flippant, half-frightened
allusions to the other sex, one feels that he is lay
ing himself open to the recrimination of the deity.
"I am certain," he says, "I have not a right feel
ing toward women"; and again, with a kind of
foreboding, he avows that his idea of beauty
stifles the more divided and minute domestic
happiness. Through all the correspondence his
thought seems to be leaping on as if pursued by
a dreaded Necessity; one hears the footsteps of the
spurned goddess behind him. So, he was over
taken at last, and his brief story was made
another example of the ways of Nemesis. The
letters in which he pours out the agony of his
love for Fanny Brawne resemble Hazlitt s Liber
Amoris more than anything else in literature.
They have the same uncontrolled passion, and the
I2O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
same unfortunate note of vulgarity, due not so
much to the exuberance of his emotion as to the
lack of any corresponding force in the woman.
The flaccidity of her temperament deprives the
episode of tragic ideality, and lowers it to the
common things of the street. It even changes
his master-vision to something approaching a
sickly sentimentalism. "I have two luxuries to
brood over in my walks," he writes, "your Love
liness and the hour of my death. O that I could
have possession of them both in the same min
ute." It helped to kill the poet in him, save for
that last sonnet, his wild swan-song, written on
his journey to Rome and a Roman grave:
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors
No yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow d upon my fair love s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever or else swoon to death.
As it seemed to him in those evil days when
disease had laid hold of his body, Death was the
victor in the contention of Fate. "If I should
die," he wrote to Fanny Brawne, "I have left no
KEATS 121
immortal work behind me nothing to make my
friends proud of my memory but I have loved
the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had
had time I would have made myself remembered."
And the epitaph which he composed for himself
how well it is remembered! was carved on
stone: "Here lies one whose name was writ in
water." But to the world, not Death but eternal
Loveliness carried the palm. We think of him as
the Marcellus of literature, who could not break
through the fata aspera, and as one of "the inher
itors of unfulfilled renown"; and still we know
that he accomplished a glorious destiny. His ,
promise was greater than the achievement of *
others.
And yet a word to avoid misunderstanding, for
it is so easy in these voyages of criticism to bring
back a one-sided report, and to emphasise over
much the broad aspects of a land while neglecting
the nicer points of distinction. Thus, in pointing
out the kinship of Keats to the Elizabethans, we
should not forget that he is, like all men, still
of his own age. By his depth and sincerity he
differs, indeed, from certain other writers of the
century who deal with the same subjects from
William Morris, for example, whose Earthly Para
dise runs on the strange companionship of love
and death with almost a frivolous persistence; but
he is still far from the brave furor and exultation
of the great passages in Marlowe. Again he
has more than once imitated the simplicity of
122 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
William Browne notably in the Ode on a Grecian
Urn where the lines to the" bold lover" already
quoted are evidently an echo of a passage in the
Pastorals:
Here from the rest a lovely shepherd s boy
Sits piping on a hill, as if his joy
Would still endure, or else that age s frost
Should never make him think what he had lost.
(Which is itself borrowed from Sir Philip Sidney s
"Shepherd boy piping as though he should never
be old.") But who does not feel that the young
beauty of Keats is different from that first careless
rapture, which has gone never to be recovered?
Perhaps the very fact that he is speaking a
language largely foreign to his own generation
adds a personal eagerness, a touch at times of
feverish straining, to his song.
I have already intimated that side by side with
the superb zest of beauty there is another note
in the dramatists which Keats rarely or never
attains. That note is caught in such lines as
Ford s
For he is like to something I remember
A great while since, a long, long time ago ;
and always when it is struck, a curtain is drawn
from behind the fretful human actors and we look
beyond into infinite space. On the other hand,
there is but little in Keats of the rich humanity
and high passions that for the most part fill
the Elizabethan stage. The pathos of Isabella
KEATS 123
is the nearest approach in him to that deeper
source of poetry. } Keats himself was aware that
this background was lacking to his work, and
harps on the subject continually. He perceived
dimly that the motto of his faith,
" Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all
Ye know on earth ; and all ye need to know,
was but a partial glimpse of the reality. Had he
been sufficiently a Greek to read Plato, he might
have been carried beyond that imperfect view ;
even the piteous incompleteness of his own life
might have laid bare to him the danger lurking
in its fair deception. As it is, his letters are filled
with vague yearnings fora clearer knowledge; he
is, he says, as one "writing at random, straining
after particles of light in the midst of a great dark
ness. S Unfortunately, inevitably perhaps, when
he came to put his half-digested theories into
practice, he turned, not to the moral drama of the
Greeks or to the passionate human nature of the
Elizabethans, but to the humanitarian philosophy
that was in the air about him; and, accepting
this, he fell into a crude dualism. "I find there
is no worthy pursuit," he writes, "but the idea
of doing some good to the world. ... I
have been hovering for some time between an
exquisite sense of the luxurious, and a love for
philosophy."
It has been generally supposed that Keats
abandoned his unfinished Hyperion, and started
124 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
to rewrite it in the form of a vision, through
dissatisfaction with the Miltonic inversions of
language in the earlier draft and through the
influence of Dante s Commedia. That view is
demonstrably true in part, but I think the real
motive for the change goes deeper. There is, in
fact, an inherent contradiction in his treatment of
the theme which rendered a completion of the
original poem almost impracticable. The subject
is the overthrow of the Titans by the new race
of gods Saturn succumbing to the arms of his
own child and Hyperion, Lord of the Sun, fleeing
before Apollo of the golden bow and the lyre; it
is the old dynasty of formless powers, driven into
oblivion by the new creators of form and order.
That was the design, but it is easy to see how
in the execution the poet s dominant idea over
mastered him and turned his intended paean on
the birth of the new beauty into a sonorous dirge
for the passing away of the old. Our imagination
is indeed lord of the past and not of the future.
The instinctive sympathy of the poet for the fallen
deities is felt in the very first line of the poem,
and it never changes. Consider the picture of
Hyperion s home:
His palace bright,
Bastion d with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touch d with shade of bronzed obelisks,
Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries ;
And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
Flush d angerly
KEATS 125
or consider the apparition of Hyperion himself :
He look d upon them all,
And in each face he saw a gleam of light,
But splendider in Saturn s, whose hoar locks
Shoue like the bubbling foam about a keel
When the prow sweeps into a midnight cove.
In pale and silver silence they remain d,
Till suddenly a splendour, like the morn,
Pervaded all the beetling gloomy steeps,
All the sad spaces of oblivion,
And every gulf, and every chasm old,
And every height, and every sullen depth,
Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented
streams: . . .
It was Hyperion ;
are there any words left in the poet s armory after
this to describe the glory of Apollo ? As a matter
of fact, the third book in which he introduces the
young usurper is distinctly below the other two
in force and beauty, and Keats knew it and broke
off in the middle. That was, probably, in Sep
tember of 1819 ; about two months later he was
engaged in reshaping his work into The Fall of
Hyperion, which was also left unfinished and was
not published until 1856. In its altered form the
poem is cast into a vision. The poet finds him
self in a garden of rare flowers and delicious fruits.
These vanish away and in their place is "an old
sanctuary with roof august, wherein is a mystic
shrine and a woman ministering thereat. Her
name had once been Mnemosyne, the goddess of
memory, the mother of the Muses, but now she
126 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
is called Moneta, that is to say, the guide or
admonisher alas, for all the change means ! The
poet cries to her for help:
" High Prophetess," said I, " purge off,
Benign, if so it please tbee, my mind s film."
"None can usurp this height," returned that shade,
"But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest."
But are there not others, cries the poet, who
have felt the agony of the world, and have laboured
for its redemption ? Where are they that they are
not here ? And then :
" Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,"
Rejoin d that voice ; " they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human ace,
No music but a happy-noted voice :
They come not here, they have no thought to come;
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing."
And thereupon, in a vision, she unfolds before his
eyes the fall of Hyperion and the progress of
humanity symbolised in the advent of Apollo.
To compare this mutilated version with the poem
Keats had written under the instinctive inspiration
of his genius is one of the saddest tasks of the
student of literature.
No, it was not any dislike of Miltonic idioms or
any impulse from Dante that brought about this
change in his ambition ; it was the working of the
ineluctable Time-spirit. His early association?
KEATS 127
with L,eigh Hunt had prepared him for this
treachery to his nature, but there was a poverty
in the imagination of those cockney enthusiasts
for progress which would have saved him ulti
mately from their influence. It was the richer
note of Wordsworth, the still sad music of
humanity running through that poet s mighty
song, that wrought the fatal revolution. As early
as May of 1818 he had written to a friend (and
the passage is worthy of quoting at some length):
My Branchings out therefrom have been numerous :
one of them is the consideration of Wordsworth s genius
. . . and how he differs from Milton. And here I
have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether
Milton s apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds
from his seeing further or not than Wordsworth : and
whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and
martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region
of his song. [After some wandering there follows the
famous comparison of human life to a large mansion of
many apartments, which may be used as a key to the
symbolism of the later Hyperion, and then] \Ve see not
the balance of good and evil ; we are in a mist, we are
now in that state, we feel the " Burden of the Mystery."
To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can con
ceive, when he wrote Tintern Abbey, and It seems to me
that his genius is explorative of those dark Passages.
Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore
them. He is a genius and superior to us, in so far as he
can, more than we, make discoveries and shed a light in
them. Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than
Milton, though I think it has depended more upon the
general and gregarious advance of intellect, than indi
vidual greatness of Mind.
128 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
The Fall of Hyperion is nothing less than the
attempt of Keats, against the native grain of his
genius, to pass from the inspiration of Milton and
Shakespeare to that of Wordsworth. The thought
of the two poems, and of the living beauty of the
one and the disrelish of the other, brings up the
remembrance of that story, told by Edward Fitz-
Gerald from a Persian poet, of the traveller in the
desert who dips his hand into a spring of water
and drinks. By and by comes another who drinks
of the same spring from an earthen bowl, and
departs, leaving his bowl behind him. The first
traveller takes it up for another draught, but finds
that the water which had tasted sweet from his
own hand is now bitter from the earthen bowl. He
wonders; but a voice from heaven tells him the
clay from which the bowl is made was once Man,
and can never lose the bitter flavour of mortality.
BENJAMIN FRANKUN
THERK is a certain embarrassment in dealing
with Franklin as a man of letters, for the simple
reason that he was never, in the strict sense of the
word, concerned with letters at all. 1 He lived
in an age of writers, and of writing he did his full
share ; but one cannot go through the ten vol
umes of his collected works, or the three vol
umes of the admirable new edition now printing
under the care of Mr. Smyth, 3 without feeling
the presence of an intellect enormously ener
getic, but directed to practical rather than literary
ends. Were it not for the consummate ease
with which his mind moved, there would indeed
be something oppressive in this display of
In celebration of Franklin s Bicentenary, January 17,
1906, the Independent printed a number of papers on the
various aspects of his activity. The subject allotted to
me was Franklin in Literature.
2 The Writings of Benjamin Franklin. Collected and
Edited, with a Life and Introduction, by Albert Henry
Smyth. 10 vols. (Three only were published at this
date.) New York : The Macmillan Co., 1905-6. The
text is here amended much for the better. But an undue
squeamishness has led the editor to omit writings im
portant for a right knowledge of Franklin, and the notes
are unsatisfactory.
9 129
I3O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
unresting energy. Politics, religion, ethics, science,
agriculture, navigation, hygiene, the mechanical
arts, journalism, music, education in all these
fields he was almost equally at home, and every
subject came from under his touch simplified and
enlarged; on his tomb might have been engraved
the epitaph, Nullum quod tetigit non renovavit. He
had perhaps the most clarifying and renovating
intellect of that keenly alert age, and to know his
writings is to be faniilar with half the activities
of the eighteenth century. Yet his pen still
lacked that final spell which transmutes life into
literature. He was ever engaged in enforcing a
present lesson or producing an immediate result,
and his busy brain could not pause long enough
to listen to those hidden powers that all the while
murmur in remote voices the symbolic meaning
of the puppets and the puppet-actions of this
world. Like his contemporary Voltaire, and to
a far higher degree, his personality was greater
than any separate production of his brain. And
so, as the real charm of Voltaire is most felt in the
Correspondence, where there is no attempt to
escape from his own personal interests, in the
same way the better approach to Franklin s works
is through the selected edition so arranged by
Mr. Bigelow as to form a continuous and familiar
narrative of his life. 1
1 The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself .
By John Bigelow. 3 vols. Philadelphia : J. B. Ivippin-
cott Co. Fifth Edition, 1905.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 131
But something is still wanting. Franklin the
man is so much larger than Franklin the writer
that, like his other contemporary, Dr. Johnson,
he needs a Boswell to give him his true place in
literature. Some indication of what such a work
might be we have in Parton s solid and self-re
specting volumes. 1 Here the practical achieve
ments of the man, the supreme versatility of his
mind, his dominance over the world, and his own
powers of expression are so brought together as
to create a figure almost comparable to the great
personalities that arise from the memoirs of
Boswell and lyockhart and Froude. But Parton
laboured under certain disabilities. He had, in
the first place, to proceed from a very imperfect
edition of Franklin s writings, which did not
even include a good text of the Autobiography;
and he lacked something of the finished literary
skill and psychological insight required for his
task. His Life is, I venture to say, despite cer
tain misapprehensions of Franklin s character, the
most interesting work of its kind yet produced in
this country, vastly superior to the mutilated lives
of Franklin that have since been turned out for
flighty readers, but it still leaves room for a book
which might be a possession forever, an honour
to American letters. And I have in mind at
least one of our younger historians who could
1 Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. By James
Parton. 2 vols. Boston : Hough ton, Mifflin & Co.,
1897. (First published 1864.)
132 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
thus, if his other self-imposed tasks did not
prevent, enroll his name among the memorable
biographers. 1
For Franklin would meet such a biographer
more than half way. Whether from some histri
onic instinct in his own nature, or from some
secret sympathy between his individual will and
the forces that play upon mankind, the supreme
moments of his career follow one another like the
artificial tableaux of a drama. As a man of
science his prime achievement was to discover
the identity of lightning and the electric fluid.
Eripuit c<zlo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis, wrote
Turgot of that famous event, having in mind the
tyrant superstitions of both heaven and earth;
and it is peculiarly appropriate that this step in
what may be called the secularisation of celestial
phenomena should have come from the champion
of political liberty. Who was better fitted than
this prophet of common sense to give an answer
to Virgil s question:
An te, genitor, cum fulmina torques,
Nequiquam horremus, csecique in nubibus ignes
Terrificant animos et inania murmura miscent ?
Not from himself but from others comes the story
of his dramatic experiment. The time is a day
in June of 1752, when a thunder-storm is threaten-
i As certain humorous critics have intimated that only
modest} prevented the naming of this gentleman, I may
say that I had in mind Mr, William Garrott Brown.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 1 33
ing. The scene is in the purlieus of Philadelphia.
Thither Franklin and his son, fearing the ridicule
of their neighbours, steal out unobserved. There
they send up a silk kite constructed for the
purpose and then seek the shelter of an open
abandoned cowshed. The cord of the kite, except
the end of non-conducting silk which they hold
in their hands, is hempen, and will become, when
wet, an excellent conductor. At the juncture of
the hemp and the silk is a metal key, which is
connected with a I,eyden jar. The storm breaks
and a thunder-cloud passes directly over the kite,
but still there is no sign of electricity. The
philosopher is in despair and begins to fear that
the fine theories he has spread abroad will end in
mockery, when, suddenly, the fibres of the hem
pen cord stand on end. He applies his knuckle
to the key, feels the customary shock, and knows
that he can justify himself in the eyes of Europe.
Even more striking, if less picturesque, is the
scene which may stand as the climax of his long
struggle to preserve the union of England and
the colonies. It happened in 1774, when he was
in London as Commissioner for Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts, and when the feeling of irritation
on both sides was at the fever point. A friendly
member of Parliament had put into Franklin s
hands certain letters in which Governor Hutch-
inson, of Massachusetts, though a native-born
American, had urged the most exasperating
measures of oppression against the colonies. These
134 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
letters Franklin, by permission, had transmitted to
Boston, where they naturally raised a tempest of
indignation. Complications ensued in L,ondon, a
fatal duel was fought, and Franklin, though his
part in the affair was perfectly honourable, had
given an occasion to his enemies for abusive
defamation. And they did not miss the oppor
tunity. A petition had been laid before the Privy
Council to remove Governor Hutchinson, and
Franklin was summoned to meet that exalted body
in the so-called Cockpit. "All the courtiers,"
Franklin wrote home afterward, "were invited, as
to an entertainment, and there never was such an
appearance of Privy Councillors on any occasion,
not less than thirty-five, besides an immense
crowd of other auditors. . . The Solicitor-General
[Mr. Wedderburn] then went into what he called
a history of the province for the last ten years,
and bestowed plenty of abuse upon it, mingled
with encomium on the governors. But the favour
ite part of his discourse was levelled at your
agent, who stood there the butt of his invective
ribaldry for near an hour, not a single L,ord
adverting to the impropriety and indecency of
treating a public messenger in so ignominious a
manner. . . If he had done a wrong, in obtain
ing and transmitting the letters, that was not the
tribunal where he was to be accused and tried.
The cause was already before the Chancellor.
Not one of their Lordships checked and recalled
the orator to the business before them, but, on
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 135
the contrary, a very few excepted, they seemed to
enjoy highly the entertainment, and frequently
burst out in loud applauses. This part of his
speech was thought so good, that they have since
printed it, in order to defame me everywhere, and
particularly to destroy my reputation on your
side of the water; but the grosser parts of the
abuse are omitted, appearing, I suppose, in their
own eyes, too foul to be seen on paper." It
would be interesting to know what the Council
thought worthy to expunge. As printed, the
speech of Wedderburn was sufficiently vitupera
tive, one would think:
I hope, my Lords, lie exclaimed, with thundering voice
and vehement beating of his fist on the cushion before
him I hope, my Lords, you will mark and brand the
man, for the honour of this country, of Burope, and
of mankind. . . . He has forfeited all the respect of
societies and of men. Into what companies will he here
after go with an unembarrassed face, or the honest in
trepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous
eye ; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up
their escritoirs. He will henceforth esteem it a libel to
be called a man of letters ; homo trium literarum (i.e.,
fur^ thief!) . . . He not only took away the letters of
one brother ; but kept himself concealed till he nearly
occasioned the murder of the other. It is impossible to
read his account, expressive of the coolest and most de
liberate malice, without horror. . . . Amidst these
tragical events, of one person nearly murdered, of an
other answerable for the issue, of a worthy governor hurt
in his dearest interests, the fate of America in suspense ;
here is a man who, with the utmost insensibility of
136 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
remorse, stands up and vows himself the author of all. I
can compare it only to Zanga, in Dr. Young s Revenge :
"Know then t was /.
/ forged the letters /disposed the picture
I hated, /despised, and /destroy."
I ask, my Lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed,
by poetic fiction only, to the bloody African is not sur
passed by the coolness and apathy of the wily American ?
The scene is dramatic in the extreme the
vociferous, malignant accuser, the lords gloating
over their victim, nodding approval to the bully
and breaking out into laughter when the slander
was most virulent; and Franklin, all the while
standing at one end of the room in the recess by
the chimney, erect, motionless, with countenance,
so an eyewitness described it, as unchangeable
as if carved out of wood. He would seem almost
to have had in view the vicissitudes of his own
life, when years before, as a young man, he had
written his character of "Cato" for the Weekly
Mercury: "His aspect is sweetened with humanity
and benevolence, and at the same time embold
ened with resolution, equally free from a diffident
bashfulness and an unbecoming assurance. The
consciousness of his own innate worth and un
shaken integrity renders him calm and undaunted
in the presence of the most great and powerful,
and upon the most extraordinary occasions. But
Franklin had his malicious side. In the Cockpit
he wore, we are told, a full dress-suit of spotted
Manchester velvet. On a memorable day, just
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 137
four years later, when the treaty with France was
to be signed, he took pains to appear in the same
conspicuous garb he was ever a humourist, this
wily American ! For the rest, the epigram of
Horace Walpole is sufficiently well known:
Sarcastic Sawney, swol n with spite and prate,
On silent Franklin poured his venal hate.
The calm philosopher, without reply,
Withdrew, and gave his country liberty.
Franklin, I believe, never met Dr. Johnson;
and this is a pity, for the clash between the dic
tator s burly insolence and Franklin s irresistible
wit would have furnished an unforgettable pen
dant to the ignominy of the Cockpit. He was,
however, brought face to face with the only other
personality entirely of that age which was com
parable to his own. In 1778 Voltaire, an old man
tottering to the grave, revisited Paris to accept the
homage of the city, and to die. The American
envoys were received in his chamber, and there
the patriarch of the terrible new faith that was
permeating society pronounced a solemn blessing
upon the representative of the rising generation.
"When I gave my benediction," he wrote a few
days later, "to the grandson of the sage and
illustrious Franklin, the most honourable man of
America, I spoke only these words, God and
Liberty ! All who were present shed tears. " But
the petted spokesmen of the century were to meet
on a more eminent stage and in a more noteworthy
138 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
scene. At a public session of the Academy of
Sciences the two " philosophers" sat together
on the platform, the lodestone of all eyes. What
happened can best be related in the words of John
Adams, a curious and jealous observer:
Voltaire and Franklin were both present, and there
presently arose a general cry that M. Voltaire and M.
Franklin should be introduced to each other. This was
done, and they bowed and spoke to each other. This
was no satisfaction ; there must be something more.
Neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was
wished or expected. They, however, took each other by
the hand ; but this was not enough. The clamour con
tinued until the exclamation came out, " // faut s em-
brasser a la Frangaise! " The two aged actors upon this
great theatre of philosophy and frivolity then embraced
each other by hugging one another in their arms and
kissing each other s cheeks, and then the tumult sub
sided. And the cry immediately spread throughout the
kingdom, and I suppose over all Europe, " Qu* il &tait
charmant de voir embrasser Solon et Sophocle! "
This great theatre of philosophy and frivolity !
Dear sir, it is the world of the eighteenth century
you are naming so petulantly, the stage on which
you are yourself play ing a lesser but no mean part.
Nor would it be easy to find a tableau more
strikingly significant of the powers that had
already given freedom to America and were soon
to set France and all Europe ablaze. It might
seem as if the Daemon of history had chosen
Franklin to be the protagonist in the successive
acts of that drama of mingled tragedy and comedy
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 139
wherein the people of the nations were shuffled
about as supernumeraries.
Other scenes might be quoted as minor episodes
in that stupendous drama the presentation of
Franklin to his Majesty Louis XVI., when
Franklin s wig played so comical a part; the
receipt of the news of Burgoyne s surrender; and,
long before these, the interrogation of Franklin
before the British Parliament. For the last and
most beautiful scene we must pass on to another
parliament which was sitting in a far less sumpt
uous hall. It was in September of 1787, and the
Convention of the States at Philadelphia had, after
long uncertainties, drafted the Constitution which
was to justify and make perpetual the labours of*
which Franklin had borne so heavy a share.
The story is related by Madison that, while "the
last members were signing, Dr. Franklin, look
ing toward the president s chair, at the back of
which a rising sun happened to be painted,
observed to a few members near him that painters
had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a
rising from a setting sun. I have, he said,
often and often, in the course of the session, and
the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its
issue, looked at that behind the president, without
being able to tell whether it was risirlfe or setting;
but now, at length, I have the happiness to
know that it is a rising and not a setting
sun. " So it was the venerable man pro
nounced upon the work of his generation and
I4O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
saluted those who were about to take up the
burden.
Franklin was not precisely a man of letters, yet
his life is almost literature, and out of it might
be made one of the great books. Not only do the
salient events of his career take on this dramatic
form which is already a kind of literary expres
sion, but he goes further than that and leaves
the task of the biographer half done, by using
language as one of his chief instruments of
activity. Kven the sallies of his wit were a
power, often consciously used, in the practical
world. So in Paris, during the dark days of the
war, a well-placed jest here and there was sur
prisingly effective in keeping up the confidence of
our French friends. When some one told him
that Howe had taken Philadelphia, he was ready
with the retort: " I beg your pardon, sir, Phila
delphia has taken Howe." And again when the
story of another defeat was disseminated by the
British Ambassador, and Franklin was asked
if it were true, he replied : No, monsieur, it is
not a truth; it is only a Stormont." And
throughout Paris a "stormont" passed for a lie.
At another time some one accused the Americans *
of cowardice for firing from behind the stone
walls of Lexington: "Sir," said Franklin, "I
beg to inquire if those same walls had not two
sides to them?" Best known of all is his pun,
bravest of all puns, in the Continental Congress
when there was hesitation over signing the
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Declaration* ofy Jndependence. "We must be
unanimous," said Hancock; "there must be no
pulling different ways ; we must all hang
together." "Yes," added Franklin, "we must,
indeed, all hang together, or, most assuredly,
we shall all hang separately."
But his pen was as ready a servant as his
tongue, and how diligently he trained himself
to this end every reader of the Autobiography
>ws. From childhood he was an eager and
tical student, anel -few pages of his memoirs are
written w.&h more warmth of recollection than
those which tell of the books he contrived to buy,
Bunyan s works first of all. He seems to think
that the Spectator had the predominating in
fluence on his style, and apparently he was still
under sixteen when an odd volume of that work
set him to studying systematically. His method
was to read one of the essays and then after a
number of days to rewrite it from a few written
hints, striving -. to make his own language as
correct and elegant as the original; or, again, he
turned an essay into verse and back again into
prose from memory. " I also," he adds, " some
times jumbled my collections of hints into con
fusion, and after some weeks endeavoured to
reduce them into the best order, before I began to
form the full sentences and complete the paper.
This was to teach me method in the arrangement
of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards,
with the original, I discovered many faults and
142 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure
of fancying that, in certain particulars of small
import, I had been lucky enough to improve the
method or the language, and this encouraged me
to think I might possibly in time come to be a
tolerable Knglish writer, of which I was extremely
ambitious." His method on the whole one of
the best of disciplines, better, I think, than the
system of themes now employed in our colleges
could scarcely have been anything for Franklin
save a precocious discovery, although it had, of
course, been used long before his day. Cicero
tells how the orator Crassus had begun to form
himself on a plan not essentially different, but
turned from this to the more approved exercise
of converting the Greek writers into equivalent
L,atin. Vertere Gr&ca in Latinum veteres nostri
oratores optimum judicabant, said Quintilian; and
Franklin s language would have gained in rich
ness if he, too, had proceeded a step further and
undergone the discipline of comparing his English
with the classics. 1 As it is, he made himself one
1 That venerable schoolmaster, Roger Ascham, had his
way of elaborating this method : " First, let him teach
the childe, cherefullie and plainlie, the cause, and matter
of the letter [ of Cicero s ] : then, let him construe it into
Bnglishe, so oft, as the childe may easilie carie awaie
the vnderstanding of it : Lastlie, parse it ouer perfitlie.
This done thus, let the childe, by and by, both construe
and parse it ouer againe : so, that it may appeare, that
the childe douteth in nothing, that his master taught
him before. After this, the childe must take a paper
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 143
of the masters of that special style of the eigh
teenth century which concealed a good deal of
art under apparent, even obtrusive, negligences.
He professed to model himself on Addison, but
his language is really closer to the untrimmed
and vigorous sentences of Defoe. And in spirit
his actual affinity is more with Swift than with
the Spectator; or, rather, he lies between the two,
with something harsher than the suave imper
tinence of Addison yet without the terrible
savagery of the Dean. In particular he affected
Swift s two weapons of irony and the hoax, and,
if he did not quite make literature with them,
he at least made history, which his predecessor
could not do. Sometimes he was content to
borrow an invention bodily "convey the wise
it call" as when he badgered a rival almanac
maker by foretelling the date of his death and
then calmly proving the truth of the prophecy out
of the poor fellow s angry protestations. And
entirely in the vein of Swift, if not so palpably
stolen, are a number of his political pamphlets,
notably, in the way of irony, the Rules for
booke, and sitting in some place, where no man shall
prompe him, by him self, let him translate into Euglishe
his former lesson. Then shewing it to his master, let
the master take from him his latin booke, and pausing
an houre, at the least, than let the childe translate his
owne Englishe into latin againe, in an other paper booke.
When the childe bringeth it, turned into latin, the
master must compare it with Tullies booke, and laie
them both togither.
144 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One. As
for his hoaxes they were innumerable and aston
ishingly successful. They all point back to
the incorrigible Dean of St. Patrick s, although
one of the most famous of them was probably
suggested by Walpole s fictitious letter of Fred
erick the Great, which drove Rousseau one stage
further into lunacy. To expose the hollowness of
Great Britain s claim to absolute ownership of
America because that country had been colonised
by Englishmen, Franklin took advantage of the
ancient German settlement of Kngland and pub
lished a so-called Edict of the King of Prussia.
The result he tells in a letter to his son (October
6> 1773):
What made it the more noticed here was, that people in
reading it were, as the phrase is, taken in, till they had
got half through it, and imagined it a real edict, to which
mistake I suppose the King of Prussia s character must
have contributed. I was down at Lord Le Despencer s,
when the post brought that day s papers. Mr. White-
head was there, too (Paul Whitehead, the author of
Manners), who runs early through all the papers, and
tells the company what he finds remarkable. He had
them in another room, and we were chatting in the
breakfast parlour, when he came running in to us, out
of breath, with the paper in his hand. Here ! says he,
here s news for ye ! Here s the King of Prussia, claim
ing a right to this kingdom! All stared, and I as much as
anybody; and he went on to read it. When he had read
two or three paragraphs, a gentleman present said, Damn
his impudence, I dare say we shall hear by next post
that he is upon his march with one hundred thousand
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 145
men to back this. Wbitehead, who is very shrewd,
soon after began to smoke it, and looking in my face,
said, / // be hanged if this is not some of your American
jokes upon us. The reading went on, and ended with
abundance of laughing, and a general verdict that it was
a fair hit : and the piece was cut out of the paper and
preserved in my Lord s collection.
Other hoaxes were not so readily detected, and
have even crept into sober history and criticism.
There is the notorious Speech of Polly Baker,
which the Abbe Raynal quoted to illustrate a
point of law in his Histoire des Deux Indes, and
which he refused to expunge when informed of
its source. "Very well, Doctor," said he with
perfect nonchalance; "I had rather relate your
stories than other men s truths." And there is
the no less notorious proposal for a New Ver
sion of the Bible, in which Franklin, under the
plea of modernising the text, altered the first six
verses of Job into a satire on monarchical gov
ernment. The solemn comment of Matthew
Arnold on the passage is a delightful piece of
unconscious humour:
I remember the relief with which, after long feeling the
sway of Franklin s imperturbable common sense, I came
upon a project of his for a new version of the Book of
Job, to replace the old version, the style of which, says
Franklin, has become obsolete and thence less agreeable.
" I give," he continues, " a few verses, which may serve
as a sample of the kind of version I would recommend."
We all recollect the famous verse in our translation :
"Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear
God for naught?" Franklin makes this: "Does your
146 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Majesty imagine that Job s good conduct is the effect of
mere personal attachment and affection ? " I well re.
member how, when I first read that, I drew a deep breath
of relief, and said to myself, "After all, there is a
stretch of humanity beyond Franklin s victorious good
sense."
Alas for the proud wit of man ! These stumblings
of a great critic may be a lesson in humility for
us, the children of a later day. And after all, to
use his own phrase, it was only a slight misplace
ment of sarcasm; he did not mean Franklin s
merry skit, but was speaking, prophetically, of
that pretentious humbug, the Revised Version.
Later in life, especially during his stay in Paris,
Franklin s satire became even mellower, and he
took up again a form of writing in which he had
early excelled. This was the Bagatelle, as he
called it, the little apologue written in the light
est vein, yet containing often the very heart of
his genial philosophy. Such were the Epitaph
on Miss Shipley s Squirrel, The Ephemera, The
Whistle, The Handsome and Deformed Leg, and
the Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout, to
name no others. How neatly turned they all
are, how wise and gracious and tender; how they
show what was lost to pure literature by the
exigencies of his busy life. I cannot pass on
without quoting the least of these, the letter to
a young friend On the Loss of Her American
Squirrel. It belongs with that long list of poems
and epitaphs, half playful and half pathetic, on
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 147
the pets of dear women, beginning with Lesbia s
sparrow :
I lament with you most sincerely the unfortunate end
of poor Mungo. Few squirrels were better accomplished,
for he had a good education, travelled far, and seen much
of the world. As he had the honour of being, for his
virtues, your favourite, he should not go, like common
Skuggs, without an elegy or an epitaph. Let us give
him one in the monumental style and measure, which,
being neither prose, nor verse, is perhaps the properest
for grief ; since to use common language would look as
if we were not affected, and to make rhymes would seem
trifling in sorrow.
EPITAPH.
Alas ! poor Mungo !
Happy wert thou, hadst thou known
Thy own felicity.
Remote from the fierce bald eagle,
Tyrant of thy native woods,
Thou hadst naught to fear from his piercing talons,
Nor from the murdering gun
Of the thoughtless sportsman.
Safe in thy wired castle,
Grimalkin never could annoy thee.
Daily wert thou fed with the choicest viands,
By the fair hand of an indulgent mistress ;
But, discontented,
Thou wouldst have more freedom.
Too soon, alas ! didst thou obtain it;
And wandering,
Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel
Ranger !
Learn hence,
Ye who blindly seek more liberty,
148 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Whether subjects, sons, squirrels, or daughters,
That apparent restraint may be real protection,
Yielding peace and plenty
With security.
You see, my dear miss, how much more decent and
proper this broken style is than if we were to say by way
of epitaph
Here Skugg
I^ies snug
As a bug
In a rug.
And yet, perhaps, there are people in the world of so
little feeling as to think that this would be a good enough
epitaph for poor Mungo.
So it is that speech and action blend together
inextricably to form this fascinating literary fig
ure. He moves through the whole length of the
eighteenth century, serene and self-possessed, a
philosopher and statesman yet a fellow of infinite
jest, a shrewd economist yet capable of the tender-
est generosities. There was a large admixture of
earth in the image, no doubt. His wit was often
coarse, if not obscene, and, as his latest editor
observes, leaves a long " smudgy trail " behind it.
Not a little that he wrote and that still exists in
manuscript is too rank to be printed. One might
wish all this away, and yet I do not know ;
somehow the thought of that big animal body
completes our impression of the overflowing
bountif ulness of his nature. If wishing were hav
ing, I would choose rather that he had not made of
his Autobiography so singular a document in petty
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 149
prudence and economy. Nothing in that record
is more typical than the remark on his habit of
bringing home the paper he purchased through the
streets on a wheelbarrow "to show," he adds,
"that I was not above my business." And for
economy, one remembers his visit to the old lady in
lyondon who lived as a religious recluse, and his
comment: " She looked pale, but was never sick ;
and I give it as another instance on how small
an income life and health may be supported."
Possibly the character of his memoirs would have
changed if he had continued them into his later
years ; but I am inclined rather to think that the
discrepancy between the breadth of his activities
and the narrowness of his professed ideals would
have become still more evident by such an exten
sion. The truth is they only exaggerate a real
deficiency in his character; there was, after all, a
stretch of humanity beyond Franklin s victorious
good sense.
We feel this chiefly in his religious con
victions; it is pressed upon us by contrast with
the only other American who was intellectually
his peer, Jonathan Edwards. The world in
which Franklin moved lay beneath a clear, white
light, without shadow of concealment, with noth
ing to cloud the sincerity and keenness of his
vision; but far beyond, in the dim penumbra,
loomed that other world of his contemporary a
region into whose treacherous obscurities those
must venture who seek the comforts and sweet
I5O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
ecstasies of faith, and who find these at times,
and at times, also, drink in only strange exhala
tions of deceit and vapours of spiritual pride. As
often as Franklin s path approached that misty
shore he drew back as from a bottomless pit.
L,ike other men of his century, he had built up
for himself his own private religion, from which
the vague inherited emotions of the past were
to be utterly excluded. The little book that
contains his formulated creed and liturgy may
still be read, an extraordinary document in the
history of deism. The remarkable point in it is
the frankly pagan way in which he relegates the
Infinite God to realms beyond our concern, and
selects for worship " that particular wise and good
God who is the author and owner of our
system." Hven more remarkable is the "great
and extensive project \ divulged in the Autobio
graphy, of creating throughout the world a kind
of religious Freemasonry, to be initiated into his
own doctrines and to be called The Society of the
Free and Easy "free, as being, by the general
practice and habit of the virtues, free from the
dominion of vice ; and particularly by the practice
of industry and frugality, free from debt, which
exposes a man to confinement, and a species of
slavery to his creditors. Who can read this with
out recalling Iamb s panegyric of \\\z great race
of borrowers and fearing that he has "fallen into
the society of lenders and little men ?
The same practical views of religion may be
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 151
traced through many of Franklin s familiar
letters. Sometimes they combine with his
humour to form a kind of benevolent worldly
wisdom, as in this letter to his sister Jane, with
its mock exegesis of some religious verses written
long ago by an uncle:
In a little book he sent her, called " None but Christ,"
he wrote an acrostic on her name, which for namesake s
sake, as well as the good advice it contains, I transcribe
and send you, viz.
" Illuminated from on high,
And shining brightly in your sphere,
Ne er faint, but keep a steady eye,
Expecting endless pleasures there.
" Flee vice as you d a serpent flee ;
Raise faith and hope three stories higher,
And let Christ s endless love to thee
Ne er cease to make thy love aspire.
Kindness of heart by words express,
Let your obedience be sincere,
In prayer and praise your God address,
Nor cease, till he can cease to hear."
. . . You are to understand, then, that faith, hope, and
charity have been called the three steps of Jacob s ladder,
reaching from earth to heaven ; our author calls them
stories, likening religion to a building, and these are the
three stories of the Christian edifice. Thus improvement
in leligion is called building up and edification. Faith
is then the ground floor, hope is up one pair of stairs.
My dear beloved Jenny, don t delight so much to dwell in
those lower rooms, but get as fast as you can into the
garret, for in truth the best room in the house is charity.
For my part, I wish the house was turned upside down ;
152 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
*t is so difficult (when one is fat) to go up stairs; and not
only so, but I imagine hope o&& faith may be more firmly
built upon charity, than charity upon faith and hope.
However that may be, I think it the better reading to
say
" Raise faith and hope one story higher."
Correct it boldly, and I 11 support the alteration ; for,
when you are up two stories already, if you raise your
building three stories higher you will make five in all,
which is two more than there should be, you expose
your upper rooms more to the winds and storms ; and,
besides, I am afraid the foundation will hardly bear them,
unless indeed you build with such light stuff as straw
and stubble, and that, you know, won t stand fire.
. In the end one feels that both in Franklin s
strength and his limitations, in the versatility
and efficiency of his intellect as in the lack of
the deeper qualities of the imagination, he was
the typical American. If his victorious com
mon sense excluded that thin vein of mysticism
which is one of the paradoxes of our national
character, he represents the powers that have
prevailed and are still shaping us to what end we
do not see. In particular one cannot read far in
his letters without noting the predominance of
that essentially American trait contemporaneity.
One gets the impression that here was almost, if
not quite, the most alert and most capacious in
tellect that ever concerned itself entirely with
the present. He was, of course, an exemplar of
prudence, and thus in a way had his eye on the
immediate future; but it was the demands of the
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 153
present that really interested him, and the pos
session of the past, the long backward of time,
WS to him a mere oblivion.
Parton regarded Franklin as the model Chris
tian, others find no religion in him at all. Their
views depend on how they are affected by his
absorption in the present, by his relegation of
Faith and Hope to the attic and his choice of
earth-born Charity. There is, in fact, no more
extraordinary chapter in the religious history of
the eighteenth century than the episode of the
Autobiography which tells how Franklin deliber
ately set aside all the traditions and experience of
the past and set himself to create a brand-new
worship of his own, adapted to the needs of the
hour. Was this prophetic of our cheerful readi
ness, long ago observed by Renan, to start a new
religion among us every time a man is convicted
of sin ? Are Christian Science and all the lesser
brood merely in the line of Franklin s projected
brotherhood of "The Free and Easy"? Some
of the more modern sects seem at least to have
taken to themselves that society s virtue of " in
dustry," and have made themselves "free of
debt."
And it was this overmastering sense of the
present that coloured Franklin s schemes of
education. Everything should be practical, and
look to immediate results. Naturally the Classics,
as the very embodiment of the past, received scant
sympathy from him. He merely tolerated them
154 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
in the project which led to the Philadelphia
Academy and the University of Pennsylvania, and
one of his last pamphlets, written, indeed, from
his death-bed, was a diatribe against Greek and
Latin.
As a writer he has all the clearness, force, and
flexibility that come from attention to what is
near at hand ; he lacks also that depth of back
ground which we call imagination, and which is
largely the indwelling of the past in the pres
ent. A clear, steady light rests upon his works ;
no obscuring shadow stretches out over them
from remote days, and also no shade inviting
to repose. It is not by accident that his two
most literary productions, in the stricter sense of
that word, are the Autobiography, which might
be called a long lesson in the method of settling
problems of immediate necessity, and the Intro
ductions to the Almanacs those documents in
contemporaneity that have so strangely weathered
the years. Particularly the Introduction of 1757,
known as the Harangue of Father Abraham, has
been translated into all the languages of the
world, and has almost made of Poor Richard a
figure of popular mythology :
I found the good man had thoroughly studied my
almanacs and digested all I had dropped on these topics
during the course of five and twenty years. The frequent
mention he made of me must have tired any one else; but
my vanity was wonderfully delighted with it, though I
was conscious that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 155
own, which he ascribed to me, but rather the gleanings
that I had made of the sense of all ages and nations.
And the sense of all ages is pretty well summed
up by Poor Richard in " One to-day is worth two
to-morrows."
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN
already said something iu these essays
about Lamb as a writer and man, but the occasion
of two excellent biographies, 1 in French and
English, is too tempting to let pass without a
word of more particular appreciation.
In the matter of literary criticism the honour
must remain, as might be expected, with the
Frenchman. M. Derocquigny has indeed treated
this aspect of his theme with an amplitude and
a precision which no English writer has ap
proached, and he has also shown the trained
subtlety of his race in winding into the secrets of
Lamb s personality. In these things Mr. Lucas
is not strong; more especially his critical pages
they are few in number would seem to suffer
from a tacit acceptance of Lamb as a great writer.
Charming Lamb s work certainly was, fascinating
in a way, and above all, like himself, lovable ;
but I cannot help feeling that the jealous pother
of so many editors recently engaged on the same
subject has tended to throw dust in our eyes.
1 Charles Lamb, sa vie et ses ceuvres. Par Jules De
rocquigny. lyille : L/e Bigot Freres, 1904.
The Life of Charles Lamb. By E. V. Lucas. 2 vols.
New York : G. P. Putnam s Sons, 1905.
156
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 157
Let us, if possible, hold fast to distinctions. To
deal with his work as if it formed a body of liter
ature great in any proper sense of the word is to
place him among the small company of masterful
spirits where his genius would only appear more
tenuous by comparison, and it is to miss, I think,
the truer source of enjoyment.
Certainly, if we would extract the sweetness
from L/amb s slender book of verse we must
come to it with no such expectations as we should
bring to the great poets. Lamb, in fact, writes
as one who has " been enamour d of rare poesy "
rather than as one impelled himself to sing.
Now and then once at least in the dialogue
between Margaret and Simon Woodvil he
echoes nobly the larger utterance of the
Elizabethans :
To see the sun to bed, and to arise,
Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes,
Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.
Sometimes the inoon on soft night clouds to rest,
Like beauty nestling in a young man s breast,
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep
Admiring silence, while these lovers sleep.
Sometimes outstretcht, in very idleness,
Nought doing, saying little, thinking less,
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,
Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare,
When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,
Filch d from the careless Amalthea s horn.
No doubt there is occasionally, as in the four
158 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
lines here underscored, a tone which may be
called the veritable lingua toscana in bocca romana,
the speech of Elizabeth with some added sympa
thetic accent of our own times. We know that
Godwin, chancing upon this passage, hunted for
it in Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher,
and then sent to Lamb to help him to the author.
But for the most part Lamb s verse reflects only
the half-faded light of old-world fancies flickering
on the details of a prosaic modern life, album
rhymes with the faint aroma of Quarles upon them,
and Cockney sonnets that remind you of Drum-
mond or Bowles. The mood of the book is like
the comfort and dreams of firelight after an irk
some day, and as such it has a well-defined
charm; but it opens no door into the higher
region of the imagination. "A page of his
writings," as Hazlitt observes, "recalls to our
fancy the stranger on the grate, fluttering in its
dusky tenuity, with its idle superstition and
hospitable welcome."
Perhaps even the most enthusiastic admirers of
Lamb would not claim more than this for his
verse ; the real confusion begins when we con
sider him as a critic. One capital service not
without the detriment of false emphasis he did
indeed perform, by reviving an interest in the
old English dramatists and in some of the half-
forgotten writers of the seventeenth century; and
to a certain extent he acted as a friendly censor of
the extravagances of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 159
So, for example, he admired Petet Bell, but his
humour could not fail to seize on the more abject
lines of that poem. The story goes that once on
seeing from the street a solemn evening gathering
he shook the railings and shouted at the window :
Is it a party in a parlour,
All silent and all damned ?
Whether in part from Lamb s criticism or not,
these lines were deleted from Peter Bell after the
first editions of 1819. 1 It is one of the irremedia
ble losses of literature that we do not know his
thoughts on the gem of that composition :
Only the Ass, with motion dull,
Upon the pivot of his skull
Turns round his long left ear.
The point to observe is that Lamb was not so
much a great critic as a reader of fine taste.
" His taste," said Coleridge " acts so as to appear
like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct in
brief, he is worth an hundred men of mere talents.
Conversation with the latter tribe is like the use
of leaden bells one warms by exercise; L/amb
1 The full stanza reads :
" Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm d just as they on earth were cramm d
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all damn d."
June 2, 1820, Wordsworth was talking about these poems
with Lamb and Crabb Robinson. June n, Robinson re
cords that he had begged Wordsworth to omit the stanza.
* *
l6o SHELBURNE ESSAYS
every now and then irradiates, and the beam,
though fine and single as a hair, is yet rich with
colours." It was this instinct, guided in part by
a common tendency of the age, that led him to
fasten on the Elizabethans. His remarks on
them do often irradiate the word is aptly chosen
but as a whole his writing is too lacking in
systematic reflection to rank him high among
critics. There is no sense of tracking the human
spirit down all its wandering way of self-reve
lation, nor is there any effort to measure and
balance the full meaning of the individual writer.
He " never," as he himself confessed to Southey,
"judged system-wise of things, but fastened
upon particulars." If this habit saved him from
rigidity and from deciduous theories, it also
brought about a misleading incompleteness. No
one could gather the just proportions of the
Elizabethan era from his sporadic remarks, nor,
to take a single case, could one gain any notion
of Andrew Marvell s works as a whole from
Lamb s occasional and irrational eulogies. In his
own day his "imperfect sympathies" made him
blind to the higher qualities of half the world.
He was in close touch with what may be called
the bourgeois group about him, but to all the
aristocratic school, headed by Byron and Shelley
and Scott, he was not merely unsympathetic, but
actually hostile. One feels even that he was
bound to Coleridge and Wordsworth, the out
standing leaders of his own group, more by per-
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN l6l
sonal than by intellectual ties. Such an admission
oan almost be read in the banter of his letters:
Coleridge is absent but 4 miles, and the neighbour
hood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of 50
ordinary Persons. T is enough to be within the whiff
and wind of his genius, for us not to possess our souls in
quiet. If I lived with him or the author of the Excur
sion^ I should in a very little time lose my own identity,
and be dragged along in the current of other peoples
thoughts, hampered in a net.
In the same letter occurs the famous phrase ap
plied to Coleridge: " His face when he repeats
his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a
little damaged. This indeed is something different
from L,amb s uncritical disregard of the whole
aristocratic school, and shows a sensitiveness to
the weaker side of one of his personal idols. But
he never developed these intuitions, never cut into
that flabby mass with the sundering sword, as
Hazlitt did so ruthlessly in the Examiner letter,
which was built up on the same phrase, Less
than arch-angel ruined," and which so fluttered
the literary dovecote.
And in public L,amb was careful that not even
such a hint of his sharper sentiments should
escape him. There is, in fact, just a touch of
mutual admiration in the writings of the whole
circle, so that we can understand, though we
may heartily condemn, the coarse assault of the
Monthly Review upon them as "a li ttle coterie
of half-bred men, who . . . puffed off each other
as the first writers of the day." Hazlitt belonged
1 62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
to the coterie as much as he could belong to any
thing outside himself, but Hazlitt, though warped
at times by prejudice, had the true critical
passion, amounting almost to a fury, one might
say, to get at the heart of things and strip the
good from the bad. Neither the temper nor the
genius of Lamb would have enabled him to detest
a man s principles yet love his literary work as
Hazlitt did with Scott, or to pass from ridicule of
Wordsworth s egotism and dulness to so splendid
a panegyric of his nobler parts.
If we wish for a parallel to Lamb s method as a
critic we must come down to Edward FitzGerald,
though by education and taste the two were so
far apart. There are who would gainsay it ?
glimpses of rare discernment in Lamb s letters
and notes, flights of sustained fancy in his critical
essays, phrases and metaphors that are like
windows opening on the garden of intellectual
delight; but after all, it is the contagion of
Lamb s own love for his favourites that makes us
think of him as a critic. His appeal is not to the
judgment, but to personal friendship. For one
who remembers his comment on the catastrophe
of The Broken Heart (Hazlitt, by the way, balks
at everything that Lamb here lauds), or has com
prehended his subtle paradox on the Restoration
Comedy, there are ten who will recall his letter to
Coleridge: "If you find the Miltons in certain
parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of right
Gloucester, blacked in the candle (my usual sup-
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 163
per), or, peradventure, a stray ash of tobacco
wafted into the crevices, look to that passage
more especially : depend upon it, it contains good
matter." So many critics seem to turn books
into business, so often we doubt whether the great
books that are commended are really enjoyed!
Lamb we know read for pleasure, as did the wise
FitzGerald, and he read Milton. 1 Perhaps we
get even closer to the secret of Lamb s influence
in a whimsical letter to Barton, written when his
head was "stuffed up with the East winds " :
I chuse a very little bit of paper, for my ear hisses -when
I bend down to write. I can hardly read a book, for I
miss that small soft voice which the idea of articulated
words raises (almost imperceptibly to you) in a silent
reader. / seem too deaf to see what I read.
We can imagine FitzGerald listening to that
1 It is merely an interesting coincidence that Lamb and
FitzGerald should have used almost the same words in
regard to the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy. In his
Specimens Lamb says of them : " There is nothing in the
undoubted plays of Jonson which would authorise us to
suppose that he could have supplied the scenes in ques
tion. I should suspect the agency of some more potent
spirit . Webster might have furnished them. They are
full of that wild solemn preternatural cast of grief which
bewilders us in the Duchess of Malfy." FitzGerald
writes in a similar strain to Fanny Kemble: "Nobody
knows who wrote this one scene [III., xii., A.] ; it was
thought Ben Jonson, who could no more have written
it than I who read it : for what else of his is it like ?
Whereas, Webster one fancies might have done it."
164 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
small soft voice of the printed page as he turned
his Madame de Sevigne or his Cervantes, and the
warmth of this living intimacy between author
and reader is communicated to us of more slug
gish temperament.
And a curious similarity might be discovered
between Lamb and FitzGerald in their disregard
for the actual concrete book. It was Lamb who
sent his volumes to a * wizened old cobbler hard
by" to be patched and botched up; and who
would not suppose these were a young lad s re
collections of FitzGerald at Woodbridge rather
than of L<amb at Enfield ?
There were few modern volumes in his collection ; and
subsequently, such presentation copies as he received
were wont to find their way into my own book-case, and
often through eccentric channels. A Leigh Hunt, for
instance, would come skimming to my feet through the
branches of the apple-trees (our gardens were contigu
ous); or a Bernard Barton would be rolled downstairs
after me, from the library door. Martian Colonna I
remember finding on my window-sill, damp with the
night s fog; and the Plea of the Midsummer Fairies I
picked out of the strawberry-bed. It was not that Lamb
was indifferent to the literary doings of his friends; but
their books, as books, were unharmonious on his shelves.
They clashed, both in outer and inner entity, with the
Marlowes and Miltons that were his household gods.
It is not as a poet or constructive critic that
Lamb lives to-day, but as the Elia of the Essays
and the quaint humourist of the Letters. These
are indeed classics in the best sense of the word,
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 165
being actually read and loved. Yet even here we
should not allow our gratitude to blind us to the
reality, nor permit our sense of charm to express
itself in terms of greatness ; for by just such indis
criminations as this we gradually blunt the finer
edge of the mind. I am not going to dwell
again on the peculiar evasion of truth that runs
through all L/amb s essays, separating them, so
at least it seems to me, from the writings that
belong to the great tradition. I have already in
an earlier essay touched, perhaps over-heavily,
on this aspect of his work, and I would not by
repetition unduly heighten the emphasis. No
such charge, however, can be laid if I quote a few
words from M. Derocquigny on the same subject:
One may love Lamb without admiring indiscriminately
everything in his character. And still one can scarcely
wish that he were exempt from his weaknesses. These
are an essential factor in his genius, and without them
Lamb would have been something not himself. They
breathed into him the spirit of indulgence and pity
which too often desert the heart of the strong man. And
we know that by much self-control we are left ignorant
of many sides of our fallible nature. The great connois
seurs of the human heart have generally had great
weaknesses.
It is fortunate that he was not a writer by profession
His merit is just this: that he was an irregular, an
amateur of literature a common character of old, which,
to our regret, is gradually become more and more rare,
and which Sainte-Beuve praises in speaking of Joubert,
with whom, by the way, Lamb has more than one
affinity.
l66 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
His devotees exalt his wisdom, his profound thought,
his penetrating criticism of life, his great knowledge of
the human heart.
His wisdom is that of a contemplative man for whom
the true life is a dream, and who avoids as far as possible
the contact of realities. And it is useless to look to him
for the conduct of life. His thought, turned in this
direction by great misfortunes and confirmed in this
habit by the reading which he sought for consolation,
glides over these deeper questions with a humour half-
playful and half-solemn, skims their surface, but into
their depths never sinks.
This is not quite the tone of the Knglish pane
gyrists of Lamb, nor will you find anything in
Mr. Lucas s two large volumes that shows this
kind of critical penetration. He is weak where
the French writer is strongest, and yet for another
reason the English biography, perhaps, takes you
nearer than the other to the secret of Lamb s spell.
From a study of contemporary literature Mr.
Lucas has made his work not so much a life of
Lamb alone as a series of chapters on the char
acters, great and small, who composed Lamb s
circle. There is no better criterion of a book than
the other books it sends you immediately to read,
and after laying down this biography I turned
almost instinctively to Cicero s De Amicitia and
to Montaigne s DeV AmitiS, and, reading these, I
began to understand how much of the magical
appeal of Lamb s writings is due to the quintes
sence of friendship he has distilled into them. It
is not the brave mingling of souls in the pursuit
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 167
of virtue which the philosophers vaunt, nor could
it be likened to that omnium divinarum humana-
rumque rerum cum benevolentia et caritate summa
consensio, to use the rolling eloquence of Cicero.
I fear the bond of union was rather one of those
" incommodities of mortality," which a later
Roman deplored, but which Lamb turned to such
sweet advantage : Nee tantum necessitas errandi
scd errorum amor. And it had little of that
" inexplicable and fatal force " that drove Mon
taigne and La Boetie to seek, before they had seen,
each other, and made of their two wills one at first
sight. Something of these lofty modes coloured
the early union of Lamb and Coleridge, but it only
served to introduce a vein of mawkishness into
his first letters, and luckily did not endure. Nor
was this youthful ideal of friendship unconscious
with him. In these days he was writing his
tragedy of John Woodvil, which turns on that
theme.
I have been meditating this half-hour
On all the properties of a brave friendship,
The mysteries that are in it, the noble uses,
Its limits withal, and its nice boundaries
says the hero of the play, and decides that it is
not enough for a man to die for a friend, but he
must wantonly place himself in the friend s power
by betraying to him a family secret.
There needed a baptism of tears and gin to
bring Lamb to a kind of earthly regeneration.
The tragedy of Mary s life and the disappoint-
1 68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
ments of his own soon taught him the hollowness
of his exaltations ; the * ragged regiment that
lured him into London streets perfected the cure.
" Twelve years ago," he afterwards wrote in one
of his semi-confessional essays, " I had completed
my six and twentieth year. I had lived from the
period of leaving school to that time pretty much
in solitude. My companions were chiefly books,
or at most one or two living ones of my book-
loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to
bed betimes, and the faculties which God had
given me, I had reason to think, did not rust in
me unused. About that time I fell in with some
companions of a different order. They were men
of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, dis
putants, drunken; yet seemed to have something
noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or
what passes for it after midnight, jovially. Of
the quality called fancy I certainly possessed a
larger share than my companions. Encouraged
by their applause, I set up for a profest joker! "
Yes, I fear it was those conteniners of the law,
Fenwick and Fell (how their names smack of
naughtiness!), that created for us the true Charles
Lamb.
To Lamb himself there must have been a mali
cious joy in thinking that the acquaintance with
Fenwick came through Godwin, who differed
from that disreputable prowler in everything
even in his manner of taking gifts. Immortal
Fenwick, whom we know as Ralph Bigod, Esq.,
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 169
setting forth in London streets, " like some
Alexander, upon his great enterprise, borrowing
and to borrow ! " alas ! his lofty spirit could not
snatch him from the vulgar fate of mankind; he
too passed away, save in Lamb s heroic epicedium :
When I think of this man : his fiery glow of heart ; his
swell of feeling ; how magnificent, how ideal he was ;
how great at the midnight hour ; and when I compare
with hitn the companions with whom I have associated
since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and think
that I am fallen into the society of lenders, and little
men.
R. Fell, also, a man of humbler genius, we
surmise, came to Lamb through Godwin ; and
Southey tells that once, when the Philosopher in
his own room had dropped asleep before them,
" they carried off his rum, brandy, sugar, picked
his pockets of everything, and made off in
triumph."
These, then, were the mystagogues who initi
ated Lamb back into humanity. " He found
them," as he was to write of those days in remi
niscence, " floating on the surface of society;
and the colour, or something else, in the weed
pleased him. The burrs stuck to him but they
were good and loving burrs for all that. He never
greatly cared for the society of what are called
good people. If any of these were scandalised
(and offences were sure to arise), he could not
help it."
One must allow, of course, for the note of mis-
170 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
chievous exaggeration in all these retrospective
confessions, but a period of retirement at Newgate
vouches for the character of Fell, and Lamb s
own whilom elevation in the stocks shows that his
amusements may at least have been rather tumult
uous. He came out of these experiences the most
immaculate of roues, let us say; the sweetest and
most exemplary of sinners. Henceforth to the
physical responsibilities of life he submits bravely,
almost heroically, yet in his mind he " yearns
after and covets what soothes the frailty of human
nature." I like to think of his later associations,
except for their beautiful fidelity, in those lines of
Euripides :
Full many things the days have taught :
I know that mortal men should rest
In moderate friendships, know how fraught
With fear the raptures of the breast ;
Safer these unions of the mind,
When light to loose and swift to bind. . . .
The unyielding rules of life, they say,
Bring more of peril than of pleasure,
And on the body prey ;
So I commend the golden measure,
The too-much put away.
Brave and learned men were among Lamb s
friends, but in his chambers they met together to
confute philosophy with a pun, and to pack
wisdom into a jest. Good and sustained conver
sation there often was, but no rigour of logic (this
was reserved for the game), and above all no
crabbed politics. These Attic nights in the Inner
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 171
Temple or Mitre Court or Southampton Buildings,
wherever L,amb s shifting tabernacle might be,
were a kind of Shandean escape from the world,
where fancy guided to a purer virtue than the
harsh commands of conscience know.
We have received many accounts of his famous
Wednesday evenings, and from these and from
other writings we might piece together a kind of
composite and half-fantastic picture, in defiance
of time and place. There are two rooms for the
reception of visitors, his summer and winter
parlours as he calls them, in one of which he has
hung up a choice collection of Hogarth s plates in
narrow black frames, as if even here he must have
the dear pathos and humour of the streets about
him. In the other room he has nailed up a book
case, new now, but with more aptitudes for grow
ing old than you shall often see ; and this is well,
for the books are ancient and worn, another
"ragged regiment" from which he will never
wean himself. The furniture is suitably old-
fashioned and mellowed by use, and the low ceil
ing shows traces of the GREAT PLANT
Brother of Bacchus, later born,
The old world was sure forlorn,
Wanting thee, that aidest more
The god s victories than before
All his panthers, and the brawls
Of his piping Bacchanals.
But Bacchus himself is not absent, if a vast jug
of porter on a side table may be under the tutelage
1 72 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of that god. And there are cold veal pie and
smoking-hot potatoes, under the care of what deity
I know not, laid out on the same board. As
yet the guests are few, and the porter vanishes
slowly ; but later the j ug will need many replenish-
ings from the foaming pots which the best tap of
Fleet Street supplies. Whist has already begun.
At a table Lamb sits opposite Martin Burney,
nephew of the great Madame D Arblay strange,
blundering, obstinate, grotesque-looking, innocent
Martin, like a second Goldsmith, "on the top
scale of my friendship ladder, " (says Lamb of him
once,) " on which an angel or two is still climb
ing." To the right of Lamb you may see God
win, his face retaining its aspect of wooden
gravity; but trust it not, for his mind is intently
on the game, and he is watching the play of his
partner Mrs. Battle, shall we call her ? who is
sitting bolt upright, with a lingering scowl on her
brow from some unwarrantable levity of the host.
Is it possible that Lamb has just ventured his
immortal rebuke to Martin: " If dirt was trumps
what a hand you d hold " ?
But the hour grows late and other guests are
gathering, Captain Burney, Martin s father,
who has sailed over the world with Captain Cook
and has made a pun in the Otaheite language, " a
better recommendation as a companion than all his
honours of exploration or of war" ; Jem White,
the author of the Falstaff Letters, in which some
of Lamb s own wit lies buried, more famous for
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 173
his annual feast of chimney-sweepers ; George
Dyer, most absent-minded and incorrigible of
book-worms, a kind of unanointed Coleridge.
Dyer, said Hazlitt, "hangs like a film and cobweb
upon letters, or like the dust on the outside cf
knowledge, which should not too rudely be
brushed aside." And it was this same celestial
bungler who walked out of Lamb s house at Isling
ton in broad day straight into a stream of water,
furnishing thereby a modern instance of Plato s
philosopher who falls into a well while looking at
the sky, and affording Elia the subject of one of
his most humorous essays. " For with G.
D to be absent from the body is sometimes
(not to speak profanely) to be present with the
Lord. At the very time when, personally
encountering thee, he passes on with no recogni
tion or, being stopped, starts like a thing sur
prised at that moment, reader, he is on Mount
Tabor or Parnassus or co-sphered with Plato."
And Hazlitt strides awkwardly in, with his coarse
hair thrown back and his eyes ablaze. He is a si
lent man often, looking with surly suspicion upon
all about him; but at times, as now, that self- de
vouring soul of his breaks out in a savage, over
whelming eloquence. " I get no conversation in
London that is absolutely worth attending to but
his," says Lamb, who alone of all refuses to quarrel
with him. To-night he is brimming with indig
nation against Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly.
You can hear him beating out his rage in the
174 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
next room : This hired assassin of the Govern
ment," he exclaims, " has grown old in the
service of corruption. He drivels on to the last
with prostituted impotence and shameless effront
ery ; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting
the driblets of his spleen and impertinence on
others ; answers their arguments by confuting
himself ; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect
for a particular acuteness, not to be imposed upon
by shallow appearances ; unprincipled rancor for
zealous loyalty ; and the irritable, discontented,
vindictive, peevish effusions of bodily pain and
mental imbecility for proofs of refinement of taste
and strength of understanding. The tirade prom
ises to go on endlessly, swelling with fury
against the universal corruption of taste, when
Lamb, who has left his party at the whist table,
breaks in with a stuttering echo : ( Damn the age !
I will write for antiquity ; and the tension is
dissolved in laughter. Even pale, earnest Charles
Lloyd, who is discoursing with Leigh Hunt in a
corner over " fate, free-will, fore-knowledge abso
lute," forgets his melancholy argument and joins
the larger group.
As the circle gathers about their host you will
observe how slight and short he is in comparison
with their bulkier forms, * a light frame, wrote
one of them afterwards, "so fragile that it seemed
as if a breath would overthrow it." Perhaps the
clerkly black of his dress, and the wearing of
small-clothes and stockings which other men are
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 175
discarding for pantaloons, exaggerate his slender
appearance. But his head and face are nobly
formed, of a Jewish cast, you may say, with dark
hair crisping about the forehead, and soft brown
eyes, the two not quite of the same colour if you
look closely, and delicately carved nose. Who
shaJ,.l describe the meaning and expression of his
countenance, as he glances from one friend to
an Bother? Who shall catch its quivering sweet-
ness, and fix it forever in words? the deep thought
striving with humour, the lines of suffering
wreathed into cordial mirth, the dignity- and
gravity of his brow. There is a diversion as the
solid, plump, governmental figure of John Rick-
man is seen at the door, Rickman who lives in
the same Buildings, immediately opposite, and
who has a pleasant habit of dropping in at a late
hour when the crust of the evening is broken.
" A fine rattling fellow," whispers L/amb as he
approaches the group, who has gone through
life laughing at solemn apes ; himself hugely
literate oppressively full of information in all stuff
of conversation, from matter-of-fact to Xenophon
and Plato, and can talk Greek with Person,
politics with Thelwall, conjecture with George
Dyer here, nonsense with me, and anything with
anybody." Greetings and a jest or two pass,
and then L,amb, with a side glance at Dyer,
breaks into solemn matter. " Ah, Rickman,"
says he, " here s Manning writing from his anti
podal home in Canton, and wants your help in a
176 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
matter of exquisite learning, viz., whether Ho-
hing-tong shall be spelt with an o or an ."
While Ricknian is collecting his wits to retort,
I/amb has shuffled away to his desk and has taken
out a sheet of paper half written over in the; neat
hand he has learned at the India House. It
is the celebrated Christmas letter to Manning
not yet sent on its voyage across the seas, and he
begins to read, stammering a little at first (yf
indeed I might hear that voice and see that"
group !):
In sober sense what makes you so long from among us,
Manning ? You must not expect to see the same England
again which you left. . . . Your friends have all got
old those you left blooming ; myself, (who am one of the
few that remember you,) those golden hairs which you
recollect my taking a pride in, turned to silvery and grey.
Mary has been dead and buried many years : she desired
to be buried in the silk gown you sent her. [She is wear
ing it this evening, as we see !] Rickman, that you re
member active and strong, now walks out supported by a
servant maid and a stick. Martin Burney is a very old
man. . . . Poor Godwin! I was passing his tomb
the other day in Cripplegate churchyard. There are
some verses upon it written by Miss , which if I
thought good enough I would send you. He was one of
those who would have hailed your return, not with
boisterous shouts and clamours, but with the complacent
gratulations of a philosopher anxious to promote know
ledge as leading to happiness; but his systems and his
theories are ten feet deep in Cripplegate mould. Cole
ridge is just dead, having lived just long enough to close
the eyes of Wordsworth, who paid the debt to Nature but
a week or two before. Poor Col., but two days before he
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN 177
died he wrote to a bookseller, proposing an epic poem
on the Wa, iderings of Cain, in twenty-four books. It is
said he hj.,s left behind him more than forty thousand
treatises / n criticism, metaphysics, and divinity, but few
of them \n a state of completion. They are now destined,
perhaps/!, to wrap up spices. You see what mutations the
busy h and of Time has produced.
Srj the drollery runs. And now the mystic
ho f \ir arrives ; the punch is mixed and hot water
i s brought in for the brandy. The talk grows in
volume, and the quick jest rattles merrily above
the wild paradox and the sober criticism. L/amb,
with a wistful look at his sister, has lighted
another pipe, his fifth, and she, knowing the
consequence, lays a warning hand on his shoulder.
"Nay," he ejaculates, let me alone ; I would
wish that my last breath might be through a
pipe and exhaled in a pun."
But even the banquets of the gods must end.
One after another of the guests has shot his part
ing arrow and passed out into the night. And at
last the few who are left draw about the dying
fire, letting their talk drift to those solemn
intimate things that haunt the mind in such
moments of relaxation. Death is named, and the
irony of life and the recompense of the grave, and
L/amb, with a slight shudder, takes up the word:
"Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks,
and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields,
and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and
society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light,
i; SHELBURNE ESSAYS
and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities,
and jest, and irony itself do these trnv, 5 go out
with life? Can a ghost laugh, or shake Jh gaunt
sides, when you are pleasant with him. And
you, my midnight darlings, my folios ! i, ust I
part with the intense delight of having you huge
armfuls) in my embraces ? Must knowledge come
to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experi
ment of intuition, and no longer by the famirar
process of reading? Shall I enjoy friendships
there, wanting the smiling indications which
point me to them here the recognisable face the
sweet assurance of a look ?
He has risen now, and breaks off with a
gesture and a smile of winsome pathos ; and
the little band silently separates. Not often
does their host so unlock the treasures of his
heart.
More than criticism, I think, we need the
impression of such scenes as this on our mind ; we
need to know how Lamb lived with these friends,
and how in their society and in the scarcely less
human companionship of books he made for
himself a refuge, an evasion, if you will, from the
realities of life. For we do not go to his Essays
and Letters primarily for transcendence of
intellect or creative genius, but for this spirit of
illusory friendliness that runs through them all,
lending to our mortal cloak of frailties and
humilities a beauty that is almost a beatitude.
The material for this knowledge Mr. Lucas has
CHARLES LAMB AGAIN I 79
given us in generous abundance, and, so doing,
has brought L/amb a little nearer to us than he
was before.
WALT WHITMAN
IT is ill dealing with the prophets. They
themselves may be approachable, serene, and
simple, but about them their disciples^saon cast
such a mirage of words that the seeker is blinded
and baffled, if he is not utterly repelled. And
denying what the disciples say, one fears the
rebuke of denying the great principles whose
names they usurp. You may read in Mr.
Burroughs or Mr. O Connor or Dr. Bucke and feel
so strong a repulsion for their idol that only a
copious draught direct from the Leaves of Grass
or the Specimen Days will restore your mind to
equilibrium. Yet it is fair now to add that, by
eliminating himself and allowing Whitman to
speak his own words, Mr. Horace Traubel, cer
tainly one of the least tolerable of these en
thusiasts, has given us a book of some im
portance, 1 a daily record of intercourse during
four months with his master, when old and
paralytic and waiting for the outward tide.
Here we may meet the " good grey poet " just
1 With Walt Whitman in Camden. (March 28-July
14, 1888.) By Horace Traubel. Boston: Small,
Maynard, & Co., 1906.
1 80
WALT WHITMAN l8l
as he was in his little house in Mickle Street,
Camden; may sit with him in his chamber in the
midst of its indescribable confusion, and hear him
talk, * garrulous to the very last. " There is all
sorts of debris scattered about," says the diary,
"bits of manuscript, letters, newspapers, books.
Near by his elbow towards the window a wash-
basket filled with such stuff. Lady Mount Tem
ple s waistcoat [a gift to Whitman from England]
was thrown carelessly on the motley table a
Blake volume was used by him for a footstool: near
by a copy of De Kay s poems given by Gilder to
Rhys. Various other books. A Dickens under
his elbow on the chair. He pushed the books
here and there several times this evening in his
hunt for particular papers. This, he said once,
is not so much a mess as it looks: you notice that
I find most of the things I look for and without
much trouble. ] As a matter of fact, his usual
method of hunting was to rummage with his stick
among the papers on the floor until the desired
object came to the surface. Meanwhile, what
other chance treasures floated up ! letters from
Tennyson, Symonds, Roden Noel, Lord Hough-
ton, Dowden, and many another stout admirer
across the sea, all which were passed over to Mr.
Traubel and by him duly transcribed for our
perusal. What will surprise most readers of the
diary is the predominance of this bookish talk;
and, except where his own work is concerned,
Whitman shows himself a trenchant and just
1 82 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
critic as might be inferred from his essays on
Carlyle and Burns. One could wish that he did
not so often fall into the trick common among the
ill-educated of denouncing criticism while them
selves exercising that function. It was, for exam
ple, not gracious to complain of Mr. Stedman for
weighing him in the critical balance, when he
himself was subjecting writer after writer to the
same process. And again, in a larger sense,
though we may after a fashion understand his
distinction, there is almost a touch of insincerity
in the constant segregation of himself from litera
ture and the literary class. After all, a book s a
book however much there s in t, and the whole
ambition of Whitman s life was in his authorship.
More than that, we remember how many times in
the Leaves of Grass he declares that the justifica
tion of America shall be her poets ; and what
student of the closet would have dared, as he did
in his lectuie on the Death of Abraham Lincoln^
to reduce the whole desperate terror of the war to
the needs of the literary imagination ?
I say, certain secondary and indirect results, out of the
tragedy of this death, are, in my opinion, greatest. Not
the event of the murder itself. Not that Mr. Lincoln
strings the principal points and personages of the period,
like beads, upon the single thread of his career. Not
that his idiosyncrasy, in its sudden appearance and dis
appearance, stamps this republic with a stamp more
mark d and enduring than any yet given by any one man
(more even than Washington s;) but, join d with these,
the immeasurable value and meaning of that whole
WALT WHITMAN 183
tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest to a nation,
(and here all our own) the imaginative and artistic
senses the literary and dramatic ones. Not in any com
mon or low meaning of those terms, but a meaning
precious to the race, and to every age. A long and varied
series of contradictory eveuts arrives at last at its highest
poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement. The whole
involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the secession period
comes to a head, and is gather d in one brief flash of
lightning-illumination one simple, fierce deed. Its
sharp culmination, and as it were solution, of so many
bloody and angry problems, illustrates those climax-
moments on the stage of universal Time, where the his
toric Muse at one entrance, and the tragic Muse at the
other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an im
mense act in the long drama of creative thought, and
give it radiation, tableau, stranger than fiction. Fit
radiation fit close! flow the imagination how the
student loves these things!
I am not sure but a complete critique of Whit
man s own methods as a poet, with his wanton
neglect of those "climax-moments," might be
read in such a passage as this. Certainly, a recol
lection of this more consciously artistic side of the
man should be carried with us when we enter the
little Mickle Street house with Mr. Traubel.
There we shall see a wearied invalid, lounging
nonchalantly and speaking the patois of the
pavement, yet withal, if our ears are prepared,
still the poet and seer. Other poets have narrowed
and grown dogmatic with age, but to Whitman
we feel that time has brought only sweetness and
breadth; and this perhaps, despite the triviality
184 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of much of the record and its childlike egotism,
despite the fact that the deeper meanings of Whit
man s mird were quite dark to the disciple, is
the last impression of Mr. TraubePs book. One
pictures the old man as looking like the bust by
Sidney Morse, which Whitman seems to have
regarded as the best portrait of himself, and which
resembles curiously the so-called head of Homer
with the broad suspense
Of lifted brows, and lips intense
Of garrulous god-innocence.
And one observes a little trait often mentioned by
the disciple: when the conversation takes a more
solemn tone, the master breaks off and turns his
eyes to the window, gazing into what vista of
thought, who shall say? It is a pretty symbol of
that "withdrawnness " of spirit, to use his own
word, which those nearest to him never under
stood. Almost the only signs of petulance during
these days of suffering came when his more
fanatical friends tried to imprison him within the
circle of their reforming dogmas. He would
remain fluid to the end.
From this closing scene we may travel back
over the earlier years in the first adequate
biography of Whitman * yet published. Mr.
A Life of Walt Whitman. By Henry Bryan Binns.
New York: B. P. Button & Co., 1905. Since the writing
of this essay Mr. Bliss Perry s sober and succinct bio
graphy has appeared. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1906.
WALT WHITMAN 185
Binns, a worshipping young Englishman who
still retains some leaven of common sense,
has skilfully thrown into relief the capital
moments of Whitman s career, particularly that
obscure period when he was formulating his new
art. We see Whitman, first as a writer of meagre
talent, promising to develop into a lesser Poe or
Hawthorne ; then a time of silence, and suddenly,
in the year 1855, in the exact mezzo cammin of his
life, he prints the first issue of that extraordinary
book, the Leaves of Grass y with its dithyrambic
annunciation of the wedding of Romantic indi
vidualism with sentimental democracy:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer
grass.
What happened during those years of gestation ?
From himself we know only that one February
day in 1848 he received an invitation to go to
New Orleans and edit the Crescent ; that he set
off with his brother Jeff, and proceeded leisurely
through the Middle States, and down the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers; that he lived in New
Orleans for some months, and then plodded back
northward, up the Mississippi and the Missouri,
by the Great Lakes, and down the Hudson to
Brooklyn once more, where for a while he
1 86 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
worked again as printer and as builder, but inter
mittently and with his heart elsewhere. We know
that during these seven or eight years he was
writing and rewriting, casting about for a form
proper to his ideas, and that he "had great trouble
in leaving out the stock poetical touches. But
of the deeper motives at work we hear from him
self nothing. Mr. Binns finds in the enlargement
of^Whitman s mental horizon by_travel one of the
main causes of his poetical conversion, and with
this he connects that shadowy passion which
somewhere lies in the background of the poet s
experience, alluded to more than once, but never
fully revealed. It seems that about this time
Whitman formed an intimate relationship with a
Southern lady of higher social rank than his own,
who became the mother of his child, perhaps, in
after years, of his children; and that he was pre
vented by family prejudice or some other obstacle
from marriage or the acknowledgment of his
paternity. One would like to connect this incident
with the fair portrait over his mantel in Mickle
Street "an old sweetheart of mine," as he once
said in the presence of Mr. Traubel, "a sweet
heart, many, many, years ago. 1 But when
asked whether she was still living, he seemed
profoundly stirred, and lapsed into his usual
reticence. <( He closed his eyes, shook his head :
I d rather not say anything more about that just
now. " All this is involved in conjecture, yet
such an experience would help to explain the
WALT WHITMAN 187
emotional intensifying of his self-consciousness
which joins with the broadening of his national-
consciousness to inspire the Leaves of Grass.
We may be thankful for these hints from Mr.
Binns and Mr. Traubel, but the best commentary--
on Whitman, apart from this period of gestation,
is still his own Specimen^. Days, one of the most
remarkable autobiographies ever written, despite
a certain tediousness due to its paucity, not
poverty, of ideas, and its ejaculatory language.
The external elements that moulded his character
are here set forth with extreme precision first of
all the sturdy Knglish and Dutch stock, thor
oughly Americanised, from which he sprung, and
then the old homestead in the garden spot of L,ong
Island. Not far off lay the Great South Bay, and
beyond that the sandy bars and the ever-beating
Atlantic. All the sights and sounds of the sea
entered into the child s heart and spoke in the
songs of the man. As a boy, he longed to write
a book which should express "this liquid, mystic
theme," and in old age his nights were haunted
with a vision "of interminable white-brown sand,
hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean per
petually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-
measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam,
and many a thump of low bass drums." Of all
his poems, the most personal, perhaps the only
one filled with passion as the world understands
passion, is that incomparable rhapsody, Out of
the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, which " tells how
l88 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
once, in the month of lilacs, he listened by the
beach to a mocking-bird complaining of its lost
mate, and in the cry of the bird and the lisp of
the waves heard the two riddling words of fate :
Yes, when the stars glisten d,
All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop d stake,
Down almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.
He call d on his mate,
He pour d forth the meanings which I of all men know.
Yes my brother I know,
The rest might not, but I have treasur d every note,
For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with
the shadows,
Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds
and sights after their sorts,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listen d long and long.
Soothe! Soothe! Soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing and lapping , every
one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.
Low hangs the moon, it rose late,
It is lagging O I think it is heavy with love, with
love.
O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
With love, with love.
O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the
breakers?
WALT WHITMAN 189*
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?
Loud! loud! loud!
Loud I call to you my love !
A word then (for I will conquer it),
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up what is it? I listen ;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you
sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper d me thrcfugh the night, and very plainly before
daybreak,
Lisp d to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my
arous d child s heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me
softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.
Of formal education Whitman had little, but lie
was always a miscellaneous reader of books, and
he had that peculiar training of the American in
those years which came from a varjetv_of occupa
tions. Through the Specimen Days we catch
glimpses of him working desultorily as type
setter, proof-reader, editor, writer, school-teacher,
carpenter for the most part in Brooklyn, but
seeing a good deal of the country, and making
himself familiar with all the manifold life of his
beloved Manhatta. It was always the tides of
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
life that attracted him. He had, as he says, a
passion for ferries, and spent much of his time on
these boats, often in the pilot-houses, where he
could get a full sweep of the changing panorama.
And the moving stream of Broadway attracted
him with a like sympathy; he loved to lose him
self in "the hurrying and vast amplitude of those
never-ending human currents," or to gaze down
into it from the advantage of the omnibus top.
The gre&LYgnt in his life was the war. His
brother George had enlisted in the army, and in
the battle of Fredericksburg was wounded. Walt
immediately went South, found his brother not
seriously injured, stayed with the army awhile,
and then in Washington made himself a kind of
voluntary nurse and friend in the hospital wards.
He passed from cot to cot bearing what gifts he
could bring, writing letters for the feeble, above
all giving of himself out of the bountifulness of
his superb physical nature :
Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself.
Many a friendless, broken lad was actually raised
by his magnetic sympathy out of the despair that
meant death; many another found, in his serene
countenance, courage for the inevitable end.
"Poor youth," he jots down in his notebook of
these days, "so handsome, athletic, with profuse
beautiful shining hair. One time as I sat look
ing at him while he lay asleep, he suddenly,
WALT WHITMAN
without the least start, awaken d, open d his eyes,
gave me a long, steady look, turning his face
slightly to gaze easier one long, clear, silent
look a slight sigh then turn d back and went
into his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-
stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hov
er d near." Such were the notes that went
unchanged into the Specimen Days mere hasty
scribblings, yet showing now and then a rare
literary art. To me the final moral impression
from these memoranda is the comforting assur
ance much needed in these days of realistic
fiction that human nature is not entirely bestial-
ised by war. Whitman describes the horrors of
the field after a battle with pathetic_vividness, but
above all he causes one to feel the great wave of
idealism that swept over the country, bringing
the hearts of men into unison, and lifting them
out of themselves into a larger purpose. And
with this goes the physical impression of endlessly
marching troops, of interminable shadowy pro
cessions through the lonely roads of Virginia
and in the streets of Washington.
To Whitman himself there came a deepening
and purifying of his nature. He gave generously,
prodigally, of his sympathy, and received his
reward in the sure possession of peace ; but under
the physical^strain something broke within him.
From the age of fifty-four to his death at seventy-
three (1892), he was an invalid, suffering more or
less from paralysis. He travelled somewhat, but
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
most of the tim^ he was at his home in Camden,
or visiting at a farmhouse in the adjacent country.
Henceforth his notes are largely made up of his
communings with nature scraps hastily written
down out of doors, and palpitating at times with
the immediate intoxication of the world s beauty.
And this is the end of the record:
Finally, the morality : " Virtue," said Marcus Aurelius,
" what is it, only a living and enthusiastic sympathy
with Nature?" Perhaps, indeed, the efforts of the true
poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been,
and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially
the same to bring people back from their persistent
strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average,
divine, original concrete.
Artistically this return to nature meant for
Whitman a revojt against the poetical ronvea-
tions. He observed as who has not ? a certain
hollowness in almost all the poetry of the day,
owing to the fact that it was not rooted in the
realities of modern life. The rhythm was merely
pretty, and had lost its vital swing ; the primitive
habits which had made it a bond of union by the
clapping of hands and the beating of feet were
too far in the past to lend it any communal force. 1
1 Mr. Bliss Perry in his Biography emphasises the fact
that Whitman was not alone in this metrical revolt. In
particular he calls attention to the remark-able parallel
between Whitman s work and Samuel Warren s rhapsody,
The Lily and the Bee, which was published in England
WALT WHITMAN 1 93
And the spmt^verse was equally a thing of the
past. It was essentially a product of feudalism,
and Tennyson was the last pale flower, exquisite
indeed, but fragile and useless, of a civilisation
which had shown its luxuriance in Shakespeare.
In these traditions of form and spirit the poet was
swathed until he sang no longer as a free individ
ual man in touch with the universal currents of
life, but was an emgty^echojDf an outworn age, a
simulacrum (this was the word Whitman applied
to Swinburne) of vanished emotions. To restore
poetry to its dominion over the present, therefore,
Whitman would first of all abrogate the accepted
rules of rhythm, and would allow his lines to
swing, so he thought, with the liquid abandon of \
the waves and the winds. Feudalism should give
place to democracy ; there should be no more
distinctions, but all things should be equally good
and significant, the body with the soul, vice with
virtue, the ugly with the beautiful, the small
with the great. And he, Walt Whitman, would
in 1851, promptly republished by Harpers, and reviewed
in Harper s Monthly of November, 1851. The rhapsody
describes a day and night passed in the Crystal Palace,
but its real subject, avowed by the author, is "Man a
unity" :
" In dusky, rainless Egypt now !
Mysterious memories come crowding round
From misty Mizraim to Ibrahim-
Abraham ! Joseph ! Pharaoh s Plagues !
Shepherd Kings \ Sesostris !
Cambyses ! Xerxes I Alexander ! Ptolemies ! Antony I Cleopatra!
Caesar
13
194 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
chant himself, lustily and unashamed, as a
"simple separate person." So he would lead the
people of America back to the costless average,
divine, original concrete. Unfortunately, in break
ing away from much that was undoubtedly a
sham, he forgot tgo often those eternaj^conven-
tions which grow out of the essential demands of
human nature. Rhythm is such a convention,
and where his broken prose is of a kind to strain
the ear in the search for cadences which are not
to be found, he simply, as Ben Jonson said of
Donne, deserves hanging for not keeping accent.
To bawl out that things unlike are like, is not to
make them so, and a manly egotism, if too noisy,
may sink into mere fanfaronade. For page after
page Whitman is rather a ^psaeher of poetry than
a rjoet; and this perhaps may be his final condem
nation, that he is persistently telling us how the
true poem of to-day should be written instead of
making such a poem. Preaching has its uses
and may arouse the loftiest emotions, but its uses
and emotions are not those of poetry. The simple
truth is that a large number of Whitman s so-
Isis ! Osiris ! Temples ! Sphinxes ! Obelisks ! Alexandria !
The Pyramids.
The Nile I
Napoleon ! Nelson !
Behold, my son, quoth the Royal Mother, this ancient
wondrous country destined scene of mighty doings per
chance of conflict, deadly tremendous, such as the world
has never seen, nor warrior dreamed of.
Even now the attracting centre of world-wide anxieties.
WALT WHITMAN
called poems are not only serjnons, but dull and
amorphous sermons. If they arouse in certain
enthusiasts any sensation beyond that of a prosaic
homily, it is because these generous readers bring
with them the residual emotion arising from his
work as a whole. Consider a few lines from the
Salut au Monde:
What do you see Walt Whitman?
Who are they you salute, and that one after another
salute you.
I see the places of the sagas,
I see the pine-trees and fir-trees torn by northern blasts,
I see granite bowlders and cliffs, I see green meadows
and lakes,
I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors,
I see them raised high with stones by the marge of the
restless oceans, that the dead men s spirits when
they wearied of their quiet graves might rise up
through the mounds and gaze on the tossing bil-
\
On this spot see settled the eyes of sleepless Statesmen
I,o ! a British engineer, even while I speak, connects the
Red Sea with the Mediterranean, Alexandria and Cairo
made as one
" A unit unperceived,
I sink into the living stream again 1
Nave, transept, aisles and Galleries,
Pacing nntired ; insatiate !
Touchstone of character ! capacity! and knowledge !
196 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
lows, and be refreshed by storms, immensity,
liberty, action.
I see the steppes of Asia,
I see the tumuli of Mongolia, I see the tents of Kal
mucks and Baskirs,
I see the nomadic tribes with herds of oxen and cows,
etc., etc.
Now it so happens that a contemporary of Whit
man, who likewise undertook in his own way to
vivify the enfeebled rhythms, and who sought, by
returning to the spirit of Greece, to escape from
mediaeval feudalism, who wrote also much of his
own feelings and was withal on occasion an undis
guised preacher it happens that Matthew Arnold
in The Strayed Reveller has treated a very similar
theme :
They see the Centaurs
In the upper glens
Of Pelion, in the streams,
Where red-berried ashes fringe
Spectacle, now lost in the Spectators ; then spectators in the
spectacle !
Rich ; poor ; gentle ; simple ; wise ; foolish ; young ; old ; learned ;
ignorant ; thoughtful ; thoughtless ; haughty ; humble ; frivo
lous ; profound!"
Whitman was a great reader of the magazines and no
doubt saw this poem just at the time when he was beating
about for his own new style. Both in form and spirit this
is a really remarkable parallel. There needs but a touch
of genius to fit the lines in with the most characteristic
of Whitman s,
WALT WHITMAN 197
The clear-brown shallow pools,
With streaming flanks, and heads
Rear d proudly, snuffing
The mountain wind.
They see the Scythian
On the wide stepp, unharnessing
His wheel d house at noon.
He tethers his beast down, and makes his meal
Mares milk and bread
Baked on the embers; all around
The boundless, waving grass-plains stretch, thick-starr d
With saffron and the yellow hollyhock
And flag-leaved iris-flowers.
Is it not plain, even from these fragmentary
quotations, that Matthew Arnold has here accom
plished what Whitman proposed as a poetical
task? that he has transferred to the reader
the actual vision insteadr-ef asserting what he
himself had seen? And a good deal of Whit
man s poetry is of this rudimentary sort. I find
jotted down in the margins of my Leaves of
Grass a dozen or more of such comparisons.
There are lines in Autumn Rivulets which
might be taken for the first rough draft from
which Landor or Wordsworth elaborated his
image of the inland shell; "Sail, sail thy
best, ship of Democracy," sounds like a
sketch for Longfellow s " Thou, too, sail on,
O Ship of State"; Shelley s West Wind is
there in embryo, and clumsily distorted stanzas
198 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of Gray and Horace. In a larger sense much of
his verse is little more than a lusty preaching of
whatothej>meii have dealt with creatively. His
proclamation of health is good in its way, but
long before him Scott had assimilated that doc
trine into the breathing characters of his novels.
I find no harm in Whitman s insistence on
unashamed physical love, only surprise now and
then to hear the language of the gutter from the
pulpit; but for poetry I prefer Byron s creative
assumption of that doctrine in the stxny of
Haidee. Is not all the theory of Whitman s
Children of Adam to be found there, turned to
beautiful uses, in that picture of the two lovers
brought together by mother Nature in the cavern
by the starlit bay ? Indeed, I am not sure but we
might go further back and discover the modern
sermon distilled by Lucretius into one perfect
sensuous verse:
Et Venus in silvis iungebat corpora amantum.
Were this all, Whitman might be dismissed to
Messrs. Traubel& Burroughs, and to his excitable
British champions, without further ado; but it is
by no means all. V Again and again when Whit
man forgets his doctrine and hearkens, to hjs^
inspiration, he shows himself a poet in the sim
plest acceptation of that term. \ There are single
lines here and there, such as the oft-quoted
"White arms out in the breakeis tirelessly
tossing," which have a magical power of evoking
WALT WHITMAN 1 99
an imagejor the memory of subtle sounds and
odors. There are phrases, such as his "vigorous,
benevolent, clean," that almost condense a system
of morals into an epigram; paragraphs that hold
the true poetic emotion and stand out from their
context like those half-evolved figures of Rodin
struggling from their matrix; short poems, such
as The Singer in the Prison^ that might take their
place unabashed in any anthology; long poems,
such as Out of the Cradle and When Lilacs Last,
that show a grandiose, if somewhat stumbling,
craftsmanship. And it should be observed that
his rhythm in these successful passages is by no
means so lawless as he himself and others have
supposed. Occasionally it resembles the move
ment in the short rhymeless lines of Matthew
Arnold, but in general it is markedly dactylic.
Perfect hexameters abound:
Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing
and
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual
darkness.
From these the variation is gradual
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valve"d voice. . . .
Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes. . . .
In a far away northern county in the placid pastoral
region
to a solution of the verse into pure prose. The
prevalent effect is that of a hexanietric cadence
"c?
20O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
such as probably preceded the regular schemati-
sation of the Homeric poems, now following its
own inner law at the expense of external form,
and now submitting to no law at all, but sprawl
ing in mere uncouth ignorance.
And when__he- succeeds, Whitman stands
naturally with the great and not the minor poets.
Take, for instance, these three familiar poems by
Browning and Tennyson and Whitman on the
same theme, and Whitman, though not at his
highest here, is still not out of place:
Fear death? to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go. . .
I was ever a fighter, so one fight more,
The best and the last !
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past !
No ! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life s arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute s at end,
And the elements rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
WALT WHITMAN 2OI
O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest !
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me !
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark !
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark;
For tho from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
Whispers of heavenly death murmur d I hear,
Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,
Footsteps gently ascending, mystical "breezes, wafted
soft and low,
Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, for
ever flowing,
(Or is it the plashing of tears ? the measureless waters of
human tears?)
I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,
Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
With at times a half-dimm d sadden d far-off star,
Appearing and disappearing.
(Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth ;
On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,
Some soul is passing over.)
2O2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Browning s lines are beaten out with a superb
vigour, but in substance they express only the
crude individualism of a man who sees nothing
beyond his personal emotions, who will contend
for these face to face with the Arch Fear, that
great contemner of persons, and thinks to carry
them into the silence of the grave. Tennyson,
the poet of universal law, has caught up into one
luminous throbbing image the merging of the
soul into the great tides of being from whence it
sprung, while still the idea of personality is not
entirely lost, but changed into a kind of mystic
symbol. It is notable that Whitman, who posed
before the world_asjhe upholder of rank egotism,
shows less of this quality in the presence of death
than either of his great contemporaries. Here all
thought of self is lost in a vague rapport^ as he
would say, with the dim suggestions of whisper
ing, cloud- wrapped night; here is a perception of
spiritual values far above the anthropomorphism .
of Browning, and a power of evoking a poetical
mood, when once we have trained our ear to bring
out his rhythms, as strong, though not as per
manent, as Tennyson s. In this note of almost
pantheistic revery, the lines may represent a
departure from Whitman s earlier manner, but in
another respect they exhibit the most constant
and characteristic of his qualities the sense of
.ceaseless indistinct^ motion, intimated in the
sounxT of ascending footsteps and of the unseen
flowing rivers, expressed more directly in the
WALT WHITMAN
shifting clouds and the far off appearing and
disappearing star, ?
And this sense of in4iseriminate_motion is, I
think, the impression left finally by Whitman s
work as a whole, not the impression of wind-
tossed inanities that is left by Swinburne, but of
realities, solid and momentous, and filled with
blind portents for the soul. Now the observer
seems to be moving through clustered objects
beheld vividly for a second of time and then lost
in the mass, and, again, the observer himself is
stationary while the visions throng past him in
almost dizzy rapidity; but in either case we come
away with the feeling of having been merged in
unbroken processions, whose beginning and end
are below the distant horizon, and whose meaning
we but faintly surmise:
All is a procession,
The universe is a procession with measured and perfect
motion.
The explanation of this effect is in part simple.
The aspect of nature never.Jhrgnt.ten by Whitman
in town or field is the_sea, and always the sea in
motion. He is on the beach listening "As the old
mother sways her to and fro singing her husky
song," and looking out upon the "troops of white-
maned racers racing to the goal." The endless
rush of the ferries is in the substance of his verse
as it formed a part of his life, and the quick pulsa
tions of Broadway are equally there :
2O4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet!
Thou, like the parti-coloured world itself like infinite
teeming, mocking life !
Thou visor d, vast, unspeakable show and lesson !
And the world itself is an Open Road, "the long
brown path before me," he calls it, " leading
wherever I choose." Only as adding to thsJree-
dom and spaciousness of this sliding panorama can
the "cataloguing" portions of Whitman s book
find any justification.
From these material images it is an easy
transition to the vision "Of the progress of the
souls of men and women along the grand roads
of the universe." Out of the infinite past he
beholds himself climbing, as it were, up the long
gradations of time:
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was
even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the
lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid
carbon. . . .
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
And in the future, the soul, like Columbus dream
ing of ever new worlds, perceives for itself other
unending voyages :
WALT WHITMAN 2O5
As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal d my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.
It was the same symbolism in the Passage to
India ("Passage to more than India!" as the
refrain becomes) which led Whitman to speak of
that poem to Mr. Traubel as containing, in the
jargon of Mickle Street, " the essential ultimate
me" and " the unfolding of cosmic purposes."
To most men, when their eyes within are
opened, that spectacle brings a feeling of painful
doubt. The mere physical perception of in
numerable multitudes jostling forward with no
apparent goal, contains an element ofjniellectual
bewilderment for the observer. His own idenj-
tity is suddenly threatened, and the meaning of
his existence becomes as obscure to him as that of
the alien individualities that crowd his path.
And when this spectacle, as it does with some
men, passes into an intuition of vast shadowy
fluctuations in the invisible world, the bewilder
ment grows to a sense of terror, even of despair.
It is the tonic Quality of Whitman the quality
for which his sane readers return to him again
and again that his eyes were opened to this
vision, and that he remained unafraid. All the
vociferousness of his earlier poems is little more
than a note of defiance against the thronging
shapes that beset him. But I think it was some
thing more than his obstreperous individualism
2O6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
that saved him in the end. Look into his face,
especially in the noble war-time picture of him
called the Hugo portrait, and you will be struck
by that veiled brooding regard of the eyes which
goes with the vision of the seer. He felt not only
his personal identity entrenched behind walls of
inexpugnable egotism, but he was conscious, also,
of another kind of identity, which made him one
with every living creature, even with the inani
mate elements. He was no stranger in the uni
verse. The spirit that gazed out ofTmTown eyes
int6 the unresting multitude looked back at him
with silent greeting from every passing face. And
it was chiefly through this higher identity, or
sympathy, that he cast away fear. He chants its
power in a hundred different ways now crudely
pronouncing himself this person and that, and
again merely declaring that all persons are the
same and equally good to him, now denying all
distinctions whatsoever. He gave it a mystical
name:
Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through
me the current and index.
I speak the pass-word primeval; I give the sign of
democracy.
The word has been caught up by certain of his
disciples and made the pass-word for admission
into Whitman clubs and the key to unlock the
society of the future. As the poet of democracy
he is supposed to have relegated all preceding
WALT WHITMAN 2O7
literatures and religions to the dust heap, and to
have inaugurated a new era of civilisation. Now,
undoubtedly he did represent in a way the politi
cal and physical aspects of America before the
war its large fluctuations of population, its sense
of unfulfilled destiny. But for the problems con
fronting the actual militant democracy I cannot
see that his poems have any answer. " Salvation
can t be legislated " was the phrase with which he
warned off the labour agitators and heralds of
reform who sought his assistance in the later
years. I fear that the working-man to-day who
should undertake to follow his doctrine of insou
ciance would soon learn that loafing may be some
thing very different from an invitation to the soul.
There may be inspiration for the self-reliant
individual in Whitman, but even more than
Kmerson s his philosophy is one of fraternal
anarchy, leaving no room- for the stricter ties of
marriage or the state. It is curious that through
out his works you will find scarcely an intimation
of the more exclusive forms of love or friendship
which furnish the ordinary theme of poetry. In
that universe of unresting motion into which he
gazed he could discover neither time nor place for
the knitting of those more enduring unions.
Camjfrado ! was his word, the cry from one man
to another as they meet in the streaming pro
cession, walk together for a little way with
clasped hands, and then with the kiss of parting
separate, each to his own end. This, and no
2O8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
poHtical_jprogramme, is, as I understand it, the
meaning of the pass-word primeval, democracy.
Only with Whitman s experience of the war,
and his daily familiarity with death, do we catch
the first note of that deeper mj^ticism which looks
through the illusion of change into the silence of
infinite calm. I have been struck by the fact that
it was the battle-fields of Virginia that first revealed
to him the stars and their infinite contrast with
this life of ours. He is describing * these butchers
shambles " in his Specimen Days, when suddenly
he seems to have become aware of the full glory
of the sky : * Such is the camp of the wounded
such a fragment, a reflection afar off of the bloody
scene while all over the clear, large moon comes
out at times softly, quietly shining. Amid the
woods, that scene of flitting souls amid the crack
and crash and yelling sounds the impalpable
perfume of the woods and yet the pungent,
stifling smoke the radiance of the moon, looking
from heaven at intervals so placid the sky so
heavenly the clear-obscure up there, those buoy
ant upper oceans a few large placid stars beyond,
coming silently and languidly out, and then
disappearing the melancholy, draperied night
above, around." It was out of such material as
this, written hastily in little pocket note-books,
that the Drum- Taps were later constructed. One
of the poems, the earliest in which this pathetic
fallacy of the sky appears, connects Whitman with
Homer:
WALT WHITMAN 2OQ
I see before me now a travelling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards
of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in
places rising high,
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes
dingily seen,
The numerous camp-fires scatter d near and far, some
away up on the mountain,
The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-
sized, flickering,
And over all the sky the sky! far, far out of reach,
studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.
It is a picture, roughly-limned, yet comparable in
its own way with that scene in the Iliad which
Tennyson has translated so magnificently:
And these all night upon the bridge of war
Sat glorying ; many a fire before them blazed :
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine.
Almost, in such passages as these, it would seem
as if the familiarity with death had drawn for
Whitman the last curtain of initiation; almost he
stands like Kmerson s young mortal in the hall
of the firmament, "On the instant, and inces
santly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies
himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and
that . . . Every moment, new changes, and
new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract
2IO SHELBURNE ESSAYS
him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the
air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the
gods still sitting around him on their thrones,
they alone with him alone." To that diviner
glimpse Whitman never quite attained, and this
is well, for in attaining it he would have passed
beyond the peculiar inspiration which makes him
what he is. He had been haunted by the idea of
death as a boy, and had associated it with the
breaking of the sea-waves on the beach. It was
the supreme symbol oj^Qhange. beautiful and
beneficent, purging and renewing, yet still a
gateway into new roads, and never a door open
ing into the chambers of home. Such a charac
ter it retains, indeed, in the later poems, but its
ministration strikes nearer the heart of things:
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its carnage must in time be
utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly
softly wash again, and ever again, this soil d world :
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin I
draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face
in the coffin.
Kven in his chant, When Lilacs Last in the Door-
yard Bloom d, it is notable that he instinctively
chooses for his picture the dead President on that
long westward journey, with the crowds throng
ing to behold the passing train. He is still
haunted by the thought of endless progress and
WALT WHITMAN 211
procession, although in the same poem is to occur
that wonderful hymn to the Deliverer :
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love but praise ! praise ! praise !
For the sure-en winding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all.
He lacked the rare and unique elevation of
Emerson from whom so much of his vision was
unwittingly derived, but as a compensation his
temperament is richer than the New England
poet s, and his verbal felicity at its best more
striking. I do not see why Americans should
hesitate to accept him, with all his imperfections
and incompleteness, and with all his vaunted
pedantry of the pavement, as one of the most
original and characterisic of their poets; but to do
this they must begfrTby forgetting his disciples.
WILLIAM BLAKE
AFTER all the editorial care bestowed on Blake
it seems incredible that we should have had to
wait until this late day for an authentic text * of
his poems ; yet such is the fact. Some of the
emendations of the earlier editors were pardonable
in a way, and if these gentlemen had been satis-
fled with correcting obvious slips of grammar
where the sense or rhythm was not involved, I for
one should be slow to censure. But they have
gone far beyond that. Take, for example, one
of the most characteristic and perfect of Blake s
epigrams:
Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau ;
Mock on, Mock on ; t is all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a Gem
Reflected in the beams divine ;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel s paths they shine.
1 The Poetical Works of William Blake. A new and
verbatim text from the manuscript, engraved and letter
press originals. With variorum readings and biblio
graphical notes and prefaces. By John Sampson. New
York : Oxford University Press, 1905. The text is also
published in a smaller volume, without the notes, and
with an introduction by Walter Raleigh.
212
WILLIAM BLAKE 213
Can any one explain by what right Mr. W. B.
Yeats should have changed the first "sand " to
"dust" and the second to "stone"? From all
these impertinences, and they are pretty numer
ous, Mr. John Sampson has delivered us by print
ing the text as it left Blake s hands. In some
cases the fulness of his notes almost gives us the
advantage of having the poet s actual manuscript
under our eyes. A notable instance of this is
furnished by the best-known of the poems, "The
Tiger," which has been printed with so many
arbitrary variations that I need make no apology
for quoting it here in its entirety, just as Blake
meant it to be :
Tyger ! Tyger ! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand ? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain ?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp ?
214 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger ! Tyger ! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Mr. Sampson is justified in pointing here to "the
terrible compressed force" of the two abrupt
sentences in the line "What dread hand ? & what
dread feet?" and in comparing it with the languid
punctuation of the Aldine text, What dread
hand and what dread feet ? " He does good service
also in showing that no manuscript authority
exists for what Swinburne perversely calls a
"nobler reading":
What dread hand framed thy dread feet?
The genesis of the correct form is not without
interest as throwing light on Blake s mental pro
cesses if it be not merely an illustration of the
common truth of poets, inspirantur eundo. In
Blake s MS. book this part of the poem originally
stood as follows:
And when thy heart began to beat
What dread hand & and what dread feet
Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep
In the well of sanguine woe
In what clay & in what mould
Were thy eyes of fury roll d
What the hammer .
WILLIAM BLAKE 215
When he came to publish the poem in his Songs
of Experienced first cancelled this weak five-line
stanza; and then, seeing that the last line of the
preceding stanza was left suspended without a
predicate, he waived the difficulty by simply
punctuating so as to make two abrupt questions,
"What dread hand ? & what dread feet ?" surely
a lucky stroke which his editors need not have
been at such pains to undo.
And even the frequent lapses of grammar and
rhythm, whose correction, one must confess, does
render the earlier editions pleasanter to read than
Mr. Sampson s scrupulous fidelity, have a meaning
for anyone who desires to understand the workings
of Blake s mind. The fact is that a well-disci
plined or genteel Blake is inconceivable. People
are in general what they are made, by education
and company, from fifteen to five and twenty,"
said lyord Chesterfield, whose Letters were pub
lished just when Blake was entering on those
critical years. And Blake was to be a voice cry
ing in solitary places against everything which
that cultured Earl represented, against the estab
lished education and society of the times. That
was an age sufficiently easy to comprehend,
because it had formed for itself so clear an ideal.
Its aim above all was to avoid immediate contact
with realities, to interpose some layer of philoso
phic experience between a man s soul and the
emotional shocks of life. There was feeling
enough, as the tearful annals of the "females"
2lb SHELBURNE ESSAYS
may prove, and there was, too, no lack of effi
ciency, as Chesterfield s own motto, Suaviter in
modo, fortiter in re, may indicate ; but both the
heart and the will were trained to act through
the mediation of approved formulae. Probably the
interest of most readers to-day, though wrongly
in my opinion, is not so much with this main
edifice of the age as with the scattered and blindly
working forces that were sapping the very founda
tions of the structure. At every turn one comes
upon traces of these subterranean currents.
Against the official virtue of the Church and the
polite horror of enthusiasm Wesley was preaching
the immediate dependency of the soul on God.
It was he who said of "the favourite of the age,"
Lord Chesterfield, "his name will stink to all
generations" as to our day, at least, it certainly
does. And another rebel, to whom in marvellous
guise the visible and invisible (to him strangely
visible) worlds were commingled, Blake as a boy
may have passed in London streets and with his
precocious insight recognised as a brother "a
placid, venerable, thin man of eighty-four, of
erect figure and abstracted air, wearing a full-
bottomed wig, a pair of long ruffles, and a curious-
hilted sword, and carrying a gold-headed cane
no vision, still flesh and blood, but himself the
greatest of modern Vision Seers Emanuel Swe-
denborg by name, who came from Amsterdam to
London in August, 1771." Much in later years
Blake was to learn of the New Jerusalem from
WILLIAM BLAKE 217
this man s books, and much of his doctrine he
was to reject. And in literature a number of
men just at this time were undertaking to deny
the validity of experience and seeking for poetry
in the childhood of the race. In 1760 Macpherson
began to publish his pseudo-translations from the
Gaelic; in 1765 Percy brought out his first Rel-
iques of Ancient English Poetry; and a year or
two later a poor boy of Bristol a child almost
might be seen lying on the sward before the
Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, dreaming his
monkish rhymes of the fifteenth century. We
must not forget that notable scholars of the day
were to wage battle for the authenticity of these
Rowley poems, and that at least one dignitary of
the Church was to rank them in excellence above
Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton.
Cynical men of the world, such as Horace
Walpole, and masters of traditional learning, such
as Thomas Gray, felt the influence of these
subterranean streams and showed it in their
works, but only a genius entirely innocent of the
schools and of the world, I think, could have been
so acutely sensitive to all these vaguely compre
hended forces; only such an one could have sur
rendered himself to be for them a spokesman so
single-minded in purpose as to have seemed to his
own generation, if indeed not to ours also, a
babbler and a maniac. William Blake was born
in London in 1757. His father (our Celtic friends
will have him, like all fathers of genius, of Irish
2l8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
extraction) was a hosier in a small way who lived
over his shop in Broad Street. William, the
second child in a family of five, seems to have
gone without any regular education. We hear of
his wandering much in the suburbs and of the
strange visions that haunted his boyhood. One
day, sauntering on Peckham Rye he beholds a
tree filled with angels, whose wings gleam among
the leaves like stars; and on relating the incident
at home he just escapes a thrashing from his
father for telling a lie. At the age of ten he was
put to the drawing school of Mr. Pars in the
Strand. Four years later he was apprenticed to
learn the trade of engraving. His father planned
first to place him under Ryland, an artist of some
reputation, but the boy objected. "Father," said
he, as they left Ryland s studio, "I do not like
the man s face ; it looks as if he will live to be
hanged!" And in due time that uncanny pro
phecy was fulfilled. In deference, therefore, to the
boy s wishes he was apprenticed to the engraver
James Basire, under whom he worked diligently
and successfully. After a little while he was sent
out to make drawings of the monuments and
buildings which Basire was engaged to engrave
for Gough, the antiquary of whom Walpole
has so much to say. Much of this time he
passed in Westminster Abbey, locked up by the
verger alone with the solemn memorials of
the dead yet not alone, for in that silence of the
tombs intimate visitations came to him of Christ
WILLIAM BLAKE 2 1 9
and the apostles, and taught him the secrets of
the spiritual world.
In 1782 he married Catherine Sophia Boucher, a
pretty brunette, who served him to the end as few
men of genius have ever been served. Crabb
Robinson, the ubiquitous, called on her after the
poet s death and found her, notwithstanding her
poor and dingy dress, a woman with a good
expression on her countenance and a dark eye,
showing the remains of youthful beauty. She
had, he says, the wifely virtue of virtues an
implicit reverence for her husband. She believed
in his visions as absolutely as Blake did himself,
and once remarked to him, in Robinson s pre
sence: "You know, dear, the first time you saw
God was when you were four years old, and he
put his head to the window and set you a-scream-
ing." Certainly Blake needed such a helpmate,
for his life henceforth was to be one of continual
toil and small remuneration. For years he prac
tically depended for support on a certain Mr.
Butts who bought his plates at the price of a
guinea each.
One episode stands out from the dull monotony
of his career. In the year 1800, the busy and
versatile Hayley then residing not at romantic
Eartham where Cowper and Mrs. Unwin had
sought peace, 1 but in a marine cottage at Felpham,
1 Alas for these hopes ! July 29, 1792, Cowper is writ
ing to Hayley: "I am hunted by spiritual hounds in the
night season. I cannot help it. You will pity me, and
22O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
some six miles away asked Blake to engrave the
illustrations for the life of Cowper which he had
undertaken to write. Blake accepted the invita
tion, and for three years he and his wife dwelt in
a little cottage near by, on the Sussex Downs.
Here, for awhile, he was buoyantly happy.
"Felpham is a sweet place for study," he writes
to his friend Flaxman because it is more spirit
ual than lyondon. Heaven opens here on all
sides her golden gates: her windows are not
obstructed by vapors ; voices of celestial inhabi
tants are more distinctly heard, and their forms
more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a
shadow of their houses." In this disposition of
content it was small matter to him that he was
poor and that the true work of his imagination
was scoffed at by the world. "Now begins a new
life," he says in the same letter, "because another
covering of earth is shaken off. I am more famed
in Heaven for my works than I could well con
ceive. In my brain are studies and chambers
wish it were otherwise ; and though you may think there
is much of the imaginary in it, will not deem it for that
reason an evil less to be lamented. So much for fears
and distresses. Soon I hope they shall all have a joyful
termination, and I, my Mary, my Johnny, and my dog,
be skipping with delight at Eartham." In less than two
months he is writing from this earthly Paradise to Lady
Hesketh : " This is, as I have already told you, a delight
ful place ; more beautiful scenery I have never beheld or
expect to behold ; but the charms of it, uncommon as
WILLIAM BLAKE 221
filled with books and pictures of old, which I
wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my
mortal life; and those works are the delight and
study of archangels. Why, then, should I be
anxious about the riches or fame of mortality ?
Many a visitation of poet and saint, "majestic
shadows, grey but luminous," descended upon
him as he paced his tiny garden or looked out over
the glory of the sea ; many a gleam of radiant
fancy lightened his labours. "Did you ever see
a fairy s funeral, madam ? " he once asked a lady
who happened to sit by him at a company during
these days. I have, but not before last night.
I was walking alone in my garden; there was
great stillness among the branches and flowers
and more than common sweetness in the air ; I
heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not
whence it came. At last, I saw the broad leaf of
a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession
of creatures, of the size and colour of green and
grey grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a
rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then
they are, have not in the least alienated my affections
from Weston. The genius of that place suits me better,
it has an air of snug concealment, in which a disposition
like mine feels itself peculiarly gratified ; whereas here
I see from every window woods like forests, and hills like
mountains, a wilderness, in short, that rather increases
my natural melancholy, and which, were it not for the
agreeables I find within, would soon convince me that
mere change of place can avail me little,"
222 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
disappeared. It was a fairy funeral ! " But this
state of contentment could not endure. The tasks
set him by so inconsequent and commonplace a
creature as Hayley lay like lead on his spirit.
And at bottom he was not in sympathy with the
country. In his letters, one begins to get
glimpses of a seething turmoil within his breast.
" Temptations are on the right hand and on the
left," he cries out. " Behind, the sea of time and
space roars and follows swiftly. He who keeps
not right onwards is lost ; and if our footsteps
slide in clay, how can we do otherwise than fear
and tremble! " And later, to the same friend:
" But, alas! now I may say to you what perhaps
I should not dare to say to anyone else that I can
alone carry on my visionary studies in L,ondon
unannoyed, and that I may converse with my
friends in Eternity, see visions, dream dreams,
and prophesy and speak parables, unobserved,
and at liberty from the doubts of other mortals."
He was not the first to find in the crowded life of
a great city a solitude deeper than that of the
remote village or the deserted field. We will not
follow him to his new London homes, nor recall
the clouds of care and poverty that drew about
him until his death in 1827. It will be sufficient
to quote a part of Crabb Robinson s graphic
account of the man and of his conversation :
He has a most interesting appearance. He is now old
(sixty-eight), pale, with a Socratic countenance and an
expression of great sweetness, though with something of
WILLIAM BLAKE 223
languor about it except when animated, and then he has
about him au air of inspiration. The conversation turned
on art, poetry, and religion. . . . He spoke of his paint
ings as being what he had seen in his visions. And when
he said " my visions," it was in the ordinary unemphatic
tone in which we speak of every-day matters. In the
same tone he said repeatedly, "The Spirit told me." I
took occasion to say : " You express yourself as Socrates
used to do. What resemblance do you suppose there is
between your spirit and his?" "The same as between
our countenances." He paused and added, "I was
Socrates"; and then, as if correcting himself, said, "a
sort of brother. I must have had conversations with him.
So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollec
tion of having been with both of them." I suggested, on
philosophical grounds, the impossibility of supposing an
immortal being created, an eternity d parte post without
an eternity d parte ante. His eye brightened at this, and
he fully concurred with me. "To be sure, it is impos
sible. We are all coexistent with God, members of
the Divine body. We are all partakers of the Divine
nature. . . ." He professes to be very hostile to Plato,
and reproaches Wordsworth with being not a Christian*
but a Platonist. It is one of the subtle remarks of Hume,
on certain religious speculations, that the tendency of
them is to make men indifferent to whatever takes place
by destroying all ideas of good and evil. I took occasion
to apply this remark to something Blake had said. " If
so," I said, " there is no use in discipline or education,
no difference between good and evil." He hastily broke
in upon me: "There is no use in education. I hold it
to be wrong. It is the great sin. It is eating of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the fault
of Plato. He knew of nothing but the virtues and
vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that.
Everything is good in God s eyes. . . ." Of himself,
224 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
lie said he acted by command. The Spirit said to him,
"Blake, be an artist, and nothing else." In this there
is felicity. His eye glistened while he spoke of the joy
of devoting himself solely to divine art. Art is inspira
tion. When Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Mr. Flax-
man, does any of his fine things, he does them in the
Spirit. Blake said : "I should be sorry if I had any
earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so
much taken from his spiritual glory. I wish to do
nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want
nothing whatever. I am happy."
It is well for him that he believed his works to
be famed in heaven, for on earth they were almost
unknown. His poetry, indeed, can scarcely be
said to have been published at all. In 1783, by
the help of a few friends, a slender volume of his
-Poetical Sketches, consisting of only thirty-eight
leaves, was privately issued without publisher s
or printer s name, and with this modest Advertise
ment: "The following Sketches were the pro
duction of untutored youth, commenced in his
twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author
till his twentieth year," etc. His other books,
beginning with the Songs of Innocence in 1789,
were produced by an original method which he
called "illuminated printing." By a process of
etching, the text and interwoven illustrations
were left raised on small copper plates, and from
these printed by the author on sheets of paper
which he bound together in a sheaf. The
illustrations he filled in with flat water-colours.
A.n edition was commonly a single copy, struck
WILLIAM BLAKE 225
off when a chance customer appeared. Lucky
the man to-day who owns one of these priceless
books ; fortunate if he can so much as handle one
of them and see with his own eyes the mystical
marriage of form and language. 1 L/yrical poetry
we have always defined by its relation to music,
but here we must accept a new genre and take
painting instead of melody as ancillary to words.
On the whole, it must be said that Blake is
greater, at least more complete, as an artist than
as a poet ; and this, I think, is due mainly to his
superior discipline as a draftsman. In verse he
never produced anything more exquisite than
some of his juvenile songs; in drawing he grew in
power to the end, and his noblest designs are the
Illustrations of the Book of Job, engraved by him
in his seventieth year. One feels the conscious
artist in such work as this, whereas his success
with words seems somehow always to be the
result of accident.
But if he was never quite certain of his art
as a poet, he was at all events fully aware of his
hostility to the reigning school of the day. It
is nothing less than miraculous that a
cockney lad in the full eighteenth century
should have written such stanzas as these
To the Muses:
1 This pleasure I myself owe to the liberality of Mr.
Robert Hoe, whose superb library contains several of
the original Blakes.
226 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Whether on Ida s shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From antient melody have ceas d ;
Whether in Heav n ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air
Where the melodious winds have birth
Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wand ring in many a coral grove,
Fair nine, forsaking Poetry !
How have you left the antient love
That bards of old enjoy d in you !
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc d, the notes are few!
Here once more is that verbal magic which had
not been heard in English since the last echo of
the Elizabethans had died away a rediscovery
more remarkable, I am inclined to think, than
the passionate realism of Burns or the homely
intimacy of Cowper. Blake s reading, in fact,
was chiefly among those older poets, and at times
a line of his or a brief passage strikes the true
Elizabethan ring, as in this quaint couplet :
When silver snow decks Sylvia s clothes,
And jewel hangs at shepherd s nose.
But more often a poem will begin with some
distinct reminiscence of Shakespeare or Spenser,
only to pass into a liquid, lisping mysticism far
WILLIAM BLAKE 22 J
removed from the spirit of those robuster poets of
the world. Such a song as the following might
be classed as standing midway between Shake
speare and Poe :
Memory, hither come,
And tune your merry notes;
And, while upon the wind
Your music floats,
I 11 pore upon the stream
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.
I 11 drink of the clear stream,
And hear the linnet s song;
And there I 11 lie and dream
The day along :
And when night comes, I 11 go
To places fit for woe,
Walking along the darken d valley
With silent Melancholy.
At bottom his work is not so much an attempt
to revive an earlier art as a personal revolt against
the present. He sought above all that immediacy
of impression which it was the chief aim of the
age to avoid. Thus, Gray and Blake are both
struck by the resemblance of man s ephemeral life
to the little orbit of the summer insects. With
the scholar of Cambridge this simple image
becomes involved in ample and stately language:
To Contemplation s sober eye
Such is the race of Man :
228 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
Alike the Busy and the Gay
But flutter thro life s little day,
In Fortune s varying colours drest;
Brush d by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chill d by Age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.
Methinks I hear, in accents low,
The sportive kind reply :
Poor moralist ! and what art thou ?
A solitary fly !
It is not the least service of Mr. Sampson s vol
ume that his notes show in the most striking
manner how carefully Blake cherished the sim
plicity of his vision. Here we may see the first
sketch of Blake s poem, which sounds almost like
a clumsy reminiscence of Gray:
Woe ! alas ! my guilty hand
Brush d across thy summer joy ;
All thy gilded painted pride
Shatter d, fled. . . .
But this was altered for publication in the Songs
of Experience, thus:
Little Fly,
Thy summer s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush d away.
Am not I
A flylikethee?
Or art not thou
A man like me ?
WILLIAM BLAKE 22Q
For I dance,
And drink, & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
I do not say that Blake is here more successful
than Gray : on the contrary, I am convinced that
his method when carried to its extreme is more
disastrous to poetry than the most rigid conven
tion of the century; but the difference of his
procedure from Gray s is unmistakable. You feel
in these tripping lines, disburdened of all rhetoric,
that Blake has his mind directly on a particular
incident and its application to himself, whereas
Gray is concerned more with the traditional ex
perience of mankind and its generalised expression.
And this immediacy reaches with Blake far
deeper than the shell of language and metrical
form. It was a theory on which he harped
unceasingly that imagination was not the daugh
ter of memory, as the Greeks would have it, but
a faculty of direct vision :
We are led to believe a lie,
When we see with, not through, the eye.
We have seen how as a guest at Felpham he lived
in the midst of these imaginary forms. L/ate in
life he became acquainted with John Varley, the
water-colour artist, who used to feed a rather
morbid craving for the supernatural by calling on
Blake to portray these aerial visitants. "Draw
me Moses," he would say, "or David, or the man
who built the pyramids ; and Blake would sketch
23O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
out the face with the utmost rapidity, looking up
from time to time as if the object were really
before him. One of these Spiritual Portraits was
the famous " Ghost of a Flea," which no one who
has beheld can ever forget. Southey, in The
Doctor, quotes Barley s account of this strange
occurrence :
The spirit visited his [Blake s] imagination in such a
figure as he never anticipated in an insect. As I was
anxious to make the most correct investigation in my
power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this
spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could
draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He in
stantly said, "I see him now before me." I therefore
gave him paper and pencil, with which he drew the por
trait of which a facsimile is given in this number [of A
Treatise on Zodaical Physiognomy}. I felt convinced, by
his mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before
him ; for he left off and began on another part of the
paper to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the
Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented
from proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed
it. During the time occupied in completing the drawing,
the Flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the
souls of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty to ex
cess, and were therefore providentially confined to the
size and form of insects.
It is not to be wondered at that a man who felt
himself to be in immediate contact with the
spiritual world should have rejected the theology
and morality of the day for a religion of his own. 1
1 For a curious parallel earlier in the century to Blake s
rejection of the letter of religion and to his use of sym
bolism, see the lucubrations of the deist Thomas Woolston.
WILLIAM BLAKE 231
Those who have the courage to track his thought
through the labyrinth of the so-called Prophetic
Books will, when their first bewilderment has
subsided, be astonished at the logical system that
begins to appear through much of this amorphous
imagery and grotesque verbiage. I shall not at
tempt to write an exegesis of those books, or to
point out the rarer passages in them of pellucid
beauty and wisdom. Mr. Swinburne has per
formed that task admirably well in his essay on
Blake, and deserves special gratitude and recogni
tion from one who takes offence at most of his
critical work. But without entering into the
details of Blake s system one may say that here,
at least, is no compromise with the imagination.
The business of the poet, he held, was to cleanse
the eyes so as to discern the eternal ideas of Plato,
not as the mere deductions of dialectic, but as real
and palpable existences. "In eternity one thing
never changes into another thing," he said,
speaking the very language of the Academy ; yet
at bottom the state of his mind was more like that
of the early Hindu philosophers than that of the
followers of the Greek, and those who have been
bewildered by the union in the Upanishads of
childish nonsense with sudden flashes of spiritual
insight may, by a strange anomaly of circum
stances, find the nearest Occidental parallel to that
combination in an Bnglish poet of the eighteenth
century. And this resemblance is curiously
enhanced by Blake s nomenclature. His state of
232 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
mind was not so much mythopoeic as logopoeic.
As with the early sages of the Ganges, words of
meaningless sound seem to have possessed a
fascination for him, and to have assumed the
force of supernatural entities. Some of these
extraordinary names are evidently echoes in his
memory of the sonorous syllables of "Ossian";
others, such as"Nobodaddy" for nobody s daddy,
are puerile attempts at humour ; while others
again baffle all attempts at elucidation. They are
employed, one soon discovers to his amazement,
with perfect consistency and with a kind of idola
trous reverence. They are the shorthand, so to
speak, of his philosophy, and they are something
more than that; there was efficacy to Blake in
their very utterance. But if this wisdom of
immediate spiritual vision coming to us out of the
babble of uncouth words has at first an extraordi
nary resemblance to the forest philosophies of
India, the final impression left upon the reader is
by no means the same. The Upanishads are not
personal or anomalous, but represent the search
ing in remote ways of a whole people; whereas
the very isolation of Blake in his age and country
throws a kind of abnormal glamour over his
work. "I am really drunk with intellectual
vision," he exclaims. Instead of a profound
universal experience, we have here the idiosyn
crasy, if not the madness, of solitary introspec
tion so perilous is it to approach alone and
unattended the inviolable sanctuary of truth.
WILLIAM BLAKE 233
Like Cassandra and Teiresias and the other
prophets of Greece, the seeing mortal is cursed
with confusion of speech for his audacity.
Certainly to most readers not a small part of
the Prophetic Books is pure raving, whatever the
ideas may be that lie concealed. For myself, I
have been particularly struck by the relation
between them and the lyrical poems a relation
not always of sequence in time, but of character.
The travail of soul that went into the recording of
those apocalyptic visions is like nothing so much
as some Titanic upheaval of nature, accompanied
with confused outpourings of fire and smoke and
molten lava, with rending and crushing and grind
ing, and with dark revelations of the unspeakable
abyss. And afterwards, in the midst of these
gnarled and broken remains, he who seeks shall
find scattered bits of coloured stone, flawed and
imperfect fragments for the most part, with here
and there a rare and starlike gem. Mr. Sampson
has thrown light on this process of crystallisation
by quoting copiously from the Prophetic Books
in illustration of his text of the lyrical poems, and
those who are curious in this matter may be
referred particularly to his notes on The Crystal
Cabinet, with the extracts from the Jerusalem
and the Milton there given.
If any doubt as to the essential coherency of
Blake s thought still remains, let the reader turn
back from The Crystal Cabinet to the Song writ
ten, it is said, before the age of fourteen, in
234 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
which the same idea is expressed by the same
metaphor :
How sweet I roam d from field to field
And tasted all the summer s pride,
Till I the prince of love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide !
He shew d me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir d my vocal rage ;
He [the prince of love] caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me ;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
There in germ may be found pretty much all
the philosophy that ramifies so egregiously in the
Prophetic Books. Out of the knowledge of life
springs the moral law, having a beauty of its
own, but holding the spirit of man within its
bounds as in a golden cage. The true wisdom is
nothing more than a recognition of the contrast
between the states of Innocence and Experience
a contrast which he sets forth in the names
given to the two collections of Songs, and in many
a naive parable:
WILLIAM BLAKE 235
I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing:
"Mercy, Pity, Peace
Is the world s release."
Thus he sang all day
Over the new mown hay,
Till the sun went down,
And haycocks looked brown.
I heard a Devil curse
Over the heath & the furze :
" Mercy could be no more
If there was nobody poor,
" And pity no more could be,
If all were as happy as we."
At his curse the sun went down
And the heavens gave a frown.
Experience sets up in the Garden of L/ove the
priest s chapel with " Thou shalt not" written
over the door; experience teaches us to doubt
the reality of our visions, to substitute reason for
intuition, to mistrust the spontaneity of our
emotions, to surrender our primitive impulses to
the dictates of religion; experience is the fall of
man, the sin of the world, above all the curse of
the age in which Blake himself was to live and
suffer and sing. The mission of his art, there
fore, as of his theosophy, was to return to a
condition of childlike innocence. There is no
thought of retracing laboriously the path of
experience; there is no image in his poems like
236 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the picture of the haggard old man in The City of
Dreadful Night, crawling
From this accursed night without a morn,
And through the deserts which have else no track,
And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,
To Eden innocence in Bden s clime.
Rather his philosophy hints of revolutions of
birth and rebirth, of experience returning natur
ally into the innocence from which it sprung.
Occasionally in conversation he spoke of transmi
gration as a life-history of which in his own case
he was fully conscious ; but more commonly, as
in The Mental Traveller it is not so much a
question of reincarnation as of mystical regenera
tion. "Whenever any individual rejects error
and embraces truth, 5 he says, "a I,ast Judgment
passes upon that individual ; the evil of experi
ence is wiped away, and the man becomes now
and here as a child to whom the windows of
heaven are opened.
It is the peculiar merit of his verse that it
really gives the impression of childlikeness and
a kind of dewy freshness. One feels this in a
thousand places in such lines as those to an in
fant, which Swinburne regards as the loveliest
he ever wrote:
Sleep, sleep : in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep ;
and in such stanzas as these in which the poet s
WILLIAM BLAKE 237
song and the wild flower s song blend together to
make a single melody:
As I wander d the forest,
The green leaves among,
I heard a wild flower
Singing a song.
" I slept in the Earth
In the silent night,
I murmur d my fears
And I felt delight.
" In the morning I went,
As rosy as morn,
To seek for new Joy ;
But I met with scorn."
If one wishes to see the difference between this
identification of the poet with the naive emotions
of childhood and the contemplation of these
emotions through experience, let him compare
these lines with Goethe s "Ich ging im Walde."
Again, I do not mean that Blake is for this reason
the higher poet; I mean merely to distinguish.
The true commentary on Blake is to read him
side by side with Wordsworth s Intimations of
Immortality , where the beauty of childhood is
seen frankly through the medium of memory, and
there is no attempt to deny or escape the burden
of experience. The result of Blake s method is in
one sense curiously paradoxical. He was himself
the sincerest of poets; his faculty of immediate
contact is perfectly genuine, and yet the mood
238 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
induced in most readers is one perilously akin to
affectation. We feel the aerial transparency and
the frail loveliness of his inspiration, and for a
moment and by a kind of ritualistic self-purgation
we may identify ourselves with his mood but
only for awhile and at rare intervals. For the most
part a little investigation will detect a slight note
of insincerity in our enjoyment, and, having
discovered this, we fall back on the poets who
accept fully the experience of the human heart.
We find something closer to our understanding,
something for that reason wholesomer, in men like
Wordsworth and Goethe perhaps even in the
more formal poets of Blake s own age. For after
all it is not the office of the true poet to baffle the
longing heart with charms of self-deception, and
we are men in a world of men. The unmitigated
admiration and the effective influence of Blake
are to be found not among the greater romantic
writers of the early nineteenth century, but among
the lesser men Rossetti, Swinburne, and their
school who in one way or another have shrunk
from the higher as well as the lower realities of
life.
THE THEME OF " PARADISE LOST"
IT was not so very long ago that a professor
of English in a great university had the audacity
to declare in print that "no one nowadays would
read Paradise Lost for pleasure ! The statement
is a generalisation from the gentleman s own
delinquencies mayhap, but it does unfortunately
approach too near the actual truth to be com
fortable. And partly, I think, Milton suffers
this neglect because the true theme of his poem
is not commonly understood, and the ordinary
reader from false tradition allows his mind to
seek out and dwell on what are not properly its
characteristic beauties. For, apart from style
and execution (in which no one would deny
supreme excellence to Milton, so that these may
be eliminated from the question), the underlying
motive of a work has much to do with its abid
ing hold on our interest ; and so true is this that
a false opinion in regard to its motive may
deprive a poem of the popularity rightly its due.
Now in order to the possession of this enduring
vitality two distinct elements must enter into the
constitution of an epic : it must be built upon a
theme deeply rooted in national belief, and,
further, the development of this theme must
express, more or less symbolically, some universal
239
240 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
truth of human nature. The first requisite is
indeed a truism of the critics, who find it fully
satisfied in the Trojan war of Homer, in the
wanderings of ^neas and the founding of Rome,
in the political allegory of Dante. Milton him
self, in recognition of this need, meditated for many
years on the Arthurian wars as an epic subject,
and, later, Tennyson did actually weave the
fabulous story of the Round Table into his Idyls
of the. King. But this national interest alone is
not sufficient. Behind it there must rest some
great human truth, some .appeal to universal
human aspirations, decked in the garb of symbol
ism. The poet himself may not be fully conscious
of this deeper meaning, and the manner of its
involution is something quite different from the
methods of the so-called school of symbolists, but
there it must lie, hidden or manifest ; such a
symbolic truth, for example, as we apprehend in
the Iliad) whose scenes of battle as we read them
come to typify, vaguely it may be, the inevitable
stress and struggle of life. For, like those
warriors on the Trojan plain, we are driven by an
irresistible summons into the contention of the
world, and still, like them, we are filled with
futile longings for repose and with unappeased
nostalgia. And the prize we strive for is like that
strange, mysteriously gliding emblem of beauty
and delight which lured the Achaeans over the
seas,
the face that launched a thousand ships.
THE THEME OF PARADISE LOST 24!
Nor need we hesitate to let the imagination play
freely with this least allegorical of poems, for
even before the days of Herodotus Helen had
become an evasive symbol of the beauty we seek
and cannot find. She never was at Troy at all,
the historian declares, but was hidden away in
Egypt while a mere phantom shape appeared to
the warriors ; and this the Greeks discovered
when they had sacked the city and made clear
to mankind the lesson that great wrongs are
greatly punished by the gods."
These two elements, then, the basis in popular
belief and the symbolic meaning, are equally
indispensable to an epic and must exist side by
side. If the national basis alone is present the
poem loses its hold on the reading world as soon
as its theme becomes antiquated. If it contains
in symbolic guise some universal human truth but
is not founded on what to the poet and his co-
temporaries seemed a vital and credible reality, it
descends forthwith into the chill region of alle
gory; it may perhaps attract attention as a work
of curiosity, but it can never come close to the
heart and take firm hold on the affections.
So strong is the demand for a national basis in
an epic that there have not been wanting scholars
to regret that Milton finally forsook his original
purpose of treating the Arthurian wars. But as a
matter of fact, the fables of Arthur were in no
wise bound up with English religion or tradition.
They meant nothing to England then and mean
16
242 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
nothing to her now, whereas the story of Genesis
was a living reality to the people and the most
truly national theme at the poet s disposal. The
minds of the people and their literature were
saturated with Old Testament ideas. Thence
came their religion and the force that sustained
them in their rebellious fight for liberty. It is
moreover a fact that something in the British
temperament approached more nearly the He
braic spirit than has that of any other people
of history. The zeal of righteousness, the hard
activity, the harshness of judgment, and even the
inordinate desire for acquisition, all these things
made a subject from the Old Testament truly
national in those times. And still to-day some
echo of this note is heard in British verse; we
catch it in Kipling s Recessional ^\n his Hymn Be
fore Action, and in his most patriotic poem, A Song
of the English.
But it is only too certain that this immediate
appeal of Paradise Lost has been dulled by the
lapse of time. The stories of Genesis do not
strike us to-day as immediately and literally true;
they even leave the average reader colder than the
myths of ancient Greece, because they are drawn
from a more restricted field of our human nature.
And if you care to see how far the Hebraic
machinery of Cromwellian England falls short of
universal acceptance, you need only turn to the
brilliant analysis of Para dise T^ost in Taine, where
the whole supernatural and earthly plan of the
THE THEME OF PARADISE LOST 243
poem is passed through the fires of French wit.
And yet, incredible as it may sound, and this is
the very point at issue, the ingenious Frenchman
does not once mention the real theme of the poem
he analyses and ridicules, the real theme which
lies like a warming sun at the centre of this
otherwise frigid system, and which lends to the
whole scheme lasting and universal significance.
The absolute verity of the Hebraic machinery, as
it appeared to Milton and his contemporaries,
gave to the work the necessary basis of realism
and sanity; the symbolic meaning of its true but
less flaunted theme carries it quite beyond the
narrow claims of Puritanic England and associates
it with the epics of the world.
Sin is not the innermost subject of Milton s
epic, nor man s disobedience and fall; these are
but the tragic shadows cast about the central
light. Justification of the ways of God to man is
not the true moral of the plot: this and the whole
divine drama are merely the poet s means of
tion. The true theme is Paradise itself; not \/
Paradise lost, but the reality of that "happy rural
raising his conception to the highest generalisa
seat" where the errant tempter beheld
To all delight of human sense exposed
In narrow room nature s whole wealth, yea more,
A heaven on earth.
This truth, indeed, we might have learned from
Tennyson who, with a fellow-craftsman s sympa-
244 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
thetic insight, discerned what gave the poem its
profound value and interest. Not the Titan angels
or the roar of angel onset was to Tennyson the
significant matter. " Me rather," he sings in his
musical Alcaics,
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Kden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o er a rich ambrosial ocean isle.
There lies, you may know, the veritable matter
of Paradise Lost. It is the good fortune of
English literature that the Hebraic preoccupa
tions of her epic poet led him to adopt a theme
whose origin is that ancient ineradicable longing
of the human heart for a garden of innocence, a
paradise of idyllic delights, a region to which
come only "golden days fruitful of golden deeds."
Turn where you will in mythology and literature,
and you will find this pastoral ideal haunting the
imagination of men; less pronounced possibly in
early days when pastoral life was a reality, more
emphasised as civilisation grows complex and
carries us away from nature. Were one to attempt
to display its universality by illustration, one
would need to abridge the libraries of the world
into a few pages. It is the Hesperian gardens
of Homer to which Menelaus was to pass un
scathed for his love of Helen s divine beauty,
THE THEME OF PARADISE LOST 245
the land from which Tennyson borrowed his
picture of
the island-valley of Avilion ;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly.
It is the dream of a Golden Saturnian Age found
among many peoples, and so well portrayed by
Hesiod in his picture of the days when "men lived
like the gods with careless heart, far off from
labours and sorrow." It was the theme of the
Sicilian idyls of Theocritus. From it Virgil drew
the tenderest and most thrilling note of Latin, I
had almost said of Kuropean, poetry :
O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
Agricolas !
It is the Tir-nan-og of the Celts, the country of
the young, the L,and of the lyiving Heart as it
used to be called, the old Paradise which to the
Irish peasant lies everywhere near at hand though
hidden from sight, a shadow-land indeed like the
ideals which have invested Irish poetry with their
mist of illusive beauty :
All the way to Tir-nan-og are many roads that run,
But the darkest road is trodden by the King of Ireland s
son.
The world wears on to sundown, and love is lost and
won,
But he recks not of loss and gain, the King of Ireland s
son.
He follows on forever, when all your chase is done,
He follows after shadows the King of Ireland s son.
246 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
And if in more modern literature we are some
times disgusted with the puerilities and frigid
conceits of Arcadias and Arcadian romances from
Sannazzaro down, let us not forget that the greatest
period of our own literature, the many-tongued
Klizabethan age, where the very wildernesses of
verse are filled with Pentecostal eloquence and
airy tongues that syllable men s names,
let us not forget that the dramas and tales, the
epics and lyrics, of that period, from Spenser to
Milton, are more concerned with this one ideal of
a Golden Age wrought out in some "imitation of
the fields of bliss," than with any other single
matter. Shakespeare s sweetest scenes are de
voted to the idyllic Forest of Arden and to
Perdita s shepherd home; and you may recognise
his hand in a play of mixed authorship when
King Henry cries out:
Ah, what a life were this ! how sweet ; how lovely !
It is, the world over, youth s vision and age s
dream of a happiness that never was on land or
sea; it is the glimmering of those " trailing clouds
of glory" which, to Wordsworth s fancy, follow
us from somewhere afar off into the darkness of
our birth.
It should seem that Milton aimed to combine all
these fleeting impressions of a golden pastoral
age and so to blend them as to produce one perfect
picture of Eden.
THE THEME OF PARADISE LOST 247
Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world ; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired
Castalian spring might with this paradise
Of Bden strive,
he writes, and enlarges the comparison through a
paragraph. There, in that garden, dwelt pure
content and peace, simple desires and love and
innocent cares. Thither came the messengers of
the Lord, bringing with them the effulgence of
the celestial courts, the beauty of whose pure
light could rest lovingly on this unalienated home
of joy. And there, the guardians of it all, dwelt
the primal pair in undisturbed innocence,
For contemplation he, and valour formed;
For softness she, and sweet attractive grace.
And there resided mutual love, the sweetness of
whose influence has been told by many poets but
by none so perfectly as by the creator of these gar
den scenes of Eden. In the night when the little
tasks of the day are done and all things are calling
to repose, we may hear the lovers reckoning up
their measure of content. It is Eve who speaks:
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun,
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistering with dew: fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers ; and sweet the coming on
248 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Of grateful evening mild; then silent night,
With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn, when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds ; nor rising sun
On this delightful land ; nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistering with dew ; nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful evening mild ; nor silent night,
With this her solemn bird ; nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet.
And when at the end she inquires why all night
long these lights of heaven shine though he and
she have closed their eyes in sleep, as if with the
ceasing of their mutual consciousness of love there
could be no meaning or purpose in that great
display of beauty, then Adam replies to her :
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep;
All these with ceaseless praise his works behold
Both day and night. How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole or responsive each to other s note,
Singing their great Creator ! oft in bands
While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk,
With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds
In full harmonic number joined, their songs
Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to heaven.
And so talking, hand in hand, the first of human
lovers pass alone on to their blissful bower, where
under foot the violet, the crocus, and every
beauteous flower broiders the ground with rich
inlay. So high and pure is the theme and so
THE THEME OF PARADISE LOST 249
lifted up the style that we do not pause to con
sider that after all we are reading only what a
score of Elizabethan poets have described,
beautifully indeed but less sublimely, in their
Arcadian idyls. Indeed if we wish to learn the
true kinship of Milton s genius, we need only
turn to the long "linked sweetness" of William
Browne s Pastorals, and to the story of Amintas
and Fida in particular, where all the delights of
nature are pressed into a similar service of happy
lovers :
O how the flowers (pressed with their treadings on them)
Strove to cast up their heads to look upon them !
How jealously the buds that so had seen them
Sent forth the sweetest smells to step between them,
As fearing the perfume lodged in their powers
Once known of them, they might neglect the flowers.
The details of the two scenes are different and the
grand style of Milton is in Browne lowered by
the search for pretty conceits, but the spirit is
after all the same. In the groves of Tavistock,
as in the garden of Eden, dwells love whose sweet
encouragement can make a swain
Climb by his song where none but souls attain.
With propriety this pastoral scene, with its
symbolism that embraces some of the deepest
desires and regrets of the human heart, is set in
the middle books of the epic, just as a painter
places the most important object of his picture in
the centre of his composition and throws upon it
250 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the highest light. Before and after are the darker
hues that direct the eye infallibly to the dominant
figure. In the two opening books stands that
picture of the l< regions of sorrow, doleful shades,
where peace and rest can never dwell " ; and as in
the description of Paradise the poet gathered
together beauties from all the fabulous gardens of
antiquity, so here he shows nature given up to
breeding
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived,
Gorgons, and Hydras,, and Chimeras dire.
And in the setting of this fiery gloom all the
vices most contrary to idyllic happiness are pre
sented in vivid poetical form by means of personi
fication. As content may be called the crowning
and creative virtue of the pastoral world, so
Satan, the lord of the demonic crew, stands for
pride and evil ambition. With him in that senate
of hell are Moloch, grim and terrible, the destroyer
of peace, who cries out for open violence; Belial,
"than whom a spirit more lewd fell not from
heaven," he who counsels "ignoble ease and
perfect sloth" for the better working of his lust;
Mammon, the prince of wealth and luxury, to
escape whose contamination most of all things
the poets laid out their simple gardens of content;
and Beelzebub, greatest of all save Satan himself,
who represents malice and hatred and every pas
sion most abhorrent to the love and loving kindness
THE THEME OF PARADISE LOST 25!
of Eden. Than this contrasted picture of utter
darkness, this plotting of violence and revenge,
and the exit of Satan through the guarded gates
of hell, no more artistic preparation could be
conceived for the idyllic scenes and virtues of
Paradise.
In like manner, when temptation has crept into
the garden and forever broken its- charm, and
when the guilty pair have awaked to a sense of
their wretchedness, then Michael, the angel of the
lyord, takes Adam to a high mountain and from
there displays to him in the form of a vast pano
rama all the toil and pain and lingering strife of
actual human history. It is the- reality of life set
like a shadow against the brief and golden dream
of Paradise. Hand in hand, with solitary steps
and slow, the man and woman go out into the
harsh experiences of the world; but through all
the generations of their children, through all the
days of labour and degradation that are to succeed,
the memory of that happy garden shall follow,
a memory at once and sweetest hope.
Many have found fault with the divine action
interwoven through the epic, and it cannot be
denied that Milton has, through his harsh Puri
tanic anthropomorphism, missed the higher mys
teries of divinity. We may even go so far
with Taiue as to admit that something of prim
ness, almost, it might be said, of priggishness,
disfigures the celestial household. But looked at in
a proper light, this action performs, nevertheless, a
252 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
needed office. The creation passages, for example,
permit the poet, as if in anticipation of Lessing s
Laocodn^ to expand his pictorial scenes and to give
them vital interest by throwing his descriptions
into the form of consecutive narration. What
would be intolerable as mere descriptive writing
becomes vivid and truly poetical when we see the
world grow into form and all its beauties one by
one develop beneath the Creator s hand. But
more than this, the celestial action lends to the
poem the desired balance of art. By the malignant
plotting of the demons, who in their evil propensi
ties stand for a personification of the antithetic
vices, the happy reality of Eden was changed to a
lingering dream of memory. The counterpart of
that demonic senate is shown in the councils of
heaven, where in the colloquy of the Father and
the Son we listen to the divine love whose power
and wisdom, so the poet dreams, shall at the last
restore to erring mankind the lost Paradise made
perfect now -against temptation and deceit. So is
the humble tragedy in the garden of Eden lifted
up in grandeur and significance until it is made
to embrace the drama of salvation; and so the
regret of memory is converted into the gladness of
hope. Meanwhile for us who merely read and
seek the exalted pleasures of the imagination,
there lies between the scenes in hell and the
panoramic vision of the world s shattered life that
perfect and splendid vision of pastoral bliss. As
Adam in his morning hymn gave thanks for the
THE THEME OF PARADISE LOST 253
glories of the outstretched and still uncontami-
nated earth, so almost we are ready to render
praise to the poet s creative genius for this sweet
refuge of retirement he has builded for the heart
of our fancy.
THE LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE
IN January of 1797 Lord Orford, then in his
eightieth year and dying of the gout, but staunch
of heart and clear of intellect as always, closed a
letter to his faithful friend the Countess of Upper
Ossory with these words they were, so far as we
know, the last he ever wrote or dictated: "Oh,
my good Madam, dispense with me from such a
task, and think how it must add to it to apprehend
such letters being shown. Pray send me no more
such laurels, which I desire no more than their
leaves when decked with a scrap of tinsel and
stuck on twelfth-cakes that lie on the shop-boards
of pastry-cooks at Christmas. I shall be quite
content with a sprig of rosemary thrown after me,
when the parson of the parish commits my dust
to dust. Till then, pray, Madam, accept the
resignation of your ancient servant." Walpole
was temperate in his modesty, as in everything
else except scandal and knew that many of his
letters were worthy of preservation; he even went
so far as practically to prepare those to Horace
Mann for the press ; yet who can doubt his sur
prise, possibly his chagrin, if he had suspected
the care that curious editors were to bestow on
254
HORACE WALPOLE 255
his correspondence, and, in particular, if he had
foreseen this latest superb edition into which
every attainable bit of writing has been pressed,
not without much learning of annotation ? 1 Here
is rosemary for remembrance, and leaves of laurel
with a vengeance. I confess that my immediate
thought on turning over the last page was the
ungracious wish that some kind editor would now
condense the fifteen volumes to four or five by
leaving out the repetitions and the purely irrele
vant; and in such a wish I think that Walpole
himself would have been the first to concur.
Indeed, there is room for a whole library of the
expansive eighteenth-century writers so abridged
that we should feel we were getting the real heart
of an author without suffering from expurgations
demanded by the parlour table or the schoolroom.
It is a questionable compliment to the reader to
print, as Mrs. Toynbee does, all the most insignifi
cant scraps of correspondence and at the same
time to suppress more vital passages here and
there, which might offend a prudish taste.
And yet, if it came to that, who would have a
1 The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of
Orford. Chronologically arranged and edited with
notes and indices by Mrs. Paget Toynbee. In sixteen
volumes, with portraits and facsimiles. New York : The
Oxford University Press, 1903-5. The whole of the six
teenth volume is given up to genealogical tables and
indices, which form not the least valuable part of the
edition.
256 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
shorter edition of Walpole at the cost of the
larger? For me, as Tennysou said, "I like those
great still books," and could even desire "there
were a great novel in hundreds of volumes that I
might go on and on." My annoyance was due to
a feeling that this long array of volumes would
deter any but a few inveterate bookmen from
opening them, and, still more perhaps, it was the
critic s dismay at the difficulty of reporting in a
single essay any adequate impression of so
prodigious a work. Here are more than three
thousand letters, extending over a period of sixty-
five years and containing pretty much all of the
eighteenth century. A whole essay might be
devoted to Walpole s relation to art ; for not only
was he a distinguished antiquary and the author
of Anecdotes of Painting in England, but his
"gingerbread castle" at Twickenham was one of
the principal factors in the revival of Gothic
architecture, a museum of antiquities to which
the curious flocked in such numbers as almost to
drive the owner out of his home. Still more
interesting would be a study of his literary taste.
His own writing, like his architecture, helped to
introduce the mania for spurious medisevalism;
Chatterton s genius he admired warmly, despite
the ill-treatment he received from the crazy
Chattertonians, and he was friendly to the ballad
poetry of Percy, though indifferent to the antiqua
rian enthusiasms of Warton. As for Macpherson,
he first accepted the Ossianic epics as full of
HORACE WALPOLE 257
shining beauties, and, later, led by his flair for
rogues and angered by the Scotchman s sup
port of lyOid North, pronounced them "dull for
geries," duller than Glover s Leonidas. On the
other hand, he "reprobated" Thomson, while
falling into rhapsodies over Dr. Darwin s wire
drawn imitations of Pope. The fact is, his taste
wavered uncertainly between the official classical-
ism of the age and the new stirrings of romance,
even where politics did not intervene to warp his
judgment. Johnson he never mentions otherwise
than with contempt and aversion; and this is due
in part to the Doctor s coarse habits and stilted
language, but still more to his pugnacious Tory
ism. Hannah More tells of wrangling with
Walpole over the merits of Pope, whom she pre
ferred to his favourite Dryden, and here again we
may suspect that Walpole is guided as much by
his uncompromising hatred of the Bolingbroke
faction as by his taste for Dry den s larger, freer
style. To unravel his opinions would be to track
the whole shifting literary movement of the age.
A highly diverting theme for the critic, no
doubt, but no sooner should he become engaged
upon it than he would find himself entangled in a
vast spider-web of politics and party. It has, in
fact, been well said, that "the history of England,
throughout a very large segment of the eighteenth
century, is simply a synonym for the works of
Horace Walpole." For finished portraits after
the manner of Clarendon and Burnet, or perhaps
17
258 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
more consciously in the school of the French
moralists, one may turn to his memoirs of King
George the Second and Third. There is nothing
better in that kind in English than the vignettes,
etched in aqua-fortis, of Chesterfield, Granville,
Pelham, and his brother, the Duke of Newcastle,
to name the first that come to mind. It is an art,
altogether precious, that was lost in the early
nineteenth century with the blunting of our sense
of personality, and has never been regained. But
to follow the political drama of those years with
all the vivacity of immediate impression one must
go to the letters themselves.
The first act is that incomparable daily record
of Sir Robert Walpole s death-struggle with his
enemies (&$ 6* OTS xanpiov a//0z :
So fares a boar whom all the troop surrounds
Of shouting huntsmen and of clamorous hounds.
Then comes the long reign of the Pelhams with
their endless intrigues and tergiversations, sym
bolised by the pathetic hands of Newcastle ;
"those hands," as Walpole pictures them, "that
are always groping and sprawling, and fluttering,
and hurrying on the rest of his precipitate
person but there is no describing them but as
Monsieur Courcelle, a French prisoner, did t other
day: Je ne sais pas, dit il, *je ne saurais rex-
primer, mais il y a un certain tatillonnage. If ona
could conceive a dead body hung in chains,
always wanting to be hung somewhere else, one
HORACE WALPOLE 259
should have a comparative idea of him." Mean
while, a more impenetrable actor, Chatham, is
playing with the map of the world, as he plays
with his gout at once statesman and mounte
bank. Bute, Grafton, and Lord North pass over
the stage; while behind the scenes we catch
glimpses of the sullen figure of George the Third
pulling the wires and causing the puppets to
speak, hear the shrill scolding of Junius from his
hiding-place in the gallery, and tremble at the up
roar of Wilkes and his mob in the pit; the Rock-
inghams and Shelburnes spin for a few hours in
view Whig within Whig like the wheels of
Kzekiel s Cherubim.
Some of the scenes in this long-protracted
drama can scarcely be matched outside of Tacitus
or Saint-Simon. Most memorable of all, perhaps,
is the ceremony at the interment of George II.,
with its grotesque shufflings of comedy and
tragedy. We enter the solemn theatre of the
Abbey, and behold about the corpse the irreverent
mummers, Archbishop Seeker, who had been so
eager to be near the new king before the old was
yet buried that he trod on the Duke of Cumber
land s foot ; Cumberland himself, the " butcher
Duke," uncle of the new king, and Newcastle,
with their dark plottings and smouldering
hostility over the regency. Walpole is fully con
scious of all the human passions and vanities
involved in the spectacle:
The procession through a line of foot-guards, every
260 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
seventh man bearing a torch, the horse-guards lining the
outside, their officers with drawn sabres and crape sashes
on horseback, the drums muffled, the fifes, bells tolling,
and minute guns, all this was very solemn. But the
charm was the entrance of the Abbey, where we were re
ceived by the Dean and Chapter in rich copes, the choir
and almsmen all bearing torches ; the whole Abbey so
illuminated, that one saw it to greater advantage than by
day ; the tombs, long aisles, and fretted roof, all appear
ing distinctly, and with the happiest chiaroscuro. . . .
When we came to the chapel of Henry the Seventh, all
solemnity and decorum ceased no order was observed,
people set or stood where they could or would, the yeo
men of the guard were crying out for help, oppressed by
the immense weight of the coffin, the Bishop read sadly,
and blundered in the prayers the fine chapter, Man that
is bom of a woman, was chanted, not read, and the
anthem, besides being unmeasurably tedious, would have
served as well for a nuptial. The real serious part was
the figure of the Duke of Cumberland, heightened by a
thousand melancholy circumstances. He had a dark
brown adonis [wig], and a cloak of black cloth, with a
train of five yards. Attending the funeral of a father,
how little reason so ever he had to love him, could not
be pleasant. His leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand
upon it near two hours, his face bloated and distorted
with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too,
one of his eyes, and placed over the mouth of the vault,
into which, in all probability, he must himself so soon
descend think how unpleasant a situation ! He bore
it all with a firm and unaffected countenance. This grave
scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke of
Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he
came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall,
the Archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle
but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his
HORACE WALPOLE 26l
hypocrisy, and lie ran about the chapel with his glass to
spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand, and
mopping his eyes with t other. Then returned the fear
of catching cold, and the Duke of Cumberland, who was
sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turn
ing round, found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing
upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble. It was
very theatric to look down into the vault, where the
coffin lay, attended by mourners with lights.
And this is the making of history! It would be
interesting to compare the tragic pathos of such a
letter with the sham terror of the same writer s
Castle of Otranto.
The weakest part of Walpole s narrative is that
which touches on the great movements outside of
Parliamentary passions. If anywhere he may be
called tedious, it is in the letters that pour out his
prolonged wail over the wanton alienation of Amer
ica and his shrill clamour against the French Rev
olution. His heart and mind were right in both
cases, but the magnitude of the events shocked
him out of his equilibrium of persiflage and left
him dull and emphatic like other men. They
had no place in the political philosophy which he
had inherited from his father; for a philosophy of
the simplest and most consistent sort he unques
tionably possessed, the belief that liberty and the
British constitution are one and inseparable, and
that the constitution is nothing other than the
balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy
introduced by the settlement of Eighty-eight.
Such a theory of government may seem both
262 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
scholastic and superficial. I am not so sure of
that. At least, it was the formula of Bolingbroke,
the working system of Burke and many of the
century s wisest statesmen. Unfortunately, it
drops into a tone of indolent cynicism when
summed up, as Walpole was fond of expressing
it, in the practical maxim of his father, Quieta non
movere. And what was a sensitive, ease-loving
gentleman, holding so comfortable a philosophy,
to do in the presence of a world that was develop
ing a terrible taste for mobs and revolutions?
Move not what is quiet, quotha; alas, he was met
by the ancient, stubborn fact e pur si muove!
But these violent uprisings come in toward the
end of Walpole s correspondence, and during all
his more vigorous years he was witness of a
stationary government where sleeping principles
were supplanted by parties, and parties degener
ated into pure faction. It was the age when a
despicable trimmer and wriggler like Bubb
Dodington could write out the story of his double-
dealings as an apologia for his life ; but it was the
age also of Dr. Johnson, an era of liberated per
sonalities, great and small, cunning and fatuous,
wise and obtuse but always interesting, as per
sonality is, after all, the one thing of permanent,
unchanging, universal concern. History at such a
time naturally becomes a satirical study of society ?
and the value of Walpole s letters, especially
those of the earlier volumes, is due chiefly to the
causticity of a wit that could etch a variety of
HORACE WALPOLE 263
characters and their milieu in strong, lasting lines.
Altogether they form a social picture whose mi
nuteness and realism no other English writer has
equalled. In some respects the impression left
by the whole period is not unlike that of the
middle sixteenth century. The great passions
that had been generated by political and religious
upheaval lingered on, but, being deprived of their
normal sustenance, worked themselves out in mon
strous idiosyncrasies of character, which gradu
ally subside into whims of an ever milder temper.
In both ages the imagination, feeling the want of
restraint, imported a model of poetic regularity
from abroad and then, at the end, rebounded into
an excessive romanticism. Surrey and Wyatt are
as close a parallel to the school of Pope as Spenser
and Sidney are to the school of Shelley. Such
comparisons, however, are admittedly as danger
ous as they are seductive, and the court of George
the Second was, it need scarcely be said, very far
from a replica of Edward the Sixth s.
It is safer to consider these liberated passions
as an exaggerated illustration of traits that have
always prevailed more or less in English society
and literature. * Why was he sent into England ?
inquires Hamlet ; and the Clown replies with a
turn that must have made the groundlings roar :
"Why, because a was mad: a shall recover his
wits there ; or, if a do not, t is no great matter
there. T will not be seen in him there ; there
the men are as mad as he. It reminds one of the
264 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
reflection that is constantly on Walpole s lips.
He is struck by it during his first tour on the
Continent. "The most remarkable thing I have
observed since I came abroad," he writes from
Florence, * is that there are no people so obviously
mad as the English. The French, the Italians,
have great follies, great faults ; but then they are
so national that they cease to be striking. In
Bngland, tempers vary so excessively, that almost
every one s faults are peculiar to himself. I take
this diversity to proceed partly from our climate,
partly from our Government : the first is change
able and makes us queer; the latter permits our
queernesses to operate as they please." And a
few years later, in London, he introduces the
extraordinary story of Lord Ferrers with the epi
gram: "Madness, that in other countries is a dis
order, is here a systematic character. He never,
I believe, connects this theory with Shakespeare s
sapient grave-digger; it springs from his own
observation, is his own way of saying what the
wits of Queen Anne before him had accepted as a
philosophy of life. Pope had used the "ruling
passion strong in death" to point his panegyric
as well as his satire :
The ruling Passion, be it what it will,
The ruling Passion conquers Reason still.
And Prior had turned it to a mock-heroic theory
of Alma, the soul :
We sure in vain the Cards condemn :
Our selves both cut and shuffl d them.
HORACE WALPOLE 265
In vain on Fortune s Aid rely :
She only is a Stander-by.
Poor Men ! poor Papers ! We and They
Do some impulsive Force obey ;
And are but play d with : Do not play. . . .
Mark then ; Where Fancy or Desire
Collects the beams of Vital Fire;
Into that Limb fair ALMA slides,
And there, pro tempore, resides.
The soul is not, as the men of Oxford hold,
diffused throughout the body, nor does she, as the
Cambridge wits contend, sit "cock-horse on her
throne, the brain," but is all contracted into this
or that member, from toes to head, as some
master impulse governs the man.
Most commonly, the ruling passion of Walpole s
characters is an overweening, undisciplined im-
periousness of will, turned in upon itself and
producing an egotism which only increases its
insolence at the approach of death. "Old
Marlborough is dying but who can tell! last year
she had lain a great while ill, without speaking;
her physicians said, She must be blistered, or
she will die. She called out, I won t be
blistered, and I won t die. " And in truth she
defied them all and the great Physician, too, for
four years. 1 Another grande dame, the Princess
J Is it fanciful to compare this with a passage in the last
sermon of lyatimer preached before Edward the Sixth?
"For a certain great man, that had purchased much
lands, a thousand marks by year, or I wot not what ; a
great portion he had : and so on the way, as he was in his
266 GHELBURNE ESSAYS
of Buckingham, natural daughter of James II.,
makes her ladies vow that, if she should lie sense
less, they would not sit down in the room before
she was dead. She had settled the ceremony of
her funeral and had applied to the Duchess of
Marlborough to borrow the triumphal car that
had borne the Duke s body. "Old Sarah, as
mad and proud as herself, sent her word that it
had carried my Lord Marlborough and should
never be profaned by any other corpse. The
Buckingham returned, that she had spoken to
the undertaker and he had engaged to make a
finer for twenty pounds. " But pride is not the
only passion; avarice and stinginess are almost
as common. Here is the Duchess of Devonshire
at her secular assembly which she keeps once in
journey towards London, or from London, he fell sick by
the way ; a disease took him, that he was constrained
to lie upon it. And so being in his bed, the disease
grew more and more upon him, that he was, by his
friends that were about him, godly advised to look to
himself, and to make him ready to God ; for there was
none other likelihood but that he must die without
remedy. He cried out, What, shall I die ? quoth he.
Wounds ! sides ! heart ! shall I die, and thus go from my
goods ? Go, fetch me some physician that may save my
life. Wounds and sides ! shall I thus die ? There lay he
still in his bed like a block, with nothing but, Wounds
and sides, shall I die ? Within a very little while he
died indeed ; and then lay he like a block indeed. There
was black gowns, torches, tapers, and ringing ; but what
is become of him, God knoweth, and not I."
HORACE WALPOLE 267
fifty years," "more delightfully vulgar at it than
you can imagine," com plaining of the dirty shoes
of the men, and calling out at supper to the Duke,
"Good God! my Lord, don t cut the ham, nobody
will eat any ! And there is a less exalted person
who sends for the undertaker before his daughter
is dead, and cheapens the coffin on the plea that
she may recover. Jealousy takes the form of my
Lord Coventry, who, at a dinner in Paris, chases
his wife, one of the rare Miss Gunnings, about
the table, seizes her, scrubs the rouge off her face
with a napkin, and swears he will carry her back
to Bngland.
Parliament is the great stage, where these
whims and frenzies move their puppets most
visibly to the world. Take a scene from one of
the letters to Sir Horace Mann, at Florence,
written during the frantic efforts of the Court
party to keep Wilkes out of the House of Com
mons on the ground of atheism. One Martin
has called him a "cowardly scoundrel," and they
go off to Hyde Park, where Wilkes receives a
bullet in his body. Meanwhile, on the same day,
Lord Sandwich produces in the House of Lords
a poem, called an Essay on Woman, written by the same
Mr. Wilkes, though others say, only enlarged by him
from a sketch drawn by a late son of a late archbishop.
It is a parody on Pope s Essay on Man; and, like that,
pretending to notes by Dr. Warburton, the present holy
and orthodox Bishop of Gloucester [" blasphemous " and
"scurrilous," he calls him elsewhere]. It is dedicated
268 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
to Fanny Murray, whom it prefers to the Virgin Mary
from never having had a child [we know this Fanny
Murray from another letter. Sir Richard Atkins had
once given her a twenty-pound note; " she said, Damn
your twenty pound, what does that signify? clapped it
between two pieces of bread and butter, and eat it "]; and
it calls the ass a noble animal, which never disgraced
itself but once, and that was when it was ridden on into
Jerusalem. You may judge by these samples of the
whole: the piece, indeed, was only printed, and only
fourteen copies, but never published. Mr. Wilkes com
plains that he never read it but to two persons, who both
approved it highly, Lord Sandwich and Lord Despeucer
[leader of the infamous Hell Fire Club of sham Francis
cans at Medmenham Abbey]. The style, to be sure, is at
least not unlike that of the last. The wicked even affirm,
that very lately, at a club with Mr. Wilkes, held at the
top of the playhouse in Drury Lane, Lord Sandwich
talked so profanely that he drove two harlequins out of
company. You will allow, however, that the production
of this poem so critically was masterly : the secret too
was well kept : nor till a vote was passed against it, did
even Lord Temple suspect who was the author. If Mr.
Martin has not killed him, nor should we, you see here
are faggots enough in store for him still. The Bishop of
Gloucester, who shudders at abuse and infidelity, has
been measuring out ground in Smithfield for his execu
tion ; and in his speech begged the devil s pardon for
comparing him to Wilkes.
And Walpole adds his comment on this mad
scene: " We are poor pygmy, short-lived animals,
but we are comical I don t think the curtain
fallen and the drama closed."
Not only history but the very seasons of the
HORACE WALPOLE 269
year and the weather in this world become ex
pressed in the language of personalities. Does
winter linger beyond his date ? Walpole will tell
you there is "not a glimpse of spring or green,
except a miserable almond tree, half opening one
bud, like my Lord Powerscourt s eye." Does the
Danish minister complain of the heat at the first
levee of Lord Bute, the incoming favourite ?
George Selwyn is there to whisper in his ear:
"Pour se mettre au froid, il faut aller chez
Monsieur le Due de Newcastle." It is this same
George Selwyn who acts throughout as a kind of
licensed jester to the motley crowd. Ghastly in
a very literal sense is much of his wit, seasoned
with his own ruling passion for hangings and
similar grewsome scenes; ghastly in a more
general way to us, like other faded things of a
past age. Already long before he had left the
stage, the young men at White s were laughing
at his bons mots only by tradition, so Walpole
laments; and to-day that laughter has grown thin,
thin to extinction ! But let us be charitable.
Much may be forgiven him for his wish to see
the comedy of High Life Below Stairs at Drury
Lane, being weary of low life above stairs.
It is a question how far Walpole distorts the
picture of this original society. Some heighten
ing of the colour there must be; certainly one may
read the letters of the pious Mrs. Montagu during
the same years and about pretty much the same
people, and feel one s self in the company of
270 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
insipid saints. My opinion is that Walpole does
not use exaggeration so much as selection; he
had that rare artistic vision which naturally
interprets life in accordance with its own impe
rious needs, throwing this event into relief and
passing by that so as to group the whole into a
rational system. Partly this was the instinctive
operation of his mind working in a congenial
medium; but partly also it was, I think, the
conscious labour of the born author. "For seven
and twenty years," he writes to Sir Horace Mann,
"I have been sending you the annals of Bedlam";
he knew pretty well the drift of these letters and
what picture of society they were creating.
Though they show no marks of having been
composed with a public audience in view, they
are something more than the ordinary clever
correspondence; they are literature, just because
they translate the jargon of events into the lan
guage of a dominating, constructive idea.
And they are not only themselves literature,
but they are a prime source for understanding a
large tract of English poetry and fiction. From
the Elizabethan days to the Victorian, humours, in
the old sense of the word, have furnished the
British writer with half his material. Such
themes, of course, are not confined or even
original to England far from that; but they
have been peculiarly fruitful there. To Ben
Jonson they gave both the light laughter of Every
Man in His Humour and the savage indignation
HORACE WALPOLE 27 1
of Volpone; he developed them into a school of
art. The ruling passion of the Queen Anne wits
is nothing more than these same humours dipped
in gall by Dry den for the purposes of satire.
Without them Fielding and Smollett would be
robbed of half their characters. Sterne tricks
them out as hobby-horses and sets all the world
astride upon them, like children in a merry-go-
round. Dickens repeoples the streets of London
with their shadows, and Thackeray himself
borrows them at will in their purest eighteenth-
century form. He need not have gone to the
Lord Hertford of his own day for his Marquis of
Steyne, for Walpole would have served him
abundantly with models the old Duke of Somer
set, for instance, waking after dinner and finding
himself on the floor, and cursing his daughter,
whose duty it was to watch him, to a year of
complete silence. Is it not easy to imagine the
girl wandering about the gloomy chambers of
Gaunt House, avoided by the servants, who are
forbidden to speak to her yet dare not show her
any disrespect? This whole letter (to Sir Horace
Mann, dated December 26, 1748) might almost
pass for a chapter in Vanity Fair. Indeed, all
these invented characters of poet and novelist
assume a new and wonderful colour of reality when
we see their counterparts walking through the
actual history of Walpole s world. It was the
crowning virtue of his wit thus to transmute life
into literature and literature into life.
272 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
The society of the eighteenth-century world is
sharply enough, perhaps too sharply, drawn in
these letters, but what of the man Horace Walpole
himself? He has limned for us a whole gallery of
characters with mordant brush ; what of his own
portrait? What is the ruling passion that impels
him to play his part in this drama of human
nature ? I have often said, and oftener think
and the maxim, which he underscores, is his
chief legacy to popular remembrance "that this
world is a comedy to those that think^ a tragedy to
those that feel a solution of why Democritus
laughed and Heraclitus wept. The only gainer
is History, which has constant opportunities of
showing the various ways in which men can
contrive to be fools and knaves. The record
pretends to be written for instruction, though to
this hour no mortal has been the better or wiser
for it." Democritus or Heraclitus, which was
he? Not precisely either, however much laughter
may have predominated over tears. To the pro-
founder thought of the age, whether speculative
or political, he gave little heed ; was indeed ready
on all occasions to admit that these things were
outside the circle of his sympathy and his powers.
Nor can he be classed among those practical
philosophers who hold themselves valiantly aloof
from the attractions and perplexities of the day.
Something of the unconcerned spectator he
possessed, and towards the end of life this quality
developed almost to the exclusion of all others,
HORACE WALPOLE 273
but during his more active years the personal
bonds were too strong to allow any such claim to
a lofty indifference. To his father he preserved
always a dog-like fidelity, and his theory of
government was at once a form of almost passion
ate pietas, and a surrender to his own tempera
mental dislike of change. Other lesser fidelities
held him, and he could enter the broil of faction
or even tolerate the enormities of war if his cousin
Conway were involved.
Life could not be quite a comedy to one as sen
sitive as he, yet his feelings had neither the quiv
ering tenderness nor the austere comprehension
of tragedy. It does not appear that the pathos of
Richardson s novels touched him in any way ; the
great heart of Dr. Johnson could be deeply stirred
by the pity of Clarissa s fall, but Walpole only
mocked. No sentiment could be more genuine
than his detestation of war. He cries out over
and over again that only a monster could have
started the reforms of Luther, had he foreseen
their cost in bloodshed and devastation. Through
all the conflicts of his own age, one feeling is con
stant with him: Quidq2iid delirant reges plec-
tuntur Achivi, as he expresses it in the verse of
his namesake it is the people who pay for this
national madness with their lives and their ruined
homes. I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of
this sentiment, yet one will look in vain to find in
it any vibration of that sympathy with the fates of
mankind which made Rousseau, despite his mor-
18
274 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
bidness and falseness, so terrible a force for good
and evil.
His thought and emotions were on the lower
scale of the dilettante, and tempered with the
desire of ease. It is to this quality of the
dilettante in life and art that he owes the almost
malignant perversion of his character which the
world has received from Macaulay ; for what
sympathy or understanding could there be
between so militant a politician and one whose
Whigism even, as Macaulay says with infinite
scorn, "was a very harmless kind"? But Macau-
lay is more than unsympathetic ; it would be easy
to take his portrait of Walpole point by point
and show that it is wantonly or ignorantly
distorted. "His republicanism," says the histo
rian, "like the courage of a bully, or the love of a
fribble, was strong and ardent when there was no
occasion for it, and subsided when he had an
opportunity of bringing it to the proof," etc.
The whole passage is an unpardonable misrepre
sentation. Walpole never was, properly speak
ing, a republican ; he believed thoroughly in the
British balance of powers, the constitution, so-
called. He never wavered in his sympathy with
the Americans, and in his admiration for Wash
ington, believing the cause of liberty lay there;
he was opposed to the French Revolution, because
he thought he saw in it a new and more terrible
tyranny. It is hard to see in this the part of a
fribble. "Though the most Frenchified English
HORACE WALPOLE 275
writer of the eighteenth century, he troubled him
self little about the portents which were daily to be
discerned in the French literature of his time. So
writes Macaulay, doing an injustice with both
turns of his paradox. The fact is that Walpole is
one of the few Knglishmen who saw clearly that
a revolution was preparing in France, and was
terrified by the prospect. And as for being
Frenchified in his style ("deeply tainted with
Gallicism"), the only Gallic traits one reader at
least can observe, apart from a phrase now and
then, are a remarkable lucidity and lightness ; he
ranks with the few chosen writers of England
who have combined the precision of literary with
the flexibility of spoken language. Macaulay
sneers again at his "unwillingness to be con
sidered a man of letters," imputes to him all the
vices of authorship without any of its virtues, and
accuses him of showing a lordly contempt for
genius while longing himself for literary fame.
"The fact is, that Walpole had the faults of Grub
Street, with a large addition from St. James s
Street, the vanity, the jealousy, the irritability
of a man of letters, the affected superciliousness
and apathy of a man of ton 1 it is a pretty
paradox after the fashion of Macaulay, and
Walpole himself might envy such a gift of satire ;
but it has one serious defect it is not true. The
tenor of Walpole s letters on this subject is suffi
ciently clear, one might suppose. Again and
again he deprecates any comparison of his own
276 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
writings with the work of real genius, not because
he despises the trade of author, but because he is
aware of his own limitations. There is, in parti
cular, a passage in a letter written late in life to
Hannah More, which sets his self-criticism in so
clear a light that it may be quoted at length:
You said in your last that you feared you took up
time of mine to the prejudice of the public; implying, I
imagined, that I might employ it in composing. Waiv
ing both your compliment and my own vanity, I will
speak very seriously to you on the subject, and with
exact truth. My simple writings have had better for
tune than they had any right to expect; and I fairly
believe, in a great degree, because gentlemen writers,
who do not write for interest, are treated with some
civility if they do not write absolute nonsense. I think
so, because I have not unfrequently known much better
works than mine much more neglected, if the name, for
tune, and situation of the authors were below mine. I
wrote early from youth, spirits, and vanity ; and from
both the last when the first no longer existed. I now
shudder when I reflect on my own boldness; and with
mortification, when I compare my own writings with
those of any great authors. This is so true, that I ques
tion whether it would be possible for me to summon up
courage to publish anything I have written, if I could
recall time past, and should yet think as I think at pre
sent. So much for what is over and out of my power.
As to writing now, I have totally forsworn the profes
sion, for two solid reasons. One I have already told
you; and it is, that I know my own writings are trifling
and of no depth. The other is, that, light and futile as
they were, I am sensible they are better than I could
compose now. I am aware of the decay of the middling
parts I had, and others may be still more sensible of it.
HORACE WALPOLE 277
I doubt if Macaulay, with all his memory, could
summon a single author who has showed a more
wholesome understanding of his own performance,
and has spoken of himself with a finer balance of
modesty and pride. It is one of the curious
anomalies of psychology that Macaulay should
have written of the most transparent of men, both
in his vanities and his excellence, as bearing
features * covered by mask within mask."
One is justified, I think, in feeling something
akin to indignation at these perverted charges.
For my own part, I confess to a certain invincible
prepossession in favour of these men of the past
who have lived and written for my entertainment.
There are writers who naturally arouse one s im
patience a Tolstoy, himself a compound of the
humanitarian and the decadent, who cries out
the Gospel of Jesus on the street-corners, a Brown
ing who imposes on the world as a spiritual
teacher, a Swinburne who mouths the great words
of liberty and righteousness. Such men challenge
us to take a stand on questions of fundamental
veracity. But to those authors who have added
so generously to our amusement without claiming
our reverence a sentimental humourist like
Sterne, a babbling man of the world like Wai-
pole I do not see why we should feel anything
but indulgence. It does not enlarge one s idea of
Wordsworth s humanity to read such words as
That cold and false-hearted Frenchified cox
comb, Horace Walpole." L,et alone the want of
278 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
charity in such a judgment, cold would seem to
be an odd epithet to apply to a nature so quick
with sensibility, and false-hearted is equally
foreign to one who made a cult of friendship,
however volatile he may have appeared at times.
But because we find Walpole engaging and at
bottom sincere, it is not necessary to exaggerate
his virtues or to raise him into a hero ; he is in
no possible sense ultimus Romanorum, as Byron
called him, but very human and very crotchety.
We may even go part way with Macaulay. "The
conformation of his mind," says that historian,
1 was such that whatever was little seemed to him
great, and whatever was great seemed to him
little." No doubt, something of this dispropor
tion is almost an essential ingredient of the
dilettante wherever and whenever found, but in
Walpole it was intensified by a certain limitation,
and I think, too, honesty of temperament. He
apparently suffered a kind of dread not only
of the forces which might solicit his heart too
eagerly, but of those also which disarranged the
settled bounds of his imagination. His disposition
to the few who were really close to him was
considerate and generous ; his interest in every
topic within a certain circumscribed sphere was
insatiable. These things he magnified with
whimsical delight; here he was at home to quar
rel and embrace at his comfort. But the great
matters of the outside popular movements, hero
isms, new philosophies, discoveries of science
HORACE WALPOLE 279
which appealed to the deeper springs of pity and
admiration all these disturbed him with a sense
of homelessness, and no one can fully understand
him who has not in some corner of his own nature
this jealous love of the small and the familiar.
The distant conquests of Great Britain under
Chatham s administration stirred his patriotic
pride, but they undeniably also gave him a feel
ing of uneasiness, as if the peculiar traits of the
little England over which he grumbled so com
fortably were disappearing in the unloved concerns
of the empire. And so of the universe at large;
he protests with humourous dismay against the
discoveries of Herschell. No, he has not visited
the gentleman s giant telescope. <( In truth," he
writes, "the scraps I have learnt of his discoveries
have confounded me; my little head will not con
tain the stupendous idea of an infinity of worlds."
And then, after other matters, he takes up this
astronomical theme again, and passes from it to
his distaste for a giant picture :
I will return to your letter ; which set me afloat on the
vasty deep of speculation, to which I am very unequal
and do not love. My understanding is more on a level
with your ball and meditations on the destruction of
Gorhambury, which I regret. . . . I called at Sir Joshua s,
while he was at Ampthill, and saw his Hercules for
Russia. I did not at all admire it: the principal babe
put me in mind of what I read so often, but have never
seen, the monstrous craws. Master Hercules s knees are
as large as, I presume, the late Lady Guilford s. Blind
Tiresias is staring with horror at the terrible spectacle.
28O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
You begin to see that this apparent trifler has
his own philosophy of life, which you may like or
not, as you please. I am certainly the greatest
philosopher in the world," he remarks quizzi
cally, " without ever having thought of being so ;
always employed, and never busy; eager about
trifles, and indifferent to everything serious.
Well, if it is not philosophy, at least it is content.
I am as pleased here with my own nutshell, as
any monarch you have seen these two months
astride his eagle." It is the philosophy least in
vogue to-day, and for which in public we have
the least charity, yet I suspect that in secret it
has its own strange seduction for many a bewil
dered soul. Intellectually there comes a time
when, with Walpole, we are ready to pardon
professed philosophers if they would allow that
their wisdom is only trifling, instead of calling
their trifling wisdom. And, morally, we have
our moments when we feel it is idle to try to cure
the follies of the world without curing it of being
foolish. The range of such a mood passes from a
lofty Platonic scorn to a very Epicurean comfort
of scolding, and Walpole may be found at both
extremes. I doubt if Plato was one of the authors
who stood on the shelves at Strawberry Hill, yet
during the height of the American war Walpole
breaks out in a spirit of invective which reads
almost like a translation of a most famous passage
in the Republic:
There are great moments, he exclaims, when every
HORACE WALPOLE 28 1
man is called on to exert himself; but when folly, in
fatuation, delusion, incapacity, and profligacy fling a
nation away, and it concurs itself, and applauds its de
stroyers, a man who has lent no hand to the mischief,
and can neither prevent nor remedy the mass of evils, is
fully justified in sitting aloof and beholding the tempest
rage, with silent scorn and indignant compassion.
Add but a touch of urbanity, and you have
the very note and almost the words of Plato s
image of the storm of sleet and dust. But we do
not go to Walpole for these heights of indignation.
He is more at ease when diverting himself at the
drolleries of society, and if at times the tone rises,
it is oftener into that of scandal than of invective.
Yes, the name is in rather bad odour, but one may
as well admit that a good many of these letters
deal in pure scandal. If Walpole possessed any
ruling passion, it was quite as much the desire to
discover the skeleton in his neighbour s closet as
to fill his own closet with bric-a-brac. And he
found what he sought; there is such a rattling
through these pages that one feels occasionally
like a modern Kzekiel strayed into the valley of
dry bones. This does not imply necessarily, I
think, that the observer s heart was corrupt or
peevish. There is no more terrible picture in all
the correspondence than Walpole s visit to his
mad nephew, the third L,ord Orford whom he
afterwards succeeded :
The gentlemen of the country came to congratulate his
recovery; yet, for more than six weeks, he would do
282 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
nothing but speak in the lowest voice, and would whisper
to them at the length of the table, when the person next
to him could not distinguish what he said. Every even
ing, precisely at the same hour, sitting round a table, he
would join his forehead to his mistress s (who is forty,
red-faced, and with black teeth, and with whom he has
slept every night these twenty years), and there they
would sit for a quarter of an hour, like two paroquets,
without speaking. Bvery night, from seven to nine, he
regularly, for the whole fortnight, made his secretary of
militia, an old drunken, broken tradesman, read Statius
to the whole company, though the man could not hiccup
the right quantity of the syllables. Imagine -what I
suffered! One morning I asked the company before my
Lord was up, how they found him? They answered,
just as he had always been. Then, thought I, he has
always been distracted.
The portraiture is sufficiently cynical, the very
"flower of brimstone," yet we must remember
that Walpole through the most trying circum
stances had treated this poor wretch with punctil
ious honour and even consideration. Here is one of
the anomalies of our nature: who will allow that
he takes pleasure in plain scandal, yet who does
not relish these letters ? It is, in fact, curious that
those who have criticised Walpole most severely,
admit almost in the same breath the amusing
qualities of his writing. Is the explanation the
old one of the French moralist, that there is a
certain consolation in watching the misfortunes of
others, even of a friend ? or is it possible to take a
more moral view of this very human trait? Some
times, while laughing at these malicious stories
HORACE WALPOLE 283
of old I/ondon, an odd sensation comes over the
reader that he is not one but two persons, and
that the jest is on himself. All the brute in his
own nature, the disgraces and follies, the coarse
and evil things he cannot entirely keep out of
sight, are set apart from himself in that wicked
society, and in the wild hilarit}^ of his freedom he is
pelting the monster with jeers and opprobrium.
So it is that we flatter ourselves, as did Walpole
in his day, by making of scandal a kind of
philosophy of life.
THE END
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