HANDBOUND
AT THE
LN1\ ERSITY OF
TORONTO PRESS
<i^c^
By Sir A. QuillenCouch
On the Art of Writing
Studies in Literature
Studies in Literature
By
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.A.
Fellow of Jesus College
King Edward VII Professor of English Literature
in the University of Cambridge
•
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons
Cambridge, England: University Press
1918
7'
PR
qq
Ube ftniclterboclier f>re00, new It^orli
PREFACE
THE first of these ' studies, ' The Commerce of Thought,
was originally read before an audience at the
Royal Institution of London. Coleridge and Matthew
Arnold have appeared as Introductions in 'The World's
Classics* series, and I thank the Oxford University
Press for allowing me to reprint them. Swinburne was
written for *The Edinburgh Review,' and Charles
Reade for 'The Times Literary Supplement' on the
centenary of Reade's birth.
I cannot quarrel with any critic who may find the
word 'studies" too important for a volume which con-
sists, in the main, of familiar discourses: and will only
plead that it was chosen to cover not this book alone
but a successor of which some part of the contents may
better justify the general title. For example, in the lec-
ture here printed On the Terms 'Classical' and 'Ro-
mantic' I purposely contented myself with discussing
some elementary and (as I believe) mistaken notions,
reserving some interesting modern theories for later
treatment.
I must here, however, avow my belief that before
starting to lay down principles of literature or aesthetic
a man should offer some evidence of his capacity to
enjoy the better and eschew the worse. The claim,
for the moment fashionable, that a general philoso-
phy of aesthetic can be constructed by a thinker who,
iii
iv Preface
in practice, cannot distinguish Virgil from Bavius, or
Rodin from William Dent Pitman, seems to me to pre-
sume a credulity almost beyond the dreams of illicit
therapeutics. By 'poetry, ' in these pages, I mean
what has been written by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare
and some others.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
May lo, 1918.
V
V
CONTENTS
The Commerce of Thought
Ballads .......
The Horatian Model in English Verse •
On the Terms "Classical" and "Romantic"
Some Seventeenth Century Poets
I. ToHN| Donne ....
II. Herbert and Vaughan
III. Traherne, Crashaw and Others
The Poetry of George Meredith
1/ The Poetry of Thomas Hard,y
Coleridge ^^^^
Matthew Arnold *^ . i
Swinburne ....
Charles Reade .
Patriotism in English Literature, I .
Patriotism in English Literature, II
Index
PAGE
I
23
51
76
96
THE COMMERCE OF THOUGHT
AMONG the fascinating books that have never been
written (and they are still the most fascinating of
all) I think my favourite is Professor So-and-So's History
of Trade-Routes from the Earliest Times, a magnificent
treatise, incomplete in three volumes. The title may
not allure you; possibly you suspect it of promising as
much dullness as the title of this lecture, and it is even
conceivable that you secretly extend your mistrust to
professors as a class. Well, concerning us, as men, you
may be right: the accusation has been levelled: but I
shall try to persuade you that you are mistaken about
this book.
For a few examples — Who, hearing that British
oysters, from Richborough, were served at Roman
dinner-parties under the Empire, does not want to know
how that long journey was contrived for them and how
they were kept alive on the road? Or take the secret
of the famous purple that was used to dye the Emper-
or's robe. As Browning asked, ''Who fished the murex
up?" How did it reach the dyeing-vat? What was
the process? Was the trade a monopoly? Again, you
remember that navy of Tarshish, which came once in
three years bringing Solomon gold and silver, ivory and
apes and peacocks. Who would not wish to read one
2 Studies in Literature
of its bills of lading, to construct a picture of the quays
as the vessels freighted or discharged their cargo? As
who would not eagerly read a description of that
lumberer's camp on Lebanon to which Solomon sent
ten thousand men a month by courses : ' ' a month they
were in Lebanon and two months at home, and Adoni-
ram was over the levy"? The conditions, you see,
must have been hard, as the corvee was enormous. What
truth, if any, underlies the legend that when Solomon
died they embalmed and robed him and stood the corpse
high on the unfinished wall that, under their great task-
master's eye, the workmen should work and not "slack"
(as we say) ? What a clerk-of-the-works !
Yet again — Where lay the famous tin-islands, the
Cassiterides ? How were the great ingots of Cornish
tin delivered down to the coast and shipped on to Mar-
seilles, Carthage, Tyre? We know that they were
shaped pannier-wise, and carried by. ponies. But
where was the island of Ictis, where the, ships received
them? Our latest theorists will not allow it to have
been St. Michael's Mount — the nearest of all, and the
most obviously correspondent with the historian's
description. They tell us hardily it was the Isle of
Wight — or the Isle of Thanet. Ah, if these professors
did not suffer from sea-sickness, how much simpler
their hypotheses would be! Image the old Cornish
merchant taking whole trains of ponies, laden with
valuable ore, along the entire south of England, through
dense forests and marauding tribes, to ship his ware at
Thanet, when he had half a dozen better ports at his
door! Imagine a skipper from Marseilles — But the
absurdities are endless, and I will not here pursue them.
For what other hidden port of trade was that Phoe-
nician skipper bound who, held in chase off the Land's
The Commerce of Thought 3
End by a Roman galley and desperate of cheating her,
deliberately (tradition tells) drove his ship ashore to
save his merchant's secret? Through what phases, be-
fore this, had run and shifted the commercial struggle
between young Greece and ancient Phoenicia imaged
for us in Matthew Arnold's famous simile:
As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily.
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the ^gean isles:
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come.
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine.
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep 'd in brine;
And knew the intruders on his ancient home.
The young light-hearted masters of the waves ;
And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail,
And day and night held on indignantly
O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale.
Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,
To where the Atlantic raves
Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails
There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,
Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;
And on the beach undid his corded bales.
What commerce followed the cutting of Rome's great
military roads? — that tremendous one, for instance,
hewn along the cliffs close over the rapids that swirl
through the Iron Gates of Danube. By what caravan
tracks, through what depots, did the great slave traffic
wind up out of Africa and reach the mart at Constanti-
nople ? What sort of men worked goods dow n the Rhone
4 Studies in Literature
valley; and, if by water, by what contrivances? To
come a little later, how did the Crusaders handle trans-
port and commissariat? Through and along what line
of entrepots did Venice, Genoa, Seville ply their immense
ventures? Who planted the vineyards of Bordeaux,
Madeira, the Rhine-land, and from what stocks?
Who, and what sort of man, opened an aloe market
in Socotra? Why, and on what instance, and how,
did England and Flanders come to supply Europe,
the one with wool, the other with fine linen and
naperies?
Now of these and like questions — for of course I might
multiply them by the hundred — I wish, first of all, to
impress on you that they are of first importance if you
would understand history; by which I mean, if you
would take hold, in imagination, of the himian motives
which make history. Roughly (but, of course, very
roughly) you may say of man that his wars and main
migrations on this planet are ruled by the two great
appetites which rule the strifes and migrations of the
lower animals — love, and hunger. If under love we
include the parental instinct in man to do his best for his
mate and children (which includes feeding them, and
later includes patrimonies and marriage portions) you
get love and hunger combined, and doubled in driving
power. Man, unlike the brutes, will also war for
religion (I do not forget the Moslem invasion or the
Crusades) and emigrate for religion (I do not forget the
Pilgrim Fathers) : but, here again, when a man expatri-
ates himself for religion the old motives at least "come
in." The immediate cause of his sailing for America
is that authority, finding him obnoxious at home,
makes the satisfaction of hunger, love and the
parental instincts impossible for him save on con-
The Commerce of Thought 5
dition of renouncing his faith, which he will not do.
Neither do I forget — indeed it will be my business,
before I have done, to remind you — that hundreds of
thousands of men have left home and country for the
sake of learning. There lies the origin of the great
universities. But here again you will find it hard to
separate — at all events from the thirteenth century
onward — the pure ardour of scholarship from the
worldly advancement to which it led. Further, while
men may migrate for the sake of learning I do not
remember to have heard of their making war for it.
On this point they content themselves with calHng one
another names.
To cut this part of the argument short — Of all the
men you have known who went out to the Colonies,
did not nine out of ten go to make money? Of all
the women, did not nine out of ten go to marry,
or to ** better themselves" by some less ambiguous
process?
We are used to think of Marathon as a great victory
won by a small enlightened Greek race over dense
hordes of the obscurantist East; of Thermopylae as a
pass held by the free mind of man against its would-be
enslavers. But Herodotus does not see it so. Herodo-
tus handles the whole quarrel as started and balanced
on a trade dispute. Which was it first — ^East or West —
that, coming in the way of trade, broke the rules of the
game by stealing away a woman ? Was lo that woman ?
Or was Europa? Jason sails to Colchis and carries off
Medea, with the gold : Paris sails to Sparta and abducts
Helen — both ladies consenting. Always at the root
of the story, as Herodotus tells it, we find commerce,
coast-wise trading, the game of marriage by capture:
no silly notions about liberty, nationality, religion or
6 Studies in Literature
the human intellect. It is open to us, of course, to
believe that Troy was besieged for ten years for the sake
of a woman, as it is pleasant to read in Homer of Helen
watching the battlefield from the tower above the
Skaian gates, while the old men of the city marvel at her
beauty, saying one to another, "Small blame is it that
for such a woman the Trojans and Achaeans should
long suffer hardships." But if you ask me, do I believe
that the Trojan War happened so, I am constrained to
answer that I do not: I suspect there was money in it
somewhere. There is a legend — I think in Suetonius,
who to be sure had a nasty mind — that Caesar first
invaded Britain for the sake of its pearls; a disease
of which our oysters have creditably rid themselves.
And even nowadays, when we happen to be fighting
far abroad and our statesmen assure us that **we seek
no goldfields, " one murmurs the advice of Tennyson's
Northern Farmer
Doant thou marry for munny, but goa wheer munny is.
Money? Yes: but let your imagination play on
these old trade-routes, and you will not only enhance
your hold on the true springs of history; you will
wonderfully seize the romance of it. You will see, as
this little planet revolves back out of the shadow of
night to meet the day, little threads pushing out over
its black spaces — dotted ships on wide seas, crawling
trains of emigrant waggons, pioneers, tribes on the
trek, men extinguishing their camp-fires and shoulder-
ing their baggage for another day's march or piling it
into canoes by untracked river sides, families loading
their camels with figs and dates for Smyrna, villagers
treading wine-vats, fishermen hauling nets, olive-
The Commerce of Thought 7
gatherers, packers, waggoners, long trains of African
porters, desert caravans with armed outriders, daha-
beeyahs pushing up the Nile, busy rice-fields, puffs of
smoke where the expresses run across Siberia, Canada,
or northward from Capetown, Greenland whalers,
Newfoundland codfishers, trappers around Hudson's
Bay. . . .
The main puzzle with these trade-routes is that while
seas and rivers and river valleys last for ever, and roads
for long, and even a railroad long enough to be called a
"permanent way," the traffic along them is often
curiously evanescent. Let me give you a couple of
instances, one in quite recent times, the other of today,
passing under our eyes.
A man invents a steam-engine. It promptly makes
obsolete the stage-coaches, whose pace was the glory
of England. Famous hostelries along the Great North
Road put up their shutters; weeds begin to choke the
canals; a whole nexus of national traffic is torn in shreds,
dissipated. A few years pass, and somebody invents
the motor-car — locomotion by petrol. Forthwith pro-
sperity flows back along the old highways. County
Councils start re-metalling, tar-spraying; inns revive
under new custom: and your rich man is swept past
a queer wayside building, without ever a thought that
here stood a turnpike gate which Dick Turpin had to
leap.
For a second change, which I have watched for a year
or two as it has passed under my own eyes at the foot
of my garden at home. — As you know, the trade of
Europe from the West Coast of America around the
Horn is carried by large sailing-vessels (the passage
being too long for steamships without coaling stations).
One day America starts in earnest to cut the Panama
8 Studies in Literature
canal. Forthwith the provident British shipowner
begins to get quit of these sailing-vessels: noble three-
and four-masters, almost all Clyde-built. He sells
them to Italian firms. Why to ItaHan firms? Because
these ships have considerable draught and are built of
iron. Their draught unfits them for general coasting
trade; they could not begin to navigate the Baltic, for
instance. Now Italy has deep-water harbours. But
the Genoese firms (I am told) buy these ships for the
second reason, that they are of iron : because while the
Italian Government lays a crippling duty on ordinary
iron, broken-up ship-iron may enter free. So, after a
coastwise voyage or two, it pays to rip their plates out,
pass them under the rollers and re-issue them for new
iron; and thus for a few months these beautiful things
that used to wing it home, five months without sighting
land, and anchor under my garden, eke out a new brief
trafiic until the last of them shall be towed to the
breakers' yard. Even in such unnoted ways grew,
thrived, passed, died, the commercial glories of Venice,
Spain, Holland.
II
Now I will ask you to consider something more
transient, more secret in operation, than ways of trade
and barter — the ways in which plants disseminate them-
selves or are spread and acclimatised. For my pupils in
Cambridge, the other day, I drew, as well as I could, in
the New Lecture Theatre, the picture of an old Roman
colonist in his villa in Britain, let us say in the fourth
century — and you must remember that these Roman
colonists inhabited Britain for a good four hundred
years. Let me quote one short passage from that
description :
The Commerce of Thought 9
The owner of the villa (you may conceive) is the grand-
son or even great-great-grandson of the colonist who first
built it, following in the wake of the legionaries. The
family has prospered, and our man is now a considerable
landowner. He was born in Britain ; his children have been
bom here; and here he lives a comfortable, well-to-do, out-
of-door life, in its essentials I fancy not so very unlike the
life of an English country squire today. Instead of chasing
hares and foxes he hunts the wolf and the wild boar; but the
sport is good, and he returns with an appetite. He has
added a summer parlour to the house, with a northern aspect
and no heating flues ; for the old parlour he has enlarged the
praefurnium, and through the long winter evenings sits
far better warmed than many a master of a modern country
house. A belt of trees on the brow of the rise protects him
from the worst winds, and to the south his daughters have
planted violet-beds which will breathe odorously in the
spring. He has rebuilt and enlarged the slave quarters and
some of the outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around
the atrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, where
stucco remains, has repainted it in fresh colours. He knows
that there are no gaps or weak spots in his stockade fence —
wood is always cheap. In a word, he has improved his estate,
is modestly proud of it; and will be content, like the old
Athenian, to leave his patrimony not worse but something
better than he found it.
Such a family — it was part of my picture — would get
many parcels from the land they still called *'home, "
from the adored City — urhe quam dicunt Romam — The
City ; parcels fetched from the near military station on
the great road where the imperial writ ran ; parcels for-
warded by those trade-routes of which I have spoken;
parcels of books — scrolls, rather, or tablets; parcels of
seeds — useful vegetables or pot-herbs, garden flowers,
fruit-plants for the orchard, for the colonnade even roses
10 Studies in Literature
with real Italian earth damp about their roots. For the
Romans here were great acclimatisers, and upon Italy
they could draw as a nursery into which the best fruits,
trees, flowers of the world had been gathered after con-
quest and domesticated.
For beasts, it seems probable that they introduced the
ass — with the mule as a consequence, the goat, certain
new breeds of oxen ; for birds, the peacock from India or
Persia, the pheasant from Colchis, the Numidian guinea-
fowl (as we call it), the duck, the goose (defender of the
Capitol), possibly the dove and the falcon. But we talk
of plants. Britain swarmed with oak and beech, as with
most of the trees of Gaul; but the Roman brought the
small-leaved elm, ilex, cypress, laurel, myrtle, oriental
plane, walnut; of fruits (among others) peach, apricot,
cherry, probably the filbert; of vegetables, green peas
(bless him!), cucumbers, onions, leeks; of flowers, some
species of the rose (the China-rose, as we call it, for
one), lilies, hyacinths, sweet-williams, lilacs, tulips.
But these were plants deliberately imported and
tended. What of wild-flowers — the common blue
speedwell, for instance? I am not botanist enough to
say if the speedwell was indigenous in Britain : but, as a
gardener in a small way, I know how it can travel!
If the speedwell will not do, take some other seed that
has lodged on his long tramp northward in the boot-
sole of a common soldier in Vespasian's legion. The
boot reaches Dover, plods on, wears out, is cast by the
way, rots in a ditch. From it, next spring, Britain has
gained a new flower.
ni
I come now to something more volatile, more fuga-
cious yet — more secret and subtle and mysterious in
The Commerce of Thought ii
operation even than the vagaries of seeds; I come
to the wanderings, ahghtings, fertihsings of man's
thought.
Will you forgive my starting off with a small personal
experience which (since we have just been talking of a
very common weed) may here come in not inappropri-
ately? I received a message the other day from an
acquaintance, a young engineer in Vancouver. He
had been constructing a large dam on the edge of a
forest, himself the only European, with a gang of
Japanese labourers. But the rains proved so torrential,
washing down the sides of the dam as fast as they were
heaped, and half drowning the diggers, that at length
the whole party sought shelter in the woods. There, as
he searched about, my young engineer came upon a
log-shanty, doorless, abandoned, empty, save for two
pathetic objects left on the mud floor — the one a burst
kettle, the other a ''soiled copy" (as the booksellers
say) of one of my most unpopular novels. You see,
there is no room for vanity in the narrative — a burst
kettle and this book — the only two things not worth
taking away ! Yet I — who can neither make nor mend
kettles — own to a thrill of pride to belong to a call-
ing that can fling the other thing so far; and nurse a
hope that the book did, in its hour, cheer rather than
dispirit that unknown dweller in the wilderness.
But indeed — to come to more serious and less dead,
though more ancient, authors — you never can tell how
long this or that of theirs will lie dormant, then sud-
denly spring to life. Someone copies down a little poem
on reed paper, on the back of a washing bill : the paper
goes to wrap a mummy; long centuries pass; a tomb is
laid bare of the covering sand, and from its dead ribs
they unwind a passionate lyric of Sappho:
12 Studies in Literature
0( iJL£V (luxrltov aTpoTOv, oc Bs xeaBov,
ot Bs vatov ^aTff* 1x1 fav ^sXatvav
e(X[jL£vat xaXXtaTov* syo) Bs /.yJv' ot-
T(i) tk; epaxai.
Troops of horse-soldiers, regiments of footmen,
Fleets in full sail — "What sight on earth so lovely? "
Say you : but my heart ah ! above them prizes
Thee, my Beloved.
I believe that this one was actually recovered from a
rubbish-heap : but another such is unwrapped from the
ribs of a mummy, of a woman thousands of years dead.
Was it bound about them because her heart within them
perchance had beaten to it? — wrapped by her desire
— by the hands of a lover — or just by chance? As
Sir Thomas Browne says
What song the syrens sang, or what name Achilles
assumed when he hid himself among women, though puz-
zling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time
the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of
the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might
admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of
these bones, or wh'at bodies these ashes made up, were a
question above antiquarism.
IV
But these travels and resuscitations of the written or
the printed word, though they may amuse our curiosity,
are nothing to marvel at; we can account for them. I
am coming to something far more mysterious.
A friend of mine, a far traveller, once assured me that
if you wanted to find yourself in a real ''gossip shop " —
as he put it — you should go to the Sahara. That desert,
The Commerce of Thought 13
he informed me solemnly, "is one great sounding-board.
You scarcely dare to whisper a secret there. You can-
not kill a man in the Algerian Sahara even so far south
as Fort Mirabel but the news of it will be muttered
abroad somewhere in the Libyan desert, say at Ain-el-
Sheb, almost as soon as a telephone (if there were one,
which there is not) could carry it. "
Well, doubtless my friend overstated it. But how do
you account for the folk-stories ? Take any of the fairy-
tales you know best. Take Cinderella, or Red Riding
Hood or Hop o' my Thumb. How can you explain that
these are common not only to widely scattered nations
of the race we call Aryan, from Asia to Iceland, but
common also to savages in Borneo and Zululand, the
South Sea Islander, the American Indian? The mis-*
sionaries did not bring them, but found them. There
are tribal and local variations, but the tale itself cannot
be mistaken. Shall we choose Beauty and the Beast?
That is not only and plainly, as soon as you start to
examine it, the Greek tale of Cupid and Psyche, pre-
served in Apuleius; not only a tale told by nurses in
Norway and Hungary; not only a tale recognisable in
the Rig- Veda: but a tale told by Bornuese and by
Algonquin Indians. Shall we choose The Wolf who ate
the Six Kids while the Seventh was hidden in the Clock-
case? That again is negro as well as European: you
may find it among the exploits of Brer Rabbit. Or
shall we choose the story of the adventurous youth who
lands on a shore commanded by a wizard, is made spell-
bound and set to do heavy tasks, is helped by the
wizard's pretty daughter and escapes with her aid.
That is the story of Jason and Medea: you may find all
the first half of it in Shakespeare's The Tempest: but
you may also find it (as Andrew Lang sufficiently
14 Studies in Literature
proved) "in Japan, among the Eskimo, among the
Bushmen, the Samoyeds, and the Zulus, as well as in
Hungarian, Magyar, Celtic, and other European house-
hold tales. "
Well, I shall not give a guess, this evening, at the
way in which these immemorial tales were carried and
spread. As Emerson said
Long I followed happy guides,
I could never reach their sides;
Their step is forth, and, ere the day
Breaks up their leaguer, and away . . .
But no speed of mine avails
To hunt upon their shining trails . . .
On eastern hills I see their smokes.
Mixed with mist by distant lochs.
But the camp-fires around which men told these old
tales have been broken up for the next day's march,
and the embers trodden out, centuries and centuries
ago.
V
Well, now, let us work back for a few minutes towards
this inexplicable thing through something of which,
though marvellous, we may catch at an understanding.
In the beginning of the eighth century in the remote
north of a barbarous tract of England, a monk called
Bede founds a school. He is (I suppose) of all men
in the world the least — as we should put it nowadays —
self-advertising. He just labours there, in the cloisters
of Jarrow, never leaving them, intent only on his page,
for the love of scholarship. Between his solitary lamp
and the continent of Europe stretches a belt of fens, of
fog, of darkness, broad as two-thirds of England;
The Commerce of Thought 15
beyond that, the Channel. Yet the Hght reaches across
and over. As Portia beautifully says
How far that little candle throws his beams !
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Men on the continent have heard of Jarrow: eyes are
watching; in due time Bede's best pupil, Alcuin of York,
gets an invitation to come over to the court of Charle-
magne, to be its educational adviser. So Alcuin leaves
York, soon to be destroyed with its fine school and
library by the Scandinavian raiders (for your true bar-
barian, even when he happens to be a pedantic one,
always destroys a library. Louvain is his sign-manual)
— ^Alcuin leaves York and crosses over to France with
his learning. Very well: but how can you explain it,
save by supposing a community of men in Europe alert
for learning as merchants for gold, kept informed of
where the best thing was to be had, and determined to
have it ?
Yes, and we are right in supposing this. For when
light begins to glimmer, day to break, on the Dark Ages
(as we call them, and thereby impute to them, I think,
along with their own darkness no little of ours, much
as the British seaman abroad has been heard to com-
miserate *'them poor ignorant foreigners") — ^when day-
light begins to flow, wavering, and spreads for us over
the Dark Ages, what is the first thing we see? I will
tell you what is the first thing / see. It is the Roads.
VI
That is why — to your mild wonder, maybe — I began
this lecture by talking of the old trade-routes. I see
the Roads glimmer up out of that morning twilight
i6 Studies in Literature
with the many men, like ants, coming and going upon
them; meeting, passing, overtaking; knights, mer-
chants, carriers ; justiciars with their trains, king's mes-
sengers riding post; afoot, friars — black, white and
grey — pardoners, poor scholars, minstrels, beggar-men;
packhorses in files; pilgrims, bound for Walsingham,
Canterbury, or to Southampton, to ship there for Com-
postella, Rome. For the moment let us limit our gaze to
this little island. I see the old Roman roads — Watling
Street, Ermine Street, Icknield Street, Akeman Street,
the Fosse Way and the rest — hard-metalled, built in
fine layers, from the foundation or pavimentum of fine
earth hard beaten in, through layers of large stones,
small stones (both mixed with mortar), pounded nu-
cleus of lime, clay or chalk, brick and tile, up to the
paved surface, summum dorsum: one running north
through York and branching, as Hadrian had diverted
it, to point after point of the Great Wall; another coast-
wise towards Cornwall; a third for Chester and on to
Anglesey, a fourth, embanked and ditched, through the
Cambridgeshire fens : I see the minor network of cross-
roads, the waterways with their slow freight. You
may remember a certain chapter of Rabelais, concerning
a certain Island of Odes in which the highways keep
moving, moving of themselves ; and another passage in
Pascal in which the rivers are seen as roads themselves
travelling with the travellers.' Well, I see it like that;
and the by-roads where outlaws lurked; the eastern
fens where a hunted man could hide for years, the lanes
leading to sanctuary. Some years ago, in Cornwall,
^ It is observable how many of the great books of the world — the
Odyssey, the ^neid, The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, The Pilgrim's
Progress, Gil Bias, Pickwick and The Cloister and the Hearth — are books
of wayfaring.
The Commerce of Thought 17
I took an old map and decided to walk by a certain road
marked on it. My host averred there was no such road
in the parish; his brother, a district councillor, agreed.
Well, being obstinate, I followed the old map, and found
that road. What is more, after tracking it for a quarter
of a mile, stooping under thorns and elders and pushing
through brambles, I came in the dusk upon a fire and a
tramp cooking his pot over it. It is a question which of
us two received the greater shock.
VII
Now in the Middle Ages, to keep these roads, and
especially their bridges, in repair was one of the first
calls on godly piety: nor will you ever begin to under-
stand these Middle Ages until you understand their
charitable concern for all travellers. Turn to your
Litany, and read :
That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land
or by water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons,
and young children : and to shew thy pity upon all prisoners
and captives.
Read the evidence collected by Jusserand, and it will
leave you with no doubt that the persons thus inter-
ceded for are not mixed together casually or carelessly ;
but that the keeping of the roads in repair was consid-
ered as a pious and meritorious work before God, of the
same sort as attending the sick or caring for the poor,
or comforting the prisoners. A religious order of Pon-
tiffs {Pontifices, bridge-makers) built bridges in many
countries of Europe. The famous Pont d'Avignon was
one; Pont St. Esprit (still in use) was another. A
bridge with a chapel on it was one of the most familiar
i8
Studies in Literature
features of medieval England — a chapel and a toll-gate
— the church being no more averse then than now to
"take up a collection." Old London Bridge, with a
chapel on it — Old London Bridge which for centuries
was the marvel of England — Old London Bridge which
(mind you) remained until the middle of the eighteenth
century, until Dr. Johnson's day, the only bridge span-
ning the Thames — ^was begun in 1176, finished in 1209,
with its twenty arches, by subscription of the charitable.
I have no time, this afternoon, to draw you separate
portraits of the men and women travelling these roads :
but medieval literature (and especially our Chaucer)
teems with pictures of them — pictures which, if read
with imagination, will "depict your chamber walls
around" as with a moving frieze. I shall conclude by
choosing one familiar figure and for a minute or two
presenting him to you, with what he meant : the Wan-
dering Scholar.
VIII
He is young, and poor, and careless. He tramps it
on foot, and, when his pocket is empty, has no shame
in begging: and men find a religious reward in doling
him a penny: he being bound for one of the great uni-
versities, of whose learning the world has heard; for
Oxford or Cambridge, or for Paris, or, farther yet, for
Bologna, for Salerno. The roads of Europe are full
of his like. No one quite knows how it has happened.
The schools of Remigius and of William of Champeaux
(we will say) have given Paris a certain prestige when
a mysterious word, a rtmiour, spreads along the great
routes, of a certain great teacher called Abelard whose
voice will persuade a man's soul almost out of his body.
The Commerce of Thought 19
The fame of it spreads almost as pollen is wafted on the
wind: but spreads, and alights, and fertilizes. Forth-
with, in all the far corners of Europe, young men are
packing their knapsacks, bidding good-bye to their
homes, waving back to the family at the gate as they
dare the great adventure and fare (say) for Paris, intel-
lectual queen of Europe.
The desire of the moth for the star! The ineffable
spell of those great names — Paris, Oxford, Cambridge,
Bologna, Salamanca ! These young men reach at length
the city which has been shining in their imagination.
The light fades down its visionar^^ spires to a narrow
noisome medieval street in which the new comer is
one of a crowd, a turbulent crowd of the wantonest
morals. But youth is there, and friendship: to be
kept green through the years of later life, when all
this young blood is dispersed, and the boys have shaken
hands, not to meet again, and nothing remains in com-
mon to Dick of York and Hans of Hungary but a
memory of the old class-room where they blew on their
fingers, and took notes by the light of unglazed windows,
and shuffled their numb feet in the straw.
Let me instance one such scholar — William Dunbar,
the great fifteenth-century poet of Scotland. He was
born about 1460, went to St. Andrews and there gradu-
ated Master of Arts in 1479: at once became an Ob-
servantine Friar of the Franciscan Order, and started
to travel : very likely took ship first from Leith to the
Thames, but anyhow crossed to France — the little
passenger ships of those days carrying a hundred besides
their crew. Says the old ballad:
Men may leve alle gamys.
That saylen to seynt Jamys!
20 Studies in Literature
(that is, to St. James of Compostella)
Ffor many a man hit gramys (vexes);
When they begyn to sayle.
Ffor when they have take the see,
At Sandwyche, or at Wynchylsee,
At Brystow, or where that hit bee,
Theyr hertes begyn to fayle.
Then follows an extremely moving picture of the
crowded sea-sickness on board. We will not dwell on it.
Somehow, Dunbar gets to France; roves Picardy; is in
Paris in 1491 and mingles with the scholars of the Sor-
bonne; returns home by way of London (and be it re-
membered that the kingdoms of England and his native
Scotland were more often antagonistic than not in those
days) ; on his way pauses to muse on London Bridge —
that Bridge of which I spoke to you a few minutes ago —
*' lusty Brigge of pylers white" he calls it and breaks
into this noble praise of our City :
London, thou art of townes A per se.
Soveraign of cities, semeiiest in sight,
Of high renoun, riches and royaltie;
Of lordis, barons, and many a goodly knyght;
Of most delectable lusty ladies bright ;
Of famous prelatis, in habitis clericall;
Of merchauntis full of substaunce and of myght :
London, thou art the flour of Cities all.
Above all ryvers thy Ryver hath renowne,
Whose beryall streamys, pleasaunt and preclare,
Under thy lusty wallys renneth down,
Where many a swanne doth sw5mime with wyngis fair;
Where many a barge doth saile, and row with are (oars) ;
The Commerce of Thought 21
Where many a ship doth rest with toppe-royall.
O, towne of townes ! patrone and not compare,
London, thou art the floure of Cities all.
My discourse, like many a better one, shall end with
a moral. I have often observed in Hfe, and especially
in matters of education — you too, doubtless, have ob-
served— that what folks get cheaply or for nothing they
are disposed to undervalue. Indeed I suspect we all
like to think ourselves clever, and it helps our sense of
being clever to adjust the worth of a thing to the price
we have paid for it. Now the medieval scholar I have
been trying to depict for you was poor, even bitterly
poor, yet bought his learning dear. Listen to Chaucer's
account of him when he had attained to be a Clerk of
Oxenford, and to enough money to hire a horse:
As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake.
But looked holwe, and ther-to sobrely;
Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy;
For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office;
For hym was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes clad in blak or reed
Of Aristotle and his philosophic,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie:
But al be that he was a philosophre.
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;
But al that he myghte of his freendes hente
On bookes and his lernynge he it spente.
And bisily gan for the soules preye
Of hem that yaf hym wher-with to scoleye.
How happy would such a poor scholar deem us, who
have printed books cheap and plenty, who have news-
22
Studies in Literature
papers brought to our door for a groat, who can get in
less than an hour and a half to Oxford, to Cambridge,
in a very few hours to Paris, to Rome — cities of his
desire, shining in a land that is very far off ! Neverthe-
less I tell you, who have listened so kindly to me for an
hour, that in the commerce and transmission of thought
the true carrier is neither the linotype machine, nor the
telegraph at the nearest post office, nor the telephone
at your elbow, nor any such invented convenience : but
even such a wind as carries the seed, "it may chance of
wheat, or of some other grain " : the old, subtle, winding,
caressing, omnipresent wind of man's aspiration. For
the secret — which is also the reward — of all learning lies
in the passion for the search.
BALLADS
THE Ballad is, of all forms of poetry, about the most
mysterious and singular: singular in its nature,
mysterious not only in this but in its origin and its
history.
We need not, here, today, trouble ourselves overmuch
with its origin, which is much the same as Melchizedek's.
Yet we may not wholly neglect the question. There
are, as you probably know, two conflicting theories
about it ; and the supporters of each talk like men ready
to shed blood, though for my part I hold that a very
little common sense might reconcile them; since each
theory contains a modicum of truth, and each, when
pushed to the extreme, becomes frantically absurd.
On the one hand we have the theory — invented
or pioneered by Herder, elaborated and oracularly
preached by James Grimm — that these ''folk songs"
were made by the ''folk" ; that they burst into existence
by a kind of natural and spontaneous generation in a
tribe or nation, at that stage of culture when it is "for
all practical purposes an individual"; that a ballad
comes, or came, into being much as the floating matter
of a nebula condenses to form a star.
Now there is much truth in this. A tribe meets to-
gether to celebrate some occasion of common interest —
23
24 Studies in Literature
a successful hunt, a prosperous foray, the wedding of
its chief, the return of the god who brings summer, the
end of a reHgious fast, a harvest home. As Professor
Kittredge puts it in his Introduction to the abridgement
of Child's great collection of Ballads :
The object of the meeting is known to all ; the deeds which
are to be sung, the dance which is to accompany and illus-
trate the singing, are likewise familiar to everyone. There
is no such diversity of intellectual interests as characterises
even the smallest company of civilised men. There is unity
of feeling and a common stock, however slender, of ideas and
traditions. The dancing and singing, in which all share, are
so closely related as to be practically complementary parts
of a single festal act. . . . And this is no fancy picture.
It is the soberest kind of science, — a mere brief chapter of
descriptive anthropology, for which authorities might be
cited without number.
Let me add that all this rests on the early discovery of
man that all manual or bodily labour is enormously in-
creased in effect, when timed to rhymth. So a regiment*
marches to a band; so the tramp of a column crossing
a light bridge has to be broken lest the timed impact
wreck the structure ; so in the Peninsular War a British
regiment heaved down a wall apparently immovable,
by lining against it and applying bodily pressure in suc-
cessive rhythmical waves. So I, who have lived most
of my life over a harbour, have seen and heard crews
weighing anchor at windlass or capstan, or hauling on
ropes, to a sailors' chanty, the solo-man intoning
We have a good ship and a jolly good crew!
the chorus taking him up
And away, away Rio !
%
Ballads 25
So also — as we saw in one of the lectures last term — the
children in our streets help out dance with song in such
primitive games as "Sally, Sally Waters, " "Here come
three Dukes a-riding,*' or
London Bridge is broken down.
Dance over, my Lady Lee !
The "nebular" theorists have etymology, too, on their
side, for what it is worth. Undoubtedly ''ballad"
comes from the late Latin verb hallare ''to dance, " and
should mean a song accompanied by dancing. Un-
doubtedly some old ballads with their refrains are refer-
able to that origin — the famous old one of Binnorie,
for example, with its chorus:
There were twa sisters sat in a bour;
Binnorie, 0 Binnorie!
There cam a knight to be their wooer.
By the honnie milldams o' Binnorie.
But this only applies to some ballads, and these a few.
The theory, pushed to cover all, exposes its absurdity
in Grimm's famous phrase ''das Volk dichtet, "
That let in Schlegel, who at first had nibbled at
Grimm's theory; as it lets in all those who maintain
(and I think incontrovertibly) that, after all, in the end
a ballad must be composed by somebody; and if you
think a ballad can be composed by public meeting, just
call a public meeting and try! In human experience
poetry doesn't get written in that way: it requires an
author. Moreover these ballads, as they come down to
us, though overlaid by improvements by Tom, Dick
and Harry, are things of genius, individual. As for
etymology, if halada be the origin of ballad, so is it of the
26 Studies In Literature
ballet: and so is sonetto the origin alike of a Beethoven*s
Moonlight Sonata and a Miltonic or Wordsworthian
Sonnet. Sonetto means a song accompanied by instru-
mental music. It is all very well to say that in Milton's
hands ' ' the Thing became a trumpet ' ' ; but he certainly
did not attune it to an instrumental ohhligato.
So you get the opposing '* artistic " theory; that our
ballads were composed by minstrels, gleemen, scops,
skalds, bards ; itinerant professional singers who com-
posed them and recited them at wakes, fairs and feasts,
from town to town, from hall to hall. Bishop Percy,
and generations of scholars after him, ascribed the com-
position of our ballads to these professional minstrels
almost as a matter of course. Nor, to my mind, does
Professor Kittredge make a very shrewd point when he
says
Such ballads as have been recovered from oral tradition
in recent times (and these . . . comprise the vast majority
of our texts) have not, except now and then, been taken
down from the recitation or the singing of minstrels, or of
any order of men who can be regarded as the descendants or
representatives of minstrels. They have almost always
been found in the possession of simple folk whose relation
to them was in no sense professional.
Quite so: and the simple answer is that the itiner-
ant singer died more than three hundred years ago.
Whether of inanition, passing out of vogue, or because
the invention of printing killed him, die he did: and
he left no professional descendants, because the print-
ing-press had destroyed the profession. You can-
not collect ballads straight from the lips of men three
hundred years in the grave. Whence in the world would
anyone expect to recover them, save from descendants
Ballads 27
of those simple folk for whom they were written and
from whom they have been transmitted ?
Nor again does that seem to me a wholly triumphant
objection which Dr. Gummere makes in his chapter on
Ballads in The Cambridge History of English Literature.
Says he:
Still stronger proof lies in the fact that we have the poetry
which the minstrels did make ; and it is far removed from
balladry.
This, to start with, is inaccurate. We have not the
poetry which the minstrels did make : we have only some
of it. But truly you could hardly have a better example
of the root -blindness which affects men who treat litera-
ture learnedly as a dead thing, without having served
an apprenticeship in it as a living art. Anyone who
practises writing, quickly learns that appropriateness to
subject and audience is a great part of the secret of style ;
and the defter, the more accomplished, the more tactful
your artist is, the less surely can you argue (say) from
his manner in light verse to his manner in a pulpit.
Let me give you an example. Here is the opening of a
nineteenth century ballad :
Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war's alarms:
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms !
Now as they bore him off the field,
Said he, "Let others shoot,
For here I leave my second leg.
And the Forty -second Foot!"
And here is the opening of a poem of about the same
date
28 Studies in Literature
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless Hke Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn ....
Now, supposing the authorship of Faithless Nelly Gray
to be uncertain, what is more certain than that a scholar
of Dr. Gummere's type would demonstrate the impossi-
bility of its having been written by Thomas Hood
"because we have Hood's Ode to Autumn, and it is far
removed from Faithless Nelly Gray^'l Yet as a fact he
would be quite wrong ; because Hood wrote them both.
No: the really important point about ballads has
nothing to do with 'Vho wrote them?" even if that
could be discovered at this time of day. It matters
very little to us, at any rate, if they were written by the
people. What gives them their singularity of nature is
that, whoever wrote them, wrote them for the people:
and to this singularity, this individuality, by a paradox,
their curious avoidance of the self-conscious personal
touch will be found (I think) in no small degree to con-
tribute.
II
Let us first, however, establish that the Ballad has a
nature of its own among poetic forms; is a thing by
itself, or, as Professor Ker puts it, "the Ballad is an Idea,
a poetical Form, which can take up any matter and does
not leave that matter as it was before. " Professor Ker
goes on:
In spite of Socrates and his logic, we may venture to say,
in answer to the question "What is a Ballad?"— "A Ballad
is The Milldams of Binnorie and Sir Patrick Spens and The
Ballads 29
Douglas Tragedy and Childe Maurice, and things of that
sort."
"And things of that sort. " Let me read you a sample
or two of the sort of thing. Here are a few stanzas from
Tam Lin:
Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little abune the knee;
And she has snooded her yellow hair
A little abune her bree,
And she is on to Miles Cross
As fast as she can hie.
About the dead hour o* the night
She heard the bridles ring;
And Janet was as glad at that
As any earthly thing.
And first gaed by the black, black steed,
And syne gaed by the brown;
But fast she gript the milk-white steed
And pu'd the rider down.
She's pu 'd him frae the milk-white steed,
An' loot the bridle fa',
And up there rase an eldritch cry,
*'True Tam Lin he's awa'!"
They shaped him in her arms at last
A mother-naked man;
She cast her mantle over him,
And sae her love she wan.
Up then spak' the Queen of Fairies,
Out o' a bush o' broom,
"She that has borrow'd young Tam Lin
Has gotten a stately groom."
30 Studies in Literature
Out then spak' the Queen o' Fairies,
And an angry woman was she,
"She's ta'en awa' the bonniest knight
In a' my companie!
"But what I ken this night, Tarn Lin,
Gin I had kent yestreen,
I wad ta'en out thy heart o' flesh,
And put in a heart o' stane.
"And adieu, Tarn Lin! But gin I had kent
A ladye wad borrow'd thee,
I wad ta'en out thy twa grey e'en
Put in twa e'en o' tree.
"And had I the wit yestreen, yestreen,
That I have coft this day,
I'd paid my teind seven times to hell
Ere you had been won away!"
Here are some verses from a carol-ballad — that of The
Seven Virgins:
All under the leaves and the leaves of life
I met with virgins seven,
And one of them was Mary mild.
Our Lord's mother of Heaven.
"0 what are you seeking, you seven fair maids,
All under the leaves of life?
Come tell, come tell, what seek you
All under the leaves of life?"
"We're seeking for no leaves, Thomas,
But for a friend of thine;
We're seeking for sweet Jesus Christ,
To be our guide and thine. "
Ballads 31
"Go down, go down, to yonaer town.
And sit in the gallery.
And there you'll see sweet Jesus Christ,
Nail'd to a big yew-tree."
Then He laid his head on His right shoulder,
Seeing death it struck Him nigh —
"The Holy Ghost be with your soul,
Idie, Mother dear, I die. "
O the rose, the gentle rose.
And the fennel that grows so green!
God give us grace in every place
To pray for our king and queen.
Furthermore for our enemies all
Our prayers they should be strong:
Amen, good Lord; your charity
Is the ending of my song.
Or here two stanzas from another old narrative carol-
/ saw Three Ships;
0 they sail'd in to Bethlehem!
— To Bethlehem, to Bethlehem;
Saint Michael was the steresman,
Saint John sate in the horn.
And all the bells on earth did ring
— On earth did ring, on earth did ring:
"Welcome be thou Heaven's King,
On Christ's Sunday at morn!"
Here are three stanzas from a ballad in dialogue-
Edward, Edward:
:^2 Studies in Literature
"Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
Edward, Edward?
Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
And why sae sad gang ye, 0?" —
*'0 I hae kiird my hawk sae gude,
Mither, mither;
O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,
And I had nae mair but he, 0."
** Your hawk's blude was never sae red,
Edward, Edward;
Your hawk's blude was never sae red,
My dear son, I tell thee, 0." —
"0 1 hae kill'd my red-roan steed,
Mither, mither;
O I hae kill'd my red-roan steed,
That erst was sae fair and free, O. "
"Your steed was auld, and ye hae got mair,
Edward, Edward;
Your* steed was auld, and ye hae got mair;
Some other dule ye dree, 0. " —
"0 I hae kill'd my father dear,
Mither, mither;
0 I hae kill'd my father dear,
Alas, and wae is me, 0!"
And here is one from a ballad with a refrain — The Cruel
Brother. [But I should say in parenthesis that, of the
ballads which survive to us, few carry a refrain: they
are far fewer than to justify the stress laid on the re-
frain by those who trace all balladry to communal
dancing. The vast majority as we have them, tell
straightforward stories straightforwardly.]
Ballads 33
There were three ladies play'd at the ba*,
With a hey ho! and a lily gay!
By came a knight and he woo'd them a'
As the primrose spreads so sweetly.
Sing Annet, and Marret, and fair Maisrie,
As the dew hangs i' the wood, gay ladie!
Here are some verses of a Robin Hood Ballad which
tells how Robin, having won the King's pardon on con-
dition that he lived at the King's court, homesickened
for the green-wood and Barnesdale, and at length
obtained leave for a week's furlough there:
When he came to greene-wood
In a merry morning.
There he heard the notes small
Of birds merry singing.
*'It is far gone, " said Robin Hood,
**That I was latest here;
Me list a little for to shoot
At the dunne deer."
Robin slew a full great hart;
His horn then gan he blow.
That all the outlaws of that forest '
That horn they coulde know,
And them together gathered
In a little throw;
Seven score of wight young men
Came ready on a row,
And faire didden off their hoods.
And set them on their knee:
"Welcome," they said, "our dear master,
Under this green- wood tree!"
34 Studies in Literature
Robin dwelt in greene-wood
Twenty year and two ;
For all dread of Edward our King,
Again would he not go.
Christ have mercy on his soul,
That died upon the rood !
For he was a good outlaw,
And did poor men much good.
And here finally is the well-known Lyke Wake Dirge^
so weird and wonderful:
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
— Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
i And Christe receive thy saule.
When thou from hence away art past,
— Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last:
And Christe receive thy saule.
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
— Every nighte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on:
And Christe receive thy saule.
If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
— Every nighte and alle,
The whinnes sail prick thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.
From whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
— Every nighte and alle.
To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.
Ballads 35
From Brig o' Dread when thou may'st pass,
— Every nighte and alle,
To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last;
^ And Christe receive thy saule.
If ever thou gavest meat or drink,
— Every nighte and alle,
The fire sail never make thee shrink;
/ And Christe receive thy saule.
If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane, '
— Every nighte and alle,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,"
— Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.
Now I put it to you, Gentlemen, that all these ex-
tracts, with all their difference of subject, have a
common note at once unmistakable and indefinable; a
note which attests them all as poetical and as alike, and
yet as somehow different from any other poetry we
know : certainly different from the note of any conscious
poet known to us. And this peculiar ballad-note per-
sists, perseveres, even down to late times and whether
the ballad sing high or low.
It can sing high :
Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour
'Tis fifty fathom deep;
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet.
{Sir Patrick Spens)
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Or
About the dead hour o* the night
She heard the bridles ring.
{Tarn Lin)
It can sing low :
Then up bespake the bride's mother —
She never was known to speak so free —
" Ye'll not forsake my only daughter
Though Susie Pye has crossed the sea."
{Young Beichan)
Or
An' thou sail marry a proud gunner;
An' a proud gunner I'm sure he'll be.
{The Great Silkie)
It can gallop :
O there was horsing, horsing in haste
And cracking of whips out owre the lee.
{Archie of Cawfield)
Or it can be merely flat pedestrianism :
There was slayne upon the Scott^s' side
For sooth as I you say,
Of four and fifty thousand Scottes
Went but eighteen away.
{Otterhurn)
But always it is unmistakable, and like no other thing
in poetry.
Ballads 37
III
Now as we study this peculiar unmistakable note,
one or two things become clear to us.
It becomes clear, in the first place, that whether or
not these ballads "wrote themselves" (as Grimm put
it) — whether or not they were written hy the people, as
they certainly were for the people — it is no accident of
chance or of time that withholds from us all knowledge
V of the authorship. We discern that somehow ano-
nymity belongs to their very nature; that anonymity,
impersonality, permeates their form and substance.
Let me apply a test which I have applied elsewhere. If
any known man ever steeped himself in balladry, that
man was Sir Walter Scott, and once or twice, in Proud
Maisie and Brignall Banks, he came near to distil the
essence. If any man, taking the Ballad for his model,
has ever sublimated its feeling and language in a poem
seraphically free
From taint of personality,
that man was Coleridge, and that poem The Ancient
Mariner, If any writer today alive can be called a
ballad- writer of genius, it is the author of Danny Deever
and East and West. But suppose a bundle of most
carefully selected ballads by Scott, Coleridge, Kipling,
bound up in a volume with such things as Clerk Saun-
ders y Cospatricky Robin Hood and the Monk, — you feel
(do you not?) — ^you know — they would intrude almost,
though not quite, as obviously as would a ballad of
Rossetti's or one from Morris's Defence of Guinevere,
Now we must never forget that the old ballads have
come down to us orally, after centuries of transmis-
sion through the memories of simple people who never
38 Studies in Literature
thought of them as ''literature"; that in fact, barring
the broadsides, they never were "literature" or written
speech at all, until Bishop Percy in 1765 started apolo-
getically to make them literature. And so I have some-
times fancied that the impress of their authorship may
merely have worn away as the impress on a shilling
wears away after years of transference from pocket to
pocket. There is something in this; and there is more
in it when we remind ourselves that a ballad written on
one memorable event will often have been recast and
refurbished to commemorate another. Let me illustrate
this from the fortunes of a beautiful one, The Queen's
Marie. You all know it :
When she cam to the Netherbow port,
She la ugh 'd loud laughters three;
But when she cam to the gallows foot
The tears blinded her e'e.
"Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she'll hae but three;
There was Marie Sea ton, and Marie Beaton,
And Marie Carmichael, and me.
**0 little did my mother ken,
The day she cradled me,
The lands I was to travel in,
Or the dog's death I wad d'ee!"
Now Professor Child collected and printed some
twenty-eight variants and fragments of this ballad —
which is a somewhat late one, if its story can be traced
no farther back than 1563 Then, or about then, Mary
Queen of Scots had four Maries among her gentle-
women— Mary Seaton, Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming
Ballads 39
and Mary Livingstone: and Knox, in his History of the
Reformation, relates a tragic scandal, involving the
queen's apothecary and "a Frenchwoman that served
in the Queen's bedchamber." This is substantially
the story told in the ballad; which, however, in most
versions makes the king himself ("the highest Stewart
of a'") to be the male sinner. But why Mary Car-
michael and Mary Hamilton in place of Mary Fleming
and Mary Livingstone? Well, we must travel to
Russia for it. There, after the marriage of one of the
ministers of Peter the Great's father with a Hamilton,
that Scottish family ranked with the Russian aris-
tocracy. The Czar Peter was punctilious that all his
Empress Catharine's maids-of -honour should be re-
markable for good looks ; a niece of the minister's wife, a
Mary Hamilton, was appointed for her extreme beauty.
There followed an amour with one Orloff , an aide-de-
camp to the Czar: a murdered babe was found, the guilt
traced to Mary. Orloff was arrested but subsequently
reprieved or pardoned. Mary Hamilton suffered ex-
ecution, on March 14, 1719.
Here, then, we have a story almost precisely similar
to that of the ballad ; with a real Mary Hamilton, who
does not occur historically in the scandal of 1563. Her
date is 1719: and yet no one with the smallest sense of
poetry can put the ballad so late, or anywhere within a
hundred years of 1719. Obviously the old ballad was
re-adapted to fit a new scandal in high life. But, mark
yet again, the stanza about the four Maries is merely
incidental and has nothing to do with the scandal : and
as that kind of scandal has been common enough in
courts from very early times, there is no reason why the
ballad should not reach back to very early times, have
been adapted to the business of 1563 and re-adapted to
40 Studies in Literature
the business of 1719. Speculation, to be sure! — But
that is where you always are with ballads.
Yet — no! Our simile of the shilHng worn in passing
from pocket to pocket, will not do. For it is not only
that the more a ballad suffers wear and change the more
it remains the same thing : it is that the more it wears,
the more it takes that paradoxically sharp impress, the
impress of impersonality.
IV
The next point to be noted of the Ballad is its extra-
ordinary rapidity of movement. Rapidity of movement
has been preached of the epic by Horace, and by Mat-
thew Arnold specially commended in Homer. But, for
rapidity, these innominate lays beat anything in Homer.
I remember studying, once on a time, a treatise on
American cocktails and coming on the following rider
to a recipe for a mixed liquor entitled Angler's Punch —
"N. B. — This punch can also be put up in bottles, so
that the Angler may lose no time."
Now the true Ballad is put up (doubtless upon ex-
perience) so that the audience loses no time:
The king sits in Dunfermline town
Drinking the blude-red wine;
and forthwith he asks
*'0 whare will I get a skeely skipper
To sail this new ship o' mine?"
And "What," Professor Ker very pertinently asks,
"What would the story of Sir Patrick Spens be worth if it
was told in any other way — with a description of the
Ballads 41
scenery about Dunfermline, the domestic establishment
of the King of Norway, and the manners of the court? "
This rapidity of movement is constant, and (if it be
not begging the question to term it so) "professional."
There are tricks, cliches, always at hand to carry us from
one incident to another:
They hadna sail'd a league, a league
A league but barely three . . .
when something new is ready to happen. The little
foot-page, after he has duly louted on his knee and
received the fatal message, always runs with it and has
to cross a river :
And whan he came to the broken briggs
He bent his bow and swam . . .
actually bending his bow (I suppose) and laying his
arms across it while he kicked his legs, swimming: and
so on. Almost always you will find the intervals hurried
over in this way, and it would seem that the audience
(easy with conventions as simple folk are) took these
formulae for granted as the right and proper bridges
over dull gaps of narrative.
V
Now let me draw four lines for you: the first two
across the map, the second two in historical time.
Across the map of England and Scotland I draw my
first and northerly line from the Firth of Forth to the
Clyde; my second and southerly from Newcastle-on-
Tyne to St. Bee's Head. Between these two lines lie
almost all the places most celebrated in ballad poetry.
They crowd thicker and thicker as on either side they
42 Studies in Literature
near the ancient Border of the two kingdoms: but I
draw no Hne here, being cautious; because, as you
know, the men of whose deeds the ballads were written
— deeds ranging from pitched battle to the reiving of
cattle and brides — drew no line at all, either in morals
or geographically : even mathematically, none known to
Euclid. Their line had breadth. At the thinnest it
was a strip; and they called this strip ''The Debatable
Land."
Now of course all the many ballads of Border fights
and forays — from Otterhurn and Chevy Chase to such
things as Kinmont Willie, Hohhie Noble, Jamie Telfer in
the Fair Dodhead — come from this region. But these
are not the very best ; and the curious fact is that all the
very best ballads, which have little or nothing to do
with forays and cattle-lifting, also come from this region,
and specially among the upper waters of Tweed and
Teviot, A fact is a fact, and a guess is a guess, and I
can bring no evidence fo;r what is nevertheless my sincere
belief — that once on a time there lived just hereabouts
a man of genius who gave these songs their immortal
impress and taught it to others (also he may have taught
the children of the Border the use of the Bow).
Now these, the songs, remain to eternity,
Those, only those, the bountiful choristers.
Gone — those are gone, those unremembered
Sleep and are silent in earth for ever.
As Ecclesiasticus has it :
Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that
begat us. . . . Leaders of the people by their counsels, and
by their knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and
eloquent in their instructions: such as found out musical
Ballads 43
tunes, and recited verses in writing. . . . All these were
honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their
times. There be of them that have left a name behind
them, that their praises might be reported. And some
there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as
though they had never been ; and are become as though they
had never been born ; and their children after them.
Or as Lucian put it :
Mortal are the things of mortals : we abide as they decay.
— If you doubt this proposition, put it just the other way.
I have told you my guess. But this much is no
guess. — Folk-poetry being a large word, we do our
scientific sense of it some help by fixing the best of
this form of our literature upon a certain folk inhabit-
ing a certain limited region, which we find to lie between
the Forth and the Tyne.
VI
I draw my other two lines, which are chronological,
at the years 1350 and 1550. Almost all the evidence
shows that the Ballad with the impress we know upon
it, rose, flourished, declined, within that period. The
author of Piers Plowman mentions "rimes of Robin
Hood and Randolph, earl of Chester" as known to the
common men of his day: Wynkyn de Worde printed
the Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood, as we have it, about a
hundred and forty years later: but when, yet a century
later, we come to the Elizabethan dramatists, we find
them holding the Ballad in open derision. Nor could
the Last Minstrel of that age (if we suppose any such
person) have pleaded with Scott's that
44 Studies in Literature
The bigots of an iron time
Had called his harmless art a crime . . .
the truth being rather that he had delighted the com-
pany long enough. A new poetry had come into vogue
with Wyatt and Surrey, Grimald, Lodge, Lyly and the
rest, and as an artistic poem the Ballad had passed
into the shade. It had been, as we know, impersonal —
curiously impersonal — in utterance: its business had
been to tell a plain tale. The lyrical cry seldom breaks
from it. When it does, at its most poignant, it breaks
forth thus, as Leesome Brand buries the wife he has
killed unwittingly :
There is a feast in your father's house.
The broom blooms bonnie and sae it is fair —
It becomes you and me to be very douce.
And we'll never gang down to the broom nae mair.
He's houkit a grave, long, large and wide,
The broom blooms bonnie and sae it is fair —
He's buried his auld son doun by her side,
And we'll never gang down to the broom nae mair.
It was nae wonder his heart was sair
The broom blooms bonnie and sae it is fair —
When he shool'd the mools on her yellow hair.
And we'll never gang down to the broom nae mair.
And this is exquisitely poignant : but it is not personal,
as any stanza of Wyatt's is personal: for instance
And wilt thou leave me thus.
That hath loved thee so long
In wealth and woe among :
Ballads 45
And is thy heart so strong
As for to leave me thus ?
Say nay ! say nay !
The ballad-metre had been simple, almost to jog-trot
(you remember Dr. Johnson's parody). The Ballad
had never philosophised its emotion. But now listen
to this :
To love and to be wise,
To rage with good advice,
Now thus, now than, so goes the game,
Uncertain is the dice:
There is no man, I say, that can
Both love and to be wise.
Keeping that stanza in mind, let us take an old ballad
which has happened to attract in its time (i) the Eliza-
bethan improver and (2) the eighteenth century embel-
lisher, and see what a mess they both make of it, with
the best intentions. It begins, much in the fashion of
the Nut Brown Maid, with a set dialogue — a dialogue
between a lover and a pilgrim who is returning from the
shrine of St. Mary at Walsingham : and it starts in the
true ballad-style. (I may mention that it is quoted in
Fletcher's play The Knight of the Burning Pestle.)
"As ye came from the holy land
Of Walsingham,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?"
**How shall I know your true love,
That have met many a one
As I came from the holy land.
That have come, that have gone?**
46 Studies in Literature
"She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath her form divine,
In the earth or the air."
**Such a one did I meet, Good Sir,
' Such an angelique face:
Who like a nymph, like a queen did appear
In her gait, in her grace."
*'She hath left me here alone.
All alone, as unknown,
Who sometime did me lead with herself
And me loved, as her own."
*' What's the cause that she leaves you alone
And a new way doth take.
That sometime did love you as her own
I And her joy did you make?"
*'I have loved her all my youth,
But now am old, as you see.
Love loves not the falling fruit,
Nor the withered tree."
So there you have, with its pretty anapaests, a little
ballad-poem, fairly ended and closed. Now comes in
the improving Elizabethan with a sophisticated moral :
Know that Love is a careless child,
And forgets promise past:
He is blind, he is deaf when he list,
And in faith never fast.
His desire is a dureless content
And a trustless joy;
He is won with a world of despair
And is lost with a toy.
Ballads 47
But true love is a durable fire
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.
You see how far we are getting from the simplicity of
the first stanzas? But worse, far worse, is to come.
Bishop Percy found this version in his folio: but a
"corrected" copy was forwarded to him by his friend
Mr. Shenstone. Now Shenstone was by no means a
negligible poet, in the eighteenth century manner: but
tripping anapaests were too vulgar for him and thus
he emended :
"As ye came from the holy land
Of blessed Walsingham,
0 met you not with my true love
As by the way ye came?"
"How shall I know your true love
That have met many a one.
As I came from the holy land
That have both come and gone?" . . .
and so on, with a deadening fist on each stanza, until
we come to this superlative ending:
But true love is a lasting fire,
Which viewless vestals tend.
That burns for ever in the soule,
And knowes not change nor end.
''Viewless Vestals"!
VII
Now let me say, before concluding, that greatly as I
adore these old ballads I do so not idolatrously. They
are genuine poetry, peculiar poetry, sincere poetry; but
48 Studies in Literature
they will not compare with the high music of Spenser's
Epithalamion or of Milton's Lycidas or of Keats' Night-
ingale. In truth any comparison of the ballads with
these would be unfair as any comparison between
children and grown folk. They appealed in their day
to something young in the national mind. They have
all the winning grace of innocence : but they cannot scale
the great poetical heights any more than mere innocence
can scale the great spiritual heights. Tears and fasting
and bread eaten in sorrow go to that achievement : and
who has not known and tried them and been tried by
them
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers !
I but contend today that to complain of the fifteenth
century as unpoetical, turning your ear aside from this
outpouring of spring numbers to listen to the bagpipe
drone of a Lydgate or a Hoccleve, is to sin like — a
handbook.
VIII
I end with a ballad — The Old Cloak — which, as we
are, with all our shortcomings, a humorous nation, de-
served a long line of children, but in fact had few or
none. I cannot think why. Jt runs in antiphon like
the Nut Brown Maid, and is a. supposed dialogue between
a good man and his wife :
This winter's weather it waxeth cold,
And frost it freezeth on every hill.
And Boreas blows his blast so bold
That all our cattle are like to spill.
Bell, my wife, she loves no strife;
She said unto me quietlye,
"Rise up, and save cow Crumbock's life!
Man, put thine old cloak about thee!"
Ballads 49
He. 0 Bell my wife, why dost thou flyte?
Thou kens my cloak is very thin:
It is so bare and over worn,
A cricke thereon cannot renn.
Then I'll no longer borrow nor lend;
For once I'll new apparell'd be;
To-morrow I'll to town and spend;
For I'll have a new cloak about me.
She. Cow Cnimbock is a very good cow:
She has been always true to the pail;
She has help'd us to butter and cheese, I trow,
And other things she will not fail.
I would be loth to see her pine.
Good husband, counsel take of me:
It is not for us to go so fine —
Man, take thine old cloak about thee!
He. My cloak it was a very good cloak,
It hath been always true to the wear;
But now it is not worth a groat:
I have had it four and forty year'.
Sometime it was of cloth in grain :
'Tis now but a sigh clout, as you may see:
It will neither hold out wind nor rain ;
And I'll have a new cloak about me.
She. It is four and forty years ago
Since the one of us the other did ken ;
And we have had, betwixt us two,
Of children either nine or ten :
We have brought them up to women and men:
In the fear of God I trow they be :
And why wilt thou thyself misken ?
Man, take thine old cloak about thee!
50 Studies in Literature
He. 0 Bell my wife, why dost thou flyte?
Now is now, and then was then:
Seek now all the world throughout,
Thou kens not clowns from gentlemen:
They are clad in black, green, yellow and blue,
So far above their own degree.
Once in my life I'll take a view;
For I'll have a new cloak about me.
She. King Stephen was a worthy peer;
His breeches cost him but a crown;
He held them sixpence all too dear,
Therefore he called the tailor "lown."
He was a king and wore the crown,
And thou'se but of a low degree:
It's pride that puts this country down:
Man, take thy old cloak about thee!
He. Bell my wife, she loves not strife.
Yet she will lead me, if she can:
And to maintain an easy life
I oft must yield, though I'm good-man.
It's not for a man with a woman to threap,
Unless he first give o'er the plea:
As we began, so will we keep,
And I'll take my old cloak about me.
THE HORATIAN MODEL IN
ENGLISH VERSE
DEFORE discussing — as I am engaged to do this
-^ morning — the Horatian model in EngHsh verse,
give me leave, Gentlemen, to delimit the ground.
I am not going to discuss the many attempts to trans-
late Horace — to turn him straight into English verse —
with their various degrees of ill-success. They are so
many, so various, as to raise one's moral estimate of
Man — improhus homo, indomitable still — against all
experience and the advice of his friends — * 'still clutching
the inviolable shade!" The talents of the late Mr.
Gladstone were multifarious and large indeed in their
ambit ; yet we may agree that the Odes of Horace were
not haunts meet for him :
Piscium et summa genus haesit ulmo . . .
as he translated
The elm-tree top to fishy kind
Gave harbour . . .
Or we might paraphrase — in words addressed to another
Father William :
51
52 Studies in Literature
And yet you incessantly stand on your Head :
Do you think, at your age, it is right?
My own judgment would place Conington first among
competitors, with Sir Theodore Martin second (surpass-
ing him„ in occasional brilliance but falling some way
behind on the long run), De Vere third. But these pre-
ferences are idle; since, in the ordinary sense, Horace
defies translation.
Secondly I shall ask your leave, this morning, to
plant our Deus Terminus yet nearer — on this side of the
Satires and Epistles. I do not deny that this fences off
a deal of the genuine Horace, or pretend that we can
either summarise or appreciate the total Horace if we
leave the Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica out of account.
But I shall take little more than a glance at them
because his magic secret does not hide anywhere in
these, and as a fact their style, in all its essentials, has
been caught and transferred into modern literature —
certainly into French and English — by a number of
writers. I am not talking of satire as we commonly
understand it today. When we think of satire we
think of Juvenal and of Swift, of Pope, of Churchill,
who derive from Juvenal — not from Horace, save but
occasionally and then at a remove. Satire has come to
connote something of savagery, of castigation : and I am
glad to be quit of it this morning because (to be frank)
it is a form of art that appeals to me very faintly, especi-
ally in warm weather — and this not merely because bad
temper is troublesome, but for the reason that anger —
valuable, indeed, now and then — is a passion of which it
behoves all men to be economical. To be indignant is
better than to be cynical: to rage is manlier than to
sneer. Yet to be constitutionally an angry man — to
Horatian Model in English Verse 53
commence satirist and set up in business as a profession-
ally angry man — has always seemed to me, humanly
speaking (and therefore artistically), more than a trifle
absurd. Few will deny Juvenal's force: yet after all
as we open a volume entitled Sixteen Satires of Juvenal,
what are we promised but this — "Go to! I, Decimus
Junius Juvenalis, propose to lose my temper on sixteen
several occasions"? In fact, when we have been
scolded through eleven or so of these efforts, even such
a genius as his is left laboriously flogging a dead horse ;
reduced to vituperating some obscure Egyptians for an
alleged indulgence in cannibalism. Say, now, that you
pick up tomorrow's newspaper and read that a mission-
ary has been eaten in the Friendly Islands. You will
pay his exit the tribute of a sigh : but the distance, and
anthropology, will soften the blow. You will not fly
into a passion. At the most you will write to The Times
calling for a punitive visit by one of His Majesty's ships.
More likely you will reckon your debt of humanity
discharged by ingeminating, after Sir Isaac Newton,
"0 Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest what thou
hast devoured ! "
II
But the Satires of Horace were not satires in this
sense at all: no more satires than this week's Punch
is the London Charivari. Satura literally translated,
is a "hotch potch" : in letters it becomes (as we should
say) a ''miscellany," a familiar discourse upon this,
that and the other. With a man of Horace's tempera-
ment such sermones could not miss to be urbane,
gossipy, sententious a little, wise a great deal, smooth
in address, pointed in wit ; and I dare to say that these
54
Studies in Literature
qualities have been achieved by his English and French
descendants. To prove that the trick can be done even
in a straight. translation, let me quote you an example
from Conington's version of Epistle 2, Book li. —
Luculli miles, etc. :
A soldier of Lucullus's, they say,
Worn out at night by marching all the day,
Lay down to sleep, and, while at ease he snored,
Lost to a farthing all his little hoard.
This woke the wolf in him ; — 'tis strange how keen
The teeth will grow with but the tongue between; —
Mad with the foe and with himself, off-hand
He stormed a treasure-city, wall'd and manned,
Destroys the garrison, becomes renowned,
Gets decorations and two hundred pound.
Soon after this the general had in view
To take some fortress — where, I never knew;
He singles out our friend, and makes a speech
That e'en might drive a coward to the breach:
"Go, my fine fellow! go where valour calls!
There's fame and money too inside those walls."
"I'm not your man," returned the rustic wit:
"He makes a hero who has lost his kit. "
At Rome I had my schooling, and was taught
Achilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought;
At classic Athens, where I went erelong,
I learnt to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong,
And search for truth, if so she might be seen
In academic groves of blissful green;
But soon the stress of civil strife removed
My adolescence from the scenes it loved.
And ranged me with a force that could not stand
Before the might of Caesar's conquering hand.
Then when Philippi turned me all adrift
A poor plucked fledgling, for myself to shift,
Horatian Model in English Verse 55
Bereft of property, impaired of purse,
Sheer penury drove me into scribbling verse :
But now, when times are altered, having got
Enough, thank Heaven, at least to boil my pot,
I were the veriest madman if I chose
To write a poem rather than to doze.
Now I would repeat here an observation of New-
man's which I have quoted before to you, that to invent
a style is in itself a triumph of genius — ' * It is like cross-
ing a country before roads are made between place and
place" and the author who does this deserves to be a
classic both because of what he does and because he can
do it. But this originality being granted in the Horace
of the Satires and Epistles, I do think that our English
translator has caught the trick of the Latin, or very
nearly. But he derives it, of course, through countless
English imitators of Horace who repeat the model at
short intervals, mile after mile, for two centuries and
more. Here, for example is Bishop Hall (i 574-1 656) :
Late travelling along in London way.
We met — as seem'd by his disguised array —
A lusty courtier, whose curled head
With abron locks was fairly furnished.
I him saluted in our la vis wise;
He answers my untimely courtesies.
His bonnet vail'd, or ever he could think,
The unruly wind blows off his periwinke.
He 'lights, and runs, and quickly hath him sped
To overtake his overrunning head.
Here is the note in Cleveland (1613-1658) :
Lord ! what a goodly thing is want of shirts !
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Studies in Literature
Here in Oldham (1653-1683) :
Some think themselves exalted to the Sky
If they light in some noble Family:
Diet, an Horse, and thirty Pounds a Year,
Besides th' Advantage of his Lordship's ear.
Here it is in Dry den :
Shimei, whose youth did early promise bring
Of zeal to God and hatred to his King,
Did wisely from expensive sins refrain.
And never broke the Sabbath, but for gain.
Here in Pope (of Dr. Bentley) :
Before them march 'd that awful Aristarch:
Plough'd was his front with many a deep remark.
His hat, which never vail'd to human pride,
Walker with reverence took, and laid aside.
Still mark it in Goldsmith:
In arguing, too, the Parson own'd his skill.
For e'en though vanquish'd, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thund'ring sound
Amazed the gazing rustics all around.
And still they gaz'd, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew . . .
in Cowper:
O barb'rous! wouldst thou with a Gothic hand
Pull down the schools? What! all the schools i' th' land?
Or throw them up to liv'ry nags and grooms.
Or turn them into shops and auction rooms ? . . .
even in Crabbe :
Horatian Model in English Verse 57
We had a sprightly nymph. In every town
Are some such sprights, who wander up and down.
She had her useful arts, and could contrive
In time's despite, to stay at twenty-five; —
"Here will I rest: move on, thou lying year,.
This is my age, and I will rest me here. "
III
But the truly magical secret of Horace lies nowhere
in his Satires and Epistles. It lies in his Odes. There
haunts that witchery of style which, the moment you
lose grasp of it, is dissipated into thin air and eludes your
concentrated pursuit — so that, like any booby school-
boy, you have your hands for certain over the butterfly,
and, opening them ever so cautiously, find it gone.
You know the man's story (he has told much of it in
the lines of which I have read Conington's paraphrase)
— born of parentage humble enough, but with gentle
instincts; a University man, of Athens and (as Mr.
Verdant Green said) proud of the title — a brief spell of
military campaigning, which he did not pretend to
enjoy, and enjoyed all the less because his was the losing
side — then Rome again with a brief experience of what
in Rome corresponded to Grub Street — then a post in
the Quaestor's office — put it at a Treasury Clerkship —
then Maecenas, patronage, success, with a small Sabine
farm to which he could retreat whenever his foot-sole
tired of pavement — a small country house, frugal but
with good wine in the cellar, and silver, well-rubbed, on
the table:
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A home with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore.
58
Studies in Literature
or their equivalents. Horace enjoyed these rural com-
forts the better that they were tinged with a delicate
nostalgia for the Town. He would have said with
Laurence Oliphant
Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly.
You know the man too. If you know him well, he is
not a mere "man-about-town" but so commonsensical
at that as to seem a kind of glorified ''man-in-the-
street, " with a touch of Browning's poet, in How it
strikes a Contemporary:
I only knew one poet in my life ...
He took such cognizance of men and things . . .
Yet stared at nobody, — you stared at him,
And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know you and expect as much . . .
an Epicurean, yet a patriot with firm views about
patriotism; a middle-aged man who had ''lived" (as we
say) and made no secret about it, yet by luck or good
management had so nursed his pleasures as to keep
a steady supply for the advance of age, calling in
htmiour and earned wisdom to amuse when appetite
failed.
You know, too, what kind of poetry the man wrote,
and have had his characteristics labelled for you a score
of times — its clarity, its nicety, its felicity of phrase, its
instinct for the appropriate, its delicate blend of the
scholar and the gentleman. I suppose one must add
"its faultless taste " since the one trick of Horace which
offends me has somehow passed for permissible from
his day to ours and apparently still delights the audi-
Horatian Model in English Verse 59
ences of the late Sir William Schwenck Gilbert — I mean
the trick of gibing at a woman because she is growing
old and losing her beauty ("Little Butter-cup,"
*' There will be too much of me in the coming by-and-
by" and the like), a form of merriment which I shall
continue to regard as inhumane until Death reconciles
me with the majority and may be (but I wonder) with
enlightenment.
Critics there are, I find, who deny the title of "poet,' ' or
at any rate of ' ' great poet, ' ' to Horace, because they miss
in him certain qualities — moral earnestness, axouBatoTYjc;,
splendour of diction, intensity of imagination, and
other abstract virtues, with all of which, though neces-
sary to their notion of a poet, Horace rather deliberately
had nothing to do. I point to one or two of the odes,
say the grand Cleopatra towards the end of Book i, or
the yet more celebrated Regulus in Book in, and
observe that if our critics' notion of poetry do not
include these, why then it had better be enlarged to
make room for them : and further that I do not care
one obol (as neither would he — yet he knew — exegi
monumentum) what is meant by "great poet" or even
**poet" in the abstract, when here you have a man
whose verses have such a diuturnity of charm that, as
has been said, "Men so wide apart in temperament
and spirit as Newman and Gibbon, Bossuet and Vol-
taire, Pope and Wordsworth, Thackeray and Glad-
stone, Rabelais and Charles Lamb, seem all to have
felt in Horace a like attraction and to have made of him
an intimate friend. " And I solemnly subscribe to the
sentence that follows. "The magnetic attraction to
which such names as these collectively testify is a
phenomenon of sufficient rarity to invite some attempt
to explain it. "
6o
Studies in Literature
IV
Whatever the secret be, our English poets have been
chasing it these four hundred years. Start, if you will,
with Sir Thomas Wyatt's Vixi puellis:
They flee from me that some time did me seek,
With naked foot stalking within my chamber . . .
Take Campion's Integer Vitae:
The man of life upright,
Whose guiltless heart is free
From all dishonest deeds.
Or thought of vanity . . .
Take Wotton in a like strain :
How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill.
Or, varying the strain, take Peele's Farewell to Arms:
His golden locks Time hath to silver turn'd . . .
His helmet now shall make a hive for bees.
Or Ben Jonson's
Still to be neat, still to be drest,
As you were going to a feast.
Take Herrick's
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Or Randolph's Ode to Master Anthony Stafford, to hasten
him into the country.
Horatian Model in English Verse 6i
Or — to leave quoting by fragments — let me read
this one lyric of Campion's, in two stanzas:
Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours,
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o'erflow with wine;
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love,
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep's leaden spells remove.
This time doth well dispense
With lovers' long discourse;
Much speech hath some defence,
Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well;
Some measures comely tread.
Some knotted riddles tell.
Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys.
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,
They shorten tedious nights.
The second stanza loses grip for a while ; but the whole
is right Horace.
V
But let us come to more learned imitation — learned,
that is to say in the matter of technique. It has been
pointed out — first I believe by our present Poet Laure-
I.
62 Studies in Literature
ate — that Milton in his sonnets was deliberately-
adapting the sonnet-form to the Horatian ode; and the
suggestion had only to be made, to convince.
Lawrence, of vertuous Father vertuous Son,
Now that the Fields are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day ; what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth ; and clothe in fresh attire
The Lily and Rose, that neither sow'd nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice.
Of Attick taste, with Wine, whence we may rise
To hear the Lute well toucht, or artful voice
Warble immortal Notes and Tuscan Ayre?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.
Consider that, or the sonnet to Cromwell, or that to
Cyriack Skinner:
To day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench
In mirth, that after no repenting draws;
Let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause.
And what the Swede intend, and what the French.
To measure life, learn thou betimes, and know
Toward solid good what leads the nearest way;
For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains.
And disapproves that care, thou wise in show.
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.
I shall discuss the technique later: but who can read
that without exclaiming Aut Flaccus aut nullus? Now I
proceed to point out that just when Milton was endeav-
ouring to break up the old Petrarchan sonnet, and
Horatian Model in English Verse 63
refit it to the Horatian ode, he was Cromwell's Latin
Secretary and, for comrade in the Secretaryship, he had
another poet, Andrew Marvell, who was at the same
time working upon the Horatian model though in a
different way: and I have sometimes wondered what
Cromwell would have said had he happened in and
caught his two secretaries at it, one at either end of the
table. Now Andrew Marvell's Garden and Coy Mis-
tress are Horatian enough, as are his later satires written
under Charles H. But his Horatian Ode upon Crom-
welVs Return from Ireland has been praised as the most
Horatian thing not written by Horace. Therefore I
pause upon it, and will quote its two best-known
stanzas, those upon Charles I at his execution:
He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try;
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.
What falls short, here, of Horace's
scilicet invidens
privata deduci superbo
non himiilis mulier triumpho,
or of the conclusion of the great Regulus ode, where
the noble Roman, simply obedient to his honour, parts
the anguished crowd that would have stayed him at any
price, and goes back to certain death by torture, cheer-
ful as though bound on a week-end release from busi-
ness?
64 Studies in Literature
Tendens Venafranos in agros
Aut Lacedaemoniiim Tarentum.
I should consent — and no two words about it — with the
general opinion that this ''falling close" is one of the
noblest on which ever poem concluded, were it not that
a critic whose judgment as a rule I respect — Dr. Tyrrell
of Dublin' — has twice at least and recently derided it
for sheer bathos. I hardly know where to begin with
such a pronouncement. Yet if Dr. Tyrrell be somehow
mixing up Venafrum or Tarentum with some reminisc-
ences of cheap week-end tickets, I would remind him
that Venafrum was a home of Samnite warriors (who
were among the best), while the verse itself reminds him
of Tarentum 's origin; and the noble associations of both
may not improbably have crossed Horace's mind as it
usually crosses his reader's. A great deal depends in
poetry on the dignity thus associated with a name : the
'busman's call ** Penny all the way — Shepherd's Bush
to Marble Arch!" would (as Dr. Tyrrell will allow) be
enhanced in allurement if beneath that Arch sat Jove,
father of gods and men, if that bush sheltered pastoral
Apollo with the flock of Admetus. But take the verse
alone, in its own beauty. Is it possible that Dr. Tyrrell's
ear has missed to hear the lovely tolling vowels of * ' Vena-
franos in agros " or missed the note the even more lovely
cadences of vowels on which it chimes a close — "Aut
hacedaemonium Tarentwm"?
Gentlemen, listen to this — though you listen to no-
thing else this morning. You would write strongly and
melodiously, so that out of the strong should come forth
sweetness. Well, as the strength of style rests on the
verb — verbum, the word; as your noun is but a name
» Now valde defiendus.
Horatian Model in English Verse 65
and your adjective but an adjunct to a name, while
along your verb runs the nerve of life; so, if you would
write melodiously, through your vowels must the melody
run. What are the consonants, all of them ? Why, as
their name implies, they are assistant sounds, naught
by themselves. Some of them are mute, and known as
"mutes." With others you can make queer abortive
noises. But take any phrase, of verse or prose, re-
nowned for beauty :
O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem . . .
Tuba mirum spargens sonum . . .
In la sua volontade h nostra pace . . .
Open the temple gates unto my love.
Open them wide that she may enter in ! . . .
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. . . .
Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud-uplifted Angel trumpets blow. . . .
Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name : worship
the Lord in the beauty of holiness.
The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God of
glory thundereth : the Lord is upon many waters. . . .
I say that after allowing all you can for the beautiful
assistance of consonants you must recognise that the
vowels carry the main music.
It amazes me therefore to find Stevenson — himself
a melodious writer — in an Essay On Some Technical
Elements of Style playing about with these secondary
letters P, V, H, and the rest, while almost totally
neglecting the great vowels, and that though he had
66
Studies in Literature
this very Regulus ode in his thoughts at the time, for he
quotes it with special approval. Yet what is approval
worth when he talks of "these thundering verses"?
What ?— ' ' thundering ' ' ?—
Aut Lacedaemoniiun Tarentum.
No : I will swear, not thundering ; or if thundering, but
as a storm rolling away southward beyond distant hills
and muted into calm.
Now in Marvell's stanza
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed . . .
with its shrill, spitting, "spite" — the sharp i and s con-
centrating on the labial p — lowered at once and dupli-
cated as by echo in the thinner i and softer sibilant v
(sp^'te — to vind) — followed by the quiet
But bowed his comely head
Down . . .
(mark the full o's)
Down, as upon a bed . . .
in Marvell's stanza we do in sense and sound get
the Horatian falling close almost perfectly suggested.
Yes: but not quite perfectly, I think. For why? Be-
cause the ear is all the while attending for the rhyme —
"head," "bed." That is the nuisance with rhyme:
it can hardly help suggesting the epigram, the clinch,
the verse "brought off" with a little note of triumph.
In rhyme you cannot quite "cease upon the midnight
I
Horatian Model in English Verse 67
with no pain. " Your ear expects the correspondent,
and *'you are not quite happy until you get it." Bear-
ing this in mind, will you turn to a sonnet of Milton,
whose sonnets (as everyone knows) are peculiarly con-
structed? Bearing this in mind, and that Milton was
labouring to make the English sonnet a vehicle for the
Horatian ode, you see, in a flash, two things :
(i) You see why Milton rejected the Shakespearean
form, with its three quatrains and rhymed distich com-
ing at the end as a clou of the whole: e.g.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
For this epigrammatic clou^ of all things, Milton wished
to avoid.
(2) You see why Milton, wisely preferring the Petrar-
chan form, yet made the curious innovation of running
octave and sestet together into a continuous strain. He
wanted to rid it of all clinches, to ease the ear of ex-
pectancy, to let the rhymes come unobtrusively — as if
they just happened. That is why he cut, so to speak,
through the cross-trench and let the verse run, on the
Horatian model, Hke a brook.
VI
Just here, Gentlemen, I find myself on the verge of
preaching heresy, and shall break off for a minute or so
to hazard some other reasons why our poets, though
pursuing it by the pack, have never captured the whole
of Horace's secret. You will find the Restoration men
— Etherege, Dorset, Sedley and others in full chase.
But all these men missed — as did Prior and his followers
in the next age — the serious side of Horace; or, more
68 Studies in Literature
likely perhaps, it did not interest them. Yet it is just
his real concern in high affairs of state that gives Horace
his Roman gravitas, a sense of which weights our under-
standing of the man even while he is telling of his ban-
quets or his lights-of-love.
The merchant, to secure his treasure,
Conveys it in a borrowed name:
Euphelia serves to grace my measure,
But Chloe is my real flame.
This trifling is all very well: but, to arrive at Horace,
you must ballast your light boat with such things as
Delicta majorum immeritus lues. . . .
Or.
Divis orte bonis, op time Romulae
Custos gentis. . . .
You may demur: but I shall be ready, at some future
occasion, to defend my firm belief that of all our poets
the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have
become our English Horace, was William Cowper. He
had the wit, with the underlying moral seriousness.
You will find almost everywhere in his poetry hints of
the Horatian touch. Moreover he had originality along
with the Horatian sense of the appropriate. But dark-
ness came down on him and he was lost. I am sure, at
any rate, that if any one of you wish to rival Horace,
he must not be afraid of serious politics, of saying— as
his conviction moves him :
Asquith, a name to resound for ages ! , . .
Or,
Asquith, thou most unhappy man of men ! . ]. .
Horatian Model in English Verse 69
Or, when the assault was (or was not) intended upon
the province of Ulster,
Or,
Carson, our chief of men, who thro' a cloud
Not of war only, but detractions rude. . . .
Carson, bound Jephthah to thy Covenant . . . .
To employ a classical phrase, I will not presume to
dictate.
VII
Time presses, and we need not pursue this part of
our enquiry to its end, because the moral of it — that
the style is the man himself — may be easily applied.
Praed has Horatian touches, but he again is light, some-
times light to flimsiness — levitas cum levitate. Landor
has all the classical sense of form, and his best I dare
almost aver to be as good as Horace :
Tanagra ! think not I forget
Thy beautifully storied streets !
But he is heir rather to the Greek anthologists than to
Augustan Rome. In our own day Mr. Austin Dobson
has chiselled out exquisite lyrics in the Horatian mode :
but one feels that the poet's gaze all the while is retro-
spective, wistful of the past, a trifle distrait about cur-
rent affairs; that its quiz is of a period, of a bygone age;
that it follows the fair Gunnings along the Mall :
The ladies of St. James's
Go swinging to the play . . .
in sedan chairs; whereas it is a part again of Horace's
secret to be for all time, just because he belonged to his
70 Studies in Literature
age and — curiously interested in it, perceiving it to be
full of meaning and worth any man's interest — caught,
fixed, the flying hour.
I revert, then, to what is more important. We can
compass the Horatian manner; we can compass the
Horatian phrase. The Horatian phrase is everywhere
in our best literature — even in the Book of Common
Prayer. See how it leaps out in the Te Deum, "When
thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death. ^' That is
right Horace. But what of his metrical secret ? If you
examine Horace's work — what he did (which I shall ever
preach to you as the first business of criticism) — one
thing, quite ludicrously missed by a good half of his
translators and imitators, leaps forthwith to the eye.
He chose the most tantalisingly difficult foreign metres
and with consummate skill tamed them to the Latin tongue.
Once grasp this — once grasp that the secret of the odes
cannot at any rate be dissociated from their metrical
cunning — once perceive that in an Alcaic, major Sap-
phic, fourth Asclepiad, fifth Archilochian, Horace is
weaving his graceful way through measures intricate
as any minuet, gavotte, saraband — and you will start
by laughing out of court all easy renderings (say) in
flat-footed octosyllables such as Gladstone's
What if our ancient love awoke
And bound us with its golden yoke?
If auburn Chloe I resign,
And Lydia once again be mine.
[They stopped the coach and all got out
And in the street they walked about :
But when the rain began to rain
In haste they all got in again.]
Horatian Model in English Verse 71
In the common anapaestic measure I know of but one
happy experiment, and that is Thackeray's gay Httle
rendering of Persicos odi:
But a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy,
I prithee get ready at three;
Have it smoking, and tender and juicy,
And what better meat can there be?
But now listen to this, by Sir Theodore Martin :
I myself, wooed by one that was truly a jewel,
In thraldom was held, which I cheerfully bore
By that vulgar thing Myrtale, tho' she was cruel —
But I reckon Sir Theodore Martin was more.
[The last line is conjectural.]
Shall we turn to such pretty measures as Tennyson
employed in The Daisy and the Invitation to F. D.
Maurice (noting by the way their delicate metrical
differences, especially in the last line of the stanza : the
one
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine,
the other
Making the little one leap for joy) ?
For a sample:
You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine.
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous under a roof of pine.
That is better: and good, too, is our present laureate's
Invitation to the Country.
72 Studies in Literature
And country life I praise,
And lead, because I find
The philosophic mind
Can take no middle ways;
She will not leave her love
To mix with men, her art
Is all to strive above
The crowd, or stand apart.
VIII
But it is time to return on my steps and state, very
briefly, my heresy; a heresy (you will say) killed long
ago in Elizabethan times, when Spenser and Gabriel
Harvey, Sidney, Campion and Daniel disputed the
question of rhyme v. no-rhyme, and the honours happily
rested with the rh3nTiers. Yes, most happily ; and yet —
that the narrow gauge system on our railways has killed
the broad gauge does not prove to every mind that the
narrow gauge is the better. And moreover rhyme did
not kill no-rhyme. On the contrary, were this demand
suddenly and dreadfully sprung upon you, ''Of rhyme
and no-rhyme in English Poetry you must today sur-
render one or the other — ^which shall it be?" you
would find it a desperate choice. Could you abandon
Paradise Lost with Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear — all the great
Elizabethan drama?
Well, as everybody knows, Daniel had the better in
the dialectic, and, we have to own, the better cause. At
all events we have plenty of reason to congratulate our-
selves that Campion's arguments were not convincing.
But as a poet Campion none the less was a better man
than Daniel and as it were casually, by an experiment,
just by "taking and doing the thing," as we say, he had
I
Horatian Model in English Verse 73
really proved this much of his case — that, though we
cannot afford to lose rhyme, there is plenty of room for
the unrhymed lyric too. Listen to this :
Rose cheek'd Laura, come;
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.
Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framed :
Heaven is music, and thy beauty's
Birth is heavenly.
These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord ;
But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renew'd by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
-selves eternal.
Campion never pretended that classical metres could be
exactly transferred to our English use : nay he expressly
denied it and was at pains to lay down lines on which
they can be adapted. In this he was undoubtedly right.
Attempts have been made e.g. to write pure Sapphics in
English, the most successful being one by Doctor Watts
who (though some of you may remember him as the
author of "Let dogs delight To bark and bite") was a
considerable poet, and wrote excellent Sapphics on the
unpromising subject (by which I mean, unpromising
for Sapphics) of the Day of Judgment :
74 Studies in Literature
When the fierce North-wind with his airy forces
Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury;
And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes
Rushing amain down.
Such shall the noise be, and the wild disorder
(If things eternal may be like these earthly),
Such the dire terror when the great Archangel
Shakes the creation;
Tears the strong pillars of the vault of Heaven,
Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes,
Sees the graves open, and the bones arising,
Flames all about them.
He ends :
0 may I sit there when He comes triumphant,
Dooming the nations ! then ascend to glory,
While our Hosannas all along the passage
Shout the Redeemer.
This, in the polite language of its own generation, is
monstrous fine: but I once spent time and pains on
studying the English Sapphic and convinced myself
that our language cannot be constrained to it naturally
or without a necessary loss beyond all likely gain.
Nevertheless I sometimes wonder that Milton — no
lover of rh3niie, as his preface to Paradise Lost tells you
— having gone some way to efface the impression of
rhyme in his Horatian sonnets, did not experiment
farther and try working on the Horatian model without
it.
That is my heresy. If any one in this room feels
that he has at all the Horatian genius (I use the word in
Horatian Model in English Verse 75
its Latin sense, not its modern) I would commend to
him the experiment of rendering it in deHcate metres
divorced from rhyme, being convinced that Horace's
secret, though it may never be captured in that way,
will be captured in no other. Then if he ask, * ' But have
you any one concrete example to encourage me?" I
answer, "Yes, one: and it is Collins's Ode to Evening.
There, if anywhere in English poetry, if he seek, he
will find the secret of Horace's "falling close":
Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow' d pile.
Or upland fallows grey
Reflect its last cool gleam.
Or if chill blustering winds, or driving rain,
Prevent my willing feet, be mine the hut
That from the mountain's side
Views wilds and swelling floods,
And hamlets brown, and dim-discover 'd spires,
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
■' Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil.
You will not accept the suggestion, but I commend it
to your thoughts ; and so, for today, conclude.
ON THE TERMS "CLASSICAL"
AND "ROMANTIC
9J
I PROPOSE to say a few words upon two terms —
"Classical" and ''Romantic" — with which your
handbooks to English Literature have doubtless by
this time made you familiar, though you will not find
them frequently mentioned in the masterpieces of which
those handbooks are supposed to treat.
They are adjectives, epithets, assigning to this and
that work of art either this or that of two qualities
which (I shall not be wrong in saying) these handbooks
suggest to you as opposed to one another, if not mu-
tually exclusive. Further, I shall not be much amiss,
perhaps, in suggesting that you have no very sharply
defined idea of how exactly, or exactly why, or exactly
how far, these qualities ''classical" and "romantic"
stand opposed one to another, or of how far exactly
they exclude one another. You can say of this paper
that it is white, of the print typed upon it that it is black:
your sense accurately distinguishes and you can indicate
with finger or pencil precisely where black impinges on
white.
But we cannot draw any such line between "clas-
sical" and "romantic" work; since, to begin with, the
difference between them is notional and vague (even if
76
'^Classicar' and ''Romantic*' fj
we admit a true difference, which at this point I do not).
You have probably not defined the difference, even to
yourselves. You have (I dare to assert) a positive
opinion that Pope is ''classical" and Blake ''romantic, "
as you have (I dare to suggest) a notion that it means
something like the difference between St. Paul's Cathe-
dral and Westminster Abbey. We may get to some-
thing a little more definite than that before we have
done, this morning. But for the moment maybe I do
few of you a grave injustice in assuming that you are
more confident of "knowing what you mean" by the
epithets "classical" and "romantic*' than of your ability
to determinate their difference in words: and that if
suddenly presented with some line or passage of litera-
ture, atimittedly beautiful, and halted with the demand
"Is this classical? or is it romantic?" you might con-
ceivably find yourself yet more diffident. Say, for
example, you were thus held up to stand and deliver
yourself upon Hamlet's dying speech to Horatio:
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story . . .
or upon this from Lycidas:
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the Moon,
We drove a-field . . .
or upon the last words of Beatrice Cenci:
Give yourself no unnecessary pain,
My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie
My girdle for me, and bind up this hair
78 Studies in Literature
In any simple knot; ay, that does well.
And yours I see is coming down. How often
Have we done this for one another; now
We shall not do it any more. My Lord,
We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well ....
I say that I may do you no grave injustice in supposing
that, confronted with those famous passages and having
it suddenly demanded of you, "Is this classical? or
romantic ? — Under which king, Besonian ? speak, or die ! '*
— you would hesitate, might be inclined to temporise,
might even save your life by admitting that, all things
considered, there was a little bit of both about them.
Well, that is a useful admission ! It concedes that the
two epithets describe things which may be contraries,
but are at any rate not contradictories, are not mutually
exclusive, may meet in the same work, may blend in a
line or phrase even, and so as to be hard to distinguish.
II
But let us go a little further. These epithets —
"romantic" and "classical" — vague and indeterminate
as we have found their frontiers to be, are still epithets,
adjectives by which we qualify real things. We say,
for example, of The Faerie Queene, that it is "romantic,"
of Samson Agonistes that it is "classical" and, The
Faerie Queene and Samson Agonistes being things, good
nouns concrete and substantive, poems actually printed
in ink upon paper, we can bring our epithets to the test.
They are not epithets like "blue" or "wine-dark" (of
the sea), like "acid" (of the taste of lemon), like "deaf-
ening" (of the explosion of a shell), like "penetrating"
(of the effect of a bullet) . They are not epithets of sense,
but of concept. They belong to the realm of opinion.
*' Classical" and '^Romantic*' 79
If you say of a bullet that it is penetrating, you appeal
to the evidence of sense, and the description cannot be
denied. If you say of the German behaviour in Belgium
that it has been beastly, you appeal to opinion: and a
German will say it has been humane, not godlike.
Still your epithet — ='* romantic" or "classical" — is,
however indeterminate, referable to a real thing, and
can be corrected by it.
But when we go a step further yet, and convert our
epithets of opinion — ''classical," ''romantic" — into ab-
stract nouns — ' ' classicism, " " romanticism ' ' — I would
point out to you with all the solemnity at my com-
mand that we are at once hopelessly lost : lost, because
we have advanced a vague concept to the pretence
of being a thing; hopelessly lost, because we have re-
moved our concept out of range of the thing; which
is not only what matters, but the one and single test
of our secondary notions. "The play's the thing.'"
Hamlet, Lycidas or The Cenci is the thing. Shakespeare,
Milton, Shelley did not write "classicism" or "roman-
ticism. " They wrote Hamlet, Lycidas, The Cenci.
Ill
Gentlemen, I would I could persuade you to remem-
ber that you are English, and to go always for the thing,
casting out of your vocabulary all such words as
"tendencies," "influences," "revivals," "revolts."
"Tendencies" did not write The Canterbury Tales;
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote them. "Influences" did not
make The Faerie Queene; Edmund Spenser made it : as
a man called Ben Jonson wrote The Alchemist, a man
called Sheridan wrote The Rivals, a man called Meredith
wrote The Egoist.
8o Studies in Literature
Now it is the weakness of Germans in criticism that,
not having a Hterature of their own to rank with the
great, but being endowed as a race with an unusual tal-
ent for philosophising, they habitually think and talk of
a literary masterpiece — which is a work of art achieved
in the way of practice — as though it were a product,
or at any rate a by-product, of philosophy, producible
by the methods of philosophy. And the reason, I be-
lieve, why the Germans have never had, nor are likely
to have, a literature comparable with the best does not
lie in the uncouthness of their language. Our English
tongue was uncouth enough until, in their varied ways
Chaucer and Wyat and Spenser; the early translators
and Tindale; Sidney, Hooker; Milton, Waller and
Dryden; Browne and Clarendon and Berkeley; Pope,
Addison, Swift, Gibbon, Johnson (to go no further)
practised and polished it. But these men, and specially,
of course, the earlier ones, saw the difficulty of their task
as a condition of overcoming it. You can scarcely
open a preface of the old translators, or of an early
collection of Songs and Sonnets, but your eye falls on
some passage of pathetic apology for our unmusical and
barbarous tongue, in which nevertheless the poor fellow
affirms that he has done his best
To find out what you cannot do.
And then — to go and do it. . . .
That was the way of the men who made English Litera-
ture exquisite.
Now the Germans would seem never, or rarely, to
have felt that humility of mind before the great master-
pieces, that prostration in worship, that questioning
and almost hopeless self-distrust, out of which, by
'^Classicar' and ''Romantic'' 8i
some divine desire of emulation yet persistent in him,
the artist is raised to win the crown. Yes, I do assure
you, Gentlemen, that George Herbert's lovehest lyric,
though it speak of holier things, may be applied in par-
able, and scarcely with exaggeration, to the attitude of
the true artist before his art. Let me remind you of
it:
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in.
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he. "
"I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee. "
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
' ' Who made the eyes but I ? "
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve. "
"And know you not, " says Love, "Who bore the blame? "
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down, " says Love, "and taste my meat. "
So I did sit and eat.
IV
Apparently (I say) the Germans feel no such himiility
of soul before other peoples' great literature: and by
consequence — it may seem a strange thing to assert of
them — they don't take pains enough; they don't take
6
82 Studies in Literature
the trouble because they don't see it. They are at ease
in other peoples' Sions : but they cannot build one, and
moreover it is not Sion. Literature being literature,
and philosophy philosophy, you can never understand
or account for literature — still less can you produce
literature — by considering it in terms of philosophy;
that is, by being wise about it in a category to which it
does not happen to belong.
So when a German, cultivating his own bent, bemuses
himself with a theory that Wordsworth (we will say)
wrote naturalism, or that naturalism wrote Wordsworth,
it matters which even less than it matters to us what
the German thinks he means. For we know that what
Wordsworth wrote was Tintern Abbey, while what
naturalism wrote was nothing at all: for it never
existed but as a concept in somebody's mind, an
abstract notion. God made man in His image. Ger-
mans make generalisations in theirs. That is all, and
that is just the difference.
To men who really practise writing as an Art — to
every true man of letters in France, in England, in
Russia, in Belgium — to an Anatole France, to a Ros-
tand, to a Rolland, to a Thomas Hardy, to a Maxim
Gorky, to a Maurice Maeterlinck, these abstract
notions are about as useful as the wind in the next
street; and the more you practise good actual writing
the more composedly you will ignore them.
But they do confuse and nullify criticism all over
Europe, even among men of strong mind who happen
to be critics only, and have never undergone the disci-
pline of creative writing. For example — yesterday I
took down a volume by that man of really powerful
mind. Dr. George Brandes. I opened it quite at ran-
dom, and read:
** Classical" and ''Romantic'' 83
The strongest tendency even of works like Byron's Don
Juan and Shelley's Cenci . . .
Do you know any works ''like" these, by the way?
The strongest tendency even of works like Byron's Don
Juan and Shelley's Genci is in reality Naturalism. In other
words Naturalism is so powerful in England that it per-
meates Coleridge's Romantic supernaturalism, Words-
worth's Anglican orthodoxy, Shelley's atheistic spiritualism,
Byron's revolutionary liberalism . . .
-ism, -ism, -ism! "Omm-jective and summ-jective!'*
I open at another page, again at haphazard:
Keats's poetry is the most fragrant flower of English
Naturalism. Before he appeared, this Naturalism had had
a long period of continuous growth. Its active principle
had been evolved by Wordsworth . . . Coleridge provided
it with the support of a philosophy of nature which had a
strong resemblance to Schelling's. In Scott it assumes the
highly successful form of a study of men, manners and
scenery, inspired by patriotism, by interest in history, and
by a wonderful appreciation of the significance of race.
At this point I began to yearn for five minutes of Jane
Austen, and wondered idly what sort of figure she could
be made to cut in this galley. But, being too listless to
search, I turned back to the Introduction and read:
It is my intention to trace in the poetry of England of
the first decades of this century the course of the strong,
deep, pregnant current in the intellectual life of the
country, which, sweeping away the classic forms and con-
ventions, produces a Naturalism dominating the whole of
literature, which from Naturalism leads to Radicalism, from
revolt against traditional convention in literature to vig-
84
Studies in Literature
orous rebellion against religious and political reaction. . . .
Though the connection between these authors and schools is
not self-evident, but only discernible to the understanding
critical eye, yet the period has its unity, and the picture
it presents, though a many-coloured restless one, is a coher-
ent composition, the work of the great artist, history.
Is not that fine ? Everything ending in * ' ion ' ' permeat-
ing everything that ends in "ance" or "ity" or "ism, "
fighting it out like queer aquatic monsters in a tank, all
subdued finally to a coherent com-pos-it-ion by a wave
of the pen in the hand of that great personi-fi-cat-ion
history! Gentlemen, tell yourselves that these foolish
abstractions never did any of these foolish things.
"The great artist, history!" Call up your courage and
say with Betsey Prig that you "don't believe there is no
sich person. " Cure yourselves, if you would be either
artists or critics, of this trick of personifying inanities.
*'My brethren," said a clergyman addicted to this
' foible, "as we feast and revel, catering for the inner
man, Septuagesima creeps up to our elbow, and pluck-
ing us by the sleeve whispers, ' Lent is near ! ' " Beware,
I beg you, of such personifying of what isn't there,
whether it be of *'the great artist, history," or of that
minatory virgin, Septuagesima.
But you will find (thanks to the servility of English
professors) this German trick of philosophising art and
fobbing off abstractions for things at its most rampant,
at its most dangerous, in your literary handbooks, which,
for convenience' sake, obliterate all that is vital to the
work you ought to be studying, to chatter about
"schools, ""influences," "revivals," "revolts," "tend-
encies, " "reactions. "
Come: shall we make such a Handbook of English
"Classical" and ''Romantic" 85
Literature together? It can be done, and completed in
five minutes or so : as thus —
A Short History of English Literature
Roman occupation of Britain. 450 years. Reason why
no results.
Extirpation of colonists by sturdy Anglo-Saxon race.
Beowulf. "Book of our origins " : "our Genesis'' : "not one
word about England in the poem. " No school of Beowulf.
Surprise at this.
Story of Caedmon, a cowherd. No school of Caedmon.
Surprise at this.
Rise of Anglo-Saxon Prose under iElfred. Orosius.
Boethius. Collapse of Anglo-Saxon Prose. Surprise at
this. Conjectural explanation.
Norman Conquest. Consequent explicable invasion of
Norman-French influence. Layamon's Brut. Wace.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. Sturdy persistence of Anglo-
Saxon. Significance of Piers Plowman.
Tendencies producing Chaucer's debt to Italian influ-
ences, to French influences, to other influences. Chaucer's
inflexions, Chaucer's word-endings. Influence of Chaucer.
Scottish Chaucerians; English school of Chaucer. Decline
of Chaucerian tradition. General tendency (shared by us)
to look everywhere but in the right place. Lydgate and
Hoccleve writing bad poetry, but improving Middle English
endings. "Transition period" (which means we haven't
much to say just hereabout).
Italianate Revival: French Pleiad: Influence producing
Wyat and Surrey : School of Wyat and Surrey. The Renais-
sance, The New Learning: Columbus discovers America.
Surprises at this. Sir Thomas More at home in Chelsea.
Simultaneous rise of the Drama. Evolution of the Miracle
Play. The Miracle Play superseded by the Morality.
Evolution of the Drama. Evolution of Blank Verse.
Shakespeare — his Comedies — his Tragedies — his Historical
86
Studies in Literature
plays — his indebtedness to his times — his many-sidedness —
his Will — his second-best bed — his romanticism. Classic-
ism of Ben Jonson. Reaction (metaphysical) led by
Donne. The mystical school. The Platonical school.
Milton's indebtedness to the Copernican system. Tend-
ency of Waller, Dryden, Pope. Decline of metaphysical
school. Rise of the classical school. Tyranny of the
Pamphlet, rise of the Essay, rise of the Novel. Tendency
to write like Gray, or Collins: tendency to admire Dr.
Johnson: tendency not to admire Dr. Johnson so much —
tendency to make up on the swings what you have lost on
the roundabouts: tendency to be Cowper or Crabbe: all
these tendencies culminating in Romantic revolt. Natural-
ism {alias Wordsworth), mysticism {alias Coleridge), deism
{alias Shelley), the revolutionary spirit {alias Byron), and
sensuous naturalism (a/m5 Keats). Exhaustion of tenden-
cies. Reform Act of 1832 — its devastating influence on
English Literature, and especially on its study in Cam-
bridge. Albeit we have heard it rumoured that in a later
generation Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold,
Morris and others made a spirited attempt to revive the
interplay of those tendencies and reactions which we
have been considering, at this point we down the curtain
and count the takings.
V
Now this method of considering literature as the pro-
duct not of successive men of genius and talent, but of
abstract "influences" and ''tendencies" divisible in
periods and capable of being studied in compartments,
has various vices, mostly consequent upon its being
untrue.
For one, it gets you into a habit of regarding literature
as a compost of blocks or slabs laid down in segments
with dabs of editorial cement to fill up the chinks : and
'^Classicar* and ''Romantic" 87
concurrently {this is the mischief) you lose your sense of
it as an organic living thing with delicate, often infini-
tesimal, roots, thrown out this way and that way and
every way, feeding it all the while by suction from the
brain and blood of living men : and so (last and worst)
you arrive at losing faith, which is the substance of
things hoped for. I do not believe in youth that is
content to abide in the past : for I am very sure it pre-
pares for itself a desert prospect against the day when it
shall have children of its own.
For another vice, this method constantly throws the
story for you into a false perspective; a perspective
which belies now the order of time and anon the degrees
of right importance. Doubtless there are, have been,
always will be, fashions in writing as in most of man's
activities ; but in the minds and feehngs of men — Htera-
ture being ever personal — they so overlap, so interlace,
so blend, dispart, reunite their forces, that if, copying
the method of science and the manner of Euclid, you
superimpose the compartment ABC upon the compart-
ment DEF, you are bound to be misled, logically and
even chronologically.
For an example, take these lines, upon a certain
translator :
That servile path thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word by word, and line by line.
Those are the laboured births of slavish brains,
Not the effects of poetry, but pains;
Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords
No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words.
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue.
To make translations and translators too.
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.
88 Studies in Literature
"Classicism, " I hear you say. "Age of Pope: finished
couplet, balanced antithesis — the whole armoury of
tricks. " Sirs, they were written by Sir John Denham,
who was born in 1 615, more than seventy years before
Pope, and died almost twenty years before Pope was
born or thought of.
VI
But come — What do you understand by the words
classical" and "classicism"? I gather from the
essays you bring me that they mean something you
certainly dislike (being children of your age, as we all
are or alas ! have been ) , and that you incline to lay your
grievance at the door of Alexander Pope. You dislike
it so much that when we read Gray or Collins together
and I pause say at these lines To Evening:
(I
0 nymph reserved, while now the bright-hair'd sun
Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts.
With brede ethereal wove,
O'erhang his wavy bed . . .
there ensues some such dialogue as this:
The Tutor pauses on the verse and muses, half to himself,
"Lovely! and lovelier every time."
"Yes, isn't it?" the Pupil agrees ardently.
"And — classical?"
The Pupil hesitates. "Well — no — I shouldn't say that.
It seems to me that there's a feeling for Nature about
it. " Pause.
Tutor (encouragingly). "Yes. I seem to have observed
that."
''Classicar' and ''Romantic'' 89
Pupil (brightly). "It seems to me just to illustrate what
Mr. So-and-So said the other day, that long before we
come to the Romantic Revival — under Wordsworth
and Coleridge and — yes, Scott of course "
Tutor. "Yes. Yes."
Pupil. "There were bound to be stirrings — 'gropings,*
as he put it. Of course I know that Collins calls
Evening a 'nymph. ' "
Tutor. " Let us look on the bright side of things. Brown-
ing— one of your romantics by the way — would have
called her a 'numph. ' "
Pupil. "And then again he speaks of the * bright-hair 'd
sun* and — dolefully — I suppose that's classical: some-
thing out of Homer, no doubt. But," — with reviving
courage — "But anyhow. Sir, you'll admit it's different
from Pope?"
Tutor. "With all my heart. "
Pupil's brow clears. He has established the point.
VII
You, who have to listen, term in and term out, to all
this talk about ' 'classicism " and " classicality " — do you
seriously suppose that Pope was a classical writer?
I am not going to define the term "classical " for you,
just at this moment. I prefer to oppose thing to thing.
You will perhaps allow that Homer, at any rate, was
a classical writer. As between him and Pope, Homer
has — I am, perhaps, not extravagant in supposing — the
first call on that title.
Well, when Homer, having to tell how Odysseus,
shipwrecked and far-spent with swimming, wins to
shore and drags himself, naked, to hide in the bushes
just as Nausicaa — the king's daughter of the country —
drives down to the beach with her maidens, to wash
90 Studies in Literature
the court linen in a stream close by, he tells the business
thus:
Then they took the clothes from the waggon, and carry-
ing them to the dark water, trod them in pits briskly, in
rivalry. Then, after they had washed and cleansed away
all the stains, they spread everything out in order on the
foreshore, even where the sea, beating on the coast, had
washed the pebbles clean. Then, having bathed and
anointed themselves with olive oil, they ate their mid-day
meal on the river bank, waiting till the clothes should dry
in the sun's rays. And anon, having finished their meal, the
maidens and the Princess, they fell to playing at ball, casting
away their veils, and among them white-armed Nausicaa
sang the song which led the game.
Could anything be simpler, more direct, more classical ?
(We are approaching a definition.) But now turn to
Pope's version — or rather, to Brome's, which Pope ad-
mired so much that he incorporated it in his rendering
of the Odyssey:
Then emulous the royal robes they lave,
And plunge the vestures in the cleansing wave
(The vestures cleansed o'erspread the shelly sand,
Their snowy lustre whitens all the strand) ;
Then with a short repast relieve their toil.
And o'er their limbs diffuse ambrosial oil;
And while the robes imbibe the solar ray,
O'er the green mead the sporting virgins play
(Their shining veils unbound). Along the skies,
Toss'd and retoss'd, the ball incessant flies.
They sport, they feast; Nausicaa lifts her voice.
And, warbling sweet, makes earth and heaven rejoice.
Can you not see at once that if Homer's narrative be
classical, Pope (or Brome) has induced something upon
**Classicar' and ** Romantic" 91
it which changes its nature? something extraneous,
ornamental, fantastic —
And while the robes imbibe the solar ray —
something more alien from true classical than almost
anything you can find in the wildest romanticist — as
you will call him ?
VIII
When you apply the word "classical" or the word
** classicism" to such tawdry overlay as I have quoted,
are you not — are your professional instructors not —
committing the first of literary offences, that of per-
verting the sense of words? Do you not — do not
your professional instructors — by this use of the word
* * classical ' ' mean in fact ' * conventional ' ' — a word which
contradicts almost every notion that can be even
remotely associated with the classics? Your professors
and compilers of little handbooks may not go about
like Theophile Gautier, wearing crimson waistcoats : but
beneath whatever waistcosts they wear they carry
a stupidity which was never Gautier's, in his most
intoxicated moments.
Pope sealed a fashion. It was an artificial manner
of writing, as far removed from the practice of the men
we call classical authors as any manner of writing could
well be. Sophocles or Virgil or Dante would have
shuddered at it. Still he set up a fashion under which
it became unpoetical — that is, was esteemed unpoetical
— to call the moon the moon without adding "sole
regent of the night, " or to talk of drying clothes: to be
garments worthy of poetry they had to "imbibe the
solar ray."
92 Studies in Literature
But are we sure that our poets, having repudiated
Pope, are not practising very similar fooleries in our
own year of grace? The inventions of one age are I
always in process of becoming the conventions, the I
tyrants, of the next. Listen to this, from Francis |
Thompson's Essay on Shelley; and mark you, it is
written of our own day:
There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian
cohorts of poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every
aspirant to the poetical purple, and without whose prescrip-
tive aid none dares aspire to the poetical purple; against
these it is time some banner should be raised.
And he goes on :
It is at any rate curious to note that the literary revolu-
tion against the despotic diction of Pope seems issuing,
like political revolutions, in a despotism of its own making.
If our teachers persist in labelling Pope and his imi-
tators as "classical, " let us cheerfully claim the bulk of
Greek and Roman literature as "romantic" and have
done with it. Why not? Do you postulate, for
romantic writing, glamour and magic, adventures on
"perilous seas in faery lands forlorn " ? Very well; then
I exhibit this same Odyssey to you, with its isle of Circe,
where that ^aean isle forgets the main,
its garden-court of Phaeacia, its wonderlands of the Cy-
clops, the Sirens, the Lotus-eaters, its scene, a moment
ago related, of the princess playing at ball with her
maidens on the strand; or I exhibit the marvellous tale
** Classical" and '^ Romantic" 93
of Cupid and Psyche, parent of a hundred fairy-tales dis-
persed throughout the world {Beauty and the Beast for
one).
Or is it passion you demand of romance? I exhibit
the passionate verses of Sappho, preserved for us by
Longinus, beginning
4>a(vs'rac [xoi x.TJvo<; \qoc, OeoTatv
£[X[JLeV WVYJp . . .
or a speech of Phaedra, or Catullus's lyric of Acme
and Septimius.
Is it pathos ? — utter pathos ? I exhibit to you Priam
on his knees, kissing the hand that has murdered his
son; Helen on the wall; Andromache bidding farewell
to her husband at the gate, her boy kicking and crowing
on her arm at sight of his father's nodding plume; and
again that last glimpse Virgil gives of her, in slavery,
returning from vows paid to the dead — of her that was
"Hectoris Andromache. "
Is it any sense of predestinate doom fulfilled? I
refer you to the last stand of the Sicilian expedition in
Thucydides. Or is it a general sense of the woe, the tears,
the frailty, the transience inherent in all human things?
A dozen passages from Virgil might be quoted.
I think, if you will look into "classicism" and
*' romanticism" for yourselves, with your own open
eyes, you will find — though the whole pother about
their difference amounts to nothing that need trouble
a healthy man — it amounts to this: some men have
naturally a sense of form stronger than their sense of
colour: some men have a sense of colour stronger than
their sense of form.
In proportion as they indulge their proclivities or
94 Studies in Literature
neglect to discipline them, one man will be a classical,
the other a romantic, writer. At their utmost, one will
be a dull formalist, the other a frantic dauber. I truly
believe there is not much more to be said.
I conclude by reciting to you two compositions by
opposing which you may summarise for yourselves all
that I have been saying today.
The first is a Table of Contents of a volume by
Doctor George Brandes {Main Currents in Nineteenth
Century Literature^ vol. iv).
Common Characteristics of the Period
National Characteristics
The Political Background
The Beginnings of Naturalism
Strength and Sincerity of the Love of Nature
Rural Life and its Poetry
Naturalistic Romanticism
The Lake School's Conception of Liberty
The Lake School's Oriental Romanticism
Historical Naturalism
All-embracing Sensuousness
The Poetry of Irish Opposition and Revolt
Erotic Lyric Poetry
The British Spirit of Freedom
Republican Humanism
Radical Naturalism
Byron: the Passionate Personality
Byron: the Passionate Personality {continued)
Byron: his Self -absorption
Byron: the Revolutionary Spirit
Comic and Tragic Realism
Culmination of Naturalism
Byron's Death
Conclusion
** Classical" and '^ Romantic" 95
What shall I oppose to this ? Something quite simple,
something you all know by heart, yet something so
lovely that it never can be hackneyed.
Ah what avails the sceptered race,
Ah what the form divine!
' , ' When every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
Is that classical? It is as classical as anything in
Catullus. Is that romantic? Yes, I think it is also
romantic.
But what matters either? It is the pure loveliness
of it that alone should concern you.
All things considered, I advise that it may help our
minds to earn an honest living if we dismiss the terms
"classical" and "romantic" out of our vocabulary for
a while.
SOME SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY POETS
I. JOHN DONNE
\')
WHEN Izaak Walton first published that gem of
biography, his Life of Dr. John Donne — now one
ma casket of five of his carving — it was to introduce a
volume of his adored master's Sermons: and he prefaced
it with a modest account of how he had first but col-
lected materials for Sir Henry Wotton, betwixt whom
and Donne ''there was so mutual a knowledge, and such
friendship contracted in their youth, as nothing but
death could force a separation," But Wotton died,
with the projected Life unwritten.
When I heard that sad news [Walton continues], and
heard also that these Sermons were to bg printed, and want
the Author's life, which I thought to be very remarkable:
indignation or grief (indeed I know not which) transported
mesofar, that I reviewed my forsaken collections. . . . And
if I shall now be demanded, as once Pompey's poor bond-
man was: — (the grateful wretch had been left alone on the
sea-shore, with the forsaken dead body of his once glorious
lord and master ; and was then gathering the scattered pieces
of an old broken boat, to make a funeral pile to burn it,
96
Seventeenth Century Poets 97
which was the custom of the Romans) — "Who art thou
that alone hast the honour to bury the body of Pompey the
Great?" so, who am I that do thus officiously set the
Author's memory on fire ? I hope the question will prove to
have in it more of wonder than disdain. ... *
And if the Author's glorious spirit, which now is in
heaven, can have the leisure to look down and see me, the
poorest, the meanest of all his friends, in the midst of his
officious duty, confident I am that he will not disdain this
well-meant sacrifice to his memory: for, whilst his con-
versation made me and many others happy below, I know
his humility and gentleness were then eminent; and, I have
heard divines say, those virtues which were but sparks upon
earth, become great and glorious flames in heaven.
Now of encomiums upon the dead, as of entries in
hotel visitors' books, you may have (with me) found
it observable that qualifications tend to disajppear. But
the poetical elegies upon Dr. Donne do by their mass
(they fill twenty-five pages in Dr. Grierson's great
edition) as by their writers' eminence in various stations
of life (Bishop King, Browne of Tavistock, Edward
Hyde — possibly the great* Earl of Clarendon — Walton
himself, Thomas Carew the poet and courtier, Lucius
Gary, Endymion Porter, Sidney Godolphin, are among
the signatory authors) convey that the men of his time
who themselves counted accounted him a very great
man indeed.
And truly he was ^ great man ; yes, and is one of the
greatest figures in English literature, albeit perhaps the
worst understood : one of the tribe of strong generative
giants in which — whether we like them or not, and
whether or not we know why — we have to reckon (for
examples) Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson;
giants whose stature we recognise albeit we cannot
(/
98 Studies in Literature
measure it by their writings, which sometimes dis-
appoint and not seldom fatigue us ; giants of whom we
still feel, after reading Sejanus or Absalom and Achito-
phel, or Rasselas, that their worth is somehow known
although their height be not taken.
Donne, I dare to say, if we range him up with that
tall three, stands an easy compeer. What is more, his
work does not disappoint — if we know where to look
for it. He wrote some of the most magnificent and
V astounding pages in our literature, if we know where to
look for them. We may not call them, though unparal-
leled, absolutely beautiful: there is nothing absolute
in Donne but his greatness and his manhood. He is
Demiourgos — a swart smith at the forge, beating out
things worthy of the heavenly city: and he cares not
what costly stuff he casts into the furnace so that he
hammer out a paving-stone, or it may be a primrose
"^ for it : and, for the sake of a primrose great fiery masses
will hurtle up out of Etna. Also one has to peer through
the smoke to discern what the artificer, too intent to
help you, has there on the anvil. It may be just a prim-
rose or it may be a whole length of celestial wall. He,
absorbed, sees only on the anvil a part of his vision.
II
But first let me tell a little of this extraordinary man :
not enough to absolve you of the duty and delight of
reading about him in Walton: just enough to preface
the remarks I shall offer upon his work this morning,
and thereafter upon the work of his followers.
John Donne was born in London, in the parish of
St. Olave, Bread Street, in the year 1573. His father,
a prosperous ironmonger of the city of London, and
Seventeenth Century Poets 99
well descended, died when the boy was about three years
old, leaving a widow and six children. The mother was
a devout and uncompromising Roman Catholic; which
explains why the boy John, after tuition at home, went
up at twelve (with a younger brother, Henry, aged
eleven) and was entered at Hart Hall, now Hertford
College, in Oxford: for certain alleged proselytising
activities of the Jesuits had hurried the government
into making an order that all students admitted to
Oxford must take the Oath of Supremacy, the crucial
test of loyalty to the Crown and. to the Reformed
Church of England; an oath not enforced, however,
upon boys under sixteen. So John and Henry dodged
it by going up at twelve and eleven. In those days
there were no Rhodes scholars: and I should imagine
that, under this rule — which apparently did not apply
to Cambridge, Cambridge would have had consistently
the better of things in athletics — had there been any.
But there were not.
Walton says that at fourteen or thereabouts he was
** transplanted" — which seems a good term — from
Oxford to Cambridge, ''that he might receive nourish-
ment from both soils." I regret to tell you that no
evidence for this, save Walton's, is discoverable, unless
it be internal evidence. Walton says that at Oxford
they avowed the age to have brought forth another
Pico Mirandola: that at Cambridge he was a most
laborious student, often changing his studies but
endeavouring to take no degree. Plus ga change, plus
c'est la meme chose.
It is probable that, after leaving Oxford, he travelled
for a while. At any rate we find him, at seventeen or
so, admitted to Lincoln's Inn and living in London. His
mother, anxious for his faith, surrounded him there with
100 Studies in Literature
tutors who (according to Walton) under cover of the
mathematics and other Hberal sciences were advised to
instil into him particular principles of the Romish
Church. Donne, being of a detached mind — detached,
but extraordinarily eager — set himself to read both
sides of the question with all his might. The end was
that he became a passionate, yet tolerant, Church of
England man. Meantime his brother Henry — the
same that had entered with him at Hart Hall — had
fallen under suspicion of disloyal commerce with the
Jesuit fathers, and was thrown into the Clink for
harbouring Harrington, a seminary priest, tracked to his
chambers in Thavies' Inn and there arrested. Harring-
ton was hurried to trial and hanged at Tyburn. Henry
Donne contracted gaol fever and died, after a few
weeks' imprisonment.
It may have been in prudence, being under suspicion,
that in 1596, John cleared from London and joined in
the Earl of Essex's famous expedition to Cadiz. Quite
as likely it^'was to^avoid the scandal of more worldly
transgressions: for his poems (and Ben Jonson tells us
that he wrote all his best pieces of verse before twenty-
five) tell us autobiographically of wild living and licen-
tious wooing:
Th' expense of Spirit in a waste of shame . . .
and of shamelessness, we may add. They exhibit him
as a genuine heir of the Renaissance, insatiable alike in
carnal and intellectual curiosity: mad to possess, and,
having possessed, violent in reaction, crueller even than
Horace to his castaways, then even more cruelly, cynic-
ally, cold in analysing the ashes of disgust:
y
Seventeenth Century Poets loi
Th ' expense of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated; as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad :
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof: and, proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. . . .
Setting forth with Essex, the youth, already famous
for gifts and learning, writes an Elegie of farewell to a
lady with whom he had had an intrigue. This is the
sort of thing:
Was't not enough, that thou didst hazard us
To paths in love so dark, so dangerous:
And those so ambush'd round with household spies.
And over all, thy husbands towring eyes . . .
and about the same time he was writing The Curse on
his mistress and the man who succeeds him, which (as
Andrew Lang said justly) "far outdoes the Epodes of
Horace in cold ferocity. " Or this:
Love, any devile else but you.
Would for a given soule give something too.
Or this:
If thou beest borne to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
. Ride ten thousand daies and nights,
Till age snow white haires on thee,
102 Studies in Literature
Thou, when thou retorn'st, wilt tell mee
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And sweare
No where
Lives a woman true, and faire.
If thou finds t one, let mee know.
Such a Pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet doe not, I would not goe,
Though at next doore wee might meet.
Though shee were true, when you met her.
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet shee
Will bee
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
Now in two more short extracts watch the fierce con-
tempt withering down into worse cynicism :
Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day.
To morrow, when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say?
Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow?
And say that now
We are not just those persons, which we were?
Or, that oathes made in reverentiall feare
Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear? . . .
Vaine lunatique, against these scapes I could
Dispute, and conquer, if I would.
Which I abstaine to doe,
For by to morrow, I may thinke so too.
Last:
Thus I reclaim' d my buzzard love, to flye
And what, and when, and how and where I chuse;
Now negligent of sport I lye.
And now as other Falc'ners use,
I spring a mistress, sweare, write, sigh and weepe:
And the game kill'd, or lost, goe talke, and sleepe . . ,
and there is worse — far worse — than that.
Seventeenth Century Poets 103
Donne shared the triumph of the Cadiz exploit with
a number of young gentlemen who had sailed with
Essex as volunteers. Its impudent success so enraged
the king of Spain that he started preparing a second
Armada. To forestall this, Elizabeth fitted out a grand
fleet under Essex, Howard and Ralegh; and Donne
sailed with it. A storm (described by him in a dull
poem, praised by a modern critic as "most vivid" in
pictures of nature and the sea; actually as full of both,
or of either, as this room) drove the ships — it was real
enough for that — back to Plymouth. They weighed
again, but in so damaged a condition that, after a
coasting raid, the larger foray was abandoned for a
dash on the Azores to intercept the Spanish plate-ships
returning from America. This enterprise (known as
the ''Islands Expedition") fell to pieces through bicker-
ings between Essex and Ralegh, and the fleet trailed a
broken wing home in the autumn of 1597. Walton tells
us that, just after this, Donne visited Italy and Spain
(presumably on minor errands of diplomacy) and that
he designed to visit the Holy Land. "But at his being
in the furthest parts of Italy, the disappointment of
company, or of a safe convoy, or the uncertainty of
returns of money into those remote parts, denied him
that happiness : which he did often occasionally mention
with a deploration. " It is pretty certain he had
wasted his patrimony in these wanderings.
We pursue with Walton :
Not long after his return into England, that exemplary
pattern of gravity and wisdom, the Lord Elsemore [Elles-
mere], then Keeper of the Great Seal, the Lord Chancellor of
England, taking notice of his learning, languages, and other
abilities, and much affecting his person and behaviour, took
104 Studies in Literature
him to be his Chief Secretary ; supposing and intending it to
be an introduction to some more weighty employment in the
State.
But here fate interposed. The Chancellor's wife had a
niece, Anna, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant
of the Tower, and kept her as frequent visitor and
attendant. This young lady of sixteen and the hand-
some young secretary were thrown much together, read
be Dks together —
Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse.
The pair fell in love, secretly plighted troth, and were
clandestinely married (1601). The father's wrath,
when he discovered it, was fierce, even "frenetical. "
He not only procured the young husband's dismissal
from the Chancellor's service, but had him committed
to prison with two friends, Samuel and Christopher
Brooke (both poets by the way, and Samuel destined^
to become Master of Trinity), who had abetted the love
affair. Almost as quickly as in a comedy the choleric
father relented, procured the bridegroom's enlargement,
gave the young couple his blessing (with, none of his
money, however, to back it) and, not to do forgiveness
by halves, begged the Chancellor to reconsider his
dismissal of so commendable a young secretary. To
which that exemplary pattern of gravity and wisdom
rephed "that though he was unfeignedly sorry for what
he had done, yet it was inconsistent with his place and
credit, to discharge and re-admit servants at the request
of passionate petitioners. "
Seventeenth Century Poets 105
III
Thus Donne found himself cast on the world, with
the obligation to provide for a wife he had dangerously-
won and passionately adored. After vicissitudes (and
much fending for a fast-growing family), he found
employ with Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted, Suffolk, one
of the wealthiest men in England; whose only child,
a daughter, had died at the age of sixteen. The rich
poor parents applied to Donne to write her epitaph.
Donne not only did so, but followed it up with that
strangest of poems. The Progresse of the Soule. It was
the first of his writings to see print. His earlier licen-
tious poems he would gladly have suppressed, had it
been possible. They wer^ never published during his
lifetime: but copies in MS. — for his reputation was
already the talk of the town — had blown everywhere, in
court and throughout London.
He would gladly have suppressed them because his
religious convictions were steadily deepening — or rather
lifting him to a mystical exaltation — but more because
the wandering bark of his love had found a polestar in *•
his most adored wife. True and ten times true as are
Burns's words of dissipated passion:
I waive the quantum o' the sin,
The hazard of concealing;
But, och! it hardens a' within,
And petrifies the feeling ! . . .
Donne was one of the few who, out of that curse hold
fire enough to revive the flame —
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion — Z»
and burn up past sins on the altar of a single devotion.
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It was in Drury's employ, on an embassy to France,
that Donne, in Paris, was visited by the apparition
reported by Walton and always worthy to be men-
tioned because in this man it undoubtedly deepened
the mysticism so important to the rest of our story:
the vision of his wife passing twice by him "with her
hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her
arms: . . . and am as sure," said he, telling it to
Drury, "that at her second appearing she stopped, and
looked me in the face, and vanished. " Sir Robert was
so far shaken by Donne's earnestness that
he immediately sent a servant [home] to Drury House, with
a charge to hasten back, and bring him word, whether Mrs.
Donne were alive : and, if alive, in what condition she was as
to her health. The twelfth day the messenger returned with
this account — That he found and left Mrs. Donne very sad,
and sick in her bed; and that, after a long and dangerous
labour, she had been delivered of a dead child. And, upon
examination, the abortion proved to be the same day, and
about the very hour, that Mr. Donne affirmed he saw her
pass by him in his chamber.
Donne returned to England, where Drury housed him
with his rapidly increasing family. He became adviser
to the Earl of Somerset ; but yet lacked preferment pro-
portionate to his merits, when in 1615, at the persuasion
of King James himself, he took Holy Orders. Then
preferment came, as it not seldom comes, to a man past
enjoying it. Donne, at any rate, had but a short while
to share the gratification with his wife. She died in
1 61 7 and was buried in St. Clement Danes. Here is a
part of the epitaph:
Seventeenth Century Poets 107
Annae.
• •••••
Quod hoc saxum fari jussit
Ipse prae dolore infans
Maritus {miserrimum dictu) alim
Charae charus
Cineribus cineres spondet suos
Novo matrimonio {annual Deus)
hoc loco sociandos
Joannes Donne
In 162 1 King James made him Dean of St. Paul's. .
He was now forty-eight, the most famous preacher in
London, and the most solitary, melancholy man.
IV
There is where you shall seek for the great Donne,
the real Donne: not in his verse, into which posterity
is constantly betrayed, but in his Sermons, which
contain (as I hold) the most magnificent prose ever
uttered from an English pulpit, if not the most magni-
ficent prose ever spoken in our tongue. I read you a
passage this day fortnight: and I hope some day to
speak to you of Donne and Andrewes, Hall, Fuller,
Jeremy Taylor and others of the Great Age of the
Pulpit. Let me today stammer out to you, for evi-
dence, two short passages; and ask you to imagine his
wonderful voice (by all men's consent, wonderful)
ringing them forth under the roof of St. Paul's — the old
St. Paul's.
(i) First, for a specimen of his lighter controversial
style, which I may call his skirmishing style. And here,
by the way, if there be any present of the Catholic
io8 Studies in Literature
Church of Rome, let him not take offence at that which
I present merely as a specimen. Donne's was an age of
\ controversy: and if we pretend amiably there was no
^ such thing, we emasculate our understanding of his time
and of the men who lived in it. And moreover I truly
believe the passage will not bruise any man's ears ; and
— yet moreover — I engage me, when dealing with
writers of "the old profession" amply to redeem the
balance.
Well, then, Donne is speaking of supplications ad-
dressed to saints. He quotes Justin Martyr's saying
that it is a strange thing men should "pray to Escu-
lapius or to Apollo for health" when they may as
easily pray to the masters who taught them ail they
know of physic ; and he goes on :
Why should I pray to St. George for victory, when I may
go to the Lord of Hosts, Almighty God Himself; or consult
with a Serjeant, or corporal, when I may go to the general?
Or to another saint for peace, when I may go to the Prince
of Peace Christ Jesus ? Why should I pray to Saint Nicho-
las for a fair passage at sea, when He that rebuked the storm
is nearer me than St. Nicholas ? /Why should I pray to St.
Antony for my hogs, when he that gave the devil leave to
drown the Gergesens whole herd of ho^gs, did not do that
by St. Antony's leave, nor by putting a caveat or prae-non-
obstante in his monopoly of preserving hogs? I know not
where to find St. Petronilla when I have an ague, nor St.
Apollonia when I have the tooth-ache, nor St. Liberius when
I have the stone. I know not whether they can hear me in
heaven, or no. Our adversaries will not say that all saints
in heaven hear all that is said on earth. I know not whether
they be in heaven or no : our adversaries will not say that
the Pope may not err in a matter of fact, and so may canon-
ise a traitor for a saint. I know not whether those saints
were ever upon earth or no : our adversaries will not say that
Seventeenth Century Poets 109
all their legends were really, historically true, but that
many of them were holy, but yet symbolical inventions.
... I know my Redeemer liveth, and I know where he is;
and no man knows where he is not.
(2) For a more solemn passage I choose this famous
one on Jezebel :
The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that
oak, to tell me how high or how large that was ; it tells me not
what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt
when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speech-
less, too : it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon
the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a prince
whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if
the wind blow it thither ; and when a whirlwind hath blown
the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man
sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard,
who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pro-
nounce. This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour],
and this the yeomanly , this the Plebeian bran ? So was the
death of Jezabel (Jezabel was a Queen) expressed. They
shall not say This is Jezabel; not only not wonder that it is,
nor pity that it should be : but they shall not say, they shall
not know, This is Jezabel.
V
Thus in his Sermons, if you seek, you will find the
Donne I maintain to be the greater Donne, master of
well-knit argument, riding tumultuous emotion as with
a bridle, thundering out fugue upon fugue of prose
modulated with almost impeccable ear. Why do critics
then go on judging him first and almost solely as a poet ?
And why do I, following them to do evil, speak of him
today chiefly as a poet?
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He had no architectonic gift in poetry: in poetry
the skill that articulated, knit, compacted his Sermons
and marched his arguments as warriors in battalion,
completely forsook him. Through lack of it The Pro-
gresse of the Soule which might have been a triumph, is a
wobbling fiasco. Of the art that constructs a Divina
Commediay an Othello , a Samson Agonistes, or even a
Beggar's Opera, he had no inkling whatever. It was
not that he strove for it and missed; it was that he
either knew not or cared not a farthing about it.
He had (they say) a most peccable ear in verse.
Critics so great as Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Coleridge, all
agree on this point: so I suppose they must be right.
They agree also in calling him difficult, crabbed, etc.
Being so great men, therefore, let them be right.
I can only say that after trial, especially in reading
him aloud to myself, I find him by nine-tenths less
inharmonious, halting, crabbed, or difficult than these
great critics take for granted that he is. Of course, if
you choose a line of his and read it clumsily, if you accent
Blasted with sighs and surrounded with tears
as if you were ordering
Bacon and eggs and a half-pint of beer
you make little of it as a ten-syllable iambic ; as if you
choose to scan with your thumb instead of the organ
God gave you :
Blasted, with sighs, and sur-rounded with tedrs,
you will make less. But if you read
BMsted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,
Hither I come to seek the spring,
Seventeenth Century Poets iii
letting the voice linger on "sur-round, " the line becomes
exquisite.
But come, let us take a poem of his and test this
alleged harshness :
Little think'st thou, poore flower,
Whom I have watch'd sixe or seaven dayes,
And seene thy birth, and scene what every houre
Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise,
And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough,
Little think'st thou
That it will freeze anon, and that I shall
To morrow finde thee falne, or not at all.
Little think'st thou poore heart
That labour'st yet to nestle thee.
And think'st by hovering here to get a part
In a forbidden or forbidding tree,
And hop'st her stiff enesse by long siege to bow:
Little think'st thou.
That thou to morrow, ere that Sunne doth wake,
Must with this Sunne, and mee a journey take.
But thou which lov'st to bee
Subtile to plague thy sclfc, wilt say,
Alas, if you must goe, what's that to mee?
Here lyes my businesse, and here I will stay:
You goe to friends, whose love and meanes present
Various content
To your eyes, cares, and tongue, and every part.
If then your body goe, what need you a heart?
Well then, stay here; but know,
When thou hast stay'd and done thy most;
A naked thinking heart, that makes no show,
Is to a woman, but a kinde of Ghost;
How shall shee know my heart; or having none.
Know thee for one?
.n
112 Studies in Literature
Practise may make her know some other part,
But take my word, she doth not know a Heart.
Meet mee at London, then,
Twenty dayes hence, and thou shalt see
Mee fresher, and more fat, by being with men,
Then if I had staid still with her and thee.
For Gods sake, if you can, be you so too :
I would give you
There, to another friend, whom wee shall finde
As glad to have my body, as my minde.
None the less I grant you that Donne's ear for the
beat of verse is so wayward, its process often so recon-
dite, that the most of his poetry is a struggle rather
than a success: and I have already admitted that he
could not plan a poem.
Why then does everyone insist on judging as a poet,
and a faulty one, this man who had a superlatively fine
ear for the rhythm of prose and could construct in
prose? And why am I following the multitude?
The first and most obvious answer is that nobody
reads sermons in these days, and few even trouble to
attend them. For reasons which we will examine on
another occasion, the once glorious art of preaching has
perished out of our midst. The tradition is there — laid
up in Donne's Sermons: "laid up, not lost!"
But the main reason is that his verse did smash up
U an effete tradition of verse. It smashed up Petrarch-
in-English, and it was high time. It did so influence
English verse for at least half a century, that (as some-
one has said) like a glove of civet it scents every gar-
ment you take out of the wardrobe.
Gentlemen, never mind when someone smashes up a
convention to make a new thing. That way — trust it —
Seventeenth Century Poets 113
lies life: and literature may make almost any sacrifice
to renew itself alive. What was it this man had to
invent or to rediscover, that he broke up so much?
VI
Most of you know Johnson's Lije of Cowley ^ and the
hay that great man made of the ''metaphysical" poets,
tossing them on his horns. Why "metaphysical" I
don't know. Johnson had compiled a Dictionary, and
therefore had no excuse for not knowing that "meta-
physical" was no accurate term for the thing he took so
much joy in deriding. He probably meant something
like "fiddlesticks"; something contemptuous. He
makes admirable play with a number of things that do
not matter. But he never gets near what does matter.
What is Mysticism ?
It is something, at any rate, which Johnson had
small care or capacity to understand.
It is also something which even Shakespeare did not
understand, though he unconsciously relied on it. You
may choose your grandest passage from Shakespeare:
choose Prospero's cloud-capped towers and gorgeous
palaces ; or choose Cleopatra's wail upon dead Antony :
0 ! wither'd is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fall'n ; young boys and girls
Are level now with men ; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
Then set beside it a line or two of Blake :
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water 'd heaven with their tears . . .
or
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A Robin Redbreast in a cage 'l
Puts all heaven in a rage . . .
or Wordsworth's Ode to Duty:
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and
strong . . .
and you will perceive that there are more things in
heaven and earth than find their way into great Shake-
speare's philosophy ; and in particular a something which
Plato had known, which Shakespeare did not know,
which therefore had to be rediscovered by poets, wise
men and children.
That something was Mysticism. And Mysticism is
— well, Mysticism, Gentlemen, is something we will
discuss in our next lecture; in which I shall also try to
explain why Donne, who helped to rediscover it, was
an imperfect mystic, as also to trace it in certain of his
followers — Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne.
For the present be it enough to say that he was an
imperfect poet, and mainly for two reasons: (i) he
had no constant vision of beauty, (2) he had too
busy an intellect, which ever tempted him (as Touch-
stone would say) to be breaking his shins on his own
wit: or as an American friend used to put it, he
suffered "from a rush of brains to the head. " In lines
and short passages he could be exquisite. Witness
this:
I long to talke with some old lovers ghost,
Who dyed before the god of Love was borne . . .
or this, from his Anatomie of the World:
Seventeenth Century Poets 115
Her pure, and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say, her body thought.
But more than half his time we see the man sweating
and straining at his forge and bellows. Obviously half
the time he himself cannot see what he is working at,
hammering at "that is as it may turn out," and then,
suddenly, out of the smoke, shine verses like this, from
The Extasie:
As 'twixt two equall Armies, Fate
Suspends uncertaine victorie.
Our soules, (which to advance their state,
Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee.
And whil'st our soules negotiate there,
Wee like sepulchrall statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And wee said nothing, all the day.
VII
In his last years, as disease, over-study and fasting
broke up his body, his mind played more and more
constantly upon death and its physical horrors, the
charnel-house and the worm: yes, though he, always
eloquent against the grave, had written this most holy
sonnet defying it :
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull ; for, thou art not soe.
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee.
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow.
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe.
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
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Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
This man lived his last days and slept for years with
a full-length portrait of himself (for which he stood on
an urn, naked, clad in a winding-sheet) laid alongside his
bed, "where it continued and became his hourly object
till his death. " You may see the horrible silly picture
in many editions of the Life. It is kept among the
archives of St. Paul's. Reflex action, say I, of carnality
in exitu. A very "gloomy Dean" of St. Paul's at any
rate! First and last, Donne \7as always that man in
Plato who, drawing near the city ditch and spying the
rotten corpses of some malefactors that had been flung
there, stood still between abhorrence and a filthy at-
traction; until at length, overcome, he ran to the spot
opening his eyes wide with his fingers and crying,
"Take your fill, you wretches, sincQ you must have it
so.
But a great man, indubitably a very great man: all
the taller for standing in the mire of corruption and
reaching up to grasp celestial doors. A great man: a
very penitent man ! He died on the 3 ist day of March,
1 63 1, and was buried in St. Paul's. Let a simple
admirer, a holy and humble man of heart — let Izaak
Walton — say the last word on him, whom many
apparently greater admired:
He was by nature highly passionate, but more^ apt to
reluct at the excesses of it. A great lover of the offices of
Seventeenth Century Poets 117
humanity, and of so merciful a spirit, that he never beheld
the miseries of mankind without pity and relief.
He was earnest and unwearied in the search of knowledge,
with which his vigorous soul is now satisfied, and employed
in a continual praise of that God that first breathed it into
his active body : that body, which once was a Temple of the
Holy Ghost, and is now become a ^all quantity of Christ-
ian dust: —
But I shall see it re-animated.
11. HERBERT AND VAUGHN
y
I SHALL begin today, Gentlemen, by collecting from
my previous lectures sundry scattered tenets which,
if you remember them at all, you probably remember
disconnectedly as things dropped disconnectedly, casu-
ally, on occasion : and I shall try (if you will allow the
simile) to piece these scraps of glass together into a
small window through which you may not only, as I
hope, have a glimpse into the true meaning of "Mysti-
cism"— which was the question on which we parted, a
fortnight ago — but even perhaps, into the last meaning
of poetry. Oh yes ! — a most presimiptuous hope most
presumptuously uttered. But we have to do our best
in our little time: and my experience has been that
while many things continue to lurk in a glass darkly,
certain clear visions have come, and the clearest of these
not seldom through the eyes of a friend. If that word,
again, be presumptuous, you must forgive me.
First, then, I have preached to you over and over
from this desk, and not seldom explicitly, that the
function of all true art, and in particular of poetry
(with which we are concerned) is to harmonise the soul
of man with the immense Universe surrounding him,
in which he divines a procession which is orderly, an
order which is harmonious, a procession, an order,
a harmony which obey, as law, a Will infinitely above
Ii8
Seventeenth Century Poets 119
him, infinitesimally careful of him — the many milHon-
millionth part of a speck of dust, yet sentient.
Great thinkers (as you know) have all recognised
this order. Indeed they must, for it conditions all
their thinking. If the Universe were a chaos, which
is anarchy — if the sun rose unpunctually and lay down
when it felt inclined, if no moon commanded the tides,
if the stars were peevish, running to and fro like spoilt
children — any connected thought would be impossible
and we no better but worse than blind men jostled
about by a crowd. But as a fact we know that what-
ever it be, watching over Israel, it slumbers not nor
sleeps. Begin where you will. Begin, if you choose,
with the rebuke to Job :
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose
the bands of Orion ?
Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season ? or canst
thou guide Arcturus with his sons ?
Or with Ecclesiasticus :
The beauty of heaven, the glory of the stars, an ornament
giving light in the highest places of the Lord.
At the commandment of the Holy One they will stand in
their order, and never faint in their watches.
Come down to Wordsworth's Ode to Duty:
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh
and strong.
Or to Meredith's Lucifer in Starlight:
On a starr'd night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
120 Studies in Literature
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened.
Where sinners hugg'd their spectre of repose.
Poor prey in his hot fit of pride were those,
And now upon his western wing he lean'd,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careen'd,
Now the black planet shadow'd Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that prick 'd his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reach 'd a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he look'd, and sank.
Around the ancient track march'd, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
The poets, as you know, and philosophers (of whom
Plato is chief of course) with poetry in their souls,
attempt by many parables to convey their sense of
this grand, harmonious, universal orchestral movement.
You recall the supposed music of the spheres, inaudible
to mortals :
Sit, Jessica, Look . . .
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings.
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
You remember in Plato the story of Er the Pamphylian,
whose relatives after ten days sought his dead body on
the battle-field, and found it without taint of corruption :
and how on the twelfth day, being laid on the pyre, he
came back to life and told them where he had wandered
in the other world, and what seen: but chiefly of the
great spindle on the knees of Necessity, reaching up to
heaven and turning in eight whorls of graduated speed
— "and on the rim of each sits a Siren, who revolves
with it, hymning a single note; the eight notes together
forming one harmony. " Plato learned of Pythagoras,
Seventeenth Century Poets 121
Dante of Plato, Chaucer of Dante, Milton of Plato
again. Hearken to Milton :
Then listen I
To the celestial Sirens' harmony
That sit upon the nine infolded spheres
And sing to those that hold the vital shears,
And turn the adamantine spindle round
On which the fate of gods and men is wound.
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie,
To lull the daughters of Necessity,
And keep unsteady Nature to her law,
And the low world in measured motion draw
After the heavenly tune.
A commentator on this passage has informed the
world in a footnote that "Modern astronomy has
exploded the singular notion of revolving hollow con-
centric spheres." (By ''singular," by the way, he
probably meant "curious" — the notion was never
"singular," it was held by thousands.) But true,
true! Not profoundly, perhaps, but how obviously
true! Orpheus and Odysseus and Dante did not de-
scend into Hell, really. There are no such places as
Utopia or the Slough of Despond or the Delectable
Mountains or Laputa or the Woods of Westermain or
Hy Brazil — really. And the cow never jumped over
the moon, really. But, poor thing, she might try ! if
she weren't suffering from the footnote and mouth
disease. In short, there are such things as parables,
and the greatest of teachers have not disdained them.
This parable presents a truth, and one of the two
most important truths in the world: — the Universe is
not a Chaos hut a Harmony.
122 Studies in Literature
II
Now the other and only equally important truth in
the world is that this macrocosm of the Universe, with
its harmony, cannot be apprehended at all except as it
is focussed upon the eye, intellect and soul of Man,
the microcosm. All systems of philosophy — from the
earliest analysed in ''Ritter and Preller " down to James
and Bergson — inevitably work out to this, that the
universal harmony is meaningless and nothing to man
save in so far as he can apprehend it, and that he can
apprehend it only by reference to some corresponding
^ harmony in himself. He is, let us repeat the admission
— ^You are, I am — but the million-millionth atom of
a speck. None the less that atom, being sentient, is
reflective: being reflective, draws and contracts the
whole into its tiny ring. Impercipient, what were we
but dead things?
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Percipient — solely by the grace of percipience, we are
inheritors of it all, and kings. To quote one of the
poets, Traherne, with whom I am to deal :
But little did the infant dream
That all the treasures of the world were by:
And that himself was so the cream
And crown of all which round about did lie.
Yet thus it was : the Gem,
The Diadem,
The ring enclosing all
That stand upon this earthly ball,
\
Seventeenth Century Poets 123
The Heavenly eye,
Much wider than the sky,
Wherein they all included were,
The glorious Soul, that was the King
Made to possess them, did appear
A small and little thing !
Here another, Henry Vaughan :
I saw Eternity, the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it. Time, in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres.
Like a vast shadow mov'd. .
In that shadow he sees men of all sorts and conditions
— the lover, the "darksome statesman," the ''fearful
miser, ' ' the ' ' downright epicure ' ' — pursuing their parti-
cular cheats of shadow :
Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing and weep, soar'd up into the Ring ;
But most would use no wing.
"O fools!" — said I — "thus to prefer dark night
Before true light !
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the Sun, and be
More bright than he!"
But as I did their madnes so discusse.
One whisper'd thus,
"This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide
But for his Bride."
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III
So we have two rings — the immense orchestral ring
of the Universe wheeling above and around us, and
the tiny percipient ring which is the pupil of your
eye or mine threaded to a brain infinitesimal and yet
infinitely capable. But there is one thing more to be
said — and a thing of first importance concerning this
little soul of man. It instinctively aspires, yearns to
know the greater harmony, if only to render it a more
perfect obedience : and it aspires, yearns, through a sense
of likeness, of oneness, of sonship. Man is, after all,
a part of the Universe and just as surely as the Pleiades
or Arcturus. Moreover he feels in himself a harmony
correspondent with the greater harmony of his quest.
His heart pumps his blood to a rhythm; like the plants
by which he is fed, he comes to birth, grows, begets his
kind, enjoys and adorns his day, dies, and returns to
earth; and by seasons regulates his life, as summer
and winter, seedtime and harvest sweep their circle
over him, rhythmical and recurrent, to find him and his
house standing, his garden a little better planted, his
task a trifle advanced to completion. And then? —
why then, of course, he is gone: another has his place,
and digs his patch. But while his day lasts, the brain
just behind his sweating brow is the percipient centre
upon which the whole cosmic circle focusses itself as the
sun through a burning-glass : and he is not shrivelled up
by it. On the contrary, he feels that it is all for him.
As Traherne writes :
The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people
were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as
much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces.
The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and
Seventeenth Century Poets 125
stars, and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator
and enjoyer of it.
And again, magnificently:
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself
floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens,
and crowned with the stars.
Yes, and moreover man nurses a native impulse to
merge himself in the greater harmony and be one with
it; a spirit in his heart (as the Scripture puts it) "of
adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father. " Open your
Browning and read Johannes Agricola:
There's heaven above, and night by night
I look right through its gorgeous roof;
No suns and moons though e'er so bright
Avail to stop me; splendour-proof
I keep the broods of stars aloof,
For I intend to get to God,
For 'tis to God I speed so fast,
For in God's breast, my own abode
Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed^
I lay my spirit down at last.
I lie where I have always lain,
God smiles as he has always smiled;
Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,"
Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled
The heavens, God thought on me his child.
IV
** All very well,* ' you m.ay urge : * 'but hov/ is it done? '*
Well it is not done by the way of philosophy. The
quarrel between philosophy and poetry is notorious
and inveterate: the patronage of poetry by philosophy
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126 Studies in Literature
as stupid as it is solemnly recognisable. For philosophy
attempts to comprehend God's purposes into some
system or another: a way which, if effectual, at once
enables man to teach God his business, or at least to
nag him about it, playing Egeria to his Numa. ' ' God, ' *
says Heine, ''created man in his image — and man made
haste to return the compliment. " The philosophers are
always returning the compliment, stoking the chimneys
of Sion red-hot to run out the Almighty's purposes
into moulds of this or that system. But if by a stretch
of fancy we can conceive Hegel or Comte or Bergson
or any of these constructives as knowing all about it,
why then Hegel or Comte or Bergson is theoretically
as good as God — and then, the Lord stiffen, for us all,
the last barrier between theory and practice !
The poet is more modest. He aspires, not to com-
prehend but to apprehend: to pierce, by flashes, to some
point or other of the great wheeling circle. I have put
it thus in an earlier lecture — There are certain men,
granted to dwell among us, of more delicate mental
texture than their fellows; men (often in the rough-
and-tumble unhappy therefore), whose minds have, as
it were, exquisite filaments to intercept, apprehend and
conduct stray messages between the outer mystery of
the Universe and the inner mystery of the individual
soul; even as telegraphy has learnt to snatch stray
messages wandering over waste waters of ocean. And
these men are poets.
V
Still you may ask, **How is this apprehending done?
What is the process?"
Why, Gentlemen, last term, in a cotirse of lectures
**0n the Art of Reading" — a course which I hope to
Seventeenth Century Poets 127
take up again after Christmas and to continue — I
insisted almost to weariness on the trinity in Man:
What does, What knows, What is. I insisted almost to
weariness that through What is lies the way to spiritual ^
understanding; that, all spirit attracting all spirit as
surely as all matter attracts all matter, it is only by
becoming like them, by being like them, that we ap-
prehend a spiritual truth in Dante, Shakespeare or
Tolstoy; as in that way and no other they brought the
angel down. Paley's Evidences? — a folly of perversion !
Any child has surer evidence within him ; as any child,
taking up Hamlet, feels that it was written for him, and
in no condescension either — he is the Prince of Denmark.
The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. A lost province?
Maybe: but we know today, Gentlemen, how a lost
province will remember its parent state, how hard a
road the parent will travel to recover that which was lost.
You may not agree with me that here lies the deepest
secret of poetry: but I present it to you as a historical
fact that here lies the central tenet of the Mystics. Man
and the Universe and God are in nature One: Unity
(if we can find it) runs through all diversities and
harmonises them. Therefore to know anything of
God Himself we must be, to that extent, like God:
therefore, too, the best part of revenge upon an enemy
(think of it, in these days) is not to be like him.
VI
But still you ask, **What is the process?'* Surely
that lies implicit in what has been said. Man has in
him — I will not say a "subliminal self" — but a soul
listening within for a message; so fain to hear that
sometimes it must arise and tip-toe to the threshold :
u^.
r
128 Studies in Literature
News from a foreign country came
As if my treasure and my wealth lay there;
So much it did my heart inflame,
*Twas wont to call my Soul into mine ear;
Which thither went to meet
The approaching sweet,
And on the threshold stood
To entertain the unknown Good.
It hover'd there
As if 'twould leave mine ear,
And was so eager to embrace
The joyful tidings as they came,
*Twould almost leave its dwelling-place
To entertain that same.
But the news comes from without, in its own good
^ time and often in guise totally surprising, like the
Messiah :
They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high:
Thou cam'st, a little baby thing,
That made a woman cry.
You must (says the mystic) await the hour and trust
the invitation, neither of Which you may command.
The poets (say they) do not read the Word by vigorous
striving and learning, as your philosophers do : neither,
like the priests of Baal, do they cut themselves and yell.
Nor do they wrestle with God like Jacob; but wait,
prepare themselves with Mary, and say, ''Be it unto me
according to thy word." They wait, in what one of
them called "a wise passiveness " :
The eye — it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.
Seventeenth Century Poets 129
Not less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.
Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking, -
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?
And again this same Wordsworth, in his Tintern Abbey ^
tells of ''that serene and blessed mood" wherein
the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul :
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Let this, then, be said today about the mystical poets.
Their way is not to strive and cry: it is enough for
them to wait, receptacles of the divine passing breath.
If you command, "Strike and sing us a song of Sion, "
they answer, *'How can we sing the songs of Sion in
a strange land?" but the harp abandoned and hung
on a willow by the waters of Babylon may catch at
evening (say they) and hum a wind whispering from
Israel. The poet merely by waiting and trusting arrives
per saltum at truths to which the philosopher, pack-
laden and varicose upon the military road of logic, can
never reach.
There yet remain two things to be said about mystic-
ism; and perhaps a third, at the end.
The first is that as a historical fact all mystics, how-
L^'
130 Studies in Literature
ever diverse their outlook or inlook, have been curiously
gracious and yet more curiously happy men. They
have found, if not contentment itself, the way of
contentment and an anchorage for the soul. They
possess it in patience. They are the pure in heart and
blessed because they see, or believe they see, God.
The second is that, possessed with a sense of unity
in all things, likeness in all things, every mystic has
a propensity to deal in symbols, to catch at illustrations
i/which to him seem natural enough, but to us far-fetched,
* 'conceited," not in pari materia. You have, all the
while, to lay account with this in dealing with these
seventeenth century men, as I shall show.
Now to return to Donne on whom we discoursed last
week. He is obviously an imperfect mystic, being too
restlessly intellectual, having little or none of Words-
worth's "wise passiveness." He strives, he cries: and
i/his wit is such that he will fetch an illustration from
anywhere. I suppose his poem The Flea to be about
the most merely disgusting in our language. He will
ruin an exquisite poem (for us) by comparing two lovers'
souls with a pair of compasses :
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff e twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other doe.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it.
And growes erect, as that comes home.
Pass that : but what shall we say to this ?
Seventeenth Century Poets 131
As the sweet sweat of Roses in a Still,
As that which from chaf'd muskats pores doth trill,
As the Almighty Balme of th' early East,
Such are the sweat drops of my Mistris breast.
VIII
George Herbert — of the family of the great Earls of
Pembroke, though of a cadet branch — was born the
3rd of April, 1593, in the castle of Montgomery; the
fifth of seven sons of Sir Richard Herbert and his
wife Magdalen, and younger brother of Edward, Lord
Herbert of Cherbury. Sir Richard, whom George re-
membered as a black-avised, well-knit, capable man,
brave and somewhat stern, died in the boy's fourth year
and sleeps under an alabaster tomb in Montgomery
church. The widow thereafter consecrated her life to
her children. She did ''often bless God, that they were
neither defective in their shapes, or in their reason ; and
very often reprove them that they did not praise God
for so great a blessing. ' ' On her death George lamented
her in one of the most exquisite elegies ever written
in Latin by an Englishman :
Tota renident aede decus et sua vitas
Animo renidentes prius.
With comeliness and kindness shone the whole
House, for they first were radiant in her soul.
The close friend and adviser of her widowhood (pray
note) was Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, and Donne
eulogised her in a poem The Autumnal, and preached her
funeral sermon. Donne was also a constant friend of
132 Studies in Literature
George Herbert, and sent him a gift, a seal, from his
death-bed.
This is not the place to speak of the eldest boy,
Herbert of Cherbury, philosopher, duellist, diplomatist,
poet and most remarkable fop of his age. All the
Herberts have had ''blood"; from Charlemagne, to
whom they seriously trace back their descent, to Sid-
ney Herbert, War Minister and friend of Florence Night-
ingale— to carry it no farther.
^ But we speak of George. At twelve he was sent to
Westminster School, where (says Walton) ''the beauties
of his pretty behaviour and wit shined, and became so
eminent and lovely . . . that he seemed to be marked
out for piety, and to become the care of Heaven, and of
a particular good angel to guard and guide him . ' ' From
Westminster he proceeded to Trinity here, where he
stuck to his books and was in due time elected a Fellow,
becoming Public Orator to the University in 1619.
As yet he had no intention to devote himself to the
priesthood, though it seems that his mother desired it.
On the contrary. King James's frequent visits to the
University set the young Orator dreaming of Court
preferment. With his high birth, his acknowledged
talents, his engaging presence and manners always
singularly attractive, there was nothing extravagant in
the ambition, and we hear that he made himself master
of Italian, Spanish and French with a view to qualifying
himself for a Secretaryship of State. But the two great
men on whose favour he counted died just then, and
King James soon after. "Nature," said a not too
friendly critic, "intended him for a knight-errant, but
disappointed ambition made him a saint." Well, let
us be thankful for saints, however they come.
-, With or without a sore heart Herbert withdrew from
Seventeenth Century Poets 133
Cambridge and spent some years in retirement, the end
of which was a resolve to take Holy Orders. As he
puts it, in penitence :
Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the town :
Thou didst betray me to a lingering book,
And wrapt me in a gown.
In 1630 he accepted the living of Bemerton in Wilt-
shire, and was ordained priest. Meantime he had
married Jane Danvers, the daughter of a Wiltshire
squire — according to Walton, after a three days'
courtship — and
The third day after he was made Rector of Bemerton, and
had changed his sword and silk clothes into a canonical coat,
he returned so habited . . . and immediately after he had
seen and saluted his wife, he said to her — "You are now a
Minister's wife, and must now so far forget your father's
house, as not to claim a precedence of any of your parish-
ioners: for you are to know, that a Priest's wife can claim
no precedence or place, but that which she piurchases by
her obliging humility." . . . And she was so meek a wife, as
to assure him, "it was no vexing news to her, and that he
should see her observe it with a cheerful willingness."
And this good wife was as good as her word — Walton
adds, the love of her parishioners ''followed her in all
places, as inseparably as shadows follow substances in
sunshine. ' '
If ever two lives illustrated the beauty of holiness
they were those lived by George and Jane Herbert at
Bemerton; dull lives, intent mainly on parish work, or
repairing church or chapel or rectory, over the mantel
of the chimney of which he graved for his successor: ;
134 Studies in Literature
If thou chance for to find
A new house to thy mind,
And built without thy cost;
Be good to the poor,
As God gives thee store,
And then my labour's not lost.
It was a homely, homekeeping life, diversified only by
trips into Salisbury — the Rector with a fiddle under
his arm — to hear and join in music, of which he was
passionately fond. But when the bell rang in the
parsonage chapel, as it did twice daily, the labourers
in the fields let their oxen rest and bowed over a prayer.
Let me read one short passage from Walton: for it
ends on one of my favourite quotations, which you
may recognise :
In another walk to Salisbury, he saw a poor man with a
poorer horse, that was fallen under his load : they were both
in distress, and needed present help; which Mr. Herbert
perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor
man to unload, and after to load, his horse. The poor man
blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man; and was
so like the Good Samaritan, that he gave him money to
refresh both himself and his horse; and told him, "That if
he loved himself he should be merciful to his beast." Thus
he left the poor man: and at his coming to his musical
friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George
Herbert, which used to be so trim and clean, came into that
company so soiled and discomposed: but he told them the
occasion. And when one of the company told him "He
had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment," his
answer was, "That the thought of what he had done would
prove music to him at midnight; and that the omission of it
would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience,
whensoever he should pass by that place : for if I be bound
Seventeenth Century Poets 135
to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am
bound, so far as it is in my power, to practice what I pray
for. And though I do not wish for the like occasion every
day, yet let me tell you, I would not willingly pass one day
of my life without comforting a sad soul, or shewing mercy;
and I praise God for this occasion. And now let's tune our
instruments."
A life — as you read of it in Walton — so delicately
holy, so fragrant of the Wiltshire water meadows along
which the biographer himself wandered with his rod,
fishing for trout and ''studying to be quiet," that it
seemed made to tick on and on like a well-oiled clock!
But Herbert had brought the seeds of consumption in
him from the fens of Cambridge. He knew it, and,
in Dr. Grosart's words, "he not merely walked down
the 'valley of the shadow of death' — knowing no
'fear' and so making no 'haste' — but sang." A little
before the end he withdrew from Bemerton to lodge
with his friend Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding in
Huntingdon, that famous religious house of retirement.
There he died, and v:as buried on the 3rd day of March,
1633. Upon a most touching, most eloquent descrip-
tion of the end, and, after it, upon a pause, "Thus he
lived, and thus he died, like a Saint, unspotted of the
world, full of alms-deeds, full of humility," Walton
(sad to say) concludes with a bad misquotation of
Shirley's :
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.
Had he remembered even a little bit better, he might
have quoted the same thought from a poem of Herbert's
own, and nowadays his most famous. I mean the one
beginning
136 Studies in Literature
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright!
The bridal of the earth and sky.
But the close, being marred by conceits, is far inferior
to Shirley's,'
Only a sweet and virtuous soul.
Like season'd timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives. . . .
which offends, even after we have reminded ourselves
that "coal," in Herbert's day, meant charcoal. But
that is always the trouble with Herbert. The example
^ of Donne had infected him, who possessed scarcely a
tithe of Donne's wit; so that he is always saying beauti-
^ ful things and always spoiling (for us) his best lyrics.
.Very few are flawless. Now and then he can make a
' conceit lovely, as when of man's heavenly comfort he
writes
Not that he may not here
Taste of the cheer,
But as birds drink, and straight lift up their head,
So must he sip and think
Of better drink
He may attain to, after he is dead.
And even a pun (you know) may be made lovely by
emotion. Witness this little one in Hood's Song of
the Shirt :
Work — work — work, . . .
While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling
As if to show me their sunny backs
And twit me with the spring.
Seventeenth Century Poets 137
But when, of man's declension from childish innocence,
Herbert says
The growth of flesh is but a blister
we must demur.
It is the trouble with Herbert, among many beauties
to find any unflawed by this fault. I know three or
four only. Let me read you two :
Discipline
Throw away Thy rod,
Throw away Thy wrath;
0 my God,
Take the gentle path !
For my heart's desire
Unto Thine is bent :
1 aspire
To a full consent.
Not a word or look
I affect to own,
But by book,
And Thy Book alone.
Though I fail, I weep;
Though I halt in pace,
Yet I creep
To the throne of grace.
Then let wrath remove;
Love will do the deed;
For with love
Stony hearts will bleed.
Love is swift cf foot ;
Love's a man of war.
And can shoot.
And can hit from far.
Who can 'scape his bow?
That which wrought on Thee,
Brought Thee low.
Needs must work on me.
Throw away Thy rod;
Though man frailties hath,
Thou art God:
Throw away Thy wrath !
Love
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
138 Studies in Literature
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "Who bore the blame? "
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
It seems almost desecrating to draw your attention down
to the mere technique of so lovely, so apparently abso-
lute a thing. Yet I think you will admire it none the
less for noting the masterly use of monosyllables and
the exquisite sense of pause, hesitancy and finally
command, produced by it :
Love said, "You shall be he."
"And know you not, " says Love, "Who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
Monosyllables throughout.
IX
The Herberts were a high family. But in Wales
dwelt another hardly less noble, the Vaughans : and the
two had preserved an ancient inveterate feud. Of the
Vaughans in 1622 was born the poet Henry, in Breck-
nockshire at Llansaintffraed on the bank of the Usk.
Seventeenth Century Poets 139
He was a twin child. We know little of his parents,
though that old gossip Aubrey, who happened to be
a relative, informs us with a relative's outspokenness
that the father was "a coxcomb and no honester than
he should be — He cozened me out of 50^. once."
The twin brothers Henry and Thomas received their
schooling from a clergyman hard by ; and in due course
both- went up to Jesus College, Oxford; then, as today,
the resort of young Welshmen. Thomas took his
degree, and entered Holy Orders; became rector of
his native parish, but was ejected by the Parliamentary
Commissioners; returned to Oxford; studied alchemy
and wrote of it under the name Eugenius Philalethes;
wrote some English and Latin verse too; and died in
1666. Henry left the university without taking a
degree; studied law in London; got entangled in
politics, on the royalist side: lost his money and hopes
of a career at the bar; fell back upon medicine and
retired to Brecknockshire, where among his native hills
and beside his beloved Usk he won such present fame
and awards as attend a benevolent medical practitioner
in the country ; and in the intervals of his practice trans-
lated some devotional prose works and left the poems
we possess. He died in 1695 at the age of seventy-
three — a fairly long life; but, as you see, quite a short
story. ---.
The first and most obvious remark upon Vaughan is
that his genius was largely imitative; the next and
almost as obvious, that it was curiously original.
For the imitation, his debt to Herbert is often patent,
sometimes flagrant ; and indeed here and there amounts
to downright literary pilfering. For a couple of ex-
amples— in Herbert's poem The Agonie occurs this
conceit — the beauty of which lifts it into a thought :
V
/
140 Studies in Literature
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine
Which my God feels as blood, but I, as wine.
Tiirn to Vaughan's poem The Passion and read
Most blessed Vine!
Whose juice so good
I feel as Wine,
But thy faire branches felt as blood.
The art of pilfering and spoiling could scarcely be better
illustrated. The verse, as verse, is poorer: and the
obtruded personification of the Vine robs Herbert's
fancy of half his delicacy, converting a subtle metaphor
into a flat simile. Take a second example. — Herbert
in his Providence writes
Rain, do not hurt my flowers; but gently spend
Your hony-drops.
Vaughan in his Rainbow again conveys and spoils:
When thou dost shine darkness looks white and fair,
Forms turn to Musick, clouds to smiles and air:
Rain gently spends his honey-drops. . . .
But the sum of these direct borrowings by no means
exhausts — does not begin to exhaust — Vaughan 's debt
to Herbert; as anyone may convince himself by half-
an-hour's study of their poems side by side. (We must
always remember however that plagiarism, in days when
poets rarely printed their poems, but circulated them in
MS. among friends was by no means the crime a later
age has made it. It did the robbed one no commercial
injury.) The influence of Herbert pervades and is felt
everywhere. In the invention of "conceits,' too,
I
Seventeenth Century Poets 141
Vaughan the more certainly stamps himself the imitator
the more audaciously he goes (as we should say) one
better than his master. Herbert can be quaint: but
Herbert must resign and lay down his arms before such
a stanza as this describing daybreak:
But, as in nature, when the day
Breaks, night adjourns,
Stars shut up shop, mists pack away,
And the moon mourns.
Stars *'shut up shop" ! Et sunt commercia coeli with a
vengeance !
So much for the debit side; now for the credit. At
first sight it seems a paradox to claim that a poet so
imitative is actually more original and certainly of
deeper insight as well as of ampler, more celestial range [^
than the man he copied. And yet it is so, as I think
almost anyone will confess after reading Vaughan *s
Eternity or The Timber:
Sure thou didst flourish once! and many springs,
Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers,
Pass'd o'er thy head; many light hearts and wings,
Which now are dead, lodged in thy living bowers.
And still a new succession sings and flies;
Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot
Towards the old and still enduring skies,
While the low violet thrives at their root.
But thou beneath the sad and heavy line
Of death, doth waste all senseless, cold, and dark;
Where not so much as dreams of light may shine.
Nor any thought of greenness, leaf, or bark.
142 Studies in Literature
And yet — as if some deep hate and dissent,
Bred in thy growth betwixt high winds and thee,
Were still alive — thou dost great storms resent
Before they come, and know'st how near they be.
Else all at rest thou liest, and the fierce breath
Of tempests can no more disturb thy ease;
But this thy strange resentment after death
Means only those who broke — in life — thy peace.
Or this poem on Friends Departed, of which I will read
some verses :
They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit ling'ring here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest
After the sun's remove.
I see them walking in an air of glory.
Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.
0 holy Hope! and high Humility,
High as the heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have show'd them me,
To kindle my cold love.
Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the Just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark ;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark !
Seventeenth Century Poets 143
He that hath found sometiedged bird's nest may know,
At first sight, if the bird be flown;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now.
That is to him unknown.
And yet as Angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul, when man doth sleep :
So some strange thoughts transcend otir wonted themes,
■X And into glory peep.
If a star were confined into a tomb,
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lock'd her up gives room.
She'll shine through all the sphere.
0 Father of eternal life, and all
Created glories under Thee !
Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty.
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass:
Or else remove me hence unto that hill.
Where I shall need no glass.
The paradox is not so strange as it appears. Some
most original men — Vaughan among them — want start-
ing. They have the soluble genius within them, but
it will not crystallise of itself; it must have a shape,
a mould. And such men take the mould supplied by
their age: it may not be the best for them, but it is
what comes to hand. That Vaughan 's ''conceits" are
often abominably bad where Herbert's were good, does
not prove him the lesser genius. Rather, the argument
may lie the other way — that he executed them badly
because he was naturall}'- superior to such devices,
1/
144 Studies in Literature
[whereas they fitted Herbert's cleverer talent like a
/glove. To prove how simple and direct Vaughan could
be when he chose I will conclude this sketch of him
with a short and well-known poem quite free of conceits.
It is called Peace :
My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
All skilful in the wars :
There, above noise and danger,
Sweet Peace sits crown'd with smiles.
And One born in a manger
Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious Friend,
And — 0 my soul, awake! —
Did in pure love descend
To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flower of Peace, "
The Rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges;
For none can thee secure
But One who never changes —
Thy God, thy life, thy cure.
I propose in my next lecture. Gentlemen, to start by
examining one most important poem of Vaughan 's,
which will lead us on to deal expeditiously with Tra-
herne, Quarles, the two Fletchers, Crashaw, and maybe
one or two other poets on this line of spiritual ancestry.
Yet one last word, which I had almost forgotten.
Can you not see that, while we have mystics among us,
death for ^ our literature is impossible ? No school-
master, even, can kill an instinct which lifts the heads
Seventeenth Century Poets 145
of all nobler young spirits to look past his herding,
for they scent the high water-brooks. So mysticism too,
in its turn, witnesses and guarantees that until the soul
of man be dust, literature shall be alive.
10
III. TRAHERNE, CRASHAW AND OTHERS
JPVERYONE knows Wordsworth's ode Intimations
^ of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child-
hood: and the stanza
/ Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And Cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy. . . .
I need rehearse no more. And almost everyone knows
— or, to speak accurately, has been told (which is a
somewhat different thing) — that Wordsworth borrowed
his thought from Vaughan's famous poem The Retreat:
Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy !
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought :
When yet I had not walk'd above
A mile or two from my first Love . . .
146
Seventeenth Century Poets 1^7
t'
When on some gilded cloud, or flow'r
My gazing soul would dwell an hour.
And in those weaker glories spy-
Some shadows of Eternity.
Now very likely, indeed, Wordsworth took it from
Vaughan: but quite as easily he might have taken it
from any one of a score of the seventeenth century
writers with whom we are dealing. With them man's
fall from grace was a preoccupation. How does the
greatest of them begin his greatest poem ?
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse!
Please understand that I do no more here than assert
a historical fact, expressing no opinion outside the
province of this Chair as by Statute restricted; that I
have not the authority, nor the leisure, nor (anyway)
the inclination to re-start the Pelagian heresy in Cam-
bridge. I simply affirm, without comment, that these
theological poets and preachers of the seventeenth
century — happy though they were in having no Dar-
winian hypothesis of man's descent to answer — were
intrigued — almost, you may say, one and all — by man's
lapse from a state of innocence. You may pursue their
curiosity about this down (say) to Dr. South, who was
born in 1633 ^'^^ ^i^^ ^ Canon of Christ church at
eighty- three — so that, if actual experience or obser-
vation could attest man's depravity, he had, as men
go, plenty of both. Take up a sermon of his, Human
Perfection : or Adam, in Paradise, and read
H^ . Studies in Literature
*
The image of God in man [he writes] is that universal
rectitude of all the faculties of the soul, by which they stand
apt and disposed to their respective duties and operations.
And first for its noblest facult}^ the understanding : it was
then [i.e., in Paradise] sublime, clear and inspiring, and, as it
were, the soul's upper region, lofty and serene, free from the
vapours and disturbances of the inferior affections. It was
the leading controlling faculty; all the passions wore the
colours of reason; it did not so much persuade as command;
it was not counsel but dictator ... It did not so properly
apprehend as irradiate the object; not so much find, as make
things intelligible. It did arbitrate upon the several reports
of sense and all varieties of imagination: not like a drowsy
judge, only hearing, but also directing their verdict. In
sum, it was vegete, quick and lively; open as the day,
untainted as the morning, full of the innocence and sprightli-
ness of youth; it gave the soul a bright and ftill view into
all things.
South then divides this Understanding into Under-
standing Speculative, which gives the mind its general
notions and rules, and the Practical Understanding,
*'that storehouse of the soul in which are treasured up
the rules of action and the seeds of morality. Of the
first, the Speculative Understanding with its notions,
he goes on :
Now it was Adam's happiness in the State of Innocence to
have these clear and unsullied. He came into the world a
philosopher. He could see consequences yet dormant in
their principles, and effects yet unborn and in the womb of
their causes; his understanding could almost pierce into
future contingents; his conjectures improving even to pro-
phecy, or to certainties of prediction: till his fall it was
ignorant of nothing but of sin; or at least it rested in the
notion without the smart of the experiment. Could any
difficulty have been propounded, the solution would have
Seventeenth Century Poets
been as early as the proposal. . . . Like a bettei
medes, the issue of all his enquiries was an eupiQxa. ^An
euprjxa, the offspring of his brain without the sweat of his
brow. . . . An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam,
and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.
Now if you ask me, Gentlemen, what I think of that,
as prose, I answer that I find it not half as good as it
looks. If you ask me what I think of its doctrine, I
answer that I don't believe a word of it : that the learned
Dr. South is dispensing positive information on a sub-
ject of which he is as ignorant as anyone else. Adam's
** understanding could almost pierce into future con-
tingents. * ' Why * ' almost ' ' ? Why, because there was,
as King George III said of the dumpling, the apple to be
accounted for. So when, of the practical understanding,
South goes on to instance such maxims as ''That God is
to be worshipped, " ''That parents are to be honoured, "
"That a man's word is to be kept, " I ask concerning the
middle proposition, what Adam could possibly know
about parents, or at that time even about children,
having neither? As when South assures us, of Love,
that "this affection, in the state of innocence, was
happily pitched upon its right object," I cannot forgo
the reflection that, after all, there was but one lady in
the garden. Forgive me that I speak brusquely. In
my belief the first three chapters of Genesis contain
nothing to justify South; and in my belief no handling
can well be too rough-and-ready for one who expands
himself so pretentiously upon ground where an angel
might be diffident.
But this is opinion : and I have quoted South's sermon,
not for what it is worth as opinion, but for what it is
worth as evidence of a historical fact — that the minds
Studies in Literature
of JjPF' seventeenth century played more persistently
tlmn do ours with the picture of a state of innocence and
the way of man's fall from it, and, by consequence,
with the notion which Wordsworth afterwards elabo-
rated— the notion of an ante-natal realm of bliss out of
which the child descends (as the children you may
remember in Maeterlinck's Oiseau Bleu, the little ones
waiting to be born), to lose his ineffable aura as this
world entraps him, encloses him in the shades of its
prison-house.
Let us turn to a more delicate mind than South's, and
consult the Platonist John Earle. These seventeenth
century men, as you know, were much given to penning
Characters more or less in imitation of the Characters
of Theophrastus. It was a literary craze in its day;
and not seldom, to my thinking, they achieved things
far more philosophical, as well as far more poetical,
than any in Theophrastus 's range. Here is what John
Earle, in his Microcosmographie, writes of ''A Child":
A Child
He is nature's fresh picture newly drawn in oil; which
time, and much handling, dims and defaces. His soul is
yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the
world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note-book.
He is purely happy because he knows no evil, nor hath made
means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He arrives
not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures evils to come
by foreseeing them. He kisses and loves all, and, when the
smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater. . . .
We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest :
and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems
and mockings of men's business. His father hath writ
him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of
Seventeenth Century Poets 151
his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what
innocence he has outUved. The elder he grows he is a stair
lower from God; and like his first father much worse in his
breeches.
He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse;
the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his
simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat,
he had got Eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but
one heaven for another.
II
But for faith in this notion which Earle treated so
playfully, and for burning fervour in that faith we must
go to a lowly follower of Herbert and Vaughan, to an
exceedingly humble man of heart — Thomas Traherne.
Who was Traherne? Well, we know him now to
have been a poor Welsh parson, born in 1636 or there-
abouts, somewhere on the Welsh border (likeliest at
Hereford), the son of a shoemaker; that somehow in
1652 he managed to enter at Brasenose College, Oxford,
was made Bachelor of Arts in 1656, Master of Arts in
1 66 1, Bachelor of Divinity in 1669; that he took Orders
and became vicar of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, about
1661; where, he tells us, "being seated among silent
trees, and meads and hills " he made a resolve to cling to
this childish f eh city. Yes, " I chose rather to live upon
ten pounds a year, and to go in leather clothes, and
feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my
time clearly to myself"; that after nine years or so he
was removed to London to be chaplain to Sir Orlando
Bridgman, Lord Keeper of the Seals, and that he died
in Bridgman's house at Teddington in October, 1674,
aged but thirty-eight.
For two hundred and fifty years his writings were
152 Studies in Literature
lost, and his name was not even the shade of a name.
When, in 1896 or 1897, a Mr. Brooks picked up two
innominate volumes in MS. for a few pence at a street
bookstall, and submitted them to Dr. Grosart, that
veteran at once and excusably pronounced them to be
the work of Vaughan and set about including them in
a new edition of Yaughan which, just before his death,
he was endeavouring to find means to publish. On his
death, his library being dispersed, the volumes again
started wandering. It were a fascinating story — had I
the time to tell it — how they came into the hands of
the late Mr. Bertram Dobell, most lovable of booksellers
(which is saying a great deal), how Mr. Dobell hit on a
clue, followed it, and discovered the true author, and
how later a third MS. not bearing Traherne's name, was
found in the British Museum. I will only recount my
own very small part in the affair. Seventeen years ago,
when preparing the Oxford Book of English Verse I was
sent by the late Professor York Powell, without com-
ment, a bookseller's catalogue with a poem on its back
page. It was the poem beginning ' ' News from a foreign
country came, " part of which I read to you a fortnight
ago. I made enquiries, and Mr. Dobell very kindly
copied out some other poems for me — none of which,
however, seemed to me quite so good as News, which
duly went into the Oxford Book — and with them some
prose passages from the second MS. volume entitled Cen-
turies of Meditations. I wrote back that the prose
seemed to me even finer stuff than the poems, and
urged him to publish it. The poems appeared — that is,
first saw print — in 1903, Centuries of Meditations in 1908,
and I cannot forbear telling you what pleasure it was to
open the volume, to find my own name on the editor's
page of dedication, and to reflect (a little wistfully if
Seventeenth Century Poets 153
not whimsically) that maybe this author, forgotten for
two hundred and fifty years might, after another two
hundred and fifty, rescue from complete oblivion the
name of another who had admired him.
Well, let that be — we all have our little vanities.
But of Traherne himself the first and last word is that
he carries into a sustained ecstasy this adoration of the
wisdom of childhood — Regnum Scientiae ut regnum coeli
non nisi sub persona infantis intratur: and it is truly mar-
vellous how the man can harp so long and elaborately
on one string. I have said that his verse, in my opinion,
ranks lower than his prose : but here is a specimen :
How like an Angel came I down!
How bright are all things here !
When first among His works I did appear
0 how their Glory me did crown!
The world resembled his Eternity
In which my soul did walk;
And everything that I did see
Did with me talk.
• •••••
The streets were paved with golden stones,
The boys and girls were mine,
0 how did all their lovely faces shine !
The sons of men were holy ones,
In joy and beauty they appear'd to me:
And every thing which here I found,
(While like an angel I did see)
Adorn 'd the ground.
• •••••
Proprieties [properties] themselves were mine,
And hedges ornaments;
Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents
Did not divide my joys, but all combine.
154 Studies in Literature
Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteem'd
My joys by others worn:
For me they all to wear them seem'd
When I was born.
So much for his verse : now for similar thinking in prose:
These pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the
womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the
best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By
the Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His
special favour I remember them till now. . . .
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never
should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had
stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones
of the street were as precious as gold : the gates were at first
the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first
through one of the gates transported and ravished me,
their . . . unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and al-
most mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonder-
ful things. The Men! O what venerable and revered
creatiu*es did the aged seem ! Immortal Cherubims.
At this point I break off to wonder, irreverently, what
Traherne would have made of some of my own uncles
and aunts; the Calvinistic one. At that age I could
have spared them to him or to anyone for experiment.
And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and
maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty ! Boys and
girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving
jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. But
all things abided eternally as they were in their proper
places. . . . The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be
built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was
mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and
silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins
Seventeenth Century Poets 155
and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun
and moon and stars, and all the World was mine; and
I the only spectator and en j oyer of it. . . . So that with
much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty
devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as
it were, a little child again that I may enter into the King-
dom of God.
So much then, again, for Traherne. But before
leaving him I will ask you to note that Donne, Herbert,
Vaughan and he — the four whose spiritual kinship we
have been tracing, came all by ancestry, proud or poor,
from the Welsh Marches. Donne's forefathers were of
Wales and spelt their name "Dwynne. " The Herberts
were lords over Pembroke, the Vaughans over Breck-
nockshire, Traherne a poor tradesman's son of Hereford.
I distrust generalisations : but there would seem to be J
something here in ''the Celtic spirit."
Ill
Before taking up another line of mystics let me deal
briefly with three or four who fall to be mentioned
here.
Sir John Davies (1570 or thereabouts- 162 6 — another
Welshman) and Phineas Fletcher (i 582-1 650 or so)
reduced this great order of the universe to harmony ^
with man, its microcosm, in elaborate poems by quaint
methods. Davies in his Orchestra set it all dancing,
treading a measure much like his mistress Queen
Elizabeth, ''high and disposedly. " For a taste:
For loe the Sea that fleets about the Land,
And like a girdle clips her solide waist,
Musicke and measiire both doth understand;
For his great chrystall eye is alwayes cast
156 Studies in Literature
Up to the Moone, and on her fixed fast;
And as she daunceth in her pallid spheere,
So daunceth he about his Center heere.
To Phineas Fletcher and to his Purple Island (entranc-
ing name) I hied as a boy after buried treasure, only to
discover it a weary allegory of the human body and its
functions. (His brother, Giles Fletcher, who died
young, was an imitator of Spenser and does not come
into this purview.)
Henry King, Bishop of Chichester (i 592-1 669),
though little of a mystic, may come in as a friend of
Donne's, one of his legal executors and withal a poet;
of extraordinary charm, too, within the short range
which he knew how to keep, so that you cannot make
his acquaintance but you remember it with pleasure.
He is best known, I suppose, by his lyric "Tell me no
more how fair she is." But let me quote you a few
lines from his lovely Exequy on his Wife:
Meantime thou hast her, earth : much good
May my harm do thee 1 Since it stood
With Heaven's will I might not call
Her longer mine, I give thee all
My short-lived right and interest
In her whom living I loved best.
Be kind to her, and prithee look
Thou write into thy Doomsday book
Each parcel of this rarity
Which in thy casket shrined doth lie,
As thou wilt answer Him that lent —
Not gave — thee my dear monimient.
So close the ground, and 'bout her shade
Black curtains draw : my bride is laid.
Seventeenth Century Poets 157
Sleep on, my Love, in thy cold bed
Never to be disquieted !
My last good-night ! Thou wilt not wake
Till I thy fate shall overtake:
Till age, or grief, or sickness must
Marry my body to that dust
It so much loves; and fill the room
My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.
Stay for me there . . .
Each minute is a short degree
And every hour a step towards thee. . . .
'Tis true — with shame and grief I yield —
Thou, like the van, first took'st the field;
And gotten hast the victory
In thus adventuring to die
Before me, whose more years might crave
A just precedence in the grave.
But hark ! my pulse, like a soft drum,
Beats my approach, tells thee I come;
And slow howe'er my marches be
I shall at last sit down by thee.
The thought of this bids me go on
And wait my dissolution
With hope and comfort. Dear! forgive
The crime — I am content to live
Divided with but half a heart
Till we shall meet and never part.
C--
Nor is William Habington (i 605-1 654) quite a
mystic. Though a Roman Catholic he might be ranked
alongside Herbert, did he own even a measure of Her-
bert's capacity for rapture, for fine excess. His much
admired Nox Nocti Indicat Scientiam
When I survey the bright
Celestial sphere . . .
158 Studies in Literature
says little more than Addison's hymn, **The spacious
firmament on high," says later on: and that, to tell
truth, does not amount to much. Its opening
When I survey the bright
Celestial sphere;
So rich with jewels hung, that Night
Doth like an Ethiop bride appear . . .
is good: or might be, did it not challenge the deadly
comparison with Shakespeare's
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear.
Its close is better :
For as yoiirselves your empires fall,
And every kingdom hath a grave.
Thus those celestial fires.
Though seeming mute.
The fallacy of our desires
And all the pride of life confute : —
For they have watch'd since first
The World had birth:
And found sin in itself accurst
And nothing permanent on Earth.
Quite good commonplace: but commonplace, never-
theless.
As for Christopher Harvey (i 597-1 663), friend of Wal-
ton— a Cheshire man who became rector of Whitney
in Herefordshire (again we are on the Welsh Marches)
— he was a mystic of the epigrammatic kind. He
imitated Herbert and, what is more, didn't care who
Seventeenth Century Poets 159
knew it. The title of his best known volume runs
thus — The Synagogue: or The Shadow of the Temple.
Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations in Imitation of
Mr. George Herbert. Printed for Philemon Stephens at
the Guilded Lyon in St. Paul's Churchyard. The poem
I like best in it is nothing mystical. It opens magni-
ficently, thus
The Bishop? Yes, why not? . . .
but cannot, of course, maintain that level. Two stan-
zas, however, may be worth quoting in these days:
The Bishop? Yes, why not? What doth that name
Import which is unlawful or unfit?
To say The Overseer is the same
In substance, and no hurt (I hope) in it:
But sure if men did not despise the thing.
Such scorn upon the name they would not fling.
Some priests — some presbyters I mean — would be
Each Overseer of his sev'ral cure;
But one Superioiur, to oversee
Them altogether, they will not endure.
This the main difference is, that I can see, —
Bishops they would not have, but they would be.
IV
Before speaking of a more important and more
mystical mystic, Francis Quarles (i 592-1 644), I must*"
say just a word upon a tenet of the mystical faith which
naturally flows from the two principles we have dis-
cussed at some length. If the universe be an ordered
harmony, and the soul of man a tiny lesser harmony,
vibrating to it, yearning to it, seeking to be one with it :
if, again, of recollection it knows itself to have been at
i6o Studies in Literature
some time one with it, though now astray upon earth, a
lost province (as I put it, a fortnight ago) of the King-
dom of God ; why, then, it follows that the King himself
passionately seeks to recover, to retrieve, that which
was lost. The idea of a Christ bruising his feet end-
lessly over stony places, insatiate in search of lost Man,
his brother, or the lost Soul, his desired bride, haunts
all our mystical poetry from that lovely fifteenth cen-
tury poem Quia Amore Langueo, down to Francis
Thompson's Hound of Heaven. In a former lecture I
read Quia Amore Langueo to you almost in extenso.
Suffer me today to recall but two verses of the wounded
Christ chanting his bride :
I crowned her with bliss and she me with thorn;
I led her to chamber and she me to die;
I brought her to worship and she me to scorn;
I did her reverence and she me villany.
To love that loveth is no maistry;
Her hate made never my love her foe:
Ask me then no question why —
Quia amore langueo.
My love is in her chamber: hold your peace!
Make ye no noise, but let her sleep.
My babe I would not were in dis-ease,
I may not hear my dear child weep.
With my pap I shall her keep;
Ne marvel ye not that I tend her to :
The wound in my side were ne'er so deep
But Quia amore langueo.
That cry still haunts out of a small innominate poem
of the century with which we are dealing :
Seventeenth Century Poets i6i
My blood so red
For thee was shed,
Come home again, come home again;
My own sweet heart, come home again!
You've gone astray
Out of your way,
Come home again, come home again!
It haunts Quarles ; but with Quarles it is rather the cry
of the soul, the Bride, seeking the Bridegroom :
I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in
the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I
sought him, but I found him not.
The watchmen that go about the city found me : to whom
I said. Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?
It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found
him whom my soul loveth. I held him and would not let
him go, until I had brought him into my mother's house,
and into the chamber of her that conceived me.
I charge you, 0 ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes
and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake
my love, till he please.
**So I my best-Beloved's am : so he is mine.'* That is a
refrain of Quarles, and his constant note. But in the
one poem I shall quote from him I am redeeming, in
some fashion — or trying to redeem — a wrong. By an
error into which no less a man than the late W. E.
Henley fell along with me, an old book misled us into
giving the lines to so unlikely a man as Rochester.
And there they are, in the Oxford Book of English Verse
ascribed to Rochester, and the ascription must be
corrected though I find it will involve destroying about
sixty pages of stereotyped plates. But they are
Quarles's. They run :
IX
i62 Studies in Literature
Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Sun's enlivening eye?-
Without thy light what light remains in me?
Thou art my life: my way, my light's in thee;
I live, I move, and by thy beams I see.
Thou art my life — If thou but turn away,
My life's a thousand deaths. Thou art my way, —
Without thee, Love, I travel not but stray.
My light thou art : without thy glorious sight
My eyes are darken'd with eternal night.
My Love, thou art my way, my Hfe, my light.
Thou art my way; I wander if thou fly.
Thou art my light; if hid, how blind am I!
Thou art my life; if thou withdraw'st, I die.
My eyes are dark and blind; I cannot see:
To whom or whither should my darkness flee,
But to that light? — and what's that light but thee?
(
If I have lost my path, dear lover, say,
Shall I still wander in a doubtful way?
Love, shall a lamb of Israel's sheepfold stray?
And yet thou turn'st away thy face and fiy'st me!
And yet I sue for grace and thou deny'st me!
Speak, art thou angry. Love, or only try'st me?
Dissolve thy sunbeams, close thy wings and stay!
See, see how I am blind, and dead, and stray!
— 0 thou that art my Hfe, my light, my way !
Seventeenth Century Poets 163
Then work thy will ! If passion bid me flee,
My reason shall obey ; my wings shall be
Stretch'd out no farther than from me to thee!
V
Mention of wings reminds me to say a word — it shall
be no more — on the quaint metrical and typographical
devices in which these poets revelled ; artificialities in far
worse taste than mere puns and verbal conceits ; very far
worse than the rebuses and elaborate emblems around
which Quarles, for example, as a symbolist, wrote so
many of his poems. It was the day of such affecta-
tions ; of ring-posies, acrostics, and the topiary art that
designed mazes, trimmed yew trees and tortured them
to the shapes of lions, camels, huntsmen with hounds.
Its worst excess is seen, possibly, in the tricks (dear to
Herbert, Harvey, and others) of writing verses to the
shape of altars, pyramids, the wings of a bird. And my
word upon these I shall borrow from Bacon's Essay Of
Gardens:
As for the Making of Knots, or Figures, with Divers
Coloured Earths, that they may lie under the Windowes
of the House, on that Side, which the Garden stands, they
be but Toyes: You may see as good Sights, many times,
in Tarts.
VI
Our last poet, Richard Crashaw (1613?-! 649) ran to
excesses of verbal conceit which anybody can arraign,
albeit Johnson rather unaccountably overlooked their
help, which had been priceless, for his indictment of the
metaphysical poets. Everyone knows the fiagrancies
of The Weeper with the Magdalen's tearful eyes :
164 Studies in Literature
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious Oceans,
and the "brisk Cherub" supposed to sip from them
each morning,
and his song
Tastes of this breakfast all day long.
Yes, the flagrancies are flagrant : yet I think too much
has been made of them. For (as I hold the business of
an examiner is always to discover how much a student
does know and never how much he does not), even so
I hold that we may overlook a hundred flagrancies for
such a stanza as this :
The dew no more will weep
The primrose's pale cheek to deck,
The dew no more will sleep
Nuzzled in the lily's neck:
Much rather would it tremble here
And leave them both to be thy tear.
Crashaw, one must admit, is often terribly at his ease
in Sion: and if one must contrast him with Herbert —
often so gently familiar, too, with his God — why, the
difference is that Herbert had, with modesty, a breeding
that made him at home in any company. But how
Crashaw's tenderness excuses all familiarity in his fare-
well to Saint Teresa, going to martyrdom !
Farewell then, all the world, adieu !
Teresa is no more for you. . . .
Farewell whatever dear may be,
Mother's arms or father's knee !
Farewell house, and farewell home!
She's for the Moors and Martyrdom.
Sweet, not so fast. . . .
Seventeenth Century Poets 165
For a last and longer taste of Crashaw let me read a
few verses of the Hymn of the Shepherdmen sung over the
infant Christ in his snow-bound cradle :
Tityrus {they are called Tityrus and Thyrsis)
I saw the curl'd drops, soft and slow,
Come hovering o'er the place's head;
Off'ring their whitest sheets of snow
To furnish the fair infant's bed.
"Forbear, " said I; "be not too bold,
Your fleece is white, but 'tis too cold."
Thyrsis. I saw the obsequious seraphim
Their rosy fleece of fire bestow :
For well they now can spare their wings
Since Heaven itself lies here below.
"Well done," said I; "but are you sure
Yotir down, so warm, will pass for piire?"
Both. No no; your King's not yet to seek
Where to repose his royal head:
See, see, how soon his new-bloom'd cheek
'Twixt mother's breasts is gone to bed.
"Sweet choice," said we; "no way but so
Not to ly cold yet sleep in snow."
Chorus. She sings thy tears asleep, and dips
Her kisses in thy weeping eye ;
She spreads the red leaves of thy lips
That in their buds yet blushing lie.
She 'gainst those mother diamonds tries
The points of her young eagle's eyes.
To thee, meek Majesty, soft King
Of simple graces and sweet loves!
Each of us his lamb will bring,
Each his pair of silver doves !
i66 Studies in Literature
At last, in fire of thy fair eyes,
Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.
VII
In conclusion, — you certainly will not charge me,
Gentlemen, with having in these lectures withheld any
due I could bring of admiration for our seventeenth
century mystical poets. Yet — for a personal confession
— ^I desire not to live very long at one stretch with them.
You may put it, if you will, that he is blameworthy
who finds them
too bright or good
For human nature's daily food.
But I find their atmosphere too rare, and at the same
time too nebulous, their manna too ambrosial, unsatis-
fying to my hunger. I turn from vapours, seeking
back to the firm Greek outline, to the art which in
Aristotle's phrase, exhibits men and women in action —
TtparrovTe^ — above all to the breathing, familiar, ador-
able bodies of my kind. I want Daphnis at the spring,
Rebecca at the well, Ruth stretched at Boaz's feet,
silent in the sleeping granary.
You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet, is this human life
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forgo;
This warm kind world is all I know.
Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay —
Seventeenth Century Poets 167
But 0 the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die!
So even coming from the presence of Dante, with an
old schoolmaster of mine I whisper, "Ariosto, wait for
me. ' ' So from symposia of these mystics, rapturous but
jejune, as from the vegetarian feast of Eugenists and of
other men made perfect, I return to knock in at the old
tavern with the cosy red blinds, where I may meet Don
Quixote, Sancho Panza, Douglas and Percy, Mr. Pick-
wick and Sam Weller, Romeo and the Three Musketeers
— above all, Falstaff, with Mistress Quickly to serve
me. I want the personal — Shakespeare, Johnson,
Goldsmith, Lamb, among men: of women I need to
worship no Saint Teresa, but Miranda the maid,
Imogen the wife. For
There vitality, there, there solely in song
Resides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs
Their forceful cravings the theme are : there it is strong.
That is the gospel of Meredith, and I subscribe to it.
For we come out of earth and fall back to earth; and
the spring of our craving soars — though it reach to
God — on the homely jet of our geniture.
THE POETRY OF
GEORGE MEREDITH
1HAVE chosen, Gentlemen, to speak of George Mere-
dith's poetry, this morning, for two or three reasons ;
of which — to be honest — the foremost is that I deHght
in it. But, for a second, I think it time to hint at
least that the Modern and Medieval Languages Board
intend to justify by practice what they meant when,
in framing the separate English Tripos, they so far
ignored academic tradition and dared the rage of
schoolmasters — which, like that of the sheep, is terrible
— as to open the study of English down to our own
times, declining to allow that any past date could be
settled, even by university statute, as the one upon
which English literature took to its bed, and expired,
and was beatified. I have possibly as much reason as
anyone in this room to know how faulty one's judgment
may be about modern work, and specially about modern
poetry. Still the task of appraising it has to be done,
for the books of our time are the books of our time.
They tell us in their various ways "How it strikes a
Contemporary": and we shall not intelligently prepare
ourselves, here at Cambridge, by drawing an imaginary
line somewhere between the past and the present and
i68
The Poetry of George Meredith 169
announcing, "On this side are the certified dead, who
are alive; on that, the living, who are non-existent."
Hazlitt's remark, "I hate to read new books, " or some-
body else's that, whenever a new book came out, he
read an old one, is- — well, just the sort of thing one does
say at the beginning of a familiar essay or at the dinner-
table ; and to press it to absurdity were an easy waste of
time. *'Ah, sir, " said the lady, "this is a sad, degener-
ate age!" "Ah, madam," answered the philosopher,
"let us thank heaven that neither you nor I belong to
it."
And, after all, what does it matter to this large world
in the long run if a tripos candidate should pronounce
a mistaken judgment on the merits of Lascelles Aber-
crombie, John Masefield or John Drinkwater ?
Moreover I have insisted, and shall go on insisting
while I speak from this place, that upon a school of
English here rests an obligation to teach the writing of
good English as well as the reading of it: to teach the
writing of it through the reading. I want the average
educated Englishman to write English as deftly, as
scrupulously, as the average educated Frenchman
writes French; to have, as at present he has not, at
least an equal respect for his language. Nay, our
language being one of the glories of our birth and state,
I want him to draw self-respect from his use of it, as
men of good ancestry are careful not to derogate from
their forefathers. I would have him sensible that a
sloppy sentence is no more nearly "good enough" than
dirty Hnen is good enough. I want, indeed. Prose "in
widest commonalty spread." I desire — to put it on
merely practical grounds, using a fairly recent example
— that among us we make it impossible to do again
what our Admiralty did with the battle of Jutland, to
170 Studies in Literature
win a victory at sea and lose it in a despatch. And I
use this illustration because many who will hardly be
convinced that a thing is worth doing well for its own
sake, may yet listen when you show them that to do it
ill, indifferently, laxly, means public damage. There
used to be a saying in the Fleet — and it should have
reached the Admiralty — that "Nigh-enough is the
worst man in the ship."
Now although our fathers — it must be confessed —
tried harder than we to write prose; although to our
age belongs that rampant substitute which I once de-
nounced to you under the name of Jargon ; nevertheless
it were, as I hold, a folly to hedge off good writing of
our day and bid you fasten your study upon remote
masterpieces. Admire them, study them, by them im-
prove your own style. But improve it also by studying
how good writers today are adapting it to express what
men and women think and do in our time. For we
belong to it. We cannot, as Charles Lamb once
threatened in a pet, say ''Damn the age! I will write
for antiquity": and as little ought we to surrender
to the baser fashions of the present. But we should,
I contend, face the arena and make what best use we
may of that present use.
Quern penes arbitrium est, et jus et norma loquendi.
II
You are thinking perhaps that all this lies wide of any
talk about George Meredith who, to begin with, is dead,
and while alive was a doubtful exemplar of pellucid
English.
Now, for the first point, you must forgive me that I,
who had the honour to know him enough to hear him
The Poetry of George Meredith 171
talk frankly, can scarcely think of him as dead, and
certainly can never think of him as old.
"I suppose," he admitted once, "I should regard myself
as getting old — I am seventy-four. But I do not feel to be
growing old, either in heart or mind. I still look on life
with a young man's eye. I have always hoped I should
not grow old as some do — with a palsied intellect, living
backwards, regarding other people as anachronisms because
they themselves have lived on into other times and left
their sympathies behind them with the years."
He never did. You must understand that while in
conversation and bearing he played with innocent ex-
travagancies which, in a smaller man, might be mis-
taken for affectations — in particular with a high Spanish
courtesy which was equally at the service of his cook
and of his king — you soon perceived all this to be
genuine; the natural manner of the man. It did not
pretend a false sprightliness of
Days, when the ball of our vision
Had eagles that flew unabash'd to sun;
When the grasp on the bow was decision,
And arrow and hand and eye were one.
But he recognised that this had been, and was irrecover-
able; that while the time lasted it had been priceless.
No poet, no thinker, growing old, had ever a more
fearless trust in youth ; none has ever had a truer sense
of our duty to it :
Keep the young generations in hail.
And bequeath them no timibled house.
None has ever been more scornful of the asserted
wisdom of our seniors, who,
172 Studies in Literature
on their last plank,
Pass mumbling it as nature's final page . . .
and would petrify the young with rules of wisdom, lest
^as he says scornfully
Lest dreaded Change, long damm'd by dull decay,
Should bring the world a vessel steer'd by brain,
And ancients musical at close of day.
< (
Earth loves her young," begins his next sonnet:
Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor1:reads
The ways they walk; by what they speak oppress'd.
Ill
I have a more difficult defence to put up against his
alleged and, in places, undeniable obscurity. Rather,
it would be more difficult if I proposed to put up any.
But I do not.
Let us separate obscurity from ugliness. Let us take,
for example, Shakespeare's King Lear, which contains
somewhat of both; and I put it to you that our sense
of tremendous beauty as we read that play is twin with
a sense of the bestial lurking in himiankind. Or I ask
you to consider Shakespeare's Pericles and say, "Is it or
is it not the test of the brothel scenes that passes Marina
for adorable?" — to consider The Tempest and answer,
*' Where would be Ariel or where even Miranda, or
where the whole lovely magic, with Caliban left out?"
But obscurity is failure. It may be a partial failure; it
may be an entirely honourable failure, born of bravery
to face truths for which, because they are difficult or
rugged, the writer can hardly find expressive words, and
smooth mellifluous words yet more hardly. Still it is a
The Poetry of George Meredith 173
disability, albeit (let me add) with this compensation,
that when the fuliginous clouds are rifted, when, as
often with Donne, with Browning, with Meredith, we
stand and gaze into a sudden vista of clear beauty, the
surprise is strangely effective : it has an awe of its own
and a reward not illegitimate. I might quote you from
Meredith separate lines or very short passages by the
score to illustrate this. Take one example only, sum-
marising that love of Earth which, as we shall find,
is the master secret he teaches :
Until at last this love of Earth reveals
A soul beside our own, to quicken, quell,
Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift.
** Irradiate, and through ruinous floods upHft." Milton
taught that line: but for Milton it had never been
written : and yet it could never have been written, after
Milton, by any but an authentic poet.
IV
Fortunately, however, Meredith has left some poems,
unchallengeably beautiful, in which a reader impatient
of obscurity will discover little or nothing to tease him.
And since — and although my practice this morning may
seem to contradict it — no small part of a teacher's
duty consists in saving other people's time, let me
indicate a few of Meredith's poems which, if you like
them, will lead you to persevere with more difficult
ones in which, if my experience be of use, you will find
much delight : for there is a pleasure in critical pains as
well as in poetic. If you like them not, why then you
will be in a position to decide on saving further time,
though you lose something else.
174 Studies in Literature
The first — Phoebus with Admetus — I will read in full.
You know the legend: how Phoebus Apollo — lord of
the sun, of music, of archery, of medicine — was exiled
by his father Zeus for having slain the Cyclops, and
condemned to serve a term on earth, tending the flocks
of king Admetus of Thessaly. This is the tale of the
shepherds and herdsmen who had known the divine
guest and the wondrous great season of plenty he
brought:^
When by Zeus relenting the mandate was revoked,
Sentencing to exile the bright Sun-God,
Mindful were the ploughmen of who the steer had yoked,
Who: and what a track show'd the upturn'd sod!
Mindful were the shepherds as now the noon severe
Beat a burning eyebrow to brown evetide,
How the rustic flute drew the silver to the sphere,
Sister of his own, till her rays fell wide.
God ! of whom music
And song and blood are pure.
The day is never darken' d
That had thee here obscure.
Chirping none the scarlet cicalas crouch'd in ranks:
Slack the thistle-head piled its down-silk grey :
Scarce the stony lizard suck'd hollows in his flanks;
Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay.
Sudden bow'd the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard,
Lengthen'd ran the grasses, the sky grew slate:
Then amid a swift flight of wing'd seed white as curd.
Clear of limb a Youth smote the master's gate.
Water, first of singers, o'er rocky mount and mead.
First of earthly singers, the sun-loved rill,
^ Mark the triple hammer-beat, closing the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th stan-
zaic lines throughout. It is one of Meredith's master-tricks.
The Poetry of George Meredith 175
Sang of him, and flooded the ripples on the reed,
Seeking whom to waken, and what ear fill.
Water, sweetest soother to kiss a wound and cool,
Sweetest and divinest, the sky-born brook.
Chuckled, with a whimper, and made a mirror-pool
Round the guest we welcomed, the strange hand shook.
Many swarms of wild bees descended on our fields :
Stately stood the wheatstalk with head bent high :
Big of heart we labour 'd at storing mighty yields,
Wool and corn, and clusters to make men cry!
Hand-like rushed the vintage; we strung the bellied skins,
Plump, and at the sealing the Youth's voice rose:
Maidens clung in circle, on little fists their chins ;
Gentle beasties through pushed a cold long nose.
Foot to fire in snowtime we trimm'd the slender shaft :
Often down the pit spied the lean wolf's teeth
Grin against his will, trapp'd by masterstrokes of craft;
Helpless in his froth- wrath as green logs seethe !
Safe the tender lambs tugg'd the teats, and winter sped
Whirl'd before the crocus, the year's new gold.
Hung the hooky beak up aloft the arrowhead
Redden 'd through his feathers for our dear fold.
Tales we drank of giants at war with Gods above:
Rocks were they to look on, and earth climb'd air!
Tales of search for simples, and those who sought of love
Ease because the creature was all too fair.
Pleasant ran our thinking that while our work was good.
Sure as fruits for sweat would the praise come fast.
He that wrestled stoutest and tamed the billow-brood
Danced in rings with girls, like a sail-flapp'd mast.
Now of medicine and song, of both of which Apollo
is God. Song — good poetry is always linked with
176 Studies in Literature
medicine in Meredith's mind: twin restoratives of
human sanity:
Lo, the herb of healing, when once the herb is known,
Shines in shady woods bright as new-sprung flame.
Ere the string was tighten'd we heard the mellow tone,
After he had taught how the sweet sounds came.
Stretch'd about his feet, labour done, 'twas as you see
Red pomegranates tumble and burst hard rind.
So began contention to give delight and be
Excellent in things aim'd to make life kind.
Last, the invocation to all beasts, leaves, trees, to join
in remembering him :
You with shelly horns, rams ! and promontory goats,
You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew !
Bulls, that walk the pastures in kingly-flashing coats !
Laurel, ivy, vine, wreath'd for feasts not few!
You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays.
You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent :
He has been our fellow, the morning of our days!
Us he chose for housemates, and this way went.
God ! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken'd
That had thee here obscure.
V
Begin with that, or begin with its fellow, the exquisite
gentle tale of Melampus the good physician to whom
the woodland creatures in reward that he
loving them all,
Among them walk'd, as a scholar who reads a book,
The Poetry of George Meredith 177
taught their love of medicine, and where to find the
herbs of healing: and from Melampus go on to the
ringing ballad The Nuptials of Attila, or that favourite
of mine The Day of the Daughter of Hades which tells
how Persephone (ravished wife of dark Hades, released
by him on a day to revisit earth and embrace her mother
Demeter) takes with her in the chariot her daughter
Skiageneia, child of Shadow ; and how this girl-goddess,
slipping from the car, confronts a mortal youth, Cal-
listes :
She did not fly,
Nor started at his advance: . . .
for all the wonder and beauty of this upper earth were
running through her blood, quickening love and mem-
ories half surmised in every drop from her mother
inherited — ''the blood of her a lighted dew" ;
She did not fly,
Nor started at his advance :
She looked, as when infinite thirst
Pants pausing to bless the springs,
Refreshed, unsated. Then first
He trembled with awe of the things
He had seen; and he did transfer.
Divining and doubting in turn,
His reverence unto her;
Nor asked what he crouched to learn:
The whence of her, whither, and why
Her presence there, and her name.
Her parentage: under which sky
Her birth, and how hither she came,
So young, a virgin, alone.
Unfriended, having no fear,
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Studies in Literature
As Oreads have; no moan,
Like the lost upon earth; no tear;
Not a sign of the torch in the blood,
Though her stature had reached the height
When mantles a tender rud
In maids that of youths have sight.
If maids of our seed they be :
For he said : A glad vision art thou !
And she answered him : Thou to me !
As men utter a vow.
Classical to me it seems; and classically radiant, as if
painted by Titian, the Sicilian day that followed for
these two: she grandly innocent in his company,
recognising and naming the fruits of earth :
Pear, apple, almond, plum . . .
And she touch 'd them with finger and thumb,
As the vine-hook closes: she smiled,
Recounting again and again.
Corn, wine, fruit, oil! like a child.
With the meaning known to men.
Read this poem carefully (I dare to say), and you will
read in this girl-goddess not only what is the secret of
the heroines in many of Meredith's novels — Lucy Des-
borough, Sandra Belloni, Clara Middleton — but also
the secret of Shakespeare's later heroines — Perdita,
Imogen, Miranda: and will not wonder how the youth
Callistes, when at evening her father's awful chariot
rapt her from him, was left with no future but to crave
for her until his life's end
And to join her, or have her brought back,
In his frenzy the singer would call,
Till he followed where never was track.
On the path trod of all.
The Poetry of George Meredith 179
There are those who would counsel you to begin your
study of Meredith with Modern Love rather than with
the poems I have chosen: and here their counsel may
easily be wiser than mine, personal taste interfering to
make me wayward. As a poetic form, the sonnet-
sequence — even when turned as Meredith turns it, from
quatorzain to seizain — is (unless handled by Shake-
speare) about the last to allure me. I should add, how-
ever, that Meredith's use of the sixteen-line stanza in
Modern Love is exceedingly strong and individual: and
that in the past hundred years few quatorzains, or
sonnets proper, will match his Lucifer in Starlight,
which I read to you last term. As a subject, the
relations of the husband, the wife and the other man,
especially when rehearsed by the husband, have usually
(I state it merely as a private confession) the same
physical effect on me as a drawing-room recitation. I
want to get under a table and howl. From the outset
the recital makes me shy as a stranger pounced upon
and called in to settle a delicate domestic difference;
and as it goes on, I start protesting inw^ardly, "My dear
sir — delighted to do my best . . . man of the world . . .
quite understand . . . sympathetic, and all that sort of
thing. , . . But really, if you insist on all this getting
into the newspapers. . . . And where did I put my
hat, by the way?" In short — take the confession —
with the intricacies and self-scourgings of Modern Love
I find myself less at home than with the franker tempt-
ations of St. Anthony, and far less than with the larger,
liberally careless amours of the early gods.
Nevertheless, and by all means, try both ways and
choose which you will, provided it coax you on to search
the real heart of Meredith's muse in The Woods of
Westermain, Earth and Man, A Faith on Trial, The
i8o Studies in Literature
Empty Purse, Night of Frost in May, and the like. You
will find many thorned thickets by the way; and some
out of which, however hard you beat them, you will
start no bird. The juvenile poems will but poorly
reward you, until you come to be interested in them
historically, as Pre-Raphaelite essays which Meredith
outgrew. The later Odes celebrating French history —
The Revolution; Napoleon; France, 1870; Alsace-Lor-
raine— should be deferred (I think) till you are fairly
possessed by the Meredithian fervour. They have
their splendid passages; but they are undeniably
difficult. Moreover I hold you must acquire a thorough
trust in a bard before trusting him at an ode, which is of
all forms of poetry the most pontifical ; before you com-
pose your spirit to a proper humility while he indues
his robes, strikes attitude and harp, and starts telling
France what he thinks of her, or anything so great as
France what he thinks of it, albeit he may sift our
approval and end on a note of encouragement. After
reading odes in this strain I, for one, always feel that I
hear France — or whatever it is — murmuring politely
at the close, "Thank you — so much!"
VI
But it is in the poems I named just now, and in others
collected under the two general titles A Reading oj
Earth and A Reading of Life, that you will find the
essential Meredith: and, as these titles hint, he is a
teacher, an expositor. Now why many of our English
poets should be teachers is a dark question — to be
attempted perhaps though probably not resolved, in
some later lecture: as why an expositor, of all men,
should be obscure and even succeed in giving us en-
lightenment by means of obscurity, is an even darker
The Poetry of George Meredith i8i
question — although I make no doubt that the genius of
this university, sometime adorned by the late and great
Dr. Westcott can somehow provide it with an answer.
But the philosophy of Meredith, when you come to it,
cannot be denied for strong, for arresting, for athletic,
lean, hard, wiry. It is not comfortable: Stoical, rather;
even strongly Stoical, as we use the epithet. But it
differs by the whole heaven from ancient Stoicism,
being reared on two pillars of Faith and Love. And,
yet again, the Faith differs utterly from the Faith
which supports the most of our religions — it can and,
as a fact does, consist with agnosticism, and the Love
differs utterly from the Love which so often infects so
much of saintliness with eroticism and even with slyness
in daily life. Let me try to outline his belief, using his
own words where I may.
The man is a modern man, lost in doubt, forlorn in
a forest of doubt, but resolved to win through by help
of the monitor, the lantern within him.
I am in deep woods,
Between the two twilights.
Whatever I am and may be,
Write it down to the light in me;
I am I, and it is my deed:
For I know that the paths are dark
Between the two twilights.
I have made my choice to proceed
By the light I have within;
And the issue rests with me,
Who might sleep in a chrysalis,
In the fold of a simple prayer.
Between the two twilights.
i82 Studies in Literature
Having nought but the light in me,
Which I take for my soul in arms,
Resolv'd to go unto the wells
For water, rejecting spells,
And mouthings of magic for charms,
And the cup that does not flow.
I am in deep woods
Between the two twilights:
Over valley and hill
I hear the woodland wave,
Like the voice of Time, as slow,
The voice of Life, as grave,
The voice of Death, as still.
He finds there is no true promise (I am but trying to
interpret) in religious promises of a compensating life
beyond this one. Those are the
spells,
And mouthings of magic for charms.
He is not appalled by the prospect of sinking back and
dissolving into the earth of which we all are created *
Into the breast that gave the rose
Shall I with shuddering fall?
More and more deeply as he contemplates Earth he feels
that — from her as we spring, to her as w^e return — so
man is only strong by constantly reading her lesson,
falling back to refresh himself from her mother-springs,
her mother-milk. Even of prayer he writes in one of
his last novels, Lord Ormont and His Aminta:
Prayer is power within us to communicate with the de-
sired beyond our thirsts. . . . And let the prayer be as a
The Poetry of George Meredith 183
little fountain. Rising on a spout, from dread of the hollow
below, the prayer may be prolonged in words begetting
words, and have pulse of fervour: the spirit of it has fallen
after the first jet. That is the delirious energy of our crav-
ing, which has no life in our souls. We do not get to any
heaven by renouncing the Mother we spring from; and when
there is an eternal secret for us, it is best to believe that
Earth knows, to keep near her, even in our utmost aspira-
tions.
To be true sons of Earth, our Mother: to learn of
our dependence on her, her lesson : to be frugal of self-
consciousness and of all other forms of selfishness; to
live near the bare ground, and finally to return to it
without whining: that is the first article of his creed.
Earth never whines, and looks for no son of hers to
whine:
For love we Earth, then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours :
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers
Earth, from a night of frosty wreck.
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck.
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.
To set up your hope on a world beyond this one is
(according to Meredith) but lust for life prolonged — ' ' a
bloodthirsty clinging to life" in Matthew Arnold's
phrase — demanding a passport beyond our natural term :
The lover of life knows his labour divine.
And therein is at peace.
The lust after life craves a touch and a sign
That the life shall increase.
184 Studies in Literature
The lust after life, in the chills of its lust,
Claims a passport of death.
The lover of life sees the flame in the dust
And a gift in our breath.
Transience? — yes, and to be gratefully accepted, like
human love, for transience! Earth, the Stoic mother,
looks on while her son learns the lesson ; she will not coddle :
He may entreat, aspire,
He may despair, and she has never heed:
She, drinking his warm sweat, will soothe his need.
Not his desire.
To this extent, then, he is one with the beasts that
perish. To this extent he is like Walt Whitman's
animals. Says Whitman :
I think I could turn and live with animals ...
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to Gods.
But the difference is that man understands: understands
that as in his mother Earth,
deepest at her springs.
Most filial, is an eye to love her young. . . .
so he, seeing how in life the love of boy and maid leads
to the nourishing and love of children, must see further
that his first duty in life is to love and care for the young.
For himself, he must curb our "distempered devil of
self," gluttonous of its own enjoyments. Meredith
promises nothing — nothing beyond the grave, nothing
on this side of it but love sweetening hard fare :
The sense of large charity over the land.
Earth's wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough.
And a bell giving thanks for a sustenance meal.
The Poetry of George Meredith 185
VII
Well, there it is, Gentlemen, for you to take or to
leave. I am here to talk about literature to you, not
about doctrine. But I think that, after the mystics we
discussed last term, you may find the herb of Meredith
medicinal, invigorating: a philosophy austere though
suffused with love; mistaken, if you will, but certainly
not less than high, stern, noble, meet for men.
I have indicated some of his poems through which you
may arrive at it. But he wrote one poem which stands
apart from these and might (you may say) conceivably
have been written by another man. If I allowed this,
which I cannot, I should still hold that no one short of
a genius could have invented it; as I hold that, with
Spenser's Epiihalamion, it shares claim to be the
greatest song of human love in our language, as it is
certainly the topmost of its age: all that Swinburne or
Rossetti ever wrote fading out like fireworks or sick
tapers before its sunshine. I mean Love in the Valley,
with a number of stanzas from which I shall this morn-
ing conclude, feeling all the while that I have no gift
to read them as they deserve.
Love in the Valley
Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward,
Couched with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow,
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:
Then would she hold me and never let me go?
i86 Studies in Literature
Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun.
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but 0 the glory of the winning were she won!
When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror,
Tying up her laces, looping up her hair,
Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
More love should I have, and much less care.
When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror,
Loosening her laces, combing down her curls.
Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
I should miss but one for the many boys and girls.
Heartless she is as the shadow in the meadows
Flying to the hills on a blue and breezy noon.
No, she is athirst and drinking up her wonder :
Earth to her is young as the slip of the new moon.
Deals she an unkindness, 'tis but her rapid measure.
Even as in a dance; and her smile can heal no less:
Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with
hailstones
Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless.
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting :
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.
The Poetry of George Meredith 187
Stepping down the hill with her fair companions,
Arm in arm, all against the raying West,
Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches,
Brave in her shape, and sweeter unpossessed.
Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking
Whispered the world was; morning light is she.
Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless;
Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.
Happy happy time, when the white star hovers
Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew,
Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness,
Threading it with colour, like yewberries the yew.
Thicker crowd the shades as the grave East deepens
Glowing, and with crimson a long cloud swells.
Maiden still the morn is; and strange she is, and secret;
Strange her eyes ; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.
Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden,
Trained to stand in rows, and asking if they please.
I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones :
0 my wild ones ! they tell me more than these.
You, my wild one, you tell of honied field-rose,
Violet, blushing eglantine in life; and even as they,
They by the wayside are earnest of your goodness,
You are of life's, on the banks that line the way.
Peering at her chamber the white crowns the red rose,
Jasmine winds the porch with stars two and three.
Parted is the window; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
Breathes a falling breath that carries thoughts of me.
Sweeter unpossessed, have I said of her my sweetest ?
Not while she sleeps -.while she sleeps the jasmine breathes,
Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wTeaths.
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i88 Studies in Literature
Gossips count her faults; they scour a narrow chamber
Where there is no window, read not heaven or her.
"When she was a tiny," one aged woman quavers,
Plucks at my heart and leads me by the ear.
Faults she had once as she learnt to run and tumbled:
Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete.
Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy
Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet.
Hither she comes; she comes to me; she lingers,
Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new surprise
High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger ;
Yet am I the light and living of her eyes.
Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming.
Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames. —
Sure of her haven, 0 like a dove alighting.
Arms up, she dropped : our souls were in our names.
A Song of Songs, which is Meredith's!
THE POETRY OF
THOMAS HARDY
T N Speaking to you, the other day, Gentlemen, on the
■*• poetry of George Meredith, I admitted how faulty
one's judgment may be — nay almost must needs be —
upon all modern work. * ' Still, ' ' I went on, " the task of
appraising it has to be done, for the books of our time
are the books of our time. They tell us in their various
ways, 'How it strikes a Contemporary.'"
Yes: but I deferred a qualification of this — a some-
what important qualification — to which I shall begin
today by asking your assent.
My qualification is this: — We elders — from among
whom, for various reasons, your professors are chosen
as a rule — may hope to help you in understanding poets
long since dead. For Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton,
Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, are removed
almost as far from us as from you. They have passed
definitely into the ward of Time. What was corrupt or
corruptible in them is now dust, though we embalm it
in myrrh, sandal-wood, cassia: dust equally for us and
for you : what was incorruptible flowers as freshly for
you as for us. We have but the sad advantage of having
studied it a little longer.
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190 Studies in Literature
Now when we come to poets of the time of Tennyson,
Browning, Matthew Arnold, our difference of age asserts
itself; middle-aged men of the 'sixties, young men of
the 'nineties, children of this century, read them at cor-
respondent removes, perceptible removes. And, though
you may like it not, it is (I believe) good that we seniors
should testify to you concerning these men who were
our seniors, yet alive when we were young, and gave
us in youth, believe me, even such thrills, such awed
surmises, such wonders and wild desires as you catch
in your turn from their successors. Nay, it is salutary,
I believe; for the reason that it appears to be the rule
for each new generation to turn iconoclast on its father's
poetic gods. You will scarcely deny that on some of
you the term ''Victorian" acts as a red rag upon a
young bull of the pasture : that, to some of you, Tenny-
son is "that sort of stuff your uncle read." Well,
bethink you that the children of yet another generation
will deal so and not otherwise with your heroes : that it is
all a part of the continuous process of criticism through
which our roseate raptures and our lurid antipathies
pass, if not into the light of common day, into that of
serener judgment. Blame not your uncle that at the
age of fourteen or earlier, in the walled garden screened
from the windows of the house, he charged among the
vegetables chanting
A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves . . .
or
Strew no more red roses, maidens,
Leave the lilies in their dew :
Pluck, pluck cypress, 0 pale maidens!
Dusk, O dusk the hall with yew ! . .
or
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 191
I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage —
Yes, the spray is on thy cloak and hair.
But thy dark eyes are not dimm'd, proud Iseult!
And thy beauty never was more fair . . .
or
And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered: and
sparkles 'gan dart
From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once with a
start,
All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at
heart.
For to dream of these things, and to awake and find one-
self an uncle — that is the common lot. Nor blame him
that he continues loyal to them. It keeps him human :
it may set you pondering, reconsidering a little; and so
may help to advance the true business of criticism. I
come down a little further; past Morris and Swinburne
to Yeats (say) or Francis Thompson. We admired and
admire them as generously as, I hope, you admire them ;
but I think not quite in the same way. To us, their
almost exact contemporaries, their first poems appealed
as youth to youth; with none of the authority they
exercise, I dare to say, upon you. To us they carried no
authority at all. They carried hope, they bred ardour:
but we criticised them freely as poems written by the
best of us. They have to wait a few years for the race
to deify them. You and we possess them by a different
line of approach.
Now take the young poets who are your contempor-
aries. Of them I say sadly, resignedly, that a man
even of my years has no right to speak, or very little
192
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power to speak usefully. Young poets write not for
antiquity, nor for middle-age. They write for you:
their appeal is to you. All that we can do is to keep our
hearts as fresh as we may; to bear ever in mind that a
father can guide a son but some distance on the road,
and the more wisely he guides the sooner (alas !) must he
lose the fair companionship and watch the boy run on.
It may sound a hard saying, but we can only keep him
admiring the things we admire at the cost of pauperising
his mind. It may sound another hard saying, that the
younger poets do not write for us old men ; yet it is the
right course of nature. I hope William Cory's apo-
phthegm is not strictly true :
One's feelings lose poetic flow
Soon after twenty-seven or so;
Professionising modern men
Thenceforth admire what pleased them then.
But if it be (though I plead for some rise in the age-
limit) , then poetry but consents with the rule of Nature
whose highest interpreter she is. Deepest in her too —
in Meredith's phrase : —
Deepest at her springs
Most filial, is an eye to love her young.
II
After this somewhat wistful opening, let me claim an
exception for my subject this morning. Thomas Hardy
— I cannot call him Doctor Hardy even in a university
which not long ago did itself honour in complimenting
him — Thomas Hardy (long may he live !) is my elder, and
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 193
so much my elder that for thirty years I have reverenced
him as a master : that is, as a master of the Novel. His
first novel Desperate Remedies dates back to 1871: his
first artistic triumph Under the Greenwood Tree, to 1872.
Pass intervening years and come to the grand close in
Tess of the D' Urhervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895) :
on that last date his career as a novelist ceases, and at
the age of fifty-five. Three years later, in 1898, he
publishes his first book of verse. Now any pettifogging
fellow can point out that this volume, entitled Wessex
Poems, contains many poems composed long before 1898
— some so far back as 1865 ; and the more easily because
Hardy is careful to print the dates. ^ So for that
matter do some of Hardy's later volumes contain
early poems, either printed as first written, or as revised.
But no petty fog can obscure the plain fact that in 1895,
or a little later, Hardy definitely turned his back on prose
fiction and started to appeal to a new generation in
verse ; as a writer of high poetical verse if the gods should
allow. To this purpose he has held. A second volume.
Poems of the Past and the Present followed in 1901 ; The
Dynasts, Part I in 1903, Part II in 1906, Part III in
1908, Time's Laughing Stocks in 1909. Satires of Cir-
cumstance were collected in 19 14. His latest volume
Moments of Vision appeared but the other day, and
bears 191 7 on its title-page. So, seeing that all this,
including that great epical drama, The Dynasts,
falls within the ken of the last twenty years, and
not without it, you may allow perhaps that it con-
cerns men of your age and mine, equally if not
similarly.
^ So that, as Whistler said of an art-critic who judged a water-colour
for an oil-painting, "it was accurately described in the catalogue and he
had not even to rely on his sense of smell. "
13
194 Studies in Literature
III
Ah, but you may answer, "By all means let it con-
cern you. The point is, can a man of Thomas Hardy's
age write what appeals to us?'' Well, yes, I think his
poetry may appeal to you, as it certainly concerns you.
That his Muse is predominantly melancholy I brush
aside as no bar at all. If youth do not understand
melancholy, why then the most of Shelley, the most of
Byron, a great part of Keats, or — to come to later
instances — a great, if not the greater, part of Francis
Thompson and Yeats and most of the young poets of
the Irish school, is closed to it: which is absurd. "No,
no! go not to Lethe" for Melancholy. She dwells
neither there nor with middle-age:
She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh.
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might.
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
No, no : it is proper to youth to know melancholy as it
is to have raptures. But only to middle-age is it granted
to be properly cheerful. Yes, there are compensations !
Let us assure you that only towards middle-age will
you burst upon a palate fine the true juice of Chaucer's
Prologue, written in his middle-age, or of Montaigne, or
of Moliere: as in youth you will choose Rossetti, but
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 195
later transfer your choice to William Morris, least sick
or sorry, best of cheer among the poets of his time.
As for Hardy's pessimism, that, to be sure, does not
consort well with youth. But, as I shall hope to show,
it always challenges youth; it is never faded, jejune,
effete; it never plays — or, to be accurate, it seldom plays
— with old mere sentimentalities. Even when it plays
with commonplaces it never leaves them conventions.
In his depths the man is always thinking, and his per-
plexities, being all-important and yet unsolved, are by
your generation to be faced, whether you solve them
or not.
IV
For another point, close beside and yet more impor-
tant, we have talked of insensibility to poetry and how
with the years it may steal upon the reader. Now
most of you remember, I daresay, Matthew Arnold's
late and mournful lines on the drying up of poesy in the
writer :
Youth rambles on life's arid mount.
And strikes the rock, and finds the vein.
And brings the water from the fount.
The fount which shall not flow again.
The man mature with labour chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanish 'd out of hand.
And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among the stones.
The mount is mute, the channel dry ;
And down he lays his weary bones.
196 Studies in Literature
Well, at any rate Thomas Hardy contradicts, and in
practice, that rather cheap kind of pessimism. (There
was always, I think, in Matthew Arnold a tendency to
be Wordsworth's widow, and to fall rather exasper-
atingly "a-thinking of the old 'un, " who undoubtedly
did in later life, for some thirty years "rake among the
stones" and died in the end, as the country practitioner
put it, "of nothing serious. ")
I am aware that to support this theory of desiccation
in poets many startling instances may be cited. But
without saying yea or nay, or supposing it symptomatic
of our age, I cannot think it quite accidental that out
of the small number of poets I have been privileged to
know personally, two should have tapped, quite late in
life, a well of poetry abundant, fresh, pure; of lyrical
poetry, too, fresher, purer and far more abundant than
ever they found as young men. It happened so, at all
events, with an old schoolmaster of mine, the late
T. E. Brown, whose quality and whose performance
are now generally admitted. It has happened so with
Thomas Hardy. His first poems — or, to say it more
accurately, the poems in his first-published volume —
were stiff, awkward. They often achieved a curious,
haunting, countrified lilt; they worked always true to
pattern: you felt about them, too, that the verses held
the daemon of poetry, constricted, struggling for expres-
sion. But in form they resembled the drawings with
which the author illustrated that first volume. They
were architectural draughts (Hardy had been an archi-
tect). When they told a story, you wondered why he,
so well able to do it, had not written this particular
story in prose. The poetic thought was there : but the
words were hard and precise, sometimes scientifically
pedantic. For instance, in the last poem I shall read
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 197
today he drags in the word "stillicide, *' which means the
drip of water in a cavern, or from eaves. Stevenson
has recorded his mingled feeHngs on discovering, in the
process of his scientific studies, that * ' stillicide " was not
a crime. The early poems faceted no rays, they melted
into none of those magical, chemical combinations out
of which words became poetry and a new thing, "half
angel and half bird. "
Years pass, with their efforts; and then in his latest
volume, published by this man at the age of seventy-
seven, he discovers a lyrical note which I shall quote to
you, not at all because its theme is characteristic — for
it is not — as not at all because it is deep and wonted —
for it is not. It is, if you will, "silly sooth, and dallies
with the innocence of love. " Yes, just for that reason
I quote it, and because in a poet of ordinary evolution
it would fall naturally among the Juvenilia:
Lalage's coming:
Where is she now, O?
Turning to bow, 0,
And smile, is she,
Just at parting,
Parting, parting,
As she is starting
To come to me?
Lalage's coming,
Nearer is she now, O,
End anyhow, 0,
Today's husbandry!
Would a gilt chair were mine.
Slippers of vair were mine,
Brushes for hair were mine
Of ivory !
u
198 Studies in Literature
What will she think, 0,
She who's so comely,
Viewing how homely
A sort are we !
Nought here's enough for her,
All is too rough for her.
Even my love for her
Poor in degree.
Lalage's come; aye,
Come is she now, 0!
Does Heaven allow, O,
A meeting to be?
Yes, she is here now,
Here now, here now.
Nothing to fear now,
Here's Lalage!
If that be too trivial, take another — remembering
that I give them only as metrical specimens, merely to
show how this poet, whose metrical muscles were stiff
and hard at fifty-odd has at seventy-odd (the date is
1 91 3) worked them supple, so that now the verse ca-
dences to the feeling :
Out of the past there rises a week —
Who shall read the years O !
In that week there was heard a singing —
Who shall spell the years 0 ! —
In that week there was heard a singing,
And the white owl wondered why.
In that week there was heard a singing.
And forth from the casement were candles flinging
Radiance that fell on the deodar and lit up the path thereby.
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 199
Or take him on a lower note :
I need not go
Through sleet and snow
To where I know
She waits for me;
She will wait me there
Till I find it fair,
And have time to spare
From company . . .
What — not upbraid me
That I delayed me,
Nor ask what stayed me
So long? Ah, no! —
New cares may claim me,
New loves inflame me,
She will not blame me.
But suffer it so.
I reserve for the whole the most individual quality in
Hardy's versifying (to me an individual excellence)
which has given it character from the first — I mean his
country lilt; because I must approach it, and the man,
and his philosophy of life, all three by one path.
V
First of all, and last of all, he is a countryman. And
the first meaning of this is that his mind works like most
country minds in this great little island. They are
introspective because insular: and their soil is cumbered,
piled with history and local tradition: a land of arable
inveterately and deeply ploughed; of pastures close-
webbed at the root by rain and sun persistently reviving
200 Studies in Literature
the blade which the teeth of sheep and cattle persist-
ently crop; of its heaths — such as Newmarket — where
racehorses in training gallops beat their hoofs in the
very footprints of Boadicea's mares and stallions; of
mines, working yet, that paid their firstfruits to Sidon
and Carthage, choked harbours, dead empires. In this
land of ours, I say, the mind of a native must dig
vertically down through strata. Though it be the mind
of a farm labourer, it knows its acres intimately; not
only their rotation of crops, and slant to wind or sun,
but their several humours, caprices, obstinacies of soil;
and, always with an eye to windward, honps for the
weather it knows likeliest to profit them. \So when,
as with Hardy, a countryman has the further knowledge
that comes of book-learning, and acquires with it the
historical sense, that sense still feels vertically down-
wards, through soil and subsoil, through the mould of
Norman, Dane, Saxon, Celt, Iber, and of tribes beyond
history, to the geological formations layered over by
this accumulated dust.
Further, you know that the tales of old time which
haunt a true countryman's imagination are tales of
violence, of lonely houses where suppressed passions
inhabit to flame out in murder or suicide, to make a
legend, to haunt a cross-road or a mile-post: fierce,
primitive deeds breaking up through the slow crust of
custom: unaccountable, but not unnatural./^ Along
the king's highway, a gibbet where sheepstealers used
to swing : in such and such a copse a tree, on that tre^
such and such a branch where a poor girl hanged her-
self for love: at the three roads by the blacksmith's a
triangle of turf still called "Betsy Beneath" because
there they buried her uncoffined and drove a stake
through her.
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 201
Further, if you know your rural England, you will
know that every village in it is a small shop of gossip.
''Have you heard? Young Peter Hodge is at upsides
with his wife? yes, already, and her only expectin'."
"They tell me Farmer So-and-so have a mortgage, if
you'll believe, on the Lower Barton Farm. " ''So, that
girl Jenny is in trouble as I always foretold." Ven-
geance o' Jenny's case!
Well as I interpret this most genuine, most auto-
chthonous of living writers, I see him leaning over the
gate of a field with a wood's edge bordering it. He
knows the wood so intimately that his ear detects and
separates the notes of the wind as it soughs in oak,
hornbeam, pine (see the opening of Under the Greenwood
Tree, or The Woodlanders, passim). Of the sheep on
the pasture he knows when their lambs will fall. He
judges the grass, if it be sufficient. He knows that
breast-shaped knob on the knap of the hill and how
many centuries have worn to this what was the high
burial mound of a British chieftain: he knows the lias
beneath the chief's grave, and the layered rock still
deeper — that is, he knows as near as geologists can
tell. He knows, having a boy's eye for this, where
a nest is likeliest to be, and of what bird. But
what more intrigues him than any of these things
— still as he follows the line of the hedge — is that
under one innocent-looking thorn such and such a
parish tragedy was enacted. Just here, they tell,
two brothers quarrelled and one smote the other
with a reaping-hook; just there was lovers' bliss
and just there, a brief while later, the woman's heart
broke.
For (you must know) though a gossip's, this country-
man's heart is strangely tender. Let me pause for proof, ^
202 Studies in Literature
by one short poem, that even Blake's heart was not
tenderer than Hardy's. It is called
The Blinded Bird
So zestfully canst thou sing?
And all this indignity,
With God's consent, on thee!
Blinded ere yet a-wing
By the red-hot needle thou,
I stand and wonder how
So zestfully thou canst sing . . .
• •'••••
Resenting not such wrong,
Thy grievous pain forgot,
Eternal dark thy lot,
Groping thy whole life long,
After that stab of fire;
Enjailed in pitiless wire;
Resenting not such wrong!
Who hath charity? This bird.
Who suffereth long and is kind,
Is not provoked, though blind
And alive ensepulchred?
Who hopeth, endureth all things?
Who thinketh no evil, but sings?
Who is divine? This bird.
/ Above all, his pity is for women, partly for the fate
, that condemns their bloom to be brief and evanescent
(unless written in time on a man's heart where it never
grows old) — so brief the chance, with no term to the
after-pain! But he pities them more because he sees
the increase of our race to rest on an unfair game,
in which, nine throws out of ten, the dice are loaded
/
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 203
against the woman; a duel of sex, almost at times an
internecine duel, which his soul grows to abhor: for
Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni,
and, looking up, he sees God, or whatever gods may be,
deriding the victim. We are all flies to these gods who
tease us for their sport. Even if man labour and profit
his fellows with an idea, yet, in Milton's phrase (as
quoted by Hardy)
Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth.
But, for women, who, nine times out of ten, pay the
price of the great jest, Hardy feels most acutely.
*'Poor wounded name," he quotes and inscribes on the
title-page of Tess
Poor wounded name ! my bosom as a bed
Shall lodge thee . . .
and in the last sentence of his most sorrowful tale he
flings his now famous taunt up at "the President of the
Immortals," even as passionately as did Cleopatra for
her own loss:
Iras. Madam !
Charmian. 0 madam, madam, madam!
Iras. Royal Egypt
Empress !
Charmian Peace, peace, Iras!
Cleopatra. No more but e'en a woman, and commanded
By such poor passion as the maid that milks
(Tess was a dairy-maid)
204 Studies in Literature
And does the meanest chares. It were for me
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods;
To tell them that this world did equal theirs
Till they had stol'n our jewel.
VI
Say what you will, this indignation in Hardy is noble,
is chivalrous, and, as the world is worked, it has much
reason at the back of its furious "Why? — ^Why? —
Why?" It has great excuse when it sours down to
r bitterest irony, as in this early ditty of two country-
bred girls meeting in London — and you will note how
the old market- jog of rhythm and rhyme ache them-
selves into the ironj:
"0 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty ? " —
"0 didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.
— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three ! '* —
*'Yes:that'showwedresswhenwe'reruined," said she. . . .
— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —
"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Isn't equal to that. You ain't ruined," said she.
Women (I think) are more impatient of irony than men :
\ and when Hardy turns his irony upon them — as he often
does in his novels — I have observed that they eye it
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 205
suspiciously, restively; they would be undetected in
their devices, hate instinctively that which shows their
secret ways of power at work under show of servility.
Hardy, their champion, would break down the servility:
and they distrust him for it.
Well — and though they be ungrateful — perhaps their
instinct is true and his is a childless creed : and for men,
though it be manly to face it out and test it, an unhope-
ful creed. For women it must be certainly unpromising
to read the doctrine of Jude the Obscure, which works
out to this, that man's aspirations to make the world
better are chiefly clogged by the flesh, and that flesh is
woman. To man it can scarcely be less heartening to
be barred with the question
Has some Vast Imbecility, n
Mighty to build and blend, (
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?
Or come we of an Automaton
Unconscious of our pains?
Or are we live remains
Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye
now gone?
Well, when it comes to this, I for one can only answer
that, if it were, we must yet carry on somehow, sing a
song on the raft we cannot steer, keep a heart of sorts,
and share out the rations to the women and children.
But that word recalls me. It is a childless creed. It
has no more evidence than Meredith's: intellectually
viewed, I find them equal: but Meredith has hope,
hope for the young: and I must put my money on
hope.
2o6 Studies in Literature
VII
Further, when I consider, these poems — as those ^
novels — crowd the sardonic laughter of the gods too/^
thickly. There is irony enough in life, God wot; but
here is a rnan possessed with it. All men, all stories,
tramp with him to his titles Lije's Little Ironies, Satires
of Circumstance, Time's Laughing Stocks ^ So one
hesitates and asks : Is life, after all, a parish full of bad
practical jokes ? Is catholic man like this? No : as we
take up poem after poem in which human loves and
aspirations find themselves thwarted, set astray, or
butting against some door that, having opened a glimpse
of paradise, shuts by some power idiotically mischievous
if not malignant — shuts with a click of the latch and a
chuckle of mocking laughter — we tell ourselves, ''These
things happen : but in any such crowd they never and
in no life happen. " And while we debate this, Hardy \
confounds us, spreading out his irony upon one grand ;
ironic drama. The Dynasts.
I suppose The Dynasts to be — and I shall not allow
for rival Doughty's noble but remote, morose, almost
Chinese, epic. The Dawn in Britain (this, too, a product
^ Why, O why will authors choose loose, woolly, undescriptive titles?
To take another writer of genius, why Traffics and Discoveries, Life's
Handicap, Many Inventions, The Day's Work ? And, to return to Hardy,
what differentiates an Irony of Life from a Satire of Circumstance, and
do not both equally make the victim a Laughing Stock of Tinae? And
if there be a difference, are the poems divided by the titles based on any
fundamentum divisionis 7 And, anyhow, what is wrong with The Iliad,
King Lear, Don Quixote, John Gilpin, Tom Jones, David Copper field ?
What is right with The Eternal Mystery, Some Emotions and a Moral,
and so on? Are they not all too loose for their contents? And what is
wrong again with a house — The House with the Seven Gables, Bleak
House, The House with the Green Shutters, The House oj Usher, A DolVs
House, The House that Jack Built ?
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 207
of a man well past meridian) — I suppose The Dynasts to
be the grandest poetic structure planned and raised in
England in our time. In the soar and sweep of that
drama the poet — whom, a moment ago, we were on the
point of accusing for provincial, lays Europe beneath
us ''flat, as to an eagle's eye" — a map with little things
in multitudes, ants in armies, scurrying along the threads
which are roads, violently agitated in nodules which are
cities. But let me quote one or two of Hardy's own
stage directions and thereby not only save myself the
vain effort to do what has been perfectly done for me,
but send you, if you would practise the art of con-
densed and vivid description, to models as good as can
be found in English prose. Imagine yourselves, then,
an audience aloft and listening to ^e talk of such Spirits
as watch over human destinies.
The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone
and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and
the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular
plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy low-
lands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a
grey-green garment hemmed by the Ural mountains and
the glistening Arctic Ocean.
The point of view then sinks downward through space,
and draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries,
where the people, . . . are seen writhing, crawling, heaving,
and vibrating, in their various cities and nationalities.
(A picture of Europe today.) Then
A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle,
enduing men and things with a seeming transparency, and
exhibiting as one organism the anatomy of life and move-
ment in all humanity and vitalized matter included in the
display.
2o8 Studies in Literature
So the focus slides down and up and again down: it
narrows on the British House of Commons, or on a
village green, or on a bedroom in a palace : it expands to
sweep the field of Austerlitz. I ask you to turn for
yourselves to one marvellous scene of a cellar, full of
drunken deserters, looking out on the snow-tormented
road along which straggles the army of Sir John Moore
and struggles for Corufia. . . . But here is a passage in
the retreat from Moscow :
What has floated down from the sky upon the Army is a
flake of snow. Then come another and another, till natural
features, hitherto varied with the tints of autumn, are con-
founded, and all is phantasmal grey and white.
The caterpillar shape still creeps laboriously nearer: but
instead of increasing in size by the rules of perspective, it
gets more attenuated, and there are left upon the ground
behind it minute parts of%tself, which are speedily flaked
over, and remain as white pimples by the wayside.
Pines rise mournfully on each side of the nearing object.
. . . Endowed with enlarged powers of audition as of
vision, we are struck by the mournful taciturnity that pre-
vails. Nature is mute. Save for the incessant flogging of
the wind-broken and lacerated horses there are no sounds.
^ The diction of the poem itself seldom rises to match
its conception. In the rustic scenes we get that incom-
parable prose, 'nervous, and vernacular, yet Biblical,^
which Hardy has made out of his native dialect : but the
major human characters talk in verse which is often too
prosy, and the watching Spirits attain but spasmodi-
cally to the height of their high argument. Their lips
are not touched by any such flame as kindles (for
example) the lips of the watching Spirits in Prometheus
Unbound. But we must not judge a poem of The
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 209
Dynasts' range and scope apart from its total impres-
sion : and that, in The Dynasts is tremendous. And I at
this moment am committing a deadly artistic sin against
proportion in attempting to talk of it in a part of a lec-
ture. It should have two lectures to itself.
As for its philosophy, one naturally compares it with
that of Tolstoy's great novel War and Peace. But
whereas Tolstoy and Hardy both see Napoleon as a
puppet under Heaven — as Plato pronounces Man to be
*'at his best a noble plaything for the gods" — the one,
being Russian and an idealist, sees the little great man's
ends shaped by a Divinity, watching over Sion, having
purpose : the other, a most honest pessimist, can detect
no purpose, or no beneficent one. For all he can see,
God works — if He work — a magnipotent Will, but
Like a knitter drowsed,
Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,
The will has woven with an absent heed
Since life first was; and ever will so weave.
And there for today we must leave it.
VIII
I fall back, to conclude, upon Wessex ; appropriately,
I think, upon a churchyard in a comer there, where
kinsmen, friends, neighbours, mingle their dust; where,
as Hardy's friend and homelier predecessor put it.
The zummer air o' theas green hill
'V a-heav'd in bosoms now all still.
Faithful to this dust, to ancestry, old associations, the
Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos
Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui. . . .
14
210
Studies in Literature
the native returns: and the dead whisper, and this is
what they tell :
William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at
plough,
Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,
And the vSquire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock church-
yard now!
"Gone," I call them, gone for good, that group of local
hearts and heads;
Yet at mothy curfew-tide,
And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back
from walls and leads.
They've a way of whispering to me — fellow-wight who
yet abide —
In the muted measured note
Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave's stillicide:
"We have triumphed: this achievement turns the bane
to antidote,
Unsuccesses to success.
Many thought-worn eves and morrows to a morrow free
of thought.
" No more need we corn and clothing, feel of old terrestrial
stress;
Chill detraction stirs no sigh;
Fear of death has even bygone us : death gave all that we
possess."
W. D. "Ye mid burn the wold bass-viol that I set such
vallie by. "
Squire. "You may hold the manse in fee.
You may wed my spouse, my children's memory of me
may decry."
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 211
Lady. "You may have my rich brocades, my laces; take
each household key;
Ransack coffer, desk, bureau;
Quiz the few poor treasures hid there, con the
letters kept by me. "
Far. '*Ye mid zell my favotirite heifer, ye mid let the
charlock grow,
Foul the grinterns, give up thrift. "
Wife. *'If ye break my best blue china, children, I shan't
care or ho."
All. " We've no wish to hear the tidings, how the people's
fortunes shift ;
What your daily doings are;
Who are wedded, born, divided; if your lives beat
slow or swift.
*' Curious not the least are we if our intents you
make or mar.
If you quire to our old tune.
If the City stage still passes, if the weirs still roar
afar."
— Thus, with very gods' composure, freed those
crosses late and soon
Which, in life, the Trine allow
(Why, none witteth), and ignoring all that haps
beneath the moon,
William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow
late at plough,
Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,
And the Squire, and Lady Susan, murmur mildly
to me now.
COLERIDGE
THE story of Coleridge's life is hard to write and,
in a sense, even harder to read: hard to write
because the innumerable lapses, infirmities, defections
of the will, all claiming — as facts — to be chronicled,
cannot but obscure that lovable living presence to which
all his contemporaries bore witness and to which the
biographer must hold fast or his portrait misses most
that is true and essential ; and hard to read because the
reader, at the hundredth instance of Coleridge 's^taking
the wrong coach, or forgetting to write to his wife and
family, or accepting money and neglecting the conditions
on which it was bestowed, is apt to let Christian charity
go to the winds, and so on his part, too, to miss, nor
care that he misses, the better Coleridge which is the
real Coleridge, the affectionate forgiving Coleridge, so
anxious to cure his faults, so eager to make people see,
so childlike and yet condemned to sit
obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind.
The story not only exasperates the temper; it dodges
the understanding, and leaves even the patient reader
in such bewilderment as, no doubt, afflicted the much-
enduring Odysseus after a third attempt to embrace his
212
Coleridge 213
mother in the Shades. For Providence (as De Quincey
put it) set "perpetual relays" along Coleridge's path
through life. We pursue the man and come up with
group after group of his friends : and each, as we demand
"What have you done with Coleridge?" answers,
"Coleridge? That wonderful fellow? ... He was
here just now, and we helped him forward a little
way."
The laie James Dykes Campbell (to whose Life of
Coleridge the reader is referred) took up his task with
enthusiasm and performed it with astonishing success.
He honoured the poet's memory a little "on this side
idolatry." Yet as we follow his condensed narrative we
feel the growth of misgivings in the writer's mind, and
at the close he has to make a clean breast of them. " If , "
says he, *'my presentment of what I believe to be the
truth be not found to tend, on the whole, to raise
Coleridge in the eyes of men, I shall, I confess, feel
both surprised and disappointed. "
I am sure that the temple, with all the rubble which
blended with its marble, must have been a grander whole
than any we are able to reconstruct for ourselves from the
stones which lie about the field. The living Coleridge was
ever his own apology — men and women who neither shared
nor ignored his shortcomings, not only loved him but
honoured and followed him. This power of attraction,
which might almost be called universal, so diverse were the
minds and natures attracted, is itself conclusive proof of
very rare qualities. We may read and re-read his life, but
we cannot know him as the Lambs, or the Wordsworths, or
Poole, or Hookham Frere, or the Gillmans, or Green knew
him. Hatred as well as love may be blind, but friendship
has eyes, and their testimony may wisely be used in correct-
ing our own impressions.
214 Studies in Literature
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21,
1772, at the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire,
the youngest of nine sons by a second marriage. His
father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was an amiable,
absent-minded scholar, and apparently somewhat un-
practical. We are told that he printed several books
by subscription, and he tried to improve the Latin
grammars in use by calling the ablative case the
" quale-quarequidditive. " He died in 1781, and a
few months later young Samuel obtained a presentation
to Christ's Hospital.
The school and the Coleridge of those days were
afterwards depicted in imperishable colours by Charles
Lamb, who, though Coleridge's junior by two years,
had become a Blue-coat boy some months earlier. In
Christ* s Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago, by one of
those tricks which were dear to him and endear him to
us. Lamb professedly supplements his own Recollections '
of Christ^s Hospital with the recollections of a lad not
fortunate like him in having a home and parents near.
I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who
should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaint-
ances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind
to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which
they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town,
soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them
to recur too often, though I found them few enough; and,
one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone
among six hundred playmates.
0 the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early home-
stead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in
those unfledged years! How, in my dreams, would my
native town (far in the west) come back, with its church,
and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in
Coleridge 215
the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wilt-
shire !
The child is Coleridge, of course, and sweet Calne
in Wiltshire is sweet Ottery in Devon, disguised. Of
course Coleridge felt this loneliness: a nature so sen-
sitive could not help feeling it; and sixteen years
later in Frost at Midnight he feelingly recalled it, and
promised his own child a happier fate. But, equally
of course, he did not feel it all the time. His earliest
letters contain allusions to half-crowns and ''a plumb
cake," and in due course, as he grows up, the theme
changes naturally to raiment. "You will excuse me for
reminding you that, as our holidays commence next
week, and I shall go out a good deal, a good pair
of breeches will be no inconsiderable accession to my
appearance, " the pair in use being "not altogether well
adapted for a female eye. "
In due course, too, he became a Grecian, fell in love
and wrote boyish poetry: and both the love-making
and the versifying, though no great matters at the time,
were destined to have more formidable consequences
than usually attach themselves to youthful experiments.
The young lady who inspired them was a Miss Mary
Evans, a widow's daughter, and sister of a small Blue-
coat boy whom Coleridge had protected.
And oh ! from sixteen to nineteen what hours of paradise
had Allen [a schoolfellow] and I in escorting the Miss Evanses
home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner's . . .
and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the
pillage of the flower-gardens within six miles of town, with
sonnet or love-rhyme wrapped round the nosega3^
But not all the inspiration came from Miss Evans.
That of the love-making she shared, if a Christ's
2i6 Studies in Literature
Hospital tradition be true, with the daughter of the
school *' nurse"; to whom the poem Genevieve was
addressed. ("For the head boys to be in love with
these young persons was an institution of long standing, ' '
says Mr. Dykes Campbell.) That of Coleridge's poetic
awakening she undoubtedly shared with the Rev.
William Lisle Bowles, as we learn from Chapter' I of
Biographia Liter aria. Critic after critic has found oc-
casion for wonder in this ; though in truth there is none
at all. To begin with, Bowles's sonnets are by no
means bad; and, moreover, even today they are percepti-
bly, if palely, tinged with the dawn that was breaking
over English poetry. Doubtless, had the book which
fell into his hands as he was entering his seventeenth
year been a volume of Blake, or of Cowper, or of Bums,
his young conversion would have been more striking;
would, at any rate, have made a better story. But by
1790 or thereabouts the new poetic movement was "in
tfie air,^ as we say : a youth might take infection from
any one, nor did it greatly matter from whom. Had
Coleridge derived it from a stronger source the results
might have been more precipitate, more violent. As it
was, the blameless Sonnets — these and the equally
blameless society of the Evans girls — ^weaned him from
metaphysics and theology, on which he was immaturely
feeding, and weaned him gently. He swore assent to
Bowles: Bowles "did his heart more good" than all
other books "excepting the Bible": but in his own
attempts at versifying he still observed, even timidly,
the conventions.
In January, 1791, the Committee of Almoners of
Christ's Hospital emancipated him, with an Exhibition,
to Jesus College, Cambridge. He started well. In
1792 he gained the Browne Gold Medal for a Sapphic
Coleridge 217
Ode on the Slave Trade, and barely missed (on Porson^s,
selection) the Craven Scholarship. In November, 1793,
he bolted from Cambridge, in a fright of his college
debts, or in a wild fit following on Mary Evans's rejec-
tion of his addresses. Both causes are suspected, and
the two may have acted in combination. At all events
he found his way to London, and on the second of
December enlisted in the 15th or King's Light Dragoons,
sinking all but his initials and his unlikeness to other
men in the alias of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. Prob-
ably a worse light dragoon — he was short of stature,
fat, and unwieldy — never occupied, or failed to occupy,
a saddle. In April, 1794, his relatives procured his
discharge, and Jesus College readmitted him. In June
he visited his old schoolfellow Allen at Oxford, and
there became acquainted with Robert Southey of
Balliol. Mr. Robert Southey was then a youth of ' ' vio-
lent principles," out of which — his friends and Cole-
ridge aiding — the famous scheme of Pantisocracy was
hastily incubated. Mr. Campbell summarises it thus:
" Twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal prin-
ciples are to embark with twelve ladies in April next,"
fixing themselves in some "delightful part of the new back
settlements of America. " The labour of each man for two
or three hours a day, it was imagined, would suffice to sup-
port the colony. The produce was to be common property,
there was to be a good library, and ample leisure was to be
devoted to study, discussion, and the education of the
children on a settled system. The women were to be
employed in taking care of the infant children and in other
suitable occupations, not neglecting the cultivation of their
minds. Among other matters not yet determined was
"whether the marriage contract shall be dissolved, if agree-
able to one or both parties. " Every one was "to enjoy his
2i8 Studies in Literature
own religious and political opinions, provided they do not
encroach on the rules previously made. " "They calculate
that every gentleman providing £125 will be sufficient to
carry the scheme into execution."
While Pantisocracy was hatching, Coleridge had
departed on a walking-tour in Wales. On the thir-
teenth of July he reached Wrexham, and there, standing
at the inn-window, he spied Mary Evans coming down
the street with her sister. "I sickened," he writes,
'*and well-nigh fainted, but instantly retired." The
two sisters, it appears, had caught sight of him. They
"walked by the window four or five times, as if anx-
iously. " But the meeting, the possible reconcilement,
were not to be. Coleridge fled to Bristol, joined his
friend Southey there, with other Pantisocrats, includ-
ing a family of young ladies named Fricker. Southey
married Edith Fricker. Coleridge — such things hap-
pen in the revulsion of disappointed passion — married
Sara Fricker. The marriage, says Mr. Campbell, was
not made in Heaven. It was in great measure brought
about by Southey.
Heaven alone knows — but no one who loves Cole-
ridge can help wistfully guessing — ^what Dorothy Words-
worth might have made of him, as his wife. We have,
perhaps, no right to guess at these things, but we can-
not help it. He met her too late, by a little while, as it
was all but too late that he met William Wordsworth.
The Coleridges, after a brief experience of house-keeping
at Clevedon and Bristol — interrupted by a tour to col-
lect subscriptions for a projected newspaper, The Watch-
man— hied them down with their first-bom to Nether
Stowey in Somerset, to be neighbours of Thomas Poole,
an admiring friend and a good fellow. To Nether
Coleridge 219
Stowey, in July, 1797, came Wordsworth and his
"exquisite sister, " and were joined by Charles Lamb —
all three as the Coleridges' guests. (The visit is com-
memorated in This Lime-tree Bower my Prison.) At
the end of his week's holiday Lamb returned to London ;
the Wordsworths, charmed by Coleridge's society,
removed themselves but three miles away, to Alfoxden,
and set up house.
Then the miracle happened. Coleridge had already
published a volume of verse and brought it to a second
edition: but it contained no promise of what was to
come. Wordsworth was meditating the Muse, if the
word "meditating" can be used of a composition so
frantic as The Borderers; but that he (the slower to
take fire) would within a year be writing Tintern
Abbey was a thing impossible, which nevertheless
befell. Brother, sister, and friend — these three as
Coleridge has testified — became one soul. "They saw
as much of one another as if the width of a street, and
not a pair of coombes, had separated their several
abodes"; and in the soul of that intimacy, under the
influence of Dorothy — herself the silent one, content
to encourage, criticise, admire — wrapped around by
the lovely solitudes of the Quantocks — Coleridge and
Wordsworth found themselves poets, speaking with new
voices in a new dawn. On the thirteenth of November,
at half -past four in the afternoon, the three friends set
off to walk to Watchet, on their way to the Exmoor
country, intending to defray their expenses by the sale
of a poem which the two men were to compose by the
way. Before the first eight miles had been covered,
the plan of joint authorship had broken down, and
Coleridge took the poem into his sole hands. He
wrought at it until the following March. On the
220 Studies in Literature
twenty- third of that month, writes Dorothy, "Cole-
ridge dined with us. He brought his ballad [The
Ancient Mariner] finished. We walked with him to the
Miner's house. A beautiful evening, very starry, the
horned moon.'* We feel that the stars were out with
excuse, to celebrate the birth of a star.
The Ancient Mariner sets one reflecting that, after
all, the men of the Middle Ages had much to say for
themselves, who connected poetry with magic, and
thought of Virgil as a wizard. As we said just now, by
taking small pains we can understand that the sonnets
of Bowles — pale, faded essays as they appear to us —
wore a different complexion in the sunrise of 1790.
But we can ignore the time and circumstance of its birth,
ignore the theorisings out of which it sprang, ignore
Wordsworth and his prefaces and the taste on which
they made war; and still, after more than a hundred
years, The Ancient Mariner is the wild thing of wonder,
the captured star, which Coleridge brought in his hands
to Alfoxden and showed to Dorothy and William
Wordsworth. Not in the whole range of English
poetry — not in Shakespeare himself — has the lyrical
genius of our language spoken with such a note.
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard . . .
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
y Its music is as effortless as its imagery. Its words do
not cumber it: exquisite words come to it, but it uses
and straightway forgets them. Not Shakespeare him-
self, unless by snatches, so sublimated the lyrical
tongue, or obtained effects so magical by the barest
necessary means. Take
Coleridge 221
Or
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie.
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.
Or
The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I puU'd at one rope,
But he said nought to me.
Here, and throughout, from the picture of the bride
entering the hall to that of the home-coming in the
moon-lit harbour, every scene in the procession belongs
to high romance, yet each is conjured up with that
economy of touch we are wont to call classical. We
forget almost, listening to the voice, that there are such
things as words.
And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel's song,
That makes the Heavens be mute.
If, in criticism, such an epithet be pardonable, we would
call that voice seraphic ; if such a simile, we would liken
it to a seraph's, musing, talking before the gate of
Paradise in the dawn.
Critics, allowing the magic of the poem, proceed to
stultify the admission by enquiring why Coleridge did
not follow it up and write others like it. The question,
when foolishness has put it, can in terms of foolishness
222 Studies in Literature
be readily answered. Coleridge yielded his will to
opium. He had already begun to contract the habit,
and he soon became a man capable (in Hazlitt's phrase)
of doing anything which did not present itself as a duty.
Once or twice, in Christabel and in Kuhla Khan^ he
found new and divine openings, but his will could not
sustain the flight, and the rest of the story of him as a
poet resolves itself into repeated futile efforts to carry
Christabel to a conclusion.
All this is true enough, or at least can be made con-
vincing by any one who sets forth the story of Cole-
ridge's subsequent aberrations. But before we blame
his weakness let us ask ourselves if it be conceivably
within one man's measure to produce a succession of
poems on the plane of The Ancient Mariner; and, next,
if — the magic granted, as it must be granted — it would
not almost necessarily exhaust a man. In other words,
let us enquire if, in a man who performed that miracle,
his failure to perform others may not be more charitably
set down to a divine exhaustion than charged upon his
frailties. Surely by Christabel itself that question is
answered; and almost as indisputably by Kubla Khan.
Coleridge himself tells us that he began Christabel in
1797; that is, either before or during the composition of
The Ancient Mariner. Between the conception of the
two poems there was no interval of opium-taking. Yet
who, studying Christabel, can, after the first two or
three pages have been turned, believe that the poem
could ever and by any possibility have been finished?
Coleridge, no doubt, believed that it could: but in his
struggles to finish it he was fighting against stronger
adversaries than opium; against fate and a providence
under which, things being what they are, their conse-
quences will be what they will be.
Coleridge 223
The metre of Christabel, perfectly handled by its
inventor, probably suffers in our ears by association
with the jingle of Scott, and the vastly worse jingle
of Byron, who borrowed it in turn. It has since been
utterly vulgarised, and the very lilt of it nowadays
suggests The Mistletoe Bough, melodrama, and the
balladry of Bow Bells. Yet, and although the sus-
picion may be unworthy, one cannot help tracing
something of Bow Bells back to an origin in such lines
as
Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale,
Murmuring o'er the name again,
''Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine"?
In short, there are some to whom Christabel rings
false, painfully false, here and there, in spite of its
witchery. Yet, where it rings true, we ask, Was there
ever such pure romantic music?
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full :
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is gray:
'Tis a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.
Of Kubla Khan, even if *' a person . . . from Porlock '*
had not interrupted it, who will contend that it could
ever have been finished, or even continued to any
length? It abides the niost entrancing magical frag-
ment in English poetry; more than this it never could
have been or have hoped to be.
224 Studies in Literature
Some three weeks after that starry evening on which
Coleridge, his immortal ballad finished, walked with
his friends, reciting it, we find Wordsworth writing to
a friend that he, too, has been "very rapidly adding
to his stock of poetry " and that the season is advancing
with strides, "and the country becomes almost every
day more lovely." The splendour of that summer in
the Quantocks has passed into the history of our
literature. Coleridge's best harvest was done; Words-
worth's— longer of continuance, yet brief in comparison
with its almost insufferably long aftermath — on the
point of ripening. The brother and sister quitted
Alfoxden at Midsummer. In September Coleridge met
them in London and voyaged with them on a happy,
almost rollicking, jaunt to Hamburg. The Lyrical
Ballads had been published a few days before, Cole-
ridge contributing The Ancient Mariner (or, to spell
it accurately, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere), The
Nightingale, The Foster-Mother's Tale, and The Dungeon.
The two friends had launched their thunderbolt, and
went off gaily. It was a real thunderbolt, too; a book
to which the overworked epithet "epoch-making" may
for once in a way be applied without strain on the
truth; but for the moment England took it with her
habitual phlegm. Mrs. Coleridge sent news that "the
Lyrical Ballads are not liked at all by any. "
At Hamburg, after a few crowded days, the travellers
separated — Coleridge for Ratzeburg, intent on acquiring
a thorough knowledge of German. He returned to
Nether Stowey in July, 1799, and towards the close of
the year met the Wordsworths again and toured with
them through the Lake Country. Thither in June,
1800, he wandered back to them from London and
Stowey. They had installed themselves at Dove
Coleridge 225
Cottage, Grasmere, and in July the Coleridges settled
at Greta Hall, Keswick, twelve miles away. Words-
worth was not working at the height of his powers : but
to Coleridge the renewed intimacy brought no secondary
spring. For him there was never to be another Stowey.
And here, both fortunately and unfortunately, the story
may break off : unfortunately, because his poetic period
had come to an end (he had, he writes to Thelwall, "for
ever renounced poetry for metaphysics," and moreover
was beginning his long slavery to opium) ; fortunately,
because its end releases us from following him to Malta
and Bristol, through quarrels and patchings-up of friend-
ship, through wanderings, returns, vows and defections,
partial recoveries, relapses and despairs, to the long-
drawn sunset of his life in the home of the Gillmans at
Highgate.
Let two things be noted, however, before we give
assent to those who write contemptuously of Coleridge
and his infirmity. The first is, that even in the lowest
depths he still fought, and in the end he did emerge
with the victory. He had won it at a terrible cost ; the
fight had killed a hundred splendid potentialities; but
though scarred, battered, enfeebled, the man emerged,
and with his manhood still in his hands, though they
trembled on the prize. Next let us, reading of quarrels
and misunderstandings between him and his friends,
note how, as time effaces the petty circumstance of each,
so the essential goodness of the man shines through,
more and more clearly ; how, in almost any given quarrel,
as the years go on, we see that after all Coleridge was
in the right. He knew his weakness: but at least it
taught him to be tender towards the weaknesses of his
fellows, and no man had a better reason to ask of his
sufferings
IS
226 Studies in Literature
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
As this affectionate disposition made him all but unin-
telligible to the Southeys and Hazlitts of his time, and
lay somewhat outside the range of self-centred Words-
worth, whose fault in friendship was that of the Dutch
in matters of commerce,^ so the very brilliance of his
intellect too often isolated him within the circle of its
own light. But on this Shelley has said the last word :
You will see Coleridge — he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightning blind.
Flags wearily through darkness and despair —
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
In justice and in decency we should strive to imagine
Coleridge as he impressed those who loved him and
listened to him in his great days of promise; not the
Coleridge of later Highgate days, the spent giant with
whose portrait Carlyle made brutal play to his own
ineffaceable discredit; nor even the Coleridge of 1816,
the ''archangel a little damaged" — as Lamb, using a
friend's privilege, might be allowed to describe him in a
letter to Wordsworth, a friend of almost equal standing ;
not these, but the Coleridge of whom the remembrance
was the abiding thought in Lamb's mind and on his lips
* " But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures
are too liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed —
the mistaking those who are desirom and well pleased to be loved by you,
for those who love you." — Coleridge to AUsop, December 2, 1818. (The
reference is to Wordsworth.)
Coleridge 227
during the brief while he survived him — "Coleridge is
dead." "His great and dear spirit haunts me. . . .
Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see
again. I seem to love the house he died at more passion-
ately than when he lived. . . . What was his mansion
is consecrated to me a chapel. " If we must dwell at all
on the later Coleridge, let it be in the spirit of his own
most beautiful epitaph:
Stop, Christian passer-by ! — Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he.
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise — to be forgiven for fame
He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!
None the less, in a world ever loath to admit that
omelets involve the breaking of eggs, men will go on
surmising what might have been, what full treasures
of poetry Coleridge might have left, had he never drunk
opium, had he eschewed metaphysics, had he married
Dorothy Wordsworth, had he taken a deal of advice
his friends gave him in good intent to rescue the Cole-
ridge which God made (with their approval) and the
creature marred. "He lived until 1834, " wrote the late
Dr. Garnett. * ' If every year of his life had yielded such
a harvest as 1797, he would have produced a greater
amount pf high poetry than all his contemporaries put
together.\ Yes, indeed! and Kuhla Khan has this in
common with a cow's tail — that it only lacks length to
reach the moon. And yet, vain though these specula-
tions are, we do wrong to laugh at them, for their protest
goes deeper than their reasoning; and while fate
228 Studies in Literature
tramples on things of beauty the indignant human
heart will utter it. Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus,
when a poet — and such a poet — is broken in his prime ?
On the other hand, the question sometimes raised —
whether, in the Quantock time, when the pair learnt
to be poets, Coleridge owed more to Wordsworth, or
Wordsworth to Coleridge — is, as Sir Thomas Browne
would say, puzzling, but not beyond all conjecture: and
we raise it again because we think it usually receives
the wrong answer. It is usually argued that Coleridge
received more than he gave, because he was the more
impressionable. We might oppose this with the argu-
ment that Coleridge probably gave more than he
received, as his presence and talk were the more inspir-
ing. But let us look at a date or two. In June, 1797,
Coleridge wrote This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, and
it contains such lines as these :
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower ! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure . . .
and
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.
Frost at Midnight is dated February, 1798, and it con-
tains the passage beginning
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee. . . .
The exquisite Nightingale belongs to the summer of
1798, and it contains the images of the "night-wander-
ing man, " of the nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes . . .
Coleridge 229
of the other birds awake in the bushes with
Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full . . ■
and that most lovely picture of the infant hushing his
woe as he gazes up at the moon through the orchard
boughs :
While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,
Did glitter in the yellow moonbeam! Well! —
It is a father's tale. But if that Heaven
Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up
Familiar with these songs, that with the night
He may associate joy.
Now the first thing to be noted of these lines, these
images, is that they are what we now call Words-
worthian; some, the very best Wordsworthian ; but all
Wordsworthian with an intensity to which (if we study
his verse chronologically) we find that in 1798 Words-
worth had never once attained — or once only, in a
couple of lines of The Thorn, When Coleridge wrote
these things, Wordsworth was writing We are Seven,
Goody Blake, Simon Lee, and the rest. It was only
after, though soon after, Coleridge had written them
that Wordsworth is seen capable of such lines as
or of
The still sad music of humanity . , .
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place.
This note Coleridge might teach to Wordsworth, as
Wordsworth might improve on it and make it his own.
230
Studies in Literature
But that other note — the lyrical note of The Ancient
Mariner — was incommunicable. He bequeathed it to
none, and before him no poet had approached it ; hardly-
even Shakespeare, on the harp of Ariel.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
I do not hold up Joubert as a very astonishing and
powerful genius, but rather as a delightful and edifying
genius. . . . He is the most prepossessing and convincing
of witnesses to the good of loving light. Because he sin-
cerely loved light, and did not prefer to it any little private
darkness of his own, he found light. . . . And because he
was full of light he was also full of happiness. . . . His life
was as charming as his thoughts. For certainly it is
natural that the love of light, which is already in some
measure the possession of light, should irradiate and beatify
the whole life of him who has it.
MANY a reader of Essays in Criticism must have
paused and in thought transferred to Matthew
Arnold these words of his in praise of Joubert, as well
as the fine passage in which he goes on to ask What, in
literature, we mean by fame? Only two kinds of
authors (he tells us) are secure of fame : the first being
the Homers, Dantes, Shakespeares, "the great abiding
fountains of truth," whose praise is for ever and ever.
But beside these sacred personages stand certain elect
ones, less majestic, yet to be recognised as of the same
family and character with the greatest, ''exercising like
them an immortal function, and like them inspiring a
permanent interest. " The fame of these also is assured.
"They will never, like the Shakespeares, command the
231
232 Studies in Literature
homage of the multitude ; but they are safe ; the multi-
tude will not trample them down."
To this company Matthew Arnold belongs. We all
feel it, and some of us can give reasons for our con-
fidence; but perhaps, if all our reasons were collected,
the feeling would be found to reach deeper into cer-
tainty than any of them. He was never popular, and
never will be. Yet no one can say that, although at one
time he seemed to vie with the public in distrusting
it, his poetry missed its mark. On the other hand,
while his critical writings had swift and almost instan-
taneous effect for good, the repute they brought him was
moderate and largely made up of misconception. For
the mass of his countrymen he came somehow to per-
sonify a number of things which their minds vaguely
associated with kid gloves, and by his ironical way of
playing with the misconception he did more than a little
to confirm it. But in truth Arnold was a serious man
who saw life as a serious business and chiefly relied, for
making the best of it, upon a serene common-sense.
He had elegance, to be sure, and was inclined — at any
rate, in controversy — to be conscious of it ; but it was
elegance of that plain Attic order to which common-
sense gives the law and almost the inspiration. The
man and the style were one. Alike in his life and his
writings he observed and preached the golden mean,
with a mind which was none the less English and practi-
cal if, in expressing it, he deliberately and almost
defiantly avoided that emphasis which Englishmen love
to a fault.
Matthew Arnold, eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold,
the famous Head Master of Rugby, was born on
Christmas Eve, 1822, at Laleham on the Thames,
where his father at that time taught private pupils.
Matthew Arnold 233
The child was barely six years old when the family
removed to Rugby, and at seven he returned to Lale-
ham to be taught by his uncle, the Rev. John Buckland.
In August, 1836, he proceeded to Winchester, but was
removed at the end of a year and entered Rugby,
where he remained until he went up to Balliol College,
Oxford, in 1841, with an open scholarship. He had
written a prize poem at Rugby — the subject, Alaric at
Rome; and on this performance he improved by taking
the Newdigate in 1843 — the subject, Cromwell. But
we need waste no time on these exercises, which are of
interest only to people interested in such things. It is
better worth noting that the boy had been used to
spending his holidays, and now spent a great part of his
vacations, at Fox How, near Grasmere, a house which
Dr. Arnold had taken to refresh his eyes and his spirits
after the monotonous ridge and furrow, field and
hedgerow, around Rugby ; and that, as Mr. Herbert Paul
puts it, young Matthew ''thus grew up under the
shadow of Wordsworth, whose brilliant and penetrat-
ing interpreter he was destined to become." Genius
collects early, and afterwards distils from recollection;
and if its spirit, like that of the licentiate Pedro Garcias,
is to be disinterred, he who would find Matthew Arnold's
must dig in and around Fox How and Oxford.
At Oxford, which he loved passionately, he "missed
his first," but atoned for this, three months later, by
winning a fellowship at Oriel. (This was in 1844-5.
His father had died in 1842.) He stayed up, however,
but a short while after taking his degree : went back to
Rugby as an assistant master; relinquished this in 1847
to become private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, then
President of the Council ; and was by him appointed in
1 85 1 to an Inspectorship ot Schools, which he retained
234
Studies in Literature
for five-and-thirty years. In 1851, too, he married
Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a Judge of the
Queen's Bench; and so settled down at the same time
to domestic happiness and to daily work which, if dull
sometimes, was not altogether ungrateful as it was
never less than conscientiously performed.
Meanwhile, in 1849, he had put forth a thin volume.
The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A; which was
followed in 1852 by Empedocles on Etna, and other
Poems, by A. In 1853 he dropped anonymity and
under the title Poems, by Matthew Arnold republished
the contents of these two volumes, omitting Empedocles,
with a few minor pieces, and adding some priceless
things, such as Sohrab and Rustum, The Church oj
Brou, Requiescat, and The Scholar-Gipsy.
"It was received, we believe, with general indiffer-
ence," wrote Mr. Froude of the first volume, in The
Westminster Review, 1854. We need not trouble to
explain the fact, beyond saying that English criticism
was just then at about the lowest ebb it reached in
the last century, and that the few capable ears were
occupied by the far more confident voice of Tennyson
and the far more disconcerting one of Browning: but
the fact — surprising when all allowance has been made
— must be noted, for it is important to remember that
the most and best of Arnold's poetry was written
before he gained the world's ear, and that he gained
it not as a poet but as a critic. In 1855 appeared
Poems by Matthew Arnold, Second Series, of which only
Balder Dead and Separation were new; and in 1858
Merope with its Preface: but in the interval between
them he had been elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford
(May 1857).
The steps by which a reputation grows, the precise
Matthew Arnold 235
moment at which it becomes established, are often diffi-
cult to trace and fix. The poems, negligently though
they had been received at first, must have helped : and,
since men who improve an office are themselves usually
improved by it, assuredly the professorship helped too.
The lectures on Homer which adorned Arnold's first
tenure of the Chair strike a new note of criticism, speak
with a growing undertone of authority beneath their
modest professions, and would suffice to explain — if
mere custom did not even more easily explain — why in
1862 he was re-elected for another five years. But
before 1865, no doubt, the judicious who knew him had
tested him by more than his lectures, and were pre-
pared for Essays in Criticism.
Although we are mainly concerned here with the
poems, a word must be said on Essays in Criticism,
which Mr. Paul pronounces to be ''Mr. Arnold's most
important work in prose, the central book, so to speak,
of his life. " Mr. Saintsbury calls it "the first full and
varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and
illustration of the author's critical attitude, the detailed
manifesto and exemplar of the new critical method, and
so one of the epoch-making books of the later nine-
teenth century in English" — and on this subject Mr.
Saintsbury has a peculiar right to be heard. i
Now for a book to be "epoch-making" it must bring I
to its age something which its age conspicuously lacks :
and Essays in Criticism did this. No one remembering
what Dryden did, and Johnson, and Coleridge, and
Lamb, and Hazlitt, will pretend that Arnold invented
English criticism, or that he did well what these men
had done ill. What_he did._and they missed doing, was
to_treat criticism as a delibera.te disinterested art, w[th
laws_and methods of its_omjj_a_^Qper_.tern2er, and
236 Studies in Literature
certain standards or touchstones of right taste by which
the quahty of any writing, as hterature, could be tested.
[In other words he introduced authority and, with
' authority, responsibihty, into a business which had
hitherto been practised at the best by brilhant noncon-
formists and at the worst by Quarterly Reviewers,
who, taking for their motto Judex damnatur cum nocens
ahsolvitur, either forgot or never surmised that to punish
the guilty can be but a corollary of a higher obligation —
to discover the truth. Nor can any one now read the
literature of that period without a sense that Arnold's
teaching was indispensably needed just then. A page
of Macaulay or of Carlyle dazzles us with its rhetoric ;
strikes, arrests, excites us with a number of things
tellingly put and in ways we had scarcely guessed to be
possible ; but it no longer convinces. It does not even
dispose us to be convinced, since (to put it vulgarly)
we feel that the author ''is not out after" truth; that
Macaulay's William III is a figure dressed up and
adjusted to prove Macaulay's thesis, and that the
France of Carlyle' s French Revolution not only never
existed but, had it ever existed, would not be France.
Arnold helping us, we see these failures — for surely that
history is a failure which, like Cremome, will not bear
the daylight — to be inevitable in a republic of letters
where laws are not and wherein each author writes at
the top of his own bent, indulging and exploiting his
personal eccentricity to the fullest. It has probably
been the salvation of our literature that in the four-
teenth century the Latin prevailed over the Anglo-
Saxon line of its descent, and that in the forming of our
verse as well as of our prose we had, at the critical mo-
ments, the literatures of Latin races, Italian or French,
for models and correctives ; as it was the misfortune of
Matthew Arnold 237
the Victorian period before 1865 that its men of genius
wrote with eyes turned inward upon themselves, or, if
outward, upon that German hterature which, for all its
great qualities, must ever be dangerous to Englishmen
because it flatters and encourages their special faults. '
Of Arnold from 1865 onward — of the books in which
he enforced rather than developed his critical method
(for all the gist of it may be found in Essays in Critic-
ism)— of his incursions into the fields of politics and
theology — much might be written, but it would not be
germane to our purpose. New Poems, including Bac-
chanalia, or the New Age, Dover Beach, and the beautiful
Thyrsis, appeared in 1867; and thereafter for the last
twenty years of his life he wrote very little in verse,
though the fine Westminster Abbey proved that the Muse
had not died in him. He used his hold upon the public
ear to preach some sermons which, as a good citizen, he
thought the nation needed. In his hard-working official
life he rendered services which those of us who engage
in the work of English education are constantly and
gratefully recognising in their effects; and we still toil
in the wake of his ideals. He retired in November,
1886. He died on April 15, 1888, of heart-failure; he
had gone to Liverpool to meet his eldest daughter on her
return from the United States, and there, in running to
catch a tram-car, he fell and died in a moment. He was
sixty-five, but in appearance carried his years lightly.
He looked and was, a distinguished and agreeable
man. Of good presence and fine manners; perfect in
his domestic relations, genial in company and radiating
cheerfulness ; setting a high aim to his official work yet
ever conscientious in details ; he stands (apart from his
^ That Matthew Arnold himself over- valued contemporary German
literature does not really affect our aigument.
238 Studies in Literature
literary achievement) as an example of the Englishman
at his best. He cultivated this best deliberately. His
daily note-books were filled with quotations, high
thoughts characteristically chosen and jotted down to
be borne in mind; and some of these — such as Semper
aliquid certi proponendum est and Ecce labora et noli
contristari! — recur again and again. But the result
owed its amiability also to that "timely relaxation"
counselled by Milton :
To measure life, learn thou betimes, and know
Toward solid good what leads the nearest way;
For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains,
And disapproves that care, though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day.
And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.
To those, then, who tell us that Arnold's poetic period
was brief, and imply that it was therefore disappointing,
we might answer that this is but testimony to the
perfect development of a life which in due season used
poetry and at the due hour cast it away, to proceed to
things more practical. But this would be to err almost
as deeply as those who tell us that Arnold, as he him-
self said of Gray, ''never spoke out" — ^whereas Arnold
habitually spoke out, and now and then even too in-
sistently. Again it would be a mistake for us to apply
to him au pied de la lettre the over-sad verses :
Youth rambles on life's arid mount,
And strikes the rock, and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount.
The fount which shall not flow again.
The man mature with labour chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
Matthew Arnold 2^^
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran ofE and vanish 'd out of hand.
And then the old man totters nigh,
And feebly rakes among the stones.
The mount is mute, the channel dry;
And down he lays his weary bones.
Yet it were stupid not to recognise that here is contained
a certain amount of general truth and of truth particu-
larly applicable to Arnold. "The poet," Mr. Saints-
bury writes of him (and it sums up the matter), ''has in
him a vein, or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of
the most real and rarest poetry. But the vein is con-
stantly broken by faults, and never very thick; the
spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops only. "
Elsewhere Mr. Saintsbury speaks of his "elaborate
assumption of the singing-robe, " a phrase very happily
critical. Arnold felt — no man more deeply — the maj-
esty of the poet's function: he solemnly attired himself
to perform it : but the singing-robe was not his daily
wear. The ample pall in which Tennyson swept, his
life through, as to the manner bom; the stiff er skirts
in which Wordsworth walked so complacently; these
would have intolerably cumbered the man who pro-
tested that even the title of Professor made him uneasy.
Wordsworth and Tennyson were bards, authentic and
unashamed ; whereas in Arnold, as Sir William Watson
has noted.
Something of worldling mingled still
With bard and sage.
There was never a finer worldling than Matthew Arnold :
but the criticism is just.
The critics, while noting this, have missed something
240 Studies in Literature
which to us seems to explain much in Arnold's verse.
We said just now that English literature has been
fortunate in what it owes to the Latin races; we may
add that it has been most fortunate in going to Italy for
instruction in its verse, to France for instruction in its
prose. This will be denied by no one who has studied
Elizabethan poetry or the prose of the * ' Augustan " age :
and as little will any one who has studied the structure
of poetry deny that Italy is the natural, France the
unnatural, school for an English poet. The reason is
not that we understand Italian better than French
history and with more sympathy — though this, too,
scarcely admits of dispute; nor again that the past of
Italy appeals to emotions of which poetry is the con-
secrated language. It lies in the very structure and
play of the language; so that an Englishman who has
but learnt how to pronounce the Italian vowels can read
Italian poetry passably. The accent comes to him at
once ; the lack of accent in French remains foreign after
many months of study. Now although Arnold was no
great admirer of French poetry (and indeed had a
particular dislike for the Alexandrine), France was, to
him, among modern nations, the heir of those classical
qualities which differentiate the Greek from the bar-
barian, and his poetry seems ever to be striving to
reproduce the Greek note through verse subdued to a
French flatness of tone, as though (to borrow a meta-
phor from another art) its secret lay in low relief. But
an English poet fighting against emphasis is as a man
fighting water with a broom: and an English poet,
striving to be unemphatic, must yet contrive to be
various, or he is naught. Successfully as he managed
his prose, when he desired it to be emphatic Arnold had,
in default of our native methods of emphasis, to fall
Matthew Arnold 241
back upon that simple repetition which irritates so
many readers. In his poetry the devices are yet more
clumsy. We suppose that no English poet before or
since has so cruelly overworked the interjection "Ah!"
But far worse than any number of "ah!s" is Arnold's
trick of italic type :
How / bewail you ! . . .
We mortal millions live alone . . .
In the rustling night-air comes the answer
"Wouldst thou 6e as these are? Liz;e as they ! " . . .
a device almost unpardonable in poetry. So when he
would give us variety, as in Tristram and Iseult, Arnold
has no better resource than frequent change of metre :
and although every reader must have felt the effect of
that sudden fine outburst
What voices are these on the clear night-air?
What lights in the court — what steps on the stair ? . . .
yet some must also have reflected that the great masters,
having to tell a story, choose their one metre and, having
chosen, so adapt and handle it that it tells all. Sohrab
and Rustum indeed tells itself perfectly, from its first
line to its noble close. But Sohrab and Rustum is, and
professes to be, an episode. Balder is little more, and
most readers find Balder ^ in spite of its fine passages
and general dignity, long enough. Arnold — let it be re-
peated— was not a bard ; not a Muse-intoxicated man.
He had not the bardic, the architectonic, gift. "Some-
thing of the worldling " in him forbade any such fervour
as, sustained day after day for years, gave the world
Paradise Lost, and incidentally, no doubt, made Mil-
16
242 Studies in Literature
ton's daughters regret at times that their father was not
as ordinary men.
Nor had Arnold an impeccable ear for rhyme (in The
New Sirens, for instance, he rhymes "dawning" with
''morning ") : and if we hesitate to follow the many who
have doubted his ear for rhythm, it is not for lack of
apparently good evidence, but because some of his
rhythms which used to give us pause have come, upon
longer acquaintance, to fascinate us: and the explana-
tion may be, as we have hinted, that they follow the
French rather than the Italian use of accent, and are
strange to us rather than in themselves unmusical.
Certainly the critics who would have us believe that
The Strayed Reveller is an unmusical poem will not at
this time of day persuade us by the process of taking
a stanza or two and writing them down in the form of
prose. We could do the same with a dozen lines of The
Tempest or Antony and Cleopatra, were it worth doing;
and prove just as much, or as little.
Something of Arnold's own theory of poetry may be
extracted from the prefaces of 1853 and 1854. They
contain, like the prefaces of Dry den and of Wordsworth,
much wisdom ; but the world, perhaps even more wisely,
refuses to judge a poet by his theory, which (however
admirable) seldom yields up his secret. Yet Arnold
had a considered view of what the poet should attempt
and what avoid ; and that he followed it would remain
certain although much evidence were accumulated to
prove that he who denounced "poetry's eternal enemy,
Caprice, " could himself be, on occasion, capricious. He
leaves the impression that he wrote with difficulty ; his
raptures, though he knew rapture, are infrequent. But
through all his work there runs a strain of serious
elevated thought, and on it all there rests an air of com-
Matthew Arnold 243
posure equally serious and elevated — a trifle statuesque,
perhaps, but by no means deficient in feeling. No one
can read, say, the closing lines of Mycerinus and fail to
perceive these qualities. No one can read any con-
siderable portion of his work and deny that they are
characteristic. Nor, we think, can any one study the
poetry of 1850 and thereabouts without being forced to
admit that it needed these qualities of thoughtfulness
and composure which Arnold brought to it. He has
been criticised for discovering in Tennyson a certain
"deficiency in intellectual power." But is he by this
time alone in that discovery ? And if no lack of thought-
fulness can be charged against Browning — as it cannot —
is not Browning violent, imchastened, far too often ener-
getic for energy's sake? Be it granted that Arnold in
poetical strength was no match for these champions:
yet he brought to literature, and in a happy hour, that
which they lacked, insisting by the example of his verse,
as well as by the precepts of his criticism, that before any-
thing becomes literature it must observe two conditions —
it must be worth saying, and it must be worthily written.
Also he continued, if with a difference, that noble
Wordsworthian tradition which stood in some danger of
perishing — chiefly, we think, beneath the accumulation
of rubbish piled upon it by its own author during his
later years. That which Matthew Arnold disinterred
and re-polished may have been but a fragment. His
page has not, says Mr. Watson, "the deep, authentic
mountain-thrill." We grant that Arnold's feeling for
Nature has not the Wordsworthian depth: but so far
as it penetrates it is genuine. Lines such as
While the deep-burnish'd foliage overhead
Splintered the silver arrows of the moon . . .
244 Studies in Literature
may owe their felicity to phrase rather than to feeHng.
The Mediterranean landscape in A Southern Night may
seem almost too exquisitely elaborated. Yet who can
think of Arnold's poetry as a whole without feeling
that Nature is always behind it as a living background?
— whether it be the storm of wind and rain shaking
Tintagel —
I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage —
Yes, the spray is on thy cloak and hair . . .
or the scent-laden water-meadows along the Thames, or
the pine forests on the flank of Etna, or an English garden
in June, or Oxus, its mists and fens and ''the hush'd
Chorasmian waste. ' ' If Arnold' s love of natural beauty
have not those moments of piercing apprehension which
in his master's poetry seem to break through dullness
into the very heaven : if he have not that secret which
Wordsworth must have learnt upon the Cumbrian
mountains, from moments when the clouds drift apart
and the surprised climber sees all Windermere, all
Derwentwater, shining at his feet ; if on the other hand
his philosophy of life, rounded and complete, seem none
too hopeful, but call man back from eager speculations
which man will never resign : if it repress, where Brown-
ing encouraged, our quest after
Thoughts hardly to be pack'd
Within the narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped . . .
yet his sense of atmosphere, of background, of the great
stage on which man plays his part, gives Arnold's
teaching a wonderful comprehension, within its range.
"This," we say, "is poetry we can trust, not to flatter
us, but to sustain, console." If the reader mistake it
Matthew Arnold 245
for the last word on life his trust in it will be illusory.
It brings rather that
lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast;
And then . . .
(if after protesting against italics in poetry we may itali-
cise where, for once, Arnold missed the opportunity)
he thinks he knows '
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.
SWINBURNE
How were the roses so fresh and so fair !
I do not suppose that anybody now alive (I speak of
lovers of poetry) who was not alive in 1832 and old enough
then to enjoy the first perfect work of Tennyson, has had
such a sensation as that which was experienced in the
autumn of 1866 by readers of Mr. Swinburne's Poems and
Ballads. And I am sure that no one in England has had any
such sensation since.
nPHUS wrote Mr. George Saintsbury, some twenty-
^ two years ago, in a volume called Corrected Impres-
sions: and it is certain that no one survives today to
compare the emotional experiences of 1832 and 1866,
to report to us. Indeed of the men who in 1866 were
old enough to wage war over Poems and Ballads the
greater number pre-deceased its author, and by this
time a very few remain. Mr. Saintsbury, who happily
survives (but will not be called ^'Doctor"), was an
under-graduate in 1866. He tells us:
The autumn must have been advanced before [the book]
did come out, for I remember that I could not obtain a copy
before I went up to Oxford in October, and had to avail
myself of an expedition to town to " eat dinners " in order to
get one. Three copies of the precious volume, with ** Mox-
246
Swinburne 247
on" on cover and "John Camden Hotten" on title-page,
accompanied me back that night, together with divers
maroons for the purpose of enHvening matters on the ensu-
ing Fifth of November. The book was something of a
maroon in itself. . . . We sat next afternoon, I remember,
from luncheon time till the chapel bell rang, reading aloud
by turns in a select company Dolores and The Triumph of
Time, Laus Veneris and Faustine, and all the other wonders
of the voliime.
The hubbub raised over Poems and Ballads in 1866
still, after half a century, interrupts criticism with an
echo too loud for its real importance, even for its his-
torical importance. It was not, to be sure, a mere hubbub
of the market-place, and for much of it that sounded in
the market-place, Swinburne and his friends were largely
to blame. The Pre-Raphaelites had a tribal way of
shouting their wares before producing them. In Goblin
Market "Come buy! Come buy!" habitually dinned as
noisily as in any vulgar one, and Alexander the copper-
smith could colourably plead, nine times out of ten, that
he had not started the tumult. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
in particular had always a nervous sense of the public
opinion it was proposed to offend; his own poems ap-
peared in circumstances (creditable enough if hidden)
which, made public, to an uncharitable world suggested
reclame. There can be no doubt, we think (after read-
ing many Memoirs) , that his friends did Swinburne little
service together with much disservice by puffing his
book beforehand. ^'Now we were told, first, that a
volume of extraordinarily original verse was coming
out; now, that it was so shocking that its publisher
repented its appearance ; now, that it had been re-issued,
and was coming out after all." Nor can it be said that,
when the storm burst, Swinburne either handled his
248 Studies in Literature
craft or comported himself in a way to make easy
weather. The book did challenge the world: it did
contain matter of offence — and he well knew it. When
we have allowed everything for the sensitiveness of a
poet, it remains true that a man who throws down a
challenge should be prepared to keep his head when the
glove is taken up.
But the real marvel of Poems and Ballads lay, of
course, in its poetry, as in that lay the real innovation.
Other poets had been scandalous — plenty of them —
before Swinburne; and the possible changes that true
poetry can ring on the libidinous are, after all, pretty
few. But here was a man who, five hundred years after
Chaucer, in the long line of descent which already
boasted Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Words-
worth, Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning — all so
great and all so different — had suddenly discovered a
new door and thrust it open upon what seemed endless
vistas of beauty. Here was a man who, coming after
these mighty inventors, could take the language in
which they had wrought, and convert it to a music as
unlike any of theirs, as absolutely fresh and original, as
it was patently the music of a peer. Swinburne con-
stantly held that all great poets must be conscious
of their greatness. He himself could be as arrogant
as any one, when provoked ; but although self-centred,
he was too noble a gentleman to be arrogant by habit —
he was even over-prone to abase himself before the
greater gods of Parnassus : and in the following anecdote
he is made to assert a claim which many will think not
overweening.
He was not disinclined, on occasion, to refer to himself
with an engaging frankness, as if he were speaking of some-
Swinburne 249
one else. At Jowett's dinner-table R. W. Raper once asked
him which of the English poets had the best ear. vSwinburne
replied with earnestness and gravity: "Shakespeare without
doubt; then Milton; then Shelley; then, I do not know what
other people would do, but I should put myself. "
Although our memory reach short of Mr. Saintsbury's,
we can bring a small illustration of the sway this genius
held over young men in 1880. The wave of enthusiasm
had fallen into a trough with Bothwell. The splendid
choruses in Erechtheus had lifted it a little; but Erech-
theus as a whole failed to "amuse," and the worshippers
had an uneasy sense that their master was fumbling in
an art for which he lacked instinct as well as tact ; that,
when prolixity should have warned him as the surest
signal of a mark missed, Swinburne had not even the
eyes to see that his prolixity was prolix. But in 1878,
with Poems and Ballads, Second Series, on the wonderful
crests of such lyrics as The Year of the Rose, A Forsaken
Garden, A Wasted Vigil, and the supreme Ave atque Vale,
the wave surged up anew to its summit : and if we missed
the adventurous feeling of naughtiness, that too was
restored to us, after a fashion, in 1880, by Heptalogia —
for youth loves parodies, and to see fun poked at ponti-
fical seniors. Memory recalls a night in the autumn of
that year, a set of rooms in Balliol — but men dropped in
from other colleges and stayed until close upon midnight
— a voice chanting the Heptalogia to wild shouts of
laughter, the company taking fire and running back,
like flame over stubble, to race through the audacities
of Poems and Ballads even back to the Circean choruses
of Atalanta — "hounds of spring on winter's traces " :
And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
250 Studies in Literature
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Maenad and the Bassarid;
And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god purvSuing, the maiden hid.
And then, almost suddenly — even in breasts that con-
tinued to echo the memory of it — all this enthusiasm
had died down ; and while Swinburne went on writing,
writing of stars and love, and waves and flames that
were deathless or breathless or tattered or battered or
shattered, none of them mattered, none of them con-
tained any longer any hope; all were galvanic — reflex
action of genius after death.
That is the real tragedy which has to be explained in
the biography of a man whose life yields the picturesque
biographer very little — or very little that can be told —
of incident for escape or resource. It would still be the
real tragedy and kernel of the whole matter had Swin-
burne's life been crowded with spirited actual adventure.
Swinburne was a tremendous force in poetry : the force
died; the man outlived it, and died, many years later,
solicitously tended. He had in his day the hearts of all
young lovers of poetry at his feet. He has left an in-
delible mark on English verse: and for this, to the end,
the younger generation venerated him as a great figure,
a spent god and asleep under the pines (Putney). He
was the last man in the world to leave a cause for a rib-
bon or a handful of silver. But he who had inspired
parodists innumerable and many pale imitators, has
left us no school of poets. Upon the literature of
Victorian England he made an amazing irruption, and
passed.
Swinburne 251
II
It is always a pleasure to read a book by a man who
knows how books should be written, and Mr. Gosse's
eageriy awaited Life of Swinburne tells the tale vividly,
tactfully, adequately, in that excellent prose which, al-
though one takes it for granted in the author of Father
and Son, still gives so much pleasure that it were ungrate-
ful to omit the henedicamus. Moreover the tale not only
gives truth of fact, so far as our knowledge enables us
to test this, but by nicely apportioning the whole to its
subject, and its casual with its more significant and im-
portant parts, conveys an impression of truth scarcely
less valuable. It omits, to be sure, the one word (of five
letters) which, if uttered, might have saved the skilful
artist a deal of trouble ; but it does this in obedience to
a tradition which makes, no doubt, for literary as well
as for parliamentary decency ; and we shall amuse our-
selves by copying Mr. Gosse's reticence.
The genius of Swinburne was something elvish, always
and throughout. He had all the precocity of an elf,
with no little of its outward guise. Like an elf, he never
grew up. Like an elf, he suddenly gave signs of arrested
growth, was an old man prematurely, and continued to
be an old man for many years, until the moment when
he peacefully faded out. There was one reason which
in ordinary men would account well enough for this
arrested development, but it will not account for
Swinburne.
Even his birth is an elfin mystery. Who could
predict — ^who can account for — this child as springing
from the union of a British Admiral with a daughter
of the third Earl of Ashbumham? The ancient and
honourable families of Swinburne and Ashbumham
252 Studies in Literature
have nothing in their records which begins to explain
him. He himself has stated that he was born "all but
dead, and certainly was not expected to live an hour. "
Of this circumstance (probably apocryphal) exact
memory can hardly be demanded of him ; but again and
again his most definite recollections of his childhood
(given in later years in all honesty by one who abhorred
falsehood all his life) are shown to be legendary, to say
the least — ''intimations of immortality" rather than
slavish records of fact. The fact of importance is
that his childhood alternated between two homes — his
parents' at East Dene, Bonchurch, in the Isle of Wight,
and Capheaton on the Northumbrian coast, where his
Border ancestors had settled in the reign of Elizabeth
and where his grandfather. Sir John Swinburne, sixth
baronet, kept house as head of the family. The seas
off the Wight to swim in — the Northumbrian coast to
gallop along, chanting verse against the rush of the
wind in his face — chanting (say) Gastibelza, "the song
of songs which is Hugo's" — these, heaven to the boy's
childhood, were cherished by him to the end as his
heavenliest experiences. Only the coasts of Cornwall
(Tristram's coast) and of Sark ever competed in his
affection with Bonchurch and Capheaton, where
Through fell and moorland,
And salt-sea foreland,
Our noisy norland
Resounds and rings. '
As he never swerved from these first loyalties to place
and kindred, so, while pretending to grow up, he but
altered, without changing, the strange elvishness of his
personal appearance. His cousin. Lord Redesdale, thus
Swinburne 253
describes his first arrival at Eton (in the summer half
of 1849) at the age of twelve:
What a fragile little creature he seemed as he stood there
between his father and mother, with his wondering eyes
fixed upon me! Under his arm he hugged his Bowdler's
Shakespeare, a very precious treasure bound in brown lea-
ther with, for a marker, a narrow slip of ribbon, blue I think,
with a button of that most heathenish marqueterie called
Tunbridge ware dangling from the end of it. He was
strangely tiny. His limbs were small and delicate, and his
sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his great
head, the size of which was exaggerated by the tousled
mass of red hair standing almost at right angles to it. Hero-
worshippers talk of his hair as having been a "golden
aureole. " At that time there was nothing golden about it.
Red, violent, aggressive red it was, unmistakable red, like
burnished copper. His features were small and beautiful,
chiselled as daintily as those of some Greek sculptor's
masterpiece. His skin was very white — not unhealthy, but
a transparent tinted white, such as one sees in the petals of
some roses. His face was the very replica of that of his
dear mother, and she was one of the most refined and lovely
of women. His red hair must have come from the Admiral's
side, for I never heard of a red-haired Ashbumham.
Against this for a pendant, let us set Mr. Gosse's
description of the mature man :
Algernon Swinburne was in height five feet four and a half
inches. He carried his large head very buoyantly on a tiny
frame, the apparent fragiUty of which was exaggerated by
the sloping of his shoulders, which gave him, almost into
middle life, a girlish look. He held himself upright, and, as
he was very restless, he skipped as he stood, with his hands
jerking or linked behind him while he talked, and, when he
was still, one toe was often pressed against the heel of the
other foot. In this attitude his slenderness and slightness
254 Studies in Literature
gave him a kind of fairy look, which I, for one, have never
seen repeated in any other human being. It reciirs to my
memory as his greatest outward peculiarity.
His head was bigger than that of most men of his height,
as Sir George Young tells us, when he entered Eton at twelve
years old his hat was already the largest in the school.
Mr. Lindo Myers, who came over with him from Havre in
the autumn of 1868, writes to me that, Swinburne's hat hav-
ing been blown overboard, "when we got to Southampton,
we went to three hatters before we found one hat that
would go on, and then we had to rip the lining out. His
head was immense." In the late Putney days, when he
became bald, this bigness of his head was less noticeable
than when it had been emphasised by the vast "burning
bush " of his red hair, which in early days he wore very much
fluffed out at the sides. . . . The orb of this mop reduced
the apparent thickness of his neck, which, looked at merely
in relation to his falling shoulders, was excessive, yet
seemed no more than was necessary to carry the balloon of
head and hair.
But we must go back to Eton, where " Grub " Brown,
the librarian, would point the boy out to visitors as one
of the sights of the place, "where he sat, day after day,
in a gallery window of the library with a folio across his
knees.** He devoured the English poets at this time:
the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists with a quite
amazing voracity. Years afterwards, in 1885, he wrote
that the plays of Marston had dwelt in his m.emory since
" I first read them at the advanced age of twelve " ; and
in 1887 that those of so obscure a writer as Nabbes had
been familiar to him "ever since my thirteenth year."
Thirty years later, too, looking over his bookshelves,
he took down a copy of Lamb's Specimens of the English
Dramatic Poets and remarked, "That book taught me
more than any other in the world — that and the Bible.'
Swinburne 255
There are some of us who hold (with all reverence
for Lamb) that he — and Swinburne after him — in their
enthusiasm have exalted these obscurer Elizabethans
quite disproportionately and out of perspective, dimin-
ishing for the unlearned or unwary reader the true
eminence of Shakespeare above them all. But we pass
this by: the point for us, just here, being that in his
literary loves, as in almost everything else, this fay-like
creature never really grew up, never developed as other
men develop. '' It is particularly important to notice,"
says Mr. Gosse, **that almost all Swinburne's literary
convictions were formed while he was at school"; and
later we read, ''From the earliest record of his child-
hood to that of his last hours at Putney we see him
unchanged by conditions and unaffected by opinion.
This gives his career a certain rigidity. ..." In 1892,
when Tennyson's death left the laureateship vacant and
Queen Victoria is reported to have said to Gladstone,
"I am told that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet in my
dominions, " Swinburne gave it as his private conviction
that Canon Dixon, author of Mano, had the highest
claim for the post, and, failing him. Lord De Tabley.
"It will be observed," Mr. Gosse points out, "that
each of these poets was older than Swinburne, who had
little knowledge of the verse of men bom after 1850, and
even less curiosity about their careers." His attitude
to old men of genius was "adorable in humility — to
Victor Hugo, to Landor — even to old men of talent,
such as Barry Cornwall and Wells of Joseph and his
Brethren "; but he had learned to worship them at school
and each lived to a ripe age to retain his loyalty. Of
young men he was incurious: which begins to explain
why this innovator never founded a school.
It was the same with his politics. He sang of Italian
256 Studies in Literature
liberty, sitting at the feet of Mazzini. Sitting at the
feet of Victor Hugo he cursed Napoleon III as never
man cursed save his master. He hailed the French
Republic: to the end he could preach tyrannicide as a
duty, like a schoolboy, academically wreathing his
sword in myrtle bough. Yet again we come back upon
ossification, both in hate and in hope.
When Napoleon III died, in pain and obscurity, at Chisle-
hurst, having ceased for three years to be a power for good
or for evil, France partly forgave him, and even Victor
Hugo forgot him. Yet Swinburne neither forgot nor for-
gave, and to him it seemed as just to continue to execrate
this miserable man six months after his death as it had been
to abuse him six months before it. . . . The essence of the
series of sonnet-curses, DiraCy was ecstasy that "we have
lived to say The dog is dead."
So he could sing for Italian liberty like a very Simon-
ides ("the emotion of the poet . . . gave to the noblest
parts of Songs before Sunrise an intensity unique in
English literature, and probably to be compared with
nothing else written since the Greeks produced cos-
mological hymns in the fifth century B. c. "), and, when
that liberty was won, could drop all interest in Italy and
Italy's future; as, after passionately acclaiming the
French Republic, he averted his face and took no fur-
ther interest in what happened to France. Yet, after
all, what worth is either a new monarchy or a new
republic, save as an instrimient for furthering new
political hopes?
Ill
Having to do with a genius so precocious and so pre-
maturely ossified, we need make no apology for switch-
I
Swinburne 257
ing from Eton to Putney and back. Mr. Gosse opines
that at Eton, where his physical strangeness invited it,
"he was preserved from bullying by a certain dignity
and by his unquestionable courage." His courage,
then and through life, was beyond question, and indeed
it would be strange if any scion of Swinburne and Ash-
bumham lacked that quality. Algernon Swinburne
possessed it, at all events. At the age of seventeen he
entertained a boyish notion of attaining eminence in
life as a cavalry officer, and attempted the climb of
Culver Cliff in the Isle of Wight (believed to be impreg-
nable) "as a chance of testing my nerve in the face of
death which could not be surpassed." He performed
the feat, which had to be confessed to his mother.
■ Of course she wanted to know why I had done such a thing
and when I told her she laughed a short, sweet laugh most
satisfactory to the young ear, and said, "Nobody ever
thought you were a coward, my boy." I said that was all
very well, but how could I tell till I tried? "But you won't
do it again?" she said. I replied, "Of course not — where
would be the fun?"
As a swimmer he was intrepid, and his rashness twice
brought him near to drowning ; but on each occasion he
saved himself, having no great strength of stroke, by his
indomitable persistence. When he was an elderly man,
some hulking poetaster, half -mad with vanity, who had
sought in vain to drag Swinburne into a correspondence,
waylaid him with a big stick on one of his lonely walks.
"The antagonist was a powerful man, his victim a sort
of fairy; but Swinburne cowed him by sheer personal
dignity and serenely continued to walk on, with the
blusterer growling behind him." Theodore Watts-
Dunton was alarmed, and took out a warrant against
17
258 Studies in Literature
the man (had it been legally possible he would have
done better to take out a warrant against a few London
street-crossings, through the murderous traffic of which
Swinburne would plunge and dance, heedless as a child,
having a charmed life) . Swinburne merely laughed at
the affair : he did not even copy Dr. Johnson's procedure
(with Macpherson) and write a letter to the bully —
which was just as well, perhaps, for we very much
doubt if the serenity shown during the actual incident
would have translated itself in ink upon paper.
In spite, however, of his constant and unquestioned
courage, evidence could be collected, we fear, that
Swinburne did suffer bullying at Eton. The late Vis-
count St. Aldwyn, who had been his contemporary
there, answered Mr. Gosse's application for a few re-
miniscences with "a horrid little boy, with a big head
and a pasty complexion who looked as though a course
of physical exercise would have done him good": and
he who has known the inside of a public school will
ponder this unfaltering pronouncement and shake his
head. Anyhow the little victim refused to play, pre-
ferring to read. He had a trick, too, then and all his
life, of jerking his arms and fluttering his hands violently
when excited. It resembled "St. Vitus' dance," and
is not the sort of thing that makes sympathetic appeal
to the average senior and stronger school-fellow. His
parents consulted a specialist, who " after a close exami-
nation," reported that these motions resulted from
"an excess of electric vitality." Electric or not, as the
boy grew and reached sixteen, this vitality put forth
symptoms of turbulence and insubordination, and at the
end of the summer half he was withdrawn from Eton
"in consequence of some representations."
This happened in 1853. In January 1856 — after two
Swinburne 259
years and a half spent in out-of-door exercise and de-
sultory private tuition — he went up to Oxford, matricu-
lating at Balliol. Scott was then Master. Jowett, who
had been passed over in the 1854 election for headship,
was Regius Professor of Greek, but the heresy-hunters
still laid their scent upon him and his plans for university
and college reform. This persecution of one who
became his wise and enduring friend may account in
some part for Swinburne's dislike of Oxford, which
became inveterate. He resided for three years and a
half, and left without taking a degree or having (so far
as his contemporaries tell us) excited any particular
attention among dons or undergraduates. But:
It is much to be observed that in later life, though he
spoke often and in affectionate terms of Eton, vSwinburne
was never betrayed into the smallest commendation of
Oxford. He was indeed unwilling to mention the Univer-
sity. . . . Long afterwards, in late middle life, he railed
against Matthew Arnold for his "effusive Oxonolatry,"
and earlier he had contrived to analyse and commend The
Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis without so much as naming the
"sweet city with her dreaming spires" which is the very
substance of those poems.
He made friends — some good for him, some rather
obviously the reverse: he competed for the Newdigate
(subject — "The Discovery of the North-West Pass-
age") and failed, having sent in a composition far
better than that which took the prize ; he learned to be a
frantic Republican, bought a portrait of Orsini — would-
be assassin of Napoleon III — hung it up in his sitting-
room, opposite that of Mazzini, and ''pirouetted in
front of it in ecstasies of enthusiasm." How much
Jowett knew of this does not appear, nor how Swin-
26o Studies in Literature
burne managed to tolerate in Jowett (whose weakness,
if he had one, was for apparent worldly success) a
certain admiration for the third Napoleon. But there
was never a break in their intimacy, which Swinburne
after Jowett's death commemorated in a chapter of
reminiscences, beginning
Among the tributes offered to the memory of an illustrious
man there may possibly be found room for the modest
reminiscences of one to whom the Master of Balliol was
officially a stranger and Mr. Jowett was an honoiu'ed and
valued friend.
Other gracious seniors attempted to take the some-
what graceless young man in hand ; notably Dr. (after-
wards Sir Henry) Acland, who asked Swinburne to his
house. Acland was — ^we can corroborate Mr. Gosse's
description — "the soul of urbanity," but all the more
and none the less an Acland.
Swinburne was particularly annoyed because Acland, in
his boundless sympathy, wished to share "the orgies and
dare-devilries" of their little group; and on one occasion
they all fled to London, to avoid having tea in a meadow
with Acland and his children. They behaved very badly,
and like shy and naughty boys, to excellent Dr. Acland,
whom they privately called, I do not know why, "the Rose
of Brazil"; but the biographer has to admit, with a blush,
that Swinburne behaved the worst of all. On one occasion,
when Dr. Acland was so kind as to read aloud a paper
on Sewage, there was a scene over which the Muse of
History must draw a veil.
Against this we may, skipping forward a little, match
an equally unhallowed scene of the year 1862 when
Swinburne, preparing his Poems and Ballads for the
Swinburne 261
press, was given to trying the effect of them on any
private audience he conceived as likely to be sympa-
thetic. The occasion of the following experiment
was a visit to Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) at
Fryston :
In the summer of 1862 a distinguished party assembled
at Fryston: it included Venables, James Spedding, the
newly appointed Archbishop of York (William Thomson) ,
and Thackeray, the latter having brought his two young
daughters, afterwards Lady Ritchie and Mrs. Leslie Stephen.
Lady Ritchie recalls for me that the Houghtons had stimu-
lated the curiosity of their guests by describing the young
poet. . . . On Sunday evening, after dinner, he was asked
to read aloud some of his poems. His choice was injudicious ;
he is believed to have recited The Leper; it is certain that
he read Les Noyades. At this the Archbishop of York
made so shocked a face that Thackeray smiled and whispered
to Lord Houghton, while the two young ladies, who had
never heard such sentiments expressed before, giggled
aloud in their excitement. Their laughter offended the
poet, who, however, was soothed by Lady Houghton's
tactfully saying, ''Well, Mr. Swinburne, if you will read
such extraordinary things, you must expect us to laugh."
Les Noyades was then proceeding on its amazing course,
and the Archbishop was looking more and more horrified,
when suddenly the butler "like an avenging angel," as
Lady Ritchie says — threw open the door and announced,
* * Prayers ! my Lord ! ' '
But our extracts run ahead of the story. In his
third year at Balliol "turbulence" again began to
exhibit itself, and Jowett expressed a fear that his
young friend might be sent down.' To protect him
from this disaster Algernon was consigned for a term
to read history at Navestock in Essex with the Rev-
262
Studies in Literature
erend William Stubbs, afterwards Bishop of Oxford
and most renowned of historians, but then vicar of
an agricultural parish and almost unknown to fame.
Stubbs, who had a sly twist of humour and no mean
capacity for telling a story, was used in later days to
draw freely on his recollections of this amazing guest's
descent upon his country cure. There is no doubt
that he and Mrs. Stubbs made the stay a happy one;
but soon after Swinburne's return to Oxford his land-
lady lodged complaint against ' ' late hours and general
irregularities," and on the 2ist of November, 1859,
Swinburne left Oxford, as he had left Eton, prematurely.
"My Oxonian career culminated in total and scandalous
failure."
IV
At Oxford he had made friends with Rossetti, Bume-
Jones, and Morris during their famous visit in which
they painted frescoes around the debating-hall (long
since converted to library) of the Union. They had
gone back to London, and thither (after patching up the
quarrel with his father, who was naturally incensed over
the Oxford fiasco) Swinburne followed them. There he
fell easily into the Pre-Raphaelite circle and talked red-
republicanism to them. They never doubted his genius
or his capacity to express it in poetry if he would choose
to try. Rossetti, then their real leader, took from the
first the line of elder brother. He "adopted, with a full
and almost boisterous appreciation of the qualities of
Swinburne, and a tender indulgence to his frailties, a
tone of authority in dealing with 'my little Northum-
brian friend, ' as he used to call him, which was emi-
nently wholesome. " And Swinburne chose to try. In
Swinburne 263
i860, while writing at Chastelard, he published his first
book, The Queen Mother and Rosamond. The in success
of the venture was conspicuous. "Of all still-born
books, " said Swinburne afterwards, " it was the stillest."
Saj^s Mr. Gosse, "Nobody read it, nobody saw it,
nobody heard of it."
The Queen Mother might be turgid and Rosamond di
pale study in Pre-Raphaelitism, but the young poet
meanwhile was mewing a mighty youth over such
h^rics as The Triumph of Time, and for a sample :
I will go back to the great sweet mother.
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and no other,
Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me;
Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast :
0 fair white mother, in days long past
Born without sister, born without brother.
Set free my soul as thy soul is free.
O fair green-girdled mother of mine,
Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain,
Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine
Thy strong embraces are keen like pain.
Save me and hide me with all thy waves.
Find me one grave of thy thousand graves,
Those pure cold populous graves of thine
Wrought without hand in a world without stain.
It was not until 1865, however, that, with Atalanta
in Calydon, he made a second attempt on the public.
The Pre-Raphaelites indeed had made some impression
by this time with their paintings, but as poets they and
their friends had met with the chilliest of receptions.
Meredith's first attempt in 1851, his second in 1862,
Morris's first in 1858, Swinburne's own in i860, D. G.
264 Studies in Literature
Rossetti's in 1861, had missed fire, one and all and com-
pletely. It was not until 1862 that Christina Rossetti
scored the first success with Goblin Market — "Chris-
tina," said Swinburne, "was the Jael who led our host
to victory." So the publisher (Bertram Payne, of the
firm of Moxon) had small confidence, rested his only
hope on making the book beautiful in outward appear-
ance, and, confining the first edition to a hundred copies
or so, spent pains to cover them in ivory-white buckram
adorned with mystic golden spheres. It must have
been a high moment in April, 1865, for one or two who
opened these covers and came, first, upon the Greek
elegiac dedication to Landor:
ouxoxe aoct;, ylpov, o^^a (fiXoiq (ptyov o\x[L(xgi Tep^j^O),
CYJq, yepov, a^(X[keyoq, (piXxaTS, Be^ixepat;. . .
and then upon the exquisite opening of the poem itself :
Maiden, and mistress of the months and stars
Now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven. . . .
Here was writing truly Hellenic, of the right line of
tradition, and we should despair of the future of our
literature — ^watered as it has ever been and renewed
from Mediterranean springs — if we believed that
England will soon lack men of an intellect ready to
recognise thaty to hail and salute it. No such curse, at
all events, had descended upon our nation in 1865.
Atalanta, and Swinburne with it, soared into sudden
fame. It was a song before sunrise, a shaft of morning
after long watches, lighting the hearts of the faithful
with hope :
And hope was strong, and life itself not weak.
Swinburne 265
V
We have hinted at the rest of the story in previous
pages, and need not dwell on it here nor tell it at length.
In particular we would skirt quickly around the throng
which vociferated about Poems and Ballads in 1866,
because it not only missed infinite good for the sake of a
little evil, but, even in so far as it happened to be right,
mistook the symptom for the disease.
The true danger, for poetry, was not so much that
Swinburne had fallen into bad courses, as that he might
fall into pedantry. Now there is — as every student of
literature, and especially every student of medieval
literature, must know — a pedantry which relaxes, as
well as a pedantry which binds. The actual disease is
a withering up of the man within, by which he loses
sense of literature as a grace of life and comes to mistake
it for an end in itself, even for life itself.
Now we make no doubt that Swinburne's way of life
helped towards that ossification which overtook his
genius. It must have acted so, since (as Bums knew
and noted) the true tragedy of profligate living is that
"it hardens a' within, and petrifies the feeling.''^ But
we think George Meredith came nearer to diagnosing
the real trouble when he wrote, " I don't see any internal
centre from which springs anything that he does. He
will make a great name, but whether he is to distinguish
himself solidly as an artist I would not willingly pro-
gnosticate." Meredith touched the secret. In this
elfin genius, when the rush of fire had spent itself over
the twigs, there was no log left "leaning back," in his
master Landor's image, with a male, slow, generating
core of fire. Set apart Hertha, that glorious poem,
Swinburne's own best-beloved, and all the blazing
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rhetoric of Songs before Sunrise falls short of convincing
us that Swinburne ever understood that greatest
of all maxims, "Look into thine heart, and write,"
or even that he had a real heart to look into. It has
the fatal chill of a parti pris: it fails to persuade, having
neither sap nor growth nor any fecundity: it neither
kindles us, where it is right, to passionate assent, nor
moves us to forgive where it is wrong. Over it all lies
the coming shadow of pedantry.
So, to speak generally, it is with Bothwell and with
almost all his verse after Poems and Ballads, Second
Series. Pegasus seems to be at a gallop all the while,
but his hoofs are for ever coming down in the same
place: and while monotony (as in The Faerie Queene)
can be pleasant enough, nothing in the world is more
tedious than a monotony of strain.
Nor, in the middle years, could Swinburne search
into himself, to criticise. Having written the opening
scene oi Bothwell (i 871) he gave it over to Jowett to read.
Jowett pronounced it much too long. Swinburne was
surprised, but having a great respect for Jowett 's judgment,
took the criticism very seriously. Accordingly next day —
they were living in the hotel at Tummel Bridge — Swin-
burne stayed in bed all the morning to work on the scene.
He produced it triumphantly at luncheon, when Jowett
dryly observed that it was three lines longer than it was
before. . . . Later on, at one of Jowett's reading-parties
at West Malvern, R. W. Raper saw Swinburne suddenly
fling himself on the floor at Jowett's feet, and heard him
say, "Master, I feel I have never thanked you enough for
axtting four thousand lines out of Bothwell.''
Thus, while still essaying sustained work for which
his genius — more and more declaring itself to be merely
Swinburne 267
lyrical — was unfitted, essaying work for which at least
that genius should have been put to hard schooling, he
could never learn that a great poem requires structure
based on stern preparation in anatomy, nor see the need
of learning. For A Song of Italy, as later for Balen, he
was capable of choosing a lyrical measure which,
pleasant enough for a snatch of song, maddens the ear
by repetition over seventy or a hundred or two hundred
pages. His critical odes, such as the Song for the
Centenary of Landor, came to have no proportions at
all ; and Tristram itself (after the magnificent prologue)
hag-rides the reader into utter weariness. Swinburne,
who delighted to recite, or intone, his own works, could
never understand that his auditor might at any point
tire of listening. In 1895, he read Balen through at a
sitting to the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, who
"did not unreservedly admire his delivery":
It was too subjective an outpour, and wearisomely im-
passioned, like a child's jump against a wall. . . . At the
first moment, however, when he ceased, I felt a poignant
grief that it was over. ... It had been very beautiful
... all the difference between seeing a beautiful woman
and feeling her embraces.
When we read Keats' s Endymion we sigh over the
premature death of one who, had the gods seen fit,
might have lived to build with his material. Swinburne
lived and never built, never arrived at seeing that
architectonic is necessary.
VI
In London, as at Oxford, Swinburne made friends
good and bad for him. Among the latter must be
counted the much-travelled Richard Burton, translator
268 Studies in Literature
of The Arabian Nights, ' ' Burton, a giant of endurance,
and possessed at times with a kind of dionysiac frenzy,
was no fortunate company for a nervous and yet spirited
man like Swinburne " — who, it may be told, had already,
by his excesses, superinduced a kind of epilepsy upon
his habitual twitch.
It took the form of a convulsive fit, in which, generally
after a period of very great cerebral excitement, he would
suddenly fall unconscious. These fits were excessively
distressing to witness, and produced a shock of alarm all
the more acute because of the death-like appearance of the
patient. Oddly enough, however, the person who seemed
to suffer from them least was Swinburne himself. The
only real danger appeared to be that he would hit himself
in his fall, which indeed he repeatedly and severely did.
But his general recovery after these fits was magical, and
it positively struck one — if it is not absurd to say so — that
he was better after them, as after a storm of the nerves.
So it happened again and again. The Admiral would
be hastily summoned to London to take his son home
to the country. In two days' time Algernon would be
out and about, a ''good boy" chastened, affectionate,
extremely docile. Then after some weeks would come
the return to London, and in due course more "ir-
regularity" more irritability, more quarrels with his
best friends, another fit, another telegram to the Ad-
miral, another swift recovery. It seemed to work
out like a sum with a recurrent decimal ; but actual life
is less tolerant of recurrent "irregularity" than is
mathematics. In actual life you may expel nature
with a thyrsus — tamen usque recur ret. The crash
came in August, 1879. He had lost his father; he had
alienated his friends ; he had a fancy for a while to have
Swinburne 269
nothing to do with his family, even with his mother.
He Hved lonely in his rooms in Great James Street,
" in a state of constant febrility and ill-health." There
an illness took him and carried him to the very doors
of death, just outside of which Mr. Theodore Watts
(afterwards Watts-Dunton) entered upon the scene
and saved him.
VII
Mr. Watts, a solicitor of St. Ives in Huntingdonshire,
had come up to London in the year 1872 or thereabouts
with an ardent enthusiasm for the group of Pre-Raphael-
ites, and had been bafHed in a first attempt to make
Swinburne's acquaintance. Towards the end of the
year, however, Madox Brown advised Swinburne,
whose business affairs he knew to be in a tangle, to
place them in the hands of Theodore Watts ; which he
did, with very happy results.
In September, 1879, then, armed with the approval of
Lady Jane Swinburne, Watts called at 3 Great James
Street and, finding the poet in a truly deplorable condi-
tion, carried him almost by force to his own rooms,
close by, and thence, after a week or two, to the upper
storey of a semi-detached villa at Putney, hired for the
purpose. Again Swinburne made an amazing recovery.
By the middle of October he was able to resume his
correspondence, to read, and even to walk out of doors.
But he had been near enough to the grave to look into it :
and henceforth he put himself into Watts 's tutelage
with a childlike and most pathetic trust. A lease was
taken of ''The Pines," Putney, and there the two lived
together for nearly thirty years. Watts supervised
the poet's food and drink, administered his moneys,
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Studies in Literature
kept away callers (with the help of an inexorable
maidservant), and mapped out his days with almost
mathematical precision. Towards the middle of every
morning Swinburne, no matter what the weather, took
a long walk "generally up Putney Hill and over the
Heath, but sometimes along the Richmond Road to
the Mortlake Arms, and then through Barnes Common
as far as Barnes Green and the Church." At the
comer-shop of the Misses Frost, going into Wimbledon,
he bought his newspapers and ordered his books.
In storm and rain, always without an umbrella, the little
erect figure, with damp curls emerging from under a soft
felt hat, might be seen walking, walking ... so that he
became a portent and a legend throughout the confines of
Wandsworth and Wimbledon. He always returned home
a little while before the midday luncheon, or dinner; and
at 2.30, with clockwork regularity, he ''disappeared to
enjoy a siesta," which sometimes lasted until 4.30. Then
he would work for a while. ... In the evening his regular
habit was to read aloud. . . . In these conditions his health
became perfect; he developed into a sturdy little old man
without an ache or a pain ; and he who had suffered so long
in London from absence of appetite and wasting insomnia,
for the last thirty years of his life at Putney ate like a cater-
pillar and slept like a dormouse.
"Walking, walking," for thirty years. But that
which walked was the ghost of the poet who had written
Atalanta and Poems and Ballads. It is pretty safe to
say that Watts had saved Swinburne's life : it is certain
that he had averted a tragedy : and against this positive
deed of friendship and thirty years of devotion little is
set by sneering at Watts as " a pedicure of the Muses " —
which, we believe, was Meredith's phrase for him. It
must be allowed, however, that Watts averted tragedy
Swinburne 271
only by turning these thirty years into comedy, and
rather absurd comedy. The worst was not that Watts,
in the jealousy of his sway, allowanced the supply of
other friends even more sternly than he cut down
"The Bard's" liquor; nor that, as elderly ladies suc-
cumb to the wiles of the tramp, he and Swinburne,
while mostly inaccessible to real authors, were given to
open their door to any who oiled its key with praise of
Watts's own preposterous novel Aylwin. Nor was it
even the worst that, happening in his own way to dislike
such faulty but full-blooded poets as Byron and Walt
Whitman, he drew Swinburne to abuse both, whom he
had formerly admired, and recant noble praise in terms
of scurrility. The unpardonable fault was that, ad-
miring the rhetorical aptitude which had always been
Swinburne's bane, he encouraged him to substitute rhe-
toric for poetry and rhetoric for prose: and so, while
Swinburne wrote much in these thirty years — especially
on Shakespeare — that was marvellous; though Swin-
burne himself be to blame that the more he learned of
Mary Queen of Scots the more it got in the way of
poetry about her; old lovers of his verse and prose
cannot help feeling that "the rest is silence" may
be, after all, a better epitaph than "the rest is —
rhetoric."
We will not quote for disparagement the worst pas-
sages which deal with Byron and Whitman in Mis-
cellanies and Studies in Prose and Poetry (1891 and
1894) 5 but we will append a passage on Byron, written
in 1866, to show what a prose-writer was lost in Swin-
burne:
His work was done at Missolonghi; all of his work for
which the fates could spare him time. A little space was
2^2 Studies in Literature
allowed him to show at least a heroic purpose, and attest a
high design; then, with all things unfinished before him and
behind, he fell asleep after many troubles and triumphs.
Few can ever have gone wearier to the grave; none with less
fear. He had done enough to earn his rest. Forgetful
now and set free for ever from all faults and foes, he passed
through the doorway of no ignoble death out of reach of
time, out of sight of love, out of hearing of hatred, beyond
the blame of England and the praise of Greece. In the
full strength of spirit and of body his destiny overtook him,
and made an end of all his labours. He had seen and borne
and achieved more than most men on record. *'He was a
great man, good at many things, and now he had attained
his rest."
VIII
We have indicated what we think the worst to be
lamented of those last thirty years, and, for all our debt
to the memory of Mr. Watts-Dunton and our gratitude
for the work Swinburne accomplished in those years,
it remains lamentable. Desperate causes may require
desperate remedies : the devotion which applied these
and kept a friend alive and happy cannot, must not, be
slighted. But as little can its effect be gainsaid — that
a biography of Swinburne must, to be true, overbalance
the end with the beginning and can hardly, to be told
well, escape being told with a touch of ironic humour, of
laughter amid tears for humanity and its ways. Mr.
Gosse has written it so ; written it with infallible tact ;
written it just as well as it could be written. But it is
so, and the pity is it should be so. H(yw were the roses
so fresh and so fair I , , , This man, who succumbed to
frailty, was a splendid poet, and his verse will yet
avenge him on Time. Meanwhile
Swinburne 273
Who shall seek thee and bring
And restore thee thy day,
When the dove dipt her wing
And the oars won their way
Where the narrowing Symplegades whitened the straits of
Propontis with spray?
18
CHARLES READE
CHARLES READE was born a hundred years ago,
on the 8th of June, 1814 ; he died on Good Friday,
April II, 1884. Then, or about then, Walter Besant
could write as follows of
the position occupied by this writer, which is — and has been,
since the death of Thackeray and Dickens — alone in the first
rank. That is to say, alone because he resembles no other
writer living or dead — not alone because there has been no
other writer in line with him. His merits are his own, and
they are those of the first order of writers. He cannot be
classified or compared; in order to be classified, a man must
be either a leader or one of a following. Reade certainly
cannot be accused of following. One can only say that he
stands in the front rank and he stands alone. One can only
say that this great writer — there is no greater praise — paints
women as they are, men as they are, things as they are . . .
all of which is skimble-skamble thought in slipshod
language; a confusion of platitude, falsity, and non-
sense stark but inarticulate. (Also George Eliot sur-
vived Thackeray and Dickens by some years.) Still it
is obviously trying, under a spell of admiration, to say
something about Charles Reade ; and the mischief — for
those of us who admire Reade, albeit differently — lurks
in a little devil of a doubt that anyone, a hundred years
hence, will care either for the something Besant wanted
to say or for the reservations we think worth while.
274
Charles Reade 275
Reade as a novelist had merits we can hardly believe
to be perishable. To take the most eminent: when he
"got going" upon high, straight epic narrative — Ge-
rard's odyssey, the last voyage of the Agra, the bursting
of Ousely dam, the storming of the Bastion St. Andre —
no one of his contemporaries could touch him; no
English writer, at any rate, could get near him. Nor
were these efforts mere spurts of invention; but long,
strong, masterly running, sustained right to the goal
over scores of pages. Could one but pluck these chap-
ters out of his books, blot the residue out of existence,
and holding them out to posterity (they would make no
mean handful either) challenge it to refuse Reade a
place in the very first rank, there could be no answer.
He had other great merits too ; but with them a fatal
talent for murdering his own reputation, for capping
every triumph with an instant folly, either in the books
themselves or in his public behaviour ; and these follies
were none the less disastrous for being prompted by a
nature at once large, manly, generous, tender, incapable
of self-control, constitutionally passionate, and in pas-
sion as blind as a bat.
He started in life as the youngest of eleven children ;
son of a high Tory squire (of tall and noble presence)
and a lady who had descended upon Ipsden in Oxford-
shire out of the inner social circle of Buckingham Palace
and the Regency. To quote the official Memoir into
which Reade 's luck followed him (it fills two volumes
worthy to survive for brilliance of fatuity even when
their subject shall be forgotten), ''Charles Reade was
bom into a refined family circle, for his mother had the
bel air of the Court, and his father was a gentleman of
the old school. ' ' Further, the mother ' ' was no common
woman. Bom under the torrid sun of Madras, im-
276
Studies in Literature
mersed while yet a girl in the life of politics, society, and
the Court, she was before all things a lady [ ! ] . Haydn
taught her music, and Sheridan epigram and repartee.
Her manner was perfect, and her conversational powers
so extraordinary as to have fascinated so superior a
master of rhetoric as Samuel Wilberforce." In the
country she imbibed religion (Calvinism) from a divine
who, " though a splendid preacher and a Hebrew scholar
never attained to the semblance of a gentleman. In his
old age a long pipe and a spittoon were his inseparable
companions." Environed by this Arcadian simplicity,
Mrs. Reade lived and did her work industriously and
happily. She was at once domestic and social, with an
aptitude for cultivating the great of the earth.
Lord Thurlow was godfather to her eldest son; Barring-
ton, the Prince-Bishop of Durham, who resided at Mong-
well Park, three miles off, became sponsor for her fourth;
and Warren Hastings for her youngest daughter. "My
dearest Lady Effingham" was the friend of her life-time
until that lady in her eighth decade ran away with a Scrip-
ture-Reader, when the note changed and she was styled
"That horrid old woman."
She was a daughter of Major John Scott (afterwards
Scott-Waring), M.P. for the old borough of Stockbridge,
Hants — a figure in the polite and the party memoirs of
his age ; and, like most women trained in its high politics,
she had a sharp eye for "openings." "Her influence
with the Board of Directors of the Old East India
Company was virtually paramount. She obtained no
less than three writerships [i.e., appointments in the
Civil Service], together with two cavalry cadetships, for
her sons, and an infantry cadet ship for a connection by
marriage." The elder sons had been sent to public
Charles Reade 277
schools — Rugby, Haileybury, Charterhouse; but she
had a whim to subject Charles, her youngest and her
darling, to private tuition.
This was the child's first misfortune, and no slight
one. Though the public schools of this land have
pretty steadily evolved some four-fifths of its admitted
genius, their reputation for discouraging genius is saccu-
lar and shall not be disputed here ; but at all events they
discourage those abnormalities of temper and conduct
to which genius is prone, as by their stem correction it
is not infrequently bettered. Reade was committed to
a flagellating minister at Ifiiey, who taught him the
Latin irregular verbs; if of a hundred he could repeat
all correctly, he escaped ; if but nine-and-ninety, he was
caned and — being all unlike an elder brother who in the
midst of a furious whacking observed pleasantly, " I say,
if you keep on at this much longer you'll hurt^^ — Charles
was not cured of a sensitive skin by this method of
grafting-on the classics. After five years of penal servi-
tude his parents removed him to a far humaner school
at Staines ; a change which, in the words of the Memoir ^
"can only be compared to one from a diet of gall to
one of champagne. ' ' Even that (one conjectures) would
not suit all stomachs; and the boy, though happier
at Staines, missed the right regimen of health for his
character. Next came Oxford. His father the squire,
who had been at Rugby and Oriel, could not see that
Oxford fitted a man for life. (He kept a pack of
harriers.) But Mrs. Reade insisted, and Charles went
up to stand for a demyship at Magdalen : which he won
in the teeth of all probability, not because he sent in
278 Studies in Literature
a good essay (which he did), nor through parental wire-
puUing, but because one of the eight nominee candidates
whom the Fellows proposed to job in failed so conspic-
uously that old Dr. Routh refused to have him and
preferred to admit the outsider who came of good family
and could write sound English. Luck and ability com-
bined again, four years later, to win him his fellowship.
A demy of Magdalen in those days could only succeed
to a fellowship on his particular county, and then only
if he had taken his degree before the day of St. Mary
Magdalen next ensuing after the vacancy. Reade,
though privately tutored by no less a man than Robert
Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke), may have been
indolent ; at any rate in the early summer of 1835 he was
unprepared for "Greats" when quite unexpectedly a
vacancy occurred in Oxfordshire, his own county. The
month was June, and he had twenty-four hours in which
to decide between entering his name for a pass or for
honours. For the pass he would have to sit at once;
and, though the examination was light as compared
with the other, a total ignorance of the books offered
would hardly be covered by autoschediastic brilliancy.
He therefore entered his name for honours, and in the
three weeks' respite read furiously. Thirty-six hours
before the examination he began upon the Thirty-nine
Articles, which all candidates had to commit to memory
— rejection on this test invalidating success in all the
others. He had a bad memory (ruined, as he always
maintained, by ferocious overtaxing at his first school).
Lo! when he started upon this task, which he had left
to the last, his memory collapsed. To make matters
worse, the three weeks' strain had brought on a racking
neuralgia. He walked up to the examination table
knowing just three Articles by rote; his mind, for the
Charles Reade 279
remaining thirty-six, a blank. The Article chosen by
the examiner chanced to be one of the magic three.
Reade repeated it pat, won his degree, and inherited his
fellowship.
Later, and having in the meantime entered at Lin-
coln's Inn and begun to study law, he achieved the
Vinerian Scholarship, less by luck than by good manage-
ment. The Masters of Arts elected to this scholarship;
and the Fellows of Magdalen, though etiquette forbade
them to vote or canvass against one of their Society,
had by this time been chafed more than a little by
Reade's "nodosities" and angularities of temper, and
would help him to no university backing. It occurred
to Reade that, with his father's influence in the shire,
he might whip up a number of county gentlemen who
happened to be M.A.'s and surprise, perhaps even
swamp, the resident voters.
His mother canvassed the clergy; and, when favourable
answers were obtained, offered conveyances free of cost.
On the day of election Oxford swarmed with squires and
parsons whipped up for Charles Reade, and thus when he
came in head of the poll by a substantial majority, some
chagrin found expression within the bosom of the college.
In truth, this contentious, irascible man was no easy
fellow for any collegiate society, let alone that of Mag-
dalen under Dr. Routh. His colleagues found him gey
ill to live with; while he, smarting as he did under every
petty wound, real or imaginary — and, for a real one,
there had been an attempt to oust him save on a con-
diuion of his taking orders — saw no more of them than
he was obliged. He rarely dined in hall : but he swore
by the college cook (who swore by him), and in later
years even bought himself a set of silver dishes in which
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Studies in Literature
his dinners were conveyed from Magdalen to London!
But he wished to be quit of college business, though he
duly served his term as Dean of Arts — in a green coat
with brass buttons, a costume at which the late Goldwin
Smith took deep umbrage.
II
In 1839 Reade left Oxford for a sort of grand tour,
Paris and Geneva being the chief resting places. There-
after for a few years he wandered a great deal, especially
in Scotland — as the Memoir puts it : " between the years
1837 and 1847 his visits to the land of cakes were
chronic." When at home he had, so to speak, three
homes — Ipsden, Magdalen, and some chambers he
rented in Leicester square — nor was either of them
warned when to expect him: for he kept a separate
wardrobe at each, travelled without luggage, and prob-
ably would have disdained the telegraph had it been
invented. His rooms in Leicester square swarmed with
squirrels which he imported from Ipsden. He started a
craze for violins ; collected Cremonas, plunged into the
secrets of their manufacture, almost desperately of-
fended his father by spilling varnishes from his win-
dow-sill over the white front of Ipsden; bolted in a
huff for the continent and Paris ; almost lost his life as a
hated Englishman in the Revolution of 1848; escaped
in a cab under a truss of straw; and arrived back at
Ipsden travel-stained but cool, as he could be when
not enraged by trifles. "My dear Charles,'* was the
greeting, ' ' you have had a narrow escape of your life. ' ' —
" I have. They put me into a damp bed at Boulogne."
We come now to that turn in Reade' s fate which, if
but for it he had never been a writer, must be accounted
Charles Reade 281
a blessing, as to the last he loudly and sincerely pro-
claimed it. But if primarily a blessing in a dozen ways
(or we are grievously mistaken) it proved to be a steady
curse, though the woman responsible was innocent of all
conscious harm. He had always been attracted by the
stage. He reckoned drama to be the first of the arts.
He left orders to be written on his tomb: ''Charles
Reade: Dramatist, Novelist, Journalist" — in that or-
der. About this time, 1849, when "his fine old sire
paid the debt of nature" {Memoir) , he wrote a play —
many plays. He took it to "a distinguished comedian,
Mrs. Seymour," then acting with Buckstone at the
Haymarket . * ' She was magnanimous and appreciative
and, like many women of her calibre, could recognise
the difference between a real and a sham gentleman.
Ladies whom the voice of scandal has spared have been
less warm-hearted," &c. (Memoir). *'It may, how-
ever, be safely predicted [sic\ that he (Reade) stood
alone in believing her to be a really great artist." He
asked for an interview. "The response was in the
affirmative" {Memoir). She did not think much of the
play, and showed that she didn't. Reade had called
"hat in hand"; "politely, and without any show of the
offence he felt he bowed himself out. " She felt sorry,
pitied "a fine man with the hel air of one accustomed
to society, " jumped (mistakingly) at the guess that he
was hard up for money, sat down and wrote a letter.
It fetched Reade back with an explanation.
What passed at that interview is not known. Each had
learnt in a moment to respect the other, and we may be sure
that a friendship thus commenced was from the outset
regarded as sacred. It had moreover to develope. ... It
must, however, be categorically asserted [sic] on the indi\4d-
282
Studies in Literature
ual authority [sic] of the late Mr. Win wood Reade, who was
a constant inmate subsequently of their house in Bolton
Row, that the friendship between these two was platonic.
To have done with this egregious Memoir. — No one
doubts that Mrs. Seymour was an honest lady, or that
she started Charles Reade upon writing novels, or that
she gave him some sound practical advice by the way.
But the crucial test of such a partnership as this (and
there have been not a few in the history of letters) is
only passed when the silent partner supplies that self-
criticism which the active partner lacks. Unless the
two are thus complementary — if the silent one merely
encourages the active performer to the top of his bent —
the momentum but drives forward an inordinate mass
to topple by its own weight; as Lewes drove George
Eliot from Scenes of Clerical Life to Deronda. Now
Mrs. Seymour, a woman of little cultivation, was quite
incapable of correcting, because incapable of perceiving,
those defects of taste and temper to which Reade was
prone. If she did not foster them she at least left these
idiosyncrasies to mar his work. Worse even than this
— she was an actress, and not a first-class actress, of
a very bad period. She saw everything "literary "in
the light of the stage, and her stage was of the stagiest.
By ill-luck Reade, too, suffered from this false stage-eye.
He too saw all his novels first as plays. His earliest,
Peg Woffington, was adapted straight from a short
play. Masks and Faces, which still holds the boards in
spite (or by virtue) of what Swanbume called "the pre-
posterous incident" of the living portrait. Rightly
classing this with the burlesque duel in Christie John-
stone, Swinburne rightly adds that "in serious fiction
they are such blemishes as cannot be effaced and can
Charles Reade 283
hardly be redeemed by the charming scenes which
precede or follow them." The tedious conclusion of the
first of the long novels, It is Never too Late to Mend, with
its avenging Jew and its Wicked Bridegroom foiled at
the church-door, is but stage-grouping and melodrama
carried to the n\h. power: the same bag of tricks being
produced again to affront the reader's intelligence in
Put Yourself in His Place. Reade had written The
Cloister and the Hearth, Hard Cash, and Griffith Gaunt in
the interval between these two, and yet Put Yourself in
His Place would seem to prove that he had learnt (or,
rather, had unlearnt) nothing. The devices by which
the hero is made to vanish and to keep his betrothed
without news that he is alive would not impose on
a child, and the sawdust puppet Squire Raby becomes
almost a thing of horror when we reflect that Reade
probably intended him for a portrait of his own father !
Few men can have written a critical sentence wider
of the truth than Besant's, "One can only say that this
great writer . . . paints women as they are, men as
they are, things as they are." That was just what
Reade could not learn to do for any length of time, save
now and then when left alone in his rooms in Magdalen.
When he saw men and women with the help of Mrs.
Seymour, or of such playwrights as Tom Taylor
and Dion Boucicault, he saw them as dolls making
their exits and their entrances behind footlights. He
wrote Foul Play in collaboration with Dion Boucicault,
which is another way of saying that he submitted his
true epical daemon, though it broke loose for a long run
in the splendid adventures of the castaways, to be
caught and reconsigned to a prison of cardboard. He
wrecked Griffith Gaunt, which was coming near to be his
best novel, as Shakespeare wrecked The Two Gentlemen
284 Studies in Literature
of Verona (but Shakespeare lived to learn better), by
making his hero for purely stage purposes suddenly
renounce his nature and behave like a quite incredible
cad ; nor could we readily find by searching the old pages
of Bow Bells or The London Journal theatricality stalk-
ing in such nakedness as in A Terrible Temptation^ one
of Reade's later works.
HI
The pity is the greater because he took enormous
trouble to be true to fact, and above everything prided
himself upon being therefore true to Nature (whereas
the two are different things) . His method of work, his
method of preparation for it, his material and appliances
— documents, blue-books, note-books, newspaper files,
indexes — ^will be found described as accessories to that
full-length portrait of himself which (for no artistic
reason) he thrusts into A Terrible Temptation along
with a picture of his work-room :
. . . an empty room, the like of which Lady Bassett
had never seen ; it was large in itself and multiplied tenfold
by great mirrors from floor to ceiling, with no frames but a
narrow oak beading; opposite her on entering was a bay
window, all plate glass, the central panes of which opened
like doors upon a pretty little garden that glowed with
colour and was backed by fine trees. . . . The numerous
and large mirrors all down to the ground laid hold of the
garden and the flowers, and by double and triple reflection
filled the room with nooks of verdure and colour.
He used this device in his rooms at Magdalen, which
looked upon the college deer park; by mirrors con-
triving to bring it indoors and around him while he sat,
Charles Reade
285
like Chaucer in Longfellow's sonnet "in a lodge within
a park":
The chamber walls depicted all around,
[Not] With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound
And the hurt deer . . .
but with the deer alone, unhurt, browsing under green
branches.
Underneath the table was a formidable array of note-books,
standing upright and labelled on their backs. There were
about twenty large folios of classified facts, ideas, and pic-
tures, for the very wood-cuts were all indexed and classified
on the plan of a tradesman's ledger. . . . Then there was
a collection of solid quartos and of smaller folio guard-books
called Indexes. There were Index Rerum et Joiirnalium —
Index Rerum et Lihrorum — Index Rerum et Hominum — and
a lot more; indeed so many that, by way of climax, there was
a fat folio ledger entitled Index ad Indices. By the side of
the table were six or seven thick pasteboard cards, each
about the size of a large portfolio, and on these the author's
notes and extracts were collected from all his repertories
into something like a focus for a present purpose. He was
writing a novel based on facts — facts, incidents, living dia-
logues, pictures, reflections, situations, were all on these
cards to choose from, and arranged in headed columns. . . .
One thing this method taught him at any rate — to exert
his style upon concrete objects. He might, indeed, dis-
tort men, women, things ; he did so as often as not ; but
he ever saw them as tangible, and detested all writing
that was nebulous, high-faluting, gushing. His style
is ever lively and nervous. It may irritate even the
moderately fastidious ; it abounds in errors of taste ; but
is always vigorous, compelling — the style of a man. We
feel the surer that our account of it does no real injustice
286 Studies in Literature
to poor Mrs. Seymour's influence on observing that
Reade's masterpiece The Cloister and the Hearth and
Hard Cash (which many rank next) were written at a
remove from her, in his college rooms. Anyhow she did
not know enough of the times or the materials handled
in The Cloister for her opinion to have had even a plau-
sible value, and in fact he seems to have done without
it. On the other hand, we do her memory the justice
to doubt if any tact, any skill, could have taught
Reade tact, cured his combativeness, or alleviated his
wrathful knack of putting himself in the wrong. He
was not only hasty in a quarrel; being in it, he might
be counted on to make his friends blush and the cool
observer smile. The Memoir contains a letter, written
before he commenced author, extending over many
pages, addressed to the officials of the Treasury and
haranguing them in this fashion because he had been
charged what he thought an excessive import duty
on some old violins :
Merit never comes to bear until first filtered through the
consideration of name. If then a Man looks at twenty old
fiddles, the merits of which he can see, but does not know
who made each and how that Maker ranks in the Market —
where is he? and what is he? — a sailor on the wide Pacific
without a compass or a star is not more the sport of water
and wind than such a man as this is of flighty dreams and of
brute chance. . . . Oh! my Lords, if you or the Com-
missioners would only condescend to look at the things.
. . . Malice is a blackguard, but Ignorance is a Wild
Beast, &c., &c.
This kind of thing may not have been ineradicable in
Reade, but it was certainly never eradicated. To the
end — for example when accused of plagiarising from
Charles Reade 2^^
Swift in The Wandering Heir — he could never fit the
word with the occasion or keep any sense of propor-
tion between the argument and his temper. A simi-
lar tactlessness led him, having accepted a commission
from the firm of Cassell, Petter and Galpin, to affront
the readers of Cass ell's Magazine with^ Terrible Tempta-
tion. Nobody could have been more genuinely amazed
and indignant than was Reade at the reprobation
it excited; but so recently as twenty years ago a mis-
chievous person in search of amusement could count on
it if he walked into Messrs. Cassell' s premises and
pronounced the name of Charles Reade in a voice above
a whisper. Reade, to be sure, had usually moral right
on his side, and behind his excesses; and the amount
of positive good he did, not only towards reforming
social abuses by such works as It is Never Too Late to
Mend and Hard Cash, but by pamphlets and letters
championing individual victims of injustice, would
amount to a fine total. But we are considering him
as an artist, and the artistic side and the side of
the angels are not conterminous, though they agree
roughly.
The general verdict seems to be that, while Griffith
Gaunt and Hard Cash are works of mastery (and the
high seriousness of Griffith Gaunt cannot be denied),
The Cloister and the Hearth was his masterpiece. With
this verdict we entirely agree, and hold that, if there
must be a first place among "historical" novels, that
work and Esmond are the great challengers for it.
For artistry, grace of handling, ease, finish, the delicate
rhythm of its prose, nice perception of where to restrain
passion, where and how far to let it go, Esmond must
carry every vote. The Cloister and the Hearth, moreover,
tails out tediously, though the end, when it comes, is
288
Studies in Literature
exquisite — a thing of human blood purified to tears_and
tears to divine balm.
"But now the good fight is won, ah me! Oh my love, if
thou hast lived doubting of thy Gerard's heart, die not so;
for never was woman loved so tenderly as thou this ten years
past."
**Calm tnyself, dear one," said the dying woman with a
heavenly smile. "I know it; only being a woman, I could
not die happy till I had heard thee say so."
In the depth of this, as through the whole story which
it closes, shines a something which Thackeray could no
more match than he could match the epic chapters
wherethrough Gerard adventures with Denys of Bur-
gundy, though between the two novelists, on the sum
of their writing, there can be, of course, no comparison.
None the less, and through all his blindfold mistakes
— even through his most amazing trivialities — Reade
carries always the indefinable aura of greatness. Often
vulgar, and not seldom ludicrous, he is never petty.
*'No man, " said Johnson, "was ever written down but
by himself." Reade, vain and apt to write himself
down in the act of writing himself up, was all but con-
sistently the worse foe of his own reputation. It will
probably survive all the worst he did, because he was
great in a way, and entirely sincere.
M
PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH
LITERATURE. I.
BY those who do not understand Socratic irony, or
the deHcacies of it as rendered by Plato, a great
deal of obtuse criticism has been wasted upon the
Menexenus, which is a dialogue purporting to be a true
account by Socrates of a funeral oration composed to be
recited over certain of the Athenian dead who fell in the
Peloponnesian war. Let me sketch the introduction:
Socrates happens on his friend Menexenus, returning
from the Agora. ' ' Where have you been, Menexenus ? ' '
"At the Council, where they were to choose some one
to pronounce the customary oration over the dead; for
there is to be a public funeral. But the meeting
adjourned without deciding on the orator." "O
Menexenus, death in battle is a fine thing. The poor
fellow, however poor he was, gets a costly funeral and an
elaborate speech by a wise man who has prepared it long
beforehand. He is praised for what he has done and for
what he has not done — that is the beauty of it. And the
speaker so steals away our souls, Menexenus, that I —
standing and listening — feel myself a finer fellow than
ever I have been ; and, if there be any foreigners present,
I am made conscious of a certain superiority over them,
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290 Studies in Literature
and they seem to experience a corresponding awe of me,
and in fact it takes me about three days to get over it."
"You are always poking fun at us, Socrates. But what
will the poor fellow — I mean the orator — have to say,
at so short a notice?" "Oh, that's easy. If a speaker
had to praise Athenians among Peloponnesians, or Pelo-
ponnesians among Athenians, he might have some ado
to gain credit. But where's his difficulty to win applause
among the very people whom he is praising? " "Could
you do it, Socrates?" — "Well, yes, I have hopes I could
praise Athenians to Athenians ; and the more because I
can recollect almost word for word a funeral oration I
heard Aspasia compose, only last night, on these very
dead, putting together fragments of a famous funeral
oration which Pericles spoke, but (as I believe) she
composed for him. "
Then follows the oration, carefully absurd in its dates,
obviously travestied from Pericles' famous speech as
conjectured for him by Thucydides. And the German
scholars solemnly doubt (although Aristotle happens to
quote the dialogue as Plato's) how the thing can be
Plato's, seeing it is so very like Thucydides: and why
Plato — a serious philosopher — should put it into the
mouth of Aspasia, of all people ! They incline to think
it spurious, on internal evidence: which means, the
evidence of their internals.
We must not suppose, however, because Plato, speak-
ing through the mouth of Socrates, lets his irony play
like summer lightning around these patriotic encomia
upon the dead, that therefore he was no true patriot, or
anything less than a fervent one. For, first, observe
that what he so gently derides is ready-made patriotism
kept in stock and vended to order — the sort of thing
that in a later age constrained Dr. Johnson to utter
Patriotism in English Literature 291
suddenly in a strong determined tone the apophthegm,
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Plato
more urbanely suggests that it appertains to the stock-
in-trade of a good many humbugs. Now it was a great
part of the service rendered to mankind by the Greek
intellect (and specially by the Athenian intellect) that it
insisted on penetrating humbug, to see things as they
are, and so has helped men ever since to separate true
things from false. — "0 Athenian stranger — mere in-
habitant of Attica I will not call you, but you seem to
deserve rather the name of Athene herself, because you
go back to first principles" (Plato, The Laws). It does
not follow, because Plato slily derides the sort of stuff
Archinus or Dion would have turned out in imitation of
Pericles, that he would not be profoundly moved by the
great oration which (put into Pericles' mouth by Thu-
cydides) has moved the souls of men for two thousand
years. ^ It does not follow from Plato's irony that he
was a man likely to be left unthrilled by a speech which
stands to this day as the locus classicus of patriotism.
Rather, the contrary follows. He is separating the true
from the spurious imitation served out by second-rate
rhetoiicians.
Lastly, on this point let me recall to some of you a
word or two spoken in a previous lecture, on the sub-
» Here may I interpose a warning that you do not hastily take it,
as some do, for Thucydides' own composition. On other speeches
in the History he may have practised freely the art of dressing-up to
which he pleads guilty. But of so glorious a speech as that every sen-
tence would sink into the hearers' hearts. Thucydides must have had
a hundred memories from which to collate it; and — what is more —
he could not only have found it hard, in the "faking," to rise so far
above his habitual style, but he could hardly have dared to foist new
sentences of his own in place of those which the occasion had left
"familiar in men's mouths as household words. "
292 Studies in Literature
ject of parody. If a man's mind be accustomed, as
Plato's was, to move reverently among holy things and
so that his appreciation of them has become a second
nature, he can afford (whether he speak of poetry, or of
art, or of religion) to play with his adored one even as
a tactful lover may tease his mistress, and the pair of
them find in it a pretty refreshment of love. For he
knows exactly where to stop, as she what to allow. So
— to come to modem times for an instance — ^you re-
spond to every noble phrase in Abraham Lincoln^s
oration over the dead of Gettysburg:
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting place for those who have given their lives that a
nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that
we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot con-
secrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men,
living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far
above our power to add or detract. The world will little
note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to
be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
''The world will little note, nor long remember, what
we say here; but it can never forget what they did
here. " The more intimately you respond to this — the
more sensitively you feel, with the thrill of the old Peri-
clean antithesis, that here, after so many generations,
the world has thrown up, in Abraham Lincoln, a man
worthy to speak to it once again as Pericles spoke — ^with
the lighter courage you can consign all spurious or
second-rate imitations to the caressing raillery of Mr.
Dooley.
Patriotism in English Literature 293
II
It may seem a long way — even a longer way than to
Tipperary — from the polite irony of Menexenus to the
cheerful irony of the English private soldier, now fight-
ing for us on the Belgian border. But I suggest to you
that his irony too plays with patriotism just because he
is at home with that holy spirit ; so much at home that
he may be called at any hour of the day or night to die
for it. Precisely because he lives in this intimacy, he is
shy of revealing it, and from shy turns to scornful when
the glib uninitiate would vulgarise the mystery :
Send for the army and the navy,
Send for the rank and file —
(Have a banana!)
A well-meaning scholar, having written, the other
day, for the British infantry-man a number of ditties to
which he will never march, protested that if he pre-
ferred to march to this sort of thing, his laureate should
be the village idiot ; which pleased me, who have al-
ways contended that the village idiot has his uses, and
that Mr. McKenna was far too hasty with his Mental
Deficiency_ Act .
There is a real mental deficiency — and most of us
who work on recruiting committees have bitter experi-
ence of it — in well-intentioned superior persons who,
with no prospect of dying for their country, are calling
on others to make that sacrifice. On platform after
platform since August I have sat and seen the ardour
of young men chilled by exhortations from intellectual
speakers who lacked understanding, by middle-aged
people — sentimental or patronising — who schooled their
294
Studies in Literature
hearers in what they ought to feel. To the British
soldier Tipperary was, if you will, just Tipperary: to
some of us who heard him singing and know what he
went forth to find, it remains a city celestial.
After this it was noised about that Mr. Valiant-for-truth
was taken with a Summons. . . . Then said he, I am going
to my Father's; and the' with great Difficulty I am got
hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the Trouble I have
been at to arrive where I am. M}^ Sword, I give to him that
shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage, and my Courage and
Skill, to him that can get it. My Marks and Scarrs I carry
with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought his
Battles, who now will be my Re warder.
When the Day that he must go hence was come, many
accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went,
he said. Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down
deeper, he said. Grave, where is thy Victory? So he
passed over, and the Trumpets sounded for him on the
other side.
{The Pilgrim'' s Progress)
But there are serious good folk who would paraphrase
into
Good-bye, Piccadilly,
Farewell, Leicester Square
Good-bye, Self-indulgence !
Farewell, the soft arm-chair!
and to these the British infantry-man responds
Have a banana !
Yes; and truly (when one comes to think) it were hard
to find, in few words, a better answer.
Patriotism in English Literature 295
Send for the boys of the girls' brigade
To set old England free:
Send for my mother, and my sister and my brother,
But for heaven's sake don't send me!
That is ''merry England.'^ The enemy wonders that
our men march — and so obstinately too — to this stuff
while by rights they should be chanting i?w/e, Britannia! :
and it would seem that not a few cultivated Englishmen,
who of late years have lent too much of their minds
to Germanic ways of thought, suffer from an uneasy
suspicion that we ought to be answering the perpetual
Deutschland iiberalles I with a perpetual Rule ^ Britannia!.
Nay, the late Professor Cramb — who felt the German
hypnotism none the less for resenting it — conveys the
reproach in passages like this :
It is hard for us in England to understand what the Rhine
really means for a German, the enthusiasm which he feels for
that River. Treitschke himself says of it, for instance, when
he has to leave Bonn: "Tomorrow I shall see the Rhine for
the last time. The memory of that noble river" — and this
is not in a poem, observe, but simply in a letter to a friend —
"the memory of that noble river will keep my heart pure
and save me from sad and evil thoughts throughout all the
days of my life. " Try [writes Professor Cramb] to imagine
anyone saying that of the Thames !
Well, I daresay some Old Etonians have felt something
like that about the Thames, and have confessed it in
private letters. But how could Professor Cramb have
missed to see that when we Englishmen lift our thoughts
to their stature, our Rhine is not the Thames ? Come,
I will answer for once with a Rule, Britannia! Our
Rhine, our king's frontier, is no Thames but the royal
sweep of seven oceans. The waters of our baptism flow
296 Studies in Literature
past Dover through the Straits of Hercules, down past
the Cape of Storms, to divide again to reach, to coast,
to claim Hindostan, Australia. There (if you will have
it so) runs our Rhine: our Bonn and Bingen and
Drachenfels are the Heads of Sydney, the ramparts
of Quebec, the citadel rock of Gibraltar:
rock which Hercules
And Goth and Moor bequeathed us. At this door
England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill
Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze,
And at the summons of the rock gun's roar
To see her red coats marching from the hill!
Ill
But — to be fair — let us admit that we do not often
open our hearts in this fashion. I suppose that if
England ever bred a great ''imperialist" in days before
our language had coined that unbeautiful word, his
name was Sir Walter Ralegh and he has left us, in noble
verse, a reminder that
Passions are liken'd best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.
I trust — as I believe — this to be the explanation why
we, who seek in English literature for the passion of
patriotism, have to pride ourselves on its being every-
where implicit. To be sure the patriotic orator can
always quote to us the lines of dying Gaunt :
This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle, . . .
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Patriotism in English Literature 297
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
or the Bastard's equally famous conclusion:
Come the three comers of the world in arms.
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.
Yet I think it observable that the one speech is put into
the mouth of a febrile and dying man while the other
rounds off a play with obvious declamation: and yet
more observable that whereas the body of Shakespeare's
work is a whole school in itself of patriotic thought and
feeling, more than nine-tenths of it is implicit; after
King Henry the Fifth almost the whole of it is implicit.
Certainly if we turn to the body of English poetry
we shall find explicit, loud-mouthed patriotism even
worse represented than is our pride in sea-power, that
particular glory of our birth and state. When we
happen to talk of our country, we are at one, or almost
at one. It is only Bubb Dodington who can write :
Love thy country, wish it well,
Not with too intense a care:
'Tis enough that, when it fell.
Thou its ruin didst not share.
It is true — nay, it is part of my argimient — that when
an Englishman talks of art, of literature, of philosophy
(I fear me, even of theology), some solid sense of his
country's dignity is usually discoverable at the back of
his mind. We feel this solid background, for example,
298 Studies in Literature
all the while we are reading Coleridge's Biographia
Literaria: in a metaphysical passage of De Quincey,
as through parted clouds, suddenly will come charging
the British dragoons of Talavera; while Dryden opens
his famous Essay of Dramatic Poesy with the sound of
our navy^s gunnery:
It was that memorable day, in the first summer of the late
war, when our navy engaged the Dutch ; a day wherein the
two most mighty and best appointed fleets which any age
had ever seen, disputed the command of the greater half of
the globe. . . . While these vast floating bodies, on either
side, moved against each other in parallel lines, and our
countrymen, under the happy conduct of his Royal High-
ness, went breaking by little and little into the line of the
enemies; the noise of cannon from both navies reached our
ears about the City, so that all men being alarmed with it,
and in a dreadful suspense of the event which we knew was
then deciding, everyone went following the sound as his
fancy led him; and leaving the town almost empty, some
took towards the park, some cross the river, others down it ;
all seeking the noise in the depth of silence.
He goes on to narrate how in company with three
gentlemen, "whom their wit and quality have made
known to all the town," he took barge down through
the crowded merchant-shipping to Greenwich, where
the four listened as the air broke about them in little
undulations of sound "like the noise of distant thunder,
or of swallows in a chimney," until, as "by little and
little," it fell more distant, one of the four, lifting his
head, congratulated the others on that happy omen of
victory, adding the devout wish "that we might hear
no more of that noise, which was now leaving the
English coast."
Thus Dryden prefaces a really profound conversation
Patriotism in English Literature 299
upon Poetry. Now you will not easily find a better
combination of poet and true Englishman than in
Dryden ; and if you would seek the true patriotic in our
literature, you must seek it in passages such as the one
I have quoted; not in your hearty Rule, Britannias !
Deaths of Nelson, or Battles of the Baltic, where senti-
ment infallibly overstrains itself and on the azure main
Britons do their duty for England, home and beauty,
and the mermaid's song condoles, while the mournful
billow rolls in a melody of souls, and the might of Eng-
land rushes to anticipate the scene — ^Which is pretty,
but whatever can it mean ?
IV
We have no great national epic like the Aeneid,
none written to extol the British empire, the men who
founded, built it, gave their lives for it. Our greatest
epic, Paradise Lost, really has one point of resemblance
with our old friend Beowulf, in that as Stopford Brooke
once sagely observed ' ' there is not one word about our
England" in either poem.
No: but wait! Let us (as I have preached to you
more than once from this desk) constantly- refer our
minds back to Rome, habitually consult with Latin
literature upon any question which puzzles us for the
moment concerning our literature in character or origin.
We have no Aeneid. But open your Horace. You
may or may not agree off-hand with what I am going
to say : but to me Horace has always seemed far more
patriotic in grain than Virgil — as it has always seemed
to me that (Burke's rhetoric discounted) Horace Wal-
pole was in his way as good a patriot as Burke and at
300 Studies in Literature
least as clear-sighted. But open your Horace, and turn
the Odes, page after page. Familiar as they may be to
you, I think you will be amazed to note how thickly
sown they are with names of nations, tribes, countries —
east, west, south and north. Asia, Scythia, Parthia,
Numidia, Dacia, Dalmatia, the passes of the Alps and
the Tyrol — over which Rome was spreading conquest
in Horace's day and establishing the Pax Romana. No-
thing of foreign affairs would appear to escape him,
and always his pride in Rome (unlike Virgil's) is quick,
alert, practical: as not seldom it is lofty, and never
less than absolutely sincere.
Why does Horace's patriotism ring so true ? Because,
if we search to the heart of it, we shall find that very
heart, not in the Forum or the boulevard of the Via
Sacra, but in his Sabine farm. The Forum and the Via
Sacra intrigued him, as the French say ; but as Piccadilly
or Whitehall or his club in Pall Mall intrigues an
Englishman, who yet knows all the while that these are
but arteries ; that for the true source that feeds them,
the spirit that clarifies, he must seek home to a green
nook of his youth in Yorkshire or Derbyshire, Shrop-
shire or Kent or Devon; where the folk are slow, but
there is seed-time and harvest and "pure religion
breathing household laws. "
I challenge you that here lies the heart of Horace's
patriotism. He looks abroad (though he warns Quinc-
tius against the habit) eagerly watching
Quid bellicosus Cantaber et Scythes
. . . cogiter . . .
And what the Swede intend, and what the French . . .
but, for trust to confound their politics, he draws home
to the Sabine lads — rusticorum mascula militum proles —
Patriotism in English Literature 301
shouldering logs for their mother's hearth; and to their
mother herself, rustic Phidyle, paying her vows to the
new moon, and her devoirs to the gods with a handful
of meal and salt.
Now as in a former lecture, Gentlemen, ' I warned
you th^t to a Greek — even to an Aristophanes — his gods
mattered enormously ; as, coming to Rome, we saw that
a Roman general on active service abroad would carry
with him, packed in mule pannier, the tessellae of a small
sacred pavement, that, wherever he encamped, his feet
might rest on these holy pictures of his gods ; so I warn
you here that you will never understand what patriot-
ism meant to a Roman unless you connect it with the old
religious usage of Latium, with Lar and Terminus and
other gods of field and garden, orchard and hearth :
At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates,
Reddereque antique menstrua thura Lari.
The feeHng of this, should the originals be closed to
you, you may yet find exquisitely conveyed in the first
chapter of Pater's Marius the Epicurean, describing how
the lad Marius attended the private annual rites of the
Amharvalia, of "the religion of Numa, " in his country
home, and how they impressed the boy's mind :
At the appointed time all work ceases; the instruments of
labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers, while
masters and servants together go in solemn procession along
the dry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the
victims whose blood is presently to be shed for the puri-
fication from all natural or supernatural taint of the lands
they have "gone about.". . . Early on that day the girls
* On the Art of Writing, pp. 192-3, Cambridge University Press, 1916.
302 Studies in Literature
of the farm had been bus}^ in the great portico, filling large
baskets with flowers plucked short from branches of apple
and cherry, then in spacious bloom, to strew before the
quaint images of the gods — Ceres and Bacchus and the yet
more mysterious Dea Dia — as they passed through the
fields, carried in their little houses on the shoulders of white-
clad youths, who were understood to proceed to this office in
perfect temperance. . . . The clean lustral water and the
full incense-box were carried after them.
Then, Silence ! Favete Unguis, before the small homely
shrines! No name in the great populace of the "little
gods" dear to the Roman home, was forgotten in the
long Litany :
Vatican who causes the infant to utter his first cry, Fabu-
linus who prompts his first word, Cuba who keeps him quiet
in his cot, Domiduca especially, for whom Marius had
through life a particular memory and devotion, the goddess
who watches over one's safe coming home.
Favete Unguis! As the procession halted before each
small shrine, Marius (we are told) strove to answer this
im.pressive outward silence of the ritual by hushing
his own boyish heart to that inward tacitness which
religious Romans held due to holy things. And its
comfort came back as he lay down to sleep that night
after the long day's ceremonies:
To procure an agreement with the gods — Paceni deorum
exposcere: that was the meaning of what they had all day
been busy upon. In a faith, sincere but half-suspicious, he
would fain have those powers at least not against him. His
own nearer household gods were all around his bed.
"His own nearer household gods were all around his
bed. " Hark, think for a moment, and catch the English
echo, out of your own childhood :
Patriotism in English Literature 303
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head. . . .
Follow that echo back, and tell me this. When you
think of the real England in English poetry — of her
heart, her meaning, her secret — nay even her glory — as
our singers have come nearest to expressing one or the
other or all of these, do you think of Rule, Britannia /,
or Ye Mariners of England? Does not whatever is
in your heart lift rather to some casual careless line —
maybe even some foolish- seeming line such as Chaucer's
Wite ye nat where ther stant a Htel toun
Which that y-cleped is Bob-up-and-down
Under the Blee?
Or this:
Me liketh ever, the longer the bet
By Wingestre, that joly cite;
The town is good and well y-set,
The folk is comely for to se.
Benedicamus Domino !
Or this of Robin Hood returning in old age to merry
Sherwood :
When he came to greene-wood
In a merry morning,
There he heard the notes small
Of birds merry singing.
"It is far gone, " said Robin Hood,
"That I was latest here;
Me list a little for to shoot
At the dunne deer."
Or again :
0 Brignall banks are wild and fair
And Greta woods are green.
304
Or:
Or:
Or:
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'Tis pretty to be by Balinderry
'Tis pretty to be by Balindoon.
The bells of Shandon
That sound so grand on
The pleasant waters
Of the river Lea.
Clunton and Clunbury^
Clungunford and Cliin,
Are the quietest places
Under the sun.
Or if it be a strip of meadow-land, with ** daisies pied and
violets blue^^ or if a village "where bells have knolled
to church": or if it be but "Scarlet town where I was
bom ** : or if it be London herself, " of townes A per se * ' :
O! towne of townes, patrone and not compare
where John Gilpin keeps shop and Izaak Walton sallies
an-angling, to stretch his legs up Tottenham, and all
the way with the voice of the Psalmist running in his
head:
He maketh me to lie down in green pastxires: he leadeth
me beside the still waters. . . .
it is thus, and incurably thus, that we see England ; as
it was thus that Horace, the true Roman, saw Italy:
and though in Britain
Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon
we keep the lesson learnt. Other nations extend, or
would extend, their patriotism over large spaces super-
Patriotism in English Literature 305
ficially : ours (or so much of it as, in Meredith's phrase,
is "accepted of song") ever cuts down through the
strata for its well-springs, intensifies itself upon that
which, untranslatable to the foreigner, is comprised
for us in a single easy word — Home. We do not, in our
true hours — as all our glorious poetry attests — brag of
England as a world-power, actual or potential. Blame
it who will upon our insularity, we do habitually narrow
and intensify our national passion upon the home and
the hearths now to be defended. And I say this, who
said just now that our Rhine was seven seas.
20
PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH
LITERATURE. II.
WE talked last time, Gentlemen, of a certain shyness
— often translating itself into irony — shared by
our nation with great nations of the past when it comes
to talking of that sacred emotion, love of one*s country.
In ordinary social life we know that a well-bred man
naturally inclines to let his ancestry (or his rank; or
his riches, if he have them ; or any personal distinction
he has won) go silently for granted; not imdervaluing
them, but taught to see them in their true value as gifts
at the best held in trusteeship from the gods. We know
the instinct of such a man towards his fellows; that it
is constantly courteous, that it never says or seems to
say, "I am as good as you, " but always prefers the im-
plication, "You are as good as I.'* We know that he
keeps his heart as a mirror for other men's feelings,
lest he should v/ound them; that even in controversy
(as Newman says) his disciplined intellect is candid,
considerate, indulgent, since he throws himself into the
minds of his opponents and accounts for their mistakes.
So a nation such as France, or England, whose title-
deeds time can no longer question, may cherish indeed
certain inveterate foibles — even certain inveterate vices
306
Patriotism in English Literature 307
of character — ^which its fellows will smile at or deplore :
but it will long ago have realised that it cannot have
the moon, that (as the saying is) all sorts go to make
a world, that civilised men must give and take. It will
long ago have rid itself of bimiptiousness, of that itch
for self-assertion which is the root-bane of good manners.
Now the general good manners of Europe have been
vexed for a generation by a people, raw in character
and uncouth of speech, which has prospered by dint
of bravery to a very high degree. Having prospered
beyond hope by this pugnacious self-assertion, it has
set itself since 1870 not only to philosophise its primi-
tive instincts but to impose that philosophy upon the
civilised nations into whose circle it had so compla-
cently forced a seat.
"The be-all and end-all of a State is Power ''—*' True
Patriotism consists in Self-assertiveness'' — "What we
want, it follows that we must have" — I will not weary
you, today, Gentlemen, with confuting this doctrine.
Long ago, on a hot day in a courtyard in Athens,
Thrasymachus announced it, rehearsing all the advan-
tages of the unjust man; and was laid on his back,
wondering what had happened.
II
The high teaching of the world was not to be put
down by Thrasymachus, in his day, and is not to be
put down in ours by the neo-Darwinists who teach that
life, for nations as for individuals, is a kind of dog-fight,
and its object self-assertion. Christ at any rate taught
that he who would save his soul must first lose it : and
that doctrine informs good literature, even down to the
artless self-surrender of our own Nut Browne Mayde:
3o8 Studies in Literature
Sith I have here been partynere
With you of joy and bliss,
I must als6 part of your woe
Endure, as reason is:
Yet I am sure of one pleasi^re.
And shortly it is this —
That where ye be, me seem'th, pard6,
; I could not fare amiss.
In good literature, as in the Gospel, the self-assertor
is, like Malvolio, a self-deceiver. ''What is a man
profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his
own soul?*' ''Love thy neighbour as thyself." "This
law," says a much-quoted German general, "can claim
no significance for the relations of one country to
another, since its application to politics would lead to
a conflict of duties."
Believe me, a man who talks like that has been
educated — that is to say, has had himself "drawn out"
— beyond his capacity to bear the strain. These are no
times for men to make fetishes of tall words, even of
words so tall as "education" and "religion." These
are times for clear sight into the values of things.
Without clear thinking religion will not help us: for a
stupid man, who cannot see clearly what he means by it,
religion may easily be — and indeed not seldom is — the
wickedest influence in the world. His heart will bleed
over Louvain while he sacks it, and with gathering
confidence he will promise, so he be allowed to do the
same to Calais, to reward the Almighty (Who knows
about crosses) with the decoration of an iron one. So
with education : some men may as easily have too much
education as too much religion. It is admittedly bad
to have none; it is possibly, nay certainly, worse to have
more than by character or intelligence you are adapted
Patriotism in English Literature 309
for. It has been the curse of Germany that, mistaking
the human end of education and misconceiving what
"power" means in the saying "Knowledge is Power,"
she has strained herself to it beyond preparation of
ancestry or manners.
Ill
Now I propose to examine for a few minutes this
morning, first the rationale, and afterwards some results,
of this German self-assertiveness as it has invaded in
our day the field of study with which we here are
particularly concerned — I mean the study of English
literature. Into what error soever the course of my
examination may betray me, I at least commit none in
starting from a fact which is one of common knowledge
— that German professors and scholars have invaded
that field with great assiduity.
You will not so readily agree — maybe you will not
agree at all — with what I am going to say next. But
I say it nevertheless. Every literature being written
in a language — every great literature commanding a
masterly style of its own language and appealing to an
almost infinitely delicate acquaintance with its mean-
ings, an almost infinitely delicate sense of its sounds,
even to semi-tones and demi-semi-tones — no foreigner
can ever quite penetrate to the last excellence of an
unfamiliar tongue. I know this to be a hard saying:
and I utter it very reluctantly because it is wormwood
to me to own myself congenitally debarred — though it
be in common with all modern men — from entering the
last shrine of beauty (say) in a chorus of Sophocles.
But I am sure that it is so. Lovely as we may divine
3IO
Studies in Literature
the thrill to be (or rather to have been for those who had
ears to hear) — educative as it may be even in tantalising
our thirst — I am sure that no modem Englishman
can ever quite reach back to the lilt of a Sophoclean
chorus; still less to its play of vowel notes. I doubt
even if by taking most careful thought he can attain to
the last beauties of a sonnet by Leconte de Lisle or
Heredia.
You may urge that, Latin and Greek being dead
languages which we are agreed in various ways to mis-
pronounce, this disability may apply to them, but does
not extend to our modern Babel. I answer, first, that
if only by structure of his vocal organs a German is
congenitally unable to read our poetry; that his eye,
perusing it, cannot translate it to any part of him
capable of reproducing its finest sound. The late
Philip Gilbert Hamerton once illustrated this from a
few lines of Tennyson^s Clarihel.
"Where Claribel low-lieth
The breezes pause and die,
Letting the rose-leaves fall : . . .
At eve the beetle booraeth
Athwart the thicket lone: . . .
The hollow grot replieth
Where Claribel low-lieth.
Now to an English critic with a musical ear the whole
consonantal secret of that little poem resides in the
labials, with their suggestion of moonlit lapsing water,
and the low "th" sounds in which one feels the very
breath of eve softly wafted :
At eve the beetle boometh
Athwart the thicket lone.
Patriotism in English Literature 311
But a German simply cannot compass the soft "th
sound. He has to introduce his own harsh hiss upon the
twiHt quiet where never a full sibilant was allowed.
As this :
At eve ze beedle boomess
Aswart ze zickhead Ion
while as for the continuous hushed run of the soft gut-
tural to lip and tooth ("Claribel,'* "throstle/* "thick-
leaved ambrosial," "the hollow grot") he must rest
content with his ancestral habit which has not yet
evolved even labials beyond the throat: "Sick-leaved
ambhrosial :
Ze hollo ghrot hrepliez
Hwhere Chlaribel hlow hliezJ
IV
I say then that it must be extremely hard for any
German to feel the last felicities of our language, to
respond to its last, most delicate, harmonies. I think
it must be impossible, for (to use a plain phrase) I don't
see what he has to do it with. But I will content my-
self with maintaining that he must naturally find it
very hard. ^
And this by no means exhausts the list of his natural
disabilities. We know that many scholars have been
able to write exquisitely in a dead language, or at any
^ I believe that in a less, but yet a very high, degree, a Frenchman
finds this natural difficulty with English, and an Englishman with
French. Both of them are far more at home with the simpler pro-
nunciation of Italian. This, further, seems to me a partial explana-
tion of a fact which few will dispute — that (to speak only of us English)
we have in the past understood Italians better than we have understood
the French. In matters of art and literature this will hardly be denied.
312 Studies in Literature
rate to write it in a way that to us seems exquisite.
Cambridge is rightly proud of a long list of sons whose
lips in her cradle the very bees of Hybla and of Hymet-
tus have visited with their honey. Certain Frenchmen
again (M. Jusserand is a notable instance) have written
English ''as to the manner born" — nervous, elastic
English, with an added grace of French charm. I
doubt if the compliment can, save in politeness, be
returned. Swinburne's French poetry, for example, is
magnificently eloquent — but is it quite French? At all
events the German who can write English of any quality
has yet, I believe, to be found, unless we accept Max
Miiller's plastering for marble. To that whole nation
— or, if you will, to that whole group of nations — our
language is not only not living but something more
than dead. This, when you consider it, throws back
some merriment upon their claim that we are — or shall
we say, have been — in some sense cousins of theirs.
It might appear that the claim has been set up on
grounds not entirely unconnected with expectations of
a legacy, and that our death has, as the lawyers say,
by our amiable relatives been somewhat too hastily
presumed.
Please understand that I am not belittling the mass
of methodical and most helpful work done, during the
last twenty or thirty — nay, the past hundred — years
by German scholars upon that side of our literature
which they are not congenitally precluded from under-
standing. When this war is over, I hope we shall
retain no little gratitude for that service of labour,
while able with clear eyes to see it in its real relationship
to literature; that is, in its right place.
For (let us be fair) I do not say, nor do I believe
for a moment, in spite of a long malignity now un-
Patriotism in English Literature 313
masked, the Germans have of set purpose treated
English Hterature as a thing of the past or imposed that
illusion upon our schools, with design to prove that this
particular glory of our birth and state is a dead posses-
sion of a decadent race. My whole argument is rather
that they have set up this illusion, and industriously,
because they could not help it ; because the illusion is in
them: because this lovely and living art which they
can never practise nor even see as an art, to them is,
has been, must be for ever, a dead science — a hortus
siccus; to be tabulated, not to be planted or watered.
But I do say that when they impose that halluci-
nation upon the schools of English in our universities,
whether they impose it deliberately or not, the effect is
the same. And I do say it is in a high degree dis-
creditable that English scholars, hypnotised (we must
suppose) by contemplating the mere mountain of
German false doctrine, have consigned to it alike in
what they neglected and what they attempted.
Have it how you will, it disgraces somebody that an
undergraduate of this university, from the sixth form
of one of our best reputed public schools, coming to
me the other day in his desire to know how English
should be written (he wanted ardently to know this
though, as he put the matter, "it will be no good for
me in the Classical Tripos") — that this boy should
confess to me that in all his schooldays he had never
been set to write one English essay, never taught to
arrange two English sentences together.
V
I have no blame for our enemies, as we must now
call them. It is our fault that we treat our beautiful,
314 Studies in Literature
breathing language as a dead thing. On all that side
of the study which allowed them scope they have taken
infinite pains, while the immensely more delicate, more
significant, more difficult side — difficult to us, im-
possible to them — we have let go by default. Is it any
wonder, then, that their general hallucination of culture
has spread with a deeper infection of self-conceit, of self-
deceit, over a study in which we have accepted them
for taskmasters whom nature forbade to be more than
hewers of wood for us and drawers of water?
I remember coming once — but cannot remember
where — upon an ingenious theory that for a period of
time in what we call the Dark Ages, everyone in Europe
was more or less mad. At the time that seemed to me
a cheerfully extravagant hypothesis, though it had the
merit of illuminating quite a considerable number of
facts the causes of which historians had left obscure.
But in our day we are obliged to lay account with some
explanation not very far short of this, seeing that the
people of central Europe are at this very moment
claiming — and, it seems, as one man — to be apostles
of a culture which the surrounding nations can only
accept after a confession of insanity. Either we or they
must be mad just now, and there can be no third way
about it.
I daresay you read in your Times yesterday of a per-
formance of Twelfth Night given in the Old Theatre at
Leipzig on October 20th with a special prologue written
by Ernst Hardt and put into the mouth of the Fool,
who appeared in front of the curtain and thus delivered
himself — I quote the English translation :
Gentles, in very sooth I do appear
A fool in semblance ! And behind the curtain,
Patriotism in English Literature 315
Where now my world is built for your delight,
I shall be truly — I can promise you —
From my heart's depth and by my body's fashion
A fool indeed! But here, and in these times,
In front of you, how can I? Thorough-baked
I stand as solemn as a whole meal loaf.
My master, the great poet, who behind
This curtain built his world, and therewith too
Innumerous other worlds as marvellous —
Ye^ know him well, for near as man can climb
To godhead, he won godhead by his works —
Now this same poet hath commanded me
In solemn earnest to declare you this :
Ye unto him have been until today
His second home ; his first and native home
Was England; but this England of the present
Is so contrarious in her acts and feelings,
Yea, so abhorr'd of his pure majesty
And the proud spirit of his free-born being,
That he doth find himself quite homeless there.
A fugitive he seeks his second home.
This Germany, that loves him most of all,
To whom before all others he gives thanks.
And says : Thou wonderful and noble land.
Remain thou Shakespeare's one and only home,
So that he wander not, uncomprehended,
Without a shelter in the barren world !
VI
Let us not deceive ourselves. The man who wrote
that, meant it: and the man who spoke that, meant it.
If I can read honest conviction in verse, honest con-
viction is there. These men do honestly believe our
Shakespeare — Shakespeare nostras, as Ben Jonson af-
^ "Ye shall be as gods!" .
3i6 Studies in Literature
fectionately termed him, whose language they cannot
speak, cannot write, can but imperfectly understand
(for those who can neither speak nor write in a language
cannot understand it perfectly), our Shakespeare's spirit
— has migrated to a nation whose exploits it benevo-
lentl)^ watches in the sack of Louvain, the bestialities
of Aerschot, the shelling of Rheims cathedral. These
men believe it no less thoroughly than they believe
that a telegram is all the better for being forged so
that the forgery advantage them. Do not be surprised.
As I warned you in certain lectures on Macbeth ^ a
generation that has lived through the consequences of
the Ems telegram and dabbled with a German pro-
fessorial philosophy, which whether for the purpose or
not does in fact excuse cheating at cards, cannot main-
tain that the mirage imposed upon Macbeth by the
witches, the dream of winning all things by substituting
evil for good, has lost its power to hallucinate the
intellect, even the strong intellect.
So let us not blame these men, but ourselves, who
tamely suffered this imposture to grow. They could
not understand, or understood only that they stood
to profit. We had the birthright of understanding as
well as the assurance that by allowing our intelligence
to be enslaved we stood only to lose.
VII
There is only one way, as we see now, of exorcising
such a devil when he has been allowed to swell to full
growth. The task then passes to the young — to the
sword in the hands of the young — and they will lance
this swollen tumour. But at what a cost of lives that
Patriotism in English Literature 317
might be building the next generation, and Hving and
seeing good days — lost to how many through that
default of ours !
Yes, it is good that the young have the salvation of
this race in hand just now, and not our professors and
lecturers. But when does ever a nation live, to whom
its language is no longer a living thing? To the care
of these professors and lecturers our language with its
tradition of glorious energy was entrusted, to be treated
at least as a living thing.
But it is ill for a country. Gentlemen — I fear we
must acknowledge it — when her destiny passes into the
guidance of professors. That lesson (if I mistake not)
is going to be very painfully learnt by Germany in the
course of this war; and it will be learnt less painfully
by us only because our pedants have earned disregard
by choosing to be abject — a doubly negative success.
If our teachers of English had only — ^would only, even
now — treat our mother tongue as a living tongue, our
pride in it as a pride of practice, our use of it as a quick
and perfectible art ! How much can they yet do with
their knowledge if they will repent and understand and
become if not as little children then at least as men of
the world !
As it is, the pricking of the bubble of arrogance
is jleft to the clean instincts of our .young men. I
seem now to read the prophecy of this in two scenes,
which suffer me to recall as they stand out now, bitten
sharply on my memory — the one of Oxford, the other
of Cambridge.
First then I recall a morning scene in Oxford in the
early spring of 19 12: the day bright, with a touch of
frost, the air alive with the spirit of youth borne back —
how poignantly ! — to the heart of a passer-by, revisiting
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the familiar streets after many years. Under instruc-
tions I had posted myself at the corner of the Turl
where it debouches into the High. Nor had I long to
wait. Punctual as the many clocks competed in
striking nine, by Carfax, around the end of St. Aldates
swung the head of a column of artillery — the O.U.T.C.
returning from morning manoeuvres, out Radley way.
They wheeled by Carfax into the High and came at a
trot down that street of memories.
Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all his sons away
doubtless: but for the moment at Oxford, all has past,
everything even to the morning sunshine these tall boys
commanded, for behind them they rattled the British
guns. A sight to make the heart leap ! But the heart
in its exultation cried out, "If it must be, well. . . .
Yet not in our time, O Lord!"
And again, but the date is a year later — I see a cavalry
troop of the C.U.O.T.C. clattering home over the
bridge by Magdalene in a drizzle that at the shut of
evening — her "gradual dusky veil" — made their lighter
Cambridge grey all but undistinguishable ; these, also,
taking charge of the road, calling to one another, as
they wheeled by St. John's as if all Cambridge belonged
to them — as now in retrospection one sees that it did.
For these also were in their careless confident way
preparing themselves.
They are gone. They have taken their cheerfulness
out of Cambridge: and have left us to an empty uni-
versity, to dull streets, the short days, the long nights.
And we who, by age or for other causes, must stay
behind, must needs question our heavy thoughts.
Patriotism in English Literature 319
VIII
Let me tell you — or remind you — of this, for a true
history and a parable. In the year 1870, in the little
village of Arbois in France and in a cottage close by the
bridge that crosses the Cuisance river, there abode
a small half -paralyzed man, working at his books to a
word which he constantly repeated — Laboremus. For
his school in Paris was closed and he had been sent out
of the city as an ''idle mouth'' and indeed he was
clearly unfit to carry arms. ''But sometimes," says
his biographer, "when he was sitting quietly with his
wife and daughter, the town-crier's trumpet would
sound : and forgetting all else, he must run out of doors,
mix with the groups standing on the bridge, listen to
the latest news of disaster and creep like a dumb hurt
animal back to his room," where the portrait of his
father an ex-sergeant of Napoleon's 3d Regiment of
the Line — "the brave amongst the brave" — hung to
reproach him. "Shall we not cry, 'Happy are the
dead'?" wrote this paralytic man to one friend; and
to another, "How fortunate you are to be young and
strong ! why cannot I begin a new life of study and work !
Unhappy France, dear country, if I could only assist
in raising thee from thy disasters ! "
Now that man swore — in the depth of national defeat
in the anguish of a brain active while the body was laid
impotent — to raise France again to her rank among the
nations and by work of pure beneficence. He would
never forgive Germany: but he — a man warned of his
end — would live to build this monument, for the glory
of France, to shame by its nobility that vulgar ex-
crescence raised by Germany over the Rhnie. You
may read it all in his Lije; how the vow was taken, how
320
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pursued, how achieved. I, who quote this vow and its
accomplishment, saw the wreaths piled five-and-twenty
years later by all Europe — prouder trophies for a
cathedral than stands of captured colours — on the grave
of Pasteur.
"But that which put glory of grace into all that he
did, " says Bunyan of Greatheart, ''was that he did it of
pure love for his Country.*'
INDEX
Acland, Sir Henry, 260
Adoniram, 2
Alcuin, 15
Allen, Robert, 215, 217
Ancient Mariner, The, 220 et seq.
Arnold, Matthew, 3, 183, 190-191,
195. 196, 232 et seq.
Atalanta in Calydon, 263
Avignon, 17
Bacon, Francis, 163
Ballads, 22> et seq.
Beauty and the Beast, 13
Bede, 15
Bentley, Dr. Richard, 56
Beowulf, 299
Besant, Sir Walter, 274, 283
Blake, William, 77, 113
Blunt, Wilfrid (quoted), 296
'Bossuet, 59
Bowles, William Lisle, 216
Brandes, Dr. George, 82, 94
Bridges, Robert, 61
Bridgman, Sir Orlando, 151
Brome, Alexander, 90
Brooke, Christopher, 104
Brooke, Samuel, 104
Brooke, Stopford, 299
Brooks, W. T., 152
Brown, Thomas Edward, 196
Browne, Sir Thomas, 12
Browning, Robert, 58, 125, 173,
190-1, 234, 243, 244
Bunyan, John, 294, 320
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 262
Burns, Robert, 265
Burton, Richard, 267
Byron, George Noel Gordon,
Lord, 194, 271
Campbell, James Dykes, 213, 216,
217
Campion, Thomas, 60, 61, 72
Carew, Thomas, 97
Carlyle, Thomas, 236
Gary, Lucius (Lord Falkland),
97.
Cassiterides, The, 2
Champeaux, William of, 18
Chaucer, 18, 21, 79, 121, 194, 285
Christabel, 222
Churchill, Charles, 52
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of,
97
Cleveland, John, 55
Cloister and the Hearth, The, 287
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 37, no,
212 ^/ seq., 298
Collins, William, 75, 88
Common Prayer, Book of, 70
Conington, John, 52, 54
Cory, William (Johnston), 192
Cowper, William, 56, 68
Crabbe, George, 56-57
Cramb, Professor J. A., 296
Crashaw, Richard, 163-166
Cupid and Psyche, 13
Daniel, Samuel, 72
Dante, 121
Davies, Sir John, 155-156
Denham, Sir John, 88
De Quincey, Thomas 213, 298
De Tabley, J. B. Leicester Warren,
Lord, 255
Dixon, Richard Watson, 255
Dobell, Bertram, 152
Dobson, Austin, 69
Dodington, George Bubb, 297
Donne, Henry, 99, 100
Donne, John, 96 et seq., 130, 131,
136, 155. 173 .„ _ , ,
Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of,
67
321
322
Index
Doughty, Charles M., 207
Drury, Sir Robert, 105, 106
Dryden, John, 56, 97, no, 242,
298-299
Dunbar, William, 19, 20
Earle, John, 1 50-1 51
Ecclesiasticus, 42, 119
••Eliot, George, "282
Ellesmere, Thomas Egerton, Earl
of, 103
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 14
Essays in Criticism, 235
Etherege, Sir George, 67
Evans, Mary, 215-8
Ferrar, Nicholas, 135
Fletcher, Giles, 156
Fletcher, John, 45
Fletcher, Phineas, 156
Froude, James Anthony, 234
Gamett, Dr. Richard^ 227 ,
Gautier, Th^ophile, 91
Gibbon, Edward, 59
Gilbert, Sir William S., 59
Gladstone, W. E., 51, 59, 70
Godolphin, Sidney, 97
Goldsmith, Oliver, 56
Gorky, Maxim, 82
Gosse, Edmund, 251 et seq.
Gray, Thomas, 238
Grierson, Professor H. J. C., 97
Grimm, James, 23, 25
Grosart, Dr. A. B,, 136, 152
Gummere, Dr. F. B., 27, 28, 37
Habington, William, 157-158
Hall, Bishop, 55
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 310
Hardt, Ernst, 314
Hardy, Thomas, 82, 189 et seq.
Harvey, Christopher, 158-159, 163
Harvey, Gabriel, 72
Hazlitt, William, 169, 222
Henley, W. E., 161
Herbert of Cherbury, Edward,
Lord, 131, 132
Herbert, George, 81, 114, 131 et
seq., 139, 140, 143, 163, 164
Herbert, Sidney, 132
Herder, 23
Herodotus, 5
Herrick, Robert, 60
Hoccleve, Thomas, 48
Homer, 5, 89
Hood, Thomas, 136
Horace, 51 et seq., loi, 299-300
Horn, sailing ships, 7
Houghton, R. Monckton Milnes,
Lord, 261
Housman, A. E. (quoted), 303,
304
Hugo, Victor, 255-256
Ictis, Island of , 2
Job, Book of,, 1 19
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 45, 97, no,
"3,258,288,290
Jonson, Ben, 60, 79, 97, 3 '7
Joubert, 231
Jowett, Dr. Benjamin, 249, 259,
266
Jusserand, J. J., ,17, 213
Juvenal, 52, 53 ' '
Keats, John, 194, 26'7
Ker, Professor W. P., 28
King, Bishop Henry, 97, 156-157
Kipling, Rudyard, 3^ .
Kittredge, Professor, 24, 26
Kubla Khan, 222, 223
Lamb, Charles, 59, 170, 214, 219,
226, 255
Landor, Walter Savage, 69, 95,
255, 264
Lang, Andrew, 13, loi
Langland, William, 43
Lebanon, levy of, 2
Lincoln, Abraham, 292
Litany, The, 17
London Bridge, 18
Longinus, 93
Louvain, 15
Lucian, 43
Lydgate, John, 48
Macaulay, Thomas Babington,
Lord, 236
Macdonald, George (quoted), 128
"Maartens, Maarten, " 267
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 82, 150
Martin, Sir Theodore, 52, 71
Marvell, Andrew, 63, 66"**:
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 259
Meredith, George, 79, 119, 167,
168 et seq., 192, 205, 263, 265,
270
Index
323
Milton, John, 48, 62, 67, 74,
77, 78, 121, 147, 203, 238, 241.
299
Moli^re, 194
Montaigne, 194
More, Sir George, 104
Morris, William, 191, 195, 262
Mxiller, Max, 312
Myers, Lindo, 254
Newman, John Henry, Cardinal,
59. 306
Nut Browne Mayde, The, 307
Oldham, John, 56
Oliphant, Laurence, 58
Paley, William, 127
Pascal, 16
Pasteur, Louis, 319-320
Pater, Walter, 301-302
Paul, Herbert, 233, 235
Peele, George, 60
Percy, Bishop, 38, 47
Pilgrim Fathers, The, 4,
Plato, 116, 120, 209, 290-293
Poems and Ballads, 265
Poole, Thomas, 218
Pope, Alexander, 52, 56, 59, 77,
88 et seq., no
Porter, Endymion, 97
Powell, F. York, 152
Praed, W. M., 69
Prior, Matthew, 67
Procter, Bryan Waller (Barry
Cornwall), 255
Pythagoras, 120
Quarles, Francis, 159, 161, 163
Quia Amore Langueo, 160
Rabelais, 16, 59
Ralegh, Sir Walter, 296
Raper, R. W., 249, 266
Reade, Charles, 274 et seq.
Redesdale, Algernon Bertram
Freeman-Mitford, Lord, 252
Remigius, 18
Richborough oysters, i
Ritchie, Lady, 261
Roads, 15-17
Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of,
161
Roman Colonists in Britain, 8
Rossetti, Christina, 264
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 247, 262,
264
Routh, Dr., of Magdalen, 278,
279
Sahara, The, 12
St. Aldwyn, Michael Edward
Hicks-Beach, Viscount, 258
Saintsbury, George, 235, 239, 246
Sappho, 11,93
Schlegel, A. W., 25
Scott, Sir Walter, 37
Sedley, Sir Charles, 67
Shakespeare, 13, 77, 113, 172, 178,
203,249, 297, 317
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 77, 194, 226,
249
Shenstone, William, 47
Sherbrooke, Robert (Lowe), Vis-
count, 278
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 79
Simonides, 256
Skeat, Professor W. W., 121
Smith, Goldwin, 280
South, Dr. Robert, 147-149
Southey, Robert, 217
Spenser, Edmund, 48, 72, 78, 79,
185, 266
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 65, 197
Stubbs, Bishop William, 262
Swift, Jonathan, 52
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 191,
246 et seq., 282
Tarshish, navy of, i
Tennyson, Lord, 6, 71, 190, 234,
239, 243
Thackeray, W. M., 59, 71
Thompson, Francis, 92, 160, 191,
194
Thucydides, 93
Tolstoy, 209
Traheme, Thomas, 114, 122, 124,
128, 151 et seq.
Tyrrell, Professor R. Y., 64
Universities, the early, i8
Vaughan, Henry, 114, 123, 138 et
seq., 152
Vaughan, Thomas, 139
Vere, Aubrey de, 52
Virgil, 93, 220
Voltaire, 59
324
Index
Walton, Isaak, 96 et seq., 133 et
seq., 304
Watson, Sir William, 240, 243
Watts, Dr. Isaac, 73
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 257, 269
et seq.
Wells, Charles Jeremiah, 255
Whitman, Walt, 184, 271
Worde, Wynkyn de, 43
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 218 et seq.
Wordsworth, William, 59, 82, 114,
119, 129, 146, 147, 150, 196, 218
et seq., 239, 242, 243-244
Wotton, Sir Henry, 60, 96
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 44, 60
Yeats, William Butler, 191, 194
Young, Sir George, 254
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