Shelburne Essays
By
Paul Elmer More
Second Series
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PLATO, Republic,
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
IKnicfcerbocfcer press
1907
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COPYRIGHT, 1905
BY
PAUL ELMER MORE
Published, May, 1905
Reprinted, January, 1906 ; December, 1906
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ADVERTISEMENT
Again thanks are due to the publishers of the Atlantic
Monthly, the New World, the Independent, and the
New York Evening Post for permission to reprint the
essays which appeared in those periodicals.
CONTENTS
PAGE
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS i
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 20
LAFCADIO HEARN 46
THE FIRST COMPLETE EDITION OF HAZLITT . 73
CHARLES LAMB 87
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 104
GEORGE CRABBE 126
NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH . . .145
HAWTHORNE : LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER . *73
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE . . . .188
NEMESIS, OR THE DIVINE ENVY . . . .219
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
SECOND SERIES
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS
THE Introduction to Mr. Sidney Lee's reprint
of the Elizabethan Sonnets, in Arber's English
Garner* has fallen plumply into the quiet waters
of criticism. Since the gracious appearance of
Charles Lamb we have grown accustomed to speak
of every versifier of the great Queen's days with
bated breath ; their freshness, their exquisite feli-
city, their unflagging inventiveness, have become
a byword of praise among all whose reading of the
period extends beyond Shakespeare. But now
comes this iconoclast, with his terrifying know-
ledge of the three hundred thousand sonnets pro-
duced by Europe in the sixteenth century, and
declares roundly, nay, proves beyond cavil, that
1 Elizabethan Sonnets^ newly arranged and edited.
With an Introduction by Sidney Lee. Vols. XI. and
XII. of An English Garner. New York : E. P. Button
& Co., 1904.
VOL. II. I.
2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the famous sonnet-sequences of Sidney and Spen-
ser and Daniel and Drayton, to name only the
better known, are a mere tissue of words and
ideas stolen from Italy and France. Worse than
that, a number of these poems are lifted solidly
from Petrarch and Ronsard and others without a
sign of credit or apology. It is shocking, but,
to be perfectly frank, his argument only confirms
the opinion which many have begun to hold, that
it would be an act of wisdom to revise our some-
what unreasonable estimate of the whole Kliza-
bethan literature.
In one respect it may seem that Mr. I,ee has
gone too far. Because a poem is manifestly an
imitation or even a barefaced theft, it does not
always follow that the incident described is unreal
or that the sentiment is insincere. Sidney's son-
net on his victory in a tournament
Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtained the prize
may very well be modelled on Petrarch's account
of a Court entertainment, but it would be captious
to conclude that such a tourney did not actually
take place, or that the chivalrous knight was not
heartened in the combat by Stella's "heavenly
face." Again the same cavalier's apostrophe to
his couch
Ah, bed! the field where joy's peace some do see,
The field where all my thoughts to war be trained
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 3
is no doubt an echo of innumerable cries from
sleepless Petrarchists, yet the emotion may be
sincere enough for all that. It is a fairly common
thing, I suppose, for young poets to be in love
and to tumble their beds and to make capital of
their agony the next morning in whatever tags
of rhyme they can summon up. There is thus a
certain danger in dogmatising too absolutely
about any particular sonnet.
With this caveat, however, I am prepared to
follow Mr. Lee in his somewhat sweeping denun-
ciation of the Elizabethan sonneteers. His col-
lection embraces fifteen series, extending from
Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, published in 1591
(though composed earlier), to Robert Tofte's
Laura, the Toys of a Traveller, published in 1597,
and including the work of Watson, Barnes, Lodge,
Constable, Daniel, Drayton, Spenser, and others
of less renown. Shakespeare, it will be observed,
is omitted, and Sidney, as Mr. Lee himself ad-
mits, rises in part fairly above jthe level of the
sonneteering herd ; buT"wTth these exceptions it
must be acknowledged that the perusal of this
branch of Elizabethan literature is likely to prove
a dull task to most readers. All that was re-
quired was a moderate acquaintance with Des-
portes or some other writer of the Pleiad and a
modicum of skill in making rhymes, and, look
you, your ambitious gentleman was ready to be-
stow immortality on any Diana or Delia who
might offer to break his heart.
/
4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Write ! write ! help ! help, sweet Muse ! and never cease !
In endless labours pens and papers tire !
Until I purchase my long-wished Desire,
exclaimed the fluent Barnabe Barnes, speaking
for himself and his brothers ; but it was against
the Petrarchian canon that the long-wished desire
should ever be satisfied, and hence these "grief's
commentaries" never ending. Of actual experi-
ence or observation there is, so far as the language
betrays, painfully little. The whole thing is a
juggling with traditional figures and phrases.
One might go through these passionate pretences,
pencil in hand, and check off the score or more
recurring themes with perfect ease. There is the
Phoenix, springing from fire and fit symbol of
ever-renewed love ; there is the silly theft of Na-
ture, who must needs borrow the hues of my lady
to paint her roses and lilies; there is the inevitable
comparison of love with a living death ; rocks,
woods, hills, and streams are witnesses to so
many plaintive despairs that the whole creation
groaneth and travaileth together; Echo retorts
upon a querulous lover in sonnet after sonnet ; a
hundred times we read, " I burn yet am I cold,
I am a-cold yet burn," and a thousand times we
hear the cry, " Give me my heart, for no man
liveth heartless." To be sure the ideas are often
combined differently in these pilfered repetitions,
but the disguise is transparent.
My heart mine eye accuseth of his death,
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 5
writes Constable, borrowing from Petrarch and a
long line of Petrarchists. Then follows Drayton
with his
Whilst yet mine Eyes do surfeit with delight
My woeful heart (imprisoned in my breast),
and Griffin with his
Oft have mine eyes, the agents of mine heart
(False traitor eyes conspiring my decay !)
nor did Shakespeare himself disdain the time-
worn theme. After reading much in these son-
net-sequences one feels as if he had visited that
celebrated chamber in the academy of L,agado,
where honest Gulliver beheld the project for im-
proving knowledge by practical and mechanical
operations. The Petrarchian tags are pasted on
the wooden dice of the frame ; at a word from
the professor the handles are turned, the bits of
wood are shifted about, and in the twinkling of
an eye a new sonnet stands before you in all the
majesty of meaningless rhetoric. There is a de-
lightful facility about the whole affair, but some-
how you are more interested in the process than
in the results.
Macaulay, in one of his essays, denounces Pe-
trarch as the malign power of Italian literature,
whose influence was always set against the better
tradition of Dante, as Ahriman was opposed to
Ormuzd. What would he have said had he
known the extent of that Ahrimanian malady in
6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
English letters as well? One can imagine him
perusing those three hundred thousand sonnets
of the sixteenth century and tabulating the com-
plicated plagiarisms with that serene assurance
which only a critic of his capacious memory could
assume. Those who have penetrated but a little
way into that jungle of delights, and boast a more
modest grasp of mind, may be content to trace the
main currents of tradition in our English sonnets
and let the details go by. And in doing this they
will, perhaps, not miss the truer pleasure. Pe-
trarch, of course, lies at the bottom of the whole
sonneteering mania ; there is the ab Jove from
which any consideration of the subject must start.
But Petrarch himself is not a simple apparition.
In him first of all_ the currents _of the old world
and the now met together, and it is a matter of nice
discrimination to determine what part of his work
is inspired directlyjby_the_classics and how far he
mee^c^ntinusJJieJrajdit;ion of the middle ages.
As I have reread his sonnets for this occasion, it
has seemed to me that too much of his inspiration
is commonly attributed to the reawakened enthu-
siasm of the Renaissance for the masters of Greece
and Rome. No doubt his style and imagery are
largely Latin ; he has put on the fair habit of the
ancient poets, but still, underneath, the passion
and the features of the man are of the Christian
world. His real innovation, so far as substance
goes, was the completeness with which he welded
into a compound of rare beauty the two mediaeval
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 7
ideals of love. The religious books of the preced-
ing centuries had been filledjwith bitter diatribes
against women, and with lamentations over the
subjection of man to feminine seduction. From
this source, more than from the odi et amo of the
Roman poets, sprang the woes and outcry of Pe-
trarch's muse.
Had I believed that death would loose the girth
Of amorous cares that drag me to the ground,
How long ago these hands the way had found
For weary limbs and burden under earth,
he writes in one of the early sonnets, and it re-
quires but a little knowledge of letters to discover
in this trepidation of grief a note purely Christian
and unknown to the pagan poets. Whatever is
added to the mediaeval spirit is that peculiar self-
consciousness which is not classic but marks the
beginning of the modern world.
With this feeling of subjection that cannot free
itself from shame, Petrarch combines the other
mediaeval tendency which idealised_woman as the
symbol of the purer and more spiritual life. That
tendency, familiarenougn in the "romances of
chivalry and in the Mariolatry of the Church to
need no explanation, found its highest expression
in the Amor sementa in voi d*ogni virtute of the
poet who preceded Petrarch. In Dante, indeed,
this idealism is pure and almost unmixed, too
pure to find imitators among the very worldly
visionaries of the Renaissance; it needed the
8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
composite genius of a Petrarch so to temper medi-
aeval ideals with mediaeval realism and then to
clothe these sentiments in such a^garb of classical
centuries. Nor is the result of this union in the
great Italian himself as disparate or as unreal as
might be supposed. Whether it be the exquisite
vehicle of his style or some fine heat of the poet's
temperament, or, more likely, both of these to-
gether whatever be the cause, the sonnets and
canzoni, which of late years have found so few
admirers, impress me as the genuine utterance of
a man in whom personal emotions and abstract
reflections and a sensuous perception of natural
beauties were so intimately bound together that
their confusion in his verse produces the effect of
a necessary and beautiful sincerity. The emotion
itself was not single and so may seem insincere ;
the expression corresponds to an actual experience
and state of mind.
Such is the basis of that vast literature of which
the works of the French Pleiad are, on the whole,
the most vital and genial, and our English Eliza-
bethan sonnets the least tolerable parts. Of the
mere copied agonies and despairs that rose from
Albion we need not stay to speak. How well it
would have been if the lamenting lovers had
heeded the admonition of their leader and master,
Sidney:
You that do dictionary's method bring
Into your rhymes running in rattling rows ;
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 9
You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing :
You take wrong ways !
And how often the rebuke of the same poet is
brought to mind :
" Fool ! " said my Muse, " look in thy heart and write ! "
Again, to show by examples in what way these
amatory lovers imitated the Petrarchian idealism,
making of their lady the symboLand quintessence
obeauty and truth, would be to quote the better
part of Mr. Lee's two volumes. As a single speci-
men of their manner I might cite Lodge's sixth
sonnet to Phillis, were it not that his language
here is a shade too luscious for our chaster days.
The eighth sonnet (so-called ; it has only twelve
lines) of the same series may stand in its place:
No stars her eyes to clear the wandering night,
But shining suns of true divinity,
That make the soul conceive her perfect light !
No wanton beauties of humanity
Her pretty brows, but beams that clear the sight
Of him that seeks the true philosophy !
No coral is her lip, no rose her fair,
But even that crimson that adorns the sun.
No nymph is she, but mistress of the air,
By whom my glories are but new begun.
But when I touch and taste as others do,
I then shall write, and you shall wonder too.
But though the basis of this literature is true
Petrarchism, there are elements imported from
10 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the French school and from direct reading of the
classics which give it at times a character of
its own. We catch here and there, for instance,
an echo of genuine_J^latonism, such as is rarely
to be found in the writers of the Continent.
I say genuine Platonism, because too often we
forget to discriminate between that spirit and the
Petrarchian love, which may be ideal, but is cer-
tainly not Greek. Yet the distinction is fairly
simple. T,nvp to Plato, was a daemonic jpower
lying hptwpf>ri o.v r
.spirit ; and the vision of earthly beauty works a
divine madness in thg soul that lifts he beholder
at lasf quite out of the sphereof human desires
info the^contemplation of eternal truth. There is
no room here for that kind of symbolism which
raised the dead Laura to be the poet's ruling
mistress in the sky. You cannot conceive of Plato
either sighing to be delivered from the dominion
of her beauty in the flesh, or worshipping her
after death as a divinity:
B viva e bella e nuda al ciel salita,
Indi mi signoreggia, indi mi sforza.
When Daniel says of his Delia,
Chastity and beauty, which were deadly foes,
Live reconciled friends within her brow,
he is employing a sentiment which is primarily
Petrarchian, and which might without straining
be called Platonic also. But the two ideals soon
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS II
diverge. The mark of mediaeval idealism is the
endeavour to carry the^conception of personality
into the realm of the infinite ; Platonic love leaves
the personal element behind Jn its heavejily
ascent. The attempt to make of Beatrice a guide
in the spiritual life would have seemed to the
Greek a sentimental sacrilege. Perhaps the finest
expression of the symbolism which derives from
thejniddle ages through Petrarch and is so com-
monly confused with Platonic love, may be found
in one of the two or three great sonnets in the
Amoretti of Spenser :
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it quite away ;
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalise ;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out, likewise.
Not so, quoth I, let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame ;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live and later life renew.
That is the idealism of the Petrarchist at its
best, the hope that his love shall somehow survive
mortality and mingle with eternal things. But
now and then another note breaks through the
12 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
true Platonism, nay, the Jrue_ philosophy that
may be found in Christian and Oriental medita-
tions, and wherever the perception of life's illusion
suddenly smites upon the eyes. You will not
hear it in Petrarch, but, in Christianised form, it
makes tlie-lheme of SMneyi&jBoblest lines:
Leave me, O love ! which reachest but to dust !
And thou, my mind ! aspire to higher things !
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust !
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke, where lasting freedoms be !
Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
O take fast hold ! Let that light be thy guide !
In this small course which birth draws out to death :
And think how evil becometh him to slide
Who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath !
Then farewell, world ! Thy uttermost I see !
Eternal Love, maintain Thy love in me !
There is doubtless a different note in this from
the love which forms the background of Sidney's
as of all these other sonnets, yet the change does
not jar acutely on the mind ; we pass from one to
the other with a certain freedom, for after all they
both lie in the field of the ideal. But another ele-
ment ha^__ejiterd^jn^ojhe_^^ sonnets,
which is utterly discordant with their Petrarchian
basis, and which does much to produce the feeling
of vacuity and insincerity inhering in them. I
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 13
mean the Anacreontic vein, which spread through
the writings of the Pleiad after the publishing of
the pseudo-Anacreon by Stephanus in 1554, and
passed thence into England. To Plato, as to all
the great writers of the early age, " Eros, the son,
Aphrodite, was a mighty god," and as such he
appeared to Dante and Petrarch. To attempt any
fusion or juxtaposition of this great divinity,
"fairest among all the immortal gods," as Hesiod
calls him, with the laughing, mischievous boy of
decadent Greece and Rome, was to show that in-
veracity of imagination which renders a work
cold and meaningless. I do not mean to condemn
the Anacreontic poems in themselves. Many of
them in their airy Greek form are exquisite trifles.
That transTucenT Tittle gem of Cupid and the bee,
for instance, not even Tom Moore could vulgarise
in his translation, and we recognise its grace in
Spenser's paraphrase :
Upon a day, as Love lay sweetly slumb'ring.
There is sp^e^thinjg^^eifecjtly^Jegitimate, even
charming, in the use of these delica tenancies in
the proper place and in the proper metre, as when
the" samirpoet fashions This~pretty conceit:
I saw, in secret to my Dame
How little Cupid humbly came,
And said to her : " All hayle, my mother ! "
But when he saw me laugh, for shame
His face with bashful blood did flame,
Not knowing Venus from the other.
14 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
That is well enough in a way, but any one can
see how the introduction of such trifling into the
idealism of Petrarchian love, with its life of melan-
choly abstinence and its visions of eternity, must
mar and distort the fair image of truth. Nor is
it an answer to say that each sonnet must be
judged by itself, and that there is no discordance
if we read Sidney's Platonic abstinence on one
page and Barnes's Anacreontic fancies on another.
In the first place, the very form of the sonnet, with
the noble gravity of its rhymes, is totally unfit for
these light themes, and further, these sonnets all
spring so manifestly from the same source and
breathe so completely the same atmosphere that
it is fair to criticise them as a single literary
production. Indeed, Sidney himself was half-con-
scious of this confusion between the worship of
the true Eros and the sportive dalliance with the
Anacreontic Erotion or Cupid, and expresses it
more than once. Out of this consciousness there
does even arise a kind of subtle reconciliation, as
in the eleventh sonnet :
In truth, O Love ! with what a boyish kind
Thou dost proceed in thy most serious ways ;
That when the heaven to thee his best displays,
Yet of that best thou leav'st the best behind.
For like a child, that some fair book doth find,
With gilded leaves or coloured vellum plays,
Or, at the most, on some fair picture stays,
But never heeds the fruit of writer's mind ;
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 15
So, when thou saw'st in Nature's cabinet
Stella, thou straight lookt'st babies in her eyes,
In her cheek's pit thou didst thy pitfold set,
And in her breast bo-peep or crouching lies,
Playing and shining in each outward part ;
But, fool, seek'st not to get into her heart.
But oftener Petrarch and Anacreon are jostled
together in such a manner as to make the former
look not a little undignified and the latter heavy.
Thus in Barnes's Parthenophil there is a sonnet to
Content, which may be quoted entire for the
serenity and strength of its noble lines:
Ah, sweet Content ! where is thy mild abode ?
Is it with shepherds and light-hearted Swains,
Which sing upon the downs and pipe abroad,
Tending their flocks and cattle on the plains?
Ah, sweet Content ! where dost thou safely rest ?
In heaven, with angels? which the praises sing
Of Him that made, and rules at His behest,
The minds and hearts of every living thing.
Ah, sweet Content ! where doth thine harbour hold ?
Is it in churches, with Religious Men,
Which please the gods with prayers manifold ;
And in their studies meditate it then ?
Whether thou dost in heaven or earth appear,
Be where thou wilt ! Thou wilt not harbour here !
Barring the flat lines (the eleventh and twelfth),
which have a way of stumbling into the very best
of these sonnets, that is an excellent piece of work;
l6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
but how disastrously the bland effect of it is dis-
pelled when the eye drops to the verses next
succeeding :
If Cupid keep his quiver in thine eye, etc.
It is such incongruities as these that point to
the shallowness and falseness of this whole pro-
cedure. In fact, we must recognise that these
sonnets show Elizabethan literature almost at its
lowest, and that is low indeed. England has
always lacked art, and the lack was greater per-
haps in those licensed days than at any subse-
quent period. Give the greater men of that age
an exquisite fancy to dandle or some swift emo-
tion to utter in lyric form where the first impulse
of genius is sufficient ; let them have some over-
riding passion or extravagant humour to unfold in
a drama whose looseness of structure imposes no
restraint, and they will bring forth effects incom-
parable for freshness and penetrating beauty.
But put on them the habit of a stricter art, bid
them confine their expression to a mould where
form and conscious style are essential, and immedi-
ately they sprawl and are helplessly confounded.
How little sense of form they had is made evident
by their habit of ending the Italianate sonnet with
a couplet ; that trivial error in technique is vastly
significant. How frigid and unreal their senti-
ment became under constraint may be seen by
comparing their work with the better productions
of the Pleiad from whom they stole so unblush-
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS \*J
ingly. Read through Mr. Tree's two volumes from
end to end, and you will not find a single sonnet
which voices the passion and pathos of fading
beauty, so genuine to the Renaissance, as in
Ronsard's " Quand vous serez bien vieille, au
soir, d la chandelle"; nor will you meet with
anything comparable to this other sonnet of Ron-
Sard's whereinto the very essence of the age, with
its love of books and love of woman, seems to be
distilled:
Je veux lire en trois jours Tlliade d'Homere,
Et pour ce, Corydon, ferme bien 1'huis sur moy:
Si rien me vient troubler, je t' assure ma foy,
Tu sentiras combien pesante est ma colere.
Je ne veux seulement que nostre chambrie're
Vienne faire mon lit, ton compagnon, ny toy;
Je veux trois jours entiers demeurer requoy,
Poor follastrer, apre"s, une sepmaine entidre.
Mais si quelqu'un venoit de la part de Cassandre,
Ouvre-luy tost la porte, et ne le fais attendre ;
Soudain entre ma chambre, et me vien accoustrer.
Je veux tant seulement d luy seul me monstrer :
Au reste, si un dieu vouloit pour moy descendre
Du ciel, ferme la porte, et ne le laisse entrer.
But I would not force the note of criticism.
Some six or eight of Sidney's pieces and here and
there a single sonnet in the other collections stand
out with a beauty or simple realism all the more
remarkable for the surrounding waste. Several
of these I have quoted, but it will have been
18 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
observed that even in these there almost invariably
creeps in a line or quatrain or badly hung couplet
that does much to mar the effect of the whole.
Only one sonnet occurs to me whose tone is per-
fectly sustained from the first word to the last,
and that is Dray ton's famous jeu d* esprit, " Since
there 's no help, come, let us kiss and part," for
which, happily, Mr. Lee has found no model in
foreign tongues. Aside, too, from these notable
exceptions, there are little groups within the
larger sequences, such as some of the earlier son-
nets in Lodge's PhilUs, which are written with a
kind of lusciousness soothing to the ear, though
they may leave the mind and heart untouched.
And then not even these imitators of an imitation
could spin verses in those ebullient days without
chancing occasionally upon a line or quatrain that
breaks through their dull convention, like the
song of a bird piercing suddenly the monotonous
undertone of the woods. It may be an effect of
resonant melody found in the words alone and
not in the sense, as where Barnes, after the usual
frigid conceit,
These mine heart-eating eyes do never gaze,
adds magniloquently,
Upon thy sun's harmonious marble wheels ;
it may be an image of high splendour such as this
metaphor in the same poet,
And Phoebe carried in her amber couch ;
ELIZABETHAN SONNETS IQ
it may be Drayton's visionary Platonism,
Bven as a man that in some trance hath seen
More than his wondering utterance can unfold,
That, rapt in spirit, in better worlds hath been;
So must your praise distractedly be told ;
whatever the note be, when it strikes unexpect-
edly on the ear, we pause in our reading and
know that this poet, too, like Daniel, has for a
little while, and in spite of the convention that
hampers him, been in the company of that "clear-
eyed Rector of the holy Hill." This, perhaps, is
the most obvious pleasure to be got from going
through these all too similar sonnet-sequences.
Another satisfaction they have, of a negative na-
ture to be sure: they show more distinctly by way
of contrast the reality and emotional veracity
which remove the greater part of Shakespeare's
sonnets to a class by themselves. But of this an-
other time.
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS
HOWEVER disappointing the mass of Eliza-
bethan sonnets in Mr. Sidney Lee's two volumes
may have been, one great service at least they
have performed: by contrast they have thrown
tJTg_rgg)ism nnrl hiirnin p^mm'rm of Shakespeare* s
sonnets into a new and bold relief. They serve
as_a4ouchstone, so to speak, by means of which
it is possible to tell with a kind of critical pre-
hprp Shakespeare was-jnggling with
conventional commonplaces of the Renais-
sance, as not seldom happened, and where, on
the contrary, he wrote from actual experience or
native emotion? And no one^ 1 think, caiFcome
back to these more personal sonnets after a perusal
of Mr. Lee's collection without being impressed
anew by the miracle of their beauty and without
feeling that with this key the poet did veritably
unlock his heart.
Not that they contain any rationalised philoso-
pfey or any formula of life ; on the~cbntrary, their
value as a confession is bound up with the very
fact that they spring directly from the experience
of the writer without any attempt to shape that
experience into a system after the manner of the
20
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 21
more reflective artists. And in this they are in
harmony with the spirit of the plays. I am aware
of the peril of such a statement to-day, when it
has become the exercise of a certain class of per-
fervid critics to read into the dramas some favoured
idea, whether political or religious or moral or
literary. Yet withal the very difficulties and
contradictions that arise from the methodical
interpretation of Shakespeare might have warned
them that no such application of philosophy was
possible. We take recourse to Matthew Arnold's
saying, "Others abide our question, thou art
free," or, we quote from Lord Lytton :
Bach guess of others into worlds unknown
Shakespeare revolves, but keeps concealed his own ;
As in the Infinite hangs poised his thought,
Surveying all things and asserting nought ;
but few of us have the courage to admit that he
evades our questioning just because he has no
answer to give. It is with him as with the oracles
of which a skeptical poet has made complaint
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain,
Because there is no light beyond the curtain.
We may find the whole_gamut_pf human_eniQr
tion in Shakespeare, but we begin to darken
struct out ofThe medley of his
22 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
vision of_life._snch as exists in Milton or Homer
or Dante or J^schylus. Other dramatists have
resorted for their tragic thesis to some definite
philosophy, whether of their own eliciting or of
the age to the antinomy of fate and the indi-
vidual will, or the clashing of family and state, or
the conflict of duty and pleasure. Shakespeare
proceeds otherwise: simple pasjjmiJs_bis_ikeme.
and hlS-tragic pYqIf-ati'nn is obtained by magnify-
ing passion tint]] it apgn*** th^ ^nnrmity r>f a
supernatural obsession and the bearer is shattered
by the excess of his own emotion. No one can
have failed to observe the incongruity of the
denouement in most of the tragedies the accumu-
lated and unmeaning slaughters that bring an
end to Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and
Lear. The simple fact is that these gruesome
conclusions, twist and turn as the system-mongers
will, do not grow out of any necessity of the plot,
but are the relics of a barbarous taste. The real
climax lies in the frenzy of the passion-driven
hero, and it is for this reason that madness forms
an essential part of the greater dramas.
In this sense Lear may be taken as the most
typical of Shakespeare's tragedies, where the very
winds and clouds re-echo the hurly-burly of over-
wrought passion. And the summit of that pas-
sion, I think, is to be found in those scenes before
Gloucester's castle and in Edgar's hovel, when
the King and his little band set the world topsy-
turvy with the unrestrained wildness of their
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 23
pathos and mockery, through which passes Lear's
cry of terror : "Oh, that way madness lies ! " On
the contrary, the formal conclusion of the play
has no consistence in reason, and, aside from the
separate passages of striking poetry, little art.
The needless intrigues and the universal butchery
bear no logical relation to the main theme and de-
grade the artistic enjoyment of the hearer. The
interest of the piece lies in the excess of passion
and not in any unravelling of a tragic nodus ; it
is a drama of character and not of plot.
And it is the same with the other plays. As
the stuff of life presents itself to Shakespeare,
broken and unarranged, so he reflects it in his
magnifying mirror a tale full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing. I remember one warm even-
ing in early spring standing with a friend on a
balcony that overlooked the lights and the throb-
bing procession of Broadway. It was the hour
when the theatres were closing. The scene was
new to him, for he had come from a far Western
town, and the odour of the city, the constant mu-
tations of the throng, the snatches of conversa-
tion, and the occasional laughter that floated
above the murmur the mystery of this boundless
activity, caught in passing glimpses, acted on his
nerves as an intoxicant. It fascinated and
troubled him at once ; he could find no answer to
the appeal of this enormous, ebullient life, and he
was haunted by the feeling that each human atom
of the mass was driven along in the current by
24 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
some desire inexplicable to all the others inex-
plicable, it might be, to himself. The whole
spectacle presented itself to the eye as a tangle of
passions woven on a web of illusion. " It is all
new to me," he said, "yet the sensation is
strangely familiar. How does it come?" And
then, after a pause: " I understand. It is the
world of Shakespeare, as we have just seen it on
the stage. And often before, while reading his
plays, I have been overwhelmed by the same feel-
ing of infinite interacting lives and infinite illu-
sion." And my friend knew his Shakespeare as
few of us know him in these laborious days.
Only there is something to add. Though
Shakespeare did not rationalise, or, in a sense,
translate the events of life into an artistic design,
though he gives back the crude material of emo-
tion as he finds it, yet in another way he did have
his own solution of the riddle it may even be
that his solution is, when all is said, profounder
and more satisfying than that of any other poet.
The passions of his play may be knit into an in-
extricable tangle so that no dramatic unravelling
is possible, yet always when the emotion is
wrought to a height beyond which human nature
cannot go, always when the hearer is about to
cry out, "That way madness lies; let me shun
that," suddenly the poet waves aside the whole
fa^bric of encBanttrrent with a word of royal com-
mand. From the fitful fever of life, in the Itirn-
ing of a moment, he carries us into that region of
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 25
eventual ealm wherefrom the stage of the world
seems as a little point at a mighty distance. He
who created this troubled scene is no longer a
partaker in its passionate perplexities ; he stands
a great way off, apart from it and above it, and
looks down where, far beneath,
. . . the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge.
We need not dwell on this aspect of his genius,
though we may animadvert, by the way, that
Taine's criticism, because it fails to recognise this
other element beside the passion of Shakespeare,
is finally false and shallow. Any one will recall
the great moments when the curtain of disillusion
-&Us. It is Hamlet's " The rest is silence"; or
the Dauphin's " Life is as tedious as a twice-told
tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man " ; or
the Second Richard's "A brittle glory shineth in
this face"; or Macbeth' s ' ' To-morrow and to-
morrow and to-morrow"; or Kent's "Vex not
his ghost"; or Prospero's " We are such stuff As
dreams are made^on^ and our
with a sleep/^ More than that, there would
seem tcTbe something akin to this inner peripeteia
in the development of Shakespeare's genius.
The peculiar calm and beauty of The Tempest,
The Winter's Tale, and the other late plays have
often been commented upon. After the tumult
26 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of the great tragedies, those scenes of idyllic sport
come like the words of Macbeth, ,
There 's nothing serious in mortality,
All is but toys -
as if the poet, finding no significance in the
thwarted fates of mankind, had turned at last to
the laughter of young girls and the innocence of
flowers.
No, wg_ Tr pr<a1 y d^reiv? onr^ vf>g if wfi go to
Shakespeare for anj_j*hi' 1r>gf> r' hl ' n
of life or any reshaping of the material afforded
by experience into a world of artistic significance,
such as we look for in the masters of Greek and
French literature. What we do get from Jiim_is-a
sense of fonmdlftfifijif* Other men have suffered
him werejjrought
mankind ; he is the
evpgrience, and there can come
of tjjumph or despair^^Qoy or
grfcf, n^ tngi'* inHa*4H4y or hno3^atiLJrLnmonr,
no envy or hate nr.lnvp r>r prirle nr ^Tiarn^, b 111 " we
shalLkaow that he on some^-day^of^his brief life
has felt as we feel and has spoken for us better
than we ourselves can speak. And so it is, I
think, that we hunger for some direct word from
this poet, some revelation of his own mind, more
than from any other writer of the world. What
had he to say of his passage through time ? Was
the sum of it sweet or bitter to him ; did he find it
a simple matter to live, or was he, too, infelixfatis
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 2/
exterritus ; did he, in the sessions of silent thought,
regard with complacence his contact with daily
life, or was there in his memory still some touch
of regret even of shame ? Just because there is
here no remoulding of experience to an ideal, we
believe that if he should open his heart to us in
these matters he would exhibit a peculiar frank-
ness ; and because his experience was broader and
deeper than that of any other man, we feel that
his word would have extraordinary validity.
Could Shakespeare confess, it would be, as it
were, a confession of the human race.
And to a certain extent Shakespeare has con-
fessed. I am not so rash as to suppose that here
and now we shall pluck out the heart of his mys-
tery; in the end a man of his wide-reaching vision
must remain as his own ^neas says : ' ' The secrets
of nature have not more gift in taciturnity."
Yet no one can compare his sonnets with those in
Mr. Lee's volumes without being immediately
impressed by the directness of the self-revelation
they contain, nor can I conceive any reason for
taking this confession otherwise than at its face
value. And what has he to say for himself this
man who ran through the gamut of human emo-
tions and made himself as it were the spokesman
ojHthe race? Alas, it is only the old story re-
peated. I do not see how one can read these son-
nets and not feel that the sum of life to the poet
of those spacious days was, as it had appeared to
the Preacher of Israel long ago, Vanity and vexa-
28 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
tion, and he that increaseth experience increaseth
sorrow ! Not_seldom, to be sure, there_is_a. note
oJLserenity ortriutnph, but always there is this
peculiarity, that tji^^ore_peispjialJthe_Jjone be-
cpmes the sadder is its import.
He was, after all, a child of his age. There
was always present with him that sense of the
eternal flux of things which is so characteristic of
the Renaissance, but which, curiously enough,
rarely appears in the other Elizabethan sonneteers,
however common it may be in the dramatists. It
is safe to say that no single motive or theme recurs
more persistently through the whole course of
Shakespeare's works than this consciousness of
the servile depredations of time, that ' c ceaseless
lackey to eternity." As with other men of the
period, this sense of brevity and mutability lay
upon his mind like an obsession, and no small
part of the tragic pathos in his plays arises from
the jostling together of the insatiable desires of
youth with the ever imminent perception of evan-
escence. One wonders whether Bacon could have
had in recollection these apostrophes to time when
he wrote in his Essays : ' ' It is not good to look
too long upon these turning- wheels of vicissitude,
lest we become giddy."
Of the great passages in the dramas which re-
vert to this theme I need say nothing, for they are
fresh in the memory of us all. But it is just as
prominent, though possibly less familiar, in the
poems. In the very midst of lyucrece's agony
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS
she forgets herself awhile to rail against this
power that "turn[s] the giddy round of Fortune's
wheel":
Mis-shapen Time, copesmate of ugly Night,
Swift subtle post, carrier of grisly care !
And in the Venus and Adonis the thought, here
in its milder aspect, is still more essential.
The tender spring upon thy tempting lip
Shews thee unripe yet mayst thou well be tasted ;
Make use of time, let not advantage slip ;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted :
Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time
cries Venus to the reluctant youth, and the real
charm of this first heir of Shakespeare's invention
resides in a young poet's pity for what Freneau
long afterwards was to call ' ' the frail duration of
a flower,'* and in his longing to conquer muta-
bility by the prowess of love:
Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty.
We are carried by this theme immediately to
the earlier sonnets of the collection in which
Shakespeare scolds his boy fnendJbxjiierisJiing
an ' ' unthifty_loyjelinss ' ' :
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee.
So striking is the resemblance between these first
seventeen sonnets and this part of the Venus and
30 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Adorns just alluded to that the poem would seem
to be a mere dramatisation or objectification (if I
may use the repellent word) of the more personal
expression of the idea, and would afford pretty
strong confirmation of the opinion that the early
sonnets, at least, were written about the year 1593
(the date of Venus and Adonis] and were addressed
to that Earl of Southampton to whom the poem
was dedicated. Everything, too, both the habit
of poets in those days and the unmistakable con-
tinuity of thought running through the greater
number of Shakespeare's series, would indicate
that the succeeding sonnets were meant for the
same person, although some of them may have
been written considerably later. Even in the
more tragic part that was to come afterwards,
when the hesitant friend accepted Shakespeare's
advice quite too literally, he turns the theme of
the Venus and Adonis to the culprit's exoneration:
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed ;
And when a woman woos what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed ?
Indeed, it might be a question whether the dra-
matisation of the subject was undertaken to con-
firm the earlier exhortation, or later, when the
turning point of the sonnet-story occurred, to
uphold the example of Adonis to the tempted,
wavering youth. In either case the sonnets of
both periods and the poem would seem to be
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 31
written under the same inspiration and not far
apart in time.
Nor is it really so difficult to explain, theoretic-
ally, the mood in which Shakespeare wrote those
earlier exhortations as the mountainous contro-
versy over them would lead one to suppose.
Consider that this_ambitious young poet had come
ujrto London with a hunger for beauty unequalled
perhapsjnjhejiistory of literature; and that with
this hunger went the haunting consciousness of
thejoncertainty and mutability of things which
was a part also of this Renaissance inheritance.
Naturally when, in the years following the first
riot of youth, he fell under the sway of the noble
boy, at once his patron and his love (whether it
was Southampton or another) naturally this
perilous perception_of_beauty with its jppign ant
regret threw anjdeal colour over their friendship.
And by virtue of that mingling together in Eng-
land of the currents of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, Shakespeare's passion for the boy
took on something of the sensuousness jrf that re-
lation as it was adopted in Italy from classical
tradition and at the same time the moral pudor of
the northern races. The result is thus easily ex-
plained in theory, but to most readers of to-day
the realisation of this mixed sentiment is not a
little baffling ; the sonnets would probably leave
them quite cold were it not that Shakespeare's
confession deals also with larger matters. His
love for the youth becomes, in fact, a beautiful
32 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
symbol of that war against Time which runs
througFall hisTwork. In this respect the fifteenth
sonnet may be regarded as_the_keynjDLte_-Df the
whole_first_. jgoupj^^lthou gh i n -poetic, diction it
cannot be ranked among the highest:
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows,
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment ;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory ;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night ;
And all in war with Time for love ofyou t
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
He looks back to " the chronicle of wasted time,"
and is filled with alarm that the grace and nobility
of his young friend also " among the wastes of
time must go." Aided probably by some family
circumstances now quite obscure to us, he appeals
to the "sweet boy " to defy the heavy hand of age
by the creative faculty of love, and finds it easy to
write this appeal with the constant revolt of his
own nature against the reign of mutability. And
when, as it appears, the malicious youth let his
exhortations fall unheeded, or heeded them in a
manner quite foreign to the preacher's intention
and desire, it was still within the range of his
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 33
Renaissance training to seek to accomplish by the
power of his own art what the other had failed to
acquire for himself. He will eternise in his verse
this " flow' ring pride, so fading and so fickle " (to
use Spenser's phrase on mutability), and so put
back the encroachments of decay ; he is but one
of many in those days who sought the ' ' stedfast
rest of all things ' ' in such an are perennius. And
it soon grows evident that in the sonnets which
express this hope the sense of universal vicissitude
has almost driven from view his concern for the
particular W. H., if those were the friend's
initials:
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage ; . . .
or turning to man's estate
| Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end ;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend ; . . .
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
It is only in this way. I think, by connecting
Shakespeare 7 ^ love for this chosen boy with the
deeper current of his thought and feeling that we
can understand, in part at least, the riddle of the
sonnets.
3
34 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
But, after all, this restiveness under the hand
ofjime, however personally expressed by Shake-
speare and however strangely omitted by his com-
patriot sonneteers, was a commonplace of his age
of all ages poetically inspired, from Homer's
* ' Like as the generations of leaves ' ' down to
Keats' s " Forever wilt thou lovejmd sheJae. fair."
It is possible to go beyond this in the sonnets,
and to catch a note of sadness which is by no
means a " topic^jof the age, which is indeed now
and again almost painfully intimate and individual.
I am aware of the temerity of such a statement,
but, taken as a whole and with all their splendours
considered, these sonnets to me seem to join with
the plays in forming one of the saddest human
documents ever penned. There is of course
humour here in abundance ; but from the days of
Aristophanes to the present time humour has had
a strange trick of springing luxuriantly from a
bitter soil. It is common also to point to the
pastoral scenes in The Tempest, The Winter's
Tale, and the other later dramas as a proof of the
large joy ousness and final serenity that lay at the
basis of Shakespeare's nature ; and in one sense
the assertion is perfectly just. Yet here, as always,
it is necessary to distinguish. We may not be
able to mark off the passages with mathematical
precision, but no one can read the plays with such
a quest in mind without feeling in a general way
that at times the poet is commenting on life in the
tone of his own direct experience, and that again
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 35
he speaks from that far Olympian height where
his own personality is forgotten and wherefrom
he looks down upon the business of men as on the
pretty sport of children and then it is that the
tricks of Ariel and Miranda's brave new world
become a wonder equal to a dukedom, and the
breath of a dim violet grows as important as the
jealous rage of Leontes. This serenity is due, in
part, no doubt, to the calming influence of years,
and falls like the wind-swept purity of the atmo-
sphere after a storm; it is no less the gift of genius,
with its well-known faculty of dwelling alternately
within and without itself.
But our concern to-day is with the poet's inner
life alone, and I see no reason to question the
common belief Jhat^ffamlet expresses more of
Shakespeare's personal experience than anyjrther
pUiY_or_character. So far as I know, no one has
pointed out how strongly that opinion is reinforced
by the similarity of tone between the dramatic
utterances of Hamlet and the confessions of the
sonnets. Compare, for instance, the list of evils
pronounced by the melancholy Dane:
The whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes
consider how foreign all these details are to the
actual situation of Hamlet and how appropriate
they are to the fortune of Shakespeare himself;
36 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
consider with them the misplaced diatribe of
I^ucrece:
The patient dies while the physician sleeps ;
The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds ;
Justice is feasting while the widow weeps ;
Advice is sporting while infection breeds
and then turn to the sixty-sixth sonnet and see
how clearly they express not the mere common-
place lament over the insufficiency of life, but the
poet's own very personal and very bitter ex-
perience :
Tired with all these for restful death I cry.
Indeed, as we read over the sonnets and mark
the lines where he speaks his own relation to the
whips and scorns of time, we may well be over-
whelmed by the magnitude and the intimacy of
the confession, and it is easy to understand why
he never gave this work willingly to the public as
he did his only other two non-dramatic poems.
The one word that occurs_to_nae_a.s
hie-4eelfrrg^s~7>M%^M'^/ / if it were not for the
sound of the word in connection with so revered
a name I should say shame indignity against
the soilure that is forced upon him from contact
with the world, shame for his too facile yielding
to contamination. The story is best told by
bringing together some of these passages without
comment:
Sonnet 29 :
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone be weep my outcast state.
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 37
Sonnet 36 :
I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame.
Sonnet 37 :
So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite.
Sonnet 88 :
Upon my part I can set down a story
Of faults concealed, wherein I am attainted.
Sonnet 90 :
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow.
Sonnet 112:
Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow.
Sonnet 119:
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distilled from limbecs foul as hell within.
Sonnet 121 :
> TJs^trettetpbevile than vile esteemed.
These are only a few of the lines that might be
quoted. Take them all together and I do not be-
lieve you will find, in the whole course of English
literature, any confession comparable to them for
the indignity and shame of a noble spirit outraged
by the familiarity of " sluttish Time." Some-
thing of this is due, no doubt, to the peculiar
position of the actor in those days. Says Casca,
when he wishes to pull the great Caesar down into
the mire of common buffeted humanity : " If the
tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him
38 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
according as he pleased and displeased them, as
they use to do the players in the theatre, I am
no true man." We do not often, while under the
spell of Shakespeare's magic, consider what it
must have meant to so sensitive and self-conscious
a nature as his to have been exposed to the out-
rageous approval and disapproval of an Eliza-
bethan audience. The groundlings, we know,
paid for the discomfort of their place in the pit by
boisterous assertion of their pleasure, and the
comments of the nobles who sometimes sat on the
stage at the very elbows of the actors must often
have been as galling as the jeers of the mob be-
low. The growing sect of the Puritans, too, gave
them something worse than contempt. Thus,
after the earthquake of 1580, the I/>rd Mayor of
London writes to the Privy Council, April i2th:
When it happened on Sundaie last that some great dis-
order was committed at the Theatre, I sent for the under-
shireve of Middlesex to understand the circumstances, to
the intent that by myself or by him I might have caused
such redresse to be had as in dutie and discretion I might,
and therefore did also send for the plaiers to have apered
afore me, and the rather because those playes doe make
assembles of cittizens and there families oF whome I have
charge ; but forasmuch as I understand that your Lord-
ship, with other of his majesties most honourable Coun-
sell, have entered into examination of that matter, I have
surceassed to precede further, and do humbly refer the
whole to your wisdomes and grave considerations ; how-
beit, I have further thought it my dutie to informe your
Lordship, and therewith also to beseche to have in your
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 39
honourable rememberance, that the players of playes
which are used at the Theatre and other such places, and
tumblers and such like, are a very superfluous sort of
men and of suche facultie as the lawes have disalowed,
and their exersise of those playes is a great hinderaunce
of the service of God, who hath with His mighty hand so
lately admonished us of oure earnest repentance.
Is it strange that Shakespeare should have re-
treated from L,ondon to the quieF of hisTStratford
home as soon as he was freed from the necessity
of serving such a public? More than once he
shows-in th^sonnets__how deeply the iron^ had
entered into his heart, and how he felt the re-
proach of being classed among this ' ' very super-
fluous sort of men/' The chief passages are
often quoted :
Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new ;
Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely ;
and, in the following sonnet:
O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds ;
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, etc.
The confession is sufficiently frank and carries us
far enough away from the elegant conventional!-
40 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
ties that ruled the other Elizabethan sonneteers.
It is not entirely pleasant to know that the man we
reverence this side often yonder side idolatry,
could have laid his heart open in this way even in
the intimacy of friendship.
But there is a more painful element in the son-
nets than mere outcry against the harshness of the
guilty goddess. This man, whose knowledge of
the heart enabled him, without the synthetic
imagination of the other supreme poets, to build
up so marvellous a literature, whose sense of pas-
sion was so profound that it took the place of
tragic conflict in other dramatists how is it with
him when, laying aside the comfortable disguise
of masque and cothurnus, he speaks directly for
himself? We call him the master of human ex-
perience, and that is his honour to-day ; but how
was it with him when he stood on the stage of the
Globe Theatre, a motley to the view, or indulged
in the wanton life of that superfluous sort of men
who were his fellows ? If the hazard and spite of
fortune produced in him a feeling of indignity,
the subjection to the wild beast within his own
heart left, for a time at least, what can only be
called a stamp of shame. It is not necessary to
dwell at length on the particular incident which
forms the heart of this confession, nor to make any
conjectures in regard to the identity and charac-
ter of that " worser spirit, a woman coloured ill,"
who was his love ' ' of despair. ' ' All that is essen-
tial is told only too frankly in the later sonnets.
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 41
There are confessions of guilt in English a plenty
of them ; but ordinarily these are made after the
sinner has reached a state of grace, and when we
probe the matter we are likely to find, as in the
case of Bunyan, that the remembered enormities
were such crimes as bell-ringing and dancing on
the green. The peculiarity of Shakespeare's con-
fession is that we see a sensitive soul actually in
the toils of evil, which he deplores yet hugs to his
breast. It is this association which makes the
terrible one hundred and twenty-ninth sonnet
unique in English unique, so far as I know, in
any language. Only the conscience of the Puri-
tan united to the libertine fancy of a Cavalier (a
phenomenon not easily conceivable outside of
England) could have produced those words :
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action. . . .
All this the world well knows ; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
If you wish to see how much of the world's ex-
perience has entered into these lines, turn back to
Horace's Epistles and see in what way the matter
presented itself to that clear-eyed pagan.
Sperne voluptates, nocet empta dolore voluptas,
was the height of his argument, and between that
admonition and the anguish of Shakespeare have
passed all the middle ages and the whole of
Christianity. Or, if you care to set in relief the
42 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
personal and intimate nature of the sonnet, com-
pare it with Byron's stanza in Childe Harold ;
'Tis an old lesson ; Time approves it true,
And those who know it best, deplore it most ;
When all is won that all desire to woo,
The paltry prize is hardly worth the cost :
Youth wasted, minds degraded, honour lost,
These are thy fruits, successful Passion !
The thought is the same as Shakespeare's, but it
is expressed by a man of the world who speaks
the wisdom of his kind ; there is lacking that in-
dividual conviction of sin, as the Puritans whom
Shakespeare so despised would have called it.
We must not, however, forget that these son-
nets were not written for the world to read, but
for the privacy of one or two persons; their enigma
would indeed be inexplicable were they intended
for the public. And just as Shakespeare's sense
of universal vicissitude is the true means of inter-
preting the opening appeal to the boy friend to
perpetuate his beauty through the power of love,
so the indignities of his public career, in his early
years at least, and the remorse of submission to
his own passions are the only explanation of those
extravagant terms of admiration and love which
he bestows on his young patron.
It is not necessary to believe all the stories of
Shaje^peare^sjrregiilar youth, yet we can hardly
doubFthat his beginnings in London were humble
and not desirable in the eyes of the world. What
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 43
he wrung from fortune came by struggle and by
coining the experience of his life for public usage.
In comparison with his own ragged honours, the
brilliant person of such a child of fortune as
Southampton would seem to hold as a visible
symbol all that he sought and could obtain, if
obtained even in part, only by paying for it in
the sanctities of his own character. Southampton
(or another), beautiful, proud, desired of women,
rich, to whom Fortune gave all things without
price, was more than a person to Shakespeare, he
was an ideal ; and the poet's devotion to this
patron, his almost cringing submission to a boy's
whims, is only comprehensible when we consider
the relation between the two in this light. There
is in the friendship the vicarious power of trans-
mitting virtues :
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be :
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast.
Almost the association with this ideal of youth is
able to cleanse the stains of time. Editors have
been troubled by the lines in which Shakespeare
speaks of his age
That time of year thou mayest in me behold
and have cited them as proof that the sonnets
must have been composed later than 1594, when
he was only thirty. They forget that this early
44 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
assumption of age was a commonplace of the Re-
naissance. And, apart from this, it does not
appear that the difficulty is solved by making him
thirty-six or thirty-eight ; even at that age the
ordinary man is not quite in the yellow leaf.
The fact is that the very intensity of Shake-
speare's passions and the depth of his experience
made him feel thus old in comparison with one
untried by life. And in the freshness of his
friend's blossoming he would find a cloak for his
own losses at the hand of Time :
But when my glass shews me myself, indeed,
Beated and chopt with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self love quite contrary I read,
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
'T is thee (myself) that for myself I praise
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
Yet, even considered in this way, there remains
something disconcerting in the peculiar tone of
self-humiliation which Shakespeare assumes be-
fore a fledgling of the Court. He pays more
than the ordinary adulation of the poets in those
days, and pays it in a different kind :
Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to prye,
To find out shames and idle hours in me ?
And the triangular comedy, in which Shakespeare
and his two loves of comfort and despair play their
extraordinary r61es, leaves the poet in a position
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 45
not calculated to enhance his honour in the eyes
of saint or worldling. Something of this whole
relation between the great exemplar of human ex-
perience and his boyish patron may be accounted
for by the poet's faculty of dramatising the gap in
his own nature between ideal and reality ; some-
thing of it is still inexplicable, an enigma never
meant for our solving, and best, no doubt, left in
obscurity.
And if you ask me, then, why I have at-
tempted, so far as I could, to lay bare this
darker side of Shakespeare's character, my only
reply is that there is a fascination in following
out what seems to one the truth. And, after all,
some comfort, not of an ignoble sort I trust,
abounds in knowing a little more precisely that
this spokesman of mankind rose to the power
and tranquillity of his vision through experiences
very like our own, and that he, too, suffered the
indignities of time and the remorse of his own
excesses.
LAFCADIO HEARN
THKRE was something almost as romantic in Mr.
Hearn's life as in his books. He was, I believe,
the child of an Irish father and a woman of the
Greek islands ; his early manhood he passed in
this country, and then converted himself into a
subject of the Mikado, taking a Japanese wife and
adopting the customs and religion of the land.
On his death this winter (1904) he was buried
with full Buddhist rites, being the first foreigner
so distinguished in Japan; and almost his last act
was to pass by cablegram on the final proofs of
his most serious attempt to transfer the illusive
mystery of the Orient into Western speech. His
Japan, an Interpretation thus rounded out what
must be deemed one of the most extraordinary
artistic achievements of modern days. For it is
as an art of strange subtlety that we should regard
his literary work, an art that, like some sympa-
thetic menstruum, has fused into one compound
three elements never before brought together.
In the mere outward manner of this art there
is, to be sure, nothing mysterious. One recog-
nises immediately throughout his writing that
sense of restraint joined with a power of after-
46
LAFCADIO HEARN 47
suggestion, which he has described as appertain-
ing to Japanese poetry, but which is no less his
own by native right. There is a term, ittakkiri,
it seems, meaning " all gone," or " entirely van-
ished," which is applied contemptuously by the
Japanese to verse that tells all and trusts nothing
to the reader's imagination. Their praise they
reserve for compositions that leave in the mind
the thrilling of a something unsaid. " Like the
single stroke of a bell, the perfect poem should
set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of
the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long dura-
tion." Now these ghostly reverberations are pre-
cisely the effect of the simplest of Mr. Hearn's
pictures. Let him describe, for instance, the im-
pression produced by walking down the deep
canon of Broadway, between those vast structures,
beautiful but sinister, where one feels depressed
by the mere sensation of enormous creative life
without sympathy and of unresting power with-
out pity, let him describe this terror of Broad-
way, and in a few words he shall set ringing
within you long pulsations of emotion which
reach down to the depths of experience. Or, let
him relate by mere allusion the story of hearing
a girl say "Good-night" to some one parting
from her in a London park, and there shall be
awakened in your mind ghostly aftertones that
bring back memories of the saddest separations
and regrets of life. He employs the power of
suggestion through perfect restraint.
48 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
But this self- restrained and suggestive style is
merely the instrument, the manner, so to speak,
of his art. If we examine the actual substance
of his writings, we shall discover that it is bor-
rowed from three entirely distinct, in fact almost
mutually destructive, philosophies, any one of
which alone would afford material for the genius
of an ordinary writer. He stands and proclaims
his mysteries at the meeting of three ways. To
the religious instinct of India, Buddhism in par-
ticular, which history has engrafted on the
aesthetic sense of Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the
interpreting spirit of Occidental science ; and
these three traditions (Hindu, Japanese, and
European) are fused by the peculiar sympathies
of his mind into one rich and novel compound,
a compound so rare as to have introduced into
literature a psychological sensation unknown be-
fore. More than any other recent author, he has
added a new thrill to our intellectual experience.
Of Japan, which gives the most obvious sub-
stratum to Mr. Hearn's work, it has been said that
her people, since the days of ancient Greece, are
the only genuine artists of the world ; and in a
manner this is true. There was a depth and
pregnancy in the Greek imagination which made
of Greek art something far more universally sig-
nificant than the frail loveliness of Japanese crea-
tion, but not the Greeks themselves surpassed, or
even equalled, the Japanese in their all-embracing
love of decorative beauty. To read the story of
LAFCADIO HEARN 49
the daily life of these people, as recorded by
Mr. Mortimer Menpes and other travellers, is
to be brought into contact with a national tem-
perament so far removed from Western compre-
hension as to seem to most of us a tale from
fairyland. When, for instance, Mr. Menpes,
with a Japanese friend, visited Danjuro, he found
a single exquisite kakemono^ or painting, dis-
played in the great actor's chamber. On admir-
ing its beauty, he was told by the friend that
Danjuro had taken pains to learn the precise
character of his visitor's taste, and only then had
exhibited this particular picture. To the Japan-
ese the hanging of a kakemono or the arranging
of a bough of blossoms is a serious function of life.
The placing of flowers is indeed an exact science,
to the study of which a man may devote seven
years, even fourteen years, before he will be
acknowledged a master. Nature herself is sub-
jected to this elaborate system of training, and
often what in a Japanese landscape seems to a
foreigner the exuberance of natural growth is
really the work of patient human artifice.
There is no accident [writes Mr. Menpes] in the
beautiful curves of the trees that the globe-trotter so
justly admires : these trees have been trained and shaped
and forced to form a certain decorative pattern, and the
result is perfection. We in the West labour under the
delusion that if Nature were to be allowed to have her
sweet way, she would always be beautiful. But the
Japanese have gone much farther than this : they realise
VOL. n. 4.
JO SHELfcURNE ESSAYS
that Nature does not always do the right thing; they
know that occasionally trees will grow up to form ugly
lines ; and they know exactly how to adapt and help her.
She is to them like some beautiful musical instrument,
finer than any ever made by human hands, but still an
instrument, with harmonies to be coaxed out.
And the same aesthetic delicacy, touched with
artificiality if you will, pervades the literature of
this people. We are accustomed, and rightly, to
regard the Japanese as a nation of imitators. But
their poetry, we are assured by Mr. Hearn, is the
one original art which they have not borrowed
from China, or from any other country ; and no-
where better than in their poetry can we observe
the swiftness and dexterity of their imagination
and that exquisite reserve with its haunting echo
in the memory. To reproduce in Knglish the
peculiar daintiness of these poems is, we are told
and can well believe, quite an impossibility ; but
from the seemingly careless translations scattered
through Mr. Hearn 's pages we do at least form
some notion of their art in the original. Many
of these stanzas are mere bits of folk-lore or the
work of unknown singers, like this tiny picture
of the cicada :
Lo ! on the topmost pine, a solitary cicada
Vainly attempts to clasp one last red beam of sun.
That is light enough in English, but even one
entirely ignorant of the Japanese language can
see that, in comparison with the rhythm of the
LAFCADIO HEARN 51
original, 1 it is like the step of a quadruped com-
pared with the fluttering of a moth. It contains
only sixteen syllables in the original ; and indeed
all these poems are wrought into the brief compass
of a stanza, like certain fragile little vases painted
inside and out which are so highly prized by con-
noisseurs. Yet these tiny word-paintings, by
virtue of their cunning restraint, are capable at
times of gathering into their loveliness echoes of
emotion as wide-reaching as love and as deep as
the grave:
Perhaps a freak of the wind yet perhaps a sign of re-
membrance,
This fall of a single leaf on the water I pour for the dead.
I whispered a prayer at the grave : a butterfly rose and
fluttered
Thy spirit, perhaps, dear friend !
To have been able to convey through the coarser
medium of English prose something of this aes-
thetic grace, this deftness of touch, and this sug-
gestiveness of restraint, would in itself deserve no
slight praise. But beneath all this artistic deli-
cacy lies some reminiscence of India's austere re-
ligious thought, a sense of the nothingness of life
strangely exiled among this people of graceful
artists, yet still more strangely assimilated by
1 S6mi hitotsu
Matsu no yu-hi wo
KakaeVkeri.
52 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
them ; and this, too, Mr. Hearn has been able to
reproduce. We feel this shadow of India's faith
lurking in the sunshine of many of the lightest
of the stanzas, a touch of swift exotic poignancy,
if nothing more. We feel it still more strongly in
such poems as these, which are inspired by the
consciousness of endless change and of unceasing
birth and death and again birth :
All things change, we are told, in this world of change
and sorrow ;
But love's way never changes of promising never to
change.
Even the knot of the rope tying our boats together
Knotted was long ago by some love in a former birth.
Endless change, a ceaseless coming and going,
and the past throwing its shadow on into the
future, that is the very essence of Hindu philo-
sophy ; but how the tone of this philosophy has
itself become altered in passing from the valley of
the Ganges to the decorated island of the Mikado!
Over and over again Buddha repeats the essential
law of being, that all things are made up of con-
stituent parts and are subject to flux and change,
that all things are impermanent. It is the All
things pass and nothing abides of the Greek philo-
sopher, deepened with the intensity of emotion
that makes of philosophy a religion. In this
ever-revolving wheel of existence one fact only is
certain, karma, the law of cause and effect which
LAFCADIO HEARN 53
declares that every present state is the effect of
some previous act and that every present act must
inevitably bear its fruit in some future state. As
a man soweth so shall he reap. We are indeed
the creatures of a fate which we ourselves have
builded by the deeds of a former life. We are
bound in chains which we ourselves have riveted,
yet still our desires are free, and as our desires
shape themselves, so we act and build up our
coming fate, our karma ; and as our desires abne-
gate themselves, so we cease to act and become
liberated from the world. Endless change subject
to the law of cause and effect not even our per-
sonality remains constant in this meaningless
flux, for it too is made up of constituent parts
and is dissolved at death as the body is dissolved,
leaving only its karma to build up the new per-
sonality with the new body. From the perception
of this universal impermanence springs the so-
called " Truth" of Buddhism, that sorrow is the
attribute of all existence. Birth is sorrow, old
age is sorrow, death is sorrow, every desire of the
heart is sorrow ; and the mission of Buddha was
to deliver men out of the bondage of this sorrow
as from the peril of a burning house. The song
of victory uttered by Gotama when the great en-
lightenment shone upon him, and he became the
Buddha, was the cry of a man who has escaped a
great evil.
But because the Buddhist so dwells on the im-
permanence and sorrow of existence, he is not
54 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
therefore properly called a pessimist. On the
contrary, the one predominant note of Buddhism
is joy, for it too is a gospel of glad tidings. The
builders who rear these prison houses of life are
nothing other than the desires of our own hearts,
and these we may control though all else is be-
yond our power. To the worldly this teaching of
Buddha may seem wrapped in pessimistic gloom,
for deliverance to them must be only another
name for annihilation ; but to the spiritually
minded it brought ineffable joy, for they knew
that deliverance meant the passing out of the
bondage of personality into a freedom of whose
nature no tongue could speak. It is an austere
faith, hardly suited, in its purer form, for the
sentimental and vacillating, austere in its recog-
nition of sorrow, austere in its teaching of spiritual
joy.
Yet the wonderful adaptability of Buddhism is
shown by its acceptance among the Japanese, cer-
tainly of all peoples the most dissimilar in temper-
ament to the ancient Hindus. Here the brooding
of the Hindu over the law of impermanence melts
into the peculiar sensitiveness to fleeting impres-
sions so characteristic of the Japanese, and the
delicacy of their aesthetic taste is enhanced by
this half-understood spiritual insight. And it
deepens their temperament: I think that the feel-
ing awakened by all these dainty stanzas of some-
thing not said but only hinted, that the avoidance
of ittakkiri to which Mr. Hearn alludes, the echo-
LAFCADIO HEARN 55
ing reverberations that haunt us after the single
stroke of the bell, are due to the residuum of
Hindu philosophy left in these vases of Japanese
art. " Buddhism, " writes Mr. Hearn, "taught
that nature was a dream, an illusion, a phantasma-
goria ; but it also taught men [men of Japan, he
should say] how to seize the fleeting impressions
of that dream, and how to interpret them in rela-
tion to the highest truth."
Buddhism when it passed over to Japan came
into contact with the national religion of Shinto,
a kind of ancestor-worship, which proclaimed
that the world of the living was directly governed
by the world of the dead. On this popular belief
the doctrine of karma was readily engrafted, and
the two flourished henceforth side by side. Faith
in the protecting presence of ancestors and faith
in the present efficacy of our own multitudinous
preexistence were inextricably confused. To the
Japanese Buddhist the past does not die, but
lives on without end, involving the present in an
infinite web of invisible influences not easily com-
prehensible to the Western mind.
And the Indian horror of impermanence and
the rapture of deliverance have suffered like trans-
formation with their causes. First of all, the
sharp contrast between the horror and the joy is
lightened. The sorrow fades to a fanciful feeling
of regret for the beauty of the passing moment,
the same regret that speaks through a thousand
Western songs such as Herrick's "Gather ye
56 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
rosebuds while ye may," and Malherbe's " Kt
rose elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses," but
touched here in Japanese poetry with a little mys-
tery and made more insistent by some echo of
Hindu brooding. And the joy, severed from its
spiritual sustenance, loses its high ecstasy and
becomes almost indistinguishable from regret.
Sorrow, too, and joy are impermanent, and the
enlightened mind dwells lingeringly and fondly
on each fair moment garnered from the waste of
Time. Here is no longer the spiritual exaltation,
the dhy&na^ of the Indian monk, but the charmed
impressions of the artist. The religion of the
Ganges has assumed in Japan the mask of aes-
thetic emotionalism.
Now this refinement of emotionalism Mr. Hearn
by his peculiar temperament has been able to re-
produce almost miraculously in the coarser fibre
of English. But more specially he has sought to
interpret the deeper influence of India on Japan,
the thoughts and images in which we see the
subtlety of the Japanese turned aside into a strange
new psychology. One may suppose that some
tendency to mingle grace and beauty with haunt-
ing suggestions was inherent in the Japanese
temper from the beginning, but certainly the par-
ticular form of imagination that runs through
most of the tales Mr. Hearn has translated is not
the product of Japan alone. Nor is it purely
Hindu: the literature of India includes much that
is grotesque but hardly a touch of the weird or
LAFCADIO HEARN 57
ghostly, for its religious tone is too austere and
lacks the suggestive symbolism which that quality
demands. Out of the blending of the stern sense
of impermanence and moral responsibility with
the flower-like beauty of Japan there arises this
new feeling of the weird. How intimately the
two tempers are blended and how rare their pro-
duct is, may be seen in such sketches as that
called Ingwa-banashi : A Tale of Karma.
Had it been that Mr. Hearn's art sufficed only
to reproduce the delicacy and haunting strange-
ness of Japanese tales, he would have performed
a notable but scarcely an extraordinary service to
letters. But into the study of these byways of
Oriental literature he has carried a third element,
the dominant idea of Occidental science ; and this
element he has wedded with Hindu religion and
Japanese sestheticism in a union as bewildering as
it is voluptuous. In this triple combination lies
his real claim to high originality.
Now the fact is well known to those who have
studied Buddhism at its genuine sources that our
modern conception of evolution fits into Buddhist
psychology more readily and completely than into
any dogmatic theology of the West. It is natural,
therefore, that the Western authors quoted most
freely by Mr. Hearn in support of his Oriental
meditations should be Huxley and Herbert
Spencer. For the most part these allusions to
Western science are merely made in passing.
But in one essay, that on The Idea of Preexistence,
58 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
he endeavours with something of philosophic sys-
tem to develop the harmony between evolution
and the Buddhist conception of previous exist-
ences, a conception which, as he shows, has little
in common with the crude form of metempsychosis
embodied by Wordsworth in such poems as Fidelity
and Intimations of Immortality. To justify his
theory he turns to Professor Huxley and quotes
these words: *' None but very hasty thinkers will
reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity.
Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of trans-
migration has its roots in the world of reality; and
it may claim such support as the great argument
from analogy is capable of supplying." Again,
in his essay on Nirvana he compares the doctrine
of impermanence, out of which the conception of
Nirv&na springs as a natural corollary, with simi-
lar ideas in evolutional science. " Every feeling
and thought," so he quotes from Herbert Spencer,
"being but transitory; nay, the objects amid
which life is passed, though less transitory, being
severally in the course of losing their individuali-
ties, whether quickly or slowly, we learn that
the one thing permanent is the Unknowable Reality
hidden under all these changing shapes"
The parallel is at once apt and misleading. In
both Oriental faith and Occidental science we do
indeed have the conception of all phenomena, in-
cluding that ultimate phenomenon which we name
our personality, we do indeed have the concep-
tion of these as suffering endless flux and change
LAFCADIO HEARN 59
behind which lies a permanent inexpressible
Reality. The parallel so far is close and makes
possible the peculiar blending of traditions which,
as I have said, is the chief mark of originality in
Mr. Hearn's essays. But in the next step the
two diverge as far as the rising sun is from the
setting. To Mr. Spencer and all the spokesmen
of science it is the impermanent sphere of phe-
nomena that is alone knowable, whereas the per-
manent Reality hidden from the eyes is the great
Unknowable. To the Buddhist on the contrary,
all impermanence is wrapt in illusion, as indeed
the very meaning of the word would seem to
imply, whereas the permanent Reality, though
inexpressible, is alone knowable. The difference
is of great importance when we come to consider
the effect of interpreting Japanese ideas in Occi-
dental terms. It even seems that Mr. Hearn him-
self is not aware of the gulf set between these two
methods of viewing existence, and that conse-
quently he has never measured the full originality
of this realm of sensation which his art has opened
by spanning a bridge between the two. In the
fusion of Mr. Hearn's thought the world of im-
permanent phenomena is at once knowable and
unknowable: it is the reality of Western cogni-
tion, and therefore is invested with an intensity
of influence and fulness of meaning impossible to
an Oriental writer ; and at the same time it is the
unreality of Eastern philosophy, and hence is in-
volved in illusion and subtle shadows into which
60 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
it threatens momentarily to melt away. It is a
realm of half reality, this phenomenal world, a
realm of mingled spirit and matter, seeming now
to tantalise the eyes with colours of unimaginable
beauty that fade away when we gaze on them too
intently, and again to promise the Soul that one
long-sought word which shall solve the riddle of
her existence in this land of exile. It is a new
symbolism that troubles while it illumines. It
leads the artist to dwell on the weirder, more im-
palpable phases of Japanese literature, and to lend
to these subconscious motives a force of realism
which they could never possess in the original.
The perception of impermanence is accompanied
with a depth of yearning regret quite beyond the
frailer beauty of the songs of the East which could
see little gravity of meaning in phenomena dis-
severed from the spirit, and equally beyond the
songs of the West composed before science had
carried the law of material mutability into the
notion of personality. From this union with
science the Oriental belief in the indwelling of the
past now receives a vividness of present actuality
that dissolves the Soul into ghostly intimacy with
the mystic unexplored background of life. As a
consequence of this new sense of impermanence
and of this new realism lent to the indwelling
past, all the primitive emotions of the heart are
translated into a strange language, which, when
once it lays hold of the imagination, carries us
into a region of dreams akin to that world which
LAFCADIO HEARN 6 1
our psychologists dimly call the subliminal or
subconscious. The far-reaching results of this
psychology on literature it is not easy to foresee.
Mr. Hearn has nowhere treated systematically
this new interpretation of human emotions, but
by bringing together scattered passages from his
essays we may form some notion of its scope and
efficacy.
Beauty itself, which forms the essence of Mr.
Hearn 's art as of all true art, receives a new
content from this union of the East and the West.
So standing before a picture of nude beauty we
might, in our author's words, question its mean-
ing. That nudity which is divine, which is the
abstract of beauty absolute, what power, we ask,
resides within it or within the beholder that
causes this shock of astonishment and delight,
not unmixed with melancholy ? The longer one
looks, the more the wonder grows, since there
appears no line, or part of a line, whose beauty
does not surpass all memory of things seen.
Plato explained the shock of beauty as being the
Soul's sudden half-remembrance of the World of
Divine Ideas : ' ' They who see here any image or
resemblance of the things which are there receive
a shock like a thunderbolt, and are, after a man-
ner, taken out of themselves." The positive psy-
chology of Spencer declares in our own day that
the most powerful of human passions, first love,
when it makes its appearance, is absolutely ante-
cedent to all individual experience. Thus do
62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
ancient thought and modern metaphysics and
science accord in recognising that the first deep
sensation of human beauty known to the indi-
vidual is not individual at all. Must not the same
truth hold of that shock which supreme art gives ?
The emotion of beauty, like all our emotions, is
certainly the inherited product of unimaginably
countless experiences in an immeasurable past.
In every aesthetic .sensation is the stirring of tril-
lions of trillions of ghostly memories buried in the
magical soil of the brain. And each man carries
within him an ideal of beauty which is but an
infinite composite of dead perceptions of form,
colour, grace, once dear to look upon. It is dorm-
ant, this ideal, potential in essence, cannot be
evoked at will before the imagination ; but it
may light up electrically at any perception by the
living outer sense of some vague affinity. Then
is felt that weird, sad, delicious thrill, which ac-
companies the sudden backward-flowing of the
tides of life and time.
So, again, to follow Mr. Hearn, it is easy to in-
fer how this perception of the indwelling of the
past gives a wonderful significance to the thral-
dom of love, to first love most of all, when the
shock of emotion comes untroubled by worldly
calculations of the present. What is the glamour,
we ask with our author, that blinds the lover in
its sweet bewildering light when first he meets the
woman of his involuntary choice? Whose the
witchcraft ? Is it any power in the living idol ?
LAFCADlo HEARN 63
Rather it is the power of the dead within the
idolater. The dead cast the spell. Theirs the
shock in the lover's heart ; theirs the electric
shiver that tingled through his veins at the first
touch of one girl's hand. We look into the eyes
of love and it is as though, through some intense
and sudden stimulation of vital being, we had
obtained for one supercelestial moment the
glimpse of a reality never before imagined, and
never again to be revealed. There is, indeed, an
illusion. We seem to view the divine; but this
divine itself, whereby we are dazzled and duped,
is a ghost. Our mortal sight pierces beyond the
surface of the present into profundities of myriads
of years, pierces beyond the mask of life into the
enormous night of death. For a moment we are
made aware of a beauty and a mystery and a
depth unutterable : then the Veil falls again for-
ever. The splendour of the eyes that we worship
belongs to them only as brightness to the morning
star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of
the Now, a ghost-light of vanished suns. Un-
knowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the
gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of
heaven, eyes otherwhere passed into darkness
and dust.
And if we turn to another and purer form of
love, it is the same force we behold. So long as
we supposed the woman soul one in itself, a
something specially created to fit one particular
physical being, the beauty and the wonder of
64 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
mother-love could never be fully revealed to us.
But with deeper knowledge we must perceive that
the inherited love of numberless millions of dead
mothers has been treasured up in one life ; that
only thus can be interpreted the infinite sweetness
of the speech which the infant hears, the infinite
tenderness of the look of caress which meets its
gaze.
So too when we listen to the harmonies of in-
strumental music or the melody of the human
voice, there arises a strange emotion within us
which seems to magnify us out of ourselves into
some expanse of illimitable experiences, to lift us
above the present cares of our petty life into some
vast concern so vast that the soul is lost between
the wonderings of divine hope and divine fear.
Great music is a psychical storm, agitating to
fathomless depths the mystery of the past within
us. Or we might say that it is a prodigious in-
cantation. There are tones that call up all ghosts
of youth and joy and tenderness ; there are tones
that evoke all phantom pain of perished passion ;
there are tones that resurrect all dead sensations
of majesty and might and glory, all expired
exultations, all forgotten magnanimities. Well
may the influence of music seem inexplicable to
the man who idly dreams that his life began less
than a hundred years ago ! He who has been
initiated into the truth knows that to every ripple
of melody, to every billow of harmony, there an-
swers within him, out of the Sea of Death and
LAFCADIO HEARN 65
Birth, some eddying immeasurable of ancient
pleasure and pain.
Genius itself, the master of music and poetry
and all art that enlarges mortal life, genius itself
is nothing other than the reverberation of this
enormous past on the sounding board of some
human intelligence, so finely wrought as to send
forth in purity the echoed tones which from a
grosser soul come forth deadened and confused by
the clashing of the man's individual impulses.
Is it not proper to say, after reading such pass-
ages as these, that Mr. Hearn has introduced a
new element of psychology into literature ? We
are indeed living in the past, we who foolishly cry
out that the past is dead. In one remarkable
study of the emotions awakened by the baying of
a gaunt white hound, Mr. Hearn shows how even
the very beasts whom we despise as unreasoning
and unremembering are filled with an inarticulate
sense of this dark backward and abysm of time,
whose shadow falls on their sensitive souls with
the chill of a vague dread, dread, I say, for it
must begin to be evident that this new psychol-
ogy is fraught with meanings that may well
trouble and awe the student. In the ghostly
residuum of these meditations we may perceive
a vision dimly foreshadowing itself which man-
kind for centuries, nay for thousands of years, has
striven half unwittingly to keep veiled. I do not
know, but it seems to me that the foreboding of
this dreaded disclosure may account for many
VOL. II. 5.
66 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
things in the obscure history of the race. By
reason of this terror the savage trembled before
the magician who seemed to have penetrated the
mysteries of nature about him. Among the free-
hearted Greeks it showed itself in many ways,
even in persecutions and deaths, as later among
the Christians. It expressed itself my thologically
in the haunting legend of Prometheus, who, by
stealing the celestial fire (a symbol of forbidden
prying into natural laws), brought on himself tor-
ment and chains and on mankind a life of brutal
labour.
But more particularly in the Christian world
this formless terror has taken to itself a body and
a name ; it is the heart of the inquisition, which
has always followed with excommunications and
tortures the unveiling of the recondite powers of
nature. It has thus made of itself a potent factor
of civilisation some would say against civilisa-
tion, yet he is a very bold man or a very ignorant
man who would brush away this long protest of
religion against scientific discoveries as the mere
vapourings of superstition. If we examine this
bitter warfare between science and revelation, we
shall find the Church actuated throughout by
one ever-present, obscure dread, and when the
source of this dread is made clear to us we shall
be slow to condemn her conduct. We shall at
least have sympathy with her in the struggle, for
if she has been a persecutor, she has also been the
champion of a losing cause.
LAFCADIO HEARN 67
At the first, indeed, she was victorious. In the
conflict with what remained of Greek philosophy
and science the prophets of the new revelation
were easily victors. " Ignorance is the mother
of devotion," was the motto of Gregory, and
ignorance won the day. We love to think of the
bright naturalism of antiquity as suffering martyr-
dom with Hypatia, philosopher and mathema-
tician,
Hypatia, fair embodiment
Of learning's great delight.
And the picture of her naked body torn to pieces
by oyster shells in the hands of a bigoted mob is
a true emblem of the dismemberment of the old
nature-worship. Man was no longer to be an in-
tegral part of the world ; he was set apart and
raised above it.
But the Church did not fare so well in the cease-
less conflict with learning, when, at the time of
the Renaissance, she laid violent hands on the
followers of Copernicus. It may seem to us now
a futile crime that Giordano Bruno should have
been burned at the stake for teaching the infinity
of space and the revolution of the earth about the
sun, and that Galileo should have languished in
prison for the same cause. But at bottom the
question was one of vital importance to religion ;
and Bruno may have been right in saying that
the sentence was pronounced against him with
greater fear than he received it. Despite the
68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
narrow bigotry displayed, it was a sublime contest
for the integrity of the human soul, for who
would believe that the divine drama of redemption
was wrought out for a race of puny creatures in-
habiting a mere atom in the illimitable expanse of
space? Copernicus and his followers disabused
us of the old belief that the universe revolved
about the home of man. Henceforth the history
of the earth was the insignificant story of one of the
least of a countless multitude of worlds. The su-
premacy and lordship of man in creation were no
longer conceivable, and in the triumph of science
our personal pride received a blow from which it
has never fully recovered.
Custom and time, however, did in a way heal
the wound, and things went well until the forces
of science rallied once again under the banner of
evolution. Volumes have been written to prove
that the new belief only adds to the dignity of
man, and Darwin himself professed never to
understand the widespread opposition to his
theory. But the new terror that aroused theo-
logical hostility was as firmly grounded as it was
against the invasion of Copernicus centuries be-
fore. There is no place for Providence or for the
divine prerogatives of the human soul in the law
of evolution. We are made a brother to the brute
and akin to unclean things that crawl in the dust.
Yet this quarrel also was adjusted after a fashion,
as the quarrels before it had been composed.
What though ignorance is necessary to obscure
LAFCADIO HEARN 69
our kinship with living nature, as Pope Gregory
declared ; what though our home is but a point in
space ; what though we are inheritors of a past of
brutal degradation ; still our consciousness has
no recking of these things, and dwells serene in
its assumption of divine supremacy and isolation.
But now at the last we are shocked out of our
security. We are made conscious of the shame
of the hidden past, and the ancient haunting
terror is revealed in all its hideous nakedness.
Have you ever by chance strayed through a
museum where the relics of old-world life are
gathered together, filthy amphibians armed with
impenetrable scales, grotesque serpents eight
fathoms long that churned the seas, huge reptiles
that beat the air with wings of nightmare
breadth ? The imagination recoils from picturing
what the world must have been when Nature ex-
hausted herself to fashion these abhorrent mon-
strosities. We have burrowed the soil and
brought into the light of day these reluctant
hidden records of bestial growths. Consider for
a moment what it would mean if some new geo-
logy should lay bare the covered strata of memory
in our own brain corresponding to these records
of the earth ; for there is nothing lost, and in
some mysterious way the memories of all that ob-
scure past are stored up within us. If evolution
be true, we are the inheritors in our soul of the
experience and life of those innumerable genera-
tions whose material forms lie moulded in the
7O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
bed-rock of earth. Consider the horror of behold-
ing in our own consciousness the remembrance of
such fears and frenzies, such cruel passions and
wallowing desires as would correspond to those
gigantic and abortive relics of antiquity. Would
not the world in its shame cry out for some
Lethean draught of sleep, though it were as pro-
found as the oblivion of Nirvana? This is the
terror, then, that from the beginning has beset
the upholders of religion, and has caused them
to attack the revelations of natural science ; for
what faith or beauty of holiness can abide after
such an uncovering? None, unless to obtain
spiritual grace the whole memory and personality
of a man be blotted out, and the spirit be severed
from the experiences of the body by an impassable
gulf. And I think the shadow of this dread is
typified in the curse which Noah laid upon his
son Ham.
The final outcome of this dread in all its naked-
ness we see foreshadowed in these fantasies and
essays of an author, who, as I have attempted to
show, has brought together into indissoluble union
our Western theory of Darwin and that strange
doctrine of metempsychosis which was carried to
Japan with Buddhism and is so curiously engrafted
on the laughing fancies of the people of the Mi-
kado. To understand the tremendous realism of
horror and gloom connected with this doctrine of
everlasting birth and death, and re-birth, one
must go to the burning valley of the Ganges,
LAFCADIO HEARN ?I
where the conception first laid hold of the human
mind. But overpowering as this notion of end-
less unrest may be, a new shadow would seem to
be added to it by contact with the scientific hypo-
thesis of evolution which has been developed in
the Occident. Evolution is a theory, drawn from
the observation of outer phenomena, that man
is the last product of myriads of generations of life
reaching back into the past ; but evolution has
foreborne to make any appeal to the inner con-
sciousness of the human soul. Metempsychosis,
on the contrary, is a half mystical theory evolved
out of the consciousness of the soul, which in a
dim way seems to carry remembrance of illimita-
ble existence before its present birth. But this
symbolic faith of the Orient has never sought con-
firmation in scientific study of the outer world.
Now comes the blending of these two theories, and
the result is a laying bare of those hideous realities
(pray heaven they prove pseudo-realities in the
end) that mankind has instinctively shunned and
denounced.
It is because I see in Mr. Hearn's sketches and
translations a suggestion of the incalculable in-
fluences that may spring from this union of the
East and the West, that I have treated them with
a seriousness that will seem to many readers
greater than they deserve. The skeptical I would
refer, in conclusion, to that little essay on the
Nightmare- Touch, which attempts to account for
the shuddering fear of seizure that so often
72 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
troubles our dreams, and to associate that fear
with the widespread superstitious dread of being
touched by a ghost. The closing words of the
essay have the sinister beauty and acrid odour of
the flowers in some Rappaccini's garden :
Furthermore, through all the course of evolution,
heredity would have been accumulating the experience
of such feeling. Under those forms of imaginative pain
evolved through reaction of religious beliefs, there would
persist some dim survival of savage primitive fears, and
again, under this, a dimmer, but incomparably deeper,
substratum of ancient animal-terrors. In the dreams of
the modern child all these latencies might quicken one
below another unfathomably with the coming and the
growing of nightmare.
It may be doubted whether the phantasms of any par-
ticular nightmare have a history older than the brain in
which they move. But the shock of the touch would
seem to indicate some point of dream-contact with the
total race-experience of shadowy seizure. It may be that
profundities of Self abysses never reached by any ray
from the life of sun are strangely stirred in slumber, and
that out of their blackness immediately responds a shud-
dering of memory, measureless even by millions of years.
THE FIRST COMPLETE EDITION OF
HAZIvlTT
IF one should turn to William Hazlitt expecting
to find critical essays like those we connect with
writers of more recent days, he would be sadly
disappointed. There is in Hazlitt's work little
were it not for a few exceptional passages that
occur to memory, I should say nothing of that
looking before and after, that linking of literary
movements with the great currents of human
activity, which has become a part of criticism
along with the growth of the historical method.
He is not concerned with the searching out of
larger cause and effect, but is intensely occupied
with the individual man, and studies to deduce
the peculiar style of each writer from his character
and temperament. Nor can we hope to find in
him I say ' * hope ' ' from the common point of
view to-day any trace of that scientific method
which would analyse the products of the human
brain as a chemist deals with " vitriol and sugar."
He wrote before these things were known. He
was, quite as much as Byron or Wordsworth, a
child of the revolution, and his blood tingled with
the new romanticism. Yet even here certain dis-
73
74 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
tinctions must be drawn. When we speak to-day
of the romantic critic, we think of one who has
joined the sensibility and fluency of the revolu-
tionary temperament to the sympathies of the later
historic method, and has taught his soul to trans-
form itself cunningly into the various types that
it chooses to study. We associate the word with
that kind of fluctuating egotism which makes of
the critic one " qui raconte les aventures de son
dme au milieu des chefs-d'oeuvre." Hazlitt was
an egotist in all conscience, but of this particular
form of the disease we can hardly hold him guilty.
His was one of the rarest, yet most characteristic,
traits of the revolutionary spirit gusto he himself
would call it. The word, now unfortunately fall-
ing into desuetude, connotes the power of intense
enjoyment based on understanding, and is so
common in his essays that Henley J took it as the
keynote of all his work. But a still stronger term
than gusto is needed, I think, to describe the
swift qualities of Hazlitt' s mind ; he is the writer,
to a supreme degree, of passion.
What he loved the few great books, the one
great man, the chosen scenes of nature, his youth-
ful scheme of philosophy he laid to his heart
with passionate zest and clung to with desperate
tenacity; what was hateful to him he spurned
with equal vehemence. Byron speaks of his own
1 In the Introduction to Hazlitt's Complete Works, in
12 vols., published by McClure, Phillips, & Co., New
York. 1904.
WILLIAM HAZLITT 7$
mind as having the motion of a tiger ; if he
missed his leap there was no retrieving the error.
That is true of Byron, who almost alone shares
with Hazlitt the untamed passion of the revolu-
tionary spirit ; but it is still more true of Hazlitt,
and, apart from the stress of journalism, accounts
for the singular unevenness of his work. There
is something even in the keen sinewy language
of Hazlitt that suggests the tiger's spring. His
sentences succeed one another like the rapid
bounds of such an animal, and at the last comes
one straight unerring leap and the prey is fixed,
bleeding, you might almost say, in his grasp.
There is nothing just like it among English
authors. Genuine passion, indeed, if one con-
siders it, is a rare, almost the rarest, trait in
literature. Certainly in English it would not be
easy to find another author whose work is so
dominated by this quality as Hazlitt' s. It gives
the tone to his critical writing ; it explains the
keenness and the limitations of his psychological
insight ; it causes the innumerable contradictions
that occur in his views ; it gives rapidity to his
style ; it imparts a peculiar zest to his very man-
ner of quoting ; it lends exhilarating interest to
his pages, yet in the long run, if we read him too
continuously, it wearies us a little, for not many
of us are keyed up to his high pitch. We go to
him for superb rhetoric, for emotions in literary
experience that stir the languid blood, but we
hardly look to him for judgment. There is much
76 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
in English that assumes the passionate tone ;
place it beside Hazlitt and for the most part it
appears tame or false.
Something of this passion we get in the very-
life of the man. It may be that we lend to our
image of him the colours his rhetoric assumes
whenever he turns aside from some critical or
psychological disquisition to speak, as he so often
does, of his own wayward career. Certain it is
that in our fancy he moves among the group of men
that we gather about his name and Lamb's (and
how well we know them, and which of our living
friends stands so clearly revealed to us, the gentle
Saint Charles, the cold, mechanical Godwin, the
impulsive, unsubstantial Hunt, Wordsworth wrapt
in the stiff robes of his priestcraft, Southey of the
bustling, shallow, loyal mind, Coleridge the cloud-
compeller !) he moves among them like some
creature of burning skies and flaming horizons
amid the cold children of the mists. His friend-
ships were swift, and his hatreds how they stir in
memory, still throbbing with venom ! The very
houses he has occupied and the scenes he has
visited become vitalised with the prodigious life
of the man. Memorable as is the house at No.
19 York Street for the years during which it was
Milton's home, it is almost more interesting still
for its association with Hazlitt. Here for a time
he lived in his irregular way, going to bed when
others were rising, getting up at one or two o'clock
in the day, lingering for hours, when not pressed
WILLIAM HAZLITT 77
by work, over innumerable cups of tea which he
brewed to an extraordinary strength in place of
forbidden intoxicants, sitting "silent, motionless,
and self-absorbed, as a Turk over his opium
pouch." From his windows he could look down
into the garden of that monumental maker of con-
stitutions, Jeremy Bentham (his landlord, by the
way), whose heartless, frigid zeal for reform seems
to have sent a shudder of aversion through Haz-
litt's whole frame. His picture of Bentham throws
light on his own character as being in every re-
spect its opposite. ' ' There you may see the lively
old man," he writes, " his mind still buoyant with
thought and with the prospect of the futurity, in
eager conversation with some Opposition member,
some expatriated patriot, or transatlantic adven-
turer, urging the extinction of close boroughs, or
planning a code of laws for some ' lone island in
the watery waste,' his walk almost amounting to
a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in shrill,
cluttering accents, negligent of his person, his
dress, and his manner, intent only on his grand
theme of utility or pausing, perhaps, for want
of breath and with lack-lustre eye," etc. no
wonder Hazlitt's friends or enemies trembled
when they heard he was to write about them !
One imagines that he was conscious while por-
traying Bentham of his own contrasted qualities
his loose, shambling walk, his slow, inter-
rupted speech, except when passion made him
eloquent, his dark burning eyes, his contempt
78 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
for the nerveless, cold-blooded reformers of the
day.
And if his London home one of them at least,
for much of life he passed in lodging houses of a
nondescript character stands out thus vivid in
memory, no less do Wem and Winterslow, his
country residences, form an integral part of the
impression made upon us by his writings. At
Wem he lived with his father, a Unitarian min-
ister, from his tenth to his twenty -second year, a
sluggish, brooding period during which his powers
seemed to have lain in some strange abeyance.
Yet the vividness of his allusions to Wem in after
times shows that even then he must have been
gathering up those personal experiences that lend
so much individuality to his most abstract essays.
And it was at Wem that the impulse came which
made the young man's ambition leap up within
his breast like a smouldering coal beneath a sud-
den breeze. Coleridge came to preach at Shrews-
bury, only ten miles away, and thither Hazlitt,
then nearly twenty years 'old, walked to hear the
divine words that were to be to him " far above
singing.** Better than that; Coleridge visited
Hazlitt' s father, and the meeting of the torpid
youth with that soaring genius Hazlitt described
years afterward in one of those essays that deal
with his memorable first experiences:
On Tuesday following the half-inspired speaker came.
I was called down into the room where he was, and went,
half hoping, half afraid. He received me very graciously,
WILLIAM HAZLITT 79
and I listened for a long time without uttering a word. I
did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. " For those
two hours," he afterwards was pleased to say, "he was
conversing with William Hazlitt's forehead." His ap-
pearance was different from what I had anticipated from
seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light
of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his
aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with
the smallpox. His complexion was at that time clear,
and even bright
" As are the children of yon azure sheen."
His forehead was high, light, as if built of ivory, with
large projecting eyebrows; and his eyes rolling beneath
them, like a sea with darkened lustre. " A certain tender
bloom his face o'erspread," a purple tinge as we see it in
the pale, thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait-
painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross,
voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured
and round ; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the in-
dex of the will, was small, feeble, nothing like what he
was. It might seem that the genius of his face as from a
height surveyed and projected him (with sufficient ca-
pacity and huge aspiration) into the world unknown of
thought and imagination, with nothing to support or
guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched
his adventurous course for the New World in a scallop,
without oars or compass.
I may be pardoned for quoting Hazlitt at this
length, for in no other way, as his latest biog-
rapher has confessed, can the style and method
of the man be set forth. The virtue of his work
lies not in his analytic criticism, which can be
studied apart from his own language, but in the
80 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
fusion of passion and insight ; and in this portrait
of Coleridge, which has passed into the universal
heritage of English letters, we may see blended
together that perception of physical traits, which
was heightened no doubt by Hazlitt's training as
a painter, and that power of seizing the psycho-
logical peculiarities of a man and using them to
explain the character of his writing. Still more
explicitly in another passage he develops the na-
ture of Johnson's style by allusion to the dictator's
physical and moral inertia ; as elsewhere, he finds
in Cowper's nervousness the source of his literary
method, and makes of Dante the personification
of blind will.
When Coleridge departed from Wem he left
with the youth whose forehead he had so much
admired an invitation to visit him at Nether
Stowey, where also Wordsworth was to be seen.
Hazlitt walked with him six miles on the road
to Shrewsbury, drinking in reverently the poet's
wise discourse. " On my way back," he wrote,
1 * I had a sound in my ears it was the voice of
Fancy ; I had a light before me it was the face
of Poetry. The one still lingers there, the other
has not quitted my side! " And we who read the
story of his glorious, passionate enthusiasm hear
as it were a distant echo of that sound, and catch
a fleeting glimpse of that golden light, and are
heartened in our obscure walk through a world
where few of us meet such poets to beguile us into
forgetfulness. Truly it might be said in those
WILLIAM HAZLITT 8 1
days, ov yap T ayi/cores 9eol a\\rf\oiffi
Tou-y not unknown does one god meet with
another.
All this happened at Wem, but not less famous
is Winterslow, where Hazlitt went with his wife,
and where in later years, embittered by many dis-
appointments, he retired to dream over a life
which had been to him " a tissue of passion "
Storm, and what dreams, ye holy Gods, what dreams !
To this spot, where the happiest years of his
young manhood were spent, he retired as to a
sheltered place of refuge " of all that dream-
world nothing left but pain." There is no more
striking artifice in any of our essayists than the
way in which he breaks suddenly into some
critical discourse to describe the scenes about him
at his beloved Winterslow, whether from the
open window he beholds the world freshened by
a recent shower, or descants on a country lass
picking up stones, or moralises on a spider crawl-
ing along the matted floor of his room. Here, as
he thought, his very language was apt to be " re-
dundant and excursive," although at other times
it might be " cramped, dry, abrupt." Or, again,
his fancy took a wider range, as in his Farewell
to Essay Writing :
We walk through life, as through a narrow path, with
a thin curtain drawn around it ; behind are ranged rich
portraits, airy harps are strung yet we will not stretch
VOL. II. 6.
82 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
forth our hands and lift aside the veil, to catch glimpses
of the one, or sweep the chords of the other. As in a
theatre, when the old-fashioned green curtain drew up,
groups of figures, fantastic dresses, laughing faces, rich
banquets, stately columns, gleaming vistas appeared be-
yond ; so we have only at any time to " peep through the
blanket of the past," to possess ourselves at once of all
that has regaled our senses, that is stored up in our
memory, that has struck our fancy, that has pierced our
hearts yet to all this we are indifferent, insensible, and
seem intent only on the present vexation, the future dis-
appointment. ... I can easily, by stooping over the
long-sprent grass and clay-cold clods, recall the tufts
of primroses, or purple hyacinths, that formerly grew on
the same spot, and cover the bushes with leaves and sing-
ing birds, as they were eighteen summers ago ; or pro-
longing my walk and hearing the sighing gale rustle
through a tall, straight wood at the end of it, can fancy
that I distinguish the cry of hounds, and the fatal group
issuing from it, as in the tale of Theodore and Honoria.
A moaning gust of wind aids the belief ; I look once more
to see whether the trees before me answer to the idea of
the horror-stricken grove, and an air-built city towers
over their grey tops.
" Of all the cities in Romanian lands,
The chief and most renown'd Ravenna stands."
I return home resolved to read the entire poem through,
and, after dinner, drawing my chair to the fire, and hold-
ing a small print close to my eyes, launch into the full
tide of Dryden's couplets (a stream of sound), comparing
his didactic and descriptive pomp with the simpler pathos
and picturesque truth of Boccaccio's story.
A cynic might point a moral from the fact that
the only events of Hazlitt's life which were utterly
WILLIAM HAZLITT 83
free from the intrusion of passion were his two
ventures into matrimony. His first marriage, to
Sarah Stoddart, was to all appearances purely an
affair of convenience arranged, or at least fostered,
by Mary Lamb. That the bride had an income
of 120 from cottages at Winterslow seems to
have been her chief attraction for the eccentric
wooer. Later on Hazlitt, to suit his pleasure,
allowed her to obtain a divorce. A second mar-
riage, with a widow, Mrs. Bridgewater, contained
an element of almost comical indifference on both
sides, and the two soon separated to their mutual
advantage. But from these experiments in matri-
mony it should not be argued that Hazlitt was
deaf to the elemental appeal of love. It is to be
feared, on the contrary, that he turned wilfully
from the Uranian to the Pandemian goddess.
Certainly the episode, which was the occasion of
his divorce and which he gave to the world in his
Liber Amoris whatever else may be said about it
is one of the few stories of strong, unrestrained
passion in the range of English letters. We
might like, for decorum's sake, to expunge that
relation from his life and from his works ; " there
is," as he himself confessed, "something in it dis-
cordant to honest ears." The tale is simply the
vulgar adventure of a man who dandles the
daughter of his lodging-house keeper on his
knees, becomes infatuated with her, pours out
the agony of his dejection in letters to his friends,
and then prints letters and all, somewhat expur-
84 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
gated to be sure, in a book. That is bad enough,
in all conscience ; but the matter has been made
worse by the recent publication of the actual cor-
respondence. As Mr. Austin Dobson says: " The
whole sentimental structure of the Liber Amoris
now sinks below the stage, and joins the realm of
things unspeakable * vile kitchen stuff, ' fit only
for the midden." And yet there is a reservation
to be made withal to this criticism. The book is
something more than merely sentimental ; it is in
part one of the very few expressions of genuine
passion in the English language, of that absolute
passion which taught him, as it long ago taught
Propertius,
Hanc animam extremse reddere nequitiae.
No one, I think, can read Hazlitt's last despairing
letter without feeling that note of verity and gen-
uineness which does much to justify what might
otherwise seem an indecent exposure of personal
emotion. " I saw her pale, cold form glide silent
by me," he writes, "dead to shame as to pity.
Still I seemed to clasp this piece of witchcraft to
my bosom ; this lifeless image, which was all that
was left of my love, was the only thing to which
my sad heart clung. Were she dead, should I
not wish to gaze once more upon her pallid feat-
ures ? She is dead to me ; but what she once
was to me can never die ! The agony, the con-
flict of hope and fear, of adoration and jealousy is
over ; or it would, ere long, have ended my life. ' '
WILLIAM HAZLITT 8$
And his last words are touched with the strange
tenderness and pathos of a man whose life is
centred in the brooding faculties of the mind :
I am afraid she will soon grow common to my imagina-
tion, as well as worthless in herself. Her image seems
fast " going into the wastes of time," like a weed that the
wave bears farther and farther from me. Alas ! thou
poor hapless weed, when I entirely lose sight of thee, and
forever, no flower will ever bloom on earth to glad my
heart again !
It is not surprising, after all, that Hazlitt took
a sort of glory to himself in this episode which his
biographers to-day would so gladly forget. "I
am in some sense proud," he says, " that I can
feel this dreadful passion it gives one a kind of
rank in the kingdom of love." One is reminded
again of the boast of Cynthia's lover, that the
Roman youths would do reverence at his tomb for
his long ardours. The vulgarity of this incident in
Hazlitt' s life is not due to the excess of his emo-
tion, but to the worthlessness of the object on
which his emotion was expended. There is some-
thing pitiful as well as degrading in the spectacle
of this vehement passion beating itself against a
poor flabby creature which could neither withstand
nor return the shock. It is only fair after expos-
ing this episode in Hazlitt' s life to quote L,amb's
beautiful encomium of his old friend :
But, protesting against much that he has written, and
some things which he chooses to do ; judging him by his
conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so
86 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
deeply ; or by his books, in those places where no cloud-
ing passion intervenes I should belie my own conscience
if I said less than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural
and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits
breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy,
which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for
so many years to have preserved it entire ; and I think I
shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to
find, such another companion.
Such is the man whose scattered works are now
for the first time collected in a complete and criti-
cally annotated edition, and it has been at least
curious to observe the comments brought out in
the press by this belated rehabilitation. There
seems to be a concerted opinion that Hazlitt is
read only by those technically interested in author-
ship, as if his essays were out of touch with life,
were indeed essentially bookish, and for the book-
ish reader only. In attempting to show the per-
versity of this view, I have perhaps dwelt too
much on Hazlitt the man, and said too little
specifically about his essays ; my justification lies
in the fact that the temperament of the writer
dominates his work to so overmastering a degree
that to unfold the one is properly to criticise the
other.
CHARLKS LAMB
IN a well-known essay Hazlitt, writing from
memory, has attempted to record one of those
famous conversations that took place among the
little group that used to gather in Lamb's cham-
bers in the Inner Temple. The subject on this
particular night was Persons One Would Wish to
Have Seen, and the discussion ended with that
beautiful comparison by the host himself of their
supposed behaviour if Shakespeare and "that
other ' ' should suddenly appear at the door. I
think to-day if such a conversation should occur
that Lamb's own name would be almost the first
to arise on the lips of any lover of literature.
Other writers great poets and philosophers and
novelists we may admire more for their accom-
plishment, but none of these has so endeared him-
self to us personally as " Elia," none of them is
cherished in our imagination with so sweet a
savour. There has in fact grown up a kind of
legend about his name. 1 He is, if ever writer
1 It may be counted as the latest step in I/amb's canon-
isation that two scholars have been spending the labour of
years in giving his works proper editorial care. The edi-
tion of Mr. E.V. Lucas, imported by G. P. Putnam's Sons,
is notable for the assiduity with which he has run down
87
88 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
were, human in his weaknesses as in his strength,
yet he dwells apart in our affection not quite as
other men do. " If there be a Good Man, Charles
Lamb is one," said Wordsworth, who was not
overmuch given to praising. Good man he was,
but to us he has come to be something more. We
like to think of him rather in the words of Thack-
eray, which FitzGerald remembered and quoted
long afterwards: " ' Saint Charles! ' said Thack-
eray to me thirty years ago, putting one of C. L,.'s
letters to his forehead." Thirty years ago went
back to 1848, and the letter that so moved Thack-
eray was one written by Lamb in 1824 to Bernard
Barton, with a pretty postcript to Lucy who was
later to bring the ill-fate of matrimony upon Fitz-
Gerald. That was the year also, 1824, in which
Lamb wrote his verses In the Album of Lucy
Barton :
Little Book, surnamed of white ,
Clean as yet, and fair to sight,
Keep thy attribution right.
Never disproportion 'd scrawl;
Ugly blot, that 's worse than all ;
On thy maiden clearness fall !
Lamb's allusions and quotations. The edition of Mr.
William Macdonald, imported by E. P. Button & Co., is
one of Dent's admirable publications, and is better fitted
for ordinary reading. Both editions are very complete,
and contain much new matter. The restoration of the
true text of the Letters is alone a service to be grateful
for. 1904.
CHARLES LAMB 89
Whitest thoughts in whitest dress,
Candid meanings, best express
Mind of quiet Quakeress.
It would be a pretty fancy to visualise the
scene that dwelt so long in FitzGerald's memory
the letter which L^ucy Barton had cherished for
twenty-four years and had apparently lent or
given to FitzGerald, her lover, if that word can
be used of so cool a wooer ; FitzGerald showing
it to Thackeray, and the great novelist, with the
story of Pendennis then at work in his brain, lay-
ing it reverently to his forehead as if it had been
some holy relic. Lionel Johnson has caught the
phrase up into a poem that expresses most aptly
our feeling to-day :
Saint Charles ! for Thackeray called thee so :
Saint, at whose name our fond hearts glow :
See now, this age of tedious woe,
That snaps and snarls !
Thine was a life of tragic shade ;
A life, of care and sorrow made :
But nought could make thine heart afraid,
Gentle Saint Charles !
"Encumbered dearly with old books,
Thou, by the pleasant chimney nooks,
Didst laugh, with merry-meaning looks,
Thy griefs away ;
We, bred on modern magazines,
Point out, how much our sadness means,
And some new woe our wisdom gleans,
Day by dull day.
go SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Lover of London ! whilst thy feet
Haunted each old familiar street,
Thy brave heart found life's turmoil sweet,
Despite life's pain.
We fume and fret and, when we can,
Cry up some new and noisy plan,
Big with the Rights and Wrongs of Man :
And where 's the gain ?
Gentle Saint Charles! I turn to thee,
Tender and true : thou teachest me
To take with joy, what joys there be,
And bear the rest.
Walking thy London day by day,
The thought of thee makes bright my way,
And in thy faith I fain would stay,
Doing my best.
That is the golden chain from the past to the
present Lamb, Lucy Barton, Thackeray, Fitz-
Gerald, Lionel Johnson.
But if Lamb has grown to be Saint Charles to
us, it is for other reasons than those which hallow
the sacred names of the calendar. We think of
the saints as of men who have risen above the
turmoil of life, together with its frailties, and there
is something austere in their altitude. To us
they seem a little sad, and we are not sure we
should choose them for companions. With Lamb
it is quite different. His very errors have become
a part of the sweet legend that surrounds him.
We remember his taste for the exhilarating cup,
and think we should like him best when warmed
by kindly potations. Who could have resisted an
CHARLES LAMB 9!
invitation to those nodes ambrosiana : " Cards &
cold mutton in Russell St. on Friday at 8 & nine.
Gin and Jokes from ^ past that time to 12"?
We remember, too, his reply to the bishop who
inquired how he had learned to smoke such furi-
ous pipes: " Sir, I toiled for it as some men toil
for virtue ! ' ' Even his trick of stammering is
a cherished accident of his humorous talk, and
without his wavering gait and those poor spindle-
legs we should lose some relish of his perambula-
tions in L-ondon streets. Were this all, we might
enjoy his wit and laugh at his oddities as it had
been another Theodore Hook ; but beneath this
seeming levity there was, as all the world now
knows, a deep-sunk basis of character and of
tragic circumstance. There is no need to rehearse
the fatal scene in the Temple when Mary in a
sudden frenzy of madness killed her mother, or to
relate the brother's lifelong devotion and renunci-
ation. L/amb was twenty-one years old at the time
of the incident, a youth given to indulge in some-
what vague literary aspirations and vaguer relig-
ious yearnings under the domination of Coleridge.
The effect of that frightful scene on his over-
sensitive nerves (he had himself passed six weeks
in a madhouse less than a year before) was in-
delible. At first it deepened his religious vein
with results not fortunate for literature ; for the
piety of a young man is not often edifying, and if
there be any part of Lamb's writings one could
wish away, it is certainly those early letters in
92 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
which he mouths religion with his mentor. But
the mood soon changes. Rather abruptly in the
year 1800 (four years after the calamity) we ob-
serve a complete alteration in his tone. He has
shaken off the ghostly dominion of Coleridge,
whose patronising ways have evidently grown a
little irksome. The last straw, apparently, was
when Coleridge used the epithet " gentle " of him
in a poem. Lamb resents the word with some
asperity, and, in place of confessing his soul,
breaks out into the boast that he is * ' suffering
from the combined effects of two days' drunken-
ness." We hope that he exaggerates his de-
bauchery somewhat, but, true or fanciful, that
confession marks the beginning of the real Charles
Lamb. Thenceforth his letters and his more de-
liberate productions show what can only be called
a half-conscious pose, a humorous waiving of the
serious matters of life, a refusal to harbour the
deeper emotions, as if he had chosen for his motto
those words in an earlier letter: " With me ' the
former things are passed away,' and I have some-
thing more to do than to feel." The tragic cir-
cumstance is still not far removed, and the recur-
ring allusion to Mary "from home" throws a
touch of half-averted pathos into the humour
pathos that only at long intervals rises into shrill-
ness, as when, under unusual stress, he exclaims
to Wordsworth : " They have had the care of her
before. I see little of her: alas ! I too often hear
her. Sunt lachrymce rerum ! ' ' But for the most
CHARLES LAMB
part the sadness of his mood passes through the
same change as the other emotions and peers at
us through the quaint mask of a jest. "The
wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs," he writes
in a letter to Miss Hutchinson, after telling how
Mary has been "gone from home these five
weeks."
This, then, is the Lamb so endeared to our
imagination. When the calamity first smote him
down and he cried out to his friend for consola-
tion, Coleridge responded: "I look upon you
as a man called by sorrow and anguish, and a
strange desolation of hopes, into quietness, and a
soul set apart and made peculiar to God ! " He
was indeed a soul set apart, but it was to man,
not to God. He alone found the secret of sacri-
ficing his heart to stern and unrelenting duty and
of dwelling the while resolutely on the surface of
life, a patron of puns and a devotee of the genial
vices. And this is the quality of his writings as
well as of his character, although some, I know,
misled by their devotion, would discover graver
traits in his work. One of his latest editors, Mr.
Macdonald, insists that " his intellect was the
primary and really great thing in him, greater and
rarer far than his humour or any other separa-
ble qualities recognised in literature." That is
true in a sense, but it is intellect turned from
the deeper questions and made to play over the
surface of things with a coruscating light that
prevents the eye from penetrating into their
94 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
depths. There is an exquisite make-believe
about his essays, like the quieting unreality of
country scenes to one whose life has been " in
populous cities pent. ' ' No doubt a vein of pathos
runs through them all, but it is of a mocking
kind and makes no appeal to the lacrimarumfons.
Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago was
in reality a school of hard discipline ; passed
through the alembic of Lamb's fancy, it becomes
unreal and very beautiful, a memory of dreams.
He goes to Oxford in the Vacation, and that city
of scholars and gay livers is suddenly transformed
into a refuge of ghosts.
What a place to be in is an old library ! [he exclaims.]
It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that
have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were
reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I
do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their wind-
ing sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to
inhale learning, walking amid their foliage : and the
odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as
the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid
the happy orchard.
The same dissolving power of the fancy is turned
upon The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, and
the place is forever haunted by those three reven-
ants, Thomas Coventry, Samuel Salt, and Peter
Pierson, walking not with arms linked together
" as now our stout triumvirs sweep the streets"
but with hands folded behind their backs,
strange figures that are very much of this earth,
CHARLES LAMB 9$
yet somehow unconcerned with its prosaic busi-
ness. He writes of those " dim specks" of the
London streets, the childish Chimney -Sweepers
"blooming through their first nigritude," who
" from their pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the
nipping air of a December morning, preach a les-
son of patience to mankind ' ' ; and their sermon
is a quaint echo of the Shakespearian,
Golden lads and lasses must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Or he takes the beggars of the metropolis for a
theme, and in place of the brutal and hideous
pictures which a modern "naturalist " would give
us, he turns to muse on the idyllic tenderness of
Vincent Bourne's blind vagrant and dog :
Hi mores, haec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant.
Again, he gathers up into an essay the bereave-
ments and long abnegations of his bachelor life,
and instead of the bitter arraignment of Thom-
son's outcast in The City of Dreadful Night or the
half-renounced envy of Christina Rossetti
While I ? I sat alone and watched ;
My lot in life, to live alone
In mine own world of interests,
Much felt but little shown ;
instead of these, he has woven his regrets into
Dream Children, a Reverie, where the pathos is as
g6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
aerial and tmdisturbing as the shadows that fall
from smoke.
And his critical disquisitions, fine and pene-
trating as they are in many respects, have to my
mind something of the same unsubstantiality. I
read of Shakespeare in Lamb's essays, and I do
not seem to be in the presence of the great con-
structive dramatist who carried the weight of hu-
man experience in his brain, but of some sovereign
alchemist skilled to convert the leaden cares of
life into golden leaf. It is characteristic of L,amb' s
paradoxical spirit and half-conscious irony that
he should have found Shakespeare more fitted for
the cabinet, where the reader's fancy had freer
license to sport, than for the stage with its closer
confinement of realism. The whole Elizabethan
drama, which he so loved and which he did so
much to restore to general favour, attracted him
chiefly by its salient points of light, and the plays
of the Restoration were avowedly dear to him be-
cause they carry us into a region ' ' beyond the
diocese of the strict conscience," into the vision
of that "pageant where we should sit as uncon-
cerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle
of the frogs and mice."
Much of L,amb's poetry is of a frankly ephe-
meral sort, album verses for importunate young
ladies and the like, but even in those poems that
are in a way dedicated to the severer muses the
same note of fanciful unreality, concealing a
basis of discarded emotions, may be heard as in
CHARLES LAMB Q?
the letters and essays. I think this note can be
detected in his tragedy of John Woodvil, in his
lament over The Old Familiar Faces, written, be
it observed, when he was scarcely out of his teens,
and in those lovely stanzas to Hester, whose close
rises higher in poetic grace perhaps than he any-
where else attained:
My spritely neighbour, gone before
To that unknown and silent shore,
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,
Some Summer morning,
When from thy cheerful eyes a ray
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,
A bliss that would not go away,
A sweet fore-warning ?
Those verses, we know, were inspired by a
young Quaker whom L/amb was " in love with "
for some years while he lived at Pentonville, and
to whom, characteristically, he never once spoke.
Their charm is of the Elizabethan school, but
they follow the models of the lesser poets who
turned from the direct expression of the emotions
and from the language of power to the more wan-
ton light of the fancy. It would be interesting,
if not too technical, to carry this contrast into the
very mechanism of L/amb's style and show how it
is based on the Kuphuistic school and on the meta-
physical writers who cared more for the lambent
play of the intellect than for directness and depth
of impression. His language does not flow, but
VOL. II. 7.
98 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
moves with a continual eddy ; the interest is in
the quaintness of individual words and phrases
rather than in sustained harmony. The effect is
delightful, piquant, tantalising, and at times, it
must be confessed, a little saaadS and even weari-
some. We remember this criticism which L,amb
pronounced on Etia> " The informal habit of his
mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of
speech, forbade him to be an orator," and we
wonder whether this impediment does not
now and then manifest itself in a certain re-
tardation of his written, as well as his spoken,
utterance. Unique and exquisite as his more arti-
ficial language often is, I confess to like even better
those occasional passages where he forgets his
mannerism and speaks out with simple straight-
forwardness. As an illustration of this chaster
style I would select that vindication of his friend
in the letter of Elia to Robert Southey, which I
have already cited in my characterisation of Haz-
litt. The passage, thus inviting a comparison
with Hazlitt, would have the further merit of
calling attention to the widely different traditions
which, coming down side by side in English
literature from the beginning, have divided the
aims of these two friends. Hazlitt, with his
passio^ ancl forrejmd_jKe4g^i^j)JL utterance, de-
scends by direct inheritance from ^arlowe and
Jlpoker and JJjlton ; Lamb, with his quaintness
and emphasj^Qn^hr^s^^njijssiXM'd, is a later- born
brother of L,yy and Sidney and Quarles and Fuller.
CHARLES LAMB 99
Only one writer, perhaps, ever united in his own
genius these two divergent temperaments Sir
Thomas Browne.
But we must not forget that it is the man
Charles L/amb after all which makes his writings
so precious, nor lose sight of that fine personality
of his which so intimately pervades his essays and
sketches that they seem all to drop naturally into
place with his private correspondence. Nor, as I
have attempted to show, is the whimsical license
of his character the least fascinating phase of it
for us to-day. With what Olympian assurance
this man of many renunciations knew how to
jest ! There is a story of his Jovian hilarity told
in Haydon's Diary which has been quoted more
than once, and which I may be permitted to bor-
row in turn. A constellation of poets, as L/amb
might say, had foregathered in Haydon's cham-
bers, and into their midst had strayed an admiring
but prosaic gentleman, a nameless Comptroller of
Stamps. Says the diarist :
When we retired to tea we found the Comptroller. In
introducing him to Wordsworth I forgot to say who he
was. After a little time the Comptroller looked down,
looked up, and said to Wordsworth, "Don't you think,
sir, Milton was a great genius ? " Keats looked at me,
Wordsworth looked at the Comptroller. Lamb, who was
dozing by the fire, turned round and said : " Pray, sir,
did you say Milton was a great genius?" " No, sir, I
asked Mr. Wordsworth if he were not?" "Oh," said
Lamb, " then you are a silly fellow." " Charles! my dear
Charles ! " said Wordsworth ; but Lamb, perfectly inno-
100 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
cent of the confusion he had created, was off again by
the fire.
After an awful pause, the Comptroller said : " Don't
you think Newton a great genius ? " I could not stand it
any longer. Keats put his head into my books. Ritchie
squeezed in a laugh. Wordsworth seemed asking him-
self, " Who is this ? " Lamb got up, and taking a candle,
said : " Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenologi-
cal development?" He then turned his back on the
poor man, and at every question of the Comptroller he
chanted :
"Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John
Went to bed with his breeches on."
The man in office, finding Wordsworth did not know who
he was, said in spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipation
of assured victory: "I have had the honour of some
correspondence with you, Mr. Wordsworth." " Witl 1
me, sir?" said Wordsworth; "not that I remember."
"Don't you, sir? I am a Comptroller of Stamps."
There was a dead silence ; the Comptroller evidently
thinking that was enough. While we were waiting for
Wordsworth's reply, Lamb sung out:
"Hey diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle."
"My dear Charles!" said Wordsworth.
"Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John,"
chanted Lamb ; and then, rising, exclaimed : " Do let me
have another look at that gentleman's organs." Keats
and I hurried Lamb into the painting room, shut the
door, and gave way to inextinguishable laughter. Monk-
house followed and tried to get Lamb away. We went
back, but the Comptroller was irreconcilable. We
CHARLES LAMB IOI
soothed and smiled, and asked him to supper. He
stayed, though his dignity was sorely affected. How-
ever, being a good-natured man, we parted all in good
humour, and no ill effects followed.
All the while, until Monkhouse succeeded, we could
hear Lamb struggling in the painting room and calling at
intervals, " Who is that fellow? Allow me to see his or-
gans once more."
Certainly the denizens of Olympus laid aside
their dignity on that day ; an unsympathetic ob-
server might even have found them acting peril-
ously like buffoons. Indeed, there is another
aspect that cannot be disregarded in the whole
conduct of this genial wit. Sometimes, if the
truth must out, that terrible picture of the man as
he appeared to Carlyle recurs unpleasantly to the
memory :
Charles Lamb and his sister came daily once or oftener ;
a very sorry pair of phenomena. Insuperable proclivity
to gin, in poor old Lamb. His talk contemptibly small,
indicating wondrous ignorance and shallowness . . .
in fact, more like " diluted insanity " (as I defined it)
than anything of real jocosity, "humour," or geniality.
. . . He was the leanest of mankind, tiny black
breeches buttoned to the knee-cap, and no farther, sur-
mounting spindle legs also in black, face and head fineish,
black, bony, lean, and of a Jew type rather ; in the eyes
a kind of smoky brightness or confused sharpness ; spoke
with a stutter ; in walking tottered and shuffled ; emblem
of imbecility bodily and spiritual (something of real
insanity, I have understood), and yet something, too, of
humane, ingenuous, pathetic, sportfully much-enduring.
Poor Lamb ! He was infinitely astonished at my Wife ;
102 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
and her quiet encounter of his too ghastly London wit by
cheerful native ditto. Adieu, poor Lamb !
There are occasions when his persistent refusal to
face, in words at least, the graver issues of life,
when his deliberate search for the quaint and the
affected do actually present him in this spectral
aspect which struck Carlyle. He could jest in
an essay over his drunkenness ; hanging and the
stocks were to him a subject of laughter ; the stale
Elizabethan mockery of ' ' horns ' ' was still comical
to him ; love, sickness, death, even friendship, in
which he was so much honoured, were in turn
given over to his amusement. We remember
Emerson's trumpet- text from the Koran: " The
heavens and the earth, and all that is between
them, think ye we have created them in jest?"
How refreshing it would be if a little oftener this
much-enduring man would lay aside his pose and
speak out straight from the heart, if he could find
confidence to lose his wit in the tragic emotions
that must have waked with him by day and slept
with him at night. And in the end it seems
almost as if fate had taken revenge on him for his
wilful disregard of sorrow and pain. All letters
are sad as the writer approaches old age, but few
are so strangely and unconsciously disturbing as
Lamb's. As the burden of years closed in upon
him and the buoyancy of spirit passed away, there
came in its place a weary vacuity, a bleak mockery
of wit, broken at times by a stammering cry of
pain such as it is not good to hear. We resent
CHARLES LAMB IO3
this failure of his long-sustained wit. The picture
of the lonely man moving from home to home
in the suburbs of L/ondon is pathetic almost to
tears. So the ineluctable Nemesis overtook him,
too, at the last. And if you ask me how I recon-
cile this aspect of L/amb with that other aspect
which has gained for him the title of saint, I reply
that I do not attempt to reconcile them. It all
depends on the reader and on the reader's chang-
ing moods. There is a time to look solemnly into
the face of life, and then these letters and essays
repel us, as they did Carlyle, with their ghastly
London wit. There is a time for laughter and for
quaint fancy that dallies lightly with the emo-
tions, and then we reflect on the sublime courage
of this man who could smile where others would
despair, and with Thackeray we lay his letters to
our forehead, and call him Saint Charles. And
the latter mood is wiser, on the whole, and safer
and more just.
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD
" THE SEVEN SEAS " AND " THE RUBAIYAT "
THERE was a story current not long ago of a
London editor who was rash enough to wager
that no paragraph on Kipling or FitzGerald should
appear in his journal during a stated period, and,
needless to add, he lost the bet in the very next
issue. This endless flux of gossip about two
chosen names, with here and there a word of seri-
ous criticism smuggled in, is indeed one of the
curiosities of our modern literary magazines ; and
the peculiarity of it all is enhanced by the fact that
two authors could scarcely be selected from the
body of English literature more opposed to each
other in style and intention. 1
Apart from this journalistic notoriety, none of
1 This essay was written for the Atlantic Monthly in the
year 1899, an d was n t> I think, a false presentation of
literary conditions when both Kipling and FitzGerald
were at their apogee. Since that time the habit of writ-
ing recklessly about Kipling, at least, has gone out
of style. As regards FitzGerald, I feel, in reading over
these pages, that the silly talk of the day led me to pass
too lightly over the extraordinary beauty and humanity
of his work.
104
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 10$
our poets, not even Byron, has enjoyed just the
kind of popularity which Kipling has achieved.
Other poets have received equal or greater honour
from the cultured public, but our new Anglo-
Saxon bard appeals with like force to the scholarly
and the illiterate ; his speech has become, as it
were, the voice of the people. Mr. William Archer,
in his American Jottings, gives an apt illustration
of this. On leaving his steamer at New York Mr.
Archer " jumped on the platform of a horse-car on
West Street," and was accosted by the conductor
as follows: " ' I s' pose you 've heard that Kipling
has been very ill ? . . . He 's pulling through
now, though. . . . He ought to be the next
Poet Laureate. . . . He don't follow no beaten
tracks. He cuts a road for himself every time,
right through ; an' a mighty good road, too ! ' "
The fame of the Rubdiydt is of a different sort
altogether, yet not less real in its own sphere.
One of our ambassadors, himself a devotee of the
** Suffolk dreamer," has related how he heard a
stanza of the poem quoted in a far-away mining
camp ; and I have read of a society of enthusiasts
in England, who, with roses garlanding their
brows, meet together and dine in honour of their
prophet. Very few poems, perhaps no poem of
its length, have exercised so marked an effect on
writers of a certain class ; and the homage paid to
this jewel among translations is strikingly mani-
fested by the number of aspirants including Mr.
L/e Gallienne, it may be observed, one of Kipling's
106 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
few literary foes who have tried, and are still
trying, to do the work over again more to their
own taste, eager apparently to win renown by
gilding refined gold.
The interest taken in these two authors is, in
fact, so persistent and so extraordinary that it
might seem as if the corpus vulgatum of our poetry
were destined to shrink within these narrow limits;
and it is a timely question to consider what strange
fatality has yoked together in notoriety this ill-
assorted couple, and what their fame signifies to
us in our racial development.
The cause of Kipling's popularity is not far to
seek. For many years the Anglo-Saxon people,
in their ever-growing self-consciousness, have
been waiting for some poet to formulate their ex-
periences and needs, and have not been slow to
express open dissatisfaction with otherwise ac-
credited singers. Tennyson dwelt for them in a
world of shadowy idealism ; he had no sympathy
with the democratic movement ; he lapsed in his
latter days into a vein of pantheistic mysticism
especially abhorrent to the straightforward Briton.
Browning was concerned mainly with that subtle
line of demarcation between the worlds of sense
and faith which finds its problems and symbolism
in the Roman Church, and nothing so disturbs
the stolid Philistine as this blending of the real
and the unreal ; furthermore Browning was ob-
scure. Longfellow sang with exquisite grace the
virtues and aspirations of the home-loving people,
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD IO/
but failed to voice its rude conquering temper out-
of-doors. Matthew Arnold chose for himself a
region of sublimated doubt and faith, interesting
enough to Oxford, but incomprehensible to the
larger public. Each and all of these poets had of
necessity strong traits of the Anglo-Saxon char-
acter, but they missed its dominant chord, and so
remained more or less isolated in the realm of pure
art.
For this reason we can understand the acclaim
with which a poet has been received who actually
sings in stirring rhythms the instincts of the peo-
ple. And in truth both the virtues and defects of
Kipling are such as to render him a popular idol.
One cannot easily imagine to himself a car con-
ductor enthusiastic over Milton or Spenser or
Shakespeare ; these luminaries revolve in a region
beyond his comprehension. Yet if Kipling fails to
strike the highest note, the reception given him
by such critics as Professor Norton proves that he,
too, in his own way, is a true artist and no moun-
tebank of the crossroads.
Probably what first impresses every one on.
reading The Seven Seas and the idea comes
with peculiar emphasis these days is the im-
perialistic temper of the poet; his earnest con-
viction that the English race, " the Sons of the
Blood," are destined to sweep over the earth and
fulfil the law of order and civilisation. " After the
use of the English, in straight-flung words and
few," he has sung his stave of victory so lustily
108 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
that the hearts of the toilers in the fields and of
the " dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-
stifled town," have leaped in response to his call.
So great is the influence of hymns like the Reces-
sional and The White Man's Burden that to his
fame as a poet has been added something of the
authority of a statesman ; he has made himself,
as no other poet before him, accepti pars imperii.
His sympathy with the impulse towards expansion
and his penetration into the hidden causes of fer-
ment are written large in his Song of the English.
He sees in the forward movement no ministerial
programme or prudential wisdom, such as guides
the rulers of Germany and France to fortify their
empire by seizing new lands, but an irresistible
impulse of the people driving them out to subdue
and possess.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power
with the Need,
Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead.
As the deer breaks as the steer breaks from the herd
where they graze,
In the faith of little children we went on our ways.
But there is another and a deeper instinct of the
Anglo-Saxon race than the impulse to expand
and absorb. With the power of conquest they
carry everywhere the law of order and obedience.
The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an* stone ;
'B don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own ;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful : 'e leaves 'em all about,
An* then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen
out,
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 109
sings Tommy Atkins in his vigorous barrack-
room idiom ; and he is right. It is the sense of
life as a vast complicated organisation, in which
every member must play his part bravely and un-
complainingly in subjection to the whole; it is the
hearkening to ' ' Law, Orrder, Duty an' Restraint,
Obedience, Discipline ! " so eloquently ascribed by
Mister Me Andrews to his beloved * * seven thou-
sand horse-power," that impels the race inevitably
to its goal. There may be, indeed there are, a
few left, even in Kngland, who are not " damned
ijjits," and who still think something of the old
romance at sea is spoiled by steam ; who feel that
in some way the fairer and richer flower of life is
crushed out by the grinding of mill wheels, and
that there is a deeper joy of philosophy than can
come to a man driven ruthlessly and restlessly by
his own invented machine. But the truth remains
that the civilisation of the day is a product of iron
and steam, and that victory belongs to those who
are strong to adapt themselves to the new de-
mands. Our late war with Spain was sufficient
proof of this.
Is it strange, therefore, that the people of Eng-
land and America, in these days of unsettled
ideals, should be genuinely thrilled by the clarion
notes of a poet who sings of the courage and dis-
cipline of the men behind the "reeking tube" with
a vigour and truth, if not with a grace, equal to
Homer's glorification of the ancient bronze-clad
heroes ; who sees in one of the masterful inven-
110 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
tions of commerce a mystical Power carrying
salutations and warnings "o'er the waste of the
ultimate slime," and whispering its message of
union to worlds dissevered by the sea ; who has
brought together, and in a way spiritualised, all
the "miracles" of a materialistic age for the cele-
bration of his love ; who has discovered in the
despised banjo, that can "travel with the cooking-
pots and pails," a true successor of the heroic lyre,
and has heard from this " Prophet of the Utterly
Absurd" a divine song crying to the dweller in
wild places :
By the wisdom of the centuries I speak
To the tune of yestermorn I set the truth
I, the joy of life unquestioned I, the Greek
I, the everlasting Wonder Song of Youth !
is it strange that such a singer should appeal to
the busy brood of the old ' ' Sea wife ' ' with some-
thing more than the force of a mere lover of beauty
and maker of pretty verses ? The eyes even of
the dullest are opened, and from the midst of his
homely surroundings he seems to see arise in the
purity of uncorrupted loveliness the vision of the
True Romance :
A veil to draw 'twixt God His law
And man's infirmity,
A shadow kind to dumb and blind
The shambles where we die.
But there is a still higher reach in Kipling than
this glorification of a prosaic civilisation and this
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD III
lauding of the character militant. At its best, his
sense of order and obedience rises into a pure feel-
ing for righteousness that reminds one of the
ancient Hebrew prophets. He has in him some-
thing of the stern Calvinistic temper of his own
McAndrews brooding over a world in which the
active and mechanical virtues fulfil their mission
under the law of ' ' interdependence absolute, fore-
seen, ordained, decreed." We shall not soon out-
live the impression produced on the Anglo-Saxon
heart by those unexpected words, " L/est we for-
get, lest we forget ! " Amid the empty jubilation
of a thoughtless optimism, the mind was suddenly
brought to recoil upon itself, and ask what higher
destiny was ruling in the affairs of men. The
Anglo-Saxon race more than any other has re-
tained the real temper of Hebraism, the worship
of a force, dwelling apart yet human in its limita-
tions, that shapes the activities of the world to its
own devising. Jehovah, the L/ord of righteous-
ness, is still Kngland's God, and nowhere else is
the religion of the land better expressed than in
the Hymn before Action :
The earth is full of anger,
The seas are dark with wrath,
The Nations in their harness
Go up against our path :
Ere yet we loose the legions
Ere yet we draw the blade,
Jehovah of the Thunders,
Lord God of Battles, aid !
112 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
When to Kipling's instinctive utterance of the
popular needs are added his wit and dramatic
power, his skill in telling a story, his mastery of
the clinging epithet, his pulsating language and
sturdy rhythms, it is easy to understand his im-
mense vogue. The limitations that debar him
from ranking with the truly great poets of Eng-
land and the world are again inherent in the peo-
ple for whom he writes, limitations which the
master singers were able to transcend while still
retaining the strength of the national character.
It is one of the ironical whims of Fate that the
man who stands preeminently for the Anglo-
Saxon and Hebraic temperament should have
been born in India, the land furthest removed
from that temper of all the world. Righteous-
ness that rules in the hurly-burly of a contentious
life, he knows and celebrates; but of that other
spirit that turns from the passion and toil of ex-
istence as from a wasteful illusion, and whose eyes
are set on solitude and a triumph of peace beyond
earthly victories, there is in Kipling hardly a
breath. I know that a poet is not called to be a
mystic, that his office is not that of a Hindu rishi
or a mediaeval Thomas a Kempis. There must be
about him always something of that union of
V illusion et la sagesse which to Joubert seemed the
essence of art. Yet poetry, to accomplish its
nobler mission, must both evoke and lay the pas-
sions. Through the din of personal struggle and
personal emotions must break at times the voice
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 113
of something deeper within us, calling us to rest.
In the clash of worldly ambitions it happens now
and then to a man to pause, while a feeling of
unreality comes over him; and for a moment he
knows that his concern in the drama about him is
purely fictitious, and that there is a witness look-
ing down with disdain on the strutting part he
plays. No man ever achieved anything really
great in this world without these moments of
deeper insight, and without a certain contemp-
tuous indifference to his own fate. No poet ever
causes the hearts of his hearers to expand with
the larger joy who does not lift the veil occa-
sionally and destroy the illusion he is himself
creating.
So at times, in Homer, the ten years of calamity
about Ilium seem filled with the warfare of
shadows.
Thus the gods fated, and such ruin wove,
That song might flourish for posterity,
he sings, as if the wrath of Achilles and the tragic
courage of Hector were no more than the phan-
tasmagoria of a dream. Both Achilles and Hec-
tor fight ever with the sure foreboding of death
upon them; and in the last book of the Odyssey,
which is certainly added as a summing up and
conclusion for both poems, the stalwart heroes
who led the tumult of battle now move before us
as shadows whose futile life is but a mockery of
their former strenuous deeds. Virgil makes the
VOL. II. 8.
1 14 SHELBUfcNE ESSAYS
plot of his epic revolve about the dim pantheistic
scenes of the sixth canto, where all that precedes
and all the events that are to follow arise in vision,
like figures beheld through the uncertain glimmer-
ing of the moon. Throughout the poet's works
the mind is continually startled by phrases filled
with a strange mystical glamour. Dabit deus his
quoque finem ! cries ^Eneas, and we feel always
that there is a fate akin to the peace of death
brooding over the actions and guiding them to
their end. Nor is Shakespeare different in this
respect from the masters of antiquity. Who can
forget the sensation of sudden liberty and enlarge-
ment that came to him, as if some new chamber
of thought or windows of wider outlook were
opened to his mind, when, after the storm of pas-
sion and ambition in Macbeth, the fated victim
hears of the queen's death ? His cry of disillusion
is in the memory of every one, but repeated
quotation cannot diminish its force or pertinency:
She should have died hereafter ;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time ;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle !
Life 's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more : it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 11$
So essential is this higher element of poetry
that a French writer of some reputation has de-
veloped it into a complete theory of mysticism.
By the side of the indispensable dialogue which
depends on the action of a drama he finds almost
always another dialogue seemingly superfluous
yet really that to which the soul listens atten-
tively; and on the quality and extent of this un-
necessary dialogue depend the character and inner
power of the work. JThe mysterious and haunt-
ing beauty of true tragedy is found in the words
that are spoken by the side of the strict and mani-
fest truth in the words that conform to a truth
profounder and incomparably nearer the invisible
soul that breathes through the poem. Now I am
far from sustaining a theory which would substi-
tute dramas built on any such pseudo-mysticism
for the ballads of Kipling. Yet one must confess
that he misses in Kipling just this added touch
of something deeper than what first meets the ear,
and that, missing this, he comes away unsatisfied.
We hear Kipling constantly praised for his virility
and out-of-door freedom; and this is well. But
Homer and Shakespeare, no poets of the closet
certainly, were able to combine this liberty with
the insight of a profounder spirituality. Our new
bard is lauded also for loyalty to the present; and
this too is well. Yet Byron found it possible to
speak for his own age, and at the same time as-
similated largely from what was memorable in the
past. In Childe Harold's reflections on Italy and
Il6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
other scenes of former grandeur, we enjoy the
same largeness of release from the fretful con-
straints of circumstance which in Virgil comes to
us from his pensive brooding over Fate. One
may indeed question whether any writer so little
formed by the traditions of the past as Kipling
can, in this day of inherited wisdom, escape the
charge of crudeness.
An attentive study of the examples quoted in
Matthew Arnold's Essay on Poetry might lead one
to call this defect in Kipling a lack of the ' ' high
seriousness " which that critic adopts as a touch-
stone of the great style; but the term at least de-
mands definition. Seriousness, if understood as
a quality of the emotions, cannot be denied to the
author of The Seven Seas ; it is in fact a marked
and distinguishing trait of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Nor is the defect due to any weakness of the intel-
lect. The world was never more ready than at
the present hour to expend its intellectual force on
social or artistic problems ; it revels in labour of
the sort. As a matter of fact, the peculiarity of
Kipling's vocabulary and the continual looseness
of his grammar, even apart from the vitality of
his thought, render him one of the harder poets
to read, yet they in no way detract from his
popularity.
The fault lies in another and more essential fac-
ulty, the will; and here again there is need of
careful analysis. Any one who looks deeply into
his own heart must recognise there two distinct
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 1 1/
principles governing his life, the will to act, and,
let us not say the will to renounce, for fear of
misinterpretation, but rather the will to refrain;
and on the right understanding of these two fac-
ulties depends largely our insight into much that
is best and much that is worst in literature. Now
no one can read a page of The Seven Seas without
being struck by its splendid virility: the book is
in this respect a faithful reflection of the restless
energy impelling the race, by fair means or foul,
to overrun and subdue the globe. But in that
other and higher will, the will to refrain, the
Anglo-Saxons are, and have always been, singu-
larly deficient. To this character must be at-
tributed both the lack of any genuinely mystical
literature in England, and the comparative free-
dom from decadence, phenomena which, indeed,
the true Briton finds far from easy to distinguish
one from the other. In fact, much of the confu-
sion of mind in regard to genius and degeneracy,
spread abroad over the world by such writers as
Lombroso and Max Nordau, is due to the same
imperfect analysis. Let the active individual will
be weakened by immorality, or whatever cause,
and there often arises a dissolution of the person-
ality into a flaccid dream state, which the ordinary
observer associates with mysticism, but which is
in reality the very opposite of that. Out of the
deliquescence of character and loosening of the
grip on things actual, such as may be seen in Paul
Verlaine and Maeterlinck, springs a sham spirit-
Il8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
uality that wraps itself in the allurements of the
senses. Quite different from this is the mysticism
of an Emerson or a Juan de la Cruz or a Plato,
where in a strong character the higher will to re-
frain holds the lower will as a slave subservient
to its purpose. The one is the defalcation of the
will altogether; the other is the subjection of the
lower will to the higher, an exercise of the func-
tion which Emerson, quoting I know not what
Eastern source, calls the "inner check." The
one is but a bewildering illusion; the other is the
truest disillusion. I would repeat that the poet
is not called to be a mystic, the sensuous ele-
ment must always be too predominant in his work
for that; and yet only by comparison with genuine
mysticism can the recurring note of disillusion in
the greater poets be explained. It was probably
the voice of this higher personality heard in Dante
that led Matthew Arnold to quote his In la sua
voluntade 2 nostra pace as an illustration of
1 ' high seriousness ' ' in verse.
Kipling is indeed serious, with the strength of
his Hebraic spirit; but the general absence of this
will to refrain in his work, although it may add
to his popularity among a people of restless en-
ergy, must effectually exclude him from the band
of sacri vates. I remember the shock of surprise
that came to me when, on first reading The Seven
Seas, I met the lines,
For to possess in loneliness
The joy of all the earth ;
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 119
so incongruous did the words appear with the
bustling spirit of the book as a whole. For the
moment I seemed to be rapt away from the society
of Tommy Atkins and Mr. McAndrews to the re-
gion out of which the inspired poets of old spoke
to us. Had Kipling written more in this vein, he
would have escaped the charge of superficiality.
But there is something else wanting in Kipling,
which may, at the last analysis, be closely akin to
this lack of true insight. I mean the seeking
after beauty as an end in itself, as an instinct of
supreme joy like that which inspired the opening
lines of Keats' s Endymion. In its* purer manifes-
tation this element of beauty is but the expression
of an inner harmony of the faculties depending on
the same will to refrain; it is the law of the Del-
phian Apollo, Nothing too much, working itself
out in perfect proportion of thought and form.
The very foundation of poetry, as possessing that
higher libert)' of spirit growing out of the har-
mony of restraint, lies therein; and such, I gather,
was the notion of Coleridge when he traced the
source of metre ' * to the balance in the mind ef-
fected by that spontaneous effort which strives to
hold in check the workings of passion." Even in
its lower manifestation, in the love of mere beauty
of detail as displayed by the lesser romantic
writers, there must still remain something of the
power to withdraw the mind from the immediate
uses of things, and read into them a higher sig-
nificance. Of this longing after beauty there is
120 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
jingularly little in Kipling in comparison with the
force and breadth of his genius. His most ardent
admirers would probably be surprised to find how
few passages of real loveliness they could recall
in his poems; and it is no doubt this deficiency
that inspires Kipling's enemies and even he has
enemies to speak so contemptuously of his work.
I have attempted thus far to show how the
poetry of The Seven Seas reflects both the domi-
nant strength and the deficiencies of the Anglo-
Saxon temper; there is a curious interest in
comparing with it another volume of almost equal
popularity, in which all that is un-English might
seem to have come to flower. Within the body
of the people has sprung up, of late years, a small
circle of men to whom the restless activity of the
race is strongly repellent: they are quietists and
worshippers of pure beauty. The movement be-
gan with the pre-Raphaelites, who sought in me-
diaeval Italy all that was wanting in the England
about them, and has grown to include an ever
widening band of malcontents. For the very
reason that they are cut off from the broader sym-
pathies with actual life, there is something ineffi-
cient in their work, something very frail and
fragile, which we are wont to stigmatise as effemi-
nate or dilettante. Beauty and form are indeed
the feminine elements of genius, which, as has
been often observed, must embrace both the mas-
culine and the feminine principles to accomplish
its best results. Alone and unsupported by the
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 121
aggressive virility of thought and action, the love
of beauty has always a tendency to degenerate
into effeminacy. It is just this flowerlike grace,
apart from any sturdier character, that appeals to
the class of dilettantes in FitzGerald's translation
of the Rubdiydt. English poetry contains nothing
more exquisitely lovely than such stanzas as this:
Earth could not answer ; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn ;
Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal'd
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.
There is in such writing all the apt felicity of
Horace, to whom FitzGerald is sometimes likened;
but it must be added that there is, on the other
hand, too little of the manly tone of Horace, and
of his shrewd reflection on life, which have made
him the friendly mentor of the centuries.
It might seem at first sight as if the Rubdiydt
should attract this small coterie alone, were it not
further true that there is a touch of the dilettante
inherent in the whole race. The very fact that
a person has little appreciation of harmony and
beauty in their higher manifestation leads him to
make a sharp distinction in his taste between
what appeals to the reason or dominant emotions
and what, under the designation of beauty, is a
mere titillation of the fancy. This divorce be-
tween the reason and the imagination, due to an
original defect of temperament in the race, has
been so widened by the exigencies of modern life
122 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
that any real synthesis of the powers has become
almost impossible. Unwholesome and irrational
as it is, the division has entered even into our
scheme of education, and in our universities we
now see the classical and modern-language facul-
ties separated into semi-hostile groups of pure
philologians on the one side, and shallow dabblers
in literature on the other; and so impossible is any
mediating ground between the two that even when
the scholar, who looks down so superciliously on
the aesthetes, himself turns by chance to notice lit-
erature, we commonly see him fall into the same
trifling attitude. Our libraries are flooded with
works that have no style or form on the one hand,
and with books of style that have no substance on
the other. And to this same division in a way is
due the almost equal popularity of authors so op-
posite as Kipling and FitzGerald.
But our English Omar has another claim on our
attention besides this mere verbal grace : his work
possesses a genuine psychological interest in so far
as it reflects a peculiar mood of the day. The
band of dilettantes to whom his felicities of style
appeal so strongly represent also a marked reac-
tion against the predominance of Anglo-Saxon
ideals. To a few men has come an inner awaken-
ing after the despotism of the recent scientific
period, and a weariness born of enthusiasms that
have failed to carry the mind beyond their own
restricted circle. Religious faith in the old form-
ulas of salvation has been weighed and rejected
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 123
by the scientific spirit of which Renan in France
and Huxley in England made themselves the
spokesmen. But in the end the new faith has
been found no more enlarging and no less dog-
matic than the old; and to some the whirl and
stress of mechanical progress seem to have taken
from life the few things that were really worth
possessing. Even the mass of the Anglo-Saxon
people, whose strenuous unreflecting minds ac-
cepted the doctrine of material advance most
eagerly, have begun at last to question dumbly
their own enthusiasm. The exultant words of a
Kipling still draw them with the force of inspira-
tion, but in their hours of relaxation they can
listen to another voice that tells of indifference
and repose. Out of the ruin of past ideals no new
vision of human spirituality has grown as yet, and
no poet has arisen to stir the heart to higher aspi-
rations. Only we listen in our uncertainty to this
prophet of disillusion and doubt:
Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
A muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries,
" Fools, your reward is neither Here nor There."
The revelations of Devout and Learn'd
Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn'd,
Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep,
They told their fellows, and to Sleep return'd.
The Rubdiydt has often been compared with
the Epicurean tone of the De Rerum Natura, and
124 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
there is no doubt a superficial resemblance.
" This too I have seen: how that men recline at
table cup in hand, and shadow their brows with
garlands, and how they cry out from the depth of
their heart, ' Brief is this joy for feeble men; even
now it has been, and never again shall we call it
to return,' " sang Lucretius to the Romans; and
to-day we read in English verse:
Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean'd the Secret of my Life to learn :
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd " While you live,
Drink ! for, once dead, you never shall return."
Yet in spirit the two poems are quite at variance.
The work of Lucretius is but a new faith of philo-
sophy, of the dux vitas Philosophia, summoning
men to put away their vain, disturbing supersti-
tions, and to conquer for themselves a better and
surer peace in strenuous thought; it is at the last
the utterance of the will to refrain speaking with
all the stress of the Roman character. Lucretius
would have been the first to repudiate the indif-
ferentism of the Persian:
Perplext no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.
The stanzas of the Rubdiydt announce the sur-
render of the will altogether; they speak the creed
of defeat, and have little in common with the
KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 125
mysticism if I may use that ambiguous word
of the great poets of England and antiquity.
We have still to await the coming of the true
modern poet, who shall unite the virility of Kip-
ling and the graceful charm of Omar with a yet
deeper note of insight into spiritual truth than has
been vouchsafed to either. Meanwhile we cannot
but admire the strange fatality that has linked to-
gether the restless rover of the seven seas and the
gentle " Suffolk dreamer" in their fellowship of
fame.
GEORGE CRABBE
IT would be a pleasure to suppose that the new
edition of Crabbe in a single volume ' would at
last bring to him that popularity which his lover,
FitzGerald, laboured so insistently to create, but
any such hope is bound to be frustrate. Here is,
in fact, one of the curiosities of literature: that a
poet who has been admired so extravagantly by
the wisest of England's readers should fail, I do
not say of popularity, but even of recognition
among critics and historians. For certainly no
one would call Crabbe popular, and to realise the
neglect of the critics we need only turn to the
most sympathetic study of the poet in recent years
and read Professor Woodberry's opening words:
' ' We have done with Crabbe. ' ' Yet to Byron this
was " the first of living poets "; and Byron's epi-
gram/ ' Nature's sternest painter, yet the best, ' '
commonly misquoted, by the way, is on the lips
of a host of readers who have never so much as
opened a volume of Crabbe' s works. Nor was
1 The Life and Poetical Works of George Crabbe. By
his son. A new and complete edition. London : John
Murray. 1901. Imported by Charles Scribner's Sons,
New York.
126
GEORGE CRABBE 12?
Byron alone among the great men of that period
to reverence what we have elected to forget. On
his deathbed Fox called for Crabbe's poems, and
in the sorrows of Phoebe Daw son found consolation
while his life was ebbing away. And of Scott we
are told that these same poems were at all times
more frequently in his hands than any other work
except Shakespeare, and that during his last days
at Abbotsford the only books he asked to be read
aloud to him were his Bible and his Crabbe. But
the true worshipper of our poet's genius was that
gentle cynic and recluse, Bdward FitzGerald.
There is something really pathetic in FitzGerald' s
constant lamentation that no one reads his " eter-
nal Crabbe." Our English Omar at least is popu-
lar, and it looks as if the Suffolk poet were to
attain a kind of spurious fame from the way his
name is imbedded in the letters of the ' ' Suffolk
dreamer. ' '
Now it is superfluous to say that a writer who
has been so lauded by the greatest poet, the most
ardent orator, the most honoured novelist, and
the most refined letter-writer of England in a
century, must himself have possessed extraordi-
nary qualities. Yet it remains true that Crabbe
is not read, is not even likely to be much read for
many years to come; and the reason of this is per-
fectly simple: his excellences lie in a direction
apart from the trend of modern thought and senti-
ment, while his faults are such as most strongly
repel modern taste.
12$ SHELBURNE ESSAYS
As for the faults of Crabbe, it is enough to say
that he is an avowed imitator of Pope in all formal
matters, and that the antithetic style of the master
too often descends in him to a grotesque flaccidity.
It would not be impossible to quote a dozen lines
almost as absurd as the parody in Rejected Ad-
dresses :
Regained the felt, and felt what he regained.
But even where his style is wrought with nervous
energy, it fails to attract an audience who have
tasted the rapturous liberties of Shelley and Keats,
and who love to take their sentiment copiously in
unrestrained draughts. They do not see that the
despised heroic couplet permits the narrative poet
to condense into a pair of verses the insignificant
joinings of a tale which in any other form would
occupy a paragraph; nor does it interest them
that in the hands of a moral poet the couplet is
like a keen two-edged sword to strike this way
and that. They are only offended by what seems
to them the monotonous seesaw of the rhythm;
and a style which opposes an effort of the judicial
understanding at every pause in the flow of senti-
ment repels those who think wit (in the old sense
of the word) a poor substitute for celestial inspira-
tion. It is partly a matter of psychology, partly
a matter of inscrutable taste, that a generation of
readers who are attracted by the slipshod rhythms
of Epipsychidion or Endymion should find the
close-knit periods of Crabbe unendurable.
GEORGE CRABBE
To me personally there is no tedium, but only
endless delight, in these mated rhymes which
seem to pervade and harmonise the whole rhythm.
And withal they help to create the artistic illusion,
that wonderful atmosphere, I may call it, which
envelops Crabbe's world. No one, not even the
most skeptical of Crabbe's genius, can deny that
he has succeeded in giving to his work a tone or
atmosphere peculiarly and consistently his own.
It would be curious to study this question of at-
mosphere in literature, and determine the elements
that go to compose it. Why are the works of
Dickens or Smollett or Spenser, to choose almost
at random, so marked by a distinctive atmosphere,
while in a greater writer, in Shakespeare for ex-
ample, it may be less observable ? Something of
bulk is necessary to its existence, for it can hardly
be created by a single book or a single poem. A
certain consistency of tone is needed, and a unity
of effect. It cannot exist without perfect sincerity
in the writer; and, above all, there is required
some idiosyncrasy of genius, some peculiar emo-
tional or intellectual process in the author's mind,
which imposes itself on us so powerfully that
when we arise from his works the life of the world
no longer seems quite the same to us; for we have
learned to see the quiet fields of nature and the
thronging activities of mankind through a new
medium.
All these qualities, and more particularly this
individuality of vision, pervade Crabbe's descrip-
VOL. II. 9.
130 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
tive passages and his portraits of men. They
colour all his painting of inanimate things, but
they are most evident, perhaps, in his pictures of
the sea, whose varied aspects, whether sublime or
intimate, seem to have become, through early as-
sociation, a part of his sensitive faculties. He has
caught the real life of the sea, its calm and tem-
pest or sudden change, as few poets in English
have done. Especially he loves the quiet scenes,
the beach when the tide retires; when all is calm
at sea and on land, and the wonders of the shore
lie glittering in the sunlight or the softer light of
the moon. Even more characteristic are his pic-
tures of the muddy, oozing shallows, as in that
passage where the dull terrors of such a waste are
employed to heighten the most tragic of his Tales :
When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mud-banks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow ;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide ;
Where the small eels that left the deeper way
For the warm shore, within the shallows play ;
Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood ;
Here dull and hopeless he 'd lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race,
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye ;
What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come,
And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home,
GEORGE CRABBE 131
Gave from the salt ditch side the bellowing boom :
He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce,
And loved to stop beside the opening sluice ;
Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried sadd'ning sound;
Where all, presented to the eye or ear,
Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear.
There, if anywhere in English, is the artist's
vision, the power to concentrate the mind upon a
single scene until every detail in its composition
is corroded on the memory, and the skill, no less
important, to select and arrange these details to a
clearly conceived end.
These lines may serve to exemplify another
trait of Crabbe's genius, the rare union of scien-
tific detail with pervading human interest. He
was, in fact, all his life a curious and exact stu-
dent of botany and geology. Kven in his old age
he kept up these scientific pursuits, and his son,
in the excellent biography, tells how the old man
on his visits would leave the house every morn-
ing, rain or shine, and go alone to the quarries to
search for fossils and to pick up rare herbs on the
wayside. " The dirty fossils," says the dutiful
son, "were placed in our best bedroom, to the
great diversion of the female part of my family;
the herbs stuck in 'the borders, among my choice
flowers, that he might see them when he came
again. I never displaced one of them, ' ' a pretty
picture of busy eld. Of this inanimate lore of
plants and rocks Crabbe is most prodigal in his
verse, but, by some true gift of the Muses, it never
132 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
for a moment obscures the human interest of the
narrative. After all, it was man, and the moral
springs in man, that really concerned him. As
he himself says, the best description of sea or river
is incomplete:
But when a happier theme succeeds, and when
Men are our subjects and the deeds of men ;
Then may we find the Muse in happier style,
And we may sometimes sigh and sometimes smile.
Even when he submits his art to minute descrip-
tions, as for instance to a study of the growth of
lichens, there still lurks this human ethical in-
stinct behind the scientific eye. Read in their
proper place, the following lines are but a little
lesson to set forth the associations of mortal
antiquity:
Seeds, to our eyes invisible, will find
On the rude rock the bed that fits their kind ;
There, in the rugged soil, they safely dwell,
Till showers and snows the subtle atoms swell,
And spread the enduring foliage ; then we trace
The freckled flower upon the flinty base ;
These all increase, till in unnoticed years
The stony tower as grey with age appears ;
With coats of vegetation, thinly spread,
Coat above coat, the living on the dead :
These then dissolve to dust, and make a way
For bolder foliage, nursed by their decay ;
The long-enduring Ferns in time will all
Die and depose their dust upon the wall ;
Where the winged seed may rest, till many a flower
Show Flora's triumph o'er the falling tower.
GEORGE CRABBE 133
I choose these lines for citation because they
form, perhaps, the most purely descriptive pas-
sage in Crabbe; and even here it is really the
association of generations of mankind with an
ancient house of worship that stirs the poet's feel-
ings. For pieces of greater scope one should go
to such pictures as the ocean tempest in The
Borough, which I would not spoil by quoting in-
complete. In his study of the Roman decadent
poets, M. Nisard has made an elaborate compari-
son of the storm scenes in the Odyssey, the sZLneid,
and the Pharsalia, showing the regular increase
from Homer down of descriptive matter added for
merely picturesque effect, apart from its connec-
tion with the human action involved. It would
not be easy to find a better example of extended
description completely fused with human interest
than this tempest in The Borough. Every detail
of that animated picture is interpreted through
human activity and emotion. This does not mean
that Crabbe' s attitude toward nature is that of an
emotional pantheism which uses the outer world
as a mere symbol of the soul. Very far from that :
the human emotions are in this passage the direct
outcome of a sharply defined natural occurrence.
In another scene, one that has achieved a kind of
fame among critics, he tells the story, in his quiet,
satirical manner, of a lover who goes a journey to
meet his beloved. The lover's way leads him
over a barren heath and a sandy road, but, in his
state of exalted expectation, everything that meets
134 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
his eye is charged with loveliness. At last he ar-
rives only to find his mistress has gone away,
gone, as he thinks, to see a rival. He follows
her, and now his way takes him
by a river's side,
Inland and winding, smooth, and full, and wide,
That rolled majestic on, in one soft-flowing tide ;
The bottom gravel, flowery were the banks,
Tall willows waving in their broken ranks ;
The road, now near, now distant, winding led
By lovely meadows which the waters fed.
But all is hideous to his jealous eye. " I hate
these scenes! " he cries:
I hate these long green lanes ; there 's nothing seen
In this vile country but eternal green.
All this is the furthest possible remove from
vague reverie; it is a bit of amusing psychology,
tending to distinguish more sharply between man
and nature rather than to blend them in any haze
of symbolism.
It may be imagined from Crabbe's power over
details that he should excel in another sort of de-
scription, in scenes of still life, which come even
closer to the affairs of humanity; and, indeed,
there are scattered through his poems little genre
pictures that for minuteness and accuracy can be
likened only to the masterpieces of Dutch art in
that kind. The locus classicus (if such a term may
be used of so unfamiliar a poet) of this genre writ-
GEORGE CRABBE 135
ing is the section of The Borough that describes
the dwellings of the poor. I cannot refrain from
quoting a few of the introductory lines to show
how skilfully he prepares the mind for the picture
that is to succeed :
There, fed by food they love, to rankest size,
Around the dwellings, docks and wormwood rise ;
Here the strong mallow strikes her slimy root,
Here the dull nightshade hangs her deadly fruit ;
On hills of dust the henbane's faded green
And pencilled flower of sickly scent is seen.
And this is the poet who has been censured for
lack of descriptive powers ! Of the scene that fol-
lows, the *' long boarded building," with one
vast room, where the degraded families of the out-
cast are huddled together, no selection can con-
vey anything but the most inadequate impression;
it must be read intact, and once read it will cling
to the memory forever. Here, at least, is a bit
that is as vivid as a picture by Van Ostade, or
Teniers:
On swinging shelf are things incongruous stored,
Scraps of their food, the cards and cribbage-board,
With pipes and pouches ; while on peg below,
Hang a lost member's fiddle and its bow ;
That still reminds them how he 'd dance and play,
Ere sent untimely to the Convicts' Bay.
It must be clear even from these imperfect selec-
tions that Crabbe was able to envelop his inani-
mate world with an atmosphere peculiar to his
136 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
own genius. As for the human beings that move
through his scenes, if one were given to compari-
sons, he would probably liken them to the people
of Dickens. The comparison is apt both for its
accuracy and its limitations. The world of Crabbe
is on the surface much like that of Dickens, but
examined more closely it is seen to be less per-
vaded with humour, and more with wit; its pa-
thos, too, is less pungent and firmer, and its moral
tone is quite diverse. Save in his later Tales of
the Hall, which, after all, are scarcely an excep-
tion to the rule, the characters in Crabbe' s poems
are taken from the ranks of the humble and poor;
they are in external appearance the I/ondon folk
of Dickens transferred to the country. But they
rarely ever descend, like Dickens' s portraits, into
caricature, for the reason that their divergencies
grow more from some inner guiding moral trait,
and are less the mere outward distinctions of trick
and manner. They are, too, more directly the out-
come of divergent individual will; they are, for
this reason, more perfectly rounded out in their
personality, and they bear with them a more
complete sense of moral responsibility for their
associations.
We are carried to the green lanes and sandy
shores of England, but it is not the land of old po-
etic illusions. Here are no scenes of idyllic peace^
no Corydons murmuring liquid love to Phyllis or
Nesera in the shade. I do not mean to imply that
the orthodox pastoral dreams are without justi-
GEORGE CRABBE 137
fication, for that would be to condemn the central
theme of Paradise Lost, not to mention a host of
minor poems justly beloved. But certainly these
dreams lie perilously near to mawkishness and in-
sincerity, and if for no other reason we could ad-
mire Crabbe for his manly resistance to their easy
allurements. It seems that he set himself delib-
erately to ridicule and rebuke the common vapid-
ities of that facile school. In those introductory
lines to The Village, notable chiefly because they
were tampered with by Dr. Johnson, he directly
satirises the poets and his master, Pope, was in
youth one of the worst sinners in this respect
who imitate Virgil rather than nature. He too
had sought the sweet peace and smiling resigna-
tion of rural life, but instead he had found only
the cry of universal labour and contention :
Here, wandering long, amid these frowning fields,
I sought the simple life that Nature yields ;
Rapine and Wrong and Fear usurped her place,
And a bold, artful, surly, savage race.
An atmosphere of gloom is, indeed, over
Crabbe' s human world; not moroseness or morbid
sentimentality, frit a note of stern j udicial pity for
the frailties and vices of the men he knew and por-
trayed. His own early life in a miserable fishing
hamlet on the Suffolk coast, under a hard father,
his starving years of literary apprenticeship in
London, and then for a time the salt bread of
dependency as private chaplain to the Duke of
138 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Rutland, acquainted him with many sorrows
which years of comparative prosperity could not
entirely obliterate. He is at bottom a true Calvin-
ist, showing that peculiar form of fatalism which
still finds it possible to magnify the free will, and
to avoid the limp surrender of determinism. Man-
kind as a body lies under a fatal burden of suffer-
ing and toil, because as a body men are depraved
and turn from righteousness; but to the individ-
ual man there always remains open a path up
from darkness into light, a way out of condemna-
tion into serene peace. And it is with this mix-
ture of judicial aloofness and hungering sympathy
that Crabbe dwells on the sadness of long and
hopeless waiting, the grief of broken love, the re-
morse of wasted opportunities, the burden of pov-
erty, the solitude of failure, which run like dark
threads through most of his Tales. And in one
poem, at least, he has attained the full tragic
style with an intensity and singleness of effect
that rank him among the few master poets of hu-
man passion. The story of Peter Grimes his
abuse of his old father, his ill-treatment of the
workhouse lads brought from London, and his
final madness and death is the most powerful
tragedy of remorse in the English language. I
have already quoted the picture of the desolate
shallows and " the lazy tide in its hot slimy chan-
nel" where the wretch sought to hide his guilt;
but not less perfect in its art is Peter's own story
of the three lonely reaches in the river where the
GEORGE CRABBE 139
images of his victims used to rise up and haunt
his vision:
" There were three places, where they ever rose,
The whole long river has not such as those,
Places accursed, where, if a man remain,
He '11 see the things which strike him to the brain ;
And there they made me on my paddle lean,
And look at them for hours; accursed scene ! "
Then madness struck into his soul:
"In one fierce summer-day, when my poor brain
Was burning hot, and cruel was my pain,
Then came this father-foe, and there he stood
With his two boys again upon the flood :
There was more mischief in their eyes, more glee
In their pale faces, when they glared at me :
Still they did force me on the oar to rest,
And when they saw me fainting and oppressed,
He with his hand, the old man, scooped the flood,
And there came flame about him mixed with blood;
He bade me stoop and look upon the place,
Then flung the hot-red liquor in my face ;
Burning it blazed, and then I roared for pain,
I thought the demons would have turned my brain."
But if the atmosphere of these poems is sombre,
that does not mean they are without brighter
glimpses of joy. As he himself expresses it, they
are relieved by * ' gleams of transient mirth and
hours of sweet repose." In fact, Crabbe has con-
trived to include a vast number of human inter-
ests and passions in these simple Tales. There
are pages of literary satire on the Gothic romances
of the day, more neatly executed even than North-
anger Abbey. There are poems, like the second
140 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
letter of The Borough, overflowing with tender
sentiment; tales such as Phcebe Dawson, where
the pathos is almost too painful to be easily sup-
ported. There are stories of quaint playfulness,
like The Frank Courtship. Humour, too, is not
wanting, and now and then comes a stroke of
memorable wit. Jealousy, ambition, pride, van-
ity, despair, and all the petty tyrannies of con-
ceit are set off with marvellous acuteness. Kven
abounding joy is not absent. I do not know but
the sense of charm, of homely intimate life, of
tranquil resignation, is, for all their dark colours,
the final impression of these Tales. And every-
where they show the delightful gift of the story-
teller. Each separate poem is a miniature novel
wrought out with unflagging zest and almost im-
peccable art. The story of the younger brother
in Tales of the Hall glows again with ' * the sober
certainty of waking bliss ' ' ; and the older brother's
history begins with a rapturous tide of romantic
dreaming that fairly sings and pulses with beauty.
The whole of this second story is, in fact, a liter-
ary masterpiece, for its scenes of joy, followed by
despondency and heroic forbearance, controlled
throughout by the unerring psychological instinct
of the poet.
But this unerring instinct is not confined to any
one tale ; it guides the poet in the creation of all
his multitudinous characters. At first, perhaps,
as we see the ethical motives that underlie a char-
acter so clearly defined, it seems the poet is deal-
GEORGE CRABBE 14!
ing merely with a moral type ; but suddenly some
little limitation is thrown in, some modification of
motive, which changes the character from a cold
abstraction to a living and unmistakable person-
ality. Crabbe has been called a realist, and in one
sense the term is appropriate ; but in the meaning
commonly given to the word it is singularly inept.
The inner moral springs of character are what first
interested him, and his keen perception of man-
ners and environment only serves to save him from
the coldness of eighteenth-century abstractions.
I have dwelt at length on these phases of
Crabbe' s work which would strike even a casual
reader, for the sufficient reason that the casual
reader in his case scarcely exists. The real prob-
lem, as I have already intimated, is to explain
why a poet of such great, almost supreme powers
should fail to preserve a place in the memory of crit-
ics, not to mention his lack of a popular audience.
His failure is due in part, no doubt, to the use of
a metrical form which we choose to contemn, but
chiefly it is due to the fact that he is at once of us
and not of us. His presentation of the world is
in spirit essentially modern, so that we do not
grant him the indulgence unconsciously allowed
to poets who describe a different form of society,
and whose appeal to us is impersonal and general;
while at the same time he ignores or even derides
what has become the primary emotion we desire
in our literary favourites. Since the advent of
Shelley and Wordsworth and the other great
142 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
contemporaries of Crabbe our attitude toward na-
ture has altered profoundly. We demand of the
poet a minute, almost a scientific acquaintance
with the obscurer beasts and flowers ; but still
more we demand, if the poet is to receive our
deeper admiration, a certain note of mysticism, a
feeling of some vast and indefinable presence
beyond the finite forms described, a lurking sense
of pantheism by which the personality of the ob-
server seems to melt into what he observes or is
swallowed up in a vague reverie. When we think
of the great nature-passages of the century, we
are apt to recall the solemn mj^steries of Words-
worth's Tintern Abbey or Shelley's Ode to the
West Wind. Even in poets who are not frankly
of the romantic school, and who are imbued with
the classical spirit, the same undercurrent of rev-
erie is heard. Matthew Arnold's verse is full
of these subtle echoes. It may be caused by a
tide of reminiscence which dulls the sharpness of
present impressions, as in so simple a line as this :
Lone Daulis and the high Cephissian vale;
or it may be present because the words are over-
freighted with reflection, as in the closing lines of
The Future :
As the pale waste widens around him,
As the banks fade dimmer away,
As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea ;
but everywhere this note of reverie runs through
GEORGE CRABBE 143
the greater modern poets. Now of science Crabbe
owned more than a necessary share, but for
reverie, for symbolism, for mystic longings to-
ward the infinite, he had no sense whatever. It
is quite true, as Goethe declared, that a " sense
of infinitude" is the mark of high poetry, and I
firmly believe that the absence of this sense is the
one thing that shuts Crabbe out of the company
of the few divinely inspired singers, the few who
bring to us gleanings from their ' ' commerce with
the skies," to use old Ovid's phrase. But it is
also true that this sense of infinitude as it speaks
in Homer and Shakespeare is something far more
sober and rational than the musings of the modern
spirit, something radically different from the
ecstatic rhapsodies of Shelley's Prometheus Un-
bound ; and Crabbe' s very limitations lend to his
verse a brave manliness, a clean good sense, that
tone up the mind of the reader like a strong cordial.
And there is the same difference in Crabbe's
treatment of humanity. Wordsworth, feeling this
difference, was led to speak slightingly of Crabbe's
" unpoetical mode of considering human nature
and society." His repulsion may be attributed in
part to Crabbe's constant use of a form of analysis
which checks the unconstrained flow of the emo-
tions ; but the chasm between the two is deeper
than that. Wordsworth was ready to ridicule
the sham idyllic poetry as freely as Crabbe or any
other ; but, at bottom, are not Michael and the
Leech-gatherer > and a host of others that move
144 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
through Wordsworth's scenes, the true successors
of the Corydons and Damons that dance under
the trees on the old idyllic swards ? In place of
pastoral dreams of peace we hear now " the still,
sad music of humanity." Yet it is the same
humanity considered as a whole ; humanity be-
trayed by circumstances and corrupted by luxury,
but needing only the freedom of the hills and
lakes to develop its native virtues ; humanity
caught up in some tremulous vision of harmony
with the universal world; it is, in short, the vague
aspiration of what we have called humanitarian-
ism, and have endowed with the solemnities of a
religion. If this is necessary to poetry, Crabbe
is undoubtedly ' ' unpoetical. ' ' In him there is no
thought of a perfect race made corrupt by luxury,
no vision of idyllic peace, no musing on humanity
as an abstraction, but always a sturdy understand-
ing of the individual man reaping the fruits of his
own evil-doing or righteousness; his interest is in
the individual will, never in the problem of classes.
His sharply defined sense of man's personal re-
sponsibility coincides with his lack of reverent
enthusiasm toward nature as an abstract idea, and
goes to create that unusual atmosphere about his
works which repels the modern sentimentalist. So
it happens, we think, that he can appeal strongly
to only a few readers of peculiar culture; for it is
just the province of culture or right education
is it not ? that it shall train the mind to breathe
easily an atmosphere foreign to its native habit.
THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH
WHEN a novelist's works come to us in a new
edition, revised and complete, it is time to con-
sider him seriously as one whose task is accom-
plished, and to ask what place he holds in the
history of fiction ; and such a consideration may
seem in an especial manner timely in the case of
an author like George Meredith, 1 whose novels
have elicited such extravagant praise and such
sweeping condemnation from different readers.
Indeed, I know of nothing much more discourag-
ing than to read in succession the various reviews
of Mr. Meredith's works. There appears to be no
middle ground between the homage of R. If.
Stevenson, to whom Rhoda Fleming was ' ' the
strongest thing in English letters since Shake-
speare died," and the equally excessive detraction
of William Watson, who has put on record his
impression of The Egoist as being ' ' the most en-
tirely wearisome book purporting to be a novel
that " he had "ever toiled through in " his "life."
And withal few or none of these critics have
deemed it necessary to give a rational explana-
1 The Works of George Meredith. 16 vols. New York :
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1898.
VOL. U.-.O.
146 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
tion of their opinions. One asks in amazement
whether the judgment is utterly and forever to be
excluded from criticism by this kind of irresponsi-
ble impressionism.
Probably the first characteristic of these novels
to attract the attention of even the most heedless
reader is the peculiar language employed, one
might almost say, with malice prepense. " Our
language is not rich in subtleties for prose. A
writer who is not servile, and has insight, must
coin from his own mint." So Mr. Meredith
states his case, and it must be admitted he has
coined with a liberal hand, not so much in the
formation of new words, though he is apt to
prefer a strange word to a common one, as in
his distortion of language in order to surcharge it
with thought and sensation. It is perhaps this
peculiarity of style that led an eminent critic to
declare his chief fault was inability to tell a story,
rather a grave charge against a story-teller, if it
could be substantiated. The construction of a
plot like that of Evan Harrington may be suffi-
cient answer to such a charge, but it is not so easy
to refute the censure of over-cleverness to which
his pointed style lays him open.
Mr. Meredith alludes more than once to his own
philosophic intentions, and speaks with some irri-
tation of the necessity of disguising his deeper
meaning for fear of seeming obscure. We fancy,
however, that it is not profundity of reflection on
human life which causes obscurity so much as the
GEORGE MEREDITH
refraction of this into innumerable burning points.
And herein lies much of the difference between
real depth and mere cleverness. In any true
sense of the word there is as much depth of re-
flection in Henry Esmond as in The Egoist ; but
the earlier novel is less obscure, because the
thought is presented in broad masses, so to speak,
which rest the mind while stimulating it, whereas
The Egoist confuses with its endless clashing epi-
grams. Mr. Meredith, like his own Mrs. Mount-
stuart, is "mad for cleverness," and does not stop
often enough to remember his judgment on Sir
Austin Feverel : "A maker of proverbs what is
he but a narrow mind, the mouthpiece of a nar-
rower ?" and, " A proverb is a halfway house to
an idea, I conceive." Now, although the highest
culture must always demand more repose of mind
than an epigrammatist can offer, yet the flippant
public is readily caught by a superficial sparkling
cleverness, as recent popular novels sufficiently
attest, and Mr. Meredith might be expected to
attract such an audience, were it not for one grave
defect. His cleverness is sparkling, but it is by
no means superficial, and such cleverness does
not make easy reading. Mr. McCarthy, one of
his admirers, has said of the novels that "a man
or woman must be really in earnest to care much
about them at all." Really, our author seems to
be caught between the devil and the deep sea.
Yet criticise his style as you will, there is after all
a note of sincerity in it, something so naturally
148 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
artificial, if the paradox may be pardoned, that
we are prone to overlook its extravagances, and
can even appreciate its fascination for certain
minds. It may be pretty well characterised in his
own words as ' ' the puffing of a giant ; a strong
wind rather than speech."
To Stevenson, Meredith's is the only conversa-
tion since Shakespeare. It is a little hard to
understand Stevenson's unreasoning enthusiasm
for an author who is in every respect a direct con-
trast to him, a contrast nowhere more apparent
than in the dialogue of these novels. Mr. Mere-
dith's characters all talk Meredith ; they are all
epigrammatic, and all his fools are wits. This
might perhaps be pardoned, if our author had
only learned from Shakespeare the further art of
making his fools witty and natural at the same
time ; but it must be confessed that Mr. Meredith
too often employs language so artificial as entirely
to destroy the illusion. In one respect, however,
he has been led by his oblique method of thought
into a false kind of realism which a deeper sense
of art would have corrected. He says of one of
his characters that " she had not uttered words,
she had shed meanings ' ' ; and this is an admirable
description of much of his conversation. To be
sure, in real life we are apt to leave our thoughts
half expressed, or even to say one thing while an-
other thought is in our mind; but the artist should
remember that in actual conversation there are,
besides words, a hundred ways of conveying our
GEORGE MEREDITH 149
meaning which the printed page cannot employ.
To produce the same impression, the novelist's
language must necessarily be fuller and more ex-
plicit than is needed in life, and true realism
should recognise this difference. Generally Mr.
Meredith leaves his readers to gather this under-
current of thought as best they may, but in one
place he has been kind enough to add a comment
to the dialogue, which sets in so clear a light this
troublesome source of obscurity that I am tempted
to quote the passage in full, though it has already
been used for the same purpose. This conversa-
tion, then, between Rhoda Fleming and Robert
Eccles proceeds as follows:
"I've always thought you were born to be a lady."
(You had that ambition, young madam.)
She answered: "That's what I don't understand."
(Your saying it, O my friend !)
" You will soon take to your new duties." (You have
small objection to them even now.)
" Yes, or my life won't be worth much." (Know, that
you are driving me to it.)
" And I wish you happiness, Rhoda." (You are madly
imperilling the prospect thereof.)
To each of them the second meaning stood shadowy
behind the utterances. And further,
" Thank you, Robert." (I shall have to thank you for
the issue.)
" Now it 's time to part." (Do you not see that there
is a danger for me in remaining ?)
"Good-night." (Behold, I am submissive.)
" Good-night, Rhoda." (You were the first to give the
signal of parting.)
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
" Good-night." (I am simply submissive.)
" Why not my name ? Are you hurt with me ? "
Rhoda choked. The indirectness of speech had been a
shelter to her, permitting her to hint at more than she
dared clothe in words.
Again the delicious dusky rose glowed between his
eyes.
But he had put his hand out to her, and she had not
taken it.
"What have I done to offend you? I really don't
know, Rhoda."
" Nothing." The flower had closed.
*
Here as so often Mr. Meredith has himself fur-
nished the means of criticising him. Indeed, it
would be quite practicable to compose a full re-
view of his work by forming a cento of phrases
from his own pen. The conversation just quoted
has been commended for its high realism, and the
praise is not undeserved ; but unfortunately the
volumes are packed with dialogue of this oblique
character, where there is no comment added to
guide the bewildered reader. The intellectual
labour required for such writing is prodigious ;
the pity of it is that simpler language would be a
higher form of realism, because truer to life as life
must be expressed through the novelist's artistic
medium. It is in the larger sense an error of
style, the same error which has led him to break
up his thought into points, and leave the tedium
of the intellect everywhere disagreeably manifest.
I have called it the substitution of cleverness for
true wisdom ; and if Mr. Meredith stands far
GEORGE MEREDITH 15 1
above the ordinary shrewd writer of the day, it
is because he is genuinely clever where others
only strive to be so. In the end we are tempted
once more to turn against him his own weapon
of attack, and quote from The Egoist : " You see
how easy it is to deceive one who is an artist in
phrases. Avoid them, Miss Dale ; they dazzle
the penetration of the composer. That is why
people of ability like Mrs. Mountstuart see so
little ; they are so bent on describing brilliantly."
One cannot help remarking, in this connection,
how few of our English novel-writers are great as
stylists. It is a noteworthy fact that any other
class of authors essayists, historians, divines,
and even philosophers can boast a greater num-
ber of avowed masters of language. Fielding has
a strong virile style, but lacks charm and grace ;
Sterne is exquisite but capricious ; Jane Austen's /
language is as limpid as still water, and occasion- 1
ally as biting as acid, but fails in compass ; Haw-
thorne's style is perfect for romance, but scarcely
flexible enough for an ordinary novelist's use.
Perhaps Thackeray alone can be accounted a
master in word-craft, and certainly Meredith is
not the least peccant among the brotherhood.
For one who desires to penetrate into the secrets
of the art, I suppose no better course could be
adopted than the careful study of two books,
Henry Esmond and Castiglione's // Cortegiano ;
the former being the most perfect specimen
among English novels of the science of writing as
152 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
cunningly defined by the Italian. I was amazed,
recently, to find that not a single copy of Castig-
lione's famous work was discoverable in a city of
six hundred thousand inhabitants ; and indeed,
Italian literature in general is so little read among
us that it may not be amiss to transcribe a sen-
tence or two from // Cortegiano. This work, as
the name indicates, is a discussion of the qualities
necessary to form a perfect courtier, or, as we
should say to-day, gentleman ; and in the first
book, after dwelling at some length on the need
of grace in every action, the dialogue turns aside
to touch on the use of language or style, and
continues as follows:
Often I have considered in myself whence this grace
arises, and, leaving aside those who have received it from
the stars, I have discovered one universal rule which
more than any other seems to me in this respect to pre-
vail in all things that men do or say : and that is, so far
as possible, and as if it were a sharp and perilous rock, to
avoid affectation ; and, if I may be pardoned the word, to
adopt in everything a certain sprezzatura [I hardly know
how to translate the word ; it signifies an easy contempt
for the means employed, a sort of gentlemanlike su-
periority to the results] a certain sprezzatura, which
hides the art, and shows that what we say or do is done
without fatigue and as it were without taking thought.
From this, as I think, springs the highest grace; for
every one knows the difficulty of things rare and well
done, and in such things a sense of ease produces the
greatest wonder ; whereas, the display of force and effort
destroys the charm and detracts from the honour of things
that may be great in themselves. . . .
GEORGE MEREDITH 1 53
Now writing, in my opinion, is only a form of speech
which abides after the man has spoken, being an image,
or rather the life itself, of his words. Therefore, in
spoken language, which is dispersed with the breath that
formed it, a certain license is permitted beyond what is
allowed in writing ; for writing preserves speech, sub-
mitting it to the judgment of him who reads and afford-
ing time for mature consideration. Hence it is reasonable
to employ greater diligence in order that our written
language may be pure and elegant, but not to such a
degree that it should differ essentially from speech.
Castiglione was an avowed Platonist, and it is
probable that his conception of style is based on a
study of that philosopher who certainly, more than
any other writer of the past or present, succeeded
in combining the elements of grazia and sprezza-
tura. In reading Thackeray, I have often been
struck by a kind of similarity in his use of lan-
guage to Plato's; there is the same easy conversa-
tional tone, which is always graceful, and rarely,
even at its loosest, slipshod, and which on the
proper occasion can express sentiments of true
sublimity without the slightest apparent effort.
It is the complete absence of this grace and this
sprezzatura that renders so much of Meredith un-
comfortable and at times even painful reading.
And yet it must be confessed that now and again,
without losing the peculiar flavour of his style, he
is able to produce pages of a strange and haunting
beauty that almost atone for chapters of dreary
affectation. I have quoted Mr. Meredith in
condemnation of himself; scant justice calls for
154 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
quotation from that famous scene by the old weir
in Richard Fever el> withal one of the most enchant-
ing love scenes in our literature :
Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by
the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying
at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from
the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and
there also hung a daughter of earth. Her face was
shaded by a broad straw hat with a flexible brim that
left her lips and chin in the sun, and, sometimes nod-
ding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her
shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in
shadow, almost golden where the ray touched them. She
was simply dressed, befitting decency and the season.
On a closer inspection you might see that her lips were
stained. This blooming young person was regaling on
dewberries. They grew between the bank and the water.
. . . The little skylark went up above her, all song,
to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue : from
a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird
fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note : the king-
fisher flashed emerald out of green osiers : a bow-winged
heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped
toward her, containing a dreamy youth ; and still she
plucked the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy
prince were invading her territories, and as if she wished
not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the
green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the
weir-fall's thundering white, amid the breath and beauty
of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in
a fair setting ; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth
leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and
beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature,
as at the meeting of two electric clouds. Her posture
was so graceful, that though he was making straight for
GEORGE MEREDITH 155
the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one en-
ticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by
unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and
could not gather what it sought. A stroke from his
right brought him beside her. The damsel glanced up
dismayed, and her whole shape trembled over the brink.
Richard sprang from his boat into the water. Pressing a
hand beneath her foot, which she had thrust against the
crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself, he
enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth,
whither he followed her.
He had landed on an island of the still-vexed Ber-
moothes. The world lay wrecked behind him : Raynham
hung in mists, remote, a phantom to the vivid reality of
this white hand which had drawn him thither away
thousands of leagues in an eye-twinkle. Hark, how
Ariel sang overhead ! What splendour in the heavens !
What marvels of beauty about his enchanted brows !
And, O you wonder ! Fair Flame ! by whose light the
glories of being are now first seen. . . . Radiant
Miranda! Prince Ferdinand is at your feet.
I have delayed at some length on this matter of
language, because it is really of vital importance,
as vital, for instance, as colour to a painter, and
because in Meredith particularly an appreciation
of his style carries with it a pretty general under-
standing of his work as novelist. There is the
same lack of graceful ease, the same laboured in-
genuity in his narration and character- drawing.
His characters do not stand forth smoothly or
naturally, so that we comprehend them and live
with them without effort. We seem to be with
the author in his phrontisterion, or thinking-shop ;
156 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
there is continual evidence of the intellectual ma-
chinery by which his characters are created. To
some this creaking of the wheels and pulleys is so
offensive that they throw away the books in dis-
gust, while others, themselves professional writers
in large part, take an actual pleasure in seeing the
whole process of construction laid bare before
them. We have in Mr. Meredith's works the
analytical novel par excellence, and it would be
hard to exaggerate the contrast between these and
the perceptive novel, or novel of manners, of
which Thackeray is the great exemplar. There
is undoubtedly a certain legitimate joy of the in-
tellect in pure analysis ; yet it should seem that
in the novel, as in every other form of art, the
true master imitates nature more unconsciously,
more objectively, if you will. The actions and
thoughts of his characters present themselves to
his mind as a concrete reality, and so he repro-
duces them. It is rather the part of the scientist
to evoke a character from conscious analysis of
motives. I have heard an eminent critic censure
Thackeray as shallow, and extol Meredith for his
profundity, without perhaps pausing to reflect that
the same logic would condemn Shakespeare. In-
deed, such a question would resolve itself into a
debate over the respective profundity of art and
science surely the idlest of all possible questions.
More to the point is it to observe that the highest
pleasure, such as comes with a sense of inner ex-
pansion, and which art aims above all things to
GEORGE MEREDITH 157
bestow, is largely dependent on that sprezzatura
whose lack is felt as much in Mr. Meredith's
character study as in his style.
Despite the admirable narrative powers dis-
played in Rhoda Fleming and elsewhere, the same
lack of ease is too often manifest in the construc-
tion and plot of Mr. Meredith's stories. So diffi-
cult is it, for example, to follow the events in the
closing chapters of The Egoist that the pleasure of
a first reading of that inimitable book is consider-
ably diminished. But in the construction of these
novels there lurks a deeper error than mere want
of facility. We cannot but feel that the author
has shown unusual genius in a wrong direction ;
and in fact, strange as it may seem, any sound
criticism of Mr. Meredith must continually repro-
bate his methods, while at the same time admiring
his powers. To this is partly due, no doubt, the
extreme divergence of opinion in regard to his
work. It is easy to retort, as Mr. McCarthy re-
torted long ago, that the great advantage of the
novel lies in the very fact that it has not been
subjected to literary canons, and remains free to
follow any direction. Epic has been strangled by
epic law ; tragedy was for a long time suffocated
by the three unities; and so it has been with other
branches of literature ; but in the novel there is
no form admitted to be of itself right or wrong.
There is truth in this idea, and the nature of the
novel has kept it free from many useless restric-
tions. Yet, however we may welcome every form
l$g SttELBURNE ESSAYS
of narration, and even rejoice that novels are not
all cast in one mould, still our judgment must
distinguish, and must regard one form as higher
than another in so far as it is capable of arous-
ing greater and more satisfactory interest in the
reader.
Apart from the story of pure adventure, which
as a reaction has come into favour of late, but
which can never touch the reader's deeper feel-
ings, there have been from the beginning two
classes of novels ; and, although the terms may
be slightly misleading since the rules of prose and
poetical narration can never quite coincide, I
would distinguish these two classes as the epic
and the dramatic. Tom Jones is epic in its aim ;
Clarissa Harlowe is dramatic. The two schools
still persist side by side, and a clear understanding
of their different aims is of prime importance in
estimating the works under question.
It is rather a far cry from latter-day fiction to
Homer and Sophocles ; yet in distinguishing be-
tween the aims of epic and dramatic narration
one is tempted to appeal to Greek rather than to
modern poets, for the very reason that in Greece
the various genres were more sharply defined in
practice. The theme of the Iliad is ostensibly the
wrath of Achilles, but in reality the effect of the
poem is double. The central theme is heightened
and diversified by the picture of its influence on a
great series of events, while at the same time a
wonderful panorama of war and life is unrolled
GEORGE MEREDITH I $9
before us, to whose varied scenes unity of effect is
lent by the main subject. During a considerable
portion of the poem Achilles is almost forgotten.
No drama remains which deals directly with the
quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, but from the
other dramas of Sophocles it is not hard to con-
ceive how the action would appear on the stage.
The attention of the audience would be concen-
trated throughout on Achilles' s passion ; the lan-
guage employed would enhance its intensity; and
all the details of life not bearing directly upon it
would be omitted. In a sense, the aim of the epic
is breadth of view, the aim of tragedy is intensity,
the one proposes to offer a large picture of life
artistically disposed, the other to express a brief
passion or conflict. The drama which should at-
tempt to concentrate its passionate discourse upon
such a series of events as those depicted in the
epic would be intolerable. It would at once seem
out of proportion, for existence is not normally
narrowed down to one grand passion, and the
throwing of such intense light on the little details
of life would affect our emotional nature very
much as close confinement would affect the body :
we should gasp to be free. Besides keeping out
of view the trivial features of life, the tragedy
must further idealise by the generalising influence
of highly wrought metaphorical language. Com-
pare, for instance, one of Ibsen's plays with Mac-
beth. Ibsen has violated the law of tragedy by
descending to trivialities and by using prosaic
l6o SHELBURNE ESSAYS
language. The result is evident. He affects our
emotional nature strongly, more poignantly than
Shakespeare ; but we lay down such a play as
Ghosts with a sense of inner suffocation, whereas
Macbeth gives a feeling of expansion, and so, as
Aristotle would say, purges the passions. Ibsen
is as false to life as he is to art. Deep emotion in
reality tends to evoke general ideas, though in the
dumbness of our heart we may need a poet to give
them utterance. And all the while the daily trivial
events of existence go on about us as it were in
another sphere. We are conscious of a great gap
between them and our inner experience ; and
when at intervals the two spheres touch, the
shock is like a bitter awakening. Any artist
who confounds these regions of experience is false
to life and to his art.
And what has this to do with the novel ? Every-
thing. Despite its elasticity of form, the novel
which would do more than offer the lightest and
most transient amusement must in aim be either
epic or tragic, tragic not because of its disastrous
denouement necessarily, but in the way it treats
the deeper passions. Now, whatever else fiction
may be, its first purpose is to entertain ; and its
power of entertainment becomes of a higher and
more lasting character in so far as it succeeds in
enhancing our sense of life and in purging the
emotions. Tom Jones and the works of that class
down to the great novels of Thackeray offer a
picture of the large currents of life ; the passions
GEORGE MEREDITH l6l
and struggles of the hero are used, like the wrath
of Achilles, to give unity to the narrative ; and
we rise from perusing such books with a feeling
of expansion. Clarissa Harlowe and its succes-
sors, including modern problem novels, follow in
part the laws of tragedy. Everything revolves
about a single emotion ; and the longer and more
complicated the plot which the author is able to
concentrate upon this one emotion, the more con-
tracting and painful is the result. And this, we
maintain, is not an arbitrary question of literary
procedure, but a matter of psychology.
In the tragedy proper this sense of expansion is
obtained by purging the passions, by liberating
them from the sphere of petty details, and so de-
personalising them, and further by the use of
lofty thought couched in language far removed
above the speech of daily intercourse. Who ever
wept over Macbeth or Antigone? Indeed, the
story is well known that the Athenians actually
fined a dramatist for putting on the stage a tragedy
which appealed too strongly to their sympathies,
and forbade the play ever to be presented again.
But the novel which is denied the employment of
these tragic means must proceed in another man-
ner. Even more than the epos it must purge the
passions by enveloping them in the free current
of life, which proceeds serenely on its way un-
troubled by the anguish and complaints of the in-
dividual, and thus lighten the emotions of their
personal poignancy.
VOL. II. IX.
162 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Were space at our disposal, it would be possible
to analyse in detail each of Mr. Meredith's novels,
and show how they turn for their effect to the
laws of the drama rather than the epos, and how,
in consequence, they leave the reader with a sense
of contraction. So, in brief, Richard Feverel holds
the mind from first to last on a single problem
(and that, by the way, a fairly disagreeable one),
and every incident is made to bear upon its de-
velopment. There seems to be but one aspect
the sexual relation to human life ; and this is
presented without any of the alleviating circum-
stances of genuine tragedy. The point is made
clear at once by comparison with Tom Jones or
Pendennis^ where the infinite variety of human
activity is unrolled before us. So too in The
Egoist a single problem, as the name implies, is
studied with unflagging persistence. Not even a
complete character, but one predominant trait is
made the centre about which all the incidents of
the book revolve. The novel is unquestionably
a most astounding piece of analytical cleverness,
yet is it true to nature ? Hardly, we think. The
final impression is one of mental and emotional
contraction ; and however useful such an impres-
sion may be in a sermon, it is not altogether amus-
ing in a work of art. Compare the book with
Pride and Prejudice, where again a single trait in
hero and heroine is the central theme, but where
this theme is used rather to lend interest to a pic-
ture of life, a picture in miniature yet complete in
GEORGE MEREDITH 163
its way, and the difference is immediately appar-
ent. The one contracts, the other expands. Nor
should it be supposed that this difference depends
to any large extent on the tragic or non-tragic
ending of the plot ; although the formal law of
the epic demands a peaceful conclusion, and the
novel, to give the highest pleasure, would seeni
to follow the epic rather than the drama in this
respect also. Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter,
comes nearer to justifying the employment of the
tragic scheme in prose narration than any other
English novelist ; but to do this he has created a
style which carries his book almost out of the re-
gion of the novel. He has so subordinated the
realistic representation of life to a subtle all-per-
vading symbolism that his work is properly a
romance or prose- poem. That elevation and
generalising ideal which the tragedian effects by
means of his poetic medium, Hawthorne achieves
in part by his inimitable language and in much
greater part by putting aside all that close por-
trayal of life which forms the very substance of
the regular novel and by making his people and
his plot mere symbols of some inner shadowy
mood of the soul. His method is perfectly justi-
fied by the results, but one cannot read a page of
The Scarlet Letter without feeling that the author's
purpose and accomplishment are quite different
from those of Mr. Meredith or of any regular
novelist whose first aim is to portray real life. 1
1 As I read over these paragraphs written a number of
164 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
So much may be said to explain why a writer
of such extraordinary genius as Mr. Meredith
fails to produce works of art that can be ranked
with the greatest. And we would repeat that
these artistic laws which he transgresses are not
conventional rules imposed arbitrarily. They are
inherent in the medium which the novelist must
use; any infraction of them means that the author
does not adopt the best and highest method of
i giving pleasure at his disposal, and his error is
more likely to be condoned by the half-informed
critic than by the unreflecting reader of native
good taste.
In the case of Mr. Meredith the artistic fault is
more or less intimately connected with a still
deeper error, which concerns his mode of regard-
ing human nature, and which associates him to a
certain degree with the naturalists. The weak-
ness of the naturalistic novel has been exposed
more than once, but never, perhaps, so exhaus-
tively and competently as by Juan Valera in his
Nuevos Estudios. Naturalism is an outgrowth or
degradation, he would have it, of romanticism.
The romantic movement reflected an abnegation
of the will as controlled by reason, and a substitu-
tion in its place of the emotions guided by the
vagaries of fancy. From this untrammelled use
years ago the distinction between the epic and the dra-
matic novel seems to me essentially just, but incomplete.
At another time Clarissa Harlowe may furnish the occa-
sion for developing the theory.
GEORGE MEREDITH 165
of the fancy, naturalism, following in the wake
of the materialistic advances of science, turned to
the boasted study of reality, thus leaving room
neither for the free will nor for the imagination.
The novelist, according to Zola, " is one who
studies man experimentally, mounting and dis-
mounting piece by piece the human mechanism
by which, under the influence of environment, he
performs his functions. ' ' Here is no account of
man as a free agent ; his acts are the inevitable
outcome of his inherited disposition and surround-
ing circumstances. As Paul Alexis forcibly ex-
presses it in his book on Zola, " man is, fatally,
the product of a particular hereditary tempera-
ment, which unfolds itself in a certain physical,
intellectual, and moral environment."
It would be neither critical nor just to class Mr.
Meredith unreservedly with the naturalists. In
many respects he is widely removed from them.
Naturalism can flourish only where the audience
itself has lost faith in the will-power, and the
Anglo-Saxon race is too healthy to permit one of
its greatest writers to fall completely under this
decadent influence. Nevertheless, it is true that
such novels as Richard Feverel and The Egoist do /
belong in part to this category. So long as the
free will is paramount, a novel tends to depict a full
character, and to unfold a picture of life wherein V*
the individual acts upon the world, and the world
reacts upon him. So soon as the will is de-
throned, the novel tends to become a treatise on
l66 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the influence of environment upon character or ar
analytical study of particular inherited traits of
character. Just this has happened in the case of
Mr. Meredith. L,ike his own Captain Baskelett,
' ' the secret of his art would seem to be to show
the automatic human creature at loggerheads
with a necessity that winks at remarkable preten-
\ sions, while condemning it perpetually to doll-like
actions." Richard Feverel is a long and patiently
elaborated monograph on the development of
character under peculiar circumstances. Given a
lad of normal temper, how will he be affected by a
certain systematic course of training ? It will be
noticed, however, that the modifying influence is
here the active personality of his father ; we are
still a wide step from regarding man as a mere
mechanism. Justice will further add that, despite
the delicacy of its theme, the book remains per-
fectly decent throughout. In^T/ie Egoist a par-
ticular trait of character is analysed and expatiated
on with vast ingenuity and, it must be confessed,
rather tedious monotony. Indeed, the ordinary
fault of naturalism is its lack of interest, so thai
we see the genuine naturalists constantly seeking
to attract readers by all sorts of illegitimate allure-
ments of the animal senses. Juan Valera curtly
asks : ' ' How can such novels interest, when they
present a temperament, and not a character ; a
mere machine which moves in obedience to physi*
ological laws ? * '
\ Mr. Meredith is again far from portraying man
GEORGE MEREDITH 167
from the purely physiological point of view, al-
though parts of Richard Feverel and others of his
novels do approach perilously near this view, and
always there is in him a tendency to confuse
things of the body and of the spirit. This is seen
in his treatment of love and women, and more ^
generally in his analysis of the emotions. Now,
apart from the bald statement that a character feels
such and such an emotion, the novelist has at
command two modes of description, conversation
and physical action. Readers of Plato will re-
member that philosopher's scathing denunciation
of the poets, and of Homer in particular, because
of their portrayal of passion by means of physical
attributes. Their heroes weep, rend the hair,
roll on the ground, and give way to other demon-
strations which excite the critical Athenian's
scorn. Plato in this is consistent, for his dismis-
sal of the poets is but a part of his sweeping con-
demnation of art in general, in so far as art must
depend on the body for its power of expression.
There is undoubtedly in all art an insidious lurk-
ing danger, which, as Plato clearly sets forth, lies
in its tendency to relax the moral fibre by trans-
lating things spiritual into corporeal symbols. If
this be true, we ought to be more jealous of any
false encroachment of physical methods into its
realm; for there is a right and a wrong method,
and unfortunately Mr. Meredith has not always
kept in the narrow path. Physical actions, which
are under control of the will and thus remain to
1 68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
a great extent voluntary, are legitimate ; physical
states, which do not depend on the free agency
of the individual, must be used with a sparing
hand, for frequent recurrence to such means of
expression at once tends to confuse the spirit with
the body, and to offer us the study of a tempera-
ment in place of true characterisation. This
pathological mode of description is distinctly a
sin of modern times, culminating in the nauseous
abuse of the naturalists. It would be easy to
take all the great emotions of the heart, fear, re-
venge, love, jealousy, hate, rage, despair, and
show how differently they are treated in this re-
spect by Fielding or Thackeray and by writers of
the modern school. Here again the translation
of these passions into physical acts that depend on
the energy of the will leaves us with a sense of
expansion and mental relief, whereas the patho-
logical method disturbs and contracts. I cannot
emphasise this truth better than by quoting sev-
eral brief passages from Meredith, and allowing
them to speak for themselves. So he says of one
of his characters : " His head throbbed with the
hearing of a heavy laugh, as if a hammer had
knocked it." Elsewhere : ' ' His natural horror of
a resolute man, more than fear, made him shiver
and gave his tongue an acid taste." And again:
* * Btnilia thought of Wilfrid in a way that made
the vault of her brain seem to echo with jarred
chords." It is not, of course, the occasional re-
course to such means which is objectionable, but
GEORGE MEREDITH 169
their perpetual use. Every one will admit with
our novelist that ' ' we are all in submission to mor-
tal laws, ' ' but a stauncher belief in the power of
the will hesitates to accept his declaration that
"our souls are hideously subject to the conditions
of our animal nature! "
In one respect Mr. Meredith has carried this
passive physical expression to a fantastic ex-
tremity, which I mention as much for its amusing
absurdity as for its real significance. Apparently
he has found a new seat of all the emotions : this
is no longer the heart, or the Biblical bowels, or
the brain, but the eyelids. L,et me justify the
statement by quotations: " Hurt vanity led Wil-
frid to observe that the woman's eyes dwelt with a
singular fulness and softness void of fire, a true
ox-eyed gaze, but human in the fall of the eye-
lids. ' ' "She had reddened deliciously, and there-
with hung a dewy rosy moisture on her underlids."
"We are creatures of custom. I am, I confess, a
poltroon in my affections; I dread changes. The
shadow of the tenth of an inch in the customary
elevation of an eyelid! " These are not isolated
cases. After a while one begins to believe that
hope, fear, humour, love, hate, anger, horror,
friendship, cunning, timidity, modesty, all the
passions of human nature are bound up with the
flutter of an eyelid. It is the very ad absurdum of
passive physical description.
Mr. Meredith's psychological attitude may be
further traced in his characterisation of women.
170 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
It is, in fact, noteworthy that the present race of
novelists are wont to take more interest in, and
succeed better with, their feminine than their
male characters. But here we tread on perilous
ground. After all that has been written by women
on the failure of the masculine mind to grasp the
subtleties of the female heart, what man is rash
enough to step forward as a judge ? Fortunately
for me, a clever woman has settled the matter.
Miss Adeline Sargent has left on record that
"George Meredith is one of the few novelists of
any age or time who see not only man but woman
as she is." Strange that, after such an avowal,
she should object so vehemently to Mr. Mere-
dith's psychological analysis of woman ! We may
perhaps explain the discrepancy by supposing that
he depicts women as they are, though not as they
are to be. But let us hear Miss Sargent again.
She quotes from Meredith as follows: "Women
have us back to the conditions of the primitive
man, or they shoot us higher than the topmost
star. But it is as we please. Let them tell us
what we are to them: for us, they are the back
and front of life : the poet's L,esbia, the poet's
Beatrice, ours is the choice. They are to us what
we hold of best or worst within. ' ' Miss Sargent's
comment on this theory is naive : " In these sen-
tences there is an assumption of woman's want of
consciousness or want of volition in the matter."
So delicate is this subject that I may be pardoned
for again taking refuge behind authorities, this
GEORGE MEREDITH 171
time a man, but a man of the most feminine
genius. Mr. L,e Gallienne is enthusiastic in his
praise of our novelist, as will be seen: "In his de-
lineation of them [women] his fearless adoption
of the modern conception of the unity of body and
spirit finds its poetry. No writer with whom I
am acquainted has made us so realise ' the value
and significance of flesh,' and spirit as the flower
of it. In his women we seem to see the transmu-
tation in process." It is in the last analysis just
because Mr. Meredith discovers this "want of
volition" in human nature, and adopts so fear-
lessly this " modern conception of the unity of
body and spirit," that his feminine characters are
complete ; whereas his studies of men, though
wonderfully keen and incisive, always leave some-
thing to be desired. Clara Middleton and Diana,
with their feverish attempt at revolt, and their
final succumbing in marriage with a character of
placid but undeveloped strength, are perhaps his
most perfect creations. But I hasten to take
leave of this perilous subject, and with it of Mr.
Meredith.
In the end, I see that my criticism, whatever
its value, has been almost entirely destructive ; yet
I would not leave this as the final impression. In
spite of the error of his methods, Mr. Meredith is
a writer of extraordinary and, to me at least, fas-
cinating genius. If he cannot stand with the
three great novelists who were almost his contem-
poraries, this is due rather to perversion than to
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
feebleness of wit; and at the least he ranks far
above the common herd. One might say of him,
distorting Gray's familiar line,
Above the good how far but far beneath the great.
There are many reasons, and alas that it should
be so, for believing that the novel, like other liter-
ary forms in the past, has reached its highest per-
fection and is already declining in excellence.
Mr. Meredith, if compared with Thackeray and
his peers, shows only too clearly a decadent ten-
dency; yet what a treasure of enjoyment his wit
and imagination have left to the world! And so
refreshing at times is his obstinate originality that
one is almost tempted, when reflecting on the
tameness of lesser men, to extol his faults as
added virtues.
HAWTHORNE: LOOKING BEFORE AND
.AFTER
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was born just one
hundred years ago, and, by a happy coincidence,
the one artist who worked in materials thoroughly
American and who is worthy to take a place
among the great craftsmen of the world celebrates
his nativity on the birthday of the nation. 1 By
something more than a mere coincidence he lived
and wrote at the only period in the history of the
country which could have fostered worthily his
peculiar genius; he came just when the moral
ideas of New England were passing from the con-
science to the imagination and just before the
slow, withering process of decay set in. As I
read his novels and tales to-day, with the thought
of this centenary in my mind, the inevitable com-
parison arises with what preceded and what exists
1 On the Fourth of July, 1904, the centenary of Haw-
thorne's birth was celebrated at Salem, Mass., at Bow-
doin College and elsewhere. I was asked to write
something in commemoration of the season for the In-
dependent, and it seemed appropriate to consider Haw-
thorne's work historically, as the central point of a long
development in New England literature.
173
174 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
now; he stands as a connecting link between old
Cotton Mather and magna cum parvis Mary
Wilkins Freeman, and only by looking thus be-
fore and after can one get a clear idea of his
work.
It seldom happens, in fact, that the history of a
country shows so logical a development as that
represented by these three names. To look back-
ward, almost all of Hawthorne may be found in
germ in the group of ecclesiastical writers among
whom Cotton Mather rises pre-eminent, and he in
turn is but a spokesman of that half-civilisation
which migrated across the Atlantic under the
pressure of the L,audian persecutions. I say half-
civilisation, for the beginnings of New England
took place when the mother country was split, as
no people in the world ever before was divided,
not by sectional but by moral differences into two
hostile parties; nor do we always remember how
largely the brilliant flowering and quick decay of
New England depend on this incompleteness of
her origins. Especially is this true in literature.
Read through the critical essays that were written
in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages and you
will be struck by the fact that the most serious de-
bate was whether poetry had any right to exist at
all. That discussion, of course, is as old as Plato
and was taken up by the Italians of the Renais-
sance as part of their classical inheritance. But
in England the question was not academic, but
vital; it came to the actual test of battle. As
HAWTHORNE 175
early as 1579, in the very first bloom of that "per-
petual spring of ever-growing invention," Stephen
Gosson dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney his School
of 'Abuse ', which he aptly describes as " an invec-
tive against poets, pipers, players, jesters, and
such-like caterpillars of a Commonwealth."
" The fathers of lies, pipes of vanity, and schools
of abuse," to use another of the crabbed Gosson' s
phrases, remained snugly in the mother country,
along with those who thought it possible to wor-
ship God with the homage of the imagination,
who made of religion, in fact, a fine sense of de-
corum in the ordering of the world. The wonder
might seem to be that any literature at all ever
sprang from the half-civilisation that came to New
England, or that any sense of art found root
among a people who contemned the imagination
as evil and restricted the outpouring of emotion
to the needs of a fervid but barren worship. The
root was indeed long in coming to flower, yet
there are passages in the Magnalia of Cotton
Mather both magnificent in themselves and indis-
pensable for a right understanding of what was to
follow. There is, for example, that famous ac-
count of the death of John Cotton, worthy of re-
peated quotation:
After this in that study, which had been perfumed with
many such days before, he now spent a day in secret
humiliations and supplications before the Lord ; seeking
the special assistances of the Holy Spirit, for the great
work of dying, that was now before him. What glorious
176 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
transactions might one have heard passing between the
Lord Jesus Christ, and an excellent servant of his, now
coming unto him, if he could have had an hearing place
behind the hangings of the chamber, in such a day !
But having finished the duties of the day, he took his
leave of his beloved study, saying to his consort, / shall
go into that room no more /
That is the positive side of the ideal, and it is a
dull heart to-day that can read this story of rapt
holiness without a thrill of wonder and admira-
tion. But the negative side is close at hand. The
same annalist records of another of his family,
Nathaniel Mather, a little incident that shows
how inveterate was the suppression of the easy
enjoyments and emotions of life. The quotation
is from Nathaniel's diary:
When very young I went astray from God, and my
mind was altogether taken with vanities and follies ;
such as the remembrance of them doth greatly abase my
soul within me. Of the manifold sins which then I was
guilty of, none so sticks upon me, as that being very
young, I was whittling on the Sabbath-day ; and for fear
of being seen, I did it behind the door. A great reproach
of God ! a specimen of that atheism that I brought into
the world with me !
One may be inclined to smile, perhaps, at this
early intrusion into sacred literature of the Yan-
kee's proverbial trick of whittling, but he will be
more apt to marvel at the austerity of a discipline
which could associate such a childish escapade
with life-long remorse. It is not strange that
HAWTHORNE 177
melancholy hovered over that chosen land. To
quote from the Magnalia once again :
There are many men, who in the very constitution of
their bodies, do afford a bed, wherein busy and bloody
devils, have a sort of lodging provided for them. . . .
'Tis well if self-murder be not the sad end, into which
these hurried people are chus precipitated. New Eng-
land, a country where splenetic maladies are prevailing
and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded
numberless instances, of even pious people, who have
contracted those melancholy indispositions, which have
unhinged them from all service or comfort; yea not a
few persons have been hurried thereby to lay violent
hands upon themselves at the last. These are among
the unsearchable judgments of God !
It is not fanciful, I think, to find in these three
passages from the greatest of the early New Kng-
land divines the ideas that were in due time to
blossom into a true and peculiar literature. That
isolation from the world and absorption in an
ideal that signalised the death of John Cotton were
to leave an echo in many lives through the follow-
ing years. Nor did the inability to surrender to
the common expansive emotions of human nature
and the dark brooding on damnation utterly die
out when the real cause ceased to act. They
changed, but did not pass away. When, with
the coming of the nineteenth century, the fierce
democracy of those Northern States asserted itself
against priestly control and at the same time
shook off the bondage of orthodoxy, it only moved
VOL. II. 12.
1?8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the burden from one shoulder to the other, and
the inner tyranny of conscience became as exact-
ing as the authority of the Church had been.
But this shifting of the centre of authority from
without to within was at least fruitful in one im-
portant respect: it brought about that further
transition from the conscience to the imagination
which made possible the only serious literature
this country has yet produced. In that shift
from the conscience to the imagination lies the
very source of Hawthorne's art. The awful voice
of the old faith still reverberates in his stories of
New England life and gives them their depth of
consciousness; the dissolution of the commands
of a sectarian conscience into the forms of a subtle
symbolism lifts them from provincial importance
merely to the sphere of universal art.
Nor is it at all difficult to follow the religion of
the seventeenth into the art of the nineteenth
century. In an earlier essay on The Solitude of
Nathaniel Hawthorne I pointed out what must
be plain to every reader of that author the cen-
tral significance of his Ethan Brand in the circle
of his works. So manifestly do the doctrines of
Cotton Mather stalk through that tale under the
transparent mask of fiction that it might almost
seem as if Hawthorne had taken the passages just
quoted from the Magnalia as a text for his fancy.
For the first quotation, in place of the rigid theo-
logian " perfuming" the bleak atmosphere of his
study with meditations on the great work of dying
HAWTHORNE 179
orthodoxly, we have Ethan Brand, the lime-
burner, dwelling in the fragrant solitude of the
mountains, watching his kiln through the long
revolutions of the sun and the stars, perplexing
his mind with no problem of predestination and
free-will, but with the meaning of life itself, with
its tangle of motives and restraining intelli-
gence. For the second quotation, in place of
remorse over one act of surrender to impulse
against the arbitrary dictates of religion, we
have a strange reversal of Puritan faith through
the lens of the imagination. Ethan Brand
returns to his long-abandoned lime-kiln after
wandering over the world, bringing with him
the sense that he has sought and found at
last in his own heart the Unpardonable Sin, the
sin of banishing from the breast all those natural,
spontaneous emotions in the pursuit of an idea.
He bears the mark, not of an artificial atheism,
like that which abased the soul of the young
divine, but of that ananthropism (if I may use the
word) which was the real sin of New England,
symbolised by the strange nature of his successful
search. " He had lost his hold of the magnetic
chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-
man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of
our common nature by the key of holy sympathy,
which gave him a right to share in all its secrets;
he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind
as the subject of his experiment. ' ' There lies the
tragedy not of Ethan Brand alone, but of the
180 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
later New England. The dogmas of faith had
passed away and left this loneliness of an unmean-
ing idealism; the enthusiasm which had trampled
on the kindly emotions of the day has succumbed,
and the contempt of the human heart has given
place to this intolerable loneliness.
And last of all there is the " splenetic malady,"
the melancholy that pursues this thwarting of na-
ture and drives the wanderer to lay violent hands
on himself. The burning of Ethan Brand in the
lime- kiln, within the circle of whose crimson light
he had pondered the Unpardonable Sin, is not,
in the sense of Cotton Mather, one of the un-
searchable judgments of God, but a cunningly
devised symbol of literary art.
This is the second act of the New England
drama, and the third proceeds from it as naturally
as the second proceeded from the first. From the
religious intolerance of Cotton Mather to the im-
aginative isolation of Hawthorne and from that
to the nervous impotence of Mrs. Freeman's men
and women, is a regular progress. The great
preacher sought to suppress all worldly emotions;
the artist made of the solitude which follows this
suppression one of the tragic symbols of human
destiny; the living novelist portrays a people in
whom some native spring of action has been dried
up, and who suffer in a dumb, unreasoning in-
ability to express any outreaching passion of the
heart or to surrender to any common impulse of
the body. It is true, of course, that Mrs. Freeman
HAWTHORNE l8l
describes only a single phase of New England
character, just as Hawthorne did before her; but
the very genealogy of her genius shows that she
has laid hold of an essential trait of that charac-
ter, and, indeed, it needs but little acquaintance
with the stagnant towns of coast and mountains
to have met more than one of the people of her
books actual in the flesh. Her stories are not
tragic in the ordinary sense of the word; they have
no universal meaning and contain no problem
of the struggle between human desires and the
human will, or between the will and the burden
of circumstances. They are, as it were, the echo
of a tragedy long ago enacted; they touch the
heart with the faint pathos of flowers pressed
and withered in a book, which, found by chance,
awaken the vague recollection of outlived emo-
tions. They are very beautiful in their own way,
but they are thoroughly provincial, just as the
treatises of Cotton Mather were provincial; they
have passed from the imagination to the nerves.
Already in Hawthorne we find the beginnings
of this strangely repressed life. Hepzibah Pyn-
cheon, struggling in an agony of shame and im-
potence to submit to the rude contact of the world,
is the true parent of all those stiffened, lonely
women that haunt the scenes of Mrs. Freeman's
little stage. Only there is this signal difference:
poor, blighted Hepzibah is part of a great drama
of the conscience which in its brooding over the
curse of ancestral sin can only be compared with
182 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the Ate of the ^Eschylean theatre. All the char-
acters that move within the shadow of that House
of the Seven Gables are involved in one tragic
idea assimilated by the author's imagination from
the religious inheritance of the society about him
the idea that pride, whether worldly or un-
worldly, works out its penalty in the separation
of the possessor from the common heart of hu-
manity. But in Mrs. Freeman's tales this moral
has utterly vanished; they have no significance
beyond the pathos of the lonely desolation de-
picted. Her first book, A Humble Romance, is
made up of these frustrate lives, which are with-
held by some incomprehensible paralysis of the
heart from accepting the ordinary joys of hu-
manity, and her latest book, The Givers, appeals
to our sympathy by the same shadow of a fore-
gone tragedy.
Very characteristic in the first book is the story
of the Two Old Lovers. There was nothing to
keep them apart, none of the well-used obstacles
of romance in the shape of poverty or tyrannous
parents or religious differences or an existing
alliance nothing save the ingrown inability of
the man to yield to the simple call of his own
bosom. For many years he visits the girl and,
as time passes, the aged woman, as an accepted
but curiously undemonstrative lover. There is,
to me at least, a pathos like the nightly memory
of tears in the watchfulness of the waiting woman
over her diffident wooer;
HAWTHORNE 183
She saw him growing an old man, and the lonely, un-
cared-for life that he led filled her heart with tender pity
and sorrow for him. She did not confine her kind offices
to the Saturday baking. Kvery week his little house was
tidied and set to rights, and his mending looked after.
Once, on a Sunday night, when she spied a rip in his
coat, that had grown long from the want of womanly
fingers constantly at hand, she had a good cry after he
had left and she had gone to her room. There was some-
thing more pitiful to her, something that touched her
heart more deeply, in that rip in her lover's Sunday coat,
than in all her long years of waiting. As the years went
on, it was sometimes with a sad heart that Maria stood
and watched the poor lonely old figure moving slower
than ever down the street to his lonely home ; but the
heart was sad for him always, and never for herself.
Only in the end, when he lies dying in his solitary
house and she is summoned to his bedside, does
the approach of the great silence of death unlock
the dumbness of his breast:
He looked up at her with a strange wonder in his
glazing eyes. "Maria" a thin, husky voice, that was
more like a wind through dry cornstalks, said "Maria,
I 'm dyin', an' I allers meant to have asked you to
marry me."
Is it fanciful to say that this story has the
shadowy pathos of emotions long ago fought
against and overcome? The tragedy of New
England came when Hawthorne wrought the
self-denial of the ancient religion into a symbol
of man's universal isolation, when out of the
deliberate contemning of common affections he
1 84 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
created the search for the Unpardonable Sin.
In the pages of Mrs. Freeman we hear only an
echo, we revive a fading memory, of that sombre
tragedy. Ethan Brand was a problem of the
will, a question of morality; the tale of the Two
Old Lovers is a sad picture of palsied nerves.
The latest volume of Mrs. Freeman's sketches
treats the same theme, with this difference, how-
ever, that here it is the woman who abandons her
lover for many years, returning to him only when
both are grown old and past the age of spon-
taneous pleasures. There is perhaps some soften-
ing of tone, a kindlier feeling that into this strange
desolation of the heart some consolation of the
spirit may descend with chastened joy. Hardly
in the earlier books, I think, will one find any
picture of the possible mellowing effect of solitude
comparable to this description of the waiting
lover:
He was a happy man, in spite of the unfulfilled natural
depths of his life. His great sweetness of nature had
made even of the legitimate hunger of humanity a bless-
ing for the promoting of spiritual growth. It had fos-
tered within him that grand acquiescence which is the
essence of perfect freedom.
But beautiftn\as this grand acquiescence may be,
it is not in that direction lies the real freedom of
New England life or literature. Rather shall the
deliverance come in the way hinted at in that
other phrase, the hunger of humanity. The whole
HAWTHORNE 185
progress from Cotton Mather to Mrs. Freeman
was determined by the original attempt to stamp
out that legitimate hunger for the sake of an all-
absorbing pride of the spirit. And now, when the
spirit, after having been victorious in the long
warfare, has itself starved away and left the bar-
renness of a dreary stagnation, the natural reversal
may well be looked for, and we may expect the
hunger of humanity to grow up out of the waste,
untempered by spiritual ideals. Already in the
New England of Hawthorne, in the exaggerated
sentimentalism of the abolitionists and a thousand
other reforming sects, this movement had begun.
Hawthorne himself, despite his humorous in-
sight and his aloofness from the currents of life
about him, did not wholly escape its influence.
Through the dark pages of The House of the Seven
Gables moves the hopeful figure of young Hoi-
grave, the daguerreotypist. To him, says Haw-
thorne, thinking no doubt of the burden that
weighed on his own imagination, it seemed ' ' that
in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless
institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their
dead corpses buried, and everything to begin
anew." There is a world of significance in the
analysis which follows of Holgrave's restless and
ardent nature, of his generous impulses, that
might solidify him into the champion of some
practical cause. He is the type of a whole race of
men who were to take revenge on the despotism
1 86 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of the spirit by casting it out altogether for the
idealised demands of the hunger of humanity.
But what was foreshadowed in Hawthorne
becomes the one dominant human note of Mrs.
Freeman's stories, heard through the desert si-
lence that otherwise encompasses her characters.
This vision of a growing humanitarianism that
shall awaken new motives for healthy, active life
and feed the hunger of the heart is the real theme
of the best of her novels, Jerome. There is a scene
in that book where the hero, beaten and marred
by hard circumstance, suddenly gives vent in his
awkward, unschooled manner to the late-born re-
calcitrance against the tyranny of Providence:
What was it to the moon and all those shining swarms
of stars, and that far star-dust in the Milky Way, whether
he, Jerome Edwards, had shoes to close or not ? Whether
he and his mother starved or not, they would shine just
the same. . . . He was maddened at the sting and
despite of his own littleness in the face of that greatness.
Suddenly a wild impulse of rebellion that was almost
blasphemy seized him. He clinched a puny fist at a
great star. "Wish I could make you stop shinin'," he
cried out, in a loud, fierce voice; "wish I could do
somethin' !"
And then, later, comes the companion scene,
again under the cold eyes of the heavens, when
the final determination takes shape before him
and he sees at last the work which the world
holds for him:
A great passion of love and sympathy for the needy
and oppressed of his kind, and an ardent defence of
HAWTHORNE l8/
them, came upon Jerome Edwards, poor young shoe-
maker, going home with his sack of meal over his shoul-
der. Ivike a bird, which in the spring views every little
straw and twig as toward his nest and purpose of love,
Jerome would henceforth regard all powers and instru-
mentalities that came in his way only in their bearing
upon his great end of life.
We have followed the development of that half-
civilisation which moulded New England from the
religious enthusiasm of Cotton Mather, through
the tragic art of Hawthorne, down to the pathetic
paralysis portrayed in these stories of a living
writer. We have seen a morbid spirituality,
spurning the common nourishment of mankind,
slowly starve itself into impotence. Now, as the
hunger of humanity begins to assert itself un-
hampered by any vision beyond its own impor-
tunate needs, are we to behold a new ideal create
in turn another half-civilisation, blindly material-
istic as its predecessor was harshly spiritual?
That question may not be lightly answered.
Only it is clear that, for the present, the way of
growth for the literature of New England lies
through the opening of this door of strictly human
sympathies.
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE
THE wise Greek was taught to judge the poets
of his land according to their influence on char-
acter, and to ask first whether they made men
better in the cities. Only with Aristotle, when
poetry ceases to be an organic part of civic life,
do we find criticism that approaches the dreary
canon of " art for art's sake." So keen indeed
was this sense of moral responsibility that Homer
himself did not escape frequent censure for his
picture of the easy-living gods, and Plato, recalling
complacently ' ' the ancient difference between
philosophy and poetry," would banish the singers
from his ideal state. Even the analytic mind of
the Greeks had not effected a divorce between
ethics and aesthetics; and on our part we may as-
sume that a true appreciation of the circumstances
under which their literature arose, and of the in-
fluence it exercised on this beauty -loving people,
as indeed any sound criticism of the literature
itself, must start from a sufficient study of the
ethical ideas it sought to convey.
It may be surmised at the outset of such a study
that Homer and his successors are pre-eminent
artists, not by reason of form alone, but because
188
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 189
they also embody more truth, more wise reflection
in short, because they present a fairer criticism
of life than is readily to be found elsewhere. It
is a contradiction that Homer and Sophocles
should be reckoned unsurpassed as poets, and
their views of life be regarded as immature and
incapable of instruction for our more experienced
age. Better were it to accept at once the standard
of Greece, and judge by their ethical import the
poets she was wont to honour as sages. If en-
couragement were needed for examining these
ancient works with such seriousness, it might be
found in the supposition that in our own land no
important revival, or shall we say creation, of
literature is likely to arise except from a renas-
cence of interest in Greek ; and that further such
a study may throw a curious light on the religious
and moral confusion now troubling our minds.
For we have ' * traversed many paths in the wan-
derings of thought," and like Odysseus of old
have reached an ^Esean island, where we know
neither the rising nor the setting of the sun and
doubt if there be any counsel for us. We, too,
like the companions of Odysseus, may meet with
some Circe to change us into bestial shapes, un-
less a god intervene with help.
Granted then that Greek literature owes its ex-
cellence largely to its ethical content, the question
first arises: Was there any one precept, any one
phase of moral truth, so constantly before the
people as to become a master law to which the
IQO SHELBURNE ESSAYS
particular rules of conduct may be referred back,
and of which literature and art may be regarded
as the manifold expression? Now it was the
established custom of the Greeks themselves,
when about to undertake a hazardous voyage of
conquest or discovery, to consult the oracle of
Apollo at Delphi. The gifts through centuries
of grateful kings and states had made Delphi one
of the great treasure houses of the world. So
numerous were the works of art collected here,
that even after the depredations of Sulla and
Nero it still displayed three thousand statues in
the time of Pliny; and in the days of its glory it
must have delighted the religious pilgrim with
more beauty than can be seen now in all the
galleries of Europe. The spot was well chosen
for the oracle of Greece. We may imagine
the traveller, anxious at heart perhaps with the
question he was to propound, climbing up the
mountain side from Cirrha on the gulf, or wind-
ing westward along the inland road that followed
the valley of the Pleistus. He had been taught
to regard the high hills as the peculiar dwelling-
place of the gods, and to believe that each globe
of mist hovering on a lonely summit might veil
the bodily presence of a divinity. The wild
scenery of Parnassus, with its misty hollows and
twin peaks rising into the sky, was calculated to
exalt his religious mood to a state of reverent
enthusiasm. It was remarked that even the at-
mosphere of the place had a peculiarly subtile,
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 19!
biting quality which affected strangely the bronze
of statuary; and this may have been a physical
stimulus to the mind also. What must have been
the feeling of admiration when the temple with
its marble front first came into view. Euripides
in one of his most exquisite scenes represents a
band of Athenian women coming to the shrine in
the early dawn. Ion, the child of Apollo and
dedicated from birth to the service of the god, is
seen sweeping with laurel boughs the vestibule
and sprinkling the pavement with lustral water
brought in golden pitchers from the Castalian
fount. Now with threatening arrows he drives
away the polluting birds that would nest under
the eaves, and again and again he cries out in
joy,
O Paean, Paean, thou from Leto sprung,
Forever be thou blest, forever young!
The chorus of Athenian women appears winding
up toward the temple. They are rapt in wonder
at the rich scene unfolded before them: one after
another they point to the statues of Hercules
slaying the Hydra while lolaus stands by with
kindled torch; of Bellerophon on the winged
horse, smiting the monstrous Chimaera; of the
gods engaged in battle with the giants. To be-
hold this unravaged beauty with the Athenian
women under the morning sky must have been a
joy such as the modern world can hardly equal.
If we had undertaken to enter into the temple,
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
we should have been met at the threshold by the
greeting of the god. It is recorded that on the
columns were inscribed the wisest proverbs of
the land; and these were taken to be Apollo's
welcome to his visitor. Several of these sentences
we know, and two of them are distinguished by
later writers as of the deepest import to Greek
philosophy. So Plutarch somewhere alludes to
them. "Consider," he says, " these inscriptions,
Know thyself and Nothing too much ; how many
philosophical discussions they have called forth,
and how great a multitude of words has sprung
from each as from a seed." Plato was never tired
of quoting them; especially in the Charmides he
weaves them into his argument on temperance
with admirable skill (164 D; Jowett): "And in
this I agree with him who dedicated the inscrip-
tion, ' Know thyself! ' at Delphi. That word, if
I am not mistaken, is put there as a sort of salu-
tation which the god addresses to those who enter
the temple; as much as to say the ordinary salu-
tation of ' Hail! * is not right, and that the exhor-
tation ' Be temperate! ' would be a far better way
of saluting one another. The notion of him who
dedicated the inscription was, as I believe, that
the god speaks to those who enter his temple not
as men speak; but, when a worshipper enters, the
first word he hears is ' Be temperate! ' This,
however, like a prophet he expresses in a sort of
riddle, for ' Know thyself! ' and ' Be temperate! '
are the same, as I maintain, and as the letters im-
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 193
ply, and yet they may be easily misunderstood;
and succeeding sages who added ' Nothing too
much,' or ' Give a pledge, and evil is nigh at
hand,' would appear to have so misunderstood
them; for they imagined that 'Know thyself!'
was a piece of advice which the god gave, and
not his salutation of the worshippers at their first
coming in; and they dedicated their own inscrip-
tion under the idea that they too would give
equally useful pieces of advice." So far the
Charmides ; elsewhere Plato writes (Protag., 343
B): " And they [the seven Sages] met together
and dedicated in the temple of Apollo at Delphi,
as the first-fruits of their wisdom, the far-famed
inscriptions, which are in all men's mouths,
1 Know thyself and ' Nothing too much.' " We
have come to the god for instruction; let us accept
his words of salutation for the advice desired. If
Apollo may be trusted, in these two brief commands
we shall find a sure guide for our proposed study.
Fortunately we need not stop here to discuss
the authorship of these apothegms. They were
ascribed to various members of the fabulous guild
of Sages, or even to a period antedating that
august body. Indeed, there was a tradition,
fostered no doubt by the priests, that Apollo him-
self was the author of ' ' Know thyself. ' ' At any
rate the guardians of the oracle, by writing the
words on the temple, had assumed the responsi-
bility of them for the god.
Neither is their significance hard to discover.
VOL. II. 13.
,94 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
" Nothing too much " is the rule of outward con-
duct. It does not say, This thou shalt do, and
that thou shalt not do; but rather in the words
of Saint Paul, " All things are lawful unto me,
but all things are not expedient: all things are
lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the
power of any." Evil, accordingly, is not essen-
tially inherent in particular acts; but the carrying
of any act to excess is transgression; failure to
strike the true mean is error; and we shall find
that transgression or error is rebuked as due more
often to ignorance than to malevolence. Evil is
commonly regarded not as sin committed wilfully
against divine law, but as harm done to self or
to the community by ill-regulated conduct. In
manners this leads easily to the ideal of rhonnte
homme qui ne se pique de rien. A perfect gentle-
man was shown by balance in acquisition and
comportment: he might not even learn music too
well, lest he should mar the just proportion of
attainments. Thus even what is good may be
desired in excess, and we have in Greece the
warning solemnly emphasised by Ecclesiastes:
" Be not righteous over much, neither make thy-
self over wise." Regarding man's position in
the world, too great prosperity also has its danger
and may awaken the jealousy of the gods. This
sentiment pervades the histories of Herodotus,
and is the subject of that famous letter to Poly-
crates: " It is sweet to learn the good fortune of
a friend united to us by ties of hospitality; yet I
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 195
am not content with thy great prosperity, know-
ing the envy of the divine nature; and I may say
I wish both for myself and my connections tc
speed here and to fail there in my doings, with
chequered fortune. ... Be therefore per-
suaded of me and do as I bid in respect of thy
prosperity. Consider what thou mayst find of
highest value to thee, and what if lost would
bring greatest regret to thy heart, and this cast
away from thee, so as it shall never again be seen
among men." The same thought is common
enough in the writers of the period, however the
quaintness of its form here is peculiar to the
historian. The dramas of ^schylus repeat over
and over again the same warning against over-
ripe prosperity whose offspring are insolence and
blindness of heart and avenging calamity. In
the proper place it would be a fruitful exercise to
compare this idea as presented by the tragedian
and by the historian. In statecraft Solon had
raised it to be the cause of eunomy, or good gov-
ernment, "which," as he says, "should make
order and harmony to rule everywhere; which
should bind with chains the evil, make smooth
the rough, lower false pride, restrain violence,
and nip the flowers of calamity in the bud; . . .
and under her sway all things among men should
become harmonious and reasonable." Theognis
and others have the same ideal always before
them: indeed it arises naturally enough from
human experience.
196 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
As this principle of moderation sums up the
empirical wisdom of Greek literature, so it is the
formal law of the poet and artist. "In der Be-
schrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister," writes
Goethe. In the strict setting of bounds to his
own faculties and to his subject-matter, we may
perhaps find the chief characteristic of the Greek
artist, as form resulting from proportion of parts
is the supreme excellence of his work. This
voluntary limitation is everywhere discoverable.
In language its result is a sharp distinction in
style; prose and poetry have their separate vo-
cabularies, and each branch of the latter has its
appropriate dialect. It penetrates still deeper
into style and causes that justness of emphasis,
that avoidance of undue stress which attaches to
the word classic. In treatment of the subject-
matter the result is no less marked. Thucydides
and Sophocles are both Athenians and contempo-
raries, yet they seem to speak from two different
worlds, so sharply defined are the aims of historian
and poet. Furthermore, each department of verse
has its own laws and themes which together
cover the range of human experience, yet never
intermingle. A still deeper limitation is observed.
Only those subjects and ideas are treated which
can be fully and luminously expressed; vague
thoughts, fleeting emotions, shadowy similitudes,
everything that would blur the general outline,
la nuance, in short, is voluntarily renounced.
Hence, however other literatures may compare
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 197
with .the Greek in respect of content, depth of
thought, breadth of experience, and fineness of
feeling, yet in formal beauty at least the master
writers of Hellas have had no rivals. By a sort
of racial instinct they are led to avoid excess of
any kind. This law of limitation sometimes pro-
duces in the works of lesser men a meagreness
and jejuneness irritating to the modern reader;
but in the masterpieces of the true artists, who
sounded the national consciousness, and who
were strong enough to hold their ideas and mould
them at will, it has brought about a perfect bal-
ance and poise comparable only to the sculpture
of the same land. Shakespeare may, with Homer,
stand apart from other poets. They rise together
into the sky like the twin peaks of Parnassus,
and in them the Old World and the New meet
with equal and sufficient champions. We read
Shakespeare and are lost in amazement at the
boundless fertility of the human mind. Every
word is a metaphor, and all the emotions and
thoughts of the heart chase one another through
his lines. But sometimes, may it be confessed,
we turn with a feeling almost of relief from the
unrestrained exuberance of the modern genius
to the simplicity and graceful self-control of the
ancient. At first, it may be, we miss in the
older poem certain profounder voices of the soul
that speak of moral claims and experience won
by centuries of suffering; we call the Greek shal-
low. But if the real depth of a poem is to be
198 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
measured by its grasp on the essential passions of
humanity, there will be found in Homer a truth-
fulness and vividness in presenting these that may
rival Shakespeare himself, while man's relation-
ship to the divine world about and the dark mys-
teries below is pictured with a simplicity that
lends unparalleled beauty to human activity, and
with a depth of wisdom, of which forgetfulness
and long sophistication have to-day almost de-
prived us.
" Nothing too much " was the law of the artist
in his effort to create; so in abstract terms it de-
fined for the philosopher the process of cosmic
creation, or ceaseless becoming, as he would
have called it. On the other hand, from a rule
of prudential wisdom it passed readily into the
ethics of the schools. Beginning with Pythagoras,
its influence down through Aristotle may be un-
erringly traced in a variety of forms. Only with
this key can we unlock the strange doctrine of
Pythagoras (strange to us but perfectly simple to
his countrymen) regarding the finite and the in-
finite. The finite is good because bounded by
just limits; the infinite is bad because it escapes
these limits. Numbers are the expression of
quantity and limitation, and as such produce
the famous Pythagorean harmony ruling in the
heavens and in man. Akin to this conception is
the formal cause of Aristotle, between which and
the earlier theory stand the ideas of Plato as a
mediating ground. Matter, according to the
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 199
Stagirite, is eternal and formless, form is eternal
and substanceless; from the union of these, that
is, from the law of limitation, springs the world
fashioned harmoniously, as we behold it. And
the final cause, which is the aim and purpose of
this union, will be satisfied when this infinite
amorphous matter is completely subjected to
form.
If, morally, " Nothing too much" receives its
ultimate expression in the ethics of Aristotle,
where every virtue becomes a mean between two
vices, the one of excess, the other of deficiency,
the sister saying, " Know thyself," may be held
to attain its full development in the mystic phi-
losophy of Plato. So in the Phadrus we read:
" I must first know myself, as the Delphian in-
scription says; to be curious about that which is
not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of
my own self, would be ridiculous." Self-know-
ledge in the Academy became the beginning and
end of philosophic discipline. In this sense it
may be taken to express the inner spiritual phase
of Greek life, just as the " golden mean" gives
the model of outward practical conduct. Yet
how closely the two formulas are related may be
seen in the very philosophers who represent the
extreme of each. The argument of Plato's Re-
public amounts to this: By self-knowledge we
learn the nature of the soul and of the three facul-
ties working together in it. Consequently upon
such knowledge each faculty performs duly its
200 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
proper function and attains its respective virtue,
the rational faculty being thus distinguished by
wisdom, the will by courage, the sensuous nature
by temperance. The fourth virtue, justice, is
still to be accounted for. This must be the har-
monious interaction of the three faculties, each
working within strict bounds and not encroaching
on the function of the other two. The highest
virtue, then, which practically includes the others,
is no more than the application of the Delphian
' * Nothing too much ' ' to the soul itself. On the
other hand, Aristotle's ethical theory may be
summed up as follows: Each virtue is defined as
the golden mean between two vices; activity of
the soul in accordance with virtue is happiness;
and happiness is the end of life. The supreme
happiness is such activity of the highest faculty
of the soul, that is, the reason : man cannot dwell
continuously and absolutely in this activity, but
can only aim to approach such a state. Its attain-
ment is the contemplative life of the deity passed
in self-reflection; and this may be called his distin-
guishing virtue, for of him activity toward others
cannot be predicated. Curiously, Plato starts
from self-knowledge and ends with * ' Nothing too
much"; his rival begins with the latter and ar-
rives at self-knowledge. One proceeds from
within outward; the other argues from conduct
inward.
But this clear distinction, by which the two
apothegms express the inner and outer faces of
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 2OI
the same truth, arose only after subtle analysis
had been brought to bear on them. Primarily
they were used almost without discrimination, as
is evident from the passage of Plato's Charmides
quoted above. " Know thyself" at first meant
simply, Know thy place in this world as a man
among men, and as a mortal subject to the im-
mortal gods; be moderate, aim not too high.
Abundant illustration of this might be offered.
Such, for example, is the meaning of the words
when put into the mouth of the seven Sages, as
may be proved from the number of proverbs that
contain the same admonition in different forms,
Periander's warning command, " Think as a
mortal," being perhaps the clearest exposition
of the thought. The worldly Simonides is said
to have given similar advice to Pausanias, " Re-
member thou art a man," words whose signifi-
cance was revealed only too clearly to the
overweening general in his last imprisonment.
The same lesson is conveyed in the story of
Croesus as told by Herodotus; and Xenophon,
doubtless with a reminiscence of the famous dia-
logue of the earlier historian, relates of the same
prince that he asked the Delphian oracle in what
way he might pass the remainder of his life
happily, and received this answer:
Knowing thyself, O Croesus, thou shalt pass through life
happy.
Croesus rejoiced on hearing this, and thought it
202 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
an easy task; others we may know, or may not,
but any man may know himself. Only after his
defeat by Cyrus did he recognise his error; for in
attempting to strive with so great a foe he had
proved his own self-ignorance. Similarly one 01
Plutarch's characters in sportive conversation de-
clares that Homer was the author of these pro-
verbs, and maintains that Hector knew himself,
who attacked others but " avoided combat with
Telamonian Ajax."
These illustrations will show how the primitive
meaning of the injunction persisted into a late
age. Yet its deeper spiritual force had been
partly recognised almost a century before the
revolution introduced by Socrates and the
sophists. Thus we read in Plutarch: "And
Heracleitus, as if he had done some great and
serious thing, says ' I searched out myself ' ; and
of the inscriptions at Delphi this seemed to him
the most divine, ' Know thyself.' " Aristotle
assures us it was from the Bphesian sage that
Socrates derived his peculiar use of the words;
and we may see for ourselves that the sophists, so
far at least as they are represented by Protagoras,
follow the same master. To Heracleitus imper-
manence was the law of existence; like the water
of a stream all things pass away, and are yet the
same. But there is no reason to suppose he con-
nected this physical theory with his boasted self-
searching. It remained for the sophists to effect
this unholy alliance. Studying man's nature,
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 2O3
Protagoras finds that the impermanence of phe-
nomena is but a reflection of the instability of the
soul looking out upon them, for man is the
measure of all things. Know thyself, and thou
knowest what is true to thee for the time being
at least; but to another man there is another
truth. Verity itself, like the physical world, be-
comes thus a matter of perpetual flux and change;
and the wisdom of Delphi is made the law of
shifting impressionism, whether in philosophy or
art or conduct. Plato would consider this sophis-
tical skepticism the outcome of a long line of
ancestors. His argument is quaintly expressed
(The&t. 152 D): "I am about to speak of a high
argument, in which all things are said to be rela-
tive; you cannot rightly call anything by any
name, such as great or small, heavy or light, for
the great will be small and the heavy light there
is no single thing or quality, but out of motion
and change and admixture all things are becom-
ing relatively to one another, which ' becoming '
is by us incorrectly called being, but is really be-
coming, for nothing ever is, but all things are
becoming. Summon all philosophers, Protago-
ras, Heracleitus, Kmpedocles, and the rest of
them, one after another, and, with the exception
of Parmenides, they will agree with you in this.
Summon the great masters of either kind of
poetry Epicharmus, the prince of Comedy, and
Homer of Tragedy; when the latter sings of
Ocean whence sprang the gods, and mother Tethys
204 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
does he not mean that all things are the offspring
of flux and motion ? "
Compare with this flower or impressionism
Socrates, who also in a different way made man
the measure of all things. Protagoras isolates
the individual; there is no spiritual law binding
soul to soul; hence there is no truth but merely
shifting opinion. Socrates would find in man a
spirit which associates him with the divine powers;
hidden in himself he thought to discover eternal
precepts of wisdom, the same for all men because
springing in all from the same source: Know
thyself, and thou knowest the truth of the gods.
So much I think we may assert of the positive
teaching of Socrates; although the words, "Know
thyself," still retained something of their simpler
primitive meaning, for they were to him an ad-
monition of man's presumptuous ignorance. But
their positive force, more or less latent in the
master, is found fully developed in the disciple
Plato. So, for example, in the First Alcibiades
we read: " But how can we have a perfect know-
ledge of the things of the soul ? For if we know
them, then I suppose that we shall know our-
selves. Can we really be ignorant of the excel-
lent meaning of the Delphian inscription of which
we were just now speaking? . . . And if the
soul, my dear Alcibiades, is ever to know herself,
must she not look at the soul; and especially at
that part of the soul in which her virtue resides,
and at any other which is like this ? , And
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 2O$
do we know of any part of our souls more divine
than that which has to do with wisdom and
knowledge? . . . Then this is that part of
the soul which resembles the divine, and he who
looks at this and at the whole class of things
divine, will be most likely to know himself. . . .
And self-knowledge we agree to be wisdom."
Socrates and the sophists mark a revolution in
Greek thought; with them the mind is first turned
inward on herself, and self-consciousness becomes
an inheritance of the race. It may be a matter
of sad reflection that the people who chose beauty
and pleasure before absolute truth should have
made Protagoras their spokesman rather than
Socrates. Certainly it is a prophecy full of fore-
boding for the fate of Greece that the one was
loaded with riches and honour, whereas the other
died a felon's death in the gaol of Athens.
It was to be expected that the Delphian saluta-
tion, when so used by Socrates and Plato, would
become a sort of catch-word in the Academy.
From the Academy the doctrine of self-know-
ledge, together with other Socratic precepts,
passed readily into the discipline of the Stoics.
With them, too, happiness is the summum bonum,
happiness which is the natural possession, the
flower, so to speak, of a virtuous life, and which,
indeed, cannot be conceived without virtue. If
asked wherein consists the virtuous life, Zeno, the
founder of the school, would reply, " In living in
conformity with one's self"; and Cleanthes, his
2o6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
pupil, would enlarge this to " living in conformity
with nature." Nor is there any contradiction in
these answers. For to Zeno, ''living in con-
formity with self ' ' meant to obey the dictates of
reason, which he deemed the highest part of man
and the true self. Now to him, as to all the
Stoics, the reason was not an isolated power
fashioned in the breast of man, but rather a por-
tion of that universal subtile element which they
in half-symbolical manner called fire. So far they
were pantheists. This subtile element, pervading
the world, is divine, is indeed God; and to the
degree that a man recognises this force within
him and surrenders to its guidance, he grows like
to God, and at death passes into the divine nature.
Self-knowledge is to Zeno and Cleanthes the root
of virtue and happiness, only Cleanthes emphasises
more strongly the kinship of this self to universal
reason.
This point of view, however, is not peculiar to
the Stoics; it marks all the philosophic schools of
the period. The old simplicity of life had passed
away, and with it the spontaneous joy of living
and that unconscious morality whose chief re-
striction could be summed up in the brief com-
mand, "Nothing too much." The youth has
grown to man's estate. In place of unconstrained
harmony with nature has come the conscious and
painful effort to conform his inner being to the
dictates of a vague, half-comprehended idea called
still by the old name Nature. Patriotism had
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 2O/
been the bond uniting men into brotherhood, and
counterbalancing what might otherwise have been
a narrow selfishness. With Alexander that local
attachment, so restricted and yet so efficient,
gives way to an ideal cosmopolitanism whose
shadowy bounds embrace gradually the whole
realm of existence. In this vague city of the
world the homeless spirit of man, finding that re-
lationship to all is kinship with none, is thrown
back on itself in brooding revery. The primi-
tive aim of self-knowledge, which would temper
action to sobriety, becomes less important than
its dormant significance, which absorbs action in
contemplation. Plato is already prophetic of the
new views; Aristotle, as if to mark off forever the
completion of a civilisation, rejects the new fer-
ment and sums up in scholastic terms all that was
truly Hellenic in thought and knowledge. Stoic
and Epicurean alike receive the tradition of
Greece, but add a spirit utterly foreign in char-
acter. Stepping beyond the limit set by Aristotle
and Alexander, we should be swept on through
the mazes of many philosophies that gradually
assume the attitude of religions, until we found
ourselves in the whirlpool that revolves about
Christianity. Our study of "Know thyself"
would be lost in the abyss of Gnosticism, for the
mystic knowledge of Gnostic and Manichaean
alike is but a late-born child of Delphi. Indeed,
the command of the god may still be heard above
the din of Saint Augustine's theology, as, for
208 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
example, in that passage of the City of 'God '(xi. 26)
where it is expanded into a curious proof or simili-
tude of the Trinity, and stands a true prophet of
the Cartesian syllogism. In its last form, cogito
ergo sum, it may be called the parent of modern
philosophy. The sister law, which gave to Greek
life its inimitable beauty, is lost to us perhaps for-
ever; the sadder words we have made our own.
Enough has been said to show how truly the
Delphian god voiced the moral aspirations of his
people. It would be instructive here, were it not
out of proportion to our design, to discover how
far these laws are recognised by other lands, and
how far they are modified or supplanted. I can-
not forbear digressing sufficiently to notice the
Hindus, who may claim after the Greeks the
honour of being the most intellectual people of
antiquity, and who likewise displayed their in-
sight by formulating their conception of life.
Tracing the first injunction in Greece, we find
that the course of development (which does not al-
ways mean progress, be it observed) is * ' Nothing
too much," temperance, self-restraint, Epicurean
tranquillity, Stoic apathy. The next step would
have carried them into * * inattachment " and re-
nunciation, and this is the form it assumes in
India; so that the Hindus may be said in this
respect to have begun where the Greeks left off.
But if we draw the line of genuine Greek thought
at Aristotle, there is a wider gap between the
two. For to the Stagirite virtue is a deliberate
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 209
state lying in the mean as regards ourselves, de-
fined by reason and as the wise man would define
it. The wise man here is that good or exemplary
character (o GnovSoaos) whom Aristotle con-
stantly assumes to be the final arbiter of right and
wrong. It is he who most adequately exemplifies
man as a political being, adapted to his surround-
ings and acting with approved energy among his
fellows; so that in the end the theory of Aristotle
rests upon a common-sense empirical view. In
one passage (Nic. Eth., ix. 4) he gives a picture
of this exemplary character, symbolising the re-
lation of his inner faculties by the attitude of
friends to one another; he has strong desires, but
these are in accord with reason; he is most keenly
attached to life, and contemplation does not sup-
plant but rather completes the general activity of
his nature.
Compare with this a passage of the Bhagavad-
gltd, the divine lay of India. It is the morning
of a great contest and the prince, seeing his own
army drawn up for battle and the host of the
enemy arrayed in opposition, is suddenly seized
with contrition for the many warriors who must
perish. In dejection he refuses to fight until
aroused by the exhortations of his charioteer, who
is, in reality, the incarnate Vishnu. The admoni-
tion of the god is drawn out into a remarkable
religious discourse:
II. ii. Thou art grieved for those that need no grief, yet
thy words are words of wisdom :
VOL. n. 14.
210 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
They that have knowledge grieve not for the dead
or the living.
19. He who reckoneth It the slayer, and he who
deemeth It the slain,
They both distinguish ill : It slayeth not, nor is
It slain.
22. As a man putteth off his outworn garments and
taketh others new ;
So the Indweller putteth off these outworn bodies,
and taketh others new.
47. Thy service is in the work only, but in the fruits
thereof never ;
Be not impelled by the result of works, neither
set thy heart to do no work.
48. Standing firm in devotion, and putting away at-
tachment, so ever work on, O Prince :
Also in success or failure be thou indifferent ; in-
difference, too, is called devotion.
III. 25. As the ignorant work because of attachment to
works, O Prince,
So without attachment let the wise work for the
constraining of mankind.
27. For all works in all places are of a truth wrought
by the blind forces of Nature ;
Only he that is deluded by egotism thinketh in
himself, " I am the doer ! "
Here, in place of the law of moderation in de-
sire and action, is a new command, a strange
exhortation to work without desire, without
attachment, without interest in the result. The
author of the Gltd sees about him a world of
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 211
action which bears no discoverable relation to his
inner spiritual needs, yet in this futile turmoil he
is called by the exigencies of earthly existence to
play a part. He would perform the duties of his
station, but with complete indifference to the out-
come, unmoved by success or failure, incapable of
pleasure or pain. The strangeness of the doctrine
to us lies in this utter " inattachment," which,
be it said, was no mere scholastic abstraction, but
the genuine aspiration of a whole people; but to
the Hindu it was novel rather because it fell short
of the commoner ideal. Beyond " inattachment "
lay the utter renunciation of works, which bade
the spirit avoid all contact with the world and in
its own life of self-contemplation seek for perfect
peace :
Like an uneasy fool thou wanderest far
Into the nether deeps,
Or upward climbest where the dim-lit star
Of utmost heaven sleeps.
Through all the world thou rangest, O my soul,
Seeking and wilt not rest ;
Behold, the peace of Brahma, and thy goal,
Hideth in thine own breast.
It is not to be supposed that such a contrast in
philosophic principles was without influence on
literature. A minute comparison of the epics of
Greece and India would show as its effect a
radical difference of language and form and senti-
ment. L/ook for a moment at the concluding
212 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
scenes of the Iliad and the Mahabhcirata. To the
Greek the Iliad presented a drama of the pro-
foundest meaning for the very reason that the
passions and actions, the tragedy of the plot,
sprung from transgression of the highest moral
law known to him, the law of moderation. Aga-
memnon errs in this respect, and the wrath of
Achilles is fatal for this reason. The reconcilia-
tion of Achilles is brought about by a personal
attachment immoderate in its strength, and
through it his wrath against the Achaians is con-
verted to rage equally excessive against Hector.
Nothing in Greek literature is more perfect in its
art than the last scene of the poem, where anger
is subdued to pathos, and the immoderate passions
subside to measure and temperance. In one
sense the action is completed at the death of
Hector, but the underlying moral drama is form-
less and meaningless without the last interview
between Priam and Achilles.
On opening the Mahabharata we seem to have
entered into a different world. Monstrous crea-
tures and actions abound, and the force of the
poet's imagination is shown, not by the creation
of harmonious forms, but by enlarging everything
to fantastic immensity. There is no tragedy of
human passion, but rather some shadowy conflict
of impersonal powers in which the character of
the individual man has little part. Briefly, the
poem is the story of the contest of two sets of
brothers for the throne. At last the rightful heirs
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 213
win back their inheritance and the usurpers are
crushed. The conclusion is as significant as the
final scene of the Iliad, for all this preliminary
trial is only preparatory to an act of religious re-
nunciation. Now the restored monarch, followed
by his four brothers, their common wife, and a
faithful dog, abandons the capital and leads them
forth as pilgrims to seek the home of the gods.
Yet one after another they fall by the way in con-
sequence of some former sin, till only the eldest is
left, whose life has been without blemish. Then
a very touching incident occurs when Indra ap-
pears from the sky and bids the prince mount up
with him in his chariot. ' * Nay, ' ' cries the prince,
"but I must take this faithful hound along."
"There are no dogs in heaven; it cannot be."
" Then neither go I thither without this devoted
follower." Whereupon the dog suddenly disap-
pears, and in his place stands Dharmar&ja, a god,
the L/ord of Justice, the true father of the prince,
who has taken this humble form to prove his son.
Together they ascend to heaven; but not even yet
is the trial complete. The prince is dismayed to
see his wicked cousins sitting with the gods,
while his own brothers, he is told, are enduring
torments in hell. ' ' Then I too will go thither ! ' '
he exclaims, " for it is better to suffer with them
than enjoy bliss with the unrighteous." He per-
sists in his resolve and is led by a servant of the
gods to the infernal regions, where he beholds his
brothers tortured by malignant fiends. Still his
214 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
purpose is unshaken; and at last a voice cries out,
" L,o, it is all ma" yd, it is illusion! " Whereupon
the evil scenes vanish like a dream, and the prince
is once more in heaven on his throne amidst the
gods; and there too are his brothers and their
wife, who welcome him to the reward of bliss.
The closing scenes of the Indian epic are not
without impressiveness, but they are mystical
rather than human; they teach renunciation and
not temperance.
As regards knowledge, we are perhaps justly
proud in this passing century that the word has
acquired almost a new meaning: the past and the
future have been added to its sphere. History,
as an attempt to re-create foregone times and by
sympathy to throw ourselves backward into other
surroundings, is essentially a modern achieve-
ment. By its side, co-operating with it, stands
natural science, with its disregard of past notions
and its ej^e fixed, so far as it regards human con-
duct at all, on some perfectibility of society to be
brought about by the acquisition of mechanical
skill. Both study man as caught in a huge
movement of evolution. The ancient conceptions
of knowledge, whether it be the jn&na of India, or
the gn6sis of early Christianity, or the self-know-
ledge of Greece, all agreed in this, that they
ignored the development of society, and recog-
nised some immutable principle upon whose com-
prehension the present virtue and happiness of
the individual depended. Concerning Greek self-
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 21$
knowledge, enough for the present. As the in-
ward-looking face of that axiomatic Janus it bears
the same relation to the Hindu jna"na (literally
and etymologically, gn6sis) as was seen to exist
between temperance and renunciation. Self-
knowledge was the means of establishing modera-
tion. The Hindu deemed the phenomenal world
(and no Greek, not even Plato, could quite fol-
low him in this) totally evil, and knowledge was
the path of inner renunciation and deliverance.
From the beginning of eternity the spirit is
mewed by illusion in these shifting material
forms. The whole world is but the creation of
ignorance, and hence with knowledge ceases to
exist, as a stick seen in the road and mistaken for
a snake ceases to be a snake when rightly re-
garded. Thisjna'na is, too, a kind of self-know-
ledge. " Know thyself," the Delphian oracle
proclaimed, ' ' learn thy individual nature and so
bring it into harmony with life about thee."
Tat tvam asi, " that art thou," is the watchword
on the Ganges: "thy soul is itself that god; know
this and thy illusive individuality comes to an
end, and the world vanishes from about thee."
This was not a mere difference of formulated
words; it penetrated the very life of the people.
With such views of man and nature the Greek
became the master of artists in every form of
beauty, whereas the Hindu sacrificed all to attain
a state of spiritual exaltation, and in religion won
a place as the teacher of mankind,
2l6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
But at last the inevitable question remains:
What profit in it all ? Why is the fate of Greece
only one of the many tragedies that go to make
up human history? Temperance, harmony, the
proper balancing of faculties and dispositions,
we might safely aver that these, if anything, were
calculated to preserve a person or a race against
decay and ruin. Other nations perished mainly
because they ignored this vital law; and this curi-
ous dilemma confronts us, that the degeneracy of a
people is accelerated by the very excellence which
wrought its earlier greatness. The strength of
Israel lay in its uncompromising worship of Je-
hovah and its intensely narrow national life; yet
in the end this same religious bigotry cut them
off from the new faith that sprung from their
midst and was to regenerate society, while their
racial prejudices caused them to be utterly crushed
as a nation by the Roman Empire. Again, the
greatness of Rome was her power of conquest and
government, and Rome at last, absorbed in her
dependencies, fell by her own weight. The Mo-
hammedans were rendered doubly invincible by
their peculiar fatalism. If death came, it was by
the will of Allah, whether they courted or shunned
danger; in the days of their vigour, accordingly,
they fought with intrepid valour; in their decline
they lay idle, for God would accomplish all things
whether they acted or not. More tragic yet is
the fate of India. With undaunted courage the
Hindus sacrificed everything, power, beauty,
DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 217
personal aggrandisement, to lay violent hands
on the kingdom of heaven; and for a time they
rose to a height of religious grandeur which must
now and always be regarded with wonder. But
life is not of the spirit alone. The body which
they so insolently neglected had its revenge.
Spiritual pride degenerated into moral indiffer-
ence; quietism begot effeminacy; and the proud
Hindu fell a prey to all the lusts of his own flesh
and to the cupidity of any adventurous conqueror.
But in Greece, where moderation was followed
as a kind of religion, what was it that caused the
same expansion and decay ? Paradoxical as it may
sound, may not their error have lain in the very
appropriation of such a standard? They, too,
made their renunciation, deliberately refusing to
accept any absolute idea which might destroy the
desired balance. Nothing is absolutely right or
wrong; nothing is absolutely true or false; seek
only the proper medium in all things. Is not this
in itself a kind of excess in raising the expedient
and beautiful above that eternal truth which in
its nakedness consumed the Hindu as in a de-
vouring fire ? If any one thing hastened the fall
of Greece, it was her disregard of that stern law
of righteousness which overawed the Jew, and
that mystic voice within which allured the Hindu
to the abysm. Plato somewhere observes: ' * When
any one prefers beauty to virtue, what is this but
the real and utter dishonour of the soul ? For
such a preference implies that the body is more
2l8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
honourable than the soul; and this is false, for there
is nothing of earthly birth more honourable than
the heavenly." Yet let us read a little in the all-
wise Plato even, and turn then to the denuncia-
tions of Isaiah or the sermons of Buddha. We
are in doubt, when hearing the beautiful words
of the Greek, whether to admire the unruffled
serenity of his contemplation of life, or to anathe-
matise his lofty tolerance before evils that were
eating out the heart of his nation. By the side
of Plato grew up another pupil of Socrates, like-
wise a moralist in his own way, who illustrated
perfectly in his doctrine and life the real tendency
of Greece, Aristippus of Cyrene, who made
pleasure and beauty the chief good, recognising
no evil action so long as a man remained master
of himself. To one who rebuked his intimacy
with L,ais the courtesan, he replied, Habeo, non
habeor ab ilia ; and it is he who said, when cen-
sured for falling at the feet of the tyrant Dionysius,
" I am not to blame, but Dionysius who has his
ears in his feet." In all his words there is the
same wisdom of experience that gives so piquant
an interest to the comic fragments of the age.
There is grace and charm yet in Greece, but the
Graculus esuriens is not far to seek. The philo-
sophy of the Cyrenaic is only a new adaptation
of the salutation of the Delphian oracle. We
hardly know in the end whether these worshippers
of Apollo followed his command too well, or only
half understood its import.
NEMESIS, OR THE DIVINE ENVY
FROM experience and reflection the Greeks for-
mulated a law of conduct, simple in expression,
but far-reaching in application. The Delphian
aphorisms, "Nothing too much" and "Know
thyself," are the refined quintessence of their
practical wisdom and moral philosophy, summing
up briefly man's duty to himself and society with-
out reference for the most part to any supramun-
daue legislative power. Yet the Greeks were
peculiarly sensitive to the immanence of the divine
in human affairs, so that a complete understand-
ing of their moral views and their literature is
hardly possible without examining this law of
moderation and self-knowledge in another form,
as adapted to man's relations to the gods.
Here at once occur to the mind those words of
the sage Periander, Think as a mortal, and the
innumerable passages in poets and philosophers
that convey the same lesson in dramatic or dia-
lectic form. So in the mouth of Calchas they
become for Sophocles the sum of tragic warning:
" Misfortune from the gods overtakes men who
forget to think as mortals ' ' ; and the same words
are still heard in the last great prose of Athens.
Demosthenes, in one of his eloquent perorations,
219
22O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
recalling the unforeseen revolutions in Grecian
affairs, Sparta humiliated by Thebes, the Syra-
cusans fallen a prey to tyrants, and Dionysius in
turn degraded from his proud eminence, ex-
claims that the whole world is full of uncertainty
and that trivial causes often effect the greatest
changes. "Wherefore," he avers, "being men
we ought to speak with caution, hoping and
praying the gods for prosperity, yet esteeming all
things human."
Greece was a land of revolutions so startling
that the plea of the orator is more than justified.
When the capture of Miletus was represented on
the Athenian stage the whole audience, we are
told, burst into tears, and the poet was fined a
thousand drachmae for reminding them of the
calamity. Yet the fall of the proud Ionian city,
ruthlessly sacked and depopulated by the Persians,
by no means stands alone in the atrocities of
Grecian war. Nor is it a singular story in Greek
annals to read of the dethroned Dionysius sailing
as a private man to Corinth and consorting in the
market-place of that city with shopkeepers and
outcasts. And there was no one of the Greeks,
the biographer adds, but was eager to see and
accost him, some through hatred rejoicing in his
overthrow and wishing to trample on one cast
down by fortune, others filled with compassion
and convinced by the manifest futility and change
in mortal things of the power of secret and divine
causes.
NEMESIS 221
This actual uncertainty of fortune in Greece
lends a tone of realism to the constant outcry
of poet and moralist. But even apart from his-
torical causes the Hellenic mind seems to have
been peculiarly affected by the precariousness of
human state. lyife, it appeared to them, was be-
sieged by infinite enemies and held its citadel only
by unceasing watchfulness, as it were the little
flame of a lamp cherished in the hand against the
buffeting flaws of the night-wind. They might
well carve as a symbol of death the inverted and
extinguished torch. Such a feeling is, to be sure,
a commonplace of poetry, and the Hindu epigrams
for example are full of similar metaphors:
Old age like as a tiger held at bay
Still crouches ; sly diseases day by day
Our leaguered body sap ;
As water from a broken urn, so leak
The wasting moments ; lo, this people seek
Oblivion in love's lap.
But for the Greek, with his eager zest of living
and his brave doubt of the future, the thought
assumes a poignancy and persistence that render
it distinctively characteristic of the race. ' ' Crea-
tures of a day what are we ? what are we not ? ' '
cries Pindar; " man is the dream of a shadow! "
The bewildered prophetess in the Agamemnon,
urged by the vision of ruin impending over her-
self and the house of Atreus, exclaims: " Alas for
human things! A prosperous man one might
222 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
liken to a sketch; and if he fail why, then 't is
but the brushing of a wet sponge obliterates the
picture." And in Sophocles there is this noble
image of changing fortune: " Sorrow and joy
circle about to each like the revolving ways of the
starry Bear. Nor doth the palpitating night re-
main, nor evil, nor riches but suddenly they are
gone."
Still, however persistently the Greeks may have
dwelt on this thought, it is nevertheless one com-
mon to the human race, a natural cry of universal
experience. Its notable feature here is its con-
nection with the oft-repeated command to think
as a mortal, in other words its frank assumption
into the religious sphere. Know thyself, and
learn moderation in thy dealings with men; know
thyself, and learn humility under the jealousy of
the divine powers. The mythology of the Greeks,
more than that of any other people, is a poetical
prosopopoeia on an extended scale, and their gods
still have meaning for us because they are the
most transparent personification of man's emo-
tions and ideals. It was inevitable therefore that
this brooding conception of our own littleness in
the midst of the threatening forces of nature
should be referred to the envy of the gods, and
should even assume individual attributes in the
Olympian hierarchy as Nemesis and the Erinyes.
To us who have been trained up in a religion
which emphasises so strongly (in theory at least)
the fatherhood and love of God, this acknowledg-
NEMESIS 223
ment of the divine envy may at first appear in-
comprehensible and even repulsive. An effort of
the understanding is required to appreciate this
phase of Greek religion, which has permeated
and coloured the whole of their literature; so that
it becomes imperative, before entering upon a dis-
cussion of the subject as treated by Greek authors,
to examine the same idea elsewhere and observe
how universal it is, although everywhere differ-
ently expressed.
What else but this haunting, vaguely conceived
dread of a daemonic jealousy compels the savage to
bloody sacrifice and hideous rites, to incantations
for exorcising evil spirits spirits not distin-
guished from his gods and for driving away
terror from the darkness ? What else but a feel-
ing that heaven begrudges man every good thing
leads him to utter prayers of supplication ?
At the very beginning of the Hebrew religion
we are met by one of the most impressive denun-
ciations of the divine jealousy. Though the
words are placed in the mouth of the Serpent,
they none the less proclaim a feeling deep-seated
in the human heart: " For God doth know that
in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be
opened; and ye shall be as gods." Nor were the
words of the tempter entirely false; for the know-
ledge of good and evil brings a godlike element
into the actions of man that were otherwise hardly
distinguishable from the workings of mechanical
force or bestial instinct. The penalty of death,
224 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
too, has its celestial ministry in wrapping trivial
earthly things in the mystery of the outer silent
world; and labour and sorrow may be, after all,
the only masters of the higher wisdom. Such an
interpretation of the passage in Genesis is by no
means a new one. Certain sects of the Gnostics,
mingling Oriental and Hellenic ideas with Christ-
ian dogma, made this a cardinal point in their
faith, boldly denouncing the Jewish God as a
malicious power who endeavoured to cheat man
of his heritage, and deeming the Serpent a mes-
senger of the truth, a forerunner and type of the
Messiah. Again, in the second commandment it
is written: " For I the Lord thy God am a jealous
God." Now jealousy is near akin to envy, and
in fact the same word is elsewhere (Job v., 2)
translated envy; yet the slight difference in mean-
ing marks a distinction between Jewish and Greek
ideas. According to the latter, the envy of the
gods followed any departure from the just limits
of man's sphere and any intrusion into the field
of celestial action; whereas the Hebrews in their
intense monotheistic creed feared the jealousy of
Jehovah if in place of blind obedience they strove
for knowledge, or if they failed in perfect and ex-
clusive devotion.
Quainter in form is the picture of divine envy
in the Indian religion. We are left to wonder a
little why the gods of the Greek should suffer this
passion. Hardly can they fear the rivalry of man,
nor is any such exclusiveness found in their cult
NEMESIS 225
as should arouse jealousy. Here, as in so many
other respects, we find the Greek conception pre-
sented by the Hindus more logically, so as to
satisfy better the speculative reason, but at the
same time divested of that moderation and nat-
uralness which lend beauty of form in art and
value of example in conduct. It was the ambi-
tion of the Hindu sage, by means of penance
which should strip the will bare of clogs and
magnify its scope indefinitely, to endow himself
with supernatural powers, equalling or even sur-
passing those of the gods. Hence the divine
envy; and Indra, the ruler in the sky, receives
warning in the drollest manner when any saint
begins to grow too mighty for his Olympian
security. Immediately the god's throne waxes
hot under him, and, thus advised in time, he dis-
patches a fair nymph or other sweet illusion to
seduce the sage from his abnegation, and to en-
feeble his will by rendering him once more subject
to the flesh. The fable is retained also by the Bud-
dhists, who, however, modify its spirit somewhat.
Sakka (the Buddhist Indra, lord of one of the
sensuous heavens) must benignantly assist the
Buddha, although his own kingdom is to be over-
thrown by the new teacher. Accordingly, after
the four admonitions, when the future Buddha is
about to retire from the world and obtain enlight-
enment, Sakka is made aware of his peril by the
customary sign: "At that moment the throne on
which Sakka was sitting grew hot. And Sakka,
VOL. II. 15.
226 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
reflecting who it might be that wished to dislodge
him, perceived that the time had come for the
adorning of a Future Buddha."
Even the Christian faith, based as it is on the
law of mercy, is permeated by the same natural
dread. Indeed, one might say that nowhere else
does it show itself in such naked austerity as in
the rigid logic of Calvin, or in the tremendous
denunciations of Jonathan Edwards. God is
love; yet, in his omnipotent righteousness, he has
created millions of beings who are predestined
to everlasting torture. Born into sin, we should
seem to behold the heavens blazing above us with
wrath and hatred, like those flaming ramparts of
the sky which smote Lucretius with a frenzy of
horror. The very fundamental idea of an angry
deity, whose justice is appeased only by the sacri-
fice of his own son, raises this envy into such a
region of awful austerity as might fill the world
with shuddering. As if in mockery, Dante read
over the portal of hell:
Created me divine Omnipotence,
The highest Wisdom and the primal I^ove.
This, it may be, is the sterner face of Christianity,
yet in the courtly orations of Bossuet we may read
here and there sentences that present the old
Greek notion of Nemesis in the disguise of Christ-
ian garb. " I must raise myself," he says,
' ' above man that I may make every creature
tremble beneath the judgments of God. I will
NEMESIS 227
enter, with David, into the might of the L,ord."
And elsewhere: " Then might she well say with
the prophet Isaiah: 'The Lord of hosts hath
purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to
bring into contempt all the honourable of the
earth.' ' Again, he quotes from the Gospel: V<z
qui ridetis, v& qui saturate estis words of more
terrible import than any echoing cry of ancient
heathen tragedy.
Apart from religion, a slight examination of
literature would show that the master minds,
those who have looked directly into the wide in-
terplay of circumstance and searched the human
heart without paying allegiance to any dogmatic
creed, have bowed to the same belief in the divine
envy. It is needless to accumulate illustrations,
but one relevant passage may be quoted from
Goethe's Conversations. "You know," said he,
' ' that Napoleon wore habitually a uniform of
dark green. From long use and exposure to the
sun this uniform had faded badly, so that it be-
came necessary to replace it. Napoleon wished
the same colour, but in the island no piece of
cloth of the kind could be found. . . . The
master of the world could not obtain the colour
he desired, and nothing was left for him but to
have the old uniform turned and to wear it so.
What say you to that ? Is it not a bit of genuine
tragedy ? Is there not something pathetic in the
sight of the master of kings reduced to wearing a
turned uniform ? And yet when you think that
228 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
such an end befell a man who had trampled under
foot the life and happiness of millions of men,
destiny, even while turning against him, seems
still to have been very indulgent. Here is a
Nemesis, who, on considering the greatness of
the hero, couid not refrain from employing still a
touch of gallantry. Napoleon gives us an ex-
ample of the dangers inherent in raising one's
self to the absolute and in sacrificing all to an
idea."
We have then in this feeling of man's frailty, in
this shrinking before an unsympathetic destiny,
one of the universal instincts of mankind; and
here as elsewhere the Greek people showed their
soundness of moral sense in raising to a general
law of conduct the maxim Think as a mortal, and
their sincerity of religious conviction in elevating
the cause of their fear to personality among the
gods. The Greeks, voicing in this, too, the com-
mon feeling of mankind, waver in their attitude
towards this personified fear. At one time it is
Krinys who upholds the divine justice, punishing
the trespasser only; at another time it is Nemesis,
taking pleasure in the downfall of human great-
ness and sporting wantonly with human pride.
Erinys, if we accept a thoroughly doubtful
etymology, was originally a nature myth, corre-
sponding to the Vedic Saranyu. But whether
Saranyu be the dawn that discovers the crimes of
the night, or a storm goddess who purifies the air
and at the same time kindles house and home,
NEMESIS 229
whether, in short, we are justified at all in seek-
ing the origin of these ethical divinities in old
nature myths is entirely problematical. Cer-
tainly in Homer's time Erinys, or the Erinyes,
had become altogether severed from any such
phenomena. There, as in later literature, they
are the demons whose charge it is to maintain the
existing order of things and especially to exact
punishment for crimes that relax the bonds of so-
ciety. So in Homer the horse of Achilles is for the
moment given human speech to warn his master
of coming fate, and then, " when he had spoken
thus, the Erinyes stayed his voice." The con-
stellations of heaven tremble before the same
power, and from them Plutarch has drawn this
admirable lesson: "And he who sees happiness
in those who are ever running about and wasting
the best part of life in wayside houses and inns,
is like to one who should think the wandering
planets fare better than the fixed stars. And
still each of the planets preserves his appointed
order, going about in one orbit as in an island:
for neither will the sun, saith Heracleitus, trans-
gress his bounds, else will the Erinyes, the minis-
trants of justice, overtake him." The beasts
are held in silence by these watchful deities, and
the inanimate bodies of nature obey their will.
Among men they are the guardians of social ties;
they have in charge the rights of suppliants, the
claims of family, the maintenance of oaths; and
theirs, above all, is vengeance for the slaying of
230 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
kin. " For this duty," they chant in the play
named from them, "this duty remorseless Destiny
hath woven for us to hold without swerving, that
when a man recklessly slayeth his kin, we should
follow after him till he come beneath the earth
yet neither in death is he altogether free." As
avengers of perjury, also, their office is to guard
the existing order of things; for in Greek the
word for oath signifies literally a restraint or
boundary, and any infraction of a solemn vow
would seem to bring fatal confusion into social
life. The gods themselves have their own oath
by the imperishable water of the Styx, and the
immortal who swears falsely by this daughter of
Ocean is for nine years degraded from Olympus
and subjected to torment.
With implacable zeal the Erinyes hunt down
earthly glory that vaunts itself unduly. So in the
play of ^schylus they exclaim : ' ' The vanity of
men and their pride that toucheth the sky, all
this melteth at our dark-stoled approach, it
wasteth away unhonoured under earth." In
these fearful daughters of Night the Greek beheld
the penalty that overtakes those who forget in
pride or madness to think as mortals: and woe to
the man whom some higher law impels to disdain
these avenging deities, whether it be a Hamlet
of the modern world driven on by conscience and
ghostly apparitions, or an Orestes summoned by
oracular voices to confront their wrath in pur-
suance of a sterner duty. And woe to the man
NEMESIS 231
whom the gods have endowed with gifts of super-
human wisdom, for to him also the grace of heaven
is not without peril. This inexorable law of the
Erinyes would seem to throw light on the strange
attitude of Greek literature toward those who
have received any form of inspiration or super-
natural favour.
For this reason the love of the gods for mortals
is represented as full of danger to the recipients
and to their offspring. The lament of sad Ca-
lypso, when summoned to part with Odysseus,
echoes through all the later poets:
Ungracious gods ! with spite and envy cursed !
Still to your own ethereal race the worst !
Ye envy mortal and immortal joy,
And love, the only sweet of life, destroy.
Did ever goddess by her charms engage
A favour'd mortal, and not feel your rage?
So when Aurora sought Orion's love,
Her joys disturb'd your blissful hours above,
Till, in Ortygia, Dian's winged dart
Had pierced the hapless hunter to the heart.
So when the covert of the thrice-ear'd field
Saw stately Ceres to her passion yield,
Scarce could lasion taste her heavenly charms,
But Jove's swift lightning scorch'd him in her arms.
The story of Ion, the child of that Creusa who
was wooed and abandoned by Apollo, gave
Euripides material for one of his most exquisite
tragedies. But of all idyls of immortal love the
tale of lo and Zeus is the saddest and the rich-
est in meaning. What reader of Greek has not
232 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
lingered over her confession in the Prometheus
Bound, the maiden visited by visions of the
night in her virgin chambers, the tender princess
wooed by the sweet voice of dreams, and at last
driven forth from her home to be the prey of her
divine suitor and to wander helpless over the
wide earth. Even between man and woman the
power of Bros was fraught with terror, just as his
ecstasy of joy seemed to transcend the bounds of
safety.
The gift of song came with like peril to the reci-
pient. Demodocus, the rhapsodist of the Odyssey -,
to whom the Muses gave skill in singing but
added darkness of sight, and * * the blind old bard of
Ohio's rocky isle," from whom sprang the legend
of Homer's blindness, are types of the poetic art
bestowed grudgingly by the gods, as if the power
of portraying to the inner vision could only be
won by closing the eyes on the winsome outer
world. In later times the poet was even regarded
as subject to a kind of daemonic possession which
deprived him of all worldly intelligence.
Something of the same sort was the madness
which overpowered the Bacchic revellers and those
who were initiated into other orgiastic rites. The
poets are replete with pictures of the Maenads
dancing wildly on the mountain ridges, uprending
trees in their fury, slaying savage beasts, and de-
vouring the raw flesh. And we know with what
horrible awakening one of them, the mother of
Pentheus, recognises in her hand the bleeding
NEMESIS 233
head of her son whom, with the other frantic
Bacchanals, she has torn lirnb from limb. Such
was the penalty which fell alike upon him who,
in his Greek love of moderation, denied the god,
and upon her who surrendered herself to his re-
ligious enthusiasm.
But still more striking is the fate of the inspired
prophets who incurred the jealousy of Olympus
for penetrating or divulging its secrets. They
are smitten with blindness, or withered by age, or
must wander among men as babblers speaking an
incomprehensible tongue. Teiresias, with his
inner vision and darkened eyes, revolving through
seven ages the doom of Thebes, or endeavouring
in vain to arouse the guilty Oedipus; Cassandra,
tormented by her knowledge of Troy's fate and
condemned to inarticulate raving; Helenus, like-
wise unable to utter words of intelligence to his
countrymen, are witnesses to the danger of wis-
dom that transcends human bounds. The most
graphic scene in the Argonautica is the picture of
Phineus, blind, shriveled with age, haunted by
the Harpies, for his oracular utterance to men of
the mind of Zeus. When at last the Argonauts
arrive, * ' he goes forth from his couch like a life-
less dream, leaning on a staff, tottering on his
stiffened feet, groping along the wall.' ' There he
sits on the threshold before the house and fore-
tells to the sailors the adventures that await them.
It was the thought of this peril attendant on
superhuman gifts which led Plato to speak of the
234 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
four kinds of divine madness, the prophetic, the
initiatory, the poetic, and the erotic. These are
all akin, being essentially a high-wrought sym-
bolism concerned with different elements. One
foretells the purpose of the gods by sacrificial and
other signs; another displays the indwelling of
spiritual faith by the surrender of the reason to a
delirious enthusiasm, or presents the mysteries
of religion in a symbolic drama; another restores
the world of phenomena to the idealising mind
by means of rhythmic imitation; and the erotic
madness, in its wider sense, awakens the desire
of heavenly perfection by the vision of earthly
grace. They are all divine because they build a
ladder by which the soul may ascend to com-
munion with celestial things; they are a madness
because by the influx of these general ideas the
relation of the personality to specific things is
perturbed, just as gazing at the stars one might
stumble into a well at his feet.
This divine madness illustrates once more the
reiterated command to think as a mortal; for the
Greek in general deliberately chose sanity within
set bounds, in preference to the hazardous har-
bouring of the unlimited. And as he found
beauty and health and reason in such limitations
he was content to worship the avengers of such
transgression as the peculiar champions of justice.
The perception of right order in the world was
the source of his moral feeling; and this right
order he personified, calling it Themis, the wife
NEMESIS 235
of Zeus and mother of the Hours. Themis, more-
over, as knowing the decrees of fate that were to
dispose all things in their place, was a giver of
oracles and in this capacity preceded Apollo at
Delphi. If we could admit a conjecture from an
epithet (Gejtis 'I^vaia} in the Homeric hymn to
Apollo, she was even believed to track the guilty
like another Krinys. A comparison with the
Vedic rita and the Zoroastrian asha would show
how deeply this sense of primitive order in crea-
tion is planted in the mind of the eastern Aryans,
and would simplify for us the understanding of
the Greek gods. The Brinyes who maintain this
order are therefore the ministers of justice, but it
is not difficult to see how the notion of envy also
becomes associated with them. Right order and
the justice deriving therefrom would hold every
class of created things in its established place,
from the inanimate wanderers of the sky to the
Lords of Olympus. Yet through the whole world
runs an impulse and striving toward a higher
plane, which the Greeks could not fail to recog-
nise, and to which the Hindus have given expres-
sion in this terse epigram:
The rooted trees would walk ; the beast
For utterance yearning still is dumb ;
Man toils for some far heaven, wherefrom
The enthroned gods were fain released.
Naturally, then, the powers who oppose this in-
stinctive aspiration seem to be animated by a
236 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
kind of envy; and the injunction to think as a
mortal becomes both a moral law and a maxim of
prudence. For the most part, the Krinyes main-
tain their character as guardians of the moral
sense, whereas the fear of the divine envy is per-
sonified in Nemesis. Yet, occasionally this dis-
tinction is overlooked. For instance, in the
Odyssey the daughters of Pandareus are snatched
away by the Harpies and given over to the
Krinyes, because they were too highly favoured
by certain of the gods. So, too, in the Iliad
Brinys, acting with Zeus and Destiny, sent upon
Agamemnon the infatuation that brought about
the fatal quarrel.
Nemesis is a late addition to the Pantheon, and
the divine envy was recognised long before her
advent. Homer already detected this trait in the
counsels of Olympus. We remember how Posei-
don envied the Phseacians their sea-craft; how
Eurytus challenged Apollo to a contest of the bow
and was killed by the irate deity; how the sons
and daughters of Niobe were slain because she
equalled herself to fair-cheeked L,eto who had
borne only two children, whereas she had brought
forth many, Niobe, symbol it may be of the
fruitful season of spring withered by the darts of
the sun, type of human pride and love smitten by
the hand of destiny. " Alas, most wretched
Niobe, thee I call a god, who in thy rocky tomb
forever weepest." Certain features of Homeric
worship also may spring from the same source.
NEMESIS 237
The offering of first fruits and the pouring of
libations seem to arise from a haunting dread
that the gods unless propitiated may be jealous
of man's prosperity; and it may be that in our
habit of saying grace before meat there lurks a
remnant of the old uneasiness.
Passing to Hesiod, we notice a marked devel-
opment of the idea. From being an occasional
whim of the gods, envy is now reckoned one of
the chief motives animating Zeus in his govern-
ment of the world, and hence the consistent pic-
ture of the labour and hardship and humility of
man's lot. In Homer libation and sacrifice served
to propitiate the divine favour; Hesiod draws from
the sacrifice his quaintest allegory. The story
of Prometheus is twice told. According to the
Theogony, the sacrificial victim is divided into
two portions, and Zeus is deceived by the rich
envelope of fat. Enraged at this, he denies to
man the use of fire, which the Titan however
conveys to earth in a hollow reed. Thereupon
Zeus takes revenge by creating an evil plague
against man. Strange that this ancient theologian
should have laid his finger on the weak spot of
the generations to come, and foreseen the Nemesis
that was to destroy them. Beauty made perfect
by the cunning of the gods, beauty and pleasure
in the form of woman, is sent upon the world;
and when the fair evil is brought into view, gods
and men are filled with wonder at the work of
fatal, inexplicable treachery. In the Works and
238 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Days the story varies slightly. Here the woman
is called Pandora, the possessor of all gifts; and
here we read of the urn from which all calamities
flow upon the earth only hope is left behind.
This Promethean struggle between the intelli-
gence of man and the forces that oppose his
activity contains the whole conception of the
divine envy, but as yet only in germ. The first
poet to recognise the full scope of the myth seems
to have been the uncertain author of the Cypria.
It is well known that a succession of poets, after
the example of Homer, took up the vast cycle of
legends that begins with the battle of the Titans,
passes through the Theban and Trojan wars, and
relates the death of Odysseus at the hands of
Telegonus, his son by Circe, concluding with the
tasteless espousal of Telegonus with Penelope and
Telemachus with Circe, who all enjoy immortality
together in the island of the enchantress. These
epics are the so-called Cyclic poems; and among
them the Cypria, if the number of quotations from
it in later works and its influence on legendary
mythology are trustworthy evidence, held the
place of honour. From the fragments preserved
and the summary of Proclus the entire plot of the
poem may be reconstructed, which, omitting cer-
tain episodes, proceeds as follows: A conference is
held between Zeus and Themis, at which the
Trojan war is planned. Kris is thereupon sent
among the gods assembled as guests at the mar-
riage feast of Peleus and Thetis; she stirs up
NEMESIS 239
Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite to contend for the
palm of beauty. The three goddesses at the com-
mand of Zeus are led by Hermes to Mount Ida,
where Paris, bribed by Aphrodite with the prof-
fered possession of Helen, gives the award to the
Cyprian deity. In this connection the amours
of Zeus and Nemesis are related, and the birth of
their daughter Helen. Paris, at the suggestion
of Aphrodite, builds a ship and prepares to sail
with ^neas to Greece, although Helenus and
Cassandra prophesy the ruin to come. The
Trojan brothers are received by Menelaus in
Sparta, where at a banquet Paris tempts Helen
with gifts. Menelaus, being called away to Crete,
bids Helen entertain the guests until they depart.
Aphrodite now brings Paris and Helen together,
and they sail away at night, taking many pos-
sessions with them. A storm sent by Hera drives
them from their course, but with the aid of Aphro-
dite they finally reach Troy. There the nuptials
of Paris and Helen are celebrated, and the Tro-
jans, by partaking in the ceremony, become
sharers in the guilt. Iris conveys to Menelaus
news of what has happened, and he, with Aga-
memnon and Nestor, collects an armament against
Troy. After a mistaken expedition against Teu-
thrania, the forces are a second time mustered at
Aulis, where occurs the memorable sacrifice of
Iphigenia. For Agamemnon, while hunting,
brings down a stag, and in his elation boasts to
excel Artemis herself, so that the angered goddess
240 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
sends continual storms which prevent the fleet
from sailing. Calchas declares the cause of the
deity's wrath, and orders that Iphigenia be sacri-
ficed to appease her. The young princess is sent
for, under pretext of wedding her to Achilles.
She is bound on the altar, but when the knife is
raised to immolate the victim Artemis intervenes,
secretly conveying the maiden to Tauris and sub-
stituting a fawn in her place. The army now
sails for Troy. Protesilaus, the first to disem-
bark, is slain by Hector; Achilles drives back the
Trojans in rout; and the long war of ten years
begins.
When, to this outline of the plot, the numerous
episodes are added, such as the story of Castor
and Pollux, the sack of Bpopeus, the tragedy of
CEdipus, the madness of Hercules, the loves of
Theseus and Ariadne, the expedition against
Teuthrania and the tale of Telephus, the amour
of Achilles and Deidamia, the abandonment of
Philoctetes, the first quarrel of Agamemnon with
Achilles, and the foraging excursions of the early
war, we can form an idea of the wealth of legen-
dary matter in the poem and appreciate the extent
of its influence on later literature. Hence we are
justified in saying that this uncertain Cyclic poet
(whether Stasinus, or Hegesias, or another is un-
known) more than any other individual writer
gave currency to the notion of Nemesis and the
divine envy. The skill with which the poet
weaves this motive through the narrative is at
NEMESIS 24!
once remarkable. The opening lines are pre-
served, and at the outset Zeus is seen counselling
with Themis (goddess of order) against mankind
who have waxed too numerous for the broad earth:
" There was a time when innumerable tribes of
men wandering over the land weighed down the
width of deep-breasted earth. And Zeus, behold-
ing this, had pity and in his mighty heart laid a
plan to relieve the all-nourishing earth of her
load, fanning the flames of that great strife of the
Trojan war that he might lighten the load by
death. So in Troy the heroes were slain, and the
will of Zeus was accomplished." The first words
of Greek epic, it will be remembered, tell how the
"will of Zeus was accomplished" by the wrath
of Achilles, and here the Cyclic poet seems to
have taken up the expression and developed its
meaning in accordance with his own ideas.
The grammarian who quotes these verses of the
Cypria gives a double reason for the action of
Zeus. The earth, he says, was overburdened
with the multitude of men, and, furthermore,
there remained no piety among them, and this
double reason corresponds to the ambiguous char-
acter of the divine wrath as envy directed against
man's overweening greatness and as justice pur-
suing his evil courses. The same grammarian
points out the twofold means employed to carry out
the divine purpose. Zeus is persuaded by Momus
not to destroy the whole race with thunder-
bolt or deluge, but on the one hand to bring about
242 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the union of the mortal Peleus with the immortal
Thetis whence should spring Achilles, and on
the other hand himself with Nemesis to beget
the beautiful Helen. One can hardly praise too
highly the invention by which these two events
are brought together, the discord at the marriage
of Peleus, the decision of Paris, who reflects the
thought of the Greek poet in giving the prize to
the goddess of beauty, and the rape of Helen,
who thus becomes the instrument of vengeance.
Already in Homer Helen is a strangely significant
figure, and in the proper place it would be inter-
esting to follow her down through Greek litera-
ture. Here it is sufficient to note the new version
of her birth which makes her the child of Nemesis,
instead of I/eda. The fragment telling of the
amour of Zeus and Nemesis deserves to be quoted
in full: "And after these, the third he begot
Helen, a wonder to mortals, whom fair-haired
Nemesis mingling in love with Zeus bare to the
king of the gods by hard necessity; for she fled
and wished not to join in love with Zeus Cronion,
the father, and was troubled at heart with shame
and indignation. Over land she fled and over
the black unharvested water. And Zeus pursued,
longing in heart to seize her. Now like a fish she
sped through the waves of the loud-resounding
sea and stirred up the mighty deep, and again
over the ocean stream and the ends of the earth
she wandered, and again over the fertile main-
land. And ever, to escape him, she took the form
NEMESIS 243
of all the wild monsters nourished by the earth."
So Helen the daughter becomes, as it were, a
human nemesis to work the will of her father;
nor is there anything inconsistent in the union of
this invidious office with her supreme beauty.
Through fragments of broken tradition we gather
that her mother, the Nemesis of the poem, con-
tained a like seeming contradiction in her im-
mortal nature.
The Greeks were slow to admit Nemesis into
their pantheon, and to the end her personality
was far more shadowy than that of the Erinyes.
The word is derived from the root meaning to dis-
tribute, and hence belongs in thought to that large
group of terms which by their etymology show
the association of ideas in distribution, order,
destiny, justice, retribution, indignation, envy.
Homer employs the word nemesis only as an ab-
stract. Its use in Hesiod is more doubtful. The
Works and Days announces that Nemesis and
Shame, at the coming on of the iron age, clad
themselves in white raiment and departed from
earth to join the immortal gods. Here Nemesis
is clearly the half-personified feeling of justice
and righteous indignation among men. But in
the Theogony of the same poet we are told that
' ' pernicious Night bare Nemesis also, a bane for
mortal men." There is no sufficient reason for
rejecting this line, with certain critics. The two
passages are of great interest as showing the
transference of human feelings to the gods and
244 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the personification of abstract ideas in the very
process. In the Cypria this ethical Nemesis
seems to have coalesced with an obscure legend
of a nymph of the same name, sprung from the
ocean like Aphrodite, probably indeed only a
local manifestation of the great goddess; so that
in a double sense, as instigator of Paris and
mother of Helen, the queen of beauty is made the
seducer and scourge of mankind. It is not easy
to decide how much of this allegory was conscious
in the mind of the epic bard; but to us at least
who look back on that old literature and weigh
the strength and error of that wonderful people,
this early union of Nemesis with Aphrodite car-
ries a haunting lesson. Its significance, however,
was soon lost, for the two deities were disassoci-
ated and Nemesis, to the later poets, became again
a separate person.
Other details of the Cyprian epic were more
fruitful of imitation. The tragic story of CEdipus,
the madness of Hercules, the fate of Protesilaus,
show the working of Nemesis in the episodes of
the poem, and must have influenced succeeding
writers. The ravings of Helenus and Cassandra
were not forgotten in later pictures of madness
sent by the divine envy. But most popular of all
was the pathetic story of Iphigenia, the echo of
whose lamentation is still heard in modern litera-
ture. Iphigenia, laying down her young life on
the altar to appease the envy of the goddess,
stands as the fairest, the most touching, emblem
NEMESIS 245
of the dread that has haunted man's heart from
of old, the purest example of the sacrifice de-
manded by the religious instinct whether pagan
or Christian. She furnished a theme for several
of the noblest of Greek tragedies; her fate ani-
mated the bitterest lines of L,ucretius, ending with
those words which the world has not forgotten
and can never forget, Tantum religio! Her story
has inspired modern poets to revive the beauty of
ancient mythology; and, among others, taught
L,andor to write verses that contain perhaps more
of the true classical spirit than any other poem of
the past century.
So far we have been dealing with pure mytho-
logy, with that form of art where symbol and ab-
stract thought are barely distinguishable. But
with the coining of the fifth century begins an age
of reflection or theology. Pindar stands at the
threshold of the new period; and in him myth
and theology, symbol and abstraction, speak side
by side. Pindar is the accepted singer of aris-
tocracy, the clear- voiced herald of splendid wealth,
of magnanimous deeds, of regal pride, of unpity-
ing strength. His odes unroll before us the
pageant of all that is glorious in individual
achievement. As in the golden pomp of tri-
umphal processions, his heroes pass before us
wearing the insolence of perfect self-reliance and
with the smile of unembittered victory. ' By their
side move the blessed Olympians, bright with the
effulgence of immortality. Gods and men hold
246 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
converse together, heedless of the thronging mul-
titudes that shout in acclaim: they lean upon one
another in graceful confidence, so that the eye
fails now and again to distinguish between deified
mortal and humanised god. Yet listen more at-
tentively to the poet's hymns of victory, and the
ear will be struck by one note that is sounded
over and over again: " Be bold, be bold; be not
too bold! ' ' Nowhere else is the lesson of worldly
moderation so intimately blended with its divine
counterpart. Through all the exultant laudation
the warning words return, in every variety of
form. Now it is direct admonition: "Seek not
to become a god"; now it is a picture of man's
littleness, who is but " the dream of a shadow ";
now it is a hint conveyed in parable or fable;
again the poet recalls the frightful stories of old-
world mythology, Tantalus, Typhus, Ixion,
Tityus, Bellerophon, and others, all overwhelmed
in their mad efforts to rival the gods; and again
he himself bows before these gods whose jealous
wrath threatens the glory even of the poet who
adores them.
From the golden-mouthed singer of the heroic
days we turn naturally to the historian who cele-
brated the same period in no less famous prose.
Herodotus occupies a unique position in literature,
for the reason that he, more than any other, com-
bines two aspects of thought which make of him
at once a master historian and a complete ex-
ponent of the essentially Greek spirit. He was
NEMESIS 247
endowed with the wondering eye of the child. In
the gardens of the Luxembourg, or elsewhere it
may be, we have seen a circle of children en-
thralled by the antic play of a puppet show; as
we watched them, gradually their enthusiasm
crept upon us until all the silly mechanism of the
tiny stage was forgotten; the painted dolls became
living creatures, their passions moved us to
laughter or tears, and the voice of the hidden
manager spoke with oracular wisdom. So Herod-
otus looked upon the world's stage with the won-
der of childlike delight; and, reading his long
narration, we are seized by the same intoxication.
The sordid wires and pulleys of history are for a
while ignored, all the nobler motives of humanity
wake a responsive chord in our hearts, and always
we hear the voice of the oracles of the gods, utter-
ing words of admonition and encouragement.
Were there nothing else in the historian's pages,
he would still rank among the great writers of
the world; for deep in our breast there remains a
haunting suspicion that somehow with the ex-
perience of age we have lost another, different
wisdom of childhood. But, side by side with this
uncontaminated vision, there runs through Herod-
otus a vein of profound and mature reflection.
Here we discern the keen eye of the philosopher
who detected through all the tangle of events the
one paramount conflict of reason with unreason,
so that, following his record of the wars of Greece
and Persia, together with their long preparation,
248 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
we seem to read once for all the struggle of the
human race. The victory at last is splendid; but
at every turn of the narrative, like a true Greek,
he insinuates his subtle warning, and the lesson
is the same as Pindar's, now made solemn by the
weight of historical example: Be bold, yet leaven
pride with humility beneath the eye of divine
envy. In the introduction to his work he writes:
' ' The cities which once were great are now for
the most part insignificant, and those that are at
present illustrious were formerly small. Knowing
then the precarious nature of human felicity, I
shall speak of both alike." A little further on,
as if to give us in dramatic form the key to all
that follows, he introduces the memorable scene
between Croesus, the type of human prosperity,
and Solon, the mouthpiece of cautious wisdom.
The Athenian would count no man happy until
the end were seen, for oftentimes God gives men
a gleam of happiness and then plunges them into
ruin. Nay, man is but a thing of accident, and
the divine nature is full of envy and prone to send
tribulations. And after the departure of Solon,
the historian adds, a great nemesis from God
came upon Croesus, presumably because he deemed
himself the most prosperous of men.
It may be a matter of astonishment that this
perpetual fear of Nemesis never in Greece degen-
erated into vulgar superstition. The Romans also
shrunk from the divine envy, and how different
is the manifestation of their dread! There we
NEMESIS 249
may behold Caesar, startled in his triumphal pro-
cession by an unlucky chance, climbing up the
steps of the Capitol on his knees; and Augustus,
terrified by nocturnal visions, begging alms on a
certain day each year, stretching out his hollow
hand to the people; we may behold Claudius also
mounting the Capitol on his knees, and the spec-
tacle will teach us the difference between servile
superstition and the free play of imagination.
Well might the insolent conquerors of the world
cringe before the wrath of Nemesis, and the down-
fall of the " Eternal City " may stand as the most
eloquent proof of her inexorable judgments.
The literature of Rome offers few examples of
belief in a personal Nemesis, for the mythopceic
faculty never flourished in that materialistic city.
But, on the other hand, Rome gave to the world
the two great religious poets of antiquity in whom
the sense of the divine envy speaks in clear and
diverse accents. Mention has already been made
of Lucretius and his use of the Iphigenia legend.
From beginning to end, his work is inspired by
the same feeling of horror toward the gods as they
appeared to him in mythology. His soul is tor-
tured by the universal dread of a watchful malig-
nant power in the sky, by the servile homage and
degrading worship exacted from men, by the cruel
deeds perpetrated in the name of religion, and by
visions of future punishment. To escape once
for all from this superstition of divine envy, he
would utterly sweep away religion and the hopes
250 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of a future life. To Epicurus who has unbur-
dened the heart of these errors he vows himself as
to a hero greater than Hercules, who freed the
earth of physical monsters: " When human life
lay shamefully grovelling on the earth, oppressed
by religion which showed her head from the re-
gions of the sky lowering down upon mortals
with horrible aspect, then first a man of Greece
dared raise aloft his mortal eyes and take stand
against her. Him neither rumours of the gods
constrained, nor thunderbolts, nor the sky with
threatening murmurs; but only the more these
things embittered his mind with desire to break
down first the narrow bars of nature's door.
Therefore the living power of his mind prevailed ;
therefore he proceeded far out beyond the flaming
ramparts of the world and with heart and soul
traversed the vast immensity." Such is his boast:
and in the empty spaces of the world what did he
find to replace the hated powers ? Only a blind,
swirling tempest of atoms which obey no law but
that of chance. And the comfort he found for the
human soul was like that which a later bard
brought back from the City of Dreadful Night :
Good tidings of great joy for you, for all :
There is no God ; no Fieud with names divine
Made us and tortures us ; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being's gall.
Lucretius consigned the gods to a far-off limbo
of unconcerned ease; Virgil retains them as a kind
NEMESIS 251
of poetical machinery for his poem, although in
reality granting them no more authority than the
Epicurean. To replace them, he introduces the
working of Fate into the world, a power as im-
personal as chance and equally devoid of responsi-
bility. Its iron sway, whether it be called fortuna
omnipotens or inexorabile fatum or ineluctabile
tempus, is more pitiless than the divine envy of
the Greeks; there is no heart in the fata aspera
for sympathy with human labour. Virgil would
replace the whims of Nemesis by a vast design of
Providence toward which the workings of Fate
inevitably move. Yet this Providence is as im-
personal as the decrees of Fate which it executes;
and ^Sneas, carried on irresistibly to establish
Rome, herself the symbol of destiny on earth,
must endure every personal sacrifice, the deso-
lation of his home, years of wandering, shipwreck,
the abandonment of love, cruel wars, all that his
heart desires is swallowed up by the exigencies of
envious necessity. So, too, in the memorable
passage of the Georgics, where Virgil gives freest
utterance to his own views and longings, what is
it lends such peculiar pathos to the lines but the
feeling that somehow happiness forever floats just
beyond, and there needs but an effort on our part
to penetrate the clouds and behold its unsullied
glory, only some strange fatality in our breast
remorselessly holds us back ! O fortunatos
nimium, sua si bona norint^ he begins. Alas,
too happy indeed! I know not if it may appear a
252 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
bit of pedantic subtlety, but in the single word
nimium I seem to read all the pathos of man's
vain aspirations beneath the frown of an incom-
prehensible Nemesis.
The chance and fate of the Roman poets, how-
ever, carry us out of the field of mythology. The
most notable effort to rationalise the divine envy
within mythology is the great trilogy of ^schylus
presenting the story of Orestes. His picture of
the Erinyes pursuing the house of Atreus as an
inherited curse is the most sombre in Greek liter-
ature. Yet, after all, they are the ministers of
justice; in the end they are appeased, and, losing
their savage aspect, remain as the Eumenides, the
kindly-disposed, the guardians of the Athenian
state. And if this fair allegory leaves unaltered
the real Nemesis who broods over human weak-
ness, still there is a word of consolation even here.
Zeus has appointed, the poet writes, that we grow
wise through suffering; and again and again he
hints that the soul may win, at the last, her own
profit from the envy of fortune. It is the old say-
ing of Genesis: " Ye shall be as gods knowing
good and evil."
With this word of good omen we may close.
If our study of the divine envy seems to leave the
subject after all as an unsolved problem, we only
reproduce in this the attitude of the Greeks them-
selves. Let us not be deceived: these questions
that touch man's deepest moral experience are not
capable of logical solution; indeed, they lose all
NEMESIS 253
reality as soon as subjected to dogmatic definition.
So it is always refreshing and stimulating to
come into contact with a people who faced these
problems frankly and naturally, without the re-
straints of revelation or sophistication or indiffer-
ence. From his perception of harmony in the
world the Greek created the Erinyes, the up-
holders of order; from his experience of man's
frailty he bowed to Nemesis; and these two, the
divine justice and the divine envy, worked side
by side, now perfectly distinct and again insepar-
ably blended. At times he seemed to discern
a higher purpose speaking through the events of
human life, but still his mind was too upright to
avow any real understanding of what transcended
his own vision. Always he drew one lesson
from Erinyes and Nemesis alike: " Think as a
mortal "; and these words he made the religious
complement of the still more famous command
which Apollo spoke to him from the portal of the
temple at Delphi.
THE END
PR
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