Some Diversions Of A Man Of Letters

SOME DIVERSIONS OF A
MAN OF LETTERS

OTHER WORKS BY

MR. EDMUND GOSSE

Northern Studies. 1879.

Life of Gray. 1882.

Seventeenth-Century Stttdies. 1883,

Life of Congreve. 1888.

A History of Eighteenth- Century Literature. 1899*

Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.JR.S. 1890.

Gossip in a Library. 1891.

The Secret of Narcisse: a Romance. 1892.

Questions at Issue. 1893*

Critical Kit-Rats* 1 896.

A Short History of Modern English Literature.

1897.

Life and Letters of John Donne. 1899*
Hypolympia. 1901.
Life of Jeremy Taylor. 1904.
French Profiles. 1904,
Life of $ir Thomas Browne. 1905.
Father and Son. 1 907.
Life of Ibsen. 1908.
Two Visits to Denmark. 1911,
Collected Poems. 1911.
Portraits and Sketches. 1912.
Inter Anna. 1916.
Three French Moralists, 1918,

SOME

OF

A MAN OF LETTERS

BY

EDMUND GOSSE, \Q.B

LONDON

VV I L L 1 A M H E 1 N E M A N N
1920

First published October
New Impressions November 1919 ; February

TO

EVAN CHARTERIS

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE: ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE i

THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN . . . .13
THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE 29

CATHARINE TROTTER, THE PRECURSOR OF THE BLUE-
STOCKINGS 37

THE MESSAGE OF THE WARTONS , . . -63

THE CHARM OF STERNE 91

THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR ALLEN FOE . , . TOI

THE AUTHOR OF "PELHAM" 115

THE CHALLENGE OF THE BRONTES . . , . 139
DISRAELI'S NOVELS 151

THREE EXPERIMENTS IN PORTRAITURE

I. LADY DOROTHY NEVILL . . . .181

II. LORD CROMER 196

HI. THE LAST DAYS OF LORD REDKSDALE . .216

THE LYRICAL POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY . .231

SOME SOLDIER POETS 259

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY . . . .287
THE AGONY OF THE VICTORIAN AGE . .311
INDEX , 338

vn

PREFACE:
ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE

PREFACE:
ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE

WHEN Voltaire sat down to write a book on Epic Poetry,
he dedicated his first chapter to " Differences of Taste in
Nations." A critic of to-day might well find it necessary,
on the threshold of a general inquiry, to expatiate on
" Differences of Taste in Generations." Changes of stan-
dard in the arts are always taking place, but it is only
with advancing years, perhaps, that we begin to be embar-
rassed by the recurrence of thorn. In early youth we fight
for the new forms of art, for the new aesthetic shibboleths,
and in that happy ardour of battle we have no time or
inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess.
But the years glide on, and, behold ! one morning, we
wake up to find oar own predilections treated with con-
tempt, and the objects of our own idolatry consigned to
the waste-paper basket. Then the matter becomes serious,
and we must either go on struggling for a cause inevitably
lost, or we must give up the whole matter in indifference.
This week I read, over the signature of a very clever and
very popular literary character of our day, the remark that
Wordsworth's was " a genteel mind of the third rank,"
I put down the newspaper in which this airy dictum
was printed, and, for the first time, I was glad that poor
Mr. Matthew Arnold was no longer with us. But, of course,
the evolutions of taste must go on, whether they hurt
the living and the dead, or no.

3

4 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Is there, then, no such thing as a permanent element
of poetic beauty ? The curious fact is that leading critics
in each successive generation are united in believing that
there is, and that the reigning favourite conforms to it, The
life of a reputation is like the life of a plant, and seems,
in these days, to be like the life of an annual. We watch
the seed, admiration for Wordsworth, planted about 1795,
shoot obscurely from the ground, and gradually clothe
itself with leaves till about 1840; then it bursts into
blossom of rapturous praise, and about 1870 is hung with
clusters of the fruit of "permanent 5 * appreciation. In
1919, little more than a century from its first evolution
in obscurity, it recedes again in the raggedness of obloquy,
and cumbers the earth, as dim old " genteel " Wordsworth,
whom we are assured that nobody reads. But why were
tc the best judges " scornful in 1800 and again in 1919 of
what gave the noblest and the most inspiriting pleasure to
" the best judges" in 1870? The execution of the verse
has not altered, the conditions of imagination seem the same,
why then is the estimate always changing ? Is every form
of poetic taste, is all trained enjoyment of poetry, merely
a graduated illusion which goes up and down like a wave
of the sea and carries "the best judges" with it? If
not, who is right, and who is wrong, and what is the use
of dogmatising? Let us unite to quit all vain ambition,
and prefer the jangle of the music-halls, with its direct
" aesthetic thrill."

So far as I know, the only philosopher who has dared
to face this problem is Mr. Balfour, in the brilliant second
chapter of his "Foundations of Belief." He Las there
asked, "Is there any fixed and permanent clement in
beauty?" The result of his inquiry is disconcerting;
after much discussion he decides that there is not. Mr.
Balfour deals, in particular, with only two forms of art,
Music and Dress, but he tacitly includes the others with

Preface : On Fluctuations of Taste 5

them, It is certain that the result of his investigations
is the singularly stultifying one that we are not permitted
to expect <c permanent relations" in or behind the feeling
of poetic beauty, which may be indifferently awakened by
Blake to-day and by Hayley to-morrow. If the critic
says that the verse of Blake is beautiful and that of Hayley
is not, he merely " expounds case-made law." The result
seems to be that no canons of taste exist; that what are
called "laws" of style are enacted only for those who
make them, and for those whom the makers can bully
into accepting their legislation, a new generation of law-
breakers being perfectly free to repeal the code. Southey
yesterday and Keats to-day; why not Southey again
to-morrow, or perhaps Tuppcr? Such is the cynical
cul-dc-sac into which the logic of a philosopher drives
us.

We have had in France an example of volte-face in taste
which I confess has left me gasping. I imagine that if
Mr. Balfour was able to spare a moment from the con-
sideration of fiscal reform, he must have spent it in
triumphing over the fate of M. Sully-Prudhomme. In the
month of September 1906 this poet closed, after a pro-
tracted agony, " that long disease, his life." He had
compelled respect by his courage in 'the face of hopeless
pain, and, one might suppose, some gratitude by the
abundance of his benefactions. His career was more than
blameless, it was singularly exemplary. Half-blind, half-
paralysed, for a long time very poor, pious without fanati-
cism, patient, laborious, devoted to his friends, he seems
to have been one of those extraordinary beings whose
fortitude in the face of affliction knows no abatement.
It would be ridiculous to quote any of these virtues as a
reason for admiring the poetry of Sully-Prudhomme. I
mention them merely to show that there was nothing in
his personal temperament to arouse hatred or in his

6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

personal conditions to excuse envy. Nothing to account
for the, doubtless, entirely sincere detestation which his
poetry seemed to awaken in all " the best minds'* directly
he was dead.

As every one knows, from about 1870 to 1890, Sully-
Prudhomme was, without a rival, the favourite living poet
of the French. Victor Hugo was there, of course, until
1885 and posthumously until much later but he was a
god, and the object of idolatry. All who loved human
poetry, the poetry of sweetness and light, took Sully-
Prudhomme to their heart of hearts. The Stances d Poemcs
of 1865 had perhaps the warmest welcome that ever the
work of a new poet had in France. Thcophilc Gautier
instantly pounced upon Le Vase Brise (since too-famous)
and introduced it to a thousand school-girls. Sainic-Bouvc,
though grown old and languid, waked up to celebrate the
psychology and the music of this new poetry, so delicate,
fresh and transparent. An unknown beauty of extreme
refinement seemed to have been created in it, a beauty
made up of lucidity, pathos and sobriety. Readers who
are now approaching seventy will not forget with what
emotion they listened, for instance, to that dialogue
between the long-dead father and the newly-buried son,
which closes :

" J' ai laissc ma socur et ma mere
Et les beaux livres que j ' ai lus ;
Vous n'avez pas dc bru, mon pcre,
On m'a blesse, jc n'aimc plus."

" De tes aienx compte Ic nornbrc,
Va baiscr leurs fronts inconnus,
Et viens fa ire ion jit dans 1'ombrc
A cote dcs dcrniers veims.

" Nc plcurc pas, dors dans 1'argilc
En csperant Ic grand re veil."
" O pe-re, qti'il est difficile
DC ne plus pensur au solcil 1 "

Preface : On Fluctuations of Taste 7

This body of verse, to which was presently added fresh
collections Les Epreuves (1886), Les Values Ten-dresses
(1875), Le Prisme (1886), was welcomed by the elder
Sanhedrim, and still more vociferously and unanimously
by the younger priesthood of criticism. It pleased the
superfine amateurs of poetry, it was accepted with enthu-
siasm by the thousands who enjoy without analysing their
enjoyment. In 1880, to have questioned that Sully-
Prudhomme was a very noble poet would have been like
challenging Tennyson in 1870, or Cowley in 1660. Jules
Lemaitre claimed that he was the greatest artist in symbols
that France had ever produced. Bnmcticrc, so seldom
moved by modem literature, celebrated with ardour the
author of Les Values Tcmlr esses as having succeeded
better than any other writer who had ever lived in trans-
lating into perfect language the dawn and the twilight of
emotion. That Gaston Paris and M. Anatolc France com-
peted in lofty praise of the lyrics of SuUy-Prudhoinmc, is
perhaps less remarkable than that Paul Verlaine, whom
all the younger schools still look upon as their apostle
and guide, declared, in reviewing Les E curies d'Angius^
that the force of style of Sully- Prudhom me was excelled
only by the beauty of his detail It is needless to multiply
examples of the unanimous praise given by the divers
schools of criticism to Sully-Prudhornnic up to about 1890.
His was, perhaps, the least contested literary glory of
France.

His death startlingly reminded us that this state of
things had to be entirely reversed. It is true that the
peculiar talent of Sully-Prudhomme, being almost exclu-
sively lyrical, scarcely survived his youth, and that he
cumbered his moon of sands with two huge and clumsy
wrecks, La Justice (1878) and Le Bouhcnr (iSStS), round
which the feet of the fairies could hardly be expected to
trip. One must be an academician and hopelessly famous

8 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

before one dares to inflict two elephantine didactic epics
on one's admirers. Unfortunately, too, the poet under-
took to teach the art of verse in his Reflexions (1892)
and his Testament Poctique (1901), brochures which greatly
irritated the young. It is probably wise for academicians,
whether poets or the reverse, to sit beside their nectar,
and not to hurl bolts down into the valley. But, behind
these errors of judgment, there they remain those early
volumes, which seemed to us all so full of exquisite little
masterpieces. Why is it that nobody, except a few elderly
persons, any longer delights in them ? The notices which
Sully-Prudhommc's death awakened in the Paris Press
were either stamped with the mark of old contemporary
affection, or else, when they were not abusive, were as
frigid as the tomb itself. " Ses tcndresscs sucrccs, siru-
peuses, sont vaines en cffct," said a critic of importance !
Indeed, it would appear so; and where arc the laurels of
yester-year ?

To those who were young when Siilly-Pniclhomme
entered into his immortality it seems impossible to realise
that the glory has already departed. Gaston Paris cele-
brated " the penetrating sincerity and the exquisite expres-
sion of feeling" which distinguished Sully-Prudhommc
above all other poets. He was the bard of the inner life,
sincere and dignified, full of melancholy reverie. A great
critic compared La Vote Lactec and Lcs Stalactites with
the far-off sound of bells heard down some lovely valley
in a golden afternoon. Yet the images and the language
were precise ; Sully-Prudhommc was a mathematician, and
if he was reproached with anything like a fault, it was
that his style was slightly geometrical. It would be otiose
to collect any more tributes to his genius, as it appeared
to all Frenchmen, cultivated or semi-cultivated, about the
year 1880. With an analysis of Sully-Prudhomme's poetry
I am not here concerned, but with the question of why

Preface : On Fluctuations of Taste 9

it is that such an authority as Remy de Gourmont could,
in 1907, without awakening any protest among persons
under fifty say that it was a "sort of social crime" to
impose such balderdash as the verse of Sully-Prudhomme
on the public.

It is not needful to quote other living critics, who may
think such prolongation of their severities ungraceful.
But a single contrast will suffice. When, in 1881, Sully-
Prudhomme was elected to the French Academy, expert
opinion throughout the Press was unanimous in admitting
that this was an honour deservedly given to the best lyric
poet of the age. In 1906, when a literary journal sent
out this question, " Who is the poet you love best?"
and was answered by more than two hundred writers of
verse, the diversity of opinion was indeed excessive; such
poets as Sainte-Beuve, as Brizeux, as Rodcnbach, received
votes, all the great masters received many. But Sully-
Prudhomme, alone, received not one vote. A new genera-
tion had arisen, and one of its leaders, with cruel wit,
transferred to the reputation of the author his own most
famous line : " N'y touchcz pas, il cst brise."

It is necessary to recollect that we arc not dealing with
the phenomenon of the inability of very astute literary
people to recognise at once a startling new sort of beauty.
When Robert Browning lent the best poems of Keats to
Mrs. Carlylc, she read them and returned them with the
remark that <f almost any young gentleman with a sweet
tooth might be expected to write such things." Mrs.
Carlylc was a very clever woman, but she was not quite
" educated up to " Keats. The history of letters is full
of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of
great art which has not yet been " classed." But we are
here considering the much stranger and indeed extremely
disconcerting case of a product which has been accepted,
with acclamation, by the judges of one generation, and is

io Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

contemptuously hooted out of court by the next. It is
not, on this occasion, Sully-Prudhomme whom we are
considering, but his critics. If Thcophile Gautier was
right in 1867, Remy de Gourmont must have been wrong
in 1907 ; yet they both were honourable men in the world
of criticism. Nor is it merely the dictum of a single
man, which, however ingenious, may be paradoxical. It is
worse than that ; it is the fact that one whole generation
seems to have agreed with Gautier, and that another
whole generation is of the same mind as Rcmy de
Gourmont.

Then it is that Mr. Balfour, like Galuppi with his " cold
music," comes in and tells us that this is precisely what
we have to expect. All beauty consists in the possession
of certain relations, which being withdrawn, beauty dis-
appears from the object that seemed to possess it. There
is no permanent element in poetic excellence. We are
not to demand any settled opinion about poetry. So
Mr. Balfour seems to creak it, and we wont the heart to
scold. But is it quite so certain that there is no fixed
norm of beauty imaginable? Is it the fact that poetic
pleasure cannot " be supposed to last any longer than the
transient reaction between it " and the temporary prejudice
of our senses? If this be true, then arc critics of all men
most miserable.

Yet, deeply dejected as it leaves me to know that very
clever people despise the "genteel third-rate mind" of
Wordsworth, I am not quite certain that I yield to Mr.
Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic. That eminent
philosopher seems to say <f you find the poets, whom you
revered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old
age. Well ! It is very sad, and perhaps it would annoy
me too, if I were not a philosopher. I Jut it only shows
how right I was to tell you not to expect permanent
relations behind the feeling of beauty, since all is illusion,

Preface : On Fluctuations of Taste 1 1

and there is no such thing as a principle of taste, but
only a variation of fashion."

Is it, however, quite so certain, after all, that there is
no standard? It must be admitted that there seems to
be no fixed rule of taste, not even a uniformity of practice
or general tendency to agreement in particular cases. But
the whole study of the fine arts would lead to despair if
we allowed ourselves to accept this admission as implying
that no conceivable principle of taste exists. We may not
be able to produce it, like a yard-measure, and submit
works of imagination to it, once and for all, in the eyes
of a consternated public. But when we observe, as we
must allow, that art is no better at one age than at another,
but only different; that it is subject to modification, but
certainly not to development; may we not safely accept
this stationary quality as a proof that there does exist,
out of sight, unat tained and unattainable, a positive norm
of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, but in each
generation all excellence must be the result of a relation
to it. It is the moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and
impossible exactly to locate, yet revealed by the light it
throws on distant portions of the sky. At all events, it
appears to me that this is the only theory by which we
can justify a continued interest in literature when it is
attacked, now on one side, now on another, by the
vicissitudes of fashion.

The essays which are here collected deal, for the most
part, with figures in the history of English literature which
have suffered from the changes of fortune and the in-
stability of taste. In every case, there has been some-
thing which is calculated to attract the sympathy and
interest of one who, like myself, has been closely concerned
with two distinct but not unrelated branches of his subject,
the literary character and the literary craft. More than
fifty years have passed like a cloud, like a dream !- since

12 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

I first saw my name printed below a passage of critical
opinion. How many reputations, within that half-century,
have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed 1
We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor
Hugo beyond Homer. We have seen the latest freak of
futurism preferred to The Lotus Eaters, and the first Ldgende
des Si&cles rejected as unreadable. In face of this whirl-
wind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it is
on its head or its feet " its trembling tent all topsy-turvy
wheels/ 5 as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that
security can only be found in an incessant exploration of
the by-ways of literary history and analysis of the vagaries
of literary character. To pursue this analysis and this
exploration without bewilderment and without prejudice
is to sum up the pleasures of a life devoted to books.

August 1919.

THE SHEPHERD OF THE
OCEAN

THE SHEPHERD OF THE
OCEAN 1

THREE hundred years have gone by to-day since Sir
Walter Raleigh was beheaded, in presence of a vast throng
of spectators, on the scaffold of Old Palace Yard in West-
minster, General Gordon said that England is what her
adventurers have made her, and there is not in all English
history a more shining and violent specimen of the adven-
turous type than Raleigh. I am desired to deliver a brief
panegyric on this celebrated freebooter, and I go behind
the modern definition of the word " panegyric " (as a
pompous and ornamented piece of rhetoric) to its original
significance, which was, as I take it, the reminder, to a
great assembly of persons, of the reason why they have
been brought together in the name of a man long dead.
Therefore I shall endeavour, in the short space of time
allotted to me, not so much to eulogise as to explain and
to define what Sir Walter Raleigh was and represents.

I suggest, therefore, before we touch upon any of the
details of his career and character, that the central feature
of Raleigh, as he appears to us after three hundred years,
is his unflinching determination to see the name of England
written across the forehead of the world. Others before
him had been patriots of the purest order, but Raleigh
was the first man who laid it down, as a formula, that
''England shall by the favour of God resist, repel and

* Address delivered at the Mansion House, October agth, 1918,
on occasion of the Tercentenary of Sir Walter Kaleigh's death,

1 6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

confound all whatsoever attempts against her sacred king-
dom." He had no political sense nor skill in statecraft.
For that we go to the Burghleys or the Cecils, crafty men
of experience and judgment. But he understood that
England had enemies and that those enemies must be
humbled and confounded. He understood that the road
of England's greatness, which was more to him than all
other good things, lay across the sea. The time was ripe
for the assertion of English liberty, of English ascendancy,
too; and the opportunity of the moment lay in "those
happy hands which the Holy Ghost hath guided," the
fortunate adventurers. Of these Raleigh was the most
eminent as he was also, in a sense, the most unfortunate.

A heavy shadow lay all over the Western world, the
shadow of a fierce bird of prey hovering over its victim.
Ever since Ferdinand expelled the Moors out of Granada,
Spain had been nursing insensate dreams of universal
empire. She was endeavouring to destroy the infant
system of European civilisation by every means of brutality
and intrigue which the activity of her arrogance could
devise. The Kings of Spain, in their ruthless ambition,
encouraged their people in a dream of Spanish world-
dominion. Their bulletins had long " filled the earth with
their vainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of
victories" ; they had spread their propaganda " in sundry
languages in print," distributing braggart pamphlets in
which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals, of their
successes against England, France, and Italy. They had
" abused and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the
Low Countries, and they held that the force of arms which
they brandished would weigh against justice, humanity,
and freedom in the servitude which they meant to inilict
upon Europe. It was to be Spanioi uber nl/cs.

But there was one particular nation against which the
malignity of the great enemy blazed most fiercely. The

The Shepherd of the Ocean 17

King of Spain blasphemously regarded himself as the
instrument of God, and there was one country which more
than the rest frustrated his pious designs. This was
England, and for that reason England was more bitterly
hated than any other enemy. The Spaniards did " more
greedily thirst after English blood than after the lives of
any other people of Europe." The avowed purpose of
Castile was to destroy that maritime supremacy of England
on which the very existence of the English State depends.
The significance of Sir Walter Raleigh consists in the
clairvoyance with which he perceived and the energy with
which he combated this monstrous assumption. Other
noble Englishmen of his time, and before his time, had
been clear-sighted and had struck hard against the evil
tyranny of Spanish dynastic militarism, but no other man
before or since was so luminously identified with resistance.
He struts upon the stage of battle with the limelight full
upon him. The classic writing of the crisis is contained
in the Last Fight of the Revenge at Sea of 1591, where the
splendid defiance and warning of the Preface arc like
trumpets blown to the four quarters of the globe. Raleigh
stands out as the man who above all others laboured, as
he said, <l against the ambitious and bloody pretences of
the Spaniards, who, seeking to devour all nations, shall
be themselves devoured."

There is a blessing upon the meek of the earth, but I
do not present Raleigh to you as a humble-minded man.
In that wonderful Elizabethan age there were blossoming,
side by side, the meekness of Hooker, the subtlety of
Bacon, the platonic dream of Spenser, the imperturbable
wisdom of Shakespeare. Raleigh had no part in any of
these, and to complain of that would be to grumble because
a hollyhock is neither a violet nor a rose. He had his
enemies during his life and his detractors ever since, and
we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He
c

1 8 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed,
even to excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He
lived in a perpetual alternation of thunderstorm and
blazing sunshine. He admitted himself that his " reason/'
by which he meant his judgment, " was exceeding weak/'
and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due appreciation
of his courage and nobility. For long years his violent
and haughty temper made him the most unpopular man
in England, except in Devonshire, where everybody doted
on him. He was " a man of desperate fortunes," and he
did not shrink from violent methods. In studying his life
we are amused, we are almost scandalised, at his snake-
like quality. He moves with serpentine undulations, and
the beautiful hard head is lifted from ambush to strike
the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With his protestations,
his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasive pertinacity,
Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the " strong
silent" type of soldier which the nineteenth century
invented for exclusive British consumption.

In judging his character we must take into consideration
not only the times in which he lived, but the leaders of
English policy with whom he came into collision. He was
not thirty years of age, and still at the height of his vivacity,
when he was taken into the close favour of (jueen Elizabeth,
There can be no question that he found in the temper of
the monarch something to which his own nature, intimately
responded. The Queen was an adventurer at heart, as he
was, and she was an Englishman of Englishmen. We
are accustomed to laugh at the extravagance of the homage
which Raleigh paid to a woman old enough to be his
mother, at the bravado which made him fling his new
plush cloak across a puddle for the Queen to tread over
gently, as Fuller tells us, " rewarding him afterwards with
many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair
a footcloth," or at the story of the rhymes the couple cut

The Shepherd of the Ocean 19

on the glass with their diamond rings. In ail this, no
doubt, there was the fashion of the time, and on Raleigh's
part there was ambition and the desire to push his fortunes
without scruple. But there was, you may be sure, more
than that; there was the instinctive sympathy between
the two who hated with the most unflagging and the most
burning hate the wicked aggression of Spain. We may
be sure that Elizabeth never for a clay forgot that Pope
Alexander VI. had generously bestowed the Western world
on the Crown of Spain. Raleigh spoke a language which
might be extravagant and which might be exasperating,
which might, in fact, lead to outrageous quarrels between
his Cynthia and himself, but which, at least, that Cynthia
understood.

But in 1602, when Raleigh was fifty years of age and
had his splendours behind him, there came another Pharaoh
who knew not Joseph. James I. was the type of the
cautious man who only looks to the present, who hopes
by staving off a crisis till Tuesday that something fresh
will "turn up" by Wednesday. He was disposed, from
the very first, to distrust and to waylay the plans of
Raleigh. We arc told, and can well believe it, that he
was " diffident" of Sir Walter's designs. He was uncom-
fortable in the presence of that breezy " man of desperate
fortunes." A very excellent example of the opposition of
the two types is offered by the discussion about the golden
city of Manoa. Raleigh believed, and after all disappoint-
ments continued to be sure, that in the heart of the swamps
of the Orinoco there existed a citadel of magnificent wealth,
an emporium of diamonds and gold, from which Spain
was secretly drawing the riches with which she proposed
to overwhelm civilisation. He struggled for nearly a
quarter of a century to win this marvellous city for England.
James I. chopped in with his cold logic, and declined to
believe that any golden mine existed in Guiana " anywhere

20 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

in nature/' as he craftily said. When Raleigh returned
after his last miserable failure in May 1617, the monarch
spared no sneer and no reproof to the pirate of the seas.
Of course, the King was right; there was no mine of
diamonds, no golden city. But the immense treasures
that haunted Raleigh's dreams were more real than reality ;
they existed in the future; he looked far ahead, and our
sympathies to-day, and our gratitude also, are all for the
noble and valorous knight who sailed out into the W es *
searching for an unknown El Dorado.

It is not so easy to defend the character of our hero
against those who, like Hume, have objected to his methods
in the prosecution of his designs. To Hume, as to many
others before and since, Raleigh seemed " extremely defec-
tive either in solid understanding, or morals, or both."
The excellent historians of the eighteenth century could
not make up their minds whether he was a hero or an
impostor. Did he believe in the Guiana mine, or was he,
through all those strenuous years, hoodwinking the world?
Had he any purpose, save to plunder the Spaniard ? Per-
haps his own family doubted his sanity, for his son Walter,
when he charged the Spanish settlement at San Thome,
pointed to the house of the little colony and shouted to
his men : " Come on, this is the true mine, and none but
fools would look for any other ! " Accusations of bad
faith, of factious behaviour, of disloyal intrigue, were
brought up against Sir Walter over and over again during
the " day of his tempestuous life, drawn on into an evening n
of ignominy and blood. These charges were the " inmost
and soul-piercing wounds 5 ' of which he spoke, still ' ' aching,"
still " uncured."

There is no need to recount to you the incidents of his
life, but I may remind you that after the failure of the
latest expedition to South America the Privy Council,
under pressure from the Spanish Ambassador, gave orders

The Shepherd of the Ocean 21

to Sir Lewis Stukeley to bring the body of Sir Walter
Raleigh speedily to London. This was the culmination of
his fall, since, three days after Raleigh landed at Plymouth,
the King had assured Spain that " not all those who
have given security for Raleigh can save him from the
gallows." His examination followed, and the publication
of the Apology for the Voyage to Guiana. The trial dragged
on, while James I., in a manner almost inconceivable,
allowed himself to be hurried and bullied by the insolent
tyrant Philip II. If the English King did not make haste
to execute Raleigh the Spaniards would fetch him away
and hang him in Madrid. In these conditions, and clutch-
ing at life as a man clutches at roots and branches when
he is sliding down a precipice, the conduct of Raleigh has
given cause to his critics to blaspheme. He wriggled like
an eel, he pretended to be sick, he pretended to be mad,
in order to protract his examination. He prevaricated
about his mine, about the French alliance, about the
Spanish treaties, about his stores and instruments. Did
he believe, or did he not believe, in the Empire of the
Inca, in the Amazons or Republic of Women, in the gold
lying hidden in the hard white spar of El Dorado? We
do not know, and his own latest efforts at explanation
only cloud our counsel. He was perhaps really a little mad
at last, his feverish brain half-crazed by the movement on
land and sea of the triumphant wealth of Spain.

Let us never overlook that the master-passion of his
whole career was hatred of this tyrannous prosperity of
England's most formidable rival. He acted impulsively,
and even unjustly; there was much in his methods that
a cool judgment must condemn; but he was fighting, with
his back to the wall, in order that the British race should
not be crowded out of existence by " the proud Iberian."
He saw that if Spain were permitted to extend her military
and commercial supremacy unchecked, there would be an

22 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

end to civilisation. Democracy was a thing as yet un-
developed, but the seeds of it were lying in the warm
soil of English liberty, and Raleigh perceived, more vehe-
mently than any other living man, that the complete
victory of Spain would involve the shipwreck of England's
hopes of future prosperity. Nor was he exclusively
interested in England, though all his best hopes were ours.
When he had been a lad at Oxford he had broken away
from his studies in 1569 to help the Protestant princes as
a gentleman volunteer in France, and he took part in the
famous battle of Jarnac. He is supposed to have fought
in France for six years. From early youth his mind was
" bent on military glory, 3 ' and always in opposition to
Spain. His escape from the bloody Vespers of Saint
Bartholomew had given him a deep distrust of the policy
of Rome. The Spaniard had "abused and tormented"
the wretched inhabitants of Flanders. Sir Walter Raleigh
dreamed that by the combination in arms of England,
France, and the Low Countries, the Spaniards " might not
only be persuaded to live in peace, but all their swelling
and overflowing streams might be brought back into their
natural channels and old banks."

Raleigh stood out, as he put it himself, against " the
continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men."
The rulers in Madrid, transported by their own arrogance,
had determined to impose their religion, their culture, their
form of government, on the world. It was a question
whether the vastly superior moral and intellectual energy
of England and France would not be crushed beneath the
heel of Spain. Raleigh was ready to sacrifice everything,
to imperil his own soul, to prevent that. He says you
might as well " root out the Christian religion altogether"
as join " the rest of all Europe to Spain." In his zeal to
prevent " the continuance of this boundless ambition in
mortal men," he lent himself to acts which we must not

The Shepherd of the Ocean 23

attempt to condone. There is no use in trying to explain
away the facts of his cruel and even savage fanaticism in
Ireland when he was governor of Munster. He was always
apt to be abruptly brutal to a man who crossed his path.
But even his Irish career offers aspects on which we may
dwell with pure pleasure. Nothing could be more romantic
than those adventures, like the feats of a paladin of the
Faerie Queen, which he encountered in the great wood
of Lisinore; while the story of how he carried off Lord
and Lady Roche from their breakfast-table in their own
castle of Ballyinharsh, and how he rode with them up ravines
and round precipices in that mad flight from their retainers,
is as rousing as any scene ever imagined by Dumas fere.

Raleigh called himself the Shepherd of the Ocean, and
the name fits him well, even though his flock were less
like sheep than like a leash of hunting leopards. His
theory was that with a pack of small and active pinnaces
he could successfully hunt the lumbering Spanish galleons
without their being able to hit back. He was, in contra-
distinction to many preceding English admirals, a cautious
fighter at sea, and he says, in a striking passage of the
History of the World, written towards the end of his career,
" to clap ships together without any consideration belongs
rather to a madman than to a man of war." He must
have taken the keenest interest in the gigantic failure of
the Fclicissima Armada in 1588, but, tantalisingly enough,
we have no record of his part in it. On the other hand,
the two finest of his prose pamphlets, the R elation of the
Action in Cadiz Harbour and the incomparable Report on
the Fight in the Revenge, supply us with ample materials
for forming an idea of his value as a naval strategist.
Raleigh's earliest biographer, Oldys the antiquary, speaks
of him as " raising a grove of laurels out of the sea/' and
it is certainly upon that element that he reaches his
highest effect of prominence. It was at sea that he could

24 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

give fullest scope to his hatred of the tyrannous prosperity
of Spain. He had to be at once a gamekeeper and a
poacher; he had to protect the legitimate interests of
English shipping against privateers and pirates, while he
was persuaded to be, or felt himself called upon to become,
no little of a pirate himself. He was a passionate advocate
of the freedom of the seas, and those who look upon
Raleigh as a mere hot-brained enthusiast should read his
little book called Observations on Trade and Commerce,
written in the Tower, and see what sensible views he had
about the causes of the depression of trade. These sage
opinions did not check him, or his fleets of hunting-
pinnaces, from lying in wait for the heavy wallowing
plate-ships, laden with Indian carpets and rubies and
sandalwood and ebony, which came swinging up to the
equator from Ceylon or Malabar. The " freedom of the
seas" was for Raleigh's ship, the Roebuck; it was by no
means for the Madre de Dios. We find these moral
inconsistencies in the mind of the best of adventurers.

A sketch of Raleigh's character would be imperfect
indeed if it contained no word concerning his genius as a
coloniser. One of his main determinations, early in life,
was " to discover and conquer unknown lands, and take
possession of them in the Queen's name." We celebrate
in Sir Walter Raleigh one of the most intelligent and
imaginative of the founders of our colonial empire. The
English merchantmen before his time had been satisfied
with the determination to grasp the wealth of the New
World as it came home to Spain ; it had not occurred to
them to compete with the great rival at the fountain-head
of riches. Even men like brake and Frobisher had been
content with a policy of forbidding Spain, as the poet
Wither said, " to check our ships from sailing where they
please." South America was already mainly in Spanish
hands } but North America was still open to invasion. It

The Shepherd of the Ocean 25

was Raleigh's half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who
first thought of planting an English settlement in what
is now the United States, in 1578. But Gilbert had " no
luck at sea," as Queen Elizabeth observed, and it was
Raleigh who, in 1584, took up the scheme of colonisation.
He did not drop it until the death of Elizabeth, when,
under the east wind of the new regime, the blossom of his
colonial enterprises flagged.

The motion for the ceremony of to-day originated with
the authorities of an important American city, which
proudly bears the name of our adventurer. The earliest
settlement in what are now the United States was made
at Roanoke, in Virginia, on a day which must always be
prominent in the annals of civilisation, August 17 th, 1585.
But this colony lasted only ten months, and it was not
until nearly two years later that the fourth expedition
which Raleigh sent out succeeded in maintaining a perilous
foothold in the new country. This was the little trembling
taper to which his own name was given, the twinkling
spark which is now the flourishing city of Raleigh in
North Carolina. We may well marvel at the pertinacity
with which Sir Walter persisted, in the face of innumerable
difficulties, in sending out one colonising fleet after another,
although, contrary to common legend, lie himself never
set foot in North America. It was fortunate that at this
period of his career he was wealthy, for the attempts to
plant settlements in the vast region which he named
Virginia cost him more than 40,000. We note at all
turns of his fortune his extraordinary tenacity of purpose,
which he illustrated, as though by a motto, in the verses he
addressed to a comrade towards the end of his imprisonment
in the Tower :~

" Change not 1 to change thy fortune 'tis too late;
Who with a manly faith resolves to die
May promise to himself a lasting State,
Though not so great, yet free from infamy."

26 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

So we may think of him in his prime, as he stood on the
Hoe of Plymouth twenty years before, a gallant figure of
a man, bedizened with precious stones, velvets, and em-
broidered damasks, shouting his commands to his captains
in a strong Devonshire accent. We think of him resolutely
gazing westward always, with the light of the sea in his
eyes.

We come to the final scene which we arc here to-day to
commemorate. Little honour to the rulers of England in
1618 redounds from it, and yet we may fed that it completed
and even redeemed from decay the character of Raleigh.
This tragedy, which was almost a murder, was needed to
round off the accomplishment of so strange and frantic a
career of romantic violence, and to stamp it with meaning.
If Raleigh had been thrown from his horse or had died
of the ague in his bed, we should have been depressed by
the squalid circumstances, we should have been less con-
scious than we arc now of his unbroken magnanimity.
His failures and his excesses had made him unpopular
throughout England, and he was both proud and peevish
in his recognition of the fact. He declared that he was
"nothing indebted" to the world, and again that " the
common people are evil judges of honest things." But the
thirteen years of his imprisonment caused a reaction.
People forgot how troublesome he had been and only
recollected his magnificence. They remembered nothing
but that he had spent his whole energy and fortune in
resisting the brutality and avarice of the Spaniard.

Then came the disgraceful scene of his cross-examination
at Westminster, and the condemnation by his venal judges
at the order of a paltry king. It became known, or slu ewdly
guessed, that Spain had sent to James I. a hectoring
alternative that Raleigh must be executed in London or
sent alive for a like purpose to Madrid. The trial was
a cowardly and ignominious submission of the English

The Shepherd of the Ocean 27

Government to the insolence of England's hereditary
enemy. Raleigh seemed for the moment to have failed
completely, yet it was really like the act of Samson, who
slew more men at his death than in all his life. Samuel
Pepys, who had some fine intuitions at a time when the
national moral was very low, spoke of Raleigh as being
"given over, as a sacrifice/' to our enemies. This has
been, in truth, the secret of his unfailing romantic popu-
larity, and it is the reason of the emotion which has called
us together here three hundred years after his death upon
the scaffold.

THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE

THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE

AMONG the " co-supremes and stars of love )J which form
the constellated glory of our greatest poet there is one small
splendour which we are apt to overlook in our general
survey. But, if we isolate it from other considerations,
it is surely no small thing that Shakespeare created and
introduced into our literature the Dramatic Song. If with
statistical finger we turn the pages of all his plays, we shall
discover, not perhaps without surprise, that these contain
not fewer than fifty strains of lyrical measure. Some of
the fifty, to be sure, are mere star-dust, but others include
some of the very jewels of our tongue. They range in form
from the sophisticated quatorzains of The Two Gentlemen of
Verona (where, however, comes "Who is Silvia ?") to
the reckless snatches of melody in Hamlet. But all have a
character which is Shakespearean, and this regardless of
the question so often raised, and so incapable of reply, as
to whether some of the wilder ones are Shakespeare's com-
position or no. Whoever originally may have written such
scraps as "They bore him bare-faced on the bier" and
" Come o'er the bourne, Bessy, to me," the spirit of Shake-
speare now pervades and possesses them.

Our poet was a prodigious innovator in this as in so many
other matters. Of course, the idea and practice of musical
interludes in plays was not quite novel. In Shakespeare's
early youth that remarkable artist in language, John Lyly,
had presented songs in several of his plays, and these were
notable for what his contemporary, Henry Upchear, called
" their labouring beauty." We may notice that Lyly's

3*

32 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

songs were not printed till long after Shakespeare's death,
but doubtless he had listened to them. Peele and Greene
had brilliant lyrical gifts, but they did not exercise them
in their dramas, nor did Lodge, whose novel of Rosalynde
(1590) contains the only two precedent songs which we
could willingly add to Shakespeare's juvenile repertory.
But while I think it would be rash to deny that the lyrics
of Lodge and Lyly had their direct influence on the style of
Shakespeare, neither of those admirable precursors con-
ceived the possibility of making the Song an integral part
of the development of the drama. This was Shakespeare's
invention, and he applied it with a technical adroitness
which had never been dreamed of before and was never
rivalled after.

This was not apprehended by the early critics of our divine
poet, and has never yet, perhaps, received all the attention
it deserves. We may find ourselves bewildered if we glance
at what the eighteenth-century commentators said, for
instance, about the songs in Twelfth Night. They called
the adorable rhapsodies of the Clown "absurd" and
"unintelligible"; "0 Mistress mine" was in their ears
"meaningless"; "When that I was" appeared to them
" degraded buffoonery." They did not perceive the close
and indispensable connection between the Clown's song and
the action of the piece, although the poet had been careful
to point out that it was a moral song " dulcet in contagion/'
and too good, except for sarcasm, to be wasted on Sir
Andrew and Sir Toby. The critics neglected to note what
the Duke says about " Come away, come away, Death/'
and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this
must not really have been sung by Viola, all the while
insensible to the poignant dramatic value of it as warbled
by the ironic Clown in the presence of the blinded pair.
"3ut indeed the whole of Twelfth Night is burdened with
lelody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and

The Songs of Shakespeare 33

at each change of scene some unseen hand is overheard
touching a harp-string. The lovely, infatuated lyrics arrive,
dramatically, to relieve this musical tension at its height.

Rather different, and perhaps still more subtle, is the case
of A Winter's Tale, where the musical obsession is less
prominent, and where the songs are all delivered from the
fantastic lips of Autolycus. Here again the old critics were
very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts " When daffodils begin
to peer" and " Lawn as white as driven snow" into one
bag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as " two nonsensical
songs" sung by " a pickpocket." Dr. Warburton blushed
to think that such " nonsense" could be foisted on Shake-
speare's text. Strange that those learned men were unable
to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely human
and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral
part of the drama. They complete the revelation of the
complex temperament of Autolycus, with his passion for
flowers and millinery, his hysterical balancing between
laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his sudden senti-
mentality, like the Clown's

" Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown I "

It is in these subtle lyrical amalgams of humour and tender-
ness that the firm hand of the creator of character reveals
itself.

But it is in The Tempest that Shakespeare's supremacy
as a writer of songs is most brilliantly developed. Here
are seven or eight lyrics, and among them are some of the
loveliest things that any man has written. What was ever
composed more liquid, more elastic, more delicately fairy-
like than Ariel's First Song?

" Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands :
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'cl,
The wild waves whist."

34 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

That is, not " kissed the wild waves," as ingenious punctu-
ators pretend, but, parenthetically, " kissed one another, -
the wild waves being silent the while." Even fairies do not
kiss waves, than which no embrace could be conceived less
rewarding. Has any one remarked the echo of Marlowe
here, from Hero and Leander,

" when all is \vhist and si ill,
Save that the sea playing on yellow sand
Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land I ' '

But Marlowe, with all his gifts, could never have written
the lyrical parts of The Tempest. This song is in emotional
sympathy with Ferdinand, and in the truest sense dramatic,
not a piece of pretty verse foisted in to add to the enter-
tainment.

Ariel's Second Song has been compared with Webster's
"Call for the robin redbreast" in The White Devil, but
solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it docs not sing to us.
Shakespeare's " ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath
of the west wind over an zcolian harp. Where, in any
language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than
in Ariel' s Fourth Song, ' ' Where the bee sucks } ' ? Do wden
saw in Ariel the imaginative genius of English poetry,
recently delivered from Sycorax. If we glance at Dryclen's
recension of The Tempest we may be inclined to think that
the " wicked dam " soon won back her mastery. With
all respect to Dryden, what are we to think of his discretion
in eking out Shakespeare's insufficiencies with such staves
as this :

" Upon the floods we'll sing and play
And celebrate a Jialcyon day ;
Great Nephew Aeolus make no noise,
Muzzle your roaring- boys."

and so forth ? What had happened to the ear of England
in seventy years ?

The Songs of Shakespeare 35

As a matter of fact the perfection of dramatic song
scarcely survived Shakespeare himself. The early
Jacobeans, Heywood, Ford, and Dekker in particular,
broke out occasionally in delicate ditties. But most play-
wrights, like Massinger, were persistently pedestrian. The
only man who came at all close to Shakespeare as a lyrist
was John Fletcher, whose " Lay a garland on my hearse"
nobody could challenge if it were found printed first in a
Shakespeare quarto. The three great songs in " Valen-
tinian" have almost more splendour than any of Shake-
speare's, though never quite the intimate beauty, the singing
spontaneity of "Under the greenwood tree" or "Hark,
hark, the lark." It has grown to be the habit of antholo-
gists to assert Shakespeare's right to " Roses, their sharp
spikes being gone." The mere fact of its loveliness and
perfection gives them no authority to do so; and to my
ear the rather stately procession of syllables is reminiscent
of Fletcher. We shall never be certain; and who would
not swear that " Hear, ye ladies that are coy " was by the
same hand that wrote " Sigh no more, ladies," if we were
not sure of the contrary ? But the most effective test, even
in the case of Fletcher, is to see whether the trill of song is,
or is not, an inherent portion of the dramatic structure of
the play. This is the hall-mark of Shakespeare, and perhaps
of him alone.

CATHARINE TROTTER

CATHARINE TROTTER,

THE PRECURSOR OF THE
BLUESTOCKINGS

THE practically complete absence of the Woman of
Letters from our tropical and profuse literature of the
early and middle seventeenth century has often been
observed with wonder. While France had her Madeleine
de Scud6ry and her Mile, de Gournay and her Mere Angelique
Arnauld, Englishwomen of the Stuart age ventured upon
no incursions into philosophy, fiction, or theology. More
and more eagerly, however, they read books; and as a
consequence of reading, they began at last to write. The
precious Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, hob-a-nobbed
with every Muse in her amazing divagations. But the
earliest professional woman of letters was Aphra Behn, the
novelist and playwright, to whose genius justice has only
quite lately been done by Mr. Montague Summers. Mrs,
Behn died in 1689, and it seemed at first that she had left
no heritage to her sex. But there presently appeared a set
of female writers, who enlivened the last years of the
century, but who were soon eclipsed by the wits of the age
of Anne, and who have been entirely forgotten. It is to
the most interesting of these " transient phantoms " that
I wish to draw attention.

The extreme precocity of Catharine Trotter makes her
seem to belong to the age of Drydcn, but she was in reality
younger than Adclison and most of the other contemporaries

39

40 Some Diversions o a Man of Letters

of Pope. She was born on August i6th, 1679, the younger
daughter of a naval officer, Captain David Trotter, R.N. ;
her mother's maiden name had been Sarah Ballcndon,
probably of the well-known Catholic family of that ilk.
She " had the honour of being nearly related to the illustri-
ous families of Maitland, Duke of Laudcrdalc and Drum-
mond, Earl of Perth/' The Jacobite fourth Earl of Perth
seems to have been the patron of Captain Trotter, of whom
he wrote in 1684 that he was " an ornament to his country."
Apparently the gallant captain was attached to Trinity
House, where his probity and integrity earned him the
epithet of " honest David/' and where he attracted the
notice of George, first Lord Dartmouth, when that rising
statesman was appointed Master. Captain Trotter had
served the Crown from his youth, " with great gallantry
and fidelity, both by land and sea," and had been very
successful in the Dutch wars. He had a brother who was a
commander in the Navy. We get an impression of high
respectability in the outer, but not outermost, circles of
influential Scottish society. Doubtless the infancy of
Catharine was spent in conditions of dependent prosperity.
These conditions were not to last. When she was four
years old Lord Dartmouth started on the famous expedition
to demolish Tangier, and he took Captain Trotter with him
as his commodore. In this affair, as before, the captain
distinguished himself by his ability, and instead of returning
to London after Tangier he was recommended to King
Charles II. as the proper person to convoy the fleet of the
Turkey Company to its destination. Apparently it was
understood that this would be the final reward of his services
and that he was to " make his fortune " out of the Turks.
Unhappily, after convoying his charge safely to Scanderoon,
he fell sick of the plague that was raging there, and died,
in the course of January 1684, m company with all the
other officers of His ship. Every misfortune now ensued;

Catharine Trotter 41

the purser, who was thus left to his own devices, helped
himself to the money destined for the expenses of the voy-
age, while, to crown all, the London goldsmith in whose
hands the captain had left his private fortune took this
occasion to go bankrupt. The King, in these melancholy
circumstances, granted an Admiralty pension to the widow,
but when he died early in the following year this was no
longer paid, and the unfortunate ladies of the Trotter family
might well murmur :

" One mischief brings another on his neck,
As mighty billows tumble in the seas."

From the beginning of her fifth year, then, Catharine
experienced the precarious lot of those who depend for a
livelihood on the charity of more or less distant relatives.
We dimly see a presentable mother pitcously gathering
up such crumbs as fell from the tables of the illustrious
families with whom she was remotely connected. But
the Duke of Laudcrdale himself was now dead, and the
Earl of Perth had passed the zenith of his power. No doubt
in the seventeenth century the protection of poor relations
was carried on more systematically than it is to-day, and
certainly Mrs. Trotter contrived to live and to bring up her
two daughters genteelly. The first years were the worst;
the accession of William III. brought back to England and
to favour Gilbert Burnet, who became Bishop of Salisbury
in 1688, when Catharine was nine years old. Mrs. Trotter
found a patron and perhaps an employer in the Bishop,
and when Queen Anne came to the throne her little pension
was renewed.

There is frequent reference to money in Catharine Trotter's
writings, and the lack of it was the rock upon which her gifts
were finally, wrecked. With a competency she might have
achieved a much more prominent place in English literature
than she could ever afford to reach. She offers a curious

42 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

instance of the depressing effect of poverty, and we get the
impression that she was never, during her long and virtuous
career, lifted above the carking anxiety which deadens the
imagination. As a child, however, she seems to have
awakened hopes of a high order. She was a prodigy, and
while little more than an infant she displayed an illumination
in literature which was looked upon, in that age of female
darkness, as quite a portent. She taught herself French,
" by her own application without any instructor," but was
obliged to accept some assistance in acquiring Latin and
logic. The last-mentioned subject became her particular
delight, and at a very tender age she drew up " an abstract "
of that science " for her own use." Thus she prepared
for her future communion with Locke and with Leibnitz.
When she was very small, in spite of frequent conferences
with learned members of the Church of England, she became
persuaded of the truth of Catholicism and joined the
Roman communion. We may conjecture that this coin-
cided with the conversion of her kinsman, Lord Chancellor
Perth, but as events turned out it cannot but have added to
the sorrows of that much-tried woman, her mother. (It
should be stated that Catharine resumed the Anglican faith
when she was twenty-eight years of age.)

She was in her tenth year when the unhappy reign of
James II. came to a close. Mrs. Trotter's connections were
now in a poor plight. The new Earl of Lauderdale was in
great distress for money ; Lord Dartmouth, abandoned by
the King in his flight, was thrown into the Tower, where he
died on October 25th, 1691, in which year the estates of
the Earl of Perth were sequestered and he himself hunted
out of the country. Ruin simultaneously fell on all the
fine friends of our infant prodigy, and we can but guess how
it affected her. Yet there were plenty of other Jacobites
left in London, and Catharine's first public appearance
shows that she cultivated their friendship. She published

Catharine Trotter 43

in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons
on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox ; she was
then fourteen years of age. Higgons was a young man of
twenty-three, who had lately returned from the exiled court
in France, where he had distinguished himself by his agree-
able manners, and who had just made a name for himself by
poems addressed to Dryden and by a prologue to Congreve' s
Old Batchelor. He was afterwards to become famous for
a little while as a political historian. Catharine Trotter's
verses are bad, but she addresses Higgons as " lovely
youth/' and claims his gratitude for her tribute in terms
which are almost boisterous. This poem was not only her
introduction to the public, but, through Bevil Higgons,
was probably the channel of her acquaintance with Congreve
and Dryden.

Throughout her life she was fond of writing letters to
celebrated people; she now certainly wrote to Congreve
and doubtless to Dryden. A freedom in correspondence ran
in the family. Her poor mother is revealed to us as always
"renewing her application" to somebody or other. We
next find the youthful poet in relation with the Earl of
Dorset, from whom she must have concealed her Jacobite
propensities. Dorset was the great public patron of poetry
under William III., and Catharine Trotter, aged sixteen,
having composed a tragedy, appealed to him for support. It
was very graciously granted, and Agnes de Castro, in five
acts and in blank verse, " written by a young lady/' was
produced at the Theatre Royal in 1695, under the " protec-
tion" of Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Lord
Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household. The event
caused a considerable commotion. No woman had written
for the English stage since the death of Mrs. Behn, and
curiosity was much excited. Mrs. Vcrbruggen, that en-
chanting actress, but in male attire, recited a clever, ranting
epilogue at the close of the performance, in which she said :

44 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

" 'tis whispered here
Our Poetess is virtuous, young and fair/"

but the secret was an open one. Wychcrlcy, who con-
tributed verses, knew all about it, and so did Mrs. Manley,
while Powell and Colley Gibber were among the actors. We
may be sure that little Mistress Trotter's surprising talents
were the subjects of much discussion at Will's Coffee House,
and that the question of securing her for the rival theatre
was anxiously debated at Lincoln' s Inn Fields. Her success
in Agnes de Castro was the principal asset which Dairy
Lane had to set that season against Congreve's splendid
adventure with Love for Love.

Agnes de Castro is an immature production, and shows
a juvenile insensibility to plagiarism, since the subject and
treatment are borrowed implicitly from a French novel by
Mile, de Brillac, published in Paris and London a few years
before. 1 The conception of court life at Coimbra in the
fourteenth century is that of this French lady, and is
innocent of Portuguese local colour. JUit, ns the dramatic
work of a girl of sixteen, the piny is rather extraordinary
for nimble movement and adroit theatrical arrangements.
It is evident that Catharine Trotter was well versed in
the stage traditions of her own day, and we may wonder
how a highly respectable girl of sixteen found her oppor-
tunity. The English playhouse under William III. was
no place for a very young lady, even if she wore a mask.
There is a good deal of meritorious character-drawing in
Agnes de Castro. The conception of a benevolent and
tenderly forgiving Princess is well contrasted with the
fierce purity of Agnes and the infatuation of the Prince,
Towards the close of the first act there is a capital scene
of exquisite confusion between this generous and distracted

1 Around the story of Agnes clc Castro there gathered a whole
literature of fiction, which Mr. Montague Summers has investigated
in his Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. V. pp. 211-212.

Catharine Trotter 45

trio. The opening of the third act, between Elvira and
her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has
some strong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with
the stabbing of the Princess and the accusation of Agnes
by Elvira, is puerile, but was doubtless welcome to a
sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but not at all
an unpromising one.

Early in 1696 Agnes de Castro, still anonymous, was
published as a book, and for the next five or six years
we find Catharine Trotter habitually occupied in writing
for the stage. Without question she did so professionally,
though in what way dramatists at the close of the seven-
teenth century lived by their pens is difficult to conjecture.
A very rare play, The Female Wits ; or, the Triumvirate
of Poets, the authorship of which has hitherto defied con-
jecture, was acted at Drury Lane after Catharine Trotter
had been tempted across to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is
evidently inspired by the intense jealousy which smouldered
between the two great houses. The success of Miss Trotter
incited two older ladies to compete with her; these were
Mrs. Delariviere Manlcy, who was a discarded favourite
of Barbara Villiers, and fat Mrs. Mary Fix, the stage-
struck consort of a tailor. These rather ridiculous women
professed themselves followers of Catharine, and they
produced plays of their own not without some success.
With her they formed the trio of Female Wits who were
mocked in the lively but, on the whole, rather disappoint-
ing play I have just mentioned, in the course of which it
is spitefully remarked of Calista who is Miss Trotter
that she has " made no small struggle in the world to
get into print," and is " now in such a state of wedlock
to pen and ink that it will be very difficult" for her " to
get out of it."

In acting The Female Wits Mrs. Temple, who had played
the Princess in Agnes de Castro, took the part of Calista,

4 6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

and doubtless, in the coarse fashion of those days, made

up exactly like poor Catharine Trotter, who was described

as " a Lady who pretends to the learned Languages, and

assumes to herself the name of a Critic/' This was a

character, however, which she would not have protested

against with much vigour, for she had now quite definitely

taken up the position of a reformer and a pioneer. She

posed as the champion of women's intellectual lights, and

she was accepted as representing in active literary work

the movement which Mary Astell had recently foreshadowed

in her remarkable Serious Pwfivstil to J^dies of 1694.

We turn again to The Female It-its, and we find Marsilia

(Mrs. Manley) describing Calista to Mrs. Weilfed (Mrs. Pix)as

" the vainest, proudest, senseless Thing ! She pretends to

grammar ! writes in mood and figure ! does everything

methodically I " Yet when Calista appears on the stage,

Mrs. Manley rushes across to fling her arms around her

and to murmur : " charmingest Nymph of all Apollo's

Train, let me embrace thce I " Later on Calista says to

Mrs. Fix, the fat tailorcss, " I cannot but remind you,

Madam. ... I read Aristotle in his own language " ; and

of a certain tirade in a play of Ben Jonson she insists :

" I know it so well, as to have turn'd it into Latin." Mrs.

Pix admits her own ignorance of all these things; she

" can go no further than the eight parts of speech.' 1 This

brings down upon her an icy reproof from Calista : " Then

I cannot but take the Freedom to say . . . you impose

upon the Town." We get the impression of a prcciscnoss

of manner and purpose which must have given Catharine

a certain air of priggishness, not entirely unbecoming,

perhaps, but very strange in that loose theatre of

William III,

Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her com-
plaining to the Princess (afterwards Queen Anne) that
she has become " the mark of ill Nature " through rccom-

Catharine Trotter 47

mending herself " by what the other Sex think their
peculiar Prerogative" that is, intellectual distinction.
Catharine Trotter was still only nineteen years of age
when she produced her tragedy of Fatal Friendship, the
published copy of which (1698) is all begarlanded with
evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of a
succession of " applausive copies" of verses. In these we
are told that she had " checked the rage of reigning vice
that had debauched the stage.' ' This was an allusion to
the great controversy then just raised by Jeremy Collier in
his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profanencss
of the Stage, in which all the dramatists of the day were
violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter
has the courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do
so without quarrelling with her male colleagues. She
takes the side of the decent women.

" You as your Sex's champion art come forth
To light their quarrel and assert their worth/'

one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds :
" You stand the first of stage-reformers too."

The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with
virtue and at vindicating the right of woman to assume
" the tragic laurel."

This was the most brilliant moment in the public career
of our bluestocking. Fatal Friendship enjoyed a success
which Catharine Trotter was not to taste again, and of all
her plays it is the only one which has ever been reprinted.
It is very long and extremely sentimental, and written
in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporaries said that it
placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, in
company with Congreve and Granvillc " the polite," who had
written a She-Gallants, which was everything that Miss
Trotter did not wish her plays to bo. Fatal Friendship

48 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

has an ingenious plot, in which the question of money
takes a prominence very unusual in tragedy. Almost
every character in the piece is in reduced circumstances.
Felicia, sister to Belgard (who is too poor lo maintain her),
is wooed by the wealthy Roquclaurc, although she is
secretly married to Gramont, who is also too poor to
support a wife. Belgard, afraid that Gramont will make
love to Felicia (that is, to his own secret wife), persuades
him in order that his best friend, Casialio, may be released
from a debtor's prison bigamously to marry Lamira, a
wealthy widow. But Castalio is in love with Lnnihn, and
is driven to frenzy by Gramont's illegal marna^e. It all
depends upon income in a manner comically imt radical.
The quarrel between the friends in the fifth act is an
effective piece of stage-craft, but the action is spoiled by
a ridiculous general butchery at the close of all However,
the audience was charmed, and even " the stubbornest
could scarce deny their Tears/'

Fatal Friendship was played at the Lincoln's Inn
Theatre, and no doubt it was Congreve who brought Miss
Trotter over from Drury Lane. His warm friendship for
her had unquestionably a great deal to do with her success
and with the jealousy of her rivals. A letter exists in which
the great dramatist acknowledges, in 16^7, the congratula-
tions of his young admirer, and it breathes an eager
cordiality. Congreve requested Betterton to present him
to Catharine Trotter, and his partiality for her company
is mentioned by several writers. The spiteful author of
The Female Wits insinuates that Congreve ma.de the
looking-over of Catharine's scenes " his pretence for daily
visits.'* Another satirist, in 1698, describes Congreve sitting
very gravely with his hat over his eyes, <f together with the
two she-things called Poetesses which write for his house,"
half -hidden from the public in a little side-box. Farquhar,
too, seeing the celebrated writer of Fatal Friendship

Catharine Trotter 49

in the theatre on the third night of the performance of
his Love and a Bottle, had ' ' his passions wrought so
high" by a sight of the beautiful author that he wrote
her a letter in which he called her " one of the fairest of
the sex, and the best judge." If Catharine Trotter, as
the cynosure of delicacy, at the age of nineteen, sat through
Love and a Bottle without a blush, even her standard of
decency was not very exacting. But in all this rough,
coarse world of wit her reputation never suffered a rebuff.

Encouraged by so much public and private attention,
our young dramatist continued to work with energy and
conscientiousness. But her efforts were forestalled by an
event, or rather a condition of the national temper, of
which too little notice has been taken by literary historians.
The attacks on the stage for its indecency and blasphemy
had been flippantly met by the theatrical agents, but they
had sunk deeply into the conscience of the people. There
followed with alarming abruptness a general public repul-
sion against the playhouses, and to this, early in 1699, a
roughly worded Royal Proclamation gave voice. During
the whole of that year the stage was almost in abeyance,
and even Congreve, with The Way of the World, was
unable to woo his audience back to Lincoln's Inn. During
this time of depression Catharine Trotter composed at least
two tragedies, which she was unable to get performed,
while the retirement of Congreve in a paroxysm of annoy-
ance must have been a very serious disadvantage to her.

On May ist, 1700, Dry den died, and with him a dramatic
age passed away. What Miss Trotter's exact relations
with the great poet had been is uncertain; she not only
celebrated his death in a long elegy, in which she speaks
on behalf of the Muses, but wrote another and more
important poem, in which she gives very sound advice
to the poetical beginner, who is to take Dryden as a
model, and to be particularly careful to disdain Settle,

E

50 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Durfey, and Blackmore, typical poetasters of the period.
She recommends social satire to the playwright :-

" Let the nice well-bred beau himself perceive
The most accomplish'd, useless thing alive;
Expose the bottle-sparks that range tlu- town,
Shaming themselves with follies not their own,
But chief these foes to virgin innocence,
Who, while they make to honour vain pivteno\
With all that's base and impious can dispense."

Honour to those who aim high and execute boldly !

" If Shakespeare's spirit, with transporting fire,
The animated scene throughout inspire;
If in the piercing wit of Vanbrugh drest,
Each sees his darling folly made a jest ;
If Garth's and Drydcn's genius, through each line,
In artful praise and well-turn 'd satire shine, -
To us ascribe the immortal sacred il.une."

In this dead period of the stage Catharine Trot tor found
a warm friend and doubtless an efficient patron in a Lady
Piers, of whom we should be glad to know more. Sir
George Piers, the husband of this lady, was an officer of
rank under the Duke of Marlbo rough, hit IT to become
useful to Catharine Trotter. Meanwhile the kit tor returned
to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, where, in 1701,
under the patronage of Lord Halifax- -Pope's " Uufo 1 '-
she produced her third tragedy, The Unhappy Penitent*
The dedication of this play to Halifax is a long and
interesting essay on the poetry of the age. The author
passes Dryden, Otway, Congrevc, and Lee under examina-
tion, and finds technical blemishes in them all :

" The inimitable Shakespeare seems alone secure on
every side from an attack. I speak not here of faults
against the rules of poetry, but against the natural Genius.
He had all the images of nature present to him, studied
her thoroughly, and boldly copied all her various features,
for though he has chiefly exerted himself on the more

Catharine Trotter 51

masculine passions, 'tis as the choice of his judgment,
not the restraint of his genius, and he has given us as a
proof he could be every way equally admirable/'

Lady Piers wrote the prologue to The Unhappy Peni-
tent in verses better turned than might have been
expected. She did not stint praise to her young friend,
whom she compares to the rising sun :

" Like him, bright Maid, Thy great perfections shine
As awful, as resplendent, as divine 1 ...
Minerva and Diana guard your soul ! "

The Unhappy Penitent is not a pleasing performance:
it is amorous and violent, but yet dull. Catharine's theory
was better than her practice. Nevertheless, it seems to
have been successful, for the author some time afterwards,
speaking of the town's former discouragement of her dramas,
remarks that " the taste is mended." Later in 1701 she
brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, Love at a
Loss, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers,
to whom " I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate/' the
privilege of a share in her friendship. Love at a Loss
was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old
tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This
is not a fortunate method of construction, and the town
showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first arid only
public section of Catharine Trotter's career was now over,
and she withdrew, a wayworn veteran at the age of
twenty- two, to more elevated studies.

When Love at a Loss was published the author had
already left town, and after a visit to Lady Piers in Kent
she now settled at Salisbury, at the house of a physician,
Dr. Inglis, who had married her only sister. Her growing
intimacy with the family of Bishop Burnet may have had
something to do with her determination to make this city

52 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

her home. She formed a very enthusiastic friendship with
the Bishop's second lady, who was an active theologian
and a very intelligent woman. Our poetess was fascinated
by Mrs. Burnet " I have not met," she writes in 1701,
" such perfection in any of our sex." She now visited in
the best Wiltshire society. When the famous singer, John
Abell, was in Salisbury, he gave a concert at the palace,
and Catharine Trotter was so enchanted that she rode out
after him six miles to Tisbury to hear him sing again at
Lord Arundell of Wardour's house. She had a great
appreciation of the Bishop's " volatile activity." It is
now that the name of Locke first occurs in her correspond-
ence, and we gather that she came into sonic personal
contact with him through a member of the Bishop's family
George Burnet of Kcmncy, in Aberdeensh ire- -probably
a cousin, with whom she now cultivated an ardent intel-
lectual friendship. He left England on a mission which
occupied him from the middle of 1701 until 1708, and
this absence, as we may suspect, alone prevented their
acquaintance from ripening into a wanner feeling. The
romance and tragedy of Catharine Trotter's life gather,
it is plain, around this George Burnet, who was a man
of brilliant accomplishments arid interested, like herself,
in philosophical studies.

These, it would appear, Catharine Trotter had never
abandoned, but she applied herself to them closely at
Salisbury, where she made some superior acquaintances.
One of these was John Norris of Bemcrton, whose Theory
of an Ideal and Intelligible World had just made some
sensation. By the intermediary of George Burnet she
came in touch with some of the leading French writers
of the moment, such as Malcbranche and Madame Dacier.
There is a French poet, unnamed, who understands English,
but he is gone to Rome before he can be made to read
The Fatal Friendship. Meanwhile, Catharine Trotter's

Catharine Trotter

obsession with the ideas of Locke was giving some anxiety
to her friends. That philosopher had published his famous
Essay on the Human Understanding in 1690, and it had
taken several years for the opposition to his views, and
in particular to his theological toleration, to take effect.
But in 1697 there were made a number of almost simul-
taneous attacks on Locke' s position. The circle at Salisbury
was involved in them, for one of these was written by
Norris of Bcmcrton, and another is attributed to a member
of the Burnet family. Catharine Trotter, who had studied
Locke's later works with enthusiastic approval, was scan-
dalised by the attacks, and sat down to refute them.
This must have been in 1701.

Although the intellectual society of Salisbury was pro-
minent in taking the conservative view of Locke, our
bluestocking could not refrain from telling Mrs. Burnet
what she had done, nor from showing her treatise to that
friend under vows of confidence. But Mrs. Burnet, who
was impulsive and generous, could not keep the secret;
she spoke about it to the Bishop, and then to Norris of
Bcmerton, and finally (in June 1702) to Locke himself.
Locke was at Gates, confined by his asthma; he was old
and suffering, but still full of benevolence and curiosity,
and he was graciously interested in his remarkable defender
at Salisbury, As he could not himself travel, he sent his
adopted son to call on Catharine Trotter, with a present
of books; this was Peter King, still a young man, but
already M.P, for Beer Alston, and later to become Lord
Chancellor and the first Lord King of Ockham. George
Burnet, writing from Paris, had been very insistent that
Catharine should not publish her treatise, but she overruled
his objections, and her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay on
the Human Understanding appeared anonymously in May
1702. People were wonderfully polite in those days, and
Locke himself wrote to his " protectress " a charming

54 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

letter in which he told her that her Defence was the
greatest honour my Essay could have procured me."

She sent her Defence to Leibnitz, who criticised it at
considerable length : I

" J'ai lu livre dc Mile. Trotter. Dans la dedicace elle
exhorte M. Locke a donner des demonstrations de morale.
Je crois qu'il aurait eu de la peine a y reussir. L'art dc
demontrer n'est pas son fait. Je tiens que nous nous
appercevons sans raisonnement de cc qui est juste et
injuste, comme nous nous appercevons sans raison de
quelques theoremes de Geometric ; mais il cst tousjours
bon de venir a la demonstration. Justice et injustice nc
dependent seulement de la nature humaine, mais de la
nature de la substance intelligente en general; et Mile,
Trotter remarque fort bien qu'elle vient de la nature de
Dieu et n'est point arbitraire. La nature de Dicu cst
tousjours fondee en raison."

Notwithstanding all this, **' the commentators of Locke
appear, without exception, to ignore the Defence, and it
was probably never much read outside the cultivated
Salisbury circle.

In this year, 1702, the health of Catharine Trotter began
to give her uneasiness, and it was for this reason that she
left Salisbury for a while. She was once more living in
that city, however, from May 1703 to March 1704, making
a special study of geography. " My strength," she writes
to George Burnet, " is very much impaired, and God knows
whether I shall ever retrieve it." Her thoughts turned
again to the stage, and in the early months of 1703 she
composed her fifth and last play, the tragedy of The
Revolution in Sweden ; " but it will not be ready for the

1 Printed in Otto Klopp's Correspondence de Leibnitz avcc
I'Electrice Sophie. Hanover, 1875.

Catharine Trotter 55

stage," she says, " till next winter." Her interest in
philosophy did not flag. She was gratified by some com-
munications, through Burnet, with Leibnitz, and she would
have liked to be the intermediary between Locke and
some philosophical " gentlemen " on the Continent, prob-
ably Malebranclie and Leibnitz, in a controversy. But
this was hopeless, and she writes (March i6th, 1704) :

" Mr. Locke is unwilling to engage in controversy with
the gentlemen you mention; for, I am informed, his
infirmities have obliged him, for some time past, to desist
from his serious studies, and only employ himself in lighter
things, which serve to amuse and unbend the mind."

Locke, indeed, had but six months more to live, and
'though he retained his charming serenity of spirit he was
well aware that the end approached. Never contentious
or desirous of making a sensation, he was least of all, in
his present precarious state, likely to enter into discussion
with foreign philosophers. It docs not appear that
Catharine Trotter ever enjoyed the felicity of seeing in
the flesh the greatest object of her homage; but he
occupied most of her thoughts. She was rendered highly
indignant by the efforts made by the reactionaries at
Oxford and elsewhere to discourage the writings of Locke
and to throw suspicion on their influence. She read over
and over again his philosophical, educational, and religious
treatises, and ever found them more completely to her
taste. If she had enjoyed the power to do so she would
have proclaimed the wisdom and majesty of Locke from
every housetop, and she envied Lady Masham her free
and constant intercourse with so beautiful a mind. Catharine
Trotter watched, but from a distance, the extinction of a
life thus honoured, which came to a peaceful end at Gates
on October 28th, 1704. The following passage does not

56 Some Diversions of a Man- of Letters

appear or I am much mistaken to have attracted the
attention of Locke's biographers :

" I was very sensibly touched with the news of Mr.
Locke's death. All the particulars I hear of it are that
he retained his perfect senses to the last, and spoke with
the same composedness and indifference on affairs as usual.
His discourse was much on the different views a dying
man has of worldly things; and that nothing gives him
any satisfaction, but the reflection of what good he has
done in his life. Lady Masham went to his chamber to
speak to him on some business ; when he had answered in
the same manner he was accustomed to speak, he desired
her to leave the room, and, immediately after she was
gone, turned about and died."

She records that, after the death of Locke, Lady Masham
communicated with Leibnitz, and Catharine is very indig-
nant because a doubt had been suggested as to whether
the writer's thoughts and expressions were her own. This
was calculated to infuriate Catharine Trotter, who outpours
in forcible terms her just indignation :

" Women are as capable of penetrating into the grounds
of things, and reasoning justly, as men are, who certainly
have no advantage of us, but in their opportunities of
knowledge. As Lady Masham is allowed by everybody
to have great natural endowments, she has taken pains
to improve them ; and no doubt profited much by a long
intimate society with so extraordinary a man as Mr. Locke.
So that I see no reason to suspect a woman of her character
would pretend to write anything that was not entirely
her own. I pray, be more equitable to her sex than the
generality of your's are, who, when anything is written
by a woman that they cannot deny their approbation to,

Catharine Trotter 57

are sure to rob us of the glory of it by concluding His not
her own."

This is the real voice of Catharine Trotter, raised to
defend her sex, and conscious of the many intellectual
indignities and disabilities which they suffered.

The first draft of The Revolution in' Sweden being now
completed, she sent it to Congrcve, who was living very
quietly in lodgings in Arundell Street. He allowed some
time to go by before, on November 2nd, 1703, he acknow-
ledged it. His criticism, which is extremely kind, is also
penetrating and full. " I think the design in general/'
he says, " very great and noble; the conduct of it very
artful, if not too full of business which may run into
length and obscurity." He warns her against having too
much noise of fighting on the stage in her second act, and
against offending probability in the third. The fourth act
is confused, and in the fifth there are too many harangues.
Catharine Trotter has asked him to be frank, and so he
is, but his criticism is practical and encouraging. This
excellent letter deserves to be better known.

To continue the history of Miss Trotter's fifth and last
play, The Revolution in Sweden was at length brought
out at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, towards the
close of 1704. It had every advantage which popular
acting could give it, since the part of the hero, Count
Arwide, was played by Betterton ; that of Constantia, the
heroine, by Mrs. Barry ; Gustavus by Booth ; and Christina
by Mrs. Harcourt. In spite of this galaxy of talent, the
reception of the play was unfavourable. The Duchess of
Maryborough " and all her beauteous family" graced the
theatre on the first night, but the public was cold and
inattentive. Some passages of a particularly lofty moral
tone provoked laughter. The Revolution in Sweden, in
fact, was shown to suffer from the ineradicable -faults

58 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

which Congreve had gently but justly suggested. It was
very long, and very dull, and very wordy, and we could
scarcely find a more deadly specimen of virtuous and
didactic tragedy. Catharine was dreadfully disappointed,
nor was she completely consoled by being styled by no
less a person than Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia
" The Sappho of Scotland/' She determined, however, to
appeal to readers against auditors, and when, two years
later, after still further revision, she published The Revo-
lution in Sweden, she dedicated it in most grateful terms
to the Duke of Marlborough's eldest daughter, Henrietta
Godolphin.

How Miss Trotter came to be favoured by the Churcliills
appears from various sources to be this. Her brother-in-
law, Dr. Inglis, was now physician-general in the army,
and was in personal relations with the General. When
the victory at Blenheim (August 1704) was announced,
Catharine Trotter wrote a poem of welcome back to
England. It is to be supposed that a manuscript copy of
it was shown by Inglis to the Duke, with whose permission
it was published about a month later. The poem enjoyed
a tremendous success, for the Duke and Duchess and Lord
Treasurer Godolphin "and several others" all liked the
verses and said they were better than any other which
had been written on the subject. George Burnet, who
saw the Duke in Germany, reported him highly pleased
with her " the wisest virgin I ever knew," he writes.
She now hoped, with the Duke's protection, to recover
her father's fortune and be no longer a burden to her
brother-in-law. A pension of 20 from Queen Anne gave
her mother now a shadow of independence, but Catharine
herself was wholly disappointed at that " settlement for
-rny life" which she was ardently hoping for. I think
that, if she had secured it, George Burnet would have
come back from Germany to marry her. Instead of that

Catharine Trotter 59

he sent her learned messages from Bayle and from Leibnitz,
who calls her " une Demoiselle fort spirituelle."

Catharine Trotter now left London and Salisbury, and
took up her abode at Ockham Mills, close to Ripley, in
Surrey, as companion to an invalid, Mrs. De Vere. She
probably chose this place on account of the Locke con-
nection and the friendship of Peter King, since there is
now much in her correspondence about Damans, Lady
Masharn, and others in that circle in which George Burnet
himself was intimate. But great changes were imminent.
Although her correspondence at this time is copious it
is not always very intelligible, and it is very carelessly
edited. Her constant interchange of letters with George
Burnet leaves the real position between them on many
points obscure. In 1704, when he thought that he was
dying in Berlin, he wrote to Catharine Trotter that he had
left her 100 in his will, and added : " Pray God I might
live to give you much more myself." He regrets that he
had so easily " pulled himself from her company," and
suggests that if she had not left London to settle in Salisbury
he would have stayed in England. Years after they had
parted we find him begging her to continue writing to him
" at least once a week." She, on her part, tells him that
he well knows that there is but one person she could ever
think of marrying. He seems to have made her want of
vivid religious conviction the excuse for not proposing to
her, but it is not easy to put aside the conviction that
it was her want of a fortune which actuated him most
strongly. Finally, he tries to pique her by telling her
that he " knows of parties " in the city of Hanover " who
might bring him much honour and comfort " were he not
afraid of losing (Catharine Trotter's) friendship." They
write to one another with extreme formality, but that
proves nothing. A young woman, passionately in love
with a man whom she had just accepted as her future

60 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

husband, was expected, in 1705, to close her letter by
describing herself as " Sir, your very humble servant."

If George Burnet hinted of " parties " in Hanover,
Catharine Trotter on her side could boast of Mr. Fenn,
" a young clergyman of excellent character," who now
laid an ardent siege to her heart. Embarrassed by these
attentions, she took the bold step of placing the matter
before Mr. Cockburn, a still younger clergyman, of even
more excellent character. The letter in which she makes
this ingenuous declaration as to a father confessor is one
of the tendercst examples extant of the " Why don't you
speak for yourself, John? " form of correspondence. Mr.
Cockburn, one of the minor clergy of the Salisbury set,
did speak for himself, and George Burnet having at length
announced his own projected marriage wiih a lady of old
acquaintance, Catharine Trotter hesitated no longer but
accepted the hand of Mr. Cockburn. They were married
early in 1708. Thackeray could have created an amusing
romance out of the relations of these four poeple to one
another, and in particular it would have been very interest-
ing to sec what he would have made of the character of
George Burnet.

Catharine Cockburn was now, after so eventful a life of
emotional and intellectual experience, still a young woman,
not far past her twenty-eighth bhthday. She was to
survive for more than forty- three years, during which
time she was to correspond much, to write persistently,
and to publish whenever opportunity offered. But I do
not propose to accompany her much further on her blame-
less career. All through her married life, which was spent
at various places far from London, she existed almost like
a plant in a Lcydcn jar. Constant genteel poverty, making
it difficult for her to buy books and impossible to travel
was supported by her with dignity and patience, but it
dwarfed her powers. Her later writings, on philosophy,

Catharine Trotter 61

on morality, on the principles of the Christian religion, are
so dull that merely to think of them brings tears into
one's eyes. She who had sparkled as a girl with Congreve
and exchanged polite amenities with Locke lived on to
see modern criticism begin with Samuel Johnson and the
modern novel start with Samuel Richardson, but without
observing that any change had come into the world of
letters. Her husband, owing to his having fallen " into
a scruple about the oath of abjuration/' lost his curacy
and " was reduced to great difficulties in the support of
his family." Nevertheless a perfect gentleman at heart
he " always prayed for the King and Royal family by
name."' Meanwhile, to uplift his spirits in this dreadful
condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the
Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to
print. He reminds us of Dr. Primrose in The Vicar of
Wakefield, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had
strong views on the Whistonian doctrine.

So little mark did poor Mrs. Cockburn make on her
younger contemporaries that she disappeared forthwith
from literary history. Her works, especially her plays,
have become so excessively rare as to be airiost unpro-
curable. The brief narrative of her life and her activities
which I have taken the liberty of presenting to-day would
be hopelessly engulfed in obscurity, and we should know
as little of Catharine Trotter as we do of Mary Pix, and
Delariviere Manley, and many late seventeenth-century
authors more eminent than they, had it not been that
in 1751, two years after her death, all her papers were
placed in the hands of an ingenious clergyman, the Rev.
Dr. Thomas Birch, who printed them for subscribers in
two thick and singularly unpleasing volumes. This private
edition was never reissued, and is now itself a rare book.
It is the sort of book that for two hundred and fifty years
must fatally have been destroyed as lumber whenever an

62 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

old country mansion that contained it has been cleared
out.

During all that time no one, so far as I can discover,
has evinced the smallest interest in Catharine Trotter.
We gain an idea of the blackness of her obscurity when
we say that even Mr. Austin Dobson appears to have
never heard of her. The champion of Locke and Clarke,
the correspondent of Leibnitz and Pope, the friend of
Congreve, the patroness of Farquhar, she seems to have
slipped between two ages and to have lost her hold on
time. But I hope her thin little lady-like ghost, still
hovering in a phantom-like transparence round the recog-
nised seats of learning, will be a little comforted at last by
the polite attention of a few of my readers.

THE MESSAGE OF THE
WARTONS

TWO PIONEERS OF ROMAN-
TICISM : JOSEPH AND
THOMAS WARTON 1

THE origins of the Romantic Movement in literature
have been examined so closely and so often that it might
be supposed that the subject must be by this time exhausted.
But no subject of any importance in literature is ever
exhausted, because the products of literature grow or decay,
burgeon or wither, as the generations of men apply their
ever-varying organs of perception to them. I intend, with
your permission, to present to you a familiar phase of
the literary life of the eighteenth century from a fresh
point of view, and in relation to two men whose surname
warrants a peculiar emphasis of respect in the mouth of
a Warton Lecturer. It is well, perhaps, to indicate exactly
what it is which a lecturer proposes to himself to achieve
during the brief hour in which you indulge him with your
attention; it certainly makes his task the easier if he
docs so. I propose, therefore, to endeavour to divine for
you, by scanty signs and indications, what it was in
poetry, as it existed up to the period of their childhood,
which was stimulating to the Wartons, and what they
disapproved of in the verse which was fashionable and
popular among the best readers in their day.

There is an advantage, which I think that our critics are

1 Delivered, as the Warton Lecture, before the British Academy,
October ayLU, 1915.

F 65

66 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

apt to neglect, in analysing the character and causes of poetic
pleasure experienced by any sincere and enthusiastic reader,
at any epoch of history. We are far too much in the
habit of supposing that what we that is the most instructed
and sensitive of us admire now must always have been
admired by people of a like condition. This has been one
of the fallacies of Romantic criticism, and has led people
as illustrious as Keats into blaming the taste of foregoing
generations as if it were not only heretical, but despicable
as well. Young men to-day speak of those who fifty years
ago expatiated in admiration of Tennyson as though they
were not merely stupid, but vulgar and almost wicked,
neglectful of the fact that it was by persons exactly
analogous to themselves that those portions of Tennyson
were adored which the young repudiate to-day. Not to
expand too largely this question of the oscillation of taste
which, however, demands more careful examination than
it has hitherto received it is always important to discover
what was honestly admired at a given date by the most
enthusiastic and intelligent, in other words by the most
poetic, students of poetry. But to do this we must cul-
tivate a little of that catholicity of heart which perceives
technical merit wherever it has been recognised at an
earlier date, and not merely where the current generation
finds it.

Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of an Oxford
professor of poetry, an old Jacobite of no observable merit
beyond that of surrounding his family with an atmosphere
of the study of verse. The elder brother was born in
1722, the younger in 1728. I must be forgiven if I dwell
a little tediously on dates, for our inquiry depends upon
the use of them. Without dates the whole point of that
precedency of the Wartons, which I desire to bring out,
is lost. The brothers began very early to devote them-
selves to the study of poetry, and in spite of the six years

The Message of the Wartons 67

which divided them, they appear to have meditated in
unison. Their writings bear a close resemblance to one
another, and their merits and their failures are alike
identical. We have to form what broken impression we
can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as
wandering in the woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or
waking out of it to note with ecstasy all the effects of
light and colour around him, the flight of birds, the flutter
of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas
were alike in their (< extreme thirst after ancient things."
They avoided, with a certain disdain, the affectation of
vague and conventional reference to definite objects.

Above all they read the poets who were out of fashion,
and no doubt the library of their father, the Professor of
Poetry, was at their disposal from a very early hour. The
result of their studies was a remarkable one, and the
discovery was unquestionably first made by Joseph. He
was, so far as we can gather, the earliest person in the
modern world of Europe to observe what vain sacrifices
had been made by the classicists, and in particular by the
English classicists, and as he walked enthusiastically in
the forest he formed a determination to reconquer the
realm of lost beauty. The moment that this instinct
became a purpose, we may say that the great Romantic
Movement, such as it has enlarged and dwindled down
to our own day, took its start. The Wartons were not
men of creative genius, and their works, whether in prose
or verse, have not taken hold of the national memory.
But the advance of a great army is not announced by a
charge of field-marshals. In the present war, the advance
of the enemy upon open cities has generally been announced
by two or three patrols on bicycles, who are the heralds
of the body. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the
bicyclist-scouts who prophesied of an advance which was
nearly fifty years delayed.

68 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

The general history of English literature in the eighteenth
century offers us little opportunity for realising what the
environment could be of two such lads as the Wartons,
with their enthusiasm, their independence, and their revo-
lutionary instinct. But I will take the year 1750, which
is the year of Rousseau's first Disco urs and therefore the
definite starting-point of European Romanticism. You
will perhaps find it convenient to compare the situation
of the Wartons with what is the situation to-day of some
very modern or revolutionary young poet. In 1750, then,
Joseph was twenty-eight years of age and Thomas twenty-
two. Pope had died six years before, and this was equiva-
lent to the death of Swinburne in the experience of our
young man of to-day. Addison's death was as distant as
is from us that of Matthew Arnold ; and Thomson, who
had been dead two years, had left The Castle of Indolence
as an equivalent to Mr. Hardy's Dynasts. All the
leading writers of the age of Anne except Young, who
hardly belonged to it were dead, but the Wartons were
divided from them only as we are from those of the age
of Victoria. I have said that Pope was not more distant
from them than Swinburne is from us, but really a more
just parallel is with Tennyson. The Wartons, wandering
in their woodlands, were confronted with a problem such
as would be involved, to a couple of youths to-day, in
considering the reputation of Tennyson and Browning.

There remains no doubt in my mind, after a close
examination of such documents as remain to us, that
Joseph Warton, whose attitude has hitherto been strangely
neglected, was in fact the active force in this remarkable
revolt against existing conventions in the world of imagina-
tive art. His six years of priority would naturally give
him an advantage over his now better-known and more
celebrated brother. Moreover, we have positive evidence
of the firmness of his opinions at a time when his brother

The Message of the Wartons 69

Thomas was still a child. The preface to Joseph's Odes
of 1746 remains as a dated document, a manifesto, which
admits of no question. But the most remarkable of his
poems, " The Enthusiast/ 7 was stated to have been written
in 1740, when he was eighteen and his brother only twelve
years of age. It is, of course, possible that these verses,
which bear no sign of juvenile mentality, were touched up
at a later date. But this could only be a matter of diction,
of revision, and we are bound to accept the definite and
repeated statement of Joseph, that they were essentially
composed in 1740. If we accept this as a fact, " The
Enthusiast" is seen to be a document of extraordinary
importance. I do not speak of the positive merit of the
poem, which it would be easy to exaggerate. Gray, in
a phrase which has been much discussed, dismissed the
poetry of Joseph Warton by saying that he had " no
choice at all." It is evident to me that Gray meant by
this to stigmatise the diction of Joseph Warton, which is
jejune, verbose, and poor. He had little magic in writing;
he fails to express himself with creative charm. But this
is not what constitutes his interest for us, which is more-
over obscured by the tameness of his Miltonic-Thomsonian
versification. What should arrest our attention is the fact
that here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly empha-
sised and repeated what was entirely new in literature,
the essence of romantic hysteria. "The Enthusiast" is
the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical
attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature
for nearly a century. So completely is this expressed by
Joseph Warton that it is extremely difficult to realise that
he could not have come under the fascination of Rousseau,
whose apprenticeship to love and idleness was now drawing
to a close at Les Charmettes, and who was not to write
anything characteristic until ten years later.
But these sentiments were in the air. Some of them

;o Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

nad vaguely occurred to Young, to Dyer, and to Shenstone,
all of whom received from Joseph Warton the ardent
sympathy which a young man renders to his immediate
contemporaries. The Scotch resumption of ballad-poetry
held the same relation to the Wartons as the so-called
Celtic Revival would to a young poet to-day; the Tea-
Table Miscellany dates from 1724, and Allan Ramsay was
to the author of " The Enthusiast " what Mr. Yeats is to us.
But all these were glimmerings or flashes; they followed
no system, they were accompanied by no principles of
selection or rejection. These we find for the first time in
Joseph Warton. He not merely repudiates the old formulas
and aspirations, but he defines new ones. What is very
interesting to observe in his attitude to the accepted laws
of poetical practice is his solicitude for the sensations of
the individual. These had been reduced to silence by the
neo-classic school in its determination to insist on broad
Palladian effects of light and line. The didactic and moral
aim of the poets had broken the springs of lyrical expres-
sion, and had replaced those bursts of enthusiasm, those
indiscretions, those rudenesses which are characteristic of
a romantic spirit in literature, by eloquence, by caution,
by reticence and vagueness.

It is not necessary to indicate more than very briefly
what the principles of the classic poetry had been. The
time had passed when readers and writers in England
gave much attention to the sources of the popular poetry
of their day. Malherbe had never been known here, and
the vigorous Art poetique of Boileau, which had been
eagerly studied at the close of the seventeenth century,
was forgotten. Even the Prefaces of Drydcn had ceased
to be read, and the sources of authority were now the
prose of Addison and the verse of Pope. To very young
readers these stood in the same relation as the writings
of the post-Tennysonian critics stand now. To reject them,

The Message of the Wartons 71

to question their authority, was like eschewing the essays
of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. In particular, the
Essay on Criticism was still immensely admired and read ;
it had crystallised around cultivated opinion very much as
the Studies in the Renaissance did from 1875 onwards. It
was the last brilliant word on the aims and experiences of
poetical art, and how brilliant it was can be judged by
the pleasure with which we read it to-day, in spite of our
total repudiation of every aesthetic dogma which it conveys.
It is immortal, like every supreme literary expression, and
it stands before us in the history of poetry as an enduring
landmark. This was the apparently impregnable fortress
which the Wartons had the temerity to bombard.

Pope had said that Nature was the best guide to judg-
ment, but what did he mean by nature? He had meant
the " rules," which he declared were " Nature methodis'd "
or, as we should say, systematised. The " rules " were
the maxims, rather than laws, expressed by Aristotle in
a famous treatise. The poet was to follow the Stagirite,
" led" as Pope says in one of those rare lines in which
he catches, in spite of himself, the Romantic accent " led
by the light of the Mssonian Star." Aristotle illustrated
by Homer that was to be the standard of all poetic
expression. But literature had wandered far from Homer,
and we have to think of what rules the Essay on Criticism
laid down. The poet was to be cautious, " to avoid
extremes" : he must be conventional, never " singular" ;
there was constant reference to " Wit," " Nature," and
" The Muse," and these were convertible terms. A single
instance is luminous. We have the positive authority of
Warburton for saying that Pope regarded as the finest
effort of his skill and art as a poet the insertion of the
machinery of the Sylphs into the revised edition of The
Rape of the Lock (1714). Now this insertion was ingenious,
brilliant, and in strict accordance with the practice of

J2 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Vida and of Boileau, both of whom it excelled. But the
whole conception of it was as unlike that of Romanticism
as possible.

In particular, the tendency of the classic school, in its
later development, had been towards the exclusion of all
but didactic and ethical considerations from treatment in
verse. Pope had given great and ever-increasing emphasis
to the importance of making "morals'* prominent in
poetry. All that he wrote after he retired to Twickenham,
still a young man, in 1718, was essentially an attempt
to gather together " moral wisdom " clothed in consummate
language. He inculcated a moderation of feeling, a broad
and general study of mankind, an acceptance of the benefits
of civilisation, and a suppression of individuality. Even
in so violent and so personal a work as the Dunciad he
expends all the resources of his genius to make his anger
seem moral and his indignation a public dut}^ This con-
ception of the ethical responsibility of verse was universal,
and even so late as 1745, long after the composition of
Warton's " Enthusiast," we find Blacklock declaring, with
general acceptance, that " poetical genius depends entirely
on the quickness of moral feeling," and that not to " fc'el
poetry'' was the result of having "the affections and
internal senses depraved by vice."

The most important innovation suggested by Joseph
Warton was an outspoken assertion that this was by no
means the object or the proper theme of poetry. His
verses and those of his brother, the Essay on Pope of the
elder, the critical and historical writings of the younger,
may be searched in vain for the slightest evidence, of moral
or didactic sentiment. The instructive and ethical man-
nerisms of the later classicists had produced some beautiful
and more accomplished verse, especially of a descriptive
order, but its very essence had excluded self-revelation.
Dennis, at whom Pope taught the world to laugh, but

The Message of the Wartons 73

who was in several respects & better critic than either
Addison or himself, had come close to the truth sometimes,
but was for ever edged away from it by the intrusion of
the moral consideration, Dennis feels things aesthetically,
but he blunders into ethical definition. The result was
that the range of poetry was narrowed to the sphere of
didactic reflection, a blunt description of scenery or objects
being the only relief, since

" who could take offence
While pure description held the place of sense ? ' '

To have perceived the bankruptcy of the didactic poem
is Joseph Warton's most remarkable innovation. The
lawlessness of the Romantic Movement, or rather its instinct
for insisting that genius is a law unto itself, is first fore-
shadowed in " The Enthusiast/' and when the history of
the school comes to be written there will be a piquancy
in tracing an antinomianism down from the blameless
Wartons to the hedonist essays of. Oscar Wilde and the
frenzied anarchism of the Futurists. Not less remarkable,
or less characteristic, was the revolt against the quietism
of the classical school. " Avoid extremes/' Pope had said,
and moderation, calmness, discretion, absence of excite-
ment had been laid down as capital injunctions. Joseph
Warton's very title, "The Enthusiast," was a challenge,
for " enthusiasm " was a term of reproach. He was him-
self a scandal to classical reserve. Mant, in 'the course of
some excellent lines addressed to Joseph Warton, remarks

" Thou didst seek

Ecstatic vision by the haunted stream
Or grove of fairy : then thy nightly ear,
As from the wild notes of some airy harp,
Thrilled with strange music."

The same excess of sensibility is still more clearly divulged
in Joseph's own earliest verses :

74 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

" All beauteous Nature ! by thy boundless charms
Oppressed, O where shall I begin thy praise,
Where turn the ecstatic eye, how ease my breast
That pa:its with wild astonishment and love ? "

The Nature here addressed is a very different thing from
the "Nature methodised" of the Essay on Criticism. It
is not to be distinguished from the object of pantheistic
worship long afterwards to be celebrated in widely differing
language, but with identical devotion, by Wordsworth and
Senancour, by Chateaubriand arid Shelley.

Closely connected with this attitude towards physical
nature is 'the determination to deepen the human interest
in poetry, to concentrate individuality in passion. At the
moment when the Wartons put forth their ideas, a change
was taking place in English poetry, but not in the direction
of earnest emotion. The instrument of verse had reached
an extraordinary smoothness, and no instance of its
capability could be more interesting than the poetry of
Shenstone, with his perfect utterance of things essentially
not worth saying. In the most important writers of that
very exhausted moment, technical skill seems the only
quality calling for remark, and when we have said all
that sympathy can say for Whitehead and Akenside, the
truth remains that the one is vapid, the other empty.
The Wartons saw that more liberty of imagination was
wanted, and that the Muse was not born to skim the
meadows, in short low flights, like a wagtail. They used
expressions which reveal their ambition. The poet was
to be " bold, without confine," and " imagination's char-
tered libertine " ; like a sort of Alastor, he was

" in venturous bark to ride
Down turbulent Delight's tempestuous tide."

These are aspirations somewhat absurdly expressed, but
the aim of them is undeniable and noteworthy.

The Message of the Wartons 75

A passion for solitude always precedes the romantic
obsession, and in examining the claim of the Wartons. to
be pioneers, we naturally look for this element. We find
it abundantly in their early verses. When Thomas was
only seventeen the precocity of the brothers was remark-
able he wrote a " Pleasures of Melancholy/ 3 in which he
expresses his wish to retire to " solemn glooms, congenial
to the soul." In the early odes of his brother Joseph we
find still more clearly indicated the intention to withdraw
from the world, in order to indulge the susceptibilities of
the spirit in solitary reflection. A curious air of fore-
shadowing the theories of Rousseau, to which I have
already referred, produces an effect which is faintly indi-
cated, but in its phantom way unique in English literature
up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency to the
sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in the
powerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts,
but nothing had been suggested in the pure Romantic style.

In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist
attitude to nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration
of feeling which was to be characteristic of romance;
an intention of escaping from the vanity of mankind by
an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering
primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive con-
ditions; a passion for what we now consider the drawing-
master's theory of the picturesque the thatched cottage,
the ruined castle with the moon behind it, the unfettered
rivulet, the wilderness of

" the pine-topped precipice
Abrupt and shaggy."

There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibl"
attractive to the next generation, that man in a state
civilisation was in a decayed and fallen condition, ai
that to achieve happiness he must wander back into

76 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly im-
pressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and
had proved to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker
alike that

" God and Nature link'd the general frame,
And bade Self-love and Social be the same."

Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love.
He designed, or pretended to design, to emigrate to the
backwoods of America, to live

" With simple Indian swains, that I may hunt
The boar and tiger through savannahs wild,
Through fragrant deserts and through citron groves,"

indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active
moral principle in social life, all the ecstasies, all the
ravishing emotions, of an abandonment to excessive sensi-
bility. The soul was to be, no longer the " little bark
attendant" that ''pursues the triumph and partakes the
gale" in Pope's complacent Fourth Epistle, but an seolian
harp hung in some cave of a primeval forest for the winds
to rave across in solitude.

*' Happy the first of men, ere yet confin'd
To smoky cities."

Already the voice is that of Obermann, of Rene*, of Byron.
Another point in which the recommendations of the
Wartons far outran the mediocrity of their execution was
their theory of description. To comprehend the state of
mind in which such pieces of stately verse as Parn ell's
Hermit or Addison's Campaign could be regarded as satis-
factory in the setting of their descriptive ornament we
must realise the aim which those poets put before them.
Nothing was to be mentioned by its technical -or even by
ts exact name; no clear picture was to be raised before
he inner eye; nothing was to be left definite or vivid.

The Message of the Wartons 77

We shall make a very great mistake if we suppose this
conventional vagueness to have been accidental, and a
still greater if we attribute it to a lack of cleverness. When
Pope referred to the sudden advent of a heavy shower at
a funeral in these terms

" 'Tis done, and nature's various charms decay;
See gloomy clouds obscure the cheerful day !
Now hung with pearls the dropping trees appear,
Their faded honours scatter'd on her bier,"

it was not because he had not the skill to come into closer
touch with reality, but that he did not wish to do so.
It had been plainly laid down by Malherbe and confirmed
by Boileau that objects should be named in general, not
in precise terms. We are really, in studying the descrip-
tive parts of the Classicist poets, very close to the theories
of Mallarme and the Symbolists which occupied us twenty
years ago. The object of the poet was not to present
a vivid picture to the reader, but to start in him a state
of mind.

We must recollect, in considering what may seem to
us the sterility and stiffness of the English poets from
1660 to 1740, that they were addressing a public which,
after .the irregular violence and anarchical fancy of the
middle of the seventeenth century, had begun to yearn
for regularity, common sense, and a moderation in relative
variety. The simplest ideas should be chosen, and should
depend for their poetical effect, not upon a redundant and
gorgeous ornament, but solely upon elegance of language.
There were certain references, certain channels of imagery,
which were purely symbolical, and these could be defended
only on the understanding that they produced on the
mind of the reader, instantly and without effort, the illus-
trative effect required. For instance, with all these neo-
classicists, the mythological allusions, which seem vapid and
ridiculous to us, were simplified metaphor and a questior

78 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

of style. In short, it rested the jaded imagination of
Europe, after Gongora and Marini, Donne and D'Aubigne,
to sink back on a poetry which had taken a vow to remain
scrupulous, elegant, and selected.

But the imagination of England was now beginning to
be impatient of these bonds. It was getting tired of a
rest-cure so prolonged. It asked for more colour, more
exuberance, more precise reproduction of visual impres-
sions. Thomson had summed up and had carried to
greater lengths the instinct for scenery which had never
entirely died out in England, except for a few years after
the Restoration. It was left to Joseph Warton, however,
to rebel against the whole mode in which the cabbage of
landscape was shredded into the classical pot-aii-feu. He
proposes that, in place of the mention of " Idalia's groves,"
when Windsor Forest is intended, and of milk-white bulls
sacrificed to Phoebus at Twickenham, the poets should
boldly mention in their verses English " places remarkably
romantic, the supposed habitation of druids, bards, and
wizards, 31 and he vigorously recommends Theocritus as a
model far superior to Pope because of the greater exactitude
of his references to objects, and because of his more realistic
appeal to the imagination. Description, Warton says,
should be uncommon, exact, not symbolic and allusive,
but referring to objects clearly, by their real names. He
very pertinently points out that Pope, in a set piece of
extraordinary cleverness which was to be read, more than
half a century later, even by Wordsworth, with pleasure
confines himself to rural beauty in general, and declines
to call up before us the peculiar beauties which characterise
the Forest of Windsor.

A specimen of Joseph Warton' s descriptive poetry may
here be given, not for its great inherent excellence, but
because it shows his resistance to the obstinate classic
mannerism :

The Message of the Wartons 79

" Tell me the path, sweet wanderer, tell,
To thy unknown sequestered cell,
Where woodbines cluster round the door,
Where shells and moss o'erlay the floor,
And on whose top an hawthorn blows,
Amid whose thickly-woven boughs
Some nightingale still builds her nest,
Each evening warbling thee to rest ;
Then lay me by the haunted stream,
Rapt in some wild poetic dream,
In converse while incthinks I rove
With Spenser through a fairy grove."

To show how identical were the methods of the two
brothers we may compare the foregoing lines with the
following from Thomas Warton's " Ode on the Approach
of Summer" (published when he was twenty-five, and
possibly written much earlier) :

" His wattled cotes the shepherd plaits ;
Beneath her elm the milkmaid chats ;
The woodman, speeding home, awhile
Rests him at a shady stile ;
Nor wants there fragrance to dispense
Refreshment o'er my soothed sense;
Nor tangled woodbine's balmy bloom,
Nor grass besprent to breathe perfume,
Nor lurking wild-thyme's spicy sweet
To bathe in dew my roving feet ;
Nor wants there note of Philomel,
Nor sound of distant-tinkling bell,
Nor lowings faint of herds remote,
Nor mastiff's bark from bosom'd cot ;
Rustle the breezes lightly borne
O'er deep embattled ears of corn;
Round ancient elms, with humming noise,
Full loud the chafer-swarms rejoice."

The youthful poet is in full revolt against the law which
forbade his elders to mention objects by their plain names.
Here we notice at once, as we do in similar early effusions
of both the Wartons, the direct influence of Milton's lyrics.
To examine the effect of the rediscovery of Milton upon
the poets of the middle of the eighteenth century would
lead us too far from the special subject of our inquiry

8o Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

to-day. But it must be pointed out that U Allegro and
II Penseroso had been entirely neglected, and practically
unknown, until a date long after the rehabilitation of
Paradise Lost. The date at which Handel set them to
music, 1740, is that of the revived or discovered popularity
of these two odes, which then began to be fashionable,
at all events among the younger "poets. They formed a
bridge, which linked the new writers with the early seven-
teenth century across the Augustan Age, and their versifi-
cation as well as their method of description were as much
resisted by the traditional Classicists as they were attractive,
and directly preferred above those of Pope, by the innovators,
Joseph Warton, who attributed many of the faults of
modern lyrical writing to the example of Petrarch, sets
Milton vehemently over against him, and entreats the
poets " to accustom themselves to contemplate fully every
object before they attempt to describe it." They were
above all to avoid nauseous repetition of commonplaces,
and what Warton excellently calls " hereditary images."

We must not, however, confine ourselves to a con-
sideration of fc The Enthusiast" of 1740 and the preface
to the Odes of 1746. Certain of the expressions, indeed,
already quoted, are taken from the two very important
critical works which the brothers published while they
were still quite young. We must now turn particularly
to Joseph Warton' s Essay on the Genius of Pope of 1756,
and to Thomas Warton 1 s Observations on the Faerie Queene
of 1754. Of these the former is the more important and
the more readable. Joseph's Essay on Pope is an extra-
ordinary production for the time at which it was produced.
Let me suggest that we make a great mistake in treating
the works of old writers as if they had been always written
by old men. I am trying to present the Wart cms to you
as I see them, and that is as enthusiastic youths, Hushed
with a kind of intellectual felicity, and dreaming how

8o Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

to-day. But it must be pointed out that U Allegro and
II Penseroso had been entirely neglected, and practically
unknown, until a date long after the rehabilitation of
Paradise Lost. The date at which Handel set them to
music, 1740, is that of the revived or discovered popularity
of these two odes, which then began to be fashionable,
at all events among the younger "poets. They formed a
bridge, which linked the new writers with the early seven-
teenth century across the Augustan Age, and their versifi-
cation as well as their method of description were as much
resisted by the traditional Classicists as they were attractive,
and directly preferred above those of Pope, by the innovators,
Joseph Warton, who attributed many of the faults of
modern lyrical writing to the example of Petrarch, sets
Milton vehemently over against him, and entreats the
poets " to accustom themselves to contemplate fully every
object before they attempt to describe it." They were
above all to avoid nauseous repetition of commonplaces,
and what Warton excellently calls " hereditary images."

We must not, however, confine ourselves to a con-
sideration of fc The Enthusiast" of 1740 and the preface
to the Odes of 1746. Certain of the expressions, indeed,
already quoted, are taken from the two very important
critical works which the brothers published while they
were still quite young. We must now turn particularly
to Joseph Warton' s Essay on the Genius of Pope of 1756,
and to Thomas Warton 1 s Observations on the Faerie Queene
of 1754. Of these the former is the more important and
the more readable. Joseph's Essay on Pope is an extra-
ordinary production for the time at which it was produced.
Let me suggest that we make a great mistake in treating
the works of old writers as if they had been always written
by old men. I am trying to present the Wart cms to you
as I see them, and that is as enthusiastic youths, Hushed
with a kind of intellectual felicity, and dreaming how

82 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

and, in spite of eloquent passages, as literature it does
not ofier much attraction to the reader of the present
day. But its thesis is one which is very interesting to
us, and was of startling novelty when it was advanced.
In the author's own words it was to prove that " a clear
head and acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to
make a poet." The custom of critics had been to say
that, when supported by a profound moral sense, they
were sufficient, and Pope was pointed to as the over-
whelming exemplar of the truth of this statement. Pope
had taken this position himself and, as life advanced, the
well of pure poetry in him had dried up more and more
completely, until it had turned into a sort of fountain of
bright, dry sand, of which the Epilogue to Lhc Satires,
written in 1738, when Joseph Warton was sixteen years
of age, may bo taken as the extreme instance. The young
author of the li^say made the eaihest attempt which any
one made to put Pope in his right place, that is to say,
not to deny him genius or to deprecate the extreme
pleasure renders found in his writings, but to insist that,
by the very nature of his gifts, his was genius of a lower
rank than that of the supreme poets, with whom he was
commonly paralleled when he was not preferred to them all.
Warton admitted but three supreme English poets
Spensei, Shakespeare, Milton and he vehemently insisted
that moral, didactic and panegyrical poetry could never
rise above the second class in importance. To assert this
was not merely to offend against the undoubted supremacy
of Pope, but it was to llout the claims of all those others
to whom the age gave allegiance. Joseph Warton does
not slnink from doing this, and lie gives reason for abating
the claims of all the classic favourites Cowiey, Waller,
Dryden, Addison. When it was advanced against him
that he .showed unogunce in placing his opinion against
that of a multitude of highly trained judges, lie replied

The Message of the Wartons 83

that a real " relish and enjoyment of poetry" is a rare
quality, and " a creative and glowing imagination" pos-
sessed by few. When the dicta of Boileau were quoted
against him, he repudiated their authority with scarcely less
vivacity than Keats was to display half a century later.

Joseph Warton' s Essay wanders about, and we may
acknowledge ourselves more interested in the mental
attitude which it displays than in the detail of its criticism.
The author insists, with much force, on the value of a
grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating
a poetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore
that Pope was so ready to forget that " wit and satire
are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are
eternal." We need not then be surprised when Joseph
Warton boldly protests that no other part of the writings
of Pope approaches Eloisa to Abelard in the quality of
being " truly poetical," He was perhaps led to some
indulgence by the fact that this is the one composition
in which Pope appears to be indebted to Milton's lyrics,
but there was much more than that. So far as I am
aware, Eloisa to Abclard had never taken a high place
with Pope's extreme admirers, doubtless because of its
obsession with horror and passion. But when we read
how

" o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence and a dead repose,"

and still more when we reflect on the perpetual and power-
ful appeals which the poem makes to emotion unbridled
by moral scruple, we have no difficulty in perceiving why
Eloisa to Abclard exercised so powerful an attraction on
Joseph Warton. The absence of ethical reservation, the
licence, in short, was highly attractive to him, and he
rejoiced in finding Pope, even so slightly, even so briefly,

84 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

faithless to his formula. It is worth while to note that
Joseph Warton's sympathy with the sentimental malady
of the soul which lies at the core of Romanticism per-
mitted him to be, perhaps, the first man since the Renais-
sance who recognised with pleasure the tumult of the Atys
of Catullus and the febrile sensibility of Sappho.

Both brothers urged that more liberty of imagination
was what English poetry needed; that the lark had been
shut up long enough in a gilded cage. We have a glimpse
of Thomas Wart on introducing the study of the great
Italian classics into Oxford at a very early age, and we
see him crowned with laurel in the common-room of
Trinity College at the age of nineteen. This was in the
year before the death of Thomson. No doubt he was
already preparing his Observations on the Faerie Qiteene,
which came out a little later. He was Professor of Poetry
at Oxford before he was thirty. Both the brothers took
great pleasure in the study of Spenser, and they both
desired that the supernatural "machinery" of Ariosto,
in common with the romance of The Faerie Qitecne, should
be combined with a description of nature as untrimmcd
and unshackled as possible. Thomas Warton, in his
remarkable Oxford poem, " The Painted Window/' describes
himself as

" A faithless truant to the classic page,
Long have 1 loved to catch the simple chime
Of minstrel-harps, and spell the iabling rhyme,"

and again he says :

" I soothed my sorrows with the dulcet lore
Which Fancy fabled in her elfin age,"

iat is to say when Spenser was writing " upon Mulla's
lore."

After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Quccne of
754 is rather disappointing. Thomas was piobably much

The Message of the Wartons 85

more learned as a historian of literature than Joseph, but
he is not so interesting a critic. Still, he followed exactly
the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge.
His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is
tempted to make too tiresome a display of it. Neverthe-
less, he is as thorough as his brother in his insistence upon
qualities which we have now learned to call Romantic,
and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then
spoke of with respect. He warmly recommends the Morte
d } Arthur, which had probably not found a single admirer
since 1634. When he mentions Ben Jonson, it is charac-
teristic that it is to quote the line about " the charmed
boats and the enchanted wharves/' which sounds like a
foretaste of Keats' s " magic casements opening on the
foam of perilous seas." The public of Warton's day had
relegated all tales about knights, dragons, and enchanters
to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage in
insisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and
adult literature. He certainly would have thoroughly
enjoyed the romances of" Mrs. Radcliffe, whom a later
generation was to welcome as " the mighty magician bred
and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary caverns,
amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition," and he
despised the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says,
with firmness, that epic poetry and he is thinking of
Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser would never have been
written if the critical judgments current in 1754 had been
in vogue.

Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto
on Spenser, and no other part of the Observations is so
valuable as the pages in which those two poets are con-
trasted. He remarked the polish of the former poet with
approval, and he did not shrink from what is violently
fantastic in the plot of the Orlando Furioso. On that
point he says, " The present age is too fond of manner' d

86 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

poetry to relish fiction and fable," but perhaps he did
not observe that although there is no chivalry in The
Schoolmistress, that accomplished piece was the indirect
outcome of the Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists
had fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to
be tenebrous and vague was a merit with the precursors
of Romanticism, or at least, without unfairness, we may
say that they asserted the power of imagination to make
what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the
fancy. This tendency, which we first perceive in the
Wartons, rapidly developed, and it led to the blind enthu-
siasm with which the vapourings of Macphcrson were
presently received. The earliest specimens of Ossian were
revealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no
evidence of any welcome which they received from either
Joseph or Thomas. The brothers personally preferred a
livelier and more dramatic presentation, and when Dr.
Johnson laughed at Collins because " he loved fairies,
genii, giants, and monsters, 3 ' the laugh was really at the
expense of his school-fellow Joseph Warton, to whom
Collins seems to have owed his boyish inspiration, although
he was by a few months the senior.

Johnson was a resolute opponent of the principles of
the Wartons, though he held Thomas, at least, in great
personal regard. He objected to the brothers that they
" affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival,"
and his louiade about their own poetry is well known :

" Phrase tliat time liatli flung away,
Uncouth words in disarray,
Tnck'd in antique run" and bonnet,
Ode and elegy and sonnet."

This conservatism was not peculiar to Johnson ; there was
a general tendency to resist the rcmtroduction into language
and literature of words and forms which had been allowed
to disappear. A generation later, a careful and thoughtful

The Message of the Wartons 87

grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of being dismissed
as " a cockscomb " because he tried to enlarge our national
vocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old
libraries for glossaries of disused terms in order to display
them in their own writings. This was not quite an idle
charge ; it is to be noted as one of the symptoms of active
Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied with the diction
commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify by
embroidering its texture with archaic and far-fetched words.
Chatterton, who was not yet born when the Wartons formed
and expressed their ideas, was to carry this instinct to a
preposterous extreme in his Rowley forgeries, where he
tries to obtain a mediaeval colouring by transferring words
out of an imperfect Anglo-Saxon lexicon, often without
discerning the actual meaning of those words.

Both the Wartons continued, in successive disquisitions,
to repeat their definition of poetry, but it cannot be said
that either of them advanced. So far as Joseph is con-
cerned, he seems early to have succumbed to the pressure
of the age and of his surroundings. In 1766 he became
head master of Winchester, and settled down after curious
escapades which had nothing poetical about them. In
the head master of a great public school, reiterated murmurs
against bondage to the Classical Greeks and Romans would
have been unbecoming, and Joseph Wart on was a man of
the world. Perhaps in the solitude of his study he mur-
mured, as disenchanted enthusiasts often murmur, " Say,
are the days of blest delusion fled?" Yet traces of the
old fire were occasionally manifest ; still each brother woke
up at intervals to censure the criticism of those who did
not see that imagination must be paramount in poetry,
and who made the mistake of putting " discernment" in
the place of " enthusiasm." I hardly know why it gives
me great pleasure to learn that " the manner in which the
Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton read the Communion Service was

88 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

remarkably awful/' but it must be as an evidence that
he carried a " Gothick" manner into daily life.

The spirit of pedantry, so amicably mocked by the
Wartons, took its revenge upon Thomas in the form of
a barren demon named Joseph Ritson, who addressed to
him in 1782 what he aptly called A Familiar Letter.
There is hardly a more ferocious pamphlet in the whole
history of literature. Ritson, who had the virulence of a
hornet and the same insect's inability to produce honey
of his own, was considered by the reactionaries to have
" punched Tom Warton' s historick body full of deadly
holes." But his strictures were not really important. In
marshalling some thousands of facts, Warton had made
perhaps a couple of dozen mistakes, and Ritson advances
these with a reiteration and a violence worthy of a maniac.
Moreover, and this is the fate of angry pedants, he himself
is often found to be as dustily incorrect as Warton when
examined by modern lights. Ritson, who accuses Warton
of ''never having consulted or even seen" the books he
quotes from, and of intentionally swindling the public,
was in private life a vegetarian who is said to have turned
his orphan nephew on to the streets because he caught
him eating a mutton-chop. Ritson flung his arrows far
and wide, for he called Dr. Samuel Johnson himself " that
great luminary, or rather dark lantern of literature/'

If we turn over Ritson' s distasteful pages, it is only
to obtain from them further proof of the perception of
Warton' s Romanticism by an adversary whom hatred
made perspicacious. Ritson abuses the History of English
Poetry for presuming to have " rescued from oblivion
irregular beauties " of which no one desired to be reminded.
He charges Warton with recommending the poetry of " our
Pagan fathers" because it is untouched by Christianity,
and of saying that " religion and poetry are incompatible."
He accuses him of " constantly busying himself with pas-

The Message of the Wartons 89

sages which he does not understand, because they appeal
to his ear or his fancy." " Old poetry," Ritson says to
Wart on, " is the same thing to you, sense or nonsense."
He dwells on Warton's marked attraction to whatever is
prodigious and impossible. The manner in which these
accusations are made is insolent and detestable; but
Ritson had penetration, and without knowing what he
reached, in some of these diatribes he pierced to the heart
of the Romanticist fallacy.

It is needful that I should bring these observations to
a close. I hope I have made good my claim that it was
the Wartons who introduced into the discussion of English
poetry the principle of Romanticism. To use a metaphor
of which both of them would have approved, that principle
was to them like the mystical bowl of ichoi, the ampolla,
which Astolpho was expected to bring down from heaven
in the Orlando Fwioso. If I have given you an exaggerated
idea of the extent to which they foresaw the momentous
change in English literature, I am to blame. No doubt
by extracting a great number of slight and minute remarks,
and by putting them together, the critic may produce an
effect which is too emphatic. But you will be on your
guard against such misdirection. It is enough for me if
you will admit the priority of the intuition of the brothers,
and I do not think that it can be contested.

Thomas Warton said, " I have rejected the ideas of
men who are the most distinguished ornaments" of
the history of English poetry, and he appealed against
a "mechanical" attitude towards the art of poetry.
The brothers did more in rebelling against the Classic
formulas than in starting 1 new poetic methods. There was
an absence in them of "the pomps and prodigality" of
genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. They
began with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness
of expression, no store of energy. It needed a nature as

90 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

unfettered as Blake's, as wide as Wordsworth's, as opulent
as Keats' s, to push the Romantic attack on to victory.
The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and
vagaries of emotion, was there ; there was present in both
brothers, while they were still young, an extreme sensi-
bility. The instinct was present in them, but the sacred
fire died out in the vacuum of their social experience, and
neither Warton had the energy to build up a style in prose
or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they
succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which
it is sometimes no light task to disengage their thought.
In their later days they made some sad defections, and I
can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at Marlowe's
Hero and Leander and failing to observe its beauties. We
are told that as Camden Professor he " suffered the rostrum
to grow cold," and he was an ineffective poet laureate.
His brother Joseph felt the necessity or the craving for
lyrical expression, without attaining more than a muffled
and a second-rate effect.

All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains
that between 1740 and 1750, while even the voice of
Rousseau had not begun to make itself heard in Europe, the
Wartons had discovered the fallacy of the poetic theories
admitted in their day, and had formed some faint con-
ception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbe Du
Bos had laid down in his celebrated Reflexions (1719) that
the poet's art consists of making a general moral repre-
sentation of incidents and scenes, and embellishing it with
elegant images. This had been accepted and acted upon
by Pope and by all his followers. To have been the first
to perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which
excluded all imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery,
is to demand respectful attention from the historian of
Romanticism, and +his attention is due to Joseph and
Thomas Warton.

THE CHARM OF STERNE

THE CHARM OF STERNE 1

IT is exactly two hundred years to-night since there was
born, at Clonmel, in Ireland, a son to a subaltern in an
English regiment just home from the Low Countries. " My
birthday/' Laurence Sterne tells us, " was ominous to my
poor father, who was, the day after our arrival, with many
other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide
world with a wife and two children." The life of the new
baby was one of perpetual hurry and scurry; his mother,
who had been an old campaigner, daughter of what her
son calls "a noted suttler" called Nuttle, had been the
widow of a soldier before she married Roger Sterne. In
the extraordinary fashion of the army of those days, the
regiment was hurried from place to place as was that of
the father of the infant Borrow a century later and with
it hastened the unhappy Mrs. Sterne, for ever bearing and
for ever losing children, " most rueful journeys," marked
by a long succession of little tombstones left behind.
Finally, at Gibraltar, the weary father, pugnacious to the
last, picked a quarrel about a goose and was pinked through
the body, surviving in a thoroughly damaged condition,
to die, poor exhausted pilgrim of Bellona, in barracks in
Jamaica.

It would be difficult to imagine a childhood better cal-
culated than this to encourage pathos in a humorist and
fun in a sentimentalist. His account, in his brief auto-

1 Address delivered to the Authors' Club, November 24 th, 191"

93

94 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

biography, of the appearance and disappearance of his
hapless brothers and sisters is a proof of how early life
appealed to Laurence Sterne in the dappled colours of
an April day. We read there of how at Wicklow " we lost
poor Joram, a pretty boy " ; how " Anne, that pretty blos-
som, fell in the barracks of Dublin" ; how little Devijehar
was " left behind " in Carrickfergus. We know not whether
to sob or to giggle, so tragic is the rapid catalogue of dying
babies, so ridiculous are their names and fates. Here, then,
I think, we have revealed to us the prime characteristic of
Sterne, from which all his other characteristics branch away,
for evil or for good. As no other writer since Shakespeare,
and in a different and perhaps more intimate way than even
Shakespeare, he possessed the key of those tears that suc-
ceed the hysteria of laughter, and of that laughter which
succeeds the passion of tears. From early childhood, and
all through youth and manhood, he had been collecting
observations upon human nature in these rapidly alternating
moods.

He observed it in its frailty, but being exquisitely frail
himself, he was no satirist. A breath of real satire would
blow down the whole delicate fabric of Tristram Shandy
and the Sentimental Journey. Sterne pokes fun at people
and things ; he banters the extravagance of private humour ;
but it is always with a consciousness that he is himself
more extravagant than any one. If we compare him for a
moment with Richardson, who buttonholes the reader in
a sermon ; or with Smollett, who snarls and bites like an
angry beast ; we feel at once that Sterne could not breathe
in the stuffiness of the one or in the tempest of the other.
Sympathy is the breath of his nostrils, and he cannot exist
except in a tender, merry relation with his readers. His
own ideal, surely, is that which he attributed to the fantastic
and gentle Y crick, who never could enter a village, but
he caught the attention of old and young. (t Labour stood

The Charm of Sterne 95

still as he passed ; the bucket hung suspended in the middle
of the well; the spinning-wheel forgot its round, even
chuck-farthing and shuffle- cap themselves stood gaping till
he had got out of sight." Like Yorick, Sterne loved a
jest in his heart.

There are, it seems to me, two distinct strains in the
intellectual development of Sterne, and I should like to
dwell upon them for a moment, because I think a lack of
recognition of them has" been apt to darken critical counsel
in the consideration of his writings. You will remember
that he was forty-six years of age before he took up the
business of literature seriously. Until that time he had been
a country parson in Yorkshire, carrying his body, that
" cadaverous bale of goods," from Sutton to Stillington,
and from Stillington to Skelton. He had spent his life in
riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering in
company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from
a clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such
an artist for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities
of average Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent
search after the enjoyment of the hour, Sterne cultivated
a formidable species of literature in which he had so few
competitors that, in after years, his indolence prompted him
to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human
being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous
learning of those writers of the Renaissance in whom
congested Latin is found tottering into colloquial French,
He studied Rabelais perhaps more deeply than any
other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de
Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the six-
teenth century were familiar to him and to him alone in
England.

Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two
streams flowing in his brain, and these were, like everything
else about him, inconsistent with one another. The faithful

g6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

tender colour of modern life competed with the preposterous
oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started the annals
of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant,
and there is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and
entertained readers of that day. But it no longer entertains
us very much, and it is the source of considerable injustice
done by modern criticism to the real merits of vSterne.
When so acute a writer as Bagehot condemns much of
Tristram Shandy as " a sort of antediluvian fun, in which
uncouth saurian jokes play idly in an unintelligible world,"
he hits the nail on the head of why so many readers now-
adays turn with impatience from that work. But they should
persevere, for Sterne himself saw his error, and gradually
dropped the " uncouth saurian jokes" which he had filched
out of Burton and Beroalde, relying more and more exclu-
sively on his own rich store of observations taken directly
from human nature. In the adorable seventh volume of
Tristram, and in The Sentimental Journey, there is nothing
left of Rabelais except a certain rambling artifice of
style.

The death of Sterne, at the age of fifty-four, is one of
those events which must be continually regretted, because
to the very end of his life he was growing in ease and ripe-
ness, was discovering more perfect modes of self-expression,
and was purging himself "of his compromising intellectual
frailties. It is true that from the very first his excellences
were patent. The portrait of my Uncle Toby, which
Hazlitt truly said is " one of the finest compliments ever
paid to human nature," occurs, or rather begins, in the
second volume of Tristram Shandy. But the marvellous
portraits which the early sections of that work contain are
to some extent obscured, or diluted, by the author's deter-
mination to gain piquancy by applying old methods to new
subjects. Frankly, much as I love Sterne, I find Kuna-
strockius and Lithopaedus a bore. I suspect they have

The Charm of Sterne 97

driven more than one modern reader away from the enjoy-
ment of Tristram Shandy.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century a leading
Dissenting minister, the Rev. Joseph Fawcett, said in
answer to a question : " Do I like Sterne? Yes, to be sure
1 should deserve to be hanged if I didn't!" That was
the attitude of thoughtful and scrupulous people of cultiva-
tion more than one hundred years ago. But it was their
attitude only on some occasions. There is no record of
the fact, but I am ready to believe that Mr. Fawcett may,
with equal sincerity, have said that Sterne was a godless
wretch. We know that Bishop Warburton presented him
with a pui so of gold, in rapturous appreciation of his
talents, and then in a different mood described him as "an
irrevocable scoundrel." No one else has ever nourished
in literature \vho has combined such alternating powers of
attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at one
moment, and we dislike him no less violently at another,
lie is attar of roses to-day and asafcetida to-morrow, and
it is not by any means easy to define the elements which
draw us towards him and a. way from him. Like Yorick,
he had {t a wild way of talking," and he wrote impetuously
and impudently " in the naked temper which a merry heart
discovered." As he " seldom shunned occasions of saying
what came uppermost, and without much ceremony, he had
but too many temptations in life of scattering his wit and
his humour, his gibes and his jests, about him."

So that even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would
have, had manifold opportunities of giving offence and
causing scandal. But he was not only a humorist with
" a thousand little sceptical notions to defend," but he was
a sentimentalist us well. These two characteristics he was
constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentality
and humour arc in reality like oil and wine. lie would
exasperate his readers by throwing his wig in their faces

98 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

at the moment when they were weeping, or put them out
of countenance by ending a farcical story on a melancholy
note. A great majority of Englishmen like to be quite
sure of the tone of what they read; they wish an author
to be straightforward; they dread irony and they loathe
impishness. Now Sterne is the most impish of all imagin-
ative writers. He is what our grandmothers, in describing
the vagaries of the nursery, used to call " a limb of Satan/'
Tristram Shandy, in his light-hearted way, declared that
" there's not so much difference between good and evil as
the world is apt to imagine," No doubt that is so, but the
world does not like its preachers to play fast and loose with
moral definitions.

The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against
the seriousness, the ponderosity, of previous prose literature
in England. We talk of the heaviness of the eighteenth
century, but the periods of even such masters of solid
rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledown in
comparison with the academic prose of the seventeenth
century. Before the eighteenth century is called lumbering,
let us set a page of Hume against a page of Hobbes, or a
passage out of Berkeley by a passage out of Selden. Com-
mon justice is seldom done to the steady clarification of
English prose between 1660 and 1750, but it was kept
within formal lines until the sensitive recklessness of
Sterne broke up the mould, and gave it the flying forms
of a cloud or a wave. He owed this beautiful inspiration
to what Nietzsche calls his " squirrel-soul," which leaped
from bough to bough, and responded without a trace of
conventional restraint to every gust of emotion. Well
might Goethe be inspired to declare that Stenie was the
most emancipated spirit of his century.

His very emancipation gives us the reason why Sterne's
admirers nowadays are often divided in their allegiance to
him. A frequent part of his humour deals very flippantly

The Charm of Sterne 99

with subjects that are what we have been taught to consider
indelicate or objectionable* It is worse than useless to try
to explain this foible of his away, because he was aware
of it and did it on purpose. He said that " nothing but the
more gross and carnal parts of a composition will go down/'
His indecency was objected to in his own age, but not with
any excluding seventy. And I would like to call your
attention to the curious conventionality of our views on
this subject. Human nature does not change*, but it
changes its modes of expression. In the eighteenth century
very grave people, even bishops, allowed themselves, in
their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting. Ytit they
would have been scandalised by the tragic treatment of sex
by our more audacious novelists of to-day. We are still
interested in these matters, but we have agreed not to joke
about them. I read the other clay a dictum of one of those
young gentlemen who act as our moral policemen : he
prophesied that a jest on a sexual subject would, in twenty
years, be not merely reprehensible, as it is now, but un-
intelligible. Very proper, no doubt, only do not let us
call this morality, it is only a change of habits.

Sterne is not suited to readers who are disheartened at
irrelevancy. It is part of his charm, and it is at the same
time his most whimsical habit, never to proceed with his
story when you expect him to do so, and to be reminded
by his own divagations of delightful side-issues which lead
you, entranced, whither you had no intention of going.
He did not merely not shun occasions of being irrelevant,
but he sought them out and eagerly cultivated them,
Remember that a whole chapter of Tristram is devoted
to the attitude of Corporal Trim as he prepared himself
to read the Sermon. Sterne kept a stable of prancing,
plump little hobby-horses, and he trotted them out upon
every occasion. But this is what makes his books the best
conversational writing in the English language. He writes

ioo Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

for all the world exactly as though he were talking at his
ease, and we listen enchanted to the careless, frolicking,
idle, penetrating speaker who builds up for us so nonchal-
antly, with persistent but unobtrusive touch upon touch,
the immortal figures of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim,
Y orick, the Widow Wadman, and so many more.

This, I am inclined to think, in drawing this brief sketch
to an end, is Sterne's main interest for ourselves. He broke
up the rhetorical manner of composition, or, rather, he
produced an alternative manner which was gradually
accepted and is in partial favour still. I would ask you
to read for yourselves the scene of the ass who blocked
the way for Tristram at Lyons, and to consider how com-
pletely new that method of describing, of facing a literary
problem, was in 1765. I speak here to an audience of
experts, to a company of authors who are accustomed to
a close consideration of the workmanship of their mdtier.
I ask them where, at all events in English, anything like
that scene had been found before the clays of Sterne. Since
those days we have never been without it.

To trace the Shandcan influence down English literature
for the last century and a half would take me much too
long for your patience. In Dickens, in Carlyle, even in
Ruskin, the Shandean clement is often present and not
rarely predominant. None of those great men would
have expressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence
Sterne. And coining down to our own time, I see the in-
fluence of Sterne everywhere. The pathos of Sir James
Barrie is intimately related to that of the creator of Uncle
Toby and Maria of Moulincs, while I am not sure that of
all the books which Stevenson read it was not the Senti*
mental Journey which made the deepest impression upon
him.

THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR
ALLAN POE

THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR
ALLAN POE

IN the announcements of the approaching celebration
of the centenary of Poe in this country, the fact of his
having been a poet was concealed. Perhaps his admirers
hoped that it might be overlooked, as without importance,
or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events,
the statement that the revels on that occasion would be
conducted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to
prove that it was the prose writer of " The Black Cat. " and
" The Murders in the Rue Morgue/' and not the verso
writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be
the centre of attention. On that side of Poe's genius,
therefore, although it is illustrated by such masterpieces of
sullen beauty as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and
such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as " The Gold Bug,"
I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think the
importance of these tales very slight by the side of that of
the best poems. Edgar Poe was, in my opinion, one of
the most significant poetic artists of a century rich in poetic
artists, and I hold it to be for this reason, and not because
he wrote thrilling "detective" stories, that he deserves
persistent commemoration.

The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of
the nineteenth century has not been easily or universally
admitted, and it is only natural to examine both the phe-
nomena and the causes of the objections so persistently
brought against it. In the first instance, if the fame of

103

104 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced
firmly, and it was encouraged from the beginning by the
experts, by the cultivated minority. Poe, on the other
hand, was challenged, and his credentials were grudgingly
inspected, by those who represented the finest culture of
his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism
are not quite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal
of American letters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood
of Boston, and it was ill-prepared to believe that anything
poetical could deserve salvation if it proceeded from a
place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, the son of Irish
strolling players, called " The Virginia Comedians, " settled
in the South and was educated in England. By an odd
coincidence, it now appears that he actually was a native,
as it were by accident, of Boston itself. In the words of
the Psalmist, " Lo \ there was he born ! " This Gentile
poet, such was the then state of American literature, could
not arrive on earth elsewhere than in the Jerusalem of
Massachusetts. But that concession was not known to
the high priests, the Lowells, the Holmeses, the Mortons,
to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder from Javan or
Gadire.

Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality
as to find himself isolated. Everything new is regarded
with suspicion and dislike by the general world of readers,
and usually by the leaders of criticism as well. Yet the
daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaron and
his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded
Poe, Wordsworth and Coleridge had been derided, but they
had enjoyed the emphatic approbation of one another and
of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah of letters, yet he
was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. Even
Keats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch
reviewers behind the confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and
Reynolds. At a still later moment Rossetti and Morris

The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poc f ; 105

would shelter themselves securely, and even serenely, ,-from
the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower of the
praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set
against the stupidity of the world at large the comfortable
cleverness of a few strong persons of taste, founded, as all
good taste must be, upon principles. The poet could pride
himself on his eclecticism, on his recognition within, as
Keats said, "a little clan/' But Poe's misfortune was to
have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely
those persons who represented, and on the whole justly
represented, good taste in America.

His behaviour in this predicament was what might have
been expected from a man whose genius was inoi e consider-
able than his judgment or his manners. He tried, at first,
to conciliate the New England authorities, and he flattered
not merely the greater planets but some of the very little-
stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher
P. Crouch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that
his blandishments were of no avail, he turned savage, and
tried to prove that he did not can 1 , by being rude to Bryant
and Longfellow. lie called the whole, solemn Sanhedrim a
college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, lie
closed upon himself the doors of mercy, biuce the central
aim and object of the excellent men who at that time ruled
American literature was to prove that, in what this im-
pertinent young man from Virginia called the Frog Pond,
the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its
home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the
recognition of Europe, which began to flow in richly just
as Poe ceased to bo able to enjoy it, the prestige of this
remarkable poet might have been successfully annihilated.

Nor was it only the synod of IJoslon wits who issued the
edict that he should be ignored, but in England also many
good judges of literature, especially those who belonged to
the intellectual rather than the artistic class, could not

106 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

away with him. I recollect hearing Leslie Stephen say,
now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms
of praise for Poe was " simply preposterous/' And one
whom I admire so implicitly that I will not mention his
name in a context which is not favourable to his judgment,
wrote (in his haste) of Poe's " singularly valueless verses."

This opposition, modified, it is true, by the very different
attitude adopted by Tennyson and most subsequent Eng-
lish poets, as well as by Baudelaire, Mallarmd and the
whole younger school in France, was obstinately preserved,
and has not wholly subsided. It would be a tactical mis-
take for those who wish to insist on Poe's supremacy in his
own line to ignore the serious resistance which has been
made to it. In the canonisation-trial of this whimsical
saint, the Devil's advocates, it may be confessed, are
many, and their objections are imposing. It is possible
that local pique and a horror of certain crude surroundings
may have had something to do with the original want of
recognition in New England, but such sources of prejudice
would be ephemeral. There remained, and has continued
to remain, in the very essence of Poe's poetry, something
which a great many sincere and penetrating lovers of verse
cannot endure to admit as a dominant characteristic of
the art.

To recognise the nature of this quality is to take the
first step towards discovering the actual essence of Pope's
genius. His detractors have said that his verses are
" singularly valueless." It is therefore necessary to
define what it is they mean by " value." If they mean
an inculcation, in beautiful forms, of moral truth ; if they
mean a succession of ideas, clothed in exalted and yet
definite language; if they are thinking of what stirs the
heart in reading parts of Hamlet and Comus, of what
keeps the pulse vibrating after the " Ode to Duty" has
been recited; then the verses of Poe are indeed without

The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poe 107

value. A poet less gnomic than Poe, one from whom less,
as they say in the suburbs, " can be learned/' is scarcely
to be found in the whole range of literature* His lack of
curiosity about moral ideas is so complete that evil moves
him no more than good. There have been writers of
eccentric or perverse morality who have been so much
irritated by the preaching of virtue that they have lent
their genius to the recommendation of vice. This inversion
of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is
vaguely called " immoral" in imaginative literature. But
Edgar Poe is as innocent of immorality as he. is of morality.
No more innocuous flowers than his are grown through the
length and breadth of Parnassus. There is hardly a phrase
in his collected writings which has a bearing upon any
ethical question, and those who look for what Wordsworth
called " chains of valuable thoughts" must go elsewhere,
In 1840 they might, in New England, go to -Bryant, to
Emerson, to Hawthorne; and it is mote than excusable
that those who were endeavouring to refine the very crude
community in the midst of which they were anxiously
holding up the agate lamp of Psycho, should sec nothing
to applaud in the vague arid shadowy rhapsodies then
being issued by a dissipated hack in Philadelphia. What
the New England critics wanted, patriotically as well as
personally, was as little like '* Ulalume" as can possibly
be conceived. They defined what poetry should be
there was about that time a mania for defining poetry
and what their definition was may be seen no less plainly
in the American Fable for Critics than in the preface
to the English Philip van Artwcltle. It was to he
picturesque, intellectual, pleasing; it was to deal, above
all, with moral " truths" ; it was to avoid vagueness and
to give no uncertain sound ; it was to regard H passion "
with alarm, as the siren which was bound sooner or later
to fling a bard upon the rocks. It is not necessary to treat

io8 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

this conception of poetry with scorn, nor to reject prin-
ciples of precise thought and clear, sober language, which
had been illustrated by Wordsworth in the present and by
Gray in the past. The ardent young critics of our own age,
having thrown off all respect for the traditions of literature,
speak and write as if to them, and them alone, had been
divinely revealed the secrets of taste." They do not give
themselves time to realise that in Apollo* s house there are
many mansions.

It is sufficient for us to note here that the discomfort
of Foe's position resided in the fact that he was not ad-
mitted into so much as the forecourt of the particular
mansion inhabited by Bryant and Lowell. There is a
phrase in one of his own rather vague and " valueless "
essays (for Poe was a poor critic) which, as it were acci-
dentally, describes his ideal in poetry, although it is not
his own verse of which he is speaking. He described in
1845, when his ripe genius had just brought forth " The
Raven" the poetic faculty as producing " a sense of
dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, in-
definable delight/' This shadowy but absorbing and
mastering pleasure impregnated his own best writings to
such a degree that it gives us the measure of his unlike-
ness to his contemporaries, and states the claim of his
individuality. Without precisely knowing it or perceiving
his revolution, in an age of intelligent, tame, lucid and
cautiously -defined poetry, Edgar Poe expressed the emo-
tions which surged within him in numbers that were, even
to excess, " dreamy, wild, indefinite and indefinable."

His early verses are remarkably exempt from the in-
fluences which we might expect to find impressed on
them. He imitated, as every man of genuine originality
imitates while he learns his trade, but his models were not,
as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley;
they were Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and

The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poc 109

Scott, Poe found nothing to transfer to his own nature,
and the early imitations, therefore, left no trace on him.
Brief as is the volume of his poems, half of it might be
discarded without much regret. Scattered among his
Byron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces
which reveal to us that, while he was still almost a child,
the true direction of his genius was occasionally revealed
to him. The lyric " To Helen/' which is said to have
been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in the
peculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to
characterise his mature poems:

" On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Tliy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."

This was not published, however, until the author was two-
and-twenty, and it may have been touched up. Here is
a fragment of a suppressed poem, " Visit of the Dead,"
which Poe certainly printed in his eighteenth year :

" The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill,
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token ;
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries ! "

This is not so perfect, but it is even more than " To Helen "
symptomatic of Poe's peculiar relation to the poetic faculty
as fostering a state of indefinite and indeed indefinable
delight. And from these faint breathings how direct is
the advance to such incomparable specimens of symbolic
fancy as "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," and
finally "Ulalume" 1

The determination to celebrate, in a minor key, in-
definite and melancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than

i jo Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

which none more dangerous can be placed in the path of
a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, and he was pro-
tected, and permanent value was secured for his poetry,
by the possession of one or two signal gifts to which atten-
tion must now be paid. He cultivated the indefinite, but,
happily for us, in language so definite and pure that when
he succeeds it is with a cool fulness, an absence of all
fretting and hissing sound, such as can rarely be paralleled
in English literature. The finest things in Milton's 1645
volume, Wordsworth at his very best, Tennyson occa-
sionally, Collins in some of his shorter odes, have reached
that perfection of syllabic sweetness, that clear sound
of a wave breaking on the twilight sands, which Poe
contrives to render, without an effort, again and again:

" By a route, obscure and lonely,
I humtod by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon/ nam'd Ni; j ,ht,
On a black throne reigns upright,
1 have reached thene lands hut newly
From an ultimate dim Thuie,
1'Yom a wild weird clinic, that lieth, sublime.
Out of space, out of time."

The present moment is one in which the. reaction against
plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it
is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a
single English poet of consequence in the younger school
who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were
preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is
done purposely, and in accordance with mysterious har-
monic laws entirely beyond the comprehension of ordinary
ears, makes the matter worse. There is no heresiarch so
dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating life,
and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges,
that the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage

1 A shocking false quantity; but how little that would matter

to Poe 1

The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poe 1 1 1

for cacophony. He holds something of the same place in
relation to Swinburne and Poe, that Donne did to Spenser
three hundred years ago. In this condition of things it
may seem useless to found any claim for Poe on the ground
of the exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We
may hope, however, some day to regain the use of our
ears, and to discover once more that music and metre arc
utterly distinct arts. When that re-discovery has been
made, Poe will resume his position as one of the most
uniformly melodious of all those who have used the
English language.

Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection
of his prosody have occasionally objected that in the most
popular examples of it, " The Raven 51 and " The Bells,"
he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be objected,
with equal force, that Victor Hugo in " Les Djinns" and
even Tennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" made use of
" tricks/' On the other hand, if the charge be deserved,
it seems odd that in the course of nearly seventy years
no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat the
wonderful experiment. In each poem there are what
must be judged definite errors against taste in detail
Poe's taste was never very sure but the skill of the long
voluptuous lamentation, broken at equal intervals by the
croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation, as
if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of
the bells, is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in
keeping with the personal genius of the writer, that it is
surely affectation to deny its value.

It is not, however, in " The Bells" or in " The Raven,"
marvellous as are these tours dc force, that we see the
essential greatness of Poe revealed. The best of his
poems are those in which he deals less boisterously with
the sentiment of mystery. During the latest months of
his unhappy life, he composed three lyrics which, from a

1 1 2 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

technical point of view, must be regarded not only as the
most interesting which he wrote, but as those which have
had the most permanent effect upon subsequent literature,
not in England merely, but in France. These are " Ula-
lume," " Annabel Lee," " For Annie." One of Poe's
greatest inventions was the liquidation of stanzaic form,
by which he was able to mould it to the movements of
emotion without losing its essential structure. Many
poets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to
do it with the stanza. In the three latest lyrics this
stanzaic legerdemain is practised with an enchanting
lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous and elastic grace. Per-
haps, had it been subjected to the poet's latest revision,
" For Annie" would have been the most wonderful of all
in the sensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluc-
tuations of sentiment.

We may, then, briefly summarise that Poe's first claim
to commemoration is that he was the pioneer in restoring
to the art of poetry a faculty which it had almost lost in
its attempt to compete with science and philosophy. It
had become the aim of the poets to state facts; it was
given to Poe to perceive that no less splendid a future lay
before those who only hinted feelings. He was the earliest
modern poet who substituted the symbol for the exact
description of an object or an event. That " expression
directe," about which the French have been debating for
the last quarter of a century, and over which M. Adolphc
Rette and M. Albert Mockel periodically dispute like
Fathers of the Church, was perceived and was deliberately
repudiated by Poe eighty years ago. He was deeply
impregnated with the sense that the harmony of imagi-
nation is not destroyed, but developed, by drawing over
a subject veil after veil of suggestion. His native tem-
perament aided him in his research after the symbol. He
was naturally a cultivator of terror, one who loved to

The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poe 1 1 3

people the world with strange and indefinable powers.
His dreams were innocent and agitating, occupied with
supernatural terrors, weighed upon by the imminence of
shadowy presentments. He trembled at he knew not
what; in this he was related to the earliest poets of the
world, and in his perpetual recurrence to symbol he recalls
the action of their alarms.

The cardinal importance, then, of Poe as a poet is that
he restored to poetry a primitive faculty of which civilisa-
tion seemed successfully to have deprived her. He rejected
the doctrinal expression of positive things, and he insisted
upon mystery and symbol. He endeavoured to clothe
unfathomable thoughts and shadowy images in melody
that was like the wind wandering over the strings of an
asolian harp. In other words, he was the pioneer of a
school which has spread its influence to the confines of
the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature.
He was the discoverer and the founder of Symbolism.

1909.

THE AUTHOR OF PELHAM

THE AUTHOR OF "PELHAM"

ONE hundred and twenty years have nearly passed since
the birth of Bulwcr-Lytton, and he continues to be sus-
pended in a dim and ambiguous position in the history
of our literature. He combined extraordinary qualities with
fatal defects. He aimed at the highest eminence, and
failed to reach it, but he was like an explorer, who is diverted
from the main ascent of a mountain, and yet annexes
an important table-land elsewhere, Bulwcr-Lytton never
secured the ungrudging praise of the best judges, but he
attained great popularity, and has even now not wholly
lost it. He is never quoted as one of our great writers,
and yet he holds a place of his own from which it is improb-
able that he will ever be dislodged. Although he stood out
prominently among his fellows, and although his career
was tinged with scandal and even with romance, very little
has been known about him. Curiosity has been foiled by
the discretion of one party and the malignity of another-
The public has not been in a position to know the truth,
nor to possess the real portrait of a politician and a. man of
letters who has been presented as an angel and as a gargoyle,
but never as a human being. Forty years after his death
the candour and the skill of his grandson reveal him to us
at last in a memoir of unusual excellence.

In no case would Lord Lytton's task have been an easy
one, but it must have been made peculiarly difficult by the
work of those who had preceded him. Of those, the only
one who deserves serious attention is Robert Lytton, who
published certain fragments in 1883. That the son wished
1x7

n8 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

to support the memory of his father is unquestionable.
But it is difficult to believe that he intended his contribu-
tion to be more than an aid to some future biographer's
labour. He scattered his material about him in rough
heaps. Apart from the " Literary Remains/' which
destroyed the continuity of even such brief biography as
he gave, Robert Lytton introduced a number of chapters
which are more or less of the nature of essays, and are
often quite foreign to his theme. Moreover, he dedicated
several chapters to literary criticism of his father's works.
It is, in fact, obvious to any one who examines the two
volumes of 1883 which Robert Lytton contrived to fill, that
he was careful to contribute as little as he possibly could
to the story which he had started out to relate. Although
there is much that is interesting in the memoirs of 1883,
the reader is continually losing the thread of the narrative.
The reason is, no doubt, that Robert Lytton stood too
close to his parents, had seen too much of their disputes,
was too much torn by the agonies of his own stormy youth,
and was too sensitively conscious of the scandal, to tell
the story at all. We have the impression that, in order
to forestall any other biography, he pretended himself
to write a book which he was subtle enough to make
unintelligible.

This baffling discretion, this feverish race from hiding-
place to hiding-place, has not only not been repeated by
Lord Lytton in the new Life, but the example of his
father seems to have positively emphasised his own
determination to be straightforward and lucid- I know no
modern biography in which the writer has kept more
rigidly to the business of his narrative, or has less success-
fully been decoyed aside by the sirens of family vanity.
It must have boon a great difficulty to the biographer to
find his pathway cumbered by the volumes of 1883, set by
his father as a plausible man-trap for future intruders.

The Author of * Pelham ' 119

Lord Lytton, however, is the one person who is not an
intruder, and he was the only possessor of the key which
his father had so diplomatically hidden. His task, however,
was further complicated by the circumstance that Bulwcr-
Lytton himself left in MS. an autobiography, dealing very
fully with his own career and character up to the age of
twenty-two. The redundancy of all the Lyttons is amaz-
ing. Bulwer-Lytton would not have been himself if he
had not overflowed into reflections which swelled his
valuable account of his childhood into monstrous propor-
tions. Lord Lytton, who has a pretty humour, tells an
anecdote which will be read with pleasure :

<c An old woman, who had once been one of Bulwcr-
Lytton's trusted domestic servants, is still living in a cottage
at Knebworth. One clay she was talking to me about my
grandfather, and inadvertently used an expression which
summed him up more perfectly than any elaborate descrip-
tion could have done. She was describing his house at
Copped Hall, where she had been employed as caretaker,
and added : ' In one of his attacks of fluency, I nursed him
there for many weeks/ ' Pleurisy/ I believe, was what
she meant."

The bacillus of "fluency" interpenetrates the Auto-
biography, the letters, the documents of every kind, and
at any moment this disease will darken Bulwer-Lytton' s
brightest hours. But curtailed by his grandson, and with
its floral and heraldic ornaments well parcel away, the
Autobiography is a document of considerable value. It
is written with deliberate candour, and recalls the manner
of Cobbett, a writer with whom we should not expect to
find Bulwer-Lytton in sympathy. It is probable that the
author -of it never saw himsdf nor those who surrounded
him in precisely their true relation. There was something

I2o Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

radically twisted in his image of life, which always seems
to have passed through a refracting surface on its way to
his vision. No doubt this is more or less true of all experi-
ence ; no power has given us the gift " to see ourselves
as others see us." But in the case of Bulwer-Lytton this
refractive habit of his imagination produced a greater
swerving aside from positive truth than is usual. The
result is that an air of the fabulous, of the incredible, is
given to his narratives, and often most unfairly.

A close examination, in fact, of the Autobiography
results in confirming the historic truth of it. What is
surprising is not, when we come to consider them, the
incidents themselves, but Bulwer-Lytton' s odd way of
narrating them. Lord Lytton, without any comment,
provides us with curious material for the verification of his
grandfather's narrative. He prints, here and there, let tors
from entirely prosaic persons which tally, of ton to a surpris-
ing degree, with the extravagant statements of Bulwer-
Lytton. To quote a single instance, of a very remarkable
character, Bulwer-Lytton describes the effect his scholar-
ship produced, at the age of seventeen, upon sober, elderly
people, who were dazzled with his accomplishments and
regarded him as a youthful prodigy. It is the sort of
confession, rather full-blooded and lyrical, which we might
sasily set down to that phenomenon of refraction. But
Lord Lytton prints a letter from Dr. Samuel Parr (whom,
by the way, he calls " a man of sixty-four/' but Parr, born
in 1747, was seventy-four in 1821), which confirms the
autobiographer's account in every particular. The aged
Whig churchman, who boasted a wider knowledge of Greek
literature than any other scholar of his day, and whose
peremptory temper was matter of legend, could write to
this Tory boy a long letter of enthusiastic criticism, and
while assuring Bulwcr-Ly tton that he kept 4 f all the letters
With which you have honoured me," could add : "I am

The Author of c Pelham ' 121

proud of such a correspondent ; and, if we lived nearer to
each other, I should expect to be very happy indeed in
such a friend.'* Letters of this kind, judiciously printed
by Lord Lytton in his notes, serve to call us back from the
nebulous witchcraft in which Bulwer-Lytton was so fond
of wrapping up the truth, and to remind us that, in spite
of the necromancer, the truth is there.

From the point where the fragment of autobiography
closes, although for some time much the same material is
used and some of the same letters arc quoted, as were
quoted and used by Robert Lytton, the presentation of
these is so different that the whole effect is practically one
of novelty. But with the year 1826, when Edward Bulwer-
Lytton, at the age of thrcc-and-twcnty, became engaged
to Rosina Doyle Wheeler, all is positively new. The story
of the marriage, separation, and subsequent relations has
never before been presented to the world with any approach
to accuracy or fulness. No biographical notices of Bulwer-
Lytton even touch on this subject, which has been hitherto
abandoned to the gossip of irresponsible contemporaries.
It is true that a Miss Devcy composed a " Life of Rosina,
Lady Lytton," in which the talc was told. This work was
immediately suppressed, and is inaccessible to the public;
but the only person who is known to be familiar with its
contents reports that it " contains fragments of the narra-
tive, obviously biassed, wholly inaccurate, and evidently
misleading/' vSo far as the general public is concerned,
Lord Lytton' s impartial history of the relations between his
grandfather and his grandmother is doubtless that portion
of his book which will be regarded as the most important.
I may, therefore, dwell briefly upon his treatment of it.

The biographer, in dealing with a subject of this incalcu-
lable difficulty, could but lay himself open to the censure
of those who dislike the revelation of the truth on any dis-
o subject. This lion, however, stood in the middle

122 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

of his path, and he had either to wrestle with it or to turn
back. Lord Lytton says in his preface that it was neces-
sary to tell all or nothing of the matrimonial adventures
of his grandparents, but, in reality, this was not quite the
alternative, which was to tell the truth or to withdraw
from the task of writing a Life of Bulwer-Lytton. The
marriage and its results were so predominant in the career
of the man, and poisoned it so deeply to the latest hour
of his consciousness, that to attempt a biography of him
without clear reference to them would have been like
telling the story of Ncssus the Centaur without mentioning
the poisoned arrow of Heracles. But Lord Lytton shall
give his own apology :

" As it was impossible to give a true picture of my grand-
father without referring to events which overshadowed
his whole life, and which were already partially known to
the public, I decided to tell the whole story as fully and as
accurately as possible, in the firm belief that the truth
can damage neither the dead nor the living. The steps
which led to the final separation between my grandparents,
and the forces which brought about so disastrous a con-
clusion of a marriage of love, apart from their biographical
interest, afford a study of human nature of the utmost
value ; and so great are the moral lessons which this story
contains, that I venture to hope that the public may find
in much that is tragic and pitiful much also that is redeem-
ing, and that the ultimate verdict of posterity may be that
these two unfortunate people did not suffer entirely in
vain."

His story, therefore, is not written with any partiality,
and it seems to be as full and as truthful as the ample
materials at the author's disposal permitted. The reader
will conjecture that Lord Lytton could have given many

The Author of 'Pelham' 123

more details, but apart from the fact that they would often
have been wholly unfit for publication, it is difficult to see
that they would in any degree have altered the balance of
the story, or modified our judgment, which is quite suffi-
ciently enlightened by the copious letters on both sides
which are now for the first time printed.

Voltaire has remarked of love that it is " de toutes Ics
passions la plus forte, parce qu'elle attaque, & la fois, la
tte, le coeur, le corps." It is a commonplace to say that
Edward Bulwer's whole career might have been altered if
he had never met Rosina Wheeler, because this is true in
measure of every strong juvenile attachment : but it is
rarely indeed so copiously or so fatally true as it was in
his case. His existence was overwhelmed by this event;
it was turned topsy-turvey, and it never regained its
equilibrium. In this adventure all was exaggerated ; there
was excess of desire, excess of gratification, an intense
weariness, a consuming hatred.

On the first evening when the lovers met, in April 1826,
an observer, watching them as they talked, reflected that
Bulwer's " bearing had that aristocratic something border-
ing on hauteur" which reminded the onlooker " of the
passage, 'Stand back; I am holier than thoul'" The
same observer, dazzled, like the rest of the world, by the
loveliness of Miss Wheeler, judged that it would be best
" to regard her as we do some beautiful caged wild creature
of the woods at a safe and secure distance/' It would
have preserved a chance of happiness for Bulwcr-Lytton
to possess something of this stranger's clairvoyance. It
was not strange perhaps, but unfortunate, that he did not
notice or rather that he was not repelled by, for he did
notice the absence of moral delicacy in the beautiful
creature, the radiant and seductive Lamia, who responded
so instantly to his emotion. He, the most fastidious of
men, was not offended by the vivacity of a young lady

124 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

who called attention to the vulgarity of her father's worsted
stockings and had none but words of abuse for her mother.
These things, indeed, disconcerted the young aristocrat,
but he put them down to a lack of training ; he persuaded
himself that these were superficial blemishes and could
be remedied ; and he resigned his senses to the intoxication
of Rosina' s beauty.

At first and indeed to the last she stimulated his
energy and his intellect. His love and his hatred alike
spurred him to action. In August 1826, in spite of the
violent opposition of his mother, he and Rosina were
betrothed. By October Mrs. Bnlwer had so far prevailed
that the engagement was broken off, and Edward tossed
in a whirlpool of anger, love, and despair. It took the
form of such an attack of " fluency" as was never seen
before or after. Up to that time he had been an elegant
although feverish idler. Now he plunged into a strenuous
life of public and private engagements. He prepared to
enter the House of Commons; he finished Falkland, his
first novel; he started the composition of Pelham and of
another " light prose work/' which may have disappeared;
he achieved a long narrative in verse, O'Neill, or the Rebel;
and he involved himself in literary projects without bound
and without end. The aim of all this energy was money.
It is true that he had broken off his betrothal ; but it was
at first only a pretence at estrangement, to hoodwink his
mother. He was convinced that he could not live without
possessing Rosina, and as his mother held the strings of
the common purse, he would earn his own income and
support a wife.

Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, who had a Roman firmness, was
absolutely determined that her son should not marry " a
penniless girl whose education had been so flagrantly
neglected, who was vain and flighty, with a mocking humour
and a conspicuous lack of principle/' At this point the

The Author of 'Pelham' 125

story becomes exceedingly interesting. A Balzac would
strip it of its romantic trappings, and would penetrate into
its physiology. Out of Rosina's sight, and diverted by
the excess of his literary labours, Edward's infatuation
began to decline. His mother, whose power of character
would have been really formidable if it had been enforced
by sympathy or even by tact, relaxed her opposition ; and
instantly her son, himself, no longer attacked, became calmer
and more clear-sighted. Rosina' s faults were patent to his
memory ; the magic of her beauty less invincible. Within
a month all was changed again. Rosina fretted herself
into what she contrived to have reported to Bulwer-Lytton
as an illness. She begged for an interview, and lie went
with reluctance to bid her farewell for ever. It was Bulwer-
Lytton's habit to take with him a masterpiece of literature
upon every journey. It seems unfortunate that on this
occasion The Tempest was not his companion, for it might
have warned him, as Prospero warned Ferdinand, against
the fever in the blood :

" No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hale,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed, with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it, both."

When his short interview, which was to have been a final
one, was over, that had happened which made a speedy
marriage necessary, whatever the consequences might be,
The new conditions were clearly stated to old Mrs.
Bulwer-Lytton, but that formidable lady belonged to an
earlier generation, and saw no reason for Quixotic behaviour.
Her conscience had been trained in the eighteenth century,
and all her blame was for Rosina Wheeler. Torn between
his duty and his filial affection, Bulwer-Lytton now passed
through a period of moral agony. He wrote to his mother :
" I am far too wretched, and have had too severe a contest

126 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

with myself, not to look to the future rather with despond-
ency than pleasure, and the view you take of the matter
is quite enough to embitter my peace of mind." Miss
Wheeler, not unnaturally stung to anger, used disrespect-
ful expressions regarding Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, and these
bickerings filled the lover and son with indignation. His
life, between these ladies, grew to be hardly worth living,
and in the midst of one such crisis this brilliant young
dandy of four-and-twenty wrote : " I feel more broken-
hearted, despondent, and sated than any old valetudi-
narian who has seen all his old hopes and friends drop off
one by one, and finds himself left for the rest of his existence
to the solitary possession of gloom and gout." Mrs.
Bulwer-Lytton fought fiercely to the last, and Edward
determined to close the matter; on August 2gth, 1827,
he married Rosina.

At first, in spite of, and even because of, the wild hostility
of his mother, the marriage seemed successful. The rage
of the mother drove the husband to the wife. Lord Lytton
has noted that in later years all that his grandfather and
his grandmother said about one another was unconsciously
biassed by their memory of later complications. Neither
Bulwer-Lytton nor Rosina could give an accurate history
of their relations at the beginning, because the mind of
each was prejudiced by their knowledge of the end. Each
sought to justify the hatred which both had lived to feel,
by representing the other as hateful from the first. But
the letters survive, and the recollections of friends, to
prove that this was entirely untrue. It must be admitted
that their union was never based upon esteem, but wholly
upon passion, and that from the first they lacked that
coherency of relation, in moral respects, which was needed
to fix their affections. But those who have dimly heard
how bitterly these two unfortunate people hated one
another in later life will be astonished to learn that

The Author of < Pelham 5 127

they spent the two first years together like infatuated
turtle-doves.

Their existence was romantic and absurd. Cut off from
all support by the implacable anger of old Mrs. Bulwer-
Lytton, they depended on a combined income of 380 a
year and whatever the husband could make to increase it.
Accordingly they took a huge country house, Woodcot in
Oxon, and lived at the rate of several thousands a year.
There they basked in an affluent splendour of bad taste
which reminds us of nothing in the world so much as of
those portions of The Lady Fldbdla which Mrs. Wititterly
was presently to find so soft and so voluptuous. The
following extract from one of Rosina's lively letters and
she was a very sprightly correspondent gives an example
of her style, of her husband's Pelhamish extravagance,
and of the gaudy recklessness of their manner of life. They
had now been married nearly two years :

" How do you think my audacious husband has spent
his time since he has been in town ? Why, he must needs
send me down what he termed a little Christmas box, which
was a huge box from Howel and James's, containing only
eight Gros de Naples dresses of different colours not made
up, four Gros cles Indes, two merino ones, four satin ones,
an amber, a black, a white and a blue, eight pocket hand-
kerchiefs that look as if they had been spun out of lilies
and air and brodce by the fairies, they are so exquisitely
fine and so beautifully worked. Four pieces (16 yards in
each) of beautiful white blonde, two broad pieces and two
less broad, a beautiful and very large blue real cashmere
shawl, a Chantilly veil that would reach from this to Dublin,
and six French long pcllerincs very richly embroidered on
the finest India muslin, three dozen pair of white silk
stockings, one dozen of black, a most beautiful black satin
cloak with very pretty odd sort of capes and trimmed round

128 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

and up the sides with a very broad band of a new kind of
figured plush I forget what they call it (it came from
Paris), and a hat of the same such a hat as can only be
made in the Rue Vivienne. You would think that this
' little Christmas box ' would have been enough to have
lasted for some time. However, he thought differently,
for on New Year's morning before I was out of bed, there
came a parcel by the mail, which on opening proved to be
a large red Morocco case containing a bright gold chain, a
yard and a half long, with the most beautiful and curious
cross to it that I ever sawthe chain is as thick as my
dead gold necklace, and you may guess what sort of a
thing it is when I tell you that I took it to a jeweller here
to have it weighed, and it weighed a pound all but an
ounce. The man saicl it never was made for less than fifty
guineas, but that he should think it had cost more/'

Rosina, who has only 80 a year of her own, will not be
outdone, and cannot "resist ordering'' Edward "a gold
toilette, which he has long wished for. . . . Round the
rim of the basin and the handle of the ewer I have ordered
a wreath of narcissus in dead gold, which, for Mr. Pelham,
you'll own, is not a bad idea."

It would be expected that all this crazy display would
lead the young couple rapidly and deeply into debt. That
it did not clo so is the most curious phase of the story.
Bulwer-Lytton immediately, and apparently without the
slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry the sober
record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott
alone may be held to have equalled it. The giants of
popular fiction did, indeed, enjoy larger single successes
than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them, not Dickens
himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote
sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd.
Even his poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand,

The Author of 'Pelham' 129

always sold. He did not know what failure was ; he made
money by Devereuoc- even The New Timon went into many
editions. To earn what was required, however and in
these early years he seems to have made 3000 his minimum
of needful return to live in the insane style which his wife
and he demanded, an enormous nervous strain was required.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton' s temper had always been warm
and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree.
His mother continued to exasperate him ; his wife suddenly
failed to please him; his health waned; and he became
the most miserable of men; yet without ceasing for a
moment to be the most indefatigable of authors. The
reader will follow the evolution of the tragedy, which is of
poignant interest, in Lord Lytton's pages. The whole
story is one of the most extraordinary in the history of
literature.

It has been a feature of Bulwer-Lytton's curious post-
humous fortune that he has seemed solitary in his intellec-
tual if not in his political and social action. We think of
him as one of those morose and lonely bees that are too
busy gathering pollen to join the senate of the hive, and
are dwellers in the holes of the rocks. It is quite true that,
with a painful craving for affection, he had not the genius
of friendship. The general impression given by his
biography is one of isolation; in " the sea of life" he was
one of those who are most hopelessly " enisled/' Nothing
is sadder than this severance of a delicate and sensitive
temperament from those who surround it closely and to
whom it stretches out its arms in vain. But a careful
reading of these interesting volumes leaves us in no doubt
of the cause of this loneliness, Bulwer-Lytton, with all
his ardour and his generosity, was devoid of the gift of
sympathy. In characters of a simpler mould a natural
kindliness may take the place of comprehension. But
Bulwer-Lytton had a lively and protean fancy which
K

130 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

perpetually deceived him. In human relations he was
always moving, but always on the wrong track.

The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify
this unfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are
even too eloquent, for Bulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself
with his own verbosity; they are meant to be kind, they
are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise and digni-
fied and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial
narrative, that they scarcely ever failed to exasperate the
receiver. His dealings with his son, of whom he was
exquisitely proud and sensitively fond, are of the saddest
character, because of the father's want of comprehension,
haste of speech and intolerance of temper. The very fact
that a son, a wife, or a mother could with impunity be
addressed in terms of exaggerated sensibility, because there
could be no appeal, was a snare to the too-ready pen of
Bulwer-Lytton, which poured out its oceans of ink without
reflection and without apprehension. If violent offence
were given, the post went out again later in the day, and
equally violent self-humiliation would restore the emotional
balance. But what could not be restored was the sense of
confidence and domestic security.

In his contact with other literary men of his own age
more restraint was necessary, and we learn from Lord
Lytton's pages of valuable and prolonged acquaintanceships
which were sometimes almost friendships. His company
was much sought after, and occasionally by very odd
persons. Lord Lytton prints a scries of most diverting
letters from the notoiious Harriette Wilson, who, in spite
of the terror into which her " Memoirs " had thrown society,
desired to add the author of Pclham to the aviary of her
conquests. But the snare was set in vain before the eyes
of so shrewd a bird as Bulwer-Lytton; he declined to
see the lady, but he kept her amazing letters. This was
in 1829, when the novelist seems to have had no literary

The Author of < Pelham ' 131

or political associates. But by 1831, we find him editing
the New Monthly Magazine, and attaching himself to Lord
Melbourne and Lord Durham on the one hand and to
Disraeli and Dickens on the other. When to these we have
added Lady Blessington and Letitia Landon, we have
mentioned all those public persons with whom Bulwer-
Lytton seems to have been on terms of intimacy during
his early manhood. All through these years he was an
incessant diner-out and party-goer, and the object of
marvellous adulation, but he passed through all this social
parade as though it had been a necessary portion of the
exterior etiquette of life. Why he fatigued himself by
these formal exercises, in which he seems to have found
no pleasure, it is impossible to conceive, but a sense of the
necessity of parade was strangely native to him.

He had, however, one close and constant friend. John
Forster was by far the most intimate of all his associates
throughout his career. Bulwer-Lytton seems to have met
him first about 1834, when he was twenty-eight and Forster
only twenty- two. in spite of this disparity in age, the
younger man almost at once took a tone of authority such
as the elder seldom permitted in an acquaintance. Forster
had all the gifts which make a friend valuable. He was
rich in sympathy and resource, his temper was reasonable,
he comprehended a situation, he knew how to hold his own
in argument and yet yield with grace. Lord Lytton prints
a very interesting character-sketch of Forster, which he
has found among his grandfather's MSS. It is a tribute
which does equal credit to him who makes it and to him
of whom it is made :

" John Forster ... A most sterling man, with an intel-
lect at once massive and delicate. Few, indeed, have his
strong practical sense arid sound judgment; fewer still
unite with such qualities his exquisite appreciation of latent

132 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

beauties in literary art. Hence, in ordinary life, there is
no safer adviser about literary work, especially poetry ; no
more refined critic. A large heart naturally accompanies
so masculine an understanding. He has the rare capacity
for affection which embraces many friendships without
loss of depth or warmth in one. Most of my literary
contemporaries are his intimate companions, and their
jealousies of each other do not diminish their trust in him.
More than any living critic, he has served to establish
reputations. Tennyson and Browning owed him much in
their literary career. Me, I think, he served in that way
less than any of his other friends. But, indeed, I know
of no critic to whom I have been much indebted for any
position I hold in literature. In more private matters I
am greatly indebted to his counsels. His reading is exten-
sive. What faults he has lie on the surface. He is some-
times bluff to rudeness. But all such faults of manner
(and they are his only ones) are but trifling inequalities in
a nature solid and valuable as a block of gold."

This was written with full experience, as the names of
Tennyson and Browning will remind us, for Bulwer-Lytton
was slow to admit the value of these younger talents. His
relations with Tennyson have always been known to be
unfortunate; as they are revealed in Lord Lytton's
biography they approach the incredible. He met Brown-
ing at Co vent Garden Theatre during the Macready " re-
vival' 1 of the poetic stage, but it was not until after the
publication of Men and Women that he became conscious
of Browning's claim, which he then very grudgingly ad-
mitted. He was grateful to Browning for his kindness to
Robert Lytton in Italy, but he never understood his genius
or his character.

What, however, we read with no less pleasure than
surprise are the evidences of Bulwer-Lytton' s interest in

The Author of c Pelham' 133

certain authors of a later generation, of whom the general
public has never suspected him to have been aware. Some-
thing almost like friendship sprang up as lately as 1867
between him and a man whom nobody would suppose him
to admire, Matthew Arnold. It sometimes happens that
a sensitive and petulant artist finds it more easy to acknow-
ledge the merits of his successors than to endure those of
his immediate contemporaries. The Essays in Criticism
and The Study of Celtic Literature called forth from the
author of My Novel and The Caxtons such eulogy as had
never been spared for the writings of Thackeray or Carlyle.
Matthew Arnold appeared to Bulwer-Lytton to have
" brought together all that is most modern in sentiment,
with all that is most scholastic in thought and language."
Arnold was a guest at Knebworth, and brought the Duke
of Genoa with him. He liked Bulwer-Lytton, and their
relations became very cordial and lasted for some years;
Arnold has given an amusing, but very sympathetic, account
of the dignified hospitalities of Knebworth.

No revelation in Lord Lytton's volumes is, however,
more pleasing or more unexpected than his grandfather's
correspondence with Swinburne. It is thought that he
heard of him through Monckton Milncs; at all events,
he was an early reader of Atalanta in Calydou. When, in
1866, all the furies of the Press fell shrieking on Poems and
Ballads, Bulwer-Lytton took a very generous step. He
wrote to Swinburne, expressing his sympathy and begging
him to be calm. The young poet was extremely touched,
and took occasion to beg the elder writer for his advice, the
publisher having, without consulting him, withdrawn his
volume from sale. Bulwer-Lytton' s reply was a most
cordial invitation to stay with him at Knebworth and talk
the matter over. Swinburne gratefully accepted, and John
Forster was asked to meet him. It was Bulwer-Lytton, it
appears, who found another publisher for the outraged

134 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

volume, and helped Swinburne out of the scrape. He was
always kindness itself if an appeal was made to his protec-
tion, and to his sense of justice. However, pleasant as the
visit to Knebworth was, there is no evidence thai it was
repeated. Bulwcr-Lytton considered Swinburne's opinions
preposterous, and indeed if he told Swinburne, as in 1869
he told his son Robert, that Victor Hugo was " but an
epileptic dwarf in a state of galvanism," there must have
been wigs on the green at Knebworth.

The student of the biography, if he is already familiar
with the more characteristic works of Bulwer-Lytton, will
find himself for the first time provided with a key to much
that has puzzled him in the nature of that author. The
story itself, apart from the tragic matrimonial trouble which
runs through it like a blood-red cord, is of unusual interest.
It is a story of strife, without repose, without enjoyment,
but with a good deal of splendour and satisfaction. Almost
to the end Bulwer-Lytton was engaged in struggle. As an
ambitious social being he was fighting the world; as an
author he was battling with his critics; as a statesman he
was always in the wild storm of party politics. As a private
individual he was all the time keeping his head up against
the tide of social scandal which attacked him when he least
expected it, and often threatened to drown him altogether.
This turmoil contrasts with the calm of the evening years,
after the peerage had been won, the ambition satisfied,
the literary reputation secured.

Few writers have encountered, in their own time and
after their death, so much adverse criticism, and yet have
partly survived it. It is hardly realised, even perhaps by
Lord Lytton, how unwilling the reviewers were to give
credit to his grandfather. He never found favour in their
eyes, and it was a matter of constant resentment with
him that they did him, as he thought, injustice. The
evidence of his wounded feelings is constant in his letters*

The Author of 'Pelham' 135

The Qttarterly Review never mentioned him without con-
tempt until 1865, when the publication of his works, in
forty-three volumes, forced it to consider this indefatigable
and popular writer with a measure of respect. Sir Walter
Scott, with his universal geniality, read Pelham in 1828 and
" found it very interesting : the light is easy and gentle-
manlike, the dark very grand and sombrous." He asked
who was the author, and he tried to interest his son-in-law
in the novel. But Lockhart was implacable : " Pelham"
he replied, " is writ by a Mr. Bulwer, a Norfolk squire, and
horrid puppy. I have not read the book, from disliking
the author," Lockhart, however, did read D ever mix, and
three years afterwards, when reviewing some other novel,
he said of the historical characters in that romance : "It
seems hard to disquiet so many bright spirits for the sole
purpose of showing that they could be dull" That was the
attitude of the higher criticism to Bulwer-Lytton from, let
us say, 1830 to 1860 ; he was " a horrid puppy " and he
was also " dull."

But this was far from being the opinion of the reading
public. We have seen that he never failed, and sometimes
he soared into the very empyrean of popularity. In 1834,
when he published The Last Days of Pompeii, again in 1837
when he published Ernest Maltmven, the ecstasy of his
adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under the
mask of anonymity which he chose to assume. This was j ust
before the outburst of the great school of Victorian novel-
ists ; Bulwer had as yet practically no one but Disraeli to
compete with. These two, the author of Pelham and the
author of Vivian Grey, raced neck and neck at the head of
the vast horde of " fashionable " novel-writers; now all but
them forgotten. In Bulwcr-Lytton's romances the reader
moved among exalted personages, alternately flippant and
sinister; a "mournful enthusiasm" was claimed for the
writer by the readers of his day. It was the latest and most

136 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

powerful development of that Byronic spirit which had
been so shortlived in verse, but which was to survive in
prose until Bulwer-Lytton adopted his Caxtons manner in
the middle of the century. As always in Byronic periods,
the portrait of the author himself was searched for among
his most fatal conceptions. To the young library sub-
scriber the stoical, solitary figure of Mordaunt, in The
Disowned, was exactly what was wanted as a representa-
tion of the mysterious novelist himself. Pelham was the
apotheosis of the man of fashion, and it is amusing to read
how, when the Bulwer-Lyttons travelled, they were gazed
at in reverence as the Pelham and the Pelhamess.

It would be difficult to improve upon the language used
so early as 1832 by one of the very few ciitics who attempted
to do justice to Bulwcr-Lytton's merits. The Edinburgh
Review found in him " a style vigorous and pliable, sonic-
times strangely incorrect, but often rising into a touching
eloquence." Ten years later such was the private opinion
of D. G. Rossetti, who was " inspired by reading Rienzi
and Ernest Maltr avers, which is indeed a splendid work."
Now that we look back at Bulwer-Lyt ton's prodigious com-
positions, we are able to perceive more justly than did the
critics of his own day what his merits were. For one thing,
he was extraordinarily versatile. If we examine his books,
we must be astonished at their variety. He painted the
social life of his own day, he dived into spectral romance,
he revived the beautiful ceremonies of antiquity, he evoked
the great shades of English and of Continental history, he
made realistic and humorous studies of middle-class life,
he engaged in vehement controversy on topics of the hour,
he prophesied of the order of the future, he wrote comedies
and tragedies, epics and epistles, satires and lyrics. His
canvasses were myriad and he crowded every one of them
with figures. At his most Byronic moment he flung his
dark cloak aside, and danced in motley through Paul

The Author of 'Pelham' 137

Clifford, with its outrageous caricature of George IV. and
his Ministers as a gang of Hounslow highwaymen. Perhaps
his best claim to regard is the insatiability of his human
curiosity, evinced in the almost infinite variety of his
compositions.

The singular being who wrote so large a library of works
and whose actual features have so carefully been concealed
from the public, will be known at last. The piety of his
grandson has presented him to us with no reservations and
no false lights. Here he stands, this half-fabulous being,
not sheathed in sham, armour and padding the stage in
buskins, but a real personality at length, " with all his
weaknesses and faults, his prejudices, affectations, vanities,
susceptibilities, and eccentricities, and also with all his
great qualities of industry, courage, kindness of heart;
sound judgment, patience, and perseverance/' Lord
Lytton has carried through to the close a biographical
enterprise of unusual difficulty, and he deserves the thanks
of all students of English literature.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE
BRONTES

THE CHALLENGE OF THE
BRONTES l

ALTHOUGH I possess in no degree the advantage which so
many of the members of your society enjoy in being per-
sonally connected with the scenes and even, perhaps, with
the characters associated with the Bronte family, I cannot
begin my little address to you to-day without some in-
vocation of the genius of the place. We meet at Dewsbury
because the immortal sisters were identified with Dews-
bury, Is it then not imperative that for whatever picture
of them I may endeavour to present before you this
afternoon, Dewsbury should form the background?
Unfortunately, however, although in the hands of a
skilful painter the figures of the ladies may glow forth,
I fear that in the matter of taking Dewsbury as the back-
ground some vagueness and some darkness are inevitable.
In the biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and of Mr. Clement
Shorter, as well as in the proceedings of your society, I
have searched for evidences of the place Dewsbury took
in the lives of the Brontes. What I find -I expect you
to tell me that it is not exhaustive- is this. Their father,
the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was curate here from 1809 to
1811. In 1836, when Charlotte was twenty, Miss Wooler
transferred her school from Roc Head to Heaid's House
at the top of Dewsbury Moor, In this school, where

1 Address delivered before the Bronte Society in thc k Town Hall
ol Dewsbury, March 28th, 1903,

141

142 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Charlotte had been a pupil since 1831, she was now a
governess, and a governess she remained until early in
1838. In April of that year Miss Wooler was taken ill
and Charlotte was for a little while in charge. Then there
was an explosion of temper, of some kind, and Charlotte
went back to Haworth.

That, then, in the main, is the limit of what the scru-
pulous Muse of history vouchsafes to tell us about Charlotte
Bronte's relation to Dewsbury. But it also supplies us
witjti one or two phrases which I cannot bring myself to
spare you. In January 1838, Charlotte reviews her
experience at Dewsbury Moor; "I feel," she says, "in
nothing better, nothing humbler nor purer/' Again, in
1841, after there had passed time enough to mellow her
exacerbations, she continues to express herself with vigour.
Miss Wooler is making overtures to Charlotte and Emily
to take over the school at Heald's House; perhaps a place
might be found for Anne as well. Miss Wooler, one of the
kindest of women, is most thoughtful, most conciliatory.
Charlotte will have none of the idea; she puts it roughly
from her. Of Dewsbury she has nothing to say but that
" it is a poisoned place for me." This is all we know of
Charlotte's relation to Dewsbury, yet nothing, you will
tell me, in Froude's phrase, to what the angels know.
Well, I must be frank with you and say that I am afraid
the angels have been inclined to record exceedingly little
of Charlotte Bronte's residence* in your inoffensive neigh-
bourhood. I have to paint a background to my picture,
and I find none but the gloomiest colours. They have to
be what the art-critics of the eighteenth century called
" sub-fuse." But it is not the fault of Dewsbury, it is the
fault, or the misfortune, of our remarkable little genius.
She was here, in this wholesome and hospitable vicinity,
for several months, during which time " she felt in
nothing better, neither humbler nor purer." and looking

The Challenge of the Brontes 143

back upon it, she had to admit that it was " a poisoned
place " to her.

I cannot help fancying that you will agree with me,
that on such an occasion as the present, and especially
when dealing with a group of writers about whom so
much as has been said as about the Brontes, it is wise not
to cover too wide a ground, but to take, and keep to, one
aspect of the subject. Our little excursion into the history
seems to have given us, under the heading " Dewsbury,"
a rather grim text, from which, nevertheless, we may
perhaps extract some final consolation. Let me say at
the outset that for the grimness, for the harshness, Dews-
bury is not at all to blame. I fancy that if, in the years
from 1836 to 1838, the Bronte girls had been visitors to
Kubla Khan, and had been fed on honey by his myrmidons
at Xanadu, that pleasure-dome would yet have been
" poisoned'' to them. It was not poverty, and cold, and
the disagreeable position of a governess, it was not the
rough landscape of your moors, nor its lack of southern
amenity which made Charlotte wretched here. It was not
in good Miss Wooler, nor in the pupils, nor in the visitors
at Heald's House that the mischief lay, it was in the closed
and patient crater of Charlotte's own bosom. And I am
almost persuaded that, if you had lived in Dewsbury
sixty-five years ago, you would have heard on very quiet
days a faint subterranean sound which you would never
have been able to guess was really the passion, furiously
panting, shut up in the heart of a small, pale governess in
Hcald's House schoolroom.

If you accuse me of fatalism, I am helpless in your
hands, for I confess I do not see how it could be otherwise,
and do scarcely wish that it could have been. Let us not
be too sentimental in this matter. Figures in literature
are notable and valuable to us for what they give us. The
more personal and intense and definite that is, the greater

144 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

the gift, the more strenuous the toil and the more severe
the initiation which lead to its expression. The Brontes
had a certain thing to learn to give; what that was we
shall presently try to note. But whatever we find it to
be, we start with allowing that it was extremely and boldly
original. It was not to be mastered by lying upon padded
sofas and toying with a little Berlin wool-work. It in-
volved pain, resistance, a stern revision of things hitherto
taken for granted. The secrets which they designed to
wring from nature and from life were not likely to be
revealed to the self-indulgent and the dilettante. The
sisters had a message from the sphere of indignation and
revolt. In order that they should learn it as well as teach
it, it was necessary that they should arrive on the scene
at an evil hour for their own happiness. Jane Eyre and
Shirley and Villdte could not have been written unless,
for long years, the world had been " a poisoned place J> for
Charlotte Bronte.

It has been excellently said by Mrs. Humphry Ward
that in many respects, and to the very last, the Brontes
challenge no less than they attract us. This is an aspect
which, in the midst of rapturous modern heroine-worship,
we are apt to forget, Thackeray, who respected the
genius of the family, and was immensely kind to the author
of Jane Eyre, never really felt comfortable in her company.
We know how he stole out of his own front-door, and
slipped away into the night to escape her. " A very
austere little person," he called her, and we may put what
emphasis on the austerity we will. I feel sure that any
maladroit " white-washing of Charlotte" will tend, sooner
or later, good-natured though it may be, in a failure to
comprehend what she really was, in what her merit con-
sisted, what the element in her was that, for instance, calls
us here together nearly half a century after she completed
her work and passed away. Young persons of genius

The Challenge of the Brontes 145

very commonly write depressing books; since, the more
vivid an unripe creature's impression of life is, the more
acute is its distress. It is only extremely stupid Sunday-
school children who shout in chorus, " We are so happy,
happy, happy ! " Genius thrown naked, with exposed
nerves, on a hard indifferent world, is never " happy 11 at
first. Earth is a " poisoned place" to it, until it has won
its way and woven its garments and discovered its food.

But in the case of Charlotte Bronte, unhappincss was
more than juvenile fretfulncss. All her career was a revolt
against conventionality, against isolation, against irre-
sistible natural forces, such as climate and ill-health and
physical! insignificance. Would this insubmissivo spirit
have passed out of her writings, as it passed, for instance,
out of those of George Sand ? I am not sure, for we see
it as strongly, though more gracefully and skilfully ex-
pressed, in Villette as in the early letters which her bio-
graphers have printed. Her hatred of what was common-
place and narrow and obvious flung her against a wall of
prejudice, which she could not break clown. She could
only point to it by her exhausting efforts; she could only
invite the generation which succeeded her to bring their
pickaxes to bear upon it. Hence, to the very last, she
seems, more than any other figure in our literature, to be
forever ruffled in temper, for ever angry and wounded and
indignant, rejecting consolation, crouched like a sick animal
in the cavern of her own quenchless pride. This is not an
amiable attitude, nor is it historically true that this was
Charlotte Bronte's constant aspect. But I will venture to
say that her amiabilities, her yielding moods, are really
the unessential parts of her disposition, and that a certain
admirable ferocity is the notable feature of her intellectual
character.

Her great heart was always bleeding. Here at Dews-
bury, in the years we are contemplating, the hemorrhage

146 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

was of the most doleful kind, for it was concealed, sup-
pressed, it was an inward flow. When once she became an
author the pain of her soul was relieved. She said, in
1850, looking back on the publication of the hapless first
volume of poems, " The mere effort to succeed gave a
wonderful zest to existence." Then, a little later, when
no one had paid the slightest attention to the slender trio
of maiden voices, " Something like the chill of despair
began to invade their hearts." With a less powerful
inspiration, they must have ceased to make the effort;
they must have succumbed in a melancholy oblivion.
But they were saved by the instinct of a mission. It
was not their private grief which primarily stirred them.
What urged them on was the dim consciousness that they
gave voice to a dumb sense of the suffering of all the world.
They had to go on working; they had to pursue their
course, though it might seem sinister or fatal ; their busi-
ness was to move mankind, not to indulge or please it.
They " must be honest ; they must not varnish, soften,
or conceal/'

What Charlotte Bronte was learning to do in her grim
and, let us admit it, her unlovely probation on Dewsbury
Moor, was to introduce a fresh aspect of the relations of
literature to life. Every great writer has a new note;
hers was defiance. All the aspects in which life pre-
sented itself to her were distressing, not so much in
themselves as in herself. She rebelled against the outrages
of poverty, and she drank to its dregs the cup of straitened
circumstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer, and
she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheer-
fulness might have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She
wrung from these positions their last drop of bitterness.
A very remarkable instance of this may be found in her
relation to the Siclgwick family, who, by universal report,
were generous, genial, and unassuming. To Charlotte

The Challenge of the Brontes 147

Bronte these kindly, if somewhat commonplace folk, grew
to seem what a Turkish pasha seems to the inhabitants of
a Macedonian village. It was not merely the surroundings
of her life it was life itself, in its general mundane arrange-
ments, which was intolerable to her.' She fretted in it,
she beat her wings against its bars, and she would have
done the same if those bars had been of gold, and if the
fruits of paradise had been pushed to her between them.
This, I think, is why the expression of her anger seems too
often disproportionate, and why her irony is so apt to be
preposterous. She was born to resist being caged in any
form. Her defiance was universal, and often it was almost
indiscriminate.

Do not let us presume to blame this insubmission. Still
less let us commit the folly of minimising it. A good
cheerful little Charlotte Bronte, who thought the best of
everybody, who gaily took her place without a grudging
sigh, whose first aim was to make those about her happy
and to minister to their illusions, would have been a much
more welcome inmate of Miss Wooler's household than the
cantankerous governess whom nobody could please, whose
susceptibilities were always on edge, whose lonely arrogance
made her feared by all but one or two who timidly per-
sisted in loving her. But such a paragon of the obvious
virtues would have passed as the birds pass and as the
flowers. She would have left no mark behind. She
would never have enriched the literature of England
by one of its master- evidences of the force of human will.
She would never have stirred hundreds of thousands of
consciences to a wholesome questioning of fate and their
own souls.

Let us endeavour to pursue the inquiry a few steps
further. It is impossible to separate the ethical conditions
of an author's mind from the work that he produces. The
flower requires the soil; it betrays in its colour and its

148 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

perfume the environment of its root. The moral consti-
tution of the writer is reflected in the influence of the
written page. This is the incessant contention; on one
hand the independence of art asserts itself; on the other,
it is impossible to escape from the implicit influence of
conduct upon art. There have been few writers of any
age in whom this battle raged more fiercely than it did in
Charlotte Bronte. Her books, and those of her sisters,
seem anodyne enough to-day; to readers of a sensitive
species they seemed, when they were published, as dangerous
as Werther had been, as seductive as the Nouvelle Helolse.
The reason of this was, in the main, the spirit of revolt
which inspired them. There was something harsh and
glaring in their landscape; there was that touch of Sal-
vator Rosa which one of their earliest critics observed in
them. But more essential was the stubbornness, the
unflinching determination to revise all accepted formulas
of conduct, to do this or that, not because it was usual to
do it, but because it was rational, and in harmony with
human nature.

Into an age which had become almost exclusively utili-
tarian, and in which the exercise of the imagination, in its
real forms, was sedulously discountenanced, Charlotte
Bronte introduced passion in the sphere of prose fiction,
as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirty
years earlier. It was an inestimable gift ; it had to come
to us, from Charlotte Bronte or another, to save our litera-
ture from a decline into triviality and pretension. But
she suffered, as Byron had suffered, in the direct ratio of
her originality. If a writer employs passion in an age
which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessities
of literary vitality he is safe to be accused of perverting
his readers. Balzac says, " When nothing else can be
charged against an author, the reproach of immorality is
thrown at his head/' When we study the record of the

The Challenge of the Brontes' 149

grim life of the sisters at Haworth, like that of three young
soldiers round a camp-fire with the unseen enemy prowling
in the darkness just out of their sight when we think of
the strenuous vigil, the intractable and indomitable per-
sistence, the splendour of the artistic result we may console
ourselves in our anger at the insults they endured, by
reflecting how little they cared. And their noble indif-
ference to opinion further endears them to us. We may
repeat of them all what Charlotte in a letter once said of
Emily, " A certain harshness in her powerful and peculiar
character only makes me cling to her more."

This insubrnissiveness, which was the unconscious
armour given to protect her against the inevitable attacks
of fortune, while, on the other hand, it was the very sign-
manual of Charlotte's genius, was, on the other, a draw-
back from which she did not live long enough to emancipate
her nature. It is responsible for her lack of interest in
what is delicate and complex; it excused to herself a
narrowness of vision which we are sometimes tempted to
find quite distressing. It is probably the cause of a fault
that never quits her for long, a tendency to make her
characters express themselves with a lyrical extravagance
which sometimes conies close to the confines of rodo-
montade. Charlotte Bronte never arrives at that mastery
of her material which permits the writer to stand apart
from his work, and sway the reader with successive tides
of emotion while remaining perfectly cairn himself. Nor
is she one of those whose visible emotion is nevertheless
fugitive, like an odour, and evaporates, leaving behind it
works of art which betray no personal agitation. On the
contrary, her revolt, her passion, all the violence of her
sensibility, are present on her written page, and we cannot
read it with serenity or with a merely captious curiosity,
because her own eager spirit, immortal in its active
force, seems to throb beside it.

150 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

The aspect of Charlotte Bronte which I have tried to
indicate to you to-day, and which I have sketched thus
hastily and slightly against the background of her almost
voiceless residence in Dewsbury, is far from being a com-
plete or unique one. I offer it to you only as a single
facet of her wonderful temperament, of the rich spectacle
of her talent. I have ventured to propose it, because, in
the multiplication of honours and attentions, the tendency
to deify the human, to remove those phenomena of irregu-
larity which are the evidence of mortal strength, grows
irresistible, and we find ourselves, unconsciously, sub-
stituting a waxen bust, with azure eyes and golden hair,
for the homely features which (if we could but admit it)
so infinitely better match the honest stories. Let us not
busy ourselves to make excuse for our austere little genius
of the moors. Let us be content to take her exactly as she
was, with her rebellion and her narrowness, her angers and
her urgencies, perceiving that she had to be this sorrowful
offspring of a poisoned world in order to clear the wells of
feeling for others, and to win from emancipated generations
of free souls the gratitude which is due to a precursor.

THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN
DISRAELI

THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN
DISRAELI

IT is not easy for a man whose sovereign ambition is
seen to be leading him with great success in a particular
direction to obtain due credit for what he accomplishes
with less manifest success in another. There is no doubt
that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until very
lately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a poli-
tician. But he was an author long before he became a
statesman, and it certainly is a little curious that even in
his youth, although he was always commercially successful
with his books, they were never, as we say, " taken seri-
ously" by the critics. His earliest novels were largely
bought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were
barely accepted as contributions to literature. If we look
back to the current criticism of those times, we find such
a book as Dacre, a romance by the Countess of Morley,
which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity
and a consideration never accorded to The Young Duke
or to Henrietta Temple. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in
the manner of Lucian and Swift, which seem to us among
the most durable ornaments of light literature in the days
of William IV., were read and were laughed at, but were
not critically appraised.

So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life,
such books as Coning$fy and Tancred were looked upon
as amusing commentaries on the progress of a strenuous
politician, not by any means, or by any responsible

153

154 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

person, as possible minor classics of our language. And
at his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour
was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was
blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknow-
ledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant
apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been un-
distinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been
" as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which
was passing over them, and then forgotten." It is only
since the beginning of the present century that a con-
viction has been gaining ground that some of these books
were in themselves durable, not because they were the
work of a man who became Prime Minister of England
and made his sovereign Empress of India, but as much
or as little as if they had been composed by a recluse in
a hermitage. This impression has now become so general
with enlightened critics that the danger seems to be that
we should underrate certain excesses of rhetoric and the
Corinthian mode the errors of which used to be over-
emphasised, but should not, in a comparative survey of
Victorian literature, be neglected as serious drawbacks
to our perfect enjoyment of the high-spirited, eloquent,
and ardent writings of Benjamin Disraeli. It is in this
spirit of moderation that I now attempt a rapid sketch of
his value as an English author.

I

There is, perhaps, no second example of a writer whose
work is divided, as is that of Disraeli, into three totally
distinct periods. Other authors, as for example, the poet
Crabbe, and in a less marked degree Rogers, have aban-
doned the practice of writing for a considerable number of
years, and then have resumed it. But the case of Disraeli
seems to be unique as that of a man who pursued the writing
of books with great ardour during three brief and indepen-

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 155

dent spaces of time. We have his first and pre-Parliamen-
tarian period, which began with Vivian Grey (1826)
and closed with Venetia (1837). We have a second
epoch, opening with Coningsby (1844) and ending with
Tancred (1847), during which time he was working out
his political destiny; and we have the novels which he
wrote after he had won the highest distinction in the
State. Certain general characteristics are met with in
all these three classes, but they have also differences
which require to be noted and accounted for. It will,
therefore, be convenient to treat them successively.

As oblivion scatters its poppy over the prose fiction of
the reigns of George IV. and William IV., it becomes in
creasingly dangerous that criticism should take the early
"fashionable" novels of Disraeli as solitary representa-
tions of literary satire or observation. It is true that to
readers of to-day this c'ass of romance is exclusively sug-
gestive of Vivian Grey and its fellows, with perhaps
the Pelh'am of Bulwer. 3ut this was not the impres-
sion of the original readers of these novels, who were
amused by them, but found nothing revolutionary in
their treatment of society. In the course of The Young
Duke, written in 1829, Disraeli suggests an amiable
rivalry with the romances " written by my friends Mr.
Ward and Mr. Bulwer." The latter name had only just
risen above the horizon, but that of Plumer Ward, for-
gotten as it now is, was one to conjure by. Ward was
the author of Tremaine (1825) and De Vere (1827),
two novels of the life of a modern English gentleman,
which seems to a reader to-day to be insipid and dull
enough. But they contained "portraits" of public
persons, they undertook to hold the mirror up to the
political and fashionable world of London, and they
lashed that fastidiousness which was considered to be the
foible of the age.

156 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

The books of Plumer Ward, who was an accomplished
personage in advancing years, were treated with marked
distinction in the press, and were welcomed by critics
who deigned to take little notice of even such books as
Granby and Dacrc. But the stories of the youthful
Disraeli belonged to a class held in still less esteem than
those just mentioned. They had to hold their own as
best they might in rivalry with a huge flight of novels of
fashionable life, all of them curiously similar in general
treatment. Above these the romances of Plumer Ward
rose in a sort of recognised dignity, as two peaks around
which were crowded innumerable hillocks. It is necessary
to recall readers of to-day, who think of Vivian Grey as
a work of amazing novelty, to the fact that the genre
it represents to us was one which had been lifted into
high credit the year before by the consecrated success
of Trcmainc, and was at that moment cultivated by a
multitude of minor novelists.

There was, however, a distinction, and it lay in the
greater fund of animal spirits which Disraeli brought to
his business. Vivian Grey was absurd, but it was fresh
and popular, and it pleased at once. As the opening work
of a literary career, it promised well ; the impertinent young
gentleman dashed off to Parnassus at a gallop. It was a
bold bid for personal distinction, which the author easily
perceived already to be " the only passport to the society
of the great in England." Vivian Grey is little more
than a spirited and daring boy's book; Disraeli himself
called it " a hot and hurried sketch." It was a sketch of
what he had never seen, yet of what he had begun to fore-
see with amazing lucidity. It is a sort of social fairy-tale,
where every one has exquisite beauty, limitless wealth,
and exalted rank, where the impossible and the hyperbolic
are the only homely virtues. There has always been a
tendency to exalt Vivian Grey at the expense of The

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 157

Young Duke (1831), Disraeli's next leading permanence;
and, indeed, the former has had its admirers who have
preferred it to all the others in this period. The difference
is, however, not so marked as might be supposed. In
The Young Duke the manner is not so burlesque, but
there is the same roughness of execution, combined with
the same rush and fire. In either book, what we feel
to-day to be the great objection to our enjoyment is the
lack of verisimilitude. Who can believe in the existence
of persons whose titles are the Earl of Fitz-Pompey and
Baron Deprivyseal, or whose names are Lady Aphrodite
and Sir Carte Blanche? The descriptions are " high-
falutin" beyond all endurance, and there is particularly
noticeable a kind of stylistic foppery, which is always
hovering between sublimity and a giggle.

But here is an example, from Vivian Grey, of Disraeli's
earliest manner :

( ' After a moment had passed, he was pouring forth in a
rapid voice, and incoherent manner, such words as men
speak only once. He spoke of his early follies, his mis-
fortunes, his misery; of his matured views, his settled
principles, his plans, his prospects, his hopes, his happiness,
his bliss ; and when he had ceased, he listened, in his turn,
to some small still words, which made him the happiest of
human beings. He bent down, he kissed the soft silken
cheek which now he could call his own. Her hand was in
his; her head sank upon his breast. Suddenly she clung
to him with a strong clasp. ' Violet ! my own, my dearest ;
you are overcome. I have been rash, I have been impru-
dent. Speak, speak, my beloved ! say, you are not ill ! '

" She spoke not, but clung to him with a fearful strength,
her head still upon his breast, her full eyes closed. Alarmed,
he raised her off the ground, and bore her to the river-side.
Water might revive her. But when he tried to lay her a

158 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

moment on the bank, she clung to him gasping, as a sink-
ing person clings to a stout swimmer. He leant over her;
he did not attempt to disengage her arms ; and, by degrees,
by very slow degrees, her grasp loosened. At last her
arms gave way and fell by her side, and her eyes partly
opened.

" ' Thank God ! Violet, my own, my beloved, say you
are better ! '

" She answered not, evidently she did not know him,
evidently she did not see him. A film was on her sight,
and her eye was glassy. He rushed to the water-side, and
in a moment he had sprinkled her temples, now covered
with a cold dew. Her pulse beat not, her circulation
seemed suspended. He rubbed the palms of her hands, he
covered her delicate feet with his coat, and then rushing
up the bank into the load, he shouted with frantic cries
on all sides. No one came, no one was near. Again, with
a cry of fearful anguish, he shouted as if an hyena were
feeding on his vitals. No sound ; no answer. The nearest
cottage was above a mile off. He dared not leave her.
Again he rushed down to the water-side. Her eyes were
still open, still fixed. Her mouth also was no longer closed.
Her hand was stiff, her heart had ceased to beat. He tried
with the warmth of his own body to revive her. He
shouted, he wept, he prayed. All, all in vain. Again he
was in the road, again shouting like an insane being.
There was a sound. Hark 1 It was but the screech of
an owl !

" Once more at the river-side, once more bending over her
with starting eyes, once more the attentive ear listening for
the soundless breath. No sound ! not even a sigh ! Oh !
what would he have given for her shriek of anguish ! No
change had occurred in her position, but the lower part of
her face had fallen; and there was a general appearance
which struck him with awe. Her body was quite cold,

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 159

her limbs stiffened. He gazed, and gazed, and gazed. He
bent over her with stupor rather than grief stamped on
his features. It was very slowly that the dark thought
came over his mind, very slowly that the horrible truth
seized upon his soul. He gave a loud shriek, and fell on
the lifeless body of VIOLET FANE ! "

A line in Disraeli's unfortunate tragedy of Alar cos
pathetically admits : " Ay ! ever pert is youth that baffles
age!" The youth of Disraeli was "pert" beyond all
record, and those who cannot endure to be teased should
not turn to his early romances, or, indeed, to any of his
writings. Henrietta Temple is the boldest attempt he
ever made to tell a great consecutive story of passion, and
no doubt there have been those who have palpitated over
the love-at-first-sight of Ferdinand Armine and Henrietta
Temple. But Disraeli's serious vein is here over-luscious;
the love-passages are too emphatic and too sweet. An early
critic spoke of this dulcia vitia of style which we meet with
even in Contarini Fleming as the sin by which the young
author was most easily beset. His attempts at serious
sentiment and pompous reflection are too often deplorable,
because inanimate and stilted. When he warns a heroine
against an error of judgment by shouting, " Tis the mad-
ness of the fawn who gazes with adoration on the lurid
glare of the anaconda's eye/' or murmurs, " Farewell, my
lovely bird; I'll soon return to pillow in thy nest," we
need all the stimulus of his irony and his velocity to carry
us over such marshlands of cold style.

Of these imperfections, fewer are to be found in
Venetia and fewest in Contarini Fleming. This beau-
tiful romance is by far the best of Disraeli's early
books, and that- in which his methods at this period can
be most favourably studied. A curious shadow of Disraeli
himself is thrown over it all; it cannot be styled in any

160 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

direct sense an autobiography, and yet the mental and
moral experiences of the author animate every chapter
of it. This novel is written with far more ease and grace
than any previous book of the author's, and Contarini
gives a reason which explains the improvement in his
creator's manner when he remarks : "I wrote with greater
facility than before, because my experience of life was so
much increased that I had no difficulty in making my
characters think and act." Contarini Fleming belongs to
1831, when its writer, at the comparatively ripe age of
twenty-seven, had already seen a vast deal of man and of
the world of Europe.

We are not to believe the preposterous account that
Contarini-Disracli gives of his methods of composition :

" My thoughts, my passion, the rush of my invention,
were too quick for my pen. Page followed page; as a
sheet was finished I threw it on the floor; I was amazed
at the rapid and prolific production, yet I could not stop to
wonder. In half a dozen hours I sank back exhausted,
with an aching frame. I rang the bell, ordered some
refreshment, and walked about the room. The wine
invigorated me and warmed up my sinking fancy, which,
however, required little fuel. I set to it again, and it was
midnight before I retired to bed."

At this rate we may easily compute that the longest
of his novels would be finished in a week. Contarini
Fleming seems to have occupied him the greater part of
a year. He liked the public to think of him, exquisitely
habited, his long csscnccd hair falling about his eyes,
flinging forth a torrent of musky and mellifluous improvisa-
tion; as a matter of fact he was a very hard worker,
laborious in the arts of composition.

It is to be noted that the whole tone of Contarini

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 161

Fleming is intensely liierary. The appeal to the intel-
lectual, to the fastidious reader is incessant. This is an
attitude always rare in English fiction, but at that epoch
almost unknown, and its presence in the writings of
Disraeli gives them a cachet. Under all the preposterous
conversation, all the unruly turmoil of description, there
runs a strong thread of entirely sober, political, and philo-
sophical ambition. Disraeli striving with all his might to
be a great poet, of the class of Byron and Goethe, a poet
who is also a great mover and master of men this is
what is manifest to us throughout Contarini Fleming.
It is almost pathetically manifest, because Disraeli what-
ever else he grew to be never became a poet. And here,
too, his wonderful clairvoyance, and his command over
the vagaries of his own imagination, come into play, for
he never persuades himself, with all his dithyrambics,
that Contarini is quite a poet.

A new influence is felt upon his style, and it is a highly
beneficial one. Up to this date, Disraeli had kept Byron
before him, and in his serious moments he had endeavoured
to accomplish in prose what the mysterious and melancholy
poet of the preceding generation had done in verse. The
general effect of this Byronism, in spite of a certain buoy-
ancy which carried the reader onwards, had been apt to be
wearisome, in consequence of the monotony of effort.
The fancy of the author had been too uniformly grandiose,
and in the attempt to brighten it up he had sometimes
passed over into positive failure. The most unyielding
admirers of his early novels can hardly contradict a reader
who complains that he finds the adventures of the bandits
at Jonstorna insupportable and the naivete' of Christiana
mawkish. There are pages in Alroy that read as if they
were written for a wager, to see how much balderdash the
public will endure. Disraeli seems to have been conscious
of this weakness, and he tried to relieve the pompous

1 62 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

gravity of his passionate scenes by episodes of irony and
satire. From his earliest days these were apt to be very
happy; they were inspired, especially in the squibs, by
Lucian and Swift.

But in Contarini Fleming we detect a new flavour,
and it is a very fortunate one. The bitterness of Swift
was never quite in harmony with the genius of Disraeli,
but the irony of Voltaire was. The effect of reading
Zadig and Candide was the completion of the style of
Disraeli; that "strange mixture of brilliant fantasy
and poignant truth" which he rightly perceived to be
the essence of the philosophic contes of Voltaire, finished
his own intellectual education. Henceforth he does not
allow his seriousness to ovcrweigh his liveliness; if he
detects a tendency to bombast, he relieves it with a
brilliant jest. Count de Moltke and the lampoons offer
us a case to our hand; "he was just the old fool who
would make a cream cheese/' says Contarini, and the
startled laugh which greets him is exactly of the same
order as those which were wont to reward the statesman's
amazing utterances in Parliament.

In spite of a certain undeniable insipidity, the volumes
of Contarini Fleming cannot but be read with pleasure.
The mixture of Byron and Voltaire is surprising, but it
produces some agreeable effects. There is a dash of Shelley
in it, too, for the life on the isle of Paradise with Alcest6
Contarini is plainly borrowed from Epiphsychidion.
Disraeli does not even disdain a touch of " Monk " Lewis
without his voluptuousness, and of Mrs. Radcliffe without
her horrors, for he is bent on serving up an olio entirely
in the taste of the day. But through it all he is con-
spicuously himself, and the dedication to beauty and the
extraordinary intellectual exultation of such a book as
Conlarini Fleming are borrowed from no exotic source.

It is impossible to overlook the fascination which Venice

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 163

exercises over Disraeli in these early novels. Contarini's
great ambition was to indite " a tale which should embrace
Venice and Greece." Byron's Life and Letters and the
completion of Rogers' Italy with Turner's paradisaical
designs had recently awakened to its full the romantic
interest which long had been gathering around " the sun-
girt city." Whenever Disraeli reaches Venice his style
improves, and if he mourns over her decay, his spirits rise
when he has to describe her enchantments by moonlight.
He reserves his most delicate effects for Greece and
Venice :

" A Grecian sunset ! The sky is like the neck of a dove !
the rocks and waters are bathed with a violet light. Each
moment it changes; each moment it shifts into more
graceful and more gleaming shadows. And the thin white
moon is above all; the thin white moon, followed by a
single star, like a lady by a page."

There are many passages as sumptuous as this in Venetia,
the romance about Byron and Shelley, which Disraeli was
thought indiscreet in publishing so soon after Byron's
death. In the story the heroine Venetia is the daughter
of Shelley (Marmion Herbert) and the bride of Byron
(Lord Cadurcis). Marmion is a most melodramatic figure,
but the indiscretions are not noticeable nowadays, while
the courage with which the reviled and hated Shelley is
described in the preface to Lord Lyndhurst as one of " the
most renowned and refined spirits that have adorned these
our latter days " is highly characteristic of Disraeli. The
reception of Lord Cadurcis in the House of Peers and the
subsequent riot in Palace Yard mark, perhaps, the highest
point in direct narrative power which the novelist had yet
reached; but Venetia was not liked, and Disraeli withdrew
from literature into public life.

164 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

II

When Disraeli resumed the art of the novelist, he was
no longer talking of what lay outside his experience when
he touched on politics. In 1837 ne nac * entered the House
at last, as Member for Maidstone, and although his enemies
roared him down on the first occasion of his rising to speak,
he soon learned how to impose his voice on Parliament.
In 1839 n * s declaration that " the rights of labour are as
sacred as the rights of property " made him famous, and
in 1841 he was one of Sir Robert Peel's Conservative army
in the House. Then followed the formation of the Young
England Party, with Disraeli as one of its leaders; these
men broke away from Peel, and held that the Tory Party
required stringent reform from within. It was in 1843
that Henry Thomas Hope, of Deepdene, urged, at a meet-
ing of the Young Englanders, the expediency of Disraeli's
t( treating in a literary form those views and subjects which
were the matter of their frequent conversations/' Disraeli
instantly returned to literary composition, and produced
in quick succession the four books which form the second
section of his work as an author; these are Coningsby,
Sybil, Tancred, and the Life of Lord George Bentinck.

In this group of books we observe, in the first place, a
great advance in vitality and credibility over the novels
of the earlier period. Disraeli is now describing what he
knows, no longer what he hopes in process of time to know.
He writes from within, no longer from without the world
of political action. These three novels and a biography
are curiously like one another in form, and all equally
make a claim to be considered not mere works of entertain-
ment, but serious contributions to political philosophy.
The assumption is borne out by the character of the
books, each of which had a definite aim and purpose.

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 165

Coningsby was designed to make room for new talent
in the Tory Party by an unflinching attack on the " medio-
crities." In Sybil the heartless abuse of capital and
the vices of class distinction are exposed. Tancred is a
vision of better things to follow upon the reforms already
indicated. In Lord George Bentinck, under the guise of a
record of the struggle between Protection and Free Trade,
we have a manual of personal conduct as applied to
practical politics.

In all these works narrative pure and simple inclines to
take a secondary place. It does so least in Coningsby
which, as a story, is the most attractive book of Disraeli's
middle period, and one of the most brilliant studies of
political character ever published. The tale is interspersed
with historical essays, which impede its progress but add
to its weight and value. Where, however, the author
throws himself into his narrative, the advance he has made
in power, and particularly in truth of presentment, is very
remarkable. In the early group of his novels he had felt
a great difficulty in transcribing conversations so as to
produce a natural and easy effect. He no longer, in
Coningsby, is confronted by this artificiality. His dia-
logues are now generally remarkable for their ease and
nature. The speeches of Rigby (who represents John
Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for Lord
Hertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the
laughable chorus of Taper and Tadpole, who never " de-
spaired of the Commonwealth," are often extremely
amusing. In Coningsby we have risen out of the
rose-coloured mist of unreality which hung over books
like The Young Duke and Henrietta Temple. The agitated
gentleman whose peerage hangs in the balance, and who
on hearing that the Duke of Wellington is with the
King breathes out in a sigh of relief (< Then there ?s a
Providence," is a type of the subsidiary figure which

1 66 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Disraeli had now learned to introduce with infinite lightness
of irony.

Disraeli had a passion for early youth, and in almost all
his books he dwells lovingly upon its characteristics. It
is particularly in Contarini Fleming and in Coningsby
that is to say, in the best novels of his first and of his
second period that he lingers over the picture of schoolboy
life with tenderness and sympathy. We have only to corn-
pare them, however, to sec how great an advance he had
made in ten years in his power of depicting such scenes.
The childish dreams of Contarini arc unchecked romance,
and though the friendship with Musaeus is drawn with
delicacy and insight, and though that is an extremely
pretty scene where Christiana soothes the pride of Con-
tarini, yet a manliness and a reality are missing which we
find in the wonderful Eton scenes of Coningsby.

Disraeli's comprehension of the feelings of half-grown
ambitious boys of good family was extraordinary, and
when we consider that he had never been to a public school,
his picture of the life and conversation at Eton is remark-
able for its fidelity to nature. The relation of the elder
schoolboys to one another a theme to which he was fond
of recurring is treated in a very adroit and natural spirit,
not without a certain Dorian beauty. This preoccupation
with the sentiments and passions of schoolboys was rather
crudely found fault with at the time. We need have no
difficulty in comprehending the pleasure he felt in watch-
ing the expansion of those youthful minds from whom he
hoped for all that was to make England wise and free. The
account of Coningsby' s last night at Eton is one of the most
deeply felt pages which Disraeli ever composed, and here
it may be said that the careful avoidance of all humour
an act of self-denial which a smaller writer would not have
been capable of is justified by the dignified success of a
very dangerous experiment.

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 167

The portraiture of living people is performed with the
greatest good-nature. It is difficult to believe that the
most sensitive and the most satirised could really be
infuriated, so kindly and genial is the caricaturing. We
are far here from Swift's bludgeon and from Voltaire's
poisoned needle. The regeneration of the social order in
England, as Disraeli dreamed it, involved the removal of
some mediocrities, but he was neither angry nor impatient.
The " brilliant personages who had just scampered up from
Melton, thinking it probable that Sir Robert might want
some moral Lords of the Bedchamber," and the Duke, who
" might have acquired considerable information, if he had
not in his youth made so many Latin verses/' wore true to
their principles, and would scarcely have done more than
blush faintly when he poked his fun at them. Of all the
portraits none is more interesting than that of the dark,
pale stranger, Sidonia, as he revealed himself to Coningshy
at the inn in the forest, over the celebrated dish of " still-
hissing bacon and eggs that looked like tufts of primroses/'
This was a figure which was to recur, and to become in the
public mind almost coincident with that of Disraeli himself.

When we pass from Coningsby to Sybil we find the
purely narrative interest considerably reduced in the
pursuit of a scheme of political philosophy. This is of all
Disraeli's novels the one which most resembles a pamphlet
on a serious topic. For this reason it has never been a
favourite among his works, and his lighter readers have
passed it over with a glance. Sybil, however, is best not
read at all if it is not carefully studied. In the course of
Coningsby, that young hero had found his way to Man-
chester, and had discovered in it a new world, " poignant
with new ideas, and suggestive of new trains of thought
and feeling/ 1 His superficial observation had revealed
many incongruities in our methods of manipulating wealth,
and Disraeli had sketched the portrait of Mr. Jawster Sharp

1 68 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

with a superfluity of sarcastic wit. But it was not until
somewhat later that the condition of the working-classes
in our northern manufacturing districts began to attract
his most serious attention. The late Duke of Rutland, that
illustrious and venerable friend who alone survived in the
twentieth century to bear witness to the sentiments of
Young England, told me that he accompanied Disraeli on
the journey which led to the composition of Sybil, and
that he never, in long years of intimacy, saw him so
profoundly moved as he was at the aspect of the miserable
dwellings of the hand-loom workers.

All this is reflected on the surface of Sybil, and, notwith-
standing curious faults in execution, the book bears the
impress of a deep and true emotion. Oddly enough, the
style of Disraeli is never more stilted than it is in the con-
versations of the poor in this story. When Gerard, the
weaver, wishes to prevent the police-inspector from arrest-
ing his daughter, he remarks ; " Advance and touch this
maiden, and I will fell you and your minions like oxen at
their pasture." Well may the Serjeant answer, " You are
a queer chap." Criticism goes further and says, " You
arc a chap who never walked in wynd or factory of a York-
shire town." This want of nature, which did not extend
to Disraeli's conversations among well-to-do folks, was a
real misfortune, and gave Sybil no chance of holding its
own in rivalry with such realistic studies of the depression
of trade in Manchester as Mrs. Gaskcll was presently to
produce, nor with the ease of dialogue in Dickens' Christ-
mas Si 'ones, which were just now (in 1845) running their
popular course. A happier simplicity of style, founded on
a closer familiarity, would have given fresh force to his
burning indignation, and have helped the cause of Devils-
dust and Dandy Mick. But the accident of stilted speech
must not blind us to the sincere and glowing emotion that
inspired the pictures of human suffering in Sybil.

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 169

Then followed Tancred, which, as it has always been
reported, continued to the last to be the author's favourite
among his literary offspring. Disraeli had little sympathy
with either of the great parties which in that day governed
English political life. As time went on, he became surer
than ever of the degeneracy of modern society, and he began
to despair of discovering any cure for it. In Tancred he
laid aside in great measure his mood of satirical extrava-
gance. The whole of this book is steeped in the colours of
poetry of poetry, that is to say, as the florid mind of
Disraeli conceived it. It opens as all his books love to
open with the chronicle of an ardent and innocent boy's
career. This is commonplace, but when Tancred, who is
mainly the author's customary type of young Englishman
born in the purple, arrives in the Holy Land, a flush of pure
romance passes over the whole texture of the narrative-
Real life is forgotten, and we move in a fabulous, but
intensely picturesque, world of ecstasy and dream.

The Prorogation of Judaism, as it had been laid down
by Sidonia in Coningsby, is emphasised and developed,
and is indeed made the central theme of the story in
Tancred. This novel is inspired by an outspoken and
enthusiastic respect for the Hebrew race and a perfect
belief in its future. In the presence of the mighty monu-
ments of Jerusalem, Disraeli forgets that he is a Christian
and an ambitious member of the English Parliament. His
only solicitude is to recover his privileges as a Jew, and
to recollect that he stands in the majestic cradle of his race.
He becomes interpenetrated with solemn mysticism; a
wind of faith blows in his hair. He cries, " God never
spoke except to an Arab," and we arc therefore not sur-
prised to find an actual Divine message presently pro-
nounced in Tancrcd's ears as he stands on the summit of
Mount Sinai. This is, perhaps, the boldest flight of
imagination which occurs in the writings of Disraeli.

170 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Tancred endeavours to counteract the purely Hebraic
influences of Palestine by making a journey of homage to
Astarte, a mysterious and beautiful Pagan queen an
" Aryan/' as he loves to put it who reigns in the moun-
tains of Syria. But even she does not encourage him to
put his trust in the progress of Western Europe.

Tancred is written in Disraeli's best middle style, full,
sonorous, daring, and rarely swelling into bombast. It
would even be too uniformly grave if the fantastic character
of Facredeen did not relieve the solemnity of the discourse
with his amusing tirades. Like that of all Disraeli's novels,
the close of this one is dim and unsatisfactory. If there is
anything that the patient reader wants to know it is how
the Duke and Duchess of Bellemont behaved to the Lady
of Bethany when they arrived at Jerusalem and found their
son in the kiosk under her palm-tree. But this is curiosity
of a class which Disraeli is not unwilling to awaken, but
which he never cares to satisfy. He places the problems
in a heap before us, and he leaves us to untie the knots.
It is a highly characteristic trait of his mind as a writer
that he is for ever preoccupied with the beginnings of things,
and as little as possible with their endings.

It is not, however, from Tancred but from Coningsby,
that we take our example of Disraeli's second manner :

" Even to catch Lord Monmouth's glance was not an easy
affair ; he was much occupied on one side by the great lady,
on the other were several gentlemen who occasionally joined
in the conversation. But something must be done.

" There ran through Coningsby's character, as we have
before mentioned, a vein of simplicity which was not its
least charm. It resulted, no doubt, in a great degree
from the earnestness of his nature. There never was a
boy so totally devoid of affectation, which was remarkable,
for he had a brilliant imagination, a quality that, from
its fantasies, and the vague and indefinite desires it en-

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 171

genders, generally makes those whose characters are not
formed, affected. The Duchess, who was a fine judge of
character, and who greatly regarded Coningsby, often
mentioned this trait as one which, combined with his great
abilities and acquirements so unusual at bis age, rendered
him very interesting. In the present instance it happened
that, while Coningsby was watching his grandfather, he
observed a gentleman advance, make his bow, say and
receive a few words and retire. This little incident, how-
ever, made a momentary diversion in the immediate circle
of Lord Monmouth, and before they could all resume their
former talk and fall into their previous positions, an impulse
sent forth Coningsby, who walked up to Lord Monmouth,
and standing before him, said,

" ' How do you do, grandpapa ? '

" Lord Monmouth beheld his grandson. His compre-
hensive and penetrating glance took in every point with
a flash. There stood before him one of the handsomest
youths he had ever seen, with a mien as graceful as his
countenance was captivating; and his whole air breathing
that freshness and ingenuousness which none so much
appreciates as the used man of the world. And this was
his child; the only one of his blood to whom he had
been kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that
Lord Monmouth' s heart was touched; but his good-nature
effervesced, and his fine taste was deeply gratified. He
perceived in an instant such a relation might be a valuable
adherent; an irresistible candidate for future elections:
a brilliant tool to work out the Dukedom. All these
impressions and ideas, and many more, passed through
the quick brain of Lord Monmouth ere the sound of
Coningsby' s words had seemed to cease, and long before
the surrounding guests had recovered from the surprise
which they had occasioned them, and which did not
diminish, when Lord Monmouth, advancing, placed his
arms round Coningsby with a dignity of affection that

172 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

would have become Louis XIV., and then, in the high-
manner of the old Court, kissed him on each cheek.

" ' Welcome to your home/ said Lord Monmouth. * You
have grown a great deal/

" Then Lord Monmouth led the agitated Coningsby to
the great lady, who was a Princess and an Ambassadress,
and then, placing his arm gracefully in that of his grand-
son, he led him across the room, and presented him in
due form to some royal blood that was his guest, in the
shape of a Russian Grand Duke. His Imperial Highness
received our hero as graciously as the grandson of Lord
Monmouth might expect ; but no greeting can be imagined
wanner than the one he received from the lady with whom
the Grand Duke was conversing. She was a dame whose
beauty was mature, but still radiant. Her figure was
superb; her dark hair crowned with a tiara of curious
workmanship. Her rounded arm was covered with costly
bracelets, but not a jewel on her finely-formed bust, and
the least possible rouge on her still oval cheek. Madame
Colonna retained her charms/'

III

Nearly a quarter of a century passed, during which
Disraeli slowly rose to the highest honours in the State.
Lord Derby died, and the novelist, already Leader of the
House of Commons, found himself called to be Prime
Minister of England. His first administration, however ,
was brief, and in the last days of 1868 he resigned in favour
of Mr. Gladstone. The Liberals were in for five years,
and Disraeli, in opposition, found a sort of tableland
stretch in front of him after so much arduous climbing.
It was at this moment, shortly after the resignation of
the Tory Minister, that' the publisher of a magazine ap-
proached him with the request that he would write a novel
to appear in its pages. He was offered, it is said, a sum

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 173

of money far in excess of what any one, at that time, had
ever received for " serial rights." Disraeli refused the
offer, but it may have drawn his thoughts back to litera-
ture, and in the course of 1869, after the disestablishment
of the Church of Ireland was completed, he found time to
write what is unquestionably the greatest of his literary
works the superb ironic romance of Lothair.

Eminent as he was and eminently successful, Disraeli
was far, in 1870, from having conquered public opinion
in England. The reception of his new novel was noisy,
and enjoyed to the full the clamours of advertisement, but
it was not favourable. The critics laughed it to scorn*
and called it a farce and a failure. The Quarterly Review,
in the course of a savage diatribe, declared that it was
" as dull as ditch-water and as flat as a' flounder," and in a
graver mood reproved it as a mere " bid for the bigoted
voices of Exeter Hall." Some of the criticisms were not
wanting in acumen. It was perceived at once that, as
Theodora Campion is the heroine of the book, it was an
error in art to kill her off in the middle of it. Moreover,
it is only fair to admit that if the stormy Parliamentarian
life Disraeli had led so long had given him immense personal
advantages, it had also developed some defects. It had
taught him boundless independence and courage, it had
given him a rare experience of men and manners, and it
had lifted his satire far above petty or narrow personal
considerations. But it had encouraged a looseness of
utterance, a mixture of the colloquial and the bombastic,
which was unfortunate. In the best parts of Coningsby and
of Tancred he had shown himself a very careless writer of
English. But Lothair, even in its corrected form and
the first edition is a miracle of laxityis curiously incor-
rect. It reads as though it were taken down from the
flowing speech of a fine orator, not as though it were pain-
fully composed in a study ; it contains surprising ellipses,
strange freaks of grammar. There was all this, and more,

174 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

to encourage the critics, whom Disraeli had gone out of
his way to affront in a violent epigram, to attack Lothair
with contempt and resentment.

The critics took irony for timidity; they thought that
the sardonic novelist was the dupe of the splendours which
he invented and gloated over. But if one thing is more
evident than another to-day it is that this gorgeous story
of a noble boy, whose guardians, a Presbyterian earl and a
Roman cardinal, quarrelled for his soul and for his acres,
is an immense satire from first to last. In Disraeli's own
words, used in another sense, the keynote of Lothair is
" mockery blended with Ionian splendour.' ' Never had
he mocked so dauntlessly, never had his fancy been more
exuberant, and those who criticise the magnificence must
realise that it was intentional. It was thus that Disraeli
loved to see life, and, most of all, the life he laughed at.
He had always been gorgeous, but he let himself go in
Lothair: all is like the dream of a Lorenzo dei Medicis or an
Aurungzebe. Nothing is done by halves. Muriel Towers
was set on " the largest natural lake that inland England
boasts " some lake far larger than Windermere and entirely
unsuspected by geographers. This piece of water is studded
with " green islands," which is natural. But the author
cannot stay his hand : this largest of the English lakes is
also alive with " golden gondolas," which are rarer objects.
In one of the odd little flashes of self-criticism which illu-
minate the book Lothair says of a certain northern garden,
with its fanes and its fountains, its glittering statues and
its Babylonian terraces, that there are " perhaps too many
temples."

There are perhaps too many temples in the landscape
of Lothair, but they were put in on purpose. The splen-
dour is part of the satire. When the hero has ordered an
architect to make some plans for a building, the door opens
and servants enter bearing " a large and magnificent port-
folio of morocco, made of prelatial purple with broad bands

The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 175

of gold and alternate ornaments of a cross and a coronet/'
It is the sort of portfolio that Belshazzar might have used,
but no English master-builder since time began ever
launched forth into such splendour. This is characteristic
of Disraeli and of his book ; it pleased him to wrap all his
fancies in jewelled cloth of gold. He chose that the world
should consist of nothing but Tudor palaces in colossal
parks, and that time should be no other than a perpetual
Holy Week of golden ceremonial. He knew his public,
and that it adored these follies. He spoke to them in
the language that they loved, but in a tone of the most
seraphical disdain and irony.

What marks the whole of Disraeli's writings more than
any other quality is the buoyant and radiant temperament
of their author. In Lothair he is like an inspired and en-
franchised boy, set free from all the trammels of reality,
and yet bringing to the service of his theme the results of
an extraordinary inherited experience. If the picture is
not real, we may take courage to say that it is far better
than reality more rich, more entertaining, more intoxi-
cating. We have said that it is carelessly written, but that
is part of the author's superb self-confidence, and when
he is fortunately inspired, he obtains here an case of style,
a mastery which he had never found before. The surcncss
of his touch is seen in the epigrams which strew the pages
of Lothair, and have become part of our habitual speech
the phrase about eating " a little fruit on a green bank
with music" ; that which describes the hansom cab, " 'Tis
the gondola of London." This may lead us on to the con-
sideration that Disraeli is one of those who have felt most
vividly and expressed most gaily the peculiar physical
beauty of London. He saw the Park as the true Londoner
sees it when " the chestnuts are in silver bluom, and the
pink may has flushed the thorns, and banks of sloping turf
are radiant with plots of gorgeous flowers ; when the water
glitters in the sun, and the air is fragrant with that spell

176 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

which only can be found in metropolitan mignonette." He
describes as no one else has ever done with equal mastery a
stately and successful house-party in a great country
mansion. He had developed, when he composed Lothair,
a fuller sense of beauty than he had ever possessed before,
but it revelled in forms that were partly artificial and partly
fabulous. An example of these forms may now be welcome :

" Mr. Giles took an early easy opportunity of apprising
Lady Farringford that she had nearly met Cardinal
Grandison at dinner, and that his Eminence would cer-
tainly pay his respects to Mrs. Putney Giles in the evening.
As Lady Farringford was at present a high ritualist, and
had even been talked of as c going to Rome/ this intelligence
was stunning, and it was observed that her Ladyship was
unusually subdued during the whole of the second course.

" On the right of Lothair sate the wife of a Vice-Chancel-
lor, a quiet and pleasing lady, to whom Lothair, with
natural good breeding, paid snatches of happy attention,
when he could for a moment with propriety withdraw him-
self from the blaze of Apollonia' s coruscating conversation.
Then there was a rather fierce-looking Red Ribbon, medalled
as well as be-starred, and the Red Ribbon's wife, with a
blushing daughter, in spite of her parentage not yet accus-
tomed to stand fire. A partner and his unusually numerous
family had the pleasure also of seeing Lothair for the first
time, and there were no less than four M.P/s, one of whom
was even in office.

" Apollonia was stating to Lothair, with brilliant per-
spicuity, the reasons which quite induced her to believe
that the Gulf Stream had changed its course, and the
political and social consequences that might accrue.

" ' The religious sentiment of the Southern races must
be wonderfully affected by a more rigorous climate,' said
Apollonia. ' I cannot doubt/ she continued, ' that a series
of severe winters at Rome might put an end to Romanism.

Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 177

" ' But is there any fear that a reciprocal influence might
be exercised on the Northern nations ? ' inquired Lothair.
' Would there be any apprehension of our Protestantism
becoming proportionately relaxed ? '

" ' Of course not/ said Apollonia. ' Truth cannot be
affected by climate. Truth is truth alike in Palestine and
Scandinavia.'

" ' I wonder what the Cardinal would think of this/ said
Lothair, ' who, you tell me, is coming to you this evening.'

" ' Yes, I am most interested to see him, though he is
the most puissant of our foes. Of course he would take
refuge in sophistry ; and science, you know, they deny/

" ' Cardinal Grandison is giving some lectures on science/
said the Vice-Chancellor's lady, quietly.

" * It is remorse/ said Apollonia. ' Their clever men can
never forget that unfortunate affair of Galileo, and think
they can divert the indignation of the nineteenth century by
mock zeal about red sandstone or the origin of species.'

" ' And are you afraid of the Gulf Stream? 7 inquired
Lothair of his calmer neighbour.

" ' I think we want more evidence of a change. The
Vice-Chancellor and I went down to a place we have near
town on Saturday, where there is a very nice piece of
water; indeed, some people call it a lake; it was quite
frozen, and my boys wanted to skate, but that I would
not permit.'

" ' You believe in the Gulf Stream to that extent/ said
Lothair; ' no skating.'

" The Cardinal came early ; the ladies had not long
left the dining-room. They were agitated when his name
was announced ; even Apollonia' s heart beat ; but then that
might be accounted for by the inopportune recollection of
an occasional correspondence with Caprera.

" Nothing could exceed the simple suavity with which
the Cardinal appeared, approached, and greeted them. He
thanked Apollonia for her permission to pay his respects
N

178 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

to her, which he had long wished to do; and then they
were all presented, and he said exactly the right thing to
every one."

Disraeli began his career, as I have pointed out in the
earlier part of this essay, as a purveyor of entertainment
to the public in a popular and not very dignified kind. He
contended with the crowd of fashionable novelists whose
books consoled the leisure of Mrs. Wititterly as she reclined
on the drawing-room sofa. He found rivals in Bulwer and
Mrs. Gore, and a master in Plumer Ward. His brilliant
stories sold, but at first they won him little advantage.
Slowly, by dint of his inherent force of genius, his books
have not merely survived their innumerable fellows, but
they have come to represent to us the form and character
of a whole school ; nay, more, they have come to take the
place in our memories of a school which, but for them, would
have utterly passed away and been forgotten. Disraeli,
accordingly, is unique, not merely because his are the
only fashionable novels of the pre- Victorian era which
any one ever reads nowadays, but because in his person
that ineffable manner of the " thirties " reaches an isolated
sublimity and finds a permanent place in literature. But
if we take a still wider view of the literary career of Disraeli,
we are bound to perceive that the real source of the interest
which his brilliant books continue to possess is the evidence
their pages reveal of the astonishing personal genius of
the man. Do what we will, we find ourselves looking be-
yond Contarini Fleming and Sidonia and Vivian Grey to
the adventurous Jew who, by dint of infinite resolution
and an energy which never slept, conquered all the preju-
dices of convention, and trod English society beneath his
foot in the triumphant irony of success. It is the living
Disraeli who is always more salient than the most fascinat-
ing of his printed pages.

THREE EXPERIMENTS IN
PORTRAITURE

THREE EXPERIMENTS IN
PORTRAITURE

i

LADY DOROTHY NEVILL

AN OPEN LETTER

DEAR LADY BURGHCLERE,

When we met for the first time after the death of our
friend, you desired me to produce what you were kind
enough to call " one of my portraits." But the art of the
portrait-writer is capricious, and at that time I felt wholly
disinclined for the adventure. I excused myself on the
ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences
made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I
did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent
charm and petulant wit of Lady Dorothy were insuperable.
I partly think so still, but your command has lingered in
my memory all these months, and I have determined to
attempt to obey you, although what I send you can be no
" portrait," but a few leaves torn out of a painter-writer's
sketch-book.

The existence of the three published volumes does, after
all, not preclude a more intimate study, because they are
confessedly exterior. They represent what she saw and
heard, not what others perceived in her. In the first place,
they are very much better written than she would have
written them herself , I must dwell presently on the curious

18*

1 82 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

fact that, with, all her wit, she possessed no power of sus-
tained literary expression. Her Memoirs were composed, as
you know, by Mr. Ralph Nevill, who is a practised writer
and not otherwise could they have been given to the public.
On this point her own evidence is explicit. She wrote
to me, in all the excitement of the success of the volume of
1906 : " The Press has been wonderfully good to my little
efforts, but to Ralph the better part is due, as, out of the
tangled remnants of my brain, he extracted these old anec-
dotes of my early years/' This is as bravely characteristic
of her modesty as it is of her candour, but I think it shows
that there is still room for some record of the more intimate
features of her charming and elusive character. I take up
my pencil, but with little hope of success, since no more
formidable task could be set me. I will at least try to be,
as she would have scorned me for not being, sincere.

My friendship with Lady Dorothy Nevill occupied more
than a quarter of a century. I met her first in the house of
Sir Redvers and Lady Audrey Buller in the winter of 1887,
soon after their return from Ireland. She had done me the
great honour of desiring that I should be invited to meet her.
She had known my venerable relative, the zoologist, Thomas
Bell of Selborne, and she had corresponded in years long
past, about entomology, with my father. We talked to-
gether on that first occasion for hours, and it seems to me
that I was lifted, without preliminaries, into her intimacy.
From that afternoon, until I drank tea with her for the last
time, ten days before her death, the precious link was never
loosened.

In 1887, her great social popularity had not begun. She
was, I now know, already near sixty, but it never occurred
to me to consider her age. She possessed a curious static
quality, a perennial youthfumess. Every one must have
observed how like Watts' picture of her at twenty she still
was at eighty-six. This was not preserved by any arts

Three Experiments in Portraiture 183

or fictile graces. She rather affected, prematurely, the dress
and appearance of an elderly woman. I remember her as
always the same, very small and neat, very pretty with her
chiselled nose, the fair oval of her features, the slightly ironic,
slightly meditative smile, the fascinating colour of the
steady eyes, beautifully set in the head, with the eyebrows
rather lifted as in a perpetual amusement of curiosity. Her
head, slightly sunken into the shoulders, was often poised
a little sideways, like a bird' s that contemplates a hemp-seed.
She had no quick movements, no gestures ; she held herself
very still. It always appeared to me that, in face of her
indomitable energy and love of observation, this was an
unconscious economy of force. It gave her a very peculiar
aspect ; I remember once frivolously saying to her that she
looked as though she were going to " pounce" at me; but
she never pounced. When she had to move, she rose
energetically and moved with determination, but she never
wasted a movement. Her physical strength and she such
a tiny creature seemed to be wonderful. She was seldom
unwell, although, like most very healthy people, she be-
wailed herself with exaggerated lamentations whenever
anything was the matter with her. But even on these
occasions she defied what she called " coddling." Once
I found her suffering from a cold, on a very chilly day,
without a fire, and I expostulated. She replied, with a sort
of incongruity very characteristic of her, " Oh 1 none of your
hot bottles for me ! }J In her last hours of consciousness
she battled with the doctor's insistence that she must have
a fire in her bedroom, and her children had to conceal the
flame behind screens because she threatened to get out of
bed and put it out. Her marvellous physical force has to
be insisted on, for it was the very basis of her character.

Her humorous petulance, her little sharp changes of voice,
the malice of her downcast eyes, the calmness of her demure
and easy smile how is any impression to be given of things

184 .Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

so fugitive? Her life, which had not been without its
troubles and anxieties, became one of prolonged and intense
enjoyment. I think that this was the main reason of the
delight which her company gave to almost every one. - She
was like a household blaze upon a rainy day, one stretched
out one's hands to be warmed. She guarded herself against
the charge of being amiable. " It would be horrid to be
amiable/' she used to say, and, indeed, there was always a
touch of sharpness about her. She was amused once because
I told her she was like an acidulated drop, half sweet and
half sour. " Oh ! any stupid woman can be sweet," she
said, " it's often another name for imbecile."

She had curious little prejudices and antipathies. I
never fathomed the reason of her fantastic horror of the
feasts of the Church, particularly of Christmas. She
always became curiously agitated as the month of December
waned. In her notes she inveighed, in quaint alarm,
against the impending " Christmas pains and penalties."
I think she disliked the disturbance of social arrangements
which these festivals entailed. But there was more than
that. She was certainly a little superstitious, in a mocking,
eighteenth-century sort of way, as Madame du Deffand
might have been. She constantly said, and still more
frequently wrote, <c D.V." after any project, even of the
most frivolous kind. The idea was that one should be polite
all round, in case of any contingency. When she was in the
Riviera, she was much interested to hear that the Prince of
Monaco had built and endowed a handsome church at Monte
Carlo. " Very clever of him," she said, " for you never
can tell."

Lady Dorothy's entire absence of affectation was emin-
ently attractive. She would be mistress of herself, though
China fell. Her strange little activities, her needlework,
her paperwork, her collections, were the wonder of every-
body, but she did not require approval ; she adopted them,

Three Experiments in Portraiture 185

in the light of day, for her own amusement. She never
pushed her peculiarities on the notice of visitors, but, at
the same time, if discovered in the act of some incredible
industry, she went on with it calmly. When she was in
Heidelberg in 1892 and successive years, what interested her
was the oddity of the students' life ; she expatiated to me on
their beer and their sabre-cuts. Whenever I went abroad of
late years, I was exhorted to send her picture post-cards
from out-of-the-way places, and " Remember that I like
vulgar ones best/' she added imperturbably. The story is
perhaps known to you of how, in a circle of superfine ladies,
the conversation turned to food, and the company outdid
one another in protestations of delicacy. This one could
only touch a little fruit, and that one was practically con-
fined to a cup of tea. Lady Dorothy, who had remained
silent and detached, was appealed to as to her opinion. In
a sort of loud cackling a voice she sometimes surprisingly
adopted she replied, "Oh, give me a blow-out of tripe and
onions ! " to the confusion of the precieitses. She had a
wholesome respect for "food, quite orthodox and old-
fashioned, although I think she ate rather markedly little.
But she liked that little good. She wrote to me once from
Cannes, " This is not an intellectual place, but then the
body rejoices in the cooking, and thanks God for that."
She liked to experiment in foods, and her guests sometimes
underwent strange surprises. One day she persuaded old
Lord Whamcliffe, who was a great friend of hers, to send
her a basket of guinea-pig, and she entertained a very dis-
tinguished company on a fricassee of this unusual game,
She refused to say what the dish was until every one had
heartily partaken, and then Mr. George Russell turned
suddenly pale and fled from the room. " Nothing but
fancy/' remarked the hostess, composedly. When several
years ago there was a proposal that we should feed upon
Jiprse-flesh, and a purveyor of that dainty opened a shop in

1 86 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Mayfair, Lady Dorothy was one of the first of his customers.
She sallied forth in person, followed by a footman with a
basket, and bought a joint in the presence of a jeering
populace.

She had complete courage and absolute tolerance. Some-
times she pretended to be timid or fanatical, but that was
only her fun. Her toleration and courage would have given
her a foremost place among philanthropists or social
reformers, if her tendencies had been humanitarian. She
might have been another Elizabeth Fry, another Florence
Nightingale. But she had no impulse whatever towards
active benevolence, nor any interest in masses of men and
women. And, above all, she was not an actor, but a spec-
tator in life, and she evaded, often with droll agility, all
the efforts which people made to drag her into propagandas
of various kinds. She listened to what they had to say,
and she begged for the particulars of specially awful examples
of the abuses they set out to remedy. She was all sympathy
and interest, and the propagandist started with this glitter-
ing ally in tow ; but he turned, and where was she ? She
had slipped off, and was in contemplation of some other
scheme of experience.

She described her life to me, in 1901, as a " treadmill of
friendship, perpetually on the go " ; and later she wrote :
" I am hampered by perpetual outbursts of hospitality in
every shape." Life was a spectacle to her, and society a
congeries of little guignols, at all of which she would fain
be seated, in a front stall. If she complained that hos-
pitality " hampered" her, it was not that it interfered with
any occupation or duty, but simply that she could not eat
luncheon at three different houses at once. I remember
being greatly amused when I congratulated her on having
enjoyed some eminent public funeral, by her replying,
grudgingly : " Yes but I lost another most interesting
ceremony through its being at the same hour." She grum-

Three Experiments in Portraiture 187

bled : " People are tugging me to go and see things," not
from any shyness of the hermit or reluctance to leave her
home, but simply because she would gladly have yielded to
them all. " Such a nuisance one can't be in two places at
once, like a bird ! " she remarked to me.

In this relation, her attitude to country life was droll.
After long indulgence in her amazing social energy in
London, she would suddenly become tired. The pheno-
menon never ceased to surprise her ; she could not recollect
that she had been tired before, and this must be the cncl of
all things. She would fly to the country ; to Dorsetshire,
to Norfolk, to Haslemere, to what she called " the sober-
ness of Ascot." Then would come letters describing the
bliss of rural calm. " Here I am ! Just in time to save
my life. For the future, no clothes and early hours." That
lasted a very short while. Then a letter signed <! Your
recluse, D. N.," would show the dawn of a return to nature,
Then "boutades of increasing vehemence would mark the
rising impatience. Sept 12 : " How dreadful it is that the
country is so full of ladies." Sept. 15 : " I am surrounded
by tall women and short women, all very tiresome-" Sept.
20 : " So dull here, except for one pleasant episode of a
drunken housemaid." Sept. 23 : " Oh ! T am so longing
for the flesh-pots of dear dirty old London " ; and then one
knew that her return to Charles Street would not be long
delayed. She was very fond indeed of country life, for a
short time, and she was interested in gardens, but she really
preferred streets. " Eridge is such a paradise especially
the quadrupeds," she once wrote to me from a house in
which she found peculiar happiness. But she liked bipeds
best.

However one may postpone the question, sooner or laier
it is necessary to consider the quality of Lady Dorothy
Nevill's wit, since all things converge in her to that. But.
her wit is so difficult to define that it is not surprising thai

1 88 Some Diversions of a Man oi Letters

one avoids, as long as possible, coming actually to grips with
it. We may lay the foundation of a formula, perhaps, by
saying that it was a compound of solid good sense and an
almost reckless whimsicality of speech. The curious thing
about it was that it was not markedly intellectual, and still
less literary. It had not the finish of such wit as is preserved
in anthologies of humour. Every one who enjoyed the
conversation of Lady Dorothy must have perceived with
annoyance how little he could take away with him. Her
phrases did not often recur to please that inward ear,
" which is the bliss of solitude." What she said seemed at
the time to be eminently right and sane ; it was exhilarating
to a high degree; it was lighted up by merriment, and
piquancy, and salt ; but it was the result of a kind of magic
which needed the wand of the magician; it could not be
reproduced by an imitator. It is very unfortunate, but
the fact has to be faced. When we tell our grandchildren
that Lady Dorothy Nevill was the finest female wit of her
age, they will ask us for examples of her talent, and we shall
have very few to give.

She liked to discuss people better than books or politics
or principles, although she never shrank from these. But
it was what she said about human beings that kept her
interlocutors hanging on her lips. She made extraordinarily
searching strictures on persons, without malice, but without
nonsense of any kind. Her own favourites were treated
with reserve in this respect : it was as though they, were
put in a pen by themselves, not to be criticised so long as
they remained in favour ; and she was not capricious, was,
on the contrary, conspicuously loyal. But they always
had the impression that it was only by special licence that
they escaped the criticism that every one else was subjected
to. Lady Dorothy Nevill was a stringent observer, and
no respecter of persons. She carried a bow, and shot at
folly as it flow, But I particularly wisl) to insist or* the fact

Three Experiments in Portraiture 189

that her arrows, though they were feathered, were not
poisoned.

Light was thrown on the nature of Lady Dorothy's wit
by her correspondence. She could in no accepted sense be
called a good letter-writer, although every now and then
brilliantly amusing phrases occurred in her letters. I doubt
whether she ever wrote one complete epistle ; her corre-
spondence consisted of tumultuous, reckless, sometimes
extremely confused and incorrect notes, which, however,
repeated for those who knew how to interpret her language
the characteristics of her talk. She took no pains with
her letters, and was under no illusion about their epistolary
value. In fact, she was far too conscious of their lack of
form, and would sign them, " Your incompetent old friend" ;
there was generally some apology for " this ill- written
nonsense," or " what stuff this is, not worth your reading ! "
She once wrote to me : "I should like to tell you all about
it, but alas ! old Horace Walpole's talent has not descended
on me." Unfortunately, that was true ; so far as literary
expression and the construction of sentences went, it had
not. Her correspondence could never be given to the
world, because it would need to be so much revised and
expanded and smoothed out that- it would no longer be hers
at all.

Nevertheless, her reckless notes were always delightful to
receive, because they gave the person to whom they were
addressed a reflection of the writer's mood at the moment.
They were ardent and personal, in their torrent of broken
sentences, initials, mis-spelt names and nouns that had
dropped- their verbs. They were not so good as her talk,
but they were like enough to it to be highly stimulating
and entertaining ; and in the course of them phrases would
be struck out, like sparks from flint, which ytse nearly as
good, and of the very same quality, as the things she used to
say. She wrote her letters on a fantastic variety of strangely

190 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

coloured paper, pink and blue and snuff-brown, violet
and green and grey, paper that was stamped with patterns
like a napkin, or frilled like a lace handkerchief, or embossed
with forget-me-nots like a child's valentine. She had tricks
of time-saving; always put "i" for " one," and "x" for
" cross," a word which she, who was never cross, loved to
use. " I did not care for any of the guests; we seemed to
live in a storm of x questions and crooked answers," she
would write, or " I am afraid my last letter was rather x."

Lady Dorothy, as a letter-writer, had no superstitious
reverence for the parts of speech. Like M. Bergeret, she
" se moquait de 1' orthographic comme une chose mpris-
able." The spelling in her tumultuous notes threw a light
upon that of very fine ladies in the seventeenth century.
She made no effort to be exact, and much of her correspond-
ence was made obscure by initials, which she expected her
friends to interpret by divination. From a withering
denunciation of the Government she expressly excepts
Mr. John Burns and " that much-abused Mr. Birhell, whom
I like." From about 1899 to 1903, I think that Lord
Wolseley was the friend who occupied most of her thoughts.
In her letters of those years the references to him are in-
cessant, but when he is not " the P.M." and " our C.C.,"
she rings the changes on all possible forms of his name, from
" Wollesley " to " Walsey." When she wrote to me of the
pleasure she had had in meeting " the Abbot Guaschet,"
it took me a moment to recognise the author of English
Monastic Life. She would laugh herself at her spelling, and
would rebut any one who teased her about it by saying,
"Oh! What does it matter? I don't pretend to be a
bright specimen like you ! " When she made arrange-
ments to come to see me at the House of Lords, which she
frequently did, she always wrote it " the Lord's House,"
as though it were a conventicle.

One curious observation which the recipient of hundreds

Three Experiments in Portraiture 191

of her notes is bound to make, is the remarkable contrast
between the general tone of them and the real disposition
of their writer. Lady Dorothy Nevill in person was placid,
indulgent, and calm; she never raised her voice, or chal-
lenged an opinion, or asserted her individuality. She
played, very consistently, her part of the amused and atten-
tive spectator in the theatre of life. But in her letters she
pretended to be, or supposed herself called upon to seem,
passionate and distracted. They are all twinkling with
humorous or petulant exaggeration. She happens to forget
an engagement, which was of no sort of importance, and
this is how she apologises :

" To think that every hour since you said you would come
I have repeated to myself Gosse at 5, Gosse at 5, and then
after all to go meandering off and leaving you to cuss and
swear on the doorstep, and you will never come again now,
really. No punishment here or hereafter will be too much
for me. Lead me to the Red Hill Asylum, and leave me
there."

This was written nearly twenty years ago, and she was
not less vivacious until the end. Lord Lansdowne tells me
of an anonymous letter which he once received, to which
she afterwards pleaded guilty. A cow used to be kept at
the back of Lansdowne House, and the animal, no doubt
feeling lonely, was in the habit of lowing at all sorts of hours.
The letter, which was supposed to voice the complaint of
the neighbours in Charles Street, was couched in the broadest
Wiltshire dialect, and ended with the postscript : " Dang
J un, there 'ee goes again ! " As a matter of fact, her letters,
about which she had no species of vanity or self-conscious-
ness, were to her merely instruments of friendship. There
was an odd mingling of affection and stiffness in them.
She marshalled her acquaintances with them, and almost
invariably they were concerned with arrangements for
meeting or explanations of absence. In my own experience,

192 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

I must add that she made an exception when her friends
were abroad, when she took considerable pains to tell them
the gossip, often in surprising terms. I was once regaled
with her experiences as the neighbour of a famous African

magnate, and with the remark, " Mrs. ," a London

fine lady of repute, " has been here, and has scraped the

whole inside out of Mr. , and gone her way rejoicing/'

Nor did she spare the correspondent himself :

" Old Dr. has been here, and tells me he admires

you very much ; but I believe he has lost his memory, and
he never had good taste at any time."

This was not a tribute which self-esteem could hug to its
bosom. Of a very notorious individual she wrote to me :

" I thought I should never be introduced to him, and I
had to wait 100 years, but everything is possible in the best
of worlds, and he was very satisfactory at last." Satis-
factory 1 No word could be more characteristic on the pen
of Lady Dorothy. To be " satisfactory," whether you were
the President of the French Republic or Lord Wolseley or
the Human Elephant (a pathetic freak in whom she took a
great interest), was to perform on the stage of life, in her
unruffled presence, the part which you had been called upon
by Providence to fill. Even a criminal might be " satis-
factory " if he did his job thoroughly. The only entirely
unsatisfactory people were those who were insipid, conven-
tional, and empty. " The first principle of society should be
to extinguish the bores," she once said. I remember going
with her to the Zoo in 1898, and being struck with a remark
which she made, not because it was important, but because it
was characteristic. We were looking at the wolves^ which
she liked; and then, close by, she noticed some kind of
Indian cow. " What a bore for the wolves to have to live
opposite a cow ! " and then, as if talking to herself, " I do
hate a ruminant ! "

Her relations to literature, art, and science were specta-

Three Experiments in Portraiture 193

cular also. She was a sympathetic and friendly onlooker,
always on the side of those things against the Philistines,
but not affecting special knowledge herself. She was
something of a virtuoso. She once said, " I have a passion
for reading, but on subjects which nobody else will touch/'
and this indicated the independence of her mind. She read
to please herself, and to satisfy her thirst for experience.
When our friendship began, Zola was in the act of producing
the tremendous series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. It
was one of our early themes of conversation. Zola was
then an object of shuddering horror to the ordinary English
reader. Lady Dorothy had already read L'Assommoir, and
had not shrunk from it ; so I ventured to tell her of La Terre,
which was just appearing. She wrote to me about it : "I
have been reading Zola. He takes the varnish off rural life,
I must say. Oh ! these horrid demons of Frenchmen know
how to write. Even the most disgusting things they know
how to describe poetically. I wish Zola could describe
Haslemere with all the shops shut, rain falling, and most of
the inhabitants in their cups." She told me later for we
followed our Zola to Lourdes and Paris that some young
Oxford prig saw La Bete Humaine lying on the table at
Charles Street, and remarked that Lady Dorothy could
surely not be aware that that was " no book for a lady."
She said, " I told him it was just the book for me 1"

She read Disraeli's novels over again, from time to time,
with a renewal of sentiment. " I am dedicating my leisure
hours to Endymion. What a charm after the beef and
mutton of ordinary novels ! " She gradually developed a
cult for Swinburne, whom she had once scorned; in her
repentance after his death, she wrote : " I never hear enough
about that genius Swinburne ! My heart warms when I
think of him and read his poems," I think she was very
much annoyed that he had never been a visitor at Charles
Street. When Verlaine was in England, to deliver a
o

194 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

lecture, in 1894, Lady Dorothy was insistent that, as I was
seeing him frequently, I should bring the author of Parallele-
ment to visit her. She said I think under some illusion
" Verlaine is one of my pet poets, though," she added,
" not of this world." I was obliged to tell her that neither
Verlaine's clothes, nor his person, nor his habits, admitted
of his being presented in Mayfair, and that, indeed, it was
difficult to find a little French eating-house in Soho where
he could be at home. She then said : " Why can' t you take
me to see him in this eating-house? " I had to explain
that of the alternatives that was really the least possible.
She was not pleased.

Nor am I pleased with this attempt of mine to draw the
features of our wonderful lairy friend. However I may
sharpen the pencil, the line it makes is still too heavy. I
feel that these anecdotes seem to belie her exquisite refine-
ment, the rapidity and delicacy of her mental movement.
To tell them is like stroking the wings of a moth. Above all,
it is a matter of despair to attempt to define her emotional
nature. Lady Dorothy Nevill was possessed neither of
gravity nor of pathos ; she was totally devoid of sentimen-
tality. This made it easy for a superficial observer to refuse
to believe that the author of so many pungent observations
and such apparently volatile cynicism had a heart. When
this was once questioned in company, one who knew her
well replied : " Ah ! yes, she has a heart, and it is like a
grain of mustard-seed ! " But her kindliness was shown,
with great fidelity, to those whom she really honoured with
her favour. I do not know whether it would be strictly
correct to say that she had the genius of friendship, because
that supposes a certain initiative and action which were
foreign to Lady Dorothy's habits. But she possessed, to a
high degree, the genius of comradeship. She held the reins
very tightly, and she let no one escape whom she wished
to retain. She took immense pains to preserve her friend-

Three Experiments in Portraiture 195

ships, and indeed became, dear creature, a little bit tyran-
nical at last. Her notes grew to be excessively emphatic.
She would begin a letter quite cheerfully with " Oh, you
demon ! " or complain of " total and terrible neglect of an
old friend ; I could fill this sheet of paper with an account of
your misdeeds ! " She was ingenious in reproach : " I
cannot afford to waste penny after penny, and no assets
forthcoming/' or " I have only two correspondents, and one
of them is a traitor ; I therefore cease to write to you for
ever ! " This might sound formidable, but it was only one
of the constant surprises of her humour, and would be
followed next day by the most placable of notelets.

Her curiosity with regard to life spread to her benevo-
lences, which often took somewhat the form of voyages of
discovery. Among these her weekly excursion to the
London Hospital, in all weathers and in every kind of cheap
conveyance, was prominent. I have to confess that I pre-
ferred that a visit to her should not be immediately prefaced
by one of these adventures among the " pore dear things'*
at the hospital, because that was sure to mean the recital
of some gruesome operation she had heard of, or the details
of some almost equally gruesome cure. She enjoyed the
whole experience in a way which is blank to the professional
humanitarian, but I suspect the ' ' pore dear things " appreci-
ated her listening smile and sympathetic worldliness much
more than they would have done the admonitions of a more
conscious philanthropist.

And, indeed, in retrospect, it is her kindliness that shines
forth. She followed all that her friends did, everything
that happened to those who were close to them. She liked
always to receive the tribute of what she called my " literary
efforts/' and was ruthlessly sharp in observing announce-
ments of them : " Publishing again, and of course no copy
for poor old me," when not a volume had yet left the binders.
She took up absurd little phrases with delightful camaraderie;

196 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

I have forgotten why at one time she took to signing herself
" Your Koh-i-Noor," and wrote : " If I can hope to be the
Koh-i-Noor of Mrs. Gosse j s party, I shall be sure to come on
Monday/' One might go on indefinitely reviving these
memories of her random humour and kindly whimsicality.
But I close on a word of tenderer gravity, which I am sure
will affect you. She had been a little tyrannical, as usual,
and perhaps thought the tone of her persiflage rather
excessive; a few hours later came a second note, which
began : " You have made my life happier for me these
last years you, and Lady Airlie, and dearest Winifred/*
From her who never gave way to sentimentality in any form,
and who prided herself on being as rigid as a nut-cracker,
this was worth all the protestations of some more ebullient
being. And there, dear Lady Burghclere, I must leave this
poor sketch for such approval as you can bring yourself to
give it.

Very faithfully yours,
EDMUND GOSSE,

January 1914.

II
LORD CROMER AS A MAN OF LETTERS

IN the obituary notices which attended the death of
Lord Cromer, it was necessary and proper that almost
the whole space at the command of the writers should be
taken up by a sketch of his magnificent work as an adminis-
trator, or, as the cant phrase goes, " an empire-builder/'
For thirty years, during which time he advanced to be one
of the most powerful and efficient of proconsuls, he held a
place in the political world which arrested the popular
imagination, and must continue to outweigh all other aspects
of his character. Of this side of Lord Cromer's splendid

Three Experiments in Portraiture 197

career I am not competent to say a word. But there was
another facet of it, one more private and individual, which
became prominent after his retirement, I mean his intel-
lectual and literary activity, which I had the privilege of
observing. It would be a pity, perhaps, to let this be wholly
submerged, and I propose to give, from my own recollection,
some features of it. Lord Cromer was the author of six
or seven published volumes, but these are before the
public, and it is needless to speak much about them.
What may be found more interesting are a few impressions
of his attitude towards books and towards ideas.

On the first occasion on which I met him, he was char-
acteristic. It was some fifteen years ago, at the time when
the brilliant young politicians who called themselves (or
were rather ineptly called) the Hooligans had the -graceful
habit of asking some of their elders to dine with them in a
private room of the House of Commons. At one of these
little dinners the only guests were Lord Cromer and myself.
I had never seen him before, and I regarded him with some
awe and apprehension, but no words had passed between
us, when the division-bell rang, and our youthful hosts
darted from the room.

The moment we were left alone, Lord Cromer looked
across the deserted tablecloth and said quietly, as though
he were asking me to pass the salt, " Where is Bipontium ? "
I was driven by sheer fright into an exercise of intelligence,
and answered at once, " I should think it must be the Latin
for Zweibriicken. Why? " " Oh ! I saw this afternoon
that my edition of Diodorus Siculus was printed ex typo-
graphia societatis Bipontince, and I couldn't imagine for
the life of rne what ' Bipontium' was. No doubt you're
quite right/' Nothing could be more characteristic of
Lord Cromer' s habit of mind than this sudden revulsion of
ideas. His active brain needed no preparation to turn from
subject to subject, but seemed to be always ready, at a

198 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

moment's notice, to take up a fresh line of thought with
ardour. What it could not endure was to be left stranded
with no theme on which to expatiate. In succeeding years,
when it was often my daily enjoyment to listen to Lord
Cromer's desultory conversation, as it leaped from subject
to subject, I often thought of the alarming way in which
"Bipontium" had pounced upon me at the dinner-table
in the House of Commons.

Some years passed before I had the privilege of renewing
my experience of that evening. It was not until after his
retirement from Egypt in the autumn of 1907 that I saw
him again, and not then for some months. He returned,
it will be remembered, in broken health. He used to say
that when King Edward VII. wrote out to Cairo, strongly
pressing him to stay, he had replied, in the words of
Herodotus, " I am too old, oh King, and too inactive; so
bid thou one of the younger men here to do these things."
He very soon, however, recovered elasticity of mind and
body when the load of office was removed from his shoulders,
and "inactive" was the last epithet which could ever be
applied to Lord Cromcr. He began to attend the House
of Lords, but, like a wise man, he was in no hurry to speak
there till he had grown accustomed to the tone of the place.
His earliest utterance (I may note the date, February 6th,
1908) we listened to with equal respect and curiosity;
this was a new clement from which much enjoyment might
be expected.

This maiden speech was not long, but it produced a
very happy impression. The subject was the Anglo-
Russian Convention, of which the orator cordially approved,
and I recall that a certain sensation was caused by Lord
Cromer's dwelling on the dangers of the Pan-Islamite
intrigues in Egypt. This is the sort of thing that the
House of Lords enjoys a man of special knowledge
speaking, almost confidentially, of matters within his

Three Experiments in Portraiture 199

professional competency. During that year and the next
Lord Cromer spoke with increasing frequency. There
were great differences of opinion with regard to his efficiency
in Parliament. I may acknowledge that I was not an un-
measured admirer of his oratory. When he rose from his
seat on the Cross-bench, and advanced towards the table,
with a fine gesture of his leonine head, sympathy was always
mingled with respect. His independence and his honesty
were patent, and his slight air of authority satisfactory.
His public voice was not unpleasing, but when he was tired
it became a little veiled, and he had the sad trick of dropping
it at the end of his sentences. I confess that I sometimes
found it difficult to follow what he was saying, and I do
not think that he understood how to nil a large space with
his voice. He spoke as a man accustomed to wind up the
debates of a council sitting round a table, rather than as a
senator addressing the benches of Parliament.

He was interested in the art of eloquence, and fond of
criticising in private the methods of other speakers. He
had a poor opinion of much studied oratory, and used to
declare that no one had ever convinced him by merely
felicitous diction. Perhaps he did not sufficiently realise
that his own strength of purpose offered rather a granitic
surface to persuasion. But no doubt he was right in saying
that, coming as he did from the florid East, he found
English eloquence more plain and businesslike than he
left it. He used to declare that he never spoke impromptu
if he could possibly help doing so, and he made great fun
of the statesmen who say, " Little did I think when I
came down to this House to-day that I should be called
upon to speak/' and then pour out by heart a Corinthiap
discourse. Lord Cromer always openly and frankly
prepared his speeches, and I have seen him entranced in
the process. As he always had a classical reference for
everything he did, he was in the habit of mentioning that

2oo Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Demosthenes also was unwilling to " put his faculty at the
mercy of Fortune."

He became an habitual attendant at the House of Lords,
and, while it was sitting, he usually appeared in the Library
about an hour before the House met. He took a very lively
interest in what was going on, examining new books, and
making a thousand suggestions. If the Lords' Library
contains to-day one of the most complete collections of
Latin and Greek literature in the country, this is largely
due to the zeal of Lord Cromer, who was always egging me
on to the purchase of fresh rarities. He was indefatigable
in kindness, sending me booksellers' catalogues in which
curious texts were recorded, and scouring even Paris and
Leipzig in our behalf. When I entered into this sport so
heartily as to provide the Greek and Latin Fathers also for
their Lordships, Lord Cromer became unsympathetic. He
had no interest whatever in Origen or Tertullian, and I think
it rather annoyed him to recall that several of these oracles
of the early Church had written in Greek. Nothing in
history or philosophy or poetry which the ancient world
had handed down to us came amiss to Lord Cromer, but
I think he considered it rather impertinent of the Fathers
to have presumed to use the language of Attica. He had
not an ecclesiastical mind.

Lord Cromer' s familiar preoccupation with the classics
was a point in his mental habits which deserves particular
attention. I have always supposed that he inherited it
from his mother, the Hon. Mrs, Baring, who was a Windham.
She was a woman of learning ; and she is said to have dis-
comfited Sir William Harcourt at a dinner-table by quoting
Lucan in direct disproof of a statement about the Druids
which he had been rash enough to advance. She sang the
odes of Anacreon to her son in his infancy, and we may
conjecture that she sowed in his bosom the seeds of his love
of antiquity. Lord Cromer made no pretension to be what

Three Experiments in Portraiture 201

is called an " exact" scholar, but I think it is a mistake
to say, as has been alleged, that he did not take up the study
of Latin and Greek until middle life. It is true that he
enjoyed no species of university training, but passed from
Woolwich straight into the diplomatic service. In 1861,
at the age of twenty, he was appointed A.D.C. to Sir Henry
Storks in the Ionian Islands, and I believe that one of the
first things he did was to look about for an instructor in
ancient Greek. He found one in a certain Levantine in
Corfu, whose name was Romano, and their studies opened
with the odes of Anacreon. Whether this was a coincidence,
or a compliment to Mrs. Baring, I do not know. This is a
rather different account from what Lord Cromer gave in
the preface to his Paraphrases, but I report it on his own
later authority.

If his scholarship was not professorial, it was at least
founded upon a genuine and enduring love of the ancient
world. I suppose that for fifty years, after the episode in
Corfu, however busy he was, however immersed in Imperial
policy, he rarely spent a day without some communing
with antiquity. He read Latin, and still more Greek, not
in the spirit of a pedant or a pedagogue, but genuinely for
pleasure and refreshment. He had no vanity about it,
and if he had any doubt as to the meaning of a passage he
would " consult the crib/' as he used to say. We may
conjecture further that he did not allow his curiosity to be
balked by the barrier of a hopelessly obscure passage, but
leaped over it, and went on. He always came back to
Honier, whom he loved more than any other writer of the
world, and particularly to the Iliad, which I think he knew
nearly by heart. But he did not, as some pundits consider
dignified and necessary, confine himself to the reading of
the principal classics in order to preserve a pure taste.
On the contrary, Lord Cromer, especially towards the close
of his life, pushed up into all the byways of the Silver Age.

202 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

As he invariably talked about the books he happened to be
reading, it was easy to trace his footsteps. Eight or nine
years ago he had a sudden passion for Empedocles, whose
fragments he had found collected and translated by Mr.
Leonard, an American. Lord Cromer used to march into
the Library, and greet me by calling out, " Do you know?
Empedocles says" something or other, probably some
parallelism with a modern phrase, the detection of which
always particularly amused Lord Cromer.

In 1908 he took a fancy to Theognis, whose works I
procured for him at the House of Lords, since he happened
not to possess that writer at 36 Wimpole Street. He would
settle himself in an armchair in the smoking-room, his eyes
close to the book, and plunge into those dark waters of the
gnomic elegist. He loved maxims and the expression of
principles, and above all, as I have said, the discovery of
identities of thought between the modern and the ancient
world. He was delighted when he found in Theognis the
proverb about having an ox on the tongue. I suppose this
was quite well known to the learned, but the charm of the
matter for Lord Cromer was that he was not deterred by
any fear of academic criticism, and found out these N things
for himself. He read Theognis as other people read
Rudyard Kipling, for stimulus and pleasure. He swept
merely "scholarly' 1 questions aside. He read his Iliad
like a love-letter, but he was bored to death by discussions
about the authorship of the Homeric epics.

In one matter, the serene good sense which was so
prominently characteristic of Lord Cromer tinged his
attitude towards the classics. He was not at all like
Thomas Love Peacock, who entreated his friends to desist
from mentioning anything that had happened in the world
for the last 2,000 years. On the contrary, Lord Cromer
was always bent on binding the old and the new together.
It was very noticeable in his conversation that he was

Three Experiments in Portraiture 203

fond of setting classic instances side by side with modern
ones. If books dealt with this parallelism, they exercised
a charm over Lord Cromer's imagination which may some-
times have led him a little astray about their positive value.
I recall a moment when he was completely under the sway
of M. Ferrero's Greatness and Decline of Rome, largely
because of the pertinacity with which the Italian historian
compares Roman institutions with modern social arrange-
ments. It was interesting to the great retired proconsul
to discover that Augustus " considered that in the majority
of cases subject peoples had to be governed through their
own national institutions/' It is scarcely necessary to
point out that these analogies form the basis of what is,
perhaps, Lord Cromer's most important late essay, his
Ancient and Modern Imperialism.

In a practical administration of India and Egypt, those
oceans of unplumbed antiquity, the ordinary British official
has neither time nor taste to do more than skim the surface
of momentary experience. But Lord Cromer had always
been acutely aware of the mystery of the East, and always
looked back into the past with deep curiosity. Sometimes
the modern life in Egypt, exciting as it was, almost seemed
to him a phantasmagoria dancing across the real world of
Rameses. This tendency of thought coloured one branch
of his reading; he could not bear to miss a book which
threw any light on the social and political manners of
antiquity. Works like Fowler's Social Life at Rome or
Marquardt's Le Culte chez les Remains thrilled him with
excitement and animated his conversation for days. He
wanted, above all things, to realise how the ancients lived
and what .feelings actuated their behaviour. On one
occasion, in a fit of gaiety, I ventured to tell him that he
reminded me of Mrs. Blimber (in Dombcy and Son), who
could have died contented had she visited Cicero in his
retirement at beautiful Tusculum, " Well ! " replied Lord

204 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Cromer, laughing, " and a very delightful visit that would
be."

In the admirable appreciation contributed to the Times
by " C." (our other proconsular " C." !) it was remarked
that the " quality of mental balance is visible in all that
Lord Cromer wrote, whether in his official despatches, his
published books, or his private correspondence." It was
audible, too, in his delightful conversation, which was
vivid, active, and yet never oppressive. He spoke with the
firm accent of one accustomed to govern, but never
dictatorially. His voice was a very agreeable one, supple
and various in its tones, neither loud nor low. Although he
had formed the life-long habit of expressing his opinions
with directness, he never imposed them unfairly, or took
advantage of his authority. On the contrary, there was
something extremely winning in his eagerness to hear the
reply of his interlocutor. " Well, there's a great deal in
that," he would graciously and cordially say, and proceed
to give the opposing statement what benefit he thought it
deserved. He could be very trenchant, but I do not think
that any one whom he had advanced to the privilege of his
confidence can remember that he was so to a friend.

The attitude of Lord Cromer to life and letters I speak,
of course, only of what I saw in the years of his retirement
from office was not exactly representative of our own or
even of the last century. He would have been at home in
the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, before the
French Revolution. I judge him to have been born with
an inflexible and commanding character, which in the
person of many men exposed to such dangerous successes
as he enjoyed might have degenerated into tyranny. On
Lord Cromer, on the other hand, time produced a humanis-
ing and mellowing effect. It may very well prove that he
has stamped his mark on the East of the twentieth century,
as Turgot did his on the West of the nineteenth century;

Three Experiments in Portraitures: 205

'A,

but without straying into the perilous fields of prophecy
we are safe in recording the impression that Lord Cromer
was not altogether a man of to-day; he looked forward
and he looked backward. Probably the nearest counter-
part to his manner of mind and conversation may be found
in the circle of whom we read in the Diary of Fanny Burney.
We can conceive Lord Cromer leaning against the Com-
mittee Box in earnest conversation with Mr. Windham
and Mr. Burke at Warren Hastings' trial. We can restore
the half-disdainful gesture with which he would drop an
epigram (" from the Greek") into the Bath Easton Vase.
His politeness and precision, his classical quotations, his
humour, his predilections in literature and art, were those
of the inner circle of Whigs nearly a century and a half
ago, and I imagine that their talk was very much like his.
He was fond of repeating Bagehot's description of the
Whigs, and it seems to me to apply so exactly to himself
that I will quote part of it :

" Perhaps as long as there has been a political history
in this country there have been certain men of a cool,
moderate, resolute firmness, not gifted with high imagina-
tion, little prone to enthusiastic sentiment, heedless of
large theories and speculations, careless of dreamy sceptic-
ism, with a clear view of the next step, and a wise intention
to take it ; a strong conviction that the elements of know-
ledge are true, and a steady belief that the present would,
can, and should be quietly improved."

In a full analysis of Lord Cromer 's character, I think
that every clause of this description might be expanded
with illustrations. In the intellectual domain, Bagehot's
words, " little prone to enthusiastic sentiment," seem
made to fit Lord Cromer 's detachment from all the ten-
dencies of romanticism. His literary tastes were highly

206 Some Diversions of a Man -of Letters

developed and eagerly indulged, but they were all in their
essence pre-Revolutionary. Those who are familiar with
a book once famous, the Diary of a Lover of Literature of
Thomas Green, written down to the very end of the
eighteenth century, have in their hands a volume in which
the very accents of Lord Cromer may seem to be heard.
Isaac d' Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern
authors in the dust ; Lord Cromer had a short way with
many of the writers most fashionable at this moment.
When he was most occupied with the resuscitations of
ancient manners, of which I have already spoken, I found
to my surprise that he had never read Marius the Epicurean.
I recommended it to him, and with his usual instant
response to suggestion, he got it at once and began reading
it. But I could not persuade him to share my enthusiasm,
and, what was not like him, he did not read Marius to
the end. The richness and complication of Pater's style
annoyed him. He liked prose to be clear and stately ; he
liked it, in English, to be Addisonian. Even Gibbon
though he read The Decline and Fall over again, very
carefully, so late as 1913 was not entirely to his taste.
He enjoyed the limpidity and the irony, but the sustained
roll of Gibbon's antitheses vexed him a little. He liked
prose to be quite simple.

In many ways, Lord Cromer, during those long and
desultory conversations about literature which will be so
perennial a delight to look back upon, betrayed his con-
stitutional detestation of the Romantic attitude. He
believed himself to be perfectly catholic in his tastes, and
resented the charge of prejudice. But he was, in fact,
irritated by the excesses and obscurities of much that is
fashionable to-day in the world of letters, and he refused
Ms tribute of incense to several popular idols. He thought
that, during the course of the nineteenth century, German
influences had seriously perturbed the balance of taste in

Three Experiments in Portraiture 207

Europe. I do not know that Lord Cromer had pursued
these impressions very far, or that he had formed any
conscious theory with regard to them. But he was very
" eighteenth century " in his suspicion of enthusiasm, and
I always found him amusingly impervious to ideas of a
visionary or mystical order. It was impossible that so
intelligent and omnivorous a reader as he should not be
drawn to the pathetic figure of Pascal, but he was puzzled
by him. He described him as " manifestly a man full of
contrasts, difficult to understand, and as many-sided as
Odysseus/' On another occasion, losing patience with
Pascal, he called him " a half-lunatic man of genius."
Fe"nelon annoyed him still more ; the spiritual experiences
of the Archbishop of Cambrai he found " almost incom-
prehensible/' His surprising, but after all perfectly con-
sistent, comment on both Fenelon and Pascal was, " How
much more easy Buffon is to understand ! "

He recommended all young men who intend to take a
part in politics carefully to study pre-Revolutionary history,
and one of his objections to the romantic literature of
Rousseau downwards was that it did not help such study.
It was too individualistic in its direction. It tended,
moreover, Lord Cromer thought, to disturb the balance of
judgment, that " level-headedness " which he valued so
highly, and had exercised with such magnificent authority.
He disliked the idea that genius involved a lack of sanity,
or, in other words, of self-command. He regretted that
Dryden had given general currency to this idea by his
famous lines in Absalom and Achitofihel :

" Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide; "

but Lord Cromer was himself, perhaps, too ready to account
by insanity for every odd or confused expression in literature.
He had nothing to say about Mazzini, whom he swept aside

208 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

impatiently, except that he " was a semi-lunatic/' and I
have heard him declare of Chatterton and Verlaine a
strange couple that they were a pair of madmen. He
objected violently to Baudelaire, but I think he knew very
little about that poet's works.

If I mention these things, it is because they seem to be
necessary to give human character to any sketch of the
mind of Lord Cromer. He himself hated mere eulogy,
which he said had ruined most of the biographies of the
world. The official lives of Disraeli and Gladstone did not
escape a measure of his blame in this respect, and it will be
recalled that resentment against what he thought a shadow-
less portrait led to his own very vivacious paper on Disraeli,
which he afterwards issued as a pamphlet. He was an avid
reader of memoirs, and of political memoirs in particular,
but he almost always passed upon them the same criticism

that they were too public. " I don't want Mr. ,"

he would say, (C to tell me what I can learn for myself by
turning up the file of the Morning Post. I want him to tell
me what I can't find out elsewhere. And he need not be
so very much afraid of hinting that his hero had faults,
for if he had not had defects we should never have heard
of his qualities. We are none of us perfect, and we don't
want a priggish biographer to pretend that we are." He
was speaking here mainly of political matters; but Lord
Cromer' s training and experience had a strong bearing on
his literary tastes. With him politics reacted on literature,
although he liked to fancy that he kept them wholly apart.

No doubt a selection from his correspondence will one
day be given to the world, for he was a vivid, copious, and
daring letter-writer. I suppose that he wrote to each of
his friends mainly on the subject which absorbed that
friend most, and as his own range of sympathies and
interests was very wide, it is probable that his letters will
prove excellent general reading. As in so many other of

Three Experiments in Portraiture 209

the departments of life, Lord Cromer did not think letter-
writing a matter to be lightly regarded or approached
without responsibility. He said :

" There are two habits which I have contracted, and
which I have endeavoured to pass on to my children, as
I have found them useful. One is to shut the door after
me when I leave the room, and the other is always to affix
the day of the month and the year to every document,
however unimportant, that I sign. I have received num-
bers of letters, not only from women, one of whose numerous
privileges it is to be vague, but also from men in high
official positions, dated with the day of the week only.
When the document is important, such a proceeding is a
fraud on posterity."

He often, both in conversation and in letters, took up
one of his favourite classic tags, and wove a- shrewd modern
reflection round it. For instance, a couple of years before
the war, a phrase of Aristotle recommending a ruthless
egotism in the conduct of war, led him to say :

" I think that at times almost every modern nation has
acted on this principle, though they gloss it over with fine
words. Its principal exponents of late have unquestionably
been the Hohenzollerns."

And, in connection with the axiom of Thucydides that
war educates through violence, he wrote, about the same
time :

" The Germans, who, in spite of their culture, preserve

a strain of barbarism in their characters, are the modern

representatives of this view. There is just this amount of

truth in it that at the cost of undue and appalling

p

2i o Some Diversions' of a Man of Letters

sacrifices, war brings out certain fine qualities in individuals,
and sometimes in nations."

This may, surely, be taken as a direct prophecy of the
magnificent effort of France. Lord Cromer's reflections,
thrown off- in the warmth of personal contact, often had a
pregnant directness. For instance, how good this is :

" The prejudice against the Boeotians was probably in
a large measure due to the fact that, as the late Lord
Salisbury might have said, they ' put their money on the
wrong horse ' during the Persian war. So also, it may be
observed, did the oracle at Delphi."

Lord Cromer's public speeches and published writings
scarcely give a hint of his humour, which was lambent and
sometimes almost boyish. He loved to be amused, and he
repaid his entertainer by being amusing. I suppose that
after his return from Cairo he allowed this feature of his
character a much freer run. The legend used to be that he
was looked upon in Egypt as rather grim, and by no means
to be trifled with. He was not the man, we may be sure,
to be funny with a Young Turk, or to crack needless jokes
with a recalcitrant Khedive. But retirement softened
him, and the real nature of Lord Cromer, with its elements
of geniality and sportiveness, came into full play.

Eight years ago, I regret to admit, Mr. Lloyd George
was not the universal favourite in the House of Lords that
he has since become. Lord Cromer was one of those who
were not entirely reconciled to the financial projects of
the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. He compared the
Chancellor with Pescennius Niger,

" who aspired to be Emperor after the death of Pertinax,
and was already Governor of Syria. On being asked by
the inhabitants of that province to dimmish the land tax,

Three Experiments in Portraiture 2 1 1

he replied that, so far as he was concerned, not only would
he effect no diminution, but he regretted that he could
not tax the air which they breathed." -

The strained relations between Mr. Lloyd George and the
House of Lords inspired Lord Cromer with a really delightful
parallel from Dryden's Absalom and AchitopM (which, by
the way, was one of his favourite poems ) :

" Thus, worn or weakened, well or ill content,
Submit they must to DAVID'S government;
Impoverished and deprived of all command,
Their taxes doubled as they lost their land ;
And what was harder yet to flesh and blood,
Their gods disgraced, and burnt like common wood."

When he pointed this out to me, I entreated him to
introduce it into a speech on the Budget. But he said that
he was not sure of his audience, and then it was most
painful to an orator to make a literary reference which was
not taken up. Once at Sheffield, when he was urging the
necessity of a strong Navy upon a large public meeting,
he quoted Swinburne's splendid lines :

" All our past comes wailing in the wind,
And all our future thunders on the sea,"

without producing any effect at all. But the House of
Lords is not an illiterate audience, and I recollect that on
one occasion, when Lord Cromer himself was speaking on
preferential treatment for the Colonies, and quoted Prior :

" Euphemia (that is Preference) serves to grace my measure,
But Chios (that is Protection) is my real flame/'

the Peers received the couplet with hilarious appreciation.
He was very entertaining about the oddities of his life
in the East, and his stories were numberless. One was of a
petition which he once received from a young Egyptian
with a grievance, which opened with these words :

212 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

" Hell ! Lordship's face grow red when he hear quite
istly behaviour of Public Works Department towards
humble servant. "

He used to repeat these things with an inimitable chuckle
of enjoyment.

We have been told that he who blows through bronze
may breathe through silver. The severe preoccupations
of Lord Cromer's public life did not prevent him from
sedulously cultivating the art of verse. In 1903, before
his retirement from Egypt, he published a volume of
Paraphrases and Translations from the Greek, in the pre-
paration or selection of which I believe that he enjoyed
the advice of Mr. Mackail. It was rather unlucky that,
with a view to propitiate the angry critics, Lord Cromer
prefixed to this little book a preface needlessly modest.
He had no cause to apologise so deeply for exercises which
were both elegant and learned. It is a curious fact that,
in this collection of paraphrases, the translator did not
touch the Attic authors whom he knew so well he used to
copy out pages of J^schylus and Sophocles hi his loose
Greek script, with notes of his own but dealt entirely
with lyric and epigrammatic poets of the Alexandrian age.
Perhaps it seemed to him less daring to touch them than to
affront ^schylus. He was not quite sure about these
verses of his ; he liked them, and then he was afraid that
they were unworthy of the original. Out in Cairo it was so
difficult, he said, to get a critical opinion.

Among his unpublished translations there is one, from a
fragment of Euripides, which should not be lost, if only
because Lord Cromer himself liked it better than any
other of his versions. It runs :

" I learn what may be taught;
I seek what may be sought ;
My other wants I dare
To ask from Heaven in prayer."

Three Experiments in Portraiture 213

Of his satirical vers-de-sotitt, which it amused him to
distribute in private, he never, I believe, gave any to the
world, but they deserve preservation. Some serious
reflections on the advantages of the British occupation of
Egypt close with the quotation :

" Let them suffice for Britain's need

No nobler prize was ever won
The blessings of a people freed,
The consciousness of duty done."

These were, in a high degree, the rewards of Lord Cromer
himself.

After his settlement in London, Mr. T. E. Page sent him
a book, called Between Whiles, of English verse translated
into Latin and Greek. Lord Cromer was delighted with
this, and the desire to write in metre returned to him. He
used to send his friends, in letters, little triolets and epi-
grams, generally in English, but sometimes in Greek. But
he was more ambitious than this. So lately as February
1911, during the course of one of our long conversations
upon literature, he asked me to suggest a task of trans-
lation on which he could engage. It was just the moment
when he was particularly busy with Constitutional Free
Trade and Woman Suffrage and other public topics, but
that made no difference. It had always seemed to me that
he had been most happy in his versions of the Bucolic
poets, and so I urged him to continue his translations by
attempting the Europa of Moschus. He looked at it, and
pronounced it unattractive. I was therefore not a little
surprised to receive a letter, on March 25th, in which he
said:

" Not sleeping very well last night, I composed in my
head these few lines merely as a specimen to begin Europa :

" When dawn is nigh, at the third watch of night,
What time, more sweet than honey of the bee,

214 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Sleep courses through, the brain some vision bright,

To lift the veil which hides futurity,
Fair Cypris sent a fearful dream to mar

The slumbers of a maid whose frightened eyes
Pictured the direful clash of horrid war,

And she, Europa, was the victor's prize."

" They are, of course, only a first attempt, and I do not
think much of them myself. But do you think the sort
of style and metre suitable? "

He went steadily on till he completed the poem, and on
April 27 th I received a packet endorsed " Patched-up
Moschus returned herewith." So far as I know, this
version of the Europa, conducted with great spirit in his
seventieth year, has never been published. It is the
longest and most ambitious of all his poetical experiments.

Lord Cromer was fond of saying that he considered the
main beauty of Greek poetry to reside in its simplicity, In
all his verses he aimed at limpidity and ease. He praised
the Greek poets for not rhapsodising about the beauties
of nature, and this was very characteristic of his own
eighteenth-century habit of mind. His general attitude
to poetry, which he read incessantly and in four languages,
was a little difficult to define. He was ready to give lists
of his life-long prime favourites, and, as was very natural,
these differed from time to time. But one list of the books
he had " read more frequently than any other" consisted
of the Iliad, the Book of Job, Tristram Shandy, and Pick-
wick, to which he added Lycidas and the Tenth Satire of
Juvenal. It would require a good deal of ingenuity to
'bring these six masterpieces into line. He was consistent
in declaring that the 28th chapter of Job was " the finest
bit of poetry ever written."

He was violently carried away in 1912 by reading Mr.
Livingstone's book on The Greek Genius. It made him a
little regret the pains he had expended on the Hymns of

Three Experiments in Portraiture 215

Callimaclms and the Bucolics of Theocritus, and he thought
that perhaps he ought to have confined himself to the
severer and earlier classics. But surely he had followed
his instinct, and it would have been a pity if he had narrowed
his range. It was the modernness of the Alexandrian
authors, and perhaps their Egyptian flavour, which had
justly attracted him. He did not care very much for an
antiquity which he could not revivify for his own vision.
I urged him to read a book which had fascinated me, The
Religion of Numa, by a learned American, the late Mr. Jesse
Carter. Lord Cromer read it with respect, but he admitted
that those earliest Roman ages were too remote and cold
for him.

Lord Crorner was very much annoyed with Napoleon
for having laid it down that apres soixante ans, un Jiomme
ne vaut rien. The rash dictum had certainly no applica-
tion to himself. It is true that, under the strain of the
long tropical years, his bodily health declined as he ap-
proached the age of sixty. But his mental activity, his
marvellous receptivity, were not merely maintained, but
seemed steadily to advance. He continued to be con-
sumed by that lust for knowledge, libido sciendi, which
he admired in the ancient Greeks. When the physicians
forbade him, four years ago, to expend his failing strength
any longer on political and social propaganda, instead of
retiring, as most men of his age would have done, to dream
in the recesses of his library, he plunged with renewed
ardour into the one occupation still permitted to him :
literature. The accident of his publishing a criticism which
excited wide popular attention led to his becoming, when
past his seventieth birthday, a " regular reviewer" for the
Spectator, where the very frequent papers signed " C."
became a prominent feature. Those articles were, perhaps,
most remarkable for the light they threw on the writer's
own temperament, on his insatiable desire for knowledge,

216 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Lord Cromer's curiosity in all intellectual directions was,
to the last, like that of a young man beginning his mental
career; and when he adopted the position, so uncommon
in a man of his experience and authority, of a reviewer of
current books, it was because he wished to share with others
the excitement he himself enjoyed in the tapping of fresh
sources of information.

Ill
THE LAST DAYS OF LORD REDESDALE

THE publication of Lord Redesdale's Memories which
was one of the most successful autobiographies of recent
times familiarised thousands of readers with the principal
adventures of a very remarkable man, but, when all was
said and done, left an incomplete impression of his taste
and occupations on the minds of those who were not familiar
with his earlier writings. His literary career had been a
very irregular one. He took up literature rather late, and
produced a book that has become a classic Tales of Old
Japan. He did not immediately pursue this success, but
became involved in public activities of many kinds, which
distracted his attention. In his sixtieth year he brought
out The Bamboo Garden, and from that time until, in his
eightieth year, he died in full intellectual energy he
constantly devoted himself to the art of writing. His
zeal, his ambition, were wonderful ; but it was impossible
to overlook the disadvantage from which that ambition
and that zeal suffered in the fact that for the first sixty years
of his life the writer had cultivated the art but casually and
sporadically. He retained, in spite of all the labour which
he expended, a certain stiffness, an air of the amateur, of
which he himself was always acutely conscious.

Three Experiments in Portraiture 217

This did not interfere with the direct and sincere appeal
nade to general attention by the 1915 Memories, a book
so full of geniality and variety, so independent in its judg-
ments and so winning in its ingenuousness, that its wider
popularity could be the object of no surprise. But, to those
who knew Lord Redesdale intimately, it must always
appear that his autobiography fails to explain him from
what we may call the subjective point of view. It tells
us of his adventures and his friendships, of the strange
lands he visited and of the unexpected confidences he
received, but it does not reveal very distinctly the
character of the writer. There is far more of his intej-
lectual constitution, of his personal tastes and mental
habits, in the volume of essays of 1912, called A Tragedy
in Stone, but even here much is left unsaid and even
unsuggested.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Lord Redesdale
was the redundant vitality of his character. His nature
swarmed with life, like a drop of pond-water under a micro-
scope. There cannot be found room in any one nature for
all the qualities, and what he lacked in some degree was
concentration. But very few men who have lived in our
complicated age have done well in so many directions as he,
or, aiming widely, have failed in so few. He shrank from
no labour and hesitated before no difficulty, but pushed
on with an extraordinary energy along many various lines
of activity. But the two lines in which he most desired and
most determined to excel, gardening and authorship, are
scarcely to be discerned, except below the surface, in his
Memories. Next to his books, what he regarded with most
satisfaction was his wonderful garden at Batsford, and of
this there is scarcely a word of record in the autobiography.
He had always intended to celebrate this garden, and when
he was preparing to return to Batsford in 1915 he wrote to
me that he was going to write an Apologia pro Horto meo, as

218 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

long before he had composed one pro Bamhtsis meis. A
book which should combine with the freest fancies of his
intellect a picture of the exotic groves of Batsford was what
was required to round off Lord Redcsclale's literary adven-
tures. It will be seen that he very nearly succeeded in
thus setting the top-stone on his literary edifice.

One reason, perhaps, why Batsford, which was ever
present to his thoughts, is so very slightly and vaguely
mentioned in Lord Redesdalc's Memories, may be the fact
that from 1910 onwards he was not living in it himself,
and that it was irksome to him to magnify in print horti-
cultural beauties which were for the time being in the posses-
sion of others. The outbreak of the war, in which all his
five sons were instantly engaged, was the earliest of a series
of changes which completely altered the surface of Lord
Redesdalc's life. Batsford came once more into his personal
occupation, and at the same time it became convenient
to give up his London house in Kensington Court. Many
things combined to transform his life in the, early summer of
1915. His eldest son, Major the Hon. Clement Mitford,
after brilliantly distinguishing himself in battle, was received
by the King and decorated, to the rapturous exultation
of his father. Major Mitford returned to the French front,
only to fall on May rjth, 1915.

At this time I was seeing Lord Ivcdesdale very frequently,
and I could not but be struck by the effect of this blow upon
his temperament. After Die first shock of sorrow, I
observed in him the determination not to allow himself to
be crushed. His dominant vitality asserted itself almost
with violence, and lie seemed to clench his teeth in defiance of
the assault on his individuality. It required on the part of
so old a man no little fortitude, for it is easier to bear a great
and heroic bereavement than to resist the wearing vexation
of seeing one's system of daily occupation crumbling away,
Lord Reclcsdale was pleased to bo going again to Batsford,

Three Experiments in Portraiture 219

which had supplied him in years past with so much sump-
tuous and varied entertainment, but it was a matter of alarm
with him to give up all, or almost all, the various ties with
London which had meant so much to his vividly social
nature.

Meanwhile, during the early months of 1915 in London,
he had plenty of employment in finishing and revising his
Memories, which it had taken him two years to write. This
was an occupation which bridged over the horrid chasm
between his old active life in London, with its thousand
interests, and the uncertain and partly dreaded prospect
of exile in the bamboo-gardens of a remote corner of
Gloucestershire, where he foresaw that deafness must needs
exclude him from the old activities of local life.

He finished revising the manuscript of his Memories in
July, and then went down, while the actual transference of his
home was taking place, to the Royal Yacht Squadron Castle,
Cowes, where he had been accustomed to spend some of the
most enjoyable hours of his life. But this scene, habitually
thronged with people, and palpitating with gaiety, in the
midst of which Lord Redesdale found himself so singularly
at home, was now, more than perhaps any other haunt of
the English sportsman, in complete eclipse. The weather
was lovely, but there were no yachts, no old chums, no
charming ladies. " It is very dull," he wrote; " the sole
inhabitant of the Club besides myself was Lord Falkland,
and now he is gone/* In these conditions Lord Redesdale
became suddenly conscious that the activity of the last two
or three years was over, that the aspect of his world had
changed, and that he was in danger of losing that hold upon
life to which he so resolutely clung. In conditions of this
kind he always turned to seek for something mentally
" craggy," as Byron said, and at Cowes he wonderfully
found the writings of Nietzsche. The result is described
in a remarkable letter to myself (July 28th, 1915), which

220 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

I auote because it marks the earliest stage in the composition
;t unfinished book :

" I have been trying to occupy myself with Nietzsche,
_>n the theory that there must be something great about a
man who exercised the immense influence that he did. But
I confess I am no convert to any of his various moods. Here
and there I find gems of thought, but one has to wade
through a morass of blue mud to get at them. Here is a
capital saying of his which may be new to you in a letter
to his friend Rohde he writes : c Eternally we need midwives'
in order to be delivered of our thoughts/ We cannot work
in solitude. ' Woe to us who lack the sunlight of a friend's
presence/

" How true that is ! When I come down here, I think
that with so much time on my hands I shall be able to get
through a pile of work. Not a bit of it ! I find it difficult
even to write a note. To me it is an imperative necessity
to have the sympathetic counsel of a friend."

The letter continued with an impassioned appeal to his
correspondent to find some definite intellectual work for
him to undertake. " You make me dare, and that is much
towards winning a game. You must sharpen my wits,
which are blunt enough just now." In short, it was a cry
from the island of boredom to come over the water and
administer first-aid.

Accordingly, I started for Cowcs, and was welcomed at
the pier with all my host's habitual and vivacious hospi-
tality. Scarcely were we seated in our wicker-chairs in
face of the Solent, not twinkling as usual with pleasure-sails,
but sinister with strange instruments of warfare, than he
began the attack. " What am I to do with myself ? " was
the instant question ; " what means can I find of occupying
this dreadful void of leisure?" To which the obvious

Three Experiments in Portraiture 221

reply was : " First of all, you must exhibit to me the famous
attractions of Cowes 1 " " There are none," he replied in
comic despair, but we presently invented some, and my
visit, which extended over several radiant days of a perfect
August, was diversified with walks and excursions by land
and water, in which my companion was as active and as
ardent as though he had been nineteen instead of seventy-
nine. In a suit picturesquely marine, with his beautiful
silver hair escaping from a jaunty yachting cap, he was the
last expression of vivacity and gaiety.

The question of his intellectual occupation in the future
came, however, incessantly to the front ; and our long talks
in the strange and uncanny solitude of the Royal Yacht
Squadron Castle always came to this : What task was he
to take up next ? His large autobiography was now coming
back to him from the printers in packets of proof, with which
he was closeted night and morning; and I suggested that
while this was going on there was no need for him to think
about future enterprises. To tell the truth, I had regarded
the Memories as likely to be the final labour of Lord Redes-
dale's busy life. It seemed to me that at his advanced age
he might now well withdraw into dignified repose. I even
hinted so much in terms as delicate as I could make them,
but the suggestion was not well received. I became con-
scious that there was nothing he was so little prepared to
welcome as " repose " ; that, in fact, the terror which pos-
sessed him was precisely the dread of having to withdraw
from the stage of life. His deafness, which now began to
be excessive, closed to his eager spirit so many of the avenues
of experience, that he was more than ever anxious to keep
clear those that remained to him, and of these, literary
expression came to be almost the only one left. In the
absence of a definite task his path in this direction led
through darkness.

But it was not until after several suggestions and many

222 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

conversations that light was found. The friend so pressingly
appealed to returned to London, where he was stern in
rejecting several projects, hotly flung at his head and then
coldly abandoned, A study of the Empress Maria Theresa,
suggested by a feverish perusal of Pechler, was the latest
and least attractive of these. Lord Redesdale then frankly
demanded that a subject should be found for him. " You
have brought this upon yourself/' he said, " by encouraging
me to write." What might prove the scheme of a very
pleasant book then occurred to me, and I suggested to
the fiery and impatient author, who had by this time retired
for good to Batsford, that he should compose a volume of
essays dealing with things in general, but bound together
by a constantly repeated reference to his wild garden of
bamboos and the Buddha in his secret grove. The author
was to suppose himself seated with a friend on the terrace
at the top of the garden, and to let the idea of the bamboo
run through the whole tissue of reflections and reminiscences
like an emerald thread. Lord Redesdale was enchanted,
and the idea took fire at once. He replied :

" You are Orpheus, with his lute moving the rocks and
stones ! I shall work all my conceits into your plan,, and
am now proceeding to my garden shrine to meditate on it.
I will try to make a picture of the VELUVANA, the bamboo-
garden which was the first Vikara or monastery of Buddha
and his disciples. There I will sit, and, looking on the
great statue of Buddha in meditation, I shall begin to
arrange all sorts of wild imaginings which may come into
my crazy brain.' 3

In this way was started the book, of which, alas 1 only
such fragments were composed as form the earlier part of
the volume published after his death. It is, however, right
to point out that for the too-brief remainder of his life

Three Experiments in Portraiture 223

Lord Redesdale was eagerly set on the scheme of which a
hint has just been given. The Veluvana was to be the
crowning production of his literary life, and it was to sum
up the wisdom of the East and the gaiety of the West,
He spoke of it incessantly, in letters and conversation.
" That will do to go into Velwuana" was Ms cry when
he met with anything rare or strange. For instance, on
September 15 th, 1915, he wrote to me :

" To-day, all of a sudden I was struck by the idea that
plants, having many human qualities, may also in some
degree have human motives that they are not altogether
mere automata and as I thought, I began to imagine that
I could detect something resembling purpose in the move-
ments of certain plants. I have jotted down a few notes,
and you will see when I expand them that at any rate the
idea calls attention to the movements themselves, some of
which seem never to have been noticed at all, or certainly
at best very inadequately. You will see that this brings
in the bamboo-garden and Buddha, and so keeps to the
scheme of Veluvama"

The monasteries of twelfth-century Japanese Buddhism,
which he had visited long before in the neighbourhood of
Kioto, now recurred to his memory, and he proposed to
describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed from an Indian
Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinary in-
terest, and wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back
to his Japanese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow"s
famous dictionary. He wrote to me :

" No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did
in the early days of our intercourse with Japan. He was
a valuable asset to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who,
with all his energy and force of character, would never have

224 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

succeeded as he did without Satow. Aston was another
very strong man."

These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit
of Vcluvana, but unfortunately what Lord Rcdcsdalc wrote
in this direction proved to be too slight for publication. He
met with some expressions of extremely modem Japanese
opinion which annoyed him, and to which he was tempted
to give more attention than they deserve. It began to be
obvious that the enterprise was one for which great concen-
tration of effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was
not to be secured at will, were imperatively needed. In
leaving London, he was not content, and no one could
have wished him to be willing, to break abruptly all the
cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee of the National
Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still occu-
pied with the administration of the Wallace Collection,
and he did not abate his interest in these directions. They
made it necessary that he should come up to town every
other week. This made up in some measure for the inevit-
able disappointment of finding that in Gloucestershire his
deafness now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly
duties which had in earlier years diversified and entertained
his country life. lie had been a great figure among the
squires and farmers of the Cotswokls, but all this was now
at an end, paralysed by the hopeless decay of his hearing.
It grieved him, too, that lie was unable to do any useful
war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon
his pen and his flying visits to London for refreshment.
He was a remarkably good letter-writer, and he now de-
manded almost pathetically to be fed with the apples of
correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915) :

" Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of
taking a part any longer in the doings of the great world,

Three Experiments in Portraiture 225

The Country Mouse even if the creature were able to scuttle
back into the cellars of the great would still be out of all
communion with the mighty, owing to physical infirmity.
And now comes the kind Town Mouse and tells him all
that he most cares to know."

He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the
most of both. " I hate the autumn/' he said, " for it means
the death of the year, but I try to make the death of the
garden as beautiful as possible." Among his plants, and
up and down the high places of his bamboo-feathered
rockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he
could no longer hear into small dark pools full of many-
coloured water-lilies, his activity was like that of a boy. He
had the appearance, the tastes, the instincts of vigorous
manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limit of such gifts,
and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him
by the one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by
this time become almost impenetrable to sound.

Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened
his mental force. With the arrival of his eightieth year,
his activity and curiosity of intellect were certainly rather
increased than abated. He wrote to me from Batsford
(December 28th, 1915) :

" I have been busy for the last two months making a
close study of Dante. I have read all the Inferno and half
of the Pur gator io. It is hard work, but the ' readings ' of
my old schoolfellow, W. W. Vernon, are an incalculable help,
and now within the last week or two has appeared Hoare's
Italian Dictionary, published by the Cambridge University
Press. A much-needed book, for the previous dictionaries
were practically useless except for courier's work.- How
splendid Dante is 1 But how sickening are the Commen-
tators, Benvenuto da Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of
Q

226 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

them I They won't let the poet say that the sun shone
or the night was dark without seeing some hidden and
mystic meaning in it. They always seem to chercher
midi a quatorze heures, and irritate me beyond measure.
There is invention enough in Dante without all their cm-
broidery. But this grubbing and grouting seems to be
infectious among Dante scholars they all catch the
disease,"

^ He flung himself into these Italian studies with all his
accustomed ardour. He corresponded with the eminent
veteran of Dante scholarship, the Honourable W. W.
Vcrnon, whom he mentions in the passage just quoted, and
Mr. Vernon's letters gave him great delight. He wrote
to me again :

" This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. Of
course, I knew the catch quotations in Dante, but I
never before attempted to read him. The difficulty
scared me."

Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction.
He worked away for hours at a time, braving the mono-
tonies of the Purgatorio without flagging, but he broke
down early in the Paradiso. He had no sympathy whatever
with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was extremely
bored by the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the Empyrean.
I confess I took advantage of this to recall his attention to
Vchwana, for which it was no longer possible to hope that
the author would collect any material out of Dante.

An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on Russian
history during the Long Vacation of 1916 was a compliment
to the value of the Russian chapters of his Memories, but
it was another distraction. It took his thoughts away
from Vcluvana, although he protested to me that he could

Three Experiments in Portraiture 227

prepare his Cambridge address, and yet continue to marshal
his fancies for the book. Perhaps I doubted it, and dared
to disapprove, for he wrote (March I7th, 1916) :

" You scold me for writing too much. That is the least
of my troubles ! You must remember that debarred as I
am from taking part in society, the Three R's alone remain
to me, and, indeed, of those only two for owing to my
having enjoyed an Eton education in days when arith-
metic was deemed to be no part of the intellectual panoply
of a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide ! I
am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time/'

He was really composing more actively than he himself
realised. About this time he wrote :

" Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford
not the Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible
but the unhappy hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte,
who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the
third-rate English Colony in Paris all his faults exaggerated,
none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good
British public has so long been used to look upon him as
a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be
told that he had many admirable points."

At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redes-
dale was very remarkable. He had settled down into his
life at Batsford, diversified by the frequent dashes to Lon-
don. His years seemed to sit upon him more lightly than
ever. His azAirc eyes, his curled white head thrown back,
the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the
external symbols of an inner man perpetually fresh, ready
for adventure and delighted with the pageant of existence.
He found no fault at all with life, save that it must leave

228 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

him, and he had squared his shoulders not to give way to
weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just
that visible determination to be strong. But the features
of his character had none of those mental wrinkles, those
" rides de 1' esprit/' which Montaigne describes as proper to
old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltless of the old man's
self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. His
curiosity and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends,
and so, in spite of his amusing violence in denouncing his
own forgetfulness, was his memory of passing events. In
the petulance of his optimism he was like a lad.

There was no change in the early part of last year,
although it was manifest that the incessant journeying
between Batsford and London exhausted him. The garden
occupied him more and more, and he was distracted by the
great storm of the end of March, which blew down and
destroyed at the head of the bridge the wonderful group
of cypresses, which he called " the pride of my old age./'
But, after a gesture of despair, he set himself energetically
to repair the damage. He was in his usual buoyant health
when the very hot spell in May tempted him out on
May i8th, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swin-
brook, a beautiful village on his Oxfordshire property, of
which he was particularly fond. He was not successful,
and in a splenetic mood he flung himself at full length upon
a bank of wet grass. He was not allowed to remain there
long, but the mischief was done, and in a few hours he was
suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result might
not have been serious had it not been that in a few days'
time he was due to fulfil certain engagements in town.
Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale more than not to keep a
pledge. In all such matters he prided himself on being
punctual and trustworthy, and he refused to change his
plans by staying at home.

Accordingly, on May 23rd he came to London to

Three Experiments in Portraiture 229

transact some business, and to take the chair next day at
a meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, of which he
was: a vice-president. This meeting took place in the
afternoon, and^he addressed a crowded assembly, which
greeted him with great warmth. Those who were present,
and saw his bright eyes and heard his ringing voice, could
have no suspicion that they would see him again no more.
His intimate friends alone perceived that he was making a
superlative effort. There followed a very bad night, and
he went down to Batsford next day, going straight to his
bed, from which he never rose again. His condition, at
first, gave rise to little alarm. The disease, which proved to
be catarrhal jaundice, took its course; but for a long time
his spirit and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him
and filled those around him with hope. There was no
disturbance of mind to the very last. In a shaky hand,
with his stylograph, he continued to correspond with
certain friends, about politics, and books, and even about
Veluvana. In the beginning of August there seemed to be
symptoms of improvement, but these were soon followed by
a sudden and final relapse. Even after this, Lord Redes-
dale' s interest and curiosity were sustained. In his very last
letter to myself, painfully scrawled only one week before
his death, he wrote :

" Have you seen Ernest Daudet's book just published,
Les auteurs de la guerre de 1914? Bismarck is the subject
of the first volume; the second will deal with the Kaiser
and the Emperor Joseph ; and the third with leurs complices.
I know E. D. ; he is a brother of Alphonse, and is a com-
petent historian. His book is most illuminating. Of course
there are exaggerations, but he is always well documents,
and there is much in his work that is new. I don't admire
his style. The abuse of the historic present is bad enough,
but what can be said in favour of the historic future with

230 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

which we meet at every step? It sets my teeth on
edge."

But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later he
passed into an unconscious state, dying peacefully at noon
on August i7th, 1916. He was saved, as he had wished
to be, from all consciousness of decrepitude.

THOMAS HARDY'S LYRICAL
POETRY

THE LYRICAL POETRY OF
THOMAS HARDY

WHEN, about Christinas time in 1898, Mr. Hardy's
admirers, who were expecting from him a new novel,
received instead a thick volume of verse, there was mingled
with their sympathy and respect a little disappointment
and a great failure in apprehension. Those who were
not rude enough to suggest that a cobbler should stick to
his last, reminded one another that many novelists had
sought relaxation by trifling with the Muses. Thackeray
had published Ballads, and George Eliot had expatiated
in a Legend of Jubal. No one thought the worse of Con-
ingsby because its author had produced a Revolutionary
Epic. It took some time for even intelligent criticism
to see that the new Wessex Poems did not fall into this
accidental category, and still, after twenty years, there
survives a tendency to take the verse of Mr. Hardy, abun-
dant and solid as it has become, as a mere subsidiary and
ornamental appendage to his novels. It is still necessary
to insist on the complete independence of his career as a
poet, and to point out that if he had never published a
page of prose he would deserve to rank high among the
writers of his country on the score of the eight volumes of
his verse. It is as a lyrical poet, and solely as a lyrical poet,
that I propose to speak of him to-day.

It has been thought extraordinary that Cowper was
over fifty when he published his first secular verses, but

233

234 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Mr. Hardy was approaching his sixtieth year when he sent
Wessex Poems to the press. Such self-restraint " none
hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more
unwearied spirit none shall ' ' has always fascinated the
genuine artist, but few have practised it with so much
tenacity. When the work of Mr. Hardy is completed,
nothing, it is probable, will more strike posterity than its
unity, its consistency. He has given proof, as scarce any
other modern writer has done, of tireless constancy of
resolve. His novels formed an unbroken series from the
Desperate Remedies of 1871 to The Well-Beloved of 1897.
In the fulness of his success, and unscduced by all tempta-
tion, he closed that chapter of his career, and has kept it
closed. Since 1898 he has been, persistently and periodi-
cally, a poet and nothing else. That he determined, for
reasons best left to his own judgment, to defer the
exhibition of his verse until he had completed his work
in prose, ought not to prejudice criticism in its analysis
of the lyrics and the colossal dramatic panorama. Mr.
Hardy, exclusively as a poet, demands our undivided
attention.

It is legitimate to speculate on other probable causes of
Mr. Hardy' s delay. From such information as lies scattered
before us, we gather that it was from 1865 to 1867 that he
originally took poetry to be his vocation. The dated
pieces in the volume of 1898 help us to form an idea of the
original character of his utterance. On the whole it was
very much what it remains in the pieces composed after a
lapse of half a century. Already, as a very young man,
Mr. Hardy possessed his extraordinary insight into the
movements of human character, and his eloquence in
translating what he had observed of the tragedy and pain
of rustic lives. No one, for sixty years, had taken so closely
to heart the admonitions of Wordsworth in his famous
Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads to seek for

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 235

inspiration in that condition where " the passions of men
are incorporated with the beautiful forms of nature."
But it may well be doubted whether Mr. Hardy's poems
would have been received in the mid- Victorian age with
favour, or even have been comprehended. Fifty years ahead
of his time, he was asking in 1866 for novelty of ideas,
and he must have been conscious that his questioning would
seem inopportune. He needed a different atmosphere,
and he left the task of revolt to another, and, at first sight,
a very unrelated force, that of the Poems and Ballads of
the same year. But Swinburne succeeded in his revolution,
and although he approached the art from an opposite
direction, he prepared the way for an ultimate appreciation
of Mr. Hardy.

We should therefore regard the latter, in spite of his
silence of forty years, as a poet who laboured, like Swin-
burne, at a revolution against the optimism and superficial
sweetness of his age. Swinburne, it is true, tended to
accentuate the poetic side of poetry, while Mr. Hardy drew
verse, in some verbal respects, nearer to prose. This does
not affect their common attitude, and the sympathy of
these great artists for one another 1 s work has already been
revealed, and will be still more clearly exposed. But they
were unknown to each other in 1866, when to both of them
the cheap philosophy of the moment, the glittering femi-
ninity of the " jewelled line/' the intense respect for Mrs.
Grundy in her Sunday satin, appeared trumpery, hateful,
and to be trampled upon. We find in Mr. Hardy's earliest
verse no echo of the passionate belief in personal immortality
which was professed by Ruskin and Browning. He op-
posed the Victorian theory of human "progress"; the
Tennysonian beatific Vision seemed to him ridiculous.
He rejected the idea of the sympathy and goodness of
Nature, and was in revolt against the self-centredness of
the Romantics. We may conjecture that he combined a

236 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

great reverence for The Book of Job with a considerable
contempt for In Memoriam.

This was not a mere rebellious fancy which passed off;
it was something inherent that remained, and gives to-day
their peculiar character to Mr. Hardy's latest lyrics. But
before we examine the features of this personal mode of
interpreting poetry to the world, we may collect what
little light we can on the historic development of it. In the
pieces dated between 1865 and 1867 we lind the gerrn of
almost everything which has since characterised the poet.
In " Amabel " the ruinous passage of years, which has
continued to be an obsession with Mr. Hardy, is already
crudely dealt with. The habit of taking poetical negatives
of small scenes ff your face, and the God-curst sun, and
a tree, and a pond edged with grayish leaves'* (" Neutral
Times") which had not existed in English verse since the
days of Crabbe, reappears. There is marked already a
sense of terror and resentment against the blind motions of
chance In "Hap" the author would positively welcome
a certainty of divine hatred as a relief from the strain of
depending upon " crass casualty." Here and there in
these earliest pieces an extreme difficulty of utterance is
remarkable in the face of the case which the poet attained
afterwards in the expression of his most strange images
and fantastic revelations. We read in " At a Bridal" :

" Should I, too, wed as slave to Mode's docivc,
And each thus found apart, of false desire
A stolid line, whom no high aims will lire
As had fired ours could ever have mingled we ! "

This, although perfectly reducible, takes time to think
out, and at a hasty glance seems muffled up in obscurity
beyond the darkness of Donne; moreover, it is scarcely
worthy in form of the virtuoso which Mr. Hardy was
presently to become. Perhaps of the poems certainly

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 237

attributable to this earliest period, the little cycle of sonnets
called " She to Him" gives clearest promise of what was
coming. The sentiment is that of Ronsard's famous
" Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, & la chandelle,"
but turned round, as Mr. Hardy loves to do, from the man
to the woman, and embroidered with ingenuities, such as
where the latter says that as her temperament dies clown the
habit of loving will remain, and she be

" Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came/'

which attest a complexity of mind that Ronsard's society
knew nothing of.

On the whole, we may perhaps be safe in conjecturing
that whatever the cause, the definite dedication to verse
was now postponed. Meanwhile, the writing of novels had
become the business of Mr. Hardy's life, and ten years go
by before we trace a poet in that life again. But it is
interesting to find that when the great success of Far from
the Madding Crowd had introduced him to a circle of the
best readers, there followed an effect which again disturbed
his ambition for the moment. Mr. Hardy was once more
tempted to change the form of his work. He wished " to
get back to verse," but was dissuaded by Leslie Stephen,
who induced him to start writing The Return of the
Native instead. On March 29th, 1875, Coventry Patmore,
then a complete stranger, wrote to express his regret that
"such almost unequalled beauty and power as appeared
in the novels should not have assured themselves the
immortality which would have been conferred upon them
by the form of verse." This was just at the moment
when we find Mr. Hardy's conversations with " long Leslie
Stephen in the velveteen coat" obstinately turning upon
" theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things,
the constitution of matter, and the unreality of time."

238 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

To this period belongs also the earliest conception of The
Dynasts, an old note-book containing, under the date
June 2oth, 1875, the suggestion that the author should
attempt " An Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815."

To this time also seems to belong the execution of what
has proved the most attractive section of Mr. Hardy's
poetry, the narratives, or short Wessex ballads. The
method in which these came into the world is very curious.
Many of these stories were jotted down to the extent of a
stanza or two when the subject first occurred to the author.
For instance, " The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," first pub-
lished by Lionel Johnson in 1894, had been begun as
early as 1867, and was finished ten years later. The long
ballad of " Leipzig" and the savage " San Sebastian/' both
highly characteristic, were also conceived and a few
lines of each noted down long before their completion.
" Valenciennes," however, belongs to 1878, and the " Dance
at the Phoenix," of which the stanza beginning " 'Twas
Christmas" alone had been written years before, seems
to have been finished about the same time. What evidence
is before us goes to prove that in the 'seventies Mr. Hardy
became a complete master of the art of verse, and that his
poetic style was by this time fixed. He still kept poetry
out of public sight, but he wrote during the next twenty
years, as though in a backwater off the stream of his novels,
the poems which form the greater part of the volume of
1898. If no other collection of his lyrical verse existed,
we should miss a multitude of fine things, but our general
conception of his genius would be little modified.

We should judge carelessly, however, if we treated the
subsequent volumes as mere repetitions of the original
Wessex Poems. They present interesting differences,
which I may rapidly note before I touch on the features
which characterise the whole body of Mr. Hardy's verse.
Poems of the Past and Present, which came out in the first

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 239

days of 1902, could not but be in a certain measure dis-
appointing, in so far as it paralleled its three years' product
with that of the thirty years of Wessex Poems. Old pieces
were published in it, and it was obvious that in 1898 Mr.
Hardy might be expected to have chosen from what used
to be called his "portfolio" those specimens which he
thought to be most attractive. But on further inspection
this did not prove to be quite the case. After pondering
for twelve years on the era of Napoleon, his preoccupation
began in 1887 to drive him into song :

" Must I pipe a palinody,
Or be silent thereupon ? ' *

He decides that silence has become impossible :

" Nay ; I'll sing ' The Bridge of Lodi '

That long-loved, romantic thing,

Though none show by smile or nod, he

Guesses why and what I sing 1 "

Here is the germ of The Dynasts. But in the meantime
the crisis of the Boer War had cut across the poet's dream
of Europe a hundred years ago, and a group of records of
the Dorsetshire elements of the British army at the close
of 1899 showed in Mr. Hardy's poetry what had not been
suspected there a military talent of a most remarkable
kind. Another set of pieces composed in Rome were not
so interesting; Mr. Hardy always seems a little languid
when he leaves the confines of his native Wessex. Another
section of Poems of the Past and Present is severely, almost
didactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language
the daring thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's
reverie, that God Himself has forgotten the existence of
earth, this " tiny sphere," this " tainted ball/' " so poor
a thing," and has left all human life to be the plaything of
blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by
ft The Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards

240 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

optimism as Mr. Hardy can let himself be drawn, or by such
reflections as those in " On a Fine Morning " :

" Whence comes Solace ? Not from seeing

What is doing, suffering, being ;

Not from noting Life's conditions,

Not from heeding Time's monitions ;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing on the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem."

Eight years more passed, years marked by the stupendous
effort of The Dynasts, before Mr. Hardy put forth another
collection of lyrical poems. Time's Laughingstocks con-
firmed, and more than confirmed, the high promise of
Wessex Poems. The author, in one of his modest prefaces,
where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our
anxiety not to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope
that Time's Langlringstocks will, as a whole, take the
" reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward."

The book, indeed, docs not take us " far " forward, simply
because the writer's style and scope were definitely exposed
to us already, and yet it docs take us " forward," because
the hand of the master is conspicuously firmer and his
touch more daring. The Langhingstocks themselves are
fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and isolation,
of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay.
No landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than
the night-pictures in " The Revisitation," where the old
soldier in barracks creeps out on to the gaunt down, and
meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) his ancient
mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation
of each to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document
for the future is "Reminiscences of a Dancing Man"?
If only Shakespeare could have left us such a song of the
London in 1585 ! But the power of the poet culminates
in the pathos of "The Tramp Woman" perhaps the

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 241 <-

greatest of all Mr. Hardy's lyrical poems and in the horror
of " A Sunday Morning's Tragedy,"

It is noticeable that Time's Laughingstocks is, in some
respects, a more daring collection than its predecessors.
We find the poet here entirely emancipated from con-
vention, and guided both in religion and morals exclusively
by the inner light of his reflection. His energy now inter-
acts on his clairvoyance with a completeness which he had
never quite displayed before, and it is here that we find
Mr. Hardy's utterance peculiarly a quintessence of himself.
Especially in the narrative pieces which are often Wessex
novels distilled into a wine-glass, such as " Rose- Ann,"
and "The Vampirine Fair" he allows no considerations
of what the reader may think " nice" or " pleasant" to
shackle his sincerity or his determination ; and it is there-
fore to Time's Laughingstocks that the reader who wishes
to become intimately acquainted with Mr. Hardy as a
moralist most frequently recurs. We notice here more
than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy's sympathy with
the local music of Wessex, and especially with its expression
by the village choir, which he uses as a spiritual symbol.
Quite a large section of Time's Laughingstocks takes us
to the old-fashioned gallery of some church, where the
minstrels 'are bowing "New Sabbath" or "Mount
Ephraim," or to a later scene where the ghosts, in whose
melancholy apparition Mr. Hardy takes such pleasure,
chant their goblin melodies and strum " the viols of the
dead" in the moonlit churchyard. The very essence of
Mr, Hardy's reverie at this moment of his career is to be
found, for instance, in " The Dead Quire," where the
ancient phantom-minstrels revenge themselves on their
gross grandsons outside the alehouse.

Almost immediately after the outbreak of the present
war Mr. Hardy presented to a somewhat distraught and
inattentive public another collection of his poems. It
R

242 Some Diversions ot a Man 01

cannot be said that Satires of Circumstance is the most
satisfactory of those volumes; it is, perhaps, that which
we could with the least discomposure persuade ourselves
to overlook. Such a statement refers more to the high
quality of other pages than to any positive decay of power
or finish here. There is no less adroitness of touch and
penetration of view in this book than elsewhere, and the
poet awakens once more our admiration by his skill in
giving poetic value to minute conditions of life which
have escaped less careful observers. But in Satires of
Circumstance the ugliness of experience is more accentuated
than it is elsewhere, and is flung in our face with less com-
punction. The pieces which give name to the volume are
only fifteen in number, but the spirit which inspires them
is very frequently repeated in other parts of the collection,
That spirit is one of mocking sarcasm, and it acts in every
case by presenting a beautifully draped figure of illusion,
from which the poet, like a sardonic showman, twitches
away the robe that he may display a skeleton beneath it.
We can with little danger assume, as we read the Satires
of Circumstance, hard and cruel shafts of searchlight as
they seem, that Mr. Hardy was passing through a mental
crisis when he wrote them. This seems to be the Troilus
and Crcssida of his life's work, the book in which he is
revealed most distracted by conjecture and most over-
whelmed by the miscarriage of everything. The wells of
human hope have been poisoned for him by some con-
dition of which we know nothing, and even the picturesque
features of Dorsetshire landscape, that have always before
dispersed his melancholy, fail to win his attention :-

" Bright y el lowhani fliers

Made mirthful clamours,
And billed long straws with a bustling air,
And bearing their load,
Flew up the road

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 243

The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the
outcome of this mood, is " The Newcomer's Wife/' with the
terrible abruptness of its last stanza. It is not for criticism
to find fault with the theme of a work of art, but only to
comment upon its execution. Of the merit of these mono-
tonously sinister Satires of Circumstance there can be no
question ; whether the poet's indulgence in the mood which
gave birth to them does not tend to lower our moral
temperature and to lessen the rebound of our energy, is
another matter. At all events, every one must welcome
a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to
have wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense
of a new chapter in history.

In the fourth year of the war the veteran poet published
Moments of Vision. These show a remarkable recovery
of spirit, and an ingenuity never before excelled. With
the passage of years Mr. Hardy, observing everything
in the little world of Wesscx, and forgetting nothing, has
become almost pretcrnaturally wise, and, if it may be said
so, " knowing," with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard.
He has learned to track the windings of the human heart
with the familiarity of a gamekeeper who finds plenty of
vermin in the woods, and who nails what he finds, be it
stoat or squirrel, to the barn-door of his poetry. But there
is also in these las t-f mils of Mr. Hardy's mossed tree much
that is wholly detached from the bitterness of satire, much
that simply records, with an infinite delicacy of pathos,
little incidents of the personal life of long ago, bestowing the
immortality of art on these fugitive fancies in the spirit
of the Japanese sculptor when lie chisels the melting of
a cloud or the flight of an insect on his sword hilt :

" I idly ctit a parsley stalk

And blew therein towards the moon;

1 had not thought what ghosts would walk

With shivering footsteps to my tune.

244 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

" I went and knelt, and scooped my hand

As if to drink, into the brook,
And a faint figure seemed to stand
Above me, with the bye-gone look.

" I lipped rough rhymes of chance not choice,

I thought not what my words might be ;
There came into my ear a voice
That turned a tenderer verse for me."

We have now in brief historic survey marshalled before
us the various volumes in which Mr. Hardy's lyrical poetry
was originally collected. Before we examine its general
character more closely, it may be well to call attention to
its technical quality, which was singularly misunderstood
at first, and which has never, we believe, been boldly faced.
In 1898, and later, when a melodious falsetto was much in
fashion amongst us, the reviewers found great fault with
Mr. Hardy's prosody; they judged him as a versifier to
be rude and incorrect. As regards the single line, it may
be confessed that Mr. Hardy, in his anxiety to present his
thought in an undiluted form, is not infrequently clogged
and hard. Such a line as

" Fused from its separateness by ecstasy "

hisses at us like a snake, and crawls like a wounded one.
Mr. Hardy is apt to clog his lines with consonants, and he
seems indifferent to the stiffness which is the consequence
of this neglect. Ben Jonson said that " Donne, for not
keeping of accent, deserved hanging " ; perhaps we may go
so far as to say that Mr. Hardy, for his indifference to a
mellifluous run lays himself open to a mild rebuke. He is
negligent of that eternal ornament of English verse, audible
intricacy, probably because of Swinburne's abuse of it.
But most of what is called his harshness should rather be
called bareness, and is the result of a revolt, conscious or
unconscious, against Keats' prescription of " loading the
rifts with ore."

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 245

In saying this, aH has been said that an enemy could ir
justice say in blame of his metrical peculiarities. Un-
questionably he does occasionally, like Robert Browning,
err in the direction of cacophony. But when we turn to
the broader part of prosody, we must perceive that Mr.
Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a very correct and
admirable metricist. His stanzaic invention is abundant;
no other Victorian poet, not even Swinburne, has employed
so many forms, mostly of his own invention, and employed
them so appropriately, that is to say, in so close harmony
with the subject or story enshrined in them. To .take an
example from his pure lyrics of reflection first, from " The
Bullfinches " :

" Brother Bulleys, let us sing
From the dawn till evening I
For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale visions fold
Unto those who sang of old,"

in the exquisite fineness and sadness of the stanza we seem
to hear the very voices of the birds warbling faintly in the
sunset. Again, the hurried, timid irresolution of a lover
always too late is marvellously rendered in the form oi
" Lizbic Browne" :-

" And Lizbic Browne,
Who else had hair
Bay -reel as yours,
Or flesh so lair
Bred out of doors,
Sweet Lizbie Browne ? "

On the other hand, the fierceness of " I said to Love" is
interpreted in a stanza that suits the mood of denunciation,
while " Toss's Lament " wails in a metre which seems to
rock like an ageing woman seated alone before the fire,
witli an infinite haunting sadness.

it is, however, in the narrative pieces, the little Wessex

246 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Tales, that Mr. Hardy's metrical imagination is most
triumphant. No two of these are identical in form, and
for each he selects, or more often invents, a wholly appro-
priate stanza. He makes many experiments, one of the
strangest being the introduction of rhymeless lines at regular
intervals. Of this, " Cicely " is an example which repays
attention :

" And still sadly onward I followed,
That Highway the Icen
Which trails its pale riband down Wessex
O'er lynchet and lea.

" Along through the Stour-bordered Forum,
Where legions had wayfared,
And where the slow river up-glasses
Its green canopy";

and one still more remarkable is the enchanting " Friends
Beyond/' to which we shall presently recur. The drawling
voice of a weary old campaigner is wonderfully rendered in
the stanza of " Valenciennes" :

" Well : Heaven wi' its jasper halls

Is now the on'y town I care to be in . .
Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls
As we did Valencieen ! "

whereas for long Napoleonic stories like " Leipzig " and
" The Peasant's Confession," a ballad-measure which con-
temporaries such as Southey or Campbell might have used
is artfully chosen. In striking contrast we have the
elaborate verse-form of " The Souls of the Slain," in which
the throbbing stanza seems to dilate and withdraw like the
very cloud of moth-like phantoms which it describes. It
is difficult to follow out this theme without more frequent
quotation than I have space for here, but the reader who
pursues it carefully will not repeat the rumour that Mr,
Hardy is a careless or "incorrect" metricist. He is, on
the contrary, a metrical artist of great accomplishment.

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 247

The conception of life revealed in his verses by this careful
artist is one which displays very exactly the bent of his
temperament. During the whole of his long career Mr.
Hardy has not budged an inch from his original line of
direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treated with
scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of " those
purblind Doomsters," accident, chance, and time, from
whom he has had to endure injury and insult from the
cradle to the grave. This is stating the Hardy doctrine in
its extreme form, but it is not stating it too strongly. This
has been called his " pessimism," a phrase to which some
admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have
objected. But, of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just
as Browning is an optimist, just as white is not black, and
day is not. night. Our juggling with words in paradox is
too often apt to disguise a want of decision in thought.
Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal
forces which beleaguer human life is a " pessimistic " one,
or else words have no meaning.

Yet it is needful to define in what this pessimism consists.
It is not the egotism of Byron or the morbid melancholy of
Chateaubriand. It is directed towards an observation of
others, not towards an analysis of self, and this gives it
more philosophical importance, because although romantic
peevishness is very common among modern poets, and
although ennui inspires a multitude of sonnets, a deliberate
and imaginative study of useless suffering in the world
around us is rare indeed among the poets. It is par-
ticularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although one of the
most profoundly tragic of all modern writers, is neither
effeminate nor sickly. His melancholy could never have
dictated the third stanza of Shelley's " Lines written in
Dejection in the Bay of Naples/ 1 His pessimism -is in-
voluntary, forced from him by his experience and his
constitution, and no analysis could give a better definition

248 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

of what divides him from the petulant despair of a poet
like Leopardi than the lines " To Life" :

" O life, with the sad scared face,

I weary of seeing thee,

And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace,
And thy too-forced pleasantry !

" I know what thou would'st tell

Of Death, Time, Destiny
I have known it long, and know, too, well
What it all means for me.

" But canst thou not array
Thyself in rare disguise,
And feign like truth, for one mad day,
That Earth is Paradise ?

" I'll tune me to the mood,

And mumm with thee till eve,
And maybe what as interlude

I feign, I shall believe i ' '

But the mumming goes no deeper than it does in the
exquisite poem of " The Darkling Thrush," where the
carolings of an aged bird, on a frosty evening, are so ecstatic
that they waken a vague hope in the listener's mind that the
thrush may possibly know of " some blessed hope " of which
the poet is " unaware. " This is as far as Mr. Hardy ever
gets on the blest Victorian pathway of satisfaction.

There are certain aspects in which it is not unnatural to
see a parallel between Mr. Hardy and George Crabbe.
Each is the spokesman of a district, each has a passion
for the study of mankind, each has gained by long years
of observation a profound knowledge of local human
character, and each has plucked on the open moor, and wears
in his coat, the hueless flower of disillusion. But there is
a great distinction in the aim of the two poets. Crabbe,
as he describes himself in The Parish Register, was " the
true physician" who " walks the foulest ward." He was
utilitarian in his morality ; he exposed the pathos of tragedy
by dwelling on the faults which led to it, forgetful of the

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 249

fatality which in more consistent moments he acknow-
ledged. Crabbe was realistic with a moral design, even
in the Tales of the Hall, where he made a gallant effort at
last to arrive at a detachment of spirit. No such effort
is needed by Mr. Hardy, who has none of the instinct of a
preacher, and who considers moral improvement outside
his responsibility. He admits, with his great French
contemporary, that

" Tout desir est menteur, toute joie epli6inere,
Toute liqueur au fond de la coupe est amere,"

but he is bent on discovering the cause of this devastation,
and not disposed to waste time over its consequences.
At the end he produces a panacea which neither Crabbe nor
*Byron dreamed of resignation.

But the poet has not reached the end of his disillusion.
He thinks to secure repose on the breast of Nature, the
alma mater, to whom Goethe and Wordsworth and Browning
each in his own way turned, and were rewarded by con-
solation and refreshment. We should be prepared to find
Mr. Hardy, with his remarkable aptitude for the perception
of natural forms, easily consoled by the influences of lands-
scape and the inanimate world. His range of vision is
wide and extremely exact ; he has the gift of reproducing
before us scenes of various character with a vividness which
is sometimes startling. But Mr. Hardy's disdain of senti-
mentality, and his vigorous analysis of the facts of life,
render him insensible not indeed to the mystery nor to the
beauty, but to the imagined sympathy, of Nature. He has
no more confidence in the visible earth than in the invisible
heavens, and neither here nor there is he able to persuade
himself to discover a counsellor or a friend. In this con-
nection, we do well to follow the poet's train of thought in
the lyric called " In a Wood," where he enters a copse
dreaming that, in that realm of " sylvan peace," Nature

250 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

would offer " a soft release from man's unrest." He
immediately observes that the pine and the beech are
struggling for existence, and trying to blight each other
with dripping poison. He sees the ivy eager to strangle
the elm, and the hawthorns choking the hollies. Even the
poplars sulk and turn black under the shadow of a rival.
In the end, filled with horror at all these crimes of Nature,
the poet flees from the copse as from an accursed place, and
he determines that life offers him no consolation except
the company of those human beings who are as beleaguered
as himself :

" Since, then, no grace I find

Taught me of trees,
Turn I back to my kind

Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound,
There discourse trills around,
There, now and then, are found,
Life-loyalties."

It is absurd, he decides, to love Nature, which has either
no response to give, or answers in irony. Let us even
avoid, as much as we can, deep concentration of thought
upon the mysteries of Nature, lest we become demoralised
by contemplating her negligence, her blindness, her im-
placability. We find here a violent reaction against the
poetry of egotistic optimism which had ruled the romantic
school in England for more than a hundred years, and we
recognise a branch of Mr. Hardy's originality. He has
lifted the veil of Isis, and he finds beneath it, not a bene-
volent mother of men, but the tomb of an illusion. One
short lyric, " Yell 1 ham-Wood's Story/' puts this, again
with a sylvan setting, in its unflinching crudity :

" Coomb-Firtrces say that Life is a moan,
And Clyffe-hill Clump says ' Yea ! '
But YcU'ham says a thing of its own :
It's not, ' Gray, gray,
Is Life alway ! '
That Yell 'ham says,
Nor that Life is for ends unknown.

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 251

" It says that Life would signify

A thwarted purposing :
That we come to live, and are called to die.
Yes, that's the thing
In fall, in spring,
That Yeirham says :
' Life offers to deny ! ' "

It is therefore almost exclusively to the obscure history
of those who suffer and stumble around him, victims of the
universal disillusion, men and women " come to live but
called to die," that Mr. Hardy dedicates his poetic function.
" Lizbie Browne 1 ' appeals to us as a typical instance of
his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and
if we compare it with such poems of Wordsworth's as
" Lucy Gray" or " Alice Fell" we see that he starts by
standing much closer to the level of the subject than his
great predecessor does. Wordsworth is the benevolent
philosopher sitting in a post-chaise or crossing the " wide
moor " in meditation. Mr. Hardy is the familiar neighbour,
the shy mourner at the grave; his relation is a more
intimate one : he is patient, humble, un-upbraiding.
Sometimes, as in the remarkable colloquy called " The
Ruined Maid," his sympathy is so close as to offer an
absolute flout in the face to the system of Victorian morality.
Mr. Hardy, indeed, is not concerned with sentimental
morals, but with the primitive instincts of the soul, applaud-
ing them, or at least recording them with complacency,
even when they outrage ethical tradition, as they do in the
lyric narrative called " A Wife and Another." The stanzas
"To an Unborn Pauper Child " sum up what is sinister
and what is genial in Mr. Hardy's attitude to the unam-
bitious forms of life which he loves to contemplate.

His temperature is not always so low as it is in the class
of poems to which we have just referred, but his ultimate
view is never more sanguine. He is pleased sometimes to
act as the fiddler at a dance, surveying the hot-blooded

252 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

couples, and urging them on by the lilt of his instrument,
but he is always perfectly aware that they will have " to
pay high for their prancing " at the end of all. No instance
of this is more remarkable than the poem called " Julie-
Jane/' a perfect example of Mr. Hardy's metrical ingenuity
and skill, which begins thus :

" Sing; how 'a would sing !

How 'a would raise the tune
When we rode in the waggon from harvesting
By the light o' the moon 1

" Dance ; how 'a would dance !
If a fiddlestring did but sound
She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance,
And go round and round.

" Laugh; how 'a would laugh 1

Her peony lips would part
As if none such a place for a lover to quaff
' At the deeps of a heart,"

and which then turns to the most plaintive and the most
irreparable tragedy, woven, as a black design on to a
background of gold, upon this basis of temperamental
joyousness.

Alphonse Daudet once said that the great gift of Edrnond
de Goncourt was to, " rendre I' irrendable." This is much
more true of Mr. Hardy than it was of Goncourt, and more
true than it is of any other English poet except Donne.
There is absolutely no observation too minute, no flutter
of reminiscence too faint, for Mr. Hardy to adopt as the
subject of a metaphysical lyric, and his skill in this direction
has grown upon him ; it is nowhere so remarkable as in his
latest volume, aptly termed Moments of Vision. Every-
thing in village life is grist to his mill ; he seems to make no
selection, and his field is modest to humility and yet
practically boundless. We have a poem on the attitude
of two people with nothing to do and no book to read,
waiting in the parlour of an hotel for the rain to stop, a

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 253

recollection after more than forty years. That the poet
once dropped a pencil into the cranny of an old church
where he was sketching inspires an elaborate lyric. The
disappearance of a rotted summer-house, the look of a
row of silver drops of fog condensed on the bar of a gate,
the effect of candlelight years and years ago on a woman's
neck and hair, the vision of a giant at a fair, led by a dwarf
with a red string such are amongst the subjects which
awaken in Mr. Hardy thoughts which do often lie too deep
for tears, and call for interpretation in verse. The skeleton
of a lady's sunshade, picked up on Swanage Cliffs, the
pages of a fly-blown Testament lying in a railway waiting-
room, a journeying boy in a third-class carriage, with his
ticket stuck in the band of his hat such are among the
themes which awake in Mr. Hardy's imagination reveries
which are always wholly serious and usually deeply tragic.
Mr. Hardy's notation of human touches hitherto excluded
from the realm of poetry is one of the most notable features
of his originality. It marked his work from the beginning,
as in the early ballad of " The Widow," where the sudden
damping of the wooer's amatory ardour in consequence of
his jealousy of the child is rendered with extraordinary
refinement. The difficulty of course is to know when to
stop. There is always a danger that a poet, in his search
after the infinitely ingenious, may lapse into amphigory,
into sheer absurdity and triviality, which Cowper, in spite
of his elegant lightness, does not always escape, Words-
worth, more serious in his intent, fell headlong in parts of
Peter Bell, and in such ballads as "Betty Foy." Mr.
Hardy, whatever the poverty of his incident, commonly
redeems it by the oddity of his observation; as in " The
Pedigree" :

" I bent in the deep of night
Over a pedigree the chronicler gave
As mine ; and as 1 bent there, half -unrobed,

254 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

The uncurtained panes of my window-square

Let in the watery light

Of the moon in its old age :
And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past

Where mute and cold it globed
Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave."

Mr. Hardy's love of strange experiences, and of adven-
tures founded on a balance of conscience and instinct, is
constantly exemplified in those ballads and verse-anecdotes
which form the section of his poetry most appreciated by
the general public. Among these, extraordinarily represen-
tative of the poet's habit of mind, is " My Cicely/' a tale
of the eighteenth century, where a man impetuously
rides from London through Wessex to be present at the
funeral of the wrong woman ; as he returns, by a coincidence,
he meets the right woman, whom he used to love, and is
horrified at "her liquor-fired face, her thick accents. "
He determines that by an effort of will the dead woman
(whom he never saw) shall remain, what she seemed during
his wild ride, " my Cicely," and the living woman be
expunged from memory. A similar deliberate electing
that the dream shall hold the place of the fact is the motive
of " The Well-Beloved." The ghastly humour of " The
Curate's Kindness" is a sort of reverse action of the same
mental subtlety. Misunderstanding takes a very prominent
place in Mr. Hardy's irony of circumstance; as, almost too
painfully, in " The Rash Bride," a hideous tale of suicide
following on the duplicity of a tender and innocent widow.
The grandmother of Mr. Hardy was born in 1772, and
survived until 1857. From her lips he heard many an
obscure old legend of the life of Wessex in the eighteenth
century. Was it she who told him the terrible Exmoor
story of " The Sacrilege; " the early tale of " The Two
Men," which might be the skeleton-scenario for a whole
elaborate novel; or that incomparable comedy in verse,
" The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's/' with its splendid human

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 255

touch at the very end? We suspect that it was; and
perhaps at the same source he acquired his dangerous
insight into the female heart, whether exquisitely feeble
as in " The Home-coming" with its delicate and ironic sur-
prise, or treacherous, as in the desolating ballad of " Rose-
Ann." No one, in prose or verse, has expatiated more
poignantly than Mr. Hardy on what our forefathers used
to call " cases of conscience." He seems to have shared
the experiences of souls to whom life was " a wood before
your doors, and a labyrinth within the wood, and locks
and bars to every door within that labyrinth/' as Jeremy
Taylor describes that of the anxious penitents who came
to him to confession. The probably very early story of
"The Casterbridge Captains" is a delicate study in com-
punction, and a still more important example is "The
Alarm," where the balance of conscience and instinct gives
to what in coarser hands might seem the most trivial of
actions a momentous character of tragedy.

This is one of Mr. Hardy's studies in military history,
where he is almost always singularly happy. His portraits
of the non-commissioned officer of the old service are as
excellent in verse as they are in the prose of The Trumpet-
Major or The Melancholy Hussar. The reader of the
novels will not have to be reminded that " Valenciennes"
and the other ballads have their prose-parallel in Simon
Burden' s reminiscences of Minden. Mr. Hardy, with a great
curiosity about the science of war and a close acquaint-
ance with the mind of the common soldier, has pondered
on the philosophy of fighting. "The Man he Killed/'
written in 1902, expresses the wonder of the rifleman who
is called upon to shoot his brother-in-arms, although

" Had he and I but met,

By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down tojvet
Right many a nipperkin."

256 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

In this connection the Poems of War and Patriotism,
which form an important part of the volume of 1918,
should be carefully examined by those who meditate on
the tremendous problems of the moment.

A poet so profoundly absorbed in the study of life could
not fail to speculate on the probabilities of immortality
Here Mr. Hardy presents to us his habitual serenity in
negation. He sees the beautiful human body " lined by
tool of time/' and he asks what becomes of it when its
dissolution is complete. He sees no evidence of a conscious
state after death, of what would have to be, in the case of
aged or exhausted persons, a revival of spiritual force,
and on the whole he is disinclined to cling to the faith in
a future life. He holds that the immortality of a dead man
resides in the memory of the living, his " finer part shining
within ever-faithful hearts of those bereft." He pursues
this theme in a large number of his most serious and
affecting lyrics, most gravely perhaps in " The To-be-
Forgotten" and in " The Superseded." This sense of the
forlorn condition of the dead, surviving only in the dwindling
memory of the living, inspires what has some claims to be
considered the loveliest of all Mr. Hardy's poems, " Friends
Beyond," which in its tenderness, its humour, and its
pathos contains in a few pages every characteristic of his
genius.

His speculation perceives the dead as a crowd of slowly
vanishing phantoms, clustering in their ineffectual longing
round the footsteps of those through whom alone they
continue to exist. This conception has inspired Mr. Hardy
with several wonderful visions, among which the spectacle
of "The Souls of the Slain" in the Boer War, alighting,
like vast flights of moths, over Portland Bill at night, is
the most remarkable. It has the sublimity and much of
the character of some apocalyptic design by Blake. The
volume of 1902 contains a whole group of phantasmal

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 257

pieces of this kind, where there is frequent mention of
spectres, who address the poet in the accents of nature,
as in. the unrhymed ode called "The Mother Mourns."
The obsession of old age, with its physical decay (" I look
into my glass"), the inevitable division which leads to
that isolation which the poet regards as the greatest of
adversities ("The Impercipient"), the tragedies of moral
indecision, the contrast between the tangible earth and the
bodyless ghosts, and endless repetition of the cry, " Why
find we us here? " and of the question " Has some Vast
Imbecility framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?"
all start from the overwhelming love of physical life and
acquaintance with its possibilities, which Mr. Hardy pos-
sesses to an inordinate degree.

It would be ridiculous at the close of an essay to attempt
any discussion of the huge dramatic panorama which
many believe to be Mr. Hardy's most weighty contribution
to English literature. The spacious theatre of The Dynasts
with its comprehensive and yet concise realisations of vast
passages of human history, is a work which calls for a
commentary as lengthy as itself, and yet needs no com-
mentary at all. No work of the imagination is more its
own interpreter than this sublime historic peep-show, this
rolling vision of the Napoleonic chronicle drawn on the
broadest lines, and yet in detail made up of intensely
concentrated and vivid glimpses of reality. But the
subject of my present study, the lyrical poetry of Mr.
Hardy, is not largely illustrated in The Dynasts, except
by the choral interludes of the phantom intelligences,
which have great lyrical value, and by three or four
admirable songs.

When we resume the effect which the poetry of Mr.

Hardy makes upon the careful reader, we note, as I have

indicated already, a sense of unity of direction throughout.

Mr. Hardy has expressed himself in a thousand ways, but

s

258 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

has never altered his vision. From 1867 to 1917, through
half a century of imaginative creation, he has not modified
the large outlines of his art in the smallest degree. To
early readers of his poems, before the full meaning of them
became evident, his voice sounded inharmonious, because
it did not fit in with the exquisite melodies- of the later
Victorian age. But Mr. Hardy, with characteristic
pertinacity, did not attempt to alter his utterance in the
least, and now we can all perceive, if we take the trouble
to do so, that what seemed harsh in his poetry was his
peculiar and personal mode of interpreting his thoughts
to the world.

As in his novels so in his poems, Mr. Hardy has
chosen to remain local, to be the interpreter for present
and future times of one rich and neglected province of the
British realm. From his standpoint there he contemplates
the wide aspect of life, but it seems huge and misty to him,
and he broods over the tiny incidents of Wessex idiosyn-
cracy. His irony is audacious and even sardonic, and few
poets have been less solicitous to please their weaker
brethren. But no poet of modern times has been more
careful to avoid the abstract and to touch upon the real.

SOME SOLDIER POETS

SOME SOLDIER POETS

THE two years which preceded the outbreak of the war
were marked in this country by a revival of public interest
in the art of poetry. To this movement coherence was
given and organisation introduced by Mr. Edward Marsh's
now-famous volume entitled Georgian Poetry. The effect
of this collection for it is hardly correct to call it an antho-
logyof the best poems written by the youngest poets
since 1911 was two-fold ; it acquainted readers with work
few had " the leisure or the zeal to investigate/ 1 and it
brought the writers themselves together in a corporate
and selected relation. I do not recollect that thi^had
been done except prematurely and partially by The Germ
of 1850 since the England's Parnassus and England's
Helicon of 1600. In point of fact the only real precursor
of Mr. Marsh's venture in our whole literature is the
Songs and Sonnettes of 1557, commonly known as Totter s
Miscellany. Tottel brought together, for the first time,
the lyrics of Wyatt, Surrey, Churchyard, Vaux, and Bryan,
exactly as Mr. Marsh called public attention to Rupert
Brooke, James Elroy Flecker and the rest of the Georgians,
and he thereby fixed the names of those poets, as Mr.
Marsh has fixed those of our youngest fledglings, on the
roll of English literature.

The general tone of the latest poetry, up to the moment
of the outbreak of hostilities, was pensive, instinct with
natural piety, given somewhat in excess to description of
landscape, tender in feeling, essentially unaggressive except
towards the clergy and towards other versifiers of an

261

262 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

earlier generation. There was absolutely not a trace in
any one of the young poets of that arrogance and vociferous
defiance which marked German verse during the same years.
These English shepherds might hit at their elders with
their staves, but they had turned their swords into pruning-
hooks and had no scabbards to rattle. This is a point
which might have attracted notice, if we had not all been
too drowsy in the lap of our imperial prosperity to observe
the signs of the times in Berlin. Why did no one call
our attention to the beating of the big drum which was
going on so briskly on the Teutonic Parnassus? At all
events, there was no echo of such a noise in the " chambers
of imagery" which contained Mr. Gordon Bottomley, or
in Mr. W. H. Davies' wandering " songs of joy/ 3 or on
"the great hills and solemn chanting seas" where Mr.
John Drinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And
the guns of August 1914 found Mr. W. W. Gibson encom-
passed by " one dim, blue infinity of starry peace." There
is a sort of German Georgian Poetry in existence ; in time
to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr.
Marsh may throw a side-light on the question, Who
prepared the War ?

The youngest poets were more completely taken by
surprise in August 1914 than their elders. The earliest
expressions of lyric military feeling came from veteran
voices. It was only proper that the earliest of all should
be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with
the prophecy :

" Much suffering shall cleanse thee !

But them through the flood
Shalt win to Salvation,

To Beauty through blood."

As sensation, however, followed sensation in those first
terrific and bewildering weeks, much was happening that

Some Soldier Poets 263

called forth with the utmost exuberance the primal emotions
of mankind ; there was full occasion for

" exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

By September a full chorus was vocal, led by our
national veteran, Mr. Thomas Hardy, with his Song of the
Soldiers :

" What of the faith and fire within us,

Men who march away

Ere the barn-cocks say

Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence no tears can win us ;
What of the faith and fire within us,

Men who march away ? ' '

Already, before the close of the autumn of 1914, four or
five anthologies of war-poems were in the press, and the
desire of the general public to be fed with patriotic and
emotional verse was manifested in unmistakable ways. We
had been accustomed for some time past to the issue of a
multitude of little pamphlets of verse, often very carefully
written, and these the critics had treated with an indul-
gence which would have whitened the hair of the stern
reviewers of forty years ago. The youthful poets, almost
a trade-union in themselves, protected one another by their
sedulous generosity. It was very unusual to see anything
criticised, much less " slated " ; the balms of praise were
poured over every rising head, and immortalities were
predicted by the dozen. Yet, as a rule, the sale of these
little poetic pamphlets had been small, and they had been
read only by those who had a definite object in doing so.

The immediate success of the anthologies, however,
proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear
for contemporary verse, an attention anxious to be stirred
or soothed by the assiduous company of poets who had

264 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

been ripening their talents in a little clan. These had now
an eager world ready to listen to them. The result
was surprising; we may even, without exaggeration, call
it unparalleled. There had never before, in the world's
history, been an epoch which had tolerated and even
welcomed such a flood of verse as was poured forth over
Great Britain during the first three years of the war.
Those years saw the publication, as I am credibly informed,
of more than five hundred volumes of new and original
poetry. It would be the silliest complaisance -to pretend
that all of this, or much of it, or any but a very little of
it, has been of permanent value. Much of it was windy and
superficial, striving in wild vague terms to express great
agitations which were obscurely felt by the poet. There
was too much of the bathos of rhetoric, especially at first ;
too much addressing the German as <c thou fell, bloody
brute/' and the like, which broke no bones and took no
trenches.

When once it was understood that, as a cancelled line
in Tennyson's Maud has it,

" The long, long canker of peace was over and done/'

the sentiments of indignation and horror made themselves
felt with considerable vivacity. In this direction, how-
ever, none of the youngest poets approached Sir Owen
Seaman in the vigour of their invective. Most of them
seemed to be overpowered by the political situation, and
few could free themselves from their inured pacific habit
of speech. Even when they wrote of Belgium, the Muse
seemed rather to weep than to curse. Looking back to
the winter of 1914, it is almost pathetic to observe how
difficult it was for our easy-going British bards to hate the
Germans. There was a good deal of ineffective violence,
and considerable misuse of technical terms, caused, in
many cases, by a too hasty reference to newspaper reports

borne Soldier Poets 265

of gallantry under danger, in the course of which the more
or less obscure verbiage of military science was picturesquely
and inaccurately employed. As the slightly censorious
reader looks back upon these poems of the beginning of
the War, he cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first
place, there is a family likeness which makes it impossible
to distinguish one writer from another, and there is a
tendency to a smug approval of British prejudice, and to
a horrible confidence in England's power of " muddling
through," which look rather ghastly in the light of
subsequent struggles.

There was, however, a new spirit presently apparent,
and a much healthier one. The bards became soldiers,
and in crossing over to France and Flanders, each had
packed his flute in his kit. They began to send home
verses in which they translated into music their actual
experiences and their authentic emotions. We found
ourselves listening to young men who had something new,
and what was better, something noble to say to us', and
we returned to the national spirit which inspired the
Chansons de Geste in the eleventh century. To the spirit
but not in the least to the form, since it is curious that
the war-poetry of 1914-17 was, even in the most skilful
hands, poetry on a small scale. The two greatest of the
primal species of verse, the Epic and the Ode, were
entirely neglected, except, as will later be observed, in one
notable instance by Major Maurice Baring. As a rule, the
poets constrained themselves to observe the discipline of
a rather confined lyrical analysis in forms of the simplest
character. Although particular examples showed a rare
felicity of touch, and although the sincerity of the
reflection in many cases hit upon very happy forms of
expression, it is impossible to overlook the general mono-
tony. There used to be a story that the Japanese Govern-
ment sent a committee of its best art-critics to study the

266 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

relative merits of the modern European painters, and
that they returned with the bewildered statement that
they could make no report, because all European pictures
were exactly alike. A student from Patagonia might
conceivably argue that he could discover no difference
whatever between our various poets of the war.

This would be unjust, but it is perhaps not unfair to
suggest that the determined resistance to all restraint,
which has marked the latest school, is not really favourable
to individuality. There has been a very general, almost a
universal tendency to throw off the shackles of poetic form.
It has been supposed that by abandoning the normal re-
straints, or artificialities, of metre and rhyme, a greater
directness and fidelity would be secured. Of course, if an
intensified journalistic impression is all that is desired,
" prose cut up into lengths " is the readiest by-way to effect.
But if the poets desire and they all do desire to speak
to ages yet unborn, they should not forget that all the
experience of history goes to prove discipline not unfavour-
able to poetic sincerity, while, on the other hand, the
absence of all restraint is fatal to it. Inspiration does
not willingly attend upon flagging metre and discordant
rhyme, and never in the whole choral progress from Pindar
down to Swinburne has a great master been found who
did not exult in the stubbornness of " dancing words and
speaking strings," or who did not find his joy in reducing
them to harmony. The artist who avoids all difficulties
may be pleased with the rapidity of his effect, but he will
have the vexation of finding his success an ephemeral
one. The old advice to the poet, in preparing the rich
chariot of the Muse, still holds good :

" Let the postillion, Nature, mount, but let
The coachman, Art, be set."

Too many of our recent rebellious bards fancy that the

Some Soldier Poets 267

coach will drive itself, if only the post-boy sticks his heels
hard into' Pegasus.

It is not, however, the object of this essay to review all
the poetry which was written about the war, nor even
that part of it which owed its existence to the strong
feeling of non-combatants at home. I propose to fix our
attention on what was written by the young soldiers
themselves in their beautiful gallantry, verse which comes
to us hallowed by the glorious effort of battle, and in too
many poignant cases by the ultimate sacrifice of life itself.
The poet achieves his highest meed of contemporary
glory, if

" some brave young man's untimely fate
In words worth, dying for he celebrate/'

and when he is himself a young man striving for the same
deathless honour on the same field of blood it is difficult
to conceive of circumstances more poignant than those
which surround his effort. On many of these poets a
death of the highest nobility set the seal of eternal life.
They were simple and passionate, radiant and calm, they
fought for their country, and they have entered into glory.
This alone might be enough to say in their praise, but
star differeth from star in brightness, and from the con-
stellation I propose to select half a dozen of the clearest
luminaries. What is said in honest praise of these may
be said, with due modification, of many others who miss
merely the polish of their accomplishment. It is perhaps
worth noticing, in passing, that most of the poets are men
of university training, and that certain literary strains
are common to the rank and file of them. The influence
of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti is almost
entirely absent. The only one of the great Victorians
whom they seem to have read is Matthew Arnold, but it
is impossible to help observing that the Shropshire Lad

268 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

>f Mr. A. E. Housman was in the tunic-pocket of every
one of them. Among the English poets of the past, it is
mainly the so-called " metaphysical" writers in the seven-
teenth century whom they studied ; Donne seems to have
been a favourite with them all, and Vaughan and Treherne
were not far behind.

The spontaneous instinct of readers has taken the name
of Rupert Brooke to illustrate the poetic spirit of the great
war in a superlative degree. His posthumous volume,
brought out in May 1915, a few weeks after his death,
has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than that
of all the other poems of the war put together. He has
become a sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is
to English sentiment what Charles Peguy is to France,
an oriflamme of the chivalry of his countiy. It is curious,
in this connection, that neither Peguy nor Brooke had the
opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, as
it seemed for the moment, obscurely. Rupert Brooke was
a pawn in the dark and dolorous flight from Antwerp.
He died in the Jigean, between Egypt and Gallipoli, having
never seen a Turkish enemy. So Peguy faded out of sight
on the very opening day of the battle of the Marne, yet
each of these young men was immediately perceived to
have embodied the gallantry of his country. The extra-
ordinary popularity of Rupert Brooke is due to the excellence
of his verse, to the tact with which it was presented to the
public, but also to a vague perception of his representative
nature. He was the finest specimen of a certain type
produced at the universities, and then sacrificed to our
national necessity.

It is needless to describe the verses of Rupert Brooke,
which have attained a circulation which any poet might
envy. They are comprised in two slender volumes, that
above mentioned, and one of 1911, published while he
was still at Cambridge. He was born in 1887, and when

Some Soldier Poets 269

he died off Skyros, in circumstances of the most romantic
pathos, he had not completed his twenty-eighth year. He
was, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, a meticulous
and reserved writer, little inclined to be pleased with his
work, and cautious to avoid the snare of improvisation.
Hence, though he lived to be older than did Keats or
Fergusson, he left a very slender garland of verse behind
him, in which there is scarcely a petal which is not of
some permanent value. For instance, in the volume of
1911 we found not a few pieces which then seemed crude
in taste and petulant in temper; but even these now
illustrate a most interesting character of which time has
rounded the angles, and we would not have otherwise
what illustrates so luminously and so divertingly that
precious object, the mind of Rupert Brooke.

Yet there is a danger that this mind and character may
be misinterpreted, even by those who contemplate the
poet's memory with idolatry. There is some evidence of
a Rupert Brooke legend in the process of formation, which
deserves to be guarded against not less jealously than the
R. L. Stevenson legend of a few years ago. We know that
for some people gold and lilies are not properly honoured
until they are gilded and painted. Rupert Brooke was
far from being either a plaster saint or a vivid public
witness. He was neither a trumpet nor a torch. He
lives in the memory of those who knew him as a smiling
and attentive spectator, eager to watch every flourish of
the pageantry of life. Existence was a wonderful harmony
to Rupert Brooke, who was determined to lose no tone of
it by making too much noise himself. In company he
was not a great talker, but loved to listen, with sparkling
deference, to people less gifted than himself if only they
had experience to impart. He lived in a fascinated state,
bewitched with wonder and appreciation. His very fine
appearance, which seemed to glow with dormant vitality,

270 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

his beautiful manners, the quickness of his intelligence,
his humour, were combined under the spell of a curious
magnetism, difficult to analyse. When he entered a room,
he seemed to bring sunshine with him, although he was
usually rather silent, and pointedly immobile. I do not
think it would be easy to recollect any utterance of his
which was very remarkable, but all he said and did added
to the harmonious, ardent, and simple effect.

There is very little of the poetry of Rupert Brooke
which can be definitely identified with the war. The last
six months of his life, spent in conditions for which nothing
in his previous existence in Cambridge or Berlin, in Grant-
chester or Tahiti, had in the least prepared him, were
devoted for we must not say wasted to breaking up the
cliche of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there
remain to us the five immortal Sonnets, which form the
crown of Rupert Brooke's verse, and his principal legacy
to English literature. Our record would be imperfect
without the citation of one, perhaps the least hackneyed
of these :

" Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead !

There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away ; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth ; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age ; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

" Blow, bugles, blow ! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain.

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

And Nobleness walks in our ways again ;
And we have come into our heritage."

If the fortune of his country had not disturbed his plans,
it is more than probable that Rupert Brooke would have
become an enlightened and enthusiastic professor. Of the

Some Soldier Poets 271

poet who detains us next it may be said that there was
hardly any walk of life, except precisely this, which he
could not have adorned. Julian Grenfell, who was a poet
almost by accident, resembled the most enlightened of
the young Italian noblemen of the Renaissance, who gave
themselves with violence to a surfeit of knowledge and a
riot of action. He was a humanist of the type of the
fifteenth century, soldier, scholar, and man of pleasure,
such as we read of in Vespasiano's famous book. Every-
thing he did was done in the service of St. Epicurus, it was
done to darsi buon tempo, as the Tuscans used to say. But
this was only the superficial direction taken by his energy ;
if he was imperious in his pleasures, he was earnest in his
pursuit of learning ; there was a singular harmony in the
exercise of the physical, intellectual, and emotional faculties
at his disposal, Julian Grenfell was a master of the body
and of the mind, an unrivalled boxer, a pertinacious hunter,
skilled in swimming and polo, a splendid shot, a swift
runner, and an unwearying student. That an athlete so
accomplished should have had time left for intellectual
endowments is amazing, but his natural pugnacity led him
to fight lexicons as he fought the wild boar, and with as
complete success.

The record of the brief and shining life of Julian Grenfell
has been told in an anonymous record of family life which
is destined to reverberate far beyond the discreet circle of
friends to which it is provisionally addressed. It is a docu-
ment of extraordinary candour, tact, and fidelity, and it is
difficult to say whether humour or courage is the quality
which illuminates it most. It will be referred to by future
historians of our race as the most vivid record which has
been preserved of the red-blooded activity of a spirited
patrician family at the opening of the twentieth century.
It is partly through his place at the centre of this record
that, as one of the most gifted of his elder friends has said,

272 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

the name of Julian Grenfell will be linked " with all that
is swift and chivalrous, lovely and courageous/* but it is
also through his rare and careless verses.

Julian Grenfell, who was born to excel with an enviable
ease, was not a poet by determination. In a family where
everything has been preserved, no verses of his that are
not the merest boyish exercises are known to exist previous
to the war. He was born in 1888, and he became a pro-
fessional soldier in India in 1911. He was on his way
home from South Africa when hostilities broke out, and
he was already fighting in Flanders in October 1914. After
a very brilliant campaign, in the course of which he
won the D.S.O. and was twice mentioned in despatches,
he was shot in the head near Ypres and died of his
wounds at Boulogne on May 26th, 1915. During these
months in France, by the testimony of all who saw
him and of all to whom he wrote, his character
received its final touch of ripeness. Among his other
attainments he abruptly discovered the gift of noble gnomic
verse. On receiving news of the death of Rupert Brooke,
and a month before his own death, Julian GrenfeU wrote
the verses called " Into Battle,' ' which contain the un-
forgettable stanzas :

" The fighting man shall from the sun

Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth ;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth. . . .

" The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each .one a friend ;
They gently speak in the windy weather ;
They guide to valley and ridge's end.

' ' The kestrel hovering by day,

And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

" The blackbird sings to him ' Brother, brother,

If this be the last song you shall sing,
Smg well, for you may not sing another,
Brother, sing/ "

Some Soldier Poets 273

The whole of this poem is memorable, down to its final
prophetic quatrain :

" The thundering line of battle stands,

And in the air Death moans and sings ;

But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,

And Night shall fold him in soft wings."

" Could any other man in the British Army have knocked
out a heavy-weight champion one week and written that
poem the next? " a brother officer asked. " Into Battle"
remains, and will probably continue to remain, the clearest
lyrical expression of the fighting spirit of England in which
the war has found words. It is a poem for soldiers, and it
gives noble form to their most splendid aspirations. Julian
Grenfell wrote, as he boxed and rode, as he fought in the
mud of Flanders, as the ideal sporting Englishman of our
old, heroic type.

The ancient mystery of verse is so deeply based on
tradition that it is not surprising that all the strange con-
trivances of twentieth-century warfare have been found
too crabbed for our poets to use. When great Marlborough,
as Addison puts it, " examined all the dreadful scenes of
war" at Blenheim, he was really in closer touch with
Marathon than with the tanks and gas of Ypres. But
there is one military implement so beautiful in itself, and
so magical in the nature of its service, that it is bound to
conquer a place in poetry. The air-machine, to quote
The Campaign once more, " rides in the whirlwind and
directs the storm." But the poets are still shy of it. In
French it has, as yet, inspired but one good poem, the
ff Plus haut toujours ! " of Jean Allard-Meeus, a hymn of
real aerial majesty. In English Major Maurice Baring's
ode " In Memoriam : A.H." is equally unique, and, in its
complete diversity from Allard-Meeus' rhapsody, sug-
gests that the aeroplane has a wide field before it in the
T

274 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

realms of imaginative writing. Major Baring's subject is
the death of Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas, who was killed
on November 3rd, 1916. This distinguished young states-
man and soldier had just been promoted, after a career
of prolonged gallantry in the air, and would have flown no
more, if he had returned in safety to our front on that
fatal day.

Major Baring has long been known as an excellent
composer of sonnets and other short pieces. But " In
Memoriam : A.H." lifts him to a position among our living
poets to which he had hardly a pretension. In a long
irregular threnody or funeral ode, the great technical
difficulty is to support lyrical emotion throughout. No
form of verse is more liable to lapses of dignity, to dull
and flagging passages. Even Dryden in Anne Killigrew,
even Coleridge in the Departing Year, have not been
able to avoid those languors. Many poets attempt to
escape them by a use of swollen and pompous language.
I will not say that Major Baring has been universally
successful, where the success of the great masters is only
relative, but he has produced a poem of great beauty and
originality, which interprets an emotion and illustrates an
incident the poignancy of which could scarcely be ex-
aggerated. I have no hesitation in asserting that " A. H."
is one of the few durable contributions to the literature of
the present war.

It is difficult to quote effectively from a poem which is
constructed with great care on a complicated plan, but a
fragment of Major Baring's elegy may lead readers to the
original :

" God, Who had made you valiant, strong and swift
And maimed you with a bullet long ago,
And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift,
And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow,
Gave back your youth to you,
And packed in moments rare and few

Some Soldier Poets 275

Achievements manifold

And happiness untold,

And bade you spring to Death as to a bride,

In manhood's ripeness, power and pride,

And on your sandals the strong wings of youth."

There is no rhetoric here, no empty piling up of fine words ;
it is a closely followed study in poetical biography.

The water has its marvels like the air, but they also
have hardly yet secured the attention of the poets. In
A Naval Motley, by Lieut. N. M. F. Corbett, published in
June 1916, we encounter the submarine :

" Not yours to know delight

In the keen hard-fought fight,
The shock of battle and the battle's thunder;

But suddenly to feel

Deep, deep beneath the keel
The vital blow that rives the ship asunder ! "

A section of the new war-poetry which is particularly
pathetic is that which is inspired by the nostalgia of home,
by the longing in the midst of the guns and the dust and
the lice for the silent woodlands and cool waters of England.
When this is combined with the sense of extreme youth,
and of a certain brave and beautiful innocence, the poig-
nancy of it is almost more than can be borne. The judg-
ment is hampered, and one doubts whether one's critical
feeling can be trusted. This particular species of emotion
is awakened by no volume more than by the slencjer
Worple Flit of E. Wyndham Tennant, who died on the
Somme in September 1916. He was only nineteen when
he fell, at an age when, on the one hand, more precocious
verse than his has been written, and when yet, on the
other, some of the greatest poets had not achieved a mastery
of words equal to that already possessed by this young
Wykehamist. The voice is faltering, and there is a want
of sureness in the touch; the metrical hammer does not

276 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

always tap the centre of the nail's head. But what pathos
in the sentiment, what tenderness in the devotion to
beauty ! Tennant had, we may suppose, read Flecker-
before he wrote " How shall I tell you of the roads that
stretch away ? " ; or was it merely the family likeness
in the generation? But I know not what but his own
genius can have inspired the " Home Thoughts in
Laventie," a poem about a little garden left unravished
among the rubble of the wrecked village, a poem which
ends thus :

" I saw green banks of daffodil,
Slim poplars in the breeze,
Great tan-brown hares in gusty March

A-courfcing on the leas.
And meadows, with their glittering streams

and silver-scurrying dace
Home, what a perfect place."

Among these boy-poets, so cruelly and prematurely
snatched from the paternal earth, Tennant suggests
to us the possibility that a talent of very high order
was quenched by death, because in few of them do we
find so much evidence of that " perception and awe of
Beauty" which Plotinus held to be the upward path to
God.

In June 1917 there was published a slender volume which
is in several ways the most puzzling and the most interesting
of all that lie upon my table to-day. This is the Ardours
and Endurances of Lieut, Robert Nichols. I knew nothing
of the author save what I learned from his writings, that
he is very young, that he went out from Oxford early in
the war, that he was fighting in Flanders before the end
of 1914, that he was wounded, perhaps at Loos, in 1915,
and that he was long in hospital. I felt the hope,
which later information has confirmed, that he was still
alive and on the road to recovery. Before Ardours and

Some Soldier Poets 277

Endurances reached me, I had met with Invocation, a
smaller volume published by Lieut. Nichols in December
1915. There has rarely been a more radical change in the
character of an artist than is displayed by a comparison
of these two collections. Invocation, in which the war
takes a small and unconvincing place, is creditable, though
rather uncertain, in workmanship, and displays a tendency
towards experiment in rich fancy and vague ornament.
In Ardours and Endurances the same accents are scarcely
to be detected; the pleasant boy has grown into a war-
worn man ; while the mastery over the material of poetic
art has become so remarkable as to make the epithet
" promising" otiose. There is no " promise" here; there
is high performance.

Alone among the poets before me, Lieut. Nichols has set
down a reasoned sequence of war impressions. The open-
ing Third of his book, and by far its most interesting
section, consists of a cycle of pieces in which the personal
experience of fighting is minutely reported, stage by stage.
We have " The Summons," the reluctant but unhesitating
answer to the call in England, the break-up of plans ; then
the farewell to home, " the place of comfort." " The
Approach," in three successive lyrics, describes the arrival
at the Front. " Battle," in eleven sections, reproduces
the mental and physical phenomena of the attack. " The
Dead," in four instalments, tells the tale of grief. " The
Aftermath," with extraordinary skill, records in eight
stages the gradual recovery of nerve-power after the
shattering emotions of the fight. The first section of
" Battle," as being shorter than the rest, may be quoted
in full as an example of Lieut. Nichols's method :

" It is inid-day : the deep trench glares

A buzz and blaze of flies
The hot wind puffs the giddy airs,
The great sun rakes the skies,

278 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

" No sound in all the stagnant trench

Where forty standing men
Endure the sweat and grit and stench,
Like cattle in a pen.

" Sometimes a sniper's bullet whirs

Or twangs the whining wire ;
Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs
As in hell's forging fire.

" From out a high cool cloud descends

An aeroplane's far moan ;
The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends,
The black speck travels on.

" And sweating, dizzied, isolate
In the hot trench beneath,
We bide the next shrewd move of fate
Be it of life or death."

This is painfully vivid, but it is far exceeded in poignancy
by what follows. Indeed it would be difficult to find in
all literature, from the wail of David over Jonathan down-
ward, such an expression of the hopeless longing for an
irrecoverable presence as informs the broken melodies, the
stanzas which are like sobs, of the fifth section of Ardours
and Endurances :

" In a far field, away from England, lies

A Boy I friended with a care like love ;
All day the wide earth aches, the cold wind cries,
The melancholy clouds drive on above.

" There, separate from him by a little span,

Two eagle cousins, generous, reckless, free,
Two Grenfells, lie, and my Boy is made man,
One with these elder knights of chivalry."

It is difficult to qualify, it seems almost indelicate to
intrude upon, such passionate grief. These poems form a
revelation of the agony of a spirit of superabundant refine-
ment and native sensuousness suddenly stunned, and as
it were momentarily petrified, by horrible spiritual anguish.
If the strain were not relieved by the final numbers of
" Aftermath," where the pain of the soul is abated, and
where the poet, scarred and shattered, but " free at last/'

Some Soldier Poets 279

snaps the chain of despair, these poems would be positively
intolerable.

In the closeness of his analysis and in the accurate
heaping up of exact and pregnant observations, Lieut.
Nichols comes closer than any other of these English
poets to the best of the French paladins, of whom I
wrote in Three French Moralists. One peculiarity which
he shares with them is his seriousness : there is no trace
in him of the English cheerfulness and levity. Most of
our war-writers are incorrigible Mark Tapleys. But Lieut.
Nichols^ even when he uses colloquial phrases and he
introduces them with great effect never smiles. He is
most unlike the French, on the other hand, in his general
attitude towards the war. He has no military enthusiasm,
no aspiration after gloire. Indeed, the most curious feature
of his poetry is that its range is concentrated on the few
yards about the trench in which he stands. He seems to
have no national view of the purpose of the war, no enthusi-
asm for the cause, no anger against the enemy. There is
but a single mention of the Germans from beginning to
end; the poet does not seem to know of their existence.
His experiences, his agonies, his despair, are what a purely
natural phenomenon, such as the eruption of a volcano or
the chaos of an earthquake, might cause. We might read
his poems over and over again without forming the slightest
idea of what all the distress was about, or who was guilty,
or what was being defended. This is a mark of great
artistic sincerity; but it also points to a certain moral
narrowness. Lieut. Robert Nichols' " endurances " are
magnificently described, but we are left in the dark regard-
ing his " ardours/' We are sure of one thing, however,
that none of us may guess what such a talent, in one still
so young, may have in store for us; and we may hope
for broader views expressed in no less burning accents.

There could hardly be a more vivid contrast than exists

280 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

between the melancholy passion of Lieut. Nichols and the
fantastic high spirits of Captain Robert Graves. He again
is evidently a very young man, who was but yester-year -a
jolly boy at the Charterhouse. He has always meant to
be a poet; he is not one of those who have been" driven
into verse by the strenuous emotion of the war. In
some diverting prefatory lines to Over the Brazier he gives
us a picture of the nursery-scene when a bright green-
covered book bewitched him by its " metre twisting like a
chain of daisies, with great big splendid words." He has
still a wholesome hunger for splendid words ; he has kept
more deliberately than most of his compeers a poetical
vocation steadily before him. He has his moments of
dejection when the first battle faces him :

" Here's an end to my art I

I must die and I know it,
With, battle-murder at my heart
Sad death for a poet !

' Oh, my songs never sung,

And my plays to darkness blown !
I am still so young, so young,

Anrl lifp> TXTQQ TTI^T rmrn JJ

And life was my own/

But this mood soon passes, and is merged in the humoristic.
and fantastic elation characteristic of this buoyant writer,
whose whim it is to meet the tragedy not mournfully but
boisterously. Where by most of the soldier-bards the
subjective manner is a little over-done, it is impossible
not to welcome so objective a writer as Captain Graves,
from whose observations of the battle of La Bassee I quote
an episode :

THE DEAD Fox HUNTER

" We found the little captain at the head;

His men lay well aligned.
We touched his hand, stone-cold, and he was dead,

And they, all dead behind,
Had never reached their goal, but they died well ;
They charged in line, and in the same line fell.

Some Soldier Poets 281

" The well-known rosy colours of his face

Were almost lost in grey.
We saw that, dying and in hopeless case,

For others' sake that day
He'd smothered all rebellious groans : in death
His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth.

" For those who live uprightly and die true

Heaven has no bars or locks,
And serves all taste ... Or what's for him to do

Up there, but hunt the fox ?
Angelic choirs ? No, Justice must provide
For one who rode straight and at hunting died.

" So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came,

Why, it must find one now :
If any shirk and doubt they know the game,

There's one to teach them how :
And the whole host of Seraphim complete
Must jog in scarlet to his opening Meet."

I have a notion that this is a gallant poem which
Englishmen will not allow to be forgotten. The great
quality of Captain Graves' verse at present is its elated
vivacity, which neither fire, nor pain, nor grief can long
subdue. Acutely sensitive to all these depressing elements,
his animal spirits lift him like an aeroplane, and he is above
us in a moment, soaring through clouds of nonsense under
a sky -of unruffled gaiety. In our old literature, of which
he is plainly a student, he has found a neglected author
who is wholly to his taste. This is Skelton, Henry VIII.' s
Rabelaisian laureate. Captain Graves imitates, with a
great deal of bravado, those breathless absurdities, The
Tunning of Elinore Rummyng and Colin Clout. He
likes rough metre, bad rhymes and squalid images : we
suspect him of an inclination to be rude to his immediate
predecessors. But his extreme modernness " Life is a
cliche I would find a gesture of my own" is, in the
case of so lively a songster, an evidence of vitality. He
promises a new volume, to be called Fairies and Fusiliers,
and it will be looked forward to with anticipation.

282 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

All these poets seem to be drawn into relation to one
another. Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon are both
Fusiliers, and they publish a <mx<y;0t'a " on Nonsense,"
just as Cowley and Crashaw did " on Hope" two centuries
and a half ago. Lieut. Sassoon' s own volume is later than
those which we have hitherto examined, and bears a some-
what different character. The gallantry of 1915 and the
optimism of 1916 have passed away, and in Lieut. Sassoon' s
" poems their place is taken by a sense of intolerable weari-
ness and impatience: " How long, Lord, how long? "
The name-piece of the volume, and perhaps its first in execu-
tion, is a monologue by an ignorant and shrewd old hunts-
man, who looks back over his life with philosophy and
regret. Like Captain Graves, he is haunted with the idea
that there must be fox-hounds in Heaven. All Lieut.
Sassoon' s poems about horses and hunting and country
life generally betray his tastes and habits. This particular
poem hardly touches on the war, but those which follow
are absorbed by the ugliness, lassitude, and horror of
fighting. Lieut. Sassoon' s verse has not yet secured the
quality of perfection; he is not sufficiently alive to the
importance of always hitting upon the best and only word.
He is essentially a satirist, and sometimes a very bold
one, as in " The Hero/' where the death of a soldier is
announced home in " gallant lies," so that his mother
brags to her neighbours of the courage of her dead son.
At the close of all this pious make-believe, the Colonel

" thought how ' Jack/ cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner ; how he'd tried
To get sent home; and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits ";

or, again, as in " Blighters," where the sentimentality of
London is contrasted with the reality in Flanders ;

Some Soldier Poets 283

" The House is crammed : tier beyond tier they grin

And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din,

' We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks !

" I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ' Home, sweet Home ! '
And there' d be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume."

It is this note of bitter anger, miles away from the
serenity of Rupert Brooke, the lion-heart of Julian Grenfell,
the mournful passion of Robert Nichols, which differentiates
Lieut. Sassoon from his fellows. They accept the war,
with gallantry or with resignation; he detests it with
wrathful impatience. He has much to learn as an artist,
for his diction is often hard, and he does not always
remember that Horace, " when he writ on vulgar subjects,
yet writ not vulgarly.' 1 But he has force, sincerity, and a
line of his own in thought and fancy. A considerable section
of his poetry is occupied with studies of men he has observed
at the Front, a subaltern, a private of the Lancashires,
conscripts, the dross of a battle-field, the one-legged man
(" Thank God, they had to amputate ! "), the sniper who
goes crazy savage, disconcerting silhouettes drawn roughly
"against a lurid background.

The bitterness of Lieut. Sassoon is not cynical, it is the
rage of disenchantment, the violence of a young man eager
to pursue other aims, who, finding the age out of joint,
resents being called upon to help to mend it. His temper
is not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments
must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can
hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty
and courage. Lieut. Sassoon, who, as we learn, has twice
been severely wounded and has been in the very furnace
of the fighting, has reflected, more perhaps than his fellow-
singers, about the causes and conditions of the war. He
may not always have thought correctly, nor have recorded

284 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

his impressions with proper circumspection, but his honesty
must be respectfully acknowledged.

I have now called attention to those soldier-writers
of verse who, in my judgment, expressed themselves
with most originality during the war. There is a temp-
tation to continue the inquiry, and to expatiate on
others of only less merit and promise. Much could be said
of Charles Hamilton Sorley, who gave evidence of preco-
cious literary talent, though less, I think, in verse, since
the unmistakable singing faculty is absent in Marl-
borough (Cambridge University Press, 1916), than in
prose, a form in which he already excelled. Sorley must
have shown military gifts as well as a fine courage, for
when he was killed in action in October 1915, although he
was but twenty years of age, he had been promoted captain,
In the universal sorrow, few figures awaken more regret-
than his. Something, too, had I space, should be said
about the minstrels who have been less concerned with
the delicacies of workmanship than with stirring the pulses
of their auditors. In this kind of lyric " A Leaping Wind
from England" will long keep fresh the name of W. N.
Hodgson, who was killed in the battle of the Somme. His
verses were collected in November 1916. The strange
rough drum-taps of Mr. Henry Lawson, published" in
Sydney at the close of 1915, and those of Mr. Lawrence
Rentoul, testify to Australian enthusiasm. Most of the
soldier-poets were quite youthful; an exception was
R. E. Vernede, whose War Poems (W. Heinemann, 1917)
show the vigour of moral experience. He was killed in
the attack on Harrincourt, in April 1917, having nearly
closed his forty-second year. To pursue the list would
only be to make my omissions more invidious.

There can be no healthy criticism where the principle of
selection is neglected, and' I regret that patriotism or indul-
gence has tempted so many of those who have spoken of

Some Soldier Poets 285

the war-poets of the day to plaster them with indiscriminate
praise. I have here mentioned a few, in whose honour even
a little excess of laudation may not be out of place. But
these are the exceptions, in a mass of standardised poetry
made to pattern, loosely versified, respectable in sentiment,
uniformly meditative, and entirely without individual
character. The reviewers who applaud all these ephemeral
efforts with a like acclaim, and who say that there are
hundreds of poets now writing who equal if they do not
excel the great masters of the past, talk nonsense; they
talk nonsense, and they know it. They lavish their
flatteries in order to widen the circle of their audience.
They are like the prophets of Samaria, who declared good
unto the King of Israel with one mouth ; and we need a
Micaiah to clear the scene of all such flatulent Zedekiahs.
It is not true that the poets of the youngest generation are
a myriad Shelleys and Burnses and Berangers rolled into
one. But it is true that they carry on the great tradition
of poetry with enthusiasm, and a few of them with high
accomplishment.

1917.

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
POETRY

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
POETRY 1

" J'ai vu Ic chcval rose ouvrir scs ailcs d'or,
Et, flairant Ic laurier quc jc tenais encor,
Vcrdoyant a jama is, hier commc aujourd'lwi,
Sc cabrer vers Ic Jour et rucr vcrs la Nuit."^

HENRI DE UEGNIER.

IN venturing this afternoon to address an audience
accustomed to listen to those whose positive authority is
universally recognised, and in taking for my theme a
subject not, like theirs, distinct in its definitions or con-
secrated by tradition and history, I am aware that I
perform what you may, if you choose, call an act of blame-
worthy audacity. My subject is chimerical, vague, and
founded on conjectures which you may well believe your-
selves at least as well fitted as I am to propound. Never-
theless, and in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I invite you
to join with me in some reflections on what is the probable
course of English poetry during, let us say, the next
hundred years. If I happen to be right, I hope some of
the youngest persons present will say, when I am long
turned to dust, what an illuminating prophet I was. If
I happen to be wrong, why, no one will remember any-
thing at all about the matter. In any case we may possibly
be rewarded this afternoon by some agreeable hopes and
by the contemplation of some pleasant analogies.

Our title takes for granted that English poetry will

1 Address delivered before tlie English Association, May 30,
1913.

U 289

zgo Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

continue, with whatever fluctuations, to be a living and
abiding thing. This I must suppose that you all accede
to, and that you do not look upon poetry as an art which
is finished, or the harvest of classic verse as one which is
fully reaped and garnered. That has been believed at one
time and another, in various parts of the globe. I will
mention one instance in the history of our own time : a
quarter of a century ago, the practice of writing verse was
deliberately abandoned in the literatures of the three
Scandinavian countries, but particularly in that of Norway,
where no poetry, in our sense, was written from about
1873 to 1885. It almost died out here in England in the
middle of the fifteenth century ; it ran very low in France
at the end of the Middle Ages. But all these instances,
whether ancient or modern, of the attempt to prove prose
a sufficing medium for all expression of human thought
have hitherto failed, and it is now almost certain that
they will more and more languidly be revived, and with
less and less conviction.

It was at one of the deadliest moments in the life of the
art in England that George Gascoigne remarked, in his
Epistle to the Reverend Divine (1574) that " It seemeth
unto me that in all ages Poetry hath been not only per-
mitted, but also it hath been thought a right good thing/'
Poetry has occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in
all ages, and you will remember that Plato, who excluded
the poets from his philosophical Utopia, was nevertheless
an exquisite writer of lyrical verse himself. So, to come
down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry out of the
living language of his country, had been one of the most
skilful of prosodical proficients. Such instances may allay
our alarm. There cannot be any lasting force in arguments
which remind us of the pious confessions of a redeemed
burglar. It needs more than the zeal of a turncoat to
drive Apollo out,o[ Parnassus.

The Future of English Poetry 291

There will, therefore, we may be sure, continue to be
English poetry written and printed. Can we form any
idea of the probable character of it ? There exists, in private
hands, a picture by that ingenious water-colour painter of
the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin. It is very
fantastic, and means what you like, but it represents
Pegasus, the horse of the Muses, careering in air on the vast
white arc of his wings, against a sky so dark that it must
symbolise the obscure discourse of those who write in prose.
You are left quite doubtful whether he will strike the rocky
terrace in the foreground with his slender, silver hooves,
or will swoop down into the valley below, or will soar to
heaven and out of sight. You are left by the painter in
a pleasant uncertainty, but Hippocrcnc may break out
anywhere, and of the vivacious courser himself all that
we can be sure of is that we are certain to see him alighting
before us when we least expect him.

We may put our trust in the persistence of Pegasus
through his apparently aimless gyrations, and in the
elasticity of the poetical spirit, and yet acknowledge that
there are difficulties in the way of believing that verse
will continue to be written in the English language for a
quite indefinite period. Perhaps we may as well face one
or two of these difficulties at once. The principal danger,
then, to the future of poetry seems to me to rest in the
necessity of freshness of expression. Every school of verse
is a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, because its
leaders have become capable of new forms of attractive
expression; its crest is some writer, or several writers, of
genius, who combine skill and fire and luck at a moment
of extreme opportuneness; and then the wave breaks,
because later writers cannot support the ecstasy, and merely
repeat formulas which have lost their attractiveness.
Shirley would have been a portent, if he had flourished
in 1595 and had written then as he did in 1645. Erasmus

292 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Darwin would be one of the miracles of prosody if The
Loves of the Plants could be dated 1689 instead of 1789.
There must always be this fluctuation, this rise and fall
in value, and what starts each new wave mounting out of
the trough of the last is the instinctive demand for fresh-
ness of expression. Can late Domino is the cry of youth,
sing a new song unto the Lord.

But with the superabundant circulation of language
year after year, week after week, by a myriad careful
scribes, the possibilities of freshness grow rarer and rarer.
The obvious, simple, poignant things seem to have all
been said. It is not merely that the actual poems, like
Gray's Elegy, and much of Hamlet, and some of Burns' s
songs, have been manipulated so often, and put to such
pedestrian uses, that they arc like rubbed coins, and
begin to lose Hie very features of Apollo and the script
of the Muses, but that the road seems closed to future
bards who wish to speak with simplicity of similar straight-
forward things. In several of the literatures of modern
Europe those which began late, or struggled long against
great disadvantages it is still possible to produce pleasure
by poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectly
limpid language. But with us in England, I confess that
it seems to me certain that whatever we retain, we can
never any more have patience to listen to a new shepherd
piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generation is likely
to be more acutely preoccupied than the last with the
desire for novelty of expression. Accordingly, the sense of
originality, which is so feivently demanded from every new-
school of writers, will force the poets of the future to sweep
away all recognised impressions. The consequence must be,
I think I confess so far as language is concerned that I see
no escape from this that the natural uses of English and the
obvious forms of our speech will be driven from our national
poetry, as they are even now so generally being driven.

The Future of English Poetry 293

No doubt, in this condition, the originality of those who
do contrive to write strongly and clearly will be more
vigorously evident than ever. The poets will have to gird
up their loins and take their sword in their hands. That
wise man of the eighteenth century, to whom we never
applv without some illuminating response, recommends
that " Oui saura penser de lui-meme et former dc nobles
idees, qu'il prenne, s'il pent, la maniere ct le tour clcvc
dcs maitres." These are words which should inspire
every new aspirant to the laurel. " S'il pent" ; you sec
that Vauvenargues puts it so, because he docs not wish
that we should think that such victories as these art; easy,
or that any one else can help us to produce them They
are not easy, and they will be made more and more hard
by the rubbed-out, conventionalised coinage of our language.

In this matter I think it probable that the little peoples
and the provinces which cultivate a national speech, will
long find a great facility in expressing themselves in verse.
I observe that it has recently been stated that Wales,
which has always teemed with vernacular poets, has never
possessed so many as she does at this time. I am debarred
by what Keats called " giant ignorance" from expressing
an opinion on the subject, but I presume that in Welsh
the resources of language are far from being so seriously
exhausted as we have seen that they are in our own com-
plicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the higher
forms of poetic diction through five centuries has made
simple expression extremely difficult. I am therefore
ready to believe that in Welsh, as in Gaelic and in Erse,
the poets have still wide fields of lyric, epic, and dramatic
art untilled. We ha\e seen, in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century, Provencal poets capable of producing simple
and thrilling numbers which are out of the reach of their
sophisticated brethren who employ the worn locutions of
the French language.

294 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

In new generations there is likely, we may be sure, to
occur less description of plain material objects, because the
aspect of these has already received every obvious tribute.
So also there can hardly fail to be less precise enumeration
of the primitive natural emotions, because this also has
been done already, and repeated to satiety. It will not
any longer satisfy to write

" The rose is red, the violet blue,
And both are sweet, and so are you."

Reflections of this order were once felt to be exquisite, and
they were so still as lately as when Blake and Wordsworth
were young. But it is quite impossible that we should
ever go back to them. Future poets will seek to analyse
the redness of the rose, and will scout, as a fallacious
observation, the statement that the violet is blue. All
schemes of art become mechanical and insipid, and even
their naivetes lose their savour. Verse of excellent quality,
in this primitive manner, can now be written to order by
any smart little boy in a Grammar-school.

We have agreed, however, to believe that poetry, as an
art, in one shape or another, will escape from the bank-
ruptcy of language, and that Pegasus, with whatever strange
and unexpected gambollings, will continue to accompany
us. But of one thing we may be quite sure, that it will
only be at the cost of much that we at present admire and
enjoy that the continuity of the art of verse will be preserved.
If I could suddenly present to you some characteristic
passages of the best English poetry of 1963, I doubt ex-
tremely whether I should be able "to persuade you of their
merit. I am not sure that you would understand what
the poet intended to convey, any more than the Earl of
Surrey would have understood the satires of Donne, or
Coleridge have enjoyed the odes of George Meredith,
Young minds invariably display their vitality by attacking

The Future of English Poetry 295

the accepted forms of expression, and then they look about
for novelties, which they cultivate with what seems to
their elders to be extravagance. Before we attempt to
form an idea, however shadowy, of what poetry will be
in the future, we must disabuse ourselves of the delusion
that it will be a repetition of what is now produced and
accepted. Nor can we hope by any exercise of philosophy
to do away with the embarrassing and painful, but after
all perhaps healthful antagonism between those who look
forward and those who live in the past. The earnestness
expended on new work will always render young men
incapable of doing justice to what is a very little older
than themselves; and the piety with which the elderly
regard what gave them full satisfaction in their clays of
emotional freshness will always make it difficult lor them
to be just to what seems built on the ruins of what they
loved.

If there is any feature which we can scarcely be wrong
in detecting in our vision of the poetry of the future it is
an elaboration which must follow on the need for novelty
of which I have spoken. I expect to find the modern poet
accepting more or less consciously an ever-increasing sym-
bolic subtlety of expression. If we could read his verses,
which are still unwritten, I feel sure that we should con-
sider them obscure. That is to say, we should find that
in his anxiety not to repeat what had been said before him,
and in his horror of the trite and the superficial, he will
achieve effect and attach interest obsciwis vcra involve n$
wrapping the truth in darkness. The " darkness" will be
relative, as his own contemporaries, being more instructed
and sophisticated than we arc, will find those things trans-
parent, or at least translucent, which remain opaque
enough to us. And, of course, as epithets and adjectives
that seem fresh to us will smell of the inldiorn to him,
he will have to exert his ingenuity to find parallel cxpres-

296 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

sions which would startle us by their oddity if we met
with them now.

A danger, therefore, which the poets of the future will
need all their ingenuity to avoid, will be the cultivation
of a patent artificiality, a forcing of the note until it ceases
to rouse an echo in the human heart. There will be a deter-
mination to sweep away ail previously recognised impres-
sions. Affectation, that is to s&y the obtaining of an effect
by illegitimate means, is an offence against the Muses
which they never fail to avenge by oblivion or by a curtailed
and impeded circulation. We may instructively examine
the history of literature with special attention to this
fault, and we find it in all cases to have been fatal. It
was fatal to the poetry of Alexandria, which closed, as
you know, in an obscurity to which the title of Lycophrontic
darkness has been given from the name of its most ex-
travagant exponent. It was fatal to several highly-gifted
writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, who en-
deavoured to give freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic
ornament; I need only remind you of the impenetrable
cloud or fog, by Cyril Tourneur, called The Transformed
Metamorphosis, and of the cryptic rhymed dramas of Lord
Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I think desper-
ately perilous to a beautiful talent of our own age, the
amiable Stephane Mallarme. Nothing, I feel, is more
dangerous to the health of poetry than the praise given
by a group of irresponsible disciples to verse which transfers
commonplace thought to an exaggerated, violent, and
involved scheme of diction, and I confess that I should
regard the future of poetry in this country with much
more apprehension than I do, if I believed that the purely
learned poet, the prosodical pedant, was destined to become
paramount amongst us. That would, indeed, threaten
the permanence of the art; and it is for this reason that
I look with a certain measure of alarm on the excess of

The Future of English Poetry 297

verbiage about versification which attends not merely
criticism for that matters little but the actual production
and creation. I am confident, however, that the common
sense of readers will always bring about a reaction in
favour of sanity and lucidity.

One great objection to the introduction of a tortured
and affected style into verse-writing is the sacrifice which
has to be made of that dignity and sweetness, that suave
elevation, which marks all successful masterpieces. Per-
haps as difficult a quality to attain as any which the poetry
of the future will be called upon to study is stateliness,
what the French call " la vraie hauteur." This elevation
of style, this dignity, is foreign to democracies, and it is
hard to sustain it in the rude air of modern life. It easily
degenerates, as Europe saw it degenerate for a century
and a half, into pomposity relieved by flatness. It is apt
to become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of empty
fine phrases. If we examine the serious poetry of the
end of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth
century especially in the other countries of Europe, for
England was never without some dew on the threshing-
floor if we examine it in France, for instance, between
Racine and Andre Chenier, we are obliged to recognise
that it was very rarely both genuine and appropriate.
The Romantic Revival, which we are beginning ungratefully
to dec^y, did at least restore to poetry the sense of a genuine
stateliness of expression, which once more gave it the
requisite dignity, and made it a vehicle for -the vital and
the noble sentiments of humanity.

Let us now turn, in our conjectural survey, from the
form to the subjects with which the poetry of the future
is likely to be engaged. Here we are confronted with the
fact that, if we examine the whole of history, we see that
the domain of verse has been persistently narrowed by
the incursions of a more and more powerful and wide

298 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

embracing prose. At the dawn of civilisation poetry had
it all its own way. If instruction was desired upon any
sphere of human knowledge or energy, the bard produced
it in a prosodical shape, combining with the dignity of
form the aid which the memory borrowed from a pattern
or a song. Thus you conceive of a Hesiod before you
think of a Homer, and the earliest poetry was probably
of a purely didactic kind. As time went on, prose, with
its exact pedestrian method, took over more and more
completely the whole province of information, but it was
not until the nineteenth century that the last strongholds
of the poetry of instruction were stormed. I will, if you
please, bring this home to you by an example which may
surprise you.

The subject which I have taken the liberty of discussing
with you this afternoon has not often occupied the serious
attention of critics. But it was attempted, by no less a
person than Wordsworth, more than a hundred years ago.
I make no excuse for repeating to you the remarkable
passage in which he expressed his convictions in the famous
Preface of 1800 :

" If the labours of men of science, Wordsworth said,
should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect,
in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually
receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present;
he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science,
not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at
his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects
of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the
Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper
objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be
employed, if the time should ever come when these things
shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which
they are contemplated by the followers of these respective

The Future of English Poetry 299

sciences, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put
on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend
his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome
the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate
of the household of man."

It is plain, then, that, writing in the year 1800, Words-
worth believed that a kind of modified and sublimated
didactic poetry would come into vogue in the course of
the nineteenth century. He stood on the threshold of a
new age, and he cast his vatic gaze across it much in the
same spirit as we are trying to do to-day. But if any
warning were needed to assure us of the vanity of prophesy-
ing, it would surely be the error of one so sublimely gifted
and so enriched with the spoils of meditation. The belief
of Wordsworth was that the poetry of the future would
deal, in some vaguely inspired fashion, with the discoveries
of science. But when we look back over the field of 113
years, how much do we find our national poetry enriched
with ore from the mines of mineralogy or botany or
chemistry? It is difficult to see that there has been so
much as an effort made to develop poetry in this or in
any similar direction. Perhaps the nearest approach to
what Wordsworth conceived as probable was attempted
by Tennyson, particularly in those parts of In Memoriam
wherehe dragged in analogies to geological discoveries and
the biological theories of his time. Well, these are just
those parts of Tennyson which arc now most universally
repudiated as lifeless and jejune.

Wordsworth did not confine himself to predicting a revival
of didactic poetry, the poetry of information, such as, in a
very crude form, had prevailed all over Europe in his own
childhood, but he conceived a wide social activity for
writers of verse. He foresaw that the Poet would " bind
together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of

3 GO Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and
over all time. )J I suppose that in composing those huge
works, so full of scattered beauties, but in their entirety
so dry and solid, The Excursion and The Prelude, he
was consciously attempting to inaugurate this scheme
of a wide and all-embracing social poetry. Nor do I
suppose that efforts of this kind will ever cease to be
made. We have seen a gifted writer in whom the memory
is perhaps even more surprisingly developed than the
imagination, employ the stores of his experience to enrich
a social poetry the elements of which, prima facie, should
be deeply attractive to us all. But I do not know that
the experiments of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, brilliant as they
are, are calculated to encourage the poets of the future
to pursue their lyric celebration of machinery and sociology
and the mysteries of natural religion. Already is it not
that portion of his work which we approach with most
languor, in spite of its originality and its outlook upon
" the vast empire of human society " ? And lesser poets
than he who seek for popularity by such violent means
are not, I think, rewarded by the distinguished loyalty of
"the best readers. We are startled by their novelty, and
we admire them for the moment; but when, a few years
later, we return to them, we are apt to observe with distress

how

" their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw."

If, therefore, I venture upon a prophecy, where all the
greater prophets, my predecessors, have failed, it is to
suggest that the energy of future poets will not be largely
exercised on themes of this intrepid social character, but
that as civilisation more and more tightly lays hold upon
literature, and excludes the purest form of it from one
province after another, poetry will, in its own defence,
cultivate more and more what Hazlitt calls " a mere

The Future of English Poetry 301

effusion of natural sensibility." Hazlitt used the phrase
in derision, but we may accept it seriously, and not shrink
from adopting it. In most public remarks about current
and coining literature in the abstract, I marvel at the
confidence with which it is taken for granted that the
sphere of interest occupied by writers of the imagination
is sure to grow wider and wider. It is expected to embrace
the world, to take part in a universal scheme of pacification,
to immortalise imperial events, to be as public as possible.
But surely it is more and more clearly proved that prose
is the suitable medium for such grandiose themes as these.
Within the last year our minds have been galvanised into
collective sympathy by two great sensations of catastrophe,
each case wearing the most thrilling form that tragedy
can take in the revolt of nature against the f everish advances
of mankind. I suppose we may consider the destruction
of the Titanic and the loss of Captain Scott's expedition
as two absolutely typical examples of what is thought by
journalists to be fitting material for poetry. Yet by
common consent, these tragic occurrences did not awaken
our numerous poets to any really remarkable effort, lyrical
or elegiac. No ode or threnody could equal in vibrating
passion Captain Scott's last testament. These arc matters
in which the fullness of a wholly sincere statement in prose
does not require, does not even admit, the introduction of
the symbol. The impact of the sentiments of horror and
pity is too sudden and forcible.

My own view is that, whether to its advantage or not,
the poetry of the future is likely to be very much occupied
with subjects, and with those alone, which cannot br
expressed in the prose of the best-edited newspaper. In
fact, if I were to say what it is which I think coming poets
will have more and more to be on their guard against, I
should define it as a too rigid determination never to
examine subjects which are of collective interest to the

302 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

race at large. I dread lest the intense cultivation of the
Ego, in minutest analysis and microscopical observation
of one's self, should become the sole preoccupation of the
future poet. I will not tell you that I dread lest this
should be one of his principal preoccupations, for that
would be to give way to a cheery piece of mid- Victorian
hypocrisy which would be unworthy of you and of me
alike. The time is past when intelligent persons ought
to warn writers of the imagination not to cultivate self-
analysis, since it is the only safeguard against the follies
of an unbridled romanticism. But although the ivory
tower offers a most valuable retreat, and although the
poets may be strongly recommended to prolong their
mlleggiaiura there, it should not be the year-long habitation
of any healthy intelligence.

I do not question that the closing up of the poetic field,
the depending more and more completely for artistic effect
upon an " effusion of natural sensibility/' will isolate the
poet from his fellows. He will be tempted, in the pursuit
of the symbol which illustrates his emotion, to draw farther
and farther away from contact with the world. He will
wrap his singing-robes not over his limbs only, but over his
face, and treat his readers with exemplary disdain. We
must be prepared, or our successors must, to find frequently
revealed the kind of poet who not merely sees nothing
superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I #m not
concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blame-
worthy; the moralist of the future must attend to that.
But I can believe that this unyielding and inscrutable
attitude may produce some fine artistic effects. I can
believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained by
this sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although
I am not prepared to say at what loss of other qualities.
It is clear that such a writer will not allow the public to
dictate to him the nature or form of his lyric message,

The Future of English Poetry 303

and he will have to depend for success entirely on the
positive value of his verse.

The isolation of the poets of the future is likely to lead
them to band themselves more closely together for mutual
protection against the reasonable world. The mystery of
verse is like other abstruse and recondite mysteries it
strikes the ordinary fleshly man as absurd. The claim of
the poet on human sympathy, if we regard it merely from
the world's standpoint, is gratuitous, vague, and silly. In
an entirely sensible and well-conducted social system,
what place will there be for the sorrows of Tasso and Byron,
for the rage of Dante, for the misanthropy of Alfred dc
Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for the rowdincss of
Marlowe? the higher the note of the lyre, the more
ridiculous is the attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public
applauds the violence of Diogenes when he tramples on
the pride of the poets with a greater pride than theirs. I
cannot help thinking that this attitude of the sacred bard,
maundering from the summit of his ivory tower, and
hollowed out and made haggard by a kind of sublime
moral neuralgia, will have to be abandoned as a relic of the
dead romantic past. So far as it is preserved by the poets
of the future it will be peculiar to those monasteries of song,
those "little clans," of which I am now about to speak
as likely more and more to prevail.

In France, where the interest in poetry has, during the
last generation, been far more keen and more abundant
than anywhere else in the world, we already see a tendency
to the formation of such experimental houses of song.
There has been hitherto no great success attending any
one of these bodies, which soon break up, but the effort
to form them is perhaps instructive. I took considerable
interest in the Abbayc dc Creleil, which was a collectivist
experiment of this kind. It was founded in October 1906,
and it was dissolved in consequence of internal dissensions

304 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

in January 1908. It was an attempt to create, in defiance
of the public, in contemptuous disregard of established
" literary opinion," a sort of prosodical chapel or- school
of poetry. It was to be the active centre of energy ior a
new generation, and there were live founders, each o[
whom was highly ambitious to distinguish himself in verse.
At Creteil there was a printing-press in a great park, so
that the members should be altogether independent ol the
outside world. The poets were to cultivate the garden
and keep house with the sale of the 'produce. When not
at work, there were recitations, discussions, exhibitions of
sketches, for they were mixed up with the latest vagaries
of the Cubists and Post-impressionists.

This particular experiment lasted only fifteen months,
and I cannot conscientiously say that I think it was in any
way a success. No one among the abbatical founders of
Creteil had, to be quite frank, any measure of talent in
proportion to his daring. They were involved in vague
and nebulous ideas, mixed up with what I am afraid I
must call charlatans, the refuse and the wreckage of other
arts. Yet I consider that it is interesting to note that the
lay monks of Creteil were in a sense correct when they
announced that they were performing " a heroic act/' an
act symbolical of the way in which poetry would in the
future disdainfully protect itself against the invasion of
common sense, the dreadful impact of the sensual -world.
. I think you will do well, if 3^011 wish to pursue the subject
of our conjectural discourse, to keep your eye on this
tendency to a poetical collectivism. We have not noticed
much evidence of it yet in England, but it is beginning to
stir a good deal in France and Italy. After all, the highest
poetry is a mysterious thing, like the practices of the
Society of Rosicnicians, of whom it was said, " Our House
of the Holy Ghost, though a hundred thousand men should
have looked upon it, is yet doomed to remain untouched,

The Future of English Poetry '" L 305

imperturbable, out of sight, and unrevealed to the whole
godless world for ever." If I am sure of anything, it is
that the Poets of the Future will look upon massive schemes
of universal technical education, and such democratic
reforms as those which are now occupying the enthusiasm
and energy of Lord Haldane, as peculiarly hateful
expositions of the godlessncss of a godless world.

To turn to another branch of our subject, it appears
to me possible that sexual love may cease to be the pre-
dominant theme in the lyrical poetry of the future. Erotic
sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied the imaginative
art of the past. In particular, the poets of the late nine-
teenth century were interested to excess in love. There
was a sort of obsession of sex among them, as though life
presented no other phenomenon worthy of the attention
of the artist. All over Europe, with the various tincture
of differing national habit and custom, this was the mark
of the sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately
and craftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples
which will easily occur to your memory, rankly, as with
the tiresome persistence of a slightly stale perfume, an
irritating odour of last night's opopanax or vervain. And
this is the one point, almost I think the only point, in
which the rather absurd and certainly very noisy and
hoydcnish manifestoes of the so-called Futurists, led by
M. Marinctti and his crew of iconoclasts, are worthy of our
serious attention. It is a plank in their platform to banish
eroticism, of the good kind and of the bad, from the
poetic practice of the future. I do not, to say the truth,
find much help for the inquiry we have taken up to-day,
in the manifestoes of these raucous young gentlemen, who,
when they have succeeded in flinging the ruins of the
architecture of Venice into its small stinking canals,
will find themselves hard put to it to build anything
beautiful in the place of them. But in their reaction against
x

306 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

" the eternal feminine," they may, I think, very possibly
be followed by the serious poets of the future.

Those who have watched rather closely the recent develop-
ments of poetry in England have been struck with the fact
that it tends more and more in the direction of the dramatic,
not necessarily in the form of what is known as pure drama,
particularly adapted for representation to listening audiences
behind the footlights, but in the increased study of life in
its exhibitions of energy. This may seem to be inconsistent
with the tendency, of which I spoke just now, to withdraw
from the world itself, either into an egotistical isolation or
into some cloistered association of more or less independent
figures united only in a rebellious and contemptuous disdain
of public opinion. But the inconsistency may very well
be one solely in appearance. It may well happen that the
avoidance of all companionship with the stereotyped social
surfaces of life, the ignorance really, the happy and
hieratic ignorance of what " people," in the fussy sense,
are supposed to be saying and doing, may actually help
the poet to come more fruitfully and penetratingly to what
lies under the surface, to what is essential and permanent
and notable in the solid earth of human character. Hence,
I think it not improbable that the poetry of the future
may become more and more dramatic, although perhaps
by a series of acts of definite creation, rather than as the
result of observation, which will be left to the ever-increasing
adroitness of the brilliant masters of our prose.

As a result of this obsession in creative drama, I suppose
that we may expect to find in the poetry of the future a
more steady hope for mankind than has up to the present
time been exhibited. The result of an excessive observation
of the startling facts of life, a work appropriate to the
violent energy of realistic prose, has been a general ex-
aggeration of the darker tints, an insistence on that promi-
nence of what was called the "sub-fuse" colours which

The Future of English Poetry 307

art-critics of a century ago judged essential to sublimity
in all art. In Continental literature, and particularly in
the very latest Russian drama, this determination to see
blackness and blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene
of existence as a Valley of the Shadow of Despair, has been
painfully frequent. In England we had a poet of con-
siderable power, whose tragic figure crossed me in my youth,
in whose work there is not a single gleam of hope or dignity
for man ; I mean the unfortunate James Thomson, author
of The City of Dreadful Night. I cannot but believe that
the poetry of the future, being more deeply instructed,
will insist less emphatically upon human failure and less
savagely upon the revolt of man. I anticipate in the
general tone of it an earnestness, a fullness of tribute to
the noble passion of life, an utterance simple and direct.
I believe that it will take as its theme the magnificence of
the spectacle of Man's successful fight with Nature, not
the grotesque and squalid picturesquencss of his occasional
defeat.

It has been admirably said, in a charming essay, that
" History may be abstract, science may be frankly in-
human, even art may be purely formal; but poetry
must be full of human life." This consideration, I think,
may make us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate
maintenance of poetic expression. For humanity will
always be with us, whatever changes may be introduced
into our social system, whatever revolutions may occur
in religion, in legality, in public order, or in the stratifica-
tion of composite life. I confess the only atmosphere in
which it is impossible for me to conceive of poetry as able
to breathe would be one of complete and humdrum uni-
formity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time,
but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme
socialistic reformers. As long as there is such variety of
individual action possible as will give free scope to the

308 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

energies and passions, the hopes and fears, of mankind,
so long I think the element of plastic imagination will be
found to insist on expression in the mode of formal art.
It is quite possible that, as a result of extended knowledge
and of the democratic instinct, a certain precipitant hard-
ness of design, such as was presented in the nineteenth
century by Tennyson in the blank verse lyrics in The
Princess, by Browning in the more brilliant parts of One
Word More, by Swinburne in his fulminating Sapphics,
may be as little repeated as the analogous hardness of
Dryden in MacFlecknoe or the lapidary splendour of Gray
in his Odes. I should rather look, at least in the im-
mediate future, for a revival of the liquid ease of Chaucer
or the soft redundancies of The Faerie Queene. The remark-
able experiments of the Symbolists of twenty years ago,
and their effect upon the whole body of French verse, leads
me to expect a continuous movement in that direction.

It is difficult indeed to speak of the probable future of
poetry without introducing the word Symbolism, over
which there has raged so much windy warfare in the
immediate past. I cannot help believing that the immense
importance of this idea is one of the principal perhaps the
greatest discovery with regard to poetry which was made
in the last generation. Symbols, among the ancient
Greeks, were, if I mistake not, the signs by which the
initiated worshippers of Ceres or Cybele recognised* their
mysterious unison of heart. A symbol is an indication of
an object, in opposition to a direct description of the same;
it arouses the idea of it in the awakened soul; rings a
bell, for we may almost put it so, which at once rouses the
spirit and reminds it of some special event or imminent
service. The importance of making this the foremost
feature of poetry is not new, although it may be said that
we have only lately, and only partially, become aware of
its value. But, really, if you will consider it, all that the

The Future of English Poetry 309

Symbolists have been saying is involved in Bacon's phrase
that " poetry conforms the shows of things to the desires
of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things."
There could never be presented a subject less calculated
to be wound up with a rhetorical flourish or to close in
pompous affirmation than that which I have so temerari-
ously brought before you this afternoon. I hope that
you will not think that your time has been wasted while
we have touched, lightly and erratically, like birds on
boughs, upon some of the probable or possible features
of the poetry of the future. Whatever you, or I, or the
wisest of professors, may predict on this theme of the
unborn poets, we may be certain that there will

" hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue "

of ours can " digest/' I began with the rococo image of
a Pegasus, poised in the air, flashing and curvetting,
petulantly refusing to alight on any expected spot. Let
me return to it in closing, that I may suggest our only
sage attitude to be one of always watching for his inevitable
arrival, ready to put grateful lips to the waters of Hippocrene
as soon as ever they bubble from the blow of his hoof.

THE AGONY OF THE
VICTORIAN AGE

THE AGONY OF THE
VICTORIAN AGE

FOR a considerable time past everybody must have
noticed, especially in private conversation, a growing
tendency to disparagement and even ridicule of all men
and things, and aspects of things, which can be defined as
" Victorian." Faded habits of mind are lightly dismissed
as typical of the Victorian Age, and old favourite poets,
painters, and musicians are treated with the same scorn as
the glued chairs and glass bowls of wax flowers of sixty
years ago. The new generation are hardly willing to dis-
tinguish what was good from what was bad in the time of
their grandmothers. With increasing audacity they repu-
diate the Victorian Age as a saclum insipiens et infacetum,
and we meet everywhere with the exact opposite of Mon-
taigne's " Je les approuve tous Tun apres Tautre, quoi
qu'ils disent." Our younger contemporaries are slipping
into the habit of approving of nothing from the moment
that they are told it is Victorian.

This may almost be described as an intellectual and
moral revolution. Every such revolution means some
liberation of the intellect from bondage, and shows itself
first of all in a temper of irreverence ; the formulas of the
old faith are no longer treated with respect and presently
they are even ridiculed. It is useless to close our eyes to
the fact that a spirit of this kind is at work amongst us,
undermining the dignity and authority of objects and
opinions and men that seemed half a century ago to be

313

314 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

more perennial than bronze. Successive orators and
writers have put the public in possession of arguments,
and especially have sparkled in pleasantries, which have
sapped the very foundations of the faith of 1850. The
infection has attacked us all, and there is probably no one
who is not surprised, if he seriously reflects, to realise that
he once implicitly took his ideas of art from Ruskin and
of philosophy from Herbert Spencer. These great men
are no longer regarded by anybody with the old credulity;
their theories and their dogmas are mined, as were those
of the early eighteenth century in France by the Encyclo-
paedists, by a select class of destructive critics, in whose
wake the whole public irregularly follows. The ordinary
unthinking man accepts the change with exhilaration,
since in this country the majority have always enjoyed
seeing noses knocked off statues. But if we are to rejoice
in liberation from the bondage of the Victorian Age we
ought to know what those bonds were.

The phenomena of the decadence of an age are never
similar to those of its rise. This is a fact which is com-
monly overlooked by the opponents of a particular section
of social and intellectual history. In the initial stages of
a "period" we look for audacity, fire, freshness, passion.
We look for men of strong character who will hew a channel
along which the torrent of new ideals and subversive senti-
ments can rush. But this violence cannot be expected to
last, and it would lead to anarchy if it did. Slowly the
impetus of the stream diminishes, the river widens, and
its waters reach a point where there seems to be no further
movement in their expanse. No age contains in itself the
elements of endless progress; it starts in fury, and little
by little the force of it declines. Its decline is patent
but not until long afterwards in a deadening of effort, in
a hardening of style. Dryden leads on to Pope, Pope
points down to Erasmus Darwin, after whom the world

The Agony of the Victorian Age 315

can but reject the whole classical system. The hungry
sheep of a new generation look up and are not fed, and
this is the vision which seems to face us in the last adven-
tures of the schools of yesterday.

But what is, or was, the Victorian Age? The world
speaks glibly of it as though it were a province of history
no less exactly defined than the career of a human being
from birth to death; but in practice no one seems in a
hurry to mark out its frontiers. Indeed, to do so is an
intrepid act. If the attempt is to be made at all, then
1840, the year of Queen Victoria's marriage with Prince
Albert, may be suggested as the starting-point, and 1890
(between the death-dates of Browning, Newman, and
Tennyson) as the year in which the Victorian Age is seen
sinking into the sands. Nothing could be vaguer, or more
open to contention in detail, than this delineation, but at
all events it gives our deliberations a frame. It excludes
Pickwick, which is the typical picture of English life
under William IV., and Sartor Resartus, which was the
tossing of the bound giant in his sleep; but it includes
the two-volume Tennyson, " chiefly lyrical," the stir of
the Corn Law agitation, the Tractarian Crisis of 1841,
and the History of the French Revolution and Past and
Present, when the giant opened his eyes and fought with
his chains. Darwin was slowly putting together the notes
he Had made on the Beagle, and Hugh Miller was dis-
turbing convention by his explorations of the Old Red
Sandstone. Most of all, the discussion of permanent and
transient elements in Christianity was taking a foremost
place in all strata of society, not merely in the form of
the contest around Tract go, but in the divergent directions
of Colenso, the Simeon Evangelicals, and Maurice.

The Victorian Age began in rancour and turmoil. This
is an element which we must not overlook, although it was
in a measure superficial. A series of storms, rattling and

316 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

recurrent tempests of thunder and lightning, swept over
public opinion, which had been so calm under George IV.
and so dull under William IV. Nothing could exceed the
discord of vituperation, the Hebraism of Carlyle denouncing
the Vaticanism of Wiseman, " Free Kirk and other
rubbish " pitted against " Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic
specialities." This theological tension marks the first
twenty years and then slowly dies down, after the passion
expended over Essays and Reviews. It was in 1840 that
we find Macaulay, anxious to start a scheme of Whig
reform and to cut a respectable figure as Secretary of State
for War, unable to get to business because of the stumbling-
block of religious controversy. Everything in heaven and
earth was turned into " a theological treatise," and all
that people cared about was " the nature of the sacra-
ments, the operation of holy orders, the visibility of the
Church and baptismal regeneration.' ' The sitting member
goes down to Edinburgh to talk to his constituents about
Corn Laws and Sugar Duties and the Eastern Question;
he is met by " a din" of such objections as "Yes,
Mr. Macaulay, that is all very well for a statesman,
but what becomes of the headship of our Lord Jesus
Christ?"

If the Victorian Age opened in a tempest of theology, it
was only natural that it should cultivate a withering dis-
dain for those who had attempted to reform society^on a
non-theological basis. In sharp contradistinction to the
indulgence of the Georgian period for philosophic specu-
lation, England's interest in which not even her long
continental wars had been able to quench, we find with
the accession of Victoria the credit of the French thinkers
almost abruptly falling. Voltaire, never very popular in
England, becomes " as mischievous a monkey as any of
them " ; the enthusiasm for Rousseau, which had reached
extravagant proportions, completely disappears, and he is

The Agony of the Victorian Age 317

merely the slanderous sceptic, who, after soaking other
people's waistcoats with his tears, sent his own babies to
the Foundling Hospital. The influence of the French
eighteenth-century literature on the mind of England was
first combated and then baldly denied. The premier
journalist of the age declared, with the satisfaction of a
turkey-cock strutting round his yard, that no trace of
the lowest level of what could be called popularity re-
mained in England to the writers of France, and he felt
himself " entitled to treat as an imbecile conceit the
pretence " that a French school of thought survived in
Great Britain. Such was the Podsnappery of the hour
in its vigilance against moral and religious taint.

Notwithstanding, or perhaps we ought to say inevitably
conducted by these elements of passion and disdain, the
infant Victorian Age passed rapidly into the great political
whirlpool of 1846, with its violent concentration of enthu-
siasm on the social questions which affected the welfare of
the masses, with, in short, its tremendous upheaval of a
practical radicalism. From that time forth its develop-
ment baffles analysis. Whatever its present enemies may
allege to its discredit, they cannot pretend that it was
languid or monotonous. No Age hitherto lived out upon
the world's surface has been so multiform or so busy; none
defies the art of the historian to such a bewildering degree.
Its lartest critic does not exaggerate when he says that our
fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumu-
lated so vast a quantity of information concerning it " that
the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it and the
perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it." This is
manifestly true, and it is evident that an encyclopaedia
would be required to discuss all the divisions of so tre-
mendous a subject. If we look over too wide a horizon
we lose our bearings altogether. We get a hopelessly
confused notion of the course of progress; we see experi-

318 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

ments, criticisms, failures, but who is to assure us what
was the tendency of evolution?

Mr. Lytton Strachey's " Eminent Victorians" has
arrived at the very moment when all readers are prepared
to discuss the age he deals with, and when public opinion
is aware of the impatience which has been " rising in the
bosom of a man like smoke " under the pressure of the
insistent praise of famous men. The book has attracted
a very remarkable degree of notice; it has been talked
about wherever people have -met together; and has
received the compliment of being seriously displayed before
the University of Oxford by one of the most eminent of
the Victorian statesmen whom Oxford has produced. If
we look into the causes of this success, enjoyed by the
earliest extended book of a writer almost unknown, a
book, too, which pretends to no novelty of matter or
mystery of investigation, we find them partly in the pre-
paredness of the public mind for something in the way of
this exposure, but partly also in the skill of the writer.
Whatever else may be said of Mr. Lytton Strachey, no one
can deny that he is very adroit, or that he possesses the
art of arresting attention.

It is part of this adroitness that he contrives to modify,
and for a long time even to conceal the fact that his pur-
pose is to damage and discredit the Victorian Age. He is
so ceremonious in his approach, so careful to avowi all
brusqueness and coarseness, that his real aim may be for
awhile unobserved. He even professes to speak " dis-
passionately, impartially,' and without ulterior intentions."
We may admit the want of passion and perhaps the want
of partiality, but we cannot avoid seeing the ulterior
intention, which is to undermine and belittle the reputa-
tion of the great figures of the Victorian Age. When the
prodigious Signer Marinetti proposes to hurl the " leprous
palaces" of his native city into her " fetid canals," and to

The Agony of the Victorian Age 319

build in their place warehouses and railway stations, he does
not differ in essential attitude from Mr. Lytton Strachey,
delicately " laying bare the facts of some cases." The
only real difference consists in the finer tact, the greater
knowledge of history in short, the superior equipment of
the English iconoclast. Each of them and all the troop
of opponents who grumble and mutter between their
extremes each of them is roused by an intense desire to
throw off the shackles of a dying age, in which they have
taught themselves chiefly to see affectation, pomposity,
a virtuosity more technical than emotional, and an exasper-
ating monotony of effect.

Mr. Strachey has conducted his attack from the point of
view of biography. He realises the hopelessness of writing
a history of the Victorian Age ; it can only be dealt with
in detail; it must be nibbled into here and there; dis-
credited piecemeal ; subjected to the ravages of the white
ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians
lend themselves to this insidious kind of examination,
because what was worst in the pretentiousness of their age
is to be found enshrined in the Standard Biographies (in
two volumes, post octavo) under which most of them are
buried. Mr. Strachey has some criticism of these monsters
which could hardly be bettered :

" 'Miose two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to
commemorate the dead who does not know them, with
their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of
selection, of detachment, of design ? They are as familiar
as the cortege of the undertaker, and bear the same air
of slow, funereal barbarism."

It is impossible not to agree with this pungent criticism.
Every candid reader could point to a dozen Victorian

320 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

biographies which deserve Mr. Strachey's condemnation.
For instance, instead of taking up any of the specimens
which he has chosen for illustration, we need only refer the
reader's memory to the appendix of " Impressions," by a
series of elderly friends, which closes the official Life of
Tennyson, published in 1897. He will find there an ex-
pression of the purest Victorian optimism. The great
object being to foist on the public a false and superhuman
picture of the deceased, a set of illustrious contemporaries
who themselves expected to be, when they died, trans-
figured in like manner form a bodyguard around the
corpse of the poet and emit their " tedious panegyric/'
In this case, more even than in any of the instances which
Mr. Strachey has taken, the contrast between the real
man and the funereal image is positively grotesque.

Without question this contrast is not a little responsible
for the discredit into which the name of Tennyson has
fallen. Lord Selborne found nothing in Tennyson " incon-
sistent with the finest courtesy and the gentlest heart."
Dr. Jowett had preserved through forty years " an ever-
increasing wonder at the depth of his thought/' and
emphatically stated that he " was above such feelings as a
desire of praise, or fear of blame." (Tennyson, who was
thirsty for ceaseless laudation, and to whom a hint of
censure was like the bite of a mosquito !) Frederick
Myers ejaculated, " How august, how limitless a ^thing
was Tennyson's own spirit's upward flight I " The Duke
of Argyll, again, during the space of forty years, had
found him " always reverent, hating all levity or flip-
pancy," and was struck by his possessing " the noblest
humility I have ever known." Lord Macaulay, who
" had stood absolutely aloof," once having been permitted
to glance at the proof-sheets of Gwenevere, was " abso-
lutely subdued" to " unfeigned and reverent admiration."
The duke was the glad emissary who was " the medium

The Agony of the Victorian Age 321

of introduction/' and he recognised in Macaulay's sub-
jugation "a premonition " of Tennyson's complete
" conquest over the living world and over the generations
that are to come."

Thus the priesthood circled round their idol, waving
their censers and shouting their hymns of praise, while
their ample draperies effectively hid from the public eye
the object which was really in the centre of their throng,
namely, a gaunt, black, touzled man, rough in speech,
brooding like an old gipsy over his inch of clay pipe stuffed
with shag, and sucking in port wine with gusto " so long
as it is black and sweet and strong, I care not ! ' ' Their
fault lay, not in their praise, which was much of it deserved,
but in their deliberate attempt in the interests of what
was Nice and Proper gods of the Victorian Age to
conceal what any conventional person might think not
quite becoming. There were to be no shadows in the
picture, no stains or rugosities on the smooth bust of rosy
wax.

On the pretext, therefore, of supplying a brief and above
all a complimentary set of portraits, Mr. Strachey takes
the biography of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority,
a woman of action, and a man of adventure, and tells them
over again in his own way. The four figures he chooses
jire all contemporary, and yet, so implacably does time
hur!^ us along, all would be very old if they still survived.
Three of them could hardly survive, for Cardinal Manning
and Dr. Arnold would be far over a hundred, and Florence
Nightingale in her ninety-ninth year; the fourth, General
Gordon, would be eighty-five. The motto of Mr.
Strachey is " Put not your trust in the intellectual princes
of the Victorian Age," or, at least, in what their biographers
have reported of them; they were not demi-gods in any
sense, but eccentric and forceful figures working dimly
towards aims which they only understood in measure,
Y

322 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

and which very often were not worth the energy which
they expended on them. This attitude alone would be
enough to distinguish Mr. Strachey from the purveyors of
indiscriminate praise, and in adopting it he emphasises his
deliberate break with the age of which they were the envy
and the ornament. Given his 1918 frame of mind, no
blame can attach to him for adopting this gesture. At
moments when the tradition of a people has been violently
challenged there have always ensued these abrupt acts of
what to the old school seems injustice. If Mr. Lytton
Strachey is reproached with lack of respect, he might
reply : In the midst of a revolution, who is called on to
be respectful to the fallen monarch ? Extreme admiration
for this or that particular leader, the principle of Victorian
hero-worship, is the very heresy, he might say, which I
have set out to refute.

When St. John the Divine addressed his Apocalypse to
the Angels of the Seven Churches, he invented a system of
criticism which is worthy of all acceptation. He dwelt
first upon the merits of each individual church; not till
he had exhausted them did he present the reverse of the
coin. In the same spirit, critics who, in the apostle's
phrase, have " something against " Mr. Lytton Strachey,
will do well to begin by acknowledging what is in his favour.
In the first place, he writes sensibly, rapidly, and lucidly,
without false ornament of any kind. Some of his jsages
might, with advantage, be pinned up opposite the writing-
tables of our current authors of detestable pseudo-
Meredithian and decayed Paterese. His narrative style
is concise and brisk. His book may undoubtedly best be
compared among English classics with Whiggism in its
Relations to Literature, although it is less discursive and
does not possess the personal element of that vivacious
piece of polemic. In this recurrence of Mr. Strachey to a
pellucid stream of prose we see an argument against his

The Agony of the Victorian Age 323

own theory of revolt. The procedure of the arts, the
mechanical tricks of the trade, do they really improve or
decline from age to age ? Are they not, in fact, much more
the result of individual taste than of fashion? There
seems to be no radical change in the methods of style.
The extravagant romanticism of rebellion against the
leaders of the Victorian Age finds at length an exponent,
and behold he writes as soberly as Lord Morley, or as
Newman himself !

The longest of these biographies is that of Cardinal
Manning, and it is the one with which Mr. Lytton Strachey
has taken most pains. Briefer than the briefest of the
English Men of Letters series of biographies, it is yet
conducted with so artful an economy as to give the im-
pression, to an uninstructed reader, that nothing essential
about the career of Manning has been omitted. To produce
this impression gifts of a very unusual order were required,
since the writer, pressed on all sides by a plethora of in-
formation, instead of being incommoded by it, had to
seem to be moving smoothly in an atmosphere of his own
choosing, and to be completely unembarrassed by his
material. He must have the air of saying, in Froude's
famous impertinence, " This is all we know, and more
than all, yet nothing to what the angels know." " In the

ce of a whole literature of controversy and correspondence,
a storm of Purcell and Hutton, Ward and Mozley
and Liddon tearing at one another's throats, Mr. Lytton
Strachey steps delicately on to the stage and says, in a
low voice, " Come here and I will tell you all about a
funny ecclesiastic who had a Hat, and whose name was
Henry Edward Manning. It will not take us long, and
ever afterwards, if you hear that name mentioned, you
will know everything about him which you need to remem-
ber." It is audacious, and to many people will seem
shocking, but it is very cleverly done.

324 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

The study of Florence Nightingale is an even better
example of Mr. Strachey's method, since she is the one of
his four subjects for whom he betrays some partiality.
" The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile fancy
painted her/' and it has greatly entertained Mr. Strachey
to chip the Victorian varnish off and reveal the iron will
beneath. His first chapter puts it in one of his effective
endings :

" Her mother was still not quite resigned ; surely Florence
might at least spend the summer in the country. At this,
indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost
wept. ' We are ducks/ she said with tears in her eyes,
' who have hatched a wild swan/ But the poor lady was
wrong; it was not a swan that they had hatched, it was
an eagle/'

It is therefore as an eagle, black, rapacious, with hooked
bill and crooked talons, that he paints Miss Nightingale;
and the Swan of Scutari, the delicate Lady with the Lamp,
fades into a fable. Mr. Strachey glorifies the demon that
possessed this pitiless, rushing spirit of philanthropy. He
gloats over its ravages," its irresistible violence of purpose.
It is an evident pleasure to him to be able to detach so
wild a figure from the tameness of the circumambienj^-
scene, and all his enmity to the period comes out in^/ne
closing pages, in which he describes how the fierce philan-
thropist lived so long that the Victorian Age had its
revenge upon her, and reduced her, a smiling, fat old
woman, to " compliance and complacency/' It is a
picture which will give much offence, but it is certainly
extremely striking, and Mr. Strachey can hardly be accused
of having done more than deepen the shadows which
previous biographers had almost entirely omitted.

In this study, if the author is unusually indulgent to his

The Agony of the Victorian Age 325

subject, he is relatively severer than usual to the surrounding
figures. To some of them, notably to Arthur Hugh Clough,
he seems to be intolerably unjust. On the other hand, to
most of those public men who resisted the work of Florence
Nightingale it is difficult to show mercy. Mr. Strachey is
so contemptuous, almost so vindictive, in his attitude to
Lord Panmure, that the reader is tempted to take up the
cudgels in defence of an official so rudely flouted. But,
on reflection, what is there that can be said in palliation
of Lord Panmure ? He was the son of a man of whom his
own biographer has admitted that "he preserved late into
the [nineteenth] century the habits and passions scandal-
ous and unconcealed which had, except in his case, passed
away. He was devoted to his friends so long as they
remained complaisant, and violent and implacable to all
who thwarted him. -His uncontrollable temper alienated
him from nearly all his family in his latter years. In
private life he was an immovable despot."

This was the father of Fox Maule, second Baron Panmure,
of whom Mr. Strachey has so much to say. Evidently he
was a Regency type, as the son was a Victorian. Deter-
mined not to resemble his father, Fox Maule early became
a settled and industrious M.P., and in 1846 Lord John
Russell made him Secretary of War. He held the same
st under Lord Palmerston from 1855 to 1858. Nothing
"lid dislodge him from office; not even the famous
despatch " Take care of Dawb " could stir him. In 1860
he became eleventh Earl of Dalhousie. He died two years
later, having enjoyed every distinction, even that of Presi-
dent of the Royal Military Asylum. He was " unco guid,"
as pious as his father had been profane, but he had no
social or political or intellectual merit of any kind which
can at this distance of time be discerned. Florence Night-
ingale called him the Bison, and his life's energy seems to
have been~ expended in trying, often with success, to

326 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

frustrate every single practical reform which she suggested.
To the objection that Mr. Strachey has depicted the heroine
as "an ill-tempered, importunate spinster, who drove a
statesman to his death,'* he might conceivably reply that
if history, grown calm with the passage of years, does so
reveal her, it is rather absurd to go on idealising her. Why
not study the real Eagle in place of the fabulous Swan?
It is difficult to condemn Mr. Strachey along this line of
argument.

The early Victorians liked what was definable and
tangible; they were "ponderous mechanists of style."
Even in their suggestions of change they preserved an
impenetrable decorum of demeanour, a studied progress,
a deep consciousness of the guiding restraint of tradition
upon character. Their preoccupation with moral ideas
tinged the whole of their surroundings, their literature,
their art, their outlook upon life. That the works of
Mr. Charles Dickens, so excruciatingly funny, should have
been produced and appreciated in the midst of this intense
epoch of exhortation seems a paradox, till we recollect
how careful Dickens is, when his laughter is loudest, never
to tamper with " the deep sense of moral evil." This
apprehension of the rising immorality of the world, against
which the only rampart was the education of "a thorough
English gentleman, Christian, manly and enlightened^
was dominant in no spirit more than in that of *for.
Thomas Arnold, of whom Mr. Strachey gives a somewhat
deterrent portrait. It is deterrent, because we have
passed, in three-quarters of a century, completely out of
the atmosphere in which Dr. Arnold moved and breathed.
We are not sure that Mr. Strachey acted very wisely in
selecting Dr. Arnold for one of his four subjects, since the
great schoolmaster was hardly a Victorian at all. When
he entered the Church George III. was on the throne; his
accomplishment at Rugby was started under George IV. ;

The Agony of the Victorian Age 327

he died when the Victorian Age was just beginning. He
was a forerunner, but hardly a contemporary.

Although in his attitude to the great Rugby schoolmaster
Mr. Strachey shows more approbation than usual, this
portrait has not given universal satisfaction. It has rather
surprisingly called forth an indignant protest from Dr.
Arnold's granddaughter. Yet such is the perversity of the
human mind that the mode in which Mrs. Humphry Ward
" perstringes" the biographer brings us round to that
biographer's side. For Mrs. Ward has positively the in-
discretion, astounding in a writer of her learning and experi-
ence, to demand the exclusion of irony from the legitimate
weapons of the literary combatant. This is to stoop to
sharing one of the meanest prejudices of the English common-
place mind, which has always resented the use of that
delicate and pointed weapon. Moreover, Mrs. Ward does
not merely adopt the plebeian attitude, but she delivers her-
self bound hand and foot to the enemy by declaring the use
of irony to be " unintelligent/' In support of this amazing
statement she quotes some wandering phrase of Sainte-
Beuve. By the light of recent revelations, whether Sainte-
Beuve was ironical or not, he was certainly perfidious. But,
to waive that matter, does Mrs. Humphry Ward consider
that Swift and Lucian and Machiavelli were, as she puts it,
^doomed to failure " because they used irony as a weapon ?
wjfes Heine and is Anatole France conspicuous for want of
intelligence? And, after all, ought not Mrs. Ward to
remember that if she had a very serious grandfather, she had
a still more celebrated uncle, who wrote Friendship's
Garland P

While no one else will seriously blame Mr. Strachey for
employing irony in his investigation of character, the subject
leads on to what may be regarded as a definite fault in his
method. A biographer should be sympathetic ; not blind,
not indulgent, but sympathetic. He should be able to enter

328 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

into the feelings of his subjects, and be anxious to do so. It
is in sympathy, in imaginative insight, that Mr. Strachey
fails. His personages are like puppets observed from a great
height by an amiable but entirely superior intelligence.
The peculiar aim of Mr. Strachey, his desire to lower our
general conception of the Victorian Age, tempts him to
exaggerate this tendency, and he succumbs to the tempta-
tion. His description of Lord Acton at Rome in 1870 " he
despised Lord Acton almost as much as he disliked him " is
not ironic, it is contemptuous. Arthur Hugh Clough
presents no aspect to Mr. Strachey but that of a timid and
blundering packer-up of parcels; one might conceive that
the biographer had never contemplated the poet in any
other capacity than, with sealing-wax in his hand and string
between his lips, shuddering under the eye of Miss Nightin-
gale. The occasional references to Lord Wolseley suggest an
unaccountable hurrying figure of pygmy size, which Mr.
Strachey can only just discern. This attitude of hovering
superiority is annoying.

But it reaches a more dangerous importance when it
affects spiritual matters. The author interests himself,
from his great height, in the movements of his Victorian
dwarfs, and notices that they are particularly active, and
prone to unusual oddity of movement, when they are in-
spired by religious and moral passion. Their motion^
attract his attention, and he describes them with gusto dJid
often with wit. His sketch of Rome before the (Ecumenical
Council is an admirably studied page. Miss Nightingale* s
ferocity when the War Office phalanx closed its ranks is
depicted in the highest of spirits ; it is impossible not to be
riveted by the scene round Cardinal Manning's death-bed;
but what did those manifestations mean ? To Mr. Strachey
it is evident that the fun of the whole thing is that they
meant nothing at all ; they were only part of the Victorian
absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, as a

The Agony of the Victorian Age 329

personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates
the feelings of Newman or Keble as a naturalist might the
contortions of an insect. The ceremonies and rites of the
Church are objects of subdued hilarity to him, and in their
presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it is solely to prevent
his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. When^the
subject of Baptismal Regeneration agitates the whole pious
world of England Mr. Strachey seems to say, looking down
with exhilaration on the anthill beneath him, " The questions
at issue are being taken very seriously by a large number
of persons. How Early Victorian of them ! ' ' Mr. Strachey
has yet to learn that questions of this kind are " taken seri-
ously" by serious people, and that their emotion is both
genuine and deep. He sees nothing but alcoholic eccen-
tricity in the mysticism of Gordon. His cynicism sometimes
carries him beyond the confines of good taste, as in the pas-
sage where he refers to the large and dirty ears of the Roman
cardinals. Still worse is the query as to what became of the
soul of Pope Pius IX. after his death.

These are errors in discretion. A fault in art is the want of
care which the author takes in delineating his minor or sub-
ordinate figures. He gives remarkable pains, for example,
to his study of General Gordon, but he is indifferent to
accuracy in his sketches of the persons who came into con-
4agt, and often into collision, with Gordon. In this he
resembles those French painters, such as Bastien Lepage,
who focus their eye on one portion of their canvas, and work
that up to a high perfection, while leaving the rest of the
picture misty and vague. Even in that case the subordinate
figures, if subdued in fogginess, should not be falsely drawn,
but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait of Gordon,
is willing to leave his Baring and Hartington and Wolseley
inexact as well as shadowy. The essay on General Gordon,
indeed, is the least successful of the four monographs.
Dexterous as he is, Mr. Strachey has not had the material

3 30 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

to work upon which now exists to elucidate his other and
earlier subjects. But it is difficult to account for his
apparently not having read Mr. Bernard Holland's life of
the Duke of Devonshire, which throws much light, evidently
unknown to Mr. Strachey, on the Gordon relief expedition.
He ought to know that Sir Evelyn Baring urged the
expedition, while Chamberlain was one of its opponents.
Mr. Strachey does not seem to have noticed how much the
issue was confused by conflicting opinions as to whether
the route to be taken should be by Suakin or up the Nile.

No part of his book is more vigorous or picturesque than
the chapter dealing with the proclamation of Papal Infalli-
bility. But here again one is annoyed by the glibness with
which Mr. Strachey smoothly asserts what are only his
conjectures.

In his account of Manning's reception in Rome and
this is of central importance in his picture of Manning's
whole career he exaggerates the personal policy of Pio
Nono, whom he represents as more independent of the staff
of the Curia than was possible. Rome has never acknow-
ledged the right of the individual, even though that indi-
vidual be the Pope, to an independent authority. Mr. Odo
Russell was resident secretary in Rome from 1858 to 1870,
and his period of office was drawing to a close when Manning
arrived; he was shortly afterwards removed to bec<$^
Assistant Under Secretary of State at our Foreign Office
The author of Eminent Victorians is pleased to describe
" poor Mr. Russell" as little better than a fly buzzing in
Manning's "spider' s web of delicate and clinging diplomacy."
It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes
that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in
address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of
character, as was evidenced when, some months later, he
explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons for stating to Bis-
marck, without instructions from the government, that the

The Agony of the Victorian Age 331

Black Sea question was one on which Great Britain might be
compelled to go to war with or without allies. Lord Morley's
Life of Gladstone (vol. ii., p. 354) is explicit on this interest-
ing point. The information which, by special permission
of the Pope, Cardinal Manning was able to give to him
o all that was going on in the Council was, of course,
of great value to Odo Russell, but his views on other
aspects of the question were derived from quite different
sources.

In this respect he had the advantage of the Cardinal, both
on account of his diplomatic position and of his long and
intimate knowledge both of Vatican policy and of the forces
which the Curia has at its command. On the strength of
those forces, and on the small amount of effective support
which British opposition to the Decree of Infallibility was
likely to receive from the Catholic Powers, he no doubt held
strong opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his
conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his
conflict with Rome on the Education Laws, and the event
proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is an ex-
ample of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial
treatment of political events which were conducted in secret,
and with every circumstance of mystery.

Several of the characteristics which diversify Mr.
^fc^chey's remarkable volume are exemplified in the follow-
ing Quotation. It deals with the funeral of Cardinal
Manning :

" The route of the procession was lined by vast crowds of
working people, whose imaginations, in some instinctive
manner, had been touched. Many who had hardly seen him
declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their best
friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man's spirit
that moved them ? Or was it his valiant disregard of com-
mon custom and those conventional reserves and poor

332 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

punctilios, which are wont to hem about the great? Or
was it something untameable in his glances and in his ges-
tures ? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour linger-
ing about him of the antique organisation of Rome? For
whatever cause, the mind of the people had been impressed ;
and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than last-
ing. The Cardinal' s memory is a dim thing to-day. And
he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which
Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche
with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on
the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object
which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs
down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten
trophy, the Hat."

Longinus tells us that " a just judgment of style is the
final fruit of long experience. }J In the measured utterances
of Mr. Asquith we recognise the speech of a man to whom all
that is old and good is familiar, and in whom the art of
finished expression has become a habit. No more elegantly
balanced, no more delicately perceptive mind than his has
appeared of recent times in our midst, and there is some-
thing in the equipoise of his own genius which points Mr.
Asquith out as a judge peculiarly well fitted to sit in judg-
ment upon rival ages. In his Romanes lecture there f #**3
but one thing to be regretted : the restricted space wlfoi it
offered for the full expansion of the theme. Mr. Asquith
excels in swift and rapid flights, but even for him the
Victorian Age is too broad a province to be explored within
one hour. He endeavoured to lighten his task by ex-
cluding theology and politics, and indeed but for such self-
denial he could scarcely have moved at all in so dense an air.
He was able, however, having thrown out so much formidable
ballast, to rise above his subject, and gazing at the Victorian
Age, as it recedes, he declared it to have been very good.

The Agony of the Victorian Age 333

The young men who despise and attack that Age receive
no support in any particular from Mr. Asquith.

He dwells on the fecundity of the literature of the Vic-
torian Age in its middle period, and especially on the publi-
cations which adorned the decade from 1850 to 1859. He
calls those years, very justly, " marvellous and almost
unexampled" in their rich profusion. I may suggest that
the only rival to them in our history is the period from
1590 to 1600, which saw the early plays of Shakespeare,
the Faerie Qveene, the Arcadia, the Ecclesiastical Polity,
Tamburlaine, The Discovery of Guiana, and Bacon's Essays.
If the works catalogued by Mr. Asquith do not equal these
in intensity, they excel them by the breadth of the ground
they cover, extending from Browning to Darwin and from
Thackeray to Ruskin. Moreover, the Oxford list might
have included Lavengro and Newman's Lectures, and
Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. The only third decade
worthy to be named with those of 1590 and 1850 is that
which opens in 1705, and is illuminated by the names of
Pope, Shaftesbury, Swift, Arbuthnot, Defoe, Steele, Addison,
and Berkeley. It is pleasant to compare these three magni-
ficently flowering epochs, but not profitable if we attempt
to weigh one against the other. They are comparable only
in the splendour of their accomplishment.
^Jft is more difficult to fit science into our scheme of the
Vici^ian Age than to find places there for Art and Litera-
ture! Perhaps the reason of this is that the latter were
national in their character, whereas scientific inquiry,
throughout the nineteenth century, was carried on upon
international lines, or, at least, in a spirit unprecedentedly
non-provincial. The vast achievements of science, practical
and theoretical, were produced for the world, not for a race.
Mr. Asquith speaks with justice and eloquence of the appear-
ance of Darwin's Origin of Species which he distinguishes
as being " if not actually the most important, certainly the

334 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

most interesting event of the Age," and his remarks on the
fortune of that book are excellent. No one can over-estimate
the value of what we owe to Darwin. But perhaps a French-
man might speak in almost the same terms of Claude
Bernard, whose life and work ran parallel with Darwin's.
If the Origin of Species made an epoch in 1859, the Intrj^
duclion a la medicine experimentale made another in 1865.
Both these books, as channels by which the experimental
labours of each investigator reached the prepared and
instructed public, exercised at once, and have continued
ever since to exercise, an enormous effect on thought as
well as on knowledge. They transformed the methods by
which man approaches scientific investigation, and while
they instructed they stimulated a new ardour for instruction.
In each case the value of the discovery lay in the value of
the idea which led to the discovery, and, as some one has
said in the case of Claude Bernard, they combined for the
first time the operations of science and philosophy. The
parallel between these two contemporaries extends, in a
measure, to their disciples and successors, and seems to
suggest that Mr. Asquith in his generous and difficult
estimate may have exaggerated the purely Victorian element
in the science of the age of Darwin. This only accentuates
the difficulty, and he may perhaps retort that there is an
extreme danger in suggesting what does and what
form a part of so huge a system.

Justifiably Mr. Asquith takes it for granted that the
performance of the central years of the Victorian Age was
splendid. With those who deny merit to the writers and
artists of the last half century it is difficult to reach a com-
mon ground for argument. What is to be the criterion of
taste if all the multiform exhibitions of it which passed
muster from 1840 to 1890 are now to be swept away with
contumely ? Perhaps indeed it is only among those extrava-
gant romanticists who are trying to raise entirely new ideals,

The Agony of the Victorian Age 335

unrelated to any existing forms of art and literature, that
we find a denial of all merit to the Victorian masters.
Against this caricature of criticism, this Bolshevism, it
would be hopeless to contend. But there is a large and
growing class of more moderate thinkers who hold, in the
,rst place, that the merit of the leading Victorian writers
has been persistently over-estimated, and that since its
culmination the Victorian spirit has not ceased to decay,
arriving at length at the state of timidity and repetition
which encourages what is ugly, narrow, and vulgar, and
demands nothing better than a swift dismissal to the
dust-bin.

Every stratum of society, particularly if it is at all sophis-
ticated, contains a body of barbarians who are usually
silent from lack of occasion to express themselves, but who
are always ready to seize an opportunity to suppress a move-
ment of idealism. We accustom ourselves to the idea that
certain broad principles of taste are universally accepted,
and our respectable newspapers foster this benevolent
delusion by talking habitually " over the heads/' as we say,
of the majority of their readers. They make " great music
for a little clan/ 5 and nothing can be more praiseworthy than
their effort, but, as a matter of fact, with or without the aid
of the newspapers, the people who really care for literature
Qi^jrt, or for strenuous mental exercise of any kind, are
rela^vely few. If we could procure a completely confiden-
tial statement of the number of persons to whom the names
of Charles Lamb and Gainsborough have a distinct meaning,
and still more of those who can summon up an impression
of the essays of the one and of the pictures of the other, we
should in all probability be painfully startled. Yet since
these names enjoy what we call a universal celebrity, what
must be the popular relation to figures much less prominent ?
The result of this tyranny of fame, for so it must appear
to all those who are inconvenienced by the expression of it,

336 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

is to rouse a sullen tendency to attack the figures of art and
literature whenever there arrives a chance of doing that
successfully. Popular audiences can always be depended
upon to cheer the statement of " a plain man" that he is not
" clever " enough to understand Browning or Meredith. An
assurance that life is too short to be troubled with Henrj
James wakes the lower middle class to ecstasy. An oppor-
tunity for such protests is provided by our English lack of
critical tradition, by our accepted habit of saying, " I do
hate " or " I must say I rather like " this or that without
reference to any species of authority. This seems to have
grown with dangerous rapidity of late years. It was not
tolerated among the Victorians, who carried admiration to
the highest pitch. They marshalled it, they defined it,
they turned it from a virtue into a religion, and called it
Hero Worship. Even their abuse was a kind of admiration
turned inside out, as in Swinburne's diatribes against Car-
lyle, who himself fought against the theory of Darwin, not
philosophically, but as though it were a personal insult to
himself. Such violence of taste is now gone out of fashion ;
every scribbler and dauber likes to believe himself on a level
with the best, and the positive criterion of value which
sincere admiration gave is lost to us. Hence the success of
Mr. Lytton Strachey.

But the decline of ardour does not explain the whg]
position, which we have to face with firmness. Epochs <pme
to an end, and before they have their place finally awarded
to them in history they are bound to endure much vicissitude
of fortune. No amount of sarcasm or of indignant protest
will avail to conceal the fact that we stand to-day at the
porch, that much more probably we have already penetrated
far into the vestibule, of a new age. What its character
will be, or what its principal products, it is absolutely im-
possible for us as yet to conjecture. Meanwhile the
Victorian Age recedes, and it loses size and lustre as we get

The Agony of the Victorian Age 337

further and further away from it. When what was called
" Symbolism" began to act in urgent and direct reaction
to the aims of those still in authority, the old order received
its notice to quit, but that was at least five and twenty years
ago, and the change is not complete. Ages so multiform
^pd redundant and full of blood as the Victorian take a long
time to die ; they have their surprising recoveries and their
uncovenanted convalescences. But even they give up the
ghost at length, and are buried hastily with scant reverence.
The time has doubtless come when aged mourners must
prepare themselves to attend the obsequies of the Victorian
Age with as much decency as they can muster.

1918.

INDEX

ABBAYE DE CRETEIL, 303-4

Acton, Lord, 328

Addison, J., relation of, to

Romanticists, 70-1; 68, 76,

82
Agnes de Castro, by Catharine

Trotter, 43-5
Akenside, 74
Allard-Me'eus, J., 273
Alroy, by B. Disraeli, 161
American criticism, and Edgar

Allan Poe, 104, 105
Anne, Queen, 58
Annabel Lee, by E. A. Poe, 103,

112

Argyll, Duke of, 320
Ariosto, 84, 85
Arnauld, Angelique, 39
Arnold, M., 3, 68, 71, 133, 267
Arnold, Dr. T., Mr. Strachey's

portrait of, 326-7
Asquith, Mr., Romanes lecture

of, 332-5

BACON, 17

Bagehot, W., 96

Balfour, A. J., re standards of

taste, 4, 5, 10
Ballenden, Sarah, 40
Baring, M., poems of, 265, 273-5
Barrie, Sir J., 100
Barry, Mrs., 57
Batsford, Lord Redesdale at,

217-8, 222, 224-8, 229
Baudelaire, 106
Bayle, 59
Behn, Aphra, 39
Bell, T., of Selborne, 182
Berkeley, 98
Betterton, 48, 57
Birch, Rev. Dr., 61
Blake, W., 5, 90
Blessington, Lady, 131
Boileau, 70, 77, 82
Booth, 57
Bottomley, G., 262

Bridges, R., War poetry of, 262 ;
no

de Brillac, Mile., 44

Bronte, Charlotte, dislike a
Dewsbury, 142-3 ; message of,
arose from pain and resistance,
144; her unhappiness, its
causes, 145-6; defiance the
note of her writings, 146-50

Bronte, Emily, 149

Brontes, The Challenge of the,
address delivered 0^141-50;
their connexion with Dews-
bury, 141-2

Brooke, Rupert, poems 0^268-70

Browning, R., 9, 81, 132

Brunetiere, 7

Bruxambille, 95

Bryant, 107, 108

Bulwer-Lytton, E., ambiguity
of his position in literature,
117; R. Lytton's biography,
1 1 8, 12 1 ; Lord Lytton's
biography, 117, 118-9, 120,
122, 129, 130, 131, 133, 137;
autobiography, 119-20; story
of matrimonial troubles, 121-
9; character, 129-30; ac-
quaintances and friends, 130-
2; relations with contem-
porary writers and poets,"
132-4; stormy life, I34;^m-
favourable attitude of critics
towards, 134-5; popularity
of his writings, 135-6; ver-
satility and merits, 136-7; 178

Bulwer-Lytton, Mrs., opposition
to Bulwer-Lytton' s marriage,
124-7

Burghclere, Lady, open letter

to, on Lady D. Nevill, 181-96

Burnet, George, 52, 53, 54, 55,

58, 59> 60
Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop, patron

of the Trotters, 41, 52, 53
Burnet, Mrs., 52, 53

Index

339

"Burney, Dr., 33
Burton, 96
Byron, 76, 104, 108, 148, 161-2

CARLYLE, 100

Carlyle, Mrs., her opinion of

Keats, 9
Catullus, 84
Charles II, 40, 41
Chateaubriand, 74
Chatterton, 87
Cibber, Colley, 44
Classic poetry, Romanticists'

revolt against principles of,

70-90

Clough, A. H., 325, 328
Cockburn, Mr., 60, 61
Coleridge, 104, 108, 274
Collier, Jeremy, attack on stage

immorality, 47
Collins, 86, no
Colonisation, England's debt to

Walter Raleigh, 24-5
Con gr eve, Catherine Trotter's

relations with, 43, 47, 48, 50;

57. 58

Coningsby, by B. Disraeli, 153,
164, 165-6, 169, 170-2, 173

Contanni Fleming, by B. Dis-
raeli, 159-61, 162

Corbett, N. M. F., poems of, 275

Cowes in war time, 219-21

Cowley, 82

Cowper, 253

Crabbe, G., Hardy compared
,with, 248

Cranch, C. P., 105

Gromer, Lord, essay on, 196-
216; intellectual and literary
activity, 197-8; as a speaker,
198-200; interest in House
of Lords Library, 200 ; classical
tastes, 200203 ; conversation,
attitude to life and letters,
204-8 ; correspondence and
reflections, 208-10 ; humour,
210 12 ; verse, 21215 1 literary
activities, 215-16

DACIER, Mme., 52
Dacre, by Countess of Morley,
153. 156

Dante, 225-6

Dartmouth, George, Earl of,
40, 42

D'Aubigne", 78

Daudet, A., 252

Daudet, E., 229-30

Davies, W. H., 262

De Vere, Mrs., 59

Devey, Miss, " Life of Rosina,
Lady Lytton," by, 121

Dewsbury, the Brontes' con-
nexion with, 141-2

Dickens, C., 100, 128, 131

Disraeli, B., novels of, address,
153-78; not taken seriously
as an author, 153-4; three
periods of writing, 154-5 ;
contemporary fiction 155-0;
Vivian Grey, 1569; The
Young Duke, 157; Henrietta
Temple, 159 ; Contavini Flem-
ing, 159-60 , Byron's influence
on, 161 ; Voltaire's influence
on, 162 ; fascinated by Venice,
163; Venetia, 163; Parlia-
mentary experience and liter-
ary results, 164; Coningsby,
165-6; Sybil, 167-8; Tancred,
169-72; Prime Minister, 172;
Lothair, 173-8; 131, 135

Donne, J., 78, in, 236, 244, 252

Dorset, Charles, Earl of, 43

Dowden, 34

Doyle, Sir A. C., 103

Dryden, 34, 49, 50, 70, 82, 274

Du Bos, Abb6, 90

Durham, Lord, 131

Dyer, 70

ELIZABETH, Queen, sympathy
between Raleigh and, 18-18

Eloisa to Abelard, by Pope, its
appeal to Romanticists, 83-4

Emerson, 107

Eminent Victorians, by Lytton
Strachey, review of, 318-32

English Poetry, The Future of,
289-309 ; instances of national
lapses in poetic output, 290;
necessity of novelty of expres-
sion and difficulties arising,
291-2; advantages of ver-

340

Index

nacular poetry, 293; future
poetry bound to dispense
with obvious description and
reflection and to take on
greater subtlety of expression,
294-7 > Wordsworth's specula-
tions concerning nineteenth-
century poetry, 298-9; pros-
pect of social poetry, 299-301 ;
" effusion of natural sensi-
bility " more probable, 302-3 ;
French experiments, 303-4 ;
as to disappearance of erotic
poetry, 305-6 ; dramatic
poetry and symbolism, 306-9
Essay on Criticism, by Pope,
Romanticists' attack upon,

7 1-4

Essay on Genius of Pope, by J.
Warton, 80-3

FARQUHAR, 48

Fatal Friendship, by C. Trotter,

47-8

Fawcett, Rev. J., 97
Fenn, Mr., 60
Fletcher, John, songs of, 35
For Annie, by E. A. Poe, 112
Ford, songs of, 35
Forster, John, 131-2, 133
France, Anatole, 7

GASKEIX, Mrs,, 141

Gautier, T., 6, 10

Genoa, Duke of, 133

Georgian poetry, its pre-war

characteristics, 261-2
Gibbon, 98
Gibson, W. W., 262
Gilbert, Sir H., 25
Gilpin, 87

Godolphin, Henrietta, 58
Goethe, 161
de Goncourt, E., 252
Gongora, 78
Gordon, General, 15; Mr.

Strachey's portrait of, 329-30
Gore, Mrs., 178
de Gourmont, R6my, his opinion

of Sully-Prudhomme, 9, 10
de Gournay, Mile., 39
? 47

Graves, R., poetry of, 2801
Gray, 89, 108
Greene, 32

GrenfeU, J., poems of, 2713
Guiana, Raleigh's " gold mine "
in, 20

HALIFAX, Lord, 50
Handel, 80
Harcourt, Mrs., 57
Hardy, Thomas, lyrical poetry
of, 23358; independence of
his career as a poet, 2334;
unity and consistence of his
poetry, 234; sympathy^ with
Swinburne, 235 ; historic
development of lyrics, 236;
novel writing interfering with,
237-8; place of poetry in his
literary career, 238 ; " Wessex
Ballads " and " Poems of
Past and Present," 238-40;
" The Dynasts " and " Times'
Laughing Stocks " 240-2 ;
" Satires of Circumstance,'*
242-3 ; " Moments of Vision,'*
243-4; technical quality of
his poetry, 244 ; metrical forms
245-6; pessimistic conception
of life, 247-8 ; compared with
Crabbe, 248 ; consolation
found by, 249-51; compared
with Wordsworth, 251 ; human
sympathy, 251 ; range of
subjects, 252-5; speculations
on immortality, 256; " Tke
Dynasts," 68, 257; unchan^e-
ableness of his art, 257-^;
" Song of the Soldiers," 263

Hawthorne, 107

Hayley, 5

Hazlitt, 301

Henrietta Temple, by B. Disraeli
153. 159

Heywood, songs of, 35

Higgons, Bevil, 43

Hobbes, 98

Hodgson, W. N., 284

Homer, 12

Hooker, 17

Hope, H. T., 164

Housman, A. E,, 268

inaex

Hugo, V., 6, 12, in, 134
Hume, 98
Hunt, Leigh, 104

INGLIS, Dr., 51, 58
Ireland, Raleigh, in, 23

JAMES I, distrust and treatment

of Raleigh, 19, 20, 21
jllmes II, 42
Johnson, Dr., his opinion of the

Wartons, 86; 98
Jowett, Dr., 320

KEATS, Mrs. Carlyle's opinion of,

9J 5. 90, 104, 105
King, Peter, 53, 59
Kipling, R., poetry of, 300

LANDON, Letitia, 131

Lansdowne, Lord, 191

Lauderdale, Earl of, 42

Lauderdale, Maitland, Duke of,
40, 41

Lawson, H., poems of, 284

Lee, 50

Leibnitz, 42, 54, 55, 56, 59

Lemaltre, J., 7 >

Lewis, " Monk," 162

Locke, Catharine Trotter's
defence of, 53-5 ; death of, 55 ;
42

Lockhart, 135

Lodge, 32

Lothair, by B. Disraeli, 173-8

Love at a Loss, by Catharine
Trotter, 51

Lc%ell, 108

Lujpts, Lord, 274

Lffy, John, 31

Lytton, Bulwer-, see Bulwer-
Lytton.

Lytton, Lord, biography of
Bulwer-Lytton, 117, 118-19,
120, 122, 129, 130, 131, 133,137

Lytton, R., biography of Bulwer-
Lytton, 1 1 8, 121

MACAULAY, Lord, 320-1
Macpherson, 86
Malebranche, 52
Malherbe, 70, 77
MaHamae", 77, 106
glory's Morte $ Arthur, 85

34 1

Manley, Mrs., 44, 45, 46, 61
Manning, Cardinal, Mr. Strachey's

portrait of, 323, 330-2
Manoa, 19
Mant, 73

Marinetti, M., 305, 318
Marini, 78
Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of,

57

Marlborough, Duke of, Catharine
Trotter's poem of welcome
to, 58

Marlowe, songs of, 34

Marsh, E., 261

Masham, Lady, 55, 56, 59

Massinger, 35

Melbourne, Lord, 131

Memories, by Lord Redesdale,
216, 217, 219, 221

Milton, influence upon eigh-
teenth-century poetry, 79 ;
82, no

Mitford, Major Hon. C., 218

Mockel, A., 112

Moments of Vision, by T. Hardy,

243-4

Monckton-Milnes, Sir R., 133
Morris, 104
Myers, F., 320

NEVILL, Lady Dorothy, Open
Letter to Lady Burghclere on,
181-96; memoirs of, 181-2;
writer's friendship with, 152;
appearance and physical
strength, 183-4; character-
istics, 1845; a spectator of
life, 186-7; attitude to the
country, 187; wit, conversa-
tion and correspondence, 187-
92 ; relation to literature and
art, 1924 ; emotional nature,
194-6

Nevill, Ralph, Memoirs of Lady
D. Nevill by, 181-2

Newcastle, Margaret, Duchesg
of, 39

Nichols, R., poetry of, 276-80

Nietzsche, 219-20

Nightingale, Florence, Mr ?
Strachey's Life of, 324

J^rris, John, 52, 53

342

index

OBERMANN, 76

Observations on the Faerie Queene,

by T. Warton, 84-6
Ode on the Approach of Summer,

by T. Warton, 79
Odes, by J. Warton, 69, 75, 80
Otway, 50

PANMURE, Lord, 325-6
Paris, Gaston, 7, 8
Parnell, 76
Parr, Dr. S., 120
Pater, W., 71
Patmore, C., 237
Peacock, 104
Peele, 32
P<guy, C., 268

Pelham, by Sir E. Bulwer-
Lytton, the author of, 117-

37; X 35, 155

Pepys, S., 27

Perth, 4th Earl of, 40, 42

Philip van Artevelde, by H.
Taylor, 107

Piers, Lady, 50, 51

Piers, Sir G., 50

Pix, Mrs. Mary, 45, 46, 61

Poe, E. A., centenary of, ad-
dress on, 103-13; importance
as a poet ignored, 103 ; original
want of recognition of, 104-5 ;
his reaction to unfriendly
criticism, 1056 ; essential
qualities of his genius, 106-7 ;
contemporary conception of
poetry, 107-8; his ideal of
poetry, 108; influences upon,
108-9; early verses^ poetic
genius in, 109 ; melodiousness
of, no-ii ; symbolism of,
112-13

Poems and Ballads, by A. C.
Swinburne, Buhver-Lytton's
support of, 133-4

Poems of Past and Present, by
T. Hardy, 238-40

Pope, Romanticists' revolt
against classicism of, 70-90 ; 68

Prussia, Sophia Charlotte, Queen
of, 58

RABELAIS, 90

Radcliffe, Mrs., 85, 162

Raleigh, North Carolina,
foundation of, 25-6

Raleigh, W., junr., 20

Raleigh, Sir W., address
delivered on Tercentenary-
celebration of, 15-27; patriot-
ism and hatred of Spain, 15-
17, 21-2; character, 18; af
venturous nature, 18-19;
James I and, 19-20; his El
Dorado dreams, 20; fail and
trial, 21 ; savage aspects of,
23; as a naval strategist, 23-
4 ; genius as coloniser, 24-5 ;
imprisonment and execution,
26-7

Ramsay, Allan, 70

Redesdale, Lord, last days of,
216-30; literary career, 216
7 ; vitality : pride in author-
ship and garden, 217-8; death
of son, 218; "Memories,"
219; loneliness and problem
of occupying his time, 219-22 ;
origin of last book, its theme,
222-4 J last days, 224-30

Rene, 76

Rentoul, L., poems of, 284

Rette, A., 112

Reynolds, 104

Ritson, Joseph, attack upon
T. Warton, 88-9

Roanoke, Virginia, British settle-
ment in, 25

Roche, Lord and Lady, 23

Romanticism, Two Pioneersof,
Joseph and Thomas Warton,
address on, 65-90

Romantic movement, features
of, 71-90

Rossetti, D. G., 104, 136

Rousseau, J. J., English Roman-
ticists' relation to, 68, 69, 75

Ruskin, 100

Russell, Odo, 330

SAINTE-BEUVE, 6
Sappho, 84

Sassoon, S., poems of, 282-4
Satires of Circumstance, by T
Hardy, 242-3

Index

343

Satow, Sir E., 223

Scott, Sir W., 108, 128, 135

Scudery, M. de, 39

Seaman, Sir O., war invective of,
264

Selboume, Lord, 320

Selden, 98

Senancour, 74

Sentimental Journey, The, by
L. Sterne, 96, 100

Seventeenth century, English
women writers of, 39

Shakespeare, the Songs of, 31-
5 ; their dramatic value, 31-3 ;
lyrical qualities, 33-5 ; com-
parison with contemporary
lyricists, 35; 17, 82

Shelley, 74, 104, 108, 162

Shenstone, 70

Shepherd of the Ocean, The, 15-
27

Shorter, C., 141

Some Soldier Poets, 261-85;
outbreak of war poetry, 262-
3 ; mildness of British Hymns
of Hate, 264-5; military
influence upon poetic feeling,
265-6; tendency to dispense
with form, 266; common
literary influences, 267-8 ;
Rupert Brooke, 268-70; J.
Grenfell, 271-3; M. Baring,
273-5 ; N. M. F. Corbett, 275 ;
E. W. Tennant, 275; R.
Nichols, 276-80; R. Graves,
2480-1; S. Sassoon, 282-4;
CJ3. Sorley, W. N. Hodgson,
^ Lawson, L. Rentoul, R. E.
Vernede, 284

Sorley, C. H., poems of, 284

Sou they, 5, 104

Spain, Anglo- Spanish rivalry
in days of Walter Raleigh,
16-17, 21-3, 24

Spenser, 17, 82, 84, in

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 106, 237

Sterne, Laurence, Essay on the
Charm of, 93-100; birth and
childhood, 93-4 ; tempera-
ment, 94-5 ; intellectual
development, 956 ; alterna-
tion of feeling about, 97;

English literature's debt to,

98; his "indelicacy," 99;

irrelevancy, 99 ; Shandean

influences upon literature, 100
Sterne, Mrs., 93
Sterne, Roger, 93
Stevenson, R. L., 100
Strachey, Lytton, " Eminent

Victorians " by, review of,

318-32

Stukeley, Sir L., 21
Sully-Prudhomme, fluctuations

in taste as regards, 59
Summers, Montagu, 39
Swinburne, A. C., Bulwer-Lytton

and, 133-4 >* Hardy's sympathy

with, 235; 68, 81, in
Symbolism and poetry, 308-9

Tales of Old Japan, by Lord

Redesdale, 216
Tancred, by B. Disraeli, 153
Taste, fluctuations in, 3-12;

regarding Wordsworth, 3-4 ;

Mr. Balfour's conclusions, 4-

5, 10; volte-face concerning

Sully-Prudhomme, 5-10
Tea-Table Miscellany, 70
Temple, Mrs.

Tennant, E. W., poetry of, 275
Tennyson, Victorian opinion of,

320-1 ; 7, 12, 81, 106, 116, 132,

299

Thackeray, 144
The Bamboo Garden, by Lord

Redesdale, 216
The Bells, by E. A. Poe, in
The Dynasts, by T. Hardy, 240,

257

The Enthusiast, by Joseph
Warton, importance of, 69,

73
The Female Wits, by Catharine

Trotter, 45-6

The Raven, by E. A. Poe, 108, 1 1 1
The Revolution in Sweden, by

Catharine Trotter, 57-8
The Unhappy Penitent, by

Catharine Trotter, 50-1
The Young Duke, by B. Disraeli,

153. 157

Thomson, James, 78, 307

344

Index

Thomson's Castle oj Indolence, 68

Times* Laughing Stocks, by T.
Hardy, 240-2

TottePs Miscellany, 261

Tristram Shandy, by L. Sterne,
94, 96, 98, 99, 100

Trotter, Capt. D., R.N., 40

Trotter, Catharine, 39-62; pre-
cocity, 39, 42; parentage, 40;
poverty, 41-2; early verses,
43 ; correspondence with cele-
brated people, 43; Agnes de
Castro, 43-5; The Female
Wits, 45-6; Fatal Friendship,
47-9 ; elegy on Dryden's death,
49-50 ; The Unhappy Penitent,
50-1 ; Love at a Loss, 51 ;
friendship with the Burnets,
52; philosophical studies, 42,
52-3; enthusiasm for Locke,
53 55 J The Revolution in
Sweden, 54, 57; correspond-
ence with Leibnitz, 55 ; indig-
nation at aspersions on
feminine intellectuality, 56-7 ;
poem of welcome to Marl-
borough, 58; attachment to
G, Burner., 59-60; marriage
with Mr. Cockburn, 60 ; later
life, 60-1

Trotter, Mrs., poverty of, 41

Tupper, 5

Turkey Company, 46

Ulalume, by E. A. Poe, 103, 107,

109, 112
Upchear, Henry, 31

Veluvana, by Lord Redesdale,
theme of, 222-4, 22( ?

Venetia, by B. Disraeli, 163

Venice, its fascination for Dis-
raeli, 163

Verbruggen, Mrs., 43

Verlaine, Paul, 7

Vernede, R. E., poems of, 284

de Verville, B., 95, 96

Victorian Age, the Agony of,

313-37
Virgil, 12

Vivian Grey, by B. Disraeli, .55*-

156, T57-9
Voltaire, 3, 162

WALLER, 82

Warburton, Dr., 33, 81, 97
Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 144,
Ward, Plumer, novels of, 15 =

*7 8 " , L

Warton, Joseph and Thomas;
Two Pioneers of Romanticism,
address on, 65-90; parentage
and early habits, 66-7 ; heralds
of romantic movement, 67;
literary contemporaries and
atmosphere, 68; Joseph, the
leading spirit, 68-9; The
Enthusiast, its romantic
qualities, 69; their revolt
against principles of classic
poetry, 70-4 ; characteristic
features of early Romanticism,
74-9; Mil tonic influence, 79-
80; Essay on the Genius of
Pope, 80-4; Observations on
the Faerie Queene, 84-6 ; John-
son's criticism of, 86-7;
Ritson's attack upon Thomas,
88 ^defects of, 89-90
Webster's White Devil, 34
Wessex Ballads, by T. Hardy,

238-40

Wheeler, R. D. (Lady Lyttori),
Miss Devey's Life of, 121-
story of marriage with Bulwer~
Lytton, 121-9
Whitehead, 74
William III, 41
Willis, N. P., 105
Wilson, Harriette, 130-1
Wolseley, Lord, 328
Wooler, Miss, 141, 142, 143
Wordsworth, Hardy compare^
with, 251 ; speculations conj
cerning future poetry, 298-9]
3, 4, 10, 74, 78, 90, 104, 107,
108, no, 253
Wycherley, 44

YEATS, 70
Young, 68, 69, 8 1

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