The works of James Russell Lowell

€tiition

THE WORKS OF
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

ILL US TRA TED WI TH FOR TRAITS
ENGRAVED ON STEEL

IN TEN VOLUMES
VOLUME II.

LITERARY ESSAYS

AMONG MY BOOKS, MY STUDY

WINDOWS, FIRESIDE

TRAVELS

BY

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

IN FOUR VOLUMES
VOLUME II.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

(3tbe ttrticrsi&e }Jrcss, Cambribge

Copyright, 1870, 1871, 1890,
BT JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company.

CONTENTS

NEW ENGLAND Two CENTURIES AGO .... 1

CARLYLE 77

SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 120

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL . 140

LESSING • 162

ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS .... 232

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 272

WITCHCRAFT ...•••••• 313

LITERARY ESSAYS

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO l

1865

THE history of New England is written imper-
ishably on the face of a continent, and in charac-
ters as beneficent as they are enduring. In the
Old World national pride feeds itself with the rec-
ord of battles and conquests ; — battles which
proved nothing and settled nothing; conquests
which shifted a boundary on the map, and put one
ugly head instead of another on the coin which the
people paid to the tax-gatherer. But wherever
the New-Englander travels among the sturdy com-
monwealths which have sprung from the seed of
the Mayflower, churches, schools, colleges, tell him
where the men of his race have been, or their in-
fluence has penetrated ; and an intelligent freedom
is the monument of conquests whose results are not
to be measured in square miles. Next to the fugi-
tives whom Moses led out of Egypt, the little ship-
load of outcasts who landed at Plymouth two cen-
turies and a half ago are destined to influence the
future of the world. The spiritual thirst of man-

1 History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty. By
John Gorham Palfrey. Vol. iii.

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Third Series,
vols. ix. and x. Fourth Series, vols. vi. and vii.

2 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

kind has for ages been quenched at Hebrew foun-
tains ; but the embodiment in human institutions
of truths uttered by the Son of Man eighteen cen-
turies ago was to be mainly the work of Puritan
thought and Puritan self-devotion. Leave New
England out in the cold ! While you are plotting
it, she sits by every fireside in the land where there
is piety, culture, and free thought.

Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work, —
this is the short formula in which we may sum up
the teaching of the founders of New England, a
creed ample enough for this life and the next. If
their municipal regulations smack somewhat of
Judaism, yet there can be no nobler aim or more
practical wisdom than theirs ; for it was to make
the law of man a living counterpart of the law of
God, in their highest conception of it. Were they
too earnest in the strife to save their souls alive ?
That is still the problem which every wise and
brave man is lifelong in solving. If the Devil
take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers,
he is as busy with us as with them ; and if we can-
not find it in our hearts to break with a gentleman
of so much worldly wisdom, who gives such admi-
rable dinners, and whose manners are so perfect,
so much the worse for us.

Looked at on the outside, New England history
is dry and unpicturesque. There is no rustle of
silks, no waving of plumes, no clink of golden
spurs. Our sympathies are not awakened by the
changeful destinies, the rise and fall, of great fami-
lies, whose doom was in their blood. Instead of

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 3

all this, we have the homespun fates of Cephas
and Prudence repeated in an infinite series of
peaceable sameness, and finding space enough for
record in the family Bible ; we have the noise of
axe and hammer and saw, an apotheosis of dogged
work, where, reversing the fairy-tale, nothing is
left to luck, and, if there be any poetry, it is some-
thing that cannot be helped, — the waste of the
water over the dam. Extrinsically, it is prosaic
and plebeian ; intrinsically, it is poetic and noble ;
for it is, perhaps, the most perfect incarnation of
an idea the world has ever seen. That idea was
not to found a democracy, nor to charter the city
of New Jerusalem by an act of the General Court,
as gentlemen seem to think whose notions of his-

O

tory and human nature rise like an exhalation from
the good things at a Pilgrim Society dinner. Not
in the least. They had no faith in the Divine in-
stitution of a system which gives Teague, because
he can dig, as much influence as Ralph, because
he can think, nor in personal at the expense of
general freedom. Their view of human rights was
not so limited that it could not take in human
relations and duties also. They would have been
likely to answer the claim, " I am as good as any-
body," by a quiet "Yes, for some things, but not
for others ; as good, doubtless, in your place, where
all things are good." What the early settlers of
Massachusetts did intend, and what they accom-
plished, was the founding here of a new England,
and a better one, where the political superstitions
and abuses of the old should never have leave to

4 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

take root. So much, we may say, they deliberately
intended. No nobles, either lay or cleric, no great
landed estates, and no universal ignorance as the
seed-plot of vice and unreason ; but an elective
magistracy and clergy, land for all who would till
it, and reading and writing, will ye nill ye, instead.
Here at last, it should seem, simple manhood is to
have a chance to play his stake against Fortune
with honest dice, uncogged by those three hoary
sharpers, Prerogative, Patricianism, and Priest-
craft. Whoever has looked into the pamphlets
published in England during the Great Rebellion
cannot but have been struck by the fact, that the
principles and practice of the Puritan Colony had
begun to react with considerable force on the
mother country ; and the policy of the retrograde
party there, after the Restoration, in its dealings
with New England, finds a curious parallel as to
its motives (time will show whether as to its re-
sults) in the conduct of the same party towards
America during the last four years.1 This influ-
ence and this fear alike bear witness to the energy
of the principles at work here.

"We have said that the details of New England
history were essentially dry and unpoetic. Every-
thing is near, authentic, and petty. There is no
mist of distance to soften outlines, no mirage of
tradition to give characters and events an imagina-
tive loom. So much downright work was perhaps
never wrought on the earth's surface in the same
space of time as during the first forty years after the
1 Written in December, 1864.

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 5

settlement. But mere work is unpicturesque, and
void of sentiment. Irving instinctively divined and
admirably illustrated in his " Knickerbocker " the
humorous element which lies in this nearness of
view, this clear, prosaic daylight of modernness,
and this poverty of stage properties, which make
the actors and the deeds they were concerned in
seem ludicrously small when contrasted with the
semi-mythic grandeur in which we have clothed
them, as we look backward from the crowned re-
sult, and fancy a cause as majestic as our concep-
tion of the effect. There was, indeed, one poetic
side to the existence otherwise so narrow and prac-
tical ; and to have conceived this, however par-
tially, is the one original and American thing in
Cooper. This diviner glimpse illumines fbe lives of
our Daniel Boones, the man of civilization and old-
world ideas confronted with our forest solitudes, —
confronted, too, for the first time, with his real self,
and so led gradually to disentangle the original
substance of his manhood from the artificial results
of culture. Here was our new Adam of the wilder-
ness, forced to name anew, not the visible creation
of God, but the invisible creation of man, in those
forms that lie at the base of social institutions, so
insensibly moulding personal character and control-
ling individual action. Here is the protagonist of
our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that of
Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don
Quixote, as romantic in its relation to our home-
spun and plebeian mythus as Arthur in his to the
mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry. We do not

6 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

mean, of course, that Cooper's " Leatherstocking "
is all this or anything like it, but that the character
typified in him is ideally and potentially all this
and more.

But whatever was poetical in the lives of the
early New Englanders had something shy, if not
sombre, about it. If their natures flowered, it was
out of sight, like the fern. It was in the practical
that they showed their true quality, as Englishmen
are wont. It has been the fashion lately with a
few feeble-minded persons to undervalue the New
England Puritans, as if they were nothing more
than gloomy and narrow-minded fanatics. But all
the charges brought against these large-minded and
far-seeing men are precisely those which a really
able fanatic, Joseph de Maistre, lays at the door
of Protestantism. Neither a knowledge of human
nature nor of history justifies us in confounding,
as is commonly done, the Puritans of Old and New
England, or the English Puritans of the third with
those of the fifth decade of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name,
enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as
it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and
it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no. A
sceptre once put in the hand, the grip is instinc-
tive ; and he who is firmly seated in authority soon
learns to think security, and not progress, the high-
est lesson of statecraft. From the summit of power
men no longer turn their eyes upward, but begin to
look about them. Aspiration sees only one side of
every question ; possession, many. And the Eng-

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 1

lish Puritans, after their revolution was accom-
plished, stood in even a more precarious position
than most successful assailants of the prerogative of
whatever is to continue in being. They had car-
ried a political end by means of a religious revival.
The fulcrum on which they rested their lever to
overturn the existing order of things (as history
always placidly calls the particular forms of disor-
der for the time being) was in the soul of man.
They could not renew the fiery gush of enthusiasm
when once the molten metal had begun to stiffen in
the mould of policy and precedent. The religious
element of Puritanism became insensibly merged
in the political ; and, its one great man taken away,
it died, as passions have done before, of possession.
It was one thing to shout with Cromwell before
the battle of Dunbar, "Now, Lord, arise, and let
thine enemies be scattered ! " and to snuffle, " Rise,
Lord, and keep us safe in our benefices, our seques-
tered estates, and our five per cent ! " Puritanism
meant something when Captain Hodgson, riding
out to battle through the morning mist, turns over
the command of his troop to a lieutenant, and
stays to hear the prayer of a cornet, there was " so
much of God in it." Become traditional, repeat-
ing the phrase without the spirit, reading the pre-
sent backward as if it were written in Hebrew,
translating Jehovah by " I was " instead of " I
^am," — it was no more like its former self than
the hollow drum made of Zi sea's skin was like the
grim captain whose soul it had once contained.
Yet the change was inevitable, for it is not safe to

8 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

confound the tilings of Caesar with the things of
God. Some honest republicans, like Ludlow, were
never able to comprehend the chilling contrast be-
tween the ideal aim and the material fulfilment, and
looked askance on the strenuous reign of Oliver,
— that rugged boulder of primitive manhood lying
lonely there on the dead level of the century, —
as if some crooked changeling had been laid in the
cradle instead of that fair babe of the Common-
wealth they had dreamed. Truly there is a tide in
the affairs of men, but there is no gulf-stream set-
ting forever in one direction ; and those waves of
enthusiasm on whose crumbling crests we some-
times see nations lifted for a gleaming moment are
wont to have a gloomy trough before and behind.

But the founders of New England, though they
must have sympathized vividly with the struggles
and triumphs of their brethren in the mother coun-
try, were never subjected to the same trials and
temptations, never hampered with the same lumber
of usages and tradition. They were not driven to
win power by doubtful and desperate ways, nor to
maintain it by any compromises of the ends which
make it worth having. From the outset they were
builders, without need of first pulling down,
whether to make room or to provide material. For
thirty years after the colonization of the Bay, they
had absolute power to mould as they would the
character of their adolescent commonwealth. Dur-
ing this time a whole generation would have grown
to manhood who knew the Old World only by re-
port, in whose habitual thought kings, nobles, and

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 9

bishops would be as far away from all present and
practical concern as the figures in a fairy-tale, and
all whose memories and associations, all their un-
conscious training by eye and ear, were New Eng-
lish wholly. Nor were the men whose influence
was greatest in shaping the framework and the
policy of the Colony, in any true sense of the word,
fanatics. Enthusiasts, perhaps, they were, but with
them the fermentation had never gone further than
the ripeness of the vinous stage. Disappointment
had never made it acetous, nor had it ever putre-
fied into the turbid-zeal of Fifth Monarchism and
sectarian whimsey. There is no better ballast for
keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it
from all risk of crankiness, than business. And
they were business men, men of facts and figures
no less than of religious earnestness. The sum of
two hundred thousand pounds had been invested in
their undertaking, — a sum, for that time, truly
enormous as the result of private combination for
a doubtful experiment. That their enterprise might
succeed, they must show a balance on the right side
of the counting-house ledger, as well as in their
private accounts with their own souls. The liberty
of praying when and how they would must be bal-
anced with an ability of paying when and as they
ought. Nor is the resulting fact in this case at va-
riance with the a priori theory. They succeeded
in making their thought the life and soul of a body
politic, still powerful, still benignly operative, after
two centuries ; a thing which no mere fanatic ever
did or ever will accomplish. Sober, earnest, and

10 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

thoughtful men, it was no Utopia, no New Atlantis,
no realization of a splendid dream, which they had
at heart, but the establishment of the divine princi-
ple of Authority on the common interest and the
common consent ; the making, by a contribution
from the free-will of all, a power which should curb
and guide the free-will of each for the general
good. If they were stern in their dealings with
sectaries, it should be remembered that the Colony
was in fact the private property of the Massachu-
setts Company, that unity was essential to its suc-
cess, and that John of Leyden had taught them
how unendurable by the nostrils of honest men is
the corruption of the right of private judgment in
the evil and selfish hearts of men when no thorough
mental training has developed the understanding
and given the judgment its needful means of com-
parison and correction. They knew that liberty in
the hands of feeble-minded and unreasoning per-
sons (and all the worse if they are honest) means
nothing more than the supremacy of their particu-
lar form of imbecility ; means nothing less, there-
fore, than downright chaos, a Bedlam-chaos of
monomaniacs and bores. What was to be done
with men and women, who bore conclusive witness
to the fall of man by insisting on walking up the
broad-aisle of the meeting-house in a costume which
that event had put forever out of fashion ? About
their treatment of witches, too, there has been a
great deal of ignorant babble. Puritanism had
nothing whatever to do with it. They acted under
a delusion, which, with an exception here and there

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 11

(and those mainly medical men, like Wierus and
Webster), darkened the understanding of all Chris-
tendom. Dr. Henry More was no Puritan ; and
his letter to Glanvil, prefixed to the third edition
of the " Sadducismus Triumphatus," was written
in 1678, only fourteen years before the trials at
Salem. Bekker's " Bezauberte Welt " was pub-
lished in 1693 ; and in the Preface he speaks of
the difficulty of overcoming " the prejudices in
which not only ordinary men, but the learned also,
are obstinate." In Hathaway's case, 1702, Chief-
Justice Holt, in charging the jury, expresses no
disbelief in the possibility of witchcraft, and the
indictment implies it* existence. Indeed, the natu-
ral reaction from the Salem mania of 1692 put an
end to belief in devilish compacts and demoniac
possessions sooner in New England than elsewhere.
The last we hear of it there is in 1720, when the
Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford detected and exposed
an attempted cheat by two girls. Even in 1692,
it was the foolish breath of Cotton Mather and
others of the clergy that blew the dying embers of
this ghastly superstition into a flame ; and they
were actuated partly by a desire to bring about a
religious revival, which might stay for a while the
hastening lapse of their own authority, and still
more by that credulous scepticism of feeble-minded
piety which dreads the cutting away of an ortho-
dox tumor of misbelief, as if the life-blood of faith
would follow, and would keep even a stumbling-
block in the way of salvation, if only enough gen-
erations had tripped over it to make it venerable.

12 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

The witches were condemned on precisely the same
grounds that in our day led to the condemnation
of " Essays and Reviews."

But Puritanism was already in the decline when
such things were possible. What had been a won-
drous and intimate experience of the soul, a flash
into the very crypt and basis of man's nature
from the fire of trial, had become ritual and tra-
dition. In prosperous times the faith of one gen-
eration becomes the formality of the next. " The
necessity of a reformation," set forth by order of
the Synod which met at Cambridge in 1679,
though no doubt overstating the case, shows how
much even at that time the ancient strictness had
been loosened. The country had grown rich, its
commerce was large, and wealth did its natural
work in making life softer and more worldly,
commerce in deprovincializing the minds of those
engaged in it. But Puritanism had already done
its duty. As there are certain creatures whose
whole being seems occupied with an egg-laying
errand they are sent upon, incarnate ovipositors,
their bodies but bags to hold this precious de-
posit, their legs of use only to carry them where
they may most safely be rid of it, so sometimes a
generation seems to have no other end than the
conception and ripening of certain germs. Its
blind stirrings, its apparently aimless seeking hither
and thither, are but the driving of an instinct to
be done with its parturient function toward these
principles of future life and power. Puritan-
ism, believing itself quick with the seed of reli-

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 13

gious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg
of democracy. The English Puritans pulled down
church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins,
and all the while it was not Zion, but America,
they were building. But if their millennium went
by, like the rest, and left men still human; if
they, like so many saints and martyrs before them,
listened in vain for the sound of that trumpet
which was to summon all souls to a resurrection
from the body of this death which men call life,
— it is not for us, at least, to forget the heavy
debt we owe them. It was the drums of Naseby and
Dunbar that gathered the minute-men on Lexing-
ton Common ; it was the red dint of the axe on
Charles's block that marked One in our era. The
Puritans had their faults. They were narrow, un-
genial ; they could not understand the text, " I have
piped to you and ye have not danced," nor con-
ceive that saving one's soul should be the cheerful-
lest, and not the dreariest, of businesses. Their
preachers had a way, like the painful Mr. Perkins,
of pronouncing the word damn with such an em-
phasis as left a doleful echo in their auditors' ears
a good while after. And it was natural that men
who captained or accompanied the exodus from
existing forms and associations into the doubtful
wilderness that led to the promised land, should
find more to their purpose in the Old Testament
than in the New. As respects the New England
settlers, however visionary some of their religious
tenets may have been, their political ideas savored
of the realty, and it was no Nephelococcygia of

14 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

which they drew the plan, but of a commonwealth
whose foundation was to rest on solid and familiar
earth. If what they did was done in a corner,
the results of it were to be felt to the ends of
the earth ; and the figure of Winthrop should be as
venerable in history as that of Romulus is bar-
barously grand in legend.

I am inclined to think that many of our na-
tional characteristics, which are sometimes attrib-
uted to climate and sometimes to institutions, are
traceable to the influences of Puritan descent. We
are apt to forget how very large a proportion of
our population is descended from emigrants who
came over before 1660. Those emigrants were in
great part representatives of that element of Eng-
lish character which was most susceptible of re-
ligious impressions ; in other words, the most ear-
nest and imaginative. Our people still differ from
their English cousins (as they are fond of calling
themselves when they are afraid we may do them
a mischief) in a certain capacity for enthusiasm,
a devotion to abstract principle, an openness to
ideas, a greater aptness for intuitions than for the
slow processes of the syllogism, and, as derivative
from these, in minds of looser texture, a light-
armed, skirmishing habit of thought, and a positive
preference of the birds in the bush, — an excellent
quality of character before you have your bird in
the hand.

There have been two great distributing centres
of the English race on this continent, Massachu-
setts and Virginia. Each has impressed the char-

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 15

acter of its early legislators on the swarms it has
sent forth. Their ideas are in some fundamental
respects the opposites of each other, and we can
only account for it by an antagonism of thought
beginning with the early framers of their respec-
tive institutions. New England abolished caste ;
in Virginia they still talk of " quality folks."
But it was in making education not only common
to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that
the destiny of the free republics of America was
practically settled. Every man was to be trained,
not only to the use of arms, but of his wits also ;
and it is these which alone make the others ef-
fective weapons for the maintenance of freedom.
You may disarm the hands, but not the brains,
of a people, and to know what should be defended
is the first condition of successful defence. Sim-
ple as it seems, it was a great discovery that the
key of knowledge could turn both ways, that it
could open, as well as lock, the door of power to
the many. The only things a New-Englander was
ever locked out of were the jails. It is quite
true that our Republic is the heir of the Eng-
lish Commonwealth ; but as we trace events back-
ward to their causes, we shall find it true also,
that what made our Revolution a foregone con-
clusion was that act of the General Court, passed
in May, 1647, which established the system of
common schools. " To the end that learning may
not be buried in the graves of our forefathers
in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assist-
ing our endeavors, it is therefore ordered by this

16 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

Court and authority thereof, that every township
in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased
them to fifty householders, shall then forthwith
appoint one within their towns to teach all such
children as shall resort to him to write and read."

Passing through some Massachusetts village, per-
haps at a distance from any house, it may be in
the midst of a piece of woods where four roads
meet, one may sometimes even yet see a small
square one-story building, whose use would not be
long doubtful. It is summer, and the flickering
shadows of forest-leaves dapple the roof of the lit-
tle porch, whose door stands wide, and shows, hang-
ing on either hand, rows of straw hats and bon-
nets, that look as if they had done good service.
As you pass the open windows, you hear whole
platoons of high-pitched voices discharging words
of two or three syllables with wonderful preci-
sion and unanimity. Then there is a pause, and
the voice of the officer in command is heard re-
proving some raw recruit whose vocal musket hung
fire. Then the drill of the small infantry begins
anew, but pauses again because some urchin —
who agrees with Voltaire that the superfluous is
a very necessary thing — insists on spelling " sub-
traction " with an s too much.

If you had the good fortune to be born and bred
in the Bay State, your mind is thronged with half-
sad, half -humorous recollections. The a-b abs of
little voices long since hushed in the mould, or
ringing now in the pulpit, at the bar, or in the Sen-
ate-chamber, come back to the ear of memory. You

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 17

remember the high stool on which culprits used to
be elevated with the tall paper fool's-cap on their
heads, blushing to the ears ; and you think with
wonder how you have seen them since as men
climbing the world's penance-stools of ambition
without a blush, and gladly giving everything for
life's caps and bells. And you have pleasanter
memories of going after pond-lilies, of angling for
horn-pouts, — that queer bat among the fishes, —
of nutting, of walking over the creaking snow-crust
in winter, when the warm breath of every house-
hold was curling up silently in the keen blue air.
You wonder if life has any rewards more solid and
permanent than the Spanish dollar that was hung
around your neck to be restored again next day,
and conclude sadly that it was but too true a proph-
ecy and emblem of all worldly success. But your
moralizing is broken short off by a rattle of feet
and the pouring forth of the whole swarm, — the
boys dancing and shouting, — the mere efferves-
cence of the fixed air of youth and animal spirits
uncorked, — the sedater girls in confidential twos
and threes decanting secrets out of the mouth of
one cape-bonnet into that of another. Times have
changed since the jackets and trousers used to draw
up on one side of the road, and the petticoats on
the other, to salute with bow and curtsy the white
neckcloth of the parson or the squire, if it chanced
to pass during intermission.

Now this little building, and others like it, were
an original kind of fortification invented by the
founders of New England. They are the martello*

18 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

towers that protect our coast. This was the great
discovery of our Puritan forefathers. They were
the first lawgivers who saw clearly and enforced
practically the simple moral and political truth,
that knowledge was not an alms to be dependent
on the chance charity of private men or the preca-
rious pittance of a trust-fund, but a sacred debt
which the Commonwealth owed to every one of her
children. The opening of the first grammar-school
was the opening of the first trench against monop-
oly in church and state ; the first row of trammels
and pot-hooks which the little Shear jashubs and
Elkanahs blotted and blubbered across their copy-
books, was the preamble to the Declaration of In-
dependence. The men who gave every man the
chance to- become a landholder, who made the
transfer of land easy, and put knowledge within
the reach of all, have been culled narrow-minded,
because they were intolerant. But intolerant of
what? Of what they believed to be dangerous
nonsense, which, if left free, would destroy the last
hope of civil and religious freedom. They had not
come here that every man might do that which
seemed good in his own eyes, but in the sight of
God. Toleration, moreover, is something which is
won, not granted. It is the equilibrium of neutral-
ized forc.es. The Puritans had no notion of toler-
ating mischief. They looked upon their little com-
monwealth as upon their own private estate and
homestead, as they had a right to do, and would no
more allow the Devil's religion of unreason to be
preached therein, than we should permit a prize-

NEW bNGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 19

fight in our gardens. They were narrow ; in other
words they had an edge to them, as men that serve
in great emergencies must ; for a Gordian knot is
settled sooner with a sword than a beetle.

The founders of New England are commonly
represented in the after-dinner oratory of their de-
scendants as men "before their time," as it is
called ; in other words, deliberately prescient of
events resulting from new relations of circum-
stances, or even from circumstances new in them-
selves, and therefore altogether alien from their own
experience. Of course, such a class of men is to
be reckoned among those non-existent human varie-
ties so gravely catalogued by the ancient natural-
ists. If a man could shape his action with refer-
ence to what should happen a century after his
death, surely it might be asked of him to call in
the help of that easier foreknowledge which reaches
from one day to the next, — a power of prophecy
whereof we have no example. I do not object to
a wholesome pride of ancestry, though a little
mythical, if it be accompanied with the feeling
that noblesse oblige, and do not result merely in a
placid self-satisfaction with our own mediocrity, as
if greatness, like righteousness, could be imputed.
We can pardon it even in conquered races, like the
Welsh and Irish, who make up to themselves for
present degradation by imaginary empires in the
past whose boundaries they can extend at will, car-
rying the bloodless conquests of fancy over regions
laid down upon no map, and concerning which
authentic history is enviously dumb. Those long

20 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

beadrolls of Keltic kings cannot tyrannize over us,
and we can be patient so long as our own crowns
are uncracked by the shillalah sceptres of their
actual representatives. In our own case, it would
not be amiss, perhaps, if we took warning by the
example of Teague and Taffy. At least, I think
it would be wise in our orators not to put forward
so prominently the claim of the Yankee to univer-
sal dominion, and his intention to enter upon it
forthwith. If we do our duties as honestly and as
much in the fear of God as our forefathers did, we
need not trouble ourselves much about other titles
to empire. The broad foreheads and long heads
will win the day at last in spite of all heraldry,
and it will be enough if we feel as keenly as our
Puritan founders did that those organs of empire
may be broadened and lengthened by culture.1
That our self-complacency should not increase the
complacency of outsiders is not to be wondered at.
As we sometimes take credit to ourselves (since
all commendation of our ancestry is indirect self-
flattery) for what the Puritan fathers never were,
so there are others who, to gratify a spite against
their descendants, blame them for not having been
what they could not be ; namely, before their time
in such matters as slavery, witchcraft, and the
like. The view, whether of friend or foe, is
equally unhistorical, nay, without the faintest no-
tion of all that makes history worth having as a

1 It is curious, that, when Cromwell proposed to transfer a col-
ony from New England to Ireland, one of the conditions insisted
on in Massachusetts was that a college should be established.

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 21

teacher. That our grandfathers shared in the pre-
judices of their day is all that makes them human
to us ; and that nevertheless they could act bravely
and wisely on occasion makes them only the more
venerable. If certain barbarisms and supersti-
tions disappeared earlier in New England than else-
where, not by the decision of exceptionally enlight-
ened or humane judges, but by force of public
opinion, that is the fact that is interesting and in-
structive for us. I never thought it an abatement
of Hawthorne's genius that he came lineally from
one who sat in judgment on the witches in 1692 ;
it was interesting rather to trace something heredi-
tary in the sombre character of his imagination,
continually vexing itself to account for the origin
of evil, and baffled for want of that simple solution
in a personal Devil.

But I have no desire to discuss the merits or
demerits of the Puritans, having long ago learned
the wisdom of saving my sympathy for more mod-
ern objects than Hecuba. My object is to direct
the attention of my readers to a collection of docu-
ments where they may see those worthies as they
were in their daily living and thinking. The col-
lections of our various historical and antiquarian
societies can hardly be said to be published in the
strict sense of the word, and few consequently are
aware how much they contain of interest for the
general reader no less than the special student.
The several volumes of " Winthrop Papers," in
especial, are a mine of entertainment. Here we
have the Puritans painted by themselves, and,

22 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

while we arrive at a truer notion of the characters
of some among them, and may accordingly sacri-
fice to that dreadful superstition of being usefully
employed which makes so many bores and bored,
we can also furtively enjoy the oddities of thought
and speech, the humors of the time, which our
local historians are too apt too despise as incon-
sidered trifles. For myself I confess myself here-
tic to the established theory of the gravity of his-
tory, and am not displeased with an opportunity to
smile behind my hand at any ludicrous interrup-
tion of that sometimes wearisome ceremonial. I
am not sure that I would not sooner give up Ea-
leigh spreading his cloak to keep the royal Dian's
feet from the mud, than that awful judgment upon
the courtier whose Atlantean thighs leaked away
in bran through the rent in his trunk-hose. The
painful fact that Fisher had his head cut off is
somewhat mitigated to me by the circumstance
that the Pope should have sent him, of all things
in the world, a cardinal's hat after that incapaei-
tation. Theology herself becomes less unamiable
to me when I find the Supreme Pontiff writing to
the Council of Trent that " they should begin with
original sin, maintaining yet a due respect for the
Emperor." That infallibility should thus curtsy
to decorum, shall make me think better of it while
I live. I shall accordingly endeavor to give my
readers what amusement I can, leaving it to them-
selves to extract solid improvement from the vol-
umes before us, which include a part of the corre-
spondence of three generations of Winthrops.

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 23

Let me premise that there are two men above
all others for whom our respect is heightened by
these letters, — the elder John Winthrop and
Roger Williams. Winthrop appears throughout
as a truly magnanimous and noble man in an un-
obtrusive way, — a kind of greatness that makes
less noise in the world, but is on the whole more
solidly satisfying than most others, — a man who
has been dipped in the river of God (a surer bap-
tism than Styx or dragon's blood) till his char-
acter is of perfect proof, and who appears plainly
as the very soul and life of the young Colony.
Very reverend and godly he truly was, and a re-
spect not merely ceremonious, but personal, a re-
spect that savors of love, shows itself in the letters
addressed to him. Charity and tolerance flow so
naturally from the pen of Williams that it is plain
they were in his heart. He does not show himself
a very strong or very wise man, but a thoroughly
gentle and good one. His affection for the two
Winthrops is evidently of the warmest. We sus-
pect that he lived to see that there was more reason
in the drum-head religious discipline which made
him, against his will, the founder of a common-
wealth, than he may have thought at first. But
for the fanaticism (as it is the fashion to call the
sagacious straitness) of the abler men who knew
how to root the English stock firmly in this new
soil on either side of him, his little plantation could
never have existed, and he himself would have
been remembered only, if at all, as one of the jar-
ring atoms in a chaos of otherwise-mindedness.

24 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

Two other men, Emanuel Downing and Hugh
Peter, leave a positively unpleasant savor in the
nostrils. Each is selfish in his own way, — Down-
ing with the shrewdness of an attorney, Peter with
that clerical unction which in a vulgar nature so
easily degenerates into greasiness. Neither of them
was the man for a forlorn hope, and both returned
to England when the civil war opened prospect of
preferment there. Both, we suspect, were inclined
to value their Puritanism for its rewards in this
world rather than the next. Downing's son, Sir
George, was basely prosperous, making the good
cause pay him so long as it was solvent, and then
selling out in season to betray his old commander,
Colonel Okey, to the shambles at Charing Cross.
Peter became a colonel in the Parliament's army,
and under the Protectorate one of Cromwell's chap-
lains. On his trial, after the Restoration, he made
a poor figure, in striking contrast to some of the
brave men who suffered with him. At his execu-
tion a shocking brutality was shown. 4i When
Mr. Cook was cut down and brought to be quar-
tered, one they called Colonel Turner calling to
the Sheriff's men to bring Mr. Peters near, that
he might see it; and by and by the Hangman
came to him all besmeared in blood, and rubbing
his bloody hands together, he tauntingly asked,
Come, how do you like this, Mr. Peters ? How
do you like this work?"1 This Colonel Turner

1 State Trials, ii. 409. One \rould not reckon too closely with
a man on trial for his life, but there is something pitiful in
Peter's representing himself as coming back to England "out of

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 25

caii hardly have been other than the one who four
years later came to the hangman's hands for rob-
bery ; and whose behavior, both in the dock and
at the gallows, makes his trial one of the most en-
tertaining as a display of character. Peter would
seem to have been one of those men gifted with
what is sometimes called eloquence ; that is, the
faculty of stating things powerfully from momen-
tary feeling, and not from that conviction of the
higher reason which alone can give force and per-
manence to words. His letters show him subject,
like others of like temperament, to fits of " hypo-
chondriacal melancholy," and the only witness he
called on his trial was to prove that he was con-
fined to his lodgings by such an attack on the day
of the king's beheading. He seems to have been
subject to this malady at convenience, as some
women to hysterics. Honest John Endicott plainly
had small confidence in him, and did not think him
the right man to represent the Colony in England.
There is a droll resolve in the Massachusetts rec-
ords by which he is " desired to write to Holland
for 500/. worth of peter, & 40/. worth of match."
It is with a match that we find him burning his
fingers in the present correspondence.

Peter seems to have entangled himself somehow
with a Mrs. Deliverance Sheffield, whether maid
or widow nowhere appears, but presumably the
latter. The following statement of his position is
amusing enough : " I have sent Mrs. D. Sh. letter,

the West Indias," in order to evade any complicity with sus-
pected New England.

26 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

which puts mee to new troubles, for though shee
takes liberty upon my Cossen Downing's speeches,
yet (Good Sir) let mee not be a foole in Israel.
I had many good answers to yesterday's worke
[a Fast] and amongst the rest her letter ; which
(if her owne) doth argue more wisedome than I
thought shee had. You have often sayd I could
not leave her ; what to doe is very considerable.
Could I with comfort & credit desist, this seemes
best : could I goe on & content myself e, that were
good. . . . For though I now seeme free agayne,
yet the depth I know not. Had shee come over
with me, I thinke I had bin quieter. This shee
may know, that I have sought God earnestly, that
the nexte weeke I shall bee riper : — I doubt shee
gaynes most by such writings : & shee deserves
most where shee is further of. If you shall amongst
you advise mee to write to hir, I shall forthwith ;
our towne lookes upon mee contracted & so I have
sayd myselfe ; what wonder the charge [change ?]
would make, I know not." Again : " Still pardon
my offensive boldnes : I know not well whither
Mrs. Sh. have set mee at liberty or not : my con-
clusion is, that if you find I cannot make an honor-
able retreat, then I shall desire to advance a-vv ®cw.
Of you I now expect your last advise, viz : whither
I must goe on or of, saluo evangelij honore : if
shee bee in good earnest to leave all agitations this
way, then I stand still & wayt God's mind concern-
ing mee. ... If I had much mony I would part
with it to her [be ?] free, till wee heare what Eng-
land doth, supposing I may bee called to some im-

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 27

ployment that will not suit a marryed estate " :
(here another mode of escape presents itself, and
he goes on :) " for indeed (Sir) some must looke
out & I have very strong thoughts to speake with
the Duitch Governor & lay some way there for a
supply &c." At the end of the letter, an objection
to the lady herself occurs to him : " Once more for
Mrs. Sh : I had from Mr. Hibbins & others, her
fellowpassengers, sad discouragements where they
saw her in her trim. I would not come of with
dishonor, nor come on with griefe, or ominous hes-
itations." On all this shilly-shally we have a
shrewd comment in a letter of Endicott : " I can-
not but acquaint you with my thoughts concerning
Mr. Peter since hee receaued a letter from Mrs.
Sheffield, which was yesterday in the eveninge
after the Fast, shee seeming in her letter to abate
of her affeccions towards him & dislikinge to come
to Salem vppon such termes as he had written. I
finde now that hee begins to play her parte, & if I
mistake not, you will see him as greatly in loue
with her (if shee will but hold of a little) as euer
shee was with him ; but he conceales it what he can
as yett. The begininge of the next weeke you will
heare further from him." The widow was evi-
dently more than a match for poor Peter*

It should appear that a part of his trouble arose
from his having coquetted also with a certain Mrs.
Ruth, about whom he was " dealt with by Mrs.
Amee, Mr, Phillips & 2 more of the Church, our
Elder being one. When Mr. Phillips with much
violence & sharpnes charged mee home . . . that

28 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

I should hinder the mayd of a match at London,
which was not so, could not thinke of any kindnes
I euer did her, though shee haue had above 300/i.
through my fingers, so as if God uphold me not
after an especiall manner, it will sinke me surely
. . . hee told me he would not stop my intended
marriage, but assured mee it would not bee good
... all which makes mee reflect upon my rash
proceedings with Mrs. Sh." Panurge's doubts
and difficulties about matrimony were not more
entertainingly contradictory. Of course, Peter ends
by marrying the widow, and presently we have a
comment on "her trim." In January, 1639, he
writes to Winthrop : " My wife is very thankf ull
for her apples, & desires much the new fashioned
shooes." Eight years later we find him writing
from England, where he had been two years : "I
am coming over if I must ; my wife comes of
necessity to New England, having run her selfe out
of breath here " ; and then in the postscript, " bee
sure you never let my wife come away from thence
without my leave, & then you love mee." But life
is never pure comedy, and the end in this case is
tragical. Roger Williams, after his return from
England in 1654, writes to John Winthrop, Jr. :
"Your brother flourisheth in good esteeme & is
eminent for maintaining the Freedome of the Con-
science as to matters of Belief e, Religion, &
Worship. Your Father Peters preacheth the same
Doctrine though not so zealously as some years
since, yet cries out against New English Rigidities
& Persecutions, their civil injuries & wrongs to

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 29

himselfe, & their unchristian dealing with him in
excommunicating his distracted wife. All this he
tould me in his lodgings at Whitehall, those lodg-
ings which I was tould were Canterburies [the
Archbishop], but he himselfe tould me that that
Library wherein we were together was Canterbu-
ries & given him by the Parliament. His wife lives
from him, not wholy but much distracted. He
tells me he had but 200 a yeare & he allowed her
4 score per annum of it. Surely, Sir, the most
holy Lord is most wise in all the trialls he exercis-
eth his people with. He tould me that his afflic-
tion from his wife stird him up to Action abroad,
& when successe tempted him to Pride, the Bitter-
nes in his bozome-comforts was a Cooler & a
Bridle to him." Truly the whirligig of time brings
about strange revenges. Peter had been driven
from England by the persecutions of Laud ; a
few years later he " stood armed on the scaffold "
when that prelate was beheaded, and now we find
him installed in the archiepiscopal lodgings. Dr.
Palfrey, it appears to me, gives altogether too
favorable an opinion both of Peter's character and
abilities. I conceive him to have been a vain and
selfish man. He may have had the bravery of
passionate impulse, but he wanted that steady
courage of character which has such a beautiful
constancy in Winthrop. He always professed a
longing to come back to New England, but it was
only a way he had of talking. That he never
meant to come is plain from these letters. Nay,
when things looked prosperous in England, he

30 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

writes to the younger Winthrop : " My counsell is
you should come hither with your family for cer-
taynly you will bee capable of a comfortable living
in this free Commonwealth. I cloo seriously advise
it. ... G. Downing is worth 500?. per annum but
41. per diem — your brother Stephen worth 2000/.
& a maior. I pray come." But when he is snugly
ensconced in Whitehall, and may be presumed to
have some influence with the prevailing powers,
his zeal cools. " I wish you & all friends to stay
there & rather looke to the West Indyes if they
remoue, for many are here to seeke when they
come ouer." To me Peter's highest promotion
seems to have been that he walked with John
Milton at the Protector's funeral. He was, I sus-
pect, one of those men, to borrow a charitable
phrase of Roger Williams, who " feared God in the
main," that is, whenever it was not personally
inconvenient. William Coddington saw him in his
glory in 1651 : " Soe wee toucke the tyrne to goe
to viset Mr. Petters at his chamber. I was mery
with him & called him the Arch. Bp. : of Canter-
berye, in regard to his adtendance by ministers &
gentlemen, & it passed very well." Considering
certain charges brought against Peter, (though he
is said, when under sentence of death, to have
denied the truth of them,) Coddington's statement
that he liked to have " gentlewomen waite of him "
in his lodgings has not a pleasant look. One last
report of him we get (September, 1659) in a letter
of John Davenport, — " that Mr. Hugh Peters is
distracted & under sore horrors of conscience, cry-

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 31
ing out of him self e as damned & confessing hay-

nous actings.

Occasionally these letters give us interesting
glimpses of persons and things in England. In the
letter of W illiams just cited, there is a lesson for
all parties raised to power by exceptional causes.
" Surely, Sir, youre Father & all the people of
God in England . . . are now in the sadle & at
the helme, so high that non datus descensus nisi
cadendo : Some cheere up their spirits with the
impossi bili tie of another fall or turne, so doth
Major G. Harrison ... a very gallant most de-
serving heavenly man, but most highflowne for the
Kingdom of the Saints & the 5th Monarchic now
risen & their sun never to set againe &c. Others,
as, to my knowledge, the Protector . . . are not so
full of that faith of miracles, but still imagine
changes & persecutions & the very slaughter of the
witnesses before that glorious morning so much
desired of a worldly Kingdome, if ever such a
Kingdome (as literally it is by so many expounded)
be to arise in this present world & dispensation.'*
Poor General Harrison lived to be one of the wit-
nesses so slaughtered. The practical good sense of
Cromwell is worth noting, the English understand-
ing struggling against Judaic trammels. Williams
gives us another peep through the keyhole of the
past: "It pleased the Lord to call me for some
time & with some persons to practice the Hebrew,
the Greeke, Latine, French & Dutch. The secre-
tarie of the Councell (Mr. Milton) for my Dutch I
read him, read me many more languages. Gram-

32 NE W ENGLA ND TWO CENTURIES A GO

mar rules begin to be esteemed a Tyrannie. I
taught 2 young Gentlemen, a Parliament man's
sons, as we teach our children English, by words,
phrazes, & constant talke, &c." It is plain that
Milton had talked over with Williams the theory
put forth in his tract on Education, (it was Mon-
taigne's also) and made a convert of him. We could
wish that the good Baptist had gone a little more
into particulars. But which of us knows among the
men he meets whom time will dignify by curtailing
him of the " Mr.," and reducing him to a bare pa-
tronymic, as being a kind by himself ? We have a
glance or two at Oliver, who is always interesting.
" The late renowned Oliver conf est to me in close
discourse about the Protestants affaires &c. that he
yet feard great persecutions to the protestants from
the Romanists before the downfall of the Papacie,"
writes Williams in 1660. This " close discourse "
must have been six years before, when Williams
was in England. Within a year after, Oliver in-
terfered to some purpose in behalf of the Protes-
tants of Piedmont, and Mr. Milton wrote his
famous sonnet. Of the war with Spain, WTilliams
reports from his letters out of England in 1656 :
" This diversion against the Spaniard hath turnd the
face & thoughts of many English, so that the saying
now is, Crowne the Protector with gould,1 though
the sullen yet cry, Crowne him with thornes."

Again in 1654 : " I know the Protector had
strong thoughts of Hispaniola & Cuba. Mr. Cot-

1 Waller put this into verse : —

" Let the rich ore forthwith be melted down
And the state fixed by making him a crown. "

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 33

ton's interpreting of Euphrates to be the West In-
dies, the supply of gold (to take off taxes), & the
provision of a warmer diver ticulum & receptacu-
lum then N. England is, will make a footing into
those parts very precious, & if it shall please God
to vouchsafe successe to this fleete, I looke to hear
of an invitation at least to these parts for removall
from his Highnes who lookes on N. E. only with an
eye of pitie, as poore, cold & useless." The mix-
ture of Euphrates and taxes, of the transcendental
and practical, prophecy taking precedence of thrift,
is characteristic, and recalls Cromwell's famous
rule, of fearing God and keeping your powder dry.
In one of the Protector's speeches,1 he insists much
on his wish to retire to a private life. There is a
curious confirmation of his sincerity in a letter of
William Hooke, then belonging to his household,
dated the 13th of April, 1657. The question of
the kingly title was then under debate, and Hooke's
account of the matter helps to a clearer under-
standing of the reasons for Cromwell's refusing the
title : " The protector is urged utrinque & (I am
ready to think) willing enough to betake himself
to a private life, if it might be. He is a godly
man, much in prayer & good discourses, delighting
in good men & good ministers, self-denying &
ready to promote any good work for Christ." 2 On
the 5th of February, 165|, Captain John Mason,
of Pequot memory, writes " a word or twoe of
newes as it comes from Mr. Eaton, viz : that the

1 The third in Carlyle, 1654.

2 Collections M'ss. Hist. Soc., Third Series, vol. i. p. 182.

34 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

Parliament sate in September last; they chose
their old Speaker & Clarke. The Protectour told
them they were a free Parliament, & soe left them
that day. They, considering where the legislative
power resided, concluded to vote it on the morrow,
& to take charge of the militia. The Protectour
hereing of it, sent for some numbers of horse, went
to the Parliament House, nayld up the doores, sent
for them to the Painted Chamber, told them they
should attend the lawes established, & that he
would wallow in his blood before he would part
with what was conferd upon him, tendering them
an oath : 140 engaged." Now it is curious that
Mr. Eaton himself, from whom Mason got his
news, wrote, only two days before, an account, dif-
fering, in some particulars, and especially in tone,
from Mason's. Of the speech he says, that it
" gave such satisfaction that about 200 have since
ingaged to owne the present Government." Yet
Carlyle gives the same number of signers (140) as
Mason, and there is a sentence in Cromwell's
speech, as reported by Carlyle, of precisely the
same purport as that quoted by Mason. To me,
that " wallow in my blood " has rather more of the
Cromwellian ring in it, more of the quality of spon-
taneous speech, than the " rolled into my grave and
buried with infamy " of the official reporter. John
Haynes (24th July, 1653) reports " newes from
England of astonishing nature," concerning the
dissolution of the Rump. We quote his story both
as a contemporaneous version of the event, and as
containing some particulars that explain the causes

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 35

that led to it. It differs, in some respects, from
Carlyle, and is hardly less vivid as a picture :
" The Parliament of England & Councell of State
are both dissolved, by whom & the manner this :
The Lord Cromwell, Generall, went to the house
& asked the Speaker & Bradshaw by what power
they sate ther. They answered by the same power
that he woare his sword. Hee replied they should
know they did not, & said they should sitt noe
longer, demanding an account of the vast sommes
of money they had received of the Commons.
They said the matter was of great consequence &
they would give him accompt in tenn dayes. He
said, Noe, they had sate too long already (& might
now take their ease,) for ther inriching themselves
& impoverishing the Commons, & then seazed
uppon all the Records. Immediatly Lambert,
Livetenant Generall, & Hareson Maior Generall
(for they two were with him), tooke the Speaker
Lenthall by the hands, lift him out of the Chaire,
& ledd him out of the house, & commanded the
rest to depart, which fortwith was obeied, & the
Generall took the keyes & locked the doore." He
then goes on to give the reasons assigned by differ-
ent persons for the act. Some said that the Gen-
eral " scented their purpose " to declare themselves
perpetual, and to get rid of him by ordering him to
Scotland. " Others say this, that the cries of the
oppressed preveiled much with him ... & hastned
the declaracion of that ould principle, Solus pop-
uli suprema lex <&c." The General, in the heat
of his wrath, himself snatching the keys and lock-

36 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

ing the door, has a look of being drawn from the
life. Cromwell, in a letter to General Fortescue
(November, 1655), speaks sharply of the disor-
ders and debauchedness, profaneness and wicked-
ness, commonly practised amongst the army sent
out to the West Indies. Major Mason gives us a
specimen : " It is heere reported that some of the
soldiers belonging to the ffleet at Boston, ffell upon
the watch : after some bickering they comanded
them to goe before the Governour ; they retorned
that they were Cromwell's boyes." Have we not,
in these days, heard of u Sherman's boys " ?

Belonging properly to the " Winthrop Papers,"
but printed in an earlier volume (Third Series,
vol. i. pp. 185-198), is a letter of John Maid-
stone, which contains the best summary of the
Civil War that I ever read. Indeed, it gives a
clearer insight into its causes, and a better view of
the vicissitudes of the Commonwealth and Protec-
torate, than any one of the more elaborate histories.
There is a singular equity and absence of party
passion in it which gives us faith in the author's
judgment. He was Oliver's Steward of the House-
hold, and his portrait of him, as that of an emi-
nently fair-minded man who knew him well, is of
great value. Carlyle has not copied it, and, as
many of my readers may never have seen it, I re-
produce it here : " Before I pass further, pardon
me in troubling you with the character of his per-
son, which, by reason of my nearness to him, I had
opportunity well to observe. His body was well
compact and strong ; his stature under six feet,

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 37

(I believe about two inches ;) his head so shaped
as you might see it a store-house and shop both, of
a vast treasury of natural parts. His temper ex-
ceeding fiery, as I have known, but the flame of it
kept down for the most part or soon allayed with
those moral endowments he had. He was natu-
rally compassionate towards objects in distress,
even to an effeminate measure ; though God had
made him a heart wherein was left little room for
any fear but what was due to himself, of which
there was a large proportion, yet did he exceed in
tenderness toward sufferers. A larger soul, I think,
hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was.
I do believe, if his story were impartially trans-
mitted, and the unprejudiced world well possessed
with it, she would add him to her nine worthies
and make that number a decemviri. He lived and
died in comfortable communion with God, as judi-
cious persons near him well observed. He was
that Mordecai that sought the welfare of his people
and spake peace to his seed. Yet were his temp-
tations such, as it appeared frequently that he that
hath grace enough for many men may have too
little for himself, the treasure he had being but in
an earthen vessel and that equally defiled with
original sin as any other man's nature is." There
are phrases here that may be matched with the
choicest in the life of Agricola ; and, indeed, the
whole letter, superior to Tacitus in judicial fair-
ness of tone, goes abreast of his best writing in
condensation, nay, surpasses it in this, that, while
in Tacitus the intensity is of temper, here it is

38 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

the clear residuum left by the ferment and set-
tling of thought. Just before, speaking of the dis-
solution of Oliver's last Parliament, Maidstone
says : " That was the last which sat during his life,
he being compelled to wrestle with the difficulties
of his place so well as he could without parliamen-
tary assistance, and in it met with so great a
burthen as (I doubt not to say) it drank up his
spirits, of which his natural constitution yielded a
vast stock, and brought him to his grave, his inter-
ment being the seed-time of his glory and Eng-
land's calamity." Hooke, in a letter of April 16,
1658, has a passage worth quoting : " The dis-
solucion of the last Parliament puts the supreme
powers upon difficulties, though the trueth is the
Nacion is so ill spirited that little good is to be
expected from these Generall Assemblies. They
[the supreme powers, to wit, Cromwell] have been
much in Counsell since this disappointment, &
God hath been sought by them in the effectuall
sense of the need of help from heaven & of the
extreme danger impendent on a miscarriage of
their advises. But our expences are so vast that
I know not how they can avoyde a recurrence to
another Session & to make a further tryall. . . .
The land is full of discontents, & the Cavaleerish
party doth still expect a day & nourish hopes of a
Revolucion. The Quakers do still proceed & are
not yet come to their period. The Presbyterians do
abound, I thinke, more than ever, & are very bold
& confident because some of their masterpieces lye
unanswered, particularly theire Jus Divinum

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 39

minis Ecclesiastici which I have sent to Mr. Dav-
enporte. It hath been extant without answer these
many years [only four, brother Hooke, if we may
trust the title-page]. The Anabaptists abound
likewise, & Mr. Tombes hath pretended to have
answered all the bookes extant against his opinion.
I saw him presenting it to the Protectour of late.
The Episcopall men ply the Common-Prayer booke
with much more boldness then ever since these
turnes of things, even in the open face of the City
in severall places. I have spoken of it to the Pro-
tectour but as yet nothing is done in order to their
being suppressed." It should teach us to distrust
the apparent size of objects, which is a mere cheat of
their nearness to us, that we are so often reminded
of how small account things seem to one genera-
tion for which another was ready to die. A copy
of the Jus Divinum held too close to the eyes could
shut out the universe with its infinite chances and
changes, its splendid indifference to our ephemeral
fates. Cromwell, we should gather, had found out
the secret of this historical perspective, to distin-
guish between the blaze of a burning tar-barrel
and the final conflagration of all things. He had
learned tolerance by the possession of power, — a
proof of his capacity for rule. In 1652 Haynes
writes : " Ther was a Catechise lately in print ther,
that denied the divinity of Christ, yett ther was mo-
tions in the house by some, to have it lycenced by
authority. Cromwell mainly oposed, & at last it was
voted to bee burnt which causes much discontent
of somme." Six years had made Cromwell wiser.

40 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

One more extract from a letter of Hooke's (30th
March, 1659) is worth giving. After speaking of
Oliver's death, he goes on to say : " Many prayers
were put up solemnly for his life, & some, of great
& good note, were too confident that he would
not die. ... I suppose himselfe had thoughts
that he should have outlived this sickness till near
his dissolution, perhaps a day or two before ; which
I collect partly by some words which he was said
to speak . . . & partly from his delaying, almost
to the last, to nominate his successor, to the won-
derment of many who began sooner to despair
of his life. . . . His eldest son succeedeth him,
being chosen by the Council, the day following his
father's death, whereof he had no expectation. I
have heard him say- he had thought to have lived
as a country gentleman, & that his father had not
employed him in such a way as to prepare him for
such employment; which, he thought, he did de-
signedly. I suppose his meaning was lest it should
have been apprehended he had prepared & ap-
pointed him for such a place, the burthen whereof
I have several times heard him complaining under
since his coming to the Government, the weighty
occasions whereof with continuall oppressing cares
had drunk up his father's spirits, in whose body
very little blood was found when he was opened :
the greatest defect visible was in his heart, which
was flaccid & shrunk together. Yet he was one
that could bear much without complaining, as one
of a strong constitution of brain (as appeared when
he was dissected) & likewise of body. His son

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 41

seemeth to be of another frame, soft & tender, &
penetrable with easier cares by much, yet he is of
a sweete countenance, vivacious & candid, as is the
whole Jrame of his spirit, only naturally inclined
to choler. His reception of multitudes of addresses
from towns, cities, & counties doth declare, among
several other indiciums, more of ability in him than
could, ordinarily, have been expected from him.
He spake also with general acceptation & applause
when he made his speech before the Parliament,
even far beyond the Lord Fynes.1 ... If this
Assembly miss it, we are like to be in an ill condi-
tion. The old ways & customs of England, as to
worshipe, are in the hearts of the most, who long
to see the days again which once they saw. . . .
The hearts of very many are for the house of the
Stewarts, & there is a speech as if they would at-
tempt to call the late King's judges into question.
. . . The city, I hear is full of Cavaliers." Poor
Richard appears to have inherited little of his
father but the inclination to choler. That he could
speak far beyond the Lord Fynes seems to have
been not much to the purpose. Rhetoric was not
precisely the medicine for such a case as he had to
deal with. Such were the glimpses which the New
England had of the Old. Ishmael must erelong
learn to shift for himself.

The temperance question agitated the fathers

very much as it still does the children. We have

never seen the anti-prohibition argument stated

more cogently than in a letter of Thomas Shepard,

1 This speech may be found in the Annual Register of 1762.

42 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

minister of Cambridge, to Winthrop, in 1639 :
" This also I doe humbly intreat, that there may
be no sin made of drinking in any case one to an-
other, for I am confident he that stands here will
fall & be beat from his grounds by his own argu-
ments ; as also that the consequences will be very
sad, and the thing provoking to God & man to
make more sins than (as yet is seene) God himself
hath made." A principle as wise now as it was
then. Our ancestors were also harassed as much
as we by the difficulties of domestic service. In
a country where land might be had for the ask-
ing, it was not easy to keep hold of servants
brought over from England. Emanuel Downing,
always the hard, practical man, would find a rem-
edy in negro slavery. " A warr with the Narra-
ganset," he writes to Winthrop in 1645, " is verie
considerable to this plantation, ffor I doubt whither
it be not synne in us, having power in our hands,
to suffer them to maynteyne the worship of the
devill which their pawwawes often doe ; 21ie, If
upon a just warre the Lord should deliver them
into our hands, wee might easily have men, woe-
men, & children enough to exchange for Moores,
which wilbe more gaynefull pilladge for us than
wee conceive, for I doe not see how wee can thrive
untill wee gett into a stock of slaves sufficient
to doe all our buisenes, for our chiklrens children
will hardly see this great Continent filled with peo-
ple, soe that our servants will still desire freedome
to plant for them selves, & not stay but for verie
great wages. And I suppose you know verie well

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 43

how wee shall maynteyne 20 Moores cheaper than
one Englishe servant." The doubt whether it be
not sin in us longer to tolerate their devil-worship,
considering how much need we have of them as
merchandise, is delicious. The way in which Hugh
Peter grades the sharp descent from the apostolic to
the practical with an et cetera, in the following ex-
tract, has the same charm : " Sir, Mr. Endecot &
myself salute you in the Lord Jesus &c. Wee
have heard of a dividence of women & children in
the bay & would bee glad of a share viz : a young
woman or girle & a boy if you thinke good." Peter
seems to have got what he asked for, and to have
been worse off than before ; for we find him writ-
ing two years later : " My wife desires my daughter
to send to Hanna that was her mayd, now at
Charltowne, to know if shee would dwell with us,
for truly wee are so destitute (having now but an
Indian) that wee know not what to doe." Let any
housewife of our day, who does not find the Keltic
element in domestic life so refreshing as to Mr.
Arnold in literature, imagine a household with one
wild Pequot woman, communicated with by signs,
for its maid of all work, and take courage. Those
were serious times indeed, when your cook might
give warning by taking your scalp, or chignon, as
the case might be, and making off with it into the
woods. The fewness and dearness of servants made
it necessary to call in temporary assistance for ex-
traordinary occasions, and hence arose the common
use of the word help. As the great majority kept
no servants at all, and yet were liable to need them

44 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

for work to which the family did not suffice, as, for
instance, in harvest, the use of the word was natu-
rally extended to all kinds of service. That it did
not have its origin in any false shame at the condi-
tion itself, induced by democratic habits, is plain
from the fact that it came into use while the word
servant had a much wider application than now,
and certainly implied no social stigma. Downing
and Hooke, each at different times, one of them so
late as 1667, wished to place a son as " servant "
with one of the Winthrops. Roger Williams writes
of his daughter, that " she desires to spend some
time in service & liked much Mrs. Brenton, who
wanted." This was, no doubt, in order to be well
drilled in housekeeping, an example which might
be followed still to advantage. John Tinker, him-
self the " servant " or steward of the second Win-
throp, makes use of help in both the senses we have
mentioned, and shows the transition of the word
from its restricted to its more general application.
" We have fallen a pretty deal of timber & drawn
some by Goodman Rogers's team, but unless your
worship have a good team of your own & a man to
go with them, I shall be much distracted for help
... & when our business is most in haste we shall
be most to seek." Again, writing at harvest, as
appears both by the date and by an elaborate pun,
— " I received the sithes you sent but in that there
came not also yourself, it maketh me to sigth" —
he says : " Hdp is scarce and hard to get, difficult
to please, uncertain, &c. Means runneth out &
wages on & I cannot make choice of my

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 45

It may be some consolation to know that the
complaint of a decline in the quality of servants is
no modern thing. Shakespeare makes Orlando say
to Adam :

" 0, good old man, how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for meed !
Thou art not of the fashion of these times,
When none will sweat but for promotion."

When the faithful old servant is brought upon the
stage, we may be sure he was getting rare. A cen-
tury later, we have explicit testimony that things
were as bad in this respect as they are now. Don
Manuel Gonzales, who travelled in England in
1730, says of London servants : " As to common
menial servants, they have great wages, are well
kept and cloathed, but are notwithstanding the
plague of almost every house in town. They form
themselves into societies or rather confederacies,
contributing to the maintenance of each other when

O

out of place, and if any of them cannot manage the
family where they are entertained, as they please,
immediately they give notice they will be gone.
There is no speaking to them, they are above cor-
rection, and if a master should attempt it, he may
expect to be handsomely drubbed by the creature
he feeds and harbors, or perhaps an action brought
against him for it. It is become a common saying,
If my servant berit a thief, if he be but honest, I
can bear with other things. And indeed it is very
rare in London to meet with an honest servant." l

1 Collection of Voyages, &c., from the Library of the Earl of
Oxford, vol. i. p. 151.

46 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

Southey writes to his daughter Edith, in 1824,
" All the maids eloped because I had turned a man
out of the kitchen at eleven o'clock on the preced-
ing night." Nay, Hugh Rhodes, in his Boke of
Nurture (1577), speaks of servants " ofte fleeting,"
i. e. leaving one master for another.

One of the most curious things revealed to us
in these volumes is the fact that John Winthrop,
Jr., was seeking the philosopher's stone, that uni-
versal elixir which could transmute all things to
its own substance. This is plain from the cor-
respondence of Edward Howes. Howes goes to a
certain doctor, professedly to consult him about
the method of making a cement for earthen ves-
sels, no doubt crucibles. His account of him is
amusing, and reminds one of Ben Jonson's Sub-
tle, This was one of the many quacks who gulled
men during that twilight through which alchemy
was passing into chemistry. "This Dr, for a
Dr he is, brags that if he have but the hint or
notice of any useful thing not yet invented, he
will undertake to find it out, except some few
which he hath vowed not to meddle with as vi-
trum maliabile, perpet. motus, via proximo, ad In-
dos & lapis pMlosi : all, or anything else he will
undertake, but for his private gain, to make a mono-
poly thereof & to sell the use or knowledge thereof
at too high rates." This breed of pedlers in sci-
ence is not yet extinct. The exceptions made by
the Doctor show a becoming modesty. Again :
" I have been 2 or 3 times with the Dr & can
get but small satisfaction about your queries. . . .

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 47

Yet I must confess he seemed very free to me,
only in the main he was mystical. This he said,
that when the will of God is you shall know what
you desire, it will come with such a light that it
will make a harmony among all your authors, caus-
ing them sweetly to agree, & put you forever out
of doubt & question." In another letter : " I
cannot discover into terrain incognitam, but I have
had a ken of it showed unto me. The way to it
is, for the most part, horrible & fearful, the dan-
gers none worse, to them that are destinati flii :
sometimes I am travelling that way. ... I think
I have spoken with some that have been there."

Howes writes very cautiously: "Dear friend,
I desire with all my heart that I might write
plainer to you, but in discovering the mystery, I
may diminish its majesty & give occasion to the
profane to abuse it, if it should fall into unworthy
hands." By and by he begins to think his first
doctor a humbug, but he finds a better. Howes was
evidently a man of imaginative temper, fit to be
captivated by the alchemistic theory of the unity
of composition in nature, which was so attractive
to Goethe. Perhaps the great poet was himself
led to it by his Rosicrucian studies when writing
the first part of Faust. Howes tells his friend
that "there is all good to be found in unity, &
all evil in duality & multiplicity. Phoenix ilia
admiranda sola semper existit, therefore while a
man & she is two, he shall never see her," — a
truth of very wide application, and too often lost
sight of or never seen at all. " The Arabian Phi-

48 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

los. I writ to you of, he was styled among us
Dr. Lyon, the best of all the Rosicrucians 1 that
ever I met withal, far beyond Dr. Ewer : they
that are of his strain are knowing men ; they
pretend [i. e. claim] to live in free light, they
honor God & do good to the people among whom
they live, & I conceive you are in the right that
they had their learning from Arabia."

Howes is a very interesting person, a mystic of
the purest kind, and that while learning to be
an attorney with Emanuel Downing. How little
that perfunctory person dreamed of what was going
on under his nose, — as little as of the spiritual
wonders that lay beyond the tip of it! Howes
was a Swedenborgian before Swedenborg. Take
this, for example : " But to our sympathetical
business whereby we may communicate our minds
one to another though the diameter of the earth
interpose. Diana non est centrum omnium. I
would have you so good a geometrician as to
know your own centre. Did you ever yet mea-
sure your everlasting self, the length of your life,
the breadth of your love, the depth of your wis-
dom & the height of your light? Let Truth be
your centre, & you may do it, otherways not. I
could wish you would now begin to leave off be-
ing altogether an outward man ; this is but casa
Regentis ; the Ruler can draw you straight lines
from your centre to the confines of an infinite cir-
cumference, by which you may pass from any part
of the circumference to another without obstacle

1 Howes writes the word symbolically.

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 49

of earth or secation of lines, if you observe &
keep but one & the true & only centre, to pass
by it, from it, & to it. Methinks I now see you
intus el extra & talk ^to you, but you mind me not
because you are from home, you are not within,
you look as if you were careless of yourself ; your
hand & your voice differ ; 't is my friend's hand,
I know it well ; but the voice is your enemy's.
O, my friend, if you love me, get you home, get
you in ! You have a friend as well as an enemy.
Know them by their voices. The one is still
driving or enticing you out ; the other would have
you stay within. Be within and keep within, & all
that are within & keep within shall you see know
& communicate with to the full, & shall not need
to strain your outward senses to see & hear that
which is like themselves uncertain & too-too often
false, but, abiding forever within, in the centre
of Truth, from thence you may behold & under-
stand the innumerable divers emanations within
the circumference, & still within ; for without are
falsities, lies, untruths, dogs &c." Howes was
tolerant also, not from want of faith, but from
depth of it. " The relation of your fight with the
Indians I have read in print, but of the fight
among yourselves, bellum linguarum the strife of
tongues, I have heard much, but little to the pur-
pose. I wonder your people, that pretend to know
so much, doe not know that love is the fulfilling
of the law, & that against love there is no law."
Howes forgot that what might cause only a rip-
ple in London might overwhelm the tiny Colony

50 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

in Boston. Two years later, he writes more phi-
losophically, and perhaps with a gentle irony, con-
cerning " two monstrous births & a general earth-
quake." He hints that the people of the Bay
might perhaps as well take these signs to them-
selves as lay them at the door of Mrs. Hutchin-
son and what not. " Where is there such another
people then [as] in New England, that labors
might & main to have Christ formed in them,
yet would give or appoint him his shape & clothe
him too ? It cannot be denied that we have con-
ceived many monstrous imaginations of Christ
Jesus : the one imagination says, .Z/o, here he is ;
the other says, .Z/o, there he is ; multiplicity of con-
ceptions, but is there any one true shape of Him ?
And if one of many produce a shape, 't is not
the shape of the Son of God, but an ugly horrid
metamorphosis. Neither is it a living shape, but
a dead one, yet a crow thinks her own bird the
fairest, & most prefer their own wisdom before
God's, Antichrist before Christ." Howes had cer-
tainly arrived at that " centre " of which he speaks
and was before his time, as a man of specula-
tion, never a man of action, may sometimes be.
He was fitter for Plotinus's colony than Win-
throp's. He never came to New England, yet there
was always a leaven of his style of thinkers here.

Howes was the true adept, seeking what spir-
itual ore there might be among the dross of the
hermetic philosophy. What he says sincerely and
inwardly was the cant of those outward professors
of the doctrine who were content to dwell in the

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 51

material part of it forever. In Jonathan Brewster,
we have a specimen of these Wagners. Is it not
curious, that there should have been a balneum
Marice at New London two hundred years ago ?
that la recherche de VAbsolu should have been go-
ing on there in a log-hut, under constant fear that
the Indians would put out, not merely the flame of
one little life, but, far worse, the fire of our fur-
nace, and so rob the world of this divine secret,
just on the point of revealing itself ? Alas ! poor
Brewster's secret was one that many have striven
after before and since, who did not call themselves
alchemists, — the secret of getting gold without
earning it, — a chase that brings some men to a
four-in-hand on Shoddy Avenue, and some to the
penitentiary, in both cases advertising its utter
vanity. Brewster is a capital specimen of his class,
who are better than the average, because they do
mix a little imagination with their sordidness, and
who have also their representatives among us, in
those who expect the Jennings and other ideal es-
tates in England. If Hawthorne had but known
of him ! And yet how perfectly did his genius di-
vine that ideal element in our early New England
life, conceiving what must have been without ask-
ing proof of what actually was !

An extract or two will sufficiently exhibit Brews-
ter in his lunes. Sending back some alchemistic
book to Winthrop, he tells him that if his name be
kept secret, " I will write as clear a light, as far as
I dare to, in finding the first ingredience. . . . The
first figure in Flamonell doth plainly resemble the

52 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

first ingredience, what it is, & from whence it
comes, & how gotten, as there you may plainly see
set forth by 2 resemblances held in a man's hand ;
for the confections there named is a delusion, for
they are but the operations of the work after some
time set, as the scum of the Red Sea, which is the
Virgin's Milk upon the top of the vessel, white.
Red Sea is the sun & moon calcinated & brought
& reduced into water mineral which in some time,
& most of the whole time, is red. 2ndly, the fat
of mercurial wind, that is the fat or quintessence
of sun & moon, earth & water, drawn out from
them both, & flies aloft & [is] bore up by the
operation of our mercury, that is our fire which is
our air or wind." This is as satisfactory as Lepi-
dus's account of the generation of the crocodile :
" Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud
by the operation of your sun : so is your croco-
dile." After describing the three kinds of fire,
that of the lamp, that of ashes, and that against
nature, which last " is the fire of fire, that is the
secret fire drawn up, being the quintessence of the
sun & moon, with the other mercurial water joined
with & together, which is fire elemental," he tells
us that " these fires are & doth contain the whole
mystery of the work." The reader, perhaps, thinks
that he has nothing to do but forthwith to turn all
the lead he can lay his hands on into gold. But
no : " If you had the first ingredience & the pro-
portion of each, yet all were nothing if you had
not the- certain times & seasons of the planets &
signs, when to give more or less of this fire, namely

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 53

a hot & dry, a cold & moist fire which you must
use in the mercurial water before it comes to black
& after into white & then red, which is only done
by these fires, which when you practise you will
easily see & perceive, that you shall stand amazed,
& admire at the great & admirable wisdom of God,
that can produce such a wonderful, efficacious,
powerful thing as this is to convert all metallic
bodies to its own nature, which may be well called
a first essence. I say by such weak simple means
of so little value & so little & easy labor & skill,
that I may say with Artephus, 200 page, it is of
a worke so easy & short, fitter for women & young
children than sage & grave men. ... I thank the
Lord, I understand the matter perfectly in the said
book, yet I could desire to have it again 12 months
hence, for about that time I shall have occasion to
peruse, whenas I come to the second working which
is most difficult, which will be some three or [4]
months before the perfect white, & afterwards,
as Artephus saith, I may burn my books, for he
saith it is one regiment as well for the red as for
the white. The Lord in mercy give me life to see
the end of it ! " — an exclamation I more than
once made in the course of some of Brewster's
periods.

Again, under pledge of profound secrecy, he
sends Winthrop a manuscript, which he may com-
municate to the owner of the volume formerly lent,
because " it gave me such light in the second work
as I should not readily have found out by study,
also & especially how to work the elixir fit for

54 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO
medicine & healing all maladies which is clean

O

another way of working than we held formerly.
Also a light given how to dissolve any hard sub-
stance into the elixir, which is also another work.
And many other things which in Ribley [Ripley?]
I could not find out. More works of the same I
would gladly see ... for, Sir, so it is that any
book of this subject, I can understand it, though
never so darkly written, having both knowledge &
experience of the world,1 that now easily I may
understand their envious carriages to hide it. ...
You may marvel why I should give any light to
others in this thing before I have perfected my
own. This know, that my work being true thus
far by all their writings, it cannot fail . . . for if
&c &c you cannot miss if you would, except you
break your glass." He confesses he is mistaken as
to the time required, which he now, as well as I
can make out, reckons at about ten years. " I
fear I shall not live to see it finished, in regard
partly of the Indians, who, I fear, will raise wars,
as also I have a conceit that God sees me not wor-
thy of such a blessing, by reason of my manifold
miscarriages." Therefore he " will shortly write
all the whole work in few words plainly which may
be done in 20 lines from the first to the last & seal
it up in a little box & subscribe it to yourself . . .
& will so write it that neither wife nor children
shall know thereof." If Winthrop should succeed
in bringing the work to perfection, Brewster begs
him to remember his wife and children. " I mean

1 " World " here should clearly be " work."

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 55

if this my work should miscarry by wars of the In-
dians, for I may not remove it till it be perfected,
otherwise I should so unsettle the body by remov-
ing sun & moon out of their settled places, that
there would then be no other after working." Once
more he inculcates secrecy, and for a most comical
reason : " For it is such a secret as is not fit for
every one either for secrecy or for parts to use it,
as God's secret for his glory, to do good therewith,
or else they may do a great deal of hurt, spending
& employing it to satisfy sinful lusts. Therefore,
I in treat you, sir, spare to use my name, & let my
letters I send either be safely kept or burned that
I write about it, for indeed, sir, I am more than be-
fore sensible of the evil effects that will arise by
the publishing of it. I should never be at quiet,
neither at home nor abroad, for one or other that
would be enquiring & seeking after knowledge
thereof, that I should be tired out & forced to
leave the place : nay, it would be blazed abroad
into Europe." How much more comic is nature
than any comedy ! Mutato nomine de te. Take
heart, ambitious youth, the sun and moon will be
no more disconcerted by any effort of yours than
by the pots and pans of Jonathan Brewster. It is
a curious proof of the duality so common (yet so
often overlooked) in human character, that Brews-
ter was all this while manager of the Plymouth
trading-post, near what is now New London. The
only professors of the transmutation of metals
who still impose on mankind are to be found in
what is styled the critical department of literature.

56 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

Their materia prima, or universal solvent, serves
equally for the lead of one friend or the brass of
another.

In a letter of Sir Kenelm Digby to J. Win-
throp, Jr., we find some odd prescriptions. " For
all sorts of agues, I have of late tried the follow-
ing magnetical experiment with infallible success.
Pare the patient's nails when the fit is coming on,
& put the parings into a little bag of fine linen or
sarsenet, & tie that about a live eel's neck in a tub
of water. The eel will die & the patient will re-
cover. And if a dog or hog eat that eel, they will
also die."

" The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died ! "

" I have known one that cured all deliriums &
frenzies whatsoever, & at once taking, with an
elixir made of dew, nothing but dew purified &
nipped up in a glass & digested 15 months till all
of it was become a gray powder, not one drop of
humidity remaining. This I know to be true, &
that first it was as black as ink, then green, then
gray, & at 22 months' end it was as white & lus-
trous as any oriental pearl. But it cured manias at
15 months' end." Poor Brewster would have been
the better for a dose of it, as well as some in our
day, who expect to cure men of being men by act
of Congress. In the same letter Digby boasts of
having made known the properties of quinquina,
and also of the sympathetic powder, with which
latter he wrought a " famous cure " of pleasant
James Howell, author of the " Letters." I do not

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 57

recollect that Howell anywhere alludes to it. In
the same letter, Digby speaks of the books he had
sent to Harvard College, and promises to send
more. In all Paris he cannot find a copy of Blaise
Viginere DCS Chiffres. " I had it in my library
in England, but at the plundering of my house I
lost it with many other good books. I have laid
out in all places for it." The words we have un-
derscored would be called a Yankeeism now. The
house was Gatehurst, a fine Elizabethan dwelling,
still, or lately, standing. Digby made his peace
with Cromwell, and professes his readiness to spend
his blood for him. He kept well with both sides,
and we are not surprised to find Hooke saying that
he hears no good of him from any.

The early colonists found it needful to bring
over a few trained soldiers, both as drillmasters
and engineers. Underhill, Patrick, and Gardner
had served in the Low Countries, probably also
Mason. As Paris has been said to be not precisely
the place for a deacon, so the camp of the Prince
of Orange could hardly have been the best train-
ing-school for Puritans in practice, however it may
have been for masters of casuistic theology. The
position of these rough warriors among a people
like those of the first emigration must have been
a droll one. That of Captain Underhill certainly
was. In all our early history, there is no figure
so comic. Full of the pedantry of his profession
and fond of noble phrases, he is a kind of cross be-
tween Dugald Dalgetty and Ancient Pistol, with a
slight relish of the miles gloriosus. Unclerhill had

58 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

taken side with Mr. Wheelwright in his heretical
opinions, and there is every reason why he should
have maintained, with all the ardor of personal in-
terest, the efficiency of a covenant of grace with-
out reference to the works of the subject of it.
Coming back from a visit to England in 1638, he
" was questioned for some speeches uttered by him
in the ship, viz : that they at Boston were zealous
as the scribes and pharisees were and as Paul was
before his conversion, which he denying, they were
proved to his face by a sober woman whom he had
seduced in the ship and drawn to his opinion ; but
she was afterwards better informed in the truth.
Among other passages, he told her how he came
by his assurance, saying that, having long lain un-
der a spirit of bondage, and continued in a legal
way near five years, he could get no assurance, till
at length, as he was taking a pipe of the good crea-
ture tobacco, the spirit fell home upon his heart, an
absolute promise of free grace, with such assurance
and joy, as he never doubted since of his good es-
tate, neither should he, whatsoever sin he should
fall into, — a good preparative for such motions as
he familiarly used to make to some of that sex.
. . . The next day he was called again and ban-
ished. The Lord's day after, he made a speech in
the assembly, showing that as the Lord was pleased
to convert Paul as he was persecuting &c, so he
might manifest himself to him as he was making
moderate use of the good creature called tobacco."
A week later " he was privately dealt with upon
suspicion of incontinency . . . but his excuse was

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 59

that the woman was in great trouble of mind, and
some temptations, and that he resorted to her to
comfort her." He went to the Eastward, and, hav-
ing run himself out there, thought it best to come
back to Boston and reinstate himself by eating his
leek. " He came in his worst clothes (being ac-
customed to take great pride in his bravery and
neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled
close to his eyes, and, standing upon a form, he
did, with many deep sighs and abundance of tears,
lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his hypoc-
risy &c. He spake well, save that his blubbering
&c. interrupted him." We hope he was a sincere
penitent, but men of his complexion are apt to be
pleased with such a tragi-comedy of self-abasement,
if only they can be chief actors and conspicuous
enough therein. In the correspondence before us
Underhill appears in full turkey-cock proportions.
Not having been advanced according to his own
opinion of his merits, he writes to Governor Win-
throp, with an oblique threat that must have
amused him somewhat : " I profess, sir, till I know
the cause, I shall not be satisfied, but I hope God
will subdue me to his will ; yet this I say that such
handling of officers in foreign parts hath so far sub-
verted some of them as to cause them turn public
rebels against their state & kingdom, which God
forbid should ever be found once so much as to ap-
pear in my breast." Why, then the world 's mine
oyster, which I with sword will open ! Next we
hear him on a point of military discipline at Salem.
" It is this : how they have of their own appoint-

60 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

ment made them a captain, lieutenant & ensign, &
after such a manner as was never heard of in any
school of war, nor in no kingdom under heaven.
. . . For my part, if there should not be a refor-
mation in this disordered practise, I would not ac-
knowledge such officers. If officers should be of
no better esteem than for constables to place them,
& martial discipline to proceed disorderly, I would
rather lay down my command than to shame so
noble a prince from whom we came." Again :
" Whereas it is somewhat questionable whether the
three months I was absent, as well in the service of
the country as of other particular persons, my re-
quest therefore is that this honored Court would be
pleased to decide this controversy, myself alleging
it to be the custom of Nations that, if a Com-
mander be lent to another State, by that State to
whom he is a servant, both his place & means is
not detained from him, so long as he doth not re-
fuse the call of his own State to which he is a ser-
vant, in case they shall call him home." Then
bringing up again his " ancient suit " for a grant
of land, he throws in a neat touch of piety : " & if
the honored Court shall vouchsafe to make some
addition, that which hath not been deserved, by the
same power of God, may be in due season." In a
postscript, he gives a fine philosophical reason for
this desired addition which will go to the hearts
of many in these days of high prices and wasteful
taxation. " The time was when a little went far ;
then much was not known nor desired ; the reason
of the difference lieth only in the error of judg-

' NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 61

ment, for nature requires no more to uphold it now
than when it was satisfied with less." The valiant
Captain interprets the law of nations, as sovereign
powers are wont to do, to suit his advantage in the
special case. We find a parallel case in a letter of
Bryan Rosseter to John Winthrop, Jr., pleading
for a remission of taxes. " The lawes of nations
exempt allowed phisitians from personall services,
& their estates from rates &• assessments." In
the Declaration of the town of Southampton on
Long Island (1673), the dignity of constable is val-
ued at a juster rate than Underbill was inclined to
put upon it. The Dutch, it seems, demanded of
them " to deliver up to them the badge of Civil &
Military power ; namely, the Constable's staffe &
the Colonel's." Mayor Munroe of New Orleans
did not more effectually magnify his office when he
surrendered the city to General Butler.

Underbill's style is always of the finest. His
spelling was under the purest covenant of grace.
I must give a single specimen of it from a letter
whose high moral tone is all the more diverting
that it was written while he was under excommuni-
cation for the sin which he afterwards confessed.
It is addressed to Winthrop and Dudley. " Hon-
nored in the Lord. Youer silenc one more admirse
me. I youse chrischan playnnes. I know you love
it. Silenc can not reduce the hart of youer loveg
brother : I would the right chous would smite me,
espeschali youer slfe & the honnored Depoti to
whom I also dereckt this letter together with youer
honnored slfe. Jesos Cbrist did wayt ; & God his

62 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

Father did dig and telfe bout the barren figtre be-
fore he would cast it of : I would to God you would
tender my soule so as to youse playnnes with me."
(As if anything could be plainer than excommuni-
cation and banishment!) "I wrot to you both,
but now [no] answer ; & here I am dayli abused
by malischous tongse : John Baker I here hath rot
to the honnored depoti how as I was dronck & like
to be cild, & both falc, upon okachon I delt with
Wannerton for intrushon, & findding them resolutli
bent to rout out all gud a mong us & advanc there
superstischous waye, & by boystrous words inde-
ferd to fritten men to acomplish his end, & he
abusing me to my face, dru upon him with intent
to corb his insolent and dasterdli sperrite, but now
[no] danger of my life, although it might hafe bin
just with God to hafe giffen me in the hanse of
youer enemise & mine, for they hat the wayse of
the Lord & them that profes them, & therfore
layes trapes to cachte the pore into there deboyst
corses, as ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch
Warden cairn up to us with intent to mak some of
ourse drone, as is sospeckted, but the Lord soferd
him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by
the hielse this too month. . . . My hombel re-
quest is that you will be charitabel of me. . . .
Let justies and merci be goyned. . . . You may
plese to soggest youer will to this barrer, you will
find him tracktabel." The concluding phrase
seems admirably chosen, when we consider the
means of making people " tractable " which the
magistrates of the Bay had in their hands, and

NE W ENGLA ND T WO CENTURIES AGO 63

were not slow to exercise, as Underbill himself had
experienced.

I cannot deny myself the pleasure of giving one
more specimen of the Captain's "grand-delin-
quent " style, as I once heard such fine writing
called by a person who little dreamed what a hit
he had made. So far as I have observed, our pub-
lic defaulters, and others who have nothing to say
for themselves, always rise in style as they sink in
self-respect. He is speaking of one Scott, who
had laid claim to certain lands, and had been
called on to show his title. " If he break the co-
mand of the Asembli & bring not in the counterfit
portreture of the King imprest in yello waxe, anext
to his false perpetuiti of 20 mile square, where by
he did chet the Town of Brouckhaven, he is to in-
duer the sentance of the Court of Asisies." Pistol
would have been charmed with that splendid am-
plification of the Great Seal. As examples of
Captain Underbill's adroitness in phonetic spelling,
I offer fafarabel and poseschonse, and reluctantly
leave him.

Another very entertaining fellow for those who
are willing to work through a pretty thick husk of
tiresomeness for a genuine kernel of humor under-
neath is Coddington. The elder Winthrop endured
many trials, but I doubt if any were sharper than
those which his son had to undergo in the corre-
spondence of this excellently tiresome man. Tantce
molix Romanam condere gentem 1 The dulness of
Coddington, always that of no ordinary man, be-
came irritable and aggressive after being stung by

61 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

the gadfly of Quakerism. Running1 counter to its
proper nature, it made him morbidly uneasy. Al-
ready an Anabaptist, his brain does not seem to
have been large enough to lodge two maggots at
once with any comfort to himself. Fancy John
Winthrop, Jr., with all the affairs of the Connec-
ticut Colony on his back, expected to prescribe
alike for the spiritual and bodily ailments of all
the hypochondriacs in his government, and with
Philip's war impending, — fancy him exposed also
to perpetual trials like this : " G. F. [George Fox]
hath sent thee a book of his by Jere : Bull, & two
more now which thou mayest communicate to thy
Council & officers. Also I remember before thy
last being in England, I sent thee a book written
by Francis Howgall against persecution, by Joseph
Nicallson which book thou lovingly accepted and
communicated to the Commissioners of the United
Colonies (as I desired) also J. N. thou entertained
with a loving respect which encouraged me " (fatal
hospitality !) — " As a token of that ancient love
that for this 42 years I have had for thee, I have
sent thee three Manuscripts, one of 5 queries, other
is of 15, about the love of Jesus &c. The 3d is
why we cannot come to the worship which was not
set up by Christ Jesus, which I desire thee to com-
municate to the priests to answer in thy jurisdic-
tion, the Massachusetts, New Plymouth, or else-
where, & send their answer in writing to me. Also
two printed papers to set up in thy house. It 's
reported in Barbadoes that thy brother Sammuell
shall be sent Governour to Antego." What a

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 65

mere dust of sugar in the last sentence for such a
portentous pill ! In his next letter he has other
writings of G. F., " not yet copied, which if thou
desireth, when I hear from thee, I may convey
them unto thee. Also sence G. Ffox departure
William Edmondson is arrived at this Island, who
having given out a paper to all in authority, which,
my wife having copied, I have here inclosed pre-
sented thee therewith." Books and manuscripts
- were not all. Coddington was also glad to bestow
on Winthrop any wandering tediousness in the
flesh that came to hand. " I now understand of
John Stubbs freedom to visit thee (with the said
Jo : B.) he is a larned man, as witness the battle
door 1 on 35 languages," — a terrible man this,
capable of inflicting himself on three dozen differ-
ent kindreds of men. It will be observed that
Coddington, with his " thou desireths," is not quite
so well up in the grammar of his thee-and-thouing
as my Lord Coke. Indeed, it is rather pleasant
to see that in his alarm about " the enemy," in
1673, he backslides into the second person plural.
If Winthrop ever looked over his father's corre-
spondence, he would have read in a letter of Henry
Jacie the following dreadful example of retribu-
tion : " The last news we heard was that the Bores
in Bavaria slew about three hundred of the Swe-
dish forces & took about 200 prisoners, of which
they put out the eyes of some & cut out the tonges
of others & so sent them to the King of Sweden,

1 The title-page of which our learned Marsh has cited for the
etymology of the word.

66 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

which caused him to lament bytterly for an hour.
Then he sent an army & destroyed those Bores,
about 200 or 300 of their towns. Thus we hear."
Think of that, Master Coddington ! Could the
sinful heart of man always suppress the wish that
a Gustavus might arise to do judgment on the
Bores of Rhode Island ? The unkindest part of it
was that, on Coddington's own statement, Win-
throp had never persecuted the Quakers, and had
even endeavored to save Robinson and Stevenson
in 1659.

Speaking of the execution of these two martyrs
to the bee in their bonnets, John Davenport gives
us a capital example of the way in which Divine
" judgments " may be made to work both ways at
the pleasure of the interpreter. As the crowd was
going home from the hanging, a drawbridge gave
way, and some lives were lost. The Quakers, of
course, made the most of this lesson to the ponti-
fices in the bearing power of timber, claiming it
as a proof of God's wrath against the persecutors.
This was rather hard, since none of the magistrates
perished, and the popular feeling was strongly in
favor of the victims of their severity. But Daven-
port gallantly captures these Quaker guns, and
turns them against the enemy himself. " Sir, the
hurt that befell so many, by their own rashness, at
the Draw Bridge in Boston, being on the day that
the Quakers were executed, was not without God's
special providence in judgment & wrath, I fear,
against the Quakers & their abettors, who will be
much hardened thereby." This is admirable, espe-

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 67

ciallyas his parenthesis about "their own rashness"
assumes that the whole thing was owing to natural
causes. The pity for the Quakers, too, implied in
the " I fear," is a nice touch. It is always noticeable
how much more liberal those who deal in God's
command without his power are of his wrath than
of his mercy. But we should never understand the
Puritans if we did not bear in mind that they were
still prisoners in that religion of Fear which casts
out Love. The nearness of God was oftener a
terror than a comfort to them. Yet perhaps in
them was the last apparition of Faith as a wonder-
worker in human affairs. Take away from them
what you will, you cannot deny them tliat, and its
constant presence made them great in a way and
measure of which this generation, it is to be feared,
can have but a very inadequate conception. If
men nowadays find their tone antipathetic, it
would be modest at least to consider whether the
fault be wholly theirs, — whether it was they who
lacked, or we who have lost. Whether they were
right or wrong in their dealing with the Quakers is
not a question to be decided glibly after two cen-
turies' struggle toward a conception of toleration
very imperfect even yet, perhaps impossible to hu-
man nature. If they did not choose what seems to
us the wisest way of keeping the Devil out of their
household, they certainly had a very honest will to
keep him out, which we might emulate with advan-
tage. However it be in other cases, historic tol-
eration must include intolerance among things to
be tolerated.

68 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

The false notion which the first settlers had of
the savages by whom the continent was beflead
rather than inhabited, arose in part from what they
had heard of Mexico and Peru, in part from the
splendid exaggerations of the early travellers, who
could give their readers an El Dorado at the cheap
cost of a good lie. Hence the kings, dukes, and
earls who were so plenty among the red men.
Pride of descent takes many odd shapes, none
odder than when it hugs itself in an ancestry of
filthy barbarians, who daubed themselves for orna-
ment with a mixture of bear's-grease and soot, or
colored clay, and were called emperors by Captain
John Smith and his compeers. The droll contrast
between this imaginary royalty and the squalid
reality is nowhere exposed with more ludicrous un-
consciousness than in the following passage of a
letter from Fitz-John Winthrop to his father, No-
vember, 1674 : " The bearer hereof, Mr. Danyell,
one of the Royal Indian blood . . . does desire me
to give an account to yourself of the late unhappy
accident which has happened to him. A little time
since, a careless girl playing with fire at the door,
it immediately took hold of the mats, & in an in-
stant consumed it to ashes, with all the common as
well as his lady's chamber furniture, & his own
wardrobe & armory, Indian plate, & money to the
value (as is credibly reported in his estimation) of
more than an hundred pounds Indian. . . . The
Indians have handsomely already built him a good
house & brought him in several necessaries for his
present supply, but that which takes deepest mel-

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 69

ancholy impression upon him is the loss of an ex-
cellent Masathuset cloth cloak & hat, which was
only seen upon holy days & their general sessions.
His journey aAhis time is only to intreat your
favor & the gentlemen there for a kind relief in
his necessity, having no kind of garment but a
short jerkin which was charitably given him by one
of his Common-Councilmen. He principally aims
at a cloak & hat."

" King Stephen was a worthy peer,
His breeches cost him half a crown."

But it will be observed that there is no allusion to
any such article of dress in the costume of this
prince of Pequot. Some light is perhaps thrown
on this deficiency by a line or two in one of Wil-
liams's letters, where he says: "I have long had
scruples of selling the Natives ought but what may
tend or bring to civilizing: I therefore neither
brought nor shall sell them loose coats nor breeches."
Precisely the opposite course was deemed effectual
with the Highland Scotch, between whom and our
Indians there was a very close analogy. They
were compelled by law to adopt the usages of
Gallia Braccata, and sansculottism made a penal
offence. What impediment to civilization Williams
had discovered in the offending garment it is hard
to say. It is a question for Herr Teufelsdrock.
Royalty, at any rate, in our day, is dependent for
much of its success on the tailor. Williams's op-
portunities of studying the Indian character were
perhaps greater than those of any other man of his
time. He was always an advocate for justice to*

70 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

ward them. But he seems to have had no better
opinion of them than Mr. Parkman,1 calling them
shortly and sharply, " wolves endowed with men's
brains." The same change of fe^feig has followed
the same causes in their case as in that of the
Highlanders, — they have become romantic in pro-
portion as they ceased to be dangerous.

As exhibitions of the writer's character, no let-
ters in the collection have interested me more than
those of John Tinker, who for many years was a
kind of steward for John Winthrop and his son.
They show him to have been a thoroughly faithful,
grateful, and unselfish servant. He does not seem
to have prospered except in winning respect, for
when he died his funeral charges were paid by the
public. We learn from one of his letters that
John Winthrop, Jr., had a negro (presumably a
slave) at Paquanet, for he says that a mad cow
there " had almost spoiled the neger & made him
ferfull to tend the rest of the cattell." That such
slaves must have been rare, however, is plain from
his constant complaints about the difficulty of pro-
curing "help," some of which we have already
quoted. His spelling of the word " ferfull " shows
that the New England pronunciation of that word
had been brought from the old country. He also
uses the word " creatures " for kine, and the like,
precisely as our farmers do now. There is one
very comical passage in a letter of the 2d of
August, 1660, where he says : " There hath been a
motion by some, the chief of the town, (New Lon-

1 In his Jesuits in North America.

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 71

don) for my keeping an ordinary, or rather under
the notion of a tavern, which, though it suits not
with my genius, yet am almost persuaded to accept
for some good grounds." Tinker's modesty is
most creditable to him, and we wish it were more
common now. No people on the face of the earth
suffer so much as we from impostors who keep in-
conveniences, "under the notion of a tavern,"
without any call of natural genius thereto; none
endure with such unexemplary patience the superb
indifference of innkeepers, and the condescending
inattention of their gentlemanly deputies. We are
the thralls of our railroads and hotels, and we de-
serve it.

Richard Saltonstall writes to John Winthrop,
Jr., in 1636 : " The best thing that I have to beg
your thoughts for at this present is a motto or two
that Mr. Prynne hath writ upon his chamber walls
in the Tower." We copy a few phrases, chiefly for
the contrast they make with Lovelace's famous
verses to Althea. Nothing could mark more
sharply the different habits of mind in Puritan
and Cavalier. Lovelace is very charming, but
he sings

" The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of his King,"

to wit, Charles I. To him " stone walls do not a
prison make," so long as he has " freedom in his
love, and in his soul is free." Prynne's King was
of another and higher kind : " Career exdudit mun-
dum, indudit Deum. Deus est turris etiam in
turre : turris libertatis in turre angustice : Turris

72 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

quietis in turre molestice. . . . Arctari non potest
qui in ipsa Dei infinitate incarceratus spatiatur.
. . . Nil cms sentit in nervo si animus sit in
coelo : nil corpus patitur in ergastulo, si anima sit
in Christo." If Lovelace has the advantage in
fancy, Prynne has it as clearly in depth of senti-
ment. There could be little doubt which of the
parties represented by these men would have the
better if it came to a death-grapple.

There is curiously little sentiment in these vol-
umes. Most of the letters, except where some
point of doctrine is concerned, are those of shrewd,
practical men, busy about the affairs of this world,
and earnest to build their New Jerusalem on some-
thing more solid than cloud. The truth is, that
men anxious about their souls have not been by
any means the least skilful in providing for the
wants of the body. It was far less the enthusiasm
than the common sense of the Puritans which made
them what they were in politics and religion.
That a great change should be wrought in the set-
tlers by the circumstances of their position was
inevitable ; that this change should have had some
disillusion in it, that it should have weaned them
from the ideal and wonted them to the actual, was
equally so. In 1664, not much more than a gen-
eration after the settlement, Williams prophesies :
" When we that have been the eldest are rotting
(to-morrow or next day) a generation will act, I
fear, far unlike the first Winthrops and their
models of love. I fear that the common trinity of
the world (profit, preferment, pleasure) will here

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 73

be the tria omnia as in all the world beside, that
Prelacy and Papacy too will in this wilderness pre-
dominate, that god Land will be (as now it is) as
great a god with us English as god Gold was with
the Spaniards. While we are here, noble sir, let
us viriliter hoc agere, rem agere humanam, di-
vinam, Christianam, which, I believe, is all of a
most public genius," or, as we should now say, true
patriotism. If Williams means no play on the
word humanam and divinam, the order of pre-
cedence in which he marshals them is noticeable.
A generation later, what Williams had predicted
was in a great measure verified. But what made
New England Puritanism narrow was what made
Scotch Cameronianism narrow, — its being se-
cluded from tlie great movement of the nation.
Till 1660 the colony was ruled and mostly inhab-
ited by Englishmen closely connected with the
party dominant in the mother country, and with
their minds broadened by having to deal with
questions of state and European policy. After
that time they sank rapidly into provincials, nar-
row in thought, in culture, in creed. Such a pe-
dantic portent as Cotton Mather would have been
impossible in the first generation ; he was the nat-
ural growth of the third, — the manifest judgment
of God on a generation who thought Words a sav-
ing substitute for Things. Perhaps some injustice
has been done to men like the second Governor
Dudley, and it should be counted to them rather as
a merit than a fault, that they wished to bring
New England back within reach of the invigora-

74 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

ting influence of national sympathies, and to rescue
it from a tradition which had become empty for-
malism. Puritanism was dead, and its profession
had become a wearisome cant before the Revolu-
tion of 1688 gave it that vital force in politics
which it had lost in religion.

I have gleaned all I could of what is morally
picturesque or characteristic from these volumes,
but New England history has rather a gregarious
than a personal interest. Here, by inherent neces-
sity rather than design, was made the first ex-
periment in practical democracy, and accordingly
hence began that reaction of the New World upon
the Old whose result can hardly yet be estimated.
There is here no temptation to make a hero, who
shall sum up in his own individuality and carry
forward by his own will that purpose of which we
seem to catch such bewitching glances in history,
which reveals itself more clearly and constantly,
perhaps, in the annals of New England than else-
where, and which yet, at best, is but tentative,
doubtful of itself, turned this way and that by
chance, made up of instinct, and modified by cir-
cumstance quite as much as it is directed by de-
liberate forethought. Such a purpose, or natural
craving, or residt of temporary influences, may be
misguided by a powerful character to his own ends,
or, if he be strongly in sympathy with it, may be
hastened toward its own fulfilment ; but there is no
such heroic element in our drama, and what is re-
markable is, that, under whatever government, de-
mocracy grew with the growth of the New England

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO 75

Colonies, and was at last potent enough to wrench
them, and the better part of the continent with
them, from the mother country. It is true that
Jefferson embodied in the Declaration of Indepen-
dence the speculative theories he had learned in
France, but the impulse to separation came from
New England ; and those theories had been long
since embodied there in the practice of the people,
if they had never been formulated in distinct prop-
ositions.

I have little sympathy with declaimers about the
Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of
grand conceptions and superhuman foresight. An
entire ship's company of Columbuses is what the
world never saw. It is not wise to form any
theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry
is apt to cram his travelling-bag, with a total disre-
gard of shape or texture. But perhaps it may be
found that the facts will only fit comfortably to-
gether on a single plan, namely, that the fathers
did have a conception (which those will call grand
who regard simplicity as a necessary element of
grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on
those two eternal bases of Faith and Work ; that
they had, indeed, no revolutionary ideas of univer-
sal liberty, but yet, what answered the purpose
quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood
of man and the fatherhood of God ; and that they
did not so much propose to make all things new,
as to develop the latent possibilities of English law
and English character, by clearing away the fences
by which the abuse of the one was gradually dis-

76 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

eommoning the other from the broad fields of natu-
ral right. They were not in advance of their age,
as it is called, for no one who is so can ever work
profitably in it ; but they were alive to the highest
and most earnest thinking of their time.

CAKLYLE i

1866

A FEELING of comical sadness is likely to come
over the mind of any middle-aged man who sets
himself to recollecting the names of different au-
thors that have been famous, and the number of
contemporary immortalities whose end he has seen
since coming to manhood. Many a light, hailed
by too careless observers as a fixed star, has proved
to be only a short-lived lantern at the tail of a news-
paper kite. The literary heaven which our youth
saw dotted thick with rival glories, we find now to
have been a stage-sky merely, artificially enkindled
from behind; and the cynical daylight which is
sure to follow all theatrical enthusiasms shows us
ragged holes where once were luminaries, sheer va-
cancy instead of lustre. Our earthly reputations,
says a great poet, are the color of grass, and the
same sun that makes the green bleaches it out
again. But next morning is not the time to criti-
cise the scene-painter's firmament, nor is it quite
fair to examine coldly a part of some general illu-
sion in the absence of that sympathetic enthusiasm,
that self -surrender of the fancy, which made it what
it was. It would not be safe for all neglected au-

1 Apropos of his Frederick the Great.

78 CARLYLE

thors to comfort themselves in Wordsworth's fash-
ion, inferring genius in an inverse proportion to
public favor, and a high and solitary merit from
the world's indifference. On the contrary, it would
be more just to argue from popularity a certain
amount of real value, though it may not be of that
permanent quality which insures enduring fame.
The contemporary world and Wordsworth were
both half right. He undoubtedly owned and
worked the richest vein of his period ; but he of-
fered to his contemporaries a heap of gold-bearing
quartz where the baser mineral made the greater
show, and the purchaser must do his own crushing
and smelting, with no guaranty but the bare word
of the miner. It was not enough that certain
bolder adventurers should now and then show a
nugget in proof of the success of their venture.
The gold of the poet must be refined, moulded,
stamped with the image and superscription of his
time, but with a beauty of design and finish that
are of no time. The work must surpass the mate-
rial. Wordsworth was wholly void of that shaping
imagination which is the highest criterion of a
poet.

Immediate popularity and lasting fame, then,
would seem to be the result of different qualities,
and not of mere difference in degree. It is safe to
prophesy a certain durability of recognition for any
author who gives evidence of intellectual force, in
whatever kind, above the average amount. There
are names in literary history which are only names ;
and the works associated with them, like acts of

CARLYLE 79

Congress already agreed on in debate, are read by
their titles and passed. What is it that insures
what may be called living fame, so that a book
shall be at once famous and read ? What is it that
relegates divine Cowley to that remote, uncivil
Pontus of the " British Poets," and keeps garru-
lous Pepys within the cheery circle of the evening
lamp and fire ? Originality, eloquence, sense, im-
agination, not one of them is enough by itself, but
only in some happy mixture and proportion. Im-
agination seems to possess in itself more of the an-
tiseptic property than any other single quality ;
but, without less showy and more substantial allies,
it can at best give only deathlessness, without the
perpetual youth that makes it other than dreary.
It were easy to find examples of this Tithonus im-
mortality, setting its victims apart from both gods
and men ; helpless duration, undying, to be sure,
but sapless and voiceless also, and long ago de-
serted by the fickle Hemera. And yet chance
could confer that gift on Glaucus, which love and
the consent of Zeus failed to secure for the darling
of the Dawn. Is it mere luck, then ? Luck may,
and often does, have some share in ephemeral suc-
cesses, ^,s in a gambler's winnings spent as soon
as got, but not in any lasting triumph over time.
Solid success must be based on solid qualities and
the honest culture of them.

The first element of contemporary popularity is
undoubtedly the power of entertaining. If a man
have anything to tell, the world cannot be called
upon to listen to him unless he have perfected him-

80 CARLYLE

self in the best way of telling it. People are not to
be argued into a pleasurable sensation, nor is taste
to be compelled by any syllogism, however strin-
gent. An author may make himself very popular,
however, and even justly so, by appealing to the
passion of the moment, without having anything in
him that shall outlast the public whim which he
satisfies. Churchill is a remarkable example of this.
He had a surprising extemporary vigor of mind ;
his phrase carries great weight of blow ; he un-
doubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as Cowper
says of him, in a certain rude and earth-born vigor ;
but his verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly in-
urned, of course, in the Chalmers columbarium,
and without danger of violation. His brawn and
muscle are fading traditions, while the fragile, shiv-
ering genius of Cowper is still a good life on the
books of the Critical Insurance Office. " It is not,
then, loftiness of mind that puts one by the side of
Virgil ? " cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wits' end.
Certainly not altogether that. There must be also
the great Mantuan's art; his power, not only of
being strong in parts, but of making those parts
coherent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to
it. Gray, if we may believe the commentators, has
not an idea, scarcely an epithet, that he can call his
own ; and yet he is, in the best sense, one of the
classics of English literature. He had exquisite
felicity of choice ; his dictionary had no vulgar
word in it, no harsh one, but all culled from the
luckiest moods of poets, and with a faint but deli-
cious aroma of association ; he had a perfect sense

CARLYLE 81

of sound, and one idea without which all the poetic
outfit (si absit prudvntia) is of little avail, — that
of combination and arrangement, in short, of art.
The poets from whom he helped himself have no
more claim to any of his poems as wholes, than the
various beauties of Greece (if the old story were
true) to the Venus of the artist.

Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to
keep a book alive than any other single faculty.
Burke is rescued from the usual doom of orators,
because his learning, his experience, his sagacity
are rimmed with a halo by this bewitching light be-
hind the intellectual eye from the highest heaven
of the brain. Shakespeare has impregnated his
common sense with the steady glow of it, and an-
swers the mood of youth and age, of high and low,
immortal as that dateless substance of the soul he
wrought in. To have any chance of lasting, a book
must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the
day, but a constant longing and hunger of human
nature ; and it needs only a superficial study of
literature to be convinced that real fame depends
rather on the sum of an author's powers than on
any brilliancy of special parts. There must be wis-
dom as well as wit, sense no less than imagination,
judgment in equal measure with fancy, and the
fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor wooden
stick that gives it guidance if* it would mount and
draw all eyes. There are some who think that the
brooding patience which a great work calls for be-
longed exclusively to an earlier period than ours.
Others lay the blame on our fashion of periodical

82 CARLYLE

publication, which necessitates a sensation and a
crisis in every number, and forces the writer to
strive for startling effects, instead of that general
lowness of tone which is the last achievement of
the artist. The simplicity of antique passion, the
homeliness of antique pathos, seems not merely to
be gone out of fashion, but out of being as well.
Modern poets appear rather to tease their words
into a fury, than to infuse them with the deliberate
heats of their matured conception, and strive to re-
place the rapture of the mind with a fervid inten-
sity of phrase. Our reaction from the decorous
platitudes of the last century has no doubt led us
to excuse this, and to be thankful for something
like real fire, though of stubble ; but our prevail-
ing style of criticism, which regards parts rather
than wholes, which dwells on the beauty of pas-
sages, and, above all, must have its languid nerves
pricked with the expected sensation at whatever
cost, has done all it could to confirm us in our evil
way. Passages are good when they lead to some-
thing, when they are necessary parts of the build-
ing, but they are not good to dwell in. This taste
for the startling reminds us of something which
happened once at the burning of a country meet-
ing-house. The building stood on a hill, and, apart
from any other considerations, the fire was as pic-
turesque as could be desired. When all was a black
heap, licking itself here and there with tongues of
fire, there rushed up a farmer gasping anxiously,
" Hez the bell fell yit ? " An ordinary fire was no
more to him than that on his hearthstone ; even the

CARLYLE 83

burning of a meeting-house, in itself a vulcanic
rarity, could not (so long as he was of another par-
ish,) tickle his outworn palate ; but he had hoped
for a certain tang in the downcome of the bell that
might recall the boyish flavor of conflagration.
There was something dramatic, no doubt, in this
surprise of the brazen sentinel at his post, but the
breathless rustic has always seemed to me a type
of the prevailing delusion in aesthetics. Alas ! if
the bell must fall in every stanza or every monthly
number, how shall an author contrive to stir us
at last, unless with whole Moscows, crowned with
the tintinnabulary crash of the Kremlin ? For
myself I am glad to feel that I am still able to
find contentment in the more conversational and
domestic tone of my old-fashioned wood-fire. No
doubt a great part of our pleasure in reading is
unexpectedness, whether in turn of thought or of
phrase ; but an emphasis out of place, an intensity
of expression not founded on sincerity of moral or
intellectual conviction, reminds one of the under-
scorings in young ladies' letters, a wonder even to
themselves under the colder north -light of ma-
tronage. It is the part of the critic, however, to
keep cool under whatever circumstances, and to
reckon that the excesses of an author will be at
first more attractive to the many than that average
power which shall win him attention with a new
generation of men. It is seldom found out by the
majority, till after a considerable interval, that he
was the original man who contrived to be simply
natural, — the hardest lesson in the school of art

84 CARLYLE

and the latest learned, if, indeed, it be a thing
capable of acquisition at all. The most winsome
and wayward of brooks draws now and then some
lover's foot to its intimate reserve, while the spirt
of a bursting water-pipe gathers a gaping crowd
forthwith.

Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been so
long before the world, tliat we may feel toward him
something of the unprejudice of posterity. It has
long been evident that he had no more ideas to
bestow upon us, and that no new turn of his kalei-
doscope would give us anything but some variation
of arrangement in the brilliant colors of his style.
It is perhaps possible, then, to arrive at some not
wholly inadequate estimate of his place as a writer,
and especially of the value of the ideas whose ad-
vocate he makes himself, with a bitterness and vio-
lence that increase, as it seems to me, in proportion
as his inward conviction of their truth diminishes.

The leading characteristics of an author who is
in any sense original, that is to say, who does not
merely reproduce, but modifies the influence of tra-
dition, culture, and contemporary thought upon him-
self by some admixture of his own, may commonly
be traced more or less clearly in his earliest works.
This is more strictly true, no doubt, of poets, be-
cause the imagination is a fixed quantity, not to be
increased by any amount of study and reflection.
Skill, wisdom, and even wit are cumulative ; but
that diviner faculty, which is the spiritual eye,
though it may be trained and sharpened, cannot be
added to by taking thought. This has always been

CARLYLE 85

something innate, unaccountable, to be laid to a
happy conjunction of the stars. Goethe, the last
of the great poets, accordingly takes pains to tell
us under what planets he was born ; and in him it
is curious how uniform the imaginative quality is
from the beginning to the end of his long literary
activity. His early poems show maturity, his ma-
ture ones a youthful freshness. The apple already
lies potentially in the blossom, as that may be
traced also by cutting across the ripened fruit.
With a mere change of emphasis, Goethe might be
called an old boy at both ends of his career.

In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we find
some not obscure hints of the future man. Nearly
fifty years ago he contributed a few literary and
critical articles to the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia.
The outward fashion of them is that of the period ;
but they are distinguished by a certain security
of judgment remarkable at any time, remarkable
especially in one so young. British criticism has
been always more or less parochial ; has never, in-
deed, quite freed itself from sectarian cant and
planted itself honestly on the aesthetic point of
view. It cannot quite persuade itself that truth is
of immortal essence, totally independent of all as-
sistance from quarterly journals or the British army
and navy. Carlyle, in these first essays, already
shows the influence of his master, Goethe, the most
widely receptive of critics. In a compact notice of
Montaigne, there is not a word as to his religious
scepticism. The character is looked at purely from
its human and literary sides. As illustrating the

86 CARLYLE

bent of the author's mind, the following passage is
most to our purpose : " A modern reader will not
easily cavil at the patient and good-natured, though
exuberant egotism which brings back to our view
4 the form and pressure ' of a time long past. The
habits and humors, the mode of acting and think-
ing, which characterized a Gascon gentleman in
the sixteenth century, cannot fail to amuse an in-
quirer of the nineteenth; while the faithful deline-
ation of human feelings, in all their strength and
weakness, will serve as a mirror to every mind
capable of self-examination." We find here no
uncertain indication of that eye for the moral
picturesque, and that sympathetic appreciation of
character, which within the next few years were
to make Carlyle the first in insight of English crit-
ics and the most vivid of English historians. In
all his earlier writing he never loses sight of his
master's great rule, Den Gegenstandfest zu halten.
He accordingly gave to Englishmen the first hu-
manly possible likeness of Voltaire, Diderot, Mira-
beau, and others, who had hitherto been measured
by the usual British standard of their respect for
the geognosy of Moses and the historic credibility
of the Books of Chronicles. What was the real
meaning of this phenomenon ? what the amount of
this man's honest performance in the world ? and
in what does he show that family-likeness, common
to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair hope
of being able to comprehend him ? These were the
questions which Carlyle seems to have set himself
honestly to answer in the critical writings which

CARLYLE 87

fill the first period of his life as a man of letters.
In this mood he rescued poor Boswell from the un-
merited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, and
taught us to see something half-comically beautiful
in the poor, weak creature, with his pathetic in-
stinct of reverence for what was nobler, wiser, and
stronger than himself. Everything that Mr. Car-
lyle wrote during this first period thrills with the
purest appreciation of whatever is brave and beau-
tiful in human nature, with the most vehement
scorn of cowardly compromise with things base ;
and yet, immitigable as his demand for the highest
in us seems to be, there is always something re-
assuring in the humorous sympathy with mortal
frailty which softens condemnation and consoles
for shortcoming. The remarkable feature of Mr.
Carlyle's criticism (see, for example, his analysis
and exposition of Goethe's " Helena ") is the
sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on to
the matter of his theme, — never turned aside by
a false scent, regardless of the outward beauty of
form, sometimes almost contemptuous of it, in his
hunger after the intellectual nourishment which it
may hide. The delicate skeleton of admirably ar-
ticulated and related parts which underlies and
sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from
sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush
remorselessly to come at the marrow of meaning.
With him the ideal sense is secondary to the ethi-
cal and metaphysical, and he has but a faint con-
ception of their possible unity.

By degrees the humorous element in his nature

88 CARLYLE

gains ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Be-
coming always more boisterous and obtrusive, it
ends at last, as such humor must, in cynicism. In
" Sartor Resartus " it is still kindly, still infused
with sentiment ; and the book, with its mixture of
indignation and farce, strikes one as might the
prophecies of Jeremiah, if the marginal comments
of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his wildest mood had by
some accident been incorporated with the text. In
" Sartor " the marked influence of Jean Paul is un-
deniable, both in matter and manner. It is cu-
rious for one who studies the action and reaction
of national literatures on each other, to see the
humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after
filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with
a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or
even displeasing, as the case may be, to the Eng-
lish mind. Unhappily the bit of mother from
Swift's vinegar-barrel has had strength enough to
sour all the rest. The whimsicality of " Tristram
Shandy," which, even in the original, has too often
the effect of forethought, becomes a deliberate arti-
fice in Richter, and at last a mere mannerism in
Carlyle.

Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the advan-
tage of a well-defined theme, and of limits both in
the subject and in the space allowed for its treat-
ment, which kept his natural extravagance within
bounds, and compelled some sort of discretion and
compactness. The great merit of these essays lay
in a criticism based on wide and various study,
which, careless of tradition, applied its standard to

CARLYLE 89

the real and not the contemporary worth of the
literary or other performance to be judged, and in
an unerring eye for that fleeting expression of the
moral features of character, a perception of which
alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness
possible. Their defect was a tendency, gaining
strength with years, to confound the moral with the
aesthetic standard, and to make the value of an
author's work dependent on the general force of
his nature rather than on its special fitness for a
given task. In proportion as his humor gradually
overbalanced the other qualities of his mind, his
taste for the eccentric, amorphous, and violent in
men became excessive, disturbing more and more
his perception of the more commonplace attri-
butes which give consistency to portraiture. His
" French Revolution " is a series of lurid pictures,
unmatched for vehement power, in which the fig-
ures of such sons of earth as Mirabeau and Danton
loom gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an
eruption, their shadows swaying far and wide gro-
tesquely awful. But all is painted by eruption-
flashes in violent light and shade. There are no
half-tints, no gradations, and one finds it impossible
to account for the continuance in power of less
Titanic actors in the tragedy like Robespierre, on
any theory whether of human nature or of indi-
vidual character supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his
success, however, in accomplishing what he aimed
at, which was to haunt the mind with memories of
a horrible political nightmare, there can be no
doubt.

90 CARLYLE

Goethe says, apparently thinking of Kichter,
" The worthy Germans have persuaded themselves
that the essence of true humor is formlessness."
Heine had not yet shown that a German might
combine the most airy humor with a sense of form
as delicate as Goethe's own, and that there was no
need to borrow the bow of Philoctetes for all kinds
of game. Mr. Carlyle's own tendency was toward
the lawless, and the attraction of Jean Paul made
it an overmastering one. Goethe, I think, might
have gone farther, and affirmed that nothing but
the highest artistic sense can prevent humor from
degenerating into the grotesque, and thence down-
wards to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a striking
example of it. The moral purpose of his book
cannot give it that unity which the instinct and fore-
thought of art only can bring forth. Perhaps we
owe the masterpiece of humorous literature to the
fact that Cervantes had been trained to authorship
in a school where form predominated over sub-
stance, and the most convincing proof of the su-
premacy of art at the highest period of Greek liter-
ature is to be found in Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle
has no artistic sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of
proportion. Accordingly he looks on verse with
contempt as something barbarous, — the savage or-
nament which a higher refinement will abolish, as
it has tattooing and nose-rings. With a conceptive
imagination vigorous beyond any in his generation,
with a mastery of language equalled only by the
greatest poets, he wants altogether the plastic imag-
ination, the shaping faculty, which would have

CARLYLE 91

made Mm a poet in the highest sense. He is a
preacher and a prophet, — anything you will, —
but an artist he is not, and never can be. It is
always, the knots and gnarls of the oak that he
admires, never the perfect and balanced tree.

It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for
what we owe an author, than to blame him for what
he cannot give us. But it is sometimes the business
of a critic to trace faults of style and of thought
to their root in character and temperament, to
show their necessary relation to, and dependence
on, each other, and to find some more trust-
worthy explanation than mere wantonness of will
for the moral obliquities of a man so largely
moulded and gifted as Mr. Carlyle. So long as
he was merely an exhorter or dehorter, we were
thankful for such eloquence, such humor, such
vivid or grotesque images, and such splendor of
illustration as only he could give; but when he
assumes to be a teacher of moral and political phi-
losophy, when he himself takes to compounding the
social panaceas he has made us laugh at so often,
and advertises none as genuine but his own, we
begin to inquire into his qualifications and his de-
fects, and to ask ourselves whether his patent pill
differ from others except in the larger amount of
aloes, or have any better recommendation than the
superior advertising powers of a mountebank of
genius. Comparative criticism teaches us that
moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related
than is commonly supposed. Had Mr. Carlyle
been fitted out completely by nature as an artist,

92 CARLYLE

he would have had an ideal in his work which
would have lifted his mind away from the muddier
part of him, and trained him to the habit of seek-
ing and seeing the harmony rather than the discord
and contradiction of things. His innate love of the
picturesque, (which is only another form of the
sentimentalism he so scoffs at, perhaps as feeling it
a weakness in himself,) 1 once turned in the direction
of character, and finding its chief satisfaction there,
led him to look for that ideal of human nature in
individual men which is but fragmentarily repre-
sented in the entire race, and is rather divined
from the aspiration, forever disenchanted to be for-
ever renewed, of the immortal part in us, than
found in any example of actual achievement. A
wiser temper would have seen something more con-
soling than disheartening in the continual failure
of men eminently endowed to reach the standard
of this spiritual requirement, would perhaps have
found in it an inspiring hint that it is mankind,
and not special men, that are to be shaped at last
into the image of God, and that the endless life of
the generations may hope to come nearer that goal
of which the short-breathed threescore years and
ten fall too unhappily short.

But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure,
and all who recommend any other method, or see
any hope of healing elsewhere, are either quacks

1 Thirty years ago, when this was written, I ventured only a
hint that Carlyle was essentially a sentimentalist. In what has
been published since his death I find proof of what I had divined
rather than definitely formulated. (1888.)

CARLYLE 93

and charlatans or their victims. His lively imagi-
nation conjures up the image of tan impossible he,
as contradictorily endowed as the chief person-
age in a modern sentimental novel, who, at all
hazards, must not lead mankind like a shepherd,
but bark, bite, and otherwise worry them toward
the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. If Mr. Carl vie
would only now and then recollect that men are
men, and not sheep, nay, that the farther they
are from being such, the more well grounded our
hope of one day making something better of them !
It is indeed strange that one who values Will so
highly in the greatest should be blind to its infinite
worth in the least of men ; nay, that he should so
often seem to confound it with its irritable and
purposeless counterfeit, Wilfulness. The natural
impatience of an imaginative temperament, which
conceives so vividly the beauty and desirableness
of a nobler manhood and a diviner political order,
makes him fret at the slow moral processes by
which the All- Wise brings about his ends, and
turns the very foolishness of men to his praise and
glory. Mr. Carlyle is for calling down fire from
Heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand
on the match-box. No doubt it is somewhat pro-
voking that it should be so easy to build castles in
the air, and so hard to find tenants for them. It
is a singular intellectual phenomenon to see a man,
who earlier in life so thoroughly appreciated the
innate weakness and futile tendency of the " storm
and thrust " period of German literature, constantly
assimilating, as he grows older, more and more

94 CARLYLE

nearly to its principles and practice. It is no
longer the sagacious and moderate Goethe who is
his type of what is highest in human nature, but
far rather some Gotz of the Iron Hand, some as-
sertor of the divine legitimacy of Faustrecht- It is
odd to conceive the fate of Mr. Carlyle under the
sway of any of his heroes, how Cromwell would
have scorned him as a babbler more long-winded
than Prynne, but less clear and practical, how
Friedrich would have scoffed at his tirades as
dummes Zeug not to be compared with the ro-
mances of Crebillon fils, or possibly have clapped
him in a marching regiment as a fit subject for the
cane of the sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr.
Carlyle's irritability is to be laid to the account
of his early schoolmastership at Kirkcaldy. This
great booby World is such a dull boy, and will not
learn the lesson we have taken such pains in ex-
pounding for the fiftieth time. Well, then, if elo-
quence, if example, if the awful warning of other
little boys who neglected their accidence and came
to the gallows, if none of these avail, the birch at
least is left, and we will try that. The dominie
spirit has become every year more obtrusive and
intolerant in Mr. Carlyle's writing, and the rod,
instead of being kept in its place as a resource for
desperate cases, has become the alpha and omega of
all successful training, the one divinely-appointed
means of human enlightenment and progress, in
short, the final hope of that absurd animal who
fancies himself a little lower than the angels.
Have we feebly taken it for granted that the dis-

CARLYLE 95

tinction of man was reason ? Never was there a
more fatal misconception. It is in the gift of un-
reason that we are unenviably distinguished from
the brutes, whose nobler privilege of instinct saves
them from our blunders and our crimes.

But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed with
the hallucination that he is head-master of this
huge boys' school which we call the world, his
pedagogic birch has grown to the taller proportions
and more ominous aspect of a gallows. His article
on Dr. Francia was a panegyric of the halter, in
which the gratitude of mankind is invoked for the
self-appointed dictator who had discovered in Par-
aguay a tree more beneficent than that which pro-
duced the Jesuits' bark. Mr. Carlyle seems to be
in the condition of a man who uses stimulants, and
must increase his dose from day to day as the
senses become dulled under the spur. He began
by admiring strength of character and purpose and
the manly self-denial which makes a humble for-
tune great by steadfast loyalty to duty. He has
gone on till mere strength has become such washy
weakness that there is no longer any titillation in
it ; and nothing short of downright violence will
rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement.
At first he made out very well with remarkable
men ; then, lessening the water and increasing the
spirit, he took to Heroes : and now he must have
downright inhumanity, or the draught has no
savor; so he gets on at last to Kings, types of
remorseless Force, who maintain the political views
of Berserkers by the legal principles of Lynch.

96 CARLYLE

Constitutional monarchy is a failure, representative
government is a gabble, democracy a birth of the
bottomless pit ; there is no hope for mankind ex-
cept in getting themselves under a good driver
who shall not spare the lash. And yet, unhappily
for us, these drivers are providential births not to
be contrived by any cunning of ours, and Friedrich
II. is hitherto the last of them. Meanwhile the
world's wheels have got fairly stalled in mire and
other matter of every vilest consistency and most
disgustful smell. What are we to do? Mr.
Carlyle will not let us make a lever with a rail
from the next fence, or call in the neighbors. That
would be too commonplace and cowardly, too an-
archical. No ; he would have us sit down beside
him in the slough and shout lustily for Hercules.
If that indispensable demigod will not or cannot
come, we can find a useful and instructive solace,
during the intervals of shouting, in a hearty abuse
of human nature, which, at the long last, is always
to blame.

Since " Sartor Resartus " Mr. Carlyle has done
little but repeat himself with increasing emphasis
and heightened shrillness. Warning has steadily
heated toward denunciation, and remonstrance
soured toward scolding. The image of the Tartar
prayer-mill, which he borrowed from Kichter and
turned to such humorous purpose, might be applied
to himself. The same phrase comes round and
round, only the machine, being a little crankier,
rattles more, and the performer is called on for a
more visible exertion. If there be not something

CARLYLE 97

very like cant in Mr. Carlyle's later writings, then
cant is not the repetition of a creed after it has
become a phrase by the cooling of that white-hot
conviction which once made it both the light and
warmth of the soul. I do not mean intentional
and deliberate cant, but neither is that which Mr.
Carlyle denounces so energetically in his fellow-
men of that conscious kind. I do not mean to
blame him for it, but mention it rather as an inter-
esting phenomenon of human nature. The stock
of ideas which mankind has to work with is very
limited, like the alphabet, and can at best have an
air of freshness given it by new arrangements and
combinations, or by application to new times and
circumstances. Montaigne is but Ecclesiastes writ-
ing in the sixteenth century, Voltaire but Lucian
in the eighteenth. Yet both are original, and so
certainly is Mr. Carlyle, whose borrowing is mainly
from his own former works. But he does this so
often and so openly, that we may at least be sure
that he ceased growing a number of years ago, and
is a remarkable example of arrested development.

The cynicism, however, which has now become
the prevailing temper of his mind, has gone on ex-
panding with unhappy vigor. In Mr. Carlyle it is
not, certainly, as in Swift, the result of personal
disappointment, and of the fatal eye of an accom-
plice for the mean qualities by which power could
be attained that it might be used for purposes as
mean. It seems rather the natural corruption of
his exuberant humor. Humor in its first analysis
is a perception of the incongruous, and in its high-

98 CARLYLE

est development, of the incongruity between the
actual and the ideal in men and life. With so
keen a sense of the ludicrous contrast between
what men might be, nay, wish to be, and what they
are, and with a vehement nature that demands the
instant realization of his vision of a world alto-
gether heroic, it is no wonder that Mr. Carlyle, al-
ways hoping for a thing and always disappointed,
should become bitter. Perhaps if he expected less
he would find more. Saul seeking his father's
asses found himself turned suddenly into a king ;
but Mr. Carlyle, on the lookout for a king, always
seems to find the other sort of animal. He sees
nothing on any side of him but a procession of the
Lord of Misrule, in gloomier moments, a Dance of
Death, where everything is either a parody of what-
ever is noble, or an aimless jig that stumbles at
last into the annihilation of the grave, and so
passes from one nothing to another. Is a world,
then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle' s works
distinguished only for its " fair, large ears " ? If
he who has read and remembered so much would
only now and then call to mind the old proverb,
Nee deus, nee lupus, sed homo ! If he would only
recollect that, from the days of the first grand-
father, everybody has remembered a golden age be-
hind him ! No doubt Adam depreciated the apple
which the little Cain on his knee was crunching,
by comparison with those he himself had tasted in
Eden.

The very qualities, it seems to me, which came
so near making a great poet of Mr. Carlyle, dis-

CARLYLE 99

qualify him for the office of historian. The poet's
concern is with the appearances of things, with
their harmony in that whole which the imagination
demands for its satisfaction, and their truth to that
ideal nature which is the proper object of poetry.
History, unfortunately, is very far from being ideal,
still farther from an exclusive interest in those
heroic or typical figures which answer all the wants
of the epic and the drama and fill their utmost
artistic limits. Mr. Carlyle has an unequalled
power and vividness in painting detached scenes,
in bringing out in their full relief the oddities or
peculiarities of character ; but he has a far feebler
sense of those gradual changes of opinion, that
strange communication of sympathy from mind to
mind, that subtle influence of very subordinate
actors in giving a direction to policy or action,
which we are wont somewhat vaguely to call the
progress of events. His scheme of history is
purely an epical one, where only leading figures
appear by name and are in any strict sense opera-
tive. He has no conception of the people as any-
thing else than an element of mere brute force in
political problems, and would sniff scornfully at
that unpicturesque common-sense of the many,
which comes slowly to its conclusions, no doubt,
but compels obedience even from rulers the most
despotic when once its mind is made up. His his-
tory of Frederick is, of course, a Fritziad; but
next to his hero, the cane of the drill-sergeant and
iron ramrods appear to be the conditions which to
his mind satisfactorily account for the result of the

100 CARLYLE

Seven Years War. It is our opinion, which sub-
sequent events seem to justify, that, had there not
been in the Prussian people a strong instinct of
nationality, Protestant nationality too, and an in-
timate conviction of its advantages, the war might
have ended quite otherwise. Frederick II. left the
machine of war which he received from his father
even more perfect than he found it, yet within a
few years of his death it went to pieces before
the shock of French armies animated by an idea.
Again a few years, and the Prussian soldiery, in-
spired once more by the old national fervor, were
victorious. After all, is it not moral forces that
make the heaviest battalions, other things being tol-
erably equal ? Were it not for the purely pictur-
esque bias of Mr. Carlyle's genius, for the necessity
which his epical treatment lays upon him of always
having a protagonist, we should be astonished that
an idealist like him should have so little faith in
ideas and so much in matter.

Mr. Carlyle's manner is not so well suited to
the historian as to the essayist. He is always great
in single figures and striking episodes, but there is
neither gradation nor continuity. He has extraor-
dinary patience and conscientiousness in the gath-
ering and sifting of his material, but is scornful of
commonplace facts and characters, impatient of
whatever will not serve for one of his clever sketches,
or group well in a more elaborate figure-piece. He
sees history, as it were, by flashes of lightning.
A single scene, whether a landscape or an interior,
a single figure or a wild mob of men, whatever

CARLYLE 101

may be snatched by the eye in that instant of in-
tense illumination, is minutely photographed upon
the memory. Every tree and stone, almost every
blade of grass ; every article of furniture in a room ;
the attitude or expression, nay, the very buttons
and shoe-ties of a principal figure ; the gestures of
momentary passion in a wild throng, — everything
leaps into vision under that sudden glare with a
painful distinctness that leaves the retina quiver-
ing. The intervals are absolute darkness. Mr.
Carlyle makes us acquainted with the isolated spot
where we happen to be when the flash comes, as if
by actual eyesight, but there is no possibility of a
comprehensive view. No other writer compares with
him for vividness. He is himself a witness, and
makes us witnesses of whatever he describes. This
is genius beyond a question, and of a very rare qual-
ity, but it is not history. He has not the cold-
blooded impartiality of the historian ; and while
he entertains us, moves us to tears or laughter,
makes us the unconscious captives of his ever-
changeful mood, we find that he has taught us com-
paratively little. His imagination is so powerful
that it makes him the contemporary of his charac-
ters, and thus his history seems to be the memoirs
of a cynical humorist, with hearty likes and dis-
likes, with something of acridity in his partialities
whether for or against, more keenly sensitive to the
grotesque than to the simply natural, and who enters
in his diary, even of what comes within the range
of his own observation, only so much as amuses his
fancy, is congenial with his humor, or feeds his

102 CARLYLE

prejudice. Mr. Carlyle's method is accordingly
altogether pictorial, his hasty temper making nar-
rative wearisome to him. In his Friedrich, for
example, we get very little notion of the civil ad-
ministration of Prussia; and when he comes, in
the last volume, to his hero's dealings with civil
reforms, he confesses candidly that it would tire
him too much to tell us about it, even if he knew
anything at all satisfactory himself.

Mr. Carlyle's historical compositions are won-
derful prose poems, full of picture, incident, hu-
mor, and character, where we grow familiar with
his conception of certain leading personages, and
even of subordinate ones, if they are necessary
to the scene, so that they come out living upon
the stage from the dreary limbo of names; but
this is no more history than the historical plays
of Shakespeare. There is nothing in imaginative
literature superior in its own way to the episode
of Voltaire in the Fritziad. It is delicious in
humor, masterly in minute characterization. We
feel as if the principal victim (for we cannot help
feeling all the while that he is so) of this mischiev-
ous genius had been put upon the theatre before
us by some perfect mimic like Foote, who had
studied his habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of
thought, costume, trick of feature, and rendered
them with the slight dash of caricature needful
to make the whole composition tell. It is in such
things that Mr. Carlyle is beyond all rivalry,
and that we must go back to Shakespeare for a
comparison. But the mastery of Shakespeare is

CARLYLE 103

shown perhaps more strikingly in his treatment
of the ordinary than of the exceptional. His is
the gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. Car-
lyle's gift . is rather in the representation than
in the evolution of character ; and it is a neces-
sity of his art, therefore, to exaggerate slightly
his heroic, and to caricature in like manner his
comic parts. His appreciation is less psychologi-
cal than physical and external. Grimm relates
that Garrick, riding once with PreVille, proposed
to him that they should counterfeit drunkenness.
They rode through Passy accordingly, deceiving
all who saw them. When beyond the town Pre-
ville asked how he had succeeded. " Excellently,"
said Garrick, " as to your body ; but your legs
were not tipsy." Mr. Carlyle would be as exact
in his observation of nature as the great actor,
and would make us see a drunken man as well ;
but we doubt whether he could have conceived
that unmatchable scene in Antony and Cleopatra,
where the tipsiness of Lepidus pervades the whole
metaphysical no less than the physical part of
the triumvir. If his sympathies bore any propor-
tion to his instinct for catching those traits which
are the expression of character, but not charac-
ter itself, we might have had a great historian
in him instead of a history-painter. But that
which is a main element in Mr. Carlyle's talent,
and does perhaps more than anything else to make
it effective, is a defect of his nature. The cyni-
cism which renders him so entertaining precludes
him from any just conception of men and their

104 CARLYLE

motives, and from any sane estimate of the rela-
tive importance of the events which concern them.
I remember a picture of Hamon's, where before a
Punch's theatre are gathered the wisest of man-
kind in rapt attention. Socrates sits on a front
bench, absorbed in the spectacle, and in the corner
stands Dante making entries in his note-book. Mr.
Carlyle as an historian leaves us in somewhat such
a mood. The world is a puppet-show, and when
we have watched the play out, we depart with a
half-comic consciousness of the futility of all human
enterprise, and the ludicrousness of all man's ac-
tion and passion on the stage of the world. Sim-
ple, kindly, blundering Oliver Goldsmith was after
all wiser, and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and not
less immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial
beauty and heroism of the homeliest human nature.
The cynical view is congenial to certain moods,
and is so little inconsistent with original nobleness
of mind, that it is not seldom the acetous fermenta-
tion of it ; but it is the view of the satirist, not of
the historian, and takes in but a narrow arc in the
circumference of truth. Cynicism in itself is es-
sentially disagreeable. It is the intellectual an-
alogue of the truffle ; and though it may be very
well in giving a relish to thought for certain pal-
ates, it cannot supply the substance of it. Mr.
Carlyle's cynicism is not that highbred weariness
of the outsides of life which we find in Ecclesiastes.
It goes much deeper than that to the satisfactions,
not of the body or the intellect, but of the very soul
as well. It vaunts itself ; it is noisy and aggres-

CARLYLE 105

sive. "What the wise master puts into the mouth
of desperate ambition, thwarted of the fruit of its
crime, as the fitting expression of passionate sophis-
try, seems to have become an article of his creed.
With him

" Life is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

He goes about with his Diogenes dark - lantern,
professing to seek a man, but inwardly resolved to
find a monkey. He loves to flash it suddenly on
poor human nature in some ridiculous or degrading
posture. He admires still, or keeps affirming that
he admires, the doughty, silent, hard-working men
who go honestly about their business ; but when
we come to his later examples, we find that it is
not loyalty to duty or to an inward ideal of high-
mindedness that he finds admirable in them, but a
blind unquestioning vassalage to whomsoever it has
pleased him to set up for a hero. He would fain
replace the old feudalism with a spiritual counter-
part, in which there shall be an obligation to soul-
service. He who once popularized the word flun-
key by ringing the vehement changes of his scorn
upon it, is at last forced to conceive an ideal flun-
keyism to squire the hectoring Don Belianises of
his fancy about the world. Failing this, his latest
theory of Divine government seems to be the
cudgel. Poets have sung all manner of vegetable
loves ; Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer
the daisy, and Wordsworth the gallows - tree ; it
remained for the ex -pedagogue of Kirkcaldy to

106 CARLYLE

become the volunteer laureate of the rod and to
imagine a world created and directed by a divine
Dr. Busby. We cannot help thinking that Mr.
Carlyle might have learned something to his ad-
vantage by living a few years in the democracy
which he scoffs at as heartily a priori as if it were
the demagogism which Aristophanes derided from
experience. The Hero, as Mr. Carlyle understands
him, was a makeshift of the past ; and the ideal of
manhood is to be found hereafter in free commu-
nities, where the state shall at length sum up and
exemplify in itself all those qualities which poets
were forced to imagine and typify because they
could not find them in the actual world.

In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr.
Carlyle was the denouncer of shams, the preacher
up of sincerity, manliness, and a living faith, in-
stead of a droning ritual. He had intense convic-
tions, and he made disciples. With a compass of
diction unequalled by any other public performer
of the time, ranging as it did from the unbookish
freshness of the Scottish peasant to the most far-
sought phrase of literary curiosity, with humor,
pathos, and eloquence at will, it was no wonder
that he found eager listeners in a world longing for
a sensation, and forced to put up with the West-
End gospel of " Pelham." If not a profound
thinker, he had what was next best, — he felt pro-
foundly, and his cry came out of the depths. The
stern Calvinism of his early training was rekindled
by his imagination to the old fervor of Wishart
and Brown, and became a new phenomenon as he

CARLYLE 107

reproduced it subtilized by German transcenden-
talism and German culture. Imagination, if it lay
hold of a Scotchman, possesses him in the old de-
moniac sense of the word, and that hard logical
nature, if the Hebrew fire once get fair headway
in it, burns unquenchable as an anthracite coal-
mine. But to utilize these sacred heats, to employ
them, as a literary man is always tempted, to keep
the domestic pot a-boiling, — is such a thing possi-
ble ? Only too possible, we fear ; and Mr. Carlyle
is an example of it. If the languid public long
for a sensation, the excitement of making one be-
comes also a necessity of the successful author, as
the intellectual nerves grow duller and the old in-
spiration that came unbidden to the bare garret
grows shier and shier of the comfortable parlor.
As he himself said thirty years ago of Edward
Irving, " Unconsciously, for the most part in deep
unconsciousness, there was now the impossibility
to live neglected, — to walk on the quiet paths
where alone it is well with us. Singularity must
henceforth succeed singularity. O foulest Circean
draught, thou poison of Popular Applause ! mad-
ness is in thee and death ; thy end is Bedlam and
the grave." Mr. Carlyle won his first successes as
a kind of preacher in print. His fervor, his od-
dity of manner, his pugnacious paradox, drew the
crowd ; the truth, or, at any rate, the faith that
underlay them all, brought also the fitter audience,
though fewer. But the curse was upon him ; he
must attract, he must astonish. Thenceforth he
has been forced to revamp his telling things ; and

108 CARLYLE

the oddity, as was inevitable, has become always
odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No very
large share of truth falls to the apprehension of
any one man ; let him keep it sacred, and beware
of repeating it till it turn to falsehood on his lips
by becoming ritual. Truth always has a bewitch-
ing savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first
taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue ;
but alas for him who would make the one a substi-
tute for the other ! We seem to miss of late in
Mr. Carlyle the old sincerity. He has become the
purely literary man, less concerned about what he
says than about how he shall say it to best advan-
tage. The Muse should be the companion, not the
giiide, says he whom Mr. Carlyle has pronounced
" the wisest of this generation." What would be
a virtue in the poet is a vice of the most fatal kind
in the teacher, and, alas that we should say it! the
very Draco of shams, whose code contained no
penalty milder than capital for the most harmless
of them, has become at last something very like a
sham himself. Mr. Carlyle continues to be a voice
crying in the wilderness, but no longer a voice with
any earnest conviction behind it, or in a wilderness
where there is other than imaginary privation.
Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and
impostors, we are inclined to answer, with the am-
bassador of Philip II., when his master reproached
him with forgetting substance in ceremony, " Your
Majesty forgets that you are only a ceremony your-
self." And Mr. Carlyle's teaching, moreover, if
teaching we may call it, belongs to what the great

CARLYLE 109

German, whose disciple he is, condemned as the
"literature of despair." An apostle to the gentiles
might hope for some fruit of his preaching ; but of
what avail an apostle who shouts his message down
the mouth of the pit to poor lost souls, whom he
can positively assure only that it is impossible to
get out ? Mr. Carlyle lights up the lanterns of his
Pharos after the ship is already rolling between
the tongue of the sea and the grinders of the reef.
It is very brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch
the crests of the breakers with an awful pictur-
esqueness ; but in so desperate a state of things,
even Dr. Syntax might be pardoned for being for-
getful of the picturesque. The Toryism of Scott
sprang from love of the past ; that of Carlyle is
far more dangerously infectious, for it is logically
deduced from a deep disdain of human nature.

Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an
old king sitting at the gate of his palace to judge
his people in the calm sunshine of that past which
never existed outside a poet's brain. It is the
sweetest of waking dreams, this of absolute power
and perfect wisdom in one supreme ruler ; but it
is as pure a creation of human want and weakness,
as clear a witness of mortal limitation and incom-
pleteness, as the shoes of swiftness, the cloak of
darkness, the purse of Fortunatus, and the elixir
vitce. It is the natural refuge of imaginative tem-
peraments impatient of our blunders and shortcom-
ings, and, given a complete man, all would submit
to the divine right of his despotism. But alas ! to
every the most fortunate human birth hobbles up

110 CARLYLE

that malign fairy who has been forgotten, with her
fatal gift of imperfection ! So far as my experi-
ence has gone, it has been the very opposite to Mr.
Carlyle's. Instead of finding men disloyal to their
natural leader, nothing has ever seemed to me so
touching as the gladness with which they follow
him, when they are sure they have found him at
last. But a natural leader of the ideal type is not
to be looked for nisi dignus vindice nodus. The
Divine Forethought had been cruel in furnishing
one for every petty occasion, and thus thwarting in
all inferior men that priceless gift of reason, to de-
velop which, and to make it one with free-will, is
the highest use of our experience on earth. Mr.
Carlyle was hard bestead and very far gone in his
idolatry of mere pluck, when he was driven to
choose Friedrich as a hero. A poet, and Mr. Car-
lyle is nothing else, is unwise who yokes Pegasus
to a prosaic theme which no force of wing can lift
from the dull earth. Charlemagne would have
been a wiser choice, far enough in the past for
ideal treatment, more manifestly the Siegfried of
Anarchy, and in his rude way the refounder of
that empire which is the ideal of despotism in the
Western world.

Friedrich was doubtless a remarkable man, but
surely very far below any lofty standard of heroic
greatness. He was the last of the European kings
who could look upon his kingdom as his private
patrimony ; and it was this estate of his, this piece
of property, which he so obstinately and success-
fully defended. He had no idea of country as it

CARLYLE 111

was understood by an ancient Greek or Roman, as
it is understood by a modern Englishman or Amer-
ican ; and there is something almost pitiful in see-
ing a man of genius like Mr. Carlyle fighting pain-
fully over again those battles of the last century
which settled nothing but the continuance of the
Prussian monarchy, while he saw only the " burn-
ing of a dirty chimney " in the war which a great
people was waging under his very eyes for the idea
of nationality and orderly magistrature, and which
fixed, let us hope, forever, a boundary-line on the
map of history and of man's advancement toward
self-conscious and responsible freedom. The true
historical genius, as I conceive it, is that which can
see the nobler meaning of events that are near him,
as the true poet is he who detects the divine in the
casual ; and I somewhat suspect the depth of his
insight into the past, who cannot recognize the god-
like of to-day under that disguise in which it al-
ways visits us. Shall we hint to Mr. Carlyle that
a man may look on an heroic age, as well as on an
heroic master, with the eyes of a valet, as misappre-
ciative certainly, though not so ignoble ?

What Schiller says of a great poet, that he must
be a citizen of his age as well as of his country,
may be said inversely of a great king. He should
be a citizen of his country as well as of his age.
Friedrich was certainly the latter in its fullest
sense ; whether he was, or could have been, the
former, in any sense, may be doubted. The man
who spoke and wrote French in preference to his
mother-tongue, who, dying when Goethe was al-

112 CARLYLE

ready drawing toward his fortieth year, Schiller to-
ward his thirtieth, and Lessing had been already
five years in his grave, could yet see nothing but
barbarism in German literature, had little of the
old Teutonic fibre in his nature. The man who
pronounced the Nibelungen Lied not worth a pinch
of priming, had little conception of the power of
heroic traditions in making heroic men, and espe-
cially in strengthening that instinct made up of so
many indistinguishable associations which we call
love of country. Charlemagne, when he caused
the old songs of his people to be gathered and
written down, showed a truer sense of the sources
of national feeling and a deeper political insight.
This want of sympathy points to the somewhat
narrow limits of Friedrich's nature. In spite of
Mr. Carlyle's adroit statement of the case, (and
the whole book has an air of being the plea of a
masterly advocate in mitigation of sentence,) we
feel that his hero was essentially hard, narrow, and
selfish. His popularity will go for little with any
one who has studied the trifling and often fabulous
elements that make up that singular compound.
A bluntness of speech, a shabby uniform, a frugal
camp equipage, a timely familiarity, may make a
man the favorite of an army or a nation, — above
all, if he have the knack of success. Moreover,
popularity is much more easily won from above
downward, and is bought at a better bargain by
kings and generals than by other men. We doubt
if Friedrich would have been liked as a private
person, or even as an unsuccessful king. He ap-

CARLYLE 113

parently attached very few people to himself, fewer
even than his brutal old Squire Western of a
father. His sister Wilhelmina is perhaps an ex-
ception. We say perhaps, for we do not know
how much the heroic part he was called on to play
had to do with the matter, and whether sisterly
pride did not pass even with herself for sisterly
affection. Moreover she was far from him; and
Mr. Carlyle waves aside, in his generous fashion,
some rather keen comments of hers on her brother's
character when she visited Berlin after he had be-
come king. Indeed, he is apt to deal rather con-
temptuously with all adverse criticism of his hero.
I sympathize with his impulse in this respect, agree-
ing heartily as I do in Chaucer's scorn of those who
" glad lie demen to the baser end " in such matters.
But I am not quite sure if this be a safe method
with the historian. He must doubtless be the friend
of his hero if he would understand him, but he must
be more the friend of truth if he would understand
history. Mr. Carlyle's passion for truth is intense,
as befits his temper, but it is that of a lover for his
mistress. He would have her all to himself, and
has a -lover's conviction that no one is able, or even
fit, to appreciate her but himself. He does well to
despise the tittle-tattle of vulgar minds, but surely
should not ignore all testimony on the other side.
For ourselves, we think it not unimportant that
Goethe's friend Knebel, a man not incapable of
admiration, and who had served a dozen years or
so as an officer of Friedrich's guard, should have
bluntly called him " the tyrant."

114 CARLYLE

Mr. Carlyle's history traces the family of his
hero down from its beginnings in the picturesque
chiaro-scuro of the Middle Ages. It was an able
and above all a canny house, a Scotch version of
the word able, which implies thrift and an eye to
the main chance, the said main chance or chief end
of man being altogether of this world. Friedrich,
inheriting this family faculty in full measure, was
driven, partly by ambition, partly by necessity, to
apply it to war. He did so, with the success to be
expected where a man of many expedients has the
good luck to be opposed by men with few. He
adds another to the many proofs that it is possible
to be a great general without a spark of that divine
fire which we call genius, and that good fortune in
war results from the same prompt talent and un-
bending temper which lead to the same result in
the peaceful professions. Friedrich had certainly
more of the temperament of genius than Marl-
borough or Wellington ; but not to go beyond
modern instances, he does not impress us with the
massive breadth of Napoleon, or attract us with the
climbing ardor of Turenne. To compare him with
Alexander, or Hannibal, or Caesar, were absurd.
The kingship that was in him, and which won Mr.
Carlyle to be his biographer, is that of will merely,
of rapid and relentless command. For organiza-
tion he had a masterly talent ; but he could not ap-
ply it to the arts of peace, both because he wanted
experience and because the rash decision of the
battle-field will not serve in matters which are gov-
erned by natural laws of growth. He seems, in-

CARLYLE 115

deed, to have had a coarse, soldier's contempt for
all civil distinction, altogether unworthy of a wise
king, or even of a prudent one. He confers the
title of Hofrath on the husband of a woman with
whom his General Walrave is living in what Mr.
Carlyle justly calls "brutish polygamy," and this at
Walrave's request, on the ground that "a general's
drab ought to have a handle to her name." Mr.

O

Carlyle murmurs in a mild parenthesis that "we
rather regret this " ! (Vol. iii. p. 559.) This is his
usual way of treating unpleasant matters, sidling
by with a deprecating shrug of the shoulders.
Not that he ever wilfully suppresses anything. On
the contrary, there is no greater proof of his genius
than the way in which, while he seems to paint a
character with all its disagreeable traits, he con-
trives to win our sympathy for it, nay, almost our
liking. This is conspicuously true of his portrait
of Friedrich's father; and that he does not succeed
in making Friedrich himself attractive is a strong
argument with us that the fault is in the subject
and not the artist.

The book, it is said, has been comparatively
unsuccessful as a literary venture. Nor do we
wonder at it. It is disproportionately long, and
too much made up of those descriptions of battles,
to read which seems even more difficult than to
have won the victory itself, more disheartening
than to have suffered the defeat. To an American,
also, the warfare seemed Liliputian in the presence
of a conflict so much larger in its proportions and
significant in its results. The interest, moreover,

116 CARLYLE

flags decidedly toward the close, where the reader
cannot help feeling that the author loses breath
somewhat painfully under the effort of so pro-
longed a course. Mr. Carlyle has evidently de-
voted to his task a labor that may be justly called
prodigious. Not only has he sifted all the German
histories and memoirs, but has visited every battle-
field, and describes them with an eye for country
that is without rival among historians. The book
is evidently an abridgment of even more abundant
collections, and yet, as it stands, the matter over-
burdens the work. It is a bundle of lively episodes
rather than a continuous narrative. In this re-
spect it contrasts oddly with the concinnity of his
own earlier Life of Schiller. But the episodes
are lively, the humor and pathos spring from
a profound nature, the sketches of character are
masterly, the seizure of every picturesque incident
infallible, and the literary judgments those of a
thorough scholar and critic. There is, of course,
the usual amusing objurgation of Dryasdust and
his rubbish-heaps, the usual assumption of omni-
science, and the usual certainty of the Duchess de
la Fertd being always in the right ; yet I cannot
help thinking that a little of Dryasdust's plodding
exactness would have saved Fouquet eleven years
of the imprisonment to which Mr. Carlyle con-
demns him, would have referred us to St. Simon
rather than to Voltaire for the character of the
brothers Belle-lie, and would have kept clear of a
certain ludicrous etymology of the name Antwerp,
not to mention some other trifling slips of the like

CARLYLE 117

nature. In conclusion, after saying, as an honest
critic must, that "The History of Friedrich II.
called Frederick the Great" is a book to be read
in with more satisfaction than to be read through,
after declaring that it is open to all manner of
criticism, especially in point of moral purpose and
tendency, I must admit with thankfulness that it
has the one prime merit of being the work of a
man who has every quality of a great poet except
that supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both
matter and manner to harmonious proportion, and
that where it is good, it is good as only genius
knows how to be.

With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been
the greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without
it, to modulate and harmonize and bring parts into
their proper relation, he is the most amorphous of
humorists, the most shining avatar of whim the
world has ever seen. Beginning with a hearty
contempt for shams, he has come at length to
believe in brute force as the only reality, and has
as little sense of justice as Thackeray allowed to
women. I say brute force because, though the
theory is that this force should be directed by the
supreme intellect for the time being, yet all in-
ferior wits are treated rather as obstacles to be
contemptuously shoved aside than as ancillary
forces to be conciliated through their reason. But,
with all deductions, he remains the profoundest
critic and the most dramatic imagination of mod-
ern times. Never was there a more striking exam-
ple of that ingenium perfervidum long ago said to

118 CARLYLE

be characteristic of his countrymen. His is one of
the natures, rare in these latter centuries, capable
of rising to a white heat ; but once fairly kindled,
he is like a three-decker on fire, and his shotted
guns go off, as the glow reaches them, alike dan-
gerous to friend or foe. Though he seems more
and more to confound material with moral success,
yet there is always something wholesome in his
unswerving loyalty to reality, as he understands it.
History, in the true sense, he does not and cannot
write, for he looks on mankind as a herd without
volition, and without moral force ; but such vivid
pictures of events, such living conceptions of char-
acter, we find nowhere else in prose. The figures
of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with
bran, whose whole substance runs out through any
hole that criticism may tear in them, but Carlyle's
are so real in comparison, that, if you prick them,
they bleed. He seems a little wearied, here and
there, in his Friedrich, with the multiplicity of
detail, and does his filling-in rather shabbily ; but
he still remains in his own way, like his hero, the
Only, and such episodes as that of Voltaire would
make the fortune of any other writer. Though
not the safest of guides in politics or practical
philosophy, his value as an inspirer and awakener
cannot be over-estimated. It is a power which
belongs only to the highest order of minds, for it is
none but a divine fire that can so kindle and irra-
diate. The debt due him from those who listened
to the teachings of his prime «f or revealing to them
what sublime reserves of power even the humblest

CARLYLE 119

may find in manliness, sincerity, and self-reliance,
can be paid with nothing short of reverential grat-
itude. As a purifier of the sources whence our
intellectual inspiration is drawn, his influence has
been second only to that of Wordsworth, if even
to his. Indeed he has been in no fanciful sense
the continuator of Wordsworth's moral teaching.

SWINBUBNE'S TRAGEDIES

1866

ARE we really, then, to believe the newspapers
for once, and to doff our critical nightcaps, in
which we have comfortably overslept many similar
rumors and false alarms, to welcome the advent of
a new poet ? New poets, to our thinking, are not
very common, and the soft columns of the press
often make dangerous concessions, for which the
marble ones of Horace's day were too stony-hearted.
Indeed, we have some well-grounded doubts whether
England is precisely the country from which we
have a right to expect that most precious of gifts
just now. There is hardly enough fervor of political
life there at present to ripen anything but the fruits
of the literary forcing-house, so fair outwardly and
so flavorless compared with those which grow in the
hardier open air of a vigorous popular sentiment.
Mere wealth of natural endowment is not enough ;
there must be also the cooperation of the time, of
the public genius roused to a consciousness of itself
by the necessity of asserting or defending the vital
principle on which that consciousness rests, in or-
der that a poet may rise to the highest level of his
vocation. The great names of the last generation
— Scott, Wordsworth, Byron — represent moods

SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 121

of national thought and feeling, and are therefore
more or less truly British poets ; just as Goethe, in
whose capacious nature, open to every influence of
earth and sky, the spiritual fermentation of the
eighteenth century settled and clarified, is a Eu-
ropean one. A sceptic might say, I think, with
some justice, that poetry in England was passing
now, if it have not already passed, into one of
those periods of mere art without any intense con-
victions to back it, which lead inevitably, and by
no«long gradation, to the mannered and artificial.
Browning, by far the richest nature of the time,
becomes more difficult, draws nearer to the all-for-
point fashion of the concettisti, with every poem he
writes ; the dainty trick of Tennyson cloys when
caught by a whole generation of versifiers, as the
style of a great poet never can be ; and I have a
foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in
many respects, and dying before he had subdued
his sensitive temperament to the sterner require-
ments of his art, will be thought a hundred years
hence to have been the truest expression in verse
of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt
and struggle towards settled convictions, of the
period in which he lived. To make beautiful con-
ceptions immortal by exquisiteness of phrase is to
be a poet, 110 doubt ; but to be a new poet is to
feel and to utter that immanent life of things with-
out which the utmost perfection of mere form is at
best only wax or marble. He who can do both is
the great poet.

Over " Chastelard, a Tragedy," we need not

122 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES

spend much time. It is at best but the school ex-
ercise of a young poet learning to wiite, and who
reproduces in his copy-book, more or less traves-
tied, the copy that has been set for him at the
page's head by the authors he most admires.
Grace and even force of expression are not want-
ing, but there is the obscurity which springs from
want of definite intention ; the characters are
vaguely outlined from memory, not drawn firmly
from the living and the nude in actual experience
of life ; the working of passion is an a priori Ab-
straction from a scheme in the author's mind ; and
there is no thought, but only a vehement grasping
after thought. The hand is the hand of Swinburne,
but the voice is the voice of Browning. With here
and there a pure strain of sentiment, a genuine
touch of nature, the effect of the whole is unpleas-
ant with the faults of the worst school of modern
poetry, — the physically intense school, as I should
be inclined to call it, of which Mrs. Browning's
44 Aurora Leigh" is the worst example, whose muse
is a fast young woman with the lavish ornament
and somewhat overpowering perfume of the demi-
monde, and which pushes expression to the last gasp
of sensuous exhaustion. They forget that convul-
sion is not energy, and that words, to hold fire,
must first catch it from vehement heat of thought,
while no artificial fervors of phrase can make the
charm work backward to kindle the mind of writer
or reader. An over-mastering passion no longer
entangles the spiritual being of its victim in the
burning toils of a retribution foredoomed in its

SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 123

own nature, purifying us with the terror and pity
of a soul in its extremity, as the great masters
were wont to set it before us ; no, it must be fleshly,
corporeal, must " bite with small white teeth " and
draw blood, to satisfy the craving of our modern
inquisitors, who torture language instead of woo-
ing it to confess the secret of its witchcraft. That
books written on this theory should be popular is
one of the worst signs of the times ; that they
should be praised by the censors of literature shows
how seldom criticism goes back to first principles,
or is even aware of them, — how utterly it has for-
gotten its most earnest function of demolishing the
high places where the unclean rites of Baal and
Ashtaroth usurp on the worship of the one only
True and Pure.

" Atalanta in Calydon " is in every respect better
than its forerunner. It is a true poem, and seldom
breaks from the maidenly reserve which should
characterize the higher forms of poetry, even in the
keenest energy of expression. If the blank verse
be a little mannered and stiff, reminding one of
Landor in his attempts to reproduce the antique,
the lyrical parts are lyrical in the highest sense,
graceful, flowing, and generally simple in sentiment
and phrase. There are some touches of nature in
the mother's memories of Althea, so sweetly pa-
thetic that they go as right to the heart as they
came from it, and are neither Greek nor English,
but broadly human. And yet, when I had read
the book through, I felt as if I were leaving a
world of shadows, inhabited by less substantial

124 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES

things than that nether realm of Homer where the
very eidolon of Achilles is still real to us in its
longings and regrets. These are not characters, but
outlines after the Elgin marbles in the thinnest
manner of Flaxman. There is not so much blood in
the whole of them as would warm the little finger
of one of Shakespeare's living and breathing con-
ceptions. I could not help thinking of those
exquisite verses addressed by Schiller to Goethe, in
which, while he expresses a half-truth so eloquently
as almost to make it seem a whole one, he touches
unconsciously the weak point of their common striv-
ing after a Grecian instead of a purely human
ideal. The result is an unreal thing.

" Doch leicht gezimmert nur ist Thespis Wag-en,
Und er ist gleich dera acheront'schen Kahn;
Nur Schatten und Idole kann er tragen,
Und drangt das rohe Leben sich heran,
So droht das leichte Fahrzeug umzuschlagen
Das nur die fliieht'gen Geister f assen kann ;
Der Schein soil nie die Wirklichkeit erreichen
Und siegt Natur, so muss die Kunst entweichen."

The actors in the drama are unreal and shadowy,
the motives which actuate them alien to our mod-
ern modes of thought and conceptions of character.
To a Greek, the element of Fate, with which his
imagination was familiar, while it heightened the
terror of the catastrophe, would have supplied the
place of that impulse in mere human nature which
our habit of mind demands for its satisfaction.
The fulfilment of an oracle, the anger of a deity,
the arbitrary doom of some blind and purposeless
power superior to man, the avenging of blood to

SWINBURNE1 S TRAGEDIES 125

appease an injured ghost, any one of these might
make that seem simply natural to a contemporary
of Sophocles which is intelligible to us only by
study and reflection. It is not a little curious that
Shakespeare should have made the last of the
motives we have just mentioned, which was con-
clusive for Orestes, insufficient for Hamlet, who so
perfectly typifies the introversion and complexity of
modern thought as compared with ancient, in deal-
ing with the problems of life and action. It was
not perhaps without intention (for who may ven-
ture to assume a want of intention in the world's
highest poetic genius at its full maturity?) that
Shakespeare brings in his hero fresh from the
University of Wittenberg, where Luther, who en-
tailed upon us the responsibility of private judg-
ment, had been Professor. The dramatic motive
in the " Electra" and " Hamlet " is essentially the
same, but what a difference between the straight-
forward bloody-mindedness of Orestes and the met-
aphysical punctiliousness of the Dane ! Yet each
was natural in his several way, and each would
have been unintelligible to the audience for which
the other was intended. That Fate which the
Greeks made to operate from without, we recognize
at work within in some vice of character or hered-
itary predisposition. Hawthorne, the most pro-
foundly ideal genius of these latter days, was con-
tinually returning, more or less directly, to this
theme ; and his " Marble Faun," whether con-
sciously or not, illustrates that invasion of the
aesthetic by the moral which has confused art by

126 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES

dividing its allegiance, and dethroned the old dy-
nasty without as yet firmly establishing the new
in an acknowledged legitimacy.

"Atalanta in Calydon" shows that poverty of
thought and profusion of imagery which are at
once the defect and the compensation of all youth-
ful poetry, even of Shakespeare's. It seems a par-
adox to say that there can be too much poetry in a
poem, and yet this is a fault with which all poets
begin, and which some never get over. But " Ata-
lanta" is hopefully distinguished, in a rather re-
markable way, from most early attempts, by a sense
of form and proportion, which, if seconded by a
seasonable ripening of other faculties, as we may
fairly expect, gives promise of rare achievement
hereafter. Mr. Swinburne's power of assimilating
style, which is, perhaps, not so auspicious a symp-
tom, strikes me as something marvellous. The
argument of his poem, in its quaint archaism,
would not need the change of a word or in the
order of a period to have been foisted on Sir
Thomas Malory as his own composition. The
choosing a theme which JEschylus had handled in
one of his lost tragedies is justified by a certain
^Eschylean flavor in the treatment. The opening,
without deserving to be called a mere imitation,
recalls that of the " Agamemnon," and the chorus
has often an imaginative lift in it, an ethereal
charm of phrase, of which it is the highest praise
to say that it reminds us of him who soars over the
other Greek tragedians like an eagle.

But in spite of many merits, I cannot help

SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 127

asking myself, as I close the book, whether " Ata-
lanta " can be called a success, and if so, whether
it be a success in the right direction. The poem
reopens a question which in some sort touches
the very life of modern literature. I do not
mean to renew the old quarrel of Fontenelle's day
as to the comparative merits of ancients and mod-
erns. That is an affair of taste, which does not
admit of any authoritative settlement. My concern
is about a principle which certainly demands a
fuller discussion, and which is important enough to
deserve it. Do we show our appreciation of the
Greeks most wisely in attempting the mechanical
reproduction of their forms, or by endeavoring to
comprehend the thoughtful spirit of full-grown
manhood in which they wrought, to kindle our-
selves by the emulation of it, and to bring it to
bear with all its plastic force upon our wholly new
conditions of life and thought? It seems to me
that the question is answered by the fact, patent in
the history of all the fine arts, that every attempt
at reproducing a bygone excellence by external
imitation of it, or even by applying the rules which
analytic criticism has formulated from the study of
it, has resulted in producing the artificial, and not
the artistic. That most subtile of all essences in
physical organization, which eludes chemist, anat-
omist, and microscopist, the life, is in assthetics
not less shy of the critic, and will not come forth
in obedience to his most learned spells, for the
very good reason that it cannot, because in all
works of art it is the joint product of the artist

128 SWINBURNE1 S TRAGEDIES

and of the time. Faust may believe he is gazing
on " the face that launched a thousand ships," but
Mephistopheles knows very well that it is only
shadows that he has the skill to conjure. He is not
merely the spirit that ever denies, but the spirit
also of discontent with the present, that material
in which every man shall work who will achieve
realities and not their hollow semblance. The true
anachronism, in my opinion, is not in Shake-
speare's making Ulysses talk as Lord Bacon might,
but in attempting to make him speak in a dialect
of thought utterly dead to all present comprehen-
sion. Ulysses was the type of long-headedness ;
and the statecraft of an Ithacan cateran would
have seemed as childish to the age of Elizabeth
and Burleigh as it was naturally sufficing to the
first hearers of Homer. Ulysses, living in Florence
during the fifteenth century, might have been
Macchiavelli ; in France, during the seventeenth,
Cardinal Richelieu ; in America, during the nine-
teenth, Abraham Lincoln, but not Ulysses. Truth
to nature can be reached ideally, never historically ;
it must be a study from the life, and not from the
scholiasts. Theocritus lets us into the secret of
his good poetry, when he makes Daphnis tell us
that he preferred his rock with a view of the Sicu-
lian Sea to the kingdom of Pelops.

It is one of the marvels of the human mind, this
sorcery which the fiend of technical imitation
weaves about his victims, giving a phantasmal
Helen to their arms, and making an image of the
brain seem substance. Men still pain themselves

SWINBURNE1 S TRAGEDIES 129

to write Latin verses, matching their wooden bits
of phrase together as children do dissected maps,
and measuring the value of what they have done,
not by any standard of intrinsic merit, but by the
difficulty of doing it. Petrarch expected to be
known to posterity by his Africa. Gray hoped to
make a Latin poem his monument. Goethe, who
was classic in the only way it is now possible to be
classic, in his " Hermann and Dorothea," and at
least Propertian in his " Roman Idylls," wasted his
time and thwarted his creative energy on the me-
chanical mock-antique of an unreadable uAchil-
lei's." Landor prized his waxen " Gebirus Rex "
above all the natural fruits of his mind ; and we
have no doubt that, if some philosopher should suc-
ceed in accomplishing Paracelsus's problem of an
artificial homunculus, he would dote on this mis-
begotten babe of his science, and think him the
only genius of the family. We cannot over-
estimate the value of some of the ancient classics,
but a certain amount of superstition about Greek
and Latin has come down to us from the revival of
learning, and seems to hold in mortmain the intel-
lects of whoever has, at some time, got a smatter-
ing of them. Men quote a platitude in either of
those tongues with a relish of conviction as droll to
the uninitiated as the knighthood of freemasonry.
Horace Walpole's nephew, the Earl of Orford,
when he was in his cups, used to have Statius read
aloud to him every night for two hours by a tipsy
tradesman, whose hiccupings threw in here and
there a kind of csesural pause, and found some

130 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES

strange mystery of sweetness in the disquan titled
syllables. So powerful is this hallucination that
we can conceive of festina lente as the favorite
maxim of a Mississippi steamboat captain, and
apia-rov fjilv vSwp cited as conclusive by a gentleman
for whom the bottle before him reversed the won-
der of the stereoscope, and substituted the Gascon
v for the b in binocular.

Something of this singular superstition has in-
fected the minds of those who confound the laws of
conventional limitation which governed the practice
of Greek authors in dramatic composition, laws
adapted to the habits and traditions and precon-
ceptions of their audience, with that sense of
ideal form which made the Greeks masters in art
to all succeeding generations. Aristophanes is
beyond question the highest type of pure comedy,
etherealizing his humor by the infusion, or intensi-
fying it by the contrast of poetry, and deodorizing
the personality of his sarcasm by a sprinkle from
the clearest springs of fancy. His satire, aimed
as it was at typical characteristics, is as fresh as
ever; but we doubt whether an Aristophanic
drama, retaining its exact form, but adapted to
present events and personages, would keep the
stage as it is kept by " The Rivals," for example,
immeasurably inferior as that is in every element
of genius except the prime one of liveliness. Some-
thing similar in purpose to the parabasis was
essayed in one, at least, of the comedies of Beau-
mont and Fletcher, and in our time by Tieck ; but
it took, of necessity, a different form of expression,

SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 131

and does not seem to have been successful. In-
deed, the fact that what is called the legitimate
drama of modern times in England, Spain, and
France has been strictly a growth, and not a manu-
facture, that in each country it took a different
form, and that, in all, the period of its culminating
and beginning to decline might be measured by a
generation, seems to point us toward some natural
and inevitable law of human nature, and to show
that, while the principles of art are immutable,
their application must accommodate itself to the
material supplied to them by the time and by the
national character and traditions. The Spanish tra-
gedy inclines more toward the lyrical, the French
toward the epical, the English toward the histori-
cal, in the representation of real life; the Span-
ish and English agree in the Teutonic peculiarity
of admitting the humorous antithesis of the clown,
though in the one case he parodies the leading
motive of the drama, and represents the self-con-
sciousness of the dramatist, while in the other he
heightens the tragic effect by contrast, (as in the
grave-digging scene of Hamlet,) and suggests that
stolid but wholesome indifference of the general
life, of what, for want of a better term, we call
Nature, to the sin and suffering, the weakness
and misfortune of the individual man. All these
nations had the same ancient examples before them,
had the same reverence for antiquity, yet they in-
voluntarily deviated, more or less happily, into
originality, success, and the freedom of a living
creativeness. The higher kinds of literature, the

132 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES

only kinds that live on because they had life at the
start, are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of
scholarship, of criticism, diligently studying and as
diligently copying the best models, but are much
rather born of some genetic principle in the charac-
ter of the people and the age which produce them.
One drop of ruddy human blood puts more life
into the veins of a poem, than all the delusive
aurum potabile that can be distilled out of the
choicest library.

The opera is the closest approach we have to
the ancient drama in the essentials of structure
and presentation ; and could we have a libretto
founded on a national legend and written by one
man of genius to be filled out and accompanied
by the music of another, we might hope for
something of the same effect upon the stage. But
themes of universal familiarity and interest are
rare, — Don Giovanni and Faust, perhaps, most
nearly, though not entirely, fulfilling the required
conditions, — and men of genius rarer. The ora-
torio seeks to evade the difficulty by choosing
Scriptural subjects, and it may certainly be ques-
tioned whether the day of popular mythology, in
the sense in which it subserves the purposes of
epic or dramatic poetry, be not gone by forever.
Longfellow is driven to take refuge among the
red men, and Tennyson in the Cambro-Breton
cyclus of Arthur ; but it is impossible that such
themes should come so intimately home to us as
the semi-fabulous stories of their own ancestors
did to the Greeks. The most successful attempt

SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 133

at reproducing the Greek tragedy, both in theme
and treatment, is the " Samson Agoriistes," as it is
also the most masterly piece of English versifica-
tion. Goethe admits that it alone, among modern
works, has caught life from the breath of the
antique spirit. But he failed to see, or at least
to give, the reason of it ; probably failed to see
it, or he would never have attempted the " Iphi-
genie." Milton not only subjected himself to the
structural requirements of the Attic tragedy, but
with a true poetic instinct availed himself of the
striking advantage it had in the choice of a sub-
ject. No popular tradition lay near enough to
him for his purpose ; none united in itself the
essential requisites of human interest and universal
belief. He accordingly chose a Jewish mythus,
very near to his own heart as a blind prisoner,
betrayed by his wife, among the Philistines of
the Restoration, and familiar to the earliest as-
sociations of his readers. This subject, and this
alone, met all the demands both of living poetic
production and of antique form, — the action
grandly simple, the personages few, the protagonist
at once a victim of divine judgment and an ex-
ecutor of divine retribution, an intense personal
sympathy in the poet himself, and no strangeness
to the habitual prepossessions of those he ad-
dressed to be overcome before he could touch
their hearts or be sure of aid from their imagina-
tions. To compose such a drama on such a theme
was to be Greek, and not to counterfeit it; for
Samson was to Milton traditionally just what

134 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES

Herakles was to Sophocles, and personally far
more. The " Agonistes " is still fresh and strong
as morning, but where are " Caractacus " and
"Elfrida"? Nay, where is the far better work
of a far abler man, where is " Merope " ? If
the frame of mind which performs a deliberate
experiment were the same as that which produces
poetry vitalized through and through by the con-
spiring ardors of every nobler passion and power
of the soul, then " Merope " might have had some
little space of life. But without color, without
harmonious rhythm of movement, with less pas-
sion than survived in an average Grecian ghost,
and all this from the very theory of her creation,
she has gone back, a shadow, to join her shadowy
Italian and French namesakes in that limbo of
things that would be and cannot be. Mr. Arnold
but retraces, in his Preface to " Merope," the ar-
guments of Mason in the letters prefixed to his
classical experiments. What finds defenders, but
not readers, may be correct, classic, right in prin-
ciple, but it is not poetry of that absolute kind
which may and does help men, but needs no help
of theirs ; and such surely we have a right to
demand in tragedy, if nowhere else. I should
not speak so unreservedly if I did not set a
high value on Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift.
But " Merope " has that one fault against which
the very gods, we are told, strive in vain. It is
dull, and the seed of this dulness lay in the system
on which it was written.

Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes,

SWINBURNE1 S TRAGEDIES 135

as Mr. Landor has done, it attempts truth of
detail to ancient scenery and manners, which may
be attained either by hard reading and good mem-
ory, or at a cheaper rate from such authors as
Becker. The " Moretum," once attributed to Vir-
gil, and the idyll of Theocritus lately chosen as
a text by Mr. Arnold, are interesting, because
they describe real things ; but the mock-antique,
if not true, is nothing, and how true such poems
are likely to be we can judge by " Punch's " suc-
cess at Yankeeisms, by all England's accurate ap-
preciation of the manners and minds of a con-
temporary people one with herself in language,
laws, religion, and literature. The eye is the only
note-book of the true poet ; but a patchwork of
second-hand memories is a laborious futility, hard
to write and harder to read, with about as much
nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists.
Alexander's bushel of peas was a criticism worthy
of Aristotle's pupil. We should reward such writ-
ing with the gift of a classical dictionary. In
this idyllic kind of poetry also we have a classic,
because Goldsmith went to nature for his " De-
serted Village," and borrowed of tradition nothing
but the poetic diction in which he described it.
This is the only method by which a poet may
surely reckon on ever becoming an ancient him-
self. When I heard it said once that a certain
poem might have been written by Simon ides, I
could not help thinking that, if it were so, then
it was precisely what Simonides could never have
written, since he looked at the world through his

136 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES

own eyes, not through those of Linus or Hesiod,
and thought his own thoughts, not theirs, or we
should never have had him to imitate.

Objections of the same nature, but even stronger,
lie against a servile copying of the form and style
of the Greek tragic drama, and yet more against
the selection of a Greek theme. As I said before,
the life we lead and the views we take of it are
more complex than those of men who lived five
centuries before Christ. They may be better or
worse, but, at any rate, they are different, and ir-
remediably so. The idea and the form in which it
naturally embodies itself, mutually sustaining and
invigorating each other, cannot be divided without
endangering the lives of both. For in all real
poetry the form is not a garment, but a body.
Our very passion has become metaphysical, and
speculates upon itself. Their simple and down-
right way of thinking loses all its savor when we
assume it to ourselves by an effort of thought.
Human nature, it is true, remains always the same,
but the displays of it change ; the habits which
are a second nature modify it inwardly as well as
outwardly, and what moves it to passionate action
in one age may leave it indifferent in the next.
Between us and the Greeks lies the grave of their
murdered paganism, making our minds and theirs
irreconcilable. Christianity as steadily intensifies
the self-consciousness of man as the religion of the
Greeks must have turned their thoughts away from
themselves to the events of this life and the phe-
nomena of nature. We cannot even conceive of

SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 137

their conception of Phoibos with any plausible as-
surance of coming near the truth. To take lesser
matters, since the invention of printing and the
cheapening of books have made the thought of all
ages and nations the common property of educated
men, we cannot so dis-saturate our minds of it as
to be keenly thrilled in the modern imitation by
those commonplaces of proverbial lore in which the
chorus and secondary characters are apt to indulge,
though in the original they may interest us as being
natural and characteristic. In the German-silver
of the modern we get something of this kind, which
does not please us the more by being cut up into
single lines that recall the outward semblance of
some pages in Sophocles. We find it cheaper to
make a specimen than to borrow one.

CHORUS. Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite.

OUTIS. Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day spurn.

CHORUS. The gods themselves are pliable to Fate.

OUTIS. The strong self-ruler owns no other sway.

CHORUS. Sometimes the shortest way goes most about.

OUTIS. Why fetch a compass, having stars within ?

CHORUS. A shepherd once, I know that stars may set.

OUTIS. That thou led'st sheep fits not for leading men.

CHORUS. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain.

We protest that we have read something very like
this, we will not say where, and we might call it
the battledoor and shuttlecock style of dialogue,
except that the players do not seem to have any
manifest relation to each other, but each is intent
on keeping, his own bit of feathered cork contin-
ually in the air.

The first sincerely popular yearning toward anti-

138 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES

quity, the first germ of Schiller's " Gotter Grie-
chenland's " is to be found in the old poem of
Tannhauser, very nearly coincident with the begin-
nings of the Reformation. And if we might alle-
gorize it, we should say that it typified precisely
that longing after Venus, under her other name
of Charis, which represents the relation in which
modern should stand to ancient art. It is the
virile grace of the Greeks, their sense of proportion,
their distaste for the exaggerated, their exquisite
propriety of phrase, which steadies imagination
without cramping it, — it is these that we should
endeavor to assimilate without the loss of our own
individuality. We should quicken our sense of
form by intelligent sympathy with theirs, and not
stiffen it into formalism by a servile surrender of
what is genuine in us to what was genuine in them.
" A pure form," says Schiller, " helps and sustains,
an impure one hinders and shatters." But we
should remember that the spirit of the age must
enter as a modifying principle, not only into ideas,
but into the best manner of their expression. The
old bottles will not always serve for the new wine.
A principle of life is the first requirement of all
art, and it can only be communicated by the touch
of the time and a simple faith in it ; all else is cir-
cumstantial and secondary. The Greek tragedy
passed through the three natural stages of poetry,
— the imaginative in ^Eschylus, the thoughtfully
artistic in Sophocles, the sentimental in Eurip-
ides, — and then died. If people could only learn
the general applicability to periods and schools of

SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 139

what young Mozart says of Gellert, that " he had
written no poetry since his death " ! No effort to
raise a defunct past has ever led to anything but
just enough galvanic twitching of the limbs to re-
mind us unpleasantly of life. The romantic move-
ment of the school of German poets which suc-
ceeded Goethe and Schiller ended in extravagant
unreality, and Goethe himself, with his unerring
common-sense, has given us, in the second part of
Faust, the result of his own and Schiller's common
striving after a Grecian ideal. Euphorion, the
child of Faust and Helen, falls dead at their feet ;
and Helen herself soon follows him to the shades,
leaving only her mantle in the hands of her lover.
This, he is told, shall lift him above the earth.
We fancy we can interpret the symbol. Whether
we can or not, it is certainly suggestive of thought
that the only immortal production of the greatest
of recent poets was conceived and carried out in
that Gothic spirit and form from which he was all
his life struggling to break loose.

THE LIFE AND LETTEES OF JAMES
GATES PERCIVAL

1867

THIS is an interesting and in many respects in-
structive book. Mr. Ward has done his work, as
is fitting, in a loving spirit; and if he over-esti-
mate both what Percival was and what he did, he
enables us to form our own judgment by letting
him so far as possible speak for himself. The book
gives a rather curious picture of what the life of a
man of letters is likely to be in a country not yet
ripe for literary production, especially if he be not
endowed with the higher qualities which command
and can wait for that best of all successes which
comes slowly. In a generation where everybody can
write verses, and where certain modes of thought
and turns of phrase have become so tyrannous that
it is as hard to distinguish between the productions
of one minor poet and another as among those of
so many Minnesingers or Troubadours, there is a
demand for only two things, — for what chimes
with the moment's whim of popular sentiment and
is forgotten when that has changed, or for what is
never an anachronism, because it slakes or seems
to slake the eternal thirst of our nature for those
ideal waters that glimmer before us and still before

JAMES GATES PERC1VAL 141

Percival met neither
of these conditions. With a nature singularly un-
plastic, unsympathetic, and self-involved, he was in-
capable of receiving into his own mind the ordinary
emotions of men and giving them back in music ;
and with a lofty conception of the object and pur-
poses of poesy, he had neither the resolution nor
the power which might have enabled him to realize
it. He offers as striking an example as could be
found of the poetic temperament unballasted with
those less obvious qualities which make the poetic
faculty. His verse carries every inch of canvas
that diction and sentiment can crowd, but the craft
is cranky, and we miss that deep-grasping keel of
reason which alone can steady and give direction.
His mind drifts, too waterlogged to answer the
helm, and in his longer poems, like " Prometheus,"
half the voyage is spent in trying to make up for a
leeway which becomes at last irretrievable. If he
had a port in view when he set out, he seems soon
to give up all hope of ever reaching it ; and wher-
ever we open the log-book, we find him running for
nowhere in particular, as the wind happens to lead,
or lying-to in the merest gale of verbiage. The
truth is, that Percival was led to the writing of
verse by a sentimental desire of the mind, and
not by that concurring instinct of all the faculties
which is a self-forgetting passion of the entire man.
Too excitable to possess his subject fully, as a man
of mere talent even may often do, he is not pos-
sessed by it as the man of genius is, and seems
helplessly striving, the greater part of the time, to

142 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL

make out what, in the name of common or uncom-
mon sense, he is after. With all the stock proper-
ties of verse whirling and dancing about his ears
puffed out to an empty show of life, the reader of
much of his blank verse feels as if a mob of well-
draperied clothes-lines were rioting about him in all
the unwilling ecstasy of a thunder-gust.

Percival, living from 1795 to 1856, arrived at
manhood just as the last war with England had
come to an end. Poor, shy, and proud, there is
nothing in his earlier years that might not be par-
alleled in those of hundreds of sensitive boys who
gradually get the nonsense shaken out of them in
the rough school of life. The length of the school-
ing needful in his case is what makes it peculiar.
Not till after he was fifty, if even then, did he learn
that the world never takes a man at his own valu-
ation, and never pays money for what it does not
want, or think it wants. It did not want his
poetry, simply because it was not, is not, and by
no conceivable power of argument can be made,
interesting, — the first duty of every artistic pro-
duct. Percival, who would have thought his neigh-
bors mad if they had insisted on his buying twenty
thousand refrigerators merely because they had
been at the trouble of making them, and found it
convenient to turn them into cash, could never for-
give the world for taking this business view of the
matter in his own case. He went on doggedly,
making refrigerators of every possible pattern, and
comforted himself with the thought of a wiser pos-
terity, which should have learned that the pur-

JAMES GATES PERC1VAL 143

pose of poetry is to cool and not to kindle. His
u Mind," which is on the whole perhaps the best of
his writings, vies in coldness with the writings of
his brother doctor, Akenside, whose " Pleasures of
Imagination" are something quite other than pleas-
ing of reality. If there be here and there a sem-
blance of pale fire, it is but the reflection of moon-
shine upon ice. Akenside is respectable, because
he really had something new to say, in spite of his
pompous, mouthing way of saying it; but when
Percival says it over again, it is a little too much.
In his more ambitious pieces, and it is curious
how literally the word " pieces " applies to all he
did, he devotes himself mainly to telling us what
poetry ought to be, as if mankind were not always
more than satisfied with any one who fulfils the
true office of poet, by showing them, with the least
possible fuss, what it is. Percival was a professor
of poetry rather than a poet, and we are not sur-
prised at the number of lectures he reads us, when
we learn that in early life he was an excellent de-
monstrator of anatomy, whose subject must be dead
before his business with it begins. His interest in
poetry was always more or less scientific. He was
forever trying experiments in matter and form,
especially the latter. And these were especially
unhappy, because it is plain that he had no musical
ear, or at best a very imperfect one. His attempts
at classical metres are simply unreadable, whether
as verse or prose. He contrives to make even the
Sapphic so, which when we read it in Latin moves
featly to our modern accentuation. Let any one

144 JAMES GATES PERC1VAL

who wishes to feel the difference between ear and
no ear compare Percival's specimens with those in
the same kind of Coleridge, who had the finest
metrical sense since Milton. We take this very
experimenting to be a sufficient proof that Perci-
val's faculty, such as it was, and we do not rate it
highly, was artificial, and not innate. The true
poet is much rather experimented upon by life and
nature, by joy and sorrow, by beauty and defect,
till it be found out whether he have any hidden
music in him that can sinp; them into an accord

O

with the eternal harmony which we call God.

It is easy to trace the literary influences to which
the mind of Percival was in turn subjected. Early
in life we find a taint of Byronism, which indeed
does not wholly disappear to the last. There is
among his poems " An Imprecation," of which a
single stanza will suffice as a specimen : —

" Wrapped in sheets of gory lightning,
While cursed night-hags ring thy knell,
May the arm of vengeance bright' ning,
O'er thee wave the sword of hell! "

If we could fancy Laura Matilda shut up tipsy in
the watch-house, we might suppose her capable of
this melodious substitute for swearing. We con-
fess that we cannot read it without laughing, after
learning from Mr. Ward that its Salmoneus-thun-
derbolts were launched at the comfortable little city
of Hartford, because the poet fancied that the in-
habitants thereof did not like him or his verses so
much as he himself did. There is something deli-
ciously ludicrous in the conception of night-hags

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL 145

ringing the orthodox bell of the Second Congrega-
tional or First Baptist Meeting-house to summon
the parishioners to witness these fatal consequences
of not reading Percival's poems. Nothing less than
the fear of some such catastrophe could compel
the perusal of the greater part of them. Next to
Byron comes Moore, whose cloying sentimentalism
and too facile melody are recalled by the subject
and treatment of very many of the shorter lyrics
of Percival. In " Prometheus " it is Shelley who
is paramount for the time, and Shelley at his worst
period, before his unwieldy abundance of incohe-
rent words and images, that were merely words
and images without any meaning of real experi-
ence to give them solidity, had been compressed
in the stricter moulds of thought and study. In
the blank verse again, we encounter Wordsworth's
tone and sentiment. These were no good models
for Percival, who always improvised, and who
seems to have thought verse the great distinction
between poetry and prose. Percival got nothing
from Shelley but the fatal copiousness which is
his vice, nothing from Wordsworth but that ten-
dency to preach at every corner about a sympathy
with nature which is not his real distinction, and
which becomes a wearisome cant at second-hand.
Shelley and Wordsworth are both stilted, though
in different ways. Shelley wreathed his stilts with
flowers ; while Wordsworth, protesting against the
use of them as sinful, mounts his solemnly at last,
and stalks away conscientiously eschewing what-
ever would serve to hide the naked wood, — nay,

146 JAMES GATES PERC1VAL

was it not Gray's only that were scandalous, and
were not his own, modelled upon those of the
sainted Cowper, of strictly orthodox pattern after
all ? Percival, like all imitators, is caught by the
defects of what he copies, and exaggerates them.
With him the stilts are the chief matter ; and get-
ting a taller pair than either of his predecessors,
he lifts his commonplace upon them only to make
it more drearily conspicuous. Shelley has his
gleams of unearthly wildfire, Wordsworth is by fits
the most deeply inspired man of his generation ;
but Percival has no lucid interval. He is perti-
naciously and unappeasably dull, — as dull as a
comedy of Goethe. He never in his life wrote a
rememberable verse. I should not have thought
this of any consequence now, for we need not try
to read him, did not Mr. Ward with amusing grav-
ity all along assume that he was a great poet.
There was scarce timber enough in him for the
making of a Tiedge or a Hagedorn, both of whom
he somewhat resembles.

Percival came to maturity at an unfortunate time
for a man so liable to self-delusion. Leaving col-
lege with so imperfect a classical training (in spite
of the numerous " testimonials " cited by Mr.
Ward) that he was capable of laying the accent
on the second syllable of Pericles, he seems never
to have systematically trained even such faculty as
was in him, but to have gone on to the end mistak-
ing excitability of brain for wholesome exercise of
thought. The consequence is a prolonged imma-
turity, which makes his latest volume, published in

JAMES GATES PERC1VAL 147

1843, as crude and as plainly wanting in enduring
quality as the first number of his " Clio." We
have the same old complaints of neglected genius,
as if genius could ever be neglected so long as
it has the perennial consolation of its own divine
society, the same wilted sentiment, the same feel-
ing about for topics of verse in which he may
possibly find that inspiration from without which
the true poet cannot flee from in himself. These
tedious wailings about heavenly powers suffocating
in the heavy atmosphere of an uncongenial, unrec-
ognizing world, and Percival is profuse of them,
are simply an advertisement to whoever has ears, of
some innate disability in the man who utters them.
Heavenly powers know very well how to take
care of themselves. The poor " World," meaning
thereby that small fraction of society which has
any personal knowledge of an author or his affairs,
has had great wrong done it in such matters. It
is not, and never was, the powers of a man that
it neglects, — it could not if it would, — but his
weaknesses, and especially the publication of them,
of which it grows weary. It can never supply any
man with what is wanting in himself, and the at-
tempt to do so only makes bad worse. If a man
can find the proof of his own genius only in public
appreciation, still worse, if his vanity console itself
with taking it as an evidence of rare qualities in
himself that his fellow-mortals are unable to see
them, it is all up with him. The " World " reso-
lutely refused to find Wordsworth entertaining, and
it refuses still, on good grounds ; but the genius

148 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL

that was in him bore up unflinchingly, would take
no denial, got its claim admitted on all hands, and
impregnated at last the literature of an entire gen-
eration, though habitans in sicco, if ever genius
did. But Percival seems to have satisfied himself
with a syllogism something like this : Men of
genius are neglected ; the more neglect, the more
genius ; I am altogether neglected, — ergo, wholly
made up of that priceless material.

The truth was that he suffered rather from over-
appreciation ; and " when," says a nameless old
Frenchman, " I see a man go up like a rocket, I
expect before long to see the stick come down."
The times were singularly propitious to mediocrity.
As in Holland one had only to

" Invent a shovel and be a magistrate,"

so here to write a hundred blank verses was to be
immortal, till somebody else wrote a hundred and
fifty blanker ones. It had been resolved unani-
mously that we must and would have a national
literature. England, France, Spain, Italy, each
already had one, Germany was getting one made
as fast as possible, and Ireland vowed that she
once had one far surpassing them all. To be re-
spectable, we must have one also, and that speedily.
We forgot that artistic literature, the only litara-
ture possible under our modern conditions, thrives
best in an air laden with tradition, in a soil mel-
low with immemorial culture, in the temperature
steady yet stimulating of historic and national
associations. We had none of these, but Sydney

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL 149

Smith's scornful question, "Who reads an Ameri-
can book? " tingled in our ears. Surely never was
a young nation setting forth jauntily to seek its
fortune so dumfounded as Brother Jonathan when
John Bull cried gruffly from the roadside, " Stand,
and deliver a national literature ! " After fum-
bling in his pockets, he was obliged to confess that
he had n't one about him at the moment, but vowed
that he had left a first-rate one at home which he
would have fetched along — only it was so ever-
lasting heavy.

If the East should fail, as judged by European
standards it seemed to have done, it was resolved
that a poet should come out of the West, fashioned
on a scale somewhat proportioned to our geograph-
ical pretensions. Our rivers, forests, mountains,
cataracts, prairies, and inland seas were to find in
him their antitype and voice. Shaggy he was to
be, brown-fisted, careless of proprieties, unham-
pered by tradition, his Pegasus of the half-horse,
half-alligator breed. By him at last the epos of
the New World was to be fitly sung, the great
tragi-comedy of democracy put upon the stage for
all time. It was a cheap vision, for it cost no
thought ; and, like all judicious prophecy, it muf-
fled itself from criticism in the loose drapery of its
terms. Till the advent of this splendid apparition,
who should dare affirm positively that he would
never come ? that, indeed, he was impossible ?
And yet his impossibility was demonstrable, never-
theless.

Supposing a great poet to be born in the West,

150 JAMES GATES PERC1VAL

though he would naturally levy upon what had
always been familiar to his eyes for his images and
illustrations, he would almost as certainly look for
his ideal somewhere outside of the life that lay im-
mediately about him. Life in its large sense, and
not as it is temporarily modified by manners or
politics, is the only subject of the poet ; and though
its elements lie always close at hand, yet in its
unity it seems always infinitely distant, and the
difference of angle at which it is seen in India and
in Minnesota is almost inappreciable. Moreover,
a rooted discontent seems always to underlie all
great poetry, if it be not even the motive of it.
The Iliad and the Odyssey paint manners that are
only here and there incidentally true to the actual,
but which in their larger truth had either never
existed or had long since passed away. Had
Dante's scope been narrowed to contemporary
Italy, the Divina Oommedia would have been a
picture-book merely. But his theme was Man,
and the vision that inspired him was of an Italy
that never was nor could be, his political theories
as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shake-
speare shows us less of the England that then was
than any other considerable poet of his time. The
struggle of Goethe's whole life was to emancipate
himself from Germany, and fill his lungs for once
with a more universal air.

Yet there is always a flavor of the climate in
these rare fruits, some gift of the sun peculiar to
the region that ripened them. If we are ever to
have a national poet, let us hope that his nationality

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL 151

will be of this subtile essence, something that shall
make him unspeakably nearer to us, while it does
not provincialize him for the rest of mankind. The
popular recipe for compounding him would give
us, perhaps, the most sublimely furnished bore in
human annals. The novel aspects of life under
our novel conditions may give some freshness of
color to our literature ; but democracy itself, which
many seem to regard as the necessary Lucina of
some new poetic birth, is altogether too abstract an
influence to serve for any such purpose. If any
American author may be looked on as in some sort
the result of our social and political ideal, it is
Emerson, who, in his emancipation from the tradi-
tional, in the irresponsible freedom of his specula-
tion, and his faith in the absolute value of his own
individuality, is certainly, to some extent, typical ;
but if ever author was inspired by the past, it is
he, and he is as far as possible from the shaggy
hero of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, who have
tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite
enough, and may safely doubt whether this satyr
of masquerade is to be our representative singer.
Were it so, it would not be greatly to the credit of
democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we
may safely hope for better things.

The themes of poetry have been pretty much the
same from the first ; and if a man should ever be
born among us with a great imagination, and the
gift of the right word, — for it is these, and not
sublime spaces, that make a poet, — he will be
original rather in spite of democracy than in con-

152 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL

sequence of it, and will owe his inspiration quite
as much to the accumulations of the Old World as
to the promises of the New. But for a long while
yet the proper conditions will be wanting, not,
perhaps, for the birth of such a man, but for his
development and culture. At present, with the
largest reading population in the world, perhaps
no country ever offered less encouragement to the
higher forms of art or the more thorough achieve-
ments of scholarship. Even were it not so, it
would be idle to expect us to produce any literature
so peculiarly our own as was the natural growth of
ages less communicative, less open to every breath
of foreign influence. Literature tends more and
more to become a vast commonwealth, with no
dividing lines of nationality. Any more Cids, or
Songs of Roland, or Nibelungens, or Kalewalas are
out of the question, — nay, anything at all like
them ; for the necessary insulation of race, of coun-
try, of religion, is impossible, even were it desir-
able. Journalism, translation, criticism, and facil-
ity of intercourse tend continually more and more
to make the thought and turn of expression in culti-
vated men identical all over the world. Whether
we like it or not, the costume of mind and body is
gradually becoming of one cut. When, therefore,
the young Lochinvar comes out of the West, his
steed may be the best in all the wide border, but
his pedigree will run back to Arabia, and there
will be no cross of the saurian in him. A priori,
we should expect of the young Western poet that
he would aim rather at elegance and refinement

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL 153

than at a display of the rude vigor that is supposed
to be his birthright ; for to him culture will seem
the ideal thing, and, in a country without a past,
tradition will charm all the more that it speaks
with a foreign accent, and stirs the gypsy blood of
imagination.

Sixty years ago, our anxiety to answer Sydney
Smith's question showed that we felt keenly the
truth implied in it, — that a nation was not to be
counted as a moral force which had not fulfilled
the highest demands of civilization. In our hurry
to prove that we had done so we forgot the condi-
tions that rendered it impossible. That we were
not yet, in any true sense, a nation ; that we wanted
that literary and social atmosphere which is the
breath of life to all artistic production ; that our
scholarship, such as it was, was mostly of that
theological sort which acts like a prolonged drouth
upon the brain ; that our poetic fathers were Joel
Barlow and Timothy Dwight ; all this was nothing
to the purpose ; a literature adapted to the size of
the country was what we must and would have.
Given the number of square miles, the length of
the rivers, the size of the lakes, and you have the
greatness of the literature we were bound to pro-
duce without further delay. If that little dribble
of an Avon had succeeded in engendering Shake-
speare, what a giant might we not look for from
the mighty womb of Mississippi ! Physical Geog-
raphy for the first time took her rightful place as
the tenth and most inspiring Muse. A glance at
the map would satisfy the most incredulous that

154 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL

she had done her best for us, and should we be
wanting to the glorious opportunity? Not we
indeed! So surely as Franklin invented the art
of printing, and Fulton the steam-engine, we would
invent us a great poet in time to send the news by
the next packet to England, and teach her that we
were her masters in arts as well as in arms.

Percival was only too ready to be invented, and
he forthwith produced his bale of verses from a
loom capable of turning off a hitherto unheard-of
number of yards to the hour, and perfectly adapted
to the amplitude of our territory, inasmuch as it
was manufactured on the theory of covering the
largest surface with the least possible amount of
meaning that would hold words together. He was
as ready to accept the perilous emprise, and as
loud in asserting his claim thereto, as Sir Kay
used to be, and with much the same result. Our
critical journals — and America certainly has led
the world in a department of letters which of course
requires no outfit but the power to read and write,
gratuitously furnished by our public schools —
received him with a shout of welcome. Here
came the true deliverer at last, mounted on a
steed to which he himself had given the new name
of " Pegasus," — for we were to be original in
everything, — and certainly blowing his own trum-
pet with remarkable vigor of lungs. Solitary
enthusiasts, who had long awaited this sublime
avatar, addressed him in sonnets which he accepted
with a gravity beyond all praise. (To be sure,
even Mr. Ward seems to allow that his sense of

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL 155

humor was hardly equal to his other transcendent
endowments.) His path was strewn with laurel —
of the native variety, altogether superior to that of
the Old World, at any rate not precisely like it.
Verses signed " P.," as like each other as two peas,
and as much like poetry as that vegetable is like a
peach, were watched for in the corner of a news-
paper as an astronomer watches for a new planet.
There was never anything so comically unreal since
the crowning in the Capitol of Messer Francesco
Petrarca, Grand Sentimentalist in Ordinary at
the Court of King Robert of Sicily. Unhappily,
Percival took it all quite seriously. There was no
praise too ample for the easy elasticity of his swal-
low. He believed himself as gigantic as the shadow
he cast on these rolling mists of insubstantial adula-
tion, and life-long he could never make out why his
fine words refused to butter his parsnips for him,
nay, to furnish both parsnips and sauce. While
the critics were debating precisely how many of
the prime qualities of the great poets of his own
and preceding generations he combined in his sin-
gle genius, and in what particular respects he sur-
passed them all, — a point about which he himself
seems never to have had any doubts, — the public,
which could read Scott and Byron with avidity,
and which was beginning even to taste Words-
worth, found his verses inexpressibly wearisome.
They would not throng to subscribe for a collected
edition of those works which singly had been too
much for them. With whatever dulness of sense
they may be charged, they have a remarkably keen

156 JAMES GATES PERC1VAL

scent for tediousness, and will have none of it un-
less in a tract or sermon, where, of course, it is to be
expected and is also edifying. Percival never for-
gave the public ; but it was the critics that he never
should have forgiven, for of all the maggots that can
make their way into the brains through the ears,
there is none so disastrous as the persuasion that
you are a great poet. There is surely something
in the construction of the ears of small authors
which lays them specially open to the inroads of
this pest. It tickles pleasantly while it eats away
the fibre of will, and incapacitates a man for all
honest commerce with realities. Unhappily its in-
sidious titillation seems to have been Percival's one
great pleasure during life.

I began by saying that the book before me was
interesting and instructive ; but I meant that it
was so not so much from any positive merits of its
own as by the lesson which almost every page of
it suggests. To those who have some knowledge
of the history of literature, or some experience in
life, it is from beginning to end a history of weak-
ness mistaking great desires for great powers. If
poetry, in Bacon's noble definition of it, " adapt
the shows of things to the desires of the mind,"
sentimentalism is equally skilful in making reali-
ties shape themsel/es to the cravings of vanity.
The theory that the poet is a being above the world
and apart from it is true of him as an observer
only who applies to the phenomena about him the
test of a finer and more spiritual sense. That he
is a creature divinely set apart from his fellow-men

JAMES GATES PERC1VAL 157

by a mental organization that makes them mu-
tually unintelligible to each other is in flat con-
tradiction with the lives of those poets universally
acknowledged as greatest. Dante, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Calderon, Milton, Moliere, Goethe, —
in what conceivable sense is it true of them that
they wanted the manly qualities which made them
equal to the demands of the world in which they
lived ? That a poet should assume, as Victor
Hugo used to do, that he is a reorganizer of the
moral world, and that works cunningly adapted to
the popular whim of the time form part of some
mysterious system which is to give us a new
heaven and a new earth, and to remodel laws of
art which are as unchangeable as those of astron-
omy, can do no very great harm to any one but
the author himself, who will thereby be led astray
from his proper function, and from the only path
to legitimate and lasting success. But when the
theory is carried a step further, and we are asked
to believe, as in Percival's case, that, because a
man can write verses, he is exempt from that inex-
orable logic of life and circumstance to which all
other men are subjected, and to which it is whole-
some for them that they should be, then it becomes
mischievous, and calls for a protest from all those
who have at heart the interests of good morals and
healthy literature. It is the theory of idlers and
dilettanti, of fribbles in morals and declaimers
in verse, which a young man of real power may
dally with during some fit of mental indigestion,
but which when accepted by a mature man, and

158 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL

carried along with him through life, is a sure mark
of feebleness and of insincere dealing with him-
self. Percival is a good example of a class of
authors unhappily too numerous in these latter
days. In Europe the natural growth of a world
ill at ease with itself and still nervous with the
frightful palpitation of the French Revolution,
they are but feeble exotics in our healthier air.
Without faith or hope, and deprived of that out-
ward support in the habitual procession of events
and in the authoritative limitations of thought
which in ordinary times gives steadiness to feeble
and timid intellects, they are turned inward, and
forced, liked Hudibras's sword,

" To eat into themselves, for lack
Of other thing to hew and hack."

Compelled to find within them that stay which
had hitherto been supplied by creeds and institu-
tions, they learned to attribute to their own con-
sciousness the grandeur which belongs of right
only to the mind of the human race, slowly en-
deavoring after an equilibrium between its de-
sires and the external conditions under which they
are attainable. Hence that exaggeration of the
individual, and depreciation of the social man,
which has become the cant of modern literature.
Abundance of such phenomena accompanied the
rise of what was called Romanticism in Germany
and France, reacting to some extent even upon
England, and consequently upon America. The
smaller poets erected themselves into a kind of
guild, to which all were admitted who gave proof

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL 159

of a certain feebleness of character which ren-
dered them superior to their grosser fellow-men.
It was a society of cripples undertaking to teach
the new generation how to walk. Meanwhile, the
object of their generous solicitude, what with cling-
ing to Mother Past's skirts, and helping itself by
every piece of household furniture it could lay
hands on, learned, after many a tumble, to get on
its legs and to use them as other generations had
done before it. Percival belonged to this new
order of bards, weak in the knees, and thinking
it healthy exercise to climb the peaks of Dream-
land. To the vague and misty views attainable
from those sublime summits into his own vast
interior, his reports in blank verse and otherwise
did ample justice, but failed to excite the appe-
tite of mankind. He spent his life, like others
of his class, in proclaiming himself a neglected
Columbus, ever ready to start on his voyage when
the public would supply the means of building
his ships. Meanwhile, to be ready at a moment's
warning, he packs his mind pellmell like a car-
pet-bag, wraps a geologist's hammer in a shirt with
a Byron collar, does up Volney's ". Ruins " with
an odd volume of Wordsworth, and another of
Bell's " Anatomy " in a loose sheet of Webster's
Dictionary, jams Moore's poems between the leaves
of Bopp's Grammar, — and forgets only such small
matters as combs and brushes. It never seems
to have entered his head that the gulf between
genius and its new world is never too wide for a
stout swimmer. Like all sentimentalists, he re-

160 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL

versed the process of nature, which makes it a
part of greatness that it is a simple thing to itself,
however much of a marvel it may be to other
men. He discovered his own genius, as he sup-
posed, — a thing impossible had the genius been
real. Donne, who wrote more profound verses than
any other English poet save one only, never wrote
a profounder verse than

" Who knows his virtue's name and place, hath none."

Percival's life was by no means a remarkable
one, except, perhaps, in the number of chances that
seem to have been offered him to make something
of himself, if anything were possibly to be made.
He was never without friends, never without oppor-
tunities, if he could have availed himself of them.
It is pleasant to see Mr. Ticknor treating him with
that considerate kindnes^ which many a young
scholar can remember as shown so generously to
himself. But nothing could help Percival, whose
nature had defeat worked into its every fibre. He
was not a real, but an imaginary man. His early
attempt at suicide (as Mr. Ward seems to think it)
is typical of him. He is not the first young man
who, when crossed in love, has spoken of " loupin
o'er a linn," nor will he be the last. But that
any one who really meant to kill himself should
put himself so resolutely in the way of being
prevented, as Percival did, is hard to believe.
Chateaubriand, the arch sentimentalist of these
latter days, had the same harmless velleity of self-
destruction, enough to scare his sister and so give
him a smack of sensation, but a very different

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL 161

thing from the settled will which would be really
perilous. Shakespeare, always true to Nature,
makes Hamlet dally with the same exciting fancy.
Alas ! self is the one thing the sentimentalist
never truly wishes to destroy ! One remarkable
gift Percival seems to have had, which may be
called memory of the eye. What he saw he never
forgot, and this fitted him for a good geological
observer. How great his power of combination
was, which alone could have made him a great
geologist, we cannot determine. But he seems to
have shown but little in other directions. His fac-
ulty of acquiring foreign tongues I do not value
so highly as Mr. Ward, having known many other-
wise inferior men who possessed it. Indeed, the
power to express the same nothing in ten differ-
ent languages is something to be dreaded rather
than admired. It gives a horrible advantage to
dulness. The best thing to be learned from Per-
cival's life is that he was happy for the first time
when taken away from his vague pursuit of a
vaguer ideal, and set to practical work.

LESSING1

1866

WHEN Burns's humor gave its last pathetic flicker
in his " John, don't let the awkward squad fire over
me," was he thinking of actual brother-volunteers,
or of possible biographers ? Did his words betray
only the rhythmic sensitiveness of poetic nerves,
or were they a foreboding of that helpless future,
when the poet lies at the mercy of the plodder,
of that bi-voluminous shape in which dulness over-
takes and revenges itself on genius at last ? Cer-
tainly Burns has suffered as much as most large-
natured creatures from well - meaning efforts to
account for him, to explain him away, to bring him
into harmony with those well-regulated minds which,
during a good part of the last century, found out a
way, through rhyme, to snatch a prosiness beyond
the reach of prose. Nay, he has been wronged
also by that other want of true appreciation, which

1 G. E. Lessing. Sein Leben und seine Werke. Von Adolf
Stahr. Vermehrte und verbesserte Volks-Ausgabe. Dritte Au-
flage. Berlin. 1864.

The Same. Translated by E. P. Evans, Ph. D., Professor, &c.,
in the University of Michigan. Boston : W. V. Spencer. 1866.
2 vols.

G. E. Lessing' 's Sdmmtliche Schriften, herausgegeben von Karl
Lachraann. 1853-57. 12 Bande.

LESSINO 163

deals in panegyric, and would put asunder those
two things which God has joined, the poet and the
man, as if it were not the same rash improvidence
that was the happiness of the verse and the mis-
fortune of the ganger. But his death-bed was at
least not haunted by the unappeasable apprehen-
sion of a German for his biographer ; and that the
fame of Lessing should have four times survived
this cunningest assault of oblivion is proof enough
that its base is broad and deep-set.

There seems to be, in the average German mind,
an inability or a disinclination to see a thing as it
really is, unless it be a matter of science. It finds
its keenest pleasure in divining a profound signifi-
cance in the most trifling things, and the number
of mare's-nests that have been stared into by the
German Gelehrter through his spectacles passes
calculation. They are the one object of contem-
plation that makes that singular being perfectly
happy, and they seem to be as common as those of
the stork. In the dark forest of aesthetics, partic-
ularly, he finds them at every turn, — " fanno tutto
il loco varo." If the greater part of our English
criticism is apt only to skim the surface, the Ger-
man, by way of being profound, too often burrows
in delighted darkness quite beneath its subject,
till the reader feels the ground hollow beneath
him, and is fearful of caving into unknown depths
of stagnant metaphysic air at every step. The
Commentary on Shakespeare of Gervinus, a really
superior man, reminds one of the Roman Cam-
pagna, penetrated underground in all directions by

164 LESSTNG

strange winding caverns, the work of human borers
in search of we know not what. Above are the
divine poet's larks and daisies, his incommunicable
skies, his broad prospects of life and nature ; and
meanwhile our Teutonic teredo worms his way be-
low, and offers to be our guide into an obscurity
of his own contriving. The reaction of language
upon style, and even upon thought, by its limita-
tions on the one hand, and its suggestions on the
other, is so apparent to any one who has made even
a slight study of comparative literature, that I have
sometimes thought the German tongue at least an
accessory before the fact, if nothing more, in the
offences of German literature. The language has
such a fatal genius for going stern-foremost, for
yawing, and for not minding the helm without some
ten minutes' notice in advance, that he must be a
great sailor indeed who can safely make it the
vehicle for anything but imperishable commodities.
Vischer's jEsihetik, the best treatise on the subject,
ancient or modern, is such a book as none but a
German could write, and it is written as none but
a German could have written it. The abstracts of
its sections are sometimes nearly as long as the
sections themselves, and it is as hard to make out
which head belongs to which tail, as in a knot of
snakes thawing themselves into sluggish individu-
ality under a spring sun. The average German
professor spends his life in making lanterns fit to
guide us throtigh the obscurest passages of all the
ologies and ysics, and there are none in the world
of such honest workmanship. They are durable,

LESSING 165

they have intensifying glasses, reflectors of the
most scientific make, capital sockets in which to
set a light, and a handsome lump of potentially
illuminating tallow is thrown in. But, in order to
see by them, the explorer must make his own
candle, supply his own cohesive wick of common-
sense, and light it himself. And yet the admira-
ble thoroughness of the German intellect ! We
should be ungrateful indeed if we did not acknow-
ledge that it has supplied the raw material in al-
most every branch of science for the defter wits of
other nations to work on ; yet I have a suspicion
that there are certain lighter departments of liter-
ature in which it may be misapplied, and turn into
something very like clumsiness. Delightful as
Jean Paul's humor is, how much more so would it
be if he only knew when to stop ! Ethereally deep
as is his sentiment, should we not feel it more if
he sometimes gave us a little less of it, — if he
would only not always deal out his wine by beer-
measure ? So thorough is the German mind, that
might it not seem now and then to work quite
through its subject, and expatiate in cheerful un-
consciousness on the other side thereof ?

With all its merits of a higher and deeper kind,
it yet seems to us that German literature has not
quite satisfactorily answered that so long-standing
question of the French abbe about esftrit. Hard
as it is for a German to be clear, still harder to be
light, he is more than ever awkward in his attempts
to produce that quality of style, so peculiarly
French, which is neither wit nor liveliness taken

166 LESS1XG

singly, but a mixture of the *two that must be
drunk while the effervescence lasts, and will not
bear exportation into any other language. Ger-
man criticism, excellent in other respects, and im-
measurably superior to that of any other nation in
its constructive faculty, in its instinct for getting
at whatever principle of life lies at the heart of a
work of genius, is seldom lucid, almost never en-
tertaining. It may turn its light, if we have pa-
tience, into every obscurest cranny of its subject,
one after another, but it never flashes light out of
the subject itself, as Sainte-Beuve, for example, so
often does, and with such unexpected charm. We
should be inclined to put Julian Schmidt at the
head of living critics in all the more essential ele-
ments of his outfit ; but with him is not one con-
scious at too frequent intervals of the professorial
grind, of that German tendency to bear on too
heavily, where a French critic would touch and go
with such exquisite measure ? The Great Nation,
as it cheerfully calls itself, is in nothing greater
than in its talent for saying little things aj^reeably,
which is perhaps the very top of mere culture, and
in literature is the next best thing to the power of
saying great things as easily as if they were little.
German learning, like the elephants of Pyrrhus,
is always in danger of turning upon what it was
intended to adorn and reinforce, and trampling it
ponderously to death. And yet what do we not owe
it? Mastering all languages, all records of intel-
lectual man, it has been able, or has enabled others,
to strip away the husks of nationality and conven-

LESS1NG 167

tionalism from the literatures of many races, and
to disengage that kernel of human truth which is
the germinating principle of them all. Nay, it has
taught us to recognize also a certain value in those
very husks, whether as shelter for the unripe or
food for the fallen seed.

That the general want of style in German au-
thors is not wholly the fault of the language is
shown by Heine (a man of mixed blood), who can
be daintily light in German ; that it is not alto-
gether a matter of race, is clear from the graceful
airiness of Erasmus and Reuchlin in Latin, and of
the Baron Grimm in French. The sense of heavi-
ness which creeps over the reader from so many
German books is mainly due, we suspect, to the
language, which seems wellnigh incapable of that
aerial perspective so delightful in first-rate French,
and even English writing. But there must also be
in the national character an insensibility to propor-
tion, a want of that instinctive discretion which we
call tact. Nothing short of this will account for the
perpetual groping of German imaginative literature
after some foreign mould in which to cast its
thought or feeling, now trying a Louis Quatorze
pattern, then something supposed to be Shake-
spearian, and at last going back to ancient Greece,
or even Persia. Goethe himself, limpidly perfect
as are many of his shorter poems, often fails in giv-
ing artistic coherence to his longer works. Leav-
ing deeper qualities wholly out of the question,
Wilhelm Meister seems a mere aggregation of epi-
sodes if compared with such a masterpiece as Paul

168 LESSIXG

and Virginia, or even with a happy improvisation
like the Vicar of Wakefield. The second part of
Faust, too, is rather a reflection of Goethe's own
changed view of life and man's relation to it, than
a harmonious completion of the original conception.
Full of placid wisdom and exquisite poetry it cer-
tainly is ; but if we look at it as a poem, it seems
more as if the author had striven to get in all he
could, than to leave out all he might. We cannot
help asking what business have paper money and
political economy and geognosy here ? We confess
that Thales and the Homunculus weary us not a
little, unless, indeed, a poem be nothing, after all,
but a prolonged conundrum. Many of Schiller's
lyrical poems, though the best of them find no
match in modern verse for rapid energy, the very
axles of language kindling with swiftness, seem
disproportionately long in parts, and the thought
too often has the life wellnigh squeezed out of it in
the sevenfold coils of diction, dappled though it be
with splendid imagery.

In German sentiment, which runs over so easily
into sentimentalism, a foreigner cannot help being
struck with a certain incongruousness. What can
be odder, for example, than the mixture of sensi-
bility and sausages in some of Goethe's earlier
notes to Frau von Stein, unless, to be sure, the
publishing them ? It would appear that Germans
were less sensitive to the ludicrous — and we are
far from saying that this may not have its compen-
satory advantages — than either the English or the
French. And what is the source of this sensibility,

LESSING 169

if it be not an instinctive perception of the incon-
gruous and disproportionate? Among all races,
the English has ever shown itself most keenly
alive to the fear of making itself ridiculous ; and
among all, none has produced so many humorists,
only one of them, indeed, so profound as Cervan-
tes, yet all masters in their several ways. What
English-speaking man, except Boswell, could have
arrived at Weimar, as Goethe did, in that absurd
Werthermontirung ? And where, out of Ger-
many, could he have found a reigning Grand
Duke to put his whole court into the same senti-
mental livery of blue and yellow, leather breeches,
boots, and all, excepting only Herder, and that not
on account of his clerical profession, but of his age ?
To be sure, it might be asked also where else in
Europe was a prince to be met with capable of
manly friendship with a man whose only decora-
tion was his genius ? But the comicality of the
other fact no less remains. Certainly the Ger-
man character is in no way so little remarkable as
for its humor. If we were to trust the evidence of
Herr Hub's dreary Deutsche komische und humor-
istische Dichtung, we should believe that no Ger-
man had even so much as a suspicion of what hu-
mor meant, unless the book itself, as we are half
inclined to suspect, be a joke in three volumes, the
want of fun being the real point thereof. If Ger-
man patriotism can be induced to find a grave de-
light in it, I congratulate Herr Hub's publishers,
and for my own part advise any sober-minded
man who may hereafter " be merry," not to " sing

1TO LESSING

psalms," but to read Hub as the more serious
amusement of the two. There are epigrams there
that make life more solemn, and, if taken in suffi-
cient doses, would make it more precarious. Even
Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorous au-
thors, and never surpassed in comic conception or
in the pathetic quality of humor, is not to be
named with his master, Sterne, as a creative hu-
morist. What are Siebenkas, Fixlein, Schmelzle,
and Fibel, (a single lay-figure to be draped at will
with whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put
in various attitudes,) compared with the living re-
ality of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby,
characters which we do not see merely as puppets
in the author's mind, but poetically projected from
it in an independent being of their own ? Heine
himself, the most graceful, sometimes the most
touching, of modern poets, and clearly the most
easy of German humorists, seems to me wanting in
a refined perception of that inward propriety which
is only another name for poetic proportion, and
shocks us sometimes with an Unflatkigkeit, as at
the end of his Deutschland, which, if it make
Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to believe,
makes other people hold their noses. Such things
have not been possible in English since Swift, and
the persifleur Heine cannot offer the same excuse
of savage cynicism that might be pleaded for the
Irishman.

I have hinted that Herr Stahr's Life of Lessing
is not precisely the kind of biography that would
have been most pleasing to the man who could not

LESS ING 171

conceive that an author should be satisfied with
anything more than truth in praise, or anything
less in criticism. My respect for what Lessing
was, and for what he did, is profound. In the
history of literature it would be hard to find a man
so stalwart, so kindly, so sincere,1 so capable of
great ideas, whether in their influence on the intel-
lect or the life, so unswervingly true to the truth,
so free from the common weaknesses of his class.
Since Luther, Germany has given birth to no such
intellectual athlete, no sou so German to the core.
Greater poets she has had, but no greater writer ;
no nature more finely tempered. Nay, may we
not say that great character is as rare a thing as
great genius, if it be not even a nobler form of
it ? For surely it is easier to embody fine think-
ing, or delicate sentiment, or lofty aspiration, in
a book than in a life. The written leaf, if it be,
as some few are, a safe-keeper and conductor of
celestial fire, is secure. Poverty cannot pinch, pas-
sion swerve, or trial shake it. But the man Less-
ing, harassed and striving life -long, always poor
and always hopeful, with no patron but his own
right-hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, who
saw ruin's ploughshare drive through the hearth on
which his first home-fire was hardly kindled, and
who, through all, was faithful to himself, to his
friend, to his duty, and to his ideal, is something
more inspiring for us than the most glorious utter-

1 " If I write at all, it is not possible for me to write otherwise
than just as I thiuk and feel." — Lessing to his father, 21st De-
cember, 1707.

172 LESSING

ance of merely intellectual power. The figure of
Goethe is grand, it is rightfully preeminent, it has
something of the calm, and something of the cold-
ness, of the immortals ; but the Valhalla of German
letters can show one form, in its simple manhood,
statelier even than his.

Manliness and simplicity, if they are not neces-
sary coefficients in producing character of the purest
tone, were certainly leading elements in the Lessing
who is still so noteworthy and lovable to us when
eighty-six years have passed since his bodily pres-
ence vanished from among men. He loved clear-
ness, he hated exaggeration in all its forms. He
was the first German who had any conception of
style, and who could be full without spilling over
on all sides. Herr Stahr, I think, is not just
the biographer he would have chosen for himself.
His book is rather a panegyric than a biography.
There is sometimes an almost comic disproportion
between the matter and the manner, especially in
the epic details of Lessing's onslaughts on the
nameless herd of German authors. It is as if
Sophocles should have given a strophe to every
bullock slain by Ajax in his mad foray upon the
Grecian commissary stores. He is too fond of
striking an attitude, and his tone rises unpleasantly
near a scream, as he calls the personal attention of
heaven and earth to something which Lessing him-
self would have thought a very matter-of-course
affair. He who lays it down as an axiom, that
" genius loves simplicity," would hardly have been
pleased to hear the " Letters on Literature " called

LESSING 173

the " burning thunderbolts of his annihilating criti-
cism," or the Anti-Gotze pamphlets, " the hurtling
arrows that sped from the bow of the immortal
hero." Nor would he with whom accuracy was a
matter of conscience have heard patiently that the
Letters " appeared in a period distinguished for its
lofty tone of mind, and in their own towering bold-
ness they are a true picture of the intrepid char-
acter of the age." 1 If the age was what Herr
Stahr represents it to have been, where is the great
merit of Lessing ? He would have smiled, we sus-
pect, a little contemptuously, at Herr Stahr's re-
peatedly quoting a certificate from the " historian
of the proud Britons," that ha was " the first critic
in Europe." Whether we admit or not Lord
Macaulay's competence in the matter, we are sure
that Lessing would not have thanked his biogra-
pher for this soup-ticket to a ladleful of fame. If
ever a man stood firmly on his own feet, and asked
help of none, that man was Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing.

Herr Stahr's desire to make a hero of his sub-
ject and his love for sonorous sentences like those
we have quoted above are apt to stand somewhat
in the way of our chance at taking a fair measure
of the man, and seeing in what his heroism really
lay. He furnishes little material for a compara-
tive estimate of Lessing, or for judging of the

1 " I am sure that Kleist would rather have taken another
wound with him into his grave than have such stuff jabbered over
him (si'-h so/ch Ztug nachschwaiztn lassen)." Lessing to Gleim,
6th September, 1759.

174 LESS1NG

foreign influences which helped from time to time
in making him what he was. Nothing is harder
than to worry out a date from Herr Stahr's hay-
stacks of praise and quotation. Yet dates are of
special value in tracing the progress of an intellect
like Lessing's, which, little actuated by an inward
creative energy, was commonly stirred to motion
by the impulse of other minds, and struck out its
brightest flashes by collision with them. He him-
self tells us that a critic should " first seek out
some one with whom he can contend," and quotes
in justification from one of Aristotle's commenta-
tors, Solet Aristoteles qucerere pugnam in suis
libris. This Lessing was always wont to do. He
could only feel his own strength, and make others
feel it, could only call it into full play in an in-
tellectual wrestling-bout. He was always anointed
and ready for the ring, but with this distinction,
that he was no mere prize-fighter, or bully for the
side that would pay him best, nor even a contender
for mere sentiment, but a self -forgetful champion
for the truth as he saw it. Nor is this true of him
only as a critic. His more purely imaginative
works, his Minna, his Emilia, his Nathan, were
all written, not to satisfy the craving of a poetic
instinct, nor to rid head and heart of troublous
guests by building them a lodging outside him-
self, as Goethe used to do, but to prove some thesis
of criticism or morals by which Truth could be
served. • His zeal for her was perfectly unselfish.
" Does one write, then, for the sake of being always
in the right? I think I have been as serviceable

LESSING 175

to Truth," he says, " when I miss her, and my fail-
ure is the occasion of another's discovering her,
as if I had discovered her myself." 1 One would
almost be inclined to think, from Herr Stahr's ac-
count of the matter, that Lessing had been an
autochthonous birth of the German soil, without
intellectual ancestry or helpful kindred. That this
is the sufficient natural history of no original mind
need hardly be said, since originality consists quite
as much in the power of using to purpose what it
finds ready to its hand, as in that of producing
what is absolutely new. Perhaps we might say
that it was nothing more than the faculty of com-
bining the separate, and therefore ineffectual, con-
ceptions of others, and making them into living
thought by the breath of its own organizing spirit.
A great man without a past, if he be not an impos-
sibility, will certainly have no future. He would
be like those conjectural Miltons and Cromwells
of Gray's imaginary hamlet. The only privilege
of the original man is, that, like other sovereign
princes, he has the right to call in the current coin
and reissue it stamped with his own image, as was
the practice of Lessing.

Herr Stahr's over-intensity of phrase is less
offensive than amusing when applied to Lessing's
early efforts in criticism. Speaking of poor old
Gottsched, he says: "Lessing assailed him some-
times with cutting criticism, and again with exqui-
site humor. In the notice of Gottsched's poems,
he says, among other things, ' The exterior of the
1 Letter to Klotz, 9th June, 1766.

176 LESSING

volume is so handsome that it will do great credit
to the bookstores, and it is to be hoped that it will
continue to do so for a long time. But to give
a satisfactory idea of the interior surpasses our
powers.' And in conclusion he adds, 4 These poems
cost two thalers and four groschen. The two
thalers pay for the ridiculous, and the four gro-
schen pretty much for the useful.' " Again, he
tells us that Lessing concludes his notice of Klop-
stock's Ode to God "with these inimitably roguish
words : 4 What presumption to beg thus earnestly
for a woman ! ' Does not a whole book of criticism
lie in these nine words ? " For a young man of
twenty-two, Lessing's criticisms show a great deal
of independence and maturity of thought ; but
humor he never had, and his wit was always of
the bluntest, crushing rather than cutting. The
mace, and not the scimitar, was his weapon. Let
Herr Stahr put all Lessing's " inimitably roguish
words " together, and compare them with these few
untranslatable lines from Voltaire's letter to Rous-
seau, thanking him for his Discours sur Vlnegalite :
" On n'a jamais employe tant d'esprit a vouloir
nous rendre betes ; il prend en vie de marcher a
quatre pattes quand on lit votre ouvrage." Less-
ing from the first was something far better than a
wit. Force was always much more characteristic
of him than cleverness. Sometimes Herr Stahr's
hero-worship leads him into positive misstatement.
For example, speaking of Lessing's Preface to the
" Contributions to the History and Reform of the
Theatre," he tells us that " his eye was directed

LESS1NG 111

chiefly to the English theatre and Shakespeare."
Lessing at that time (1749) was only twenty, and
knew little more than the names of any foreign
dramatists except the French. In this very Preface
his English list skips from Shakespeare to Dry-
den, and in the Spanish he omits Calderon, Tirso
de Molina, and Alarcon. Accordingly, we suspect
that the date is wrongly assigned to Lessing's
translation of La Vida es Suefio. His mind was
hardly yet ready to feel the strange charm of this
most imaginative of Calderon's dramas.

Even where Herr Stahr undertakes to give us
light on the sources of Lessing, it is something of
the dimmest. He attributes " Miss Sara Sampson "
to the influence of the " Merchant of London," as
Mr. Evans translates it literally from the German,
meaning our old friend, " George Barn well." But
I am strongly inclined to suspect from internal
evidence that Moore's more recent "Gamester"
gave the prevailing impulse. And if Herr Stahr
must needs tell us anything of the Tragedy of
Middle-Class Life, he ought to have known that on
the English stage it preceded Lillo by more than a
century, — witness the "Yorkshire Tragedy," —
and that something very like it was even much
older in France. One may fairly complain, also,
that he does not bring out more clearly how much
Lessin£ owed to Diderot both as dramatist and

O

critic, nor give us so much as a hint of what al-
ready existing English criticism did for him in
the way of suggestion and guidance. But though
1 feel it to be my duty to say so much of Herr

178 LESSINQ

Stahr's positive faults and negative shortcomings,
yet we leave him in very good humor. While he
is altogether too full upon certain points of merely
transitory importance, — such as the quarrel with
Klotz, — yet we are bound to thank him both for
the abundance of his extracts from Lessing, and
for the judgment he has shown in the choice of
them. Any one not familiar with his writings will
be able to get a very good notion of the quality of
his mind, and the amount of his literary perform-
ance, from these volumes ; and that, after all, is
the chief matter. As to the absolute merit of his
works other than critical, Herr Stahr's judgment
is too much at the mercy of his partiality to be of
great value.

Of Mr. Evans's translation I can speak for the
most part with high commendation. There are
great difficulties in translating German prose ; and
whatever other good things Herr Stahr may have
learned from Lessing, terseness and clearness are
not among them. I have seldom seen a transla-
tion which read more easily, or was generally more
faithful. That Mr. Evans should nod now and
then I do not wonder, nor that he should some-
times choose the wrong word. I have only com-
pared him with the original where I saw reason
for suspecting a slip ; but, though I have not
found much to complain of, I have found enough
to satisfy me that his book will gain by a careful
revision. I select a few oversights, mainly from
the first volume, as examples. On page 34, com-
paring Lessing with Goethe on arriving at the

LESSING 179

University, Mr. Evans, I think, obscures, if he
does not wholly lose the meaning, when he trans-
lates Leben by " social relations," and is altogether
wrong in rendering Patrizier by " aristocrat." At
the top of the next page, too, " suspicious " is not
the word for beden/dich. Had he been writing
English, he would surely have said " questionable."
On page 47, " overtrodden shoes " is hardly so good
as the idiomatic "down at the heel." On page
104, "• A very humorous representation " is oddly
made to " confirm the documentary evidence." The
reverse is meant. On page 115, the sentence be-
ginning " the tendency in both " needs revising.
On page 138, Mr. Evans speaks of the " Poetical
Village -younker of Destouches." This, I think,
is hardly the English of Le Poete Campagnofd,
and almost recalls Lieberkiihn's theory of transla-
tion, toward which Leasing was so unrelenting, —
" When I do not understand a passage, why, I
translate it word for word." On page 149, " Miss
Sara Sampson "is called " the first social tragedy
of the German Drama." All tragedies surely are
social, except the " Prometheus." 'Bilrgerliche
Trayodie means a tragedy in which the protagonist
is taken from common life, and perhaps cannot be
translated clearly into English except by " tragedy
of middle-class life." So on page 170 we find
Emilia Galotti called a " Virginia bourgeoise," and
on page 172 a hospital becomes a lazaretto. On
page 190 we have a sentence ending in this strange
fashion : " in an episode of the English original,
which Wielaud omitted entirely, one of its charac-

180 LESS ING

ters nevertheless appeared in the German tragedy."
On page 205 we have the Seven Years' War called
" a bloody process" This is mere carelessness, for
Mr. Evans, in the second volume, translates it
rightly " lawsuit." What English reader would
know what "You are intriguing me" means, on
page 228 ? On page 264, vol. ii., I find a passage
inaccurately rendered, which I consider of more
consequence, because it is a quotation from Less-
ing. " O, out upon the man who claims, Almighty
God, to be a preacher of Thy word, and yet so
impudently asserts that, in order to attain Thy
purposes, there was only one way in which it
pleased Thee to make Thyself known to him ! "
This is very far from nur den einziyen Weg
gehgbt den Du Dir gefallen lassen ihm Icund zu
machen ! The ihm is scornfully emphatic. I hope
Professor Evans will go over his version for a
second edition much more carefully than I have
had any occasion to do. He has done an excellent
service to our literature, for which we may heartily
thank him, in choosing a book of this kind to
translate, and translating it so well. I would not
look such a gift horse too narrowly in the mouth.

Let me now endeavor to sum up the result of
Lessing's life and labor with what success I may.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born (January
22, 1729) at Camenz, in Upper Lusatia, the sec-
ond child and eldest son of John Gottfried Lessing,
a Lutheran clergyman. Those who believe in the
persistent qualities of race, or the cumulative prop-
erty of culture, will find something to their purpose

LESSING 181

in his Saxon blood and his clerical and juristic
ancestry. It is worth mentioning, that his grand-
father, in the thesis for his doctor's degree, defended
the right to entire freedom of religious belief. The
name first comes to the surface in Parson Clement
Lessigk, nearly three centuries ago, and survives
to the present day in a painter of some distinction.
It has almost passed into a proverb, that the mo-
thers of remarkable children have been something
beyond the common. If there be any truth in the
theory, the case of Leasing was an exception, as
might have been inferred, perhaps, from the pecu-
liarly masculine type of his character and intellect.
His mother was in no wise superior, but his father
seems to have been a man somewhat above the
pedantic average of the provincial clergymen of his
day, and to have been a scholar in the ampler
meaning of the word. Besides the classics, he had
possessed himself of French and English, and was
somewhat versed in the Oriental languages. The
temper of his theology may be guessed from his
having been, as his son tells us with some pride,
one of " the earliest translators of Tillotson." We
can only conjecture him from the letters which
Lessing wrote to him, from which I should fancy
him as on the whole a decided and even choleric
old gentleman, in whom the wig, though not a pre-
dominant, was yet a notable feature, and who was,
like many other fathers, permanently astonished
at the fruit of his loins. He would have preferred
one of the^o-called learned professions for his son,
— theology above all, — and would seem to have

182 LESS TNG

never quite reconciled himself to his son's distinc-
tion, as being in none of the three careers which
alone were legitimate. Lessing's bearing towards
him, always independent, is really beautiful in its
union of respectful tenderness with unswerving self-
assertion. When he wished to evade the maternal
eye, Gotthold used in his letters to set up a screen
of Latin between himself and her ; and we conjec-
ture the worthy Pastor Primarius playing over
again in his study at Camenz, with some scruples
of conscience, the old trick of Chaucer's cock : —

" Mulier est hominis conf usio ;
Madam, the sentence of this Latin is,
Woman is marine's joy and mannes bliss."

He appears to have snatched a fearful and but ill-
concealed joy from the sight of the first collected
edition of his son's works, unlike Tillotson as they
certainly were. Ah, had they only been Opera !
Yet were they not volumes, after all, and able to
stand on their own edges beside the immortals, if
nothing more ?

After grinding with private-tutor Mylius the
requisite time, Lessing entered the school of Ca-
menz, and in his thirteenth year was sent to the
higher institution at Meissen. We learn little of
his career there, except that Theophrastus, Plautus,
and Terence were already his favorite authors, that
he once characteristically distinguished himself by a
courageous truthfulness, and that he wrote a Latin
poem on the valor of the Saxon soldiers, which his
father very sensibly advised him to slferten. In
1750, four years after leaving the school, he writes

LESS1NG 183

to his father : " I believed even when I was at Meis-
sen that one must learn much there which he can-
not make the least use of in real life (der Welt),
and I now [after trying Leipzig and Wittenberg]
see it all the more clearly," — a melancholy obser-
vation which many other young men have made un-
der similar circumstances. Sent to Leipzig in his
seventeenth year, he finds himself an awkward, un-
gainly lad, and sets diligently to perfecting himself
in the somewhat unscholastic accomplishments of
riding, dancing, and fencing. He also sedulously
frequents the theatre, and wrote a play, " The
Young Scholar," which attained the honor of rep-
resentation. Meanwhile his most intimate compan-
ion was a younger brother of his old tutor Mylius,
a young man of more than questionable morals,
and who had even written a satire on the elders
of Camenz, for which — over-confidently trusting
himself in the outraged city — he had been fined
and imprisoned ; so little could the German Muse,
celebrated by Klopstock for her swiftness of foot,
protect her son. With this scandalous person and
with play-actors, more than probably of both sexes,
did the young Lessing share a Christmas cake sent
him by his mother. Such news was not long in
reaching Camenz, and we can easily fancy how
tragic it seemed in the little parsonage there, to
what cabinet councils it gave rise in the paternal
study, to what ominous shaking of the clerical
wig in that domestic Olympus. A pious fraud is
practised on the boy, who hurries home thinly clad
through the winter weather, his ill-eaten Christmas

184 LESS2NG

cake wringing him with remorseful indigestion, to
receive the last blessing, if such a prodigal might
hope for it, of a broken-hearted mother. He finds
the good dame in excellent health, and softened to-
ward him by a cold he has taken on his pious jour-
ney. He remains at home several months, now writ-
ing Anacreontics of such warmth that his sister (as
volunteer representative of the common hangman)
burns them in the family stove ; now composing
sermons to convince his mother that "he could
be a preacher any day," — a theory of that sacred
office unhappily not yet extinct. At Easter, 1747,
he gets back to Leipzig again, with some scant
supply of money in his pocket, but is obliged to
make his escape thence between two days some-
where toward the middle of the next year, leaving
behind him some histrionic debts (chiefly, we fear,
of a certain Mademoiselle Lorenz) for which he
had confidingly made himself security. Stranded,
by want of floating or other capital, at Witten-
berg, he enters himself, with help from home, as a
student there, but soon migrates again to Berlin,
which had been his goal when making his hegira
from Leipzig. In Berlin he remained three years,
applying himself to his chosen calling of author at
all work, by doing; whatever honest job offered it-
self, — verse, criticism, or translation, — and profit-
ably studious in a very wide range of languages and
their literature. Above all, he learned the great
secret, which his stalwart English contemporary,
Johnson, also acquired, of being able to " dine
heartily " for threepence.

LESSING 185

Meanwhile he continues in a kind of colonial
dependence on the parsonage at Camenz, the bonds
gradually slackening, sometimes shaken a little
rudely, and always giving alarming hints of ap-
proaching and inevitable autonomy. From the
few home letters of Lessing which remain, (cov-
ering the period before 1753, there are only eight
in all,) we are able to surmise that a pretty con-
stant maternal cluck and shrill paternal warn-
ing were kept up from the home coop. We find
Lessing defending the morality of the stage and
his own private morals against charges and sus-
picions of his parents, and even making the awful
confession that he does not consider the Chris-
tian religion itself as a thing "to be taken on
trust," nor a Christian by mere tradition so valu-
able a member of society as " one who has pru-
dently doubted, and by the way of examination
has arrived at conviction, or at least striven to
arrive." Boyish scepticism of the superficial sort
is a common phenomenon enough, but the Less-
ing variety of it seems to me sufficiently rare in
a youth of twenty. What strikes me mainly in
the letters of these years is not merely the ma-
turity they show, though that is remarkable, but
the tone. We see already in them the cheerful
and never overweening self-confidence which al-
ways so pleasantly distinguished Lessing, and that
strength of tackle, so seldom found in literary men,
which brings the mind well home to its anchor,
enabling it to find holding-ground and secure rid-
ing in any sea. " What care I to live in plenty,"

186 LESS1NG

he asks gayly, " if I only live ? " Indeed, Less-
ing learned early, and never forgot, that whoever
would be life's master, and not its drudge, must
make it a means, and never allow it to become
an end. He could say more truly than Goethe,
Mein Acker ist die Zeit, since he not only sowed
in it the seed of thought for other men and other
times, but cropped it for his daily bread. Above
all, we find Lessing even thus early endowed with
the power of keeping his eyes wide open to what
he was after, to what would help or hinder him,
— a much more singular gift than is commonly
supposed. Among other jobs of this first Berlin
period, he had undertaken to arrange the library
of a certain Herr Rudiger, getting therefor his
meals and "other receipts," whatever they may
have been. His father seems to have heard with
anxiety that this arrangement had ceased, and
Lessino* writes to him : " I never wished to have

O

anything to do with this old man longer than
until I had made myself thoroughly acquainted
with his great library. This is now accomplished,
and we have accordingly parted." This was in his
twenty-first year, and I have no doubt, from the
range of scholarship which Lessing had at com-
mand so young, that it was perfectly true. All
through his life he was thoroughly German in
this respect also, that he never quite smelted his
knowledge clear from some slag of learning.

In the early part of the first Berlin residence,
Pastor Primarius Lessing, hearing that his son
meditated a movement on Vienna, was much ex-

LESSING 187

ercised with fears of the temptation to Popery he
would be exposed to in that capital. I suspect
that the attraction thitherward had its source in
a perhaps equally catholic, but less theological
magnet, — the Mademoiselle Lorenz above men-
tioned. Let us remember the perfectly innocent
passion of Mozart for an actress, and be comforted.
There is not the slightest evidence that Lessing's
life at this time, or any other, though careless,
was in any way debauched. No scandal was ever
coupled with his name, nor is any biographic chem-
istry needed to bleach spots out of his reputation.
What cannot be said of Wieland, of Goethe, of
Schiller, of Jean Paul, may be safely affirmed of
this busy and single-minded man. The parental
fear of Popery brought him a seasonable supply
of money from home, which enabled him to clothe
himself decently enough to push his literary for-
tunes, and put on a bold front with publishers.
Poor enough he often was, but never in so shabby
a pass that he was forced to write behind a screen,
like Johnson.

It was during this first stay in Berlin that
Lessing was brought into personal relations with
Voltaire. Through an acquaintance with the great
man's secretary, Richier, he was employed as trans-
lator in the scandalous Hirschel lawsuit, so dra-
matically set forth by Carlyle in his Life of Fred-
erick, though Lessing's share in it seems to have
been unknown to him. The service could hardly
have been other than distasteful to him ; but it must
have been with some thrill of the anche io ! kind

188 LESSING

that the poor youth, just fleshing his maiden pen
in criticism, stood face to face with the famous
author, with whose name all Europe rang from
side to side. This was in February, 1751. Young
as he was, we fancy those cool eyes of his making
some strange discoveries as to the real nature of
that lean nightmare of Jesuits and dunces. Af-
terwards the same secretary lent him the manu-
script of the Siede de Louis XIV., and Less-
ing thoughtlessly taking it into the country with
him, it was not forthcoming when called for by the
author. Voltaire naturally enough danced with
rage, screamed all manner of unpleasant things
about robbery and the like, cashiered the sec-
retary, and was, I see no reason to doubt, really
afraid of a pirated edition. This time his cry
of wolf must have had a quaver of sincerity in
it. Herr Stahr, who can never keep separate the
Lessing as he then was and the Lessing as he
afterwards became, takes fire at what he chooses
to consider an unworthy suspicion of the French-
man, and treats himself to some rather cheap
indignation on the subject. For myself, I think
Voltaire altogether in the right, and I respect
Lessing's honesty too much to suppose, with his
biographer, that it was this which led him, years
afterwards, to do such severe justice to Merope,
and other tragedies of the same author. The
affair happened in December, 1751, and a year
later Lessing calls Voltaire a " great man," and
says of his Amalie that " it has not only beautiful
passages, it is beautiful throughout, and the tears

LESSING 189

of a reader of feeling will justify our judgment."
Surely there is no resentment here. The only
ground for wonder would be its being written
after the Hirschel business. At any rate, we can-
not allow Herr Stahr to shake our faith in the
sincerity of Lessing's motives in criticism, — he
could not in the soundness of the criticism itself,
— by tracing it up to a spring at once so petty
and so personal.

During a part of 1752,1 Lessing was at Witten-
berg again as student of medicine, the parental no-
tion of a strictly professional career of some kind
not having yet been abandoned. We must give
his father the credit of having done his best, in a
well-meaning paternal fashion, to make his son
over again in his own image, and to thwart the
design of nature by coaxing or driving him into the
pinfold of a prosperous obscurity. But Gotthold,
with all his gifts, had no talent whatever for con-
tented routine. His was a mind always in solu-
tion, which the divine order of things, as it is
called, could not precipitate into any of the tradi-
tional forms of crystallization, and in which the
time to come was already fermenting. The prin-
ciple of growth was in the young literary hack, and

1 Herr Stahr heads the fifth chapter of his Second Book,
" Lessing1 at Wittenberg. December, 1751, to November, 1752."
But we never feel quite sure of his dates. The Richier affair puts
Lessing in Berlin in December, 1751, and he took his Master's de-
gree at Wittenberg, 20th April, 1752. We are told that he finally
left Wittenberg "toward the end" of that year. He himself,
writing from Berlin in 1754, says that he has been absent from
that city nur ein halbes Jahr since 1748. There is only one letter
for 1752, dated at Wittenberg, 9th June.

190 LESSING

he must obey it or die. His was to the last a na-
tura naturans, never a naturata. Lessing seems
to have done what he could to be a dutiful failure.
But there was something in him stronger and more
sacred than even filial piety ; and the good old pas-
tor is remembered now only as the father of a son
who would have shared the benign oblivion of his
own theological works, if he could only have had
his wise way with him. Even after never so many
biographies and review articles, genius continues
to be a marvellous and inspiring thing. At the
same time, considering the then condition of what
was pleasantly called literature in Germany, there
was not a little to be said on the paternal side of
the question, though it may not seem now a very
heavy mulct to give up one son out of ten to im-
mortality, — at least the Fates seldom decimate in
this way. Lessing had now, if we accept the com-
mon standard in such matters, " completed his edu-
cation," and the result may be summed up in his
own words to Michaelis, 16th October, 1754 : " I
have studied at the Fiirstenschule at Meissen, and
after that at Leipzig and Wittenberg. But I should
be greatly embarrassed if I were asked to tell
what.''' As early as his twentieth year he had
arrived at some singular notions as to the uses of
learning. On the 20th of January, 1749, he writes
to his mother : " I found out that books, indeed,
would make me learned, but never make me a man'''
Like most men of great knowledge, as distinguished
from mere scholars, he seems to have been always
a rather indiscriminate reader, and to have been

LESSING 191

fond, as Johnson was, of " browsing " in libraries.
Johnson neither in amplitude of literature nor
exactness of scholarship could be deemed a match
for Lessing ; but they were alike in the power
of readily applying whatever they had learned,
whether for purposes of illustration or argument.
They resemble each other, also, in a kind of abso-
lute common-sense, and in the force with which
they could plant a direct blow with the whole
weight both of their training and their tempera-
ment behind it. As a critic, Johnson ends where
Lessing begins. The one is happy in the lower
region of the understanding : the other can breathe
freely in the ampler air of reason alone. John-
son acquired learning, and stopped short through
indolence at a certain point. Lessing assimilated
it, and accordingly his education ceased only with
his life. Both had something of the intellectual
sluggishness that is apt to go with great strength ;
and both had to be baited by the antagonism of
circumstances or opinions, not only into the exhi-
bition, but into the possession of their entire force.
Both may be more properly called original men
than, in the highest sense, original writers.

From 1752 to 1760, with an interval of some-
thing over two years spent in Leipzig to be near a
good theatre, Lessing was settled in Berlin, and
gave himself wholly and earnestly to the life of a
man of letters. A thoroughly healthy, cheerful
nature he most surely had, with something at first
of the careless light-heartedness of youth. Healthy
he was not always to be, not always cheerful, often

192 LESSING

very far from light-hearted, but manly from first
to last he eminently was. Downcast he could
never be, for his strongest instinct, invaluable to
him also as a critic, was to see things as they really
are. And this not in the sense of a cynic, but of
one who measures himself as well as his circum-
stances, — who loves truth as the most beautiful of
all things and the only permanent possession, as
being of one substance with the soul. In a man
like Lessing, whose character is even more inter-
esting than his works, the tone and turn of thought
are what we like to get glimpses of. And for this
his letters are more helpful than those of most
authors, as might be expected of one who said of
himself, that, in his more serious work, "he must
profit by his first heat to accomplish anything."
He began, I say, light-heartedly. He did not be-
lieve that "one should thank God only for good
things." " He who is only in good health, and is
willing to work, has nothing to fear in the world."
" What another man would call want, I call com-
fort." " Must not one often act thoughtlessly, if
one would provoke Fortune to do something for
him ? " In his first inexperience, the life of " the
sparrow on the house-top " (which we find oddly
translated " roof ") was the one he would choose
for himself. Later in life, when he wished to
marry, he was of another mind, and perhaps dis-
covered that there was something in the old fa-
ther's notion of a fixed position. u The life of the
sparrow on the house-top is only right good if one
need not expect any end to it. If it cannot always

LESSING 193

last, every day it lasts too long," — he writes to
Ebert in 1770. Yet even then he takes the manly
view. " Everything in the world has its time,
everything may be overlived and overlooked, if one
only have health." Nor let any one suppose that
Lessing, full of courage as he was, found profes-
sional authorship a garden of Alcinoiis. From cre-
ative literature he continually sought refuge, and
even repose, in the driest drudgery of mere schol-
arship. On the 26th of April, 1768, he writes to
his brother with something of his old gayety :
" Thank God, the time will soon come when I can-
not call a penny in the world my own but I must
first earn it. I am unhappy if it must be by writ-
ing." And again in May, 1771 : " Among all the
wretched, I think him the most wretched who must
work with his head, even if he is not conscious of
having one. But what is the good of complain-
ing ? " Lessing's life, if it is a noble example, so
far as it concerned himself alone, is also a warning
when another is to be asked to share it. He too
would have profited had he earlier learned and
more constantly borne in mind the profound wis-
dom of that old saying, /Si sit prudent ia. Let the
young poet, however he may believe of his art that
" all other pleasures are not worth its pains," con-
sider well what it is to call down fire from heaven
to keep the pot boiling, before he commit himself
to a life of authorship as something fine and easy.
That fire will not condescend to such office, though
it come without asking on ceremonial days to the
free service of the altar.

194 LESS1NG

Lessing, however, never would, even if lie could,
have so desecrated his better powers. For a bare
livelihood, he always went sturdily to the market
of hack-work, where his learning would fetch him a
price. But it was only in extremest need that he
would claim that benefit of clergy. " I am worried,"
he writes to his brother Karl, 8th April, 1773,
" and work because working is the only means to
cease being so. But you and Voss are very much
mistaken if you think that it could ever be indiffer-
ent to me, under such circumstances, on what I
work. Nothing less true, whether as respects the
work itself or the principal object wherefor I work.
I have been in my life before now in very wretched
circumstances, yet never in such that I would have
written for bread in the true meaning of the word.
I have begun my ' Contributions ' because this
work helps me ... to live from one day to an-
other." It is plain that he does not call this kind
of thing in any high sense writing. Of that he
had far other notions ; for though he honestly dis-
claimed the title, yet his dream was always to be a
poet. But he was willing to work, as he claimed
to be, because he had one ideal higher than that of
being a poet, namely, to be thoroughly a man. To
Nicolai he writes in 1758 : " All ways of earning
his bread are alike becoming to an honest man,
whether to split wood or to sit at the helm of state.
It does not concern his conscience how useful he is,
but how useful he would be.v Goethe's poetic sense
was the Minotaur to which he sacrificed everything.
To make a study, he would soil the maiden petals

LESSING 195

of a woman's soul ; to get the delicious sensation
of a reflex sorrow, he would wring a heart. All
that saves his egoism from being hateful is, that,
with its immense reaches, it cheats the sense into
a feeling of something like sublimity. A patch of
sand is unpleasing ; a desert has all the awe of
ocean. Lessing also felt the duty of self-culture ;
but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat
this or that faculty as of strengthening character,
the only soil in which real mental power can
root itself and find sustenance. His advice to his
brother Karl, who was beginning to write for the
stage, is two parts moral to one literary. " Study
ethics diligently, learn to express yourself well and
correctly, and cultivate your own character. With-
out that I cannot conceive a good dramatic author."
Marvellous counsel this will seem to those who
think that wisdom is only to be found in the fool's
paradise of Bohemia !

I said that Lessing's dream was to be a poet.
In comparison with success as a dramatist, he
looked on all other achievement as inferior in kind.
In 1767 he writes to Gleim (speaking of his call
to Hamburg) : " Such circumstances were needed
to rekindle in me an almost extinguished love for
the theatre. I was just beginning to lose myself
in other studies which would have made me unfit
for any work of genius. My Laocobn is now a
secondary labor." And yet he never fell into the
mistake of overvaluing what he valued so highly.
His unflinching common-sense would have saved
him from that, as it afterwards enabled him to see

196 LESSING

that something was wanting in him which must
enter into the making of true poetry, whose distinc-
tion from prose is an inward one of nature, and
not an outward one of form. While yet under
thirty, he assures Mendelssohn that he was quite
right in neglecting poetry for philosophy, because
" only a part of our youth should be given up to
the arts of the beautiful. We must practise our-
selves in weightier things before we die. An old
man, who lifelong has done nothing but rhyme,
and an old man who lifelong has done nothing but
pass his breath through a stick with holes in it, —
I doubt much whether such an old man has arrived
at what he was meant for.1'

This period of Lessing's life was a productive
one, though none of its printed results can be
counted of permanent value, except his share in
the " Letters on German Literature." And even
these must be reckoned as belonging to the years
of his apprenticeship and training for the master-
workman he afterwards became. The small fry of
authors and translators were hardly fitted to call
out his full strength, but his vivisection of them
taught him the value of certain structural prin-
ciples. " To one dissection of the fore quarter of
an ass," says Haydon in his diary, " I owe my in-
formation." Yet even in his earliest criticisms we
are struck with the same penetration and steadiness
of judgment, the same firm grasp of the essential
and permanent, that were afterwards to make his
opinions law in the courts of taste. For example,
he says of Thomson, that, "as a dramatic poet,

LESSING 197

lie had the fault of never knowing when to leave
off; he lets every character talk so long as any-
thing can be said ; accordingly, during these pro-
longed conversations, the action stands still, and
the story becomes tedious." Of " Roderick Ran-
dom," he says that " its author is neither a Rich-
ardson nor a Fielding ; he is one of those writers
of whom there are plenty among the Germans and
French." I cite these merely because their firm-
ness of tone seems to us uncommon in a youth of
twenty-four. In the " Letters," the range is much
wider, and the application of principles more con-
sequent. He had already secured for himself a po-
sition among the literary men of that day, and was
beginning to be feared for the inexorable justice of
his criticisms. His " Fables " and his " Miss Sara
Sampson " had been translated into French, and
had attracted the attention of Grimm, who says of
them (December, 1754) : " These Fables commonly
contain in a few lines a new and profound moral
meaning. M. Lessing has much wit, genius, and
invention ; the dissertations which follow the Fa-
bles prove moreover that he is an excellent critic."
In Berlin, Lessing made friendships, especially with
Mendelssohn, Von Kleist, Nicolai, Gleim, and Ram-
ler. For Mendelssohn and Von Kleist he seems
to have felt a real love ; for the others at most a
liking, as the best material that could be had. It
certainly was not of the juiciest. He seems to have
worked hard and played hard, equally at home in
his study and Baumann's wine-cellar. He was
busy, poor, and happy.

198 LESSING

But he was restless. I suspect that the neces-
sity of forever picking up crumbs, and their occa-
sional scarcity, made the life of the sparrow on the
house-top less agreeable than he had expected.
The imagined freedom was not quite so free after
all, for necessity is as short a tether as dependence,
or official duty, or what not, and the regular occu-
pation of grub-hunting is as tame and wearisome
as another. Moreover, Lessing had probably by
this time sucked his friends dry of any intel-
lectual stimulus they could yield him ; and when
friendship reaches that pass, it is apt to be any-
thing but inspiring. Except Mendelssohn and
Von Kleist, they were not men capable of rating
him at his true value; and Lessing was one of
those who always burn up the fuel of life at a fear-
ful rate. Admirably dry as the supplies of Ramler
and the rest no doubt were, they had not substance
enough to keep his mind at the high temperature
it needed, and he would soon be driven to the cut-
ting of green stuff from his own wood-lot, more
rich in smoke than fire. Besides this, he could
hardly have been at ease among intimates most of
whom could not even conceive of that intellectual
honesty, that total disregard of all personal inter-
ests where truth was concerned, which was an in-
nate quality of Lessing's mind. Their theory of
criticism was. Truth, or even worse if possible, for
all who do not belong to our set ; for us, that deli-
cious falsehood which is no doubt a slow poison,
but then so very slow. Their nerves were unbraced
by that fierce democracy of thought, trampling

LESSING 199

on all prescription, all tradition, in which Lessing
loved to shoulder his way and advance his insup-
portable foot. " What is called a heretic," he
says in his Preface to Berengarius, " has a very
good side. It is a man who at least wishes to see
with his own eyes." And again, " I know not if
it be a duty to offer up fortune and life to the
truth ; . . . but I know it is a duty, if one under-
take to teach the truth, to teach the whole of it, or
none at all." Such men as Gleim and Ramler
were mere dilettanti, and could have no notion
how sacred his convictions are to a militant thinker
like Lessing. His creed as to the rights of friend-
ship in criticism might be put in the words of
Selden, the firm tread of whose mind was like
his own : " Opinion and affection extremely differ.
Opinion is something wherein I go about to give
reason why all the world should think as I think.
Affection is a thing wherein I look after the pleas-
ing of myself." How little his friends were capa-
ble of appreciating this view of the matter is plain
from a letter of Ramler to Gleim, cited by Herr
Stahr. Lessing had shown up the weaknesses of a
certain work by the Abbe Batteux (long ago gath-
ered to his literary fathers as conclusively as poor
old Ramler himself), without regard to the impor-
tant fact that the Abbe's book had been translated
by a friend. Horrible to think of at best, thrice
horrible when the friend's name was Ramler ! The
impression thereby made on the friendly heart
may be conceived. A ray of light penetrated the
rather opaque substance of Herr Ramler's mind,

200 LESSING

and revealed to him the dangerous character of
Lessing. " I know well," he says, " that Herr Less-
ing means to speak his own opinion, and " — what
is the dreadful inference ? — " and, by suppressing
others, to gain air, and make room for himself.
This disposition is not to be overcome." 1 For-
tunately not, for Lessing's opinion always meant
something, and was worth having. Gleim no doubt
sympathized deeply with the sufferer by this trea-
son, for he too had been shocked at some disre-
spect for La Fontaine, as a disciple of whom he
had announced himself.

Berlin was hardly the place for Lessing, if he
could not take a step in any direction without risk
of treading on somebody's gouty foot. This was
not the last time that he was to have experience of
the fact that the critic's pen, the more it has of
truth's celestial temper, the more it is apt to re-
verse the miracle of the archangel's spear, and to
bring out whatever is toadlike in the nature of him
it touches. We can well understand the sadness
with which he said,

"Der Blick des Forscher's fand
Nicht selten mehr als er zu finden wiinschte."

Here, better than anywhere, we may cite something
which he wrote of himself to a friend of Klotz.
Lessing, it will be remembered, had literally " sup-
pressed " Klotz. " What do you apprehend, then,
from me ? The more faults and errors you point
out to me, so much the more I shall learn of you ;

1 " Ramler," writes Georg Forster, " ist die Ziererei, die Eigen-
liebe, die Eitelkeit in eigener Person."

LESSING 201

the more I learn of you, the more thankful shall I
be. ... I wish you knew me more thoroughly. If
the opinion you have of my learning and genius
(Geisf) should perhaps suffer thereby, yet I am
sure the idea I should like you to form of my char-
acter would gain. I am not the insufferable, un-
mannerly, proud, slanderous man Herr Klotz pro-
claims me. It cost me a great deal of trouble
and compulsion to be a little bitter against him." l
Ramler and the rest had contrived a nice little
society for mutual admiration, much like that de-
scribed by Goldsmith, if, indeed, he did not convey
it from the French, as was not uncommon with
him. "' What, have you never heard of the ad-
mirable Brandellius or the ingenious Mogusius, one
the eye and the other the heart of our University,
known all over the world?' 'Never,' cried the
traveller; 'but pray inform me what Brandellius
is particularly remarkable for.' 'You must be
little acquainted with the republic of letters,' said
the other, 'to ask such a question. Brandellius
has written a most sublime panegyric on Mogusius.'
' And, prithee, what has Mogusius done to deserve
so great a favor ? ' ' He has written an excellent
poem in praise of Brandellius.'"2 Lessing was not
the man who could narrow himself to the propor-
tions of a clique ; life long he was the terror of the
Brandellii and Mogusii, and, at the signal given
by him,

1 Lessing to Von Murr, 25th November, 1768. The whole
latter is well worth reading1.

2 Review of Dunkins's Epistle to Lord Chesterfield.

202 LESSING

" They, but now who seemed
In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons.
Now less than smallest dwarfs in narrow room
Throng numberless."

Besides whatever other reasons Lessing may
have had for leaving Berlin, I fancy that his having
exhausted whatever means it had of helping his
spiritual growth was the chief. Nine years later,
he gave as a reason for not wishing to stay long in
Brunswick, *' Not that I do not like Brunswick, but
because nothing comes of being long in a place
which one likes." l Whatever the reason, Lessing,
in 1760, left Berlin for Breslau, where the post of
secretary had been offered him under Frederick's
tough old General Tauentzien. " I will spin my-
self in for a while like an ugly worm, that I may
be able to come to light again as a brilliant winged
creature," says his diary. Shortly after his leaving
Berlin, he was chosen a member of the Academy
of Sciences there. Herr Stahr, who has no little
fondness for the foot-light style of phrase, says,
" It may easily be imagined that he himself re-
garded his appointment as an insult rather than as
an honor." Lessing himself merely says that it
was a matter of indifference to him. which is much
more in keeping with his character and with the
value of the intended honor.

The Seven Years' War began four years before

1 A favorite phrase of his, which Egbert has preserved for us
with its Saxon accent, was, Es kommt dock nischt dabey heraus, im-
plying that one might do something better for a constancy than
shearing swine.

LESS/NO 203

Lessing took up his abode in Breslau, and it may
be asked how he, as a Saxon, was affected by it.
I might answer, hardly at all. His position was
that of armed neutrality. Long ago at Leipzig he
had been accused of Prussian leanings; now in
Berlin he was thought too Saxon. Though he
disclaimed any such sentiment as patriotism, and
called himself a cosmopolite, it is plain enough
that his position was simply that of a German.
Love of country, except in a very narrow parochial
way, was as impossible in Germany then as in
America during the Colonial period. Lessing him-
self, in the latter years of his life, was librarian of
one of those petty princelets who sold their sub-
jects to be shot at in America, — creatures strong
enough to oppress, too weak to protect their people.
Whoever would have found a Germany to love
must have pieced it together as painfully as Isis
did the scattered bits of Osiris. Yet he says that
" the true patriot is by no means extinguished " in
him. It was the noisy ones that he could not
abide ; and, writing to Gleim about his " Grena-
dier " verses, he advises him to soften the tone of
them a little, he himself being a " declared enemy
of imprecations," which he would leave altogether
to the clergy. I think Herr Stahr makes too
much of these anti-patriot flings of Lessing, which,
with a single exception, occur in his letters to
Gleim, and with reference to a kind of verse that
could not but be distasteful to him, as needing no
more brains than a drum, nor other inspiration
than serves a trumpet. Lessing undoubtedly had

204 LESSING

better uses for his breath than to spend it in shout-
ing for either side in this " bloody lawsuit," as
he called it, in which he was not concerned. He
showed himself German enough, and in the right
way, in his persistent warfare against the tyranny
of French taste. Goethe long afterwards incurred
the same reproach and with as much reason.

He remained in Breslau the better part of five
years, studying life in new phases, gathering a
library, which, as commonly happens, he afterwards
sold at great loss, and writing his Minna and his
Laocoon. He accompanied Tauentzien to the siege
of Schweidnitz, where Frederick was present in
person. He seems to have lived a rather free-and-
easy life during his term of office, kept shockingly
late hours, and learned, among other things, to
gamble, — a fact for which Herr Stahr thinks it
needful to account in a high philosophical fashion.
I prefer to think that there are some motives to
which remarkable men are liable in common with
the rest of mankind, and that they may occasion-
ally do a thing merely because it is pleasant, with-
out forethought of medicinal benefit to the mind.
Lessing's friends (whose names were not, as the
reader might be tempted to suppose, Eliphaz, Bil-
dad, and Zophar) expected him to make something
handsome out of his office ; but the pitiful result
of those five years of opportunity was nothing more
than an immortal book. Unthrifty Lessing, to
have been so nice about your fingers, (and so near
the mint, too,) when your general was wise enough
to make his fortune ! As if ink-stains were the

LESS ING 205

only ones that would wash out, and no others had
ever been covered with white kid from the sight of
all reasonable men ! In July, 1764, he had a vio-
lent fever, which he turned to account in his usual
cheerful way : " The serious epoch of my life is
drawing nigh. I am beginning to become a man,
and flatter myself that in this burning fever I have
raved away the last remains of my youthful follies.
Fortunate illness ! " He had never intended to
bind himself to an official career. To his father
he writes : " I have more than once declared that
my present engagement could not continue long,
that I have not given up my old plan of living,
and that I am more than ever resolved to with-
draw from any service that is not wholly to my
mind. I have passed the middle of my life, and
can think of nothing that could compel me to make
myself a slave for the poor remainder of it. I
write you this, dearest father, and must write you
this, in order that you may not be astonished if,
before long, you should see me once more very far
removed from all hopes of, or claims to, a settled
prosperity, as it is called." Before the middle of
the next year he was back in Berlin again.

There he remained for nearly two years, trying
the house-top way of life again, but with indif-
ferent success, as we have reason to think. In-
deed, when the metaphor resolves itself into the
plain fact of living just on the other side of the
roof, — in the garret, namely, — and that from
hand to mouth, as was Lessing's case, we need not
be surprised to find him gradually beginning to see

206 LESS1NG

something more agreeable in ajixirtes Gluck than
he had once been willing to allow. At any rate,
he was willing, and even heartily desirous, that his
friends should succeed in getting for him the place
of royal librarian. But Frederick, for some unex-
plained reason, would not appoint him. Herr Stahr
thinks it had something to do with the old Siecle
manuscript business. But this seems improbable,
for Voltaire's wrath was not directed against Less-
ing ; and even if it had been, the great king could
hardly have carried the name of an obscure Ger-
man author in his memory through all those anx-
ious and warlike years. Whatever the cause, Less-
ing early in 1767 accepts the position of Theatrical
Manager at Hamburg, as usual not too much vexed
with disappointment, but quoting gayly

" Quod non dant proceres, dab it histrio."

Like Burns, he was always " contented wi' little
and canty wi' mair." In connection with his place
as Manager he was to write a series of dramatic
essays and criticisms. It is to this we owe the
Dramaturgie^ next to the Laocoon the most valu-
able of his works. But Leasing, though it is
plain that he made his hand as light as he could,
and wrapped his lash in velvet, soon found that
actors had no more taste for truth than authors.
He was obliged to drop his remarks on the special
merits or demerits of players, and to confine him-
self to those of the pieces represented. By this his
work gained in value ; and the latter part of it,
written without reference to a particular stage, and
devoted to the discussion of those general principles

LESSING 207

of dramatic art on which he had meditated lon<r

O

and deeply, is far weightier than the rest. There
are few men who can put forth all their muscle in
a losing race, and it is characteristic of Lessing
that what he wrote under the dispiritment of fail-
ure should be the most lively and vigorous. Cir-
cumstances might be against him, but he was inca-
pable of believing that a cause could be lost which
had once enlisted his conviction.

The theatrical enterprise did not prosper long ;
but Lessing had meanwhile involved himself as
partner in a publishing business which harassed him
while it lasted, and when it failed, as was inevita-
ble, left him hampered with debt. Help came in
his appointment (1770) to take charge of the Duke
of Brunswick's library at Wolfenbuttel, with a sal-
ary of six hundred thalers a year. This was the
more welcome, as he soon after was betrothed with
Eva Konig, widow of a rich manufacturer.1 Her
husband's affairs, however, had been left in con-
fusion, and this, with Lessing's own embarrass-

1 I find surprisingly little about Lessing in such of the contem-
porary correspondence of German literary men as I have read. A
letter of Boie to Merck (10 April, 1775) gives us a glimpse of him.
" Do you know that Lessing will probably marry Reiske's widow
and come to Dresden in place of Hagftdorn ? The restless spirit !
How he will get along with the artists, half of them, too, Italians,
is to be seen. . . . Liffert and he have met and parted good
friends. He has worn ever since on his finger the ring with the
skeleton and butterfly which Liffert gave him. He is reported to
be much dissatisfied with the theatrical filibustering of Goethe
and Lenz, especially with the remarks on the drama in which so
little respect is shown for his Aristotle, and the Leipzig folks are
said to be greatly rejoiced at getting such an ally."

208 LESSING

ments, prevented their being married till October,
1776. Eva Konig was every way worthy of him.
Clever, womanly, discreet, with just enough coy-
ness of the will to be charming when it is joined
with sweetness and good sense, she was the true
helpmate of such a man, the serious companion
of his mind and the playfellow of his affections.
There is something infinitely refreshing to me in
the love-letters of these two persons. Without
wanting sentiment, there is such a bracing air about
them as breathes from the higher levels and strong-
holds of the soul. They show that self-possession
which can alone reserve to love the power of new
self - surrender, of never cloying, because never
wholly possessed. Here is no invasion and conquest
of the weaker nature by the stronger, but an equal
league of souls, each in its own realm still sover-
eign. Turn from such letters as these to those of
St. Preux and Julie, and you are stifled with the
heavy perfume of a demirep's boudoir, — to those
of Herder to his Caroline, and you sniff no doubt-
ful odor of professional unction from the sermon-
case. Manly old Dr. Johnson, who could be tender
and true to a plain woman, knew very well what
he meant when he wrote that single poetic sentence
of his, — " The shepherd in Virgil grew at last
acquainted with Love, and found him to be a native
of the rocks."

In January, 1778, Lessing's wife died from the
effects of a difficult childbirth. The child, a boy,
hardly survived its birth. The few words wrung
out of Lessing by this double sorrow are to me as

LESSIXG 209

deeply moving as anything in tragedy. " I wished
for once to be as happy (es so gut haben) as other
men. But it has gone ill with me ! " " And I
was so loath to lose him, this son ! " " My wife is
dead ; and I have had this experience also. I re-
joice that I have not many more such experiences
left to make, and am quite cheerful." " If you
had known her ! But they say that to praise one's
wife is self-praise. Well, then, I say no more of
her ! But if you had known her ! " Quite cheer-
ful ! I can recollect nothing more pathetic except
Swift's "Only a lock of hair." On the 10th of
August he writes to Elise Reimarus, — he is writing
to a woman now, an old friend of his and of his
wife, and will be less restrained : " I am left here
all alone. I have not a single friend to whom I can
wholly confide myself. . . . How often must I curse
my ever wishing to be for once as happy as other
men ! How often have I wished myself back again
in my old, isolated condition, — to be nothing, to
wish nothing, to do nothing, but what the present
moment brings with it ! ... Yet I am too proud to
think myself unhappy. I just grind my teeth, and
let the boat go as pleases wind and waves. Enough
that I will not overset it myself." It is plain from
this letter that suicide had been in his mind, and,
with his antique way of thinking on many subjects,
he would hardly have looked on it as a crime. But
he was too brave a man to throw up the sponge to
fate, and had work to do yet. Within a few days
of his wife's death he wrote to Eschenburg : u I am
right heartily ashamed if my letter betrayed the

210 LESSING

least despair. Despair is not nearly so much my
failing as levity, which often expresses itself with
a little bitterness and misanthropy." A stoic, not
from insensibility or cowardice, as so many are,
but from stoutness of heart, he blushes at a mo-
ment's abdication of self-command. And he will
not roil the clear memory of his love with any tinge
of the sentimentality so much the fashion, and to
be had so cheap, in that generation. There is a
moderation of sincerity peculiar to Lessing in the
epithet of the following sentence : " How dearly
must I pay for the single year I have lived with a
sensible wife!" "Werther" had then been pub-
lished four years. Lessing's grief has that pathos
which he praised in sculpture, — he may writhe,
but he must not scream. Nor is this a new thing
with him. On the death of a younger brother, he
wrote to his father, fourteen years before : " Why
should those who grieve communicate their grief
to each^ other purposely to increase it? . . . Many
mourn in death what they loved not living. I will
love in life what nature bids me love, and after
death strive to bewail it as little as I can."

I think Herr Stahr is on his stilts again when
he speaks of Lessing's position at Wolfenbiittel.
He calls it an " assuming the chains of feudal ser-
vice, being buried in a corner, a martyrdom that
consumed the best powers of his mind and crushed
him in body and spirit forever." To crush forever
is rather a strong phrase, Herr Stahr, to be applied
to the spirit, if one must ever give heed to the sense
as well as the sound of what one is writing. But

LESSING 211

eloquence has no bowels for its victims. I have no
doubt the Duke of Brunswick meant well by Less-
ing, and the salary he paid him was as large as he
would have got from the frugal Frederick. But
one whose trade it was to be a Duke could hardly
have had much sympathy with his librarian after
he had once found out what he really was. For
even if he was not, as Herr Stahr affirms, a repub-
lican, and I doubt very much if he was, yet he
was not a man who could play with ideas in the
light French fashion. At the ardent touch of his
sincerity, they took fire, and grew dangerous to
what is called the social fabric. The logic of wit,
with its momentary flash, is a very different thing
from that consequent logic of thought, pushing
forward its deliberate sap day and night with a
fixed object, which belonged to Lessing. The men
who attack abuses are not so much to be dreaded
by the reigning house of Superstition as those who,
as Dante says, syllogize hateful truths. As for
"the chains of feudal service," they might serve
a Fenian Head-Centre on a pinch, but are wholly
out of place here. The slavery that Lessing had
really taken on him was that of a great library, an
Alcina that could always too easily witch him away
from the more serious duty of his genius. That a
mind like his could be buried in a corner is mere
twaddle, and of a kind that has done great wrong
to the dignity of letters. Wherever Lessing sat,
was the head of the table. That he suffered at
Wolfenbiittel is true ; but was it nothing to be in
love and in debt at the same time, and to feel that

212 LESSING

his fruition of the one must be postponed for un-
certain years by his own folly in incurring the
other? If the sparrow-life must end, surely a wee
bush is better than nae beild. One cause of Less-
ing's occasional restlessness and discontent Herr
Stahr has failed to notice. It is evident from
many passages in his letters that he had his share
of the hypochondria which goes with an imagnative
temperament. But in him it only serves to bring
out in stronger relief his deep-rooted manliness.
He spent no breath in that melodious whining
which, beginning with Rousseau, has hardly yet
gone out of fashion. Work of some kind was his
medicine for the blues, — if not always of the kind
he would have chosen, then the best that was to be
had ; since the useful, too, had for him a sweetness
of its own. Sometimes he found a congenial labor
in rescuing, as he called it, the memory of some
dead scholar or thinker from the wrongs of igno-
rance or prejudice or falsehood ; sometimes in fish-
ing a manuscript out of the ooze of oblivion, and
giving it, after a critical cleansing, to the world.
Now and then he warmed himself and kept his
muscle in trim with buffeting soundly the cham-
pions of that shallow artificiality and unctuous
wordiness, one of which passed for orthodox in
literature, and the other in theology. True reli-
gion and creative genius were both so beautiful to
him that he could never abide the mediocre coun-
terfeit of either, and he who put so much of his
own life into all he wrote could not but hold all
scripture sacred in which a divine soul had re-

LESSING 213

corded itself. It would be doing Leasing great
wrong to confound his controversial writing with
the paltry quarrels of authors. His own personal
relations enter into them surprisingly little, for his
quarrel was never with men, but with falsehood,
cant, and misleading tradition, in whomsoever in-
carnated. Save for this, they were no longer read-
able, and might be relegated to that herbarium of
Billingsgate gathered by the elder Disraeli.

So far from being " crushed in spirit " at Wol-
fenbiittel, the years he spent there were among
the most productive of his life. " Emilia Galotti,"
begun in 1758, was finished there and published
in 1771. The controversy with Gotze, by far the
most important he was engaged in, and the one in
which he put forth his maturest powers, was car-
ried on thence. His " Nathan the Wise " (1779),
by which almost alone he is known as a poet
outside of Germany, was conceived and composed
there. The last few years of his life were darkened
by ill-health and the depression which it brings.
His Nathan had not the success he hoped. It is
sad to see the strong, self-sufficing man casting
about for a little sympathy, even for a little praise.
" It is really needful to me that you should have
some small good opinion of it [Nathan], in order
to make me once more contented with myself," he
writes to Elise Reimarus in May, 1779. That he
was weary of polemics, and dissatified with him-
self for letting them distract him from better
things, appears from his last pathetic letter to
the old friend he loved and valued most, — Men-

214 LESSING

delssohn. " And in truth, dear friend, I sorely
need a letter like yours from time to time, if I
am not to become wholly out of humor. I think
you do not know me as a man that has a very hot
hunger for praise. But the coldness with which
the world is wont to convince certain people that
they do not suit it, if not deadly, yet stiffens one
with chill. I am not astonished that all I have
written lately does not please you. ... At best,
a passage here and there may have cheated you by
recalling our better days. I, too, was then a sound,
slim sapling, and am now such a rotten, gnarled
trunk ! " This was written on the 19th of Decem-
ber, 1780 ; and on the 15th of February, 1781,
Lessing died, not quite fifty-two years old. Goethe
was then in his thirty-second year, and Schiller
ten years younger.

Of Lessing's relation to metaphysics the reader
will find ample discussion in Herr Stahr's volumes.
We are not particularly concerned with them, be-
cause his interest in such questions was purely
speculative, and because he was more concerned
to exercise the powers of his mind than to ana-
lyze them. His chief business, his master impulse
always, was to be a man of letters in the nar-
rower sense of the term. Even into theology he
only made occasional raids across the border, as
it were, and that not so much with a purpose
of reform as in defence of principles which ap-
plied equally to the whole domain of thought.
He had even less sympathy with heterodoxy than

LESS1NG 215

with orthodoxy, and, so far from joining a party or
wishing to form one, would have left belief a mat-
ter of choice to the individual conscience. " From
the bottom of my heart I hate all those people who
wish to found sects. For it is not error, but secta-
rian error, yes, even sectarian truth, that makes men
unhappy, or would do so if truth would found a
sect." l Again he says, that in his theological contro-
versies he is " much less concerned about theology
than about sound common-sense, and only there-
fore prefer the old orthodox (at bottom tolerant)
theology to the new (at bottom intolerant), because
the former openly conflicts with sound common-
sense, while the latter would fain corrupt it. I rec-
oncile myself with my open enemies in order the
better to be on my guard against my secret ones." 2
At another time he tells his brother that he has a
wholly false notion of his (Lessing's) relation to
orthodoxy. " Do you suppose I grudge the world
that anybody should seek to enlighten it ? — that I
do not heartily wish that every one should think
rationally about religion ? I should loathe my-
self if even in my scribblings I had any other end
than to help forward those great views. But
let me choose my own way, which I think best
for this purpose. And what is simpler than this
way ? I would not have the impure water, which
has long been unfit to use, preserved ; but I would
not have it thrown away before we know whence
to get purer . . . Orthodoxy, thank God, we

1 To his brother Karl, 20th April, 1774.

2 To the same, 20th March, 1777.

216 LESSING

were pretty well done with ; a partition-wall had
been built between it and Philosophy, behind which
each could go her own way without troubling the
other. But what are they doing now ? They are
tearing down this wall, and, under the pretext
of making us rational Christians, are making us
very irrational philosophers. . . . We are agreed
that our old religious system is false ; but I can-
not say with you that it is a patch-work of bun-
glers and half-philosophers. I know nothing in
the world in which human acuteness has been
more displayed or exercised than in that." 1 Less-
ing was always for freedom, never for looseness,
of thought, still less for laxity of principle. But
it must be a real freedom, and not that vain
struggle to become a majority, which, if it suc-
ceed, escapes from heresy only to make heretics of
the other side. Abire ad plures would with him
have meant, not bodily but spiritual death. He
did not love the fanaticism of innovation a whit
better than that of conservatism. To his sane un-
derstanding, both were equally hateful, as different
masks of the same selfish bully. Coleridge said
that toleration was impossible till indifference made
it worthless. Lessing did not wish for toleration,
because that implies authority, nor could his ear-
nest temper have conceived of indifference. But
he thought it as absurd to regulate opinion as the
color of the hair. Here, too, he would have agreed
with Selden, that " it is a vain thing to talk of an
heretic, for a man for his heart cannot think any

1 To his brother Karl, 2d February, 1774.

LESSING 217

otherwise than he does think." Herr Stahr's chap-
ters on this point, bating a little exaltation of tone,
are very satisfactory ; though, in his desire to make
a leader of Lessing, he almost represents him as
being what he shunned, — the founder of a sect.
The fact is, that Lessing only formulated in his
own way a general movement of thought, and what
mainly interests us is that in him we see a layman,
alike indifferent to clerisy and heresy, giving ener-
getic and pointed utterance to those opinions of his
class which the clergy are content to ignore so long
as they remain esoteric. At present the world has
advanced to where Lessing stood, while the Church
has done its best to stand stock-still ; and it would
be a curious were it not a melancholy spectacle, to
see the indifference with which the laity look on
while theologians thrash their wheatless straw, ut-
terly unconscious that there is no longer any com-
mon term possible that could bring their creeds
again to any point of bearing on the practical life
of men. Fielding never made a profounder stroke
of satire than in Squire Western's indignant " Art
not in the pulpit now ! When art got up there, I
never mind what dost say."

As an author, Lessing began his career at a
period when we cannot say that German literature
was at its lowest ebb, only because there had not
yet been any flood-tide. That may be said to have
begun with him. When we say German literature,
we mean so much of it as has any interest outside
of Germany. That part of the literary histories
which treats of the dead waste and middle of the

218 LESSING

eighteenth century reads like a collection of obitu-
aries, and were better reduced to the conciseness
of epitaph, though the authors of them seem to
find a melancholy pleasure, much like that of un-
dertakers, in the task by which they live. Gott-
sched reigned supreme on the legitimate throne of
dulness. In Switzerland, Bodmer essayed a more
republican form of the same authority. At that
time a traveller reports eight hundred authors in
Zurich alone ! Young aspirant for lettered fame,
in imagination clear away the lichens from their
forgotten headstones, and read humbly the " As I
am, so thou must be," on all ! Everybody remem-
bers how Goethe, in the seventh book of his auto-
biography, tells the story of his visit to Gottsched.
He enters by mistake an inner room at the moment
when a frightened servant brings the discrowned
potentate a periwig large enough to reach to the
elbows. That awful emblem of pretentious sham
seems to be the best type of the literature then pre-
dominant. We always fancy it set upon a pole,
like Gessler's hat, with nothing in it that was not
wooden, for all men to bow down before. The
periwig style had its natural place in the age of
Louis XIV., and there were certainly brains under
it. But it had run out in France, as the tie-wig
style of Pope had in England. In Germany it
was the mere imitation of an imitation. Will it
be believed that Gottsched recommends his Art of
Poetry to beginners, in preference to Breitinger's,
because it " will enable them to produce every spe-
cies of poem in a correct style, while out of that

LESSING 219

no one can learn to make an ode or a cantata " ?
"Whoever," he says, "buys Breitinger's book in
order to learn how to make poems, will too late re-
gret his money." 1 Gottsched, perhaps, did some
service even by his advocacy of French models, by
calling attention to the fact that there was such a
thing as style, and that it was of some consequence.
But not one of the authors of that time can be said
to survive, nor to be known even by name except
to Germans, unless it be Klopstock, Herder, Wie-
land, and Gellert. And the latter's immortality,
such as it is, reminds us somewhat of that Lady
Gosling's, whose obituary stated that she was " men-
tioned by Mrs. Barbauld in her Life of Richardson
4 under the name of Miss M., afterwards Lady G.' "
Klopstock himself is rather remembered for what
he was than what he is, — an immortality of preter-
iteness ; and we much doubt if many Germans put
the " Oberon " in their trunks when they start on
a journey. Herder alone survives, if not as a con-
tributor to literature, strictly so called, yet as a
thinker and as part of the intellectual impulse of
the day. But at the time, though there were two
parties, yet within the lines of each there was a
loyal reciprocity of what is called on such occasions
appreciation. Wig ducked to wig, each blockhead
had a brother, and there was a universal apotheosis
of the mediocrity of our set. If the greatest hap-
piness of the greatest number be the true theory,
this was all that could be desired. Even Lessing
at one time looked up to Hagedorn as the Ger-

1 Gervinus, iv. 62.

220 LESSJNG

man Horace. If Hagedorn were pleased, what
mattered it to Horace? Worse almost than this
was the universal pedantry. The solemn bray
of one pedagogue was taken up and prolonged in
a thousand echoes. There was not only no origi-
nality, but no desire for it, — perhaps even a dread
of it, as something that would break the entente
cordiale of placid mutual assurance. No great
writer had given that tone of good-breeding to the
language which would gain it entrance to the soci-
ety of European literature. No man of genius had
made it a necessity of polite culture. It was still
as rudely provincial as the Scotch of Allan Kam-
say. Frederick the Great was to be forgiven if,
with his practical turn, he gave himself wholly to
French, which had replaced Latin as a cosmopol-
itan tongue. It had lightness, ease,, fluency, ele-
gance, lucidity — in short, all the good qualities
that German lacked. The study of French models
was perhaps the best thing for German literature
before it got out of long-clothes* It was bad only
when it became a tradition and a tyranny. Less-
ing did more than any other man to overthrow this
foreign usurpation when it had done its work.

The same battle had to be fought on English
soil also, and indeed is hardly over yet. For the
renewed outbreak of the old quarrel between Clas-
sical and Romantic grew out of nothing more than
an attempt of the modern spirit to free itself from
laws of taste laid down by the Grand Siecle. But
we must not forget the debt which all modern prose
literature owes to France. It is true that Machia-

LESSING 221

velli was the first to write with classic pith and
point in a living language ; but he is, for all that,
properly an ancient. Montaigne is really the first
modern writer, — the first who assimilated his
Greek and Latin, and showed that an author might
be original and charming, even classical, if he did
not try too hard. He is also the first modern
critic', and his judgments of the writers of antiquity
are those of an equal. He made the ancients his
servants, to help him think in Gascon French ;
and, in spite of his endless quotations, began the
crusade against pedantry. It was not, however,
till a century later, that the reform became com-
plete in France, and then crossed the Channel.
Milton is still a pedant in his prose, and not seldom
even in his great poem. Dryden was the first Eng-
lishman who wrote perfectly easy prose, and he
owed his style and turn of thought to his French
reading. His learning sits easily on him, and has
a modern cut. So far, the French influence was
one of unmixed good, for it rescued us from pedan-
try. It must have done something for Germany
in the same direction. For its effect on poetry we
cannot say as much ; and its traditions had them-
selves become pedantry in another shape when
Lessing made an end of it. He himself certainly
learned to write prose of Diderot; and whatever
Herr Stahr may think of it, his share in the " Let-
ters on German Literature " got its chief inspira-
tion from France.

It is in the Dramaturgic that Lessing first prop-
erly enters as an influence into European literature.

222 LESSING

He may be said to have begun the revolt from
pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have been thus
unconsciously the founder of romanticism. Wie-
land's translation of Shakespeare had, it is true,
appeared in 1762 ; but Lessing was the first critic
whose profound knowledge of the Greek drama
and apprehension of its principles gave weight to
his judgment, who recognized in what the true
greatness of the poet consisted, and found him to
be really nearer the Greeks than any other modern.
This was because Lessing looked always more to
the life than the form, because he knew the classics
and did not merely cant about them. But if the
authority of Lessing, by making people feel easy
in their admiration for Shakespeare, perhaps in-
creased the influence of his works, and if his discus-
sions of Aristotle have given a new starting-point
to modern criticism, it may be doubted whether
the immediate effect on literature of his own criti-
cal essays was so great as Herr Stahr supposes.
Surely " Gotz " and " The Robbers " are nothing
like what he would have called Shakespearian, and
the whole Sturm und Drang tendency would have
roused in him nothing but antipathy. Fixed prin-
ciples in criticism are useful in helping us to form
a judgment of works already produced, but it is
questionable whether they are not rather a hin-
drance than a help to living production. Ben
Jonson was a fine critic, intimate with the classics
as few men have either the leisure or the strength
of mind to be in this age of many books, and built
regular plays long before they were heard of in

LESSING 223

France. But he continually trips and falls flat
Over his metewand of classical propriety, his per-
sonages are abstractions, and fortunately neither
his precepts nor his practice influenced any one of
his greater coevals.1 In breadth of understanding,
and the gravity of purpose that comes of it, he was
far above Fletcher or Webster, but how far below
either in the subtler, the incalculable, qualities of
a dramatic poet ! Yet Ben, with his principles off,
coidd soar and sing with the best of them ; and
there are strains in his lyrics which Herrick, the
most Catullian of poets since Catullus, could imi-
tate, but never match. A constant reference to
the statutes which taste has codified would only be-
wilder the creative instinct. Criticism can at best
teach writers without genius what is to be avoided
or imitated. It cannot communicate life ; and its
effect, when reduced to rules, has commonly been
to produce that correctness which is so praise-
worthy and so intolerable. It cannot give taste,
it can only demonstrate who has had it. Lessing's
essays in this kind were of service to German liter-
ature by their manliness of style, whose example

1 It should be considered, by those sagacious persons who think
that the most marvellous intellect of which we have any record
could not master so much Latin and Greek as would serve a soph-
omore, that Shakespeare must through conversation have pos-
sessed himself of whatever principles of art Ben Jonson and the
other university men had been able to deduce from their study of
the classics. That they should not have discussed these matters
over their sack at the Mermaid is incredible ; that Shakespeare,
who left not a drop in any orange he squeezed, could not also
have got all the juice out of this one, is even more so.

224 LESSING

was worth a hundred treatises, and by the stimulus
there is in all original thinking. Could he have
written such a poem as he was capable of conceiv-
ing, his influence would have been far greater. It
is the living soul, and not the metaphysical ab-
straction of it, that is genetic in literature. If to
do were as easy as to know what were good to be
done ! It was out of his own failures to reach the
ideal he saw so clearly, that Lessing drew the wis-
dom which made him so admirable a critic. Even
here, too, genius can profit by no experience but its
own.

For, in spite of Herr Stahr's protest, we must
acknowledge the truth of Lessing' s own character-
istic confession, that he was no poet. A man of
genius he unquestionably was, if genius may be
claimed no less for force than fineness of mind, —
for the intensity of conviction that inspires the
understanding as much as for that apprehension of
beauty which gives energy of will to imagination, —
but a poetic genius he was not. His mind kindled
by friction in the process of thinking, not in the
flash of conception, and its delight is in demonstra-
tion, not in bodying forth. His prose can leap
and run, his verse is always thinking of its feet.
Yet in his Minna and his Emilia l he shows one

1 In Minna and Emilia Lessing followed the lead of Diderot.
In the Preface to the second edition of Diderot's Theatre, he
says: "I am very conscious that my taste, without Diderot's
example and teaching1, would have taken quite another direction.
Perhaps one more my own, yet hardly one with which my under-
standing would in the long run have been so well content."
Diderot's choice of prose was dictated and justified by the ac-

LESSING 225

faculty of the dramatist, that of construction, in
a higher degree than any other German.1 Here
his critical deductions served him to some purpose.
The action moves rapidly, there is no speechifying,
and the parts are coherent. Both plays act better
than anything of Goethe or Schiller. But it is the
story that interests us, and not the characters.
These are not, it is true, the incorporation of cer-
tain ideas, or, still worse, of certain dogmas, but
they certainly seem something like machines by
which the motive of the play is carried on ; and
there is nothing of that interplay of plot and char-
acter which makes Shakespeare more real in the
closet than other dramatists with all the helps of

centual poverty of his mother-tongue. Lessing certainly revised
his judgment on this point (for it was not equally applicable to
German), and wrote his maturer Nathan in what he took for
blank verse. There was much kindred between the minds of
the two men. Diderot always seems to me a kind of deboshed
Lessing. Lessing was also indebted to Burke, Hume, the two
Wartons, and Hurd, among other English writers. Not that he
borrowed anything of them but the quickening of his own thought.
It should be remembered that Rousseau was seventeen, Diderot
and Sterne sixteen, and Winckelmann twelve years older than
Lessing. Wieland was four years younger.

1 Goethe's appreciation of Lessing grew with his years. He
•writes to Lavater, 18th March, 1781: " Lessing' s death has
greatly depressed me. I had much pleasure in him and much
hope of him." This is a little patronizing in tone. But in the last
year of his life, talking with Eckermann, he naturally antedates
his admiration, as reminiscence is wont to do: "You can con-
ceive what an effect this piece (Minna) had upon us young people,
It was, in fact, a shining meteor. It made us aware that some-
thing higher existed than anything whereof that feeble literary
epoch had a notion. The first two acts are truly a masterpiece of
exposition, from which one learn jd much and can always learn."

226 LESSING

the theatre. It is a striking illustration at once of
the futility of mere critical insight and of Lessing's
want of imagination, that in the Emilia he should
have thought a Roman motive consistent with mod-
ern habits of thought, and that in Nathan he should
have been guilty of anachronisms which violate not
only the accidental truth of fact, but the essential
truth of character. Even if we allowed him im-
agination, it must be only on the lower plane of
prose ; for of verse as anything more than so many
metrical feet he had not the faintest notion. Of
that exquisite sympathy with the movement of the
mind, with every swifter or slower pulse of passion,
which proves it another species from prose, the
very a^poSirrj Kal Xvpa of speech, and not merely a
higher form of it, he wanted the fineness of sense
to conceive. If we compare the prose of Dante or
Milton, though both were eloquent, with their verse,
we see at once which was the more congenial to
them. Lessing has passages of freer and more
harmonious utterance in some of his most careless
prose essays, than can be found in his Nathan from
the first line to the last. In the numeris lege
solutis he is often snatched beyond himself, and be-
comes truly dithyrambic; in his pentameters the
march of the thought is comparatively hampered
and irresolute. His best things are not poetically
delicate, but have the tougher fibre of proverbs.
Is it not enough, then, to be a great prose-writer ?
They are as rare as great poets, and if Lessing
have the gift to stir and to dilate that something
deeper than the mind which genius only can reach,

LESSING 227

what matter if it be not done to music? Of his
minor poems I need say little. Verse was always
more or less mechanical with him, and his epigrams
are almost all stiff, as if they were bad translations
from the Latin. Many of them are shockingly
coarse, and in liveliness are on a level with those of
•our Elizabethan period. Herr Stahr, of course,
cannot bear to give them up, even though Gervinus
be willing. The prettiest of his shorter poems
(Die Namen) has been appropriated by Coleridge,
who has given it a grace which it wants in the
original. His Nathan, by a poor translation of
which he is chiefly known to English readers, is an
Essay on Toleration in the form of a dialogue. As
a play, it has not the interest of Minna or JZmilia,
though the Germans, who have a praiseworthy
national stoicism where one of their great writers
is concerned, find in seeing it represented a grave
satisfaction, like that of subscribing to a monu-
ment. There is a sober lustre of reflection in it
that makes it very good reading ; but it wants the
molten interfusion of thought and phrase which
only imagination can achieve.

As Lessing's mind was continually advancing,
always open to new impressions, and capable, as
very few are, of apprehending the many-sided-
ness of truth, as he had the rare quality of being
honest with himself, his works seem fragmentary,
and give at first an impression of incompleteness.
But one learns at length to recognize and value
this very incompleteness as characteristic of the
man who was growing lifelong, and to whom the

228 LESS ING

selfish thought that any share of truth could be
exclusively his was an impossibility. At the end
of the ninety-fifth number of the Dramaturgic he
says : " I remind my readers here, that these pages
are by no means intended to contain a dramatic
system. I am accordingly not bound to solve all
the difficulties which I raise. I am quite willing
that my thoughts should seem to want connection,
— nay, even to contradict each other, — if only
there are thoughts in which they [my readers] find
material for thinking themselves. I wish to do
nothing more than scatter the fermenta cogni-
tionis" That is Lessing's great praise, and gives
its chief value to his works, a value, indeed, im-
perishable, and of the noblest kind. No writer can
leave a more precious legacy to posterity than this ;
and beside this shining merit, all mere literary
splendors look pale and cold. There is that life in
Lessing's thought which engenders life, and not
only thinks for us, but makes us think. Not scep-
tical, but forever testing and inquiring, it is out of
the cloud of his own doubt that the flash comes at
last with sudden and vivid illumination. Flashes
they indeed are, his finest intuitions, and of very
different quality from the equable north-light of
the artist. He felt it, and said it of himself,
" Ever so many flashes of lightning do not make
daylight." We speak now of those more remem-
berable passages where his highest individuality
reveals itself in what may truly be called a passion
of thought. In the " Laocoon " there is daylight
of the serenest temper, and never was there a

LESS1NG 229

better example of the discourse of reason, though
even that is also a fragment.

But it is as a nobly original man, even more
than as an original thinker, that Lessing is pre-
cious to us, and that he is so considerable in Ger-
man literature. In a higher sense, but in the same
kind, he is to Germans what Dr. Johnson is to us,
— admirable for what he was. Like Johnson's,
too, but still from a loftier plane, a great deal of
his thought has a direct bearing on the immediate
life and interests of men. His genius was not a
St. Elmo's fire., as it so often is with mere poets, —
as it was in Shelley, for example, playing in in-
effectual flame about the points of his thought, —
but was interfused with his whole nature and made
a part of his very being. To the Germans, with
their weak nerve of sentimentalism, his brave com-
mon-sense is a far wholesomer tonic than the cyni-
cism of Heine, which is, after all, only sentimental-
ism soured. His jealousy for maintaining the just
boundaries whether of art or speculation may warn
them to check with timely dikes the tendency of
their thought to diffuse inundation. Their fond-
ness in aesthetic discussion for a nomenclature sub-
tile enough to split a hair at which even a Thomist
would have despaired, is rebuked by the clear sim-
plicity of his style.1 But he is no exclusive prop-
erty of Germany. As a complete man, constant,
generous, full of honest courage as a hardy follower
of Thought wherever she might lead him, above

1 Nothing can be droller than the occasional translation by Vis*
cher of a sentence of Lessing into his own jargon.

230 LESSING

all, as a confessor of that Truth which is forever
revealing itself to the seeker, and is the more loved
because never wholly revealable, he is an ennobling
possession of mankind. Let his own striking
words characterize him : —

" Not the truth of which any one is, or supposes
himself to be, possessed, but the upright endeavor
he has made to arrive at truth, makes the worth of
the man. For not by the possession, but by the
investigation, of truth are his powers expanded,
wherein alone his ever-growing perfection consists.
Possession makes us easy, indolent, proud.

" If God held all truth shut in his right hand,
and in his left nothing but the ever-restless instinct
for truth, though with the condition of for ever
and ever erring, and should say to me, Choose!
I should bow humbly to his left hand, and say,
Father, give ! pure truth is for Thee alone ! "

It is not without reason that fame is awarded
only after death. The dust-cloud of notoriety
which follows and envelops the men who drive
with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.
Lessing, while he lived, had little reward for his
labor but the satisfaction inherent in all work
faithfully done ; the highest, no doubt, of which
human nature is capable, and yet perhaps not so
sweet as that sympathy of which the world's praise
is but an index. But if to perpetuate herself be-
yond the grave in healthy and ennobling influences
be the noblest aspiration of the mind, and its frui-
tion the only reward she would have deemed worthy
of herself, then is Lessing to be counted thrice for-

LESS ING 231

tunate. Every year since he was laid prematurely
in the earth has seen his power for good increase,
and made him more precious to the hearts and in-
tellects of men. " Lessing," said Goethe, " would
have declined the lofty title of a Genius ; but his
enduring influence testifies against himself. On
the other hand, we have in literature other and in-
deed important names of men who, while they
lived, were esteemed great geniuses, but whose
influence ended with their lives, and who, accord-
ingly, were less than they and others thought.
For, as I have said, there is no genius without a
productive power that continues forever opera-
tive." i

1 Eckermann, Gesprache mil Goethe, iii. 229.

ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMEN-
TALISTS 1

1867

" WE have had the great professor and founder
of the philosophy of Vanity in England. As I had
good opportunities of knowing his proceedings al-
most from day to day, he left no doubt in my mind
that he entertained no principle either to influ-
ence his heart or to guide his understanding but
vanity ; with this vice he was possessed to a degree
little short of madness. Benevolence to the whole
species, and want of feeling for every individual
with whom the professors come in contact, form the
character of the new philosophy. Setting up for
an unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity
refuses the just price of common labor, as well as
the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and
which, when paid, honors the giver and the re-
ceiver, and then pleads his beggary as an excuse
for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those
only who touch him by the remotest relation, and
then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a
sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his dis-

1 Histoire des Idtes Morales et Politiques en France auXVIII"*
Siecle. Par M. Jules Barni, Professeur & I'Acade'mie de Geneve.
Tome ii. Paris. 1867.

ROUSSEAU 233

gustful amours, and sends his children to the hospi-
tal of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms
her young ; but bears are not philosophers."

This was Burke's opinion of the only contempo-
rary who can be said to rival him in fervid and
sustained eloquence, to surpass him in grace and
persuasiveness of style. Perhaps we should have
been more thankful to him if he had left us instead
a record of those " proceedings almost from day to
day " which he had such " good opportunities of
knowing," but it probably never entered his head
that posterity might care as much about the do-
ings of the citizen of Geneva as about the sayings
of even a British Eight Honorable. Vanity eludes
recognition by its victims in more shapes, and more
pleasing, than any other passion, and perhaps had
Mr. Burke been able imaginatively to translate
Swiss Jean Jacques into Irish Edmund, he would
have found no juster equivalent for the obnox-
ious trisyllable than " righteous self-esteem." For
Burke was himself also, in the subtler sense of the
word, a sentimentalist, that is, a man who took
what would now be called an aBsthetic view of
morals and politics. No man who ever wrote Eng-
lish, except perhaps Mr. Ruskin, more habitually
mistook his own personal likes and dislikes, tastes
and distastes, for general principles, and this, it
may be suspected, is the secret of all merely
eloquent writing. He hints at madness as an ex-
planation of Rousseau, and it is curious enough
that Mr. Buckle was fain to explain him in the
same way. It is not, I confess, a solution that

234 EOUSSEA U

we find very satisfactory in this latter case.
Burke's fury against the French Revolution was
nothing more than was natural to a desperate man
in self-defence. It was his own life, or, at least,
all that made life dear to him, that was in danger.
He had all that abstract political wisdom which
may be naturally secreted by a magnanimous
nature and a sensitive temperament, absolutely
none of that rough-and-tumble kind which is so
needful for the conduct of affairs. Fastidiousness
is only another form of egotism ; and all men who
know not where to look for truth save in the nar-
row well of self will find their own image at the
bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.
Burke's hatred of Rousseau was genuine and
instinctive. It was so genuine and so instinctive
as no hatred can be but that of self, of our own
weaknesses as we see them in another man. But
there was also something deeper in it than this.
There was mixed with it the natural dread in the
political diviner of the political logician, — in the
empirical, of the theoretic statesman. Burke, con-
founding the idea of society with the form of it
then existing, would have preserved that as the
only specific against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming
that society as it then existed was but another
name for anarchy, would have reconstituted it on
an ideal basis. The one has left behind him some
of .the profoundest aphorisms of political wisdom ;
the other, some of the clearest principles of polit-
ical science. The one, clinging to Divine right,
found in the fact that things were, a reason that

ROUSSEAU 235

they ought to be; the other, aiming to solve the
problem of the Divine order, would deduce from
that abstraction alone the claim of anything to be
at all. There seems a mere oppugnancy of nature
between the two, and yet both were, in different
ways, the dupes of their own imaginations.

Now let us hear the opinion of a philosopher
who was a bear, whether bears be philosophers or
not. Boswell had a genuine relish for what was
superior in any way, from genius to claret, and of
course he did not let Rousseau escape him. " One
evening at the Mitre, Johnson said sarcastically
to me, 4It seems, sir, you have kept very good
company abroad, — Rousseau and Wilkes ! ' I an-
swered with a smile, ' My dear sir, you don't call
Rousseau bad company ; do you really think him a
bad man?' JOHNSON. 'Sir, if you are talking
jestingly of this, I don't talk with you. If you
mean to be serious, I think him one of the worst of
men, a rascal who ought to be hunted out of soci-
ety, as he has been. Three or four nations have
expelled him, and it is a shame that he is protected
in this country. Rousseau, sir, is a very bad man.
I would sooner sign a sentence for his transporta-
tion, than that of any felon who has gone from the
Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like
to have him work in the plantations.' " We were
the plantations then, and Rousseau was destined to
work there in another and much more wonderful
fashion than the gruff old Ursa Major imagined.
However, there is always a refreshing heartiness
in his growl, a masculine bass with no snarl in it.

236 ROUSSEA U

The Doctor's logic is of that fine old crusted Port
sort, the native manufacture of the British conser-
vative mind. Three or four nations have, there-
fore England ought. A few years later, had the
Doctor been living, if three or four nations had
treated their kings as France did hers, would he
have thought the ergo a very stringent one for
England ?

Mr. Burke, who could speak with studied respect
of the Prince of Wales, and of his vices with that
charity which thinketh no evil and can afford to
think no evil of so important a living member of
the British Constitution, surely could have had no
unmixed moral repugnance for Rousseau's "dis-
gustful amours." It was because they were his
that they were so loathsome. Mr. Burke was a
snob, though an inspired one. Dr. Johnson, the
friend of that wretchedest of lewd fellows, Richard
Savage, and of that gay man about town, Topham
Beauclerk, — himself sprung from an amour that
would have been disgustful had it not been royal,
— must also have felt something more in respect
of Rousseau than the mere repugnance of virtue
for vice. We must sometimes allow to personal
temperament its right of peremptory challenge.
Johnson had not that fine sensitiveness to the polit-
ical atmosphere which made Burke presageful of
coming tempest, but both of them felt that there
was something dangerous in this man. Their dis-
like has in it somewhat of the energy of fear.
Neither of them had the same feeling toward Vol-
taire, the man of supreme talent, but both felt that

ROUSSEAU 237

what Rousseau was possessed by was genius, with
its terrible force either to attract or repel.

" By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."

Burke and Johnson were both of them sincere
men, both of them men of character as well as of
intellectual force ; and I cite their opinions of
Rousseau with the respect due to an honest con-
viction which has apparent grounds for its adop-
tion, whether we agree with it or no. But it strikes
me as a little singular that one whose life was so
full of moral inconsistency, whose character is so
contemptible in many ways, in some one might
almost say so revolting, should yet have exercised
so deep and lasting an influence, and on minds so
various, should still be an object of minute and
earnest discussion, — that he should have had such
vigor in his intellectual loins as to have been the
father of Chateaubriand, Byron, Lamartine, George
Sand, and many more in literature, in politics of
Jefferson and Thomas Paine, — that the spots he
had haunted should draw pilgrims so unlike as
Gibbon and Napoleon, nay, should draw them still,
after the lapse of near a century. Surely there
must have been a basis of sincerity in this man sel-
dom matched, if it can prevail against so many
reasons for repugnance, aversion, and even disgust.
He could not have been the mere sentimentalist and
rhetorician for which the rough-and-ready under-
standing would at first glance be inclined to con-
demn him. In a certain sense he was both of these,
but he was something more. It will bring us a

238 ROUSSEAU

little nearer the point I am aiming at if I quote
one other and more recent English opinion of him.
Mr. Thomas Moore, returning pleasantly in a
travelling-carriage from a trip to Italy, in which he
had never forgotten the poetical shop at home, but
had carefully noted down all the pretty images that
occurred to him for future use, — Mr. Thomas
Moore, on his way back from a visit to his noble
friend Byron, at Venice, who had there been lead-
ing a life so gross as to be talked about, even amid
the crash of Napoleon's fall, and who was just
writing " Don Juan " for the improvement of the
world, — Mr. Thomas Moore, fresh from the read-
ing of Byron's Memoirs, which were so scandalous
that, by some hocus-pocus, three thousand guineas
afterward found their way into his own pocket for
consenting to suppress them, — Mr. Thomas Moore,
the ci-devant friend of the Prince Regent, and the
author of Little's Poems, among other objects of pil-
grimage visits Les Ckarmettes, where Rousseau had
lived with Madame de Warens. So good an oppor-
tunity for occasional verses was not to be lost, so
good a text for a little virtuous moralizing not to
be thrown away ; and accordingly Mr. Moore pours
out several pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sen-
suality of the dead man of genius. There was no
horror for Byron. Toward him all was suavity and
decorous bienseance. That lively sense of benefits
to be received made the Irish Anacreon wink with
both his little eyes. In the judgment of a liberal
like Mr. Moore, were not the errors of a lord ex-
cusable ? But with poor Rousseau the case was

ROUSSEAU 239

very different. The son of a watchmaker, an out-
cast from boyhood up, always on the perilous edge
of poverty, — what right had he to indulge himself
in any immoralities ? So it is always with the sen-
timentalists. It is never the thing in itself that is
bad or good, but the thing in its relation to some
conventional and mostly selfish standard. Moore
could be a moralist, in this case, without any
trouble, and with the advantage of winning Lord
Lansdowne's approval ; he could write some grace-
ful verses which everybody would buy, and for the
rest it is not hard to be a stoic in eight-syllable
measure and in a travelling - carriage. The next
dinner at Bowood will taste none the worse. Ac-
cordingly he speaks of

" The mire, the strife
And vanities of this man's life,
Who more than all that e'er have glowed
With fancy's flame (and it was his
In fullest warmth and radiance) showed
What an impostor Genius is ;
How, with that strong- mimetic art
Which forms its life and soul, it takes
All shapes of thought, all hues of heart,
Nor feels itself one throb it wakes ;
How, like a gem, its light may shine,
O'er the dark path by mortals trod,
Itself as mean a worm the while
As crawls at midnight o'er the sod ,

How, with the pencil hardly dry

From colouring up such scenes of love

And beauty as make young hearts sigh,

And dream and think through heaven they rove," &c.

Very spirited, is it not ? One has only to over-

240 ROUSSEAU

look a little threadbareness in the similes, and it is
very good oratorical verse. But would we believe
in it, we must never read Mr. Moore's own journal,
and find out how thin a piece of veneering his own
life was, — how he lived in sham till his very na-
ture had become subdued to it, till he could per-
suade himself that a sham could be written into a
reality, and actually made experiment thereof in
his Diary.

One verse in this diatribe deserves a special com-
ment, —

" What an impostor Genius is ! "

In two respects there is nothing to be objected to
in it. It is of eight syllables, and " is " rhymes
unexceptionably with " his." But is there the least
filament of truth in it? I venture to assert,
not the least. It was not Rousseau's genius that
was an impostor. It was the one thing in him
that was always true. We grant that, in allowing
that a man has genius. Talent is that which is in
a man's power ; genius is that in whose power a
man is. That is the very difference between them.
We might turn the tables on Moore, the man of
talent, and say truly enough, What an impostor
talent is ! Moore talks of the mimetic power with
a total misapprehension of what it really is. The
mimetic power had nothing whatever to do with
the affair. Rousseau had none of it ; Shakespeare
had it in excess ; but what difference would it make
in our judgment of Hamlet or Othello if a man-
uscript of Shakespeare's memoirs should turn up,
and we should find out that he had been a pitiful

ROUSSEAU 241

fellow ? None in the world ; for he is not a pro-
fessed moralist, and his life does not give the war-
rant to his words. But if Demosthenes, after all
his Philippics, throws away his shield and runs,
we feel the contemptibleness of the contradiction.
With genius itself we never find any fault. It
would be an over-nicety that would do that. "We
do not get invited to nectar and ambrosia so often
that we think of grumbling and saying we have
better at home. No ; the same genius that mas-
tered him who wrote the poem masters us in read-
ing it, and we care for nothing outside the poem
itself. How the author lived, what he wore, how
he looked, — all that is mere gossip, about which
we need not trouble ourselves. Whatever he was
or did, somehow or other God let him be worthy to
write this, and that is enough for us. We forgive
everything to the genius ; we are inexorable to the
man. Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, — what have
their biographies to do with us ? Genius is not a
question of character. It may be sordid, like the
lamp of Aladdin, in its externals ; what care we,
while the touch of it builds palaces for us, makes
us rich as only men in dream-land are rich, and
lords to the utmost bound of imagination? So,
when people talk of the ungrateful way in which
the world treats its geniuses, they speak unwisely.
There is no work of genius which has not been the
delight of mankind, no word of genius to which
the human heart and soul have not, sooner or later,
responded. But the man whom the genius takes
possession of for its pen, for its trowel, for its

242 ROUSSEAU

pencil, for its chisel, him the world treats according
to his deserts. Does Burns drink? It sets him
to gauging casks of gin. For, remember, it is not
to the practical world that the genius appeals ; it
is the practical world which judges of the man's
fitness for its uses, and has a right so to judge.
No amount of patronage could have made distilled
liquors less toothsome to Robbie Burns, as no
amount of them could make a Burns of the Ettrick
Shepherd.

There is an old story in the Gesta Romanorum
of a priest who was found fault with by one of his
parishioners because his life was in painful discord-
ance with his teaching. So one day he takes his
critic out to a stream, and, giving him to drink of
it, asks him if he does not find it sweet and pure
water. The parishioner, having answered that it
was, is taken to the source, and finds that what
had so refreshed him flowed from between the jaws
of a dead dog. " Let this teach thee," said the
priest, " that the very best doctrine may take its rise
in a very impure and disgustful spring, and that ex-
cellent morals may be taught by a man who has no
morals at all." It is easy enough to see the fallacy
here. Had the man known beforehand from what
a carrion fountain-head the stream issued, he could
not have drunk of it without loathing. Had the
priest merely bidden him to look at the stream and
see how beautiful it was, instead of tasting it, it
would have been quite another matter. And this
is precisely the difference between what appeals to
our aesthetic or to our moral sense, between what
is judged of by the taste or by the conscience.

ROUSSEAU 243

It is when the sentimentalist turns preacher of
morals that we investigate his character, and are
justified in so doing. He may express as many and
as delicate shades of feeling as he likes, — for this
the sensibility of his organization perfectly fits him
and no other person could do it so well, — but the
moment he undertakes to establish his feeling as a
rule of conduct, we ask at once how far are his own
life and deed in accordance with what he preaches ?
For every man feels instinctively that all the beau-
tiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a sin-
gle lovely action ; and that while tenderness of
feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are
accidents of temperament, goodness is an achieve-
ment of the will and a quality of the life. Fine
words, says our homely old proverb, butter no pars-
nips ; and if the question be how to render those
vegetables palatable, an ounce of butter would be
worth more than all the orations of Cicero. The
only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is
that he give himself for a principle. Words,
money, all things else, are comparatively easy to
give away ; but when a man makes a gift of his
daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth,
whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.
From that sincerity his words gain the force and
pertinency of deeds, and his money is no longer the
pale drudge 'twixt man and man, but, by a beau-
tiful magic, what erewhile bore the image and su-
perscription of Caesar seems now to bear the image
and superscription of God. It is thus that there
is a genius for goodness, for magnanimity, for self-

244 ROUSSEAU

sacrifice, as well as for creative art ; and it is thus
that by a more refined sort of Platonism the Infi-
nite Beauty dwells in and shapes to its own likeness
the soul which gives it body and individuality.
But when Moore charges genius with being an
impostor, the confusion of his ideas is pitiable.
There is nothing so true, so sincere, so downright
and forthright, as genius. It is always truer than
the man himself is, greater than he. If Shake-
speare the man had been as marvellous a creature
as the genius that wrote his plays, that genius so
comprehensive in its intelligence, so wise even in
its play that its clowns are moralists and philoso-
phers, so penetrative that a single one of its phrases
reveals to us the secret of our own character, would
his contemporaries have left us so wholly without
record of him as they have done, distinguishing
him in no wise from his fellow-players ?

Rousseau, no doubt, was weak, nay, more than
that, was sometimes despicable, but yet is not
fairly to be reckoned among the herd of sentimen-
talists. It is shocking that a man whose preaching
made it fashionable for women of rank to nurse
their children should have sent his own, as soon as
born, to the foundling hospital, still more shocking
that, in a note to his Discours sur Vlnegalite, he
should speak of this crime as one of the conse-
quences of our social system. But for all that there
was a faith and an ardor of conviction in him that
distinguish him from most of the writers of his time.
Nor were his practice and his preaching always in.
consistent. He contrived to pay regularly, what-

ROUSSEAU 245

ever his own circumstances were, a pension of one
hundred livres a year to a maternal aunt who had
been kind to him in childhood. Nor was his ascet-
icism a sham. He might have turned his gift into
laced coats and chdteaux as easily as Voltaire, had
he not held it too sacred to be bartered away in
any such losing exchange.

But what is worthy of especial remark is this, —
that in nearly all that he wrote his leading object
was the good of his kind, and that, through all
the vicissitudes of a life which illness, sensibility
of temperament, and the approaches of insanity
rendered wretched, — the associate of infidels, the
foundling child, as it were, of an age without be-
lief, least of all with any belief in itself, — he pro-
fessed and evidently felt deeply a faith in the good-
ness both of man and of God. There is no such
thing as scoffing in his writings. On the other
hand, there is no stereotyped morality. He does
not ignore the existence of scepticism ; he recog-
nizes its existence in his own nature, meets it
frankly face to face, and makes it confess that
there are things in the teaching of Christ that are
deeper than its doubt. The influence of his early
education at Geneva is apparent here. An intel-
lect so acute as his, trained in the school of Calvin
in a republic where theological discussion was as
much the amusement of the people as the opera
was at Paris, could not fail to be a good logician.
He had the fortitude to follow his logic wherever
it led him. Jf the very impressibility of character
which quickened his perception of the beauties of

246 ROUSSEAU

nature, and made him alive to the charm of music
and musical expression, prevented him from being
in the highest sense an original writer, and if his
ideas were mostly suggested to him by books, yet
the clearness, consecutiveness, and eloquence with
which he stated and enforced them made them
his own. There was at least that original fire in
him which could fuse them and run them in a
novel mould. His power lay in this very ability
of manipulating the thoughts of others. Fond of
paradox he doubtless was, but he had a way of put-
ting things that arrested attention and excited
thought.

It was, perhaps, this very sensibility to the sur-
rounding atmosphere of feeling and speculation,
which made Rousseau more directly influential on
contemporary thought (or perhaps we should say
sentiment) than any writer of his time. And this
is rarely consistent with enduring greatness in lit-
erature. It forces us to remember, against our
will, the oratorical character of his works. They
were all pleas, and he a great advocate, with Europe
in the jury-box. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm,
eloquence produces conviction for the moment, but
it is only by truth to nature and the everlasting in-
tuitions of mankind that those abiding influences
are won that enlarge from generation to generation.
Rousseau was in many respects — as great pleaders
always are — a man of the day, who must needs
become a mere name to posterity, yet he could not
but have had in him some not inconsiderable share
of that principle by which man eternizes himself.

ROUSSEAU 247

For it is only to such that the night cometh not in
which no man shall work, and he is still operative
both in politics and literature by the principles he
formulated or the emotions to which he gave a voice
so piercing and so sympathetic.

In judging Rousseau, it would be unfair not to
take note of the malarious atmosphere in which he
grew up. The constitution of his mind was thus
early infected with a feverish taint that made him
shiveringly sensitive to a temperature which hardier
natures found bracing. To him this rough world
was but too literally a rack. Good-humored Mother
Nature commonly imbeds the nerves of her chil-
dren in a padding of self-conceit that serves as a
buffer against the ordinary shocks to which even a
life of routine is liable, and it would seem at first
sight as if Rousseau had been better cared for than
usual in this regard. But as his self-conceit was
enormous, so was the reaction from it proportion-
ate, and the fretting suspiciousness of temper, sure
mark of an unsound mind, which rendered him in-
capable of intimate friendship, while passionately
longing for it, became inevitably, when turned
inward, a tormenting self-distrust. To dwell in
unrealities is the doom of the sentimentalist; but
it should not be forgotten that the same fitful in-
tensity of emotion which makes them real as the
means of elation, gives them substance also for tor-
ture. Too irritably jealous to endure the rude
society of men, he steeped his senses in the en-
ervating incense that women are only too ready
to burn. If their friendship be a safeguard to

248 ROUSSEAU

the other sex, their homage is fatal to all but the
strongest, and Rousseau was weak both by inher-
itance and early training. His father was one of
those feeble creatures for whom a fine phrase could
always satisfactorily fill the void that non-perform-
ance leaves behind it. If he neglected duty, he
made up for it by that cultivation of the finer senti-
ments of our common nature which waters flow-
ers of speech with the brineless tears of a flabby
remorse, without one fibre of resolve in it, and
which impoverishes the character in proportion as
it enriches the vocabulary. He was a very Apicius
in that digestible kind of woe which makes no man
leaner, and had a favorite receipt for cooking you
up a sorrow a la douleur inassouvie that had just
enough delicious sharpness in it to bring tears into
the eyes by tickling the palate. " When he said
to me, ' Jean Jacques, let us speak of thy mother,'
I said to him, ' Well, father, we are going to weep,
then,' and this word alone drew tears from him.
' Ah ! ' said he, groaning, ' give her back to me,
console me for her, fill the void she has left in my
soul ! ' Alas ! in such cases, the void she leaves
is only that she found. The grief that seeks any
other than its own society will erelong want an ob-
ject. This admirable parent allowed his son to
become an outcast at sixteen, without any attempt
to reclaim him, in order to enjoy unmolested a
petty inheritance to which the boy was entitled in
right of his mother. " This conduct," Rousseau
tells us, "of a father whose tenderness and vir-
tue were so well known to me, caused me to make

ROUSSEAU 249

reflections on myself which have not a little con-
tributed to make my heart sound. I drew from it
this great maxim of morals, the only one perhaps
serviceable in practice, to avoid situations which
put our duties in opposition to our interest, and
which show us our own advantage in the wrong of
another, sure that in such situations, however sin-
cere may be one's love of virtue, it sooner or later
grows weak without our perceiving it, and that we
become unjust and wicked in action without having
ceased to be just and good in soul."

This maxim may do for that " fugitive and clois-
tered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never
sallies out and seeks its adversary," which Milton
could not praise, — that is, for a manhood whose
distinction it is not to be manly, — but it is chiefly
worth notice as being the characteristic doctrine of
sentimentalism. This disjoining of deed from will?
of practice from theory, is to put asunder what
God has joined by an indissoluble sacrament. The
soul must be tainted before the action become cor-
rupt ; and there is no self-delusion more fatal than
that which makes the conscience dreamy with the
anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is grovel-
ling and sensual, — witness Coleridge. In his case
we feel something like disgust. But where, as in
his son Hartley, there is hereditary infirmity, where
the man sees the principle that might rescue him
slip from the clutch of a nerveless will, like a rope
through the fingers of a drowning man, and the
confession of faith is the moan of despair, there is
room for no harsher feeling than pity. Rousseau

250 ROUSSEAU

showed through life a singular proneness for being
convinced by his own eloquence ; he was always
his own first convert ; and this reconciles his power
as a writer with his weakness as a man. He and
all like him mistake emotion for conviction, velleity
for resolve, the brief eddy of sentiment for the mid-
current of ever-gathering faith in duty that draws
to itself all the affluents of conscience and will, and
gives continuity of purpose to life. They are like
men who love the stimulus of being under convic-
tion, as it is called, who, forever getting religion,
never get capital enough to retire upon and to
spend for their own need and the common service.
The sentimentalist is the spiritual hypochon-
driac, with whom fancies become facts, while facts
are a discomfort because they will not be evapo-
rated into fancy. In his eyes, Theory is too fine a
dame to confess even a country-cousinship with
coarse-handed Practice, whose homely ways would
disconcert her artificial world. The very suscepti-
bility that makes him quick to feel, makes him also
incapable of deep and durable feeling. He loves
to think he suffers, and keeps a pet sorrow, a blue-
devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere, like
Paracelsus's black dog. He takes good care, how-
ever, that it shall not be the true sulphurous article
that sometimes takes a fancy to fly away with his
conjurer. Rene says : " In my madness I had
gone so far as even to wish I might experience a
misfortune, so that my suffering might at least
have a real object." But no ; selfishness is only
active egotism, and there is nothing and nobody,

ROUSSEAU 251

with a single exception, which this sort of creature
will not sacrifice, rather than give any other than
an imaginary pang to his idol. Vicarious pain he is
not unwilling to endure, nay, will even commit sui-
cide by proxy, like the German poet who let his
wife kill herself to give him a sensation. Had
young Jerusalem been anything like Goethe's por-
trait of him in Werther, he would have taken very
good care not to blow out the brains which he
would have thought only too precious. Real sor-
rows are uncomfortable things, but purely aesthetic
ones are by no means unpleasant, and I have al-
ways fancied the handsome young Wolfgang writ-
ing those distracted letters to Auguste Stolberg
with a looking-glass in front of him to give back
an image of his desolation, and finding it rather
pleasant than otherwise to shed the tear of sym-
pathy with self that would seem so bitter to his
fair correspondent. The tears that have real salt
in them will keep ; they are the difficult, manly
tears that are shed in secret ; but the pathos soon
evaporates from that fresh-water with which a man
can bedew a dead donkey in public, while his wife
is having a good cry over his neglect of* her at
home. We do not think the worse of Goethe for
hypothetically desolating himself in the fashion
aforesaid, for with many constitutions it is as
purely natural a crisis as dentition, which the
stronger worry through, and turn out very sen-
sible, agreeable fellows. But where there is an
arrest of development, and the heartbreak of the
patient is audibly prolonged through life, we have

252 ROUSSEAU

a spectacle which the toughest heart would wish to
get as far away from as possible.

I would not be supposed to overlook the distinc-
tion, too often lost sight of, between sentimental-
ism and sentiment, the latter being a very excel-
lent thing in its way, as genuine things are apt to
be. Sentiment is intellectualized emotion, emotion
precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the
fancy. This is the delightful staple of the poets
of social life like Horace and Beranger, or Thack-
eray, when he too rarely played with verse. It
puts into words for us that decorous average of
feeling to the expression of which society can con-
sent without danger of being indiscreetly moved.
It is excellent for people who are willing to save
their souls alive to any extent that shall not be dis-
composing. It is even satisfying till some deeper
experience has given us a hunger which what we
so glibly call " the world " cannot sate, just as a
water-ice is nourishment enough to a man who
has had his dinner. It is the sufficing lyrical in-
terpreter of those lighter hours that should make
part of every healthy man's day, and is noxious
only wh$n it palls men's appetite for the truly pro-
found poetry which is very passion of very soul
sobered by afterthought and embodied in eternal
types by imagination. True sentiment is emotion
ripened by a slow ferment of the mind and qual-
ified to an agreeable temperance by that taste
which is the conscience of polite society. But the
sentimentalist always insists on taking his emotion
neat, and, as his sense gradually deadens to the

ROUSSEAU 253

stimulus, increases his dose till he ends in a kind
of moral deliquium. At first the debaucher, he
becomes at last the victim of his sensations.

Among the ancients we find little or no trace of
sentimentalism, though Euripides and still more
Ovid give hints of it. Their masculine mood both
of body and mind left no room for it, and hence the
bracing quality of their literature compared with
that of recent times, its tonic property, that seems
almost too astringent to palates relaxed by a dain-
tier diet. The first great example of the degen-
erate modern tendency was Petrarch, who may be
said to have given it impulse and direction. A
more perfect specimen of the type has not since ap-
peared. An intellectual voluptuary, a moral dilet-
tante, the first instance of that character, since too
common, the gentleman in search of a sensation,
seeking a solitude at Vaucluse because it made
him more likely to be in demand at Avignon,
praising philosophic poverty with a sharp eye to
the next rich benefice in the gift of his patron,
commending a good life but careful first of a good
living, happy only in seclusion but making a dan-
gerous journey to enjoy the theatrical show of a
coronation in the Capitol, cherishing a fruitless
passion which broke his heart three or four times
a year and yet could not make an end of him till
he had reached the ripe age of seventy and sur-
vived his mistress a quarter of a century, — surely
a more exquisite perfection of inconsistency would
be hard to find.

When Petrarch returned from his journey into

254 ROUSSEAU

the North of Europe in 1332, he balanced the
books of his unrequited passion, and, finding that
he had now been in love seven years, thought the
time had at last come to call deliberately on Death.
Had Death taken him at his word, he would have
protested that he was only in fun. For we find
him always taking good care of an excellent con-
stitution, avoiding the plague with commendable
assiduity, and in the very year when he declares it
absolutely essential to his peace of mind to die for
good and all, taking refuge in the fortress of
Capranica, from a wholesome dread of having his
throat cut by robbers. There is such a difference
between dying in a sonnet with a cambric hand-
kerchief at one's eyes, and the prosaic reality of
demise certified in the parish register I Practically
it is inconvenient to be dead. Among other things,
it puts an end to the manufacture of sonnets.
But there seems to have been an excellent under-
standing between Petrarch and Death, for he was
brought to that grisly monarch's door so often,
that, otherwise, nothing short of a miracle or the
nine lives of that animal whom love also makes
lyrical could have saved him. "I consent," he
cries, " to live and die in Africa among its ser-
pents, upon Caucasus, or Atlas, if, while I live, to
breathe a pure air, and after my death a little
corner of earth where to bestow my body, may be
allowed me. This is all I ask, but this I cannot
obtain. Doomed always to wander, and to be a
stranger everywhere, O Fortune, Fortune, fix me at
last to some one spot ! I do not covet thy favors.

ROUSSEAU 255

Let me enjoy a tranquil poverty, let me pass in
this retreat the few days that remain to me ! "
The pathetic stop of Petrarch's poetical organ was
one he could pull out at pleasure, — and indeed
we soon learn to distrust literary tears, as the cheap
subterfuge for want of real feeling with natures of
this quality. Solitude with him was but the pseu-
donyme of notoriety. Poverty was the archdea-
conry of Parma, with other ecclesiastical pickings.
During his retreat at Vaucluse, in the very height
of that divine sonneteering love of Laura, of that
sensitive purity which called Avignon Babylon,
and rebuked the sinfulness of Clement, he was
himself begetting that kind of children which we
spell with a b. We believe that, if Messer Fran-
cesco had been present when the woman was taken
in adultery, he would have flung the first stone
without the slightest feeling of inconsistency, nay,
with a sublime sense of virtue. The truth is, that
it made very little difference to him what sort of
proper sentiment he expressed, provided he could
do it elegantly and with unction. And with su-
preme elegance he knew how to express it, thereby
conferring an incalculable benefit on the literature
of Italy and of Europe.

Would any one feel the difference between his
faint abstractions and the Platonism of a powerful
nature fitted alike for the withdrawal of ideal con-
templation and for breasting the storms of life, —
would any one know how wide a depth divides
a noble friendship based on sympathy of pursuit
and aspiration, on that mutual help which souls

256 ROUSSEAU

capable of self-sustainment are the readiest to give
or to take, and a simulated passion, true neither
to the spiritual nor the sensual part of man, — let
him compare the sonnets of Petrarch with those
which Michel Angelo addressed to Vittoria Co-
lonna. In them the airiest pinnacles of sentiment
and speculation are buttressed with solid mason-
work of thought, of an actual, not fancied ex-
perience, and the depth of feeling is measured by
the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in
Petrarch's all ingenuousness is frittered away into
ingenuity. Both are cold, but the coldness of the
one is self-restraint, while the other chills with pre-
tence of warmth. In Michel Angelo's, you feel
the great architect ; in Petrarch's the artist who
can best realize his conception in the limits of a
cherry-stone. And yet this man influenced liter-
ature longer and more widely than almost any
other in modern times. So great is the charm of
elegance, so unreal is the larger part of what is
written !

Certainly I do not mean to say that a work of
art should be looked at by the light of the artist's
biography, or measured by our standard of his
character. Nor do I reckon what was genuine in
Petrarch — his love of letters, his refinement, his
skill in the superficial graces of language, that
rhetorical art by which the music of words sup-
plants their meaning, and the verse moulds the
thought instead of being plastic to it — after any
such fashion. I have no ambition for that charac-
ter of valet de chambre which is said to disenchant

ROUSSEAU 257

the most heroic figures into mere every-day person-
ages, for it implies a mean soul no less than a ser-
vile condition. But we have a right to demand a
certain amount of reality, however small, in the
emotion of a man who makes it his business to en-
deavor at exciting our own. We have a privilege
of nature to shiver before a painted flame, how
cunningly soever the colors be laid on. Yet our
love of minute biographical detail, our desire to
make ourselves spies upon the men of the past,
seems so much of an instinct in us, that we must
look for the spring of it in human nature, and that
somewhat deeper than mere curiosity or love of
gossip. It should seem to arise from what must
be considered on the whole a creditable feeling,
namely, that we value character more than any
amount of talent, — the skill to be something, above
that of doing anything but the best of its kind.
The highest creative genius, and that only, is privi-
leged from arrest by this personality, for there the
thing produced is altogether disengaged from the
producer. But in natures incapable of this escape
from themselves, the author is inevitably mixed
with his work, and we have a feeling that the
amount of his sterling character is the security for
the notes he issues. Especially we feel so when
truth to self, which is always self-forgetful, and not
truth to nature, makes an essential part of the
value of what is offered us ; as where a man under-
takes to narrate personal experience or to enforce
a dogma. This is particularly true as respects
sentimentalists, because of their intrusive self-con-

258 ROUSSEAU

sciousness ; for there is no more universal charac-
teristic of human nature than the instinct of men
to apologize to themselves for themselves, and to
justify personal failings by generalizing them into
universal laws. A man would be the keenest devil's
advocate against himself, were it not that he has
always taken a retaining fee for the defence ; for
I think that the indirect and mostly unconscious
pleas in abatement which we read between the lines
in the works of many authors are oftener written
to set themselves right in their own eyes than in
those of the world. And in the real life of the
sentimentalist it is the same. He is under the
wretched necessity of keeping up, at least in public,
the character he has assumed, till he at last reaches
that last shift of bankrupt self-respect, to play the
hypocrite with himself. Lamartine, after passing
round the hat in Europe and America, takes to his
bed from wounded pride when the French Senate
votes him a subsidy, and sheds tears of humilia-
tion. Ideally, he resents it ; in practical coin, he
will accept the shame without a wry face, he will
" impeticos the gratillity."

George Sand, speaking of Rousseau's u Confes-
sions," says that an autobiographer always makes
himself the hero of his own novel, and cannot help
idealizing, even if he would. But the weak point
of all sentimentalists is that they always have been,
and always continue under every conceivable cir-
cumstance to be, their own ideals, whether they are
writing their own lives or no. Rousseau opens his
book with the statement : " I am not made like any

ROUSSEAU" 259

of those I have seen ; I venture to believe myself
unlike any that exists. If I am not worth more, at
least I am different." O exquisite cunning of self-
flattery ! It is this very imagined difference that
makes us worth more in our own foolish sight.
For while all men are apt to think, or to persuade
themselves that they think, all other men their ac-
complices in vice or weakness, they are not difficult
of belief that they are singular in any quality or
talent on which they hug themselves. More than
this ; people who are truly original are the last to
find it out, for the moment we become conscious of
a virtue, it has left us or is getting ready to go.
Originality does not consist in a fidgety assertion
of selfhood, but in the faculty of getting rid of it
altogether, that the truer genius of the man, which
commerces with universal nature and with other
souls through a common sympathy with that, may
take all his powers wholly to itself, — and the truly
original man could no more be jealous of his pecu-
liar gift, than the grass could take credit to itself
for being green. What is the reason that all chil-
dren are geniuses, (though they contrive so soon to
outgrow that dangerous quality,) except that they
never cross-examine themselves on the subject?
The moment that process begins, their speech loses
its gift of unexpectedness, and they become as
tediously impertiment as the rest of us.

If there never was any one like him, if he consti-
tuted a genus in himself, to what end write confes-
sions in which no other human being could ever be
in a condition to take the least possible interest ?

260 ROUSSEAU

All men are interested in Montaigne in proportion
as all men find more of themselves in him, and all
men see but one image in the glass which the
greatest of poets holds up to nature, an image
which at once startles and charms them with its
familiarity. Fabulists always endow their animals
with the passions and desires of men. But if an
ox could dictate his confessions, what glimmer of
understanding should we find in those bovine con-
fidences, unless on some theory of preexistence,
some blank misgiving of a creature moving about
in worlds not realized? The truth is, that we
recognize the common humanity of Rousseau in
the very weakness that betrayed him into this con-
ceit of himself ; we find he is just like the rest of
us in this very assumption of essential difference,
for among all animals man is the only one who
tries to pass for more than he is, and so involves
himself in the condemnation of seeming less.

Benvenuto Cellini was right in his dictum about
autobiographies ; and so was Dr. Kitchener, in his
about hares. First catch your perfectly sincere
and unconscious man. He is even more uncom-
mon than a genius of the first order. Most men
dress themselves for their autobiographies, as
Machiavelli used to do for reading the classics, in
their best clothes ; they receive us, as it were, in a
parlor chilling and awkward from its unfamiliarity
with man, and keep us carefully away from the
kitchen-chimney-corner, where they would feel at
home, and would not look on a lapse into nature as
the unpardonable sin. But what do we want of

ROUSSEAU 261

a hospitality that makes strangers of us, or of con-
fidences that keep us at arm's-length ? Better the
tavern and the newspaper ; for in the one we can
grumble, and from the other learn more of our
neighbors than we care to know. John Smith's
autobiography is commonly John Smith's design
for an equestrian statue of himself, — very fine, cer-
tainly, and as much like him as like Marcus Aure-
lius. Saint Augustine, kneeling to confess, has an
eye to the picturesque, and does it in pontificali-
bus, resolved that Domina Grundy shall think all
the better of him. Rousseau cries, " I will bare
my heart to you ! " and, throwing open his waist-
coat, makes us the confidants of his dirty linen.
Montaigne, indeed, reports of himself with the im-
partiality of a naturalist, and Boswell, in his letters
to Temple, shows a maudlin irretentiveness ; but
is not old Samuel Pepys, after all, the only man
who spoke to himself of himself with perfect sim-
plicity, frankness, and unconsciousness ? a creature
unique as the dodo, a solitary specimen, to show
that it was possible for Nature to indulge in so odd
a whimsey ! An autobiography is good for noth-
ing, unless the author tell us in it precisely what he
meant not to tell. A man who can say what he
thinks of another to his face is a disagreeable
rarity ; but one who could look his own Ego
straight in the eye, and pronounce unbiased judg-
ment, were worthy of Sir Thomas Browne's Mu-
seum. Had Cheiron written his autobiography, the
consciousness of his equine crupper would have rid-
den him like a nightmare ; should a mermaid write

262 ROUSSEAU

hers, she would sink the fish's tail, nor allow it to
be put into the scales, in weighing her character.
The mermaid, in truth, is the emblem of those who
strive to see themselves; her mirror is too small
to reflect anything more than the mulier formosa
superrie.

But it would be sheer waste of time to hunt
Rousseau through all his doublings of inconsis-
tency, and run him to earth in every new paradox.
His first two books attacked, one of them litera-
ture, and the other society. But this did not pre-
vent him from being diligent with his pen, nor
from availing himself of his credit with persons
who enjoyed all the advantages of that inequality
whose evils he had so pointedly exposed. Indeed,
it is curious how little practical communism there
has been, how few professors it has had who would
not have gained by a general dividend. It is per-
haps no frantic effort of generosity in a philosopher
with ten crowns in his pocket when he offers to
make common stock with a neighbor who has ten
thousand of yearly income, nor is it an uncommon
thing to see such theories knocked clean out of a
man's head by the descent of a thumping legacy.
But, consistent or not, Rousseau remains perma-
nently interesting as the highest and most perfect
type of the sentimentalist of genius. His was per-
haps the acutest mind that was ever mated with
an organization so diseased,1 the brain most far-
reaching in speculation that ever kept itself steady
and worked out its problems amid such disordered

1 Perhaps we should except Newton.

ROUSSEAU 263

tumult of the nerves. His letter to the Arch-
bishop of Paris, admirable for its lucid power and
soberness of tone, and his Rousseau jv ge de Jean
Jacques, which no man can read and believe him to
have been sane, show him to us in his strength and
weakness, and give us a more charitable, let us
hope therefore a truer, notion of him than his own
apology for himself. That he was a man of genius
appears unmistakably in his impressibility by the
deeper meaning of the epoch in which he lived.
Before an eruption, clouds steeped through and
through with electric life gather over the crater, as
if in sympathy and expectation. As the mountain
heaves and cracks, these vapory masses are seamed
with fire, *as if they felt and answered the dumb
agony that is struggling for utterance below. Just
such flashes of eager sympathetic fire break con-
tinually from the cloudy volumes of Rousseau, the
result at once and the warning of that convulsion
of which Paris was to be the crater and all Europe
to feel the spasm. There are symptoms enough
elsewhere of that want of faith in the existing
order which made the Revolution inevitable, —
even so shallow an observer as Horace Walpole
could forebode it so early as 1765, — but Rousseau
more than all others is the unconscious expression
of the groping after something radically new, the
instinct for a change that should be organic and
pervade every fibre of the social and political body.
Freedom of thought owes far more to the jester
Voltaire, who also had his solid kernel of earnest,
than to the sombre Genevese, whose earnestness

264 ROUSSEAU

is of the deadly kind. Yet, for good or evil, the
latter was the foster-father of modern democracy,
and without him our Declaration of Independence
would have wanted some of those sentences in
which the immemorial longings of the poor and the
dreams of solitary enthusiasts were at last affirmed
as axioms in the manifesto of a nation, so that all
the world might hear.

Though Rousseau, like many other fanatics, had
a remarkable vein of common sense in him, (wit-
ness his remarks on duelling, on landscape-garden-
ing, on French poetry, and much of his thought on
education,) we cannot trace many practical results
to his teaching, least of all in politics. For the
great difficulty with his system, if system it may
be called, is, that, while it professes to follow na-
ture, it not only assumes as a starting-point that
the individual man may be made over again, but
proceeds to the conclusion that man himself, that
human nature, must be made over again, and gov-
ernments remodelled on a purely theoretic basis.
But when something like an experiment in this
direction was made in 1789, not only did it fail as
regarded man in general, but even as regards the
particular variety of man that inhabited France.
The Revolution accomplished many changes, and
beneficent ones, yet it left France peopled, not by
a new race without traditions, but by Frenchmen.
Still, there must have been a wonderful force in the
words of a man who, above all others, had the secret
of making abstractions glow with his own fervor ;
and his ideas, dispersed now in the atmosphere of

ROUSSEAU 265

thought, have influenced, perhaps still continue to
influence, speculative minds, which prefer swift and
sure generalization to hesitating and doubtful expe-
rience.

Rousseau has, in one respect, been utterly mis-
represented and misunderstood. Even Chateau-
briand most unfilially classes him and Voltaire
together. It appears to me that the inmost core
of his being was religious. Had he remained in
the Catholic Church, he might have been a saint.
Had he come earlier, he might have founded an
order. His was precisely the nature on which reli-
gious enthusiasm takes the strongest hold, a tem-
perament which finds sensuous delight in spiritual
things, and satisfies its craving for excitement with
celestial debauch. He had not the iron temper of
a great reformer and organizer like Knox, who,
true Scotchman that he was, found a way to weld
this world and the other together in a cast-iron
creed ; but he had as much as any man ever had
that gift of a great preacher to make the oratorical
fervor which persuades himself while it lasts into
the abiding conviction of his hearers. That very
persuasion of his, that the soul could remain pure
while the life was corrupt, is not unexampled
among men who have left holier names than he.
His "Confessions," also, would assign him to that
class with whom the religious sentiment is strong
and tiie moral nature weak. They are apt to be-
lieve that they may, as special pleaders say, con-
fess and avoid. Hawthorne has admirably illus-
trated this in the penance of Mr. Dimmesdale.

266 ROUSSEAU

With all the soil that is upon Rousseau, I cannot
help looking on him as one capable beyond any in
his generation of being divinely possessed ; and if
it happened otherwise, when we remember the
much that hindered and the little that helped in a
life and time like his, we shall be much readier to
pity than to condemn. It was his very fitness for
being something better that makes him able to
shock us so with what in too many respects he un-
happily was. Less gifted^ he had been less hardly
judged. More than any other of the sentimental-
ists, except possibly Sterne, he had in him a sta-
ple of sincerity. Compared with Chateaubriand,
he is honesty, compared with Lamartine, he is man-
liness, itself. His nearest congener in our own
tongue is Cowper.

In the whole school there is a sickly taint. The
strongest mark which Rousseau has left upon liter-
ature is a sensibility to the picturesque in Nature,
not with Nature as a strengthener and consoler, a
wholesome tonic for a mind ill at ease with itself,
but with Nature as a kind of feminine echo to the
mood, flattering it with sympathy rather than cor-
recting it with rebuke or lifting it away from its
unmanly depression, as in the wholesomer fellow-
feeling of Wordsworth. They seek in her an ac-
cessory, and not a reproof. It is less a sympathy
with Nature than a sympathy with ourselves as we
compel her to reflect us. It is solitude, Nature for
her estrangement from man, not for her companion-
ship with him ; it is desolation and ruin, Nature
as she has triumphed over man, with which this

ROUSSEAU 267

order of mind seeks communion and in which it
finds solace. It is with the hostile and destructive
power of matter, and not with the spirit of life and
renewal that dwells in it, that they ally themselves.
And in human character it is the same. St. Preux,
Kene, Werther, Manfred, Quasimodo, they are all
anomalies, distortions, ruins, — so much easier is it
to caricature life from our own sickly conception
of it than to paint it in its noble simplicity; so
much cheaper is unreality than truth.

Every man is conscious that he leads two lives,
the one trivial and ordinary, the other sacred and
recluse; one which he carries to society and the
dinner-table, the other in which his youth and aspi-
ration survive for him, and which is a confidence
between himself and God. Both may be equally
sincere, and there need be no contradiction be-
tween them, any more than in a healthy man be-
tween soul and body. If the higher life be real
and earnest, its result, whether in literature or
affairs, will be real and earnest too. But no man
can produce great things who is not thoroughly
sincere in dealing with himself, who would not ex-
change the finest show for the poorest reality, who
does not so love his work that he is not only glad
to give himself for it, but finds rather a gain than a
sacrifice in the surrender. The sentimentalist does
not think of what he does so much as of what the
world will think of what he does. He translates
should into would, looks upon the spheres of duty
and beauty as alien to each other, and can never
learn how life rounds itself to a noble completeness

268 ROUSSEAU

between these two opposite but mutually sustaining
poles of what we long for and what we must.

Did Rousseau, then, lead a life of this quality ?
Perhaps, when we consider the contrast which
every man who looks backward must feel between
the life he planned and the life which circumstance
within him and without him has made for him, we
should rather ask, Was this the life he meant to
lead ? Perhaps, when we take into account his
faculty of self-deception, — it may be no greater
than our own, — we should ask, Was this the life
he believed he led ? Have we any right to judge
this man after our blunt English fashion, and con-
demn him, as we are wont to do, on the finding of
a jury of average householders ? Is French reality
precisely our reality ? Could we tolerate tragedy
in rhymed alexandrines, instead of blank verse ?
The whole life of Rousseau is pitched on this heroic
key, and for the most trivial occasion he must be
ready with the sublime sentiments that are sup-
posed to suit him rather than it. It is one of the
most curious features of the sentimental ailment,
that, while it shuns the contact of men, it courts
publicity. In proportion as solitude and commu-
nion with self lead the sentimentalist to exaggerate
the importance of his own personality, he comes to
think that the least event connected with it is of
consequence to his fellow-men. If he change his
shirt, he would have mankind aware of it. Victor
Hugo, the greatest living representative of the
class, considers it necessary to let the world know
by letter from time to time his opinions on every

ROUSSEAU 269

conceivable subject about which it is not asked nor
is of the least value unless we concede to him an
immediate inspiration. We men of colder blood,
in whom self -consciousness takes the form of pride,
and who have deified mauvaise honte as if our de-
fect were our virtue, find it especially hard to un-
derstand that artistic impulse of more southern
races to pose themselves properly on every occa-
sion, and not even to die without some tribute of
deference to the taste of the world they are leav-
ing. Was not even mighty Caesar's last thought
of his drapery ? Let us not condemn Rousseau for
what seems to us the indecent exposure of himself
in his " Confessions."

Those who allow an oratorical and purely con-
ventional side disconnected with our private under-
standing of the facts and with life, in which every-
thing has a wholly parliamentary sense where truth
is made subservient to the momentary exigencies
of eloquence, should be charitable to Rousseau.
While we encourage a distinction which establishes

O

two kinds of truth, one for the world and another
for the conscience, while we take pleasure in a kind
of speech that has no relation to the real thought
of speaker or hearer, but to the rostrum only, we
must not be hasty to condemn a sentimentalism
which we do our best to foster. We listen in
public with the gravity of augurs to what we smile
at when we meet a brother adept. France is the
native land of eulogy, of truth padded out to the
size and shape demanded by comme-il-faut. The
French Academy has, perhaps, done more harm by

270 ROUSSEAU

the vogue it has given to this style, than it has
done good by its literary purism ; for the best
purity of a language depends on the limpidity of
its source in veracity of thought. Rousseau was in
many respects a typical Frenchman, and it is not
to be wondered at if he too often fell in with the
fashion of saying what was expected of him, and
what he thought due to the situation, rather than
what would have been true to his inmost conscious-
ness. Perhaps we should allow something to the
influence of a Calvinistic training, which certainly
helps men who have the least natural tendency
towards it to set faith above works, and to per-
suade themselves of the efficacy of an inward grace
to offset an outward and visible defection from
it ; perhaps something also to the Jewish descent
which his name seems to imply.

As the sentimentalist always takes a fanciful,
sometimes an unreal, life for an ideal one, it would
be too much to say that Rousseau was a man of
earnest convictions. But he was a man of fitfully
intense ones, as suited so mobile a temperament,
and his writings, more than those of any other of
his tribe, carry with them that persuasion that was
in him while he wrote. In them at least he is as
consistent as a man who admits new ideas can ever
be. The children of his brain he never abandoned,
but clung to them with paternal fidelity. Intel-
lectually he was true and fearless ; constitution-
ally, timid, contradictory, and weak ; but never, if I
understand him rightly, false. He was a little too
credulous of sonorous sentiment, but he was never.

ROUSSEAU 271

like Chateaubriand or Lamartine, the mere lackey
of fine phrases. If, as some fanciful physiologists
have assumed, there be a masculine and feminine
lobe of the brain, it should seem that in men of
sentimental turn the masculine half fell in love
with and made an idol of the other, obeying and
admiring all the pretty whims of this folle du
logis. In Rousseau the mistress had some noble
elements of character, and less taint of the demi-
monde than is visible in more recent cases of the
same illicit relation.

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER1

1867

IT is the misfortune of American biography that
it must needs be more or less provincial, and that,
contrary to what might have been predicted, this
quality in it predominates in proportion as the
country grows larger. Wanting any great and ac-
knowledged centre of national life and thought, our
expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation
than growth ; reputations must be hammered out
thin to cover so wide a surface, and the substance
of most hardly holds out to the boundaries of a sin-
gle State. Our very history wants unity, and down
to the Revolution the attention is wearied and con-
fused by having to divide itself among thirteen
parallel threads, instead of being concentred on a
single clue. A sense of remoteness and seclusion

O

conies over us as we read, and we cannot help ask-
ing ourselves, " Were not these things done in a
corner?" Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow
sphere, but fame demands for its evidence a more
distant and prolonged reverberation. To the world
at large we were but a short column of figures in
the corner of a blue-book, New England exporting
so much salt-fish, timber, and Medford rum, Vir-

1 The Life of Josiah Quincy, by his son.

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 273

ginia so many hogsheads of tobacco, and buying
with the proceeds a certain amount of English
manufactures. The story of our early colonization
had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was al-
together inferior in picturesque fascination to that
of Mexico or Peru. The lives of our worthies, like
that of our nation, are bare of those foregone and
far-reaching associations with names, the divining-
rods of fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of
the Old World get for nothing by the mere acci-
dent of birth. Their historians and biographers
have succeeded to the good-will, as well as to the
long-established stand, of the shop of glory. Time
is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the sons of
Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs
of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud
solace in saying,

" Avia Pieridura peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo ; "

but all the while he has the splendid centuries of
Greece and Rome behind him, and can begin his
poem with invoking a goddess from whom legend
derived the planter of his race. His eyes looked
out on a landscape saturated with glorious recol-
lections ; he had seen Caesar, and heard Cicero.
But who shall conjure with Saugus or Cato Four
Corners, — with Israel Putnam or Return Jona-
than Meigs ? We have been transplanted, and for
us the long hierarchical succession of history is
broken. The Past has not laid its venerable hands
upon us in consecration, conveying to us that
mysterious influence whose force is in its conti-

274 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

nuity. We are to Europe as the Church of Eng-
land to her of Rome. The latter old lady may be
the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with ten horns, if
you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers that
vast spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet every-
where, whose revenues are none the less fruitful
for being levied on the imagination. We may
claim that England's history is also ours, but it is
a dejure, and not a de facto property that we have
in it, — something that may be proved indeed, yet
is a merely intellectual satisfaction, and does not
savor of the realty. Have we not seen the mock-
ery crown and sceptre of the exiled Stuarts in St.
Peter's ? the medal struck so lately as 1784 with
its legend, HEN IX MAG BRIT ET HIB REX, whose
contractions but faintly typify the scantness of the
fact?

As the novelist complains that our society wants
that sharp contrast of character and costume which
comes of caste, so in the narrative of our historians
we miss what may be called background and per-
spective, as if the events and the actors in them
failed of that cumulative interest which only a long
historical entail can give. Relatively, the crusade
of Sir William Pepperell was of more consequence
than that of St. Louis, and yet forgive me, injured
shade of the second American baronet, if I find
the narrative of Joinville more interesting than
your despatches to Governor Shirley. Relatively,
the insurrection of that Daniel whose Irish patro-
nymic Shea was euphonized into Shays, as a set-off
for the debasing of French chaise into shay, was

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 275

more dangerous than that of Charles Edward ; but
for some reason or other (as vice sometimes has
the advantage of virtue) the latter is more enticing
to the imagination, and the least authentic relic
of it in song or story has a relish denied to the
painful industry of Minot. Our events seem to
fall short of that colossal proportion which befits
the monumental style. Look grave as we will,
there is something ludicrous in Counsellor Keane's
pig being the pivot of a revolution. We are of
yesterday, and it is to no purpose that our political
augurs divine from the flight of our eagles that to-
morrow shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-hail
hereafter. Things do really gain in greatness by
being acted on a great and cosmopolitan stage, be-
cause there is inspiration in the thronged audience
and the nearer match that puts men on their met-
tle. Webster was more largely endowed by na-
ture than Fox, and Fisher Ames not much below
Burke as a talker ; but what a difference in the
intellectual training, in the literary culture and as-
sociations, in the whole social outfit, of the men
who were their antagonists and companions ! It
should seem that, if it be collision with other minds
and with events that strikes or draws the fire
from a man, then the quality of those might have
something to do with the quality of the fire, —
whether it shall be culinary or electric. We have
never known the varied stimulus, the inexorable
criticism, the many-sided opportunity of a great
metropolis, the inspiring reinforcement of an un-
divided national consciousness. In everything but

276 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

trade we have missed the invigoration of foreign
rivalry. We may prove that we are this and that
and the other; our Fourth-of-July orators have
proved it time and again ; the census has proved
it ; but the Muses are women, and have no great
fancy for statistics, though easily silenced by them.
We are great, we are rich, we are all kinds of good
things ; but did it never occur to you that somehow
we are not interesting, except as a phenomenon?
It may safely be affirmed that for one cultivated
man in this country who studies American his-
tory, there are fifty who study European, ancient
or modern.

The division of the United States into so many
wellnigh independent republics, each with official
rewards in its gift great enough to excite and to sat-
isfy a considerable ambition, makes fame a palpa-
bly provincial thing in America. We say/>a//?a£fy,
because the larger part of contemporary fame is
truly parochial everywhere ; only we are apt to over-
look the fact when we measure by kingdoms or em-
pires instead of counties, and to fancy a stature for
Palmerston or Persigny suitable to the size of the
stage on which they act. It seems a much finer
thing to be a Lord Chancellor in England than a
Chief Justice in Massachusetts ; yet the same abili-
ties which carried the chance-transplanted Boston
boy, Lyndhurst, to the woolsack, might, perhaps,
had he remained in the land of his birth, have
found no higher goal than the bench of the Su-
preme Court. Mr. Dickens laughed very fairly at
the " remarkable men " of our small towns ; but

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 277

England is full of just such little-greatness, with
the difference that one is proclaimed in the " Bung-
town Tocsin " and the other in the " Times." We
must get a new phrase, and say that Mr. Brown was
immortal at the latest dates, and Mr. Jones a great
man when the steamer sailed. The small man in
Europe is reflected to his contemporaries from a
magnifying mirror, while even the great men in
America can be imaged only in a diminishing one.
If powers broaden with the breadth of opportunity,
if Occasion be the mother of greatness and not
its tool, the centralizing system of Europe should
produce more eminent persons than our distribu-
tive one. Certain it is that the character grows
larger in proportion to the size of the affairs with
which it is habitually concerned, and that a mind
of more than common stature acquires an habitual
stoop, if forced to deal lifelong with little men and
little things.

Even that German-silver kind of fame, Notori-
ety, can scarcely be had here at a cheaper rate than
a murder done in broad daylight of a Sunday ; and
the only sure way of having one's name known to
the utmost corners of our empire is by achieving a
continental disrepute. With a metropolis planted
in a crevice between Maryland and Virginia, and
stunted because its roots vainly seek healthy nour-
ishment in a soil long impoverished by slavery, a
paulo-post future capital, the centre of nothing,
without literature, art, or so much as commerce, —
we have no recognized dispenser of national reputa-
tions like London or Paris. In a country richer in

278 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

humor, and among a people keener in the sense of
it than any other, we cannot produce a national
satire or caricature, because there is no butt visible
to all parts of the country at once. How many
men at this moment know the names, much more
the history or personal appearance, of our cabinet
ministers ? But the joke of London or Paris
tickles all the ribs of England or France, and the
intellectual rushlight of those cities becomes a
beacon, set upon such bushels, and multiplied
by the many-faced provincial reflector behind it.
Meanwhile New York and Boston wrangle about
literary and social preeminence like two schoolboys,
each claiming to have something (he knows not
exactly what) vastly finer than the other at home.
Let us hope that we shall by-and-by develop a
rivalry like that of the Italian cities, and that the
difficulty of fame beyond our own village may
make us more content with doing than desirous of
the name of it. For, after all, History herself is
for the most part but the Muse of Little Peddling-
ton, and Athens raised the heaviest crop of laurels
yet recorded on a few acres of rock, without help
from newspaper guano.

Till within a year or two we have been as distant
and obscure to the eyes of Europe as Ecuador to
our own. Every day brings us nearer, enables us
to see the Old World more clearly, and by inevita-
ble comparison to judge ourselves with some closer
approach to our real value. This has its advantage
so long as our culture is, as for a long time it
must be, European ; for we shall be little better

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 279

than apes and parrots till we are forced to measure
our muscle with the trained and practised cham-
pions of that elder civilization. We have at length
established our claim to the noblesse of the sword,
the first step still of every nation that would make
its entry into the best society of history. To main-
tain ourselves there, we must achieve an equality in
the more exclusive circle of culture, and to that
end must submit ourselves to the European stan-
dard of intellectual weights and measures. That we
have made the hitherto biggest gun might excite
apprehension (were there a dearth of iron), but
can never exact respect. That our pianos and
patent reapers have won medals does but confirm
us in our mechanic and material measure of merit.
We must contribute something more than mere
contrivances for the saving of labor, which we
have been only too ready to misapply in the do-
main of thought and the higher kinds of invention.
In those Olympic games where nations contend
for truly immortal wreaths, it may well be ques-
tioned whether a mowing-machine would stand
much chance in the chariot-races, whether a piano,
though made by a chevalier, could compete success-
fully for the prize of music.

We shall have to be content for a good while
yet with our provincialism, and must strive to
make the best of it. In it lies the germ of nation-
ality, and that is, after all, the prime condition of
all thorough-bred greatness of character. To this
choicest fruit of a healthy life, well rooted in native
soil, and drawing prosperous juices thence, nation-

280 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

ality gives the keenest flavor. Mr. Lincoln was
an original man, and in so far a great man ; yet it
was the Americanism of his every thought, word,
and act which not only made his influence equally
at home in East and West, but drew the eyes of
the outside world, and was the pedestal that lifted
him where he could be seen by them. Lincoln
showed that native force may transcend local boun-
daries, but the growth of such nationality is hin-
dered and hampered by our division into so many
half -independent communities, each with its objects
of county ambition, and its public men great to the
borders of their district. In this way our standard
of greatness is insensibly debased. To receive
any national appointment, a man must have gone
through precisely the worst training for it ; he
must have so far narrowed and belittled himself
with State politics as to be acceptable at home. In
this way a man may become chairman of the Com-
mittee on Foreign Affairs, because he knows how
to pack a caucus in Catawampus County, or be
sent ambassador to Barataria, because he has drunk
bad whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City.
Should we ever attain to a conscious nationality, it
•will have the advantage of lessening the number of
our great men, and widening our appreciation to
the larger scale of the two or three that are left, —
if there should be so many. Meanwhile we offer a
premium to the production of great men in a small
way, by inviting each State to set up the statues of
two of its immortals in the Capitol. What a nig-
gardly percentage ! Already we are embarrassed,

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 281

not to find the two, but to choose among the crowd
of candidates. Well, seventy-odd heroes in about
as many years is pretty well for a young nation.
I do not envy most of them their eternal martyr-
dom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimination.
I fancy even native tourists pausing before the
greater part of the effigies, and, after reading the
names, asking desperately, " Who was he ? " Nay,
if they should say, " Who the devil was he ?" it
were a pardonable invocation, for none so fit as
the Prince of Darkness to act as cicerone among
such palpable obscurities. I recall the court-yard
of the Uffizj at Florence. That also is not free
of parish celebrities ; but Dante, Galileo, Michel
Angelo, Machiavelli, — shall the inventor of the
sewing-machine, even with the button-holing im-
provement, let us say, match with these, or with
far lesser than these ? Perhaps he was more prac-
tically useful than any one of these, or all of them
together, but the soul is sensible of a sad difference
somewhere. These also were citizens of a provin-
cial capital ; so were the greater part of Plutarch's
heroes. Did they have a better chance than we
moderns, — than we Americans ? At any rate they
have the start of us, and we must confess that

" By bed and table they lord it o'er us,
Our elder brothers, but one in blood."

Yes, one in blood ; that is the hardest part of
it. Is our provincialism, then, in some great mea-
sure due to our absorption in the practical, as we
politely call it, meaning the material, — to our habit
of estimating greatness by the square mile and the

282 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

hundred weight ? Even during our war, in the
midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were
not our speakers and newspapers so enslaved to
the vulgar habit as to boast ten times of the thou-
sands of square miles it covered with armed men,
for once that they alluded to the motive which gave
it all its meaning and its splendor? Perhaps it
was as well that they did not exploit that passion
of patriotism as an advertisement in the style of
Barnum or Perham. "I scale one hundred and
eighty pounds, but when I 'm mad I weigh two
ton," said the Kentuckian, with a true notion of
moral avoirdupois. That ideal kind of weight is
wonderfully increased by a national feeling, whereby
one man is conscious that thirty millions of men go
into the balance with him. The Roman in ancient
and the Englishman in modern times have been
most conscious of this representative solidity, and
wherever one of them went, there stood Rome or
England in his shoes. We have made some ad-
vance in the right direction. Our Civil War, by
the breadth of its proportions and the implacability
of its demands, forced us to admit a truer valua-
tion, and gave us, in our own despite, great sol-
diers, sailors, and statesmen allowed for such by all
the world. The harder problems it has left be-
hind may in time compel us to have great states-
men again, with views capable of reaching beyond
the next election. The criticism of Europe alone
can rescue us from the provincialism of an over or
false estimate of ourselves. Let us be thankful,
and not angry, that we must accept it as our touch-

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stone. Our stamp has so often been impressed upon
base metal, that we cannot expect it to be taken on
trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be
equally persuasive the world over. Real manhood
and honest achievement are nowhere provincial,
but enter the select society of all time on an even
footing.

Spanish America might be a good glass for us
to look into. Those Catharine-wheel republics, al-
ways in revolution while the powder lasts, and sure
to burn the fingers of whoever attempts interven-
tion, have also their great men, as placidly ignored
by us as our own by jealous Europe. The follow-
ing passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar
might allay many motus animorum, if rightly pon-
dered. Bolivar, then a youth, was travelling in
Italy, and his biographer tells us that " near Cas-
tiglione he was present at the grand review made
by Napoleon of the columns defiling into the plain
large enough to contain sixty thousand men. The
throne was situated on an eminence that overlooked
the plain, and Napoleon on several occasions looked
through a glass at Bolivar and his companions, who
were at the base of the hill. The hero Caesar could
not imagine that he beheld the liberator of the
world of Columbus ! " And small blame to him,
one would say. We are not, then, it seems, the
only foundling of Columbus, as we are so apt to
take for granted. The great Genoese did not, as
we supposed, draw that first star-guided furrow
across the vague of waters with a single eye to the
future greatness of the United States. And have

284 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

we not sometimes, like the enthusiastic biographer,
fancied the Old World staring through all its tele-
scopes at us, and wondered that it did not recog-
nize in us what we were fully persuaded we were
going to be and do ?

Our American life is dreadfully barren of those
elements of the social picturesque which give piq-
uancy to anecdote. And without anecdote, what
is biography, or even history, which is only biog-
raphy on a larger scale? Clio, though she take
airs on herself, and pretend to be "philosophy
teaching by example," is, after all, but a gossip
who has borrowed Fame's speaking-trumpet, and
should be figured with a tea-cup instead of a scroll
in her hand. How much has she not owed of late
to the tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia? In
what gutters has not Macaulay raked for the bril-
liant bits with which he has put together his admi-
rable mosaic picture of England under the last two
Stuarts? Even Mommsen himself, who dislikes
Plutarch's method as much as Montaigne loved it,
cannot get or give a lively notion of ancient Rome,
without running to the comic poets and the an-
ecdote-mongers. He gives us the very beef -tea of
history, nourishing and even palatable enough, ex-
cellently portable for a memory that must carry her
own packs, and can afford little luggage ; but for my
own part, I prefer a full, old-fashioned meal, with
its side-dishes of spicy gossip, and its last relish,
the Stilton of scandal, so it be not too high. One
volume of contemporary memoirs, stuffed though
it be with lies, (for lies to be good for anything

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 285

must have a potential probability, must even be
true so far as their moral and social setting is
concerned,) will throw more light into the dark
backward of time than the gravest Camden or
Thuanus. If St. Simon be not accurate, is he any
the less essentially true ? No history gives us so
clear an understanding of the moral condition of
average men after the restoration of the Stuarts as
the unconscious blabbings of the Puritan tailor's
son, with his two consciences, as it were, — an in-
ward, still sensitive in spots, though mostly tough-
ened to India-rubber, and good rather for rubbing
out old scores than for retaining them, and an
outward, alert, and termagantly effective in Mrs.
Pepys. But we can have no St. Simons or Pepyses
till we have a Paris or London to delocalize our
gossip and give it historic breadth. All our cap-
itals are fractional, merely greater or smaller gath-
erings of men, centres of business rather than of
action or influence. Each contains so many souls,
but is not, as the word " capital " implies, the true
head of a community and seat of its common soul.

Has not life itself perhaps become a little more
prosaic than it once was? As the clearing away of
the woods scants the streams, may not our civiliza-
tion have dried up some feeders that helped to
swell the current of individual and personal force ?
I have sometimes thought that the stricter defi-
nition and consequent seclusion from each other of
the different callings in modern times, as it nar-
rowed the chance of developing and giving variety
to character, lessened also the interest of biog-

286 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

raphy. Formerly arts and arms were not divided
by so impassable a barrier as now. There was
hardly such a thing as a pekin. Caesar gets up
from writing his Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul,
change the course of history, and make so many
things possible, — among the rest our English
language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a
colonel ; and from ^Eschylus, who fought at Mara-
thon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the
Low Countries, the list of martial civilians is a
long one. A man's education seems more complete
who has smelt hostile powder from a less aesthetic
distance than Goethe. It raises our confidence in
Sir Kenelm Digby as a physicist, that he is able to
illustrate some theory of acoustics in his Treatise
of Bodies by instancing the effect of his guns in a
sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would expect the
proportions of character to be enlarged by such
variety and contrast of experience. Perhaps it
will by and by appear that our own Civil War has
done something for us in this way. Colonel Hig-
ginson comes down from his pulpit to draw on his
jack-boots, and thenceforth rides in our imagina-
tion alongside of John Bunyan and Bishop Comp-
ton. To have stored moral capital enough to meet
the drafts of Death at sight must be an unmatched
tonic. We saw our light-hearted youth come back
with the modest gravity of age, as if they had
learned to throw out pickets against a surprise of
any weak point in their temperament. Perhaps
that American shiftiness, so often complained of,
may not be so bad a thing, if, by bringing men

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acquainted with every humor of fortune and human
nature, it put them in fuller possession of them-
selves.

But with whatever drawbacks in special circum-
stances, the main interest of biography must always
lie in the amount of character or essential manhood
which the subject of it reveals to us, and events are
of import only as means to that end. It is true
that lofty and far-seen exigencies may give greater
opportunity to some men, whose energy is more
sharply spurred by the shout of a multitude than
by the grudging Well done ! of conscience. Some
theorists have too hastily assumed that, as the
power of public opinion increases, the force of
private character, or what we call originality, is
absorbed into and diluted by it. But I think
Horace was right in putting tyrant and mob on a
level as the trainers and tests of a man's solid qual-
ity. The amount of resistance of which one is
capable to whatever lies outside the conscience, is
of more consequence than all other faculties to-
gether ; and democracy, perhaps, tries this by pres-
sure in more directions, and with a more continuous
strain, than any other form of society. In Josiah
Quincy we have an example of character trained
and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure
democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness,
unity, and self-centred poise that recall the finer
types of antiquity, in which the public and private
man were so wholly of a piece that they were truly
everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of na-
ture that dignified the hearth carried also a charm

288 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

of homeliness into the forum. The phrase " a great
public character," once common, seems to be going
out of fashion, perhaps because there are fewer ex-
amples of the thing. It fits Josiah Quincy exactly.
Active in civic and academic duties till beyond the
ordinary period of man, at fourscore and ten his
pen, voice, and venerable presence were still effi-
cient in public affairs. A score of years after the
energies of even vigorous men are declining or
spent, his mind and character made themselves felt
as in their prime. A true pillar of house and state,
he stood unflinchingly upright under whatever bur-
den might be laid upon him. The French Revo-
lutionists aped what was itself but a parody of the
elder republic, with their hair a la Brutus and their
pedantic moralities a la Cato Minor, but this man
unconsciously was the antique Roman they labo-
riously went about to be. Others have filled places
more conspicuous, few have made the place they
filled so conspicuous by an exact and disinterested
performance of duty.

In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son there
is something of the provincialism of which we have
spoken as inherent in most American works of the
kind. His was a Boston life in the strictest sense.
But provincialism is relative, and where it has a
flavor of its own, as in Scotland, it is often agree-
able in proportion to its very intensity. The Mas-
sachusetts in which Mr. Quincy's habits of thought
were acquired was a very different Massachusetts
from that in which we of later generations have
been bred. Till after he had passed middle life,

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 289

Boston was more truly a capital than any other
city in America, before or since, except possibly
Charleston. The acknowledged head of New Eng-
land, with a population of wellnigh purely English
descent, mostly derived from the earlier emigration,
with ancestral traditions and inspiring memories of
its own, it had made its name familiar in both
worlds, and was both historically and politically
more important than at any later period. The
Revolution had not interrupted, but rather given a
freer current to the tendencies of its past. Both
by its history and position, the town had what
the French call a solidarity, an almost personal
consciousness, rare anywhere, rare especially in
America, and more than ever since our enormous
importation of fellow-citizens to whom America
means merely shop, or meat three times a day.
Boston has been called the " American Athens."
^Esthetically, the comparison is ludicrous, but polit-
ically it was more reasonable. Its population was
homogeneous, and there were leading families ;
while the form of government by town-meeting,
and the facility of social and civic intercourse, gave
great influence to popular personal qualities and
opportunity to new men. A wide commerce, while
it had insensibly softened the asperities of Puri-
tanism and imported enough foreign refinement to
humanize, not enough foreign luxury to corrupt,
had not essentially qualified the native tone of the
town. Retired sea-captains (true brothers of Chau-
cer's Shipman), whose exploits had kindled the
imagination of Burke, added a not unpleasant savor

290 A G RE AT PUBLIC CHARACTER

of salt to society. They belonged to the old school
of Gilbert, Hawkins, Frobisher, and Drake, parcel-
soldiers all of them, who had commanded armed
ships and had tales to tell of gallant fights with
privateers or pirates, truest representatives of those
Vikings who, if trade in lumber or peltry was dull,
would make themselves Dukes of Dublin or Earls
of Orkney. If trade pinches the mind, commerce
liberalizes it ; and Boston was also advantaged with
the neighborhood of the country's oldest College,
which maintained the wholesome traditions of cul-
ture,— where Homer and Horace are familiar there
is a certain amount of cosmopolitanism, — and
would not allow bigotry to become despotism.
Manners were more self-respectful, and therefore
more respectful of others, and personal sensitive-
ness was fenced with more of that ceremonial with
which society armed itself when it surrendered the
ruder protection of the sword. We had not then
seen a Governor in his chamber at the State-House
with his hat on, a cigar in his mouth, and his feet
upon the stove. Domestic service, in spite of the
proverb, was not seldom an inheritance, nor was
household peace dependent on the whim of a for-
eign armed neutrality in the kitchen. Servant and
master were of one stock ; there was decent author-
ity and becoming respect ; the tradition of the Old
World lingered after its superstition had passed
away. There was an aristocracy such as is health-
ful in a well-ordered community, founded on public
service, and hereditary so long as the virtue which
was its patent was not escheated. The clergy, no

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 291

longer hedged with the reverence exacted by sacer-
dotal caste, were more than repaid by the consider-
ation willingly paid to superior culture. What
changes, many of them for the better, some of them
surely for the worse, and all of them inevitable, did
not Josiah Quincy see in that wellnigh secular life
which linked the war of independence to the war
of nationality ! I seemed to see a type of them
the other day in a colored man standing with an
air of comfortable self-possession while his boots
were brushed by a youth of catholic neutral tint,
but whom nature had planned for white. The
same eyes that had looked on Gage's red-coats saw
Colonel Shaw's negro regiment march out of Bos-
ton in the national blue. Seldom has a life, itself
actively associated with public affairs, spanned so
wide a chasm for the imagination. Oglethorpe's
offers a parallel, — the aide-de-camp of Prince
Eugene calling on John Adams, American Ambas-
sador to England. Most long lives resemble those
threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to noth-
ing unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathway
of some worm from his cradle to his grave; but
Quincy's was strung with seventy active years, each
one a rounded bead of usefulness and service.

Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type.
Since the settlement of the town, there had been a
colonel of the Boston regiment in every generation
of his family. He lived to see a grandson brevet-
ted with the same title for gallantry in the field.
Only child of one among the most eminent advo-
cates of the Revolution, and who but for his un-

292 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

timely death would have been a leading actor in it,
his earliest recollections belonged to the heroic pe-
riod in the history of his native town. With that
history his life was thenceforth intimately united
by offices of public trust, as Representative in
Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and President of
the University, to a period beyond the ordinary
span of mortals. Even after he had passed ninety,
he would not claim to be emeritus, but came for-
ward to brace his townsmen with a courage and
warm them with a fire younger than their own.
The legend of Colonel Goffe at Deerfield became
a reality to the eyes of this generation. The
New England breed is running out, we are told !
This was in all ways a beautiful and fortunate
life, fortunate in the goods of this world, fortu-
nate, above all, in the force of character which
makes fortune secondary and subservient. We are
fond in this country of what are called self-made
men (as if real success could ever be other) ; and
this is all very well, provided they make something
worth having of themselves. Otherwise it is not
so well, and the examples of such are at best but
stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a false demo-
cracy. The gist of the matter is, not where a
man starts from, but where he comes out. I am
glad to have the biography of one who, beginning
as a gentleman, kept himself such to the end, —
who, with no necessity of labor, left behind him an
amount of thoroughly done work such as few have
accomplished with the mighty help of hunger.
Some kind of pace may be got out of the veriest

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 293

jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thor-
ough-bred has the spur in his blood.

Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his
father's life with the skill and good taste that
might have been expected from the author of
"Wensley." Considering natural partialities, he
has shown a discretion of which we are oftener re-
minded by missing than by meeting it. He has
given extracts enough from speeches to show their
bearing and quality, from letters, to recall bygone
modes of thought and indicate many-sided friendly
relations with good and eminent men ; above all,
he has lost no opportunity to illustrate that life
of the past, near in date, yet alien in manners,
whose current glides so imperceptibly from one
generation into another that we fail to mark the
shiftings of its bed or the change in its nature
wrought by the affluents that discharge into it on
all sides, — here a stream bred in the hills to
sweeten, there the sewerage of some great city to
corrupt. We cannot but lament that Mr. Quincy
did not earlier begin to keep a diary. " Miss not
the discourses of the elders," though put now in
the Apocrypha, is a wise precept, but incomplete
unless we add, " Nor cease from recording what-
soever thing thou hast gathered therefrom," —
so ready is Oblivion with her fatal curfew. The
somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone-
picker, like Athenaeus, is turned to gold by time.
Even the Virgilium vidi tantum of Dryden about
Milton, and of Pope again about Dryden, is worth
having, and gives a pleasant fillip to the fancy.

294 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

There is much of this quality in Mr. Edmund
Quincy's book, enough to make us wish there were
more. We get a glimpse of President Washing-
ton, in 1795, who reminded Mr. Quincy " of the
gentlemen who used to come to Boston in those
days to attend the General Court from Hampden
or Franklin County, in the western part of the
State. A little stiff in his person, not a little for-
mal in his manners, not particularly at ease in the
presence of strangers. He had the air of a coun-
try-gentleman not accustomed to mix much in so-
ciety, perfectly polite, but not easy in his address
and conversation, and not graceful in his gait and
movements." Our figures of Washington have
been so long equestrian, that it is pleasant to meet
him dismounted for once. In the same way we get
a card of invitation to a dinner of sixty covers at
John Hancock's, and see the rather light-weighted
great man wheeled round the room (for he had
adopted Lord Chatham's convenient trick of the
gout) to converse with his" guests. In another
place we are presented, with Mr. Merry, the Eng-
lish Minister, to Jefferson, whom we find in an un-
official costume of studied slovenliness, intended
as a snub to haughty Albion. Slippers down at
the heel and a dirty shirt become weapons of di-
plomacy and threaten more serious war. Thus
many a door into the past, long irrevocably shut
upon us, is set ajar, and we of the younger gener-
ation on the landing catch peeps of distinguished
men and bits of their table-talk. We drive in
from Mr. Lyinan's beautiful seat at Waltham

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 295

(unique at that day in its stately swans and half-
shy, half-familiar deer) with John Adams, who
tells us that Dr. Priestley looked on the French
monarchy as the tenth horn of the Beast in Beve-
lation, — a horn that has set more sober wits dan-
cing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those were
days, I arn inclined to think, of more solid and
elegant hospitality than our own, — the elegance
of manners, at once more courtly and more frugal,
of men who had better uses for wealth than merely
to display it. Dinners have more courses now,
and, like the Gascon in the old story, who could
not see the town for the houses, we miss the
real dinner in the multiplicity of its details. We
might seek long before we found so good cheer,
so good company, or so good talk as our fathers
had at Lieutenant-Governor Winthrop's or Sena-
tor Cabot's.

I shall not do Mr. Edmund Quincy the wrong
of picking out in advance all the plums in his vol-
ume, leaving to the reader only the less savory
mixture that held them together, — a kind of fill-
ing unavoidable in books of this kind, and too apt
to be what boys at boarding-school call stickjaw,
but of which there is no more than could not be
helped here, and that light and palatable. But
here and there is a passage where I cannot re-
frain, for there is a smack of Jack Horner in all
of us, and a reviewer were nothing without it.
Josiah Quincy was born in 1772. His father, re-
turning from a mission to England, died in sight
of the dear New England shore three years later.

296 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

His young widow was worthy of him, and of the
son whose character she was to have so large a
share in forming. There is something very touch-
ing and beautiful in this little picture of her which
Mr. Quincy drew in his extreme old age.

" My mother imbibed, as was usual with the
women of the period, the spirit of the times. Pa-
triotism was not then a profession, but an energetic
principle beating in the heart and active in the
life. The death of my father, under circumstances
now the subject of history, had overwhelmed her
with grief. She viewed him as a victim in the cause
of freedom, and cultivated his memory with ven-
eration, regarding him as a martyr, falling, as did
his friend Warren, in the defence of the liberties
of his country. These circumstances gave a pathos
and vehemence to her grief, which, after the first
violence of passion had subsided, sought consolation
in earnest and solicitous fulfilment of duty to the
representative of his memory and of their mutual
affections. Love and reverence for the memory of
his father was early impressed on the mind of her
son, and worn into his heart by her sadness and
tears. She cultivated the memory of my father
in my heart and affections, even in my earliest
childhood, by reading to me passages from the
poets, and obliging me to learn by heart and re-
peat such as were best adapted to her own circum-
stances and feelings. Among others, the whole
leave-taking of Hector and Andromache, in the
sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one of her favor-
ite lessons, which she made me learn and frequently

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 297

repeat. Her imagination, probably, found conso-
lation in the repetition of lines which brought to
mind and seemed to typify her own great bereave-
ment.

' And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be, —
A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? '

These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's
address and circumstances, she identified with her
own sufferings, which seemed relieved by the tears
my repetition of them drew from her."

Pope's Homer is not Homer, perhaps ; but how
many noble natures have felt its elation, how many
bruised spirits the solace of its bracing, if monoto-
nous melody ! To me there is something inexpres-
sibly tender in this instinct of the widowed mother
to find consolation in the idealization of her grief
by mingling it with those sorrows which genius
has turned into the perennial delight of mankind.
This was a kind of sentiment that was healthy for
her boy, that refined without unnerving, and asso-
ciated his father's memory with a noble company
inaccessible to Time. It was through this lady,
whose image looks down on us out of the past, so
full of sweetness and refinement, that Mr. Quincy
became of kin with Mr. Wendell Phillips, so justly
renowned as a speaker. There is something nearer
than cater-cousinship in a certain impetuous auda-
city of temper common to them both.

When six years old, Mr. Quincy was sent to
Phillips Academy at Andover, where he remained
till he entered college. His form-fellow here was a
man of thirty, who had been a surgeon in the Con-

298 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

tinental Army, and whose character and adven-
tures might almost seem borrowed from a romance
of Smollett. Under Principal Pearson, the lad,
though a near relative of the founder of the school,
seems to have endured all that severity of the old
a posteriori method of teaching which still smarted
in Tusser's memory when he sang,

" From Paul's I went, to Eton sent,

To learn straightways the Latin phrase,
Where fifty-three stripes given to me
At once I had."

The young victim of the wisdom of Solomon was
boarded with the parish minister, in whose kind-
ness he found a lenitive for the scholastic discipline
he underwent. This gentleman had been a soldier
in the Colonial service, and Mr. Quincy afterwards
gave as a reason for his mildness, that, " while a
sergeant at Castle William, he had seen something
of mankind." This, no doubt, would be a better
preparative for successful dealing with the young
than is generally thought. However, the birch was
then the only classic tree, and every round in the
ladder of learning was made of its inspiring wood.
Dr. Pearson, perhaps, thought he was only doing
justice to his pupil's privilege of kin by giving
him a larger share of the educational advantages
which the neighboring forest afforded. The vivid-
ness with which this system is always remembered
by those who have been subjected to it would seem
to show that it really enlivened the attention and
thereby invigorated the memory, nay, might even
raise some question as to what part of the person

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is chosen by the mother of the Muses for her resi-
dence. With an appetite for the classics quick-
ened by " Cheever's Accidence," and such other
preliminary whets as were then in vogue, young
Quincy entered college, where he spent the usual
four years, and was graduated with the highest
honors of his class. The amount of Latin and
Greek imparted to the students of that day was
not very great. They were carried through Horace,
Sallust, and the De Oratoribus of Cicero, and read
portions of Livy, Xenophon, and Homer. Yet
the chief end of classical studies was perhaps as
often reached then as now, in giving young men a
love for something apart from and above the more
vulgar associations of life. Mr. Quincy, at least,
retained to the last a fondness for certain Latin
authors. While he was President of the College,
he said to a gentleman, who told me the story, that,
" if he were imprisoned, and allowed to choose one
book for his amusement, that should be Horace."

In 1797 Mr. Quincy was married to Miss Eliza
Susan Morton of New York, a union which lasted
in unbroken happiness for more than fifty years.
His case might be cited among the leading ones in
support of the old poet's axiom, that

" He never loved, that loved not at first sight ; "

for he saw, wooed, and won in a week. In later
life he tried in a most amusing way to account for
this rashness, and to find reasons of settled gravity
for the happy inspiration of his heart. He cites
the evidence of Judge Sedgwick, of Mr. and Mrs.

300 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

Oliver Wolcott, of the Rev. Dr. Smith, and others,
to the wisdom of his choice. But it does not ap-
pear that he consulted them beforehand. If love
were not too cunning for that, what would become
of the charming idyl, renewed in all its wonder and
freshness for every generation ? Let us be thank-
ful that in every man's life there is a holiday of
romance, an illumination of the senses by the soul,
that makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quincy
caught the enchantment through his ears, a song of
Burns heard from the next room conveying the in-
fection, — a fact still inexplicable to him after life-
long meditation thereon, as he " was not very im-
pressible by music " ! To me there is something
very characteristic in this rapid energy of Mr.
Quincy, something very delightful in his naive
account of the affair. It needs the magic of no
Dr. Heidegger to make these dried roses, that drop
from between the leaves of a volume shut for
seventy years, bloom again in all their sweetness.
Mr. Edmund Quincy tells us that his mother was
" not handsome ; " but those who remember the
gracious dignity of her old age will hardly agree
with him. She must always have had that highest
kind of beauty which grows more beautiful with
years, and keeps the eyes young, as if with the par-
tial connivance of Time.

I do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely
through his whole public life, which, beginning with
his thirty-second, ended with his seventy-third year.
He entered Congress as the representative of a
party, privately the most respectable, publicly the

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least sagacious, among all those which under differ-
ent names have divided the country. The Federal-
ists were the only proper tories our politics have ever
produced, whose conservatism truly represented an
idea, and not a mere selfish interest, — men who
honestly distrusted democracy, and stood up for
experience, or the tradition which they believed
to be such, against empiricism. During his Con-
gressionaj. career, the government was little more
than an attache of the French legation, and the op-
position to which he belonged a helpless revenant
from the dead and buried Colonial past. There
are some questions whose interest dies the moment
they are settled ; others, into which a moral element
enters that hinders them from being settled, though
they may be decided. It is hard to revive any heat
of temper about the Embargo, though it once could
inspire the boyish Muse of Bryant, or in the im-
pressment quarrel, though the Trent difficulty for
a time rekindled its old animosities. The stars in
their courses fought against Mr. Quincy's party,
which was not in sympathy with the instincts of
the people, groping about for some principle of
nationality, and finding a substitute for it in hatred
of England. But there are several things which
still make his career in Congress interesting to us,
because they illustrate the personal character of the
man. He prepared himself honestly for his duties,
by a thorough study of whatever could make him
efficient in them. It was not enough that he could
make a good speech ; he wished also to have some-
thing to say. In Congress, as everywhere else,

302 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

quod voluit valde voluit ; and he threw a fervor
into the most temporary topic, as if his eternal sal-
vation depended upon it. He had not merely, as
the French say, the courage of his opinions, but his
opinions became principles, and gave him that gal-
lantry of fanaticism which made him always ready
to head a forlorn hope, — the more ready, perhaps,
that it was a forlorn hope. This is not the humor
of a statesman, — no, unless he hold a position like
that of Pitt, and can charge a whole people with
his own enthusiasm, and then we call it genius.
Mr. Quincy had the moral firmness which enabled
him to decline a duel without any loss of personal
prestige. His opposition to the Louisiana purchase
(Jefferson's best legacy in the way of statesman-
ship) illustrates that Roman quality in him to
which we have alluded. He would not conclude
the purchase till each of the old thirteen States
had signified its assent. He was reluctant to en-
dow a Sabine city with the privilege of Roman cit-
izenship. It is worth noting, that while in Con-
gress, and afterwards in the State Senate, many of
his phrases became the catch-words of party poli-
tics. He always dared to say what others deemed
it more prudent only to think, and whatever he
said he intensified with the whole ardor of his tem-
perament. It is this which makes Mr. Quincy's
speeches good reading still, even when the topics
they discussed were ephemeral. In one respect he
is distinguished from the politicians, and must
rank with the far-seeing statesmen of his time. He
early foresaw and denounced the political danger

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 303

with which the Slave Power threatened the Union.
His fears, it is true, were aroused for the balance
of power between the old States, rather than by any
moral sensitiveness, which would, indeed, have been
an anachronism at that time. But the Civil War
justified his prescience.

It was as Mayor of his native city that his re-
markable qualities as an administrator were first
called into requisition and adequately displayed.
He organized the city government, and put it in
working order. To him we owe many reforms in
police, in the management of the poor, and other
kindred matters, — much in the way of cure, still
more in that of prevention. The place demanded
a man of courage and firmness, and found those
qualities almost superabundantly in him. His vir-
tues lost him his office, as such virtues are only too
apt to do in peaceful times, where they are felt
more as a restraint than a protection. His address
on laying down the mayoralty is very character-
istic. Let me quote the concluding sentences : —

44 And now, gentlemen, standing as I do in this
relation for the last time in your presence and that
of my fellow-citizens, about to surrender forever a
station full of difficulty, of labor and temptation,
in which I have been called to very arduous duties,
affecting the rights, property, and at times the lib-
erty of others ; concerning which the perfect line
of rectitude — though desired — was not always to
be clearly discerned ; in which great interests have
been placed within my control, under circumstances
in which it would have been easy to advance pri-

304 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

vate ends and sinister projects ; — under these cir-
cumstances, I inquire, as I have a right to inquire,
— for in the recent contest insinuations have been
cast against my integrity, — in this long manage-
ment of your affairs, whatever errors have been
committed, — and doubtless there have been many,
— have you found in me anything selfish, anything
personal, anything mercenary? In the simple lan-
guage of an ancient seer, I say, 'Behold, here I
am ; witness against me. Whom have I defrauded ?
Whom have I oppressed? At whose hands have
I received any bribe ? '

" Six years ago, when I had the honor first to
address the City Council, in anticipation of the
event which has now occurred, the following ex-
pressions were used : ' In administering the police,
in executing the laws, in protecting the rights and
promoting the prosperity of the city, its first officer
will be necessarily beset and assailed by individual
interests, by rival projects, by personal influences,
by party passions. The more firm and inflexible
he is in maintaining the rights and in pursuing the
interests of the city, the greater is the probability
of his becoming obnoxious to the censure of all
whom he causes to be prosecuted or punished, of
all whose passions he thwarts, of all whose inter-
ests he opposes.'

" The day and the event have come. I retire —
as in that first address I told my fellow-citizens,
' If, in conformity with the experience of other
republics, faithful exertions should be followed by
loss of favor and confidence,' I should retire —

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 305

' rejoicing, not, indeed, with a public and patriotic,
but with a private and individual joy ; ' for I shall
retire with a consciousness weighed against which
all human suffrages are but as the light dust of
the balance."

Of his mayoralty we have another anecdote quite
Roman in color. He was in the habit of driving
early in the morning through the various streets
that he might look into everything with his own
eyes. He was once arrested on a malicious charge
of violating the city ordinance against fast driving.
He might have resisted, but he appeared in court
and pa'id the fine, because it would serve as a good
example u that no citizen was above the law."

Hardly had Mr. Quincy given up the govern-
ment of the city, when he was called to that of the
College. It is here that his stately figure is asso-
ciated most intimately and warmly with the recol-
lections of the greater number who hold his memory
dear. Almost everybody looks back regretfully to
the days of some Consul Plancus. Never were
eyes so bright, never had wine so much wit and
good-fellowship in it, never were we ourselves so
capable of the various great things we have never
done. Nor is it merely the sunset of life that casts
such a ravishing light on the past, and makes the
western windows of those homes of fancy we have
left forever tremble with the reflected glow of such
sweet regret. We set great store by what we had,
and cannot have again, however indifferent in itself,
and what is past is infinitely past. This is espe-
cially true of college life, when we first assume the

306 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

titles without the responsibilities of manhood, and
the President of our year is apt to become our
Flancus very early. Popular or not while in office,
an ex-president is always sure of enthusiastic cheers
at every college festival. Mr. Quincy had many
qualities calculated to win favor with the young, —
that one above all which is sure to do it, indomi-
table pluck. With him the dignity was in the man,
not in the office. He had some of those little oddi-
ties, too, which afford amusement without contempt,
and which rather tend to heighten than diminish
personal attachment to superiors in station. His
punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep
there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular in-
ability to make even the shortest off-hand speech
to the students, — all the more singular in a prac-
tised orator, — his occasional absorption of mind,
leading him to hand you his sand-box instead of
the leave of absence he had just dried with it, —
the old-fashioned courtesy of his " Sir, your ser-
vant," as he bowed you out of his study, — all
tended to make him popular. He had also a little
of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry
humor, not without influence in his relations with
the students. In taking leave of the graduating
class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever
honest compliment he could. Who, of a certain
year which shall be nameless, will ever forget the
gravity with which he assured them that they were
" the best-dressed class that had passed through
college during his administration " ? How sin-
cerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 307

levity, will always be gratefully remembered by
whoever had occasion to experience it. A visitor
not long before his death found him burning some
memoranda of college peccadilloes, lest they should
ever rise up in judgment against the men eminent
in Church and State who had been guilty of them.
One great element of his popularity with the stu-
dents was his esprit de corps. However strict in
discipline, he was always on our side as respected
the outside world. Of his efficiency, no higher
testimony could be asked than that of his successor,
Dr. Walker. Here also many reforms date from
his time. He had that happiest combination for
a wise vigor in the conduct of affairs, — he was a
conservative with an open mind.

One would be srpt to think that, in the various of-
fices which Mr. Quincy successively filled, he would
have found enough to do. But his indefatigable
activity overflowed. Even as a man of letters, he
occupies no inconsiderable place. His " History of
Harvard College " is a valuable and entertaining
treatment of a subject not wanting in natural dry-
ness. His " Municipal History of Boston," his
" History of the Boston Athenaeum," and his " Life
of Colonel Shaw " have permanent interest and
value. All these were works demanding no little
labor and research, and the thoroughness of their
workmanship makes them remarkable as the by-
productions of a busy man. Having consented,
when more than eighty, to write a memoir of John
Quincy Adams, to be published in the " Proceed-
ings " of the Massachusetts Historical Society, he

308 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

was obliged to excuse himself. On account of his
age ? Not at all, but because the work had grown
to be a volume under his weariless hand. Ohne
Hast ohne Rast was as true of him as of Goethe.
We find the explanation of his accomplishing so
much in a rule of life which lie gave, when Presi-
dent, to a young man employed as his secretary,
and who was a little behindhand with his work:
" When you have a number of duties to perform,
always do the most disagreeable one first." No
advice could have been more in character, and it is
perhaps better than the great German's, " Do the
duty that lies nearest thee."

Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy's
life was his old age. What in most men is decay
was in him but beneficent prolongation and ad-
journment. His interest in affairs unabated, his
judgment undimmed, his fire unchilled, his last
years were indeed " lovely as a Lapland night."
Till within a year or two of its fall, there were no
signs of dilapidation in that stately edifice. Sin-
gularly felicitous was Mr. Winthrop's application
to him of Wordsworth's verses : —

" The monumental pomp of age
Was in that goodly personage."

Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of,
he had in deserved abundance, — the love, the
honor, the obedience, the troops of friends, His
equanimity was beautiful. He loved life, as men
of large vitality always do, but he did not fear to
lose life by changing the scene of it. Visiting him
in his ninetieth year with a friend, he said to us,

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 309

among other tilings : " I have no desire to die, but
also no reluctance. Indeed, I have a considerable
curiosity about the other world. I have never
been to Europe, you know." Even in his extreme
senescence there was an April mood somewhere in
his nature " that put a spirit of youth in every-
thing." He seemed to feel that he could draw
against an unlimited credit of years. When eighty-
two, he said smilingly to a young man just returned
from a foreign tour, " Well, well, I mean to go
myself when I am old enough to profit by it." I
have seen many old men whose lives were mere
waste and desolation, who made longevity disrep-
utable by their untimely persistence in it ; but in
Mr. Quincy's length of years there was nothing
that was not venerable. To him it was fulfilment,
not deprivation ; the days were marked to the last
for what they brought, not for what they took
away.

The memory of what Mr. Quincy did will be lost
in the crowd of newer activities ; it is the memory
of what he was that is precious to us. Bonum
virum facile credercs, magnum libenter* If John
Winthrop be the highest type of the men who
shaped New England, we can find no better one of
* se whom New England has shaped than Josiah
Quincy. It is a figure that we can contemplate
with more than satisfaction, a figure of admirable
example in a democracy, as that of a model cit-
izen. His courage and high-mindedness were per-
sonal to him ; let us believe that his integrity, his
industry, his love of letters, his devotion to duty,

310 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

go in some sort to the credit of the society which
gave him birth and formed his character. In one
respect he is especially interesting to us, as belong-
ing to a class of men of whom he was^ the last rep-
resentative, and whose like we shall never see
again. Born and bred in an age of greater social
distinctions than ours, he was an aristocrat in a
sense that is good even in a republic. He had the
sense of a certain personal dignity inherent in him,
and which could not be alienated by any whim of
the popular will. There is no stouter buckler than
this for independence of spirit, no surer guaranty of
that courtesy which, in its consideration of others,
is but paying a debt of self-respect. During his
presidency, Mr. Quincy was once riding to Cam-
bridge in a crowded omnibus. A colored woman
got in, and could nowhere find a seat. The Presi-
dent instantly gave her his own, and stood the rest
of the way, a silent rebuke of the general rudeness.
He was a man of quality in the true sense, — of
quality not hereditary, but personal. Position
might be taken from him, but he remained where
he was. In what he valued most, his sense of per-
sonal worth, the world's opinion could neither help
nor hinder. I do not mean that this was con-
scious in him ; if it had been, it would have been a
weakness. It was an instinct, and acted with the
force and promptitude proper to such. Let us
hope that the scramble of democracy will give us
something as good ; anything of so classic dignity
we shall not look to see again.

Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office ; from

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 311

first to last he and it were drawn together by the
mutual attraction of need and fitness, and it clung
to him as most men cling to it. The people often
make blunders in their choice ; they are apt to
mistake presence of speech for presence of mind ;
they love so to help a man rise from the ranks, that
they will spoil a good demagogue to make a bad
general ; a great many faults may be laid at their
door, but they are not fairly to be charged with
fickleness. They are constant to whoever is constant
to his real self, to the best manhood that is in him,
and not to the mere selfishness, the antica lupa so
cunning to hide herself in the sheep's fleece even
from ourselves. It is true, the contemporary world
is apt to be the gull of brilliant parts, and the
maker of a lucky poem or picture or statue, the
winner of a lucky battle, gets perhaps more than is
due to the solid result of his triumph. It is time
that fit honor should be paid also to him who shows
a genius for public usefulness, for the achievement
of character, who shapes his life to a certain classic
proportion, and comes off conqueror on those in-
ward fields where something more than mere talent
is demanded for victory. The memory of such
men should be cherished as the most precious in-
heritance which one generation can bequeath to
the next. However it might be with popular
favor, public respect followed Mr. Quincy unwav-
eringly for seventy years, and it was because he
had never forfeited his own. In this, it appears to
me, lies the lesson of his life and his claim upon our
grateful recollection. It is this which makes him

312 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER

an example, while the careers of so many of our
prominent men are only useful for warning. As
regards history, his greatness was narrowly provin-
cial ; but if the measure of deeds be the spirit in
which they are done, that fidelity to instant duty,
which, according to Herbert, makes an action fine,
then his length of years should be very precious to
us for its lesson. Talleyrand, whose life may be
compared with his for the strange vicissitude which
it witnessed, carried with him out of the world the
respect of no man, least of all his own ; and how
many of our own public men have we seen whose old
age but accumulated a disregard which they would
gladly have exchanged for oblivion! In Quincy
the public fidelity was loyal to the private, and
the withdrawal of his old age was into a sanctuary,
— a diminution of publicity with addition of influ-
ence.

"Conclude -we, then, felicity consists
Not in exterior fortunes. . . .
Sacred felicity doth ne'er extend
Beyond itself. . . .

The swelling of an outward fortune can
Create a prosperous, not a happy man."

WITCHCRAFT1

1868

CREDULITY, as a mental and moral phenomenon,
manifests itself in widely different ways, according

1 Salem Witchcraft, with an Account of Salem Village, and a
History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects. By
Charles W. Uphain. Boston : Wiggin and Lunt. 1867. 2 vols.

loannis Wieri de Praestigiis Daemonum, et incantationibus ac
veneficiis Libri sex, postrema editione sexta aucti et recogniti.
Accessit Liber Apologeticus et Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.
Cum Rerum ac verborum copioso indice. Cum Caes. Maiest.
Regisq; Galliarum gratia et privilegio. Basilese, ex officina
Oporiniana. 1583.

Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft : proving the common opinions
of Witches contracting with Di vels, Spirits, or Familiars ; and
their power to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men
women, and children, or other creatures by diseased or other-
wise ; their flying in the Air, &c. To be but imaginary Erronious
conceptions and novelties; Wherein also, the lewde, unchristian
practises of Witchmongers, upon aged, melancholy, ignorant, and
superstitious people in extorting confessions, by inhumane terrors
and tortures, is notably detected. Also The knavery and confed-
eracy of Conjurors. The impious blasphemy of Inchanters. The
imposture of Soothsayers, and Infidelity of Atheists. The delu-
sion of Pythonists, Figure-casters, Astrologers, and vanity of
Dreamers. The f ruitlesse beggarly art of Alchimistry. The hor-
rible art of Poisoning and all the tricks and conveyances of jug-
gling and Liegerdemain are fully deciphered. With many other
things opened that have long lain hidden : though very necessary
to be known for the undeceiving of Judges, Justices, and Juries,
and for the preservation of poor, aged, deformed, ignorant people ;
frequently taken, arraigned, condemned and executed for Witches,

314 WITCHCRAFT

as it chances to be the daughter of fancy or terror.
The one lies warm about the heart as Folk-lore,

when according to a right understanding, and a good conscience,
Physick, Food, and necessaries should be administred to them.
Whereunto is added, a treatise upon the nature, and substance of
Spirits and Divels, &c. all written and published in Anno 1584.
By Reginald Scot, Esquire. Printed by R. C. and are to be sold
by Giles Calvert, dwelling at the Black Spread Eagle, at the
West-end of Pauls, 1651.

De la Demonomanie des Sorciers. A Monseigneur M. Chres-
tofle de Thou, Chevalier, Seigneur de Coeli, premier President en
la Cour de Parlement, et Conseiller du Roy en son prive* Conseil.
Reueu, corrige*, et augmente" d'une grande partie. Par I. Bodin,
Angevin. A Paris, Chez lacques Du-Puys, Libraire lure", a la,
Samaritaine. M.D LXXXVII. Avec privilege du Roy.

Magica, seu mirabilium historiarum de Spectris et Apparitionibus
spirituum : Item, de magicis et diabolicis incantationibus. De
Miraculis, Oraculis, Vaticiniis, Divinationibus, Prsedictionibus,
Revelationibus et aliis eiusmodi multis ac varijs praestigijs, ludi-
brijs et imposturis malorum Daemonum. „ Libri II. Ex probatis
et fide dignis historiarum scriptoribus diligenter collecti. Islebise,
cura, typis et sumptibus Henningi Grossij Bibl. Lipo. 1597. Cum
privilegio.

The displaying of supposed Witchcraft. Wherein is affirmed
that there are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, and divers
persons under a passive delusion of Melancholy and Fancy. But
that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the Devil and the
Witch, or that he sucks on the Witches body, has carnal copula-
tion, or that Witches are turned into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests,
or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is han-
dled, The existence of Angels and Spirits, the truth of Appari-
tions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal Spirits, the force of
Charms, and Philters ; with other abstruse matters. By John
Webster, Practitioner in Physick. Falsse etenim opiniones Hom-
inum prseoccupantes non solum surdos sed et csecos faciunt, ita
ut videre nequeant quse aliis perspicua apparent. Galen, lib. 8,
de Comp. Med. London : Printed by J. M. and are to be sold by
the booksellers in London. 1677.

Sadducismus Triumphatus : or Full and Plain Evidence con-
cerning Witches and Apparitions. In two Parts. The First treat-

WITCHCRAFT 315

fills moonlit dells with dancing fairies, sets out a
meal for the Brownie, hears the tinkle of airy bri-

ing of their Possibility ; the Second of their Real Existence. By
Joseph Glanvil, late Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty, and
Fellow of the Royal Society. The third edition. The Advantages
whereof above the former, the Reader may understand out of
Dr H. More's Account prefixed therunto. With two Authentick,
but wonderful Stories of certain Swedish Witches. Done into
English by A. Horneck DD. London, Printed for S. L. and are
to be sold by Anth. Baskervile, at the Bible, the Corner of Essex-
street, without Temple-Bar. M.DCLXXXIX.

Demonologie ou Traitte des Demons et Borders: De leur puis-
sance et impuissance : Par Fr. Perreaud. Ensemble L'Antidemon
de Mascon, ou Histoire Veritable de ce qu'un Demon a fait et
dit, il y a quelques anne*es en la maison dudit Sr Perreaud a Mas-
con. S. Jacques iv. 7, 8. " Resistez au Diable, et il s'enfuira de
vous. Approchez vous de Dieu, et il s'approchera de vous.' ' A
Geneve, chez Pierre Aubert. M,DC,LIII.

The Wonders of the Invisible World. Being an account of the
tryals of several witches lately executed in New-England. By
Cotton Mather, D. D. To which is added a farther account of
the tryals of the New England Witches- By Increase Mather,
D. D., President of Harvard College. London : John Russell
Smith, Soho Square. 1862. (First printed in Boston, 1692.)

I. N- D. N. J. C. Dissertatio Juridica de Lamiis earumque
processu criminali, $on ^)er,en unb bem peint. $roge§ ttrifcer tte-
felfceu, Quam, auxiliante Divina Gratia, Consensu et Authoritate
Magnifici JCtorum Ordinis in illustribus Athenis Salanis sub prae-
sidio Magnifici, Nobilissimi, Amplissimi, Consultissimi, atque Ex-
cellentissimi Dn. Ernesti Frider. Scforotcr hereditarii in TSirfers
fHH, JCti et Antecessoris hujus Salanae Famigeratissimi, Consili-
arii Saxonici, C arise Pro vincialis, Facultatis Juridicae, etScabinatus
Assessoris longe Gravissimi, Domini Patroni, Praaceptoris atq; Pro-
motoris sui nullo non honoris et observantise cultu sancte devene-
randi, colendi, publicse Eruditorum censurae subjicit Michael Paris
ffij.iltntrfler, Grcebziga Anhaltinus, in Acroaterio JCtorum ad diem
1. Maj. A. 1670. Editio Tertia. Jenae, Typis Pauli Ehrichii.
1707.

Histoire des Diables de Loudun, ou de la Possession des Reli-
gieuses Ursulines, et de la condamnation et du suplice d'Urbain

316 WITCHCRAFT

die-bells as Tamlane rides away with the Queen of
Dreams, changes Pluto and Proserpine into Oberon
and Titania, and makes friends with unseen powers

Grandier, Cure* de la meme ville. Cruels effets de la Vengeance
du Cardinal de Richelieu. A Amsterdam Aux depens de laCom-
pagnie. M.DCC.LII. [By Aubin, a French refugee.]

A View of the Invisible World, or General History of Appari-
tions. Collected from the best Authorities, both Antient and
Modern, and attested by Authors of the highest Reputation and
Credit. Illustrated with a Variety of Notes and parallel Cases ;
in which some Account of the Nature and Cause of Departed
Spirits visiting their former Stations by returning again into the
present World, is treated in a Manner different to the prevailing
Opinions of Mankind. And an Attempt is made from Rational
Principles to account for the Species of such supernatural Appear-
ances, when they may be suppos'd consistent with the Divine Ap-
pointment in the Government of the World. With the sentiments
of Monsieur Le Clerc, Mr. Locke, Mr. Addison, and Others on
this important Subject. In which some humorous and diverting
instances are remark'd, in order to divert that Gloom of Melan-
choly that naturally arises in the Human Mind, from reading or
meditating on such Subjects. Illustrated with suitable Cuts.
London : Printed in the year M,DCC,LII. [Mainly from DeFoe's
" History of Apparitions."]

Satan's Invisible World discovered ; or, a choice Collection of
modern Relations ; Proving evidently, against the Atheists of this
present Age, that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches and Appari-
tions, from authentic Records, Attestations of Witnesses, and un-
doubted Verity. To which is added that marvellous History of
Major Weir and his Sister, the Witches of Bargarran, Pittenweem,
and Calder, &c. By George Sinclair, late Professor of Philosophy
in Glasgow. — No man should be vain that he can injure the merit
of a Book ; for the meanest rogue may burn a City, or kill a Hero ;
whereas ha could never build the one, or equal the other. Sir George
M'Kenzie. — Edinburgh : Sold by P. Anderson, Parliament-Square.
M.DCC.LXXX.

La Magie et I'Astrologie dans VAntiquite et au Moyen Age, ou
Etude sur les superstitions pai'ennes qui se sont perpe'tue'es jusqu'a
nos jours. Par L. F Alfred Maury. Troisieme Edition revue
et corrige*e. Paris: Didier. 1864.

WITCHCRAFT 317

as Good Folk ; the other is a bird of night, whose
shadow sends a chill among the roots of the hair :
it sucks with the vampire, gorges with the ghoul,
is choked by the night-hag, pines away under the
witch's charm, and commits uncleanness with the
embodied Principle of Evil, giving up the fair
realm of innocent belief to a murky throng from
the slums and stews of the debauched brain. Both
have vanished from among educated men, and such
superstition as comes to the surface nowadays is
the harmless Jacobitism of sentiment, pleasing it-
self with a fiction all the more because there is no
exacting reality behind it to impose a duty or de-
mand a sacrifice. And as Jacobitism survived the
Stuarts, so this has outlived the dynasty to which
it professes an after-dinner allegiance. It nails a
horseshoe over the door, but keeps a rattle by its
bedside to summon a more substantial watchman ;
it hangs a crape on the beehives to get a taste of
ideal sweetness, but obeys the teaching of the lat-
est bee-book for material and marketable honey.
This is the aBsthetic variety of the malady, or
rather, perhaps, it is only the old complaint robbed
of all its pain, and lapped in waking dreams by
the narcotism of an age of science. To the world
at large it is not undelightful to see the poetical
instincts of friends and neighbors finding some
other vent than that of verse. But there has been
a superstition of very different fibre, of more in-
tense and practical validity, the deformed child of
faith, peopling the midnight of the mind with fear-
ful shapes and phrenetic suggestions, a monstrous

318 WITCHCRAFT

brood of its own begetting, and making even good
men ferocious in imagined self-defence.

Imagination has always been, and still is, in a
narrower sense, the great mythologizer ; but both
its mode of manifestation and the force with which
it reacts on the mind are one thing in its crude
form of childlike wonder, and another thing after
it has been more or less consciously manipulated
by the poetic faculty. A mythology that broods
over us in our cradles, that mingles with the lullaby
of the nurse and the winter-evening legends of
the chimney-corner, that brightens day with the
possibility of divine encounters, and darkens night
with intimations of demonic ambushes, is of other
substance than one which we take down from our
bookcase, sapless as the shelf it stood on, and re-
mote from all present sympathy with man or nature
as a town history. It is something like the differ-
ence between live metaphor and dead personifica-
tion. Primarily, the action of the imagination is
the same in the mythologizer and the poet, that is,
it forces its own consciousness on the objects of the
senses, and compels them to sympathize with its
own momentary impressions. When Shakespeare
in his " Lucrece " makes

'* The threshold grate the door to have him heard,"

his mind is acting under the same impulse that
first endowed with human feeling and then with
human shape all the invisible forces of nature, and
called into being those

" Fair humanities of old religion,"

WITCHCRAFT 319

whose loss the poets mourn. So also Shakespeare
no doubt projected himself in his own creations ;
but those creations never became so perfectly dis-
engaged from him, so objective, or, as they used
to say, extrinsical, to him, as to react upon him
like real and even alien existences. I mean per-
manently, for momentarily they may and must
have done so. But before man's consciousness had
wholly disentangled itself from outward objects, all
nature was but a many-sided mirror which gave
back to him a thousand images of himself, more
or less beautified or distorted, magnified or dimin-
ished, till his imagination grew to look upon its
own incorporations as having an independent being.
Thus, by degrees, it became at last passive to its
own creations. You may see imaginative children
every day anthropomorphizing in this way, and the
dupes of that superabundant vitality in themselves,
which bestows qualities proper to itself on every-
thing about them. There is a period of develop-
ment in which grown men are childlike. In such
a period the fables which endow beasts with human
attributes first grew up ; and we luckily read them
so early as never to become suspicious of any ab-
surdity in them. The Finnic epos of " Kalewala "
is a curious illustration of the same fact. In it
everything has the affections, passions, and con-
sciousness of men. When the mother of Lemmin*
kainen is seeking her lost son, —

"Sought she many days the lost one,
Sought him ever without finding ;
Then the roadways come to meet her,

320 WITCHCRAFT

And she asks them with beseeching1 :
4 Roadways, ye whom God hath shapen,
Have ye not my son heholden,
Nowhere seen the golden apple,
Him, my darling- staff of silver ? '
Prudently they gave her answer,
Thus to her replied the roadways :
* For thy son we cannot plague us,
We have sorrows too, a many,
Since our own lot is a hard one
And our fortune is but evil,
By dog"'s feet to be run over,
By the wheel-tire to be wounded,
And by heavy heels down-trampled.' "

It is in this tendency of the mind under certain
conditions to confound the objective with the sub-
jective, or rather to mistake the one for the other,
that Mr. Tylor, in his " Early History of Man-
kind," is fain to seek the origin of the supernatural,
as we somewhat vaguely call whatever transcends
our ordinary experience. And this, no doubt, will
in many cases account for the particular shapes
assumed by certain phantasmal appearances, though
I am inclined to doubt whether it be a sufficient
explanation of the abstract phenomenon. It is
easy for the arithmetician to make a key to the
problems that he has devised to suit himself. An
immediate and habitual confusion of the kind
spoken of is insanity ; and the hypochondriac is
tracked by the black dog of his own mind. Dis-
ease itself is, of course, in one sense natural, as be-
ing the result of natural causes ; but if we assume
health as the mean representing the normal poise
of all the mental faculties, we must be content to

WITCHCRAFT 321

call hypochondria subternatural, because the tone
of the instrument is lowered, and to designate
as supernatural only those ecstasies in which the
mind, under intense but not unhealthy excitement,
is snatched sometimes above itself, as in poets and
other persons of imaginative temperament. In
poets this liability to be possessed by the creations
of their own brains is limited and proportioned by
the artistic sense, and the imagination thus truly
becomes the shaping faculty, while in less regulated
or coarser organizations it dwells forever in the
Nifelheim of phantasmagoria and dream, a thau-
maturge half cheat, half dupe. What Mr. Tylor
has to say on this matter is ingenious and full
of valuable suggestion, and to a certain extent
solves our difficulties. Nightmare, for example,
will explain the testimony of witnesses in trials for
witchcraft, that they had been hag-ridden by the
accused. But to prove the possibility, nay, the
probability, of this confusion of objective with sub-
jective is not enough. It accounts very well for
such apparitions as those which appeared to Dion,
to Brutus, and to Curtius Eufus. In such cases
the imagination is undoubtedly its own doppel-
ganger, and sees nothing more than the projection
of its own deceit. But I am puzzled, I confess, to
explain the appearance of the first ghost, especially
among men who thought death to be the end-all
here below. The thing once conceived of, it is
easy, on Mr. Tylor's theory, to account for all after
the first. If it was originally believed that only
the spirits of those who had died violent deaths

322 WITCHCRAFT

were permitted to wander,1 the conscience of a re-
morseful murderer may have been haunted by the
memory of his victim, till the imagination, infected
in its turn, gave outward reality to the image on
the inward eye. After putting to death Boetius
and Symmachus, it is said that Theodoric saw in
the head of a fish served at his dinner the, face of
Symmachus, grinning horribly and with flaming
eyes, whereupon he took to his bed and died soon
after in great agony of mind. It is not safe, per-
haps, to believe all that is reported of an Arian ;
but supposing the story to be_ true, there is only a
short step from such a delusion of the senses to the
complete ghost of popular legend. Yet, in some of
the most trustworthy stories of apparitions, they
have shown themselves not only to persons who had
done them no wrong in the flesh, but also to such
as had never even known them. The eidolon of
James Haddock appeared to a man named Taver-

1 Ltician, in his Liars, puts this opinion into the mouth of
Arig-notus. The theory by which Lucretius seeks to explain ap-
paritions, though materialistic, seems to allow some influence also
to the working of imagination. It is hard otherwise to explain
how his simulacra (which are not unlike the astral spirits of later
times) should appear in dreams.

. . . ea quae rerum simulacra vocamus,

quae, quasi membranae summo de corpore rerum

dereptae, volitant ultro citroque per auras

atque eadem

. . . nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes

terrificant atque in somnis, cum saepe fignrag

contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum

quae nos honifice languentis saepe sopore

excierunt.

De Eer. Nat. iv. 33-37, ed. Munro.

WITCHCRAFT 323

ner, that he might interest himself in recovering
a piece of land unjustly kept from the dead man's
infant son. If we may trust Defoe, Bishop Jeremy
Taylor twice examined Taverner, and was con-
vinced of the truth of his story. In this case,
Taverner had formerly known Haddock. But the
apparition of an old gentleman which entered the
learned Dr. Scott's study, and directed him where
to find a missing deed needful in settling what had
lately been its estate in the "West of England,
chose for its attorney in the business an entire
stranger, who had never even seen its original in
the flesh.

Whatever its origin, a belief in spirits seems to
have been common to all the nations of the ancient
world who have left us any record of themselves.
Ghosts began to walk early, and are walking still,
in spite of the shrill cock-crow of wir haben ja
aitfgelclart. Even the ghost in chains, which one
would naturally take to be a fashion peculiar to
convicts escaped from purgatory, is older than the
belief in that reforming penitentiary. The younger
Pliny tells a very good story to this effect : " There
was at Athens a large and spacious house which
lay under the disrepute of being haunted. In the
dead of the night a noise resembling the clashing
of iron was frequently heard, which, if you lis-
tened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of
chains ; at first it seemed at a distance, but ap-
proached nearer by degrees ; immediately after-
ward a spectre appeared, in the form of an old
man, extremely meagre and ghastly, with a long

324 WITCHCRAFT

beard and dishevelled hair, rattling the chains on
his feet and hands. ... By this means the house
was at last deserted, being judged by everybody to
be absolutely uninhabitable ; so that it was now
entirely abandoned to the ghost. However, in
hopes that some tenant might be found who was
ignorant of this great calamity which attended it,
a bill was put up giving notice that it was either to
be let or sold. It happened that the philosopher
Athenodorus came to Athens at this time, and,
reading the bill, inquired the price. The extraor-
dinary cheapness raised his suspicion ; neverthe-
less, when he heard the whole story, he was so far
from being discouraged that he was more strongly
inclined to hire it, and, in short, actually did so.
When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch
to be prepared for him in the fore part of the
house, and, after calling for a light, together with
his pen and tablets, he directed all his people to re-
tire. But that his mind might not, for want of
employment, be open to the vain terrors of imagi-
nary noises and spirits, he applied himself to writing
with the utmost attention. The first part of the
night passed with usual silence, when at length the
chains began to rattle ; however, he neither lifted
up his eyes nor laid down his pen, but diverted his
observation by pursuing his studies with greater
earnestness. The noise increased, and advanced
nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in
the chamber. He looked up and saw the ghost ex-
actly in the manner it had been described to him;
it stood before him, beckoning with the finger.

WITCHCRAFT 325

Athenodorus made a sign with his hand that it
should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon
his papers ; but the ghost still rattling his chains
in his ears, he looked up and saw him beckoning as
before. Upon this he immediately arose, and with
the light in his hand followed it. The ghost slowly
stalked along, as if encumbered with his chains,
and, turning into the area of the house, suddenly
vanished. Athenodorus, being thus deserted, made
a mark with some grass and leaves where the spirit
left him. The next day he gave information of
this to the magistrates, and advised them to order
that spot to be dug up. This was accordingly
done, and the skeleton of a man in chains was
there found ; for the body, having lain a consider-
able time in the ground, was putrefied and mould-
ered away from the fetters. The bones, being
collected together, were publicly buried, and thus,
after the ghost was appeased by the proper cere-
monies, the house was haunted 110 more." l This
story has such a modern air as to be absolutely dis-
heartening. Are ghosts, then, as incapable of in-
vention as dramatic authors? But the demeanor
of Athenodorus has the grand air of the classical
period, of one qui connait son monde and the other
too, and feels the superiority of a living philosopher
to a dead Philistine. How far above all modern
armament is his prophylactic against his insubstan-
tial fellow-lodger! Nowadays men take pistols into
haunted houses. Sterne, and after him Novalis, dis-
covered that gunpowder made all men equally tall,

1 Pliny's Letters, vii. 27. Melmoth's translation.

326 . WITCHCRAFT

but Athenodorus had found out that pen and ink
establish a superiority in spiritual stature. As men
of this world, we feel our dignity exalted by his
keeping an ambassador from the other waiting till
he had finished his paragraph. Never surely did
authorship appear to greater advantage. Atheno-
dorus seems to have been of Hamlet's mind :

" I do not set my life at a pin's fee,
And, for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing- immortal as itself ? " l

A superstition, as its name imports, is something
that has been left to stand over, like unfinished
business, from one session of the world's witenage-
mot to the next. The vulgar receive it implicitly
on the principle of omne iynotum pro possibili, a
theory acted on by a much larger number than is
commonly supposed, and even the enlightened are
too apt to consider it, if not proved, at least ren-
dered probable by the hearsay evidence of popular
experience. Particular superstitions are sometimes
the embodiment by popular imagination of ideas
that were at first mere poetic figments, but more
commonly of the degraded and distorted relics of

1 Something1 like this is the speech of Don Juan, after the
statue of Don Gonzalo has g-one out :

" Pero todas son ideas
Que da & la imaginacion
El temor ; y temer muertos
Es muy villano temor.
Que si u n cuerpo noble, vivo,
Con poteneias y razon
Y con alma no se teme,
<, Quien cuerpos muertos temio" ? "

El Burlador de Sei ilia, A. iii. s. 15.

WITCHCRAFT 327

religious beliefs. Dethroned gods, outlawed by the
new dynasty, haunted the borders of their old do-
minions, lurking in forests and mountains, and
venturing to show themselves only after nightfall.
Grimm and others have detected old divinities
skulking about in strange disguises, and living
from hand to mouth on the charity of Gammer
Grethel and Mere 1'Oie. Cast out from Olympus
and Asgard, they were thankful for the hospitality
of the chimney-corner, and kept soul and body to-
gether by an illicit traffic between this world and
the other. While Schiller was lamenting the Gods
of Greece, some of them were nearer neighbors to
him than he dreamed ; and Heine had the wit to
turn them to delightful account, showing him-
self, perhaps, the wiser of the two in saving what
he could from the shipwreck of the past for pre-
sent use on this prosaic Juan Fernandez of a scien-
tific age, instead of sitting down to bewail it. To
make the pagan divinities hateful, they were stig-
matized as cacodaemoiis ; and as the human mind
finds a pleasure in analogy and system, an infernal
hierarchy gradually shaped itself as the convenient
antipodes and counterpoise of the celestial one.
Perhaps at the bottom of it all there was a kind of
unconscious manicheism, and Satan, as Prince of
Darkness, or of the Powers of the Air, became at
last a sovereign, with his great feudatories and
countless vassals, capable of maintaining a not un-
equal contest with the King of Heaven. He was
supposed to have a certain power of bestowing
earthly prosperity, but he was really, after all,

328 WITCHCRAFT

_

nothing better than a James II. at St. Germains,
who could make Dukes of Perth and confer titular
fiefs and garters as much as he liked, without the
unpleasant necessity of providing any substance
behind the shadow. That there should have been
so much loyalty to him, under these disheartening
circumstances, seems to me, on the whole, credi-
table to poor human nature. In this case it is due,
at least in part, to that instinct of the poor among
the races of the North, where there was a long
winter, and too often a scanty harvest, — and the
poor have been always and everywhere a majority,
— which made a deity of Wish. The Acheronta-
movebo impulse must have been pardonably strong
in old women starving with cold and hunger, and
fathers with large families and a small winter stock
of provision. Especially in the transition period
from the old religion to the new, the temptation
must have been great to try one's luck with the
discrowned dynasty, when the intruder was deaf
and blind to claims that seemed just enough, so
long as it was still believed that God personally
interfered in the affairs of men. On his death-
bed, says Piers Plowman,

' ' The poore dare plede and prove by reson

To have allowance of his lord ; by the law he it claimeth ;

•

Thanne may beggaris as beestes after boote waiten
That al hir lif ban lyved in langour and in defaute :
But God sente hem som tyme som manere joye,
Outher here or ellis where, kynde wolde it nevere."

He utters the common feeling when he says that it
were against nature. But when a man has his

WITCHCRAFT 329

choice between here and elsewhere, it may be feared
that the other world will seem too desperately far
away to be waited for when hungry ruin has him
in the wind, and the chance on earth is so tempt-
ingly near. Hence the notion of a transfer of alle-
giance from God to Satan, sometimes by a written
compact, sometimes with the ceremony by which
homage is done to a feudal superior.

Most of the practices of witchcraft, such as the
pretence to raise storms, to destroy cattle, to as-
sume the shape of beasts by the use of certain
ointments, to induce deadly maladies in men by
waxen images, or love by means of charms and
philtres, were inheritances from ancient paganism.
But the theory of a compact was the product of
later times, the result, no doubt, of the efforts of
the clergy to inspire a horror of any lapse into
heathenish rites by making devils of all the old
gods. Christianity may be said to have invented
the soul as an individual entity to be saved or lost ;
and thus grosser wits were led to conceive of it as
a piece of property that could be transferred by
deed of gift or sale, duly signed, sealed, and wit-
nessed. The earliest legend of the kind is that of
Theophilus, chancellor of the church of Adana in
Cilicia some time during the sixth century. It is
said to have been first written by Eutychianus, who
had been a pupil of Theophilus, and who tells the
story partly as an eyewitness, partly from the nar-
ration of his master. The nun Hroswitha first
treated it dramatically in the latter half of the tenth
century. Some four hundred years later Kute-

330 WITCHCRAFT

beuf made it the theme of a French miracle-play.
His treatment of it is not without a certain poetic
merit. Theophilus has been deprived by his bishop
of a lucrative office. In his despair he meets with
Saladin, qui parloit au deable quant il voloit.
Saladin tempts him to deny God and devote him-
self to the Devil, who, in return, will give him back
all his old prosperity and more. He at last con-
sents, signs and seals the contract required, and is
restored to his old place by the bishop. But now
remorse and terror come upon him ; he calls on
the Virgin, who, after some demur, compels Satan
to bring back his deed from the infernal muniment-
chest (which must have been fire-proof beyond any
skill of our modern safe-makers), and the bishop
having read it aloud to the awe-stricken congrega-
tion, Theophilus becomes his own man again. In
this play, the theory of devilish compact is already
complete in all its particulars. The paper must
be signed with the blood of the grantor, who does
feudal homage (or joing tes mains, et si devien
mes Aow?), and engages to eschew good and do evil
all the days of his life. The Devil, however, does
not imprint any stigma upon his new vassal, as in
the later stories of witch-compacts. The following
passage from the opening speech of Theophilus
will illustrate the conception to which I have al-
luded of God as a liege lord against whom one
might seek revenge on sufficient provocation, —
and the only revenge possible was to rob him of a
subject by going over to the great Suzerain, his
deadly foe : —

WITCHCRAFT 331

"N'est riens que por avoir ne face ;
Ne pris riens Dieu ne sa manace.
Irai me je noier ou pendre ?
le ne m'en puis pas a Dieu prendre,
C'on ne puet a lui avenir.

Mes il s'est en si haut lieu mis,
Por eschiver ses anemis
C'on n'i puet trere ni lancier.
Se or pooie a lui tancier,
Et combattre et escrimir,
La char li feroie fremir.
Or est la sus en son solaz,
Laz ! chetis ! et je sui es laz
De Povret<$ et de Soufrete." 1

During the Middle Ages the story became a
favorite topic with preachers, while carvings and
painted windows tended still further to popularize
it, and to render men's minds familiar with the
idea which makes the nexus of its plot. The plas-
tic hands of Calderon shaped it into a dramatic
poem not surpassed, perhaps hardly equalled, in
subtle imaginative quality by any other of modern
times.

In proportion as a belief in the possibility of this
damnable merchandising with hell became general,
accusations of it grew more numerous. Among
others, the memory of Pope Sylvester II. was black-
ened with the charge of having thus bargained
away his soul. All learning fell under suspicion,
till at length the very grammar itself (the last vol-
ume in the world, one would say, to conjure with)
gave to English the word gramary (enchantment),

1 Theatre Franqais au Moyen Age (Monmerqu^ et Michel),
pp. 139, 140. Rutebeuf, Oeuvres, (Jubinal) ii. 80.

332 WITCHCRAFT

and in French became a book of magic, under the
alias of Grimoire. It is not at all unlikely that, in
an age when the boundary between actual and pos-
sible was not very well defined, there were scholars
who made experiments in this direction, and signed
contracts, though they never had a chance to com-
plete their bargain by an actual delivery. I do not
recall any case of witchcraft in which such a docu-
ment was produced in court as evidence against the
accused.1 Such a one, it is true, was ascribed to
Grandier, but was not brought forward at his trial.
It should seem that Grandier had been shrewd
enough to take a bond to secure the fulfilment of
the contract on the other side ; for we have the
document in fac-simile, signed and sealed by Luci-
fer, Beelzebub, Satan, Elimi, Leviathan, and As-
taroth, duly witnessed by Baalberith, Secretary of
the Grand Council of Demons. Fancy the com-
petition such a state paper as this would arouse
at a sale of autographs! Commonly no security
appears to have been given by the other party to
these arrangements but the bare word of the Devil,
which was considered, no doubt, every whit as good
as his bond. In most cases, indeed, he was the
loser, and showed a want of capacity for affairs
equal to that of an average giant of romance.
Never was comedy acted over and over with such

1 In 1644 (20th April) the grand jury of Middlesex (England)
found a true bill against one Thomas Browne for that per quod-
dam scriptum gerens datum eisdem die et anno nequiter diabolice et
felonice convenit cum malo et impio spiritu &c. The words which
I have italicized seem to imply that the Jury had the document
before them. Notes and Queries, 7th S. iv. 521.

WITCHCRAFT 333

sameness of repetition as " The Devil is an Ass."
How often must he have exclaimed (laughing in
his sleeve as he heard these foolish libels) : —

" / to such blockheads set my wit,
/ damn such fools ! — go, go, you 're bit ! "

In popular legend he is made the victim of some
equivocation so gross that any court of equity
would have ruled in his favor. On the other hand,
if the story had been dressed up by some mediaeval
Tract Society, the Virgin appears in person at the
right moment ex machina, and compels him to give
up the property he had honestly paid for. One is
tempted to ask, Were there no attorneys, then, in
the place he came from, of whom he might have
taken advice beforehand ? On the whole, he had
rather hard measure, and it is a wonder he did not
throw up the business in disgust. Sometimes, how-
ever, he was more lucky, as with the unhappy Dr.
Faust ; and even so lately as 1695, he came in the
shape of a " tall fellow with black beard and peri-
wig, respectable looking and well dressed," about
two o'clock in the afternoon, to fly away with the
Marechal de Luxembourg, which, on the stroke of
five, he punctually did as per contract, taking with
him the window and its stone framing into the bar-
gain. The clothes and wig of the involuntary aero-
naut were, in the handsomest manner, left upon the
bed, as not included in the bill of sale. In this case
also we have a copy of the articles of agreement,
twenty-eight in number, by the last of which the
Marechal renounces God and devotes himself to
the enemy. This clause, sometimes the only one,

334 WITCHCRAFT

always the most important in such compacts, seems
to show that they first took shape in the imagina-
tion, while the struggle between Paganism and
Christianity was still going on. As the converted
heathen was made to renounce his false gods, none
the less real for being false, so the renegade Chris-
tian must forswear the true Deity. It is very likely,
however, that the whole thing may be more modern
than the assumed date of Theophilus would imply,
and if so, the idea of feudal allegiance gave the
first hint, as it certainly modified the particulars,
of the ceremonial.

This notion of a personal and private treaty with
the Evil One has something of dignity about it
that has made it perennially attractive to the most
imaginative minds. It rather flatters than mocks
our feeling of the dignity of man. As we come
down to the vulgar parody of it in the confessions
of wretched old women on the rack, our pity and
indignation are mingled with disgust. One of the
most particular of these confessions is that of Abel
de la Rue, convicted in 1584. The accused was a
novice in the Franciscan Convent at Meaux. Hav-
ing been punished by the master of the novices for
stealing some apples and nuts in the convent gar-
den, the Devil appeared to him in the shape of a
black dog, promising him his protection, and advis-
ing him to leave the convent.1 Not long after,

1 It is hard to conceive in what language they communicated
with each other unless it were Dog-Latin. It is interesting to note,
however, that beasts were still deemed as capable of speech on
occasion as in the days of

WITCHCRAFT 335

going into the sacristy, he saw a large volume
fastened by a chain, and further secured by bars
of iron. The name of this book was Grimoire.
Thrusting his hands through the bars, he contrived
to open it, and having read a sentence (which
Bodin carefully suppresses), there suddenly ap-
peared to him a man of middle stature, with a pale
and very frightful countenance, clad in a long
black robe of the Italian fashion, and with faces of
men like his own on his breast and knees. As for
his feet they were like those of cows. He could
not have been the most agreeable of companions,
ayant le corps et haleine puante. This man told
him not to be afraid, to take off his habit, to put
faith in him, and he would give him whatever he
asked. Then laying hold of him below the arms,
the unknown transported him under the gallows of
Meaux, and then said to him with a trembling and
broken voice, and having a visage as pale as that
of a man who has been hanged, and a very stinking
breath, that he should fear nothing, but have entire
confidence in him, that he should never want for
anything, that his own name was Maitre Rigoux,
and that he would like to be his master ; to which
De la Rue made answer that he would do whatever
he commanded, and that he wished to be gone from
the Franciscans. Thereupon Rigoux disappeared,
but returning between seven and eight in the even-
ing, took him round the waist and carried him back
to the sacristy, promising to come again for him
the next day. This he accordingly did, and told
De la Rue to take off his habit, get him gone from

33G WITCHCRAFT

the convent, and meet him near a great tree OH the
high-road from Meaux to Vaulx-Courtois. Rigoux
met him there and took him to a certain Maitre
Pierre, who, after a few words exchanged in an un-
dertone with Rigoux, sent De la Rue to the stable,
after his return whence he saw no more of Rigoux.
Thereupon Pierre and his wife made him good
cheer, telling him that for the love of Maitre Ri-
goux they would treat him well, and that he must
obey the said Rigoux, which he promised to do.
About two months after, Maitre Pierre, who com-
monly took him to the fields to watch cattle, said
to him there that they must go to the Assembly,
because he (Pierre) was out of powders, to which
he made answer that he was willing. Three days
later, about Christmas eve, 1575, Pierre having
sent his wife to sleep out of the house, set a long
branch of broom in the chimney-corner, and bade
De la Rue go to bed, but not to sleep. About
eleven they heard a great noise as of an impetuous
wind and thunder in the chimney : which hearing,
Maitre Pierre told him to dress himself, for it was
time to be gone. Then Pierre took some grease
from a little box and anointed himself under the
arm-pits, and De la Rue on the palms of his hands,
which incontinently felt as if on fire, and the said
grease stank like a cat three weeks or a month
dead. Then, Pierre and he bestriding the branch,
Maitre Rigoux took it by the butt and drew it up
chimney as if the wind had lifted them. And, the
night being dark, he saw suddenly a torch before
them lighting them, and Maitre Rigoux was gone

WITCHCRAFT 337

unless he had changed himself into the said torch.
Arrived at a grassy place some five leagues from
Vaulx-Courtois, they found a company of some
sixty people of all ages, none of whom he knew,
except a certain Pierre of Dampmartin and an old
woman who was executed, as he had heard, about
five years ago for sorcery at Lagny. Then sud-
denly he noticed that all (except Rigoux, who was
clad as before) were dressed in linen, though they
had not changed their clothes. Then, at command
of the eldest among them, who seemed about eighty
years old, with a white beard and almost wholly
bald, each swept the place in front of himself with
his broom. Thereupon Rigoux changed into a great
he-goat, black and stinking, around whom they all
danced backward with their faces outward and
their backs towards the goat. They danced about
half an hour, and then his master told him they
must adore the goat who was the Devil, et, cefait et
diet, veit que ledict Bouc courba ses deux pieds de
deuant et leua son cul en haut, et lors que certaines
menues graines grosses comme testes d'espingles,
qui se conuertissoient en poudres fort puantes,
sentant le soulphre et poudre a canon et chair
puant meslees ensemble seroient tombees sur plusi-
eurs drappeaux en sept doubles. Then the oldest,
and so the rest in order, went forward on their
knees and gathered up their cloths with the pow-
ders, but first each se seroit incline vers le Diable
et iceluy baise en la partie honteuse de son corps.
They went home on their broom, lighted as before.
De la Rue confessed also that he was at another

338 WITCHCRAFT

assembly on the eve of St. John Baptist.1 With
the powders they could cause the death of men
against whom they had a spite, or of their cattle.2
Rigoux before long began to tempt him to drown
himself, and, though he lay down, yet rolled him
some distance towards the river. It is plain that
the poor fellow was mad, or half-witted, or both.
And yet Bodin, the author of the De Itepublica,
reckoned one of the ablest books of that age, be-
lieved all this filthy nonsense, and prefixes it to his
Demonomanie, as proof conclusive of the existence
of sorcerers.

This was in 1587. Just a century later, Glan-
vil, one of the most eminent men of his day, and
Henry More, the Platonist, whose memory is still
dear to the lovers of an imaginative mysticism,
were perfectly satisfied with evidence like that
which follows. Elizabeth Styles confessed, in 1664,
" that the Devil about ten years since appeared to
her in the Shape of a handsome Man, and after of
a black Dog. That he promised her Money, and
that she should live gallantly, and have the Plea-
sure of the World for twelve Years, if she would
with her Blood sign his Paper, which was to give
her Soul to him and observe his Laws and that he
might suck her Blood. This after four Solicita-
tions, the Examinant promised him to do. Upon

1 The dates (Christmas and St. John Baptist) are noteworthy as
being1 those of pagan festivals which the Church had mediatized.

2 For these crimes a regular fee was sometimes paid : quand le
sorcier donne un malejice a mort, le Diable leur [hd] donne huict
sols six deniers, et a un animal la moitie. ( Varittts Historiques et
Litttraires. T. v. 203.)

WITCHCRAFT 339

which he pricked the fourth Finger of her right
Hand, between the middle and upper Joynt (where
the Sign at the Examination remained) and with
a Drop or two of her Blood, she signed the Paper
with an O. Upon this the Devil gave her sixpence
and vanished with the Paper. That since he hath
appeared to her in the Shape of a Man, and did so
on Wednesday seven-night past, but more usually
he appears in the Likeness of a Dog, and Cat, and
a Fly like a Millar, in which last he usually sucks
in the Poll about four of the Clock in the Morning,
and did so Jan. 27, and that it is Pain to her to be
so suckt. That when she hath a Desire to do Harm
she calls the Spirit by the name of Robin,1 to whom,
when he appeareth, she useth these Words, O Sa~
than, give me my Purpose. She then tells him
what she would have done. And that he should so
appear to her was Part of her Contract with him."
The Devil in this case appeared as a black (dark-
complexioned) man " in black clothes, with a little
band," — a very clerical-looking personage. "Be-
fore they are carried to their Meetings they anoint
their Foreheads and Hand- Wrists with an Oyl the
Spirit brings them (which smells raw) and then
they are carried in a very short Time, using these
Words as they pass, Thout, tout a tout, throughout
and about. And when they go off from their
Meetings they say, Rentum, Tormentum. That
at every meeting before the Spirit vanisheth away,
he appoints the next Meeting Place and Time, and
at his Departure there is a foul Smell. At their

1 There seems to be a reminiscence of Robin Goodfellow here.

340 WITCHCRAFT

Meeting they have usually Wine or good Beer,
Cakes, Meat or the like. They eat and drink
really when they meet, in their Bodies, dance also
and have some Musick. The Man in black sits at
the higher End, and Anne Bishop usually next
him. He useth some Words before Meat, and none
after ; his Voice is audible but very low. The
Man in black sometimes plays on a Pipe or Cit-
tern, and the Company dance. At last the Devil
vanisheth, and all are carried to their several
Homes in a short Space. At their parting they say,
A Boy ! merry meet, merry part ! " Alice Duke
confessed " that Anne Bishop persuaded her to go
with her into the Churchyard in the Night-time,
and being come thither, to go backward round the
Church, which they did three times. In their first
Round they met a Man in black Cloths who went
round the second time with them ; and then they
met a Thing in the Shape of a great black Toad
which leapt up against the Examinant's Apron.
In their third Round they met somewhat in the
Shape of a Rat, which vanished away." She also
received sixpence from the Devil, and " her Fami-
liar did commonly suck her right Breast about
seven at Night in the Shape of a little Cat of a
dunnish Colour, which is as smooth as a Want
[mole], and when she is suckt, she is in a Kind of
Trance." Poor Christian Green got only four-
pence half-penny for her soul, but her bargain was
made some years later than that of the others, and
quotations, as the stock-brokers would say, ranged
lower. Her familiar took the shape of a hedge-

WITCHCRAFT 341

hog. Julian Cox confessed that " she had been
often tempted by the Devil to be a Witch, but
never consented. That one Evening she walkt
about a Mile from her own House and there came
riding towards her three Persons upon three Broom-
staves, born up about a Yard and a half from the
Ground. Two of them she formerly knew, which
was a Witch and a Wizzard that were hanged for
Witchcraft several years before. The third Person
she knew not. He came in the Shape of a black
Man, and tempted her to give him her Soul, or to
that Effect, and to express it by pricking her Fin-
ger and giving her Name in her Blood in Token
of it." On her trial Judge Archer told the jury,
" he had heard that a Witch could not repeat that
Petition in the Lord's Prayer, viz. And lead us
not into Temptation, and having this Occasion, he
would try the Experiment." The jury " were not
in the least Measure to guide their Verdict accord-
ing to it, because it was not legal Evidence." Ac-
cordingly it was found that the poor old trot could
say only, Lead us into temptation^ or Lead us not
into no temptation. Probably she used the latter
form first, and, finding she had blundered, corrected
herself by leaving out both the negatives. The old
English double negation seems never to have been
heard of by the court. Janet Douglass, a pre-
tended dumb girl, by whose contrivance five per-
sons had been burned at Paisley, in 1677, for hav-
ing caused the sickness of Sir George Maxwell by
means of waxen and other images, having recov-
ered her speech shortly after, declared that she

342 WITCHCRAFT

" had some smattering knowledge of the Lord's
prayer, which she had heard the witches repeat, it
seems, by her vision, in the presence of the Devil ;
and at his desire, which they observed, they added
to the word art the letter w, which made it run,
4 Our Father which wart in heaven,' by which
means the Devil made the application of the prayer
to himself." She also showed on the arm of a
woman named Campbell " an invisible mark which
she had gotten from the Devil." The wife of one
Barton confessed that she had engaged " in the
Devil's service. She renounced her baptism, and
did prostrate her body to the foul spirit, and re-
ceived his mark, and got a new name from him,
and was called Margaratus. She was asked if she
ever had any pleasure in his company ? 4 Never
much,' says she, ' but one night going to a dancing
upon Pentland Hills, in the likeness of a rough
tanny [tawny] dog, playing on a pair of pipes ;
the spring he played,' says she, ' was The silly bit
chicken, gar cast it a pickle, and it will grow
meikle.'1 " l In 1670, more than sixty of both sexes,
among them fifteen children, were executed for
witchcraft at the village of Mohra in Sweden.
Thirty-six children, between the ages of nine and
sixteen, were sentenced to be scourged with rods on
the palms of their hands, once a week for a year.
The evidence in this case against the accused seems
to have been mostly that of children. " Being asked

1 " There sat Auld Nick in shape o' beast,
A towzy tyke, black, grim, an' large,
To gie them music was his charge."

WITCHCRAFT 343

whether they were sure that they were at any
time carried away by the Devil, they all declared
they were, begging of the Commissioners that they
might be freed from that intolerable slavery."
They " used to go to a Gravel-pit which lay hardby
a Cross-way and there they put on a Vest over their
Heads, and then danced round, and after ran to the
Cross-way and called the Devil thrice, first with a
still Voice, the second time somewhat louder, and
the third time very loud, with these Words, Ante-
cessour, come and carry us to Blockula. Where-
upoji immediately he used to appear, but in differ-
ent Habits ; but for the most Part they saw him in
a gray Coat and red and blue Stockings. He had
a red Beard, a highcrowned Hat, with Linnen of
divers Colours wrapt about it, and long Garters
upon his Stockings." " They must procure some
Scrapings of Altars and Filings of Church-Clocks
[bells], and he gives them a Horn with some Salve
in it wherewith they do anoint themselves." " Be-
ing asked whether they were sure of a real personal
Transportation, and whether they were awake when
it was done, they all answered in the Affirmative,
and that the Devil sometimes laid Something down
in the Place that was very like them. But one of
them confessed that he did only take away her
Strength, and her Body lay still upon the Ground.
Yet sometimes he took even her Body with him."
" Till of late they never had that Power to carry
away Children, but only this Year and the last, and
the Devil did at this Time force them to it. That
heretofore it was sufficient to carry but one of their

344 WITCHCRAFT

Children or a Stranger's Child, which yet happened
seldom, but now he did plague them and whip them
if they did not procure him Children, insomuch
that they had no Peace or Quiet for him ; and
whereas formerly one Journey a Week would serve
their Turn from their own Town to the Place afore-
said, now they were forced to run to other Towns
and Places for Children, and that they brought
with them some fifteen, some sixteen Children
every night. For their Journey they made use of
all sorts of Instruments, of Beasts, of Men, of Spits,
and Posts, according as they had Opportunity.. If
they do ride upon Goats and have many Children
with them," they have a way of lengthening the
Goat with a Spit, " and then are anointed with the
aforesaid Ointment. A little Girl of Elfdale con-
fessed, that, naming the Name of JESUS, as she
was carried away, she fell suddenly upon the
Ground and got a great Hole in her Side, which
the Devil presently healed up again. The first
Thing they must do at Blockula was that they must
deny all and devote themselves Body and Soul to
the Devil, and promise to serve him faithfully, and
confirm all this with an Oath. Hereupon they cut
their Fingers, and with their Bloud writ their Name
in his Book. He caused them to be baptized by
such Priests as he had there and made them con-
firm their Baptism with dreadful Oaths and Impre-
cations. Hereupon the Devil gave them a Purse,
wherein their Filings of Clocks [bells], with a
Stone tied to it, which they threw into the Water,
and then they were forced to speak these Words :

WITCHCRAFT 345

As these Filings of the Clock do never return to the
Clock from which they are taken^ so may my Soul
never return to Heaven. The Diet they did use to
have there was Broth with Col worts and Bacon in
it, Oatmeal-Bread spread with Butter, Milk, and
Cheese. Sometimes it tasted very well, sometimes
very ill. After Meals, they went to Dancing, and
in the mean while swore and cursed most dread-
fully, and afterward went to fighting one with an-
other. The Devil had Sons and Daughters by
them, which he did marry together, and they did
couple and brought forth Toads and Serpents. If
he hath a Mind to be merry with them, he lets them
all ride upon Spits before him, takes afterwards
the Spits and beats them black and blue, and then
laughs at them. They had seen sometimes a very
great Devil like a Dragon, with Fire about him and
bound with an Iron Chain, and the Devil that con-
verses with them tells them that, if they confess
Anything, he will let that great Devil loose upon
them, whereby all Sweedland shall come into great
Danger. The Devil taught them to milk, which
was in this wise : they used to stick a Knife in the
Wall and hang a Kind of Label on it, which they
drew and streaked, and as long as this lasted the
Persons that they had Power over were miserably
plagued, and the Beasts were milked that Way till
sometimes they died of it. The minister of Elf-
dale declared that one Night these Witches were
to his thinking upon the Crown of his Head and
that from thence he had had a long-continued Pain
of the Head. One of the Witches confessed, too,

346 WITCHCRAFT

that the Devil had sent her to torment the Minis-
ter, and that she was ordered to use a Nail and
strike it into his Head, but it would not enter very
deep. They confessed also that the Devil gives
them a Beast about the Bigness and Shape of a
young Cat, which they call a Carrier, and that he
gives them a Bird too as big as a Kaven, but white.
And these two Creatures they can send anywhere,
and wherever they come they take away all Sorts of
Victuals they can get. What the Bird brings they
may keep for themselves ; but what the Carrier
brings they must reserve for the Devil. The Lords
Commissioners were indeed very earnest and took
great Pains to persuade them to show some of their
Tricks, but to no Purpose ; for they did all unani-
mously confess, that, since they had confessed all,
they found that all their Witchcraft was gone, and
that the Devil at this time appeared to them very
terrible with Claws on his Hands and Feet, and
with Horns on his Head and a long Tail behind."
At Blockula " the Devil had a Church, such an-
other as in the town of Mohra. When the Com-
missioners were coming, he told the Witches they
should not fear them, for he would certainly kill
them all. And they confessed that some of them
had attempted to murther the Commissioners, but
had not been able to effect it."

In these confessions we find included nearly all
the particulars of the popular belief concerning
witchcraft, and see the gradual degradation of the
once superb Lucifer to the vulgar scarecrow with
horns and tail. " The Prince of Darkness was a

WITCHCRAFT 347

gentleman." From him who had not lost all his
original brightness, to this dirty fellow who leaves
a stench, sometimes of brimstone, behind him, the
descent is a long one. For the dispersion of this
foul odor Dr. Henry More gives an odd reason.
" The Devil also, as in other stories, leaving an ill
smell behind him, seems to imply the reality of
the business, those adscititious particles he held to-
gether in his visible vehicle being loosened at his
vanishing and so offending the nostrils by their
floating and diffusing themselves in the open Air."
In all the stories vestiges of Paganism are not in-
distinct. The three principal witch gatherings of
the year were held on the days of great pagan fes-
tivals, which were afterwards adopted by the Church.
Maury supposes the witches' Sabbath to be derived
from the rites of Bacchus Sabazius, and accounts
in this way for the Devil's taking the shape of a
he-goat. But the name was more likely to be
given from hatred of the Jews, and the goat may
have a much less remote origin. Bodin assumes
the identity of the Devil with Pan, and in the pop-
ular mythology both of Kelts and Teutons there
were certain hairy wood-demons called by the
former Dus and by the latter Scrat. Our common
names of Dense and Old Scratch are plainly de-
rived from these, and possibly Old Harry is a cor-
ruption of Old Hairy. By Latinization they be-
came Satyrs. Here, at any rate, is the source of
the cloven hoof. The belief in the Devil's appear-
ing to his worshippers as a goat is very old. Pos-
sibly the fact that this animal was sacred to Thor,

348 WITCHCRAFT

the god of thunder, may explain it. Certain it is
that the traditions of Vulcan, Thor, and Wayland l
converged at last in Satan. Like Vulcan, he was
hurled from heaven, and like him he still limps
across the stage in Mephistopheles, though without
knowing why. In Germany, he has a horse's and
not a cloven foot,2 because the horse was a frequent
pagan sacrifice, and therefore associated with devil-
worship under the new dispensation. Hence the
horror of hippophagy which some French gastro-
nomes are striving to overcome. Everybody who has
read " Tom Brown," or Wordsworth's Sonnet on a
German stove, remembers the Saxon horse sacred
to Woden. The raven was also his peculiar bird,
and Grimm is inclined to think this the reason why
the witch's familiar appears so often in that shape.
It is true that our Old Nick is derived from Nik-
kar, one of the titles of that divinity, but the asso-
ciation of the Evil One with the raven is older, and
most probably owing to the ill-omened character of
the bird itself. Already in the apocryphal gospel
of the " Infancy," the demoniac Son of the Chief
Priest puts on his head one of the swaddling-clothes
of Christ which Mary has hung out to dry, and
forthwith "the devils began to come out of his
mouth and to fly away as crows and serpents."

It will be noticed that the witches underwent a
form of baptism. As the system gradually per-
fected itself among the least imaginative of men,

1 Hence, perhaps, the name Valant applied to the Devil, about
the origin of which Grimm is in doubt.

2 One foot of the Greek Empusa was an ass's hoof.

WITCHCRAFT 349

as the superstitious are apt to be, they could do
nothing better than describe Satan's world as in
all respects the reverse of that which had been con-
ceived by the orthodox intellect as Divine. Have
you an illustrated Bible of the last century ? Very
good. Turn it upside down, and you find the prints
on the whole about as near nature as ever, and yet
pretending to be something new by a simple device
that saves the fancy a good deal of trouble. For,
while it is true that the poetic fancy plays, yet the
faculty which goes by that pseudonyme in prosaic
minds (and it was by such that the details of this
Satanic commerce were pieced together) is hard
put to it for invention, and only too thankful for
any labor-saving contrivance whatsoever. Accord-
ingly, all it need take the trouble to do was to re-
verse the ideas of sacred things already engraved
on its surface, and behold, a kingdom of hell with
all the merit and none of the difficulty of original-
ity ! " Uti olim Deus populo suo Hierosolymis
Synagogas erexit ut in iis ignarus legis divina? pop-
ulus erudiretur, voluntatemque Dei placitam ex
verbo in iis predicate hauriret ; ita et Diabolus in
omnibus omnino suis actionibus simiam Dei agens,
gregi suo acherontico conventus et synagogas, quas
satanica sabbata vocant, indicit. . . . Atque de
hisce Conventibus et Synagogis Lamiarum nullus
Autorum quos quidem evolvi, imo nee ipse Lami-
arum Patronus [here he glances at Wierus] scili-
cet ne dubiolum quidem movit. Adeo ut tuto affir-
mari liceat conventus a diabolo certo institui. Quos
vel ipse, tanquam praBses collegii, vel per daemonem,

350 WITCHCRAFT

qui ad cujuslibet sagae custodiam constitutus est,
. . . vel per alios Magos aut sagas per uimm aut
duos dies antequam fiat congregatio denunciat. . . .
Loci in quibus solent a daemone coetus et conven-
ticula malefica institui plerumque sunt sylvestres,
occulti, subterranei, et ab hominum conversatione
remoti. . . . Evocata3 hoc modo et tempore Lamiae,
. . . daemon illis persuadet eas non posse conventi-
culis interesse nisi nudum corpus unguento ex
corpusculis infantum ante baptismum necatorum
praeparato illinant, idque propterea solum illis per-
suadet ut ad quam plurimas infantum insontium
caedes eas alliciat. . . . Unctionis ritu peracto,
abiturientes, ne forte a maritis in lectis desideran-
tur, vel per incantationem somnum, aurem nimirum
vellicando dextra manu prius praedicto unguine il-
lita, conciliant maritis ex quo non facile possunt
excitari ; vel daemones personas quasdam dormien-
tibus adumbrant, quas, si contigeret expergisci,
suas uxores esse putarent ; vel interea alius daemon
in forma succubi ad latus maritorum adjungitur
qui loco uxoris est. . . . Et ita sine omni remora
insidentes baculo, furcae, scopis, aut arundini vel
tauro, equo, sui, hirco, aut cani, quorum omnium
exempla prodidit Remig. L. I. c. 14, devehuntur
a daemone ad loca destinata. . . . Ibi daemon
praeses conventus in solio sedet magnifico, forma
terrifica, ut plurimum hirci vel canis. Ad quern
advenientes viri juxta ac mulieres accedunt rever-
entiae exhibendae et adorandi gratia, non tamen uno
eodemque modo. Interdum complicatis genubus
supplices ; interdum obverso incedentes tergo et

WITCHCRAFT 351

modo retrograde, in opposifcum directo illi rever-
entiae quam nos praestare solemus. In signum
homagii (sit honor castis auribus) Principem suum
hircum in [obscaenissimo quodara corporis loco]
summa cum reverentia sacrilego ore osculantur.
Quo facto, sacrificia daemoni faciunt multis modis.1
Saepe liberos suos ipsi offerunt. Saepe comrau-
nione sumpta benedictam hostiam in ore asser-
vatam et extractam (horreo dicere) daemoni oblatam
coram eo pede conculcant. His et similibus flagi-
tiis et abominationibus execrandis commissis, inci-
piunt mensis assidere et convivari de cibis insipi-
dis, insulsis,2 furtivis, quos daemon suppeditat, vel
quos singulae attulere, interdum tripudiant ante
convivium, interdum post illud. . . . Nee mensse
sua deest benedictio co3tu hoc digna, verbis con-
stans plane blasphemis quibus ipsum Beelzebub et
creatorem et datorem et conservatorem omnium
profitentur. Eadem sententia est gratiarum ac-
tionis. Post convivium, dorsis invicem obversis
. . . choreas ducere et cantare fescenninos in ho-
norem daemonis obscaenissimos, vel ad tympanum
fistulamve sedentis alicujus in bifida arbore saltare
... turn suis amasiis daemonibus foedissime com-
misceri. Ultimo pulveribus (quos aliqui scribunt
esse cineres hirci illis quern daemon assumpserat et
quern adorant subito coram illius flamma absumpti)
vel venenis aliis acceptis, saepe etiam cuique indicto
nocendi peiiso, et pronunciato Pseudothei daemonis

1 In a French case I find the incongruous sacrifice of a turtle-
dove. Perhaps in mockery of the symbol of the Holy Ghost ?
- Salt was forbidden at these witch-feasts.

352 WITCHCRAFT

decreto, ULCISCAMINI vos, ALIOQUI MORIEMINI.
Duabus aut tribus horis in hisce ludis exactis circa
Gallicinium daemon convivas suas diimttit." 1 Some-
times they were baptized anew. Sometimes they
renounced the Virgin, whom they called in their
rites extensam mulierem. If the Ave Mary bell
should ring while the demon is conveying home his
witch, he lets her drop. In the confession of Agnes
Simpson the meeting place was North Berwick
Kirk. " The Devil started up himself in the pul-
pit, like a meikle black man, and calling the row
[roll] every one answered, Here. At his command
they opened up three graves and cutted off from
the dead corpses the joints of their fingers, toes, and
nose, and parted them amongst them, and the said
Agnes Simpson got for her part a winding-sheet
and two joints. The Devil commanded them to
keep the joints upon them while [till] they were
dry, and then to make a powder of them to do evil
withal." This confession is sadly memorable, for
it was made before James I., then king of Scots,
and is said to have convinced him of the reality of
witchcraft. Hence the act passed in the first year
of his reign in England, and not repealed till 1736,
under which, perhaps in consequence of which, so
many suffered.

The notion of these witch-gatherings was first
suggested, there can be little doubt, by secret con-
venticles of persisting or relapsed pagans, or of
heretics. Both, perhaps, contributed their share.
Sometimes a mountain, as in Germany the Blocks-

1 De Lamiis, p. 59 et seg.

WITCHCRAFT 353

berg,1 sometimes a conspicuous oak or linden, and
there were many such among both Gauls and Ger-
mans sacred of old to pagan rites, and later a
lonely heath, a place where two roads crossed each
other, a cavern, gravel-pit, or quarry, the gallows,
or the churchyard, was the place appointed for
their diabolic orgies. That the witch could be
conveyed bodily to these meetings was at first ad-
mitted without any question. But as the husbands
of accused persons sometimes testified that their
wives had not left their beds on the alleged night
of meeting, the witchmongers were put to strange
shifts by way of accounting for it. Sometimes the
Devil imposed on the husband by a deceptio visus ;
sometimes a demon took the place of the wife ;
sometimes the body was left and the spirit only
transported. But the more orthodox opinion was
in favor of corporeal deportation. Bodin appeals
triumphantly to the cases of Habbakuk (now in
the Apocrypha, but once making a part of the
Book of Daniel), and of Philip in the Acts of
the Apostles. " 1 find," he says, " this ecstatic
ravishment they talk of much more wonderful than
bodily transport. And if the Devil has this power,

1 If the Blockula of the Swedish witches be a reminiscence of
this, it would seem to point back to remote times and heathen
ceremonies. But it is so impossible to distinguish what was put
into the mind of those who confessed by their examining torturers
from what may have been there before, the result of a common
superstition, that perhaps, after all, the meeting on mountains
may have been suggested by what Pliny says of the dances of
Satyrs on Mount Atlas. It is suggested that the scene of the
Swedish delusion should have been .EV/dale, and in one of the Scot-
tish narratives the Devil's name is Elpha.

354 WITCHCRAFT

as they confess, of ravishing the spirit out of the
body, is it not more easy to carry body and soul
without separation or division of the reasonable
part, than to withdraw and divide the one from the
other without death ? " The author of De Lamiis
argues for the corporeal theory. " The evil An-
gels have the same superiority of natural power
as the good, since by the Fall they lost none of the
gifts of nature, but only those of grace." Now, as
we know that good angels can thus transport men
in the twinkling of an eye, it follows that evil ones
may do the same. He fortifies his position by a
recent example from secular history. u No one
doubts about John Faust, who dwelt at Witten-
berg, in the time of the sainted Luther, and who,
seating himself on his cloak with his companions,
was conveyed away and borne by the Devil through
the air to distant kingdoms." 1 Glanvil inclines
rather to the spiritual than the material hypothesis,
and suggests " that the Witch's anointing herself
before she takes her flight may perhaps serve to
keep the body tenantable and in fit disposition to
receive the spirit at its return." Aubrey, whose
" Miscellanies " were published in 1696, had no
doubts whatever as to the physical asportation of
the witch. He says that a gentleman of his ac-
quaintance " was in Portugal anno 1655, when one
was burnt by the inquisition for being brought
thither from Goa, in East India, in the air, in an

1 Wierus, whose book was published not long- after Faust's
death, apparently doubted the whole story, for he alludes to it
with an utfertur, and plainly looked ou him as a mountebank.

WITCHCRAFT 355

incredible short time." And we have the case of
un Anglais francise who was let fall by the Devil
into the Channel avec un bruict espovantable fait
en la presence de deux cens navires ffollandois. As
to the conveyance of witches through crevices, key-
holes, chimneys, and the like, Herr Walburger dis-
cusses the question with such comical gravity that
we must give his argument in the undiminished
splendor of its jurisconsult latinity. The first sen-
tence is worthy of Magister Bartholomaeus Kuckuk.
" Haee realis delatio trahit me quoque ad illam vulgo
agitatam quaestionem : An diabolus Lamias cor-
pore per angusta foramina parietum, fenestrarum,
portarum aut per cavernas ignijluasferre queant ? "
(Surely if tace be good Latin for a candle, caverna
igniflua should be flattering to a chimney.) " Resp.
Lamiae praedicto modo saepius fatentur sese a dia-
bolo per caminum aut alia loca angustiora scopis
insidentes peraerem ad montem Bructerorum de-
ferri. Verum deluduntur a Satana isteec mulieres
hoc casu egregie nee revera rimulas istas penetrant,
sed solummodo daemon praecedens latenter aperit
et claudit januas vel fenestras corporis earum ca-
paces, per quas eas intromittit quae putant se for-
mam animalculi parvi, mustelae, catti, locustae, et
aliorum induisse. At si forte contingat ut per
parietem se delatam confiteatur Saga, tune, si non
totum hoc praestigiosum est, daemonem tamen max-
ima celeritate tot quot sufficiunt lapides eximere et
sustinere alios ne ruant, et postea eadem celeritate
iteruin eos in suum locum reponere, existimo : cum
hominum adspectus hanc tartarei latomi fraudem

356 WITCHCRAFT

nequeat deprendere. Idem quoque judicium esse
potest de translatione per caminum. Siquidem si
caverna igiiiflua justse amplitudinis est ut nullo
iinpedimento et haesitatione corpus liumanum earn
perrepere possit, diabolo impossible non esse per
earn eas educere. Si vero per inproportionatimi
(ut ita loquar) corporibus spatium eas educit tune
meras illusiones praestigiosas esse censeo, nee a dia-
bolo hoc unquam effici posse. Ratio est, quoniam
diabolus essentiam creaturse seu lamia? immutare
non potest, midto minus efficere ut majus cor-
pus penetret per spatium inproportionatum, alio-
quin corporum penetratio esset admittenda quod
contra naturam et omne Physicorum principium
est." This is fine reasoning, and the ut ita loquar
thrown in so carelessly, as if with a deprecatory
wave of the hand for using a less classical locution
than usual, strikes me as a very delicate touch in-
deed. Walburger wrote this in 1757.

Grimm tells us that he does not know when
broomsticks, spits, and similar utensils were first as-
sumed to be the canonical instruments of this noc-
turnal equitation. He thinks it comparatively mod-
ern, but I suspect it is as old as the first child that
ever bestrode his father's staff, and fancied it into
a courser shod with wind, like those of Pindar.
Alas for the poverty of human invention ! It can-
not afford a hippogriff for an every-day occasion.
The poor old crones, badgered by inquisitors into
confessing they had been where they never were,
were involved in the further necessity of explaining
how the devil they got there. The only steed their

WITCHCRAFT 357

parents had ever been rich enough to keep had
been of this domestic sort, and they no doubt had
ridden in this inexpensive fashion, imagining them-
selves the grand dames they saw sometimes flash
by, in the happy days of childhood, now so far
away. Forced to give a how, and unable to con-
ceive of mounting in the air without something to
sustain them, their bewildered wits naturally took
refuge in some such simple subterfuge, and the
broomstave, which might make part of the poorest
house's furniture, was the nearest at hand. If
youth and good spirits could put such life into a
dead stick once, why not age and evil spirits now ?
Moreover, what so likely as an emeritus implement
of this sort to become the staff of a withered bel-
dame, and thus to be naturally associated with her
image ? I remember very well a poor half -crazed
creature, who always wore a scarlet cloak and
leaned on such a stay, cursing and banning after a
fashion that would infallibly have burned her two
hundred years ago. But apart from any adventi-
tious associations of later growth, it is certain that a
very ancient belief gave to magic the power of im-
parting life, or the semblance of it, to inanimate
things and thus sometimes making servants of them.
The wands of the Egyptian magicians were turned
to serpents. Still nearer to the purpose is the capi-
tal story of Lucian, out of which Goethe made his
Zauberlehrling, of the stick turned water-carrier.
The classical theory of the witch's flight was driven
to no such vulgar expedients, the ointment turning
her into a bird for the nonce, as in Lucian and

358 WITCHCRAFT

Apuleius. In those days, too, there was nothing
known of any camp-meeting of witches and \vizards,
but each sorceress transformed herself that she
might fly to her paramour. According to some of
the Scotch stories, the witch, after bestriding her
broomstick, must repeat the magic formula, Horse
and Hattock! The flitting of these ill-omened
night-birds, like nearly all the general superstitions
relating to witchcraft, mingles itself and is lost in
a throng of figures more august.1 Diana, Bertha,
Holda, Abundia, Befana, once beautiful and divine,
the bringers of blessing while men slept, became
demons haunting the drear of darkness with terror
and ominous suggestion. The process of disen-
chantment must have been a long one, and none
can say how soon it became complete. Perhaps we
may take Heine's word for it, that

" Genau bei Weibern
Weiss man niemals wo der Engel
Aufhort und der Teufel anfangt."

Once goblinized, Herodias joins them, doomed
still to bear about the Baptist's head ; 2 and Woden,
who, first losing his identity in the Wild Hunts-
man, sinks by degrees into the mere spook of a
Suabian baron, sinfully fond of field-sports, and
therefore punished with an eternal phantasm of
them, " the hunter and the deer a shade." More
and more vulgarized, the infernal train snatches up
and sweeps along with it every lawless shape and
wild conjecture of distempered fancy, streaming

1 Sse Grimm's D. M., under Hexenfart, Wutendes Heer, &c.

2 Probably through some confusion with Eurydice, whose name
became Erodes in Old French.

WITCHCRAFT 359

away at last into a comet's tail of wild-haired hags,
eager with unnatural hate and more unnatural lust,
the nightmare breed of some exorcist's or inquis-
itor's surfeit, whose own lie has turned upon him
in sleep.

As it is painfully interesting to trace the gradual
degeneration of a poetic faith into the ritual of
unimaginative Philistinism, so it is amusing to see
pedantry clinging faithfully to the traditions of its
prosaic nature, and holding sacred the dead shells
that once housed a moral symbol. What a divine
thing the outside always has been and continues to
be ! And how the cast clothes of the mind con-
tinue always to be in fashion ! We turn our coats
without changing the cut of them. But was it
possible for a man to change not only his skin but
his nature ? Were there such things as versipelles,
lycanthropi, werwolf s, and loupgarous? In the
earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later
poetry has become science. The phenomena of
nature, imaginatively represented, were not long in
becoming myths. These the primal poets repro-
duced again as symbols, no longer of physical, but
of moral truths. By and by the professional poets,
in search of a subject, are struck by the fund of
picturesque material lying unused in them, and
work them up once more as narratives, with appro-
priate personages and decorations. Thence they
take the further downward step into legend, and
from that to superstition. How many metamor-
phoses between the elder Edda and the Nibelungen,
between Arcturus and the " Idyls of the King " I

360 WITCHCRAFT

Let a good, thorough-paced proser get hold of one
of these stories, ancl he carefully desiccates them
of whatever fancy may be left, till he has reduced
them to the proper dryness of fact. King Lycaon,
grandson by the spinclleside of Oceanus, after
passing through all the stages I have mentioned,
becomes the ancestor of the werwolf. Ovid is put
upon the stand as a witness, and testifies to the
undoubted fact of the poor monarch's own meta-
morphosis : —

'* Teiritus ipse fugit, nactusque silentia ruris
Exululat, frustraque loqui conatur."

Does any one still doubt that men may be
changed into beasts ? Call Lucian, call Apuleius,
call Homer, whose story of the companions of
Ulysses made swine of by Circe, says Bodin, nest
pas fable. If that arch -patron of sorcerers,
Wierus, is still unconvinced, and pronounces the
whole thing a delusion of diseased imagination,
what does he say to Nebuchadnezzar? Nay, let
St. Austin be subpoenaed, who declares that " in
his time among the Alps sorceresses were common,
who, by making travellers eat of a certain cheese,
changed them into beasts of burden and then back
again into men." Too confiding tourist, beware
of Gruyere, especially at supper ! Then there was
the Philosopher Ammonius, whose lectures were
constantly attended by an ass, — a phenomenon
not without parallel in more recent times, and all
the more credible to Bodin, who had been professor
of civil law.

In one case we have fortunately the evidence of

WITCHCRAFT 361

the ass himself. In Germany, two witches who
kept an inn made an ass of a young actor, — not
always a very prodigious transformation, it will
be thought by those familiar with the stage. In
his new shape he drew customers by his amusing
tricks, voluptates mille viatoribus exhibebat. But
one day making his escape (having overheard the
secret from his mistresses), he plunged into the
water and was disasinized to the extent of recover-
ing his original shape.1 " Id Petrus Damianus, vir
sua aetate inter primos numerandus, cum rem scis-
citatus est diligentissime ex hero, ex asino, ex mu-
lieribus sagis confessis factum, Leoni VII. Papae
narravit, et postquam diu in utramque partem
coram Papa f uit disputatum, hoc tandem posse fieri
fuit constitum." Bodin must have been delighted
with this story, though perhaps as a Protestant he
might have vilipended the infallible decision of the
Pope in its favor. As for lycanthropy, that was
too common in his own time to need any confirma-
tion. It was notorious to all men. " In Livonia,
during the latter part of December, a villain goes
about summoning the sorcerers to meet a,t a cer-
tain place, and if they fail, the Devil scourges
them thither with an iron rod, and that so sharply
that the marks of it remain upon them. Their
captain goes before ; and they, to the number of
several thousands, follow him across a river, which
passed, they change into wolves, and, casting them-
selves upon men and flocks, do all manner of dam-
age." This we have on the authority of Melanc-

1 This is plainly a reminiscence of Apuleius.

362 WITCHCRAFT

thon's son-in-law, Gaspar Peucerus. Moreover,
many books published in Germany affirm " that
one of the greatest kings in Christendom, not long
since dead, was often changed into a wolf." But
what need of words? The conclusive proof re-
mains, that many in our own day, being put to the
torture, have confessed the fact, and been burned
alive accordingly. The maintainers of the reality
of witchcraft in the next century seem to have
dropped the werwolf by common consent, though
supported by the same kind of evidence they relied
on in other matters, namely, that of ocular wit-
nesses, the confession of the accused, and general
notoriety.1 So lately as 1765 the French peasants
believed the " wild beast of the Gevaudan " to be
a loupgarou, and that, I think, is his last appear-
ance. Schoolcraft found the werwolf among the
legends of our Red Men.

The particulars of the concubinage of witches
with their familiars were discussed with a relish
and a filthy minuteness worthy of Sanchez. Could
children be born of these devilish amours? Of
course they could, said one party; are there not
plenty of cases in authentic history? Who was
the father of Romulus and Remus ? nay, not so very
long ago, of Merlin? Another party denied the

1 " He learned an herb of such a wondrous power
That, were it gathered at a certain hour

That, with thrice saying a strange magic spell,

It him a war- wolf instantly would make."

(Dray ton's Mooncalf.)

WITCHCRAFT 363

possibility of the thing altogether. Among these
was Luther, who declared the children either to be
supposititious, or else mere imps, disguised as in-
nocent sucklings, and known as Wechselkinder, or
changelings, who were common enough, as every-
body must be aware. Of the intercourse itself
Luther had no doubts.1 A third party took a
middle ground, and believed that vermin and toads
might be the offspring of such amours. And how
did the Demon, a mere spiritual essence, contrive
himself a body ? Some would have it that he en-
tered into dead bodies, by preference, of course,
those of sorcerers. It is plain, from the confes-
sion of De la Rue, that this was the theory of his
examiners. This also had historical evidence in its
favor. There was the well-known leading case of
the Bride of Corinth, for example. And but yes-
terday, as it were, at Crossen in Silesia, did not
Christopher Monig, an apothecary's servant, come
back after being buried, and do duty, as if nothing
particular had happened, putting up prescriptions
as usual, and " pounding drugs in the mortar with
a mighty noise " ? Apothecaries seem to have been
special victims of these Satanic pranks, for another
appeared at Reichenbach not long before, affirm-
ing that " he had poisoned several men with his
drugs," which certainly gives an air of truth to
the story. Accordingly the Devil is represented as

1 Some Catholics, indeed, affirmed that he himself was the son of
a demon who lodged in his father's house under the semblance of
a merchant. Wierus says that a bishop preached to that effect in
1505, and gravely refutes the story.

364 WITCHCRAFT

being unpleasantly cold to the touch. "Caietan
escrit qu'une sorciere demand a un iour au diable
pourquoy il ne se rechauffoit, qui fist response qu'il
faisoit ce qu'il pouuoit." Poor Devil !

" 'T was all in vain, a useless matter*
And blankets were about him pinned,
Yet still his jaws and teeth they chatter
Like a loose casement in the wind."

But there are cases in which the demon is repre-
sented as so hot that his grasp left a seared spot as
black as charcoal. Perhaps some of them came
from the torrid zone of their broad empire, and
others from the thrilling regions of thick-ribbed
ice. Those who were not satisfied with the dead-
body theory contented themselves, like Dr. More,
with that of " adscititious particles," which has, to
be sure, a more metaphysical and scholastic flavor
about it. That the demons really came, either cor-
poreally or through some diabolic illusion that
amounted to the same thing, and that the witch
devoted herself to him body and soul, scarce any-
body was bold enough to doubt. To these fami-
liars their venerable paramours gave endearing
nicknames, such as My little Master, or My dear
Martin, — the latter, probably, after the heresy of
Luther, and when the rack was popish. The fa-
mous witch-finder Hopkins enables us to lengthen
the list considerably. One witch whom he con-
victed, after being " kept from sleep two or three
nights," called in five of her devilish servitors.
The first was " Holt, who came in like a white kit-
ling "; the second " Jarmara, like a fat spaniel

WITCHCRAFT 365

without any legs at all " ; the third, " Vinegar
Tom, who was like a long-tailed greyhound with an
head like an oxe, with a long tail and broad eyes,
who, when this discoverer spoke to and bade him
to the place /provided for him and his angells, im-
mediately transformed himself into the shape of a
child of foure yeares old, without a head, and gave
half a dozen turnes about the house and vanished
at the doore " ; the fourth, " Sack and Sugar, like
a black rabbet " ; the fifth, " News, like a polcat."
Other names of his finding were Elemauzer, Py-
wacket, Peck-in-the-Crown, Grizzel, and Greedy-
gut, " which," he adds, " no mortal could invent."
Middleton in his Witch gives us Titty, Tiffin,
Suckin-Pidgen, Liard [Hamlet's Truepenny, per-
haps], Robin, Hoppo, Stadlin, Hellwain, and Puc-
kle. The name of Robin, which we met with in
the confession of Alice Duke, has, perhaps, wider
associations than the woman herself dreamed of;
for, through Robin des Bois and Robin Hood, it
may be another of those scattered traces that lead
us back to Woden. Probably, however, it is only
our old friend Robin Goodfellow, whose namesake
Knecht Ruprecht makes such a figure in the Ger-
man fairy mythology. Possessed persons called in
higher agencies, — Thrones, Dominations, Prince-
doms, Powers ; and among the witnesses against
Urbain Grandier we find the names of Leviathan,
Behemoth, Isaacarum, Belaam, Asmodeus, and Be-
herit, who spoke French very well, but were re-
markably poor Latinists, knowing, indeed, almost
as little of the language as if their youth had been

366 WITCHCRAFT

spent in writing Latin verses.1 A shrewd Scotch
physician tried them with Gaelic, but they could
make nothing of it.

It was only when scepticism had begun to make
itself uncomfortably inquisitive, that the Devil had
any difficulty in making himself visible and even
palpable. In simpler times, demons might almost
seem to have made no inconsiderable part of the
population. Trithemius tells of one who served as
cook to the Bishop of Hildesheim (one shudders to
think of the school where he had graduated as
Cordon bleu), and who delectebatur esse cum ho-
minibus, loquens, interrogans, respondens famili-
ariter omnibus, aliquando visibiliter, aliquando in-
visibiliter apparens. This last feat of " appearing
invisibly " would have been worth seeing. In 1554,
the Devil came of a Christmas eve to Lawrence
Doner, a parish priest in Saxony, and asked to be
confessed. " Admissus, horrendas adversus Chris-
tum filium Dei blasphemias evomuit. Verum cum
virtute verbi Dei a parocho victus esset, intolerabili
post se relicto foetore abiit." Splendidly dressed,
with two companions, he frequented an honest
man's house at Rothenberg. He brought with him
a piper or fiddler, and contrived feasts and dances
under pretext of wooing the goodman's daughter.

1 Melancthon, however, used to tell of a possessed girl in Italy
who knew no Latin, but the Devil in her, being asked by Bona-
mico, a Bolognese professor, what was the best verse in Virgil,
answered at once : —

" Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos," —
a somewhat remarkable concession on the part of a fallen angeL

WITCHCRAFT 867

He boasted that he was a foreign nobleman of im-
mense wealth, and, for a time, was as successful as
an Italian courier has been known to be at one of
our fashionable watering-places. But the impor-
tunity of the guest and his friends at length dis-
plicuit patrifamilias, who accordingly one evening
invited a minister of the Word to meet them at
supper, and entered upon pious discourse with him
from the word of God. Wherefore, seeking other
matter of conversation, they said that there were
many facetious things more suitable to exhilarate
the supper-table than the interpretation of Holy
Writ, and begged that they might be no longer
bored with Scripture. Thoroughly satisfied by their
singular way of thinking that his guests were dia-
bolical, paterfamilias cries out in Latin worthy of
Father Tom, " Apagite, vos scelerati nebulones ! "
This said, the tartarean impostor and his compan-
ions at once vanished with a great tumult, leav-
ing behind them a most unpleasant foetor and the
bodies of three men who had been hanged. Per-
haps if the clergyman-cure were faithfully tried
upon the next fortune-hunting count with a large
real estate in whiskers and an imaginary one in
Barataria, he also might vanish, leaving a strong
smell of barber' s-shop, and taking with him a body
that will come to the gallows in due time. It were
worth trying. Luther tells of a demon who served
as famulus in a monastery, fetching beer for the
monks, and always insisting on honest measure for
his money. There is one case on record where the
Devil appealed to the courts for protection in his

368 WITCHCRAFT

rights. A monk, going to visit his mistress, fell
dead as he was passing a bridge. The good and
bad angel came to litigation about his soul. The
case was referred by agreement to Richard, Duke
of Normandy, who decided that the monk's body
should be carried back to the bridge, and his soul
restored to it by the claimants. If he persevered
in keeping his assignation, the Devil was to have
him, if not, then the Angel. The monk, thus put
upon his guard, turns back and saves his soul, such
as it was.1 Perhaps the most impudent thing the
Devil ever did was to open a school of magic in
Toledo. The ceremony of graduation in this insti-
tution was peculiar. The senior class had all to run
through a narrow cavern, and the venerable pre-
sident was entitled to the hindmost, if he could
catch him. Sometimes it happened that he caught
only his shadow, and in that case the man who had
been nimble enough to do what Goethe pronounces
impossible, became the most profound magician of
his year. Hence our proverb of the Devil take the
hindmost, and Chamisso's story of Peter Schlemihl.
There is no end of such stories. They were re-
peated and believed by the gravest and wisest men
down to the end of the sixteenth century ; they

1 This story seems mediaeval and Gothic enough, but is hardly
more so than bringing the case of the Furies v. Orestes before the
Areopagus, and putting Apollo in the witness-box, as ^Eschylus
has done. The classics, to be sure, are always so classic ! In the
Eumenides, Apollo takes the place of the good angel. And why
not ? For though a demon, and a lying one, he has crept in to the
calendar under his other name of Helios as St. Helias. Could any
of his oracles have foretold this ?

WITCHCRAFT 369

were received undoubtingly by the great majority
down to the end of the seventeenth. There was,
indeed, abundant evidence that familiar spirits
could be and were carried about in the pommels
of swords, in phials, in finger-rings. The Devil
was an easy way of accounting for what was be-
yond men's comprehension. He was the simple
and satisfactory answer to all the conundrums of
Nature. And what the Devil had not time to be-
stow his personal attention upon, the witch was
always ready to do for him. Was a doctor at a
loss about a case ? How could he save his credit
more cheaply than by pronouncing it witchcraft,
and turning it over to the parson to be exorcised ?
Did a man's cow die suddenly, or his horse fall
lame ? Witchcraft ! Did one of those writers of
controversial quartos, heavy as the stone of Diomed,
feel a pain in the small of his back ? Witchcraft !
Unhappily there were always ugly old women ; and
if you crossed them in any way, or did them a
wrong, they were given to scolding and banning.
If, within a year or two after, anything should hap-
pen to you or yours, why, of course, old Mother
Bombie or Goody Blake must be at the bottom of
it. For it was perfectly well known that there
were witches, (does not God's law say expressly,
" Suffer not a witch to live ? ") and that they could
cast a spell by the mere glance of their eyes, could
cause you to pine away by melting a waxen image,
could give you a pain wherever they liked by stick-
ing pins into the same, could bring sickness into
your house or into your barn by hiding a Devils'

370 WITCHCRAFT

powder under the threshold ; and who knows what
else ? Worst of all, they could send a demon into
your body, who would cause you to vomit pins,
hair, pebbles, knives, — indeed, almost anything
short of a cathedral, — without any fault of yours,
utter through you the most impertinent things
verbi ministro, and, in short, make you the most
important personage in the parish for the time be-
ing. Meanwhile, you were an object of condolence
and contribution to the whole neighborhood. What
wonder if a lazy apprentice or servant-maid (Bek-
ker gives several instances of the kind detected by
him) should prefer being possessed, with its at-
tendant perquisites, to drudging from morning till
night? And to any one who has observed how
common a thing in certain states of mind self-con-
nivance is, and how near it is to self-deception, it
will not be surprising that some were, to all intents
and purposes, really possessed. Who has never
felt an almost irresistible temptation, and seem-
ingly not self-originated, to let himself go ? to let
his mind gallop and kick and curvet and roll like
a horse turned loose ? in short, as we Yankees say,
" to speak out in meeting " ? Who never had it
suggested to him by the fiend to break in at a fu-
neral with a real character of the deceased, instead
of that Mrs. Gnmdyfied view of him which the
clergyman is so painfully elaborating in his prayer ?
Remove the pendulum of conventional routine, and
the mental machinery runs on with a whir that
gives a delightful excitement to sluggish tempera-
ments, and is, perhaps, the natural relief of highly

WITCHCRAFT 371

nervous organizations. The tyrant Will is de-
throned, and the sceptre snatched by his frolic sis-
ter Whim. This state of things, if continued, must
become either insanity or imposture. But who can
say precisely where consciousness ceases and a kind
of automatic movement begins, the result of over-
excitement ? The subjects of these strange dis-
turbances have been almost always young women
or girls at a critical period of their development.
Many of the most remarkable cases have occurred
in convents, and both there and elsewhere, as in
other kinds of temporary nervous derangement,
have proved contagious. Sometimes, as in the affair
of the nuns of Loudun, there seems every reason
to suspect a conspiracy ; but I am not quite ready
to say that Grandier was the only victim, and that
some of the energumens were not unconscious tools
in the hands of priestcraft and revenge. One thing
is certain : that in the dioceses of humanely scep-
tical prelates the cases of possession were sporadic
only, and either cured, or at least hindered from
becoming epidemic, by episcopal mandate. Car-
dinal Mazarin, when Papal vice-legate at Avignon,
made an end of the trade of exorcism within his
government.

But scepticism, down to the beginning of the
eighteenth century, was the exception. Undoubt-
ing and often fanatical belief was the rule. It is
easy enough to be astonished at it, still easier to
misapprehend it. How could sane men have been
deceived by such nursery-tales? Still more, how
could they have suffered themselves, on what seems

372 WITCHCRAFT

to us such puerile evidence, to consent to such atro-
cious cruelties, nay, to urge them on ? As to the
belief, we should remember that the human mind,
when it sails by dead reckoning, without the possi-
bility of a fresh observation, perhaps without the
instruments necessary to take one, will sometimes
bring up in very strange latitudes. Do we of the
nineteenth century, then, always strike out boldly
into the unlandmarked deep of speculation and
shape our courses by the stars, or do we not some-
times con our voyage by what seem to us the firm
and familiar headlands of truth, planted by God
himself, but which may, after all, be no more than
an insubstantial mockery of cloud or airy juggle of
mirage ? The refraction of our own atmosphere has
by no means made an end of its tricks with the
appearances of things in our little world of thought.
The men of that day believed what they saw, or,
as our generation would put it, what they thought
they saw. Very good. The vast majority of men
believe, and always will believe, on the same terms.
When one comes along who can partly distinguish
the thing seen from that travesty or distortion of it
which the thousand disturbing influences within
him and without him would make him see, we call
him a great philosopher. All our intellectual
charts are engraved according to his observations,
and we steer contentedly by them till some man
whose brain rests on a still more unmovable basis
corrects them still further by eliminating what his
predecessor thought he saw. We must account
for many former aberrations in the moral world by

WITCHCRAFT 373

the presence of more or less nebulous bodies of a
certain gravity which modified the actual position
of truth in its relation to the mind, and which, if
they have now vanished, have made way, perhaps,
for others whose influence will in like manner be
allowed for by posterity in their estimate of us.
In matters of faith, astrology has by no means yet
given place to astronomy, nor alchemy become
chemistry, which knows what to seek for and how
to find it. In the days of witchcraft all science
was still in the condition of May-be ; it is only just
bringing itself to find a higher satisfaction in the
impertubable Must-be of law. We should remem-
ber that what we call natural may have a very dif-
ferent meaning for one generation from that which
it has for another. The boundary between the
" other " world and this ran till very lately, and at
some points runs still, through a vast tract of unex-
plored border-land of very uncertain tenure. Even
now the territory which Keason holds firmly as
Lord Warden of the marches during daylight, is
subject to sudden raids of Imagination by night.
But physical darkness is not the only one that
lends opportunity to such incursions ; and in mid-
summer 1692, when Ebenezer Bapson, looking out
of the fort at Gloucester in broad day, saw shapes
of men, sometimes in blue coats like Indians, some-
times in white waistcoats like Frenchmen, it seemed
more natural to most men that they should be spec-
tres than men of flesh and blood. Granting the
assumed premises, as nearly every one did, the syl-
logism was perfect.

374 WITCHCRAFT

So much for the apparent reasonableness of the
belief, since every man's logic is satisfied with a
legitimate deduction from his own postulates.
Causes for the cruelty to which the belief led are
not further to seek. Toward no crime have men
shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in pun-
ishing difference of belief, and the first systematic
persecutions for witchcraft began with the inquisi-
tors in the South of France in the thirteenth cen-
tury. It was then and there that the charge of
sexual uncleanness with demons was first devised.
Persecuted heretics would naturally meet in dark-
ness and secret, and it was easy to blacken such
meetings with the accusation of deeds so foul as to
shun the light of day and the eyes of men. They
met to renounce God and worship the Devil. But
this was not enough. To excite popular hatred
and keep it fiercely alive, fear must be mingled
with it ; and this end was reached by making the
heretic also a sorcerer, who, by the Devil's help,
could and would work all manner of fiendish mis-
chief. When by this means the belief in a league
between witch and demon had become firmly es'
tablished, witchcraft grew into a well-defined crime,
hateful enough in itself to furnish pastime for the
torturer and food for the fagot. In the fifteenth
century, witches were burned by thousands, and
it may well be doubted if all paganism together
was ever guilty of so many human sacrifices in
the same space of time. In the sixteenth, these
holocausts were appealed to as conclusive evi-
dence of the reality of the crime, terror was once

WITCHCRAFT 375

more aroused, the more vindictive that its sources
were so vague and intangible, and cruelty was the
natural consequence. Nothing but an abject panic,
in which the whole use of reason, except as a mill
to grind out syllogisms, was altogether lost, will
account for some chapters in Bodin's Demono-
manie. Men were surrounded by a forever-renewed
conspiracy whose ramifications they could not trace,
though they might now and then lay hold on one
of its associates. Protestant and Catholic might
agree in nothing else, but they were unanimous in
their dread of this invisible enemy. If fright could
turn civilized Englishmen into savage Iroquois
during the imagined negro plots of New York in
1741 and of Jamaica in 1865, if the same invisible
omnipresence of Fenianism shall be able to work
the same miracle, as it perhaps will, next year in
England itself, why need we be astonished that
the blows should have fallen upon many an inno-
cent head when men were striking wildly in self-
defence, as they supposed, against the unindictable
Powers of Darkness, against a plot which could be
carried on by human agents, but with invisible
accessories and by supernatural means? In the
seventeenth century an element was added which
pretty well supplied the place of heresy as a sharp-
ener of hatred and an awakener of indefinable sus-
picion. Scepticism had been born into the world,
almost more hateful than heresy, because it had
the manners of good society and contented itself
with a smile, a shrug, an almost imperceptible lift
of the eyebrow, — a kind of reasoning especially

376 WITCHCRAFT

exasperating to disputants of the old school, who
still cared about victory, even when they did not
about the principles involved in the debate.

The Puritan emigration to New England took
place at a time when the belief in diabolic agency
had been hardly called in question, much less
shaken. The early adventurers brought it with
them to a country in every way fitted, not only to
keep it alive, but to feed it into greater vigor. The
solitude of the wilderness (and solitude alone, by
dis-furnishing the brain of its commonplace asso-
ciations, makes it an apt theatre for the delusions
of imagination), the nightly forest noises, the
glimpse, perhaps, through the leaves, of a painted
savage face, uncertain whether of redman or Devil,
but more likely of the latter, above all, that mea-
sureless mystery of the unknown and conjectural
stretching away illimitable on all sides and vexing
the mind, somewhat as physical darkness does,
with intimation and misgiving, — under all these
influences, whatever seeds of superstition had in
any way got over from the Old World would find
an only too congenial soil in the New. The lead-
ers of that emigration believed and taught that
demons loved to dwell in waste and wooded places,
that the Indians did homage to the bodily presence
of the Devil, and that he was especially enraged
against those who had planted an outpost of the
true faith upon this continent hitherto all his own.
In the third generation of the settlement, in pro-
portion as living faith decayed, the clergy in-
sisted all the more strongly on the traditions of the

WITCHCRAFT 377

elders, and as they all placed the sources of good-
ness and religion in some inaccessible Other World
rather than in the soul of man himself, they clung
to every shred of the supernatural as proof of the
existence of that Other World, and of its interest
in the affairs of this. They had the countenance
of all the great theologians, Catholic as well as
Protestant, of the leaders of the Reformation, and
in their own day of such men as More and Glan-
vil and Baxter.1 If to all these causes, more or
less operative in 1692, we add the harassing ex-
citement of an Indian war (urged on by Satan in
his hatred of the churches), with its daily and
nightly apprehensions and alarms, we shall be less
astonished that the delusion in Salem Village rose
so high than that it subsided so soon.

I have already said that it was religious antipa-
thy or clerical interest that first made heresy and
witchcraft identical and cast them into the same
expiatory fire. The invention was a Catholic one,
but it is plain that Protestants soon learned its
value and were not slow in making it a plague to
the inventor. It was not till after the Reformation

1 Mr. Lecky, in his admirable chapter on Witchcraft, gives a
little more credit to the enlightenment of the Church of England
in this matter than it would seem fairly to deserve. More and
Glanvil were faithful sons of the Church ; and if the persecution
of witches was especially rife during the ascendency of the Pu-
ritans, it was because they happened to be in power while there
was a reaction against Sadducism. All the convictions were un-
der the statute of James I., who was no Puritan. After the res-
toration, the reaction was the other way, and Hobbism became
the fashion. It is more philosophical to say that the age believes
this and that, than that the particular men who live in it do so.

878 WITCHCRAFT

that there was any systematic hunting out of
witches in England. Then, no doubt, the inno-
cent charms and rhyming prayers of the old reli-
gion were regarded as incantations, and twisted into
evidence against miserable beldames who mumbled
over in their dotage what they had learned at their
mother's knee. It is plain, at least, that this was
one of Agnes Simpson's crimes.

But as respects the frivolity of the proof ad-
duced, there was nothing to choose between Cath-
olic and Protestant. Out of civil and canon law a
net was woven through whose meshes there was no
escape, and into it the victims were driven by pop-
ular clamor. Suspicion of witchcraft was justified
by general report, by the ill-looks of the suspected,
by being silent when accused, by her mother's hav-
ing been a witch, by flight, by exclaiming when
arrested, I am lost ! by a habit of using impreca-
tions, by the evidence of two witnesses, by the
accusation of a man on his death-bed, by a habit of
being away from home at night, by fifty other
things equally grave. Anybody might be an ac-
cuser, — a personal enemy, an infamous person, a
child, parent, brother, or sister. Once accused, the
culprit was not to be allowed to touch the ground
on the way to prison, was not to be left alone there
lest she should have interviews with the Devil
and get from him the means of being insensible
under torture, was to be stripped and shaved in
order to prevent her concealing some charm, or to
facilitate the finding of witch-marks. Her right
thumb tied to her left great-toe, and vice versa, she

WITCHCRAFT 379

was thrown into the water. If she floated, she was
a witch ; if she sank and was drowned, she was
lucky. This trial, as old as the days of Pliny the
Elder, was gone out of fashion, the author of De
Lamiis assures us, in his day, everywhere but in
Westphalia. " On half proof or strong presump-
tion," says Bodin, the judge may proceed to tor-
ture. If the witch did not shed tears under the
rack, it was almost conclusive of guilt. On this
topic of torture he grows eloquent. The rack does
very well, but to thrust splinters between the nails
and flesh of hands and feet " is the most excellent
gehenna of all, and practised in Turkey." That of
Florence, where they seat the criminal in a hang-
ing chair so contrived that if he drop asleep it
overturns and leaves him hanging by a rope which
wrenches his arms backwards, is perhaps even bet-
ter, " for the limbs are not broken, and without
trouble or labor one gets out the truth." It is well
in carrying the accused to the chamber of torture
to cause some in the next room to shriek fear-
fully as if on the rack, that they may be terrified
into confession. It is proper to tell them that
their accomplices have confessed and accused them
("though they have done no such thing") that
they may do the same out of revenge. The judge
may also with a good conscience lie to the prisoner
and tell her that if she admit her guilt, she may be
pardoned. This is Bodin's opinion, but Walbur-
ger, writing a century later, concludes that the
judge may go to any extent citra mcndacium, this
side of lying. He may tell the witch that he will

380 WITCHCRAFT

be favorable, meaning to the Commonwealth ; that
he will see that she has a new house built for her,
that is, a wooden one to burn her in ; that her con-
fession will be most useful in saving her life, to
wit, her life eternal. There seems little difference
between the German's white lies and the French-
man's black ones. As to punishment, Bodin is
fierce for burning. Though a Protestant, he quotes
with evident satisfaction a decision of the magis-
trates that one " who had eaten flesh on a Friday
should be burned alive unless he repented, and
if he repented, yet he was hanged out of compas-
sion." A child under twelve who will not confess
meeting with the Devil should be put to death if
convicted of the fact, though Bodin allows that
Satan made no express compact with those who
had not arrived at puberty. This he learned from
the examination of Jeanne Harvillier, who de-
posed, " that, though her mother dedicated her to
Satan so soon as -she was born, yet she was not
married to him, nor did he demand that, or her re-
nunciation of God, till she had attained the age of
twelve."

There is no more painful reading than this, ex-
cept the trials of the witches themselves. These
awaken, by turns, pity, indignation, disgust, and
dread, — dread at the thought of what the human
mind may be brought to believe not only probable,
but proved. But it is well to be put upon our
guard by lessons of this kind, for the wisest man
is in some respects little better than a madman
in a strait-waistcoat of habit, public opinion, pru-

WITCHCRAFT 381

dence, or the like. Scepticism began at length
to make itself felt, but it spread slowly and was
shy of proclaiming itself. The orthodox party
was not backward to charge with sorcery whoever
doubted their facts or pitied their victims. Bodin
says that it is good cause of suspicion against a
judge if he turn the matter into ridicule, or incline
toward mercy. The mob, as it always is, was or-
thodox. It was dangerous to doubt, it might be
fatal to deny. In 1453 Guillaume de Lure was
burned at Poitiers on his own confession of a com-
pact with Satan, by which he agreed " to preach
and did preach that everything told of sorcerers
was mere fable, and that it was cruelly done to
condemn them to death." This contract was found
among his papers signed " with the Devil's own
claw," as Howell says speaking of a similar case.
It is not to be wondered at that the earlier doubters
were cautious. There was literally a reign of
terror, and during such regimes men are commonly
found more eager to be informers and accusers
than of counsel for the defence. Peter of Abano
is reckoned among the earliest unbelievers who de-
clared himself openly.1 Chaucer was certainly a
sceptic, as appears by the opening of the Wife of
Bath's Tale. Wierus, a German physician, was
the first to undertake (1563) a refutation of the

1 I have no means of ascertaining whether he did or not. He
•was more probably charged with it by the inquisitors. Mr.
Lecky seems to write of him only upon hearsay, for he calls him
Peter "of Apono," apparently translating a French translation of
the Latin "Aponus." The only book attributed to him that I
have ever seen is itself a kind of manual of magic.

382 WITCHCRAFT

facts and assumptions on which the prosecutions
for witchcraft were based. His explanation of the
phenomena is mainly physiological. Mr. Lecky
hardly states his position correctly in saying " that
he never dreamed of restricting the sphere of the
supernatural." Wierus went as far as he dared.
No one can read his book without feeling that he
insinuates much more than he positively affirms or
denies. He would have weakened his cause if he
had seemed to disbelieve in demoniacal possession,
since that had the supposed warrant of Scripture ;
but it may be questioned whether he uses the words
Satan and Demon in any other way than that in
which many people still use the word Nature. He
was forced to accept certain premises of his oppo-
nents by the line of his argument. When he re-
cites incredible stories without comment, it is not
that he believes them, but that he thinks their ab-
surdity obvious. That he wrote under a certain
restraint is plain from the Colophon of his book,
where he says : " Nihil autem hie ita assertum volo,
quod a3quiori judicio Catholics Christi Ecclesiae
non omnino submittam, palinodia mox spontanea
emendaturus, si erroris alicubi convincar." A great
deal of latent and timid scepticism seems to have
been brought to the surface by his work. Many
eminent persons wrote to him in gratitude and
commendation. In the Preface to his shorter trea-
tise De Lamiis (which is a mere abridgment),
he thanks God that his labors had "in many
places caused the cruelty against innocent blood to
slacken," and that "some more distinguished judges

WITCHCRAFT 383

treat more mildly and even absolve from capital
punishment the wretched old women branded with
the odious name of witches by the populace." In
the P seudomonarchia Daemonum^ he gives a kind
of census of the diabolic kingdom,1 but evidently
with secret intention of making the whole thing
ridiculous, or it would not have so stirred the bile
of Bodin. Wierus was saluted by many contem-
poraries as a Hercules who destroyed monsters, and
himself not immodestly claimed the civic wreath
for having saved the lives of fellow-citizens. Pos-
terity should not forget a man who really did an
honest life's work for humanity and the liberation
of thought. From one of the letters appended to
his book we learn that Jacobus Savagius, a physi-
cian of Antwerp, had twenty years before written
a treatise with the same design, but confining him-
self to the medical argument exclusively. He was,
however, prevented from publishing it by death.
It is pleasant to learn from Bodin that Alciato, the
famous lawyer and emblematist, was one of those
who " laughed and made others laugh at the evi-
dence relied on at the trials, insisting that witch-
craft was a thing impossible and fabulous, and so
softened the hearts of judges (in spite of the fact
that an inquisitor had caused to burn more than a
hundred sorcerers in Piedmont), that all the ac-
cused escaped." In England, Reginald Scot was

1 "With the names and surnames," says Bodin, indignantly,
"of seventy-two princes, and of seven million four hundred and
five thousand nine hundred and twenty -six devils, errors ex-
cepted."

384 WITCHCRAFT

the first to enter the lists in behalf of those who had
no champion. His book, published in 1584, is full
of manly sense and spirit, above all, of a tender
humanity that gives it a warmth which we miss
in every other written on the same side. In the
dedication to Sir Eoger Man wood he says : " I
renounce all protection and despise all friendship
that might serve towards the suppressing or sup-
planting of truth." To his kinsman, Sir Thomas
Scot, he writes : " My greatest adversaries are
young ignorance and old custom ; for what folly
soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so super-
stitiously pursued of some, as though no error could
be acquainted with custom." And in his Preface
he thus states his motives : " God that knoweth my
heart is witness, and you that read my book shall
see, that my drift and purpose in this enterprise
tendeth only to these respects. First, that the
glory and power of God be not so abridged and
abased as to be thrust into the hand or lip of a
lewd old woman, whereby the work of the Creator
should be attributed to the power of a creature.
Secondly, that the religion of the Gospel may be
seen to stand without such peevish trumpery.
Thirdly, that lawful favor and Christian compas-
sion be rather used towards these poor souls than
rigor and extremity. Because they which are com-
monly accused of witchcraft are the least sufficient
of all other persons to speak for themselves, as
having the most base and simple education of all
others, the extremity of their age giving them leave
to dote, their poverty to beg, their wrongs to chide

WITCHCRAFT 385

and threaten (as being void of any other way of
revenge), their humor melancholical to be full of
imaginations, from whence chiefly proceedeth the
vanity of their confessions. . . . And for so much
as the mighty help themselves together, and the
poor widow's cry, though it reach to Heaven, is
scarce heard here upon earth, I thought good (ac-
cording to my poor ability) to make intercession
that some part of common rigor and some points of
hasty judgment may be advised upon." . . . The
case is nowhere put with more point, or urged with
more sense and eloquence, than by Scot, whose
book contains also more curious matter, in the way
of charms, incantations, exorcisms, and feats of
legerdemain, than any other of the kind.

Other books followed on the same side, of which
Bekker's, published about a century later, was the
most important. It is well reasoned, learned, and
tedious to a masterly degree. But though the be-
lief in witchcraft might be shaken, it still had the
advantage of being on the whole orthodox and re-
spectable. Wise men, as usual, insisted on regard-
ing superstition as of one substance with faith, and
objected to any scouring of the shield of religion,
lest, like that of Cornelius Scriblerus, it should
suddenly turn out to be nothing more than " a pal-
try old sconce with the nozzle broke off." The
Devil continued to be the only recognized Minister
Resident of God upon earth. When we remember
that one man's accusation on his death-bed was
enough to constitute grave presumption of witch-
craft, it might seem singular that dying testimonies

386 WITCHCRAFT

were so long of no avail against the common cre-
dulity. But it should be remembered that men are
mentally no less than corporeally gregarious, and
that public opinion, the fetish even of the nine-
teenth century, makes men, whether for good or
ill, into a mob, which either hurries the individual
judgment along with it, or runs over and tramples
it into insensibility. Those who are so fortunate
as to occupy the philosophical position of spectators
db extra are very few in any generation or any
party, and may safely count on being misunderstood
and therefore misrepresented.

There were exceptions, it is true, but the old
cruelties went on. In 1610 a case came before the
tribunal of the Tour ell e, and when the counsel for
the accused argued at some length that sorcery was
ineffectual, and that the Devil could not destroy
life, President Seguier told him that he might spare
his breath, since the court had long been convinced
on those points. And yet two years later the
grand-vicars of the Bishop of Beauvais solemnly
summoned Beelzebuth, Satan, Motelu, and Brif-
faut, with the four legions under their charge, to
appear and sign an agreement never again to enter
the bodies of reasonable or other creatures, under
pain of excommunication! If they refused, they
were to be given over to " the power of hell to be
tormented and tortured more than was customary,
three thousand years after the judgment." Under
this proclamation they all came in, like recon-
structed rebels, and signed whatever document was
put before them. Toward the middle of the sev-

WITCHCRAFT 387

enteenth century, the safe thing was still to believe,
or at any rate to profess belief. Sir Thomas
Browne, though he had written an exposure of
" Vulgar Errors," testified in court to his faith in
the possibility of witchcraft. Sir Kenelm Digby,
in his " Observations on the Religio Medici," takes,
perhaps, as advanced ground as any, when he says :
" Neither do I deny there are witches ; I only re-
serve my assent till I meet with stronger motives
to carry it." The position of even enlightened
men of the world in that age might be called semi-
sceptical. La Bruyere, no doubt, expresses the
average of opinion : " Que penser de la magie et
du sortilege ? La theorie en est obscurcie, les
principes vagues, incertains, et qui approchent du
visionnaire ; mais il y a des faits embarrassants,
affirmes par des hommes graves qui les ont vus ;
les admettre tous, ou les nier tous, parait un egal
inconvenient, et j'ose dire qu'en cela comme en
toutes les choses extraordinaires et qui sortent des
communes regies, il y a un parti a trouver entre
les ames credules et les esprits forts." l Mon-
taigne, to be sure, had long before declared his
entire disbelief, and yet the Parliament of Bor-
deaux, his own city, condemned a man to be burned
as a noueur d* aiguillettes so lately as 1718. In-
deed, it was not, says Maury, till the first quarter
of the eighteenth century that one might safely
publish his incredulity in France. In Scotland,
witches were burned for the last time in 1722.
Garinet cites the case of a girl near Amiens pos-

1 Cited by Maury, p. 221, note 4.

388 WITCHCRAFT

sessed by three demons, — Mimi, Zozo, and Cra-
poulet, — in 1816.

The two beautiful volumes of Mr. Upham are,
so far as I know, unique in their kind. They are
in some respects a clinical lecture on human na-
ture, as well as on the special epidemical disease
under which the patient is laboring. He has writ-
ten not merely a history of the so-called Salem
Witchcraft, but has made it intelligible by a mi-
nute account of the place where the delusion took
its rise, the persons concerned in it, whether as ac-
tors or sufferers, and the circumstances which led
to it. By deeds, wills, and the records of courts
and churches, by plans, maps, and drawings, he
has recreated Salem Village as it was two hundred
years ago, so that we seem wellnigh to talk with its
people and walk over its fields, or through its cart-
tracks and bridle-roads. We are made partners
in parish and village feuds, we share in the chim-
ney-corner gossip, and learn for the first time how
many mean and merely human motives, whether
consciously or unconsciously, gave impulse and in-
tensity to the passions of the actors in that mem-
orable tragedy which dealt the death-blow in this
country to the belief in Satanic compacts. Mr.
Upham's minute details, which give us something
like a photographic picture of the in-door and out-
door scenery that surrounded the events he nar-
rates, help us materially to understand their origin
and the course they inevitably took. In this re-
spect his book is original and full of new interest.
To know the kind of life these people led, the kind

WITCHCRAFT 389

of place they dwelt in, and the tenor of their thought,
makes much real to us that was conjectural before.
The influences of outward nature, of remoteness
from the main highways of the world's thought,
of seclusion, as the foster-mother of traditionary
beliefs, of a hard life and unwholesome diet in ex-
citing or obscuring the brain through the nerves
and stomach, have been hitherto commonly over-
looked in accounting for the phenomena of witch-
craft. The great persecutions for this imaginary
crime have always taken place in lonely places,
among the poor, the ignorant, and, above all, the
ill-fed.

One of the best things in Mr. Upham's book is
the portrait of Parris, the minister of Salem Vil-
lage, in whose household the children who, under
the assumed possession of evil spirits, became accu-
sers and witnesses, began their tricks. He is shown
to us pedantic and something of a martinet in
church discipline and ceremony, somewhat inclined
to magnify his office, fond of controversy as he was
skilful and rather unscrupulous in the conduct of
it, and glad of any occasion to make himself promi-
nent. Was he the unconscious agent of his own
superstition, or did he take advantage of the super-
stition of others for purposes of his own ? The
question is not an easy one to answer. Men will
sacrifice everything, sometimes even themselves,
to their pride of logic and their love of victory.
Bodin loses sight of humanity altogether in his
eagerness to make out his case, and display his
learning in the canon and civil law. He does not

390 WITCHCRAFT

scruple to exaggerate, to misquote, to charge his
antagonists with atheism, sorcery, and insidious
designs against religion and society, that he may
persuade the jury of Europe to bring in a verdict
of guilty.1 Yet there is no reason to doubt the sin-
cerity of his belief. Was Parris equally sincere ?
On the whole, I think it likely that he was. But
if we acquit Parris, what shall we say of the de-
moniacal girls ? The probability seems to be that
those who began in harmless deceit found them-
selves at length involved so deeply, that dread of
shame and punishment drove them to an extremity
where their only choice was between sacrificing
themselves, or others to save themselves. It is not
unlikely that some of the younger girls were so far
carried along by imitation or imaginative sympathy
as in some degree to " credit their own lie." Any
one who has watched or made experiments in ani-
mal magnetism knows how easy it is to persuade
young women of nervous temperaments that they
are doing that by the will of another which they
really do by an obscure volition of their own, under
the influence of an imagination adroitly guided by
the magnetizer. The marvellous is so fascinating,
that nine persons in ten, if once persuaded that a
thing is possible, are eager to believe it probable,
and at last cunning in convincing themselves that
it is proved. But it is impossible to believe that
the possessed girls in this case did not know how
the pins they vomited got into their mouths. Mr.

1 There is a kind of compensation in the fact that he himself
lived to be accused of sorcery and Judaism.

WITCHCRAFT 391

tlpham has shown, in the case of Anne Putnam,
Jr., an hereditary tendency to hallucination, if not
insanity. One of her uncles had seen the Devil by
broad daylight in the novel disguise of a blue
boar, in which shape, as a tavern sign, he had
doubtless proved more seductive than in his more
ordinary transfigurations. A great deal of light is
let in upon the question of whether there was delib-
erate imposture or no, by the narrative of Rev. Mr.
Turell of Medford, written in 1728, which gives us
all the particulars of a case of pretended possession
in Littleton, eight years before. The eldest of
three sisters began the game, and found herself be-
fore long obliged to take the next in age into her
confidence. By and by the youngest, finding her
sisters pitied and caressed on account of their sup-
posed sufferings while she was neglected, began to
play off the same tricks. The usual phenomena
followed. They were convulsed, they fell into
swoons, they were pinched and bruised, they were
found in the water, on the top of a tree or of the
barn. To these places they said they were con-
veyed through the air, and there were those who
had seen them flying, which shows how strong is
the impulse that prompts men to conspire with
their own delusion, where the marvellous is con-
cerned.1 The girls did whatever they had heard or
read that was common in such cases. They even
accused a respectable neighbor as the cause of

1 I myself have talked with men (one of them not unknown as
a man of science) who had seen Hume float out of a window in
London and back again.

392 WITCHCRAFT

their torments. There were some doubters, but
" so far as I can learn," says Turell, " the greater
number believed and said they were under the evil
hand, or possessed by Satan." But the most inter-
esting fact of all is supplied by the confession of
the elder sister, made eight years later under stress
of remorse. Having once begun, they found re-
turning more tedious than going o'er. To keep up
their cheat made life a burden to them, but they
could not stop. Thirty years earlier, their juggling
might have proved as disastrous as that at Salem
Village. There, parish and boundary feuds had
set enmity between neighbors, and the girls, called
on to say who troubled them, cried out upon those
whom they had been wont to hear called by hard
names at home. They probably had no notion
what a frightful ending their comedy was to have ;
but at any rate they were powerless, for the reins
had passed out of their hands into the sterner
grasp of minister and magistrate. They were
dragged deeper and deeper, as men always are by
their own lie.

The proceedings at the Salem trials are some-
times spoken of as if they were exceptionally cruel.
But, in fact, if compared with others of the same
kind, they were exceptionally humane. At a time
when Baxter could tell with satisfaction of a
" reading parson " eighty years old, who, after be-
ing kept awake five days and nights, confessed his
dealings with the Devil, it is rather wonderful that
no mode of torture other than mental was tried at
Salem. Nor were the magistrates more besotted

WITCHCRAFT 393

or unfair than usual in dealing with the evidence.
Now and then, it is true, a man more sceptical or
intelligent than common had exposed some pre-
tended demoniac. The Bishop of Orleans, in 1598,
read aloud to Martha Brossier the story of the
Ephesian Widow, and the girl, hearing Latin, and
taking it for Scripture, went forthwith into convul-
sions. He found also that the Devil who possessed
her could not distinguish holy from profane water.
But that there were deceptions did not shake the
general belief in the reality of possession. The
proof in such cases could not and ought not to be
subjected to the ordinary tests. " If many natural
things," says Bodin, " are incredible and some of
them incomprehensible, a fortiori the power of
supernatural intelligences and the doings of spirits
are incomprehensible. But error has risen to its
height in this, that those who have denied the
power of spirits and the doings of sorcerers have
wished to dispute physically concerning supernatu-
ral or metaphysical things, which is a notable in-
congruity." That the girls were really possessed,
seemed to Stoughton and his colleagues the most
rational theory, — a theory in harmony with the
rest of their creed, and sustained by the unanimous
consent of pious men as well as the evidence of
that most cunning and least suspected of all sorcer-
ers, the Past, — and how confront or cross-examine
invisible witnesses, especially witnesses whom it
was a kind of impiety to doubt ? Evidence that
would have been convincing in ordinary cases was
of no weight against the general prepossession. In

394 WITCHCRAFT

1659 the house of a man in Brightling, Sussex, was
troubled by a demon, who set it on fire at various
times, and was continually throwing things about.
The clergy of the neighborhood held a day of fast-
ing and prayer in consequence. A maid-servant
was afterwards detected as the cause of the mis-
siles. But this did not in the least stagger Mr.
Bennet, minister of the parish, who merely says :
" There was a seeming blur cast, though not on
the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their ser-
vant-girl was at last found throwing some things,"
and goes off into a eulogium on the " efficacy of
prayer."

In one respect, to which Mr. Upham first gives
the importance it deserves, the Salem trials were
distinguished from all others. Though some of the
accused had been terrified into confession, yet not
one persevered in it, but all died protesting their
innocence, and with unshaken constancy, though
an acknowledgment of guilt would have saved the
lives of all. This martyr proof of the efficacy of
Puritanism in the character and conscience may be
allowed to outweigh a great many sneers at Puri-
tan fanaticism. It is at least a testimony to the
courage and constancy which a profound religious
sentiment had made common among the people of
whom these sufferers were average representatives.
The accused also were not, as was commonly the
case, abandoned by their friends. In all the trials
of this kind there is nothing so pathetic as the pic-
ture of Jonathan Gary holding up the weary arms
of his wife during her trial, and wiping away the

WITCHCRAFT 395

sweat from her brow and the tears from her face.
Another remarkable fact is this, that while in other
countries the delusion was extinguished by the in-
credulity of the upper classes and the interference
of authority, here the reaction took place among
the people themselves, and here only was an at-
tempt made at some legislative restitution, however
inadequate. Mr. Upham's sincere and honest nar-
rative, while it never condescends to a formal plea,
is the best vindication possible of a community
which was itself the greatest sufferer by the perse-
cution which its credulity engendered.

If any lesson may be drawn from the tragical
and too often disgustful history of witchcraft, it is
not one of exultation at our superior enlightenment
or shame at the shortcomings of the human intel-
lect. It is rather one of charity and self-distrust.
When we see what inhuman absurdities men in
other respects wise and good have clung to as the
corner-stone of their faith in immortality and a
divine ordering of the world, may we not suspect
that those who now maintain political or other doc-
trines which seem to us barbarous and unenlight-
ened may be, for all that, in the main as virtuous
and clear-sighted as ourselves? While we main-
tain our own side with an honest ardor of convic-
tion, let us not forget to allow for mortal incom-
petence in the other. And if there are men who
regret the Good Old Times, without too clear a
notion of what they were, they should at least be
thankful that we are rid of that misguided energy
of faith which justified conscience in making men

396 WITCHCRAFT

unrelentingly cruel. Even Mr. Lecky softens a
little at the thought of the many innocent and
beautiful beliefs of which a growing scepticism has
robbed us in the decay of supernaturalism. But
we need not despair; for, after all, scepticism is
first cousin of credulity, and we are not surprised
to see the tough doubter Montaigne hanging up
his offerings in the shrine of our Lady of Loreto.
Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by
defect of imagination, and is the very quality of
mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of super-
sensual things. If one came from the dead, it
could not believe ; and yet it longs for such a wit-
ness, and will put up with a very dubious one. So
long as night is left and the helplessness of dream,
the wonderful will not cease from among men.
While we are the solitary prisoners of darkness,
the witch Fancy seats herself at the loom of
thought, and weaves strange figures into the web
that looks so familiar and ordinary in the dry light
of every-day. Just as we are flattering ourselves
that the old spirit of sorcery is laid, behold the
tables are tipping and the floors drumming all
over Christendom. The faculty of wonder is not
defunct, but is only getting more and more eman-
cipated from the unnatural service of terror, and
restored to its proper function as a minister of
delight. A higher mode of belief is the best exor-
ciser, because it makes the spiritual at one with the
actual world instead of hostile, or at best alien.
It has been the grossly material interpretations of
spiritual doctrine that have given occasion to the

WITCHCRAFT 397

two extremes of superstition and unbelief. While
the resurrection of the body has been insisted on,
that resurrection from the body which is the privi-
lege of all has been forgotten. Superstition in its
baneful form was largely due to the enforcement
by the Church of arguments that involved a petitio
principii, for it is the miserable necessity of all
false logic to accept of very ignoble allies. Fear
became at length its chief expedient for the main-
tenance of its power ; and as there is a beneficent
necessity laid upon a majority of mankind to sus-
tain and perpetuate the order of things they are
born into, and to make all new ideas manfully
prove their right, first, to be at all, and then to be
heard, many even superior minds dreaded the tear-
ing away of vicious accretions as dangerous to the
whole edifice of religion and society. But if this
old ghost be fading away in what we regard as the
dawn of a better day, we may console ourselves by
thinking that perhaps, after all, we are not so
much wiser than our ancestors. The rappings, the
trance mediums, the visions of hands without bod-
ies, the sounding of musical instruments without
visible fingers, the miraculous inscriptions on the
naked flesh, the enlivenment of furniture, — we
have invented none of them, they are all heirlooms.
There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster,
when a score of seers advertise themselves in Bos-
ton newspapers. And if the metaphysicians can
never rest till they have taken their watch to pieces
and have arrived at a happy positivism as to its
structure, though at the risk of bringing it to a

398 WITCHCRAFT

no-go, we may be sure that the majority will al-
ways take ^more satisfaction in seeing its hands
mysteriously move on, even if they should err a
little as to the precise time of day established by
the astronomical observatories.

THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

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